On Monday morning as Ned walked through St James’s Park it was not until he saw the Citadel – in much the same way that a marauding band of Tuaregs would see a French Foreign Legion fort in the dark of a sandstorm – that he thought again of the Battle of the Atlantic. The charcoal-burner’s oven smell of charred wood still hung over the city after another night of heavy bombing and left a layer of haze. It was one of those unexpectedly mild and cloudless November mornings when a pale-blue sky brought a few hours’ life to the skeleton parade of leafless trees and emphasized the peeling paint of the buildings. Nurse Clare Exton was having breakfast in bed. In Clare’s own bed, or rather the one in the lower guest room, served by his mother.
It was a situation which had its funny side and he suspected both women knew it. Clare had arrived at Palace Street nearly exhausted by a long spell of night duty, and at Willesborough she had gone for walks with him in the afternoon when she should have been sleeping. Then her weekend in London had been exhausting for her, but in another way: two nights when, as he remembered them in detail only a few hours later, they had made love with the desperation of a couple knowing they would soon be parted, or that the next hissing bomb could kill them both, and it was a desperation which left them exhausted yet, because of the possible ultimatum, not sated.
However, as a smiling Clare had commented when he had kissed her goodbye before setting off for the Admiralty, although it left dark rings under the eyes it did wonders for the complexion. She was glowing with love – and shivering with it, too, because she had gone back to her own room after getting Ned some breakfast, and found the sheets cold. Mrs Yorke had insisted that as Clare was not due back in Willesborough until the evening she should spend the day at Palace Street, sleeping as much as she could, doing any shopping she needed, and catching the latest possible train back.
Ned smiled to himself as he pictured Clare curled up in her bed, now wearing a nightdress and sleepily and pleasantly bewildered by the physical effects of making love. But there ahead was the Citadel, the towers and cupolas of the old Admiralty building beyond emphasizing the eastern atmosphere – almost Byzantine, except that the cupolas lacked the Byzantine boldness and colours.
He collected his dockets, notes and diagrams from the safe and went over to his desk. The room was empty and still chilly, the pipes round the walls gurgling and rattling as if they were doing their best to rouse the building after the brief weekend. He had just arranged the papers on his desk when Jemmy came in, his head jerking with the usual twitch but looking surprisingly rested. ‘Morning, Ned, nice weekend?’
‘Fine, and you?’
‘Went to bed Saturday afternoon, got up this morning. Feel all the better for it. A few aches but the old brain is clear. Joan will be in with some coffee,’ he added, the train of thought all too obvious. ‘Don’t tease her; she’s in a wonderful mood. She should be, too, so let’s make the best of it.’
Within five minutes the Croupier was spreading his gridded German chart of the Atlantic on the table like an Arab carpet-seller displaying his wares and the other four officers were at their desks. Ned took out the docket on the third of the convoys. It was almost a rubber stamp version of the others. Nine ships sunk, five others saw the torpedo tracks of near misses because of abnormal phosphorescence – the German electric torpedoes left no wake of compressed air.
Once again he drew a convoy diagram of the eight columns and marked in the ships which had been sunk. Yes, there was the same pattern – all the ships hit had been in the centre, the third or fourth ships in the third, fourth or fifth columns.
He reached for the next docket and read the details. The brief, almost illiterate accounts of some of the survivors picked up later and interrogated, the terse report of the rear-commodore of the convoy (both the commodore and vice-commodore had been killed when their ships were sunk), the clipped wording of the report of the senior officer of the escort… No one complained, everyone did his best to explain what he saw or did, but it added up to five nights of horror. And, to be fair, the captain of the U-boat must be a brave man.
The convoy had sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, forty-four merchant ships, with three frigates and four corvettes as escort. The convoy commodore was a retired vice-admiral who had volunteered – as had so many other retired officers in their late sixties and early seventies – to ‘serve at sea in any capacity’. The senior officer of the escort was an RN two and a half ringer who had a reputation of being one of the best.
By the last day of February the convoy was close to the southern edge of the Grand Banks as a gale come up astern: a gale verging on a storm. With massive following seas the ships had kept their positions, and Yorke could visualize the corvettes being more like half-tide rocks. Gradually the weather had eased to a near gale with a biting cold wind sweeping down from the north-west, chilled as it came over the icecap. Then the attack had started: two ships the first night, three on each of the second, third and fourth nights and two the fifth. Then a pack had taken over, and surprisingly enough they had sunk only two more ships before the escorts, with improving weather, sank two U-boats. The single U-boat inside the convoy had sunk thirteen ships; the convoy had finally lost fifteen.
