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

by Alexander Fullerton

  Other signals: Isis, Hero, and Nizam were returning from their attempt to land commandos at Selinos Kastelli. Bad weather had forced them to turn back; Nizam had lost both her whalers in the heavy seas. But Tuareg and company must have got their troops ashore: brother Nick, Jack thought wrily, coming up to scratch—as usual … Meanwhile Glenroy would be sailing later today for Timbaki, escorted by Coventry and two destroyers: she’d been turned back from a similar operation a couple of days ago. And last, but very far from least, a battle squadron under Vice-Admiral Pridham-Whipple was sailing from Alexandria at just about this moment, escorting the carrier Formidable for an air attack on Scarpanto airfield. The carrier’s escorting force consisted of the flagship Queen Elizabeth, her sister-battleship Barham, and eight destroyers.

  At lunch yesterday in the wardroom, Jack had remarked to Tom Overton, “Rather funny exchange of signals, our skipper’s and Glenshiel’s on the way in.”

  Overton hadn’t heard about it. Jack told him about Fifi and the Auberge Bleu. Overton chuckled: “Great spot, the old Auberge.”

  “Oh, d’you know it?”

  He wouldn’t have thought nightclubs were the first lieutenant’s line of country. Overton had murmured, “Used it once or twice, you know.”

  Then they’d met in the evening, in the Union Club. Jack had gone ashore with Willy Irvine for a drink and a snack, a change of atmosphere. Leave had been granted until 0600 Sunday morning; the ship was “under sailing orders” but no specific orders had been received by the time he’d come ashore, and the engine-room department had still been at work down in the bowels. So she hadn’t even had steam up, and no early departure had seemed likely.

  In the bar he’d found himself standing next to old Tom. Carnarvon’s first lieutenant had a glass of Stella beer in his sunburnt fist: Jack had looked at it in surprise.

  “I agree. This horse is not fit for work. But the night is yet young, dear boy, and at this stage easy does it, eh?”

  “I dare say, if you’re making a night of it.” He wondered if Overton played golf in the dark. Luminous balls? He laughed, spluttering into his gin. But Overton ignored that: he was looking at him rather intensely as if he’d just had some bright idea. “Everard, I say.”

  “What?”

  “Did I understand you to say that you had never sampled the pleasures of the Auberge Bleu?”

  “I haven’t, no.”

  “Like to? Tonight?”

  “Right ahead. Just her masthead.”

  Glenshiel had been spotted from the director platform ten minutes ago but now Commander Bell-Reid had sighted her from the bridge. He added, “You can see her spotting-top when she rises on a swell or we do. There—”

  “Yes.” Napier, ramrod-straight on his seat, had got on to it too. There was a certain relief in having made the rendezvous with the assault ship before the bombers came back to her.

  Then they had the destroyer, Huntress, in sight too. A quarter of an hour later, when they were at close quarters and Carnarvon was being put about to turn in astern of Glenshiel, Jack could see the assault ship’s fire-blackened upperworks, bomb damage aft, several landing-craft shattered in their davits and paintwork scorched black from near-misses. He could imagine her as she’d have looked yesterday evening, on fire, and this morning with the 88s’ bombs raining down around her: for all that, she’d got off lightly. With only one destroyer in company, and so sloweddown that from the bombers’ point of view she must have looked like a sitting bird, at their mercy …

  No—not mercy. You couldn’t use that word, here in the eastern Mediterranean in the spring of 1941. Certainly not in relation to Stuka pilots. And despite that, last night one had—he thought, It’s incredible … To think of himself last night in that nightclub, and later in the small hours in the cousin’s bed: and this wounded ship struggling south while others nearer to Crete waited for the dawn and for the arrival of the bombers: there was a harsh incongruity, a sense of two identities, two worlds.

  Napier had given the yeoman a signal that was to be flashed to Glenshiel’s captain but not recorded on the log: Fifi is filing a paternity suit. Now which way do you want to go?

