by James Philip
“How sophisticated?” Sir David Luce asked. The First Sea Lord’s question was not for his own benefit; he wanted the others around the table to hear the answer.
“The emissions were consistent with a modern Soviet style fighter command and control system. The sort one would only turn on if one had interceptors already in the air. At my personal request a U-2 sortie was subsequently flown over the area from Aviano Air Force Base in Northern Italy. Preliminary analysis of the material arising from that sortie indicates as many as eight destroyer-sized or larger warships in the Golden Horn. Two of the large ships seen on the previous mission were absent. However, over the Sea of Marmara some fifteen miles from the nearest land the U-2 photographed a large vessel in company with at least four small escorts and two medium-sized merchantmen. General cargo ships or small liners, it isn’t possible to tell. The big ship was making a lot of smoke and by then it was early evening and visibility was poor.”
“And these aren’t Turkish ships?” Margaret Thatcher checked, frowning.
“The smaller vessels might be. Well, some of them. The Turkish Navy comprised a handful of surplus war-construction Royal Navy and USN destroyers and frigates, and ten or so Balao class diesel-electric submarines. Again, late World War Two vintage unmodernized vessels.”
“Neither the RAF Canberra or the U-2 were actually attacked?”
“No. The U-2 overflew the region at sixty-eight thousand feet, the Canberra at over fifty thousand.” Julian Christopher moved on. “Crete,” he announced, tapping the long shape of the island with his pointer. “Our intelligence was that Crete, which had been overlooked in the original Greek military coup d’état had recently been taken over by the Government in Athens. This may not be the case. Refugees talk about an invasion, towns and villages being sacked and massacres having taken place. The whole island seems to be in chaos. All the refugees who have come ashore on Cyprus or been picked up far out at sea talk about soldiers everywhere, atrocities, widespread rape and looting. Aerial reconnaissance from Akrotiri had been inconclusive, other than to tell us that several settlements have been burned to the ground and most of the harbours along the north coast are deserted. However, two days ago a Red Navy Kirov class cruiser and two smaller escorts were identified anchored in Souda Bay. The same over flight brought back pictures of new major construction work in progress on the airfield at Heraklion where the main runway is being extended. It is now our working assumption that Crete is no longer under the control of the Greek Junta in Athens.”
The silence in the room was palpable, uneasy.
“Greece,” Julian Christopher continued, “has, as you will know opted for a policy of armed neutrality since the military took over a couple of months after the October War. That neutrality initially took the form of non-interventionism, then turned into a sort of paranoid isolationism in which all foreigners were first encouraged to leave, and later forcibly expelled from the country along with dissidents and trouble makers the regime did not get around to imprisoning or shooting. There is evidence that life on several of the major Greek Islands went on fairly normally until fairly recently but we now believe that around the time Crete was removed from the control of the regime in Athens – sometime in the last six weeks we now think - the Greek Junta has lost contact with many, perhaps all, the major islands in the southern Aegean. It may be that they have declared independence of the mainland, or suffered the same fate as Crete. The simplest explanation for this may simply be that local military garrisons have rebelled against Athens. Obviously, the presence of at least one former Soviet cruiser at Souda Bay, may suggest that something more sinister has befallen the region.”
The pointer moved onto Asia Minor.
“We knew that Ankara was almost totally destroyed by several airbursts during the October War. We don’t know what happened to all the NATO military assets based in Anatolia. Incirlik, for example, was abandoned within a month of the war. Frankly, the Mongol Hordes of Genghis Khan could be at large across the Anatolian plains for all we know. What we do know for sure is that in the last few weeks our listening stations on Cyprus are picking up a lot of radio chatter from the vicinity of Incirlik, the coastal strip directly north of Cyprus, and from around Izmir on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. People who know about these things categorise this ‘chatter’ as being typical of a Division or perhaps, an under-strength Corps-sized military organisation. Some of the ‘chatter’ is in the clear, mainly in Turkish but we’ve also got intercepts in various Russian dialects, but most of the traffic is non-voice and coded so we’ve got no real feel for what’s being said to whom about what.”
