Convoy Read online

  If, Ned warned himself, it was a trick and not inefficiency. He looked down at Jemmy’s drawn face. Jemmy was ruthless – with himself and others. And, Ned realized, it was the only way. So start with Uncle: Uncle had said that ships were being torpedoed by U-boats that managed to get inside the convoys, implying it was by some new invention or a clever trick. But supposing it was simply that the SOs of eleven escorts had been inefficient, or that the whole system of convoy defence was badly organized, or… There were dozens of possibilities. He could only hope, he realized, that the answer was in those eleven dockets, the contents of which had been so tardily assembled.

  Delay, delay, delay… It had already killed so many men and lost so many ships, yet could anyone really be blamed? Could every escort commander’s report, and every commodore’s report, be sent by wireless to the Admiralty the moment a convoy arrived? Obviously not – the Admiralty’s entire wireless capacity would be swamped. And for most of the convoys arriving it would be unnecessary.

  He realized Jemmy was watching him.

  ‘Now you see you’ve got a problem,’ the submariner said without malice. ‘It’s easy to say that a complete report on every convoy should be sent to the Admiralty immediately on arrival – and there’s no reason why it isn’t when a convoy arrives in the UK – but how can it be done for the convoys arriving in Canada, the USA, West, South and East Africa, India, South America… Ned, my old mate, Uncle was wrong when he said you shouldn’t blame voodoo: it’s the only explanation I can think of.

  ‘I’ve seen some of the dockets,’ Jemmy continued, ‘but let’s go over it from the start. If I remember correctly the first that anyone in the convoy or escort knows is when one or two ships go up with a bang, often followed by others?’

  ‘Yes, with the torpedo always coming from somewhere inside the convoy.’

  ‘So there’s absolutely no doubt the Ted boat is in there among the merchant ships – actually inside the perimeter of the columns, in other words?’

  ‘None at all. Not in these eleven cases, anyway.’

  ‘You realize what this means, Ned?’

  ‘Well, there’s little or no chance of the escort detecting or attacking a U-boat which is actually inside the convoy: the heavy propeller and engine noises of the merchant ships themselves mask the U-boat, which is running silently on its batteries.’

  ‘Oh yes, we can take all that for granted,’ Jemmy said, ‘and it won’t matter a damn if the U-boat attacks submerged or on the surface. No, you’re missing the vital point, mate.’

  ‘Surface and tell me, then.’

  ‘Every one of the escorts must be deaf. A Ted boat did get into the middle of each of these convoys, and to do that he must have passed close to one or other of the escorts, but they heard nothing. Not a single return ping on a single Asdic…’

  ‘The Ted could have been down deep with motors stopped.’

  ‘Oh yes, but every time he had to be in exactly the right position so that the convoy’s next zig or zag brought it right over him, so he could surface in the middle. Bit of luck, eh?’

  ‘But you’ve just found a diagram…’

  ‘I know, but your nine convoys were all using different diagrams: different from each other and different from mine. I checked the numbers, and they didn’t include the three.’

  ‘So you don’t think a Ted boat could be lying in wait ahead for the convoy to pass over?’

  ‘No,’ Jemmy said bluntly. ‘At least, it could be but wasn’t in these cases. But let’s have another chat when you’ve gone through the rest of the dockets. Incidentally, you’re probably new to dockets,’ he added, a bitter note in his voice. ‘Don’t take any notice of the minutes written on them by various directors: most of them are just trying to impress each other with their wit, not win the bloody war at sea.’

  Yorke went back to his desk and reached for the second docket, a convoy from Freetown to Liverpool. Dozens of reports by everyone ranging from the escort commander to the skipper of an ocean-going tug that found a lifeboat from one of the torpedoed ships, full of dead men. He glanced at the dates. They had been written over a period of nine weeks; they had been received at the Admiralty one by one and up to three months later, so that no one ever read all the reports together, and that was the weakness – unavoidable, of course – of the system.

