by David Black
Not that the Scourges had seemed to be all that bothered; there was a buzz in the boat… did you see the mess Georgie made o’ that wheelhouse?… and that second shot into her arse – I saw the whole rudder come off!…
So they had left the area and gone north again. But not before they’d deployed a little secret weapon that had been passed to Harry by Leading Telegraphist Grieve, one that had given him particular pleasure for the sheer inventive genius of the idea and that it had come from one of his own ratings. Something so simple and totally hilarious, he thought Grieve should have his photo on the front page of Good Morning*.
(*the Daily Mirror’s newspaper dedicated solely to the submarine service).
Harry had had no idea what Grieve had wanted when he’d asked for a ‘captain’s table’, and feared the worst. The L Tel had come before him, cap on and in the best uniform he could muster this far into the patrol, just after they had sailed from Vis for the last time. He was carrying what looked like a metal rod. But it wasn’t.
‘Bamboo?’ Harry had asked after he’d lifted the object off the wardroom table and squinted at it.
It was at least four foot long, and Grieve had sanded smooth its natural ribbing and painted it with some gunmetal paint he’d scrounged from the back-afties. Harry could feel it was weighted at one end. The other end had a little carved screw-on confection that looked like the head of the attack periscope.
‘I had the idea when I was ashore, helping Sergeant Reynolds with his radio gear, sir,’ said Grieve, shifting nervously, which Harry had thought unusual for a hand like him, who had all quiet confidence of the technically expert.
‘It was their fish traps, sir. When they set them on the sea bed. They’d mark where they were, using these bamboo sticks. They drilled down through all the wooden compartments, you see, and dropped ballast into the last one, so as they floated upright, sir. Like buoys, sir, only a lot cheaper and easier to make. I thought they looked like a periscope, sir. So if I did, I thought maybe the Eyeties would too. I thought if we chucked one over the side and left it bobbing about where we’d been, maybe if someone spotted it, they’d think we were still there and waste a lot of time and depth charges looking for us. Even though we weren’t… there, that is… if you see what I mean… sir.’ Grieve had trailed off, uncertain whether he was making an ass of himself.
Harry remembered frowning at the thing in his hands. He hadn’t meant to leave the L Tel hanging there, wondering if he’d just made the biggest fool of himself, it was just that he was amazed. Well, bugger me, he’d thought. But he remembered with a smile, what he’d eventually said.
‘Grieve. You’re a fucking genius!’
That had put a big smile on Grieve’s usually taciturn face, which, of course, had been pretty quickly wiped off by his messmates.
‘…of course, the skipper got the idea from Grieve’s dick… when he’s ’avin’ one o’ his Betty Grable dreams, it’s wavin’ about like Guy Lombardo’s baton… so we made a cast of it to frighten Jerry… an’ the next thing ye know… “thing?” Aye, that’s the right word for it… Hey! Angus! Who’d’ve thought a cast o’ yer porky love truncheon’d become the Allies’ secret weapon!’ Every one of them, of course, being as proud as peacocks of Grieve, one of their own, coming up with such a stonker of a ruse.
‘Of course, he’s one of your lot, sir, isn’t he?’ Harding had said when he’d heard.
‘One of my lot, Miles?’ Harry had asked, archly.
‘A jockulist, sir.’ Harding had smiled back. ‘You’ve all got the badness in you. It’s generally accepted.’*
Harry watched, as first the long bowsprit and then the hull of the schooner cleared the headland. It seemed to be the pattern of the coastal traffic along here that they snuck in behind every island they passed for fear of what might be lurking outside.
Although he doubted if this one had been worried about anything until they saw Scourge and in a panic luffed up and shuddered to halt as if someone had applied a set of brakes.
‘Give her a shot across the bows, Mr Hooper,’ Harry said. ‘See how brave she is.’
Hooper obliged.