“Reformed Turkish Army formations?” Walter Brenckmann asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Julian Christopher guffawed ruefully.
The pointer returned to Istanbul.
“There has been fighting in and around Istanbul in the last month or so. Or that was what we thought. Three days ago the destroyer HMS Undaunted, on patrol at a mid-point between Cyprus and Malta acting as an emergency communications relay between RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus and my headquarters in Malta, rescued several fishermen from a badly shot up fishing boat that had run out of fuel. The boat had been fired on by a Turkish warship somewhere off Rhodes. Two men dressed like Soviet naval officers had been put aboard and the crew ordered to sail the boat to Crete. To cut a long story short there was a storm and the crew threw the ‘Russians’ over the side. Not knowing that Crete was not safe they headed for Souda. When they got there they were ordered to anchor off shore, refused fuel and provisions and questioned by another ‘Russian’. Concluding they weren’t among friends the crew decided to make a run for it. Which they did but there was another storm and eventually they ran out of fuel. They claim that before they left Rhodes on their last voyage there were rumours that a pogrom against Westerners and Jews was under way in Istanbul.”
“Just gossip?” Margaret Thatcher asked.
“This big ship making a lot of smoke you mentioned earlier, Admiral Christopher?” Tom Harding-Grayson inquired idly. “Modern ships make relatively little smoke unless they mean to lay a smokescreen?”
“Quite,” the First Sea Lord concurred tersely.
“The smoke is a problem,” Julian Christopher added. “But we’ve got enough detail on the pictures we’ve got of this ship to make a preliminary identification.”
Margaret Thatcher was both intrigued, and troubled by the two Admirals reluctance to share their little secret.
“Tell me more,” she demanded, trying not to flutter her eyelids.
“There’s only one big ship that fits the bill,” Sir David Luce explained. “Big guns in five twin turrets, one forward, two aft and two offset amidships. A big, coal-burning ship, that’s what the smoke must be, coal smoke.”
Tom Harding-Grayson barked a short laugh.
“My God,” he whistled, “just when you think the World has stopped going mad, something comes along and disproves one!”
“You’re going to have to explain it to me,” the Angry Widow said, beginning to frown. “Whatever it is you are all laughing about?”
“It has got to be the Yavuz,” her Foreign Secretary announced. “I thought the Turks scrapped her years ago!”
Julian Christopher concluded that a little straight talking was in order.
“The battlecruiser Yavuz was built as the Seiner Majestät Schiff – His Majesty’s Ship - Goeben by Blohm and Voss in Hamburg before the First World War. She was commissioned into Kaiser Wilhelm II’s High Seas Fleet in July 1912 but trapped in the Mediterranean by the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. Basically, she was chased into the Sea of Marmara by the Royal Navy where she was handed over to the Ottoman Empire as part of the deal that saw the Turks come in on the German side.”
“Oh.” The Prime Minister did not know what to make of this news.
Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord decided to clarify matters.
“The Turks struck the Yavuz off their Navy list fo
ur years ago. The ship had never been properly modernized. It was and probably remains a museum piece. The thing that worries me is that somebody – somebody who has other big, more modern ships at their disposal – has obviously gone to a great deal of effort to re-activate one of the Kaiser’s dreadnoughts. It speaks to me of a disturbing obsession to put every available weapon, regardless of its usability or suitability, to the, er, wheel.”
“It is madness to waste time and resources on a ship like this when you have better assets to hand, Prime Minister,” Julian Christopher said sombrely. “To me it suggests a military mind that doesn’t care about waging war effectively,” he concluded, “but a mind whose one guiding purpose is simply to make war.”
