Marine L SBS

by Ian Blake

  The submarine’s new base at Malta, the home of the already famous Tenth Submarine Flotilla, was the Lazaretto, a building constructed of crumbling yellow stone. At one time it had been a hospital for the Grand Knights of Malta and was built on Manoel Island, which lay between Sliema and Lazaretto Creeks, close to Grand Harbour.

  All around them the SBS men could see the scars of the aerial siege that the island was undergoing. In Sliema Creek the masts and upper superstructure of a bombed merchant ship stuck out of the water and in the distance palls of smoke still hung over Valletta itself from the latest air raid. Even as the two men came aboard, the ominous, undulating wail of the air-raid siren started up for the umpteenth time that day.

  The grin of welcome on Timber Woods’s bearded face belied his first words as Pountney and Ayton mounted the conning tower. He shook their hands and then pointed to a mound of equipment that had just preceded them. ‘What’s this garbage then? I can’t have my ship cluttered up with a lot of experimental rubbish.’

  ‘RG equipment,’ Pountney answered. ‘Infrared lamps.’

  He showed Woods the Aldis-type lamp, designed to send a beam of invisible infrared light from the submarine. The beam, he explained, could be picked up on the screen of a small receiver the size of a box camera, which the SBS team carried with them.

  Woods shrugged. ‘Better than hand-grenades, I suppose.’

  On the supporting standard of the Sentinel’s main periscope an outsize Jolly Roger fluttered in the breeze: the flag flown in harbour by all British submarines to broadcast their successes against the enemy. Below the crossbones was sewn a single commando dagger commemorating the submarine’s role in the attack on Maritsa airfield the previous month. On the left were three white bars, signifying that the Sentinel had so far torpedoed three enemy ships; on the right was a single star which showed that it had also sunk one with its gun.

  ‘I see you’ve been busy since we last graced the Sentinel with our presence, Timber,’ Pountney said with sincere admiration, knowing his friend was fast becoming an ace submarine commander, the stuff legends were made of.

  ‘Had some luck,’ Woods admitted, tugging at his beard, a sign that he was embarrassed. He turned to Ayton. ‘Keeping him in order, Phil?’ he asked, to change the subject.

  ‘Some hope,’ Ayton replied cheerfully. ‘Just wait and hear what he’s let us in for now.’

  As they went below to the wardroom the anti-aircraft batteries on the far side of Valletta opened up with a concerted thunderous roar. Woods opened the ‘medicine cabinet’ and took down a bottle of gin and a smaller, dark-brown bottle. The cabinet was open in harbour but always locked at sea, with its key safely clipped on to the Captain’s key ring. Glasses and a carafe of water were asked for and produced.

  ‘Well, where is it this time?’ Woods asked as he shook a few drops of a dark liquid into the glasses, then twirled the glasses expertly in his hand to distribute the Angostura bitters.

  ‘Sicily,’ said Pountney.

  ‘I know that much,’ Woods retorted. The eastern side of the island was his new ‘billet’, his patrol area. ‘But whereabouts?’

  He measured the gin exactly by closing his forefinger and index finger together and putting them alongside each glass. Satisfied, he topped up the measures with half the amount of water and stirred each glass with a teaspoon before passing them to his guests.

  ‘North of Catania. There’s a big airfield just to the south of where we’re planning to land. Apparently the Krauts have just reinforced it with another squadron of Stukas.’

  Woods raised his glass: ‘To Admiral Nelson, God bless him.’

  They all stood and touched glasses.

  ‘Admiral Nelson,’ the two SBS men repeated solemnly.

  The Senior Service had its fair share of eccentrics and Woods was one of them. The Marines were part of the Royal Navy, so Ayton was used to toasting the great admiral. Pountney, however, had objected the first time, but his objection had been quickly overruled by Woods’s dictum ‘no toast, no gin’. The submariner knew that such rituals helped to relieve the tension they all felt before an operation.

  Outside they heard the thud of the first bombs falling.

  ‘So, it’s another airfield raid?’ said Woods.

  Pountney shook his head. ‘Not this time.’

