The double doors open. JOSEPH enters with SERGEI.
ROGACHEV: Ah, Joseph. Drinks for everybody, please. Champagne for his royal highness …
JOSEPH: At once, my lord. (To SERGEI) Champagne here … vodka here …
MAJOR: (To GENERAL) If you call for a vote now, sir, you will assuredly carry the day.
GENERAL: Will you support me?
MAJOR: Of course, and not only I.
GENERAL: Very well. (Raises his voice) I move that we petition the High Command to proceed no further with any plan to move against India. I call for a show of hands.
ROGACHEV: Immediately, general?
GENERAL: If it please your honour.
ROGACHEV: So be it. All present, please signify. For the general’s motion, that the Indian plan be called off forthwith.
Hands are raised in silence.
ROGACHEV: Against, that we are still resolved to move against India.
Another pause.
ROGACHEV: In the circumstances I will not call for a toast.
PRINCE: Better luck next time, Rogachev.
ROGACHEV: I thank your royal highness for an impeccably British sentiment. (Irritably) That will be all, Joseph.
JOSEPH: Thank you, my lord count.
Sequence 8 – London
The Retrenchment Club. We move over to where CECIL and MORRIS are sitting.
CECIL: Well, Morris, you look well enough to take a glass of port.
MORRIS: Thank you, my lord. I think I could manage just the one.
CECIL: I suppose one or other of us has to say a great deal has happened since we last sat here.
MORRIS: Yes.
CECIL: Do you mind talking about it?
MORRIS: No. No, not at all, my lord.
CECIL: Can you tell me how many were lost in the charge? The reports I’ve seen disagree.
MORRIS: I know for a fact that 673 officers and men began the charge. Afterwards, only 195 answered at the first muster. I was not one of them, and many unwounded men had lost their horses and only turned up later. Altogether 113 men were killed and 134 wounded. But for the French attack that followed, there would have been many more.
CECIL: A hundred and thirteen too many.
MORRIS: Oh, most certainly, my lord, but what would you? And if it’s any comfort, Lew Nolan would very likely have done just as he did do if you had never met him. He was a mad fellow.
Closing notes of the Last Post.
CECIL: Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. But not in vain.
PS to Captain Nolan’s Chance
Ever since I first heard of it as a boy, I have suspected that the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava was the result not of a blunder but of somebody’s intention. My recent look at the matter in some detail has confirmed me in this view. For instance, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s excellent, very full study, The Reason Why (1953), leaves one with at any rate a strong suspicion that Captain Lewis Nolan deliberately and vitally misled the commander of the Cavalry Division, Lord Lucan, about the objective of the charge.
Nolan had a unique chance to do so. He was the ADC of General Airey, Lord Raglan’s second-in-command and the officer who wrote down and signed the fatal message that Nolan delivered. Up on the heights overlooking the battlefield, Raglan and Airey and their staff, who included Nolan, could see both (1) the captured British guns Raglan actually intended the Cavalry Division to recapture; and (2) the Russian artillery battery at the far end of the North Valley. From his lower position, Lucan could see neither (1), an easily attained objective, nor (2), to be attacked only at great risk. He was thus vulnerable to Nolan’s deception (and had negligently failed to acquaint himself with the Russian groupings).
The reason why Nolan misled Lucan, if he did, would clearly have been something above and beyond his amply documented zeal for action. He was also a fanatical believer in the unrealized powers of cavalry, especially light cavalry. This too is well documented; after a dazzling early career as a cavalryman he wrote not one but two books on the subject, and much of what I put into his mouth in the first sequence of my play is a close paraphrase of some views he expressed. But for good measure, and to contribute something of my own, I invented a small conspiracy that included Nolan and plotted to convince a sinister Russian cabal of the formidable fighting qualities of the British soldier, especially the cavalry soldier.
