Dempsey laughed: he remembered all right — the days, sometimes weeks, spent trying to beat round Cape Horn from the South Atlantic into the teeth of the storm, those never-ending westerlies. And never mind steam propulsion: it was only too true that the gales had cut the convoy’s speed quite considerably and would continue to do so unless they got out of their track. Like Stripey Sinker earlier, he looked all around the closer waters: the ships were wallowing, the laden grain ships making heavy weather of it as they butted into the wind and waves. The destroyers were largely invisible behind the crests, reappearing at intervals as they climbed the sheer-looking sides of watery mountains.
The executive came and the orders were passed to the convoy from the Commodore. Captain Dempsey brought the Coverdale round onto her new course and the ships re-formed behind the senior officer of the escort, the destroyers shifting fast to take up their screening positions, rolling heavily as they cut across the wind and sea.
By the time the order was passed that night to darken ship, the convoy was already moving into somewhat easier waters. Below in his cabin, the Coverdale’s chief steward was pouring himself a whisky and checking through some stores requisitions for Simonstown: there had been certain items unobtainable in Sydney that the Cape might provide. One of the things he hoped to persuade the Old Man to sanction was a case or two of South African brandy — Van der Humm. The chief steward knew that HM ships calling in at the Cape usually took a stock aboard, and the Old Man, used to visiting the wardrooms of the warships, would probably approve though he wouldn’t overdo it in case there were queries from the Naval Stores Department of the Admiralty. And normally the Old Man preferred ordering through Saccone and Speed: that excellent firm was generous when the orders went in, in Portsmouth, Chatham or Devonport, or Malta or Gibraltar, for the usual stock of whisky, gin, port, sherry and cigarettes by the hundred thousand. It was the Old Man that got the benefit of the free gifts — gold watches, canteens of cutlery and so on, but if he was a decent bloke he usually passed some of it on to his officers who were the consumers, and to his chief steward who did the donkey work. Chief Steward Lugg had garnered plenty before the war, when he’d served in the Mediterranean Fleet oiler Brambleleaf…
There was a knock at his door.
‘Come in.’ Lugg looked up. ‘You, Porter.’
‘As ever was, chief. Captain’ll do rounds of the accommodation and storerooms, tomorrow, eleven hundred hours.’
‘All right.’ Lugg was unworried: he ran an efficient department. ‘I’m on the top line whenever he says.’ One of Dempsey’s foibles was to make rounds at different times, nothing routine about them, with fairly minimal notice. It had largely to do with the exigencies of war, of course, but it wasn’t just the War, it was Dempsey. And he could be pernickety, real RN, white gloves and all, the gloves showing every trace of dust concealed, until his probing hand met it, on the tops of steam pipes and so on. As Porter stood there the chief steward looked at him closely. There were worry lines visible and he’d noticed an absent-mindedness at times, nothing much, but it was there and Porter wasn’t quite the first-rate steward he’d been a few months ago, not that the Old Man had ever complained. But it was the chief steward’s job to keep an eye on that sort of thing; he would watch out.
‘That Commodore,’ he said. Porter attended also, this voyage, on the unexpected addition. ‘What’s he like, eh?’
‘No bother. Decent bloke.’
‘From the liners.’
‘Yes.’
‘Still no word about his son.’ The news had reached everyone aboard, by galley wireless. ‘Rotten, that. Not the only one, of course.’ The chief steward looked Porter in the eye when he went on, ‘We all have our worries, right?’
Porter nodded, shifted his feet, looked away and rearranged the cloth which he always carried over his left arm. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
Lugg waited a few moments but nothing emerged and he said, ‘All right, Porter, tell the skipper I’ll be ready.’
The steward went off. Lugg shook his head and poured another whisky, a small one. You had to watch that in wartime — you might have to act fast at any moment of the twenty-four hours, see to your department, your men and your boat station if needs be, and there was that commerce raider at large somewhere to the north. Lugg looked up at his life-jacket, hanging from the hook on his cabin door, carried with him at all times when at sea like the gas-mask that was supposed to accompany you at all times when ashore, though no one had seemed to bother in Australia. Australia was remote from the War, except up around the Cape York peninsula which was pretty close to the Japs by all accounts.
