by James Philip
The number of crashes and aircraft lost told their own tale.
The schedule was killing because killing had become, again, the name of the game. Moreover, the new President’s ceasefire – which the Navy was respecting, in detail in the Western Pacific Theatre of Operations – had had no impact on the ‘Fleet Accelerated Readiness Program’ (FARP) that each of the ships joining Seventh Fleet was required to undergo, and pass, before being deemed ready for combat. Ceasefires were ceasefires, nothing more. A ceasefire could end without warning and the US Navy had to be fully prepared, ready and waiting, like a cocked gun if the war started again.
So, John McCain had got to be an F-4 jockey!
Now all he had to do was spot a couple more landings and he would be bone fide qualified.
The Phantom was a sixty-three-feet-long beast of an aircraft; the biggest, baddest fighting flying machine in history. Back in the early sixties – and still, now probably – the type had held over a dozen world flight performance records, including those for speed and altitude.
A Phantom made his beloved old Skyhawk look like a Model T sitting on a speedway grid beside the 1962 Le Mans winning Ferrari!
The Deck Controllers arms dropped.
The aircraft lurched forward on its catapult so violently that McCain’s helmeted head seemed to smack back against the front cabin bulkhead. In a moment there was just hazy blue water either side of the cockpit; his hand was on the throttle and his ride, ‘Lucky Lucy’ was climbing very nearly straight up like a proverbial bat out of Hell, or as he preferred to say, like an angel in a hurry to get back to Heaven!
He disengaged re-heat, levelled out at ten thousand feet.
A check of his instruments.
“I’m nominal across the board back here, boss,” his navigator, weapons technician and electronic warfare man, a fresh-faced lieutenant in his early twenties, reported.
Although the F-4 could dogfight like she been built for it, she was designed with the raw speed – with her afterburners lit up she could break and maintain better than Mach 2 at altitude - to stay at arms’ length from anything else in the air, and an airframe capable of carrying many tons of the very best cutting edge war-fighting technology known to man. The aircraft could be a dogfighter, a stand-off air-to-air missile duellist, or, on internal tanks alone a medium-range strategic or tactical bomber, a ground attack platform, a high altitude ELINT asset, or basically, whatever the battlefield called for at any time it was in the air.
John McCain still had to pinch himself that the Navy had been dumb enough to put him behind the controls of such a wonder plane. Not bad for a cadet who had passed out sixth bottom of his Annapolis class of eight-hundred-and-ninety-nine in 1958!
The aircraft’s crew had wanted to daub something racy on his ride, a flimsily attired floozy. The old John McCain would have been okay with that. In the event he had told them, with an uncharacteristic stiffness of manner, to just stencil the words ‘Lucky Lucy’ on port side of the fuselage beneath the front cockpit. There were some ladies a man never, ever dreamed of taking a liberty with.
“Sara Two to Devil One-oh-One,” the Controller was calling.
VF-74’s squadron badge showed a devilish figure with his hair on fire over an inscription which read: ‘BE-DEVILERS’.
All squadron call signs were ‘Devil’ and the aircraft’s designated number. McCain got to be Devil 101 because he was the commanding officer of the fighter squadron.
“I copy you Sara Two.”
The old Saratoga (CV-3) – the one ‘expended’ at Bikini Atoll in the Able and Baker atomic bomb tests in 1946, after winning eight Combat Stars in the Second War, had had, among her nicknames, Sara Maru.
CV-60, the second of the sixty-thousand-ton post-war super carriers of the Forrestal class, which had come into service in the mid-1950s was sometimes called Super Sara but old-timers still preferred Sara Maru. Like many ships brought back out of mothballs, the great ship was still searching for her former identity, her crew, hardly any of whom had served on her before were still trying to get to know her, to feel at home on her. It was simpler for aviators to settle on board a new ship, they were accustomed to moving from one seaborne billet to another, and for whom shipboard attachments could sometimes only be passing acquaintances.
“The circuit will be clear by the time you circle back for DLO.”
