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

by Alexander Fullerton

  The one Dalgleish had scrounged some time ago had been reclaimed by its rightful owners. Dalgleish nodded. “But we’ve an extra whaler in its place.”

  “How about the others—Afghan and—”

  “She’s the same as us—one motorboat, two whalers. Same with Huntress. Highflier’s been craftier; she’s won herself a motor-cutter.”

  “Where’d they steal that?”

  He didn’t know. But there’d been a bit of a free-for-all over boats, after so many had been lost on the Greek beaches. Nick was thinking that a motor-cutter, 32 feet long, would be a tight fit in a twenty-fivefooter’s davits. They must have adapted the stowage somehow: and that boat would hold up to fifty men, at a pinch.

  Five minutes after Dalgleish had left the bridge some empty paintdrums were thrown overboard, and Tuareg circled to give each pair of guns in turn a few bursts at the floating targets. After an unimpressive start they got the hang of it, and with his third burst Chalk just about cut his drum in half. One of the other pair jammed, but the torpedoman cleared it quickly and then sank his target. Nick told Dalgleish over the telephone, “Secure from target practice.” Hanging up, he told Pratt, “Come up to two-four-oh revs.” The destroyers were deploying into their screening positions across Glenshiel’s bow, Asdics were closed up and pinging and Glenshiel had the signal flying for “Commence zigzag.” The force had three hundred and fifty miles to cover, and at dusk they’d be only a hundred miles from Scarpanto; but they’d be in range of the Stuka base long before the light went.

  “‘Commence zigzag’ signal down, sir!”

  “Port five. Continue the ordered zigzag, Quartermaster.” The telegraphman would have started the clock as the wheel went over. Nick, with his glasses on the still hazy horizon on the bow, spotted crosstrees: then more, a ship’s superstructure strangely distorted by the mirage. He’d suspected it would turn out to be Carnarvon and now, seeing a C-class cruiser’s spotting-top sort itself out of that peculiar object, he knew it was. A minute later recognition signals were being exchanged. There was a destroyer, one of the H-class, with her. Astern of Tuareg, Glenshiel was flashing to the cruiser: Good morning. Please book me a table at the Auberge Bleu for next Saturday night. After a few seconds the reply came winking: Shall I warn Fifi to expect you?

  Lorrimer and Carnarvon’s captain must be close friends. Nick couldn’t see—using his glasses as they passed the cruiser—any external damage. There were two tall figures in the front of her bridge, and either of them could have been Jack. Two days in harbour, Wishart had reckoned Carnarvon would be allowed now. Lucky devils …

  Noon: and the force was 85 miles from Alexandria, 215 from Scarpanto. A north-west wind, which had been no more than light airs an hour ago but had already increased to about Force 3, was putting a lop on the sea’s surface, pushing up small white-edged waves through which Tuareg’s stem smashed continuously with spray streaming back across her foc’sl. Wet steel gleamed in the sun, and the spray was brilliant white; the sound of it lashing across the gunshields and superstructure was a constant drumming. The wind was still rising and it was driving wisps of cloud across the high blue of the sky.

  Rum had been issued, and one watch sent to dinner. Tony Dalgleish was at the binnacle, and Chalk had just gone down; he’d been up with a file of official correspondence with which there hadn’t been time to bother when they’d been in harbour. No time, and even less inclination … Nick reached for a cigarette, as Tuareg swung to a port leg of the zigzag pattern. He’d slid the case back into his pocket and pulled out his lighter when, behind him, Dalgleish barked, “Alarm starboard—aircraft—green five-oh—”

  Nick was off his seat, his thumb on the alarm button, sending morse “As” racketing through the ship. He’d yelled at Mason, the signalman on watch, “Red flag—hoist!” Houston told him, “Junkers 88s, sir. Flying right to left.”

  “Yes, I see them.” Black against the blue, and flying at this moment through shreds of cloud. They had been flying from right to left—westward—but they were turning to port now, this way. They’d probably been on a sweep, just hoping to run across some target. Six of them. He’d been holding the binoculars one-handed while he used the other on the action stations buzzer, but that was finished now, the ship humming and clattering with movement as her crew closed up, and he had both hands free. Pratt was at the binnacle, Dalgleish had gone aft, and Houston was dragging his dead weight up to the director tower, where his team were already busy, with “A” and “B” guns’ barrels lifting and traversing outwards on the bow. Six 88s were not anything to get worked up about—not after the experiences of recent weeks—but they would already have wirelessed a sighting report to their colleagues on Scarpanto and to the other airfields, and that was something else again.

