Convoy (29 page)

Hobson, watching the
Florida Star
burning, seemed hypnotized by looking at the fire, the seaman’s worst enemy. The whole forward part of the ship was blazing now with flames leaping as high as the bridge, but because she still had way on, her own forward movement against the wind created a roaring draught sweeping the fire aft. Through binoculars Yorke could see black figures dropping from the after side of the bridge down on to the deck thirty feet below, risking injury from the jump to escape the flames rolling aft like jagged waves and enveloping the whole bridge and wheelhouse.

Yorke trained his binoculars on the
Penta
. With the wind on the port bow she was rolling like the rest of the ships, but there was no sign of anyone out on the wings of the bridge. The Swedes must be inside the wheelhouse. Curious (or was it natural for frightened men to seek cover?). In a ship men tended – hmm, he remembered he had seen frightened men bolt below, and he had also seen frightened men scurry up on deck, scared of being trapped below. But…he shrugged his shoulders beneath his bridge coat: he had seen very few frightened men, and they had all regained control in a few minutes, indeed, a few moments, usually more scared of anyone else noticing than of death itself.

The
Penta
seemed like a bulky black ghost sliding on into the darkness, turning just enough to pass that black mound on her port side that had, until a few minutes ago, been her next ahead, and was now a steel shell filling with water pouring in through a great hole on her port side. A black ghost she might seem, but the
Penta
was doing nothing that a neutral ship would not be expected to do in the circumstances: haul out to avoid the casualty ahead and increase speed to fill the gap in the column – it was all in convoy orders, just as the
Marynal
would in a few moments increase speed to fill the gap left by the
Penta
moving ahead and the
Flintshire
too would have to move up. With the difference, he thought grimly, that an untoward shower of sparks tonight would make the coal-burner a perfect target…

Out there astern, until now a figure of fun to the
Marynal
’s cadets, was the tug. She was tiny compared with the merchant ships (even though she could tow any one of them across the Atlantic if the need arose) and as the swell waves had come up with the approaching depression she had looked absurd as she seemed to chug up one side, flip over the crest like a seesaw and then chug down the other side into the trough, like a toy tugged on a string across a rippling pond. It was obvious that after a good gale the tug would be lucky if she had a single whole piece of china left on board but, as the second mate had remarked in his dour Sunderland accent, no hungry man baulked at eating a hot meal from an enamel bowl. Tonight, though, they had to try and rescue the men from three ships. Three so far.

Yes, there was Hobson going into the wheelhouse to call the engine room on the telephone. They would have heard the three dull but heavy rumbles coming through the water above the din of the engine and generators. Obviously torpedo hits. Yorke could never understand how during an attack engineers stayed sane down in their brightly lit engine room with a noise that prevented any talking, watching dials that varied in diameter from a saucer to the face of a church clock, and knowing that any moment a long steel tube about twenty-one inches in diameter and loaded with explosive might crash through the side of the hull… And above the noise the heat, so hot that even though there might be ice and snow on deck, down there men would be perspiring in the equivalent of the Tropics, many of them dressed in nothing but an oily pair of shorts…

Now the
Marynal
seemed to come alive as her propeller speeded up, and then Hobson was standing beside him again, his face pink in the flames from the
Florida Star
, which was now lying on the
Marynal
’s port beam. Hobson was calm enough, even though he knew quite well it needed only a moment to transform the
Marynal
from a well-run merchant ship to a flaming wreck like the
Florida Star
.

The DEMS gunner who for the whole watch so far had been watching the ship ahead with his binoculars said to Yorke: ‘The Swede’s hauling round to port now, sir, like she was getting back into the column.’

‘Very well,’ Yorke said, and was thankful that the far side of the
Marynal
’s bridge and the wheelhouse were now beginning to obscure the furnace that was the
Florida Star
. The flames had a horrible, almost magnetic attraction – and he was glad to see that the DEMS lookout not only did not sneak a glance but kept his hands cupping the eyepieces of the binoculars to prevent the fire reflecting into his eyes and completely spoiling his night vision.