  Overton chuckling at the binnacle, looking round at Jack …

  At the Auberge last night he’d been a different man entirely. His girl—she’d be about twenty-eight or -nine, he guessed—had turned out to be about the most beautiful woman Jack had ever seen. In a city of beautiful women, she outshone them all. The cousin, Gabrielle, could have walked into practically any room and stopped the conversation, but beside Tom’s girl she’d been eclipsed, made to look quite ordinary. She wasn’t ordinary: when her cousin was out of view she was sensational. And very lively, warm, outgoing: within minutes they’d been having fun, and even right at the start there’d been an edge of tension, expectation … Overton quick-witted, amusing, taking it for granted that he should have this extraordinarily beautiful, extremely rich man’s wife hanging on his words, taking no notice of anyone but him … And again, thinking back to it, he was struck by the nightmarish contrast—the girl’s lips and lithe, sweet body, enclosing arms, whispers in the scented darkness and the first faint light of dawn outside—dawn that had also begun to light this long rolling swell and the bomb-scarred ship, the battle raging in the north.

  At 1800, when they’d brought Glenshiel to within 75 miles of Alexandria, they met the battle squadron on its way out north-westward for the attack on Scarpanto, and Carnarvon was detached to join it. Jack’s mind stayed full of the girl: his memory of the extraneous events which followed was like a film shown fast but with occasional stills of incidents and conversations that weren’t necessarily of particular importance. There was the run northwards, Carnarvon acting as AA guardship and stationed between the battleships and Formidable: Queen Elizabeth impressive in her dazzle-camouflage, with the vice-admiral’s flag at her foremasthead and a huge ensign flapping at the main. He was watching her through binoculars when Overton asked him, just before they closed up for dusk action stations, “Wish it was this time yesterday, Jack?”

  Lowering the glasses, he shrugged.

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy yourself.”

  He took a breath. “No. I won’t tell you that.”

  “Seeing her again, d’you think?”

  He had to. He said, “Of course.”

  “She won’t always be available, you know. Matter of luck and timing.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  Action stations: the Marine bugler, Sykes, splitting the air with it, and the same call floating from the flagship and from Barham and the carrier. It felt good, he remembered, being part of such a powerful force—and being on the offensive, too. It was a disappointment to learn next morning that the twenty-three-thousand-ton aircraft carrier had only ten operational aircraft with which to attack the hundreds on Scarpanto and then fight off the inevitable retaliatory attacks. At dawn action stations on the Monday morning—it was 26 May—he watched Formidable turn into the wind to launch her aircraft. Two of the ten that took off turned out to be defective and had to land-on again, but the other eight, four Fulmars and four Albacores, formed up and winged away towards Scarpanto. All eight returned, with reports of Stukas destroyed on the ground and damage inflicted on the airfield installations. They had to get airborne again almost at once, as the Stuka counter-attacks began to come in; and at about the same time the battle squadron was joined by the cruisers Dido and Ajax and destroyers which included Tuareg, Afghan, and Highflier.

  Thinking about Gabrielle—between Stuka attacks, and sometimes even while they were in progress—Jack wished his involvement with her hadn’t stemmed from Tom Overton’s affair with another man’s wife. That was a bit over the odds, he felt; it stuck in the gullet, rather, and he was aware of having consciously to turn a blind eye to it.

  Still fighting off Stukas and 88s, the fleet withdrew south-westward. Then at noon there was a signal ordering them to provide cover for Glenroy, who was trying to r
un troops up to Timbaki, and course was altered to due west. At 1320 a force of twenty Stukas arrived from the direction of the desert, and attacked, most of them going for the carrier while she was still in the process of getting her fighters up. She was hit by two bombs and badly damaged, and at the same time the destroyer Nubian had her stern blown off.

  If a girl went to bed with you so readily, the very first time you met her, did it mean she’d do it with anyone?

  Of course it didn’t. He told himself not to be stupid, not to waste time thinking about it. It kept him awake, though, even when he was dog-tired.

