by David Black
It was something he thought was a good thing to do, to ask his senior hands’ opinions, instead of just barking at them and brooking only monosyllabic replies. A lot of them were highly experienced men, even some of the younger ones – and trained. If a skipper was asking them, it meant he respected their judgement. All part of the trust stuff, the two-way street. And if they thought they were going to get called on what they were about, it usually meant they’d raise their game. He’d served with a good Asdic man before, Leading Seaman Tuke, on Umbrage. And this one appeared just as sharp. Unfortunately, he was buggered if he could remember his name.
A voice came back from the cuddy with the new bearing; Harry could see Prosser out the corner of his eye, update the plot. They were all bloody good, actually.
While he was thinking that, the voice from the cuddy continued, ‘Turns on all the transports, unchanged, sir. Their speed’s constant. The escorts have been scooting about a bit though … half ahead, full ahead … and their bearings have been changing. Like they’re ranging ahead, then dropping back …’ There was a pause in the voice right then. Not a full stop, more like something else was happening. ‘They’re spooling up right now, sir! The escorts. High-speed turns. Escorts’ bearings separating! Increased turns on the transports now, too. They’re under helm. Looks like they’re starting a zig-zag. Turning away, sir.’
Harry stepped back to the big periscope, ‘Anything else out there?’
A pause as the Asdic rating did his all round sweep, ‘No, sir.’
Harry rang the telegraph again, for “slow ahead”, then half-turning to Lansley, said, ‘Up periscope!’ And as the periscope came up, he called, ‘Periscope depth,’ and everyone felt Nonpareil begin to rise. Harry was already looking through the ’scope, the head cranked to a high angle so he could see the sun-dappled surface descend towards him; and when the ’scope broke clear in a tiny welter of droplets, he did a very swift high-angle 360 degrees sweep.
‘Sky’s clear,’ he reported. No shagbat come back to try and sneak up on them. Good, he thought, as he swung back to where he knew the enemy ships should be, and turned the head down. The enemy ships meanwhile, had turned together, so were steaming diagonally away from him, combing the sea at 30 degrees off their track, while the escorts had ranged wide, the nearest one racing out towards him to cut across his bows at a good 2,000 yards.
‘Down ’scope,’ he said; the periscope had been above the waves for barely 12 seconds. He stood back, hands plunged into his pockets, head deep in the box. He looked a lot older than his age right then.
Blake was watching him; their wrecker, Frank Lansley, had from the beginning assured all the Nonpareils in his broadest, suffer-no-fools cockney drawl that Harry Gilmour was, ‘awright’, and a ‘good sort’. After all, he’d served with him, he’d said, and, ‘you get to know a lot about a bloke when yer boat’s on the bottom, and yer trapped in the same compartment, the sea comin’ in one ’ole and you waitin’ to squeeze out another, know wot I mean? Mr Gilmour’s sahnd as a pahnd!’
Blake was thinking Mr Lansley was probably right. They’d all soon see. The seconds ticked by as Nonpareil crept towards the gaggle of enemy ships, pirouetting away on the surface. Harry, hands still in his pockets, was thinking that if they kept on this new course, they’d out run him. But then they’d end up in the Straits of Gibraltar. So, would they turn and zig towards him, or would they merely turn back onto their mean course and continuing running on 260 degrees, but further away. Sometimes you had to think and act fast, but sometimes it was better to just wait.
****
‘Targets are turning again,’ came the voice from the Asdic cubby. ‘Turning to port. Escorts are pinging ahead again.’
Seconds of silence passed, then, ‘Bearings are holding steady,’ said the Asdic man, ‘They’re not turning towards.’
So, Harry notes to himself, it’s back on to 260 degrees. But what’s their range now? He’s doing the sums in his head before he realises; at 12 knots, they’d have covered 400 yards every minute, always assuming he’d guessed the speed correctly; heading away from their track at 30 degrees; minus the distance Nonpareil had covered heading towards their track at full ahead together. He steps to the plot; Prosser, with his slide rule, already has it all marked up. Harry isn’t surprised to note that what’s in his head more or less tallies with what Prosser has copied out. He needs another look upstairs though, to make sure.
‘Up periscope!’
