by John Wingate
As Rugged wove her way through the congested harbour, the chaos became pandemonium. Tracers flew in every direction, as ships fired one upon another and even the shore batteries joined in the fun and were spiritedly engaging each other.
Bullets whined in the darkness, smacking against the steel casing of the submarine. Above the din, Stack’s voice yelled suddenly.
“Davis is hit bad, sir!”
Peter tore his eyes away from his glasses and glanced over the bridge at the gun’s crew. Davis lay sprawled by the mounting, his body slumped near the edge of the casing, one arm trailing and flapping over the side but even by the light of the sporadic flashes, Peter could see that he was dead.
“Carry on firing, I’m coming down,” Peter yelled.
“Davis is dead, sir. Permission to man the gun?” Peter shouted to his Captain.
“Carry on,” Joe answered, crouched low over the voicepipe as he conned the boat through the crowded harbour.
Peter leaped over the bridge-side, scrambled down the iron rungs of the ladder and then ran forward to take Davis’s place at the mounting.
On the shore, men could be seen running to man the launches which were secured to the jetties by slip-ropes, and then the throaty roar of an E-boat starting up her engines burst familiarly on Peter’s ears.
“E-boat starting up,” Peter shouted up to the Captain on the bridge, and he pointed towards the jetty to port.
“Let’s get out of here!” muttered the Captain above the din as the gun banged away at any target that presented itself, yellow spurts of flame piercing the blackness. An overwhelming roar burst upon their ears as a small petrol tanker exploded and vivid tongues of flame shot hundreds of feet into the air.
Peter’s stomach turned over at the horrifying sight and he looked away. Even at this stage of the war he could not enjoy the actual process of annihilation.
“Check! Check! Check! Cease firing — clear the gun!” the Captain shouted as he swung the boat seawards towards the entrance. “Clear the tower. Stand by to dive!”
Peter was by the gun and he heard the order above the tumult.
“Clear the gun!” he shouted, as he stooped over Davis’s slumped body. He quickly turned the man over, but sickened at the sight. He could do nothing for him.
“Here, Stack, give me a hand.”
Stack was crouching over Peter.
“Clear the gun, do you hear?” Joe’s voice bellowed angrily. “Leave Davis and get below.”
Peter looked at Stack who turned and made for the bridge.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Peter yelled as he gently lowered the shattered body to the casing. “God rest your soul,” he whispered as he sprang after Stack who was already disappearing over the lip of the bridge.
“Full ahead together!”
The boat surged forward, as Peter reached the bridge.
“Lookout astern, Pilot. Sub, keep a lookout ahead! Remainder, clear the bridge!”
The bridge was cleared in a few seconds, save for the Captain and his two officers. Already the entrance buoy was close on their port bow, looming larger with every second that passed.
“I can’t dive until we’re a mile outside, can I, Pilot?”
“No, sir: only thirty feet of water.”
“Go below, Pilot, and start the echo sounder. Let me know as soon as I’ve got forty feet.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Peter was left alone with his Captain.
“Keep your eyes skinned astern, Sub, while I take her out.
Cleaving through the water, the little submarine strained forward to reach freedom before the pursuing hounds could pounce upon her in the shallows. “Six minutes should do it, Sub,” said the Captain, as the buoy slid past them. “Keep your fingers crossed!”
“E-boats astern, sir!” Peter interrupted, “I can just make out a bow wave.”
“To blazes with them!”
Slowly the faint smudge astern gained upon them, becoming larger and splitting into two distinct V’s of foaming bow waves. They were less than half a mile astern now and gaining at every second.
“Sounding?” the Captain shouted down the voicepipe.
“Thirty-two feet, sir,” a voice replied.
Another agonising minute dragged by, while the overhauling shapes of the E-boats enlargened.
“Thirty-five feet, sir.”
Long pencil lines of red tracer slowly spiralled towards them whistling overhead in the darkness, a shrill whine howling above the wind on the bridge. The E-boats, going like bats out of hell, had now opened out on either quarter, closing in for the kill, a mountain of white water building up astern of them as they closed in at forty knots.
