New England 04 - Remember Brave Achilles, page 22
Enemy forces had penetrated over fifty miles behind New England lines in less than forty-eight hours. Nightmarishly, there was little to stop the all-conquering invaders driving all the way to the Mississippi Delta in the east and up into the Colorado high lands to the north; with all the territories in between now lying at the mercy of the invaders.
“That’s jolly good news, Cuthbert,” Philip De L’Isle affirmed when his friend had completed his terse report of the first operations conducted by one of the Royal Navy’s new ‘super’ carriers.
The scrambled land line between Norfolk and Government House in Philadelphia was pleasantly clear, proof positive of the efficacy of the latest digital communications systems installed at both ends of the line in recent months.
At the crack of dawn that morning a strike force of eight Sea Eagle torpedo bombers and six dive-bombers, escorted by eighteen Goshawk scouts had sortied from HMS Ulysses – then holding station north east of the Turks and Caicos Islands – against enemy surface units operating in the lee of Little Inagua Island and ‘targets of opportunity’ on Great Inagua.
“You say our Sea Eagles put at least one fish into one of the Spaniards big ships?”
“Yes,” Collingwood confirmed, keen not to over-egg the as yet preliminary combat assessments to hand. In the heat of battle personal accounts and impressions were no always to be trusted; later today the first of the gun camera and bomb-aiming films would become available, likewise more information about the drop points and performance of the relatively new, unproven aerial torpedoes employed. “Another ship, one of their ironclad cruisers took a couple of bomb hits, too, we think. Our Goshawks had a merry old time shooting up the harbour at Matthew Town. We obviously caught the bounders with their trousers down.”
Collingwood did not dwell on such matters.
“Indomitable is under way again. She has significant underwater damage and her starboard turbine rooms are out of commission but she is still capable of making fifteen knots. The plan is to bring her home, well, back to the St John’s River for makeshift repairs, via coastal waters. The RNAS has already commenced anti-submarine patrols to cover Indomitable’s return. I have sent four of Indomitable’s destroyers to join the Devonshire Squadron off the Delta.”
“Devonshire?” The Governor of New England queried, distractedly.
“In Indomitable’s absence, Devonshire’s eight-inchers are the biggest guns we have at sea in the waters of the Gulf of Spain.”
“Ought we to leave her out there, Cuthbert?”
Collingwood had mulled exactly this question overnight.
“Ideally, no. But in the circumstances, the Navy cannot be seen to be pulling out of harm’s way, sir.”
“Quite, quite. Forgive me, I did not intend to give the impression I was, er, jogging your arm, Cuthbert.”
Collingwood had taken no offence.
Jamaica had fallen.
Indomitable was limping out of the fray.
The situation in the Borderlands was nothing short of disastrous.
At times like this, friends needed to stand shoulder to shoulder.
“The Perseus task force is presently steaming south to co-ordinate its operations with the Ulysses, sir,” Collingwood went on. “The Indefatigable has also put to sea with her own gun line, ostensibly to operate independently of both Task Force 5.1 and 5.2. Once we’ve achieved aerial superiority over the seas north of Cuba and Santo Domingo, I plan to send gun lines inshore to bring the war to the peoples of those islands.”
Philip De L’Isle had often discussed the arcane consequences of the rapidly developing new war-fighting technologies with his friend. ‘Air superiority’ was everything, without it the most powerful ships afloat had, in the course of the last twenty years, become horribly vulnerable to attack from the air.
Thus far, there had been no unsettling revelations about the ‘air power’ of the lesser partners in the Triple Alliance. Neither Cuba, Santo Domingo, Hispaniola or any of the other minor players possessed modern scouts or bombers, mostly, their air forces comprised string bag biplanes or slow, first generation monoplanes, and they had no heavy bombers other than a handful of aging ‘clippers’, large seaplanes converted from civilian employment. That said, it was believed that these ‘junior’ partners possessed a very large number of old, otherwise obsolete aircraft and as any military man could attest, weight of numbers was never to be discounted.
