H.M.A.S. WIND RODE, fleet destroyer, was at sea, at peace.
That last-named state, for a destroyer in a worldwide war, was, admittedly, unusual. But Woodlark Island, a small and dangerous speck in the wide blue of the Coral Sea, had been passed last night, at high speed.
Now on this hot and cloud-piled morning Jomard Passage lay ahead of her; its lighthouse doused in these unfriendly times but its reef-bound exit known accurately to Commander Peter Bentley. Once through she could turn to starb’d and run straight for Port Moresby. There she would refuel.
Allied naval forces in the Pacific were stretched worryingly thin, and Wind Rode had been patrolling on her own. This state was not unusual. She was a destroyer, and what she couldn’t handle with her torpedoes she could run away from. Anything seaborne, that is ...
From outboard she made a graceful picture. She was clean grey overall, and her gleaming paintwork made a colourful and matching union with the clouded blue of the sea. The sea was almost flat—it is never completely smooth—so that the white flashes of her bow waves and wake made a solitary and vivid contrast against the vast reach of blue.
The ship was steaming at twenty knots, and her long low hull, the armoured gun-mountings, the compact bridge and the squat funnel imbued her with an impression of efficient and powerful purpose.
The impression was accurate. Commander Bentley had had close on a year in which to train his ship’s company. It may be an aphorism to state that any weapon is only as good as the men who handle it. Wind Rode was a beautiful weapon of offence—fast, powerful, heavily-gunned; designed by the experience behind centuries of tradition and sea-fighting. Bentley and his first-lieutenant had seen to it that her capabilities had not been wasted.
Bentley was thinking, as he stood on the bridge, in terms related to this. It had not been easy ... One book might succeed in outlining the schemes and plans, the manoeuvres and drills, the sternness, the cajoling, the psychological devices used by her captain over the past year to weld his heterogeneous team of two hundred officers and men into the single-minded unit they now were.
But it had been done, Bentley mused, the coxswain’s book opened in his hand. It would not be anywhere near the truth to report that the captain thought of the state of his crew only occasionally: their wellbeing and efficiency and state of mind were in his mind constantly, sometimes deliberately as now, at other times subconsciously.
Today was Thursday, the day of Captain’s requestmen and defaulters. Bentley could have waited another day or so, until they were safely berthed in Moresby; the fact that he was holding his court this Thursday morning at sea was simply a part of his unceasing endeavour to maintain his ship in its present state of undoubted competence. A typhoon or an enemy attack might disrupt the routine he had laid down, but nothing else.
These thoughts threaded subconsciously through his mind as he glanced down the morning’s list while the coxswain waited beside him. There is a saying that a ship is known by her boats—she is also known by her quarterly punishment returns. For the past six months Wind Rode’s returns had been almost negligible. This morning’s court would not add to them.
There was three requests. Able-Seaman McConnell wanted compassionate leave, Able-Seaman Ellis desired to increase his allotment to his wife, and Leading-Seaman Billson required official and automatic seal on his entitlement to his third good-conduct badge.
And one defaulter. In any ship, and especially in this one, for a man’s offence to go before the officer of the watch, and then be passed on to the first-lieutenant, and then be considered serious enough to require the captain’s decision, was bad. Obviously he had committed one of the cardinal sins.
Able-Seaman Nesbitt had done this. He had been caught asleep on watch, at sea, in wartime.
Randall, the first-lieutenant, had had no option but to put him in the captain’s report. And had then immediately called on Bentley in his sea-cabin. Bentley had not even been angry—surprise, approaching astonishment, had been his reaction, which speaks very decisively indeed for the opinion of Nesbitt held by his officers.
Nesbitt was an educated, devoted and highly-sensitive seaman: a man marked for promotion, the last man expected to let himself and the ship down. But the officer of the watch himself had caught him.
It had been after a vicious dusk air-attack, three days earlier. For an hour Wind Rode had battled desperately against the howling demons which fell out of the sky upon her, twisting, firing with all her gunnery armament until the friendly opacity of the night had brought her surcease from the agony.
At a few minutes to nine o’clock that night the asdic-officer, Lieutenant Peacock, strolling back and forth across the bridge, had sighted a dark figure sprawled forward in the lookout’s position, its arms on the disregarded binoculars.
