by Alan Evans
Later Worcester got under way but was capable of only eight knots. Meanwhile a signal from the C.-in-C. Nore ordered the other destroyers to return to Harwich. Mackay and Whitshed had now rejoined and the five steamed for home at twenty knots.
They passed the Landguard fort at the mouth of the harbour half an hour before midnight, refuelled, took on ammunition and torpedoes and landed wounded. Boston had no wounded and Joe Krueger shook his head in wonder. “She’s hardly got a scratch on her that we didn’t start with, apart from the weather damage. Boy! Were we lucky! Shelled by battlecruisers and bombed by two air forces, theirs and ours.”
Ward sucked at coffee, hot and strong, the stein held in both hands: “Understandable.”
Krueger nodded. The bad weather, mist, and the mêlée that the battle had become, all made for confusion. “The fog of war, all right. And I’ve never seen so many air-planes! M.E. 109s and 110s, Junkers 88s, Wimpys, Whirlwinds—and the rest. I’m damn’ sure we fired on a couple of friendlies. Don’t think we hit ’em though, thank God.”
“How is it below?”
Krueger shrugged. “Standard bad weather state. We had sea washing a foot deep in the mess-decks before we pumped her out.”
“Tell the galley I want a hot meal for every man before we sail.”
“I got the cooks started on that, soon as she was stable enough to light the stoves. It won’t be exactly cordon bleu but the guys will eat.”
In the galley the cooks cursed: “Dried eggs, dried milk—the only thing they can’t dry out is this old cow!”
But Boston’s crew ate—just.
The flotilla sailed at 0330 and at 0645 were on patrol again off the Hook of Holland. It was believed, or hoped, that one of the three battlecruisers had been damaged and was still limping home. Daylight air reconnaissance dashed that hope and at 0943 the flotilla was ordered back to Harwich.
On Boston’s bridge Mason asked, “What’s the date?”
Krueger answered, “February thirteen.”
Mason said lugubriously, “Unlucky for some.”
Ward thought, Unlucky for us. Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen had escaped. The enormity of it struck him like a slap in the face. An enemy fleet had steamed through the Channel in broad daylight.
His first reaction was anger and the black rage burned inside him but he shut his mouth on it. There was silence on the bridge. After the work and the meal as the ship lay at Harwich, there had been a brief release of tension, relief at having survived. Now that was gone and there was only gloom, anticlimax. Ward had to control his anger because his men deserved better than that.
He said, “Pass the word for the coxswain.” And when Adams came to the bridge Ward told him, “My congratulations and thanks, Coxswain. You did a terrific job. I’ll be saying the same to the Chief and everybody else aboard but I wanted you to know now.”
“Thank you, sir.” That came flat.
“You don’t look too happy.”
“I’m choked because the bastards got away with it, sir.”
“So am I. But it wasn’t your fault or Pizey’s or any other of the men who tried their damnedest. You can pass that word now! I’m bloody proud of the lot of you!”
He succeeded in raising their spirits but wished he could raise his own.
When Boston picked up her buoy a boat was waiting to come alongside. Curiously, it brought Quartermain.
*
Ward took the wiry little admiral to his cabin under the bridge. This time the steward had contrived to unlash the armchair from its bad weather station against the settee. He had also set out a bottle of gin. Ward offered Quartermain the chair and mixed him a pink gin, took one for himself and sat down on the settee. He lifted the glass: “The sun’s over the yard-arm and I think we’ve earned this one. Cheers, sir!”
“Cheers!” Quartermain sipped at the gin, ran it around his mouth, swallowed. He watched Ward empty his glass and set it down, sigh and rub a hand over the stubble on his chin. Quartermain asked, “How d’ye feel?” Knowing very well, having been over the course himself and more than once.
Ward shrugged. “Glad to be alive. Sorry we didn’t get one.”
“Ready to go again?”
“Any time. All we need is topping up with fuel.”
Quartermain nodded, “Unfortunately, the chance has gone.”