  Forty-two merchant ships had rendezvoused in the great almost landlocked bay at Freetown, ships from other ports on the west coast of Africa like Takoradi on the Gold Coast and the open anchorage of Accra, Lagos and Apapa, the twins on either side of the same river in Nigeria; and from Port Harcourt. Some of the ships had come from South America, crossing the South Atlantic in a small convoy.

  They had weighed anchor and then formed up outside Freetown, seven columns of six ships each, like chocolates in a box, with an ocean-going tug forming a little tail and steaming at the end of the fourth column. The tug was intended to be the rescue ship because no merchant ship was allowed to stop to pick up survivors from another which had just been torpedoed. The order had at first seemed harsh to the Merchant Navy – until it realized that when a pack of U-boats was attacking it was easy for a particular U-boat to torpedo a merchant ship and then stand by her as she sank, waiting for the next astern in the column to stop for the survivors – presenting another and perfect target, without the U-boat having to manoeuvre. Before the order was given, there were cases of three ships lying torpedoed within a hundred yards of each other, victims of the same U-boat.

  Yorke sat for a few minutes, staring unseeing at the badly typed reports but picturing the convoy forming up. All the ships would be painted grey, the famous ‘crab fat grey’, and many would be rusty, particularly those just arrived from the South American ports of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santos or Rio, and carrying cargoes from all three countries of meat, hides and wool. The meat ships with their refrigerated holds were usually modern-looking, but the rest of the convoy ranged from one of the new American ships to old coal-burning tramps, ancient enough to have been in convoys trying to dodge the Kaiser’s U-boats in the Great War. Coal-burners – a nightmare to escort commanders because from time to time they suddenly erupted black smoke from their funnels; one could imagine the bells ringing the stokehold to start the stokers shovelling and the smoke lifting over the horizon into the field of vision of a U-boat captain…

  The ships from along the west coast of Africa: they had come out with bombs, shells and small-arms ammunition in the holds and crated aircraft on deck, enormous rectangular boxes almost as high as the bridge, creating a frightening amount of windage in a gale. These planes, uncrated and assembled in West Africa, would fly diagonally across the great continent to join the RAF in Egypt. Now the ships were going back to the UK with an almost bewildering mixture of general cargoes – palm nuts to be made into margarine or soap, palm oil in those few dry cargo ships also fitted with tanks that could be heated (because the oil had to be kept at a certain temperature), dehydrated bananas (which looked like sunbaked dog droppings), copper, bauxite, cotton…

  With the exception of the Elder Dempster Line, which operated regularly in peacetime to West Africa and built fine-looking ships, the West African run seemed to a cynical young naval officer to be a godsend for every struggling shipping company that in peacetime would have gone to the wall: they could charter their miserable ten-knots-maximum, six-knot-convoy-speed rusty wrecks to the Ministry of War Transport, which provided crews from ‘the Pool’ and DEMS gunners (who were volunteers from the Royal Artillery and the Navy and received their name from the description Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships), and complete cargoes. And if a ship was sunk by enemy action, the Ministry provided a new ship as well…

  Paint blistered from the tropical sun, the officers and men yellow from the Mepacrine antimalarial tablets or with their heads buzzing from the bitter quinine, and sometimes still pale and shaky from the m
alaria that often defied all precautions… And all the ships preparing for the strict blackout once again after several weeks on the coast in ports far from the enemy where there was no blackout; on the contrary, unloading and loading continued through the night using powerful arc lamps. And those damned lamps – Yorke could remember when dining on board merchant ships how frequently one heard the bulbs bursting as huge stag beetles, the size of large walnuts and harder, dazed by the light, crashed through the wire screens and into the big bulbs, breaking them in a cloud of sparks which produced the bellow, ‘Where’s Lecky?’ He seemed to remember the ship’s electrician was usually on shore or sleeping off an overcharge of palm wine.

  Most of the men were glad to be leaving the tropical heat. Well, perhaps the high humidity rather than the sun’s heat, although the engineers suffered badly, having to eat salt tablets to make up for the salt lost in perspiration.