Lugg’s thoughts went ahead to Simonstown where he hoped to get some news of a grandchild, to be his first, offspring of his only daughter. Susan was just twenty-one and the last news was that it might be a difficult birth. They were all keeping their fingers crossed back home in Devonport. Lugg’s wife, Janet, had gone into details in her last letter, quite explicit: Janet was never the sort to keep worries to herself, had always to spill them out to a husband and father away at sea and unable to do anything about them except worry himself sick.
As he’d suggested to Porter, no one was exempt…no one who had given hostages to fortune. Often enough since the War had started Lugg had envied the bachelors.
Porter was a bachelor. Something up with his parents? They counted too, bachelors weren’t entirely alone. But then Lugg remembered Porter’s parents were both dead, carried off by the ‘flu epidemic, the Spanish ‘flu back in 1917 when Porter had been a small child. Thereafter he’d been brought up by Dr Barnado’s. Might be a girl…Lugg sucked in his cheeks and tut-tutted. To Lugg — coming spot on though he didn’t realize it — girl trouble, if that was what it was, meant only pregnancy and Lugg was old-fashioned in that way. He simply didn’t care to think about it and he switched his mind back to Van der Humm.
II
Next morning Captain’s Rounds had just been satisfactorily completed and Dempsey was back on the bridge with Kemp when the urgent signal came from the Rhondda. The order went down for first degree of readiness and the closing of all watertight doors and hatches. Petty Officer Rattray reported at the double to the bridge.
‘Commodore, sir —’
‘Ah, Rattray. All guns’ crews ready?’
‘All closed up, sir, yes. For what they’re worth, sir.’
‘They’ll do their best, Rattray.’
‘That they will, sir.’ The PO hesitated. ‘Do we know who it is, sir? The raider?’
Kemp nodded. ‘She’s believed to be the Kormoran.’
Rattray’s lips moved into position for a whistle that never came: he hung onto it in time. But the Kormoran was worth a whistle and to hell with it. She was one of the big jobs, successor to an earlier Kormoran, sunk by HMAS Sydney off Shark Bay in Western Australia on 19 November the year before while the new Kormoran, immediately renamed as such in honour of her predecessor, had only just completed her fitting-out. Petty Officer Rattray went down to talk to his guns’ crews about the Kormoran mark II.
He said, ‘More or less standard armament for the commerce raiders, plus a little: eight 5.9-inch main armament, six torpedo tubes. Believed to have sunk upwards of 30,000 tons of Allied shipping in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean already. Diesel electric engines with a cruising range of 70,000 miles at ten knots, and capable of twenty knots, which is more than the first bloody Kormoran. You, Leading Seaman Sinker.’
‘Yes, PO?’
‘Know anything else about the first Kormoran, do you?’
Stripey Sinker nodded. ‘She and the Sydney…they sank each other.’
‘Right! Remember that, you lot. She sank a County Class cruiser, like the Rhondda. So watch it, all right?’ Rattray turned away and marched for’ard along the flying bridge towards the other of his two main guns, left-right-left, smart as ever and bugger Hitler. This, he knew, was going to be a day to remember, to tell any grandchildren about in his dotage, how grandda
d fought the Kormoran. That was, of course, if he didn’t find his name inscribed on one of the Jerry projectiles.
He continued firmly for’ard, fixing his mind on Whale Island and past glories at Olympia, and of his time as gunner’s mate aboard the old battleship Emperor of India. As he reached the 3-inch the battle ensigns were going up aboard the Rhondda and on the heels of this the cruiser was heard to engage the enemy.
On Coverdale’s bridge Captain Dempsey took a report from his WIT office: a transmission had been intercepted from the Kormoran, a transmission in the German naval cypher. Once engaged, there remained no point in maintaining wireless silence. A moment later Sub-Lieutenant Cutler emerged from the wheelhouse carrying Kemp’s perforated canvas bag. Then the Rhondda was seen to be hit below and abaft her bridge superstructure and her foremast carried away. Two minutes later there was a dull glow from her after section and a monumental explosion came across the water, a roar of sound followed by a blaze of light. Debris was seen, as the officers on Coverdale’s bridge brought up their binoculars, flung high into the air.
