Convoy Read online

  Yorke raised his eyebrows. ‘And my role in this unremitting battle, sir?’

  ‘Ah yes, your job. Well, first of all don’t let those pipes get you down. At first Jemmy was inclined to bellow “Dive, dive, dive!” when they gurgled and vibrated, but he’s settled down. Well, your job is to apply your unsullied young mind to a very new problem which so far has defeated the rest of these dumb buggers. They don’t admit defeat, of course; they simply write me brief memos each day which I assume say they are too busy on their own problems to tackle this one. I don’t read the memos, you understand. My tame Wren secretary tells me they simply retype the last one with the new date on it, using the same split infinitives.’

  ‘And my job, sir?’ Yorke reminded him.

  ‘Hmm…well, it’s something which has equal priority with what these chaps are doing, but we’ve only just discovered it. You have to read all the dockets and pick the brains of the others (and use your own, too) and then come up with a convincing explanation of how, without any warning whatsoever, a U-boat can torpedo our ships from inside the convoy. No one knows how he avoids the escorts and gets into the middle, nor how he gets out again. But at the moment it’s the Germans’ latest trump card. It’s a new card and one which so far is a winner. The others will tell you how to get up the papers on the attacks so far from Records. If you drop a neatly typed solution into my In-tray in a week’s time, I’ll see you get a bottle of gin in yours. But I warn you, if you listen to these fellows you’ll end up blaming voodoo, poltergeists, Wagner, the Indian rope trick, the Stewards of the Jockey Club or the Ministry of Fuel and Power. I can assure you,’ Watts said with a straight face, ‘they’ve all been investigated by NID and cleared of any complicity.’

  Chapter Five

  Staying at his own home in Palace Street and working at the Admiralty should have been a young naval officer’s dream, with a pleasant walk to the end of the street, a right turn into Buckingham Palace Road, passing the Palace on the left, and making the big decision of the day – whether to walk through the trees and bushes of St James’s Park or along the Mall itself.

  He usually chose the Mall and often let his mind slip back a few centuries as he walked. The park had once been a marsh, and Henry VIII had drained it to make it into a deer park beside his new palace of St James’s. And as Yorke walked towards Admiralty Arch he often imagined the lonely Charles I almost three hundred years earlier taking his last walk across his path, under guard and bound from St James’s Palace to his execution in Whitehall.

  Slipping back in time was not difficult for Yorke: he might be dressed up in the modern uniform of a lieutenant, Royal Navy, gloves in hand, respirator over the shoulder, shoes polished and heels clicking on the paving stones along the great boulevard of the Mall, with its double row of trees, or more quietly among the paths of the park, but on several mornings there was a smell of smoke, as though bonfires had been burning among the trees, autumnal and making one think of charcoal burners at work in past centuries, when coal was an expensive luxury.

  Only it was London that was burning now, not charcoal. The night’s bombing usually left enough blazing buildings for the reek of smoke and charred wood to last long after dawn. Occasionally, as he skirted the Queen Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, he could see the individual fires linked by a smoky haze, and occasionally a big blaze nearby which had gone out of control still billowing smoke like a destroyer laying a screen.

  On his first day’s walk to the Admiralty he found the Mall roped off, with an Army lorry with red mudguards parked nearby – a bomb had landed halfway along it. ‘Don’t know if it’s a delayed-action job or a dud, sir,’ the steel-helmeted police constable explained. ‘Won’t do much damage even if it does go off, and the bomb disposal lads are busy.’

  On the third day, after a night’s raid, he chose the Park route and found that forty or fifty incendiary bombs had landed on the green grass and only a few – those which had glanced off trees – had ignited: the rest had landed on ground which must have been too soft to set off the impact fuses, and they stuck up vertically a few inches above the ground, their fins painted green, slightly darker than the grass, and the bombs even smaller than the cardboard tubes used to protect calendars and other such things when sent through the post. One of the ancient park attendants was walking among the trees, stabbing pieces of paper with a stick which had a nail protruding from the end. As he removed a piece of paper and stuffed it into the big bag slung over his shoulder he saw Yorke looking at the incendiary bombs.

