Warsaw Concerto, page 21
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
There were days when René Leguay felt like he was in command of a floating…circus. Or bordello. And sometimes, the situation defied description.
Not that the ‘crewing calculus’ was overly taxing. Simply stated, if he wanted men to steam and fight the ship he, like all the other captains in his motley fleet had to give his men something in return and all he had to offer was safe haven – for them and their people – food and a bare modicum of medical care; it was not as if there was any money worth the paper or coin available, and notions of patriotism and duty had gone out of the porthole four years ago. On the plus side, with so many women on board at least the ship was relatively clean, the laundry got washed, food was efficiently prepared, and as time went by some a small but significant number of the fairer sex resident on his ship were starting to learn a modicum of genuinely useful ‘naval’ skills as part of the vessel’s deck division. Moreover, if the worst came to the worse, a woman or a child – certainly a teenager – could load and train an anti-aircraft cannon as well as any man.
Needless to say, there were other boons to have so many women aboard. Personally, he had resisted the temptation to take a mistress although these days so many of his officers already had mistresses, or favourites, that it was hard to cling to the notion that the Captain ought to set an example. That he still thought such personal reticence, or attention to old-fashioned proprieties, probably only showed what an out of touch, unreconstructed throw-back he was!
Nonetheless, he had a – positively devoted and motherly - female steward who pretty much catered to his every ‘officerly’ needs; and a couple of months ago he had finally allowed his second-in-command to roster a slim, fetching brunette to act as Captain’s Secretary. That had been while he was absent ashore haggling with the Dockyard Workers’ Committee to release the spares and ordnance that he needed to get the Jean Bart half-way operational.
His secretary’s name was Aurélie Faure, she was in her late twenties, spoke English and Spanish, and had been an infant school teacher before the war.
Leguay was cognisant that Mademoiselle Faure had, like many of the women on board the battleship, had to prostitute herself to get on board the Jean Bart; apparently escaping that sorry existence only when Leguay had taken command of the Fleet and literally thrown the most notorious pimps – the ones who coerced their women with violence - over the side, just to encourage the others to desist from their evil ways.
Thereafter, for much of the last year Aurélie had worked translating intercepted plain language British and other radio transmissions, and drafting digests for the crew of the main points of interest overheard in foreign language news broadcasts. Now, she was also the Fleet Commander’s secretary which had finally stopped her, as a single woman, constantly having to fight off the attentions of all and sundry.
The woman had followed Leguay out onto the bridge wing, silently observing the work of the deck crews fore and aft. She was dressed in over-sized seaman’s fatigues, with heavily-worn plimsolls on her feet. Her hair was shorn short, like a boy’s.
Leguay looked to her, a wistful smile playing on his lips.
“They look so fine from a distance,” he remarked ruefully.
The woman followed his gaze as he turned to survey the other ships in the anchorage.
“They will be again, Mon Amiral,” she said quietly. “We all trust you to make it so.”
The man was tempted to put her right about that.
But he said nothing.
If she, and the others chose to believe that he was some kind of magician then what harm was there in that?
For his part, he could only do what he could do!
The great battleship beneath his feet was certainly in better mechanical condition after her time in dry dock but as a fighting warship, she was still nothing short of a disaster area.
For example, only one – the forward of her two huge quadruple 380-millimetre main battery turrets was operable, and crewed by less than half its proper complement - but that was not actually very important because there were propellant charges sufficient to ‘shoot’ just twenty of the fifty-seven rounds, a mixture of high explosive and practice shells, neatly stored in No. 1 Turret’s magazines. Those magazines were designed to hold up to seven hundred and twenty, one-ton projectiles – ninety per barrel – and nearly two hundred tons of cordite propellant.
Add to this the fact that the battleship’s engineering officer had warned Leguay that if he ever asked for more than half-ahead on any of the screws it would quote: ‘probably tear the guts out of the turbines’, the Jean Bart was not about to cleave through any sea at much in excess of fifteen to twenty kilometres per hour in the foreseeable future. This was hardly surprising because by the night of the October War, the flagship had already been a neglected, rotting old training ship tied to a pier in Toulon Naval Base, deemed too expensive to operate and considered surplus to the requirements of the modern French Navy.
