Marine K SBS

by Jay Garnet

  Contents

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  1

  Murmansk, Saturday 25 April 1942

  It was two a.m. and bitterly cold. In the Arctic port of Murmansk that April morning there was no hint of spring or dawn. The sky was veiled by charcoal cloud. Flurries of snow swirled along the quay, whipped by an icy wind that bit at half a dozen Russian soldiers working in pairs at the dockside railhead.

  Two lights, shaded by tubes of metal, cast swinging yellow circles on the snow-covered stone slabs and on the soldiers’ rifles stacked tepee fashion beside a single railway wagon. The men, dressed in heavy gloves, fur hats and greatcoats down to their ankles, were unloading two-foot-long wooden boxes from the cavernous interior of the wagon, its door locked open. Two by two they carted the boxes twenty yards across to the edge of the quay, where they stacked them in lines. Despite the cold, the men were sweating, for the boxes were heavy: 120lb each.

  Beside the quay in the dark waters lay a flat-bottomed barge and a sturdy tug. Away southwards, beyond the barge, loomed the shadows of cargo ships and cranes. Back from the railhead a line of warehouses ran off towards the town, which was bomb-shattered, blacked-out and dead. Even in daylight there was little to see or hear. Most of the wooden houses had been burnt. Skeletal brick chimneys marked their sites, like gravestones. A few concrete blocks stood with windows gaping and paint peeling.

  To the west, the rumble of heavy guns and distant flashes beyond low, bleak hills were a constant reminder that the Germans were close, hammering at the Norwegian and Finnish borders a mere fifty miles away.

  Two of the soldiers lifted the last crate from the wagon. Nearby, in the darkness, an officer stepped forward and shouted an order, his breath steaming briefly beneath the arc lights. Two other men slammed the heavy doors and walked across to join the others by the crates. There were ninety-three boxes in all, stacked along the harbour wall.

  Another order. Four of the men jumped down off the quay on to the deck of the barge. The two remaining men began to pass the boxes down to them.

  The officer, glancing towards the north-eastern sky, stamped in a useless ritual gesture to counteract the cold, slapped his gloves together and shrugged his collar higher. Pyotr Grigorenko was weary to the depth of his mind and body.

  After eight days of travel, they all were. But they would endure, because they had no option, and because they knew their mission was almost over.

  Only Grigorenko knew its purpose.

  Hitler had occupied Norway in April 1940, extending German domination of the seas northwards to the Arctic, and then swept across western Europe. On 22 June 1941 he had invaded Russia. Within days all access to the West was barred, except for the sea route via Russia’s remote Arctic ports of Archangel and Murmansk. One quick push eastwards by the Germans and their Finnish allies would have deprived Russia of even these two outlets. But in winter, across those hideous, snowy wastes of infinite woods and a thousand frozen lakes, there was no such thing as a quick push. The northern rail link from Moscow, though battered, remained intact.

  At the time of the invasion of Russia, Britain had stood alone for six months. Everywhere on mainland western Europe Germany had triumphed. But Russia was not such an easy target. If she could endure, she could tie down Hitler’s armies for months, years perhaps, and offer respite to beleaguered Britain. Churchill had therefore promised Stalin all the aid that could be spared. Supplies were to be sent in on convoys of ships ploughing northwards through gales and fog, edging between the Germans to the south and pack ice to the north, skirting the northern tip of Norway to Archangel and Murmansk.

  Murmansk lay ten miles inland, in the Kola Inlet. For Russia, this estuary was of vital strategic importance. Despite its position north of the Arctic circle, it was ice-free all year round. The sea was kept fractionally above freezing point by the last dying touch of the Gulf Stream as it curled along Norway’s northern coast, forcing back the pack ice that lay at most a hundred miles away. Only a few miles further east, the Gulf Stream gave up the last of its heat. Four hundred miles away in the White Sea, Archangel was blocked off by ice from December to June.

  The first convoy had arrived in October 1941. By the end of the first year the convoys, sailing every two or three weeks, had delivered seven hundred and fifty tanks and fourteen hundred vehicles. Britain could spare little more. But in December America had entered the war. From then on, most material would be from America. Until June the following year all of it would go to ice-free Murmansk.