  ‘There are so many airfields near Catania,’ explained Ayton, ‘that the powers that be think it’s a better use of resources to choke off vital supplies to them than to try and attack each one.’

  Woods nodded and refilled their glasses. ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Pountney, ’since Angelo every Axis airfield in the Med has been put on the alert for commando attacks.’

  ‘So what’s the drill?’

  Pountney pulled out a large-scale map of Sicily from one of his many pockets and spread it on the wardroom table. The sound of exploding bombs drew gradually closer. The anti-aircraft guns on Fort Manoel, behind the Lazaretto, began firing and were joined by the high-angle 5.5-inch guns of a cruiser anchored nearby. The racket was terrible, but Pountney did not even pause. With his forefinger he traced a coastal railway line running south from Messina through Catania to Syracuse and on to Ragusa. ‘They ship everything across the Straits of Messina and then load it on to supply trains. Food, ammunition, fuel, bombs, spare parts – the lot.’

  Ayton glanced across at Woods. ‘Do you go into the Straits, Timber? Sounds as if you would find some prime targets.’

  Woods snorted derisively. ‘Know anything about the Straits of Messina, Phil?’

  Ayton shook his head.

  ‘No submarine can operate there: the current’s too strong. It’s like a mill-race at times.’

  A near miss exploded in the water close to the Lazaretto, shaking the moored submarine from stem to stern. A second hit the island somewhere and debris clanged against the side of the vessel. The three men waited tensely, but the next exploded farther away, while the fourth was just a distant thud. But the guns continued their clamour in an attempt to divert the next bomber swooping on the creek.

  ‘That’s why we’re being used, I reckon,’ said Pountney calmly. ‘It’s the only way we can get at those bastards bombing the hell out of this island.’

  ‘What about our boys in blue?’ asked Woods.

  ‘Sicily’s well beyond the range of any of our bomber bases,’ Pountney explained. ‘And as you well know, Timber, your aircraft carriers are having their work cut out protecting the convoys trying to get through to here. So it’s down to us.’

  Suddenly the raid was over as quickly as it had begun, for the guns stopped firing and moments later the even wail of the all-clear siren drifted across the creek.

  ‘There’s a railway line running along the northern side of Sicily, too,’ said Woods, scrutinizing the map of the roughly triangular island.

  ‘The sub which patrols there is landing one of our teams near that line at about the same time as you’ll be landing us.’

  ‘The Salmon, that would be. Good man, Sandy Hargreaves – he’ll not let you down.’

  The duty steward put his head through the curtains. ‘You’ll be eating lunch ashore, sir?’ he asked pointedly.

  Woods glanced at the other two. ‘Base received a few boxes of rations yesterday, so we might as well see what we can scrounge.’

  They climbed on to the bridge and paused to watch the highly decorated dghaisas moving like coloured beetles across the creek. The craft were not rowed in the normal way: the oarsmen stood and pushed the oars, like gondoliers.

  The SBS men watched as the dghaisas gathered in one area of the creek.

  ‘That’s where the bomb must have dropped into the water just now,’ Woods told them. ‘They’re hoping some stunned fish might have floated to the surface. If we don’t get some food in soon the islanders are going to start dying like flies.’

  Lunch was a meagre meal, interrupted by another air raid. The Lazaretto trembled as the bombs cascaded down. Dus
t settled on the soup and the leaden heat of the afternoon added to the atmosphere of foreboding. A surgeon commander sitting with them described with the detached interest of his profession the outbreak of scabies among the civilian population – the first signs, he said, of serious malnutrition.

  Yet another raid was developing when the Salmon and the Sentinel sailed together at dusk. Once north of the island they went their separate ways, the first heading north-west through the Sicilian Channel, the second north-east across the sixty-mile stretch of water between Malta and Sicily known as the Malta Channel. In the Sentinel’s wardroom the two SBS men were served breakfast – mealtimes in submarines were often reversed – and Pountney ripped open the envelope containing his orders.

