Convoy

by Dudley Pope

  ‘May have low freeboard, sir.’

  There was no time to look her up again in the identification books – even if they could be found in this tangle of bent metal. Grab the boys and girls and bolt, said Their Lordships; thank goodness there was no question of taking the Pole in tow.

  And here was the first of a new wave of Teds diving down from ahead. Ju 88s, silvery in the sunlight despite camouflage on the upper surfaces, the black crosses easy to see, the reflection of sun glinting from the flat pieces of Perspex forming the cockpit canopy. Was the pilot right-handed or left? That had been Bascombe’s last mistake; Yorke was sure that for some reason the commander had guessed the pilot was right-handed, but he had been left.

  The plane, dive brakes down, was now beginning a shallow dive towards the Aztec, which for the moment was steering a straight course. The Ted pilot did not know before he began his bombing run whether the destroyer would jink to his left, his right – or carry straight on. If she turned to port (to his right) and he was right-handed, the plane’s alteration of course to aim his bombs would be easy to make, an instinctive move. Was it any harder to the left? What did their bomb sights look like, anyway? Was it like a car driver pulling out to pass?

  ‘Now!’ he shouted at the rating holding the engine room telephone and saw the man’s mouth twist into the word ‘Smoke!’; then he called, ‘Starboard thirty!’ into the voicepipe and held on as the Aztec heeled violently in response to full effective rudder applied at full speed. He glanced aft through the splinter holes and saw a gush of black smoke streaming up from the funnel; just enough (he hoped) to divert that Ted pilot’s attention for a few seconds when he should be concentrating on his bombing run. From aloft, the Aztec might look for a moment as if she had been hit by a bomb not yet dropped.

  The score went up to thirty misses, though the engineer complained that two of the six had been close enough to start some rivets below the waterline and there were a few trickles of water round skin fittings. And, he grumbled, all this high-speed steaming was raising the engine-room temperatures…

  The next was a Dornier 217, and the score rose to thirty-six; the third and fourth were Ju 88s, which dropped only two bombs each and then tried to spray the Aztec with machine-guns.

  ‘Only forty – they must have used the rest of the sticks on that bloody Pole,’ grumbled the starboard lookout, who had appointed himself scorekeeper.

  At that point a petty officer scrambling across the wrecked bridge came up to Yorke, who recognized him despite a grubby and bloodstained bandage round his head.

  ‘The torpedoes, sir: is there any chance…?’

  Yorke thought of all that explosive and compressed air sitting amidships – as well as the depth charges aft. The Admiralty seemed very concerned about whomever was on board the Polish destroyer. Were the torpedoes so much extra weight? Would there be a chance to use them? Perhaps to make sure the Pole sank – the Teds might send out tugs, or even a destroyer.

  ‘For the moment, no; but make sure all the depth charges are set to safe.’

  The order about the depth charges should have been given long ago; there had been more than one case already of a destroyer sinking and, with her men swimming in the water above her, reaching the depth to which the hydrostatic valves in her depth charges had been set, where they had automatically exploded. Water being incompressible, the men were found unmarked but dead, the shock wave rupturing something inside them (Yorke watched the last Ju 88 turn away to the north-east), the diaphragm, he supposed.

  ‘No Teds over the Pole, sir,’ one of the lookouts reported. ‘But – yes, two more approaching him from the east.’

  It was little short of a miracle that the Pole was still afloat. Judging from the Aztec’s losses, when she could still steam and evade at full speed, he dared not think of the dead and wounded in a ship which had been fought to a standstill.

  These latest two Ju 88s seemed determined to sink the Pole before the Aztec arrived; then no doubt they or their mates would deal with the intruder. They wheeled and dived again, like vultures over their prey and uncertain what to do, greed fighting fear.

