Escort ship a world war.., p.1
Escort Ship (A World War 2 Naval Adventure), page 1
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Bentley’s first sight when Wind Rode broke clear was not for the cruisers, but the destroyers.
His task was difficult enough as it was. But the destroyers could make it even tougher if they decided to join in. Spitting the oily taste from his mouth he swung his glasses. No—there they were, still milling about the torpedoed flagship. Wasted.
But maybe the Japanese admiral did not think so. Bentley had to concede his point of view. He was in a crippled ship, there could quite easily be enemy submarines about. And to handle the three midgets he still had two great cruisers.
Bentley’s decision to continue fighting was possibly the simplest he had ever made in all his life. It would be true to claim that the decision had been made for him, centuries before. Never in the memory of living man, nor for a long time further back than that, had a British warship surrendered to, or run from, an enemy.
J.E. MACDONNELL
ESCORT SHIP
J.E. MACDONNELL 26: ESCORT SHIP
By J.E. Macdonnell
First published by Horwitz Publications in 1960
©1972, 2024 by J E Macdonnell
First digital Edition: September 2024
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CHAPTER ONE
5.49 P.M.
COMMANDER PETER BENTLEY came up the ladder and with a heave of his big arms swung himself on to the compass-platform of H.M.A. destroyer Wind Rode. The Timor Sea was almost calm, and he walked without swaying towards the binnacle. As he stepped up on to the wooden grating circling the compass he glanced at his wrist watch. The time was almost ten to six.
Ten minutes still left of the first dog-watch. A little more than two hours left of Randall’s watch: the first-lieutenant in a destroyer usually keeps the morning and the dog-watches, for those periods encompass the danger times of dawn and dusk.
But Bentley was not concerned about watches. He leaned forward to take up his binoculars, always kept hung round one of the soft-iron spheres flanking the magnetic compass, and said to Randall:
“What time’s sunset?”
They were on the bridge, with the bosun’s mate and signalman in hearing.
“Good afternoon, sir,” Randall answered crisply, “sunset at 7.19.”
Bentley nodded acknowledgement and raised his glasses. The mouth under the twin black cylinders was a composed, level line of lips, and the large chin jutted forward a little.
Slowly, very slowly, the captain searched the blue weld of sea and sky. All around the escort ships and the convoy the sea wheeled circularly, no land breaking the smooth edge of their watery world. But Bentley’s concentration was on the horizon astern.
His scanning was practised: it would be safe to claim that something like a quarter of each of the thousands of watches he had kept on a bridge had been spent staring through the high-powered lenses of binoculars. So that, while he searched astern, his mind was quite free to busy itself with calculations and assessments.
An hour and a half to sunset. In these tropical seas sunset was almost synonymous with darkness. The convoy, five modern ships, was nicely maintaining a steady fifteen knots. If they could sail unmolested into the darkness they would be the better part of 200 miles nearer to safety when the sun rose again. There might be submarines about, but then there was always the possibility of submarines, even in Sydney harbour.
Those 200 miles were vitally important to the successful discharge of his responsibility. They would put him within air protection from Darwin, but, most important, they represented for the Japanese cruiser squadron a total distance of 400 miles, and at a cruising speed of twenty knots that represented twenty hours’ steaming. A long time for a busy force to waste on a comparatively small convoy.
And the composition of the convoy itself was an advantage to him. It was bound from Dilli in Timor to Darwin in Australia. It carried no tanks, or guns, or ammunition, or planes; in those five ships were several thousand elderly men, and young women and children, their towns and villages destroyed or captured, a human cargo without belongings, burdened only with sorrow and lightened with a growing hope.
A cargo of no war significance whatever. Surely not the sort of prize to make a cruiser-squadron rear-admiral waste twenty precious hours and tons of fuel-oil to capture. Of course not, there was too much to do around the Indies. Bentley was certain that if he could get through those 200 miles of night he and his charges would be safe.
The binoculars halted; for several long seconds they remained steady on a point astern, and then they moved on. He was not even sure that the enemy squadron was after him. The report which had sent him scuttling out of Dilli’s harbour mentioned only that several Japanese heavy cruisers were in the vicinity. The trouble was that there were many eyes which had seen them depart, and many natives would be only too willing to curry favour with the invaders by revealing what they had seen.
He lowered the glasses and Randall said:
“An hour and a half. Their radar’s not so nifty–by tomorrow we’ll be home and dry.”
Bentley was not surprised at this apparent clairvoyance on the part of his friend and deputy: they had been trained in the same tactical school, by the same officer, and they had been in intimate contact with each other for so long that often a glance sufficed for an order to be carried out.
“There’s only one snag about that cheerful forecast—the hour and a half bit.”
Bentley lifted his head and looked up at the mast which tapered in steely strength above the bridge.
“Who’s the masthead lookout?”
“Norton. Jensen relieves him at four bells.”
