by James Philip
Saturday 7th December 1963
HMS Talavera, 33 miles NW of Vigo
The wind had touched hurricane force just before dawn but during the morning the fury of the cruel iron grey seas had slowly abated. Unable to make more than steerage way into the teeth of the gales HMS Talavera had been driven thirty miles back towards the rocky Atlantic coast of northern Spain. Now at least, she was holding her own as she pitched and rolled like a drunken matelot after a run ashore, her pumps straining to keep her afloat as each long, uncaring swell sweep under her keel. Big waves had flooded the upper deck and inundated the wrecked Combat Information Centre during the night; the ship was blind, defenceless.
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher – cuts, bruises, a bump on the head and a very sore shoulder apart – was among the fittest of the destroyer’s walking wounded. Knowing that he was the only surviving watch-keeper that the Captain, David Penberthy, trusted to stand a bridge watch in these seas he’d volunteered his services, vehemently insisting – mutinously in hindsight - that he was fit to stand a watch. This had allowed the Old Man a chance to go below decks – where he was desperately needed - to save the ship.
It was over twenty hours since the attack.
Another spume-topped wave threatened to break over the bow. The whole ship shuddered, seemed to stop dead in the water then after a long, heart-stopping hesitation, she lurched ahead again. After several aborted attempts they’d succeeded in welding a crude patch over the jagged hole behind B turret where the unexploded five hundred pound bomb lodged in the flooded bilge abaft the main battery magazine bulkhead had crashed through the fo’c’sle. Guns – Talavera’s Gunnery Officer, Lieutenant Miles Weiss – had packed the space around the bomb to stop it rolling with the ship’s motion, before minutely examined the missile and declared that ‘messing around with the bloody thing is probably the worst thing we can do in the circumstances’. Nobody had cared to debate the point. If the bomb went off it went off, there was nothing anybody could do about it.
Two of the four Douglas A-4 Skyhawks had gone for the big County class destroyer HMS Devonshire, and two for Talavera. Devonshire, the bigger, less handy ship had burned in the night for several hours before the fires had disappeared from view. Talavera had been in no position to offer aid or comfort to her larger consort.
The initial attack had happened so fast that it was only later that they’d been able to piece together the sequence of events. Each Skyhawk had dropped two iron bombs – a five hundred pounder and a thousand pounder, an odd loading but then airmen were an odd breed – and escaped out to sea before returning a few minutes later to strafe the two crippled and burning destroyers.
Both of the five hundred pound bombs had hit Talavera: the one lying malevolently like a ticking time bomb next to her 4.5 inch magazines; the other exploding on contact somewhere in the vicinity of the base of the main mast. One of the thousand pounders had detonated alongside the stern of the ship; the other...well, they’d searched the vessel from stem to stern and not found it so basically, it didn’t matter what had happened to it. At the time it had seemed academic; when the mainmast went over the side it had fouled the port shaft and destroyed the port reduction gear, while simultaneously the near miss had swept the stern with a blizzard of supersonic shrapnel spontaneously igniting the fuel and warheads of two unfired GWS 21 Sea Cat surface-to-air missiles. Among the two dozen dead had been Talavera’s Executive Office, Hugo Montgommery. It was a miracle that the ready lockers containing a dozen charges for the stern-mounted Squid anti-submarine mortar hadn’t blown up. Such small mercies tend to be lost, instantly forgotten in the general mayhem that ensues in the minutes after the first, catastrophic impacts. When the Skyhawks had commenced their strafing runs Talavera was dead in the water, and the destroyer’s only working weapons system had been a single heavy machine gun lashed to the amidships deck house roof manned by a pair of suicidally courageous Royal Marines.
The Skyhawks had made two strafing runs. Approaching from astern they’d raked the destroyer from end to end. The Combat-Information-Centre, the fighting heart of the ship, had been demolished during the first run; Peter Christopher had watched CIC disintegrating around him as if in slow motion. Sparks, flames, binding flashes and billowing smoke concealed the blood and body parts randomly splashed on the walls, and running, falling dark and evil on the deck. If Leading Electrical Artificer Jack Griffin – who’d always enjoyed the reputation of being the ship’s roughest of rough diamonds – hadn’t rugby tackled him out of his command chair he’d probably have been cut in half by a cannon shell.
