Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  ‘Up periscope!’

  Harry jumped. He hadn’t been paying attention. He snapped back from the runaway reverie, shamed by the horror of what he had allowed. His mind went back to the task in hand. The range was now 3,200 yards, target course steady, time 13.11.

  Would Jerry zig again? Would she turn inside their attack, steaming so fast they no longer had battery reserves for another sprint to get in position for another shot? The seconds dripped away.

  Or, what if instead of crossing her bows she would pass too close down their starboard side, too close for Pelorus to turn and fire? Was Harry’s tender, now exultant thrill of impending glory to be snatched away in the spin of a bloody Jerry helmsman’s wheel?

  Sandeman was impossibly still, poised over the periscope well. Still no one breathed; chests hurt; then Sandeman, as if the words were almost being wrung from him, said in a level, conversational tone, ‘Up periscope’. He looked, and Gault called the bearing. Still no course change on the target. Sandeman stepped back, ‘Time?’

  ‘13.12,’ said McVeigh. And then it all happened very quickly. Sandeman and McVeigh were looking at their watches as Sandeman matter of factly requested, ‘Confirm periscope angle for a nine-five degree track?’

  Harry had already done his job. He’d cranked in all the data, Sandeman should have all the figures he needed to calculate that all-important angle. The angle between Pelorus’s course and the German cruiser which would draw the first line in a deadly triangle, marked in time and trigonometry, that when crossed would tell Sandeman when to fire; which would leave the German cruiser speeding, unknowing, to arrive at a spot on the ocean at exactly the same time as Pelorus’s torpedoes.

  Harry read it off: ‘Red-two-nine.’

  If Harry had worked the machine correctly, when Jerry crossed that invisible line running from Pelorus, Sandeman would order, ‘fire one’, and the first of the steel monsters would launch into the sunlight-dappled sea to tear away at over forty knots, heading for a pre-determined rendezvous. If he had done his job, the cruiser would reach that spot in less than two minutes’ time. No going back now to correct. Harry turned to watch the show.

  No one was moving in the control room, save to execute an order. The helmsman had Pelorus steady on 180 degrees, his eyes never varying from the gyro repeater. On the fore and aft planes the two senior chiefs held her steady at periscope depth. Lansley’s eyes never left the trim board; he stood poised to move whenever he would need to – fast – to adjust the trim as each torpedo left its tube and compressed air blew back into the boat, as Pelorus became lighter by one and a half tons, less the weight of the water flooding back into the empty tube. Little sheens of sweat began to mist around the temples of several of the control room crew.

  Pelorus slid slowly towards her rendezvous, an unhurried killer moving silent and unseen, guided with an almost artistic deftness by her crew. In his mind’s eye, Harry saw the forward torpedo room; Swann presiding over the preparations with a calmness born of his own utter lack of imagination. Harry might not like the bastard, and the bastard might regard him as beneath recognition, but Harry was in no doubt that Swann would do his job. He could almost imagine him ordering one of the young Torpedomen to remove the safety pins from the torpedo tubes’ firing levers. Behind the boy would be standing a Leading Torpedoman ready to throw the number one tube lever on Sandeman’s order. Next to him would be a chief with a stopwatch to tell him when to fire the remaining five; to be launched in a daisy chain, on timings that would spread the salvo over two-and-a-half ship lengths as the enemy ship thundered past.

  Sandeman intended to fire the first torpedo just ahead of the target; and on the stopwatch, the last would be launched to pass just astern. It was a standard attack, Harry had read all about the simple lethal logic behind how it should work. At twenty knots, Jerry was going too fast to turn into the attack if he spotted the tell-tale torpedo tracks scything towards him. If he ordered full ahead in a bid to get out of their paths, he would plough into the first torpedo; if he ordered full astern in an attempt to let the torpedoes pass ahead of him, the last one would get him. If he did nothing, if he didn’t see the bubble wakes streaking towards him, Jerry would take all remaining four kippers, right in his guts. Technically, Sandeman could not miss, Harry told himself, repeating it in his head like a mantra. Technically.

  Sandeman once again ordered, ‘Up periscope,’ and stepped forward, asking Gault, almost politely, ‘Put me on the periscope angle please, chief.’

