Tides of Valor

by Peter Albano

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  Tides of Valor

  Peter Albano

  This book is dedicated to Thomas C. Dante, a generous man who is devoted to his family and in return is loved by those fortunate enough to be related to him. A man of integrity, he is respected by all who know him.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  Acknowledgments

  The author makes the following grateful acknowledgments to:

  Master Mariner Donald Brandmeyer for his generous help with ship handling both in port and at sea; Patricia Johnston, RN and British citizen, who assisted with medical problems and descriptions of the English countryside; William D. Wilkerson and Dennis D. Silver for advising on flight characteristics of aircraft in all aspects of flight including the stress of combat; Kevin Eldridge and John Maloney of the “Planes of Fame Museum” in Chino, California, who gave freely of their time to answer questions about the Rolls Royce Merlin engine; John McCoy of “The Museum of Flying” in Santa Monica, California, for contributing his expertise on the Spitfire fighter; Craig Michelson of the “Heritage Park/Military Museum” in El Monte, California, for allowing me to inspect the museum’s unsurpassed collection of World War II armored vehicles and answering my endless questions; Mary Annis, my wife, for her careful reading of the manuscript and thoughtful suggestions; Robert K. Rosencrance for lending his technical and editorial skills in the preparation of the manuscript.

  I

  The North Atlantic

  May 27, 1941

  The North Atlantic was gray and brooding, swirling mists and banks of fog obscuring the early morning sun and lending a leaden hue to the surging swell. Chains of atmospheric depressions swept across the frigid waters with gale-force winds, building sea upon sea, unchecked rollers sweeping implacably across the length of the ocean like an endless procession of gray hills.

  High on the square, citadel-like bridge of battleship King George V, Lieutenant j.g. Rodney Higgins, USN, focused his glasses and leaned against the steel windscreen. Tall with sandy hair that spoke equally of Kansas wheat fields or California beaches, his broad shoulders tapered to the narrow waist and powerful legs of the trained fullback. Set in deep sockets, the American’s intense blue eyes had the look of a man who could discuss poetry with Byron or savage a countryside with Attila the Hun. The jaw was square and strong as if fashioned by Rodin’s chisel, nose straight and aristocratic, hinting at English antecedents. The entire visage was that of striking good looks—an aspect of matinee-idol perfection that inevitably turned female heads.

  Sweeping his sector, he grunted in frustration as time and again his lenses were fogged by swirls of mist. Nearby, the sea was as hard and cold as slate, while on the eastern horizon, where occasional shafts of feeble sunlight broke through, it appeared like molten chrome. To the far north towering clouds massed and rolled across the horizon, flashing lightning as if doing battle, giant mushrooms colliding, blending, and darkening the horizon with solid sheets of rain. Turning his glasses astern, he caught glimpses of the rest of the force; battleship Rodney, battle cruiser Repulse, carrier Victorious, and escorting cruisers and destroyers charging through the mists like gray ghosts.

  The cold was bitter, borne on the brunt of Arctic winds that mourned through the rigging and ripped the tops from the chop in gray-white sheets. The shock of the frozen air whipped Rodney’s breath away in solid banners of vapor, causing him to gasp like a drowning man. Tears streamed from his eyes and across his cheeks, icy spray scoring his face like frozen sand and coating his lips with salt. He tried to contract his big bulk into his navy great coat and cinched his muffler until it almost strangled him. But the cold found its way in, between his gloves and sleeves, seeping around the muffler as if it were liquid. He tried to put it out of his mind. Pressing the glasses tighter against his eyes, he cursed the terrible visibility. The pride of the Kriegsmarine, battleship Bismarck, was out there somewhere. He had to find it before it found them.

