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The Lonely Sea
Alistair MacLean


Collection of riveting tales of the sea including the story that launched his writing career, the account of the epic battle to sink the German battle ship, Bismarck, and two new stories collected here for the first time.THE MASTER STORYTELLER IN HIS ELEMENT…Alistair MacLean has an unmistakable and unrivalled skill in writing about the sea and its power and about the men and women who sail it, and who fight and die in it.His distinctive voice was evident from his very first prize-winning story, ‘The Dileas’, and has been heard time and again in his international career as the author of such bestsellers as H.M.S. Ulysses and San Andreas.The Lonely Sea starts where MacLean’s career started, with ‘The Dileas’, and collects together his stories of the sea. Here is a treasury of vintage MacLean, compelling and brilliant, where the master storyteller is in his element.This reissue includes two new stories, ‘The Good Samaritan’ and ‘The Black Storm’, which bear all the classic hallmarks of MacLean’s finest writing and are published here for the very first time.









Alistair Maclean

The Lonely Sea


Collected Short Stories



















Copyright (#ulink_a90299b2-c6f6-5b67-8a9f-278dfb6b3c8b)


HarperCollins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF



www.harpercollins.co.uk



FIRST EDITION



First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1985 then in paperback by Fontana 1986



Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1985, 2009

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work



City of Benares, The Arandora Star, Rawalpindi, The Meknes, The Jervis Bay and Lancastriapublished by the Sunday Express 1960.

Rewards and Responsibilities of Success, The Black Storm and The Good Samaritan published by the Glasgow Herald 1982, 1995 and 1996.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library



All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.



Source ISBN: 9780006172772

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 9780007289332



Version: 2018-11-21






Table of Contents


Cover Page (#u34b74af8-22d1-56a5-a239-e74624602e53)

Title Page (#u8e2fdb5c-997b-5a05-a761-a7db6b995926)

Copyright (#u282c7f09-0614-561e-b01f-fbaa967691c0)

The Dileas (#u69f4d09a-a5a2-5906-9a4d-fd457cb118cb)

St George and the Dragon (#u10b78e31-7013-5c73-9925-5c732d0804f8)

The Arandora Star (#u96dba103-3c4f-5419-b1b6-2167d4fd9ca7)

Rawalpindi (#ue29a2dce-d699-5252-96e7-ac8fa13ebdf9)

The Sinking of the Bismarck (#ub5ce76ec-5151-5083-b693-76e8ac9da020)

The Meknes (#litres_trial_promo)

MacHinery and the Cauliflowers (#litres_trial_promo)

Lancastria (#litres_trial_promo)

McCrimmon and the Blue Moonstones (#litres_trial_promo)

They Sweep the Seas (#litres_trial_promo)

City of Benares (#litres_trial_promo)

The Gold Watch (#litres_trial_promo)

Rendezvous (#litres_trial_promo)

The Jervis Bay (#litres_trial_promo)

The Black Storm (#litres_trial_promo)

The Good Samaritan (#litres_trial_promo)

Postscript: Rewards and Responsibilities of Success (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

By Alistair MacLean (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




The Dileas (#ulink_c1d36dda-95ff-53a8-b68e-fdc002fca79c)


Three hours gone, Mr MacLean, three hours—and never a word of the lifeboat.

You can imagine just how it was. There were only the four of us there—Eachan, Torry Mor, old Grant, and myself. Talk? Never a word among the lot of us, nor even the heart of a dram—and there on the table, was a new bottle of Talisker, and Eachan not looking for a penny.

We just sat there like a lot of stookies, Seumas Grant with his expressionless face and yon wicked old pipe of his bubbling away, and the rest of us desperately busy with studying the pattern of the wallpaper. Listening to the screech of the wind, we were, and the hail like chuckies battering against the windows of the hotel. Dhia! What a night that was! And the worst of it was, we couldn’t do a thing but wait. My, but we were a right cheery crowd.

I think we all gave a wee bit jump when the telephone rang. Eachan hurried away and was back in a moment beaming all over. One look at yon great moonface of his and we felt as if the Pladda Lighthouse had been lifted off our backs.

‘Four glasses, gentlemen, and see’s over the Talisker. That was the lightkeeper at Creag Dearg. The Molly Ann got there in time—just. The puffer’s gone, but all the crew were taken off.’

He pushed the glasses over and looked straight at old Grant.

‘Well, Seumas, what have you to say now? The Molly Ann got there—and Donald Archie and Lachlan away over by Scavaig. Perhaps you would be saying it’s a miracle, eh, Seumas?’

There was no love lost between these two, I can tell you. Mind you, most of us were on Eachan’s side. He was a hard man, was old Seumas Grant. Well respected, right enough, but no one had any affection for him and, by Jove, he had none for us—none for anyone at all, except for Lachlan and Donald, his sons. For old Seumas, the sun rose to shine on them alone. His motherless sons: for them the croft, for them the boat, for them his every waking thought. But a hard man, Mr Maclean. Aloof and—what’s the word?—remote. Kept himself to himself, you might say.

‘It’s a miracle when anyone is saved on a night like this, Eachan.’ Old Grant’s voice was slow and deep.

‘But without Donald and Lachlan?’ Eachan pressed. Torry, I remember shifted in his seat, and I looked away. We didn’t care for this too much—it wasn’t right.

‘Big Neil’s weel enough in his own way,’ Grant said, kind of quiet. ‘But he’ll never be the lifeboat coxswain Lachie is—he hasn’t got the feel of the sea—’

Just then the hotel door crashed open, nearly lifted off its hinges by the wind. Peter the Post came stumbling in, heaved the door shut and stood there glistening in his oilskins. It only required one look at him to see that something was far wrong.

‘The lifeboat, Eachan, the Molly Ann!’ he jerked out, very quick and urgent. ‘Any word of her yet? Hurry, man, hurry!’

Eachan looked at him in surprise.

‘Why surely, Peter. We’ve just heard. She’s lying off Creag Dearg and…’

‘Creag Dearg! Oh Dhia, Dhia, Dhia!’ Peter the Post sunk down into a chair and gazed dully into the fire. ‘Twenty miles away—twenty miles. And here’s Iain Chisholm just in from Tarbert farm—three miles in four minutes on yon big Velocette of his—to say that the Buidhe ferry is out in the middle of the Sound, firing distress rockets. And the Molly Ann at Creag Dearg. Mo chreach, mo chreach!’ He shook his head slowly from side to side.

‘The ferry!’ I said stupidly. ‘The ferry! Big John must be smashed mad to take her out on a night like this!’

‘And every boat in the fishing fleet sheltering up by Loch Torridon like enough,’ said Torry bitterly.

There was a long silence, then old Grant was on his feet, still puffing away.

‘All except mine, Torry Mor,’ he said, buttoning up his oilskins. ‘It’s God’s blessing that Donal’ and Lachie went to Scavaig to look over this new drifter.’ He stopped and looked slowly around. ‘I’m thinking I’ll be needing a bit hand.’

We just stared at him, and when Eachan spoke it was like a man in a stound.

‘You mean you’ll take yon old tub out in this, Seumas?’ Eachan was staggered. ‘Forty years old if she’s a day—and the seas like houses roaring straight down the Sound. Why, you’ll be smashed to pieces, man—before you’re right clear of the harbour mouth.’

‘Lachie would go.’ Old Grant stared at the ground. ‘He’s the coxswain. He would go—and Donal’. I canna be letting my boys down.’

‘It’s suicide, Mr Grant,’ I urged him. ‘Like Eachan says, it’s almost certain death.’

‘There’s no almost about it for the poor souls out on that ferry.’ He reached for his sou’wester and turned to the door. ‘Maybe I’ll be managing right enough.’

Eachan flung the counter-flap up with a crash.

‘You’re a stiff-necked old fool, Seumas Grant,’ he shouted angrily, ‘and you’ll roast in hell for your infernal pride!’ He turned back and snatched a couple of bottles of brandy from the shelves. ‘Maybe these’ll come in handy,’ he muttered to himself, then stamped out of the door, growling deep in his throat and scowling something terrible.

Mind you, the Dileas—that was old Seumas Grant’s boat—was a deal better than Eachan made her out to be. When Campbell of Ardrishaig built a Loch-Fyner, the timbers came out of the heart of the oak. And old Grant had added mild steel frames of his own and installed one of these newfangled diesels—a 44 hp Gardner, I remember. But even so.

Outside the harbour wall—you couldn’t imagine it and you’ll never see the like, not even in your blackest nightmares. Bitter cold it was and the whistling sleet just flying lumps of ice that lanced your face open to the bone.

And the Sound itself! Oh Dhia, that Sound! The seas were short and desperate steep, with the speed of racehorses, and the whole Sound a great sheet of driven milk gleaming in yon pitchy blackness. Man, it makes me shudder even now.

For two hours we headed straight up into it, and, Jove, what a wild hammering we took. The Dileas would totter up on a wave then, like she was falling over a cliff, smash down into the next trough with the crack of a four-inch gun, burying herself right to the gunwales. And at the same time you could hear the fierce clatter of her screw, clawing at the thin air. Why the Dileas never broke her back only God knows—or the ghost of Campbell of Ardrishaig.

‘Are you seeing anything, boys?’ It was old Grant shouting from the doghouse, the wind whipping the words off his lips.

‘There’s nothing, Seumas,’ Torry bawled back. ‘Just nothing at all.’

I handed the spotlight, an ancient Aldis, over to Eachan and made my way aft. Seumas Grant, his hands light on the wheel, stood there quietly, his face a mask of blood—when yon great, seething comber had buried the Dileas and smashed in the window, he hadn’t got out of the way quick enough.