The disintegrating High Command had had her towed to Villefranche a month or so after the October War in a failed attempt to keep her out of the hands of the Workers’ Committees then fighting for control in the city, and there she had remained, her pumps working full time to keep her trimmed and afloat. Until, that was, Leguay had made the case, with no little difficulty, that at a bare minimum the ship was worth sufficiently rejuvenating for her to become a ‘useful mobile heavy artillery battery’ for ‘coastal defence purposes’.
The jury was out on how ‘useful’ the old hulk would be even in that much reduced capacity if Leguay could not recover more of the long mothballed, 380-millimetre rounds from the ruins of the Toulon Naval Arsenal, or from the hold of the sunken motor ship Argonne which, for reasons beyond Leguay’s understanding, had loaded over two hundred of the irreplaceable, no-longer manufactured – even in 1962 – projectiles for transfer to Brest in the weeks before the war.
The Jean Bart had not actually fired any of her main battery guns since July 1957 – over nine years ago, shortly after which she had been placed in reserve and begun to host the Toulon base’s gunnery schools. In the years leading up to the Cuban Missiles War there had been desultory discussions about upgrading her anti-aircraft batteries, her electronics, or of possibly employing her as a guided missile test ship – this latter would have involved modifying her in ways similar to those of the re-configured USS Mississippi, a battleship of an earlier vintage but of comparable bulk - none of which had borne fruit.
On the plus side; the thing about battleships was that they could not help but look…incredible. Leguay knew, he knew it like he knew nothing else, that the men on the ships of the ghost fleet of Villefranche would have watched the huge dinosaur slowly rounding the Cap de Nice – under her own power for the first time since the 1950s – and manoeuvring with stately, majestic grace among them before anchoring, and suddenly felt, for a few minutes at least, as if they were all three or four metres tall!
The other big plus had been successfully persuading the port authorities at Toulon to pump nearly two-and-a-half thousand tons of scarce oil into the Jean Bart’s huge midships bunkers.
‘I have to have enough fuel to run trials and besides, the ship is unstable in a light condition without her magazines topped off.’
Astonishingly, somebody with the clout to release the oil from the closely guarded tanker farm, had swallowed his battleship man’s old maid’s tale hook, line and sinker.
Or perhaps, somebody had simply wanted to stop the fiercely hoarded black gold in the tanker farm from being requisitioned by those jackals in the Auvergne?
Three hundred metres away the crew of the derelict aircraft carrier Clemenceau had briefly lined the port-side of her empty flight deck to greet the return of the Jean Bart. There were still seven meticulously de-activated Dassault Étendard IV jet fighters and five Breguet Br.1050 Alizé turboprop anti-submarine warfare aircraft battened down in the armoured hangar of the twenty-five-thousand-ton carrier: just cargo at present for want of technicians to maintain them and pilots to fly them…but Leguay lived in hope. If a man lost his hope what else was there for him in this life?
Clemenceau’s sister ship, the Foch had been fitting out at the Chantiers de l'Atlantique yard at St Nazaire in October 1962: they said her fire-scorched carcass lay half-capsized in a graving dock to this day. Not that René Leguay tended to believe anything he had not witnessed with his own eyes, these days.
Nobody knew what had happened to the Navy’s third carrier, the Arromanches – formerly the British HMS Colossus – which like so many ships had just gone missing in the war or in the confusion of the following days. One heard so many rumours, each as odd and unlikely as any other.
If tall stories were to be believed a whole squadron of Dutch ships, including the light carrier the Kurt Doorman had been wiped out by Indonesian insurgents on or about the 1st or the 2nd of November 1962. Having taken shelter in a supposedly ‘safe’ anchorage – where in God’s name was any place safe in this bloody World? – Communist forces had attacked the anchored Dutch ships with torpedoes and what sounded suspiciously like anti-ship missiles of some kind, sunk the carrier, a cruiser and two destroyers, killing about seven hundred Dutchmen and pretty much left the British and the Australians to carry on holding the line in the Java Sea.
