by David Black
They are at sixty feet now. Harry stands over the planesmen, and asks, ‘How did she feel going down?’
‘Like we suddenly ran on to a squashy floor, Sir,’ says one. Good, thinks Harry, we’re below the thermocline. They can ping til they’re blue in the face now.
‘Multiple heavy high-speed HE, still closing fast now on bearing red-one-five!’ calls Tuke.
Then, another voice.
‘Helm, turning on to zero-four-zero,’ calls the Cox’n. The four minutes have passed. It’s too soon to turn. Damn! Harry calls, ‘Helm. Make your new course zero-zero-five!’
He marks the plot, and although he is looking at it, he is seeing a big box in his head: where Umbrage has gone deep, charging towards the enemy, as the enemy is charging in towards them; and he is imagining the plane of the triangle in the water they make, with the point where Umbrage’s torpedoes must be, if they are to hit. His mouth is dry and his throat tight.
‘Periscope depth!’ he calls. And up they rise. He needs ranges now. He needs to know where the screen is, and where the cruisers are, behind it. Before they run over, and past him, and it’s too late.
‘Periscope depth,’ calls Parry-Jones, and Harry calls, ‘Up periscope.’
He steps in and drops the handles and Low steps behind. And right away he sees them. Moving the periscope around thirty degrees of angle, small shadows, one to port, others away to starboard, coming on fast. The screen. You’re not interested in them, Harry, he tells himself. Moving the periscope slower now, he is screwing his eyes to see beyond, and yes: there they are. Bigger shadows.
‘The bearing is that!’ he calls, and Low calls back, ‘Red-two-zero!’
Harry cranks to split image, and brings the top shadow down, but everything is too indistinct. He does it anyway, until what he thinks is the base of something that is just a darker smudge, rests on where he thinks the masthead must be on the smudge below. It will have to do. ‘Range!’ he calls, and Low calls the minutes back. Harry does the sums in his head. The range is three thousand five hundred yards! He calls it and hears the mechanical ratcheting as Wykham dials it into the fruit machine, and then he calls their track angle, and it’s bang on fifty degrees. Wykham’s about to call the DA for a shot, but Harry holds his hand to silence him. He’s thinking: Not at this range, or at that track angle.
Harry slaps the handles shut. ‘Down periscope. Make your depth sixty feet!’
And Umbrage falls away beneath them. Harry steps back towards his plot, and scribbles briefly; whatever he’s drawing must be very rough, and as he does, Parry-Jones is having to make an adjustment to the trim; the outside water density is changing again.
When Wykham turns back to see what’s happening, Harry has a stopwatch in his hand.
‘They’re doing just under a thousand yards a minute down their track,’ Harry announces to no one in particular, ‘and we’re covering two hundred and sixty yards a minute towards it.’
Harry watches the minute hand go round.
Tuke calls out, ‘No indication of any target zig, closest escorts are now at green-two-five and red-one-five.’
And then they all hear it: an Italian destroyer’s propeller sounds, and her pinging; the noise coming through the hull. But it isn’t hitting them; there’s no telltale handful of stones rattling the pressure hull the way an echo sounder or an ASDIC beam does when it’s bouncing off you. Harry wants to kiss Tuke, and the Commander S1.
Ricka-chicky-Ricka-chicky-Ricka-chicky!
And Tuke calls, ‘Escort destroyers abeam now, Sir. Bearing red- and green-zero-nine-zero. Passing now, bearing’s drawing aft, Sir!’ But they can all hear it for themselves; they are through the screen. The pinging has stopped. They can no longer hear it, and the escorts are charging away astern of them.
‘Starboard thirty, steer one-zero-zero!’ orders Harry. But he needs to see the cruisers again now; he needs to come up. ‘Periscope depth, bring us up fast in the turn.’
And as they rise, he calls, ‘Up periscope!’ Tuke calls out the latest bearing to the main targets. And Low steps in to begin his dance, holding his hands over Harry’s on the handles, placing him on the bearing Tuke’s just called out. Harry sees blackness . . . and then there they are again! ‘Bearing is that!’
‘Bearing, red-one-four degrees, in the swing,’ calls Low. They are still turning. Wykham dials it in.
Harry flips the stadimeter down. ‘Range!’
