by David Black
Only Farrar knew – for sure – that their skipper wasn’t planning that. Oh, make no mistake, Captain Gilmour was going to put them all in harm’s way all right – but he had a plan to get them out of it afterwards. The thing was, this lot somehow seemed to sense that: no need to worry lads, Cap’n Gilmour’s got it. Everything’s under control.
It was all part of the compact, thought Farrar. The lads up here, and the black gangs back aft would make the boat work, and in return the skipper would take care of them. That’s was supposed to be the deal – the Trade.
Privately, Farrar had always thought that faith naive. In his short naval career in this war, how often had skippers ever lived up to it? Certainly the only person Bertie Bayliss had ever looked after was himself; even when he was being generous, there was a motive somewhere. The same went for a lot of the other skippers too. Jesus Christ, he’d even heard one clown say out loud in the Lazaretto wardroom that he’d prefer a posthumous Victoria Cross to any DSC they were ‘throwing about like confetti these days’. What would his crew’s feelings have been, if they’d heard that? It was just as well the men didn’t really know what went on in some of these buffoons’ heads; if they did, they’d surely see how fucked they really were. But then all Jack had to know was that his diligence was required when carrying out his work on a boat. Waste of time worrying about what fucking officers were up to; it was just eyes down and pay attention, because as everybody knew, to do otherwise would get you and all your mates killed. And that was how it was, the best you could hope for, wasn’t it? That’s how it had certainly been on Scourge under Bayliss.
But since Captain Gilmour had come aboard there had been a change in the boat, one Farrar couldn’t pin down. Ainsworth had been right about the laughter, but there was more to it. These men around him, they knew there was an Italian battlefleet out there, whose firepower dwarfed theirs, and that they were going to attack it. Under Bayliss he would have met a grim, all-pervading sense of ‘let’s get-on-with-it’, because they all knew there was nothing anyone could do about their fate. Because they hadn’t believed in Bayliss. But they believed in this one. How’d that happen? Farrar suddenly felt an enormous surge of pride in his chest – to be serving alongside these men and their trust, in this boat, under this Captain, who, he was starting to realise, really did respect the compact, and was being respected in turn. And a bloody Wavy-Navy wunderkind to boot! Who’d have thought it? For the first time in the war, Farrar thought it really might be going to be all right.
Back in the control room, Harry had been listening to Biddle calling, ‘high-speed HE … closer in … bearing red five zero, drawing right …’ when he heard the call from the bridge he’d been waiting for, ‘Enemy in sight! Off the port bow!’
He didn’t even call a response, just hit the klaxon twice, rapid, to dive the boat. He was aware of Meacham, the wrecker, venting the main ballast tanks behind him as the lookouts hit the deck plates practically on top of each other, and he heard McCready call the clips before he too, dropped down.
‘Two big black blobs, sir! Destroyers, with bones between their teeth …’ McCready blurted.
The outer screen. ‘Keep sixty feet,’ said Harry, ‘Group up, full ahead together. Maintain present course.’
Farrar came swinging into the control room, to see Harry at the plot with Harding and the stopwatch between them, and McCready slipping in, in front of the fruit machine. Farrar’s diving station was on the trim, so he went and stood behind ERA Meacham at the dive board.
Harry peered at the plot. He needed to get past the outer screen, needed the two destroyers upstairs to run past him at 30 knots, as he sneaked in at nine knots. Then he’d have his shot at the battleships hiding behind the clamour of their inner screen, a racing pack of destroyers, and if intelligence was right, two light cruisers in there too, keeping a steady pace with the big ships at maybe just 1,500 yards off their beams, or less. And he needed the big ships to be zagging away so as …
‘Main targets under helm, sir,’ called Biddle. ‘Starting a zag, sir.’
Biddle had been calling the bearings, and Harding marking them. The battleships were zig-zagging en echelon. Following their mean track, the ships would be line astern, six cable lengths apart – just over 360 yards. But under helm, they would turn simultaneously onto their new course and instead of sailing in line, would comb it, and the same when they zigged back again.
