by David Black
He counted seven of them, scattered across water all sheened with bunker fuel. A couple of them were clinging to debris, another striking out for shore, about a mile away. It meant Scourge was going to have to creep up on each one individually – a slow process – and Harry was getting nervous about the Caproni coming back.
Scourge was nosing towards the fifth survivor when the call came from behind him. ‘Aircraft off the starboard quarter, closing fast … twin engine …’ yelled the rating, his binoculars still stuck to his face. Harry raised his; it was the Caproni all right, boring right in on them.
Harry hit the klaxon twice, and leaned over to yell, ‘Clear the casing!’ as if they needed any encouragement. The lookouts were already tumbling down the hatch behind him. Harry waited until he saw Powell shut the forward hatch, and he headed for the hole too. The water was already lapping round the conning tower’s deck plates when he slammed the hatch down behind him.
‘Keep eighty feet, starboard thirty!’ he yelled, as he hit the control room deck. When he looked round, everybody was grinning.
Fourteen
The Italians were three middle-aged men and a boy, maybe 15 years old. When Harry went to see them, they were sitting shivering on boxes of tinned potatoes and fruit in the torpedo re-load space, each with blankets round them and their clothes being stacked to be carried aft and dried in the engine room. They all looked terrified – wide-eyed, eyes skittering about them trying to look everywhere at once. The boy couldn’t stop yawning. A rating coming up behind Harry was carrying a mess kid with four steaming mugs of Ky in it.
Harry said to him, ‘Take that back and get the cox’n to fire a tot into each.’
‘Aye, aye, sir!’ said the rating, and he was gone. Watching what they’d hoped was the first sign of kindness vanish so abruptly, the prisoners looked at Harry with a sort of collective, forlorn resignation. Which abruptly turned first to incredulity, and then smiles when they realised Harry was talking to them in Italian, and apologising for sinking their ship.
‘The sea’s pretty cold at this time of year, so I didn’t want to leave you to freeze to death,’ Harry had said. ‘But not very nice of your shipmates to row off in the lifeboat without you.’
‘They thought you were going to machine gun them,’ said the oldest of the sailors, a fleshy, swarthy looking cutthroat, with thinning grey hair, all wet and pasted to his dome head. ‘The Germans say that’s what you do. And that you torture the ones you save for information.’ Now he was talking, he obviously felt a bit braver. One of the others, another blubbery individual with luxuriant body hair, elbowed him to shut up. ‘He means nothing, Capitano. A knock on the head. The boy is only fourteen. He doesn’t know anything. Leave him, please …’
The rating came back with the mess kid and the steaming mugs. Harry waved him through. ‘Drink this, it’ll make you feel better.’
They did as they were told, and each one’s eyes lit up as the alcohol hit them, including the boy, who coughed before his second gulp.
Harry explained they were prisoners now, and would get their clothes back dry in 20 minutes. After that, all that was expected of them was to lie back and not touch anything until they could be put ashore on Malta. Everybody nodded furiously, repeating and repeating, ‘Si! Si! Si!’
The Caproni had dropped two bombs where Scourge had dived, but she wasn’t there anymore, having moved inshore. All they heard was the bangs in the water and then nothing. Twenty minutes later, Scourge had come up to periscope depth for a look round; the Caproni was circling high, a little to the south of them, and the up-turned hull of the tramp was still visible. The armed trawler, however, was nowhere to be seen.
‘I reckon we must’ve sunk her too,’ Harding had said.
It was the change of the first and last dog watches, so Scourge went to breakfast.
Windass served up tinned grapefruit, and then scrambled egg and tinned bacon, with a slice each of his home-baked bread, which he was a dab hand at, and some jam. Harding had the watch, and Harry sat with Farrar, Powell and young McCready round the wardroom table. He had taken Scourge a little south of the scene of their two sinkings, and had her lying inshore of the tiny island of San Macario. Three MAS boats had come out and had gone careering up and down the coast, searching; none of them had come close, and they’d vanished over an hour ago.
