by Dudley Pope
Chapter Thirteen
The dull red flash over on the port bow was like a great furnace door flung open for a few seconds and then slammed again. It made a deep reverberation, rather than an explosion, and Yorke looked at the luminous hands of his watch. Eight twenty. One torpedo. The insider had started.
‘Second ship in the fourth column,’ Captain Hobson said. ‘In the next column to us, in other words, and she is on the Penta’s port bow. I wonder…’
He broke off as a second red glow dead ahead silhouetted the Swedish ship for a few moments, signalling that one of the leading ships in the Marynal’s column had been hit.
‘That could be the leader of our column,’ Hobson said.
‘No, it’ll be the second. The U-boat probably fired a bow tube at the first ship and the stern tube at the second.’
‘Has he time to reload that stern tube and fire at us as we go past?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Yorke said, ‘but it might be the other way round, and he has his bow heading this way. Anyway you’ll be leaving the sinking ship to port so she’ll still be between us and the U-boat.’ It was a tactful way of making sure Hobson took the Marynal the right way, but the Yorkshireman was already calling a helm order through to the wheelhouse and looking astern to see if he could distinguish the Flintshire.
‘The Penta’s beginning to swing out to starboard, sir,’ the cadet reported and Yorke recognized the voice of young Reynolds. ‘And I can see torches flashing about on that torpedoed ship – she looks heeled over, the best I can see with the glasses, so they’re probably abandoning – Jesus!’ he exclaimed as another red flash lit up everyone on the bridge and for a moment Yorke saw all the ships on the starboard side of the convoy.
‘Another one in about the same position as the first,’ Hobson said. ‘Must be the third ship in that column hit while she was passing. That German reloaded fast!’
‘No, that was from his bow tubes.’
‘You think it’s an insider, not a pack?’
Never forecast the result on the day of the race – Yorke remembered a journalist giving him that advice years ago. ‘Yes,’ Yorke answered. ‘No one’s been hit on the wings of the convoy.’
‘Flames, sir,’ Reynolds reported urgently. ‘That last ship – I saw some round by number two hatch, as though they’re coming up the ventilators.’
By now the Swedish ship was swinging well out to starboard to clear the torpedoed ship ahead of her and Hobson was passing another helm order to the quartermaster in the wheelhouse. Yorke called up to Jenkins, the leading seaman who was standing on the monkey island above the bridge, the microphone of a Tannoy system in his hand, waiting to pass fire orders to his guns.
‘Jenkins – tell your fellows to train round to red seven-five: there’s just a chance you might spot this submarine on the surface, beyond the torpedoed ships. Open fire at once if you do – the tracer might make the Jerries keep their heads down.’
As he finished speaking he was just beginning to distinguish Jenkins’ figure standing up against the night sky, wearing a steel helmet and hunched over the microphone, and he realized the slight flicker was because the whole ship – all the nearby ships in fact – were being lit up by the flames suddenly coming from the last ship to be torpedoed.
‘That’s the Florida Star,’ Hobson said. ‘I hope she isn’t carrying ammo. And just listen…’
Above the gentle rumble of the engine and the whine of the wind, Yorke could hear a weird, distant moan, deep and distressed, the sound of some great mechanical object in agony.
‘Her siren’s jammed,’ Hobson said. ‘Often does that when a ship’s hit. A derrick or something breaks adrift and swings across the lanyard leading to the siren. The noise is deafening; no one can hear orders.’
Yorke glanced over his shoulder at the long wire lanyard leading from the after side of the bridge to the Marynal’s funnel. ‘Ought to stow it during attacks!’ he said. He meant it but made it into a joke; Captain Hobson’s whole life at sea had been spent with the blast of a siren only a quick tug away, to be used in fog and to signal the ship’s intentions to another vessel – one blast meant she was turning to starboard, two to part and three that her engine was going astern. But Yorke, seeing how control would break down entirely if the roaring of a siren prevented any orders being heard, reacted from a different background: in an emergency during a convoy attack it was more important to control your men than signal to another ship…
Hobson, watching the Florida Star burning, seemed hypnotized by looking at the fire, the seaman’s worst enemy. The whole forward part of the ship was blazing now with flames leaping as high as the bridge, but because she still had way on, her own forward movement against the wind created a roaring draught sweeping the fire aft. Through binoculars Yorke could see black figures dropping from the after side of the bridge down on to the deck thirty feet below, risking injury from the jump to escape the flames rolling aft like jagged waves and enveloping the whole bridge and wheelhouse.
