Convoy (11 page)

‘Congratulations,’ Yorke said, remembering the girl with honey-coloured hair and a ready smile.

‘I just thought I’d mention it.’

Yorke grinned and saluted: ‘You may safely dive to periscope depth.’

The folders sent up from Records and now stored in the safe comprised a pile of eleven dockets, each one of which contained all that was known of eleven convoys attacked by single U-boats which suddenly appeared in the middle, undetected by the escorts.

Yorke spent the morning skimming through them all before carefully reading the first one, which was outward-bound. There seemed to be no pattern in the attacks, no pattern in the times except that they were always at night. The advantage of Uncle’s arrangement of ASIU was that in one room were experts in many aspects of anti-submarine warfare, and after lunch Yorke sat on Jemmy’s desk, seeing if the submariner had any ideas.

Jemmy, his face grim, put his hands flat on the desk and said in a low voice, ‘I’ve seen some of those dockets. What Uncle didn’t tell you, and I will now reveal for the good of your immortal soul, is that there’s been a colossal bog-up. The first of these attacks was more than a year ago. The first time the ASIU saw those reports was two weeks ago.

‘The trouble is simple. Over there, on your desk, you have eleven dockets; eleven folders containing all the reports about each of those eleven convoys. But let me assure you, that ain’t the way the Admiralty got them in the first place. Uncle is now fighting to get the system changed because he’s been to see the Air Ministry boys to find out how they get all the information out of hundreds of air crew after a big bombing raid. Not only get it, but get it within a few hours, sort it out and if necessary act on it. They have a system of “de-briefing” where everyone who flew in a raid is questioned immediately his plane lands by intelligence officers. They can spot any weakness in the Ted defences immediately, or any weakness in our own planes, as well as assessing the success of our bombing.

‘Well, my old mate, that’s not the way the Navy and Merchant Navy have been doing it where convoys are concerned… Take as an example a convoy from the UK to, say, West Africa. The senior officer of the escort sees the merchant ships into, say, Freetown, Sierra Leone. He writes his report, hands it in to the local port admiral, and eventually, whenever there’s a ship coming back to the UK, the report is forwarded to the Admiralty.’

‘But that could take weeks!’ Ned interrupted.

‘Exactly, my lad, and that’s why Jemmy is telling you this parable. The commodore of the convoy also writes his report and that wanders along “the usual channels”, from one “In” basket to another. Losses, on the basis that bad news travels fast, get signalled to the Admiralty as soon as the convoy escort arrives at the destination. So already you have a separation of weeks between the Admiralty knowing that Convoy X lost Y ships, and then getting the SO’s report of what happened and eventually the commodore’s report. And here at the Admiralty the poor devils are swamped with paperwork, anyway.’

‘But hellfire, Jemmy, all this has cost dozens of ships and hundreds of lives,’ Ned said angrily.

‘Yes,’ Jemmy said quietly, ‘and that’s why, the minute that someone suspected there could be an “insider” – it was only an idle rumour; gossip at a club bar – all the papers were got together and bunged over to us. That was last week. This department isn’t yet six weeks old. Now you have all the dockets on your desk. All you have to do is find out what the Teds are up to, and write a memo to Uncle… Easy isn’t it…?’

Suddenly Ned felt trapped; caught between his own knowledge of the sheer exhaustion of escort officers, and the demands of Admiralty planners. Equally suddenly he knew that Jemmy’s twitch would never be cured while he was doing his present job; he was driven on to find flaws and answers because he knew, from bitter experience, that men’s lives depended on his wits.

You, Lieutenant Edward Yorke, he told himself, are caught up, too; you know the senior officer of an escort arrives at the convoy’s destination worn out with the actual voyage, but the minute the ship is anchored new orders arrive on board telling him to escort another convoy… No rest, no relaxation: the ship has to be fuelled and provisioned; men have to be given a few hours’ leave if possible; calls have to be made on port admirals; dozens of reports have to be written or checked and signed. Say that four ships were torpedoed – no SO wants to admit a U-boat managed to get through his screen, so probably he blurs the details in his report, never suspecting for a moment that the U-boat managed to get inside by some trick, rather than the SO’s faulty screen.

