Empire Day

by James Philip

  Soon Cassandra would sweep through the narrows – Hell’s Gate - into the Upper Bay, still rushing until she came abreast of the Tiger, the fourth ship in the 5th Battle Squadron ‘line’.

  Each of the Lions had supposedly been built to the same ‘class pattern’ but a professional eye could pick out a myriad of minor distinguishing differences between the great ships; service refits, retrofits and upgrades to their upper works, masts, ELDAR aerials and arrays, and communications antenna which readily identified each as being unique.

  For example, third in the line was the Queen Elizabeth, the least modified of the four ships still operating with her original ELDAR rig and twenty-year-old main battery gun directors. Of course, to a casual observer, or at a distance all of the Lions seemed identical, virtually indistinguishable from the smaller heavy cruisers Ajax and Naiad flanking the flagship.

  All the visiting Navies had been allocated anchorages in the Lower Bay either side of the ships of the 3rd and 5th Cruiser Squadrons, the nucleus of the Americas-stationed East Coast Fleet. Presently, the flagship of the ECF, the massive battlecruiser Indomitable, was dry-docked at Norfolk having been in collision with a merchantman in Chesapeake Bay a month ago. Nevertheless, her two sisters, the thirty-year old Invincible and Indefatigable swung around their chains in the middle of the Lower Bay dwarfing practically every other ship other bar the visitors from Kiel.

  The German Empire had sent the 2nd Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet across the Atlantic with a bevy of escorting destroyers. Just to remind the Royal Navy that if it neglected the Home Fleet the North Sea and the Atlantic sea lanes might not be forever the British ‘ponds’ they had been for most of the last two hundred years.

  The Imperial German Navy, numerically and technically second only to the Royal Navy – upon which it modelled its organisation, training, operational practices and traditions – had sent three of its most formidable capital ships to New England.

  The Kaiser Wilhelm, and her sisters the Grosser Kurfurst and Friedrich der Grosse were fifty-thousand-ton leviathans with main batteries and systems of armoured protection mirroring that of the Lion and the subsequent Victory class battleships currently serving with the Home Fleet. Many naval architects regarded the Kaiser Wilhelm class as improved ‘copies’ of the Lions, and possibly superior and more robust gun platforms, given that the first of them had only been laid down some years after the Lion had been commissioned. The Germans had always refuted any suggestion that they had ‘copied’ the design of the Lions, rightly pointing out that the Kaiser Wilhelms had adopted a significantly different hull form.

  They were almost as long as the Lions but seven or eight feet broader in the beam, with their main armoured deck – protected by a 6-inche shell of Krupp cemented steel - positioned seven feet lower in that wider hull, a thing made necessary because their machinery was supposedly more modern, and therefore lighter than that of the Lions, necessitating the redistribution of weight lower in the hull to thus maintain the optimum metacentric height (GM) – the distance between a ship’s centre of gravity and its centre of buoyancy – to ensure that the ship remained a stable gun platform.

  German naval architects tended to aim for a slightly higher GM number – as many as two to three feet higher – than their British counterparts. For the Kaiser Wilhelms the number was between nine and ten feet; for the Lions around six to seven feet when they were fully loaded. This meant that the German ships were stiffer; faster in the roll and less comfortable sea boats in heavy weather, and the British slower to swing back through the horizontal making them intrinsically better gun platforms in any kind of seaway.

  In terms of gunnery speed of roll had been the crucial thing throughout most of history, certainly since the first cannon went to sea. Nowadays, it was less so, with gyroscopic gun directors capable of identifying the exact moment the ship was level regardless of the speed of the roll, and electrical fire circuits synchronising salvos and broadsides with that critical ‘moment’.

  The King was old-school about these things.

  The Kaiser Wilhelms were built to fight in the North Sea or the Baltic, His ships were built to fight in any ocean anywhere in the World in any conditions.