But the old eyes were calm, steady, and watchful as ever.

‘It’s no good, Mr Grant,’ I shouted at him. ‘We’ll never find anyone tonight, and nothing could have lived so long in this. It’s hopeless, just hopeless—the Dileas can’t last out much longer. We might as well go back.’

He said something. I couldn’t catch it, and bent forward. ‘I was just wondering,’ he said, like a man in a muse, ‘whether Lachie would have turned back.’

I backed slowly out of the wheelhouse, and I cursed Seumas Grant, I cursed him for that terrible love he bore for those two sons of his, for Donald Archie and Lachlan. And then—then I felt the shame, black and crawling, welling up inside me, and I cursed myself. Stumbling, I clawed my way for’ard again.

I was only halfway there when I heard Eachan shouting, his voice high and excited.

‘There, Torry, look there! Just off the port bow. Somebody in the water—no, by God, two of them!’

When the Dileas heaved over the next crest, I looked along the beam of the Aldis. Eachan was right. There, sure enough, were two dark forms struggling in the water.

In three quick jumps I was back at the doghouse, pointing. Old Grant just nodded, and started edging the Dileas across. What a skill he had with him, that old one! Bring the bows too far round and we’d broach to and be gone in a second in yon great gullies between the waves. But old Seumas made never a mistake.

And then a miracle happened. Just that, Mr MacLean—a miracle. It was the Sea of Galilee all over again. Mind you, the waves were as terrible as ever, but just for a moment the wind dropped away to a deathly hush—and suddenly, off to starboard, a thin, high-pitched wail came keening out of the darkness.

In a flash, Torry had whipped his Aldis round, and the beam, plunging up and down, settled on a spot less than a hundred yards away—almost dead ahead. At first I thought it was just some wreckage, then I could see it was a couple of timber baulks and planks tied together. And lying on top of this makeshift raft—no, by God, lashed to it!—were a couple of children. We caught only flying glimpses of them: up one minute, down the next, playthings of the devil in yon madness of a sea. The poor wee souls. Oh Dhia! The poor wee souls.

‘Mr Grant!’ I roared in old Seumas’s ear. ‘There’s a raft dead ahead—two wee children on it.’

The old eyes were quiet as ever. He just stared straight ahead: his face was like a stone.

‘I canna be picking up both,’ he said, his voice level and never a touch of feeling in it, damn his flinty heart. ‘To come round in this would finish us—I’ll have to quarter for the shelter of Seal Point to turn. Can the children be hanging on a while longer, do you think, Calum?’

‘The children are near gone,’ I said flatly. ‘And they’re not hanging on—they’re lashed on.’

He looked quickly at me, his eyes narrowing.

‘Lashed, did you say, Calum?’ he asked softly. ‘Lashed?’

I nodded without speaking. And then a strange thing happened, Mr MacLean, a strange thing indeed. Yon craggy old face of his broke into a smile—I can see yet the gleam of his teeth and the little rivers of blood running down his face—and he nodded several times as if in satisfaction and understanding…And he gave the wheel a wee bit spin to starboard.

The little raft was drifting down fast on us, and we had only the one chance of picking them up. But with old Seumas at the wheel that was enough, and Torry Mor, with one sweep of his great arm, had the children, raft and all, safely aboard.

We took them below and old Grant worked his way up to Seal Point. Then we came tearing down the Sound, steady as a rock—for in a heavy stern sea there’s no boat on earth the equal of a Loch-Fyner—but never a trace of the two men did we see. A mile out from harbour old Seumas handed over to Torry Mor and came below to see the children.

They were sitting up on a bunk before the stove, wrapped in blankets—a lad of nine and a fair-haired wee lass of six. Pale, pale they were, and frightened and exhausted, but a good night’s sleep would put them right.

Quietly I told old Grant what I’d learned. They’d been playing in a wee skiff, under the sheltered walls of the Buidhe harbour, when the boy had gone too near the entrance and the wind had plucked them out to the open Sound. But they had been seen, and the two men had come after them in the ferryboat: and then, they couldn’t turn back. The rest they couldn’t remember: the poor wee souls they’d been scared to death.

I was just finishing when Eachan came below.

‘The wind’s backing, Seumas, and the sea with it. Perhaps there’s a chance for yon two—if they’re swimmers at all—of being carried ashore.’

Old Seumas looked up. His face was tired, lined and—all of a sudden—old.

‘There’s no chance, Eachan, no chance at all.’

‘How can you be so sure, man?’ Eachan argued. ‘You never know.’

‘I know, Eachan.’ The old man’s voice was a murmur, a million miles away. ‘I know indeed. What was good enough for their old father was good enough for Donal’ and Lachie. I never learned to swim—and neither did they.’

We were shocked into silence, I tell you. We looked at him stupidly, unbelievingly, then in horror.

‘You mean—’ I couldn’t get the words out.

‘It was Lachie and Donal’ all right. I saw them.’ Old Grant gazed sightlessly into the fire. ‘They must have come back early from Scavaig.’

A whole minute passed before Eachan spoke, his voice wondering, halting.

‘But Seumas, Seumas! Your own two boys. How could you—’

For the first and only time old Grant’s self-control snapped. He cut in, his voice low and fierce, his eyes masked with pain and tears.

‘And what would you have had me do, Eachan? Pick them up and let these wee souls go?’

He went on, more slowly now.

‘Can’t you see, Eachan? They’d used the only bits of wood in yon old ferryboat to make a wee raft for the children. They knew what they were doing—and they knew, by doing it, that there was no hope for themselves. They did it deliberately, man. And if I hadn’t picked the wee craturs up, it—it—’

His voice trailed off into silence, then we heard it again, the faintest shadow of a whisper.

‘My two boys, Lachie and Donal’—oh, Eachan, Eachan, I couldna be letting them down.’

Old Grant straightened, reached out for a bit of waste, and wiped the blood from his face—and, I’m thinking, the tears from his eyes. Then he picked up the wee girl, all wrapped in her blankets, set her on his knee and smiled down gently.

‘Well, now, mo ghaol, and how would you be fancying a wee drop hot cocoa?’




St George and the Dragon (#ulink_4d35d04e-ddd3-52a7-b146-e3b7dc5d0946)


If ever a man had a right to be happy, you would have thought it was George. In the eyes of any reasonable man, especially a parched and dusty city-dweller, George, at that very moment, was already halfway to Paradise.

Above, the hot afternoon sun beat down from a cloudless summer sky; on either side the golden stubble fields of the south slid lazily by; beneath his feet pulsed the sleek length of a 25-foot cabin cruiser; and immediately ahead stretched the lovely and unruffled reaches of the Lower Dipworth canal—not to mention the prospect of an entire month’s vacation. Halfway to Paradise? The man was there already.

Dr George Rickaby, BSc, MSc, DS, AMIEE, considered himself the most unfortunate of mortals. How grossly deceived the world would be, he thought bitterly, if it judged by what it saw. What if he had sufficient money to indulge his taste for inland cruising and plenty of time to enjoy it? What if he had for his crew his devoted and industrious ex-batman whose sole aim in life was to prevent George from overexerting himself? What if he was spoken of as a coming man in nuclear fission? What, even, if the Minister of Supply had been known to clap his shoulder and call him George?

Dust and ashes, mused George disconsolately, easing the cruiser round a wooded corner of the canal, just dust and ashes. But he supposed he shouldn’t judge the foolish imaginings of an ignorant world too harshly. He mournfully regarded the spotless deck of white pine. After all, in the days of his youth, he had been criminally guilty of the same thing himself. Why, only three months ago—

‘Look out! You’re going to hit me!’

The high-pitched, urgent shout cut through George’s painful daydreams like a knife. He hurriedly straightened himself to the full height of his painfully lean six feet, clutched at his spectacles and blinked myopically ahead through his thick-lensed glasses.

‘Quickly, quickly, you idiot, or it’ll be too late!’

George had a momentary impression of a barge, its bows fast on the bank and blocking threequarters of the canal, and, in its stern, a noisy and wildly gesticulating young female. All of this registered only superficially. George was not a man of action and his upper centres were momentarily paralysed.

‘Starboard, you fool, starboard your helm!’ she yelled frantically.

George awoke to life and grabbed the wheel. But, as said, he was not a man of action. He was not at his best in emergencies. Spin the wheel he did, and with tremendous speed and energy. But he spun it in the wrong direction.

A mile away on the Upper Dipworth green, smock-coated octogenarians stirred uneasily in their sleep as the sound of the crash reverberated across the peaceful meadows. But in no time at all they were again sunk in peaceful slumber.

Back on the canal, however, matters showed every sign of taking a much more lively turn. The shock of the collision had flung the female bargee, in most unladylike mid-sentence, on to the bows of George’s cruiser. At the same time, George had been catapulted forward. For the space of ten seconds they eyed each other malevolently from a distance of two feet.

The lady spoke first.

‘Of all the bungling fools! Are you completely blind, you—you—you roadhog?’ she demanded fiercely. ‘Or perhaps, poor man—’ this in a tone of vitriolic sweetness—‘too much of the sun?’ She tapped her head significantly.

George rose to his feet in a hurt and dignified silence. With this latest injustice his cup of bitterness was full to overflowing. But he had been brought up in a stern school. He hoped he knew how to behave like a gentleman.

‘If either your boat or yourself is in any way damaged, please accept my apologies,’ he said coldly. ‘But you must admit it is unusual, to say the least of it, to see a barge sailing broadside up a canal. I mean, one doesn’t expect that sort of thing—’

Here George suddenly broke off. He had adjusted his spectacles and now saw the lady clearly for the first time.

