H. M. S. Ulysses (21 page)

Any impartial court of judgment would have cleared Tyndall of all guilt, would have acquitted him without a trial. He had done what he thought right, what any commander would have done in his place. But Tyndall sat before the merciless court of his own conscience. He could not forget that it was he who had re-routed the convoy so far to the north, that it was he who had ignored official orders to break straight for the North Cape, that it was exactly on latitude 70 N—where their Lordships had told him they would be— that FR77 had, on that cold, clear windless dawn, blundered straight into the heart of the heaviest concentration of U-boats encountered in the Arctic during the entire course of the war.

The wolf-pack had struck at its favourite hour—the dawn— and from its favourite position—the north-east, with the dawn in its eyes. It struck cruelly, skilfully and with a calculated ferocity. Admittedly, the era of Kapitan Leutnant Prien—his U-boat long ago sent to the bottom with all hands by the destroyer
Wolverine
— and his illustrious contemporaries, the hey-day of the great U-boat Commanders, the high noon of individual brilliance and great personal gallantry, was gone. But in its place—and generally acknowledged to be even more dangerous, more deadly—were the concerted, highly integrated mass attacks of the wolf-packs, methodical, machine-like, almost reduced to a formula, under a single directing command.

The
Cochella
, third vessel in the port line, was the first to go. Sister ship to the
Vytura
and the
Varella
, also accompanying her in FR77, the
Cochella
carried over 3,000,000 gallons of 100-octane petrol. She was hit by at least three torpedoes: the first two broke her almost in half, the third triggered off a stupendous detonation that literally blew her out of existence. One moment she was there, sailing serenely through the limpid twilight of sunrise: the next moment she was gone. Gone, completely, utterly gone, with only a seething ocean, convulsed in boiling white, to show where she had been: gone, while stunned eardrums and stupefied minds struggled vainly to grasp the significance of what had happened: gone, while blind reflex instinct hurled men into whatever shelter offered as a storm of lethal metal swept over the fleet.

Two ships took the full force of the explosion. A huge mass of metal—it might have been a winch—passed clear through the superstructure of the
Sirrus
, a cable-length away on the starboard: it completely wrecked the radar office. What happened to the other ship immediately astern, the impossibly-named
Tennessee Adventurer
, was not clear, but almost certainly her wheelhouse and bridge had been severely damaged: she had lost steering control, was not under command.

Tragically, this was not at first understood, simply because it was not apparent. Tyndall, recovering fast from the sheer physical shock of the explosion, broke out the signal for an emergency turn to port. The wolf-pack, obviously, lay on the port hand, and the only action to take to minimize further losses, to counter the enemy strategy, was to head straight towards them. He was reasonably sure that the U-boats would be bunched—generally, they strung out only for the slow convoys. Besides, he had adopted this tactic several times in the past with a high degree of success. Finally, it cut the U-boats' target to an impossible tenth, forcing on them the alternative of diving or the risk of being trampled under.

With an immaculate precision and co-ordination of Olympic equestrians, the convoy heeled steadily over to starboard, slewed majestically round, trailing curved, white wakes phosphorescently alive in the near-darkness that still clung to the surface of the sea. Too late, it was seen that the
Tennessee Adventurer
was not under command. Slowly, then with dismaying speed, she came round to the east, angling directly for another merchantman, the
Tobacco
Planter
. There was barely time to think, to appreciate the inevitable: frantically, the
Planter
's helm went hard over in an attempt to clear the other astern, but the wildly swinging
Adventurer
, obviously completely out of control, matched the
Planter
's tightening circle, foot by inexorable foot, blind malice at the helm.

She struck the
Planter
with sickening violence just for'ard of the bridge. The
Adventurer
's bows, crumpling as they went, bit deeply into her side, fifteen, twenty feet in a chaos of tearing, rending metal: the stopping power of 10,000 tons deadweight travelling at 15 knots is fantastic. The wound was mortal, and the
Planter
's own momentum, carrying her past, wrenched her free from the lethal bows, opening the wound to the hungry sea and hastened her own end. Almost at once she began to fill, to list heavily to starboard. Aboard the
Adventurer
, someone must have taken over command: her engine stopped, she lay almost motionless alongside the sinking ship, slightly down by the head.

