New England 11 - Rising Sun, page 32
Nicky had been assured that eight hours tuition on most biplanes – so much slower and kinder to fly than the modern all-metal monoplanes – was in no way unheard of. Most ‘first-timers’ usually needed twelve to eighteen hours tuition but Ted had well over five hundred combat hours logged, and ‘if you survived that long’ Bob Greaves had assured her, “even the doziest back-seaters learn a trick or two!”
The Bristol’s wheels lifted, brushed the ground anew, and then the scout was airborne, gaining height as it flew east towards the blue waters of the southern bay.
Ted Forest waggled the wings.
Nicky almost fainted.
“He’s allowed to show off a little!” Bob Greaves growled, not entirely impressed.
The Bristol climbed to an altitude of about a thousand feet over the water and began to turn to the north in a mile-wide circle.
Nicky wondered if Ted had the presence of mind to enjoy the view, it was a beautiful, clear summer morning too early for the haze to be spoiling the panorama from his lofty eagle’s perch. Ted circled again, this time sweeping high above the aerodrome, losing height as he swung back out across the water.
It was a complete anti-climax when he came in to land some minutes later, smoothly touching down and taxying over towards the film crew, rolling to a halt about twenty yards short of the group and cutting the ignition. There was a brief pause while Ted Forest checked his instruments, not wanting to jump out in triumph only to have to rush back with a fire extinguisher in hand because he had forgotten to turn something important off!
Then he was jumping down, beaming broadly.
Nicky, customarily wary of such overtly affectionate outbursts, sprinted to Ted and threw herself into his arms and before she knew what she was doing, she was kissing him.
She would have been embarrassed but she had been terrified he was going to get himself killed and…here he was, alive and now that she thought about it, kissing her like a man dying of thirst who has just been thrown into a well. She contemplated breaking the clinch, albeit only for a nanosecond and surrendered to the moment. The future would have to look after itself, she decided. Had Bob Greaves not intervened she would probably have started throwing off her clothes…
“That’s enough of that, you’re still on duty, Mister Forest! Get back in the fucking aeroplane and do that again!”
Ted and Nicky were suddenly looking at each other very self-consciously, both breathless.
For Nicky it was only marginally less terrifying to watch the Bristol take off and circle a second time but Ted Forest again landed immaculately. On this occasion, there was no ‘scene’ and he remained in the cockpit while Bob Greaves clambered into the second seat. Again, the Bristol took off.
This time, as the Bristol VIII circled it climbed high into the azure skies and began to do aerobatics, barrel rolls, diving, plummeting down like a hawk and swooping upwards, soaring like an eagle.
The Public Information Department film crew began to record the exploits of other aircraft and trainees, who had started arriving about an hour after Ted’s first dawn solo flight. The morning haze was obscuring the other side of the southern bay as the Bristol came back into land after about an hour in the air.
The crew focused anew on Ted Forest and his grizzled instructor.
“It is official!” Bob Greaves proclaimed. “Mister Forest is hereby certified on Type, namely all marks of Bristol scout, for solo daytime flying. We’ll get him certified for night flying later in the week then he can go off to an Operational Training Unit, probably 83 Conversion Squadron outside Sacramento, to qualify on Goshawks. That’ll take him about six weeks. He dug his left hand into a pocket inside his grubby flying suite, clasped Teds hand in an iron grip and presented him with his wings. “Get those sewn on, I’ll put through the paperwork this afternoon! Congratulations, Ted!”
By then, Nicky was bouncing up and down like a yo-yo in the hands of a manic child.
Bob Greaves winked at the PID men.
“If I was you, I’d leave these young people to resolve their…issues,” he grinned broadly, “for the rest of the day.”
In the ninety minutes it took Ted and Nicky to get back on board the Lord Falkland, scurry down several decks to the claustrophobic just above the waterline cabin that Ted Forest shared with a fellow aviator – who serendipitously was away for seven days at San Diego several hundred miles away – neither party’s lustful ardour had materially lessened. In fact, anticipation had stoked it to a still higher peak.
