Sweeney snapped, “Shut that, Morgan! Don’t want a splinter in me guts!”
How long it lasted he had no idea; he never once took his eyes from the compass to consult the wheelhouse clock. Smoke eddied around them until caught and dispersed by the fans, and their aching bodies were spotted with deckhead paint like snow.
“Full ahead together!”
Sweeney hid his relief as the telegraphs sent their message to the engine-room. Christ, he thought, the Chief and his mob would be feeling it down there. You would never hear a bomb or see a torpedo until the side caved in and you were scalded to death.
The revolutions mounted and Sweeney tried to picture what was happening. A gong rattled sharply through the din of engines and gunfire, and for a moment he thought he had gone deaf.
“Cease firing!”
They stared at one another in disbelief. Morgan said thickly, “Near thing.”
“Revolutions seven-zero.” Just as promptly the speed began to drop away. Howard must be standing right by the voicepipe, Sweeney thought.
“Sea-boat’s crew, Pilot! Doctor to the bridge at the double!” Then he said, “Cox’n up here, please.”
Sweeney automatically made to wipe the paint flakes from his cap and duffle coat. “Take over, Bully.”
After the trapped confinement of the wheelhouse the sky seemed unnaturally bright through a great undulating pall of smoke.
Sweeney climbed the ladder, past the starboard Oerlikon where the crew were reloading and checking over the firing mechanism, their eyes wild and glaring.
Sweeney had seen pictures of similar faces in his father’s old books about the Western Front. Faces driven beyond hope, even despair, with only the madness left; the need to kill.
Sweeney stepped through the bridge gate and stared at the scene ahead of the ship with stunned dismay.
The convoy was scattered into uneven straggling lines, and the oil-covered swell was covered with the flotsam of battle. Broken lifeboats and packing-cases, bodies and men still, unbelievably, alive as they foundered towards the destroyer moving amongst them. Sweeney kept his face hard and expressionless as he saw the others: pieces of men, no longer human, just things.
He touched his cap. “Sir?”
Howard swung towards him, seeing him for the first time. “I’d like you to take over aft, ’Swain. Sort the wounded out in the wardroom.” He tried to smile but it did not reach his eyes. “You know what to do.”
Sweeney shaded his face to study a dark shape in the far distance. The keel of an upturned freighter. There were men there too, some standing on the stricken hull. Sailors were often like that. Unwilling to quit their ship even at the end.
Howard said, “You did well, ’Swain.” He lowered his eyes and stared at his sleeve. “We lost seven merchantmen.”
Sweeney watched him gravely. A third of the convoy wiped out since they had left Iceland. God alone knew how many blokes had gone with them. He asked, “Did we get any of them, sir?”
Howard stood motionless and stared at the drifting smoke. “Two, and a probable.” He faced the coxswain. “Pretty good deal for Jerry, I’d have thought?”
Marrack clattered on to the bridge, his nose probing around. “Sea-boat ready for lowering, sir.”
His expression asked, Is it wise? But one look at Howard’s despair gave him his answer.
Petty Officer Tucker levelled his telescope above the gently shivering screen.
“From commodore, sir!”
Treherne said heavily, “I thought they’d done for him too.” He sounded dazed by it, sickened at the simplicity of slaughter.
Tucker continued relentlessly, “Am abandoning ship.”
Howard raised his glasses and found the elegant Lord Martineau drifting bows-on in a bank of smoke. There were flames too. She had been straddled several times by bombs, and with her massive cargo of tanks and armoured vehicles she would go suddenly when the time came.
“Beothuck is standing by to take off survivors.”
Howard saw the foremast and derricks topple over the side, the noise lost in the distance. Eight then. In what? An attack which had lasted only two hours.
He crossed to the other side and peered down at the deck where the whaler was already swinging above the sea, its crew grim-faced; hating it, not wanting to be left by their own ship.