The crucial post of lookout ... a few feet from the bridge itself ... Nesbitt’s keenness and dependability ... and careless sleep. None of these equations fitted. But now Bentley had the report of Surgeon-Lieutenant Landis, delivered two hours after he had asked for it.
No blame at all, Landis had decided with professional firmness. A sensitive nature, driven by natural devotion and the fierce strain of years of war close to the point of exhaustion. The offence was serious, the cause was medical. Nesbitt’s mental and physical strength was too finely-tempered for the savage hammering of war in a destroyer. His very strength—his loyalty and keenness and dependability—was his weakness. He had driven himself too hard, he lacked the comparatively insensitive phlegm of his messmates.
He should be transferred, Landis had advised, either to a shore base for a spell or to a bigger ship, one not almost constantly at sea and in action like this one. Or else he would crack wide open, perhaps at a dangerous time.
There had been a time when Bentley would have queried his surgeon’s present unequivocal opinion. i But now he accepted Landis’s judgment as definitely as his own.
He closed the big report-book and handed it over with a murmured “Thanks, cox’n,” and his eyes, squinted against the sea’s glare, stared thoughtfully out over the bow. Being a defaulter, Nesbitt would be seen last, with no messmates to hear. Bentley would explain to him the surgeon’s diagnosis, and that he was to be transferred south from Moresby. There were other things the captain would say, for with his remissness common knowledge throughout the ship Nesbitt would be going through hell, but those things Bentley did not have to rehearse in his mind now. He had been in command of men a long, violent time, and what he would say would be spontaneous, sincere; a few words of encouragement and understanding which could have even more therapeutical value than medical attention in Sydney.
There was another man on whom the ship’s present state largely depended, and he was standing beside and a little behind Bentley now. Chief Petty-Officer Herbert Smales, the coxswain; standing on the bridge, waiting, respectful, his slight frame reaching not much higher than his captain’s broad shoulder, his leathery face composed, his alert blue eyes flicking regularly to Bentley’s face, waiting for the word.
He had not the slightest conception of what his lord was thinking, nor was he interested. His sole concern at this moment was time—whether he would muster requestmen and defaulters at the normal time of eleven o’clock, or whether—as he guessed—the captain would wait till the ship was safely through Jomard Passage.
Chief Petty-Officer Smales was, officially, the chief of police, the keeper of discipline, the senior rating on the lower-deck. He was also the man who took the wheel when the ship entered or left harbour, or came within dangerous approach of land, as she shortly was to do. And that was another reason why now he waited for the captain to give him the time—for those few minutes of tricky steering and navigation through the Passage, Smales would hold Wind Rode’s safety literally in his small and practised hands.
But the coxswain was much more than these things. Officially he was junior in ranking to a midshipman, who enjoyed officer status; he was required by regulation to salute the greenest acting-sublieutenant, and to address him as “Sir”. Yet Smales, a most experienced representative of his select branch, was Bentley’s confidant; in Wind Rode he was closer to the captain, knew more of his trials and worries over the ship’s working-up, than many a senior lieutenant.
The asdic, radar, torpedo and gunnery officers were important to the handling of the ship. But between Commander Bentley and the two hundred men of his command, the main and incorruptible link, the mouthpiece of their requests and troubles, the knowledge-packed well of information and advice, was the small and weather-wizened figure of Smales.
In a big ship like a cruiser or battleship or carrier his opposite number would be the Master-at-Arms, the only non-commissioned officer in the Navy entitled to wear, at Sunday Divisions, a sword: in the Army, he would correspond to a regimental sergeant-major, or perhaps a provost-marshal. His authority might not be greater than an R.S.M., and yet there was a subtle difference; here, aboard ship, he was indefinably closer to his captain than the Army man to his colonel.
A coxswain in a destroyer could make or mar a crew, his slackness or indifference could negative the most assiduous efforts of the bridge officers. But then it was a most precious position, and a candidate was most carefully and shrewdly judged before he was promoted to it; so that although there may have been unreliable or inefficient coxswains in the British and Australian Navies, this chronicler has never heard of them.
