Turn Left for Gibraltar

by David Black

  His message had been: We have recovered our folbots, and we are coming off. Right now. Please start distracting the Eyeties.

  Carey had ordered Napier to get his gun crew up and start shooting. But the first round up the spout of Nicobar’s three-inch gun had jammed. Carey had already demanded to know exactly what had caused that particular timely fuck-up, and was waiting for answers. Meanwhile, the folbots had indeed started coming off the beach, and the Eyeties had already noticed. That’s when Carey had ordered the Lewis guns to open up. They sprayed the MAS-boat with their .303 rounds, chipping paintwork, splintering the odd sill, but mainly keeping heads down. That wasn’t going to last forever, and Carey – all the while, Carey quite candidly confessed to not being able to take his eyes off the single Breda 20mm anti-aircraft cannon, as yet still unmanned, sitting on the MAS-boat’s quarterdeck.

  ‘It was one of those moments, Number One,’ Carey had said, with a shake of his head, ‘where you know you really have no choice. All the other options have been exhausted, or are going to take too long. You have to do it and do it now . . . and the “it” I was going to have to do, was to have Nicobar ram that bloody Eyetie right up the arse. Nothing personal, you understand.’

  And that had been what Harry had felt, down below in the control room: the crunch as Nicobar’s bows had run right into and through the Italian’s transom, so that Nicobar’s bows had come to rest in the enemy’s engine room, crushing her aft deck frames and half-sinking her. Most of the MAS-boat’s crew’s immediate reaction had been to dive into the water and start swimming for the beach, almost as if choreographed, Carey recounted. Others, coming up from below were armed, however, and started to make a fight of it. But Napier’s lads were already swarming forward along the sub’s casing, firing as they went.

  ‘I think it’s safe to say it brought out the Glaswegian hooligan in Mr Napier,’ Carey had told Harry, with an affectionate grin. ‘He was first down off the hydroplanes and on the enemy’s deck. It was Nelson and the Glorious First of June all over again. If the damn thing hadn’t gone glug, glug, glug on us, he’d have taken her, and we’d all be drinking the prize money by Thursday night.’

  The Italian resistance had been token, but the Corporal, who’d been right alongside Napier all the way, had wanted to finish off all those Eyetie sailors who had now decided to follow their shipmates into the water, splashing for shore, by turning their own guns on them. Napier had apparently grabbed him by the throat and explained in easy to understand phrases, that His Britannic Majesty’s Royal Navy did not machine-gun shipwrecked mariners in the water, pal!

  Harry swung himself through the watertight door into the engine room and squeezed his way past the two diesels, which were going flat out with a noise that seemed to knock his eyes out of focus; through the dense oil and diesel reek, and then aft past the relative cloister of the motor room into the Stokers’ mess. It looked like a scene from down a mineshaft instead of at sea; a cramped little domestic nook, with bunks and pin-ups, and a table where two of Nicobar’s bigger Stokers were sat, playing cribbage under a little row of yellow deckhead lights, just keeping an eye on things. At one end of the table, perched on a bunk, Bill Sutter was tying off the final suture on an Italian sailor’s thigh, the ragged pucker of the wound he’d just sewn up showing what a bloody gash it had been. A large, oil-stained Stoker in his singlet was kneeling beside them with cotton wool and a bottle of alcohol to clean away the remaining blood. Not that the wounded boy was noticing any of this; with his head lolling and a morphine smirk on his face. Propped up against the next bunk was another Italian sailor, another mere adolescent, with a big wad of gauze wrapped against his ribs, and beyond the far end of the table was a third man, in a civilian suit of sorts. He was older, with luxuriant grey hair and an even more luxuriant moustache, seemingly unhurt, sitting with his back against the aft bulkhead, his eyes watchful. His face lit up when he saw Harry come through the door: this officer had spoken fluent Italian to him when he’d first been bundled aboard this steel tube deathtrap – at last someone he could reason with – but his gaze flicked towards the big Stokers and he decided not to break the silence just yet, if silence was what they had in a small compartment surrounded by heavy machinery going hell-for-leather. Harry was pleased to note that the Stokers were no longer carrying the revolvers they’d been issued with earlier. A shoot-out at the OK Corral was all he needed right now. Both Stokers looked up, and one said, ‘What’s happenin’, Sir?’

