by James Philip
Peter had been wondering if the twelve-man detachment responsible for his and Marija’s safety while they were in the United States, had already been earmarked to join Liverpool’s thirty-man Royal Marine contingent. So far as he knew, none of his ‘personal dozen’ was a musician, an issue because customarily Royal Marines on board Her Majesty’s Ships were bandsmen and corpsmen, medics first and fighting men second.
“Good man,” Peter replied. Several of the other bodyguards had accompanied him to the dockyard, not Corporal Simms as far as he could recollect. He checked: “Have you been on board her yet?”
“No, sir.”
“She’s quite a lady.”
“Yes, sir!”
Since his first tour of his command, Peter had got hold of a set of the USS Fall River’s original design blueprints, each variously annotated and amended during her construction at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation Yard at Camden, New Jersey. In between the ship being laid down in April 1943, her launching on 13th August 1944, and her commissioning on 1st July 1945, countless small, and one or two not so small, war-honed modifications had been built into the ship; evidence of which they had discovered literally from her bilges to her main battery gun directors a hundred and twenty feet above. He and Jack had pored over the drawings, mentally checking what they had seen with what was on the plans; it was an infallible way of understanding better what lay behind the plates, armour and bulkheads normally inaccessible to the naked eye.
The Baltimores were armoured like old-fashioned battlecruisers but constructed with the structural robusticity of not so small battleships. Conceived on the slipway as, if not unsinkable, then very hard to sink or to slow down, guardships for the fleet of fast fleet carriers envisaged in the early 1940s, they had never been intended to perform the classic trade route protection, or battle fleet screening roles of gunship cruisers of yore. In fact, during the Second War, the US Navy had prioritised the building of a fleet of 6-inch gunned cruisers – over forty, of which the twenty-seven Cleveland class ships were the most iconic – for traditional, and fleet carrier escort duties. Part of this predilection for light, rather than heavy cruisers, was because of the much faster rate of fire of 6-inch naval rifles, easily twice that of the Baltimores’ 8-inch/55-caliber guns, and the availability in those days of war-built fast battleships, typified by the forty-five thousand-ton Iowas. Ironically, although only seven of the fourteen completed Baltimores had actually seen service in the Second War, by the 1950s several of them were performing battleship/fleet flagship roles, or their rugged hulls being employed as templates for massive, radical modernisations which had produced the US Navy’s first true guided missile cruisers.
But not the USS Fall River, after serving as flagship to the US Fleet conducting the Abel and Baker A-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, she had gone into the Reserve Fleet at Bremerton in the American North West in October 1947, where she had still been on the night of the October War.
At the time of her transfer to the Royal Navy, she was little altered from her original state, a young-old ship, much like Talavera had been in what now seemed like a lifetime ago when Peter had first stepped on her gangway at Chatham in April 1962. Like Talavera, the Liverpool was old in years – twenty-one, older than many of the green recruits under training who would troop on board in the next few weeks – but she had very, very few miles on the clock in comparison with ships which had been continually in commission in the long years she had rocked gently around her chains in the cold, grey tidal waters of Puget Sound.
That night in October 1962 several Soviet ICBMs had overshot targets in the American North West. One had flown over Vancouver, north across the border into British Columbia, another, the missile which had devastated most of Seattle had likewise, probably fallen long; another had – it now seemed likely, only partially initiated (albeit producing a marginally sub-Hiroshima type explosion) - exploded over Dabob Bay, the best part of twenty miles north-north-east of its target, likely to have been Bremerton on the western side of Puget Sound, one of the biggest naval bases in the world and the location where over a third of the US Reserve Fleet had been mothballed in October 1962.
The USS Fall River had survived without so much as a single, additional blemish to her by then, rusting hull.
Fate, and all that…
Apparently, one of the ‘retrofits’ mooted for the Liverpool had been an ABC – Atomic, Biological, Chemical – washdown capability and the ability to lock down an air-conditioned ‘operational core’ within the ship. However, unlike some pre-October War larger Royal Navy ships, like the Lion class cruisers, in which such systems had been ‘designed-in’ very nearly from the keel up; such a modernisation would have added several hundred tons of unwanted, and very undesirable top weight to the cruiser, necessitating the corresponding removal of a not insignificant part of her war-fighting potential. For example, one of her main battery turrets, or foregoing the work to equip her to host a contemporary flag staff and its complex communications requirements, or both. It seemed that in the end the whole idea had been abandoned.
