New England 05 - George Washington's Ghost, page 15
The young pilot swallowed hard, and tried to retain his composure.
“That depends, Corporal. I’m not about to give you chaps a pep talk. The mere fact that most of you are here means that you didn’t just roll over and surrender as soon as the first Mexican rifleman walked towards you.” He glanced to Bill Fielding for moral support. “Flight Sergeant Fielding and I were the last chaps out. Bill managed to get our kite fixed while the Spanish were shelling our old field at Big Springs. It strikes me that we’re all in pretty much the same boat. We keep waiting for the top brass to organise a defensive line but it hasn’t happened yet. Well, I’m fed up with taking a beating and watching our chaps running away.”
Practically everybody was looking at the tall man in the corporal’s uniform.
Greg Torrance pointed at the map on the wall.
“This is as good a place as any in this sector. If our side hangs on to this bit of the northern Texas Territory then the Spanish will leave a massive open left flank if they carry on driving towards the Mississippi…”
The tall man was standing very nearly in front of the much younger aviator.
“The Spaniards will have to get across the Red River if they plan to invade the Louisiana Country between there and the Big Muddy, son,” the other man observed, merely stating the obvious and clearly at pains not to pick a fight with, or in any way do down the CAF man. “In the meantime, we’ve only got a hundred or so effectives here, and down at Trinity Crossing.”
This rather took the wind out of the sails of the younger man.
The one hundred-and-eighty miles of desert and prairie west of the Red River – to all intents, as formidable a barrier as the great Mississippi itself – was an entirely different proposition to the forests, swamps and bayous blocking the one hundred-and-seventy tortuous miles beyond the Red River to the Mississippi, and much of the ground to the south was impassable to wheeled, or even tracked vehicles.
Talk of Santa Anna driving all the way to New Orleans was, perhaps, a little premature; a litmus test of the panic in the air.
“At the moment, yes,” Greg Torrance agreed, nodding. “I would just remind you that there were only three hundred Spartans at that pass at Thermopylae, they held back a hundred thousand Persians. And besides, they didn’t even have an airfield.”
The Corporal sighed.
He glanced over his shoulder to the men cramming the room and to his companions, whom Torrance could now identify as a Hispanic-looking man in his fifties, a younger man who could have been his son, and a blue-eyed young woman – booted and dressed in riding gear like the others – and then back to Greg Torrance.
“We’ve got families hereabouts,” he explained. “Most of us have got Mexican kith and kin, and proud of it. We hear what those boys back East say about the Mexicans; but take it from me, they know squat. A lot of people in these parts don’t believe they’d be any worse off living under Il Presidente de Soto, they say old Hernando ain’t so bad…” He shrugged. “I met General Santa Anna a couple of times back in the day. He’s a man like you and I, son. He’s got a wife and kids, and he wants the best for them. Just like I do for my family. A hundred years ago this country was a part of the Empire of New Spain, all of us around here grow up speaking Spanish.”
The younger man felt his face burning.
For all that there was a strange absence of malice in the other man’s voice, almost sympathy, in fact, the scout pilot began to bristle with anger.
Bill Fielding watched, figuring that the older man was trying to rile Greg Torrance; not really questioning his military but his moral authority to claim leadership. He was mightily relieved when his friend refused to rise to the bait.
“You may be right,” Greg Torrance shrugged. “I’ve never lived under a Catholic theocracy. What’s your name, friend?”
The Corporal straightened.
He was six feet tall if he was an inch, his shoulders stooped unless he was making an effort to stand with his head held high. Stepping forward, he had the gait of a man who has spent his life on horseback, a stiff erectness of posture that oddly defined him in this rag-tag collection of fleeing CAF personnel and local militiamen.
“Washington,” the older man said gruffly. “George Nathaniel. I was Mayor of this County a few years back. I have a ranch up river. I was Colonel of the North Texas Brigade in the last war; I thought I was done with soldiering after that.”
Greg Torrance frowned.
