by Hall, Ian
“Aye,” I could think of nothing more fruitful to say.
His face turned suddenly to me, his eyes fierce with concern, his eyes wide. “Have you killed, son?”
My eyes now glistened with the same tears he was growing. I found no words to answer his question. I thought of poor Charlie, my fingers clutching for a hold on his naked neck, looking for a hold to break him by. I thought of the German soldiers at Restalrig Church, guarding poor Balfour. The Germans at the wadi.
“My God…” My father’s voice, torn between anger and disappointment.
“Have you, dad?” I roared at him. “Have you killed?”
He shook his head. Of course, he hadn’t; he’d been guarding useless sites in Palestine; living in the midst of a war that happened all around him, but never actually touched him. “I’ve never had to.” Damned if he didn’t look smug about the fact.
“Then consider yourself lucky!” I spat back at him. “Back home, we’re fighting the bloody Huns every day! They walk our streets, they patrol our buildings, they take what they want. If it wasn’t for us, the British people would have no idea that we’re still fighting! Africa’s a bloody long way away!”
He looked to the front again, now openly weeping, the tears streaming down his cheeks, past his ear lobes. “I’m sorry!”
“Aye, me too!”
We got into Port Said around midnight, and soon found beds in a dorm for migrant forms, basically anyone in transition.
In the morning, dad seemed back to some semblance of his normal self.
I however had crossed a Rubicon; dad knew of my secret work, and I now had to watch my speech closer than before. With confidences broken, I had to limit the depths of my divulgence, not only for my own good, but for dad’s too. If he was going to live in Edinburgh with us, he didn’t need to know more than he needed to.
Major Bagnold embraced me like a long-lost brother, and for a few minutes we discussed our flight to the Nile, and the final parts of Operation Ascalon. When I told him of our need for transport to Britain, however, he shook his head. “There’s only two ways of doing it,” And his expression didn’t bode well for our future. “By ship, and by that I mean mainly by submarine, or by air to Morocco, then by sub from there. To get such a berth could take months, I’m afraid.”
I looked at dad, but he gave me no help. Perhaps too many years in the ranks had doused his ability to talk freely in front of officers.
“There is a way you could maybe speed things up,” he rubbed his chin in thought.
“Yes?”
He gave a laugh. “But it means going back up to Haifa.”
“What?” I could feel the muscles on my shoulders slouch.
“STS 102.” Bagnold held my gaze. “They’re the ones doing counter-espionage in these parts; if they’ve got a mission on, they might be your best bet. Hitch a ride, so to speak.”
I didn’t fancy the trip back to Palestine, but STS 102 were hardly likely to talk about anything over the phone. It would mean another day away from Alice, but hey, at least we were making progress on the way home. As we shook hands in parting, a loud ship’s horn sounded across the port. The call was answered by another, and soon the air was a chorus of off-pitched sounds, some rising and falling sirens.
I looked at Bagnold. “Air raid?”
“Nope, not this.” We looked out the office window, but the skies were clear.
We filed outside to see men smiling, grinning like Cheshire cats. “What’s going on?” I pulled one by the sleeve.
He just laughed, throwing his cap in the air like many others.
His friend, however, was more forthcoming. “We’ve only gone and sunk the Bismark!” he roared, and danced away.
I could hardly believe it.
And of course, I couldn’t tell if my small mission to get photographs to the Organization had played any part.
On board the MTB back to Tel Aviv, we got more of the story as details came over the radio.
Somehow, probably through an aircraft carrier launch, some old Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers had gotten through to the ship as it performed sea trials off the coast of Scotland. Three torpedo hits had been scored, and the Bismarck had sunk with all hands. There was some chance that the Prinz Eugen had been hit too, but details on that were sketchy to say the least.
The euphoria had reached Tel Aviv, and as we entered the harbor, ships sirens welcomed us. Bunting flags flew from many of the ships and there was almost a carnival atmosphere in the Royal Naval base.
