First Command
A Lieutenant Commander Steadfast Thriller
Richard Freeman
Richard Freeman 2014
Richard Freeman has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - The New Captain
Chapter 2 – Steadfast Takes Command
Chapter 3- Defiant Goes To Sea
Chapter 4 – Forming The Convoy
Chapter 5 – A Storm To Remember
Chapter 6 – Disaster Aft
Chapter 7 – The End of a Hard Night
Chapter 8 – Steadfast Is Deceived
Chapter 9 – Steadfast’s Triumph
Chapter 10 – Taking Prisoners
Chapter 11- Order out of Chaos
Chapter 12 – A Visit from the Luftwaffe
Chapter 13 – Fire Aft
Chapter 14 – Time for Congratulations
Chapter 15 – The Tragedy on the Buttercup
Chapter 16 – The Return of the E-Boats
Chapter 17 – The End of Defiant
Chapter 18 - Rescue
Naval Terms
Extract from Audacity by Alan Evans
All the men on the ships in this story are fictitious, as are the convoy and escort ships. Almost every incident is, though, based on a true event in one of the thousands of convoys during the Second World War.
Chapter 1 - The New Captain
Chief Petty Officer Reg Phillips, his cap pushed back at a jaunty angle, sat foursquare on an upturned crate on the deck of HMS Defiant. Through the clouds of white smoke emerging from his filthy looking pipe he eyed the lanky young redhead who was nonchalantly walking up the gangway. The newcomer had the air of a man who was already at home on the ship. This will be the new Sparks, Phillips said to himself.
George Barton flung down his brand new kit bag onto the deck and, without a hint of deference, nodded a half-greeting to Phillips.
‘You’re to take over from Ted?’ Phillips asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘Good luck to you then. He never had any.’
‘Why?’
‘Never you mind. We’ve worse things to worry about.’
‘Worse?’
‘It’s the captain’s first ship.’
‘So what?’
‘Where’ve you been? Don’t you know it’s bad luck to be on a captain’s first ship?’
‘I don’t believe in that sort of stuff.’
‘Just wait and see. You new to destroyers?’
‘New to ships, actually.’
‘Well, welcome aboard the roughest posting in the Navy. We get all the dirty jobs: shadowing Jerry, chasing off E-boats, hunting down subs. And if they can’t think of any other way to send us to the bottom, there’s always minelaying. Then there’s fog and mines even when Jerry’s not about.’
‘And this trip?’
‘Coal-scuttle brigade, or coastal convoy to you. Offers every ‘azard you can wish for: mines, torpedoes, Stukas, rocks and shoals.’
‘He’s right,’ came a voice from behind Barton. ‘Joe Callaghan, Gunner’s Mate. I’ve been on the Artic run, the Atlantic run and the Gibraltar run to Alex. Sunk three times. But guess which is the worst berth I’ve ever had.’
Barton looked quizzical.
‘This one – the bloody East Coast convoys. A total, hellish, living nightmare.’
Barton, young, naïve, and excited at the prospect of going to sea, would have liked to hear more, but Phillips interrupted the discussion with a curt, ‘You’d better look sharp. The new captain will be here soon.’
Callaghan nodded a silent ‘follow me’ and took Barton below, leaving Phillips sucking on his grimy pipe. Thickset and only five feet eight inches tall, Phillips was a solid looking man. His profuse and rather ragged black beard and his full head of matching hair gave the impression of someone not to be argued with. He was a Navy man to his roots, having enlisted before the Great War when the Service was the nation’s pride. In June 1911 he had stood to attention on the deck of Dreadnought as she sailed past the Royal Yacht at the Coronation Fleet Review, where he had saluted King George V and Churchill, who was then First Lord of the Admiralty. Five years later, in May 1916, still on Dreadnought, he took part in the Battle of Jutland. He claimed to have seen Invincible sink, but many treated that as a legitimate embellishment of an old sailor’s memories.
