by Dudley Pope
The other was that this insider always attacked ships in the next column to port of the Penta’s column. How significant was that? Not very: probably just a quirk of this particular Oberleutnant. Perhaps he was left-handed, or his periscope would not train to starboard, or his port propeller had a chipped blade so that he tried not to turn to starboard… a dozen different explanations. It could be just a coincidence that the column usually attacked was the one next to the Penta.
In fact, if he was honest Yorke knew that so far coincidence could explain everything. Coincidence that dirty fuel (the explanation given to Johnny Gower) kept plaguing the Penta so that her daytime stops were genuine and a night’s running was long enough to block them again; coincidence that this convoy was being attacked by a U-boat commander who liked attacking the fourth column. It was a safe one anyway because he could see the escort dare not start depth-charging inside the convoy itself.
Coincidence. Diplomatic incident. Melodrama. Lack of detachment. Dreaming up a theory and then trying to find the facts to prove it. They all seemed to fit. But, he told himself angrily, they did not help. So…after the Hidalgo blew up, that bloody U-boat would have dived deep and stopped all machinery, lying at two or three hundred feet like a sleeping whale until her hydrophone operator could report that the convoy had long since passed and there was no sign of an escort. Then what? By tomorrow night she will have to catch up with the convoy again. Will she do that by following in the Penta’s wake?
Yorke sat up on one elbow and found he knew what he had to do. Or, rather, what he was going to do. Tomorrow afternoon, about two o’clock, just as soon as the Penta increased speed: that would be the time for Jenkins to work on the lock with his new screwdriver, so that the door could be opened just enough to let Yorke look astern, along the Penta’s wake. It was fortunate that the after side of the Penta’s poop was curved so that opening the door a fraction gave a good view over the stern. Yorke yawned and looked at his watch. More than sixteen hours to wait. One glance through the partly open door should answer all his questions one way or the other.
At seven o’clock next morning the Swedish cooks and a steward opened the door and brought down a stainless-steel pail full of steaming coffee and several containers of sliced bread, marmalade, jam, butter and sugar, plus a flat baking tin piled with fried bacon and many fried eggs.
Watkins, helping to place the containers on the table, looked at the bacon and sniffed disparagingly. ‘Very fat. In fact it’s all bleedin’ fat. Don’t you have no lean up there?’
Neither of the cooks spoke English but the steward translated and gave the answer: ‘We Swedes like fat bacon. You English like the lean. In Denmark they breed special lean pigs to make lean for the English – in peace, of course.’
‘Yes,’ Watkins growled, ‘that’s what makes me cross, the idea that those bloody Jerries are eating up all those nice lean rashers. Here mate,’ he added, having been briefed by Yorke, ‘who was hit last night? Torpedoed,’ he said; when he saw the steward did not understand ‘hit’.
‘Ah yes, the name of the first one I do not know. The second ship in the next column to the left exploded. The Hidalgo. No survivors, I think. The ship vanished in the flash.’
‘What about the Penta’s engines? Are they still giving trouble?’
The steward paused as he was taking the lid off a container of sugar and looked puzzled. ‘I don’t know what the engineers do. It seems dangerous to me.’ With that he said something in Swedish to the two cooks and together they left the cabin, the steward tapping his watch. ‘Next meal at noon,’ he said. ‘You have containers washed ready for us. The box,’ he pointed to a small cardboard box at the end of the table, ‘has the soap powder. You wash good, eh?’
The door slammed shut at the top of the ladder and Jenkins went up to check it, coming back to report to Yorke that it was locked. Reynolds and Mills were serving out the eggs and bacon as the seamen stood in line with their plates.
Mills handed a plate to Yorke. ‘Two eggs each. We can’t complain that the Swedes are starving us!’
Yorke remembered pre-war visits to Scandinavia. ‘By Swedish standards, they are. Most Scandinavians are trenchermen.’ He saw the puzzled expression on Mills’ face. He probably thought the word meant homosexual. ‘Most Scandinavians are great eaters.’
