Dauntless (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

  Dauntless

  Alan Evans

  Copyright © Alan Evans 1980

  The right of Alan Evans to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1980 by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  My thanks to:

  Squadron Leader Gordon Hyams, DFC, who flew Short Seaplanes in that war.

  Anina Kaplan and the Staff of the Museum of the History of Tel-Aviv-Yafo, particularly Michaela Golderthal.

  The Hagana Museum, Tel Aviv.

  All those people who helped me in Israel and Deir el Belah, and the Arab gardener and gentleman at the British Military Cemetery at Deir el Belah.

  The staffs of the National Maritime Museum, Imperial War Museum, Public Record Office, Royal Geographical Society, Royal Air Force Museum, Fleet Air Arm Museum and the library at Walton-on-Thames.

  But as always — any mistakes are mine!

  Table of Contents

  1 — Make or Break

  2 — The Battalion

  3 — A Killing Machine

  4 — The Search

  5 — A Quiet Little Run up the Coast

  6 — Dawn Rendezvous

  7 — “They’ll Bury Me There — And I Won’t Be The Only One!”

  8 — The Raid

  9 — Dawn Patrols

  10 — The Legion

  11 — Walküre

  12 — Make or Break

  Extract from Seek Out and Destroy by Alan Evans

  In 1917, after three years of war, Britain barely survived a U-boat campaign that threatened to starve her into defeat. The French army mutinied, Russia was torn apart by revolution and the battles in France and Flanders only resulted in enormous slaughter. So the British government sought in desperation for a victory to off-set the succession of disasters.

  The enemy stretched from Germany on the North Sea through Austria-Hungary to Turkey and her Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. That empire was rotten, the army its only strength. If Turkey could be defeated then Germany would lose an ally and, instead, face the drain of war on another front, because an attack could be launched on her through Turkey.

  The Turks fought two British armies, one in Mesopotamia and the other, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, in Palestine. If that army in Palestine, which had driven the Turks back from the Suez Canal and through the desert of Sinai, could drive on northward and cut the line of supply between Turkey and her army in Mesopotamia then the Turks might throw in their hand.

  It was a big ‘if’. But the decision was taken: a victory was needed and Palestine had to supply it, and soon. That was the task facing the Egyptian Expeditionary Force and its commander, General Allenby, in October 1917.

  1 — Make or Break

  24.10.17.

  Commander David Cochrane Smith pencilled the date at the top of the notepad and it triggered the thought: Allenby’s army would attack the Gaza-Beersheba line in a week, on the 31st. It would be a battle vital to the entire future of the war. Thoughtfully, he laid the notepad down and stared out across the water.

  He stood right in the stern of H.M. Seaplane Carrier Blackbird. Until the war, she had been a fast cross-channel packet. Now she had accommodation for four Short seaplanes in the big barn of a hangar the dockyard had built on her after end. His own ship, the light cruiser Dauntless, cruised a quarter mile to starboard. Both ships were on a course almost due south, with the coast of Palestine lifting above the eastern horizon, the morning sun blazing out low over the sea from that coast.

  Smith’s figure in the white drill trousers and shirt was slight, seemingly frail, but that was deceptive. He was thin-faced, not handsome, the pale blue eyes watchful under the peak of the cap. He was probably as happy as he would ever be. He had a command and considered himself lucky and he was grateful to Rear-Admiral Braddock who had been sent out to organise convoys to combat the menace of U-boats in the Mediterranean. He was a friend.

  Smith had few friends, and was bleakly aware of it. But Braddock had asked for him, got him the command of Dauntless and had given him Blackbird as consort. Smith and his seaplane carrier were to act in support of Allenby’s army, while Braddock concentrated on convoys.