“Aren’t you in the wrong uniform, sir?”
“I resigned my commission in sixty-seven,” George Nathaniel Washington cast his eyes down onto his battledress. “This was the only tunic in the4 stores in town that fitted me.”
George Washington…
Bill Fielding stared at the man.
That name had caused him and his family untold grief.
“Well, Colonel,” Greg Torrance sighed. “I was about to try to talk everybody into extending the runway, digging slit trenches and defending this field as something of a forward reconnaissance, patrol and sally point,” he explained, feeling a little foolish. “But that was when I was still under the mistaken impression that I was the senior officer present. Patently, that is not case.”
Torrance and beside him, Bill Fielding came to attention and saluted the other man.
Around the room, unbidden, almost in groaning existential relief that at last somebody had stepped forward, others began to do likewise.
George Washington stood like an island in the stream, oddly apart and for a moment, an onlooker might have suspected he was seriously contemplating refusing the command which was being thrust upon his shoulders.
In saying that he had ‘resigned’ his commission he had stretched the truth somewhat. In fact, he had requested to be assigned to the Reserve on the grounds that he could not afford to devote more than a month a year to military duties; after all, he had a family that depended on him and a ranch to run. Similarly, when he said he had been Mayor of Trinity Crossing a ‘few years back’, actually he had been Lieutenant Sheriff of the District of Northern Texas until a little less than a year ago, to all intents, the King’s representative for most of the several thousands of square miles of the Unincorporated Territory between the Trinity and the Red Rivers.
In both war and peace, duty and service had always weighed heavily on his now stooped shoulders.
George Washington had no fond memories of war, or of leading men in combat. He had been happy, content, in his element ranching the country of his youth before his head had been turned by the bright lights of the East, first at William Penn College in Philadelphia, then as a ‘Sword Student’ in England at Sandhurst, through baptisms of fire in India and Egypt, where his regiment had guarded the army of men digging that great ditch across the desert to link the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, before returning a decade later to the land of his birth where brutal attrition and defeat had elevated him from brevet battalion command to acting Brigadier, 1st Texas Mechanised Infantry in the last Border War. Afterwards, they had made him substantive Colonel, stuck a Military Cross on his chest and offered him a garrison post down on the Border.
Nobody had tried to stop him returning home, by then his twenty-two-year contract with the British Army was at an end, and he had earned the right to give his young family an idyllic home overlooking the valley of the west fork of the Trinity River. It had seemed like a good place to bring up his boys and he and his wife, Mary Dandridge, the Punjab-born daughter of an Indian Army officer, had been happy enough, even when the droughts of the last few years bit hard.
He had known that this new war had been coming a long time; only the fools in Philadelphia had not noticed the writing on the wall, turned a blind eye to the emissaries of the Mexican Republic who had travelled these lands with impunity, salting the battlefield and seducing the unwary and the Catholic-minded to defect, or leastways, to stand aside when the armies of New Spain came north to reclaim what, to a man, its fighting men believed was their birth right.
There had been many times over the years when he had asked himself if he ought to try to do something about the malaise but he had fallen out of contact with old friends from his Army days; and wanted only to build a new, second life in this country; God’s own land.
George Washington met the eye of the dapper, dark-eyed man beside the young pilot. Unlike Torrance, who seemed relieved to be able to pass on the burden of command; Sergeant Fielding was giving him a very odd look.
As if he had seen a ghost…
The older man returned the salutes.
Oh, well!
What will be; will be.
He looked around the room, made eye contacts with two men who had until then, been anonymous in the crowd.
“William, Israel,” he said, in that moment taking command. “Take a couple of men with you down to Trinity Crossing. Requisition that bulldozer they’ve been using to lay out the new town square and any tractors you can lay your hands on. While you’re at it, shake out anybody who hasn’t reported for militia duty as yet, and summon the townsfolk to a public meeting in the Chapel for six o’clock this evening. I will address the County at that hour. Any questions?”
There were no questions.
George Washington turned to Greg Torrance.
