Kniha Alistaira MacLeana H.M.S. Ulyssess vyšla poprvé v roce 1955 a byla dokonce zfilmována. Děj se na základě vlastních zkušeností autora zabývá osudy příslušníků Královského námořnictva za druhé světové války.
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A
ghost-ship, almost, a legend. The Ulysses was also a young ship, but she had
grown old in the Russian Convoys H.U.33B and on the Arctic patrols. She had
been there from the beginning, and had known no other life. At first she had
operated alone, escorting single ships or groups of two or three: later, she
had operated with corvettes and frigates, and now she never moved without her
squadron, the 14th Escort Carrier group.
But
the Ulysses had never really sailed alone. Death had been, still was, her
constant companion. He laid his ringer on a tanker, and there was the erupting
hell of a high-octane detonation; on a cargo liner, and she went to the bottom
with her load of war supplies, her back broken by a German torpedo; on a
destroyer, and she knifed her way into the grey-black depths of the Barents
Sea, her still racing engines her own executioners; on a U-boat, and she
surfaced violently to be destroyed by gunfire, or slid down gently to the
bottom of the sea, the dazed, shocked crew hoping for a cracked pressure hull
and merciful instant extinction, dreading the endless gasping agony of
suffocation in their iron tomb on the ocean floor. Where the Ulysses went,
there also went death. But death never touched her. She was a lucky ship. A
lucky ship and a ghost ship and the Arctic was her home.
Illusion,
of course, this ghostliness, but a calculated illusion. The Ulysses was
designed specifically for one task, for one ocean, and the camouflage experts
had done a marvellous job. The special Arctic camouflage, the broken, slanting
diagonals of grey and white and washed out blues merged beautifully, imperceptibly
into the infinite shades of grey and white, the cold, bleak grimness of the
barren northern seas.And the camouflage was only the outward, the superficial
indication of her fitness for the north.
Technically, the Ulysses was a light cruiser. She was the
only one of her kind, a 5,500 ton modification of the famous Dido type, a
forerunner of the Black Prince class. Five hundred and ten feet long, narrow in
her fifty-foot beam with a raked stem, square cruiser stern and long fo'c'sle
deck extending well abaft the bridge, a distance of over two hundred feet, she
looked and was a lean, fast and compact warship, dangerous and durable. "Locate:
engage: destroy." These are the classic requirements of a naval ship in
wartime, and to do each, and to do it with maximum speed and efficiency, the
Ulysses was superbly equipped. Location, for instance. The human element, of
course, was indispensable, and Vallery was far too experienced and battlewise a
captain to underestimate the value of the unceasing vigil of look-outs and signalmen.
The human eye was not subject to blackouts, technical hitches or mechanical
breakdowns. Radio reports, too, had their place and Asdic, of course, was the
only defence against submarines.
But
the Ulysses's greatest strength in location lay elsewhere. She was the first
completely equipped radar ship in the world. Night and day, the radar scanners
atop the fore and main tripod masts swept ceaselessly in a 360° arc, combing
the far horizons, searching, searching. Below, in the radar rooms, eight in
all, and in the Fighter Direction rooms, trained eyes, alive to the slightest
abnormality, never left the glowing screens. The radar's efficiency and range
were alike fantastic. The makers, optimistically, as they had thought, had
claimed a 40-45 mile operating range for their equipment. On the Ulysses's
first trials after her refit for its installation, the radar had located a
Condor, subsequently destroyed by a Blenheim, at a
range
of eighty-five miles.
Engage
that was the next step. Sometimes the enemy came to you, more often you had to
go after him. And then, one thing alone mattered speed. The Ulysses was
tremendously fast. Quadruple screws powered by four great Parsons
single-reduction geared turbines two in the for'ard, two in the after
engine-room, developed an unbelievable horse-power that many a battleship, by
no means obsolete, could not match. Officially, she was rated at 33.5 knots.
