Gone to Sea in a Bucket Read online

  ALSO BY DAVID BLACK

  Triad Takeover: A Terrifying Account of the Spread of Triad Crime in the West

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 David Black

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503947498

  ISBN-10: 1503947491

  Cover design by bürosüdo München, www.buerosued.de

  To Margaret and Davy

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Author’s Note

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Postscript

  Author’s Note

  The Royal Navy Submarine Service

  About the Author

  ‘There is no branch of His Majesty’s forces which in this war have suffered the same proportion of losses as our Submarine Service. It is the most dangerous of all services.’

  —Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, in an address to Parliament.

  Author’s Note

  The Victoria Cross is Britain’s highest honour for valour. Of the Royal Navy’s twenty-two VCs awarded during the Second World War, nine were won by submariners.

  Of the 238 Royal Navy submarines to sail on war patrols between 1939 and 1945, 76 were lost.

  My technical adviser on Gone to Sea in a Bucket was Captain Iain D. Arthur OBE, RN, a former Captain (S), Devonport: the officer commanding the Devonport submarine flotilla. Captain Arthur guided me through all the technical complexities of an operational submarine, explaining procedures, tactics, and submarine lore. Without him, this book would not have been possible. However, I must say this to my expert readers: I know you will have found errors. But they are my errors, are deliberate, and have been dictated by the momentum of the story. This is, after all, a work of fiction. I hope you will forgive me.

  Foreword

  When I was first given the opportunity to read Gone to Sea in a Bucket by David Black, I was very busy and I put the manuscript to one side. However, when I did finally manage to pick it up, I was glad I’d cleared my in-tray first – because I could not put it down!

  Speaking as a submariner, I found this tale of submarine life in wartime a genuine pleasure. It is technically extremely accurate from an engineering/equipment point of view, with regards to how a submarine of that era was operated and fought; and the detailed description of life on board (even down to ‘Train Smash’ and ‘Cheese Oosh’ – always popular scran!) and all the associated atmospherics one might encounter are most authentic. There are a couple of instances where I felt nomenclature was different to that I have used – for example, I would say ‘All Round Look’ as opposed to ‘360 Look’ – but these are tiny; and the author may have it right: in 1940 that may have been the expression used.

  I found myself easily transported back to the time I joined my first submarine 50 years ago – built in the closing stages of World War Two, so not that different from the submarines David Black describes. I was in total empathy with Harry Gilmour, his hero, when he joins HMS/M Pelorus as the junior watchkeeper on board; in my case, and at a similar age, I went aboard my first boat as 5th Hand, and Harry’s experiences scarily mirrored my own, right down to having a CO known for his liking of the hard stuff – though happily in my situation he indulged ashore and not aboard, where he was a formidable and skilled attacker. And when Harry joins HMS/M Trebuchet . . . well, what can I say? I too had a wardroom steward just as much an eccentric character as Harry’s ‘Lascar’ Vaizey.

  The insight into the relationship between ‘the Trade’1 and General Service (the surface navy) is also absolutely spot-on – and an element of that still exists in modern times between submariners and ‘skimmers’! (It was certainly powerfully in-being when I joined my first boat – Vice Admiral Wilson’s words live on!!2)

  And the insight also captures perfectly the ethos and professionalism of the whole crew beneath the waves:

  ‘Thing about the trade is, Mr Gilmour, unlike that lot upstairs, with us, if every man knows his job and does his duty exactly right, then there’s a good chance we’ll all live. If he don’t, then we don’t. It’s simple as that.’

  ‘There isn’t less discipline in the trade, Mr Gilmour. If anything, the discipline here is the hardest of all. Self-discipline. You look after yourself, your mates and your boat. At all times.’

  Life in a submarine was a unique experience. On a big ship, hierarchy prevailed. On a submarine, it was different. You had to rub along, mainly because it wasn’t safe to do otherwise.

  The fear of ‘friendly fire’ from the RAF also lives on – or at least it did until the Government got rid of the RAF’s ASW Maritime Patrol Aircraft in the 2010 defence review (incidentally, a crass decision – in general ASW terms!).

  The book’s closing adventure is indeed the stuff of Hornblower and Jack Aubrey; it’s the singeing of the King of Spain’s beard and ‘Crap’ Miers3 (I knew him personally, and my father served under him) winning his VC in World War Two rolled into one – and the exciting way it is told helps to sustain credulity! All the aspects of submarine warfare are brought into play: the surveillance mission is extremely authentic, and once the shooting starts . . .

  I could go on – there is so much to parallel with my own experiences as, I suspect, will be the case for anyone who has been in the Trade, even in today’s nuclear submarine fleet – but if I did I would end up making this foreword longer than the book with my own quotes and personal reflections from every page!

  Yet I do hope that anyone reading this book who is not a submariner will gain as much enjoyment as I have taken! I say this because I know that out there is a huge readership with no experience of Nelson-era Ships of the Line, yet who find the works of C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian hugely readable in spite of their delving deeply into the technical detail of their day.