The rest of the convoy cleared the drifting vessels, steadied west by north. Far out on the starboard hand, Commander Orr, in the
Sirrus
, clawed his damaged destroyer round in a violent turn, headed back towards the crippled freighters. He had gone less than half a mile when he was recalled by a vicious signal from the flagship. Tyndall was under no illusions. The
Adventurer
, he knew, might remain there all day, unharmed—it was obvious that the
Planter
would be gone in a matter of minutes—but that would be a guarantee neither of the absence of U-boats nor of the sudden access of misguided enemy chivalry: the enemy would be there, would wait to the last possible second before dark in the hope that some rescue destroyer would heave to alongside the
Adventurer
.

In that respect, Tyndall was right. The
Adventurer
was torpedoed just before sunset. Threequarters of the ship's company escaped in lifeboats, along with twenty survivors picked up from the
Planter
. A month later the frigate
Esher
found them, in three lifeboats tied line ahead, off the bitter, iron coast of Bear Island, heading steadily north. The Captain alert and upright, was still sitting in the stern-sheets, empty eye-sockets searching for some lost horizon, a withered claw locked to the tiller. The rest were sitting or lying about the boats, one actually standing, his arm cradled around the mast, and all with shrunken sun-blackened lips drawn back in hideous mirth. The log-book lay beside the Captain, empty: all had frozen to death on that first night. The young frigate commander had cast them adrift, watched them disappear over the northern rim of the world, steering for the Barrier. And the Barrier is the region of the great silence, the seas of incredible peace, so peaceful, so calm, so cold that they may be there yet, the dead who cannot rest. A mean and shabby end for the temple of the spirit . . . It is not known whether the Admiralty approved the action of the captain of the frigate.

But in the major respect, that of anticipating enemy disposition, the Admiral was utterly wrong. The wolf-pack commander had outguessed him and it was arguable that Tyndall should have foreseen this. His tactic of swinging an entire convoy into the face of a torpedo attack was well known to the enemy: it was also well known that his ship was the
Ulysses
, and the
Ulysses
, the only one of her kind, was familiar, by sight or picture silhouette, to every U-boat commander in the German Navy: and it had been reported, of course, that it was the
Ulysses
that was leading FR77 through to Murmansk. Tyndall should have expected, expected and forestalled the long overdue counter.

For the submarine that had torpedoed the
Cochella
had been the last, not the first, of the pack. The others had lain to the south of the U-boat that had sprung the trap, and well to the west of the track of FR77—clear beyond the reach of Asdic. And when the convoy wheeled to the west, the U-boats lined up leisurely firing tracks as the ships steamed up to cross their bows at right angles. The sea was calm, calm as a millpond, an extraordinary deep, Mediterranean blue. The snow-squalls of the night had passed away. Far to the south-east a brilliant sun was shouldering itself clear of the horizon, its level rays striking a great band of silver across the Arctic, highlighting the ships, shrouded white in snow, against the darker sea and sky beyond. The conditions were ideal, if one may use the word ‘ideal' to describe the prologue to a massacre.

Massacre, an almost total destruction there must inevitably have been but for the warning that came almost too late. A warning given neither by radar nor Asdic, nor by any of the magically efficient instruments of modern detection, but simply by the keen eyes of an eighteen-year-old Ordinary Seaman—and the God-sent rays of the rising sun.

‘Captain, sir! Captain, sir!' It was young Chrysler who shouted. His voice broke in wild excitement, his eyes were glued to the powerful binoculars clamped on the port searchlight control position. ‘There's something flashing to the south, sir! It flashed twice—there it goes again!'

‘Where, boy?' Tyndall shouted. ‘Come on, where, where?' In his agitation, Chrysler had forgotten the golden rule of the reporting look-out—bearing must come first.

‘Port 50, sir—no, port 60 . . . I've lost sight of it now, sir.'