Harry was feeling relieved rather than pleased with himself. It had been necessary to get those two ships and their success had obviously put the Scourges in a much better mood. However, Harry was after something more substantial than a tramp steamer and an armed trawler.
‘Mr McCready,’ said Harry, pushing more scrambled egg onto his bread, ‘What do submarines operating off an enemy coast do after completing a successful attack in full view of defending A/S forces?’
‘Leave the area immediately, and seek a new hunting ground,’ said McCready, parroting accepted doctrine. Once you’d alerted the anti-submarine forces that you were in their area, it was always going to be the smart thing to do, to get out of it.
‘Excellent,’ said Harry. ‘Exactly right. What are we doing?’
‘Not leaving the area,’ said McCready.
‘Right again!’ said Harry. ‘This boy’s sharp,’ he said to Farrar, while waggling his knife at McCready. Everybody sat in silence, conscientiously chomping through their eggs and bread. The skipper had taken to doing this silly question-and-answer charade recently, and everybody found it annoying.
Harry had more coffee, and suddenly it was like he was bored with it too. Farrar silently hoped it was a game that he would soon tire of, forever.
‘When we sank those two,’ said Harry, ‘we showed the local A/S that we hadn’t pushed off after our attack on the tank transporter. We double-bluffed them and got lucky the next time. It was a risk, but we took it. But nobody’d be so stupid as to try it again. Right?’
Farrar groaned inwardly; he wasn’t about to start again, surely.
‘But I am going to risk it,’ said Harry, and Farrar thought, thank fuck for that – not that they were going to risk it a third time, but that Harry wasn’t going back into his Q&A routine, again.
‘That tank transporter, Atilla, or whatever she’s called. She’s got to come out. She’s got all those tanks, and Rommel presumably would like to have them sooner, rather than later. So she has to sail, and if the local A/S are thinking we’d never be so stupid as to try and triple bluff them, then we have a good chance of getting her. What d’you think?’
‘She’ll still have her torpedo boat escorts,’ said Powell. ‘Maybe even others for the final dash across the Sicilian Channel.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Harry, sounding like he was getting perilously close to starting again, ‘but that’s exactly where they’ll be expecting any attack. In the Channel. Not here in the Gulf. Because we should be long gone.’
Farrar tapped the table. ‘Great plan, sir,’ he said in a fashion that brooked no argument. He really didn’t want Harry to lapse. Again. Risking it was definitely the preferred option.
****
It was about 25 miles from where they were off San Macario to the Isle of Cavoli on the other side of the Gulf. Away to the northwest lay the huge port and naval base of Cagliari itself, protected by layers of minefields. It was all in the intelligence profile of the port. So was a note that entry and exit to the port must be made through two swept channels that ran along either coast. After studying the charts, it was Harry’s bet that the Atilla, when she decided to show her face, would use the easterly channel, and run out by Cavoli. The water was deeper there and the channel ran closer in to the coast, making hugging it easier for the Atilla, and harder for any submarine to get inshore of her and lie in ambush.
But he couldn’t be sure, so Scourge was crawling along at periscope depth about midway across the mouth of the Gulf. It was the fag end of the afternoon watch, and it was a Sunday, so Scourge’s usual service was being held in the control room.
Sunday service
was an established tradition on the boat. Bayliss had apparently insisted on it, and only the appearance of the enemy was allowed to interfere. After he’d transferred off, and Harry had arrived, one of the first things Farrar had explained to the skipper was that the crew liked their service, and that he should let the tradition continue. Harry, who was somewhat agnostic about the idea, had asked why. After all, it appeared to him, the Scourges were a pretty irreligious shower. Farrar had just one word in reply: ‘Joss.’
Joss. Ask Jack, any Jack, and he’d laugh at you if you said he was superstitious.
‘It’s all bollocks’ – regulation, standard issue reply, for the use of.
But then, you never knew, did you? Stranger things twixt heaven and hell. And anyway, we’ve always done it this way, haven’t come to no harm, so why change now? Could be bad Joss, know what I mean? So, just to be on the safe side.