  Smith suspected the old admiral had fought to get this command for him, and he was right. Smith was unpredictable. He had won two bloody but decisive actions, one in the Pacific and one in the North Sea, but in the first he had outraged a neutral government and created diplomatic uproar, and in the second had again broken the rules, defied his immediate superior and even unofficially ‘borrowed’ a monitor from her anchorage in Dunkerque Roads. There were many who said he was a hot-head and a rebel, and Braddock admitted there was some truth in the charges, but he had won his fight all the same.

  Now Smith stood aboard Blackbird and told himself that this was make or break for him. He was far from a conventional naval officer, brought up in a village shop in Norfolk by adoptive parents — a retired chief petty officer, Reuben Smith, and his wife, Hannah. He had no knowledge of his true family, no background at all, a mystery to his contemporaries and to himself. His career had been chequered, the long routine of service life highlighted by successful actions, but marred by scandal. Now he was convinced his professional future hung in the balance. If he made a success of his part in Allenby’s campaign then his critics would be silenced and he would have a professional future, would go forward on the flood-tide of victory. And there would be a victory. There had to be. The allies needed it in this third year of war and Allenby had been sent out to get it. Smith dared not think of the alternative.

  The carrier had reduced speed to ten knots and was slowing still as one of the Shorts was wheeled out of the hangar, its big, box-like floats resting on a trolley. It stood fifteen feet high, a biplane with its wings folded back, but now it was clear of the hangar the riggers swung out the wings and rammed the locking pins into the sockets on their leading edges. The Short changed from a nesting bird to one ready to fly, wings spread. Smith saw Lieutenant Chris Pearce checking that those pins were secure, as he always checked since the day he had been about to take off and had seen one hanging loose.

  Chris was a pilot as well as captain of Blackbird, a tall, good-looking young man who had worn an engaging grin when Smith first met him, three weeks before. But since those early days he had gone downhill and now he looked drawn and edgy, tired. Smith was startled. He had not seen Chris for days: he had worked him and his crew hard but still he should not look as worn as he did. It added to Smith’s recurring doubts. Pearce had come to him with reports of near-brilliance. But his was a highly-strung brilliance and, in Smith’s short experience of him, he had proved increasingly nervy and erratic.

  He had four flying crews on board, but he was flying himself today. He drove himself hard, as if needing to prove something. Now Pearce turned, lifted a hand signalling that he was ready and Smith joined him, took the leather flying helmet and climbed up into the Short. That was all the flying gear they needed in these last days of the Mediterranean summer. He put notepad and map on the seat of the observer’s cockpit. Pearce stood in the pilot’s cockpit in front of him, reaching up for the hook on the derrick purchase dangling on the end of its wire. The armourer passed up the 16-pound anti-personnel bombs to Smith, four of them and each no more than a foot long. “All we’ve got left, I’m afraid sir.”

  Smith listened to his instructions as he set the bombs down on the floor of the cockpit, the Lewis gun on its Scarff ring-mounting nudging his back. He nodded his readiness as Pear
ce looked round questioningly.

  Pearce faced forward, lifted a hand, the winch hammered and the derrick lifted the Short and swung it out over the side to hang above the sea. Events moved rapidly now. Blackbird was used to launching a seaplane in forty-five seconds. The Short dropped down to the sea off Blackbird’s port quarter and seamen standing on her wide rubbing strake used long poles to boom off the fragile seaplane from the steel side. For a second it dangled less than a foot above the wave-crests slipping beneath the floats as Blackbird steamed slowly ahead, then Pearce yanked the toggle release that slipped the hook and the Short smacked down on the sea. Blackbird pulled away, increasing speed now the seaplane was slipped.

  ‘Short’ was a deceptive term, being the name of the firm that made it; the Short was forty feet long and the wings spread sixty-three feet. And ‘floatplane’ was a more accurate term than ‘seaplane’, because besides the two big floats under the mid-section there was a smaller float at each wing tip and another on the tail. The Short sat back on the tail float now it was on the sea. Shorts were big, ungainly birds but reliable. They flew and flew.

