Storm Force to Narvik: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 1

by Alexander Fullerton

  “I think others too that we haven’t heard about. After all, we know they are invading—and there must be inshore forces, assault parties for the different ports … But that’s the state of things. Admiralty has signalled to the C-in-C that his priorities must be (a) to stop the bunch in the north returning south, and (b) locate and engage the southern force.” Wishart shook his head. “Between ourselves, I’d say we’re making a frightful mess of it. The places we ought to be watching are the Norwegian ports—because that’s where the Hun’s going, must be. In fact we’ve three cruiser squadrons up there and all out in the deep field, and when the C-in-C just a short while ago ordered the First and Second Squadrons to get into position to start an inshore sweep at first light tomorrow—really inshore, in sight of land—our Lordships here in the Admiralty cancelled the order over Forbes’s head.”

  “That’s—incredible …”

  And utterly depressing. What must it be like for Sir Charles Forbes, the C-in-C?

  Wishart drew heavily on his cigarette. Hugh Everard thought, He’s telling me all this to get my mind off Nick …

  “I imagine you’re staying at your club tonight, sir?”

  “What?” He looked up. “Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.” He frowned. “I’m being a damn nuisance to you, I’m afraid.”

  “You’re being nothing of the sort. I only wish I could—” He broke off in mid-sentence, shook his head as he stubbed out the cigarette. “Sir Hugh, if you were to telephone me here during the forenoon—say about eleven—then if there’s any news we could arrange to meet, here or elsewhere, whatever’s handy?”

  “Very good of you, Wishart. I’ll make my call at eleven sharp.”

  “You said you’d had some success today, in this scheme of yours?”

  “It’s a matter of the supply-and-demand balance being tipped my way, I believe. Nobody’s admitted it, but I suspect they need more chaps than they’ve got fit and able to do the job. So—yes, as far as that’s concerned it’s been a well-spent day.”

  Would the day have been missed all that much if the sun had failed to rise?

  Careful, he thought. If you get too fanciful they’ll rule you out as old and dotty, senile … He shivered suddenly: it was a shiver of the mind but it came out through his nerves like a sign of fever. To cover it, he moved quickly, standing up.

  “I’ll telephone. I am—most grateful to you.”

  “B” gun’s crew took over their own gun from “A’s” when the watch changed at midnight, and by this time the gale was said to be easing. Down from Force 9 to Force 8—that kind of easing. Trying to sleep on the messdeck had been like taking one’s ease in a tin that was being kicked around by a mule; and in spite of it Paul hadn’t only tried to sleep, he’d slept.

  Waking had a new pattern to it. First there was a feeling of relief, of escaping from a disturbing dream. Then the truth bore in: it hadn’t been a dream at all, Intent was lost and almost certainly her captain would have gone down with her. Reality confirmed itself sickeningly while he dressed for the four hours of the middle watch: sweaters, towel round the neck, oilskins. Depression: this unwashed, unshaven feeling: and the sense of isolation … It wasn’t only his father’s death—he’d lived to all intents and purposes without him, and he could do so again—but the consequences of it, the prospect of becoming a baronet, with Mullbergh to cope with and Sarah and Jack and—oh, Christ … It wasn’t only depressing, it was frightening. Then, feeling the ice-cold sweat, he told himself to snap out of it: stop acting Dherjhorakov … Old tennis shoes: they were already on his feet but not laced up. He slept in them. Rubber soles were best on the gundeck, when you had to stagger around with projectiles or charges in your arms and the ship was doing its best to dump you overboard …

  Up top, out of the screen door and in the howling bedlam of the gale on the port side of the foc’sl deck—the wind was on Hoste’s starboard bow—he paused with one foot on the ladder and both hands stretched up overhead as high as he could reach; when she started her roll back to starboard he began climbing, up to the top and over the edge of the gundeck quickly, across into the lee of the gun. He clung to the edge of the gunshield, peered round at the sea and as much as was visible of other ships in company. Renown’s biggish stern-on shape ahead was a black smudge framed in white; and to starboard in another patch of broken sea another destroyer banged along on Hoste’s beam … Then he realised how wrong he was. In the dark, with your eyes not yet adjusted and your brain only half awake, sizes and shapes were confusing. That wasn’t Renown ahead, that was a destroyer; the battlecruiser would be ahead of her. Or even two up … Hoste and that ship on her beam each had at least one other destroyer ahead of them; the rest would be strung out astern and invisible from this gundeck.