  Glenroy had been badly mauled by the bombers: she’d been forced to turn back again without getting her troops ashore. Air power, nothing else, was allowing the Germans to pour their troops in and keep British reinforcements out. Nothing was going well: if you faced it squarely you had to admit that all the Navy was doing was losing ships … Destroyers were oiling from the battleships during the 26th, that Monday. It was at dusk that evening that Formidable was detached to limp away to Alexandria. At daylight on Tuesday the 27th the battle squadron was ordered to close in towards the Kaso Strait again, to cover the withdrawal of Hero, Nizam, and Abdiel, who’d run the gauntlet with commandos and ammunition into Suda Bay and were now bringing out about a thousand other personnel who weren’t needed on the island. But the battle squadron was still a couple of hundred miles short of Kaso, just before 9 am, when a mixed force of Junkers 88s and Heinkel 111s attacked. Jack saw the almost solid descent of bombs: it was a wellexecuted, highly-concentrated attack, and the battleship Barham got the worst of it. One bomb hit her on “Y” turret; near-misses, enormous blasts of sea flinging up close beside her, holed and flooded two of her anti-torpedo bulges. She took on a list, and had a fire inside her which her ship’s company were fighting all that forenoon.

  He could imagine what it must be like inside there, in those cramped, smoke-filled compartments, airless, suffocating, and the fire taking hold and spreading …

  “Everard—are you in love, or something equally ridiculous?”

  He looked round quickly. The commander, Bell-Reid, was glaring at him from a couple of feet away.

  “The plot is calling, Everard.” Bell-Reid pointed. “The plot voicepipe?” It was right beside him. He hadn’t heard a thing. He answered it now, and Midshipman Brighouse, who was taking a turn as his Tanky, navigator’s assistant, had some footling thing to ask him. He gave the snotty a short answer.

  Bell-Reid growled at him as he straightened from the voicepipe, “Ever since we left Alexandria two days ago, Everard, you’ve been giving a close imitation of a dying duck in a thunderstorm. Are you sick?”

  He shook his head. “Perfectly fit, sir.”

  “Woman trouble?”

  “No, sir.” There was no trouble that couldn’t be solved by getting back to Alexandria.

  Bell-Reid muttered, “Well, pull yourself together, for God’s sake!”

  At least he’d had the decency to keep his voice down …

  At 1230, the C-in-C recalled the whole force to Alex. Jack’s last memory of that trip—the last still picture in the blur of ships’ movements, signals, Stuka attacks, and the sickening sight of bomb-bursts—was of Petty Officer Hillier’s face as he goggled at a signal which he’d just removed from the pneumatic tube. Hillier was yeoman of the watch. It was early afternoon, and the battle squadron was steaming southwestward. He’d been taking the signal over to Napier, unfolding it as he crossed the bridge: glancing at it, he’d stopped in his tracks, mouth open.

  Napier asked him, “What is it, Yeoman?”

  “Sir, they’ve—” Hillier gulped, swallowing emotion. “We’ve sunk the Bismarck, sir!”

  In Alexandria, Aubrey Wishart left ABC in the Operations Room and went down the passage to his own office. The wires had been humming all day between this headquarters, Army HQ in Cairo, and the Chiefs of Staff in London.

  Wishart picked up the telephone and asked the exchange to connect him to the extension which was Rear-Admiral Creswell’s office at Rasel-Tin.

  “Creswell.”

  “Aubrey Wishart here. It’s on, Hector.”

  At the other end, George Hector Creswell took a deep breath. “It” meant the lifting of twenty thousand troops from Crete.

  “Right. Thank you.”

  He put the phone down, on a battle lost.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Something wrong, Nick?”

  It was stuffy in the day-cabin, despite open scuttles: all they seemed to let in was the smell of Egypt, and Egypt’s flies. The urgency now, the need to be seeing to about forty things at once in order to be ready to sail again at dawn, might be adding to the sense of airlessness. And he didn’t want to seem fidgety to Aubrey Wishart, who must have had a thousand matters to deal with but had still found time to call by and see him.

  He answered that question: “Not … necessarily.” He’d had a feeling there would be a letter from Fiona, this time. He told Wishart, nodding at the totally uninteresting mail scattered on the table, “I’d hoped for one that isn’t here, that’s all.”

  “When you get back on Thursday”—Wishart smiled: genial, confident—“she’ll have written then, old lad.”

  “Well.” He glanced at her portrait. “I hope so.”

  “That one, eh?”

  “She’s stationed in London. MTC. Since that bloody awful raid three weeks ago, I haven’t heard from her.”

  “Mails are fairly erratic, you know.”

