Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  The First Lieutenant was back on the bridge. Lieutenant Malcolm Carey was an Australian, and the complete antithesis of every Aussie archetype, for the most part.

  ‘Mike’s mob’s in the well, Skip,’ he whispered in Trumble’s ear, and then he settled beside him in the darkness, a shadow in a conspiratorial hunch, so that right away Harry felt his guts clench, because Harry, being his mother’s son, knew what was coming. ‘Cobber’ Carey was about to start discussing; and in the two patrols he’d completed so far, Harry had never seen any good come of that.

  ‘Not sure it’d be a good one to get in a gunfight with this fellah, Skip. What d’you think?’

  Harry could barely hear Carey’s words, but could almost sense the stiffening of the shadow next to him. Here we go, he thought, willing Carey to shut up. But he didn’t.

  ‘Even if Mike’s mob pots him with their first round, we’ll still have lit up the coast. The Hun’ll be all over us like a bad suit, and our mate Gabriel, he won’t be sneaking back home unnoticed.’

  Andy Trumble continued to fix the two boats out there in the darkness with his binoculars. Carey continued to blithely ignore his ominous silence: ‘We’ve got fallback rendezvous over the next two nights, then the fallbacks next week. When you think about it, what’ll be served in stirring Jerry up tonight, when we can come back tomorrow? I mean we ought to weigh it up, Skip.’

  Whether Carey had a point or not was now academic, thought Harry, the watcher and weigher of men. No solid judge of character would ever deny Harry’s assessment that the two officers were good men, but Harry was still too young himself to comprehend just how very young they were too. Andy Trumble and Malcolm Carey, both 24 years old; the latter, although as yet untested by real responsibility, was a man of calm certainty and like most Aussies, infallible confidence; the former was a harum-scarum boy brought suddenly to earth by command at sea in wartime, and still uncertain whether he was striking the right poses.

  Without taking his eyes off the targets, Andy whispered back, ‘If you enjoy debating so much, you should have gone to that university like your old man told you to.’

  It was Carey’s turn to stiffen. There we are, thought Harry; mission accomplished, and in front of crew, just as we are about to go into action; because we are going into action now, good idea or not. From the heights of his rarefied intellect Carey could not comprehend that you didn’t advise the captain of a king’s ship what to do on his own bridge, especially a newly hatched captain lacking in the necessary confidence to ignore you and leave the righteous bollocking you deserved until later. As a result, The Bucket’s two most senior officers were now sulking instead of concentrating on fighting Jerry. Brilliant, said Harry to himself, as the Skipper turned and hissed down into the control room, ‘Gun crew, close up for action!’

  Instantly Harry could hear the commotion as Mike, Sub-Lieutenant Michael Milner, the Torpedo and Gunnery Officer, led his ‘mob’ in a mad rush up out the hatch and on to the little raised platform just forward and below the bridge where The Bucket’s quick-firing 4-inch gun nestled.

  From where Harry stood watching the Räumboote and their cornered French drifter, if he twitched to his right he could just make out the flurry of heads below the bridge and hear the opening schaungs! of precision steel being worked. He’d seen Mike drill his gun crew many times now. Last thing before diving at dawn he’d have them up and at it, and the same every evening immediately after surfacing. Up, gun cleared, loaded and laid, and, ‘shoot!’ – although the Skipper seldom permitted the waste of a live round. All against Mike’s stopwatch. Apparently their times were the envy of many another boat, the interval between the order ‘gun crew close up’ and being ready to fire mere seconds. In time Harry would come to understand just how important those seconds were.

  Things were moving out there across the water. Harry focused just as an improbable yell ripped the silence. It was Mike! Shouting, ‘Gun crew closed up!’ In full-throated excitement, like he didn’t know or care how far a voice, a sound, could carry over water at night-time. Harry could almost see Andy Trumble’s eyes rolling with exasperation, but any reprimand was lost in the equally full-throated explosion from Jerry’s diesels as they revved back into life, drowning out Mike’s exuberance.

  ‘Jerry’s pulling away, sir,’ Harry whispered to the Skipper’s back, ‘and it looks like our Frenchy is hoisting his sails.’