If there was another big thermonuclear exchange, Peter Christopher for one, suspected they would all be better off dead, anyway.
There were perfunctory security checks at the gate.
Peter had to concede, now and then, that there were one or two, very small advantages to having been one of the most photographed men in the world in the last four-and-a-half years!
Inside the yards Peter left his tame Royal Marine and Jack Griffin at the front desk of the Superintendent’s Block and paid his respects to his nominal, senior officer, Captain Solomon Phelps. Such courtesies would become redundant once he formally assumed command of the Liverpool; until then, technically, following the spirit of Queen’s Regulations, and more importantly, consistent with basic good manners, he fastidiously sought Phelps’s leave to board the ship, and to generally make a nuisance of himself at the Brooklyn Naval Yard.
“Come on in, Peter,” the other, older man smiled, looking up from his cluttered desk. “Life was a damned sight easier when I was on the Implacable back in forty-five! All I had to worry about then was pointing the bally ship in the right direction!”
Peter had known that Phelps had been a navigator on one of the big fleet carriers sent out to the Pacific in the last year of the Second War. He also knew that he was a survivor of the Prince of Wales, sunk along with the battlecruiser Repulse in the South China Sea on 10th December 1941.
Peter entered the office and dropped into the seat the other officer indicated.
“You know you don’t need to ask my by your leave,” the older man sighed. “Dammit, in a few years’ time I’ll probably serving under you!”
Peter Christopher stifled a gout of laughter.
He shook his head.
“If I’ve learned anything, it is that one never knows what life has in store for one,” he retorted mildly. He glanced down at the four rings on his uniform cuffs. “Back in 1962, I’d hoped to be a two-and-a-half ringer by now; that would have put me on a par with my father at my age. Not that I was ever very competitive about it; I was having far too much fun to worry overmuch about any of that career advancement nonsense. But for David Penberthy seeing something in me,” he shrugged, “I’d probably have washed up ashore by now, on secondment to Marconi or Ferranti, stuck away in some back room in Scotland playing with oscilloscopes or radar repeaters. The funny thing is, I’d have been happy enough.” He paused for a moment of reflection. “Now, if I think about that at all, I feel like a complete idiot. I’d never have got to Malta, and everything would have been different…”
“But then the war happened.”
Peter nodded. He had not meant to open a piece of his soul to the other man, even though Marija was always telling him that the best way to connect with somebody was to open up one’s heart, just a little at first because that never did any harm.
“Funny old world, what?”
“Isn’t it just,” Solomo
n Phelps sighed. “In May of forty-one, I was a subby,” a sub-lieutenant, “on the Polyphemus with your father, the Admiral, during the evacuation of Crete,” he confided, a little wistfully.
The younger man had had no idea the Royal Navy’s Superintendent at Wallabout Bay had served with his father.
“Remember that film?” Phelps grinned. “In Which We Serve… The one in which Noel Coward was supposed to be a fictional version of Louis Mountbatten? It wasn’t like that at all. We shot ourselves dry and we were dive bombed to buggery for two days before we got out of range of those bloody Stukas and Junkers Eighty-Eights.” He chuckled ruefully. “At one stage your father had us all out on deck popping off at the whole damned Luftwaffe with pistols and old Lee Enfield rifles and flare guns as he threw the ship all over the shop. By the time we got back to Alexandria the poor old Polyphemus was riddled with splinters, cannon and bullet hits from end to end, not to mention leaking like a sieve. Pretty much, I should imagine, like Talavera was when you brought her into Sliema Creek after that fight off Lampedusa!”
Peter suddenly wondered what his father must have thought when he laid eyes on the destroyer. Had his mind flashed back to 1941, the desperate clanking of his ship’s pumps and the quiet purposefulness of the men transferring the wounded onto the lighters alongside to be taken ashore?