Every pair of glasses on the bridge swung round on the given bearing. There was nothing to be seen, just nothing at all. Tyndall shut his telescope slowly, shrugged his shoulders eloquent in disbelief.

‘Maybe there
is
something,' said the Kapok Kid doubtfully. ‘How about the sea catching a periscope making a quick circle sweep?'

Tyndall looked at him, silent, expressionless, looked away, stared straight ahead. To the Kapok Kid he seemed strange, different. His face was set, stonily impassive, the face of a man with twenty ships and 5,000 lives in his keeping, the face of a man who has already made one wrong decision too many.

‘There they go again!' Chrysler screamed. ‘Two flashes—no,
three
flashes!' He was almost beside himself with excitement, literally dancing in an agony of frustration. ‘I did see them, sir, I
did
. I
did
. Oh, please, sir, please!'

Tyndall had swung round again. Ten long seconds he gazed at Chrysler, who had left his binoculars, and was gripping the gate in gauntleted hands, shaking it in anguished appeal. Abruptly, Tyndall made up his mind.

‘Hard aport, Captain. Bentley—the signal!'

Slowly, on the unsupported word of an eighteen-year-old, FR77 came round to the south, slowly, just too slowly. Suddenly, the sea was alive with running torpedoes—three, five, ten—Vallery counted thirty in as many seconds. They were running shallow and their bubbling trails, evil, ever-lengthening, rose swiftly to the surface and lay there milkily on the glassy sea, delicately evanescent shafts for arrowheads so lethal. Parallel in the centre, they fanned out to the east and west to embrace the entire convoy. It was a fantastic sight: no man in that convoy had ever seen anything remotely like it.

In a moment the confusion was complete. There was no time for signals. It was every ship for itself in an attempt to avoid wholesale destruction: and confusion was worse confounded by the ships in the centre and outer lines, that had not yet seen the wakes of the streaking torpedoes.

Escape for all was impossible: the torpedoes were far too closely bunched. The cruiser
Stirling
was the first casualty. Just when she seemed to have cleared all danger—she was far ahead where the torpedoes were thickest—she lurched under some unseen hammer-blow, slewed round crazily and steamed away back to the east, smoke hanging heavily over her poop. The
Ulysses
, brilliantly handled, heeled over on maximum rudder and under the counter-thrusting of her great screws, slid down an impossibly narrow lane between four torpedoes, two of them racing by a bare boat's length from either side: she was still a lucky ship. The destroyers, fast, highly manoeuvrable, impeccably handled, bobbed and weaved their way to safety with almost contemptuous ease, straightened up and headed south under maximum power.

The merchant ships, big, clumsy, relatively slow, were less fortunate. Two ships in the port line, a tanker and a freighter, were struck: miraculously, both just staggered under the numbing shock, then kept on coming. Not so the big freighter immediately behind them, her holds crammed with tanks, her decks lined with them. She was torpedoed three times in three seconds: there was no smoke, no fire, no spectacular after-explosion: sieved and ripped from stern to stem, she sank quickly, quietly, still on even keel, dragged down by the sheer weight of metal. No one below decks had even the slightest chance of escaping.

A merchantman in the centre line, the
Belle Isle
, was torpedoed amidships. There were two separate explosions—probably she had been struck twice—and she was instantly on fire. Within seconds, the list to port was pronounced, increasing momentarily: gradually her rails dipped under, the outslung lifeboats almost touching the surface of the sea. A dozen, fifteen men were seen to be slipping, sliding down the sheering decks and hatch-covers, already half-submerged, towards the nearest lifeboat. Desperately they hacked at bellyband securing ropes, piled into the lifeboat in grotesquely comical haste, pushed it clear of the dipping davits, seized the oars and pulled frantically away. From beginning to end, hardly a minute had elapsed.

Half a dozen powerful strokes had them clear beyond their ship's counter: two more took them straight under the swinging bows of the
Walter A. Baddeley
, her companion tankcarrier in the starboard line. The consummate seamanship that had saved the
Baddeley
could do nothing to save the lifeboat: the little boat crumpled and splintered like a matchwood toy, catapulting screaming men into the icy sea.