“I know how it seems.”
He’d asked Cruance yesterday, pressing a question that had gone unanswered earlier, “How many corvettes am I likely to get?”
“Depends what’s available. There’s a Freetown-based escort force which at full strength is quite large, but—as I’ve said already, demands on available resources are exceptionally heavy. And incidentally, a fast homebound convoy from the Cape will have veered off westward—heading for Trinidad, actually—just ahead of you.”
“Homebound from the Cape via Trinidad?”
Cruance had nodded. “Yours will be the last SL convoy northbound for quite a long time. We have to keep this area as uncongested as possible, to allow for a steady flow of follow-up convoys into the North African ports, so Cape shipping will be routed across and up through the American coastal system, then home across the North Atlantic. It’s a long way round, certainly, but once we have the Med open there won’t be nearly as much Cape traffic anyway.”
They had it all worked out, cut and dried. Nick commented, “You say when the Mediterranean’s open, not if. As if it’s a certainty.”
“But it is! As long as ‘Torch’ is a success—which with the help of your convoy it will be.”
“Are you sure there’ll be any corvettes at all down there?”
Cruance had left his chair and begun to pace up and down. Stooping, with his hands clasped behind his back. Muttering, “Everard—now, listen … You seem to me to be over-dramatising this. You appear to assume you’ll suffer heavy losses. It isn’t necessarily so, however. Your function—I make this point with all deference to you as an experienced and accomplished seaman—will, as always, be to protect your ships, to ensure their—what’s the phrase—safe and timely arrival … Now, the possibility that you may attract the attentions of any U-boats who in twelve to fifteen days’ time may happen to be on your convoy’s route is obviously a real one. But for heaven’s sake, a large proportion of convoys today do still have escorts who haven’t trained together! And the long-distance slow convoys do tend to have coal-burning trawlers among their escorts. It’s advantageous, isn’t it, from the point of view of their endurance, over those long hauls? But here’s another point I’d like to make. Every man who puts to sea in wartime knows the risks he’s running. Whatever kind of ship or convoy he’s in … What it amounts to, surely, is that while the routing and timing of convoy SL 320 may well contribute substantially to the success of ‘Torch,’ the risks and chances will be the same that any other convoy runs!”
“Were you a barrister, in civvy street?”
Cruance had stared at Nick in surprise. Then he smiled, and bowed. “My eloquence has betrayed me?” “No. Not your eloquence.”
By midnight on the second day out of Gibraltar, Madeira was fifty miles to starboard and Palma in the Canaries two hundred on the port bow. It seemed more likely that any U-boats in the area now would be on the far side of Madeira, in the four hundred mile gap between it and the Azores. But that was only a guess. Harbinger’s antisubmarine zigzag was being scrupulously maintained, RDF and HF/DF and asdics working twenty-four hours a day, and bridge lookouts were being harried to keep on their toes.
Nick had asked Cruance, “What happens to your Freetown convoy if my ship gets sunk before we get there?”
“The convoy would sail with whatever escorts were available, under whichever CO might be the senior officer.” “You mean senior trawlerman.”
Cruance had ignored that. Rightly, in a way, since there were plenty of very good men in the escort trawlers. But they didn’t have the speed or the armament to do more than supplement the long-haul convoys. Not, Nick thought, that Cruance would know much about it: he was a desk man, he’d probably never even seen a trawler. He assured Nick, “You’ll get there, all right—there and back. Admiral Wishart has great faith in your powers of survival.”
It was pointless to argue. They’d been over the same ground half a dozen times already. He asked instead, “Do we happen to know who the commodore will be?”
“A former Cunard master, name of Sandover. He’s settling himself into a ship called the Chauncy Maples.”
“And how do I get him to accept that we can’t divert, when the heat’s turned on us?”
The point being that the care of any convoy was a responsibility shared, usually on give-and-take terms, between its commodore and the escort commander. Commodores were usually retired admirals, or retired senior Merchant Navy captains. Whatever their previous ranks had been, they were appointed as commodores RNR. They were responsible for the convoy’s internal discipline and organisation—for the ships keeping station and observing regulations such as not showing lights at night or making excessive smoke by day, and for manoeuvring, changing formation, emergency turns, and so on. The escort commander’s job was defence of the convoy against enemy attack; but a decision to change the route when there was some threat ahead would normally be a matter of agreement, often a request from the escort commander with which the commodore would comply.
