by James Philip
The Royal Marine Band of the Atlantic Fleet struck up the first notes of God Save the King, rescuing De L’Isle from his darkest fears.
But for his presence the dockside church parade would have long been over and done with and the crew of HMS Achilles would have been getting on with its duties. Instead, over five hundred officers and men were still standing in the bloody rain!
Just to honour him…
He hoped to be able to board the cruiser and wish her Captain, Francis Jackson, a man he had first met nearly forty years ago leading a contingent of Naval Volunteers in Alexandria in a short, sharp, bloody little action that no historian would remember in fifty years’ time. Their paths had crossed a dozen or more times over the years and their wives were regular correspondents. He had made a point of commending the C-in-C Atlantic Fleet on the Navy’s ‘style’ in so ordering affairs that his old friend might conclude his career flying his own flag in command of the Jamaica Station.
‘If Francis hadn’t been having such a jolly good time at sea, he could have been First Sea Lord just like his old mater!’ Admiral Lord Collingwood had retorted.
Jackson had spent most of the last twenty years in command of ships the Lords of Admiralty considered otherwise ‘problematic’, specifically, vessels often serving on foreign stations with a history of poor morale or low efficiency. In this respect Achilles was a notable exception, re-commissioned eighteen months ago, after a major refit with a new crew by Francis Jackson. Without exception, Jackson had earned a reputation as the best man in the Fleet to ‘turn around’ any ship. To be rewarded with his commodore’s pennant upon the day Achilles docked in Kingston, Jamaica, was the least a grateful service could do to reward him.
The C-in-C had had a covered saluting platform erected when the weather had turned bad; De L’Isle had led his grumbling entourage out of it onto the wet concrete of the dockside when the rain had set in. The King might occasionally avoid the weather when he was with Queen Eleanor, Bertie worried terribly – albeit with very little real cause - about his wife’s constitution, but Philip Sidney had no intention hiding away in the dry when so many good men were getting a soaking just because he was there!
His aide-de-camp, a nephew of Sir George Walpole, quickly took his dripping coat and hat as soon as the party retired into the sheltered warmth of the Operations Complex.
Lord Collingwood and Rear Admiral Sir Anthony Parkinson, Flag Officer, Task Force 5.1, had been deep in conversation when the Governor arrived. De L’Isle had not had the opportunity to renew acquaintance with Parkinson in the weeks since his appointment in January.
Task Force 5.1 had been created as part of the Royal Navy’s root and branch battlefleet re-organisation necessitated by the commissioning of the new Ulysses class of fleet carriers.
The days of the line of battle were numbered.
Going forward, instead of ‘battle fleets’ there would be ‘task forces’ assigned to specific roles in peace and in war. Henceforth, the ‘task’ would determine the ‘composition’ of each ‘force’.
Parkinson flew his flag on HMS Princess Royal, one of the fifty thousand-ton battleships attacked on Empire Day 1976. Together with the new fleet carrier Ulysses, two heavy and two light cruisers, half-a-dozen destroyers and a fleet train of auxiliaries, Task Force 5.1 was focused not around the guns of the Princess Royal and the cruisers but the seventy to eighty aircraft and in due course, up to eight helicopters, carried by the Ulysses.
The coming of the new generation of big – forty thousand ton plus nearly one thousand feet long – carriers had prompted the most radical re-think of the tactics of naval warfare for a generation. In the mid-years of the century the introduction of ELDAR and of new long-range communication technologies had revised the calculus of global fleet operations; now, the advent of the new, so-called ‘strike carriers’ meant that future battles could be fought at ranges of hundreds of miles. The Fleet’s reach was no longer determined by the effective range of its biggest guns – around twenty-five miles - but by the range of its seaborne Combat Air Wing (CAW).
Task Force 5.2 was presently forming, working up to combat worthiness, around the Princess Royal’s sister ship HMS Tiger and the second of the Brooklyn-built Ulysses class ships, HMS Perseus, while in British waters the Home Fleet would soon be forming the first three of five such Task Force’s with one Canadian, and two Scottish-built Ulysses class ships.