  Indeed he was not sure that they would see ‘Frenchy’ achieve any great velocity, thought Harry. The veteran of many a regatta, he knew what it took to eat every point out of a contrary breeze as the one blowing now, and on far, far more weatherly sailors than this fishing scow.

  ‘Jerry’s going to shove our chap back with the rest of them over there,’ said Trumble to no one in particular.

  All tonight there had been a breeze coming off a collapsing anti-cyclone, blowing out of the north-east, force 3 at most, barely enough to ruffle the surface. Harry took his eyes off the drifter and mentally drew his course. He turned to Trumble, facing him square, because this was going to be a delicate conversation after ‘Cobber’ Carey’s helpful ‘remarks’, but this was stuff the Skipper needed to know, if he didn’t already. So Harry said it straight.

  ‘Obviously our girl isn’t intending on wasting what petrol she’s been rationed, sir, but the breeze is pretty foul for her getting back to the rest of the fishing fleet. She’ll have to run inshore of them, and then tack to get back. Looking at the tub she is, I don’t think she’ll be able to sail closer on the run-in than one-three-zero.’

  Trumble looked hard at Harry. Harry tensed for the put-down, but his words were met with only a brisk nod before Trumble turned and began issuing his commands into the control room voice-pipe: ‘Steer port thirty, bring her on to two-zero-zero, then finish with motors, main engines on line, half ahead. Prepare for gun action.’ The Skipper leant back and fixed Carey with a stare. ‘Get below, number one. I want the rubber raft inflated and ready under the forward torpedo hatch, and two crew with oars. And make sure Mike’s shells keep coming and the damage-control team’s on their toes . . . and be ready to take over the con if anything happens to me.’ He turned away abruptly, jamming his binoculars to his face and looking out to the French drifter, now all a-billow with flapping canvas.

  For one heart-stopping moment Harry thought Carey was going to say something, but he must have thought the better of it and vanished down the hole.

  Harry moved to the front of the bridge with Trumble as he felt The Bucket heel with her turn. Behind him the main engines started up with reports like rifles; loud, but not enough to be heard above the German’s own rattling diesels. Looking over the lip of the bridge, Harry could see the dark shapes: Mike Milner and his crew working around the gun; a ready-use magazine, like a rack of post boxes behind them, was being filled with shells by the darkened shape of a rating, turning and bending between it and the open gun deck hatch where a head and shoulders was sticking up, passing up shell after shell.

  ‘Right, Mike,’ Trumble was saying over the lip of the bridge to the pale smudge of face below him. ‘We’re going to run inside the drifter so her sails will mask us from any Hun matelot with a carrot habit. Harry here reckons she’ll run away on this course before she tries to tack but I think she’ll wear instead . . .’

  Harry bridled at this correction, but quickly agreed; the wind was nothing and the drifter was a big broad-beamed waddler; better to just fall off before the wind and paddle round on to a new course than try and win any points for elegance with a tack. Harry’s respect for his Skipper ratcheted up another notch.

  ‘. . . which means Frenchy will be turning towards the Räumboote like a pregnant duck. When he does, I’ll bring The Bucket round inside her so that as she wears, she’ll unmask Jerry for us, and we will be pointing straight at him, hopefully broad on his port bow. Then you start pouring them in. Go for his bridge and fo’c’sle first, he’s got some scary stuff up there. Then go for the waterline aft, see if
you can open up his engine room. Got it?’

  ‘Aye aye, Skipper!’ said Mike, the gleam in his eyes actually visible in the dark.

  Mike, who to Harry’s mild irritation had contrived to be younger than him by over a year, was a Dartmouth boy; regular RN, not overly bright, yet his innocent zeal for the service and the energy with which he fell to every task assigned him, continued to fill Harry with a sort of amazed humility. He was a short, broad-shouldered boy, keen to the point of parody, who made no attempt to conceal his undiluted glee at being allowed to work and control the array of lethal toys the navy had presented him with.

  Off to starboard, the little bobbing Christmas tree that was now the French drifter was slowly sliding abaft their beam to seaward, plain to see. Jerry, who had obviously told her to keep her navigation lights on like all the other fishing boats lest she slip from view again, was now somewhere out there keeping a beady eye on his errant charge.