Joe dared not risk waiting any longer, even though he had not received any further information on his depth of water.
“Hard-a-port! Dive! Dive! Dive!” he shouted down the voicepipe, while he pressed the diving alarm.
Peter jumped for the hatch and let himself down with a rush. The upper lid clanged behind him as the Captain shut it.
“Twenty-eight feet,” he roared above the din.
Number One took her down in nineteen seconds, the boat still steaming at full speed. Tumbling out at the bottom, the Captain exchanged glances with Number One and nodded.
“Shut off for depth-charging!” the First Lieutenant rapped.
“Watch your trim,” the Captain muttered, “or we’ll be aground, Number One.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Group down, slow ahead together.”
Twenty-five feet — twenty-eight — thirty — thirty-three feet.
Poor Davis has found his grave, Peter thought to himself as a harsh scraping, like sandpaper along a stone floor, scratched along the metal sides. They were grounding on the seabed.
“Group up, full ahead together. Twenty-five feet, Number One.”
In an agony of suspense, all eyes watched the pointers of the depth gauges stick at thirty-three feet. Overhead the rumble of propellers roared all about them, drowning everything in a tumult of sound. Strained faces waited, waited for the shattering explosions that would send them all to Kingdom Come.
Thirty-three — thirty-three — thirty-three feet. The pointers remained motionless.
Thirty-three — thirty-two — thirty feet — with a jerk she shuddered, trembled and started to shake herself free. At that instant, an overwhelming shock squeezed the minute submarine like an egg crushed in a man’s hand. Men gasped as the surrounding air constricted them like a smothering blanket, and expanded again as quickly.
Lights flickered and went out. The pale emergency lighting clicked on. Men groped in the semi-darkness to hold themselves upright in the jumping boat which was now out of control, for she leaped at an alarming angle, almost breaking surface.
With his heart thumping, Peter watched the depth gauge.
Twenty — twenty — nineteen — nineteen feet.
“Flood Q. Full ahead together,” the First Lieutenant snapped. All eyes were mesmerised by the depth gauges, for a break-surface at this moment, with the E-boats directly over them, meant disaster.
Nineteen — eighteen — eighteen — eighteen, and she hung, balancing between life and sudden death, with twelve inches as the margin.
Eighteen — eighteen — nineteen — nineteen — twenty — twenty-one…
Good old Number One! He’d got her!
A ripple of relief was audible throughout the boat, as the dreadful rumble of the E-boats faded away astern, followed by the muffled explosions of depth charges well away to starboard.
“Nice work, Number One,” Joe said, looking his First Lieutenant straight in the eye. “Do you think that we gave the Sub enough to do?” he grinned.
With a roar of delight which released the tense atmosphere, the whole boat joined in the merriment and burst into deep, rumbling laughter. They were safe and could relax for a moment.
But an empty hammock swung lazily in the fore-ends.
CHAPTER 6
&
nbsp; Too Close!
The area of Burat-el-Sun seemed an unlikely hunting ground for Rugged on the following day. Joe took her down the coast, keeping an eye on the motor traffic as it poured eastwards along the shore road but, apart from air patrols, they spent a quiet day, men snatching their rest while they had the chance.
Before turning in for the forenoon sleep, a small group of men mustered in the Control Room and when they had gathered round him in a semicircle, Joe addressed them by the for’d periscope.
He explained that Davis had given his life and how there had been no chance of recovering his body. Davis had found his last resting place in the way he would have liked: Rugged had committed him to the deep as she dived. The small band gathered round their Captain while he said a shortened Burial Service. Submariners said little, but the service ended with a murmured “Amen”.
“Carry on,” Joe said.
They went for’d slowly, and, as the Coxswain passed Joe, he held out his hand. “Thank you, sir,” he said.
The day passed and the night, dark and cheerless, soon stole upon them. Rugged surfaced and charged her batteries.
“Permission for the Officer of the Watch on the bridge?” asked Peter, glancing at the clock which showed five minutes to eleven.
