Battlecruiser (1997)

by Reeman, Douglas

  He half-listened to the endless clatter of typewriters and teleprinters in the adjoining offices: signals, codes, instructions, orders, the demands of a fleet at war.

  It would be Twelfth Night tomorrow. He glanced at the tattered Christmas decorations hung above the framed portrait of Winston Churchill, and the fake holly beside the operations board. He peered harder at the blurred outline of the Forth Bridge, that vital link, which must have offered such a tempting target in the first months of war.

  He told himself often enough that he was lucky to be doing something useful, important even, that his age and experience carried a lot of weight with his team of Wrens, most of whom were young enough to be his daughters. But occasionally that sense of satisfaction at being back, being a part of it again, was not enough.

  He remembered the small escort destroyer, which had nearly failed to make it back to base. He had watched her creep in, her bows so low in the water that her forecastle was almost awash. By luck or by mischance, the destroyer, a veteran from the Great War like so many, had confronted a U-Boat, surfaced, and about to attack a slow-moving convoy.

  The operations officer had pictured the confrontation, as if he himself had been there: the sudden realization, the U-Boat, taken by surprise and unable to dive, opening fire with her heavy machine-guns in a last attempt to stave off the inevitable. There had been small bundles laid out on the destroyer’s listing deck that day, each covered with a flag: there was always a price to be paid. But the destroyer had kept going, and had rammed the submarine at full speed, driving it down, until only an oil slick and the remains of her deck party were left to mark the spot. The Admiralty was far from keen on escorts ramming U-Boats. Even if successful, it meant that the ship involved would be in dock for months, at a time when every escort was worth her tonnage in gold.

  But the cheers that day from every ship in the anchorage must have made each man in her company feel like a giant, and he had been surprised that he could still be so moved. So envious.

  ‘Tea, sir?’ He turned and looked at his personal Wren, a petty officer writer who had been with him for four months. It was a long time in the service these days. He wondered what she would say if he asked her out for a quiet meal in Edinburgh, for a Twelfth Night celebration. Probably make some excuse, and then ask for a transfer.

  She smiled to herself. She knew exactly what he was thinking, or could make a good guess.

  She said, ‘The battlecruiser’s new captain is due today, sir. I wonder what he’ll be like.’

  He looked at her. How different from the time he had found her crying in that very chair, the telegram gripped in one hand. Her fiancé had been killed in some godforsaken place in North Africa. Was she over it? So many such telegrams . . . thousands, probably millions.

  He considered her remark, and replied, ‘I know something of him. It was just before you joined us here at Leith. He’s Captain Guy Sherbrooke – young for his rank. He was in command of the cruiser Pyrrhus, Leander class, like the Achilles and Ajax of River Plate fame. Smart ships, small by today’s standards, of course. Six six-inch guns as main armament.’ Without looking, he knew she was sitting down in the chair, listening, as she had that day when he had found her with the telegram. ‘She was part of the escort for a convoy to North Russia – that damnable place. The Admiralty had been expecting trouble, even with Bismarck sunk and only Scharnhorst as an immediate threat, and they had ordered heavier units to stand by off Iceland, just in case.’

  ‘I remember, sir. I read about it in the papers. Three German cruisers came out of Norway and went for the convoy. But the Scharnhorst never appeared.’

  He touched the cup on his desk. The tea was cold. ‘The convoy was ordered to disperse, not “scatter”, as some might have had it. Pyrrhus placed herself between the convoy and the enemy.’ He added with sudden bitterness, ‘But the heavy units never arrived, and Captain Sherbrooke’s challenge was in vain. Pyrrhus managed to maul one of them, but she was hopelessly outgunned. Swamped.’

  ‘But the convoy was left alone, sir?’

  He did not hear her. ‘I remember seeing Pyrrhus at a fleet review before the war. I couldn’t keep away, even then. She had a ship’s company of four hundred and fifty. They picked up eight of them. One was Sherbrooke. You don’t last long in the Arctic in September.’

  ‘And now he’s here, sir.’

  ‘And now he’s here.’ A small Wren hovered at the door with a signal-pad in her hands.

