Last Lift from Crete: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 2

by Alexander Fullerton

  Because it was going to be a long, long day. If Carnarvon got a move on they might last through it. Might. The silence came, lasted about 25 seconds before the next attack developed, a batch of a dozen 88s coming up high astern. Houston could give the HACS a run this time, with planes coming straight and high as peacetime expectations had allowed for: you could estimate height, speed, inclination, wind, et cetera, feed it down to the machine below decks—a machine presided over, like the Admiralty Fire Control Table next door to it, by Petty Officer Eustace Roddick, Gunner’s Mate—and the machine would feed back its instructions to the layers, trainers, fuse-setters at the guns. The system’s pre-war designers had only reckoned on aircraft being able to fly at 125 knots, so all the figures had to be doubled (roughly) to make the equation come out right: and there was a long sheet of paper stuck on to the machine to extend its scale.

  Astern, Masai had opened fire. Nick got up on his seat for extra height-of-eye, and trained his glasses westward to where Carnarvon had until now been only a flashing searchlight. At first he couldn’t pick up anything: Tuareg’s “X” and “Y” guns opened fire, the hard crashes of the explosions drowning nearer sounds, and there was other gunfire—Masai’s astern and Afghan’s from the landward bow. Now he had the cruiser in his glasses, he’d moved them to the right and picked up her foretop, bridge, and both funnel-tops: as he’d expected, she’d gone round to port, steering to close Blackfoot. Gunfire was one continuous blast again as he got down off the seat, and Pratt was shouting something, pointing astern: his expression was one of alarm and Nick thought the tow must have gone. It wasn’t that, thank God: the navigator had yelled, “Blackfoot is coming up astern, sir!” Thank God again: for tiny, though very much belated, sparks of sense. But probably much too bloody late. The Junkers 88s were coming up astern too, not only Blackfoot: they were almost overhead now—twin-engined, black, big-looking against the bright morning sky: the other half of the formation had circled away eastward and were turning in now to make their attack from the direction of the land. Nick leant out over the side of the bridge and put his glasses up for a glimpse of Marsh’s ship chasing up astern, but all he was looking at was gunsmoke hanging over his own ship and Masai. The report must have come down from the director, which had the advantage of being above most smoke and all but the biggest splashes. He’d thought of the tow first when Pratt had shouted because it was what he most feared—a hit on Tuareg aft or Masai for’ard, to snap the wire or the cable. Then they’d be done for. Bombs raised humps of sea all up the port side and on the bow; the pompoms were pumping away at the 88s overhead and the four-sevens were engaging the next crowd, the detachment coming in on the beam.

  He went to the binnacle, rested a hand on Rocky Pratt’s shoulder as he checked ship’s head and glanced at the revolution indicators: everything was as it should have been. The first flight of 88s had gone on over and swung north and the other lot was rising across the sky from the Crete side: going into their dives now, more downhill runs than dives. He saw shell-bursts high astern, right up and way back behind Masai’s masthead, a couple of miles back, and those bursts led his eye to Stukas, two flights, one of five and one of four: he heard the whistle of the 88s’ bombs falling, saw the first go up to port—short—in a thick upheaval of dark sea, and a second, then four others closer and a batch of four still nearer but off Masai’s stern: then the much closer rush of the next one coming and a thought flashing through his mind, Here comes ours … Pratt’s face in shock, mouth open and eyes upward then momentarily screwed shut: water-mountains rose to starboard, thirty yards clear, explosions like blows against the Tribal’s hull and more bombs falling farther off, receding like huge footprints splashing in puddles as some vast beast plodded on. Pratt was looking up over the stern as the first of the newly-arrived Stukas went into their dives, one pair starting down while others circled left and right: he thought, They have to hit us some time; they’ll go on all day until they do … Ashcourt came from the back of the bridge and told him, “Captain (D)’s about three miles astern, sir; he’s on fire and he seems to have slowed—he was coming up quite fast but—”

  Gunfire drowned the end of it as the pompoms opened on the diving Stukas.

