It seemed to me, at that moment, that I had been torn from my own world to witness a vision of Armageddon—and, oddly enough, I felt privileged!
I think that it was then that the notion first occurred to me that perhaps I had been selected by Providence to be involved in a countless series of what might be called alternative versions of the Apocalypse—that I was doomed to witness the end of the world over and over again and doomed, too, to search for a world where Man had learned to control the impulses which led to such suicidal conflicts, perhaps never to find it. I still do not quite understand my motives in recording my experiences, but it could be that I hope that, if they are ever read, they will serve as a lesson to a world which has so far managed to avert its own destruction.
But, as I have said before, I am neither introspective nor morbid by nature, and my thoughts soon returned to the more immediate aspects of my situation.
It was about 4 p.m. on Christmas Day, 1907, that the Australasian-Japanese fleet was sighted speeding rapidly from south-southwest out of the twilight, firing as it came.
Night had fallen by the time we properly engaged and the fighting was confused. The air was full of fire and noise. Above us the air fleets were locked in terrible conflict, while on every side huge guns poured forth destruction seemingly at random, and when, at sudden moments, there came a lull, when there was a second or two of silence and blackness, I experienced a cold and impossible fear, certain that it was all over, that the world itself had been destroyed and that the sun would never rise again.
By means of wireless telegraphy, Hood was able to direct the battle from the Chaka, which was riding somewhere above the clouds, and it became evident to me that he was building up a defensive position around the contents of that huge and mysterious hull at the centre of our fleet. The Dingiswayo, also close to the centre, was not therefore immediately engaged in battle, but impatiently awaited orders to have a crack at the enemy, firing occasionally, when so commanded, into the sky at one of the Australasian-Japanese airships, which would return our shots with bombs and concentrated cannon-fire, none of which happily scored a direct hit and all of which failed to pierce our superstrong steel armour.
At last we received an order to break formation and moved at full speed to a position on the starboard flank of the main Australasian-Japanese grouping, where our own ships were sustaining particularly heavy losses.
We seemed at first to be moving away from the main battle— away from the crimson and yellow flashes of the guns, the incessant booming, and into utter blackness. Then, suddenly, as if receiving warning of our presence, two battleships turned their searchlights on us. Powerful beams of white light struck us in the eyes and blinded us for the moment. I was still on the quarter- deck, with precious little to do, not being a regular officer of the ship. I heard the captain shouting from the bridge, saw our long guns begin to swing into position, felt the Dingiswayo roll as she turned at an acute angle, broadside to the enemy, giving me my first clear view of two long lines of battleships, some mere silhouettes in the darkness, and others speckled with reflected light from the gun-flashes to port. Then the air was full of the whine of shells, the chunky, throaty noise of those shells hitting the water ahead and astern of us, but never, thankfully, scoring on either our hull or superstructure. Then all our guns began to go off and the Dingiswayo shuddered from stem to stern so that I thought she might well shake herself to pieces. Our shells left the muzzles of the guns with a kind of high-pitched yell—almost an exultation—and the enemy ships were grouped so tightly together that we could not miss. The shells hit the battleships and exploded. Heavy smoke drifted back to us and we were all forced to don the special masks designed for the purpose of protecting our lungs in just such circumstances.
The air had been cold, the temperature well below zero, but now it began to heat up, becoming tropical, as far as we were concerned. We went about and sought the darkness again, knowing that we had been lucky and that we could not expect to take on a dozen or more battleships alone.
For a while the searchlights roamed across the sea, trying to pick us out, but we skulked just out of their range, using their own lights to try to get some idea of our best chance. A battleship had detached itself from the main formation and was rushing blindly towards us, apparently unaware of our presence in its path. It was a splendid opportunity for us. I heard the order given to release torpedoes but to hold off firing. There was a faint sound, like the striking of a bell, and the torpedoes sped silently towards their prey, darting from our tubes while the enemy ship remained unaware that she was under attack!