“Lower away!” Marrack was standing on a washdeck locker, hands on hips, his nose trained towards the men at the boat’s falls.
Howard said, “Dead slow.”
“Vast lowering! Out pins!” Marrack watched as the oily swell rose evenly below the whaler’s keel. “Slip!” The slender hull hit the water and with the helm lashed over was guided away from the destroyer’s side by the long boat-rope from the forecastle.
Howard forgot them and looked at the scattered convoy. Here and there a lamp stammered amongst the smoke, and the big tug was somehow managing to take a freighter in tow. The damaged vessel’s bows were so deep in the water that her screw was lifted cleanly above the surface.
He watched the commodore’s ship give another shudder, her stern sinking even as he watched. The strange hull of Tromp II, the makeshift anti-aircraft vessel, steamed slowly across his vision. But for her, the Germans could have wiped out the whole convoy. No bother at all. By the time she had passed, the commodore’s ship was almost gone, obscene bubbles bursting around her as her heavy cargo began to break free and complete her destruction.
Treherne said, “Escort commander has ordered the corvettes to carry out another sweep, sir, while the rescue goes on.”
“Good decision, Pilot, and a brave man to make it.” He said it with the bitterness which held him like a vice. All this way, and for nothing. It was a game where one player held all the aces. The Home Fleet support group had stayed well clear because of the U-Boat reports, and had retained their carrier for their own protection. The large enemy surface ship had failed to appear, and it was unlikely she would now that the Kola Inlet was so near. She was probably back in harbour. Another ruse, then?
“Stop engines!” He heard the Buffer’s rough voice bellowing at his men at the scrambling nets and bowlines.
The gasping, anonymous faces in the sea alongside, soaked in oil, bloody and nearly done for.
I should be too used to it to care. But I do care. He found he was gripping the cold steel so hard that his fingers cracked.
Treherne said, “Have another fill of mine, sir?” He was holding out his tobacco pouch, concerned. “I’ll join you in that first Horse’s Neck when we get back, sir. If I may?”
Howard took the pouch but did not speak. Treherne knew he could not. Dare not.
Ayres moved silently to his side and whispered, “I’ve never seen anything so terrible!”
Treherne made certain Howard was out of earshot and noticed that he had not managed to fill his pipe.
“Well, my lad, Winston Churchill has promised our wonderful allies, the Russians, that we shall push a convoy through to Murmansk every three weeks.” He turned his gaze from Howard’s stooped shoulders. “Can you imagine anything so bloody crazy, Sub? Like the Germans trying to send a convoy up the Thames Estuary!” He spat it out. “The bloody bastards!” But Ayres did not really understand who he meant.
The whaler was picking its way through the drifting wreckage, the carnage. They were still doing it when a Russian unit of six destroyers and a tug came to join them for the rest of the way.
“Tea, sir?”
Howard turned in his chair and took the chipped mug with great care.
The Russian senior officer and Beothuck’s captain were exchanging signals, while the convoy gathered its strength and tried to take up its positions again.
“Ready to proceed, sir!” Marrack was calm, as usual. “We should be in port by dawn.”
But Howard was listening to the port Oerlikon gunner, who was squatting below his mounting and banging his gloved hands together in time with a quiet lament, which he recognised was sung to the tu
ne of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
When this bloody war is over
Oh how happy I shall be,
But we’re here today and gone tomorrow,
So let’s get back to bloody sea …
6 | When Do You Leave?
THE great stretch of the natural harbour was the colour of dirty pewter, so that the craggy hills and fjords seemed without life or movement. Narvik, once a busy Norwegian port, was partly hidden in mist, and there was no horizon to separate land from sky.
The apparent lifelessness of the place was an illusion. Even as another snow flurry blotted out some of the small houses above the harbour, a fighter roared out of the shadows, her engine shaking the hills and cutting a sharp passage across the sea’s face.