  Pearce turned the tap on the compressed air cylinder in his cockpit, and under the thrust of the air the pistons of the Maori engine kicked and it fired. Pearce ran it up, taxi-ing then shoved forward the big wheel that topped the control column until the tail float lifted off, and hauled back on the wheel as the Short reached flying speed. There was just enough broken water to unstick the floats and the Short rose into the air. Pearce eased it around in a gently-banking turn until they were headed towards the distant coast and still slowly climbing. Ten minutes later they crossed the coastline at fifteen hundred feet.

  Allenby’s orders had been short and to the point. The government had sent him out from France to capture Palestine. The land lay under Smith now; this would be the battleground. Behind him was the sea, to his left and far to the north was Syria, ahead the Hills of Judaea lifted in a blue wall to the east and on the right, in the distant south, was the desert of Sinai. Palestine had been fought over for thousands of years and soon would be fought over again. And as never before.

  The Turks had ruled here for centuries and when the war started they advanced through Sinai and threatened the Suez Canal but were beaten back. In the last year the British army under Murray fought its way through the desert of Sinai and the way was hard because the Turks fought hard. Now they had with them the German Asia Corps under Kressenstein, five thousand of them, all specialists and scattered through the Turkish formations to supply a technical stiffening to the courage already there. It was the German engineers who had built the Gaza-Beersheba line.

  The Short turned south, following the thread of the railway and pointing its nose towards that Gaza-Beersheba line sixty-odd miles to the south. Beersheba was the fortress at the southern end of the Hills of Judaea, while Gaza stood on the northern coast. The German engineers had strung fortifications across the thirty miles between and they boasted the line was impregnable. Now Allenby had taken over from Murray. The Germans knew he would attack the Gaza-Beersheba line and believed he would fail. But he had no choice except to try. Allenby’s army crouched ready on one side of the line, Palestine lay on the other, and he had his orders: take Palestine.

  Braddock’s orders to Smith were simply: harass the enemy.

  “Harass the enemy.” Dauntless and Blackbird had raced up and down this coast from Gaza to the Gulf of Alexandretta, three hundred miles to the north, for the last two weeks. Dauntless shelled installations and any troops seen, drove the coastwise traffic of dhows and small craft into the shallows, then sent armed boarding parties in the motor-boat to set them afire or blow them up. Blackbird’s Shorts reconnoitred and bombed the railway whenever they could. A railway track was a difficult target to hit and, when it was, any damage could be made good in a day, but any delay meant a break in supplies to the enemy army. Palestine’s roads were poor and few. The railway that ran down from Alexandretta to the Gaza-Beersheba line was the sole slender artery sustaining the enemy there. So the enemy defended it and the flights over the railway were met by gun-fire or the Fokker fighter planes of the Asia Corps.

  This was not Smith’s first flight in those two weeks because he needed to see for himself — he could not always stand by and send others. So here he was with Pearce, looking for trouble and ready to make it; hence the four 16-pound bombs. He knew these were all that remained after the Shorts’ repeated bombing attacks. Trouble was not hard to find. A week ago one of the Shorts was hit by gun-fire and forced down in the shallows off the coast. Again Smith had sent an armed party in the motor-boat, this time to lift the pilot and observer out of the surf. They had been very lucky.

  The Short droned on at a steady sixty knots and the old Arab town of Lydda slid under the port wing. The Turks had a garrison a mile or so north of it, but Smith saw no troops on the move. The railway ran on southwards. Smith stood up and leaned to one side to peer ahead, round the radiator of the water-cooled engine, like a laundry basket a foot square, which was mounted right in front of the pilot’s cockpit. There was no train in sight. The spur line coming up from Jaffa on the coast swung southwards to angle towards and finally join the main line at Lydda station, a half-mile south of the town itself. The junction of the lines formed a V which held the green of a wood but that was still ahead of them. Also ahead of them, and a mile south of the station, was a German anti-aircraft battery.

