The general concept was argued for further development in the US Navy, a seeming compromise between the big gun school and the flat top camp. The Marines liked the ships because they had space below decks for a strong reinforced company or two, and provided an excellent platform for shore fire support from those forward guns, as well as air cover over a landing zone. They saw them as a perfect complement to a small amphibious landing task force, and trained with both ships in that capacity off San Diego before the war.
The Japanese were in love with this hybrid cruiser/carrier concept, and they had several more in the ship yards, and were eyeing older battleships like Ise and Hyuga for conversion to hybrid “battlecarriers.” Their special SNLF battalions had not failed to see the same utility in the ships, and both Gozo and Mezu were designated for special small landing operations to the distant Pacific isles.
As to extending the idea to a larger hull, the Navy decided its successful conversion of Lexington and Saratoga would be the end of that road. From now on, all new carriers would be built from the ground up on all new hulls, and several were already under construction. So Antietam and Shiloh would be the only two ever built for the US Navy, which decided that full sized fleet carriers would do the job much better than these hybrids.
Halsey was nonetheless grateful those two ships were afloat on December 8th, and he was counting on them getting to safe water so they could operate with Enterprise. With Operation Bobcat in mind, Halsey sent word to Captain James Hansen on the Antietam, telling him he should take his small task group to Suva Bay in the Fiji Island Group, wait there, and stay out of trouble. It was a fateful order, because the French were soon going to complicate matters for the US. Those two hybrid cruiser carriers would soon be right in the middle of more trouble than they needed.
With war imminent, the US had dispatched a number of forces to reinforce the Philippines. Some were air groups, like the B-17s that arrived just as the Japanese attack began at Pearl Harbor. Others were land units intended to reinforce MacArthur’s garrison, basing personnel, engineers, and even crated aircraft were all heading west on the Pacific as the Japanese offensive began. One such convoy sailed under the code name “Operation Plum,” which was an Acronym standing for Philippines, LUzon, Manila. It was escorted by the cruiser Pensacola and the submarine chaser Niagara, with four transports, Republic, Chaumont, Meigs, and Holbrook, and three freighters, Admiral Halstead, Coast Farmer, and the Bloemfontein under Dutch colors. The convoy was being routed southwest instead of trying to take the more direct route which might take it too close to Japanese controlled territories. They planned to make a stop at Port Moresby and then come up through the Dutch East Indies to Davao, but the outbreak of war changed all that.
Soon the leisurely cruise on the open Pacific was given new urgency. Crews were quickly put to work, painting over white hulls and superstructures in haze grey, removing the white canvas on the life boats, and then the men were sent below to don life jackets and look through the cargo and find anything that might serve as a deck gun for the otherwise unprotected cargo ships. Republic found four British 75mm guns in her hold, and the crews dragged them up onto the weather deck, feeling just a little more secure when they had tied them down fore and aft, until it was discovered there was no ammunition for the guns on board.
Commander Guy Clark, the Captain of the Republic, shook his head. “Well at least we might look a little threatening,” he said, and he gave orders that if a Japanese sub were spotted on the surface the crews were to rush to the guns and look as though they were prepping them for action. In fact, he ordered drills to that effect, though the whole exercise seemed to mirror the sense of futility hanging over the entire Navy at that moment. “Here we are rushing to serve an empty gun,” he said to the Army commander aboard, Brig. Gen. Julian F. Barnes, but there was nothing else to be done.
“At least we’ve got Pensacola out there,” said Barnes.
Things got edgy when a report came in that a Japanese sub had been spotted near the Ellice Islands, even though they were 300 miles away. Then late on December 8th, word came from Pearl that they were to divert their course to Fiji and wait at Suva Bay for further instructions. The Navy Brass, particularly Halsey, had decided that the waters ahead were too uncertain. If they continued, the Pensacola Convoy would soon be entering French controlled waters, and no one knew whether or not a state of war might exist between the US and France. Suva Bay seemed a safe alternative, and Halsey then ordered Antietam and Shiloh to get over there to put some more teeth in the defense of that convoy.