But this convoy was different from all the others because during the first three nights of bad weather the insider U-boat had attacked on the surface. First sighted between the third ships in the fourth and fifth columns, stopped and athwart the convoy’s course, it had then apparently fired one torpedo from its bow tubes at the ship ahead and one from its stern tube at the target astern, and both had hit. The nearest merchant ships had immediately opened fire on it – just a black shape on a swirling black sea – with machine-guns and Oerlikon 20 mm cannons, and it had submerged. Probably not, the commodore noted, as a result of the gunfire but because its night’s work was completed.
On the second night it had been sighted on the surface near the head of the convoy. There had been a flash as a torpedo hit (and sank) the vice-commodore’s ship, and a sharp-eyed lookout in another ship had spotted the great black whale-like shape. Almost at once the tanker which had been the vice-commodore’s next astern was hit as she passed the sinking ship, unable to alter course in time to pass on the other side and so use the sinking ship as a shield between herself and the waiting U-boat.
No one had sighted it on the third night – the first anyone knew of the U-boat’s presence had been the hollow ‘bong’ of a torpedo exploding in a merchant ship hull. Then, after five nights, the pack had arrived. And – was this significant? – from then on the U-boat in the convoy had not attacked again: with thirteen ships to claim he had left it to the pack. And, just as Jemmy had said, the escorts could deal with pack attacks…
Yorke reached for the fifth docket, but then decided that first he would draw out the convoy diagram of the fourth to see if he could plot the U-boat’s track for the first three nights. The escort commander’s comments on putting a frigate inside the columns were succinct and correct – there was little or no roam to manoeuvre; dropping depth charges risked having them explode as the next merchant ship steamed over them… The only chance would be for the frigate to ram, should she manage to spot a U-boat on the surface. More important, he pointed out that a surface attack by a single U-boat (even in the bad weather of the winter when high seas made it difficult to use the periscope) was very rare…
He folded the finished diagram and put it in the docket. It all made a packet less than a quarter of an inch thick: all that was known – and a good deal more than most people cared – about one of hundreds of convoys which had been attacked, with ships sunk and men drowned and cargoes lost. Even as he put the docket back on the pile he thought of those euphemistically called ‘the next of kin’. By now they would, after a great deal of arguing with the bureaucrats, be receiving meagre pensions and no doubt the minute the war ended the politicians would cut the rate of the pension and in many cases abolish it altogether. Wars were fought by men who could be killed or disabled, but wars were administered by sycophantic civil servants lurking in ministries at the dictate of politicians who converted fighting men’s patriotism into cheap victories in the Parliamentary voting lobbies. The last piece of irony was that in the dockets the dead men were not even recorded by name; they were merely totals under the ‘Dead’, ‘Wounded’ and ‘Missing’ columns next to the names of each ship.
In all the bureaucratic war there had been one victory for the fighting men, he recalled with a tinge of bitterness. Although the Admiralty was a fighting headquarters in the way that the War Office and Air Ministry were not, the Civil Service Union insisted on regarding it as an administrative headquarters, so that to begin with all the clerical staff had to be civil servants. Yet from here, from the Admiralty building, ships of war of every type and size were dispatched hither and yon by naval officers, who sometimes found themselves directing the battle. The Submarine Tracking Room was just along the corridor, marking the position of every known U-boat, while the Trade Plot gave the positions of all the Allied convoys at sea.
The Air Ministry did not exercise direct tactical control over its aircraft in this way; fighters were controlled from different sector headquarters while the Army was administered from various commands scattered throughout the world. The War Office did not tell a distant battalion to march from place A to place B, yet the Admiralty, by direct wireless signal, did tell HMS A to ‘proceed’ to position B to carry out operation C. But at last the Civil Service Union had been persuaded there was a war on; that out there in the Atlantic beyond Bath, beyond the reach of buff official envelopes, beyond letters drafted in that bureaucratic language which is only one remove from illiteracy, there was indeed a war being fought and men were dying by the hundreds, and Wrens were needed inside the Admiralty, highly intelligent and specially chosen girls, many of them university graduates, excellent linguists, mathematicians… Above all, more than willing to work long hours and stand watches.
