by James Philip
The Captain of the destroyer half-turned.
“Wasn’t it just,” he concurred.
“You can’t stay here, Peter,” the other man said quietly, his words a little slurred as if he was moderately inebriated.
“What else can I do, Miles?”
The two friends looked dazedly one to the other, unhurriedly contemplating the matter as if there was no particular urgency in their situation.
Peter Christopher met his friend’s unfocused stare for a moment. The two men understood each other perfectly. Miles Weiss knew that if it had come to it he would have driven Talavera into the side of the nearest of the two big ships. Given the option he would have rammed the Soviet cruiser; that would have been better than crumpling his fragile little ship against the thickly armoured carapace of the Yavuz, the ancient battlecruiser the Turks had inherited from the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet back in 1914. The Soviet cruiser Admiral Kutuzov’s armour was less than a third as thick as the old German behemoth’s, at speed Talavera would have made a big hole in her...
Thankfully it had not come to that.
One of Talavera’s torpedoes had jammed the old dreadnought’s rudders; another had exploded beneath the keel of the Sverdlov class cruiser and broken her back somewhere in the vicinity of her forward turret. While she was lying dead in the water the Yavuz, her rudders jammed and out of control had rammed the Admiral Kutuzov moments before the first giant armour-piercing shells of the USS Iowa’s 16-inch 50-calibre main battery had started to fall like watery Redwood trees all around the two interlocked, stricken enemy warships.
Not for the first time since the night of the October War the twenty-seven year old commanding officer of the sinking Battle class destroyer HMS Talavera paused to take a deep breath and to reflect upon his situation. He was living his life in a series of intense thousand mile-an-hour episodes, each climactic battle more desperate and more murderous than the last; but even by his standards the events of the last hour had been completely insane.
That the battle had cost him his ship there was little doubt; nothing else was simple, or straightforward. Many of his men, his people, had been killed and maimed in a battle that neither he, nor anybody else should or ought to have had to fight.
He thought about his father in distant Mdina; was he still alive?
‘Cut your lines and go, Peter!’
For all he knew those would be the last words he would ever hear his father say to him.
And what of Marija?
There had been no time to worry about Marija once he had decided what he had to do. Between that moment and now he had not, for a moment, believed that he or any of his men were going to survive the day. That had been easier to accept than the dreadful uncertainty of not knowing if the last people on earth he loved and cared for were dead or alive.
He had peered at the two enemy ships – Red Dawn ships, perhaps – locked together in their deadly dance as the USS Iowa’s broadsides had plunged down through the great electrical storm which had become the Wagnerian background to the battle. Massive blooms of crimson fire had splashed across the Admiral Kutuzov. Pieces of the cruiser’s superstructure had been sent wheeling through space to crash into the ocean hundreds of yards away. Enormous fires had begun to belch black smoke, one of the Yavuz’s amidships turrets had ignited like a giant Roman candle and burned with the momentary blinding ferocity of a two hundred feet tall blow torch. Later, the cruiser had drifted away, settling fast as seawater rushed into the huge rent in her side. With spine-tingling speed the fifteen thousand ton Admiral Kutuzov had lurched to starboard and within less than a minute capsized, her red-leaded hull briefly visible before she went down by the bow. He stern had hung suspended in the air for a moment and then she had dived towards the bottom of the sea.
The Yavuz had reeled away, her screws reversed and her rudders hopelessly jammed she had proscribed a wide slow circle under a murderous rain of shells. The old battlecruiser had disappeared from sight each time a new deluge of 2700-pound super-heavy Mark 8 armour piercing 16-inch rounds fired by the fast approaching USS Iowa fell upon her. Some of the battleship’s shells carved right through the ship and exploded in the water around and beneath her, while others wrought untold mortal carnage within her thickly armoured carapace.
Nobody on HMS Talavera had actually seen the Yavuz turn turtle, or linger capsized on the surface for another minute as one last dreadful broadside lanced down upon her like multiple blows from Thor’s mighty hammer before the darkling, lightning bolt illuminated squall finally drifted away to the east.
