by John Wingate
“Blow Q!” shouted Number One. The air rushed into the boat as the tank was vented inboard, but still she plunged on downwards, now at a twenty-five-degree bow-down angle.
“After-planes jammed, sir,” the voice of the grey-haired coxswain on the after-planes calmly reported. “At hard-a-dive!”
“Thank you, Coxswain. Pass by phone to the after-ends. After-planes in hand,” snapped the First Lieutenant.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Hanging on to a pipe with one hand, the telegraphsman spun the telephone handle and passed the order.
A hundred and sixty — a hundred and eighty — two hundred feet. The rate of dive had increased rapidly and now only fifty feet remained before the boat’s safe diving depth of two hundred and fifty feet would be reached. On trials she had been tested to this depth, but below that, the designers could not predict at what depth she would disintegrate like a squashed fruit.
Down — down — down… She seemed to slide away from under their very feet, the pointers on the gauges now racing by the luminous numbers on the dials.
Two hundred and forty — two hundred and fifty — two hundred and sixty — two hundred and seventy … jumping in ‘tens’ now!
Providing there was enough high-pressure air left in the bottles, and that the high-pressure lines were intact, there always remained one last resort when plunging to destruction.
“Why doesn’t he blow the main ballast tanks? Please God, let him blow those main ballast tanks,” Peter whispered to himself, remembering his training course which seemed so far away in murky, dreary, bleak but oh-so-friendly Blyth.
The Captain gripped the rungs of the steel ladder.
“Blow number one main ballast!” he ordered crisply.
Eagerly the Outside E.R.A. spun the air valve open, to send the high-pressure air screaming along the airlines to the main ballast tanks in the eyes of the boat.
“Stop blowing!”
All eyes hung on the quivering needles of the gauges — it was now or never, for the pointers showed three hundred and ten — three hundred and fifteen — three hundred and eighteen — three hundred and twenty feet. The pointers hung motionless, while at any moment sudden calamity must surely burst upon them. Peter held his breath. A pin dropped at this moment would have sounded like a steam hammer.
Suddenly he felt the bows begin to lift under his feet, as she started to take up her new level. Abruptly the bows sheered up and away from the hungry expectant depths and then canted upwards at an alarming bow-up angle. She started to shoot upwards, as the water was expelled from the for’d main ballast tank.
Three hundred and fifteen — three hundred and ten — three hundred feet … she swooped upwards.
“Crack number two main ballast,” ordered the Captain.
The air screamed to the after main ballast tank in the stern.
“Stop blowing!” Joe snapped.
The boat levelled off to a five-degree bow-down angle but, in spite of the planes being at hard-a-dive, she was still surging upwards out of control. Two hundred and ten — two hundred — one hundred and eighty — one hundred and sixty feet…
“Don’t speed up, Number One, they’re waiting for us up top,” the Captain murmured to the First Lieutenant. “I’ll try and catch a main ballast trim. Try to hold her on the planes — we’ll have to risk the bubbles.”
One hundred feet. Eighty feet.
“Open main vents,” the calm tones of the Captain ordered.
The main vents thunked open, allowing the air in the main ballast tanks to escape to the surface in enormous bubbles, and thereby giving away their position to the waiting enemy.
“Shut main vents. Port ten. Half ahead together.”
The whine of the motors slowly rose in pitch, as the boat gathered speed and turned to port, opening her distance as far away as possible from her pursuers. With the air in her main ballast tanks partly liberated, more water flooded in to check her crazy upward swoop. The pointer dithered at fifty feet and she slowly sank back to eighty, ninety, one hundred feet, Number One just holding her on the planes.
“Slow ahead together. Steady … steer one-eight-oh,” ordered the Captain. By taking the boat through the wake of the convoy, he hoped to confuse the attackers.
“H.E. increasing, red six-oh, sir,” reported Elliott on his Asdic set.
Already the noise of fast-running propellers thrashed above them, and the noise drummed into a roar as the hunter rumbled overhead. Not a sound in the boat as every man waited for the sickening crash of depth charges.