  ‘We’re heading out to get some sea room between us and that bloody mess we’ve left behind,’ Harry said as he sat at the table and plonked the coffee flasks down. ‘And shortly, we shall be cruising through the Aeolian Islands. If the weather were better and one was minded to take cocktails on deck, one might see Stromboli’s fires light up the night sky.’

  The Stokers all grinned. ‘Is that Java, Sir?’ asked one, nodding at the flasks.

  It hadn’t taken much interrogation by Harry to establish that the Italian sailors were just boys, both still teenagers – and they knew nothing about anything, including why they were even in the war. One had been the boat’s greaser and had been in the MAS-boat’s engine space when Nicobar had rammed them, and had just got out in time. The other was the boat’s cook. Both seemed genuinely amazed and relieved that the Brits had an officer aboard that could speak Italian, and both were almost pathetically grateful for the treatment they had received, each one nodding ‘Si’ vehemently to every question, as they slurped their piping hot coffee.

  Harry explained that they were now prisoners of war, and that they would be well treated. He then remembered what Mahaddie had said about the fate of Axis POWs captured these days by the British, and he told the boys they’d probably end up spending the rest of the war working on some Canadian prairie ranch, going to barn dances at the weekend. And yes, there would be girls at the dances; and yes, the girls would be missing their menfolk who were all away at war. This went down very well. But they must behave themselves while Nicobar remained on patrol . . . ‘Si! Si!’ . . . and make no attempt to interfere with the operation of the boat . . . ‘No! No!’ Perish the thought. When one of the Stokers came back with bundles of clean slops for them to swap for their tattered and sodden uniforms, both even seemed eager to volunteer to help out while on board. Harry made a note – especially in the case of the cook.

  The civilian turned out to be the most interesting of their guests. He said his name was Michaele, and he was an employee of the Ferrovie dello Stato, the Italian state railways. He gave some grand-sounding technical name for his job in Italian, which he himself translated as meaning he was a technical inspector. He said he too was relieved to be able to converse with someone in authority in Italian, but that he wanted to take this opportunity to express his dismay that he, a civilian, should be handled in such a discourteous fashion by the British Royal Navy, of all people. He would have expected more; indeed, he was dismayed and astonished; and he asked to be put ashore on Italian soil at the earliest opportunity. His wife and children would be missing him.

  Harry, smiling, poured him another cup of coffee, which Michaele accepted gratefully, and then Harry explained. Verney had nabbed him, even though he was a civilian. ‘Because I bet he can give us some really damned top-hole gen on how the Eyetie railways work, and how best to bugger them up, what!’

  Verney was almost certainly right. Unfortunately, that meant that Michaele would not see his wife and family again until the war was over.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Harry stepped into the control room to find Carey on the periscope, cap on the back of his head, two bright circles of light on his face: sunlight from above reflected through the ’scope’s eyepieces, as he surveyed the approaches to Malta’s Grand Harbour. It was late afternoon on a beautiful flat calm day, and they were at twenty-seven feet, about a mile off Fort St Elmo, at the edge of the swept channel through Malta’s own protective minefield.

  ‘The red flag’s up,’ said Carey
, ‘but I don’t see any air raid in progress.’

  There had been a signal the previous day to all boats – Nicobar had received it while coming down the Sicilian Channel – air raids were so frequent, all returning submarines must wait submerged at the entrance to the swept channel, and only enter if there were no red flag flying from Fort St Elmo. There would no longer be a minesweeper or ML to escort them in, as any surface ship venturing out from under its camouflage netting in daylight was being subjected to sustained strafing attacks by German 109s. And when they did surface, on no account was anyone to risk coming up on to the conning tower until they were through the boom and under the notional protection of the Bofors gun batteries.

  Harry had been aft in the engine room, making sure the fix list was up to date for the base maintenance crew and everything was ready to hand over, so everyone could make a quick getaway when they came alongside. It was always something that miffed Nicobar’s notoriously grumpy Warrant Engineer, the dreaded McAndrew: someone checking up on him, as if he didn’t know his own job. But Harry didn’t care – it was his job, checking up.

