The Captain was handling his ship, watching the Italian gunnery and observing the effect of his own. He turned and looked aft; the other cruisers had broken through the smoke screen and were blazing away at the Italian line, a chain of Davids attacking Goliaths. He turned his attention forward again; that was where the destroyers would launch their attack as soon as the Italians were fully distracted by the light cruisers. It was a matter for the nicest judgement on the part of the destroyer leader, for the cruisers could not be subjected for too long to the fire of the Italian battle line. In the very nature of things, by pure laws of chance, one or other of those innumerable salvoes must strike home at last; he ordered a new change of course, and a sudden flash of thought set him smiling grimly again as it crossed his mind momentarily that perhaps, if the Italian spotters were rattled and the Italian gunnery officers unskilful, the ‘short’ might be corrected as if it were an ‘over’ and he might be steering right into the salvo instead of away from it. There was no predicting what unnerved men might do. But still it certainly could not be worse than pure chance, and the sea was wide and the spread even of an Italian salvo was small; the Captain’s sane and sanguine temperament reasserted itself. Despite that tremendous din, with Artemis rolling in a beam sea, and with a dozen factors demanding his attention and his calculation, and in face of appalling odds it was necessary that he should remain both clear-headed and cheerful.
Jerningham behind the Captain felt physically exhausted. The noise and the nervous strain were wearing him down. This was the third time Artemis had emerged from the shelter of the smoke screen to run the gauntlet of the Italian salvoes. How many more times would they have to do this – how many more times would they be able to? He was tired, for many emotions had shaken him that day, from terror under the morning’s bombing attack to exasperation at reading Dora Darby’s letter, and thence to exultation after the first successful attack. Exultation was gone now, and he only knew lassitude and weariness. He felt he would give anything in the world if only this frightful din would stop and the terrible danger would cease. The hand which held the rail beside him was cramped with gripping tight, and his throat was so dry that although he tried to swallow he could not do so. His eyes were dry too, or so they felt – his lids wanted to droop down over them and seemed to be unable to do so because of the friction with the dry surface. He was caught between the upper millstone of the Captain’s inflexible will and the nether millstone of the Italian invulnerability.
It was a six-inch shell that hit the cruiser eventually, fired perhaps, from the Italian flagship’s secondary armament, or maybe a chance shot from one of the cruisers. The chances of dynamics dictated that it did not deal the Artemis nearly as severe a shock as the previous hit had done, although it caused far more damage. It struck the ship’s side a yard above the water line abreast of ‘X’ turret, and it penetrated the main deck as it burst, flinging red-hot fragments of steel all round it. Beneath the main deck there was No. 7 fuel tank containing fifty tons of oil fuel, and the shell ripped it open as it set everything ablaze. Oil welled up into the blaze and blazed itself, and the heat generated by the fire set more and more of the expanding oil welling up to feed the fire. The roll of the ship sent the burning oil running over the decks, turning the after-part of the ship into one mass of flames.
It was not merely the oil which burnt; it was not merely No. 7 fuel tank which was ripped open by the flying red-hot steel. Inboard of where the shell struck was ‘X’ turret, and from ‘X’ turret downwards to the bottom of the ship extended the ammunition supply arrangements for the turret – the lobby below the gunhouse and the magazine below the lobby. Fragments of the shell came flying through that thin steel of the bulkhead of ‘X’ turret lobby, and with the fragments came the flame of the explosion. The rating at the shell ring, the rating at the ammunition hoist, fell dead at their posts, killed by the jagged steel, and the petty officer in charge of the lobby, and the other ratings survived them only by a second. They died by fire, but it was a quick death. One moment they were alive and hard at work; the next, and the cordite charge in the hoist had caught alight and was spouting flames which filled full the whole interior of the lobby. One quick breath, and the men who took that breath fell dead. It was their dead bodies upon which the flame then played, so hot that the bodies were burned away in smoke and gas during the few seconds that the ammunition blaze lasted. Lobby and crew were wiped out; of the crew nothing remained – nothing – and of the lobby only the red-hot steel box, its sides warped and buckled with the heat.
