The Torch Bearers: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 5

by Alexander Fullerton

  The skipper, up on his high seat now, had his glasses on the Burbridge. It was full daylight by this time. He told Scarr, “Pilot—bring her round ten degrees to port … Signalman—by light to him, ‘What is your best speed now?’”

  Wolstenholm went for the lamp. Daylight was revealing tired, whiskered, anxious faces. They’d sunk a U-boat but lost too many of the ships in their charge for that to be a sufficient cause for joy. From Harbinger’s pitching, swaying bridge Stella’s upperworks were visible, some way out on the Burbridge’s starboard bow, whenever she rode up on a wave, but otherwise she was still hidden.

  “I’ll reduce speed in a minute, Chubb. Who’s on asdics?”

  “Leading Seaman Garment, sir.”

  Garment was the HSD, Higher Submarine Detector, the operator who’d made such an effective partnership with Tony Graves. The skipper’s question had been in reference to the fact that as soon as he slowed the ship to something less than twenty knots he’d be relying on asdics as the defence against any dived submarine attack—a shadower closing in from the beam, for instance, and finding this very attractive target. She’d answered now, and the message was being passed. The sea was livelier, Warrimer thought, than it had been yesterday. The rough stuff coming at last: it had been promised days ago.

  The Burbridge’s answer was, Making eight knots at the moment but doubtful this can be maintained. Machinery problems snowballing. Sorry to be a nuisance.

  The skipper grunted: he’d read it for himself. “Make to Stella, ‘I will look after this. Rejoin convoy.’”

  It would take Broad a while to do it, but not as long as it was going to take the Burbridge and Harbinger.

  Warrimer saw the captain staring at the passengers who were lining the rail of the Burbridge’s main deck, one level below the boat deck. Promenade deck, they’d probably call it. The nurses were easily distinguishable, in their cloaks. Queen Alexandras’, Warrimer thought they might be. The skipper half-raised his glasses; then lowered them again to hang on their strap—as if he’d been about to take a closer look and for some reason decided not to. Frowning, then glancing aside and finding Warrimer’s eyes on him.

  “When one corvette’s refuelled, she can take over from us here.” He added, in a lower tone, as if talking to himself as much as to Warrimer, “Just hope to God this fellow can keep going.”

  “What if he can’t, sir?”

  A baffled look—as if he barely knew who he was, or the question didn’t make sense … He told Mike Scarr, “One-eight-oh revs, pilot. Come round to port now.”

  Asdics began to ping, as the ship slowed. And Stella was drawing away, making her best speed up the convoy’s wake.

  CHAPTER TEN

  2 November 1942:

  General Montgomery to Chief of the Imperial General Staff:

  I think he [Rommel] is now ripe for a real hard blow … It is going in tonight and … if we succeed it will be the end of Rommel’s army.

  Same evening. Adolf Hitler to Field Marshal Rommel:

  I and the German people are watching the heroic defensive battle waged in Egypt with faithful trust in your powers of leadership and in the bravery of the German-Italian troops under your command … You can show your troops no other way than that which leads to victory or to death.

  “All right, then.” Max Looff glanced up at Franz Walther,Willi Heusinger and the quartermaster, Oelricher. They were round the table in the wardroom—Oelricher by invitation, since he messed next door with the engine room artificers and the coxswain. Looff said, “Comments of a constructive nature will be welcome.”

  U 702 was rolling heavily on the surface twenty miles north of the convoy. It was afternoon now. They’d spent the forenoon reloading one torpedo tube and bringing in the spares from the external stowage in the casing. Most of the reload fish were carried internally, except for those two outside the pressure-hull, one for’ard and one aft, but they’d now been moved in through the hatches and secured in the racks. The weather hadn’t made it an easy operation, by any means, but as they were bound to need all their torpedoes and conditions weren’t about to improve, Looff had opted to do it while it was still just feasible: one fish at a time, first stemming the sea with a stern hatch open, then turning stern-to for the same job for’ard. He’d advised the other Drachen group captains who’d used any torpedoes to do the same. Looff had expended three so far, which left him with eleven.

