The Lonely Sea

The 17,000-ton Rawalpindi, in peacetime a crack P & O liner plying between Britain and the Far East, was one of the first Merchant Navy vessels to be converted to an armed merchant ship. Her gay pre-war colours were gone, lost under a drab coat of battleship grey. The lavishly furnished interior had been gutted, a main control gunnery room constructed and deck fittings removed to make way for ammunition lockers and her hastily installed armament—eight old 6-inch guns, four ranged along either side. But there had been no time, no opportunity to make any alteration to her unarmoured sides and decks, and the strengthening of these was largely impossible anyway: in terms of the penetrating power of modern armour-piercing shells, the hull of the Rawalpindi might as well have been made of paper.

The crew of the Rawalpindi knew this, but just accepted it, with the mental equivalent of a philosophic shrug, as just another of the hazards of the sea. Among the 280 officers and men aboard, there was not one to whom the sea and all its dangers were unknown, for in terms of experience if not in actual age—but more often than not in age as well—it was a crew of old men. Apart from fiftyodd officers and men who had served with the Rawalpindi as a regular passenger liner, the entire crew was composed of RNVR men of the Merchant Navy. RNVR—civilians with the bare essentials of naval training—reservists, and pensioners who had come back to the sea after having already completed twenty-two years in the Navy. There was not one active service officer or rating aboard the Rawalpindi, but there was a tremendous fund of knowledge and experience, more than any regular Naval ship could ever hope to boast. The crew knew the sea and its dangers, and accepted them. They knew too the very sharp limitations of their ship and accepted these also. And when, in latitude 63° 40′ North, 11° 29′ West, at 3 o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, 23 November, they saw the lean sleek shape of the Scharnhorst looming through the ice-cold rain-squalls of the bleak sub-Arctic waters, they knew that this was indeed the end, but they accepted that also.

On the bridge, Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy, called back to the colours after seventeen long years in the unwanted wilderness of civilian life, had seen the danger and recognized its implications even before any of his men. He wrongly identified the ship as the Deutschland, but the mistake was one of academic importance only: he rightly identified it as a German pocket battleship or battle-cruiser, 26,000-ton leviathans with 13-inch armour-plate and nine 11-inch and twelve 5.9 guns capable of delivering a 8,000-pound broadside in reply to his own puny 400—and his light 100-pound shells could never hope to penetrate that massive armour anyway.

Even as she emerged from the rain-squalls the Scharnhorst’s big signalling lamp was stuttering out the command to ‘Heave-to’. The sensible thing, the wise and politic thing—for which there couldn’t possibly have been any reproach—would have been to do as the Scharnhorst ordered. But with Kennedy, as with most of the great British naval captains down the centuries, prudence in the face of the enemy was a quality that he had never learned, and certainly never inherited. He knew he could neither fight nor outrun the Scharnhorst, but there were sheltering icebergs and fogbanks nearby and, while there remained even one chance in a thousand he was determined to take it. He ordered the wheel to be put hard over and smoke floats to be dropped to cover their withdrawal.

The Rawalpindi was still heeling over on her turn when the Scharnhorst again ordered her to ‘Heave-to’. This time the message was reinforced with an 11-inch shell that crashed into the sea just ahead, sending a tall, slender column of white-streaked water towering far into the rain-filled darkening sky, twice the height of the tip of the Rawalpindi’s main mast. Kennedy acknowledged the weight of the warning by turning even further away from the enemy and dropping more smoke floats.

And then, for a moment, he thought salvation had come. Far off on the starboard bow, a long dark ship, white water piled high at its bow, emerged out of rain-squall, arrowing in towards the scene. One of their own Northern Patrol cruisers, Kennedy thought jubilantly, almost certainly the Newcastle, and he ordered course altered towards this haven. Almost at once the bitter truth struck him, but it was too late now. The new arrival represented not safety but the certain end of everything: it was the Gneisenau, sister ship to the Scharnhorst.

Even the one chance in a thousand had gone. There could be no escape now and the two pocket battleships, Kennedy knew, could pound his fragile vessel to death in a matter of minutes. There wouldn’t even be a semblance of a fight. Captain Edward Kennedy could have placed scuttling charges, surrendered with honour, and, had he succeeded in reaching Britain again, would almost certainly have been given command of another vessel straight away.

But scuttling charges had never played any part in the Kennedy family’s long and honourable two hundred year association with the Royal Navy, and Kennedy was certainly not the man ever to think of such things now even although he, probably above all captains, most certainly owed nothing to a Navy and an Admiralty that had courtmartialled him in 1922 on a grotesquely unfair charge and, brilliant officer though he was, had axed him from the service in the following year, calling him back only in their hour of need in 1939. But whatever he thought at the time we can only guess at: all we know is what he said as he watched the two pocket battleships bear down on him: ‘We’ll just fight them both.’ As a death sentence for a great ship and hundreds of men, this must rank as the most laconic ever.

