Marine L SBS

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  1

  The Prime Minister removed the newly lit cigar from his mouth and glared at his First Sea Lord. ‘What the devil do you mean, “reluctant”?’

  Admiral Sir Dudley Pound was not First Sea Lord for nothing. He had commanded a battleship at Jutland and served with distinction as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. He was a sea dog through and through, and as tough as old boots. Yet he had to admit to himself that he found the Prime Minister intimidating. There was something of the schoolboy bully in Churchill, and once he had made up his mind he was implacable. When the two clashed it was a case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. When that happened third parties kept well clear.

  ‘The French are our allies, Prime Minister,’ Pound said stubbornly. ‘They are, like ourselves, a proud and ancient nation. It is not unreasonable that Admiral Somerville should be reluctant to act until every alternative has been explored.’

  The two men were seated in a small office in Admiralty Arch, for Churchill had chosen to stroll across Horse Guards Parade from his underground bunker in Whitehall to savour the warm summer’s day. The office had an uninterrupted view of Buckingham Palace at the other end of the Mall. Now the building, with the royal standard flying above it to show that the royal family were in residence, sparkled in the sunshine, a reminder to the Prime Minister of everything he held dear.

  Before becoming Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, less than two months earlier, Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty, the Royal Navy’s political chief, as he had been during the Great War of 1914–18. So he knew the Royal Navy as a mother knows her child. It was the country’s senior service and its centuries of duty and loyalty to the Crown had been unwavering.

  But Churchill knew it also possessed a stubborn streak of independence. The War Office and the Air Ministry were merely administrative organizations; the Admiralty was an operational headquarters with the power to command and direct great fleets and great actions. Upon its decisions the fate of the nation could hang, and it guarded this independence with the jealousy of a lover. It did not take kindly to political intervention, from whatever source.

  He could, the Prime Minister thought, take the bull by the horns. As a forthright individual, he always favoured this option: the bull, in his experience, when shaken hard, often turned out to be only a cow. But he knew Pound was a hard man, a bull to be reckoned with, and being the consummate politician he was, the Prime Minister instinctively knew that on this occasion confrontation was not the answer.

  ‘Look, Dudley,’ he said quietly. ‘I do understand your problem and I do appreciate your loyalty to Somerville.’

  ‘I support my admirals because I believe in them, Prime Minister,’ Pound replied stiffly, even more wary of Churchill when he adopted a conciliatory mood, ‘not because it is my duty to do so, though it is that, too. It is my profound belief that Somerville is right. We must give the French Navy every chance before we resort to force.’

  ‘Let us hope they take it,’ Churchill replied gruffly. ‘We cannot allow the French fleet to fall into German hands, and our resolve to fight on cannot be seen to falter.’

  He leant forward and studied the chart of the western Mediterranean that lay between them. ‘You say the bulk of the French fleet lies at Oran.’

  His stubby forefinger pointed to a large bay some two hundred miles west of Algiers, on the North African coast, and three hundred miles east of Gibraltar.

  ‘There and at Mers-el-Kebir on the opposite side of the bay.’

  ‘And Somerville has the fire-power?’

  ‘He flies his flag aboard the Nelson, Prime Minister.’

  No more needed be said on that point: HMS Nelson was among the most powerful battleships in the world.

  ‘Then we can only await the outcome of the negotiations.’

  Churchill stood up and gazed out of the window towards the Palace. For once the burden of decision weighed heavily upon him. It was an odious task that he had to perform, but perform it he must if he was not to lose an even more important battle: the one for the minds of the American people. If the Americans were convinced that Britain would fight on alone, and showed it by going to the extreme of destroying the fleet of a conquered ally, then sooner or later they would join them. Such an alliance would be unbeatable.

  There was a knock on the door. ‘Come,’ said Pound.

  A lieutenant commander entered. ‘A signal from Admiral Somerville, sir.’

  Pound took the slip of paper, read it and wrote a reply on the signal pad that the officer was carrying. ‘With all dispatch,’ he said to the officer as he returned the pad. The officer left.