  ‘Look like ’eads of celery, don’t they? Make yer think they oughter be earthed up!’

  York nodded towards a blackened patch of earth at the foot of a tree where one of the bombs had burned.

  ‘Yus, they burn bloody ’ot, and no mistake. They say it’s haluminium hoxide. Still, only scorched one side of the bark and the grass’ll grow again.’

  ‘Best place for them to land,’ Yorke commented. ‘The earth must be soft there from all the rain.’

  ‘Yus. Not like the two that hit our ’ouse.’

  Yorke knew that a man needed to tell his bomb story again sometimes, and, although this old chap must be over seventy, he spoke with a mixture of pride and modesty, as if referring to winning the darts championship at his local pub.

  ‘Yus, we got two. One ledged in a beam in the attic, the other landed in the lavatory pan. We ’ad a stirrup pump and a couple of buckets of sand, but me and the old lady couldn’t do much – she gets the screws in ’er back somefing chroninc. So up it all went. Lived there forty-three years we did, ever since we was married. Mum wasn’t arf mad, I can tell you, sir. We’re living with the married daughter now–’er hubby’s gone for a sojer, the London Scottish, and she’s glad of the company, and the extra money and coupons ’elps with the ’ousekeeping.’

  Yorke chatted for a few minutes. The old man needed no sympathy; the loss of his home after forty-three years, with the mortgage long since paid off, did not worry him: he and mum were alive to tell the tale, and all he asked was an occasional sympathetic listener.

  As he walked the last hundred yards to the Citadel, reminded by its shape from this angle of desert forts and half expecting to see a French Foreign Legion camel patrol trotting out of a hidden gateway to meet the lurking Tuaregs, Yorke was thankful that the filters in the air conditioning, intended to take out any poison gas, would also remove the stench of charred wood and smoke which, from the wind direction, must be from some gutted building at the St James’s Palace end of Pall Mall.

  ‘London Bridge is falling down’… The old nursery rhyme came back to him. London was enormous; it might take fifty years of nights for the Ted bombers to flatten it, but only five years would reduce it to a city without character. Nelson’s Column, the old Banqueting Hall, Somerset House, the Admiralty and Horse Guards buildings in Whitehall, Downing Street, St Margaret’s, and the Abbey…these still stood. Parliament was damaged – the Commons, anyway – but Big Ben was there. St Paul’s remained amid flattened office buildings: one could really see it for the first time: he hoped that when peace came the City Fathers would prevent crude property profiteers building new and ugly office blocks to hide it once again. But all over London, in quiet squares and busy streets, the Queen Anne, Georgian and Regency houses were being smashed down by high-explosive bombs or gutted by incendiaries, although ironically some of the modern monstrosities like the Lever building, Adelphi and Savoy seemed to have a charmed life, their very ugliness apparently making them bombproof.

  Would London eventually become a shell inhabited only by starving starlings and pigeons? How did a U-boat get into the centre of a convoy without being picked up by Asdic? The two questions were related.

  Jemmy was already at work with parallel rules, protractor and dividers, plotting a particular zigzag diagram on the back of an old chart. Like all such diagrams the long legs and short legs, th
e zigs and the zags, were so designed that after a set distance on each one the convoy would at the end of a certain time be back in a position it would have reached had it steered a direct course.

  Jemmy’s ‘Good morning, Ned,’ was half-strangled by a twitch but he was in a good humour. ‘Just look at this bloody diagram!’ he said cheerfully. ‘The man who designed it must be a traitor in the pay of the Kriegsmarine. Look – you get ahead of the convoy or find it coming towards you, so you park your U-boat either here or there.’ He pointed to two red crosses he had drawn in. ‘Now, no matter which zig or zag come up next, it takes the convoy within a mile one side or other of you. A browning shot into the middle of the covey from all the forward tubes and dive deep… God, if only the Teds had sailed Mediterranean convoys using this diagram…’

  Teds, Yorke thought to himself; the one word that showed a man had served in the Mediterranean, or anyway near the Italians. ‘What do you do now?’ he asked curiously.

