by James Philip
Chapter 25
Friday 3rd February 1967
The Presidio, Sixth Army Headquarters, San Francisco
Fifty-three-year-old Lieutenant General Frederick C. Weyand, the acting Commander of the United States Sixth Army – he was also filling the post of Military Advisor to the Secretary of State, Henry Cabot Lodge II at the forthcoming United Nations re-dedication – was somewhat at a loss to know what to make of his British guests. All, that was, except the remarkable force of nature to whom the entire entourage deferred, and in some respects, seemed to worship.
Sitting next to the lady at dinner that evening he had very nearly become completely bewitched. And this, notwithstanding his carefully pre-scripted diplomatic conversation, and rehearsed short set-piece monologues and anecdotes, of the sort all men who reached high command in the service of the Union, failed to master at their peril. Somebody like Curtis LeMay, or that tearaway young tyro ‘Storming’ Norman Schwarzkopf, could probably get away with any number of faux pas; not so men of a less Herculean, nonetheless professionally accomplished warrior ilk of soldiers like Fred Weyand. In his experience, it paid for a man to know and the understand his limitations.
Fred Weyand was a product of the University of California, Berkeley ROTC – Reserve Officer Training Corps – program commissioned as an artilleryman in 1938. During the recent war in the Midwest, he had commanded all US and allied ground troops west of the Mississippi. It did not bother him that he had not emerged from the war with the kudos of young Schwarzkopf, or his old friend Creighton Abrams; he had been given the job of holding St Louis, wearing down and pinning a dozen Legions of the End of Days in the west, ahead of the massive armoured thrusts from the east, and the amphibious operations on Lake Michigan which had ended the war in damned nearly one hundred hours.
What those deskbound tacticians in DC thought about it was their problem. The war had been won fast, dirty and with negligible casualties on the US side, and that was all any real soldier ought to care about.
Margaret Thatcher had listened attentively, with – so far as he could tell – genuine fascination as he had rolled out his dutiful spiel about the long and illustrious history of the Presidio.
“There was nothing here until 1776,” he had explained. “Although, I don’t discount the possibility that in years to come archaeologists or historians of the Mesoamerican period, might dig up something or find an obscure reference in a dusty, crumbling old native text to prove me wrong!”
“1776,” the lady had smiled. “Wasn’t that around the time George Washington was having all that trouble with the Howe brothers at New York?”
Fred Weyand had been impressed by the reference to the Battle of Long Island, where, had George Washington not contrived, very much against the odds, to extricate the Continental Army across the East River to Manhattan, the Revolutionary War might have ended, right there and then.
In which case, he might he wearing a British, not an American uniform that evening…
“I don’t think Juan Bautista was very concerned about that when he led a wagon train, from Tucson to the West Coast and first settled this piece of real estate,” Weyand countered, smiling broadly.
The British Prime Minister, seemingly well-rested after her party’s unscheduled stay over at Grand Forks Air Force Base in Nebraska, had drunk only still water, and daintily picked at the salad and then the main course, prime beef steak, put before her.
“The stories which have come down to us from the Spanish, pre-Mexican period, suggest that there were several earthquakes and a lot of bush fires in this part of California around the turn of the nineteenth century. We know more about the site after 1846. Around then American settlers had explored as far south as the northern side of the Bay but everything to the south was still Mexican, although, between us, I don’t think the Mexicans ever cared that much for California, or as they called it Alta-California. Then a certain Lieutenant John Freemont crossed the Golden Gate by boat and captured the Spanish Fort, which was probably situated more or less where we are sitting. A year later gold was found in the mountains, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
He had excised the normal ‘tourist’ gibberish from his dinner talk, sticking strictly to the curios and significant events in the Presidio’s one-hundred-and-twenty or so – give or take a few months – relationship with the US Army.
“The first real fort was constructed in 1853, this eventually became – around 1912, if I recall correctly – officially, Fort Winfield Scott. Back at the start of the Civil War, the one in the 1860s, Colonel Albert Sydney Johnson defended the post against secessionists, yet later in the war he died at Shiloh fighting for the Confederate side.”
