New England 04 - Remember Brave Achilles, page 11
Anybody who cared to study portraits of the 1st Baron invariably remarked upon the fact his modern descendent was, uncannily, the spitting image of his illustrious ancestor. Like the 1st Baron, the C-in-C Atlantic Fleet, was also famous for his dour, no nonsense, methodical approach to his duties. At the Admiralty they called him the ‘Navy’s voice of common sense’, renowned for his implacable decisiveness once he had determined that the good of the Navy – and the Empire, to his mind the two were inseparable - demanded a particular course of action.
Many speculated, that it was this trait which had permitted him, as a career gunnery specialist, to appreciate much earlier than any of his senior contemporaries that the days of the big gun ship of the battle line, were numbered. In fact, he had been the man who, as Director of Naval Planning (DNP), had drafted the directive cancelling the construction of four new ‘super’ Vanguards – the latest and most formidable, fifty thousand ton-plus battleships – and placing, six years ago, the orders for the first of the Ulysses class aircraft fleet carriers; the corollary to having spent the previous four years of his time as DNP thanklessly fighting a bitter, rear guard action against the dyed in the wool ‘battleship’ men who still, truth be known, were under the mistaken impression that they – rightfully – still dominated the Board of Admiralty.
Although he had a well-earned reputation for being an ‘absolute tartar’ for rooting out men whom he deemed ‘not to be up to the job’, he ran his New England headquarters with a relatively light touch. He explained this apparent contradiction thus: ‘Spit and polish, tradition and respect for the chain of command must be a given; however, within an efficiently ordered regime there must, in this new age when everything we do is dependent upon the ever-developing technologies of civil society and war-fighting, there must be a recognition that not all of the old ways are appropriate. What is required is a collegiate atmosphere at all levels in which no man fears disadvantage for honestly speaking his mind. Concomitant to this it must be a sine qua non of the modern Royal Navy that men in positions of responsibility should be mindful of the physical and mental well-being of those under their command. If the Navy is to continue to be one big happy family, reason must replace the rod and we must allow our people to develop alongside, and wherever possible, to embrace change and the marvellous boons of modern science.’
So, while old fogeys muttered darkly about the new ‘soft Navy’ in which an officer was as likely to ‘ask’ one of his men to do something rather than to directly ‘order’ it, and in which it was considered good man-management practice to actually ‘thank’ a man for doing a good job, in which the acknowledgement of excellence and as importantly, ‘potential’ in a man reflected as much credit on the issuer and the recipient of praise, under Collinwood’s tenure the Atlantic Fleet had begun to be a repository of efficiency and modified good practice.
In other words, the Atlantic Fleet was as ready for war, if it came, as it could possibly be, given that theoretically peace had ruled the Atlantic approaches to the disputatious waters of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain for the best part of the last decade.
In past ‘Border Wars’, the Navy had generally been deployed in a blockading role during which there had been only a handful of minor engagements – between small ships or patrol boats in coastal waters – with Las Armada de Nuevo Granada remaining steadfastly in port and the Cuban, Dominican and other ‘unfriendly’ powers in the region carefully preserving their neutrality so as to avoid incurring the wrath of perfidious Albion.
This time around nobody in Norfolk imagined the Triple Alliance was going to use that ‘play book’. Not after what had happened to the Achilles and was still going on down in Jamaica.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding that the ‘Make Ready for War’ signal had been sent out to all ships and stations under Cuthbert Collingwood’s command over twenty hours ago, nobody in the Situation Room that morning was taking anything for granted.
Theoretically, it was not too late for the Cubans to hand over the men and ships which had sunk the Achilles; or for the agents of the Triple Alliance to desist their operations on Jamaica and withdraw their forces. Thereafter, it would be up to the diplomats to hammer out a new peace.