Cruance nodded. “Good question. The answer is you’ll be taking the orders down there with you, and he’s being warned there are special circumstances applying on which you’ll have been briefed. It’s been intimated to him that he should accept your decisions, particularly on routing.”
At noon on day two out of Gibraltar, Palma was a hundred miles abeam to port. A noon sunsight provided a position-line to confirm it. Scarr told him, “We’ll be two hundred miles west of Palma at midnight, sir.”
It was what he’d anticipated. “And our course will then become—one-seven-five, roughly?”
“One-seven-seven, sir.”
The route northward with the convoy from Freetown was already laid off on the chart. For Nick’s personal and private use Cruance had provided him with another tracing, a transparent overlay on which all the relevant “Torch” movements were inked. It was the first system in reverse; while Cruance’s chart displayed the “Torch” pattern and could have SL 320’s movements added to it, Harbinger’s chart showed only the convoy’s line of advance, and Nick could check on the whereabouts of other forces by applying this overlay, with its spreading fan of red-ink tracks annotated with convoy designations, dates and times.
Scarr asked him, “Is there something special about this lot we’re collecting, sir?”
Nick had his glasses up. Harbinger pitching to a glassy swell rolling up from the southwest. In these conditions you’d see a periscope a long way off.
“Special?”
Everyone had the same sort of mental disquiet: a feeling of wasting time, being out of things … Harbinger began to roll as she swung to a new leg of the zigzag, pushing her stem across the lifting mounds of sea.
“Well, sir, seems peculiar being sent such a long way just to bring some convoy back. I mean, why us … Will we get the group together again some time, sir?”
“That’s the intention.” He looked round at Graves, who was officer of the watch. “I’ll be in my sea-cabin.”
Scarr’s question—“something special” about the convoy—had put Kate in his mind again. It was a constant, losing battle to keep her out of it.
When Harbinger altered course at midnight she’d already passed the Canaries-Azores line. Daylight, when it came, flushed an ocean that was losing its greenish northern tinge, beginning to shade into the blue-black of its southern reaches.
In mid-forenoon Nick was smoking a pipe on the bridge when the HF/DF bell rang. Carlish, sharing the watch with Warrimer, went to the voice-pipe.
“U-boat transmissions on bearing two-four-six, sir!”
“Range?” He looked round at Warrimer. “Make mean course one-four-seven. Get Gritten on that set.” He knew it couldn’t be PO Gritten down there now, because Gritten would never have made a report like that without including a distance in it. Carlish had got one now, though: with an ear still close to the pipe he told Nick, “Range fifteen miles, sir.”
The alteration of thirty degrees to port was to gi
ve the U-boat as wide a berth as possible. At that range and on a bearing that had been almost on the beam to start with it wasn’t strictly necessary; but he hadn’t known the range, initially, and anyway there was no harm in playing safe. If there was one U-boat around, there could be more.
The bell rang again. Carlish reported, “Petty Officer Gritten’s taken over, sir. Bearing two-four-six, range sixteen.”
Nick moved to the voice-pipe, displacing Carlish.
“Captain here. Sure of that range, Gritten?”
“Yessir. Ground-wave, sixteen—well, say fifteen to seventeen. And—hold on a mo’, sir …”
Harbinger under helm again, making a zig to port. Binoculars examining the blue horizon, finding nothing. This leg of the zigzag would leave her steering almost directly away from the reported position of the German.
Gritten called, “Captain, sir—this one’s just surfaced. And that weren’t no sighting report. He’s still transmitting, sir.”
When the transmission ended, Gritten would sweep around and try to pick up any other submarine that might be answering. He’d know this one had just surfaced because he was a very experienced operator and could tell the difference between transmissions over wet aerials and dry ones; in this weather there was no other reason for aerials to be wet. His other conclusion, that the U-boat wasn’t passing a report of an enemy seen or heard, came from knowing that German enemy-report calls were always prefixed with a morse sequence called an E-bar.
