Take or Destroy! (26 page)

On
Horambeb,
now curving away to port from Umberto’s side, the engineers were keeping up an enormous head of steam in the boilers, but then a shell from the 47 above the slipway hit her wheelhouse and her captain was flung aside dead with the helmsman, while the first lieutenant crawled away stupefied. A second 47 millimetre shell hit her from only a few hundred yards as she headed in but the determination of her captain had already done its work. Steered by an elderly petty officer with a face like a set of nutcrackers, who kept his head just above the sill of the wheelhouse, she continued to move away from
Umberto,
her bridge a wreck, her mast trailing over her stern. Trembling under the thrust of engines held at a gland-shattering pressure of steam, she bore ahead. Then another shell from the 47 tore through her side, to explode in the grimy cavern of her engine room. A high shaft of red-orange flame, ancient soot and roaring steam shot up from her funnel and she immediately began to lose way, her rudder and engines useless.

From
Umberto
they watched her with agonized faces, then a shell hit
Umberto
herself with an aching shuddering crash and they felt the ship roll against the explosion.

‘Another two hundred yards,’ Babington prayed, ‘and we’ve made it!’

As he spoke, the bright glare of the searchlight in the centre of the town disappeared and they realized they were in the shelter of the great stone mole. Hardness had just ordered the wheel to be put to port and rung down to stop engines when another shell from the 75 at Mas el Bub hit the roof of the wheelhouse. It killed Hardness and Babington outright and wounded the helmsman, the yeoman and the Italian-speaking signaller. At the most crucial moment of the approach,
Umberto
was no longer under control.

Von Steen saw the explosion through the smoke. The shell had passed dangerously near to where
Giuseppe Bianchi
was lying astern of the other three ships.

‘Stop those guns,’ he screamed, and as Nietzsche crawled to the telephone the firing slackened. Despite the bullets still chipping plaster from the ceiling, Nietzsche lifted his head to look out. He could just see the topmast and upperworks of
Umberto,
caught by the overspill of the searchlight, sticking out of the smoke as they glided past
Giuseppe Bianchi.
He stared at them helplessly.

‘For God’s sake,’ he said. ‘What do we kill them with?’

Von Steen swung round. ‘Not with guns,’ he shouted. ‘Get your men down to the mole!’

As Nietzsche scrambled to his feet and headed for the stairs,
Horambeb’s
port bow thumped against the mole. As the steel scraped the stone, groaning and flinging out sparks in protest, the petty officer at the helm, coughing at the smoke in his lungs, put the wheel hard-a-starboard. The old water boat swung outwards and slithered along the wall, tearing off her rails against a projecting stone. As they lifted, screeching in protest and snaking through the air, they skewered a sailor crouching for shelter near the bridge. His screams as the rusty iron stabbed into his stomach went unheard as
Horambeb’s
bow dug into the mud-bank ahead to fling everybody off their feet. Then her boilers blew and the engine became a tangled mass of steel and she slid to a steaming, spluttering, crackling halt with her nose on the mud, her stern sticking out at an angle of thirty degrees from the wall.

Lieutenant Carter was still singing to himself as he drove LCT 11 towards the beach. Smoke enveloped his ship and nobody seemed to have spotted her yet so that he thought he might even get her ashore without being touched. They might actually give him a gong for it, and then he could
go
out and get happily drunk. Or even, he decided gaily, go home and strangle his wife.

He heard the tanks start their engines and caught the smell of exhaust fumes, and saw turret lids clang shut. There were only a hundred yards to go now and the well-deck was full of blue smoke. It was going to be a piece of cake. His song grew louder.

‘Pin a rose in your permanent wave,
The navy’s at the door.
There’s cider down the eiderdown -’

But at that moment LCT 11 burst from the smoke and the crew of the 75 at Mas el Bub saw her. The gun barrel swung and, even as Carter saw the muzzle flash, the shell hit the side of the bridge. The wheelhouse, together with Lieutenant Carter’s plans and his song, seemed to disintegrate in a blood-red blur as the place fell in on him. The signaller standing alongside him, together with the helmsman and the twenty-year-old first lieutenant fell in a heap. As Carter dragged himself to his knees, he saw that the wheelhouse was on fire and the signaller’s clothes were already burning. The first lieutenant’s head, the steel helmet still in place, was at the opposite side of the wheelhouse, staring at the body it belonged to with an expression of startled bewilderment, and the helmsman was so peppered with splinters he looked like a colander oozing blood through every hole.