  Huntress—on Tuareg’s starboard quarter—opened fire. Too soon, Nick thought. Waste of shells. Houston was holding his fire, but the guns were following director and on target, their barrels still moving slowly upward and inching left, tracking the black twin-engined bombers as they droned in towards the ships.

  You could imagine the scene on Scarpanto, when the sighting report came in: the ranks of yellow-nosed 87s, their pilots racing out to them … Fire-gongs: the double, tinny clang, and immediately the headsplitting crash as the four-sevens fired. Fumes choking for a second, clearing immediately as the wind and the ship’s forward motion whisked the stink aft and away. Shell-bursts opened ahead of the attackers: Huntress’s had seemed to be on the right from this angle, which meant short, but Houston had put his straight under the Germans’ noses. They’d begun to weave, the formation splitting as they dodged and bucketed. The Glen ship had opened fire, and now Afghan had too: two bombers were going for the big ship in the centre, putting themselves into shallow glides and crossing in the sector between Huntress and Tuareg:Tuareg’s rate of fire increased sharply as Houston gave up his controlled shoot and switched to barrage, browning the sky ahead of the Junkers’ dives.

  Bombs away …

  The other four were boring in, flak all round them, black crosses plainly visible on white panels on wings and fuselages. Bombs leaving them now—leaving two of them just as the first ones raised thick humps of sea astern and on the quarter of the Glen ship. Rather like shallowset depthcharges exploding, only smaller in diameter. More bombs coming now, from the last two attackers: a double line of splashes rose astern again, well clear. Compared to Stukas these 88s were so unfrightening that they were almost benign. The first lot of bombs must have fallen on Glenshiel’s far side, hidden by her not inconsiderable bulk. All six Junkers had banked away to starboard after their attacks, and all six were still in sight but nobody was wasting ammunition on them now; they were drawing together, gradually re-forming as they flew away northwestward at about two thousand feet.

  The red flags were sliding down. Pratt suggested, “Just a curtain-raiser, I suppose.”

  Nick had got through to Dalgleish, on the telephone to the aftercontrol position. “We’ll remain at first degree, Number One.”

  It would mean action messing for the watch who hadn’t fed yet. Even those who’d been sent to dinner probably hadn’t got much of it inside them before the buzzers went. But this sort of thing was Dalgleish’s problem. Nick lit the cigarette which he’d been about to light when Houston had spotted the bombers; he’d taken his first drag at it and he was letting smoke trickle gently from his nostrils, deliberately relaxing while he had the chance, when Yeoman Whiffen reported, “Red warning flag on Glenshiel, sir!” Turning, he put his glasses up—to the danger sector, the starboard bow: he saw them at once, fine on that bow, high up, a big crowd of them. Stukas—as evil-looking as ever.

  Guns were already following the director to that alarm bearing. The Stukas were flying south. Nick tossed his ill-fated cigarette away to leeward. They were flying across the force’s bows, from right to left. They’d circle, he supposed, and attack from the port side on a northward—homeward—course, using the sun behind them to b
lind the gunners. There seemed to be a couple of dozen of them in roughly equal groups, two groups at different heights. No—three. There was a third lot behind the higher one, on a closing course towards the others as if they’d been out on their own. A sky sweep, and homing now on the target they’d found; about thirty bombers in three groups of ten. He’d been wrong with his mental picture of Scarpanto: these things must have been in the air long before the 88s had arrived.

  Houston was telling the four-sevens to load with long-fused barrage. Nick was watching that force of bombers as it crossed ahead, circling its intended victims; he was thinking that with eight hours to go before the light went, if the Luftwaffe was going to hound them in this kind of strength they’d be bound to draw some blood. Better not to dwell on it too much: best to live from one minute to the next, from one attack to another. Although one might imagine that now the bastards had located them, going by recent Aegean experience the attacks might soon become continuous—the kind that poor Gloucester and Fiji were subjected to, the kind that made ABC recall Glenroy yesterday. Cunningham wouldn’t want to recall this expedition if he could possibly get it through: after the Glenroy business he’d be under enormous pressure from London to get these troops in.