All of which had little to do with finding out how U-boats attacked from inside convoys. Yet in a way it did; cheating seamen (any servicemen for that matter) out of their pensions, laying down arbitrary bureaucratic rules from Bath or some such safe evacuation centre, going on strike as the dockers had done, refusing to unload the cargoes brought in by the merchant ships, were things that were kept secret yet were none the less shameful. The next of kin of those in the ‘dead’ and ‘missing’ columns might wonder for what their men died, while those disabled and even now lying in bed in some hospital, missing an arm or a leg, an eye or whatever, while doctors and nurses tried to mend them, must at times wonder whether they would have been wiser to volunteer for some safer wartime task, same clerkship in the Ministry of Fuel and Power, some post in the Ministry of Food. The best thing if you were of military age and likely to be called up was, of course, to stand for Parliament: Members of Parliament were not called up. By some strange logic (an instinct for self-preservation?) it was considered to be war service, and several sturdy young men with MP after their names making stirring speeches about the conduct or misconduct of the war were duly reported in the newspapers. No one turned round and said that with more than 600 Members of Parliament, the task of the political government of the country could be left to the older men – many of whom, ironically, had volunteered or were on active service. The younger Members were obviously intent on building up reputations that would secure their political advancement after the war, although the way the Battle of the Atlantic was going (if the pile of dockets was a true indication) it would be hard to find a bookie who would give even reasonable odds about the ‘after’.
The fifth docket was of a thirty-one-ship convoy from Freetown to Liverpool. There were many pages of paper which were simply epitaphs to eight of its thirty-one ships sunk by a single U-boat inside the convoy. Once again he sketched out a diagram and saw the eight ships had all been in the centre. Again, no pattern – although perhaps the attacks in the centre ought to be regarded as a pattern.
Eleven ships in this convoy had crossed the south Atlantic to Freetown from various South American ports in a small convoy and not seen an enemy. At Freetown they were joined by four American, two Norwegian, one Swedish and three Dutch ships: a cosmopolitan bunch carrying every sort of cargo from frozen meat to palm nuts, with several of the ships which had passenger accommodation (usually for a dozen or so people) bringing back Service officers or, in the case of the ships from South America, men and women volunteering for the Forces. Four such ships had been sunk; of fifty-two passengers, only eleven had survived. Forty-one had died before seeing the shores of the Britain they intended to help defend.
He read through the reports referring to the eight ships and noticed that five of them had each been hit with two torpedoes while the other three had been hit with singles, so the U-boat had certainly fired a total of thirteen.
Yorke picked up his diagram and walked over to Jemmy who glanced up and combined a twitch with a grin when he saw who was standing beside him. ‘Solved the riddle, Ned?’
‘No, I just want to peer into the devious mind of a submariner. Look, eight ships sunk by the same U-boat. Five are each hit by two torpedoes, but three others get singles.’
‘Ten fish expended on five, plus three, makes thirteen fired. Any misses seen?’
‘No, not one. No phosphorescence.’
‘Thirteen…and a U-boat carries fourteen, so either he missed with one fish that no one sighted, or he kept it in reserve for the trip home. Or one was defective. What do you conclude from all that?’
Ned shrugged his shoulders. ‘That convoy was like all the rest of them: when the U-boat joined in he had a full outfit of torpedoes. Which means, I suppose–’ it hit him like an almost physical blow, ‘–yes, that it’s definitely not chance that puts a U-boat into the middle of a convoy. Every U-boat up to now has had a full outfit of torpedoes. So old Doenitz is planning it in Lorient. Kernevel, rather – or wherever he has his headquarters.’
Jemmy’s eyes narrowed and he seemed to be staring at a far horizon. ‘Ned, keep on talking…’
‘Well, I’m not too sure of that, come to think of it. Most of these convoys are homeward bound, which means they’re loaded down and also sailing from places thousands of miles from Lorient. Halifax, Nova Scotia, New York, Freetown and so on. Each convoy I’ve checked so far was attacked by a U-boat which fired at least a dozen torpedoes. That makes me wonder whether each of these U-boats sighted a convoy by accident, as it were, and somehow got into the middle and attacked until all its torpedoes were used up, or whether the U-boat was there with a full outfit of torpedoes to attack a particular convoy: whether it was sent out from Lorient full of fuel and fish with orders to wait for convoy number so and so in a certain position.’