That of course, was a pipe dream. Practically speaking, the war had begun and the forces of the Commonwealth of New England and the Atlantic Fleet were in motion. The genie was well and truly out of the bottle and nothing short of a miracle was going to persuade it to obediently get back into it.
The Army Liaison Officer was completing his briefing.
It was an accident of history that to all intents, there was no standing apparatus of high-level integrated military or industrial command in New England, or across the Canadian provinces. In the past the wartime appointment of a Supreme Commander had been a thing stoutly resisted, an article of faith among the First Thirteen seemingly from time immemorial. It was almost as if the individual colonies were afraid that such a military ‘supremo’ might, like Caesar, one day cross the Rubicon to enslave them.
Thus, there was War Plan West Texas (covering operations west of the Mississippi), War Plan East (covering operations east of the great river) and War Plan Anson (in respect of the Atlantic Fleet’s operations and ‘obligations’ under the other two ‘Plans’ in the Atlantic, the Caribbean and in the Gulf of Spain).
Technically, all land forces and Colonial Air Force squadrons, were under the command of the Chief of Staff of all North American Colonial Forces, Field Marshall Lord George Everard St John Markham, GCB, CBE, DSO and Bar, MC, but the post had been a largely ceremonial institution ever since the Great War, as witnessed by the fact that Markham was a seventy-nine-year-old former Indian Army man promoted field marshal upon his retirement from active service nearly fifteen years ago.
Pragmatically, if there was such a thing as a commander of New England land forces it was probably, implicitly if not acknowledged elsewhere, the fifty-eight-year-old Quartermaster General of New England, Lieutenant General Sir Vivian Macmillan Clinton, KCB, OBE, MC, a direct patrilineal descendent of Sir Henry Clinton, one of General William Howe’s commanders at the Battle of Long Island in August 1776.
Unfortunately, Clinton had only been appointed at the end of last year and made very little progress – due to obstruction by several colonies, Virginia, Delaware and New York in particular – in integrating colonial militias into larger, New England brigades and divisions. While the Governor of New England had, and had always had, the prima face right to raise, disband, and deploy the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Regiments of a given colony’s or territory’s militia anywhere in North America, no Governor had attempted to use such powers since the era when the suppression of revolution was the over-riding concern of Government House. Consequently, there was not now, and there had never been, any New England equivalent to the Indian Army, mainly because the First Thirteen, and their two belated associates, New Hampshire and Vermont, had always been vehemently opposed to the creation of such an army. The argument went something like: We are loyal New Englanders; we have no need of an Army of Occupation. And besides, since they had never had to pay anything like the full cost of the British and (other) non-American Empire troops deployed on their territory – for their defence – in previous wars, the legislatures of the East Coast colonies really did not see why they should be inconvenienced by the onerous price of such an army.
The defence of New England was, after all, as much a vital interest of the rest of the Empire as it was in, say, Virginia or Massachusetts. As Governors of New England had attested down the years, you could always tell a Virginia planter a mile away, but in practice you could never tell him anything!
“Air activity over the Rio Grande sector is greatly increased in recent days. This has curtailed our own reconnaissance activities,” the Army Liaison Officer, a Major with the tabs of the 4th Maryland Fusiliers on his collar, explained stoically. “However, the picture emerging from radio intercepts and the analysis of the same, coded traffic, indicates that the Mexicans,” most Army men called the citizens of New Granada, ‘Mexicans’ these days, “have elements of at least seven divisions concentrated within ten miles of the front. It is hard to know for sure but we strongly suspect that if and when they come over the border, they will send columns north into the Indian Country, possibly developing aggressively into the Colorado Territory later. However, it is likely that the main weight of attack will fall on our forces in West Texas. Particularly the further west one goes this is truly dreadful campaigning country. There are still substantial native populations, Apache, Arapaho and other tribes who basically, we have more or less allowed to get on with their own affairs for years now. One imponderable is that we simply do not know whether the tribes will be friendly, or hostile to the Mexicans. Frankly, we don’t have enough men down there to fight the Mexicans, let alone the damned Apaches and Cherokees, and so forth. Those fellows are the finest irregular soldier-warriors on the continent; to us the terrain is our enemy, to them it is their friend.”