“It is a funny old world, sometimes,” his guest agreed, her blue eyes twinkling.
“The Modoc Campaign, the last of the Indian wars was conducted from the headquarters here at the Presidio. That would have been in the 1870s. In the late 1890s the Presidio became a training and embarkation point for troops fighting in the Spanish-American War.”
The Prime Minister had been curious about the 1906 earthquake; most visitors to San Francisco were.
“The then commanding officer, a fellow called Funston, incidentally a decorated hero of the Spanish-American War took over the emergency response to the disaster. His soldiers fought fires and recovered poor souls trapped in the rubble of collapsed buildings. A large tented refugee camp was set up within the Presidio.” Fred Weyand was actually enjoying himself. His officers were amusing the other British guests; he had the star of the show to himself.
“I read somewhere that your great First World War general, Pershing,” Margaret Thatcher prompted him, “suffered a terrible personal loss at this place?”
“Yes, Ma’am. In 1915, while he was absent on an operation against the bandit Pancho Villa, his family was killed in a fire…”
“Oh, how awful!”
“Yes. General Pershing was at Fort Bliss, in Texas, at the time. His wife Helen, and his three daughters, Mary, Anne and Helen junior, all died, it was believed at the time from smoke inhalation. The girls were aged only three to eight years old. The only mercy was that the General’s son, Francis Warren survived. Although the General was subsequently engaged at one time to Nita Patton, George Patton’s niece, he only remarried very late in life, in 1936 shortly before his death to a lady he had met while in France in the latter stages of the Great War.”
Thereafter, the Presidio had been a mirror of America’s wars; a base, a staging point, a hospital, a headquarters, post-1945 a meeting place of friendly nations and during the denouement of the Second Korean War the object of student and popular demonstrations against the United States’ participation in those foreign wars.
As the British party had been driven into the fortress that afternoon there had been demonstrators waving placards at the gates.
Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson had been button-holed by a Marine Corps colonel and his bubbly Hispanic wife; after the meal was over, she came and compared notes with her younger friend. The thing which had struck her most during the enjoyable, relaxing dinner as the guests of the US military, was that nobody had mentioned Operation Maelstrom; revelations of which seemed to be threatening to tear the American body politic apart, limb from limb back in Washington but which, seemingly, had been taken with a very large pinch of salt out here on the West Coast.
The other thing about the whole affair that had not been missed by the Foreign Secretary’s wife, was that nothing in that morning’s papers, nor in the cables thus far received from home in the short time they had been resident at the Presidio, had really come as any news to her husband or, his old partner in crime, Airey Neave. To say that both men were ‘relaxed’ about the scandal would have been the most arrant of understatements; it was as if nothing they were hearing, dreadful as it was, surprised or in any way worried them. In fact, she strongly suspected they had known all about Operation Maelstrom, possibly for many years!
Tom
Harding-Grayson and Airey Neave had advised the Prime Minister that it was ‘nothing to do with us’; that it was ‘best not to intrude on our ally’s personal grief’, and that obviously, ‘other than in the period of the post-war emergency in the United Kingdom, and in the exceptional case of fighting the ongoing Nationalist insurgency in Northern Ireland’, we do not do that sort of thing…
“You and General Weyand seemed to be getting on like a house on fire?” Pat Harding-Grayson observed, mischievously.
Margaret Thatcher pulled a face.
“Oh, have I said something wrong?”
“No, no, it was just that the General told me all about how one of his predecessors, General Pershing, once went off on campaign and his wife and their three daughters were killed in a house fire.”
“Oh, how gruesome…”
“Apparently, that was why they set up their own fire brigade on the base.”
The two women agreed they might take a walk around the elongated part-circle of redbrick ‘lodges’, one of which had been given over to the British mission. During daytime, the lodges had a marvellous view of the Golden Gate Bridge. As it was, in the darkness, the two women had to make do with the bridge lights in the near distance, itself an impressive thing.
Even though they were inside a well-fortified military base surrounded by heavily-armed soldiers, marines and naval personnel, not to mention that the grounds were positively infested with Secret Service men, two of Steuart Pringle’s battle-dress-fatigued AWPs hefting Stirling sub-machine guns, followed the two women as they walked.
