by David Black
After breakfast the next day, he gravitated back there. Just hanging around waiting to see who had passed and what would happen next. Most of the class were there already. A few were conspicuous by their absence. Then chaps started getting the call: ‘Captain (S)wants to see you.’ Captain, Submarines, the base CO.
When Harry was called, he trouped out, still tired but tensed up. Gripped by one of those emotional tug-of-wars where you try and force yourself to believe failure doesn’t really matter; that getting bumped back to the General List, on to a minesweeper or some old rattling conversion of an armed merchant cruiser or a Flower-class corvette and the life of an Atlantic convoy escort, will just be another twist of fate to take in one’s stride. But knowing all the time, wishing, pleading to any higher power alert and on receive, to let you through; to pass you as a submarine officer, and at the same time, not really knowing why. Knowing it to be dangerous, yet still wanting it.
So with stomach knotted and shallow of breath, he headed off down the bland institution-coloured corridor to hear the verdict from Captain, Submarines. When he got to the office, he discovered the call wasn’t strictly true. Captain (S) didn’t want to see him. There was no avuncular figure in gold braid and four rings. No handshake, congratulations or ceremony awaited him. Just a Petty Officer Writer.
‘You’re appointed fourth in HMS submarine Pelorus, sir,’ he’d said, handing him his sealed orders and travel dockets. ‘Welcome to the trade.’
‘You’ve got Pelorus?’ One of the training officers said, impressed, after bumping into Harry on his way to pack: ‘She’s a Parthian-class boat, big by current navy standards. Commanded by a bit of a legend in the service. Commander Charlie Bonnalleck, otherwise known as “the Bonny Boy”. You’ll be in for an interesting time of it, Mr Gilmour.’
Harry was going to be the fourth officer, by seniority, in a submarine wardroom. And since he was at the age when the word ‘interesting’ still meant something to be looked forward to, his overall mood was excitement rather than trepidation as he went off to catch a train to Chatham. It should have been the other way round.
Chapter Six
At least twenty minutes had passed since the masthead had been sighted and His Majesty’s Submarine Pelorus had gone to Diving Stations. Diving Stations – in the Submarine Service it also passed as the equivalent to Action Stations on a surface ship. Because on a submarine the everyday act of submerging was far more fraught with risk than mere contact with the enemy, and that was why Diving Stations was a call to cover every emergency eventuality.
Everyone who should be was in the control room and the entire crew were closed up and cleared for action. Lieutenant ‘Sandy’ Sandeman, Pelorus’s Jimmy, was at the trim board concentrating on his pumping and flooding, keeping the boat nailed to its periscope depth, delivering to the Skipper a perfect platform to calculate the target’s bearing, range and speed, all the while compensating for the crew running to and fro, and the boat sprinting, then slowing as it manoeuvred into a firing position, with everything in movement acting to shift the load on board and affect the boat’s buoyancy. Compensating was Sandy’s job: ensuring the water was pumped and blown between the trim tanks, keeping the boat in balance as it hung there between the surface and the deep.
And then when the time came to fire each torpedo – each weighing more than one and half tons – he had to be there, flooding the forward trim tanks to prevent the submarine from reeling with every torpedo loosed, from breaking the surface, too light and out of control, right under the enemy’s guns. Except time was passing and so far there hadn’t been much trim to adjust.
For an attack, this lack of urgency was bewildering even to a new boy like Harry. He allowed himself the licence to risk a glance around the control room. The Skipper, the Bonny Boy, was at the periscope; behind him, the bulk of his favourite chief, Jimmy Gault, there to read off the bearings from the steel bezel engraved in degrees and minutes which sat fixed around the periscope casing above the Skipper’s head.
Whatever direction the Skipper was looking in, when he shouted, ‘The bearing is . . . that!’ Gault had to call out the number on the bezel giving the bearing to the target. The new boy, Harry, was then supposed to crank it into the ‘fruit machine’, an electro-mechanical gizmo in the corner of the control room that, when fed all the right numbers, would deliver up the all-important ‘target solution’. With the help of whoever was manning the plot and the fruit machine, the Skipper could then work out the periscope angle; in other words, the relative bearing on which he needed to fix his periscope crosswire so that when the target appeared he’d know when to fire.