  The operations officer was glad of the interruption. He was only speculating, in any case. Nobody knew for certain what had happened that day. He wiped the window again. He could not see the ship from here, but he had already watched her at her anchorage, surrounded by barges and lighters, boats coming and going like servants. She was there: he could feel her. A ship so well known in peace and war, part of the legend, a symbol of all the navy stood for.

  Her previous captain, Cavendish, had died suddenly, not on his bridge but at home. An accident, the report had stated. Cavendish would have known the truth. He had been in command of that great ship out there when Pyrrhus had gone down, guns blazing, in seas as high as this building. Now Sherbrooke was taking his place. In command of a legend . . . the ship which had left his Pyrrhus to perish.

  The Wren petty officer came back and said, ‘Nothing important, sir.’ She saw his face, and exclaimed, ‘What is it, sir?’

  He turned his back on the streaming window and the choppy waters of the Firth.

  He said bluntly, ‘I wonder if you could spare an evening for dinner in the city? Nothing fancy.’

  She said, ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m tied up for the next few runs ashore.’ Then she smiled. ‘I’d love to. Really.’

  The operations officer beamed. ‘I’ll cadge some transport. Rank hath its privileges!’

  Then he turned again, and stared across the busy anchorage. He still could not see her through the haze and drizzle. But the ship was there. Waiting.

  Captain Guy Sherbrooke stepped down from the staff car and turned toward the Firth. He heard the operations officer giving instructions to the driver about something, and wished he could have been alone for these last free moments. Taking command, even joining a ship for the first time, was always a testing business. All the way from London, changing trains, holding onto solitude even in crowded compartments, he had thought about it. This was very different from all the other times. At the Admiralty they had tried to make light of it, for his sake; it had only made it worse, in some ways.

  His new company would be much more worried about what their new captain would be like. Think of it that way. The old vice-admiral at the funeral had also said as much. ‘She’s a fine ship, a great ship. I’d give my whole life to command her all over again.’

  During the journey he had found himself recalling the funeral and the aftermath, the sandwiches and the sherry, and the first nervous laughter as the tension had begun to wear thin. What had he really expected?

  And why could he not accept that nothing would ever be the same? Pyrrhus was gone. All the faces, the weaknesses, and the rough camaraderie which made any ship were no more. Eight survivors.

  He had passed the journey north going through his notes, putting names to people who would soon become an everyday part of his life. Whenever he had glanced up from his papers, a ruddy-faced brigadier had tried to force him into conversation about the war. What the navy, ‘the blue jobs’ as he called them, really thought about it, while he took occasional sips from a silver flask which certainly did not contain tea. He had not offered it to Sherbrooke. He felt his mouth relax into a thin smile. Just as well. I’d probably have told him!

  The operations officer was speaking again. He had seen the glances passing between him and the Wren petty officer: like the old vice-admiral and his Wren driver, wanting to be the man he once was.

  Sherbrooke turned towards him. He was doing his best: they all were. It’s me. ‘What is it?’

  The operations officer replied,
‘Nothing, sir. Just a young chap joining the ships. Asking about boats. I told him to report to . . .’

  ‘I’ll take him.’

  He caught sight of a young lieutenant with a pile of ill-assorted luggage and an instrument case, a banjo, by the look of it. His stripes were wavy: another R.N.V.R. officer, hostilities only, who overnight had become the largest part of the navy.

  But there was something different about this one, a gold-laced letter ‘A’ in the curl of his upper stripe, and when he responded to the operations officer’s reluctant offer, Sherbrooke saw the pilot’s wings on his left sleeve.

  ‘Great! Thanks!’ He stared, obviously dismayed as he saw the oak leaves around the peak of Sherbrooke’s cap. ‘Gee, I’m sorry, sir! I didn’t realize!’ He added helplessly, ‘I’m joining the Reliant, you see.’

  Sherbrooke nodded, momentarily off-balance. The easy use of her name. Had he really been avoiding it?

  Then he smiled. ‘So am I, as it happens.’

  The lieutenant slipped the raincoat off his shoulder and saluted.

