by Peter Albano
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Waves of Glory
Peter Albano
To Kurt Warner and Dennis Ogren
for the inspiration and encouragement
they provided.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Master Mariner Donald Brandmeyer, who advised on problems confronting warships at sea. For solving problems encountered by pilots of antique pursuit planes, my grateful thanks to airline pilots William D. Wilkerson and Dennis D. Silver.
Finally, my gratitude to librarians Robin Swallow and Ann Rumery, who helped lighten the heavy burden of research.
Prologue
The North Sea, May 31, 1916
Turret captain Lieutenant Geoffry Higgins, R.N.R., despised the cold, windswept North Sea, particularly the Skagerrak where perennial banks of fog smothered the sea, deadening sounds and muting all colors to the putrescent gray of a day-old corpse. High on the compass platform of battle cruiser “big cat” Lion, the turret captain shuddered as he stood between two lookouts and brought his glasses to his eyes and scanned directly over the bow to the southeast where the sky was low and twisting squalls of rain slanted from it like lead dust. If Admiral Hipper’s battle cruiser force of Lützow, Derfflinger, Seydlitz, Moltke, and Von der Tann were over that horizon as reported by scouting destroyers and a single seaplane from seaplane carrier Engadine, they would be hard to see. Swinging his glasses with the short, jerky movements of a trained lookout, he glassed the horizon to the east and north where he found a buildup of thunderheads, tall ramparts, and buttresses turned purple and sullen leaden blue by the weak rays of the sun that filtered through the thin cirrus over the ship. And astern the five other ships of the first battle cruiser squadron steamed hard through Lion’s spreading white wake—Princess Royal, Queen Mary, Tiger, New Zealand, and Indefatigable—while all around a screen of twelve torpedo-boat destroyers charged, crashing through the seas recklessly like wolves scenting game, torpedoes ready, depth charges armed.
A severe shock staggered Geoffry and he brought both hands to the windscreen. The many moods and faces of the North Sea were changing. Since early morning freshening northeasterlies—Force 5 on the Beaufort scale—had whipped the tops from the chop in ostrich plumes of spray. But now from the south row after row of combers advanced on Lion like legions of an implacable enemy, taking her hard on the starboard bow and sending reverberating shock waves through her plates and frames. But Lion fought back with her 29,680 tons of steel, her knifelike bow smashing and slashing through the combers, flinging spray and dun-colored water over her bows sometimes as high as the bridge.
Sighing, Higgins gave thanks for his lined greatcoat—the best fashionable Swan and Edgar had to offer—leather gloves and silk scarf. Yet, he was still cold—chilled to the bone. But it was not just the North Sea. They were there. Yes, indeed. The Hun was over the horizon. He was sure of it.
Thirty-six years of age, tall and slender with thinning brown hair and gray-green eyes, Geoffry’s pale complexion had faded to a pasty hue of vanilla pudding, revealing to all the empty, sick feeling gripping his stomach this afternoon of May 31, 1916. Lion, the flagship of the grand fleet’s first battle cruiser squadron with the bellicose Admiral Beatty on board, had left Rosyth the day before when Whitehall radio operators deciphered German signals ordering the entire German high seas fleet to sea. Now trailed by her five consorts, Lion prowled east, fulfilling her battle cruiser destiny —scouting and acting as a lure, hoping to bait the German High Seas Fleet into an imprudent charge into range of the Grand Fleet.