It was a measure of the controlled tenseness in each officer that Bentley asked, and Randall knew, the names of the lookouts in the crow’s nest. Normally these men were detailed off for their tricks by the petty-officer of the watch, and the officer’s only concern was that the post was manned.
Bentley’s eyes went to the voice-pipe which ran, an extended throat, up to the canvas-covered, breast-high platform above the lower yard. He changed his mind at once about speaking. Norton’s presence up there at this time was deliberate on Randall’s part: the seamen would need no inducement from the captain to keep his eyes lifting.
Bentley looked again at his watch. Realisation of why he did produced a slight surge of anger at his own tenseness. Without comment he walked to the starb’d forrard corner of the bridge and lifted himself into his high-legged stool.
Perched some seventy feet above the sea, Able-seaman Nipper Norton was completely content. He was utterly isolated from the rest of the ship’s company, and the warmth of the westering sun smiled upon him, tempered by the breeze of Wind Rode’s passage. Below him the ship’s slim streamlined length was laid out for his inspection, from the flared bow back to the squat, wake-washed stern: the tops of the three twin gun-mountings, the bridge with its fore-shortened figures of officers and men, the capacious and heat-hazed mouths of the two funnels, and, abaft them, at deck level, the quintuple back of the twin sets of torpedo tubes.
But Nipper Norton’s attention was not on his own ship, nor on the three consort destroyers arrow-heading the placidly steaming convoy. Like the captain before him, his attention was concentrated on a ninety degree arc of the horizon astern, forty five degrees on either side of the stern.
The face under the big binoculars was small-boned—a keen, bright, cocky sort of face. As to the rest of him—naval soubriquets are usually apt, and Nipper was well-named. Possibly because he was small, and quite good-looking in a bold sort of way, Nipper was possessed of an outsize conceit. He knew he could handle men much bigger than himself with his trained fists, he knew he was attractive to women, and he knew why he had been selected to man the crow’s nest at this important time.
Nipper hailed from Crow’s Nest, a small country town thirty miles outside Toowoomba, the city on the Darling Downs which handles all that rich area’s wheat and dairy products. But there was no geographical connection between his birthplace and his present place.
Nipper was up there because all his life he had been used to staring over long and glaring distances, used to the quick picking-up of a jumping wallaby with his alert eyes. That, his background, helped, but there was another reason—anatomically his vision was better than any of his shipmates.
His eyes were not at all large—on the contrary, they were habitually squinted. At the back of each eye lies a sensitive membrane, or retina. Vibrations of the ether, commonly known as light, produce images of the outside world on the retina; the ends of the optic nerve are thus stimulated, and impulses pass back to the brain. Nipper’s r
Nipper, of course, had not the slightest inkling of his anatomical advantage: all he knew was that he could see farther than any man in the ship, better even than the hawk-eyed yeoman of signals, and that he had proved this facility more times than he could remember.
Yet the most powerful sight up in that crow’s nest would have been negatived if its owner had not possessed a further characteristic. Nipper was certainly conceited, and had no qualms whatever about boasting of his sight, but his analytical intelligence stopped short of appreciating this additional faculty—complete reliability.
Wind Rode carried radar, but electronic particles unfortunately are not able to identify classes of ships, nor can they instantly pass down to the bridge the information that the enemy is turning towards, or away. By the same token, the keenest pair of eyes are useless to a captain if their owner panics, if he misjudges the meaning of a pair of masts growing together or apart, if he reports a heavy cruiser as a battleship—all quite feasible errors when the targets are upwards of 20 miles distant.
But Nipper had been tested before, and found not wanting. Which was the reason why Bentley had refrained from speaking to him up the voice-pipe.
Nipper was not aware of the commendable completeness of his reliability—the faculty was too abstract for him to grasp. If you sighted a thin pencil of a mast minutes before anybody else, that proved quite conclusively and obviously that you had better than six-six vision. The rest of his ability—the correct reporting of enemy movements—came to him naturally, and was not so obvious. He never thought about this: he was in the crow’s nest, his conceit told him, simply because he had excellent eyesight. He could not know the satisfaction with which Bentley had often in the past received the supplementary reports.
But there was another thing which Nipper knew quite plainly—the reason for his presence aboard this destroyer in the Timor Sea. He knew this specifically—he was not at all concerned by the philosophy of geography and demography, by the claims of Lebensraum from Germany nor of the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from Japan. He was in the Navy, and in Wind Rode’s crow’s nest, simply because he did not want his sisters and girl-friend in that other Crow’s Nest to be raped by Japanese soldiers, for the whole world had been told of enemy treatment of women in Shanghai and the nurses in Singapore.
Nipper was confident that if the Jap squadron they had heard about were chasing them, he would sight them in plenty of time, probably even before radar, for thin topmasts are difficult to echo from. In the pockets of his clean overalls were three packets of peanuts—next to cashew nuts his favourite between-meal filler—but cashews had on him a certain laxative effect, somewhat awkward in his present elevated and isolated position.