Off Arraa, in her full-power trials, bows lifting out of the water, stern dug
in like a hydroplane, vibrating in every Clyde-built rivet, and with the
tortured, seething water boiling whitely ten feet above the level of the
poop-deck, she had covered the measured mile at an incredible 39.2 knots, the
nautical equivalent of 45 m.p.h. And the "Dude "-Engineer-Commander
Dobson had smiled knowingly, said he wasn't half trying and just wait till the
Abdiel or the Manxman came along, and he'd show them something. But as these famous
mine-laying cruisers were widely believed to be capable of 44 knots, the
wardroom had merely sniffed "Professional jealousy "and ignored him. Secretly,
they were as proud of the great engines as Dobson himself.
Locate,
engage and destroy. Destruction. That was the be all, the end all. Lay the
enemy along the sights and destroy him. The Ulysses was well equipped for that
also. She had four twin gun-turrets, two for'ard, two aft, 5.25 quick-firing
and dual-purpose equally effective against surface targets and aircraft. These
were controlled from the Director Towers, the main one for'ard, just above and
abaft of the bridge, the auxiliary aft. From these towers, all essential data about
bearing, wind-speed, drift, range, own speed, enemy speed, respective angles of
course were fed to the giant electronic computing tables in the Transmitting
Station, the fighting heart of the ship, situated, curiously enough, in the
very bowels of the Ulysses, deep below the water-line, and thence automatically
to the turrets as two simple factors, elevation and training. The turrets, of
course, could also fight independently.
These
were the main armament. The remaining guns were purely AA, the batteries of
multiple pom-poms, firing two-pounders in rapid succession, not particularly
accurate but producing a blanket curtain sufficient to daunt any enemy pilot,
and isolated clusters of twin Oerlikons, high-precision, high-velocity weapons,
vicious and deadly in trained hands.
Finally,
the Ulysses carried her depth-charges and torpedoes, 36 charges only, a
negligible number compared to that carried by many corvettes and destroyers,
and the maximum number that could be dropped in one pattern was six. But one depth-charge
carries 450 lethal pounds of Amatol, and the Ulysses had destroyed two U-boats
during the preceding winter. The 21-inch torpedoes, each with its 750-pound
warhead of T.N.T., lay sleek and menacing, in the triple tubes on the main
deck, one set on either side of the after funnel. These had not yet been
blooded.
This,
then, was the Ulysses. The complete, the perfect fighting machine, man's
ultimate, so far, in his attempt to weld science and savagery into an
instrument of destruction. The perfect fighting machine, but only so long as it
was manned and serviced by a perfectly integrating, smoothly functioning team.
A ship, any ship, can never be better than its crew. And the crew of the
Ulysses was disintegrating, breaking up: the lid was clamped on the volcano,
but the rumblings never ceased.
Corvette
Frigate
Squadron
Cargo liner
Destroyer
long fo'c'sle deck
square cruiser stern
Asdic
Wardroom
Parsons single-reduction geared turbines
twin gun-turrets, two for'ard, two aft,
AA, the batteries of multiple pom-poms
twin Oerlikons
depth-charges
Then
it happened. It was A.B. Ferry's fault that it happened. And it was just
ill-luck that the port winch was suspect, operating on a power circuit with a
defective breaker, just ill-luck that Ralston was the winch driver, a taciturn,
bitter mouthed Ralston to whom, just then, nothing mattered a damn, least of
all what he said and did. But it was Carslake's responsibility that the affair
developed into what it did.
Sub-Lieutenant
Carslake's presence there, on top of the Carley floats', directing the handling
of the port wire, represented the culmination of a series of mistakes. A
mistake on the part of his father, Rear- Admiral, Rtd., who had seen in his son
a man of his own calibre, had dragged him out of Cambridge in 1939 at the
advanced age of twenty-six and practically forced him into the Navy: a weakness
on the part of his first C.O., a corvette captain who had known his father and
recommended him as a candidate for a commission: a rare error of judgment on
the part of the selection board of the King Alfred, who had granted him his
commission ; and a temporary lapse on the part of the Commander, who had
assigned him to this duty, in spite of Carslake's known incompetence and
inability to handle men.
