New England 11 - Rising Sun, page 30
The harsh fact of the matter was that whereas, in ELDAR-directed point defence exercises there was a routine kill-rate of over eighty percent in ‘auto’ mode, this fell to a consistent sub-thirty-five percent score for gun mounts shooting wholly in ‘manual’ mode. It all came down to the efficiency with which a gun could be laid to fill a given piece of air with explosive, incendiary or solid rounds travelling in excess of the speed of sound.
Gun camera film footage recovered from the Ulysses showed countless Japanese aircraft literally ‘shredded’, disintegrating into a thousand flaming pieces as they flew into the ‘death zones’ created by the overlapping fields of fire of both the larger and smaller calibre chain guns hastily installed on the doomed carrier, mainly operating entirely under manual command due to the teething problems arising from their hurried installation in the rush to get the carrier back to sea ahead of OPERATION PRESTIGE.
Patzig-Green’s Staff began to brief him as the battlespace plot began to update.
The Japanese were bombing the airstrip on Guadalcanal, a force of about thirty aircraft, mostly scouts, Falcons which probably meant there was at least one enemy carrier somewhere north of the Solomons.
Simultaneously, the battle group’s ELDAR pickets had detected several surface contacts emerging from the shadow of the most eastern of the main islands, San Cristobal. The CAP was investigating; presently there were no unidentified aerial contacts on ‘the board’ south of Guadalcanal.
District officers and their staffs had been evacuated from the Solomons over a month ago, as had any of the natives who had wished to leave. At the same time volunteer coast watchers had been inserted onto all the main islands in the Solomon archipelago. Now, several had reported ship movements in ‘the Channel’ – the islands were arranged in two lines, running approximately east-south-east of Bougainville with a broad – miles deep in places – channel up to fifty or sixty miles across. From many of the islands its nearest neighbour was actually well below the horizon, out of sight even from the upper branches of the tallest hill or tree. Thus, ships transiting ‘the Channel’ were often invisible, and invariably unidentifiable from land. Or by long-range ELDAR if by day they hid behind the bigger islands, and observed strict radio silence.
The battle group commander cursed under his breath.
“Send scouts to get eyes on those surface contacts and to overfly the southern end of the Channel west of Guadalcanal,” he ordered.
Up until now the priority had been concealing the position of his fleet from the enemy. Clearly, this was academic; the Japs knew he was in the vicinity and the next thing would be the detection of an incoming air attack!
I should have gone looking for the beggars!
At least that way I would be the one calling the first shots; not just reacting to 1st Fleet’s opening gambit!
However, he did not dwell overlong on the possible error of his ways. It never did any good beating oneself up, especially not when one was in a tight corner because the enemy was perfectly capable of doing it himself.
“Order Hyperion and Spartan to close to within twenty miles of the flagship.”
As this was being transmitted he motioned to be given a headset and via the CIC, several decks below his feet, he requested: “Flag to speak to Colossus,” and waited patiently while the connection was established with the carrier’s captain.
Patzig-Green had been five years ahead of Captain Gordon McInnes, the man who had assumed command of the great carrier on her return from OPERATION PRESTIGE, at Dartmouth. McInnes had come in as part of the revised command rotation system put in place to ensure that officers and men with recent combat experience were re-allocated to ships and shore establishments where their knowledge was most needed.
“It looks like things are going to get interesting in the coming hours, Gordon,” the C-in-C observed ruefully. “I apologise in advance if my guess is wrong; but I think there may be several heavies and carriers lurking in the shadow of Guadalcanal and San Cristobal. My intention is to have a crack at any carriers we find but to avoid a surface action with the heavies.”
The other man thought about it.
“I’ve already ordered eighteen Sea Eagles to be bombed up, and the remaining ten to load fish, sir. By your permission, I’ll let the armourers get on with their task unmolested. In the meantime, I’m getting the rest of 804 Squadron’s scouts up on deck in case we need to reinforce the CAP in a hurry.”
“Very good. Carry on, Gordon.”
