The Lonely Sea (18 page)

Slowly, it all came back to me. I could see it all now and cursed myself for my blindness.

Their overdone casualness and offhandedness towards each other. The constant bickering, yet the unswerving loyalty and belief in each other—how familylike, I thought with chagrin. Nicky's strange behaviour when I suggested I might fall for her (I squirmed at that thought). His anger when I expressed distaste for her spying. The secret holding of hands. His increasingly haggard and worried appearance—God, I thought, how
would I have felt if
my
wife had been in that position. Finally, his desperate eagerness to rescue her—strictly in defiance of all Special Service orders and, as far as he had known at the time, in the face of certain capture or death.

Without a word I pushed my chair away from the table and rose carefully to my feet. Slowly my leg came back and deliberately, and with great accuracy, I kicked myself.

The gallery, first-nighters to a man and obviously trained to a hair, applauded with great fervour. And as I sat down, I realized that the unbridled enthusiasm of the audience wasn't entirely on my behalf.

Laughter and tears and love walk always hand in hand. Stella and Nicky were kissing each other with a most unEnglish lack of restraint. They looked for all the world like a pair of newly-weds.

Which for me, of course, was exactly what they were.

The second year of the war, as dark and sombre a year as Britain had ever known, was drawing steadily to its dark and sombre close. November, 1940, and behind lay the long agonizing months of hardship and suffering and crushing defeat, abandonment by our last allies in Europe, the wanton destruction of our cities and towns and thousands upon thousands of civilians, of the never-ending and always imminent threat of invasion by a ruthless and implacable enemy who would be content with nothing short of the annihilation of our country as an entity and a nation.

True, the crushing defeat was a thing of the past, albeit of the recent past: Hitler's all-conquering Panzer divisions had swept us out of Europe and only a miracle had spared the survivors who had found their way to the desolate beaches of Dunkirk. The collapse of France, also, was long an accomplished fact, and we had at least and at last
the satisfaction of knowing precisely where we stood—alone.

But the Battle of Britain was still with us. Night after night, through the lengthening hours of darkness of October and November, the Luftwaffe's heavy bombers, seldom less than two hundred at a time, droned over our ports and cities and unloaded their cargoes indiscriminately over docks, factories and homes—but principally over homes. And the threat of invasion, the launching of the longawaited operation ‘Sealion' against our shores, was a looming peril that might at any hour of the night or day explode into devastating reality.

Britain, in that dark hour, was exactly in the position of a beleaguered garrison the remnants of whose army, all but destroyed in the field, have taken refuge behind the walls and barred the gates. But beleaguered garrisons can fall, and invariably do fall, if fear and despair destroy the will to survive or if constant attrition weakens the defenders to the point where continued defence and defiance becomes a physical impossibility, but most surely of all, they can be inexorably starved into surrender.

There was nothing to fear on the first score. Defiance burned like a flame, and with pikes, clubs and home-made petrol bombs the people of Britain were prepared to follow Churchill's injunction to fight for every beach and street and village in the country. But starvation and attrition was another matter altogether.

We had to have food or die. We had to have minerals and metals and chemicals for the manufacture of tanks and weapons for our weaponless armies, we had to have oil for the naval ships that guarded the shores, for the factories and the power stations, for the manufacture of petrol enough to keep in the air the handful of Hurricanes and Spitfires that alone stood between us and the savagery of the Luftwaffe.

The food, the oil and many of the most essential raw materials had to be imported into this beleaguered garrison; and there was only one way by which these could come—the sea. A garrison without any hope of relief, we were utterly dependent on the merchant ships that sailed upon this sea as our only remaining lifeline to the world that lay beyond. But lifelines can be cut. The Germans knew this as well as anyone.

They spared no effort to cut these lifelines, once and for all. Sabotage in foreign ports, bomber attacks above the sea, E-boats on the sea, U-boats under the sea—they threw in every weapon they possessed. But, at that time, their most deadly and devastating weapon of all was the raider—heavy cruisers and pocket battleships, big fast and powerful vessels that could be stopped by nothing less than a battleship of the line. An armed raider let loose among a convoy was prelude to a merciless and inevitable slaughter—the
Hipper,
for instance, had once fallen upon a defenceless convoy and sent eleven merchant ships to the bottom in less than an hour.

And now, with the collapse of France and the fall of Norway offering the enemy a thousand miles of Atlantic seaboard as operating base, and with the advent of winter storms and long winter nights affording almost unlimited opportunity to break out into the Atlantic, the menace had reached critical proportions. The raiders, with almost complete freedom of operation, sailed where they liked, struck where they chose and sank with impunity.

