A Ship Must Die (1981)

by Reeman, Douglas

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Douglas Reeman

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  1 Help from on High

  2 The Return

  3 Evidence

  4 Rendezvous

  5 The Enemy

  6 A Small World

  7 To Die with Dignity

  8 Convoy

  9 News from Home

  10 Making a Start

  11 ‘It Happens –’

  12 No Proof

  13 Secrets

  14 Last Chance

  15 Dirty Weather

  16 ‘Am Engaging!’

  17 Just a Man

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Douglas Reeman joined the Navy in 1941. He did convoy duty in the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the North Sea, and later served in motor torpedo boats.

  As he says, ‘I am always asked to account for the perennial appeal of the sea story, and its enduring interest for people of so many nationalities and cultures. It would seem that the eternal and sometimes elusive triangle of man, ship and ocean, particularly under the stress of war, produces the best qualities of courage and compassion, irrespective of the rights and wrongs of conflict . . . The sea has no understanding of righteous or unjust causes. It is the common enemy, respected by all who serve on it, ignored at their peril.’

  Douglas Reeman has written thirty-two novels under his own name; he has also written twenty-three bestselling historical novels featuring Richard Bolitho, under the pseudonym Alexander Kent.

  Also by Douglas Reeman

  The Greatest Enemy

  The Last Raider

  With Blood and Iron

  H.M.S. ‘Saracen’

  A Prayer for the Ship

  Dive in the Sun

  High Water

  The Hostile Shore

  Rendezvous – South Atlantic

  Send a Gunboat

  The Deep Silence

  Go in and Sink!

  Path of the Storm

  The Pride and the Anguish

  To Risks Unknown

  The Destroyers

  Winged Escort

  Surface with Daring

  Strike from the Sea

  Torpedo Run

  Badge of Glory

  The First to Land

  The Volunteers

  The Iron Pirate

  Against the Sea (non-fiction)

  In Danger’s Hour

  The White Guns

  Killing Ground

  The Horizon

  Sunset

  A Dawn Like Thunder

  Battlecruiser

  A Ship Must Die

  Douglas Reeman

  To Winifred

  with love and with thanks

  The author wishes to thank those officers and men of the Royal Australian Navy and the Royal New Zealand Navy who gave their assistance.

  1

  Help from on High

  THE NEW YEAR of 1944 was only two weeks old but already it looked as if it might be one of the hottest on record. The sun which blazed down across His Majesty’s Australian Naval Dockyard at Williamstown was so fierce that it had stripped the sky of colour, and the crowded berths and wharves twisted and danced in an ever-changing mirage.

  But it was Sunday, and the working parties about the dockyard were reduced to a minimum, leaving the ships to themselves, overlapping shapes of grey steel or vivid dazzle-paint.

  The main berth was devoid of movement, the gantrys motionless like dozing storks, the massive wooden concourse all but covered with a litter of pipes, wire, anchor cable and debris of all sorts, a scrap-dealer’s paradise. Ships being refitted, others being constructed to fill the unending gaps left after four years of war. Veterans too, their hulls showing hasty repairs, others still displaying their scars. Splinter holes and buckled plates, where weapons and men had once stood and faced their enemies.

  But it was Sunday. War or not, the urgency could wait.

  Halfway along the main berth was a cruiser. From her sharp stem to the motionless ensign which drooped from her quarterdeck staff she seemed to stand apart from the many vessels around her. Despite her seven thousand tons she had the grace of a destroyer, with her funnels trunked into a single structure to add to her air of power and speed.

  At the foot of her brow, where a sentry stood almost asleep in a patch of shade, a lifebuoy hung on a small varnished stand with the ship’s name, HMS Andromeda, for anyone who cared to read it.

  She, of any ship in the Royal Navy, was a veteran in the clearest terms. She had steamed thousands of miles from one theatre to another. Norway, Dunkirk, the Atlantic and finally the Mediterranean, there was no sort of war she had not experienced. Andromeda had become famous, another of the Navy’s special legends which nobody could explain. Some ships were happy ones, others brought only trouble, even disaster to those who served them. Outsiders scoffed at the idea. How could a thing of steel effect people? But those who knew such ships were content to keep the secret to themselves.

  Now, after two years of some of the hardest sea warfare in the Mediterranean, when Andromeda had rarely been absent from the nation’s headlines, she had come far south, to this dockyard in Victoria, Australia.

  The Pacific war was spreading in all directions, and with the United States Navy taking the lion’s share of the operations, the Australians were in need of more ships to reinforce their scattered fleet and to replace the ones already lying on one sea-bed or another.

  Soon now, HMS Andromeda would be paid-off, to recommission eventually into the Royal Australian Navy, perhaps even with a new name, one more in common with the men who would fill her messdecks and action stations.

  The cruiser had been at sea for Christmas, an occasion of very mixed emotions as well as being a far cry from the previous ones she had seen.

  For if Andromeda was special, so too were her people. Now, some had already left, to be sent home in the next convoy, others to work their passage on a newly repaired vessel needed elsewhere.