As far as Harry was concerned, it was ‘all bollocks’. But then, the last thing Harry wanted attaching to his new command was bad Joss. The prayer and psalm-singing part of the service was left to an engine room artificer who had a bit of the Holy Joe about him, and nobody had to worry about it anymore.
Harry was winding up the service with the lay part of the sermon, which involved him reading from the news bulletins broadcast daily to the fleet, and giving a short update on what Scourge herself was up to.
‘Smoke. Bearing red five zero!’ It was Powell, officer of the watch, calling from behind the periscope. Harry, with a sigh of relief, reached over and hit the general alarm sending Scourge to diving stations. He’d been right; Atilla’s little convoy was exiting the mine fields through the easterly swept channel.
What followed looked like tumbling confusion. It wasn’t. The crew dispersed to their stations, each man going through a drill made perfect by constant repetition. Within seconds all aboard Scourge was serene calm again, with everyone and everything slotted into its familiar configuration, ready and waiting. In the engine room, the motors were grouped up and she was surging forward, east north east towards Cavoli and the deeper water around the exit to the channel.
Harry had already explained to his officers and some of the senior rates what he intended to do: Scourge would run in front of the enemy ships right were the swept channel ended. Coming out the enemy would be penned in between the charted minefields and the shore, so they would be running more or less line-astern, one after the other. The spot where Harry wanted to launch his attack, however, was right where the exit opened out, where the leading escorts would begin to fan out, right where they would be manoeuvering to establish their screen. Their crews would be concentrating on executing that without ramming each other – that and pinging the deeper water ahead for any sub lurking where they knew none would be, because no sub skipper with even half a brain would continue to hang around for a third attack in the same area where he’d already launched two.
And while they were concentrating on watching each other, and ahead for a threat they didn’t expect to see, Harry and Scourge would be underneath them, waiting as they rolled over, heading for the open sea.
His plan was to keep to the south side of the exit; to keep the Atilla’s track off his starboard beam. And then when she had almost passed him, turn in on a 95 degree track angle at a range of probably a little less than 700 yards, and give the bugger a four-shot salvo.
Biddle began his incantations from the Asdic cubby. Harry had one more task to do before he could lean back against the search periscope and let all the angles set themselves up in his head – between him, the enemy’s track, and the enemy himself.
He lifted the sound powered-telephone and called the forward torpedo room. ‘Tell the TGM to send the four Italians back aft to the stokers’ mess. I don’t want them getting in the way.’ Whoever had been on the other end must’ve said ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ because Harry hung up and set about getting his head in the box.
A few moments later a young AB messenger came swinging through the for’ard watertight door, and stood smartly to attention in front him. He snapped off a salute with military precision Harry hadn’t seen before on Scourge. It soon became apparent why: the lad was scared shitless over something.
‘Permission to speak, sir?’
Harry, frowning, said, ‘Yes?’
‘Petty Officer Gooch, sir, asks permission, sir, to retain the Eyetalians in the for’ard space, sir.’
Harry’s face darkened. Could he be hearing this? One of his orders being questioned, even as Scourge was at diving stations? About to engage the enemy? No wonder the rating was scared shitless, being expected to tell his skipper one of his orders were being questioned.
Then another thought entered Harry’s head: he couldn’t just blow his top in front of this poor kid, who was only obeying orders from his department head – that would’ve been bad command form. But nor was he having any of this bloody nonsense. Contradicted in his own control room? He stepped past the AB, and took two steps towards the for’ard door before he realised what he was doing – leaving the control room, to go and bawl out one of his senior rates at his diving station? That was bloody awful command form, too. But he was doing it. He couldn’t be seen to go stomping up and down, back and forward like some old auntie having a tantrum. He swung himself through the door. He was going to fire Gooch out of one of his own torpedo tubes when he got there.
When he swung into the for’ard space, the first thing he saw out the corner of his eye was the four prisoners, stowed on top of the torpedo re-loads, stretched out, chatting to each other without a care in the world.