Over half of HMS Talavera’s crew were dead or seriously wounded. The destroyer’s doctor, a nervous young man who’d been drafted into the Royal Navy after the October War while in his penultimate year at Medical School – therefore deemed under the War Emergency Powers Regulations a ‘qualified medical practitioner’ – had been killed attempting to minister to the handful of survivors on the stern as the Skyhawks had made their first strafing run.
Peter Christopher tried to focus on the feel of the ship under his feet.
“Try to bring her head around to two-six-zero!” He called, sensing that Talavera might ride a little easier if her bow could be persuaded to point a few degrees further south of south-west. He eyed the leaden skies, his gaze flicking slowly from the heavens to the seas and back again. The glass had been rising slowly for the last three hours as the storm front passed over, raging north into Biscay. With luck the sea state would moderate a little that evening. He guessed the wind was blowing at a steady force six, gusting now and then to force eight; but always out of the west-south-west.
“SURFACE CONTACT!”
Peter Christopher swung around so fast he lost his balance and had to make an undignified and painful grab for the bridge rail to avoid taking a tumble. Wrapped in layers of cold-weather gear beneath his oilskins, keeping his feet on the wet, wind-blown, pitching open bridge required care and attention, both of which he’d been neglecting as his mind ran through the uniformly bleak likely outcomes of his, and his ship’s current predicament.
“SURFACE CONTACT BEARING THREE-FOUR-FIVE DEGREES
Peter Christopher raised his binoculars.
A first he saw nothing but the churning grey sea, the spray of enraged white horses breaking from the crests of countless wild waves, and the gloom and the rainy haze that hung like a mist across the middle distance. He kept looking, searching for a shape with hard edges, a wisp of smoke, lighter or darker than the gun metal greyness of the sky and the sea.
“CONTACT BEARING...THREE-FOUR-SEVEN DEGREES!”
Peter Christopher stared down the compass bearing as the ship rose and fell. The waves were so big an aircraft carrier a thousand yards away would have appeared and disappeared in their troughs.
“RANGE?” He shouted over the whistling, rippling roar of the wind.
“FIVE MILES, SIR!”
He raised his glasses to find the swooping and gyrating horizon.
Still, he saw nothing.
And then...
Was that the black lattice of a frigate’s foremast?
He lowered his binoculars for a moment and squeezed his eyes shut. He’d banged his head last night, passed out for a while. Concussion, most probably. His temples thumped and although he’d stopped throwing up several hours ago he was having trouble forcing his vision to focus for more than a few consecutive blinks. He picked up the glasses anew.
He saw the mast rise, roll and fall once, and rise again.
“Runner!” He yelled. The ship had virtually no electrical power and practically all internal communications lines were shredded. “Find the Captain. Give him my compliments and report that we have an unidentified surface contact approaching our position from the north.”
“SURFACE CONTACT IS SIGNALLING BY LAMP, SIR!
The big Aldis signal lamps bolted onto each wing of the bridge were undamaged; unfortunately, they were useless without electrical power.
“FIRST LETTER IS ‘F’!” Reported the lookout who had made the initial sighting. “SECOND IS ‘ONE’!”
Peter Christopher watched the winking light.
“F-One-Two-Six!” He chuckled, suddenly relieved as if all the weight of the World had suddenly been lifted off his aching shoulders. “That’s the Plymouth!”
Within seconds the lookout had confirmed it.
The other ship was much closer now, corkscrewing and pitching sickening as she quartered the mountainous Atlantic swells.
HMS Plymouth was a Rothesay class anti-submarine frigate commissioned some eighteen months before the October War. With a displacement several hundred tons lighter than Talavera but with more or less the same general hull dimensions, Plymouth was handier ship than the older converted Battle class destroyer; even so, her Captain was battering south with a fearsome bone in his teeth and life onboard the frigate must be as interesting as it was precarious for her crew. The approaching warship was closing the distance at in excess of twenty knots.
