Attack at Night Read online

  Attack at Night

  Robert Jackson

  © Robert Jackson 1988

  Robert Jackson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1988 by St. Martin’s Press.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The pilot of the big four-engined Short Sunderland flying boat gave a slight start as a hand tapped him on the shoulder, then looked up, smiled, and reached out to take the enamel mug of coffee that was being offered to him by one of the crew.

  It was three hours since the Sunderland had lifted away from the waters of Plymouth Sound and set course south-westwards into the Atlantic, flying under a grey December sky. The island of Ushant off the Brest Peninsula, marking the most westerly point of German-occupied Europe, was well astern now, invisible in the murk that veiled the horizon, and now the flying boat was cruising over the outer limits of the Bay of Biscay.

  The pilot was a squadron leader and, like the twelve members of his crew, came from the sunnier climes of Australia. He was an old flying boat hand, having captained the magnificent ‘Empire’ Class boats — from which the Sunderland had been developed — with Qantas on the Singapore to Darwin run before the war.

  Now, in December 1943, the war was in its fifth year, and showed no sign of ending. As far as the flying boat skipper and his crew were concerned, war meant the monotony of endless hours droning over the ocean, protecting the vital Atlantic convoys from the ever-present menace of Hitler’s U-boats. In all those hours the Australian crew had sighted two enemy submarines and succeeded in attacking one of them, with unknown results. On the second attack, the depth-charges had hung up through an electrical fault and the U-boat had got away unscathed. Other crews had been luckier, particularly in the early part of 1943, when shore-based RAF aircraft, equipped with new detection gear and operating in conjunction with the Royal Navy’s ‘hunter-killer’ groups, had at last begun to get the measure of the underwater threat.

  Successes had continued to mount steadily throughout the year, especially in the North Atlantic, where the German ‘wolfpacks’ had taken a severe hammering. In September and October alone, British, Canadian and American aircraft and warships had destroyed no fewer than twenty-five U-boats, while they themselves had sunk only nine merchant ships.

  Beaten in the North Atlantic, the U-boats were now concentrating in more southerly waters, preying on the north-south convoys from Freetown and Gibraltar. In October and November two convoys had been attacked as they passed the notorious Bay of Biscay, but two U-boats had been sunk by the escorting warships and all the Germans had to show for their efforts was one merchant ship damaged.

  ‘Navigator to pilot.’

  The squadron leader put a hand to his face mask, which had been dangling loosely, and placed it over his mouth, flicking the intercom switch as he did so.

  ‘Go ahead, nav.’

  ‘We will be at position forty-six north, zero nine west in fifteen minutes, skipper. Should be sighting the convoy shortly, if it’s where it should be.’

  The pilot grunted over the intercom. ‘Roger. Can’t see anything yet. It’s very hazy up ahead, and the cloud seems to be getting lower. Keep your eyes peeled, lookouts.’ He glanced at his co-pilot, a very young flying officer who was sitting in the right-hand seat. This was his first operational trip, and the squadron leader had decided to take him under his wing for a while.

  ‘Take over for a minute, Dickie. I’m going back for a pee.’

  The boy’s face brightened at being given the responsibility. ‘Right, skipper. I’ve got her.’

  The Sunderland’s captain grinned and winked at him as he undid his harness and clambered out of his seat. Can’t do much harm anyway, he thought as he moved back along the fuselage towards the Elsan toilet. The Sunderland was flying on autopilot.

  Behind the two pilots’ seats, the Sunderland’s flight-deck crew of navigator, radio operator and flight engineer were all busy at their stations. The captain went past them and along the companionway, passing the beam gunners and the midupper. The Sunderland had a powerful defensive armament of fourteen 303 Browning machine-guns, and needed it; the big boats sometimes had to fight off attacks by enemy Junkers 88s over the Bay of Biscay.

  A few minutes later, feeling much relieved, the captain made his way back to the flight deck and resumed control. The ASV radar operator, whose task it was to detect ships or U-boats on the surface, had nothing to report, which was puzzling; the convoy ought to have been within radar range by now.

  The Sunderland crews of RAF Coastal Command generally preferred convoy protection duty to anti-submarine patrols. At least, circling protectively around a convoy, there was something to look at, something to relieve the boredom of long hours spent quartering the sea, all too often with no result.

  The convoy which the Sunderland was on its way to meet was a big one, even by the standards of 1943. In fact it was two in one: SL142 from Sierra Leone, combined with MKS36 from Gibraltar — sixty-six ships in all, homeward bound for the United Kingdom under a heavy escort of destroyers, sloops and a single small aircraft carrier.

  On the first day of December, as the convoy battled its way through heaving Atlantic seas, passing latitude forty-four degrees north on its homeward run, lookouts sighted a distant black speck in the eastern sky and knew it for what it was: a Focke-Wulf Kondor long-range reconnaissance aircraft. The little carrier — a converted merchant vessel — launched two of her six Grumman Martlet fighters in desperation to intercept the enemy, but the Kondor escaped into cloud long before they got within striking distance.

