by David Black
But to make up for it, here was the table full of documents with title stamps such as Intelligenz-Bewertung and Auftrag der Schlacht.
‘Schlacht? That’s Jerry for “battle”, isn’t it?’ Pettifer had said, and Harding agreed.
‘Auftrag der Schlacht? It’s just lists and lists of units,’ Pettifer had observed. ‘Hundreds of them. Für die Luftwaffe? And für Panzer-Grenadier-Regiment this? And for Fallschirmjäger-battlaion that? It’s Jerry’s full order of battle. Must be.’
This put a different complexion entirely on the matters at hand. And just as well, thought Harding. He had been of one mind with his captain when he’d heard what their initial orders had been, back when Captain Gilmour had finally spilled the beans to HMS Scourge’s crew as to why they had a sub full of commandos, a huge weapons cache and all those bloody explosives and were heading for the north coast of Sicily on another of those cloak-and-dagger missions so unbeloved of the service.
They were to put the commandos ashore near some fancy villa a dozen or so miles east of Palermo where Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief South was – according to ‘intelligence’ – having a lie-down. And the objective of the mission was for the commandos to murder him.
That hadn’t gone down too well with the rest of the crew. It wasn’t that Jack – your average lower deck sailor – had any inherent squeamishness about killing Jerries. Far from it. There were probably more than a few aboard Scourge who would be happy to tell you they enjoyed it. But only in a good, clean fight. Murder was something altogether different as far as Jack was concerned. And aboard Scourge, this wasn’t just a hypothetical feeling. There had been a patrol in the Dodecanese, under Bertie Bayliss, their former CO, that the whole boat preferred not to talk about.
Then circumstances had changed.
The commando three-pipper who should have been in charge of the landing party, Captain Tony di Marco – latterly Eighth Battalion, the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders and now Combined Operations – had come down with ’flu en route. And without Captain Tony, whose family owned a third-generation ice cream parlour on Montague Street, Rothesay, capital of the island of Bute, the whole op was kiboshed. Because Tony was a fluent Italian speaker, and his skills were to be key to liaising with a band of Sicilian partisans who were going to guide his team to the villa, suppress any armed guards while Tony slit Kesselring’s throat and then the partisans were to spirit the assassins back to the beach for rescue by Scourge before melting into the Sicilian hinterland to await further rewards after the upcoming Allied invasion had stormed ashore.
‘Bugger, Captain Tony’s second in command,’ Ewan Pettifer had said while listening to Captain Tony cough and sneeze as he writhed and sweated in the grip of a fever in Captain Gilmour’s bunk. Captain Tony had been very keen on the idea of murdering Kesselring, despite Captain Gilmour’s strongly expressed misgivings. But whichever way you looked at it, a coughing, sneezing, delirious CO, was not going to be an effective leader of a clandestine operation behind enemy lines, where speed, clarity of thought and keeping quiet would be essential. With Captain Tony out of the picture, it should have been a no-go. But Captain Gilmour had come up with an alternative plan; one in which the operation still went ahead, but didn’t involve murdering the wretched Nazi Field Marshal. They were going to nab him instead.
The fact that Kesselring wasn’t here, however, didn’t have to mean the op was a total wash-out, thought Harding, and he said so to Pettifer, who agreed. They were going to nab Von Puttkamer instead and all the bumpf strewn across the villa’s large dining table and in the box files surrounding it. However, in order for their efforts to be worthwhile, both British officers also agreed there were two other things they had to do. Since Harding was insistent that no one was going to be allowed to slit poor little Ulrich’s throat, they were going to have to nab him too; and for the barrow loads of document intelligence to still be relevant after they’d nabbed it, Jerry was going to have to believe they’d been destroyed.
‘We have to get that cut-throat Dandolo in here now,’ said Harding, referring to their smelly ‘partisan’ leader.Dandolo’s personal hygiene was another thing that Harding and Pettifer agreed on.
A commando was dispatched to summon Snr Dandolo. The other commandos also peeled off on their missions; and right there, the war, and all its absence of morality and mercy, resumed.