And now the enemy were beginning another zag. It was too soon. Damn and blast. Yet what had Teacher, Cdr Lipsey, said about never depending on the enemy doing what you think he will.
Scourge needed to be closer, not just for the range, but for the track angle – the angle his torpedoes would hit the target. Ideally the angle needed to be as close to either side to 90 degrees; he was never going to get that, but he needed it to be better than this. Still, there should still time left on this zag to claw their way to a better track. Come on Scourge! Come on girl!
Biddle called the outlying destroyers; they were past them now, drawing off to starboard and moving away. Harry needed to take Scourge up to periscope depth. It was time to take a look, even though he didn’t want to. Not yet. It would mean he’d have to cut their speed. Because if he stuck their periscope up going nine knots he’d create a feather like a water-skier and probably even bend the dam thing. Should he wait – did he have time? On past performance the Eyeties would probably run out on this zag for at least five or six minutes, maybe longer. But remember what Cdr Lipsey used to say, “… attack what you see, Mr Gilmour, you can’t do anything else,” that was his mantra.
They just had to stay on this track, and close the distance a little more.
Because the battleships were echeloned, and heading diagonally away from Scourge as she angled in, the idea was to get their individual lengths to converge in his sights; instead of firing at three individual targets 780 feet long, with the chances of missing, fore or aft, it would one continuous one, over 2,300 feet long, with no chance of missing fore or aft. A target that long – he couldn’t miss.
He looked at the plot again. He could keep going flat out, getting as close to a good track angle, and then firing on the Asdic bearing. Folk had done it before. But my God, it was really placing everything on luck. It really was time to take a look, if he was going to. He glanced at the estimated range and speed on the plot. Biddle was good, but there were too many variables. He was guessing the speed based on what the prop revs were delivering. As for the range, a myriad of factors could be distorting what Biddle’s experience was telling him it might be.
‘Periscope depth!’ said Harry. ‘Plane her up, Mr Ainsworth,’ he called to the cox’n, then, ‘Group down, slow ahead together.’
Harry knelt to grab the periscope handles as the search tube came up. He called Harding to place him on the bearing then he called for full extension. It was a risk, but one he needed to take. ‘We’ll use seventy feet as the height of the targets’ fighting tops above the water line for the range calculation,’ he added, fitting the periscope’s eyepiece to his face.
And there they were, right on the limit of his vision, almost hull down, their huge phosphorescent propeller wakes at this range like tiny drawn daubs of white poster paint on the black water, three moving castles.
‘Bearing is that!’ called Harry and Harding, looking up, read it off the bezel and called it for McCready to dial in. ‘Range … that!’ said Harry. Harding called off the numbers, and McCready dialled again.
The enemy course was 015 degrees and range was 5,800 yards. With that wake phosphorescence, the speed was easily 22 knots.
British Mark 8 torpedoes were pretty damn basic devices in 1942. You could set their depth but that was about all, unlike American or German torpedoes, where you could even dial in the course they’d steer. But the American and German torpedoes had hardly any legs; they wouldn’t reach those Eyetie battleships for a start. British torpedoes might only go one way – straight ahead – unless they went rogue of c
ourse. So your only option was to point and fire just like a bow and arrow, and hope you really were on the right heading. But they had range. By God they did. You could hit something up to 10,000 yards away, provided you aimed your Mark 8 properly.
‘Keep sixty feet, group up, full ahead together. Maintain course zero one zero,’ called Harry. Harry just needed to see that continuous line; he just needed to drive Scourge a little further down the big ships’ track.
If he fired now, with the track angle for their torpedoes too acute, the torpedoes running at 45 knots would still be doing more catching up than running towards. Just a few more degrees, even if the range did open out a fraction more. He checked the stopwatch. If the Eyeties did what they always did, Scourge had the time. He stood back against the periscope tube, hands deep in pockets, staring at the deck head. When Harding glanced back him, he looked demonic in the hard angles of the red light.
‘Vittorio Veneto, Littorio and Roma,’ said Harry to the control room. ‘Couldn’t make out the light cruisers, but there was a swarm of destroyer wakes, all churning all around them.’
