SBS, page 12
He nodded and Hunter looked away. That was all they needed now. Why the hell hadn’t it come out in training? Too late now.
Up on deck, the German officer was speaking again. In Greek: ‘We are coming aboard.’ One of the men with the Schmeissers stepped nimbly from his own boat on to the deck of the Rosetta and moved quickly so that his back was to the mast and he had a view of the foredeck. The German officer followed him and walked up to Gorringe before speaking again in Greek: ‘Papers? Who are you? Where are you bound?’
They were the last words he would ever utter. Gorringe made to get his papers from beneath the chart on the wooden table but instead his finger gently squeezed the trigger of his Webley, which instantly spat flame through the paper. The bullet hit the young officer point-blank in the chest and exited, making a mess of his back, embedding itself in the German vessel’s wheelhouse. He sank to the deck. As he did so, the two Brens and the MG34 opened up from the portholes straight into the hull and deck of the German vessel, ripping away the wood and steel to leave three great, gaping holes. The boat lurched at the impact, unsettling the men on deck and at that moment two Royal Navy crew on the Rosetta’s deck let loose with the concealed Oerlikon cannon and the port side Vickers machine gun. The cannon was trained on the forward Spandau gun and its fire tore into its barrel and stock and ripped apart its gunner in a spray of blood, his body crashing to the deck. The arc of fire of the Vickers took in both the remaining man with the Schmeisser and the two men standing by the rear Spandau.
The British crewmen let rip with a belt of bullets that tore through the three men who crumpled onto the deck, one of them falling into the sea. The German beside the mast was the last to die, shot by Hunter as he emerged from the cabin, but not before he had let off a burst from the Schmeisser, which hit one of the British crewmen in the lower leg. It was all over in seconds, leaving them with a momentary deafness from the gunfire and the penetrating stench, a mix of hot metal, gunpowder and blood.
The others were all up on the deck now, but as it had transpired there had been no need for their support, save for Hunter’s.
Hunter searched the deck for Phelps and to his relief saw that he was standing with the others and not, as he had worried, crouched in a terrified funk.
Gorringe took command. ‘Right, we need to send this lot to the bottom before that spotter plane comes back again.’
He looked at his stricken crewman, who was lying on the deck clutching his leg. ‘Woods, you’ve got a medic with you, haven’t you? Can you get him to help young Forbes there?’
Woods nodded and summoned Martin, who apart from being the man with an eye for detail, was also the medical asset of the little party. He had qualified on a battlefield aid course while a QMS with the Argylls and carried his small canvas ‘doctor’s bag’ with him at all times.
As Martin attended to the wounded seaman, Hunter spoke to Gorringe: ‘What do you suggest we use to sink her, sir? Two grenades in the engine room should do the trick, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, I’d say so. No need for anything more elaborate. You want to keep your big stuff, don’t you. Your chaps below did a pretty good job on the hull. She won’t last long.’
Hunter found Duffy. ‘I’ve got a demolition job for you. Nothing too exciting, I’m afraid. Just need to sink the bastard. Use grenades. I should think the engine room would work best.’
Duffy shook his head. ‘No, sir. I’ll just blow the ammo stores. But we’d better untie first or she’ll take us with her.’
Hunter nodded. ‘You’re the expert. I’ll leave it to you.’
He turned to Fletcher and Miller. ‘You two, better get rid of those bodies. Over the side. But tie something heavy to them. We’ll need to weigh them down. We don’t want corpses bobbing around alerting the enemy.’
The two men set about their unpleasant task, securing the dead rating’s Spandau to him by its sling before rolling him off the side of the deck and into the water, where he quickly sank. To the German officer they tied a heavy piece of metal that the gunfire had part ripped from the boat’s deck and heaved his body over the side.
They climbed aboard the German vessel followed by Hunter who moved cautiously aft. He was right to be careful: one of the men lying on the deck was not dead and as Hunter approached he turned, with a gun in his hand. He was stopped dead with a burst from Hunter’s Sten gun. Fletcher and Miller moved the four German dead down into the small cabin and battened the door before returning with Hunter to the AHS 23 Rosetta.
