The Divine Wind (New England Book 15), page 2
“The first of two convoys from the West Coast of New England carrying elements of 18BRE and its equipment are currently waiting at the Pearl Lagoon. Further to this, five Australian construction battalions are en route to the Sandwich Islands via New Caledonia, transported in two escorted groups. Altogether, some 33,500 combat engineering troops and civilian ancillaries will eventually be deployed to the Northern Marianas – Saipan and Guam as well as Tinian – to construct as many as seven major airfields, and to extend and develop deep-water sheltered combat anchorages for future fleet operations. If the OPERATION DURBAR timetable had gone according to plan,” CINCPAC allowed himself a half-smile at this juncture, they all knew no plan survived first contact with the enemy, “we would have already started breaking ground for those runways on Tinian. No matter, every day of delay equates, I am reliably informed, to another two or three Blenheim heavy bombers capable of carrying an eight-ton bombload to targets up to 2,200 miles away, and returning safely to base, rolling off the production lines in New England. Further to this, I have been authorised to inform you, the Senior Command Group of Task Force 81.9, that approximately 100 of the projected force of at least 300 Blenheims that will eventually be assigned to operate from the Marianas will be ready to fly out to us as soon as those runways are completed. However, first things first; you will all be aware of the problems we have had subduing Tinian; we must complete the job before we,” his tone altered, suggesting a mental shrug, “count our chickens.”
Nobody in the compartment believed that anything in the war with Empire of Japan was going to be easy, cut and dried, or without its price in blood.
CINCPAC cleared his throat, as if getting his second wind.
“The invasion of Guam will not now begin until substantial elements of the 2nd Australian-New Zealand – ANZAC – Division, four all-arms battlegroups of the 8th and the 12th Armoured Brigades, and both formations’ attached combat engineering battalions are in theatre, and its lead echelons fully acclimatised. You may also be aware that 45 Royal Marine Commando Assault Brigade has been acclimatising at Pikinni; it will be shipping to us here in the Marianas in the next few days. In total, this will mean we will start the invasion of Guam with a force of approximately 55,000 troops, of whom approximately half will be infantrymen. Moreover, unlike on Saipan or Tinian, future ground operations will be supported by significant armoured forces. One more thing: Lieutenant General Bernard Smith-Dorran will shortly assume command of all land forces committed to operations in the Marianas. Although he will report to me, and in extremis, I will reserve the prerogative to countermand any order he might give, in practice he will run the land war while I get on with keeping his forces supplied by sea and inflicting the sombre consequences of our seaborne superiority upon the enemy.”
He turned to another side of the equation.
Holland did not usually pay much attention to ordinary soldierly affairs; they were the Army’s problem, nothing to do with him. That said, he and everybody else in the briefing room had heard of, and knew an uncommon amount about Bernard Lawson Smith-Dorran, the youngest son of a landowning family in County Antrim, an Irishman of an ilk particular only to Presbyterian Ulster, whose members were liberally scattered across the senior ranks of the British Army. Like James Dundas in the Royal Navy, Smith-Dorran also had been released onto the Reserve List before his time, an awkward, unconventional man in a peacetime army who had spent his entire career putting down rebellions, fighting nasty little border wars and in between, training and instructing others, and writing several of the standard tactical manuals of the Indian and latterly, the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps. It was said the man was moody, wilful, prone to long bouts of introspection and outbursts of sudden raging, and ranting. He had lost his first wife to a fever in Bengal, married an older woman – ostensibly, it was said – to bring up his two daughters and a son – who had eventually followed him into the Army – sometime in the mid-1950s, and lived for nothing but his career ever since. All of which would be incidental if the man really was what even many of his detractors claimed him to be: a man in possession of the finest military mind in…Christendom.
