Warsaw Concerto, page 45
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Tuesday 17th January 1967
HMS Campbeltown, 7 miles West of Royan, France
“KENT HAS OPENED FIRE!”
The angry grey seas and vicious squalls completely masked the muzzle flash of the guns of the big ships farther off shore, viewed from the storm-tossed bridge of HMS Campbeltown. In fact, it was all that the lookouts on the bridge wings could do to keep her sister ships, the Perth and the Dundee in sight.
HMS Kent was the former American heavy cruiser USS Des Moines (CA-134), freshly commissioned into the Royal Navy but still operating with over a hundred US Navy ‘advisors’ on board. Her nine self-loading 8-inch 55-calibre Mark 16 rifles were capable of throwing as many as ten three hundred-and-thirty-five-pound shells per minute up to seventeen miles down range.
“BELFAST HAS OPENED FIRE!”
The veteran of the Battle of North Cape, the Normandy Landings and Operation Manna, stripped of one of her four main battery turrets and her original 4-inch calibre secondary armament to accommodate a new radar and communications suite and two quadruple GWS 21 Sea Cat missile launchers, was the last World War II-vintage cruiser in the Royal Navy. Standing another three miles out to sea her nine 6-inch 50-calibre BL Mark XXIII guns were throwing one hundred-and-twelve-pound projectiles at a rate of about five per minute.
Captain Dermot O’Reilly nodded to the bridge speaker.
“Inform Guns that he may open fire at his discretion!”
There was a short delay before the salvo bell rang and the destroyer’s four Mark 12 5-inch 38-calibre guns fired. The ship shuddered as the broadside screamed landward, each projectile weighing fifty-five pounds. Astern of their leader the Perth and the Dundee, their gun directors slaved to the Campbeltown’s firing table, had belched five-gun salvoes.
“Broadsides,” O’Reilly intoned. “Fire at will!”
Farther out to sea the second division of the 21st Destroyer Squadron, the Berwick, the Stirling and the Dunbar were operating as an anti-submarine screen for HMS Victorious as she attempted to operate a two Sea Vixen combat air patrol over the bombardment group, and to fly off Buccaneer S-2 strike aircraft on missions inland of the town of Royan, the primary target.
The continuing foul weather slowed everything down.
In theory Campbeltown’s main battery could shoot off a dozen or more rounds a minute, in practice there were interminable waits for the ship to right herself between waves, and times when the salvo bell seemed as if it was never going to ring as they waited for the destroyer to right herself and to roll through the vertical.
In the first sixty seconds of the bombardment Campbeltown fired just three broadsides.
Out to sea the bigger ships were only marginally less inconvenienced. Even the massive Kent, twenty thousand or more tons of her with her bunkers topped off, was struggling in the renewed gale.
Dermot O’Reilly honestly had no idea what manner of men could fly Sea Vixens, Buccaneers and turboprop Fairey Gannets – the latter operating in an unaccustomed artillery spotting, and electronic intelligence gathering role over France – off the crazily pitching and rolling deck of a carrier in weather like this!
Royan, a base for the Kriegsmarine and a fortress stronghold of the Nazis in the last year of the war in Europe, was one of several coastal enclaves, like those at La Rochelle and on the Ile d'Oléron threatening to interdict the lines of supply of the British forces pressing along the north bank of the Gironde Estuary opposite Bordeaux. There was no question of systematically besieging, or of taking such well-defended or geographically isolated towns or locales by force majeure, frontal assaults with the limited forces available on the ground in western France, so, another way had had to be found to persuade the ‘hold-outs’ to see reason.
That morning’s scheduled three-minute-long bombardment with all ships ‘aiming-off’ by six degrees to the south was designed not to obliterate Royan, rather to provide an object lesson to the enemy within it of what they were up against. The defenders were defenceless, if they wanted oblivion then the Navy would return in twenty-four hours and oblige them. Otherwise, they could lay down their arms, open their gates, co-operate with the invaders and continue to go on living!
