Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

“What happened the last time the Chinese stepped out of line, Major Zabriski?”

  It was several seconds before Nathan realised that what the man was probably interrogating him about, was the Communists’ previous response across the radio spectrum.

  I thought that was covered during the briefing…

  “They went quiet, sir,” he reported. “Once you get away from the coast there isn’t much radar coverage in that part of the world. Most of the radio traffic is civilian, or rather, non-military. We suspect the Chinese make widespread use of buried lines we can’t access…”

  “What about the Russians in the Vladivostok enclave?”

  “They played dead when the Berkeley and the Goodrich were attacked, sir.”

  Even ‘deader’, in fact, than the Chinese seemed to be playing after the recent massive retaliatory air strikes on their coastal provinces.

  Prior to every Looking Glass operation, the Battle Staff received a concise global military ‘threat analysis’ briefing, separate from the general ‘political threat calculus’ which moved from the domestic to the international and back again; hence the current interest in the anti-war protests going on or planned mainly in California – San Francisco and Los Angeles – and in Philadelphia, Boston, and of course, Washington DC.

  This time around, the ‘military’ session had included a summary of the bloody events in the Tsushima Strait and the opening blows of the massive retaliatory counter-strikes against the People’s Republic of China. Nathan had got the distinct impression that North Korea was going to be on the receiving end of similar treatment, once the logistical situation had been tidied up.

  The problem was that while the Enterprise, the Independence and the Shangri La, which was being rushed back to sea, were well-placed to pound targets on Hainan, and in Guangdong and Fujian Provinces, with the Ranger out of commission, the US Navy found itself bereft of offensive resources in the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea.

  Flying bombing missions from US bases in Japan was considered ‘inflammatory’ and besides, it was understandable that the Japanese Government, essentially pacifistic these days, was unenthusiastic about allowing its ‘friends’ to use it as a base for mounting a new war against the Korean Peninsula.

  No matter, in forty-eight hours the Independence and hopefully, the Shangri La would be in position to maintain a CAP over the south of Korea, strike aircraft could then take out the Koreans’ primitive, patched together 1950s air defence system and more B-52s flying from the Marianas would be free to get to work on the problem…

  Nathan scolded himself for being so cynical.

  Unsettlingly, he was getting the oddest feeling of déjà vu about what was going on in the Western Pacific. What had happened to the Ranger’s TF-134, bore uncanny similarities with what had happened four years ago in the Persian Gulf. The impossible had occurred, again, and this time there had been nothing particularly high-tech or original about it.

  Four years ago, the US Navy had still been reeling from the post-October War ‘Peace Dividend’ salami-slicing of the surface fleet. Many of its people were demoralised; unsure what they were doing in the Persian Gulf fighting somebody else’s war.

  Morale was not the operational issue it might have been four years ago; no, this time around the poor performance of the Ranger’s protective battle group might well have had more to do with the insane race to get so many big ships back to sea so soon. The technologically sophisticated, modern Navy of 1968, was not the old-fashioned one of the Second War when ships could be crewed quickly and thrown into battle after what seemed, today, like ridiculously short work-ups.

  They said it took a year to crew and restore one of the big carrier’s fighting potential. It took years to train men – from scratch - to fight the latest missile systems, to maintain the mass of semi-automated equipment on board the newest ships, and graduate-level electrical and mechanical accomplishment to understand many of the systems that were critical to the operational efficiency of the fleet. And all the while more greenhorns were being herded up the gangways onto ever more sophisticated warships…

  It was a theory.

  Everything depended on a frighteningly small core of experienced and technologically skilled officers and senior non-coms; he was one of the most highly trained men in the US military, so he ought to know!

  Well-motivated and led citizen warriors no longer cut it on the modern three-dimensional battlefield. It was a thing that had been hammered home to Nathan by the example of his own Air Force career. In retrospect, he now saw his whole adult life as a preparation for his current assignment. He was where he was now because of over a decade’s hard-won experience, and endless, sometimes very painful graft during which he had never stopped learning, soaking up knowledge, developing new competencies, and acquiring thousands of hours of hands-on time in the air, and in the increasingly sophisticated simulators now coming on stream.