Until he assumed command at Norfolk, Cuthbert Collingwood had not been aware that successive Governors of New England had abandoned concerted attempts to ‘pacify’ the native tribes of the South West as long ago as the late 1940s. Peaceful co-existence had become the mantra with large parcels of ‘Indian Land’ set aside with all settler and other grants automatically voided by any New Englander who trespassed on that country.
The Colonial Air Force Liaison officer, a one-legged Wing-Commander in his forties with a chest full of meddle ribbons and a bushy handle-bar moustache, reported that four scout and two bomber squadrons were forming on ‘the Great Plains’ and should join the Border Air Command – BAC - within the next few weeks. Presently, there were six scout and five bomber-ground support squadrons stationed in the ‘Border Sector’, a force comprising approximately one hundred and sixty aircraft ‘ready for operations’.
Three of the scout squadrons were equipped with the Goshawk Mark II; even so, a hundred and sixty aircraft to cover seven to eight hundred miles of threatened ‘border’ seemed to the Navy men around the table as inadequate as the fifty-five thousand men of the nominally four-division strong Border Army, sometimes popularly referred to in the press as the ‘Army of the Rio Grande’ or simply the ‘Rio Grande Army’.
Both the Army and the CAF men stated the patently obvious when they said, more or less in chorus: “Hopefully, the Royal Naval Air Service will be in a position to assist us if the worst comes to the worst.”
Both men were a little downcast when Collingwood reiterated the difficulties inherent in carrier operations in the western area of the Gulf of Spain. His ships would be liable to attack from land-based aircraft based in Nuevo Granada to one side, and Cuba in his rear. Moreover, the navies of the Triple Alliance would hardly be likely to grant a Royal Navy carrier task force free passage into their waters!
War Plan Anson contemplated air strikes on enemy ships at sea and ports, blockade operations, commerce raiding and actively seeking battle with enemy warships. Attempts to conduct full scale war games to establish the practicality of the Royal Navy providing continuous, or in any way meaningful air support to land operations conducted more than a few miles from the sea had, to Cuthbert Collingwood’s chagrin, never been conducted.
The view in both London and Philadelphia was that such exercises would have been construed as provocations by the Spanish!
In any event, with the big carriers only now commissioning, the value of such evolutions employing smaller, or ‘make believe’ carriers would have been nominal.
That was not to say the Collingwood and his staff had not mounted small scale exercises, and extended ‘table wars’ in secret; but that was not the same thing as testing theory against reality at sea with actual ships and men. Moreover, Cuthbert Collingwood was in little doubt that the first time one of the new task forces – built around one of the Ulysses class fleet carriers - went into action, would come to be universally regarded as a seminal moment in naval history.
Sadly, he suspected that moment would not long be delayed.
Chapter 12
Sunday 9th April
St James’s Palace, Pall Mall, London
His Majesty George the Fifth, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His Other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith, had, as was his custom, risen early that morning and spent much of the last two hours mentally preparing himself for the conversation he was going to have with his cousin, twice removed, the forty-four year old heir presumptive – history taught Teutonic dynasties to never take the votes of the twenty-four Electors, the disorderly mob of kings and princes of the Empire for granted – to the Imperial Crown of the Germanies.
He glanced again at the big clock on the wall over the hearth.
In a few minutes the Prime Minister would be speaking to the Empire.
Later that afternoon, it would be his turn.
At this very moment his advisors were finalising the text of his own address, to be delivered from the studios of the Empire Broadcasting Corporation at Hampstead…
It seemed that Crown Prince Wilhelm’s father was ‘indisposed’ which, unfortunately, unlike the ‘indisposition’ of a supposedly key member of the establishment in London, the seat of a slowly maturing constitutional monarchy since the days of the Glorious Revolution of the latter seventeenth century, meant that there was an almost complete vacuum of power in Berlin, at the very moment that the crisis deepened and potentially, the great powers stumbled ever-closer to the edge of the abyss.