Now Wind Rode’s coxswain judged that his master had been allowed sufficient time for introspective thought. He did not reason quite like that—rather, he was worried about sufficient time in which to get his four cases out of their working rig into clean khaki shorts and shirts to meet their judge. He coughed.
The small and respectful sound was as expressive as the imminent narrowing of a lover’s eyes, or the clang of a bus conductor’s bell. Bentley’s head swung, to see the brown face looking back at him expectantly.
“Oh, ’Swain,” he said, half apologetically, “I’d forgotten you were still there.”
“Yes, sir,” Smales answered truthfully. “Ah ... I was wonderin’ about the time for requestmen, sir ...”
“I was thinking, ’Swain,” Bentley said, ignoring the suggestion with a nod of his head at the book under the coxswain’s arm, “we seem to have the punishment returns licked. Looks like we have a pretty taut bunch down there.”
“So long as they’re kept that way,” Smales answered definitely. “They ain’t all angels, not by a long shot.” He shook his head slightly. “There’s a rogue or two amongst ’em.”
But I’ve got a bigger and better one, the captain thought with satisfaction. He said, smiling:
“So long as they know that you know more wrinkles than they do ...”
Smales did not look too sure about this dubious compliment. But he said, dutifully:
“Yes, sir.”
“Now,” said Bentley, his tone crisp, “we’ll be through Jomard in half-an-hour. I’ll see defaulters directly we’re clear.”
Smales’s tone was also crisp.
“Aye, aye, sir,” he said, saluted smartly, and left the bridge.
A small smile on his lips, Bentley turned and walked slowly towards the binnacle. The officer of the watch, the radar-officer, saw him coming and made to step down from the raised wooden grating. Bentley made a slight negative gesture with his forefinger and the officer stayed where he was. Bentley halted beside the grating. His head and eyes turned up to the sullen sky.
The clouds were dark grey, almost black, and heavy. But he was not much concerned with the weather threat. He said, his voice low and casual:
“That stuff could be troublesome.”
The radar-officer knew what he meant, and he was relieved that the captain had noticed it. Thick clouds like that could cause temperature inversion, and that could greatly decrease the efficiency of their radar. He had been mildly worried about it since he had come on watch two hours before. But every hour of steaming brought them closer to Moresby, and once through the Passage they would be on the last leg of the base course.
“Yes, sir,” he answered, also looking skyward, and keeping his voice down—there was no point in spreading unnecessary alarm. “We have no contacts on the two-nine-one ...”
No, Bentley thought, but that means a hell of a lot of nothing with that muck up there. On the other hand, there mightn’t be a Jap aircraft within a hundred miles ...
The voice of the signal yeoman cut across his musing:
“Jomard light bearing Green oh-five.”
“Very good,” the radar-officer acknowledged, and both officers lifted their glasses. No other comment was made—the light had appeared almost dead ahead, where it should have, but plumb-on landfalls were the norm in a warship.
While Bentley stared through the twin powerful lenses the officer of the watch ordered the bosun’s mate:
“Tell the navigating-officer we’ve raised Jomard Light.”
The young seaman scuttled down the ladder.
Bentley was looking at the light, lifting up from its low island at the southern limit of the passage like a white saltcellar, but he was thinking of the significance of the radar-officer’s order, and its immediate result.
The lieutenant’s thought of the navigator had been instant, and his order had followed at once: the bosun’s mate had doubled away on his errand. Nothing out of the ordinary in that, perhaps—but he had been on bridges where the captain would have had to send for the navigator, and where the messenger would have walked to the ladder. Little things ...
A good ship, Bentley mused, a taut ship. Like all deep-water sailors, he was inclined to be superstitious but there was no doubt whatever about this—she was a good ship, and nothing could alter that proven fact.
At twenty knots the light was growing more identifiable every minute. He could pick out the circle of protecting glass. The navigating-officer stepped on to the bridge and at once checked the ship’s position. Obviously she was steaming on a safe course, but with thousands of tons of moving metal you didn’t rely on what your eye told you—you got it down mathematically on the chart. Many times, especially in these waters, the only obvious thing about a “safe” course had been the shearing grind as her hull ran up on the hidden reef.
