by David Black
And when you were finished, you rang the telegraph for more speed, marked your progress on the chart and waited, running a little faster for quarter of an hour, maybe twenty minutes; not enough to drain the battery too much; then you began it all again. Hour in and hour out, slipping through the dark waters, moving inexorably, always unseen, towards that x marked on a chart. And as long as everybody kept paying attention and doing their job exactly right, then you all might live; because it took only one not to. Just one. That was what had been drilled into Harry at Dolphin. That was what the Bonny Boy had told him during their one and only conversation since he’d stepped aboard. That was life on patrol in the trade.
Chapter Eight
Harry was lying squirrelled in his bunk, eyes fixed on the ageing, caked white paint covering the steel deckhead mere inches above his nose, slathered on during how many refits he’d no idea. His curtain was closed, creating the illusion of separation between him and the narrow companionway immediately beyond its flimsy weft. There was the clamour in his head, while outside the crew passed like goods’ trains between the engine spaces and the control room, then there was the too- and fro-ing to the radio cubby, and the chatter and the clash of pans in the galley as Scanlon repaired the devastation from his previous meal; all of it leaving Harry nowhere near sleep, which was not good, as he was due back on watch in less than two hours. The only thing missing was the all-pervading guttural thump of the diesels. It was still daylight and Pelorus was dived, running on her electric motors, whose hum did not extend this far forward. Another goods’ train came past, except this time it did not lumber on through.
The curtain unceremoniously swished aside and the face of a control room rating he recognised but could not put a name to, even after six days of confinement, was inches from his face. The expression was shut-down and determined to such a degree that Harry didn’t at first register that the boy was even younger than he was.
‘Sir!’ This was hissed, emphatic and low. ‘Jimmy says control room pronto, sir!’
Harry was out of his bunk and airborne, feeling as if his feet weren’t actually touching the deck until at least halfway down the passageway. He burst through the control room hatch to see the crew complete their hectic bundling into Diving Stations. Sandeman, eyes hidden, was at the handlebars of the main search periscope. Commander Bonalleck’s ‘mascot’ chief, Jimmy Gault, was behind him, leaning forward over Sandeman’s crouched figure. Gault, a big, jowly man with grizzled grey hair and a pair of totally incongruous, dainty pince-nez on his nose, was squinting at the bearing bezel above Sandeman’s head. He was in the process of reading off the bearing, saying ‘Red-six-five.’ It could mean only one thing, a target.
McVeigh was already clearing the chart table to begin opening a plot for an attack.
‘We have a warship coming out of the Baltic on our bows,’ announced Sandeman to the control room, still glued to the periscope. ‘And a big one at that. Bigger than a destroyer, anyway. Down periscope,’ he said, and stepped back. ‘Mr McVeigh, tell Mr Swann in the for’ard torpedo room to open the bow doors on tubes one to six for a snap attack. I got a bit of a look,’ he added, and swept his hand through his blond waves in the absent way he had, not addressing anyone in particular. ‘She’s got some kind of control tower forward . . . not sure who she is, but she’s a Jerry all right. It is my intention to attack her.’
Harry stepped forward to face him and said, ‘Can I have a look?’
McVeigh shot him a look. It could not have held more shock and menace than if Harry had just dropped his trousers in front of the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Harry, the new boy, could not conceive of the sheer scale of the breach of control room etiquette he had just committed. Sandeman turned his head slowly with that level expression on his face that could be as encouraging as it was scary. It was definitely the latter now. Everyone else assumed expressions of stone.
Harry hurriedly added, ‘Apologies, sir. My ship recognition is excellent.’
That wasn’t doing it, but Harry was not to be deflected. He had something to say and it was his duty to speak up. He wasn’t a student any more, to be ignored. Bloody right he wasn’t.
‘Jane’s Fighting Ships was bedtime reading, sir,’ he added.
Sandeman frowned, then as if on impulse, suddenly sidestepped with a slightly theatrical gesture that said ‘rise and approach’. He ordered: ‘Up attack periscope! You already have the angle on the bow, Mr Gilmour. Who is she? And be quick, I don’t want us scaring her off.’