She was well worth looking at, George admitted to himself dispassionately. Burnished red hair, intensely blue—if unfriendly—eyes, long golden limbs, a sleeveless green sweater and very abbreviated white shorts—she had, he privately confessed, everything.

‘Sailing broadside, you clown!’ she snapped angrily, brushing aside his proffered hand and climbing painfully to her feet. ‘Broadside, he says.’ She flexed a speculative knee, while George stood by admiringly, and seemed relieved to find that it still worked.

‘Can’t you see I’m stuck right into the bank?’ she enquired icily. ‘It’s just happened and I haven’t had time to move. Why on earth couldn’t you pass by my stern?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said George stiffly, ‘but, after all, your boat is lying in a patch of shadow where these trees are. Besides—er—I wasn’t paying much attention,’ he concluded lamely.

‘You certainly wasn’t—I mean weren’t,’ retorted the redhead acidly. ‘Of all the inept and panic-stricken displays—’

‘Enough,’ said George sternly. ‘Not only was it your fault, but no damage has been done to your old barge anyway. But look at my bows!’ he exclaimed bitterly.

The redhead tossed her head in a nice blend of scorn and indifference, swung round, picked her way delicately over the cruiser’s splintered bows and buckled rails and gracefully stepped aboard the barge. George, after a moment’s hesitation, followed her aboard.

She turned round quickly, stretching her hand out for the tiller, which lay conveniently near. To George, her hair seemed redder than ever. Her blue eyes almost sparked with anger.

‘I don’t remember inviting you aboard,’ she said dangerously. ‘Get off my barge.’

‘I didn’t invite you aboard either,’ George pointed out reasonably. ‘I have merely come,’ he added loftily, ‘to offer what assistance I can.’

She tightened her grip on the tiller. ‘You have five seconds. I’m perfectly capable of looking after—’

‘Look!’ cried George excitedly. ‘The tiller rope!’ He picked up a loose end, neatly severed except for a broken strand. ‘It’s been cut.’

‘What a brain,’ remarked the lady caustically. ‘Do you think the mice have been at it?’

‘Very witty, very witty indeed. The point is, if it’s been cut, somebody cut it. I don’t suppose,’ he added doubtfully, ‘that you go about cutting tiller ropes.’

‘No, I don’t,’ she replied bitterly. ‘But Black Bart does. He’d cut anything. Tillers, mooring ropes, throats—they all come alike to him.’

‘A thorough going villain, it would seem. Possibly you are biased. And who might Black Bart be?’

‘Biased!’ She struggled incoherently for words. ‘Biased, he says. A man who robs my father, puts him in hospital, steals carriage contracts, sabotages barges. Right now he’s on his way to the Totfield Granary to steal the summer contract from me. First come, first served.’

‘Oh, come now,’ said George peaceably. ‘Piracy on the Lower Dipworth canal. In 1953, England and broad daylight. I am, I have been told, a more than normally gullible character—’

‘Do you see any Navy around to prevent it?’ she interrupted swiftly. ‘Or any witnesses—this is the loneliest canal in England.’

George peered thoughtfully at her through his bifocals. ‘You have a point there. Fortunately, you are not alone. Eric—my man—and I—’

‘I’m too busy to laugh. I can take care of all this myself. Get off my boat.’

George was nettled. He forgot his well-bred upbringing.

‘Now, look here, Ginger,’ he burst out, ‘I don’t see why—’

‘Did you call me “Ginger”?’ she enquired sweetly.

‘I did. As I was saying—’

Barely in time, he saw the tiller swinging round. He ducked, stumbled, clawed wildly at the air and fell backwards into the murky depths of the Lower Dipworth canal, clutching his precious bifocals in his left hand. When he surfaced, the redhead was no longer there, and in her place was the ever ready Eric, boathook in hand.

An hour later the cruiser was chugging along the canal at a respectful distance behind the barge. George, clad in a pair of immaculate tennis flannels and morosely watching his duck trousers and jersey flapping from the masthead, had once again fallen prey to his bitter thoughts.

Women, he brooded darkly, were the very devil. Three months previously he had been the happiest of men. And today—this very day was to have been his wedding day. The least his fiancée could have done, he considered, was to have switched her wedding date with the same ease and facility as she had switched prospective husbands.

But women had no finer feelings. Take this redhead, for instance, this termagant, this copperheaded Amazon, this female dragon in angel’s clothing. Perfect confirmation of his belief in women’s fundamental injustice, unfairness and lack of sensibility. Not that George needed any confirmation.

‘Lock ahead, sir,’ sang out Eric in the bows. ‘And another boat.’

George squinted ahead into the setting sun. The redhead was steering her barge skilfully alongside the canal bank and, even as he watched, she jumped nimbly ashore, rope in hand, and made fast. Just beyond hers, another and much more ancient barge was gradually disappearing behind the lock gate. One gate was already shut, the other was being slowly closed by a burly individual who was pushing the massive gate handle. This, George guessed, might very possibly be Black Bart. The situation had interesting possibilities.

‘Take her alongside, Eric, and tie up,’ said George. ‘The presence of a man of tact is called for up there, or I’m much mistaken.’ With that, he leapt ashore and scrambled up the bank to the scene of conflict.

Conflict there undoubtedly was, but it was very one-sided. The man who had been pushing the gate shut, a very large, swarthy, unshaven and ugly customer with the face of a retired prizefighter, continued to close it steadily, contemptuously fending off the redhead with one arm. Such blows as she landed had no effect at all. An elderly and obviously badly frightened lock-keeper hovered nervously in the background. He made no attempt to interfere.

‘Now, now, Mary, me gal,’ the prize-fighter was saying. ‘Temper, temper. Assaulting a poor innocent feller like myself. Shockin’, so it is. A criminal offence.’

‘Leave that dock gate open, Jamieson,’ she cried furiously. ‘There’s plenty of room for two barges, and you know it. Cutting people’s tiller ropes! It’ll cost me an hour if you go through alone. You—you villain.’ The redhead was becoming a trifle confused. She struggled fiercely but to no effect at all.

‘Language, language, my dear.’ Bart grinned wickedly. ‘And tiller ropes’—he started in large surprise—‘I don’t know what you are talking about. As for letting your barge in…No-o-o.’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘I couldn’t risk my paint.’ He spat fondly in the direction of the battered hulk which lay in the dock below.

‘Can I be of any assistance?’ interrupted George.

‘Beat it, Fancypants,’ said Bart courteously.

‘Oh, go away,’ snapped the redhead.

‘I will not go away. This is my business. This is everybody’s business. An injustice is being done. Leave this to me.’

Jamieson paused in his efforts and regarded George under lowered eyebrows. George ignored him and turned to the redhead.

‘Mary, me gal—er—I mean, Miss—why won’t this ruffian let your barge into the lock?’ he asked.

‘Because, don’t you see, it’ll give him an hour’s start on me. His barge is far older and slower. It’s sixty miles to the Granary yet. He’s determined to get there first, so he’ll use any method to stop me.’ Tears of rage welled up in her eyes.

George turned and faced Black Bart.

‘Open that gate,’ he commanded.

Bart’s mouth fell open, just for a second, then tightened ominously.

‘Run away, sonny,’ he scoffed, ‘I’m busy.’

George removed his yachting cap and placed it carefully on the ground.

‘You leave me no alternative,’ he stated. ‘I shall have to use force.’

Mary clutched his arm. Her blue eyes were no longer hostile, but genuinely concerned.

‘Please go away,’ she pleaded. ‘Please. You don’t know him.’

‘That’s right. Oh please,’ Bart mocked. ‘Tell him what I did to your father.’

‘Silence, woman,’ George ordered. ‘And hold these.’

He thrust his spectacles into her reluctant hand and swung round. Unfortunately, without his glasses, George literally could not distinguish a tramcar from a haystack. But he was too angry to care. His normal calm had completely vanished. He took a quick step forward and lashed out blindly at the place where Black Bart had been when last he had seen him.

But Black Bart was no longer there. He had thoughtfully moved quite some time previously. Further, and unfortunately for George, Black Bart had twenty-twenty vision and no finer feelings whatsoever. A murderous right whistled up and caught George one inch below his left ear. From the point of view of weight and the spirit in which given, it could be in no way compared to the encouraging clap he had so recently received from the Minister of Supply. George rose upwards and backwards, neatly cleared the edge of the lock and, for the second time in the space of an hour, described a graceful parabolic arc into the depths of the Lower Dipworth canal.

The girl, white-faced and trembling, stood motionless for a few seconds, then swung frantically round on Black Bart.

‘You swine,’ she cried. ‘You vicious brute! You’ve killed him. Quickly, quickly—get him out! He’ll drown, he’ll drown!’ The redhead was very close to tears.

Black Bart shrugged indifferently. ‘I should worry,’ he said callously. ‘It’s his own fault.’

Mary, colour returning to her cheeks, looked at him incredulously.

‘But—but you did it! You knocked him in. I saw you.’

‘Self-defence,’ explained Black Bart carefully. ‘I only stumbled against him.’ He smiled slowly, evilly. ‘Besides, I can’t swim.’

Seconds later, another splash broke the stillness of the summer evening. The lady had gone to the rescue of her rescuer.

‘Get off my barge,’ she ordered angrily. ‘I don’t want your help.’

George seated himself more comfortably on the counter of the barge and peacefully surveyed the wooden jetty where the three boats had tied up for the night. He appeared none the worse for the accident of a couple of hours earlier.

‘I will not get off,’ said George, calmly puffing at his pipe. ‘And neither,’ he added, ‘will Eric.’ He indicated his companion who then engaged in viewing the night sky through the bottom of an upturned tankard. ‘Every young lady—especially a young lady struggling to carry on her father’s business—needs protection. Eric and I will look after you.’