Once PO Telegraphist Archie Gritten got himself turned to a U-boat’s transmissions, he could just about tell you its captain’s date of birth.
After half an hour the transmissions ceased. They’d grown fainter before they disappeared altogether, and Mike Scarr’s plot of ranges and bearings during those thirty minutes showed that the U-boat had been steering north at about fifteen knots. It wasn’t worth breaking radio silence to report it, especially as the Admiralty tracking room would probably have recorded every dot and dash.
“Sub.”
Carlish jumped. “Yes, sir?”
“Petty Officer Gritten said he was getting those transmissions on ground-wave. Do you know what he meant by that?” “Ground-wave as distinct from sky-wave, sir.”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, as confirmation that the U-boat had to be within about twenty miles of us, sir. Sky-wave transmissions are bounced off the ionosphere, so they could be coming from hundreds of miles away.”
He nodded. “Good.”
You couldn’t ever be sure, unless you checked. Youngsters tended to have gaps in their knowledge that could be hidden under a few technical phrases, and an introvert like Carlish might be embarrassed to admit ignorance, particularly if he’d disguised it in the first place. Then he’d remain ignorant, and perhaps one day make some daft mistake in consequence.
Nick told Warrimer, “Resume mean course one-seven-seven.”
Freetown, as Harbinger closed in towards it on the evening of the sixth day out of Gibraltar, was a mass of dark-green forest behind a crescent of bright-yellow beach. That beach was to the left of the entrance, the estuary of the Sierra Leone River. Two shabby-looking freighters were just in the process of entering harbour: the pair of trawlers shepherding them in looked as if they were suspended above the surface, a mirage-effect in the low-lying haze of heat. Clammy, mosquito-bearing heat, like foetid breath in your face as you steamed into it.
Graves murmured, beside him and with binoculars trained on those ships, “Couple of old rust-buckets …”
He was right, so far as those new arrivals were concerned. They’d have been brought up from one of the other West African ports, no doubt. But inside, out of sight from here, there’d be thirty or forty others, and among those there might be passenger ships, or anyway ships with cabin accommodation as well as cargo holds.
The signal station flashed a challenge, and Leading Signalman Wolstenholm passed Harbinger’s pendant numbers in reply. A longer message then came stuttering over: orders to fuel from the oiler Redgulf Star and then berth at Number Two buoy. A glance at the harbour plan showed they were being placed conveniently close to the naval landing-place.
“Close up Special Sea Dutymen, sir?”
“Yes, please. And tell Hawkey about the oiling.”
The Redgulf Star was at the far end of the anchorage, which was an estuary about two miles wide and seven long, its steamy expanse littered with moored ships. In there, twenty minutes later, with Harbinger forging smoothly through dead-flat, transparently blue water, Nick was examining ship after ship and finding none in which Kate could possibly have embarked. “Old rust-buckets” was a fair description. Many of their crewmen were on deck, escaping the heat below and draped limply along the ships’ rails to watch the destroyer threading her way up-river. The town—Freetown itself, and the waterfront where the naval headquarters was situated—lay to starboard, on the southern coast of the estuary and about three and a half miles from the entrance.
He took over from Scarr at the binnacle. Stooping to the voice-pipe: “Slow together.” He was about to take her close under the stern of a freighter of about eight thousand tons: rust-streaked and battered like all the others, she was flying a tired-looking Red Ensign, and on her stern a fat man who appeared to be naked was playing an accordion.
“Port five.”
From the wheelhouse the coxswain, CPO Elphick, acknowledged, “Port five, sir …”
Scarr muttered, with his glasses up, “That fellow’s starkers.” Then he read out the ship’s name and registration, which was in faded lettering across her counter. “Chauncy Maples. Newcastle upon Tyne.”
Strains of “Rule Britannia” floated across the water from the naked man’s accordion. Nick informed Scarr and anyone else who might be interested, “Chauncy Maples is our commodore’s ship.” He was suddenly quite light-headed with relief. From somewhere at the back of the bridge he heard Harris, a bosun’s mate, suggest in a low growl, “Reckon that’s ’im—bloke with the squeeze-box?” Laughter here and there—and Nick chuckled too, happy because the commodore would have picked the best accommodation that was available, and if the best was the Chauncy Maples he could have spared himself some sleepless nights. There’d have been no reason for her to have taken passage in any of these old crocks: they wouldn’t have any space for passengers anyway. Scarr reported, “I can see two Flower-class corvettes, sir. And so far I’ve counted nine trawlers … No, three Flowers, there’s one under way, over that side.”
He thought, Any advance on three?
Nine corvettes and three trawlers would be more like it. He was looking around: at the glossily green hillside above the town, greenery studded with smart-looking bungalows, residences of local bigwigs. The senior officials lived well here—or would have done if it hadn’t been for the heat and the rains. The rainy season had ended, obviously, but the land would have been heavily soaked throughout recent months, and the sun would now be steaming it out, maintaining the hothouse atmosphere until the next downpour … He stooped again, to order the wheel amidships. Sliding past yet another war and weatherworn veteran, he was thinking that he was going to have to fight for every ship he could get. And it might not be a battle he could win. If they had only three corvettes here, they’d hardly let him take all three away. And how could you possibly do the job with fewer?
CHAPTER FIVE
20 October 1942:
Prime Minister to C-in-C Middle East, General Alexander:
“Torch” goes forward steadily and punctually. But all our hopes are centred upon the battle you and Montgomery are going to fight … Let me have the word “Zip” when you start.
Commodore Sandover touched Nick’s arm. “We’ll have to start without him, eh?”
Without Baillie, CO of the corvette Astilbe, he meant. All the rest were here—thirty-six merchant-ship masters, three trawler skippers, and Guyatt, who had the other corvette, Paeony. Baillie had known he was expected to be here in good time for the conference t
o open at 1400: and time was precious, with only this one day for getting the whole show on the road … He asked the commodore, “Give him another minute?”
The commodore was being very helpful—despite being puzzled, obviously aware there was something peculiar about this trip. The way the convoy of old crocks had been assembled here in dribs and drabs, and he himself kept kicking his heels for nearly a week … “Then they send you down to nursemaid us! Practically single handed!” Nick had admitted—last night, over dinner in the Chauncy Maples’s dark-pannelled, worn-plush saloon—“I agree, it’s odd.” He’d decided on the spur of the moment to take the bull by the horns: “Even odder—one point in the verbal briefing they gave me at Gib—is we’re not to divert. The route’s to be stuck to exactly, come hell or high water. I’d imagine it might be something to do with other fleet or convoy movements.”
“No diversions?”
Sandover had stopped eating, stared at him incredulously. He was about seventy: deeply tanned under a mop of thick white hair, eyes light-blue and lively, a young man’s eyes in the seamed brown face. White eyebrows hooped: “What if we find a wolf-pack smack on the line of advance? Walk straight into ’em, do we?”
They’d come to some useful conclusions about that “no diversion” rule. But remembering the conversation and hearing the duplicity in his own voice, Nick was uncomfortably aware of double-dealing under the pretence of ignorance and openness … Just as now, looking round the packed, smoke-filled conference room, he felt isolated again in that sense of being a Judas. He of all people, the man they all looked to for protection!
Well, they’d get protection …
Last evening, after Harbinger had filled up her fuel tanks and then moved to her buoy, he’d taken a boat ashore, visiting the naval offices with the primary purpose of finding out what ships they’d earmarked for his escort force. The answer was two corvettes, three trawlers. Attempts to get a third corvette added to the force—Scarr had been right, there were three Flowers here at the moment—had been firmly rebuffed, despite the fact that six wouldn’t have been even one too many … But there’d been no point arguing. He’d sent RPC signals instead—“request the pleasure of your company”—to those five ships, inviting their captains to come aboard immediately. Baillie of Astilbe, Guyatt of Paeony, and Messrs Broad, Cartwright and Kyle of the trawlers Stella, Gleam and Opal respectively. They’d all arrived in the Astilbe’s motorboat, Baillie having rounded the others up. Studying them while his steward poured their drinks, Nick had wished he had a week instead of only part of one day in which to get to know them, impress on them his own ideas of convoy escort tactics, transform this bunch of highly individual characters into a like-minded team.
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