Using hand signals and his radio, he began to deploy his four attack squadrons two on either side of the approaching Italian column for an ‘anvil’ attack. The Albacore squadrons would attack the last six battleships in column using their higher maximum speed, still only 159 mph, but more than the Swordfish’s maximum of 139 mph, to go the greater distance. With the “stringbags” attacking the leading six, all the torpedo squadrons would be dropping at about the same time, spreading the anti-aircraft fire out among all seventy-two of the biplanes. As they began their attack runs, he would release his eighteen fighters of the escort to both strafe the AA gunners and deal with the Italian aircraft.
It was a great plan, limited only by the poor capability of the Mark XII* 45 cm torpedoes. With a warhead of less than 400 pounds of TNT it would be a miracle if the torpedo defenses designed into the battleships was breached and any significant damage could be achieved.
Just in time he completed the deployment of the squadrons as the black puffs of exploding 90 mm shells began to appear near the British.
Torello Luzzatto began to make a series of mental calculations on the speed of the destroyers, their range from Giulio dé Medici in comparison to the distance he needed to travel to a launching point for his torpedoes. They were only capable of four kilometers at the high speed setting of 48 knots. It was too far. The destroyers would be on him before he got to the firing point for his steam torpedoes. All they had to do was look back along the visible wakes to see his location and increase speed to attack
They wouldn’t even need to drop depth charges. Giulio dé Medici would not be able to go deep fast enough to avoid being rammed. No, he would have to take a low speed shot using the 36-knot setting. That gave him 8 kilometers and he was already within that range. He could shoot but the likelihood of his target evading was high.
Adriana calculated that his target would have about five and a half minutes to spot the torpedo wakes and take avoiding action before his weapons arrived at the intercept point. It was too long, but the only other answer was to not attack at all. Go deep to avoid the destroyers and hope for better luck another day. Torello Luzzatto would never do that!
He took one more observation of his target to confirm his solution of the course speed and range. When his torpedo firecontrol system operator reported, “Ready,” he began to fire the narrow spread of six—only one degree separation for the gyro angle offsets. As long as the target did not maneuver, he was certain all six would hit on the port side of that huge ship. With any luck that much damage all on only one side would capsize the target before counter flooding could control the list. Torello smiled as the fish left his forward tubes.
Worse than the fact that fatigue was getting to Sheppard was the fact that he knew it. He stepped out on the conning platform hoping the morning breeze would help clear his head, but the warm sun only made it worse. He had to concentrate and stay sharp until Argonne was comfortably inside a destroyer screen in formation with the French fleet. Perhaps then he could doze off in the conning station chair.
He decided to concentrate on the recovery of his Kingfishers. Zero-five, zero-three, and zero-four had landed and were waiting astern. Depth charges were being hoisted into position on the wings of mustang zero-six and zero-seven as they rested on the catapults. The aircraft and boat crane had put the sled into Argonne’s wake to snag the hook of the first OS2U-5 when it ran up on the landing mat. He raised his binoculars to identify which of his aircraft was the first in line for recovery and saw that it was Barry Jensen and Admiral Hamblen’s mustang zero-five. Sheppard was pleased with that; he actually looked forward to seeing the Admiral back on board. If he had to pick, Hamblen was probably one of the better flag officers he had ever worked with.
Barry had managed to get hooked onto the sled on his first try and quickly shut down his Pratt & Whitney engine. Without his gunner, it was Barry’s job to climb out onto the wing to attach the crane’s hook to the lifting cable on the bulkhead behind his seat. He was definitely not as agile or familiar with the evolution as his usual gunner Radioman Hargrove was. This was taking more time.
Everything else was all going like the well-oiled machine that Bronco had trained when Sheppard’s thoughts were interrupted by, “Torpedoes bearing Two-Nine-Zero relative.” Instinctively he ordered, “Conning Officer, come to flank with left full rudder. Have the signal bridge raise the submarine alarm on the port halyard.”