One of the commandos sneaked out and shoved his commando dagger into the brain stem of the guard on walk-round duty, while the other two sneaked back to the summer house and did the two Jerries in there likewise. It was all very, quick, silent and brutal, like they’d been trained to do. One of the bodies was dragged back and was dressed in the oberst’s uniform.
Dandolo’s men were relieved of three of the demolition charges from the stack that had formed part of the US Navy gift package to their new partisan allies, and had been carried here by Scourge. Two of the charges were attached to the villa’s load-bearing walls; the other was attached to the very modern, large steel cylinder out back, that was full of propane gas for heating and cooking.
The commandos started stuffing documents and maps into pillowcases, and Pettifer led the partisans carrying the BARs – Browning Automatic Rifles, another gift from the US Navy – to the edge of the driveway. Here, he shoved them into a little impromptu gun line. ‘I fire,’ he said, pointing at his own Thompson, ‘then you,’ pointing at his little gaggle of gangsters. ‘Three bursts,’ he told them, counting with his fingers and mimicking firing, ‘…and then you eseguire come l’inferno! You run! Capeachy? Run!’
When he got back to the villa, it was just Harding left there. He was sloshing paraffin over the floor in the dark. ‘Ready,’ said Pettifer, grinning. Harding couldn’t help but notice that the man had lost all that louche indifference that had been rubbing him up since the young subaltern had first deigned to disport himself on Scourge’s wardroom banquettes. The type Harding had remembered from his public school days, and not fondly, appeared to have gone, while the battlefield Pettifer seemed to be shaping up to be an entirely different creature.
‘Well then,’ said Harding, ‘I’ll pop the timers on the wall charges, and you do the propane tank…’
‘And fire my starting gun,’ Pettifer interrupted, un-shouldering his Thompson and brandishing it. He then snapped briefly, and comically, to attention, snapped off a salute and said, ‘Aye, aye, sir!’ But not mocking, having fun.
‘See you on the beach, then,’ said Harding, grinning too, now, and then both men peeled off.
Harding was already running on sand when he heard the rapid, tell-tale rat-at-tat of the Thompson gun from up the hill. There was a brief pause in which he wondered if anything at all had actually happened, and then all hell had broken loose.
Deep down inside he knew it would be prudent of him to be scared, but he couldn’t stop grinning as he sprinted, he just couldn’t help himself. The ninety minutes or so it had taken to get into that villa, grab their man – not the right man admittedly, but an important one anyway – load their booty and see it all on its way to the beach to be picked up by Scourge, easily qualified as the most exciting, exhilarating and downright bloody marvellous of his life. They’d all been wrong-footed by what they’d discovered up there on the clifftop, but he’d kept his head and devised another plan, on the run; he’d kept the momentum of the op going. No standing about thumb-sucking while the minutes dripped away. He had acted.
Now, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, Harding had long ago learned that plans never usually worked out, but by God, this one was looking bloody good so far! The fact that it had in large part depended on a mob of half-cut Eyetie irregulars running away had probably a lot to do with it… but hey!
And there, in the lapping waves, were the two folbots, held by two of Pettifer’s commandos, and if he squinted really hard, out there in the night, on the fine line between the darkness of the water and the sky, was Scourge.
The steady thump of
the 20mms echoed out to him and then reflected in the lapping waves, the false sunrise of the propane going up and quickly after, the bang.
****
Even in the darkness of Scourge’s bridge, his captain, Lt Harry Gilmour DSO, DSC, RNVR could tell how pleased Harding was with himself, now that he had, at last, got him back aboard. Behind them, down on the casing, that commando subaltern was supervising the collapsing of the folbots – those flimsy canvas-and-frame kayaks Combined Ops seemed to love so much – as his boat crept back out to sea again, half astern together on her diesels, not even bothering to go to her quiet electric motors because the bangs and flashes from the headland told Harry that Jerry was still busy in a firefight with an empty villa. No one was looking their way or listening over the thump, thump of the 20mms and the persistent chatter of small-arms fire.
