Eagle at Taranto (Commander Cochrane Smith series) Read online

  But none of this concerned Mark now. He knew an Italian Fleet of two battleships, sixteen cruisers and close on thirty destroyers was less than forty miles away and his squadron was to attack it.

  The nine Swordfish were ranged in a herringbone from Eagle’s stern, a line of them along each side, noses pointing at an angle across the deck and inclined towards her bow. Their wings were folded so they could be packed more closely together. Chocks were jammed under their wheels and the metal propellers whirled as the fitters ran up the engines.

  Mark walked the uneven plates of Eagle’s deck to where Ethel waited, third in the starboard line. Campbell was already up in the aftermost cockpit, the upper half of his stocky body jutting up out of it, stubby fingers ‘busy on a final check on the Vickers machine-gun. Mark beckoned and Campbell leaned over, the straps of the as yet unbuckled flying-helmet flapping against his jaw. Ward bellowed up at him: “Torpedo attack on the Eyeties!”

  That was all the briefing Doug Campbell would get. He might have heard the shouted words above the din of the engines or more likely read the message on Mark’s lips — or simply guessed, because torpedos were slung underneath the Swordfish. He stuck up his thumb and Mark mentally added another possibility: Campbell doesn’t give a bugger, anyway.

  He was wrong. Campbell did not worry about where he was going but he did wonder bleakly if he would come back. So he took a good look at Mark Ward, thought the big feller was looking calm and confident, and that was the main thing.

  Mark climbed up to the cockpit. Hardy eased his bulk out of it and Mark slid into his seat on top of the parachute already resting there like a cushion. Hardy belted him into the Sutton harness, slapped his shoulder and bawled, “Good luck, sir!” Then he manoeuvred his way down to the deck. The sad-faced Laurel was settling Rogers into the observer’s cockpit between Mark and Campbell, passing him his chartboard and instruments.

  Now it was routine for Mark, going through the checks, looking up at the weather. Two tenths cloud, slight sea and a wind out of the north-west about Force 5. Eagle was steaming into it now and he could see the steam jet, in her bow trailing a white streamer down the centre of her flight-deck. Up there in the cockpit he was only aware of the slipstream from his engine, flapping Laurel’s voluminous overalls like a flag hung round his skinny body.

  And all the while Mark was thinking: Better this time. Better this time. Got to do better this time.

  A light flashed from the island and the flight-deck officer gestured “come-on” with his two flags. The chocks were whipped away from under the wheels of the first Swordfish and it rolled forward, turning, then halted when the F.D.O. signalled. It stood with its nose pointed into the wind, towards Eagle’s bow. The wings were swung out and locked in place, the engine run up until it thundered. Then the two flags snapped down and the Swordfish surged forward, lifted off slowly under the three-quarter-ton weight of the torpedo, dipped out of his sight as it cleared the bow then a second later rose into view again, climbing.

  Mark watched the others go at ten second intervals then saw the flags beckon to him. Laurel and Hardy, flat on the deck on either side of Ethel’s wheels and gripping the ropes attached to the chocks, whipped them away from under the wheels and Ethel rolled forward. The fitter and rigger scrambled to their feet and stood together close to the side out of the way of the remaining Swordfish. They watched as Ethel lumbered into the air, held their breath as she sagged from sight over the bow, let it out as she rose again. That was always a gut-sinking moment for them.

  Mark climbed, joined the circling Swordfish and fell into formation when the rest joined them. They headed for the Italian Fleet beyond the horizon, all the while searching the sky for enemy fighters.

  The squadron flew in a formation of three “vics” of three, each “vic” with its leader and a wingman flying on either side of him but a few yards astern so that they made a V. They climbed over a layer of patchy cloud and through a hole Mark caught a glimpse of sea glinting far below like hammered, polished pewter, its many facets reflecting the sunlight like a bank of mirrors. He was reminded, curiously, of the tunnel. Once, when caught by a storm while he was flying, he had seen a passage through the black clouds that narrowed down to a window of clear, blue sky. He had flown through the cloud tunnel with them closing in, and then burst out through the window into sunlight.

  He wondered why he had remembered that now...

