Convoy

by Dudley Pope

‘How do they do it?’

  Ned shook his head. ‘No idea, sir But I think I’ve found a starting point.’ He handed over the folded chart with the form drawn in on the back. ‘If you’ll look at this a moment… It is all the data in the dockets of the eleven convoys put down in tabulated form.’

  Captain Watts was no longer Uncle; he was a man who had won a DSO and DSC in action, had several mentions in dispatches, and commanded the Anti-Submarine Intelligence Unit responsible direct to the Prime Minister. The three young lieutenants watched as his eyes locked on a heading and slowly went down the column below it. Would he spot it? Ned wondered. Would it be best to mention the Swedes now, so that Uncle would not be embarrassed if he did not spot it? He caught Jemmy’s eye and saw his head move a fraction, a negative shake, before it was overtaken by a twitch. Jemmy knew Uncle better than most…

  Uncle’s eyes went over column after column and Ned’s heart sank. The nationality, owner and charterer columns were at the beginning on the left hand side of the form, and now he was reading the last column on the right. Then he dropped the chart on his desk and looked hard at Ned and said: ‘Checked and double-checked?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘No chance that there’s even one convoy which didn’t have a Swede?’

  Ned shook his head. ‘Nor one case of a Swede being torpedoed.’

  ‘How many ships altogether in the eleven convoys?’

  ‘Three hundred and sixty-three.’

  ‘Torpedoed?’

  ‘Eighty-eight.’

  ‘How many neutrals sailed in these convoys?’

  ‘Sixty-nine. Only four were torpedoed.’

  ‘Charmed life for neutrals, but they’re given the safest positions. Fair enough – they can’t sail alone…’

  ‘Damned if I know why not, sir,’ the Croupier grumbled.

  ‘They’d be all right at night, all the accommodation lit up and navigation lights, but what about daylight, eh? What U-boat is going to waste time manoeuvring close to see what flag she’s flying? Painting a great flag on each side doesn’t work either – shadow from the sun or a position ahead and you can’t see it through a periscope. Bad enough checking them at the beginning of the war from a surface ship, when the Americans painted a big Stars and Stripes on each side and thought it’d be a talisman. I was commanding a destroyer at the time and it took ages checking if they were up sun, or it was a hazy or foggy day. What do you reckon, Jemmy?’

  ‘I agree, sir. In daylight if I saw a juicy merchant ship steaming towards me I’d fire two fish. Farting around, “up periscope, down periscope”, is just asking for trouble – air attack, being spotted by an escort, being spotted by the target herself. The point is one isn’t expecting a neutral.’

  Captain Watts tapped the chart. ‘These Swedes – eleven of ’em, but different owners, I see.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Several different companies, but–’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed: every ship under charter to the same firm. Know anything about it?’

  ‘No, and there’s no clue in Lloyd’s. I was thinking that Naval Intelligence could ask our naval attaché in Stockholm…’

  ‘Yes,’ Uncle said shortly, ‘I wasn’t proposing to send you there for a month’s leave among the Nordic blondes. But so what, gentlemen? What does it all mean? Every convoy has a silver lining in the shape of a Swedish ship, and every Swedish ship is under charter to the same charterers. Then what happens?’

  ‘The charter company is operating for the bloody Germans,’ Ned said bluntly.

  ‘Obviously,’ Uncle snapped. ‘And even if there’d been eleven different companies chartering the ships, you can bet your last fiver that all eleven would be owned by or working for the Jerries. That’s a fact of life with the Swedes – but,’ he said quietly, enunciating every word clearly, ‘that still doesn’t put a U-boat in the middle of a convoy and it doesn’t keep its batteries charged so it can stay submerged for days and continue firing away until it has no fish left…’

  ‘You think it is just a coincidence, sir?’ Jemmy asked miserably.

  Captain Watts shrugged his shoulders and waited while Joan came in and handed round cups of tea. Watts inspected his cup. ‘Why do I always get the chipped one? I’ll bet you’ve given Jemmy a good one.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Joan said matter of factly. ‘When I complained about the same sort of thing at Euston Station buffet the old trout serving tea told me there was a war on.’

  ‘Wren officers aren’t supposed to drink tea in railway buffets.’

