by Alan Evans
The man who got down from the cab was a British naval officer. He took off his cap and pushed a hand through hair black and rumpled. His face was smeared with sweat and dust. He took in the girl and the soldier and bellowed, “Bear a hand here.” Then he crouched by the soldier, looked across him at Catherine Guillard and started ponderously, “Bonjour, Mademoiselle—”
She cut him short: “I speak English.”
Ward said from the heart, “Thank God for that. We saw the plane dive and the bomb burst. It got him?”
“Yes. I do not know if he is wounded except for his head. I have not—” She searched for the word.
Ward supplied it: “—examined him. We won’t, either. No time.” He rose as Jenkins and Tracey came running with Williams. Ward told the S.B.A., “We’ll get him aboard, then you can take a look at him.”
The three of them lifted the soldier carefully, Williams with one hand keeping the improvised pillow in place, and laid him in the back of the Commer.
Ward turned to the girl, “Thank you, Mademoiselle.”
Catherine stared at him. Did he intend to leave her on the road? She asked, “You are going into St. Nazaire?”
“That’s right.”
“Then you must take me, please. My taxi is finished.”
Ward glanced back at the car. Finished was right; the front end was stove in. Presumably its driver would want to stay with it: he did not enquire. He did not want another passenger in the Commer, let alone two. Nor did he particularly want responsibility for the girl if they should run into Germans again. But could he leave her here? He hesitated, then said reluctantly, “All right.”
But Catherine Guillard had noticed that reluctance. She answered him icily, “Thank you.”
“You’ll have to travel in the back.”
“There is a seat beside the driver, surely!”
“I ride in the front.” Because he was in command, and in case they met trouble, but he had no time for explanations. “In you go.”
Jenkins and Tracey reached down hands to her and automatically she took them. Then she was inside and staring at the wounded on their stretchers. Ward shoved up the tail-board, jammed in the pins and disappeared. The girl thought him an arrogant boor. The cab door slammed and Jenkins said, “Better sit down, Miss.”
She sat beside the soldier on the floor of the truck as it jerked forward. One of the sailors knelt and quickly examined the soldier. “Can’t see anything except that bump on the noggin.” He looked at Catherine: “Concussion.”
“I understand.”
Williams gave her a boyish grin, “One thing, we’re getting a better class of passenger.”
She smiled at him, realising he was as young as herself, that all the sailors were except that ill-mannered, black-haired officer. Her smile faded.
The Commer was travelling at speed now and in the back they swayed to its rocking. None of the wounded complained but Catherine’s soldier opened his eyes, stared at her, then reached out a hand. She took it and bent over to listen to his muttering. He was delirious. At times he thought he talked to his mother, at others it was a girl’s name that he spoke, several girls. Catherine held his hand, talking quietly, trying to soothe him.
They were in the town, travelling more slowly, then bumping over the railway tracks of the dock area. The Commer halted by the side of the Normandie dock, sailors appeared at the tail-board and a petty officer shouted cheerily, “All right! Let’s be having you!” And: “Mr. Ward! Captain wants to see you on the bridge, sir!”
The tail-board swung down and the wounded were taken off. The soldier was first and Catherine went with him. She held the pillow under his head and he gripped her hand, eyes still fixed on her face. He was carried up the brow, along the deck and down narrow, steep stairs. Catherine knew she was showing an immodest length of leg but that could not be helped. She was hot, tired, thirsty and the cotton dress clung to her as if wet.
They took the soldier to the wardroom and laid him on a leather-covered bench. Catherine sat with him. There were four English nurses there, all from Lancastria. She gathered from the nurses’ talk that the sick-bay was already full of wounded from hospitals ashore which was why the survivors rescued by Ward were being brought down to the wardroom. One nurse gently prised the soldier’s fingers loose and took over the job of comforting him while another brought Catherine a cup of tea. She drank it gratefully. It was good to sit quietly for a few minutes, head back and eyes closed, the hum of the fans and throb of machinery not unpleasant.