  Stalin was an unwilling ally, united with Britain only by Hitler’s assault, but he had at least agreed to pay for some of America’s supplies. Grigorenko’s task had been to accompany the first payment of five and a half tons of gold to Murmansk, and there to hand it to the British for delivery to America.

  The journey from Moscow had been dismal. Once, there had been a line direct to Murmansk, but that was an age ago, when Hitler was still an ally. The route now lay six hundred miles north to Archangel and then on north-west another four hundred miles around the White Sea. Throughout the late summer German planes bombed the railway and Murmansk itself almost daily. Under cover of the long Arctic nights, convict labourers, emaciated bundles of rag, repaired the rails. They had not the strength to do it well. In Moscow, Grigorenko was told the journey would take two and a half days, but they had given him rations for five; and it had taken eight. The train had rolled at walking pace through the northern forests, past remote communities of wooden shacks – Belomorsk, Kem, Loukhi, Kandalaksha. The engine, its tenders stacked with three-foot fir logs, pulled just a single enclosed wagon. In one half lay the boxes; in the other half wooden benches lined the walls. Above them hung wooden bed pallets slung from chains. A wood-burning stove kept the men from freezing to death, but although it was red-hot for twenty-four hours a day, it never melted the ice on the inside of the truck. Grigorenko and his men had not undressed, nor even taken off their coats, for over a week.

  Now, unshaven and stinking like goats, they had nearly completed their task. They finished stacking the crates on the stern of the barge, and Grigorenko looked up at the tug, a tough little workhorse with a tiny wheelhouse open at the stern. He shouted; in the cab a shadow moved and the ancient single-cylinder engine thumped into life. Grigorenko scrubbed the back of his glove along his stubbly chin, easing his frozen jaw, then shouted once more. The men clambered back on to the quay, walked over to their rifles, slung them over their shoulders and began to climb down again on to the barge. The last soldier cast off fore and aft, then jumped down to join his companions.

  The tug’s engine chugged out a more urgent rhythm. Leaving the gold riding high on the stern of the barge, the men gathered together in the well of the bows, seeking protection from the icy breeze. Tug and barge pulled away, leaving the dockside and its circles of yellow light, fading now as the grey dawn filtered through the scudding clouds.

  On the nearest British cargo ship a muffled figure appeared on deck and waved. Grigorenko waved back. He was still waving slowly as the barge passed under the lee of a British cruiser, HMS Trinidad, moored off the dockside at a sickening seventeen-degree list, the result of a torpedo strike on an earlier convoy. She was awaiting repairs. No one was working on her yet. Grigorenko nodded to himself in satisfaction. He had carried out his orders: to be away early enough that morning to avoid attention.

  Over the western hills, the guns were silent now. He looked northwards, into the wind, across the flecked water. Ahead, seve
n miles up the inlet, hidden in the dusk and falling snow, lay his destination: HMS Edinburgh.

  2

  Aboard the Edinburgh no lights showed. She seemed asleep, a black hulk of turrets, guns and funnels. But directly beneath the bridge, in a large hall amidships, a dozen ratings stood talking quietly and sipping hot cocoa.

  The hall was an aircraft hangar, one of two. When the Edinburgh was commissioned she was equipped with four Walrus amphibious planes that were used to spot enemy ships and also – if the opportunity arose – to bomb them. The Walruses were launched by catapult from the flight deck between the bridge and the forward funnel. After a mission each plane was lifted back on board by one of two fifty-five-foot cranes. The planes were then stored away, wings folded, in the hangars. But shortly before this convoy the Walruses had been withdrawn: their role was to be taken on by planes from aircraft carriers. The hangars had been converted to other uses: the starboard one was a storeroom, and the other, in which the ratings were now gathered, was a cinema, with chairs stacked round the bulkheads.