Nor were the crews of Dermot O’Reilly’s destroyers under any misapprehension that once the job was done in the Bay of Biscay that they would be heading home to a heroes’ welcome in Portsmouth. Well, one day they might well return to Pompey in triumph, of one sort or another but not this time. The Victorious’s and one or both, nobody had decided yet, of the big cruisers’ and the 21st Destroyer Squadron’s next port of call was Gibraltar.
The Victorious Battle Group had been renamed Task Force V1 while the carrier and O’Reilly’s destroyers had been sheltering – for the second time that winter - in Portland Harbour a week ago. With the Kent and the Belfast operating ‘in hand’, and further reinforced by the latest additions to the 21st Destroyer Squadron, the Stirling (formerly the USS Trathen, DD-530) and the Dunbar (formerly the USS Kimberley, DD-521), the Task Force’s commanding officer, Commodore Henry Leach, had temporarily, been promoted rear admiral.
Not that this had in any way turned Commodore Henry Leach’s head. He was not that sort of man.
Leach had been a midshipman, on duty in the Operations Room at Sembawang at Singapore the day his father, the Captain of HMS Prince of Wales, had gone down with his ship in the South China Sea in December 1941. Later he had waited in vain as the destroyers Electra, Express and Vampire landed the survivors of the lost battleship and her consort, the battlecruiser Repulse. Not a lot turned a man’s head after an experience like that so young.
‘There’s been a change of plan, gentlemen,’ he had confided jovially in his state room on board the Victorious, with his flag captain, the commanding officers of the Kent and the Belfast, O’Reilly and the carrier’s Combat Air Group Commander (CAG) present.
‘Or rather,’ Leach had corrected himself, grinning wry self-deprecation, ‘an upping of the ante with regard to operations in France. With things relatively quiet elsewhere and, given the season of the year, hopefully, something of an impediment to our enemies in central and southern France, it has been decided to take the initiative not just on the Loire Line, as the BEF is in the process of doing as I speak, but in the south also.’
It seemed that the Eagle, at present the only other operational fleet carrier – having stayed out a ‘day or so’ too long in the recent ‘blow’ was going to need ‘a little time’ in dockyard hands, and that meant Victorious was the Navy’s only remaining available ‘big deck’ in home waters.
‘With the Soviets playing silly buggers the Mediterranean Fleet may be fully occupied in the Levant for the foreseeable future,’ Leach explained as his steward served tea and digestive biscuits. ‘Malta may be able to offer us some assistance but otherwise we shall be on our own. At this time, I have no word as to whether we can expect support from the US Navy although there is talk of a couple of their nuclear boats being tasked to beef up our anti-submarine screen. Ongoing discussions, as they say, are in progress at the highest levels, I’m told. It may also be that now that the US Air Force has re-activated a couple of its former bases in Spain that we can expect some assistance from that quarter also. However, my view is that we need to assume that we will be reliant upon our own resources until we hear differently.’
In a years’ time the Royal Navy would have assimilated the cruisers, destroyers, and the two fleet carriers the United States was loaning or permanently transferring to the United Kingdom. Presently, only two of the cruisers, the Des Moines (HMS Kent) and the Fall River (HMS Liverpool), and approximately half the destroyers had been commissioned into British service, and of those, only the Kent and six of Dermot O’Reilly’s eight Fletcher-class ships were truly operational, albeit with in the main, relatively green crews.
Basically, the cupboard remained bare.
Of the big carriers, the Ark Royal was scheduled to sail for New York for an eight-month major refit and overhaul at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Hermes was at Portsmouth having her long-standing machinery problems addressed, the Eagle was getting ‘very tired’ and at some stage would follow ‘the Ark’ to the East Coast to be given, hopefully, a new lease of life. The two American carriers due to be loaned, part-crewed to the Royal Navy – the Franklin D. Roosevelt (CV-42) and the Randolph (CV-15) - were still moored at Norfolk, Virginia, the latter in dry dock for at least another six weeks. The Royal Navy’s only other cruiser, the Lion, which had been steamed virtually ‘to death’ in the last four years was the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet and guardship at Malta, and seriously in need of a major overhaul. Legend had it that the Lion was in such a poor way, that her aft main battery turret was mothballed and she was unable to steam at better than seventeen knots.
