- Author
- Ward, Kirwan
- Subjects
- Biographies and personal histories, WWII operations
- Tags
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- RAN Ships
- None noted.
- Publication
- March 2008 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)
The sun had waned now and the last faint rays of it glowed from below the horizon, tingeing the lowest clouds with a faded pastel pink; only a washy smudge of light separated sea from sky.
Against this background, the midshipman could see the large black monoplane circling to come in for the attack again. He’d seen that same black silhouette hundreds of times on the identification charts in the lecture rooms back at the training depot, but then it had seemed abstract and unreal, part of the irksome routine. Now, it was there, tangible and horribly frightening, a killer intent on his destruction.
Though his limbs were quivering with excitement, he felt an odd calmness as he edged his way along the deck towards the vacant gun. Seasickness and self-pity were swept aside in a surge of primitive masculine emotion, a savage atavistic desire to get to that gun and start hitting back. His world had suddenly narrowed down to the circular spider-web of his gun-sight and that malevolent black monster sweeping down over the water.
Life became a series of sharp but disjointed impressions; the darting tongue of flame from his barrel, the beautiful staccato barking of his gun, the feeling of the smooth metal grooves beneath his fumbling fingers as he changed the ammunition drums. The little ship was twisting and turning in a frenzy of evasive action, and at each change of course, the water came tumbling along the scuppers, swirling around his ankles, backwards and forwards with the motion of the ship.
Back came the plane, alive with venom, hurtling low over the bridge, the leading edges of its wings spurting jets of fire, ripping jagged holes in the corvette’s superstructure, leaving a trail of destruction to mark its passage. A fire party went lurching and staggering forward along the heaving decks towards a column of smoke billowing ominously from the charthouse, and soon the ship was cluttered with sinuous lengths of hose.
The snotty remembered reading somewhere that air fighters seldom bore any malice towards their opponents, regarding them rather as an integral part of their machines, thinking of them as inanimate objects instead of as men. He didn’t feel like that though. This was essentially a personal affair between himself and some grinning yellow baboon up there with murder in his heart.
Time after time, the plane flashed across the sights and passed out of range again, maddeningly unscathed, but at last there came a glorious moment when the whole aircraft seemed to be glued to the very centre of his sight, and he knew, even before he saw the plane’s cowling dissolve beneath the fury of his fire, that the battle was over.
For a second, the youngster kept squeezing the trigger, blazing aimlessly into space. The screaming shadow passed over for the last time, and then from the seas to starboard, came a terrible, rending impact. For a timeless period, the tail unit of the shattered plane protruded defiantly above the ocean, as though striving to keep its Rising Sun insignia free, but the waters reached up inexorably, and it too slid beneath the hungry waves.
A curious silence settled over the tiny corvette, and her crew, their senses, still stunned by the din of the battle, moved stiffly about their duties like drugged men, their nerves relaxing almost painfully from the tension of the past few moments.
The Captain, peering over from the shattered housing of the bridge, gave a quiet order and the ship swung round in a wide half-circle to resume its course. Then he turned to his First Lieutenant standing beside him: ‘Well, Number One, I must say that young snotty came in rather handy just then. Is he hurt at all?’
Number One grinned broadly. ‘Not hurt, exactly, sir, but I fancy he’s . . . well, incapacitated.’ He pointed to the stern sheets, where a small dejected figure, its shoulders heaving violently, hung limply over the rail, gazing with a dreadful intensity at the swirling waters below.