The White Guns (1989) Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 The Victors

  Chapter 2 And Then There Were Two

  Chapter 3 Twenty Crosses

  Chapter 4 Allies

  Chapter 5 Viewpoint

  Chapter 6 Reunion

  Chapter 7 Mayday

  Chapter 8 Yesterday's Enemy

  Chapter 9 Old Scars

  Chapter 10 Vodka Diplomacy

  Chapter 11 Out of Luck

  Chapter 12 The Last Watch

  Chapter 13 Without Fear or Favour

  Chapter 14 The Same Men?

  Chapter 15 Innocence

  Chapter 16 Until We Meet Again

  Chapter 17 Victims

  Chapter 18 A Promise Kept

  Chapter 19 White Guns

  Epilogue

  THE

  WHITE GUNS

  Douglas Reeman joined the Navy in 1941, where he was twice mentioned in dispatches. He did convoy duty in the Arctic and the North Sea, and later served in motor torpedo boats. As he says, 'I am always asked to account for the perennial appeal of the sea story, and its enduring interest for people of so many nationalities and cultures. It would seem that the eternal triangle of man, ship and ocean, particularly under the stress of war, produces the best qualities of courage and compassion, irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the conflict. The sea has no understanding of righteous or unjust causes. It is the common enemy respected by all who serve on it, ignored at their peril.'

  Apart from the many novels he has written under his own name, he has also written more than twenty historical novels featuring Richard and Adam Bolitho, under the pseudonym of Alexander Kent.

  Also by Douglas Reeman

  A Prayer for the Ship

  High Water

  Send a Gunboat

  Dive in the Sun

  The Hostile Shore

  The Last Raider

  With Blood and Iron

  H.M.S. 'Saracen'

  The Deep Silence

  Path of the Storm

  The Pride and the Anguish

  To Risks Unknown

  The Greatest Enemy

  Rendezvous – South Atlantic

  Go In and Sink!

  The Destroyers

  Winged Escort

  Surface with Daring

  Strike from the Sea

  A Ship Must Die

  Torpedo Run

  Badge of Glory

  The First to Land

  The Volunteers

  The Iron Pirate

  Against the Sea (non-fiction)

  In Danger's Hour

  Killing Ground

  The Horizon

  Sunset

  A Dawn Like Thunder

  Battlecruiser

  Dust on the Sea

  For Valour

  Twelve Seconds to Live

  Knife Edge

  THE

  WHITE GUNS

  DOUGLAS

  REEMAN

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781407010120

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books in 2007

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Copyright © Highseas Authors Ltd 1986

  Douglas Reeman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1989 by William Heinemann First published in paperback in 1990 by Pan Books

  Arrow Books

  The Random House Group Limited

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781407010120

  Version 1.0

  To Kim,

  the girl on the beach,

  with my love

  With this signature the German people

  and the German armed forces are,

  for better or worse,

  delivered into the victors' hands.

  Colonel-General Gustav Jodl

  after signing the German surrender

  to the Allies, May 1945.

  1

  The Victors

  The confined waters of the Baltic Sea have moods and hazards as varied as the countries which enclose it, from Finland in the north to the gentler shores of Denmark and the turbulent currents of the Kattegat which divides it from Sweden.

  This particular morning, with May just a few days old, was no exception; if anything, the air, chilling and heavy with damp, was hostile, as if it knew the reason for this day being different from any other.

  The early sunlight was masked by low clouds, and when it touched the sea's face it was hard and metallic, so that the water looked like burnished pewter. When the sun was hidden, the same sea appeared darker, the colour of lead.

  The small flotilla of vessels moving slowly south towards the approaches to Kiel Bay kept station close together, as if they too sensed the air of menace and uncertainty. Their engines, throttled down to hold the group in visual company at all times, rumbled across the water, and as an occasional glimpse of land loomed up to starboard the crews who stood to their action stations could hear the echoes thrown back from the shore.

  It was a place very few had been before, and only those old enough to have recalled the days of peace might have remembered or recognised the names on the chart.

  For this was May 1945, and after nearly six years of war British ships were penetrating the Baltic, where none but a handful of reckless submariners had been able to grope their way to carry their particular skills to the enemy's coastal convoys.

