Love is Strange (Timeline 10/27/62), page 7
“And now,” the man breathed, his tone less than sanguine, “they want to conquer the Moon.”
“Exactly! How long do you think it’ll take them to blow it up?”
“I think we’ll leave that one for our children to worry about, Margaret.” He gathered his courage and looked into her eyes. And asked the question: “You’d support a radical change of policy, I take it?”
“Yes,” she replied without hesitation. “Emphatically, yes. But we must take our people with us.”
Henry Tomlinson allowed himself time to digest the implications of this caveat before he asked a second, much more important question.
“Would you’d be happy for me to communicate the content of our tete-a-tete to the Prime Minister, Margaret?”
“Henry,” the Angry Widow smiled that smile that came out of nowhere to charm the hardest-hearted of men. “Far be it for me to dictate to the Cabinet Secretary what he may, or may not, communicate to his political master.”
Chapter 8
Monday 25th November, 1963
HMS Ark Royal, 193 miles WSW of Ushant
Vice-Admiral Julian Wemyss Christopher placed the dark-visored grey blue flying helmet on the Chart Room table and looked around at his assembled Flag Staff. None of them had known each other very well when he’d assumed command of the British Pacific Fleet at Hong Kong in last year. In the intervening fourteen months they’d made good – with a vengeance - that particular deficiency. The Fleet Commander implicitly trusted the professional excellence, loyalty and common purpose of all the men gathered around him. If the Chart Room table had been circular rather than rectangular a less pragmatic and hard-headed man than Julian Christopher, might have let his thoughts roam into the mists of former eras and contemplated myths and legends which had no part in this savage new epoch. However, he was not Arthur and the men around the Chart Room table were not mythic knights; they were, however, the steely core of the finest fighting fleet in the World.
The deck under their feet whispered as an aircraft was catapulted into the sky. The carrier was charging into twelve foot swells, periodically thumping into bigger waves at twenty-seven knots as she launched and recovered her fighters.
“Any developments?” Julian Christopher asked. The clumsy flying suit accentuated his tall, angular frame. His grey hair was swept back, his dark eyes questing. His voice was quiet and calm, deadly in its precision. He glanced up at the radar repeater on the aft bulkhead.
Ark Royal and her screening destroyers had moved out ahead of the merchant ships. HMS Belfast and her frigates had fallen in astern of the convoy. Other escorts flirted with the big ships on either wing of the fleet.
“We think we’ve got another Yank SSN on our starboard bow, sir. Lowestoft and Rhyl are trying to herd her to the east. We have at least three major surface units to our west, holding steady at about ninety miles on a bearing of approximately two-seven-five true.”
“Very good.” The Admiral studied the plot. Very little that had happened in the last year had enhanced his long-standing suspicion and disdain for America and all things American. The imbeciles had been buzzing his ships and making mock torpedo runs against his screening anti-submarine frigates for the last eight days. The American’s games had begun forty-eight hours after the new nuclear-powered leviathan-sized super carrier USS Enterprise had replaced the USS Midway as flagship of what the Admiralty called the ‘US Navy’s Western Approaches Squadron’. This ‘Squadron’ in question – officially designated CINCLANT Task Force 27 - had been on station for the last three months, a formidable battle group comprising at any one time at least one big fleet carrier and up to twenty other smaller warships and support vessels screened by two, sometimes as many as three nuclear attack submarines.
Soon after the October War the US Navy had withdrawn the majority of its major surface units to port and subsequently mothballed over fifty percent of its major surface units. This meant that at any one time a significantly high percentage of the USN’s combat ready assets had been wasted in maintaining a presence in the eastern waters of the North Atlantic. Maintaining such a presence was wasteful in terms of the wear and tear on ships and their crews – for every ship on station another would be undergoing repair and replenishment, or training and unavailable for deployment elsewhere – and served no strategic or tactical purpose other than to antagonise America’s former European allies. Given the reduced size of the US surface fleet it spoke volumes for the muddled geo-political thinking of the Kennedy White House; and worryingly, suggested an abysmal appreciation of the likely reaction of those former allies.
