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Porpoising

Just above me, outside the hull, lay the six-foot-long towing bar, lodged in a tube in the upper casing. I think it must have been held firm by a shackle at the inboard end, for there was some play between the bar and the tube. As the big sub gathered way - I realised that the transfer must now be complete and the dinghy hauled inboard and deflated an stowed - this bar began clanking above me, reverberating through the casing with each dip and rise of the swell, and sending echoes through the hull. Even when we had reached our maximum towing speed of eight knots, the bar did not settle down into one position and stay there. The swell, which I could feel was increasing, caused the pull of the tow to vary in angle both vertically and horizontally. The X craft began swaying, swerving, dipping and breasting the next swell with sufficient motion to make me feel grateful to be lying prone, for I guessed I would not be seasick provided I stayed horizontal.

All I could do was doze uneasily as we slid along and across the swell during the rest of the night. Then the hatch opened, and Buck called to me to come and have some breakfast. He was trying to fry eggs on a primus stove, and boil water for tea; there was some bread, rather stale, and margarine. Squatting on the lip of the hatchway, I gave what help I could. The smell of the eggs was turning my stomach, for the seaway had much increased; it was hard to stop liquids from spilling about, and the primus had to be held steady. The control room seemed a lot damper than the battery space, and rather colder too; breakfast was a meal without comfort, and so I was glad to regain the floorboards in the forward compartment once more.

Dawn had broken, and it was time for X8 to dive. I heard the vents ease and the air escape, and looked forward to calm running underwater, after enduring the seaway on the surface; the motion of the X craft through the swell had been strange to me and had made me feel quite queasy. The waves stopped slapping at the casing; we were below, and sinking. Soon I could scarcely feel the swell. The bow down angle held and held. Suddenly there was a heavy clank as the towing bar shifted; we were running level, but I guessed, from creakings that seemed to come from the hull, quite deep. Another clonk, and the nose of the craft was pointing up. Up and up we rose, till the swell began swaying us, and suddenly the waves were striking the casing again, and the swell had us in its grip. But only for a few seconds; then we were pointing down again, running deeper until the clank from the towing bar once more reversed the trend, and we were rising. This time we didn't break surface, and I thought that Jack, on the hydroplanes, must be getting the hang of how to counter the porpoising we had been doing.

For a minute or so we ran even, and not very deep; but, imperceptibly to begin with, and then with increasing velocity, the plunge into the depths took hold of us, and would not let us go till we had reached an angle of vertical tow sufficient to break that arc of the porpoising motion. Then we would be once again in the grip of the upward movement, and it was and go whether or not we would surface.

The truth of the matter seemed to be that being towed simply hadn't been practised enough. Depth-keeping under your own power, with the screw acting directly on the after planes of the X craft, with a direct sense of the trim of the vessel - whether she was slightly bow heavy or stern heavy; whether the buoyancy of the whole craft was neutral, or a trifle positive or negative - none of this was possible when the power came from another submarine, through a two or three hundred foot long manilla, attached to an iron bar that in itself made a profound difference to the weight distribution along the length of the vessel. We were under-rehearsed. Now, on the operation itself, we were having to discover by trial and error how to maintain depth while being towed. Jack Smart had complained about the porpoising, now we knew, with a vengeance, what he meant, for we were having to handle the effects of a long swell into the bargain, and worsening sea conditions.

After a while the hatch opened and Buck called me in to take the wheel; the ERA crawled forward into the space I had vacated to get some rest. I twisted my body into the tiny seat, got the bearing, and tried to hold it as best I could, though the effects of the swell when we rode shallow often made me yaw off course to begin with. Once I had got the sense of when to correct the craft's head when the swell took us, Buck went aft to relieve Jack, whom I had noticed earlier looking flushed and angry as he wrestled with the controls, at times cursing and swearing at the way X8 was behaving.
'I’ll take over for awhile now, Jack.' Buck stated.
'Yeah, you can take the cowson!' Jack replied.
He half-rose, keeping his hands on the wheel till Buck had got installed, then squeezed onto a diminutive bunk at the entrance to the engine room, drawing a blanket over himself as he did. Buck was calmer than Jack, but no more successful at depth-keeping; there seemed to be no effective way of controlling the porpoising. My job on the wheel, steering a given bearing, was a great deal easier than Buck's. He was seated before the inclinometer (showing the angle of dive or rise) and the depth gauge, and trying to balance the angle of tow against the supposed trim, and counteract the effect of the swell. It was a strange sensation, being dragged and yanked along below those northern waters, now deep, now shallow, not really in command of the craft in which we were penned.
I visioned the depths below us: green, dark green, shading into black. The bottom was about a. thousand feet down; we were in no danger of striking any rocks when we plunged. The risk was much more that the hull, or some valve or joint, would start, owing to the enormous strains that the craft was being subjected to during each dive. Or that the explosive charges on either side of the craft, also fitted with buoyancy chambers, would themselves give way and suddenly make us much heavier …

At length Buck wearied of the struggle with the planes, and took us up to the surface by putting some air in the side tanks. It was time for lunch, and we needed fresh air for the primus, as well as for our lungs. We broke open one of our emergency rations - an escape kit for travelling across Norway - and tried to make soup from a cube that had been much praised by the army men. It made a thin liquid, tasting faintly of meat; that, with bread and marge and tea, constituted our meal. It was a poor enough affair, but I couldn't get much down at all, for the swaying and bucking across what was now quite a rough swell made me drowsy and heavy, signs of the onset of seasickness.

