by Peter Albano
Higgins had his binoculars on Bismarck when at least five one-ton projectiles struck her amidships. Strakes of plates, chunks of a splintered whale boat, and an entire crane that appeared intact shot into the sky on the tips of flame-red explosions. He could see the bodies of a dozen men cartwheeling in the air like rag dolls. Cheers. “We’ve taped the buggers!” Quinn screamed. “Kill ‘em!”
Blackstone’s calm voice: ‘Port ten.”
The equally calm reply from the quartermaster; “Ten of port wheel on, sir.”
“Steady up on zero-nine-zero. Watch your head, Quartermaster. All ahead together one-half.”
There were new sounds overhead. Ripping canvas, warbling and sighing. Bismarck’s secondaries; 150-and 105-millimeter shells fired from at least fourteen guns that should bear on King George V, But the fire was wild, the German had taken too many hits. If her directors had not been destroyed already, they had been damaged, perhaps knocked from their circular ball-bearing mounts.
They were so close to Bismarck Rodney Higgins could see small details: her forward director turned toward him; the emerging sun reflecting from the glass on the bridge; life rafts hanging from the superstructure; searchlights mounted on her upper works and single raked stack; her rigging, antennas, and even her battle ensign whipping from her mainmast. Her guns were pointed at him, the fire of her secondary armament continuous rippling red flashes, her main battery firing about every thirty seconds. Big shells hurled waterspouts as high as her masts all around the great ship, spray reaching out in vast circles to mark the power of each one. Flashes winked and smoke puffed where she was struck by 5.25-inch projectiles. They could do terrible execution, but it would take big shells to sink her.
Battleship Rodney veered to the south across Bismarck’s bow to keep her firing arcs open and to stand clear of KG V’s fire. Again and again KG V fired, her big guns at zero elevation now. The hits came. Fourteen- and sixteen-inch shells poured in, their soft steel AP caps weakening the German’s face-hardened armor before the shell proper plunged through. For three quarters of an hour annihilation rained on the battleship.
Bismarck’s A turret was flung into the sky, number-one gun flying off like a twig in a gale. The main director was blown into the sea like a piece of trash thrown into a garbage pail. The mainmast tilted slowly and then plunged into the water like a tree felled by an ax, trapping every man in the aft director and drowning most of her lookouts. Struck by at least a half-dozen hits, the bridge disintegrated in a cyclonic whirl of shattered plate, glinting fragments of glass from her scuttles and recognition lights. Bodies and pieces of bodies rained into the water. Her stack exploded and flames leapt up amidships, black smoke roiling, clinging to the sea in greasy rolls. Plates, men, and secondary turrets shot into the air, fires burst from her hull, and ready ammunition began to explode and bum on her main deck. Slowing, she began to wallow deep in the swells. But Y turret fired defiantly until a full salvo blew it off its barrette and it skidded across the fantail and toppled overboard.
Rodney Higgins shuddered. The exhilaration of battle, the blood lust was fading. Men were dying horribly, blown to pieces, trapped in flooding compartments or flung about in engine compartments by the compression and concussion of big shells, blasted into the machinery and chewed to death by gears and flailing pistons. He tried to depersonalize as all men do in battle. She was a ship. That’s all she was, he told himself. But at three thousand yards his binoculars almost took him aboard the wreck. He could actually see men being killed, blown high into the air, dismembered. His stomach was suddenly sick and empty. Was this the triumph of battle—the garden of glory? These witty, warm, jolly Englishmen were killing hundreds and enjoying it.
Quinn’s eyes were wild and saliva streaked his chin. “Stuff that lot, guttersnipes! Fill your Kraut bellies with British steel.” He laughed, waving his fist, eyes glinting with the savage joy of a predator making his kill. Rodney turned his glasses back to the stricken enemy.
Bismarck was dead in the water, guns silent, burning from a dozen fires. Although she was down by the head, she appeared in no danger of sinking. Her superb compartmentation and excellent damage-control parties were keeping her afloat.
Her executioners were so close, their shells fired on flat trajectories could blow away her upper works, but her hull was relatively immune to the heavy shells. An old naval adage wisely suggests, “Let water into them. Air won’t sink a ship.” Admiral Tovey had come to that realization. Plunging fire was needed. They had to open the range.