There was, however, a very brief hiatus.
Naked, breathless and with their wits thoroughly scrambled the couple had paused a moment, looking one to the other a little wild-eyed.
For Ted this was a new departure, utterly unlike the handful of prior middlingly embarrassing and unsatisfactory couplings he had enjoyed, or rather, experienced, with working girls in various ports none of which had left him feeling very proud of himself and ultimately, before his transfer to New England, persuaded him that there was a great deal to be said for waiting for the ‘right girl’.
For Nicky, whose only previous sexual experience with men – actually, just one man – had been painful, desperately unpleasant and unwanted, she too, froze momentarily even though her whole body was yearning to be…used.
“Oh, God,” Ted muttered, “I had no idea you were so…beautiful.”
Nicky lowered her eyes like a blushing virgin, tingling with pleasure. She had always thought she was a little chubby, her belly stuck out a fraction too much, her hips were vaguely androgynous and she usually hated being described as pretty, let alone…beautiful.
“You’re not so bad yourself,” she mumbled.
He grimaced as he glanced down at his own straining tumescence.
The bunks were too small for anybody over five-feet tall to stretch out, and narrow also…
“Blankets on the floor, do you think?” She suggested timidly.
Timidly…that is so not me!
It was the work of an instant to spread several coarse Navy issue blankets across the cold deck plates.
They looked at each other once, twice and then they were entwined, sinking to their knees, she gasping at the feel of his pulsing erection against her abdomen, wanting so badly to hold and to stroke his erection. Although, not so badly as she wanted to kiss and be kissed by him.
It was a madness, this she knew as she rolled onto her back and spread herself to receive him, gazing up at the deckhead, wondering who exactly it was being so exquisitely fucked. This time it did not hurt, she was ready and he slid into her, pumped as her fingers explored his back and shoulders and eventually, she held him close to herself as his chest heaved, he sagged momentarily onto her and she felt him spasm inside her.
Again, she had the oddest feeling that she was looking down on herself.
What are you doing?
You could get pregnant?
She shut her eyes; she did not care. She was here, he was inside her and it felt different, different not better than it had been like with another woman. He was worshipping her, loving her and in this place at this time she was the most important person in the universe to him.
They began to kiss.
Slowly, coming up for air only reluctantly, their bodies moving in sinuous synchronisation, pressing, rubbing, touching, seeking and giving pleasure; explorations were always thus, part autonomic, greedy, and yet selfless.
Giggling, Nicky reached down for him, held him, caressing as he became engorged anew.
“Again,” she whispered, “don’t you dare hold back…”
Chapter 43
Tuesday 3rd July
HMS Colossus
Coral Sea
Rear Admiral Andrew Patzig-Green had awakened that morning as he had for the last several days to the stench of burning – thankfully fading at last - that the ship’s air-conditioning blew into every nook and cranny of the wounded leviathan. This morning, there was no hammering, no reverberation of hydraulic rivet guns; the crew had done what could be done to keep their ship in the battle and, in retrospect, a day later than he ought to have surrendered to the logic of the situation, he had given the order for the Colossus, the Edgar and the destroyers Danae and Foresight to break away to the south under cover of darkness to make best speed for Sydney, leaving the undamaged remainder of the battle group to maintain a passive watching presence in the Coral Sea.
As to what naval historians would probably describe as the Battle of the Solomon Sea the Colossus’s Sea Eagles had, at a terrible price, sunk one Japanese carrier, provisionally identified as the ten thousand-ton Ryūjō and put at least one torpedo into the side of another flat-top, the Hōshō, already burning from taking a bomb hit on her stern. It was likely that a Nagato class battleship had also been torpedoed, primarily because the Japanese had revised their fleet air defence tactics so radically that the battleship had got in the way of six of Colossus’s attacking torpedo bombers, shooting down four of them!
The enemy carriers had launched over a hundred aircraft before they were discovered. After taking their medicine getting past Hyperion and Spartan, which respectively had claimed nine and eleven Sea Leopard surface-to-air missile kills, the Japanese had initially concentrated all their attacks on the Colossus, only getting distracted late in the battle when the smoke from her fires began to obscure her.