McCain acknowledged.
‘Deck Landing Operations’ sounded reassuringly routine.
Problematically he had only made half-a-dozen landings on terra firma in a Phantom, and only one on a carrier, yesterday before the weather closed in. He had been ready to carry on, log the two further landings he needed, including the vital night DLO he needed to be properly certified on F-4s. However, much though the Navy needed the Saratoga out West, the carrier’s captain did not want his people scraping the wreckage of another aircraft off his deck if it could be avoided. And, in truth, that was exactly the way John McCain felt about it too, these days.
His two-week furlough in Australia had done him a world of good. Although he was a fast healer, he knew the damage from his various accidents and scrapes with death were cumulative, and that in the end they would catch up with him. He had been lucky to survive that fight in Upper Michigan, even luckier to get back onto the flight roster. Period. Everything else was a bonus. If he had been a cat, he would have been burning through his nine lives ever since. He had got lucky getting over the side of the Berkeley before the ship capsized on top of him, luckier still to get onto a raft, out of the freezing water, he and the men he had hauled out of the water had only survived because they had huddled together all through that terrible night…
Then he had baled out over the Pescadores.
He had not needed any surgeries after that; just tidying up and plenty of time to heal anew. Loafing about in Canberra had been perfect for completing that process.
His parents had missed having kids around the house. John was the second of three children, his sister, Jean Alexandra, ‘Sandy’ in the family, was two years his senior and had long flown the nest. Joe, his little brother was twenty-six now, he had tried to emulate their father and grandfather but the Navy – well, officer country – had not been for him at the time. Notwithstanding, no McCain ever ran away from a fight, and Joe had volunteered for service during the first Midwest rebellion. He had had a spell on board the battlewagon USS New Jersey and later, the heavy cruiser Saint Paul. The latest news was that he was ashore at Fleet Headquarters in San Diego.
Whatever, having Lucy De L’Isle around had taken a dozen years off McCain’s mother, Roberta and brought out the old Admiral’s gruff, long-dormant paternalism.
The hero returned from the faraway wars had been mindful never to be alone with Lucy, other than in public. That had worked well, and he had learned that his mother not only took the business of being in loco parentis of the kid every bit as seriously as Lady Marija Christopher had, but planned to supervise the self-same ongoing ‘communication protocols’ in respect of her charge’s correspondence with her son.
She got to vet all Lucy’s letters.
Which was kind of weird thinking about it, given the sort of life he had led, and the kind of man he had been until he got shot down at the end of the war in the Midwest. But then his mother was not protecting him; she was protecting a very smart, and a very, very cute, fifteen-year-old girl.
And in the meantime, he was getting on with his life; as they had agreed they would for most of the next three years.
It was always good to have a plan.
Right now, his plan was to hold Devil 101 dead centreline on this approach as the angled deck of the Saratoga loomed ever-larger in his windscreen.
He watched the landing lights winking in the gathering dusk; it would be dark soon.
He waited for the last minute wave off.
Which never came.
The F-4 crashed down onto the deck and caught the second trap as he slammed the throttle forward; insta
ntly, he pulled back and the aircraft stopped shaking.
“Good spot, Devil One-oh-One. Roll off the traps and take position one on the port bow cat.”
McCain raised the now disengaged tail hook.
“I copy that, Sara Two. Roll onto the port cat. Over.”
The deck crew were already beckoning him forward, hand signals pointing him towards the next yellow-vested crewman as the daisy chain of men who had the most dangerous job in the Navy – bar none – moved him aside for the next landing, a Skyhawk was lining up as Devil 101 cleared the angled deck and the hawsers, traps, came under tension again, lifting off the deck ready to catch the next landing hook.
Train hard, fly hard, live hard.
Well he could still do the first two, the third was a personal choice and maybe, just maybe, that was all behind him. It seemed more important these days to live well, to be a better man. He hoped that was possible but either way, he planned to give it his best shot.
Always assuming he survived the next landing.