He hadn’t had to say any more. Everybody in the control was imagining the huge towering masses of the ships’ main citadels, and their long, sleek hulls. Seconds dripped. Harry didn’t really want to think about the implications of what he was doing anymore. It was too big. He swallowed and checked his watch again. If anything was going to happen, it had to happen now. He picked up the sound-powered telephone.
‘Mr Powell, captain speaking,’ said Harry. ‘Full salvo, depth as per previous order. Eighteen feet on all torpedoes. We’ll fire one on my command and then on the stopwatch at five second intervals … Stand by, Mr Powell …’ then to the control room, ‘Periscope depth. Group down, slow together.’
He was kneeling to grab the periscope handles when Biddle called, ‘Main targets under helm, sir … turning towards …’
Harry looked at his watch. Surely at least another minute on the zag. There should’ve been another minute. But there wasn’t. They were turning now. Zigging.
‘Up periscope,’ he called, ‘Mr Harding. Put me on the bearing.’
And there they were. The big, black citadels and the long sleek hulls, except the spaces between them, which had all but disappeared the last time he looked, were widening perceptibly, faster now, and faster. He swivelled to the furthest. It had all gone to hell. They had turned to race diagonally at him, each presenting a narrowing target at extreme range. If he was going to fire, he needed to do it now, or they would pass him by. No time for a mental re-group and new plan.
‘Starboard twenty … Bearing is that … range that!’
McCready called back the track angle – a horrible 150 degrees. And the director angle. Harry laid the graticule on the bearing and waited for the first hull to appear. ‘Mr Farrar. Tell the torpedo room, change of orders. All torpedoes now firing on command!’
He was aware of Farrar relaying the order when the first bow crossed his sights. ‘Fire one!’
Scourge bumped, and Harry counted the beats in his head, ‘Fire two … fire three …’ then he ordered a narrow turn to port. ‘Next target … enemy speed twenty-two knots … bearing is that … range is that …’
The track angle on the next target was wider, but McCready read him off the director angle anyway, and he fired the next three torpedoes on the turn.
‘Port thirty!’ he called as he sent the periscope down. ‘Keep one hundred feet, group up, full ahead together. Rig for depth charging.’
And down they went, going flat out in a diving high-speed turn. No waiting to see the fruits of their work, running for it while they still could.
‘Torpedoes running true,’ said Biddle, whose voice seemed small now. He gave the bearings for the big ships and their course, and the bearings on the nearest destroyers and their course. Harding studied the stopwatch.
‘One hundred feet!’ called Meacham.
Harry ordered a course change taking them directly away from the scene.
Biddle called the enemy’s bearings and courses again. They were speeding away. Holding their zig. He waited to hear Biddle call the frantic course changes … the sounds of propellers going to full ahead … all the racket of ships trying to dodge torpedo tracks. But it was as if nothing had happened. No ships were turning hard to take evasive action, no destroyers revved up and turning towards, no anti-submarine pinging starting up, probing deep through the water. And no explosions from torpedo hits either.
‘First salvo is a miss, sir,’ said Harding, who’d been timing them on the stopwatch. The clock never lied: the torpedoes running out would have hit by now, if they were going to.
They’d loosed their best punch and not only missed but nobody had noticed.
Three great steel leviathans, crammed with shell and shot, and each with 1,800 men aboard, attending to their duties as their ships’ giant turbines’ 130,000 horse power drove them through the dark sea, completely, blissfully unaware of the six high-powered missiles of death out there in the water that had been seeking them but were now running to nowhere, until their fuel ran out and they tumbled into the deep.
‘HE moving beyond range, sir,’ said Biddle, ‘Mean course zero four zero.’
They’d been heading for Naples, and now it looked like they were going to make it.
‘Second salvo missed, sir,’ said Harding, folding the lid over the watch’s face, almost as an afterthought.
There was a long silence in the control room.
Then Harry said, ‘Well, I made a complete bollocks of that, then.’
Twelve
‘So, what about the Friday after the attack?’ said Shrimp. ‘You’ve given me a pretty detailed account of every day after you decided to go after the battleships. But not the Friday. What happened on the Friday?’