  The orders were, the two of them agreed after they had studied them, sketchy in the extreme. But the urgency of the situation came through the terse paragraphs plainly enough. A vital Malta convoy from Gibraltar would pass through the Sicilian Straits in three days’ time and the massed strength of enemy aircraft on Sicily had to be depleted before then. The orders did little more than give the map coordinates of the raiders’ landing beach near Taormina, stating that it had been chosen because at that point the railway ran close to the coast through a series of tunnels. These burrowed their way under the hilly foothills of Mount Etna, which in that area reached the eastern shoreline.

  Aerial reconnaissance photographs were included in the sealed envelope, but added little to the written orders. The verticals were taken from too great a height for either Pountney or Ayton to make much sense of them – though they showed the tunnels clearly, as they did the winding railway line itself – and the obliques of the landing beach were blurred and indistinct. There had been no time for the interpretation unit to look at the photographs.

  ‘We’ll just have to take pot luck,’ said Pountney cheerfully. He always preferred too few orders to ones which detailed every move he had to make. Using your initiative, that’s what the SBS was all about. To the more thoughtful Ayton, the mission they had been given appeared a one-way operation. But he knew now, as he could not have done before visiting Malta, just how vital it was going to be.

  They made their way to the torpedo compartment to have a final check on the folbot and their equipment, then returned to the wardroom, unfolded the cots from the bulkhead and turned in.

  * * *

  By dawn, a pale-pink strip on the starboard bow, Catania was abeam but beyond the horizon. The navigator had just taken a star sight with his sextant to confirm the submarine’s position, and Woods was preparing to dive, when one of the lookouts shouted with ill-concealed excitement: ‘Masts on the port bow, sir.’

  Woods swung his binoculars. ‘Where?’

  ‘Bearing red twenty, sir.’

  All sightings were given in degrees relative to the submarine’s bows, red for port, green for starboard, but sometimes the lookouts forgot to do this in the excitement of spotting a possible target. Woods could see the masts now, needle-fine above the horizon. It was either two separate ships close together or one large one. Whatever it was, the hull, or hulls, were still below the horizon, but the masts could plainly be seen against the lightening sky. Everyone on the bridge studied them closely through binoculars, and it was some minutes before the lookout broke the silence.

  ‘A schooner, I’d say, sir. Under power.’

  Woods grunted by way of agreeing. The Italians sometimes sent large trading schooners across to Tripoli with supplies.

  ‘She’ll cross our bows, sir. Moving at about six knots, I’d say.’

  Woods made up his mind. ‘Starboard five,’ he said down the voice pipe; and then: ‘Wheel amidships.’

  The two vessels, now on converging courses, began to close with each other. Woods pressed the klaxon button and the lookouts tumbled below. He followed, sliding expertly down the ladder, and on reaching the control room gave orders for the submarine to dive to periscope depth.

  As it was flat-calm on the surface, he ordered the attack periscope to be raised. This was smaller than the main periscope – it tapered to only two inches in diameter – and created hardly any wake, making it almost impossible for any surface lookout to spot it. But its light transmission was poor compared with the main periscope and it was some time before Woods could positively identify the vessel by the large Italian naval ensign flying from the backstay of the mainmast. It was quite large, about 180 feet in length, but not, Woods decided, worth wasting a torpedo on, even if he had been able to judge an attack correctly in the half-light of the morning.

  He waited until the schooner was almost within gun range before ordering the Sentinel to surface. Once on the bridge, he could see that the schooner was maintaining its course and speed.

  ‘Close up, gun crews,’ he ordered down the voice pipe.

  Seamen tumbled out on to the forecasing and began preparing the three-inch gun for action. On the bandstand behind the bridge the Oerlikon gunners did the same. Moments later the gunnery control officer joined Woods on the bridge. In the wardroom the two SBS men were woken by the ammunition rating, who made ready to feed shells up to the gun crew through a hatch in the wardroom deckhead.

  On the bridge Woods and the gunnery control officer studied the schooner through their binoculars. Coming, as the submarine was, out of the remains of the night, the schooner had not yet seen it.

  ‘Range and speed?’ Woods asked.

  ‘Four thousands yards. Around six knots,’ replied the gunnery control officer.

  ‘What do you make of her?’

  ‘She doesn’t look armed, sir. I suppose we ought to have a quick look at her.’

  ‘I agree.’

  Intelligence was badly needed and small vessels like this often carried important papers or personnel.

