Killer ship, p.13
Killer Ship, page 13
But first, they had to have air.
He snapped: “Surface!” and while the tanks were being pumped he dug into his memory and brought up what he had learned of the radius of a destroyer’s turning circle at twenty knots. Not much more than half a minute had passed since the depth-charges had exploded, and she should be at her maximum distance from them—not far, a thousand yards at the most.
“Stand-by gun-action!” he ordered, and a quick glance showed him the gun-crew already waiting at the far end of the control room, at the foot of the ladder which led up through a hatch to the rear of the gun. His trained mind calculated relative positions and bearings.
“Enemy bearing Red five, range a thousand.”
If his calculations were correct—and they should be, for the destroyer obviously had passed over them, heading to the eastward—then she should be fine on their port bow when they surfaced, half a mile away. An ideal position for the submarine—except that he would have to swing her a little to allow the gun behind the bridge to bear on the target. That would bring more of their own length into view, but that disadvantage should be far outweighed by the comparatively large size of the target, and their own low-in-the-water silhouette.
Thirty feet. He thought of raising the periscope and checking his orders to the gun. There was not time. Even if he were out a few degrees in his bearing assessment, the gun could correct the error in a second, once they were in sight of the target.
Twenty feet, coming up fast.
“Aim at her boiler-rooms.” he snapped to the gun layer without taking his eyes from the depth-gauge. He pulled from his pocket the silver whistle always used in gun-action. The needle moved on.
They waited, in a tense tableau, the gun-crew crouched under their hatch, shells in their arms; Kranzbuhler staring in concentration at his depth gauge, a dozen pairs of hands on wheels and levers; the only movement was the twirling of their hydroplane wheels.
Kranzbuhler stepped to the bridge ladder, waiting behind the lookout, who had one foot ready on the rung. He lifted the silver whistle to his mouth. The pointer steadied on ten feet; the bridge was out. He blew a loud blast.
The silent tableau broke instantly—lookout unclipping the hatch in one swift movement and running up the vertical ladder as though it were household stairs; gun-crew disappearing in a second up their ladder, emerging in rear of the gun.
Through the second hatch, and lieutenant and lookout were on the swilling bridge; U-221, cascading water from her casing, was on the surface. The hot, foul, compressed air of their long immersion poured up the shaft and the heavy, cool, fresh air of the early morning dropped down into the control-room, into gasping, grateful lungs.
Half a mile ahead, Wind Rode swung in a wide circle, heading back towards the target, her sonic fingers had been hunting all night.
Kranzbuhler jerked his head back and glared down at the gun. He saw that the trainer and layer were on target, he saw the long, pointed shell slide into the open breech, and he watched the heavy breech-block slide across and snick immovably into place.
The black barrel, water dribbling from its smooth rotundity, was pointing straight at the destroyer’s stern. The layer squeezed his trigger. The heavy breech jerked back in recoil and the roar of the submarine’s challenge beat across the water.
Able-Seaman Menotti had saved his ship once. He did not know this, of course, and so later on, when they got to talking about it, nobody aboard Wind Rode thought it was a coincidence that he should save the ship again.
Menotti was bending over his depth-charge rails, setting the depth on the charges ready to roll down when the ship had positioned herself for the next attack. He knew, they all knew, that this time the attack would be pressed until one of the combatants was killed. The time for the rapier thrusts of cunning and psychology was over—now the bludgeon of explosive force would be used, swung with all the destroyer’s strength until the bitter end.
Bending over, Menotti had his back to the low black shape which had shouldered its way up from underneath the sea, so that he did not know the submarine had surfaced, just as he would never know what hit him.
A depth-charge is not as wide as a man, even a slender man like Menotti. His back and hips effectively covered the last charge on the rails, the one ready to drop down first when the next pattern should be fired. The shell from U-221’s four-inch gun curved down in its short-range parabola and instead of plunging into the boiler-room a few feet forrard from the stern struck, because it had been hastily aimed, square in the middle of Able-Seaman Menotti’s back.