Inevitably, when last year the Admiralty had proposed to de-commission and to place in reserve as many as five, six or seven of the older battleships and battlecruisers – nearly a quarter of the big gun battle fleet - to crew the giant, manpower hungry carriers, there had been an unholy storm of protest.
The wind of change often blew cold…
Philip De L’Isle was unlikely to have been the only colonial governor who wondered how the commissioning of the new carriers and the radical re-design of the Royal Navy’s age-old Fighting Instructions and deployments would be received in Germany, whose admirals had doggedly resisted the latent, now very real, possibilities of naval air power because they well understood that their aging, ailing Kaiser – and more importantly, his rambunctious son Prince Frederick – was a confirmed ‘big gun man’.
The Governor stood over the situation table of the New England, and the Jamaica and Gulf of Spain Stations with the two admirals, each man nursing a cup and saucer in his hands. If Englishmen abroad ever started to neglect the proprieties, the Empire would surely fall and more important, in times of trial there was nothing quite so guaranteed to sooth a fevered brow than a nice cup of tea taken in convivial company.
“I’m worried about our dispositions in the Caribbean,” Lord Collingwood admitted. “Achilles is a damned good ship but when all is said and done a single light cruiser armed with eight 6-inch guns is really here nor there in the bigger picture. All this loose talk about the Germans pushing the Spanish in Cuba, Santo Domingo and New Granada into declaring some kind of Triple Alliance gives me pause. I’m damned if I know how that would work in practice but if it did, at any level, with von Reuter’s ships in the region it might well embolden the hotheads in Havana, Port au Prince and in Mexico City. If that happens my ships down there on the Jamaica Station will suddenly be out on a limb!”
The C-in-C had in mind the modern cruisers of the so-called Vera Cruz Squadron of the Kaiserliche Marine, supposedly on an extended ‘good will’ cruise in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic was, to put it mildly, a loose cannon which now skewed every debate about naval policy south of the Gulf of Spain, which was presently through to be exercising with units of the Armadas of both Cuba and New Granada.
Fifty-five-year-old David Cuthbert Horatio, 9th Baron Collingwood was the direct descendent of the great admiral of the French Wars of the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the man who had smashed a Franco-French Fleet nearly twice the size of his own at the Battle of the Channel after that other legendary hero of the period, Admiral Lord Nelson’s flagship, the Temeraire, had suddenly blown up early in the action. Uncannily, people who cared to study, even momentarily, portraits of the 1st Baron invariably remarked upon the fact that he was the spitting image of his illustrious ancestor.
Like his illustrious forbearer he was also famous for his dour, no nonsense, methodically cautious approach to his duties. His peers called him the ‘Navy’s voice of common sense’, implacably unswayable when he had decided that the good of the Navy demanded a certain course of action. Oddly, it was this very trait which had allowed him, a career gunnery specialist, to appreciate much earlier than many of his contemporaries that the days of the big gun ship of the battle line, were numbered. In fact, he had been the man who, as Director of Naval Planning, had written the key directive cancelling the construction of four new ‘super’ Vanguards – the latest most formidable, fifty thousand ton-plus battleships – and placing, some six years ago, the orders for the first Ulysses class aircraft carriers; having spent the previous four years of his time a
s DNP fighting a bitter, thankless battle against the ‘battleship’ men who still, truth be known, were under the mistaken impression that they dominated the Board of Admiralty.
So, when he said he was worried about something it was usually as well to take note.
“Indomitable is at New Orleans,” Collingwood reminded the Governor of New England. “Invincible is about to come out of dry dock at Halifax after a routine period out of the water; I have drawn up provisional orders for her to steam south to the St John’s River anchorage in Florida. She can work up to full fighting trim down there. HMS Lion, as you know is undergoing a major refit and partial modernisation in Nova Scotia which is not due to complete until this coming autumn. The Queen Mary is currently based in Vancouver, at some stage thought may have to be given to reinforcing her squadron, especially, if the Russians start sabre rattling from their bases farther up the coast.”