This impunity could have been removed, risks halved and effective counter-measures doubled if we had had bases nearer the scene of action: the country at large, no less than the Admiralty, was convinced of this. The use of certain ports in Southern Ireland, would have moved our outposts far west into the Atlantic, and the advantages gained, the scores of ships and thousands of lives saved, could have made all the difference between life and death. But Southern Ireland wasn't interested in the life or death of its neighbour (officially, that is—it would be most unfair to forget that thousands of its citizens volunteered for and served with distinction in our armed forces during the war) and categorically denied us the use of any port in Ireland. Far from offering us help in these, our darkest days, they were prepared to stand aside while the German raiders cut our lifeline to the outer world and brought us to defeat.

In Britain, in the latter half of 1940, the feeling against Ireland was intense: so it was particularly
fitting that it should be an Irishman, Captain Edward Fogarty Fegen, who was to light the beacon of hope in the darkness, who was to show that we could live in spite of the lack of bases, that a convoy could survive even the savagery of a fullscale assault by a pocket battleship…Provided, of course, that there was always a Fegen to stand between the convoy and the enemy.

It was the evening of 5 November, 1940, and Convoy HX 84, in latitude 52° 45′ North, longitude 32° 13′ West—the very heart of the Atlantic—was steaming steadily, peacefully home to England. The sky was a cloudless blue: visibility was exceptional: light airs blew gently out of the south-east and the setting sun glittered across the burnished gold of a sea calm and quiet and smooth as the Atlantic almost never is.

In nine parallel lines, the big convoy slowly zigzagged its way across the broad face of the Atlantic. Thirty-seven ships there were in all in this convoy—including eleven tankers—and the total value of its cargoes of food and machinery and oil quite beyond computation. Millions of pounds, many millions of pounds, but then the value was not to be reckoned in terms of money but in terms of the lives of those who sailed the cargoes home from Halifax, in the lives and the freedom of those who so eagerly awaited these desperately needed supplies.

Among these thirty-seven ships there were some which, for one reason or another, took the attention and the eye more often than the others. The New Zealand
Rangitiki,
for instance, 17,000 tons and the largest ship in the convoy: the
Puck,
at the other end of the scale, a tiny 1,000 ton vessel that had no business at all on those great waters: or the
Cornish City,
wearing the flag of the Convoy Commodore, Rear-Admiral Maltby. These caught the eye, and one or two others: but certainly no one paid much attention to two ships destined for a fame that has diminished but little with the passing of the years—the tanker
San Demetrio,
London and the Swedish motor vessel
Stureholm,
Gothenburg—or to the third, sailing steadily east and into immortality, the armed merchant cruiser
Jervis Bay.

The
Jervis Bay,
the sole guardian and escort of all these ships, was in the middle of the convoy. Neither in appearance nor in fact was she calculated to inspire any confidence at all among the vessels she was supposed to protect. She was big—14,000 tons—but in war size counts for little. What mattered was that she was old—built in 1922—vulnerable, unarmoured, and equipped with only a handful of worn, weak and inaccurate 6-inch guns, twice as old as the
Jervis Bay
herself: as a man of war, as a fighting ship, she had nothing: but then again she had everything—she had Captain Fogarty Fegen.

Captain Fegen, a big, tough, 47 year-old bachelor Irishman, son of an admiral, grandson of a captain, already twice decorated for his gallantry, was in his usual position on the bridge when a ship was sighted far to the north, hull-down over the smooth, unbroken horizon. That ship had no business to be there, and at once the challenge started flickering out from the Aldis lamp on the bridge of the
Jervis Bay.

The stranger made no reply, but kept steaming at high speed towards the convoy. A second challenge went out. That, too, went unanswered. Then a third—but after the third there was no need for more. Fegen had her now. The fox was in among the chickens.

It was the 10,000 ton, 30-knot pocket battleship
Admiral Scheer,
a powerful, heavily armoured raider equipped with six 11-inch guns of a phenomenal range, and a secondary armament of eight 5.9-inch guns. Only a
Nelson,
a
Rodney
or a
Hood
could have stopped her with certainty—nothing else. She was a killer against whom there was no defence and her helpless victims could only lie there waiting for her, waiting for the inevitable execution: her hull was heaving over the horizon now, and HX 84 could see the setting sun striking golden glints off the white waters piled high at her bow as she raced south under the maximum power of her great engines.

