Minutes later, he watched in disappointment as the planes climbed, formed up, and flew away to the south. He didn’t need the radio signal he received to tell him why: “Herd returning to base to refuel and rearm.” A second signal then acknowledged his urgent demand for a strike at the battery, and added a terse “wilco”: “will comply”. But, of course, only after flying back to Charlie, re-arming and topping up fuel tanks, then flying back to Stone Town – which would take the best part of an hour. That was plenty of time for gun-dhows that had survived the air raid – doubtless there were at least a few – to sortie from the harbor and engage his two schooners.
He had only two options: Try to force the harbor entrance in the teeth of the battery’s guns at point-blank range, and if one or both schooners succeeded, catching the dhows as they were heaving up or unmooring and getting under way; or waiting here and engaging them one by one as they exited the narrow harbor channel. He had mere minutes – maybe less than a minute – to decide, if the first action was to have any chance of success. This was the high risk – high reward option: if both schooners made it into the harbor relatively unscathed, sinking the surviving dhows would be shooting fish in a barrel, and the operation would be a dramatic success, despite other losses. But he had to acknowledge that the odds were very much against even one of them making it – and losing both, in addition to losses already incurred, would be a crushing defeat.
So: wait for the inevitable enemy sortie, and pray that the Charlie’s aviation deck gang made a record-breaking turn-around of Dave’s remaining four planes.
Ennis ordered a signal to Joan to be on the lookout for a dhow exiting the channel, and on sighting same, to close the battery to within range of her marksmen’s rifles, and engage it with all her firepower. He told Kendall that Albatros would close and engage the emerging dhow.
Ennis then asked a question he had never in his seagoing career posed to the recipient of an order of his: “Do you agree with this action, Al?”
Kendall looked startled, then replied, “Of course I do, Bill. You’re the Commodore.”
“Forget that. I’m asking, as one old shipmate to another, if you believe that, all risks considered, this is what we should do.”
Kendall paused a moment, then replied: “Yes, Bill. I think it’s what Sam would do.”
Ennis was deeply relieved at this validation of his decision, but ashamed, too, of the momentary lapse in self-confidence that made him need it.
The two schooners continued their duel with the battery. With their superior range, the edge was with the schooners, and their 37 mm guns would gradually and inevitably reduce the masonry fortification to rubble, dooming its guns and gunners. But with just two rifles of this caliber, the process would take time, the resource in shortest supply.
For very soon the masts of a dhow appeared in the harbor end of the channel, apparently under tow, judging from the puffs of black smoke that preceeded it. The gun-dhow would be at its most vulnerable in the narrow channel – but so would the schooners, as they closed to bring all their firepower into play, coming well into the effective range of the battery’s guns.
Both schooners motored toward the harbor mouth, and Albatros shifted her fire to the dhow in the channel, while Joan strove to increase the rate of fire of her 37 mm at the battery, and, as they came into range, her one-inch rifles and then the rifles of her marksmen, in their masthead battle stations. The schooners were at full speed, on power alone, all sails furled to reduce the risk of fire and the size of the target their rigs presented. They chased shot splashes to complicate the enemy gunners’ aim, heeling wildly as their helmsmen put wheels over hard to port or starboard repeatedly.
The battery’s rate of fire seemed to falter from the storm of shot poured onto it by Joan, and Ennis, through his telescope, thought he could see hits on the gun-dhow in the channel. Beyond her, he could see other dhows queueing up to follow – clearly the air strike had not been as effective as he had hoped in thinning out the enemy fleet.
Then a nearly-spent three-inch ball, presumably fired by the dhow, struck Ennis squarely in the chest, but without enough force to pierce his flesh. He fell to the deck, unconscious. Kendall shouted for SBAs to take him below and told his phone talker to alert sick bay that the Commodore was wounded. Kendall cursed the evil luck that caused this desperate wild shot, which by rights should have fallen well short of the Albatros, to make Ennis the first casualty aboard her.
