New England 07 - The Lines of Laredo, page 9
Triple Alliance…
Now, there was another joke!
There had always been four ‘partners’ in the alliance: Nuevo-Granada-Mexico, Cuba, Hispaniola and Santo Domingo. Moreover, there were volunteer battalions, regiments and even a couple of brigades of Salvadorian, Guatemalan, and Panamanian troops actually fighting on the ground in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, and over a thousand Colombian infantrymen manning emplacements on the Rio Grande Line.
While he waited, attempting to veil his ill temper from his Cuban subordinates he gazed, seemingly lost in thought at El Rey Ferdinand II, the name ship of the ill-begotten class of ‘small’ battleships which formed the backbone of the Cuban and Hispanic lines of battle.
The ‘Ferdinands’ – two of which also served in the Hispanic Armada – were a truncated, fifty-year-old failed capital ship experiment. Five of them had been transferred to Cuban and Dominican service in the 1940s. a sixth, manned by a skeleton ‘transfer crew’ and in a poor state of repair after years rusting in the Reserve, had sunk in a storm in mid-Atlantic, which said everything one needed to know about the sea-keeping capabilities of the class.
The ‘Ferdinands’ were mightily odd ships ordered by the Armada Española back in the 1920s, presumably, to convince itself that it was still the navy of a first-rate power, rather than any part of a coherent strategic grand design. Instead of building two or three vessels which were a match for the latest Royal Navy capital ships – the Spanish Government, then as now bankrupt – somebody had had the bright idea of building a dozen smaller, cheaper, slower, poorly armoured big gun ships. In the event, the Spanish had been unable to fund the procurement of the planned twelve vessels it had decided it needed, or two or three thirty-thousand-ton behemoths which might actually have been capable of trading broadsides with the British or German capital ship of the day.
The result of this parsimonious, muddled thinking born of unrealistic grandiloquent dreams of sustaining an empire that no longer existed other than in the fevered imaginings of the Hapsburg monarchs of Old Spain, had been the painfully slow construction of the six ‘small battleships’ of the El Rey Ferdinand II class which had come into commission between 1926 and 1937.
Nobody believed that the expenditure of nearly a hundred million silver pesetas had been a good investment. Many of the great cities of Old Spain still lacked modern hospitals or half-way safe tape water, or city-wide sewers.
Tellingly, only one of the vessels had ever been in commission in the Armada Española at any one time, the others having been consigned almost immediately to the reserve, moored, rusting at Cartagena or Ferrol in a state of semi-permanent de-activation, a fate that awaited the five surviving ships after their ‘gifting’ – a cost-saving measure - to the former Caribbean colonies between 1943 and 1948.
At around sixteen thousand tons fully loaded the Ferdinands were only marginally more heavily armoured, and then only along the waterline, than modern British, German and Japanese heavy cruisers, all of which had significantly thicker and more extensive deck protection, and a far superior underwater layout in terms of the placement of machinery and the blast gaps between armoured bulkheads. Additionally, the Ferdinands were notoriously bad sea boats. Bizarrely, although designed to have comparable stability to larger foreign ‘ships of the line’, they had a very low metacentric height – just 1.5 metres when fully loaded – combined with around four-and-a-half metres of freeboard amidships at that displacement. This meant the class was ‘wet’ in almost any sea state, and if there was any damage beneath the waterline it was only a – perilously short – matter of time before the ship listed heavily, and capsized.
Basically, too many bad compromises had been made in the design of the Ferdinands to arrive at hulls capable of mounting eight 12-inch rifles in four twin turrets in ships which would have been better suited to a main battery of perhaps, six, or ideally, just four such rifles. The Ferdinand II, the lead ship of the class, had been completed with Whitworth Mark III 50-calibre patent rifles installed; in the later ships, driven by the crying need to save every single silver peseta, inferior Ferrol Naval Arsenal licenced ‘lower bursting tolerance’ Whitworth Mark VI 48-calibre guns had been installed.