The fruit machine was the new boy’s action station, and there was Harry, glued to it.
Sandeman was watching the Skipper, too, and getting that awful sinking feeling, one he was becoming all too familiar with in recent weeks. For some time he had excused the Skipper’s frequently erratic behaviour as the eccentricities of an old-fashioned war hero, but the truth had begun inexorably to make itself all too plain. Sandeman wondered if anyone else among the crew knew what was happening, especially the ones who had sailed with the Bonny Boy since the start of this commission.
The bloody Bonny Boy. Submarine legend, twice breaking into the Baltic in the last lot; an ace wreaking havoc among German shipping from the Gulf of Bothnia to Kiel Roads, blue-eyed boy to the Tsar’s Admirals, a brass band every time he cruised in and out of Kronstadt or Reval or Riga, and a brass band and a VC when he returned home to Haslar Creek. Out of the navy in the twenties and then back in; seen as the sage of submarine operations, and a Commander now, and far too bloody senior to be commanding a submarine. Flotilla leader was a Commander’s billet, so what was he doing here? Sandeman knew the literal answer to that: the Skipper was arsing about, risking the lives of his crew and the safety of the boat. And over the past few weeks he’d come to know why. Except that to ever utter it, to say out loud what he knew inside, especially to someone up the chain of command – who would know Bonalleck of old, and who would remember the veteran and not the man at the periscope over there – that would be a career killer.
Sandeman was regular RN, and a conscientious and ambitious officer, and a first Lieutenant at twenty-two. The way things were going he could have a good shot at ‘the Perisher’ – the commanding officers’ qualifying course – in six to nine months at the latest, and if he passed, his own boat within a year if the war lasted that long – and it would.
‘Up periscope!’
The sage speaks, thought Sandeman, as through the muted whirr the brass tube rose, and Commander Bonalleck stooped to pull down the grips.
Sandeman turned again to his trim board and waited. They had performed one sprint since the navigator, McVeigh, a surly Northern Irish RNR Lieutenant on duty-diving watch, had spotted that mast creep above the horizon from the direction of the Texel-Den Helder cut which lay about a score or more miles away to the north-east of their current position. The rest of the time they had been crawling. No urgency, just a gentle puttering along with barely an amp out of the batteries.
‘I think you’ll find there are two masts, Mr McVeigh,’ said Bonalleck, once he’d finally made it to the control room and fastened his unusually bright, watery eyes to the periscope’s viewfinder.
Sandeman didn’t need to see the Ulsterman to know the look of seething contempt on his face. Two masts indeed, when it had taken the Skipper three calls of: ‘Captain to the control room!’ to get here. The entire Kriegsmarine could have been coming over the horizon by then, which was why McVeigh, who knew it, did not deign to respond to the Skipper’s smug commentary even though an ‘Aye aye, sir’ was called for.
‘Target bearing . . . that!’ Bonalleck had intoned. ‘Range . . .’ and Gault had reeled off the figures. ‘Down periscope,’ Bonalleck had continued. ‘Helmsman, steer zero-five-zero . . . engine room, group up, full ahead together for a three-minute run.’
He moves! thought Sandeman. The ‘group up’ order
shifted the two electric motors up from ‘series’ to ‘parallel’ to give the necessary burst of speed. The engine room telegraphs rang, the Planesmen adjusted their angles of approach to compensate for the ‘lift’ the speeding propellers or ‘screws’ would give the hydroplanes, and as Sandeman watched his trim with one eye, with the other he watched young Gilmour diligently programme the fruit machine with Bonalleck’s target data.
The control room was crowded, and the atmosphere alert. Pelorus had a good crew, together a long time by submarine standards these days. All older men: regulars, allowed to stay together because of the pull of the Bonny Boy; a crew as yet un-raided to make up cadres for new crews pouring out of the training establishments to man the new submarines coming off the slips. But this was Gilmour’s first war patrol, and Sandeman, like the good Jimmy he was, was looking out for his new man.
