HMS Ulysses

CHAPTER TWELVE SATURDAY

TO ALL things an end, to every night its dawn; even to the longest night when dawn never comes, there comes at last the dawn. And so it came for FR77, as grey, as bitter, as hopeless as the night had been long. But it came.

It came to find the convoy some 350 miles north of the Arctic Circle, steaming due east along the 72nd parallel of latitude, half-way between Jan Mayen and the North Cape. 8ø 45' east, the Kapok Kid reckoned, but he couldn't be sure. In heavy snow and with ten-tenth cloud, he was relying on dead reckoning: he had to, for the shell that had destroyed the F.D.R. had wrecked the Automatic Pilot. But roughly 600 nautical miles to go. 600 miles, 40 hours, and the convoy-or what would be left of it by that time, would be in the Kola Inlet, steaming up-river to Polyarnoe and Murmansk... 40 hours.

It came to find the convoy, 14 ships left in all-scattered over three square miles of sea and rolling heavily in the deepening swell from the NNE.: 14 ships, for another had gone in the deepest part of the night.

Mine, torpedo? Nobody knew, nobody ever would know. The Sirrus had stopped, searched the area for an hour with hooded ten-inch signalling lamps. There had been no survivors. Not that Commander Orr had expected to find any-not with the air temperature 6ø below zero.

It came after a sleepless night of never-ending alarms, of continual Asdic contacts, of constant depth-charging that achieved nothing.

Nothing, that is, from the escorts' point of view: but for the enemy, it achieved a double-edged victory. It kept exhausted men at Action Stations all night long, blunting, irreparably perhaps, the last vestiges of the knife-edged vigilance on which the only hope, it was never more, of survival in the Arctic depended. More deadly still, it had emptied the last depth-charge rack in the convoy.... It was a measure of the intensity of the attack, of the relent-lessness of the persecution, that this had never happened before. But it had happened now. There was not a single depth-charge left-not one. The fangs were drawn, the defences were down. It was only a matter of time before the wolf-packs discovered that they could strike at will...

And with the dawn, of course, came dawn Action Stations, or what would have been dawn stations had the men not already been closed up for fifteen hours, fifteen endless hours of intense cold and suffering, fifteen hours during which the crew of the Ulysses had been sustained by cocoa and one bully-beef sandwich, thin, sliced and stale, for there had been no time to bake the previous day. But dawn stations were profoundly significant in themselves: they prolonged the waiting another interminable two hours-and to a man rocking on his feet from unimaginable fatigue, literally holding convulsively jerking eyelids apart with finger and thumb while a starving brain, which is less a brain than a well of fine-drawn agony, begs him to let go, let go just for a second, just this once and never again, even a minute is brutal eternity: and they were still more important in that they were recognised as the Ithuriel hour of the Russian Convoys, the testing time when every man stood out clearly for what he was. And for the crew of a mutiny ship, for men already tried and condemned, for physically broken and mentally scourged men who neither could nor would ever be the same again in body or mind, the men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame. Not all, of course, they were only human; but many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side.

For some men, neither precipice nor valley ever existed. Men like Carrington, for instance. Eighteen consecutive hours on the bridge now, he was still his own indestructible self, alert with that relaxed watchfulness that never flagged, a man of infinite endurance, a man who could never crack, who you knew could never crack, for the imagination baulked at the very idea. Why he was what he was, no man could tell.

Such, too, were men like Chief Petty Officer Hartley, like Chief Stoker Hendry, like Colour-Sergeant Evans and Sergeant Macintosh; four men strangely alike, big, tough, kindly, no longer young, steeped in the traditions of the Service.

