The whole of the Jap's port side was open to B-mounting. She was moving past Wind' Rode's bow, and Lasenby knew that his own ship could not turn to keep his guns on the changing bearing. Deliberately, forcing himself to calmness, he aimed at her waterline.
The short range which a few minutes earlier would have endedWind Rode's life was now her salvation. A less-skilled gunner than Lasenby could not have missed. The first two shells took her in the port bow, and six seconds later another pair bit into her belly. Her speed slowed.
She had put her rudder over a few seconds after the arrival of Lasenby's first two messengers. But, while a destroyer is fast, she slows quickly when her power drops: she has not the weight to take her on for a long distance at still-high speed. Now her stern swung towards Lasenby's sight.
He could aim at her screws and rudder, and cripple her. But then, though she was already listing through the shell's entry amidships, she could still bring some of her guns to bear on the crippled Wind Rode. His other alternative was to aim at her quarter-deck, and what was packed there.
He had a second to make his decision. He made it. The order went down and the two guns elevated slightly. Then they fired.
One shell, possibly through some minute difference in the rifling wear of its barrel, cleared the quarter-deck and smashed into the funnel, wasted. The remaining projectile made up for its companion's dereliction.
It was luck for Wind Rode that the Jap was drawing almost directly away from her. Her quarter-deck was packed with depth-charges. In a fractional instant several charges split open under the shell's blast and then the spilled explosive burned under the short and fierce heat.
Her stern was blown off as though an enormous and blunt knife had slashed down through steel and decks and bulkheads, right through to the backbone of her keel. On Wind Rode's bridge they reeled under the blast. The dome of the sky rang to the explosion and the iron plates beneath them vibrated in unison. His ears ringing. Bentley grabbed himself upright and stared at the dissected ship.
A large compartmented merchantman has been known to survive the loss of her stern or bow. But not a destroyer. From a little aft of the bridge she is almost all boiler-rooms and engine-room, and amidships she was already filling through the holes made by Lasenby's shells. Before the ravaged stern part dropped under they could see fuel-oil, like black blood, gushing out and fouling the sea.
The slim bow lifted, sharply. They stared, feeling no exultation, feeling only an awed fascination, and a little sick. The bow rose up until it was vertical with the tonnage of water acting on it. Her foremast lay back a few feet above the waiting sea, unnaturally horizontal, a position it had not assumed since the time it was lifted from a dockyard and swayed into her keel. Then, with a sharp, distinct crack, the mast broke in two. It fell into the water with a small splash, beating the bow under by a few seconds. For a moment the water boiled, and then the turmoil subsided and the blue sea set about smoothing out the mark of entry.
On Wind Rode's bridge no one spoke. After what they had been through, the violence of the past minutes had dazed them. Bentley remembered that not all the enemy had disappeared. He lurched to the opposite side of the bridge and stared out over the sea to the eastward, the direction in, which Scimitar had been last heading.
He saw two ships at once, and a moment later a third. The first was a large attention-claimer. She was one of the two destroyers Scimitar had first engaged, and she was still furiously on fire a mile away. The next ship he saw was Scimitar, returning towards him at full speed. He had to use his glasses to sight the third. She, too, was burning, though not as fiercely as her consort, and she was also at high speed - to the south, running with desperate haste into the encroaching night.
He felt someone beside him. The word was husky, short, and implicit with a full understanding and im-measurable relief.
"Well..." said Randall.
Bentley drew his breath in as he nodded, mutely. What else was there to say? Instead, he pointed. Scimitar had reached the burning ship. She began to circle her, at close range. A single gun spat at her and the shell sent up its ghostly spout two hundred yards over. Scimitar's bow swung away, but she continued on her circling course. Her guns must have been already laid on the Jap. Not at full speed, leisurely it seemed, she steamed round her crippled enemy and with systematic broadsides punched her under. Then she hauled off and steamed for Wind Rode.
She came slowly down her starb'd side and the thin voice crackled across the scummy water:
"I'm afraid I had to leave some valuable prisoners, but I want to get you in tow before dark, if possible. In any case, they have their rafts, and I believe a boat or two. Can you be towed?"
Just like that, Bentley thought. But he was past surprise. If his ship had grown wings and deposited her poor wounded body in the dock in Manus harbour he would have accepted the phenomenon as simply a piece of that insane afternoon.
"Yes," he replied, forcing himself to match the other's practical calmness of tone. He was not surprised at Sainsbury's obvious health, either. He knew he had been wrong, the lesson had been well and hardly learned. He did not know why he had been mistaken, but that could wait. "I'm taking water, and my rudder's not much good. But the forepart should be clear. I'll rig towing gear at once." And then the absurdity, the incongruity of his measured words struck him. He had been taught a lesson which would colour his actions for the rest of his life; he had just witnessed a single-handled action which should go down in the text-books as the classic method of handling a destroyer against overwhelming strength; he was almost out on his feet. And he was talking like this!