The schooner started to drift. She was a beautifully lined craft, rigged fore-and-aft and stately as a swan with all her white canvas set, but a complete scruff when it came to her paintwork – all peeling black and exposed planking. There appeared to be a lot of industry on deck. He could see a figure waving a scrap of material. Harry raised his binoculars. It was a man waving a greyish tea towel. A white flag? Behind him, he could now make out what the activity was about. About half a dozen crewmen were freeing some kind of wooden dinghy when suddenly it shot up off its blocks and dangled from the mainmast jib.
Harry called down the pipe, ‘Boarding party to the casing. Bring charges and two Tommy gunners.’ Then over his shoulder to the .303 crew, ‘Keep your sights on those buggers until I see what they’re up to.’
He hadn’t long to wait. Quite deftly for a rabble, they righted the dinghy and lowered it into the water. No sooner had the falls gone slack than every man-jack of them were over the side and into her so that the dinghy wobbled so much, Harry thought she’d capsize. Then they were rowing away for Brač, maybe two hundred yards behind them.
Harry conned Scourge so as her bows came alongside the schooner, and the boarding party stepped off Scourge’s casing onto the bow planes and over the schooner’s gunnel. Not much of show for Hooper, but the lads would enjoy pirating whatever goodies they might find and then blowing her up with the charges. He looked around him; it was a beautiful, rugged coastline and remote. From where they lay, he couldn’t see any settlement onshore. It was early, so once they’d seen off this customer, he thought they’d hang about a bit, see if anything else turned up. When he looked back at the schooner, he could see some of his party emerging from the its hold, shoving up a veritable mountain of booty.
The day had dragged on without even a fishing boat puttering by or an aircraft to darken the sky. So they passed the time on the surface, stowing their haul. The schooner had been carrying sacks of wheat and onions, tins of tomatoes, pallets of soap, olive oil, rifle and machine gun ammunition and boxes of hand grenades. There had also been a couple of cases of French brandy. The boarding party had portered across all they thought they could stow, but with only two torpedoes gone, room in the forward spaces was minimal. Harry sent Harding to conduct a triage on the stuff coming aboard – what was worth keeping and what would have to get tossed. They would have no use for the grenades for a start, and anyway, they’d help the schooner go out with an even bigger bang. Which it did, most satisfyingly, with quite a few Scourges up on the casing, snapping away with their Box Brownies. It really had been most amusing how big bangs could put such a childlike smile on the face of the most grizzled stoker. That night, Scourge headed out to sea to spend the hours of darkness getting a good charge on. In the morning, Harry thought he’d head down the coast and take a look around the entrance to the Bay of Kotor to see if there were any likely targets there. After all, they still had almost a full load of torpedoes.
Not long after sunrise, with Scourge bow on to the coast, Harry took his first all-round look, and there it was: a tiny smudge of smoke on the horizon. Harry leaned back from the periscope to check the bearing bezel himself, then leaning back in, he called, ‘Asdic. Do you have any HE on green two eight?’ It was a different rating manning the set this morning; Biddle, Scourge’s leading Asdic man was off watch, sound asleep for’ard, on his favourite perch above one of the torpedo reload racks. This lad was a bit slower. It took him a few moments to report, ‘No HE on that bearing, sir. No HE within range at all, sir.’
Harry ordered the ’scope down and went to look at the chart. While he was pondering it, a voice came from the Asdic cubby, ‘Multiple HE on green two zero, sir. It’s faint, some of it high speed, but they’re only coming on slow, sir.’
‘Well done,’ said Harry, still peering at the chart. He let five minutes pass, then
did another all-round look. The smoke was further above the horizon now, and the range was closing. He issued orders for a course to close the coast ahead of what appeared to be the target’s track. The enemy was steaming north, heading to go past, or even into the Bay of Kotor. Also, from his quick look, the smoke smudge appeared to be coming from more than one source, a convoy in other words. Harry sent Scourge to diving stations and squeezed himself between the periscopes as the scramble of bodies went past him, but it took only a moment for everyone to be at their stations. Harry let everyone settle down and then stepped to the chart table where Harding, as usual, had already begun plotting all his calls on bearing and estimated speed. He issued another stream of orders and the boat continued to work in closer to the convoy’s estimated track.