“Passed over, sir,” quietly reported Elliott, “H.E. fading on…”
Crash! … Crash! Crash!
The charges, which exploded some yards away on the starboard bow, shook the boat slightly, but were too far away to cause anxiety. The pursuers were dropping all that they had on to the tell-tale streams of bubbles, now seething and frothing in the moonlit sea, but hundreds of yards astern of the submarine. Joe had acted wisely by scurrying away from the scene of the tell-tale bubbles which he had been forced to vent.
“Well done, everybody!” Joe grinned. “I think we’ll slide out of this while the going’s good.”
The next day was comparatively quiet. Following the abortive moonlight attack, Rugged had surfaced an hour after the last depth-charge attack to recharge her batteries. After surfacing they had been put down three times by low-flying search aircraft, before they finally dived at dawn.
Joe was not in jocular mood at breakfast. Tired after the fruitless efforts of the night, he grimaced as his teeth sank into the mushy baked beans.
“O’Riley!” he shouted.
“Sorr?” O’Riley’s face registered innocent inquiry, as it popped round the bulkhead door.
“Take these frightful beans away and bring me some more coffee.”
“Yes, sorr.”
O’Riley scuttled into the Ward Room and left it more quickly than he had come.
“It isn’t as if we’d hit anything for all our trouble and the ‘heat’ we got — and they almost had me for a ‘sucker’!” continued Joe with his one-sided conversation.
“Yes, sir,” smiled Number One, cannily feeling his way.
“Don’t say ‘Yes, sir’, blast you!” Joe roared. “You just sit there, grinning like a Cheshire cat.”
“No, sir,” replied Number One, poker-faced.
Joe exploded into a gust of laughter. The storm was over.
“Good old Number One, he won’t be drawn! He’s too used to the edge of my tongue, Sub!” said Joe, addressing Peter, while Hickey kept the periscope watch in the Control Room.
“Well, Number One? What do you suggest now?”
“Let’s get out of the area, as they are obviously alerted in these parts, sir. Let’s go up to our old hunting grounds at Hammamet. We had better luck there last time.”
“Yes, and catch ’em as they come round the corner. The snag is that there’s not much water for us there. I don’t like that but beggars can’t be choosers! Sub, take over from the Pilot and tell him to let me have a course and E.T.A. for Hammamet. It’s about two hundred miles away. Care for a game of ‘liars’, Number One?”
“Yes, I’d love one when the Sub gets back.”
Peter went into the Control Room.
The Captain lowered his voice. “How’s Sinclair doing with you?”
“Very well, sir. Reliable.”
“Good. That’s what I hoped you’d say. Let’s get on with the game. Aces up and Kings towards.” Then he carefully adjusted the grimy dice in front of him.
When Peter re-joined them, the Control Room crew could hear nothing but bursts of laughter from the Ward Room, mixed with the rattling of tumbling dice on the mahogany table.
The storm was over, but Joe had hated letting them down and all aboard knew it.
The moon slowly sank behind the high mountains, leaving a cold glow as a backdrop to the silhouetted peaks. The darkness closed in rapidly, enfolding Rugged in a mantle of
invisibility. It was three-fifteen a.m. and Hickey had just taken over from Number One on the bridge. He shivered as the first of the dawn’s clammy coldness enveloped him. Trimmed right down, the submarine’s small conning tower was almost invisible, as she slid silently through the darkness. The lookouts shook themselves and drew their Ursula jackets closer around them. Hickey swept the landward horizon with his binoculars for the twentieth time. In his last sweep, a faint blur, darker than the rest of the horizon, checked him. He swung across it again, but the other way this time and — yes, there WAS something there!
“Captain, sir!” shouted Hickey to the back of the bridge.
“Ye-e-s?” mumbled Joe, stumbling sleepily to Hickey’s side.
Lining up his glasses with Hickey’s, he soon found the object.
“Small ship, about two thousand tons. Sound the night alarm!” the Captain ordered Hickey.