  In the same way, Gone to Sea in a Bucket reflects the submarine service in World War Two, with the same attention to detail. And that is why I believe that, in its hero Harry Gilmour, David Black has created a Jack Aubrey for the modern age. And set him at the heart of a tale as epic as those of O’Brian and Forester; a tale that encompasses not only the same thrill of action, but also the same compassion and understanding for the true heroes of our nation’s seafaring traditions – the sailor warriors then, as now.

  —Admiral of the Fleet the Lord Boyce KG GCB OBE; former First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, 1998 to 2001; and Chief of the Defence Staff, 2001 to 2003

  * * *

  1 ‘The Trade’: the Royal Navy Submarine Service’s name for itsel
f.

  2 In 1901, when the Royal Navy was first considering commissioning submarines into the fleet, the then Vice Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson VC described them as: ‘Underhand, unfair and damned un-English.’

  3 Rear Admiral Sir Anthony Cecil Capel Miers VC KBE CB DSO & Bar, who won his VC commanding HMS Torbay in 1942.

  Chapter One

  Like all young men of a certain age, Harry Gilmour had grown up with his own notion of how a naval battle should be. This wasn’t it.

  Six hours ago he had still been naive enough to be excited; tensed for the roar of the guns, braced against the heel of the ship at speed beneath him, as if he were the central figure in a heroic tableau. Like that remembered painting from a Boys’ Own annual: the 16-year-old boy seaman, still at his post while all the other members of his gun crew lie about, decorously dead, as the Battle of Jutland unfolds somewhere beyond the smoke and twisted metal. Stirring stuff.

  Of course there was no doubt that he was in a battle. The Captain had said so, his staticky monotone crackling out of the tannoy as they had settled into their posts after the Actions Stations bell at 05.15. And yes, there had been the roar of guns. And bloody loud they were too. But hardly the rippling salvoes of his imagination. Every now and then there would be an air-quivering BUDUD-DDUMMM! as the main battery sent off another pair of 15-inch shells sailing over that bloody great anonymous Norwegian fjord-wall, filling the night with rock. If he shut his eyes, he could see it now. A looming silhouette in the pre-dawn darkness, rising up almost to the sky itself, glimpsed as he and the rest of his damage-control party had descended into the fo’c’sle.

  But the sailors slouched around Harry now were anything but decorous. And his ship, HMS Redoubtable, had done nothing more than circle round all morning at a stately five knots, as befitted a battleship of her antiquity, lobbing her shells over into the next fjord, to plummet down on a battered squadron of German torpedo boats. The fall of shot was being directed by that lanky, deeply stupid spotter pilot and the two comic grotesques he called his crew. They were up there now in Redoubtable’s Swordfish floatplane, watching the shells splash, telling the Gunnery Officer, ‘Left a bit, right a bit,’ in their smug gunnery jargon. Trying to plop the huge shells on to Jerry in his diminutive little tubs. Jerry called them torpedo boats, but they were more like the British corvette: proper steel-hulled ships, near on 1,000 tons, not the marine-ply and glue jobs that the name suggested, and armed with three 4.1-inch guns and six 21-inch torpedo tubes. Dangerous-enough little buggers. Harry had looked them up in the wardroom copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships last night, when the talk was of nothing else among the officers off-watch. It gave him something to take his mind off never being invited to join in their conversation.

  That spotter pilot had been there too. Lieutenant Turl-d’Urfe. Could anyone actually be called that? An accent to cut glass and a sneer as if there was a permanent smell under his nose, insisted, ‘yes’. The Lieutenant had never once spoken to Harry, but he’d managed to make it clear that as far as he was concerned, Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour was just plain wrong. Wrong class, wrong country, and wrong bloody ring on his sleeve. For Harry, the son of a Scots schoolmaster, was ‘wavy navy’. His single gold ring was not the solid band of the Royal Navy but a gold squiggle that said ‘Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve’. A bloody civilian in a hostilities-only uniform, pretending to be a sea officer. And he was in the pilots’ wardroom. Horrid little oik. The pilot wasn’t alone in his opinions. Not by any means.

  BUDUD-DDUMMM! Another salvo.

  The deck lurched, and the world went out of focus again in another shock wave. Paint flakes fluttered down like snow from the deckhead low above them. Harry’s stomach felt like it had just been punched again, and his brain rattled like a pea in a tin can. He looked around, letting his eyes stop dancing. The more fastidious of the dozen or so ratings under his command were brushing the paint flakes off their duffel coats before returning to concentrate on puffing at the cigarettes that Harry had allowed them to produce two hours ago.

  He shouldn’t have done it, of course. The ship was at Action Stations, and any activity which might distract you from your total concentration on killing the enemy was a violation of the Articles of War. Also, there was another reason. The damage-control party was up here because right under that bloody great hatch in front of him, with its winch capable of lifting the two-ton lid atop it, was the well that led down to the paint locker. And old First World War veteran R-Class battleships like Redoubtable, fresh from two decades of peacetime spit and polish, carried a lot of paint. Which as any schoolboy knows is highly flammable. And the damage-control party, of which Harry was in charge, was now smoking.