“Tradition,” he murmured. “As time goes by,” he continued, his voice a little hoarse, “the niceties, the small things seem to matter more. So,” he added, smiling, “if it is all the same with you, sir,” Phelps’s fourth ring was three or four years above his on the Navy List, making him the senior officer in the room, “by your leave, I will carry on observing those niceties.”
Phelps nodded, and rose to his feet.
“Of course, Sir Peter. Thank you for your kind consideration, it is appreciated.”
The two men exchanged nods of respectful mutual acknowledgement; one did not salute inside a building ashore.
And parted, each understanding the other better than they had only a few minutes earlier.
Chapter 64
Wednesday 16th October, 1968
Camp David, Maryland
Although there had been no big announcement, even before the Thirty-Eighth President of the United States had addressed the House eight days ago, he had signed an Executive Order instructing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General William Childs ‘Westy’ Westmoreland, to put into effect, ‘at the earliest practical time’ a unilateral cessation of ‘hostile and provocative operations’ by US Forces in the Far East.
The following day he had ordered Westmorland to report to the Oval Office to personally deliver a progress report. In the event, both ‘Westy’ and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas Hinman had presented themselves.
It would take another forty-eight hours to pull back all naval assets in theatre out of range of enemy retaliation, or to safe ports; during this time, it was essential for the avoidance of ‘sneak attacks’ on ships attempting to disengage, to continue ‘aggressive aerial tactical reconnaissance and electronic eavesdropping evolutions close to and of necessity, occasionally within Chinese airspace.’
Thereafter, it would be practical to configure all US military assets in the region in a defensive posture.
Nelson Rockefeller had accepted the logic of this.
Then added a caveat: ‘Until further notice, no further warships are to be deployed to the Western Pacific Theatre of Operations without my personal permission, gentlemen.’
The two officers had acknowledged this.
Both men had reported to the Oval Office with envelopes in their pockets containing their immediate resignation from their current posts, and from their respective arms of the services.
The President had refused to accept their resignations.
‘You were acting under the direct orders of President Nixon, orders lawfully issued to you which you obeyed,’ he reminded them. ‘Until such time as you disobey lawful orders issued by me, you will continue to enjoy my confidence. I cannot, and will not speak to any decisions in this respect my successor may determine after his inauguration in January.’
The other thing that Rockefeller had done before he went to the Senate Chamber last week was to sack Bob Haldeman, and to put a call through to his personal office in New York, to ask the woman who had been his Executive Assistant when he had been Governor of New York, and his Chief of Staff during his Vice Presidency since January 1965, if she was prepared to move to Washington DC to become – for however long it turned out to be – the Chief of Staff of his White House.
He did not trust Haldeman, or any of his J. Walter Thompson, or UCLA frat buddies and in any event, he had always assumed that they were all – the whole gang of them – up to their necks in the President’s impossibly tangled web of malfeasance.
‘I assume Haldeman is gone, Nelson?’ Sixty-year-old Ann Cook Whitman had inquired primly, politely.
‘Yes, Ann. As Chief of Staff you will have a free hand, without reference to me, or any Cabinet member or other DC staffer, to hire and fire whomsoever you please between now and Inauguration Day, 1969!’
‘In that case, it will be an honour to continue to serve you, Mister President.’
Ann Whitman had brought practically the whole Rockefeller Staff with her to Washington; and when she cleaned house, God in Heaven, did she clean house!
But then Nelson Rockefeller had known exactly what to expect, and not been in the least surprised or disappointed by the way the new broom had ruthlessly swept through 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
At his request, letters had been sent over his signature at the end of last week to the Department of Justice indicating that it was his, Presidential opinion – to be tested in the courts as appropriate in ‘the normal course of events’ – that no member of the White House Staff or member of the Administration was automatically protected from ‘due process’ other than in respect of strictly personal conversations with the President, or in matters that were ‘clearly’ related to the security of the nation.
In an ideal world he would have sacked half his Cabinet; but that would just lead to chaos this late in the day and besides, Melvin Laird at the Pentagon, and Bill Rogers at State had tried to do the right thing all along. Well, so far as he could tell, granted, history might tell another story.