Taciturn, never heard to speak of themselves, they were under no illusions as to their importance: they knew, as any Naval officer would be the first to admit-that, as the senior N.C.O.s, they, and not any officer, were the backbone of the Royal Navy; and it was from their heavy sense of responsibility that sprung their rock-like stability. And then of course, there were men-a handful only-like Turner and the Kapok Kid and Dodson, whom dawn found as men above themselves, men revelling in danger and exhaustion, for only thus could they realise themselves, for only this had they been born. And finally, men like Vallery, who had collapsed just after midnight, and was still asleep in the shelter, and Surgeon Commander Brooks: wisdom was their sheet anchor, a clear appreciation of the relative insignificance both of themselves and the fate of FR77, a coldly intellectual appraisal of, married to an infinite compassion for, the follies and suffering of mankind.

At the other end of the scale, dawn found men-a few dozen, perhaps-gone beyond recovery. Gone in selfishness, in self-pity and in fear, like Carslake, gone because their armour, the trappings of authority, had been stripped off them, like Hastings, or gone, like Leading S.B.A.

Johnson and a score of others, because they had been pushed too far and had no sheet anchor to hold them.

And between the two extremes were those-the bulk of the men-Who had touched zero and found that endurance can be infinite-and found in this realisation the springboard for recovery. The other side of the valley could be climbed, but not without a staff. For Nicholls, tired beyond words from a long night standing braced against the operating table in the surgery, the staff was pride and shame. For Leading Seaman Doyle, crouched miserably into the shelter of the for'ard funnel, watching the pinched agony, the perpetual shivering of his young midships pom-pom crew, it was pity; he would, of course, have denied this, blasphemously.

For young Spicer, Tyndall's devoted pantry-boy, it was pity, too-pity and a savage grief for the dying man in the Admiral's cabin. Even with both legs amputated below the knee, Tyndall should not have been dying.

But the fight, the resistance was gone, and Brooks knew old Giles would be glad to go. And for scores, perhaps for hundreds, for men like the tubercular-ridden McQuater, chilled to death in sodden clothes, but no longer staggering drankenly round the hoist in 'Y' turret, for the heavy rolling kept the water on the move: like Petersen, recklessly squandering his giant strength in helping his exhausted mates: like Chrysler, whose keen young eyes, invaluable now that Radar was gone, never ceased to scan the horizons: for men like these, the staff was Vallery, the tremendous respect and affection in which he was held, the sure knowledge that they could never let him down.

These, then, were the staffs, the intangible sheet anchors that held the Ulysses together that bleak and bitter dawn, pride, pity, shame, affection, grief-and the basic instinct for self-preservation although the last, by now, was an almost negligible factor. Two things were never taken into the slightest account as the springs of endurance: never mentioned, never even considered, they did not exist for the crew of the Ulysses: two things the sentimentalists at home, the gallant leader writers of the popular press, the propagandising purveyors of nationalistic claptrap would have had the world believe to be the source of inspiration and endurance, hatred of the enemy, love of kinsfolk and country.

There was no hatred of the enemy. Knowledge is the prelude to hate, and they did not know the enemy. Men cursed the enemy, respected him, feared him and killed him if they could: if they didn't, the enemy would kill them. Nor did men see themselves as fighting for King and country: they saw the necessity for war, but objected to camouflaging this necessity under a spurious cloak of perf ervid patriotism: they were just doing what they were told, and if they didn't, they would be stuck against a wall and shot. Love of kinsfolk-that had some validity, but not much. It was natural to want to protect your kin, but this was an equation where the validity varied according to the factor of distance. It was a trifle difficult for a man crouched in his ice-coated Oerlikon cockpit off the shores of Bear Island to visualise himself as protecting that rose-covered cottage in the Cots-wolds... But for the rest, the synthetic national hatreds and the carefully cherished myth of King and country, these are nothing and less than nothing when mankind stands at the last frontier of hope and endurance: for only the basic, simple human emotions, the positive ones of love and grief and pity and distress, can carry a man across that last frontier.

Noon, and still the convoy, closed up in tight formation now, rolled eastwards in the blinding snow. The alarm halfway through dawn stations had been the last that morning. Thirty-six hours to go, now, only thirty-six hours. And if this weather continued, the strong wind and blinding snow that made flying impossible, the near-zero visibility and heavy seas that would blind any periscope... there was always that chance. Only thirty-six hours.