  As the periscope handles rose, Gault smiled. ‘Aye aye, sir,’ he said, and moved behind Sandeman as he crouched, released the handles and pressed his eyes to the rubber. This was the defining moment of Sandeman’s entire naval career, thought Harry. If he pulls this off . . . but he could not complete the sentence in his head. His imagination did not reach that far. He could not imagine what glory would rain down on Sandeman if this day’s work went well. He marvelled at the sangfroid, the cool, unhurried, detached professionalism of the man, and felt an unfamiliar pang of jealousy. He had forgotten all about the Bonny Boy, lying in god knows what state behind his tiny cabin’s curtain; and he did not begin to consider what cataclysmic consequences must flow from Sandeman’s courage.

  The seconds dripped by. It had been barely six minutes since the target had been first sighted. Sandeman pulled down the periscope handles and as he focused, Gault placed his big maw hands over his, and squinting like a school master at the bezel, began to slowly walk him round. ‘Red-two-nine . . . now!’

  Sandeman acknowledged, ‘Red-two-nine,’ and there was a stomach-twisting beat, and then, ‘. . . and hee-re she comes . . . right on time . . . FIRE ONE! Down scope,’ and he leapt back as the attack periscope slid away.

  His command was instantly echoed by McVeigh, into his mic.

  Suddenly there was a lurch, as if Pelorus had hit a bump in the road, and a sudden, subtle increase in pressure on the ears, as the compressed air used to launch the first torpedo vented back.

  The control room galvanized as McVeigh was announcing, ‘Range to target nineteen-hundred yards.’

  Lansley was all over the trim board, adjusting stop cocks, squinting at dials; across the tiny space the senior Planesmen began edging their big wheels to hold Pelorus level. As they worked, the status calls came fast.

  ‘One away and running!’

  Sandeman called, ‘Fire on the stopwatch!’

  From the squawk box above Harry’s head, a disembodied staticky voice began counting down, ‘. . . three, two, FIRE TWO! . . . four, three, two, FIRE THREE! . . .’

  Pelorus started to buck as if she was passing over cobbles; and then, as if the speed of events had not been cranked high enough, two further shattering things happened at once.

  A bellow from the hydrophones rating: ‘HE effects on the starboard bow, high-speed propellors, approaching fast . . . going to pass ahead of us!’

  Ahead. Between Pelorus’s salvo, and the big fat cruiser!

  Sandeman snapped round, his eyes on Harry, a huge question on his face. High-speed propellors . . . it could only be one of the escort ships . . . and she was in danger of shielding the primary target. Sandeman’s fierce stare was asking, silently, agonisingly, Will she take the torpedoes meant for the cruiser?

  Harry’s mind froze, became a perfect blank, black void, until it suddenly filled with a page from Janes’s, and a figure. ‘Eighteen feet!’ He hissed, ‘Loewe-class TBs only draw eighteen feet. We set for twenty-plus!’

  Sandeman threw his head back and seemed to suck in air. And then, before him, in the bulkhead doorway, stood Commander Bonalleck. Harry saw Sandeman’s look, spun to follow its line, and there at his shoulder stood the wreck of his CO: dishevelled hair above a crumpled white officers’ shirt, buttoned wrongly and nothing else; ivoried, lumpy sticks of legs extending beyond the shirt-tails, ending in feet in need of a wash. But it was the face and the expression; its porridgy mass, blobbed with red. The eyes rimmed with red too, like red wool wo
ven round their bulging stare. And the mouth stretched into a rictus that seemed barely human. A foxy stink, rising from unwashed parts, eddied around him as the bug eyes crept round the tiny space, and wet lips drew back over yellowing teeth. Yet he seemed unable to speak. A hand reached out and he steadied himself on Harry’s shoulder, but without seeing him. The other hand rose, sepulchral, reaching out from a grubby cuff to accuse Sandeman.

  ‘You,’ was all he managed to say, the word spoken not with a voice but with a breath.

  Before he could develop his point, Sandeman, as if he was batting him aside, said with an imperative authority: ‘You shouldn’t have got out of your sickbed, sir!’ And he was looking away before the words were out of his mouth, turning back to his fast-moving attack, not yet complete, still needing to be managed.