CINCPAC cleared his throat: “As to what we are up against on Guam. The latest intelligence is that the enemy have over 40,000 regular troops of the 118th and 131st Infantry Divisions, several regiments of light and medium artillery, a naval ground force of some 12,000 marines and supernumeraries including over 3,000 IJN naval air personnel, and at least 30,000, perhaps as many as 50,000 auxiliary, so-called ‘home-defence’ militiamen. Unlike on Saipan, and to a degree on Tinian, where a proportion of the indigenous native people, and most of the Japs’ civilian settler and ‘camp follower’ population had been evacuated prior to the arrival of TF 81.9, it is thought that on Guam the majority of the pre-war population of some 120,000 persons, remain. Sadly, from our experience on Saipan and ongoing, on Tinian, it would be a mistake to consider any Jap as a non-combatant. Therefore, we must assume that the island will be defended by a combined force of well over a 100,000, and that every person, man, woman or child our forces encounter in or out of uniform should be regarded as a ‘hostile’, unless proven otherwise. As an addendum to this, although intelligence digests suggest that we have destroyed over two hundred enemy aircraft on the ground and in the air, the topography of Guam, and the jungle, forested nature of much of the terrain away from the coasts, means that the Japs may have a large number of serviceable aircraft in concealment, presumably waiting an opportune time to attack our invasion forces.”
Holland had heard that at least two of the first Royal Marine Commando battalions to go ashore on Saipan had suffered over fifty percent casualties – 8 to 11 percent killed or missing in action, 25 percent wounded, with 15 to 20 percent subsequently adjudged to be sick, exhausted or generally unfit for duty in the foreseeable future – and had had to be withdrawn to rear areas, troop ships at sea or sent back to Pikinni to recover and to assimilate replacements.
The Marianas were big volcanic rocks riddled with thousands of caves, mile upon square mile of jagged rocks sticking up out of impenetrable rain forests where a determined enemy could hold out virtually indefinitely. On both Saipan, supposedly conquered, and even more so on Tinian, lone suicide attacks and concerted assaults by groups of ‘hold-out’ defenders constantly appearing out of caves and holes in the ground in rear areas, continued to harass the invaders. The Marines, and on Tinian, where their Army – Ranger Assault battalions – comrades had had a brutal introduction to the war against the Japanese, were having to resort to collapsing or sealing underground boltholes with demolition charges, or ‘smoking’ out enemy soldiers hiding in deep tunnels with flamethrowers. It was a vicious, grisly business and understandably, it broke some men…
The butcher’s bill continued, remorselessly to lengthen.
The latest figures, inflating all the while by returns from areas where intense fighting was still going on, especially on Tinian were:
Royal Marines ashore and at sea: 1,911 killed or missing in action presumed killed; and 5,631 wounded.
British and Commonwealth Army: 688 killed or missing in action presumed killed; and 1,407 wounded.
Royal Navy/RNAS personnel at sea and ashore: 1,887 killed or missing in action presumed killed; and 903 wounded.
CAF personnel on attachment ashore and at sea: 33 killed or missing in action presumed killed; and 41 wounded.
That morning the lists had ticked past 12,500 killed, missing, or wounded in action, approximately ten percent of the manpower committed to the Marianas Campaign at sea and on land.
“Understandably, some of our people have been unnerved by suicide attacks, both on land and at sea,” Dundas continued. “Such nihilistic tactics as Banzai charges, wounded men deliberately lying on grenades and improvised explosive devices, or pilots deliberately setting out to crash their aircraft into ships or depots on shore, are alien to our way of thinking, and to our way of war. It may or may not be of comfort to our people, but I think it is important to reassure our people that such tactics are tantamount to an admission of defeat by an enemy who knows he has no other way to halt our progress towards his homeland.”
There was suddenly a ring of steel in his voice.
“We must expect such suicide tactics to become, possibly, the standard operating procedure of all Japanese armed forces the closer we come to the Home Islands. We must be ready for this. Further, we now know that the enemy calls their self-immolation tactic ‘Kamikaze’, which I believe, literally translates into English as ‘Divine Wind’.”
He allowed a few moments for this to sink in.