Meanwhile, Duffy had been hard at work. He had found the Germans’ pile of ammunition in the hold and had carefully arranged a dozen stick grenades around the boxes so that when each of them exploded it was sure to create a much bigger explosion, ensuring that the whole lot would go up. Then, satisfied with his work, he took two Mills bomb grenades from his pockets and inserted a primer into each of them. He then took a piece of twine from another pocket and cut two lengths, each of them around ten yards long. With great care he knotted each piece of twine around the circular pin of one of the grenades. He then placed each of the Mills bombs into holes that he had made within the piles of boxes, positioning another ammunition box over the top of the hole. Then he climbed out of the hold, up on to the deck, slowly playing out the two lengths of twine, as he went. Taking care not to tighten either of the strands, Duffy stepped from the deck of the German boat on to that of the Rosetta.
He turned to Hunter. ‘Job done, sir. All we have to do is sail away from her like the clappers and, when we’re a good thirty yards away, up she goes. Boom!’
‘Well done. Let’s hope it works.’
‘Oh it’ll work, sir. We had just better make bloody sure that we’re going fast enough when it does.’
Woods and Gorringe were giving the final instructions to finish up before they blew the German caique. The two naval crewmen were swabbing the decks of blood, while Russell had been detailed to bring down the German naval ensigns from the mast and the stern flagpole of the enemy boat. He delivered both of them to Hunter. ‘Enemy flags, sir. What shall we do with them?’
‘Better give them to Captain Gorringe, I suppose. Spoils of war. They’ll look good on the walls of his ward room.’
Hunter walked over to Gorringe and presented him with the two flags, neatly folded. ‘How’s your crewman?’
‘Oh, he’ll live. Nasty wound though, two bullets in the lower leg, another in his foot. I suspect that’s the end of his war.’
‘You might have to leave him on the island. The resistance fighters, the andartes, have their own doctors. Proper doctors, I mean. Poor chap.’
‘Well, let’s just see what your man can do for him. I’d far rather get him back to Alex with us, after you’ve finished your business.’
The plan was to hide the caique on the south coast of Crete while the raiders were doing ‘their business’ as Gorringe referred to it. Special camouflage netting cloths in varying shades ranging from grey to the yellow grey that prevailed around the Aegean had been created by some very talented creative types from SOE based in Beirut, which had the extraordinary effect of masking the ship’s outline and making it blend into the scenery to look exactly like a rocky part of the cliff face. It hadn’t yet been used in an active operation and Gorringe was more than a little apprehensive. Although he would never have admitted as much.
‘My demolition man has rigged a bomb. It’s on two lines tied to detonators made from Mills bombs. Once we get to within forty yards of her the pins will pull then we’ve got another five seconds before she blows. We’ll have to push the engine to get this old girl to move as fast as she can. Need to get up some speed.’
Gorringe raised his eyes. ‘I can push her to about eight knots. That’s about it.’
‘Whatever you can manage, sir. It’ll have to do. Those five seconds will probably take us out another ten or fifteen yards. That should be safe enough.’
The decks were clean of blood now and there was no human debris to suggest anything had taken place. All that remained to do was to untie from the German boat and then go like blazes. And then, as Duffy had put it: ‘Boom!’
Woods and Hunter ordered all of the men apart from Duffy and Martin to go below. He watched as Gorringe started up the engine and waited until it was turning over nicely before signalling to his two crewmen.
They untied the German boat from Rosetta’s cleats and almost immediately, Gorringe pushed down on the throttle. Gently at first and then gradually stronger, until Rosetta began to move away from the enemy boat. Duffy, a tin hat on his head and wearing a battledress top and gloves, had found himself a seat on the aft deck and was holding one of his strings of twine. Seated beside him, Martin, similarly attired, had hold of the other. Duffy had placed each of the loops over the end of a wooden boat-hook and these he and Martin were now using as spindles, allowing the twine to play out as if they were running a salmon on a line. Gorringe began to gather speed and the caique sped away from the German boat until she was making about seven knots.