Another curiosity was that the arrangement of the four turrets had reverted to the inefficient layout of the first all big-gun battleships of thirty years before. One main turret was mounted forward, another aft, with two amidships turrets, offset to port and starboard ahead of and behind the ship’s single funnel meaning that the vessels could never deploy their full main battery against a single target.
A secondary armament of twenty 4-inch casemate mounted, and therefore, low-elevation guns had been provided for close range but not anti-aircraft defence. While this latter omission was not unreasonable back in the early 1920s when the ships were designed; in the modern age it was unforgivable that nothing had been done to rectify this glaring deficiency other than to mount a few machine guns on the main deck, and on top of the four 12-inch turrets.
To be fair, the Ferdinands’ shortcomings had been recognised long before their keels kissed the water; just not by the Spanish. The compromises necessitated by the requirement to carry so many big guns on such a relatively small hull, meant that the addition of any topweight had a potentially critical negative effect on general stability. In much bigger ships the Royal Navy and the Kaiserliche Marine had modernised their first-generation – twenty-five to thirty thousand ton - battleships by removing casemate mounted secondary armaments and using the weight saved to install ELDAR aerials as high as possible in the enlarged bridge superstructures constructed to accommodate the latest command and control technologies, and developed air defence systems that clustered smaller, quick firing dual-purpose weaponry above the level of the weather deck.
However, the Ferdinand’s were unsuitable for this kind of expensive, radical re-design; thus, the Armada Española, with no other option, had accepted the ongoing constraint of local fire control – that is, each main battery turret had its own optical equipment and was directed by its commander – and abdicated responsibility for providing the ships with any meaningful anti-aircraft capability, which it was blithely assumed, would be ‘looked after’ by ‘escorting’ vessels.
Therefore, the Ferdinands still had their original tripod masts above a minimalist bridge superstructure, originally open to the elements but partially enclosed in subsequent minor refits. Lacking centralised main battery fire control, they were – a few light machine guns apart – utterly bereft of air defences.
It was positively…negligent.
Exacerbating the situation given the low freeboard of the Ferdinands, a gun captain sitting in a turret at deck level could not even see his target until it was virtually close enough to throw a rock at it! Any enemy ship coming across one of the Ferdinands could simply stand-off at more or less point-blank range and pummel it into submission. Although a chance hit by one of the battleship’s eight-hundred-and-fifty-pound shells might wreak havoc; this would be very much an unlucky accident and as such, for battle planning purposes, it could be disregarded.
Gravina had to force himself not to glare at the useless pile of scrap moored nearby his flagship.
The big guns of several of the Ferdinands had been employed in support of the landings in the eastern Gulf, albeit with varying degrees of success. Even when fall of shot was regularly corrected by spotter planes, the rate of fire and the wide dispersal of most broadsides made it virtually impossible to land a given shell within hundreds of yards of its target. Clearly, the main batteries of the Ferdinands had never, or at least not since their acceptance trials forty to fifty years ago, been calibrated; that is, the barrels of the four twin turrets properly aligned to guarantee a close grouping of the ship’s fall of shot.
Amateurs…
It was embarrassing…
He was just glad most of the Kaiserliche Marine men had gone back to Germany now; having to put up with their smug condescension would have been the final straw!
The Ferdinands’ antique design philosophy had had one last deleterious consequence. Granted, the last two ships completed had been equipped with turbines, albeit cranky, Valencia Naval Dockyard models, but El Rey Ferdinand II and the other two surviving ships of the class still had their original triple-expansion reciprocating engines. This, allied to the vessels’ coal-fired boilers meant that the machinery sets of the Ferdinands, produced only about one-seventh of the shaft horsepower of a modern light cruiser. Optimistically specified to steam at 21.5 knots, none of the Ferdinands had managed to sustain 20.5 when brand new, and nowadays, struggled to maintain a speed of around 15 or 16 knots for more than an hour or so; and even to do this they had to burn prodigious quantities of coal, greatly reducing their operating range at this, maximum speed, to less than fifteen hundred miles.
Gravina tried to remind himself that it was every commander’s duty to try to be positive.