Something whispered No! Was it his fatigued mind? Was it Evelyn trying to warn him from thousands of miles away? He felt her presence in his mind or did he?
Two French squadrons of large destroyers called Contre-torpilleurs were building speed to recover Italian survivors. After all Amiral D’Aubigné had ordered “expedite” in spite of their shortage of fuel, when the lookouts aboard the Contre-torpilleur Mogador also saw the torpedo tracks begin off of the French ship’s starboard bow. Capitaine de Frégate Destin Moreau was on the bridge of his destroyer and knew instantly that the Argonne was in grave danger.
He knew exactly what to do, having had experience with Italian torpedoes before when Mogador had been hit off of LaSpezia in 1940. Destin relieved his Officer of the Deck of both the administration of the ship and the direction of her movements immediately by issuing his first order directly to the helmsman. He would now only have to issue orders to the helm and crew for what he needed to quickly accomplish. There would be no unnecessary delays. Though in all honesty, if asked, he would say that he had forgotten or that it did not concern him. But when Amiral D’Aubigné had passed around the list of French dependents on Argonne, he had seen that his pregnant wife Angélique was safely aboard the American battle cruiser.
Mogador was lightly loaded with little fuel oil or stores onboard. She had proven capable of over 43 knots on her sea trials with well over a hundred thousand shaft horsepower, and at this loading she would be even faster. That was what Destin was counting on as he ordered maximum speed and began issuing rudder orders to the helm. He also proved himself again as one of France’s greatest young naval leaders by ordering all hands not required in the engine and boiler rooms onto the weather decks in their life jackets.
Then he ordered, “Standby the depth charges.”
“Belay my last! Maintain course zero-eight-zero and one-third speed! Suspend aircraft recover after zero-five is aboard. Signal zero-three and zero-four to stand clear. Pass the word, ‘collision imminent, collision port side, and sound the collision alarm.’”
There is nothing like nearly killing six men in the Kingfishers to shock you back to focus. If Sheppard’s original order had been acted upon, the wash from Argonne’s over half-million shaft horse power would have destroyed the aircraft astern and drowned their crews. For the sake of his air crews he could not increase speed. If he turned before mustang zero-five was lifted, the crane would drag the Kingfisher sideways and swamp it. The younger man might swim clear, but someone of Hamblen’s age weighed down with flight gear, and unfamiliar with the “Mae West” inflatable life jacket would drown.
His torpedo defense system should be capable of absorbing the blows, without endangering Argonne’s vitals. There would be broken ankles and frightened French but no one should die. He did have to worry about one thing and went to the 21MC.
“Damage Control Central, Captain, begin counter flooding the starboard outboard voids. Fantail, Captain, warn Mustang zero-three and zero-four to remain well clear of the propeller wash.” He was so tired, was he repeating himself? Would his men notice?
If it was a full salvo from an Italian submarine, six or eight hits might capsize Argonne if he did not get ahead of the list caused by the resulting flooding. The down side was that if set as deep as his draft the torpedoes might hit below the turn of the bilge, under his torpedo defense system with catastrophic results to the engineering plant. He went back out on the conning platform to check on mustang zero-five and the torpedoes.
The Italian anti-aircraft fire was beginning to take a toll
on the British biplanes as they pressed home their attack. Shrapnel from the bursting 90mm shells, as well as 37mm and 20mm projectiles, were hitting the obsolete aircraft. Holes were appearing in the fabric of the wings and fuselages. Despite their age, in one respect the Albacores and Swordfish had an advantage. The fabric did not offer enough resistance to activate the fuses of the lighter Italian AA projectiles. Occasionally one of the planes fell when a pilot was killed or an engine was hit; however, for the most part they reached their drop points about a thousand yards from the Italians.
It was a beautifully executed attack. The Fulmar fighters even managed to do some strafing of the light anti-aircraft guns on some of the ships after they had destroyed the Ro43 float planes. Of the seventy two torpedo bombers that had launched from Splendid and Ark Royal, Bruce-MacLeod saw sixty-seven reach the drop points for their torpedoes. Only two more were destroyed as they escaped.