  Harry was keeping an equally beady eye fore and aft of the drifter, peering into the darkness for any hint of a denser shadow that might reveal the Frenchman was no longer hiding them from the German gunboat. The Bucket, at slow ahead, was keeping pace with the spread of pale canvas labouring along a quarter of a mile or so away. Harry kept checking the relative position of the rest of the French fishing fleet, feeling the direction and strength of the wind on his cheek, watching the drifter’s decks for any sign of activity.

  The time wore on, and soon, as everyone on the bridge well knew, the first glimmers of dawn would be arriving over the port beam. The lookouts were starting to give Trumble the odd glance when they eased their binoculars to give their eyes a moment’s break. But Trumble remained impassive. Harry kept checking him too, between watching the drifter and checking his watch against the hour of sunrise. It was as he was turning back to the drifter after one of those little ‘divertimentos’ that he saw the French crew already clambering over their deck.

  ‘She’s standing by to wear, sir!’ said Harry. Trumble immediately flipped open the voice-pipe and start barking orders, and Harry felt The Bucket heel under his feet. She wasn’t as big or heavy a boat as Pelorus, just over 270 feet long with a twenty-six-foot beam, and weighing in at about 1,300 tons, but she was a nimble beast on the surface for a submarine. It was nothing short of exhilarating for Harry to feel her bound away, rapidly closing the distance to the drifter as he fixed the Frenchman through his binoculars again. But the drifter seemed to be wallowing on the same course despite the activity on her deck, and for a long stomach-sinking moment it looked as if he had called it wrong.

  How could it be? He knew these things. The distance she’d run, the position of the rest of the fishing fleet, their lights still dancing away astern just on the lip of the horizon, it should be now or never . . . and indeed, there she was, Harry could make her out now, the length of her hull’s shadow shrinking as she fell away, the speed starting to come off her until her stern was coming round to present itself. Against the glimmer of her deck’s working lights, there were the crew, seen quite clearly now, hauling on her fore and main sheets with all the gusto of bored laundry women bringing in the washing. But their antics went largely unnoticed.

  All eyes on The Bucket’s bridge were now forward, screwed to that patch of opening water, straining for the first glimpse of the Räumboote as they heeled inside the fishing boat’s turn. Harry didn’t see her first, nor did Trumble, but Jerry was there all right. And it was Mike Milner who spotted her: ‘Target coming clear, fine on the port bow, sir!’ he said. Just where Trumble had said she’d be.

  Harry felt a sudden rise of fierce pride, and that madness of battle which fills all warriors the first time they face the enemy, before they learn what war really is; that madness that had escaped him during the sinking of the Von Zeithen, where the only challenges he faced were cranking in numbers, and the humiliation if he cranked them in wrong; that madness came upon him at last.

  ‘Commence firing!’ yelled Trumble.

  The words were still coming from his lips, when Milner’s reedy pipe could be heard ordering, ‘Traverse! . . . up! . . .’ the numbers he was calling inaudible. The gun mount and barrel moved with sudden independent jerks and then the boy Milner’s scream, so loud and sharp it sounded almost like a girl: ‘Shoot!’ And in that instant there was a crack, not so much a sound as a needle in the ear and whump of pressure.

  ‘Action commenced at 03:42 hours!’ yelled Harry, and scribbled the time in his notebook as the noises all around became denser and more confused.

  The Bucket’s gun had gone off without any flicker of telltale flame from the barrel, just a gout of all-but-invisible smoke, her shells using the latest flashless propellant. All remained dark, and Harry still couldn’t see the Räumboote, but he saw the fall of shot; a sudden pale stalk of water appeared a bit less than a mile away, and then Harry could make out the denser shadow right behind it. He waited for the thud of the shell detonating to echo back over the water, his mind quiet and functioning just below the confusing din.

  ‘Shoot!’ Milner screamed, and the 4-incher went off again.

  This time there was no fall of shot, but a commotion seemed to shiver the Räumboote’s shadow. Harry was still waiting for the crack of the previous shell detonating. And then the Jerry’s searchlights came on, two fierce stabs of white light swinging wildly across the backdrop of night, one waving in a huge skyward arc and the other sweeping away low across the water, but to seaward, away from them. The flashless shells: Jerry didn’t know yet where the fire was coming from.