But we wasted no time. I commandeered the same jeep from the same motor pool, and drove north to camp STS 102.
With my SOE history, getting back into the commandant’s presence was as easy as pie.
The news Colonel Terence gave me was actually quite good. “We’re planning a little operation as we speak, a reconnaissance to witness the Bismarck sinking. There’s actually differing reports on her position; some say she’s going to be salvageable, some say she’s totally under.”
“Where was she attacked?” I asked.
“In the Firth of Forth.” Terence replied. “The folks on land got a front-row seat of the whole thing.”
I smiled. “I got pictures of the Bismarck when she arrived, Prinz Eugen too. I got taken out on a motorboat with a newspaper photographer.”
“Well, let’s hope we never see he again.” Terence rounded his desk and showed us out.
We waited in the camp for three days, given rooms exactly like the ones in Canada. Dad got first hand evidence of some of the techniques we’d been trained in. At every juncture, I think he grew in understanding.
In the mess each evening, we drank, toasted those back home and watched as Christmas loomed closer. I felt their mood; Christmas away from home is a lonely time.
On the third day, we got called to Colonel Terence’s office.
“Tonight.”
I don’t think I’ve ever sighed more deeply.
Dad, however, took it ill when he got dismissed to his room. Only I got details of the mission, included in the last briefing. Considering the 2000 miles of Britain’s coastline, I was getting dropped off at the front door.
North Berwick.
North Berwick, East Lothian, maybe five miles from Gullane where I’d taken the family for their beach picnic.
When I told dad of our eventual destination, he turned away, tears in his eyes again. “I can’t go.”
He walked away, heading into the dying sun of my last day in the Middle East. It took me seconds to catch up. “What the hell do you mean?” I grabbed his shoulder, perhaps spinning him around more brusquely than I intended. “You’re going home to mum, to Frances. Away from this sham, this phony war you’ve been in.”
“Phony?”
“Yes, there’s no fighting here in Palestine; that’s why the SOE have their training camp here. Look, I’ve risked a lot to get us this chance, and I’m not going to blow it.”
“But James,” he protested. “How will I live back there?”
“What?” I could hardly believe the ambiguity of his question. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m a soldier, I can’t just jump back into my old life; the Germans would know. The neighbors would know.”
I almost grinned. “Dad, I hardly recognized you. You could be Uncle Mike or something, a distant cousin staying with us. No-one outside the immediate family need know the truth.”
“It’s not going to work, I tell you.”
And no matter what I said, he steadfastly refused to see my point. I was rescuing him from a war situation, and taking him home to his family. In the end I had only one card to play. “Dad, you’re coming home with me, and that’s an order.”
At that moment, Colonel Terence appeared, I didn’t know how much he’d heard, but he certainly knew something was up. “Anything I can help with?”
I pointed to dad’s chest. “This idiot thinks he can stay here in Palestine when I’ve given him a direct order to accompan
y me home.” I could hardly believe the words out of my mouth. My father, the shining light of my boyhood, so recently reunited with me, had slipped to the level of ‘idiot’.
“Well that simply won’t do, will it?” Terence’s straightforward stance was a breath of fresh air. “You’ll do as you’re told, Corporal, or I’ll throw you in the clink myself, understand?”
To my surprise, dad even railed against the colonel. “He’s ordered me home, but he’s not a Captain; he’s not even in the Army, for goodness sake.”
“Stand to attention when you address me, soldier!” Years of instantaneous command hit dad like a brick in the face. He crisply snapped to attention, stiff as a freshly starched board. “Who the hell do you think you are?” Terence started to pace back and forward in front of dad, I almost protested. “Do you recognize these, sonny?” He tapped his own epaulette.
The double pips and crown were worn with wear in the desert, but dad didn’t even glance at them. “Yes, sir!”
“Are you going to take orders from me, sonny?” he bawled in dad’s face.
“Yes, sir!”