‘Aye, and drinkers too,’ Mills said. ‘I’ve seen a couple of Scandies full of booze pull out knives and clear a bar in ten seconds. Must remember to ask that steward to get us some fags. Wonder how we pay for them.’
‘Sign chits, I suppose,’ Yorke said, sitting down and reaching for a knife and fork. The bacon was very salty. He preferred breakfast on board the Marynal.
The morning had dragged. Just before eleven o’clock they had noticed a slight reduction in the engine revolutions followed an hour later by another drop, with the Penta resuming the previous day’s slow pitch and slight roll. Mills was certain the propellers were turning at just enough revolutions to keep the ship heading into the wind and sea.
When the Swedes brought the midday meal, Watkins had teased the steward. ‘Good job you cooks and stewards don’t have breakdowns in the galley, otherwise we’d all starve,’ he said. The steward took a few moments to absorb the complex sentence and then said sourly; ‘The engineers like to sit comfortable and play the cards.’
The seamen had drawn lots to take it in turns to wash the plates and cutlery, and it was all clean and stacked away, with the men sitting round playing cards or gossiping, by two o’clock. Yorke and Mills sat at the table, both listening to the whine of the shafts and the steady, low rumble of the engines. Five minutes past two, quarter past, twenty past…
‘Perhaps that steward misunderstood Watkins,’ Mills said. ‘Maybe we haven’t left the convoy. The vice-commodore may have reduced speed.’
Yorke shook his head. ‘No, the steward understood, and anyway we altered course slightly.’
‘A zigzag?’ Mills said hopefully.
‘Too small an alteration, only five or ten degrees. It was just…’
He broke off as the engines slowly increased speed, the propeller shafts beneath them increasing their hum and the ship beginning to vibrate. He looked at his watch and took out his notebook. ‘1425 – ship increased speed to estimated revolutions for 15 knots.’
Jenkins was sitting on his mattress, alert, the deck knife-screwdriver beside him.
Give them time out there to do whatever it was they were doing. Don’t rush, Yorke told himself: don’t be impatient. But he knew he was not fighting back impatience; on the contrary he was having to force himself to set a time for the signal to Jenkins.
How should he signal? Point upwards nonchalantly with his right index finger? Point up to the door with his hand? Just speak a few words? Stand up himself to lead the way, gesturing to Jenkins to follow?
He was deliberately wasting time, and he was prepared to admit it was nerves. The few moments following Jenkins unscrewing the lock would be the climax of his appointment to the ASIU, perhaps the climax (or end) of his career in the Navy. All those hours spent going over those bloody dockets had been steps on a path which ended here and now on a grating at the top of a steel ladder on board the Penta: one glance aft the moment Jenkins removed the lock, or loosened it, or whatever he needed to do to allow the door to be opened a fraction, that glance would be enough. If there was nothing, then he was wrong, very wrong, and wasting everyone’s time. He pointed upwards and led the way.
Jenkins worked to a system. First he slid a knife into the seam nearest the lock between the thick planks of mahogany which made up the door, and told Yorke to use it as a hook to keep the door pulled inwards, so that it did not swing open when the lock came free. Then he took out the deck knife and undid one of the screws, putting it away carefully in his pocket. Then he undid the second, and then the third.
‘Right sir, now re
ally keep the door pulled in: one big roll and it might swing out, in spite of you, so be ready to reach round and grab the edge.’
With that he crouched down over the lock again and turned the knife. Yorke watched the screw turning, as though growing up out of the brass plate of the lock. Jenkins glanced round at Yorke to warn that the moment was approaching, slid the knife into his pocket and undid the screw the rest of the way with his fingers. After putting the screw away safely he gently slid the lock sideways less than half an inch, just enough to disengage the metal tongue from its slot on the door jamb. Quickly he seized the knob, then turned to Yorke. ‘It’s all right, sir, no chance of it swinging out so you can let go of the knife. Perhaps you’d like to have a look out!’
Yorke grasped the knob and gently pushed the door open a fraction. There was no one standing between the door and the taffrail. The Penta’s wake streamed astern, a white, swirling path of lace in the sea made up of whorls and eddies typical of a twin-screwed ship.