  Another call from the Asdic cubby: ‘High-speed propeller sounds, revs increasing, she’s turning fast, coming directly at us, she’s coming on fast, very fast.’

  Over the hydrophones operator delivering his commentary, the squawk box announced, ‘Four, three, two, fire SIX!’

  Another bump, as the last torpedo left its tube, and a flash of movement across the control room, the trim crew and Planesmen’s deft touch settling the Pelorus, calming her bucking. And Sandeman’s voice above it all, no longer directed at the crazed figure in front of the aft bulkhead; staccato now, issuing precise orders, executing Pelorus’s escape: ‘Port thirty, helmsman, make your course zero-six-five. Flood Q! Mr Lansley. Make your depth one-eight-zero feet. Twenty degrees down angle. Group up, full ahead together.’

  The deckplates began to fall away beneath Harry as he took in the brief intense activity and became aware of a growing sound, like a food mixer echoing through the hull, soft at first, but insistent. The Jerry torpedo boat.

  To Bonalleck’s side, ignoring him, stood McVeigh, grim, gripping a stopwatch, fit to crush it. And Bonalleck, just staring now, no longer seeing anything anymore, unaware; his eyes fixed on a point either inches beyond his nose or 1,000 miles away, Harry could not tell.

  ‘Two minutes gone,’ announced McVeigh, like a toll of doom, his and Sandeman’s eyes locked. Too many seconds had elapsed. The silence said it all.

  The first torpedo had crossed the cruiser’s course, and the cruiser had not been there. The seconds again began to drip. Harry focused on a tiny oil leak down one of the runners on the main periscope. Counting.

  One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . And then the whole hull echoed as if hit by some vast steel hammer, reverberating away to a terrible silence.

  One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .

  And another.

  And another.

  Sandeman, almost leisurely, picked the mic off its bulkhead catch and clicked it on.

  ‘This is the first Lieutenant here,’ he said to the crew, with a showman’s ice-cool control. ‘We have just scored three torpedo hits on a German Hipper-class heavy cruiser.’ A pause. ‘Shut off for depth charging. Prepare for depth charging.’ And then he clipped back the mic, turned and treated the entire control room to one of his very boyish and rather fetching grins.

  Chapter Nine

  HMS Pelorus was a little over two hours away from her pre-arranged rendezvous with a Royal Navy motor gunboat scheduled to be waiting for her at 06:30 hours two miles east-north-east of the Bass Rock. She was running at a steady fourteen knots, on the surface on a pitch-black night, with a force 4 wind and a short stubby sea hitting her from the south-west. She had taken almost three days to weave her way through the North Sea minefields – German and British – and was now heading for the Rosyth Naval Base on the Firth of Forth.

  The journey from the mouth of Skagerrak had been fraught, the crew cowed by Commander Bonalleck’s unspoken recriminations, and a poisonous atmosphere that seemed to smother any celebration of their successful action against the German cruiser. Bonalleck had not slept in the sixty-odd hours since they managed to escape the attentions of the two German escorts accompanying the cruiser, such as they’d been. The first torpedo boat, obviously having spotted Pelorus’s torpedo tracks, had turned towards them, opening her throttles and charging in at over thirty knots. But by the time the Jerry had reached the spot where Pelorus had fired, Pelorus was long gone, in a diving turn heading away at ninety degrees.

  The Asdic cubby had reported a series of splashes as depth charges entered the water, and Harry had remembered a vague clenching of the guts. Over the next fifteen minutes there had been six boat-rattling bangs which had initially caused him some considerable alarm. But as no one else aboard appeared remotely concerned, and each succeeding bang had appeared to be getting farther away, Harry began to wonder what all the fuss was about; this depth-charging business hadn’t been so bad. He certainly hadn’t been impressed by the much-lauded Kriegsmarine’s anti-submarine tactics.

  Of the other escort there was no report. Sandeman, musing aloud, concluded she had probably stayed back to rescue survivors. Harry also remembered the very distant rumbles which followed the attack, echoing through their hull from the depths, and the creaking sound of tearing metal.