  This group of vessels was small but no less deadly. A pair of lithe motor gunboats, butting through the choppy water as if they resented being reined down from their spectacular thirty knots – more with a following wind as some claimed. A trio of motor launches, very similar in design with their low bridges and raked bows, but lacking the MGBs' formidable armament, followed by a long-funnelled salvage vessel. Dull grey like the clouds, all the hulls glistening in spray, guns manned as if expecting to be challenged.

  The leading MGB, her number 801 painted on either bow, might appear to any landsman to be as smart as the day she had first tasted salt water in 1942. But the old scars were still visible despite the paint. Three years of war at close quarters. Seeking out the enemy, E-Boats and other such vessels, whose crews were just as dedi cated and determined to win, or simply to survive. From Iceland to the Med, the English Channel and up to the North Sea, manned for the most part by hostilities-only officers and ratings, schoolboys and clerks, milk roundsmen and taxi drivers, they had proved in blood that they were more than able to adapt to the demands of war, despite the cost which had hit them harder than most.

  Lieutenant Vere Marriott, the commanding officer of MGB 801, rested his elbows on the screen and levelled his powerful binoculars on a spur of land; as he had done countless times, so many that they were beyond measure. He was twenty-six years old, and apart from getting the 'feel' of the navy in an elderly V & W class destroyer had spent all his time in Light Coastal Forces, in both MTBs and gunboats like this one. Covering the desert army in retreat along the North African coast, then turning to share the unbelievable change of fortune when the battered, bloodied veterans of the Eighth Army had stood firm at a place called El Alamein, a name which had previously been barely worth noting on any map or chart. After years of setbacks, both naval and military, their luck had changed. Rommel's crack Afrika Korps had been driven back. It never stopped until the German divisions were out of Africa and across to Sicily and Italy, harried all the way by craft like this one.

  Marriott half-listened to the muffled growl of the four great Packard engines and watched some bobbing wreckage drift slowly abeam.

  His had been a different command then. Once again he felt his stomach muscles contract as if anticipating a blow, his jaw tightening while he tried to push the memory from his mind.

  This should have been a different day. Eleven months since the great Allied invasion of Normandy, and now they were here, following the German coastline, heading for Kiel. A place often mentioned in news bulletins, being bombed around the clock but still able to hit back, to build and offer sanctuary to the U-Boats which for the second time in a generation had almost brought Britain to starvation and defeat.

  To most, Kiel was more legend than reality. Marriott recalled seeing a film before the war called The Spy in Black, with Conrad Veidt playing the Kaiser's U-Boat captain who had been chosen to penetrate Scapa Flow and attack the Grand Fleet. It was just a coincidence, perhaps, that Günther Prien had done exactly that in this war in U-47, and had torpedoed the battleship Royal Oak, and laid her on the bottom with great loss of life.

  He heard seaboots clattering up from the chartroom, which was hunched just forward of the square, open bridge.

  Sub-Lieutenant Mike Fairfax RNVR, second-in-command of MGB 801 but still weeks away from his twenty-first birthday, watched him gravely before saying, 'It feels different.'

  'Yes, Number One.' Marriott wanted to shake his hand, to laugh, even cry, but could find no proper emotion. All those faces, wiped away but not forgotten, the months and the years, the elation and the stark terror which tore at your guts like claws. It was over, they said. All but the actual signatures and the flag-waving.

  Germany had collapsed. The impossible dream was still as hard to face, let alone accept, as the fact of their own survival.

  Of course there was always Japan, the other theatre in the Pacific. Errol Flynn's war. But that was later. This was here and now.

  He glanced over the screen at the forecastle, the power-operated six-pounder with Leading Seaman Townsend testing the sights, the slender muzzle moving very slightly from bow to bow. Was that how he felt?

  Like other MGBs of her class she carried a company of thirty officers and ratings. The boat had served them well and was paying for it. The hull had been holed and patched many times. Exploding bombs from the aircraft nobody had spotted in time. Enemy tracer, cannon fire and white-hot splinters which could rip a man apart. The thick pusser's paint covered a multitude of sins. But her engines were good and she could still respond when roused. Stronger than anything faster. Faster than anything stronger. That combination had saved their bacon many times. For her size she was heavily armed. Along her one hundred and fifteen feet she mounted two six-pounders, the slender-barrelled Oerlikons and a selection of machine guns both heavy and light, as well as a few unlawful ones which they had 'come by' along the way.