  “Going to be too late. Why the blazes he had to go and—” Napier shook his head, bit off words spoken in sudden anger. He had his glasses on Blackfoot, who’d just been hit again. She was about four miles ahead of the cruiser. She’d slowed down and smoke was belching from her afterpart, but that last hit had been on the for’ard part of the bridge.

  Clutterbuck’s voice boomed from the speaker: “‘X’ and ‘Y’ shift target, Stukas red one-three-oh angle of sight four-oh, blue barrage—”

  “Port twenty!”

  “Port twenty, sir …”

  Napier was at the binnacle: he’d taken over the ship from Irvine a few minutes ago, about the time they’d started having to fight off their own Stukas. McCowan still had “A” gun, the mounting for’ard, throwing shells up over Blackfoot. When she’d slowed and they’d turned directly towards her, to get in close and try to save her, the other three guns wouldn’t bear. In any case the cruiser had to protect herself as well. Now with the swing to port he was using “Q” again, as well as “A,” keeping only the after mountings and the pompoms for self-defence.

  “Midships and meet her.”

  He’d turn his ship back now: the jink had been to fox the Stukas, at least make their job less easy. There was a cloud of them in and out of a haze of smoke over Tuareg and the other Tribals: like flies round a distant runner’s head. Tuareg couldn’t do any dodging, with Masai strung on astern of her. Napier had ordered starboard wheel, and Clutterbuck was telling “Q” to follow ADP; the multiple pompoms were trained as far aft as they’d go, blazing at the yellow face of a diving 87. Blackfoot had been very badly hit …

  She was about twenty degrees on the cruiser’s port bow as Napier checked the counter-swing, steadying on this interception course which also allowed the midships gun to bear. Jack’s glasses had been focused on the Tribal leader and he’d watched a Stuka pressing its attack home almost to deck level, breaking out of its dive only when the Pilot must have been certain his bombs must hit. Amidships, somewhere abaft the bridge, a yellow-orange brilliance sparked and bloomed inside outspreading petals of black smoke, then the smoke was all you could see, the destroyer’s forepart protruding from it and her “B” gun still firing at maximum elevation, its small flame-spurts winking in the shredding eddies of the smoke. There was something both desperate and pathetic in that one gun’s puny-looking effort. Napier had doubled to the voicepipe again, a bomb had thumped into the sea to starboard and a Stuka had dived straight in after it, its siren shrieking right up to the moment of explosive impact: another, trailing smoke, was wobbling away just a few feet above the water, and the cruiser’s guns were blazing furiously at two others screaming down. Jack looked back towards Blackfoot as Napier steadied the ship directly towards her: and Blackfoot had blown up. The sound reached him as confirmation just as his mind grasped what had happened, watching the huge expanding cloud which had hidden her and a Stuka branching out through its upper fringes, arcing away towards the mountains: a stab of flame quickly smothered in the centre of the cloud was the Stuka’s bomb exploding on a ship already killed.

  Napier called down, “Starboard twenty.” Grim-faced, knowing his duty now: to get his ship and her guns to the others, leave the dead to bury the dead, seek the salvation of the living. “Midships.” A Stuka was boring down on the quarter and Clutterbuck had all the guns poked up at it, spitting flame and smoke and noise: Clutterbuck who at breakfast yesterday had blinked pale-faced across the wardroom table, that strangely calm, deliberate way he had of blinking through shiny steelframed glasses while he buttered a piece of toast and piled Oxford marmalade on it from his own private jar, and answered a remark which Jack had made to the effect that gunnery control, even a half-arsed procedure like HA gunnery control, was a peculiar employment
for a paybob.

  In fact, half the fleet were using paymasters for the job. Brand-new RNVR officers, straight out of the knife-and-fork course at King Alfred, were being drafted to Whale Island for a course of instruction in the new art, but there weren’t many such people at large yet.

  “Peculiar, do you say?” Clutterbuck had raised an eyebrow towards the paymaster commander, his boss. “Not if you give the matter a moment’s thought, my dear Everard. It’s a job requiring gumption, d’you see. Brains. It’s not at all a job for bone-headed, bloody, salt-horse ullages such as—”

  He’d stopped short as his eyes had met those of Commander Bell-Reid, who was a salt horse if there’d ever been one. Clutterbuck had smiled disarmingly. “Good morning, sir.”

