New England 11 - Rising Sun, page 9
In that connection, the painful decision not to reinforce the horribly out-matched and vulnerable ABDP Squadron in the Java Sea, notwithstanding the squeals of anguish back in London and – incidentally – from the Hague and Lisbon had been a no brainer. The political cost of losing more Australian-crewed ships defending islands the Dutch had never properly garrisoned, and generally misruled for generations was less than strategically optimal but the priority was now had to be the defence of Australasia and India, not the Spice Islands, the majority of which, frankly, the Japanese were welcome to. Timor was a different matter but that was a conundrum wrapped up in the enigma that was German colonial policy, along with a score of other strategically problematic places, including the Caroline Islands, the whole Bismarck Sea, New Guinea, Toga and Samoa. In fact, if one was being cruelly realistic, the role of the ABDP Squadron was no more or less than to trick the Japanese into believing that the former European colonial powers still thought the East Indies were worth fighting over, and therefore, worth conquering and garrisoning with all the wasted manpower, naval resources and treasure that such a campaign would tie down, which one day – possibly soon - would be sorely needed elsewhere.
For reasons best known to themselves, flying in the face of the evidence, the Dutch remained under the stubbornly-held impression that the Royal Navy had some kind of sacred obligation to stand by them in the East Indies; notwithstanding, they took great umbrage when it was pointed out to them that this had not been their reciprocal stance over the defence of Malaya or Singapore. Basically, the Allies were not in accord over the tactical, or the strategic significance of the Malay Barrier – broadly speaking the East Indies from Sumatra to the Solomons – and somebody in Whitehall ought to have had the gall, and the native unction, to tell the Dutch, and the Portuguese, that the game was up. As it was, it was hardly inexplicable that the prevalent mood in Australia, London and around the C-in-C’s dining table at his still bullet-scarred official residence in Honolulu, was one of increasing irritation, rather than sympathy for the plight of the pig-headed ‘Hollanders’. And that had been before the news reached Oahu that the Temeraire had been crippled by two bomb hits participating in a reckless, criminally inept Dutch-inspired sortie into the Makassar Strait!
Subsequently, the well-received news that at least Lord Clive – rescued from his latest Quixotic attempt to rally the Dutch - was now well on his way to safety in Western Australia, had done little to lighten Henry Darby’s mood. Personally, much though he had applauded Clive’s first mission to Batavia in the name of making one last attempt to persuade the Dutch to see reason, even if the whole affair would probably end with him being scapegoated for the abject failure of British colonial policy in the Far East, he had been less impressed by his two recent adventures and the possibility that he might by some misfortune fall into enemy hands. Things were going badly enough as it was without handing the Japanese a cheap propaganda triumph.
Darby walked to the northern end of Gun Wharf and gazed across the water to Drake Island where the battleship Lion and the heavy cruiser Edgar were moored. Through the heat haze he could just make out the slab-sided bulk of the Colossus and the tall ELDAR masts of the guided missile cruiser Hyperion moored on the wharves facing the North Channel.
HMS Swordsman was due to dock that night; that would be a blessed relief for the submarine’s civilian passengers, unwittingly trapped on board for the duration of OPERATION PRESTIGE and only now returning to civilisation. While he hoped he was not going to have to spend the next week smoothing ruffled feathers, he was looking forward to hearing Ben Young’s – Swordsman’s skipper’s – account of how he had kept the peace on his boat when he broke the news to his unsuspecting ‘guests’ that they were on a war patrol.
He was still wool-gathering when a car drew up nearby.
“Ah, I thought I might find you here, sir!”
Captain Nigel Birch, the Fleet Operations Officer (Intelligence and Plans), approached his boss, grinning broadly.
“It looks like the Japs are going to try to simultaneously gobble up Java and the Solomons after all!” He announced cheerfully.
“They might have the shipping for that but do they have the infantry, Nigel?”
“No,” Birch replied.
Henry Darby thought about it.
“I’m not convinced,” he admitted. “Convince me.”
“Fair enough,” the younger man shrugged, a gesture that had – given he had lost an arm early in his career – every right to be a lot less emphatic than he made it. “Neither am I, actually. Convinced, that is,” Birch confessed, philosophical as ever about the vagaries of his world as he struggled to get inside the minds of their enemies. “I was hoping chatting to you might help clarify the grey areas. The Japs have naval supremacy in the South West Pacific all the way east and south east to the Coral Sea. It would make much more sense if they were planning a limited surgical operation to sever our lines of communication with Australasia, say by by-passing the Solomons and going for New Caledonia, or a raid on Fiji, just to put the cat among the pigeons, as it were?”
The two men stood side by side, peering into the haze, deep in thought.
“So, who is saying that the Solomons are on the agenda?” Darby asked idly, his mind turning around the possibilities.
“Signals, traffic analysis, the IJN’s ongoing re-arranging of the deck chairs as the ships of the Combined Fleet emerge from dry dock. They’re all indicative factors.”
Henry Darby suppressed a groan.
