One of Our Submarines by Edward Young

Author:Edward Young [Young, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War II, Naval, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781473816923
Google: yuqXAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2004-09-30T03:04:15+00:00

XII

INSIDE THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

THE Staff Officer drew back the curtain which hid the operational wall-chart, and we studied the white expanse of empty sea stretching up from Scotland (looking very small in the bottom left-hand corner), past Orkney and Shetland, past the Faroes, past Iceland, into the Arctic Circle and beyond to Jan Mayen Island and Bear Island, with the jagged coast of Norway sprawling up the right flank until it reached North Cape and swung east towards the Barents Sea.* The Mercator grid-lines of latitude and longitude, the submarine patrol areas precisely outlined, the known and suspected minefields blocked in and neatly shaded with red pencil, the routes to and from patrol drawn in exact, variously coloured lines—all combined to make our particular war seem like a gigantic paper game; a game in which the enemy’s moves were hidden and could only be shrewdly guessed; a game in which there were no winds, no stormy seas, no wet and weary men struggling to keep to route and schedule without sight of sun or star for days on end, only straight lines drawn on paper, and pins for pieces—the coloured pins which represented the positions of our submarines at 0900 that morning.

He was pointing to the top of the chart and telling us where our respective patrol areas were to be. Ogle and Mclntosh were allocated neighbouring areas along the Norwegian coastline in the approximate latitude of Tromsö. I imagined my billet would be somewhere further south, perhaps out of sight of land in the middle of the North Sea where I was unlikely to run into enemy anti-submarine activity. I was surprised to learn that I was being sent to the most northerly patrol area of all, off North Cape itself, in the same billet where two years earlier Sealion, operating from North Russia, had spent a bleak and fruitless fortnight. At first I was mildly excited by the task of making the 1,500-mile voyage in each direction, but when I looked at the little huddle of pins clustered round Dunoon, saw the one marked Storm amongst them, and realised that I was responsible for getting that pin safely over the enormous distance to the top of the chart and back, I was assailed afresh by all my old fears.

For months my chief anxiety had been lest I should, on my first patrol in command, make a fool of myself through some avoidable navigational error or misjudgment. Disaster resulting from a mistake of this sort would not be forgiven by one’s crew or by the Staff at home. It was true that I had in Brian Mills a navigating officer on whom I knew I could rely, and I had myself had a certain amount of practical experience of celestial navigation. But I had always been aware that with all the navigational data available there were moments of crisis when the Captain must make a decision, perhaps to disregard a doubtful star-sight because it ran counter to common sense, or to play for safety when approaching land in bad visibility after several days without a sight.

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