  ‘Stand by, boarding party,’ Woods said into the voice pipe.

  ‘Stand by, boarding party,’ the First Lieutenant called out from the control room.

  ‘That’s us,’ said Pountney, emerging from the wardroom with Ayton close behind him. The SBS now regularly formed part of a submarine’s boarding party, but the First Lieutenant looked at the two SBS men doubtfully. ‘Can’t afford to lose you two if there’s any trouble. You’ve got your own fish to fry.’

  Pountney brushed aside his protest. ‘Nonsense,’ he said brusquely. ‘We need some fresh air. Better than staying cooped up down here all day.’

  Pountney’s patience aboard a submarine was always on a short fuse. The confined space and the heavy, stale atmosphere made him pine for action, any action.

  Still the schooner stood on, rolling awkwardly in the swell as its diesels powered it through the water. Those aboard it, thought Woods, were either asleep or blind. The barrel of the three-inch gun was tracking the schooner’s progress as it moved across the Sentinel’s bow.

  For a minute or more Woods studied the target with his binoculars. He could now see the schooner had a wireless, because a wire ran up the mast from a small cabin aft of the main one, and he pointed this out to the gunnery control officer.

  ‘Take that after cabin out first,’ the gunnery control officer shouted down to the crew. ‘Range four thousand yards and closing. Speed six knots. Stand by to fire.’

  The seconds ticked by. Anxiously, the gunnery control officer glanced across at Woods, who responded with a nod.

  ‘Fire!’

  The crack of the shell reverberated throughout the submarine and a whiff of cordite blew across the bridge. The shell went slightly high and fell beyond the schooner, which now swerved violently away from its attacks.

  ‘Fire!’

  The second shell ripped the wireless cabin apart.

  ‘Now one across her bows,’ said Woods.

  A great plume of water rose in front of the schooner, which continued to turn to port. A cloud of exhaust fumes from its counter told those on the Sentinel’s bridge that it was putting on speed.

  ‘Up two hundred. Fire!’

  The next shell fell farther ahead
of the schooner.

  ‘He must have the message by now,’ said Woods. ‘Or is he trying to make a run for it?’

  The next shell made up the schooner captain’s mind for him. He swung his ship back on to its original course and came to a halt. A lifeboat was lowered from davits into the sea, and figures, some of them in uniform, could be seen scampering along the deck.

  ‘Boarding party on deck, Number One,’ Woods said into the voice pipe. The submarine’s rubber dinghy was brought up, inflated and fitted with its outboard engine. The First Lieutenant, who was in charge of the boarding party, hurriedly strapped on his revolver, then issued Pountney and Ayton and two seamen with Lanchester carbines, the Royal Navy’s standard small-arms weapon. A third seaman, also armed with a revolver, took charge of the outboard engine.

  While the boarding party was being prepared the submarine continued to close with the schooner until it lay abeam of the stationary Italian vessel, both its guns trained on it. Covered as it was by the submarine’s main armament, the schooner was not about to go anywhere, and the lifeboat bobbing alongside its dirty white wooden hull remained empty.

  As the dinghy approached, a rope ladder was thrown over the schooner’s side. Pountney and Ayton were the first up it, their Lanchesters at the ready, but the crew, an ill-assorted bunch, made no attempt to resist. The SBS men first made for the wrecked wireless cabin to make sure that the shell had destroyed the wireless. The cabin was a gruesome spectacle, as the remains of the operator were splattered all over its smouldering walls.

  ‘Get everyone on deck,’ the First Lieutenant ordered. ‘I want the whole ship searched from stem to stern.’

  There were a number of unarmed Italian air crew on board, but no one could explain what they were doing there. The one member of the crew who spoke some broken English just kept shrugging his shoulders. The schooner’s cargo was hardly more interesting than its human one: it consisted entirely of pasta.

  Ayton, who had been given the task of laying the scuttling charge, went below to find a good position for it. He found one aft of the main saloon. He knelt down, lifted the wooden sole to get at the bilges, and began preparing the charge. He was about to insert the detonator into the primer when he heard a sound in front of him. He looked up and automatically dropped a hand to the handle of his knife.