by Alan Evans
Smith shouted, “All other guns out of action?”
“Yes, sir.” Sanders added, eyes on the destroyers, “Brodie’s got his hands full.” The little steward would be trying again to cope with the wounded but there would be too many. Smith could see the deck astern seemed impassable because of twisted steel and the ripped plates of the iron deck. The funnels, what was left of them, were shot full of holes that spurted flame and Sparrow dragged their smoke and the smoke from her fires that Lorimer was fighting and she dragged it in a thick black trail. It was an empty deck; he could see just one man, Lorimer, peering up at the bridge as he staggered aft. This was not a battleship nor a cruiser. There was no big crew so you could move men from one part of the ship to another to meet an emergency. This was a little, old TBD and her crew was small. Some of them were below manning her engines or stoking. Some of them were dead or near it so he looked at a bridge and a deck near-deserted. He did not want to think about the wounded and dying crammed into the wardroom now. He had no time.
* * *
Brodie was trying to hold the man down to put a tourniquet on his leg but he was insane with pain and writhing on the wardroom table. Brodie was sprayed with blood. The wardroom stank of antiseptic, blood, vomit and smoke that coiled. There were holes in the side and the deckhead that Brodie had tried to plug with blankets and the wounded lay on the couches or the deck where the water swilled inches deep and sometimes washed over their faces as the ship heeled. Brodie dressed or stitched their wounds and then they were left to fend for themselves. He could do no more.
* * *
Lorimer saw the ready-use charges burning by the wrecked sixpounder under the bridge and kicked them over the side. As he started aft, seeing flames there, he tripped and fell. A bursting shell had minutes ago hurled him across the deck and now something ground in his arm; every movement was agony. He sobbed with pain and frustration but got up. He was the sole survivor of the damage-control party. He could see Smith on the bridge, saw his head turn and met the cool stare, saw Smith grin at him. Lorimer started aft again. He would carry on.
He had heard the other shells, but this one he did not.
* * *
Buckley slapped open the breech of the six-pounder, turned to seek the next round. It felt as if he was kicked. When he came round he was sprawled on the deck with his head near the side and the seas bursting over him. As he dragged himself inboard and on to his feet he saw the six-pounder was dismounted. His head ached. He staggered forward and almost fell over a body, unrecognisable but the uniform, what was left of it, was of a midshipman. So it had to be Lorimer. Buckley shook his aching head, sick, and went to help McGraw.
* * *
Sanders shouted, “I think — they’re going to ram!”
Smith nodded. They were rushing down on Sparrow, big as houses and growing bigger and making all their thirty-odd knots. Bare seconds away now and Sparrow was slowing. “Hard astarboard…meet her…Steady!” Sparrow swung sluggishly but her falling speed made her turn the shorter and just in time so she turned from broadside to the big boats, bow swinging until it pointed at the gap between them, but the one to port would be the closer, very close. She was hurtling down on Sparrow like a train but she would miss now. Her captain was trying to turn but his speed was against him and he would be too late. She was firing every gun that would bear, Sparrow was hit every second and machine-guns were rattling now. The other boat was not too late, had room and time to turn and would ram Sparrow. Smith whispered, “Come on, old lady.” He shouted, “Hard aport!” And into the voice pipes, “Stand by to ram!”
Sparrow turned in on the big German boat and Gow collapsed over the wheel. Smith grabbed at him and the wheel together and held Sparrow steady, feeling the blood on his hands and the spokes as Sparrow crossed the narrow strip of sea in brief seconds but even then the destroyer raced ahead, slipping across Sparrow’s bow that pointed at her bridge and then was ticking off the funnels as the high length of her went streaking past, but not all of her. Sparrow’s stem struck her ten feet from her stern.
Smith held on and had his arms nearly jerked from their sockets as Sparrow changed from a warship charging along at fifteen knots to a steel wreck. Her bow had cut into the destroyer’s stern but Smith could see Sparrow’s turtle-back bow was crumpled and twisted upwards. The German boat was not stopped, though her engines had stopped. The way still on her dragged Sparrow along until the old thirty-knotter tore loose, as the big boat shook her off.