  A crewman placed a mug of coffee close to his right hand.

  Nathan nodded his gratitude.

  He had been wool-gathering.

  That was unforgivable.

  His country was depending upon him to defend it from all evil and he had been half-asleep at the wheel!

  “Navigation,” he called over his private crew communications channel. “Please run a diagnostic on the latest ground track projection.”

  “Roger, copy that, AC,” the relatively new man sitting in Nathan’s old seat acknowledged crisply. “I’m on it now, out.”

  Nathan had returned from Minnesota last month to discover that while he had been away, a contractor had re-written a section of the computer code converting inertial navigation system inputs to displayable numbers on his screen.

  He was convinced the upgrade was still buggy.

  “Nav to AC. Diagnostic is nominal, sir. Still showing minimal variance with manual outputs.”

  “Inform me if the variance decreases with time please. Out.”

  Nathan was fully awake, hyper alert again.

  Good, that’s the way I need to be tonight!

  Chapter 37

  Friday 14th June, 1968

  Situation Room, Headington Quarry, Oxford

  Captain Dermot O’Reilly was – to say the least – somewhat taken aback to be ushered into the brightly-lit, pleasantly airy subterranean conference room where his escort, a blond secretary in the uniform of a First Officer in the WRNS, without warning, had introduced him to two vice admirals, and departed.

  The Canadian had met one of the two great men in the room as long ago as May 1964, when the man recently nominated to assume the post of Flag Officer Submarines later that year on his promotion to full Admiral, Sir Simon Collingwood, VC, had still been a relatively lowly, newly-minted four-ringer.

  The former commanding officer of the Royal Navy’s first nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine (SSN), HMS Dreadnought had already been the veteran of two hugely successful war patrols by then, and but for Peter Christopher’s and the Talavera’s death run off Sliema in April 1964, it might have been Collingwood who became his country’s latest Nelsonian exemplar and globally trumpeted hero. However, still only forty-three, Collingwood was by a country mile, the highest, fastest flyer in the service, catapulted ahead of the pack by Margaret Thatcher’s imperious decision to install him as ‘God’ in the British ‘nuclear undersea fleet’ project.

  Presently, the Navy had three British-built and designed SSNs in the water: Dreadnought, recommissioned after eighteen months in dock, Warspite and Valiant, and a total of six other hulls in varying degrees of construction, fitting out or trialling, with the lead pair of the first of the Churchill class boats – improved Valiant class submarines incorporating a tranche of advanced US Navy systems - the Churchill herself and her sister Courageous, expected to commission in the next few months and to commence operations sometime next spring. Additionally, the first two British Ballistic Missile Submarines (SSBNs), weighing in at over seven thousand tons and equipped with sixteen Polaris silos,
were approaching the half-way stage of their building at the dedicated Barrow-in-Furness facility in Lancashire.

  Allegedly, Simon Collingwood was the Prime Minister’s favourite admiral; in pretty much the same way the new Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Daniel French was her most ‘trusted’ airman. The jury was out on whether the Chief of the Defence Staff, Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver was still equally esteemed in the Lady’s eyes these days; apparently, the pair of them had had their differences in the last year or so since the end of the campaign in France.

  The successful conclusion of the French war had led to a general shake-up in the higher command echelons of all three services; a slew of retirements and promotions, and what many regarded as a ‘rare old game of musical chairs’ generally ‘freshening up’ home and overseas commands, predominantly in the Army but also in the RAF, which had pro-rata, suffered the most severely from the rationalisations and cutbacks of the last year.

  The Royal Navy had been so knocked about, not to say generally exhausted by the time hostilities in France had petered out, that although it too, had not been immune to the Treasury axe, most of the ships taken out of commission had been on their last legs, anyway. Therefore, more than a few officers of Dermot O’Reilly’s rank had had the same sinking feeling a man got when he saw good ships being consigned to the breakers before their natural time.

