Love and War in the Apennines (2 page)

‘No need for that, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you a blank cheque. All you have to do is fill in the name and address of your bank and sign it.’

Even then it seemed an evil omen.

As soon as we were submerged and clear of Sliema Creek, George Duncan, who was our C.O., gave us all the information about the larger operation of which
Whynot
was a minute part that his superiors had thought fit to give him. The rest he had picked up for himself, which he was very good at doing. Listening to him I was glad I was no longer a merchant seaman.

In a final attempt to save Malta from capitulation, a convoy of fourteen merchant ships was being fought through the Mediterranean from the west. One of them was a tanker, the only one that could be found that could attain the sixteen knots at which the ships were to steam. The safe arrival of this tanker was essential, for without it the island would be deprived of fuel.

The convoy had already passed through the Straits of Gibraltar the previous night and it was now somewhere south of the Balearics. The escort and covering forces were prodigious: two battleships, four carriers, one of which was going to fly its entire complement of Spitfires into Malta when it got within range, seven cruisers and twenty-five destroyers. Somewhere at the mouth of the Sicilian Channel the covering force would turn back and the remaining cruisers and destroyers would take the convoy through to Malta. Heavy losses were expected.

The enemy’s preparations for the destruction of the convoy
were on an even grander scale than the arrangements for protecting it. They had been following its movements with great interest ever since it had left the west coast of Scotland and they probably knew its destination (crates marked MALTA had been left conspicuously on the quayside at Glasgow while the ships were loading them for anyone interested to see but, mercifully, none of us knew this at the time). All the Sardinian and Sicilian airfields were crammed with bombers of the Second and Tenth German Air Fleets, and that remarkable military jack-of-all-trades and master of most of them, Field-Marshal Kesselring, was in overall command of the air operations. There was also a force of Italian torpedo bombers, which was to play an important part in the operation, and large numbers of German and Italian submarines and motor torpedo boats had been deployed along the route.

The code name of the convoy was
Pedestal.
It was commanded by a rear-admiral, and the cruiser and destroyer force which had the truly awful task of taking the convoy through to Malta, by a vice-admiral. George didn’t know their names but it was unimportant. I did not envy them; but I envied much less the men in the merchant ships. Besides, we had enough on our hands with our own piddling little
Whynot
to worry about them. By this time, one o’clock in the afternoon of the tenth, although none of us knew it, the carrier
Eagle
had already been sunk by an Italian submarine. And this was only the beginning.

It would be tedious to relate the details of the voyage. They were the same as any other for passengers in a submarine. The wardroom was so minute that apart from the times when I emerged to eat and discuss our plans, such as they were, and pore over the aerial photographs which had been taken from such an altitude that they needed an expert to interpret them and we soon gave up trying to do so, I spent the rest of the time lying on a mattress under the wardroom table, a place to which I had been
relegated as the most junior officer of the party. I shared this humble couch with Socks, a dachshund, the property of Desmond Buchanan, an officer in the Grenadiers who was one of our party and who had persuaded Pat Norman to allow him to bring her with him because of the noise of the air-raids on Malta which were practically continuous. (‘I wouldn’t dream of leaving my little girl here. Her nerves are going to pieces.’) From time to time Socks went off to other parts of the submarine, from which she returned bloated with food and with her low-slung chassis covered with oil, a good deal of which she imparted to me. But on the whole it was a cheerful journey and we laughed a lot, although most of it was the laughter of bravado. We all knew that we were embarked on the worst possible kind of operation, one that had been hastily conceived by someone a long way from the target, and one which we had not had the opportunity to think out in detail for ourselves. I felt like one of those rather ludicrous, illbriefed agents who had been landed by night on Romney Marsh in the summer of 1940, all of whom had been captured and shot.

By four o’clock in the afternoon of the eleventh we were in the Bay of Catania, about a mile offshore, and Pat brought
Una
up to periscope depth so that we could have a look at the coast.

He got a bit of a shock when he did. He had come up in the midst of a fleet of Sicilian fishing boats and they swam into the eye of the periscope like oversize fish in an aquarium. Raising the periscope he was lucky not to have impaled one of them on the end of it. Nevertheless, with what I thought an excess of zeal, he insisted on giving each of us an opportunity to look at the coast which we did, hastily, before causing
Una
to sink to the bottom where she remained for the next five hours with everything shut off that might produce a detectable noise. It had not been a very successful reconnaissance; but there had been nothing to see anyway. With an immense sun glaring at us from behind a
low-lying coast, the shore had appeared as nothing more than a thin, tremulous black line with a shimmering sea in front of it.

We surfaced at nine o’clock and the four folboats were brought up on to the casing through the torpedo hatch without their midship frames in position, the only way we could get them through it, and we carried out the final assembly.

It was not a very dark night, but after thirty-six hours in artificial light underwater it seemed terribly black until we became accustomed to it, when it seemed altogether too bright. To the north we could see the lights of Catania and to the west the landing lights of the airfield. Planes were coming in to land a couple of hundred feet above our heads, and when they were directly above us the noise was deafening. The wind was on-shore and there was a nasty swell running which made the launching of the canoes over the bulges difficult with the tanks blown, and the loading of them once they were in the water even more so. One canoe was so badly damaged getting it into the water that it had to be left behind, together with the marine who was going to travel in it. He was very disappointed at the time. How fortunate he was.

‘Rather you than me, mate, but good luck anyway,’ were the last words addressed to me by a rating as he threw me the stern line; then we set off in arrowhead formation towards the shore, if three canoes can be said to constitute an arrowhead.