‘The buggers are hugging right in on the coast,’ muttered Harry in his usual fashion, so as the entire control room could hear. ‘Definitely three steamers… and three MAS-boats, dancing around them… going like the clappers…’ another quick all-round look, ‘…no air cover as yet… down periscope.’
He stepped over to the chart table again. Biddle had given him the mean bearing rate and reported that he could detect no indication that the steamers were attempting to zig-zag. Biddle’s usual unhurried voice could be heard easily in the control room, ‘…the ships, they’re a clattery bunch, sir. Real bangers… the high-speed HE, they’re scooting about at random, sir. They’re all over the place.’
Except they weren’t ‘scooting about at random’, not from what Harry had just seen. These MAS boats were performing deliberate patterns to seaward of their charges – a fancy way of saying they were getting in the way. Systematically and to a plan. The Regia Marina anti-submarine kit had never been up to much, on that, most Tenth Flotilla skippers were agreed. ‘Rudimentary,’ was perhaps the most polite description Harry had read in another boat’s patrol report. But quite a few of their Italian skippers managed to work distressingly well with what they had. And these three MAS-boat skippers appeared to be at the top end of competent.
He preferred it when the enemy formed a traditional anti-submarine screen when escorting convoys, arrayed in arrow formation, pinging on their echo sounders and listening on their hydrophones, like they were trying to beat any threat away with the sheer volume of racket they’d created, then listening for anything they might flush out. In those circumstances, all an astute submarine skipper had to do was get inside that screen, pick his spot abaft the convoy’s beam and bingo! There was your clear shot.
But not with these boys. One of the MAS-boats was zig-zagging apparently wildly ahead of the three steamers, but if you were paying attention, there was nothing wild about it; he was doing high-speed sweeps, positioning himself to go directly at anyone foolish enough to raise a periscope in his path. The other two also had their throttles wide open, but they were staying well back, keeping station always on their charge’s beams and aft quarters but ranging out, up to almost a mile – quartering the sea room around the convoy at high speed, their huge wakes like gouts of icing sugar, smothering the sea all around them and getting in the bloody way so you couldn’t settle and take your shot. Harry couldn’t imagine anything more disconcerting – if you’ve got your target in your graticules, you’ve called the bearing and range and you’re just waiting on the target’s dumb, lumbering bow to cross your DA… and a fucking escort starts coming directly at your periscope at thirty knots.
It was all a matter of keeping your head and concentrating. Of course it was.
The three steamers were a motley collection, none of them more than a thousand tons. Two, with their natural draught stacks aft, belting out black smoke, were easily last-century veterans, the third, and the biggest by a small margin, looked like a scaled-down cargo-passenger liner, with an elongated superstructure that had a row of cabins. All were rust buckets, and all had deck cargo, like giant fruit crates. Was he going in to risk all against a glorified grocery delivery?
He was trying to concentrate. Except that from the moment he had started this attack in his head, it had felt different. He was having to think about what he was doing, all the angles and ranges and decisions to be made weren’t flowing through his head like they should. It was as if, because all the previous actions had been gun actions, he’d gone suddenly a bit rusty when it came to good old-fashioned torpedoes. Going in with the gun, after all, had only required him to point Scourge in the right direction and then his dead-eyed gun layer, Hooper had done the rest. In a torpedo action, however, it was all about him.
That was when the indecision started creeping in. He suddenly discovered, in the back of his mind, he was wondering about whether he should be pressing home this attack at all. Or should he just not bother, just let them pass, don’t alert the coast, just move along and wait for the next one. This was the Adriatic. The targets had been coming thick and fast, and he hadn’t even ventured over to the other shore. There was no pressure on the boat to press home this one.
Because these bloody MAS-boats weren’t going to let him get close easily.
But say he decided to fire anyway a full salvo spread? He’d be bound to hit something. But that would all be down to luck, wouldn’t it? In the end, he might just waste six torpedoes. And then there would be the counter-attack. These MAS-boats only carried six depth charges each at most – but it only took one. Was it worth risking it to bag a grocery delivery?