Admiral John Tyndall died a few minutes after noon. Brooks, who had sat with him all morning, officially entered the cause of death as post-operative shock and exposure." The truth was that Giles had died because he no longer wished to live. His professional reputation was gone: his faith, his confidence in himself were gone, and there was only remorse for the hundreds of men who had died: and with both legs gone, the only life he had ever known, the life he had so loved and cherished and to which he had devoted forty-five glad and unsparing years, that life, too, was gone for ever. Giles died gladly, willingly. Just on noon he recovered consciousness, looked at Brooks and Vallery with a smile from which every trace of madness had vanished. Brooks winced at that grey smile, mocking shadow of the famous guffaw of the Giles of another day. Then he closed his eyes and muttered something about his family-Brooks knew he had no family. His eyes opened again, he saw Vallery as if for the first time, rolled Ms eyes till he saw Spicer. "A chair for the Captain, my boy." Then he died.

He was buried at two o'clock, in the heart of a blizzard. The Captain's voice, reading the burial service, was shredded away by snow and wind: the Union flag was flapping emptily on the tilted board before the men knew he was gone: the bugle notes were broken and distant and lost, far away and fading like the horns of Elfland: and then the men, two hundred of them at least, turned silently away and trudged back to their frozen mess-decks.

Barely half an hour later, the blizzard had died, vanished as suddenly as it had come. The wind, too, had eased, and though the sky was still dark and heavy with snow, though the seas were still heavy enough to roll 15,000-ton ships through a 30ø arc, it was clear that the deterioration in the weather had stopped. On the bridge, in the turrets, in the mess-decks, men avoided each other's eyes and said nothing.

Just before 1500, the Vectra picked up an Asdic contact. Vallery received the report, hesitated over his decision. If he H.U. 193 G sent the Vectra to investigate, and if the Vectra located the U-boat accurately and confined herself, as she would have to do, to describing tight circles above the submarine, the reason for this freedom from depth-charging would occur to the U-boat captain within minutes. And then it would only be a matter of time until he decided it was safe to surface and use his radio that every U-boat north of the Circle would know that FR77 could be attacked with impunity. Further, it was unlikely that any torpedo attack would be made under such weather conditions. Not only was periscope observation almost impossible in the heavy seas, but the U-boat itself would be a most unstable firing platform: wave motion is not confined to the surface of the water, the effects can be highly uncomfortable and unstabilising thirty, forty, fifty feet down, and are appreciable, under extreme conditions, at a depth of almost a hundred feet. On the other hand, the U-boat captain might take a 1,000-1 chance, might strike home with a lucky hit. Vallery ordered the Vectra to investigate.

He was too late. The order would have been too late anyway. The Vectra was still winking acknowledgment of the signal, had not begun to turn, when the rumble of a heavy explosion reached the bridge of the Ulysses.

All eyes swept round a full circle of the horizon, searching for smoke and flame, for the canted deck and slewing ship that would show where the torpedo had gone home. They found no sign, none whatsoever, until almost half a minute had passed. Then they noticed, almost casually, that the Electro, leading ship in the starboard line, was slowing up, coming to a powerless stop, already settling in the water on an even keel, with no trace of tilt either for'ard or aft. Almost certainly, she had been holed in the engine-room.

The Aldis on the Sirrus had begun to flash. Bentley read the message, turned to Vallery.

"Commander Orr requests permission to go alongside, port side, take off survivors."

"Port, is it?" Turner nodded. "The sub's blind side. It's a fair chance, sir, in a calm sea. As it is..." He looked over at the Sirrus, rolling heavily in the beam sea, and shrugged. "Won't do her paintwork any good."

"Her cargo?" Vallery asked. "Any idea? Explosives?" He looked round, saw the mute headshakes, turned to Bentley.

"Ask Electro if she's carrying any explosives as cargo."