The skies over the seas which had consumed the two great ships remained grimly brooding; now and then the last paroxysms of the enormous electrical storm which had raged throughout the battle sent tridents of lightning spearing into the iron grey Mediterranean in the middle distance.
If there had ever been a time in Peter Christopher’s life that he had been tempted to, or had entertained a sneaking suspicion that there was some guiding handing in human affairs, that time was long gone. Surely, no merciful loving God would sit on His hands and allow what had happened this day. The only kind of deity who might conceivably take any pleasure from the sheer bloody murder of the last couple of hours was the sort whose rightful place was adjacent to Lucifer’s right hind claw.
Mile Weiss had patted his arm a second time.
“We have to go, Peter.”
The commanding officer of Her Majesty’s Ship Talavera nodded. He waved for his friend to precede him to the ladder. They were alone on the bridge and the destroyer was settling ever deeper into the water beneath their feet.
At the head of the ladder Peter Christopher hesitated.
Talavera’s bow was awash now in an oily, flotsam fouled sea.
There would still be men trapped below decks in the mangled, twisted wreckage and he imagined he could hear their plaintive, hopeless cries for a succour that would never come.
He felt physically sick.
Was this what the future held?
War and only war?
War without end?
Chapter 11
14:22 Hours
Saturday 4th April 1964
USS Independence (CV-62), Passing South through the Straits of Messina
The whole ship shuddered as two McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms thundered off the foredeck catapults, and with full after burners lit climbed into the stormy Mediterranean skies like a pair of homesick angels. On the aft flight deck of the USS Independence Marines and every man with medical training and first aid skills who could be spared were being packed – like sardines, in fact – into three waiting Sikorsky SH-3 Sea Kings for the long flight to Malta, still more than two hundred miles to the south. Down in the fire rooms of the great ship all eight of her Babcock and Wilcox boilers were on line, and in the huge machine rooms the carrier’s four Westinghouse geared turbines were running faster, hotter and farther beyond the red line than anybody had ever run them. Six months out of dock and long overdue a full machinery overhaul the one thousand and seventy feet long seventy-five thousand ton super carrier was hurtling south at flank speed, thirty-three knots – over thirty-seven miles an hour in landsman’s terms - on a mission. Several of the big ship’s smaller consorts were already trailing far in her wake. The nine thousand ton Leahy class nuclear powered guided missile destroyer leader Bainbridge, commissioned only days before the October War, and designated as the Independence’s ‘backstop’ – or as the British would say ‘goalkeeper’ – had long been detached and now, ironically, only the fleet-footed Farragut and Charles F. Adams class destroyers of Rear-Admiral Laverne Lucas Detweiller’s so-called ‘Malta Squadron’, still paced the Independence as she crashed south spitting F-4 Phantoms and A-4 Skyhawks off her catapults as fast as the deck crews could refuel and rearm them.
Fifty-two year old Vice Admiral Bernard Ambrose ‘Chick’ Clarey stood on the inboard wing of his Admiral’s Flag Bridge gripping the rail with such angry, helpless fury that his hands
eventually rebelled. The agonising spasms of cramp shot up his arms and he swung away from watching the dangerous, organised chaos on his flagship’s flight deck, to face his operations staff.
The USS Independence’s CAG – Commander Air Group – had been issued his orders and was absent, carrying them out with ferocious and calmly, impressively competent zeal. The carrier’s F-4s were assigned to combat air patrol roles over the Maltese Archipelago and its environs out to a range of one hundred nautical miles from Valletta, while A-4 Skyhawks and the Grumman A-6 Intruders ‘dealt with’ any ‘hostile surface units’ they encountered ‘anywhere’ within a two hundred nautical mile radius of Malta. The Independence had also launched three Grumman S-2 Tracker anti-submarine birds each carrying two live ‘homing’ torpedoes to hunt for any ‘Soviet submarines’ in the vicinity. Every aircraft and every ship in Bernard Clarey’s Task Force – since midnight designated United States Sixth Fleet – was now operating on a war footing, ‘weapons free’ at the discretion of individual commanding officers.