‘Protection!’ she scoffed bitterly. ‘Protection!’ George followed her meaningful glance towards the white shorts and green jersey on the line. They were still dripping. ‘You couldn’t take care of a wheelbarrow. Can’t sail, can’t swim, can’t defend yourself—a fine protector you’d make.’ She breathed deeply and with fearful restraint. ‘Get off!’

‘’Ere, ’ere, Miss,’ said the aggrieved Eric, ‘that’s not quite fair. The guv’nor’s no sissy. ’E’s got a medal, ’e ’as.’

‘What did he get it for?’ she queried acidly. ‘Ballroom dancing?’

‘The lady, I’m afraid, Eric, is annoyed,’ said George. ‘Perhaps justifiably so. All dragons,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘are in a state of perpetual annoyance.’

‘What was that?’ the lady demanded sharply.

‘Nothing,’ said George, courteously but firmly. ‘You will now please retire to your bed. No further harm will befall you or your boat. Eric and I,’ he finished poetically, ‘will watch over you to the break of day.’

Mary made as if to protest, hesitated, shrugged her shoulders resignedly, and turned away.

‘Suit yourself,’ she said indifferently. ‘Perhaps,’ she added hopefully, ‘you’ll both catch pneumonia.’

For some time, there followed sounds of movement in the cabin, then the light was switched off. By and by the sound of deep and peaceful slumber drifted up the companionway. It was in many ways a pleasant sound—infinitely so, indeed, in comparison with the obligato of snores already issuing from the two faithful watchers in the stern.

Sleep, however, was not universal. Far from it. Black Bart and his henchman were not only awake, but uncommonly active. The latter had stealthily vanished into the engine room of George’s cruiser: Black Bart himself was squatting on one of the submerged cross-beams bracing the piers of the jetty. Looped over his shoulder were about sixty feet of slender wire hawser. One end was secured to the pier, the other to the rudder of the barge, immediately below the sleeping warriors. The coils he let fall gently to the bottom of the canal.

At 7.00 a.m. the following morning, George and Eric left the barge in a hurry. The frying pan wielded by the redhead was daunting enough, but far more devastating were her scorn and derision.

At 7.30 Black Bart’s barge moved off, chugged along the canal for a couple of hundred yards, then stopped. Jamieson wanted a grandstand view of the proceedings.

At 8.00 a.m., Eric appeared on deck, luridly cursing the villain who had drained all the paraffin tanks and refilled them with water.

At 8.02 George made his hurried way along the bank to Mary’s boat in urgent search of fuel. He was driven off by unkind words and a bargepole.

At 8.05, Mary cast off, and at 8.06, with a terrific rending, splintering noise, the rudder was torn off. Immediately the barge slewed round and thudded into the bank.

At 8.08, George had run along the towpath and leapt aboard to offer help. At 8.09 the redhead knocked him into the canal and at 8.10 she fished him out again.

Two hundred yards away, Black Bart was bent double, convulsed at the results of his own genius. Finally he straightened up, wiped the streaming tears from his eyes, and journeyed on towards the famous Watman’s Folly, the last stopover of the trip.

‘Ol’ man, I’ve mishjudged you—mishjudged you badly, ol’ man. Sorry, Bart, ol’ man. But you unnershtand how it is. Women! Women! Tchah! Did you see what she did to me? Eh? Did you see it?’ George was incoherent with indignation.

‘Sure, sure, Doc, I saw it.’ Black Bart swore fluently. ‘She’s a bad-tempered young lady.’ ‘Lady’ was not Bart’s choice of word. ‘Better rid of her. Sorry about the scrap at the lock, Doc. All her fault, the wicked little so-and-so.’

‘It’s forgotten, Bart, ol’ man, forgotten. All my own fault. Pals, eh, ol’ man?’

The new-found pals solemnly shook hands, then returned to the serious competitive business of deplenishing the Watman’s Arms available supplies of West Country cider. It was powerful stuff. George appeared to be winning by a short head: but then George was pouring nearly all of his into a convenient window box. Black Bart remained happily unaware of this. He was likewise ignorant of the immense care with which George had arranged this accidental meeting—the Arms was a favourite haunt of Jamieson’s. Striking up an acquaintanceship on a friendly basis had been easy—after what Black Bart had seen that morning, George’s friendliness came as no surprise. Besides, George was spending very freely.

‘’S ten o’clock, Doc,’ said Bart warningly. ‘Chucking-out time, you know.’

‘Imposhible, ol’ man,’ replied George thickly. ‘We’ve only been here ten minutes. Tell you what, ol’ man,’ he continued eagerly. ‘Lesh make a night of it. Eh? ol’ pal? Come on.’

Ten minutes later the old pals were staggering erratically along the towpath, singing in what they frequently praised as wonderful harmony, and swinging a demijohn of cider in either hand. First they passed the cruiser, then Mary’s barge with the jury-rigged rudder—Bart meant to attend to that later on—and finally boarded Bart’s barge.

Bart’s barge lay close by Watman’s Folly, which was only ten miles short of the Granary. The Folly was what is known as a blind lock. It had lock gates at either end, but the outer end led nowhere. It just stopped there, overlooking the Upper Totfield valley—an embryo canal killed by finance. Like most blind locks, it had been sealed by concrete.

Bart’s henchman welcomed them eagerly, and the night’s festivities really commenced. At half past one the henchman slid beneath the table. At a quarter to two George followed him, and at two o’clock Bart, in the act of draining the last demijohn, crashed to the floor in a highly spectacular fashion.

George rose briskly to his feet, dusted down his clothes and strode ashore. First, he boarded Mary’s barge and rapped imperatively on her door.

A light immediately flicked on and in ten seconds a tousled red head and sleepy, rather scared blue eyes peeped round the door. When she saw who it was her expression changed to something curiously like gladness, then merely to relief, finally to exasperation.

‘I know, I know,’ said George. ‘“Get off my barge”. Well, I’m just going. I am not,’ he added hastily, ‘keeping a watch over you tonight. Just came to tell you to be prepared to move early tomorrow. I don’t think Black Bart will be feeling particularly friendly towards any of us in a few hours’ time.’

‘What are you talking about,’ she asked wonderingly. ‘And just what do you propose to do?’ she inquired suspiciously.

‘Wait and see,’ said George ungallantly. ‘Perhaps I’m no sailor, swimmer or boxer but—’ he tapped himself briefly on the forehead—‘possibly I am not completely useless in every department. Goodnight.’

He returned to his cruiser, collected Eric, and together they made their way back to Bart’s barge. They unhitched his mooring ropes, dragged the barge along the canal, opened the gates of the Folly, creaky and stiff with long disuse, and towed the barge inside. Once they had it safely inside, they closed the gates and George, producing a hacksaw, thoughtfully sawed off the handle of the sluice trap, so that it could not be opened to admit water.

While he was doing this, Eric was struggling with the sluice trap at the blind end. Together they raised it and immediately the water rushed out in a continuous jet. They then sawed that handle off, so that it could no longer be closed. In ten minutes the lock was empty, and the barge, with its unconscious crew, was high and dry and fast in the mud. Black Bart and his barge were there for some time to come.

In the end, it was touch and go. The scheme had worked perfectly, but its author almost came to a sticky and premature end.

George had underestimated Black Bart’s terrific powers of recuperation. All were awake early next morning and at seven o’clock, just as George was casting off Mary’s ropes, Black Bart, bloodshot and unshaven, covered from head to foot in mud, slime and grease, appeared over the top of Watman’s Folly like some savage prehistoric monster. Nor did the resemblance stop there. Black Bart was out for blood.

George had no time to reach his own boat, which was just moving off. Cursing and raving like a madman, Black Bart leapt in tigerishly, his great fists swinging in blind anger. But his own speed and power robbed him of revenge. A tremendous blow caught George on the shoulder, spun him round like a top, and knocked him head first into the canal for the fourth time in thirty-six hours.

George struggled wildly in the water, his arms windmilling frantically, spluttering, coughing, going under and resurfacing at regular intervals. But there was no real cause for worry. For a third time a slim vision in red, brown and white sliced down through the waters of the canal and towed the feebly struggling George towards the barge. Eric helped them aboard.

Ten minutes had passed and still George had not recovered. With Black Bart safely half-a-mile behind, still cursing fearfully, George was in no hurry to recover. His head was pillowed on Mary’s lap; a very comfortable pillow he thought. Besides, he could hear his own cruiser purring alongside and he did not feel like meeting Eric’s accusing eye.

He stirred, experimentally, and his eyebrows fluttered open. The redhead still sat motionless on the deck, oblivious of her soaking clothes, mechanically steering with one hand. She was whispering, ‘George, George, oh George’ in a manner highly pleasing to George’s ears: and her blue eyes, usually so hostile and snapping, were now misted over with an anxiety and a soft concern.

But, he thought in a delicious drowsiness, I must remember to warn Eric about the medal. Mary must never know—well, at least not till later. For George really was the holder of nothing less than the George Medal. It had been given him for an amazing feat of personal survival when his fighter had crashed in the Mediterranean, eight miles off the Libyan coast. He had been wounded, dazed, weak from the loss of blood and he ought to have died. But George had reached land.

And he had swum every foot of the way.




The Arandora Star (#ulink_b6bf21fa-e6e6-588e-b792-d8517d3c800f)


The Arandora Star had indeed fallen upon evil days. Less than a year had elapsed since the ending of her great days, the proud days when the fluttering of the Blue Star house flag at her masthead had signalled in a score of harbours all over the world the stately arrival of one of the elite of the British Mercantile Marine—a luxury cruise liner on her serene and regal way round the better ports of the seven seas.

