by James Philip
No, Zumwalt chastised himself for over-thinking, over-complicating the tactical situation.
At Tsushima those bogeys had been on suicide runs.
These bogeys might not be...
At Tsushima the analysts speculated that the bogeys could, and should have loosed off their birds at much longer ranges. Instead, the enemy had kept on boring in and it was pure chance that four or five of them had probably escaped unscathed.
“Bingo! Bogey Two stopped in the water.”
Bogey One, Four, Six, and Eight all came to abrupt halts and within seconds, began to drop off the tactical plot. Bogey One, too, was at a standstill, stubbornly remaining on the plot.
“Bogey Three and Seven have increased speed. All other Bogeys conforming to Three and Seven!”
Okay, nine still coming on.
Reports came in that all five Trackers had put their fish in the water ahead of the charging missile boats.
“Bogey Twelve and Bogey Fifteen stopped in the water.”
The three-hundred and thirty pound HDX charge of a Mark 37 torpedo would shred a two-hundred-ton thin-skinned hull built for speed not resilience. The wreckage would float for a few seconds, and sink. Both the Haddo and the Thresher would be chasing the survivors but the seven remaining Bogeys all had small speed advantages over the SSNs, possibly five or six knots in a straight line.
The submarines would be re-loading their tubes but neither could fire again without reducing speed.
“Bogey Seven and Bogey Ten dead in the water!’
Five left!
The Trackers, having launched their Mark 41s had climbed to five thousand feet and begun to drop strings of flares as they weaved high above the surviving missile boats.
Skyhawks blitzed down in long, curving runs as their pilots searched for their relatively small targets in the blackness of the night. Their 20-millimetre Colt cannons hammered; and cluster bomblets spewed from their underwing carriers. Momentarily, the sea and the night around a missile boat boiled and a string of small, apparently harmless points of light erupted and winked out as shrapnel swept the upper deck of the vessel attacked.
A cannon round or a red-hot fragment of tempered steel must have carved through the paper-thin skin of a fully-fuelled, primed for launch STYX anti-ship missile.
In that moment the missile’s fuel and one thousand-pound hollow-charge warhead must have exploded because suddenly, the Osa disintegrated as it was consumed by a huge orange-white fireball.
“Incoming! Incoming!”
Bogey Eleven had put two STYX into the air.
“CGN-25 has a firing solution for her aft Terriers!”
The STYX had to pop up above the radar horizon to refresh its target lock; and that was when a Terrier, closing at a speed of well over Mach 2, detonated about eight feet above the nearest incoming ship-killer. There was no big flash in the sky, the STYX simply dove into the sea.
None of this was visible from the CIC, or from any of the ships of Task Force-136. Everything was happening over the horizon, reported by the integrated and in some cases, slaved electronic systems of individual ships.
A third, then a fourth STYX registered on the CIC plot.
One veered erratically to the left and fell off the screens.
Two ships, and a third, the Lynde McCormick (DDG-8) launched medium range Tartars at the incoming STYX, which the plot had reported had a forty-percent probability of intercept with either the Saint Paul or the Enterprise. Which became immaterial a few seconds later, when it was intercepted by the Lynde McCormick’s second Tartar launch.
It was all over inside ten minutes.
Had the last few Osa missile boats scattered they might have survived a little longer; as it was, the Big E’s Skyhawks queued patiently to deliver shattering cannon runs, and scores of cluster bomblets ripped the reeling target to shreds.
Zumwalt did not waste long in reflection.
Fifteen Osa class missile boats destroyed, over four hundred enemy combatants were dead, or in the water, and the enemy’s capacity to wage war at sea had been severely degraded.
No US casualties.
Now, if only the politicians would allow us to wage war our way that was how it could be, most times, in future!
He ran a hand through his hair.
“My compliments to the Captain,” he said, “please recover aircraft.”
Chapter 60
Tuesday 8th October, 1968
HMS Liverpool, Brooklyn Navy Yard
It had taken Captain Sir Peter Christopher and Chief Petty Officer Jack Griffin, the best part of two middlingly gruelling days, to crawl over every accessible inch – from her bilges to her conning tower over a hundred-and-forty feet above - of the heavy cruiser.