Thirty years in the Navy! No man could have been prouder of the Senior Service, nor more committed to making his own ship worthy of the Navy’s great traditions. A Chief Petty Officer of five years’ standing, Phillips was a man set in his ways. Or rather, the Navy’s ways. The ship and the men were everything to him. Woe betide the man in his cups on shore who dared to say a word against her. Phillips would defend Defiant to the last.
He had seen them all: the slackers, the know-alls, the men over-eager for promotion before their time, and the plain insubordinate. But he only warmed to men like himself: down-to-earth, loyal and steady. No fuss, no show. Just keep the ship running and keep your head down, he would tell the new recruits. If they did, Phillips would always be there to support and defend them. The rest could look after themselves. As to Barton, he wasn’t too sure about him – rather too much on the cocky side, he thought.
Phillips soon forgot about Barton and turned his thoughts to the change of captain. Smith, or Old Smithy as he was affectionately known, had been taken off with appendicitis when Defiant had returned from her last convoy two days ago. Now there was a captain to Phillips’s liking; easy-going, he left Phillips to sort the men out his own way. The thing about Smithy was that he had no ambition: he had come out of retirement for the war and couldn’t wait to get back to his small-holding in the Cotswolds. He’d rather talk about his cows and pigs than the war and the Navy. But would the new captain be another Smithy, or one of those difficult types who are all ambition and medal-hunting, he asked himself. That soon upset a ship – and Phillips.
***
An hour later, Phillips was still enjoying his captain-free possession of the ship as he drew on his pipe and sucked in a mouthful of stale air. Lifting one leg over the other, he deftly knocked out the ash with three sharp taps on his boot. As he reached into his pocket for his tobacco pouch, the sound of the grinding gears of an ancient taxi crawling along the congested dockside broke his reverie. Only when the vehicle drew up rather sharply at some distance from the ship did Phillips realise what this signified: the new captain.
Lieutenant Commander George Steadfast RNR nearly tore the rear door of the taxi off its hinges as he flung it open and bounded out. He took two steps forward and then stopped and quizzically looked around for his ship. Once he was sure which battle-scarred heap of metal was his, he edged around the large puddles of black oily water and stepped over coils of wire, ripped out cables, mangled metal, and boxes of stores that were littering the dockside. Meanwhile, his taxi driver dumped a mountain of cases and boxes at the foot of the gangway.
Leaving his luggage on the dockside, Steadfast walked slowly towards the ship, not with the ambling walk of a casual onlooker, but with the slow, deliberate walk of an inspectorial mind. Before boarding, he paused at the foot of the gangway to admire his new command. She had clearly seen the wars. In places, rust burst through her peeling paint; in others patched up steelwork gleamed with new camouflage. But she was a beauty: small, yes, but streamlined and sleek. Already he could feel her racing through the pounding waves, spray tumbling over her foredeck, the white foamy sea streaming behind. At last he was to command on the bridge. No longer would he be held back by timid commanders or lambasted by faul
t-finding captains. His pulse quickened at the thought of the throbbing engines, the thundering guns, and the acrid smell of cordite.
Steadfast was short – about the only quality that he shared with his Chief Petty Officer. He had a powerful, square face with a wry snarling curl to his lips. He walked with his head tipped back that bit farther than was customary and eyed all those he met with a quizzical, disdainful air. His short, dark hair and clean shaven chin gave him a businesslike appearance. His haughty voice matched his demeanour, especially when he barked out orders in a crisp ‘do it now’ manner. Many who met Steadfast saw in him a fearful mixture of the supercilious ‘Jacky’ Fisher and the arrogant David Beatty. He would not have demurred from either characterisation.
Steadfast had joined the Navy after the First World War and worked his way up to lieutenant, but the endless cut-backs following the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 had left few chances for commands. In 1933 he left the Navy and started his own art gallery in Bond Street. It did well and by the time war broke out it had a reliable reputation for sea and naval pictures. His passion for artwork was equalled only by his passion for hunting. Whenever possible he would retreat to his tiny cottage in the depths of rural Leicestershire to spend the weekend ripping through the countryside on his hunter, which brought him the same thrill and sense of triumph as did the search for an enemy submarine or the chase of a warship.