“This should be another, salutary lesson to us never to lower our guard again, or to underestimate in any way the resourcefulness and the entirely, undoubtedly courageous but wholly alien mindset of our enemies. In retrospect, we should have been forewarned of Kamikaze attacks; similar, isolated incidents have happened in several of our earlier battles with the Japanese but were always, complacently in my opinion, explained away as ‘dead man’s hands on the controls’ or the recklessness or incompetence of individual pilots. We now know better and must adapt our formations and our fire plans accordingly. It is difficult to fathom the workings of the Samurai-influenced thinking of the enemy; but,” said flatly with the slightest suggestion of a shrug of the shoulders, “if I were commanding men intent on committing suicide I might prioritise attacks on my enemy’s aircraft carriers, or perhaps the radar pickets giving warning of such imminent attacks. Obviously, I am not a Japanese admiral,” he half-smiled, baring his teeth, “if I were I would put a stop to this,” a short breath, “abomination. Thus far, all the evidence is that the Japanese High Command still seems to be big-gun orientated, even though you would have thought by now that they would have noticed that the aircraft carrier is the new arbiter of the oceanic battlefield.”
This drew a murmured of respectful amusement.
“So, to recap. Our objectives in the coming months are as follows. One, to complete the occupation of Tinian and to suppress remaining, isolated pockets of resistance on Saipan. Two, to facilitate the construction of at least one major air station on the northern plateau of Tinian with 8,500-foot-long east-west runways and taxiways, and two ‘scout’ fields, both on Saipan. Three, to blockade Guam to prevent its garrison from being re-supplied by air or by sea. Four, to maintain naval supremacy around the Northern Marianas, extending our ‘reach’ three hundred miles to the southwest, west, northwest and to the north. Five, to begin the process of softening up the defences of the landing beaches, and other shore targets on Guam, mindful of the need to conserve ammunition stocks ahead of the main invasion. Six, integrate new ships into the operations of Task Force 81.9. Within this schema, as many ships and personnel as possible will be rotated back to the Pearl Lagoon, notwithstanding, from now on the size of the fleet will gradually increase month on month. For your information only, at least seven additional Hamley carriers capable of operating up to 175 aircraft will join TF 81.9 during May.”
The ambitious virtually no-cost-spared naval building programs launched during the Mexican War and subsequently, massively expanded in the months after the Battle of the Sandwich Islands in December 1978, were now sending ships of all sizes and classes down the slipways at an ever-accelerating pace. Battleships belonged to the past, and bigger, better sisters for the giant Ulysses-class carriers like the Pegasus took years to build; not so the dozens, scores of merchant and cruiser conversions – Hamleys even though they were no toys – and the growing fleet of 15,000 to 23,000 ton ‘light’ and ‘medium’ fleet carriers, the first of which were ordered as long ago as early 1979, which had begun coming into commission in the last year as yards in the First Thirteen in the colonies of Virginia, New York and Baltimore, in Nova Scotia, in the British Isles at Wallsend, on the Clyde at Greenock, and the Rosyth on the Firth of Forth, Bombay and Madras in India, and Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, had them sliding down the slipways with ever-increasing frequency. If the big gun battleship’s day had passed, the heavy cruiser-building program had also been cut back, although as many as eight more modified Minotaur-class sisters of Holland’s own command, the Orion, were under construction around the Empire, as were over forty light ‘gun boat’ cruisers, hundreds of destroyers and smaller convoy escorts. The original 1973-4 Naval Estimates order for six Polyphemus-class guided missile cruisers had now become a program to commission another fourteen of the devilishly sophisticated, deadly ships in the present year, twelve in 1982 and ten in 1983, to join the thirteen which had already been commissioned into the Fleet. If all that sounded formidable; there had been no stinting of the sinews of non-military maritime traffic; yards not equipped to build modern warships were churning out merchant hulls at a rate of one, or two ten- to twenty-thousand-ton ships a day across the Empire, general cargo ships, new-style ‘container’ carriers, tankers of tonnages from thirty to a hundred thousand deadweight tons, and whole classes of special ‘fast’ transports capable of carrying fighting men and their war supplies at sustained speeds of over twenty knots to any port, or invasion beach, anywhere in the world.
