The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  Ericson ventured a smile. ‘As far as I remember, sir, there won’t be much spare time anyway.’

  ‘I should think not, by God! It’s still the middle of the war . . . How’s that First Lieutenant of yours? Better than the last one you had?’

  ‘He’s first class, sir. We’ve been together for a long time.’

  ‘Remarkable what these R.N.V.R. fellows have done. I wouldn’t have believed it, at the beginning.’ He drained his sherry, refused a second glass, and stood up again. ‘Time for me to be moving . . . You must dine with me one night. I want to hear about that U-boat.’

  How does he do it, wondered Ericson, ushering him out on to the upper deck: is it a prodigious memory – or just good briefing? . . . By the ladder, the piping party came to attention, headed by the coxswain. ‘I’ve seen you before,’ said the Admiral, looking at the yellow beard rather than the man. ‘Barnard, sir,’ said the coxswain, his West Country accent very prominent: ‘coxswain of the Tangerine when she was up here.’ The Admiral nodded, satisfied. ‘No beard then,’ he said to Ericson, ‘but it takes more than a beard to hide a man. Knew him straight away.’

  The pipes shrilled, and the Admiral saluted and climbed over the side, all in one agile movement. With his head at a level of the rail he said gruffly: ‘You start your sea exercises at half-past five tomorrow morning.’ Then he disappeared down the ladder, and presently the sleek and spotless barge shot out from the side of the ship and sped towards the shore. On the way it started signalling to Saltash with a hand lamp. ‘All guns should be trained fore and aft in harbour,’ came the message. Lockhart looked round swiftly, and saw, alas, that ‘X’ gun was trained approximately ten degrees out of the true. He walked heavily aft, calling to Allingham as he went.

  Three weeks, the Admiral had said, and three weeks it was, with every hour counting. The time went more quickly now: for all of them except Holt, there was less to learn, more to practise and to perfect: they were simply picking up again the outlines of a known job, on a bigger and broader scale than ever before. Saltash steamed faster, fired more guns, detected U-boats at a greater range, and dropped more depth-charges; in the matter of degree, they were breaking new ground, in the matter of anti-submarine warfare they were not. It was the same task as it had been for the last three years; they now had better weapons to help them in it, but its essentials never altered. They must accept A, they must guard against B – and A and B were the same old characters, the weather and the enemy, waiting in the wings for yet another scene from the longest play in the world.

  The days passed: the ship shook together and started to work: the men smartened up, and the time taken for each operation – for firing a gun, dropping a depth-charge, sending a signal, lowering a boat, rigging a hose – decreased gradually as the seconds were pared off. Saltash began to fulfil the picture in the Admiral’s mind – and in Ericson’s as well. A bigger and better Compass Rose, Ericson wanted her to be: in moments of introspection and memory, it did not seem a particularly happy thing to be aiming at, but it was the whole point of being given a new ship and more men to man her. He and Lockhart were alike in mourning the past, and in turning their backs upon it; it was made easier by a ship that came readily to hand, and by the intensive and demanding future they knew they must prepare for.

  In a ship of this size, both of them were far more remote from the crew than had been the case in Compass Rose; the working day was no longer a matter of dealing with personalities at close range, it was simply a question of the allocation of numbers – twenty seamen to do a job on the fo’c’sle, sixteen stokers to practise oiling at sea. All that mattered was that there should be enough men available at any given moment, with a petty officer to detail them off by name, using his closer knowledge of their capabilities. Saltash’s crew was almost double the size of Compass Rose’s, and sometimes it seemed that they were twice the distance away as well, and twice as anonymous. There was no one like Gregg, the seaman with the unfaithful wife, there was no one like Wainwright to cherish the depth-charges, there was no one like Yeoman Wells who looked after the signalmen with a father’s care; or if there were these characters on board, as there must still have been, they did not meet the eye, they had the permanent disguise of being names on a watch bill or a pay list, not individuals whose foibles had to be remembered. Perhaps it was a gain, perhaps it was a loss: when he took ‘Hands Fall In’ each morning, and looked down a long double line of eighty seamen whom he barely knew by sight and would not have recognised ashore, Lockhart sometimes regretted the intimate past, and the feeling, which he had had in Compass Rose, that this was a family matter, not a parade. But possibly the gain was in efficiency, which was always liable to be a cold-blooded matter.