  All right, come on, let’s get on with it …

  Vultures still circling: mean, sharp-eyed, crossing the ships’ line of advance and edging round, moving down the port side now. Pratt muttered, “Wonder what it feels like. They must know some of ‘em won’t get home.”

  Each would count on it happening to the other man, Nick guessed. And they’d be thinking of killings and Iron Crosses, not of their own casualties. Yeoman Whiffen reported, at Nick’s elbow and with his tin hat at a rakish angle over his bony face, “Signal from Glenshiel to C-in-C, sir, repeated Ajax: Under attack from Ju88s, in position—”

  That would have gone out ten minutes ago. Nick nodded. “Thank you, Yeoman.”

  “Sir.”

  Tin hats, binoculars jutting below them, revolved slowly as the bomber force drew aft down the port side with the sun flashing on a wing here, a tailplane there. Guns traversing too, loading numbers peering out round the edges of the gunshields, hands shielding narrowed eyes against the sun. Pompom gunners squinting upwards, rotating themselves on their seats as the whole mounting swivelled, turned by handwheels rather like pedals on a bicycle. Tuareg seesawed rhythmically, splitting the choppy sea and spraying it out on either side as her bow dipped smoothly into it, smashing the waves one after another without noticing them, flinging sea back over her foc’sl and the for’ard guns. Everything white and blue gleaming in the wetness of salt spray, the shine of painted steel. The bombers were far out beyond Afghan, who was on Tuareg’s beam; farther out and two cables’ lengths astern, Highflier’s single-barrelled fourseven mountings were cocked up, waiting, ready on the target: one group of which seemed for a moment to be stationary, suspended in mid air, floating … Then Nick realized that they’d turned inwards—while the other groups continued steadily from right to left. The batch who’d turned were splitting up: separating, some of them climbing …

  “What the hell?”

  Bombs were falling, over there. Out there halfway to the horizon, over no kind of target, he saw a desultory rain of bombs. And Stukas climbing, swirling out in a general break-up of the formation. He moved his glasses to the left again: a thought had occurred to him, an explanation of the Stukas’ strange behaviour, but he wasn’t putting any trust in it, no more than he believed in fairies. Settling his binoculars on the other two groups of Stukas, the ones who’d flown on down the port side, he saw them turning in now: the far-back lot were all over the place but two other groups of ten were turning to attack.

  A Stuka out of that mix-up on the beam was falling, streaming smoke. And another—watching it, he was beginning to believe in fairies after all—exploded, sending a third over on its back and spinning downwards. Others scattering in all directions: and he saw another in flames, gliding seawards.

  “All guns follow director. Red barrage, stand by!”

  Highflier and Afghan had opened fire. But the second group of bombers seemed to be in trouble now—as if they’d caught the same infection. Bursts of HA shell were to the left, ahead of and below the flights approaching from the quarter: looking up at his own ship’s director tower Nick saw Houston shifting left as well, swinging about ten degrees and settling on that left-hand attack. And the reason was—extraordinarily, but beyond doubt now—

  Pratt began it.

  “Sir—I hesitate to suggest such a thing, but—”

  “We’ve got an air force.”

  “Thank God. Thought I was getting DTs or—”

  Tuareg opened fire. But Pratt hadn’t been seeing pink elephants, he’d been seeing Hurricanes. And Stukas were falling like autumn leaves. At one point he saw four dead ones in the air at the same moment: all burning, going down. Poetry of motion, he thought, beauty unsurpassed: but the left-hand flight was coming over now and all the ships were in action, barraging ahead of it as it approached. To the right, three Hurricanes were making hay, making the Stukas look as clumsy and as vulnerable as barnyard fowls, as helpless as the half-drowned sailors they liked to shoot at in the water. No time to watch that circus, though; weaving, dodging bombers were overhead, Tuareg throwing up a shortfused barrage now, all four destroyers putting an umbrella of shellfire over Glenshiel, whose own guns were shrouding her upper decks in smoke. Shooting into the sun, which the enemy was trying to make use of; pompoms opened up just as the first siren-screams rose to cut through the din of gunfire. Glancing to the right he saw a Hurricane chasing a Stuka in a shallow dive: he saw the blast of the fighter’s guns, bits flying off the bomber. Come-Uppance Day, he thought, glimpsing it in one ecstatic glance: looking back quickly at the danger zone he saw a Stuka picking Tuareg for its target, flipping over at this moment into its dive: he was already at the binnacle, displacing Rocky Pratt. The attack was coming from the port side, from high up across Afghan.