  Churchill turned from the window. ‘Well?’

  ‘Admiral Gensoul still refuses,’ said Pound quietly. He folded the signal and threw it on the table.

  ‘We have given him enough time, God knows,’ said the Prime Minister, slumping back into his chair. ‘And we have given him enough choices. He can join us, he can choose disarmament in a British or West Indian port, or he can scuttle. What does he intend to do?’

  ‘Fight,’ said Pound, ‘isn’t that what you would do when threatened?’

  The jaw of the bulldog face jutted out. ‘We cannot afford to waste any more time.’

  ‘I have suggested to Somerville that he send a personal emissary who knows Gensoul well.’

  ‘Will Gensoul receive him?’

  Pound sighed. ‘I doubt it. But we must try.’

  Churchill stood up again and paced the floor. It was always the waiting that was so trying, knowing that the flow of events was out of your hands.

  Five minutes passed and neither man had spoken, when the silence was broken by another knock on the door. On Pound’s command the same officer entered. ‘Yes, Bill? Problem?’

  ‘Gibraltar have just signalled to say they have intercepted a signal from the Minister of Marine, Admiral Darlan, to Admiral Gensoul, sir. It was en clair.’

  The effect on the two men was electrifying. Governments always transmitted signals in code, never in plain language. It could mean only one thing: the French wanted the British to know what the signal contained.

  ‘What did it say?’ Pound asked, though he already knew what the purport would be.

  ‘"French squadron dispatched Toulon 1100,"’ the officer read carefully, ‘"will be transferred to your command 1500 today."’ The officer hesitated. ‘Our cipher people decided not to translate the last phrase, sir.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Vive la France.’

  The silence was profound. Then Pound said quietly: ‘Thank you, Bill. Wait outside, would you.’

  Churchill sat down. ‘I’m sorry, Dudley, so desperately sorry.’

  Pound shook his head. ‘We’ve done all we can, Prime Minister. Somerville must not be allowed to be caught between the two forces. We both know that.’

  There was nothing more to be said. The Admiral stood up, walked to the door and opened it. ‘Come in, Bill.’

  The officer entered. Later he was to say that he had never seen two such powerful men so obviously gripped by emotions they found hard to control.

  ‘Top-priority signal to Admiral Somerville,’ Pound dictated, not trusting the trembling in his hands to write the words himself. ‘French squadron sailed Toulon 1100 today. Imperative that you act immediately.’ He hesitated and then added: ‘God bless you all.’

&
nbsp; The afternoon sun was down below the roofs of Whitehall when the two men received Somerville’s reply: ‘French Fleet at Oran engaged at 1754 today. Bretagne blown up, Dunkerque sunk, other units severely damaged. Some have escaped and will be hunted down. Estimated loss of French lives: 1200.’

  2

  Admiral Sir Roger Keyes glanced across at the captain of the commando ship Glengyle. There was a hint of a twinkle in his eye. ‘Well, Dick. What do you think?’

  Captain Richard Broakes knitted his fingers together on top of the table and considered them carefully. He was a grave, donnish figure, with a high-domed forehead which was now wrinkled with perplexity.

  Keyes knew his friend was considered by many of his peers to be not only over the hill but well down the other side. However, the Admiral viewed his old colleague differently. He remembered him as a dashing young destroyer captain when he, Keyes, had commanded the Dover Patrol, which had wreaked such havoc among the German Navy between 1914 and 1918. It was a different war they were fighting now, of course, but not that different.

  Not liking the proposition that had been put to him, Broakes unwove his fingers and placed his hands apart, palms down on the table. The mahogany surface had been buffed by generations of men who knew that when the Royal Navy said clean it meant clean, and the four gold rings on Broakes’s sleeves glittered back at him from its burnished depths.

  Not a spot, not a blemish – just like Broakes’s naval record.

