At All Costs (27 page)

He nosed the
Ledbury
into the flames as hoses tried to push back the fire. “On the bridge, the flames and smoke towered over us,” said Robin Owen, a young officer. “The first lieutenant had hoses rigged, and they played on the upper decks, as the captain maneuvered the ship with the engines and rudder to get as close as possible to the survivors while a boat was lowered.”

They picked up survivors for two hours. There was one more man in the water. Hill couldn’t leave him.

The coxswain reported up the voice-pipe, “There’s a man on a raft in the flames.” I hesitated, wishing to ignore what he reported. Then I wondered if the ship would blow up if we went right into the heat. The density of the smoke changed, and I saw a man sitting on some debris surrounded by leaping flames, and he raised his arm to us. I took the ship in and shouted to Number One, “For Christ’s sake, be quick!”

The flames were higher than the mast, and the roaring noise and choking fumes were all around us.

“Jesus,” said Yeoman (who had been forbidden to go over the side),

“it’s just like a film.”

The cook came out of his galley aft, saw the man, took off his apron, kicked off his boots and over he went.

Charles Henry Walker is ninety-one years old now, built like a bull and living life to the full in Reading with ten grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. He shows off the pictures on the wall of his room. “There’s me and the queen, there’s me and Margaret Thatcher, there’s me and Prince Philip. Who haven’t I met?” he says with a spark in his eye and a poke in his guest’s arm. “The queen called me Charles Henry, so you commoners can call me Charles Henry too. I met her after I gave a fella a little help in the water.”

Petty Officer Walker, the ship’s cook, was the strongest swimmer on the
Ledbury,
captain of her water polo team. For two hours he rowed the whaler with chief gunner Musham and three more men, working in the channels and pools between the flames, picking up survivors. Some couldn’t swim, and all of them were burned. When the rowers could go no closer, Walker went over the side of the whaler and swam the backstroke, splashing away the fire, to reach the last couple of men. Reginald Sida, a steward, also swam for survivors, connected to the
Ledbury
by a line.

“One chap I picked up, oh he was really bad, he was burned to hell he was,” said Walker. “He was really cooked in diesel oil. His nose was like a little pear drop, and he was cooked in diesel, and he was going, ‘Water, water…’

“When you see bodies floating around the ocean like that, and you can’t do a thing about it…

“I saw a body in the water, we rowed out to get his dog tags off him. His jacket was full of air, keeping him up. I touched him and he rolled over in the water, went blub blub blub. Things like that stick in your mind.” They stick in his throat, and his eyes begin to take on water, as if to splash away the memory.

“Somebody’s son, somebody’s dad. Somebody’s sweetheart. That’s the nastiest thing about war, isn’t it.

“Musham said, ‘All right, let’s get going,’ Flames were getting on the boat, he was pretty worried. I was too. I see a hand on the gunwale, I see this bloke, and I say, ‘Give me your hand, I’ll pull you in,’ and I turn away for a second to put the oar down, and the hand is gone. I could see the hand on there, even now when I go to bed, late at night, I see the hand, I see his eyes. Christ yes, ooh wee. We survived, we survived. When you come to think of it, why? Why was it us who survived?”

Walker earned the George Cross Medal, the highest civilian honor the monarch can bestow, for what he did next. “Ah, you’d like to hear that story, would you?” he says with the spark in his eye returning.

He hasn’t told the story many times. Few of the veterans have told their stories many times. When they got back from the war they didn’t want to, and nobody wanted to hear them. They didn’t even tell their children. Decades have passed, and now they’re beginning to tell them, these eightysomethings who don’t want to carry the reality of war to their graves. If anyone asks. The children are fifty and sixty years old, and they’re astounded. They never knew their fathers were heroes.

“We picked these boys up out of the water, we didn’t think anything,” continues Walker. “I was on the upper deck and my mate was rubbing diesel off me because I was covered in diesel. The skipper give the order ‘No more men over the side, we’re getting under way.’ I didn’t hear the order, because I was over the side when he gave it.