The torpedoes scored direct hits below the battleship’s waterline. She was holed in five places and was sinking even before she realized it. I heard a confused shouting from her decks, and her searchlights came on, but already she was keeling over and the lights slowly rose into the sky like the fingers of a clutching, imploring hand. She went down without having fired a single shot. For a little while I saw her electrics gleaming below the surface, winking out slowly as she sank, and then the water was black again, dotted with a few bits of wreckage and a handful of wailing sailors.
There was no time to pick up survivors, even if we had wished to (and the Ashanti did not believe in showing much mercy to defeated enemies). We had been sighted again and two battleships were rushing towards us at speeds which would have seemed incredible on land and which were, to me, all but impossible on sea! We were capable of not much more than half their speed, but again we were successful in finding covering darkness.
It seemed to me that we had moved quite a long way off from the main conflict. At least a mile away now, the sea and the sky seemed to be one vast mass of flame, lighting a wide area and revealing wreck upon wreck. The entire sea was filled with broken remains—both of ordinary battleships and fallen airships—while beneath this mass of torn metal and blazing oil and wood could sometimes be seen the dark shapes of the underwater boats, like so many gigantic killer whales, seeking out fresh prey.
Once I had a glimpse of two subaquatic destroyers locked in conflict several fathoms below, searchlights piercing the gloom, guns flashing in what was to me an eery silence. Then one of the boats wheeled and dived deeper and the other followed it, still firing. I saw something flicker down there and then suddenly the water above the scene gushed up like a monstrous geyser, flinging fragments of metal and corpses high into the air, and I knew it was all over for one of the vessels.
My attention went back to the two battleships whose searchlights had picked us up. Our decks were suddenly flooded with light and almost immediately the enemy guns began to go off. This time we were not so lucky. An explosive shell hit us somewhere amidships and I was flung backwards by the force of the blast. A fire-fighting team ran past me, paying out a hose behind it, and I saw the fire flicker out in what must have been seconds. I pulled myself to my feet and climbed the companionway to the bridge, where the captain, peering through a pair of night-glasses, was rapping out orders through an electrical loud-hailer which amplified his clicking, harshly accented speech (it was an Ivory Coast dialect with which I was unfamiliar). Again the Dingiswayo went about, taking evasive action, all her port guns firing at once and scoring at least two hits on the vessel which had damaged us. We saw her lurch heavily over to one side and settle in the water, part of her hull glowing red-hot and a shower of sparks streaming into the air from a point near her afterbridge. We must have hit some vital part of her, for a moment later there came an awesome explosion which flung me backwards once again so that this time my spine struck the rail and winded me horribly. Oily black smoke was borne on the wind of the explosion and blinded us, and the Dingiswayo was buffeted as badly as if she had been seized suddenly by a hurricane, but then the smoke cleared and we saw little of the other ship, just something which might have been her top-mast standing out for a second above the waterline and then this, too, disappeared.
Her sister ship now commenced a heavy cannonade and again we were
hit, though not badly, and were able to fire back until the enemy evidently thought better of continuing the engagement, turned about and sped at its maximum rate of knots back into the darkness.
This cautious action on the part of the enemy skipper had a considerable effect on our own morale and a huge cheer went up from our decks while our forward gun fired one last, contemptuous shot at the stern of the retreating vessel.
It seemed to me (and I was later proved correct) that for all its superiority of speed and fire-power, the Australasian-Japanese navy had little stomach for fighting. They had had no direct experience of naval warfare, whereas the Ashanti had been fighting now for several years and were used to risking death almost daily. Faced with the terrible implications of actual battle, our enemy began to lose its nerve. This was the pattern, also, above and below the waves.
But by dawn we were still fighting. For miles in all directions battleship met battleship, steering through a veritable Sargasso Sea of wreckage (in many places it was virtually impossible to see the water at all), and the air continued to be filled with the booming of the guns, the whine of the shells and, less audible but far more chilling to my ears, the screams and the wails of the wounded, the drowning, the abandoned of both sides. Parts of the water were on fire, sending sooty smoke into the cold, grey sky, and now the cloud had come down so low that it was rare to catch sight of an aerial ironclad as it manoeuvred overhead, though we could hear the guns sounding like thunder and see occasional flashes of light, like lightning, every so often split those clouds. A couple of times I saw a blazing hull fall suddenly from out of the grey, boiling canopy above us.
