The Knight’S Gambit: Pq-17: a Sea Story

By John Alfred Barrett

The melodious thrill of the calvary charge is absent here. Only the cold impersonal movement of human chess pieces guided by ignorance and error creates scenes of devastation. And through it all anonymous heroism as men struggle to serve their respective nations and loyally do their duty.

Men go to sea because they are poor and not because they are dreamers. During the Great Depression young workers thought it heaven to have a job that provided food and shelter and enabled them to save a little money. It was the foundation of the authors engineering career. His youthful vigor found him a wife, and a college education after he left the sea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456878092

Book preview

Copyright © 2011 by John Alfred Barrett, Mariner.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011903275

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4568-7808-5

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4568-7807-8

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4568-7809-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

APOLOGICA

PROLOGUE

FIRST SEA LORD AND HIS LADY I

THE ALBATROSS

PATRICK

RÖSSELSPRUNG

PLAN B

ANASTASIA

CHORAL

REQUIEM

FIRST SEA LORD AND HIS LADY II

GROSSMUTTER

FREIDA AND RUDY

AFTERWORD

Dedicated to the Allied Seamen

who served during the Second World War.

APOLOGICA

Even in Texas our magnum opus is not long enough to be a novel, and is too long to be a short story. And while it may pretend to be a novel, by having a Prologue and After-word, we have endeavored to temporize the horns of our dilemma by calling it a sea story. It is a story about one of the convoys to Russia during the Second World War, and the lives of the different people it affected. To the extent that the author experienced many of the events, it is not purely a work of fiction, perhaps it may be something of a documentary. The characters portrayed are not real people living or dead so welcome to our masquerade party. Whatever the inadequacies of its author, it is a story that deserves to be told.

PROLOGUE

Imagine if you will, a collection of merchant ships during the second world war, all going in the same direction, but unlike a school of fish they are assembled in rank and file like good soldiers on parade. Flanking their convoy are destroyers constantly moving about protecting them from U-Boats. From time to time these drop depth charges creating a crushing underwater explosion that all the ships’ engine rooms and U-Boats can hear; resulting in a geyser that breaks the surface of the water behind them.

But one day, for reasons unknown to the onlooker, the destroyers leave the scene and the ships begin to disperse in a prescribed fashion. In the ancient Greek tragedy the violence always takes place offstage but here it will occur in all its ramifications before the audience. The ships now become a feast for the U-Boats and torpedo planes of the Luftwaffe in what the Germans call operation RÖSSELSPRUNG. Oil Tankers loaded with aviation fuel will give their crews a Viking funeral while they are still alive to enjoy it as the torpedoes ignite their cargo. Freighters with a thousand boxes of dynamite optimistically stored in their tween decks above the waterline are easily detonated into oblivion by the shock of the torpedoes. The twenty-four hour arctic daylight enables the torpedo planes