"Thank God you came...!" he said, and the low fervency in his voice filtered through even the distortion in the speaker.
The reply, or its tone, gave to this exhausted man the surprise he considered himself incapable of feeling. "What did you expect me to do?" Sainsbury asked, gently. "Engage the main Fleet instead?"
Randall's sudden and unexpected reply beside him was neither gentle nor restrained.
"I wouldn't be bloody well surprised!" the big lieutenant ejaculated.
It was possible that the words reached to Scimitar's bridge. If they did, they would have gone to add to the legend of the officer they concerned. But Sainsbury was back to normal.
"Smack it about," he ordered crisply, "there's little enough time, and that lone Jap might have second thoughts. I shall come in stern to bow now."
An hour later, with night all about them, the two destroyers moved slowly off to the eastward. Between stern and bow the 4"-inch steel-wire towing hawser lifted its catenary into a straight, singing line, and then sank back into a weighty curve as Wind Rode obeyed her sister's sympathetic tugging.
They had been under way two hours when from out of a clear starlit sky thunder and lightning flashed and roared to the north. The measure of the enervating tiredness of Bentley and Randall is best indicated by recording that both men simply glanced towards the ugly indications of that northern battle between leviathans, and that the only comment made was Randall's brief:
"I'm glad I'm out of that lot!"
The sea was kind to them. The noise of gunfire had lasted a long time, but gradually they had drawn clear of its ominous message. The sun lifted up its welcoming face and shone in their eyes, and on a glittering sea whose emptiness was more welcome.
But that state did not obtain for long. Bentley was at breakfast when the officer of the watch's call took him running up the ladder to the bridge. There they were, and the forest of masts surged in him the same tension as the afternoon before; until a short time later a great bridge shouldered above the horizon and a demanding light winked at them. It was the challenge, and Ferris wasted no time in affording the correct answer.
Bentley forgot his half-eaten breakfast. The American Battle Fleet came on at a fast clip, multiple bow-waves flashing in the sun, a disciplined and orderly formation which at that distance seemed to have suffered no damage. Only later were they to learn t
he cost of turning back that Japanese threat.
But the three battleships were still alive. They surged on, overtaking the little convoy swiftly and easily, until they drew level a mile away. The flag-ship's signal-lamp flashed again.
A British admiral might, seeing it was a highly public occasion, have considered signalling a comparatively effusive "Well done." The American counterpart was not so meagrely inclined. His message
-which the incorrigible Ferris read out aloud - was long and not at all official.
"Well, well," he said to them, rescuer and cripple, "I see my two Down-Under boys still stick together. A damn fine job of reporting you did back there. We won't see that Fleet again. What did you run into?"
The flagship was drawing ahead, and from his position astern Bentley could not read Sainsbury's answer. But later he asked for, and was shown, Scimitar's signal-log.
Sainsbury's reply was completely official, and he answered the admiral's wondering query as a British naval captain should - at least as a captain like Sainsbury should.
"Destroyer force under my command," he replied, was engaged by four enemy destroyers, Asasio-class. Three destroyers were sunk, one broke off the action. Ends."
There was a long pause, while the Fleet drew further ahead. Then the bright eye blinked back at them. "My God! You should get the Victoria Cross for that! "
Bentley was to carry back to his wardroom the story of what he read in that log-book, and it was to surface delighted and appreciative grins.
"Thank you," Sainsbury flashed back, "but I doubt if it would be awarded twice. Ends."
There were no more signals after that, apart from one to the destroyer screen which sent three boats curving over to take station as their escort home.
Scimitar and Wind Rode sailed into Manus harbour as they had left it, under a hot sun and a blue sky. Sainsbury steamed to his anchorage, and three tugs took over the sluggish Wind Rode. They edged her carefully towards the dock.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
"I DON'T WANT to talk about it," said Captain Sainsbury, a little worriedly, "but I can see you are determined to. All right, then, out with it and then be finished with it."
The time was just before lunch the next morning, the place was Sainsbury's cabin, and the other occupant was not in the least abashed by his superior's petulant tone. He took a pull of cold beer, and then he started.
"You know damned well I've got to get it off my chest. I was wrong, wrong to hell. But I've got a right to know where I slipped up. Look at it from my point of view." Sainsbury nodded, resignedly. "First, this caution you were always warning me about. That's not like you, not a bit. My God, don't I know that now! Second, the way you looked in here after that air attack. I'd never seen you - anyone -look so damned awful! Do you know something?" Bentley leaned forward. He did not hesitate. Not now. "You had tears in your eyes!"
