by David Black
Not, in the end, that it was to matter. As they watched, the schooner had slipped into the mouth of the bay to the right of a huge promontory that protected the entrance to Porto Azzuro, and which somewhat unfairly sported a huge Renaissance fortress around its peak, with bastions that lowered over them. Faced with the prospect of trading fire with a huge lump of stone and glacis that looked quite capable of defying siege engines let alone their three-inch popgun, Rais had turned his back. One perfunctory order to withdraw, and he’d gone below without another word. It had been left to Harry to tidy up and get the gun crew back below for steaming mugs of hot condensed milk and cocoa that the service called Ky.
But this was the new day.
Looking through the periscope, Harry could see a range of forested mountains in the background, with the odd jagged edge, rolling down to the top half of a picturesque town, all stucco and red tiles. The rest of the town and the harbour was obscured by the bluff promontory. In the daylight, he now had an even better view of the fortress. San Giacomo, it was called, according to the chart – and it was bigger and more intimidating than it had appeared last night. The walls were constructed of a series of star ramparts, all mossy now, but no less scary, although he couldn’t see any obvious gun emplacements. Below it, in the bay, was their schooner: moored fore and aft to a line of buoys, her sails all furled now on their booms, and her decks deserted. Likely no one was up yet despite it being such a beautiful morning. An Italian flag, flapped with some vigour over her transom, having obviously been left out all night, the slack buggers! Harry reported it all, but Rais didn’t bother answering, just continued tapping the chart with the dividers, in a manner calculated to irritate.
Harry sent the periscope down.
‘Did it occur to you, Mr Gilmour, that I might have wanted to take a look?’ said Rais, without looking up.
Jesus H. Christ, Harry seethed to himself, you know, and I know, and everybody fucking knows, you don’t keep a periscope up any longer than you have to, especially when you’re this close inshore . . . Did that not occur to you? Sir? . . . ‘Oooh! Look! I wonder what that is?’ says little Giuseppe to the gun Captain on the six-inch coastal battery! ‘Could it be a periscope?’ But all Harry actually said was, ‘Do you wish me to call it back up, Sir?’
Rais left a silence before replying, and even then his first words were to the young control room messenger. ‘Get me a cup of coffee,’ he said, then, turning to Harry, all he said was, ‘When I’m ready.’
Rais, coffee in hand, took his look, then issued orders that would take Umbrage in a long circle to the south-east, so that she would come up on to the target, bow and torpedo tube pointing directly at her beam. As they motored round, he ordered the torpedo tube made ready to fire, then when Umbrage was just six hundred yards from her unsuspecting prey and her bows pointing directly at it, he ordered, ‘Stop, together.’
Harry looked at Grainger. When was he going to say something?
The schooner was secured to buoys; Umbrage was hove to. The Med was not a tidal sea, but there were currents, some of them notorious. In a normal torpedo attack, you’re both under way, both moving through the water, so the action of any current was compensated for. If you were both stopped, it wasn’t.
And there was a current.
For Harry as Navigator, it was his job to know. Working from his dead reckoning on the plot, he’d been calculating the difference between where his DR had said they should be, and where his last fix – taken as they’d moved along the coast – said they were. And he’d already advised Rais as to the current, its speed and direction. And he’d been ignored.
Grainger had said nothing.
Suddenly, Rais called, ‘Fire one!’ and sent the periscope down.
There was a slight lurch as Umbrage recoiled from the launch, and everybody waited. At six hundred yards it wouldn’t take long.
Nothing.
‘Lost the torpedo’s HE, Sir,’ said Tuke. How was that possible? No torpedo HE meant the torpedo had somehow stopped running, without exploding. How did that happen? Unless it wasn’t in the water any more.
‘Up periscope!’ snapped Rais. He took one look along the bearing, and then another even briefer one, barely two points to port. ‘Down periscope! Blow tanks one and six! Surfacing! Close up for Gun Action!’
The gun crew came tumbling into the control room. In a Gun Action, they were always first up, and then the CO.
