St. John's and the Battle of the Atlantic by Bill Rompkey

Author:Bill Rompkey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flanker Press
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Of all those desperate, oil-soaked men, none were more vulnerable than Coder Ed Munro. When the torpedo struck, Munro had been standing beside his hammock in the communications mess, dressing to go on watch in the wireless office. The resultant explosion had wiped out his warm, sleepy world in the twinkling of an eye; Munro found himself, dressed only in his underwear shorts, in the sudden darkness of a sinking ship, the deck already tilting sharply under his feet and icy water surging over his ankles. Snatching up his lifejacket and buckling it about him as he moved, Munro managed to clamber out of the escape hatch onto the deck-head above and plunged into the sea that was already swallowing up the forward half of the ship. The chill of the 32-degrees-Fahrenheit water bit into his bare body, numbing mind and senses, so that he functioned like an automaton, driven by a blind instinct to survive. He swam desperately at first, to avoid being sucked down with the forward half of the ship, already beginning its final plunge to the bottom far below. Once clear, he found himself in a pool of oil littered with wreckage and floating debris of every kind.

There was a raft near by, and Munro made his way to it, joining the little huddle of men who fringed its sides, submerged to their shoulders and hanging on to the lifeline that was looped around the outer edge of the float. Numbed and chilled and covered with oil, he and his shipmates watched with horrified fascination as their ship, rearing high in the moonlight, began to slip beneath the glittering surface. Slowly, deliberately at first, then with ever-increasing rapidity as her overtaxed bulkheads gave way, she disappeared from sight, carrying with her the warm home and ordered world they all had known and the shipmates, dead and dying, of only a few minutes before.

On one of the rafts, someone began to sing: “For she’s a jolly good fellow, for she’s a jolly good fellow—” and everyone in earshot joined in. As Valleyfield’s pastel-painted hull slipped forever from mortal gaze, the thin voices of her shivering crewmen sang her requiem.

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