Less than a year had elapsed since she had taken aboard her last complement of financially select passengers, wrapped them in a silken cocoon of luxury and impeccable service and transported them painlessly north to the Norwegian fjords in search of the summer sun or south to bask in the warmth of the blue Caribbean skies. Deck games, soft music, cinema shows, dancing to the ship’s band, the tinkling of ice in tall frosted glasses, the unobtrusive but omnipresent white-jacketed stewards—there had been no lack of every last comfort and convenience which might in any way conduce to the perfect shipboard holiday atmosphere of relaxation and romance.

Less than a year had elapsed, but now all that was gone. The change was great. The relaxation and romance were no more. Neither were the bands, the bars, the deck games, the dancing under the stars.

Greater even was the change in the ship itself. The hull, upper-works and funnel that had once so gaily reflected their colours in the millpond waters of fjords and Mediterranean ports were now covered in a dull coat of neutral grey. The public rooms had been stripped of their expensive furnishings, panelling and draperies, cabins and staterooms altered and fitted with crude metal bunks to accommodate twice—and in some cases four times—as many passengers as formerly.

But the greatest change of all was in the nature of the passengers, and the purpose of their voyage. Where once there had been a few hundred affluent Britons, there were now no fewer than 1,600 far from affluent German and Italian internees and prisoners of war: and they were going not in search of the sun, but to internment camps in Canada for the duration of the war.

These internees, composed mostly of British-resident civilians and captured German seamen, were the lucky ones. They were leaving the bleak austerity of blacked-out and rationed England for the comfort and comparative plenty of North America. True, they were going to be locked up and guarded for months or even years, and it was going to be a dull and boring war for them: but at least they would be well clad, well fed—and above all safe.

Or they would have been. Unfortunately, both for the Germans and their Italian allies, soon after 6.00 a.m. on 2 July, 1940, on their second day out from Liverpool and some way off the west coast of Ireland, the Arandora Star slowly swam into view, and framed herself on the crossed hairs of the periscope sights of a German U-boat’s captain.

The torpedo struck the Arandora Star fair and square amidships, erupting in a roar of sound and a towering wall of white water that cascaded down on the superstructure and upper decks, blasting its way through the unarmoured ship’s side clear into the engine room. Deep inside the ship, transverse watertight bulkheads buckled and split under the impact, and the hundreds of tons of water, rushing in through the great jagged rent torn in the ship’s side, flooded fore and aft with frightening speed as if goaded by some animistic savagery and bent on engulfing and drowning trapped men before they could fight their way clear and up to freedom.

Many of the crew died in these first few moments before they had recovered from the sheer physical shock of the explosion, their first intimation of the direction in which danger lay being a tidal wave of seething white and oil-streaked water bearing down upon them even as their numbed minds registered the certain knowledge that the one and only brief moment in which they could have rushed for safety was gone forever.

From the already flooded depths of the ship some few did manage to claw their way up iron ladders and companionways to the safety of the upper deck, to join the hundreds already there: but they had no sooner arrived than it was swiftly borne in upon them that this safety was an illusion, that their chances of being able to get clear away of the already sinking liner were indeed remote.

In the reports of the tragedy which appeared in the British press on Thursday, 4 July and Friday, 5 July, there was a remarkable degree of unanimity with regard to what constituted the reasons for the subsequent appalling loss of life. Not reasons, rather, but one single all-encompassing reason: the unbelievable cowardliness and selfishness of the Germans and the Italians who, grouping themselves on an ugly nationalistic basis, fought desperately for precedence in the boats, with the inevitable result that the speed and orderliness which the rapid loading and lowering of the lifeboats demanded were utterly impossible.

The press reports of the time leave one in no doubt as to that. ‘Casualties due to panic’: ‘Passengers fight to reach boats’: ‘Fights among aliens’ and similar uncompromising captions headlined articles which spoke freely of disgraceful panic, of the wild rushes and cowardice of the Germans—‘great hulking brutes kicking and punching every person who got in their way’—who fought to get into the boats, of the sickening scramble of the Italians who thought of nothing but their own skins, of scores of people being forced overboard, of British soldiers and sailors losing invaluable time, and often their own lives, in separating the madly fighting, screaming aliens.

One report even had the Italians so crazy with fear that they fought not the Germans but among themselves; thirty of them, it was alleged, battling furiously for the privilege of sliding down a single rope.

In order to establish, among other things, just how widespread and uncontrollable this panic had been, survivors of the Arandora Star were recently interviewed and four of these finally selected as providing testimony as impeccable as we are ever likely to have. They were selected on the bases (a) that they represented different contingents—crew, guards and internees—aboard the ship and (b) that their independently volunteered statements were mutually corroborative to a very high degree indeed. Such insignificant discrepancies as existed were readily accounted for by the fact that they were in different parts of the ship and all left it by different means.

These four are: Mr Sidney (‘Nobby’) Fulford, ship’s barman, of 57 Northbrook Road, Southampton: Mr Edward (‘Ted’) Crisp of 210 High Road, North Weald, Essex, a veteran Blue Star Line steward who has been going to sea for 39 years: Mr Mario Zampi, the well-known Italian-born film producer of Wardour Street: and Mr Ivor Duxberry, a War Department employee, of 89 Johnson Road, Heston, Middlesex.

In view of the newspaper reports of the time, their answers to the question of the extent of the panic and pitched battles which are alleged to have taken place are singularly interesting.

‘I saw no signs of panic and no fighting whatsoever,’ Mr Fulford states flatly: and as sixty internees left the Arandora Star in the same boat as he, he should have had an excellent chance to observe anything of the kind. ‘There was confusion, of course, but only that.’

Mr Crisp said exactly the same.

Mr Zampi agreed. ‘These reports of panic and disorder among the internees were just not true. The only trouble I saw was between a British Army sergeant and his men: they had jumped into a lifeboat and shots were fired at them to make them leave.’

This statement by Mr Zampi, who must have suffered considerably on hearing the courage of his countrymen so frequently maligned in the days after the sinking, might well be suspected of being actuated by pique, nationalistic bias, or a very understandable desire to get a little of his own back, especially as it seems so grossly improbable.

In point of fact it is perfectly true, except that it was a corporal Mr Zampi saw and not a sergeant: and that corporal, by a remarkable coincidence, was the fourth witness, then Corporal Duxberry of the Welsh Regiment, the most informative of all the witnesses, whose phenomenal memory is matched only by the detailed accuracy of his recollections of these days.

‘Some of the guard,’ Ivor Duxberry says, ‘disregarded the order of “Prisoners of war and internees first into the boats”. Major Bethell—CO of the 109 POW unit—using a megaphone from the bridge, ordered them out. When they didn’t respond, he ordered me to fire a volley over their heads to show that he meant business.’ Duxberry fired as ordered, and the soldiers soon left.

Duxberry confirms that there was no general panic or fighting. He did, he says, see two Italians, a young man and an old, fighting for a position in a boat, a fight which quickly ended when a German internee knocked out the younger man with a ship’s dry scrubber and escorted the old man into the boat.

Apart from these minor incidents, there was no trouble at all of the kind described in the papers at the time. Why, then, these reports?

The obvious answer, of course, is that the citizens of an embattled nation tend to become afflicted with an irremediable chauvinism, a nationalistic myopia which only peace can cure, a temporary suspension of reasonable judgment where our side, our troops, become the good, the kindly, the brave, while those of the other, the enemy, become the bad, the wicked and the cowardly.

But, as so often, the obvious answer is the wrong one. Top newspapermen, such as covered these stories, are, as a class, less likely to be affected by such unthinking emotionalism than almost any other people. Hard-headed realists, cynics in the best sense of the word, they tend to regard with a very jaundiced eye indeed the flag-waving, drum-beating, nonsensically juvenile jingoism of the average nation at war. Their job is to get and evaluate facts.

It is more than likely that they did get and evaluate the facts, took a good look at them and hastily put them away, using instead the accounts of a few ill-informed survivors to put flesh on the bones of their stories and at the same time give a reasonable explanation for the dreadful loss of life. They did so because they had a very healthy fear of editors, of the censor and of the terms of imprisonment which might all too easily come the way of any man so foolish as to tell the truth in wartime, if that truth could be interpreted as a violation of security, as lowering morale or giving aid and encouragement to the enemy.

These are the facts, the true reasons for the great loss of life:

1. The ship was grossly overloaded. All the survivors agree on this. Originally—in peacetime—the Arandora Star carried 250 first-class passengers, but later had superstructure alterations made to accommodate another 200 passengers. On the morning of the disaster there were close on 1,700 internees and guards aboard, in addition to the normal ship’s crew.

Ivor Duxberry was with his CO, Major Bethell, when the latter was told by the ship’s master—Captain E. W. Moulton—that he had protested most strongly about the danger of overcrowding, and demanded that his number of passengers be cut by half. The authorities had refused to listen to him. It is not known precisely who these authorities were, except that they were not Frederick Leyland & Co, the owners of the vessel, nor the Blue Star Line, its managers.

2. Some of the survivors state that there were not enough lifejackets. The truth of this statement is difficult to substantiate—obviously no person, other than the chief officer and those directly responsible to him, can know where every lifejacket is—but what seems beyond dispute is that if there were enough, they were not issued to all.

Many people drowned through the lack of these jackets. It may be, although it seems extremely unlikely, that scores of people forgot that they had these jackets: apart from that, many had none in the first place. Steward Crisp had no lifejacket, and neither had Corporal Duxberry, who says that, as far as he knows, not one member of the guard was issued with a lifejacket. Reports at the time speak of army officers handing over their lifejackets to internees, but these were isolated instances.