  ‘At five o’clock in the morning after an all-night journey standing in a corridor I’ll drink tea anywhere, sir – with respect – and anyway, that was before I was commissioned.’

  ‘The quality is going down,’ Uncle remarked conversationally to Ned. ‘Not like it used to be. Much lower standard…weaker…not so sweet. I mean tea, m’dear,’ he said to Joan, ‘but by Jingo, you’ve a guilty look on your face.’

  When Joan had left the room, Captain Watts said: ‘I’ll get NID to make some inquiries through the naval attaché in Stockholm about that chartering firm. I can guess the answer – just a shop front for the Jerries. Still, the NA in Stockholm is a bright lad; in my term at Dartmouth.’

  He sipped his tea and made a wry face. ‘God, war is hell… Now, supposing all the answers are yes: yes, the charter firm really is Jerry, yes, of course the Swedish ships get all the secret papers (Mersigs, zigzag diagrams and so on) – where does that get us? A copy of merchant ships’ signals may have “Secret” printed on the cover, but what the hell, it gives flag signals which won’t help a U-boat. Zigzag diagrams might be helpful–what do you think, Jemmy?’

  Jemmy shrugged his shoulders. ‘Might help U-boat Headquarters in Lorient when instructing fledgling Jerry navigators, but a U-boat skipper could be clutching a copy in his hand as he attacked and it wouldn’t help – not at the underwater speeds we know about. Even add five knots for something fancy, and it still doesn’t help.’

  ‘We seem to be back at square two,’ Watts said heavily. ‘We’ve passed square one with the throw about the Swedes. We can’t pass square two until we find out if there is any link between the Swede and the U-boat inside the convoy. I’m not a communications wallah, but I’m certain our escorts would pick up any chitchat on the wireless between the two, even if the Jerries have some exotic frequencies. Anyway, I’ll have a word with our experts. Any ideas?’

  The Croupier said: ‘We need to know if the U-boat stays inside the convoy during the day.’

  ‘She has to surface for several hours to charge her batteries,’ Jemmy said, ‘so she can’t even if she wanted to. So she has to leave and then rejoin the convoy. Christ, that’s what puzzles me.’

  ‘So if the convoy zigged or zagged during daylight, she’d have a long run on the surface to charge batteries and catch up,’ Uncle said.

  Jemmy shook his head. ‘That’s easy. I can tell you how I’d do it and that’s the way the Jerry would do it, because it is the only way. Blast away in the dark firing fish like a run-amok Billingsgate fish porter starring in a Western film, then dive deep, preferably under a layer of cold water so the Asdic can’t penetrate, and wait for everyone to pass, particularly any escort coming up astern after acting as a rescue ship.

  ‘Then, with the convoy a dozen miles ahead – two hours’ steaming – I’d surface, start charging, and follow the convoy. A set of zigzag diagrams wouldn’t help because once it was out of sight I wouldn’t know which zigzag it was using but a bit of high-speed steaming on the surface around teatime would find the convoy – there’s always smoke, or some bloody fool commodore doesn’t realize how dark it is getting and rips off a long signal using an Aldis lamp. Even those little blue signal lamps can be seen a fair distance. And on a quiet night if the wind is blowing from the convoy, you can smell the diesel exhaust fumes
. Yep, I know that’s hard to believe, but don’t forget the Jerry skipper and his mates have spent the whole day in the fresh air and their own diesel fumes are also blowing astern… Anyway, by the time the stewards are mixing the cocoa ready for the night-watch men, the U-boat has sneaked up astern on the surface, ready to dive the moment an escort is sighted…’

  Watts pulled the chart towards him and ran his finger down the column giving the positions of the convoys when they were attacked, and even as he did it Ned realized he had not thought of one perhaps vital factor, the one that had obviously just occurred to Uncle.

  He mumbled figures and then pushed the chart away. ‘Every attack was made in the Black Pit… Not one attack started while the convoy was still within range of our planes.’

  Jemmy coughed. ‘I didn’t bother to mention that, sir: no U-boat would dare belt along on the surface if there was any risk of a Sunderland or a Liberator – or even those weird-looking Catalinas – thundering down, dropping death and destruction and making Hans upset his Stein of good Tedeschi beer.’

