Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  Besides, nobody was going to ask him to dock the ship or navigate it from A to B, this was just a routine familiarisation shake down.

  ‘Shadow the Exec,’ Commander Fritz Ward, the Berkeley’s commanding officer had told McCain when he came aboard.

  The man had looked vaguely familiar.

  ‘I guess I ought to apologise for being under your feet, sir,’ the aviator had confessed.

  Ward, a tall, angular man with thinning hair and eyes that missed very little had grinned wearily, knowingly.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. The Berkeley is honoured to have a McCain on board. Me, my officers and the whole crew, Lieutenant Commander. For the record, my Pa was a torpedo monkey on the USS Gunnel back in forty-three. He was with her when your Pa sank the Koyo Maru in the Tsushima Strait, and attacked that convoy off the mouth of the Yangtze. He always said that was the nearest he got to being godammed killed in the whole war!’

  John McCain had been brought up with the legend of that attack, in which the Gunnel had sunk the seven-thousand-ton Tokiwa Maru and a second vessel before being subjected to a frenzied depth charge attack, in which at one stage a Japanese escort vessel had attempted to drag the submarine to the surface with grappling hooks! In the end, his boat damaged and probably – although ‘the Admiral’ was not the sort of man who would ever confess as much – running out of options, McCain’s father had surfaced, ventilated the boat and as Japanese ships opened fire and raced to run the Gunnel down, torpedoed a minesweeper, and dived deep as a new deluge of depth charges rained down. Forced to remain submerged for another thirty-six hours, his batteries exhausted, he had surfaced again, expecting another, this time hopeless battle only to discover the enemy escorts just far enough away to allow the Gunnel to escape to safety on the surface…

  McCain had seen Ward’s father in a crew shot in an old family photograph album.

  ‘Is your father still with us?’ He asked.

  A shake of the head.

  ‘No, he had bad lungs after the war. He died in sixty-one. He missed all the shit we’ve gone through since,’ the destroyers’ captain observed, philosophically without any real bitterness. ‘You and me are both newbies. I only joined the ship in March; the Berkeley has a hell of a battle record and where we’re headed it might get longer sometime soon.’ Fritz Ward had sobered. ‘Like I say, shadow the Exec. Enjoy your time with us. Try not to puke your guts too much; you carrier jocks don’t get a chance to get your sea legs on those floating airfields!’

  That was true!

  The Berkeley and the USS Goodrich, a Gearing class destroyer commissioned just before the end of the Second War, which had undergone a FRAM II modernisation a couple of years before the October War, had entered the southern reaches of the Taiwan Strait at dawn and cruised north, at first roughly mid-way between the ragged Fujian coastline of the Communist People’s Republic of China to the west, and the equally invisible shores of Nationalist China, formerly Formosa but now Taiwan, at fourteen knots into ever-steeper grey, foam-flecked seas, as the two ships gradually zig-zagged closer to the hostile shores of the mainland to the west.

  Visibility was less than a couple of miles from the bridge of the Berkeley as the three-and-a-half thousand-ton, still only five-year-old Charles F. Adams class guided missile destroyer plunged through the seas, shipping greenish water over her bow every fourth or fifth wave. The Goodrich, a slightly heavier ship with a different hull form, was noticeably ‘wetter’, her sharp stem frequently under water for a moment. Everybody on the bridge was clinging on to something, or like Fritz Ward, sitting nonchalantly in his command chair, very clearly, and cheerfully enjoying the ride.

  “We’re only twenty miles from the coast. The water is relatively shallow here, and across the whole strait,” he explained as the ship shuddered to what felt like a momentary halt before her twin screws forced her ahead again, “in these waters. Hereabouts, the seas get funnelled between Taiwan and the mainland even though at its widest it is well over a hundred miles across. The seas are always worst at the northern end of the straight where the currents from the South China Sea get to meet the counter flows from the East China Sea. I’ve heard it likened to the waters off South Africa, where the western boundary current of the Indian Ocean flows down the Mozambique Channel into the meeting place of all the cold water coming up north from the Southern Ocean, and supposedly, you can get giant waves coming at you out of nowhere, even in weather like this.”

  The destroyer’s captain embellished his remark with a relaxed wave of his right arm as the warship pitched downward into a trough in the waves and rolled ten and then fifteen degrees to starboard.

