by Jay Garnet
There were compensations. A Russian tug, the Rubin, appeared, along with four British minesweepers from the main convoy. With the minesweepers circling her protectively, the Rubin steadied the Edinburgh’s course by pulling to starboard and a minesweeper threw a line to her stern to act as a drogue. With this assistance the Edinburgh limped back towards the Kola Inlet at a steady three knots.
Early on 2 May the three German destroyers emerged from scudding snow showers to finish off the Edinburgh. Faulkner at once released the tow-ships and ordered full steam ahead – eight knots – driving round in a fixed circle to port, but still able to fight. Indeed, with her second salvo from her remaining six-inch guns, she struck the Hermann Schoemann, bringing her to a standstill.
Meanwhile the Forester had been hit by Z24, and brought to a temporary halt, her boiler room and bridge shattered. Z25 attempted to finish her off with a fan of torpedoes. Fortunately, they ran too deep and passed clear underneath her. Slowly, shielded by smoke from the Foresight, the Forester got underway again.
But the torpedoes were still running clear. Beyond the Forester, they surfaced. Way ahead, the Edinburgh pursued her eight-knot fixed circle.
Mike was up in the flight deck, watching the action, when he saw the torpedoes, four of them, bouncing along on the surface like dolphins, their wakes streaming out behind them. He and the other lads with him yelled and pointed.
By then the torpedo tracks had been spotted from the bridge. Faulkner ordered full steam ahead on the one propeller and astern on the other, to turn the Edinburgh, and then ordered the engine-room to be abandoned.
As the wakes of the torpedoes approached, the Edinburgh’s bows slowly swung away from them, presenting a narrower and narrower target. By the time the torpedoes reached her, she had reduced her effective width by two-thirds, and three of the torpedoes passed her harmlessly.
The fourth did not. It hit the port side, almost exactly opposite the spot at which the first torpedo had struck. A cascade of water shot up over the side of the vessel. Mike and the rest of the men on deck were nearly deafened by the blast, but had tight hold of railings and companion-ways, which prevented them from falling as the stricken ship reared.
The torpedo almost cut her in two. Because she was seven feet lower in the water, the torpedo entered above her armour plating and exploded in her abandoned engine-room.
As she began to list to port, Mike shouted, ‘That’s it! We’re going!’ Across his mind there raced suddenly the stories of what happened to you in the Arctic waters – frostbite in two minutes, death in three. He refused to contemplate the idea that he would die, but didn’t fancy risking frostbite. Immediately across from him was the starboard hangar, the one being used as a store. Inside, he knew, were some tins of engine grease, and with a shout of ‘Come on, lads!’ to his shipmates, he dashed across to the tins, grabbed one, forced off a lid and began to daub it on his hands and face. The other four watched him in amazement, but refused to follow suit.
At that moment Charlie George ran past and, spotting them, turned and shouted, ‘Come on, you lads! Get down to your mess decks! Get your gear together!’
But they didn’t go below. They all had lifebelts on, and didn’t want to risk being trapped.
It was clear that the Edinburgh was doomed. The six-inch guns were still firing, but she was listing more and more heavily to port. Further down the flight deck, Mike saw a score of sailors trying to put out a thirty-two-foot cutter. Others had begun to unship the four starboard Carley floats. Someone shouted, ‘One, two, six!’ and one of the floats sailed over the side. No one had secured it, and it hit the water with a splash and vanished slowly astern.
Suddenly there was the chief again at his duty station on the flight deck, shouting down the starboard side to the men struggling with the cutter and beyond them to the others with the Carley floats. ‘Get those inboard! Minesweepers coming alongside! Prepare to abandon ship!’
The word had already been passed below decks. Men streamed from every doorway, crossing on to the flight deck, on to the starboard side in an automatic attempt to counteract the port list, now so severe that the six-inch guns could not be brought to bear and had fallen silent. Even the weight of eight hundred men could not do much to rectify a list in ten thousand tons of metal, but as they crowded up against the railings, one diminutive sailor who went across the sloping deck to view the battle from the other side drew shouts from a score of his mates. ‘Come over ’ere, you daft bastard, you’ll tip us over.’