‘You mean, the Teds know when our convoys sail. Or at least the ones that are attacked. Is that likely, Ned?’
Yorke shrugged his shoulders again. ‘I’m only thinking aloud. But isn’t it too much of a coincidence that the first five “insider” convoys I check were all attacked by U-boats with full outfits of torpedoes? If you command a U-boat what would you reckon on your chances of sighting a particular type of convoy before you’d fired any torpedoes?’
‘Pretty good,’ Jemmy said. ‘After all, most attacks are on convoys, not single ships. But the chances of staying with that convoy are not so good, so I might then find a second convoy with only half my torpedoes left. But Ned, keep thinking on these lines…this last convoy: the chances of a U-boat with a full outfit of fish picking it up just after leaving Freetown does seem a hell of a coincidence. There are so many single ships running along the West African coast – between Freetown, Takoradi, Accra, Lagos, Calabar, Port Harcourt – that…well, it’s surprising, to say the least.’
‘And the ships hit with two torpedoes, Jemmy?’
‘That’s either definite orders from U-boat Headquarters or this particular Ted captain thinks a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Well, you have fourteen torpedoes. In theory you should be able to hit fourteen merchant ships. In fact we know from experience and radio intercepts that usually a U-boat is lucky if it sinks four ships on each trip, even when part of a pack. That probably means ten fish missed. Most captains dread running out of fish – they’re sure the enormous target of a lifetime will loom up the moment they’ve used the last one. So even though a captain knows he should fire two fish at every target – which could give him seven ships sunk – he usually tries to get away with firing one. So the Ted attacking your convoy was either acting under orders or he was a realist, an experienced skipper who knew it was better to be certain of one ship for every two fish rather than gamble on one for one. Sensible chap.’
‘What would you have done?’
‘What I always did, Ned my lad: if it is worth the risk of getting into a firing position, which means farting around at periscope depth, dodging escorts, it’s worth firing two fish to make certain of one sinking – after all, you’re risking your whole boat and crew. Mind you, occasionally you find a target where all the conditions are perfect and one fish is enough: your Ted found three like that in this convoy, but he wouldn’t gamble on the other five.’
Yorke took back the diagram and said ruefully: ‘All we’ve learned from that lot is that a U-boat usually has a barrowload of fish when it meets a convoy.’
‘That a U-boat going to attack from inside has a barrowload.’ Jemmy corrected.
‘I’m beginning to dislike submarines and submariners,’ Yorke grumbled. ‘Why don’t you tell me all about ’em? Ted ones, I mean.’
‘Right,’ said Jemmy, ‘grab a notebook and make some notes while I deliver my “Meet the Ted U-boat” lecture. I start off with this gesture–’ he gave a thumbs down sign ‘–which means: “We who are about to be torpedoed say ta-ta to the tarts in Trafalgar Square.”
‘Now, at the moment we reckon Doenitz can keep between 200 and 250 boats at sea at all times. His headquarters are at Kernevel, which is a small town near Lorient. His Atlantic boats can refuel at six places – Brest, St Nazaire, Lorient and Bordeaux, La Pallice and La Rochelle.
‘Now for the boats themselves. Various types, so I’ll describe the latest we know about. Commanded by an Oberleutnant (occasionally a Kapitänleutnant) with a first lieutenant (responsible for torpedoes and gunnery), a second officer (radio and ciphers) and an ensign (similar to a sub-lieutenant) who is the navigator. The engineer is a lieutenant.
‘There are signs that Doenitz is getting very short of really experienced captains – we reckon we’ve sunk about a hundred boats in the last twelve months. We captured Kretschmer, and two of the other aces, Schepke and Gunther Prien (the chap who sank the Royal Oak), have been killed. Still, Doenitz has the pick of the German Navy’s men, even if he has to promote ’em fast to keep up with new building and losses.
‘A typical boat – well, 770 tons, 75 metres long, six metres diameter. Twin diesels, of course, which give it nineteen knots on the surface and charging batteries at the same time. Generally they have to recharge every twenty-four hours. Submerged speeds? Well, according to the information we have, they can make a maximum of nine knots submerged for an hour; after that their batteries are almost flat. Or they can chug along submerged at one or two knots for three days – by which time the air is nearly solid.
