This time it was the Portpatrick. For one reason and another, her reports were generally treated with a good deal of reserve, but this time she was particularly emphatic. Commander Turner had no option; again he reached for the EAS switch.
Twenty minutes later the stand-down sounded again, but the Commander was to have no cocoa that night. Three times more during the hours of darkness all hands closed up to Action Stations, and only minutes, it seemed, after the last stand-down, the bugle went for dawn stations.
There was no dawn as we know it. There was a vague, imperceptible lightening in the sky, a bleak, chill greyness, as the men dragged themselves wearily back to their action stations. This, then, was war in the northern seas. No death and glory heroics, no roaring guns and spitting Oerlikons, no exaltation of the spirit, no glorious defiance of the enemy: just worn-out sleepless men, numbed with cold and sodden duffels, grey and drawn and stumbling on their feet with weakness and hunger and lack of rest, carrying with them the memories, the tensions, the cumulative physical exhaustion of a hundred such endless nights.
Vallery, as always, was on the bridge. Courteous, kind and considerate as ever, he looked ghastly. His face was haggard, the colour of putty, his bloodshot eyes deep-sunk in hollowed sockets, his lips bloodless. The severe hæmorrhage of the previous night and the sleepless night just gone had taken terrible toll of his slender strength.
In the half-light, the squadron came gradually into view. Miraculously, most of them were still in position. The frigate and minesweeper were together and far ahead of the fleet—during the night they had been understandably reluctant to have their tails tramped on by a heavy cruiser or a carrier. Tyndall appreciated this and said nothing. The Invader had lost position during the night, and lay outside the screen on the port quarter. She received a very testy signal indeed, and came steaming up to resume station, corkscrewing violently in the heavy cross seas.
Stand-down came at 0800. At 0810 the port watch was below, making tea, washing, queueing up at the galley for breakfast trays, when a muffled explosion shook the Ulysses. Towels, soap, cups, plates and trays went flying or were left where they were: blasphemous and bitter, the men were on their way before Vallery’s hand closed on the Emergency switch.
Less than half a mile away the Invader was slewing round in a violent half-circle, her flight-deck tilted over at a crazy angle. It was snowing heavily again now, but not heavily enough to obscure the great gouts of black oily smoke belching up for’ard of the Invader’s bridge. Even as the crew of the Ulysses watched, she came to rest, wallowing dangerously in the troughs between the great waves.
‘The fools, the crazy fools!’ Tyndall was terribly bitter, unreasonably so; even to Vallery, he would not admit how much he was now feeling the burden, the strain of command that sparked off his now almost chronic irritability. ‘This is what happens, Captain, when a ship loses station! And it’s as much my fault as theirs—should have sent a destroyer to escort her back.’ He peered through his binoculars, turned to Vallery. ‘Make a signal please: “Estimate of damage—please inform.” . . . That damned U-boat must have trailed her from first light, waiting for a line-up.’
Vallery said nothing. He knew how Tyndall must feel to see one of his ships heavily damaged, maybe sinking. The Invader was still lying over at the same unnatural angle, the smoke rising in a steady column now. There was no sign of flames.
‘Going to investigate, sir?’ Vallery inquired.
Tyndall bit his lip thoughtfully and hesitated.
‘Yes, I think we’d better do it ourselves. Order squadron to proceed, same speed, same course. Signal the Baliol and the Nairn to stand by the Invader.’
Vallery, watching the flags fluttering to the yardarm, was aware of someone at his elbow. He half-turned.
‘That was no U-boat, sir.’ The Kapok Kid was very sure of himself. ‘She can’t have been torpedoed.’
Tyndall overheard him. He swung round in his chair, glared at the unfortunate navigator.
‘What the devil do you know about it, sir?’ he growled. When the Admiral addressed his subordinates as ‘sir’, it was time to take to the boats. The Kapok Kid flushed to the roots of his blond hair, but he stood his ground.
