At 0702, the Blue Ranger was torpedoed. The Ulysses was two cable-lengths away, on her starboard quarter: those on the bridge felt the physical shock of the twin explosions, heard them shattering the stillness of the dawn as they saw two searing columns of flame fingering skywards, high above the Blue Ranger’s bridge and well aft of it. A second later they heard a signalman shouting something unintelligible, saw him pointing forwards and downwards. It was another torpedo, running astern of the carrier, trailing its evil phosphorescent wake across the heels of the convoy, before spending itself in the darkness of the Arctic.
Vallery was shouting down the voice-pipe, pulling round the Ulysses, still doing upwards of twenty knots, in a madly heeling, skidding turn, to avoid collision with the slewing carrier. Three sets of Aldis lamps and the fighting lights were already stuttering out the “Maintain Position “code signal to ships in the convoy. Marshall, on the phone, was giving the stand-by order to the depth-charge L.T.O.: gun barrels were already depressing, peering hungrily into the treacherous sea. The signal to the Sirrus stopped short, unneeded: the destroyer, a half-seen blue in the darkness, was already knifing its way through the convoy, white water piled high at its bows, headed for the estimated position of the U-boat.
The Ulysses sheered by parallel to the burning carrier, less than 150 feet away; travelling so fast, heeling so heavily and at such close range, it was impossible to gather more than a blurred impression, a tangled, confused memory of heavy black smoke laced with roaring columns of flame, appalling in that near-darkness, of a drunkenly listing flight-deck, of Grummans and Corsairs cartwheeling grotesquely over the edge to splash icy clouds of spray in shocked faces, as the cruiser slewed away; and then the Ulysses was round, heading back south for the kill.
Within a minute, the signal-lamp of tine Vectra, up front with the convoy, started winking. “Contact, Green 70, closing : Contact, Green 70, closing.”
“Acknowledge; “Tyndall ordered briefly;
The Aldis had barely begun to clack when the Vectra cut through the signal.
“Contacts, repeat contacts. Green 90, Green 90. Closing. Very close.
Repeat contacts, contacts.”
Tyndall cursed softly.
“Acknowledge. Investigate.” He turned to Vallery. “Let’s join him, Captain. This is it. Wolf-pack Number One-and in force. No bloody right to be here,” he added bitterly. “So much for Admiralty Intelligence!”
The Ulysses was round again, heading for the Vectra. It should have been growing lighter now, but the Blue Ranger, her squadron fuel tanks on fire, a gigantic torch against the eastern horizon, had the curious effect of throwing the surrounding sea into heavy darkness. She lay almost athwart of the flagship’s course for the Vectra, looming larger every minute. Tyndall had his night glasses to his eyes, kept on muttering: “The poor bastards, the poor bastards!”
The Blue Ranger was almost gone. She lay dead in the water, heeled far over to starboard, ammunition and petrol tanks going up in a constant series of crackling reports. Suddenly, a succession of dull, heavy explosions rumbled over the sea: the entire bridge island structure lurched crazily sideways, held, then slowly, ponderously, deliberately, the whole massive body of it toppled majestically into the glacial darkness of the sea. God only knew how many men perished with it, deep down in the Arctic, trapped in its iron walls. They were the lucky ones.
The Vectra, barely two miles ahead now, was pulling round south in a tight circle. Vallery saw her, altered course to intercept. He heard Bentley shouting something unintelligible from the fore corner of the compass platform. Vallery shook his head, heard him shouting again, his voice desperate with some nameless urgency, his arm pointing frantically over the windscreen, and leapt up beside him.
The sea was on fire. Flat, calm, burdened with hundreds of tons of fuel oil, it was a vast carpet of licking, twisting flames. That much, for a second, and that only, Vallery saw: then with heart-stopping shock, with physically sickening abruptness, he saw something else again: the burning sea was alive with swimming, struggling men. Not a handful, not even dozens, but literally hundreds, soundlessly screaming, agonisingly dying in the barbarous contrariety of drowning and cremation.
“Signal from Vectra, sir.” It was Bentley speaking, his voice abnormally matter-of-fact. “‘Depth-charging. 3, repeat 3 contacts. Request immediate assistance.'”