‘Depths? Again, it varies with the type of boat, but the latest we know of can dive safely to 120 metres, which you can call sixty fathoms, or more than 400 feet. The newest boats can probably double that by now.’
Yorke sensed that Jemmy envied and admired the German boats. ‘What armament?’
‘Fourteen fish, with electric drive, so there’s no trail of compressed air bubbles to give ’em away. You’ll only spot tracks when they go through patches of phosphorescence. Four tubes forward and one aft. They can fire four in quick time. They’re discharged by compressed air, so on the surface in daylight you might spot a few bubbles. Enough to say “Boo” to. So much for fish. In the bang department they have an 88 mm gun – that’s the flat trajectory job that’s bashing up our tanks in the Western Desert – and a couple of 20 mm cannon for anti-aircraft stuff.’
Yorke finished scribbling notes and then said: ‘I know British and German subs are different, but use your imagination and describe what it’d be like in a Ted submarine while she’s making an attack. What the skipper is thinking, what happens if she’s depth-charged. I want to try to get into the skin of a U-boat commander. Maybe that’ll help me working out how he thinks.’
‘I can do that,’ Jemmy said, ‘and better than most because I’ve been in a U-boat. It’s secret that we’ve ever captured one, so keep your mouth shut, but it’s one of the reasons why I’m on this zigzag diagram lark: I’m supposed to be a specialist in Ted submarine tactics.
‘Okay, then. You could get the next bit from the Croupier, but I know it and he’s busy, so I’ll give it to you. You’ve seen the big gridded chart he’s got. The Teds don’t use ordinary ocean charts with latitude and longitude – for U-boats, anyway. The charts are gridded, letters of the alphabet in pairs one way and numbers the other. This system probably changes a lot. Anyway, our U-boat surfaces for its night’s battery charging and picks up a radio transmission from U-boat Headquarters at Lorient. The message might be something like: Emergency, All U-Boats With Torpedoes Proceed Full Speed To Grid Square AB 64 Where Convoy Expected Pass Six Knots On Course ESE.
‘That signal would come over in cipher and the second officer would be called to crank it through the cipher machine. If we had torpedoes and if we could reach AB 64 within a reasonable time, we’d go up to full speed on the surface. If we picked up the signal soon after darkness on a winter’s evening, don’t forget we can be more than 200 miles away by dawn.
‘Once we get to AB 64 we search and if we sight the convoy we might try a daylight attack if we are in the Black Pit, outside the range of Allied planes. Most probably we’d shadow at extreme range until before nightfall, and making sure we’re in good attacking position by then.
‘We’d shut down the diesels and go on to the electric motors, diving and rigging the boat for silent running. Four fish loaded in the forward tubes, one in the after tube. Motors turning at something between sixty and eighty revolutions. We’d have plotted the convoy’s course and speed by now and I’d have had a guess whether they’re on the leg of a zigzag or not. I’d be watching the sea water temperature gauges, too, looking for cold water layers. The Teds were lucky. When they captured French warships at the fall of France they captured the Royal Navy’s biggest secret – one we should never have shared with the Frogs. They found our Asdic… The magic ping that bounces off the Ted boats and comes back up and registers as a bearing. They also found what we’d long known and kept secret – that the ping won’t go through a layer of cold water. All this you know well enough, but I’m like a gramophone record, I have to start at the beginning and go on until the end.
‘Anyway, I’d be watching the gauge to see if there’s a convenient cold water layer around in case I want to hide underneath it, like a bomber dodging under a cloud to hide from a fighter above, with the difference that the fighter can’t come down through the cloud!
‘I’d pop up to periscope depth for a few moments every now and again, just to check the convoy hasn’t zigged and to try to plot where the escorts are. One might even come towards me and I’d dive deep and shut off everything and no man would move. We’d hear the ping of the Asdic impulses, high-pitched, like a wasp sending dots in Morse. We’d all be breathing shallowly – pure nerves. Then maybe the escort would think she was getting an echo on the Asdic. She might stop, so her own turbines didn’t interfere with her hydrophones. If she stops reasonably near we’ll be hearing the ping-ping-ping of the bloody Asdic, and the whine of her auxiliary motors and pumps – fantastic how sound travels through water, and anyway our ears are working overtime.