Low calls the minutes, Harry does the sums and calls it, ‘Eighteen hundred yards!’, and Wykham dials it in.
‘Estimate target’s speed at twenty-seven knots,’ calls Harry. He has barely uttered the words, when Tuke calls, ‘New HE! High-speed revs, bearing red-two-zero. Closing fast, Sir. It’s another destroyer. And he’s pinging, Sir!’
It’s one of the beam escorts, Harry realises. He has swung the periscope, and there it is. Closer than it should be. Harry can see the bone in its teeth; its huge, creaming bow wave, glimmering pale against the shadow of its hull. Its anti-submarine equipment will acquire them any minute now.
That’s a hell of a bloody speed, she’s doing, Harry is thinking. He barks, ‘Down periscope!’ but he doesn’t order Umbrage down again; no time to dive below the layer now, to try and dodge the enemy A/S, and be back up again to fix the targets for their final firing solution.
Ricka-chicky-Ricka-chicky-Ricka-chicky!
The sound is coming through the hull now, and suddenly it is followed by the first ping. Their depth is twenty-eight feet; well above the layer. They hear the telltale pebbles hitting their hull. They have been acquired, although the destroyer is still too far away to be an imminent threat. But it’s closing.
Harry is thinking about Italian destroyer crews. Knowing how everything now depends on how efficient Italian Navy signallers are, how fast they will react. The one on the bridge of that destroyer that has just pinged them – is he paying attention as the yelling starts from the hydrophone cubby; will he understand quickly enough what he’s being told, that they have acquired a submarine; and will he have a head cool enough to turn it into a signal, and signal it to the cruiser squadron’s flag, and will the flag’s signaller, taking it down, get it right, and how quickly will he pass to the flag lieutenant . . . Will he be in time for the flag to order an emergency course change, and turn the squadron to comb his torpedoes, so that they will all miss and run uselessly out into the night to eventually sink and detonate on the seabed. Time, Harry, you just need time. Don’t think about it. Just keep willing them to take their time.
He consults his stopwatch. It must be close now . . . ‘Up periscope!’ he orders. Just concentrate on what you’re looking at, Harry . . .
And suddenly he is looking at an overlapping target: the lead cruiser’s silhouette, which he is sure now is a Zara-class, and coming on just beyond her, and behind, with her bows in the shadow of the big cruiser’s stern, is the silhouette of an Abruzzi-class light cruiser. And they’re overlapping. Making not two targets, but one continuous one – 1,700 feet long.
‘Steady on course 110,’ calls the Cox’n.
He is in an almost perfect position; the track angle is 117. He calls it. Then the bearing is called, and then the range. Target speed is still twenty-seven knots. Wykham has dialled it all in.
‘Target track angle is 117!’ Wykham calls back, then, ‘Director angle is red-three-seven!’
In the periscope, Harry sees that the two ships are going to pull apart now, and become two targets again, with all the space in between for his torpedoes to miss.
‘Place me on the DA!’ calls Harry, and Low coaxes him round. Mere seconds pass . . . and suddenly he is watching the Zara, as her bow crosses the black vertical etched on his periscope eyepiece.
He’d always thought there would have been time for deliberation when this moment approached – the moment when he would fire his first war shot.
‘Full salvo, fire on my command!’ he hears himself say, so matter-of-fact.
Somewhe
re off, he is aware of another voice: Tuke, interrupting his train of thought, calling, ‘High-speed HE! Now bearing red-seven-five! Still closing fast!’
The other destroyer. Harry can’t think about that right now.
He is imagining his own fists with an iron grip on his lungs, so that he only has air enough to call the order, and not scream it like a girl. ‘Fire one!’ he says. And the control room messenger calls it into the sound-operated telephone, through to Mr Bell in the forward torpedo room. ‘Fire two!’
Harry, knowing he has to fire fast, if he’s to have any chance of getting two into the big 14,500-ton Zara-class; before her two giant steam turbines – made at Wallsend on the Tyne of all places, and sold to the Italian Navy a decade before there was ever any rumour of war – before their 95,000-shaft horsepower drives her out of his torpedoes’ run.
Then there are the bumps, quick together, and the hiss of HP air. The first two torpedoes are away in quick succession, and now there is only the drip of seconds. He’s counting in his head, thinking, God, this is too fucking gimcrack, knowing his torpedoes are running at over fourteen hundred yards a minute, and the target’s range is drawing for’ard. He’d launched at nine hundred yards. What is the range now, to the next cruiser, further away and moving further?
