Tales of Brave Ulysses (Timeline 10/27/62)

by James Philip

  The Master at Arms had donned a yellow life preserver over his filthy, blood-stained and ragged uniform. He was holding out a second life jacket in his free hand.

  “You need to put this on, sir,” he directed with gentle, calmly compelling implacability.

  Alan Hannay felt his arms sliding into the unwieldy jacket.

  That was when he finally took a pause for breath; and gazed, perhaps for the first time down the length of the doomed destroyer and his conscious mind actually registered what he was seeing. From his viewpoint on the shattered stern house roof he could see approximately two thirds of the ship’s length from the stern to the wrecked bridge. The stump of the great smashed lattice foremast blocked any sight of the foredeck. His first thought was: how on earth is Talavera still afloat? The sleek grey lines of before were gone, above him the tattered and torn battle flag still flew, somehow, from the halyards of the pole mainmast but everything around it and forward of it was mangled, charred, on fire and there were bodies everywhere. Men were clambering up onto the chaos of the main deck from below and the wounded were being carried to the port rail. Around the ship an evil brown-black slick of heavy bunker oil was spreading across the choppy waters, calming the short, close-packed waves before they could strike the flanks of the stricken ship.

  Suddenly, Alan Hannay felt very tired.

  Was that me screaming and cursing as I swung the barrels of the cannon round to bear on the nearest of the two big ships? That ship which looked like something out of somebody’s First World War scrapbook? How could we possibly have been that close to a monster like that? I just pulled the triggers and watched the shells walking down the main deck of the dinosaur...

  Strong hands grabbed him otherwise he would have fallen.

  He thought he was going to be sick.

  The moment passed and he felt a little better, suddenly his ears seemed to be working again and he shrugged off the supporting hands.

  The ship was steadier but down several degrees by the bow.

  In his peripheral vision he was aware of a looming long grey shape.

  He blinked at the apparition in mute supplication.

  The big American destroyer was very nearly alongside.

  So near he wanted to reach out and touch her.

  The other ship had to be one of the two modern Charles F. Adams guided missile destroyers which had creamed past HMS Talavera to interpose themselves between her and the surviving Russian cruiser coming down from the north east. Both American ships had surged past with huge bones in their teeth, their quick firing automatic five-inch guns pumping defiance.

  Now the other ship completely filled Alan Hannay’s field of vision, rising and falling on the swell as she manoeuvred to shelter the Talavera in her lee. Boarding nets were rolling down the American destroyer’s flank; men were crowding her starboard rail as if steeling themselves to jump down onto the Talavera’s deck.

  Unyielding steel ground against steel as the ships came together.

  The first men threw themselves from the side of the American destroyer and landed amidst the carnage on the stricken destroyer’s main deck. Multiple lines were hurled. Alan Hannay watched mesmerised, hardly believing what he was seeing. Talavera could sink or capsize any moment. She might blow up and take both ships to the bottom. More men from the American destroyer tumbled onto the Talavera; he could hardly credit the courage of the men jockeying to be the next man to leap onboard the stricken Battle class destroyer, already groups were gathering around the wounded men lying on the deck behind the bridge.

  A flapping, cracking sound over his head made Alan Hannay glance upwards to where HMS Talavera’s battle flag still streamed proudly, raggedly in the gusting wind.

  “Mr McCann,” he said hoarsely. “If you’d be so good as to haul down the remaining flags.” As an afterthought, most likely grinning like an idiot he added: “The way things are in the World I wouldn’t be the least surprised if we don’t need those dusters again one day!”

  Chapter 4

  13:34 Hours

  Friday 3rd April 1964

  Royal Naval Hospital, Bighi, Malta

  Marija Christopher and Rosa Calleja were carefully, almost tenderly, handed down from the back of the army Bedford lorry they had flagged down at Kalkara. Marija had taken charge the moment it became evident the truck was transporting badly injured men to the nearest hospital at nearby Bighi. The grim-faced, trigger-happy soldiers riding shotgun had gladly relinquished their charges to the two young Maltese women. There were five men lying on the bloody floor of the Bedford. One was already dead. There were two Royal Engineers with single gunshot wounds to the torso, and an unconscious Redcap – a Royal Military Policeman – with a facial wound that looked worse than it was and shrapnel injuries to both legs. The other wounded man was wearing strange and unfamiliar grey camouflage fatigues.

