Convoy of War (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  Kemp was about to make a further remark to Hampton about the peacetime liners when the conference was called to order by a lieutenant-commander RNR. The conference, Kemp reflected, was to be a high-powered one: as the conversation died, the Chief of Staff to the Flag Officer in Charge entered the room. The Chief of Staff was a pompous-looking officer, rotund, two pisspots high in Kemp’s seafaring terminology, wearing a gold-rimmed monocle and carrying, of all things, a beautifully turks’-headed telescope. There was a good deal of other brass around: the Rear-Admiral commanding the cruiser squadron, no less than five four-ring captains RN from the cruisers themselves and the solitary battleship of the escort, each of them accompanied by his navigating officer. The remainder were a mix of commanders and lieutenant-commanders plus a number of lieutenants, mostly RNR or RNVR, from the smaller escort vessels — the corvettes — and the masters of the merchant ships.

  The Naval Control Service officer was concise: time was not for wasting. As they all knew, the OB convoy route was normally south through the Irish Sea, the last pick-up being the ships out of Liverpool Bay. This time, they were going north about, taking their departure from the Bloody Foreland. Why? The answer lay in the intelligence reports. Some German cyphers had been broken and it was known that there was to be a concentration of U-boats lying in wait off the exit from St George’s Channel. So the Germans were to be fooled: no convoy would steam into their periscopes this time. Instead, the U-boats would come under heavy depth-charge attack from Western Approaches command. The lieutenant-commander went on to give the precise route to be followed clear of the British Isles and beyond the range of the German bombers. He stressed the importance of the convoy even though the ships were in ballast. Bottoms were valuable even without cargoes, and the cargoes and Canadian troops that would be picked up in Halifax were very badly needed. As for the escort, the corvettes would break off for return to base at 19 degrees west longitude. The remainder, the destroyers, the heavy cruisers and the old battleship, would, exceptionally, remain with the convoy right through to Halifax to form part of the homeward escort which would if necessary be joined nearer home waters by a fleet aircraft-carrier being held in readiness in the Clyde. The destroyers would re-fuel as necessary from one of the tankers, a Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker which would be carrying sufficient oil fuel for replenishment. The RFA would break off with the other tankers for the Gulf of Mexico, escorted by destroyers of the Royal Canadian Navy, which would leave Halifax for the rendezvous.

  Afterwards Kemp remarked to Hampton that he had the feeling something hadn’t been said. Hampton shrugged. ‘They always keep their cards close to their chests when there’s — ’

  ‘When there’s something else. That’s what I meant. Apart from the sheer size, the convoy’s not all that unusual. Why fall over themselves to provide an escort all the way when they’re always so short of escorts? There’s got to be some other factor.’

  ‘I dare say we’ll be told in due course,’ Hampton said.

  They made their way along the dockside at Albert Harbour, stepping over the usual clutter of any dock — coils of wire and rope, broken packing cases and the like — closely attended by Lieutenant Williams who was efficiently looking out for the drifter detailed to take the officers back to their ships in the stream. Kemp thought his assistant looked like an impatient bird, peering about for its nest. Back in London words had been uttered in the Queen Anne’s Gate office of the Naval Assistant to the Second Sea Lord, known in brief as NA2SL, the officer responsible for appointments. Naturally, the confidential nature of Williams’ flimsies had been respected; but the navy had ways of conveying information by facial gestures, waved hands and a minimum of words. Commodore Kemp had hoisted in that his new assistant walked with God, but was otherwise reliable and efficient enough. Williams needed to be sat on now and again, and Kemp was regarded at the Admiralty as someone who would sit hard when necessary.

  ‘Training exercise?’ he’d asked with a grin.

  ‘You could put it that way, Commodore. Yes. Make something of him — what?’