On the bridge the shock of the blow passed nearly unfelt; the crash of the explosion nearly unheard. Jerningham saw the Chief Yeoman of Signals, on the wing of the bridge, looking anxiously aft. Where Jerningham stood the funnels and superstructure blocked the view astern, and he walked to the side and leaned over, craning his neck to look aft. Dense black smoke was pouring out of the side of the ship and was being rolled by the wind towards the enemy, and as Jerningham looked he saw massive flames sprouting at the root of the smoke, paling as a trick of the wind blew the smoke away, reddening as the smoke screened the sunshine from them. It was a frightening sight.
‘Turn two points to starboard, pilot,’ said the Captain to the Navigating Lieutenant; he was still handling his ship to avoid the shells raining round her, unconscious of what had happened. Jerningham saluted to catch his attention, and the Captain turned to him.
‘Ship’s on fire aft, sir,’ said Jerningham. His voice quavered, and was drowned as he spoke by the roar of the guns. He repeated himself, more loudly this time, and the need to speak more loudly kept his voice steady. It was two full seconds before the Captain spoke, and then it was only one word, which meant nothing.
‘Yes?’ said the Captain.
‘Pretty badly, apparently, sir,’ said Jerningham. Exasperation at the Captain’s dullness put an edge to his voice.
‘Very good, Jerningham, thank you,’ said the Captain.
The guns bellowed again, their hot blast whirling round the bridge.
‘The reports will come in soon,’ said the Captain. ‘Pilot, turn four points to port.’
On the instant he was immersed again in the business of handling the ship. The destroyers were at this very moment dashing out of their ambush round the end of the smoke screen, and this was the time for them to be given all possible support. As long as the guns would fire, as long as the ship would answer her helm, she must be kept in the fighting line – for that matter she must be kept in the fighting line anyway, if for no other reason than to attract to herself as much of the Italian fire as possible. The fact that she was a mass of flames aft did not affect the argument. Whether she was doomed to blow up, or whether eventually she was going to sink, had no bearing on the present. She would or she would not. Meanwhile, there went the destroyers.
The Captain fixed his glasses on them. The attack had been well judged, and the destroyers were racing down to meet the Italians on a course converging at an acute angle. They were going at their highest speed – even at this distance the Captain could see their huge bow-waves, brilliant white against the grey; and their sterns had settled down so deep in the troughs they ploughed in the surface as to be almost concealed. The White Ensigns streamed behind them, and the thin smoke from their funnels lay above the surface of the sea in rigid parallel bars.
The Captain swung his glasses back to the Italian fleet, and from there to the other cruisers steaming briskly along with their guns blazing; for the first time he saw the dense smoke which was pouring out of Artemis’s quarter. He saw it, but his mind did not register the sight – the decision to take no action about the ship being on fire had already been made. He changed the ship’s course again to dodge the salvoes and looked once more at the destroyers. His glasses had hardly begun to bear on them when he saw the sea all about them leap up into fountains – the Italians had at last opened fire on them. For a full minute of the necessary five that they must survive they had been unopposed. The d
estroyers began to zigzag; the Captain could see their profiles foreshortening first in one sense and then in the other as they turned from side to side like snipe under gunfire. Evasive action of that sort was a stern test of the gunners firing on them. Not merely was the range decreasing but the bearing was constantly altering – traversing a big gun back and forth to keep the sights on a little ship as handy as a destroyer, zigzagging under the unpredictable whim of her captain, was a chancy business at best.
It was important to note whether the Italian fire was accurate or not. The whole surface of the sea between the destroyers and the Italians was pock-marked with splashes, and far beyond the destroyers too. There were wild shots which threw up the sea hardly a mile from the Italians’ bows, and there were wild shots falling three miles astern of the destroyers; over the whole of that length and making a zone a mile and a half wide, a hundred guns were scattering five hundred shells every minute, but the splashes were clustered more thickly about the destroyers than anywhere else – that much at least could be said for the Italian gunnery.