Kemp said, ‘After 6-inch turret by the look of it.’
Below Petty Officer Rattray was shaking a fist in the direction of the not-yet-visible Kormoran. ‘Buggers!’ he yelled at the top of his voice. ‘Dirty buggers!’ He had a fair idea of what the inferno inside a turret would be like when it took a direct hit. Searing flame, molten metal, strips of flesh, a whole turret’s crew fried. There would have been a gunner’s mate in that turret…and almost certainly it wouldn’t be just the turret: the flash would probably have gone downwards through the decks to the shell-handling room and there would be nothing left of the handling parties, the men who sent the big ammo up in the hoists to the guns. And the magazines would be in danger, the order very likely being passed from Rhondda’s compass platform to open the flooding valves as a precaution, drowning men in the process, men shut beneath the clipped-down hatches who would have to be sacrificed for the greater good of a whole ship’s company. A nasty moment for the skipper faced with giving that order.
When the next explosion came, to be followed by a series of similar explosions, Rattray knew that at least one of the magazines had gone. And only a matter of seconds later, with her remaining guns firing to the last, the Rhondda blew up, an immense and sickening cataclasm, her decks erupting in flame and thick black smoke all along her hull from stem to stern. On Coverdale’s bridge Leading Signalman Goodenough read off a signal from Captain(D) in the destroyer leader.
‘From Captain(D), sir. “Intend to engage the enemy.”’
‘Thank you, Goodenough.’ As the destroyers, moving under maximum power, raced across to starboard with their battle ensigns streaming along the wind, Kemp gave what he knew to be the inevitable, last-hope order.
‘Cutler?’
‘Sir?’
‘Pass to all ships from Commodore, convoy is to scatter.’
‘Aye, aye, sir —’
‘And give me that bloody bag.’
Cutler handed it over: it was the Commodore’s personal responsibility and would go down with him if it came to that.
III
Kemp was thinking of Harry as he watched all the ships making off in their different directions so as to spread the target for the German raider. Harry would have faced something like this, aboard his convoy escort in the Mediterranean, would perhaps have been blown up unrecognizably, or gone over the side to drown in a hail of gunfire or dive bombing. Or he might yet be safe: there was always the hope, though it was growing fainter as no news came through. It didn’t fade entirely: there could be word at the Cape, probably would be, they probably wouldn’t clutter up the air with personal messages to a convoy’s Commodore…
Moving now under the direct orders of Kemp, the Coverdale was coming up to her maximum speed. Below in the engine-room Chief Engineer Warrington had given her all he’d got and the oiler moved like a cruiser, very manoeuvrable, very fast, as Kemp moved in and out between the scattering ships while the signal lamps passed the final order for them to proceed independently to Simonstown. After that it would be up to each master where he took his ship to be as safe as possible from the Kormoran’s guns: Kemp expected that mostly they would choose to head down again into the Roaring Forties, accept their inevitably slower speed of advance and hide in the immensity of the seas and the spume-blown rollers of the westerlies. As they watched the ships moving apart — the four big troop transports, the ammunition carriers and the unwieldy grain ships — Dempsey remarked on the wisdom or otherwise of the senior officer’s original order to move the convoy up into better weather.
He said, ‘We’d have remained safer if we’d kept farther south, in my opinion.’
‘Being wise after the event, Captain?’
Dempsey shook his head. He stood four square in his belief and reinforced it. ‘Those seas would have thrown off the German gunners. As it is, we’ve steamed right into her.’
Kemp said nothing: Dempsey was at least half right. It so often happened that way: you tried to assess the odds and strike a balance and you stood only a fifty percent chance of being right. If things went the other way, then you were wrong and took the consequences, death or court martial for making a mistake. Well, the Captain of the Rhondda would face no court martial now for a possibly wrong assessment: almost certainly he would be dead. If he’d survived those explosions that had wracked his ship…the Kormoran would certainly not be standing by to pick up any survivors. And that wrong assessment: it would have been open to Kemp at least to disagree and put a different point of view to the senior officer of the escort, but he hadn’t, because he’d believed it was the right decision, or anyway the best gamble. So he was also to blame, if anyone was.
