Indeed, hell had no fury like that ship on this moonlit night. The destroyer surged ahead, while the Bianchi veered off her firing angle, realizing her peril too late to evade. Captain Giovannini got his periscope down and gave the order to fire, then put his sub into an emergency dive, but to no avail.
The torpedoes were too widely spaced and Fury veered violently, thrashing up the sea before turning and running right between the two torpedoes. The fish had been jostled about by the maneuver, just enough to set them off their intended course. Then it was time for hell to unleash her fury. The destroyer had a rack of 20 depth charges and Lieutenant Commander Robinson put them all into the water, causing a series of wrenching explosions that found and tore Bianchi to pieces. There was a last explosion, the sea welling up like a boiling pot, and then subsiding before wreckage from the broken sub bobbed to the surface.
So Valiant was kept safe from harm, her octuple mounts saying a last goodbye to a lingering Ju-88. Then her aft turrets fired one last mighty salvo of four rounds, which came in right on Devil’s Tower Road, hurting the Germans that had been assembling there. Hotspur and Greyhound came following behind the big ship, and the British squadron withdrew at 20 knots, their daring mission accomplished.
Captain Rawlings soon received a signal in thanks from General Liddell on the Rock, which was quickly passed on to Somerville and the Admiralty. The battleship had hit the North Mole, Land Port, Cemetery, Cattle Sheds-all occupied by German troops when the big rounds struck home. Beyond that, they had put the Spanish Government on notice that England knew her enemies as well as her friends. HMS Valiant had just tapped Franco on the chin with the few salvos that she managed to put on German positions in La Linea, but it was a promise of retribution, and a day of reckoning that would surely come before this war would be concluded.
For his part, Captain Rawlings aboard Valiant would be ‘Mentioned In Dispatches’ for his courageous raid under intense enemy fire, delivering timely and much needed fire support to a hard fighting garrison force on the Rock.
Admiral Somerville had been pacing on the bridge of Nelson throughout the engagement, dreading more bad news and the possible loss of yet another battleship in the hastily mounted raid. But no bad news came that night. This one was chalked up for the Royal Navy, and Somerville sighed with relief when he got the signaclass="underline" HMS Valiant now west of Tangier, and all is well.
Chapter 36
The German effort on the second day was heavily concentrated in the town itself. The 98th Mountain Regiment consolidated positions near the Moorish Castle while Grossdeutschland Regiment began to push south from the Civil Hospital towards Governor’s Parade. As they did so, units from the 98th Mountain Regiment would extend south along the line of the higher ground to the east to hold the flank of this advance. This enabled the Germans to keep considerable force in the attack, which was difficult house to house fighting.
The weak area of the British defense was the area known as the Devil’s Gap that lay between the town itself and the Rock. The Germans seemed to instinctively know that this was the place to attack, and by so doing they could split the British defenders into two groups. To the west, in the town itself, the 4th Devonshire Battalion, with a company from the 2nd Somerset Light and another of Royal Engineers, put up a stolid defense but, outnumbered three to one, they continued to be attacked by fresh troops.
In the east the remnant of the 2nd Kings Rifles had retreated up the rising knees of the rock to defend the naval batteries and old siege tunnels there. With the Gate House of the Moorish Castle breached, only the tall battlement of the Tower of Homage remained in British possession, and was now defended by a company of the Black Watch. It was to be Gibraltar’s Hougoumont, the farmhouse and gate that was defended by the Coldstream Guards at Waterloo and stubbornly held throughout that great battle. Yet unlike the gates of the farmhouse that were bravely forced shut in the heat of that struggle, there was no gate here, and no way to get inside the tower itself from below. It was simply a massive stone square, with two tiers of crenulated battlements at the top where the bravest of the Black Watch took turns firing down at the German mountain troops.
Inside the top portion of the tower were four stone rooms where fresh ammunition, water, supplies and more men huddled in defense. The Germans fired round after round against the tower with their 150mm infantry gun, blasting away a fragment here a battlement there, but still the Black Watch fought on. Men emerged from the inner tower rooms to drag the wounded back to safety, while others took their place on the battlements. One after another they fought and died, Corporal Robert Cord, Privates Nick Mulligan, Jon McIntyre, Alex Jones and Bill Barclay. A squad of German mountain troops tried to hurl up grappling hooks to begin a medieval style attack, but were cut down by a rifle team led by Lance Corporal David Nichol. The Germans hurled grenades and the British threw them back again. MG-34 machineguns would rake the battlements for long minutes, but the instant the German squads advanced, every embrasure spit fire at them from above. It was soon clear that the position would not fall easily, if at all.
General Kubler was watching the action with his field glasses, gritting his jaw when he saw the latest attempt to scale the tower wall fail. A man as rugged as the mountain itself, he shook his head with dismay. “Tell the assault team to enfilade that tower,” he said. “No hammer will break it, or the men inside. That place will not fall by direct assault.” He knew the old game of scissors, paper, rock well enough. What he could not smash with the rock of his mountain troops could be taken by a paper like envelopment, which he ordered at once. The Germans now moved to scale the green, tree sewn slopes to either side of the tower, well concealed by the thick foliage, and inside the Tower of Homage the Black Watch held on, defiant, enduring and resolute to the last man.
To the west of this position, the fighting in the town itself was going much better for the Germans. This was no ordinary regiment of soldiers at work, but the elite Grossdeutschland Regiment, and they knew their business well. Governor’s Parade and Residence was taken by 10:00 and fighting was particularly bitter near the Cathedral and Convent, the holy places desecrated by the deathly rattle and shock of war. Another two hours hard fighting cleared most of the town as far south as the edge of the Grand Parade, and soon the rifle squads were again creeping through the hallowed ground of Trafalgar Cemetery, where every grave and tombstone told a story.
A gritty Sergeant and two German Privates crouched low near one grave site, dedicated to Thomas Worth and John Buckland of the Royal Marine Artillery. One man knew the English and read the inscription aloud: “The brightest ornaments of their Corps… Killed by the same shot on the 23rd November, 1810 while directing the Howitzer Boats in an attack on the enemy’s flotilla in Cadiz Bay.”
The Sergeant gave him a sour look. “Yes? Well spread out and keep your heads down or you will both join them here!”
Captain Thomas Norman of HMS Mars and Lieutenant William Forester of HMS Colossus must have turned over in their graves as the Germans slowly fought through their burial sites. Both men had died in the famous Battle of Trafalgar that had lent its name to this place.
Soldiers of the 4th Devonshires fought a losing battle, their numbers dwindling until they were eventually holed up in the buildings around the Main Wharf and docks. The elegant Alameda Gardens felt the stain of war and death when a platoon of grenadiers made a brave rush over that area to reach the sand pits near Upper Witham’s Road. Meanwhile, the 98th Mountain Regiment had begun to push up onto the Devil’s Gap, intending to reach the main north south road there. It was very hard fighting to clear the gun positions at Princess Caroline’s Battery and Princess Anne’s Battery, but all these were finally taken, the British Engineers spiking the guns before they fell back to the entrance of the underground Upper Galleries.