Read H. M. S. Ulysses for Free Online Page B

rooms, trained eyes, alive to the slightest abnormality, never left the glowing screens. The radar’s efficiency and range were alike fantastic. The makers, optimistically, as they had thought, had claimed a 40-45 mile operating range for their equipment. On the Ulysses ’s first trials after her refit for its installation, the radar had located a Condor, subsequently destroyed by a Blenheim, at a range of eighty-five miles.
    Engage—that was the next step. Sometimes the enemy came to you, more often you had to go after him. And then, one thing alone mattered—speed.
    The Ulysses was tremendously fast. Quadruple screws powered by four great Parsons singlereduction geared turbines—two in the for’ard, two in the after engine-room—developed an unbelievable horsepower that many a battleship, by no means obsolete, could not match. Officially, she was rated at 33.5 knots. Off Arran, in her full-power trials, bows lifting out of the water, stern dug in like a hydroplane, vibrating in every Clyde-built rivet, and with the tortured, seething water boiling whitely ten feet above the level of the poop-deck, she had covered the measured mile at an incredible 39.2 knots—the nautical equivalent of 45 mph. And the ‘Dude’—Engineer-Commander Dobson—had smiled knowingly, said he wasn’t half trying and just wait till the Abdiel or the Manxman came along, and he’d show them something. But as these famous mine-laying cruisers were widely believed to be capable of 44 knots, the wardroom had merely sniffed ‘Professional jealousy’ and ignored him. Secretly, they were as proud of the great engines as Dobson himself.
    Locate, engage—and destroy. Destruction. That was the be-all, the end-all. Lay the enemy along the sights and destroy him. The Ulysses was well equipped for that also.
    She had four twin gun-turrets, two for’ard, two aft, 5.25 quick- firing and dual-purpose—equally effective against surface targets and aircraft. These were controlled from the Director Towers, the main one for’ard, just above and abaft of the bridge, the auxiliary aft. From these towers, all essential data about bearing, wind-speed, drift, range, own speed, enemy speed, respective angles of course were fed to the giant electronic computing tables in the Transmitting Station, the fighting heart of the ship, situated, curiously enough, in the very bowels of the Ulysses , deep below the water-line, and thence automatically to the turrets as two simple factors—elevation and training. The turrets, of course, could also fight independently.
    These were the main armament. The remaining guns were purely AA—the batteries of multiple pompoms, firing two-pounders in rapid succession, not particularly accurate but producing a blanket curtain sufficient to daunt any enemy pilot, and isolated clusters of twin Oerlikons, high-precision, highvelocity weapons, vicious and deadly in trained hands.
    Finally, the Ulysses carried her depth-charges and torpedoes—36 charges only, a negligible number compared to that carried by many corvettes and destroyers, and the maximum number that could be dropped in one pattern was six. But one depthcharge carries 450 lethal pounds of Amatol, and the Ulysses had destroyed two U-boats during the preceding winter. The 21-inch torpedoes, each with its 750-pound warhead of TNT, lay sleek and menacing, in the triple tubes on the main deck, one set on either side of the after funnel. These had not yet been blooded.
    This, then, was the Ulysses . The complete, the perfect fighting machine, man’s ultimate, so far, in his attempt to weld science and savagery into an instrument of destruction. The perfect fighting machine—but only so long as it was manned and serviced by a perfectly-integrating, smoothlyfunctioning team. A ship—any ship—can never be better than its crew. And the crew of the Ulysses was disintegrating, breaking up: the lid