Ann Whitman escorted the President’s guests into his chalet. Outside, a Marine Corps SH-3 Sea King was lifting off, shuttling staffers and the six-man Congressional delegation he had entertained for a working breakfast, back to DC.
Bringing his wife, Happy, with him to Camp David yesterday evening had been one of his better decisions in recent days. There had been more than a whiff of scandal at the time of their marriage; his and her divorces had been staged – just a little too obviously, in retrospect - and people had noticed, as they were always going to notice. She was seventeen years his junior; vivacious, witty, funny and she had injected her vitality into his life and, he liked to think, made him a better man. When she was around everything seemed to go smoothly, often with a real swing.
Happy had been injured more seriously than he, on the night of the Empire State bombing, and it had taken her much longer than he, the best part of a year to re-find her old self. It was not just the physical injuries, those healed fastest; no, it had been the shock and horror of the disaster, the knowledge of the mutilations on an unimaginable scale, the dreadful toll of death and life-changing wounds upon so many friends. Being briefly lost in the confusion, separated from each other in the abattoir emergency field hospitals overwhelmed by casualties in the aftermath of the atrocity, no nightmare from Dante’s Inferno could compare…
Rockefeller smiled at Ann Whitman.
Born in Perry, Ohio, Ann had moved to New York, but before finishing Antioch College had had to look for work. At the time that she married Edmund S. Whitman, a senior public relations man with the United Fruit Company, she was the personal secretary of the daughter of one
of the founders of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and much later, while at the New York Office of the Crusade for Freedom, she had been recruited by the Eisenhower for President campaign. To cut a long story short, she had become President Dwight Eisenhower’s trusted personal secretary, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week for eight long years, all the while the only person Ike trusted to take his dictation, and writing what became a fifteen thousand page diary of his time in the White House. Almost incidentally, she managed a department full of secretarial assistants, and was the custodian and gatekeeper to all the President’s correspondence and confidential files.
Ann had left Washington for the Eisenhower family’s Gettysburg Farm in 1961, before accepting an appointment on Nelson Rockefeller’s staff and in essence, got on with doing the job for him that she had done all those years for President Eisenhower. Needless to say, in perfecting her persona as the perfect secretary and office manager, wholly in tune with her successive bosses, something had had to give; her marriage but then even that was a thing with a silver lining now that, as the files about the CIA’s meddling in Guatemala in the 1950s were finding their way into the papers, her connection with Ed Whitman, United Fruit’s top PR man, in the CIA’s meddling in Central America could be written off as ancient history, and nothing whatsoever to do with her.
A Marine Corps steward had already brought in a coffee tray. As soon as Ann had introduced Ronald Reagan, and his companion, George Romney, the Governor of Ohio, Nelson Rockefeller’s formidable Chief of Staff had taken a seat close by his right hand and readied her pad, pencil raised to record the forthcoming meeting in her precise, lightning-fast shorthand.
Both Reagan and Romney had travelled to Maryland with their wives, and only a handful of their closest aides.
Of the pair, the President knew Romney better.
Sixty-one-year-old George Wilken Romney had come late to politics; and but for one problem he would have been an excellent candidate to fill the vacant Vice Presidential role; he had been born in Mexico, where his parents had been members of a Mormon colony, and therefore, could never be, even in the direst extremis, the President of the United States of America. A devout man, he had worked as a missionary in Scotland, never graduating from college. Notwithstanding, by 1939 he had settled in Detroit, where during the Second War he had been the spokesman of the American Automobile Manufacturers Association in that unique, wartime environment in which the ‘Big Three’ companies – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – had shared facilities in an arrangement which optimised production and maximised each firm’s bottom line. After the war he had joined Nash-Kelvinator and in 1954, became CEO of its later incarnation, the American Motors Corporation. He was the man who had decided to compete with the Big Three on his, not their terms, with the smaller Rambler model, cheaper to buy and run than all its competitors and the key to boosting the price of AMC stock, to such effect that his share options had made him a millionaire by the time he ran for Governor of Ohio in 1962.