The twine was running fast now and before the two men knew it snapped taut. Then it held for a moment as it strained against the pins of the now distant Mills bombs, buried in the enemy ship’s hold, and then suddenly, both lines of twine came away, as if a huge salmon had at last managed to escape a fishing fly.
Hunter and Woods had also been given tin helmets by the crew and they watched in fascination and apprehension as the inevitable unfolded. They were around forty yards distant from the German boat now and, as Gorringe urged more speed from Rosetta, the caique managed to pull away another five yards. Then ten. Gorringe kept going, waiting. Yelled out to all of them, ‘Take cover. Tin hats, everyone on deck. Cover your heads.’
The two unhurt crewmen crouched down on deck, as did Hunter and Woods, while Duffy and Martin took cover behind the central mast.
As they reached a further fifteen yards away from the enemy there was a small explosion from the vessel, followed by another and then, with an almighty crash, the whole thing went up.
The hull of the boat was sent twenty feet up into the air and exploded in a mass of timber and metal and body parts. None of the men on Rosetta saw the blast, as all were sheltering. But all of them felt it. Gorringe, though looking away from it, had stayed at the wheel, pushing the old caique to the limit of her endurance. Then, as if in slow motion, the debris began to come down, crashing into the waters behind them and narrowly avoiding Rosetta’s stern.
Woods looked up. The German boat had split into three main parts. Fore, aft and centre. The for’ard part was sinking fast – what was left of it – and the rear, with the mangled gun mounting attached, was also going under. The central part, where the engines had been, amazingly had still retained the twisted metal frame of the wheelhouse and the lower portion of the great mast. It was all burning, but such was the intensity of the blaze that there seemed to be little smoke to attract enemy planes. Woods gazed at the wreckage in horror. A horror that intensified when he fancied he had caught sight of a leg and then half a torso. Then the central section too began to sink, hissing into the sea as the waters extinguished the flames and as she went, oil and air made the water around her into a ghastly, boiling whirlpool coloured a deep red by the blood of six dead men.
Following Woods’s gaze to focus on the vanishing ship, Hunter’s thoughts returned once again to the Greek myths. To Scylla and Charybdis, the two sea monsters that lay in wait on either side of a narrow strait. Mostly he thought of Charybdis, the monstrous mouth that sucked in huge volumes of water and belched them out as a gigantic whirlpool, which swallowed up unwary ships. Aeneas had just managed to escape death in the churning whirlpool and Jason had only survived when guided through the strait by Thetis.
Ulysses too had steered away from the Charybdis, only to lose six men to Scylla. Six men. He was suddenly chilled by the strange coincidence that there had been six Germans on the enemy boat.
As a boy, the man-eating whirlpool had lived in his mind. He had woken too often from sleep in terror of the irresistible vortex, sucking him in, as it had almost done to his hero Ulysses. And here it was, as it seemed, in reality, right in front of him, sucking down the mangled bodies of the German sailors and their doomed boat. He shuddered and stared, spellbound at the last, dying moments of their caique. Watched as her fractured mast and ruined wheelhouse slid down into the maelstrom, which gave a final froth of bubbles and a last eerie hiss and an almost animal groan, before closing over the wreckage.
And then, where there had been a German boat, there was now hardly anything to be seen, save a few pieces of floating wreckage, most of which had been strewn around the centre of the blast, for a diameter of around fifty yards. The enemy boat had simply disappeared and the surface of the Libyan Sea was flat and silent, as if nothing had ever happened.
Hunter leant over the side and fished out an upturned German helmet. He shook the water from it and placed it on the deck before turning to Gorringe. ‘She’s gone, sir. Very quick, wasn’t it.’
‘Damned quick. Faster than I’d thought, Lieutenant. Let’s just hope that what’s left doesn’t arouse the curiosity of any enemy spotter planes. Thank God most of it’s gone under. It only just missed us. Too bloody close for my liking.’