To look on the bright side of things…
The Ferdinands, and most of the other big ships of Mexico’s allies, did actually share a single one low-technology advantage. In the absence of modern systems to run, monitor and maintain, like for example ELDAR, or communications kit that could talk securely to anybody in the World, or fragile high-pressure steam and hydraulic equipment requiring constant care and attention, or the need to run galleys that were capable of serving men more than just gruel, hard tack and salted meat, or any need for deck crews and machinery to operate seaplanes, or the small army of men needed to operate and in action, ensure that ammunition was continuously fed to the clusters of upper deck anti-aircraft guns of modern warships; the Ferdinands could be crewed by around eight hundred men – the majority relatively unskilled – about half the war complement of a modern battleship.
Unskilled, land-lubberly cannon fodder was the one thing Mexico’s allies had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of!
Gravina tried very hard to find something positive to focus upon.
At least El Rey Ferdinand II was not still wearing her peacetime livery. Battleship grey was a lot better than the brilliant white she had boasted at the start of the war. Now, if only I could get the bloody Cubans to adopt the dazzle camouflage now worn as standard by the Armada de Nuevo Granada!
Both Hispanic Ferdinands, the newly repaired – she had almost sunk under tow to Guantanamo Bay from Little Inagua in April – Reina Eugenie and the Alphonse XII were still with the bombardment fleet in the Eastern Gulf of Spain, and the re-commissioned fifth surviving sister ship, the San Juan, crewed by Dominicans, was guard ship at Kingston, Jamaica. The San Juan had been selected for this particular duty because the ship was in such a poor structural and mechanical condition that harbour defence – moored in shallow water in case her pumps failed and she sank - was practically all she was fit for.
The crew of the Valkyrie had moored to a buoy about fifty yards off the flagship’s port quarter. The Felipe II’s captain’s barge chugged asthmatically to meet her and to collect her passengers.
He saw Felipe de Santa Anna clamber into the boat and trotted down to the main deck to greet his arrival on board, recollecting that the High Commander of the Forces of the Triple Alliance had been, superficially and briefly, impressed by the ships of the Combined Fleet, until Gravina had put him right.
Also present in Guantanamo Bay was the nine-thousand-ton Cuban armoured cruiser Santa Ana, named for one of the Commander-in-Chief’s long dead ancestors, so long dead that he did not bear the family’s contemporary name Santa Anna, as opposed to the old-fashioned Ana, still used by distant members of the clan back in Old Spain.
There were several modern German and Mexican-built destroyers in the roads, each looking what they were, hard-hitting greyhounds of the seas. However, they were out-numbered by Cuban and Dominican torpedo boats, three or four-stack eight-hundred-ton throwbacks, lightly gunned and wet in any seaway, half of them still coal-burning. The fleet ‘train’ comprised half-a-dozen tramp steamers seized for Government service, there were no oilers but there were several coaling ships.
The thirty-year-old La Romana, the Ferrol Naval Arsenal’s spectacularly botched attempt to copy the British Hero class – the name ship of the class of which the Achilles, which had put up such a magnificent fight in the Battle of the Windward Passage had been the last survivor – stood out among the ironclads and monitors around her. Transferred to the Dominicans in the late 1960s, La Romana’s all-rivetted design had added so much weight to her hull that one of her four twin 6-inch turrets had had to be removed, as had any other armament heavier than a machine gun, to preserve her stability. Throughout her chequered career, the cruiser had suffered ongoing machinery problems and rarely spent more than month or so at sea in any given year.
Perhaps, one ship that said more about the Triple Alliance’s naval aspirations than any other was the Tomás de Torquemada, the twin-stack, black smoke-belching twenty-five-thousand-ton dinosaur flagship of the Santo Domingo Navy.
Gravina had been under the impression that the old monster had been so badly neglected, that she had capsized at anchor years ago. The Torquemada not so much carved through the waves as shouldered them aside, riding so low in the water it sometimes seemed that she was part-submerged every time her ram-shaped prow met a new wave.