Now the idiots were playing war games!
Vice-Admiral Julian Christopher didn’t like leaving his people at a time like this but the needs of the Service came before the needs of any of its servants. Besides, in Sam Gresham, flying his Rear-Admiral’s flag on HMS Belfast, he couldn’t have wished for a better deputy.
He scanned the faces around him.
“Fleet Standing Order Number Seven remains in force until further notice,” he declared with sombre vehemence.
FSO7 specified that if the shadowing USN forces interfered with or in any way impeded the progress of the Fleet or approached within gunnery range of any of the merchant ships, his captains were authorised to use force. Moreover, the level of force that they were authorised to employ was wholly at their discretion short of deploying nuclear weapons. In a few minutes time he would surrender the nuclear prerogative – Arc Light - to Sam Gresham.
He made eye contact with his Flag Captain. Frank Maltravers had taken command of the Ark when she’d docked in Sydney. He’d been an unknown quantity to Julian Christopher but since proved himself to be a rock of a man. A former Fleet Arm pilot he’d been kicking his heels as Naval Attaché in Australia. Like Rear-Admiral Sam Gresham, the Ark’s Captain had enthusiastically signed up to turn the peace time Pacific Fleet into the efficient, war fighting machine they all known it was going to have to become. It helped that they’d been away from home when disaster struck. Or at least, it helped in the sense that they’d been able to view events in Europe and America with more distant, if only partially dispassionate eyes unscarred by the nuclear torch. As soon as the scale of the cataclysm became apparent they’d understood that an ally whose actions had led to the indiscriminate mass destruction of both friends and foes alike, was no friend at all. From that conclusion what flowed next was self evident; a friend so lacking in scruples, and apparently without moral conscience would – sooner or later - as likely consume its friends as its foes unless one stood up to it.
“Look after my Flagship while I’m away, Frank.”
“I’ll do my best not to run her aground in your absence, sir,” the huge, bearded commanding officer of the Ark Royal chuckled.
Julian Christopher half-smiled.
“Until we meet again, gentlemen,” he saluted, and the room returned his salute. “Good hunting!”
Emerging onto the windswept flight deck of the carrier the deck crew ushered Christopher to the awaiting 893 Squadron Sea Vixens. He clambered, lithely for his advancing years, up the ladder and eased himself into the navigator’s empty seat of the leading fighter. Willing hands strapped him in, adjusted the connection to his helmet, and checked his oxygen mask was correctly in place and working. There was a light tap on his helmet, a burst of static over the intercom.
“Ready to go, sir?” The pilot inquired.
Julian Christopher hit the mask switch. “Yes, carry on.”
There was another light tap on his helmet, he looked up and gave the yellow jacketed crewman a thumbs up signal. The long, polished Perspex cockpit swung down over him and locked into place.
The Sea Vixen was moving, its folded wings swinging down to the horizontal. The locking mechanisms clicked through the whole airframe, or so it seemed. The fighter jerked as the starboard catapult head dragged it forward. The twenty ton interceptor rocked on its landing gear, reverberating with the idling fury of is twin Rolls-Royce Avon Mk 208 turbojets. Glancing across to his left Christopher could just make out the twin-boom tail of his fighter’s wingman dragging onto the port catapult.
Suddenly the Avons cycled up, roaring. The nose of the fighter crouched down like a sprinter setting in his blocks before a sprint.
Christopher took a deep breath.
The next second he was pressed back into his seat as if a giant’s foot was resting on his chest. He glimpsed the grey deck race past, and then there were only the storm-tossed waters of the Bay of Biscay under the wings and the Sea Vixen was climbing steeply like a bat out of Hell. He tried to look over his shoulder to find Ark Royal, all he saw was an empty ocean.
“Pilot to passenger, are you comfortable, sir.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“We’re heading up to angels three-five for a look around before we turn for our destination, sir. Out.”
Christopher sat back to enjoy the flight.