  The King mulled this and other questions as he studied the three German monsters moored to starboard of the immensely more ascetically pleasing, if less durable silhouettes of the two Formidable class battlecruisers. The Formidables, with their thin deck armour would be no match for the Kaiser Wilhelms in a stand-up fight despite the fact that they carried comparable main batteries.

  The battlecruisers belonged to a bygone age.

  He guessed that any of the Lions would be a match for the newer German pretenders. He did not understand why the Imperial Navy had allowed its architects to put that armoured deck so low in their ships. What use was an unsinkable steel raft if most of the men in the ship were on top of it?

  It was all academic; the British and German Empires were allies, after all…

  Cassandra’s signalling lamp was clattering noisily – the device was a modified searchlight with shutters that banged open and shut with metallic insouciance as messages were exchanged – on the port bridge wing.

  The King had briefly been lost in his thoughts.

  He blinked back to the here and the now.

  “Sorry, my dear,” he apologised, realising belatedly that his wife had spoken to him

  “Was that an explosion, Bertie?” She asked with barely contained alarm.

  The King – who had been a gunnery specialist in his early naval career and was therefore a little deafer than he ought to be for a man still only in his late middle years - had been staring at the forward main battery gun director position of the Grosser Kurfurst.

  He followed his wife’s gaze, past the looming bulk of the Invincible and the Indefatigable towards the narrows where he could just make out the Tiger, the rearmost Lion of the 5th Battle Squadron.

  He blinked in disbelief.

  There was a crimson flash and a roiling mushroom of grey-black smoke.

  And then, distantly, another.

  Chapter 22

  Jamaica Bay Field, King’s County, Long Island

  Alex Fielding had had a good morning. After he got back from taking Albert Stanton over the fleet he had taken to the air with one of the Manhattan Globe man’s competitors and now he had nearly a hundred pounds sterling in his pocket! The last dope had paid him a twenty pounds bonus for taking a detour north over Wallabout Bay so he could snap a few pictures of the Polyphemus lying on her side. From all the activity on the half-submerged hull it seemed likely that they were still trying to get people out of the sunken ship. Just the thought of being trapped in the darkness with the water rising around him gave him nightmares.

  He hated confined spaces…

  Anyway, somebody else’s misfortune was usually somebody’s opportunity and so it had proved for him. As if he had not already had a good morning when he looked up from refuelling his trusty Bristol V it was to see his next ride getting out of her car. She was almost on time, too. No problem, he had had to go under the cowling to monkey about with the plugs anyway when he had landed.

  “I’m the Honourable Leonora Coolidge, Mister Fielding,” the woman announced.

  Even if she had not been smoking a cigarette and Alex had not just splashed a pint of 87-octane gasoline down his pants she would have been the sort of woman who made him nervous.

  She had turned up in a chauffeur-driven Bentley and she was dressed in the sort of flying leathers and boots only very rich people and strippers wear in public.

  Alex took an involuntary step backwards.

  “I’d shake your hand but you want to put that smoke out first,” he explained hurriedly, “or we’ll both go up in flames.”

  The woman gave him a thoughtful look, then, smelling the petrol vapour in the air, she worked it out for herself.

  She took a step back and ground out the cigarette beneath her heel.

 
; “Forgive me. I don’t usually fly in such small aeroplanes,” she informed the pilot.

  “Sorry about the way I look. I’ve been up a couple of times already this morning and had to do some work on the engine just now,” he blurted, still a little intimidated by Leonora Coolidge.

  She was blond – from what he could see of the hair sticking out of her brown leather flying skull-cap – and willowy, late twenties maybe and her eyes were very nearly cornflower blue.

  “Oh,” Alex added, “and you always get gasoline on you when you refuel these kites on your own.”

  The woman contemplated the whiplash fit tousled haired man in the oil-stained flying suit, sizing him up. She guessed he was a little older than her, and his face was weathered, had about it a prize-fighter’s propensity to take hard knocks if that was what it took to get the job done.

  That said she remained unimpressed by his aeroplane.

