by James Philip
Why had the Red Air Force sent – at huge peril - most, if not all, of its long-range heavy bomber force thousands of miles from the Russian heartland to destroy what survived of the French Mediterranean Fleet?
To keep it out of the hands of the Front Internationale?
That made no sense, the Soviets were obviously hand in glove with those maniacs.
To stop the West getting hold of those ships?
That was almost as nonsensical as any other explanation. Those ships had been rusting at Villefranche for years, nobody in Oxford or London had given them a second thought until the last few weeks. By spiriting the surviving ships to Malta, the allies – the British and the French – were as good as putting them out of the fight as if they had scuttled them at their moorings.
And yet the Russians had sent at least twenty bombers laden with ship-killing bombs to destroy that fleet. Was this some sort of reaction to the Front Internationale’s failure to seize the fleet; or had the Russians intended to destroy the fleet sooner or later, if only to deny it to the allies?
But for the Victorious’s Sea Vixens and the radar-directed barrage thrown up by his Fletchers, those Tu-95s would have had a field day…
Of course, the Russians had not expected to be confronted with fast jets, or murderously effective anti-aircraft fire filling the skies precisely where they planned to release their bomb loads. So, if neither the Royal Navy nor their new French friends had been expecting the attack; the Russians had certainly not anticipated running into fighters or three old-fashioned gunship destroyers spitting radar-directed fire in their faces. In other words, everybody was as blind as everybody else!
The wind was starting to whistle through the upper works of the old destroyer; even in the shelter of the anchorage he could feel the Campbeltown working under his feet. The trip to Malta was going to be a rough one for the people on the smaller ships. Nonetheless, at the moment he suspected most of Rene Leguay’s people would steam into the jaws of Hades to get away from Villefranche and the hated Front Internationale. It was too early for the full shock of that afternoon’s disaster to have sunk in, either for many of his people, or Rene Leguay’s. While he and his French counterpart knew that this was what mortal combat was like, even in this brave new post-apocalypse world, many, the majority perhaps, of those who had not experienced the savagery of a sea battle, would need a little time to come to terms with their experiences. Even after the fire fight with the Front Internationale’s Revolutionary Guards, the civilians on the battleships would have felt relatively secure, having witnessed how invulnerable the great ship was to the ‘big guns’ of their foes. Now, however, they knew the great ship could easily have been smashed like matchwood by the two-ton bombs falling like supersonic bolts from a grey sky, dropped by aircraft they never even saw.
Dermot O’Reilly was under no illusion how lucky his ships had been that afternoon. Even a relatively near miss by one of those bombs would have stove in the side of one of his thin-skinned Fletchers, a direct hit would have folded Campbeltown or one of her sisters in half and killed most of the men aboard.
It was around midnight that a hand touched Dermot O’Reilly’s shoulder as he dozed in the captain’s chair on the bridge.
“La Savoyard’s splinter damage is too bad. Her engine room is still flooded, sir,” Brynmawr Williams reported in the unearthly red lighting of the compartment.
The Villefranche Squadron and the three detached Fletchers of the 21st Destroyer Squadron were observing a total black out; the red lighting preserved the bridge watch’s night vision.
La Savoyard was a thirteen hundred ton Le Normand class frigate capable of making twenty-eight knots, a relatively modern ship commissioned as recently as 1956.
Dermot O’Reilly sighed.
“Admiral Leguay has ordered her to be evacuated,” Campbeltown’s Executive Officer continued grimly. “She may sink before dawn. If she doesn’t…”
“Notify the Jean Bart, that Campbeltown will sink La Savoyard with gunfire at dawn.”
Using torpedoes within the enclosed anchorage was impractical, not least because the frigate was moored close in to the corniche at the northern end of the bay where the waters narrowed.