‘Well, sir, in the first place the Sirrus is covering the Invader’s port side, though well ahead, ever since your recall signal. She’s been quartering that area for some time. I’m sure Commander Orr would have picked her up. Also, it’s far too rough for any sub to maintain periscope depth, far less line up a firing track. And if the U-boat did fire, it wouldn’t only fire one—six more likely, and, from that firing angle, the rest of the squadron must have been almost a solid wall behind the Invader. But no one else has been hit . . . I did three years in the trade, sir.’
‘I did ten,’ Tyndall growled. ‘Guesswork, Pilot, just guesswork.’
‘No, sir,’ Carpenter persisted. ‘It’s not. I can’t swear to it’—he had his binoculars to his eyes—‘but I’m almost sure the Invader is going astern. Could only be because her bows—below the waterline, that is—have been damaged or blown off. Must have been a mine, sir, probably acoustic.’
‘Ah, of course, of course!’ Tyndall was very acid. ‘Moored in 6,000 feet of water, no doubt?’
‘A drifting mine, sir,’ the Kapok Kid said patiently. ‘Or an old acoustic torpedo—spent German torpedoes don’t always sink. Probably a mine, though.’
‘Suppose you’ll be telling me next what mark it is and when it was laid,’ Tyndall growled. But he was impressed in spite of himself. And the Invader was going astern, although slowly, without enough speed to give her steerage way. She still wallowed helplessly in the great troughs.
An Aldis clacked acknowledgement to the winking light on the Invader. Bentley tore a sheet off a signal pad, handed it to Vallery.
‘“Invader to Admiral,”’ the Captain read. ‘“Am badly holed, starboard side for’ard, very deep. Suspect drifting mine. Am investigating extent of damage. Will report soon.”’
Tyndall took the signal from him and read it slowly. Then he looked over his shoulder and smiled faintly.
‘You were dead right, my boy, it seems. Please accept an old curmudgeon’s apologies.’
Carpenter murmured something and turned away, brick-red again with embarrassment. Tyndall grinned faintly at the Captain, then became thoughtful.
‘I think we’d better talk to him personally, Captain. Barlow, isn’t it? Make a signal.’
They climbed down two decks to the Fighter Direction room. Westcliffe vacated his chair for the Admiral.
‘Captain Barlow?’ Tyndall spoke into the handpiece.
‘Speaking.’ The sound came from the loudspeaker above his head.
‘Admiral here, Captain. How are things?’
‘We’ll manage, sir. Lost most of our bows, I’m afraid. Several casualties. Oil fires, but under conrol. WT doors all holding, and engineers and damage control parties are shorting up the crossbulkheads.’
‘Can you go ahead at all, Captain?’
‘Could do, sir, but risky—in this, anyway.’
‘Think you could make it back to base?’
‘With this wind and sea behind us, yes. Still take three-four days.’
‘Right-o, then.’ Tyndall’s voice was gruff. ‘Off you go. You’re no good to us without bows! Damned hard luck, Captain Barlow. My commiserations. And oh! I’m giving you the Baliol and Nairn as escorts and radioing for an ocean-going tug to come out to meet you—just in case.’
‘Thank you, sir. We appreciate that. One last thing—permission to empty starboard squadron fuel tanks. We’ve taken a lot of water, can’t get rid of it all—only way to recover our trim.’
Tyndall sighed. ‘Yes, I was expecting that. Can’t be helped and we can’t take it off you in this weather. Good luck, Captain. Goodbye.’
‘Thank you very much, sir. Goodbye.’
Twenty minutes later, the Ulysses was back on station in the squadron. Shortly afterwards, they sa
w the Invader, not listing quite so heavily now, head slowly round to the southeast, the little Hunt class destroyer and the frigate, one on either side, rolling wickedly as they came round with her. In another ten minutes, watchers on the Ulysses had lost sight of them, buried in a flurrying snow squall. Three gone and eleven left behind; but it was the eleven who now felt so strangely alone.
1. Cam-ships were merchant ships with specially strengthened fo’c’sles. On these were fitted fore-and-aft angled ramps from which fighter planes, such as modified Hurricanes, were catapulted for convoy defence. After breaking off action, the pilot had either to bale out or land in the sea. ‘Hazardous’ is rather an inadequate word to describe the duties of this handful of very gallant pilots: the chances of survival were not high.