On the readiness board 804 Squadron was now on full alert, and 814 Squadron’s Goshawks were showing as ‘arming and fuelling’. 804 was showing fourteen aircraft ‘ready’, and 814, a unit only formed shortly before Colossus sailed from the Pearl Lagoon whose pilots had little or no combat experience, showed thirteen serviceable airframes. The carrier’s two Sea Eagle squadrons, 805 and 812 were sprinkled with veterans of the Battle of the Sandwich Islands and OPERATION PRESTIGE, and both were commanded by relentless ‘press-on’ men whose customary, affable personalities belied their proven determination to wreak havoc upon His Majesty’s foes.
“HYPERION IS PAINTING BANDITS COMING OUT OF THE CHANNEL!”
Again, Patzig-Green cursed inwardly.
He ought to have brought his two lethal guided missile cruisers close enough to overlap their kill zones earlier!
Granted, he was no more gifted with second sight than the next man; that was not the point. Something had been niggling at him, worming in his head, an itch he could never scratch, for some days and he should have trusted his gut instinct to use the two ships in tandem!
“SPARTAN IS PAINTING MORE BANDITS OVER GUADALCANAL COMING OUR WAY!”
The electronic battle board was automatically moving symbols, pointers, flashing new data inputs.
“TEN HIGH ALTITUDE BANDITS AT TWO-NINE-FIVE TRUE!”
Andrew Patzig-Green was momentarily speechless.
These ‘bandits’ approaching from a completely unexpected direction…
The bastards have ambushed me!”
This realisation was followed by another, presently less relevant question.
How the fuck did I let that happen?
Chapter 40
Saturday 30th June
IJNS Saganami
North Pacific
3rd Fleet’s advanced pickets excepted, presently the four ships of Destroyer Division 4 forming a forty-mile-wide picket line, some fifty miles in advance of the Kido Butai, Isoroku Yamamoto had kept his fleet in unusually close steaming order.
In part this was to reduce the visible, detectable profile of his command as it bored on into the east, every two days encountering oilers and supply ships daisy-chained, pre-positioned across the vast wilderness of the North Pacific. The other advantage of ‘keeping the fleet in hand’ as he had described it to his subordinate flag officers, was that it enabled low-powered TBS communications to be kept to a minimum, and meant all bar the distant pickets could keep in touch with their ‘leaders’, and with the Saganami by signal lamp, minimising risking any hint of the Kido Butai’s presence in these waters leaking into the ether.
In practice, he left the day-to-day co-ordination and monitoring of the fleet’s station-keeping compliance in the hands of Rear Admiral Shimamura Sumiyoshi (whose flag flew on the second ship of Battlecruiser Division 1, the Mikasa). With the loss of the Kirishima off the Sandwich islands in December, only the Mikasa and the Saganami, respectively the first and fourth ships of their class, the Kongo having been wrecked after running aground in the Tsushima Strait as long ago as 1957, survived. Both had undergone two radical and several modernisation refits in their thirty-plus year careers, during which their displacement had increased by nearly five thousand tons and their original best speed reduced from around thirty-two to twenty-eight or nine knots. Which, for Yamamoto’s purpose was good enough, and at least five knots better than that of any other big gun ship currently afloat and fit for active service. All his carriers were faster but not much faster and for their size, Mikasa and Saganami were relatively manoeuvrable in exactly the way the lumbering forty-two thousand-ton Kagas, and thirty-three-thousand-ton Nagatos, were not. And, if it came to an artillery duel with an unexpectedly strong British Fleet, he intended to run away, not slog it out like that fool Nomura Tamotsu had done off Oahu half-a-year ago. Operating in a bombardment and air defence role, his two capital ships needed to be able to keep up with his aircraft carriers, and if and when it came to shelling land targets, any enemy would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between being blown up by 14-inch or 16-inch shells!
Initially, Rear Admiral Kawamura Hayao (flying his flag in the Amagi, regarded himself as Yamamoto’s right-hand man and second-in-command. Yamamoto had disabused him of this notion by nominating Nakamura Kuranosuke, the firebrand commander of his heavy cruisers – Cruiser Division 7) as his deputy.
