by James Philip
Peter had speculated that when the First Sea Lord arrived in Australia, ostensibly to refresh and generally update the Anglo-Australasian Naval Agreements promulgated by his own, late father back in 1963 but also to check up on the naval side of the preparations for Her Majesty’s State Visit to Australasia scheduled for August, they might get an inkling of what awaited them when, in September, their posting at Yarralumla came to an end.
Marija would miss Yarralumla; they all would.
Nevertheless, it would not be so bad for her third child to be born in her husband’s native land. She guessed she was around two months pregnant; so full-term would be in the days after Christmas or the New Year of 1969. Peter had been very distracted last week when she broke the news, and treated her as if she was made of fragile cut glass crystal for a day or two. He had been hopeless when she was pregnant with Elisabetta, and only a little better when she was carrying their son, Miles. He ought to know by now that whatever the evidence of his eyes she was as tough as old boots underneath!
By the time Peter made his belated appearance, towelled down and wearing fresh slacks and a crisply pressed short-sleeved shirt beneath his jacket, Lucy had given his visitor an excruciatingly detailed blow by blow account of how she had made mincemeat of the Governor General on the tennis court.
Jack McCain was very nearly crying with mirth.
He had made a token attempt to engage the vivacious girl, young woman really even though she was still only fifteen-years-old, who was his aviator son’s ‘pen-pal’, whatever that meant, in conversation about the latest news from the USS Enterprise but the kid had adroitly, politely, mischievously side-stepped his clumsy inquiries.
She might still be only a kid; but she was as bright as a button!
The Governor General and the American Ambassador shook hands and the room slowly cleared, with only Marija remaining with the two men. As always on these occasions Elisabetta was relatively easily reined in by the presence of her honorary ‘big sister’ Lucy, and exited stage left with reluctant good grace after bidding farewell to Uncle Jack.
There was a short interregnum while coffee was served and chairs were drawn into a circle around a low, dark wood table.
“My word, things look a bit grim in California, Jack,” Peter Christopher observed sympathetically.
Jack McCain’s brow furrowed.
“Yeah, the demonstrations. I don’t think the Administration counted on the anti-war people getting their act together so fast. Those idiots at the FBI probably told the President they were just a bunch of rich kids with too much time on their hands!”
Despite his patina of bonhomie, the US Ambassador was not a happy man. Until his fall from grace, he, as much as any of the Navy’s admirals had been a DC insider, a man who had cultivated countless contacts on the Hill in the years before the October War, and since. He had been the man the Pentagon routinely dispatched to Congress to explain, justify or occasionally, to just ‘talk straight’ to the men who held the Navy’s purse strings. He had become the guy who made the lawmakers feel good about what they were doing to keep the oceans of the world safe for US trade, and free of Communist piracy.
Peter listened, alarms ringing.
“I came over to fill you in on the latest intel from the Sea of Japan. You’ll probably hear most of this in due course through the usual channels but I guess, in the way of things, some of it is going to be covered up by the Pentagon.” He hesitated. “There were two Royal Navy OLO’s with Task Force 134; I’m sorry, but I have to tell you that they are both missing, presumed killed in action.”
Peter Christopher suspected his eyes had momentarily been as wide as saucers as he digested his friend’s unsolicited candour.
“How bad is this, Jack?” He asked, suddenly thinking about those anti-war demonstrations blocking the streets of San Francisco, Boston and the capital.
The first few times he had encountered the man many among his generation of naval officers regarded as ‘Mister Sea Power’, he had frankly, been more than a little in awe of Jack McCain. True, he and Marija had consciously gone out of their way to do everything in their power to improve and promote the best possible relations with the US Embassy; but his personal respect for the man had always been more than just a politico-diplomatic fig leaf.
It had been no surprise that the moment Peter had encountered the Ambassador’s son, John junior, that they had instantly hit it off, each man recognising kindred spirits in the twinkle of an eye.