  Bow down, stuck deep into the sea: the ship quivering, shaking, as if she was trying to wriggle or bore her way into it … “That you there, Yank?”

  Dan Thomas, gun captain and breechworker, a three-badge killick whose hometown was Swansea, was checking to see he had his crew complete. Vic Blenkinsop the sightsetter told Paul, “Shifted course to nor’-west during the First, Shortarse ‘Iggins says. Ride out the worst o’ the blow like, ‘e reckoned.”

  “Which way we goin’ now, Vic?”

  “Every fuckin’ way, mate.” Blenkinsop spat down-wind, over Johnno Dukes’s shoulder. Dukes was gunlayer. Blenkinsop asked him,”‘Adn’t you noticed?” He settled the headphones over his ears, easing his balaclava over them before he turned the mouthpiece up and reported to the TS, “‘B’ gun closed up.”

  “No ‘B’ gun bloody ain’t, you bloody ullage you!” Dan Thomas bawled it from inside the gunshield. “If ‘B’ gun’s closed up where’s that bald-‘eaded bloody bookworm then?”

  “I’m—if you mean me, I’m—here …” Baldy Percival launched himself from the head of the ladder and came slithering across the canting gundeck. Bow out: water streaming back—solid, battering against the shield. She was rolling viciously to port: Paul grabbed an arm and held on until Baldy had his balance and was more or less at rest … “Sorry— er—Dan. Fact is I lost a boot, couldn’t find it anywhere, then—”

  “Next time come up wi’out the bugger!”

  “Ah—yes—Yes, I will.” He crouched down, close to Paul who was edging his way further into shelter, past the sightsetter. The ship was acting like a mad thing: it was a marvel that she was holding together. If it had been worse than this, as apparently “Shortarse” Higgins—one of “A” gun’s crew—had indicated, it must have been pretty frightening. Percival told him, “This boot’s soaking wet inside—all slushy round my foot. I think—it sounds ridiculous, but—I think someone must have peed in it.”

  “‘B’ gun!” Blenkinsop was answering a call through his headset. He was listening now, and the men round him waiting for the message. Then, “Aye aye. But if I’m not ‘ere when you next call, mate—ah, shurrup yourself …” He pushed the microphone away from his mouth, and told them, “In five minutes, ship will be reversin’ course—turnin’ right around like. They reckon she’ll roll like a bastard an’ all ‘ands is to ‘ang on an’ say their prayers … ‘Ear me, kiddies?”

  Baldy Percival was muttering, close to Paul’s ear, “All squelchy round my toes. Honestly, some filthy—”

  “Who’d have peed in it, for Christ’s sake.” He was fed up with Baldy’s fussing. He should have kept his boots on his feet, like anyone else did if they had any sense. He was thinking about this change of course they’d just been warned about. It was a north-westerly gale and they had it on the starboard bow, so Hoste was steering west, and reversing course would mean coming round to east. Heading back towards Narvik, then. Or Vestfjord, whatever it was called.

  Having left it long enough for some Germans to sneak in?

  He remembered Lieutenant-Commander Rowan’s Ours not to reason why. If it wasn’t for a ship’s CO to reason why, it surely wasn’t for a raw OD … He still did, though. He wanted not only to know what was going on
, but to understand it. He’d always had such a need: it irritated him to have to act blindly, or to be fobbed off with shallow explanations that didn’t fit or make sense in his own mind. (Shades of childhood: Because I tell you to, that’s why!) None of his messmates seemed to share this urge; most of the time they didn’t even know which way the ship was heading, let alone what for. But in training, the instructors talked about “initiative”: and how could you use initiative if you didn’t know what the hell was happening in the first place?

  “Here comes the Rose an’ Crown!”