  Bismarck. Formidable with an awesome reputation most professionals knew was not completely earned, the great ship was a rework of the old World War I Baden design. Typical of World War I naval architecture, the German battleship had a low armored deck and lacked the dual-purpose secondary guns being adopted by the British and Americans. Eight hundred twenty-three feet long with the unusually wide beam of 118 feet, she was armed with a main battery of eight fifteen-inch guns and was capable of thirty knots. She was intricately compartmented and would be hard to sink. But the old design left her rudders and steering gear poorly protected, her communications and data-transmitting systems exposed. Worse, because her fifteen-inch ammunition was poorly fused, many of her shells would not explode. However, she was a convoy killer with massive secondary batteries: twelve 150-millimeter guns; sixteen 105-millimeter guns; sixteen 37-millimeter guns; twelve 20-millimeter guns. And she had already killed the pride of the Royal Navy, battle cruiser Hood.

  Horror had filled the Allied camp when on May 21 Bismarck and her consort, the eight-inched gunned cruiser Prinz Eugen, sailed from the Kors Fjord near Bergen, Norway. There were eleven convoys at sea; one, bound for the Middle East, was loaded with troops. Battle cruiser Hood and the new battleship Prince of Wales, completed only two weeks earlier and still suffering teething problems with her fourteen inch turrets, put to sea in a line ahead from Scapa Flow and made for the Denmark Straits—the eighty-mile-wide passage between Greenland and Iceland. Here cruisers Suffolk and Norfolk had sighted the German ships and broadcast an alarm. Bismarck turned, opened her firing arcs, hurling several salvoes at her tormentors. Unharmed and continuing to broadcast sighting signals, the cruisers turned away and began shadowing just out of range or concealed by the mists. Hood and Prince of Wales, steaming just south of the exit to the Denmark Straits and skirting the Greenland ice, charged in.

  May 24 was a day that rocked the British Navy, shattering confidence and depressing an entire nation. At 0552 hours at a range of twenty-five thousand yards the action began. Exchanging salvo after salvo, Hood and Prince of Wales concentrated on Bismarck, Bismarck and Prinz Eugen firing on Hood. Eight minutes after the action began, one of Bismarck’s shells penetrated Hood’s deck and plunged into her magazines. A flash like the birth of a new sun leapt from the sea, the whole bow of the ship hurled up out of the sea before the fore part of the ship began to sink. A giant black cloud of smoke covered the area like a pall and when it cleared, Hood had vanished. There were three survivors.

  Prince of Wales, with two turrets out of action, turned away but not before hitting Bismarck with two fourteen-inch shells, one of which crashed through her bow and started a leak in a fuel bunker. Losing oil, Bismarck turned south, shaping a course for St. Nazaire. Prinz Eugen steamed off to the north to carry out commerce raiding.

  May 25 was another bad day for the British fleet, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Prince of Wales lost Bismarck. Worse, believing Bismarck was returning to her base by making for the Iceland-Faeroes gap, King George V, Rodney, Repulse, and Victorious turned to the northeast, away from the German battleship. But that afternoon Bismarck’s commanding officer foolishly sent a long, thirty-minute message boasting of the victory over Hood. Picked
up by radio direction finders, the English ships reversed course and closed in. But Bismarck was 110 miles ahead of her pursuers. Nothing short of a miracle would bring her to action. And the British were running low on fuel, too; Prince of Wales breaking off and heading for Iceland to replenish; Repulse making for Newfoundland with her tanks nearly dry.

  On May 26 antique Swordfish biplanes flying from Ark Royal, which was steaming north from Gibraltar with battle cruiser Renown and cruiser Sheffield of Force H, found Bismarck. Throughout the day the old planes dogged her, reporting her position. They never let go. That evening fifteen Swordfish attacked Bismarck with torpedoes. Two hits were scored; one exploded amidships on the port side doing no appreciable damage while the second struck her starboard quarter, damaging her starboard propeller, wrecking the steering gear, and jamming her rudders. The great battleship began to turn in circles and her speed dropped to eight knots. The British had their miracle.

  Lieutenant Rodney Higgins dropped his glasses and grabbed the teakwood rail below the windscreen as King George V slammed into a huge swell with the violence of a maddened bull, sending banners of gray-white water flying to both bows, sounds like great bass drums booming through her hull. Built with a low bow for zero elevation firing of her forward turrets, King George V challenged and fought the seas, crushing the swells and shouldering them aside arrogantly when other ships rode over. A two-fisted, barroom brawler of a ship, she gave her crew a rough ride, defying the Atlantic’s worst efforts with her 38,000 tons and 110,000 horsepower.