The older man nodded; his face suddenly craggy.
“As an aside, Roberta and I have been told we’ll be staying on out here at least until next spring, or maybe mid-1969. I don’t see Nixon losing in November; this is exile,” he chuckled, “after all, and those people won’t let me anywhere near the Navy Department when they’re back in the White House. Anyway, Roberta asked me to float an idea with you, about Lucy when you guys move on.”
Marija and Roberta McCain were as publicly aligned, presenting as united a front as their husbands in Canberra. The two women often went shopping together, met most weeks for a lunch or a coffee morning and actively supported many of the same charitable good causes.
“Obviously, it’s up to Lucy, and her father but we’d be happy to, let’s say, ‘babysit’ the kid if it was decided it wasn’t appropriate for her to stay on here in Australia on her own, or to return back home to the British Isles…”
Marija reached over and patted Jack McCain’s hand.
“When we know what is happening to us, we will talk to Lucy and her father, I’m sure they will both be honoured by your offer, Jack.”
The US Ambassador relaxed now that he had voiced the one personally problematic issue which had begun to preoccupy his wife and he of late.
“Somebody was asleep at the wheel in the Tsushima Strait,” he prefaced, getting down to business. “And I don’t just mean catnapping, I mean damned nearly unconscious, catatonic at the wheel!”
Peter Christopher had been asking himself how on earth a terrifyingly powerful carrier task group had got ambushed and it seemed, very badly handled by a flotilla of missile-armed gunboats?
“Not,” Jack McCain continued, ‘that we didn’t get unlucky, too.”
“How so?” The younger man prompted.
“In the absence of a CAP, due to the weather and what seems some kind of misunderstanding with the Air Force on the Japanese Home Islands, the Ranger deployed the USS Semmes west of the Tsushima Archipelago on radar picket detail. The seas were bad, she got side-swiped by a big wave and suffered, so far as anybody knows, a number of major electrical failures. The assumption is she lost her air search, fire control and all her other radar systems, temporarily or from that moment onwards. Because by then she was west of Tsushima she’d lost line of sight to the flagship so TBS was blocked…”
The old admiral grimaced.
He had paused, from habit, meaning to explain the acronym TBS – the modern scrambled equivalent of the Second War UHF Talk Between Ships voice radio system – to the lady in the room, momentarily forgetting that Marija was a proud daughter of the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta and she was perfectly capable of holding her own in any conversation with him, or his Navy people about the design philosophies, practical engineering, weaponry, and the mechanical accidents waiting to happen to any given classes of warships.
“None of that would have mattered if the Semmes’s satellite uplinks had still been on line. As it was, nobody even knew she’d been hit; we think by several STYXs, until after the battle was over and the first search and rescue Sea Kings were vectored onto wreckage floating off the western shore of Tsushima. “They only picked up nine survivors from the Semmes.”
Peter Christopher absorbed this.
The USS Semmes (DDG-18) was a three-and-a-half thousand-ton Charles F. Adams class – a sister ship of the Berkeley - guided missile destroyer commissioned in 1963, the year after the October War, with a crew of over three hundred men.
“One theor
y is that the Semmes got mark-one eyeballs on the Korean missile boats – I say Korean but some of them may have been Chinese; they were all vessels of a type and machinery set consistent with the boats the Soviets supplied both of them before 1962, and during the Second Korean War – and was closing the range to investigate when she was attacked. Survivors report the Semmes’s superstructure being raked by heavy-calibre automatic gunfire before the missile strike lit off her Tartar magazine. She foundered so fast there was no order given to abandon ship.”
“The attackers?” Peter pressed his friend.
“Surviving radar plots identify at least sixteen missile boats, there may have been several more, we think we’re talking about a mix of Komar and Osa class units; as I say, either supplied to the Communists by the Soviets, or built locally. They were lurking in the lee of the Tsushima Archipelago, and suddenly emerged at high speed. As soon as they got line of sight on Task Force 134, they loosed-off everything they had as fast as they could!”