By now the German destroyers were less interested in the Edinburgh than in rescuing their own countrymen from the crippled Hermann Schoemann. A British minesweeper, the Hussar, laid a smokescreen between the British and the German forces, and two other minesweepers drew up alongside the Edinburgh. First to arrive, on the starboard side, was the Gossamer, which took aboard four hundred and forty officers and men. Another three hundred and fifty left by the port side on to the Harrier.
In the circumstances, the evacuation was surprisingly orderly. Mike helped to carry the twenty-three wounded from below decks, across to the Harrier, on to which he also stepped. The weather was kind: the ships moved only a little in the swell, and the stretchers of the wounded were easily handed from one to the other.
The Harrier then stood off and was given the task of scuttling the Edinburgh, to prevent the ship and its gold cargo falling into enemy hands.
Still protected by the Forester, the Foresight and the Hussar’s smokescreen, she lobbed depth-charges up against the Edinburgh amidships in an attempt to break her back. The explosions had no effect other than to drench the Edinburgh’s decks with water. Harrier’s gunners then put some four-inch shells into her point-blank, succeeding only in blowing up one of the pom-poms.
Mike was watching from the Harrier’s deck.
‘Ere,’ he said. ‘She ain’t goin’ to go, after all. The Jerries are buggering off. What say we get back on and save her?’ It was only a joke, but as he said it, it crossed his mind that somewhere entombed in the Edinburgh was poor old Peaches. Perhaps he’d had enough air to survive. Perhaps the wireless cabinet was still not flooded.
‘No, mate. You can see she won’t last. But we’ve got to do for her quick as possible, or the Jerries’ll come back for her.’
Finally, while the Gossamer made for Murmansk, the Harrier laid off to supervise the Edinburgh’s final dispatch.
It was done with a torpedo from the Foresight. The smoke had cleared. There was no sign of any German vessel. The Hermann Schoemann’s crew had been saved, and she herself scuttled, for the same reason as the Edinburgh.
The Foresight’s torpedo struck the listing Edinburgh in the forward boiler-room. This time the explosion was lethal, for a boiler-room cannot be divided off by bulkheads and decks, and the huge hall, stuffed with a maze of boilers and pipes, tubes, wires and dials would accommodate so much water that there could be no hope of saving her.
Mike, emotionally stricken but otherwise unharmed, watched the death of the Edinburgh from the Harrier’s quarterdeck. It happened extraordinarily quickly. In less than a minute the great boiler-room filled sufficiently to roll the Edinburgh slowly over on to her port side.
Then, without any further explosions and with a steady dignity, her battered stern sank. Her forward section, well sealed against the effects of any of the three torpedoes, was as buoyant as ever. As the stern went down she tilted to a seemingly impossible angle, until sixty feet of her bows were pointing straight up in the air.
Then she began her descent, slipping steadily beneath the waves. But before her final departure, something strange occurred. Held up briefly by the air pocket in her bows, she paused with her ‘A’ turret of three six-inch guns pointing skywards like fingers reaching for help. In later life Mike came to call this her ‘curtsey’, a brief, formal farewell before she resumed her descent and the waves closed gently over her.
In the light of later events her strangely placid burial was extremely fortunate.
The Barents Sea at this position is eight hundred feet deep. A ship of some ten thousand tons, descending at a shallow angle in that depth of water, would normally have picked up a considerable speed. When she hit the bottom, she would have buckled. Bulkheads would have collapsed, decks bent and any remaining cargo been shaken and crushed beneath the weight of metal. But with the Edinburgh this did not happen. She was herself over six hundred feet long. When she finally sank beneath the waves she was vertical and her stern was only two hundred feet from the seabed. By the time she had begun to pick up any speed, the buckled stern was touching the bottom. The rest of her, still borne up by the tremendous pressure of water trapped in her bows, pivoted lazily downwards, depositing her on her port side on the ocean floor.