She had been the German-built, Turkish Sultan Osman I, launched as long ago as June, 1923, conceived by the Ottomans in Constantinople as the ultimate floating ‘guardian of the Bosphorus’, a giant, unsinkable armoured raft mounting the two biggest naval rifles ever taken to sea, two of the ten Kaiserliche Marine Experimentelle Waffeneinrichtung (the Imperial Navy’s Experimental Gun Establishment at Stettin) guns planned to be incorporated in the German Empire’s coastal fortification program designed to prevent an enemy fleet, specifically the British, from ever again forcing entry into and roaming the Baltic at will, as had happened in 1865.
The guns, 18.3-inch 45-calibre, one hundred-and-fifty-ton, sixty feet-long monsters, one housed in a turret forward, the other aft, fired a one-and-a-half-ton shell with a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bursting charge at a muzzle velocity of three-quarters of a mile a second. In tests, the Kaiserliche Marine had conclusively demonstrated that armour-piercing rounds fired from these barrels – which had a maximum range of about twenty-three miles - could penetrate the latest (in 1925) 12-inch-thick Krupp patent cemented plate – the thickest protection carried by any battleship of any navy, afloat – up to a striking angle of forty-three degrees at a range of nearly fourteen miles.
Back in 1929, as the Sultan Osman I was approaching completion, Russian objections during a brief period of Russo-German rapprochement, had intervened to prevent the delivery of the ship to Constantinople; a diplomatic slap in the face that had contributed to decades of coolness in German-Ottoman relations. The ship had been sold to the Swedes, who moored it at Stockholm, then off Gotland and finally at Malmo as a floating gun battery. When the hulk was sold on, for little more than its scrap value to Santo Domingo in 1963, nobody had actually expected the derelict to survive the Atlantic crossing under tow. Thereafter, for many years it had been used as a headquarters ship, an accommodation barge and latterly, legend had it, been somewhat rejuvenated as a gunnery training school. All the rumours that the old scow had been refitted for operations in the open ocean had been universally decried as nonsense, right up until the moment she had steamed, very ponderously, into Guantanamo Bay to join the Combined Fleet.
General of the Army of New Spain, Minister of Defence Felipe de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, climbed the gangway and stepped onto the deck of the Armada de Cuba Ship El Rey Felipe II, crisply returning the salutes of the battleship’s captain, and Gravina.
Diplomatically, he turned to the Cuban officer at his countryman’s side.
“An impressive fleet, Comodoro,” he said, his tone that of a man who honestly believed it. “Most impressive!”
It was some minutes before Gravina could separate the man the people on the streets of the allied powers regarded as a cross between a reincarnation of Hernan Cortez and the Messiah, from all the Cuban officers who wanted to be introduced to him.
However, eventually they were alone in Gravina’s stateroom.
“The English bombed San Juan, and shelled Ponce and Salinas on the south coast of Santo Domingo overnight,” Gravina reported cursorily, knowing his superior already knew this.
He collected his wits.
“There are heavy casualties in San Juan and Ponce, many hundreds dead and injured. There were only a few persons killed in Salinas. When the Dominicans attempted to launch air attacks on the ships responsible, they were met by a large force of scouts and driven off with heavy losses; they returned to their main field east of Ponce to discover that in their absence the base had been destroyed by a massive air attack.”
Santa Anna took this stoically.
He sniffed.
“Well, at least we know where the English fleet is now, my friend!”
Chapter 10
Saturday 4th November
HMS Princess Royal, 72 miles SSE of Rojo Cabo
Bombardment Group One (BG-1), the heavy cruisers Minotaur and Antrim with two picket destroyers had steamed within eight miles of the coast to shell the second largest city on the island.
Meanwhile, BG-2, the two 6-inch gunned light cruisers Gambia and Fiji, each with a destroyer in harness had moved into within five miles of the coast to attack Salinas.
Each attack had lasted just seven minutes and then the cruisers had retired out to sea at twenty-eight knots, steering due south for over an hour before turning onto a course to rendezvous with the flagship, the Perseus, the light cruiser Persephone and the other five destroyers of Task Force 5.2, to the south west.