As to Hayao, he was a sound officer who had commanded the third aircraft carrier commissioned into the Imperial Navy, the Ryūjō, a ten thousand ton converted merchantman between 1969 and 1971 and had, at the late age of forty-one achieved deck certification as a naval aviator. Much as he might be brooding about having Onomoto Tomomichi usurping his command of his four carriers’ combined air group, Yamamoto was confident that the man’s professionalism would get the better of any residual existential angst.
Yamamoto considered himself fortunate in the senior subordinates – without prior consultation - the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Shimada Nagano had given him for OPERATION EAST WIND.
The one wild card was Rear Admiral Takeda Hideo, who commanded the 6-inch gunned light cruisers of Cruiser Division 3, a man who had achieved flag rank the previous year at the outrageously young age of forty-two despite completely lacking a coterie of influential friends at Court, or powerful sponsors within the Navy. It was said of Hideo that he had only two modes of operation: dead stop and full speed ahead.
Well, given what Yamamoto had in mind for Hideo’s cruisers, the Asatsuya, Chishima, Nisshin and Tokima, boasting thirty-four 6-inch and as many 4- and 3.7-inch rifles between them and all capable of thirty-three knots, Takeda Hideo’s reputation was about to be tested, hopefully to the limit but possibly not to destruction in the coming days.
Yamamoto had had his Staff pore over the unsatisfactorily fragmentary reports from IJN Headquarters about the inconclusive action, which might – for all he knew - still be going on, in the Solomon Sea. He hated to jump to conclusions; sadly, he was getting the sense that just as it had made a meal of driving the weak, rag-tag ABDP Squadron out of the Java Sea, the reconstituted and strengthened 1st Fleet, under the command of Vice Admiral Yakarabe Tanin, an old-school gunner who was, it was said, very nearly completely deaf and would have been on the retirement list by now but for the war, had almost certainly failed to spring the carefully constructed trap that Yamamoto had hoped would destroy the British presence in those waters.
Tanin was claiming to have ‘crippled’ an enemy aircraft carrier, which he presumed to be the Colossus, sunk a cruiser and ‘seriously wounded’ several other vessels. Superficially, this was a good return for the loss of the light carrier Hōshō, and the ‘significant aircrew casualties’ sustained in the attacks on the enemy fleet as it retired south into the Coral Sea, pursued by the battleships Owari and Kashima and the heavy cruisers of Cruiser Division 6, a chase which for all Yamamoto knew, might still be ongoing a day later. He took Tanin’s claim that ‘virtually all the enemy’s bombers had been shot down’ with a very large pinch of salt.
Notwithstanding, he was far from downcast.
What he was hearing was not all bad and it seemed as if 1st Fleet had been left, largely, in possession of the battlefield.
Whatever else he had achieved, dear old Yakarabe Tanin had succeeded in driving the main fighting strength of the British Pacific Fleet even farther away from Yamamoto’s prospective operational sphere in the days leading up to day the first hammer blow of OPERATION EAST WIND fell on the Golden Gate, implying that there would be very little the enemy could do in the following weeks, if as he hoped, after the first phase of operations, he was still in a position to systematically harry and ravage the West Coast of New England.
As was his habit, the fleet commander took a stroll on the Saganami’s quarterdeck in the hour before dusk settled. He liked to settle his thoughts, pacing alone, clearing his mind ahead of dining, usually with several of the Staff. Then he would return to his desk, compose his daily journal entries and ponder the following day’s ‘to do’ list, a habit he had picked up on his second exchange posting with the Royal Navy, over thirty years ago. One’s duties were immensely simplified by considered foresight, and in consequence one was less ‘surprisable’, always a good thing in an officer of any rank, let alone in an admiral.
Both the Mikasa and the Saganami were carrying four Nagoya, metal-skinned, monoplane single-engine float planes, three-man machines capable of nearly two hundred miles an hour in level flight, armed with a defensive machine gun and fitted with racks designed to carry up to two hundred pounds of ordnance under each wing. The battlecruisers and all the cruisers had at least one catapult and, most two, quarterdeck and amidships mounted, and presently, the Saganami had an additional catapult installed on her Number 3, X turret, providing the fleet with a total of nineteen Nagoya and eight of the older, dope and canvas, ‘string bag’ Suzuki biplanes, whose main role in the forthcoming operations was likely to be reconnaissance and search and rescue missions, when not being employed in the judicious insertion, support and recovery of men operating behind enemy lines.