  Ships! Lean shapes in line ahead, Italians, each trailing its banner of smoke and cutting a white arrowhead in the sea. And always the words ran through his head: Got to do better.

  He spoke into the mouthpiece of the Gosport tube, the intercom of the Swordfish, joined to the earpieces of his helmet like a doctor’s stethoscope. “Enemy fleet ahead!”

  But not the battleships. Away to his left smoke was banked like a monstrous, dirty blanket cast on the surface of the sea. The battleships had done their disappearing act, retreating behind that smoke-screen to evade the fire of Warspite, far astern of Mark and hidden by cloud. The ships ahead were cruisers.

  “Seen!” That was Tim Rogers answering. He and Campbell were standing up in their open cockpits now, seat harnesses unclipped and only the “jock-strap”, a single long band of webbing running from each man’s belt to an anchorage on the cockpit floor, to save them from falling out if Ward was forced into aerobatics.

  Mark watched his “vic” leader, eased the stick forward to follow him into the dive. The ships might only be cruisers but they were big, and there were four of them in line ahead with an escorting screen of destroyers. Their wakes left white hatchings scoring the blue surface of the sea. They grew in size from small toys to big ones as the altimeter unreeled and the needle on the airspeed dial crept around to 160 — 170 180 knots.

  Mark pulled Ethel out of the dive and levelled her off at fifty feet above the sea. He had been aware of flak bursting while in that dive but none of it was near him. Now he was flying into it, the black smoke-balls appearing ahead and above. He worked stick and rudder gently with hand and feet to try to swing Ethel away from the bursts, watched the ship ahead of him grow, all her upperworks sparkling with red flashes as she fired her anti-aircraft armament.

  She was in the torpedo-sight, a yard-long, calibrated bar mounted across the engine cowling in front of Mark’s wind-screen. But she was heeling under helm, turning towards the attacking Swordfish so that they would not get a shot at the full length of her but only at her bow. Mark checked on the airspeed: 130 knots and falling. The ship filled the torpedo-sight but he could barely see her through the bursting flak. His left hand was on the firing button down by the throttle.

  Now.

  Tim’s voice squawked in his ear: “Torpedo’s gone!”

  The cruiser loomed huge, rushing at him and Mark swung Ethel into a turn, climbing and banking away over the stern. There was briefly no flak around him but instead the looping, glinting arcs of tracer from the cruiser’s heavy machine-guns. Then he left her behind and tucked Ethel close down to the sea to run away.

  Tim’s voice came again. “A hit! I’m sure that was a hit!”

  Mark kept Ethel swaying and swerving from side to side to evade the bursting shells that followed her from the escorting screen of destroyers. “Ours?”

  “Somebody’s. It could have been ours. All the squadron dropped their fish, I think.”

  That was better, anyway, much much better. This time Mark was not frozen in shock. He had been frightened by the flak but able to deal with it.

  Now there were no more shell bursts and he inched the stick back, set Ethel climbing. He peered about the sky, saw the other Swordfish of the squadron gathering and altered course to join them. Ethel settled snugly into her place in the formation and they all headed back to Eagle. They had suffered no casualties and Ward marvelled. How could the entire squadron fly through such a curtain of fire without a single one of them coming to harm? Was it perhaps because the Swordfish were so slow and the gunners were trained to fire at
faster-moving targets, and thus were leading them by too big a margin?

  Tim Rogers spoke but the words were distorted; the Gosport tube did not always work.

  Mark said, “Say again?”

  More squeaks and rumbles, then, “Can you hear me?”

  “I can now.”

  “I said, back in time for tea.”

  Mark agreed, “That’s right.” Provided he didn’t make a mess of landing on and ran into the island, or skidded over the side to finish up jammed nose-down in the catwalk, or overshot and dived into the sea.

  He did none of those things but made a neat landing on all three wheels. Then after debriefing he sat in the wardroom with Tim and they sipped at cups of tea with the other returned aircrews, while the white-jacketed Chinese stewards moved quietly among them. They were Chinese because Eagle’s last commission had been on the China Station and the stewards had stayed with her.

  Tim said thoughtfully, “Funny sort of war.”