  Johnno Dukes yelled it: it was his rhyming slang for Renown. He’d been looking out through his sighting port, the window in the gunshield above his laying handwheel. Paul shifted back out of the crush, craned his head round the edge of the shield into the buffeting, thumping wind. Eyes more settled to the dark now: in fact it wasn’t really dark. Baldy Percival squeezing out beside him. Must be more of a kook than one had realised, to suspect messmates of pissing into his boot, for heaven’s sake … Renown—he saw her suddenly, a black mass surrounded by a welter of white: she’d come about and she was pounding back on an opposite course to the destroyers’. Getting on for forty thousand tons of ship—colossal, like a floating town, seven hundred fifty feet of her and Lord only knew how many decks below the waterline. About a third of that seven hundred fifty feet was foc’sl, and all of that, as she ploughed bow-down, was buried in the sea: now, rising, bursting out immense, fantastic in size and power: the very size and weight of it made the upswing of that long sweep of bow seem to be happening in slow-motion, breaking out and throwing up a mountain of sea to stream back over her massive for’ard turrets like so much confetti flying on the wind—only it wasn’t confetti, it was solid sea, as much as a hundred tons of it tossed back as effortlessly as a man might flick a peanut. The night sky turned blacker with her bulk across it as she thundered past, turrets and superstructure and twin funnels seemingly one mass, bow-wave high and bright underscoring it, curling away aft to pile and then spread out into the morass of foam astern. Bow down again now, that enormously long, powerful-looking forepart dipping in with the same slow-seeming grace: there was a look of grandeur, impressive and somehow emotionally inspiring too: it triggered some thought-process at the back of his mind and it was important, a personal thing he had to come to terms with … Dan Thomas yelled, “Inside and ‘ang on, lads!”

  Paul moved in, shoving Baldy in ahead of him. Thomas was right, of course. The destroyers which had been next-astern of the battlecruiser would be following her round now, and soon it would be Hoste’s turn, and when she was beam-on to this murderous sea she was likely to do just about everything except loop the loop. Even crowding in here and jammed tight as they were might be quite hazardous, if a big sea decided to demonstrate its power, to reach in and winkle a few bodies out.

  “‘B’ gun!”

  Blenkinsop taking another call. They waited to hear what was probably a warning again, stand by for the rough stuff. Tom Brierson, the leading hand of 3 Mess, had said he’d been in a destroyer when she had her foc’sl deck flattened and pushed in by sea no worse than this one. There’d been stooping-height only in the upper messdeck, he’d said; and it had happened only a few miles outside Scapa Flow.

  “Aye aye,”Vic Blenkinsop shouted. “Secure the gun, clear upper deck!”

  The skipper must have been having second thoughts, seeing just how tricky this turn-about was going to be. Dan Thomas was yelling at them to do this and that; Paul, clear of the scrum, checked that the lids of the ready-use lockers were screwed down tight. The lockers held cordite charges; the projectiles were in open racks, since it didn’t matter how wet they got.

  “One at a time to the ladder, now. Percival—you first—move!”

  Baldy went slithering to it, crab-like. One at a time made sense; there wasn’t anything much to hold on to at the top of the ladder, if you’d had to wait there. “All right, Yank!” He shot across, and swung over the edge. Below him Baldy yelped as Paul’s foot coincided with his ear or nose, and above Paul’s head boots were already clumping down relentlessly. He kept his hands on the ladder’s sides, clear of the rungs where fingers could get crushed. Then he was off it and tight-rope walking aft, reaching from one support to the next, vividly aware of the sea roaring fury at him on his right and only a few feet away. The screen door was open, Percival holding it open for him: he pushed inside, and Lofty McElroy leapt in behind him. Paul knew what it was that had been in his mind when he’d been watching Renown pass them: the CW business, going in for a commission: what the skipper had told him and also, linking with that, the fact of being alone now, a feeling that one had to move in some direction.

  “How’s the time, Yank?”

  Paul shifted aching limbs. A steel deck got to you, after a few hours, and a tin hat didn’t make much of a pillow. He squinted at his watch, and was vaguely surprised that there was enough light to make out the positions of the hands. He told Dukes, “Half three.”

  Baldy Percival, mummy-like with the white anti-flash gear covering his head and face, twisted up and on to his elbows. “What? What’s that?”

  “Go back to dreamland, Baldy.”

  “My foot’s frozen!”

  “Oh dear, oh dear!” The high-pitched exclamation came from Harry Rush, the rammer. He began to warble in a falsetto voice, “Your tiny foot is frozen. Let me wa-arm it in the fire …”

  “Shut up, you fuckin’ idiot!”

  Dan Thomas’s growl, from the huddle of duffel-coats and oilskins inside the shield. Rush murmured, “Charming. Suave, you might say … ‘Ow you makin’ out, Yanky lad?”

  “I’m okay, thanks.”

  “Can’t you bastards bloody kip?”

  “No, we soddin’ can’t. Too bleedin’ comfortable up ‘ere, for the likes of us. We ain’t used to such soddin’ luxury, are we, Yank?”