Joan signaled a direct hit to her bow at the waterline, bending a frame and thus making a watertight emergency patch impossible – especially as her forward speed forced water through the patch. Kendall assumed that she was pumping and counter-flooding, and hoped that she could stay in action against the battery, continuing a high volume of suppressive fire. If he could sink the leading gun-dhow in the channel, it would temporarily block the exit of her sisters long enough to safely disengage – because without Joan at full battle readiness it was time to cut their losses. Albatros, on her own, could do little else but insure her own loss, but by breaking off the action she could possibly save both Joan and herself.
But Joan had clearly reduced speed to minimize the inflow of seawater at the leak. Kendall needed some quicker action. He consulted the tide table in his head; it was now on the ebb. The range of tide was only three feet, and the tidal current was slight – but if deprived of her tow, the dhow would drift aground at the next turn. With a little luck, she would then pivot on her bow to drift at a right angle to the channel, blocking it completely.
He turned to his phone talker and pulled the nearest headphone off to rasp into his ear: “All guns: concentrate fire on the towboat! Repeat, sink the towboat!” The one-inch rifles were within range by now, and he thought the marksmen’s rifles might be, too: killing the towboat’s crew would help.
This achieved the desired effect. The towboat, while not sunk, sustained damage; forward motion of both towboat and dhow ceased.
“Signal to Joan: Break off action and withdraw out of range of enemy!” Again, into the phone talker’s ear. And, “All guns, shift fire to battery!” He desperately needed to suppress the battery’s fire long enough for the crippled Joan to escape.
As Joan turned to execute this order, still returning the battery’s fire, she exposed her side and Kendall, saw her hit repeatedly. But apparently none of the hits were crippling, and she could continue the turn and motor directly away from the battery, almost obscured by ball splashes, until she was at extreme range, and enemy fire became wide and short.
Kendall now saw, too, that the dhow had drifted aground and her stern swung out to block the channel, as he had hoped. He grabbed the watch officer’s shoulder and rasped into his ear, “Reverse course!”. Then, to his phone talker, “Keep up a rapid fire on battery, all guns.”
As Albatros turned and motored away from the battery, she too suffered several direct hits to her hull, and one shot that raked her deck, striking down four hands, including a petty officer. Almost the entire weather deck turned scarlet with blood, and SBAs slipped in it as they ran to check whether any of the fallen still lived.
Then, to his amazement, for not much more than thirty minutes had elapsed since the air element had left to refuel and rearm, a flight of two Puffins appeared. Kendall guessed that Dave Schofield had devoted the carrier’s entire resources to turning around just these two planes to carry out Ennis’s order to destroy the battery. Ironically, however, they were just too late to make it matter.
“Signal those planes to break off action! Emphasize with a red rocket!” He saw no point in risking any more planes now that the battle was effectively over. But the Puffins were already down on the deck, starting their skip-bombing run as he spoke. The grounded dhow fired her single AA gun, and with the devil’s luck – the sort enjoyed by the Pirates almost from the beginning of the action – hit the nearest Puffin squarely with her first round. The plane at once flipped on its side and crashed into the sea.
The other Puf
fin broke off his attack run at that point, whether because of losing his wing man or seeing Kendall’s frantic signal in time, and turned away. Kendall sent it another flash signal ordering it to return to base.
He then ordered the watch officer to set all the canvas she would carry, and motor-sail at her best speed south, toward a rendezvous with the carrier. He signaled the Joan to do the same.
Both schooners now had their DC crews frantically trying to control flooding and patch shot holes. The pumps were hard at work on both, as shown by the pulsing streams overboard. Joan signaled: “Request permission to reduce speed to better control flooding”. Kendall denied the request, but noted how low in the water the Joan now floated. She must soon slow or stop, to fother the shot hole in her bow, since because of the bent frame her DC gang couldn’t patch it effectively from within her hull. He wanted to delay this for as long as possible, however, because he knew the Pirates would soon tow the grounded dhow out to sea, and she and her sisters would set sail in pursuit.
