by James Philip
The first remarkable man was Admiral the Earl of Mountbatten, the First Sea Lord, whom Simon Collingwood considered himself honoured to have been introduced on several occasions. The second remarkable man was Admiral Sir Wilfred Woods, Flag Officer Submarines in the mid-1950s and between 1958 and 1960 Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic based in Norfolk, Virginia, on whose staff Collingwood had been lucky enough to serve for several months. Mountbatten was the political powerhouse with a trans-Atlantic contact book unrivalled in history; Sir Wilfred Woods was the supremely professional and technically brilliant master submariner who’d spent every minute of his time in America making friends.
Initially, the two men planned to build a new generation of all-British nuclear boats. Given that the Americans had shut Britain out of the nuclear research loop almost as soon as the Second World War ended, this had seemed the only realistic basis on which to proceed. As late as 1956 Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, the high priest and implacable guardian of the US naval nuclear power programme had gone so far as to veto Mountbatten’s request to visit USS Nautilus. In retrospect this incident proved to be the high water mark of US-British non co-operation in the field because later that year Rickover came to the United Kingdom with a formal offer to supply third generation S3W reactor technology – which was then being deployed in the American Skate class nuclear powered attack boats - to the Royal Navy. Behind the scenes Mountbatten had been hard at work, capitalising on his old friendship with Arleigh Burke, the US Navy’s Chief of Operations and subsequently Rickover was persuaded – presumably reluctantly – to agree to the transfer of the latest reactor technology under the terms of the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement. Thus, HMS Dreadnought was built around an American power plant; a British hull populated with British combat systems heavily influenced by virtually unrestricted access to the Electric Boat Company’s yard at Groton where vessels of the Skipjack class were currently under construction.
General War Order...
Dreadnought was only weeks, possibly days away from ‘reactor initiation’ and her first scheduled ‘in dock’ dive trial.
Simon Collingwood stared into the darkness beyond Dreadnoughts tall, looming sail to where the first of her ‘improved’ sisters was already taking shape in an adjacent dock.
The Americans had transferred so much reactor and systems technology and divulged so much operational information that even before Dreadnought had been being laid down, Rolls-Royce, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and the Admiralty Research Station at Dounreay had begun work on a wholly British nuclear propulsion suite. The first of a new class of nuclear powered attack boats, HMS Valiant, had been ordered in August 1960 and laid down in January 1962. The partially formed skeleton of the Royal Navy’s second nuclear boat was invisible in the night on a covered nearby slipway.
More people were collecting on the dockside.
Civilians, men in uniform, milling around, waiting for orders.
“You there!” Collingwood bawled. “You should all be somewhere! If you don’t know where you are supposed to be report to your ships or take shelter! Now!”
From across the other side of Dreadnought’s dock diesel generators were roaring into life. Acrid smoke began to drift to seaward. Thank god somebody’s got their heads screwed on, Collingwood thought. He took one last look around and strode up the gangway. He went to the forward hatch, which was unguarded, clambered down the vertical steel ladder into the bowels of the submarine, turned at the foot of the ladder and stepped into the control room.
Collingwood was pleasantly surprised to find more than a dozen men waiting for him. Cables snaked everywhere, through open hatches, coiled on the deck, hanging in tangles from overhead control panels.
“The radio room is manned, sir,” reported Lieutenant Richard Manville, the boat’s Supply Officer. “The General War Order is being re-broadcast every five minutes in the clear, sir. I’ve verified its authenticity. This is no drill...”“
“Very good,” Collingwood acknowledged, pleased that the second most senior officer in the compartment was showing no signs of panic. “I have the boat, Mr Manville.” He looked around at the faces in the control room. “Until we know what’s going on I want all our people onboard.” He briefly considered disconnecting the umbilicals and dogging down the fore and aft hatches, decided against it. Theoretically, the boat had viable internal battery power but he had no idea what charge was in the batteries or even if they were fully operable. He stepped through to the radio room. “Do we have a telephone link to the Dockyard Supervisor’s Office?”
“Yes, sir.”
Then he heard it.