The crew of the twelve-pounder was standing in on the gun but there were only two of them now. Sanders was shouting, “Shift target! Destroyer on the port beam!” And jumping to heave the gun around. Smith saw that the captain of the other destroyer had seen Sparrow stopped and crippled and changed his mind about ramming. He had reduced speed, slipped past Sparrow’s stern and was now turning to close on his crippled consort and to deal with Sparrow on the way.
A messenger appeared below the bridge. The ladder had gone altogether now and he bawled up, “Forrard bulkhead’s stove in and the sea’s coming in!” It was McGraw, naked to the waist and the sweat running down his body. He shook his head. “There’s nae stoppin’ it, sir!”
The twelve-pounder slammed and at the same instant Sparrow was hit forward on that crumpled turtle-back. Smith’s eyes caught the flash as the blast-wave hit him and threw him off the bridge.
He lay on the iron deck and stared across the sunlit sea at the destroyer, cruising slowly now, guns flaming, pounding the life out of the already dying Sparrow. He lay and seemed remote from it all. He tried to get to his feet but his legs would not work properly. Then he saw Sanders climbing down from the bridge and felt a hand grip his arm and lift him so he stood wide-legged and wavering. It was Buckley.
Smith said thickly, “Thought you were on the after six pounder.”
“Was, sir. Got knocked out, it an’ me together. Come around wi’ the sea washing in on me. Got a bang but me skull’s too thick, I suppose.”
Sparrow was listing and down by the head. He remembered McGraw’s message. And here came the Chief, black with oil and soot and the hair scorched from one side of his head. “Engineroom’s filling up, sir. I’ve pulled the lads out.”
Smith turned on Sanders. “Get the wounded up. Get them all out, Sub. Abandon ship.” And to Buckley: “Let go of me and lend a hand with the wounded.”
“Sure you’ll be all right, sir?” They both peered at him, concerned, where he stood holding on to a buckled stanchion.
He snapped irritably, “Yes, damn it! Get on!”
They left him, and he almost fell.
The destroyer had ceased firing. She was passing a tow to the other that was down by the stern but she could have kept up that terrible pounding just the same. Her captain must have seen that Sparrow was finished and ordered the ceasefire. That was an act of humanity.
Beyond the destroyers, beyond the drifting smoke and the smell of burning the battlecruiser Siegfried moved in another world. Smith stared at her. She had been hit, was on fire and the damage inflicted by Marshall Marmont might make her leave the convoy alone — but only ‘might’ because the damage had not slowed her. Her twelve inch turrets were trained around towards the invisible shore, long barrels at high elevation. They fired. So now she could reach Marshall Marmont, was firing at her. Sleek, smooth and swift, she was running on, her course unchanged, running for home and towards the convoy.
Smith watched her and waited. Sparrow had done all she could and so had Marshall Marmont and he thought they had done enough. He could only watch and wait as they dragged up the wounded from the wardroom through the hatch aft one at a time and laid them on the deck in a rapidly lengthening line. A fire burned in the waist because there were no hoses, no pumps, no pressure on the water, and nobody to fight it. The smoke hung around Sparrow where she lay heeling, sinking under him. He seemed to watch it all from a distance as if he floated above the deck. His vision would blur and then clear and he clung to the stanch
ion and peered out through the smoke to the bright, blue sunlit sea beyond.
* * *
Marshall Marmont was Garrick’s first command in action. He did not bemoan the fact that she was a ship only in that she floated. Marshall Marmont was his and Smith had given him the chance and he was grateful. He was an unimaginative man but he saw very clearly that it was an opportunity he might regret and he might be lucky even to live to regret it. That was irrelevant. He had a command and an action to fight. He stood on his bridge and through his glasses he watched Sparrow’s smoke that showed where she steamed hull-down over the horizon and saw from that smoke that she had turned. Towards the enemy, of course. He turned, sea and sky blurring in the glasses, then stopped, steadied them. He could see a lot of smoke but there would be more than one ship because the battlecruiser would have an escort.
“‘Guns’ reports enemy in sight, sir! Twenty thousand yards!”
Garrick grunted, acknowledging the report, not lowering the glasses, and ordered, “Open fire!”
That was how Smith would have done it. The imitation was unconscious.
