Turn Left for Gibraltar

by David Black

  Rais had already sent the periscope down, and Harry was breathing again. A periscope breaking surface too long, leaving its little telltale wake, could be spotted by an eagle-eyed lookout on the cargo ship or on her escort – the source of the other HE and likely an Italian Navy MAS-boat. It didn’t matter. A sighted periscope meant the cargo boat would turn and comb Umbrage’s torpedoes, run between them as they passed harmlessly down its sides, while the MAS-boat would race towards them, dispensing depth charges. Meanwhile Rais’s gaze flicked around the control room. No rage now, but more like a schoolboy caught dozing in class.

  ‘Eight knots,’ he said. ‘Make the target’s speed eight knots. That tub’s never done twelve knots in her life.’ A silence, as if he were collecting himself; as if he knew it was he who was in error. And then another thing remembered: ‘Make ready tubes one and three. Set the depth for fifteen feet.’

  The young control room messenger, tucked in for’ard as if he were hiding among the maze of pipework, looked more terrified than alarmed as he repeated the order through the sound-powered telephone to the boat’s Chief Torpedo Gunner’s Mate in the forward torpedo room.

  It’s a bit bloody late for that, thought Harry, for those orders should have been given at the start of the attack. But the TGM, a Chief Petty Officer by official rank, was Dinger Bell, an old hand who knew his business. Umbrage had only three torpedoes left out of her full load of eight, but Bell would have had their tubes flooded and ready to fire right after Umbrage went to Diving Stations. He wouldn’t have waited for the call to his station in the torpedo room – this was not the first time he’d gone into an attack under this CO.

  The other five torpedoes, fired in their previous attacks, had all missed.

  Wykham sang out the director angle, and Rais immediately ordered the periscope back up. Umbrage was gliding through the water at dead slow ahead, together, and as the ’scope slid up from its housing, he ordered, ‘Turns for three knots’, and then he bent and dropped the ’scope’s handles and said to the Chief, ‘Lay me on the DA, Chief’, and big Jonners stepped forward and, reading off the bezel, put his big paws on Rais’s hands and steered the periscope on to the right bearing, as though they were performing some baroque minuet.

  ‘Range?’ called Rais, and the PO peered and read off, ‘Thirty-two minutes!’

  Rais called, ‘Range is thirty-eight hundred yards.’

  Wykham called it back and dialled it in.

  Out on the deep blue sea, the wallowing Italian merchantman was puffing and wheezing towards the line that bisected Rais’s view through the periscope. When its bows crossed it . . .

  ‘Fire one!’ said Rais, managing not to shout. The control room messenger repeated the order in his reedy pipe and a moment later Umbrage gave a little bump, like a car hitting a pothole in the road, and they could all hear and almost feel the hiss of the compressed air that had shoved the torpedo out of her tube, venting back into the boat.

  Rais had his left hand off the periscope and was counting the seconds as they elapsed with his fingers: one, two . . . At seven, he called, ‘Fire two!’ then stepped away and sent the periscope back down. ‘One hundred feet. Starboard, fifteen, slow ahead, together.’

  Tuke called out from the ASDIC cubby, ‘Both torpedoes running true.’

  They were slinking away as their torpedoes sped at over forty-five knots towards the old, fat merchantman.

  ‘Time to target now?’ said Rais to Harry. Harry had already worked out the running time on his slide rule, the instant the first torpedo left its tube: thirty-eight hundred yards, two minutes thirty seconds. He glanced down at the stopwatch to check how many seconds left now: ‘One minute twenty, Sir.’

  That was a long, long time, because 3,800 yards was a long, long way for a torpedo to run if you were expecting it to be accurate. Time dripped. Over two miles of water to cover, to hit a target that was only a little over four hundred feet long and moving at an estimated eight knots, and no matter what way you calculated the equation, the fact remained that all the figures you’d used to aim it were estimates. Would the target still be doing eight knots? Would it still be on the same course, or would it turn? So they waited.

  ‘First torpedo, thirty seconds to run,’ said Harry, and wondered what Rais was thinking. This was the Captain’s last chance to hit something on this patrol. If these two missed, he only had one torpedo left, and what did he think he was going to do with that? Rais’s previous patrol, his first as part of the Tenth Flotilla, had been a duck too, apparently. Shrimp Simpson, the Captain (S), would be wondering if he had a duck for a Skipper.