But Bentley, with his trained team working about him, was not worried about navigation. The Passage was not wide, but with the island on one edge and the visible reef on the other it presented in this quiet sea no problem to a well found ship. Once she was committed to a safe course through she had simply to hold that course.
That was what was exercising his mind at the moment—the committal of the ship to an undeviating course, with disaster waiting on either side if she swerved from it. That would be the time for a waiting aircraft to drop upon her ...
A clipped and competent voice came up the voice-pipe:
“Bridge? Cox’n on the wheel, sir.”
“Very good.”
Nice, Bentley thought briefly. No actual order had been passed to Smales, but either he had been waiting for the light to come into sight or else the bosun’s mate had used his own initiative. The team was working smoothly with him ...
He turned to the radar-officer, and the order he gave was one which could come only from him:
“Get the close-range weapons closed-up.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
That would give him the multiple pom-pom, the Oerlikons and the machine-guns ready for instant use. There was not sufficient danger, nor indication of it, to warrant closing-up the big guns’ crews.
“Five minutes to the turn, sir,” the navigator reported quietly.
Bentley nodded. The radar-officer stepped from the grating and the captain took his place, behind the binnacle and close to the open mouth of the wheelhouse voice-pipe. By that simple gesture he had tacitly taken control of the ship.
“Close-range weapons closed-up.”
“Very good.”
It was the deep voice of Bob Randall, the first-lieutenant, who answered the report. He would have come to the bridge anyway with the ship in confined waters, but he was the gunnery-officer as well, and the call to the guns had ensured his presence on deck.
But Bentley was not concerned with the obvious movements of his deputy. His eyes were on the light and the passage, and he kept clear of the compass while Pilot took his bearings. Yet while the one part of his brain was busy with seamanship requirements, another was judging:
This is the time ... we’re too close to swing hard a starb’d or port; either we go on through, or else we stop and back out into clear water. From now on in we’re sitting ducks.
“On the bearing, sir,” Pilot said. And:
“Starb’d fifteen,” Bentley ordered.
She was built to swing fast, and her bow felt the effect of the angled rudder-face almost at once. Bentley was not watching her slim nose slide round—his eyes were on the lubber’s line of the compass, watching it approach the course he would have to steer on his way through. This was the crucial straightening-up and not the whole Japanese Air Force could have diverted his attention now.
“Midships.”
“Midships, sir ... wheel’s amidships.”
It was the two of them now, the captain and the coxswain. One judging, the other implementing. The R.S.M was never as close as this ...
“Steady!”
“Steady, sir! Course two-two-five.”
“Steer two-two-five.”
“Steer two-two-five, sir.”
It was done. To a civilian observer the manoeuvre would have appeared ridiculously simple, a minor exercise in course alteration. Yet Bentley, ten feet above the ship’s wheel, had by his judgment stopped the swing of two thousand tons of advancing steel dead on the course required. Aided by the quick and practised hands of the coxswain, the practical extension of the captain’s brain and experience.
The light was sweeping past on their port hand now, and they could see that its apparent pristine whiteness was marred by the grey droppings of a myriad of seabirds. The island behind the light rose to a rounded peak, its rock sides scrubbed over with low bushes and an occasional palm.
To the right the coral reef ran its jagged teeth up to the edge of the chasm through which the ship was safely sailing; the green swell broke lazily over this obstruction, and fell back, exposing the cruel brown masses of roots, snags which could rip her thin sides open as easily and efficiently as a can opener.
“Lovely sight.” said Randall beside Bentley, and the growl in his voice belied the words.
Bentley nodded, shortly. His head was raised to the leaden skies, and now he had no qualms about letting the whole bridge team know the source of his worry. A destroyer’s main defence against attacking aircraft is her length and her manoeuvrability. Viewed from that angle, Wind Rode might now as well have been held immobile in dry dock.
Bentley’s instinct was to give her her head, to release her waiting strength and increase to thirty-five knots. His experience warned him that he had to keep her in hand, that a set could move him to port or starb’d, that he could not afford to gamble with the increased line of advance a turn at high speed would ensure.