  The commodore’s ship would steam out into a clear patch of ocean, with all the other ships milling around – chugging, in many cases – each flying the four-letter flag hoist of her registration letters that identified her. The leaders of the columns would get into position abreast the commodore, three on each side in this case. One of them, commanded by an experienced captain, would be the vice-commodore, and he would take over if the commodore’s ship was sunk. A third captain would be the rear-commodore.

  The seven ships would be the leaders of the seven columns and each of the forty-two ships had been given a position – third ship in the fifth column, sixth in the first column, and so on. Slowly and warily – for the masters of merchant ships disliked manoeuvring near other vessels, having spent a life in peacetime worrying about collisions and insurance claims, underwriters and average adjusters – the ships would form into columns, with the escorting destroyers and corvettes (most likely only corvettes and perhaps a frigate: destroyers sailed with only the most important convoys) staying outside the throng, biting their nails with impatience perhaps, but knowing that a harassed master became mulish and probably abusive when, doing his best, he was chivvied by one of the escorts. There was little love lost between the Merchant and Royal Navies, and none between masters (with twenty years’ sea time and more) and the young officers commanding a corvette, a type of ship little admired by the masters because it was slow and, in anything of a sea, pitched and rolled too much to operate its Asdic, fire guns or drop depth charges.

  Yorke focused his attention on the commodore’s report. The convoy of forty-two ships had formed up and steamed off in good order at 1635 on the 23rd instant escorted by His Majesty’s ships – and the names were listed, a frigate and four ‘Flower’ class corvettes. The Ship Names Committee deserved to be hanged one at a time for calling such tough little ships ‘the Flower class’ and then giving them names culled from their grandmothers’ gardens – peony, pansy and so on. Many tough seamen after weeks at sea, most meals eaten out of bowls because of bad weather, were not too pleased at being referred to as ‘a Pansy’, or ‘a Peony’.

  The forty-two ships, the commodore had noted in his report, comprised three tankers and thirty-nine dry cargo ships. Two were Norwegian, one French, four American and one a neutral, a Swedish ship. The rest were British. All the masters had attended the convoy conference in Freetown, each had copies of the zigzag diagrams, ‘Mersigs’ (the book of Merchant Navy signals) and various instructions. It was, in other words, a routine sailing with an escort of four corvettes and the escort commander in a frigate (which was due for repairs in the United Kingdom but could not be spared to make the voyage home on her own).

  The rest of the commodore’s report was brief: eleven nights out of Freetown, with no U-boats detected, the fourth ship in the fifth column was hit with a single torpedo and sank in eight minutes. The wind was westerly, force six, with a moderate to rough sea. Moon in the first quarter, three-tenths cloud… Ten minutes later the fifth ship in the fifth column, which under standing convoy orders had moved up to take the lost ship’s position (and her next-astern had also followed) was hit with a single torpedo and sank half an hour later.

  The next night saw a repeat performance: the third ship in the fourth column and the sixth in the second column. Three ships were sunk the third night and another reported sighting the phosphorescence of a torpedo track from the port side which just missed astern. Three more ships were lost the fourth night and two the fifth.

  With twelve ships lost in five nights and the convoy zigzagging the whole time, a corvette steaming up and down between the columns just before darkness fell, the commodore admitted that he considered dispersing the convoy: with an average rate of two point four ships lost a night, it would take only thirteen point three nights for the remaining thirty-two ships to be sunk…

  Yorke was intrigued by the precision of the commodore’s mathematics but even more so by the position of the torpedoed ships in the convoy: they were all in the middle section: none of the leading ships nor the last in any column was hit; nor were any of those in the outside columns.

  The commodore had not thought of – or, rather, did not mention in his report – re-forming the convoy into a broad rectangle of eight columns each of four ships, or a narrow one of four eight-ship columns. What effect would that have made on the U-boat? Four eight-ship columns would have made it easier and quicker to zigzag: the problem with any convoy altering course was that it was like a big wheel – the ships on the outside of the turn had to increase speed while those on the inside had almost to stop (and became very difficult to manoeuvre). It was hard enough in daylight; on a dark night it was a nightmare.