Bernard Clarey might have been dispatched to Gibraltar to take command of the disparate units of the new US Mediterranean Fleet with orders that focussed more on organisational and diplomatic niceties, than practical war fighting; but now that he was the man ‘on the spot’ in what was self-evidently a war zone, there was absolutely nothing unambiguous about the instructions he had issued to his captains approximately an hour ago.
In the absence of other specific countermanding orders from ComSixthFleet you will seek out and destroy the enemy and render all POSSIBLE assistance to allied units and authorities!
Bernard Clarey had been in command of United States Submarine Force Pacific at the time of the Battle of Washington. This meant that when the Chief of Naval Operations floated his name as the C-in-C of the newly recreated Sixth Fleet neither the White House, or more importantly, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Curtis LeMay, had raised objections to Clarey’s nomination. Bernard Clarey’s hands were clean. He had had nothing whatsoever to do with the naval comedy of errors which had resulted in the October War, and had had nothing whatsoever to do with the provocative operational ‘demonstrating’ of the Enterprise Battle Group in the Western Approaches to the British Isles at the time of the Operation Manna Convoys, or with the subsequent unprovoked harassment and bungled attack on the British nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought. That this unwarranted, wholly illegal attack had taken place in international waters and that in attempting to frustrate it an American vessel, the nuclear-powered hunter killed USS Scorpion, had been sunk by torpedoes deployed by Grumman S-2 Tracker aircraft flying off the Enterprise, spoke – in Curtis LeMay’s and the President’s minds – as ample testimony to the idiocy of a certain clique of highly placed naval officers at the Pentagon and at Atlantic Fleet Headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. Any man ‘soiled’ by contact with this clique was permanently ‘damaged goods’ in Washington. Thus, when the Chief of Naval Operations had put Clarey’s name into the hat his nomination had literally, gone through on the nod.
However, the manner in which he had assumed command – at less than forty-eight hours notice - at Gibraltar still left a bad taste in Bernard Clarey’s mouth. Rear-Admiral David Torrance, his predecessor in command of the Independence Task Force had been summarily dismissed when the Chief of Naval Operations concluded he was dragging his feet about the true battle and sea readiness of his command.
Clarey had not known David Torrance very well but the two men were fellow veterans of the Pacific War against the Japanese and of the later Korean conflict. Torrance had always been a vaguely political – there was no such thing in the United States Navy as an overtly political – officer with the sort of family connections, rich Southern Democrats, who despised everything John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his ilk stood for, and worse, had felt free to periodically declaim as much. Torrance had done himself no favours the previous year while on a courtesy visit to Madras when he had disparaged both the former colonial power, Great Britain, and the post October War foreign policy of the Kennedy Administration. In front of his Indian hosts and the representatives of the international press at an official public function, he had made a series of less than complementary remarks about the way the [United States] ‘Navy was being run post-war’ and how it would be ‘a good thing if the Royal Navy, what’s left of it, was driven from the Indian Ocean’. In some accounts he had boasted the Independence could ‘do the job in five minutes’ if the President had the ‘guts to size the nettle’.
Against this backdrop Torrance’s fate was sealed when rumours about poor morale within the ranks of his Task Force reached the Navy Department in its new Philadelphia Headquarters on the New Jersey shore of the Delaware River, and it subsequently emerged that the Independence’s much discussed ‘catapult troubles’ had been gravely overstated. The axe had fallen with a sudden, decisive ruthlessness which would have been inconceivable before the trauma of the Battle of Washington.
Nevertheless the affair still left a bitter tang in Bernard Clarey’s mouth; for he was a man who harked after a more honourable time when a man’s word was his bond and his oath of service inviolable. Moreover, he had understood that in sending practically every senior officer on David Torrance’s Flag Staff back to the States he was effectively ending each and every man’s career in the US Navy. He had felt even worse about that.