  Crescendo of gunfire: then Clutterbuck’s voice from the speaker intoning the ritual, “Check, check, check,” and an isolated last shot from one of the stern mountings. Silence, now.

  Blackfoot had disappeared, and Carnarvon’s attendant Stukas had—for the moment—left them. Fine on the cruiser’s bow the cluster of surviving Tribals was almost stern-on, the air above it murky with shellbursts: sunlight flashed there on circling and diving Stukas. About five miles away, Jack thought. Chasing after them now at 22 knots, less the 12 knots or more that the destroyers would be making southwards, would close the gap at no more than ten sea-miles per hour; so it was going to take a minimum of half an hour.

  Nick hadn’t seen Blackfoot go. Houston had reported it, from his perch in the director. Gloom wasn’t much lessened, if at all, by having been aware for some time of the possibility, even likelihood, of it happening, but one’s own predicament left little time for ruminating on the fate of others. One was aware of the loss of a fine ship and of some proportion of her company of two hundred and thirty men, and that it had not been necessary. Tuareg was leader now, because Nick was the senior of the remaining COs; and now that the Luftwaffe had eliminated Blackfoot he knew that Tuareg and Masai would become the priority target in this area.

  Not quite yet, though. There was a lull in progress, and every second of it was being used: clearing gundecks of the litter of shellcases, overhauling guns, getting up stocks of ready-use ammunition, and setting more barrage fuses.

  The Luftwaffe would be busy too, refilling their bombers’ tanks and bomb racks.

  He’d sent young Chalk aft to make himself useful to Dalgleish. With the tow to keep an eye on as well as his other responsibilities, Dalgleish could probably use some help.

  “Alarm port—aircraft, red nine-oh!”

  Houston was on them too: the director had just swung round, settled on the port beam, and the barrels of “A” and “B” guns had swung to the same bearing. You could see them now slowly lifting as the angle of sight increased, and shifting in small amounts this way and that as layers and trainers followed the pointers in their dials, pointers that moved in step with the one in the director-layer’s dial up in the tower. Nick had the Stukas in his glasses now, and it was the biggest group he’d seen this week. Three flights of six planes each, then a space and then another three flights of six.

  Pratt muttered, lowering his glasses, “Bastards could do with some thinning out.” He glanced round into the bridge behind him casually, then sharply: “Sub, put your bloody hat on!”

  Ashcourt grinned as he reached for his tin helmet. Pratt turned back, grumbling, “Cooling his fat head.”

  Afghan, weaving ahead of them, opened fire. Fire-gongs rang down on Tuareg’s gundecks and the show was on the road again, the guns’ crashes and the ringing in her steel and in men’s heads and, up around the oncoming yellow-snouted bombers, puff-balls opening like brown woolly fists with the Stukas streaking on, flying straight and level at the moment so that Houston had the HA director above him controlling the guns, shooting by the book, an AA shoot at this stage and not a barrage. After each salvo there was a pause, and just as deafness seemed to be easing off in your eardrums there’d be another thunderclap, and just as regularly a new group of shell-bursts that broke open against the blue background of the sky, adding to those from Afghan and Masai. Now they were splitting up, some one way and some the other, others coming on but weaving, jinking, rate of fire increasing as the guns switched to barrage fire. Deafness was cumulative, building while the action lasted. The first two planes were tipping over, lowering their yellow noses as if to inspect for the first time the shell-bursts that were plastering the air they were about to dive through. He saw one explode: a flash, black smoke-burst, cloud of debris scattering: only one plane diving now: the next pair tearing in, dodging and bucketing through the bursts, this front-runner half-hidden in them, its siren’s ear-splitting note rising as it swept down at the ships. Pompoms giving all they had, point-fives stammering from both sides. Ammunition wouldn’t last the day out if this went on—it wouldn’t even last till noon. The Stuka was hit, flaming, on its back and falling away to port, but there were two others—no, four, two beyond them—in their dives and no pause in the barrage, in the huge expenditure of shells, two more bombers coming in shallowly from astern and yet another brace steeply from right ahead, so there was no question of shooting at individual attackers—except at close range, for the pompoms and point-fives. The best you could do was fill the air with shells and pray for the things to fly into them.