‘We’d hear her starting her turbines and there’d be a slowish swishing noise as her propellers started turning. Then maybe we’d hear a single splash, a double and then a single… Which would mean, Ned my old chum, that the escort has dropped a diamond pattern of four depth charges.
‘If they explode too near us the boat will groan as though someone is twisting the hull like a dry cigar. There’ll be some noisy banging overhead as the pressure waves make deck plates jump. Inevitably the glass of some dials will break – hardly surprising; the jerk you feel from the explosions will loosen your teeth, too – and the inevitable leaks will be reported: propeller shaft packing leaking, valve seats and gaskets letting water trickle in… The main thing is that if there isn’t too much water we don’t pump it because pumps mean noise and, like the mouse, we know the cat is up there waiting and listening.
‘That’s about all there is to an attack on the boat. One gets to know the noises well enough – the pounding of the cylinders of a triple-expansion steam engine, the fast drumming of diesels, the singing of steam turbines. They make noise; so do you. The chap with the best ears wins! But the skipper’s morale – if he’s anything like me – is likely to be more affected if he’s been through a long spell of bad weather – North Atlantic winter sort of stuff, when every time the hatch is opened half a ton of beastly cold water crashes down and drains into the bilge, every man comes off watch soaking wet and frozen, trying to dry his clothes, and the humidity down below gets so high it is nearly precipitating into rain in the wardroom. There’s condensation streaming down the bulkheads, the damned charts get soggy like blotting paper and when you move the parallel rules across them, the rollers stick and the edges take bites out of the paper, and if they’re the sliding sort they won’t slide. Everyone’s snappy, everybody seems to be farting, and the atmosphere gets vile. The weather’s far too bad to keep the hatch wide open…it’s the sort of time when you pray for the ammeters and voltmeters to hurry up and show the batteries are charged so you can dive to get out of the rolling and pitching – but diving won’t reduce the humidity…’
Yorke smiled as he said: ‘I’m sorry when it happens to you, Jemmy, but I’m glad it’s hell down there for those Teds! Anyway, I get the picture. Let’s say we’ve attacked and sunk some ships. What do we do now?’
‘Well, assuming we’ve no more fish, we surface at night and transmit a ciphered report to Lorient – something brief like Convoy Grid Square CD 32 Course 090 Six Knots Sunk Three Ships 18000 Tons All Torpodoes Expended Returning Base. That would go off to Lorient, Doenitz would rub his hands, and any other U-boats in the area who didn’t pick up the original report on the convoy position would turn up the wick and hurry to grid square CD 32.’
‘This would be in U-boat cipher?’ Ned asked.
‘Yes. Pretty simple stuff because of course as far as the Germans are concerned the Allies know how many ships they’ve lost in that convoy, they know where it is, and they know U-boats are round the convoy so using direction- finders on the transmission doesn’t help much. The route our boat takes back to Lorient can vary by 500 miles north or south of a rhumb line.’
Jemmy waited until Ned had finished writing. ‘Any questions? I don’t seem to have told you much. You’ve chased enough U-boats in that destroyer of yours. In fact as far as I am concerned, destroyers are the enemy, no matter whose they are!’
Ned thanked him and went back to his desk, picking up the next docket. The sixth convoy had been attacked five weeks after the fifth, thirty-seven ships bound from Halifax to the Clyde. Five sunk and one more damaged but taken in tow, although finally sunk by the escorts. Five had each been hit with two torpedoes, while the sixth had been hit by one but had seen another miss ahead. Twelve torpedoes definitely fired for a score of six merchant ships, probably two other misses.
He looked at the list of ships and their positions. Fourteen American, sixteen British, three Norwegian, one Dutch, one French, one Swedish and one Greek. All those sunk had been in the centre columns. Weather reasonably good, the attack lasting only four days. No further attacks after the sixth ship was hit, and no pack attacked, although the Submarine Tracking Room report in the docket said there had been a pack passing to the south which subsequently attacked another convoy. He drew the convoy diagram more out of habit than anything else and glanced up to find Joan standing at the side of his desk. ‘Uncle would like to see you,’ she said. ‘Nothing alarming – he just wants to hear how the detective work is going.’
Ned grunted and Joan, glancing at her watch, misunderstood and said: ‘Are you meeting her for lunch? It won’t take more than fifteen minutes – unless you talk a lot.’
‘Thanks for the kind thought, but we said goodbye this morning.’