Bentley's Aldis chattered, fell silent. After half a minute, it was clear that there was going to be no reply.

"Power gone, perhaps, or his Aldis smashed," the Kapok Kid ventured.

"How about one flag for explosives, two for none?"

Vallery nodded in satisfaction. "You heard, Bentley?"

He looked over the starboard quarter as the message went out. The Vectra was almost a mile distant rolling, one minute, pitching the next as she came round in a tight circle. She had found the killer, and her depth-charge racks were empty.

Vallery swung back, looked across to the Electro. Still no reply, nothing... Then he saw two flags fluttering up to the yardarm.

"Signal the Sirrus," he ordered. "'Go ahead: exercise extreme care.'"

Suddenly, he felt Turner's hand on his arm.

"Can you hear 'em?" Turner asked.

"Hear what?" Vallery demanded.

"Lord only knows. It's the Vectra. Look!"

Vallery followed the pointing finger. At first, he could see nothing, then all at once he saw little geysers of water leaping up in the Vectra's wake, geysers swiftly extinguished by the heavy seas. Then, faintly, his straining ear caught the faraway murmur of underwater explosions, all but inaudible against the wind.

"What the devil's the Vectra doing?" Vallery demanded. "And what's she using?"

"Looks like fireworks to me," Turner grunted. "What do you think, Number One?"

"Scuttling charges-25-pounders," Carrington said briefly.

"He's right, sir," Turner admitted. "Of course that's what they are.

Mind you, he might as well be using fireworks," he added disparagingly.

But the Commander was wrong. A scuttling charge has less than a tenth part of the disruptive power of a depth-charge, but one lodged snugly in the conning-tower or exploding alongside a steering plane could be almost as lethal. Turner had hardly finished speaking when a U-boat, the first the Ulysses had seen above water for almost six months-porpoised high above the surface of the sea, hung there for two or three seconds, then crashed down on even keel, wallowing wickedly in the troughs between the waves.

The dramatic abruptness of her appearance, one moment the empty sea, the next a U-boat rolling in full view of the entire convoy, took every ship by surprise, including the Vectra. She was caught on the wrong foot, moving away on the outer leg of a figure-of-eight turn. Her pom-pom opened up immediately, but the pom-pom, a notoriously inaccurate gun in the best of circumstances, is a hopeless proposition on the rolling, heeling deck of a destroyer making a fast turn in heavy weather: the Oerlikons registered a couple of hits on the conning-tower, twin Lewises peppered the hull with as much effect as a horde of angry hornets; but by the time the Vectra was round, her main armament coming to bear, the U-boat had disappeared slowly under the surface.

In spite of this, the Vectra's 4.7s opened up, firing into the sea where the U-boat had submerged, but stopping almost immediately when two shells in succession had ricocheted off the water and whistled dangerously through the convoy. She steadied on course, raced over the position of the submerged U-boat: watchers on the Ulysses, binoculars to their Vectra's poop-deck hurling more scuttling charges over the eyes, could just distinguish duffel-coated figures on the side. Almost at once, the Vectra's helm went hard over and she clawed her way back south again, guns at maximum depression pointing down over her starboard side.

The U-boat must have been damaged, more severely this time, by either the shells or the last charges. Again she surfaced, even more violently than before, in a seething welter of foam, and again the Vectra was caught on the wrong foot, for the submarine had surfaced off her port bow, three cable-lengths away.

And this time, the U-boat was up to stay. Whatever Captain and crew lacked, it wasn't courage. The hatch was open, and men were swarming over the side of the conning-tower to man the gun, in a token gesture of defiance against crushing odds.

The first two men over the side never reached the gun, breaking, sweeping waves, waves that towered high above the submarine's deck, washed them over the side and they were gone. But others flung themselves forward to take their place, frantically training their gun through a 90ø arc to bear on the onrushing bows of the Vectra.