  The wind was south-east, and he gave the quartermaster a course that would bring the Aztec passing to windward of the Pole. The breeze was perhaps ten knots; the smoke should drift about one mile in six minutes although it was impossible to guess if this wind was constant; the Aztec, thundering along at over thirty knots, prevented anything more than guesswork. A young man standing up in a sports car tearing down the Brighton road at about forty land miles an hour would have the same difficulty…

  One of the Ju 88s suddenly banked away from the Pole, but there were no bomb bursts. Were the Teds just waiting patiently for her to sink? The Aztec was vibrating as the engineer tried to get the last knot out of his engines, so that it was hard to see through binoculars.

  Now the Ju 88 was darting for the Aztec in the same shallow dive from ahead. Was this the Luftwaffe’s standard procedure for attacking ships? The pilots were (thank goodness) unimaginative: the Aztec was steaming towards this one at over thirty knots and he assumed that the Ju 88 with air brakes down was making 100 knots, so the Aztec would pass beneath on an opposite course at a combined speed of 130 knots. But if the pilot came up astern in the Aztec’s wake, the destroyer’s speed would be subtracted; the Ju 88 would pass the destroyer at 70 knots, giving the Ted bomb aimer more ‘time over target’ and therefore a better chance. He stopped thinking about it; one could not be sure about telepathy, and anyway, there was no need to walk under ladders any day of the week, least of all on a Friday.

  This pilot is left-handed! He’s coming down in a gentle curve to his left, a difficult job for a right-handed man. Wasn’t it? Wouldn’t a right-handed man make a single larger alteration to line himself up, so that he could then approach in a straight line?

  ‘Port thirty,’ he snapped down the voicepipe, staking everything on his guess. If the bridge communications hadn’t been so badly damaged he’d be reducing and increasing speed too, like a plover shamming injury to lure the enemy away from the nest.

  But he might guess wrongly, like Bascombe, and bring a bomb down to shatter the bridge. ‘Port thirty’ had been enough; five bombs burst in a neat line on the port quarter.

  ‘Forty-five for one,’ remarked the signalman as he reported to the engine room. ‘Be a while before we get “Bad light stopped play”, though.’

  Now Yorke could make out the Polish destroyer’s outline clearly with the naked eye. The ship had paid off in the wind and sea so that her bow was heading to the north-west.

  ‘She’s a bleedin’ wreck, sir,’ reported one of the lookouts with binoculars. ‘Hits on A turret, B turret and the bridge, both funnels riddled, torpedo tubes smashed… No fires though, and no steam neither… Reckon her boilers are out.’

  ‘Any floats?’

  A group of lozenge-shaped Carley floats, the simple rafts which were little more than rope nets over wooden frames, would be the clearest indication that the Poles were abandoning ship, and knowing the kind of men they were it would mean the destroyer was at last sinking fast.

  ‘No, sir. Still a lot of tracer going up. Bet them gun barrels is hot.’

  Yorke could just see the three or four thin red lines of tracer curling up towards the single plane still circling the stricken ship. It was light stuff; more likely stripped Lewis guns than anything else; guns which could be aimed and fired by hand: no electrics or hydraulics would be left working. And there would be only so many pans of Lewis gun ammunition remaining, however fast they were loaded.

  She was now perhaps a mile away. The remaining Ju 88 seemed undecided what to do. The Ted pilot had no bombs left; that much seemed certain. Almost certain, he corrected himself.

  Using the Aztec to circle the Polish destroyer a mile off, laying smoke, meant steaming round in a circle for just over thre
e miles. At thirty-five knots – that was what the engineer now reckoned – it would take a little over twelve minutes to lay the screen. How many Ju 88s could – would, rather – arrive in that time, a flock of screaming vultures determined to stop the Aztec from spoiling their party?

  Now a sick berth attendant was waiting to report.

  ‘Surgeon, sir – he says we’ve eight so badly wounded they won’t last, no matter what we do, and fifty-three other wounded.’

  ‘How serious are the fifty-three?’

  ‘‘Bout twenty bad; the rest cuts and fractures, sir; no amputations.’

  ‘Very well; thank the surgeon. The dead?’

