A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (11 page)

No one, including Norman, had any money on them. Like me, none of them had thought that they might conceivably need money underwater.

‘I’ll pay you when I get back,’ I said, airily. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. I’m attached to the Tenth Submarine Flotilla.’

‘That’s what they all say, sir,’ he said, gloomily. ‘Military officers attached to the Tenth Submarine Flotilla. And then we never see them again, more often than not. I’m afraid I must ask you to give me a cheque, sir.’

I told him with some relish that, if he wanted a cheque from me, he would have to shift some tons of masonry in order to find one.

‘No need for that, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you a blank cheque. All you have to do is fill in the name and address of your bank and sign it.’

Even then it seemed an evil omen.

It would be tedious to relate the details of the voyage. They were the same as any other for passengers in a submarine. The wardroom was so minute that apart from the times when I emerged to eat and discuss our plans, such as they were, and pore over the aerial photographs which had been taken from such an altitude that they needed an expert to interpret them and we soon gave up trying to do so, I spent the rest of the time lying on a mattress under the wardroom table, a place to which I had been relegated as the most junior officer of the party. I shared this humble couch with Socks, a dachshund, the property of Desmond Buchanan, an officer in the Grenadiers who was one of our party and who had persuaded Pat Norman to allow him to bring her with him because of the noise of the air-raids on Malta which were practically continuous. (‘I wouldn’t dream of leaving my little girl here. Her nerves are going to pieces.’) From time to time Socks went off to other parts of the submarine, from which she returned bloated with food and with her low-slung chassis covered with oil, a good deal of which she imparted to me. But on the whole it was a cheerful journey and we laughed a lot, although most of it was the laughter of bravado. We all knew that we were embarked on the worst possible kind of operation, one that had been hastily conceived by someone a long way from the target, and one which we had not had the opportunity to think out in detail for ourselves. I felt like one of those rather ludicrous, ill-briefed agents who had been landed by night on Romney Marsh in the summer of 1940, all of whom had been captured and shot.

By four o’clock in the afternoon of the eleventh we were in the Bay of Catania, about a mile offshore, and Pat brought
Una
up to periscope depth so that we could have a look at the coast.

He got a bit of a shock when he did. He had come up in the midst of a fleet of Sicilian fishing boats and they swam into the eye of the periscope like oversize fish in an aquarium. Raising the periscope he was lucky not to have impaled one of them on the end of it. Nevertheless, with what I thought an excess of zeal, he insisted on giving each of us an opportunity to look at the coast which we did, hastily, before causing
Una
to sink to the bottom where she remained for the next five hours with everything shut off that might produce a detectable noise. It had not been a very successful reconnaissance; but there had been nothing to see anyway. With an immense sun glaring at us from behind a low-lying coast, the shore had appeared as nothing more than a thin, tremulous black line with a shimmering sea in front of it.

We surfaced at nine o’clock and the four folboats were brought up on to the casing through the torpedo hatch without their midship frames in position, the only way we could get them through it, and we then carried out the final assembly.

It was not a very dark night, but after thirty-six hours in artificial light underwater it seemed terribly black until we became accustomed to it, when it seemed altogether too bright. To the north we could see the lights of Catania and to the west the landing lights of the airfield. Planes were coming in to land a couple of hundred feet above our heads, and when they were directly above us the noise was deafening. The wind was on-shore and there was a nasty swell running which made the launching of the canoes over the bulges difficult with the tanks blown, and the loading of them once they were in the water even more so. One canoe was so badly damaged getting it into the water that it had to be left behind, together with the marine who was going to travel in it. He was very disappointed at the time. How fortunate he was.

‘Rather you than me, mate, but good luck anyway,’ were the last words addressed to me by a rating as he threw me the stern line; then we set off in arrowhead formation towards the shore, if three canoes can be said to constitute an arrowhead.

The water was extraordinarily phosphorescent. We might have been in a tropical sea and as we dipped the blades of the paddles it exploded into brilliant green and blue fire and as we lifted them out of it they shed what looked like drops of molten metal which vanished when they fell back into the water. At any other time these effects would have seemed beautiful; now they seemed an additional hazard. Surely to the sentries patrolling the beach it must look as if there was a fire out at sea, and surely the crews of the bombers which were still coming in to land over our heads from dead astern must see it, just as surely as they must have already seen the submarine. Together with Corporal Butler of the South Lancashire Regiment, my companion at bow who was no doubt sharing these gloomy thoughts, I paddled towards the shore, trying to hearten myself with the prospect of the bacon and eggs which we had been promised if and when we returned on board.

After a few minutes we heard the boom of surf and soon we were on the outer edge of it. It was not very heavy, but we got out of the canoes as we knew how to without capsizing them, and swam in with them until our feet touched bottom and we could stand. It is better to arrive sopping wet on two feet on a hostile shore than to be capsized or thrown up on it dry but immobile in a sitting position, unless you are a secret agent who must immediately enter the market place and mingle with the crowds.

The beach, with the wind blowing over it and the surf beating on it, seemed the loneliest place in the world. The wire began about fifty feet from the water’s edge. We carried the canoes up over the sand and put them down close to the entanglements without being blown to pieces. At least this part of the beach did not seem to be mined with anything that a man’s weight would set off, or perhaps we were lucky, there was no way of knowing.

Now we attached the time pencils to the bombs, which were a mixture of plastic and thermite. (With the white cordtex fuses they looked like big black conkers on strings.) This was something that could not safely be done on board a submarine costing a mint of money, because time pencils were rather erratic, and I always hoped that the workers in the factory in which they had been made had not got all mixed up and substituted a thin, thirty-second delay wire for a thicker, thirty-minute one, or simply painted the outside casing with the wrong colour paint, which was one of the methods of identifying them, mistakes that could quite easily happen after a pre-Christmas factory beano.