The ship was still a complete mess, at least three weeks, or a month away from being in any fit state to be handed back, in stages, to her new crew. Maddeningly, the making good and signing off process could not officially begin until then. That said, cadres of the Liverpool’s engineering and electrical divisions were already on board, working side by side with the dockyard, and the ship’s main battery rifles were scheduled to be aligned in the second half of next week.
So, some progress had been made!
Not that it was easy to discern at present.
“She’s a real beast,” Jack Griffin grunted as the two men walked down the steps into the bottom of the huge graving dock where the Liverpool had been confined for the last five-and-a-half months.
The Liverpool, formerly the USS Fall River (CA-131), was a Baltimore class cruiser commissioned just before the end of the Second War, on 1st July 1945.
Back in 1965, the two men, accompanied on that occasion by Marija, had been given a tour of the de-activated USS Macon (CA-132), another ‘Baltimore’, while they had been at the Embassy in Philadelphia, and also gone on board the Des Moines class USS Salem (now commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMS London), the original Fall River’s three-thousand-ton even bigger sister. However, other than the three mighty Des Moines class ships, the Liverpool suffered by comparison to no other cruiser of her era.
She was indeed, a beast of a ship.
The third of the US Navy cruisers transferred to Britain in 1965 and 1966 – a fourth, the USS Oregon City (CA-122) had remained in the US Reserve Fleet because the Royal Navy had no idea where it was going to find the men to man her – the Fall River, unmodified from her Second War state, had seen no action in the French campaign, spending most of the time moored at Portland as Fleet Gunnery and Training Ship.
HMS London was currently moored with the ‘ghost’ fleet at Devonport; only HMS Kent (formerly the USS Des Moines), was currently in commission, serving as the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet, based at Malta.
From what the two men had discovered in the last couple of days, placing the London in reserve was a terrible waste of a superb fighting machine. ‘Heavy metal’ was a phrase they had picked up talking to dockyard workers on their explorations; it perfectly described both the concept, and the reality of the great ship now looming above them as they stepped out onto the damp, concrete floor of the huge dry dock.
The Des Moines class, of which a dozen had been planned but only three completed, all post-Second War, might represent the absolute acme, the pinnacle of big-gun cruiser design but they were only scaled up versions of the Baltimore class ships which, the US Navy veterans Peter Christopher had spoken to regarded, to a man, as the actual, ultimate fighting incarnation of the Second War gunship cruiser.
The Baltimores were big enough, rugged enough, fast enough and hard-hitting enough to do the job: practically any job! The bigger Des Moines versions were overkill, their extra tonnage gave them marginally more cruising range, and theoretically, greater resilience to battle damage but they mounted more or less the same armament and none of them would relish a bar-room brawl engagement with a Baltimore!
The Liverpool would leave Brooklyn weighing in at around fourteen-thousand-five-hundred tons (that wen
t up to seventeen-thousand-two-hundred, and some, with her bunkers filled with two-thousand-two hundred tons of oil and her magazines packed high with ordnance). She was six-hundred-and-seventy-three feet long, nearly seventy in the beam and in deep condition drew the best part of twenty-seven feet in the water. From the waterline to the top of her forward mast was one-hundred-and-twelve feet, and post refit, her primary air search radar would sit nearly a hundred feet above the water.
Down in her machinery spaces her four Babcock and Wilcox boilers powered General Electric turbines generating one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand – and in practice, a deal more – shaft horsepower to drive her four screws. Clean bottomed and straight out of dock the engineers promised that if he ever ‘turned on all the taps’ she might make thirty-four knots, around forty miles per hour, in land-lubber’s terms. More prosaically, at fifteen knots she could sail half way around the world without refilling her bunkers.
