Go In and Sink!
Authors: Douglas Reeman
About the Author
Douglas Reeman
did convoy duty in the navy in the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the North Sea. He has written over thirty novels under his own name and more than twenty bestselling historical novels featuring Richard Bolitho under the pseudonym Alexander Kent.
Also by Douglas Reeman
A Prayer for the Ship
High Water
Send a Gunboat
Dive in the Sun
The Hostile Shore
The Last Raider
With Blood and Iron
H.M.S. Saracen
Path of the Storm
The Deep Silence
The Pride and the Anguish
To Risks Unknown
The Greatest Enemy
Rendezvous – South Atlantic
The Destroyers
Winged Escort
Surface with Daring
Strike from the Sea
A Ship Must Die
Torpedo Run
Badge of Glory
The First to Land
The Volunteers
The Iron Pirate
In Danger’s Hour
The White Guns
Killing Ground
The Horizon
Sunset
A Dawn Like Thunder
Battlecruiser
Dust on the Sea
For Valour
Twelve Seconds to Live
Against the Sea (non-fiction)
and Sink
Douglas Reeman
For my mother, with love
The Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943 proved to be the turning point in the Second World War. Too many setbacks and retreats had left Britain and her Allies almost beyond hope, and the proposed invasion, the biggest amphibious operation ever planned, needed to be a success, perhaps more than any previous undertaking. Over the years, that first combined stab at Europe’s underbelly has been overshadowed by other events, and greater invasions, but none was more vital at the time.
My story is fiction, but most of the background is based on what actually happened. A German submarine, U-570, was in fact captured by the British and used against her previous owners. The then unknown secret weapon, a radio-controlled bomb which could be launched and directed by an enemy aircraft, may seem to us almost antique in this age of nuclear weapons, but in 1943 it was a threat which almost tipped the balance against us.
Had the Germans discovered our intention to invade Sicily, instead of through Greece and the Balkans, it is almost certain that those deadly bombs would have broken the back of our sea forces before a landing could have been completed. As it was, several cloak-and-dagger ruses were successfully used. A dead body dressed as a Marine officer was found on a Spanish beach with supposedly secret details of an Allied invasion through Greece. Other schemes were employed to make the enemy believe in this
idea
, so that when the attack began his forces were wrongly deployed to repulse it.
Two months later, when the Allies struck at the Italian mainland and hit the beaches at Salerno, there were many who realised just how thin the margin of success had been.
The Germans, then prepared and ready, brought those radio-controlled bombs into immediate use. Many men were lost, and fine ships put out of action. Among the latter were famous veterans of the Mediterranean campaign, including the battleship
Warspite
, the cruiser
Uganda
, and the American warships
Philadelphia
and
Savannah
.
IT WAS JUST
nine o’clock on a February morning when His Majesty’s Submarine
Tristram
edged against the greasy piles at Fort Blockhouse, Portsmouth and her lines were taken by the waiting shore-party.
In the forepart of her conning tower Lieutenant Commander Steven Marshall watched the wires being dragged to the bollards along the pier, felt the steel plates beneath his boots vibrating uneasily, as if, like himself, his command was unable to accept that they had arrived safely.
In the early morning, while they had idled outside the harbour until the tide was right to enter Haslar Creek by the submarine base, he had studied the land as it had grown out of the gloom, searching his thoughts for some sensation of achievement. Now, as he glanced briefly at the curious faces along the wall and below on the pier he could sense little but anti-climax. Even his men looked different. It did not seem possible. For fourteen months they had lived together in their own confined private world within this hull. From one end of the Mediterranean to the other, with each day bringing some fresh challenge or threat to their very existence.
There had been a few new faces during that time. To replace the dead and wounded. But for the most part they were the same men who had assembled fore and aft on the
Tristram’s
casing when she had slipped out of Portsmouth to join the war and seek out the enemy.
‘All secure aft, sir.’
Marshall turned slightly and glanced at his first lieutenant. Robert Gerrard, tall and thin, with the slight stoop brought about by service in this and other boats. Even he seemed strangely alien in his reefer and best cap. For months they had seen each other in almost anything but regulation dress. Old flannel trousers and discarded cricket shirts. Shorts and sandals in kinder days. Dripping oilskins and heavy boots when the Mediterranean showed its other face, the one never seen on travel posters.
‘Thank you, Bob. Ring off main motors.’
He turned back to watch the busy working party on the pier. There were two Wrens sheltering below the wall on their way to some office or other, their arms crammed with files and papers. One of them waved to him, and then they both scuttled out into the wind again and vanished. A party of new trainees was being mustered on the rampart above, a petty officer no doubt pointing out the finer points of a returning submarine. Few appeared to be paying much attention, and Marshall could guess their feelings at this moment in their service.
