Алистер Маклин – San Andreas (страница 3)

Flying high and safely out of reach of antiaircraft fire, the Condor would literally circle the convoy, its crew noting down the number of ships, the convoy’s speed, course and precise latitude and longitude. This information was radioed to Alta Fjord or Trondheim and then transmitted to Lorient, the French HQ of Admiral Karl Doenitz, almost certainly the best submarine C-in-C of his time or any time. From there the information was re-transmitted to the growing submarine wolfpack or packs, instructing them when and where exactly to position themselves to intercept the convoy.

As far as surface warships were concerned, the Germans were more than adequately prepared at the outbreak of war. By the Anglo-German agreement of 1937 Germany could build 100% of the British equivalent of submarines but only 35% of surface ships. In fact they built twice as many submarines and completely ignored the other 35% restriction. The Deutschland, Admiral Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer were nominally 10,000 ton cruisers: they were, in fact, fast and powerful commerce raiders, in effect pocket battleships of a far greater tonnage than purported. The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, 26,000 ton battle-cruisers, were completed in 1938 and it was in that year that the Bismarck and Tirpitz were laid down in the Blohm and Voess shipyards in Hamburg. Those were the best and most powerful battleships ever built, a statement that remains true to this day. By treaty limitations they were restricted to 35,000 tons: they were, in fact, 53,000 tons.

The Bismarck had a brief but spectacular career, the Tirpitz no career at all. It spent its war holed up in northern Norway, where it none the less performed the invaluable function of tying up major units of the British Home Fleet which feared that the giant battleship might slip its moorings in Alta Fjord and break out into the Atlantic. It was at those moorings that the Tirpitz was ultimately destroyed by ten-ton bombs from RAF Lancasters.

Although the British had a very considerable advantage in battleships, they were, individually, no match for those of the Germans, as was tragically proved when the Bismarck sank the battle-cruiser Hood, pride and darling of the Royal Navy, with a single salvo.

Underwater, the Germans used mines and submarines. Less than three months after the outbreak of war the Germans had come up with a rather unpleasant device—the magnetic mine. Unlike the standard type, which had to come into physical contact with a vessel before being activated, the magnetic mine was set off by the electrical current generated by the ship’s hull. Those mines could be laid by either ships or aircraft and in the first four days after their introduction no fewer than fifteen ships were sent to the bottom—the fact that they were nearly all neutrals seemed of no great concern to the Germans: magnetic mines are very clever devices but not clever enough to discriminate between a neutral and an enemy. The British managed to retrieve one intact, took it to pieces—not without considerable danger to those engaged in the dismantling—and came up with electronic counter-measures which enabled minesweepers to detonate the magnetic mine at a respectful distance.

Submarines, of course, were the most deadly enemies the Merchant Navy had to face. The toll taken in the first three and a half years of war was savage beyond belief. It wasn’t until the early summer of 1943 that the menace was brought under some form of control, but it wasn’t until the end of 1944—during the two years 1943-4 480 German submarines were destroyed—that those stealthy pursuers and silent killers ceased to be a factor of consequence.

It was inevitable that the U-boats should be selected as the target for hatred and their crews depicted, both during the war and subsequently, as cunning, treacherous and ice-cold murderers, fanatical Nazis to a man, who hunted down unsuspecting innocents, closed in unheard and unseen, destroyed their victims without mercy or compunction, then moved on again, still unheard and unseen. To a limited extent, this view was valid. The pattern for this belief was set on the very first day of the war when the liner Athenia was torpedoed. In no way could the Athenia have been mistaken for anything other than what it was: a peaceful passenger vessel crammed with civilians—men, women and children. This must have been known to the far from gallant Oberleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, commander of the German U-boat that sent the Athenia to the bottom. There is no record that Lemp was ever reprimanded for his action.

The same charge of ruthlessness, of course, could have been levelled against Allied submariners—to a lesser extent, admittedly, it is true, but that was only because they had a much more limited choice of targets.