  It looked like it was made of coarse canvas and held together by cane and cat gut.

  The man was reading her thoughts.

  “Don’t get carried away by the way she looks,” he chuckled. “This old bird’s a lot tougher than you or me!”

  Leonora Coolidge’s driver was standing by his vehicle, ready to open the door so that his ride could get back in.

  “Your guy got a name?” Alex inquired, nodding at the man.

  “Joe.”

  “Once you’re in the front seat I’ll need him to give me a hand pointing the aircraft into the wind.”

  “You’re ready to go?”

  “Sure. When you are.”

  That made up her mind.

  Her fiancé had offered to fly her over the review in his De Havilland twin-engined racer – a gilded carriage in comparison with the heap of scrap in front of her now – but they had had a tiff and she had decided that she was going to fly over the Fleet with or without the assistance of that no-good piece of…

  Leonora climbed into the machine with no little trepidation.

  A single slip and she strongly suspected that she would put her foot through the fuselage and probably fall to the ground!

  She was a little irked to be treated like a child.

  “Make sure you are strapped in at all times”

  “Don’t touch any of the controls in the front cockpit.”

  And: “Don’t be sick until we’re back on the ground again!”

  Then Alex was running up the engine and waving at Leonora’s driver, Joe, to pick up the tail and walk it around to the north.

  Leonora heard and felt the engine quieten.

  Nothing happened.

  “What are we waiting for?” She shouted.

  Alex had been watching Rufus McIntyre’s Bristol VI waddle across the turf like a baby elephant trying to get airborne by flapping its ears. It eventually got off the ground just short of the sandy marshland bordering the eastern side of the field.

  He pointed sidelong at Paul Hopkins’s aircraft repeating McIntyre’s slow-motion, horribly laboured take-off run.

  The two idiots had been sitting around all morning while everybody else had been flying their socks off and now both men were taking off slightly across the wind.

  “I’m waiting to see if that fellow crashes or not!”

  The second Bristol VI took an even longer run up before staggering into the air at the very last moment.

  What on earth do those comedians think they are doing taking-off in aircraft so obviously over-loaded?

  Sooner or later the authorities were going to have to do something to stop every Tom, Dick or Harry – or Rufus or Paul – going flying. Those two would not be the only complete beginners, regardless of what their pilot’s logs said they were, in Alex’s humble opinion, rank amateurs, taking to the sky as they pleased today.

  Not my problem, thank goodness!

  He gunned the motor and the trainer lurched forward.

  Soon she was bumping, running across the grass.

  Opening up the throttle the engine bellowed and the old biplane lifted effortlessly, as light as a feather off the turf and began to climb over Rockaway Point, the long sandy isthmus that sheltered Gravesend and Jamaica bays from the winter storms.

  The aircraft soared high above a destroyer slowly quartering the entrance to the Lower Bay between Rockaway Point in the north and Sandy Hook to the south.

  The whole Lower Bay in the west seemed full of column after column of grey warships streaming a thousand flags and pennants in the brilliant morning sunshine.

  Leonora had only ever flown in the relative luxury of a passenger cabin of a big two or four propeller air-liner or Imperial Airways flying boat – aerial gin palaces by any other name – or in one or other of her beau’s, there had been three or four in the last couple of years, shiny, super-fast racers or airborne playthings. The men she became ‘involved with’ all had aeroplanes or noisy, over-power motor launches, souped-up over-powered speedboats by any other name, like the ones ripping up the waves far down below.

  She twisted in her seat.

  “CAN WE GO LOWER?”

  The man grinned and nodded, gave her a thumb’s up signal and the old aircraft dove towards the ships in the mile-wide narrows between Long Island and Staten Island.

  They flew over the top of a huge battleship, so low that Leonora imagined she could smell the fumes coming out of the ship’s after smoke stack.

  Then they were climbing, soaring over the next leviathan.

  There was an orange-red flicker of light below her.