“The flames were coming over the ship. There was Alan Burnet, he was only a young lad, someone saw him having difficulty on a raft in the flames, and I went over the side again and got him. He starts yelling, ‘There’s something around my legs!’ I said there’s no bloody sharks on you, he bloody finds his trousers had got around his ankles. So I pulled the buggers off and they sank to the bottom, and I push him alongside the ship to the scrambling net, and he’s got a big bare ass, isn’t he? You should have heard them on the boat. He’s only sixteen years old. Lovely white bum, I can see it now. He was quite knackered, had been in the water a long time, and I had to push him up: like this.”

“I felt like I could not wait any longer,” said Captain Hill, “and called through the loudhailer, ‘Hold on like hell, I’m going astern!’ We came out fast astern, and I was sure the cook and the man would have been washed away, but he had one arm round the man’s neck and the other through the net and had held on.”

“I was still in the water,” says Walker. “The skipper said, ‘We’re getting under way.’ I’m in the water. ‘Throw the line for Christ’s sake!’ I nearly go mad.

“The yeoman, oh a nice chap, really nice chap, he said to Hill, ‘Excuse me sir, petty officer Walker is still in the water.’ Bloody hell! Put the
Ledbury
astern! Picked us up, and that was it.”

“We had been two hours picking up forty-five survivors, one of whom was dead,” said Hill. “I told the admiral I was thirty miles astern and set off to rejoin the convoy.”

CHAPTER 38 •••

SWERVING TOWARD MALTA

C
aptain Mason conned the SS
Ohio
hard aport, around the flaming gold sea over the sinking
Waimarama.
“Weather was fine with good visibility, smooth sea, and light airs, and we were steaming at thirteen knots, steering approximately East, in position a hundred miles west from Malta,” he reported. The tanker continued swerving toward Malta, shadowed by two dozen Ju 88s.

“At 0800 the heavy bombing attacks started again,” said Mason. “
Ohio
seemed the main objective, as always. The planes never flew over in any particular formation, and appeared to adopt the same technique each time. Ten or twelve planes would appear over the horizon to the southward, and all guns would open fire, then the real attack would develop from the opposite direction, i.e., northward. We had got used to this method of attack by now and were ready for the enemy. Our gunners brought down a Stuka with one of the Oerlikons.

“At about 0900 we shot down a Ju 88 that crashed into the sea close to our bow and bounced onto our foredeck, making a terrific crash, and masses of debris were thrown high into the air.”

“We saw it come down in the sea and fly off a swell onto the main deck,” said Allan Shaw. “Luckily nobody was on the main deck at the time. A lot of the aircraft just fell back into the sea, but what stayed on deck was afire. Hot machine-gun bullets from the plane were all over the place. We put out the fire and threw it over the side.”

Continued Mason, “A little later the chief officer telephoned from aft in great excitement to say that a Stuka had landed on the poop. Apparently this plane also fell into the sea and bounced onto our ship. I was rather tired, having been on the bridge all night, and I’m afraid I answered rather curtly, saying, ‘Oh, that’s nothing, we’ve had a Ju 88 on the foredeck for nearly half an hour.’

“The bombing attacks seemed to go on for ages, and we were constantly receiving orders by wireless to make forty-five-degree emergency alterations. It was quite impossible to execute these in the time given. These orders were also transmitted over the radio telephone, and the wireless orders were always several seconds behind, thus causing misunderstanding and confusion.

“The enemy planes were dropping parachutes with an object suspended which looked like a seven-pound tin of marmalade, and these fell at a considerable speed into the middle of the convoy as we were executing the emergency turns. It appeared to be impossible to avoid them, but I never saw any actually hit a ship.”

With the
Ohio
finally back in the convoy, Admiral Burrough was keeping an eye on her. “The air attacks that were carried out by Stuka dive-bombers were of a most determined nature, being chiefly directed against
Ohio,
who suffered several near misses,” he said.