‘Tower clear!’ called Grainger from the trim board, standing less than two arms’ lengths from where Harry stood at the back of the control room, leaning up again after plotting their manoeuvres on the chart. The gun crew went up, and a cascade of sparkling Tyrrhenian sea came down; and suddenly Harry was hearing some distant whining noise he couldn’t fathom. Rais followed the gun crew up, and Harry stepped to call up the periscope, to make sure the noise wasn’t being caused by someone sneaking up behind them. A quick 180 look astern and then back on the schooner. Some of her crew were tumbling up, as if woken from their slumbers by some alarm. Maybe even by the mystery noise. Except they weren’t looking to seaward, towards where Umbrage would have been rising from the deep, as well they might given the bloody racket a submarine blowing main ballast normally makes. No, they were looking up the shore. Harry turned the ’scope two points, and there on the beach, nuzzled underneath a grass bank above the sand was their torpedo, wobbling a little, smoke rising from her mechanism as her motor, still delivering revs for forty-five knots, burnt itself out in a fearsome screaming tantrum.
The current that Harry had calculated, told his CO about, and been ignored, was a well-known one locally. It flowed down the east side of the island, sometimes at several knots, and as it went, it created clockwise vortices in the Mola Gulf; these had swept up Umbrage’s torpedo and carried it way off its intended target, leaving it to run up the beach and bury itself in the saw grass.
Harry heard their gun’s first round go off, and turned back to see it blow the schooner’s transom to matchwood, and the Italian flag, like a flapping shroud, on to the sparkling blue water. The schooner’s crew were already diving off, and swimming like torpedoes themselves for the beach, not bothering to launch any lifeboat. The next round went through her side, forward, and was followed by a spectacular whump that blew upwards from her guts, launching hatch combings and huge lengths of rigging into the air. The third one hit too, with similar effect, but it was the fourth round that explained why the schooner had moored up outside Porto Azzuro for the night. It turned her into a fireball. Harry and the rest of the control room crew even felt the hot blast of it come down the conning tower hatch. And then they heard the bang.
‘That was the schooner,’ Harry informed them.
‘And we’re all going to get a laugh when we see the gun crew’s scorched eyebrows,’ said Grainger, and everybody laughed. Not because they thought it was that funny, but because Rais was still on the bridge, and they could enjoy the joke.
And the schooner, thought Harry; she must have been carrying a cargo of fuel of some kind – paraffin for the islanders’ stoves, probably. And he wondered how much the disrupting of the cooking habits of several hundred Italians had furthered the war effort.
Chapter Eight
Malta. Umbrage was tied up alongside the Lazaretto, half a dozen of her crew scouring her out with bottles of Izal disinfectant. Harry was elsewhere. On the other side of Valletta, to be precise, aboard someone else’s ship: sitting, grinning to himself like a village idiot, sunk into the enveloping comfort of a floral-patterned easy chair in the Captain’s day cabin of the light cruiser HMS Pelleas, gazing about, luxuriating in the space a cruiser Captain gets compared to a Navigator on a submarine. He took another sip of the pink gin he was cradling, and it curdled the grin for a moment. The Captain’s Steward had handed it to him the minute the Marine who’d escorted him from the gangway had showed him in.
‘Captain Dumaresq’s orders, Sir,’ the steward had said. ‘“Mr Gilmour is a special guest,
so make sure there’s enough gin in it to kill a small furry animal.” Those was his very words, Sir.’ And the glass was handed over with all the beaming hospitality you’d expect from the Royal Navy.
And now he was waiting to see again the officer who had taken him in hand when he was making a mess of everything, and given him a way out before he ended up in front of a court martial. How long ago had it been? Winter 1940? Aboard that old R-class, HMS Redoubtable – more gin palace than battleship – where Harry, an RNVR Sub right out of King Alfred, had been neither fish nor fowl, either ignored or resented by her hide-bound wardroom. Peter Dumaresq, a Flag Lieutenant then, and older, awaiting his next shove up, had got him out of there.
And into submarines.
Given the chop rate among submariners these days, Harry, when he thought about it, wasn’t sure whether it was wise to feel quite so grateful. Which was why he tried not to think about it. And now Peter Dumaresq was a Captain, in command of an Arethusa-class light cruiser. But then Peter Dumaresq had always been an anointed one – naval aristocracy, who could chart his lineage in the service back to Anson and Hawke. If anyone was going to be on an accelerated promotion ladder, it was Peter Dumaresq. Admiral written all over him was the word among the surface skimmers apparently, one day.