‘I shall not attempt to delve into the geopolitics of the Mediterranean situation,’ Henry Leach had promised, much to his captains’ relief. ‘The Soviets seem to be up to all manner of troublemaking from the Rhine to Anatolia, probably best if we leave the Lords of Admiralty and the Prime Minister to worry about all that guff. Likewise, regardless of whether the Americans come to the party or not, we have a job to do. And, by golly, we shall get on with it in the finest traditions of the service!’
Dermot O’Reilly had been very aware that the Task Force Commander, not content with briefing his closest lieutenants to the fullest extent possible at the earliest moment, was keen that they each went away from this meeting singing from the same hymn sheet.
‘You will be aware that British and Commonwealth forces in western France have advanced far to the south of the Loire Line and now threaten Bordeaux. You will also have heard that the general tactical situation in France is as confused as ever, that Allied forces are now compelled to maintain a constant watch on the Rhine, and that much of southern France is in the hands of Communist factions sympathetic to, or controlled by Krasnaya Zarya, Red Dawn fanatics who espouse a particularly pernicious, brutal form of the Marxist-Leninist creed. The most extreme of the groups which make up the so-called Front Internationale is based in the Auvergne, secure, it no doubt presumes, in the citadel of the Massif Central. The Mediterranean coastal region of the former French Republic is we believe, under the control of marginally more rational workers’ committees and suchlike whose actions are influenced by former naval and army officers. It was to avoid these ‘moderates’ becoming completely marginalised, that the submarine blockade of the Bay of Lions and the Riviera towns was suspended last year.’
Henry Leach had sipped his tea.
‘Our job is, depending upon how things develop, to make life so difficult for the ‘southern leadership’ that they lose control of their fiefdom along the coast; or, to facilitate their wholesale defection to our side. In either event, the object of the exercise is to lay the groundwork for a future liberation of the south of France. To this end I plan to park Victorious fifty miles south of Toulon and to commence operations against the forces of the Front Internationale not later than 1st February.’
He had smiled.
‘On that day the Allied armies in the north supported by every aircraft and ship we’ve got will launch a quote ‘no holds barred’ offensive along the Loire and south from Picardy.’
Dermot O’Reilly’s face must have betrayed his scepticism.
‘I am given to understand,’ Henry Leach assured him, ‘that our Free French allies are fully on board, in no small measure on account of certain alterations in the configuration of the, er, chain of command.’
‘We’ve sacked De Boissieu, sir?’ Dermot O’Reilly had half-asked, half-suggested.
‘No. Not exactly. I think it is more the case that we have finally convinced him that we mean it when we say we are prepared to back him ‘up to the hilt’ in this endeavour.’
As of 1st February, diesel-electric submarines of the 2nd Submarine Squadron based at Malta would reinstitute a total blockade of the Bay of Lions.
Before that Task Force V1 would refuel and re-ammunition at Gibraltar, assimilate at least two, possibly three more destroyers or frigates into 21st Destroyer Squadron, and sail for the north with a fleet train of oilers, and supply ships in company with HMS Fearless, the newly commissioned sixteen-thousand-ton purpose-built amphibious assault ship which had been working up in the western Mediterranean for the last two months.
Once TFV1 was on station off Toulon, the Admiralty had issued Henry Leach with a ‘shopping list’ to ‘get on with.’
His brief was to support the blockade.
To bombard coastal ‘strongpoints’ but initially to avoid hitting major population centres.
To mount small scale hit and run amphibious raids, employing men from the two hundred-and-seventy Royal Marines of 43 Commando on board the Fearless, supplemented by detachments drawn from the one-hundred-and forty Royal Marines serving on the other ships in the Task Force.
All the while the Task Force was to gather electronic and other intelligence to support future raiding ‘in strength’.
Leech was to conduct air strikes, and electronic and photographic reconnaissance missions over southern France as far inland as latitude 46 degrees North.
With regard to the surviving units of the former French Mediterranean Fleet berthed at Toulon and Marseilles, he was to, for the moment, avoid engagement with the same if they maintained a ‘non-aggressive status’ and remained in port.