He’d sat in the observer’s seat of a Swordfish once; that was over twenty years ago, in the Mediterranean. The Stringbag had rolled and tottered down the deck of the old Illustrious so slowly that he’d been convinced the aircraft would fall straight over the bow into the sea. But it hadn’t, it had floated into the air and slowly, surely drawn ahead of the carrier. They’d arrived at Malta after dark in the middle of an air raid, landed by the glow of the distant searchlights and the flash of bombs in the night. Compared to a Swordfish a de Havilland Sea Vixen was like something out of a Buck Rogers or a Flash Gordon cartoon. Twenty years ago he’d thought trundling off the Illustrious at sixty miles an hour was the height of scientific military technology and now here he was riding six miles high in a chariot of the gods.
He’d wondered how he’d feel about going home. The country he’d left fifteen months ago to assume command of the British Pacific Fleet at Hong Kong no longer existed. The war had come and gone so fast that few of his ships had even had time to raise steam, let alone contemplate joining the fight. In the days after the war he’d organised his ships into three battle groups based around his carriers; Ark Royal, Hermes and Ocean and sailed north into the Sea of Japan where the US 7th Fleet was known to be assisting the civilian authorities deal with the refugees from the strikes on the Sapporo and Sendai areas. The Hermes Battle Group had proceeded as far north as the Inland Sea before the Americans made it clear they didn’t want the Royal Navy trespassing in its waters. When the 7th Fleet had refused an offer to co-ordinate fleet supply train activities, Christopher, in the absence of orders from Fleet Command in the United Kingdom had reluctantly ordered his ships to sail for Australia.
It was in Australia that Christopher had learned the true dimensions of the cataclysm wrought across huge swaths of the Northern Hemisphere and first realised that potentially his ships were all that stood between his country and despair. He’d drawn up the first planning draft of what later became Operation Manna in Sydney on Christmas Eve last year. By then it was obvious that Britain’s closest military ally regarded the Pacific as an American ocean. Moreover, for unspecified reasons of ‘continental security’ the Panama Canal had been closed to all ‘armed vessels’ other than US Navy warships. The world was in shock, the nuclear genie was out of the bottle and the accepted rules of the game of international realpolitik no longer applied. In the United Kingdom nobody had the time or the inclination to think beyond the immediate challenge of surviving the brutal winter clamping down over Northern Europe as if it was the frigid harbinger of a new ice age.
The long range strategic maritime trade routes of the world had been fractured and the European wealth that had created and sustained those now fractured trade routes was lost. Worse, the old balance of power had been eliminated. Everywhere insurgency and civil war threatened. India and Pakistan’s border wars had reignited, South East Asia was literally on fire, in South America Chile and the Argentine teetered on the edge of war. The story was the same from Africa to the Middle East to the Manchurian hinterland. The old world order was broken and nobody knew how much more blood would be spilled before order was restored. Or, if order might ever be restored.
Operation Manna would not have been possible without the backing of the Australian and New Zealand governments, neither of whom wanted to find themselves friendless upon the southern extremities of the new American maritime dominion.
To Julian Christopher the geopolitical nightmare in which the old country – what was left of it – found itself was simply expressed; until such time as the Royal Navy retained mastery of the Mediterranean and reopened its trade routes to what had been the Empire, and was now more or less ‘the Commonwealth’, its survival depended almost entirely on reopening and sustaining its trans Australasian and South Atlantic sinews of commerce. In the long term a failure to re-establish the mastery of the Mediterranean or to re-establish both two key oceanic supply lines would, literally, be the death of his country.
The immediate priority was to ensure that in the United Kingdom as many people as possible survived this coming winter. Afterwards, he’d turn his mind to the Mediterranean hoping in the meantime that no new calamity befell British arms in those most problematic of waters.
He squinted at the new blips on the radar screen by his right hand.
“Passenger to Pilot. What am I seeing on my screen?”
“That will be the Enterprise Battle Group’s CAP, sir. Coming up to investigate us, sir. ETA within visual range in about three minutes.”