Two points might be added here. I hope my conspiracy and its doings are fun, but in the end I incline to the view I attribute to Morris in his last speech, that Nolan as portrayed ‘would very likely have done just as he did do’ if there had been no conspiracy. And as for whether the historical Nolan really misled Lucan on purpose, we shall never know. Still, I rather think he did. True, he had a lot of luck with the incompetence that surrounded him, but it was the sort of luck that comes the way of murderous maniacs.
With exceptions like Nolan’s discourse, most of my London and St Petersburg scenes (sequences 1, 2, 4, 6–8) are fiction. The Crimean sequences, 3 and 5, are largely factual, here and there closely so. For instance, Nolan’s face-to-face diatribe against Lucan, Cardigan’s remarks about siege warfare, Paget’s questions about the significance of the two flags (and the cannonade that interrupts them), Campbell’s words to his men, Morris’s exchange with Cardigan, the text of the order to Lucan (verbatim), Nolan’s placing himself beside Morris, Lucan’s talk with Cardigan just before the charge, the incident of Paget’s cigar and Cardigan’s orders immediately following, the momentary lull in firing, the circumstances of Nolan’s death and what Cardigan and Scarlett say about it afterwards are all matters of record. That record comes chiefly of course from what survivors of the battle wrote about it subsequently, and if one sometimes feels that they remembered with advantages, the capacity of human beings to say memorable or melodramatic things at great moments should not be forgotten.
Morris’s version of the numbers killed and wounded in the charge is taken from p. 272 of The Age of Reform (1938) by E. L. Woodward.
1941/A
I – The Pacific Operation
… The Imperial Fleet that sailed from the Kuril Islands in the last days of November was the most powerful naval force ever assembled. It consisted in the first place of eleven battleships. The largest of them, Yamato, in which Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto flew his flag, was at 68,200 tons displacement one of the two largest battleships ever built, the other being her sister ship Musashi, then uncompleted. Each of their nine 18.1-inch guns (the biggest ever carried afloat) fired shells weighing 3,220 pounds. Top speed was a remarkable 27 knots to a range of 7,200 miles.
With the exception of the sister ships Nagato and Mutu, each bearing eight 16-inch guns, the other battleships in the Grand Fleet carried 14-inch primary armament, altogether providing a broadside of eighty pieces. Speeds of 22.5–28 knots could be attained. All the above ships could launch up to three aircraft via catapult.
The accompanying carrier component was likewise uniquely strong at the time, consisting as it did of no fewer than nine vessels, from the impressive sister ships Soryu and Hiryu with their capacity of seventy-one aircraft each and their top speed of 34.5 knots, to the smaller Taigo with her twenty-seven aircraft and 21 knots. In aggregate these ships carried the prodigious total of 380 aircraft.
Six heavy cruisers, fourteen light cruisers, sixty-six destroyers and nearly one hundred other craft, including a sufficiency of tankers for refuelling purposes, accompanied the capital ships.
Divided into four forces under vice-admirals, this unparalleled armada set its course due east. It passed hundreds of miles to the north of the main Pacific base of the US Navy at Pearl Harbor, the objective of an earlier strike plan now superseded. The change of plan had been largely the personal doing of Yamamoto, who had never wavered in his conviction that Japan could only hope to defeat America in a short
war, the shorter the better.
Thanks to miracles of organization and the most rigid security, the Grand Fleet assembled intact and on schedule off the Californian coast, far enough off to be below its horizon. The four forces maintained for the voyage across the Pacific Ocean had become two, separated by some hundreds of miles, in fact the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
At first light on 11th December, the Japanese fleet commenced bombardment of these two prosperous and populous cities with every gun that could be brought to bear, while every aeroplane capable of flight took off on bombing and strafing missions into their harbours and business and residential quarters. Complete surprise was attained. Of the initial salvoes, one heavy shell struck almost the precise centre of what was at that time the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world, opened only four years earlier, the Golden Gate Bridge at the entrance to San Francisco harbour. The bridge sustained great damage and there was some loss of life.