Ward said, “We’ve only seen or heard bits of this operation and you probably know a lot more, sir.” He finished bitterly, “From our point of view it looks like an almighty cock-up.”
Quartermain swallowed the rest of his gin, shook his head at the offer of another, stood up and began to prowl restlessly about the cabin. “It’s not my area, but I suppose I know a bit more. There’ll be an enquiry, of course. You did all that was possible and Pizey did bloody well. So did the Swordfish torpedo bombers and a lot of people here and there. I think the enquiry will show up a succession of misunderstandings and some bad luck. But Jerry will be crowing because he’s sailed a fleet through the Channel in broad daylight. By God! but he’ll make some capital out of that! I’m told that when the First Lord informed the P.M. they’d got away with it, Churchill said just one word: ‘Why?’”
Ward said, “Why they got away with it? Or was he asking their reason? Was he asking why they’ve gone north?”
Quartermain halted in his pacing. “What do you think?”
“It could be just that the Air Force was making it too hot for them in Brest. Or Hitler wants to stiffen his naval defences in the north and the Baltic. Or perhaps he intends Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen to join up with Tirpitz. If that lot sets out raiding—” Ward did not finish, did not need to. The damage that could be wrought by such a force set loose in the Atlantic to attack the big, slow, vulnerable convoys, would be enormous. “It’s the same threat we’ve talked of before, only now it’s worse. They must still expect to have to fight a major action, sooner or later, and then they might well need a dock outside Germany that could take a ship of their size. And that brings us back to St. Nazaire.”
Quartermain did not blink, his face remained expressionless.
Ward asked, “What do you think, sir?”
“I think—your last suggestion could be right. It’s a possibility we can’t ignore.”
“So what about CHARIOT, sir?”
“Going forward, but we still need to know about the dock-gates. And we still need a ship for it.”
“A ship?” Ward stared. “Surely to God, sir, and with all due respect, the Navy can find one ship!”
“Not so easy. We need every one, particularly of this kind. The plan demands a destroyer and the Admiralty is proving very reluctant to part.”
Ward was reminded that Combined Operations possessed very little; such ships as they needed for operations they had to beg or borrow. He stood up in his turn and prowled over to a scuttle, peered out at what little he could see of Boston. Part of his mind immediately turned to the work he wanted done before she went to sea again.
Quartermain guessed at the train of Ward’s thought. Boston was the young man’s first destroyer command and he was proud of her. The admiral remembered that feeling, too, though he had experienced it over twenty years ago. He thought that Ward was less serious, less impatient and intense than he himself had been—but probably none the worse for that. Or was he judging himself too harshly? He liked this young man. He said drily, “Suppose they picked your ship, just took it away?”
Ward swung around, startled, then grinned. “You had me worried for a moment, sir, but I don’t think this old girl would be up to a job like that.”
Quartermain shot him a sharp glance, suspicious. How much did Ward know or guess? “Like what?”
“Fighting her way into a defended port, landing troops, giving them covering fire and fetching them out again.”
Quartermain relaxed. Ward did not know how they planned to use the destroyer. “You’re right about that…” He lifted his cap from the table.
W
ard asked, “Is that all you came to see me about, sir?”
“No. I’ve had word of a friend of yours and she’s well.” That was over a week ago, just a curt report that the station, Geneviève, was still operating. It was three weeks since Quartermain had sent a wireless signal to the circuit in Paris asking them to obtain Peyraud’s address from the hotel near the Champs Elysées. A day later they reported the hotel had been requisitioned by the Germans as an office and swarmed with them. So now everything depended on Geneviève, with her contacts at the St. Nazaire dockyard office.
Ward thought, Catherine. He asked, “She’s—well? Can you tell me any more, sir?”
“Her safety depends on silence.” Quartermain hesitated, then told what he could for Ward’s comfort. “She has the advantage of running a very small team. The bigger the team the greater the chance of one of them being detected. The disadvantage of a small team, of course, is that there are fewer people to do the work.” He finished definitely, “That’s all I can tell you.”
