The pressure was being applied now, and the screw tightened. The heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen was at sea, and with her the world’s heaviest and most modern battleship, the Bismarck.

As the British ships weighed and made for the gates of Scapa Flow—the booms opening up before them and the heavy nets sliding through the water—the men with the cold, un- glamorous task of protecting the great anchorage watched them go. It was a little over a year since Lieutenant Gunther Prien had penetrated Scapa Flow in the U-47 and sunk the battleship Royal Oak. He had come through a gap in the defenses of Holm Sound, noting in his log as he did so: "It is disgustingly light. The whole bay is lit up.” Those weaknesses had been eliminated, but the watchers and defenders had to remember that whenever the fleet went out and the gates were open, there was always a chance of an enemy getting in.

The darkened ships slid past, silently hush-hushing through the water. The destroyers were first, moving rakish and graceful to take up their screening positions outside. Big ships were coming out too.

Dialogue varies little from one war area to another, or from one war to another for that matter.

"What’s up, mate?”

“Some flap on. Fleet’s going out.”

“’Ope no one ’its the gate. Last time it cost us twenty-four hours solid to fix things up.”

On board the destroyers there was the inevitable grousing of small ship sailors, who tend to have the same feelings about battleships as a collie dog does about its sheep.

“Always us. Only got in yesterday.”

“There’s a big panic on.”

“They spends weeks swinging round the buoy, and as soon as they goes to sea we ’as to go too.”

“They can’t look after themselves.”

“This’ll wreck the chiefs’ billiards party in their second-best saloon!”

“They’re both, coming out.”

“They” was always the battleships to destroyer men—a sardonic “they” reserved for capital ships, aircraft carriers, and the remote figures of the senior officers and politicians who directed the war.

Both of them were coming out—the new Prince of Wales, and the old, the world-famous Hood. Their silhouettes were visible now against the lines of the sea and the islands: the long sweep of their foredecks, the banked ramparts of their guns, and the hunched shoulders of bridges and control towers.

We shall never see their like again, but no one who has ever

watched them go by will forget the shudder that they raised along the spine. The big ships were somehow as moving as the pipes heard a long way off in the hills. There was always a kind of mist about them, a mist of sentiment and of power. Unlike aircraft, rockets, or nuclear bombs, they were a visible symbol of power allied with beauty—a rare combination.

Achates, Antelope, Anthony, Echo, Electra, and Icarus—the destroyers went past—their names culled from myth, legend, and history—then the new battleship, and then the ship that was almost a legend herself, the Hood.

She was 860 feet long, with a displacement of 44,600 tons, a battle cruiser designed before Jutland had been fought, and the ship that above all others had represented British sea power in the harbors and oceans of the world during the uneasy interwar years.

In the destroyers, when they were “washing down” heavily, or when shore leave had been long in coming, or on any other occasion when the matelot was fed up with his lot, he would sigh for a comfortable billet in one of those leviathans that—to his way of thinking—never seemed to go to sea. His chorus was always the same:

Roll on the Nelson, the Rodney, the Hood—

This one-funneled basket is no mucking good!

Although they might despise battleship life and feel themselves superior sailors to the big ship men, there were times when they thought nostalgically of the comforts, the canteens, and the large messdecks of the Hood and her sisters.

The ships were all heading out now into the night and the sea. The boom gates were closing, the normal antisubmarine patrols were resuming their stations, and aboard the ships left behind, in the shore stations, and in the humble boom-defense vessels, routine went on. It was just after midnight and the watches had changed over. There were cups of cocoa in the galleys, and men

. . 19

were pulling off their sea boots and stockings before rolling into bunks or hammocks. The islands were pools of darkness against the glow of the northern sky, and the night wind smelled of the turf as well as the sea.

Beyond the confined waters of the Flow the destroyers were skating into position, moving on to bow and beam and quarter of the giants. Their asdic* (Sonar) sets were combing the dark fathoms, and their lookouts were posted. Duty watch helmsmen and telegraphists were relieving the Special Sea Dutymen who had taken the ships out of harbor, and navigating officers were putting down a last fix before leaving the shore line.

The force was bound for Hvalfiord in Iceland, there to refuel. Then, under the command of Vice-Admiral Holland in the Hood, they would proceed again to sea and cover the northern approaches to the Atlantic. Theirs was the force detailed to watch the cold, treacherous Denmark Strait.

Dropping the Seal Islands of the Orkneys behind them, the ships turned to the northwest and increased speed. Their bow waves began to crest and shine against the dark gray paint, and their stems settled deeper as the screws took up their thrust against the sea. Directors and turrets began to turn. Voices echoed over a complexity of wires or down the simple bell mouths of bridge pipes. The sky was cloudy and the wind came from the north.

 

 

 

 

Birth of a Ship

It was a long time since she had been built—another world almost. But it was similar in one respect—it was a world at war.

Lord Fisher had been First Sea Lord when she was laid down. From the Admiralty, his pen spluttering with indignation and the underlinings coming fast and furious on the paper, he had written to Admiral Beatty on March 5, 1915:

I’ve had a big fight to get you Pakenham [to command the Second Battle-cruiser Squadron]—fierce endeavours in other directions.