The French squadron at Villefranche-sur-Mer was to be kept under surveillance unless it made preparations to emerge from its anchorage; in which case it was to be engaged and destroyed at TFV1’s ‘earliest convenience…’
The salvo bell rang and Campbeltown’s four 5-inch guns barked.
“Two minutes and thirty seconds, sir!”
“Very good.”
Dermot O’Reilly glanced at the green screen of the air search radar repeater on the bulkhead nearby. The tracks of the rounds rocketing towards the French coast were clearly visible each time the aerial swept through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. He hoped six degrees of offset was enough to ensure that most of the metal now plummeting to earth was missing the outskirts of Royan. Inevitably, with such a massive weight of firepower falling in such a restricted area anybody unfortunate enough to be underneath it would already be dead…
Today’s ‘shoot’ was the first of three such exercises.
Later that day Victorious’s Buccaneers, covered by at least four of the carrier’s Sea Vixens would hit targets in and around Bordeaux – which was too far inland to be threatened by even the Kent’s 8-inch rifles – while the gun line moved north to mete out brief, savage warnings to the defenders of La Rochelle and the Ile d'Oléron.
O’Reilly hoped the defenders would see sense and that it would not be necessary to return tomorrow and obliterate them. That said, he would not bat an eyelid if he was ordered to so do.
“Two minutes and fifty seconds, sir!”
The salvo bell rang and Campbeltown, and astern of her, the Perth and the Stirling fired their final broadsides.
“Cease firing!” O’Reilly ordered, knowing that in these sea conditions ten seconds was not long enough for the three ships to safely reload, re-train and fire another salvo. “Cease firing!”
“Three minutes, sir!”
“Train guns fore and aft and secure the gun houses.”
White water was periodically coming over the ship’s bow and the relatively flimsy gun houses – not fully-fledged turrets which would have weighed an awful lot more - accommodating Campbeltown’s main battery rifles were a lot less vulnerable to damage when locked down along the ship’s centreline.
And of course, in weather like this their crews tended to be a lot dryer, also…
“Sound the manoeuvring bell, if you please!”
The three Fletchers of the ‘inshore squadron’ would ride a lot easier once they pointed their sharp prows into the long Atlantic swells but as with everything in life, there was a price to be paid, the three destroyers were going to roll and pitch like barrels as they turned across the wind.
He stepped to the bridge talker, took his handset.
“This is Captain (D). Everybody needs to hang on to something like their life depends on it! I’m about to put the wheel over!”
He waited several seconds.
Then, with a wolfish grin threatening to spread from ear to ear on his bearded, piratical countenance and a glint in his eye he commanded: “Put the wheel over. Full starboard wheel!”
Chapter 41
Tuesday 17th January 1967
Yarralumla, Australian Capital Territories
The Governor-General of Australia was in an unusually testy mood when eventually, he clambered out of his official Rolls-Royce and trudged, still muttering under his breath, into Government House, the somewhat quaint old-fashioned mansion which these days, often seemed like he and his family’s one safe haven.
Whatever else he had been born to be it was not a diplomat!
Having to preside over the State Opening of the Australian Parliament was, by any standard, an honour, especially to an old-fashioned Englishman like him but then, having to listen to those bloody republicans in the Labour Party witter on interminably about what everybody knew was a done deal – specifically, that he was going to be the last non-native Governor-General of this marvellous, beautiful, fascinating and utterly infuriating country – had been very nearly more than body and soul could tolerate.
The only saving grace had been that Marija had not been there to suffer it with him. Although, Jack Griffin was probably right when he said ‘the bastards would have gone easy on that crap’ if his wife had been sitting beside him.
As it was, Peter Christopher had been a little afraid that Sir Robert Menzies, since the turn of the year somewhat hard-pressed by dissenters on his own benches, in the newspapers and virulently, by the ‘loyal opposition’ and their trades union confederates, was going to burst a blood vessel or give vent to a most unseemly outpouring of his self-evident existential angst in the chamber. Fortunately, he had restrained himself.