  ‘Show it to Uncle,’ Jemmy said, waving towards Captain Watts’ office. ‘Then he’ll go and raise hell with someone in Trade Division and then escort commanders and convoy commodores will be told not to use this particular diagram. My third double-top, incidentally.’

  ‘Third what?’

  ‘Third diagram that I’ve shown leads the convoy right into the wolf’s arm, or legs, or jaws.’

  ‘Mr Zig or Mr Zag is going to end up hating you.’

  Jemmy shrugged his shoulders and gave another twitch. ‘The buggers ought to be jailed. That’s the trouble with the Admiralty and the Civil Service. No one ever gets a real kick in the backside. He can kill a hundred men and all he’ll get is a “displeasure” letter from Their Lordships. My last CO had twenty-three of them framed and hung up in his lavatory. He also had a VC, DSO and a DSC, plus five mentions. But the fool who designed these three diagrams – if anyone does anything about it, which is unlikely – won’t get a kick: no, he’ll be told to draw up three more diagrams to replace ’em. The brotherhood will cover up.’

  ‘The brotherhood isn’t as bad as that!’ Yorke exclaimed.

  ‘It’s worse,’ Jemmy said quietly. ‘Every bloody profession – trade, too, probably – has its own brotherhood. The Navy, the Admiralty civilians, the brown jobs in the War House, lawyers, accountants… Same with the Civil Service. Look how they refused to let Wrens work here until recently. “A civilian establishment” – Christ, don’t the Civil Service Union know there’s war on? Have you ever heard of an incompetent doctor being jailed for killing a patient by negligence? Or a lawyer made to pay his client damages for ruining his case? Or a firm of accountants struck off for giving wrong advice and ruining a client’s business?’

  The lieutenant’s face was white now with perspiration which was breaking out along his upper lip and his brow just below the hair line, and Yorke realized he must have seen some great injustice done – or perhaps he knew of too many mistakes that sank merchant ships and drowned men in the winter wastes of the North Atlantic.

  ‘The aristocrats of impregnability,’ Jemmy continued, ‘are the highest permanent civil servants in a ministry. They are the safest – they can gang up on a minister, but no one can gang up on them: they can’t be sacked – unless they’re pinched on a criminal charge – and all they need do is sit still, avoiding decisions, supping their char (in better quality cups as they get promotion), and then collect their pension. The temporary civil servants come next – the cream of the war dodgers, they are. What a future they have when the war ends!’

  ‘Don’t be so bitter at this time of the morning, Jemmy,’ Yorke said.

  ‘B-b-bitter!’ Jemmy stammered angrily. ‘I’m the only survivor from my last boat because of these bureaucratic buggers, and they gagged me at the court of inquiry. Too bloody secret to be talked about, so the president said. I was so angry they ordered a couple of Marines to march me out. Somehow Uncle heard about it and asked for me. Probably saved me from a court martial. Anyway, I got away with “an expression of Their Lordships’ displeasure”.’

  ‘The first of your collection?’

  ‘Yes. Uncle paid to have it framed by a Bond Street firm and gave it to me as a present. We had a formal presentation last month. Christ, it was a riot: he sent invitations to the Board Secretary, all the Board Members (including the Civil Lord) and that fellow Aneurin Bevan – who didn’t come, incidentally. He’d have had a fit if he’d known what he was missing!’

  ‘But Uncle…’ Yorke said lamely. ‘It’s a wonder they didn’t make him naval-officer-in-charge, Freetown, or Aden, or even liaison officer with the Russians in Archangel!’

  ‘They daren’t,’ Jemmy said, cheering up. ‘For a start he’s brilliant and Winston knows it: Uncle is under orders to trot along to Winston once a month to report direct, with copies to the Board. When the First Sea Lord, old Dudley Pound Cake, made a moan about my presentation, Uncle said he was concerned that the gravity of the affair should be brought home to me, hence the ceremony!’

  ‘Uncle must be quite a lad!’

  ‘Uncle is quite a lad. Either he’s a future First Sea Lord, or he’ll be pensioned off the moment Winston stops being the PM. There’s no in-between. If you want a cuppa, incidentally, Uncle’s Wren secretary arranges it. She’s mine, by the way.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Yorke said, remembering the girl with honey-coloured hair and a ready smile.