  Harry looked at his stopwatch, and followed as the second hand swept past the moment, then he gave it another whole five seconds.

  Tuke had told the CO, ‘Twelve knots’ – Tuke, the most experienced ASDIC man aboard. And Rais hadn’t listened, had followed what his own inexperienced eyes had told him, and gone with eight.

  And their target: she’d still be chugging down that invisible bearing on the water – the one their torpedoes had been fired to cross. If they’d called the target’s speed just right, those torpedoes would be crossing it just as their target arrived. But Rais had called, ‘Eight knots’, which meant the old, fat merchantman would be long gone . . . and their torpedoes just two bubbling streaks bisecting its big fat wake . . . the stupid, arrogant . . .

  Harry, still looking at his stopwatch, said, ‘First torpedo, miss . . .’ and his words were shut off by a loud budduddum! that echoed through the boat. Rais’s head went back, and he let out a deep sigh. Everyone looked at everybody else. The second torpedo would still be running. Harry started counting aloud, ‘One . . . two . . .’, but he only got to three, and then the noise of the second detonation filled the boat. ‘Both torpedoes hit,’ said Harry, grinning now, stating the bleedin’ obvious. Everybody was grinning – everybody except Grainger, who merely allowed himself a superior smirk, which Rais, his face wreathed in smiles, didn’t see because his head was still tilted back, so that Harry wasn’t sure whether he was looking at the deckhead pipe runs or beyond, all the way to heaven.

  The merchant ship’s escort didn’t pursue them, and down at one hundred feet, Umbrage tiptoed away from the scene. She hadn’t needed to surface to make sure she’d sunk the enemy ship; everybody heard her boilers blowing, and then her bulkheads collapsing; and all the other breaking-up noises a ship makes as she sinks. So Umbrage had stayed deep for the rest of the day. Tuke picked up several HE returns, sounds in the water of unknown ships passing, not surprising with a major port like Genoa astern, and off their port beam the naval base at La Spezia. But the returns were all far away, and Rais remained resolutely uncurious as to their identity. Further and further they crept into the Ligurian Sea, on a steady course that Harry estimated would put them fifteen miles north of Capo D’Enfola on the Italian island of Elba after sunset.

  Harry was going to have the first watch when they surfaced, which if they were going to let the sun fully set, would be just around 5pm local time. Harry had his head down for most of the day, and when he woke, after making himself a piping-hot mug of coffee with condensed milk, he sat down to encode a signal for Shrimp Simpson, alerting him to their claim to have sunk a seven-thousand-ton general cargo vessel, and to the fact they had one torpedo left and were off on the hunt for a target to use it on. Once fired, they could head back to Malta, and Harry, for one, was looking forward to that. A lot.

  Submarines the size of Umbrage didn’t merit a cook, and their nominated hash-slinger was one of the Stokers, a quiet, diffident Essex lad, who had been in the Navy since he’d graduated from a Barnardo’s home in Billericay, and that hadn’t been yesterday. He had thinning, swept-back hair the colour of an ashtray, and a submariner’s usual pasty skin. The cracks in his rough-hewn hands and the crescents of his fingernails were permanently ingrained with oil and grease, collected over a score or more commissions from Pompey to the China Station, and were beyond scrubbing clean now. But he was
a bloody good cook. Everyone agreed, yet that was something he hated to hear. Ken Musgrave was his name, and he was one of those blokes you found yourself liking without ever knowing why.

  ‘Spot o’ breakfast, Sir?’ said Ken, leaning around the galley partition wall. ‘Do you a nice Train Smash, Sir, before we go to red light.’

  Like every Royal Navy submarine on patrol, day swapped for night. For each day was spent dived, and it was only during the hours of darkness you came up, the diesels came to life and the work of the boat began, and why breakfast was at 5pm.

  Harry was sitting back on his banquette in the wardroom, gazing into space, with Wykham snoring in his fold-down bunk above him, and their CO, Lieutenant Clive Rais, hidden behind the drawn curtains concealing his bunk, a bare two feet opposite him on the other side of the passage. Rais, too, was probably asleep, but with the CO, you never knew. Umbrage’s Jimmy, Kit Grainger, was on watch in the control room, all of a dozen feet aft.

