Read Online Back to Battle by Max Hennessy - Free Book Online Page A

still remained the darling of the British people, who considered it its bulwark against aggression, the men in it knew that out of fifteen capital ships only two were of post-1918 vintage, and Kelly had long suspected in any case that battleships’ bulk and low speed made them vulnerable to air and undersea attack, so that they could never be exposed without a fleet of smaller vessels as escort. Yet, because only a battleship could confront a battleship and since the Germans had built them too, blue-water admirals, who believed that ack-ack was better for ships than fighters, had been glad to build them in reply and they would have to be housed in secure anchorages until needed, absorbing thousands of men who might usefully have been employed on escort duties. It had not even been a battleship which had scored their only real success to date, the crippling of the pocket battleship, Graf Spee, in December, but three cruisers, every one of them outgunned.
    It was a far grimmer war that was being fought by the lighter forces – and even they were far from perfect for their job. A destroyer was not an efficient escort vessel because her torpedoes were pointless for that duty, her low-angle guns valueless against aeroplanes, and her tremendous speed rarely needed. Her enormous engines occupied space that was needed for fuel and she required an unnecessarily large crew. The new escort sloops and corvettes that had been planned, though slower and smaller, were not only less cramped, but also less complex, and they could be built much more easily, while their armament laid stress chiefly on anti-aircraft weapons and depth charges.
    From Feudal’s bridge, Kelly could see the ship’s company closed up at action stations. There were many newcomers among them, still going through the shocks of the changeover from peace to war. This war was a different one from the last, with different problems, though war itself remained the same and still brought out the same old human imperfections. The Hostilities-Only men were still struggling to become part of a crew. There still weren’t many of them, but to them everything was horrifyingly new – the sea, the ship, even seasickness – and, with the battle fleets taking all the best destroyers, only the old ones were left for escort duties, so that they were all desperately tired, desperately dirty and desperately overstretched.
    His mind busy, even as he was alert to what was going on around him, Kelly glanced to starboard. The old W-class ship, Wrestler, now converted to escort vessel, was just heaving herself out of a trough. To port was the armed merchantman, Sappho, formerly a Lampert and Holt ship. Bringing up the rear of the convoy was another converted destroyer, Vandyke, together with the corvette, Sanderling. By the standards of the day the convoy was well-protected.
    To Kelly and everybody else who had taken the anti-submarine course at Portland, it had always seemed that a defensive policy was the only one that could be applied to convoy work: make the U-boats come to the escort, rather than form escorts into hunting groups to search the vast ocean spaces for the enemy. Perhaps the desire to assume the offensive had been implicit in everything the Admiralty had done since the signal, ‘Winston is back,’ had been sent out in 1939, but at a time when the submariners were also still learning, not only were the hunting groups achieving negligible successes but they were certainly not using their new radar sets properly by thundering about the sea after stale scents and false periscopes sighted by aircrews, trawler skippers and old gentlemen fishing from the ends of piers. Judging by the reports that had to be investigated, the sea was teeming with German U-boats, and the radar operators – still nervously believing their sets made them impotent – were new enough to the game to be regularly sick over their dials.
    Kelly’s own group had originally included the destroyers,