Convoy Read online

  The last time he had walked across the top of Whitehall and under Admiralty Arch into the Mall – the other way, rather, because they were all going to Charing Cross Station to catch the Dover train – had been with Clifton and Jeffries, and both of them had been killed within a few weeks. Clifton was lost in a corvette; Jeffries had been commanding his own flotilla of MTBs out of Felixstowe but was late back from one night patrol when several German fighters caught him after dawn somewhere off Smith’s Knoll. Although his riddled boat managed to get back without her petrol tanks exploding, she was, they said, like a seagoing hearse.

  Salute, salute, salute…rarely ten paces without a salute. The Poles seemed most frequent and were a smart crowd; even the privates had taken their battledress jackets to decent tailors for a good fit. All the American soldiers looked like officers and even the lowliest private, obviously freshly arrived in Britain, the hayseed still in his crew-cut hair, seemed to have two or three medal ribbons, although from what he had heard they received medals where the British would have been lucky to get an arm badge – marksman, and so on; even a medal for being in Britain, which they considered a war zone. Judging from the sandbagged doorways, signs pointing towards air-raid shelters, boarded-up windows and bombed buildings, perhaps they were right.

  Even the pigeons had a military gait, perhaps more Nazi than Allied; strutting, almost goose-stepping, and always beady-eyed, like Guards drill sergeants or Navy gunnery instructors. All that each one lacked was a respirator slung over the shoulder; a standard Service-issue one but with stiff cardboard or plywood inside, front and back, to make the bag square, in the best Guards style. Guards? Put a telescope under a wing and each pigeon was a strutting midshipman or flag lieutenant on the quarterdeck as the admiral loomed in sight. They were blasé about bangs, too; a taxi backfiring a few yards from one group of a dozen put up only a single bird which fluttered a yard or so and then, Yorke was sure, looked ashamed as it strutted back.

  Under Admiralty Arch, with the ammonia whiff of the pigeons who lived up there, and then he could see Buckingham Palace sitting at the far end of the Mall, four-square and reassuring, the double row of trees stark now, stripped of leaves for the winter. The Palace was in fact the symbol of yet another family who weren’t moving out because of the Ted bombers. And there, just inside the Arch and beyond the bronze statue of Captain Cook, was the ‘Gingerbread’, officially the Citadel, the huge brown concrete box, nearly new and housing, many feet below ground, the operational heart of the Royal Navy. Down there officers juggled with markers and charts and sent fleets to sea or tracked Ted U-boats as they converged on some convoy unlucky enough to have been spotted by Focke-Wulf Condors, or seen by a single U-boat which raised the alarm…

  Yorke walked into the entrance and explained his business to the ancient messenger sitting in the booth just inside the door.

  ‘ASIU, sir? Any particular person? Captain Watts? If you’ll just wait a moment, sir, and fill in this form?’

  While Yorke wrote in the details, the messenger spoke on the telephone, and by the time he had put it down and torn off the top sheet of the form another and slightly younger messenger, like the first one obviously a retired former petty officer, was waiting.

  ‘Take this gentleman to Captain Watts in ASIU, Room 103.’

  Yorke followed the messenger, whose row of medals included most of the last war.

  ‘Submarines, sir?’

  ‘No, destroyers.’

  ‘Sorry, sir, ’ope you didn’t mind me asking. Most of the gentlemen calling on Captain Watts is submariners.’

  ‘I expect you know them?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the messenger said, turning to grin at Yorke. ‘Joined me first boat in ’17, took me pension in ’38. Wouldn’t let me sign on again on account o’ m’eart. Give me a pension and this job.’

  ‘You saw some changes between the wars.’

  By now they had turned off the corridor of the old building with its marble mosaic floor and gone through thick steel and concrete doors into the Citadel itself, with its faint hum which Yorke assumed was a form of air conditioning.

  ‘Yes, sir. You never saw the M class, I suppose?’

  ‘Only three built, surely? One had a big gun – twelve inch, wasn’t it? And another carried a seaplane in a tiny hangar…’

  ‘That’s ’em, sir. Big boats all right. I was in M 2. Ah, here we are.’