The wheel was spinning and the landing craft’s head was beginning to fall off, so that she was aimed now towards the cliffs instead of the slipway. Carter could hear shouts from the well deck in front of him where the soldiers were staring anxiously back towards the bridge. Grimly he struggled to his feet and grasped the wheel to bring the head round again. Then he realized that something was soaking the front of his uniform, and with his free hand he pawed clumsily at his body. Curiously, he didn’t feel any great pain, but as he stared at the palm of his hand, glistening and red with his own blood, he knew he was badly wounded somewhere.

Automatically, he started to sing again, in the same tuneless monotone he always used.

‘When I get out of the navy
What a wonderful wife I’ll make - ‘

Staring ahead, he started a mad conversation with the dead men around him. ‘Proper cock we made of that one, Number One,’ he said, uncertain whether to address the first lieutenant’s head or his body. ‘And what a bloody helmsman! Lying down on the job!’

Another shell burst near the bridge and the blast knocked him to his knees. Down below in the well the soldiers were crouching with their heads down.

‘Officers don’t worry me - not much,’ Carter sang as he dragged himself to his feet again. ‘The bastards’ll pay for this, Number One. If I don’t get a medal for this night’s work I’ll shit in the admiral’s hat, you see!’

They were almost on the beach now, and the crew of the 75, unable to depress the barrel of the gun any further, had switched back to
Umberto.
The 47 by the slipway picked them up instead. Its first shell screamed over them but the second hit the bow and the air became full of singing splinters, and steel peeled back as if it were the rind of an orange. Someone started screaming in the well deck and, unable to see properly for the blood that streamed into his eyes from a wound on his head, Carter made out the rusty loom of a wrecked freighter on the beach. As he felt the bow of the landing craft scrape the sand, he knew he’d arrived. A petty officer started to lower the ramp but the shell on the bows had cut the chains and it fell with a crash into the shallow water.

‘Made it,’ Carter said aloud, and reeled back to sit down heavily on the body of the helmsman. Slowly, feebly, he fumbled in his pocket for his flask. Lamps seemed to be going out, and little doors were shutting one after the other in his mind, each one cutting off one more cord in his brain, so that he could remember his song only in fragments. Then, for the first time in his life, he found he couldn’t recall the words at all, couldn’t even lift the flask to his mouth. He stared round him at the shambles in the wheelhouse and felt a terrible lassitude, as if he’d done what he usually did and had one drink too many.

New song, he decided. New song. Sober him up.

‘Rolling home,’ he mumbled. ‘By the light of the silvery moon...’

Then his own light finally went out and, as they dragged him from the wheelhouse, he was silent at last.

As
Umberto
thumped out of control against
Horambeb,
her riddled main mast came down and another piece flew off her funnel. A man jumped over the side, glad to be out of the flying splinters, and secured a rope round one of the water-boat’s bitts, but with no one to correct her and only her high bows touching,
Umberto
began to swing and it was impossible to get ashore.

ML 146, having discharged her men across
Horambeb’s
bow, reeled away with her fuel tanks on fire, her crew jumping into the water. ML 138, just behind and outside her, had to back away from
Umberto’s
swinging stern or be borne under. At that moment, a burst of machine-gun fire shattered her bridge and killed her captain and her coxswain. Half-blinded by cuts on the face, Lieutenant Dysart saw the danger and punched frantically at the vast body of Leading Seaman Gaukrodger, hunched alongside him.

‘Get on that bloody wheel, Gaukrodger,’ he screamed. ‘Shove ‘em in!’

Umberto’s
first lieutenant had now got the secondary controls working and had swung the wheel over. Then the Fairmile’s bow thumped against her stern, springing the launch’s planks and lifting the winch. As the third ML joined Dysart and they pushed together,
Umberto
at last began to swing alongside. Her weight shoved the lighter
Horambeb
towards the wall, the trapped water between the two vessels surging and thrashing as it leapt and boiled, to rock the ships like cradles.