But Steadfast had not honed his naval skills to spend this war showing seascapes and battle scenes to people with enough money to keep themselves out of the war. And, in any case, fox hunting was suspended for the duration. All in all, he welcomed the war. For him it offered a chance of fame and glory. He imagined himself conning a zigzagging warship under attack from Stuka dive bombers or patiently following asdic pings as he hunted down U-boats, or even heroically rescuing men from sinking ships. In a few years’ time when the war ended – and he hoped that would not be too soon – he saw himself marching down Whitehall in a victory parade with a string of medals on his strutting chest and perhaps dressed in at least a rear admiral’s insignia. In short, Steadfast was a man in a hurry, a man on the make.
He had signed-up on the outbreak of war and was quickly appointed lieutenant in the destroyer HMS Orchard. It was Narvik in 1940 that taught him what modern war was like. Holed up in that long fiord at the flaming port and under constant air attack, he watched ships such as the H-class destroyer HMS Hunter go under. Then there was the agonisingly long retreat home in which the carrier HMS Glorious had been sunk. After Narvik he had done a year on HMS South Riding as First Lieutenant with the Atlantic convoys. She had gone down one night – torn in two by a single torpedo. Steadfast knew what it was to freeze on a raft in a rough sea, watching the life slip away from your companions, one by agonizing one. He knew what it was to have little hope of seeing the next dawn and the fear that instilled in men. Some survivors, such as Lieutenant Richards and Able Seaman Rigby, had never recovered. They were now broken men, who cowered at the sound of gunfire and woke screaming in the night. Deep down, Steadfast knew that he too carried the mental scars of that ordeal. He still had nightmares when he found himself back on the sinking ship, flames leaping around him, men screaming as the skin was shorn from their bodies, the sea on fire and dead and dying men dotted on the waves. His worst fear was to wake screaming one night in his cot at sea and so reveal his weakness to his men on this new command.
There were more personal reasons for Steadfast’s out-and-out determination to deal the enemy as many mortal blows as he could. First there was the murder of his grandmother, at her own breakfast table by the Derfflinger and the Von der Tann when Rear Admiral Franz Hipper had bombarded Scarborough in December 1914. That cowardly act had bitten deep into his soul and drove him forward in moments of weakness. More recently there was the death of his brother at the hands of Korvettenkapitän Johannes Wendorff. It was one of Wendorff’s flotilla of E-boats that had sunk the merchant ship on which Raymond had been a naval gunner. Steadfast’s greatest ambition was to meet Wendorff and send him and his E-boat to the bottom of the North Sea.
Yes, Steadfast knew about war and he knew its subtle combination of crushing boredom intermingled with terrifying actions. Yet not for one moment did he think of asking for an easier berth. This war was to be the defining moment of his life. It was a test of his manhood – a test he was determined not to fail. So when the order to join Defiant came from Vice Admiral C G Ramsey KCB of the Rosyth Command, he was filled with apprehensive jubilation.
Chapter 2 – Steadfast Takes Command
The Defiant was one of the new Hunt class type III escort destroyers. One thousand tons of sleek beauty with a bow that could cut through any sea and a bold bridge abaft her single funnel. Aft she was lean and low. There was not much space to spare on the flats, but that was because she was packed from stem to stern with her fearsome weaponry. She was ready to fend off all comers with her four 4-inch and four 2-pound quick-firing guns and her two recently added Oerlikons on either side of the bridge. She bristled with the latest technology, including radar-controlled direction firing for the guns. Steadfast didn’t understand much about all those valves, transformers and tubes, but he knew what they could do. The main armament would be aimed by the amazing box of tricks called the director. All the aimer had to do was to point his telescope at the target for the type 285 radar to pick up the range and direction. Then the magic director sent the details to the guns and they turned to follow the ship’s prey.
