Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) (40 page)

Coventry
scored the first kill when one of her 3-inch guns caught a
German plane a little too eager to get in close, and blasted off the right
wing, taking the engine off in the bargain and sending the plane into a
cartwheeling splash into the sea. The lead destroyers danced ahead, too nimble for
the Germans to get any hits on them, but
Valiant
was another story. A
venerable old
Queen Elizabeth
class ship,
Valiant
had fought at
Jutland in her youth, but now found a strange new foe in the Ju-88s.

The
bigger ship was running full out at 23 knots, all her AA guns firing, but was
soon straddled by a string of bombs falling along her port side. The ship
rocked away from the blast, her heavy side armor taking most of the damage and
shrugging it all off as
Valiant
labored on. Her gunners took down another
Ju-88 before the next near miss fell just forward of the ship, but her Captain
Rawlings pressed on and ran right over the fuming spray, heedless.

The
squadron was now coming in range of Gibraltar and Captain Rawlings heard the
call from his mainmast watch, the range finders calling out 28,000 yards. The
ship’s main 15-inch guns had recently been modified to allow them to elevate to
30 degrees, allowing
Valiant
to fire out 32,000 yards, and seeing that
the target was stationary, Rawlings ordered the guns into action at a few
minutes before midnight on the 16th. The boom of the main batteries was indeed
heard in far off Gibraltar, like the rumble of thunder heralding a fast moving
storm of steel.

Valiant
had been sent to do more than buck up the morale of the beleaguered
garrison. Somerville had been discretely told that the main wharf and docks
were fair game. Seeing as it was well behind British lines that night, however,
Rawlings was reluctant to fire at that target from any great range. The British
had spotters up on Signal Hill and the Weather Station up on Devil’s Tower, and
they called the shots as it were, seeing the first salvos coming in four
enormous splashes right in the harbor itself near the North Mole.

Sergeant
John Miller of the 4th Battalion Black Watch saw the first rounds fall. He had
been ordered as part of his company to reinforce the battered positions near
the old Moorish Castle, which was still under assault from the Grossdeutschland
Regiment at that time. When he saw the big geysers of water shoot up in the bay
he rallied his squad. The troops on the front line thought they were German
bombs at first, having been hit the last several nights. Then someone else
realized what was happening and shouted out that the navy was back.

 “Right
mate! It’s the bloody Navy!” Miller called out. “Listen to that, me Boyos!
Those are nice fat fifteen inch guns, and the sweetest sound in the world to my
ears tonight.”

Chapter 35

Lieutenant
Dawes did not see the first shells land, as it was well
after sunset and he was already down the ladder to Europa Point, with no view
of the main harbor. But he certainly heard them, a loud roar and the long
whistling fall of the heavy shells. He also thought it was a German bomb
falling at first, thinking to find any cellar at hand to get under cover. The
Stukas
had been pounding the hill all day off and on but, from the sound of the planes
overhead, these were the twin engine German bombers at hand. Then he caught a
bright flash to the south, where the dark Straits of Gibraltar became the
gateway that had long been known as the Pillars of Hercules. It suddenly seemed
as though Hercules was there himself, roaring in anger, and Dawes immediately
knew what he was seeing now.

The
Royal Navy had kept its appointment. That was a battleship firing out in the
channel, and he ran to the edge of the ridge to get a better look.

“Bloody
marvelous!” he said to a Gunnery Sergeant there. It was Sergeant Hobson, the
same man he had huddled with in the bomb shelter the previous night, the one who
had the cheek to suggest the officer’s planning to watch the horse races that
morning might hope they had fast steeds. He had stopped his loading of a nearby
lorry to gawk at the ships out on the moonlit waters to the south.

“Lucky
the Germans didn’t get smart and put artillery over there on Spanish Morocco,”
said the Sergeant. “The Navy’s doing it right this time. They snuck in right in
the lee of those hills.”

“Let’s
see how the Germans sleep tonight under the guns of
Rodney
and
Nelson
.”
Dawes smiled with an eager nod of his head.

“Oh,
that’s not
Rodney
, sir. And it looks to be only one battleship that I
can make out. That other ship is most likely a destroyer. My guess is that HMS
Valiant
is out there tonight, with a pair of valiant souls stuck on the Rock here to
watch her do her business.”

“Wish I
could say I belonged to that club,” said Dawes, just a bit dejected. “I’ve
bounced about from the North Mole to the Hospital to the Signals Station, and
then down here. Jerry took a whack at me this morning near the mole, but I
haven’t done much of anything since.”

“I
shouldn’t worry about that, sir. We’ll all have more than enough to do before
this gets settled one way or another.”

That
suddenly put a new fear into Dawes’ head, and he realized that this would have
to resolve somehow, and he wondered how it would all turn out. The Germans had
hit the Rock very hard that day. They had chased him from his tower, nearly put
a bullet into him and set him on line with what looked to be sixty other men waiting
for medical care. Now, with
Valiant
firing out there, her massive
volleys rolling out with bright orange fire and a terrible roar, it was easy to
think he might wake up tomorrow and find the Germans gone, but he knew that was
not likely.

That
thought jangled his nerves again. My God, he thought, what if we lose? What
happens to every man jack of us here if those guns aren’t enough to make the
difference? We’ll either be killed or taken prisoner and marched off to Berlin…
and that thought gave him no comfort at all.

“What
do you say, Sergeant?” he asked. “Will the Germans take a good knock tonight
and give up the ghost?”

The
Sergeant grimaced. “Not bloody likely,” he said heavily. “I was at Dunkirk…” He
didn’t need to say anything more.

Dawes
watched the battleship firing, trying to take heart with every salvo, but the
ache of fear was on him now, and he found himself worrying about his fate, and
the lives of everyone else in Gibraltar. The Sergeant seemed very calm,
however, and so he asked his question again.