  A bomb had gone up astern of Masai: about eight Stukas were diving on her and half a dozen on Tuareg, one levelling out over Afghan now with its bomb raising the sea ahead of her as she swung hard astarboard: you glimpsed pieces at a time, saw bits here and bits there through a blanket of noise and smoke: behind it was the recurrent and sick certainty that it couldn’t last. Afghan, being free to dodge, was not a favourite target and she was having a comparatively easy time, contributing her firepower mostly to the barrage above this tow. Flame shot up in a streak like a gas-jet, and as the top of it seemed to pinch inwards a fireball rose from that: burning gas—ammunition, a cordite fire? Masai— from her stern, where a bomb had burst. Smoke now erupting: her after magazine, he guessed. Magazine and shellroom, respectively port and starboard sides, were under the “X” gun-mounting, and immediately for’ard of that was an oil-fuel tank. He had to think it out, get facts and probabilities straight in his mind, thinking of what Masai’s position would be now and what could be done about it, if anything. The tillerflat bulkhead was already exposed to the sea, and that would have been an internal explosion about 25 feet for’ard of it. But it was whether the bulkhead for’ard of the explosion held that would decide whether she sank or floated.

  The bombers’ siren-screams were howls of exaltation piercing bedlam: another Stuka had gone down burning, spinning, and the sea was lifting all around as planes hurtled in from all angles and all directions, plummeting through the cloud of shell-bursts screaming for blood to dip their yellow beaks in. One disintegrating, flung over as a shell burst under it, two others weaving as they flew off towards the mountains, one of them trailing smoke: and one right ahead now, coming down near-vertically, pompoms blasting up at it from all three destroyers. It was beginning to pull out, bomb falling clear, shiny like a toy with the flicker of the sun on it as it turned over in the air: the Stuka had flown into converging streams of pompom shells, and flames were licking round its cockpit. The bomb went into the sea but so close to Masai’s stem that its fins might have scraped it: sea mushroomed up from the explosion, raining across both ships: Nick felt Tuareg’s sudden lunge and it was the thing he’d dreaded, the tow parting.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Stop both engines. Port twenty-five.” Over the blare of guns he heard the swelling volume of a Stuka’s siren: it wasn’t his business, it was Houston’s and the gunners’. He yelled at Pratt, “Tell them to slip the tow!” Pratt was at the A/S telephone. The pompoms had allowed him to make that audible but now they drowned the voicepipe acknowledgements from CPO Habgood: a Stuka was pulling out of its dive higher than usual, he heard the whistling rush of its bomb and then the hard whumpf of it explodin
g in the sea, not in his field of view but too close for comfort. Then in slackening gunfire he caught Pratt’s shouted report, “All gone aft, sir!” That meant the tow, they’d knocked the slip off: he told the coxswain, “Half ahead together, three hundred revolutions. Midships.” The stop-engines order had been a precaution against getting wire wrapped round the screws: if there was a wire trailing and a screw turning that was what invariably happened, and this wouldn’t have been the best time or place for it; but with the slip knocked off, the cable would have gone straight down, taking the wire with it into about four thousand feet of water. Taking stock now: tow gone, Masai on fire aft, stopped and down by the stern: Masai was a dead loss, in fact. He had no options, really. He called down, “Starboard ten.” The crippled Tribal was on his port quarter, two cables’ lengths away, with Afghan circling round her stern, guns just ceasing fire as a Stuka—the last of this batch, perhaps—batted away towards the land. Nick shouted to Mason, the signalman, “Make to Masai: Prepare to abandon ship over your starboard side for’ard. I am coming alongside bow to bow.” He beckoned Ashcourt: “Go down and tell the first lieutenant I’ll be putting the starboard side of this bridge alongside the starboard side of hers. I want her people over like greased lightning and straight below. Then—”