  Among the ratings was a sixteen-year-old seaman, Mike Cox. About all one would have noticed of him, buried in his voluminous duffle-coat, was a pair of startling blue eyes and a frank, enquiring gaze, contrasting with the subdued expressions of his bleary-eyed mates. Like them, he clasped a mug of thick, unsweetened cocoa, part of a sailor’s staple diet, as they all awaited further orders. They had been turned out half an hour earlier, four from each of the ship’s three divisions – forecastle, top deck and quarterdeck. Despite the heat that spread through the deck from the galleys immediately below them, they were cold, and they wanted action.

  ‘What we doin’ up ’ere, then?’ said Mike to one of the others, a lanky lad he had never seen before.

  ‘What d’you think I am? A bleedin’ prophet?’ the lanky youth said, aggrieved, and took another sip of cocoa.

  Mike shrugged and peered round the side of the hangar. He saw the chief bosun’s mate, an imposing man of six foot four with a fearsome hook nose, looking over the rails and down the inlet. He admired the chief, Charlie George, a Yorkshireman, partly because he was a powerful figure who exuded strength and confidence. But it was also because he was one of the ship’s four divers, and as such had a special aura that hinted at adventure, danger and mastery of an unknown and fearsome environment. The chief nodded and stared more intently. Clearly there would be work soon, probably unloading stores of some kind. But why at this hour? He withdrew again into the hangar and raised his mug of cocoa.

  Mike Cox was from Poplar, the heart of London’s docklands. His father, Harry, worked on the railway; his mother, Doris, kept a whelk stall. Mike had been born in 1926, a bad time to enter life in the East End; but he had been protected against the worst by luck and his parents’ strength of character. All around him as a child there were families who had lost fathers and brothers in the Great War; but Mike’s father, born with the century, fought at Ypres in 1918 and survived unscathed. All around in the 1930s there were men out of jobs; but Harry Cox kept his. Most families were large, whereas, whether by luck or choice, Harry and Doris had only two children, Martin and Mike.

  His father had been the pillar of Mike’s universe. Fortunately, Harry was a man of good sense. During the blackshirt business, when the East End was torn by riots between fascist and anti-fascist mobs, he had kept clear. ‘Don’t you listen to that Mosley feller,’ he told ten-year-old Mike. ‘It ain’t the Yids and it ain’t just the government what’s responsible for this mess. It’s that bleedin’ ’Itler. If ’e starts something, you give ’im what for from me.’

  Harry was also a man of some imagination. Often, when commenting on the harshness of life in Poplar, he would say to his sons: ‘You two are lucky. You don’t have to put up with what your mum and me did. Our life’s ’ere. You can get out.’

  Martin had done just that. He was three years older than Mike and joined the Navy in 1939. Twice he returned, self-confident and tanned, from tours in the Mediterranean. The sight of him was enough to convince Mike that he must follow in his brother’s steps.

  When war came, Mike was sent off with a gas mask and suitcase to a farm in Somerset, along with a trainload of other kids. He hadn’t worried. Dad was immortal, and Mum had old Lil – Mrs Reynolds – and the rest of the street. But in December 1941 he’d had a letter from his mum: Dad had been killed at work by a bomb. Mike came back for the funeral. By then, America and Japan were at it as well. The whole sodding world was at it. His mother tried to bury her own and the world’s tragedies in hospital work. Mike stifled his tears and said it was time to give the Jerries what for.

  In February 1942, a week after his sixteenth birthday, he joined the Navy, which was glad to have him. He was five foot ten, broad-shouldered, with light-brown curls trimmed short above the ears, solid in both body and character.

  Two weeks later he was aboard HMS Ganges at Ipswich for basic training in elementary seamanship. Mike was not a born leader, but he was tough and adaptable, with a self-possession and an easy charm that won him ready acceptance.

  In the case of Derek Hoskins it won him a good deal more than that. Hoskins was a gangling, pimply seventeen-year-old, taller than Mike by a couple of inches, but no match for him in confidence or strength. He seemed to tire easily and was often depressed by the skivvying required of a young would-be seaman. With his ravaged skin, he was the natural butt of the raw comments slung back and forth by the other lads. Mike never joined in. On the contrary: he had seen enough bullying in the East End. It was an activity of which his father had sternly disapproved.

  One day, when the boys were in their hammocks, after their tea, the talk turned to girls.

  ‘’Ere, ’Oskins,’ came a voice from across the mess deck. ‘You ever ’ad it, ’ave you?’