But Higgins felt none of the exhilaration that seemed to possess the other men in this horrifying hunt for like creatures of like intelligence. Instead, timorous spasms flowed from his viscera like electric waves, trembling his fingers and slackening his jaw despite efforts to clench his teeth and jut his chin like that bulldog first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill. Geoffry braced his feet and gripped the windscreen with new strength as the great warship took a particularly vicious roll. He could see most of the weather decks from the compass platform—actually the armored roof of the bridge and the highest point of the conning tower. Forward he could see the forecastle with its skylight over the wardroom and his own cabin in “officer country.” Then turrets “A” and “B”—flat, squat vaults ironically armored with Krupp-cemented ten-inch plate, each with a pair of Vickers Mark V 13.5-inch guns jutting over the bow like gray tree trunks. Behind him was the control top with its range finder and fire control plot all hooked up to that unreliable new system of electric telegraphy called telephones that sometimes slipped without warning from one circuit to another, confusing everyone. Fortunately, the old reliable voice tubes were still in place, connecting the bridge to all turrets and battle stations. Just aft were two of the ship’s three funnels; too close and capable of spewing coal smoke in his face when Lion was whipped by a quartering wind. Abaft the second funnel was his own “Q” turret stupidly mounted amidships on the forecastle deck forward of the third stack and limited to 120-degree arcs of fire on each beam.
“Reduces the bending moment to which the hull would have been subjected by locating all four turrets fore and aft,” gunnery officer Anthony Saxon, R.N., had explained one evening in the wardroom when queried by Higgins.
“But I’m limited—one hundred twenty degrees,” Geoffry had protested.
“We’ll confine the Boche to our beams,” Saxon had said with a smirk.
Laughter had rippled around the table. But there was no laughter in Lion now. No indeed. Not with reports of a German scouting force of five or six battle cruisers under that clever tormentor of the fleet, Admiral Franz von Hipper, just over the horizon.
Beneath his feet on the bridge he knew Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty and the ship’s captain, A.E.M. Chatfield, strained at binoculars while ratings read engine revolutions from counters and the helmsman stood to the big spoked wheel, following his southeasterly course from the hooded light of the brass binnacle. But he didn’t feel confident. A sudden fierce blast of Arctic-cold wind struck like a block of ice, whipping the breath from his lungs, singed his eyes until they watered, and brought a sudden longing for his wife and home at his family’s estate, Fenwyck. Brenda. Brenda, his American wife; their warm bed, her soft body.
He preferred American women to Englishwomen who had grown up with Queen Victoria, armoring their souls with her preposterous morals and their bodies with layers of petticoats and undergarments. Bedding one was more difficult than breaking through the Turkish batteries in the Dardanelles. But Brenda was a different breed. She loved sex; responded to him with fire. Closing his eyes he could see her auburn hair spread on the pillow, eyes slitted, full lips twisted by waves of ecstasy as he drove into her. And she was his—only his. All men lusted after her: his brother Randolph, so randy semen seeped through his eardrums and who jig-a-jigged one of the maids regularly like a stable hand, caught Brenda’s scent the moment he brought her home to Fenwyck. And his father, Walter: the old lecher pointed his ears and arched his back whenever she passed him. But she belonged to him, Geoffry Higgins, and to no other.
/> Suddenly, as so often happens to lonely men at sea, the memory became real, she was on the platform, and he could feel her against him, the soft malleable body shaping itself to his own so that he could feel her from knees to firm young bosom, the heat of her soaking through his heavy foul-weather clothing, igniting a long-dormant fire deep in his groin.
“They’ve laid out tea in the wardroom, old boy,” a casual voice mumbled suddenly, jarring him from his thoughts. “Better have a spot before we have a go at the Hun. They’re out there somewhere.”
Without turning, Higgins knew Commander Anthony Saxon, Lion’s range-taking officer, was standing at his left elbow. He disliked the brusque, low-class son of a Newcastle miner who had risen from the ranks. Poorly educated in public schools, Saxon slurred syllables together through the thick red lips of a sensualist, speaking in short bursts with his head canted birdlike to one side, eyelids heavy and drooping like the hooded eyes of a falcon. However, the most galling aspect of the man was the superior bearing of one of inferior breeding looking down on Geoffry with the usual disdain “regulars” reserved for “temporaries.” Built as wide as a door, the gunnery officer worked hard at acquiring the “salty” look: light brown hair bleached in silver white streaks from sun with darker splashes beneath; face driven and weathered to honey gold leather so that the intense blue of his eyes paled in contrast. Geoffry did not belong here with men like this. He was a civilian playing at war while Saxon wallowed in it.
