Andrew Williams - The Interrogator

Heavy pools of smoke swirled beneath the droplights like winter smog. The atmosphere was always impossibly thick in the Tracking Room. Everyone smoked — everyone but Mary. It had the stale smell of a room that was never empty. With the smoke, the half-light and the clatter of typewriters, at first her head had throbbed continually. But she was used to it now and perversely it helped to induce a strange, exhilarating mental clarity.

Mary Henderson was the first woman to be given a senior role in Naval Intelligence. Her crustier male colleagues had grumbled that the Submarine Tracking Room was no place for a ‘female’, an Oxford archaeologist. In her first weeks, they had made her feel as useful as a village bumpkin press-ganged into service on a man-of-war. What with the shrugs and snatched conversations, she had floundered in a sea of acronyms and potent initials: ‘Put DDOD (H) on the distribution list’; ‘don’t forget DNOR and please be sure to ring the SOI. to FOS’. It seemed like a ritual designed to confuse the interloper in the clubhouse. She found it easier to nod and pretend, then secretly search the Citadel’s telephone directory for clues. Her head of section, Rodger Winn, caught her with one on her knee, like a naughty schoolgirl with a crib sheet in an examination. But Winn was an outsider too, a clever lawyer with a twisted back and a limp. The Navy would have classified him as ‘unfit’ in peacetime but now the heavy duty of tracking the enemy’s submarines in the Atlantic rested on his awkward shoulders.

Winn took Mary’s education upon himself. Calling her into his office, he roughed out the structure of the Naval Intelligence Division on a blackboard. ‘At the top, the Director or DNI, that’s Admiral Godfrey in Room 39, entrance behind the statue of Captain Cook on the Mall. Under the Director, nineteen sections dealing with everything from the security of our own codes to propaganda and prisoners of war.’ For more than an hour, he shuffled back and forth in front of the board, presenting the facts with the austere clarity of a High Court barrister. ‘We’ll only win the war at sea if we win it here in the Citadel first,’ he told her.

The Citadel was the heartbeat of the Division, where threads from fifteen different sources — enemy signals, agents in the field, photographic reconnaissance — were carefully gathered. A thousand ships had been lost in 1940 and with them food, fuel, steel and ore. The country was under siege. The Germans held the coast from Norway to the Pyrenees and were busy establishing new bases for their U-boats. ‘They’re playing merry hell with our convoys. If we can’t stop them, they’ll cut our lifeline west to America and the Empire and we’ll lose the war.’ Winn was not a man to gild the lily.

Mary settled behind her desk and lifted a thick bundle of signals and reports from her in-tray. The first flimsy was from HMS Wanderer in the North Atlantic. At 0212 the destroyer had registered a ‘strong contact’ with a submerged submarine on her echo detector. Two hours later and fifteen miles to the west, HMS Vanoc reported another. Was it the same U-boat on a north-westerly course? Perhaps the enemy was preparing a fresh pack attack on convoys south of Iceland. A timely warning would save ships and lives. Mary’s task was to pursue the German U-boat as mercilessly on paper as a destroyer might at sea. It was careful work that called for a trained mind and the memory of an elephant. My sort of work, she thought with the self-conscious pride of a novice.

A few feet from her, Wilmot was dictating the night’s ‘headlines’ to a typist and at the far end of the room, the plotters were clucking around a wall chart of the British coast. Room 41 was long and narrow, bursting with map tables and filing cabinets, too small for the fifteen people who would be weaving up and down it within the hour. It resembled a shabby newspaper office with its rows of plain wooden desks covered in copy paper, black Bakelite phones and typewriters. The main Atlantic plot was laid out on a large table in the centre of the room: a crazy collage of cardboard arrows, pinheads and crisscrossed cotton threads. At times the enemy’s U-boats could be tracked with painful certainty — a distress call from a lone merchant ship or a convoy under attack — but at other times the plot was marked with what the section called ‘Winn’s Guess’.

‘Good morning to all. A quiet night I hope?’

Rodger Winn had shuffled through the doorway, peaked cap in one hand, brown leather briefcase in the other. He blinked owlishly at the room for a moment, then began to struggle out of his service coat. The well-tailored uniform beneath was embroidered with the swirling gold sleeve-hoops of a commander in the volunteer reserve. He was in his late thirties, short, stocky, with powerful, restless shoulders, twinkling eyes and a good-humoured smile. Wilmot stepped forward with his clipboard to hover at his elbow: ‘Good news, Rodger — Berlin has confirmed the loss of the U-100 .’

‘I heard that on the BBC,’ replied Winn brusquely.

Mary bent a little closer to the signals on her desk in an effort to disguise an embarrassingly broad smirk.

‘It’s the only good news. I was trying to spare you the rest.’

‘Don’t.’

Wilmot led Winn to the plot and began to take him through the night’s business. A tanker and three freighters had been sunk in the North Atlantic and four more ships damaged. ‘But here the news is worse.’ Wilmot’s hand swept south across the table to a cluster of pinheads off the coast of West Africa. ‘Homebound convoy from Sierra Leone — SL.68. Six more ships sunk — three of them tankers — that’s twelve ships in three days.’

Winn groaned and reached inside his jacket for his cigarettes. He shook one from the packet and lit it with a snap of his lighter: ‘Any idea how many U-boats they’ve sent into African waters?’

‘Perhaps three,’ said Wilmot with a doubtful shrug of his shoulders. ‘A French source in the naval dockyard at Lorient thinks one of them is the U-112 . The crew was issued with warm-weather clothes.’

Winn half turned from the plot to blink over his glasses at Mary: ‘Dr Henderson, what do we have in the index?’

Mary reached up to a small box on top of the battered filing cabinet beside her desk. She flicked through it, found the 112 ’s file card and handed it to Winn.

‘Kapitän zur See Jürgen Mohr: a very capable commander,’ he grunted. ‘What’s our source — can you check?’ He paused to remove a thread of tobacco from his lip. ‘The most senior U-boat officer still at sea. The darling of the newsreels. They’ve credited him with twenty five of our ships — perhaps after last night’s attacks, a few more.’

Winn handed Mary the card: ‘You’ll need to update this.’

He turned back to lean over the plot, resting his weight on his hands. He had suffered from Polio as a boy and found it uncomfortable to stand unsupported for long. The pile of signals and reports on Mary’s desk seemed to have mysteriously grown. She would have to work her way through it before the midday conference.

‘He’s winning, Mary. Winning.’

She looked up in surprise. Winn was gazing intently at a small portrait photograph on the wall above the plot table. It was of a thin, severe-looking man who sat primly upright, hands held tightly in front of him. He was wearing the rings and star of a German admiral and the Ritterkreuz — the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross — hung at his throat. It was the face of the enemy, their particular enemy, the commander of the German U-boat arm:Karl Dönitz.

‘Always a step ahead of us.’ Winn drew heavily on the last of his cigarette, then squeezed it into an ashtray at the edge of the plot. ‘A step ahead.’