And fought them both he did. Three times the Scharnhorst ordered him to abandon ship, and on the third time it had its answer—a salvo that fell just short. At the same time, a salvo from the Rawalpindi struck the Gneisenau amidships, and almost together the two German battle cruisers replied with heavy, accurate and devastating close-range fire.

The first salvo from the Scharnhorst crashed into the Rawalpindi’s high superstructure, wrecking the boat-deck and killing almost everyone on the bridge: but Captain Kennedy survived. Almost immediately, another salvo of 11-inch shells, this time from the Gneisenau, crashed into the main control room of the Rawalpindi, and turned it into a lifeless shambles: all semblance of concerted fire now ceased, but the seven guns—one had already been destroyed—fought on independently.

The fires amidships were already beginning to take hold as yet another salvo sliced through the tissue-thin sides of the liner and exploded deep in its heart. One of these blew up in the engine room, completely destroying the dynamos, and this was the blow that effectively carried into execution Kennedy’s sentence of death. With the dynamos gone, the electricity supply was destroyed: and the shell hoists from the magazines were worked by electricity.

Kennedy, still fighting with his wrecked ship, from the twisted wreckage that was all that was left of his bridge, issued instructions that every available member of the crew should assist in manhandling shells up from the magazines and rolling them across the heaving, shell-swept deck towards those guns that still kept firing: there were only five left now.

That exposed deck of the Rawalpindi, raked by screaming shrapnel and jagged twisted steel, became a blood-soaked abattoir for those who fought to reach the empty breeches of the waiting guns. Some carriers were killed outright, and their shells rolled from side to side with the movement of the ship, through the ever-growing flames and over deck-plates beginning to glow dull red from the heat of the internal fires. Other men were wounded, but ignored their agony: one incredibly gallant man, both legs smashed, wounded to death, and with a shell clutched in his one sound arm, dragged his way along the deck, groping blindly for the breech of the gun that he could not see, swearing that he would get them yet.

The battle was grotesquely one-sided. Shells still crashed into the dying Rawalpindi and the end could not be long delayed. Loose ammunition was falling into the fires and exploding far beneath. The entire ship, excepting only the poop and fo’c’sle, was a leaping, twisting map of flame. One by one the guns fell silent, as the enemy destroyed them, as the crews died beside them and the supply of ammunition, cut off by walls of flame, finally stopped altogether.

As a fighting unit the Rawalpindi was finished, beaten into silence and submission, all but dead in the water. But the sixty year-old Captain Kennedy was a man who was literally incapable of conceiving of the idea of defeat. He left his shattered bridge, groped through the blazing ruins of the superstructure and along the deck towards the poop: if he could only drop some smoke floats, he thought, he might still sail the Rawalpindi to safety. His ship was holed and sinking, damaged beyond help or repair and visibly dying: his guns were gone, his crew was decimated, but still he fought for survival. Such indomitable courage, such unyielding tenacity of purpose when all reason for purpose has long since vanished lies barely within the realms of comprehension.

Captain Kennedy vanished into the smoke and the flame, and died.

He was not long survived by his ship or by all except a tragic minority of the crew that had so magnificently served both himself and the Rawalpindi. Another shell from the Scharnhorst brought the coup de grace—a tremendous roar and a column of white flame lancing high into the gathering gloom of the evening as the erupting main magazine blew out through the sides and deck and burning superstructure and almost severed the Rawalpindi in two.

The guns of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau fell silent: every salvo now could only be so much wasted ammunition. For the handful of men still left alive aboard the Rawalpindi nothing could be achieved by remaining where they were but a death swifter and even more certain than that offered by the ice-cold waters slowly climbing up the rent and gaping sides of the sinking ship.

Miraculously, almost, two of the lifeboats had survived the ferocity of the Germans’ shells, and those few men—twenty-seven in all—who were able, slid down the falls and pulled desperately away from the blazing Rawalpindi: at any moment an explosion might reach out and destroy them, or destroy the ship and pull them after it as it sunk swiftly down to the deep floor of the ocean.

These men, picked up by the German ships, were the only survivors apart from a handful rescued the following morning. Most of the others had been killed by shell-fire, burnt to death or trapped below decks and drowned in the rising waters. Some men who could not reach the lifeboats, jumped into the sea, searching frantically for broken bits of boats, oars, wreckage, anything that would offer even a passing moment’s security before the numbing cold struck deep and their hearts just stopped beating. And many there were, scattered here and there over the decks and in passages and compartments below, too desperately wounded either to move or to call out, who just sat or lay waiting quietly for the end, for the blessing of the freezing waters that would bring swift release from their agonies.

Two hundred and forty men went down with the Rawalpindi, and, in light of the fanatical courage with which they had served both their ship and their commander, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to think that some of those who were still alive when the waters closed over them at 8 o’clock that evening may have derived no little consolation from the thought that if they had to go down with their ship, they could have asked no greater privilege than to do so in the incomparable company of Captain Edward Kennedy.

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