That shell struck Menotti’s back with the force potential of an express train travelling at sixty miles per hour, with nothing to cushion the shock, nothing to prevent it exploding into the depth-charge save the frail tissues of the seaman. But that trifling frailness saved Wind Rode from utter destruction. If Menotti had not been there setting the depth on the charge, the shell would have burst into the depth-charge and exploded with white-hot incandescence; the four hundred pound charge of T.N.T. would have gone up, shattering the charges on the rails behind it, opening up their explosive to unimaginable heat. In an almost instantaneous chain-reaction at least a dozen charges would have exploded, blowing her stern off and probably shooting the heat of their eruption into X-gun magazine.
Naval shells are designed either to explode on impact with a target, or, as in the case of the submarine’s armour-piercing ammunition, to delay their action by the insertion of a fuse which will burst the shell a hundredth of a second later, when it might be expected to be inside the plating of the ship it was aimed at.
Menotti’s body had not offered sufficient resistance to the hurtling projectile to cause it to burst, but it had offered enough to cause the fuse to start into action. Having passed through the seaman, the shell exploded only beneath the last charge on the rails, and not into it. Had it not done so, it would have started the chain reaction, and it would have ripped Wind Rode open to the sea.
What it did was bad enough. The upward thrust of the explosion lifted the charge clear of its retaining pawls and flung it into the sea. That would have caused no damage, normally, for the ship was steaming on the turn at a forward speed of perhaps twelve knots. But Menotti had just begun to set the ordered depth on the charge, and he had not nearly completed his job when he died.
The canister sank down to within a few feet of Wind Rode’s vulnerable stern and there it exploded.
The shell-burst had flung it a little to one side of the stern. The propellers were not damaged much, mainly because of their streamlined shape. But the rudder—quite large in destroyers, for they are built to turn quickly—was practically at right-angles to the forward thrust of the explosion. The rudder was held rigidly, and so for a moment it resisted the enormous force which slammed against it. Only for a moment. Then it was twisted violently sideways. The force of that twist, transmitted up through the rudder shaft and onto the cross-head in the tiller-flat below the quarterdeck, stripping the gears of the steering engine.
Wind Rode careered on across the sea, out of control, her rudder buckled and jammed hard over to starb’d.
Yet this catastrophe was in reality her salvation. A destroyer is an extremely offensive weapon—she is heavily-gunned, mounts ten torpedo-tubes and hundreds of depth-charges. She is also fitted with powerful engines developing forty thousand horsepower. But because of the weight of all these offensive advantages her own weight must be kept stripped to the minimum. For her defence, she is given little but her speed and manoeuvrability. Her side plating is so thin that it would barely stop a rifle fired at close range.
Now Wind Rode was cruelly reduced in both speed and manoeuvrability—her ability to turn was, in fact, almost nil. Normally she could swing herself with her screws, but the position of the jammed rudder would largely negative that effect.
But the rudder’s jamming hard over to starb’d had the effect of suddenly swinging her more tightly on the turn to which she was already committed. It was this involuntary movement which saved her from the consequences of the submarine’s next shell.
Staring through his telescope, the gun-layer had seen the visible result of his first shot—the mound of water which the charge had hurled up and over her quarterdeck. He had neither the time nor the inclination to interpret what that explosion might mean in terms of damage to his adversary. He felt only a brief exultation as he squeezed his trigger and sent his next shell on its way.
This shell was better aimed. It was headed straight for the boiler-room. But at the range at which the submarine was firing it took four seconds for the shell to reach its target; and in that precious four seconds Wind Rode, swinging violently under her hard-over rudder, succeeded in turning her bow towards the submarine just far enough for the shell to strike, instead of the boiler-room, the forrard mess-deck.