They were on their fourth day out from Chatham, and this was their first contact since reaching their patrol billet. Gilmour had performed adequately for an RNVR at any rate: always a minute or so early for his watch, competent in his use of the periscope, and when on diving watch there had been no fancy stuff or sudden manoeuvres to confound the Planesmen or the rating on the trim valves. He listened when you told him things, and remembered them. A bit shy, and obviously tense, but it was his first patrol and tense was what Sandeman wanted to see. Tense meant he was paying attention, blasé got people killed; and now, heading to engage the enemy, he was doing his duty, calm despite the atmosphere that gripped the tiny compartment tighter than an armature. And even if, like Sandeman on his first torpedo attack, Gilmour’s heart was beating fit to burst out of his chest, he was displaying a cool head. We like cool heads, Sandeman noted to himself, by way of taking comfort; for there was no comfort to be taken anywhere else.
For the minutes since the sighting had passed in silence. No running commentary from the Skipper, no clue as to what the target was or what it was doing, whether they were going to attack, and if so, the torpedo tubes he intended to use. The Bonny Boy was saying nothing. On surface ships, silence was the captain’s prerogative. Indeed, justifying his actions to his crew would have been seen as ‘rather off’. But on a submarine, it was part of the contract. The Skipper was the eyes of the boat. But the Bonny Boy was saying nothing about what those eyes were seeing. Just, ‘up periscope . . . down periscope’; a course change to the helmsman. Now this short sprint, and then nothing.
In the meantime, from what exchanges with the helmsman there had been, Sandeman had been constructing a mental picture of the Skipper’s course relative to the target, which appeared to be running south-south-west at probably no more than nine knots. By his reckoning, the Bonny Boy had swung Pelorus on a parallel track most likely a mile or so ahead, but it was most assuredly not his place to pass on those surmises to the crew – that would have been a serious breach of naval discipline.
Sandeman didn’t need to look round the control room to sense the deep unease. The Skipper leant back from the rubber eyepieces and began ‘walking’ the periscope round again for another 360-degree look; a check to make sure nothing was coming up from another quarter while his attention had been elsewhere. Sandeman watched the two pale rings of light shining on the Skipper’s eyes, sunlight reflected down the scope through its maze of mirrors, from a clear, bright North Sea afternoon.
‘Afternoon’ explained the fug in the boat. They had dived just before dawn, not long after 04.00, and it was now 18:17 hours – more than fourteen hours underwater, and the air was getting a little thick. That was the trouble with submarine operations in northern waters in summer: there was always too much daylight keeping you down, and the shorter nights meant you never got enough time on the surface to charge the batteries properly either. This was about to become Pelorus’s next problem: if the Skipper wanted to execute any more short, fast runs he would really start eating up the battery amps. If you kept the speed down on a boat as big as Pelorus, you could easily chug along under battery power for a good fifteen or sixteen hours, but the minute you started sprinting, the batteries drained like you’d pulled the plug on a bath.
‘Down periscope!’ ordered the Bonny Boy, as he snapped the grips shut and stood back from the scope in time to watch it hiss into the bowels of the boat. The navigator had to hurriedly move aside as his Skipper stepped back without looking, to lean against the chart table.
There was a momentary shuffling as each of those crammed into the control room’s confining space repositioned themselves; their sudden movements rippled through, like a human wash, raising another wave of human stink from men gone four days without a wash. Pelorus, like all subs, carried only a finite amount of fresh water, and when you could be out as long as three weeks, you reserved what there was for drinking and cooking. A saltwater wash was only for when it was a case of needs must and you’d steeled yourself for the abrading rasp of saltwater soap.
They waited for the next order, but the Bonny Boy said nothing. No course change or ‘group up’ for another sprint. Each crewman, taut over his own lever, dial or valve, awaiting orders, held the tension for a too-long moment, before easing back enough to risk a look over their shoulder. The Bonny Boy, at rest against the wooden table, sported a sanguine look, meeting no one’s gaze. Then at last he spoke, matter-of-factly: ‘Take her down, number one. Eighty feet. Make your course two-six-five.’
