by Dudley Pope
‘What on earth are you going to do?’ asked an alarmed Heath. ‘Nothing that will damage the boat, I hope?’
The Croupier bellowed with laughter as Jemmy began climbing the ladder. ‘Not the boat, but you might get hit for a six if you get in the way!’
Ned followed Jemmy up the steep ladder, stepped out into the conning tower and then up again through the hatch on to the tiny bridge, and blinked in the daylight.
‘You don’t realize how dim it is down there,’ he grumbled to Jemmy. ‘Makes even a winter’s day seem gaudy.’
‘And the smell!’ Jemmy said. ‘That Ersatz stink gets into everything.’ Jemmy waved at the sergeant in a Marine commando beret. ‘Sarn’t Keeler, get the men ready.’
Further along the dock, near the U-boat’s bow, an engine-room artificer in Ned’s party, Hooper, was slow-bowling a worn cricket ball to a leading seaman who was catching it with the ease of a born wicket-keeper, making a comment as he returned each ball. As Jemmy spoke to Keeler, Hooper put on his cap and as he tucked the ball in his pocket called: ‘Ready for us too, sir?’
‘Ready for everyone! Into the boat!’
Ned looked round carefully: the gaunt and grey brick boxes which hid the dry-dock were either warehouses or workshops, once lit by windows in the roof, but the glass had long since been shattered by bomb blast. The only men in sight of the boat – the only men who could see what was happening, in fact – were the group of seamen and Marines who had arrived in the grey bus, which had long since departed.
‘Let’s get started,‘ Ned said, and stood at the forward end of the conning tower. It was tiny, a semicircular affair the size of an apartment balcony, and crowded with the thick pedestals of the two periscopes and the azimuth compass. The after side opened on to a gun platform and Ned imagined a heavy following sea washing everyone out. But as a vantage point the visibility was perfect. No excuse for hitting the dock when coming alongside, yet deep enough to duck to avoid a rogue wave.
Yet it was all unreal: the grey whale – for that was how Ned saw the boat – bore no relationship to an enemy; no relationship to the elusive enemy he had hunted as it turned and weaved and dived under the sea beneath his ship. This rusting and inert object was a sister ship of the U-boat he had recently been responsible for sinking – but there was no link. Until a few minutes before this one was captured and taken prize, the German lieutenant commanding her had stood here on the grating shouting orders in German. An hour or so before that he had no doubt sent signals in the Hydra cipher and used the Enigma machine to encipher them. And they had been tapped out by a wireless operator so that the wireless waves went out to those aerials, with the enormous porcelain insulators and running forward to the bow, and then at something around the speed of light went to Kernével. Was there a powerful shore station at Lorient, or did Kernével have its own? He tried to remember what the countryside around Kernével looked like. Hilly, but not mountainous.
Jemmy was calling from the dock. ‘Duck down, sir!’ The ‘sir’ was a politeness because of the ratings and Marines. If he crouched along the port side of the conning tower he would be safe from anything that did not bounce. The hatch, the cover clipped back, looked like a well.
He was just going to lean over and tell Jemmy to carry on when he saw a red-capped military policeman taking a reluctant step backwards, as though remonstrating with someone, and it brought the soldier right into view. He had his left arm up, as though keeping someone at bay, and a moment later Ned saw the stocky figure of Commander Shoar dodge round the military policeman like someone learning a complicated Scottish sword dance, and bellow: ‘Yorke! Yorke! Tell this blasted fellow it’s all right! The ’phone, Yorke, the ’phone: it’s urgent!’
‘I’ll meet you in your office, sir.’ Ned beckoned to Jemmy. ‘Take over up here and once I’ve got this joker out of sight carry on with the exercise.’ With that he scrambled down the steps welded into the side of the conning tower, ran down the side of the casing and up on to the dock.
He found Commander Shoar sitting behind his desk, dignity restored but now replaced by outrage.
‘Really, Yorke, that MP! Said he was acting under direct orders from –’
‘He was, sir. The ’phone?’ He gestured at the receiver, lying on the top of the desk.