  Harry, roused from his reverie, smiled. ‘Train Smash, Ken? That’d be bloody marvellous. And some buttered toast and more coffee too, please. I’ll wake Mr Wykham. He’ll have some too.’

  Musgrave touched a grubby paw to his cap. ‘Aye aye, Sir. Mr Wykham, Sir . . . never been known not to.’

  Train Smash: powdered egg, tinned tomatoes and bacon, flung together in a pot, but with Musgrave’s little extra somethings. A pinch or so of mustard, Harry reckoned, and maybe even a dash of some of those herbs Lascar Vaizey used to fire in, when he was clashing pans – Vaizey, the curry king from Trebuchet, or the Bucket, as she was known to the men who’d sailed in her. They’d been a good crew, the Buckets, and she’d been a happy boat. The Umbrages were a good crew too, thought Harry, but there the similarities ended.

  Harry prodded the underside of Wykham’s bunk. ‘Jim,’ he said, quietly so as not to wake Rais – if he was sleeping. ‘There’s grub on the go.’

  Two pipe-cleaner legs immediately swung down by Harry’s head, and Wykham dropped into the passage, dragging his trousers after him. ‘Put that away,’ said Harry. ‘You’ll frighten the children.’

  Wykham pulled on his trousers, and dragged his white roll-neck pullover over his head. ‘Oh shut up, Harry . . . What is it?’

  ‘Well, if you don’t know that, at your age . . .’ said Harry.

  ‘To eat, you silly bugger. Grub? What’s the grub?’ The two young men were both sniggering, but still trying to be quiet. For the same reason.

  Umbrage hadn’t started life with Clive Rais as her CO; there’d been someone else before him. Another Skipper, and Grainger, as her designated Number One, had stood by her while she was being built by Cammell Laird; sailed her from the Mersey to the Clyde to work her up, and then out down the Bay of Biscay, heading for Gib and then Malta. She’d been a happy boat then, until they’d got as far as Cap Trafalgar, when the Skipper suffered an appendicitis. The poor bastard eventually died from the ensuing peritonitis.

  Harry had learned all about the boat’s history from Grainger, that first night they’d met again, after Harry had finally made it to Malta, sitting together in the Tenth Flotilla’s wardroom, back in Lazaretto. Grainger had told Harry all about how he had brought Umbrage into Gib, and how that was when they were all first introduced to Clive Rais. He’d been a spare Skipper on the staff of the Eighth Flotilla, fresh from his Perisher – as the Trade’s Commanding Officers’ Qualifying Course was universally known – and waiting for just such a chance to assume a command of his own.

  Nobody knew anything about him.

  ‘It was a marriage made somewhere,’ Grainger had told Harry, ‘but not in a million years was it ever in heaven.’

  All was quiet as Harry and Wykham fell upon their Train Smash, and their boat crept south, her crew at ‘Watch, Dived’ – a third of them up and about, and the other two watches racking up zeds: two hours on, four hours off during daylight hours; three hours on, and six off at night.

  Umbrage wasn’t a big boat, not by Trebuchet’s standards; she displaced about 648 tons surfaced, 735 tons dived, and was 196 feet long, with a beam of just eleven feet. So really, if you were one of her twenty-nine-strong crew – including her CO – you knew everything that was going on in her, wherever you were. Right at the back of the boat, in the after ends among the auxiliary machinery, there’d be a mound of sleeping engine-room hands, in hammocks where there was space, or just stretched out on the deck plates – Stokers and Torpedomen. Beyond the bulkhead, in the motor room, there’d be a couple of Torpedomen, the Navy’s electricians, on watch, keeping their eyes on the ammeters and voltmeters, making sure their electric motors ran smoothly, and on the battery outputs and temperatures; checking the sumps for any traces of acid that might betray a crack or a leak in the giant beasts, each cell weighing in at over 1,500 pounds.

  In the next compartment for’ard, there’d be the engine-room watch on duty: a clutch of Stokers, crawling over their main engines; polishing here, a bit of oil in there; peering in the gaps and spaces, prodding, tightening. Making sure all was just so, ready for the moment they’d surface, and the two 400-horsepower Paxman diesels would be brought back to life with blasts of compressed air to kick-start their huge crankshafts, so they could suck down their own air to feed their combustion, through a now open conning tower hatch.