There were flashes darting from the destroyers, too. They were banging away with their 4.7-inch popguns – peashooters would not be much less effective against the massive steel sides of the Italian battleships, but there was always the chance of a lucky hit. The leading destroyer vanished utterly in a huge pyramid of splashes, and the Captain gulped, but two seconds later she emerged unharmed, her guns still firing, jinking from side to side so sharply that her freeboard disappeared as she lay over.
Jerningham was at the Captain’s side again, with a report received by telephone.
‘ “X” turret reports they have flooded the magazine, sir,’ said Jerningham to the Captain’s profile.
‘Thank you,’ said the Captain without looking round.
If the after-magazine was flooded it would mean that the two guns in ‘X’ turret would be silent, that was all. There were still the four guns of ‘A’ and ‘B’ turrets in action, and four guns fired a large enough salvo for efficiency. Artemis would not blow up yet awhile, either; but as the Captain would not have varied his course of action even if he had been utterly certain that she was going to blow up in the next minute that did not matter.
The leading destroyer disappeared again in the splashes, and reappeared again miraculously unhurt. The second destroyer in the line swung round suddenly at right angles, her bows pointed almost straight for Artemis. A cloud of white steam enveloped her, and then a moment or two later her black bows crept out of it and she began to crawl slowly away, steam and smoke still pouring from her as she headed for the shelter of the smoke screen. It was the first casualty; some shell had hit her in the boiler-room presumably. The other five were still tearing towards their objective; the Captain swung his glasses back at the Italian line in time to see a bright flash on the side of the Italian flagship – indisputably a hit and not gunfire, for it was a single flash – but he did not know enough about the broadsides Artemis had been firing to be able to credit it either to his own ship or to the destroyers. ‘A’ and ‘B’ turrets were still firing away, but, amazingly, the ears were so wearied by the tremendous sound that they took no special note of it unless attention was specially directed upon the guns.
By now the destroyers must be nearly close enough to discharge their torpedoes. The Captain tried to estimate the distance between them and their objective. Six thousand yards, maybe. Five thousand, perhaps – it was difficult to tell at that angle. The officers in command had displayed all the necessary courage and devotion. And the Italian destroyers were creeping out ahead of the Italian battle line to meet them now – they had been left behind when the Italian fleet turned about to try and work round the smoke screen, and had been compelled to sheer away widely to get on the disengaged side, and had then had to waste all those precious minutes working their way up to the head of the line where they should have been stationed all along. At the first hint of a British destroyer attack they should have been ready to move forward to fend it off, engaging with their own class beyond torpedo range of the battle line. The Captain fancied that there was a bad quarter-hour awaiting the senior Italian destroyer officer if ever he made port; he would probably be unjustly treated, but a naval officer who expected justice was expecting too much.
The leading British destroyer was wheeling round now, and the others were following her example, turning like swallows. Presumably at that moment the torpedoes were being launched, hurled from the triple tubes at the Italian line. Thirty torpedoes, the Captain hoped, were now dashing through the water, twenty feet below the surface against the Italians – sixty thousand pounds’ worth of machinery thrown into the sea on the chance that five pounds’ worth of TNT might strike home; that was as typical of war as anything he knew; the dive bombers he had beaten off that morning were a hundred times more expensive still.
He kept his glasses on the Italian line so as to make sure of the effect of the torpedo attack, even while, in the midst of the deafening din, he continued to handle his ship so as to evade the enemy’s salvoes. He was wet through from the splash of a shell close overside, and his skin kept reporting to his inattentive mind the fact that it was clammy and cold, just as in the same way he had been listening to reports on the progress of the struggle to extinguish the fire aft. This was the crisis of the battle, the moment which would decide the fate of Malta and of the world. Whatever happened to that fire aft, he must keep his ship in action a little longer, keep his four remaining six-inch guns in action, not merely to cover the retirement of the destroyers but to out-face and out-brave that line of Italian capital ships.