“You, sir, have the good fortune to have raised a bloody hero!” Even in the growing darkness, I could see the spittle rain on dad’s face. “And now you have the opportunity to go home, see your family, fight Jerry where he lives!” he continued pacing. “Christ man, you’ve been given the chance of a lifetime; a chance that every man, jack and boy over here would jump at!”
“Yes, sir.” At last he looked somewhat contrite. He glanced in my direction, but even I didn’t fancy interrupting a Colonel in full-flow.
“You, Corporal Baird, will go home with your son, the bloody hero, and you will treat him as if he is a bloody Captain in the Army, because after his exploits in the desert, he deserves that respect. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.” That one came with a little resistance.
“He captured a full German General almost single-handed!” At that, his diatribe lessened, his tone fell. This was the speech of a man well versed in the art. “You, Corporal Baird, will go home with your son, and you will join the first resistance organization you are recruited for, and you will kick Jerry’s backside at every opportunity you can find.”
“Yes, sir!”
“And you, Corporal Baird will do it, not for yourself. Not for your country, but you’ll do it for every man, jack and boy that’s sitting here in this hell-hole that can’t do it. You’ll do it for every man who’s tied up here in Palestine and isn’t getting the chance. You’ll do it for every man trapped in Canada and the Sudan, and South Africa who can’t get home. Is that clear, Corporal?”
“Yes, sir.” Dad’s expression showed he’d been cut to the quick. Colonel Terence had made him see what I hadn’t.
“Corporal Baird. You’re not escaping out of a war. You’re not being given a free pass. You’re being recruited in the most valiant fight we’re doing at the moment. You’ll be fighting Jerry where he lives. Damn it man, you’re not being rescued from a war… you’re being taken from a back-alley and thrown in at the deep end!”
Does Anyone Actually Like Submarines?
We boarded HMS Talisman in the dark hours after midnight, Christmas Day, 1941, celebrations the furthest things from our minds.
The men from STS102 were a four man team, and dad and I made six. Trust me, six extra men in a submarine stretched the already meagre sleeping space to the limit. Sealed in the dark tube, we set off from our mooring less than an hour later. We were finally bound for Blighty.
Standing in the narrow corridor, the First officer, Lieutenant Chapman, told us of the routine. He pointed into a small room, the whole floor space no larger than a single bed. “There’s two bunks here; those are yours. You’ll sleep in shifts. When you’re not sleeping, you can use the head, two rooms down, starboard side, or you can sit in the doc’s room, two further down. You can also sit in the mess, one door for’ard, port side. That’s it. Go anywhere else, you’re in the way. Got it?”
We got it alright. We were prisoners of a corridor, no longer than our hallway in the apartment. We slipped through the Mediterranean Sea in a metal tube 85 yards long, just 10 yards wide, and we heard every protest that every bolt and rivet made to keep it together, the creaking sometimes waking us from sleep. Many times in one of those bunks I dreamed of home, the comfort, the welcoming arms of my beloved Alice, the warmth of the family home.
We began the sea routine with relative ease. We sailed on the surface each night, all hatches open to get as much fresh air as possible. During the day we cruised at a depth of a hundred and twenty feet, doing a meagre 10 miles per hour. We were going home alright, but we were going at a snail’s pace. Four weeks in a metal bucket no bigger than one of the corridors at my old university.
I could have ran quicker.
On our fourth day out, cruising the surface, we sighted an approaching ship and did an emergency dive, the floor tilting at an alarming rate. There was no sleep for the rest of that night. The six of us crowded onto our bunks, sitting trying to play cards, looking at the walls in silent fear.
Whatever ship went over us, it thankfully never returned.
I think that was the worst part; the not knowing anything. In any mission I had taken part in, there were periods of uncertainty, but never the same as my days on board the submarines. One of the SOE chaps from STS 102 called us mushrooms; ‘kept in the dark and fed nothing but shite’. He wasn’t far wrong.
We celebrated New Year by breaking out a couple of bottles of low quality beer, our celebrations muted and morose.