‘Yes. Admiralty. Now, about this insolent MP –’
Ned picked up the receiver and just stared at Shoar. It had no effect, so Ned spoke into the mouthpiece.
‘Yorke here.’
‘Watts. Are you on scramble?’
‘No, sir, and I’m not alone.’
‘Scramble and make yourself alone!’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ To Shoar he said: ‘This is a confidential call, sir…’
Shoar did not move. ‘Well, go ahead.’
‘I have been ordered to take it alone, sir.’
‘Good God!’ Shoar exploded. ‘First an MP threatens to shoot me, and now a wretched two and a half ringer wants to throw me out of my office while he talks to his girlfriend!’
Ned spoke into the telephone. ‘Commander Shoar insists on listening in, sir.’
‘Put him on,’ Watts growled, ‘and stand by to pick up the pieces!’
Ned held out the receiver. ‘Captain Watts would like to speak to you, sir.’
Shoar stood up suddenly, grabbed his cap and made for the door. He slammed it shut, and Ned spoke into the ’phone to hear, before Watts recognized the voice, a cutting voice say: ‘Shoar, you were a soft cock as a sub – you haven’t changed!’
‘He’s gone, sir,’ Ned said.
‘Oh, pity. That’d be news to him. Very well, you’re on scramble – that I can hear – and now you’re alone now, right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you’re concentrating?’
‘Oh, furiously, sir.’
‘Well, what I’m going to tell you will wipe that silly grin off your face.’
‘I’m concentrating even more furiously, sir, with a stern expression on my face.’
‘They start using Triton at one minute past midnight Greenwich tonight. At zero zero zero one.’
‘Hmm, very thoughtless of them. We wanted another couple of weeks.’
‘Finish what you’re doing and then come down here.’
‘Very well, sir,’ Ned said, and thought a moment. ‘Before you go, sir, there’s a chap here we want in our happy band of pilgrims: a lieutenant (E) called Heath. Can you fix it?’
Watts laughed. ‘I can hear Shoar’s screams from here! Any more of his chaps you want?’
‘No, just Heath. These U-boats are set up for the engineer to be the second-in-command, and although we’re not playing that game we need an enginer office rather than just an ERA – even though our chap’s very good.’
‘Do you want to give Heath a hint?’
Ned thought for a moment. ‘No, sir, I think not: I don’t want to risk him refusing because he thinks his present job is more important, but I can’t tell him yet why we want him!’
‘What’s his clearance, any idea?’
‘B2, he said.’
‘Easy. The rest of your chaps are B1 anyway, and upping him to A1 will be easy, for this job. Now listen, Ned: the intelligence people reckon they won’t dry up entirely on Hydra for three or four weeks, until all the Ted boats on patrol at the moment are replaced. Meanwhile, the Great Blackout begins at midnight, Ned m’lad.’
Chapter Eight
The City of Norwich started going through the boom gate across the river Clyde just as, the Croupier complained, decent people were settling down for afternoon tea. At 17,000 tons, the City of Norwich was in peacetime one of the smaller twin-screw passenger liners engaged in taking passengers to and from the United Kingdom and India. She was a favourite among Army officers and their wives because, in the tedi
ous part of the voyage up the Red Sea, her cabins were cool. Yet none of the other competing shipping lines had realized what really made the City Line ships so popular – that they went to a great deal of trouble to provide large daytime nurseries with trained staff to look after and amuse the passengers’ bored and querulous children (spoiled in India by doting amahs).
This left the parents to enjoy the voyage, lying back in deckchairs reading or playing deck tennis, or being unfaithful to each other, as the mood or opportunity overtook them.
Now the City of Norwich’s hull and superstructure were painted a dull grey, along with her once-famous blue funnel, with the vertical white sword (symbolizing the city’s civic dignity) on each side. Her topmasts (like all merchant ships) had been removed to lower her profile, and an ancient 4-inch gun now sat on the poop deck where once peacetime passengers gathered for the first whisky and soda of the evening.