  Dermot had not been overly interested, or bothered by the Defence Ministry-Treasury bickering, or the ‘musical chairs’ going on several ranks above his head. A Captain (D)’s life was never dull, one of those real twenty-four-and-a-half hours a day jobs guaranteed to keep any man out of mischief. Thus, practically all of the behind the scenes machinations had gone on so far above his head as to be almost but not quite, wholly disconnected to his day to day duties, and life. Or, so he had assumed until he was shown, unexpectedly into this room with two of the three ‘big men’ of the modern Royal Navy.

  Fifty-five-year-old Vice Admiral Sir Peter John Hill-Norton shook Dermot O’Reilly’s hand and looked him in the eye, no mean feat since the Canadian was by several inches, the tallest of the three men in the Situation Room.

  The Vice Chief of the Naval Staff smiled.

  “It is good to meet you at last, Captain O’Reilly,” declared the man who was touted to succeed Sir Varyl Begg as First Sea Lord on New Year’s Day, 1969. I was minding the shop at Singapore at the time when Talavera saved our bacon in the Med,” he continued, wryly, “and when you and Cavendish were evoking all those memories of the Second War fight for the narrow seas of the Channel a couple of years ago, our diaries never quite synchronised. And then, of course, you were straight off writing still more glorious annals upon the escutcheon of the 7th Destroyer Squadron back in the Med again!”

  O’Reilly risked a grimace.

  “A man likes to keep busy, sir.”

  Both the admirals guffawed at some length over this.

  Presently, Peter Hill-Norton sobered.

  “You’re probably wondering what you’ve done wrong to be in the same room as Collingwood and I?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind, sir,” O’Reilly confessed, glad that his conscience was middlingly at ease that morning.

  “The First Sea Lord originally planned to be in attendance also,” Hill-Norton informed him. “It’ll be in the news tomorrow but Sir Varyl has accompanied the Prime Minister on her trip to Delhi, and plans, thereafter, to fly on to Australasia. As you are probably aware, the arrangements put in place back in 1963 by Julian Christopher, vis-à-vis Anglo-Australasian naval co-ordination and co-operation badly need refreshing. Initially, I was to go down under but our man in Canberra, Sir Peter, prevailed upon the Admiralty to give the mission absolute top priority ahead of Her Majesty’s state visit to the region in August.”

  Involuntarily, the mention of his friend’s name conjured a picture of Peter and Marija in Dermot O’Reilly’s head, and with it an involuntary half-smile.

  Suddenly, the Vice Chief of the Naval Staff was all brisk business.

  He had been born Peter John Norton in the Transvaal, and changed his name to incorporate his mother’s maiden surname – Hill – shortly before his education at Dartmouth, and the Royal Naval College at Greenwich ended, aged sixteen. A naval cadet from the age of fourteen, he had served in the Western Approaches, on the Murmansk Run, and in the latter stages of the Second War was the gunnery officer of the battleship HMS Howe when the British Pacific Fleet attacked the Sakishima Islands in 1945. Between 1959 and 1961 he had commanded the Ark Royal, and by then was earmarked for rapid advancement to high command. Promoted rear admiral he was Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff in October 1962; at the NATO Maritime Command headquarters at Northwood, near Eastbury in Hertfordshire when London had been destroyed by the Soviet onslaught. His wife had disappeared in the conflagration; and their only son, Nicholas, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant, having joined the service in 1957, had been killed in action on board HMS Tiger at the Battle of the Abadan in July 1964. Not for nothing was Hill-Norton known in the Admiralty not just for his keen mind, strategic acuity and his capacity to get on with, and when necessary, to say ‘no’ to politicians without earning their undying enmity but for his grim, unhesitating attitude to making very, very hard decisions.

  He was the man the First Sea Lord, Sir Varyl Begg, had given the onerous task of re-shaping the make-up and the role of the surface fleet, in an era when there was an embargo on new warship hulls being laid down in the British Isles.