Incredibly, for the seas were washing over the decks, seas which kept tearing the men from their posts, and the submarine was rolling with impossible speed and violence-their first shell, fired over open sights, smashed squarely into the bridge of the Vectra. The first shell and the last shell, for the crew suddenly crumpled and died, sinkiag down by the gua or pitching convulsively over the side.

It was a massacre. The Vectra had two Boltoa-Paul Defiant night-fighter turrets, quadruple hydraulic turrets complete with astrodome, bolted to her fo'c'sle, and these had opened up simultaneously, firing, between them, something like a fantastic total of 300 shells every ten seconds. That often misused cliche "hail of lead" was completely accurate here. It was impossible for a man to live two seconds on the exposed deck of that U-boat, to hope to escape that lethal storm. Man after man kept flinging himself over the coaming in suicidal gallantry, but none reached the gun.

Afterwards, no one aboard the Ulysses could say when they first realised that the Vectra, pitching steeply through the heavy seas, was going to ram the U-boat. Perhaps her Captain had never intended to do so. Perhaps he had expected the U-boat to submerge, had intended to carry away conning-tower and periscope standard, to make sure that she could not escape again. Perhaps he had been killed when that shell had struck the bridge. Or perhaps he had changed his mind at the last second, for the Vectra, which had been arrowing in on the conning-tower, suddenly slewed sharply to starboard.

For an instant, it seemed that she might just clear the U-boat's bows, but the hope died the second it was born. Plunging heavily down the sheering side of a gaping trough, the Vectra's forefoot smashed down and through the hull of the submarine, some thirty feet aft of the bows, slicing through the toughened steel of the pressure hull as if it were cardboard. She was still plunging, still driving down, when two shattering explosions, so close together as to be blurred into one giant blast, completely buried both vessels under a sky-rocketing mushroom of boiling water and twisted steel. The why of the explosion was pure conjecture; but what had happened was plain enough. Some freak of chance must have triggered off the T.N.T.-normally an extremely stable and inert disruptive, in a warhead in one of the U-boat's tubes: and then the torpedoes in the storage racks behind and possibly, probably even, the for'ard magazine of the Vectra had gone up in sympathetic detonation.

Slowly, deliberately almost, the great clouds of water fell back into the sea, and the Vectra and the U-boat-or what little was left of them-came abruptly into view. To the watchers on the Ulysses, it was inconceivable that either of them should still be afloat. The U-boat was very deep in the water, seemed to end abruptly just for'ards of the gun platform: the Vectra looked as if some great knife had sheared her athwartships, just for'ard of the bridge. The rest was gone, utterly gone. And throughout the convoy unbelieving minds were still wildly rejecting the evidence of their eyes when the shattered hull of the Vectra lurched into the same trough as the U-boat, rolled heavily, wearily, over on top of her, bridge and mast cradling the conning-tower of the submarine. And then the water closed over them and they were gone, locked together to the bottom of the sea.

The last ships in the convoy were two miles away now, and in the broken seas, at that distance, it was impossible to see whether there were any survivors. It did not seem likely. And if there were, if there were men over there, struggling, swimming, shouting for help in the murderous cold of that glacial sea, they would be dying already. And they would have been dead long before any rescue ship could even have turned round.

The convoy steamed on, beating steadily east. All but two, that is-the Electro and the Sirrus.

The Electro lay beam on to the seas, rolling slowly, sluggishly, dead in the water. She had now a list of almost 15ø to port. Her decks, fore and aft of the bridge, were lined with waiting men. They had given up their attempt to abandon ship by lifeboat when they had seen the Sirrus rolling up behind them, fine on the port quarter. A boat had been swung out on its davits, and with the listing of the Electra and the rolling of the sea it had proved impossible to recover it. It hung now far out from the ship's side, swinging wildly at the end of its davits about twenty feet above the sea. On his approach, Orr had twice sent angry signals, asking the falls to be cut. But the lifeboat remained there, a menacing pendulum in the track of the Sirrus: panic, possibly, but more likely winch brakes jammed solid with ice. In either event, there was no time to be lost: another ten minutes and the Electra would be gone.