“Do you
think we’ll hold, Sergeant?”

“We’ll
do our bloody best.”

“But
will it be enough?”

“If it
isn’t then you can join the Royal Engineers, sir, and dig yourself a nice
little tunnel under the Straits. Either that or you might get lucky and find the
one already there.”

“Already
there? You mean we can get out that way?”

The
Sergeant winked at him. “Just a legend, sir. But find me the right Barbary Ape
and stay on its tail when things get hot. You might be surprised!” He was up,
rolling up his shirt sleeve on the warm late summer night.

“Well
I’d best see to my lorry. The boys will be needing this ammunition soon enough.”

Dawes
nodded, but he sat there, spellbound with the sight of the battleship firing
and finally realizing what a horror this war was going to become. We build
these massive steel leviathans to hurl shot and shell at the enemy, and all the
while the Germans are coming out of the night in those planes like banshees.
His pulse was up and there was a thrill of excitement, edged with yawning
anxiety. Here he was watching the battle being joined, with the issue still
gravely in doubt. HMS
Valiant
probably never thought she would be
directing those guns at the very harbor she would drop anchor on. The Navy is
out there bawling away like someone who’s come home from the town and found a
burglar has broken into his home.

Now the
fight was on, and at least all he could see of it was good British steel firing
away for a change. Yet that doubt was still there, a cold spot in his stomach
that made him very afraid. He was not a fighting man by nature. Dawes had come
in an officer, and the most rigorous thing he had ever done in his brief time
in the service was a good long workout on the “Hardening Course.” Pushups and
sit ups were one thing, the shock and sound of real combat quite another.

He
remembered how he had looked forward to settling into a comfortable bed after
that long workout. He had been stuck on the course with the rankers, and on the
morrow he would swagger back into the Bleak House and belly up for a good
breakfast, basking in the privileges that came with his Lieutenant’s rank.

The
thought of food invariably led him to think of what might happen to them if
they got holed up in those dark, dusty tunnels. If the Germans don’t kill us all
first, they’ll bloody well starve us in time. He knew they had nearly nine
month’s supplies laid in, but that would be a long and agonizing haul. The
thought of becoming a tunnel rat did not seem at all appealing. He watched HMS
Valiant
get off another salvo, and then got up on unsteady legs. He needed a smoke,
reaching into his pocket to fish about for his cigarette pack and lighter, and
when he had them out he realized his hand was shaking so badly that he could
barely get one lit. The words of a poem by Rudyard Kipling came to his mind
with their sad, mournful song.

To
the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned;

To
my brethren in their sorrow overseas…

We're
poor little lambs who've lost our way,

    Baa!
Baa! Baa!

We're
little black sheep who've gone astray,

    Baa—aa—aa!

Gentlemen-rankers
out on the spree,

Damned
from here to Eternity…

* * *

It
did not take much for the spotters on the weather station
hill to correct the fall of those shells. Plus 400, right 1000 and the guns
were right on target, striking the Land Port at the base of the Devil’s Tongue,
with the next salvos corrected to fall right on the cemetery, which was now
occupied by the Germans. One round struck the silent tombstones, sending chunks
of granite into the air and cratering the graves of generations past. The
gunners at the Windsor Battery had been taking a pounding from the Germans, but
now they cheered gleefully as the spotters slowly walked the 15-inch barrage
back over the runway and across the old British lines right into La Linea,
Britain’s first fire in anger to strike Spanish soil.

The
intent was to get at the German artillery there, and though no one on the Rock
knew it at the time, the British had some success in knocking out several
German guns. Then
Valiant
began to make a wide turn, her lease in the
relatively narrow waters of the strait run out, coming about to head back west.
The German planes continued to make their diving runs at her, with bombs
straddling the ship, splintering the weather deck and churning up the sea, but
Valiant
sailed right on through. Her aft batteries again found the bay near the North
Mole, and were expertly walked due east right across the German lines, through
the cemetery, and right off shore when the last rounds fell in the sea near the
Cattle Sheds.

Meanwhile,
the dogged
Hotspur
had surged on ahead with
Greyhound
, racing past
the southern tip of Europa Point where they saw British AA gunners firing to
lend their support against the German planes. Lieutenant Dawes was there with
them, watching the bright tracers streak across the sky, and the night was
deafened by the sharp crack of the gunfire. Commander Herbert Francis Hope
Layman led the ship from the exposed weather bridge, and he saw the men waving
and saluting from the flagstaff at Europa Point.

“Hoist
colors!” he ordered, showing the garrison the flag, which immediately set the
men to cheering.
Hotspur
and
Greyhound
raced up the eastern side
of the Isthmus, past the Governor’s Cottage on the flank of Windmill Hill and
on towards Sandy Bay. They surged on past the hamlet at Catalan Bay until they
were off the coast near the Slaughterhouse. There Commander Layman saw the
boats on the shore, where the German mountain troops had stormed ashore to cut
off the Cattle Sheds and make their daring ascent up the sheer rocky walls of
the Devil’s Tower. She had only four 4.7-inch guns, nothing to speak of
compared to
Valiant’s
broadside, but
Hotspur
was valiant too, and
she poured it on, setting three landing boats ablaze and blasting the hillside cliffs
where Signal Hill had reported German mountaineering operations were still
underway. Half a squad of the 2nd Company, 3rd battalion 98th Mountain Regiment,
was blown from their rocky perches and blasted clean off the hill.

The gallant
rush of the destroyers did more to bolster British morale than any real harm to
the enemy, but that was enough. They wheeled about at Catalan Bay, circling
once as if to dare anything German to challenge them, guns blazing all the
while. Then the nimble destroyers turned south and ran to rejoin the British naval
squadron.