  ‘Twenty-seven, sir. Leastways, them we know about; but there ain’t been time to search everywhere yet; the surgeon said to get out the livin’ and leave the dead, sir. For the time being, anyway.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Yorke said, watching the Polish destroyer now lying like a log on the port bow. The last Ju 88 was heading away north, rapidly growing smaller, exasperated or out of ammunition. Twelve minutes, that was all he needed now. A clear blue sky – that had its advantages because the Ted bombers could not sneak in above clouds and suddenly dive through a gap to bomb. It seemed strange, though, that gulls wheeled under a warm sun while around them men were blowing each other to pieces.

  He called to the rating at the telephone: ‘Tell the engine room to make smoke.’

  He could imagine seamen spinning valves so that more fuel oil poured out of the sprayers than could burn properly, and the extra would – like a smoking paraffin lamp in a draughty room – be sucked up the funnel and poured out in a thick black cloud.

  He glanced aft through a splinter hole and saw the smoke streaming astern to lie on the water as an oily black coil barely moving in the wind, a bulging thick snake, writhing slowly, almost languorously.

  Senior surviving officer. Only surviving officer except for the engineer and surgeon. Not even a blasted midshipman to lend a hand, run errands, take over responsibility for a part of the ship. And somehow he had to get ‘the passengers’ off that damned destroyer. Not just passengers, of course, but the whole ship’s company. Well, he could do with the men; the Aztec was like a ghost ship, just thundering along with a handful of men on the bridge, a few at the remaining guns, some in the engine room, a lot in the sick bay… But the Pole would have few survivors too; she had taken a terrible beating. But if a Pole could crawl he could fight; Yorke had met enough of them to know that.

  A few words down the voicepipe to the quartermaster and the Aztec began her turn; an Aldis lamp winked from the bridge of the Polish destroyer and Yorke ignored it; one of the signalmen would report the message and he could already hear the metallic chatter showing that the man had found an undamaged lamp and was acknowledging each word.

  Now the Polish destroyer was on the port beam and the smoke was hiding a quarter of the horizon; now she was coming round to the port quarter and the smoke cut off half the horizon and was rising slowly.

  ‘Sir, ship says “Thanks for smoking; we’ve given it up.”’

  Must be the British liaison officer. Still, it was a good signal; they were still cheerful.

  ‘Signalman, have you a pad? Good, make this: “When smoke covers us am coming alongside stop expecting more visitors so cannot stay long.”’

  The Aldis chattered away while Yorke continued turning the Aztec. She seemed to be towing a great black tail of smoke. No planes yet, but the two ships could not stay in the smoke for ever; the Teds could chase them – the Aztec anyway – the moment she came out of it and made for home. That was assuming the smoke hid them anyway: was it rising high enough to hide the tops of the masts? Perhaps the Teds would get short of planes; maintaining a flying circus over a sinking ship three hundred miles from their base must need plenty – a couple of hours out and two back, half an hour or more to fuel and bomb up – say five hours. It would take twenty planes to keep one arriving over the target every fifteen minutes. That was nearly two squadrons by the British measure; twelve planes per Imperial squadron. Did the Teds use the Metric system? By now Hitler might have followed Napoleon’s example and invented his own system of weights and measures.

  Half a mile to go and then the Aztec and the Pole would be snug inside the smokescreen. Suddenly it went dark and he began coughing as he breathed in the smoke, shouting a new helm order to turn the Aztec inwards out of the tail of her own screen. Just as suddenly it was bright sun again and the two destroyers were like two wounded chicks inside the rim of a nest, hoping the sparrowhawks would not see them through the leaves of the hedgerow.

  The Pole, her ensign flapping sporadically as a gust of wind stirred the cloth, was deep and sluggish in the water: he could now see that her decks would soon be awash and as she rolled the sea sloshed down one side then the other like breakers along a sandspit. Men seemed to be gathered like limpets on the upper deck – her captain would have everyone up from below.

  ‘They’ve got the casualties ready just abaft the bridge on the port side, sir,’ one of the lookouts reported. ‘I can see ’em clear. A dozen stretcher cases; the rest can move. Bandaged up, a lot of ’em.’