  I just want the whaler lowered, thought Lockhart to himself on one occasion, when he could not avoid noticing that one or two of the hands were still miserable with seasickness, after a day outside. I need twelve men to do it. I don’t want to bother about whether they’ve got hangovers this morning, or whether they’re in debt or in despair. I just want the whaler on the water. Twelve men, that’s all I need. Bodies . . . Coxswain!

  It was he who dealt mostly in this principle of numbers, not people; and he could not help being aware of the change. He could even feel guilty about it, like a man forced by circumstances to replace twelve trusted workmen with twelve mechanical grabs. The answer, of course, lay in the extra amount of work the grabs could do; but that did not salve the general wound to humanity . . . Without doubt, however, that was the way the war was going: the individual had to retreat or submerge, the simple unfeeling pair of hands must come to the fore. The emphasis was now on the tireless machine of war; men were parts of this machine, and so they must remain, till they fulfilled their function or wore out. If, in the process, they did wear out, it was bad luck on the men – but not bad luck on the war, which had had its money’s worth out of them. The hateful struggle, to be effective, demanded one hundred per cent from many millions of individual people: death was in this category of demand, and lower down the list, the cancellation of humanity was an essential element in the total price.

  They were all together in the wardroom, after dinner, when their sailing signal arrived, marking the end of their stay at Ardnacraish. Earlier, the Admiral’s report had come through; he was satisfied – no more, no less – and Saltash could go. The signal which translated this into action was short and to the point.

  ‘HMS Saltash sails for Greenock 0600 hours April 15th, and will be attached to Clyde Escort Force.’

  ‘Damn,’ said Vincent as he read the message. ‘I wanted to be at Liverpool again.’

  ‘The Clyde will do for me,’ said Johnson.

  ‘Anything will do for me,’ said Holt. ‘I want to see the world.’

  ‘I must say,’ remarked Scott-Brown, ‘that there are worse places than Glasgow in the spring.’

  ‘We may not see much of it,’ said Lockhart, carefully non-committal. The midshipman’s bright and speculative eye was on him, but he avoided meeting it. Julie, he thought: it wasn’t goodbye after all . . . ‘But Glasgow is certainly something to have in the background.’

  So, once more, they went to war.

  The war to which they went, towards the middle of 1943, had reached a hard and hopeful moment. Since the new year, the escorts and convoys in the Atlantic had been neither winning nor losing: the moment of balance was at hand, with the escorts cutting back the long start which the U-boats had gained, and attaining, with tremendous effort, some sort of parity in terms of sinkings. They were still stretched thin – sometimes there were seven hundred ships at sea at one time, and a hundred escorts, which meant a huge choice of targets for the U-boats; but the thin weapon was sharp, and try as they would, the U-boats could no longer break through in any decisive sense, could not hold the bloody advantage they had gained during the past three years.

  Certainly they tried desperately hard, certainly they tried everything. The wolfpack attacks were now r
eaching their zenith, and occasionally they brought off a surprise and brutal success, as when seven tankers out of a total convoy of nine were sunk in a two-night battle in the South Atlantic. The enemy could now regularly keep over a hundred U-boats at sea at the same time, and the packs themselves, concentrating in any given area, could always muster anything up to twenty. Early in the year, their successes had begun to mount again, to a peak point in March when they sank a hundred and eight ships. The new acoustic torpedoes, which automatically ‘homed’ themselves on to the noise of a propeller, claimed many victims. But then the tide began to turn: March saw fifteen U-boats sunk, April sixteen, and May the huge total of forty-five. At this stage, evidently, the German High Command began to think it over, for the U-boats now started to withdraw from the North Atlantic convoy routes, and to disperse to other and softer areas. The attack, at long last, was running down.