“Port ten,” came from the pilothouse. Then Higgins heard Blackstone give a series of commands that turned the ship away from Bismarck and opened the range at a high speed. Dutifully, three destroyers assumed escort stations; Cossack ahead, Maori off the starboard beam, Zulu to port. Battleship Rodney, escorted by two other destroyers, continued firing at the helpless German at close range while KG V’s X turret fired over her fantail. At a range of fourteen thousand yards, the battleship turned and unmasked her entire main battery. Now, with a longer range, the barrels were elevated and the big shells would arc high and then plunge into Bismarck’s bowels and hopefully sink her. The secondary battery fell silent.
The bombardment continued for almost an hour, yet Bismarck refused to sink. Quinn was delighted. He jumped up and down and actually danced a jig while humming a music-hall ditty, “’ave a jugful, you bloody tiffies.”
Suddenly Reed-Davis was on the bridge, standing next to Rodney Higgins and staring into his glasses. He licked his lips and muttered, “That’ll settle their lot.” He turned to the American, “What do you think of your first battle, old boy?”
“The battle was over long ago. Commander.”
“What do you mean?”
Higgins waved. “She’s helpless. In a battle, your opponent can fight back.”
The Englishman bristled. “They’re Huns. They’ve bloody well earned what they’re getting.”
“They’re men and this has become an execution. Why don’t you take prisoners?”
Reed-Davis waved irritably. “Her battle ensign is still flying—look for yourself.”
Swinging his glasses, Higgins saw a flag whipping from a stub of the mainmast. His voice was filled with incredulity, “You’ll kill hundreds because of that rag?”
The voice was acid. “That’s what this lot’s all about, Lieutenant.” Whirling on his heel, he vanished back into the conning tower. Higgins returned to the windscreen, seething with anger. Quinn stared through his glasses sullenly as if he had heard nothing.
“Cease fire! Cease fire,” echoed through the ship. Immediately the cease fire gong rang at each gun station.
Quinn turned to the conning tower and spoke as if the admiral could hear him. “Bonk ‘em, your nibs! Some of them buggers ain’t bought it yet.” He eyed the American angrily.
Rodney Higgins sighed with relief, the silence washing through his ears like a soothing salve. Everyone knew they were low on fuel. He suspected the admiral would let escorts finish off Bismarck with torpedoes. Tovey’s tinny voice coming through the speaker confirmed his suspicion, “We’re very low on fuel. We will disengage and return to port for fuel.”
Quinn shouted, “No!” and shook a fist at the conning tower.
Tovey continued, “I am ordering Dorsetshire to finish off our enemy.” There was a cheer. “Well done. I’m proud of every man jack of you. Each of you has made his mark on history—a mark that will stick in Hitler’s craw like unboiled cabbage. Well done. Well done.”
There was a rumble that came through the closed vents, dogged doors and scuttles; from the engine rooms, handling rooms, turrets. Thousands of boots thudding against the steel decks and floor plates, and the cheers swelled and echoed through the ship. It was the joy of victory, the tribal scream of the victorious warrior who was holding his enemy’s head on high for all to see. Quinn added his voice. To Rodney, he seemed to be he
aring the cry of a wild beast dipping his fangs into his quarry’s entrails. He stared at the dying German as Dorsetshire moved in with her torpedo tubes ready and felt no joy, no feelings of triumph.
“Fall out action stations. Port watch to defense stations,” came through the speaker.
Men stirred in the pilothouse and there were the sounds of scuttles being opened, doors and hatches undogged and locked in open positions, and the welcome sound of blowers coming to life. The great guns came back to battery and the turrets were trained fore and aft. There were excited shouts as men began to be relieved on the bridge and foretop. Crawling out of the small hatches under the foot-thick armor at the rear of the turrets, gunners still encased in their flash-resistant clothing began to pour out of A and B turrets. They gathered in groups at the rail, gesticulating at the dying battleship and talking excitedly.