  Mark looked around the wardroom at the pilots and observers stretched out in armchairs, listened to the quiet buzz of conversation with an occasional burst of laughter. They were in a battle, two fleets manoeuvring, one seeking a death-grip and the other striving to evade it. Just over the horizon the great guns were hurling their huge shells across fifteen miles of sea and men were dying. You flew an attack before lunch and another before tea.

  Mark answered, “Yes.”

  Tim asked, “Do you think we’ll have another go?”

  “It’s on the cards. They’re servicing and re-arming in the hangar now.”

  Laurel, working on Ethel, saw Campbell passing through the steel box of the hangar and called to him, “Hey, Doug! How did it go?”

  Campbell paused for a moment. He was on his way to get his head down for a kip because he could be flying again before this day was over. “It went all right. Hairy, but all right.”

  Laurel did not pause in his repairs to Ethel’s fuselage, rent by shrapnel from the flak, but he asked, “What price your amateurs now?”

  Campbell looked from the rigger to Hardy’s bulk perched on a staging as he bent over Ethel’s engine. Hardy turned his head and winked. Doug Campbell remembered the fitter telling him that Laurel himself had described Ward as a “weekend sailor”. Campbell said, “The big feller can fly and Rogers hasn’t got us lost. I could do worse than those two.” That was the highest praise he could give.

  Laurel said, “Ward doesn’t say a lot, but he can crack a joke and take one. Right?”

  This time Hardy spoke, “Aye. But I wouldn’t cross him.”

  Laurel blinked, then captured the conversation again. “Oh, sure. I reckon he’s got a temper. But like I said, it’s Rogers does most o’ the talking.”

  Campbell eyed the two R.A.F. men and said solemnly, “I’ve known oppos like that, one with all the chat and the other not getting a word in.”

  Laurel nodded agreement, “That’s right. I’ve known some.”

  Hardy said, “Ah.”

  Campbell grinned and went on his way.

  Warspite had scored a hit with a fifteen-inch shell on one of the Italian battleships but then their fleet had made off behind a smoke-screen, headed for home. Cunningham kept up the pursuit until his ships were only twenty-five miles from the coast of Calabria. Only then did he turn away. His fleet was attacked by bombers of the Italian air force, operating from its bases ashore and Eagle was bombed five times inside ninety minutes, but no ship was hit. The Swordfish were not ordered to make another attack because it was now too close to nightfall and the Italian ships were too far away.

  The British Fleet joined up and steamed south through the night.

  The trouble with the dawn patrol, as always, was that it started the previous night when a midshipman made his way down to the hangar deck. He handed over the orders detailing the aircraft to fly off at first light and how they were to be armed, then went off.

  The petty officers and the Air Force sergeants read the orders, blasphemed, then shouted for the fitters and riggers. They squeezed between the tight-packed aircraft and gathered under the glaring lights that made the sunburned, sweating faces an oily yellow, with the blue stubble of the day’s growth beneath. They listened to the voice of the P.O., lifted above the throb of the ventilating fans, echoing in the vast steel sounding-box of the hangar, bawling out the numbers of the two Swordfish slated for the dawn patrol, the first ones to go onto the lift in the morning.

  Hardy looked at Laurel who pulled a face and said, “Sod their luck.” Ethel was on the dawn patrol.

  Hardy mumbled, “Sod ours.”

  Now they all had to turn to. The eighteen Swordfish, wings folded, were parked neatly — and closely — two by two along the narrow length of the hangar. The task now was to shuffle the pack, picking out the two chosen Swordfish and bringing them right aft to stand by the lift. Obviously two other aircraft were already there, so not only had the chosen pair to be worked aft through the others, but all those others had to be moved forward to take up the spaces vacated by those two and to make room for them aft. It was like solving a huge puzzle where the pieces were not finger-slid squares of polished wood in a frame, but ungainly aircraft, each weighing over two tons. They had to be manhandled, shifted around by muscle, craft and sweat to an accompaniment of cursing and yelps of pain as a finger was torn or a knuckle bruised.