Another high-angle 360 sweep, to see if the Cant 506 has returned. It has. But it’s way over on the other side of the convoy, coming out of a turn as if to begin another run ahead of their course. Harry turns down the periscope head and swings it round the horizon until he is looking at the convoy, making its stately progress at an angle to cross his bows. He calls the bearing and the range, and his estimate of its speed, and is aware they are being dialled into the fruit machine as he speaks. ‘Down periscope!’ He checks his watch; 15 seconds that time, still not bad.
He orders a ‘Keep sixty feet!’ and as he feels Nonpareil even off, he orders his course change, before lifting the sound-powered telephone.
‘Forward torpedo room. Captain here,’ he says, ‘Tubes one to four ready for firing. Put a depth setting on of twenty feet. I’ll be firing each tube on command, Mr Gilligan.’ He is speaking to the petty officer TGM, or torpedo gunners’ mate, who is in charge of the boat’s main weapons up in the bow. He hears an, ‘Aye, aye, sir’, come back and then disconnects, before powering up again and repeating the orders for tubes 5 and 6 to the aft torpedo room.
So, no scatter-gun salvo, then bugger off quick time; he’s going to pick them off one by one, thinks Blake. Everybody else in the control room is thinking the same thing.
‘Such an embarrassment of targets,’ says Harry, ‘I think each one deserves personal attention.’ He’s speaking to no-one in particular, with the jaunty air of someone picking out the coconuts he’s about to shy at a county fair stall. There are smiles all round. Meanwhile in the Asdic cubby, their Asdic man, whose name Harry still can’t remember, is listening to the manoeuverings of the two big escorts, wondering what the hell they’re up to.
Harry rings for full ahead together, and Nonpareil surges forward through the limpid, shadowy water, 60 feet down, deep enough for her speed not to trouble further an already breeze riffled surface.
Nonpareil is not a big boat – a little over 200 feet long, and little under 800 tons. The N-Class is just a slightly improved U-Class, the workhorses of the Tenth Flotilla’s war in the central Med. She is armed with a three-inch deck gun and four 21-inch torpedo tubes for’ard; but unlike her U-Class sisters, Nonpareil has two stern tubes. And her engines with a couple of hundred more bhp have a bit more whoomf to them too – almost 15 knots surfaced, as opposed to the U’s laughable 11 knots. It’s thanks to the more powerful diesel generators she’s equipped with. For both N- and U-Class boats have a unique arrangement in their engine rooms. Instead of a submarine’s usual configuration, where you have two diesel engines to turn your screws and drive you on the surface, and two electric motors, battery-powered, to drive you submerged, the Ns and Us are driven always on their motors, surfaced and dived. Because their diesels aren’t actually engines, directly turning the boat’s two propeller shafts on the surface, ready to be de-clutched when she dives, they are simply generators, there to either deliver electric power direct to the motors submerged and on the surface, or to charge the boats’ batteries that supply the power when dived.
Over the next few minutes, Harry brings Nonpareil up twice more to periscope depth as he works her into position; the third time is for a final look. The escorts, in an act of remarkable generosity, have pulled ahead. They’re still close in, so Harry is going to have to fire from outside their screen. Even so, the range is barely 1,600 yards. But the track angle on the lead cargo passenger ship is a near perfect 105 degrees. Harry asks for his DA. He’s only going to take it for the first shot on the lead ship, t
hen fire the second shot on five seconds.
‘I’m going to fire one and two on the first target, then take the second target on the turn and on the stop watch,’ says Harry to the control room, all too conscious how long the ’scope has been up. ‘Number One. Time me on fifteen seconds to the third shot.’
In his head, he’s already thinking about how he’s then going to present Nonpareil’s backside to the enemy and give the tanker the stern tubes as a parting gift.
‘What are the escorts up to, Freer?’ He’s remembered the Asdic man’s name! Thank God for that!
‘Both escorts’ bearings and turns are constant, sir,’ says Freer. The escorts are holding station still where Harry is holding them in his head.
‘DA is sixteen red,’ calls young Mr Lesile in his reedy pipe. Good lad, says Harry to himself, oblivious to the fact he’s still just a lad himself. He is watching the lead ship’s bow wave creep towards the periscope’s graticule, that little line of etched glass that when the enemy’s bow crosses it, it is time to fire.
