A LOOK-OUT ON A DESTROYER AND PART OF HIS VIEW
“When I came up to stand my watch as anti-submarine
lookout, on the after searchlight platform, at four in the morning of the 17th, I remember that it was cloudy and thick overhead, but with very fair visibility on the water. We were steaming along comfortably with two boilers, which gave us a big margin of speed over everything needed to cut our zigzags round the comparatively slow packets we were escorting. The sea was rough but almost dead astern, so that it made little trouble—for the moment, that is. We had enough of it a little later.
“Along toward six o’clock the visibility began to extend as it grew lighter, but there was no sign of the main convoy when, at exactly five-fifty, I sighted flashes of light fluttering along the northern horizon. Although my ears caught no sound but the throb of the engines and the churning of the screws, I had no doubt they were from gun-fire, and reported them at once by voice-pipe to the Officer of the Watch—it was Gunner T., if I remember right—on the bridge. The captain was called, and must have concluded the same, for he at once ordered her put about and sounded ‘Action Stations.’ That took me to the foremost torpedo tubes, where my station was on the seat between the tubes, with the voice-pipe gear fitted to my ears. Most of what followed I saw from there.
“In some of the published accounts of the action it was stated that the captain of the Mary Rose
thought that the flashes he saw were from the gun of a submarine shelling the convoy, so that when he turned back it was with the expectation of meeting a U-boat rather than powerful raiding cruisers. I don’t know anything definite on this score, of course, as I only heard the captain speak once or twice (and then to give orders) before he went down with his ship, but I don’t think it could possibly have been true. There is a sort of fluttering ripple to the flash of a salvo that you can’t possibly mistake for that of the discharge of a single gun, and the flashes which we continued to see for some time were plainly those of salvo answering salvo. The flashes from the mingled salvoes of the heavy guns of the Hun raiders could not have been confused with those from the few light guns of the Strongbow any more than these could have been taken to come from the single gun of a U-boat. Everything pointed to just what we learned had taken place—a cruiser raid on the convoy. There was nothing in the flashes to suggest a submarine was firing, and I can’t see how the captain could have had any such impression. It was enough for him—yes, and for all of us—to know that our consort was in trouble, and I shall always think that he turned back to help the Strongbow with the full knowledge that he would have to face hopeless odds. He was a proper gentleman, was Captain Fox, and so there was nothing else that he could have done; and, what’s more, there’s nothing else
that we men in the Mary Rose—or any other British sailors, for that matter—would have had him do. It would have been against all the traditions of the Navy to have done anything else but stick by a consort to the last.”
Able Seaman Bailey smote resoundingly the hollow palm of his left hand with the fist of his right as he spoke those last words, and then, in a quieter voice, took up the thread of the story again.
“That turn through sixteen points brought the seas, which we had been running before all night, right ahead, and all in a minute she was being swept fore-and-aft by every second or third of them. Anxious as the captain was to drive her full speed (which would have been a pretty terrific gait, let me tell you, for the ‘Ms’ are very fast), it was no use.
“Plates and rivets simply wouldn’t stand the strain of the green water that anything like full speed would have bored her into, and she was finally slowed down to about twenty knots as the best she could do without flooding the decks and making it impossible to serve the guns and torpedo tubes. As she was good for a lot more than this with two boilers, I doubt very much if the third was ever ‘flashed up.’