The Spoils of War: An action-packed WWII military thriller by Douglas Scott

Author:Douglas Scott [Scott, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2025-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

11: TEMPORARY MASTER

The holds of the Fort Harrison were emptying. All the army vehicles had been unloaded. Discharging from number three and four holds had been completed and at numbers one, two and five all that now remained was the small crate cargo-boxes of ammunition, octane in jerrycans, detonators and light bombs.

Pendlebury, Acting Master of the ship, was little aware of what was going on and had made no contribution whatsoever to this satisfactory state of affairs. He had moved his personal belongings up to the Captain’s day-room and cabin on the bridge-deck, locked himself in, and left the entire running of the ship to Andrew Mitchell.

Pendlebury was in nominal command. Mitchell was the de facto commander.

Mitchell was gaunt and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep. He had perhaps snatched four or five naps of twenty minutes each in the course of the last week. He was not alone in this respect. Few members of the ship’s company had fared any better.

The air raids on the anchorage had continued night and day and showed little sign of let-up. Throughout all this time, the engine-room staff had been working ceaselessly to repair the damage caused by the near-miss bomb. Indeed, another alarming indication of damage had been discovered. The Fort Harrison might well be starting to split in two.

A galley-boy dumping trash over the side had noticed a crack beginning to appear in the ship’s side just beside the bunker hatch. It had grown. A fracture in the plating of the main deck had begun to appear. It was structural damage which they could not even begin to repair outside a dry dock or ship-yard.

It could only be watched with the hope that it would not get too bad. But it worried Mitchell. He knew that in an open sea with the stresses and strains which that imposed upon a ship, the Fort Harrison could break apart and sink in minutes.

Mitchell was proud of the way the ship’s company had behaved at the beach-head. It had not escaped him that many of the seamen, relieved of their gunnery or deck duties for their watch off, had volunteered their services to the American army stevedore officer and had been helping to discharge the ship when they could have been snatching well-earned sleep. The docks troops had been insufficient in number to man all the holds at once and, because this had become apparent when some of the docks men had collapsed with exhaustion, the crewmen had come forward without being asked.

In addition to four fatal casualties as a result of the bomb, two of the Fort Harrison’s men had cracked up under the strain of the constant bombing.

A forty-five-old steward had gone completely berserk. He had to be physically restrained in a straitjacket and had been transferred to a hospital ship for care. The man had been torpedoed five times in the previous four years — experiences which in themselves had left great scars on the mind. The nightmare of Salerno had been the last straw.

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