  Harry had propped himself against the hull, slumped deep in his reefer jacket, his watch cap pushed back to cushion his head against the steel. Beside him were two ratings in huge puffed-up white asbestos firemen’s suits, with the tops off, looking for all the world like the wrong end of a pantomime horse. The rest were in overalls and duffel coats – April up here, off Narvik, was still bloody freezing. About them lay fire-fighting equipment and a medieval arsenal of bars and wrenches.

  The party looked small inside the vast, bland, white steel box which formed the capstan flat, a compartment that stretched away forward, interrupted only by the chains and machinery that entered and departed through it. The deck stretched the width of the ship, tapering forward towards the bow. A big space. Down through the middle came the capstans – huge metal cylinders that raised and lowered the anchors. And then the anchor chains themselves, passing down through holes in the decks above and below, into the bowels of the chain lockers. Huge, limb-thick links. A hit here on the machinery that controlled them could release those chains and send them thundering out of the locker, dragged by free anchors weighing god knows how many tons, over the side, checking movement, slewing, damaging the ship, dragging her out of the line of battle, if there had been any line of battle or indeed any battle to speak of.

  The damage-control party were the ship’s defence against whatever mayhem enemy ordnance might wreak. It was a critical role that the men of the damage-control party might have to perform under Harry’s resolute command.

  They were all older than Harry: peacetime sailors, who’d been ‘in’ for years. Balding pates, smokers’ teeth, noses lit by rum, sea-weathered and battered. Regular Royal Navy. ‘Jack’, to themselves, and all around them. Career sailors, whose latest inconvenience, in a long line of inconveniences, was to find themselves at war. But then ‘Jack’ had long been wise in the ways of inconveniences, and wise in the ways of officers. Especially a kid like Harry.

  The Petty Officer, who was Harry’s leading hand on the party and who had a good 15 years on him, had persuaded Harry that, seeing as there wasn’t that much happening, and as Jerry was actually on the other side of a bleedin’ mountain, it seemed only fair to let the boys have a gasper. I mean it was cruel to deny ‘Jack’ his smoke for the equivalent of a whole bleedin’ watch when there was nothin’ happenin’. He had appealed to Harry’s sense of what was fair. Exasperated, Harry knew it was a fatal mistake even as he’d said, ‘All right then, but . . .’ and all his caveats were lost in the fumble to produce the cigarettes and light up.

  Harry, about to turn 19 years old, was not a happy Harry these days. It wasn’t just naval battles that were not living up to his expectations. The whole navy lark, he was now coming to realise, was somewhat lacking in the glamour and esprit de corps he had envisaged when on Tuesday, 5 September, 1939, just two days after the prime minister had announced ‘this country is at war with Germany’, he had walked into the Royal Navy recruitment office in Glasgow to sign up.

  He’d quickly found himself at the other end of the country, rolling up to a recently requisitioned municipal swimming pool and sports pavilion on the shorefront at Hove.

  ‘Have you ever been at sea, done any sailing, messed about in boats?’ asked some ageing instructor officer, not even looking at him.

&nbs
p; ‘Yes, actually,’ Harry replied eagerly, ‘I’ve done quite a bit of yachting.’ A tick on a form, and for the next three months, the pavilion became his home. That was where they tried to turn him into a naval officer.

  Nearly all his fellow officer trainees had gone on to little ships: corvettes destined for the inglorious slog of defending convoys against the U-boat menace, or minesweeping trawlers, requisitioned to keep the harbours and ports clear. The navy was facing a huge mobilisation challenge, and with a near-impossible task of manning all the ships they’d need to put to sea. And that was before losses.

  Harry knew this because an unlikely, ageing sea dog called Captain John Noel Pelly, the training establishment’s CO, told him so – him and all the other 140 aspiring officers on the course. But pretty soon, predicted Captain Pelly, by necessity if nothing else, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve officers like them, johnny-cum-latelys here only for the war, would find themselves posted throughout the service, to plum jobs as well as the glamourless. So they were starting now to siphon off a select few into the real navy, the big ship navy.

  And that’s how Harry had got his ‘plum’. Someone who knew someone, who knew someone, had passed the word. A chain of sage nods all the way back to the clubhouse of the Royal Northern Yacht Squadron in Harry’s little town on the shore of the Firth of Clyde, at the bottom of Harry’s road, where the membership had included America’s Cup challengers like Sir Thomas Lipton and Sir Tommy Sopwith not to mention numerous naval officers of flag rank and lower, some serving, some not. This was where Harry had spent sizeable chunks of his youth scrubbing and polishing, and latterly even crewing. ‘A sound lad’ had been the verdict on Harry. So he got the wardroom of a capital ship, a clubhouse in its own right, in peacetime; an ante-room for preferment for the chaps from Dartmouth Royal Naval College. A ‘fly-the-flag’ beauty like Redoubtable was their territory. She was tantamount to a grey yacht, and within her wardroom was the opportunity to make oneself known to senior officers who would themselves one day command; to forge alliances and distinguish oneself in lounge lizardry.