  ‘I just thought I’d mention it.’

  Yorke grinned and saluted: ‘You may safely dive to periscope depth.’

  The folders sent up from Records and now stored in the safe comprised a pile of eleven dockets, each one of which contained all that was known of eleven convoys attacked by single U-boats which suddenly appeared in the middle, undetected by the escorts.

  Yorke spent the morning skimming through them all before carefully reading the first one, which was outward-bound. There seemed to be no pattern in the attacks, no pattern in the times except that they were always at night. The advantage of Uncle’s arrangement of ASIU was that in one room were experts in many aspects of anti-submarine warfare, and after lunch Yorke sat on Jemmy’s desk, seeing if the submariner had any ideas.

  Jemmy, his face grim, put his hands flat on the desk and said in a low voice, ‘I’ve seen some of those dockets. What Uncle didn’t tell you, and I will now reveal for the good of your immortal soul, is that there’s been a colossal bog-up. The first of these attacks was more than a year ago. The first time the ASIU saw those reports was two weeks ago.

  ‘The trouble is simple. Over there, on your desk, you have eleven dockets; eleven folders containing all the reports about each of those eleven convoys. But let me assure you, that ain’t the way the Admiralty got them in the first place. Uncle is now fighting to get the system changed because he’s been to see the Air Ministry boys to find out how they get all the information out of hundreds of air crew after a big bombing raid. Not only get it, but get it within a few hours, sort it out and if necessary act on it. They have a system of “de-briefing” where everyone who flew in a raid is questioned immediately his plane lands by intelligence officers. They can spot any weakness in the Ted defences immediately, or any weakness in our own planes, as well as assessing the success of our bombing.

  ‘Well, my old mate, that’s not the way the Navy and Merchant Navy have been doing it where convoys are concerned… Take as an example a convoy from the UK to, say, West Africa. The senior officer of the escort sees the merchant ships into, say, Freetown, Sierra Leone. He writes his report, hands it in to the local port admiral, and eventually, whenever there’s a ship coming back to the UK, the report is forwarded to the Admiralty.’

  ‘But that could take weeks!’ Ned interrupted.

  ‘Exactly, my lad, and that’s why Jemmy is telling you this parable. The commodore of the convoy also writes his report and that wanders along “the usual channels”, from one
“In” basket to another. Losses, on the basis that bad news travels fast, get signalled to the Admiralty as soon as the convoy escort arrives at the destination. So already you have a separation of weeks between the Admiralty knowing that Convoy X lost Y ships, and then getting the SO’s report of what happened and eventually the commodore’s report. And here at the Admiralty the poor devils are swamped with paperwork, anyway.’

  ‘But hellfire, Jemmy, all this has cost dozens of ships and hundreds of lives,’ Ned said angrily.

  ‘Yes,’ Jemmy said quietly, ‘and that’s why, the minute that someone suspected there could be an “insider” – it was only an idle rumour; gossip at a club bar – all the papers were got together and bunged over to us. That was last week. This department isn’t yet six weeks old. Now you have all the dockets on your desk. All you have to do is find out what the Teds are up to, and write a memo to Uncle… Easy isn’t it…?’

  Suddenly Ned felt trapped; caught between his own knowledge of the sheer exhaustion of escort officers, and the demands of Admiralty planners. Equally suddenly he knew that Jemmy’s twitch would never be cured while he was doing his present job; he was driven on to find flaws and answers because he knew, from bitter experience, that men’s lives depended on his wits.

  You, Lieutenant Edward Yorke, he told himself, are caught up, too; you know the senior officer of an escort arrives at the convoy’s destination worn out with the actual voyage, but the minute the ship is anchored new orders arrive on board telling him to escort another convoy… No rest, no relaxation: the ship has to be fuelled and provisioned; men have to be given a few hours’ leave if possible; calls have to be made on port admirals; dozens of reports have to be written or checked and signed. Say that four ships were torpedoed – no SO wants to admit a U-boat managed to get through his screen, so probably he blurs the details in his report, never suspecting for a moment that the U-boat managed to get inside by some trick, rather than the SO’s faulty screen.