  It was running down because the pace was too hot; the escorts, as well as the U-boats, had been steadily crowding on to the scene, and they had at last got the full measure of what they had to deal with. They could now go all the way across the Atlantic, thanks to the new technique of oiling at sea: there were enough ships available to provide many roving escort groups, independent of any specific convoy, and coming to the help of the ones that were hardest pressed. Above all, the escorts were learning how to find, stalk, and kill the enemy, with the smallest possible margin for failure.

  It was now a very skilful war. Nothing was left to chance: gone for ever were the makeshift days when untrained and under armed escorts put to sea with a handful of depth-charges and a couple of Lewis guns and, hoping for the best, ran straight into slaughter. Science was now king in the Atlantic: science, and skilled men to make use of it. Radar and asdics had become phenomenally accurate: a system of interception of wireless signals from U-boats made it possible to foresee an attack almost before it had been planned: aircraft carriers accompanied many of the convoys, to give, all the way across, the air cover which had been so long and so fatally absent from the black stretch of water that marked and marred the centre.

  Counter-attacks on U-boats had now reached a high degree of skill and coordination: practice and training during the time spent in harbour, carried out in concert by teams from each ship in the group, ensured that escorts knew what to do, no matter what happened, and knew also exactly what all the other ships would be doing at the same moment. There was no more improvisation, no more of the slapdash ‘it’ll-be-all-right-on-the-night’ feeling which had cost so many ships and men in the past. Now it was a streamlined job, a smooth essay in destruction; and the ships which went to sea to carry it out had strong and highly-organised backing from the naval bases ashore, which sent them out well-equipped, well worked-up, ready for anything.

  They despatched them fully armoured to a war where convoy losses were no longer inevitable, where the total frustration of an attack, and even the sinking of a U-boat, were beginning to be nothing out of the ordinary. With the tide starting at last to flow in the escorts’ favour, there could have been no better moment to rejoin the battle.

  Ericson had summoned a last conference aboard Saltash, at ten o’clock on the morning of their sailing day, so that he could give the captains of the seven other ships under his command a final run through their sailing orders, a final briefing on the way the escort screen was to be organised. The whole group, comprising three frigates and five corvettes, lay at anchor off the Tail-of-the-Bank; swinging to their shortened cables in the brisk tideway, enjoying a bright, blustering April morning which promised them lively movement as soon as they left the shelter of the Clyde. The three frigates – Saltash, and the two others which, fresh off the stocks, had later joined her at Ardnacraish – were brand-new; the five corvettes were old stagers, and they looked it, as did most corvettes nowadays: they had an air of shabby sufficiency, a salt-stained rusty competence impossible to counterfeit. At a quarter-to-ten, motorboats began to put off from each ship in turn, all bearing, besides their coxswain and bowman, a solitary figure in the stern; and Lockhart, waiting at the head of the ladder to greet the various captains and pipe them aboard, saw them converging on Saltash like chickens rallying to the man with the dinner pail.

  They had to pick their way through a crowded anchorage; within his view were upwards of forty naval escorts – destroyers, sloops, frigates, corvettes, and trawlers: a battleship, a cruiser, and two small aircraft carriers lay in an outer ring, as if to endorse the evidence of power and plenty; and farther down the river the vast concourse of merchant ships in the convoy anchorage completed a picture of concentrated naval might.

  It was, indeed, a brave sight, a promise of success coming at last within reach. But it recalled, inevitably, the stringencies of the past. ‘I wish we’d had some of these ships available a couple of years ago,’ said Lockhart, indicating the escorts to Raikes, who as Officer-of-the-Day was waiting on deck with him. ‘It might have saved us a few rough nights.’

  ‘Muddle through,’ answered Raikes, in tones of brisk cynicism. ‘If we’d had these ships then, there would have been something wrong with them, for certain – they wouldn’t have floated in salt water, or something. Better to wait for nature to take its course.’

  ‘We’re not muddling through now,’ said Lockhart coldly, summoning his decided views on the point. ‘We weren’t then, really, either. We just hadn’t got the machinery for building escorts quickly, that’s all.’