There was a clunking noise on the deck behind Peter Christopher.
Leading Electrical Artificer Jack Griffin smiled piratically at his divisional officer through his thick black beard. At his feet lay two large battery boxes; while snake-like coiled cables terminated by wicked-looking crocodile clips were draped around his broad shoulders.
“These boys,” the newcomer declared, flicking a glance at the two battery boxes, “should have enough juice left in them to let us talk to our new friend, sir.” He coughed, still struggling to recover his breath. The batteries weighed over thirty pounds each and were normally stowed in the aft electrical locker in the bowels of the ship. “Give me a jiffy and I’ll strip the cables off the bridge lamps and we’ll be up and running, sir.”
Peter Christopher suppressed a conspiratorial grin.
A few minutes later Captain David Penberthy came onto the bridge as Jack Griffin was standing up to admire his handiwork. Below the signal lamp mount the deck was a riot of severed and stripped back wires, flaked paint and crazily uncoiled cables.
HMS Talavera’s exhausted commanding officer eyed the mess for a moment before he took the binoculars Peter Christopher offered him and studied the approaching frigate.
Plymouth was flashing her pennant number – F126 – every few seconds.
“Number Two Bridge Lamp is back in commission, sir,” Jack Griffin boasted.
“Acknowledge with our Pennant number,” David Penberthy ordered.
HMS Plymouth turned a long, slow circle around the stricken destroyer after ranging alongside so that the two Captains could exchange megaphone pleasantries. Then Plymouth manoeuvred to within fifty feet of the Talavera’s port side.
“MY! MY!” Boomed the hearty voice from the bridge of the frigate. “YOU CHAPS REALLY HAVE BEEN IN THE WARS! NEVER MIND! THEY SAY THAT WORSE THINGS HAPPEN AT SEA!”
There followed a cheerful discussion as to how best to proceed.
Talavera needed fit men to help her stay afloat and whatever medical assistance Plymouth could render. The problem was in the transference of the one to the other. In the end the two captains agreed that ‘this was no time to be pussyfooting around worrying about the paintwork’ of their respective commands.
Talavera would make whatever revolutions she could and attempt to hold her present course; Plymouth would, literally, ‘bump against her windward flank’. Every available mattress and life jacket would be strewn on Talavera’s amidships port main deck and Plymouth’s people would – all being well – jump from the deck of one ship to the other.
In the middle of an Atlantic gale it was insane.
However, it was no less insane than the world in which they had all lived these last thirteen months.
First across the lethal gap between the rising and falling, erratically rolling warships was HMS Plymouth’s Executive Office – Lieutenant-Commander Edward Perry - a small wiry man with beetle brows and a stern smile that radiated confidence in everybody he met. He slightly mistimed his leap, stepping off the cliff-edge of the frigate’s bow at the very moment Talavera’s deck fell off the crest of a particularly tall swell. He and the destroyer fell into the trough of the waves together as Plymouth’s plates ground loudly, horribly against the destroyer’s rail, ripping away a ten foot section. The falling man hit the pile of mattresses and lifejackets hard, rolled and was grabbed by the waiting hands of the reception party that, to a man, fell unceremoniously on top of him to stop him sliding between the screeching hulls of the two ships.
In a moment the newcomer was on his feet, brushing himself down and shaking Captain David Penberthy’s hand.
Chapter 7
Saturday 7th December 1963
UKIEA Government Buildings, Cheltenham, England
It had been a very long day and nobody around the Cabinet table had slept in the last twenty-four hours. The leading members of the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration waited patiently, welcoming the respite, while the technicians in RAF blue uniforms set up the projector and loaded the first spool of film.
The Right Honourable Edward Richard George Heath, for most of the last year the acknowledged, if not ever formally constitutionally appointed let alone anointed Prime Minister, spent the idle minutes writing slow, deliberate notes in the small pocket journal he’d kept, sporadically, over the last few terrible months. Up until the October War he’d been a man who’d methodically, perhaps obsessively documented his life. Famously, he was reputed to have never parted company with any correspondence he’d received and habitually kept copies – even of personal letters – of everything he wrote. This old habit had lapsed after the cataclysm. His records, the precious correspondence which had catalogued and validated his life had been destroyed and for a while, he’d felt a little bereft, as if the foundation of his life, his very personality, had been somehow eroded. A man with a lesser sense of mission, lacking in his almost religious – although he’d always been a very secular sort of Christian – sense of duty would have been weighed down forever by that loss of self, the sudden absence of the physical evidence of the life he had lived up until then.