The next signal from Joan told him that he had no more time: “Decks nearly awash must stop now and fother hole in bow”.
Kendall replied, “Permission granted”. He hoped fervently that Lieutenant Commander Bobby Munro, Joan’s skipper, had the foresight to have already started thrumming a sail, or even have completed this by now, for that was the part of fothering a shot hole that took the longest.
Kendall reversed course and came alongside the Joan. He saw that the Joan’s bosun and his mates, crowded onto the bow, already had a sail over the side, and were passing lines under the bowsprit in preparation for working them under the hull to make fast on the other side, snugging the sail up tight against the shot hole. The idea was that the “thrumming” – rope yarns worked into the sail – would be sucked into the hole and block it, or at least enough to reduce the flooding to a point the pumps could handle.
“Bobby, I see you got a quick start on thrumming a sail,” Kendall rasped through a megaphone.
“Yes sir, I had Sails and his mates start on it as soon as we broke off the engagement.” There was a slight pause, and then Munro added, “Where’s Commodore Ennis?” The Flag’s absence from Albatros’s quarterdeck was obvious.
“Wounded. Down in sick bay,” Kendall replied. He then broke off the conversation – too much shouting made the old wound in his throat sore, and then he had trouble eating and drinking. He ordered Albatros into a position a couple of cables astern of Joan, then hove to, keeping a sharp lookout for Pirate dhows. Sooner than he thought possible, Joan signaled “Ready to proceed. Clearly, under Munro, the schooner had a highly efficient deck gang.
Their course to the rendezvous with Charlie and Joan was south-west, and the wind was out of the east-south-east, which meant the two schooners were motor-sailing on a very close reach, approaching a beat. At Kendall’s order, they hoisted their drifters, braced right aft with clews aboard. It meant careful attention to steering and trim, the big drifters always on the very edge of luffing, but they achieved the best speed possible, given the wind and their tubby merchantman hulls. They kept a close lookout astern, and once Kendall thought he saw with his telescope a lateen sail just nick the northern horizon, but it soon vanished. He assumed – rather, devoutly prayed – that it had taken the Pirates just long enough to clear the channel of the grounded dhow to negate their speed advantage.
Once it seemed clear that the battle wouldn’t resume soon, Kendall went below to sick bay, to visit the wounded, and learn the extent of the butcher’s bill from Doc Cheah. Once there, he saw a very disheartening ratio of bodies sewn into their hammocks, lying in a neat row on the deck along the bulkhead, to live patients in swinging cots. He wanted to find Commodore Ennis first – if he were conscious, he’d want a detailed account of the course of the battle from the time he was wounded. He went from cot to cot, and his heart sank as he found none of them held Ennis.
He encountered Cheah, who was examining a head wound.
“Doc, where’s the Commodore?” Without speaking, Cheah nodded toward the row of bodies.
“But … surely he was merely wounded? Just knocked unconscious? The round was nearly spent – didn’t even pierce the skin!”
“Nevertheless, it killed him instantly – stopped his heart. Commodore Ennis was quite dead when brought into sick bay.”
In shock at this news, Kendall wandered topsides without visiting any of the wounded. His first reaction was horror at the thought that it would fall to him to break this news to Marie Ennis.
His mind then automatically went to the question of who was next senior to Ennis, and he couldn’t recall. He had become Flag as a matter of course when Ennis fell in the engagement at Stone Town, because he was the senior of the two schooner captains. But he hoped to God there was another officer in the task force, or in command of one of the “Stingers”, who was senior to him.
Because whoever became acting Commodore in Ennis’s place was going to have to explain this fiasco, this total “Charlie Foxtrot”, to Sam Bowditch when he arrived to resume command.
Fourteen
It was a somber group that met around the table in Charlemagne’s wardroom for a first review and “lessons learned” session about the recent raid on Stone Town.