Gooch saw him arrive, and saw the look on his face. He came to attention, and before Harry could ask him, ‘What’s the meaning of this?’ Gooch spoke first, in a breathless, but determined rush.
‘I don’t have enough bodies to do a fast re-load safely, sir,’ said Gooch. ‘The Eyeties said they don’t mind helping.’
‘Don’t mind helping?’ Harry was trying not to shout.
‘And if they’re stuck back in the stoker’s mess when it all goes off, somebody’s going to have to watch them. Here I’ve got my eyes on them, sir. They’re not bad lads.’
Harry was speechless – for several reasons, not least of which was that what Gooch was saying made complete sense. With all those torpedo boats upstairs, Scourge would need a fast re-load, and the safer the better. These one-and-a-half ton steel tubes had to be man-handled in a very tight space, so it was always a case of the more hands, the better.
And when the depth charges started coming down, having four screaming, panicking civilians back aft would be something of a distraction for the engine room crew at a time when all their concentration would be required for the job in hand.
Harry stared at Gooch. He thought of all the skippers he’d known who’d’ve just re-bored the TGM anyway. This bloody command at sea nonsense; it was enough to make a bishop want to throw a brick at a stained glass window. Talk about the judgement of Solomon. But then, how many boats must have been lost just because their CO wouldn’t tolerate being contradicted, even it was by common sense? He knew of one at least, because he’d been on her at the time. Pelorus. And Umbrage had been a nearly. No doubt about that. There was nothing left to say, except, ‘Mr Gooch. The next time you want to contradict your commanding officer, do it yourself. Don’t send a junior rate. He almost shat himself. Carry on.’
When Harry got back to the control room, he resumed his position by the search ’scope, and said, matter-of-factly, to no-one in particular, ‘That was the damndest thing …’ Then to Farrar, ‘You know the Eyetie prisoners … they say they want to help out with the torpedo re-loading. It’s all pals up there.’
Nobody said anything; they weren’t expected to. But there were the grins. They liked this skipper and his little streams of consciousness; it made them feel like he was including them in the game.
Out the corner of his eye Harry caught the expression on Ainsworth’s face. It was one of approval. Harry didn’t know how he d
id it; the face was carved from the same ancient statuary it always was, but manage it he did. And in some down-in-the-guts way, Harry felt a little bit of pride in himself. Irritated too, of course, at the presumption of the man “approving” his captain’s decisions, but mainly relieved at his getting it right.
‘Start the plot, Mr Harding,’ he said, and he settled down to run his battle.
The minutes passed and the ranges changed. In his mind’s eye Harry watched and calculated as the picture developed, with his hands plunged into his pockets and a little frown on his forehead. Back in the box.
The lead enemy torpedo boat had been using its anti-submarine echo-sounder to blast the water ahead as the single file of ships had come down the channel. A Cant Z506 seaplane had been sweeping the skies all round the convoy, while there were the same four torpedo boats serving as a screen. But Biddle was also reporting HE for up to half a dozen MAS boats, running about like outriders.
Harry said a silent ‘Thank you’ for the brisk southerly breeze that was chopping the surface into a sea of tiny white horses. It meant he didn’t have to worry about the Cant’s crew spotting their shadow beneath the waves. He wasn’t worried about the MAS boats either; annoying gnats, they’d only be a threat if the big boys cornered them first.
As Scourge came up on the enemy’s mean track, Harry ordered the turn to port, to face the on-coming convoy. He held their depth at 120 feet. According to the chart, there was another 250 feet below his keel, if he needed it.
And on the convoy came. He ordered silent routine so that the only sound in the control room was Biddle and his chanting the bearing changes.
Then the first two torpedo boats sped up and Biddle’s calls showed them fanning out.
They began blasting the water again with their echo-sounders – the Italian Navy didn’t have anything as sophisticated as Asdic even at this stage in the war, and every time he heard the pings of the gear they did have, Harry offered up a heartfelt prayer of thanks for that as only an agnostic can.