They were almost through. An enemy would have to strike shortly, or lose a priceless advantage. Above his head the air-search radar aerial circled smoothly, its radius of search blocked only by the bulk of the island, which was now dropping astern on the port quarter. Down to Bentley’s ears came the sound of its operation, a soft electronic whirring.
Slowly his taut nerves let go. His head lowered from the sky and he automatically searched the empty sea ahead.
“Clear, sir,” Pilot reported.
Thank God for that, Bentley felt. He said, casually:
“Put her on-course, Pilot,” and then leaned to the voice-pipe:
“Cox’n? I’ll see requestmen and defaulters as soon as you’re ready.”
“Yes, sir. They’re mustered now, sir.”
“Very well, I’m coming now.”
Bentley unslung his black binoculars and stepped down from the grating. Pilot moved over behind the compass.
At sea, the captain held his court in the tiny flag-deck behind the bridge. This position had several advantages—it was clear of curious eyes, and it was handy to the bridge.
As he stepped towards the ladder Bentley idly noted that with the ship’s swinging on to her more north-westerly course, with the quartermaster now on the wheel, the island and its light were almost dead astern, though still quite close.
He knew it was deserted—the light was unwatched and his tension-relieved mind mused briefly on the fact that men like Bully Hayes and the old copra-traders would have taken their bearings on that peak to beat up to and through the Passage. That island had seen many ships come and go—and had received more than one luckless hull on its hard coral edge. Now another ship had made its landfall and was receding into the blue distance. The island and the reef, uncaring, timeless, waited for the next.
Bentley stepped on to the flag-deck and he saw the pom-pom’s crew falling-out; the starb’d Oerlikon was already deserted, the danger past. Then he saw the coxswain and the supplicants lined-up, waiting, but his eyes went to Nesbitt, standing a few paces clear of the requestmen.
Bentley had possibly a little more than five seconds before he reached the baize-covered table behind which he would deliver judgment, yet in that time the expression of utter dejection on the seaman’s face seared into his consciousness. Nesbitt’s normally alert face was drawn and grey, tortured, pitiful in its evidence of what he had been through in the past days, and Bentley knew with the utmost clarity of conviction that it would be a long time, if ever, before the seaman was of any use for anything.
As Landis had judged, his keenness and eagerness had been his weakness; the reaction was complete and irrevocable.
The coxswain’s waiting head jerked back and faced his line-up. His voice, curt and impersonal, snapped out:
“Requestmen and defaulters ...” The warning. Then: “Requestmen and defaulters, atten ...”
“Requestmen and defaulters.”
“Requestmen and defaulters.”
“Request ...”
When the shells land and explode. When the grinning radiator and the pounding wheels of the car loom above the fallen pedestrian. When the heart can no longer pump, and the brain-cells are starved for oxygen, and consciousness slides down into blackness, there remain in the dying brain words or thoughts, or perhaps a remembered face or scene, which linger on the photographic cells of memory before death closes the shutter.
Bentley was not dead, but the coxswain’s words and their broken ending remained ringing in his consciousness for a second or two after it had happened.
He was not sure which had come first, the powered snarl of the aircraft or the softer, shearing noise of the bomb. It did not matter—both sounds were blasted to insignificance by the intimate eruption of the bomb.
The next thing he knew was that he was sprawled on the deck, a body beneath him and a stinking rain of salt water pouring upon him. The noise of the water was like the hissing of torrential rain, a foreground accompaniment to the shrill background of the alarm bells.
Then he was scrabbling to his feet, one hand shoving uncaringly at the other prone body.
His eyes stung with the deluge of salt. Upright, he dug at them with his handkerchief, and with his clearing vision he saw two definite things amongst the shambles on the flag-deck. The bomb had exploded close to the ship’s side, abreast where they had been standing. The splinters had laced upwards. The coxswain, on whom he had fallen, was lying on his stomach, unmoving; Able-Seaman Nesbitt was beside him but Bentley could no longer see the tortured expression of his face. Nesbitt now had no face.