  Very little sea; for once the Atlantic was not pushing swell waves across the Bay, and he was thankful: swell waves were the ones that would pick up the Aztec as she stopped alongside the Pole and smash the two ships together so hard they would hole each other.

  The wind and sea, what there was of it, was on the Pole’s starboard side. He had better come alongside her port side – as the Polish captain had anticipated – so that the breeze would be trying to blow the high sides of the Aztec away from the stricken ship and getting clear again would only be a matter of cutting ropes… Everything that saved time would be a help – already the smoke was drifting gradually and perceptibly thinning; the bombers might be back any moment.

  And, he thought to himself, it had worked: he had brought the Aztec alongside the Pole – it was only in the last few moments of the approach that he realized just how much she was rolling, the result of all those hundreds of tons of water sloshing around inside her, the ‘free surface liquid’ that caused instability.

  As the Aztec came alongside, with ratings throwing heaving lines, Yorke guessed the Polish ship was in effect a mirror image of the Aztec: her bridge, too, was riddled; it looked like what was often to be seen along a country lane, a can on a stick riddled by shotgun pellets. The rust was there, too; the scorching heat of blast and the impact of splinters left a neglected and rusted effect, burning or chipping off the paint.

  That it worked was a tribute to the way Henry Bascombe had trained the ship’s company. Yorke spoke into the voicepipe and called to the rating at the engine-room telephone and did very little more than that. One of the lookouts, the one on the starboard side of the bridge, had a strident voice and relayed orders to both ships’ companies like a loudhailer fitted with a five-second delay, the time it took for the man to absorb Yorke’s orders and repeat them.

  The heaving lines were hauled across the narrow gap of water between the two ships, heavier ropes followed and were secured, holding the two ships together. The wounded men, cocooned in the slatted stretchers, were hoisted on board the Aztec with the surgeon standing there, white overalls so bloodstained he looked as though he had spent a busy morning in a slaughter house.

  The torpedo artificer had taken command of his section of the Aztec’s deck, under the surgeon, and the wounded were first put down beside the torpedo tubes.

  Now someone was shouting from the Polish ship’s bridge: a British voice. The signalman repeated it: ‘Gennelman asks if it’s all right for the rest of their ship’s company to board now.’

  Like the Gosport ferry, Yorke thought: ‘Yes, if all the wounded are over.’

  ‘They are, sir; they’ve seen to that.’

  ‘Very well, pass the word.’
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br />   The Polish ship’s company boarded as though they were a Whale Island team working under the fiercest of gunnery instructors, in preparation for the annual Earl’s Court Show. Whale Island GIs were the fiercest animals in Britain not kept behind bars, but they would have found little to criticize in those Poles.

  Yorke watched the sky as the smoke thinned round them; the black hedge was grey now, almost transparent in places, like fog or mist dispersing. The whole ring had drifted to the north-west, and the south-eastern edge was only a hundred yards or so from the two ships. Was it worth making more smoke now so that it would blow to leeward, a long black column into which the Aztec could dart if the bombers came back? No – the Poles would give him enough men to fight the ship; there was no merit in hanging about: their only chance was a high-speed run from now until darkness.

  Was the Polish captain senior? Did he take command of the Aztec? Was he rated RN? Hardly. The point had never arisen, so far as he knew. Even the bloody British liaison officer might be senior and want to play silly buggers by commanding the Aztec for the trip back to the UK. Well, he was welcome to argue the point; but unless his name was senior in the Navy List, Lieutenant Ned Yorke was taking this wreck home.

  The liaison officer, a VR lieutenant, appeared on the bridge, introduced himself as John Wood, and told him the Polish destroyer was the Orzel and that the captain would be along as soon as the last man was off.

  ‘It’s the passengers,’ Wood said. ‘They’re special people.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I took ’em straight down to the wardroom, out of your way. Civilians. Your steward’s taken charge of them. They’re important political refugees; they’ve had a bad time.’

  ‘What the hell are they doing in the Bay?’

  ‘They’d escaped across Europe to Spain and the Orzel took them off a fishing boat near Ferrol. All arranged through the Admiralty.’