Winged Escort (Modern Naval Fiction Library) - Softcover

Reeman, Douglas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590137310 ISBN 13: 9781590137314

Verlag: McBooks Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

As the grim years of the Second World War go by, the destruction of Allied shipping mounts. Out of the terrible loss of men and ships, the escort carrier is born. They were typically half the length and a third the displacement of larger fleet carriers. While they were slower, carried fewer planes, and were less well armed and armored, escort carriers were cheaper and could be built quickly, which was their principal advantage. At twenty-six, fighter pilot Tim Rowan, RNVR, is already a veteran of many campaigns. Now he joins the new, American-made escort (or "jeep") carrier HMS Growler, the flagship of a task force protecting Allied convoys sailing the Arctic route to supply Soviet Russia. The service in the Arctic is harrowing, and not all of Rowan's adversaries are German. In late 1944, Growler is transferred to the Indian Ocean and faces the Kamikaze, experiencing vicious onslaughts.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Douglas Reeman served in the Royal Navy in the Atlantic and Mediterranean campaigns during World War Two. He has written 37 novels under his own name as well as 28 novels featuring Richard and Adam Bolitho under the pseudonym Alexander Kent.

Douglas Reeman served in the Royal Navy in the Atlantic and Mediterranean campaigns during World War Two. He has written 37 novels under his own name as well as 28 novels featuring Richard and Adam Bolitho under the pseudonym Alexander Kent.

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Winged Escort

By Douglas Reeman

McBooks Press, Inc.

Copyright © 1975 Douglas Reeman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-59013-731-4

CHAPTER 1

1: A Fresh Start

Lieutenant Tim Rowan stood on the side of Gladstone Dock and studied the overhanging bulk of the aircraft carrier with something like apprehension.

Behind and around him the air was filled with all the usual noises, creaking gantrys, a clatter of dockside machinery, and the sloshing footsteps of workers and sailors alike as they bustled through a steady drizzle.

It was mid-July 1943, but this was Liverpool, where it always seemed to rain a great deal, and where war had left too deep a mark for people to think much of past summers.

Tim Rowan was twenty-six, but at this particular moment felt older, less sure of himself. It was often like this when you returned from leave, no matter how short the break, how elusive the ability to relax.

He ran his gaze critically along the newly painted ship's side from the high stem up across her flight deck, past the small, boxlike bridge, the "Island," and aft to where some oilskinned seamen were hosing down wood shavings from emptied crates.

She was not a proper aircraft carrier. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But then the war had gone on for so long that people were able to believe almost anything. Like his parents who slept every night beneath the frail stairs of their house in Surrey. Like the unending intake of naval recruits who accepted a one-time holiday camp as a training base, merely because of its flag and its uniforms, and the fact that they believed it.

Old paddle-steamers which had once plied between Southampton and the Isle of Wight with cheerful holiday makers were now accepted as minesweepers or patrol vessels.

He walked slowly along the carrier's side towards a brow. On the deck stood a solitary lifebuoy on a varnished stand. Even the ship's name, HMS Growler, sounded as if someone at the Admiralty had had to think of it in a hurry. Like the ship.

For Growler had been thrown together without much concern for style or beauty. With several others she had begun life in an American shipyard to become, it was thought, a freighter. Fate, and the desperate need for air cover over the battered and butchered Atlantic convoys, had decided otherwise.

To help plug the breach left by the losses of more gracious carriers early in the war, the conversion from freighter to warship had started. Now, with her flight deck and her blunt, uncompromising lines, there was little left of Growler's original design.

Rowan watched the comings and goings of dockyard men and naval personnel up and down the two steep brows. It was a strange, unnerving feeling. As if he were an onlooker. As if none of these preoccupied-looking men could see him. He shivered inside his raincoat. As if he were dead.

He had been in the Growler, now officially classed as an escort carrier, for three months. Before that he had been in a heavy fleet carrier in the Mediterranean. And before that ... He shook himself from his thoughts, shutting out the jumbled pictures which had made up his life since the outbreak of war.

Places and faces always stood out more than the ships. Norway, the burning ships, the exhausted retreating troops. The Mediterranean and Greece, Crete and beleaguered Malta. It was always an uphill fight. The faces rarely left him. Broad smiles to hide taut nerves. The expressions becoming set and grim, like strangers, as one by one the aircraft had rolled snarling along a carrier's deck, then off towards an horizon. He could barely recall the names of some of them, especially those who had not come back.

In HMS Growler he had discovered an unexpected change. He was no longer a unit in a trained team. From the losses, and the growing requirements in every theatre of war, he had emerged a veteran. It was still hard to grasp. He did not want to accept it. It lessened the odds on living, they said.

They had done two big convoys in the North Atlantic, in the "Gap," as it was termed, that vast seven hundred miles spread of mid-ocean between longitudes thirty and forty degrees west where land-based aircraft could not operate to any purpose from British or American fields. It was for the Gap, and similar areas, that Growler and her consorts were born.

After working up the new ship's company, learning each other's jobs and flying-on her two broods of aircraft, Growler had gone to show her paces in earnest.

An Atlantic convoy, eastbound or westbound, was something to make even the most hardened sailor take notice. Line upon patient line. Tired, rusty freighters, tall, proud grain ships, their histories as varied as the flags they flew against a common enemy. Two enemies, if you counted the Atlantic.

And from the air each convoy was even more inspiring. Soundless and terribly vulnerable when viewed through a racing prop, or a tear in the clouds.

When a ship was suddenly torpedoed it merely seemed to fall away, slowly and gracefully, while the space she had left closed up immediately and her companions of many days sailed on without stopping. Only amongst the lithe, angry escorts was there movement and hate. You could almost feel it from the sky.

Lieutenant Tim Rowan of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, aged twenty-six, had seen it many times. For he was a fighter pilot.

During the last convoy an escorting corvette had hit a mine, a "drifter," and had gone down in seconds. Had she seen and avoided the mine, Growler would most likely have taken her place, as she was close astern of the little escort. But the explosion had given the hull a good shaking, and after completing her patrols Growler had come into Liverpool, the headquarters of Western Approaches, for a quick lick of paint and an inspection to ensure her shaft was in no way damaged. For if she fought as a warship, Growler's lower hull was still that of a freighter. One shaft, one propeller. It was something to think about in a screaming Force Twelve in the Atlantic. Also something she had in common with her overworked aircraft, Rowan thought grimly. One prop between you and the deep blue sea.

He made up his mind and strode towards the brow, from the top of which the quartermaster and gangway sentry had been watching him curiously for some minutes.

Like starting for the first time. Anywhere. A new job. Beginning school. There would be different faces to adjust to, fresh jokes, more irritations and small things which had not bothered you at the beginning.

It was bad luck, everyone had said. He paused, one hand resting on the brow, his senses suddenly very alert and taut. Like wires.

On that last convoy a submarine had been reported on the surface by one of Growler's hardy, two-winged Swordfish aircraft. She had been trailing oil and had not dived when sighted. It meant that the U-boat had probably been damaged in an earlier fight. She could even have been mauled by one of the convoy's own escorts.

Six Swordfish had been flown-off instantly, their crews grinning and giving the usual "thumbs up" at the prospect of doing something definite instead of the endless round of patrols.

The plane which had given the sighting report had fallen silent. It had no doubt gone too near to the U-boat's ack-ack for safety. In thirty minutes after the scramble a blustery gale had lashed into the convoy with unexpected fury.

As dusk had closed around the plodding lines of ships Rowan had stood with his companions on one of the walkways which ran along...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: McBooks Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1590137310
• ISBN 13: 9781590137314
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar