A ripple of sharp, red flashes blossomed and travelled from right to left down the line of ships.
‘Enemy s opened fire, sir!’ Johnson had reported it.
Nick was aware of an extraordinary feeling of detachment. One heard nothing, yet. One had seen those red gun-flashes, and now… nothing. All silent, and those enemy ships so far away. One knew what it was about, what it meant, what would be happening here in a matter of twenty or thirty seconds, yet it seemed to be utterly remote from what was happening and visible here now.
But there was also a sense of enormous satisfaction ‒ relief, it might be. This, finally, was battle.
More flags were showing from Lion, and Garret shouted to Mortimer, ‘Distribution of fire signal, sir!’ Beatty had six ships to the Germans’ five; he had to tell his captains which targets each of them should aim at. Johnson had come to the after end of the bridge, where Blewitt crouched beside the Barr and Stroud transmitter; Nick had opened his mouth to ask whether he should go down now, when the sound of that distant gunfire reached them. A booming roll of far-off thunder, but it was lost immediately in a tearing, ripping noise as if the atmosphere was being forced apart, torn open, and the sea began to spout great mast-high columns of white water with dark tops; a forest of yellowish foam. All short, but already the red flashes of a second salvo were rippling down the German line, red spurts out of what looked now like a lumpy layer of smoke. Simultaneously the air astern erupted, split and split again as first Lion and then the ships astern of her opened fire.
You could actually see the shells, like scratch-marks against the pale-grey sky, as the battle cruisers’ guns lobbed them away towards the Germans. Nick got his question through to Johnson when the volume of noise lessened. Johnson shouted, ‘No, I’ll tell you when to go down.’ He’d explained earlier that it was preferable for Nick to stay on the bridge until the last moments before action, so that when he went down to his guns he’d know as much as possible about the tactical situation and the CO’s intentions. Nick had thought perhaps that the time had come, but of course it hadn’t, there was no enemy anywhere within range of the destroyers’ little four-inch guns. This was a duel between giants, and it was continuous now. That reply of Johnson’s had been squeezed into the last oasis of comparative silence there’d been ‒ perhaps the last there’d ever be? Gunfire was no longer a matter of separate percussions or even separate salvoes, the noise of guns firing and shells falling was continuous, both fleets shooting steadily and rapidly and the fall-of-shot thick, closing-in, the German salvoes creeping closer as their gunners adjusted range, and ‒ Lion had been hit! And hit again… That second hit had struck her centre turret, ‘Q‘ turret: not just the shell-burst but a larger explosion and a shaft of flame and smoke that leapt to the height of her funnel-tops. Nick watched, fascinated, horrified: it was a blaze now, orange flames and thick, black smoke pouring back across the flagship’s upperworks as she thrust on at twenty-five knots, her other three turrets all still firing. One had to remind oneself that shells would be raining down also on the enemy: in fact that had been a hit! He’d glanced over at the German line as the thought had come to him, and he’d seen the red-and-black explosion on their leading ship: and the third ship too, that third one might even be on fire… But in Beatty’s squadron Lion wasn’t the only one getting knocked about: her next astern, Princess Royal, had been hit on her foc’sl and the flash of the explosion had erupted from inside the ship. Extraordinary ‒ horrible ‒ to stand and watch: men must have died in there at that second, there’d be others wounded, mutilated, and the two fleets steaming on, side by side and ten miles apart and ‒ as it seemed ‒ indifferent…
Tiger was being hit now ‒ so was Indefatigable. Nick whispered inside his skull, please God, may the Hun be getting as much as he’s handing out! Indefatigable had been hit again. The sea was a mass of leaping shell-splashes, the churned foam yellow, even the air yellowish with the explosive reek; the line of battle cruisers astern was almost entirely hidden now under the absolute smothering of German shells and ‒ even more obscuring ‒ their own funnel-smoke. But it was blowing clear again: suddenly he could see the whole line, and it looked as if Indefatigable was badly hurt. Smoke pouring from her after super-structure but no sign of any flames…
Lion was altering course to port ‒ to close the range? The next ship to her, Princess Royal, going round too; and Queen Mary, and Tiger, and New Zealand and ‒ Garret, the leading signalman, had turned to draw Nick’s attention to the fact that Indefatigable didn’t seem to have put her helm over. She was ploughing straight on across the other battle cruisers’ tracks ‒ already she was two cables or thereabouts out on New Zealand’s starboard quarter, and she was still steaming straight ahead. Her steering might have jammed, Nick thought; perhaps steering engine smashed; smoke billowed from her afterpart. As he watched her ‒ with Johnson close beside him in the starboard after corner of the bridge ‒ two more shells hit her. Nick felt himself cry out: or he thought he had. He’d felt his gut convulse and all the muscles of his body clench. But she was all right! The first shell had landed on her foc’sl and the other one on ‘A’ turret, and both had seemed to burst on impact. Had seemed to…
Indefatigable blew up.
There were those two hits, which hadn’t seemed to penetrate her armour. Then perhaps half a minute in which nothing seemed to happen; he’d only continued to watch her because she held her course and still hadn’t altered round with the other ships. He kept his eyes on her, aware of bedlam all around, of the continuing roar of gunfire and the fall of German shot, the sound of it screeching through the sky and then its impact mostly, but not all, in the sea, foul black water from near-misses sheeting across ships’ decks. And then suddenly great flares of orange flame were leaping from Indefatigable’s forepart, spreading aft in a blazing mass with black smoke as well as flame, the smoke spreading until everything else had been blotted out, until that ugly, sickening pall hid the ship entirely. Above the smoke, in clear air, a fifty-foot picket boat soared, spinning like a toy. Other debris too. As it fell, the smoke was already dissipating and blowing clear, and Indefatigable, nineteen thousand tons of battle cruiser and more than a thousand men, had gone.
Leading Seaman Garret’s mouth was open, his eyes wide and glazed with shock. His hands up at chest-level, opened and shut convulsively, as if they were trying to find substance in thin air.
* * *
Hugh Everard told his gunnery lieutenant, speaking into the navyphone to the control top, ‘Open fire when you’re ready, Brook.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Replacing the telephone, Hugh joined Rathbone at the binnacle.
Nile heeled slightly under rudder as she followed the others of her squadron in a sharp turn to starboard, on to a firing course.
It was five minutes past four. The Fifth Battle Squadron had been straining eastward to close the gap between themselves and Beatty’s battle cruisers, and even more essentially to get into hitting-distance of the enemy. Now the battle cruisers were in sight, at a range of something like eleven miles, and Admiral Evan-Thomas was opening his squadron’s broadsides to that distant target.
A minute ago, Hugh had seen Indefatigable blow up. He’d been watching the battle cruisers through his binoculars at the time; there’d seemed to be some alteration of course in progress, but it was a confused, smoky picture and he’d been trying to sort it out while he chatted briefly to Tom Crick. During the short exchange of conversation Crick had been standing with his back towards Beatty’s ships, and consequently hadn’t seen the sudden and total destruction of the battle cruiser. Probably very few men had. Indeed, hopefully…
Hugh had continued with the conversation. He’d kept the glasses at his eyes, hiding the shock he’d felt.
Now Rathbone was steadying Nile on the new course. The turrets were all trained out to about forty degrees on the port bow, which was where the Hun was. That far-off smoke, that cloudy suggestion of a line of ships was the e
nemy. From the top, where Brook was, the view would be much clearer, of course. But the Germans had the light on their side, and there was nothing Beatty could have done about it.
How would the Germans enjoy their first taste of fifteen-inch shells? The long barrels jutted menacingly, upward-pointing; silent, but ready to erupt. One could envisage very easily the interiors of the turrets; the warm, slightly oily atmosphere, the gleam of polished brass and steel, the quiet, and the tension in the guns’ crews as they waited. The range was long, certainly, but that was no great drawback. These ships, like all those in Jellicoe’s Scapa squadrons, had been trained to standards of excellence which one knew would be difficult to improve upon.
The Germans could shoot, there was no doubt of that; in the last few minutes the evidence of it had been incontrovert-ible. But in the next few minutes, they’d be getting experience of Jellicoe-type gunnery.
Hugh lowered his binoculars, stared up at his ship’s masthead and then back at her after struts… It was all right. He might have known Crick would have seen to it. No less than three white ensigns and one union flag were fluttering up there. One or more might be shot away and Nile would still display her colours.
Barham opened fire. The thunder of that first salvo rolled back like thunder and brown cordite-smoke clung for a few seconds round her turrets. Now Valiant had begun: and that was Warspite joining in. Hugh left Rathbone, and moved out again to the port side ‒ which shortly would be the engaged side ‒ of the bridge, and levelled his glasses at the far-off enemy. The rearmost pair of them, the two grey shapes to the left, flickering with the red sparks of their own gunfire, had been identified as Von der Tann and Moltke, and on them ‒ once the nearer cruisers had been dealt with – this squadron’s fire would be concentrated.
Malaya had opened fire. Hugh swallowed to clear his ears from the percussion-effect of it. He put his glasses up again, and watched for the fall of Barham’s shells.
* * *
Five minutes ago the guns had been loaded; since then, range and deflection had been passed electrically from the TS to the director-sight in the top; and in the turrets, pointers followed the director settings.
The TS, or transmitting station, was a small compartment deep in the belly of the ship. In it, Royal Marine bandsmen fed numerous items of information into a computer called a Dreyer fire control table, which then churned out the settings that were to be applied to the guns.
In ‘X’ turret, Blackaby had ordered ‘Salvoes! Right gun commencing!’
For the moment, that was his job done. Now it was up to the captain of the turret, PO Cartwright out there behind the gleaming oiled steel of the great breech mechanisms, with the crew he’d trained and over whose every movement he now watched eagle-eyed. Number three, for instance; if number three had shut the interceptor switch before he’d seen the gunlayer raise his hand to confirm the pointers were in line ‒ All right. The layer had put his hand up and three had slammed the switch shut and bellowed ‘Right gun ready!’
In the TS. and in the control top where the lieutenant (G) hunched tensely at a binocular sight, and in the director tower where the director layer had his eye at the cross-wired telescope and a hand hovering close to the firing key, four out of eight ‘gun ready’ lights glowed brightly as in each of the four fifteen-inch turrets the crews stood by one loaded and cocked gun.
Brook, the gunnery lieutenant, who’d already had the order from Captain Everard to commence firing, spoke clearly and unexcitedly into the mouthpiece of his telephone-set.
‘Fire.’
The director layer waited a split second, until his sights rolled on. Then he pressed the key.
* * *
Moorsom, one of the tenth flotilla destroyers, had closed up astern of Lanyard so that the port column of the thirteenth flotilla now consisted of Nestor, Nomad, Nicator, Lanyard, Moorsom. It was twelve minutes past four. Almost unbeliev-ably, that meant it was less than two hours since the first enemy report had been made by Galatea.
A long way astern, perhaps almost ten miles, the Fifth Battle Squadron was in action. One could hear nothing, of course, at such a distance and when the noise here was so great and so constant, but one could see the Queen Elizabeths back there in a grey clump hazed by smoke that was pierced intermittently by the spurting scarlet flashes of their guns. With binoculars you could also see their fall of shot. The fifteen-inch shells made such enormous splashes that there was no question of confusing them with the battle cruisers’ smaller-calibre projectiles, and it looked as if they were straddling and hitting with impressive frequency. Their first salvoes had fallen short, but now they’d found the range and the Germans must have been feeling the effects unpleasantly: in fact the enemy rate and accuracy of fire had fallen off, or seemed to have, and the third ship in their line was clearly burning. The British battle cruisers had suffered badly enough, meanwhile; Lion had had the roof of one of her turrets blown clean off, and all the ships had been punished, hit time and time again. But no one would have guessed it from a quick inspection now ‒ no one who hadn’t seen the shells hitting, or didn’t know that where five ships steamed now there’d been six ten minutes ago.
‘Signal from Champion, sir!’
Garret had his glasses up, but hardly needed them. That signal whipping from the light cruiser’s yard was one familiar to all destroyer men. It was the order they longed for, dreamt about.
‘Flotilla will attack the enemy with torpedoes, sir!’
‘Number One! Tell Chief I’ll be calling for full power!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
Johnson started yelling into the engine-room voicepipe, and at the same time he was beckoning to Nick to come for’ard… ‘Chief? Full power any second now. We’ll be carrying out a torpedo attack on enemy battle cruisers. You‘ll—’
Interruption. Something about fuel? Johnson cut in again: ‘Just everything we’ve got, Chief. Everything.’ He straightened, nodding to Mortimer. Then he looked at Nick. ‘Sub, listen. When we—’
Garret called, ‘Champion to thirteenth flotilla, Sir: Speed thirty knots – three-oh knots, sir!’
