Altered States -Volume III. Hinge of Fate

Chapter 35

Lieutenant Dawes did not see the first shells land, as it was well after sunset and he was already down the ladder to Europa Point, with no view of the main harbor. But he certainly heard them, a loud roar and the long whistling fall of the heavy shells. He also thought it was a German bomb falling at first, thinking to find any cellar at hand to get under cover. The Stukas had been pounding the hill all day off and on but, from the sound of the planes overhead, these were the twin engine German bombers at hand. Then he caught a bright flash to the south, where the dark Straits of Gibraltar became the gateway that had long been known as the Pillars of Hercules. It suddenly seemed as though Hercules was there himself, roaring in anger, and Dawes immediately knew what he was seeing now.

The Royal Navy had kept its appointment. That was a battleship firing out in the channel, and he ran to the edge of the ridge to get a better look.

“Bloody marvelous!” he said to a Gunnery Sergeant there. It was Sergeant Hobson, the same man he had huddled with in the bomb shelter the previous night, the one who had the cheek to suggest the officer’s planning to watch the horse races that morning might hope they had fast steeds. He had stopped his loading of a nearby lorry to gawk at the ships out on the moonlit waters to the south.

“Lucky the Germans didn’t get smart and put artillery over there on Spanish Morocco,” said the Sergeant. “The Navy’s doing it right this time. They snuck in right in the lee of those hills.”

“Let’s see how the Germans sleep tonight under the guns of Rodney and Nelson.” Dawes smiled with an eager nod of his head.

“Oh, that’s not Rodney, sir. And it looks to be only one battleship that I can make out. That other ship is most likely a destroyer. My guess is that HMS Valiant is out there tonight, with a pair of valiant souls stuck on the Rock here to watch her do her business.”

“Wish I could say I belonged to that club,” said Dawes, just a bit dejected. “I’ve bounced about from the North Mole to the Hospital to the Signals Station, and then down here. Jerry took a whack at me this morning near the mole, but I haven’t done much of anything since.”

“I shouldn’t worry about that, sir. We’ll all have more than enough to do before this gets settled one way or another.”

That suddenly put a new fear into Dawes’ head, and he realized that this would have to resolve somehow, and he wondered how it would all turn out. The Germans had hit the Rock very hard that day. They had chased him from his tower, nearly put a bullet into him and set him on line with what looked to be sixty other men waiting for medical care. Now, with Valiant firing out there, her massive volleys rolling out with bright orange fire and a terrible roar, it was easy to think he might wake up tomorrow and find the Germans gone, but he knew that was not likely.

That thought jangled his nerves again. My God, he thought, what if we lose? What happens to every man jack of us here if those guns aren’t enough to make the difference? We’ll either be killed or taken prisoner and marched off to Berlin… and that thought gave him no comfort at all.

“What do you say, Sergeant?” he asked. “Will the Germans take a good knock tonight and give up the ghost?”

The Sergeant grimaced. “Not bloody likely,” he said heavily. “I was at Dunkirk…” He didn’t need to say anything more.

Dawes watched the battleship firing, trying to take heart with every salvo, but the ache of fear was on him now, and he found himself worrying about his fate, and the lives of everyone else in Gibraltar. The Sergeant seemed very calm, however, and so he asked his question again.

“Do you think we’ll hold, Sergeant?”

“We’ll do our bloody best.”

“But will it be enough?”

“If it isn’t then you can join the Royal Engineers, sir, and dig yourself a nice little tunnel under the Straits. Either that or you might get lucky and find the one already there.”

“Already there? You mean we can get out that way?”

The Sergeant winked at him. “Just a legend, sir. But find me the right Barbary Ape and stay on its tail when things get hot. You might be surprised!” He was up, rolling up his shirt sleeve on the warm late summer night.

“Well I’d best see to my lorry. The boys will be needing this ammunition soon enough.”

Dawes nodded, but he sat there, spellbound with the sight of the battleship firing and finally realizing what a horror this war was going to become. We build these massive steel leviathans to hurl shot and shell at the enemy, and all the while the Germans are coming out of the night in those planes like banshees. His pulse was up and there was a thrill of excitement, edged with yawning anxiety. Here he was watching the battle being joined, with the issue still gravely in doubt. HMS Valiant probably never thought she would be directing those guns at the very harbor she would drop anchor on. The Navy is out there bawling away like someone who’s come home from the town and found a burglar has broken into his home.