  Captain Henry Watts looked as if he had been lifted straight out of a Noel Coward war film and put behind a desk: he had the build of a rugby player, black wavy hair and features that were only just a little too heavy to be handsome in the film-star style. Two ribbons on his left breast showed that although Watts might enjoy his pink gins at the Senior, he had been put in charge of ASIU to do a proper job, not because the Admiralty were trying to find him employment. Next to the DSO was the ribbon of the DSC, and Yorke knew that Captain Henry Watts, DSO, DSC, was one of the most successful destroyer flotilla commanders in the Navy, who was himself credited with sinking four U-boats.

  He shook Yorke by the hand: ‘Welcome to ASIU. How does the job appeal to you?’

  Watts spoke briskly and clearly was not a man to waste words. Yorke saw no reason to dissemble.

  ‘I don’t know anything about it, sir – not even what the initials mean – but I’d prefer to go back to sea.’

  ‘That makes two of us, but Their Lordships in their infinite wisdom think we can outwit the crafty Jerries in their submersible sausage machines by using our brains, instead of just hurling depth charges at them. Not so noisy. And ASIU stands for “Anti-Submarine Intelligence Unit”. It was formed six weeks ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve got stuck with me, sir; I’m not much good on anti-submarine work. Not the theory, anyway.’

  ‘I didn’t get stuck with you,’ Watts said, ‘I asked for you. Lesson number one for success, my lad, is never get stuck with people you don’t want because they’ll sink you. I want a good crew, but don’t think you’ll get back to sea by making a balls of it here; my failures will get happy jobs like deputy assistant NOIC in Massawa with the temperature 110° in the shade on a cold day.’

  ‘I can make a good pot of tea,’ Yorke said.

  ‘That’ll be useful because since we’ve only been in existence six weeks, all we’ve got so far is a Wren, kettle, teapot and some black-market tea. I’m still fighting to get typewriters and files. If you’re wondering what we’re supposed to be doing I’ll quote from Mr Churchill’s memorandum creating us and dated two months ago. The original is locked in someone’s safe, but he ordered the First Sea Lord to form “a group of specially skilled young sea officers who will devise new and cunning methods of outwitting Admiral Doenitz by detecting and destroying his U-boats”.’

  ‘New and cunning?’

  ‘Their Lordships would settle for old and crude, providing we sink the bloody Jerries. Oh, I see what you mean. No, we’re not expected to invent new weapons – we leave that to the Underwater Weapons boys. No, Their Lordships assume the Boss had tactics in mind. And having seen from the bridge of a destroyer and from this desk the pathetic tactical methods we rely on, while I run this shop it’s going to be tactics and intelligence that we’re buying and selling.’

  ‘You mean the mathematics of attacks, sir?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, how many depth charges to ensure destroying a U-boat within a given area; the most effective patterns; the sinking rate of depth charges…’

  ‘Christ, no! All that’s supposed to have been worked out by the boffins before the war began – slide-rule stuff; quite beyond me. No, as I see it our job is just to out-think these buggers. Out-think Doenitz and out-think Oberleutnant Hermann Schmidt who is just doing his first trip in command of one of Hitler’s latest boats. Use any intelligence we can get that lets us build up a picture of Doenitz’s m
ethods.’

  Yorke had instinctively leaned forward: whether or not Their Lordships, otherwise the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, let Watts run ASIU as he wanted, the job would be interesting while Watts lasted.

  ‘How does it interest you?’ Watts demanded unexpectedly, as if reading his thoughts.

  ‘The out-thinking bit sounds interesting, but I’ve no real anti-submarine experience.’

  ‘Let’s call it outwitting the bastards: “out-thinking” sounds a bit pretentious. “Outfox” is even better. But don’t make any mistake, my lad; we haven’t much time to find answers; the outfoxing has to start yesterday. We’re in trouble, in case you didn’t know.’

  ‘I saw some leaflets a few weeks ago, dropped by Goering’s boys. Seems we’re losing the Battle of the Atlantic.’

  ‘Don’t make any mistake about that,’ Watts said sharply, ‘we are. I don’t have to remind you about the Official Secrets Act, but what I’m going to tell you now explains why ASIU has been formed and why we have to get cracking. In the first full year of the war, 1940, we lost four million tons of shipping. Four million, remember that figure.