The water was extraordinarily phosphorescent. We might have been in a tropical sea and as we dipped the blades of the paddles it exploded into brilliant green and blue fire and as we lifted them out of it they shed what looked like drops of molten metal which vanished when they fell back into the water. At any other time these effects would have seemed beautiful; now they seemed an additional hazard. Surely to the sentries patrolling the beach it must look as if there was a fire out at sea, and surely the crews of the bombers which were still coming in to land over our heads
from dead astern must see it, just as surely as they must have already seen the submarine. Together with Corporal Butler of the South Lancashire Regiment, my companion at bow who was no doubt sharing these gloomy thoughts, I paddled towards the shore, trying to hearten myself with the prospect of the bacon and eggs which we had been promised if and when we returned on board.

After a few minutes we heard the boom of surf and soon we were on the outer edge of it. It was not very heavy, but we got out of the canoes as we knew how to without capsizing them, and swam in with them until our feet touched bottom and we could stand. It is better to arrive sopping wet on two feet on a hostile shore than to be capsized or thrown up on it dry but immobile in a sitting position, unless you are a secret agent who must immediately enter the market place and mingle with the crowds.

The beach, with the wind blowing over it and the surf beating on it, seemed the loneliest place in the world. The wire began about fifty feet from the water’s edge. We carried the canoes up over the sand and put them down close to the entanglements without being blown to pieces. At least this part of the beach did not seem to be mined with anything that a man’s weight would set off, or perhaps we were lucky, there was no way of knowing.

Now we attached the time pencils to the bombs, which were a mixture of plastic and thermite. (With the white cordtex fuses they looked like big black conkers on strings.) This was something that could not safely be done on board a submarine costing a mint of money, because time pencils were rather erratic, and I always hoped that the workers in the factory in which they had been made had not got all mixed up and substituted a thin, thirty-second delay wire for a thicker, thirty-minute one, or simply painted the outside casing with the wrong colour paint, which
was one of the methods of identifying them, mistakes that could quite easily happen after a pre-Christmas factory beano.

When the bombs were ready we buried the canoes upside down in the sand and obliterated our footprints, working upwards from the water’s edge.

The wire entanglements were about twenty yards wide and they stretched away along the shore north and south as far as the eye could see. Behind them, there were two blockhouses about 150 yards apart. We had landed exactly half way between them. I felt as if I had survived the first round in a game of Russian roulette.

Now we began to cut a narrow swathe through the wire at a place where there appeared to be none of the more visible sorts of anti-personnel mines with which we were acquainted. Nevertheless, it was a disagreeable sensation. Only God and the enemy knew what was buried underfoot.

By the time we got to the other side it was ten o’clock. An hour had passed since we had left the submarine. We were already late, but it was difficult to see how we could have been any quicker. The earliest possible time at which we could arrive back at the submarine had been estimated to be eleven o’clock. The latest possible time, providing that
Una
had not been discovered, in which case she would have to submerge and leave us anyway, was one o’clock in the morning. If all went well it still seemed that we might make it by midnight, or earlier.

On the far side of the wire at the edge of the dunes, we came to a track which ran parallel with the shore and presumably linked all the blockhouses on this stretch of coast. Fortunately, it was deserted and we pressed on across it and pushed our way through a hedge of some kind of coarse vegetation which had probably been planted to stop the sand drifting inland. For the first time in my life I was in Europe.

Behind this windbreak there was a line of stunted pines and a low drystone wall with a sunken field on the other side of it. Coming from this field was an appalling noise which sounded like a body of men marching along a road and we crouched behind the wall for what seemed an age, waiting for them to pass, until we realised that it was only a horse that was munching grass.

Feeling very stupid we dropped down into the field and crossed it. The horse went on munching. It was a white horse. How I envied it. How silly the whole business seemed at this moment. It was a nice horse but at this moment it was an enemy horse. If it whinneyed or began to gallop around the field we might be discovered; but it did neither of these things. It simply went on eating its dinner.

On the far side of the field there was a high stone wall which, like the wire entanglements on the beach, seemed to be endless, and we pushed George up on to the top of it so that he could see what there was on the other side; but all that he could report was that the landing lights on the airfield had been put out. No more planes were coming in and everything seemed quiet. Our prospects began to seem quite good.

He hauled us up one by one, on to the top of the wall and we dropped down into what proved to be a farmyard full of dogs. Previously they must have been dozing, but the thump of our great boots as we landed on the cobbles brought them to life and they came at us barking and yelping furiously.

The farmhouse had been invisible from the top of the wall, hidden among trees, and now we had to pass the front door, but in spite of the din the dogs were making, no windows or doors were flung open and we made a dash for the far side of the yard where there was a gate which opened on to a dark lane, overshadowed by trees, which seemed to lead in the direction of the airfield.
And as we went along it an engine, which sounded as if it was on a test bench, began to scream and sob, drowning the din the dogs were still making, and then died away, tried to start again, but failed.

After about a mile, the lane suddenly came to an end and we found ourselves in the workshop area of the airfield, among buildings with bright lights burning in them. One of them had a number of large wooden crates standing outside it, some of which had only recently been broken open. They contained aircraft engines. On as many of these as we dared expend them we stuck a bomb. It was a terrible waste of explosive; but if we failed on the airfield itself we wanted to leave something to be remembered by. Perhaps, unconsciously, in destroying the engines we were performing some primitive ritual of atonement.

We were now very close to the edge of the airfield and we were just about to split up into pairs and set off for our various targets, Butler’s and my own being the bombers on the far side of it, more than half a mile away, when we ran straight into a body of men, one of whom shouted at us in Italian, demanding to know who we were. We said nothing but pressed on through them until the same man shouted at us again, this time more insistently – what sounded to me like ‘Eh! Eh! Eh!’ – so insistently that George was forced to reply, using one of the phrases which we had all memorised,
‘Camerati Tedeschi’
, which we had been told meant ‘German Comrades’.