Now the fight was on, and at least all he could see of it was good British steel firing away for a change. Yet that doubt was still there, a cold spot in his stomach that made him very afraid. He was not a fighting man by nature. Dawes had come in an officer, and the most rigorous thing he had ever done in his brief time in the service was a good long workout on the “Hardening Course.” Pushups and sit ups were one thing, the shock and sound of real combat quite another.

He remembered how he had looked forward to settling into a comfortable bed after that long workout. He had been stuck on the course with the rankers, and on the morrow he would swagger back into the Bleak House and belly up for a good breakfast, basking in the privileges that came with his Lieutenant’s rank.

The thought of food invariably led him to think of what might happen to them if they got holed up in those dark, dusty tunnels. If the Germans don’t kill us all first, they’ll bloody well starve us in time. He knew they had nearly nine month’s supplies laid in, but that would be a long and agonizing haul. The thought of becoming a tunnel rat did not seem at all appealing. He watched HMS Valiant get off another salvo, and then got up on unsteady legs. He needed a smoke, reaching into his pocket to fish about for his cigarette pack and lighter, and when he had them out he realized his hand was shaking so badly that he could barely get one lit. The words of a poem by Rudyard Kipling came to his mind with their sad, mournful song.

It did not take much for the spotters on the weather station hill to correct the fall of those shells. Plus 400, right 1000 and the guns were right on target, striking the Land Port at the base of the Devil’s Tongue, with the next salvos corrected to fall right on the cemetery, which was now occupied by the Germans. One round struck the silent tombstones, sending chunks of granite into the air and cratering the graves of generations past. The gunners at the Windsor Battery had been taking a pounding from the Germans, but now they cheered gleefully as the spotters slowly walked the 15-inch barrage back over the runway and across the old British lines right into La Linea, Britain’s first fire in anger to strike Spanish soil.

The intent was to get at the German artillery there, and though no one on the Rock knew it at the time, the British had some success in knocking out several German guns. Then Valiant began to make a wide turn, her lease in the relatively narrow waters of the strait run out, coming about to head back west. The German planes continued to make their diving runs at her, with bombs straddling the ship, splintering the weather deck and churning up the sea, but Valiant sailed right on through. Her aft batteries again found the bay near the North Mole, and were expertly walked due east right across the German lines, through the cemetery, and right off shore when the last rounds fell in the sea near the Cattle Sheds.

Meanwhile, the dogged Hotspur had surged on ahead with Greyhound, racing past the southern tip of Europa Point where they saw British AA gunners firing to lend their support against the German planes. Lieutenant Dawes was there with them, watching the bright tracers streak across the sky, and the night was deafened by the sharp crack of the gunfire. Commander Herbert Francis Hope Layman led the ship from the exposed weather bridge, and he saw the men waving and saluting from the flagstaff at Europa Point.

“Hoist colors!” he ordered, showing the garrison the flag, which immediately set the men to cheering. Hotspur and Greyhound raced up the eastern side of the Isthmus, past the Governor’s Cottage on the flank of Windmill Hill and on towards Sandy Bay. They surged on past the hamlet at Catalan Bay until they were off the coast near the Slaughterhouse. There Commander Layman saw the boats on the shore, where the German mountain troops had stormed ashore to cut off the Cattle Sheds and make their daring ascent up the sheer rocky walls of the Devil’s Tower. She had only four 4.7-inch guns, nothing to speak of compared to Valiant’s broadside, but Hotspur was valiant too, and she poured it on, setting three landing boats ablaze and blasting the hillside cliffs where Signal Hill had reported German mountaineering operations were still underway. Half a squad of the 2nd Company, 3rd battalion 98th Mountain Regiment, was blown from their rocky perches and blasted clean off the hill.

The gallant rush of the destroyers did more to bolster British morale than any real harm to the enemy, but that was enough. They wheeled about at Catalan Bay, circling once as if to dare anything German to challenge them, guns blazing all the while. Then the nimble destroyers turned south and ran to rejoin the British naval squadron.

When the destroyers rounded Europa Point, Lieutenant Dawes looked to see the looming shadow of Valiant heading west through the straits, big guns still firing. There was a small fire aft where the battleship must have been finally struck by a 500 pound German bomb, but it did not look serious. The Ju-88s had emptied their bomb bays and had little to show for their effort.

Dawes watched as the two destroyers raced in the big ship’s wake, the white foam of their bows glistening in the moonlight. They followed like a pair of faithful hounds coming home to the hunter, and Dawes took off his cap and waved farewell. Some inner sense took hold just then, and it told him he had seen the last of Force H and the Royal Navy in this gallant attack, but what a sight it was.