  ‘That’s bulkheads going,’ a disembodied voice had said. A little later the voice reported HE effects for internal explosions. By then Bonalleck had vanished from the control room, missing all the grim smiles of satisfaction and relief. There had been no cheers or yells among the crew. Indeed the aftermath of the attack had felt something of an anti-climax to Harry who was already pinching himself to ram home the immensity of what they had done; the scale of their victory.

  This was the biggest enemy warship so far to be lost to direct hits from Royal Navy ordnance. Graf Spee had been lost, but she’d scuttled herself. This one was a different matter altogether and he had expected a little more demonstrable triumph to accompany their achievement. But Harry was still a boy really, and his only experience until now of war at sea was the abstract news heard in Redoubtable’s wardroom of the demise of a handful of German ‘puddle-jumpers’ picked off close to shore, in a bombardment whose effects had all taken place on the other side of a bloody great mountain. He wasn’t thinking about what it must be like to be sunk at sea; to have your ship blown apart and disappear beneath you, throwing you into the cold, numbing water among the debris and the bodies and the spreading slick of bunker fuel. Nor could he know then that fate was already on the way, bent on his enlightenment.

  Bonalleck had not returned to the control room until Sandeman was bringing Pelorus up to periscope depth again for a look back to make sure they had made good their escape. When he did, he was the CO once more: immaculately dressed and grim of countenance, scrutinising any gesture or word spoken in his presence as if sniffing for conspiracies.

  He individually summoned Sandeman and McVeigh to his cabin where what was said could not be deciphered, even by the curious Scanlon, who, being in charge of the galley directly across the shoulder-wide passageway, was the only member of crew with any justification for lurking nearby. Both officers emerged separately to inform the control room crew that they had been relieved of their watch-keeping duties and would now only ‘assist’ in the operation of the boat. After that, the Bonny Boy’s presence was ubiquitous in the control room and on the bridge. And he kept the crew busy. Pointless tasks, meticulous housekeeping and checks, all to be completed with utmost urgency and written up immediately on completion with the report presented to him personally; only for him to then ostentatiously file each one away, unread.

  Harry, with Chief Petty Officer Gault in tow, was now involved in one such infuriating, petty little exercise as Pelorus sped towards her rendezvous: a spares inventory in the engine room, matching up stock with requisition forms. The deeply offensive suggestion being that Pelorus’s Chief Engineer, a warrant officer with 20 years service called Ted Padgett, was flogging off Admiralty stores. Ted was a short, paunchy man with a round Toby-Jug face that was usually plastered with oil and a smile. Now the fleshy jaw was set like a stone escarpment as he stood i
n his usual set of disreputable overalls, smeared and sweat-caked, with heavy gauntlets stuffed in one pocket and a rag in the other, peering over one of his senior ERA’s shoulders as he counted the paper returns for securing bolts, marked ‘used’ or ‘holding’.

  Being in the engine room was like being inside the ribcage of some modernist replica dinosaur cast in steel and brass, with the rising flanks of the diesels pressing in on the steel-decked companionway, not dead, but moving, with rank upon rank of tappets dancing their perpetual dance, generating a din in the confined space that was extreme, especially with both diesels going flat out now, all their power driving the boat, since there was no need for a battery charge tonight. Pelorus would be entering the safe waters of the Forth when the sun came up tomorrow, not diving.

  Harry could feel his teeth rattling, and his vision at times seemed close to blurring in the vibration. From where he stood aft by a tall desk for spreading plans and engine schematics, he could see the two Stokers on watch patrolling their engines, applying a little oil here and there from cans like a genie’s bottle, or polishing a smeared part or pipe. The cramped cylinder in which the two throbbing diesels rested was gleaming, as were the diesels themselves, lovingly pampered by the two Stokers in their oily overalls, caps perched jauntily on the backs of their heads. Harry always felt he was entering a parallel universe every time he came aft to the engine spaces, especially when the boat was at sea and underway. A universe of noise and the reek of oil and diesel fuel, and these complex, moving engines, like beasts themselves, always seemingly on the verge of tearing free, the thrum of them rising in every steel plate and pipe surface. That was when, looking down the for’ard end of the engine room, Harry saw McVeigh appear, like a messenger from the other universe he’d left behind.