  Keyes knew what the gesture meant and Broakes knew he knew. But there were others sitting round the table who would not. So Broakes looked at the Admiral and said quietly but firmly: ‘Rubbish, sir. Absolute rubbish. Not possible.’

  Keyes swung round in his chair and glowered under his bushy, grey eyebrows at the large, khaki-clad individual with the battered face standing at ease in front of the table.

  ‘Look, Pountney,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘With Dunkirk this country has just suffered one of its greatest defeats in its long history. If it hadn’t been for the Navy . . .’

  ‘And the Royal Air Force, Admiral,’ the Air Vice-Marshal at the end of the table interjected.

  ‘And the Air Force,’ the Admiral added imperturbably. ‘If it hadn’t been for the Navy and the Air Force the entire British Expeditionary Force would still be in Dunkirk in one big POW camp. And we would have no army to face Mr Hitler’s storm troopers when they arrive on our shores.’

  ‘If they arrive,’ the Air Vice-Marshal interceded again. ‘They’re going to have to defeat us in the air first.’

  ‘When they arrive,’ the Admiral said firmly. ‘They’ll come all right. Much as I hate to say it, Pountney, we are all thinking about how we are going to defend this fair isle from the German legions, and what with. There are hardly enough rifles to go around, much less automatic weapons. And you bowl in and suggest we go on the attack. Doesn’t make sense, does it, laddie?’

  Although their interviewee was standing at ease, there was about him a tenseness, an alertness, that transmitted itself to the high-ranking officers around the table. He was like a coiled spring.

  ‘With respect, sir,’ said Roger ‘Jumbo’ Pountney, former big-game hunter, one-time middleweight boxing champion, now an HO (Hostilities Only) officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, ‘attack is often the best form of defence.’

  Keyes glowered at the young man for a moment, as if demanding that he should retract such an absurd statement. Then he relaxed, leant back in his chair and nodded his pleasure.

  ‘I thought you might say that, Pountney. That’s exactly why Mr Churchill has appointed me Director of Combined Operations. It is our job to take the offensive, come what may. We did it at Oran and we’ve got to keep doing it wherever and whenever we can.’

  In the pause that followed this pronouncement Pountney felt the headiness of success beginning to envelop him. So it was going to be all right, despite what everyone had said. This board of old geezers was, after all, big enough and bold enough to see the potential of his scheme to use canoes launched from submarines to attack enemy shipping. And there was plenty of that on the other side of the Channel at the moment, for the German preparations for the invasion were well advanced.

  As the pause continued, Pountney brimmed with excitement and gratitude towards the Admiral. Keyes was a genius, of course; the offensive spirit personified. You had only to read about the Zeebrugge raid of April ‘18 to know that. The old boy might be over seventy now, but he knew when to give the next generation their head.

  That innate caution that keeps only the best big-game hunters alive stopped Pountney from opening his mouth and reeling off details of the idea that had been maturing within him for months.

  The grandfather clock at the far end of the room filled the hot, silent afternoon as it laboriously marshalled its mechanism to strike four o’clock.

  Time for tea, thought Pountney feverishly, but would there be honey?

  Keyes waited for the clock to stop whirring and striking, then laid down the pencil he had been toying with.

  There was something about this deliberate gesture that alerted Pountney. It alerted him just as a snapping twig had that time in the Serengeti when the old lioness had broken cover: a yellow streak, a bolt out of the blue.

  Now Pountney tensed, suddenly expecting trouble, just as he had tensed on that peaceful, beautiful day in the Kenyan bush; but now, as then, he was not exactly sure what the trouble would be or from what direction it would come. In the Serengeti he had instantly snapped the safety-catch off his .475 Mannlicher and raised the rifle’s polished butt to his shoulder; now he could only grip his hands behind his back and wait.

  The old lioness had come, it seemed, from nowhere, charging with a snarl that had turned his blood to ice. Now Keyes did rather the same by leaning forward and surprising even those around the table with the vehemence of his words.