  “Sea’s gone down a little.”

  “Bloody ‘ell it ‘as. Just the course she’s on.”

  You could feel the way the following sea was driving her along, lifting her from astern, the destroyer surfing over the big seas and seeming to drop back as well as down as each small mountain rolled on ahead of her. Still going east, Paul realised. Narvikwards. Vibration and ventilator-noise suggested they were doing revs for about 12 knots, something like that.

  McElroy mumbled, half asleep, “Fuckin’ ‘oggin. Nothin’ but mile upon mile of fuckin’ ‘oggin.”

  “Never knew you was a poet, Lofty.” Vic Blenkinsop shifted, pushing himself upright and adjusting the headset under his balaclava. “Sheer delight to listen to you … What fuckin’ time d’you say it was, Yank?”

  “Minute or two past 3:30.”

  The sky was brightening ahead. In streaks here and there, where the black storm-clouds had cracks between them, were rifts with a new pale, gale-driven day glittering through. If any Germans had got into Narvik during the night they’d have been damn glad to get inside, he thought, into the shelter of those fjords. He wondered what it would be like inside there. Like a river, probably: flat calm, reflecting the mountain-sides, beautiful. What a change from this … Keeping one’s thoughts on solid things, on present and immediate-future subjects: the aim being to stop oneself indulging in the luxury of worrying, of trying to find an angle that would make everything all right and as it had been. It was not all right, and this was something one was going to have to accept and live with, recognise as existing, permanently, behind all the other facts of life.

  If the Germans had got into Narvik, what could this force do about it? Sit the gale out in Vestfjord, wait for the Hun to come out and fight?

  Couldn’t hang around and wait forever, though. Have to fuel some time. Some time pretty soon, he imagined.

  “We’re in Indian bloody file again.” Dan Thomas had stepped over some sprawling bodies, crossed behind the breech; he was leaning against the inside edge of the gunshield and staring out over the port bow and ahead. He yawned: it sounded like a donk
ey braying … “Like a lot of bloody ducks followin’ mother … Hey, what the—”

  Vic Blenkinsop screamed, “Alarm bearing red one-oh, all guns follow director!”

  A split second while it hit them and penetrated drowsy brains: then everyone was dodging and barging to the various positions round the gun. Everything happening at once: alarm buzzer honking away below to get the other watch up, and the sound of the engines changing, turbine-whine rising and the roar of the fans increasing; the ship was swinging to port—but steadying already, course about due east …

  “All guns with SAP load, load, load!”

  SAP stood for semi-armour-piercing, and Baldy Percival, who was the projectile supply number, snatched one of the right kind from the ready-use rack and clanged it into the loading-tray. Paul dropped his cordite charge in behind it and Harry Rush rammed shell and charge home into the breech. The block slid up automatically, its concave curve of silk-smooth steel pushing his fist clear as it rose, and Dan Thomas had slammed the interceptor shut.

  “‘B’ gun ready!”

  No fire order yet. Anti-climax. Thomas told them, “Dirty great battler out there.”

  “What, German?”

  “Wouldn’t be fuckin’ Chinese, boyo, would she.”

  The ship that had sunk Intent? But that had been a cruiser, not a battleship …

  “‘Aving you on.” Dan Thomas laughed. “All I seen was Renown swingin’ off course. Some fuckin’ HO on the ‘elm, I thought …”

  Paul had another charge ready in his arms. Until yesterday he’d been the projectile supply number and this job had been Baldy’s: they changed you around so you’d learn the different jobs and be able to take other men’s places in an emergency. In other words, if some of them got killed. Handling the cordite charges was a lot easier than lumping shells. Hoste was in a hurry now, slamming across the rollers, rolling savagely as she plunged in the wake of her next-ahead. She’d have to alter course, he guessed, before they opened fire. The enemy—whatever kind of enemy it was—was somewhere right ahead, blanked off from them by the leading ships. It had to be so, or the guns would have been trained out on some other bearing. He was pulling on his anti-flash gear one-handed and with the tin hat gripped between his knees while he leant sideways against the gun for support. They were supposed to wear the anti-flash hoods and gloves all the time when they were closed up at the gun, but nobody did—except for Baldy … Blenkinsop shouted, “Target is Gneisenau with one Hipper-class cruiser astern of ‘er. Course will soon be altered to port and enemy will be engaged to starboard!”