The Gunnery Officer high in the control top would see more than Garrick below him. Garrick thought that the battlecruiser would have vision equally as good as ‘Guns’ but not the indications he had, the smoke to lead him on to the tiny speck of the ship beneath. And the men in the battlecruiser were staring straight into the morning sun. It would be a miracle, or rather the devil’s own luck, if they saw Marshall Marmont where she lay low in the water.
The twin fifteen-inch fired and the long barrels recoiled, licking out long tongues of flame and pouring smoke. Garrick stood as immobile as the ship, as quiet as the sea on which she lay as the salvoes roared out again and again.
“Leading destroyer altered course towards us, sir!”
“Seen.” Garrick thought, sent to look for us. And take us on? Through the glasses he saw her head-on, high-stemmed with a big white bone in her teeth as she came on at full speed.
“Battlecruiser’s signalling, sir!”
He lifted the glasses fractionally and the battlecruiser swam in the lenses and then was still. He just caught the final blinking of the searchlight and then it stopped.
“Destroyer’s turning, sir.”
He grunted again. She was turning away towards the battlecruiser. So the big ship was calling back her escort, as if, now that the destroyer had reported the solitary monitor, the enemy commander was guarding against another threat, leaving the monitor to his big guns. Another threat? Sparrow? Ridiculous! Then maybe the battlecruiser, eight miles or so to westward could see something he could not?
Or had Smith contrived something?
He grinned with the rest of them when ‘Guns’ reported a hit and then another, and ducked inside himself though he never visibly flinched as the first salvo from the battlecruiser howled overhead and into the sea four hundred yards inshore. Then into one voice pipe he said, “Good shooting, ‘Guns’. Keep it up!” And into another, “Baker. Got your damage-control party alert?”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Keep ’em on their toes. You’ll be busy soon.”
When Garrick had served under Smith not long ago in the Pacific the ship had been almost totally destroyed beneath them. He would never forget that. He knew the horrors to come. But he watched the battlecruiser through his glasses as she came on, steaming hard inside her destroyer screen and he saw she had been hurt. Marshall Marmont could not kill her but she bore the marks of this action in the smoke she trailed that was not funnel smoke and the yellow flick of flame that marked a fire.
In the control-top ‘Guns’, Lieutenant Chivers, short and stocky and crouched like a gnome over the director sight, saw the damage he had done. This was justification, reward, for all the training, practice shoots, and the coastal bombardments of targets unseen over the horizon; this sight of a big ship being hit by his guns. He had never been in a big ship action, and never expected to be, not in Marshall Marmont. He did not know what was to come but he knew the German gunnery was good and they were seeking him out, that they were firing eight gun salvoes and the range was closing, that Marshall Marmont was a stationary target to be shot at. He knew these things and he could have drawn some unpleasant conclusions if he had let his imagination run away with him but he refused to allow that, huddled lower over the sight and grew hoarser as he called his orders. His thumb punched the salvo button again and in the turret the bells rang and the twin fifteen-inch fired. He thought they would hit, the sight and deflection right, the battlecruiser a clean-cut target. He thought she might be Siegfried.
That was his last thought.
Garrick’s stolid, appreciating glance took in that the battlecruiser was hit but maintaining course and speed, that ahead of her and to seaward destroyers were fighting an action, tiny ships flickering with gunfire as they seemed to creep towards each other. He never heard the salvo that hit them and blasted the control-top into wreckage that went over the side. He found he was on his face on the deck and his nose was bleeding. He climbed to his feet to receive reports and coughing in the smoke he ordered the guns: “Independent firing!” Before they could fire, another salvo hit Marshall Marmont and he sprawled again, rose again, holding on to keep his balance in a reeling world and saw through the smoke and flames surrounding the bridge that the turret leaned drunkenly on its mounting. He found he was the only man on his feet on the bridge and set himself to gathering reports, staggering to the voice pipes, stubbornly determined to fight his ship to the last, to save her.
Then the last salvo plunged down.