  “Sort of like that,” he observed conversationally as the destroyer lurched upright, “I guess, but a seventy or eighty feet-high cross sea as opposed to a fifteen to twenty feet rogue wave like that last one!”

  “DD-831 IS SIGNALLING BY LAMP!”

  The Communists had to know that the two destroyers were in the Strait, their electronic tentacles probing every wrinkle of the coast, plotting every ship and aircraft for tens of miles in every direction. Yet the Berkeley and the Goodrich were observing strict radio silence. It was all very old-school, a hangover from the days before scramblers and radar.

  “MAKE YOUR SPEED ONE-SEVEN KNOTS!”

  “COPY THAT! PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE!”

  Fritz Ward spoke to the quartermaster at the wheel.

  “She’ll yaw to starboard when we come up to revs for one-seven knots. Try to keep ahead of it.”

  He turned to McCain.

  “Us and the Goodrich won’t necessarily respond to helm commands as quickly at increased speeds. My mission orders permit me to vary the range to Goodrich by a thousand yards at my discretion while we’re transiting the Strait.”

  He gave the order to increase revolutions on both shafts.

  Then, to the petty officer at the wheel commanded:

  “PORT TEN! COME TO ZERO-ONE-FIVE!”

  It soon became apparent that the ship was taking a disproportionately heavier battering at the higher speed, even when, after a few minutes she resumed her previous course, now approximately a mile off the Goodrich’s port stern quarter. The other ship’s captain had five month’s seniority on Fritz Ward, so he was in command. If his counterpart wanted a wilder ride, that was his prerogative.

  The destroyers had parted company from the Enterprise Strike Group (Task Force 136) yesterday afternoon but were still operating beneath the Big E’s CAP, unseen, other than by radar’s all-seeing eyes, patrolling five miles above the grey, threatening overcast which seemed to loom just above the two destroyers’ aerial-topped mastheads.

  In the last week all three Seventh Fleet Carrier Groups had commenced joint operations ‘in theatre’, with each in turn closing to withing thirty to forty miles of the coasts of the People’s Republic of China, not so much showing the flag as brandishing it in the face of the Chongqing regime.

  The Ranger (CV-61), flagship of Task Force 134, was patrolling in the Sea of Japan; the Independence (CV-62), with the Shangri La (CV-38) in company with Task Force 133, was ‘projecting’ power in the northern East China Sea and the Yellow Sea; and the Enterprise was roaming the South China Sea, demonstrating the US Navy’s ability to navigate and block, at any time if it so wished, the Taiwan Strait.

  It was a couple of Vought F-8 Crusaders operating off the Shangri La which had splashed those two overly inquisitive MiGs last week. Prior to that the Chinese had been probing the air defence perimeters of the carrier groups with gradually escalating intent.

  The two hostiles had stepped over the line; paid for it.

  Sending a couple of destroyers through the Taiwan Strait so soon after the incident was literally, tweaking the Tiger’s tail. McCain had been a little surprised by how casual everybody around him was about that.

  Maybe, that was because he thought too much like a fighter jock; he needed time at sea as a ‘real’ naval officer if he was ever going to think like a ‘rea
l’ seadog!

  John McCain had transferred onto the Berkeley as the Big E was singling up her lines ahead of departing Subic Bay. In the Navy a man got used to such transfers, literally on the fly, and been briefed by the destroyer’s Intelligence Officer late on Friday morning as the ship had headed back out to sea to sweep the area north west of Luzon where the big ships of the task force would rendezvous on Saturday. Nobody really knew why the fleet’s sailing orders had been brought forward by forty-eight hours but then again, in the Navy, it would have been unusual for the top brass to have felt it necessary or appropriate, to have shared any of the reasons why.

  ‘The Communists don’t have much of a Navy,’ McCain had been informed, which he had already known.

  Most of what the People’s Republic of China’ Navy had was former Soviet cast-offs: perhaps, a dozen operational WWII-type diesel-electric submarines, a rag-tag of other 1930s and 1940s vintage destroyers and frigates including several smaller ex-Imperial Japanese Navy units, otherwise they had nothing bigger or more dangerous than few patrol boats and river gunboats of museum ship age. The only really modern vessels in the PRC fleet were the seventy to two-hundred ton fast missile-armed patrol boats – possibly as many as thirty – that the Russians had handed over before the October War and later, during the war in Korea. It was not known how many of these small units, or how many of the two or three hundred STYX ship-killer missiles in the PRC’s pre-1962 armoury might be operational, if any.