Ward was on the bridge. His captain asked, “Enjoy your run ashore?”
“It made a change, sir. We got them all, anyway.”
“Any trouble?”
“A bit.” Ward told him about it while Gates watched the brow taken aboard. Saracen cast off, then went astern. As she did so one last Polish soldier ran along the dock and jumped down on to her fo’c’sle. Henderson, the navigator, said, “Good God! He must have broken every bone in his body!”
He had not; only both legs and he counted himself lucky to get away on the last ship out of St. Nazaire.
Saracen swung stern first out of the Normandie dock and turned to head down-river. Gates, intent on conning his ship, tossed at Ward, “Well done. When did you eat last?”
“Breakfast, sir.”
“Well, nip aft and get rid of that artillery you’re wearing then grab a quick bite.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ward dropped down the ladder from the bridge. First he must see Jenkins, make sure he and the men of the landing-party were fed—and Driver Gibb. He was hurrying aft when the girl appeared and stared disbelievingly at the receding shore. Jack Ward also stared disbelievingly. “What are you doing aboard?”
Catherine turned to look up at him. “I came with the wounded man. He needed me. You should have told me you were sailing. Put me ashore, please!”
“Out of the question.” Saracen’s captain would not return to the dock nor lower a boat just to set one girl ashore.
Catherine’s patience had been sorely tried by this young man. Her chin lifted in anger and she demanded, “I insist—”
The klaxons blared, drowning her voice and Ward saw the aircraft, black silhouettes sharp against the blue. They flew in from the west, racing low over the estuary with the descending sun behind them so that he had to narrow his eyes to see they were single-engined Messerschmitts. He grabbed the girl by the shoulders, swung her around and shoved her in at an open door. “Get below!” Then left her as Saracen’s guns opened up.
He ran forward along the port side, shouldering through the Poles crowding the deck. Then the enemy machine-guns fired, a long, ripping burst and up on the bridge he saw a lookout fall. A Messerschmitt passed low overhead with a bang and a howl, tore away over the water. His ears ringing, he climbed to the bridge. At the head of the ladder he halted, sick and shocked. That long enemy burst had done its bloody work here. The captain and most of the bridge staff were sprawled and still, only the signal yeoman and one of the lookouts moved dazedly.
Ward fought down his sickness and moved across the bridge to the voicepipe. The ship had to be conned and there was no one else to do it. “Coxswain?”
“Sir?”
It was a relief to hear that deep, west-country voice from the wheel-house. “Mr. Ward here. The bridge is a mess. What about you?”
“All right, sir. A bit deaf.” From the hammering on the steel deck above him. But the coxswain took comfort from the calm tone of the young man on the bridge. Ward would cope.
“Port ten.”
“Ten of port wheel on, sir.”
Ward conned Saracen for only the time it took for the first lieutenant to be told and to come quickly forward. The bridge filled up with a new staff and the casualties were taken gently below. Gates, wounded in shoulder and leg, was carried to his bunk because the sick-bay was already crowded. Others went to the mess-decks. Ward became navigator for the rest of the voyage; Henderson, his friend, was dead.
; They were not attacked again.
*
Saracen berthed at Plymouth. There were ambulances waiting on the quay for the wounded and trucks to take away the Polish infantry, but the first man aboard was a rear-admiral. He was small, seeming shrunken under the big cap but he came quickly up the brow and saluted, very straight in the back. To Ward, who returned his salute, he said, “I’m looking for French subjects. Any aboard?”
“Only one that I know of, sir, a young lady.”
“Where?”
“In the wardroom, sir.”
“Thank you.”
The Poles crowded on the upper deck gaped at the little admiral. His uniform was immaculate, brilliant with gold braid and he made a startling contrast to the drab infantry. When he strode aft they opened a lane for him so he did not falter.