He leaned back, his head nodding, as though in that lachrymose function of his captain's tear ducts lay the complete justification for his own abysmal error of judgment. Sainsbury noted the expression. There were many things he would have liked to say, but he contented himself with a categorical explanation.
"Very well," he said, "your first point. Caution. I trust you have learned your lesson there?" He held up a negating hand. "I have the chair, and by heaven you're going to listen! Caution, now. You realise we could have both escaped unhurt from the Japanese Fleet if you'd not gone further in? I know your answer. But here is mine. The Admiral knew the size of his enemy - he was ignorant solely of his where-abouts. Your second point..."
"Now just a moment," Bentley broke in forcedly. "Answer this one. Where in hell was your caution when you took on four destroyers? Eh?"
Sainsbury shifted himself a little in his chair. He looked at Bentley, his head shaking slightly.
"You miss my meaning, my boy. The exercise of caution might have got us those four destroyers we met just before dark a week or so ago. It would certainly have brought you away from the Jap Fleet unhurt, remembering your thirty-six knots. But," he said, his tone crisping, "once the enemy is engaged once the balloon had burst, why then you can forget about caution. Now is that clear?"
"Quite clear," Bentley grinned ruefully. "The second point?"
"That is cleared up even more simply. Had I guessed the real reason for your judgment on my - ah - age and general lack of fitness, I should have enlightened you at once, and thus saved us both a good deal of un-pleasantness."
"Then for Pete's sake do so!" Bentley urged him.
"I have noticed it in a number of younger commanders," Sainsbury said reflectively, "a certain lack of restraint, a bullheadedness of approach... However... The reason why I looked so bad when you visited me was that I was suffering what the surgeon was pleased to described as a rather nasty wound in my side."
"What! You didn't mention it!"
"No more than you have mentioned the reason for that slice of sticking plaster adorning your own impetuous and unthinking head. Now, happily, I am well-nigh recovered."
"So that's it," Bentley said wonderingly, "that accounts for the wetness of your optics."
"In part. But not quite."
"What's that?"
"I said `Not quite.' As I remember it now, you were partly to blame for my unfortunate lapse into lachrymosity. You may recall that you knocked your cap from the table; I have always thought that both you and your first-lieutenant possess the bodies and movements of a bull. I bent down to retrieve said cap. The movement was objected to by the surgeon's stitches. Hence the regrettable but unavoidable tears."
Bentley looked at him for four long seconds.
"My God," he said softly, "and I thought..." He `recovered himself. "But what about that submarine attack? You sent me in. Surely you don't tell me that's normal practice?"
"I make no such claim. But again the reason is simple. I have... h'mm... enough submarine kills on my tally. It occurred to me that perhaps you would not be adverse to increasing your score. And, after all..." he flicked a finger at the beak of a nose, "it was rather a sure thing, wasn't it...?'
It was a wiser and very thoughtful destroyer commander who returned to the dock which supported his own wounded ship. He met Randall on the quarter-deck, and right aft, clear of the swarming workmen, he put his friend in the pretty picture.
"Well, I'm damned," Randall growled in the wideness of his relief. And because he accepted privately complete responsibility for his own error of analysis, he added, defensively:
"But damn it all, Peter, we had good reason... And he is old, y'know."
Bentley looked at him, and Randall knew he was fooling no one.
"Yes," Bentley said musingly, "I suppose you could call him old, by our standards. What we should remember is this - steel-wire ropes take a hell of a lot of ageing...!"
They walked forward, their object the wardroom and liquid refreshment. Randall gave in to the pleasure and relief filling him. He rubbed his big hands together.
"Fine, fine," he grinned, "he'll be over tonight? I'll have the greatest pleasure in apologising to the old boy."
"Hell, no!" Bentley ejaculated, "that'd ruin everything. He wants to forget the whole mess. So do I.
And..." He stopped, and smacked one fist into the other palm. "Oh what a clot I am!"
"Eh?"
"I clean forgot to ask him for dinner!"
"You are a clot!" Randall decided forcibly. "Get on to it now."
Bentley got on to it. The signal went off: "R.P.C. (Request Pleasure Company) dinner tonight."
They were in the wardroom when the reply came back. Ferris brought it in and Bentley read it quickly. It was easy to do that. The answer to his invitation was terse, and typical:
"W.M.P."
But it meant "With Much Pleasure."
Bentley looked up. Randall was watching him. Bentley raised his glass, and his smile was low and wide.
The End
E. MacDonnell - 030
J. E. MacDonnell - 030 Page 16