We were soon engaged again, with a ship called the Iwo Shima, which had already seen some pretty fierce fighting by the look of her. Part of her bows, above the waterline, had been blown away and there was a great pile of miscellaneous junk in her starboard scuppers which had either been washed or blown there by whatever had damaged her bridge. But she was plucky and she still had a considerable amount of fire-power, as she proved. I think she felt that she was doomed anyway, and was determined to take the Dingiswayo to the bottom with her, for she showed no concern for her own safety, steaming directly at us, apparently with the intention of ramming us full on if her guns didn’t sink us first.
In the distance there were a hundred ships of varying tonnage locked in similar struggles, but I saw no sign of the great hull we had been protecting, nor of the ships which had been assigned to tow her, and it seemed to me then that she had gone down.
The Iwo Shima did not waver in her course and we were forced to do what we could to avoid her, giving her everything we had left from our forward guns and, for the first time, using every machine-gun that we had behind armour in the fighting tops. This manoeuvre brought us so close to the enemy that we almost touched and neither of us could use any of our big guns at such close range, nor risk using torpedoes. I got a good view of the Japanese seamen, their elaborate and somewhat unfunctional uniforms torn and dirty, their faces begrimed with blood, soot and sweat, watching us grimly as they sped past us, already beginning to turn in the hope of taking us in our stern. But we were turning, too, and a few minutes later the manoeuvre was all over. On our captain’s orders, we released our starboard torpedoes the instant we were broadside of the Iwo Shima, at the same time pouring the last of our fire-power into her, every starboard gun firing at once. She was fast enough to escape most of what we sent, but her speed told against her, for her retaliatory fire went wide of us, scoring only one minor hit in our starboard bow. We had managed to upset most of the big guns in her battery, but she turned again, much slower now, for our torpedoes had damaged at least one of her screws. But now the sea had begun to rise, making it much more difficult to aim or, indeed, to see our enemy. Everywhere I looked there were walls of water containing all varieties of flotsam—metal, wood and flesh jostling together in some ghastly minuet—and then the sea would sink for a moment, revealing the Iwo Shima, and we would fire hastily until, momentarily, she disappeared again.
Our own damage was not slight. From somewhere below, our pumps were working full out to clear many of the compartments which were flooded. In several places the superstructure of the ship had fused into strange, jagged shapes, and corpses hung limply from damaged positions in the fighting tops, where medical staff had been unable to reach them. We had two big holes above the waterline and a smaller one below, amidships, and we had lost at least thirty men. In ordinary circumstances we might have retired with perfect honour, but all of us knew that this battle was crucial, and there was nothing for it but to fight on. We were closing on the Iwo Shima now, letting the sea carry us broadside on to the enemy ironclad, going about so that, with luck, we should be able to take her with our port battery which was in better condition and better equipped to deal with her.
We rose on the crest of a great wave and saw the Iwo Shima below us. She had taken in more water than her pumps could cope with and she was already beginning to list astern and to starboard. As the huge wave carried us down, we commenced firing.
The Iwo Shima went down without letting go another shot. The water foamed and hissed; and we saw her bows jutting stubbornly out of the green-grey ocean for a second or two and then she was gone. Immediately we went full astern, to avoid being dragged down by her undertow, and there came a massive, grumbling series of explosions from below, immediately followed by a roaring water-spout which shot at least a hundred feet into the air and rained our decks with tiny pieces of shrapnel.