* * *
Jack Curds had climbed the single mast of the CMB and clung there with one leg over the yard, watching, waiting. From there he could see Marshall Marmont firing and he saw Sparrow start her charge. He saw Siegfried heave up over the horizon and swallowed at the sight of her. He watched and waited as Sparrow charged in and slipped one destroyer then was lost in the smoke that rolled across the sea and hid her and the others. He watched and waited till then, seeing the fires start on Siegfried and then others start on Marshall Marmont as she was hit again and again and became a ship aflame. He felt sick and angry, frightened and cold and eager. But this was the moment that Smith had ordered and Siegfried was only two miles away and his CMB lay dead ahead of her.
He slid down the mast, burning the inside of his thighs, said, “Start —” But his throat was choked up and he had to cough to clear it. This time his voice croaked harshly, “Start up!” The engines burst into life with a roar and CMB 19 moved ahead. Curtis stood in the cockpit behind the wheel and stared through the already lifting spray at the knife-edge bow of the battlecruiser, the big turrets and the superstructure that climbed up to the control top and stood like a castle out of the sea. The CMB was alive now, smacking across the wave crests and now she would not be invisible. Bow-wave and wash would mark her like banners, plainer than the big ensign she flew and that cracked above Curtis. He glanced up at it then back at the midshipman. He shouted, “Ready?” And when Johnson lifted a hand and gave him a tight grin: “You’d better be! Only get one chance!”
He turned away and gulped. In those few seconds the battle-cruiser had seemed to leap towards him. The CMB was up on the step now, making her thirty-odd knots and still accelerating. She was closing the battlecruiser at their combined speeds of nearly seventy miles an hour and she was too quick and too sudden for Siegfried and the destroyers. They picked her out but not until she began to move, making that bow-wave and wash. Till then she lay unseen, a splinter on the surface of the sea while a tethered monitor fired big gun salvoes from inshore and an old torpedo-boat-destroyer manned by lunatics charged in from the sea. Now they saw her and it was too late. She had raced in under their noses and the seaward destroyer screen was involved with Sparrow. The others tried to intercept her and fired on her but she was too close and too fast for them to hit.
Curtis steered the boat and thought with a part of his mind that he and his
little crew might be the only men still alive in Smith’s flotilla and he must not waste the chance that the rest, that Smith, had thrust upon him. He hunched over the wheel and stuck his jaw out as he peered over the screen and through the spray at the battlecruiser. The midshipman watched him and thought, You can see by the look of him he’s goin’ to set his teeth into this one. Christ! He’s whistling!
Curtis’s lips were pursed and he was whistling as he might have whistled when baiting a line. The same frown of concentration was there. It was a toneless whistle and his lips were dry. The CMB fled over the sea with her fore half lifted clear of the water and her stern dug in and the battlecruiser grew to a giant and then a monster. Curtis eased on the wheel as the thought registered ‘seven hundred yards’, and the CMB spun away to starboard out of the path of Siegfried. The sea lifted in tall towers of upflung water ahead of him and alongside and he could see from the corner of his eye the destroyer to port and plunging across towards him. But he eased the wheel back and the CMB spun again and this time turned in towards Siegfried.
Aboard her they saw the motorboat off the port bow and looking to be standing on end in the sea as she snarled in at them. Curtis peered over the lifted stem and watched the bow of Siegfried, gauging her speed and how she lay to the boat, the distance between. He lifted one hand. The midshipman had been waiting for it, for seconds had been begging for it. Come on. Come on! Any closer and you’ll run aboard her? Come on! Curtis held on because Siegfried was no destroyer under which a torpedo might run if he fired too near her. She was a deep-draughted ship so he would get in close.
Nearly there.
Nearly…
Now!
He cut down the hand, felt the jar, then the leap of the stern as Johnson yanked the release handle and fired the torpedo stern first into the sea. Curtis turned the wheel and the CMB spun to starboard, laid right over in a skidding turn. He held the wheel but sat half-turned in the seat shooting glances astern. The midshipman was yelling, red-faced with excitement, both hands lifted in a ‘thumbs-up’ sign and beyond him Curtis saw the track of the torpedo. He had held on to the last split-second to be certain and now he could watch the track and knew it could not miss. Siegfried was trying to turn away but he had run too close and she had no time. She was firing every gun that would bear, hurling ton after ton of steel and high explosive at the slender, flitting, bouncing black speck in its shifting curtain of spray that jinked and swerved and ran for dear life.