  ‘He’s a fucking Russian!’ The women were informed.

  Marija was a nurse; she did not care whose side the wounded man had been on before he had been injured and captured.

  The enemy soldier’s left arm was shattered above the elbow and he was in terrible pain.

  No, there had been no morphine left!

  Marija had applied pressure to the wound of one of the badly injured Royal Engineers and brusquely ordered the nearest guard to turn the other onto his left hand side before he drowned in his own blood. Meanwhile, Rosa had taken the Russian’s undamaged arm, begun to talk lowly, reassuringly to him as the lorry bumped and ground along the pot-holed road above the burning village of Kalkara.

  Prior to deciding to get to Bighi as soon as possible the two young women had not spent overlong surveying the devastation of their island home before leaving their shelter on the heights and flagging down the Bedford truck.

  They had watched the two modern American destroyers racing north like sharks hunting prey, their guns spitting fire. Both ships had passed so close inshore that they had, briefly, feared they might run aground as they ran up the coast at breakneck speed, carving huge bow waves as they cut every corner to close the range with the enemy as fast as possible. The gun in each ship’s fo’c’sle turret had fired every two or three seconds, the puff of grey smoke of each shot instantly whipped away by the rushing wind.

  Marija had spared herself the indulgence of a single second glance over her shoulder.

  Valletta was burning. The airfield at Luqa and all the surrounding villages burned. Senglea, Cospicua and Birgu where she had been born were on fire; she hardly trusted herself to imagine what carnage the rain of shells had wrought in the dockyards of French Creek, Dockyard Creek and elsewhere in the Grand Harbour, the surface of which was now vilely fouled with leaking bunker oil. She had wondered briefly if her new married home in Kalkara had survived. Beyond Valletta there were big fires in Gzira and Sliema, and distant Mdina was enveloped in the burning haze. The entire island was disappearing beneath a spreading pall of smoke, dust and ash.

  Notwithstanding that Marija understood that in the last hour her whole life had just been torn asunder she had important work to do. Far out to sea her husband – the man she had loved since she was thirteen – had probably gone to his death in the last few minutes. It had been impossible to make out the details of the faraway battle in the middle of the darkling, lightning-forked Mediterranean squall. Guns had flashed; there had been huge explosions, and the rumbling thunder of distant big guns. Future historians would know the exact moment the final sea battle had begun because the big guns had stopped shelling Malta when HMS Talavera had commenced her attack; one small ship against a whole fleet...

  Oh Peter!

  The Russian soldier groaned as he was dumped on the ground.

  Marija realised she had been woolgathering.

  That was unforgivable.

  “Be careful please!” She snapped in the tone of voice she had learned from her friend and mentor, Margo Seiffert. Marija knew she had a long way to go before she could match her friend’s uncanny talent for tur
ning strong men’s knees to jelly; so she was pleasantly surprised that when the soldiers next they picked up the delirious Russian it was with no little care for his injuries.

  The air was laced by fine ash and pulverised brick dust, and tainted with drifting smoke. One part of Marija’s mind registered that a fire was burning somewhere in the hospital complex and that there were spent cartridge shells in the rubble under her feet. Occasionally, there were single gunshots, now and then bursts of automatic gunfire and the crack of grenades. Fortunately, the shooting sounded as if it was several hundred yards away. And mercifully, the naval bombardment had not yet resumed.

  She became aware of Rosa’s presence at her shoulder.

  “What shall I do, sister?” The other woman asked simply.

  Marija thought about it.