  ‘Which was part of the muddle, surely,’ said Raikes, uncertain whether he ought to argue about it. Lockhart, he knew, had a definite viewpoint on the subject, whereas he himself had only a vague civilian disparagement of the whole conduct of the war, summed up now and again in the words: ‘If this thing was run on competitive business lines, the Navy wouldn’t last a fortnight’. ‘We hadn’t got the ships,’ he continued, ‘because we were caught with our pants down.’

  ‘That’s the difference,’ said Lockhart, ‘between thinking war’s a good thing, and thinking it’s horrible. We delayed getting ready for it as long as we possibly could, because we thought it was thoroughly bad, and could somehow be avoided. We’re only just catching up now.’

  ‘Boat coming alongside, sir,’ said the quartermaster, a bored eavesdropper in this conversation. He intercepted, and acknowledged, a covert signal from the coxswain of the approaching motorboat. ‘Captain of Harmer, sir.’

  ‘Stand by to pipe,’ said Lockhart. Harmer was the senior frigate, after Saltash, and her captain was a notorious stickler for the utmost limits of naval etiquette. Lockhart could see him now, peering up out of the corner of his eye to confirm that he was going to be properly piped aboard. On the last day of the war, he thought, they might consider piping him aboard with a mouth organ – playing, preferably, I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you! . . . He realised that he was thinking on the lines of the cynical, the determinedly amateur Raikes, and he came to an especially stiff salute as the captain of Harmer started to climb on board. The latter might have a weakness, amounting almost to fetishism, for the ceremonial aspect of command, but he ran a good ship at the same time; and that, in war, excused nearly everything, from bad temper to sodomy.

  Something like the same thought presently struck Ericson, as he sat at the head of the wardroom table and surveyed his assembled captains. These were the sort of men he wanted: two of them, he knew for certain, drank far more than they ought to, one was invariably unpleasant to his officers – but their methods got results, their ships worked . . . There were seven of them, ranging from the captain of Harmer, an old lieutenant-commander nearer sixty than fifty, to the young, the positively baby-faced two-ringer in charge of Petal, the junior corvette. But in spite of a wide variety in age, in looks, in accent and upbringing, they all had the same aura of responsibility, the same air of knowing what it was all about: their faces – the lined, over-accented faces of men who had often been exhausted in the past and would often be so again – their faces all bore, in a greater o
r lesser degree, the harsh stamp of command in war.

  Perhaps I look like that myself, thought Ericson; and indeed he had only to recall the face that met him in his shaving mirror every morning to be damned certain that he did . . . But the hard lines had been hardly earned, the look of undue and continued tension was excusable. He himself, with the men round the table, made up a handful of the principals in a private fight which all the participants knew, perforce, in exhaustive detail. They were men who had become dedicated to a single theme of war, like the Eighth Army men in the desert who had slept for years under the same stars, grown to love the same comrades, and fought two and three and four times over the same stretch of arid, precarious coastline. Like these desert fighters, the men of the Atlantic had become remarkably expert, astonishingly specialist, with no eyes for any theatre of war except their own. For them, even the cleansing of that other disputed ocean, the Mediterranean, was a different sort of job from this one; it was being carried out by another group of sailors who, though brothers, had no connexion with their own single-emblem firm. Their firm was the Atlantic, and their job was the unspectacular, year-to-year passing of ships to and fro between the New World and the Old: an aspect of war that was hardly war at all, but more like a rescue operation on an enormous scale – rescue of ships in peril, rescue of men in the water, rescue of troops who needed arms and of aircraft which needed petrol; rescue of the forty-million garrison of Britain who had to have food and clothing to keep them alive, as they confronted, year after year, the hostile coast of Europe.

  When the newspapers called it ‘the lifeline’, for once the newspapers were right; and the men who had tended that lifeline for nearly four years, who had watched it being almost throttled and at last saw it easing, included, as of right, the men who now sat round the table in the wardroom of Saltash – men who were hopeful and cynical at the same time, tired but not too tired, ready for surprises and wielding counter-surprises of their own.