3. There were far too few lifeboats. There were about a dozen of these, old, worn out, and with a capacity of about sixty each, altogether a total capacity of less than half of the entire complement of the Arandora Star. Some of these had had oars, emergency provisions and plugs removed, to immobilize them against any escape attempt on the part of the internees. How those responsible for this monstrous action thought that any party of internees could steal a lifeboat with armed soldiers constantly on guard and sailors on lookout is difficult to understand: but it is downright impossible to understand how it could be thought possible to lower a boat safely in darkness with the liner racing at full speed through the rough Atlantic seas. It is hard to imagine any naval man being responsible for this action.

4. There appears to have been no lifeboat drill whatsoever. Neither Mr Crisp nor Mr Fulford had anything to say on this matter, very possibly and understandably because they wished to cast no reflection on their employers, one of the world’s most respected shipping companies—an admirable but unnecessary reticence because no blame attaches to the company. But neither Mr Zampi nor Mr Duxberry had any such hesitations, and the absence of drill is borne out in Mr Lafitte’s book The Internment of Aliens.

It would be easy, and perhaps proper, to call this criminal negligence, but, in fairness, it must be borne in mind that there were many confirmed Nazi merchant sailors and submariners on board who might have chosen the confusion of this drill as a cover to gain control of the ship.

5. The rafts, which might have saved most of those who could find no room in the lifeboats, were secured by wire. These wires could only be loosened by special implements which all too often were unobtainable, or their location unknown. Most of the rafts, immovably lashed in position, eventually went down with the Arandora Star.

6. All the above reasons—the overloading, shortage of lifejackets and lifeboats, the lack of drill and jammed rafts—undoubtedly contributed materially to the heavy loss of life. But, nevertheless, all of these taken together did not even begin to equal the lethal, murderous effect of one other item, the existence of which was not even admitted at the time: barbed wire.

The decks of the ship were unrecognizable, surrounded and festooned with impenetrable barbed-wire fencing which turned the Arandora Star into a floating concentration camp.

‘I had had a lot of experience with POW cages,’ Ivor Duxberry says, ‘but I have never seen barbed wire erected more expertly than this. It was impregnable—so closely woven that no space was big enough for a man to get his head through without damaging himself.

‘This barbed wire partitioned the decks—and cut off access to the lifeboats.’

It cut off access to the lifeboats. One single damning statement that holds the key to the tragedy of the Arandora Star—barbed wire cut off access to the lifeboats. Little wonder, indeed, that security clamped down on all mention of this: what magnificent propaganda material it would have made for the Axis!

It is difficult indeed to understand why the omniscient authorities of the time deemed this murderous wire necessary—did they expect, perhaps, to prevent some of the internees from escaping by diving overboard in mid-Atlantic and swimming for the nearest continent?—but it is not difficult to understand the attitude of Captain Moulton who protested with the utmost violence against the erection of this wire.

‘You are sending men to their deaths,’ he insisted, ‘men who have sailed with me for many years. If anything happens to the ship, that wire will obstruct passage to the boats and rafts. We shall be drowned like rats and the Arandora Star turned into a floating deathtrap.’

But the authorities knew better than the man who had spent a lifetime at sea. The barbed wire remained. And the Arandora Star became a floating deathtrap.

That, then, was the desperate situation that confronted all those who finally managed to struggle to the upper deck. But not all of those who survived the initial impact of the explosion or the lethal onrush of the invading waters reached the upper deck.

There were old men aboard, old men and sick men, and many of these never left their cabins—they had been asleep in their bunks when the torpedo struck, and many of them died there. Others were too weak to fight their way along flooded alleys, or took wrong turnings in the Stygian darkness of the great liner’s vast complex of passageways: Edward Crisp owes his life simply to the fact that he knew the internal geography of the ship like the back of his hand.

Others again did reach the upper decks, found their way to the nearest fore or aft lifeboat blocked by rolls of athwartships barbed wire, and went below again to find some passage which would bring them up to a lifeboat no further away than twenty yards from where they stood. But the press and confusion below decks was increasing steadily, the level of the water was rising, and many of those who went below were never seen again.

Major Bethell, OC of the guard, ordered his men to clear away the barbed wire in front of the lifeboats. (It appears that there was some method of loosening sections of the barbed barricade by operating a slipwire, but no instructions had been given in this.) The guard tore at the wire with rifles and bayonets—Ivor Duxberry has still the scars on his arms as the grim proof of his story—and the rush for the boats was on.

Unfortunately, because of the obstructing wire, trained members of the ship’s company were not able to reach all their boats’ positions—or at least not in time. Edward Crisp and Taffy Williams—the bosun’s mate—arrived at their station to find sixty Germans and Italians already sitting in a lifeboat, and had to order them out—no easy task when everyone was convinced that the Arandora Star was already foundering—before they could begin to lower the boat. Elsewhere, some of the internees tried to lower the boats themselves and within a few minutes, in Duxberry’s graphic phrase, half a dozen of them were hanging on one fall like turkeys outside a poulterer’s shop.

But some of the prisoners of war, as distinct from the internees, proved invaluable. One such was Captain Burfend, master of the Adolph Woermann, who marched a group of men—for the most part highly experienced seamen and confirmed Nazis—in a column of two on to the boatdeck, and lowered several lifeboats in perfect order. Nazis or not, their behaviour was all that could have been wished for at this moment of crisis. Especially was this true of Captain Burfend himself. When he had seen as many men as possible, regardless of race, into the lifeboats for which he had assumed temporary responsibility, he denied himself a place in any of these, stepped back and went down with the Arandora Star.

But though there were not enough lifeboats for all, this was not realized. Most of the intervening barbed wire was still in position, with men flinging themselves bodily upon it, trying to tear it apart with their bare hands, only to find within seconds that they were caught beyond any hope of escape. Others smashed a path through with fire hydrants, went back, incredibly, to collect their suitcases, and returned to find the lifeboats gone.

The survivors, of course, were those who were not caught in or trapped by the barbed wire. Mario Zampi, who had lowered a raft only to have it taken over by some of his fellow countrymen already in the water, dived over the side and all but broke his neck when his lifejacket struck the water. Fulford jumped from the boatdeck—a dive at which even an Olympic champion would have baulked—and struck the water far beneath with such force that large quantities of oil and salt water were forced into his stomach and lungs: he, too, was injured by his lifejacket. Edward Crisp, as said, managed to get away in a lifeboat, while Ivor Duxberry slithered down a rope and landed astride the upturned hull of a lifeboat.

Even as the great liner foundered, there were hundreds still aboard. Most of these were trapped. Some were too terrified to jump. Others, like Captains Moulton and Burfend, elected to remain with the ship rather than abandon it before everyone else had been saved. Few of the regimental guard officers survived. When last seen, they were lined up, as one survivor put it, and chatting amiably like suburban passengers waiting in a morning bus queue. It is difficult to recognize either the wisdom or necessity of this quixotism and nonchalant acceptance of a fate which, until they themselves made the decision, had been by no means certain: but it is impossible not to admire their selfless gallantry.

At 7.30 a.m. the Arandora Star heeled over sharply until she was almost on her side in the water, the guard rails far below the surface of the sea, hesitated for a moment, then, momentarily shrouded in clouds of hissing steam, slid quietly beneath the surface of the Atlantic.

The waters in the immediate vicinity of the foundering liner were alive with people on rafts or clinging to planks or nonswimmers frantically churning the surface of the sea with the last of their rapidly failing strength. All saw what was coming, all struggled fearfully, desperately to avoid it, but for all but a few the effort had come too late, a meaningless tribute to the age-old instinct to survive. How many people were sucked down in the vortex of the plummeting Arandora Star will never be known: but no more, it is certain, than were dragged down, trapped by the impenetrable barrier of barbed wire, or still impaled on the savage hooks, helpless flies trapped in this monstrous spider’s web.

The Arandora Star was gone, but almost a thousand of its passengers, guards and crew—mainly Italians and Germans—still lived, scattered in groups or singly over several square miles of the Atlantic. That morning the Atlantic, mercifully, was calm and all but windless—but the sea was bitterly cold. Before long the number of swimmers and those supported only by planks and benches became pitifully fewer and fewer. Mario Zampi lost all but one of the six companions who originally clung to the same bench as he. Their pathetic cries of ‘Mother’, repeated over and over again in three or four languages, grew fainter and fainter and gradually faded away altogether as the numbing cold struck through the scanty clothing and pathetically limited defences of the old, the infirm and the gravely wounded, and stopped the beating of their hearts. And some there were, supported by their life jackets, who, by and by, just lay face down in the water, dead.

About noon, a Sunderland flying boat appeared and circled the area dropping all it had in the way of first-aid kits, emergency rations, chocolate and cigarettes, and then disappeared to guide the Canadian destroyer St Laurent to the scene.

All of the survivors are unanimous in their unstinted praise of the magnificently selfless work performed by the crew of that ship: operating from the St Laurent’s boats while the destroyer itself kept constantly on the move to avoid submarines, they scoured the area for hours until they collapsed unconscious over their oars, having driven themselves far beyond the limits of exhaustion.

In all, the crew of the St Laurent picked up and took to safety over eight hundred survivors, an astonishing feat almost without parallel in the lifesaving annals of the sea, almost enough to make one forget, if even only for a moment, the barbed wire and the thousand men who died.

Almost, but not quite.




Rawalpindi (#ulink_91c1a0bb-6a2e-52a3-8cbc-5e096323b1ad)


Even with the two brand new untried battle cruisers under his command, even although he was leading them on this, their first sortie against the enemy and the cold, dark hostility of the winter north Atlantic, Vice-Admiral Marschall was as unworried as any fleet commander can ever hope to be in wartime. Wilhelmshaven was dropping south behind him into the early gathering dusk of a November afternoon and the low flat shores of Jede Bay were already vanishing into nothingness, but Marschall never spared them a glance. He was busy, far too busy for any of this nonsense of sentimental farewells, and, besides, he knew he didn’t have to bother. Barring accidents, it would only be a matter of brief time before he saw these shores again.

