“Locate: engage: destroy.” These are the classic requirements of a naval ship in wartime, and to do each, and to do it with maximum speed and efficiency, the Ulysses was superbly equipped.
Location, for instance. The human element, of course, was indispensable, and Vallery was far too experienced and battlewise a captain to underestimate the value of the unceasing vigil of look-outs and signalmen. The human eye was not subject to blackouts, technical hitches or mechanical breakdowns. Radio reports, too, had their place and Asdic, of course, was the only defence against submarines.
But the Ulysses’s greatest strength in location lay elsewhere. She was the first completely equipped radar ship in the world. Night and day, the radar scanners atop the fore and main tripod masts swept ceaselessly in a 360° arc, combing the far horizons, searching, searching. Below, in the radar rooms, eight in all, and in the Fighter Direction rooms, trained eyes, alive to the slightest abnormality, never left the glowing screens. The radar’s efficiency and range were alike fantastic. The makers, optimistically, as they had thought, had claimed a 40-45 mile operating range for their equipment. On the Ulysses’s first trials after her refit for its installation, the radar had located a Condor, subsequently destroyed by a Blenheim, at a range of eighty-five miles.
Engage that was the next step. Sometimes the enemy came to you, more often you had to go after him. And then, one thing alone mattered speed.
The Ulysses was tremendously fast. Quadruple screws powered by four great Parsons single-reduction geared turbines two in the for’ard, two in the after engine-room, developed an unbelievable horse-power that many a battleship, by no means obsolete, could not match. Officially, she was rated at 33.5 knots. Off Arraa, in her full-power trials, bows lifting out of the water, stern dug in like a hydroplane, vibrating in every Clyde-built rivet, and with the tortured, seething water boiling whitely ten feet above the level of the poop-deck, she had covered the measured mile at an incredible 39.2 knots, the nautical equivalent of 45 m.p.h. And the “Dude “-Engineer-Commander Dobson had smiled knowingly, said he wasn’t half trying and just wait till the Abdiel or the Manxman came along, and he’d show them something. But as these famous mine-laying cruisers were widely believed to be capable of 44 knots, the wardroom had merely sniffed “Professional jealousy “and ignored him.
Secretly, they were as proud of the great engines as Dobson himself.
Locate, engage and destroy. Destruction. That was the be all, the end all. Lay the enemy along the sights and destroy him. The Ulysses was well equipped for that also.
She had four twin gun-turrets, two for’ard, two aft, 5.25 quick-firing and dual-purpose equally effective against surface targets and aircraft. These were controlled from the Director Towers, the main one for’ard, just above and abaft of the bridge, the auxiliary aft. From these towers, all essential data about bearing, wind-speed, drift, range, own speed, enemy speed, respective angles of course were fed to the giant electronic computing tables in the Transmitting Station, the fighting heart of the ship, situated, curiously enough, in the very bowels of the Ulysses, deep below the water-line, and thence automatically to the turrets as two simple factors, elevation and training. The turrets, of course, could also fight independently.
These were the main armament. The remaining guns were purely AA, the batteries of multiple pom-poms, firing two-pounders in rapid succession, not particularly accurate but producing a blanket curtain sufficient to daunt any enemy pilot, and isolated clusters of twin Oerlikons, high-precision, high-velocity weapons, vicious and deadly in trained hands.
Finally, the Ulysses carried her depth-charges and torpedoes, 36 charges only, a negligible number compared to that carried by many corvettes and destroyers, and the maximum number that could be dropped in one pattern was six. But one depth-charge carries 450 lethal pounds of Amatol, and the Ulysses had destroyed two U-boats during the preceding winter. The 21-inch torpedoes, each with its 750-pound warhead of T.N.T., lay sleek and menacing, in the triple tubes on the main deck, one set on either side of the after funnel. These had not yet been blooded.
This, then, was the Ulysses. The complete, the perfect fighting machine, man’s ultimate, so far, in his attempt to weld science and savagery into an instrument of destruction. The perfect fighting machine, but only so long as it was manned and serviced by a perfectly integrating, smoothly functioning team. A ship, any ship, can never be better than its crew. And the crew of the Ulysses was disintegrating, breaking up: the lid was clamped on the volcano, but the rumblings never ceased.