Harry stepped forward. As the smaller of the two scopes came up, he flicked the skip of his cap aside, checked the bearing bezel was on red-four-five as the handles came up, and took a look. The slight chop leaped at him, splashing as if right in front of his eyes, a few droplets clinging for an instant, distracting his focus from the beyond, where in the middle distance, was the target; her starboard bows, three quarters on with a ‘white bone in her teeth’. He flicked the scope briefly to either side, and he had her escorts, too. Then he flicked back to the target again, dwelling but an instant to confirm. It was but three blinks of his eyes, but he’d seen enough. He stepped back, his throat practically closing with excitement.
‘Down scope!’ said Harry.
The periscope slid away. Bloody Norah! he thought. The Bonny Boy has indeed been passed intelligence on Jerry shipping, for this bastard is it!
‘Sir,’ he said, struggling to keep calm in his voice, ‘she’s a Hipper-class heavy cruiser! With two Loewe-class torpedo boats . . . small destroyers, really. But, sir. She’s coming about. Turning, sir.’
‘Well I’ll be damned. Hipper?’ breathed Sandeman, his eyes lighting with a vivid intensity. ‘You’re sure?’
Harry grinned, the implications dawning on him too. ‘Not Hipper herself, sir. Either Prinz Eugen, or Graf von Zeithen. Must be either. Hipper’s in drydock after Glowworm rammed a hole in her back in April . . . and the Norskies blew the bottom out of Blücher in Oslofjord during the invasion!’
A frisson ran round their tight little space, the men grinning that Harry couldn’t stop blabbing: ‘It’s one of their heavy cruisers, sir, 18,000 tons if she’s an ounce! Four 8-inch guns, six 4-inch. Capable of thirty-three knots . . . oh and a draught of over thirty feet.’
‘We get the picture, Mr Gilmour,’ said Sandeman, smiling. He stepped forward, creating a little eddy of confidence in the tense confines of the control room, and patted Harry’s shoulder. ‘Well done, Mr Gilmour. Excellent,’ he announced, half to himself, then to the crew: ‘We have identified our target, gentlemen, now let us sink her. Mr McVeigh, tell Mr Swann in the torpedo room to set the torpedo running depth for twenty feet, just to be on the safe side, Mr Gilmour, in case they’ve guzzled all their lager ration and are running light. Now, to your position, Mr Gilmour.’ He paused, then, ‘Oh, and I know you sailing chaps like to say “coming about”, but in the navy we say, “she’s under helm”.’
Harry beamed at him. ‘Aye aye, sir!’ he said and shoved his way to his position at the fruit machine to begin setting it up.
If he’d been cocky one instant, he wasn’t now: his throat was constricting again, but it was a cold fear that washed over him. Pelorus, his boat, was being set up to attack a major German warship, and his role in that attack was going to be critical. Him. Wee Harry Gilmour, from Dunoon. All the dreaming, all the fantasy, all the training, leading to the right here and now. He swallowed, clamped his jaw and set to work.
Pelorus’s true course and speed was already being automatically fed into the fruit machine through feeds from the gyro compass and log, and Harry looked over to the helmsman’s position, to confirm. He couldn’t see.
Then a hand with a slip of notepaper appeared in Harry’s face. The hand belonged to the ‘Wrecker’, a slight, skelf-like, shrewd-looking Londoner who’d developed an easy cocksure way of appraising Harry’s every move when he was on watch. Although the ‘outside’ ERA had seldom actually addressed him personally, Harry didn’
t like the familiarity of the man. Sandeman and McVeigh always appeared to hold him in great respect however, must have done, as he was now obviously in charge of the trim, with Sandeman on the periscope. Harry knew the ERA’s name all right. Frank Lansley. But before he could consider Lansley further, something interrupted Harry’s train of thought.
Commander Bonalleck was nowhere to be seen. And no klaxon had sounded for Diving Stations, yet at Diving Stations they were. This was wrong.