“Yes,” Hickey’s voice grunted from the voicepipe.
After taking over the Watch from Hickey, Peter settled down to his second night’s watch ‘on the billet’, as the patrol area was called. At the back of the bridge, the Captain slept fitfully on a camp stool while the figures of the two lookouts leaned over their respective sides of the bridge, glasses to their tired eyes, as they methodically swept through their sectors of the horizon.
It was very dark, but shortly after midnight a golden orb climbed out of the sea, throwing a pale shaft of dancing light on the black water. The moon, aloof and cold, slipped slowly and majestically high into the night sky, throwing the submarine into relief.
It’s like being caught in the nude! thought Peter as the moonlight shimmered off the boat’s sides, making her visible for miles. Though trimmed right down so that her casing was barely visible, her conning tower stood out like a house. Slowly weaving across the moon’s track, the submarine zigzagged her way, the diesels roaring and coughing into the night.
As Peter’s glasses swept the horizon, a grey smudge checked him so that he looked again. Yes! There it was. A small dark object, then another and another.
“Captain, sir!” he shouted, keeping his eyes on the target.
“Yes?” mumbled a hoarse voice, as the Captain stumbled to his feet.
“Three small objects right ahead,” reported Peter.
The Captain picked them up almost immediately.
“E-boats, I think,” he murmured. “Can you see any more, Sub?”
Straining his eyes, Peter waited a full minute before replying.
“Yes, sir … five … six. Looks like a small convoy.”
“Yes, that’s what it is. Sound the night alarm.”
Peter jumped for the night-alarm knob and pushed it. Below, in the red gloom, the alarm rattlers awoke the boat, sending men still drowsy from the sleep of exhaustion pell-mell to their diving stations.
“Stand by all tubes, stand by gun action!” the Captain sang out down the voicepipe.
In the moonlight ahead, Peter could just pick out a dozen small tankers, plodding their way in the same direction westwards. Rugged was slowly overhauling them from astern.
“They often keep no lookout astern, and we are down-moon of them, so I’ll stalk them, Sub. Let’s see whether we can get within range so that we can use the gun. I think that those two escorts are F-lighters, armed with eighty-eights. We want to look out for them. It’s not worth wasting our ‘fish’ on small coasters as they would probably run under anyway.”
“Gun’s crew ready, sir,” a voice reported up the voicepipe.
“Gun action! Load with flashless H.E.,” the Captain ordered.
Once more the agile gun’s crew emerged from the conning tower hatch and nipped nimbly over the bridge to bring their gun to the ‘ready’.
“Target — first ship on the port bow,” yelled Peter.
“On target, sir,” roared the gunlayer.
It was another game of cat and mouse, however, for Rugged, her diesels at maximum speed, was only just able to overhaul the small silhouettes which slowly, so slowly, grew in size. She was now less than a mile from them, yet they showed no sign of alarm.
“Haven’t those F-lighters got closer?” asked Joe suspiciously.
“Don’t think so, sir,” replied Peter, who had been glaring at them for so long that he hadn’t noticed any enlargement of their outlines.
“They must see us soon,” murmured the Captain to himself, and then spoke out loud. “Do you reckon that you can hit at this range, Sub? It’s about twelve hundred yards.”
Peter could now see the tiny ships pitching and yawing on their erratic courses, the pale moonlight stippling their rusty sides. But the F-lighters showed no sign, keeping rigidly on their station.
“Could we get a little closer, sir?” he asked.
“All right, but I don’t like the smell of it,” replied the Captain as he ordered down the voicepipe. “Stop the generators!”
The roar of the diesels died away and the following silence seemed uncanny. There was nothing to be heard except the lapping of the wavelets along the rounded pressure hull.
One thousand yards. Nine hundred yards. The inaction was suspicious. Surely they must have been sighted?
“Open fire, Sub.”
“Open fire!” yelled Peter, leaning over the lip of the bridge.
“Trainer on!” the voice of the new trainer growled.