Devil 101 was waved forward onto the port bow catapult. Behind him the blast screen would be rising from the deck; without it his afterburners were going to incinerate everything on the flight deck all the way back to the island superstructure.
John McCain was so deep inside his personal bubble of intense concentration he was practically in autopilot mode. He cycled up the F-4’s two General Electric J79 axial-flow after-burning turbojets, each capable of delivering nearly eighteen thousand pounds of thrust. The aircraft strained at the leash, the ‘go’ signal came and the catapult exploded the aircraft, having burned off several hundred pounds of fuel in her first flight, probably weighing around eighteen tons into the air.
This time McCain turned to starboard as the Phantom climbed, the altimeter dial spinning fast. Two thousand feet below the Gearing class destroyer USS Rowan (DD-782), with her ugly, silhouette-ruining Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization (FRAM) I modernisation helicopter hangar, drifted past his port wingtip. At five thousand feet he throttled back, disengaged re-heat and began to circle, painting two-mile wide figure eights across the azure canvas of the sky.
“Devil One-oh-Eight joining you on your right tail…”
“I’ve got her, boss,” McCain’s back seat guy confirmed. “He’s coming up hot.”
McCain touched the stud of his throat mike.
“This is Devil One-oh-One. Devil One-oh-Eight, what’s your hurry? Take station on my port wing, and conform to my movements. Out.”
The other pilot was a hot shot Air Force jock, one of many looking for some ‘real’ action without really having any idea what he was getting himself into. In the Navy you did things slickly, fast was not so important as ‘accurate’ except in an emergency. ‘Fast’ or ‘showy’ got you killed in a hurry on a carrier. Landing, you had to hit a twenty or twenty-five yard spot on a moving deck, at the right speed – give or take two or three-miles-an-hour – if you wanted the best chance of catching a wire, and even then, the better you were the luckier you were likely to be.
The sky was cloudless now, with hardly any haze, darkening.
The sun bathed the cockpit as it lingered a moment before dipping below the western horizon for another day.
Somewhere between spotting that last landing and rocketing again off the bow of the Sara Maru, John McCain knew he had cracked the F-4’s secrets, he knew how to fly her, she was an extension of his body, his forever.
He heard Flight Control calling him back to the nest.
No problem…
Chapter 68
Thursday 24th October, 1968
The Upper Bay, New York
The original grand plan had been for HMS Ark Royal to go into dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard first; and that had actually happened. Her crew would – supposedly - then transfer onto the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, learn the ropes and steam her back to Portsmouth to be commissioned as HMS Indefatigable. But that had not happened; instead a part of Ark Royal’s crew had transferred to HMS Eagle, which had spent most of the last year in harbour because it had turned out that she was in an even worse condition than her half-sister ship.
Ark Royal and the Eagle had been ordered and laid down late in the Second War as ships of the Audacious class, four bigger, rougher, tougher versions of the Illustrious class ships which had served with such distinction throughout that conflict. The other two vessels of the class had been scrapped on the stocks, and neither Ark Royal or the Eagle had been commissioned until the 1950s, in which time their designs had subtly, and in some areas, not so subtly, diverged between the drawing board and their keels touching the water. Thus, they were, at best, only half-sisters. Subsequent refits and modernisations had resulted in the siblings no longer even looking like each other, and for no readily apparent reason, the mechanical and structural fabric of the Eagle, prior to her major reconstruction in the early 1960s, had deteriorated faster than that of ‘the Ark’.
To cut a long story short, this meant that no one overhaul, refit, or modernisation program, was suitable for both ships; meaning that instead of the Navy ending up with two fairly big carriers which could be treated as two peas out of a pod, what it actually had, was two completely different ships and therefore, no scope for applying common fixes, or substantial reductions in cost arising out of economies of scale. The same non-compatibilities, and variances in design, also applied to the two smaller carriers, the old Victorious, and the relatively ‘new’, Hermes. Whereas, the US Navy built classes of near identical ships, maintaining cross-class standardisation wherever possible and practical; the Royal Navy could not, if it had deliberately set out to do so, have created a carrier fleet that was so, very nearly, impossible and expensive to keep at sea. Which was what happened when Navy decisions were taken by Treasury ministers!