  Increasing the convoy speed of six knots was impossible in this case because four of the ships had been unable to guarantee a sustained speed of more than six knots. Again, neither commodore nor escort commander could do anything about that, even though the Admiralty suspected that in dozens of cases the speeds announced by certain masters were not the best speeds they could maintain but their ships’ most economical speed: the one which would save fuel and give the ships’ owners that much extra profit on the voyage. That such parsimony could cost men’s lives seemed not to bother them: a benevolent Ministry of War Transport replaced the ship and men if they were lost… Yorke turned over to the last page of the report. The attacks had stopped suddenly on the sixth night, by which time one more ship had been lost.

  The report of the escort commander told Yorke little more. The master of the rescue tug merely listed the numbers of people he had saved from each ship, and to which ships he had transferred them at daylight. He had picked up a total of 272 men, some of whom had been torpedoed two or three times as their new ship was hit. He could not give a total of killed or missing because in several cases the captains and pursers, often the only ones who knew how many had been on board, were lost.

  Afraid that he would miss some too-obvious clue, Yorke drew the convoy on a sheet of paper, forty-two dots in seven rows of six ships, and wrote in the names of those that had been sunk, marking where ships astern had moved up to fill the gap and, in several cases, then been hit themselves.

  He glanced up to find Jemmy looking down at the drawing.

  ‘Most interesting, Ned. I’ll tell you one thing, and it’ll cost you a gin.’

  ‘Consider the gin ordered and paid for.’

  ‘That Ted was inside the convoy every time he attacked.’

  ‘That’s not worth a gin; I’d worked that out myself.’

  ‘All right. Are these numbers against the ships the nights they were hit?’

  ‘Yes, “1” means the first night; “2” the second, and so on.’

  Jemmy traced the sequence of numbers with his index finger, giving an occasional twitch. He reached the last ship and sighed.

  ‘It’ll cost you two gins.’

  ‘I hope it’ll be a better-quality pronouncement than the last one.’

  ‘It is. First, he stopped the attack ev
entually because he’d run out of torpedoes. He must have been carrying a full load when he found the convoy. Second, in any one night’s attack, he never moved more than the distance between two columns.’

  ‘I’d spotted that, too; but I’ll count the “full load” as a separate piece of information.’

  ‘What about the other convoys? The ones you asked me about. Are you drawing them out?’

  ‘I think so. I can picture it better.’

  ‘Wise man. One picture, to borrow the Fleet Street phrase, is worth a thousand words. Pity the Navy ever gave up drawing for writing. In Nelson’s day the artist Rowlandson could tell it all in one sketch.’

  With that Jemmy ambled back to his plan in a series of twitches and jerks, and a moment or two later the Croupier went over and perched on the edge of the desk, no doubt to see if Jemmy had any ideas on the U-boat movements which were being so carefully plotted.

  At that moment Yorke realized how clever Uncle had been in the way he had organized ASIU. Half a dozen experts each working in separate rooms could very easily become pundits or prima donnas – or just plain lazy. Each would be working in a separate, isolated compartment. All in one room, they were eager to ‘try it on the dog’, going over to another man’s desk with an idea or a problem and inviting criticism or an answer.

  Jemmy, with his cheerful cynicism, obviously had a very shrewd mind as well as an intimate knowledge of submarines. Anyone spending so long attacking enemy ships in the narrow and often shallow confines of the Axis-held Mediterranean coasts had to be clever beyond all permutations of chance. Jemmy’s twitch showed the price he had paid; but his mind was alert, a violin string. And, Ned thought, in this imperfect world where jealousy had more to do with promotion (or the lack of it) than most people would admit, Jemmy was lucky to be working for Uncle, who was obviously making good use of him. The same went for the Croupier. And for himself, he supposed, providing he produced results.