  “Port twenty-five.”

  “Port twenty-five, sir!”

  Turning his ship into the direction of the attack. Guns pounding solidly: and he heard, as one bomber pulled out of its dive and curved away from Glenshiel’s bow through the gap between Tuareg and Huntress— out of his sight as it passed astern—the new Vickers guns’ strident blare. He hoped Huntress wasn’t in the line of fire of one trigger-happy RNVR sub-lieutenant. He was watching the Stuka, its dropping, screeching, vulturish descent.

  “Midships!”

  “Midships, sir …”

  By turning towards it he was making it dive more steeply: break its bloody neck, if it could be persuaded to go just a little steeper … Or else make it let go of its egg from high up, with consequently poor aim, before Tuareg passed under the line of steepest-possible trajectory.

  “Steady as you go!”

  “Steady, sir!”

  The bomb fell clear of the thing’s spread legs. Tumbling in the sun: one thousand pounds of high explosive gathering the pull of gravity while the Stuka pilot fought to defeat that same pull, the aircraft flattening and shell-bursts and close-range fire all around it as it pulled out high and the bomb went wide. Nick called down to CPO Habgood, “Starboard fifteen.” Tuareg was right ahead of Glenshiel after that swing off to port, and he had to get her back into station. There were Stukas in all directions, gunsmoke, shell-bursts, noise. The one who’d attacked so ineffectually was legging it away northwards, half a mile away and about five hundred feet above the sea. Tuareg heeled to port as she turned to regain her position in the screen. A Stuka was dropping on Glenshiel— it was through the barrage and only close-range weapons were shooting at it as it came on down, down … Bomb leaving it now: and the Stuka was sliding away to port, banking as it dragged its yellow nose up, and flames streamed suddenly from that raised starboard wing: then he’d lost sight of it in smoke, and he’d no idea where the bomb went. Gunfire was easing off: Tuareg had just ceased fire altog
ether. The only Stukas in sight were three scurrying northwards with two Hurricanes in pursuit.

  Sixteen-thirty: with four and a half hours of daylight left, the ships were alone again. Two Hurricanes had stayed with them for about an hour after that air battle, then another had arrived and that pair had departed. The single aircraft had been relieved by yet another, after another hour, and he’d been the last. End of luxury, of the sensation of being pampered.

  Three times during the afternoon enemy reconnaissance machines had come to look at them. Twice Hurricanes had chased the snooper away, and once it had been shot down. But the Germans would know that when the force got to a certain distance from the desert airfields the fighter escort would be withdrawn; once a recce flight came and found them unescorted, it wouldn’t be long before the dive-bombers returned.

  There was quite a lot of movement on the ships now. The wind was Force 4 and the sea was up to match it. But it seemed to have got no worse during the past hour; if it stayed like this and there was some degree of shelter inshore, it ought to be possible to get the troops in.

  On his high stool, Nick drank tea and munched biscuits. Pratt came up from the chart, bringing a tea-mug with him. He murmured, looking round at the sea’s frothy, jumpy surface, “Might be a bit tough for the landing-craft, sir?”

  “They’ll have to cope with it. It’s important to get this lot ashore.”

  The appearance of the Hurricanes might have been an indication of the importance attached to it. For the sake of the cut-off Retimo garrison, presumably. A garrison—Wishart had said—that included women, for God’s sake: an Aussie field hospital with twenty or thirty nurses in it, evacuated from Greece. Well, they’d be worth their weight in gold, no doubt, but there’d be all hell to pay if they couldn’t be got out when the crunch came … There’d been a heated exchange of signals, Wishart had told him privately, between Whitehall and ABC during the last day or two; the C-in-C had had to point out that the Navy wasn’t afraid of incurring losses, only of losing so many ships that there’d be too few left operationally fit for the Eastern Mediterranean to be held. Then Malta would fall, and Suez would be lost, and the Levant, and the whole Middle East and its oil … London still seemed blind to the facts of life in terms of air power and the lack of it. One trouble was that “Tiger,” the big Malta convoy operation, had succeeded; it had only got through by a fluke of weather, but as a result of it London—or Churchill, anyway—did believe in miracles and the performing of the impossible.