I couldn’t get the feeling of dread out of my head; I just hated traveling by submarine.
On our ninth day out, we first got the idea that all wasn’t well with our metal tube. Frantic messages, submariners running past our doorways, saying nothing, their faces full of concern.
“All hands to surface battle stations,” came the captain’s voice over the ship’s tannoy. “Prepare to surface,”
“Isn’t it daylight up there?” I asked.
I got nods from everyone in the small room.
We could wait no longer without information. The next sailor who tried to get past our corridor got dragged to one side by force. “What’s going on?” we asked.
“Navigation’s on the fritz.” He said, seemingly not bothered by our coercion. “We have to surface.”
“Shite,” I said, watching dad’s face fall.
“We’ll be sitting ducks.”
The First officer ‘dropped by’ half an hour later. “We’ve had a bit of a hitch, gremlins in the works, I’m afraid. We’re just a day out of Malta, so we’ll be sailing into Valetta tonight.”
“Lieutenant?” I asked. “Are we on the surface right now?”
He nodded. “We were just taking bearings, we’ll drop to periscope depth once we’re done.”
I didn’t breathe any easier. Like the previous submarine captain had remarked, sitting on the surface, we were an earthworm on a pavement. And we all knew what happened to those.
Valetta, the capital city of Malta; talk about the frying pan into the fire.
We slipped ashore, equipment and all, the six of us finding a corner of a warehouse where we fell asleep in seconds.
I awoke with explosions all around me. Well, the breaking of glass above me, and the close rumble of explosions. By the light coming through the taped windows, it was daylight. I was the second man to the door. Outside, in the stark blue morning sky, German bombs rained down like pebbles, exploding all around us, hitting buildings, wharfs, and dropping harmlessly into the bay beyond.
I crouched behind the door, praying, and I wasn’t the only one.
I heard machine gun fire through the bomb blasts, heard men cheering, and peeked outside. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Right in front of me, like a movie in full Technicolor, Spitfires flew against Stuka dive bombers. I looked at the fighting like a kid in a candy store. Then a Spitfire swooped low, and instead of seeing circled Br
itish markings, I saw a star, and a band of blue round the fuselage near the tail.
“Americans!” I exclaimed, the new arrivals obviously making their presence felt as a bomber tailed from the sky above, a streaming plume of black smoke behind it.
“They arrived last month!” a man ran for cover into my doorway, then turned, as mesmerized as I was. “They made a difference right away.”
I spotted one Spitfire, a scantily-clad lady painted under the engine manifold, and laughed. “Typical Yanks.” I grinned. Despite the danger, I thrilled to every aspect of the scene outside.
Then, just as soon as it started, the bombs stopped. I stood praying they’d leave forever. Coursing adrenaline aside, I’d lived through my first real bombardment, and I certainly didn’t relish another one, let alone a prolonged period of it.
As we gathered on the dusty quay, men just walked around the rubble as if this were the norm; they tended to the wounded, they dusted themselves down. I wondered just how long this pattern had been going on, then remembered the date of the invasion of Britain, and came to the assumption that the poor occupants of Malta had probably been undergoing such bombings for over a year.
We later learned that stuck halfway between the Germans on the Tunisian coast and the Italians in Sicily, Malta had held firm against every Luftwaffe raid, repulsing the bombers twice, sometimes three times each day. I simply couldn’t believe the stoicism these people had exhibited, both taking a pounding and coming back every single day, defying the Axis threat. I will always consider their survival one of the key points in the war in North Africa.
I spent my first day on Malta on the lookout for any SOE faction, but it was difficult to find. In the end I had to forget any kind of propriety and ask for ‘Intelligence’. We were immediately directed to the Royal Malta Golf Course, just a mile or so from the harbor. I shook my head in disbelief as I entered the clubhouse, it being one of the premier ‘classy’ hotspots of the island. In the impending gloom of another Luftwaffe bombing run, there were even men playing the course.