Al Kendall was still shaken by the worst experience of his life to date: relaying to Marie Ennis the news of her husband’s death. He thought at first that she would faint; her face turned ashen, and she seemed to have lost the power of speech. She was devastated, but Kendall had a feeling that, somehow, she had been expecting, and dreading, this news; as if she had had a premonition. Her grief pierced him to the heart. She had not left her cabin since, and the meal trays he had ordered delivered she returned untouched.
Kendall had also learned that he would face another very painful experience, that of reporting the raid and its outcome to Commodore Bowditch on his arrival on-station. For on ordering a thorough review of officers’ records, held on board Charlemagne as the more-or-less permanent flagship, he had discovered that he was senior by date of rank – by one day, for God’s sake! – to all other line commanders in the Navy, including those absent in command of the shipping protection patrol vessels.
Dave Schofield sat with his head down, staring at his hands clasped before him on the table. He had reported the loss of half his strength – two Petrels and a Puffin, along with three experienced pilots and an observer. He had not needed to stress that he had lost all three airplanes in the two futile attempts to destroy the harbor entrance battery, nor that all the damage done to the Pirates had been inflicted by his air strikes on the vessels in the harbor, the godowns, and the boat yards. It was easy for everyone present to conclude that the quixotic attempt to penetrate the harbor had turned what would have been a successful air raid into a joint air-sea disaster.
Honorable men all, it had crossed none of their minds that they could blame this on Ennis, whose idea it had been. They had all shared in the planning; they would all share in the blame.
Kendall broke the brief silence following Schofield’s report. “Dave, wasn’t it the Boss’s rule that if we were down to three planes, we’d cease offensive air ops? And just conduct reconnaissance flights?”
“That’s affirmative, Commodore,” Schofield replied without looking up. “We’ll resume high-altitude photo-recon flights over Stone Town, and I assume Chief Landry will want us to continue our Mafia overflights, too.”
“Yes, please, Commander,” said Chief Landry. “I’ve got at least a hundred more guerilla fighters on the island now, well-armed and fully supplied, to contend with.”
“Ouch,” said Kendall, wincing visibly. “More unwelcome news. Okay, Chief, go ahead – it’s your turn to report anyway.”
“My mission was simply to defend the island. Commodore Ennis left it to me to decide how to do this, although we both agreed that the obvious approach -- a forward defense – seemed the only practical one.
“I moved all my troops to the northern end of
Mafia, right up to the stretch of coast between Bweni Village and Ras Mkundi.” He stood, and pointed out, on the chart of Mafia posted on the bulkhead, the island’s west coast from the village named to the northernmost point of the island.
“I used Mafia Utukufu to shuttle the gunners and askaris from down south, and everyone else by forced march. I stationed the gunners of the Landing Force at Mkundi, to guard the beaches there – a favorite spot for the gun-running dhows. I mustered a dozen canoes and filled ‘em with askaris to patrol the shore north of Bweni, which is mostly mangrove. Sometimes dhows get as close as they can inshore, and then use their boats to tow in barrels of supplies and hide them in the mangroves for fighters to retrieve.
“By the way, one thing Commodore Ennis didn’t consider when he gave me the Utukufu: her skipper, Lieutenant Coetzee is senior to me. I can’t give him orders. Luckily, he understood my dilemma and was gracious about following my “recommendations” to the letter. One of them was using his craft as a troop shuttle; another was patrolling north of the island to intercept and sink, destroy, or drive back any re-re dhow he met, which he did with considerable success. He deserves a Bravo-Zulu.”
Kendall acknowledged this with a nod, making a mental note to commend Coetzee: coming from Landry, and for a commissioned officer, this was high praise indeed.
“The Commodore’s choice of a night with a quarter-moon and early moonset for the task force sortie made sense, but it meant we had just enough time before pitch dark to get fully into position. I had sent runners to every village to alert their Home Guard detachments to be ready for attacks, and I needed every one of those askari back with their units. Most of them made it back before dark, but just in time. Amazing how fast those ouens can run.
Assault on Zanzibar: Book Four of the Westerly Gales Saga Page 28