  Moving through Albert Harbour to the drifter, Kemp reflected on these words of wisdom. So far his contact with Williams had been of the briefest, a hurried introduction just before the convoy conference, but already he’d got the idea that his assistant was summing him up as a kind of blimp, a relic of the last war, and that he, the assistant, was going to find it a bit of a strain keeping the boss up to the mark. Well, time would tell; Kemp wasn’t the man to make pre-judgements. He had asked Williams a question that he knew the answer to already: was this his first experience of the merchant-ship side of convoys? It was; but Williams had served in the escorts, which should be of some help. Kemp had had, in the past, RNVR lieutenants who had never hitherto moved off their backsides in shore jobs, not as officers anyway: they’d done their sea-time as ratings and then promptly shifted out of discomfort and forgotten all they’d learned. Kemp had refrained from saying what Williams would learn for himself soon enough: that his job wasn’t going to be so much that of assistant commodore, which his manner suggested he believed, or flag lieutenant, as of a kind of tea boy and general-purpose dogsbody.

  Meanwhile Williams identified the duty drifter, not a hard task since so many officers were making for it, and reported the fact with a flourish and a salute.

  ‘Well done, Williams,’ Kemp said, keeping his face straight. Williams didn’t seem aware of any irony. They embarked and proceeded out of the harbour. As senior officer present, Kemp was accorded the privacy, honour and fug of the wheelhouse where he did his best to interpret the Scots tongue of the skipper, a gnarled fisherman from Caledonia’s wilder northeastern shores. Kemp gathered that the skipper regretted his patriotism in making his drifter and himself and crew available to the English, like so many other skippers, for the duration when he could be making a damn sight more money by sticking to the fishing. Kemp saw that he was homesick: to the skipper, Clydeside was the south.

  ***

  Leading Signalman Mouncey, together with his number two, Signalman MacCord, had already taken up his quarters aboard the Commodore’s ship and was having his customary grumble about this, that and the other whilst waiting for the Commodore to come aboard. Their quarters, for one thing: a bloody great liner with hundreds of single-berth cabins and state-rooms and they’d been shoved in a carved-up former nobs’ suite on A deck together with the naval guns’ crews, the gunnery rates who manned the two six-inch, one for’ard and one aft, that made up the Ardara’s main defence and despite the strengthening would likely split the ship asunder if fired. Signal ratings, Mouncey said, didn’t expect to be berthed with common seamen gunners.

  ‘Handy for the bridge,’ MacCord said. It didn’t sound like that, MacCord being very Scots, and Mouncey had to ask for a repeat.

  Mouncey said, ‘Bollocks. Plenty of other spaces just as handy. Just some sod being awkward. When I was in the ... ’ He went on and on, moaning about better ships and better billets. MacCord listened philosophically, letting the killick drip himself out. Even a tap must eventually empty the reservoir. After a while Mouncey, a small, dark man with a repaired hare lip and the screwed-up eyes that spoke of many a long year gazing through a telescope at flag hoists and Aldis lamps and the big signalling projectors, came back from the past and peered into the future.

  ‘That there RNR. Commodore Kemp.’

  ‘What about him, killick?’

  ‘Looks all right. Spoke to me decent, almost as if I was yuman. I’ve ’eard ’e used to be in this ship — must be funny, coming back like with a bloody great thick stripe on ’is cuff.’ Mouncey sniffed and wiped the back of a horny hand across the end of his nose. ‘That wavy bloke gives me the bloody creeps, though. The lootenant — Williams.’

  ‘Looked all right to me, killick — ’

  Mouncey jeered. ‘Call yourself a bunting tosser! Blind as a bat, you are. Tarted-up little ponce. Stuck up as a pr — ’

  MacCord never heard the rest of
it. Mouncey was interrupted by the broadcaster coming on suddenly, almost in his ear. A voice said, ‘Leading Signalman on the bridge. Leading Signalman on the bridge, immediately.’

  That meant the Commodore of the convoy was aboard. Mouncey went up the ladders at the double. On arrival he got a bollocking from the Commodore’s assistant, which didn’t please him: he should have been on the bridge waiting for the Commodore, Williams said, not skulking below. Mouncey didn’t answer back, you didn’t answer officers unless you liked being put in the rattle, but he fizzed and muttered like a bomb. For his part, Lieutenant Williams didn’t like that. He said something hasty, about dumb insolence. Mouncey’s mouth fell open in astonishment. Daft young bleeder ...

  A moment later Kemp called Williams across for a quiet word. ‘Laid yourself open, haven’t you?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Dumb insolence went out of the crime sheet years ago — as you must surely know.’

  ‘Sorry, sir. Heat of the moment — ’

  ‘Well, don’t let us have any more such moments, Williams. You did right to utter a reprimand, but don’t overdo it. I like a happy signal staff. Understood?’