  ‘I think I’m going to risk it,’ said Carey. ‘It’ll be dark any minute now and Jerry’s probably knocked off for tea—’ But his last words were cut short by weird splashy staccato sounds coming through the hull. Everyone in the control room looked up, puzzled, except Carey, his face still stuck to the big periscope. He was transfixed, looking at the sudden blossoming of a row of watery spouts erupting right in front of the periscope head, and then a huge dark shadow swept over everything. He involuntarily stepped back as they all heard a clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk hitting the casing above them: the Germans’ spent 20mm cannon shells sinking down to bounce off their hull on the way to the seabed.

  Carey slammed the periscope handles shut and sent it down. ‘Mundell! Eighty feet. Now.’ He stood away from the periscope and wiped his brow. ‘Bloody hell,’ he whispered, ‘that was a bloody 109 shooting at us. Where did he come from? The sea’s flatter than a witch’s tit up there. He must have seen our shadow. Christ. The bastards really are all over us. At least he didn’t have a bomb. We’ll wait until after dark.’

  Everybody was jittery now, the little bounce in the step you get returning from patrol gone.

  Nicobar had remained on patrol in the Tyrrhenian Sea for almost three weeks after her action against the railway tunnels north of Bagnara, hunting between the coasts of northern Sicily and Calabria. And she’d collected quite a bag from a series of successful Gun Actions against small trading schooners and other light coastal merchant ships, none of which had been deserving of one of her torpedoes, but each loaded with cargo vital to the enemy’s war effort. At least that’s what the Nicobars told themselves, and who was to gainsay it?

  So the Nicobars had been quite chipper coming in. They would be entering harbour with a lot of new bunting on their Jolly Roger: lots of white stars on it for all her gun sinkings, and a huge dagger for the tunnels op, plus a ram’s head for ramming the MAS-boat, and crossed sabres for Napier’s foray on to her decks.

  But Harry knew Carey was worried the Shrimp might not see it so rosily. They were hauling all their torpedoes back home. And they were doing it because they had avoided any targets deserving of torpedoes: targets with destroyer and torpedo boat escorts, on the grounds that their ASDIC set was buggered. Because Carey had buggered it when he had rammed the MAS-boat. And if you attacked an escorted convoy without having a functioning ASDIC dome, you couldn’t tell if the escort was counter-attacking, at least not until the depth charges were raining down around your ears.

  All because of Carey’s decision to blatantly disregard Shrimp’s standing order: not to mix it with surface warships, on the surface.

  So, in this case, hauling all the torpedoes home wasn’t going to be seen as merely prudent. Not by a keen-eyed Captain (S) who was going to take a very dim view of the dented ASDIC. Carey had good reason to suspect there might be squalls ahead.

  In the event, he needn’t have worried. When they eventually came alongside, it was plain to see that the Shrimp had far more pressing things on his mind. And so had everyone else.

  There was no gang on hand to welcome them home, nor even a wardroom to welcome them to. No one around to hear all the stories about Napier’s boarding party and the looting of an enemy MAS-boat, and how, all of Napier’s gang, coming back aboard, all the ones not carrying the poor Eyeties who’d been shot up, had been loaded down with hams and cheeses and jars of yummy stuff, and butts of wine, from its galley. And that Napier had to be reminded about the other items that might be of interest, such as code books and charts and stuff like that, and that he’d had to go back for them. And how little Carmine, the eighteen-year-old Eyetie with the gash in his ribs, had taken over all Empney’s culinary duties – and shown them what a real cook could do, even on a tiny four-ring stove, feeding thirty-eight of them! It was touch and go whether they wanted the patrol to end. The lad had even begged to stay on as Nicobar’s cook until the end of the war. And quite a few had begun plotting as to how they could wangle it.

  Then there was what they did to keep all the pongoes amused for the rest of the patrol, how Verney had kept them from getting bored by forming them into boarding parties, and how they’d go on to any enemy schooner or coaster they stopped with a shot across its bows, with orders to gather any intelligence they could – but mainly to raid their galleys to keep Carmine’s larder stocked – before packing off the crew in their lifeboats and letting Napier’s gun crew dispatch the enemy vessel with their three-inch gun, the untimely jamming incident now forgotten.