  Pearce had not forgotten this and the Short was banking away to steer well clear of the guns, turning eastwards towards the coast and picking up the line of the railway to Jaffa. Smith saw Pearce scowling, pushing up the goggles to rub at his eyes irritably. Smith stood up again with the bombs rolling about his feet, smacked the pilot’s shoulder and pointed at the steel ribbon of the track running across the green of the plain and the trailing plume of grey-black smoke some seven or eight miles ahead. Pearce pulled down the goggles, peered in the direction Smith indicated and the scowl was wiped away by a grin. He eased the nose of the Short down in a shallow dive. It was the train that ran once a day from Lydda down to Jaffa and back again, or had until Dauntless and Blackbird shelled and bombed it. Now it was trying again, puffing down to the coast, pottering along at around fifteen miles an hour, while the Short was making close to eighty knots and dropping out of the sky towards it.

  Smith groped down by his feet as he watched the train coming up — six, seven, eight trucks, all of them loaded, then the tender stacked with logs of wood because the Turks were short of coal, and the engine, its tall chimney belching out the smoke that carried down along the side of the track. There were men on the footplate of the engine. The Short was down to two hundred feet or so, sweeping forward over the train. Smith could see the dark faces turned up to him.

  He was standing again, holding the bomb over the side a the cockpit, yanking out the pin and seeing the fan of the tail start to revolve. He let it go as the locomotive raced back towards him, the footplate flashed beneath and he saw a soldier there with a rifle at his shoulder.

  The Short was past in a blink and tearing away ahead of the train as the bomb burst, in front of the engine but wide of the track. Smith groped for another as the Short’s nose lifted, the port wing dipping in as tight a turn as the unwieldy craft could produce, and the nose pointed once more at the train.

  Smith reminded himself that the Short wasn’t overtaking the train now but closing it and he had to allow for their increased combined speeds. He worried at the pin, got it free and let the bomb go. He squirmed around in the cockpit, banged his head on the breach of the Lewis and swore, swore again as he saw the bomb fall ahead of the train and wide again. He’d botched it. Next time ... He reached down, felt his fingers on the pin and took care not to grip it, lifted the third bomb.

  He remembered the armourer aboard Blackbird, macabrely humorous. “You pulls out the pin, sir, and lets the bomb go. See, sir, once you pulls the pin, the fan has a habit o’ revolving and after two or three turns
that bomb’ll go off if you cough. There was one feller got excited and let the pin go an’ kept the bomb. That didn’t do no good. Not to him, anyway.”

  Smith grinned briefly, remembering the tale. Now Pearce had turned the Short and they were overhauling the train again. It was steaming more slowly still as it climbed the long slope up the hill before the left-hand turn at the crest and the run down into Jaffa. Sand dunes on the right of the track and orange groves on the left, the train sliding up at him, beneath him, the engine coming up — now!

  The bomb burst in the dunes, hurling up sand, yards from the track though level with the engine.

  One to go.

  The Short was banking right-handed above the crest of the hill. Smith caught a quick, wheeling glimpse of Jaffa a mile or more down the slope on its own small hill, a lean tower and a minaret standing above the walls of the old town perched on the edge of the sea. Then the two ships, far out at sea, patrolling. And then the smaller township, just half-a-dozen neatly laid out, criss-crossing streets, deserted now, that lay a half-mile below the crest and the same from Jaffa. That was where some Jews had moved to from overcrowded Jaffa back in 1909 to build a town of their own. What was it? — Tel Aviv. And all the time he scanned the sky, head turning. He checked in that turning, stiffened, then tapped Pearce’s shoulder.

  The Short levelled out and Pearce twisted around in his seat, flying the Short with one hand, making downward thrusting gestures with the other.

  Smith pointed and Pearce peered in the direction Smith indicated, sought and found what Smith was pointing out. It was like a small black insect, high in the sky and coming up from the south where the German Asia Corps had an airfield at Et Tine. But Pearce put up his thumb, then made the downward thrusting gesture again. So he thought there was time to finish the attack.