  ‘Rayner, sir. R.C.N.V.R.’

  Sherbrooke returned his salute, and glanced at the word Canada on the lieutenant’s shoulder. It was a different navy now: errand boys and bank clerks, brick-layers and bus conductors. A miracle which had been performed without any one noticing, or so it sometimes seemed to him.

  The operations officer looked up from his watch. ‘The launch is coming, sir.’

  Sherbrooke shivered again, but not because of the cold. ‘Right on time.’

  The operations officer sounded relieved. His part was almost over. ‘She would be on time, sir. In that ship.’

  Sherbrooke barely heard him. He was feeling in his pockets, half expecting to find his pipe there, but that had gone too, probably when they had cut his frozen clothing from his body. All the time, he had been trying to hold onto the other man, hearing his voice. Help me. Somebody help me. And another voice, a stranger’s. ‘No use, Captain. He’s gone.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir.’

  ‘What?’ He swung on the Canadian almost blindly. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I just realized what a stupid goddamn fool I am. Who you are. What you did.’ He shook his head. ‘And all I do is . . .’

  Sherbrooke held out his hand. ‘Don’t say it. This is an important day for both of us.’ He slipped out of his new raincoat, feeling the bitter air through his uniform, and stinging his face. This young Canadian temporary lieutenant would be the replacement pilot for the ship’s Walrus amphibian, affectionately known throughout the navy as ‘the Shagbat’, which was used for both reconnaissance and rescue. He had made a good start; he had just rescued his captain, without even knowing it.

  He heard the throaty growl of the launch as it swung around a ponderous tug and headed straight for the jetty.

  Very smart: it could have been Spithead in peacetime. The bowman with his raised boathook, a petty officer as coxswain, and some other face beside his in the cockpit. There was a rear-admiral’s flag painted on either bow. Stagg was doing him proud. He would . . . He almost smiled. In that ship.

  Sherbrooke watched as the boat’s engines coughed astern, and the hull came to rest against the jetty’s fenders with barely a shudder.

  A midshipman scrambled ashore and saluted. ‘Ready when you are, sir.’

  Sherbrooke turned to shake hands with the operations officer. A few passers-by were hanging about to watch. He could almost hear them.

  All right for some, eh?

  He found that it did not worry him. ‘Thanks for your help.’

  ‘Good luck, sir.’ The other man saluted.

  The midshipman was staring at the Canadian lieutenant, confused, angry perhaps, that something unrehearsed was happening. The pilot was gathering up his bags, and lastly the banjo, if that was what it was.

  ‘After you, sir.’

  Sherbrooke did not raise his voice. ‘It’s not vital, Mr Rayner, but senior officers go last, right?’

  More confusion, until a seaman ran to help carry the bags into the launch.

  He could feel the scrutiny, the curiosity, perhaps the understanding, too. The navy was a family, after all.

  He touched the peak of his cap and stepped down into the boat.

  ‘Bear off forrard! Let go aft!’ The midshipman’s voice was just a little too loud. He would be watching everything, preparing what he would say to his fellows in the gunroom when he was dismissed from this duty. The new captain, what’s he like?

  The boat tore away from the jetty and caught the Canadian off-balance; Sherbrooke heard a twang as the banjo fell onto the deck. A face he would get to know, and the man behind it, like all the rest of them. He gripped the safety rail until his hand throbbed. But not too intimately. Not again.

  He thought suddenly of his last visit to the Admiralty, the barrage balloons like basking whales in the washed-out sky, uniforms everywhere, representing every country imaginable, all fighting the same war with their homes under German occupation.

  When he had been told about Reliant, he had heard himself ask, ‘Why me, sir?’

  The admiral’s face had crinkled. Relieved, perhaps, that it was a question he could answer without personal involvement.

  ‘Her flag officer, Rear-Admiral Stagg, asked for you himself. Insisted, I should say.’

  Spray lanced over the glass screen, and he wiped his face with the back of his hand. It was exhilarating, without threat. What had he expected? The question always repeated itself.