“You will command all pilots and air crew. Please report to me later this day how many aircraft are airworthy. You spoke of building a radio?” This was posed rhetorically. “Good. We’ll need more than one. Once you have got us back in contact with headquarters, send technicians to the local farmsteads and haciendas; most of the estates and ranches have their own radio sets. Borrow them if possible, otherwise, requisition them.”
“Yes, sir,” the two CAF men chorused.
“That is all. Please carry on.”
Chapter 16
Monday 1st May
Portsmouth Admiralty Dockyards, Norfolk, Virginia
Commander Alexander Lincoln Fielding, sporting the ribbon of his newly acquired Navy Cross on the left breast of his uniform jacket beneath his wings, wandered with the other officers from the Perseus, back down the length of the huge, drained graving dock. No 4 Dock was one of three at Portsmouth which had been extended by some one hundred and fifty feet to accommodate the Navy’s big carriers. The dimensions of the dock and the ship in it boggled the human imagination. Leastways, it boggled Alex Fielding’s credulity, and as anybody who had ever met him could attest, he was not a man easily impressed!
The great, looming hulk of the wounded, thousand-feet-long, forty-four thousand ton – that was just empty! – HMS Ulysses blotted out the sky above his head as it rested on a thousand, precisely placed wooden blocks positioned so as to evenly spread the weight of the leviathan. Everything about the mighty, beached whale of a ship was stupendous, from her keel to the top of her island bridge she was higher than most skyscrapers, her four enormous three-bladed screws could drive her through the water at over thirty-three knots – that was thirty-seven-and-a-half miles-an-hour on land – and she needed a crew of over three thousand men to steam, fight and to launch and recover her design complement of eighty-two fighting aircraft.
Two things had saved the leviathan when that torpedo had ruptured and ignited – by one of those cruel twists of fate that war manifests struck her Achilles heel – the aft high octane fuel main and sparking a fire, initially on the rearward hangar deck which, fanned by the movement of the ship, had roared unstoppably up onto the flight deck where the last of the carrier’s Sea Eagles, fuelled and bombed up had been neatly lined up for take-off.
Much of what followed had already been intensely analysed; inevitably, and fundamental questions had been asked about the design of the Royal Navy’s huge new fleet carriers.
What had been learned – nothing quite so accelerated ‘learning’ as actual battle experience – was both troubling and oddly, reassuring.
It had been a pure fluke that the torpedo had hit where it had and caused a theoretically improbable rupture in a heavily armoured high-octane conduit. However, despite this the Ulysses had survived.
Lessons…
Firstly, the fire had broken out, and the seat of that fire had remained, contained within the armoured box of her hangar deck, which ran over two-thirds of the length of the vessel, and despite the main fire main also having been cracked by the torpedo hit which was the cause of all the problems in the first place, the hangar deck’s integral fire suppression system had, on its first test in earnest, almost certainly saved the day.
Secondly, although the fire had spread – via the after aircraft elevator - to the flight deck where several aircraft, their fuel and bomb loads had been consumed in the blaze; fortunately, the majority of the Ulysses’s aircraft had already taken off, and the deck crew had managed to push five of the ten aircraft still on deck over the side before the fire engulfed them and their munitions had started ‘cooking off’.
Several bombs – including three five-hundred pounders - had exploded on the flight deck and the fires, up top, had raged for well over an hour-and-a-half most of the damage had turned out to be relatively superficial. The design concept of making the flight deck an integral ‘strength deck’ had been wholly vindicated. Likewise, the associated concept of building the hangar deck as, in effect, a giant armoured box, had ensured structural integrity was never threatened and that once the wreckage of the four planes undergoing servicing near the seat of the fire had been cleared away, and the stern elevator repaired – probably the most challenging element of the repair program – the ship would swiftly be back in business.
As to the flight deck, the dockyard was already peeling and cutting away the distorted, splintered plating directly above the still intact armoured roof - up to three inches thick - of the hangar deck, preparatory to ‘resurfacing’ the rear four hundred and forty-seven feet of decking.