A cough into a cupped hand cleared Higgins’s throat but not his mind. Forcing his wife’s memory back into the recesses with a physical effort, he spoke in a high nasal twang. “Thank you, sir. But if ‘Kaiser Willy’s’ ships are out there,”—he waved with exaggerated bravado—”we’ll be at battle stations soon and I may be battened down in Q turret for hours.”
“Give them a full one hundred twenty degrees of fire power, Lieutenant.”
“That wasn’t necessary, sir,” Higgins said, bristling.
Saxon dropped his glasses. “Sorry, old boy. . .”
He was halted by an excited shout from the foretop. “Smoke! Ships, fine off the starboard bow!”
Higgins, Saxon, and the two lookouts raised their glasses as one to the starboard bow. Cursing the fog and muttering “Green forty” to the lookouts, Geoffry moved his focusing knob. Suddenly, the fog broke and the sun poured down in a cold golden shaft of light between gashes in the clouds and he saw them under a black cloud of coal smoke hulled down on the horizon—fighting tops; either battleships, battle cruisers, or both. And torpedo-boat destroyers.
“Enemy in sight!” came from the voice tube. Then the blare of a bugle. “Action stations!”
Saxon whirled toward the door to the main director station while a trembling Geoffry dropped his glasses from numb fingers and stepped to the ladder.
Commander Anthony Saxon could never adjust his big bulk to the close quarters of the director room. An eight-by-twelve-foot box plated with two-inch steel, it was placed between the compass platform and number one stack. From this position one hundred twenty-four feet above the waterline, the fire control crew had a horizon of almost fifteen thousand yards. But the room was jammed with range finders, communications equipment, calculators, and twelve men sweating the subtle odors of fear.
Dominating the steel box was the new Dreyer fire control table. Bewilderingly complicated, the eight-foot table was manned by Sublieutenant Joseph Booth and three P.O.s who faced a jungle of dials and machinery, which included a clock range screw, clock range scale, rate grid, deflection master transmitter, bearing plot, own course plot, range clock, gun range counter, spotting plot, a complete Dumaresq calculator, and even a typewriter. Its banks of dials could be set with the target’s estimated speed, bearing, and range, and the known course and speed of Lion. Also weighed in were data for wind force, direction,wear of guns, drift of shells imparted by rifling twist, and air temperature, which affected the propelling powers of cordite. In theory it was a highly sophisticated and efficient system that juggled all these factors in its spindles, springs, and wires for a moment and then produced a set of instructions that gave gunlayers the degree of barrel elevation, told the gun trainers the angle of deflection the barrels must be turned from the ship’s center line, and even produced a rate of change of range to keep the fall of shot on target as Lion’s relative position to her target changed. The machine was a real marvel on paper but produced nothing except distrust in Commander Saxon. In his mind F.C. Dreyer, Henry Ford, and Tommy Sopwith were all lunatics who belonged in the same asylum. He was a nineteenth-century man who preferred to find his target in his cross hairs, try a few ranging shots, correct and salvo fire. These newfangled machines were too complex, consumed time that could never be bought back, and tended to fire long with maddening regularity.
Grunting, Saxon slipped on his headset as he seated himself in front of the eight-light panel of the gun-ready board of the Scott-Vickers gun-director system and pulled down the fifteen-power lens of his periscope so that the rubber-molded eyepiece was just above his forehead. Then the flick of a switch opened his earphones to the gunnery circuit, connecting him to the bridge, turrets “A,” “B,” “Q,” and “Y,” the after director and spotters atop the mainmast and stem mast.
Already, leading seaman Ian Edwards and C.P.O. Archie Strutt were seated next to him in their pointer’s and trainer’s seats, testing handwheels as they stared into the lenses of their periscopes, which led to the telescopes projecting above the director room.
“Manned and ready, sir,” they chorused.