  Fear, perhaps? Some manifestation of the horror that might have scarred him more deeply than even the experts realized?

  He looked up again, and saw her for the first time. It had happened so suddenly that it was hard to take in, to accept. H.M.S. Reliant, a battlecruiser, one of the giants, and to the public a surviving symbol of a world which would never be the same again.

  She was huge but graceful, with the speed and agility of a destroyer, and the fighting power of a battleship. At the outbreak of war Britain, with the largest fleet in the world, had retained four battlecruisers. The Hood, and Reliant’s two sisters, Repulse and Renown. The Hood, probably the most beautiful warship ever built, and in her day the largest afloat, not only represented the strength and majesty of the peacetime Royal Navy, to the general public she was the navy. But she was a battlecruiser, built for speed, for a style of warfare already outdated at Jutland, if not even before that. In 1941, she was destined to meet with Bismarck, Hitler’s most powerful battleship, and unsinkable, as her German builders had claimed. On that bitter day in the North Atlantic, Hood, in company with a battleship, Prince of Wales, so new that she still carried dockyard workers on board, had opened fire on the enemy. It had taken only one direct hit from Bismarck’s great shells, which had exploded inside a magazine after piercing Hood’s thinly armoured deck, to sink her like her forerunners at Jutland. Out of a complement of some fourteen hundred men, only a midshipman and two ratings had been found alive. Just months later, off the coast of Malaya, Repulse, in company with the same ill-fated Prince of Wales, was attacked by Japanese aircraft. Within an hour, both great ships were sunk, with terrible loss of life. A different theatre of war, but the same sacrifice, the same fatal weakness.

  The launch was slowing down but Sherbrooke did not move, although his reefer jacket was shining black with spray.

  The young Canadian, Rayner, stared at him, wanting to understand, needing to remember this moment for all time.

  A full captain, he thought, a sort of god to most junior ranks, and yet so youthful himself. A face you would trust. Believe.

  Sherbrooke saw the figures on the battlecruiser’s quarterdeck. Marines, officers, people whom he must meet, and who should see him before the darkness closed in across the Firth of Forth.

  Then he stared up at the grey superstructure, still graceful and unaltered, without the massive tower-bridges given to several of the older capital ships.

  It was like being held, taken over; like nothing he had
ever experienced.

  ‘Hooked on, sir!’ They were waiting, and up there on deck the boatswain’s mates would be moistening their silver calls. Ready for the captain.

  The king is dead. Long live the king.

  Captain Guy Sherbrooke was thirty-nine years old, twenty-seven of which he had been in naval uniform. Whatever had gone before, and no matter what it had cost him, this was his future. Perhaps his only future.

  Pride, then? Satisfaction? If anything, he felt only disbelief. He saluted the coxswain and reached for the safety lines.

  He might have spoken aloud. ‘I survived.’ He looked up at the after funnel, and the mast with the rear-admiral’s flag standing out in the breeze like painted metal. ‘I’m back.’

  2

  Welcome Aboard

  Captain Guy Sherbrooke leaned his elbows on the desk and massaged his eyes with his fingers. Like the nearby chairs, the desk was almost covered with books, folders, and separate pads of signals, arranged in order of importance or urgency. He stared around the day cabin, where he had been working without a break since he had been piped aboard only this afternoon. The cabin was huge, but Reliant had been built at a time when allotted space was often measured by rank. And so quiet. Even with half the ship’s company on a week’s leave, there were still enough people aboard to be heard. Reliant carried a total of twelve hundred officers, ratings and marines, and yet beyond the cabin bulkhead he could barely hear the occasional tannoy announcement, or the twitter of a boatswain’s call.

  He tried to remember the ship as she had appeared when he had first stepped aboard in peacetime. The Mediterranean, regattas, parties, and receptions. Showing the flag. Like the time when the squadron had been at Naples: he could see it as if it were yesterday, perhaps because he wanted to erase what had happened so recently. Suntanned shoulders and daring gowns, officers in their ‘ice-cream suits’ falling over one another to entertain and impress all the ladies. One had been Jane, in Italy with her father, who had been on some important trade mission. Another world . . .