  Apparently, the Soviets had been quizzed about this during the recent summits but been unable, or unwilling to supply any information about the current status of any of the ships, aircraft or missiles they had transferred to their former Communist allies.

  What was known, was that the Chinese had a very large army and an air force equipped by the Soviets during and after the first Korean War, and reinforced with an unknown number of MiG-19s and 21s, and several squadrons of Ilyushin bombers prior to 1962. It was taken as read by the intelligence community that before Sino-Soviet relations had cooled in the last two years, that the Russians had also passed what was then state of the art surface-to-air, and air-to-air missiles to the Chinese.

  However, how much of this equipment was actually in service, was unknown. One view was that most of it would be useless, idle without the army of Soviet technicians and advisors who had long since been called back home.

  Others were less sanguine about the PRC’s technical shortcomings, and presumed ‘skills gaps’ and believed it was dangerous to plan on the assumption that the Chinese were incapable of maintaining, or deploying advanced weapons systems. The safest basis for operational planning, the hawks suggested, would be to anticipate that the PRC had the wherewithal to operate SS-75 SAMs which had shot down U-2 spy planes and RAF V-Bombers in 1964, and ship-launched P-15 Termit (NATO designator STYX) cruise missiles of the type which had very nearly sunk the cruiser-sized British destroyer HMS Devonshire in the Mediterranean in the same year.

  ‘So,’ McCain had checked, just to be awkward, ‘if we were the Chinese and we wanted to make a statement we might mine the Taiwan Strait or fire off a few P-15s at US Navy ships in the Strait?’

  The Straits were hazardous playgrounds for submarines old or modern; too shallow in most places, less than a hundred feet anywhere near the coasts, and only a couple of hundred feet deep elsewhere. The shallowness of the water, the frequency of storms and the proximity of the enemy in the Strait implied that even sophisticated modern warships, could be in trouble if the Communists came at them with old-fashioned dirty low-tech, mines and contact torpedoes, or hit and run air strikes, or simply a rain of ship-killing missiles.

  ‘Problematically,’ he was told, ‘the Chongqing regime has gone quiet recently, unlike the clowns in Taipei – sorry, the Government of the Republic of China - the puppet administration of eighty-year-old General Chiang Kai-shek, the dictator of Taiwan.’

  ‘Is it true the Little Rock is still moored in Taipei harbour to make sure we can talk to Chiang’s military?’ McCain had inquired, testing a morsel of scuttlebutt he had picked up on the Enterprise.

  ‘Yes.’

  The whole briefing had seemed to John McCain like a roundabout way of saying: ‘Beware all those so unwise to trespass here…’

  The USS Little Rock (CLG-4), a Second War Cleveland class gunship radically reconstructed as a guided missile cruiser, and equipped with a sensor and communications suite which enabled it to operate as a fleet flagship, was bridging the communications gap between the US military and its ‘republican’ allies.

  McCain had never been to Taiwan, people who had said Chiang Kai-shek, his mendacious First Lady, Soong Mei-ling and their sycophantic inner circle dominated by a gang of aging – failed and defeated - army generals, lived like medieval potentates while most of the population of the island did not even have mains electricity or running water, or access to a telephone. This latter was hardly a big thing because everybody knew that Madam Chiang’s secret police listened to every word one said on the few working telephones…

  “CIC TO BRIDGE!”

  McCain had been allowing his thoughts to wander; it took his mind off his roiling stomach as the ship began to take the seas from half-a-point to port of her heading.

  The call was broadcast over the Bridge PA.

  “REPORT!” Fritz Ward drawled.

  “FOUR FAST-MOVING BOGEYS. VECTOR THREE-FOUR-SEVEN AT LEVEL ONE-SIX!”

  Bells were ringing throughout the ship, clanging as the CIC Officer signalled the destroyer to assume the highest air defence level as he reported to his captain.

  Fritz Ward glanced at the air search repeater on the bulkhead over John McCain’s shoulder.