Coming out of his daydreaming Steadfast sprinted up the gangway. Phillips had just enough time to jump to his feet and salute.
‘Welcome aboard, sir!’
‘Thank you, er …’
‘Philips, sir. I’ll have the men put your luggage in your cabin. Number One’s in the wardroom. There’s tea if you’d like it.’
Philips went below, leaving Steadfast to inspect his ship. As the Chief Petty Officer eased his heavy frame down the ladder, he mused on the arrival of this haughty-looking captain with a bellicose air. He wasn’t sure that was what the Navy needed nowadays. Gone were the days when you met the enemy face-to-face and dashed at him with unrestrained bravado. Now death came without warning from an unseen foe. In the depths of the night one unannounced, shattering explosion could send a ship to the bottom in minutes. That required a new type of captain – not fearless, fear was what kept you alert – but strong, resolute and determined on denying the sea to the German menace, without displays of mindless swagger. Would Steadfast know when to attack and when to hold back? The last man got it just right. Smithy never flinched from battle, but nor did he seek out trouble. Now, Phillips feared, the ship was about to be in the hands of a man with no caution at all. ‘Just when I’ve got the ship running like clockwork,’ he muttered with all the resignation of an old hand.
As Steadfast turned towards the ladder to go below he noted the furious preparations for sailing. Sides of beef lay on the deck alongside bulging sacks of potatoes, bursting string bags of onions, cabbage and other vegetables. One-hundred-and-seventy men took a lot of feeding. The seamen strained under the weight as they hauled the stores on board and humped them down the ladders to fill every last corner of the ship below.
Other hands worked on the more delicate task of taking on ammunition – the last run had clearly diminished supplies. They handled the bright brass four-inch shells with care, taking them down to the magazines. Those could put up a good fight, Steadfast thought, as he ran his eye over the supplies of armour-piercing shell and shrapnel. Some was set aside for the ready-use lockers on deck.
Now, excited by his new command, Steadfast went aft to watch some depth-charges coming on board. He smiled the smile of a self-satisfied man. This was his ship, his domain. He turned back towards the ladder and went to meet his officers.
***
‘Gin and bitters, please, Steward,’ said Captain Steadfast as he entered the wardroom.
‘Tell me about the ship, Number One.’
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p; ‘She’s a warhorse, sir,’ responded Lieutenant Henry Gardiner RNVR. ‘We’ve only been commissioned for a year. We’ve done for a Jerry sub and seen off a good many others. Of course, we’ve had our knocks – been in for dockyard repairs twice, once from shrapnel damage and one collision.’
‘So, you’re RNVR. What do you do in Civvy Street?’
‘Actor, sir. Mostly West End stuff, but there’s a bit of touring.’
‘Tricky for getting in the water, eh?’
‘A bit, but my father-in-law has a small yacht near Harwich. I often get down there on Sundays.’
The condescending look on Steadfast’s face was all that Gardiner needed to realise the disdain that Steadfast felt for RNVR officers. But, after over a year of wartime service, he had come to expect this reaction from the career officers.
‘And the men?’
‘A good lot, sir. They’ve had a tough time. You know what it’s like. You get into dock with plans for a few days off, set foot on dry ground and, hey presto, you’re handed orders for the next day. Boiler cleans are our best chance of a bit of leave. But these are all Chatham lads, so leave’s not much use when we put in at Rosyth or some other place off the end of the earth. I won’t say you need to go easy on the men – that wouldn’t be right – but they like to be appreciated. They know they’ve got a tough job and they like others to acknowledge it. Especially now. We’re just back from a bad run. Three colliers lost and some very nasty sights with the deck covered with mangled bodies. It takes it out of the men, sir.’
‘Umh. I’m sure they’re a fine bunch of men, Number One, but we must keep up appearances. They look a scruffy lot to me. Most look as if they’ve not seen a razor or the barber for weeks. And the Coxswain’s not setting an example.’
‘Commander Smith never bothered much about show. He just wanted the fastest destroyer…’
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