This time Marija was silently flummoxed.
“Komar class boats,” her husband explained, “weigh in at about sixty or seventy tons and have two STYX launchers; the Osa type ships displace about one-hundred-and-sixty tons and have four STYX launchers. Both types are capable of speeds of up to around forty knots, although obviously, a lot less in heavy seas.”
“So,” Marija counted fast, “they might have had about fifty or sixty missiles to launch between them?”
Jack McCain agreed, albeit with a concise, qualifying extemporisation.
“As I said, they probably expended several at the Semmes but we calculate at least forty, possibly as many as forty-seven, were deployed against the Ranger and her escorts at ranges of between six and ten miles within a nine-minute window. At one time during the battle there were fifteen to twenty incoming missiles in the air.”
A swarm of missiles roaring in at night in the middle of a storm, each approaching at relatively low level at over six hundred miles-an-hour.
Peter Christopher imagined the alarm bells ringing through the ships in the Ranger Strike Group, men sprinting to their stations, and the air defence officers down in the Combat Information Centres desperately trying to spin up their systems, acquire target locks and load surface-to-air missiles onto rails regularly drowned by new waves. It would have been a nightmare as vessels pitched and rolled, perhaps thirty degrees this way, and then the other, corkscrewing through the angry seas as the screening destroyers attempted to clear their ‘A’ Arcs. Every gun on every ship would have begun to blaze away into the night on juddering radar fixes, anti-aircraft autocannons and main batteries rattling and thumping, their recoil reverberating through hulls groaning as they twisted across waves and fell into troughs…
“Several ships tried to get between the Ranger and the main locus of incoming missiles,” Jack McCain explained with forced coolness. “Only the Halsey succeeded. She took four hits, maybe another couple of near misses. She went down in minutes; the latest report is that there were six survivors. The President lied to the American people about the Halsey; according to him she was only damaged.”
USS Halsey (DLG-23) was an eight thousand-ton Leahy class guided missile cruiser equipped with state-of-the art Terrier surface-to-air missiles with a crew of over four hundred.
“The USS Luce was in close company with the Halsey at the time, possibly less than a mile behind her. A STYX went off in the water about fifty metres off her port side, disintegrated and the wreckage punched several big holes,” Jack McCain circled his hands indicating porthole-sized penetrations, “and the fireball killed practically everybody on deck amidships. Another STYX carried away the Luce’s air search and forward fire control radar antennae and caused severe splinter damage to the bridge, severing comms lines and, well, you get the idea, making a heck of a mess of the forward part of the ship.”
USS Luce (DLG-7) was a four-thousand-ton Farragut class guided missile destroyer with a crew of three-hundred-and-sixty men.
“The Luce reports twenty-seven dead and thirty-nine seriously wounded. She was able to make Sasebo under her own power. They plan to patch her up and send her to Kobe for more permanent repairs. Dry dock space at Sasebo is kind of at a premium at the moment.”
Peter Christopher cleared his throat.
“The Roanoke was also damaged?”
“She took three hits and one of her secondary, 5-inch magazines lit off. They eventually abandoned her, left her to burn out. The hulk was still afloat a couple of hours ago. The weather is from the north so she’s drifting south towards Jeju Island, the only part of what was formerly South Korea that we still hold. The plan is to sink the wreck with torpedoes if it is still afloat tomorrow morning. The last I heard, they’ve accounted for eight-hundred-and-nine of Roanoke’s people.”
The cruiser had had a crew of approximately fourteen hundred souls.
The younger man had worked out that his friend was saving the news about the Ranger until last; he did not press him.
“As many as a third of the incoming STYX passed straight through or over the task group, several with a lot less than a few hundreds of yards clearance. Unfortunately, most of the ‘fly through missiles’ locked onto the Niagara Falls, one of the fleet’s newest combat stores ships.”