Harry looked at the slip of paper Lansley had handed him, seeking enlightenment. On it was a scribble confirming Pelorus’s true course and speed. Lansley, a picture of calm benevolence, gave Harry a wink and turned away. Harry automatically checked the figures. Lansley, the man he’d decided to dislike, had just done him a favour of such immensity that even a wet-behind-the-ears Sub-Lieutenant could comprehend its import. It meant Harry did not have to start calling out for information, interrupting what was turning into a fast-moving attack, sounding like an irritating schoolboy unable to keep up with the rest of the class, late on parade and looking like a prat. Harry’s dislike for Lansley evaporated in a flash of comprehension. This was the actual arcane ritual at work, the one he had always wondered how it happened: he was becoming ‘ship’s company’.
Sandeman called up the periscope, and spoke again, the voice low and forceful, yes, but not the full-volume quarterdeck bellow which the tension of the moment might have merited. He looked at his watch, then over at the chronometer above the chart table.
‘It is 13.02. I am commencing the attack, mark the time, Mr McVeigh,’ he said. Then there was a pause as the periscope rose, and he gripped it for a quick 360-degree sweep before swinging back to the target. Then: ‘The bearing is . . . that!’
Gault, squinting, read off the bezel: ‘Red-five-zero.’
Sandeman began working a dial on the periscope, using its horizontal split-image device. Harry knew what he was doing; he was looking at two images of the target, one on top of the other, and he was bringing the waterline of the top image to sit on the superstructure of the bottom image. With the two together, it would give the range. Sandeman called again: ‘Range is . . . that!’
And as fast as Gault read it off: ‘Twenty minutes!’ on the readout, McVeigh with his slide rule announced: ‘Range 6,000 yards!’
Sandeman ordered, ‘Down periscope!’ and Harry cranked in the target’s numbers. His machine had been storing and updating what Pelorus was doing, now it had to store and update the target.
Two minutes elapsed before Sandeman ordered the periscope back up. The bearing and the range were called again. The range was now a little over 5,000 yards. McVeigh estimated the target’s speed at twenty knots.
Sandeman ordered the periscope down and observed: ‘Right. She’s been zigzagging and she’s just completed a zig. If she stays on this course, and doesn’t zag, for another seven minutes . . .’ He trailed off, then said to Harry, still cranking in the readings: ‘Mr Gilmour, what is the target doing?’
You’re on, thought Harry. If you’ve paid attention, and dialled it all in correctly . . .
He kept his voice matter-of-fact, even though he certainly didn’t feel it. This was battle now. ‘Target on course two-three-four! Range now five-thousand two-hundred! Bearing red-four five!’ he said.
And Sandeman replied: ‘Give me a heading for a track angle of zero-nine-five degrees, Mr Gilmour.’
Harry made the regulation call-back, and began cranking figures into the fruit machine. Christ, he thought, anyone would think I know what I’m doing! The solution rolled up. ‘Steer one-eight-zero, sir!’ he said through a dry mouth.
Sandeman confirmed to the helmsman, ‘Put me on one-eight-zero. Half ahead together.’
He waited until his orders were being executed, leaning against the chart table, his back to McVeigh. Without turning, looking into some far distance he spoke again: ‘Mr Gilmour. What is my periscope angle?’
Harry read off the data with a certain precision and formality he didn’t recognise as his own: ‘Red-three-four, sir.’
The thought flashed into Harry’s head again: a head going full pelt it hadn’t had time to re-occur to him until now. Where was the Skipper?
There was an unknown target up there and Sandeman had brought the boat to Diving Stations . . . without informing the Skipper. Harry could only guess at the state Bonalleck might be in, but even so, this was wrong. He didn’t dare look at Sandeman, yet the atmosphere in the control room was calm – taut yes, but business-like, as if the crew had no quibble with the first Lieutenant’s conduct and were awaiting his orders.
Sandeman leant back into the passageway and called aft: ‘Asdic. Any HE?’
This was to the wireless rating sitting in the Asdic cubby, right now manning the boat’s other underwater listening device – the hydrophones, capable of passively picking up a target’s propeller noises miles off. HE was ‘hydrophone effects’, and yes, there was.
