Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) (41 page)

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.

Chapter 36

The
German
effort on the second day was
heavily concentrated in the town itself. The 98th Mountain Regiment consolidated
positions near the Moorish Castle while Grossdeutschland Regiment began to push
south from the Civil Hospital towards Governor’s Parade. As they did so, units
from the 98th Mountain Regiment would extend south along the line of the higher
ground to the east to hold the flank of this advance. This enabled the Germans
to keep considerable force in the attack, which was difficult house to house
fighting.

The
weak area of the British defense was the area known as the Devil’s Gap that lay
between the town itself and the Rock. The Germans seemed to instinctively know
that this was the place to attack, and by so doing they could split the British
defenders into two groups. To the west, in the town itself, the 4th Devonshire
Battalion, with a company from the 2nd Somerset Light and another of Royal
Engineers, put up a stolid defense but, outnumbered three to one, they
continued to be attacked by fresh troops.

In the
east the remnant of the 2nd Kings Rifles had retreated up the rising knees of
the rock to defend the naval batteries and old siege tunnels there. With the
Gate House of the Moorish Castle breached, only the tall battlement of the
Tower of Homage remained in British possession, and was now defended by a
company of the Black Watch. It was to be Gibraltar’s Hougoumont, the farmhouse
and gate that was defended by the Coldstream Guards at Waterloo and stubbornly
held throughout that great battle. Yet unlike the gates of the farmhouse that
were bravely forced shut in the heat of that struggle, there was no gate here,
and no way to get inside the tower itself from below. It was simply a massive
stone square, with two tiers of crenulated battlements at the top where the
bravest of the Black Watch took turns firing down at the German mountain
troops.

Inside the
top portion of the tower were four stone rooms where fresh ammunition, water,
supplies and more men huddled in defense. The Germans fired round after round
against the tower with their 150mm infantry gun, blasting away a fragment here
a battlement there, but still the Black Watch fought on. Men emerged from the
inner tower rooms to drag the wounded back to safety, while others took their
place on the battlements. One after another they fought and died, Corporal Robert
Cord, Privates Nick Mulligan, Jon McIntyre, Alex Jones and Bill Barclay. A squad
of German mountain troops tried to hurl up grappling hooks to begin a medieval
style attack, but were cut down by a rifle team led by Lance Corporal David
Nichol. The Germans hurled grenades and the British threw them back again.
MG-34 machineguns would rake the battlements for long minutes, but the instant
the German squads advanced, every embrasure spit fire at them from above. It
was soon clear that the position would not fall easily, if at all.

General
Kübler was watching the action with his field glasses, gritting his jaw when he
saw the latest attempt to scale the tower wall fail. A man as rugged as the
mountain itself, he shook his head with dismay. “Tell the assault team to
enfilade that tower,” he said. “No hammer will break it, or the men inside.
That place will not fall by direct assault.” He knew the old game of scissors,
paper, rock well enough. What he could not smash with the rock of his mountain
troops could be taken by a paper like envelopment, which he ordered at once.
The Germans now moved to scale the green, tree sewn slopes to either side of
the tower, well concealed by the thick foliage, and inside the Tower of Homage
the Black Watch held on, defiant, enduring and resolute to the last man.

To the
west of this position, the fighting in the town itself was going much better
for the Germans. This was no ordinary regiment of soldiers at work, but the
elite Grossdeutschland Regiment, and they knew their business well. Governor’s
Parade and Residence was taken by 10:00 and fighting was particularly bitter
near the Cathedral and Convent, the holy places desecrated by the deathly
rattle and shock of war. Another two hours hard fighting cleared most of the
town as far south as the edge of the Grand Parade, and soon the rifle squads
were again creeping through the hallowed ground of Trafalgar Cemetery, where
every grave and tombstone told a story.

A
gritty Sergeant and two German Privates crouched low near one grave site,
dedicated to Thomas Worth and John Buckland of the Royal Marine Artillery. One
man knew the English and read the inscription aloud: “The brightest ornaments
of their Corps… Killed by the same shot on the 23rd November, 1810 while
directing the Howitzer Boats in an attack on the enemy’s flotilla in Cadiz Bay.”

The
Sergeant gave him a sour look. “Yes? Well spread out and keep your heads down
or you will both join them here!”

Captain
Thomas Norman of HMS
Mars
and Lieutenant William Forester of HMS
Colossus
must have turned over in their graves as the Germans slowly fought through
their burial sites. Both men had died in the famous Battle of Trafalgar that
had lent its name to this place.

Soldiers
of the 4th Devonshires fought a losing battle, their numbers dwindling until
they were eventually holed up in the buildings around the Main Wharf and docks.
The elegant Alameda Gardens felt the stain of war and death when a platoon of
grenadiers made a brave rush over that area to reach the sand pits near Upper
Witham’s Road. Meanwhile, the 98th Mountain Regiment had begun to push up onto
the Devil’s Gap, intending to reach the main north south road there. It was
very hard fighting to clear the gun positions at Princess Caroline’s Battery
and Princess Anne’s Battery, but all these were finally taken, the British
Engineers spiking the guns before they fell back to the entrance of the
underground Upper Galleries.

The
King’s Rifles were now shut inside the Rock, and General Liddell knew he could
not hope to hold the remainder of the ground to the south through Rosia Bay. At
02:00 he finally gave the grim order that all service troops and battery crews
on Windmill Hill and Europa Point should make their way into Saint Michael’s
Cave, a natural labyrinth where stalagmites grinned like stony teeth. There
they would stolidly hold their ground, accepting this self imposed internment
rather than surrender, unless order to do so by higher authorities.

 Lieutenant
Dawes was shut inside Saint Michael’s cave with all the rest. In the heady
retreat up the steep ground he had come across a fallen private, noting the
patch on his shoulder—4th Battalion, Devonshire Regiment. It had once been
called the 11th Regiment of Foot, formed in the year 1667, with a long and
storied history. The Regiment fought in Holland, Spain and Austria, it’s powder
blackening the air at battles like Fontenoy, Warburg, and Kampen. During the
years when Napoleon loomed as the great threat in Europe, it fought as a Marine
unit at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, at the siege of Malta, in the Peninsular
War, and the famous Battle of Salamanca. There it took on a well earned
nickname—the Bloody Eleventh, and carried it on through the Great War, in
Italy, Macedonia, Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia. It went ‘over the top’ at
the battle of the Somme, and then one day the 4th Battalion found its way
here—to the Rock of Gibraltar.