The trouble was, he knew the more he thought like that, the less he was concentrating, and it definitely wasn’t him being decisive.
And that was when all the shit he had in his head about the Bonny Boy started leaking in.
The thing was, since the encounter with the safe conduct ship and everything that had surrounded it, the previous reports from the Bonny Boy about Captain Gilmour’s ‘lack of aggressiveness’, there had been a voice in his head, a voice that kept coming back, again and again, these days when he was doing his war stuff, a voice that wondered whether it was true. And whether at some time, somewhere in the future, at some inquiry against him for God knows what, there would be the Bonny Boy, giving evidence, carping on again about how shy that Gilmour character had always been – especially when it came to pressing home his attacks. The boy had been shy before, he could hear him saying it. And who was he to gainsay it?
Harry shook his head; he was supposed to be conducting an attack. But he was getting tired, and he knew it.
Not surprisingly, really. He hadn’t had a rest since the bloody war started; he didn’t count his two weeks’ survivors’ leave because he’d ‘won’ that on his first war patrol. He’d hardly spent any time as a clockwork mouse in the Firth of Clyde – usually every new skipper’s time off for practice – and as for racking up lots of shore time overseeing a new-build command, well the Luftwaffe had blown the arse out of that. And anyway, what was he doing having this kind of discussion in his head in the middle of an attack?
Maybe it wasn’t his crew’s morale he should’ve been worrying about but losing his own edge, his tiredness, his continued fitness for command. Concentrate!.
‘Bring all six bow tubes to readiness…’ said Harry, back-leaning against the chart table, missing his trouser pockets. Harding, watching him out the corner of his eye, reckoned he wasn’t the only one these days thinking the captain was looking… what? Nobody could pin it down… could think of the word. If he was asked to take a stab, what would he have to say? Careworn? Could it really be that? Harry Gilmour, careworn? Didn’t seem possible.
‘…shallow setting. Ten feet.’
Harry looked at Harding’s plot of the advancing track of the little convoy. Harding hadn’t even bothered to try and follow the careering about of the MAS-boats. Harry ordered the periscope up for another all-round look, then he turned it back on the targets’ bearing.
‘Bearing is that,’ called Harry, and Dickie Bird, the yeoman, standing by the periscope, read off the bezel.
McCready, on the fruit machine, dialled it in. ‘Range is…
that,’ and Bird read off the minutes. Well over four thousand yards. ‘Down periscope!’said Harry.
He went and stood behind Leading Seaman Cross on the helm. ‘Steer one eight five,’ he said, tapping the lad’s shoulder, then to Ainsworth, operating the engine room telegraph, ‘Slow ahead together, Cox’n.’
He had placed Scourge on a parallel track to the convoy, going in the opposite direction, and when Harding began updating the plot, he could see from their course they would pass at a range of over three thousand five hundred yards. He could see Harry checking his watch – timing himself to the next manoeuvre? But nobody else could tell, because the commentary from the skipper had suddenly stopped, which was unusual. ‘Stand by all tubes,’ said Harry, then he ordered the ’scope up again. He did his usual all-round look, then, ‘…We’re still shagbat free.’ At last, a bit of commentary again. Then, with the periscope pointing almost directly to port so as his shoulders were almost fore and aft down the control room, he began reading off the bearing and range and an updated estimate for the targets’ speed, ‘Six knots. Down periscope.’
It had all looked very dramatic, with Harry crouching down on the deck plates, holding the ’scope so low to ensure as little of the head was above the flat, calm sea, but his calls and orders were all being delivered like he was dictating a shopping list to the scullery maid. He stood up and reached to tap Cross again, ‘Helmsman. Port twenty. Keep on slow ahead together.’
Harding ticked the plot; they were turning in on the convoy’s track, and from the look of it, he was coming round to let the leading enemy steamer just pass by. The ’scope went up again, and Harry called the lead target then asked McCready on the fruit machine, ‘What’s my DA?’ McCready called it back. Harry ordered the ’scope down again and stepped to the sound-powered telephone and lifted it. He’s doing it all himself this time round, noted Harding, wondering why.