  ‘Nar, course ’e ain’t. All ’e’s ’ad is the pox. Look at his mug.’

  ‘Where’d ya get that, ’Oskins? Too many ’and-jobs?’

  It was then that Mike stepped in.

  ‘Leave off,’ he said. ‘Just leave ’im a-bloody-lone.’ Then, in the silence left by his sharp words, he defused the tension with humour. ‘Anyway, I dunno what you buggers are on about. ’Is complexion’s like peaches and cream. And it ain’t ’is face what the girls want, is it? I mean ’e’s got a prick like a six-inch gun. Ain’t that right, Peaches?’

  It was a poor defence, but the first the unfortunate Hoskins had had. From then on Hoskins had become Peaches, and relied on Mike. The relationship worked for them both. Unkindness towards Peaches brought a swift and witty response from Mike. Peaches was still a cause for laughter, but it was no longer brutal, and he was grateful.

  Before the war, the boy seamen would have gone on to Chatham for a further six weeks’ training. But America’s entry into the war had changed all that. Mike and a couple of dozen other under-trained youngsters, Peaches included, were needed on the Arctic convoys. They were given rail tickets and told to join the Edinburgh at Greenock at the mouth of the Clyde on 30 March.

  The Edinburgh had been launched in March 1938, as a sister ship to HMS Belfast. When Mike joined her, she had already seen a good deal of convoy action, having been on runs to Malta, South Africa and Russia. She was a fine ship: six hundred and thirteen feet long, with four propellers. At full stretch her eight Admiralty boilers and her Parsons turbines could drive her along at a shuddering thirty-two knots. Her crew was over eight hundred strong. Her armaments consisted of twelve six-inch guns, and twelve four-inch guns, together with a scattering of Oerlikons, some torpedoes and a couple of eight-barrelled pom-poms. Some experts considered her under-gunned for her size. Fully laden, she displaced fourteen thousand seven hundred tons; Fiji-class cruisers had the same armament yet displaced only nine thousand eight hundred. As one of the more experienced galley staff told Mike soon after his arrival on board: ‘She’s a big ship, mate, but she ain’t got much punch. But,’ he added, prodding a finger in Mike’s stomach, ‘I wouldn’t swap her. She’s safer
than some.’ By this he meant she had more than her fair share of armour-plating, which was up to five inches thick along the most vital sections – boiler-room, engine-room and magazines.

  It was something of a relief to Mike, therefore, to find that when in action he was to be assigned to the four-inch magazine, four decks down, where his task would be to heft shells on to the endless-chain hoists that lifted the ammunition up to the flight deck. There, conveyor belts carried the shells aft to the three sets of twin four-inch guns set at twelve-yard intervals down both sides of the ship. When he was on normal duty his time would be taken up cleaning the mess decks and performing the ancient ritual of ‘holy-stoning’ the quarterdeck – scrubbing on hands and knees with a large, square stone known as the ‘Sailor’s Bible’.

  In the light of what happened later Mike would have been happy to holy-stone the quarterdeck for the whole war. But within a week the Edinburgh was on her way.

  As the cruiser pulled clear of the Clyde, the crew had no idea which direction they were to go – south to the Mediterranean or north towards Iceland and the Arctic? Only when she swung north was curiosity satisfied. On the mess decks, Mike overheard comments picturing for him the experiences he was in for.

  ‘The last convoy – what was it? PQ 13? The old Trinidad, she was torpedoed and only just made it into Kola . . .’

  ‘Cold? Last time we went out we had to chip ice off the gun turrets. There was three inches of it all over from the sea spray.’

  ‘Hammocks! What you want with hammocks, young Cox? You want to sleep near a hatch. Don’t want to be caught too long below decks if we’re hit!’

  Then the captain’s voice echoed over the intercom with the news that the Edinburgh was heading for Iceland, there to rendezvous with twenty-three other ships and head for Murmansk, forming convoy PQ 14. The Edinburgh herself was to be more than just a close-support vessel. She was carrying steel plating for the repair of the damaged Trinidad, material that the Russians were unable or unwilling to provide.