  ‘On the German side they can claim they had not yet perfected attack methods; on our side we can say we hadn’t got the convoy system sorted out. So let’s look at the next year’s figures. Well, in 1941 we lost four million tons, the same as 1940. So you could say it was a sort of stalemate, the Germans not improving their attack methods, we not improving the convoy system.

  ‘Now we come to this year, or rather the eleven months that have passed so far. We’ll have lost eight million tons by Christmas. Double last year’s and more than 650,000 tons a month.’

  ‘How many boats do we reckon Doenitz has in service?’

  ‘He started off the war with about sixty, according to the Intelligence boys. Now he has about four hundred, as far as we can tell – by inspired guesswork, air reconnaissance of the building yards, and intelligence work, mainly breaking ciphers. Four hundred boats means a hundred actually patrolling on the convoy routes, quite apart from those on their way there and back, and being refitted.’

  ‘Mostly operating in packs, sir?’

  ‘No, they seem to search alone. Then, as soon as a boat sights a convoy it signals U-boat headquarters at Lorient to drum up business and they blow the whistle and Doenitz assembles enough nearby boats to form a pack.’

  ‘We can DF the first U-boat’s transmission?’

  ‘Oh yes, usually we know the moment a particular convoy has been sighted, but that doesn’t help much. Take SL 125 coming home from Freetown last month. Spotted off Madeira, Doenitz assembled a pack of nine boats and attacked every night for a week. Escort three or four corvettes, thirteen merchant ships lost. The worst non-Russian one so far – but probably not for long. We just don’t have the escorts, and corvettes are beaten by really bad weather. They can stay at sea but they can’t attack. I’m just waiting for the SL 125 boys to get in to have a chat with them.’

  ‘Where do we start, sir?’

  ‘Well, the rest of my lads have already made a start, but they haven’t got very far yet.’ He stood up and headed for the door. ‘Come and meet the rest of the family.’

  The family, as Watts always called his staff, comprised two lieutenant commanders and four lieutenants, six officers sharing five DSCs, one DSO and four mentions in dispatches, and not one of them physically complete: all had been wounded and would normally have been invalided and given a pension, but in wartime their knowledge and experience made them too valuable to lose. Three wore the straight gold bands on their sleeves showing they were regular Navy; the other three wore the wavy bands that Watts called ‘the sine wave’ Navy.

  The room they worked in was small, the upper part of the walls lined with piping and ducting, like the cabin of a ship, carrying hot water, cold water, sewage, air conditioning and electrical wiring. It would save time and effort, Yorke thought sourly, if they ran a tea pipe into each room, collecting coupons once a month. Dark cream walls with dark green at the bottom, the room was an improbable cross between the cabin of a ship and a school classroom.

  The three regulars Yorke remembered from Dartmouth; the RNVR lieutenants were strangers. All but one of the six had one thing in common – they had been serving in escort destroyers, chasing U-boats, until wounds had put them on shore. The sixth man had been serving in submarines; his last boat had sunk eight ships. Now, as Watts said in his breezy introduction, the poached, rather than the poachers, were turning gamekeepers, and Yorke was the seventh and last that Their Lordships would allow ASIU.

  Each of the six, Watts explained, was specializing in a particular aspect of sub-hunting. One of the lieutenant commanders was working on convoy attacks by single submarines, the other on pack attacks. A lieutenant was investigating U-boat attacks on single ships – those merchantmen which could maintain fifteen knots or more and often sailed alone. The fourth man was a signals expert – Watts said jokingly that he was also good at repairing torches or radios, but rather expensive – and was by now one of the Admiralty’s experts on the German Navy’s radio procedure and responsible for the evaluation of much of the U-boat HQ’s intercepted orders to its boats and their reports back.

  The fifth man, whose desk was beside a large table on which an unusual-looking chart of the Atlantic was unrolled, with the Channel, North Sea and the waters up to the North Cape of Norway included, was introduced by Watts as ‘the Croupier’.

  ‘He’s supposed to keep track of every U-boat from before it sails. He cheats at times by cribbing from the Operational Intelligence Centre and the trade plot.’

  ‘Why keep several plots going?’ Yorke asked.

  The Croupier pointed at the chart of the North Atlantic and Yorke realized that it was heavily-gridded and, with a gothic style typography that looked German, had numbers and letters of the alphabet forming the horizontal and vertical sides, not the degrees and minutes of latitude and longitude. The whole chart was crisscrossed with thin lines drawn in with coloured pencils.