  The grizzled skipper of one of the freighters, a veteran of forty years at sea and an old hand on the Atlantic convoys in two world wars, settled his greasy cap more firmly on his head and sucked hard on his unlit pipe before removing it from his mouth and turning to the mate, who was studying a chart and trying to stay upright on the heaving bridge. The mate was a much younger man, and this was his first convoy run in the Atlantic; he had previously been on the East African run, from Mogadishu to Durban, before crossing the continent to join this ship at Sierra Leone as a replacement. He was UK-bound in any case, and his predecessor was still in hospital in Freetown, recovering from the effects of a bar-room brawl.

  The skipper, seeing the mate hunched and shivering in his duffle coat, grinned before speaking. His accent betrayed his origins in the Yorkshire port of Hull, from where he had first taken ship in a trawler at the age of fifteen.

  ‘Feeling t’ cold, lad? Never mind, things’ll warm up soon enough. They allus do, after yon buggers put in an appearance.’ He waved his pipe in the direction of the cloud into which the Focke-Wulf had recently disappeared. ‘Bay o’ bloody Biscay,’ he went on, jabbing a finger at the mate’s chart. ‘Forty-four north to forty-eight. The buggers’ll give us hell for the next couple of days, until we’re abeam Ushant. Then the Air Force will come out to look after us — when it’s too bloody late, as usual.’

  The skipper was being less than fair on the RAF, but he found it hard to shake off the terrible experiences of the early war years, when no air cover had been available and convoys had been decimated. Besides, he had a nasty feeling in his gut that the Germans would go all out to hit this conv
oy hard. He was right. But this time, the threat would not come from beneath the waves.

  Twenty-four hours later, as the Sunderland flew southwards to make its rendezvous, it was the keen-eyed co-pilot who saw the first sign of the disaster that had overwhelmed the ships.

  It looked at first like a dark and threatening cloud, drifting low over the horizon. But as the Sunderland drew closer, the men in the cockpit could see that the base of the cloud was shot with red in places. Minutes later, the cloud had resolved itself into several distinct columns, merging higher up into a single spreading pall that fanned out slowly before the easterly wind.

  Stunned, the Sunderland’s crew gazed down on the carnage. The sea was littered with dying ships, many of them fiercely ablaze. Dense black smoke boiled up from stricken oil tankers, their shattered hulls surrounded by circles of burning fuel in which men screamed and died. Some freighters, which must have been carrying chemical cargoes, burned with a fierce multicoloured light. The escort carrier was listing heavily, but not heavily enough to have lost her aircraft overboard. Yet there was no sign of them.

  The Sunderland circled the remnants of the convoy slowly. The pilots counted twenty-two vessels, either sinking or so severely damaged that it was doubtful if they could be saved. Vessels which had escaped unharmed, or apparently so, were scattered all over the ocean. The destroyer escorts were scurrying to and fro like sheepdogs, trying to restore some order from the confusion. Others were stopped in the water, braving any danger from prowling U-boats in order to pick up survivors. The flying boat’s signaller tried to contact one of the warships by Aldis lamp, but got no response.

  ‘Never seen anything like this before,’ the Australian squadron leader muttered. ‘Can’t have been an attack by a pack of U-boats, or there’d be ships trailing back for fifty miles. This lot is concentrated in just a few square miles of sea. The carrier has obviously launched her aircraft, so it must have been an air strike — but I’ve never seen damage like this caused by one air attack.’

  ‘Couldn’t have been a battleship or something, could it?’ ventured the co-pilot. The flying boat skipper shook his head. ‘No — if you remember the Tirpitz was damaged by our midget subs a few weeks ago in Norway, and the Scharnhorst is still in Altenfjord. Or at least she was yesterday, according to the latest Intelligence reports. Couldn’t have got down here, unless she flew. Their only other seaworthy battle-wagon, the Lützow, is holed up in the Baltic. So it must have been an air attack, hence the absence of the carrier’s fighters. The poor beggars have probably run out of fuel.’

  The Sunderland flew over a spreading patch of oil which marked the grave of a ship. A dozen or so men were swimming away from it, some helping others to stay afloat.

  The Sunderland’s captain quickly made up his mind. Turning the big aircraft, he began a low-level run back towards the struggling survivors and instructed his crew to drop the aircraft’s rear dinghy, which would hold seven men. There was no hesitation in obeying his order, even though it meant that the airmen’s own chances of survival could be greatly diminished.

  Below, the elderly merchant captain from Hull, who had just had his ship blown from under him for the third time in this war, saw the dinghy pack hit the water and began to strike out towards it, dragging the mate with him. The younger man had a bad gash in his scalp and was barely conscious.

  ‘Come on, lad,’ the skipper gasped, spitting out a mouthful of salt water. ‘Bear up, now. We’ll be all right. Told you the buggers were always late.’

  Not that they could have done much about it this time, he thought bitterly.

  *

  Four hundred miles south-east of the Bay of Biscay, the winter sun that had shone wanly through the smoke of the burning convoy now reflected from the salt marshes of the Camargue, highlighting their pastel shades of green and dun; but the sun was weaker now, for time had passed and December was well advanced.