Problematically, if the British Empire’s former advantage in quality over quantity had been rendered null and void in the West, it might now be that the one hundred and thirty modern aircraft on the Ulysses and the Perseus, might now be confronting possibly thousands of theoretically less capable aircraft but nevertheless, thousands of them, in the Eastern sector.
“Once Perseus is on station,” Collingwood continued, “we shall start ‘beating up’ the Cuban and Dominican air defence systems, such as they are, and wrecking their airfields. If the beggars are so ill-advised as to place their ships upon the open seas, we shall harry them all the way to the bottom of the ocean!”
Neither man asked what the Royal Navy could do to take the pressure off the hard-pressed colonial forces on the South West Front. Had Collingwood been permitted to station powerful squadrons at Jamaica, or to patrol the western Gulf of Spain with one or other of his carrier task forces, it might have deterred the Triple Alliance. However, such deployments had been viewed as ‘provocative’ in London, now if the C-in-C wanted to command those dangerous seas his men were going to have to pay a heavy price in blood and ships.
Philip De L’Isle had always known that even if things went badly down on the Border, Imperial forces could always play the long game. Specifically, garrison New Orleans knowing that the Delta and the Mississippi itself would be impenetrable barriers to the eastern march of any Mexican army. Likewise, New England could afford to trade tens, and if necessary, hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory in the West to an invading army. Wrecking everything in their rear, retreating colonial forces, scorching the earth, could, eventually simply allow their enemies to wither, starve, die of thirst in the trackless desert they left behind them. Yes, that was a strategy of despair but then no New Englander had been, to date, prepared to pay for a standing army large enough, and well-enough equipped, to defend the thousand miles of contested borders down in the South West.
The Governor of the Commonwealth of New England took absolutely no pleasure in knowledge, and having told his principals in London, repeatedly, that sooner or later local and Imperial parsimony in respect of his Colony’s military preparedness on land, if not at sea, might be their downfall.
De L’Isle changed the subject.
“There were no German nationals on the submarine which attacked the Indomitable?”
“No. The boat has sunk now. My people tell me it is a modified Kaiserliche Marine Type IV. Three hundred and fifty tons, a couple of forward torpedo tubes and a crew of thirty-six. We have thirteen men in custody, all Cuban. The boat was built in one of those big sheds we identified at Havana some years back. They hide the bloody things away in concrete pens at bases along their northern coast.”
Cuthbert Collingwood was disgusted.
“Dammit, we should never have trusted the bloody Germans!”
Philip De L’Isle let this remark go uncontested.
“Well, at least we stole a march on Berlin with all these big carriers you persuaded the Admiralty to build, Cuthbert!”
Both men knew that moves were afoot to send at least one, perhaps, two more of the great ships across the North Atlantic. The only reason movement orders had not already been drafted was that the ‘situation’ of the German Government was as yet, regarded as being somewhat…fluid. With the old Kaiser clearly in terminal decline nobody in Whitehall was entirely sure who, exactly, was in charge in Berlin. Things were so worrying, that practically everybody in Great Britain now fervently hoped that the Crown Prince, in former years regarded as a feckless philanderer and a clear and present threat to global security and the post-Treaty of Paris world order, would emerge as the new German Emperor. For all his faults, it was felt that at least ‘young Willy’ was a man London could do business with.
Unspoken, was another conundrum.
Many times in recent years the Kaiserliche Marine had demanded ‘proof’, if such a thing was not an oxymoron, that the British Empire had not been – somewhere in its vast lands, well over a quarter of the non-oceanic surface of the planet – itself in breach of the Submarine Treaty banning the further manufacture of nuclear devices or reactors, and ‘vessels propelled above or below the water by such contrivances’.
Philip De L’Isle did not know – or need to know, let alone want to know - if his country was rigorously abiding with each and every one of the nuclear protocols of the Submarine Treaty. He had never asked anybody who might be in the know about such things: why would he, they might actually give him an honest answer?