The U-boat was slicing along on the surface about two hundred yards astern, and for a moment it seemed the Penta was towing a slim but rusty iron cigar, a giant paravane. Three men were in the conning tower. The green slime of marine growth covering parts of the conning tower and deck seemed symptoms of some oceanic leprosy: dull, reddish rust streaks looking like dried blood. The U-boat was simply steaming along in the Penta’s wake, using her bulk to shield it from any radar beams ahead, and presumably relying on the men standing on her high bridge to act as lookouts – from their height of eye the Swedes could see several miles further over the horizon. One 88mm gun forward; two 20mm cannon in a mounting abaft it for use against aircraft.
Chapter Twenty-One
His mattress was becoming the equivalent of a fakir’s bed of nails. It had all the discomfort but, he thought ruefully, it did not seem to help provide the answers even after much contemplation. The U-boat was surfacing during the day and proceeding on the surface (in the Navy no ship or person ever ‘went’; Their Lordships preferred the word ‘proceed’) in the shadow of the Penta. Fifteen or sixteen knots (from what he remembered of conversations with Jemmy) would give the best charge from the U-boat’s generators and top up the batteries as quickly as possible while economizing on diesel fuel. It was also by a convenient coincidence (perhaps not such a coincidence) the best speed for the Penta, so the two in tandem caught up with the convoy.
That was why they used to watch from the Marynal and see the Penta come over the horizon from astern like a dose of salts, then slow down three or four miles away. At that point the U-boat dived, and somehow got into the convoy, passing the two escorts weaving back and forth across the rear of the convoy.
He had guessed all that before leaving the Marynal, so there was no point in wasting time lying on his bed of nails and going over it again. The important question was simple enough: how did the U-boat get from the Penta to the middle of the convoy?
It was a good question; a waffling counsel in the Law Courts could spend thousands of pounds of a client’s money arguing about it without having a single fact, or, indeed, the slightest knowledge of the subject. A bureaucrat could conduct an official and inconclusive correspondence about it for years, keeping himself busy until he was ready to retire on a comfortable pension, when he would hand it over to another younger man travelling the same road to superannuated obscurity.
Yorke, by his own unaided efforts, had manoeuvred himself into the position where unlike a lawyer or a bureaucrat he had to provide an answer, or else… Civil Servants in high positions were in the happy position of having what one politician had quite wrongly attributed to the Press: ‘Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.’ The press had little or no real power; the upper-level Civil Servant, on the other hand, was all-powerful; he encouraged or thwarted ministers who generally took his advice and resigned if the resulting uproar proved it wrong.
The bureaucrat, however, took neither blame nor responsibility; indeed, he usually denied ever having given ‘advice’. What he did, he claimed, was to outline ‘the alternatives’ open to the minister. No bureaucrat could be sacked unless he committed some criminal offence. If he was incredibly and consistently stupid, the only way of getting him out of a particular job was to promote him. Some of the highest Civil Servants owed their rank to sheer incompetence. Had they been a little brighter they would have reached retiring age in quite a lowly post.
Though true, none of this helped Yorke’s present problem. There was a diplomatic incident lurking at the foot of his mattress, a dereliction of duty charge was on the left side, a negligence on the right, while under the pillow was straight failure, with a job waiting for him as naval officer in charge at Calabar, or some other collection of mud huts up some tropical river in Africa. And none of it mattered a damn if he could stop the sinkings.
He decided to look at it through the eyes of the Oberleutnant commanding the U-boat. The Penta gave him a way of approaching within three or four miles of the convoy in daylight and on the surface. It was still daylight and he was within three or four miles and now he had to dive to avoid the British Asdics and hydrophones. What did Heinrich do? Bark out the question in the best Erich von Stroheim manner, monocle screwed into the eye. Hurry, hurry, Heinrich, the Tommy frigates are racing towards you! What are you going to do?