Actually, ‘farther up the coast’ was Novo-Archangelsk – New Archangel - the capital of the Russian province of Russkaya Amerika, a huge almost entirely uninhabited tract of land in the north-western extremity of the continent which included the Aleutian Islands, the base of the Tsar’s Eastern Pacific Fleet. Other than at Novo-Archangelsk the only other significant ‘Russo-European’ settlements of any size were on Kodiak and Unalaska Islands, both garrisoned by Russian troops and the home to small naval flotillas.
“I think we can defer decisions on that score a little while yet,” Philip De L’Isle suggested wryly.
The C-in-C of Atlantic Fleet guffawed.
“True, whatever happens we’re hardly likely to be at odds with both the Kaiser and the Tsar at the same time.” Cuthbert Collingwood re-focused on more immediate matters. “Our only other available capital ship, Indefatigable, was to return to England in the coming months to pay off into the Reserve Fleet. As you know, she has been operating as Atlantic Fleet’s combined seagoing Gunnery School and Midshipmen’s ‘cruise ship’. At this time, she is perhaps, somewhat less than fifty percent operational. Her aft main battery is, effectively, de-activated and her electronics suite is minimal, stripped back to her 1950s rig. In her present state, even von Reuter’s cruisers might give the old girl a severe handling.”
Rear Admiral Parkinson grunted his displeasure at this juncture.
“If they came upon her unescorted, they’d mob her under in the most likely scenarios I can foresee,” he remarked.
The Governor of New England thought that sort of ‘scenario’ was straight out of a bad dream. That said, the one thing practically everybody agreed was that whatever the Germans were up to, sending a powerful cruiser squadron to the Caribbean under the command of Rear Admiral Edwin von Reuter, a favourite of the Kaiser and a close friend of Crown Prince Frederick – they had been naval cadets together at Kiel in their youth – no ship flying a German flag was going to deliberately fire on a British ship.
Because, if that happened there would be another general war…
No, the question at the moment was how big the ‘small war’ in the Caribbean and the borderlands of the South West was going to be? Or at least, De L’Isle hoped that was still the question.
If it was not, they were all in big trouble.
Collingwood was still unhurriedly contemplating his subordinate’s remark about the capabilities of the Kaiserliche Marine cruisers in the Caribbean, presently thought to be visiting the port of Vera Cruz, thankfully some fifteen hundred miles – some four to five days cruising time – from Jamaica, by dint of its proximity to Cuba and Santo Domingo effectively cut off from direct support from the north, the least defensible of all the Empire’s major Caribbean colonies.
“Two heavy cruisers, three light cruisers and a pack of destroyers would,” he conceded ruminatively, “be a bit of a handful for Indefatigable. If we sent her back to sea in earnest she’d be in company with escorts of her own, mind you. I’m sure they’d have something to say about the issue, Tony.”
“I’m sure things won’t come to that, sir,” Parkinson decided.
Even with two of its four modern fast battleships unavailable for operations in the Gulf of Spain-Caribbean theatre of operations and discounting Indefatigable, that still left the two Lion class ships and the two Indomitable class battlecruisers, each vessel boasting a main battery of eight 15-inch guns ‘in play’. Including the anti-aircraft cruiser Cassandra, the present Jamaica Station guardship and Achilles, soon to join her at Kingston, the C-in-C had eleven operational cruisers – five heavy and six light – several others which could be rushed back into service in short order if necessary, over fifty fleet destroyers and trade route protection frigates and corvettes, not to mention about two hundred other vessels, everything from tugs to fast motor gunboats to ammunition ships and fleet oilers with which to counter any threat posed by Spanish colonial naval forces.
Moreover, this accounting did not take account of the two new aircraft carriers joining the fleet: Ulysses, within days of being declared fully operational, and Perseus possibly only weeks behind her, albeit probably joining the fleet with a much smaller air group than the name ship of her class.
The problematic availability of ‘carrier-adapted’ modern aircraft and the crying shortage of qualified naval aviators was another matter altogether, one nobody seemed to have thought about until the two carriers were undergoing trials when, obviously, it was far too late to do much about it this side of the coming six to twelve months.