Campbeltown’s 21-inch fish needed to run several hundred yards before their warheads activated, thus making it almost impossible for the destroyer to safely manoeuvre into a firing position without risking running aground, or fouling the wreckage of one or other of the sunken ships.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
It gave neither man any pleasure to be contemplating delivering the coup de grace to any ship; but neither could they risk allowing the ship, her weaponry or any of her equipment falling into the hands of the Front Internationale, or their Soviet sponsors.
Most of the survivors from the sunken ships had been transferred to the Jean Bart, which, courtesy of Campbeltown’s surgeon, assisted by sickbay attendants from both the Dundee and the Perth, and the ransacking of the contents of all three destroyers’ medical lockers, was the best equipped of the French ships to deal with casualties. Ideally, helicopters from the Victorious or the Fearless would have airlifted off the most seriously injured casualties in the morning but because of the increasingly wild weather offshore, that was not going to happen now.
Jean Bart, her list stabilised by counter-flooding, and her head still down by a couple of degrees, would lead the Clemenceau, the cruiser De Grasse, the fleet destroyers La Bourdannais, and Kersaint, the frigate Le Lorrain and a motley collection of fishing boats out of the anchorage in the hours before dawn. If Le Lorrain’s sister ship, La Savoyard was still afloat at daybreak, Campbeltown, which would remain behind in the anchorage until all the other vessels had safely departed, would sink her.
Even after Campbeltown had recovered every one of her people not essential to the operation of the battleship, there would still be over a hundred and seventy Royal Navy men – including sixty-six of Campbeltown’s complement on the Jean Bart, and a similar-sized contingent from the Dundee and Perth aboard the Clemenceau - aboard the French ships. Several of Rene Leguay’s smaller ships were so bereft of competent, let alone qualified watchkeepers, and so short-handed that had the three destroyers not each have given up several experienced officers and petty officers it would simply not have been possible to operate La Bourdannais, or the Kersaint.
Mercifully, at the time of the bombing raid there had been no British personnel on either the Jeanne d’Arc or La Savoyard, and miraculously of the twenty or so men from the Perth aboard La Galissoniene and the Surcouf, had all survived with nothing worse than cuts and bruises and for two men blown overboard by near misses, a brush with hypothermia and exposure in the cold waters, survivable only because, fortuitously, they had been wearing life jackets when they went into the water.
Dermot O’Reilly blinked awake again.
He had been cat-napping, lost track of time.
Three bells in the middle watch: zero-one-thirty-hours.
A mug of cocoa was respectfully pressed into his hands.
“Thank you, Tompkins,” he said gruffly to the young quartermaster’s mate who had brought him the life-giving brew.
O’Reilly had once asked Peter Christopher how ‘on earth do you remember everybody’s name?’ It transpired that his friend religiously locked himself away for a few minutes every day and mentally walked the ship, or the office, or the embassy or these days, presumably the Governor-General’s Mansion at Yarralumla and the nearby Australian Parliament, picturing faces and naming the names. Apparently, Lady Marija did the same sort of exercise; and sometimes they tested each other.
Apparently, quite competitively!
HMS Campbeltown’s commanding officer had still not got the faces and the names of each and every man of his three-hundred-and-four-man crew locked and loaded in his mind’s eye. He was only about ninety percent of the way, the calculus complicated by the fact that thirty-one men had transferred off the destroyer at Gibraltar, mostly older han
ds or promising greenhorns going on board other of the 21st Destroyer Squadron’s vessels, and forty-seven completely new men had joined the ship.
O’Reilly could only imagine what a nightmare it must be trying to remember names on a big ship like a cruiser or an aircraft carrier! Reconciling names to faces, ranks and duties on a ship the size of the Victorious must be akin to painting the Forth Bridge; no sooner had one finished one end and it was time to start daubing again at the other!
He tried very hard not to fret over everything that had to be done over the next few hours, if the ships in his charge were to be safely set upon their way to freedom.