And her siren. Along with a bell buoy tolling in a calm on a black, foggy night, it was the eeriest noise he had ever heard at sea. Kempenfelt at Spithead and Sir John Moore at Coruña…toll for the brave…nor a funeral note.

Suddenly beside him one of the signalmen appeared, direct from the radio cabin. ‘“Lancaster” is calling “Cantab”, sir. Passed the word “Andrews”.’

‘Very well.’

So Johnny Gower was telling all the rest of the escorts that the attack was by an insider; no pack was involved. It was a routine message sent by low power, although presumably the insider would send off a report to Kernevel as soon as he had time, to tell Grandpa Doenitz how easy it was.

Should he go into the radio cabin and tell ‘Lancaster’ that ‘Yorke’ was asking for a ‘War of the Roses down the middle’, which was the phrase they had agreed on should Yorke think it was worth a frigate making a sweep down one of the columns? Or up – he had to specify which, and there was quite a difference. A frigate down between two columns at, say, ten knots would be meeting ships coming towards her at six knots, so they would be passing at sixteen knots. But going up the column, from astern to ahead, she would be passing at their speed subtracted from her own, at four knots in other words, the speed of a dawdling bureaucrat with his sandwiches in his briefcase.

The answer was no, just as he and Jemmy and the Croupier had agreed it probably would be as they drew sketches in the ASIU room at the Citadel. Supposing a frigate managed to get a contact over there, between the columns. Even if it was in the middle, the lines of ships would be only one hundred yards away on each side of her, and if the U-boat bolted – as it certainly would – the risk of chasing it and dropping depth charges with their delay would be too great: half a pattern might explode directly under an oncoming merchant ship which had steamed over them as they sank, breaking her back, and doing the U-boat’s work. Even worse, as far as the long-term safety of this convoy was concerned, the frigate might collide with a merchant ship and receive damage so that the escort was reduced either in size or effectiveness. No War of the Roses, in other words. Not tonight, Josephine, but it may come to that in the end.

The
Florida Star
was drawing astern now as the
Marynal
passed and through the binoculars Yorke could see a group of men huddled right aft, as far away from the flames as they could get. Then his stomach turned as realized the flames had swept aft so fast there had been no time to get to the rafts and the lifeboats were still hanging from the davits – the two on the starboard side, anyway. The forward rope falls of one had burnt through so it hung vertically; the second was burning like a bundle of kindling, still held by the gripes, which would be wire or chain. In the distance, right astern, he saw white flecks and for a moment thought of a U-boat pursuing on the surface and then realized it was the tug coming out of the darkness and looking like a halftide rock, shipping green seas right over the bow as she raced to get to the
Florida Star
. With thirty or forty men gathered high up on the stern of a blazing ship, it was going to take superb seamanship to get the tug’s bow or stern under the after overhang so that the survivors could drop to safety. But of all seamen, the tug skippers and mates were among the finest, and they were lucky that the
Florida Star
had an old-fashioned stern that stuck out like an aggressive dowager’s chin and under which they could probably manoeuvre.

Hobson said quietly: ‘I should think we’re past now, aren’t we?’

‘Depends where the U-boat was when she fired: no certainty she was abeam of the
Florida Star
. She might have been fine on her starboard bow, and that would put her on our port beam now…’

‘You’re a comfort,’ Hobson grumbled good-naturedly just as the DEMS gunner turned from the bridge rail to report to Yorke.

‘The first ship that was hit is now on our port bow, sir: red three-oh. Down by the bow with a heavy list to starboard.’

‘Can you see any boats?’ Yorke asked.

‘Thought I saw two this side, sir, but those flames from the
Florida Star
make funny shadows with the crests and troughs.’ He resumed looking through his binoculars and then added: ‘Both boats are gone from this side; I can see the empty davits.’