“A large plane flew right over us at a height of about two thousand feet, banked slightly, and dropped a salvo of six bombs, three falling close to the port side and three close to the starboard side,” said Mason. “The vessel seemed to be lifted right out of the water and shook violently from stem to stern. One near miss right under the forefoot opened up the port and starboard bow and buckled the plating, filling the forepeak tank and shaking the vessel violently forward to aft, amidst a deluge of water.”

“We were standing around the end of the poop deck and the whole deck just heaved up in the air,” said Allan Shaw. “Your feet left the deck and you were like shuddering, back down again. If it wasn’t happening on one end of the ship, it was happening on the other. There was so many near misses we couldn’t count them all.”

The steam turbine engine room of the
Ohio
was the most beautiful place its chief engineer, James Wyld, had ever seen. After decades at sea in tubs, he had finally been rewarded with a masterpiece like the
Ohio.
He had restarted the engines just thirty minutes after the first torpedo hit, twelve long hours ago, and was dealing heroically with the 600-square-foot hole in the pump room. But the near misses kept knocking the engines out. Captain Mason counted six separate whacks.

Wyld’s report:

Approx. 9.15 a.m. Violent explosion at stern of vessel, causing severe concussion.

Approx. 9.20 a.m. Engines stopped. Investigation showed that trip gear on Fuel Pump had disengaged owing to concussion.

Approx. 9.30 a.m. Full ahead.

Approx. 10.30 a.m. Violent explosion at stern of vessel, causing severe concussion.

Approx. 10.35 a.m. Engines stopped. Investigation showed that Circuit Breakers on both Fuel Pumps disabled.

Approx. 10.50 a.m. Engines started. Unable to maintain vacuum. Investigation showed no apparent cause, but most likely caused through fracture in Condensing system. Utmost available 3 inches of vacuum, and engine speed of 20 R.P.M. [4 knots].

The lighting system in the engineroom and stokehold were put out of commission by the severe concussions, so that all illumination in the engineroom, stokehold and auxiliary engineroom was hand lamps and emergency lighting, though some of the emergency lamps were also out of commission, so that work in the engine room was carried out under extreme difficulty and very trying circumstances.

Approx. 11.30 a.m. Port boiler gave out. Severe explosion inside furnace, and escape of steam, putting out fires.

Approx. 11.50 a.m. Starboard boiler gives out. Severe explosion inside furnace and escape of steam putting out fires.

Approx. 11.52 a.m. Informed Captain Mason no steam on boilers and no likelihood of getting under way again. All burner valves shut tight and manoeuvring valves shut.

Approx. noon. Engineroom staff left engineroom.

The
Ledbury
had come back to the side of
Ohio—
her massive, heaving, kerosene-leaking, ripped-up hull—about an hour before noon, while the tanker was struggling at 4 knots in fits and starts. Her funnels blew out alternating clouds of black and white smoke, from oil in water and water in fuel. Hill had offered to tow the tanker—some 30,000 tons of deadweight, half of it seawater—in the same spirit that had invited his fantasy of the little
Ledbury
ramming a battleship. He reckoned that together they could make 12 knots.

They were getting ready to toss a towline, when Hill suddenly told Mason he had to run.

Some baffling balzupped messages had been flying between the ships. Signals were relayed by sleepless men under fire, so words got lost and twisted in translation. Hill had earlier gotten a far-out signal that ordered the long-gone
Nigeria
to the Orkney Islands, or so he said; but it was from Burrough, ordering the
Ledbury
back to Gibraltar, and Hill had ignored it.

Burrough was largely out of touch on the
Ashanti
and was still unaware that the
Manchester
had been scuttled some eight hours earlier. As the convoy neared Malta, Vice-Admiral Sir Ralph Leatham played a bigger part in its direction, working with others from the damp control room in a well-lit limestone cave with a loft and vaulted ceilings.