‘Action Station' bells sounded aboard the
Jervis Bay
as the signal to the convoy fluttered up to her yardarm—‘Prepare to scatter'. Almost at the same moment, Rear-Admiral Maltby on the
Cornish City
gave the order for an emergency turn to starboard, away from the enemy: at once all the ships in the convoy heeled far over to port as they broke south-east under cover of a smoke screen.

All the ships—except one. The biggest smoke screen ever laid, Captain Fegen realized grimly, wasn't going to make the slightest difference to the
Admiral Scheer.
She would slice through that swirling curtain of smoke as if it didn't exist, pursue and cut the fleeing convoy to pieces. Smoke was not enough: the convoy had to have time, time to scatter and lose themselves in the great wastes of the Atlantic, time to wait for the protective blanket of night…Fegen pulled the
Jervis Bay
round to port under maximum rudder and headed straight for the
Admiral Scheer.

Even before the
Jervis Bay
had straightened up on course, the
Admiral Scheer,
determined that it would not be baulked of its prey by this crazy gesture of defiance, opened up with its 11-inch guns. Some shells fell among the convoy. The
Rangitiki
was straddled but miraculously escaped: the tanker
San Demetrio,
then and later, was heavily hit, set on fire, abandoned, then later resighted, boarded and sailed home in triumph.

But the
Scheer,
at that moment, had no interest in the convoy, only in the big merchantman racing in on a collision course. Two ranging salvos fell one on either side of the armed merchant cruiser, dismaying testimony to the German reputation for gunnery of a quite phenomenal accuracy: the third salvo crashed solidly home into the hull.

In one stroke the foremast was shot away, the bridge all but destroyed, the director and rangefinder wrecked, the transmitting station, which controlled all the guns, knocked out of action and the guns themselves rendered useless for all but primitive hand control—the cables feeding in the electrical supplies had been completely severed.

The battle had not yet properly begun, but already the
Jervis Bay
was finished as a fighting unit. Kapitän Theodore Krancke of the
Admiral Scheer
knew that he had nothing more to fear from the big merchantman. He at once altered course to the east to overtake the fleeing convoy, only to find that his way was barred once more: the
Jervis Bay,
too, had put over her helm, and was again closing rapidly on a head-on collision course.

Savagely the
Admiral Scheer
lashed out at the crippled merchant cruiser that so infuriatingly baulked him of the retreating convoy. Not one shell or two, this time, but salvo after salvo, each shell 650 pounds of high-explosive steel, screamed across the calm ice-cold surface of the sea and smashed, pairs and threes at a time, into their
target with devastating accuracy, killing, maiming and destroying, scything across the upper decks and superstructure in a murderous storm of bursting shrapnel or exploding deep inside the already mortally wounded
Jervis Bay.
There was no more thought, now, on the part of the Germans, of just silencing the
Jervis Bay'
s guns and bypassing her to the south: they meant to finish her off, swiftly and without mercy.

But the
Jervis Bay
was not to be so easily finished off. Impossibly, not only did she still survive, but she still held steadily on course, still making for the pocket battleship that was relentlessly hammering the life out of her. Great holes were now torn in her port side, above water level and below: the boiler room was severely damaged: the wireless room was gone: the bridge and superstructure had been hit again and again, and she was listing more and more heavily with the passing of each moment as rivers of water poured in through the gaping rents in her side.

Fogarty Fegen still stood on what shattered remnants were left of his wrecked and blazing bridge. In the first few minutes Fegen, like his ship, was wounded to death, but like his ship incredibly he survived and kept on closing with the enemy long after death should have claimed him.

He was terribly wounded. An exploding shell had blown his left arm off just below the shoulder, and the arterial blood was pumping out with
every heartbeat: the agony must have been indescribable but Fegen ignored it. He still issued his orders calmly, concisely and with the courtesy that had always been his wont as he drove the
Jervis Bay
ever closer to the enemy, as he directed the firing of those ancient and pathetic guns whose useless shells fell into the sea miles short of the
Admiral Scheer.

Another exploding shell, and the main steering controls were severed. At once Captain Fegen ordered the quartermaster back to the emergency steering position—whatever happened they must retain steering control, move in ever closer on the German battle cruiser. The bridge, burning more furiously than ever and beginning to buckle under the captain's feet, became completely untenable. Steadying himself with his one good arm, Fegen descended the twisted steel ladder and staggered aft, along the promenade deck, through the choking smoke and eddying flames, to the emergency bridge, every foot of his progress marked by a smeared trail of blood on the charred and blackened decks.