Obviously, nothing was as simple in practice as it was in theory; the landing systems had been destroyed, as had the hydraulic mechanisms tensioning the ‘traps’, the steel hawsers, wires that ‘caught’ a plane when it landed, and light anti-aircraft weaponry and other equipment had been wrecked but essentially, the ship was sound and it was confidently predicted, that in between six and eight weeks she would be ready to re-join the Fleet.
As yet, the dockyard had done nothing about the fifteen feet wide by seventeen feet high hole caused by the explosion of the submarine-launched single torpedo – one of at least four launched at the carrier, apparently – which had struck the ship’s port side approximately sixteen feet below the waterline between frame fifty-six and fifty-seven, some two hundred-and-thirty-five feet forward of the stern.
The ship’s plates were twisted inward as if Ulysses had been hit by a giant sledgehammer.
The fish had exploded on contact with the outer plating and its warhead, its effect multiplied by hydrostatic forces, had punched through the carrier’s double hull like a fist through paper. The Navy’s boffins had studied the hole and determined that it had been caused by the detonation of approximately seven hundred-and-fifty pounds of, probably, ‘enhanced high-explosive’.
‘Bloody hell,’ Alex Fielding thought to himself, ‘no wonder the powers that be decided they wanted to ban submarines back in the mid-1960s!’ And, ‘no wonder the top brass is absolutely livid that two of their biggest ships – the battlecruiser Indomitable, and now the Ulysses - had, thus far, been so badly damaged by internationally outlawed weapons.’
Worse, the very existence of the Spanish submarines had forced the Fleet to fight at long-range and compelled a hurried, somewhat ad hoc re-writing of the rulebook of naval warfare.
It was hardly any surprise that people in New England, and presumably, back in the Old Country, were presently asking themselves what the Navy was doing?
The answer, of course, was that the Navy was licking its wounds prior to getting stuck in again with a vengeance. However, with the sinking of the Indomitable in Mobile Bay, the crippling of the Ulysses and the loss of so many of her aircraft – although most of her birds had landed on the Perseus there had been no room for all those kites on her flight deck so they had had to go over the side – and the threat of the submarine menace ever-present, there was an awful lot of head-scratching going on at Norfolk trying to work out how exactly, the Royal Navy was going to reassert its supremacy over the waters of the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean when clearly, not even Atlantic waters were safe!
Alex had been staring into the dark depths of the great gash in the carrier’s flank for some moments, unaware of anything going on around him.
“It’s Fielding, isn’t it?”
For once in his life Alex had been, quite literally, lost in his thoughts.
He had steered clear of the gaggle of senior officers down at the other end of the dry dock when he had descended into its depths. He was killing time before he boarded his flight to Bronxwood Aerodrome that afternoon; by tonight he hoped to be holding his nineteen-day-old son, Alex junior, in his arms for the first time.
Leonora’s parents said the baby had his nose. He could not see it himself, or at least, not in the photograph Leonora had sent him of his then, day-old first born. Every baby he had ever laid eyes on looked exactly the same to him but he knew it would be different once he got to hold the little sprog in his own arms.
He would never have visited the dockyard had he not been in such a state of high anxiety about his forthcoming, seventy-two hour-long furlough on Long Island. Which was crazy, not like him at all. Leonora had obviously spun some web of bewitchment about him. That said, now that he was down here, he was fascinated, especially looking into that dark chasm in the great ship’s flank.
The new carriers were of all-welded construction; a technique that saved weight – on a ship the size of the Ulysses, up to five or six thousand tons – and, Alex had been assured more than once, made any ship, especially a really big one, a significantly tougher ‘nut to crack’. Apparently, rivetted ships of yore had ‘worked’, much as old-time wooden sailing ships had; and absorbed a little of the motion of the seas. Modern ships were ‘stiff’, unbending and more easily repaired. Farther aft the sparks of several oxy-acetylene torches showered down the side of the carrier.