Everybody in Nonpareil’s control room had started the attack unable to take their eyes off Lt Gilmour; the way you might watch your child take their first steps or ride a bike for the first time. But with every call he has made – the simple, clear orders he’s issued, the way he’s met your eye in passing, catching you staring, and then gives you that lop-sided grin of his, almost as if he was asking, ‘are we having fun yet?’ – there’s been no stumble; the bike is staying upright and everybody’s now feeling, ‘we’ve all done this before’.
Needless to say, Harry is utterly unaware as to how his conduct has been affecting the tension in the boat. He is in the box, and his eye sees nothing but the enemy’s bow. But in the space it takes to blink it, the target’s bow begins turning away from the graticule, and Harry watches with a sinking feeling in his stomach, as the enemy transport’s hull begins to shorten in his view.
Freer calls, ‘Sir! Target HE changing. She’s under helm!’
But Harry has already called, ‘Down periscope! Flood Q! Keep eighty feet!’ And he steps back as the long brass tube slides below the deck plates. Nobody in the control room is breathing; all eyes are on him. ‘The target’s started another zig,’ he says, as Nonpareil goes deep to avoid the convoy running her down.
They hear pinging in the water; everybody at once, their eyes look up again, like there’s going to be something to see.
‘Stop together,’ orders Harry, and the barely moving submarine loses all way. There’s no sounds of pebbles hitting their hull; the Italian escort has not picked them up. Then the pinging stops, and is replaced by the sound of high-speed propellers, echoing like an approaching washing machine … ricka-chicky-ricka-chicky-ricka-chicky! … getting louder, passing from for’rad to aft, down their port side, then fading as fast as it had come.
‘Lead enemy transport, fine on the starboard bow, sir. Closing fast,’ calls Freer. And that is when Harry orders, ‘Group up. Full ahead together. Keep one two zero feet. Port thirty.’ And suddenly they are leaping ahead in a diving turn away, as the enemy convoy comes combing towards them.
As Nonpareil completes her sweeping evolution, Harry rests his backside against the chart table, hands deep in pockets again, brow furrowed and eyes fixed on the tiny right-angle patterns on the control room deck plates. Whatever it is he’s seeing in his mind’s eye prompts him to issue two course changes, but because of where his backside is, it makes it difficult for Prosser to lean in to update the plot accordingly.
Blake, who is little more than an arm’s length away, standing by the dive board, watches their little dance, of which Harry is oblivious and Prosser is becoming increasingly irritated. This little moment of comic relief apart, Blake senses the control room is thinking they are breaking off the attack, that the convoy’s last zig has wrong-footed them and the targets’ speed will take them beyond Nonpareil’s ability to catch up and get into a new firing position. While still submerged, Nonpareil simply doesn’t have the power in her batteries. Which would be true, if they were just going to turn and try and chase the enemy.
But Blake has been paying attention to the course changes Harry’s been calling; he’s been looking into the box too. You’re not finished with these buggers yet, Captain Gilmour, are you? Not by a long shot, he is saying to himself.
****
Afterwards Blake would quietly admire they way this young Turk who was now his CO had managed to keep the whole three-dimensional picture in his head, and knew precisely the gamble to take, and when to take it. It was the way he kept looking at his watch that made Blake realise what he was up to.
He was timing the spaces between the convoy’s zigs and zags. The minute the enemy ships had rumbled over their heads, he wasn’t thinking, Bugger! They’re escaping in the opposite direction, like everyone else was. He was seeing the apex of a triangle, with the enemy’s new course as one side, until the next zag, when it would become the base. So instead of chasing the enemy, he’d ordered course changes to put Nonpareil on the triangle’s hypotenuse. A decision, and a gamble, Blake had realised, that he must’ve made in the blink of an eye. His CO was betting that the convoy would stick religiously to the zig-zag pattern it had been following for the past 20 minutes and not do something intelligent, like break up the timings, or execute a different course change.
It was when Freer had announced the convoy was again under helm and turning to starboard that Blake knew he’d guessed right; and when his Skipper glanced at his watch and started grinning, Blake really knew.