After a prearranged interval, the two forces ceased fire, turned into line abeam and steamed inshore, a change of location designed partly to permit greater accuracy and to conserve aircraft fuel, but also, at least as important, to leave the helpless citizens in no doubt of who and what it was that brought them destruction and death. The ships of the battle-fleet went to their new stations and recommenced bombardment, whether of the cities themselves or of shipping and harbour and other installations. The aerial attacks had continued without pause.
Shortly before 10.00 hours a tender or other small boat was observed approaching the waterborne forces bearing a rough-and-ready white flag. This impudent excursion, which could have claimed nothing conceivable in the way of legal standing or significance, was swiftly and properly dealt with. On orders of the Admiral himself, the destroyer Shimakaze closed with the intruder at top speed and rammed her amidships, cutting her clean in two. The remnants rapidly sank, those persons who had survived the impact being helped on their way by small-arms fire and grenades from Shimakaze’s deck.
By then or soon afterwards, large parts of both cities and their outskirts were ablaze. Visibility on this clear, sunny winter’s morning had at first been excellent; now heavy clouds of smoke drifted across the target and ascended hundreds of feet into the air. Massive explosions occurred at intervals. One especially severe and prolonged disturbance in the San Francisco area has been taken to indicate a seismic shock induced by the bombardment in an area notoriously subject to earthquakes, but material evidence is lacking.
Despite increasing difficulties of ranging and targeting, the Japanese warships and warplanes prolonged their assault on the two coastal cities until breaking off the action shortly before noon. Already large parts of the afflicted areas had been destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of their people lay buried in the rubble or lay dead or dying in what had been their streets. Sentimentalists have suggested that the attack was needlessly prolonged and excessive damage and slaughter inflicted, perhaps forgetting the first objective of the Californian operation, viz. the delivery of the maximum possible shock, not only locally but throughout the United States. It could be asserted with some confidence, in the light of subsequent events, that those Americans who lost their lives in and around Los Angeles and San Francisco did so, albeit unknowingly, in the service of their country.
When the cease-fire came and all aircraft were safely returned, the fleet drew off. The whole of it with one exception began the long voyage home across the Pacific under the command of Vice-Admiral S. Toyoda. The exception, the giant battleship Yamato, whose ammunition had been conserved, started off on her way to a fresh target some 3,500 miles to the south-east, a target of such importance that Admiral Yamamoto had insisted on attending to it personally.
The naval forces assaulting the Californian cities had met with negligible resistance. A number of obsolete US warplanes made feeble, uncoordinated attempts to close with the vastly superior Japanese aerial armament, but in almost all cases these were shot out of the sky at ranges too great for them to return effective fire. Even considered solely by the standards of warlike profit and loss, the Pacific operation was the most successful in history.
II – The Atlantic Operation
Twenty-one hours in real time after the Japanese had launched their first attack, at first light on 12th December, the German battleship Tirpitz, having eluded the vigilance of the Royal Navy in slipping out of European cover and crossing the Atlantic, commenced bombardment of the city of New York.
At 41,700 tons and with eight 16-inch guns as primary armament, Tirpitz was clearly a ship on a rather smaller scale than the mighty Yamato, and hers was a solitary adventure; nevertheless the damage and loss of life she inflicted were considerable and bore closely upon events.
Tirpitz concentrated her fire on the island borough of Manhattan, though she caused some damage to the US Navy Yard on the farther side of the East River. Her shells destroyed or severely damaged several of the city’s loftier buildings, including the 102-storey Empire State Building. Two considerable fires were started. At a later stage, making up in boldness for what she lacked in firepower, Tirpitz actually sailed some distance up the Hudson, bombarding the shore at point-blank range with every gun available. A salvo from her secondary armament of 5.9-inch guns reduced the famous Statue of Liberty to fragments.