He had
the face of an overbred racehorse, long, lean and narrow, with prominent pale
blue eyes and protruding upper teeth. Below his scanty fair hair, his eyebrows
were arched in a perpetual question mark: beneath the long, pointed nose, the
supercilious curl of the upper lip formed the perfect complement to the eyebrows.
His speech was a shocking caricature of the King's English: his short vowels
were long, his long ones interminable: his grammar was frequently execrable. He
resented the Navy, he resented his long overdue promotion to Lieutenant, he
resented the way the men resented him. In brief, Sub-Lieutenant Carslake was
the quintessence of the worst by-product of the English public school system.
Vain, superior, uncouth and ill-educated, he was a complete ass.
He was
making an ass of himself now. Striving to maintain balance on the rafts, feet
dramatically braced at a wide angle, he shouted unceasing, unnecessary commands
at his men. C.P.O. Hartley groaned aloud, but kept otherwise silent in the
interests of discipline. But A.B. Ferry felt himself under no such restraints. "'Ark
at his Lordship," he murmured to Ralston. "All for the Skipper's
benefit." He nodded at where Vallery was leaning over the bridge, twenty
feet above Carslake's head. "Impresses him no end, so his nibs
reckons."
"Just
you forget about Carslake and keep your eyes on that wire,"
Ralston
advised. "And take these damned great gloves off. One of these
days------"
"Yes,
yes, I know," Ferry jeered. "The wire's going to snag 'em and wrap me
round the drum." He fed in the hawser expertly. "Don't you worry,
chum, it's never going to happen to me."
But it
did. It happened just then. Ralston, watching the swinging paravane closely,
flicked a glance inboard. He saw the broken strand inches from Ferry, saw it
hook viciously into the gloved hand and drag him towards the spinning drum
before Ferry had a chance to cry out.
Ralston's
reaction was immediate. The foot-brake was only six inches away but that was
too far. Savagely he spun the control wheel, full ahead to full reverse in a
split second. Simultaneously with Ferry's cry of pain as his forearm crushed
against the lip of the drum came a muffled explosion and clouds of acrid smoke
from the winch as £500 worth of electric motor burnt out in a searing flash. Immediately
the wire began to run out again, accelerating momentarily under the dead weight
of the plunging paravane. Ferry went with it. Twenty feet from the winch the
wire passed through a snatch block on the deck: if Ferry was lucky, he might
lose only his hand.
He was
less than four feet away when Ralston's foot stamped viciously on the brake.
The racing drum screamed to a shuddering stop, the paravane crashed down into
the sea and the wire, weightless now, swung idly to the rolling of the ship.
Carslake
scrambled down off the Carley, his sallow face suffused with anger. He strode
up to Ralston.
"You
bloody fool!" he mouthed furiously. "You've lost us that paravane.
By
God, L.T.O., you'd better explain yourself! Who the hell gave you orders to do
anything?"
Ralston's
mouth tightened, but he spoke civilly enough.
"Sorry,
sir. Couldn't help it, it had to be done. Ferry's arm------"
"To
hell with Ferry's arm!" Carslake was almost screaming with rage.
"I'm
in charge here and I give the orders. Look! Look!" He pointed to the
swinging wire. "Your work, Ralston, you, you blundering idiot! It's gone,
gone, do you understand, gone!"
Ralston
looked over the side with an air of large surprise.
"Well,
now, so it is." The eyes were bleak, the tone provocative, as he looked
back at Carslake and patted the winch. "And don't forget this, it's gone
too, and it costs a ruddy sight more than any paravane."
"I
don't want any of your damned impertinence!" Carslake shouted. His mouth
was working, his voice shaking with passion. "What you need is to have
some discipline knocked into you and, by God, I'm going to see you get it, you
insolent young bastard!"
Ralston
flushed darkly. He took one quick step forward, his fist balled, then relaxed
heavily as the powerful hands of C.P.O. Hartley caught his swinging arm. But
the damage was done now. There was nothing for it but the bridge.
