Air roaring now; torchlight touching faces here and there: some of them, since they hadn’t expected to be illuminated, showed anxiety to live. She wasn’t moving.
“Stop blowing!”
Silence, when the flow of air cut off. That was a hell of a lot of it gone already, to no purpose. He couldn’t understand it. If he’d been taking his final submarine-course exams now and a question had required him to explain such a situation, he couldn’t have. He heard Ruck mutter, “There must be some—”
She’d quivered. Like a dog stirring in a dream: a little shake. Then she was still again, like a dead creature on the seabed.
Wykeham suggested,”We’ve taken a slight bow-down angle, sir, d’you think?”
It was hard to judge, and the fore-and-aft spirit-level was useless because depthcharging had split the bubble up. Paul thought Wykeham might be right, though.
Ruck asked McClure, “What’s the bottom here, pilot?”
“Supposed to be sand, sir.”
“That’s what I thought. Funny sort of sand. “ He chuckled. Several other men laughed with him, and Paul was one of them—for no reason that he could have explained. Ruck told Quinn, “Blow one main ballast.”
“Blow one, sir!”
He had the torch in his hand as he did it. Light flaring round. And this time, she moved: her forepart seemed to jerk free suddenly and begin to lift, the angle growing steeply …
“Stop blowing?”
Quinn shut the air off. Bow still rising.
“Blow four main ballast!”
Now she was coming up. Needle moving in the depthgauge: hundred and thirty-four feet—thirty-two …
“Stop blowing. Open number one main vent.”
Because of the bow-up angle. Quinn’s hand went to the top-most vent-lever and pulled it out towards him: you heard the thud as the vent banged open.
“Shut!”
He slammed the lever in again. She was on an even keel, more or less, and rising steadily. Passing the hundred-foot mark, and accelerating as she rose, through the natural effect of becoming lighter as depth and density decreased.
Sixty feet. Coming up too fast. But it was better than being stuck on the bottom—in mud, or silt, or whatever had been so loath to let her go.
Ruck muttered, “It’s a great life if you can stand it.” On his way to the ladder. “You all right, signalman?”
Janaway nodded. His grin was wolfish in the torchlight. Face bearded and running wet with sweat, sick-looking. The grin was a grimace. He said thickly, “Better every minute, sir.”
“Needle and thread tomorrow. Two new red bars on the Roger. Right?” He looked round. “Come on, Sub.”
Thirty feet. Twenty-seven … Paul climbed, following Ruck. The idea of having clean air to breathe was staggering. Dreaming this? High on the ladder, he clamped his arms round Ruck’s knees. Not seaboots: it would be embarrassing to be left hugging a pair of boots and to have mislaid one’s captain. He could hear him easing the pins out of the clips and then the clang as one clip swung free. From below, Wykeham’s voice called, “Twenty feet!”
He repeated, “Twenty—”
“All right, I can hear …”
“Fifteen … Fourteen … Twelve … Ten …”
Ruck eased the second clip towards him. Pressure inside the boat lifted the hatch fractionally off its seating: despite a weight of solid water on the other side of it, only the clip’s leverage was preventing it flying open. Air leaking out …
“Eight feet, sir!”
Air pouring up now, roaring up the tower: a strong wind of it, foul-smelling and fog-coloured, flooding out like pus from a boil. Paul’s weight hanging on Ruck’s legs. The hatch crashed open. Ruck yelled, “All right, Sub!”
He let go, hearing from below Wykeham’s yell of, “Start main engines!”
Air—salt-wet, fresh, cold, dark air … He was out of the hatch, in the sea-swept bridge. Dragging the voicepipe cock open. Ruck was a black silhouette revolving slowly, glasses at his eyes … He’d lowered them, muttering, “All clear, thank God.” Stooping to the voicepipe: “Four-two-oh revolutions. Up Vickers gunners.” The diesels had already coughed themselves into loud, grumbling life: Ultra herself, rolling to the swell and beginning to forge ahead, was suddenly, astonishingly, alive …
Paul had his glasses up, sweeping across the bow. Ruck too, searching the dark sea and hazy impression of a horizon to starboard. Both of them silent, concentrating, straining their eyes through the binoculars and the darkness—knowing this was the only way, now, they’d stay alive.
POSTSCRIPT
In the raid on St Nazaire there was no Sauerkraut and no direct attack on the U-boat shelter. Whether such an attempt could have succeeded—perhaps using the harbour-defence launches, of which there were several in the St Nazaire Basin that night—may be arguable. The raid as it did take place is described here as Jack Everard would have seen it if he’d been involved in such a sideshow.
Of the assault craft only three MLs and the MGB got back to England. The totals of British killed and missing were Navy eighty-five, Army fifty-nine. Many others were taken prisoner. Estimates of the number of Germans who allowed themselves to be blown up with Campbeltown vary a great deal; one account puts the figure as high as 380.
The main target was destroyed, and the “Tirpitz Dock” was out of action for the duration of the war. Sir Winston Churchill described the operation as “a deed of glory intimately involved in high strategy.”
Ultra is a fictional submarine, and so is Unslaked, but in other respects I have tried to draw a lifelike portrait of the 10th Flotilla and its work. I admit that in order to tie up the two themes of the novel I have “fiddled” some dates: for instance the convoy operation from Alexandria (in the course of which Admiral Vian fought his magnificent Second Battle of Sirte) was completed a few days before the attack on St Nazaire, so Ultra would have been back in Malta before Jack sailed from Falmouth. And some events in Malta—for example, the strafing of the rest camp and the bombing of the Sliema flats—have been switched from April into March. I did this because such happenings illustrate the conditions under which the Malta base operated, and the story had to be set in March.
I am not sure that “Mussolini’s Mysterious Measures” were in operation in March 1942. They certainly were a few months later. For this kind of detail, which one might have forgotten, I have been able to make use of a notebook which I kept during my own first submarine patrol. I was a midshipman, allowed to go along for “submarine experience”; I kept watches as a look-out, as a planesman, in the motor room, etc., but having no diving-stations duties there was time to make notes during attacks. The patrol was from Malta, in HM Submarine Unbending, in January 1943. In the Messina Straits her captain, Lieutenant E. S. Stanley, torpedoed a 9000-ton troopship within half a mile of the beach near Cape dell’Armi. Unbending was then heavily depthcharged and kept down for thirty-six hours, protosol being spread on trays to improve the air. She finally returned to Malta with defects listed in my notes as: Periscope will not rise. After pump out of action. Bubble split up. After plane indicator and shallow gauges out. Gyro fell over. Battery containers cracked.
Upholder, whose captain was Lieutenant-Commander David Wanklyn VC, DSO, was lost in April 1942 on her twenty-fifth Mediterranean patrol. Urge, commanded by Wanklyn’s close friend Lieutenant-Commander E. P. Tomkinson DSO, survived her by only a fortnight. Tomkinson had heard, from a distance, the depthcharge attack that destroyed Upholder.
“Shrimp” Simpson left Malta at the end of January 1943, and the ship in which he was taking passage to Alexandria was torpedoed and sunk by an Italian submarine. He survived, later to become Flag Officer (Submarines), and he retired in 1954. He farmed in New Zealand for some years and died shortly before his “professional autobiography,” Periscope View, was published in 1972.
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A Share of Honour: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 4 Page 33