A gun emplacement looking like a roofless chicken coop had been built on each wing of the bridge, overhanging the ship’s side and fitted with twin Hotchkiss machine guns. The armour plating in front of the gunner reminded Ned of two sections of an altarpiece triptych. Up on the monkey island above the bridge a pair of 20 mm Oerlikon cannons nestled in a circular emplacement shaped like the small, wooden bull rings, miniature amphitheatres, so common in French towns near the Pyrenees. Various other Hotchkiss guns were mounted on the boat deck, where there was a clear field of fire.
Down in the cabins all the comfortable furniture of peacetime, mahogany tables, chintz-covered armchairs and settees, had been removed to avoid damage by the brutal and licentious soldiery and stored in a warehouse in Liverpool which had been burned to the ground during one of the first air raids. Now each cabin was crammed with bunks which were crude steel frames welded to the bulkheads and usually fitted in pairs one above the other, four to a cabin, giving it the egalitarian appearance of a prison cell.
Ned, Jemmy, the Croupier and the Lieutenant (E), Heath (who on joining the party, still slightly bewildered at the sudden transition, had immediately been nicknamed by Jemmy ‘Yon blasted’, abbreviated to ‘Yon’), shared one cabin on the boat deck. Rectangular, with the door on one long side, two bunks one above the other on a short side and another two opposite the door, its furniture comprised a heavy mahogany table in the centre, bolted to the deck, a settee with rattling fans aimed at it from each end, four hanging lockers, a large chest of drawers with four drawers, and a gramophone with five records, four rusted needles and, presumably left by the previous inhabitants, a small piece of sandpaper to polish the points. In peacetime the cabin belonged to the wireless operators employed by the Marconi Company.
The cabin reeked of O-Cedar, the wood polish which was, Jemmy declared, the Merchant Navy’s elixir. It was to the chief officers of merchant ships what Brasso was to the first lieutenants of warships, and reflected a curious difference between the two: the Royal Navy worshipped polished brass and the Merchant Navy polished wood.
The City of Norwich had been launched from a Scottish builder’s yard two years before the war: when the Labour Party and the Conservatives under Baldwin thought of ‘rearming’ in the same way as the Vatican regarded ‘Satan’, and in the Conservative Party the strongest voices (although a small minority) belonged to the Anglo-German Society. She was designed to make a 16-knot passage, which meant she could average sixteen knots in near gale conditions, although in peacetime she would not, because her captain had to consider the comfort of his passengers and account to the Line’s marine superintendent for the cost of the extra fuel consumed. But the war bringing in the convoy system meant that the City of Norwich was a lucky ship.
Convoys were made up of between twenty and a hundred ships: the average was about forty. Sailing together in a box formation of several columns, with the escort round the outside, their speed was the speed of the slowest ship. This meant that most of the convoys bringing food and armaments to Britain, and carrying arms to distant war theatres, sailed at six knots, a mile an hour faster than a reasonably fit man walks down the road for his Sunday paper.
Thus a merchant ship carrying tanks and ammunition, cases of dried egg, fighters, or seven or eight thousand tons of food from the assembly port of Halifax, in Nova Scotia, to Liverpool or Glasgow, covered the two thousand five hundred miles across the Atlantic at a not very brisk walking pace; a speed which showed the advantages of the U-boats – nineteen knots on the surface, or nine knots submerged for an hour. It meant, in fact, that a U-boat on the surface could cross the Atlantic three times faster than its target.
There were several reasons why the ‘slow’ convoys were so slow (the ‘fast’ ones varied but ten to twelve knots was normal). In peacetime, shipowners wanted a ship of the lowest possible net tonnage, to keep down the cost of harbour and canal dues, and the highest possible gross tonnage, to carry as much cargo as possible. Neither tonnage bore any relation to a ton as a weight: net and gross tons were based on a ton comprising one hundred cubic feet. Into the largest practical cargo-carrying hull the shipowners put the smallest and most economical engine that would propel her at the lowest speed acceptable to the shipper and producing in peacetime the highest possible profit to the shareholders.
In wartime, of course, all such ships were, like militant prelates, complete disasters: prime examples of the compromise that kills. Crossing the Atlantic at walking pace meant that a U-boat could attack a convoy, use all her torpedoes, race back to Lorient on the surface (except for the last couple of hundred miles, when she would have to dive at daylight), refuel, rearm, and race back again to make another attack on the same convoy. Did they do that? Ned wondered. Dönitz did not seem very short of boats, although just as Nelson was always crying out for frigates, so too B der U no doubt always cried out for more U-boats.