The shell bored in through her thin side and burst. The instantaneous heat of the explosion was tremendous; it fired everything consumable around the wide circle of its reach. Paint in a warship is kept down to the lowest possible thickness because of the white-hot heat from high-explosive. Even so, the thin paint on sides and bulkheads of the messdeck burst at once into flame. The scant covering of cortisone linoleum on the deck burst into flames. The wooden stools caught fire. The forward-throwing blast of the shell had shocked open kit-lockers and toppled them onto the deck, spilling their contents. These caught fire—all the sparse pitiful little things which kept the destroyer’s men in touch with their home life; photographs, knitted balaclavas and socks, half-eaten parcels of foodstuffs sent from home ...
All these things fed the fire. Then, into the flames which blazed luridly in the gloom of the confined smoke, came the fearnought-suited men of the forrard fire-party.
Commander Bentley had been informed immediately of the state of his rudder—he knew where it was jammed by the position of his brass rudder indicator before him. He did not dare stop his engines because then he would be a sitting shot for the rest of the submarine’s torpedoes—they could not miss at this range, fired with the certainty of actual visual judgment from the low black bridge.
Nor could he do much with his guns. Lasenby had opened fire not more than five seconds after the first round from the enemy had spat out with its little stab of orange flame. But the target was very low in the water—there was little but her bridge showing. Nevertheless, he had straddled her, and expected to hit with his next broadside, when Wind Rode began her violent swinging.
Normally, at long range, Lasenby in his director could have coped even with this violent alteration of course. But here the range was so close that a second of swing would take his barrels yards off the target. Maximum deflection had to be set on the gunsights—Wind Rode’s swift turning, wiping the gun-barrels along the target’s length as she swung, had the same effect as if the target were racing past them at twenty knots.
Bentley was not worried about the fire—he knew it was being handled. What concerned him was the effect of that one first shell—one four-inch shell had rendered the whole offensive mechanism of the ship virtually useless.
There was no precedent here for a captain to act on. He stood behind the binnacle on the bridge. The ship swung and the guns bellowed, the noise of their discharges beating back and up over the bridge in almost solid waves of sound. He saw the broadside land, beautifully placed, on either side of the enemy’s bridge, dead in line and exact for range.
He saw only white splashes—not the ugly red of a burst. He knew why. The whole of the submarine’s hull was beneath the water. Only the bridge and the raised casing on which the gun was mounted showed above the sea. Even with a fully-surfaced submarine it was common gunnery knowledge that wounding her vitally was extremely difficult—hitting the casing would not hurt her at all, and the vital pressure-hull was rounded, the shells ricocheting from its whaleback steel. And here—trying to open her up with her hull below water—the task was almost impossible.
The gun! They had to get the gun. The pom-pom could do it. He swung to Randall, abruptly angry that the gun had not been ordered to open fire. Before he could speak the pom-pom behind the funnel gave tongue in a snarling cacophony of sound. He jerked his head back and saw the tracer stitching out, the red sparks fleeing low across the water towards the submarine. The leaden flail struck at the base of the bridge in brief red flowers and then it trained left, towards the gun.
And the pom-pom fell silent.
Even on the bridge the trainer’s shout reached them;
“Gun will not bear!”
Uncooperative, Wind Rode had swung her nose across the line of fire, blotting it out. The pom-pom was useless.
Wind Rode’s nose was now pointing almost straight at her desperate enemy. A phrase of his thoughts was nagging at the back of Bentley’s consciousness. It was kept down by the decisions pressing in upon him and being discarded; yet it was the very urgency with which his brain was working that finally surfaced the phrase.
The whole of the submarine’s hull is beneath the water!
He acted with a cold, instant certainty. His voice cut across the bellowing of the guns.
“Stand-by torpedo attack! Range nine hundred, set depth ten feet, fire when your sights come on!” And then, urgently down the voice-pipe;
“Stop both engines!”
That would ease her swing, give the torpedo-officer more time. He did not have to train his tubes—he had merely to wait until the ship’s continuing swing brought his ten open mouths to bear on the enemy.