Leguay had no idea if that was just another tall tale or simply the sort of bad, unpredictable, inexplicable thing which often happened in a war. In war dreadful things happened all the time and that was why the longer he kept his scrapyard fleet ‘in being’ the better for all concerned.
Deeper into the bay the old cruiser Jeanne D’Arc lay alongside the fleet oiler La Seine. If the tanker had not turned up in the Bay of Lions a fortnight after the October War still filled to her load lines with nearly eleven thousand tons of bunker oil on board, there would have been no ghost fleet by now. Nowadays, the tanker was high in the water and Leguay’s over-riding preoccupation was how on earth he was ever going to get her filled up again.
The sooner he could get La Seine alongside and refill a couple of her bunkers the better; his ships were ‘thirsty’, a little of the precious ‘black stuff’ would go a long way, and help to keep spirits up. Of course, even if he emptied the Jean Bart of every last drop of fuel, it was only a stop gap measure.
That was a thing he would worry about another day; he still could not believe he had persuaded the dockyard to top off several of the Jean Bart’s two biggest bunkers, supposedly to allow her to conduct sea trials. A couple of thousand tons should be sufficient to keep the ships of the ghost fleet afloat another couple of months, perhaps three, if his captains were frugal.
Yes, it paid to be grateful for small mercies.
Another cruiser, the De Grasse was moored near the mouth of the Bay. Laid down before the German Occupation of 1940 she had sat on the stocks at Lorient for over a decade before she was towed to Brest to be completed, to a much-modified design in the mid-1950s. She was a nine-thousand-ton vessel bristling with dual-purpose 127-millimetre guns, drably threatening at a distance but up close, a hulk manned by little more than a ‘pumping out’ crew. Leguay had requested a tug to haul her to Toulon for a general machinery overhaul. Hopefully, in a few months’ time she might be able to steam again and then, they would find out if she was worth further dockyard time. It was no way to run a navy but these days one did what one could and was happy.
Of more immediate utility were the half-a-dozen destroyers and frigates moored raggedly stem to stern along the eastern shore of the bay.
The La Bourdannais and the La Galissoniene were three-thousand-ton relatively modern, although still all-gun, T-53 type air detection destroyers which had been well-equipped and fleet-footed radar pickets when they were last in full fighting fettle.
The Surcouf and the Kersaint were T-47 type, big anti-aircraft destroyers built in the 1950s. At the landward end of the line the fast frigates Le Lorrain and Le Savoyard were thirteen-hundred-ton escorts, again built in the decade before the 1962 war.
It was maddening, if only he could get his little ghost fleet half-way combat ready his country, well the Front Internationale, would possess a ready-made carrier battle group capable of making any enemy think twice about threatening its Mediterranean coast…
That was a pipe dream, of course.
It was never going to happen.
Still, if he could just persuade those idle loafers in Toulon to let him do something with those three submarines that they routinely hid away, submerged in the harbour, during daylight hours there was no telling what might be achieved…
The Arethuse and the Dauphin were relatively quiet, spritely post-Second War builds in good mechanical order, even the old Roland Morillat, formerly the U-2518 – most allied 1950s submarines were only improved versions of the Kriegsmarine’s advanced late Second War boats – was capable of wreaking havoc if the British threatened to resurrect their blockade of the Bay of Lyons or trespassed again into the Ligurian Sea.
Always assuming the men in charge in Toulon had the balls to actually send those submarines to sea again!
This being a thing he doubted…
René Leguay shook his head and walked back onto the compass bridge, unconsciously gesturing for Aurélie Faure to proceed ahead of him. The World had gone mad but as the English said: ‘Manners maketh man.’
“Ring down finished with main engines!” He called over his shoulder.
He waited for this to be acknowledged and for the old-fashioned engine room telegraphs to ring inside the wheelhouse.
“Engage harbour generators.”
Dreaming was going to achieve precisely nothing.
It was going to take the Chief Engineer several days to repair the damage the gentle cruise along the coast from Toulon had wrought on the great ship’s boilers, shaft bearings and temperamental reduction gear. The quicker he got started the better; in the meantime, the newly installed diesel generators could carry the load and keep the battleship’s essential equipment, among them the gun room refrigeration system which stopped the cordite propellant charges stored in the ship’s bowels overheating and spontaneously detonating, running.