By now,
Umberto’s
upperworks, were like a sieve. In the din, another shell crashed into her funnel and reduced an Oerlikon position to a tangled nest of smoking ruin and blackened bodies, but she was still swinging in, bearing
Horambeb
with her. As a second rope went down to the ruined deck of the water-boat, Hockold rose to his feet. There seemed to be no point in trying to dodge the bullet that was going to kill him, and his indifference as he stood upright put heart into the men about him.

‘Mole parties!’ he yelled and Lieutenant Brandison’s men rushed forward, slamming their gangways across to
Horambeb
and racing over them. A ladder lifted from
Horambeb’s
port side against the wall and a man scrambled up into the smoke at the top. But the German gunners were flaying the air above the mole with their weapons and a blast of machine-gun fire flung him back on to Belcher who fell to the deck half-stunned.

Brandison was behind them, however, and, crouching low, dived across the mole with the ropes to secure the top of the ladder. Immediately, more men swarmed up, to fling themselves flat behind oil drums, crates and piles of rope, and direct their fire towards Wutka’s wooden bridge and the 47 at the end of the mole.

‘Bridge party!’ Brandison and his men jumped up and went clattering away long the mole, with the smoke floats hissing and poppling from the wall on their right. The rest of
Umberto’s
complement began to swarm across
Horambeb
after them.

Then a burst of firing caught the bridge party and Brandison went down on his face with a crash, sliding along the concrete with the speed of his run until he came to a stop against a wrecked hand-cart. As the rest reached the bridged gap, Sergeant Jacka saw Germans hurrying up the mole from the landward end where there were huts and stone-built sheds and the crew of a 47 working at their gun. He flung himself down, his Tommy gun up, and as the Germans approached, the dazed Belcher flattened out alongside him.

‘Laid out like dog’s dinner,’ Jacka said and, as the two guns chattered, the Germans dropped to the ground. All but one, who went on running, leaning over at an angle as if he were trying to dodge the bullets, his head lolling, his mouth wide open. Then his legs crumpled and he crashed down, his helmet bouncing away, to roll over on to his back, his arms spread-eagled.

Jacka couldn’t tell which of the others was alive and which was dead, but they’d captured the wooden bridge. When another group of Germans made a rush forward, one of them with a grenade in his hand, Jacka’s burst caught them before they’d gone a yard and the grenade went straight up in the air to fall back against the man who had flung it. The explosion tossed his body over the edge of the mole into the harbour.

‘That’ll stop him coughing in church,’ Jacka said.

They scrambled to their feet and pounded across the wooden bridge to fling themselves flat again at the far side. Almost immediately behind them, Hockold crashed across the planking and began to run along the mole.

On the beach, clear of the smoke, Meinertz had got his Honey out of the landing craft and was heading towards the slip. The tank didn’t move very fast, but he reached the bottom of the slope hard under the cliff where he couldn’t be hit either by the 75 above or the 47 on the mole, and stopped to wait for Sergeant Gleeson.

He could hear both guns firing just above him and the clatter of machine-guns, and, pushing his head out of the hatch, he saw that Gleeson’s tank had stuck on a patch of soft sand and was sinking deeper with every turn of the tracks. A shell from the 47 hit it low on the port side and a cloud of sand, water and grit shot upwards. Thick smoke came from the turret and he saw the glow of an explosion inside. There was rubber in the burning smell, and hot oil mingled with something else that was nauseating, and he heard someone howling like a sick dog. He stared, helplessness quickening the horror as the ball of flame that seemed to surround the tank grew, fattened and bloated. After what seemed an age, the turret opened and he saw Gleeson’s head appear, his hair ablaze. But then the flames shot up round him like a gas jet and Meinertz had to shut his ears to the screams.

By this time, men were running through the streets of Qaba carrying weapons. Unteroffizier Upholz, magnificently indifferent to flying shards of metal, was standing at the bottom of the Shariah Jedid, waving a carbide torch to direct them into the buildings at the end of the mole. The whole town was alert now, but the Germans were so preoccupied with watching the harbour and keeping their guns on the mole that at first no one noticed the three RAF launches rushing in alone on a separate course to the eastern beaches. Then one of the guards in the watch tower of the POW compound spotted them and pressed the alarm while his mate snatched at his Schmeisser MP 38 and started firing. The MP 38 didn’t do much harm but it brought the crew of a heavy machine-gun below to life and as it started directing a stream of bullets out to sea, it was followed immediately by the 47 near the palace.