Yorke trained his binoculars on the Penta. With the wind on the port bow she was rolling like the rest of the ships, but there was no sign of anyone out on the wings of the bridge. The Swedes must be inside the wheelhouse. Curious (or was it natural for frightened men to seek cover?). In a ship men tended – hmm, he remembered he had seen frightened men bolt below, and he had also seen frightened men scurry up on deck, scared of being trapped below. But…he shrugged his shoulders beneath his bridge coat: he had seen very few frightened men, and they had all regained control in a few minutes, indeed, a few moments, usually more scared of anyone else noticing than of death itself.
The Penta seemed like a bulky black ghost sliding on into the darkness, turning just enough to pass that black mound on her port side that had, until a few minutes ago, been her next ahead, and was now a steel shell filling with water pouring in through a great hole on her port side. A black ghost she might seem, but the Penta was doing nothing that a neutral ship would not be expected to do in the circumstances: haul out to avoid the casualty ahead and increase speed to fill the gap in the column – it was all in convoy orders, just as the Marynal would in a few moments increase speed to fill the gap left by the Penta moving ahead and the Flintshire too would have to move up. With the difference, he thought grimly, that an untoward shower of sparks tonight would make the coal-burner a perfect target…
Out there astern, until now a figure of fun to the Marynal’s cadets, was the tug. She was tiny compared with the merchant ships (even though she could tow any one of them across the Atlantic if the need arose) and as the swell waves had come up with the approaching depression she had looked absurd as she seemed to chug up one side, flip over the crest like a seesaw and then chug down the other side into the trough, like a toy tugged on a string across a rippling pond. It was obvious that after a good gale the tug would be lucky if she had a single whole piece of china left on board but, as the second mate had remarked in his dour Sunderland accent, no hungry man baulked at eating a hot meal from an enamel bowl. Tonight, though, they had to try and rescue the men from three ships. Three so far.
Yes, there was Hobson going into the wheelhouse to call the engine room on the telephone. They would have heard the three dull but heavy rumbles coming through the water above the din of the engine and generators. Obviously torpedo hits. Yorke could never understand how during an attack engineers stayed sane down in their brightly lit engine room with a noise that prevented any talking, watching dials that varied in diameter from a saucer to the face of a church clock, and knowing that any moment a long steel tube about twenty-one inches in diameter and loaded with explosive might crash through the side of the hull… And above the noise the heat, so hot that even though there might be ice and snow on deck, down there men would be perspiring in the equivalent of the Tropics, many of them dressed in nothing but an oily pair of shorts…
Now the Marynal seemed to come alive as her propeller speeded up, and then Hobson was standing beside him again, his face pink in the flames from the Florida Star, which was now lying on the Marynal’s port beam. Hobson was calm enough, even though he knew quite well it needed only a moment to transform the Marynal from a well-run merchant ship to a flaming wreck like the Florida Star.
The DEMS gunner who for the whole watch so far had been watching the ship ahead with his binoculars said to Yorke: ‘The Swede’s hauling round to port now, sir, like she was getting back into the column.’
‘Very well,’ Yorke said, and was thankful that the far side of the Marynal’s bridge and the wheelhouse were now beginning to obscure the furnace that was the Florida Star. The flames had a horrible, almost magnetic attraction – and he was glad to see that the DEMS lookout not only did not sneak a glance but kept his hands cupping the eyepieces of the binoculars to prevent the fire reflecting into his eyes and completely spoiling his night vision.