  Fairfax gauged his mood with practised care. He had joined the boat just before last Christmas after serving as third-hand in a smaller Vosper boat at Felixstowe. He could still recall his dismay when he had been told who his next skipper was to be.

  Lieutenant Vere Marriott, holder of the DSC and Bar, had been one of the legends in Coastal Forces. But that had been earlier, before D-Day and the Normandy invasion. In these boats life was fast and furious. When they had nothing more interesting to write about, the newspapers would sometimes describe these young veterans as heroes. It usually brought derision from Fairfax's companions. In their kind of warfare there were only two sorts. The quick and the dead.

  Marriott had been twenty-six. That had seemed incredibly old to Fairfax. His friends had suggested that Marriott might be over the hill. It had not helped.

  But, in the months since then, Fairfax had come to feel something for his grave-eyed skipper which was closer to love than mere respect. The latter seemed insignificant when he had seen what Marriott had done to weld a mixed collection of characters into a team, into one company. Many of the hands had come from other boats. Men who had seen their comrades drown or die in a dozen different ways. Those who had trod water and had watched their boats take that last dive. In their small, compact world each man relied on the other. He had to. There was nobody else when the flak started to fly.

  Marriott had spared nobody, least of all his first lieutenant. The real test had been when they had encountered E-Boats off the Hook of Holland. They had been sent to cover an attack by MTBs on a small enemy convoy. With day and night air raids reducing Germany's railways and roads to a shambles, such convoys had become doubly important. It had been a quick, savage embrace, with two E-Boats and one MTB blasted apart, lighting up the night sky in their death agony before darkness closed in again, and friend and foe alike ran like assassins for their bases at full throttle.

  Marriott's behaviour then had taught Fairfax much about his commander. He had handled the boat like a thoroughbred, not one which had almost come to the end of her useful life.

  Marriott felt he was being watched and thought he knew what Fairfax was thinking. He liked Fairfax. He was bright, cheerful, and good at his job. In action he behaved like a veteran, but he succeeded in looking like a hurt schoolboy when Marriott had torn him off a strip. Schoolboy. He had been just that when he had joined up for the duration.

  Marriott had sworn he would never allow himself to get too close to anyone else again. Not after... He slammed the door on his thoughts and said, 'I wonder how Cuff is getting on back there?'

  Lieutenant Leo Glazebrook, known as 'Cuff, commanded another of the MGBs which had been detached earlier to investigate a W/T report of small craft moving along the coast.

  Cuff was one of the originals of the flotilla. Marriott had bumped into him several times during his service. In the Channel, then out to the Med where he had been sent to run guns to Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia who were fully stretched fighting their own war against the German and Italian occupation forces.

  Then Normandy. Cuff was always around. Marriott bit his lip. So what was it, envy? Because Cuff was ending the war in his own boat, one he had commanded for over two years – a lifetime in this regiment?

  Marriott glanced at the men around him, taut and tense, watching the sea, the sky, everything.

  Why could he not accept this boat as his own? He looked at the coxswain as he stood swaying slightly behind the wheel. A one-badge petty officer named Robert Evans, or so it said in his paybook. Another mystery. A bloody good coxswain, always the vital link between officers and ratings. He had dark hair and a swarthy skin, a firm mouth, and eyes which were very steady, unnerving sometimes when he looked at a defaulter or some skate who had overstayed his run ashore. Like black olives. Originally Welsh, but one who had lived for much of his life in the C hannel Islands.

  Evans had worked with the Special Boat Squadron, the cloak-and-dagger brigade. He spoke fluent French, perhaps because of his time in the Channel Islands, but there was something more to him than his papers explained. How did he feel now? Jersey, his home, had been the only part of Britain to be overrun and occupied by the Germans. If he had family there he said nothing of them. A withdrawn, remote man, but one who was respected by the youthful company and even the hard men who had been no strangers to the navy's detention quarters.