So, whereas, in an ideal World, if such a thing had ever existed, the King would be speaking directly to the grumpy old man he had regarded as an eccentric, bad-tempered uncle in his youth; instead, he was waiting to be put through to the Kaiser’s brilliant, intemperate, charming, meddlesome eldest surviving son. On the plus side the two men had had early careers in common, as the younger sons of families apparently well-stocked with spare male heirs, they had been allowed to pursue naval careers. Unfortunately, that was about all they had in common.
Whereas, George, over ten years the Crown Prince’s senior had enjoyed a long and fulfilling naval career, met and married the love of his life to whom he had been, and would be faithful unto death; Wilhelm had had his career abruptly curtailed in his late twenties, and – even if one was being exceptionally charitable about it – compensated for this disappointment, by setting out to bed every aristocratic, and numerous less well-bred women, in Europe, marrying and divorcing two royal princesses by the time he reached his mid-thirties. In Berlin they gossiped that the man had bastard sons and daughters in every principality of the German Empire!
And as for politics…
King George had treated with Whigs, Conservatives and ‘People’s Christian’ and whichever kind of ‘democrats’ – Liberal, Social, Popular, Syndicalist - his people had cared, as was their right, to place in power in the Palace of Westminster with equal, ineffable aplomb. True, he had offered advice, and what support he might at times of crisis but he had never, ever taken sides. In Germany, such a regal ‘hands-off’ approach was regarded as the signature of crippling weakness, contemptible, in fact.
The door opened and the Queen entered the room overlooking the ancient Friary Court. She smiled tight-lipped and took a seat beside the desk at which her husband sat, trying very hard not to fidget and scowl as the long wait for the phone to ring continued, seemingly indeterminably.
The royal couple had never liked Buckingham Palace, where, for short, painful periods of their marriage George had had to put up with the Old King, his not entirely dearly remember father, who, egged on by his dear and only vaguely lamented mother, had always treated Eleanor like a tradesman’s daughter.
Well, Bertie had put a stop to that nonsense when, unexpectedly, the crown had been placed upon his – at the time – somewhat befuddled head!
Prior to his accession, courtesy of the worst Fenian outrage in modern times some fifteen years ago, which had, at a stroke, murdered all five men – the his father, the King, his elder brother and three nephews – in the royal line above him, he, Eleanor and their brood of then little-known princes and princesses, had ‘camped out’ at St James’s Palace on their rare ‘duty calls’ to London. Until then, other than for royal weddings, funerals and occasionally, to make up the numbers at state banquets and bun fights to celebrate this or that visit by miscellaneous emperors or potentates, they had lived – blissfully – apart, ‘semi-detached’ as the press would have it, from most of the Royal Family, and had had as little as possible to do with ‘the Court’. George had pursued his naval career and in the decade before the assassination of the Old King, they had lived in sublime, relative anonymity in rural Hampshire, with the notable of exception of that happy interlude when Eleanor and the younger children had joined George in New England during HMS Lion’s first commission, attached to the Atlantic Fleet at Norfolk, Virginia.
Originally, Henry VIII had built St James’s Palace as a purposefully modest royal residence, by then, presumably, wearying of the splendour and the oppressive formality of his great palaces at Whitehall, Hampton Court, Richmond and elsewhere.
Eleanor maintained that ‘the old monster must have wanted a quiet love nest where he could have his wicked way with Ann Boleyn!’
Her husband speculated that his infamous predecessor’s motivations might have been a tad subtler, although as in most things, he was loath to gainsay his wife, whose judgement in so many things was infallible. For his part he was fond of telling visitors that the palace was built on the site of a leper hospital!