  “Mr Gieves gets his bills to me regularly enough.” He flopped into the armchair facing Wishart’s. There wasn’t time for this kind of chat, for talk of personal matters and the outside world. They mattered as much as they ever had, but here and now they had to be pigeon-holed: to get back to the real world, or be any use to Fiona—if she’d let him—he had to see this through first. It wasn’t going to be any joy-ride.

  Tuareg had entered Alexandria with the rest of the force a couple of hours ago; they’d oiled and then shifted to a buoy, and now as daylight faded they were taking in ammunition from a lighter on the starboard side. On the other side there was a lighter with stores and fresh provisions, and a water-boat beyond it. Lights had been rigged on the upper deck and the work would be going on for some hours yet; then there’d be an interval in which to get some rest before sailing at 0600 for Heraklion via the Kaso Strait.

  The object of this expedition was to lift forty-five hundred men, the entire garrison of Heraklion, from under the Germans’ noses and into destroyers and cruisers between midnight tomorrow and 2 am on Thursday the 29th. Embarkation would have to be completed by 2 am, or the warships with their loads of soldiers would be caught by daylight on the wrong side of Kaso.

  He reached over with a light for Wishart’s cigarette. This was the evening of Tuesday, 27 May, but it felt as if it could easily have been last Friday, when he’d sat in this same chair and Wishart had filled the one he was occupying now; the ensuing days could have been one long disjointed dream. Another dream haunted him too, when he let it: that apparently inconsequential one of Jack and Paul at Mullbergh. He had a sense of important things left undone: of time running out, no chance now to put matters on any better footing. He or Jack or both of them might so easily not survive this next phase of the battle—survival even this far seemed vaguely surprising—and he’d have liked to have cleared things up, at least to have had a shot at bridging the gulf between them.

  Too late now. And even with time and opportunity, he knew it might well have been a wasted effort. He shook it out of his mind again … “It’s good to see you, Aubrey. I hope one of these days we’ll be able to spend more than five minutes talking to each other.”

  “Not this evening, anyway.” The admiral shot a glance at his watch. “As I need hardly tell you, there’s a lot going on. I’m on my way over to Ras-el-Tin, actually. Main reason for stopping was, as I said, to tell you that having got those chaps ashore at Plaka Bay has impressed ABC considerably.”r />
  “I was lucky. The weather only just held up long enough.” He changed the subject. “Who’s this navigator I’m getting?”

  “Masai’s. A VR lieutenant, name of Drisdale. Smeake says he’s good.”

  “And what’s the overall pattern for the evacuation, can you tell me that? Apart from tomorrow’s outing?”

  Force B, the ships heading for Heraklion tomorrow, was to be commanded by Rear-Admiral Rawlings with his flag in Orion. There’d be three other cruisers—Ajax, Dido, and Carnarvon—and the destroyers Tuareg, Afghan, Decoy, Jackal, Imperial, Hotspur, Kimberley, and Hereward. But the Tribals and Carnarvon wouldn’t be embarking troops; they were to sweep north of Heraklion to fend off interference by Italian torpedo-boats.

  Wishart told him, “Mostly it’ll be from Sphakia on the south coast. All the troops from the Suda-Maleme area have been told to fall back across the island to Sphakia, and the first lift will be tomorrow night, same time as yours on the other side. There’ll be a bigger one the second night—six thousand men, it’s hoped—and about another three thousand on each of the two nights after that. There’s also Retimo …” He frowned. “That’s much less simple. We want them to pull out and get across the Plaka Bay, but so far it hasn’t been possible to get a message through.”

  “No W/T there?”

  “There’s no military wireless anywhere, old lad. All army communications for some time now have been passed through our NOIC Suda—one Captain Morse. He’s now shifting to a cave above the Sphakia beach, and the pongoes are setting up their HQ there with him. But we sent a Hurricane with long-range fuel tanks on it, to drop a message to the Retimo garrison, and nothing more’s been heard of it. We’ve twice tried sending submarines in, too; but the Eyeties are patrolling that coast with their torpedo craft every night, and we damn near lost the first boat we sent in. The second simply didn’t get her landing-party back. And as you know we’re having to use every submarine we’ve got, to sit on the Italian ports in case they get a rush of blood to the head and send their fleet out—”