If only I had the men and the equipment priority, this fleet needs to get back to sea, Leguay silently bemoaned.
If only…
Many in Toulon had advised him not to communicate a much-truncated list of ‘urgent requirements’ to Clermont-Ferrand. The fools simply did not understand the politics of his situation. It was not as if he was keen to take on the British or the Americans, or anybody really; however, if and when he was ordered to do something by his FI masters – which was bound to happen one day because those people were imbeciles - turning around and saying ‘that is not possible’ was not going to cut it.
At the risk of reminding the people in the Massif Central of the existence of the ghost fleet, he had to be seen to be doing something.
So, that was what he had belatedly set about doing.
Six weeks ago, he had placed his somewhat fancifully phrased ‘Report on the Combat Readiness of the Villefranche Squadron’ in the hands of the headquarters Staff in Toulon and copied it to the Politburo in Clermont-Ferrand.
Now the waiting was beginning to prey on his mind.
Chapter 19
Sunday 11th December 1964
Kharitonov Palace, Sverdlovsk
In the years before the First World War the Kharitonov Palace, standing on Annunciation Hill, had been one of the forgotten glories of Tsarist Yekaterinburg, a jewel of the Urals. However, built in the shadow of the Annunciation Church in the latter eighteenth century amidst gardens landscaped in the then – ironically - fashionable ‘English style’, the estate had fallen into no little disrepair long before 1917, and had not been repaired until the 1930s.
At the time of the Cuban Missiles War the complex had been one of some three thousand ‘Pioneer Palaces’ spread around the USSR. Such institutions were, in some ways, beacons of light if not enlightenment in the Soviet education system. Intended for youngsters of Secondary School age, the so-called Young Pioneer Palaces cultivated mantras like ‘now you have been taught, teach your comrades’. They were institutions slightly outside the educational mainstream, attendance was not mandatory and curriculums, such as they were, tended to be built around self-motivated hobby or interest groups, actively encouraging the development of an individual’s creative abilities, albeit within the relative straight-jacket of Party dogma. Increasingly, it had been from within the ‘Pioneer’ system that young people were ‘talent spotted’, and subsequently, fast-tracked into the lower echelons of the state apparatus, a key element of the Motherland’s drive to modernise.
Notwithstanding, most children in the pre-October War Soviet Union were still schooled by rote, their young minds treated like cartridge cases into which knowledge was packed and sometimes, hammered.
In its role as a Pioneer Palace the old Tsarist hangover had been a drab, cold place other than in the height of summer. In the last two years it had become the Sverdlovsk Kremlin, the over-ground Office of the First Chairman of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, forty-eight-year-old Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin.
Outside, the first snows of winter lay deep on the ground.
These days the cold burrowed into Zhou Enlai’s bones.
Like death…
Yet he still lived; which only went to show that life was full of surprises.
The Plenipotentiary of the People’s Republic of China felt oddly spry that day, a thing he knew would pass, soon enough as did all things.
Sixty-eight years was a long life, a life of such longevity that in generations to come any man or woman might only dream of achieving such an age living and breathing upon this radiation poisoned planet.
Only the Soviets – his country’s ally – kept its most recent research into the radiological effects of the Cuban Missiles War secret.
The Americans and the British had resumed publishing scientific papers with the reckless abandon of the pre-war era, and digests presented to the Politburo in Chongqing by the Peoples’ Liberation Army Atomic Task Force, now reported a range of uniformly grim predictions in respect of the ongoing prospects for the higher mammalian species in general, and homo sapiens in particular. In the future, perhaps for centuries to come, very few children born today could realistically expect to live into their sixties. Crudely put, by the time a woman born since the October War reached child-bearing age she would have lived in a radiological environment several times more hostile than at any time in the tens of thousands of years human beings had walked the Earth. Thereafter, the inherited damage to future generations would be cumulative up to and including – assuming no more ionising radiation was released into the atmosphere – the point at which, in the distant future, at least a century or a century-and-a-half from now, when ‘background’ radiation levels might be expected to return to pre-October 1962 levels.