Amid growing but still largely ineffectual signs of resistance, Tirpitz discontinued the action just before 09.00 hours and retired. Out in the North Atlantic once again she turned southward, her mission in that ocean not yet accomplished. While in transit she successively launched from her catapult the four aircraft she carried, each of them an Arado 196A-3 twin-float seaplane carrying two 110-pound bombs. The two-man crews had been carefully selected and intensively trained for what was perhaps the most important part of the entire Western operational sector.
It had been decided with some reluctance that a regular naval attack on Washington, DC, though infinitely tempting, must be ruled out as too hazardous. Approach via the Potomac River or the Chesapeake Bay was finally rejected as too difficult and remote, with a risk that the encroaching force might be trapped and destroyed before it could withdraw. Such an outcome was unacceptable in view of the necessity that the enemy be denied any countervailing success, however small in proportion, on this day of his humiliation.
Accordingly, the four seaplanes delivered a short-range, low-level and deadly accurate attack on the White House on the late afternoon of a day that had filled it with Service and civilian chiefs of every description. No one who witnessed it would ever forget the unheralded approach at nearly one hundred yards per second of a warplane flaunting the insignia of a distant but hostile Power and firing a machine gun as it came. The story goes that one such round, penetrating a conference room by its shattered window, struck the wheelchair in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt sat and, ricocheting, hit and killed an air-force general standing behind him. Whether literally true or not, the supposed incident has great metaphorical force.
After completing a number of strafing runs at their target, and having dropped on it their collective bomb-load, amounting to something not far short of half a ton of explosive, the seaplanes rendezvoused with the Tirpitz. Two airmen were lost. Those killed in and around the White House ran into scores, but the moral effect of such a daring stroke was incalculable.
Now, by an assiduously reconnoitred route, Tirpitz continued her long journey to the south. Round the tip of Florida she steamed, through the Yucatan Channel between Cuba and Mexico, then down the Caribbean to her third and final objective.
III – The Combined Operation
During the night of 16th/17th December, Yamato and Tirpitz took up their stations off the two ends of the Panama Canal, each vessel out of range of the shore defences. At a previously agreed time close to first light, both commenced bombardment of the sections of canal nearest them. After two hours the Tirpitz, whose primary ammunition had started to run low, disco
ntinued fire, and a little later Yamato followed suit.
There were altogether six double locks in the canal system, each of great mass and strength. All lock walls rested on rock foundations and were over 80 feet in height. In the case of the outermost locks, the walls contained over two million cubic yards of concrete. Nevertheless the concentrated broadsides of the two great battleships caused multiple breaches in both. What with severe consequential flooding and damage to permanent installations, it was estimated from reports reaching the Washington office of the canal that, even under normal conditions, repair and reopening could be expected in months rather than weeks.
Before the preliminary investigations were complete, Yamato and Tirpitz had reached home and safety, having accomplished their part in the shaping of history.
IV – The Sequel
The Empire of Japan had declared war on the United States of America in a proclamation date-timed 11.30 p.m. on 11th December, but unfortunately delayed for some hours before it reached the US Government. At two o’clock that afternoon Joachim von Ribbentrop, as Foreign Minister, had read out to the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin the text of Germany’s declaration of war.
The combatant Powers continued in a state of war seven full days. At 11.00 a.m. on 18th December, President Roosevelt delivered an address to both Houses of Congress and, by simultaneous radio broadcast, to the nation at large. The text ran, in part:
It is with a heavy heart, my fellow Americans, that I stand before you this day. You will all share my feelings of shock, sorrow and indignation at the appalling carnage that resulted from the Japanese surprise attack on the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. The German raids on the East Coast cities of New York and Washington, DC, though smaller in scale, were no less dreadful and demoralizing. In the nation’s capital I myself came under enemy fire, for a single instant only, but long enough to kindle in me a special sympathy with those men, women and children who really suffered.
Complete Stories Page 54