  Clutching the rail, Higgins reflected on how he, an American naval officer and a neutral, could find himself in the middle of a naval battle fought by the British and Germans. In essence, he was a stowaway—a neutral observer attached to the American embassy who had been aboard King George V (the British affectionately referred to her as KG V) when the first warning had been broadcast by cruiser Suffolk.

  Rodney’s first impulse was to return ashore as ordered by the ship’s public-address system. But an inexplicable compulsion, a fascination for battle—the killer of many, yet the domain of only a few—drew him, pulled him, like metal shavings to a magnet. KG V was about to embark on a great adventure, lend her name to a footnote of history, live it and, perhaps, die with it. He knew he risked a hideous death and possibly a court-martial, if he survived, but he rigged a flimsy excuse of illness and sleep and remained in his tiny cabin until he felt the battleship rise to the North Atlantic swell as it sortied from Scapa Flow. Then feigning surprise and embarrassment, he emerged from his cabin.

  The British were surprisingly sporting about the whole flimsy deception, handing him a greatcoat, “battle bowler” (steel helmet), binoculars, and actually assigning him as a lookout on the starboard wing of the navigation bridge. “By Jove, we never have enough good eyes on the bridge,” the navigator, Commander John Reed-Davis, said the morning Rodney reported to the bridge. A Sandhurst graduate and a true professional, the tall, slender, middle-aged commander had brown, thinning hair streaked with gray, hollow cheeks, and blue-green eyes that glinted with good humor on the surface, but steely resolve, characteristic of his race, burned in the depths. And then, clapping the young American firmly on the back with his tongue firmly in his cheek, said, “Remember, Mr. Higgins, you’re a neutral. If it comes to hand-to-hand combat, cast off the Krauts grappling hooks but keep your cutlass in its scabbard.” He laughed while the other members of the bridge force chuckled.

  Every member of the crew Rodney met from the nineteen-year-old Midshipman Ian Longacre to the commander of the battle fleet, commander-in-chief of the Home Fleet Admiral Sir John Tovey, had made him feel welcome. In fact, he even sensed the powerful bond of camaraderie that binds all men together on the eve of battle—the mutual sharing of mortal risks that made brothers of strangers. He was served hot chocolate laced with rum in a white mug with the ship’s logo in gold, referred to as “Sir” by the enlisted men and “Mr. Higgins” by the officers. He became aware of the feeling of isolation and desperation endured by these brave people in the darkest of hours, Britain standing alone against the conquering, invincible madman, Adolph Hitler.

  The year 1941 had seen a parade of disasters. German forces had smashed through the Balkans, conquering Greece and Yugoslavia in a mere three weeks. A British relief force was driven into the sea and took refuge on Crete. Incredibly, the British army on Crete was overwhelmed by an airborne assault. A new general named Erwin Rommel took command in North Africa and swept up the British forces and drove them back into Egypt, trapping over twenty thousand British troops in a Libyan port called Tobruk. Convoys attempting to relieve Malta were smashed. London was hit by the deadliest raid of the war, hundreds were killed, Westminster Abbey, the House of Commons, and the British Museum were all hit. At sea, U-boats were sinking ships at will. The only bright light came from the Italians. The British routed them whenever they met. But everyone knew the Italians couldn’t fight, anyway.

  Surrender, conciliation, even a negotiated “peace with honor,” were out of the question. The mad “paper-hanging corporal” would be fought and beaten. The tradition of Nelson was there, the spirit of Drake. Nevertheless, the English needed more than tradition and spirit to survive. They needed America. Their warmth and congeniality were easy to understand. Of course, he was welcome.

  The bugle calling the crew to “close to action stations” had been blown before dawn. Now Rodney had been at his station on the starboard wing of the navigation bridge for over an hour, searching the dark mists and finding absolutely nothing. Everyone knew that Bismarck had been damaged and everyone knew U-boats were about, prowling just below the surface, ready to sink the most powerful ship with salvoes of torpedoes. Between 0200 and 0300 lookouts had reported flashes over the far southeastern horizon and there had been reports of destroyer actions on the fleet circuits. But nothing was sighted. Probably just more lightning. It was all around.