Harry let Nonpareil run on for a few more minutes at 120 feet, full ahead together; he wanted to close the convoy’s track a bit more, and the boat’s track angle, before he turned to fire. Success would depend on the clock; on whether he had the time to get to where he needed to be. Blake had become transfixed watching him – how his head had become completely wrapped in the trigonometry, and how he was using all of them as simple extensions of his own calculations. All unconsciously. It had become quite touching really to see how completely he was trusting the Nonpareils to do his bidding, and Blake, looking round the control room had the sense the Nonpareils knew it, and were happy to comply. It was pure Trade. How the hell did he do that? Blake had said to himself.
And then Harry had become all orders again; ‘Periscope depth! … Group down, slow ahead together … Up periscope! … Bearing is that! … Range is that! …’ And when he’d ordered, ‘Down periscope!’ again, he’d explained his tactics to a control room struggling not to let its collective jaw drop.
‘We’re going to be on their starboard quarter, so no easy beam shots I’m afraid. But the angle shouldn’t be too bad,’ he’d said to no-one in particular, but then added, ‘Oh, and the escorts, one has the letters CP and the other PY on their bows; log that please Mr Prosser, just so we know who we’re up against.’
And Prosser had replied, ‘That’ll be the Capella and the Procyon, sir.’
And Harry had thought, Smart Alec, but not without a secret grin, because he knew it was the sort of reply he’d been liable to make when he was younger – 10,000 years ago.
He ordered the periscope up for a final look, called the bearing and range and asked for the DA. Blake remarked to himself the seeming lack of tension, the sheer business-like execution.
Harry with his eye fixed to the attack scope, calls, ‘Fire one!’ He uses the fingers on his left hand, that he can’t see, to count five seconds, and then calls, ‘Fire two!’ Each time Nonpareil does a little bump as compressed air forces the one-and-a-half-ton torpedo with its 750 pounds of high explosives out of its tube and on its way at a speed of 45 knots. Immediately “two” is away, Harry orders, ‘Port ten!’
He doesn’t have time to call for a DA on the second target, the 3,000-ton tramp steamer; he has to guess, and when he does, he fires Nonpareil’s two remaining bow shots, slaps the periscope handles shut and orders the ’scope down’, before, a bit too loudly, calling, ‘Flood Q! Full dive on the
dive planes. Keep one hundred feet. Starboard thirty!’
Prosser has the stop watch. ‘First torpedo, three seconds to run … two … one …’
BUH-DUDDUDDUMMMNN!
The detonation echoes through the boat, followed five seconds later by another; the 7,000-ton cargo passenger liner must now be doomed. Blake watches the control room crew nod, or clench a fist in satisfaction; then another detonation hits them. Not just the echo from a loud bang, but a cataclysm, a reverberating roar, as if the deadening of the deep ocean and the steel of their hull plates were as wet tissue before the physical blow of its sound, like the opening note of the Last Trump. And deep as they are diving, it is followed by a shock wave that rocks the boat like they’ve just gone over a waterfall. Blake and their wrecker, CERA Lansley end up on their arses, Harry is gripping the periscope, and Prosser the chart table. Poor little Leslie goes sprawling across the deck plates and lands at Harry’s feet.
Everyone is looking around wildly.
‘She must’ve been carrying ammunition,’ says Harry, loud enough to be heard above the residual rumblings that are filling the water around them like aftershocks.
‘One hundred feet, sir,’ says the coxs’n, all matter of fact. And the leading seaman on the helm reports, ‘Steady on course zero six five, sir.’
They speed away from the carnage they must have left behind at a stately nine knots. Heading home free.
‘All that bloody clatter, I never heard whether our other two torpedoes hit,’ says Harry to no-one in particular, ‘Anybody hear anything?’
There’s a lot of grinning, and, ‘No sirs!’ all round – and a ‘What? Over that bloody great bang you just caused, sir?’
The grinning stops when Freer calls, ‘HE closing fast from the port and starboard quarters, sir. And they’re pinging, sir.’
Harry immediately orders, ‘Group down, slow ahead together!’ Then, ‘Keep one two zero feet! Rig for silent, shut all watertight doors, rig for depth charging.’