He was relying on Geneviève to locate Peyraud and expected to hear from her very soon because she knew the urgency. Good news or bad? Quartermain could only hope.
Ward said quietly, “Thank you for that much. I’m glad she’s…all right.”
Quartermain turned to the door. “I have to go.”
As his boat took him ashore he looked back at Boston, filthy from foul weather and gunsmoke, a hardworked, worn, old ship. But ready to go again. He picked out Ward’s tall figure on her deck. If the news from France was good then he could have a task for him. Until this evening he hadn’t been certain of the man, but now he was. That, really, was why he’d come: he’d needed to make up his mind.
His thoughts returned to the events of the last twenty-four hours—and the past months, a succession of defeats and losses and now they needed a victory. CHARIOT had to go through—and succeed.
But it was a very risky, very dangerous business.
7: A Dirty Game
The Germans in St. Nazaire were celebrating the escape of the battlecruisers through the Channel and there were many impromptu parties, one of them at the Kommandatur. Engel knew of it though he was not invited. He would not have gone, anyway. But he celebrated, sitting in his office across the basin from the U-boat pens, his chair pushed back and booted feet up on the desk. Although it was still early in the afternoon one glass of cognac was already warming his belly, another stood on the desk, and he watched it, savouring it in anticipation. The typed orders lying on the desk were also good news though they left him only six weeks, till the end of March, to break the Resistance in this area. He had a couple of ideas…
Pianka hunched over the typewriter, punching at it with two thick fingers as he copied the report Engel had scrawled in pencil on a pad of message-forms. Pianka, too, was celebrating with cognac, a glass of it balanced dangerously close to the vibrating carriage of the typewriter. He paused to straighten his bent back, lifted the glass and toasted: “The Navy!” He tossed back the cognac and scowled at Engel. “That was a hell of a thing they pulled off, you know? They really rubbed Churchill’s nose in it!”
Engel said, “That’s right. I’m proud of them.” He was. This was a good day.
Pianka turned back to punching the typewriter and grumbled, “Your writing is bloody awful! Every day it gets worse! Takes me all my time to read it! Hell!” He swore as he hammered out his mistake and started the word again. Engel took no notice, nor did he move when a car pulled up outside except to take his new orders from the desk and button them in the pocket of his tunic. Pianka shoved back his chair, listened to the familiar tick-over of the big Mercedes and made his habitual announcement, “It’s that shit, Grünwald.”
Engel did not answer. A moment later Grünwald entered, wearing his expensive dark grey suit with a long leather trenchcoat thrown over his shoulders like a cape. He said, “I got a message that you wanted to discuss something and I happened to be passing, so—?” Making the point that he had not come here at Engel’s bidding.
Engel thought. You’re trying to save your precious dignity but Pianka has the name for you. You’d lick my boots if it would take you another rung up the ladder. When I look at you and remember the men I left in Russia I could vomit.
Grünwald muttered, “What the hell’s the matter?” Engel’s cold glare had unnerved him. He smiled sourly. “Cheer up, Hauptmann. This is a great day!”
It was no longer a great day, not even a good one. Engel decided to get things over, to play his greedy little fish and land it. He said, “Admiral Dönitz will come here soon. We don’t know when, but he will come to inspect the U-boat pens and see how the building of the new ones progresses.”
Grünwald shrugged his shoulders inside the leather coat. “So? This is known.”
Engel said, “Usually he spends the night at the Chateau Beauregard outside the town but I think it would be a generous gesture on our part, in view of the Navy’s triumph today, if we were seen to make a gift to the admiral of a suite here, where he could stay and look out over the basin to his U-boats in their pens.”
Grünwald watched him suspiciously. “You say ‘we’. How am I involved?”
“The suite would be on the floor above this. Afterwards that floor and the one above it would be yours.”
There was a gleam in Grünwald’s eyes but he was still suspicious. “What do you want in return?”