Again, cheering broke out all over the ship, but was swiftly stifled as a heavy black shape emerged from the clouds overhead. The Iwo Shima must have signaled to one of her sister airships for help just before she went down. We had hardly anything left with which to defend ourselves. Machine-gunners in the fighting tops aimed their guns upwards, pouring round after round into the hull of the flying ironclad. I could hear a steady ping ping as our bullets struck metal, but they had about as much effect as a cloud of midges on a charging rhinoceros. It was our good fortune that this monster had evidently dropped all her bombs and spent her heavy artillery, for she answered us with a chatter of steam-gatlings, raking our decks where our men were thickest and wreaking immediate havoc so that in one moment where there had been proud, cheering individuals, citizens of the Ashanti Empire, there was now a horrible mass of writhing, bloody flesh.
I could read the name emblazoned on the airship’s dark hull—the R.A.A. Botany Bay—and made out her insignia. This gave me a peculiar lurching sensation in the pit of my stomach, for she was flying the good old Union Jack inset with the crimson chrysanthemum of Imperial Japan! Half of me wanted to hail the ship as a friend, while the other half shared the emotions of my fellows aboard the Dingiswayo as they fought desperately and hopelessly back. Only our stern gun, a sort of latter-day Long Tom, was operational, and as the Botany Bay went past, we managed to get off three or four shots at her, holing her astern, just above her main propellers, but it was the best we could do. Apparently careless of the damage we had done to her, she made a graceful turn in the air and fell upon us again. This time I barely managed to get down behind the shield of one of our useless 9-inch guns before the bullets hailed across our decks.
When I next raised my head, I was fully expecting death, but saw instead the black-and-white markings of one of our own aerial cruisers, dropping down almost as if out of control, so swiftly did she move, clouds of grey smoke puffing from the length of her slender hull as she gave off a massive cannonade. Shell after shell struck the top of the Botany Bay’s armoured canopy, piercing it so that her buoyancy tanks were thoroughly holed. She turned first on one side and then on the other and it was a horrifying as well as an awe-inspiring sight to see such a huge beast rolling in the air almost directly above our heads! I have witnessed the death-agonies of more than one airship, but I have never seen anything quite like the death of the Botany Bay. She shuddered. She tried to right herself. She lost height and then shot into the air agai
n, almost to the base of the clouds, then her nose dipped, her convulsions ceased and she smashed down into the sea, disappearing beneath the waves and bobbing up again on her side, steam hissing from her ports, to lie upon the face of the ocean like a dying whale. Few inside her could have survived that awful shaking and we made no attempt to discover if there were survivors. Our own flying cruiser dipped her tail to us by way of salute and climbed back into the clouds.
A few minutes later, as we moved among our wounded, trying to save those we could, news came over the wireless apparatus, telling us to rejoin the main fleet at a position which would put us only a few miles off the coast of Newfoundland. The Battle of the Atlantic was over, the enemy fleet having retired, but the Battle of America had not yet begun.
CHAPTER TWO
The Land Leviathan
What remained of our fleet regrouped the next morning. For all that we had defeated the Australasian-Japanese fleet, we had probably sustained greater losses. There were scarcely a dozen flying ironclads left, perhaps five underwater ships operational, and of the surface fleet half had been sunk, while most of the fifty or so surviving craft had all sustained damage, some of it crippling. The Dingiswayo, pumps still working full out, was perhaps in better condition than most of its sister craft, and the only ships to have received minimal damage were those which, under cover of the darkness, had towed the huge floating hull out of danger. I saw Hood’s Chaka flying overhead, inspecting us as we rose and fell on a moderately heavy sea. A misty rain was falling, adding to the gloomy atmosphere permeating the whole fleet. Somehow the proud black-and-scarlet lion banners we flew did not look so splendid in the wintry, North Atlantic light as they had done under the blazing skies of Africa. Clad in heavy jerseys and sea-cloaks, our caps pulled well down to protect us from the worst of the drizzle, we stood on our decks, shivering, weary and pessimistic. Messages of approval began to come down from the Chaka, but could not break our mood. It was the first experience many of the Africans had had of real cold, the sort of cold which cuts into the marrow and threatens to freeze the blood, and liberal amounts of hot toddy seemed to have no effect at all against the weather.
The Land Leviathan Page 13