There had been no torpedo bombers in the Japanese strike force, comprised of bomb-carrying Suzuki Falcon scouts with up to four 50-pound high explosive or fragmentation munitions on their underwing racks, supporting the slower, old-fashioned Nagoya B2-4A Cherry Blossom dive bomber lumbering into the fray carrying 500-pound armour-piercing bombs.
Colossus had taken several direct hits from smaller munitions, then a 500-pounder had penetrated her amidships elevator and partially exploded on the 2-inch thick armour of the hangar deck below. Fortunately, there was only a handful of aircraft below deck at the time and miraculously there had been no major fire. However, five minutes later a Falcon had dived into the wrecked elevator, and thereafter, there was a fire, a big one for some minutes until the carrier’s still functioning fire-suppression system kicked in. Only for another 500-pounder to hit the flight deck fifty feet forward of the island very nearly on the centre-line of the ship. Although it failed to penetrate the deck – presumably it broke up on impact – it had destroyed three aircraft and started a new fire; the proximity of which to the forward elevator effectively putting a stop to flight deck operations or, when the survivors from the attack on the Japanese 1st Fleet began to return, of landing any of them back on the Colossus.
With the great ship shrouded in the smoke of her fires, the enemy had gone after new targets.
The heavy cruiser Edgar had been hit by two bombs forward, one of which had torn a fifteen feet gash in her starboard side below the waterline and jammed her forward twin 8-inch turret. The second hit, roughly equidistant between the jammed turret and the ship’s bow, had penetrated a chain locker, wrecked an adjacent crew berthing space – mercifully unoccupied at the time – and detonated in a store room just above the double hulled bottom of the vessel, compromising the cruiser’s forward latitudinal armoured bulkhead, and initially giving rise to a concern that the bow might detach in bad weather or if the ship attempted to steam at high speed. Effectively, the Edgar had been rendered hors de combat for over twenty-four hours as emergency repairs were made even though she had suffered only three dead and seven wounded in the action.
The destroyer Danae had been hit by two small bombs and briefly stopped in the water by a 500-pounder which had exploded in the water alongside her turbine room, and while unable to manoeuvre been strafed by two Falcons, suffering seven dead and twenty-three men wounded.
Another Falcon had crashed into the Foresight, targeting her bridge and killing her captain and fifteen other men including the ship’s navigation and gunnery officers.
Colossus’s casualties, given the extent of her mauling, had been remarkably light; forty-one men dead or missing and around a hundred wounded. However, her air wing had sustained catastrophic losses: of the ninety-seven men who had participated on the strike on 1st Fleet, sixty-seven were missing, presumed dead or captured by the enemy, and of the others, six men had drowned, or perished going down with their ditched aircraft. Of the survivors rescued from the sea, four were seriously injured. Every single aircraft which had taken off from the Colossus had either been lost directly to enemy action, or lost as a result of being forced to put down in the sea on returning from their missions against the Japanese 1st Fleet.
The Lion had been hit by several bombs, none of which had penetrated her main deck armour – 6-inch thick over two-thirds of her length – sustaining only minor damage at weather deck and higher levels. Again, her butcher’s bill had been relatively light; eighteen dead and fourteen seriously wounded.
Patzig-Green’s inclination had been to transfer is flag to the battleship; Cedric Blackwood had demurred, ordering him to disembark at Sydney, there to board the C class flying boat Caprice for the first leg of the long haul back to the Pearl Lagoon. Thus, command of the much-depleted battle group had passed to the commander of the 8th Cruiser Squadron, Commodore John ‘Black Jack’ Heaney, a rambunctious, larger than life man who had boxed for the Navy for several years in his younger, salad, less-scarred days.
Andrew Patzig-green was pondering this at the moment there was a quiet, firm knock at the bulkhead beside the open hatch to his stateroom, and the greying head of the carrier’s captain, Gordon McInnes peered in. Patzig-Green waved for him to come in and called for his steward to bring tea.