As we sat or crouched, warming our hands on the mugs of tea, the ERA remarked: 'There's battery gas in that forward compartment.'
'Much of it?' Buck enquired.
'Enough tae gee me a thick heed.'
'Jack Smart thought there might be a cell cracked, ' Buck commented. 'Notice anything, Lefty?'
'Bit of a sweet smell, I thought,' I replied. I had no idea what battery gas smelt like, nor what its effects were.
'Shall I go and have a look?' asked Jack Marsden.
'Yeah, see what you think.'
Jack crawled through and rummaged around. He came back to report that he thought he could smell battery gas, but had no idea how much damage there might be to one of more of the cells. It would be too long a job, and probably impossible to carry out: it would mean taking up the floorboards and identifying which of the units was cracked. With all the extra gear now stowed in that small space, and the movement of the craft in the seaway, or plunging and rising when dived, the risk of accidents with uncovered batteries would be great. So we simply left it, and I returned to lie on the floorboards in there.

When we dived again, I noticed that the depth-keeping was even more erratic than before. Sometimes the downward plunges would go on and on and on, so that I took to using my will, quite ineffectually, as if to help Jack overcome the force dragging us into the depths. The craft strained and creaked at the bottom of these porpoisings, so much so that I began now to fear that each of them might be our last, and my senses became keyed up to a higher pitch of attentiveness, listening for all the noises, trying to identify them, wondering whether it would be the wet and dry chamber that would first succumb, through its hatch seating or its inlet valve, and admit the first fatal inrush of water. Buck must have had a similar idea, for he put his head through to shut the hatch between the battery space and the wet and dry, which could only be done from the outside. Now if the wet and dry gave, we could at least try pumping it out, and so retrieve our buoyancy. But the plunging continued as bad as ever, and finally I heard and felt that we had come to the surface again, and were staying there.

Explosion

Buck had me come back into the control room. I noticed that Jack and the ERA were both looking glum and pre-occupied.
'We're in this together,' Buck began, 'so I want us to decide what to do by talking it through.'
I felt relieved to be out of the battery space and freed of the anxiety of listening to the creaking of the hull underwater; but I sensed that something very serious had occurred.
'I've checked carefully,’ Buck continued, ‘and there's no doubt of it: we've developed a list to starboard. It's not our tanks, so it must be the charges, or rather the charge on the starboard side.'
That might explain why the craft had been so difficult to control, I thought.
'Each of us has listened to see if he can hear water moving about in the buoyancy compartment. Now we want you to listen too, Lefty.'
I leaned over and put my ear to side of the vessel; all I could hear were confused noises of the waves slapping against the casing; and said so.
'We could hear it clearer when we were below,' Jack said, 'especially when we changed the bow angle.'
That seemed to me to make sense.
'What does it mean, if the charge has flooded - that it’s been put out of action?'
Buck looked down and paused. 'Worse than that, I'm afraid. The book of words -’ he flourished a pamphlet ‘- says that water in the charges may set a chemical change going which ... can lead to the charge exploding.'
I looked up at him to make sure I had grasped his meaning. 'You mean it might go off any minute?’
'If there's water in the charge, and if the chemical change has begun,' Jack repeated. He was perhaps seeking refuge in the if's.
'But we don't know for sure about there being water in the charge,' I countered. 'And perhaps a leak into its buoyancy chamber isn't dangerous. Does it say anything specifically about that?'
'Only what I've read out,' Buck replied.

A silence followed, each of us perhaps wondering if the charge was going to blow us all to smithereens in the next second. There was no knowing; only uncertain surmise.
'Put it this way,' Buck began again. 'If that starboard charge goes off, then we've bought it, and the whole operation for the Lützow is scuppered. Also the Seanymph may be badly damaged. That’s a risk we daren’t take. But if we ditch this charge, we still have one of them left to use. And two tons of amatol ought to be enough to blow a big hole in the guts of our target.'
'I'm for ditching,' Jack said.
'Lefty?'
'Me too.'
The ERA merely nodded agreement.
'That's it then,' Buck concluded.
He turned to another page in the instruction booklet.
'We'll set it to safe, and then ditch.'
After reading and checking with Jack, he turned the setting dial round to safe; I wondered if that was faulty too, and after a moment would trigger off the explosion. But all was quiet. Then Buck took hold of the winding out wheel, a large metal ring with spokes, standing out from the side of the craft inwards into the control room, roughly amidships. With Jack's help, for it was stiff to work, they turned it round, many revolutions. This was the action we would have performed during an attack, while under the target. It struck me as clumsy and slow: I had imagined that the charges would be laid with the X craft in motion. It took so long to wind the charge out, that it wasn’t clear when it had fallen away. We had to assume that when the wheel wouldn't move any further, the charge was gone.

Even on the surface, we noticed the righting of X8, however. Since she was more or less on an even keel now, that showed that the charge had taken in water, a good deal too, and had been jettisoned. The tension eased, and now we hoped that things would go better, for we felt X8 had had its share of bad luck, what with the tow parting, and losing contact, and wasting time in finding her again - and now jettisoning half our attacking power. Buck reported on what had been done to Jack Oakley, explaining the reasons for the decision. We were about to prepare for diving again - I was still in the control room - when there was a muffled explosion in the sea aft of us, and a modest shock wave hit us, lifting us a little, and reverberating in the hull.

We looked at each other, one thought in our minds.
'She went off!' Jack exclaimed. ‘We set her to safe, but she blew up!’
'Can't have been anything else,' Buck commented.
'No damage to us, anyhow,' Jack said, with some relief.
I looked at him, suddenly aware of what he must be thinking. If we had delayed another fifteen minutes, we would all have been dead by now; for the safe setting had not in fact worked. The chemical reaction must have been started, and that was what had caused the explosion.
Buck was already calling Seanymph. They had heard the bang too, but there was no damage; just relief that we had acted when we did, and not later.

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