And her siren. Along with a bell buoy tolling in a calm on a black, foggy night, it was the eeriest noise he had ever heard at sea. Kempenfelt at Spithead and Sir John Moore at Coruña…toll for the brave…nor a funeral note.
Suddenly beside him one of the signalmen appeared, direct from the radio cabin. ‘“Lancaster” is calling “Cantab”, sir. Passed the word “Andrews”.’
‘Very well.’
So Johnny Gower was telling all the rest of the escorts that the attack was by an insider; no pack was involved. It was a routine message sent by low power, although presumably the insider would send off a report to Kernevel as soon as he had time, to tell Grandpa Doenitz how easy it was.
Should he go into the radio cabin and tell ‘Lancaster’ that ‘Yorke’ was asking for a ‘War of the Roses down the middle’, which was the phrase they had agreed on should Yorke think it was worth a frigate making a sweep down one of the columns? Or up – he had to specify which, and there was quite a difference. A frigate down between two columns at, say, ten knots would be meeting ships coming towards her at six knots, so they would be passing at sixteen knots. But going up the column, from astern to ahead, she would be passing at their speed subtracted from her own, at four knots in other words, the speed of a dawdling bureaucrat with his sandwiches in his briefcase.
The answer was no, just as he and Jemmy and the Croupier had agreed it probably would be as they drew sketches in the ASIU room at the Citadel. Supposing a frigate managed to get a contact over there, between the columns. Even if it was in the middle, the lines of ships would be only one hundred yards away on each side of her, and if the U-boat bolted – as it certainly would – the risk of chasing it and dropping depth charges with their delay would be too great: half a pattern might explode directly under an oncoming merchant ship which had steamed over them as they sank, breaking her back, and doing the U-boat’s work. Even worse, as far as the long-term safety of this convoy was concerned, the frigate might collide with a merchant ship and receive damage so that the escort was reduced either in size or effectiveness. No War of the Roses, in other words. Not tonight, Josephine, but it may come to that in the end.
The Florida Star was drawing astern now as the Marynal passed and through the binoculars Yorke could see a group of men huddled right aft, as far away from the flames as they could get. Then his stomach turned as realized the flames had swept aft so fast there had been no time to get to the rafts and the lifeboats were still hanging from the davits – the two on the starboard side, anyway. The forward rope falls of one had burnt through so it hung vertically; the second was burning like a bundle of kindling, still held by the gripes, which would be wire or chain. In the distance, right astern, he saw white flecks and for a moment thought of a U-boat pursuing on the surface and then realized it was the tug coming out of the darkness and looking like a halftide rock, shipping green seas right over the bow as she raced to get to the Florida Star. With thirty or forty men gathered high up on the stern of a blazing ship, it was going to take superb seamanship to get the tug’s bow or stern under the after overhang so that the survivors could drop to safety. But of all seamen, the tug skippers and mates were among the finest, and they were lucky that the Florida Star had an old-fashioned stern that stuck out like an aggressive dowager’s chin and under which they could probably manoeuvre.
Hobson said quietly: ‘I should think we’re past now, aren’t we?’
‘Depends where the U-boat was when she fired: no certainty she was abeam of the Florida Star. She might have been fine on her starboard bow, and that would put her on our port beam now…’
‘You’re a comfort,’ Hobson grumbled good-naturedly just as the DEMS gunner turned from the bridge rail to report to Yorke.
‘The first ship that was hit is now on our port bow, sir: red three-oh. Down by the bow with a heavy list to starboard.’
‘Can you see any boats?’ Yorke asked.
‘Thought I saw two this side, sir, but those flames from the Florida Star make funny shadows with the crests and troughs.’ He resumed looking through his binoculars and then added: ‘Both boats are gone from this side; I can see the empty davits.’
Any innocent questions, answers or reports helped pass the time; the time it took the Marynal to get past the insider. Yorke imagined the German torpedomen over there, sixty feet or so deep in their metal cylinder, heaving and grunting and cursing as they slid new torpedoes into the tubes. No doubt the Oberleutnant commanding the boat was trying to make them hurry as new targets passed across his bow and, while petty officers cursed, seamen probably suffered the usual crop of nipped fingers and bruised arms. Of course, Yorke had forgotten to ask Jemmy an important question: how long did it take a submarine to reload four tubes?