Randall, hearing the staccato commands, felt a surge of excitement and exultation sweep away the tight feeling of frustration. Torpedoes! What irony, what a poetically just king-hit to climax the action! All night and morning they had been in constant fear of the German’s torpedoes, had actually avoided a shoal of them. Now, with all their guns and depth-charges, they were going to hurl back in his teeth some of his own especial medicine!
The tube-crews had been closed-up at the twin banks of multiple tubes all morning—little to do, restless, impatient at the earlier slow stalking of their enemy, their restlessness underlaid with the constant, corroding worry that at this precise second a torpedo might be leaping from the submarine’s bow. They knew that in this battle of track and set and depth charge they had no part—they were useful only against a target so large that the destroyer had to use her king-hit to escape.
Then the order came from the bridge.
They scrambled into their positions. They knew they had little time, they knew that they would have to be ready to fire when the ship’s swing brought them onto the bearing. They set the calculables of range and bearing and depth and own speed on their weapons, and while they were doing this they felt the shaking of the ship ease and the whine of the engine-room blowers nearby die down to a muted hum. They knew then that they would have a little more time, but not much.
They did it. With ten degrees of swing still to go the long grey tubes were trained outboard, reaching almost right across her narrow-gutted waist. The open mouths were each filled with a yellow warhead, bright swollen tongues. Beneath each tube the sea slid past in quick retreat.
They could see the submarine now, the waves washing up against the base of its bridge in brief light flashes of white. They saw the gun near the bridge open a yellow eye at them, and they heard the shell scream overhead near the funnel. The enemy bridge was almost directly opposite them, not quite.
From the bridge came a high, thin voice. Three brief staccato commands. A moment’s silence broken only by the whine of the engine-room blowers and the swish of water down the sides. Then, in rapid succession, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
The torpedoes hit the water almost level, propellers already whirling, and started their underwater run to the target. Fifteen seconds, twenty seconds of breath rasping suspense. Then from beneath the submarine’s ridge a high, intense flame split the day, dimming the light of the sun. The flash of it was still in their eyes when the roar of the triple hit crashed across the water and muttered away to silence.
“That’s the lot, sir,” Chief bosun’s mate Hooky Walker reported, standing to attention on the bridge.
“Only three?” Bentley mused more than queried. Hooky nodded, his mahogany face solemn.
“One would have done,” Randall said grimly.
“Who are they? What rank?” Bentley said to Hooky.
“Hard to tell, sir,” the big seaman shook his head. “They’ve had the clothes ripped off ’em in the blast. One of ’em looks a funny bird, not like the others. And one of ’em reckons he’s the captain.”
“I see,” Bentley rubbed his unshaven chin. Now that it was finished, he longed to get below to his bunk. Instead, he would have to see these prisoners, and he would have to shave first. Also, there was the matter of the steering engine.
As if the thought had conjured him up, Mr. Fry, engineer, came climbing onto the bridge. Bentley swung his eyes to him.
Mr Fry was smiling. It was a tired gesture, it merely creased the blackened cheeks of his drawn face, but still it was a smile.
“We’ll do, sir,” he told Bentley. “The steering engine’s had it, completely—major dockyard job. But we’ve disconnected the gearing and now the rudder’s fore and aft. I’d say she’s more than a bit buckled. You can try steering by hand. Anyway,” he grinned, realising that he was getting out of his territory, “she’s fore and aft.”
“Thank you, Chief,” Bentley smiled back. That was better than nothing. He could steer her back to Moresby either by his screws, or else more tediously by the big hand-wheel down in the tiller-flat above the rudder-head. The means of getting there were not important—what was, was that they could. And it looked like a dockyard job in Brisbane, even Sydney.
“All right,” he said wearily to Randall when the engineer had gone, “bring this captain to my cabin. Give me ten minutes for a shave and sluice.”
“Armed guard, sir?” Randall asked formally.