‘Did you have a nice weekend?’
‘Yes,’ Ned said and without thinking added: ‘You look as if you did, too.’
Joan smiled and said, ‘Yes, it does wonders for the complexion.’
And, Ned thought to himself, realizing that although Jemmy still had a king among twitches, he seemed much more relaxed in the last few days, it must be good for overworked submariners, too.
Uncle was relaxed like a tiger in the shade after a good meal: comfortable, tractable and cheerful, but ready to spring at a moment’s warning.
‘How is it going, Yorke? Anything interesting turned up?’
‘No, sir. They’re all alike. The ships are sunk in the middle of the convoy. From the fourth convoy onwards it seems Doenitz ordered them to fire two torpedoes at every target.’ He thought for a moment. Did Uncle want to chat about it all, to throw ideas back and forth, or was he interested only in specifics? Well, there was no harm in mentioning it. ‘I’ve been totalling up the number of torpedoes fired against each convoy, and it seems that every U-boat had a full outfit of fourteen torpedoes on board when he began his attack, or certainly never less than a dozen.’
‘Have you mentioned it to Jemmy?’
‘Yes, sir: he thinks it is a hell of a coincidence, particularly in cases where the attacks began a day or two out of Halifax, or Freetown. And a hell of a long way to go with a full barrow of fish.’
Uncle picked up a pencil and balanced it across the index finger of his left hand. ‘A hell of a long way unless your orders were to attack that particular convoy and no other…’
‘That’s what Jemmy and I thought. But being ordered to attack a particular convoy implies the Ted knew it was due to sail. Which means spies – or else they’ve broken some of our ciphers.’
‘Local spies, most probably. Once ships began to collect it’s difficult to keep it secret that a convoy is about to sail. Someone watching in Liverpool or the Clyde, Halifax or Freetown… An agent familiar with ships and even half sober should, from his own observation, be able to estimate the time of sailing within twenty-four hours, probably less. All he needs is a decent pair of binoculars. Or even grandad’s old telescope.’
Just how much did one contradict Uncle? He would soon know. ‘Yes, sir, but would even forty-eight hours’ notice be enough for a U-boat? Supposing the agent could get the warning to Lorient, for example. It means that a U-boat with all its torpedoes would have to be within forty-eight hours’ steaming of the port, or the convoy’s track, which it would have to know. The later ones can make nineteen knots on the surface, but 450 miles in twenty-four hours isn’t…’
Uncle nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, a fully-equipped U-boat waiting off each of the major ports from here to the New World and to West Africa. Well, that rules out agents with binoculars and mathematical wizards breaking our ciphers. Which seems to leave us ouija boards, black magic, voodoo, telepathy or politicians’ promises.’
‘I’ve only gone through five of the eleven convoys so far, sir.’
Uncle shook his head gloomily. ‘Unless there are eleven coincidences, there must be a pattern, and that pattern must be in the first five as well as the last six.’
‘If there’s a pattern it must be like marriage, sir; if you take fifty couples who seem ideally suited to each other, you’ll be lucky if you find twenty-five of them are really happy after a year of marriage.’
‘You mean there was a pattern for the fifty but it broke down?’
‘Not exactly. There seemed to be a pattern for fifty but in fact it was valid for only twenty-five, so we have to be careful we don’t grab at some pattern just because it is a pattern.’
‘My dear Yorke, how right you are – about marriage anyway. I’ve been divorced twice and my third marriage goes through the divorce court mincer next month.’
‘I – er, I’m sorry, sir, I–’
‘Don’t be, my dear fellow; I only mentioned it as proof of your pattern theory. My first wife was quiet, very county, mad on horses; my second was half French, very chic, very animated and loathed the country and all but the most obvious form of sport; my third is a very shrewd businesswoman, runs the estate very well, was a very good rally driver until the war put a stop to all that…no pattern except that for me the path of marriage leads to the divorce court.’
Yorke thought to himself that there was indeed the beginning of a pattern – a county wife mad on horses sounded as though she might be frigid, as did the ‘very shrewd business woman’, and the pattern was broken by the half-French woman who loathed all but the most obvious form of sport but who didn’t stay the marriage course either…
Uncle looked at him from under bushy eyebrows, his eyes twinkling. ‘That’s the way, Yorke; I want you looking for patterns in everything. And by the way,’ he added casually, ‘I have to report on our work to the Boss this afternoon.’