  ‘But lookee, Lieutenant Pountney, I’m not going to waste my precious time and my even more precious resources on any old crackpot scheme that some foolhardy, hare-brained youth has dreamt up in his cups but not thought through. I hope that is plainly understood by you and all your “act first, think afterwards” friends.’

  Pountney swallowed his disappointment. Silly old farts, the lot of them, he railed inwardly. They were all fighting the last war, if not the one before that. They didn’t understand that it was a different world now.

  He pictured again as he stood stolidly silent the piles of dead civilians in the Norwegian streets and the obscene, swaggering arrogance of the German SS Untersturmführer he had captured, and felt his teeth gritting. It was a very different world. He remembered the recent statement in the House of Commons by a Government minister that a certain German target had not been bombed because it was private property, and felt a derisive laugh swell within him. There would be no gentlemanly tactics this time round, no chivalrous conduct. This war wasn’t going to be won on the playing fields of Eton. It was going to be a bloody, no-holds-barred affair.

  As well as seeing the enemy in action in Norway, Pountney also knew from what had happened when the German Panzers had swept into Holland, Belgium and France in May: this time round they were fighting common killers, Swastika-toting criminals who murdered civilians and unarmed prisoners of war without a second thought.

  The clock intruded on the silence, ticking the moments away with a steady, maddening rhythm, and Pountney felt an overwhelming impulse to tell this old fossil where to get off. But again his highly developed instinct for self-preservation reined him back and he swallowed the protest Keyes had been deliberately trying to provoke. When it didn’t come, the Admiral smiled slightly. He had been right, he told himself with the satisfaction that the elderly gain from a correct judgement: the lad had restraint and discipline as well as plenty up top.

  So far so good.

  Keyes said crisply: ‘However, I don’t put your idea in that category, Pountney. In fact, I quite like it and I can see that you have given it mature consideration.
But I must have proof. From the proposition you have put to us, you obviously understand that, and I must say that makes me feel inclined to listen to you further. But you do understand that even if you succeed in the little stunt you propose, the odds against you getting the go-ahead are high? Very high?’

  A surge of excitement passed through Pountney like an electric current, just as it had when he had calmly stood his ground in the Serengeti. Then he had deliberately avoided squeezing the Mannlicher’s double-pressure trigger until the lioness had been so close that he swore he had smelt her feral heat. He was, he knew, a gambler at heart.

  ‘Yes, sir. I understand.’

  ‘Very well. Let battle commence. We meet again at nine tomorrow morning. Thank you, gentlemen. It’s time for tea.’

  Pountney swore under his breath. The wind had switched from its prevailing direction, the south-west, to the south-east, so that the water in Dover harbour no longer had the protection of the long, curved sweep of the granite breakwater. Instead, the freshening July breeze blew steadily and directly through the harbour entrance, out of which the tide was ebbing strongly. The effect of wind against tide ruffled the normally flat-calm surface into a chop that occasionally glittered white out of the darkness. It wasn’t much, but propelling a canoe through any kind of a sea was an extra chore Pountney could have done without.

  He grasped his companion’s elbow and whispered in his ear: ‘Which direction do you reckon the shore patrol will come from?’

  Lieutenant Philip Ayton, Royal Marines, as fair-haired and as slight as Pountney was dark and broad-shouldered, pointed to the right.

  Ayton had met Pountney when the young Royal Marine officer, as part of the Marine detachment aboard the cruiser Sheffield, had been sent ashore to bolster Norwegian Army units around Namsos. Later, in the heat of battle, Ayton and some of his men had become separated from the rest. So they had joined one of the Army’s Independent Companies – the forerunners of the Commandos that Keyes was now forming – which had counted Pountney among its number. Shortly afterwards Ayton had met Pountney in a snow-filled ditch which had been under fire from a German machine-gun nest. There it had been Ayton’s cool restraint, showing maturity beyond his years, which had, in Pountney’s mind, undoubtedly saved both their lives. He had never told Ayton that – Pountney wasn’t a man who praised others easily – but he had noted it with approval.