Harry had no idea what had happened back there, but no doubt he’d soon find out. That it had turned out well, however, there was no doubt, judging from the grin still splitting Harding’s face. It was as if someone had just a rammed an inverted coat hanger in his mouth. With the flames still flickering from the burning villa on the headland, even a chap with night vision as terrible as Harry Gilmour’s couldn’t miss it.
‘Well, Mr Harding, you look like you’ve been having a jolly time,’ said Harry.
‘Bloody right, sir!’ said Harding.
Two
He’s still just a bloody kid, thought Shrimp. Yes, there were lines tightening about the eyes, and the set of the jaw and the mouth was a lot harder. And that stillness about him, that air of composure you never ordinarily see in the young. What age was he now? Twenty-three? Twenty-four?
Harry Gilmour. One of his battle-hardened captains. The CO of a 670-ton S-class submarine, dispatcher-to-the-deep of God knows how many thousand tons of Axis shipping now, with some thirty-six men under his command and thirteen torpedoes at his disposal to fire at the enemy wherever he could find them. And here he was back on Malta. When he shouldn’t have been.
‘This is by way of a more detailed examination of the night of the ninth, tenth and the days leading up to it and since,’ said Shrimp, still sitting back in his new chair, tapping a pencil on the big legal pad before him on the desk. ‘As you can imagine, Mr Gilmour, C-in-C Mediterranean is going to want a lot more detail than the bare bones we signalled last night.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ said Harry, trying to look bright-eyed despite the cargo of brandy he’d taken on board… last night.
‘And Mr Wincairns’ friends are also taking an interest,’ added Shrimp.
George Wincairns, a roly-poly sort of chap in a cobbled-together uniform of no service or unit Harry had ever seen or heard of, beamed familiarly at him from the corner. Harry knew him of old. He’d been on Malta for some time now. No one knew exactly what he did though. Some said he was some kind of ‘Information Officer’, although he was more frequently to be seen hanging around places where anyone connected with public relations should’ve been decidedly persona non grata – like the island’s main ops room and the main signals ‘hole’.
And so they began. Shrimp – Captain George Simpson RN, the Captain S of the Tenth Submarine Flotilla – took Harry over the hurdles: could he be specific about his orders for this op? Who gave them? What exactly was the mission? Why had he arbitrarily decided to vary those orders? And more importantly, why had he decided to return to Malta and not to Algiers where his boat had been temporarily detached to Twelfth Flotilla?
For Harry, the great temptation was to dissemble. But he knew he mustn’t. For there were going to be the statements from the two pongo officers, di Marco and Pettifer, that had to tally with his. Just tell it straight, Harry, and don’t elaborate, he told himself.
What Harry didn’t know about was the signal from the CO of the Twelfth Flotilla back in Algiers that had arrived since, that Shrimp had read with furrowed brow, a signal that Harry was going to have to explain, eventually.
As for the other man in the room, George Wincairns, nobody ever knew what George Wincairns knew, and if they were wise, they didn’t bother wondering.
‘Start at the beginning,’ said Shrimp.
So Harry began, surprised at how little nerves he felt. It would be good to finally get the story out there, although he was under no illusions that this little gathering was not the place to fully reveal how poisoned the waters were that he was swimming in.
Harry told how he’d been ordered to a meeting ashore in Algiers. The summons had come in the form of a written order from, ‘Staff Officer, Operations: Twelfth Flotilla’ and handed to him at the door of the pokey little wardroom of the Twelfth’s depot ship, HMS Ellan Vannin, by a petty officer writer. He’d been summoned to a meeting. Usually, these notes were informal, jokey even, for a skipper returning from patrol, dashed off by a flotilla CO, grateful, at least, to have got his boat back. Not this one. It had been curt and to the point, not that Harry had been expecting anything like bonhomie. Especially after the post-patrol interview he’d just given right after Scourge had come in – with the Twelfth’s Captain S, Captain Charles Bonalleck VC, DSO and Bar, RN, the famous Bonny Boy – when Captain Bonalleck had called into question Lt Gilmour’s ‘zeal’, and ‘diligence’ and noted his ‘tendency to interpret your orders in an apparent effort to justify what can only be described as a lack of fighting spirit in the face of the enemy’. Even so, a summons to an operational meeting, he’d have expected one of those to at least come from his Captain S and not just the SOO. This was his CO sending a message that he was keeping an eye on him.