The banshee wail of air raid sirens that he remembered so well from his boyhood in London filtering distantly, eerily down through the open hatches into the equipment cluttered spaces inside the pressure hull of HMS Dreadnought.
With a horrible, sickening foreboding Simon Collingwood realised that this was indeed no exercise...
04:25 Hours local (03:25 Hours GMT)
Sliema, Malta
“What is it?” Marija Calleja asked, sleepily.
“I don’t know,” her mother complained irritably in the gloom.
Marija blinked into a more wakeful state. Why was her mother holding a lighted candle? And what was that noise, that commotion in the distance? Gradually, her ears became a little more attuned to the background clutter. She heard car and truck motors, many, many of them, dozens, perhaps scores of them. There were raised voices in the street outside leading down to the sea, and there was a glare of bright light behind the thick curtains of her bedroom.
“Your father says for us to go down to the cellar,” Marija’s mother said, growing ever more vexed.
“Papa?”
“Soldiers from the barracks at Tigne woke us up,” the older woman explained. “Didn’t you hear all the banging! Oh, never mind! You always could sleep through an air raid! Your father went off in the car they sent for him.”
“Oh.” Marija could hear the rest of the house coming to life. Her second floor room was at the back of the building on the quiet side of the block with no direct view of either Sliema Creek, or the street outside leading down to the harbour. “What happened to the lights, Mama?”
“I don’t know. The power is off. Get up, get up, girl!”
Marija groaned and pushed herself up into a sitting position. She was twenty-six years of age and her mother still called her ‘girl’! She let it pass. She loved her Mama dearly and sometimes felt guilty for not being the respectful, obedient, dutiful daughter that her mother still expected her to be, even in this modern world. Mothers, she consoled herself, could not stop being mothers even when their brood was fully fledged and able to fend for themselves. Of course, her Mama had never expected her only daughter to break those shackles in the way her brothers, Samuel, and latterly, Joseph, had broken free in the normal way of all sons. Daughters were different, particularly daughters who’d lived the life that she had lived. Marija sighed and began to rouse herself, stiffly from her bed.
In Sliema Creek a ship blew its whistle. The sound reverberated around the house, rattling windows.
Marija shook off her mother’s supporting arm.
“I’m getting up. I’m getting up,” she protested, rising unsteadily to her feet and shrugging the creases out of her long cotton nightdress. She understood why her mother was still so protective but sometimes it irked her intolerably. She wasn’t an invalid and she hadn’t been one for many years. She wasn’t a child any more either although she suspected that in her mother’s eyes she would always be twelve years old. Marija would bear the terrible scars of her crippling childhood injuries for the rest of her life but she hated it when she was treated as if she wasn’t fully capable of looking after herself. “Go! Go! Stop fussing over me, Mama!”
Her mother departed huffily.
Marija pulled the curtains aside from her bedroom window. Unable to see anything she went out into the hallway to see what she
could see from that vantage point. The Cambridge Barracks astride nearby Tigne Point were a blaze of floodlights, the parade ground and vehicle park dazzlingly illuminated. As she watched a helicopter – a Westland Wessex - swooped in to land in the centre of the open space, and ant-like figures scurried away from it stooping beneath the churning rotors, before the machine lifted into the air and thrummed across Marsamxett to disappear in the night over Valetta.
“Marija!” Her mother called, angrily.
“I’m coming!” She returned to her room and slipped on her sandals, pulled a summer overcoat from her sparsely populated wardrobe over her nightdress and went to the head of the stairs. Her left leg ached but she limped only slightly and the back pains from yesterday – when she’d spent almost the whole day on her feet at the hospital – were mercifully absent. “I’m coming!”
She went down the stairs with a confidence that astounded those who’d heard her story but who didn’t actually know her. Her hand rested on the old, warped oaken banister rail but only as an afterthought, just in case she slipped as now and then, happened. Marija Elizabeth Calleja had learned when she was young that life wasn’t about how many times one fell over; it was about how quickly one picked oneself up afterwards.