And then the door opened and there he was: tanned, in his tropical whites, looking taller than Harry remembered, and thinner, like a steel hawser now, not an inch of flab. And was that his hair thinning, or was it the cap with the scrambled egg on its brim that he’d just removed, that had been pressing his dark waves too flat? The glint in the eye and the easy smile were still there though – the look that told you all you needed to know about this man’s relentless capacity for cheery devilment.
‘Harry bloody Gilmour!’ he said, his hand outstretched.
‘Sir!’ said Harry, disentangling himself from the easy chair.
Dumaresq closed the door behind him. ‘First names in the cabin, Harry,’ he said, pumping his young friend’s hand. ‘You’re looking better than you have a right to.’ Then, calling over his shoulder towards the serving hatch, ‘Capper! Two more of your special liveners, please!’
‘You’re one-and-a-half rings heavier since I saw you last . . .’ said Harry, trying to say ‘Peter’ and not ‘Sir’ . . . and ending up just shaking his head. ‘God! I’m becoming a right proper Andrew now,’ he laughed. ‘Four rings and I’m gobsmacked.’
Dumaresq sat down on his sofa. ‘Yes,’ he said with that grin, ‘but was I born to them, did I achieve them, or were they thrust upon me?’ He waved Harry back into the easy chair.
Then he asked, ‘Was that you we elbowed aside, coming in?’
Harry nodded. ‘Yes . . . Peter,’ he said, trying it out. Sub-Lieutenants – being the second-lowest form of marine life after Midshipmen – didn’t call Captains by their first names; in fact, they didn’t speak to them unless spoken to.
‘I saw a white bar and a white star on your Jolly Roger?’ said Dumaresq.
Harry, grinning again, too: ‘A seven-thousand-ton freighter, torpedoed, and a four-hundred-ton coasting schooner loaded with paraffin, by Gun Action.’ Their patrol didn’t sound so bad when you described it like that, thought Harry, and he left it that way, not wanting to think any more about Lieutenant Clive Rais. Except he couldn’t stop thinking about the expression he’d seen on Rais’s face, when he’d been standing next to him on Umbrage’s bridge, hove to alongside their minesweeper escort a mile off Tigne Point – their return to the submarine base in Marsamxett Harbour blocked as the two cruisers and three destroyers of Force F swept down from the north in front of them, on their way into Valletta’s Grand Harbour next door. The ships, running line-astern, had indeed looked magnificent on that blue, blue, blustery morning, but it hadn’t been pride that had burned in Rais’s steady stare: more like resentment and envy.
Outside, through Dumaresq’s day cabin scuttle, were the wharves of French Creek. You could hear the clamour, the shouting and the clanking of cranes. You could imagine the tumult of dockyard workers, climbing over stores, loading the cruisers for their next sortie. And you could crunch the grit and dust in your mouth that had been wafted in through the scuttle. On the next berth up, Harry had passed Pelleas’s sister ship, HMS Patroclus, also being hurriedly re-stored and ammunitioned; and on the other side of Senglea, in Dockyard Creek, was the rest of the squadron, the destroyers Jocasta, Darter and Dimapur.
‘Right, Harry,’ said Dumaresq, after Capper had brought them refills of pink gin, ‘tell me the secret to how you’ve managed to stay alive this long.’
Capper had brought them some corned beef sandwiches for lunch, which had helped to soak up all the gin Harry had drunk, but he was still a bit wobbly when he walked to the end of the wharf to hail one of Grand Harbour’s dghaisas that plied the port like water taxis. He’d taken it to the Customs House Steps, and intended to walk up the full length of the notorious Strait Street – known to Jack and every other serviceman who’d ever taken leave on the island as The Gut. A sink of moral turpitude beyond your wildest dreams, Harry had been told. He’d yet to dip his toe in. Then at the other end he’d take another dghaisa over Marsamxett Harbour to Manoel Island and the base.