  He was steering northeast at six knots, which was the convoy’s present rate of advance—according to Drachen Six, Ernst Pöhl, who was shadowing from the quarter. Pöhl estimated the Brits were making seven to seven and a half, but with a zigzag taken into account it came down effectively to about six. And at this low speed, with wind and sea on the beam, U 702 was behaving like a drunken cow. It was tempting to dive, get under all the rough stuff, but he wanted to keep a lookout for other members of the group who were close by, and it could be put up with at least until the battery was fully charged. It was rather a luxury, too, to be operating in this zone where there was no chance at all of being jumped on by aircraft. Meanwhile there were signals to be sent and received, and after he’d finalised this plan of action for tonight and passed precise orders to each of the other COs he’d take her a bit farther along the convoy’s track before he dived. The peace and quiet was something to look forward to: and you could still use wireless, by shoving the mast up.

  “The first point to note is that the convoy has been regrouped, during the forenoon. Six columns only—so it’s a somewhat tighter formation covering a smaller area. Not exactly to our advantage, I admit, but—well, can’t help whittling ’em down, can we?”

  It was a blow that Knappe, Dracken Four, had been lost last night. Werner Knappe had managed to get part of a signal out, just before the end: he’d been hit by gunfire from the escort’s only destroyer, and hadn’t been able to dive, and then another hit had blown off the diesel intakes and swamped the engines. So he’d had to stop and take his punishment: the signal had cut off in the middle of a word.

  Ernst Pöhl had missed a wonderful chance, early this morning. Probably because of increased wave-height limiting his periscope vision. The passenger liner had dropped right astern of the convoy; she’d been on her own, a sitting duck, and Pöhl had been just too late catching-on to this situation. The convoy had slowed to allow the straggler to catch up, and before Pöhl had been able to get inside torpedo range the steamer had been enfolded in the convoy’s embrace again: worse still, the destroyer, having got her there, was starting an A/S sweep back southward, directly towards him. As he was there primarily to shadow, not to make single-handed attacks, he’d got out of the way, swiftly. It had been an intelligent bit of guesswork on the part of the escort commander, Looff considered, to have realised that the odds were a U-boat would by that time have been trying to get into position to attack.

  Pöhl and his Drachen Six had had a lucky break two nights ago. A shell from a trawler had hit him as he dived, very close to the convoy: the hit had been right aft, on the casing. It had scared the daylights out of everyone with its noise and percussion, but had done no damage to the pressure-hull or anything else that mattered, only tangled some steel up there. It was pure luck that Ernst wasn’t playing a harp duet with Werner Knappe, right at this minute: and lucky for everyone else up there too, since the only songs he’d ever known had been dirty ones. But there was a lesson in that experience—not to dismiss trawlers too lightly.

  “So.” Looff’s pencil tapped the diagram he’d been working on. “Here’s the convoy, and these are the escorts as they were deployed last night. We can see it now, well enough—their stations and modus operandi. Corvettes: here, and here. These two stick rather closely to their own corners. And these three objects, the trawlers, are similarly limited. As, of course, they’d have to be, and it would be easier for us if they were not … The exception to the rule seems to be that when ships are torpedoed, the trawlers hang around them for rescue purposes, at least for a while, and
this of course leaves certain sectors open to attack. My idea last night was based on this factor: to have one assault by several boats create alarm and confusion, and then three more of us coming in to reap the harvest. Unfortunately it didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped—and tonight, therefore, we’ll make one simultaneous attack, as shown here.”

  From each bow of the convoy a U-boat would approach at an angle of about thirty degrees to the line of advance. It was a reasonably good bet that these two—they’d be Drachens Eight and Five—would draw the full attention of the two corvettes, who’d romp out after them. This would leave the centre open except for the destroyer, which if it stuck to last night’s system would be placed centrally and poised to rush out ahead to break up attacks before they got in close. So for the entertainment of the destroyer—whose captain was obviously the escort commander—Drachens Two and Three would attack the convoy head-on, midway between Drachens Eight and Five and with about three thousand metres between them initially. Whichever the destroyer picked on, the other would go on through, while the one attacked would dive and be ready to surface and press in again as soon as the destroyer diverted to the other.