These things Bentley saw, but they were extraneous, unimportant impressions. Insistent in his brain was the need to get back to the bridge. He flung the handkerchief aside and stumbled forward on the drenched deck. He did not even halt to think if he were himself wounded—subconsciously his unhindered movements told him he was not. But his brain was racing—that Jap was a fool! He’d missed his chance. Or was he? He had let them through the Passage, but he’d cleverly come in behind the island. Nicely blanketed from their radar.
These thoughts were a flash of appreciation, formed and discarded before he reached the bridge. Blinking from the salt, he saw Randall at the wheelhouse voice-pipe, snapping orders with his mouth close to the pipe and his head twisted so that he could look up at the sky.
He felt Bentley jump on to the grating and he jerked upright and said at once:
“Fighter-bomber, bearing Green two-oh, angle of sight seven-oh. Climbing for another run!”
The rapped directions were just as quick as a pointing hand, and more specific. Bentley picked up the aircraft at once, a bat-winged shape dwindling ahead and above them. It was climbing steeply, and as he stared the wings canted—in a moment he would be round, facing them for the next run in.
The ship was heeling on the turn, and as Bentley tensed one leg and relaxed the other to meet the cant the movement crystallised an urgent memory prodding at his consciousness.
His eyes trained on to the bosun’s mate.
“Get the Buffer on the wheel! First-aid party on the flag-deck!”
The seaman dived for the ladder and Randall asked:
“Cox’n?”
“Yes. Wounded at least.”
All about him he heard voices and running feet as the gun-crews closed-up. Directly below him B-gun’s pump began to whine. His eyes on the wheeling aircraft, he spoke to the wheelhouse:
“Who’s on the wheel?”
“Leading-Seaman Bennet, sir.”
“Cox’n’s been wounded, Bennet the Buffer will be up to take over.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Bentley thought of adding some exhortation to the quartermaster to be on his toes. But this was no time for needless speech. He watched the aircraft, now circling at ten thousand feet, and he spoke to Randall:
“That pilot’s a fool.”
The big lieutenant nodded, definitely. He understood Bentley’s judgment. The pilot had caught them napping, with gun-crews fallen-out. He had barely missed with his first bomb; he should have climbed and come in again at once. Even if he had missed with his second bomb he could have raked the scrambling men on the upper-deck with cannon-fire.
Now, circling high up there, he was merely threatening them. His threat was empty. They had been given precious minutes, and in that time the decks had emptied, the men were posted behind their guns, waiting, ready.
“He might be waiting for some cobbers,” Randall suggested.
Bentley shook his head.
“I doubt it. If he had any he would have brought them down in a bunch. I’d say he’s patrolling from Woodlark and decided to have a shot on his own. Now he’s left it too late.”
Randall pursed his lips, his face alert, thoughtful. Only just too late, he was thinking—a few feet in to the right and that bomb would have landed nicely ... But he said nothing.
“Bridge? Buffer on the wheel.”
That was Chief Petty-Officer Hooky Walker, the giant chief bosun’s mate, next to Smales in seniority, a polished steel hook in place of a hand, and an old shipmate of the captain.
“Very good,” Bentley acknowledged.
As with Bennet, there was no need for amplification. He would know by now Smales was wounded, and certainly he would need no exhortation to remain alert.
A phone buzzed and Lasenby’s voice came through from the director:
“Main armament closed-up.”
Now ... Bentley thought grimly. He reached forward and juggled the microphone from its brackets.
“This is the captain speaking. We’ve been attacked by a single Japanese fighter-bomber. He’s now at ten thousand feet ahead of us, circling. Very nice of him ... Now listen to this, gun-crews. That pilot seems either a fool, or very green. You know why I say he ‘seems’ to be. We must assume he knows his business. Therefore you will not open fire until ordered. He could come down in a power-dive, draw your fire, haul off, and then come in for the real thing and catch you with your guns empty. If he does that we’ll be ready for him. When ordered, main armament will open in long barrage, shifting to short barrage if he gets through. Close-range weapons will open in the normal hosing fire. The ship will be swinging quite fast, so watch your aim-off.”
He paused, the microphone cuddled in his big hand, his eyes on the distant black speck. Throughout the length of the listening ship there was no sound, nothing but the soft hissing of the water down her sides and the muted beat of the engines.
“We’ll get this fellow,” Bentley said, “that’s all.”