FIVE
Tuesday
The Invader and her troubles were soon forgotten. All too soon, the 14th Aircraft Carrier Squadron had enough, and more than enough, to worry about on their own account. They had their own troubles to overcome, their own enemy to face—an enemy far more elemental and far more deadly than any mine or U-boat.
Tyndall braced himself more firmly against the pitching, rolling deck and looked over at Vallery. Vallery, he thought for the tenth time that morning, looked desperately ill.
‘What do you make of it, Captain? Prospects aren’t altogether healthy, are they?’
‘We’re for it, sir. It’s really piling up against us. Carrington has spent six years in the West Indies, has gone through a dozen hurricanes. Admits he’s seen a barometer lower, but never one so low with the pressure still falling so fast—not in these latitudes. This is only a curtain-raiser.’
‘This will do me nicely, meantime, thank you.’ Tyndall said dryly. ‘For a curtain-raiser, it’s doing not so badly.’
It was a masterly understatement. For a curtain-raiser, it was a magnificent performance. The wind was fairly steady, about Force 9 on the Beaufort scale, and the snow had stopped. A temporary cessation only, they all knew—far ahead to the north-west the sky was a peculiarly livid colour. It was a dull glaring purple, neither increasing nor fading, faintly luminous and vaguely menacing in its uniformity and permanence. Even to men who had seen everything the Arctic skies had to offer, from pitchy darkness on a summer’s noon, right through the magnificent displays of Northern Lights to that wonderfully washed-out blue that so often smiles down on the stupendous calms of the milk-white seas that lap edge of the Barrier, this was something quite unknown.
But the Admiral’s reference had been to the sea. It had been building up, steadily, inexorably, all during the morning. Now, at noon, it looked uncommonly like an eighteenth-century print of a barque in a storm—serried waves of greenish-grey, straight, regular and marching uniformly along, each decoratively topped with frothing caps of white. Only here, there were 500 feet between crest and crest, and the squadron, heading almost directly into it, was taking hearty punishment.
For the little ships, already burying their bows every fifteen seconds in a creaming smother of cascading white, this was bad enough, but another, a more dangerous and insidious enemy was at work—the cold. The temperature had long sunk below freezing point, and the mercury was still shrinking down, close towards the zero mark.
The cold was now intense: ice formed in cabins and mess-decks: fresh-water systems froze solid: metal contracted, hatch-covers jammed, door hinges locked in frozen immobility, the oil in the searchlight controls gummed up and made them useless. To keep a watch, especially a watch on the bridge was torture: the first shock of that bitter wind seared the lungs, left a man fighting for breath: if he had forgotten to don gloves—first the silk gloves, then the woollen mittens, then the sheepskin gauntlets—and touched a handrail, the palms of the hands seared off, the skin burnt as by white-hot metal: on the bridge; if he forgot to duck when the bows smashed down into a trough, the flying spray, solidified in a second into hurtling slivers of ice, lanced cheek and forehead open to the bone: hands froze, the very marrow of the bones numbed, the deadly chill crept upwards from feet to calves to thighs, nose and chin turned white with frostbite and demanded immediate attention: and then, by far the worst of all, the end of the watch, the return below deck, the writhing, excruciating agony of returning circulation. But, for all this, words are useless things, pale shadows of reality. Some things lie beyond the knowledge and the experience of the majority of mankind, and here imagination finds itself in a world unknown.
But all these things were relatively trifles, personal inconveniences to be shrugged aside. The real danger lay elsewhere. It lay in the fact of ice.
There were over three hundred tons of it already on the decks of the Ulysses, and more forming every minute. It lay in a thick, even coat over the main deck, the fo’c’sle, the gun-decks and the bridges: it hung in long, jagged icicles from coamings and turrets and rails: it trebled the diameter of every wire, stay and halliard, and turned slender masts into monstrous trees, ungainly and improbable. It lay everywhere, a deadly menace, and much of the danger lay in the slippery surface it presented—a problem much more easily overcome on a coalfired merchant ship with clinker and ashes from its boilers, than in the modern, oil-fired warships. On the Ulysses, they spread salt and sand and hoped for the best.
