by David Black
The Nicobar’s crew were moving, shutting valves, kicking deck plates back into place, hanging more emergency lights. The scream of escaping air was silenced, but only to be replaced instantly by a more terrifying sound – the sound of a hull breaking up. At first everyone thought it was them, but it was too big, and out there. One of the troopships; it must be.
They felt Nicobar start to rise again.
Carey started calling for damage reports. Butler was first: his ASDIC set was in bits, and God knows what that charge that went off for’ard did to the ASDIC dome.
McAndrew had sent a Stoker for’ard with his list: water was pouring in through the starboard propeller shaft gland, the main switchboard was in danger of flooding, and water was lapping around the starboard main motor casing. He was checking the battery cells right now for cracks. It was bad, but it would be brought under control.
A damage control party ran through from aft, heading for the big leak; carrying wooden battens and hammocks.
Nicobar was going up fast now, and Carey still didn’t know what depth they were at. He thought a moment then ordered up the main periscope, and as it rose, he grabbed the handles and rolled it back as if for an aerial survey. Kneeling in the shattered glass, he could see the surface above; the sun dappling the slight chop. It was difficult to say what depth they were at; maybe forty feet, not much more. He fought the urge to look around, not daring to wonder where the destroyer was and why she wasn’t coming back to finish the job.
Harry was on the trim board behind him, trying to control their depth using the main vents; it was proving to be an imprecise science. The boat’s rise had slowed, but she wasn’t stopping.
‘It would be good if you could put the brakes on now, Number One,’ said Carey.
‘Aye aye, Sir,’ said Harry, but it wasn’t working.
Oh well, thought Carey, if they were going to broach, he might as well have a look. The periscope broke the surface, and Carey turned to look to port. There was a lot to take in. Six torpedoes fired; five hits.
Closest was the Lombardia. She was well down by the stern, with an impressive list to starboard. Her entire upper works were crawling with soldiers; on her decks, in her lifeboats; and the lifeboats were being lowered. The Sovrana dei Mari was under way, and further off, but down by her bows, and listing too; and she appeared to be under tow by another Navigatori-class destroyer, or maybe it was the same one she’d tried to sink earlier? They were steaming north, very slowly, with two cargo ships steaming ahead of them, going faster. Of the Toscana, there was no sight – just a lot of lifeboats and rafts bobbing on the surface, carpeting the surface, each crammed with soldiers in the sand-coloured uniforms of the Afrika Korps. It wasn’t hundreds of them; it seemed more like thousands. And he could see why their attacker hadn’t come back, why none of the escorts were hunting Nicobar any more; they were all busy picking up survivors, on a sea dark with them. Carey called Harry to take a look.
Nicobar began going down again, the waters lapped over the periscope, but she didn’t go deep; Harry had already got her back under control before he stepped to the periscope.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Harry could make out the unmistakable outline of Shrimp, standing alone in the dark at the end of the quay, waiting on them, as they limped around the corner from the main harbour into Dockyard Creek. Apart from a group of local dockyard workers, there to throw the piles of camouflage netting over her, Shrimp Simpson made up Nicobar’s entire welcoming committee. They couldn’t take her directly into the dry dock; its gates had been damaged in the last air raid – or was it the one before? They all seemed to run together now.
In the background was the glow of a welding torch, flashing from underneath a canvas canopy strung out to shield its light from the air. Everything else was black shadow. You could still smell the reek of fire and high explosives in the air.
Carey was bringing them in, and for that Harry was grateful. He watched a docker throw a heaving line to one of Nicobar’s ratings out on the casing, for’ard. Concentrating on it, to try and block out the gnawing in his guts.
It was fear. There was nothing else to call it. It had been there, eating at him since halfway through the afternoon watch. It had hit him when he had sat down, for the first time in thirty hours, to drink a mug of coffee, and his mind had started doing sums again, like a gramophone needle stuck in a groove. He’d been doing sums since before they’d gone into action; speeds against distance; bearings, track angles, director angles, ranges. And he’d still been doing them as they had worked flat out to repair the damage done to the boat by the Eyetie’s departing depth charge attack.
Especially to their fuel tanks. One of the depth charges had smashed the sub-pressure system, the pipe network that reduced the pressure in the tanks to below the outside sea pressure, so the oil would stay in the tank if it were ruptured. And one of their tanks had been ruptured, so he had to work out the time it would take to pump it out and flood it with seawater so they wouldn’t leave a telltale slick of oil for any passing shagbat to follow. Then he had to work out if they had enough fuel in the other remaining tanks to get back to Malta. Then he had to check all Yeo’s navigation calculations: thought it best to, since they had to get them past the QB 255 mine belt without straying into it; then their speed and the timings to their waypoints; the course changes and the currents to factor in, knowing they could never surface to take sightings with a sky full of enemy aircraft hunting them. The charge left in their cracked battery cells, that McAndrew’s team were frantically strapping to get every last amp out of them – would it be enough to get them back to Malta? The air left in the boat – would there be enough of it for them to breathe?