The USS Niagara Falls (AFS-3), was an eighteen-thousand-ton auxiliary designed to resupply the fleet at sea with everything from frozen meat and Hershey Bars to the most advanced munitions reloads, with an embarked air detachment bringing her normal operational crew to over four hundred men.
“The best guess is that she soaked up eight or nine direct hits that would otherwise have locked onto the Ranger. We haven’t picked up any survivors from the Niagara Falls.”
“What about the Ranger, Jack?” Marija asked in a very small voice.
“She took four hits. The first one killed everybody in her island, including her captain, her CAG and the strike group commander Rear Admiral James Holloway. Shortly afterwards, one, perhaps two STYXs penetrated her hangar deck, at the time packed full of aircraft, stores and munitions on account of the bad weather topsides. One STYX may have gained egress to the hangar deck via her port midships elevator, the other almost certainly expended itself against the ship’s port side, breaching the armoured bulkheads and blast spaces protecting the hangar. In any event, there was a catastrophic fire. By some miracle that fire was contained short of the ship’s magazines and AVGAS tanks but there was an estimated fifty tons of ordnance stored on the hangar deck, over fifty aircraft and of course, the fuel in their tanks. All of that burned, and exploded. The heavy cruiser USS St Paul went alongside the Ranger when the seas moderated sufficiently about ten hours after the battle, and trained her fire hoses on the remaining fires and eventually took the carrier under tow.”
Jack McCain was clearly struggling to contain his horrified incredulity that such a disaster could have been allowed to happen.
“The President mentioned a provisional casualty roster of one thousand for the Ranger, obviously, it is likely to be a lot worse than that. He lied about her being safely tied up at Sasebo. We’ll have a better idea if and when the salvage crews manage to get her into dry dock. There will be a lot of people still trapped below decks, the ship’s taken on a lot of water and she’s listing ten degrees to port. They may have to abandon her.”
“Even with people still on board?” Marija queried.
McCain nodded solemnly.
“They may already have abandoned her,” he groaned. “The news I’ve got may be twelve to twenty-four hours out of date by now.”
“How many nukes does she have in her special magazines, Jack?” Peter Christopher asked, cutting to the chase and the reason why the US Navy would, in extremis, sink the carrier in deep water rather than risk her drifting anywhere near a hostile shore.
“Thirty plus.”
“Oh, I see,” his wife murmured, understanding everything in that moment.
If the St Paul could not tow the deadweigh
t of the great, crippled carrier safely back into a safe harbour the US Navy would do what needed to be done to ensure that her ‘nuclear stores’ could not, under any circumstances, fall into enemy hands.
“You must know many of the senior men on those ships, Jack?” Marija suggested softly, reaching out to touch his arm.
“A few, yes. Good men. Good officers.” He took a deep breath, briefly squeezed Marija’s hand and looked his friends directly in the eye. “This fiasco has only just started. The President authorised a ‘Rolling Thunder’ response to Communist aggression in the Western Pacific.”
Peter Christopher thought ‘Rolling Thunder’ was just a war game scenario; something to keep cadets and inveterate war college staff gamers out of mischief.
Jack McCain was reading his younger friend’s thoughts.
“Rolling Thunder, in this context, involves the progressive dismantling and dislocation of the enemy’s capacity to wage war, initially by the use of conventional bombing munitions. It is a development of the Second War method of bombing one’s foes back into the Stone Age,” he remarked with unmitigated disgust. “The remaining carrier strike groups will achieve local then regional air superiority, reinforced in time by fresh strike groups, and all available Strategic Air Command heavies, B-52s based at home and in the Pacific, supported by medium bomber assets based in Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. The remit will be to systematically plough up the People’s Republic of China, presumably starting with major strikes on targets in Fujian Province and major cities like Shanghai. I should imagine B-52s are being tasked to flatten Pyongyang in what used to be North Korea, as we speak.”
Peter Christopher was lost for words.
It was all too…awful.
“This is insane,” Marija whispered. “Completely insane!”