  Williams, red-faced, said, ‘Yes, sir. If I might explain, Mouncey strikes me as a — ’

  ‘All right, Williams, that’s all.’ Kemp turned away, walked with Captain Hampton to the port bridge wing. Signals were passing between the King’s Harbour Master and the battleship, and between KHM and the senior officer of the close escort. The moment of departure had come. Five minutes later the great concourse of shipping was on the move, the battleship and the cruisers going ahead to be followed by the Commodore and the other ships in convoy, with the destroyers and smaller escorts bringing up the rear, proceeding in line ahead; the ships would remain in single column until the waters of the Clyde opened out beyond the Cumbraes, widening into the firth between Holy Island and Ardrossan so that the convoy could begin to move into its ocean formation. On the bridge of the Ardara Kemp stared ahead through binoculars, towards the anti-submarine boom strung across from Cloch Point to Dunoon, a strange stirring agitating his mind. This, he believed for no real reason beyond a hunch that he avoided thinking of as psychic, was going to be no easy convoy.

  TWO

  Signalman MacCord reported again: ‘Lost contact, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, MacCord. Scared off by the depth-charges.’

  ‘Likely, sir. No apparent damage to the bastards, sir.’

  Kemp nodded. That was convoy work: attack, draw off, come again. Alarms that were not false, but led to no result. A lot of it was boredom and fatigue, but you could never let up, never drop your guard, never allow yourself to miss the smallest feather of water that would indicate a watching periscope. Hampton, as the morning wore on into afternoon and the convoy left Ireland well behind, had a feeling of deteriorating weather: the wind was increasing from the south-west and heavy cloud was extending. White horses were forming on the water and soon there would be spindrift. That was good: the U-boat packs didn’t attack when the weather was bad and if the wind strengthened to gale force, and stayed with them beyond the range of the hunter packs, then they would have a good chance of getting through unscathed. And before long they would be coming to the limit of the Nazi aircraft range, the bombers anyway.

  Not the recce boys, the FW Condors. So far, by some stroke of sheer luck, nothing had appeared in the sky, but the convoy was not yet in the clear.

  ***

  Every convoy had its arse-end Charlie, the ship that couldn’t keep up the speed and fell everlastingly astern to become the bête noire of the Commodore and even more so of Captain(D) in the destroyer flotilla leader, whose job it was to detach one of his escorts for the job of chivvying. This time, arse-end Charlie was the SS Stephen Starr, one of the smaller steamers whose official maximum speed was said to be a fraction over the mean speed of the convoy which had therefore allowed her inclusion in what was a semi-fast convoy insofar as the outward run was concerned. The Stephen Starr, along with all the other smaller ships, was due to detach in Halifax and return at a later date with a slow convoy, while the Commodore and the troopships and armaments carriers formed a fast HX convoy for home waters.

  But for now the OB convoy was saddled with her. Her master, Captain Peter Redgrave, saw the impatient signalling, saw one of the destroyers turning out of formation on the starboard beam and bearing down on him with a big bone in her teeth. As the destroyer passed along the steamer’s side a loud-hailer boomed irritation across the water.

  ‘What’s it this time, Captain?’

  ‘Trouble in my engine-room,’ Redgrave called back.

  ‘What sort of trouble?’

  Redgrave set his teeth. ‘Worn-out bloody machinery, that’s what! If it’s not one thing it’s another. My chief engineer’s doing his best.’

  ‘He’d better do it fast,’ the destroyer Captain said. ‘Much longer and you’ll be astern of the corvettes.’

  The destroyer turned away, making back at speed for its position in protection of the main body of the convoy. Captain Redgrave thought: astern of the whole God-damn escort, right out on a limb! NCSO at Liverpool, where the Stephen Starr had sailed from, had put it very plainly: stragglers would have to lump it. The speed of the convoy would not be reduced and escorts couldn’t be spared, not unless one of the big ships happened to become a straggler, which wasn’t likely. Redgrave knew his ship was expendable, a casualty that could be accepted. Had it not been for the war and the need to keep as many ships as possible at sea, she would have gone to the breaker’s yard long since. As it was, just so long as she could stay afloat without becoming an inconvenience, she could carry cargoes around the world and help to keep Britain fed.