  “This way I believe we can’t fail to get at least one boat into the front of the convoy with a free hand to pick targets, and no escorts to interfere—they’ll be busy elsewhere, at least for some time. And of course if they cease to be busy, those boats can then surface and wade in, help themselves … Meanwhile Drachen Eight and Drachen Five, who’ve come in on the bows, will either dive and re-surface, or dodge round their attendant corvettes—they’ll have the speed advantage—and come in again on the flanks. Simultaneously with this, Drachens Six and Seven will sweep in from port and starboard—here, and here—to attack from the quarters or astern. If the flank trawlers—these boys—should be drawn towards Drachens Four and/or Five, then the quarters will be undefended; otherwise the rear would be the place—just one trawler in the way shouldn’t be much of a problem for the combined talents of Oberleutnants Pöhl and Horsacker … Eh?”

  “Excellent, sir.” Heusinger nodded. “You’ll have ’em by the balls. But may I ask—”

  “Yeah.” Franz Walther had been about to speak when the first lieutenant had annoyed him by jumping in first. “You didn’t say what we’ll be doing, sir.”

  “I’ve saved that until last.” Looff pointed, with the pencil’s tip. “We start up here, somewhere between Köning and Becker.” Those were Drachens Two and Three, coming in frontally, from the northeast. “My intention is to move in wherever the door’s open, depending on which way the cat jumps. We’ll be just far enough out to control the start of it, then to take advantage of results as they show up. I would guess this scheme should give us at least six kills tonight: and what I would hope—” he raised a hand with two fingers crossed—“is that the convoy will be opened up so well that I can get right inside it. I want that passenger ship. Also, there are two tankers in there.”

  Franz Walther murmured, “Passengers.” He wrinkled his blunt nose. “The Dönitz doctrine?”

  It was a kind of joke, from the U-boat men’s angle. Flag Officer U-boats’ orders in the context of killing human beings as well as the ships they sailed in had been cleverly ambiguous; this was what made it mildly amusing, to the sea-going cynic. The issue was whether crews as well as ships were legitimate targets, and the admiral had contented himself with pointing out that without crews, Allied ships couldn’t sail. The logical conclusion was that for men to drown couldn’t be at all a bad thing. It pleased some U-boat captains to take it a few steps further: for instance, when time and circumstances permitted, to destroy a ship’s boats on their davits by riddling them with machine-gun fire before torpedoing the ship. Others felt differently, sharing the traditional instinct of the seaman that a man in the water was a life to be saved.

  Looff told Walther, “What I’m thinking of is my score. That liner’s a fair size.”

  Heusinger suggested, smiling, “Thinking of bonfires too, sir?”

  That old fable … Looff had a suspicion that Franz Walther knew the truth of it—that it was rubbish. Walther was smart, and saw through things: whereas this self-ingratiating Willi Heusinger was really still a boy, and typical of the kind who’d enjoy having a CO who laughed when he watched tankers burn … How would he like to know, Looff wondered, that the same CO, alone in his bunk at nights, often woke shaking like a man in fever—in a helpless, mother-seeking funk?

  As likely as not Franz Walther knew it. Or guessed. He’d been around, seen other captains in similar shape. You tried to disguise it, but—well, nobody else succeeded. And the top brass ignored it, because they wanted you at sea, wanted the last gasp out of you … This was something that Looff had come to recognise and cling to during those few days in the base just recently: that practically everyone had trouble with his nerves. After a while … Not the new boys, who were so busy being heroes: but after a certain stage, when you’d come to the conclusion that you were not a hero and saw the stark reality—that the odds were you’d drown … If there was any heroism at all, he’d decided, it was being like this and carrying on, putting up with the shakes and the mental screams and assuring yourself between whiles that you were OK, could see it through … Walther’s brown eyes were on him, thoughtful, understanding: and if he was aware of that aspect of it too there’d be no contempt in such insight.