Down below, the night-alarm rattlers clattered, once more bringing sleep-hungry men scrambling to their feet.
“No blooming peace for the blooming wicked,” the Coxswain muttered to himself, as he rushed to his position at the after-planes in the Control Room. The Captain’s voice could just be heard as the muffled orders came down the voicepipe.
“Group up, full ahead together. Stand by all tubes!” The boat shuddered as she sped forward to work up to her utmost speed, the white bow wave creaming ahead of her and the phosphorescence gleaming and tumbling down the wet sides of her hull.
Manoeuvring into a position ahead of the target, the Captain stopped and waited on the steamer’s port bow. Slowly the target grew larger. The men on the bridge waited breathlessly, while they continued to sweep their own sectors with their binoculars, just in case of errors.
The ship bore down upon them, growing larger at every second. Her blunt bow shoved a massive wall of white water as she wallowed her ponderous way down the coast, oblivious of her lurking danger.
“Confound it. I’m too close,” muttered Joe to himself. “Still, it’s too late now. I’ll have to stay where I am.”
Slowly the target bore down upon them, her bearing drawing quickly ahead of Rugged’s bows. Now she seemed right on top of them, looming down upon them, ready to rip them open.
But Joe never wavered. His knuckles gleamed white on the side of the bridge as he waited, his long body crouched low over the starboard torpedo sight, his eye glued along the bar.
“Fire one!” his voice snapped.
A slight tremor…
“Fire two!”
Another tremor, as the second torpedo loosed into the night.
The thin trail of white bubbles spurted like a pencil line ahead of them, and then there was an explosion that seemed to rend the heavens apart. A vivid, electric-blue flash split the night and a sheet of orange flame swept upwards, blinding the bridge personnel. A roar, which nearly split their eardrums, rolled over them, reverberating again and again far into the night, while strange sighings and hissings gradually replaced the diabolic pandemonium. Then a loud splash, close on their starboard bow, shot a shower of seawater slopping over the bridge.
“Down, all of you! Cover up! She’s an ammunition ship!” roared Joe.
The four men on the bridge needed no reminding! They dropped to the deck instinctively and shielded their heads with crossed arms as the splashes, sizzling and hissing, seethed in the water around them. A great clang rent the air, and Rugged shivered from stem to stern, as a large hunk of metal fell from the skies to land on her after-ends.
Down below, the Leading Torpedoman, Flint, was watching his switches and ammeters in the Motor Room. Suddenly the boat quivered and the air split above his head and he fell to the steel deckplates, stunned by the concussion. When he came to his senses seawater was streaming on to his sweating face.
“Water! Water!” he screamed through to the Engine Room. “Water’s pouring into the Motor Room! Tell the bridge!” and he tore frantically at his switches, where blue flashes spurted, choking from the acrid smell of burning and from the billows of brown fumes which circled about the Motor Room.
On the bridge, the Captain had felt the boat shudder from the blow on the after-ends, so he was not surprised when he received the report from the Motor Room.
“Blow number two main ballast tank!” he shouted down the voicepipe.
The air roared into the after tank and cocked the submarine’s stern high into the air, free from the water; while in the Motor Room Flint, dazed by the fumes which swirled about him, gradually noticed that only a trickle of water was now seeping in from the jagged rent in the steel plating above the port switchboard. Through this he saw stars twinkling, and he laughed. He was quickly sobered, however, by the realisation that the boat was now unable to dive.
“Here, Joey, take over while I report to the Old Man,” Flint said as he dashed out of the Motor Room, sliding neatly past the Engine Room’s silent crew. He received permission to go on to the bridge, where he reported to his Captain.
Ahead of them, apart from the bubbling of confused water, there was nothing to show that a ship had been afloat here a few seconds before. In this appalling explosion, she had disappeared in a sheet of flame to leave the submarine’s personnel shocked by their success.