And then there’d been the sum his brain had wandered backwards into, when he’d finally sat on his arse, shattered. How long ago had it been since he’d last slept? Even a catnap? It took a long time to count back, trying to work his brain as if he were cranking a machine with a cracked sump. The foul air he was breathing wasn’t helping. Three days – he hadn’t slept in three days. And that was when it had started – the fear.
It wouldn’t go away. Still hadn’t gone away, even now they were surfaced, were back in harbour, coming alongside. For all he was trying, standing there on the bridge in the warm night, he couldn’t block it out. The fear in his guts.
He’d tried at first thinking back to all his past ruminating on this thing called fear: its nature and corrosiveness, who it touched and who it passed by, seeing himself like some sort of scientific observer monitoring an experiment. Using all that as a device to push the fear away. And look where it had got him. Picking away at what made it tick, and now, suddenly, out of the blue, while he was tired and not looking, it had turned around and started picking away at him.
How had it started? He’d been sitting minding his own business and an empty hole had opened in him and his throat had closed, and he’d felt his skin sheen with cold sweat; and he’d started yawning and couldn’t stop. And his hands had started shaking.
All he’d done was stop being busy, and the fear had taken it as an invitation.
Sitting there, down in the wardroom, falling apart inside, abstractly wondering if he was going to crack up, and if he was, how was it going to manifest itself. He’d never actually seen anyone crack up yet, except that young rating in Pelorus’s escape trunk. But then he’d felt a bit like yelling for his mum too, right then, until the big Chief Petty Officer – what had his name been? Gault; yes, of course. Until Gault had calmed the rating down, calmed everybody down. Thinking about Gault again had calmed Harry a bit, even if it hadn’t quite made the fear go away. At least his hands had stopped shaking.
After the attack on the convoy, they had remained submerged all that day, the crew working to fix their damaged boat as they sneaked away. Their ASDIC set wrecked, they were unable to listen for the approach of any enemy ship. They hadn’t even risked a look through the periscope. Not in daylight. But when night fell, they had gone to perisco
pe depth three times, and on each occasion they had sighted an enemy warship looking for them, and had to dive again. Fast.
As the hours passed, the air had started to become increasingly foul, and Harry had ordered everyone not on watch to lie down and limit all movement. Soda trays were laid out in an attempt to soak up the excess carbon dioxide; Harry had no idea if they were working or not.
The following day, they again didn’t bother to look around. Everybody was breathing in short gasps. Harry had felt he was thinking through treacle. The fear didn’t help; and it didn’t help the fear, sitting around, limiting all his movements too. But come nightfall, they risked raising the periscope again, and brought the north tip of Gozo in sight. Carey had ordered them to the surface, and when Harry had gone up on to the bridge behind him, both of them had been sick. The two lookouts who followed them had been sick too. Carey sent a signal to Shrimp: Nicobar was returning to Malta. She was too damaged to make it to Alex. She’d be in the next night.
How many hours ago had that been? Despite being on the surface again, in the good clean air, the effort to try and count back now was too great. The fear continued to wash over him like Canute’s incoming tide, indifferent to all his ploys to order it, halt!
Suddenly, he heard Carey shouting, right next to his ear.
‘Good evening, Sir!’ Carey was calling to someone on the quay. ‘Bet you didn’t expect to see us back so soon.’
Harry looked down, and saw it was Shrimp. He’d forgotten all about Shrimp.
‘Just glad to see you back at all, Malcolm,’ Shrimp called back. ‘Very glad indeed. Is that Mr Gilmour next to you?’
‘Yes, Sir,’ Carey replied, looking at Harry as if to say, You can’t answer for yourself?
But Harry couldn’t.
‘Mr Gilmour!’ called Shrimp. ‘Go below and get all your kit, and report to me the minute the gangway comes aboard.’
Harry’s brow furrowed. Everyone was going to have to get their kit off the boat. She was going into dry dock. Why was he being told . . .?
‘Well,’ Carey hissed under his breath, ‘get a fucking move on. The Captain (S) is talking to you.’
Harry jumped, and vanished down the conning tower. Busy again, noticing in passing, as his feet hit the control room deck plates, that the hole in his guts had suddenly gone.
When Harry came down the gangway, in a press of sailors, Carey was standing talking to Shrimp by a pile of rubble, opposite Nicobar’s aft end. Somehow Harry knew they were talking about him.
The hole in his guts might have gone, but now it was replaced by another dread. It made him remember how Carey had left him alone once all the repairs were done and they’d cleared QB 255, hadn’t issued even so much as an order in his direction for the whole final run down to Valletta.
Had he seen? Did Carey know what had been happening to his First Lieutenant? Did he recognise the symptoms? The flutter inside that Harry thought he had hidden so well. And was that him now, telling the Captain (S)? Officially? Gilmour had been about to flunk it.