The Sirrus made two runs past in all, Orr had no intention of stopping alongside, of being trampled under by the 15,000-ton deadweight of a toppling freighter. On his first run he steamed slowly by at five knots, at a distance of twenty feet-the nearest he dared go with the set of the sea rolling both ships towards each other at the same instant.

As the Sirrus's swinging bows slid up past the bridge of the Electro, the waiting men began to jump. They jumped as the Sirrus's fo'c'sle reared up level with their deck, they jumped as it plunged down fifteen, twenty feet below. One man carrying a suitcase and Burberry stepped nonchalantly across both sets of guard-rails during the split second that they were relatively motionless to each other: others crashed sickeningly on to the ice-coated steel deck far below, twisting ankles, fracturing legs and thighs, dislocating hip-joints. And two men jumped and missed; above the bedlam of noise, men heard the blood-chilling, bubbling scream of one as the swinging hulls crushed the life out of him, the desperate, terror-stricken cries of the other as the great, iron wall of the Electra guided him into the screws of the Sirrus.

It was just then that it happened and there could be no possible reflection on Commander Orr's seamanship: he had handled the Sirrus brilliantly. But even his skill was helpless against these two successive freak waves, twice the size of the others. The first flung the Sirrus close in to the Electra, then passing under the Electra, lurched her steeply to port as the second wave heeled the Sirrus far over to starboard. There was a grinding, screeching crash. The Sirrus's guard-rails and upper side plates buckled and tore along a 150-foot length: simultaneously, the lifeboat smashed endwise into the front of the bridge, shattering into a thousand pieces. Immediately, the telegraphs jangled, the water boiled whitely at the Sirrus's stern-shocked realisation of its imminence and death itself must have been only a merciful hair's-breadth apart for the unfortunate man in the water, and then the destroyer was clear, sheering sharply away from the Electra.

In five minutes the Sirrus was round again. It was typical of Orr's ice-cold, calculating nerve and of the luck that never deserted 'him that he should this time choose to rub the Sirrus's shattered starboard side along the length of the Electra, she was too low in the water now to fall on him, and that he should do so in a momentary spell of slack water. Willing hands caught men as they jumped, cushioned their fall. Thirty seconds and the destroyer was gone again and the decks of the Electra were deserted. Two minutes later and a muffled roar shook the sinking ship, her boilers going.

And then she toppled slowly over on her side: masts and smokestack lay along the surface of the sea, dipped and vanished: the straight-back of bottom and keel gleamed fractionally, blackly, against the grey of sea and sky, and was gone. For a minute, great gouts of air rushed turbulently to the surface. By and by the bubbles grew smaller and smaller and then there were no more.

The Sirrus steadied on course, crowded decks throbbing as she began to pick up speed, to overtake the convoy. Convoy No. FR77. The convoy the Royal Navy would always want to forget. Thirty-six ships had left Scapa and St. John's. Now there were twelve, only twelve. And still almost thirty-two hours to the Kola Inlet...

Moodily, even his tremendous vitality and zest temporarily subdued, Turner watched the Sirrus rolling up astern. Abruptly he turned away, looked furtively, pityingly at Captain Vallery, no more now than a living skeleton driven by God only knew what mysterious force to wrest hour after impossible hour from death. And for Vallery now, death, even the hope of it, Turner suddenly realised, must be infinitely sweet. He looked, and saw the shock and sorrow in that grey mask, and he cursed, bitterly, silently. And then these tired, dull eyes were on him and Turner hurriedly cleared his throat.

"How many survivors does that make in the Sirrus now?" he asked.

Vallery lifted weary shoulders in the ghost of a shrug.

"No idea, Commander. A hundred, possibly more. Why?"

"A hundred," Turner mused. "And no-survivors-will-be-picked-up. I'm just wondering what old Orr's going to say when he dumps that little lot in Admiral Starr's lap when we get back to Scapa Flow!"