Aware that the RAF technicians were tidying up and preparing to leave the room the Prime Minister collected his thoughts as he eyed the other players around his Cabinet table.
To his left sat his nominal deputy, the Right Honourable Leonard James Callaghan, the forty-one year old Member of Parliament for the constituency of Cardiff South East, and the Leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party of the United Kingdom. Jim Callaghan also held the post of Minister of Defence in the UKIEA. A big, lugubrious man his slowness of speech and apparently unhurried mannerisms veiled a keen intellect which was as equally attuned to the strategic as the tactical side of politics.
Beyond James Callaghan sat the new Home Secretary, thirty-eight year old Margaret Hilda Thatcher. The Prime Minister’s relations with the woman many people called ‘the Angry Widow’ – although always out of her hearing – had been distantly cordial for many years before the war but they were not, and probably never would be true friends or confidantes. Nobody had been more surprised than he when belatedly, he’d realised that he had no greater allies in the fight to save the nation that Margaret Thatcher and Jim Callaghan, the erstwhile leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition.
It was a funny old World...
To Edward Heath’s right hand sat the constantly fulminating figure of fifty year old Iain Norman Macleod, the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, whom he’d recently brought into his inner War Cabinet as Minister of Information. This latter title was a euphemism for a role that specifically combined overseeing both a political warfare function and the duties of the Government’s official, albeit non-political, propagandist. It was the Prime Minister’s most fervent hope that his old but somewhat estranged ‘One Nation Conservative’ friend would henceforth, be too busy confounding their mutual foes to sponsor further consp
iracies within the Conservative Party. Iain Macleod was a man who was constantly in motion. Partly, this was because he’d never fully recovered from wounds received in the 1945 war, mostly it was because no other man in Government had such a brilliant, or such a restless mind.
Beyond Iain Macleod, George Edward ‘Peter’ Thorneycroft, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and now the Conservative Party’s man at the Ministry of Defence viewed proceedings with his normal inscrutability. The fifty-four year old Tory Grandee was well liked in the ranks of what little survived of the pre-war party, and with the tragic death of Alec Douglas-Home, the Foreign Secretary in the treacherous attack on Balmoral Castle, he was the senior surviving member of Harold ‘Supermac’ MacMillan’s old guard. Peter Thorneycroft wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t entertained ambitions – perhaps, the expectation – that he would step in poor Alec’s shoes. However, if he was discommoded by the promotion of a career civil servant, Tom Harding-Grayson, formerly Alec Douglas-Home’s Permanent Secretary to the post, he’d kept his disappointment to himself.
Tom Harding-Grayson, his mind uncluttered with political baggage, had been the logical choice to succeed Sir Alec Douglas-Home. This was not a time for politics; this was a time for hard-headed pragmatism and who better to inject that into the highest councils in the land than the man who’d been shunned and sidelined as a Jeremiad in the years before exactly what he’d predicted might happen had indeed, happened. No man in Whitehall had seen so clearly, or discussed the dangers so eloquently, as Tom Harding-Grayson. The catastrophic developments of recent days and hours only served to reinforce the Prime Minister’s conviction that he’d done the right thing in leaving Peter Thorneycroft where he was and bringing in Tom Harding-Grayson.
At the head of the table sat Sir Henry Tomlinson, the Head of the Home Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary, and the greying éminence grise of the UKIEA. Had it not been for the October War, Henry Tomlinson would have found himself overlooked – sidelined like Tom Harding-Grayson - for the job he now discharged with such effortless aplomb. Like his Prime Minister, Henry Tomlinson had spent the last ten minutes writing in his notebook. Unlike his Prime Minister, he hadn’t looked up once in those minutes.