“You’re still feeling guilty about abandoning Rachel in the middle of nowhere, aren’t you?” The Foreign Secretary’s wife prompted quietly.
“Yes, and no. Frankly, I wonder if it was a mistake getting her involved in this thing in the first place, I suppose.” The Prime Minister shook her head. “What will her poor husband think when he learns his wife was ejected from Commonwealth One in the middle of the night?”
“That wasn’t exactly the way it was, Margaret,” Pat Harding-Grayson objected, putting on her best Head Girl’s tone. She had discovered when there were times that her younger friend needed a little tough love; and suspected that this was one such. “Rachel is hardly a defenceless little lamb lost in the woods…”
“Um…”
“What does Airey think about all this?”
Margaret Thatcher scowled momentarily.
Airey Sheffield Middleton Neave, MP, the Secretary of State for National Security thought it was all ‘a jolly good wheeze’, whereas, she did not!
“What on Earth is Rachel going to do? I mean, on her own…”
The older woman halted, and the two friends looked at each other.
“Margaret,” Pat Harding-Grayson murmured, as if afraid they were being overheard. “Honestly and truly, had you considered that it might be in everybody’s best interests, that it may well be for the best if you know absolutely nothing, or at least, as little as humanly possible, about whatever Rachel French gets up to over here?”
Chapter 26
Friday 3rd February 1967
HMS Campbeltown, Villefranche-sur-Mer
As the grey pre-dawn began to turn the night to subtle shallower hues of darkling grey the Jean Bart cut her stern chains, the black water under her transom churned, and she began to move, drifting, crabbing towards Cap Ferrat for several anxious seconds before her screws began to drive water across her massive rudder.
Flooded down aft the great ship sat lower in the water than the day HMS Campbeltown had first come alongside her, if anything seeming like she was even more a giant castle of steel rising out of the sea. The old Fletcher class destroyer idled in the now lonely anchorage, flotsam occasionally bumping her camouflaged flanks, the waters fouled with oil still leaking from the bunkers of the sunken ships as the Jean Bart eased past the headlands guarding the entrance to Villefranche Bay, and took the first tall seas over her clipper bow.
Many men had gone to the port rail to watch the battleship get under way. Out to sea the other survivors of the Villefranche Squadron were limping to the south, shepherded by the Dundee and the Perth, with the modern Leander class frigate HMS Ajax still patrolling three miles off the mouth of the anchorage, her Type 965 air search radar probing deep inland.
Ajax was one of three Leanders rushed to Gibraltar from their Devonport home, to beef up Task Force V1, an acknowledgment that Henry Leach’s operation brief seemed to expand daily. To his original mission, the relatively straightforward job of wreaking havoc along the Bay of Lions and the old French Riviera, and in so doing implement a close blockade of the same, had been added neutralising what was left of the French Mediterranean Fleet at Villefranche, mounting not punitive but ‘seize and hold’ raids on targets on and near the coast, deep ELINT and tactical strike missions, and now, the small chore of escorting Rene Leguay’s leaking scows all the way to Malta.
Or rather, as Dermot O’Reilly had feared, that was a chore he had inherited. One plan had been for the County class destroyer HMS Hampshire, en route to Malta, to rendezvous with the Anglo-French fleet during the transit of the Tyrrhenian Sea, so that Campbeltown might ‘pass the baton’ to her, and make best speed back to the Bay of Lions to join Task Force V1, thereupon to retake command of the 21st Destroyer Squadron.
Instead, the Hampshire was now slated to join the Victorious; leaving the ‘baton’ firmly in Dermot O’Reilly’s hands. Wickedly, he suggested to Brynmawr Williams he ought to have just recommended that the ships at Villefranche be scuttled…
No, that would never have done!
Not once he had met the remarkable people who had kept what was left of the once proud French Mediterranean Fleet in being all these years.