Oh well, better he got spotted now, before he did any damage. The thought that even just one of his crew might suffer because he’d been found wanting, or that someone might actually get killed, that the boat might be lost . . . He’d take the shame any day before he’d let that happen, without a second’s regret. Better they found him out now.
He squeezed by Bill Sutter, who was at the end of the gangway counting everyone coming off, getting ready to march them around to the Lazaretto. Nobody was going to Alexandria any time soon, and certainly not in Nicobar.
Harry, with his kitbag over one shoulder, and the Bergen he’d purloined off Olly Verney to hold his sextant on the other, marched up to his Flotilla Captain. Prepared for it.
‘Lieutenant Gilmour, reporting, Sir,’ he said, and saluted. Shrimp returned his salute, but Harry missed it; he was looking instead at one of the island’s remaining MLs burbling up, coming alongside the quay behind him, a rating on her bow, with his boathook in both hands.
‘Captain Simpson says the photoreconnaissance boys have reported the big one, the Sovrana dei Mari, beached at the entrance to Cagliari,’ said Carey, all smiles. ‘Neither she nor her troops made it to Tunis. There’s no sign of the other two. We must have sunk them. How about that then? We did it. We’re the boys, are we not, Harry?’
Harry was too tired to say anything.
‘You might as well shake your CO’s hand now, Mr Gilmour,’ said Shrimp. ‘You’re being relieved.’
‘Sir?’ said Harry, realising he was too tired to speak. He just stood there, feeling sick, beaten, crushed. To have come so far and to have failed his crew, his Captain, himself. Wondering whether he had enough fortitude left to ask, even if just for form’s sake, why. What the hell. If he was going to get cashiered and transferred to the infantry, he might as well know the reason. Hear the terrible truth.
‘Permission to ask why, Sir?’
‘Permission granted, Mr Gilmour. You’ve become too good at your job. There’s a Sunderland leaving for Gib tonight and you’re going to be on it. The ML is going to take you round to Kalafrana.’ Shrimp put his hand out to be shaken.
Harry shook it. ‘Sir?’ he said.
Shrimp smiled. ‘I’ve had this going through channels for a while. You were due to leave from Alex, when you got there. But leaving from here’s just as good. You’re on the next Commanding Officers’ Qualifying Course, Mr Gilmour. You’re going home to do your Perisher.’
Afterword
THE ROYAL NAVY SUBMARINE SERVICE
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of submarine warfare was considered by senior Royal Navy officers to be ‘Underhand, unfair and damned un-English’ – that particular quote being attributed to Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson VC, who went on to call on the Royal Navy to ‘Treat all submarines as pirates in wartime . . . and hang all crews.’
However, those in favour of experimenting with submarine technology eventually won the argument, and the Royal Navy launched its first submarine, Holland 1, in 1901.
For anyone interested in finding out more about the service in which Harry Gilmour, the hero of this story, would find himself in 1941 to 1942, there is the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, situated adjacent to the site of HMS Dolphin, the submarine service’s first shore establishment on the Gosport side of Portsmouth Harbour, Hampshire.
It is Europe’s only dedicated submarine museum and houses exhibitions covering the history of submarine warfare in general, and the role of the Royal Navy in particular.
The centrepiece is HMS Alliance, the UK’s only surviving Second World War-era submarine, which has been preserved as an operational boat of the day, and is fully accessible to visitors, with frequent walk-through tours conducted by former RN submariners. HMS Alliance is also the Royal Navy’s memorial to the 5,300 British submariners who lost their lives in the service.
Among other displays are a series of interactive exhibits including a working periscope, and a collection of thousands of personal items, photos and documents detailing the everyday lives of those in ‘the silent service’. The other submarines in the collection include the original Holland 1, and X24, the only surviving Second World War midget submarine, similar to the boats that crippled the German battleship Tirpitz.
Acknowledgments
I would once again like to thank Captain Iain D. Arthur OBE RN, the former Captain (S) of the Devonport Flotilla, for his technical guidance in writing this novel. The accuracy of my portrayal of submarine warfare is entirely down to him.
About the Author
David Black is a former Fleet Street journalist and television documentary producer. He spent much of his childhood a short walk from the Royal Navy Submarine Memorial at Lazaretto Point on the Firth of Clyde, and he grew up watching the passage of both US and Royal Navy submarines in and out of the Firth’s bases at Holy Loch and Faslane. As a boy, the lives of those underwater warriors captured his imagination. When he grew up, he d
iscovered the truth was even more epic, and so followed the inspiration for his fictional submariner, Harry Gilmour, and a series of novels about his adventures across the Second World War. David Black is also the author of a non-fiction book, Triad Takeover: A Terrifying Account of the Spread of Triad Crime in the West. He lives in Argyll.