The idea of sailing the French ships to Malta was, to his way of thinking, something of a stretch. Corsica and Sardinia, neither under the control of regimes friendly to Royal Navy surface ships trespassing anywhere near their waters, and Sicily – nobody knew what to expect from that Mafia-controlled island, or the Italian mainland if the fleet attempted to make a passage through the Straits of Messina – all lay between the French Riviera and the safety of the Grand Harbour, a transit of the best part of seven hundred and fifty miles. Granted, a voyage to Gibraltar, over nine hundred miles distant, would have been no picnic but at least they could be confident that the Spanish were not going to make any difficulties, not now that Generalissimo Franco was in the middle of gratefully falling back into bed with NATO.
Surely, it would have been better to attempt to park the French ships at La Spezia or Genoa; the people in charge of those ports – Fascisti, by all accounts – were badly in need of friends and there were big dry docks and shipyard workers crying out for gainful employment, capable of patching up the French warships…
Ours is not to reason why…
So, Malta it was; and it was his job to see the fleet – what was left of it – safely on its way.
O’Reilly sipped his cocoa.
‘Chi,’ they called it in the Royal Navy. His brew was laced with rum, a little something to help him get through the night. When he dined with his officers, he nursed a small glass of beer, and axiomatically, it went without saying that he drank the Queen’s health with ‘the real stuff’, that apart, he was fastidiously teetotal these days.
At a pinch, the French ships had just enough oil in their bunkers to make Naples. Before the air raid he had been contemplating pumping a couple of hundred more tons of Campbeltown’s fuel into the Jean Bart’s tanks, little more than a drop in the ocean to a thirsty monster like the battleship. He had hoped similar ‘top ups’ from the Dundee and the Perth would have been just enough to get the French to Malta. All those plans had gone overboard when the first Russian bomb screamed down. Out at sea, even had the survivors of the Villefranche Squadron been equipped, or their crews trained to do it, oiling was going to be impossible given the predicted sea conditions.
O’Reilly tried not to obsess about all the things which could go wrong. If any of the French ships broke down, lost power, there would be no way a tow could be passed or secured, a stricken ship would be at the mercy of the seas, possibly even driven north onto a lee shore…
Another sip of his restorative cocoa.
Another sigh, oddly contented.
Whatever his worries these were the days any Royal Navy Captain worth his salt longed to live.
God in Heaven, how Peter would envy me if he could see me now!
Chapter 23
Thursday 2nd February 1967
The Oval Office, The White House
US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was in conference with Richard Nixon when Bob Haldeman had burst into the Oval Office, without knocking, and turned on the new colour TV in the corner near the door.
Bizarrely, nobody had mentioned The Washington Post’s damning indictment of the Administration’s competence, morals and grasp of legal proprieties that morning. Other, that was, than to despatch senior staffers to bad mouth Ben Bradlee and ‘the traitors within’ to the White House press corps, which, despite the furore, was oddly depleted, the building had been in a state of semi-denial.
That was not to say that the phones did not ring, maniacally.
“No comment…”
“That’s horseshit…”
“No comment…”
“Which part of ‘no comment’ don’t you get, buddy?”
“No, the President is working at his desk as normal…”
“No comment…”
“You need to see this!” Bob Haldeman informed the Commander-in-Chief, rattled, which was not like him. Other staffers had followed him into the Oval Office.
Richard Nixon’s scowl of displeasure to be interrupted without a by your leave, morphed into something a lot closer to unmitigated horror as he realised what he was watching.
Walter Brenckmann and his wife were fielding – with courtesy and an uncanny ‘down home’ charm - a barrage of questions.
“He’s just told the American people that we’ve been tapping their phones and bugging their houses,” John Ehrlichmann explained breathlessly. He had spilled something, possibly coffee, on his jacket in his anxiety to get to the Oval Office. “And he’s just announced he’s running in 1968!”
“The general election is two years away!” Somebody objected derisively.
“It is in twenty-one fucking months,” Bob Haldeman snapped irritably.