The submarine moved slowly, her powerful diesels throbbing as if, like a wounded beast, she was returning to her lair to recover. There was barely any wash, and the men who stood on her casing, muffled to the eyes in their heavy clothing, watched the approach of land, some probably regarding it as some kind of miracle.
When the small minesweeper pushed abeam and tooted to them, nobody moved or returned the waves of welcome and admiration.
There were no such gestures from some nearby fishing-boats, for this was an occupied country where it was wiser not to display any feelings at all. A big launch detached itself from the powdery snow and surged to meet the incoming U-Boat, a lamp already stabbing through the gloom, so that the long, shark-like outline turned slightly to starboard as if on an invisible towrope.
At the rear of the conning-tower, on the “bandstand,” a flag had suddenly appeared, scarlet with black cross and swastika to match the ones on the launch and minesweeper.
By the periscope standard the submarine’s commander turned his head to stare up at it, sharing the moment with the rest of his men. There would be other eyes watching from the land, he thought. Spies, terrorists, who would be quick to send word by their forbidden radios to London, to report their presence. Their survival.
With a kind of defiance the German threw off his weatherproof hood and jammed his white-topped cap on to his untidy hair. The white cap, the mark of a U-Boat commander.
They might even see the extent of the damage, he thought. He touched the side of the bridge, the buckled plating, the holes punched through it by cannon fire while they had gone into a steep dive. One man had been hit by splinters and had died a few moments after they had gone under. If the enemy’s attacks had continued the sailor’s corpse, with some more fuel, could have been sent to the surface. That might have convinced them.
Kapitänleutnant Manfred Kleiber had been in submarines for most of his naval service. He was now twenty-six years old, and until that last attack had never really considered the possibility of being killed himself. It happened to others, for theirs was a dangerous trade.
But this time things had gone wrong; and he still searched his mind, trying to discover if he had failed in some way.
They had sailed from Kiel after a short refit to make their way north around the Faeroes, through the Rosegarten and then down to a new base on the French coast near Lorient. A change from these bitter seas, with only cold stares and hostility to greet a U-Boat’s return. But he had received orders redirecting him to find and shadow the convoy. To keep pace with it, he had had to surface, and had been very aware of the dangers afforded by the ice and what it could do.
He had known the vents to freeze solid in Arctic waters, so that a U-Boat was unable to dive and would lie surfaced until an enemy flying boat or bomber found her.
They had fired at extreme range, knowing it was the only chance to slow down the convoy, to fight for time to home other U-Boats to the area. Now he knew differently: that the other boats had been sent after the heavy British warships to the northwest.
He had taken his boat into a dive, barely knowing if the damage from the torpedo which had exploded prematurely was fatal; realising only that he had done his best, and had managed to send one more precious supply ship to the bottom.
Even as he had reached up to pull the upper hatch behind him, and the tracer had shone so vividly in the dying seaman’s blood, he had seen the destroyer ploughing over the sea towards him as if all else was excluded and it was a personal fight to the death.
When the hydroplanes had finally responded and the water had thundered into the saddle-tanks, Kleiber had retained that picture starkly in his mind. And later, while he had used every trick and skill which had managed to keep him and his men alive, he had recalled the destroyer’s number as it shone in the bright tracers like the dead man’s blood. H-38. He had looked it up in his soiled and well-used copy of Weyers Kriegs-Flotten: his bible. So now he had one up on the enemy which had so nearly sent them down into the crushing depths for the last time. HMS Gladiator.
But for the damage caused by the explosion Kleiber knew he would have had another attempt to find the convoy. And H-38.
Boots grated on the casing and he saw the seamen gathering up the mooring wires, kicking them free of ice.
Kleiber glanced around the narrowing anchorage. They could not stop here. It would be back to Kiel again to put matters right. By the time they eventually reached their French base it would be summer. They said there was fresh butter, wine and good food a-plenty in France. Women too probably, to get his men into more trouble.
He thought of his home in Hamburg. They would all ask, “Home again? When do you leave?” Maybe it was like that in all navies.