  The two women had been strangers – they had not even liked each other – before Marija’s elder brother, Samuel, had gone missing a day or so before HMS Torquay was destroyed by sabotage in the Grand Harbour. Soon afterwards Rosa had been injured in the booby trap explosion which had killed Marija’s friend and self-appointed guardian, Lieutenant Jim Siddall, when they had gone together to examine her brother’s workshop. The women had been brought together by their grief and been virtually inseparable – Marija’s short weekend-long honeymoon apart – ever since. Marija was the slimmer of the pair, descended from a half-British and wholly Sicilian mother; Rosa was the daughter of an old Maltese landowning clan that rather looked down on ‘dockyard’ families like the Callejas who had no claim to having been ‘of the archipelago’ for centuries. Rosa was a little shorter, bustier and her unhappy marriage to Marija’s brother had made her a little dowdy, filling her with a self-doubt that had only really begun to fade with the hesitant, rather shy introduction of Lieutenant Alan Hannay into her life. Both women had fled from the house they shared in Kalkara when the alarms had sounded and the first shells had screamed overhead on their way to RAF Luqa.

  They looked at each other. They were grimy, sweaty, hair awry like urchins out of some World War II Pathe report on the bombing of Malta straight out of 1941 or 1942. Instinctively, the two young Maltese women exchanged forced smiles.

  “I am not a nurse,” Rosa reminded her friend.

  “I don’t think that matters, sister,” Marija decided.

  An emergency casualty clearing station had been established on the ground floor of the damaged West Wing of the hospital. The ‘damage’ was blasted windows apart, thankfully cosmetic and nobody was overly worried about the splintered glass underfoot. The injured were already backed up into corridors and lying beneath makeshift awnings in the courtyard outside.

  A stone-faced Royal Navy Surgeon Lieutenant was hurriedly inspecting each new arrival and mandating priorities.

  Marija introduced herself.

  “I am Maria Calleja-Christopher. I am an auxiliary nurse,” she glanced to Rosa. “My sister and I are at your disposal, sir.”

  “Calleja-Christopher?” The naval doctor was probably only in his late twenties, little older than Marija and obviously – from his pale complexion – very new to Malta. “Marija Calleja-Christopher?” He asked again, a sudden smile in his eyes threatening to burst across his suddenly not very severe face. He wiped his hands on his apron. “I’m Michael Stephens.”

  Marija shook the hand he offered.

  “I’m Reginald Stephen’s nephew,” the man went on, his lips quirking into the previously threatened smile.

  Marija blinked, struck at once by the absurdity and the poignancy of the moment. She was looking into the face of the man whose uncle – and Margo Seiffert - had painstakingly put her back together again after she had been crippled in a bombing raid over twenty years ago.

  “My goodness,” the man shook his head. “It really is a small World, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she agreed numbly.

  “Right,” the man declared, coming back down to earth. “I need you two ladies to intercept new arrivals. The dead need to be carried directly to the morgue. The most seriously wounded need to be brought to me immediately, everybody else will have to join the queue. Make sure pressure pads and tourniquets are applied where necessary. Any questions?”

  “No,” Marija said and turned away.

  With Rosa she made her way to the main entrance to the hospital and instructed the guards where to send vehicles bearing the wounded. The truck she and her sister had turned up in had initially been misdirected over rough ground and she made it crystal clear that this was not to be allowed to happen again. Of course, because it was her, she commanded it with a winning smile and the men defending the gate took it in good – albeit harassed - heart.

  Then she and Rosa returned to the clearing station to begin their work.

  Chapter 5

  13:35 Hours

  Friday 3rd April 1964

  Emergency Communication Room, RAF Luqa, Malta

  Air Vice-Marshal Daniel French paced the small, dusty room packed with communications equipment which no longer worked – or if it did still work it either could not talk to anybody else, or there was nobody else left alive to talk to - technicians, staff officers and countless dazed Maltese civilians simply seeking shelter, like a caged tiger. Radio links with the United States Navy ships in the vicinity of the Maltese Archipelago and sporadic reports from units dispersed across the main island apart, he was both deaf and blind to the actual ‘tactical situation’.