‘The First Lord, sir?’
‘No, I have to go round to Number Ten.’
‘’Fraid my contribution doesn’t amount to anything.’
‘Can’t be helped, but it’s these inside-the-convoy attacks that are troubling him. He says – and he’s quite right – that we’ll beat the packs as soon as we get enough escorts because it’s simply a question of enough dogs to chase the foxes. But we could beat the packs and still lose an enormous number of ships unless we find out how these insiders operate.’
Yorke suddenly had a mental picture of that chubby pink face with the hooded but sharp eyes looking across at the Citadel from Downing Street as he listened to Uncle’s report. Surely he would expect half a dozen men working in watches trying to solve the problem.
‘Does the Prime Minister – er, know that…’
‘Know that Lt Edward Yorke, DSO, RN, is the only person working on the problem?’
‘Well, yes sir,’ Yorke said lamely.
‘An honest question which deserves an honest answer, but don’t let it scare you. Yes, he does; in fact it was his idea. You realize this isn’t a new problem: it began eleven convoys ago. It’s just that only recently did they spot the “insider” aspect. That’s when the Boss started getting angry.’
‘He must be raving by now, sir,’ Yorke said bitterly, wishing he was back at sea.
‘No. From what I know of him and the little experience I have of his methods, he’s a queer bird. You know he writes books, histories. Well, it seems he does an enormous amount of research, and then does nothing for ages: he says after the research his mind is like a muddy pool, and he has to wait for the mud to settle. Once the water is clear the ideas come swimming to the surface.’
‘Where do I come in, sir?’
‘Well, the Boss’s idea is that when you have a problem you swot up all the facts without any previous prejudices or ideas – you start off with an open mind, in other words, which in this case the previous chaps who are supposed to study every convoy attack didn’t have because they were all anti-submarine specialists with their own prejudices. One of them used to beat a drum for Asdic, another had an idea for faster-sinking depth charges, another wanted faster escorts, and so on. So the Boss quite rightly set up ASIU to deal with the whole anti-U-boat question. Just after that, the “insider” was spotted. Finally the Boss told me to look around for one person whose brain he was proposing I should muddy up on the insider problem, with the proviso that when the water cleared some ideas surfaced.’
‘And I was that one person?’ Yorke asked incredulously.
‘Yep. I told you when you arrived that you’d been selected. Don’t think you were chosen from the whole Navy List, though. You were available and have seen service. “Smelled powder”, as the Boss calls it.’
‘So I ought to be living like a monk in a cell, just reading dockets and thinking hard.’
‘Not bloody likely. I want seven or eight hours of your time during the day. The rest you can spend as you wish, providing you’re creating the state of mind in which, once the water clears, the ideas pop up. The Boss seems to keep going on brandy, cigars and cat naps, late nights and a patient wife. Have you got a girlfriend?’
When Yorke nodded, Uncle asked: ‘Where is she? What does she do?’
‘Nurse at a hospital down in Kent.’
‘Met her while you were having that arm fixed?’
When Yorke nodded, Uncle said, ‘Does that mother of yours approve of her?’
‘Yes – apparently her family are old friends. I didn’t know them, though. I didn’t know you knew my mother, sir.’
‘I don’t really. Met her at various cocktail parties though. If she approves, you must have found yourself a fine girl. What’s her name?’
‘Clare Exton.’
‘Oh yes,’ Uncle said, picking up a pen and writing on a pad. ‘Must be old Bunko Exton’s daughter. And where’s the hospital?’
‘At Willesborough in Kent, beyond Ashford. An annexe of St Stephen’s. But why…?’
‘Don’t you wish she was up here at St Stephen’s, rather than the other side of Kent?’
‘Why, of course, sir, but perhaps she…’
‘As far as winning the war is concerned, my lad, it’s far better that she’s up here holding your hand, or whatever, than being in the Weald of Kent. However, you’ll register suitable surprise when she tells you of her transfer back to town. Now, anything more to report?’ When Yorke shook his head, Uncle stood up and said: ‘I estimate we have a month to six weeks left. By then we’ll have to see our way to getting enough escorts to break the packs, and we’ll have to know the secret of the insiders. Otherwise we’ll have lost the Battle of the Atlantic and we’ll face starvation and maybe not surrender but – well, that’s when I switch off thinking.’