Joanne Brenckmann was talking.
“You really never know what life is going to bring next,” she reflected. “A little over four years ago, we were planning to sell up our house in Cambridge – we were almost right next to the MIT campus - and go down to the Keys, and then,” she shrugged and smiled that ‘grandmother of the nation’ smile that scared the living daylights out of the older campaigners in the Oval Office, “everything changed!”
“Oh shit!” More than one man muttered.
Joanne Brenckmann was not Jackie Kennedy, nor was she anywhere near as scary as Lady Bird Johnson. She certainly was not Mamie Eisenhower, that most anonymous of presidential spouses in the last three decades.
No, she was more Eleanor Roosevelt reincarnated…
Except, happily married to her husband…
And as for the Ambassador: heck, nobody wanted to get into a man to man debate with the guy who had been Claude Betancourt’s go-to fixer for all those years!
“No chance,” another pundit offered, wandering into the Oval Office. “What about the beatnik son in LA. You know, the one who did jail time…”
“Even Hoover figured that was a fix up.”
“Oh, right…”
“Shut up!” Richard Nixon barked angrily. “All of you, shut up!”
Coincidentally, that was when Pat Nixon entered the Oval Office, having been warned that something ‘was going on’. Normally, the President’s wife prided herself on being above the fray, that classic non sequitur, a ‘non-political’ political wife. She was no such thing, no woman married to a career politician who had been vice president for eight years in the 1950s could claim to be ignorant or untouched by the curse of political life.; all she could do was try to protect her daughters from the nastiness of the environment in which they lived.
She came to stand beside her husband’s desk.
She too, frowned at the telecast.
Joanne Brenckmann had that natural common touch that simply could not be taught, or acquired. She just connected, instantly, her smile cutting through all the shit…
“If he runs,” John Ehrlichmann speculated, “we hit him for his links to the Kennedys, we call him old man Betancourt’s personal congressman, we dig up dirt on his kids…”
“Turn up the sound,” the President snarled.
“I support my husband in everything he does,” Joanne Brenckmann was saying. “No, of course we don’t agree over everything. How do I feel about Walter running for President? How did I feel about bringing up three, and then a fourth young child during wartime when he was away in the Navy? Walter was doing his duty. He was defending us all. That is what he will be doing ru
nning for President.”
A secretary scurried into the Oval Office and spoke to Haldeman. The Chief of Staff scowled, nodded curtly and the woman fled back into the adjacent secretary’s room.
“Brenckmann and his wife are going to be on Walter Cronkite’s show tonight,” he reported to the room at large. “It gets worse. The word from her lawyer in San Francisco is that Miranda Sullivan will be holding a news conference this afternoon, local time. All the networks are going to carry it live tonight as soon as Cronkite winds up with the Brenckmanns.”
Ronald Ziegler, the still absurdly youthful White House Press Secretary skidded into the Oval Office.
“There’s hardly anybody in the press room,” he complained, “they’ve all gone down to Sallis, Betancourt and Brenckmann. What am I supposed to say to them all when they come back here?”
Nobody said anything.
“I’ve got to have something to work with,” Ziegler pleaded. “There’s a whole lot of blood in the water and all those guys down there at the Ambassador’s conference are real sharks!”
“Former Ambassador,” John Ehrlichmann said absent-mindedly. Like other members of the President’s inner circle he was in shock.
“Did we sack the guy?” Ziegler queried, brightening a little.
“No. He quit.”
“Oh, but can’t we still say we fired him? For being such a klutz with the Brits, or something?”
“No,” Henry Kissinger spoke for the first time in several minutes. The urbane Harvard academic was ashen-faced, clearly not himself. The US National Security Advisor seemed to be standing, physically and psychologically, apart from everybody else in the Oval Office. He threw a questioning glance at Richard Nixon. “You told me there was nothing to worry about?” He put to the President, disappointed.