Her sinking caused almost no further damage. The inner bulkheads of the bomb-room remained intact. The gold boxes tumbled over each other as the bomb-room floor became its new wall. Two or three bodies from the lower conning tower drifted down through the hole blasted by the first torpedo, and on into the bomb-room. They were joined by shells from the four-inch magazine. But except for the torpedo damage, she remained to all intents and purposes in perfect condition. Even the wooden thirty-two-foot cutter that had proved so obdurate, remained intact. It was as if the Edinburgh, in a final gesture to her country, had arranged to die in the most convenient possible position for future salvors.
Though no one knew it at the time, all that had to be done to reach the gold was make a long arm from the surface.
It was to take nearly forty years before anyone knew how to make an arm long enough.
5
Like many of the older men around him, Mike wept at the loss of the Edinburgh. If he had been asked why, he would probably have denied the tears. If pressed, he might have said they were for Peaches, the poor daft bastard. But, of course, it was much more than that. For the past few weeks the Edinburgh had been his whole world. For every seaman a ship becomes a living thing. The complexity of her, the fact that for ninety-nine per cent of the time she works with her subsidiary elements – junior officers, cooks, engineers, communications staff, gunner personnel, all the separate divisions and watches – knowing nothing at all about what the others are doing, makes her at once like both a human body and a city. The information that flows through the ship and the services that make her function seem to operate automatically, suggesting the notion that she is alive and in control of her own destiny. Which was why, as well as mourning Peaches and the loss of other lives, Mike also mourned the Edinburgh herself.
That stage did not last long. He was young, resilient and, above all, safe. He was also cold, tired – he had not slept more than a few hours in four days – and very hungry. Physical need superseded emotional distress.
Though three hundred and fifty mouths were a lot extra to accommodate aboard a minesweeper, it was not far to the Kola Inlet – twelve hours – and the galley staff set about making food and cocoa for the new arrivals.
Below decks, warm again, Mike crowded into a mess room with scores of others, all as bemused as himself. He began to pick out other boy seamen from his own mess deck on the Edinburgh and joined them. They talked about what they had experienced over the past three days. They had all aged. They had faced the possibility of death for the first time, and had survived, acquiring a certain stature as a result.
This was dramatized by one little incident. One of the minesweeper’s ABs came in to dispense tots of rum. Mike was not used to spirits. He had tried the odd sipper and gulper – the two quantities of rum that formed a sort of alcoholic currency aboard – but had been more put off by the pain of the rough liquid coursing down his throat than attracted by the heady after-effects. This time, however, he had little choice. He was on the point of refusing his tot when an officious mess lieutenant glanced over the heads of the survivors and said to the AB, ‘You can’t give any to those lads! They’re under age!’
At this moment Mike saw Charlie George for the first time. The chief overheard the comment and his response was instantaneous. ‘Forget the bloody regulations! These lads have just come off a sinking ship. They deserve their tot, same as the rest of us!’
There weren’t enough tin mugs to go round and Mike had to swig the rum in one gulp. To someone unused to alcohol, and with an empty stomach, the effects were rapid. He downed his cocoa, lay down on the deck by a locker, pulled the hood of his duffle-coat up to soften the metal beneath his head, and fell asleep.
The run back to the Kola Inlet was uneventful. He slept for eight solid hours, awoke only to relieve himself, picking his way back to his billet over the exhausted, silent bodies of his shipmates, and slept again. By the time he had collected some soup and bread for breakfast on the morning of 3 May, the Harrier was approaching the inlet that he had left in the Edinburgh just five days before.
The two minesweepers moored just inside the mouth of the inlet, alongside the dock at the Polyarnyo naval base. That first stop on Russian soil was a brief one. The survivors assembled ashore. Faulkner called the roll on the dockside, establishing that seven hundred and ninety of the Edinburgh’s eight hundred and fifty crew had been successfully evacuated.
At Polyarnyo the senior officers were billeted until they could be found flights home on the British bombers that landed in Norway for refuelling after raiding the German airfields. The ratings remained only long enough to draw replacement hats, coats, boots and gloves from the British stores there. Then they were re-embarked – there was no room to billet them ashore – and the following day were taken five miles further down the inlet to the Russian camp at Vaenga.