Although it was now painfully obvious that his predecessor’s lack of enthusiasm to join the fight had had potentially disastrous consequences for the fragile re-constructed US-British alliance; but for the one-eyed atypical decisions of a man he had known and respected for more years than he cared to recollect, the consequences of David Torrance’s tardiness and lack of appetite for the fight would probably have been substantially mitigated and the worst effects of the present crisis averted.
Bernard Clarey had watched the tall, bear like lump of a man that was Rear Admiral Laverne Detweiller jump down from the Sea King which had collected him from his flagship, the USS Mahan, and stalk, bowed beneath the still churning rotors towards the bridge.
If Detweiller’s modern guided missile destroyers had been patrolling Maltese waters – as they were supposed to have been – it would not have fallen to two small and hopelessly out-gunned Royal Navy ships to stand alone against overwhelming enemy forces. If Detweiller’s ships had been in the gun line with HMS Talavera and HMS Yarmouth Laverne Detweiller would be a hero by now rather than the villain of the piece.
The man whose singular blunder had done more to torpedo Anglo-US relations in a day than any man since Boston tea party on the night of 16th December 1773; stalked past the assembled operations staff to confront his new C-in-C. Not so long ago Detweiller had commanded the most modern and powerful naval squadron in the World. His flagship had been the brand new eighty thousand ton nuclear powered super carrier the USS Enterprise; in company had been the nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser USS Long Beach and half-a-dozen of the most state of the art warships in Christendom. Then one day the Long Beach had been sunk and the Enterprise so badly damaged by a two megaton air burst that without the assistance of escorting British destroyers, her fires would surely have consumed her. Over a thousand Americans had died that day, hundreds more had been injured, many terribly burned by the thermonuclear fireball which had suddenly bloomed above Detweiller’s seemingly invulnerable, all-conquering little fleet.
Detweiller had not behaved badly in the aftermath, but in hindsight he had been slow to publicly give the Royal Navy due credit for its efforts in saving those who could be saved from the Long Beach, and in acknowledging the desperate risks its ships and men had taken to save the Enterprise. The USS Enterprise had limped back to Norfolk where she was expected to be in dockyard hands for most of the next eighteen months; Detweiller left to command his much reduced squadron but stateside, questions had been asked about what cost the disaster had wrought on him. In a funny sort of way when Bernard Clarey had received Detweiller’s signal
, belatedly transmitted eight hours after he had departed Malta that he intended to exercise his squadron ‘south of Sicily’ prior to joining Clarey’s fleet for ‘familiarization evolutions’ it had come as no real surprise that he had left the British in Malta completely in the lurch. Had Admiral Sir Julian Christopher, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations not ‘counted’ on the presence of Detweiller’s powerful ‘Malta Squadron’ of at least four fast, modern warships to safeguard the Maltese base in the absence of the Mediterranean Fleet, it was inconceivable that he would have so comprehensively denuded its defences in favour of the forces he had sent to re-conquer Cyprus.
Clarey looked the much bigger man in the eye.
“If you would be so good as to accompany me to my sea cabin, Admiral Detweiller.”
Rear Admiral Laverne Lucas Detweiller glowered at the man who had so recently leapfrogged him in rank. A fifty-four year old third generation American son of Saxon immigrants who had settled in Jones’s County, Iowa in the 1880s, he was a towering, blond giant of a man with a handshake that would have made a full grown Grizzly bear wince; and subsequently count his clawed fingers to make sure they were all still present and correct. Normally the most jovial and big hearted of men, throughout the Navy he was fondly referred to as ‘Det’ or ‘Luke’ by his peers. For his whole career he had been larger than life, an indefatigable Viking of a man. But not today; partly on account of Clarey’s peremptory order to ‘report on board the flagship at your earliest convenience’, partly because he had graduated Annapolis two years before ComSixthFleet and he thought the fleet command ought by rights to have been his, but mostly because he knew his thirty-six year career in the United States Navy was over.