When the bombs were ready we buried the canoes upside down in the sand and obliterated our footprints, working upwards from the water’s edge.

The wire entanglements were about twenty yards wide and they stretched away along the shore north and south as far as the eye could see. Behind them, there were two blockhouses about 150 yards apart. We had landed exactly halfway between them. I felt as if I had survived the first round in a game of Russian roulette.

Now we began to cut a narrow swathe through the wire at a place where there appeared to be none of the more visible sorts of antipersonnel mines with which we were acquainted. Nevertheless, it was a disagreeable sensation. Only God and the enemy knew what was buried underfoot.

By the time we got to the other side it was ten o’clock. An hour had passed since we had left the submarine. We were already late, but it was difficult to see how we could have been any quicker. The earliest possible time at which we could arrive back at the submarine had been estimated to be eleven o’clock. The latest possible time, providing that
Una
had not been discovered, in which case she would have to submerge and leave us anyway, was one o’clock in the morning. If all went well it still seemed that we might make it by midnight, or earlier.

On the far side of the wire at the edge of the dunes, we came to a track which ran parallel with the shore and presumably linked all the blockhouses on this stretch of coast. Fortunately, it was deserted and we pressed on across it and pushed our way through a hedge of some kind of coarse vegetation which had probably been planted to stop the sand drifting inland. For the first time in my life I was in Europe.

Beyond the beach there was a high stone wall which, like the wire entanglements, seemed endless, and we pushed one of our number up on to the top of it so that we could see what was on the other side, but all that he could report was that the lights on the airfield had been put out. No more planes were coming in and everything seemed quiet.

He hauled us up one by one and we dropped down into what proved to be a farmyard full of dogs. The thump of our great boots as we landed on the cobbles brought them to life, and they came at us barking and yelping. But in spite of the din they were making no windows or doors were flung open and we made a dash for the far side of the yard where there was a gate. It opened on to a lane which eventually led to the edge of the airfield.

On it we encountered a body of Italians and Germans, one of whom opened fire on us and one of our party returned it, firing a single round from a machine pistol.

The effect of these shots was positively magical. Immediately the airfield was brightly lit by searchlights which were disposed around the perimeter – as if the man who had fired at us had his hand on the switches – and then pandemonium broke loose: vehicles started up; Very lights rose; the air was filled with the ghastly sounds of commands being issued in Italian and German; and there was, to me, the equally terrifying noise made by men in boots running in step on a hard surface. It was difficult to repress the thought that we were expected. I had never seen so many JU 88s in my life, all guarded by sentries.

We took refuge in a small wood. ‘What I think we should do,’ our CO said, ‘is …’

‘Fuck off,’ said a readily recognizable voice which was not that of an officer. ‘That’s what we ought to do, fuck off while there’s still time.’

And we did: back to the beach, through the wire, encountering an enemy patrol, the members of which were too frightened to shoot; putting to sea in the only two canoes still undamaged; going out beyond the submarine in the darkness and eventually spending eight hours in the water before being picked up by some Sicilian fishermen who took us to Catania, where we narrowly escaped being shot as saboteurs.

Then to Rome.

Of the fourteen merchant ships which took part in
Operation Pedestal
, five reached Malta, including the tanker
Ohio
, which was enough to save the island from having to capitulate. At least four of them were sunk by JU 88s operating from Sicily.

In Rome we were housed in barracks occupied by the
Cavalleria di Geneva
, a regiment in Italy of similar status at that time to one or other of the regiments of the Household Cavalry in Britain. They still had their horses and the few officers and men who were about looked like ardent royalists. Although they were not allowed to speak to us, their demeanour was friendly. They sent us magazines and newspapers and the food, which was provided by the officers’ mess and brought to us by a white-jacketed mess waiter who had the air of a family retainer, was of an excellence to which none of us were accustomed in our own regiments, although there was not much of it.

Once a day, but never together, we were let out to exercise on the pathway which surrounded the
manége
. Here ‘by chance’, we met other ‘prisoners’, an extraordinarily sleazy collection of renegades and traitors, most of them South African or Irish, dressed in various British uniforms, some in civilian clothes, who called us ‘old boy’ and offered to fix us up with nights on the town and escape routes into the Vatican in exchange for information.

I enjoyed being alone. It was so long since I had been. From my room, high up under the eaves of the barracks, I used to watch a solitary, elegant officer taking a succession of chargers around the tan. He was a wonderful horseman, even I could tell this without knowing anything about horses. The days were poignantly beautiful. The leaves on the plane trees were golden. Here, in Rome, in late August, it was already autumn. I was nearly twenty-three and this was my first visit to Europe. Locked up, isolated in the centre of the city, I felt like the traitor Baillie-Stewart, ‘the Officer in the Tower’, or, even less romantically, someone awaiting court martial for conduct scandalous and unbecoming, looking out across the Park in the years before the war.

After a few days we were dispersed, the officers to one camp, our men to another. We all survived the war and so did Socks the dachsund. Pat, in accordance with Desmond’s last wish, took her to Beirut where she took up residence with Princess Aly Khan.

On the seventh of September, 1943, the day before Italy went out of the war, I was taken to the prison hospital with a broken ankle, the result of an absurd accident in which I had fallen down an entire flight of the marble staircase which extended from the top of the building to the basement. The prison camp was on the outskirts of a large village in the Pianura Padana, the great plain through which the river Po flows on its way from the Cottian Alps to the sea. The nearest city was Parma on the Via Emilia, the Roman road which runs through the plain in an almost straight line from Milan to the Adriatic.