22
From the Captain’s Report
…the ship sustained another hit…
When that six-inch shell struck Artemis’s side they were hardly aware of it forward on the bridge, but aft in ‘X’ turret there could be no misunderstanding of what had happened – they heard the crash and felt the jar of the explosion, smelt the suffocating stench of high explosive and burning fuel, and saw the red flames that raged round them. Beneath their feet in the gunhouse they felt the whole structure stir uneasily, like the first tremor of an earthquake, but the guns’ crews could not allow that to break the smooth rhythm of loading and firing – sliding shells and charges from the hoist to the breeches, inserting the tubes and masking the vents, closing the breeches and then swinging them open again. Yet something else broke that rhythm.
‘Hoist’s stopped working, Chief,’ reported Number Two at the right-hand gun.
‘Use the ready-use charges,’ said Allonby.
Three rounds for each gun were kept in ‘X’ turret in contemplation of such an emergency – enough for half a minutes’ firing. There is no point in keeping ammunition below the surface of the sea in the magazine and yet maintaining large quantitites of high explosive above decks behind a trivial inch of steel. And when dealing with high explosive – with cylinders of cordite that can spout flames a hundred feet long a second after ignition – thirty seconds is a long time.
Allonby bent to the steel voice pipe beside him which led down to the lobby beneath his feet. A blast of hot air greeted him, and he hastily restoppered the pipe, for actual flame might come through there. The turret walls were hot to the touch – almost too hot to touch; the gunhouse must be seated at that moment in a sea of flame. It was just as well they were firing off those ready-use rounds and getting rid of them the best possible way. The turret was filling with smoke so that they could hardly see or breathe. They could be suffocated or baked alive in this steel box; the party in the lobby below must have been killed instantly. The instinct of self-preservation would have driven Allonby and the guns’ crews out of ‘X’ turret the moment those red flames showed through the slits. It would be hard to believe that flight was actually the last thought that occurred to them, except that our minds are dulled by tales of heroism and discipline. We hear so many stories of men doing their duty that our minds are biased in that direction. The miracle of men stay
ing in the face of the most frightful death imaginable ceases to be a miracle unless attention is directly called to it. Undisciplined men, untrained men, would have seen those flames and felt that heat; they might have halted for one paralysed second, but the moment realization broke in upon them they would have fled in the wildest panic that nothing would have stopped – possibly not even the threat of a worse fate (if one could be imagined) than being baked to death in a steel box. In ‘X’ turret under Allonby’s leadership the thought of flight occurred to no one; they went on loading and reloading. Allonby had to take the decision that would make his turret utterly useless, even if the lobby and the hoist could be repaired; he had to relegate himself from being the proud captain of ‘X’ turret into the position of being a mere passenger at the same time as he put one-third of the main armament of Artemis out of action for good. He had to bear all the responsibility himself; with that fire blazing there was not even time to ask permission from the Gunnery Lieutenant.
Allonby seized the voice pipe to the magazine, and to his intense relief it was answered; Allonby knew Burney’s voice as he knew the voice of every man under his command.
‘Flood the magazine,’ said Allonby.
‘Flood the magazine?’
There was a question mark at the end of the sentence – it was not the usual Navy repetition of an order. The crash of the firing of the next round made Allonby pause for a second before he repeated himself, slowly and distinctly, making quite sure that he was understood. The last round was fired from the guns as he plugged the voice pipe.
‘Clear the turret,’ said Allonby to his men, and they began to scramble out, leaping, through the flames to safety as if it were some ceremonial worship of Moloch.
Allonby applied himself to the telephone. The Gunnery Lieutenant and the Transmitting Station must know at once that ‘X’ turret had ceased to fire; otherwise both the control and the spotting of the other guns would suffer. When he had finished that it was too late to escape from the turret, which was ringed with fire now and whose steel plates were red hot.