The first signs of further trouble came within three hours of clearing harbour. As always, minesweepers swept the channel ahead of them, but, as always, Vallery left nothing to chance. It was one of the reasons why he, and the Ulysses, had survived thus far. At 0620 he streamed paravanes, the slender, torpedo-shaped bodies which angled out from the bows, one on either side, on special paravane wire. In theory, the wires connecting mines to their moorings on the floor of the sea were deflected away from the ship, guided out to the paravanes themselves and severed by cutters: the mines would then float to the top to be exploded or sunk by small arms.
At 0900, Vallery ordered the paravanes to be recovered. The Ulysses slowed down. The First Lieutenant, Lieutenant-Commander Carrington, went to the fo’c’sle to supervise operations: seamen, winch drivers, and the Subs, in charge of either side closed up to their respective stations.
Quickly, the recovery booms were freed from their angled crutches, just abaft the port and starboard lights, swung out and rigged with recovery wires. Immediately, the three-ton winches on ‘B’ gun-deck took the strain, smoothly, powerfully; the paravanes cleared the water.
Then it happened. It was A.B. Ferry’s fault that it happened. And it was just ill-luck that the port winch was suspect, operating on a power circuit with a defective breaker, just ill-luck that Ralston was the winch driver, a taciturn, bitter mouthed Ralston to whom, just then, nothing mattered a damn, least of all what he said and did. But it was Carslake’s responsibility that the affair developed into what it did.
Sub-Lieutenant Carslake’s presence there, on top of the Carley floats’, directing the handling of the port wire, represented the culmination of a series of mistakes. A mistake on the part of his father, Rear-Admiral, Rtd., who had seen in his son a man of his own calibre, had dragged him out of Cambridge in 1939 at the advanced age of twenty-six and practically forced him into the Navy: a weakness on the part of his first C.O., a corvette captain who had known his father and recommended him as a candidate for a commission: a rare error of judgment on the part of the selection board of the King Alfred, who had granted him his commission ; and a temporary lapse on the part of the Commander, who had assigned him to this duty, in spite of Carslake’s known incompetence and inability to handle men.
He had the face of an overbred racehorse, long, lean and narrow, with prominent pale blue eyes and protruding upper teeth. Below his scanty fair hair, his eyebrows were arched in a perpetual question mark:
beneath the long, pointed nose, the supercilious curl of the upper lip formed the perfect complement to the eyebrows. His speech was a shocking caricature of the King’s English: his short vowels were long, his long ones interminable: his grammar was frequently execrable. He resented the Navy, he resented his long overdue promotion to Lieutenant, he resented the way the men resented him. In brief, Sub-Lieutenant Carslake was the quintessence of the worst by-product of the English public school system. Vain, superior, uncouth and ill-educated, he was a complete ass.
He was making an ass of himself now. Striving to maintain balance on the rafts, feet dramatically braced at a wide angle, he shouted unceasing, unnecessary commands at his men. C.P.O. Hartley groaned aloud, but kept otherwise silent in the interests of discipline. But A.B. Ferry felt himself under no such restraints.
“‘Ark at his Lordship,” he murmured to Ralston. “All for the Skipper’s benefit.” He nodded at where Vallery was leaning over the bridge, twenty feet above Carslake’s head. “Impresses him no end, so his nibs reckons.”
“Just you forget about Carslake and keep your eyes on that wire,”
Ralston advised. “And take these damned great gloves off. One of these days——”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Ferry jeered. “The wire’s going to snag ’em and wrap me round the drum.” He fed in the hawser expertly. “Don’t you worry, chum, it’s never going to happen to me.”
But it did. It happened just then. Ralston, watching the swinging paravane closely, flicked a glance inboard. He saw the broken strand inches from Ferry, saw it hook viciously into the gloved hand and drag him towards the spinning drum before Ferry had a chance to cry out.