As an adventure writer, MacLean found his natural readership among schoolboys, and literary critics have not been able to tolerate the strained and sometimes second-hand nature of his language. However, at its best – as in this memorable passage – MacLean’s writing has a passionate authenticity.
THE ULYSSES WAS at dawn Action Stations as the shadowy shapes of the convoy, a bare mile ahead, lifted out of the greying gloom. The great bulk of the Blue Ranger, on the starboard quarter of the convoy, was unmistakable. There was a moderate swell running, but not enough to be uncomfortable: the breeze was light, from the west, the temperature just below zero, the sky chill and cloudless. The time was exactly 0700.
At 0702, the Blue Ranger was torpedoed. The Ulysses was two cable-lengths away, on her starboard quarter: those on the bridge felt the physical shock of the twin explosions, heard them shattering the stillness of the dawn as they saw two searing columns of flame fingering skywards, high above the Blue Ranger’s bridge and well aft of it. A second later they heard a signalman shouting something unintelligible, saw him pointing forwards and downwards. It was another torpedo, running astern of the carrier, trailing its evil phosphorescent wake across the heels of the convoy, before spending itself in the darkness of the Arctic.
Vallery was shouting down the voice-pipe, pulling round the Ulysses, still doing upwards of twenty knots, in a madly heeling, skidding turn, to avoid collision with the slewing carrier. Three sets of Aldis lamps and the fighting lights were already stuttering out the ‘Maintain Position’ code signal to ships in the convoy. Marshall, on the phone, was giving the standby order to the depth-charge LTO: gun barrels were already depressing, peering hungrily into the treacherous sea. The signal to the Sirrus stopped short, unneeded: the destroyer, a half-seen blue in the darkness, was already knifing its way through the convoy, white water piled high at its bows, headed for the estimated position of the U-boat.
The Ulysses sheered by parallel to the burning carrier, less than 150 feet away; travelling so fast, heeling so heavily and at such close range, it was impossible to gather more than a blurred impression, a tangled, confused memory of heavy black smoke laced with roaring columns of flame, appalling in that near-darkness, of a drunkenly listing flight-deck, of Grummans and Corstairs cartwheeling grotesquely over the edge to splash icy clouds of spray in shocked faces, as the cruiser slewed away; and then the Ulysses was round, heading back south for the kill.
Within a minute, the signal-lamp of the Vectra, up front with the convoy, started winking: ‘Contact, Green 70, closing: Contact, Green 70, closing.’
‘Acknowledge,’ Tyndall ordered briefly.
The Aldis had barely begun to clack when the Vectra cut through the signal.
‘Contacts, repeat contacts. Green 90, Green 90. Closing. Very close. Repeat contacts, contacts.’
Tyndall cursed softly.
‘Acknowledge. Investigate.’ He turned to Vallery. ‘Let’s join him, Captain. This is it. Wolf-pack Number One – and in force. No bloody right to be here,’ he added bitterly. ‘So much for Admiralty Intelligence!’
The Ulysses was round again, heading for the Vectra. It should have been growing lighter now, but the Blue Ranger, her squadron fuel tanks on fire, a gigantic torch against the eastern horizon, had the curious effect of throwing the surrounding sea into heavy darkness. She lay almost athwart of the flagship’s course for the Vectra, looming larger every minute. Tyndall had his night glasses to his eyes, kept on muttering: ‘The poor bastards, the poor bastards!’
The Blue Ranger was almost gone. She lay dead in the water, heeled far over to starboard, ammunition and petrol tanks going up in a constant series of crackling reports. Suddenly, a succession of dull, heavy explosions rumbled over the sea: the entire bridge island structure lurched crazily sideways, held, then slowly, ponderously, deliberately, the whole massive body of it toppled majestically into the glacial darkness of the sea. God only knew how many men perished with it, deep down in the Arctic, trapped in its iron walls. They were the lucky ones.
The Vectra, barely two miles ahead now, was pulling round south in a tight circle. Vallery saw her, altered course to intercept. He heard Bentley shouting something unintelligible from the fore corner of the compass platform. Vallery shook his head, heard him shouting again, his voice desperate with some nameless urgency, his arm pointing frantically over the windscreen, and leapt up beside him.