But the real danger of the ice lay in its weight. A ship, to use technical terms, can be either stiff or tender. If she’s stiff, she has a low centre of gravity, rolls easily, but whips back quickly and is extremely stable and safe. If she’s tender, with a high centre of gravity, she rolls reluctantly but comes back even more reluctantly, is unstable and unsafe. And if a ship were tender, and hundreds of tons of ice piled high on its decks, the centre of gravity rose to a dangerous height. It could rise to a fatal height . . .
The escort carriers and the destroyers, especially the Portpatrick, were vulnerable, terribly so. The carriers, already unstable with the great height and weight of their reinforced flight-decks, provided a huge, smooth, flat surface to the falling snow, ideal conditions for the formation of ice. Earlier on, it had been possible to keep the flight-decks relatively clear—working parties had toiled incessantly with brooms and sledges, salt and steam hoses. But the weather had deteriorated so badly now that to send out a man on that wildly pitching, staggering flight-deck, glassy and infinitely treacherous, would be to send him to his death. The Wrestler and Blue Ranger had modified heating systems under the flight-decks—modified, because, unlike the British ships, these Mississippi carriers had planked flight-decks: in such extreme conditions, they were hopelessly inefficient.
Conditions aboard the destroyers were even worse. They had to contend not only with the ice from the packed snow, but with ice from the sea itself. As regularly as clockwork, huge clouds of spray broke over the destroyers’ fo’c’sles as the bows crashed solidly, shockingly into the trough and rising shoulder of the next wave: the spray froze even as it touched the deck, even before it touched the deck, piling up the solid ice, in places over a foot thick, from the stem aft beyond the breakwater. The tremendous weight of the ice was pushing the little ships down by their heads; deeper, with each successive plunge ever deeper, they buried their noses in the sea, and each time, more and more sluggishly, more and more reluctantly, they staggered laboriously up from the depths. Like the carrier captains, the destroyer skippers could only look down from their bridges, helpless, hoping.
Two hours passed, two hours in which the temperature fell to zero, hesitated, then shrank steadily beyond it, two hours in which the barometer tumbled crazily after it. Curiously, strangely, the snow still held off, the livid sky to the north-west was as far away as ever, and the sky to the south and east had cleared completely. The squadron presented a fantastic picture now, little toy-boats of sugar-icing, dazzling white, gleaming and sparkling in the pale, winter sunshine, pitching crazily through the everlengthening, ever-deepening valleys of grey and green of the cold Norwegian Sea, pushing on towards that far horizon, far and weird and purply glowing, the horizon of anot
her world. It was an incredibly lovely spectacle.
Rear-Admiral Tyndall saw nothing beautiful about it. A man who was wont to claim that he never worried, he was seriously troubled now. He was gruff, to those on the bridge, gruff to the point of discourtesy and the old geniality of the Farmer Giles of even two months ago was all but gone. Ceaselessly his gaze circled the fleet; constantly, uncomfortably, he twisted in his chair. Finally he climbed down, passed through the gate and went into the Captain’s shelter.
Vallery had no light on and the shelter was in semi-darkness. He lay there on his settee, a couple of blankets thrown over him. In the half-light, his face looked ghastly, corpse-like. His right hand clutched a balled handkerchief, spotted and stained: he made no attempt to hide it. With a painful effort, and before Tyndall could stop him, he had swung his legs over the edge of the settee and pulled forward a chair. Tyndall choked off his protest, sank gracefully into the seat.
‘I think your curtain’s just about to go up, Dick . . . What on earth ever induced me to become a squadron commander?’
Vallery grinned sympathetically. ‘I don’t particularly envy you, sir. What are you going to do now?’
‘What would you do?’ Tyndall countered dolefully.
Vallery laughed. For a moment his face was transformed, boyish almost, then the laugh broke down into a bout of harsh, dry coughing. The stain spread over his handkerchief. Then he looked up and smiled.
‘The penalty for laughing at a superior officer. What would I do? Heave to, sir. Better still, tuck my tail between my legs and run for it.’
Tyndall shook his head.
‘You never were a very convincing liar, Dick.’
Both men sat in silence for a moment, then Vallery looked up.
H. M. S. Ulysses Page 8