  The gardien’s sturdy white horse shifted restlessly and he clucked his tongue at it. It understood and resumed its statue-like stance, head down slightly, a tremor of pleasure passing through it as the rider stroked its neck briefly.

  The gardien sat easily and solidly in the saddle, which consisted of a cantle in the form of a back rest and a very high pommel. It was flanked by two saddle bags. He held his chest slightly in, his legs stretched almost at full length, feet resting firmly in the stirrups — solid metal cages that were peculiar to the Camargue horsemen — with his heels turned outwards. His left hand grasped the mourraioun, the traditional lasso which, knotted around the horse’s muzzle, also served as a bridle.

  Nowhere else in France, perhaps not even in the whole of Europe, was there a region as haunting as the Camargue, that three-hundred-square-mile area of lagoons and marshy plains nestling in the heart of the Rhône delta. Here, amid this wild and lonely scenery, flourished thirty ranches, each with its own manade, or herd, of white horses and small black bulls.

  The bulls came originally from Asia, but no one could say for sure where the horses had their origins. Some said that they were first imported to the Camargue by the Carthaginians and that later the Romans, impressed by the animals’ stamina, bred them to provide mounts for their auxiliary cavalry. Another theory was that they came from Chinese Turkestan with the Huns, the terrible cavalry from the Steppes, whose drive westwards had pushed other barbarian tribes before them like a floodtide, to batter against and finally break the defences of the Roman Empire.

  The gardien had often turned his mind to these things during his lonely vigil in all weathers, watching over the bulls that were his responsibility. It was in the nature of his people not to take things for granted, but to learn and to inquire. Secretly, though, he preferred the tale his grandmother had told him, long ago; that the first white horses of the Camargue were born out of the Mediterranean foam. It was easy to believe, when one watched the horses galloping wild and free along the shore, manes and tails flying and nostrils wide to the sea wind.

  Between this horse and its rider there was a deep trust that had been built up over the years, ever since the gardien had cut the animal out of the wild herd and broken him in.

  Ruefully, the rider recalled the end of the first round of that struggle: the débrandage, the kind of rodeo when, for the first time, the horseman had tried to keep his seat on his new mount’s back. He had carried the bruises for a long time, but in the end mastery had been his.

  Soon it would be the start of a New Year — 1944. The gardien let his eyes rove over the peaceful herd of grazing bulls and wondered whether, in the coming summer, the young men of nearby Arles would once again compete in the old Roman arena — once the scene of gory contests between gladiators and wild beasts — to pluck cockades from the bulls’ horns.

  Last year, for the first time in the long memory of the Camargue, there had been no such event. The Germans had put a stop to all big public gatherings when they had moved in to occupy Vichy France at the end of 1942. The gardien had asked his boss, the rancher, why the Germans had done that, and had learned that it was because the British and Americans had invaded North Africa. From then on the rancher had been happy to tell the gardien how the war was progressing, pointing out the places where fighting was taking place with the aid of a school atlas.

  Then one day the rancher, Etienne Barbut, had taken the gardien to one side and, after swearing him to secrecy, had asked him to do a curious thing. If ever the horseman came upon any strangers as he watched over his herd of bulls, he was to report the matter immediately to Barbut. In particular, he was to report any aeroplanes which he spotted flying low down, as though they were about to land at Istres, the airfield that lay close to the shores of the Etang de Berre, the big lake to the east of the Camargue between Arles and Marseille.

  For this reason, the gardien raised his head, suddenly alert, as his keen ears caught the distant throb of aero-engines. A moment later he saw the aircraft themselves, strung out across the north-western horizon like a gaggle of geese
. His eyes widened a little, for he had never before seen so many at the same time. He counted twenty-six as they thundered over his head, four at a time, with two bringing up the rear. The noise of their engines spooked his horse and he had to fight for a few moments to bring the animal under control again; the bulls were already scattering in all directions, but they would have to wait.

  The last two aircraft were lower than the others, and the gardien could see every detail clearly as they passed overhead, down to the black, white-edged crosses and the oil streaks under the pale blue wings. The aircraft had bulbous noses on which the sun glittered, and slender bodies ending in a kind of double tail. He noted all this carefully, knowing that he would shortly be quizzed by his boss. Most interesting of all, each machine carried what seemed to be two little aeroplanes, one under each wing.

  He watched the formation for a while longer as it crossed the coast, losing height steadily and splitting up. The leading aircraft broke away and descended towards Istres, their wheels lowered; the remainder circled like a flock of pigeons, then more of the big twin-engined machines also dropped away and followed the first down to land.

  The gardien had seen enough. There would be much work to do later, rounding up the scattered bulls, but first he had to tell his boss about the aeroplanes. Barbut was certain to have seen them too, of course, but the ranch was a good five miles away, too far for him to have seen the little aircraft attached under the wings of the larger ones. That, the gardien was sure, was important, although he did not understand why. Neither did he understand the rancher’s sudden interest in what was going on at Istres. But then, that was no business of his. He clapped his heels to the horse’s flanks and the animal launched almost at once into a supple gallop, sure-footed as it sped across the spongy ground, its hooves kicking up little rainbows of salty spray.