The frigate La Savoyard’s listing silhouette began to clarify out of the murk as the dawn hurried into the bay. A near miss by a big bomb had twisted the thirteen-hundred-ton ship like she was a tin can in the hands of a greater God; both her shafts had been warped out of alignment so badly her engine room had been flooded within minutes. Her skeleton crew had wanted to try to pump out the water; O’Reilly’s engineers had taken one look at the ship and known it was hopeless. Even had it been possible to tow the ship to a dry dock, any sane naval surveyor would have inevitably declared the vessel a constructive total loss. In fact, the only thing nobody understood was how a relatively small ship could have sustained such severe, terminal structural damage – her back must be bent or fractured for her stern to be pointed several degrees out of kilter – and still be afloat the next day. There was no accounting for it; one just had to accept that some ships fought harder than others to carry on living.
“Guns! Prepare to open fire on La Savoyard with the aft Bofors and the 20-millimetre auto-cannons. Warn Numbers Three and Four main battery gun houses to be ready to shoot Common HE if needed!”
The acknowledgments flowed back via the Bridge Talker from the Gunnery Officer at his post in the big rotating gun director station almost directly above Dermot O’Reilly’s head.
“Permission to shoot in local control, bridge?”
“Affirmative. Aye to that!”
The Campbeltown was closed up at battle stations, her stern about two-hundred-and-fifty yards from the bow of La Savoyard. The frigate seemed visibly lower in the water at the stern now; perhaps, they would be able to let her succumb in her own time, without the indignity of first being pummelled by close range heavy automatic fire or high explosive shells.
The Jean Bart cleared the entrance to the bay, pitching into the worst of the weather at the minute and the hour that dawn was supposed to break over the Riviera. Beneath lowering clouds as the wind whistled across the two to three-foot swell in the bay despite the sheltering hills, darkness clung to the wilderness of the seascape off shore.
Suddenly, there was a clang of metal on metal somewhere within the Compass Platform behind Dermot O’Reilly, then another. This time something ricocheted within the steel confines of the compartment.
The ship juddered as the aft 5-inch guns fired and 40-and 20-millimetre cannons unleashed the first, short, aimed bursts at La Savoyard.
There was another ‘clang’ in between the rattle of gunfire from aft.
Dermot O’Reilly had stepped onto the starboard bridge wing to see La Savoyard trembling with impacts amidst a fine mist of spray from rounds exploding in, or skipping off the surface of the water.
There was a groan behind him, and the sound of a man dropping to the deck.
“SNIPERS!”
Dermot O’Reilly strode back onto the bridge as the splinter shutters were banging shut all around him.
Men were diving for the deck.
Dermot O’Reilly did not flinch.
He patted the Bridge Talkers shoulder.
“Stand up, son.”
Another round hit a nearby bulkhead: starboard side.
“GUNS! FORWARD MAIN BATTERY MOUNTS AND ALL UNENGAGED ANTI-AIRCRAFT MOUNTS THAT WILL BEAR ENGAGE SNIPERS AND TARGETS OF OPPORTUNITY TO STARBOARD. COMMENCE FIRE IMMEDIATELY. ALL GUN CREWS TO FIRE AT WILL UNDER LOCAL CONTROL. EXECUTE!”
The aft main battery rifles barked again.
“ENGINE ROOM TELEGRAPHS! RING FULL AHEAD BOTH!”
He felt the screws bite in the cold waters of the bay, the destroyer began to shoulder into the light swell piling up at the entrance to the anchorage.
“PORT TEN!”
The hammering of anti-aircraft cannons shook the ship. Pound for pound no ships in the Royal Navy bristled, more or less from bow to stern, with as many guns as the transferred former US Navy Fletchers.
The ship was picking up speed, surging forward like a seagoing greyhound exploding out of the traps.
“LE SAVOYARD IS SINKING BY THE STERN!”
O’Reilly acknowledged this.
“ALL GUNS THAT WILL BEAR ENGAGE TARGETS OF OPPORTUNITY TO STARBOARD UNDER LOCAL CONTROL!”
The Campbeltown was pushing fourteen or fifteen knots as she crashed out of the anchorage into the roiling seas clear of the lee of the land.