  “The Defence Staff has determined that all the ad hoc, disconnected thinking and planning about the situation in the South Atlantic must be formally brought together, rationalised, as it were,” Peter Hill-Norton said, “under one, cohesive operational planning umbrella.”

  Dermot O’Reilly heard this but only belatedly realised that he must have looked as dumbstruck as he felt, as he absorbed the meanings of what he had just been told.

  Everybody had assumed that the SAPG – the long-standing South Atlantic Planning Group – was just a paper-pushing exercise. Or rather, an intelligence gathering department already famous for its obsession with security, probably a left over from its creation as an organ of the Ministry of National Security shortly after the invasion of the Falklands in April-May 1964.

  The Vice Chief of the Naval Staff pursed his lips.

  “The Argentine Republic seized by force majeure sovereign British territories and subsequently treated the inhabitants, British citizens one and all, abominably. The Prime Minister warned the Chiefs of Staff at the time, back in the spring of 1964, that she would not let this affront to international law go unchallenged. Moreover, that has been and remains, the consistent policy of Her Majesty’s Government.”

  “Okay…” O’Reilly murmured.

  “Given that the main challenge to any operation to take back the lost territories is that it will have to be mounted by sea eight thousand miles from the United Kingdom, and over three thousand miles from the nearest likely friendly base, Cape Town, the onus will be on the Royal Navy to transport and re-supply ground and air forces sufficient to re-take South Georgia and the Falklands Archipelago from their current, illegal, occupants. Therefore,” Peter Hill-Norton declared, pausing to sigh, “the Chief of the Defence Staff has requested that the First Sea Lord take under his wing responsibility for all existing Army, Air Force and Royal Navy teams examining the practicalities of Operation Downwind, bringing them all together under the auspices of the South Atlantic Planning Group, based in Fife.”

  Dermot O’Reilly was suddenly remembering the conversations he had had with staff officers about his experiences in the Southern Ocean before the October War.

  Take back the Falkland Islands…

  No, that was pure blarney…

  He looked to the second admiral in the room.

  “I’m not sure what I can contribute to this project,” he said frankly.

  Simon Collingwood nodded sympathetically, then grinned a little crooked
ly.

  “You’d be surprised, Captain.”

  “Yes,” agreed Peter Hill-Norton. “You’ve acquired a great deal of operational war-fighting experience in the last few years, O’Reilly. We need people like you attached to the SAPG to ensure that enthusiastic officers lacking your combat insights don’t get carried away with things. Rest assured that we have other plans for you, also. But more of that another time.”

  Given that he was already just about as surprised as he could be without pinching himself to test whether it was all just a bad dream, O’Reilly nodded like an idiot.

  “The Warspite has recently returned from a sortie below Fifty South,” the dapper, youthful Flag Officer Submarines designate – he was five years Dermot O’Reilly’s junior - explained, very matter-of-factly, suggesting that it was in no way remarkable for a Royal Navy SSN to be routinely tasked to patrol the South Atlantic at the outset of the austral winter. “Just to ease you into things; I want you to go up to Rosyth to have a damned good chin-wag with my Captains. After that, you’ll be attached to the SAPG HQ Staff, pro tem, probably for most of the rest of the year. Then, you and I, and the VCNS will have another conversation, when the question of your future employment can be sorted out.”

  It occurred to Dermot O’Reilly as he emerged into the warmth of the June day a few minutes later that it really had been a funny old week.

  He still felt a little bereft, as if he had lost the Campbeltown; ridiculous really, he had had his time on her as he had had on Talavera and Cavendish, fate and circumstance, time stood still for no man and he had had several months to come to terms with going ashore.

  Perhaps, as unsettling, he had finally broken, well and truly broken, the ice with Lottie Richards.

  My, oh my, had they caught up for lost time!

  And now he had learned that the Royal Navy was not just paying lip service to the Government’s public pronouncements about the Falklands, it was actively, and very seriously planning – at the highest command level - to do something about it.