“Well, that’s torn it, literally!” joked the Captain, having heard Flint’s report. “We can’t dive until we get it patched up, if that’s possible, and dawn is in two hours’ time. We’d better get cracking. Send the First Lieutenant on to the bridge.”
Number One came scuttling up into the moonlight.
“Number One, you realise the position? We can’t dive. Dawn is only two hours away and Malta two hundred miles. If we are to get back at periscope depth, we’ve got to plug that hole within the next one hundred minutes. Would both you and the Chief have a go? You may, of course, refuse if you wish, for I should have to dive if we were savaged, leaving you to fend for yourselves.”
“Of course. We’ll fix it, sir. I’ll get the Chief.”
Within two minutes, Number One and Chief E.R.A. Reginald Potts, clad in gym shoes, bathing trunks and sweaters, and each with a heaving line around his chest, slithered down to the slippery roundness of the after-ends.
The gash was nine inches long and two inches wide: quite sufficient to sink the boat. She would be unable to dive below periscope depth, even if the plug held as deep as that, because the increasing pressure would force the water through the gash and into the boat in an irresistible deluge.
Working steadily and surely, the Chief would not be hurried. His skilful fingers chopped at the wooden chocks with a seaman’s knife. Full well he realised that at dawn all their lives depended upon his present skill for there would be no second chance. As he was knocking the last chock home into the mass of cotton waste which acted as a wad in the rent, the dull purr of a prowling aircraft grew louder and louder somewhere astern of them. The Chief stopped, head cocked on one side, automatically trying to determine from whence the sound came.
Peering aft, the Captain kept his thumb on the diving alarm knob. The angry hum throbbed into a rough moan, bursting into a roar as the aircraft swept directly over them. In a moment of time that no one would ever forget, they saw the dim lights in the pilot’s cockpit of the Cant 52 on its anti-submarine patrol.
They held their breaths. They watched and waited for her to lurch into a steep bank and circle, to hurtle in upon them with all guns blazing. Waiting … waiting, the Chief licked his lips — and then suddenly it was gone.
“Thank God,” the Chief whispered, and to give vent to his feelings, he smacked the wedge home, as hard as he could.
Fifteen minutes later, just as dawn was breaking, the Chief and Number One, blue with cold, were helped down below. With a grateful grunt, they accepted hot mugs of cocoa which were thrust into their hands. Number One went to his depth gauges in the Control Room and the Chief to his warm Engine Room. The klaxon brayed, the upper lid in the conning tower clanged shut.
“Take her down to twenty-e
ight feet, Number One — slowly,” sang out the Captain from the tower.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Peter looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes to go before daylight. It had been a close shave! If this plug did not hold… Peter thrust the thought from his mind although the next thirty seconds would show.
“Eighteen feet, sir,” Number One reported quietly.
For once the Captain was not in the Control Room. He had gone aft to the Motor Room, where, amid the filth and stench from the burning switchboard, the Chief and Flint crouched to watch the plug.
“Twenty-three feet, sir,” came the report from the Control Room.
The plug started to drip as the cotton waste became saturated. The drip flooded to a trickle which splashed on to the back of the switchboard. Would it swell to a gushing torrent? The steady drip continued, and the plug held, as the Chief sighed audibly.
“Twenty-eight feet, sir,” came the report.
“Very good. Tell the First Lieutenant, ‘Twenty-eight feet and keep her there’.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Rig up drip-tins and drain that water away from the switchboard and lead it into the bilges, Flint.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“ — and, Flint.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Well done.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Joe returned to the Control Room through the Engine Room.
“Well done, Chief,” he said as he passed. “Thanks.”
“Thank you, sir. All in a day’s work, as they say.”
“Come into the Ward Room on your way for’d and have a drop of medical comforts.”
“Yes, sir, thank you” — and with a grin on his wrinkled face, which was now losing the blue shadows around the jowls, the Chief wiped his greasy hands on the seat of his swimming trunks.
And so, for the next two days, Rugged proceeded at periscope depth, steaming on the surface at night. On the morning after the second night, the friendly bluffs of Malta showed ahead.