  ‘Very well,’ Uncle said, ‘since we can invent our own rules for this game we’ll call that square two passed: all attacks made outside the range of air cover.’

  Jemmy protested, ‘I deserve a square, sir, for my description of the boat dropping astern to charge batteries and then sneaking back.’

  Captain Watts looked doubtful. ‘Well, Jemmy, it sounds likely enough, but your story gets a bit weak at the end. With the convoy ahead there comes a point when the U-boat has to dive to get back into the middle of it. With such a low underwater speed and endurance and the convoy making six knots, if the U-boat can only make seven or so and had to dive six miles astern of the convoy, it’d take her hours to get abreast of the rear ships. By that time her batteries would be flat and we know the attacks usually start within a couple of hours of darkness.’

  Jemmy gave a double twitch and wriggled in his chair. Ned knew that Jemmy was thousands of miles away, surrounded by the whine of electric motors, peering out at the horizon through a submarine’s periscope for a brief glance at a world measured horizontally and vertically by the range graticules on the lenses. He was trying to think of a way of getting back into the convoy, wondering if the Swede could help, and knowing that the Royal Navy escorts would be crossing the wake of the convoy, guessing that the back door of the convoy, as it were, represented the best way of returning to the hen run.

  Finally Jemmy sat up straight and reached out for his cup. ‘Christ, she can’t make tea,’ he grumbled after a sip. ‘Still…well, I’ve no ideas at the moment, sir. So we stay on square two?’

  ‘We stay on square two,’ Captain Watts said firmly. ‘I’m not trundling my barrow out of the Admiralty building until I’ve got a better load of rubbish to sell. We’ll start looking at the fruit market in Stockholm, but…’

  Ned suddenly heard his voice saying: ‘There’s only one way of finding out, sir, and that’s to sail in a convoy close to a Swedish ship chartered by this same firm. Her next ahead or next astern; maybe one on her beam. A powerful pair of glasses, a radio operator and an all-band receiver, and a transmitter to talk to the senior officer of the escort. Board the bugger if necessary. We can use the DEMS gunners as commandos.’

  ‘You want to go?’ Uncle asked.

  Ned shrugged his shoulders. ‘They say those chaps eat well in merchant ships. Would you ask the Director of Trade Division to let us know when the Swedes next apply for a convoy?’

  Uncle nodded and then said doubtfully: ‘What about that arm and hand of yours? I wangled the transfer of that nurse on the basis that you were a specialist officer who couldn’t be spared but needed special medical treatment…’

  ‘I’m the only one who can be spared,’ Ned said, gesturing at Jemmy and the Croupier. ‘These two beachcombers still have a lot of paperwork to finish…’

  Chapter Ten

  Liverpool in early December with a noontime drizzle that had been falling on its soot-stained buildings for three days had all the gaiety of wet sticks of charcoal planted in a pile of damp grey ash, but the taxi driver was cheerful and Yorke’s train from London, delayed for hours by an unexploded bomb on the line ten miles short of the city, had arrived in daylight so that he could join the ship. The taxi had to detour round streets barricaded and blocked because bombs had toppled a building or two across them in untidy piles of rubble or the trestles were hung with the familiar red notices:

  Danger – Unexploded Bomb.

  Finally, through gaps in the streets which were like missing teeth in grey gums and showed the damage from two years of intensive night bombing, Yorke saw a few masts. They were stumpy because merchant ships had removed their topmasts to lower their silhouette. Long gone were the coloured stripes or bands on funnels showing the different companies; instead they were all painted a uniform grey, the ‘crab fat grey’ which in daylight or darkness provided the most camouflage.

  ‘Queen’s Dock you said, guv?’ the driver said conversationally.

  ‘Yes, number two, Queen’s Dock.’

  ‘That’s the other end from the entrance we use. You’ll need some paper to show the coppers at the gate. Uniform ain’t enough these days. Some of these foreigners look like commissionaires so the coppers is tightening up. ‘Fraid someone’ll go in and drill an ’ole in one of the ships, I s’pose.’