Hunter grinned. ‘Yes, sir. I thought it might be rather a close thing.’
After the explosions had stopped, the men had quickly come up on to the deck and were all watching now, and cheering. Woods joined them. ‘Everyone alright?’
They shouted and shook their heads, smiling. Only White quipped, ‘Oh, I’d be tickety-boo, sir, if I wasn’t feeling so bloody rough.’
That got another laugh. Hunter turned to Duffy. ‘Well done, Duffy. With the bang.’
Duffy smiled at him. ‘Think that I might have overdone it a bit, Mister Hunter. Don’t you?’
8
Their caique moved on, leaving the few remaining pieces of still-smouldering debris from the vanished German vessel far behind it and making good time. By eleven o’clock that evening the Rosetta was within four miles of their objective.
It felt, all too frustratingly, for Hunter, as if they were almost there. Just about within touching distance. But this, he knew, was the most dangerous time of all. The moment when any raiding party was at its most vulnerable. Hunter looked around the deck and watched as the crew scoured the watery horizon for further enemy vessels and the skies for more spotter planes or fighters.
The moon had risen and the night was bright. Far brighter than Hunter felt was good for them. Before them the distinct silhouette of Crete, with its unmistakable mountains stood in sharp outline against the sky. Surely, he reasoned, not wanting to believe it, if they were able to see the island so clearly, they themselves would be equally evident to anyone looking out to sea. Of course it was nonsense, but at that moment it seemed all too horribly real.
They were supposed to be heading for the small headland of Cape Kochinoxos, in the south of the island, next to which was a cove with a secluded stretch of beach. Gorringe had spotted a couple of prominent landmarks on the coast, which were all that he needed to guide him in. As he positioned himself for the long run into the island, for an uncomfortable few minutes they found themselves sailing along the coast, as if taking part in a regatta. If any unfriendly eyes happened to be looking to the south from the cliffs, this would be their moment. According to their intelligence, there was a German post almost a mile away to the west and another just over a mile to the east.
They edged ever closer to the coast and, as they did so the two unwounded crewmen, each armed with a pair of binoculars, moved forward to look towards their destination. To find the tiny light from a flashing torch that would guide them in to safety.
Woods was alongside Hunter now, himself with a pair of glasses trained on the beach.
‘Nothing yet?’
‘No. Not a glimmer. Christ, Hunter, I hope they’re alright.’
Beside Woods, from his position behind the wheel, Gorringe flashed another signal and waited.
Both men stared into the low mist, which lay above the sea and below the rising mountains of the Cretan landscape. Still nothing.
Woods turned away and walked towards the prow of the vessel. There was no point in all of them watching. It just made the waiting harder.
He peered over the side of the boat and into the mist-covered water, but could not resist being drawn back up to the coastline. In the distance he could just make out the line of surf around the cliffs and the beach.
Gorringe, aware of the danger they were in, at last took the decision to head inshore. Gently, he turned the caique and headed for the rendezvous. As he did so, he ordered one of the crew to move to the prow and hang over the side to watch out for rocks.
Woods and Hunter, along with the other crew member, were now straining to catch a sign of the signal light. Still the night yielded nothing. As they edged ever closer to the coast the man on the prow watch began to call back, whenever he saw a possible rock, and Gorringe adjusted course accordingly. It was a painstaking process and, as Gorringe had cut the engines to half speed, they were now travelling slower than ever.
And then, without warning, Hunter saw it. Just faintly, a twinkle of light. But it was unmistakable. He spoke quietly to Woods: ‘Sir. Look. There,’ and pointed into the enveloping darkness. Woods tried to follow his pointing arm.
‘God, yes you’re right.’
He moved to Gorringe, at the wheel. ‘Captain. We’ve found them.’
Gorringe and the crewman looked in the direction Woods was indicating. The captain smiled. ‘Yes. Well spotted. That’ll be them. If it’s not the Jerries.’
He didn’t alter the speed, kept the engines slow, but he was able at least to settle on a course making directly for the light, which could now clearly be seen to be flashing. On and off. On and off.