The overall U-boat picture is false. Ruthless Nazis there may have been among the crews but they were a tiny minority: the men were motivated principally by an intense pride in the traditions of the Imperial German Navy. Certainly there were acts of brutality by individual U-boat commanders but there were also acts of humanity, gallantry and compassion. What was undeniable was the immense personal courage and spirit of self-sacrifice of those men. It has to be remembered that, out of a total of 40,000 U-boat submariners, 30,000 died, the most shocking casualty rate in the history of naval warfare. While the actions of those men are not to be condoned, the men themselves are not to be condemned. Ruthless they were—the nature of their job demanded it—but they were brave beyond belief.

Such then were the conditions in which the men of the Merchant Navy had to live and die: such, too, were their enemies, who sought, implacably, to destroy them. The odds against the health and lives of the merchantmen surviving, respectively, their living conditions and the attentions of the enemy were high indeed: theirs was a classic no-win situation. In the circumstances it was an astonishing and commonplace fact that men who had survived two or three torpedoings and sinkings would immediately, on their return to Britain, seek out another ship to take them to sea again. By definition, those men were noncombatants but their endurance, tenacity and determination—they would have laughed at words like gallantry and courage—matched those of the men who hunted them down.

ONE

Silently, undramatically, without any forewarning, as in any abrupt and unexpected power cut in a city, the lights aboard the San Andreas died in the hour before the dawn. Such blackouts were rare but not unknown and gave rise to no particular alarm as far as the handling and navigation of the vessel were concerned. On the bridge, the binnacle light that illuminated the compass, the chart light and the essential telephone line to the engine-room remained unaffected because, operating as they did on a lower voltage, they had their own separate generator. The overhead lights were on the main generator but this was of no consequence as those lights were switched off: the bridge, any bridge, was always darkened at night. The only item on the bridge that did fail was the Kent screen, an inset circular plate of glass directly ahead of the helmsman which spun at high speed and offered a clear view in all conditions. Third Officer Batesman, the officer of the watch, was unworried: to the best of his belief there were neither land nor ships within a hundred miles of him with the exception of the frigate HMS Andover. He had no idea where the frigate was and it didn’t matter: the frigate always knew where he was, for it was equipped with highly sophisticated radar.

In the operating theatre and recovery room it was a case of business as usual. Although the surrounding sea and sky were still dark as midnight, the hour was not early: in those high latitudes and at that time of year daylight, or what passed for daylight, arrived about 10.00 a.m. In those two rooms, the most important in a hospital ship, for that was what the San Andreas was, battery-powered lights came on automatically when the main power failed. Throughout the rest of the ship emergency lighting was provided by hand-hung nickel-cadmium lamps: a twist of the base of such a lamp provided at least a bare minimum of illumination.

What did give rise to concern was the complete failure of the upper deck lights. The hull of the San Andreas was painted white—more correctly, it had been white but time and the sleet, hail, snow and ice spicules of Arctic storms had eroded the original to something between a dingy off-white and an equally dingy light grey. A green band ran all the way around the hull. Very big red crosses had been painted on both her sides, as well as on the fore and after-decks. During night-time those red crosses were illuminated by powerful floodlights: at that time darkness accounted for twenty hours out of the twenty-four.

Opinion as to the value of those lights was fairly evenly divided. According to the Geneva Convention, those red crosses guaranteed immunity against enemy attacks, and as the San Andreas had so far been reassuringly immune those aboard her who had never been subjected to an enemy attack of any kind tended to believe in the validity of the Geneva Convention. But the crew members who had served aboard before her conversion from a Liberty cargo carrier to her present status regarded the Convention with a very leery eye. To sail at night lit up like a Christmas tree went against all the instincts of men who for years had been conditioned to believe, rightly, that to light a cigarette on the upper deck was to attract the attention of a wandering U-boat. They didn’t trust the lights. They didn’t trust the red crosses. Above all, they didn’t trust the U-boats. There was justification for their cynicism: other hospital boats, they knew, had been less fortunate than they had been but whether those attacks had been deliberate or accidental had never been established. There are no courts of law on the high seas and no independent witnesses. Either from reasons of delicacy or because they thought it pointless the crew never discussed the matter with those who lived in what they regarded as a fool’s paradise—the doctors, the sisters, the nurses and the ward orderlies.