The Cruel Sea (1951) (58 page)

Certainly they tried desperately hard, certainly they tried everything. The wolfpack attacks were now reaching their zenith, and occasionally they brought off a surprise and brutal success, as when seven tankers out of a total convoy of nine were sunk in a two-night battle in the South Atlantic. The enemy could now regularly keep over a hundred U-boats at sea at the same time, and the packs themselves, concentrating in any given area, could always muster anything up to twenty. Early in the year, their successes had begun to mount again, to a peak point in March when they sank a hundred and eight ships. The new acoustic torpedoes, which automatically ‘homed’ themselves on to the noise of a propeller, claimed many victims. But then the tide began to turn: March saw fifteen U-boats sunk, April sixteen, and May the huge total of forty-five. At this stage, evidently, the German High Command began to think it over, for the U-boats now started to withdraw from the North Atlantic convoy routes, and to disperse to other and softer areas. The attack, at long last, was running down.

It was running down because the pace was too hot; the escorts, as well as the U-boats, had been steadily crowding on to the scene, and they had at last got the full measure of what they had to deal with. They could now go all the way across the Atlantic, thanks to the new technique of oiling at sea: there were enough ships available to provide many roving escort groups, independent of any specific convoy, and coming to the help of the ones that were hardest pressed. Above all, the escorts were learning how to find, stalk, and kill the enemy, with the smallest possible margin for failure.

It was now a very skilful war. Nothing was left to chance: gone for ever were the makeshift days when untrained and under armed escorts put to sea with a handful of depth-charges and a couple of Lewis guns and, hoping for the best, ran straight into slaughter. Science was now king in the Atlantic: science, and skilled men to make use of it. Radar and asdics had become phenomenally accurate: a system of interception of wireless signals from U-boats made it possible to foresee an attack almost before it had been planned: aircraft carriers accompanied many of the convoys, to give, all the way across, the air cover which had been so long and so fatally absent from the black stretch of water that marked and marred the centre.

Counter-attacks on U-boats had now reached a high degree of skill and coordination: practice and training during the time spent in harbour, carried out in concert by teams from each ship in the group, ensured that escorts knew what to do, no matter what happened, and knew also exactly what all the other ships would be doing at the same moment. There was no more improvisation, no more of the slapdash ‘it’ll-be-all-right-on-the-night’ feeling which had cost so many ships and men in the past. Now it was a streamlined job, a smooth essay in destruction; and the ships which went to sea to carry it out had strong and highly-organised backing from the naval bases ashore, which sent them out well-equipped, well worked-up, ready for anything.

They despatched them fully armoured to a war where convoy losses were no longer inevitable, where the total frustration of an attack, and even the sinking of a U-boat, were beginning to be nothing out of the ordinary. With the tide starting at last to flow in the escorts’ favour, there could have been no better moment to rejoin the battle.

Ericson had summoned a last conference aboard
Saltash,
at ten o’clock on the morning of their sailing day, so that he could give the captains of the seven other ships under his command a final run through their sailing orders, a final briefing on the way the escort screen was to be organised. The whole group, comprising three frigates and five corvettes, lay at anchor off the Tail-of-the-Bank; swinging to their shortened cables in the brisk tideway, enjoying a bright, blustering April morning which promised them lively movement as soon as they left the shelter of the Clyde. The three frigates –
Saltash,
and the two others which, fresh off the stocks, had later joined her at Ardnacraish – were brand-new; the five corvettes were old stagers, and they looked it, as did most corvettes nowadays: they had an air of shabby sufficiency, a salt-stained rusty competence impossible to counterfeit. At a quarter-to-ten, motorboats began to put off from each ship in turn, all bearing, besides their coxswain and bowman, a solitary figure in the stern; and Lockhart, waiting at the head of the ladder to greet the various captains and pipe them aboard, saw them converging on
Saltash
like chickens rallying to the man with the dinner pail.

They had to pick their way through a crowded anchorage; within his view were upwards of forty naval escorts – destroyers, sloops, frigates, corvettes, and trawlers: a battleship, a cruiser, and two small aircraft carriers lay in an outer ring, as if to endorse the evidence of power and plenty; and farther down the river the vast concourse of merchant ships in the convoy anchorage completed a picture of concentrated naval might.

It was, indeed, a brave sight, a promise of success coming at last within reach. But it recalled, inevitably, the stringencies of the past. ‘I wish we’d had some of these ships available a couple of years ago,’ said Lockhart, indicating the escorts to Raikes, who as Officer-of-the-Day was waiting on deck with him. ‘It might have saved us a few rough nights.’

‘Muddle through,’ answered Raikes, in tones of brisk cynicism. ‘If we’d had these ships then, there would have been something wrong with them, for certain – they wouldn’t have floated in salt water, or something. Better to wait for nature to take its course.’

‘We’re not muddling through now,’ said Lockhart coldly, summoning his decided views on the point. ‘We weren’t then, really, either. We just hadn’t got the machinery for building escorts quickly, that’s all.’

‘Which was part of the muddle, surely,’ said Raikes, uncertain whether he ought to argue about it. Lockhart, he knew, had a definite viewpoint on the subject, whereas he himself had only a vague civilian disparagement of the whole conduct of the war, summed up now and again in the words: ‘If this thing was run on competitive business lines, the Navy wouldn’t last a fortnight’. ‘We hadn’t got the ships,’ he continued, ‘because we were caught with our pants down.’

‘That’s the difference,’ said Lockhart, ‘between thinking war’s a good thing, and thinking it’s horrible. We delayed getting ready for it as long as we possibly could, because we thought it was thoroughly bad, and could somehow be avoided. We’re only just catching up now.’