He could see the dark shape of the first casualty and she was now abeam, her misshapen silhouette showing how much she was listing – it seemed that in daylight they would be able to look down her funnel, and her masts were like stunted fishing rods poking out from the river bank. Then suddenly the black shape seemed to be surrounded by a bubbling, whitish-green collar.
‘She’s going!’ Hobson exclaimed.
The ship slowly turned over, capsizing with an ever-increasing flurry of white water as though some enormous sea anemone was sucking her down: the air pressure hurled up hatchcovers like a box of matches emptied in the wind.
Hobson was nudging him and he saw much closer, lying dead in the water and now revealed by the Swedish ship’s turn, the second ship hit that night, the second ship in their own column and the one whose position had been ahead of the Penta.
Yorke, resting his elbows on the bridge rail, swung his binoculars in a circle round the ship. Two lifeboats and four rafts in the water; a third lifeboat being lowered even now because, by luck, the ship was settling upright. A ship heeling as she sank usually meant only the lifeboats on the low side could be launched because those on the high side would not fall clear of the davits without hitting the curving bilge of the ship.
The Board of Trade, now called the Ministry of War Transport, had over the years loaded the dice against the merchant seaman: starting off with the fact that none of the lifeboats for a merchant ship had to have a motor – which meant that in a gale of wind they would be lucky if one boat in four managed to get away – the Board of Trade had specified a type of lifejacket which ensured that most of the men who failed to get into a lifeboat and had to swim would die anyway.
First there had been the scandal (except that of course the Ministry officials made sure that censors stopped it appearing in the Press) of the cork ‘BoT’ lifejackets. These had by law to be carried, but no bureaucrat had ever tested them properly, so that when a particular troopship was bombed and started sinking rapidly at the time of Dunkirk, hundreds of soldiers donned their lifejackets, lined up on deck and obeyed the order to jump over the side. Within minutes the sea was covered with dead soldiers – men with their necks
neatly broken. They had dived in feet first and quite naturally their bodies should have gone under the water for a few feet before they surfaced – as anyone who had ever attended a swimming pool would know. But the big cork blocks in the BoT lifejackets, at the front and back, had stopped that – and because they were not secured between the men’s legs, the blocks floated the moment they hit the water and jammed hard up against the jaw and the back of the head so that the plunging men’s own weight dislocated their vertebrae as effectively as if the lifejackets had been hangmen’s nooses.
The men at the Ministry had then designed a new type of lifejacket, a cross between a waistcoat and a jacket without sleeves. The jacket, made of a light brown material, was filled with kapok, like the quilted coats worn by Chinese labourers. Kapok was cheap, light, buoyant and warm, so that men on watch could wear the lifejacket in cold weather and it helped them keep warm. Altogether it seemed a splendid design – except that apparently no one had tested it properly.
When a motor ship was torpedoed, usually the surface of the sea was covered with diesel fuel, one of the most penetrating liquids in general use. Into this oil – there need be only a thin film of it on the surface of the sea – drifted the hapless seaman wearing his new lifejacket. Unless he was picked up he would sink in twenty-four hours, because the lifejacket soaked up diesel like a wick and it destroyed the kapok’s buoyancy. Because a drowned seaman did not return to haunt the gentlemen from the Ministry, it took a long time for the defect to be discovered – Yorke noticed the Marynal’s men still had the old type. The Royal Navy’s blue tube, inflated by mouth, might look crude by comparison, Yorke thought, but it kept men afloat…
Now they were past the last of the torpedoed ships: the dark shape ahead was the Swede; ahead of her would be the leader of the column. The commodore led the next column to port – a column which now had only three of its original five ships left. The Flintshire was, to his surprise, in position astern; she had increased speed to keep up with the Marynal.