Sitting in the little gondola-like wooden boat being rowed across by a smiling, scruffy-looking Maltese ancient, he felt dwarfed by Grand Harbour. Ahead of him, the sheer walls of Valletta’s white limestone bastions were dazzling in the sun, and way over to his left, the citadel of Fort St Elmo at the head of the harbour, looked all too capable of repelling any siege. It was a stunning, glorious sight, and noisy with the sound of caulking hammers from the dockyards. Not too much shipping though – Force F’s ships, of course, and two big, fat ten-thousand-ton merchantmen, still here from the Operation Halberd convoy apparently, waiting their turn to run back to Gib. And of course there was the minesweeping flotilla, dotted about, moored alongside.
But there were also the carcasses of the ships that, having made it this far, would go no further. Bombed-out twisted hulks, lying half-submerged in the Kalkara Creek, or the ones back up the harbour, under the Corradino Heights. Harry could also see where the bombs had gouged their marks on the walls, and smashed down among the houses on the heights of Floriana. He’d seen them on the way over, all the intimate views of people’s wrecked homes, but he’d been in a hurry then to see Peter Dumaresq so he hadn’t looked that closely; he certainly didn’t need to see any more now.
The submarine base, officially known as HMS Talbot, was home to the six remaining U- and N-class submarines of the Tenth Flotilla. Except only Umbrage and another boat – another no-namer, just P-something or other, Harry couldn’t remember her number – were at home, secured to the floating pontoons jutting out from the old Lazaretto, the island’s former fever hospital. The rest were on patrol.
Why the Tenth was here on Malta was on a scrap of paper, pinned to the Flotilla’s noticeboard: a scribbled note of the verbal order given to the Tenth’s Captain (S), George ‘Shrimp’ Simpson by the Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham. Your object is to cut the enemy’s sea communications between Europe and Tripoli, was what it said. Which was typical Cunningham: to the point, no fluff.
The island had been badly bombed, especially between the previous January and the end of April. It had been in all the papers. Hitler had sent an entire Luftwaffe Fliegerkorps, a whole air group of over two hundred aircraft, dispatched from its bases in occupied Norway to Sicily to assist the Führer’s Italian allies in the Regia Aeronautica in reducing Malta to rubble. But then the Germans had gone, whisked away to take part in the invasion of Russia. Things had been quieter since then, apparently. No more multiple raids every day. And even when the Italians did try to come over, more Hurricanes had been flown in when they weren’t looking, and as often as not the Italians had been driven off.
The last convoy had provided a measure of respite, and under it the RAF had built up their force: a couple of squadrons of
Blenheim bombers, another two of Beaufighters; there were Wellingtons on the island too. The Fleet Air Arm even had some Swordfish torpedo planes operating out of Hal Far, all attacking the convoys supplying Rommel and his Afrika Korps in Tunisia, who were there with the stated intent of getting to Alexandria and taking the Suez Canal. And now even Royal Navy surface units had returned to the central Med. Force F had arrived, and another, Force K, was on the way. Yes, in many ways they were still just clinging on, but everyone said things were starting to look up. Harry wasn’t so sure, not with the way the war was going in Russia. The Germans were winning, and when they did, the Luftwaffe would be back.
When Harry got to the Custom House Steps, he decided not to depress himself even more by taking the rundown, seedy route. He’d skip The Gut, and all the clubs and the drinking dens sweeping out last night’s reek of booze and cigarette smoke and sweat. He’d take the Kingsway, which would lead him past the magnificent façade of the Royal Opera House. Since he’d arrived on the island, a mere few weeks ago, he’d put to sea again almost immediately to go on patrol, and had had no time to explore, but what he had seen during his walk today had stunned him.
He’d known about Malta’s history, all the way back to Calypso holding Odysseus as her sex slave; about the arrival of the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians and then the Romans; and of how, at the end of the Dark Ages, the Normans in Sicily had taken the island from the Moors and then how the Knights of St John had defeated the Ottoman Empire’s repeated attempts to seize it back again for Islam in the sixteenth century; and how Napoleon had seized it for France, and Nelson had taken it back off him again. The islands had been British ever since. But he’d never imagined this opulence.