And there would be no accidents. Of that the Squadron Commander, Marschall, was convinced. One of Germany’s best and most experienced naval officers, Vice-Admiral Marschall was fully aware that in wartime the element of risk could never be fully eliminated, that chance must always play its part. But the risk was negligible: not only was he the gambler who had been dealt all the best cards in the pack—he was playing against a blindfolded opponent.

Already, in these first few months of war, the German Naval Intelligence Service, with the intensive preparations of years behind them, was operating at maximum efficiency. Its agents were scattered all over Britain and the neutral countries of Western Europe—and these agents were the best there were. The accuracy and completeness of the information obtained was matched only by the speed with which this information was transmitted to Berlin.

German Naval HQ knew the position, speed, course and destination of almost every convoy leaving or approaching Britain. They knew the position of every British capital ship—and they knew that on that day, 21 November, 1939, every British capital ship was either in harbour or in far distant waters: that the Nelson and the Rodney were in the Clyde, the Hood and the French battlecruiser Dunkerque were in Plymouth, a cruiser squadron was fuelling and victualling in Rosyth, and that the only other ship they might have had to fear, the aircraft carrier Furious was in Nova Scotia with the battleship Repulse. They knew, too, that after the torpedoing of the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow by Leutnant-Kapitän Günther Prien’s U-boat, the British Navy had precipitately abandoned that far northern base, and retreated to the Clyde and Forth, maintaining only a small secret base in Loch Ewe, a northwesterly Scottish fjord. At least it was secret as far as the British public and most of the Royal Navy were concerned: the Germans knew all about it.

There was, of course, no guarantee that these ships would remain where they were. Again, the Germans were unworried. Their experts had completely broken the British naval codes at that time, with the results that British naval redisposition orders were known to the Germans almost as quickly as they were to the captains of the ships concerned.

Not that Marschall had any intention of engaging any large British ships in any case. His superior, Admiral Raeder, had been adamant on this point. This was only a shakedown cruise which might pay the added dividends of dislocating our shipping and drawing off our patrols.

There was the further possibility that news of the departure of the squadron might be transmitted to London by espionage agents, but, in view of past achievements of the British Intelligence Service, that was highly unlikely. At the time, our Intelligence Service was untrained, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffectual—the Deutschland, for instance, after her first Atlantic foray, had been back in the Baltic for over a month before we knew anything about it. And, it must be confessed, our sketchy air patrols over the North Sea were, at the time, not much better than our Intelligence Service.

Vice-Admiral Marschall, therefore, felt justifiably light of heart as his two battle cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau cleared Jede Bay and sailed out into the cold, wind-swept darkness of the North Sea. A bitter night, a bad night, but Marschall welcomed it, for over and above all the cards he held in his hand, the darkness of the long northern winter nights, the forecasted bad weather and visibility reducing rain-squalls and fog were further powerful allies, that made for safety. Marschall reckoned that it would take him exactly forty-eight hours to reach the Iceland-Orkney line of the British contraband control.

The British Northern Patrols were in position, thinly stretched out over nearly a thousand miles of sea. Cruisers were the backbone of this patrol, but mostly superannuated ships of the old C and D classes. Only four ships could be reckoned as really effective fighting units: the Norfolk and the Suffolk, the same two ships as were to report the historic breakthrough of the Bismarck into the Atlantic in May 1941, were in exactly the same position as they were on that memorable day—the Denmark Strait—the Glasgow was just to the north-east of the Shetlands, with the Newcastle stiffening the line between the Faroes and Iceland. Of these, only the Newcastle was anywhere near the coming scene of action, but even she was too far away.

Holding much of the line in between these cruisers were the armed merchant ships. For contraband control—the stopping and searching of ships carrying proscribed cargoes—these ships were ideal in the high wild latitudes of the Atlantic. Big ex-passenger ships, able to remain at sea for long periods in bad weather, they were stripped of all their luxury fittings, and fitted with guns sufficient to deal with any cargo ship. But only with cargo ships—they were never intended to cope with anything else: it is significant that the very first move of the Admiralty when they finally learnt of the breakthrough of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, was to withdraw all the armed merchant ships off the northern patrol. But the order came too late, tragically but inevitably, for one of these ships; for it was not until the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau turned their great guns on the Rawalpindi that the Admiralty knew that these two ships, then the most powerful in the German Navy, were loose in the Atlantic.

The 17,000-ton Rawalpindi, in peacetime a crack P & O liner plying between Britain and the Far East, was one of the first Merchant Navy vessels to be converted to an armed merchant ship. Her gay pre-war colours were gone, lost under a drab coat of battleship grey. The lavishly furnished interior had been gutted, a main control gunnery room constructed and deck fittings removed to make way for ammunition lockers and her hastily installed armament—eight old 6-inch guns, four ranged along either side. But there had been no time, no opportunity to make any alteration to her unarmoured sides and decks, and the strengthening of these was largely impossible anyway: in terms of the penetrating power of modern armour-piercing shells, the hull of the Rawalpindi might as well have been made of paper.

The crew of the Rawalpindi knew this, but just accepted it, with the mental equivalent of a philosophic shrug, as just another of the hazards of the sea. Among the 280 officers and men aboard, there was not one to whom the sea and all its dangers were unknown, for in terms of experience if not in actual age—but more often than not in age as well—it was a crew of old men. Apart from fiftyodd officers and men who had served with the Rawalpindi as a regular passenger liner, the entire crew was composed of RNVR men of the Merchant Navy. RNVR—civilians with the bare essentials of naval training—reservists, and pensioners who had come back to the sea after having already completed twenty-two years in the Navy. There was not one active service officer or rating aboard the Rawalpindi, but there was a tremendous fund of knowledge and experience, more than any regular Naval ship could ever hope to boast. The crew knew the sea and its dangers, and accepted them. They knew too the very sharp limitations of their ship and accepted these also. And when, in latitude 63° 40′ North, 11° 29′ West, at 3 o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, 23 November, they saw the lean sleek shape of the Scharnhorst looming through the ice-cold rain-squalls of the bleak sub-Arctic waters, they knew that this was indeed the end, but they accepted that also.

On the bridge, Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy, called back to the colours after seventeen long years in the unwanted wilderness of civilian life, had seen the danger and recognized its implications even before any of his men. He wrongly identified the ship as the Deutschland, but the mistake was one of academic importance only: he rightly identified it as a German pocket battleship or battle-cruiser, 26,000-ton leviathans with 13-inch armour-plate and nine 11-inch and twelve 5.9 guns capable of delivering a 8,000-pound broadside in reply to his own puny 400—and his light 100-pound shells could never hope to penetrate that massive armour anyway.

Even as she emerged from the rain-squalls the Scharnhorst’s big signalling lamp was stuttering out the command to ‘Heave-to’. The sensible thing, the wise and politic thing—for which there couldn’t possibly have been any reproach—would have been to do as the Scharnhorst ordered. But with Kennedy, as with most of the great British naval captains down the centuries, prudence in the face of the enemy was a quality that he had never learned, and certainly never inherited. He knew he could neither fight nor outrun the Scharnhorst, but there were sheltering icebergs and fogbanks nearby and, while there remained even one chance in a thousand he was determined to take it. He ordered the wheel to be put hard over and smoke floats to be dropped to cover their withdrawal.

The Rawalpindi was still heeling over on her turn when the Scharnhorst again ordered her to ‘Heave-to’. This time the message was reinforced with an 11-inch shell that crashed into the sea just ahead, sending a tall, slender column of white-streaked water towering far into the rain-filled darkening sky, twice the height of the tip of the Rawalpindi’s main mast. Kennedy acknowledged the weight of the warning by turning even further away from the enemy and dropping more smoke floats.

And then, for a moment, he thought salvation had come. Far off on the starboard bow, a long dark ship, white water piled high at its bow, emerged out of rain-squall, arrowing in towards the scene. One of their own Northern Patrol cruisers, Kennedy thought jubilantly, almost certainly the Newcastle, and he ordered course altered towards this haven. Almost at once the bitter truth struck him, but it was too late now. The new arrival represented not safety but the certain end of everything: it was the Gneisenau, sister ship to the Scharnhorst.

Even the one chance in a thousand had gone. There could be no escape now and the two pocket battleships, Kennedy knew, could pound his fragile vessel to death in a matter of minutes. There wouldn’t even be a semblance of a fight. Captain Edward Kennedy could have placed scuttling charges, surrendered with honour, and, had he succeeded in reaching Britain again, would almost certainly have been given command of another vessel straight away.

But scuttling charges had never played any part in the Kennedy family’s long and honourable two hundred year association with the Royal Navy, and Kennedy was certainly not the man ever to think of such things now even although he, probably above all captains, most certainly owed nothing to a Navy and an Admiralty that had courtmartialled him in 1922 on a grotesquely unfair charge and, brilliant officer though he was, had axed him from the service in the following year, calling him back only in their hour of need in 1939. But whatever he thought at the time we can only guess at: all we know is what he said as he watched the two pocket battleships bear down on him: ‘We’ll just fight them both.’ As a death sentence for a great ship and hundreds of men, this must rank as the most laconic ever.

And fought them both he did. Three times the Scharnhorst ordered him to abandon ship, and on the third time it had its answer—a salvo that fell just short. At the same time, a salvo from the Rawalpindi struck the Gneisenau amidships, and almost together the two German battle cruisers replied with heavy, accurate and devastating close-range fire.