“Very well.” Saxon turned to his left where midshipman Bertram Ramsey pressed his face to the rubber-padded eyepiece of the main range finder—a sixteen-foot Barr and Stroud optical range finder that towered above the director room like the ears of a giant rabbit. He was flanked by his two assistants seated in high steel chairs attached to the postlike shaft of the Barr and Stroud: Sean Henderson, a skinny range taker from Sussex, and a young ox of a farm boy from Nottinghamshire named Ethan Blakemore who read bearings. But every man and all this equipment worth thousands of pounds were useless until young Ramsey brought the split images of the target together in his lenses.
“Manned and ready, sir,” Ramsey piped in a high, taut voice and a rolling of Rs that spoke unmistakably of Scottish heritage.
A voice crackled tinnily in Saxon’s earphones. “All stations muster.”
“Manned and ready,” Sublieutenant Booth said from deep in his throat, turning from the Dreyer apparatus.
“Main director manned and ready,” the commander shouted into the phones just after the captain of “Y” turret made his report.
Captain Chatfield’s voice, not quite masking a timbre of anxiety, was in his earphones: “Five battle cruisers in a column, steaming one-three-zero, speed twenty-four, eight torpedo-boat destroyers screening.” He was halted by a cough; returned with a stronger voice of command, “All ahead flank, come right to one-four-zero, fire control—all hoists filled, armor piercing, full charge powder, wind force four from zero-four-zero, temperature of cordite sixty-two degrees. We have five enemy capital ships at green forty, range seventeen thousand.” And the words that chilled Anthony’s soul and sent ice cold insects crawling up his spine, “Ship’s main and secondary armament, load! Commence firing on our corresponding ship. Signal bridge make the hoist, engage corresponding ship. Execute!”
Now the fate of the ship and perhaps the outcome of the battle itself was in his hands, hinging on the speed and efficiency of his crew. Gripping the gun-ready board, he could feel new vibrations as Lion’s sweating stokers, stripped to the waist and blackened by coal dust, fed her forty-two Yarrow boilers with wide-mouthed shovels, spinning the four Parsons turbines until they shrieked their objections, delivering 73,800 horsepower to her four shafts and driving her through the sea at twenty-eight knots.
Anxiously, his eyes moved to Booth and his assi
stants who leaned over the Dreyer table, a pair furiously turning dials while the fingers of the third, a yeoman, flew over the typewriter. Looking up, Sublieutenant Booth’s usually handsome, unexpressive visage was suddenly twisted by new ugly lines born of fear as he shouted at Commander Saxon, “Range? Bearing, Commander?”
Saxon whirled to the range finder crew. “Mister Ramsey! Confound it, man—give me a bloody range and bearing on our corresponding ship. The whole British Empire is waiting.”
“It’s foggy, sir, and the sun’s behind them,” the midshipman pleaded, turning a pair of cranks with quick, jerky movements, striving to bring the two halves of the enemy ship together in his lenses. Every man stared and fidgeted while the seconds passed like dripping oil. After an eternity, the young range finder finally shouted through tight lips, “On target! Mark!”
“Range sixteen thousand six-zero-zero,” Henderson shouted, reading a scale attached to the tube.
“Bearing green forty-three,” Blakemore added, reading another vernier.
“Too bloody close,” Anthony Saxon muttered under his breath, knowing the fog had cost them the one-thousand-yard advantage in range their 13.5-inch guns had over the Germans’ 12-inch cannons. He turned to Lieutenant Booth, who scanned the bearing plot while cranking the “own course” handle of the Dreyer machine. “Damn it, man,” the gunnery officer persisted. “Can’t you read it? We’ve got to start ranging before we take a broadside.”
Booth’s voice was high like a taut violin string. “Elevation two-four-zero-zero minutes, direction lead ship forty-three degrees, deflection thirty-seven left, range one hundred minus sixteen thousand five-zero-zero.”
Instantly, Saxon set his deflection and elevation dials, knowing turret captains in all four turrets were at that moment reading identical dials repeating his settings. Within seconds, eight red lights glowed on his gun-ready board and he felt the Scott-Vickers control chair begin to turn as Edwards and Strutt brought their telescopes to the target. “On target,” they chorused.