From the cubby just beyond the control room door, the rating announced, ‘Yes, sir, multiple . . . at least one set of heavy returns, and . . . one, maybe two light . . . all high speed. Moving quite fast, coming down our throat, sir, maybe twenty knots, still away off, but closing fast.’
‘Very good,’ said Sandeman.
No matter how many times Harry had thought he was preparing for this moment, he knew now that nothing could have prepared him. It would not have been true to say he was frightened. He sat at his position, not rigid but relaxed, a sense of cool, clear-headed anticipation suffusing his senses. Here was the moment he had conjured up countless times before. Now it was happening. He told himself this was an ancient moment, timeless among men: the approach to battle. Except this was nothing like that far-away fantasy that had happened to him at Narvik. That had been bangs and thuds directed from beyond steel doors to a place somewhere else, with consequences that took place beyond a mountain, and the fact it was happening only known about through a crackling radio he could not hear, broadcast to people he couldn’t see.
Not this time, however. This was here, now, with the enemy ‘coming down our throat’. He did not have a weapon in his hand, a gun, or a cutlass, but this clunky metal box he sat before would just as surely kill the enemy if he wielded it properly. He felt the control room crew around him, rather than saw them; like him, they were utterly immersed, bent together on putting their boat in the enemy’s way.
He had only one concern: that he would not rise to the conduct expected of him; that he would in some way be found wanting by these grave and capable men; but he would not let that happen. He knew that. He would not allow himself to be found wanting.
‘Up periscope!’ Sandeman ordered again. The swift 360-degree scan, then on to the target. ‘Bearing is . . . that!’ Then the range was called. Harry cranked it in. McVeigh, over the plot, made his notations. Sandeman said: ‘Down periscope!’ The scope slid away, and he turned to the plot where McVeigh stood with undisguised blood-lust in his eyes, grinning evilly; in the tight space of the control room, Sandeman only had to lean to see their relative positions marked on the chart.
‘We’re not closing fast enough, Bill, not if we’re still on for a ninety-five degree track angle,’ Sandeman announced – ‘track angle’ was the difference between the course the target was steering and the torpedoes’ course when they intercepted.
Sandeman unclipped a mic: ‘Motor room? Control room. How are our batteries for a two-minute sprint?’
An excruciating silence, then: ‘Full ahead together for two minutes,’ said Sandeman. Almost immediately they all felt a surge. Sandeman waited, and as the surge came off he called, ‘Up periscope.’
Bearing and range were called. Harry updated the machine, McVeigh his slide rule. Sandeman ordered the periscope down.
‘We’re there. If she stays on this course for another three, she’ll be within two-thousand yards when we fire, and we’ll hit her with a full salvo, beam on, on the stopwatch.’ He turned: ‘Harry, what’s a Hippe
r’s length?’
‘About seven-hundred feet, sir.’
Before even Sandeman could ask, McVeigh had his slide rule up, muttering through gritted teeth, ‘. . . speed about twenty knots, length seven-hundred feet . . . give it five-second intervals between launches, Skipper, that’ll hose the bastard from paint locker to steering flat.’
Sandeman nodded. ‘Up periscope!’ The scope slid up once more.
Each of those German warships would be bristling with lookouts whose only job was to spot the tell-tale ‘feather’ of a periscope. There would be no slackers; a dry bunk to sleep in that night depended on them keeping their eyes peeled. Their very lives depended on it!
Sandeman called the range and bearing again. The target was closing fast, maintaining course. The time was 13.09. A further three minutes had elapsed: Sandeman had had the periscope up for less than seven seconds.
If this happened, it would make the newspapers. It would be gazetted. HMS Pelorus would take her place in submarine lore. The boat that sank the Royal Navy’s first German heavy cruiser of the war; and may there be many more of them! It would go down in the history books! And Harry was here, on his first war patrol. He could feel his chest tighten with the sheer epic intensity of it. Harry Gilmour, the boy who used to crew on Tangle and get his hair mussed by those grandee yachtsmen; young Harry, grand lad, always keen to lend a hand, fetch and carry and be taken for granted in a kindly, patronising, jollied-along sort of way, was about to sink a bloody great German cruiser.