Two days later, just as the convoy was arriving at Suva Bay, it was learned that Germany had declared war on the United States in support of Japan, and they were insisting that all Axis partners do the same. The French equivocated, afraid that they might be on the wrong side of the equation, but eventually bowed to pressure and issued a formal declaration that day, though the French Ambassador in Washington stated it was carried out with great regret.
“You can regret it all you want now,” said the US Secretary of state, Cordell Hull. “But I can assure you that you will certainly regret it a good deal more before this is over.”
That said, the French then made a formal request that the US send no forces to Bora Bora as they had agreed earlier. Hull smiled, looked the man squarely in the eye, and gave it to him in his best Tennessee accent. “Mister Ambassador,” he said. “Don’t suppose the Japanese have done away with the entire United States Navy in that dastardly attack they just pulled. Now I’ve got one ornery Fleet Admiral over at Pearl Harbor, and he’s dead set on occupying those Islands. We’re coming as planned, and if you want to do anything about it, you’ll have to get past Bull Halsey first.”
And that ended the matter. The US was coming, but French pride, which was considerable and well wounded in this war, would not allow them to simply hand over French territory without some action in reprisal. So word was quickly sent to the French Far East Fleet, such as it was, and they were told to prepare to initiate hostilities against any American shipping entering French territorial waters. For good measure, they passed on information concerning the American plans to the Japanese, hoping they might get some support from them in the matter, and it was a bid that paid them good dividends.
In Fedorov’s history, the French might have posed no threat to the Pensacola Convoy, or any other American shipping in the Pacific, but again, things were different now in this world. As France was falling, the carrier Bearn was sent packing on a mission very much like the one HMS Rodney was undertaking when she met her fate. The ship was carrying gold to safety in the West Indies. That was yet another ship that was to have been designed as a battleship, but when the French saw the British carrier Argus, they got other ideas and converted Bearn to a carrier. The work was done in 1927, making the ship old and slow at 21 knots in 1941, but it was a carrier, with 30 aircraft aboard, and that made it a significant ship.
In better days, the carrier had proudly served in the French Force de Raid, and even participated in the hunt for the German raider Graf Spee. Then, as France’s fortunes declined, she sent her fortune abroad in the holds of that carrier, escorted by the cruisers Jean de Arc and Emile Bertin. They were supposed to transport the gold to Halifax, but never got there due to a U-boat scare. Instead they diverted to Martinique, where they would have been interned, save for a timely warning that came from Ivan Volkov.
So it was that the French ordered the little flotilla to slip away before the Armistice with Germany was signed, and it made the long, hazardous journey to the Pacific thru the South Atlantic, around the Cape to Madagascar to refuel, and then on to French Indochina at Saigon. It was there before the Japanese offensive began, when the French decided to move it out of an impending war zone to safer climes—in their colonial island holdings of the New Hebrides. There it cooperated with the Japanese as they landed troops on New Caledonia, again another insult, but at least from a nation that was a supposed ally in this war.
&nb
sp; But Bearn was not alone with those two cruisers. The French also had a small flotilla at Saigon, ships they had moved to the Pacific before the war. The cruisers Lamotte-Picquett, Suffren, and four destroyers sailed with the carrier to Noumea, Fougueux, Frondeur, Lansquenet, and Le-Hardi. All the power the French Pacific Fleet could muster was now massed at Noumea, closing like a steel fist as the ships gathered. This war would see fleets massed with ships in the hundreds, but now, right at the outset of the conflict, the French had managed to put together a task force comprised of a carrier, four cruisers, and four destroyers. It was the most powerful naval force for a thousand miles in any direction, and the raging Bull Halsey was nowhere at hand. Vice Admiral Decoux from Saigon took command, planting his flag on the Bearn. The only question now was whether he knew how to use the force he had, and what he might decide to do with it.