They were disengaging. There was a terrible pause before his orders were bellowed back to him and executed without question. The pause was terrible, not because it was long – anyone not attuned to submarine life would never even have registered it. Nor had the delay been long enough for the Bonny Boy to be forced to recall his crew to their duty. It was terrible because it had happened at all, and it was just long enough for even the Bonny Boy to notice. Much import can be conveyed in such a pause, and no one in that control room, in that very moment, was in any doubt that everyone was sharing the same terrible suspicion that Pelorus was running away.
Oh god! thought Harry, concentrating on his mechanical box, which right at this moment looked particularly Heath Robinson, and stupid. What is going on now? Why can’t we just get on and fight this bloody war? Please, please don’t let me be aboard another floating lunatic asylum!
Harry looked around for reassurance but all he saw were the slab faces of the control room crew, reflecting absolutely nothing.
Sandeman went about his business, taking the boat down, making sure the helmsman put her on the right course, and tweaking the trim to make her just so. Then he straightened up and regarded the Skipper. Commander Bonalleck jutted his chin in a few random directions, before clearing his throat, and with an arch indifference said to no one in particular: ‘A couple of minesweepers. Not worth alerting Jerry to the fact there’s a submarine about. I’m minded to keep our torpedoes for more telling targets,’ and then a sharp look directly at Sandeman, challenging his gaze. ‘I’m sure you agree Sandy, eh?’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ There was nothing else Sandeman could say.
Harry had the middle watch, midnight to 04.00, and was on the bridge with two ratings acting as his lookouts. The night was a calm spring beauty with barely a swell, and an indigo sky exploded with stars as Pelorus continued to slice her way up the North Sea to the steady thrum of her two big diesels powering her progress and pumping amps into her ranks of battery cells against the coming daylight when she would run submerged. Thirty-odd miles over the dark eastern horizon was the coast of German-occupied Denmark, and just over a hundred miles away, directly on Pelorus’s bow, was German-occupied Norway and the waters of the Skagerrak. This was the ascendant Third Reich’s front doorstep, but Harry found it difficult to focus on his watch-keeping duties after what had occurred earlier in the evening. He forced himself into another sweep of the horizon trying to open his night vision to the slightest nuance in the shade of night that might betray the presence of an approaching prey, predator, or even friend, for Pelorus was now well north of her last assigned patrol billet
, and other Allied submarines could be out there, perhaps unaware that a British submarine was straying into their hunting ground.
That last consideration Harry had picked up from one of the several hissed whispers passing between Sandeman and McVeigh since Pelorus had turned and run from the two German minesweepers. They had been discussing the drill for submarine operations in enemy waters. McVeigh had been saying: ‘. . . and a time off station, and then a rendezvous time with the trawler off Sheerness. You need to know all that. He should have told you as his first Lieutenant’ – this last with a sotto-voce vehemence that Harry had last heard between grown-ups unwilling to alarm the children with their squabbling. And that was how all this was making him feel – like a child among grown-ups. He shut his racing mind and conducted another all-round sweep of the horizon, then checked the lookouts were continuing to make their regular ninety-degree pans back and forth, a pause, forth and back.
The sea was empty, just a vast obsidian plain beneath endless starlight where the diesel thump seemed like silence. Yet Harry knew that, down the hatch behind him, the boat was in silent ferment since the minesweepers had been allowed to get away. The old crew, the ones who had been with the Bonny Boy forever, were quiet, grim and battened down; the rest, nervous; and him and Swann, the other watch officer, left in a limbo-land between. Not that Swann bothered much: he was all noise and self-assertion, any sensitivity to nuance or feeling long battered out of him in some middle-ranked public school.
The whole atmosphere was making Harry angrier by the minute; it was Redoubtable all over again. He’d put up with the patronising all through his time aboard her, enduring it because he believed it was expected of him; ever the diligent student. Stay in your place and do not annoy the grown-ups while they conduct grown-up business; like a child, without say.