There was very little that the Italian admiral could do other than signal a simultaneous turn toward the port group after they dropped. That left the starboard group perfectly positioned to make beam attacks on the battleships.
As he jinked and skidded his Albacore, Commander Bruce-MacLeod’s gunner reported water columns alongside nearly every Italian battleship with some suffering two and one three hits.
He had every reason to be pleased as he signaled the attack results back to Renown. The final determination of the exact number of hits would have to wait until the flight crews were debriefed, but as the biplanes and Fulmars headed back west nearly every battleship was listing, slowing, and almost all were trailing a heavy oil slick.
Destin had been in command of Mogador when she engaged an Italian destroyer squadron in company with her sister ships Volta and Marceau. The victim of a well-executed torpedo attack that ended the fight, Mogador had suffered a hit that kept the ship in repair at Toulon until just before the Germans occupied the rest of France in late 1941. That damage was not what caught Destin’s attention.
It was the two torpedoes that had not hit his ship. Both missed astern as he had accelerated to avoid them. Both had also exploded in Mogador’s wake without hitting anything solid. The whole time in the shipyard he had badgered the engineers at the torpedo design shop in the Toulon Navy Yard for the reason. It had taken a considerable amount of good will and cognac to finally get them to devote the time for an engineering determination of the forces involved and the causes of the detonations.
The explanation in retrospect was fairly simple. The Italians had to be using an inertia switch to activate the warhead rather than the more conventional contact exploder. It was the only possible explanation. That was the genesis of Capitaine de Frégate Destin Moreau’s plan; that and his ability to do mathematics quickly in his head. It would work only if Mogador could outrun the Italian torpedoes.
Sheppard was back out on the port conning platform watching the progress of the recovery of mustang zero-five as well as the torpedoes coming his way. Argonne was starting to list to starboard as Damage Control Central orchestrated the filling of the starboard side voids in the torpedo defense system. Idly amused that everything seemed to be slowing down, he looked around at Argonne almost like a last look before leaving an old friend.
She appeared a wreck. The gun muzzles were blackened, blistered paint gave emphasis to their deadly work. There were hundreds and hundreds of shell casings from the 5 and 6-inch guns knee deep on the main and O-1 decks. As he looked closer the weather decks were covered with the residue of the silk powder bags and cork powder cartridge closures. Pieces of shrapnel from the near misses of exploding Italian shells littered those same decks and turret tops. The teak decks were scarred here and there from shrapnel gouging light marks in the dark blue camouflage.
He could see the ugly furrow in the starboard side of the main deck between turret I and II; still smoking from the last of the fire below decks. Sheppard could not see the holes in the port side of the hull cut by the shell fragments of the two hits that had detonated onboard, or the neat round entry hole abreast the aft starboard engine room. He also could not see the burned and blistered paint on the starboard side of the bridge and forward tower where the muzzle flash from the main battery had scorched the superstructure.
That is when he saw the large French destroyer accelerating and racing at him akin to an outfielder trying to snag a fly ball before it hit the wall in Yankee Stadium. What was that captain trying to do? Sheppard prayed he wasn’t trying to sacrifice his ship by having the torpedoes hit him rather than Argonne. His battle cruiser could withstand the blows, a destroyer could not. Sheppard looked aft to check on mustang zero-five.
Captain Moreau had briefed Mogador’s Weapons Officer on his plan and the vital role he had. So vital, that the Weapons Officer was running aft now, at breakneck speed. It would be his job to supervise the depth charge racks and perfectly place some of the drop points. When he breathlessly arrived, his men had already set the charges to thirty meters; the shallowest possible setting for their two-hundred kilograms of explosive.