Although the Baltimores had been designed as long ago as 1940 – the first US Navy heavy cruisers built after the lapsing of the Washington Treaty stipulations limiting standard displacements to only ten thousand tons – much of their layout had been trialled on the USS Wichita, a ship with a similar main armament and internal layout accommodated within a ten thousand, rather than the Baltimores’ fourteen thousand ton hull. So, in the same way the later Des Moines class was an enlarged version of the Baltimores, ships like the Fall River were bigger, hugely more robustly built, versions of the tried and war-tested and proven Wichita. Often new classes of ships were works in progress; the US Navy had avoided this, and the customary mistakes most navies made in each new type of warship sent to sea.
The Baltimores were bigger, better Wichitas, physically longer and broader, similarly armoured but constructed far more ruggedly. One of the seven Baltimores completed before the end of the Second War, the Pittsburgh – had lost her bow section and one hundred feet of her forward hull in a typhoon, a thing later attributed to faulty welding and rectified by re-welding and structural reinforcement in the other ships – and still steamed, under her own power to port. With greater compartmental sub-division than any previous US cruiser class and with battlecruiser, rather than strictly cruiser protection: 4- to 6-inch belt, side protection, up to 2.5-inches of main deck armour, 8-inch thick main battery turret faces, barbettes with 6-inches of protection, over 6-inches of cemented plate circling her conning tower, and key bulkheads shielded by up to another 6-inches of steel, she was invulnerable to similarly armed enemy warships beyond ten thousand yards, and retained areas of virtual ‘invulnerability’ to 8-inch shell fire in many areas of the ship down to engagement ranges of five and six thousand yards.
As one US Navy supervisor had offered the two Englishmen: ‘She’s one tough mother!’
The only time Peter Christopher had been up close and personal with big guns like those his new command carried had been many years ago, when, as a cadet, he had spent thirty days on board the Royal Navy’s last battleship, HMS Vanguard at Portsmouth. By then the great ship’s two aft twin 15-inch turrets had been de-activated, their nine-hundred-ton carapaces locked, dead on the centreline of the behemoth. Even from a distance, the Liverpool’s three, three-hundred ton, heavily armoured turrets, each bearing three Mark 15, 55-caliber 8-inch guns, did not suffer by the comparison.
Those 8-inch/55-caliber rifles - generating a muzzle velocity of two-thousand-five-hundred feet a second - were capable of flinging a 335-pound armour piercing, or a 260-pound common, or high explosive round over sixteen miles down range. After firing each barrel automatically returned to its maximum loading elevation, about fifteen degrees, which, in combination with each gun having its own dedicated shell hoist, meant that a rate of fire of up to eight rounds per minute could be sustained.
As constructed, the Fall River had had a secondary armament of twelve 5-inch/38-caliber dual purpose guns mounted in six twin turrets, one behind number two turret forward, and one forward of the number three, aft main battery turret on the ship’s centreline, and the other turrets mounted to port and starboard of the amidships superstructure. The two centreline turrets had been removed, as had all twelve quadruple 40-millimetre Bofors guns and replaced by eight twin 3-inch mounts. The ship’s original two dozen single 20-millimetre anti-aircraft cannons had initially been deemed surplus to requirement but a rethink had led to the retention of half of the guns ‘for close-range protection’.
Personally, Peter viewed the retention of so many anti-aircraft guns as a mixed blessing. He seriously questioned the continuing efficacy of such large mixed batteries in the age of fast jets capable of attacking warships at sea without ever coming into range of main, let alone, secondary and close defence anti-aircraft batteries; and retaining so many manually-handled weapons tended to overly inflate the ship’s overall crewing requirements. Even with her reduced gun batteries, the Liverpool’s peacetime complement would still be fifty-eight officers and nine-hundred-fifty-six-men, not including officers and cadets (at any one time between thirty and forty) on board under training.
Moreover, this was a calculation which ignored the Liverpool’s likely role as a squadron or a fleet flagship.