  ‘Shoot!’

  Just seconds had passed since the last, and the bang was still ringing in their ears, when everyone on the bridge saw it. A brief fountain of debris, a bit of plank, a lifebelt, other smaller lumps of stuff, pirouetting away in the darkness. But again, no sound of an explosion or the flash of igniting explosives.

  Almost in the same instant Trumble shouted, ‘Mike!’ and Mike shouted ‘Shoot!’ again.

  Trumble was at the bridge lip, but before he could say anything Jerry’s searchlight was swinging back in their direction. He flipped the voice-pipe and yelled, ‘Dive! Dive! Flood Q! Ahead full together, down angle twenty degrees for a hundred feet!’ The pipe lid flipped shut as he hit the klaxon twice. ‘Clear the bridge! Clear the gun deck! Dive! Dive!’ As he did so Milner’s last 4-inch shell hit the Räumboote – and like the others, it failed to explode.

  There was the chaos of scrambling boots, muttered effing and blinding, and the peculiar, surrealist cameo of Milner and his gun layer-dancing on the gun platform . . . except they weren’t really dancing. They were slinging shells from the ready-use magazine, out over the sides as far as they would go. Harry dropped to the hatch and vanished below, the Skipper giving his head an ungentlemanly shove.

  In the control room Carey was giving orders and Harry was backing away from the ladder, giving space for the Skipper to jump down, him barking: ‘One clip on! Two clips on!’ as he secured the hatch and then landed on the deckplates crouched and ready.

  There was a pause, everyone frozen in theatrical red light, as The Bucket plunged to her ordered depth. Carey called, ‘One hundred feet’, and the Skipper ordered ‘Group up, port thirty.’ At the words ‘Dive, dive’, the engine room shut down the diesels and their exhaust vents to prevent water rushing in as the submarine went down, and closed the breakers on The Bucket’s electric motors. The motors were now surging the boat into a hard turn, forcing everyone in the control room to brace themselves. Now they were swiftly moving under the wearing French fishing boat, putting it between them and the Jerry.

  Andy Trumble looked around the control room, his face satanic in the red. He looked at his watch. ‘Steer starboard thirty.’

  They swung again.

  ‘Midships, group down, slow ahead together . . . bring her to periscope depth.’

  Another moment, then another. The depth was called.

  ‘Up periscope,’ said Andy, and as the brass cylinder shot up, he
removed his watch cap and handed it to Harry with a tight smile – Harry’s reward as the only innocent among a host of guilty. As he bent to fix his face to the eyepiece, he said, ‘Would someone please like to tell me what just happened there?’

  Carey was out of the control room, heading forward without being asked; Harry jumped to set up a plot, leaning over the chart table to sketch the changing positions of submarine, Räumboote, fishing boat and fishing fleet.

  The minutes passed. Trumble conned the boat and called out headings; Harry scribbled; and in-between, Trumble gave an account of all the happenings upstairs, finishing with, ‘And with all the bloody racket we’d’ve made going down, if he was in any doubt about a submarine being out here, he isn’t now.’

  The Räumboote had opened her throttles and shot off in a creamy cleave of foam. She was circling now at high speed, some four hundred yards off the fishing boat, searchlights wildly stabbing the surface of water in great probing sweeps, but aimed to seaward, instead of in close to the fishing boat, where The Bucket’s periscope was keeping a beady eye on its erratic progress.

  One searchlight, however, was firmly trained on the fishing boat. Which was even better, said Trumble, because anyone following its glare would have no night vision to separate the dark pencil of The Bucket’s periscope against the dark of the water, as it followed twenty yards astern of the fishing boat’s slow progress back to the fleet. The control room also learned that the fishing boat crew was lining her sides, peering uselessly into the night, also blinded by the Räumboote’s searchlight. Oh, and that the Räumboote had quite a collection of automatic weapons on her deck, but none larger than twenty millimetres. Still, in a surface action, that was enough to put a hole in The Bucket’s pressure hull. And if Jerry did that, then The Bucket wouldn’t be able to dive. And no diving was effectively a death sentence.