Destin had to get ahead of the Italian torpedoes to make his plan work. The limiting item was the sink rate of his depth charges which he knew to be three meters per second. As Mogador pulled abreast the silver colored underwater missiles, Destin estimated that they were moving at about 35 knots—say eleven-hundred meters per minute. He had to drop the first charge about two-hundred meters ahead of the torpedo for the charge to explode just alongside and beneath it when the weapon passed the drop point. He would roll the charge two seconds after he could look straight down the wake from the bridge of Mogador compensating for most of the ship’s length. To be sure in case his estimate was off, his Weapons Officer would drop a second charge when he was looking directly down the wake from the fantail. The first charge should create a lateral motion the second a vertical one. The last try was Mogador’s wake itself as she strained every fiber of her being at over 44 knots.
One thing was working in his favor. The Italian submariner had spread his shots from aft to forward on his target achieving the maximum separation between torpedo hits in his planned attack, even though the gyro offset appeared to be small between weapons. Most of the fan shaped spread probably was caused by Argonne’s motion between launches. The first torpedo that Destin needed to attack was the closest to him, but to reach the farthest he had to continue racing at top speed. He did not think he would get to it in time.
Chief Bledsoe should have hoisted the Kingfisher by now. Sheppard went into the conning station and demanded of the JA talker, “Fantail, Captain, report delay in hoisting aircraft!”
When he got the answer, Sheppard had to struggle to hold his anger. The crane operator was reporting that the landing sled was hung up on the hook beneath the pontoon of mustang zero-five. Chief Bledsoe was seeing to the arming of zero-six and seven. Try as they could, the airdales had been unsuccessful in their attempts to free it.
Sheppard’s order was quick and to the point, “Hoist both together!” A quick check from the conning platform for the results of his order and he barked, “All ahead, flank, left full rudder!”
He had a dozen things to estimate in trying to determine if his actions were going to swing Argonne clear of the danger. How fast was the ship going to accelerate? Not very! How fast would she turn with the wash of the inboard racing propellers hitting the rudders? Not fast enough! How many boilers were on line—he had forgotten? Where were the torpedoes? Which ones were the most dangerous? What was that destroyer trying to do? Would her captain keep her clear?
There was no time for instruments or measurements of the variables. It all came down to his twenty-four years of service mostly at sea and the seaman’s eye that he had honed during that time. Like so many things, too many for Sheppard as tired as he was, the safety of his ship and the crew rested on his judgment in a crisis. It was no wonder that the service saying was, “... at sea the Captain is God!”
He wasn’t going to make it. Something else was needed
!
Destin had ordered two depth charges dropped as Mogador had crossed the first two torpedo paths and his weapons officer had dropped one, when the first detonated two hundred and fifty meters astern of the racing destroyer. The first blast of high explosive from the depth charge was followed by a larger explosion immediately after as the first Italian torpedo was destroyed by its own warhead. It was working!
Now all that Destin and Mogador, for the action of the two were inseparable, needed was continue rolling the charges as the Contre-torpilleur raced on—as long as there was enough sea room to complete the plan. Destin looked at the American ship. Finally she was trying to evade. What had taken her so long? There was a gigantic swirl of white water forming at her stern. Captain Moreau could only guess at the power that could create such a wash.
Mogador was pointed only slightly aft of amidships of the American battle cruiser. There was not enough room for him to complete his plan as he dropped another charge and another torpedo was destroyed. He would collide with the Argonne just aft of her after turret at almost the exact moment he needed to drop the last of his charges. Destin knew the results of his three thousand ton Contre-torpilleur hitting that monster of a ship at nearly 45 knots. Mogador would be destroyed but what of the American?
Sheppard jumped back into the conning station and barked, “Port outboard main engine. Back emergency!” He was now the Conning Officer and Lieutenant Cunningham’s, “The Captain has the conn,” confirmed it.
The port lee helmsman grabbed the handle for the outboard engine order telegraph and yanked it aft as far as it would go, went all the way forward and then back again leaving it indicating the Captain’s order.
Sheppard and the French Rescue Page 30