General-Admiral Rolf Carls, with his flag aboard the Tirpitz, immediately sent over an order to get all the Stukas rearmed and fueled, and that would again take over two hours, given that several more Stukas had minor damage that needed to be addressed. In the meantime, he had four fighters spotted on deck in case the enemy decided to launch a counter strike.
“I doubt they know where we are,” said Kapitan Topp. “We’ve seen no enemy planes over our task force this whole time.”
“But yet they know we are out here,” said Carls. “The question now is what to do this evening.”
“Hoffmann is south of us with Scharnhorst,” said Topp. “He’s too close, and we will not want him tangling with Hood alone if they find him there.”
“Agreed. We also have the two Deutschland class ships well to the south. My inclination is to order Hoffmann to turn and give this enemy covering force a wide berth. As for us, Peter Strasser aside, we will continue west on this heading.”
“You intend to look for Hood?”
“And that enemy carrier as well.”
“Good enough.” Topp had been wanting to get his ship back into action for many months now. The news of what had happened to Bismarck off Fuerteventura had been most disconcerting. But at 21:15, a series of messages from two U-boats would begin the real game. Kapitan Max-Martin Teichert was also out from Bergen in U-456, and he had taken up the watch on another covering force first seen by Marks on U-376 earlier. Together they had identified two British cruisers, and then Marks turned further west, leaving Teichert to shadow the enemy force. Now he added a battleship to that contact list, an American ship.
“Most likely the Mississippi,” said Carls. “It has been operating in the Denmark Strait.” He was wrong, of course, for the Germans did not yet know that a much newer and faster ship had come on the scene, BB Massachusetts. That report sent tumblers clicking in the Admiral’s mind, and knowing his enemy well, he realized this must be the close covering force. That meant the real prey was probably close at hand, the nice fat merchant ships of PQ-17.
That was the very same thing Kapitan Marks had in his mind when he turned west at periscope depth, and a little after 21:30 he spotted two groups of enemy merchantmen. After maneuvering for position for some time, torpedoes were in the water at 21:50. Firing in salvos of two, his first fish ran right between the lead ships in the formation, the Hartelbury and Olpana, missing both. The number two salvo had no better luck, skirting past the bow of the Samuel Chase and passing harmlessly through the formation. Frustrated, he put two more torpedoes in the water, grateful that there was no sign of enemy destroyers yet. They would also miss, and he cursed under his breath, this time determined to line up better before his next shot. His determination paid off, much to the chagrin of the Hartelbury, which he hit amidships with torpedo 5.
“Got him!” he shouted. “Now fifteen points to port, I can get one more off.” He would then hit the Richard Bland, both ships penetrated and with flooding and fires lighting up the scene and undoubtedly getting the Convoy Master to grit his teeth. Now he needed time to let the men manhandle more torpedoes from the magazines and get them mounted in the tubes. So he turned east away from the two ships he had set afire, still running at periscope depth. There was another group of eight merchantmen off his port side, and he was thinking to line up on the nearest ship when his careful eye spotted trouble in the high foaming bow wash of a destroyer. That was enough to dampen his ardor.
“Secure periscope,” he said. “Enemy destroyers to the north. Dive!”
“Goblin!” said Captain George Stephenson, Master of Hartlebury. “Where are the bloody destroyers?”
His First Officer, a man named Gordon, came staggering in from the radio room. “Got a signal off,” he breathed. “Help is on the way.”
“Look to our damage, would you? I think one of the Oerlikon gun-platforms has collapsed.”
Even as he said that, the Captain had a strange inner thought, seeing himself there on the outer deck, that gun platform right on top of him, hearing the shouts of several men, the gunners that were flung into the sea. His head was throbbing with pain, there was blood running down his forehead into his left eye, and the twisted steel legs of the platform restricted his movement, pinning him to the deck.
He shook his head, as if to chase that fearful image from his mind, but his First Officer’s report was darker than he expected. “The whole mount is gone,” he said. “Five men overboard there, and two guns lost. There’s heavy damage to two others on the deck below, and a nice hole in the hull near the water line—a fire there too, though it looks controllable.”
Right where I might have been, thought Stevenson, though he did not know why. His strange intuition was, in fact, the fate he had suffered in Fedorov’s history, where the Hartlebury had been one of the last ships to be hit, well up around the North Cape. In that incarnation, his First Officer and a Marine had dragged him to safety, away from that fire, but that would not be his fate in this time line. Matthew 20: verse 16 applied in some skewed way to this whole affair—‘the last shall be first.’ Here, now, Hartlebury had been the first ship hit, and Stevenson was still safely in the confines of the bridge. It was U-355 that had ended the ship’s life in the old history, but now it would be Hartlebury that would put an end to U-376.
The destroyers had all been too far ahead, well out in front of the merchant ships, even the four that should have been well aft of the main convoy. Marks had slipped in very quietly to become the first wolf to get at the fold, very pleased with himself. If he had known that he was silently creeping towards his own doom, he might have changed course, picked another target, and lived into his eighth war patrol in the Bay of Biscay as he once did. It took him all eight in that history to get just two ships, and he had already scored two hits here, so he seemed to be riding a resurgent swell in the seas of time. But he had picked on the wrong ship out of sixteen different targets he might have fired at that day. Hartlebury was also harboring the Vice Commodore of the entire convoy, and so she had a special Naval Signals staff aboard, who were very quick to get hold of the Aft Destroyer Screen and read them the riot act. What were they doing forward of his formation if they were the bloody Aft screening force? Couldn’t they see that an attack was underway?
So the bow wash Kapitan Marks had seen was from the O-Class Destroyer Onslaught, and its name would be well given that day. Chastened by the sharp radio call he had received, and somewhat angry, Commander William Halford Selby was about to put an end to the career of Kapitänleutnant Friedrich-Karl Marks. Selby had spotted the wake from the U-boat periscope just before Marks had given that dive order. Now he turned and bored in relentlessly at 28 knots, knowing that if he was quick to the scene his depth charges would likely find the enemy below.