  Oelricher cleared his throat, and spoke for the first time. “If I might make one comment, sir. It’s—” he nodded—“excellent … But wouldn’t it be more effective—that’s to say, really guaranteed to succeed—if we postponed it twenty-four hours, so we’d have the other two as well?”

  There’d been a signal from Kernéval to the effect that two Sixth Flotilla boats who’d been on their way from Brest down to the Mediterranean were being diverted to join the Drachen group. Otto Meusel and Klaus Ziegner were travelling in company and had been ordered to rendezvous with Drachen One as soon as possible. They’d be here some time tomorrow and they’d become Drachens Nine and Ten. It would have been inviting bad luck, Looff thought, to have reallocated Werner Knappe’s number in the group.

  He agreed with his quartermaster, up to a point.

  “You’re right, of course. But there’s no reason to wait for them. After all, our lord and master is crying out for blood: and time isn’t completely unlimited.”

  The rest of that signal from U-boat headquarters had said, This convoy with its weak defence should be annihilated. There can be no excuse for even one ship emerging from the air gap. The Black Pit must swallow it.

  “Tomorrow night, if this plan has proved itself—and mind you, we may learn some lessons and find it can be improved—well, we’ll repeat it, only in a more elaborate form with nine boats instead of seven. I’ve already considered this, in fact. All things being equal, I’d employ the newcomers as back-ups to Drachens Eight and Five—two more attackers going in on the bows at the same time as the two—or three, counting ourselves—from ahead. Well, Oelricher?”

  The quartermaster nodded. “I would say there’s no doubt at all you’ll be giving the C-in-C exactly what he wants, sir.”

  “But don’t we always?”

  Franz Walther chuckled at his own humour. Black-rimmed nails, greasy hair over his collar, face as fuzzy as a dog’s and with discoloured teeth that could have been a dog’s too. Even his eyeballs looked as if they could do with a good rinse. And he was as efficient a chief engineer as you’d find afloat. Heusinger was looking at him with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion in his expression: he wasn’t used to Walther yet, and they were such contrasting types—Heusinger youthfully fresh, well groomed and clean … Looff, who was neither as scruffy as his engineer nor as immaculate as his first lieutenant, said, “I intend to give him what he wants. Even before that signal I had decided—”

  “Signal, sir.”

  He glanced up—at Kreis, the PO telegraphist. Kreis said, “From Drachen Six, sir.”

  Looff read,
Convoy reduced speed to four knots at 1515.

  “Well, I’ll be—damned …” He looked up at Walther, who was squinting in an attempt to read the scrawl upside-down. “We even have a few extra days now in which to make a job of it.”

  Jack Everard lay in a depression that was no more than a fold in the ground, in roughly the geometric centre of something like four acres of sloping stubble. Beside the slot he was lying in was a low outcrop of rock and some gorse and nettles; the rock would account for the fact that these few square yards in the middle of the field had never been ploughed. He was wet, cold, hungry, and his left ankle wouldn’t support his weight. He’d used Frank Trolley’s knife to cut and trim a stick, in the woods where he’d hidden before daylight came and from which he’d moved only a few hours ago; using the stick he was able to hobble along, slowly. The knife had been under the edge of a platter on the table in that village where they’d had the meal: it was the kind you’d expect to be kept in a sheath, but someone must have used it earlier that evening for cutting meat, and Trolley had managed to liberate it. Frank’s word for surreptitious acquisitions, that was. Jack had pulled it out of Frank’s sock, in the early hours of this morning beside the railway line, and now it was in his own.

  This was a good hide, as hides went, because it didn’t look like one. A platoon of soldiery had been through the wood where he’d been earlier; that had been the sort of place you’d search for a man on the run. They’d reappeared on the road down there at the bottom, re-embarked in their trucks and gone off to draw some other covert a long time ago now. There’d been no reason for them to have beaten over this field: only someone unusually astute or experienced in such matters would have guessed there could be cover for a man here, even though from the road below the gorse must have been in plain sight just as the crossroads was from up here. There were some small houses around it, and several times military vehicles had stopped, soldiers getting out for a smoke while others knocked on doors. Now, the crossroads was deserted, and the occupants of the houses weren’t visible.