The inner sense became a feeling of dreadful doubt again, and he took another drag on his cigarette, noting the tremor in his hand and feeling ashamed. Dawes chided himself, knowing that he had been little more than a spectator in this whole affair. What’s gotten into me, he asked himself? That nick on your shoulder is nothing to worry about. You saw that battleship out there, and how those destroyers came in with their fists shaking, ready for a fight. Buck up man, and get a grip on yourself. This party is only just beginning, and something tells me you’ve more than one more dance left on your card. Nobody gets in on something like this without good reason, he thought, and it gave him some small comfort.

Suddenly the smell of the air and the whole scene on the bay filled him with a sense of life and purpose. He was here for some reason, by chance or fate, and he would see it through. He dropped the half smoked cigarette, stepping on it and breathing deep, trying to chase the jitters away. There was no sense standing here gawking any longer, so he turned and started back up the rise, suddenly feeling very drained and weary, and intent on finding someplace relatively quiet where he might get some sleep.

All that was on his duty roster for the day had been that ten hour shift in the North Mole Tower that was cut short just before dawn. Just sit up there and answer the telly-that was what his mates had told him at breakfast. It had been a very long day. Baa-Baa-Baa…

Valiant had come boldly on through the strait, braving a thickening enemy air attack the whole while, and now she was heading for the open sea again, though not yet safe from harm. Lurking in the waters just off the mouth of the straits, another threat was waiting silently for the courageous ship, which had lived up to its name in every respect that night, Valiant in name and deed.

The Italian Submarine Bianchi had been hoping for a chance to get torpedoes in the water, intending to put them right down the path of the oncoming battleship, but her inexperienced Captain, Adalberto Giovannini, had not counted on the skill and speed of the British Destroyers. Fury had taken the lead, and was well out in front of the battleship sniffing with her asdic sonar equipment when she got wind of the Italian sub. Lieutenant Commander Terence Robinson had the ship in fine trim. In these familiar waters, the crews had learned the depth of the sea lanes well and had excellent charts. Robinson took a very good guess as to where the contact must be, and then began to churn up the sea at top speed, ready to raise hell.

Indeed, hell had no fury like that ship on this moonlit night. The destroyer surged ahead, while the Bianchi veered off her firing angle, realizing her peril too late to evade. Captain Giovannini got his periscope down and gave the order to fire, then put his sub into an emergency dive, but to no avail.

The torpedoes were too widely spaced and Fury veered violently, thrashing up the sea before turning and running right between the two torpedoes. The fish had been jostled about by the maneuver, just enough to set them off their intended course. Then it was time for hell to unleash her fury. The destroyer had a rack of 20 depth charges and Lieutenant Commander Robinson put them all into the water, causing a series of wrenching explosions that found and tore Bianchi to pieces. There was a last explosion, the sea welling up like a boiling pot, and then subsiding before wreckage from the broken sub bobbed to the surface.

So Valiant was kept safe from harm, her octuple mounts saying a last goodbye to a lingering Ju-88. Then her aft turrets fired one last mighty salvo of four rounds, which came in right on Devil’s Tower Road, hurting the Germans that had been assembling there. Hotspur and Greyhound came following behind the big ship, and the British squadron withdrew at 20 knots, their daring mission accomplished.

Captain Rawlings soon received a signal in thanks from General Liddell on the Rock, which was quickly passed on to Somerville and the Admiralty. The battleship had hit the North Mole, Land Port, Cemetery, Cattle Sheds-all occupied by German troops when the big rounds struck home. Beyond that, they had put the Spanish Government on notice that England knew her enemies as well as her friends. HMS Valiant had just tapped Franco on the chin with the few salvos that she managed to put on German positions in La Linea, but it was a promise of retribution, and a day of reckoning that would surely come before this war would be concluded.

For his part, Captain Rawlings aboard Valiant would be ‘Mentioned In Dispatches’ for his courageous raid under intense enemy fire, delivering timely and much needed fire support to a hard fighting garrison force on the Rock.

Admiral Somerville had been pacing on the bridge of Nelson throughout the engagement, dreading more bad news and the possible loss of yet another battleship in the hastily mounted raid. But no bad news came that night. This one was chalked up for the Royal Navy, and Somerville sighed with relief when he got the signal: HMS Valiant now west of Tangier, and all is well.