The sea was on fire. Flat, calm, burdened with hundreds of tons of fuel oil, it was a vast carpet of licking, twisting flames. That much, for a second, and that only, Vallery saw: then, with heart-stopping shock, with physically sickening abruptness, he saw something else again: the burning sea was alive with swimming, struggling men. Not a handful, not even dozens, but literally hundreds, soundlessly screaming, agonizingly dying in the barbarous contrariety of drowning and cremation.
‘Signal from Vectra, sir.’ It was Bentley speaking, his voice abnormally matter-of-fact. ‘“Depth-charging. 3, repeat 3 contacts. Request immediate assistance.”’
Tyndall was at Vallery’s side now. He heard Bentley, looked a long second at Vallery, following his sick, fascinated gaze into the sea ahead.
For a man in the sea, oil is an evil thing. It clogs his movements, burns his eyes, sears his lungs and tears away his stomach in uncontrollable paroxysms of retching; but oil on fire is a hellish thing, death by torture, a slow, shrieking death by drowning, by burning, by asphyxiation – for the flames devour all the life-giving oxygen on the surface of the sea. And not even in the bitter Arctic is there the merciful extinction by cold, for the insulation of an oil-soaked body stretches a dying man on the rack for eternity, carefully preserves him for the last excruciating refinement of agony. All this Vallery knew.
He knew, too, that for the Ulysses to stop, starkly outlined against the burning carrier, would have been suicide. And to come sharply round to starboard, even had there been time and room to clear the struggling, dying men in the sea ahead, would have wasted invaluable minutes, time and to spare for the U-boats ahead to line up firing-tracks on the convoy; and the Ulysses’s first responsibility was to the convoy. Again all this Vallery knew. But at that moment, what weighed most heavily with him was common humanity. Fine off the port bow, close in to the Blue Ranger, the oil was heaviest, the flames fiercest, the swimmers thickest: Vallery looked back over his shoulder at the Officer of the Watch.
‘Port 10!’
‘Port 10, sir.’
‘Midships!’
‘Midships, sir.’
‘Steady as she goes!’
For ten, fifteen seconds the Ulysses held her course, arrowing through the burning sea to the spot where some gregariously atavistic instinct for self-preservation held two hundred men knotted together in a writhing, seething mass, gasping out their lives in hideous agony. For a second a great gout of flame leapt up in the centre of the group, like a giant, incandescent magnesium flare, a flame that burnt the picture into the hearts and minds of the men on the bridge with a permanence and searing clarity that no photographic plate could ever have reproduced: men on fire, human torches beating insanely at the flames that licked, scorched and then incinerated clothes, hair and skin: men flinging themselves almost out of the water, backs arched like tautened bows, grotesque in convulsive crucifixion: men lying dead in the water, insignificant, featureless little oil-stained mounds in an oil-soaked plain: and a handful of fear-maddened men, faces inhumanly contorted, who saw the Ulysses and knew what was coming, as they frantically thrashed their way to a safety that offered only a few more brief seconds of unspeakable agony before they gladly died.
‘Starboard 30!’ Vallery’s voice was low, barely a murmur, but it carried clearly through the shocked silence on the bridge.
‘Starboard 30, sir.’
For the third time in ten minutes, the Ulysses slewed crazily round in a racing turn. Turning thus, a ship does not follow through the line of the bows cutting the water; there is a pronounced sideways or lateral m
otion, and the faster and sharper the turn, the more violent the broadside skidding motion, like a car on ice. The side of the Ulysses, still at an acute angle, caught the edge of the group on the port bow: almost on the instant, the entire length of the swinging hull smashed into the heart of the fire, into the thickest press of dying men.
For most of them, it was just extinction, swift and glad and merciful. The tremendous concussion and pressure waves crushed the life out of them, thrust them deep down into the blessed oblivion of drowning, thrust them down and sucked them back into the thrashing vortex of the four great screws . . .