The Calleja family had moved into the old house in Sliema eight years ago. After the war they’d lived in an apartment in Mdina but when Marija’s father had been promoted to Under Manager of what was still, in those days, the Royal Naval Dockyard at Senglea, he’d wanted to be closer to both his office and the British headquarters, HMS Phoenicia on Manoel Island. There’d been some talk at the time of the family moving back to Vittoriosa-Birgu – which would have been right next to the dockyards – but Marija’s mother had never been back to the place where in 1941 her brother, sister and her uncle had died, and where she’d almost lost her only daughter, Marija.
Marija was about to follow her mother and her youngest brother, Joe, down into the cellar when the strident howl of another ship’s steam whistle reverberated across the harbour. On an impulse she ducked out of the front door onto the main street where she had a view straight down the avenue of buildings to a small sliver of Sliema Creek.
When she’d returned home for the weekend – this month her ‘weekend’s as defined by the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women’s nursing rota fell on a Sunday and a Monday - the previous evening there had been four big, grey destroyers at anchor. She’d lingered on the waterfront, sat a while on the sea wall and enjoyed the feel of the sun on her face as it set over the lumpy towers of the hospital at Msida, allowing herself the time and the space to think her own thoughts. Her thoughts had drifted, turning slowly around the many good things in her world.
Lately, every time she laid eyes on the ships of the 7th Destroyer Squadron with their ugly, ungainly bedstead radars and their long, gun-bristling hulls she thought about Peter Christopher.
HMS Talavera was a sister to two of the destroyers currently based in Sliema Creek, and inevitably she’d begun to wonder if one day, maybe soon, she’d be sent to Malta – carrying Peter Christopher - to relieve one or other of her sisters. Of course, she didn’t – ever – let her thoughts run too far ahead. The immutable lesson of her life was that one had to walk before one tried to run. She knew Peter had had sweethearts in England, and once, one in Simonstown, in far away South Africa. She knew also that the life of a career naval officer was hardly compatible with her own, very singular...circumstances. Yet, every time she looked at those beautiful, deadly ships moored in Sliema Creek she allowed herself to dream her dreams. Always a voice in her head told her those dreams would be her secrets forever; that nothing would ever come of them but that didn’t matter. She’d discovered when she was a girl - imprisoned hopelessly in one hospital bed after another for what had seemed like eternity - that a world without dreams was a world without hope.
Without hope there was nothing.
Marija stared down the arrow straight street to the darkly glinting waters of the Creek. A tug was dragging the bow of HMS Scorpion off its mooring buoy. She often watched the destroyers slipping their lines, edging out towards the sea. Always, the evolutions were smoothly choreographed, unhurried. Tonight, men were running about the decks in...panic. The Scorpion’s sharp prow - pointing out into Marsamxett - began to move. A vehicle hooted behind her and she stepped close to the wall of her house as several British soldiers jogged down the hill.
What was going on?
It was a defining characteristic of the British presence - her little brother Joe called it ‘the occupation’ - on Malta that ships and troops didn’t hurry anywhere. Certainly not in the middle of the night and never ever in the small hours of a Sunday morning. If Malta was in any sense ‘occupied’ the occupiers were as a rule at pains not to overly inconvenience the civil population in any way. Brave little Malta had gone through so much to help the British win the war and memories were long. Marija owed her survival and the fact that she was able to live the life she wanted to a remarkable British Naval Surgeon, without whose intervention she’d have lived out her years in a cot, gazing at the world passing her by. Quite apart from her feelings for a certain Englishman – Peter Christopher – whom she’d never actually met or spoken to but whose existence inevitably coloured her view of England and the British, notwithstanding the widespread yearning for real Maltese independence, she hoped the British would stay forever. If not as rulers then as protectors and friends; firebrands like her foolish little brother might spout all manner of anti-colonial rhetoric but most Maltese took a more pragmatic, and yes, sentimental view of these things. So, to see the British running around in what they’d call ‘a funk’ was more than a little unnerving.