Leatham sent Burrough a message suggesting that
Ledbury
stop to look for survivors from
Manchester,
on her way back to Gibraltar. Burrough never got the message but Hill did, and he seized the opportunity to save more men. He steamed at 24 knots to look for
Manchester
in the Gulf of Hammamet.

“We relaxed into two watches, to give the hands a chance to bath, eat and sleep,” he said. “I went down to the engine room and boiler room, which I hated doing, and visited the wounded survivors in the sick-bay. Some of the poor chaps were terribly badly burned, just a mass of bandages from head to foot.”

Hill was napping below when two torpedo bombers appeared in the glare of the afternoon sun; he awoke to the alarm and ran to the bridge to direct the guns through the loud hailer. He ordered the bigger guns to hold fire so the planes would come closer, and together the pom-pom and Oerlikons shot them down. They lay wrecked and sinking on the calm sea, a column of brown smoke rising from each.

“I was calling through the loudhailer, ‘Bloody good shooting!’ and the whole ship was cheering, slapping each other on the backs,” said Hill. “Then there was a cry, ‘Torpedo!’ and there it was, coming straight for the after part of the ship. The second plane had dropped it while we were shooting down the first. Hard a-port was all I could do, and we waited, our hearts in our mouths, for the explosion.”

The torpedo passed a few inches astern. The exhilaration was too great, the victory too sweet to go unrewarded.

“Coxswain, what are the regulations about splicing the mainbrace?” asked Hill, using an expression that dates to the days of Nelson, for tapping the rum.

“Don’t know, sir. I think it’s when the King visits the fleet or some special occasion.”

“I think this is a special occasion, Coxswain. Pipe round the ship, ‘Splice the Mainbrace, including all survivors. Stand fast the Hun.’

“The whole ship was cheering hard, and after this everything went with a swing,” said Hill.

Forty-five minutes later, with the crew in what Hill called a “happy and piratical mood,” the
Ledbury
sighted land. Hill thought that some of the
Manchester
’s crew might be ashore, captured by Arabs or Frenchmen.

With rum fueling their creative inspiration and courage, the
Ledbury
’s men came up with a plan: like a scene out of
Heart of Darkness,
they would charge the coast of Africa, shooting at the sky. The destroyer raced toward shore, with shells from the four-inch guns—Hill called them “Pip,” “Squeak,” and “Wilfred”—flying into the blue sky and exploding in the jungle.

“We arranged to send a landing party with rifles, revolvers and hand-grenades in the motorboat towing the whaler to form a rearguard or bridgehead, or some such military term. Anyhow, they were to knock off any Frenchmen or Arabs who tried to interfere, and to get the survivors off to the ship.”

The men had scarcely slept or eaten, and some had washed down uppers with the rum. Hill was wearing a pair of trousers rolled up to the knees (his father had worn them fighting in India) with a faded, ragged blue shirt; “and the sailors were dressed as they pleased,” he said, as they went off on their expedition to liberate the
Manchester
’s men from their bonds in Africa. All they needed were daggers between their teeth.

Hill harked back to his chicken-thieving night in port with the doctor—who didn’t think much of this mission. He had watched it organize on deck before returning below to his injured survivors, “shaking his head and muttering about ‘a lot of bomb-happy bloody lunatics,’” said Hill.

After a couple of hours trolling the coast and shouting into the bushes, they returned to the ship without having found anyone to rescue. The destroyers
Eskimo
and
Somali
had been there before
Ledbury
and picked up survivors in the water. Hundreds more had made it ashore and had already been marched off to be interred.

As the
Ledbury
steamed off, there was trouble: the shore station at Hammamet signaled, “Hoist your signal letters.”

They still had the three-letter signal flying for “Splice the Mainbrace,” so the yeoman lowered it and put an I flag on top of it. The I flag was the first letter in all Italian warship identifications.

The joke—“I splice the mainbrace”—was lost on the Frenchmen at Hammamet, who challenged the bomb-happy bloody lunatic pirates of
Ledbury
no more.