Chapter 17
Thursday 23rd January 1964
HMS Talavera, Eastern Mediterranean
The Battle class destroyer was loping along at twenty knots with only one of her Admiralty three-drum boilers lit. Her captain, David Penberthy was taking full advantage of his orders requiring him to make an independent passage to Valletta to test the hurried repairs to his ship. If he had been allowed to top off his bunkers in Gibraltar he would have fired up her second boiler and let HMS Talavera off her leash; as it was he planned to wait until he was closer to their destination. Besides, if the forces detailed to seize the three rebel-held islands of Pantelleria, Linosa and Lampedusa on the way to Malta ran into any significant resistance he wanted a healthy operating reserve in his tanks. In the Royal Navy no self-respecting destroyer captain wanted to miss a potential scrap on account of a trifling thing like empty fuel bunkers.
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher was not about to get used to his new berth, the Executive Officer’s cabin, any time soon. His old friend Hugo Montgommery’s ghost still lingered in the cabin and throughout the ship. His predecessor had been a harsh task master when he had to be; but always a man ready to put a consoling hand on a fellow’s shoulder.
Accommodation on a destroyer tended to be at a premium. There was a bunk against the aft bulkhead, a writing table over a slim chest of drawers, a couple of small overhead lockers. There was no port hole because the original scuttle had been welded over during Talavera’s eighteen month long conversion from an old-fashioned gunboat to a Fast Air Detection Escort.
Ironically, the only reason he and so many of the men still onboard the destroyer had survived the October War, was because Talavera had been at sea running radar trials when a megaton-range ground burst had destroyed her home port of Chatham.
At the time Talavera had been one of the most advanced ships in the Royal Navy. Not so today. A couple of months ago off Cape Finisterre an A-4 Skyhawk’s bomb had exploded at the base of her main mast, and another alongside her stern, The first hit had destroyed most of her electronics suite, the second – a near miss – had ignited two unfired GWS 21 Sea Cat surface-to-air missiles and detonated several ant-submarine mortar rounds loaded in her stern-mounted Limbo launcher. Every man caught on deck aft of the amidships deck house had been killed or seriously wounded within seconds. Shortly afterwards, as the ship’s doctor - a perpetually sea sick young man who had been deemed fit to practice medicine at the end of his penultimate year at medical school under the War Emergency Act, and sent onboard Talavera just ten days before she left Portsmouth - and every single one of his qualified sick bay orderlies had been transformed into disambiguated parcels of flesh and bone randomly sprayed across burning bulkheads during the Skyhawks’ first strafing run. Peter, his position in the Radar Room compartment of the Command Information Centre – CIC – partially shield by structures farther aft from the hail of cannon fire raking the main deck, had been knocked unconscious but otherwise emerged remarkably uninjured, a concussion, a gashed head, a very sore shoulder and several deeply bruised and miscellaneously cracked ribs excepted. Approximately half his shipmates had not been so lucky. Ignoring the walking wounded among whose number he had considered himself, of the 218 officers and men onboard fifty seven were killed, eight men were listed as missing presumed killed, and forty-one had been so seriously injured as to be unable to return to duty before the ship reached port. Nobody knew how many of the dead might have lived if the ship’s surgeon – albeit a not quite qualified doctor in normal times, inexperienced and horrendously out of his depth as he would inevitable have been had he survived the attack – not been killed when the Skyhawks returned to torment their helpless victims.
HMS Devonshire, Talavera’s consort that stormy afternoon, had suffered a similar casualty list. Unlike Talavera she was a brand new ship with a green crew and it was only the fact she was twice Talavera’s size, built like a cruiser with a complement over twice the size of the converted Battle class ship that had enabled her to survive. Talavera had survived because her core of experienced old hands had somehow managed to keep her afloat long enough for help in the form of HMS Plymouth, a modern Rothesay class frigate commanded by a veteran captain with a seasoned crew, to come to her aid.
HMS Devonshire had been sent back to England.
Talavera had not; and Peter Christopher was not complaining.
There was a rapping knock at his cabin door.
“Come in!”