During her modernisation and refit, the deck space previously occupied by several gun mounts and miscellaneous general machinery between the cruisers two slim, slightly raked funnels, had been cleared, decks strengthened and a two-storey high deckhouse complex been built to house a flag staff numbering, at any one time, perhaps, a hundred or more. That number would only be the tip of the iceberg, an admiral’s staff would bring on board all manner of specialists, technicians and its own communications watch, whose members would spread out within the ship like the tendrils of a great spider’s web, partially taking over every free space and ensconcing themselves in the Liverpool’s new, ultra-modern Command-Information-Centre – presently a chaos of wiring and consoles in the armoured citadel deep below the bridge – from where the ship would be fought in any future battle.
With a fleet commander on board, it was likely that the Liverpool’s crew would swell to over ninety officers and about thirteen hundred men.
As built, the Fall River had been intended to carry up to four seaplanes, launched from catapults on her stern. Those catapults were long gone, all that remained was the heavy-duty crane on her transom, now only required to lift the ship’s boats in and out of the water. The hangar, beneath big, sliding panels on the stern, with space to accommodate two of the cruiser’s original, as designed flight of Kingfisher float planes, was now reconfigured to house – or more correctly, stack – as many as six boats, safe below deck out of the weather until or unless, needed.
Peter had viewed the idea of having an aircraft hangar, inevitably full of inflammable materials like fuel, lubricants, paint and so forth, in a lightly armoured compartment above the rudder and steering spaces below – albeit protected by splinter plating overhead – as the one questionable aspect of the Baltimores’ and the later Des Moines classes’ design. He still did not care for the arrangement whereby fuel lines still snaked all the way back into the old hangar, now boat store, and had made a mental note for those pipes to be flushed after every use so as to never have flammable fluid or fumes in them other than when a boat needed to be refuelled.
It was nit-picking really; honestly and truly, he was still a little bit like a child who had got his hand caught in what in the States they referred to as ‘the cookie jar!’
It was all he could do not to pinch himself.
He was a thirty-two year old post captain in the Royal Navy – how on earth had that happened? – and he had been given command of what, after the fleet carriers, none of which were actually in service apart from the Victorious, and the Kent, which was badly in need of the sort of tender loving care his ship was getting, what was likely to be the biggest, most fearsome beast in the nation’s post-October War Navy!
The Board of Admiralty, in their wisdom, must, he was tempted to suspect, be mad!
He and
Jack Griffin were attired in dark blue, almost black, borrowed boiler suits with only their distinctive caps and small, greasy badges, hastily attached to their chests, identifying them to the workers going about their business all around them.
There would be a formal handover ceremony on Friday morning; presently, the ship was nominally under the command of Lieutenant Commander (Engineering) Evan Griggs, the man who was preparing to recommission the cruiser’s machinery set.
The real authority over the ship remained in the hands of Captain Solomon Phelps, the senior Royal Navy Superintendent at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, responsible for overseeing all work on ‘British contracts’ but he seemed to spend most of his time at Norfolk, liaising with his counterparts at Portsmouth, where all work on British and Commonwealth ships in US ports was actually planned and co-ordinated.
Peter intended to have a proper sit down chat with Evan Griggs, a forty-year-old widower – his wife had been killed on the night of the October War – and a proudly born and bred Liverpudlian, who had previously been Acting Engineering Officer of the old Belfast on her final cruise, before she paid off and was reclassified as Fleet Gunnery Training Ship. Griggs would be promoted Commander when Liverpool commissioned; not that it seemed to matter to him. He had described serving on board ‘the Liverpool’ as like ‘winning the football pools!’ And: ‘going to Heaven on the same day!’
There would be a lot of men in Peter’s crew like Griggs; with only the Navy for their family, men who had lost everything, and everybody they cared for, swallowed up by the world catastrophe of six years ago. That had never really been a problem on the Talavera: the war had still been too fresh, many of her crew had been together through it all, and developed their own sense of belonging, esprit de corps. He was going to be starting from scratch on the Liverpool; this time around there would be no David Penberthy, his old mentor, to pull everybody together, to make the Liverpool the well-oiled fighting machine that Talavera had become by that fateful day in April 1964 off Sliema…