Tyndall was at Vallery’s side now. He heard Bentley, looked a long second at Vallery, following his sick, fascinated gaze into the sea ahead, For a man in the sea, oil is an evil thing. It clogs his movements, burns his eyes, sears his lungs and tears away his stomach in uncontrollable paroxysms of retching; but oil on fire is a hellish thing, death by torture, a slow, shrieking death by drowning, by burning, by asphyxiation-for the flames devour all the life-giving oxygen on the surface of the sea. And not even in the bitter Arctic is there the merciful extinction by cold, for the insulation of an oil-soaked body stretches a dying man on the rack for eternity, carefully preserves him for the last excruciating refinement of agony.
All this Vallery knew.
He knew, too, that for the Ulysses to stop, starkly outlined against the burning carrier, would have been suicide.
And to come sharply round to starboard, even had there been time and room to clear the struggling, dying men in the sea ahead, would have wasted invaluable minutes, time and to spare for the U-boats ahead to line up firing-tracks on the convoy; and the Ulysses’s first responsibilty was to the convoy. Again all this Vallery knew. But, at that moment, what weighed most heavily with him was common humanity.
Fine off the port bow, close in to the Blue Ranger, the oil was heaviest, the flames fiercest, the swimmers thickest: Vallery looked back over his shoulder at the Officer of the Watch.
“Port 10!”
“Port 10, sir.”
“Midships!”
“Midships, sir.”
“Steady as she goes!”
For ten, fifteen seconds the Ulysses held her course, arrowing through the burning sea to the spot where some gregariously atavistic instinct for self-preservation held two hundred men knotted together in a writhing, seething mass, gasping out their lives in hideous agony. For a second a great gout of flame leapt up in the centre of the group, like a giant, incandescent magnesium flare, a flame that burnt the picture into the hearts and minds of the men on the bridge with a permanence and searing clarity that no photographic plate could ever have reproduced:
men on fire, human torches beating insanely at the flames that licked, scorched and then incinerated clothes, hair and skin: men flinging themselves almost out of the water, backs arched like tautened bows, grotesque in convulsive crucifixion: men lying dead in the water, insignificant, featureless little oil-stained maunds in an oil-soaked plain: and a handful of fear-maddened men, faces inhumanly contorted, who saw the Ulysses and knew what was coming, as they frantically thrashed their way to a safety that offered only a few more brief seconds of un-speakable agony before they gladly died.
“Starboard 30!” Vallery’s voice was low, barely a murmur, but it carried clearly through the shocked silence on the bridge. “Starboard 30, sir.”
For the third time in ten minutes, the Ulysses slewed crazily round in a racing turn. Turning thus, a ship does not follow through the line of the bows cutting the water; there is a pronounced sideways or lateral motion, and the faster and sharper the turn, the more violent the broadside skidding motion, like a car on ice. The side of the Ulysses, still at an %Cttte ‘attgte, caught the edge of the group on the port bow : almost on the instant, the entire length of the swinging hull smashed into the heart of the fire, into the thickest press of dying men.
For most of them, it was just extinction, swift and glad and merciful.
The tremendous concussion and pressure waves crushed the life out of them, thrust them deep down into the blessed oblivion of drowning, thrust them down and sucked them back into the thrashing vortex of the four great screws. …
On board the Ulysses, men for whom death and destruction had become the stuff of existence, to be accepted with the callousness and jesting indifference that alone kept them sane-these men clenched impotent fists, mouthed meaningless, useless curses over and over again and wept heedlessly like little children. They wept as pitiful, charred faces, turned up towards the Ulysses and alight with joy and hope, petrified into incredulous staring horror, as realisation dawned and the water closed over them; as hate-filled men screamed insane invective, both arms raised aloft, shaking fists white-knuckled through the dripping oil as the Ulysses trampled them under: as a couple of young boys were sucked into the maelstrom of the propellers, still giving the thumbs-up sign: as a particularly shocking case, who looked as if he had been barbecued on a spit and had no right to be alive, lifted a scorified hand to the blackened hole that had been his mouth, flung to the bridge a kiss in token of endless gratitude ; and wept, oddly, most of all, at the inevitable humorist who lifted his fur cap high above his head and bowed gravely and deeply, his face into the water as he died.