How many seconds have passed since he’d fired those last torpedoes? He’s forgotten his count. The second target, moving at twenty-seven knots, a thousand yards a minute. The range to that now, what? Twelve hundred? Less? And your torpedoes travelling at forty-five knots.
‘Fire three!’ he calls. Shutting off the noise in his head. It’s too late now to worry. He gives it five more seconds and then calls, ‘Fire four!’ Then he waits for the bumps to confirm they have gone before he shouts, his voice urgent, but firm and clear. So everybody knows where they’re going.
‘Group up, full ahead, together! Full dive on the planes. Flood Q! Make your depth 150 feet! Cox’n! Starboard, thirty, when we hit it!’
They’re getting out of the way, fast.
Will the second target still be there when his torpedoes arrive? Has he left it too late? He’s wondering if he should have made time to check his stopwatch, his slide rule. But what time? From where?
Tuke calls again, ‘High-speed HE, still closing fast, going to pass to port . . . passing to port . . .’
But they can all hear the HE for themselves now: the high-speed nagging, Ricka-chicky-Ricka-chicky-Ricka-chicky! as a destroyer tears through the water, sounding as if it’s right above them. And then the splashes . . .
Meanwhile Low has produced a stopwatch of his own, and he’s counting the first torpedo running time, ‘. . . Ten seconds left to run . . . Five . . .’, as he’s holding up his hand, counting off on his fingers.
RABUMMDUHDUHDUMMM!
And again.
RABUMMDUHDUHDUMMM!
But the detonations are not any of their torpedoes; they’re depth charges.
Umbrage rolls with the shock wave, like a tram passing over a bad set of points. And everyone holds their breath, but the charges aren’t close. And there are no other splashes; no more sounds of depth charges entering the water. Even so, no one seems to notice Low’s count has gone way beyond his five seconds left; and it is as if everybody has forgotten, until they hear their first torpedo hit.
Harry scrunches his eyes so tight, he misses all the grim grins around the torpedo room, until two more RABUMMDUHDUHDUMMMS! brings everybody back to the now. More depth charges, but they’re further away, and no one is holding their breath any more, and it’s into the depth charges’ echoing rumble, as it fades away, that everyone hears their second torpedo find a target.
Chapter Fifteen
There were maybe a thousand people or more lining the path around Tigne Point, on the other side of the harbour entrance, and around below the back walls of Fort St Elmo – all jumping up and down and cheering. Harry, standing on the bridge, bareheaded to feel the weak warmth of the afternoon sun on him, knew what it was for, all right. He’d seen the Maltese people do it before, for the Force F and Force K ships, when they’d come back after blasting their way through another Axis convoy. The Government Information office, aided and abetted by that fierce old biddy who ran the Times of Malta, would organise these welcome-home crowds using the Rediffusion service: the loudspeakers on every town and village square and city street corner that used to broadcast what should have been Malta’s radio programmes, except the British authorities didn’t like broadcasting radio here, on the grounds that the enemy, sixty miles away on Sicily, could hear how you were doing, what news you were listening to and how morale was.
But every time a convoy made it through, or a Royal Navy warship returned with a good account of herself, they’d broadcast it on the Rediffusion, tell the whole island, and everybody would get down to the harbour and line the battlements. Nobody made them do it. And now they were doing it for Umbrage and her crew. Well, fancy that.
Out on the casing for’ard, beyond the gun, stood Petty Officer Bell in his Number One jacket and cap, especially for the occasion, and the five ratings in their grubby white pullovers, hands behind their backs, making some pretence of standing at ease in a military fashion – their caps on at all angles, faces wreathed in grins, keeping looking back up at Harry on the bridge, winking. All this while Umbrage burbled sedately up the Marsamxett, with her Jolly Roger at the periscope stand.
There had been a big debate aboard, when Shrimp had signalled them. ‘Confirmed, serious damage suffered two major Italian Navy surface units.’ What were they going to sew on the Jolly Roger? One red block equalled one enemy warship sunk: that was the tradition. However, they hadn’t actually sunk anything. But ‘serious damage suffered’, well, you couldn’t let that go unremarked. They’d settled on red blocks, torn half in two. And now, every time another waft of air snapped their little skull and crossbones out, so that it showed their triumphs, a little cheer rippled around the harbour. Harry had got the Cox’n and Jim Wykham up to bask in the glory, and then sent them down to let Mr Parry-Jones, Big Jonners and Warrant Engineer Crabtree up for a look, too. Big smiles all round.