On board the Ulysses, men for whom death and destruction had become the stuff of existence, to be accepted with the callousness and jesting indifference that alone kept them sane – these men clenched impotent fists, mouthed meaningless, useless curses over and over again and wept heedlessly like little children. They wept as pitiful, charred faces, turned up towards the Ulysses and alight with joy and hope, petrified into incredulous staring horror, as realization dawned and the water closed over them; as hate-filled men screamed insane invective, both arms raised aloft, shaking fists white-knuckled through the dripping oil as the Ulysses trampled them under: as a couple of young boys were sucked into the mælstrom of the propellers, still giving the thumbs-up sign: as a particularly shocking case, who looked as if he had been barbecued on a spit and had no right to be alive, lifted a scorified hand to the blackened hole that had been his mouth, flung to the bridge a kiss in token of endless gratitude; and wept, oddly, most of all, at the inevitable humorist who lifted his fur cap high above his head and bowed gravely and deeply, his face into the water as he died.
Suddenly, mercifully, the sea was empty. The air was strangely still and quiet, heavy with the sickening stench of charred flesh and burning Diesel, and the Ulysses’s stern was swinging wildly almost under the black pall overhanging the Blue Ranger amidships, when the shells struck her.
The shells – three 3.7s – came from the Blue Ranger. Certainly, no living gun-crews manned these 3.7s – the heat must have ignited the bridge fuses in the cartridge cases. The first shell exploded harmlessly against the armour-plating: the second wrecked the bosun’s store, fortunately empty: the third penetrated No. 3 Low Power Room via the deck. There were nine men in there – an officer, seven ratings and Chief Torpedo Gunner’s Mate Noyes. In that confined space, death was instantaneous.
Only seconds later a heavy rumbling explosion blew out a great hole along the waterline of the Blue Ranger and she fell slowly, wearily right over on her starboard side, her flight-deck vertical to the water, as if content to die now that, dying, she had lashed out at the ship that had destroyed her crew.
On the bridge, Vallery still stood on the yeoman’s platform, leaning over the starred, opaque windscreen. His head hung down, his eyes were shut and he was retching desperately, the gushing blood – arterial blood – ominously bright and scarlet in the erubescent glare of the sinking carrier. Tyndall stood there helplessly beside him, not knowing what to do, his mind numbed and sick. Suddenly, he was brushed unceremoniously aside by the Surgeon-Commander, who pushed a white towel to Vallery’s mouth and led him gently below. Old Brooks, everyone knew, should have been at his Action Stations position in the Sick Bay: no one dared say anything.
Carrington straightened the Ulysses out on course, while he waited for Turner to move up from the after Director Tower to take over the bridge. In three minutes the cruiser was up with the Vectra, methodically quartering for a lost contact. Twice the ships regained contact, twice they dropped heavy patterns. A heavy oil-slick rose to the surface: possibly a kill, probably a ruse, but in any event neither ship could remain to investigate further. The convoy was two miles ahead now, and only the Stirling and Viking were there for its protection – a wholly inadequate cover and powerless to save the convoy from any determined attack.
It was the Blue Ranger that saved FR77. In these high latitudes, dawn comes slowly, interminably: even so, it was more than half-light, and the merchant ships, line ahead through that very gentle swell, lifted clear and sharp against a cloudless horizon, a U-boat commander’s dream – or would have been, had he been able to see them. But, by this time, the convoy was completely obscured from the wolf-pack lying to the south: the light westerly wind carried the heavy black smoke from the blazing carrier along the southern flank of the convoy, at sea level, the perfect smoke-screen, dense, impenetrable. Why the U-boats had departed from their almost invariable practice of launching dawn attacks from the north, so as to have their targets between themselves and the sunrise, could only be guessed. Tactical surprise, probably, but whatever the reason it was the saving of the convoy. Within an hour, the thrashing screws of the convoy had left the wolf-pack far behind – and FR77, having slipped the pack, was far too fast to be overtaken again.
Robert Harris
ENIGMA
Robert Harris’s novel Enigma (1995) is set in Bletchley Park where throughout the war men and women worked night and day to break the German signal codes. Among them is the novel’s hero, a Cambridge mathematician called Tom Jericho.
When in March 1943 the Germans unaccountably change their U-boat code (‘Shark’), the codebreakers in Hut 8 are desperate for U-boat signs from the Atlantic that they can decrypt to read the new code. They do know, however, that the U-boats will only break their radio silence when they have found and started hunting one of the convoys crossing the Atlantic on its way to Britain.