  ‘Trends, habits, systems, methods…’ the Croupier explained. ‘We track the boats on their way out to their operational areas and we track ’em back. Or we try to. Some of the coloured lines represent only two aircraft sightings of a U-boat and a report from some bloke in the Resistance standing on a cliff near Lorient watching the boat come back or leave.’

  ‘The chart?’

  ‘German – we captured it. Very secret, too; they still use the same co-ordinates in W/T traffic.’

  ‘You’re hoping to find a pattern?’

  ‘Yep: patterns or habits. Everyone develops habits, but not just captains or boats. I’m watching to see if and when Doenitz’s operations boys start sending out the boats on regular routes – or fetching ’em back.’

  ‘Any luck?’

  The Croupier shrugged his shoulders and looked up at Captain Watts. ‘I call it deduction and the Director calls it luck; but we’ve jumped a few when we could cadge a Coastal Command plane, or beg a couple of frigates. Easier on their way home because we’ve usually identified them by then and found out if we know any of the CO’s quirks. I’ve a file on those captains we know. But homeward-bound means they’ve also done the damage, too. Harder to spot ’em on the way out – usually they keep radio silence now until they’re well out in the Atlantic and sight something.’

  The sixth man in the ASIU’s team, wearing the ribbon of a DSO and the tiny bronze oak leaf of mention in dispatches, was the submariner, a regular whom Yorke remembered from Dartmouth days. His jerky movements and the nervous twitch of his head betrayed the months of tension that made up a submariner’s life in the Mediterranean and caused the tic.

  Watts called him ‘Jemmy’ but Yorke was not sure if it was a play on ‘Jemmy Twitcher’, the nickname of the Earl of Sandwich who was First Lord of the Admiralty in the days of Sa
muel Pepys, or the character in The Beggar’s Opera.

  ‘Jemmy,’ Watts said, ‘is our fake Jerry. He’s supposed to dream up ways of attacking our convoys by using and beating our zigzag diagrams. He’s a bit of a mathematician, and when a convoy zigs he tries – at nine knots or so – to get to the zag point so he can attack, fire a few fish and dive deeper below a convenient layer of cold water so that the escort’s Asdics bounce off.’

  ‘What’s the object of the exercise?’ Yorke asked. ‘Improve our zigzag diagrams or improve our methods of attacking the attacker?’

  ‘Both,’ Jemmy said, giving a violent spasm that seemed likely to dislocate his neck. Yorke was wondering whether to look him in the face or look away when the lieutenant said matter-of-factly, ‘Ignore this bloody tic. I knocked myself cold with it last week. I was standing with my back to a brick wall and gave such a monumental twitch that I bashed my head and woke up flat on my face on the pavement. Two agitated old trouts were kneeling beside me trying to wrestle the top off a bottle of smelling salts that one of them had in her handbag.’

  ‘Tell the rest of the story,’ Watts said.

  Jemmy grinned. ‘Well, I sat up with my head throbbing and the old trout who owned the smelling salts suddenly began to feel faint, so I had to wrestle the stopper off the bottle and give her a whiff or two to get her back on her pins.’

  ‘If Hitler knew the diabolical cunning and intrepidity of his enemy,’ Watts said in imitation of Churchill’s rolling tones, ‘he’d surrender tomorrow.’

  ‘In the meantime we have to get through today,’ said Jemmy, ‘and I’m getting some good leads on six boats trying to form a pack ahead of QB 173, which is eight days out of Halifax.’

  ‘Is that a Clyde or Liverpool convoy?’ Watts asked.

  ‘Clyde,’ Jemmy said, ‘if it ever gets that far. Doenitz has put Kohler in command of this pack, and he’s good. He usually outguesses the zigzag diagrams.’

  Watts took Yorke by the elbow, pointing to the vacant and well-worn desk in the far corner of the room. ‘This is your berth. Every one of these pipes,’ he pointed to the wall, ‘gurgle, belch and fart at irregular intervals. Unnerving at first; but useful as an alarm clock if you doze off. Dozing is not encouraged in ASIU; we’re supposed to stay wide awake to fight the King’s enemies.’