Harry called down, ‘Finish with diesels’, and they went to motors to come alongside and accept pride of place by mooring right underneath the wardroom gallery, where all the Tenth’s officers at home that day were standing above them, waiting, drinks in hand, to hurl abuse, according to ancient tradition.
Another tradition was that the instant the gangway was aboard, the boat’s CO was first ashore to report immediately to the Captain (S). But Harry, still the new boy in many ways, still the RNVR boy, wasn’t first off. It wasn’t that he was consciously being disrespectful or insubordinate even, he just didn’t think it was right he should go wandering off until he’d got his wounded First Lieutenant safe into the hands of the base medical staff.
He’d gone below and hung around until they’d got the torpedo loading hatch open, and the doctor and two stretcher-bearers could come down to carry Grainger to the 3cwt ambulance waiting on the shore side of the Lazaretto, and then off to Bighi. Harry had sat with Grainger while they were waiting, telling him about their reception. But Grainger wasn’t there most of the time. He was grey and his breathing was shallow, and his eyes seemed to go in and out of focus. He didn’t speak at all, and Harry feared it wasn’t just the morphine that had put him out of it. When the doctor had come down the hatch and checked him over, Harry had asked him, ‘What’s the score?’ The doctor had replied, ‘He needs a blood transfusion’, and then had shaken his head. ‘We’ll look after him now,’ he’d said.
Harry went up through the torpedo loading hatch first. His fellow officers were all there, leaning over the gallery a bare ten feet above his head, and the cat calls had started. ‘Here he is!’ ‘Harriet, dahling! Your adoring public is waiting!’ ‘Stage fright, Gilmour?’ But they all shut up when Grainger’s stretcher appeared, and while Harry walked behind it across the gangway.
Captain Simpson wa
s in his office, with the Hubert fellow, Commander Marsham, his deputy. They both had their caps on. Harry immediately came to attention and saluted. ‘Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour reporting, Sir.’
Both senior officers returned his salute, and Shrimp said, ‘How nice of you to join us’, before removing his cap and taking his seat behind his desk. Harry wasn’t invited to sit. He was, however, invited to make a verbal report.
Harry recited it all, from racing to get on station, to the CO being lost and the First Lieutenant falling down the conning tower hatch; the First Lieutenant ordering Harry to keep Umbrage where she was, on billet, no deserting her post; how she had to hold the line. And how the Italian squadron had come over the horizon in a running fight with the Hal Far Swordfish, and how it ended up with just Umbrage left to stop the Eyeties disrupting Force F’s attack on Rommel’s supply ships. And finally how they had ended up firing a full four-torpedo salvo, and scored two hits.
Shrimp listened in silence, and when Harry had finished, he stood and gestured to Commander Marsham, who turned to the filing cabinet.
‘So you decided to take it upon yourself to attack?’ Shrimp asked. ‘No CO. No First Lieutenant. A command team of just you and an even more junior Sub, fresh off the boat from King Alfred? Against one heavy and two light cruisers, and six fleet destroyers?’
Harry, standing at ease, stiffened. ‘Yes, Sir,’ he said.
‘Why?’ said Shrimp, with an arch of his eyebrows.
Well, if I’m going to have to state the bleedin’ obvious, said Harry to himself. Thinking, If you’re going to bollock me, get on with it; but only saying, ‘There was no one else there, Sir. Somebody had to do it.’
Shrimp came around his desk and perched on it. He nodded again to Marsham, then he fixed Harry with a steady eye and said, enunciating his words with deliberate precision, ‘That is the most irresponsible . . . reckless . . . downright . . . bloody marvellous . . .’ and suddenly his words wouldn’t come, and he had grabbed Harry by the hand and was pumping it; and with his left hand had swept Harry’s cap off and thrown it on a chair. And when Harry had looked around in alarm, Marsham was standing there by the filing cabinet’s open top drawer with three tumblers gripped in one hand and a bottle of Plymouth Gin in the other.