Harry was sitting in Shrimp’s office, wearing his ubiquitous white submariner’s sweater because he was feeling chilly. Outside a persistent rain fell vertically out of a windless sky. It meant Shrimp could leave the shutters open without his desk getting soaked by any wayward gust, and it let in what natural light there was under the low cloud base. There was fresh coffee too, steaming in tin mugs on Shrimp’s cluttered desk.
Harry blew air out his puffed cheeks. ‘Um,’ he said. Shrimp said, ‘Yes …?’
The Captain (S) had been listening, mute and patient, as Harry had described in meticulous detail what had happened right up until Shrimp had recalled him, not flinching from the orders he’d disobeyed or the signals he’d never sent. He had accounted for every decision he’d made, and why. Apart from the Friday, the day after his failed attack on the Italian battleships. He was embarrassed to. But his Captain (S) wanted to know, and as there was no way to gloss over it, he just took a deep breath and told it straight.
‘I needed a good sleep, sir,’ he said, ‘So I took us deep and gave us all the day off.’
He saw the glint in Shrimp’s eyes first, then the slight shaking of the shoulders – then the laugh came proper.
‘There was only one place the Italians could’ve been heading,’ Harry continued, not knowing what else to say as his ,commanding officer succumbed to hilarity. ‘And I’d been up for days, sir. None of the crew had had much sleep either. I thought it best for us to be refreshed and ready if the enemy were to decide to have another go later.’
But Shrimp was laughing out loud now. Then he stopped, and beamed at Harry.
‘That’s exactly what Max Horton told me he used to do on the old E9,’ said Shrimp. ‘So how am I expected to bollock you now, for doing exactly what our recently departed FOS used to do in the last war?’
Harry had never met the fearsome Admiral Max Horton, who had been the Royal Navy’s Flag Officer, Submarines since 1940, but he knew his reputation. Horton had made his name during the last lot, commanding the submarine HMS E9 in the North Sea and the Baltic. Now it had just been announced he’d been re-appointed to head up the war against the U-boat in the North Atlantic a
s C-in-C Western Approaches.
It was nice to know he hadn’t been the first slacker in the Trade. Because, out there in the middle of the Tyrrhenian Sea, in the final throes of exhaustion, Harry had remembered what had happened to him aboard Nicobar, the last time he didn’t sleep for three days. He also remembered his Perisher, and what being tired had done to everybody’s performance. No, tiredness wasn’t going to kill him, not this time – nor any of his crew. So after he’d ordered the torpedo tubes reloaded, and after he had drafted and coded a detailed signal to Malta on the position and course of the Italian battleships, and on his failed attack, he ordered Scourge down to 80 feet and sent the crew to watch diving. ‘Now, everybody not on duty get your heads down,’ he’d said. ‘War recommences at the end of tomorrow’s afternoon watch.’
Even so, switching off the war and getting his head down had still felt like a dereliction of duty at the time. But that was then. Now that he knew the Royal Navy’s most senior submariner had once thought it had seemed like a good idea, then who was Harry to challenge his judgement?
‘Have you been beating yourself up about all this?’ asked Shrimp. ‘Missing the battleships? Having a kip in the middle of a war?’
Harry blew out his cheeks; he had been tempted to beat himself up at the time, but he was getting quite good these days at putting all that stuff away in a box for a later date. Except saying so now felt like he’d be bleating, ‘Oh poor me!’ So he said nothing.
Shrimp sat back on his camp chair and steepled his fingers. ‘Mr Gilmour, you used your initiative not waiting to set up a patrol line off Calabria when you were convinced the enemy squadron had already passed. And it was a smart decision not to use your radio, thus not revealing to the enemy the presence of a submarine where they thought there wasn’t one. And I understand your disappointment after out-guessing the enemy for so long, and then failing to score any hits on his capital ships. But you had a bloody good kick at the ball. So it didn’t work out this time. But equally, you didn’t lose your boat, and given the set-up you have described to me, you so easily could’ve. There’ll be other times. No, Mr Gilmour, you will not hear any criticism of your conduct on this patrol from me, and I’ll be saying as much in my endorsement of your patrol report to C-in-C.