Shipowners, excluding the respectable and well-known lines like Blue Funnel, Shaw Savill, New Zealand Shipping Company, Royal Mail and a few others, regarded the war as a good thing: they were carrying assured cargoes at high rates, which was the first consideration. But if their old ships, the depreciation long ago written down on the companies’ books, were sunk by the enemy, the government replaced them with new ships and new crews drawn from the Pool of seamen organized by the Ministry of War Transport. And, Ned remembered bitterly, supplied them with those infamous life jackets and lifeboats.
Once the City of Norwich was out in the open Atlantic, her engines throbbing comfortably and the ship pitching slightly as she met swells which could be the distant outriders of yet another depression sweeping across the Atlantic to the north-east, a seaman knocked on the door of the cabin with a request for Ned to visit the City of Norwich’s captain.
Yorke was surprised to find that Captain Painter was a tall, thin-faced and ascetic man who looked as though he would be more at home in a pulpit than on the bridge of a ship. Then he remembered that Painter was the City Line’s senior captain and that he had taken the City of Norwich through an out-of-season typhoon, reputedly breaking only half a dozen teacups.
‘Commander Yorke,’ he said after they had shaken hands, ‘I do believe these orders, every spare inch of which is stamped “TOP SECRET”, are the oddest I’ve yet received, and I’d be glad to go over them with you, so there’s no chance of mistakes.’
Ned nodded as Painter went to his desk, sat down and unlocked a drawer, taking out several sheets of paper clipped together. He read through them, after putting on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses.
‘We’re not unused to picking up survivors from lifeboats – in fact we rarely make a crossing without sighting a boat, though now winter’s here again I’m afraid we often arrive a few days too late: the poor beggars have died of exposure.’
Ned waited, nodding understandingly.
‘It’s bitter in an open boat out there in mid-Atlantic. We go up as close to the ice as we dare, you know.’
‘Yes I know,’ Ned said. ‘I w
ent over your routeing chart for this voyage.’
‘But abandoning some twenty men in one of our own lifeboats – it’s asking a lot. It goes against what I’ve been trained to do since I first went to sea.’
‘Think of it as “delivering”, not “abandoning”,’ Ned said. ‘And I’ve no need to assure you that there’s a very good reason for it.’
‘I’m sure there is, and I’m certainly not questioning it, but I just want you to be sure you know what you’re doing. In gale force winds, you’ll need all you’ve got to survive in one of those dam’ lifeboats. If it gets up to storm force…’
‘We shall be very uncomfortable,’ Ned agreed. ‘But please don’t worry.’
‘But you don’t realize what it’s like in a lifeboat!’ Painter exclaimed.
‘Not a lifeboat, no; but in a lifejacket, yes.’
‘Oh, then you’ve…’
‘We are all picked men. Several of my chaps have things like DSCs.’
‘It’s impossible to tell since you’re all wearing, ah –’
‘Fake Merchant Navy uniforms,’ Ned said, grinning. ‘There’s a reason why the officers have them, and anyway the seamen and Marines very sensibly prefer thick jerseys. When the time comes probably we’ll all be wearing oilskins!’
Painter looked at him closely. ‘I don’t want to pry into whatever it is you are doing, but does it depend on people thinking you are a boatload of survivors?’
Ned thought for a moment or two and then nodded.
‘Well,’ said Painter, ‘if we spotted you through glasses, I’ll tell you straight, we’d alter course ninety degrees away and leave you to it!’
A puzzled Ned tried to think what would raise Painter’s suspicions and finally shook his head. ‘Tell me why!’
‘Oilskins! Most survivors split into two types: the few chaps on watch or who had time to drag on some clothes – they’ll be wearing uniform if officers, and anyway lifejackets. The rest will be in whatever they can scrounge – engineers, greasers and so on would have been down in the engine room in shorts, singlet and sweat rags round their necks. A few might be wearing those yellow survival suits, but they rarely do.’