Able Seaman Bowles had taken Davis’s place at the gun. Peter watched the gunlayer. With his eyes glued to the sights, he squeezed the trigger as the crosswires came on.
Peter was watching for the fall of shot, waiting for it to burst on the silver shape fine on the port bow, but the Captain was concentrating on the F-lighters, barely nine hundred yards away, their washes streaming in sparkling bubbles astern of them.
At the very moment that the gun’s first round crashed into the night, the nearest F-lighter spun round on its tail, pushing a surging bow wave ahead of it. As it came beam on, its familiar and sinister shape became apparent, whilst it leapt forward with green tracer spurting from its guns.
“E-boats!”
The warning rang out through the night.
“Clear the gun! Dive! Dive! Dive!”
The urgent summons of the klaxons could be heard even above the din. The gun’s crew, for the second time in twenty-four hours, leaped up the bridge-side and hurled themselves down into the gaping cavity of the conning tower hatch. The Captain stood alone, waiting for the last man up from the gun. Already the water was lapping up the side of the bridge as the boat gathered way, but not until the gunlayer had dropped into the void below him, did the Captain swing himself down, pulling the upper lid shut after him.
“This is too close,” he muttered to himself, before shouting to the Control Room “— one clip on! Port twenty, one hundred and twenty feet. Shut off for depth-charging!”
The last glimpse that Joe had before shutting the hatch remained etched on his memory for the remainder of his life. Bright moonlight washed the sea with its pale beauty, the phosphorescence of the disturbed seawater sparkling on the calm surface. This peaceful background seemed to accentuate the savage shapes of the leaping E-boats which thrashed towards him. As Joe dipped below the rim of the bridge, the leading boat was barely two hundred yards away. Her gleaming bows lunged hungrily through the cascade of spume and spray. Green and white tracer smacked about the side of the conning tower, but already only the periscope standards remained visible in the flurry of sparkling foam, as Rugged gained speed in her desperate dive.
The leading E-boat, engines roaring in the stillness of the night, saw the swirl of the standards as they dipped ahea
d of her. The young German Ober-Leutnant held his breath as he waited for the crash of his propellers against the submarine. His hands twitched nervously on the depth-charge firing lever, as he waited to give the coup de grace to this English swine. Another three seconds now! As he leaned over the side of his small armoured bridge, he saw the swirling water where the standards had disappeared.
“Fire!” he yelled as his hand jerked on the firing lever. “Gott strafe England!”
Two wicked depth charges rolled over the foaming stern. Almost instantaneously, two shattering explosions rent the night, hurling spouts of cascading water high into the moonlight. The E-boat heeled over to port to make way for the other three boats now tearing into the attack.
Down below in Rugged, the First Lieutenant heard the “Dive, dive, dive!” order from the voicepipe, even before the klaxons shattered the silence below. He nodded quickly to the Outside E.R.A. who jumped for the panel and pulled the main vent operating levers. The vents clunked open, as the first man tumbled into the Control Room from the canvas trunking, stumbling as he swiftly moved for’d to his diving station. The hum of the main motors rose to a shriller whine as the submarine gathered speed to take up a steep bow-down angle, while the planesmen spun their handwheels over to ‘hard-a-dive’.
“Shut off for depth-charging,” Easton ordered quietly, his eyes fixed on the depth gauges, hands swiftly flicking the pump order instrument. The bulkhead doors swung ponderously, shutting off each compartment from the next. It was difficult to stand upright now, for the boat had taken on a steeper angle — thirty-five — thirty-eight — forty-two feet and men were still tumbling out of the canvas trunking when the crash came.
A savage wrench jolted the whole boat. The curved steel sides jumped towards them and then as suddenly bounced out again. The boat plunged into darkness as the lights shattered from the shock. Mercifully, a few emergency lights clicked on automatically, and threw a thin light on the confused scene in the Control Room.
Fifty — fifty-five — sixty-five — seventy-eight feet. The luminous pointers spun round the dials of the depth gauges alarmingly fast, for the boat was now out of control as she shot into the black depths of the ocean. Men lay struggling in heaps at the forward end of the Control Room.