‘Sub,’ Johnson turned sideways, blocking one ear with his palm; Reynolds was bawling into a voicepipe to Pilkington, the torpedo gunner. Johnson told Nick, ‘What’ll happen is this. We’ll push on ahead a mile or two first, and then—’
‘Executive signal for thirty knots, sir!’
Mortimer was shouting now, on Nick’s other side, for increased revolutions. It would be a relief to Worsfold the engineer; Lanyard could manage thirty easily enough. Johnson yelled. ‘When we’re far enough ahead we’ll haul away to port and aim for a spot out there somewhere.’ He was pointing ahead and into the no-man’s-land between the British and German squadrons. ‘Up there on the Hun’s bow, you see, for the attack. But when he sees what’s happening, the Hun’ll almost certainly send a flotilla or two out to meet us halfway. Perhaps light cruisers too. Understand?’
Nick nodded. Lanyard had the shakes again; thirty knots, and the whole flotilla in its three line-ahead divisions was racing forward on Champion’s heels. The first lieutenant told him, pitching his voice high above the din of increasing speed and of battle from astern, ‘There’ll be some high-speed gunnery before we can launch our torpedoes. Impossible to say which side the action’ll develop on. Most likely both sides at once. You’ll just have to watch out and shift from side to side; it’ll be too fast for me to control from here.’ He stared at him questioningly. All right?’
It was as ‘all right’, Nick thought, as it ever would be. The tight feeling in his stomach wasn’t anything to take notice of; nor had the appalling dryness in his mouth anything to do with what was going on. Such fear as one was conscious of was ‒ well, ninety per cent of it – was fear of not measuring-up, not doing the thing right.
Suddenly that mattered more than anything had ever mattered in his life.
Chapter 5
Destroyers of the 13th Flotilla… having been order
ed to attack the enemy when opportunity offered, moved out at 4.15 pm simultaneously with a similar movement on the part of the enemy. The attack was carried out in the most gallant manner and with great determination…
From Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty’s report to Commander-in-Chief
Champion was flying the signal for the port column, this division, to attack, and over Nick’s head at the after end of the bridge Lanyard’s answering pendant thrashed enthusiastically at the yardarm. Ahead, Nicator, Nomad and the divisional leader Nestor also had their pendants close-up; astern, Moorsom’s ran up now.
Mortimer was hugging the binnacle in an ape-like stance with his arms spread and hooked around the spheres. Reynolds was making an adjustment to the port torpedo sight. Johnson, close to Nick on the port side farther aft, was looking through his binoculars at the head of the German line.
Behind them Garret’s yell was like a seagull s screech:
‘Executive, sir!’
That signal had dropped from Champion’s yard; a new one climbing off the other side would be the order for the next division, the centre column, to follow this one. Mortimer, in that hunched-up position, had his face right down on the voicepipe, and he’d called down to the quartermaster for full power before Garret had had time to haul in the answering pendant. Nestor had put her helm over and she was careering away to port, leaning to the turn and digging her bow deep, flinging back a bow-wave like a great white scarf streaming from a runner’s throat, the wave lengthening and curling aft down her sleek black side and her wash sluicing away in a heaped-up curve of foam with Nomad’s stem sheering into it, and then Nicator’s into hers; and now it was Lanyard’s turn. Mortimer shouting ‘Starboard twenty!’ into increasing noise as the stoke-hold fans roared and her speed built up. Nick grasped for handholds on the base of the searchlight platform to steady himself against the force of the turn and the suddenly slanting deck, the sharp heel to starboard as she swung fast to port; Garret, coiling halyards with the pendant bundled temporarily under one arm, lurched round and crashed against him, muttered terse apologies as he struggled back up the sloping deck. But she was levelling again now, straightening into the straight lines of the other destroyers’ wakes. Reynolds shouted into a voicepipe close to the torpedo sight. ‘Stand by all tubes!’ His voice, snatched away by the wind, was sharp and thin. Nobody had said anything about the guns yet; Nick was watching Johnson, who had his glasses up again to stare out over miles of grey-green sea to the dark shapes and heavy smoke-trails of Hipper’s battle cruisers.
The Blooding of the Guns Page 9