  “ROGER THAT, CIC. I SEE THEM ON THE BRIDGE REPEATER. CHECK CBDR?”

  Constant bearing, decreasing range.

  Collision or intercept plotted…

  “AFFIRMATIVE THAT, SIR. CIC CONFIRMS CBDR IN LESS THAN THREE MINUTES. INTERCEPT SPEED IS FIVE-TW0-ZERO KNOTS. NO IFF. THE GOODRICH IS ATTEMPTING TO RAISE THE BOGEYS ON THE STANDARD ATC FREQUENCY. THE CAP WILL INVESTIGATE.”

  “VERY GOOD. SOUND BATTLE STATIONS. I SHALL REMAIN ON THE BRIDGE.”

  McCain listened to the Tannoy blaring; new men appeared on the bridge and the quarter master ‘talker’ reported Berkeley’s departments’ readiness reports.

  The destroyer’s dual-purpose automatic 5-inch forward deck gun swung to the north west, its barrel rising to maximum elevation. The stern DP turret would, unseen, slaved to the ship’s fire control computer, would have already swung around in unison.

  Locked and loaded…

  It took a little longer to spin up the guidance systems for the destroyer’s RIM-24 Tartars, sitting on the rails of their stern-mounted launcher while the CIC developed preliminary engagement envelopes.

  Those rails had been getting wet, very wet and cold, the last twenty-four hours and it was amazing that nothing had shorted out when the two thirteen hundred pound, fifteen-feet-long Tartar SAMs had loaded.

  A quick glance at the readiness board showed the heavy weather was playing havoc with the sophisticated, somewhat delicate AN/SPG-51 missile fire control radar dishes mounted behind the ship’s single aft stack.

  No firing solution yet…

  John McCain well understood the rules of engagement in these waters.

  Threats were warned off but if they continued to menace US or allied military assets in international waters, or violated Taiwanese airspace, the use of deadly force was pre-authorised.

  The CAP, two of Enterprise’s F-4 Phantoms would be operating weapons free by now, their Sidewinder air-to-air heat-seeking missiles hot on their underwing racks.

  “MORE BOGEYS COMING UP BEHIND THE FIRST GROUP.”

  “HELM,” the destroyer’s captain said tersely. “FULL LEFT RUDDER. RING DOWN REVS FOR TWO-FIVE KNOTS!”

  McCain stood beside Fritz Ward, feeling oddly detached.

  The Berkeley and the Goodrich were manoeuvring to open their ‘A’ ar
cs and to a enable their fire control radars to establish unobstructed firing solutions. They were also taking advantage of the fact there were no other surface vessels in the vicinity so as to negate any collision risk, if they needed to take violent evasive action. Although, this latter was a subsidiary consideration in the age of fast jets and guided munitions; the essential calculus was that any attacking aircraft was going to be relatively small and twenty times faster than either destroyer, both of which were correspondingly large, and slow targets moving across a two-dimensional battlefield where there were no hiding places.

  “This sort of thing happens now and then in these waters,” the Berkeley’s commanding officer remarked, casually. “Most times nobody gets hurt but if those bogeys don’t back off in the next thirty seconds this is going to get ugly.”

  Like the other men on the bridge John McCain had pulled on a heavy flak jacket.

  Another alarm was sounding.

  Fritz Ward had waved away a yeoman offering him a hard hat, pulling on a comms headset, and adjusting its microphone.

  “THIS IS THE CAPTAIN! INCOMING! REPEAT INCOMING! BRACE FOR IMPACT!”

  Chapter 23

  Tuesday 21st May, 1968

  Churchill House, Headington Quarry, Oxford

  Lord Thomas Carlyle Harding-Grayson, the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, was the last member of the Cabinet to arrive, five minutes late just as the Prime Minister was about to call the meeting to order.

  “I do apologise for keeping you waiting, Prime Minister,” he said a little breathlessly as he moved to his seat at her left hand, “and to colleagues,” he added, grimacing a tight-lipped smile around the big, oval table in the hall adjoining the residence.

  Junior Cabinet Office civil servants had briefly risen to their feet upon his entry.

  “I popped in to see poor old Henry, and then there was an urgent call from the United States Embassy which, in the way of these things did not turn out to be quite as urgent as one had originally been led to believe.”