But for the present crisis the ‘air group’ question – which had been ‘parked’ temporarily by the decision to fully crew Ulysses and then ‘make and mend’ to get Perseus to sea – would never have raised its ugly head. It was no comfort to know that the Home Fleet was having similar problems putting together the CAWs for its newly commissioned carriers. The right aircraft had been ordered and the training programs to supply the necessary flow of ‘deck qualified’ aviators had been launched as long ago as last autumn; unfortunately, nobody in the Navy had been told that the politicians were going to let the international situation get out of hand so damned fast!
If this or any other vexation was presently costing Lord Collingwood to lose sleep there was little in his calm, unruffled demeanour to betray it. If nothing else a career in the Navy inured a man to setbacks and frustrations; a captain at sea often had to choose between the lesser of two evils so it paid to be mindful of what remained on the credit side of the ledger regardless of the down side of the naval balance sheet.
On paper, and in reality, he knew that the Atlantic Fleet remained nothing less than formidable, of itself the equal of any other Navy on the planet with the obvious exception of the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet, and the rapidly modernising Imperial Japanese Navy. The Spanish colonies in the Americas had no centralised command system, no modern battleships, no aircraft carriers, an antique collection of ironclads, a dozen variously modern cruisers but perhaps as many as thirty or forty notionally operational destroyers and frigates of varying vintages and utility.
“If this goes badly,” Rear Admiral Parkinson observed, daring to mention the dog in the manger which had be-devilled planning. The big unknown was the quality of enemy air. “Frankly, nobody seems to have the remotest idea whether the Spanish, be it on Santo Domingo, Cuba, or New Spain or in Colombia or Venezuela, are capable of projecting meaningful air power over any or all of the Caribbean or the Gulf of Spain. Goodness, we don’t even know if the beggars are capable of bombing southern Florida!”
What with one thing and another the presence of the modern German ‘Vera Cruz Squadron’ inconveniently muddied the tactical situation. In much the same way that a similar, more powerful German East Asia Squadron at Tsingtao, flying the flag of Rear Admiral Reinhard von Trotha in the battlecruiser Goeben, was complicating the strategic calculus in the Far East where, in comparison, the Royal Navy was spread somewhat thinly.
Other Kaiserliche Marine squadrons and flotillas, and a number of lone vessels were currently abroad conducting ‘good will visits’ and suchli
ke. There was nothing remotely unusual about this: the Kaiser was as enthusiastic about flag-waving as anybody. Some analysts speculated that perhaps, one in four ‘active’ units in the Imperial Navy was presently engaged on such ‘flag-waving’ missions outside European waters. This was important because the last time there had been so many German warships ‘showing the flag’ in foreign parts had been at the height of the Submarine Crisis in the mid-1960s.
That had turned out all right in the end…
Collingwood stepped back into the conversation, electing to defer further, unprofitable discussion of the intentions of Edwin von Reuter’s cruiser squadron, for another time.
“Achilles is going south with the latest covert electronic listening gear on board,” he reported, for the Governor’s information. “She may be able to answer one or two of the questions we have concerning, particularly, the Dominicans’ electronic warfare capabilities along the north coast of Santo Domingo. Frankly, the thing which worries me at the moment is not if the Spanish come out looking for a rough-house fight with my ships but if they attempt to fight an asymmetric campaign of attrition.”
Philip De L’Isle frowned, said nothing.
“For example,” Collingwood continued, “the blighters could secretly mine shallow water channels in the Floridian Keys, or ports in the south, the entrance to the Mississippi Delta say. Or make sneak hit and run attacks using their fastest units against undefended or lightly-defended coastal targets in the Gulf or as far north as the Carolinas.”
“Is that likely?”
Parkinson shrugged: “It is very hard to say, sir,” he admitted. “But one has to try to visualise how they, knowing they are outgunned, might view things. If I was in my counterpart’s place in Havana I’d seriously think about a range of well, basically, underhand options. One of which might be to convert several merchantmen into disguised commerce raiders…”