  “Sir!” A man called from across the room. “I have the Captain of the USS Iowa on the net. He’s asking to speak to the ‘Surviving Senior Officer on Malta’.”

  The last message received from Headquarters in the citadel at Mdina had been to the effect that there had been an assault on the HQ complex and that Soviet Spetsnaz troops were inside the building...

  Dan French took the handset.

  “This is Air Vice-Marshal French,” he announced. “For my sins, Deputy C-in-C Malta.” Even if he had not been so painfully conscious that he was the sole object of attention in the crowded room his the airman’s voice would still have rung with calm, mildly insouciant command. He owed it to everybody to make a good impression. He had flown Lancaster bombers over Germany in 1943 and 1944; one night a fighter shot away large lumps of his port wing over Magdeburg, on another night he had brought back an unrecognisable lump of meat in his rear turret that had once been a nineteen year old gunner from Maltby in Yorkshire. The turret had been shattered by a brace of twenty millimetre cannon shells and the following morning ground crew had had to hose the remains out of what was left of the it. No matter how bad things looked they could always be worse and a wise man knew as much. “To whom do I have the pleasure to be speaking, sir?”

  “Captain Anderson Farragut Schmidt, sir!”

  Dan French tried and failed to suppress a wan smile.

  “How do you do, Captain Schmidt?”

  This amiable riposte seemed to momentarily disarm the man at the other end of the connection,

  “My radio people tell me that you have limited communications on Malta, sir?”

  “I have virtually no communications other than with and via the good offices of the United States Navy at this time, Captain Schmidt,” Dan French confessed affably. “I am out of communications with my HQ in Mdina. We believe the Citadel may have fallen to enemy forces but have no way of confirming this at this time. May I rely on you for naval gunfire support if offensive operations to retake the Citadel are necessary and practical later this day?”

  The Deputy Commander of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations was a little surprised by the unhesitating vehemence of the other man’s reply.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Oh, jolly good. That’s, er, good to know. Are you in a position to give me an update of the naval situation around the Maltese Archipelago, Captain Schmidt?”

  “Yes, sir. There is one enemy heavy retiring at flank speed to the north east in company with at least two escorts. There are oth
er small enemy surface units retreating in an easterly direction and I have reports of the presence of one confirmed and one suspected enemy submarine to the north.” The Captain of the USS Iowa seemed to realise at this juncture it was probable that the man in the bunker at RAF Luqa might not have any idea whatsoever of the bigger ‘picture’. He digressed, seeking to ensure everybody was reading from the same page. “Vice Admiral Clarey is coming south via the Straits of Messina at his best speed in the USS Independence. He has delegated tactical command of all US forces in the area ahead of his arrival off Malta to Iowa, sir. In the mean time one of the Independence’s E-2 Hawkeyes,” brand new state of the art electronic surveillance and command and control aircraft, “is operating north of Gozo keeping eyes and ears on all hostile air and sea activity in the area. Independence will mount a strike on all surviving enemy surface and submarine units at the earliest time.”

  Dan French decided he needed to make an admission.

  “I’m blind here, Captain Schmidt. I have no idea what has been going on for the last hour or so or what the situation of my surviving forces may be. All I know for sure is that the island has taken a Hell of a beating, and that the strike force I launched this morning to intercept a suspected Red Dawn invasion fleet some one hundred plus miles due east of the archipelago has been lost. I have no operable runways on the archipelago, no radio or radar net worth a candle and for all I know there are Soviet paratroopers besieging this command bunker at this very minute.”

  Such forthright honesty gave the American a very brief pause for thought.

  “The naval situation is under control, sir. As to the land situation,” there was an unspoken shrug of the shoulders, “that I cannot speak to at this time. As soon as the Independence is in range her helicopters will fly off every Marine in the battle group to assist your ground forces but that won’t be for another two to three hours. Independence’s E-2 put a couple of sonar buoys in the water and we have anti-submarine aircraft in the air over both suspected hostile submarines operating north and east of the island of Gozo.”