‘Kormoran in sight, sir, bearing —’
‘All right, Cutler. I’ve got her.’ Kemp was looking through his binoculars. A long, lean ship, not unlike a cruiser, with puffs of smoke coming from her gun-batteries. Shells fell among the retreating merchant ships. Kemp called out, ‘Zigzag, Captain. Take the ship, please.’
Dempsey ordered the helm over at precisely the right moment: a projectile took the sea off his port bow and spray came up like a waterfall in reverse. The Coverdale moved on, shuddering to another near miss, shuddered further as a small-calibre shell exploded on the port waterline for’ard.
Kemp swung round.
‘Hit?’
‘Near miss. Not serious, I think.’ Dempsey leaned over the bridge screen and called down through a megaphone to the fo’c’sle. ‘Bosun!’
‘Aye, sir?’
‘Get the carpenter. Sound round below, port side.’
Bosun Pedley lifted a hand in acknowledgement of the order, left the fo’c’sle and vanished into the accommodation beneath. Kemp said, ‘The destroyers are moving in.’
‘Good luck to them,’ Dempsey said. ‘They’ve got guts, all right.’
Now the Kormoran was being engaged: but she was still firing towards the convoy, and as Dempsey finished speaking there was a hit on the stern of one of the grain ships and she began circling: rudder gone, most likely, to bring a lame duck to the convoy and one that Kemp would wish to stand by. But the bite had gone out of the gunfire as the German turned his attention to the destroyers, now worrying him like a pack of terriers, each with all her guns in action, blasting away at the Kormoran’s decks. As Captain(D) in the leader handled his ship so as to come between the German and the other destroyers, Kemp latched on to what was being attempted.
He said, ‘Captain(D)’s getting in close —’
‘Inside the German’s ability to bear?’
Kemp nodded. ‘He’s risking the smaller stuff but if he can make it, it’ll be worth while. He’ll be making a torpedo run, for my money!’
‘It looks like it,’ Dempsey said, his voice tense. Down by the after 3-inch Petty Officer Rattray was also tense. He, like Kemp, had recognized the manoeuvring for what it was. Rattray hadn’t much opinion of torpedoes nor of torpedo-gunners�
� mates, who were of a different stamp from the gunnery branch — sloppier and not so bright, didn’t ever have ceremonial duties to perform: who wanted a tin fish at Olympia for instance? And who manned the Commodore’s guard at the home depots? Not the torpedomen. But, of course, they had their uses, and this just could be one of their times of glory.
Rattray found that he was gripping a stanchion as though strangling it; also that he was praying for the torpedomen’s success, and sweating like a pig with excitement and hope. He knew he was standing on a time bomb himself — oilers were always that way inclined. Then the unexpected happened and a groan went up from the Coverdale’s decks: HMAS Timor, carrying Captain(D) close to the port side of the Kormoran with the latter’s heavy guns helpless, came under withering fire from the secondary armament and from rifles and close-range weapons aimed down on them from all along the high side. From the Coverdale’s bridge Kemp, through his binoculars, saw it all in greater detail than Rattray: men fell in heaps and swathes, scattered from the torpedo-tubes like ninepins, the bridge left with apparently not a man alive, the destroyer swinging out of control and heading away once more from the Kormoran to cause confusion to her consorts.
But not for very long.
Kemp believed something from the German had set off a vital part of one of the Timor’s torpedoes. The destroyer blew up with terrifying suddenness and began to settle fast; for a while her blazing hull drifted across the other destroyers of the flotilla and then as she went down further, almost on an even keel, and started to roll over to starboard, she vanished beneath the sea and the blazing fires were doused into clouds of steam. A few heads bobbed in the water, a handful of men trying to swim to the succour of the destroyers’ nets that were being put over the sides as fast as possible.
Then, as Kemp watched in increasing anxiety, one of the other destroyers, HMAS Ayers, altered course parallel with the Kormoran and Kemp saw the splash through his binoculars as what looked like four torpedoes hit the water and sped on their set courses, point blank, for the high, sheer sides of the Kormoran. It seemed to Kemp impossible that they could miss. But the Nazis reacted quickly, the helm went hard over and the Kormoran swung to present her bows to the destroyer, giving a smaller target as she steadied on a ramming course.
Convoy South Page 6