Any innocent questions, answers or reports helped pass the time; the time it took the
Marynal
to get past the insider. Yorke imagined the German torpedomen over there, sixty feet or so deep in their metal cylinder, heaving and grunting and cursing as they slid new torpedoes into the tubes. No doubt the
Oberleutnant
commanding the boat was trying to make them hurry as new targets passed across his bow and, while petty officers cursed, seamen probably suffered the usual crop of nipped fingers and bruised arms. Of course, Yorke had forgotten to ask Jemmy an important question: how long did it take a submarine to reload four tubes?

He could see the dark shape of the first casualty and she was now abeam, her misshapen silhouette showing how much she was listing – it seemed that in daylight they would be able to look down her funnel, and her masts were like stunted fishing rods poking out from the river bank. Then suddenly the black shape seemed to be surrounded by a bubbling, whitish-green collar.

‘She’s going!’ Hobson exclaimed.

The ship slowly turned over, capsizing with an ever-increasing flurry of white water as though some enormous sea anemone was sucking her down: the air pressure hurled up hatchcovers like a box of matches emptied in the wind.

Hobson was nudging him and he saw much closer, lying dead in the water and now revealed by the Swedish ship’s turn, the second ship hit that night, the second ship in their own column and the one whose position had been ahead of the
Penta
.

Yorke, resting his elbows on the bridge rail, swung his binoculars in a circle round the ship. Two lifeboats and four rafts in the water; a third lifeboat being lowered even now because, by luck, the ship was settling upright. A ship heeling as she sank usually meant only the lifeboats on the low side could be launched because those on the high side would not fall clear of the davits without hitting the curving bilge of the ship.

The Board of Trade, now called the Ministry of War Transport, had over the years loaded the dice against the merchant seaman: starting off with the fact that none of the lifeboats for a merchant ship had to have a motor – which meant that in a gale of wind they would be lucky if one boat in four managed to get away – the Board of Trade had specified a type of lifejacket which ensured that most of the men who failed to get into a lifeboat and had to swim would die anyway.

First there had been the scandal (except that of course the Ministry officials made sure that censors stopped it appearing in the Press) of the cork ‘BoT’ lifejackets. These had by law to be carried, but no bureaucrat had ever tested them properly, so that when a particular troopship was bombed and started sinking rapidly at the time of Dunkirk, hundreds of soldiers donned their lifejackets, lined up on deck and obeyed the order to jump over the side. Within minutes the sea was covered with dead soldiers – men with their necks neatly broken. They had dived in feet first and quite naturally their bodies should have gone under the water for a few feet before they surfaced – as anyone who had ever attended a swimming pool would know. But the big cork blocks in the BoT lifejackets, at the front and back, had stopped that – and because they were not secured between the men’s legs, the blocks floated the moment they hit the water and jammed hard up against the jaw and the back of the head so that the plunging men’s own weight dislocated their vertebrae as effectively as if the lifejackets had been hangmen’s nooses.

The men at the Ministry had then designed a new type of lifejacket, a cross between a waistcoat and a jacket without sleeves. The jacket, made of a light brown material, was filled with kapok, like the quilted coats worn by Chinese labourers. Kapok was cheap, light, buoyant and warm, so that men on watch could wear the lifejacket in cold weather and it helped them keep warm. Altogether it seemed a splendid design – except that apparently no one had tested it properly.

When a motor ship was torpedoed, usually the surface of the sea was covered with diesel fuel, one of the most penetrating liquids in general use. Into this oil – there need be only a thin film of it on the surface of the sea – drifted the hapless seaman wearing his new lifejacket. Unless he was picked up he would sink in twenty-four hours, because the lifejacket soaked up diesel like a wick and it destroyed the kapok’s buoyancy. Because a drowned seaman did not return to haunt the gentlemen from the Ministry, it took a long time for the defect to be discovered – Yorke noticed the
Marynal
’s men still had the old type. The Royal Navy’s blue tube, inflated by mouth, might look crude by comparison, Yorke thought, but it kept men afloat…

Now they were past the last of the torpedoed ships: the dark shape ahead was the Swede; ahead of her would be the leader of the column. The commodore led the next column to port – a column which now had only three of its original five ships left. The
Flintshire
was, to his surprise, in position astern; she had increased speed to keep up with the
Marynal
.