However, like many men at or close to the summit of Imperial power he had his suspicions, albeit ones never voiced, or even alluded to in private, or heaven forfend, in public. Pragmatist that he was, it had always seemed, to say the least, improbable, that somewhere remote, cut off from the rest of the world – there were countless such places in the Empire – somebody was not carrying out forbidden research, development, or perhaps, even producing exactly the weapons and systems unilaterally banned under the terms of the Submarine Treaty.
In fact, it was inconceivable to him that the Germans would have so openly supported their allies in the West Indies and the Central Americas, in building vessels such as the one which had crippled the Indomitable had Berlin not strongly suspected that their British co-signatories had their own dirty little secrets. The sort of dirty little secrets which had always prevented British Governments, regardless of political hue, from ‘calling out’ Berlin on its own transgressions. Such, after all, was the normal give and take of diplomacy, the thing which usually maintained the peace.
Personally, the Governor of New England had been one of those who had believed that it would have been better to have stood up to the German Empire back in the mid-1960s, to have bitten the bullet and accepted the reality of the new technologies and their implications rather than attempt to put the nuclear genie back into its bottle.
Over a decade later he was far too worldly a man to know, in his heart of hearts, that his Government would never have actually given away, or accepted such Draconian constraints, as it seemed to have done when it signed the Submarine Treaty, unless it had other, contingency plans in its locker.
Moreover, in the same spirit Berlin would have – and had obviously done in the West Indies – done everything it could to circumvent those inherently odious restrictions on its right to develop nuclear technologies and its undersea warfare capability; it seemed axiomatic to Philip De L’Isle that his own government would have behaved likewise.
Philip De L’Isle had taken it as read that Cuthbert Collingwood was one of the few men who might know, for sure, all of the Empire’s dirty little secrets.
“Oh, well, I suppose we should not be that surprised that our enemies will, from time to time, spring surprises on us,” he observed dryly.
“That is to be expected,” the C-in-C Atlantic Fleet concurred.
The Governor of New England had the distinct impression that the other man was, briefly, smiling like a Cheshire cat as he spoke.
“I’ll let you get about your work, Cuthbert. You have a war to fight; meanwhile, I shall do my best to circumvent an insurrection in the First Thirteen!”
Both men chuckled.
Both men wondering exactly what the other had to be so rueful about…
Chapter 27
Tuesday 12th April
Shinnecock Hills, Long Island
“Our chaps have finally got their act together,” Sir Maxwell Coolidge announced portentously, for reasons best known to himself convinced that the three women and his new born grandson needed, or for some reason, wanted to hear an unscrupulous New York banker’s take on the two-day old war.
Leonora’s mother, Lady Geraldine gave him a censorious look. The new mother and her best friend, Maud Daventry-Jones had not even noticed that the great man had deigned to find time in his financial wheeling and dealing diary, to set eyes upon the latest addition to his clan.
War was not just good for business; it was Manna from Heaven to the bankers who confidently expected that it would be to them that the East Coast colonies would turn to finance their contribution to the coming battles. It was an article of faith in the First Thirteen, and therefore in the Johnny-cum-lately fourteenth and fifteenth colonies of Vermont and New Hampshire, that their taxpayers should be, insofar as it was possible, insulated from the real costs of hostilities. Particularly those skirmishes hundreds, or in the case of the South West, thousands of miles away which when all was said and done, were really the affair of the wider Empire, not exclusively the citizenry of New England. Therefore, it was confidently expected that what relatively small charge was levied upon the Crown Colonies, territories and unincorporated lands of North America could be covered, under existing Imperial credit guarantees, and therefore at no risk to the exchequers of the individual colonies, by the banks; preferably, by the banks of the First Thirteen, just so all the profit stayed in New England. Or rather, in the already deep pockets of men like Sir Max Coolidge.