  There’d been no one there to hear about the moving service they’d held on the casing the night the badly wounded Italian sailor had finally died, and how his shipmates and even Michaele had cried, and so had a couple of Nicobars too, when they commended the body, wrapped in a hammock, to the deep.

  All the stories left untold.

  Because Jerry had finally found the Lazaretto. The gallery that had formed the front on the wardroom was still there, but the back wasn’t. It was just a big hole now: no Shrimp’s office or CO cabins, the periscope shop and the battery store: all rubble. And the Army barracks, tacked on to the side of the base, where all the Commandos and the cloak-and-dagger johnnies had lived, rubble too.

  Miraculously, no one had been killed. But nearly everyone on the base at the time had been cut, gashed, singed or had limbs broken. Even Shrimp and Hubert sported bandages and sticking plasters. And all officers and ratings now messed together in an old, disused, giant underground oil tank, cut by a previous naval generation into the rock face. Shrimp’s new office was in a corner, behind a sheet strung up between two scaffold towers. There were rows of camp beds, and against one wall, bunks, a common table with a surviving mismatch of chairs, and on the ceiling, a run of bare cable snaked from hook to hook with naked lamps giving such imperfect light that the whole cavernous space looked under water. And it reeked, with a sometimes throat-gagging stink of oil – puddles of it still here and there, and duck boards laid over the worst of them. But it was safe from the bombs that fell night and day now.

  And as for the torpedoes, Hubert told Harry the boss would be quite pleased to see the torpedoes back, and not wasted. The base was running short.

  While Carey made his report to Shrimp, Harry was handing over the boat’s paperwork.

  ‘You need to detail a couple of POs and an officer to stay behind,’ Hubert told him, ‘and the rest of you, tonight, off up to Ghajn Tuffieha rest camp.’

  ‘Why?’ said Harry. ‘Most of the lads have rooms in Sliema.’

  ‘You haven’t seen Sliema yet,’ said Hubert. He looked really strained in the sickly light. ‘Most of it isn’t there any more,’ he added eventually. ‘Whoever you roster on for harbour duty will be staying on the boat. New standing orders. All boats in base have to submerge on one of the buoys out in Marsamxett during daylight hours. They surface at night for any repair or maintenance work. They’ll
get sunk otherwise. You’ll need to draw up a roster before you leave tonight.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ said Harry. ‘I’ve business in town.’

  ‘No,’ said Hubert. ‘No COs or Number Ones to stay behind. You’ve got to rest. And that means Ghajn Tuffieha. Shrimp’s orders. And anyway, who are you going to see sitting at the bottom of the harbour?’

  ‘We’ll be needing to go into dry dock,’ said Harry. ‘Our ASDIC dome needs replacing. I’ll stay.’

  ‘Oh,’ Hubert sighed, before eventually nodding, because Harry was right: they couldn’t leave a dry-docking to a junior officer. ‘Jerry got the pigs, by the way,’ he added. ‘What was left we made into sausages.’

  Official business over, Harry went looking for Verney to say cheerio and good luck, and thanks for the fireworks display, and for the professional way his men had taken to pirating Italian Navy galley stores on the high seas. But Verney and his mob had already gone, been marched out of the Lazaretto’s gate, and off into some remote gulley in the hills where they could hide during daylight from the marauding Jerries.

  Bloody war. You met up, made friends, and the next minute they’d gone, and you didn’t know whether you’d ever see them again. Not this side of demob at any rate. Maybe not even this side of the Pearly Gates.

  Harry went off to find Bill Sutter and Bob Mundell and informed them they’d be remaining with him on Nicobar. Neither looked particularly pleased, so he told them neither was he, but he needed their experience on hand for the dry-docking, and for when work started on the ASDIC dome. It was when you started pulling out the guts of a boat that you started finding things, and he wanted to know what they’d put up with and what they’d say needed fixing. They, in turn, selected four ratings. Along with a base maintenance crew, they conned Nicobar around to the Msida Creek torpedo store and unloaded her four forward and two stern tubes. By the time they were finished, it was almost dawn, and a telephone call to Hubert got agreement not to dive in the harbour, but to just throw cam netting over Nicobar where she lay alongside the rubble piles that had been used to disguise the arched entrance to the underground store.