Then, as King George V turned for home, Dorsetshire fired three torpedoes into the wreck. Looking back at the horizon, Rodney saw the great ship finally roll over, her red-leaded bottom rocking and kicking up spray, her three bronze screws still turning. Higgins felt a start of horror; there must still be live men in her engine rooms. Within minutes, she vanished, only a black cloud lingering. Quickly, the smoke yielded to the wind and faded away, leaving nothing to mark the grave of over two thousand men.
Lieutenant Higgins lingered by the windscreen. He wondered about the strange gamut of emotion that had wracked him and wrung him dry of feelings. He had felt the blood lust of battle, triumph, and then near despair when he realized men were really being killed. But had he not trained for this? Pointed his entire life at this moment? But never in his training had he ever conceived of actually killing anyone. And then a revelation on a day of revelations—nothing prepares a man for battle except battle itself.
He should not have felt despair—regret. Bismarck had been the enemy of KG V and he had been part of KG V. With a little luck the Germans would have killed him just as they had killed the crew of Hood. And they would have celebrated his death with cheers and backslapping. He was convinced of one thing: the battleship was the supreme power at sea. Nothing could stand up to her power.
The kaleidoscope was racing again and he felt exhausted. He pounded his temple with a clenched fist. He needed a drink. And he needed to see home again. Yes. That was it. He was due for a leave. He would return to his home on Fifth Avenue. To his mother. To Kay Stockard.
II
Return to New York
June 18, 1941
Carrying a heavy canvas barracks bag in one hand and a briefcase in the other. Lieutenant j.g. Rodney Higgins flagged down the 1936 De Soto cab. He was home at last. Standing on Twenty-third Street where it butted into the East River docks and looking east, the skyline was studded with Manhattan’s forest of skyscrapers. Raucous sirens wove through the city’s peculiar dull roar of rumbling subways, noisy cabs, and street traffic. He could even smell it. Feel the press and energy of two million crowded souls. It was all back. The town of towns. He loved it. “Sixty-first and Fifth Avenue,” he said, slamming the door behind him and settling back into the lumpy upholstery. The cabbie pushed the flag down, grunted, and roared away from the curb.
Rodney’s ship, the old tramp steamer Bristol Spirit, had arrived at the Hudson River’s Pier 36 just forty minutes before. It had made the crossing in complete secrecy. The lieutenant still felt the grime of the antique freighter and yearned for a long luxurious bath in his old tub. Just twenty minutes, he told himself as the taxi turned up Sixth Avenue.
It had been a long, grueling trip with incessant U-boat alarms sending him to his boat station at all hours. And the ship had steamed alone with only her American flag for protection. But everyone knew the U-boat captains respected nothing. Just the week before, the American steamer Robin Moore had been sunk. But Bristol Spirit was steaming back to America with empty holds. To the Germans, she was a low-priority target. Everyone knew that, too.
His first sightings of the New York coast had been exhilarating. Standing on the forecastle, he and a dozen other passengers—officers and noncoms who had been attached to the RAP, BEF, and Royal Navy as observers since 1939—had strained their eyes for the first glimpse of home. There was a ripple of excitement as New Jersey’s Sandy Hook was sighted in the dim early morning light. Then Rockaway Point and Coney Island where he had spent many exciting days as a youth loomed to the north and east. At a maddeningly slow speed, the old steamer creaked into the Lower Bay, passed Norton Point, and entered the Narrows. Looking around happily, Rodney saw the green shore of Staten Island crowding the restricted passage from the west, Brooklyn’s Owl’s Head Park to the east.
There had been shouts when the Statue of Liberty came into view. Growing up, Rodney had seen her a hundred times. The lonesome figure had been nothing but a three-hundred-foot pile of weathered copper to him then. Today, she was different. Holding her torch higher than ever, the grand old lady welcomed them and seemed to bless them at the same time. To Rodney, the streaked greenish face appeared warm, alive, and beatific. Two young officers broke into a chorus of “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” Two sergeants began to jitterbug.
Someone pointed to the Empire State Building. Its 102 stories reaching for the low clouds dominated the Manhattan skyline of metal-clad, steel-ribbed, glass-shrouded towers and rising clouds of steam. Everything that represented America was there—strong, reassuring, rich, and stable after the bloodletting in the North Atlantic. It was colossal. It was romantic. It was their country. More murmurs of excitement like young schoolboys on their first field trip.