  Suddenly the aircraft was on its side.

  Leonora felt the hot blast of air on her face and the machine tip over and start to fall out of the air.

  Somebody screamed in feral, animal terror.

  It was a second or two before she realised that she was the one who was screaming.

  Chapter 23

  HMS Lion, Upper Bay, New York

  Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Pakenham eyed the aircraft circling over the fleet and the chaotic proliferation of motor boats and yachts of practically every conceivable size and rig milling in between the big ships with a very jaundiced eye. Fleet Reviews were staid, disciplined affairs in home waters but out in the colonies they were always circuses. Given what had happened yesterday afternoon he had quietly, very strongly advised the King that either there should be a general prohibition on small craft or the whole thing should be called off. His old friend had politely and very firmly rebuffed his advice.

  It was Empire Day and ‘a lot of people will have been looking forward to this day for a long time’.

  Including, the commander of the 5th Battle Squadron reflected, a lot of people with malice aforethought!

  Problematically, as the Review was to be held in the waters of the Crown Colonies of New York-Long Island and New Jersey the whole thing had had to be organised by the combine ‘Fleet Review Committees’ of both colonies; the members of which spent the rest of their lives in cut-throat competition, and basically, really did not like each other. Wisely, the Governor of New England had tried to keep above the fray, acting as an impartial referee employing his most diplomatic staffers as peace-making go-betweens as the arrangements had finally been agreed, line by painful line over the course of the last six months.

  Allegedly, the Fleet Review Committee had disintegrated into open warfare – albeit nothing more unpleasant than ineffectual fisticuffs – several times over the last few weeks and only the intercession of the Governor’s daughter, Henrietta, shuttling between the alienated factions had avoided her father having to opt for the so-called ‘Flanders Option’, so named after a particularly bloody Allied victory in France in 1864, removing the whole thing from the hands of the ‘local’ colonies. No Governor in living memory had wanted to do that about anything, let alone an event designed to be an Imperial celebration of everybody’s loyalty to the Crown!

  Young Henrietta was a marvel!

  Even after she had knocked the warring parties’ heads together she remained, apparently, the most sou
ght-after guest at any reception held in either New Jersey or New York-Long Island in the coming social season when all the great families of the First Thirteen ‘brought out’ their daughters.

  Nevertheless, the soul of the Commander of the 5th Battle Squadron’s was restless. The King and Queen’s mission ashore in Flatbush that morning had further troubled Pakenham as he paced the lofty flying bridge atop his flagship’s broad citadel-like forward superstructure. In action he would retreat to the compass platform a deck below; up here in the open air the concussion of the forward 15-inch guns could easily knock a man off his feet or concuss him insensible or worse.

  HMS Lion’s captain was no less anxious.

  “We knew it was going to be chaos but this is ridiculous, sir,” he observed to Packenham as the two men eyed the countless small boats criss-crossing the Upper Bay. It was a miracle that there was not a collision a minute!

  “Ours’ is not to reason why,” the Squadron Commander guffawed as if he had not a worry in the world. Nonetheless, he had ordered all the Royal Navy ships moored in the Upper Bay to observe maximum watertight integrity – that is, to dog shut all bulkheads below the waterline and to exclude sea duty men from ‘parade duties dressing ship’. Just in case anything amiss did occur he wanted at least half the guns manned, and all damage control and emergency teams ready, waiting and in position. Moreover, he had ordered that all four Lions ‘light off’ at least a pair of boilers in their second fire rooms.

  Each battleship had four boiler rooms – or fire rooms as they were increasingly termed these days – and four turbine compartments, with a boiler room-turbine room ‘set’ each turning one of the battleships’ screws.

  Fear nothing but be ready for anything!

  “Cassandra is signalling, sir!”

  The Squadron Commander glanced to the binnacle clock.

  Ten-fifty-seven-hours; the King was going to arrive just in time!

  Tom Packenham regarded this as a minor miracle and hoped it boded well for the rest of the day.