  Redgrave was well aware of the facts: neither the poor old Stephen Starr nor any of the other former tramps of uncertain years would have formed part of this convoy if it hadn’t suited the Trade Division of the Admiralty to shove them in, tag them along with the big stuff and thus save on escorts. It was insane, and it was probably murder.

  But didn’t they all know there was a war on?

  Redgrave knew, all right. Not just because he had sailed the war-torn seas right from the start. Because his home had been in Liverpool, or Birkenhead to be precise. In peacetime Liverpool had been his home port and he had sailed out of it for more than twenty years as second mate, mate and master. He had bought his house on a mortgage at the time he’d met his wife. When Clare had said she wouldn’t marry unless he started buying a house, he had been in full agreement. That was — what? — ten years ago, just under. The house hadn’t been much to start with, but it had become a little palace in those years, the happy years before Hitler had mucked everything up. Clare had done wonders with decorations and he’d spent almost all his leaves with a paint brush in his hand. A lot of hard-earned money had gone into it as well, and what with that and three children in due course, Redgrave had never had so much as twopence to scratch his own bottom with. But he hadn’t minded that; though a seafarer, he was a home-lover and the mere thought of home, the satisfaction of owning his own place, had been his mainstay during days of boredom on the bridge, taking cargoes around the world from Liverpool to Sydney, Sydney to Japan, Japan to San Francisco and virtually anywhere else you cared to name.

  And what had been the end result?

  Extinction. Back in May the Luftwaffe had come to Liverpool in an attempt to put the city and docks out of commission. The result had been terrible but Redgrave’s house had been all right. Then a sneaky raid had taken place, nothing very big, only a fortnight before Redgrave had sailed on the present run to Halifax, and this time his house had taken a direct hit in his absence on a coastal convoy. There had been nothing left when he’d come home, nothing but a heap of rubble. Somewhere underneath it all had been Clare and the children. He’d been told it was impossible to get them out. Maybe they’d got the bodies out by now; if so, he didn’t know. He didn’t much want to. Probably they hadn’t; too much else
to do — and if they had, then presumably he would have been told.

  Since then there had been nothing left but the sea, and the Stephen Starr. There was something very personal about the ship now: Clare and the children had come aboard whenever he was in Liverpool and he had the memories of them all about him, in his cabin, in the saloon, on the decks.

  And now he was being a nuisance to the escort and the Commodore. Light signals were being flashed from the Ardara, admonitory messages similar to the amplified words of the destroyer captain, messages warning him that he would soon be on his own. The Commodore wished him luck and added his regrets. Redgrave knew the regrets were sincere; no seafarer liked the idea of leaving men to the mercy of the sea and the enemy, and Commodore Mason Kemp was RNR, had been a merchant shipmaster himself and would thus have an intimate understanding.

  Redgrave sighed and moved to the engine-room voice-pipe.

  ‘Chief? Bridge here. What’s the score?’

  ‘Heap of old iron.’ The voice came hollowly up the pipe, and sourly. Mronverted to troop decks much used as such over the last eighteen months and now ready for the reception of the Canadians — Mr Portway, second steward, was in his cabin, an inboard compartment with no outlet to the fresh air other than by way of the forced-draught trunking. Mr Portway, the stewards mustered and detailed for the day’s work by this time, was making up his overtime bill for eventual presentation to the purser. War or no war, the routine of a liner went on notwithstanding, if in a less glamorous way. Troops were passengers of a sort, and the first-class saloon, officers for the use of, was still a somewhat superior place and with an air of distinction, though Mr Portway had found that some so-called officers were not quite what would have worn stars and crowns in pre-war days. Some of them didn’t know how to treat stewards — chucked their weight around and were rude and dismissive. Once, Mr Portway had been first-class head waiter in the Aramac on the Australian run. The passengers had been ladies and gentlemen then; they treated you decently and also they tipped well. Often on arrival in Sydney Mr Portway’s pockets had bulged with five-pound notes, and in those days five nicker was five nicker and bought a lot. Of course he didn’t keep it all himself: like the table waiters, he passed some of it on to the pantry and galley. The waiters did it because if they didn’t, then they would get rotten pantry service and passengers kept waiting didn’t tip well.