He thought of the thunder and crack of depth-charges. He had grown to accept them, although he had heard that the enemy were acquiring better anti-submarine weapons.
But time was running out for the British. They did not have enough escorts, and could not provide air cover for the convoys where it was most needed. Whereas Germany was building more submarines, faster and bigger than ever before. It was a race which could only have one ending. The Americans could not offer much help; they were too enmeshed in the Pacific, fighting the Japanese and seeing the enemy drawing closer and closer to a homeland which had never known the destruction of war.
The Russians were falling back and the convoys to Murmansk must soon stop. Even the British, desperate, with their backs to the wall, would have to admit defeat there, just as their army was being defeated in the Western Desert. He paused in his private evaluation and passed a few brief orders down to the control room. The first heaving line snaked through the thinning snow and soon had a wire eye bent on to it.
Kleiber saw the caps and greatcoats of senior officers waiting to come aboard. To hear his part of the game they played at HQ with their flags and coloured counters.
The diesels puffed out choking fumes and shuddered into silence.
Kleiber straightened his oil-stained cap and climbed down to the casing-deck.
“Besatzung stillgestanden!”
He saluted his men on the fore-casing, and only then did he turn to meet the visitors.
Respect had to be earned from these men. It did not come only with the white cap.
Lieutenant-Commander David Howard switched off the remaining light in his day cabin and felt his way to one of the scuttles. It took physical effort to unscrew the deadlight and then open the scuttle; weeks and weeks of being tightly secured had seen to that.
He held his face to the air and took several long, deep breaths. It was all so unreal, like the day cabin, or part of a nightmare, the strangle-grip which almost stopped his breathing when the alarm bells screamed out in the night, or when Howard had awakened in his bridge chair, the sky bright from some burning merchantman.
The only light here was a fine edge of deep gold around a solitary cloud, and soon that would be gone as night gave an even denser darkness to the Firth of Clyde.
After the bitter days and nights on the upper bridge the air here felt almost balmy. He strained his eyes as if to see the sprawling town of Greenock beyond the dockyard, but it was sealed-off as tightly as any cupboard. Here and there a boat c
hugged through the darkness, showing itself occasionally with a bow-wave, or some shaded light as it approached a mooring buoy. After so many weeks of endless duty, Gladiator had been sent back to Britain in this, the middle of June.
But not before she had completed another convoy to Murmansk and several hazardous anti-submarine sweeps to clear the way for a second, homeward bound.
He still thought of that convoy which had been the first for many of his company, when they had been attacked by aircraft. There had been one final victim before the ships were taken into the port for unloading. The freighter Empire Viceroy which had been under tow with her stern high out of the water had gone down quite suddenly within sight of land. So the losses had risen to twelve, nearly half the total number when you considered that the fighter catapult vessel, and the converted anti-aircraft ship Tromp II had been counted amongst the thirty to be escorted from Iceland. It was ironic that none of the escorts had lost a man.
Reluctantly, Howard sealed the scuttle again and switched on all the lights. Even this place felt different, he thought. Damp, unlived-in; that was nothing new, but he could sense another change in the whole ship, as if there was surprise and not just relief at being here.
When he had opened the scuttle he had heard music blaring out from the messdecks and W/T office, the buzz of voices through the bulkhead where Marrack would soon assemble the officers and Howard would be invited to join them in what was theoretically their own, private mess.
He stared at the desk, the neat piles of papers and requests he had spent most of the day scrutinising and signing so that Ireland, the petty officer writer, could parcel them up to be collected by the guard-boat.
Breakages, losses, reports on machinery and supplies, ammunition and fuel. He had to deal with it, stand in a queue with all the other commanding officers.
He glanced at the cupboard where he kept his personal stock of brandy but decided against it. Not yet anyway.
He crossed to the mirror inside his sleeping cabin and touched his face with his fingers. The first real shave he had had for weeks.
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