Here, the seven hundred and fifty crew were housed in conditions so primitive that Mike could only think fondly of East End slums and the hugger-mugger friendliness of the Edinburgh’s mess deck. On arrival he was ordered into a gang of a hundred by a sturdy Russian officer, who was, he realized after several minutes, a woman. Speaking in abrupt and distorted English, she lined them up on the dockside, then marched them up through lines of wooden houses to a large hall set on the snowy hillside. Inside, the hall was empty save for a single stove. At the far end was what had once been a stage. Six feet above it, over the same area, was a second floor. In the corner of the hall was a pile of sacks. ‘Take bags!’ the woman shouted. ‘Go outside! You see spades, sawdust! You fill bags with sawdust! This is mattress!’
‘Sawdust’ turned out to be something of a euphemism. The pile of dust and chippings outside contained blocks of wood up to two inches square, some of them with nails in. But it was all there was. Within an hour Mike and his companions had made their crude mattresses. As they filed back inside the hall the woman was pointing to the stage and the floor above it. ‘Fifty men down here! Fifty men up here! You sleep!’
The hall was one focal point of their lives for the next few weeks. The other was the mess-house down the hillside. The food was revolting – greasy tea and bread so stodgy that, as several survivors proved to their satisfaction, it stuck when thrown at the walls.
But the Russians had nothing else to offer, and were keen to save on even this appalling fare. On the first day some of the men found themselves physically unable to consume all of their portion. The next day the amount of food delivered to their table was cut by precisely the amount that had been left the previous day. After a week of this the rations of some tables had been cut by about twenty per cent. By then the men were so hungry that they would have eaten anything. They protested. Through interpreters the Russian officers claimed it was too late – the men had themselves decided how much they wished to eat and could not change their minds now. Only when it became clear that the British still had the strength to riot, and would do so, did the Russians capitulate and reinstitute the original amount of their stomach-turning rations.
There were no toilets. At first this didn’t seem so bad, because urine and faeces simply melted holes in the snow, vanished and froze solid. But spring was coming. Within two weeks, by the middle of May, the snow was mostly gon
e. During the day the top soil began to thaw. The stench that then arose around the camp was appalling. It was also a health hazard. The master-at-arms, acting as spokesman for all the men, persuaded the camp commandant to provide a few dozen shovels. As spring turned into summer, work parties dug out a twelve-foot pit a suitable distance away from the other huts. The pit was roofed over with boards, through which holes were cut.
Given these conditions, the question of going home became obsessive. There was no way in which everybody could return together. It had to be done piecemeal. A destroyer could take forty; a submarine ten; a minesweeper just half a dozen. One question had to be settled: who was to sail first?
There were no senior officers present to adjudicate over such a matter. A chief petty officer suggested a solution: ‘We’d better go Bolshevik and form a committee.’ The committee of twelve established two simple rules: those over forty went first, in alphabetical order; and the others were to put their names in a hat and go home according to chance.
At first every man ached to get out of the hell-hole of Vaenga. Mike pined for his home in Willis Road, thought mournfully of his mum, envied Martin the luxurious warmth of his Mediterranean posting, and wrote long, misspelt letters to them both detailing his miseries. He was downcast not to be included among the hundred picked for the first return journey with the Trinidad, now patched up with the steel plating brought in by the Edinburgh. But the Trinidad’s fate modified his eagerness to leave. She sailed as Admiral Bonham-Carter’s new flagship on 13 May; on 14 May she was bombed and sunk.
Thereafter enemy pressure made the route increasingly hazardous. Hitler ordered the convoys to be stopped permanently. It was now full summer, and the Germans could attack round the clock. Formidable ships, in particular the new battleship Tirpitz, struck out from the Norwegian fiords. In July there came the disaster of PQ 17, in which twenty-three of thirty-six ships were lost. Later the same month the minesweeper Niger ran into a British minefield which had not found its way on to her charts and went down with forty Edinburgh survivors. After these disasters many back at Vaenga wondered whether they wouldn’t rather sit out the rest of the war in unhealthy boredom with the Russians rather than risk death in the Arctic.