  Finally the taxi swung into the great gateway to the dock, an entrance that owed its size to the need to admit heavily-laden lorries rather than a desire to impress. Ships alongside the quays were sharply-angled examples of perspective, their harsh lines in the dull light making the whole scene look like an old print, the paper dulled and foxed, the illustration lacking only the square-sail yards and furled sails to slip back a century or two with ships about to sail in other wars, yet the crews facing the same threat, death. The taxi stopped by a small office at the gate and a policeman came out and saluted.

  ‘What ship was you wanting, sir?’

  ‘The Marynal.’

  ‘Ah, the Mar-ie-nal,’ the policeman said, as if correcting Yorke’s pronunciation and certain it rhymed with ‘urinal’. ‘You have papers, sir? You just visiting her – an inspection?’

  ‘No, I’m joining her.’ Yorke avoided speaking the name, which sounded like mariner, and handed over two papers which the policeman read quickly and handed back.

  ‘Thank you, sir: she’s the third ship, just abreast the burned-out warehouse. Have a good trip, sir.’

  The taxi moved off. Quays in busy ports looked the same the world over, the only difference being the weather, the presence or lack of bomb damage, and the colour of the dockers’ skin. Piles of small crates alongside the first ship were being loaded on to large flat metal trays before being hoisted on board by the ship’s derricks and two lorries were obviously waiting to unload whatever they carried direct into cargo nets or trays.

  Mooring warps curved from stem and stern, their great spliced eyes looped over stone bollards and holding the ship. Each rope had a circular disc of thin metal lodged halfway along it, like the spinning coloured disc of a child’s toy. Rat guards were compulsory and although ports insisted on them being used to prevent rats, perhaps infected in some tropical port, from immigrating into Britain, they also stopped rugged British rats from climbing on board a ship and stowing away for a warmer climate where there was no rationing or bombing. A stick of bombs or a few hundred incendiary bombs on a warehouse, Yorke reflected, must play havoc with a rat’s personality.

  The wreckage of a small crate which had been dropped, with the black printed exhortations ‘Use No Hooks’ and ‘Stow Away From Boilers’ still visible on pieces of the deal boards, had been kicked out of the way. Again, on any quay there would be such wreckage, and if the contents had been edible or saleable, they would vanish like smoke in a high wind.

  The second ship was loading tanks a
nd lorries, the sandy-coloured camouflage paint betraying their destination, although many a ship, merchant or war, had ended up in the tropics just after all the crew had been fitted out with thick woollen Arctic underwear and heavy clothing. The ship was also beneath one of the few big cranes left standing, and Yorke saw several large crates close against the wall of the warehouse: aircraft in crates, probably fighters to be stowed on top of the hatches, so big that one on each hatch completely changed the silhouette of a merchant ship.

  ‘’Ere you are, then,’ the driver said, pulling up at the gangway of a modern-looking ship, turning the car round a pile of crates and a swinging cargo net. A group of dockers looked up incuriously, saw an officer in uniform getting out of the taxi and, noticing two gold bands on each sleeve, assumed he was the second officer or one of the engineers – they were too far off to distinguish any coloured stripes between the gold. And Yorke knew that apart from the basic uniform, the insignia of rank and cap badges in the Merchant Navy usually varied, depending on the company. Some favoured straight gold stripes with the regular diamond instead of the curl used in the Royal Navy. Every large company had its own cap badge; the smaller ones made do with the regular Merchant Navy cap badge.

  As the taxi driver took Yorke’s case out of the boot, a Royal Navy seaman came hurrying down the gangway, hair untidy and wearing working clothes.

  ‘Mr Yorke, sir? I’m Watkins, been fitting the radio gear. Let me take your case.’ His eyes rested for a moment on the medal ribbon before he grabbed the luggage.

  With the taxi paid off, Yorke followed Watkins up the gangway and paused for a moment at the top. The Marynal’s decks looked as though every available length of loose rope, empty cardboard carton and cigarette packet had been emptied over them; at least three welding torches spurted eerie blue tongues and showered sparks, twentieth-century dragons huffing and puffing to frighten the enemy.

  The convoy was due to sail the day after tomorrow and it seemed the Marynal could never be ready in time, but Yorke had seen enough warships in port for a few hours, hurriedly getting stores on board and welding repairs to action or heavy-weather damage, or putting in new equipment that needed extra fittings, to know how soon it could be cleared up.