“I’ll only say it once,” the newcomer said lowly in the tone of a man who is addressing a respected fellow officer whose morale, regardless of the mask he is presenting to the rest of the world, he suspected was in urgent need of a little shoring up. “You played a poor hand damned well up there in the Solomon Sea, sir.”
Patzig-Green forced a tight-lipped smile.
Galling though it was to have to admit it – and privately, he had admitted it – the Japanese had managed to pull off a masterful coup, keeping the Colossus Battle Group at arm’s length by convincing the Intelligence fraternity that the IJN’s 1st Fleet was present in overwhelming strength, forcing Patzig-Green onto the back foot when in fact it now transpired the IJN-Royal Navy forces engaged were roughly comparable. The enemy had a brace of battleships, perhaps a couple more cruisers and destroyers but their two light carriers ought to have been no match for Colossus, assuming the enemy had still been as blind, and as reckless as he had been in December. Instead, the Japanese had got their blow in first, both side’s carriers had been sunk or knocked out of the fight and the contest had resulted in what, in the parlance of a bare-knuckle fight had been, after the mutual elimination of the respective air wings, a technical draw with neither side willing to take further risks attempting to lay a long-range artillery glove on the other.
He hoped the yard at Sydney could patch up the Colossus and send her back out to see in days or weeks – as the Ulysses had been ahead of OPERATION PRESTIGE – but doubted that even if the carrier could be quicky restored to some kind of operational condition, she was not going to be risked again other than in the direst circumstances until the late autumn at the earliest, if at all until her battle damage had been made good, and her command and control systems upgraded.
The Edgar, Danae and Foresight were in a similar situation. Half-repaired ships were not going to be thrown into the fire again now that, in theory if not practice, replacement ships were beginning to arrive East of Suez in the Indian Ocean, and to work up to combat efficiency in the safe waters of the New England West Coast.
“The trouble is that we still don’t know where the blasted Kido Butai is, Gordon,” Patzig-Green groaned. “Or how the heck we could have blundered into a trap like that in the Coral Sea!”
The other man vented a rumbling chuckle.
“The other side is allowed to not act like prize idiots all the time,” he reminded his superior officer with the wry candour of a man who had known him for over thirty years.
Patzig-Green had been Gordon McInnes’s divisional commander when he joined his first ship, the old cruiser Daedalus in the Mediterranean, later McInnes had been a watchkeeper on the frigate Cardigan Bay on the Deira Station, during Patzig-Green’s first stint in command. Subsequently, McInnes had briefly been his Executive Officer when he took command during the Culloden’s paying-off commission in 1965. Wise men did not abandon friendship and comradeship in the seemingly cut-throat competition for promotion and commands; such was the great, underlying and unbreakable strength of the Royal Navy.
“Yes, damn them, they are,” Patzig-Green agreed. “I suppose I’m just a bad loser, Gordon!”
The other man allowed himself an odd moment of philosophical reflection: “We tend to forget, given the nonsense the Japs have got up to in the last few years, that they made their Navy in the image of ours. Most of their senior men trained with us, some of them served with us, quite naturally, if they give themselves a chance to stop and think about it, they ought to understand us a little, or at least as well as we understand ourselves. We really ought not to be surprised when, now and then, they turn the tables on us, sir.”
Patzig-Green nodded, again.
“I shall miss your propensity to administer regular doses of ‘home truth’ as antidotes to my tendency to rush in where others, wiser men than I, elect to wait and see what happens next,” he laughed as a steward brought in a tea service.
“I think you’ll do just fine without me putting my oar in all the time!”
The two men agreed to differ.
The sun was well over the yardarm so the Assam blend had been put away and the Darjeeling had been brought out.
“It’s a thing though, isn’t it,” the Colossus’s captain said, brow creased with thought. “If the Kido Butai, all their best carriers, aren’t down here in 1st Fleet’s area of operations,” he posited, “where the Devil are they?”
