- Author
- Max Darling, RANVR
- Subjects
- Ship histories and stories
- Tags
- None noted.
- RAN Ships
- None noted.
- Publication
- December 1978 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)
With Quentin pinging in the outfield against possibilities of other submarines in the area we continued our inner examining every isolatable depth-charge or other disturbance in the hope of finding one a little less woolly than the others and perhaps with a suspicious shape to it.
Kendall called bearings and ranges down to the Chart Room Plotting Table where our Surgeon-Lieutenant, John Hardcastle, pencilled a time against each new dot and any remark that Kendall thought might be useful. Thus there would grow a plan of every contact relative to the ship’s position at any time. When there was nothing sufficiently new or definite to be worth calling, we would ask the plot to give the bearing and range of a previous contact so as to test it from another angle. Came a test bearing and short range little different from others except when we pinged on the bearing there was no echo. We pinged again. And again. Nothing. Flash. That AFO about submarines at 500 feet! Could there be a sub way below Quentin’s depth-charge explosions?
We went out to 1,500 yards and headed back on the bearing that the Plot now gave us. Sure enough it came, a faint and woolly echo.
Such were the intervening wake and depth-charge disturbances that Kendall had difficulty in holding the now suspect contact, but well enough to note where it failed to trace on the recorder and that the echo had faded completely at 600 yards.
‘Well?’ asked the Captain, calmly as always and never in a hurry when there was time for second thought.
What else but to test that disappearing contact with a minimum pattern of five heavies, three from the stem chutes, two from the side throwers. Repeating the approach procedure we turned at 1,500 yards into the least disturbed water we could find, steadied on the contact bearing as now advised and regained the echo but so feebly that it was barely tracing and hardly audible at 1,100 yards.
In such blurry conditions and against even the slight noise of our own propellers, there was little chance of holding the contact at the prescribed minimum attacking speed of 12 knots. Essentially we would have to remain at our seven-knot searching speed. The Captain agreed to hold our adjusted course exactly.
I was now in the hut, in the hot seat, encouraged at least by the certainty that we had a stationary target and concentrating utterly to fix the moment when we should lose both trace and echo. Sure enough the detectable fade out came, at 670 yards on the scale, at two minutes 49 seconds to go to target position! Check the firing cursor on such little recorder information as there was. Confirm maximum depth-charge settings. ‘Stand by.’ Zero position less 10 seconds. ‘First depth-charge Fire!’ Zero position. ‘Centre and throwers. Fire!’ Zero position plus 10 seconds. ‘Last depth-charge. Fire!’
Now to see what happened on the surface from such deep explosions. Most of us were accustomed to spectacular bursts within 20 seconds from depth-charge explosions at the usual 50 feet. Vertical heavies descending at seven feet a second would take at least 70 seconds to reach their exploding depth of 500 feet. Forty seconds dragged by. Fifty. I sensed half the bridge personnel looking doubtfully at me, but not the Captain. With the Gunner at the depthcharge party phone there could be no mistake about the settings. Patience.
CRACK and a bang on the hull! The first explosion. Then the other four. On the surface? No great upheaval. With each explosion came only a pointy shiver. And down below? Kendall, now back in the hut, pulled my sleeve and passed me the second earphones in time to catch the last sounds of hammering, very distinct, like some poor devil bashing at a watertight door with a maul, slight whistle effect, and clear breaking sounds like, to quote Kendall, ‘egg shells being crushed in a crisp paper bag.’ Then a dull whump. And nothing more. Only silence beyond the slight murmur of our screws.
‘Look at Quentin‘ someone called. There astern was Quentin, romping in at the full 12 knots, attack flag flying. She fired a solitary depth-charge, evidently her last, withdrawing again to the outfield.
Later came good echoes from dense nonsubs in the attack area and from Quentin, in the phones and on the recorder. At such times one is apt to fall down on the lesser things, like a reminder to the rating detailed to switch on the echo-sounder as we passed over the target and timing the arrival of whatever was coming up from the explosion zone. But, judging by our position after turning back from 800 yards, fully three minutes had passed when up came a lively white turbulence to seethe, hump and leap for perhaps two minutes and finally subside in another three minutes over a wide two acres. Moving in for evidence we found only small bubbles still rising and oil, samples of which proved to be of four kinds including dirty sump oil. ‘That’s it’, concluded the Engineer Officer. ‘Explosion gas, air and oil. I doubt if there will be anything else from a hull fracturing inward at that depth.’
With nothing more to be done, and yet two hours to sundown, we two Q’s formed line abreast and pinged out way back for the night defence of Bone.
‘Good show, Asdics’, said the Captain. ‘Thanks’.
Said Kendall, ‘The crowd will have a shot at me, of course, about luck and Quentin. But we know better, sorting out those non-subs, Doc coming good on the Plot, the Captain giving us a go, sneaking that pattern right down to where the target was.’
Back in Bone the Group Senior A/S officer read my report, and, after noting some deviations from standard practice, remarked, ‘A submarine at five hundred feet. With your first pattern of depth-charges. That has to be something of a record.’
It probably was. And is.
The identity of our target that day was not known until years later when access to enemy records revealed that the Italian submarine Dessie was lost off Bone, North Africa, on 28 November 1942.