Ward reported to the first lieutenant up on the bridge and he said wryly, “Company already and the beds not made. All right, Jack. Look, our people ashore want a verbal report on our state straightaway. You do that. Tell ’em I want to be here when the skipper’s taken ashore to the hospital. I’ll see to your admiral.”
When Ward returned the ship was empty of her passengers, and the admiral. That night in the last slipping moments before he slept Ward thought he was glad they’d got the wounded and the Poles out and that he was sorry about the girl. God alone knew when she would see her home and family again. And the Normandie dock, one of the biggest in the world and now the Germans had it. Should have done something about that…
It was a thought often to return to him in the months ahead. He would bombard his superiors with ideas for improvements in equipment and tactics but always he would return to worry at the problem of St. Nazaire.
*
In Massachusetts, Joseph Edward Krueger, sole owner of Krueger Boatyards, locked the front door of his house and deposited the key with a neighbour. His bag in one hand and jacket swung over a broad shoulder he walked away from the house and down to the cab that waited for him. His wife was dead, and for the moment he was done with the boatyard and the house. He felt neither excitement nor exhilaration. When you have survived the war of your youth you do not hasten eagerly to another in your middle-age. You think about it quietly until you decide what is the right course and only then do you close up your home and book a passage for Liverpool, England.
He looked back once at the house, then turned to face his uncertain future.
*
On that same eastern seaboard but far to the south a ship patrolled the warm waters off Florida in the evening of her days. Her name was U.S.S. Buchanan and she was a flush-decked, four-funnel destroyer built for a war long past, the war of Krueger’s youth. Unlike him she was strictly too old to fight another war but she would have no say in the matter. This country of hers was neutral, yet some of its sons were already at the war or headed for it, like Krueger, and her time would come.
2: “Our necks in a noose…!”
Ward served in Saracen until she was torpedoed and sank in the North Atlantic in late 1940. After his survivors’ leave they drafted him, because he expressed a preference for small ships, to M.G.B .s, Motor Gunboats working out of Harwich. He said that was not what he meant at all, loudly and continually, but he served six months of long winter nights in the boats. He learned a great deal about them in that time, frightened some E-boats and had some terrible frights himself. He made a lot of friends and left with regret when his requests were finally answered and he was sent to a destroyer.
He served in her through the summer of 1941, escorting convoys from Liverpool to mid-Atlantic where they would hand over to the escort force from Nova Scotia and take their U.K.-bound convoy back to Liverpool. He was her first lieutenant and twenty-six years old when he was called to the Admiralty for an interview. He went with optimism and some apprehension. He thought his record was good but not spectacular.
The commander said, “You like small ships.”
“Destroyers, sir.” Ward wanted that straight from the beginning this time.
The commander nodded and said, “Well, we’re giving you a command.” And when Ward came down from the clouds he added drily, “This one is to learn on.”
*
She was H.M.S. Boston, one of the fifty old U.S. Navy destroyers transferred to the Royal Navy in September 1940 in exchange for a lease of bases. They were known as ‘four-stackers’ or ‘packets of woodbines’ because of their upright four funnels. They were called a lot of other things, too.
Ward went to her at Sheerness knowing he would have his hands full but ready for anything. In his cabin he talked to his first lieutenant, also new to the ship. Joseph Edward Krueger was a lieutenant of forty-two with a wartime commission in the R.N.V.R., wide-shouldered and solid, taciturn but with an easy smile. And he was American.
Ward knew something of Americans. Not long before he went to Boston he had spent a weekend at Claridges with a party of them—and his brother Geoffrey. Ward went along because he was major shareholder in the Perseus Group, chief of the clan, and because Geoffrey wanted him there. He still leaned on Ward, knowing the decisions to make but needing reassurance. The meeting was to hammer out a number of deals between the American corporations and the Group. They worked long hours into the night but ended well pleased on both sides and the leader of the Americans told Ward, “We like a guy who comes straight to the point.” Ward had just returned from one convoy, was due to sail on another and had been just too tired for circumlocution. Going back to the war did not exactly appeal but he preferred it to Geoffrey’s world and blessed the day he talked his brother into running the Perseus Group.