Chief Petty Officer ‘Spider’ McCann stepped in from the corridor. The small, lined, sinewy ex-champion pugilist was a little surprised – pleasantly so – by the effortless aplomb with which the formerly easy going Electronic Warfare Officer had rejoined the ship in an entirely new role. Not that he would ever mention it to anybody. A ship’s Executive officer trod an extremely narrow path; he needed to retain the respect and trust of the crew but he could never forget that he was the man answerable to the Captain for the smooth running and the battle readiness of the ship. It was very hard for any second-in-command to actually be liked or popular and friendships were things many Executive officers eschewed. Yes, Lieutenant-Commander Christopher began from a good place; a lot of the men knew him and he and the Old Man had virtually carried Talavera into Oporto on their backs after the action off Finisterre. But no, that did not count for much as time went by and the destroyer fell back into normal seagoing routines. Half the crew were new men, many of them on their first ship, lacking the sea legs, the professionalism, the seamanship and the priceless seagoing experience of the men they had replaced. Which made it even more remarkable how sure-footed Talavera’s ridiculously young – the kid was only twenty-seven, the Master at Arms continually reminded himself – new Executive Officer had been in the five days he had been aboard.
“Any new defaulters for the Captain’s table overnight, Mister McCann?”
“No, sir.”
Peter Christopher checked his watch. It would be dawn in thirty minutes. In Ten minutes time the ship would stand to Air Defence Stations One; a drill that owed its origin to the exigencies of former wars. In the pre-dawn twilight surface ships were marvellously silhouetted against the half light of the new day, periscopes and even small boats, like torpedo boats, were almost invisible to the naked eye down low against the background of the iron grey sea. In the twilight there was no real horizon, no ranging point for the lookouts high in a warship’s superstructure, the only sign of a threat was a trail of bubbles in the water or a tell-tale smear of exhaust smoke. The advent of radar in World War II had somewhat eroded the necessity and the utility of the pre-dawn drill, but as a way of waking up the ship and starting each new day with a metaphorical ‘bang’, closing up at Air Defence Stations One was hard to beat. In any event, who really trusted in radar? HMS Talavera’s slowly rotating four-ton double bedstead Type 965 long-range air defence system atop her great lattice foremast could supposedly see to and slightly beyond the visible horizon; but seeing danger hurtling towards one was not the same thing as being capable of fending it off when it actually arrived overhead. This was never more true than in the ship’s current, electronically denuded condition. The wreckage of the GWS 21 Sea Cat surface-to-air quadruple launcher had been removed, likewise the Limbo anti-submarine mortar; bare ste
el plates covered the decks where they had blown up and burned off Cape Finisterre. The 20-millimetre Oerlikon cannons on the stern deckhouse had gone, too, and while the twin 4.5 turrets of the destroyer’s main battery on the foredeck looked mightily impressive and made a comfortingly loud noise when fired in unison, currently the guns could only be directed, ranged and fired under local control. The gunnery control radar and all its associated electronics had been destroyed off Cape Finisterre and not replaced in the desperate rush to patch Talavera up for the run to Malta.
“Mr Weiss has the watch, sir,” the Master at Arms reported. Both men knew the watch list but the formalities had to be observed. Redundant information was nowhere near as big a problem as risking a failure to communicate a potentially vital piece of information one believed a colleague already knew.
Peter Christopher eased himself to his feet, grabbed his cap.
“Lead on, Mister McCann.”
The two men went first to the bridge.
“Good morning, Mr Weiss,” Peter half-smiled. Miles Weiss had joined the destroyer two months after the October War. Eighteen months his new Executive Officer’s junior in age, the two men were both ‘modern technical officers’ by training and vocation. For Peter the fascination was with radar and electronics, for Miles Weiss it was with guns and ordnance of every imaginable description. “Any surface contacts?”
“We’re painting several fishing boats on the Type 965 repeater, sir.” The dark-haired shorter man reported. “Nothing closer than seven miles. We have a couple of larger contacts farther out. Range thirty miles and slowly falling astern. Might be the Spanish destroyers Gibraltar warned us were stooging about out here?”