  Leaning forward Rodney could see the ship’s long graceful bow, forecastle, and turrets A and B; A with four Mark VIII fourteen-inch guns, B with two. Aft, X turret mounted four more great cannon. In all, the ten guns could deliver an awesome 21,200-pound broadside at a range of 36,000 yards. However, the quadruple turret was an unusual arrangement; not one American ship used four-gun turrets because of the crowded conditions, slow rate of fire, and dangers inherent in loading the big guns. But KG V had been built in the late thirties under the restrictions of the London Naval Agreement of 1936 and her design had suffered. Still, she was a solid gun platform and powerful, the first ship to carry the 5.25 inch dual-purpose gun capable of an elevation of ninety degrees. Rodney Higgins had counted sixteen of the rapid-fire weapons mounted in twin turrets lining her sides from the bridge to the boat deck.

  KG V’s armor was designed on the “all or nothing” principle with a newly devised vertical external belt and increased thickness over the magazines. It was also deepened below the water-line where capital ships were vulnerable to plunging fire and the main horizontal armor was raised one deck to protect against the threat of aerial bombs. Discarding torpedo bulges, her builders, Vickers-Armstrong, Newcastle, relied on the double bottom and a longitudinal bulkhead with two watertight compartments sandwiching an oil-filled compartment between the bulkhead and the hull for torpedo protection.

  Glancing over his shoulder, Rodney Higgins could see the foretop with its main gun director, lookout stations, banks of recognition lights, radar and radio antennas, searchlights, and signal halyards. One deck below was the flag and signal bridge while aft was the chart house, WT (wireless transmitter), and captain’s and admiral’s night cabins. Just abaft the superstructure were her two stacks; the first mounted too close to the bridge, occasional clouds of acrid smoke and fumes enveloping the crew whenever the ship was struck by a powerful following wind. The second was set well aft, just behind the two aircraft hangars and crane. ‘Two blocked” during the night, the battle ensign whipped proudly from the gaff, ju
st forward of X turret. Visible along her sides and cluttering the superstructure were nests of pom-poms; dozens of the unreliable 1.1-inch AA machine guns (the Americans called them “Chicago Pianos”). All were manned, the helmeted heads of their crews appearing like clusters of chamber pots.

  “‘E’s out there, sir,” Nives Quinn, a young cockney lookout from Wapping, said. Standing next to a gyro repeater with his glasses to his eyes, the young able seaman moved his glasses through his sector with the short jerky movements of the trained lookout. The son of a “costermonger,” as fruit vendors were known in London’s East Side, the short, burly Quinn had a particularly venomous hatred for the Germans who had killed his brother at Dunkirk. Typical of the battleship’s crewmen, Quinn had started his training at sixteen and was a thoroughly trained and experienced professional. Only twenty-two years of age, the set of lines around Quinn’s eyes and mouth were those of a much older man. “The buggers’ knickers are in the twist,” Quinn said, dropping his glasses to his waist and waving furiously at the hazy horizon. “You’ll see, guvn’r—ah, I mean Mr. ’iggins.”

  Chuckling, the American refocused his glasses. Nothing. Nothing at all. He shifted his search to the east where the sun was fighting a losing battle with the clouds, smudging the seascape with bloody carmine and dull brass. The sun was not rising, it was hemorrhaging. Was nature’s bloody display a harbinger? Would he die this day? If so, he would die in good company. With Englishmen. His father had been an Englishman, Commander Geoffry Higgins, the hero of battle cruiser Lion in the battle of Jutland who had saved his ship from a cataclysmic magazine fire at the cost of his own life—a frightful death in the incandescent heat of burning gunpowder. There had been a Victoria Cross, posthumous, of course, but Rodney had seen it only once. His mother had put it away where it could never be found or even seen again. He had heard her sobbing to his grandmother once, “It was a lousy trade—a monkey’s paw.”