A great gout of steam issued from the funnel of a tug ramming its snout under HMS Scorpion’s bow. Marija realised that the destroyer was swinging unnaturally close to the waterfront. With a tingling jolt of icy anxiety she realised the big ship must have cut her cables.
What is going on?
22:28 Hours EST (03:48 Hours GMT)
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Walter Brenckmann tried to roll deeper into the sheets when the alarm went off seemingly inches from his head. He and his wife, Joanne, had turned in early ahead of their planned early start in the morning. Tomorrow was their twenty-eighth wedding anniversary and Walter had taken several days off so they could drive down to Cape Cod. Joanne groaned, shrugged closer to her husband and for some blessed moments, neither of them was fully awake. Since the kids had moved out – the last, nineteen year old Tabatha, just a month ago to head up to New York State where she was boarding with Joanne’s sister’s family in Buffalo – Walter and Joanne had been struggling to get used to having the big house next to the MIT campus to themselves again. The quietness and the emptiness of the place had spooked them at first, now they’d reached the point where they were learning how to enjoy and fully appreciate the peculiar privacy which had returned to their lives for the first time in over a quarter of a century.
They’d married in 1934, the year Walter had finished law school at Yale. He’d been twenty-five and Joanne had been twenty-eight, a month short of her twenty-ninth birthday. Both families had been quietly scandalised by the age difference which seemed very odd looking back. Joanne had helped pay Walter’s way through law school, as a typist nine to five through Monday to Friday, and waiting tables at night. They’d started having babies as soon as could be decently arranged. Walter junior had been born nine months and three days after the wedding. Daniel fourteen months later, Samuel within another thirteen months. Tabatha had been an afterthought; an accident many years later. Sam’s birth had been difficult and the doctors had warned Joanne not to have another baby. What did doctors know?
Walter Junior was in the Navy, in the Submarine Service of all things! A lieutenant (senior grade), the newly minted Torpedo Officer on the Skipjack class nuclear attack boat the USS Scorpion. Daniel, after various stops and starts had been persuaded to follow in father’s foo
tsteps to Yale where he’d knuckled down to his studies and was in his last year. Sam, to be different because he’d been born with a contrary streak a mile wide had dropped out of college, thrown his guitar in the back of his beaten up Chevy and headed west last year. Sam had inherited his musical itch from Joanne’s side of the family. Joanne’s uncle Saul had been in Glen Miller’s orchestra in the war and made a living playing clubs and bars and halls across the North East ever since. Tabatha had always been closest to Sam but thank God, she retained every ounce of horse sense she’d been born with. She’d wanted to be a teacher so she’d gone to New York State to study English Literature and Geography. Neither of her parents understood how that combination of subjects worked but what parent’s ever understood anything about their offspring!
The alarm seemed very loud.
Walter Brenckmann rolled onto his back.
22:29.
The screeching, wailing noise was coming from outside, penetrating the battened down bedroom windows.
“Walter?” Joanne groaned. “What’s...”
Back in 1940 when Walter and Joanne had realised that - sooner or later - war was coming Walther Brenckmann had put himself forward for Officer Selection to the Navy. If he was going to have to put on a uniform it was not going to be that of an infantryman. They’d reasoned, his thriving downtown law practice notwithstanding that it would be for the best if he got into the military early. Yes, there had been ways of dodging the draft. And yes, they’d explored them, cursorily. But every time they’d walked through the options, the Navy recommended itself. Walter’s father had been on the battleship the USS Arizona in the Great War. He’d never fired a shot in anger and come home a hero; nobody in the Navy was going to order Walter to climb over a parapet and walk into a hail of machine gun fire. Hell, nobody was likely to ask him to even personally handle a weapon in the Navy. All the clever money said the Navy would most likely post him straight to the Judge Advocate’s Department in the Pentagon. Washington wasn’t that far away, was it? Of course, things hadn’t worked out that way. By the end of the war Walter had ended up in command of a destroyer escort in the North Atlantic and returned home in 1946 with a Lieutenant-Commander’s commission in the US Navy Reserve. When the Korean War came along they’d promoted him full Commander and given him a Fletcher class fleet destroyer. So much for the best laid plans...