What he had heard about the scope and scale of the Empire-wide naval construction program frankly boggled Bertram Holland’s imagination, truth be told. Granted, it was unlikely that he was the only man in the Royal Navy worrying about how on earth they were going to man all those ships in a year or so from now.
CINCPAC was winding up his talk to his key commanders.
“In the light of the enemy’s possible adoption of massed Kamikaze-type attacks against TF 81.9,” CINCPAC concluded, “I will be issuing revised Fleet Fighting Instructions in the next twenty-four hours. Operational requirements allowing, we will begin exercises to familiarise our officers and men with those altered FFIs during the next week. That will be all. With the exception of Commodore Holland and Captain Taylor, I will now pass you over to your designated briefing officers.”
Chapter 2
Monday 27th April 1981
RMS Queen Eleanor
Southampton Docks
England
There was to be a ceremonial official welcome – ‘bells and whistles and all that,’ he had apologised over dinner on their last night at sea – for the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England’s party, with bands playing and no little ‘speechifying’ by the Colonial Secretary and the Mayor of the great port city. Thereafter, they would all be driven to a nearby airfield – at a place called Eastleigh, where apparently the latest version of the Goshawk V scout was being tested – and flown to RAF Great Massingham in Norfolk, to be ‘put up’ at a nearby ‘Royal Retreat’ called Sandringham Hall, for much of the coming week while they ‘prepared’ for the events planned for next weekend.
This, at least, was what Kate had gleaned.
Although she could not claim to be unfamiliar with being the centre of attention; she and Abe had had their fair share of that, there were moments – many of them – when she longed for the quiet sanity of her little chalet-house at Contra Costa, which she suspected she would never see again, and missed the sounds, scents and tranquility of the valley. As to her little ones, Tom and Neta were in seventh heaven in the First-Class creche, making new friends, and surrounded by adoring, ultra-attentive nurses and nannies leaving the adults free to socialise, and to be submitted to the less than onerous schedule of interviews and ‘chats’ with the travelling press and television crews, one from the Empire Broadcasting Service, another from Votre Monde – Your World – an arm of the Paris-based movie, TV and newspaper conglomerate owned by Sir Pelham ‘Plum’ Stanton, and the newly-established Independent Television Company. The latter shared the EBC’s public broadcasting remit in New England, financing its five channels by accepting sponsorship, monthly subscriptions and by what were, by all accounts, positively booming advertising revenues accompanying its coverage of the Pacific War.
Kate hardly watched television and had ignored notices to sign up for ‘SIX MONTHS FREE TV’ to the local ITV West Coast Station. Bill had later confirmed that she would have needed a ‘special’ receiver to watch the ITV programs, while the EBC was ‘free to air’ providing one’s aerial could pick up its broadcasts, often a problematic thing in the deep valleys of ‘frontier land’ colonial Alta California.
Either Alex Fielding, more often Bill, and occasionally Harry Keppel, the Governor’s aide-de-camp, were always with Kate when she was in front of the cameras, or recording an interview for a radio transmission. Albert Stanton had been – as one would expect – a tower of strength and source of sound advice to both Kate, and to Bill, to whom all this media attention was even newer, and somewhat intimidating.
Uncomfortable in the limelight, Bill only relaxed when Kate was also in the picture, not least because on those occasions she became very much the centre of attraction. Which, of course, she had always been to him for as long as he could remember but that was another story, one he had always tried so hard to keep from his younger half-sibling and the beautiful Mohawk girl in whose thrall he had been…forever.
Bill, sometimes in a wondrous daze, had been Kate’s constant companion – sleeping arrangements apart, as was wholly appropriate – during the late Spring season passage across a chilly, thankfully comparatively benign North Atlantic.
It had been a truly blessed interlude for reflection.
“I know that this is very hard for you,” Kate had confided to him, leaning close, almost whispering, intimately on the fourth day at sea.
“I feel that this, being with you, is,” Bill had shrugged, helplessly, “too soon, as if Abe is still with us. I know that must sound stupid, I know…”
They had been lonely on the windswept promenade deck in the darkness as the great ship swept towards southern Ireland and the approaches to the English Channel, nearing voyage’s end.