If, Ned warned himself, it was a trick and not inefficiency. He looked down at Jemmy’s drawn face. Jemmy was ruthless – with himself and others. And, Ned realized, it was the only way. So start with Uncle: Uncle had said that ships were being torpedoed by U-boats that managed to get inside the convoys, implying it was by some new invention or a clever trick. But supposing it was simply that the SOs of eleven escorts had been inefficient, or that the whole system of convoy defence was badly organized, or… There were dozens of possibilities. He could only hope, he realized, that the answer was in those eleven dockets, the contents of which had been so tardily assembled.

Delay, delay, delay… It had already killed so many men and lost so many ships, yet could anyone really be blamed? Could every escort commander’s report, and every commodore’s report, be sent by wireless to the Admiralty the moment a convoy arrived? Obviously not – the Admiralty’s entire wireless capacity would be swamped. And for most of the convoys arriving it would be unnecessary.

He realized Jemmy was watching him.

‘Now you see you’ve got a problem,’ the submariner said without malice. ‘It’s easy to say that a complete report on every convoy should be sent to the Admiralty immediately on arrival – and there’s no reason why it isn’t when a convoy arrives in the UK – but how can it be done for the convoys arriving in Canada, the USA, West, South and East Africa, India, South America… Ned, my old mate, Uncle was wrong when he said you shouldn’t blame voodoo: it’s the only explanation I can think of.

‘I’ve seen some of the dockets,’ Jemmy continued, ‘but let’s go over it from the start. If I remember correctly the first that anyone in the convoy or escort knows is when one or two ships go up with a bang, often followed by others?’

‘Yes, with the torpedo always coming from somewhere inside the convoy.’

‘So there’s absolutely no doubt the Ted boat is in there among the merchant ships – actually inside the perimeter of the columns, in other words?’

‘None at all. Not in these eleven cases, anyway.’

‘You realize what this means, Ned?’

‘Well, there’s little or no chance of the escort detecting or attacking a U-boat which is actually inside the convoy: the heavy propeller and engine noises of the merchant ships themselves mask the U-boat, which is running silently on its batteries.’

‘Oh yes, we can take all that for granted,’ Jemmy said, ‘and it won’t matter a damn if the U-boat attacks submerged or on the surface. No, you’re missing the vital point, mate.’

‘Surface and tell me, then.’

‘Every one of the escorts must be deaf. A Ted boat
did
get into the middle of each of these convoys, and to do that he must have passed close to one or other of the escorts, but they heard nothing. Not a single return ping on a single Asdic…’

‘The Ted could have been down deep with motors stopped.’

‘Oh yes, but every time he had to be in exactly the right position so that the convoy’s next zig or zag brought it right over him, so he could surface in the middle. Bit of luck, eh?’

‘But you’ve just found a diagram…’

‘I know, but your nine convoys were all using different diagrams: different from each other and different from mine. I checked the numbers, and they didn’t include the three.’

‘So you don’t think a Ted boat could be lying in wait ahead for the convoy to pass over?’

‘No,’ Jemmy said bluntly. ‘At least, it could be but wasn’t in these cases. But let’s have another chat when you’ve gone through the rest of the dockets. Incidentally, you’re probably new to dockets,’ he added, a bitter note in his voice. ‘Don’t take any notice of the minutes written on them by various directors: most of them are just trying to impress each other with their wit, not win the bloody war at sea.’

Yorke went back to his desk and reached for the second docket, a convoy from Freetown to Liverpool. Dozens of reports by everyone ranging from the escort commander to the skipper of an ocean-going tug that found a lifeboat from one of the torpedoed ships, full of dead men. He glanced at the dates. They had been written over a period of nine weeks; they had been received at the Admiralty one by one and up to three months later, so that no one ever read all the reports together, and that was the weakness – unavoidable, of course – of the system.

Forty-two merchant ships had rendezvoused in the great almost landlocked bay at Freetown, ships from other ports on the west coast of Africa like Takoradi on the Gold Coast and the open anchorage of Accra, Lagos and Apapa, the twins on either side of the same river in Nigeria; and from Port Harcourt. Some of the ships had come from South America, crossing the South Atlantic in a small convoy.

They had weighed anchor and then formed up outside Freetown, seven columns of six ships each, like chocolates in a box, with an ocean-going tug forming a little tail and steaming at the end of the fourth column. The tug was intended to be the rescue ship because no merchant ship was allowed to stop to pick up survivors from another which had just been torpedoed. The order had at first seemed harsh to the Merchant Navy – until it realized that when a pack of U-boats was attacking it was easy for a particular U-boat to torpedo a merchant ship and then stand by her as she sank, waiting for the next astern in the column to stop for the survivors – presenting another and perfect target, without the U-boat having to manoeuvre. Before the order was given, there were cases of three ships lying torpedoed within a hundred yards of each other, victims of the same U-boat.