He needed to know about this particular American, Joe Krueger, however, and started, “How long have you been aboard?”
“Just a coupla hours ahead of you, sir.”
“Krueger.” Ward asked, “Is that a Dutch name?”
“German. My grandfather emigrated to the States in the 1860s. We used to talk it back home when he was alive.” And Krueger asked, “Does it bother you, sir?”
“No. Mountbatten’s father had a German name till he changed it in the last war. I trust Mountbatten.”
Krueger said solemnly, “I guess he’d be real pleased to know that.”
Ward grinned. “The blokes will probably call you Fritz behind your back but if they don’t it will probably be something worse, seeing as you’re first lieutenant.”
Joe smiled, “They did in my last ship.”
“Which was?”
“Another ex-U.S. four-stacker, like this. When I first came over from the States they asked me what service I had so I told them. When they heard I’d done a hitch in the U.S.S. Buchanan, in 1919-20 they said, ‘O.K., you know four-stackers, so you get one.’” He paused, then said quietly, “I got to like her. Shame.”
“What happened to her?”
“Struck a mine and sank.”
“Many lost?”
“All of the engineroom on watch; they never had a chance. The warrant engineer was a good friend of mine, nice guy.” That was said with regret but no emotion; you could not mourn friends for ever. In that vein Krueger reminisced, “We used to talk engines. I ran a boatyard before the war and we worked with all kinds of engines—mostly for power-boats like your M.G.B.s or Jerry’s E-boats.”
“You’re an expert?”
“I guess so,” Krueger paused, then corrected himself, “I am, sure. That’s not some big-mouth talk because I was twenty years in the business and in that time you get to be an expert or go broke.”
Ward said drily, “So they drafted you to destroyers.”
“Well, I knew something about them, too.”
That was Ward’s cue. “I’m told this one isn’t the happiest of ships. Any idea what’s wrong with her?”
“After two hours? No, sir.”
Ward grinned, “Suppose we go in at the deep end. Is she ready for sea?”
*
Boston was a long, narrow ship. She rolled in the Thames estuary
and Joe said, “She’d roll on a wet towel.” Also she had twin screws sticking far out of her stern and a guard built on either quarter so she would not damage those screws when coming alongside. In consequence she was not easy to manoeuvre—as Ward found out when he tried his hand on the first day they went to sea, with Joe Krueger at his shoulder murmuring suggestions. While a conventional destroyer could turn on her heel, Boston handled like a big ship with a turning circle of a thousand yards or more. To follow the course changes of a more modern ship, sailing in line ahead, Boston had to anticipate them by several seconds. Ward said, “What you really need on this bridge is a crystal ball.”
Krueger ruefully agreed. “That’s about the size of it.”
You could laugh or cry so they laughed. Then Ward looked around the bridge and walked out to the wing to peer forward and aft. He returned to his place behind the screen and said to Joe Krueger, “Well, now we know what’s wrong with the ship: nobody else is laughing. We’ve got to change that.”
In the following weeks Ward exercised Boston’s crew at every possible moment in every evolution he could think of and timed them with a stop-watch. On their first night back in Sheerness, he cleared lower deck and read the lesson according to Ward, standing on the mounting of the 12-pounder aft and glowering down at the faces below. “I can’t say we’re the worst destroyer crew in the world because I haven’t seen them all! For the same reason I won’t be able to boast some time in the future that we’re the best. But when I meet another captain, any captain, I’ll look him in the eye and think, ‘Your ship’s no better than mine!’ Because you’ve got it in you! I’ve seen it before and I see it now. Between us we can make this old girl work!” He paused for a moment to let that sink in. He was not one for making speeches but he believed what he’d been saying and the men watching him knew that. “All right. Now we’ll hold a wake for the cock-ups of today and start again tomorrow.”