Mechanics working on one of the aircraft perched high on the port stern catapult leapt to attention as Yamamoto approached.
“As you were, carry on, boys,” he said sternly.
It was a grey, bleak day and the sea had about it an oddly oily sheen as the battlecruiser shouldered through the long swells. There were few white horses and with what wind there was veering towards the north, the ships rolled only gently, outrunning the waves astern.
Yamamoto attempted to put aside his biggest fear; that of discovery, a discovery that might scupper the whole enterprise or cause the grand scheme of things to be scaled back, and its likely impact on the collective psyche of New England correspondingly diminished. There would be only the one opportunity to strike a telling blow, of that he was certain. Once alerted to danger of a second attack the British would fortify their enclaves, prioritise the defence of the West Coast and the opportunity would be gone forever. History turned on fleeting inflexion points where the gods were either with one, or against one. Such was destiny. The old admirals spoke of their mythical war-winning Kantai Kessen – decisive blow – but wars were not often won by great victories alone, or even by the side that had the biggest battalions. History was more complicated than that…
Yamamoto eyed the heavy cruiser Tsugami in the middle distance. She was making more smoke than was ideal, either her engine room throttle man was asleep on the job or there was a pressure issue with the injectors pumping oil into her boilers.
The Tsugami was an older ship re-activated after several years in the Reserve Fleet in January, her crew were three-quarters recalled reservists and conscripts. Given the vintage of her equipment, how recently she had been recovered from mothballs and how little time her officers had had to work up their ship, it was hardly surprising that she was smoking like a pile of wet leaves.
Nevertheless…
He noted that the starboard bridge lamps were flashing angrily at the Tsugami. The Saganami’s captain was a strict disciplinarian, a martinet whom nobody had ever accused of having a heart of gold and he took the battlecruiser’s role as the chief navigation and station-keeping ship on the right wing of the fleet very, very seriously. Right now, he would be asking Tsugami’s captain why his ship was emitting ‘smoke signals’ and enjoining him in no uncertain terms to desist forthwith!
Since passing through Longitude 173 degrees East, all flight operations had been suspended. The chance of an aircraft flying this far out at sea, or even at relatively low altitudes being detected by a neutral, or even a hostile vessel visually, or more likely, by ELDAR was remote but operationally unacceptable. While the Kido Butai remained undetected, that non-flying proscription would remain in place.
Everything depended on secrecy; upon the fleet arriving off the West Coast of the Americas undetected a thing Yamamoto had not believed, for a moment, was likely. Nevertheless, he had taken every conceivable precaution, every imaginable step to mitigate the risk of inadvertently alerting the enemy to his existence. It was a wise man who sometimes listened to his own counsel; he liked to think he had at least partially mastered the knack of not endlessly obsessing imponderables over which he had no meaningful control.
“The Okinami is approaching, sir.”
Yamamoto walked unhurriedly to the port rail.
The destroyer was about to range alongside to report by lamp; he would hear what was to be heard soon enough even if he could not view the whole exchange for himself.
Okinami was one of the destroyers carrying the new microwave detectors, watching for geographically ‘local’, that is, spikes in the normal background level of natural activity on those inscrutable wavelengths within several hundred miles, which might indicate the proximity of Royal Navy warships.
Yamamoto smiled as he mentally interpreted the Hamanami class destroyer’s brief report.
“SOUP STOP.”
Soup was the codename for the Royal Navy’s suspected real-time global communications system.
“NEGATIVE INDICATIONS STOP.”
In effect, the equipment on board the destroyer had detected nothing out of the ordinary in the background hissing sound of the universe.
Yamamoto watched on, with a raised eyebrow.
“RANDOM DISTANT FLUCTUATIONS SOUTH STOP.”