AT 5 A.M. GMT on Tuesday 16 March, some nine hours after Jericho had parked the Austin and walked into Hut 8, U-653 was heading due east on the surface, returning to France. In the North Atlantic it was 3 a.m.
After ten days on station in the Raubgraf line, with no sign of any convoy, Feiler had finally decided to head for home. He had lost, along with Leutnant Laudon, four other ratings washed overboard. One of his petty officers was ill. The starboard diesel was still giving trouble. His one remaining torpedo was defective. The boat, which had no heating, was cold and damp, and everything – lockers, food, uniforms – was covered in a greenish-white mould. Feiler lay on his wet bunk, curled up against the cold, wincing at the irregular beat of the engine, and tried to sleep.
Up on the bridge, four men made up the night watch: one for each point of the compass. Cowled like monks in dripping black oilskins, lashed to the rail by metal belts, each had a pair of goggles and a pair of Zeiss binoculars clamped firmly to his eyes and was staring blindly into his own sector of darkness.
The cloud cover was ten-tenths. The wind was a steel attack. The hull of the U-boat thrashed beneath their feet with a violence that sent them skidding over the wet deck plates and knocking into one another.
Facing directly ahead, towards the invisible prow, was a young Obersteuermann, Heinz Theen. He was peering into such an infinity of blackness that it was possible to imagine they might have fallen off the edge of the world, when suddenly he saw a light. It flared out of nowhere, several hundred yards in front of him, winked for two seconds, then disappeared. If he hadn’t had his binoculars trained precisely upon it, he would never have seen it.
Astonishing though it seemed, he realized he had just witnessed someone lighting a cigarette.
An Allied seaman lighting a cigarette in the middle of the North Atlantic.
He called down the conning tower for the captain.
By the time Feiler had scrambled up the slippery metal ladder to the bridge thirty seconds later the cloud had shifted slightly in the high wind and shapes were moving all around them. Feiler swivelled through 360 degrees and counted the outlines of nearly twenty ships, the nearest no more than 500 yards away on the port side.
A whispered cry, as much of panic as command: ‘Alarrrmmm!’
The U-653 came out of her emergency dive and hung motionless in the calmer water beneath the waves.
Thirty-nine men crouched silently in the semidarkness, listening to the sounds of the convoy passing overhead: the fast revs of the modern
diesels, the ponderous churning of the steamers, the curious singing noises of the turbines in the warship escorts.
Feiler let them all go by. He waited two hours, then surfaced.
The convoy was already so far ahead as to be barely visible in the faint dawn light – just the masts of the ships and a few smudges of smoke on the horizon, and then, occasionally, when a high wave lifted the U-boat, the ironwork of bridges and funnels.
Feiler’s task under standing orders was not to attack – impossible in any case, given his lack of torpedoes – but to keep his quarry in sight while drawing in every other U-boat within a radius of 100 miles.
‘Convoy steering 070 degrees,’ said Feiler. ‘Naval grid square BD 1491.’
The first officer made a scrawled note in pencil then dropped down the conning tower to collect the Short Signal Code Book. In his cubbyhole next to the captain’s berth the radioman pressed his switches. The Enigma came on with a hum.
At 7 a.m., Logie had sent Pinker, Proudfoot and Kingcome back to their digs to get some decent rest. ‘Sod’s law will now proceed to operate,’ he predicted, as he watched them go, and sod’s law duly did. Twenty-five minutes later, he was back in the Big Room with the queasy expression of guilty excitement which would characterize the whole of that day.
‘It looks like it may have started.’
St Erith, Scarborough and Flowerdown had all reported an E-bar signal followed by eight Morse letters, and within a minute one of the Wrens from the Registration Room was bringing in the first copies. Jericho placed his carefully in the centre of his trestle table.
RGHC DMIG. His heart began to accelerate.
‘Hubertus net,’ said Logie. ‘4601 kilocycles.’
Cave was listening to someone on the telephone. He put his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Direction finders have a fix.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Pencil. Quick.’ Baxter threw him one. ‘49.4 degrees north,’ he repeated. ‘38.8 degrees west. Got it. Well done.’ He hung up.
The Vintage Book of War Stories Page 18