Nipper was content. Without removing his binoculars he felt in his pocket, bringing out his fingertips full of peanuts. His hand came up, and his mouth opened in reflex readiness. The next second the peanuts spattered to the wooden deck of the platform. His hand came up to grasp and steady the glasses.
For a full five seconds the whole power of his extraordinary sight was concentrated on a point astern of the convoy. Then his eyes glanced down at the bearing ring. Still with the glasses up, he leaned sideways and pressed the buzzer. Almost at once the deep voice of Randall came back up the pipe.
“Bridge!”
“Masthead, bridge,” Nipper stated with calm precision, “bearing dead astern, masts sir. Three sets, look like cruisers.” He paused, but Randall did not ask the question which was exercising his mind below. In a few seconds Nipper justified his faith in his competence and reliability.
“No destroyers in sight, sir, not yet. Inclination of the masts very slight—I’d say they’re coming up on our port quarter.”
A second voice came up to the crow’s nest, the resonant confines of the pipe making it sound flat and clipped.
“Norton … can you identify what class of cruiser?”
Nipper recognised that voice. His conceit wanted to make a definite answer. His binoculars told him that the mainmasts of those distant ships were higher than the foremasts—an unusual and distinctive recognition point. Nipper knew the silhouettes of Japanese warships better than those of his own side, and he was almost certain they were first-class cruisers, Takao-class. He badly wanted to show off his knowledge and sight to the captain. His reliability made him answer:
“No, sir. I think they’re Takao-class, but I’m not sure.”
“What makes you think that?”
Nipper told him.
“Good work, Norton. You’re probably right. Radar should be ranging shortly. Let me know at once any alteration in inclination.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Nipper straightened from the voice-pipe. He stared back over the mouth of the funnel. Made you feel nice, that—he and the captain close together, he the captain’s uplifted eye, an extension of his vision and his knowledge. And only he. Radar was useless against those far-off, thin mast trucks. Norton—Bentley. Nice.
He stared at the tiny forest of tiny sticks breaking the even edge of the far horizon and he wanted to press his eyes in further in the rubber sockets. But he was far too experienced to do that—perspiration could condense on the lenses, and in the seconds the mist took to clear those masts could alter their inclination and that would mean an alteration of enemy course: and the brain down there, the skill and experience on the bridge of which he was a vital component, wanted to know when and if that course was altered, and wanted to know it instantly.
His right hand keeping the glasses steady, Nipper stole his other hand down to his pocket. There was a minute rustling, and then the quiet steady crunching of peanuts. For month after month he had been trained meticulously to sight and judge and report, and now he had done his job.
Bentley came away from the crow’s nest voice-pipe and at once his eyes went to the chart-table. He was not in the least surprised to see Randall waiting there, craning back a little from the small canvas-covered alcove, watching him. In front of him lay an open recognition book, in which was pictured every vessel of the German, Italian and Japanese Navies. He stepped quickly across.
“Makes pleasant reading,” Randall commented drily.
The photograph stretched the full width of the large page. Above it was the caption: First Class Cruisers (Zyunyokan)—Japan. Under it, the information, baldly given—crisp, complete, ominous.
“Takao, displacement 9850 tons, complement 692, length 630 feet, Guns 10—8 inch, 4—4.7 inch, 8—47 mm. AA, many smaller AA. Torpedo tubes, 8—21 inch above water. Armour 4 inches side, 3 inches deck, 3 inches turrets. Machinery, geared turbine, twelve Kanpon boilers, Shaft Horse-power 100,000—thirty two knots maximum.”
There was much else, but Bentley had read enough. If they were Takao-class—and he agreed with Norton about those masts—he knew what an overwhelming firepower they mounted: he was interested mainly in their speed. Thirty-two knots. But they had been completed in 1932. It was doubtful if they could raise as much as thirty knots now. His superior six knots could mean a good deal when it came to altering the rate at which the range closed, or running to head them off from the convoy. And, of course, it meant that with his lighter tonnage and shorter length he could swerve much more quickly than they.
Less than a minute had passed since Norton’s report. Bentley backed out and looked towards the rear of the bridge.
Yeoman of Signals Ferris was waiting for that look. His name was William Bruce Ferris and for as long as he could remember he had answered to nothing but “Nutty.” There was no apparent reason for the cognomen, except that all Ferrises in the Navy are tagged Nutty—just as Riordans are given the extra-baptismal title of Spike.
But only to his messmates, his equals, was Ferris called Nutty. His minions in his own rigidly-controlled branch called him Chief, and they uttered that permissible title with respect. A hard, crisp man, the yeoman of signals, a man who scorned binoculars and used instead a telescope three feet long: a hawk-eye who could read the fastest Morse as easily as he read the foot-high letters on an advertising poster.