Had the Brooklyn yards been able to apply the modernisation plans employed to revitalise and make good the Ark Royal’s deficiencies, directly to the Eagle, then there would have been no issue about the latter carrier following her half-sister directly into dry dock earlier that year. However, completely new plans had had to be developed and agreed, by all the interested parties, and in the interim, it had been decided that the Liverpool – still essentially a 1945 gunship cruiser with twenty-year-old radars, fire control systems and communications suites – would be taken in hand; while the Admiralty got its act together and decided what work ought to be carried out on the Eagle.
That the Eagle was badly in need of the attentions of the Brooklyn yards was evidenced by the fact she had made the transatlantic passage on only two of her four turbines, minus a great deal of flight deck equipment scavenged in an attempt to keep the Victorious at sea.
What the Americans called the ‘British Carrier Crisis’ was so dire, and its underlying causes so acute, that neither of the generously mooted US aircraft carrier transfers had come to pass in the way intended; the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (CV-42), and the other ship initially offered, the Bonhomme Richard (CV-31) remained in the US Reserve, and active Fleet respectively, and the USS Randolph (CV-15), substituting for the latter had, as yet, seen very little service flying the White Ensign. Partly this was bad organisation, mainly it was because the Royal Navy had returned to port and far too many skilled and experienced men had been transferred to the Royal Navy Reserve, and allowed to return to the civilian workplace.
This latter policy was, apparently, deliberate because apart from the Mediterranean Fleet, most of the rest of the Grey Funnel Line’s ships were badly in need of dockyard attention, or simply, surplus to requirements, and any notion of maintaining the fleet fully in being during peacetime in case it was needed again in the future, seemed to have been subsumed by the need for the Treasury to save money!
Peter Christopher wondered how their American friends felt about footing the bill for work on the Royal Navy’s last few major surface warships, at a time when the British Government was using its largesse as an excuse to hollow out the service at home. Well, the surface fleet,
at least. From what he could gather, whatever the undersea fleet wanted, it got, no questions asked.
The whole thing was a dreadful mess. However, now that the Eagle had finally arrived in New York’s Upper Bay, there was a sudden urgency to get the Liverpool back to sea.
Inevitably, there was a problem.
The drafts allocated in England to crew the Liverpool were still, mostly, in the United Kingdom, many of them undergoing basic induction training; and even the relatively small number of ‘qualified men’ transferring from the Eagle to the cruiser, would take time to familiarise themselves with their new ship. And in the way of these things; most of the men coming on board would hate the Liverpool because, they were ‘Eagle men’, aircraft carrier men, not bloody cruiser men!
The Captain designate of Her Majesty’s Ship Liverpool ought, by rights, to have been royally ticked off about the mess that the Lords of Admiralty, in their wisdom, had dropped him in.
Actually, his mood was anything but darkling.
If being a commanding officer of a magnificent beast like the old Baltimore class cruiser was easy, a proverbial piece of cake, anybody could have done it.
Forget about doodling with the latest electronic gizmos; those nincompoops back home had given him fifteen thousand tons of superbly designed and put together heavy metal to play with.
So, although he fully understood the true measure of the multiple, systemic oversights and cock-ups, the burden of which he was expected to accept and sort out without complaint Captain Sir Peter Christopher, VC, as he stepped off the launch and to the trilling of the bosun’s pipe, ascended the boarding ladder up to the hangar deck level of the rusty, rather worse for wear aircraft carrier as she swung around her chains, was whistling a happy tune.
Life was good!
The next few minutes, hours, days and months were going to be precisely the kind of professional challenge that he had been aching for ever since fate – Marija would attribute it to a higher deity – had decreed that he had been dragged into the ‘ambassadoring’ and ‘governor generalling’ game back in 1964.