  On this sweltering Sunday all the remaining members of the ship’s company not required for duty were ashore. Again, it was an entirely new experience. No air attacks, no bitter cold or freezing nights, just sunshine and a warmth of hospitality which left them breathless.

  The ship was very still, with just the gentle murmur of fans and a faint throb of a generator deep in her bowels to show a sign of life.

  Right aft in his day cabin, Andromeda’s captain sat alone at his desk, plucking his shirt away from his skin as he sipped at a glass of iced gin and considered his own feelings.

  Captain Richard Blake was just thirty-three years old. Earlier in the war such swift promotions were compared with other, less demanding times, but now they hardly raised a comment. At the outbreak of war Blake had commanded a destroyer. It was a world he understood and enjoyed, in spite of all the hazards. He had imagined that nothing could ever replace a destroyer in his affection. Even as a small boy he had read about them. The ‘greyhounds of the ocean’ as they were described by writers who had obviously never served in one.

  As the war had increased momentum, and every belief he had gathered on his way up the ladder of promotion had been rewritten by the savagery of battle, Blake had seen his old world crumble. The enemy could not be stopped, or so it had seemed in those first months and years. Precious convoys had been decimated, while on land the British armies had been forced into retreat again and again.

  At home, bewildered by the swiftness of apparent disaster, the civilian population had been made to endure air raids around the clock, rationing, shortages of just about everything, with only the tiny vapour trails above London or the Kenti
sh fields to tell of the few who were winning in spite of the odds, or perhaps because of them.

  Once more, Blake had been advanced in promotion, ‘forced up under glass’, as they had called it, and had joined Andromeda as her acting-commander. He had been with her ever since, and when her captain, Tom Fellowes, had been killed outright by a bomb splinter when they were escorting a convoy to Alexandria, Blake had been put temporarily in command.

  The war had been going so badly throughout the Mediterranean that any change in a ship’s pattern could spell disaster. Perhaps there had been somebody in Whitehall who understood about ships like Andromeda. Maybe he had served aboard her either in her three years of peace or since then in combat.

  But Blake had stayed. Malta, North Africa, Tobruk and back again. E-boats, submarines, dive-bombers and powerful cruisers, they had survived it all together when many, many others had not.

  They had fought duels with shore batteries, humped stores and fuel to beleaguered Malta and protected the army’s flank whenever they could be of use.

  Then, quite suddenly, the balance had hesitated. At a place called El Alamein the army started back along the coast road. And Andromeda had stayed with them, until last year when the Allies had taken that first, tentative stab at the enemy’s own territory, the invasion of Sicily.

  Looking around the quiet cabin it was hard to picture any of it, Blake thought. The clattering automatic fire, the Mediterranean sky pock-marked with drifting shell-bursts and ripped apart by tracer. Screaming dive-bombers, the bridge jerking and reeling to a near-miss, or too often a hit.

  Blake could see their faces better than the actual events, or the order of each incident. Yells and cheers, curses and screams as the steel cracked into the cruiser’s side. Grins on smoke-blackened faces when his promotion had been signalled and his steward had sewn an extra stripe on his faded reefer, bright gold against the three tarnished ones. Just for the hell of it. A thing for the moment. Andromeda was that kind of ship.

  The deck trembled very slightly and Blake stood up and crossed to an open scuttle to watch a tug thrusting past.

  Three months after Sicily had come the invasion of Italy, a far more ambitious and deadly affair. Costly too, in men and ships.

  And then, after all the varied actions, the heart-breaks and the jubilant moments of survival had come that challenge which in hindsight might have been planned for the ship and for himself.

  He felt his stomach muscles contract as he relived the moment. A great double column of landing craft, weaving and floundering about as only they could in anything but a flat calm. Each packed with troops, tanks and ammunition, heading for the beaches to join the fighting. Two elderly destroyers trying to maintain some sort of discipline, an even older anti-aircraft cruiser which had looked like a relic from Jutland. And at the head of the unruly flotilla had been Andromeda. It had been a Sunday then as now, he thought, his mouth suddenly dry.

  Three ships had been sighted to the north-east, closing fast. They should not have been there. The approaches to Italy and Sicily were sealed and patrolled by a massive force of capital ships, cruisers, destroyers, everything you could think of.

  The Italians had betrayed their German comrades and had thrown in their lot with the British and American forces. Their fleet, too, was in Allied hands, all their fine, beautifully designed cruisers were a menace no longer. At least so everyone had believed.

  But the three approaching vessels were Italian cruisers, racing at full speed towards the west to force the Gibraltar Straits and make for Biscay.

  Andromeda had faced Italian warships many times, but the same vessels in German hands were something else entirely.

  At the time Blake had had no idea of the enemy’s intention. All he knew was that the slow-moving lines of landing-craft were helpless, their hastily gathered escort no match at all for the powerful cruisers.

  Plenty of other captains had made the same decision as Blake, most of them had not lived to recall it.

  With her four six-inch turrets crooked to maximum elevation, a battle-ensign flying from each mast, Andromeda had increased speed and had curved away to place herself between the enemy and her vulnerable charges.