“Thank you. Out.”
The USN had pulled out of Holy Loch immediately after the cataclysm and probably regretted it ever since. The latest intelligence was that CINCLANT was looking for forward bases in Ireland or the French Biscay ports. Officially, the Irish government hadn’t made up its mind yet. The French, to their credit, had warned that any American vessel approaching their shores would be fired upon. No formal request for base facilities had been placed before the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration headed by Prime Minister Edward Heath. The presence of a powerful US Navy battle group in the Western Approaches almost but not quite barring the path of the first Operation Manna convoy was an incredibly clumsy, ill-considered provocation. A crass reminder to its old ‘special ally’ that it was Washington that was calling the shots.
Hubris was the downfall of every great empire.
Hubris was what blinded great men to reality.
The aircraft and the nuclear attack submarines of the Enterprise Battle Group were playing war games but the British Pacific Fleet was not playing games with anyone. It was odd that having committed the unthinkable – unleashing thermonuclear Hell across the northern hemisphere – the Americans seemed incapable of actually thinking the unthinkable. That his former allies complacently assumed that the survivors would meekly go back to ‘business as normal’ in the aftermath seemed, to Julian Christopher, so surreal that it defied belief. Likewise, he could hardly imagine how perturbed the US Navy would be to discover that the primary objective of the Atlantic War Plan developed by Christopher’s staff – and currently before the Prime Minister - assumed that the ‘forwardly deployed battle group’ of CINCLANT Command would be the first target of the United Kingdom Defence Forces in any future war. Although the Enterprise Battle Group was, on paper, more than a match for the leading squadrons of Christopher’s fragmented Pacific Fleet, he’d never been a man who placed much faith in ‘paper facts’.
Christopher had been a student of American tactical and strategic naval doctrine for two decades. The USN had ended the 1945 war with more ships than it had men to man them and successive US administrations had opted to save money by putting new technology into old hulls instead of building new ships from the keel up. The Americans had, quite reasonably, decided that its preponderance of naval air power and its overwhelming superiority in nuclear submarines spelled ‘victory’ in any conceivable future conflict. It was a policy designed for the world in which it had been made; not the new post October War world. In the old world the US Navy had enjoyed a massive technological and firepower advantage over any likely foe and the next most capable navy on Earth, the Royal Navy, was on its side. While the US Navy remained – on paper – invincible, other than in its undersea fleet its margin of superiority had been significantly eroded by the mothballing of so many of its surface units purely to save money, over the Royal Navy was hugely reduced. Moreover, the Atlantic War Plan didn’t envisage a confrontation with the USN anywhere other than in British waters beneath an umbrella of land-based RAF aircraft.
Put bluntly, any plan which proposed engaging the USN in deep water beyond the effective reach of one’s own air cover amounted to a suicide note. This was why if it came to it the Atlantic War Plan foresaw drawing a single battle group – like that based around the USS Enterprise – relatively close to shore and hitting it with everything including the kitchen sink short of nuclear weapons...
“Pilot to passenger. We have company on our starboard side, sir. Two F4s coming in to eyeball us.”
“I see them.” The McDonnell Douglas Phantoms were big elegant, businesslike beasts. Two great white sharks of the sky in close formation, rising to meet the two Sea Vixens.
“These chaps are just trying to be friendly, sir.” The Pilot said quickly. “They’ve switched off their radars and they’re broadcasting old-fashioned NATO IFF codes like they’re going out of fashion.”
“What’s our combat status?”
“Hot and ready, sir.”
“Very good.”
The leading Phantom drifted in until it was level with Christopher’s Sea Vixen, and little more than thirty yards away, wingtip to wingtip. The pilot raised his left hand, waved. Appeared to salute. Before he could stop himself Julian Christopher had returned the gestures. The Phantoms flew in company for about thirty seconds, waggled their wings and broke away in a long, slow, shallow turn to the south west. There had been talk of buying Phantoms for the Navy’s proposed new fleet carriers but somehow, Christopher didn’t think that was going to happen now.