  And on the other side of the engine room for’ard bulkhead, there’d always be a rating on watch in the ASDIC cubby, listening passively to the wide ocean beyond the three-quarter-inch plate that curved above his shoulder; and probably one of the Telegraphists, in the radio room, in case Umbrage needed to go up in a hurry and there’d always be someone there to transmit or receive.

  And between them and the wardroom, the control room itself, with the two planesmen on duty on Umbrage’s hydroplanes off to the side, controlling her miniature wings, two for’ard, two aft, that with a turn on their wheels would point Umbrage’s bow either to the surface or the deep.

  In front of them, at the helm position from where Umbrage was steered, the Coxswain, the boat’s most senior rating sat when the boat was at Diving Stations. His name, Chief Petty Officer William Libby, a taciturn south Londoner who had the uncanny ability to exude calm with menaces.

  On the trim board, a Gordian knot of pipes, valves, pumps and gauges, would be their Wrecker, the Outside ERA, the engineering senior rate in charge of all that myriad of plumbing that allowed Umbrage to control her depth, and in charge of her two periscopes too.

  The pencil-thin attack ’scope, slender to avoid detection, and monocular, was aft, while for’ard was the larger-diameter, high-powered periscope, bi-focal and up to x6 magnification, with all the gadgets to help you do everything from calculate range to search for enemy aircraft right above you. Both ’scopes were just under thirty feet long, and recessed into tubes that ran down to the keel of the boat. When raised so the eyepieces were up in the control room where the watch officer could see through them, there was a little over twelve feet of the periscope sticking out above the top of the conning tower, and that was your periscope depth.

  Presiding over it right now would be Grainger, with very little to do. For Rais had ordered: no clockwork-mousing up to periscope depth for a quick all-round look, and back down again. So Grainger would just be keeping an eye on the helmsman, and on the gyro compass to make sure he was holding Umbrage on her unvarying, unwavering course; with his other eye on her steady, three-knot progress, pricking the chart at every waypoint. And watching the bubble, always watching the bubble, which showed whether Umbrage was either pointing up or down. And on the depth gauge, making sure Umbrage kept her one hundred feet, because the Med was notorious for thermoclines, sudden changes in water temperature, usually caused here by differing levels of salinity, so that the density of the water around them could change in a blink, playing havoc with a boat’s trim, causing them to rapidly sink or rise without warning.

  In the wardroom, Harry and Jim Wykham were mopping up the last stains of their Train Smash with buttered to
ast, when Umbrage went to red light. The ordinary low-level lighting went out, and a series of red bulbs came on; it meant there was twenty minutes to go until Umbrage surfaced, and it was done to accustom the eyes of the watch keepers about to go up into the dark of another Mediterranean night. In the next compartments for’ard were the ERAs’, Petty Officers’ and Leading Seamen’s messes: tiny spaces, now bestirring with grunts and harrumphs as the men going to Diving Stations for surfacing pulled on whatever few extra clothes they might need, for Mediterranean winter nights could be chilly, even in the boat when the conning tower hatch opened and the diesels starting sucking down the cold sea air. It would be the same in the next space for’ard, in the forward torpedo room, where the ordinary ratings bunked down among the torpedo reload racks and the three-inch gun magazines, where the boat’s four twenty-one-inch torpedo tubes were.

  And elsewhere in the boat, out of sight, fore and aft, beneath the deck plates, there would be the two Ordinary Seamen, crouched in the pump spaces – there to open and shut yet more banks of valves on the orders of the Jimmy or the Wrecker, the valves that fed and drained the trim tanks and kept Umbrage suspended unseen in her dark domain; knowing they would have at least another hour of the First Dog Watch to go before they would be relieved and come up for their breakfasts.

  The curtain swished a single, flawless swish, and there was Rais’s beatific countenance, fresh, and his eyes darting from Harry to Wykham where they sat opposite him behind the wardroom table.

  ‘Morning, gentlemen!’ he said, grinning at his own joke, as he always did, because it wasn’t morning, it was evening, and wasn’t he a wit. His officer’s white shirt had been neatly folded at the foot of his bunk, and laid on top of his folded uniform trousers, and as he reached for them, his eyes focused on Harry’s and Wykham’s plates.