  Meanwhile the sergeant armourer searched the ship, rats in the shadows skittering away from him, for the members of his party. Eagle was crowded, as are all ships in time of war. Men did not sleep below the waterline and there were never enough sleeping berths. So many slept where they could, tucked away in corners, in stores, even curled up inside cupboards. The armourer tracked them down one after another and detailed them to carry out the bombing-up of the Swordfish in the last of the night.

  It was all done, was always done.

  Laurel and Hardy snatched a few hours’ sleep and were out on the flight-deck in the twilight before dawn as Ward and his crew climbed into Ethel and flew her off on patrol. The fitter and rigger stood by the catwalk on Eagle’s port side, trailing by the ropes the chocks they had yanked from under Ethel’s wheels to let her run, and watched the Swordfish clamber slowly into the dark sky. Some stars still prickled palely, remote, dying with the coming of the day. Ethel’s silhouette became shadowy, blurred, but still marked by the blue formation lights on her wings, the glow of her exhaust.

  Laurel admitted, “He’s a bloody good pilot.”

  Hardy nodded his bullet head. “Ah.”

  The deck heeled under them as Eagle, after steaming into the wind to fly off the two Swordfish, turned to resume her course. They flew their patrol and returned without sighting the enemy.

  The Fleet was now cruising to the south of Malta and Eagle flew off anti-submarine and reconnaissance patrols all through that day. But it was a Sunderland flying-boat from Malta, far outranging the Swordfish, that found Italian ships. Its wireless operator reported three cruisers and eight destroyers in the harbour of Augusta on the coast of Sicily.

  In the early evening the squadron assigned to the operation flew off from Eagle to make a dusk attack. Mark stood with Tim Rogers by the island and watched them go.

  Tim muttered, “Good luck.”

  “Better them than Ethel,” said Mark, remembering the attacks of the previous day. But it would be Ethel again, sometime.

  After the last Swordfish had flown off he and Tim strode rapidly up and down the flight-deck, stretching their legs after the day’s flying, until the night closed in. Then they went down to the wardroom, drank a glass of beer each, slowly, savouring it, then turned in. They were to fly antisubmarine patrols the next day.

  But they had already returned from their first patrol and were up- in the goofer’s platform aft of the bridge in the forenoon when the striking force returned. After carrying out their operation the squadron had gone back to Malta rather than risk unnecessary night-deck landings on Eagle. Now they slid down one by
one, wings rocking gently, in over the round-down of the stern and settled on the deck. Each ran briefly until its trailing hook caught on the arrester wire and halted it, when the deck-handling party shoved it onto the forward lift and it was struck below to make way for the next.

  Mark and Tim counted them and saw with relief that all were present. They raced down from the platform and caught one of the observers as he made his way aft, chartboard under his arm. They asked him, “Any luck?”

  He shook his head. “The birds had flown. The harbour was empty. We scouted around, found one destroyer further up the coast and sank her. Better than nothing but not what we had hoped for. That bloody fleet will be back in Taranto by now.” He went on to his debriefing in the island.

  Tim said despondently, “So now it’s back to Alex.”

  Mark peered at him, amazed. “What’s so wrong with Alex? When Eagle’s there you’re ashore every time you get a chance.”

  “Oh, sure. But you know what I mean. It’s a bit of a let-down. Pity they didn’t stand and fight.”

  Mark grinned at him. “In a bloodthirsty mood?”

  Tim said seriously, “Look, I’m no keener on being shot at than the next man —”

  Mark put in drily, “And that’s me.”

  Tim said flatly, “Ho, ho!” He went on: “— but as I see it Cunningham has to control this end of the Med. if we’re going to hold Egypt. To do that he has to cripple the Italian Fleet and if he can chew it up a piece at a time, so much the better. That’s why I wish we could have settled with those two Italian battleships. As it is, their fleet’s intact, strong as ever. We’ve got it all still to do.”

  Mark shrugged. “The Italians know all that and they won’t give Cunningham a chance if they can help it.”

  “So they won’t come out?”

  “They will, but only for a definite purpose — like covering a convoy as they did this week. That’s the only hope Cunningham has of catching them at sea.” Mark glanced at his watch. “We’re flying the next patrol and I want to look over Ethel before they bring her up from the hangar. Come on.”