Yorke sat for a few minutes, staring unseeing at the badly typed reports but picturing the convoy forming up. All the ships would be painted grey, the famous ‘crab fat grey’, and many would be rusty, particularly those just arrived from the South American ports of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santos or Rio, and carrying cargoes from all three countries of meat, hides and wool. The meat ships with their refrigerated holds were usually modern-looking, but the rest of the convoy ranged from one of the new American ships to old coal-burning tramps, ancient enough to have been in convoys trying to dodge the Kaiser’s U-boats in the Great War. Coal-burners – a nightmare to escort commanders because from time to time they suddenly erupted black smoke from their funnels; one could imagine the bells ringing the stokehold to start the stokers shovelling and the smoke lifting over the horizon into the field of vision of a U-boat captain…

The ships from along the west coast of Africa: they had come out with bombs, shells and small-arms ammunition in the holds and crated aircraft on deck, enormous rectangular boxes almost as high as the bridge, creating a frightening amount of windage in a gale. These planes, uncrated and assembled in West Africa, would fly diagonally across the great continent to join the RAF in Egypt. Now the ships were going back to the UK with an almost bewildering mixture of general cargoes – palm nuts to be made into margarine or soap, palm oil in those few dry cargo ships also fitted with tanks that could be heated (because the oil had to be kept at a certain temperature), dehydrated bananas (which looked like sunbaked dog droppings), copper, bauxite, cotton…

With the exception of the Elder Dempster Line, which operated regularly in peacetime to West Africa and built fine-looking ships, the West African run seemed to a cynical young naval officer to be a godsend for every struggling shipping company that in peacetime would have gone to the wall: they could charter their miserable ten-knots-maximum, six-knot-convoy-speed rusty wrecks to the Ministry of War Transport, which provided crews from ‘the Pool’ and DEMS gunners (who were volunteers from the Royal Artillery and the Navy and received their name from the description Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships), and complete cargoes. And if a ship was sunk by enemy action, the Ministry provided a new ship as well…

Paint blistered from the tropical sun, the officers and men yellow from the Mepacrine antimalarial tablets or with their heads buzzing from the bitter quinine, and sometimes still pale and shaky from the malaria that often defied all precautions… And all the ships preparing for the strict blackout once again after several weeks on the coast in ports far from the enemy where there was no blackout; on the contrary, unloading and loading continued through the night using powerful arc lamps. And those damned lamps – Yorke could remember when dining on board merchant ships how frequently one heard the bulbs bursting as huge stag beetles, the size of large walnuts and harder, dazed by the light, crashed through the wire screens and into the big bulbs, breaking them in a cloud of sparks which produced the bellow, ‘Where’s Lecky?’ He seemed to remember the ship’s electrician was usually on shore or sleeping off an overcharge of palm wine.

Most of the men were glad to be leaving the tropical heat. Well, perhaps the high humidity rather than the sun’s heat, although the engineers suffered badly, having to eat salt tablets to make up for the salt lost in perspiration.

The commodore’s ship would steam out into a clear patch of ocean, with all the other ships milling around – chugging, in many cases – each flying the four-letter flag hoist of her registration letters that identified her. The leaders of the columns would get into position abreast the commodore, three on each side in this case. One of them, commanded by an experienced captain, would be the vice-commodore, and he would take over if the commodore’s ship was sunk. A third captain would be the rear-commodore.

The seven ships would be the leaders of the seven columns and each of the forty-two ships had been given a position – third ship in the fifth column, sixth in the first column, and so on. Slowly and warily – for the masters of merchant ships disliked manoeuvring near other vessels, having spent a life in peacetime worrying about collisions and insurance claims, underwriters and average adjusters – the ships would form into columns, with the escorting destroyers and corvettes (most likely only corvettes and perhaps a frigate: destroyers sailed with only the most important convoys) staying outside the throng, biting their nails with impatience perhaps, but knowing that a harassed master became mulish and probably abusive when, doing his best, he was chivvied by one of the escorts. There was little love lost between the Merchant and Royal Navies, and none between masters (with twenty years’ sea time and more) and the young officers commanding a corvette, a type of ship little admired by the masters because it was slow and, in anything of a sea, pitched and rolled too much to operate its Asdic, fire guns or drop depth charges.