At that same moment, the Pensacola convoy was heaving to at Suva Bay, a little over 700 nautical miles to the northeast, or about two days at 15 knots. The convoy ships were carrying 9,000 drums of high octane Aviation Gas on the Admiral Halstead. 18 crated P-40 Tomahawks of the 24th Fighter Group, and the 2nd Battalion of the 131st Field Artillery with twelve 75mm guns, and 48 more British 75s bound for Luzon were on the Dutch freighter Blomfontein. Most of the 7th Bomb group personnel were on the Republic, and 52 more Douglas A-24 Banshee dive bombers, also crated, were on the Meigs.
Along with all that equipment there were 4,600 National Guard personnel scattered among all the ships, considerable stores of half a million rounds of .50 caliber ammunition and another 9,600 for 37mm guns, 5000 bombs for the aircraft, 340 vehicles and trucks. The convoy code name was well chosen, for here was a ripe plum, low hanging fruit within easy reach of any enemy, and it was a most valuable, and highly volatile prize.
There was one other valuable prize at sea, en route from California to Australia with 125 more P-40s, with their pilots, and ammunition comprising the entire 4th Mobile Depot Group. Information on the likely existence of these convoys, fetched from the archives Volkov had compiled over the years from his old service jacket, was being fed to the Japanese and French. He did not know whether they would actually form and sail on schedule, but this one did, the Pensacola Convoy, ringing true like a bell that resounded through the history, inviolate.
That convoy would now become the target of all that wounded French pride, and the single American cruiser in escort would find itself badly outnumbered if the French fleet ever found it at sea. But Pensacola was soon to get some much needed help from a pair of ships that never were, the USS Antietam and USS Shiloh, steaming at that moment in the Coral Sea.
MacArthur was eager to receive the guns and ammo on that convoy, and those 52 A-24 dive bombers, the Army version of the Dauntless SBD, would be most welcome. He pressed Admiral Hart to send out anything he had left. Gloomy and thinking the Japanese would soon have all the Philippines blockaded with their powerful navy, Hart wanted to keep what little he had in Manila Bay, but MacArthur persisted, another point of departure that would nudge things off in a new direction. He got his way instead of Hart, and the US cruiser Houston under Captain Rooks, with four destroyers, was sent south looking for the Antietam group, and with orders to sail for Fiji.
Meanwhile, a debate was on as to what should be done with the valuable convoy. Some argued that it should be recalled to Pearl Harbor or the West coast, but George Marshall took it to Roosevelt one morning, and the president was fairly decisive.
“Where is it now?” he asked.
“Approaching Suva Bay,” said Marshall. “It was the only safe place we could send it until this gets decided.”
“Well, it’s half way there,” Roosevelt exclaimed. “Why recall it now? If it can’t reach MacArthur, then at the very least it should go to Australia.”
That decision made, the rest was about to become all new history. When Cliff Causton, B Battery, 148th Artillery, heard the news aboard the transport Holbrook, he was quite surprised.
“Australia?” he said to a fellow National Guardsman, Bill Heath. “I thought we were supposed to go to the Philippines.”
Willard A. Heath had smiled when he first heard he was being assigned to a ship that bore his own first name and middle initial, the 27,000 ton ex-steamship liner, now called the Willard A. Holbrook. He had never liked the name, preferring William instead, and most now called him Bill, and sometimes Willie. “Too hot over there,” said Heath. “And I don’t mean the weather. The Japs are probably swarming all over the place by now.”
“Well hell,” said Causton, “That’s what these damn 75s are for! What are we supposed to do in Australia?”
“I’ll tell you one thing they should do,” said Heath. “They ought to scrub this damn rust bucket down real good. It smells like hell!”
He pinched his nose, for the ship they were on had been carrying shipments of jute and copra from the Philippines for many months, and the residual stench was so bad that they call the ship “Stinking Old Holbrook.” But that would be the least of worries for Heath. Causton would also get his wish one day, but he would get to the Philippines in a very roundabout way, after years of hard fighting that would see him return there with the very man he was hoping to relieve, General Douglas MacArthur.