Engel lowered his boots to the floor and limped across to the window, stood looking out at the Mercedes and the handsome Aryan features of Horstmann behind the wheel. Engel said, “I don’t like traitors but they have their uses. I understand that there are disaffected Englishmen who can be infiltrated into the prison camps as captured RAF flyers and that they then supply the guards with information on the prisoners’ escape plans.”
Grünwald nodded. “That is so.”
Engel went on, “We know that some RAF men who are shot down are smuggled out of this country by the French Resistance before we get to them. The French have a network for this purpose. We know there is a Resistance organisation here in St. Nazaire but so far we haven’t been able to find it. Therefore I want you to go to your masters and borrow one of these traitors to pass himself off as a British airman needing helps”
Grünwald said softly, “I see! And we will work together on the operation?”
Engel thought, As long as it suits you. He said, “Of course. Well, is it a deal?”
Grünwald hesitated. “This suite for the admiral, it would be a gift from us both?”
“Naturally.”
The Gestapo officer frowned. “There is the question of his safety when he spends the night here. There is possible danger from the Resistance, remember Feldkommandant Holtz?”
Holtz had been assassinated in Nantes, just up-river from St. Nazaire, in November. French hostages were shot in reprisal. Engel had not been involved in that and was glad. He nodded. “I have not forgotten. And I don’t think you need have fears for the admiral.” He explained what he had in mind.
Grünwald smiled unpleasantly. “Very well. For once we are in agreement; it is a good plan!”
Engel watched from the window as the still smiling Grünwald strode out to the Mercedes and Horstmann drove him away, doubtless to the Kommandatur and the free drinks. Engel turned and limped back to his desk, lifted his glass and took a long, gulping swallow, coughed and sighed.
Pianka, still hunched over the typewriter, said, “I don’t trust that bastard.”
“Neither do I.” Engel refilled his glass. “Is your lady friend, what’s her name—the housekeeper at Grünwald’s—still keeping her eyes and ears open?”
Pianka looked at him sideways. “Fat Anna is not my friend. She and Grünwald are two of a kind; she reports and I pay her. That stud Horstmann is round there every chance he can get and Anna says the slut is waiting for him like a bitch in heat. It’s all typed, dates, times, details, and locked in my drawer.”
Engel sighed again. Intellige
nce could be a dirty game sometimes, but when you played it with people like Grünwald it stank to high heaven. He was glad, however, that he had a card up his sleeve: the day would almost certainly come when he’d need it.
Engel left his office in the early darkness of that winter day and Pianka waited for him in the Citroën with its shaded headlights glowing dim because of the black-out. A cold wind blew in off the estuary, the rain slanting on it. In the buoy yard across the road the buoys brought in for maintenance glistened blackly. As Engel reached the car a girl came walking quickly along the road that ran by the side of the basin and past the office of the Abwehr, heading towards the bridge and the town. She wore a raincoat belted at the waist, the collar turned up and a scarf covering her hair. As she came up Engel recognised her despite the gloom and lifted a hand to his cap in salute: “Mam’selle Guillard.” She nodded, not looking at him and did not break her stride. He said, “A moment, please.”
Catherine Guillard halted. “A moment only, if you please. It is raining.”
“Yes. In Intelligence we know everything.” The joke did not amuse her. She watched him coldly. He shrugged. “Perhaps I could give you a lift. Because of the rain.”
“No, thank you. I prefer the rain.”
“You do not like us Germans.”
“You have no business here.”
Engel could understand her reaction. Nevertheless—“I mention your dislike because in the course of your duties you show it.” One of the girl’s duties was to interpret when the dockyard dealt with the Germans: she spoke their language well.
“I am always correct.” Her eyes held his, unflinching.
“Correct, yes, but formal, distant, cold. And that could bring you trouble from…certain people.”
“Is that a warning? A threat?”
“A warning, not a threat. I do not speak of myself. There are others.” Like Grünwald. Engel’s leg was hurting, and his tone hardened, “I think you are entitled to your opinions but it is unwise for you to make them so obvious. I am not suggesting warmth, just neutrality. For your own sake.”