Harry, however, decided now was not the time to mention Captain S12’s verbal assessment of him, even though it ended up having considerable bearing on Harry’s subsequent decisions, because that would have involved going into all the painful details of that previous patrol. The whole dodgy set-up for it, the orders that took no account of the tactical picture at sea, the signals and intelligence – vital signals and intelligence – that had not been passed on and the terrible conclusion he’d been driven to confront, the only one that made any sense when you’d stacked up all the evidence, that the Captain S12 had been trying to kill him. Instead, he just stuck to his storyline.
The meeting the SOO’s summons had referred to had been ashore, Harry told Shrimp and Wincairns, at an address he didn’t recognise.
‘Can’t miss it,’ he remembered a US Army MP telling him. ‘It’s one of them big fancy French shacks. Got a big sign outside says, “Mediterranean Theater of Operations, United States Army”. It’s where Ike lives.’
Ike – General Dwight D Eisenhower, the US Army officer who was now supreme commander for the whole of the Med – which had turned out to be ironic in a way as most of the American officers in the meeting had been US Navy.
It had been all very informal; there had been a US Army one-star general presiding, having come out from behind the cover of his desk to sit with everyone in the room on easy chairs. With one other exception, everybody else had been in blue.
And that was when Harry first learned that they wanted his boat to carry a team of British commandos to a beach just east of Palermo and drop them ashore so they could murder Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. Oh, and while you’re at it, could you also drop off this not-inconsiderable cache of arms and explosives… and cash… to a team of waiting Italian partisans eager to help us kick Jerry off of Sicily when the time comes in the not-too-distant future.
The plan had all been thought out and written down on flipcharts and was spelled out to the room by a pointer-waving, spindly, myopic US Army major in a most immaculate uniform. Harry had noticed the uniform – in fact, all their uniforms – because as only one of two British servicemen in the room, he compared very unfavourably in his ill-fitting shirt and shorts, which he’d been forced to scrounge from HMS Ellan Vannin’s slops room. Because what kit he’d had left these days had been back here on Malta, in the Lazaretto’s wardroom – the kit that is, that had survived all the bombing.
&
nbsp; The US Army major, nor indeed any of the others in that room, hadn’t looked like they’d seen much bombing, if any, in their careers. But Harry didn’t mention any of that to Shrimp or Wincairns either.
‘So this was an American op?’ asked Shrimp.
Before Harry could answer, Wincairns said, ‘Oh, no. No. It’s all under AFHQ these days… Allied Forces Headquarters. We’re all in it, friends together, George.’
Shrimp winced slightly at the familiarity.
‘Yes, sir. All the other officers in the room were US Navy, commanders mainly,’ said Harry. ‘And apart from Captain Bonalleck and myself, the only other British representative was a civilian.’
‘Who?’ said Shrimp.
‘Ah…’ said Harry, his eyes resting on Wincairns, who merely smiled like an innocent babe before filling the gap in the conversation.
‘Oh, I don’t think we need bother about him,’ said Wincairns. ‘Probably just some FO Johnny sent there so as he could fill in all the colour for Winston. You know how he loves to hear about all our behind-the-enemy-lines japes.’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Harry. ‘He didn’t speak and wasn’t introduced.’
‘And the reason they’d picked on a British boat for this… operation… was because?’ asked Shrimp.
‘According to one of their commanders, S12 and I were there because the US Navy doesn’t have any boats in the Med, sir…’ said Harry.
‘…and our Combined Ops chaps are more experienced at this sort of stuff than theirs,’ Shrimp finished for him.
And then Harry started relating the jeep ride back to Ellan Vannin with Captain Bonalleck.
‘He told me this job, this mission to kill the German Field Marshal, was not only vital to winning the war, but to the future of the Anglo–American alliance,’ recounted Harry. ‘He was very emphatic. I’d better return with evidence of a corpse, or not return at all, were more or less his exact words.’