But first his ship would have to make the risky trip to Brisbane, not knowing that the French Pacific Squadron was going to be looking for them soon, and the altered history they were now sailing into would one day become known as the First Battle of the New Hebrides….
Chapter 12
When the convoy had first sailed from Hawaii, a pilot on board the Republic with a poets last name for his first name, Byron Wilhite, wrote in his diary: “There’s something about leaving that gets you… a feeling that creeps over you and, try as you may to down it, it remains to remind you that you may never see this place again. It’s sort of like the feeling you get at New Year when, for a short moment amid all the gaiety and laughter of the party, you pause to reflect and realize that here is something slipping from you that can never be returned as it is.”
That was life in a nutshell, a poetic muse that was akin to that made by J. D. Salinger when he wrote, “…all we do our whole lives through is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.”
Men aboard those ships had hailed from small towns all over the US, Texas, New York, and the Midwest. They had said their goodbyes to girlfriends, buddies and family, piled onto trains for the long trip to San Francisco, steamed out to Hawaii, and then slipped away into the wide empty sea. They crossed the equator where the old salts, the ‘Shellbacks’ who had been there once before, planned an elaborate initiation for the ‘Pollywogs’ making the journey for the first time. They smeared them with oil and grease, dunked them in vats of sea water, and otherwise subjected them to every indignity they could devise. But this would be nothing compared to the baptism by fire all these men would soon endure.
They had all sailed on to Fiji, an island paradise if ever there was one. Many had hoped that might be the end of their sea voyage, but their Holy Ground would lie elsewhere in this turn of events, and now they were slipping away from the pier yet again, leaving behind a place that could never be returned to them as it was, and their last moments of innocence and civility as they now went off to war. Every moment in life was like that, but some moments make you stand up and pay attention as they slip away, a last kiss, a goodbye, a heave to and out to sea moment that was heavily upon the men aboard old stinking Holbrook that day. They could hear the dolorous song of the Tahitian Maori farewell as they slipped away, and many never forgot it. They could feel in their hearts that they were crossing yet another frontier, the thin line of demarcation between the peaceful lives they had left behind, and the peculiar form of human insanity that was war.
Things started in a very ominous way, when one of the sea planes launched off the Pensacola went out later that morning, and never returned. That started the men talking, tightening the straps of their life jackets, and g
etting down into the hold for cases of ammo for those .50 caliber machine guns, which were soon bristling from all the ships in the convoy. They were the only guns that had ammo, and Bill Heath passed a moment thinking about all the rest of the stuff in those crates below as he came on deck, his broad shoulders draped with straps of MG rounds.
One hit from an enemy bomb, shell, or torpedo, and this old rust bucket will go up like fireworks, he thought. Holbrook had her guts stuffed with bombs and ammo, and her decks crawling with National Guardsmen.
The convoy was stretched out in a long line, with Pensacola in the van, leading the others in a zig-zag course to the south. The gunboat Niagara was bringing up the rear, last out of the harbor and lagging behind. A small steel hulled yacht of only 1000 tons, the boat could make no more than 16 knots, enough to keep up with the convoy easily enough, but not much good in her intended role as a sub chaser.
An enemy submarine would get the better of the little ship that day, the Japanese boat I-19, which was to have a particularly fruitful war record. The boat was supposed to be credited with the sinking of the US carrier Wasp, destroyer O’Brien, and would also put her lance into the side of the battleship North Carolina. On this day it would cut its teeth on the little Niagara, and when her distress call was received by Captain Frank L. Lowe on the Pensacola, it was far too late for the cruiser to do anything about it. The rumors spread that they were now being stalked by Japanese subs, and the men watched the mid day sea with fearful eyes, many pointing at possible periscopes that were never there, and even firing off their .50 caliber machineguns at them, which did little more than stir up the sea and relieve just a little tension on the boat. Somehow firing the guns was a great release, better than just sitting there on the open decks, watching and waiting.
Tide Of Fortune (Kirov Series Book 20) Page 10