‘Boat coming alongside, sir,’ said the quartermaster, a bored eavesdropper in this conversation. He intercepted, and acknowledged, a covert signal from the coxswain of the approaching motorboat. ‘Captain of
Harmer,
sir.’

‘Stand by to pipe,’ said Lockhart.
Harmer
was the senior frigate, after
Saltash,
and her captain was a notorious stickler for the utmost limits of naval etiquette. Lockhart could see him now, peering up out of the corner of his eye to confirm that he was going to be properly piped aboard. On the last day of the war, he thought, they might consider piping him aboard with a mouth organ – playing, preferably,
I’ll
be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you!
. . . He realised that he was thinking on the lines of the cynical, the determinedly amateur Raikes, and he came to an especially stiff salute as the captain of
Harmer
started to climb on board. The latter might have a weakness, amounting almost to fetishism, for the ceremonial aspect of command, but he ran a good ship at the same time; and that, in war, excused nearly everything, from bad temper to sodomy.

Something like the same thought presently struck Ericson, as he sat at the head of the wardroom table and surveyed his assembled captains. These were the sort of men he wanted: two of them, he knew for certain, drank far more than they ought to, one was invariably unpleasant to his officers – but their methods got results, their ships
worked
. . . There were seven of them, ranging from the captain of
Harmer,
an old lieutenant-commander nearer sixty than fifty, to the young, the positively baby-faced two-ringer in charge of
Petal,
the junior corvette. But in spite of a wide variety in age, in looks, in accent and upbringing, they all had the same aura of responsibility, the same air of knowing what it was all about: their faces – the lined, over-accented faces of men who had often been exhausted in the past and would often be so again – their faces all bore, in a greater or lesser degree, the harsh stamp of command in war.

Perhaps I look like that myself, thought Ericson; and indeed he had only to recall the face that met him in his shaving mirror every morning to be damned certain that he did . . . But the hard lines had been hardly earned, the look of undue and continued tension was excusable. He himself, with the men round the table, made up a handful of the principals in a private fight which all the participants knew, perforce, in exhaustive detail. They were men who had become dedicated to a single theme of war, like the Eighth Army men in the desert who had slept for years under the same stars, grown to love the same comrades, and fought two and three and four times over the same stretch of arid, precarious coastline. Like these desert fighters, the men of the Atlantic had become remarkably expert, astonishingly specialist, with no eyes for any theatre of war except their own. For them, even the cleansing of that other disputed ocean, the Mediterranean, was a different sort of job from this one; it was being carried out by another group of sailors who, though brothers, had no connexion with their own single-emblem firm.
Their
firm was the Atlantic, and their job was the unspectacular, year-to-year passing of ships to and fro between the New World and the Old: an aspect of war that was hardly war at all, but more like a rescue operation on an enormous scale – rescue of ships in peril, rescue of men in the water, rescue of troops who needed arms and of aircraft which needed petrol; rescue of the forty-million garrison of Britain who had to have food and clothing to keep them alive, as they confronted, year after year, the hostile coast of Europe.

When the newspapers called it ‘the lifeline’, for once the newspapers were right; and the men who had tended that lifeline for nearly four years, who had watched it being almost throttled and at last saw it easing, included, as of right, the men who now sat round the table in the wardroom of
Saltash –
men who were hopeful and cynical at the same time, tired but not too tired, ready for surprises and wielding counter-surprises of their own.

On the table before them were the tools of their trade: the convoy lists, the sailing orders, the charts, signal codes, lists of R/T call signs, screening diagrams, schemes of search, tables of fuel endurance. In this self-contained circle, these were as familiar as the alphabet or the sound of their own ship’s bell; for months and years on end, these things had been the interior decoration of their lives, the frieze that ran round the inside of the head . . . Ericson looked down at the list of his ships: it read like a banner whose staff was clasped in his own hands:

‘Saltash, Harmer, Streamer, Vista, Rockery, Rose Arbour, Pergola, Petal’.

But was the staff truly and firmly in his hands? Reading the list, knowing what it meant in terms of effort and effectiveness, he was conscious, as he had been on the tactical course at Liverpool, of a certain inadequacy. There had been an undeniable break in his training, a break which the men round him had not suffered: no one else at the table had been stuck on shore for four months, no one else had had a chance to become rusty, no one else (though this was a private whisper) came fresh from losing his ship and nearly all his men . . . But that was something which was
not
to show. He cleared his throat.

‘You’ve all got the screening diagram in front of you,’ he began formally. ‘You see how the escort is to be stationed, on the outward journey at least: two frigates in front of the convoy – that’s myself and
Harmer
: two corvettes on either side –
Vista
and
Pergola
to starboard,
Rockery
and
Rose Arbour
to port. The third frigate,
Streamer,
is in position K, and the other corvette,
Petal,
is astern of the whole outfit.’

‘Tail-end Charlie, as usual,’ said the captain of
Petal
, a
young man entirely undaunted by his lack of seniority. ‘One day I’m going to find out what the
bows
of a merchant ship look like.’

‘You’d better ask
Rockery
about that,’ remarked the captain of
Harmer
caustically, and there was a general laugh round the table. A few weeks previously,
Rockery
had been squarely rammed by a straggling merchantman whom she was trying to chivvy into greater activity, wrapping herself round the bows of the bigger ship and remaining there for some hours, as neatly centred and as prominent as a handlebar moustache: she had only just come out of the repair dock after the encounter.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ said the captain of
Rockery
rebelliously. He had the air of a man who had been repeating the phrase, at very short intervals, for a very long time, and had still to make his first convert. ‘She came straight at me, and I couldn’t dodge.’