From the periscope standards above his head flew their Skull and Crossbones which the coxswain had cared for so proudly over their long days and nights at sea. Sewn above and around the grinning death’s-head were their recorded battle honours. Bars for vessels sunk, crossed guns for those hair-raising attacks on ships and coastal installations alike, stilettos for the
cloak-and-dagger
jobs, landing agents on enemy shores, picking up others with valuable information. Sometimes they had waited in vain for these brave, lonely men, and he had prayed their end had been quick.
The new intake of seamen at the submarine base would
see
the flag, would picture themselves and not his men on the scarred casing.
The deck gave a quick shudder and lay still. They had officially arrived. This part at least was over.
From aft a generator coughed into life and a haze of exhaust floated over the hull. Marshall thrust his hands into his pockets, momentarily at loss. There was nothing to do. Soon the boat would be taken to the dockyard. Stripped out and refitted from bow to stern. He sighed. God knows, she needs it. The silent recruits would also be seeing the submarine as she really was. Pitted from continuous service in all conditions. There was hardly a square yard without a dent or a scar of some sort. Splinters from shellbursts. Buckled plates below the conning-tower from a very close depth-charge off the Tunisian coast where they had stalked the Afrika Korps’ supply ships. The deeper furrow across the bridge itself was from a burst of cannon fire from an Italian fighter outside Taranto. It had killed the lookouts even as the boat had dived deep. A cruel justice, if you could see it that way. They were the ones who should have seen the danger to themselves, and therefore to all those under their feet who depended on their constant vigilance. They had died because of that hair’s-breadth between life and oblivion which every submariner should recognise.
A wooden brow was being hauled out from the pier now. He saw the captain of the base and some other officers with oak leaves around their caps waiting to go through the formalities. He did not recognise many of them. It was hardly surprising. A lot had happened in fourteen months, and not only in the Mediterranean.
‘Dismiss the hands, Bob. I’ll——’ He faltered, suddenly
unsure
. ‘I‘d like to speak with them before they shove off on leave.’
The words had come out at last. These men, his company of fifty officers and ratings, would be scattered to the corners of the British Isles. To share their leave in their own ways. With parents and wives, girlfriends and children. Merging for just a few weeks in that other world of rationing and shortages, bombing and pathetic determination.
When the leave was over they would be sent to other boats. To form a hard core amongst men like the recruits on the wall. To crew new boats which were being built to replace those strewn across the beds of a dozen disputed seas.
He shivered, feeling the wind cold and clammy across his face. 1943 was now a month old. What, when his own leave was over, would it have for him?
He leaned over the screen to watch his men hurrying gratefully for the main hatch. In white caps, their hands and faces deeply tanned, they looked out of place. Vulnerable against the grey stone, the cruising wavecrests of the Solent, the rain-haze across Portsdown Hill. He sighed again and climbed out of the bridge and down to the casing.
The base captain was genuinely welcoming, his handshake hearty. Other faces moved around Marshall, a pat on his back, more handshakes.
The captain said, ‘Good to see you, Marshall. By God, it’s a tonic to read what you’ve done out there. Just what the doctor ordered.’
Another officer suggested swiftly, ‘Now, if we could go to your office, sir?’
Marshall was tired, and despite a clean shirt and his best
uniform
felt dirty and unkempt. You did not shake off submarines merely by walking ashore. They all said that. The smells seemed to get right inside you. Diesel and wet metal. Cabbage-water and sweat. And that wasn’t the half of it. But he was not too weary to notice the brief exchange of glances. A sense of urgency.
The captain nodded. ‘Fair enough.’ He touched Marshall’s arm. ‘I expect you’ll find things have changed a bit since you’ve been away.’ He walked to the brow and returned the trot sentry’s salute. ‘Heavy bombing all round here. Terrible.’ He forced a smile. ‘But the Keppel’s Head is still standing, so things can’t be too bad!’
Marshall fell silent as he walked through the familiar gates, allowing the conversation to flow around him almost unheeded. Even out of the wind he felt chilled to the marrow, and wondered how long it would take to get away from this unexpected gathering. He saw young officers marching to instruction, others sitting in a classroom where he had once sat. Gunnery and torpedoes, first lieutenant’s course, and then finally the one for command, the
Perisher
as it was guardedly called. Fort Blockhouse seemed to have altered little. Only he seemed an intruder.
Into a large office, where a fire burned invitingly in its grate beneath a picture of a pre-war submarine lying in Grand Harbour, Malta. He found himself studying it intently, recalling the setting as he had last seen it. Rubble and dust. Endless bombing, and a population eking out their lives in cellars and shelters.
A steward was busying himself with glasses at the far end of the room, and the captain said cheerfully, ‘Early in the morning, I know. But
this
is special.’