Well, sir, I will dive and get right under the Penta, so close that the top of my periscope (housed) is nearly scratching the barnacles off her bottom, and I will be running on the almost silent electric motors, and I will rely on the appalling roar of the Penta’s two diesel engines, and the heavy thump-thump, or whoomp-whoomp, of her twin propellers to deafen the frigates’ hydrophone operators. The vast bulk of the Penta’s hull will send the probing sound fingers of the Asdic bouncing back without the Tommy operators realizing that the Penta whale has a lethal remora on her underside.
Leave that idea to soak in for a while and then come back and have another look at it, Yorke told himself. Stay with Oberleutnant Heinrich who has just been given his first command. A new boat, 770 tons, strong enough to dive to four hundred feet without damage, twin diesels giving 19 knots on the surface, and a battery capacity of nine knots submerged for an hour or three days at one to two knots. Repeating what Jemmy had said parrot-fashion reassured him that he had remembered it correctly.
There you are, Oberleutnant Heinrich, this is your new boat: no dents, newly painted, no kinks in the guardrails, no rust, no slime… You board at the Tirpitz Pier in Kiel and way up above you on the side of the hill is the Navy war memorial, commemorating the dead of the First World War, those who perished for the Kaiser in those early and crude U-boats, or who died at the battle of the Heligoland Bight, which the Tommies called Jutland…
You probably know your first lieutenant, who will be your right hand, and perhaps your second officer. The ensign, equivalent to the Tommies’ sub-lieutenant, will probably be a stranger. If you have any sense or enough influence you will know your chief engineer. Fourteen electric torpedoes will be stowed below, fuel tanks will be full, batteries topped up with electrolyte, the latest signal books and the settings for the cipher machine will be on board…
Your orders would come from the Senior Officer, West, a procedure which (although you do not know it) has the Tommies baffled, because Admiral Doenitz’s U-boat headquarters at far away Kernevel, near Brest, will give you your tactical orders.
So now the time has come to leave the Tirpitz Pier: best uniform for you, with medal ribbons worn. You might have an Iron Cross, too, and perhaps other decorations slung round your neck. A Navy band standing on the jetty is thumping and blowing as you ease 75 metres of boat (most of which cannot be seen because, like an iceberg, the bulk of a U-boat is under the water, even when technically surfaced), and you take a spin round Kiel Bay. Before the war you sailed some of the Navy’s yachts across these waters, beautifully-kept 50-square metres
that slept six or eight men and were fast. The Olympic Games yachting was held here just before the war. The big Navy ocean racers were here that took part in the race across the Atlantic before the war began and had romantic names like the Roland von Bremen and Wappen von Hamburg…
Back to Kiel and then up to the locks opening into the North-East Sea Canal linking the Baltic and the North Sea in an almost straight line. The Tommies do not seem to understand the importance of the canal because they have not destroyed the locks either at the Kiel end or at Brunsbüttelkoog, where they opened into the River Elbe below Hamburg, nor bombed the sections where the high sides would tumble down into the water and block the channel.
The trip through the canal is like a cruise through Dutch canals or a cycle ride through sunken lanes with hedges on either side. Here a village, with old men fishing in the canal waters; there passing under a bridge where, high above, cars and lorries stop so their drivers can look down admiringly at the U-boat on its way to the Atlantic.
Out of the locks at Brunsbüttel and down the Elbe, fast flowing with long sandbanks which constantly shift position, something of a nightmare for poor Oberleutnant Heinrich, who can imagine his fate if he puts his new command on to a shoal before reaching the open sea. ‘Open sea’ means the North Sea, with the North Frisian Islands to starboard, scattered along the Danish coast as though protecting it from the winter storms, and the East Frisian Islands on the port quarter, scattered along the north German coast; islands with names that are fast becoming part of German naval history: Borkum, Juist, Norderney, along to Wangerooge, protecting such ports as Emden, Wilhelmshaven and Bremerhaven. No Zeppelins now at Wilhelmshaven, of course, but everyone honours Graf von Zeppelin, a man who turned dreams into the reality of enormous silver flying cigars filled with highly explosive hydrogen because the Americans would not sell the inert helium to foreigners.