Thus, despite having been up all night making the final arrangements to create the cartel via which, he and a select band of brothers planned to rob the British taxpayer blind, Leonora’s father was in a very sunny mood that morning.
That his formerly errant, somewhat wild child embarrassing daughter had become something of a reformed character in recent months and now produced a robustly healthy six-pound, thirteen-ounce baby son, was just the icing on the cake.
This was indeed a fine day to be alive.
And to a Manhattan banker.
And to be a grandfather again…
Dammit, he ought to have insisted that Alex accept an appointment on the board of one or other of his companies!
How on earth was the man going to afford to keep his daughter in the style to which she was accustomed on an Air Force salary?
Never mind; that could be revisited when the boy got home…
Leonora had been dozing; her labour had been uncomplicated, just overlong and she was, understandably, exhausted and just wished everybody would go away and leave her alone.
Except for Maude, obviously, who was presently cradling little Alex Lincoln Fielding wearing an expression of very nearly beatific joy. Leonora’s mother had held the baby briefly but motherliness had always come a very poor second to her duties as a hostess, and Long Island’s queen bee socialite.
“What on earth are you talking about Max?” Lady Geraldine demanded irritably.
Like her husband she had also been up all night, although in a better cause than gratuitously conspiring to make huge piles of money out of the death, and the misery of the First Thirteen’s young men.
“Our chaps gave the Spanish a bloody nose in the Bahamas. Sank a cruiser and shot up a couple more. All our boys got back, too! That ought to show the blighters what’s what!”
Maude Daventry-Jones had never seen Leonora’s mother so…disappointed with her husband. She had seen her get testy, even turn a little sneering. Apparently, her friend’s parents’ marriage had never been a love match; more an alliance between two very rich families whose elder statesmen, and women, had determined that it was high time the two tribes made peace and pooled their immense resources. At the time, both Leonora’s parents were the only children already too old to imagine they would be blessed with further offspring, so, there had been no ‘competing’ inheritance ‘issues’; in the event, people said they had knocked along fairly well in the beginning, just not so well from around the time Leonora and her two older brothers, Leo and Max junior had come along and secured the Coolidge line of succession. Lady Geraldine, having performed her maternal duty as a brood mare, had thereafter been a little surplus to requirements in the marriage. Leonora’s father had been a notorious womaniser until he had his first heart attack, five or six years ago.
All families are unhappy in their own way…
Maude’s parents had often seemed like chalk and cheese when she was growing up, they argued, fought sometimes but the big difference between them and Leonora’s parents, was that Maude’s mother and father always, absolutely always, made up after they had had a row. Actually, even now when they were in their late fifties they sometimes behaved like young lovers, much to Maude and her sister’s eternal embarrassment…
Little Alex Lincoln Fielding gurgled.
Maude could tell he needed cleaning.
Her nose wrinkled but she did not mind.
If she had not already been feeling broody; she had been, ever since she set her sights on Albert Stanton, she would have been now.
“He’s a fine-looking boy!” Sir Max declared. “He’s got his father’s nose!”
The great man clearly wanted to be somewhere else.
He was far too important to be ‘baby gazing’ when there was money to be made!
“Go away, Max,” Lady Geraldine snapped lowly. “The baby needs a feed.”
“Oh, right you are…”
Leonora stirred herself and Maude passed her precious bundle of new life back to the weary mother, who sleepily put tiny Alex to her breast. If the kid was anything like his father, he would get the message sooner rather than later…
“Why on earth do you put up with Daddy?” She asked her mother.
“Seriously,” Lady Geraldine murmured.
“Yes?” Leonora confirmed. “You hate each other’s guts, so why do you stay with him?”
Maude froze, hoping the ground would open beneath her feet and swallow her.
“If I didn’t, I’d spend my declining years in penury,” Leonora’s mother explained dryly. “Your father would see to that. Then he’d marry some little harlot actress or perhaps, one of your friends, my dear. Just to humiliate me.”