The first salvo from the Scharnhorst crashed into the Rawalpindi’s high superstructure, wrecking the boat-deck and killing almost everyone on the bridge: but Captain Kennedy survived. Almost immediately, another salvo of 11-inch shells, this time from the Gneisenau, crashed into the main control room of the Rawalpindi, and turned it into a lifeless shambles: all semblance of concerted fire now ceased, but the seven guns—one had already been destroyed—fought on independently.

The fires amidships were already beginning to take hold as yet another salvo sliced through the tissue-thin sides of the liner and exploded deep in its heart. One of these blew up in the engine room, completely destroying the dynamos, and this was the blow that effectively carried into execution Kennedy’s sentence of death. With the dynamos gone, the electricity supply was destroyed: and the shell hoists from the magazines were worked by electricity.

Kennedy, still fighting with his wrecked ship, from the twisted wreckage that was all that was left of his bridge, issued instructions that every available member of the crew should assist in manhandling shells up from the magazines and rolling them across the heaving, shell-swept deck towards those guns that still kept firing: there were only five left now.

That exposed deck of the Rawalpindi, raked by screaming shrapnel and jagged twisted steel, became a blood-soaked abattoir for those who fought to reach the empty breeches of the waiting guns. Some carriers were killed outright, and their shells rolled from side to side with the movement of the ship, through the ever-growing flames and over deck-plates beginning to glow dull red from the heat of the internal fires. Other men were wounded, but ignored their agony: one incredibly gallant man, both legs smashed, wounded to death, and with a shell clutched in his one sound arm, dragged his way along the deck, groping blindly for the breech of the gun that he could not see, swearing that he would get them yet.

The battle was grotesquely one-sided. Shells still crashed into the dying Rawalpindi and the end could not be long delayed. Loose ammunition was falling into the fires and exploding far beneath. The entire ship, excepting only the poop and fo’c’sle, was a leaping, twisting map of flame. One by one the guns fell silent, as the enemy destroyed them, as the crews died beside them and the supply of ammunition, cut off by walls of flame, finally stopped altogether.

As a fighting unit the Rawalpindi was finished, beaten into silence and submission, all but dead in the water. But the sixty year-old Captain Kennedy was a man who was literally incapable of conceiving of the idea of defeat. He left his shattered bridge, groped through the blazing ruins of the superstructure and along the deck towards the poop: if he could only drop some smoke floats, he thought, he might still sail the Rawalpindi to safety. His ship was holed and sinking, damaged beyond help or repair and visibly dying: his guns were gone, his crew was decimated, but still he fought for survival. Such indomitable courage, such unyielding tenacity of purpose when all reason for purpose has long since vanished lies barely within the realms of comprehension.

Captain Kennedy vanished into the smoke and the flame, and died.

He was not long survived by his ship or by all except a tragic minority of the crew that had so magnificently served both himself and the Rawalpindi. Another shell from the Scharnhorst brought the coup de grace—a tremendous roar and a column of white flame lancing high into the gathering gloom of the evening as the erupting main magazine blew out through the sides and deck and burning superstructure and almost severed the Rawalpindi in two.

The guns of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau fell silent: every salvo now could only be so much wasted ammunition. For the handful of men still left alive aboard the Rawalpindi nothing could be achieved by remaining where they were but a death swifter and even more certain than that offered by the ice-cold waters slowly climbing up the rent and gaping sides of the sinking ship.

Miraculously, almost, two of the lifeboats had survived the ferocity of the Germans’ shells, and those few men—twenty-seven in all—who were able, slid down the falls and pulled desperately away from the blazing Rawalpindi: at any moment an explosion might reach out and destroy them, or destroy the ship and pull them after it as it sunk swiftly down to the deep floor of the ocean.

These men, picked up by the German ships, were the only survivors apart from a handful rescued the following morning. Most of the others had been killed by shell-fire, burnt to death or trapped below decks and drowned in the rising waters. Some men who could not reach the lifeboats, jumped into the sea, searching frantically for broken bits of boats, oars, wreckage, anything that would offer even a passing moment’s security before the numbing cold struck deep and their hearts just stopped beating. And many there were, scattered here and there over the decks and in passages and compartments below, too desperately wounded either to move or to call out, who just sat or lay waiting quietly for the end, for the blessing of the freezing waters that would bring swift release from their agonies.

Two hundred and forty men went down with the Rawalpindi, and, in light of the fanatical courage with which they had served both their ship and their commander, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to think that some of those who were still alive when the waters closed over them at 8 o’clock that evening may have derived no little consolation from the thought that if they had to go down with their ship, they could have asked no greater privilege than to do so in the incomparable company of Captain Edward Kennedy.





The Sinking of the Bismarck (#ulink_381d0a38-6d16-56a1-ae31-43e8b354a1c7)

PART ONE


Far south of the Arctic Circle, along the great trade routes of the Atlantic, westerly gales die away to a whisper and then the warm sun shines on the long gentle swells. Far to the north, in the numbing cold of the Barents Sea, stretch away the immense reaches of an almost miraculous calm, the sea milk-white from horizon to unbroken horizon for day after endless day. But between these two vast areas, along the belt of the Arctic Circle itself, lie the most bitter seas in the world: and no part of it more bitter, more hostile to man and the puny ships that carry him across the savagery of its galetorn waters than that narrow stretch of ocean between Iceland and Greenland that men call the Denmark Strait.

From the far-ranging Vikings of a thousand years ago to the time of the modern Icelandic fishermen, ships have sailed through this narrow passage, but they sailed always at their peril, only when necessity dictated, and they never lingered long, never a moment more than they had to. No man, no ship, has ever waited there from choice, but, at rare intervals, some few men and ships have had to do it from necessity; just seventeen years ago this month, two ships, with the hundreds of men aboard them, were just coming to the end of the longest vigil man has ever kept on these dark and dangerous waters.

The ships’ companies of His Majesty’s Cruisers Suffolk and Norfolk were tired, tired to the point of exhaustion. They had kept their vigil far too long. Even one winter’s day in the Denmark Strait, with twenty hours of impenetrable darkness, driving snow, a sub-zero wind knifing off Greenland’s barren ice-cap and the ship rolling and plunging steeply, sickeningly, incessantly, is a lifetime in itself, a nightmare that has no ending. And the Norfolk and the Suffolk had been there for months on end, had been there all through the grim winter of 1940 and the spring of 1941, suffering incredible hardships of cold and discomfort, always watching, always waiting. The strain of watching never ceased, the tension of waiting never ended.

But now summer, or what passes there for summer, had come to the Denmark Strait, and the struggle merely to exist was no longer an all-exclusive preoccupation. True, the cold still struck deep through the layered Arctic clothing, the packice stretching out from the shores of Greenland was only a mile or two away and the rolling fog banks to the east, off the Icelandic coast, no further distant, but at least the sea was calm, the snow held off and the darkness of the long winter night was gone. Halcyon conditions, almost, compared to those they had so recently known: even so, the strain was now infinitely greater than anything that had ever gone before, the tension bow-tautened almost to breaking point.

At that moment, just after 7 o’clock on the evening of 23 May, 1941, the strain, the tension bore most heavily on one man and one man alone—Captain R. M. Ellis, on the bridge of his cruiser Suffolk. He had been there, on his bridge, for two days now without a break, he might be there as long again, even longer, but it was impossible that he relax his unceasing vigilance, even for a moment. Too much depended on him. He was not the senior officer in the area: Rear-Admiral Wake-Walker was in his flagship, the Norfolk, but the Norfolk, though not far away, was safely hidden in the swirling fog. The ultimate responsibility was that of Captain Ellis, and it was a crushing responsibility. He could fail in what he had to do, he could all too easily fail through no fault of his own, but the disastrous consequences of any such failure were not for contemplation. Britain had already suffered and lost too much: one more defeat, one more blunder and the war could well be lost.

The war was in its twentieth month then, and Britain was alone and fighting for its life. Twenty dark, gloomy and tragic months, a gloom only momentarily lifted by the shining courage of the young pilots who had destroyed the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, but now the road ahead was more dark, more hopeless than ever before, and no light at the end of it.

The Wehrmacht’s panzer divisions were waiting, the threat of invasion still a Damoclean sword. We had just been driven ignominiously out of Greece. In that very week, Goering’s Eleventh Air Corps, whom Churchill called the flame of the German Army, had launched a ruthless and overwhelming attack on our forces in Crete, and the end was only a matter of brief time. Six million tons of shipping had been lost at sea, 650,000 tons in that April alone, the blackest month of the war, and May might prove even more terrible still, for at the moment when Captain Ellis was patrolling north-east and south-west through that narrow lane of clear water between the Greenland ice and the Icelandic fogs, there were no fewer than ten major freight convoys and one large and vital troop convoy, far scattered and for the most part only thinly protected, sailing over the face of the broad Atlantic.

And what part, people were asking bitterly, was Britain’s mighty Home Fleet playing in all this. Our first line of defence, our last hope in the darkest hour, why wasn’t it throwing all its great weight into these life and death battles? Why wasn’t it patrolling the North Sea and the English Channel (where the Stukas and the Heinkels could have destroyed it between dawn and sunset on any given day) ready to smash any cross-Channel invasion? Why hadn’t it helped in the evacuation of Greece? Why wasn’t it north of Crete, breaking up the seaborne reinforcements without whom Goering’s paratroopers could not hope to complete their conquests? Why wasn’t it at sea, bringing its great guns to bear for the protection of these threatened convoys in the submarine infested waters to the west? Why was it lying idle, powerless and useless, in its retreat in Scapa Flow? Why, why, why?




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