The passage through the Upper Bay had been made at a snail’s pace. All around the bay was thick with freighters, tugs, tall-funneled ferryboats, sludge (honey) barges, launches, lighters, motor yachts, train flats. The most powerful fireboat in the world. The Firefighter, passed, making for the Upper Bay.
Looking around at the heavy traffic, a lieutenant said to Rodney, “Thicker’n whores on Broadway.”
Rodney chuckled. “Safer. None of these ships can give you a dose of clap.”
“I’ll drink to that,” an old, gnarled top sergeant named Christopher Lester said, leisurely scratching his crotch. A native of Chicago and at least sixty years old, Lester’s sleeve was crowded with “hash marks” that reached to his elbow. Then eyeing the other passengers slyly, the sergeant mimicked a medic’s voice. “Skin it back and milk it down,” he crowed, arching a bushy gray eyebrow. There was a roar of laughter.
Crossing the East River estuary they glimpsed the Brooklyn Navy Yard where gray-clad warships and transports were nested, gantries and cranes drooping over them like old birds with broken backs. They passed Liberty Island, Ellis Island, Governors Island, Fort Jay, and entered the Hudson River where most of the city’s 103 piers jutted into the stream like an interminable row of black teeth. Everyone stared at the interned French liner Normandie. Moored at the foot of Fourteenth Street, the one-thousand-foot-long leviathan looked pathetic and forlorn in her rust-streaked gray paint. Two German freighters were moored astern of her. Armed guards could be seen on the pier and walking the decks of the ships.
With the help of a tug as dilapidated and old as herself, the old steamer finally made her turn and was warped into her berth at Pier 41 on Manhattan’s West Side. Rodney and the rest of the passengers were ready to disembark as soon as the first line was secured. It took at least twenty minutes to lower and rig the gangway. Each clumsy gaffe by the crewmen was analyzed by the waiting passengers with colorful expletives. “Get on the ball! Get your finger out your ass!” a middle-aged infantry captain from Boise bellowed. A former sergeant major, he continued the harangue with his sergeant’s vocabulary, “You assholes can’t even rig a simple plank. We should make you walk it, you six-fingered fuck-ups!”
Now Rodney was eyeing his hometown from the cab eagerly, like a first-time tourist. The sleazy irregular structures of lower Sixth Avenue; the vast, impersonal slab o
f mundanity called the RCA Building; the asymmetric facade of Rockefeller Center with its flower gardens and roof gardens; midtown with its smart shops, grand hotels, plush offices, theaters. Unlike the austere traffic of London, New York’s was multitudinous—brightly painted, endless, vigorous, and confident. The flash and panache of it was like a tonic. He had missed it. Lord, he had missed it.
The cabbie was a slice of New York, too. He was a short, dark man who chewed on the end of an unlighted cigar incessantly. Either the back of his hairy neck had not seen soap and water for days or he was a very dark Italian or Spaniard. It was also obvious his origins were in Brooklyn, “Youse from New Yawk, Lieutenant?”
“Yes. Just got back from England,” Rodney said, contemplating the neck.
“Then you ain’t up with them bums?”
“The Dodgers?”
“Yeah.”
“The English papers aren’t interested.”
“No wonder we had a revolution. They ain’t civ’lized.”
They both laughed. The cabbie continued, “The bums ain’t doin’ shit. I seen ‘em yesterday. Pee Wee Reese an’ Mickey Owen ain’t hittin’. The pitchin’ stinks.”
“What about Dixie Walker, Cookie Lavagetto, Dolph Camilli?”
Rodney had made a mistake. The cabbie had a live one and he knew it. Waving his arm for emphasis, he launched into a long soliloquy about the incompetence of the manager, Leo Durocher, the hitting, pitching, analyzing each player in minute detail. The villains were the aristocratic Yankees who he obviously loathed. The Dodgers were a team of the people, a team for the common man. Rodney grunted, nodded, and stared out of the window. Fortunately, a rush of traffic as they approached Fifth Avenue finally brought silence to the front seat, the cabbie wrestling with the wheel as he weaved and dodged in the usual reckless fashion of a New York cabdriver. Rodney held his breath, but the cabbie had talked himself into silence.