  What had occurred next was a part of history. It could not have happened, but it did. No single ship, outgunned in strength and size, could take on three cruisers and survive. But she had. At the close of the day, one enemy vessel was on the bottom, the second stopped and unable to move. The third made off streaming smoke, to be sunk the following day by a submarine.

  When the Andromeda had finally managed to reach Gibraltar there had not been a single cheer raised nor a siren blared to greet her. Down by the bows, riddled with holes from bow to stern, she was barely afloat. At her guns, cooks and stewards, writers and supply ratings had replaced the dead crews who had fallen during the fight. It was a sight too terrible for applause.

  In 1936, when the ship’s keel had first tasted salt water, they had built well. In a month the sights and horrors of battle were cleaned away, the hull patched, the blackened paintwork redone. In two months she was out of dock, and soon on her way to Australia.

  There was a tap at the door and Moon, the captain’s steward, peered in at him warily. Chief Petty Officer Moon was an odd-looking man. Gaunt and bony like a scarecrow, untidy ashore, but like a guardsman when he was tending to his duties.

  In spite of his mournful face he had a well-hidden humour, and was a good judge of when to do things. Like the time he had sewn on that extra stripe which he had scrounged from somewhere, because he had known they were all at the limit of despair and exhaustion. And the time he had held a young signalman in his arms, had spoken about his early life as a steward in a clapped-out tramp steamer before the war. The youth had watched him entranced while he had slowly bled to death.

  ‘Will you be goin’ ashore today, sir?’

  Blake shook his head. ‘Doubt it. Into Melbourne tomorrow. Get things started.’

  Moon nodded gloomily. ‘It’ll not be the same, sir.’

  Blake looked away. Not be the same. Nor would it.

  Two years in the same ship was a lifetime during a war. He glanced at a painting which hung on one bulkhead. It depicted Andromeda, the daughter of Cepheus, chained to a rock as a sacrifice to the sea monster. With her rescuer, Perseus, on his winged horse charging down to the attack.

  Underneath was the ship’s motto. Auxilium ab Alto. Help from on High.

  A young hostilities-only sub-lieutenant, in peacetime a commercial artist, had given it to him as a present. The officer had been killed two days later off Benghazi. When you thought about it, the picture was all that he had had time to leave on earth.

  Moon added, ‘I’d like to stay with you, sir, when you gets another ship.’

  Blake looked at him gravely. ‘I don’t think I could manage without you any more.’

  The chief steward seemed satisfied. ‘I’ve got your best whites ready for tomorrow, sir.’ He held up a freshly ironed tunic. ‘Can’t ’ave them Aussies thinkin’ we don’t know how to do things!’

  Blake barely heard him. He was staring at the crimson ribbon which Moon had pinned on the white tunic. The ribbon with the tiny cross in the centre of it.

  He still could not believe it. The Victoria Cross.

  He saw himself in the mirror above Moon’s special sideboard. The one where he hoarded his best glasses. He had even features, with brown hair bleached fair by many months of sea-going in the Med. A youthful face. The boy captain, one stupid journalist had labelled him.

  But it was not the sort of face he would have expected to see on the holder of a VC. He did not know if it had changed him in any way, or might in the future.

  Moon watched him and said quietly, ‘You earned it, sir.’ He looked round the cabin and added almost bitterly, ‘So did she!’

  Blake sat down again. Tomorrow he would take up the reins. See the admiral, meet his successor, explain about the ship, what she meant.

  He
raised his glass. ‘Another, please.’

  Moon padded to his sideboard. Captain Blake was the best he had ever served, although he had been a bit sceptical at the beginning. So young, so confident. Now Moon understood differently. He of everyone else aboard knew what the captain was like when he was hidden from the eyes of his men.

  Blake tilted the glass. A proper pink gin this time. On his own he often forgot or neglected to prepare the drink properly. Always too busy. No time. He watched the sunlight reflected on the deckhead. No wonder Bligh’s men mutinied at Tahiti, he thought drowsily. Melbourne must seem just as much of a miracle to his own men after what they had been made to endure.

  His head lolled and Moon deftly removed the glass from his fingers.

  Then, with the tunic and its crimson ribbon over his arm, he silently left the cabin.

  Commander Victor Fairfax of the Royal Australian Navy opened the bedroom curtains very carefully and looked out at the brilliant moonlight. The house was in a quiet, tree-lined road on the outskirts of Melbourne, much like those on either side of it, but to its occupants so very different.

  The night was quiet, the house on the opposite side of the road shining in the strange light like the face of a glacier.

  Fairfax was thirty-one, a professional to his fingertips. He was naked, and gave a sensuous shiver as the air, cool and clean after the day’s humidity, explored his body.

  Tomorrow he would join his new ship, the British cruiser at Williamstown. It was always an exciting prospect, even the first times as a younger and less confident junior officer. But this would be different. He listened to his wife’s gentle breathing in the bed behind him and felt his heart warm towards her. She was the real difference. They had been married for eight months after meeting in Sydney at a party on Garden Island. A whirlwind and passionate courtship, then marriage with all the trimmings, raised swords, the admiral, the whole lot.

  The war had seemed a long way off then, despite the news from Europe and the Pacific.

  She stirred and he knew she was awake, watching him in the filtered moonlight.