In analysing the value of any intelligence assessment emanating from Fleet Headquarters in England, he and his colleagues in the Sandwich Islands had soon come to realise that the Admiralty – despite the evidence of the maps – really did not begin to understand the sheer vastness of the Pacific. The people at home thought the Atlantic was wide; the Pacific was twice as wide…and more.
Nothing happened quickly over the immense tracts of ocean involved in the Pacific; the only way to plan major operations was to incorporate lead times which, in the North Atlantic, and certainly in the Mediterranean seemed absurdly overlong, and cautious in the extreme. The huge distances involved meant that no major operation was viable without first sorting out and in most cases, pre-positioning a fleet train, oilers, general stores and ammunition ships, none of which could steam anywhere as near as fast or for so long as any of the warships they were there to support. Therefore, it was no use reacting to a confirmed Japanese move because by then it was already too late. To effectively counter, or better still, defeat the enemy, the ships of the Pacific Fleet had to know, or if not know, then have a general sense of where exactly, the enemy might be on any given day ten, fifteen or twenty days – ideally longer - in advance.
Intelligence about what was going to happen in Java in even a fortnight’s time was useless; Batavia was over six-and-a-half thousand miles from the Pearl Lagoon!
The Japanese could have Java, and the rest of the Dutch East Indies, in many ways that simplified the strategic picture and reduced possible future diversions of scarce shipping and other resources from more important sectors. On the other hand, if the Japanese really planned to invade part, or all of the Solomon Islands archipelago that was a thing that it might be possible to plan for, assuming it did not happen in the next four weeks, otherwise, regardless of the strategic significance of those islands distance made it impossible to do much about it. Again, if the Japanese objective was to burst past the ‘Malay Barrier’ they were to raid or to land troops on the Australasian continent, that was a thing that could, theoretically, be countered. There were troops, modest but significant air forces and a number of warships in Australian ports which might be available for spoiling operations in a matter of days, not weeks.
The trouble was that if the enemy did the most aggressively pragmatic thing to directly alter the strategic calculus in the Pacific, that is, to employ his greater combat power – everywhere east of the Caroline Islands to seize New Caledonia and at a stroke contest command of the Coral Sea and threaten the entire eastern coast of Australia, cutting in the process the umbilical supply cord to the Sandwich Islands the long way around the Antipodes and conceivably, that around Cape Horn also…all bets were off.
That, of course, was the worst case analysis.
Nightmare upon nightmare...
The Pacific Fleet was not, and could not be strong everywhere; actually, if the Japanese threw everything they had at Oahu, it was touch and go whether the Sandwich islands could be held. That was the measure of the state of the Pacific Fleet, the nub as it were, of the strategic balance of power in the theatre.
Not that Henry Darby thought the enemy would be that rash; a second strike at the Pearl lagoon would be a real ‘bet the house on red thirteen’ adventure and having been repulsed once, he doubted the Japanese would risk a second potentially disastrous rebuff. And in any event, the man he worked for was not of a disposition to placidly sit on his hands waiting for His Majesty’s foes to call the next shot.
If by hook or by crook, the Empire of Japan’s next move could be reliably predicted, then it might, just, be possible to frustrate it. Just because the Pacific Fleet had adopted a quasi-defensive posture that did not mean its big ships were going to sit out the next few months swinging around their chains!
“So, what do you think the Japs are up to, Nigel?” He asked the Fleet Intelligence Officer as the two men began to walk down the quayside back towards the Command Centre.
“Well, as you know, my people think that if the Japs are thinking logically, they would call a halt, consolidate what they’ve got and concentrate on exploiting their newly seized resources to build up their rather disjointed war economy. Rationally, that would involve a drawdown of forces in Manchuria to garrison their new South East Asia Co-Prosperity Zone. Again, if they were thinking logically, they might even consider drawing in their horns and abandoning a lot of the outer, indefensible islands and atolls they’ve acquired over the years. They’d also try to draw the Russians into an alliance of some kind to eliminate the threat to their rear areas, but,” Nigel Birch grinned, “I don’t think they’ll do any of that because they still think they’ve got us on the run. Oh, and honour demands they avenge the insult of OPERATION PRESTIGE, regardless of whether it exacerbates their existing strategic over-stretch.”
Neither man understood how it could be that nobody in Tokyo seemed to be applying fundamental staff college axioms to the conduct of the war.
“Do we think the Japs view Java as a jumping off base for an invasion of Australia?” Henry Darby asked rhetorically.
“Possibly. Yes. But only after they’ve secured what they probably see as their open left flank, that’s why I keep coming back to the Solomons, but,” Nigel Birch rationalised, “only after the IJN feels it has avenged the humiliation of the Battle of the Sandwich Islands.”
“You know that sounds cock-eyed, Nigel?”
“I didn’t say I thought it was sound strategic sense; it’s just that it occurs to me that grabbing a couple of islands in the Solomons would not in any way avenge the insult to the Emperor’s honour, and all that stuff, sir. So, the odds are that they do that, the Solomons operation to threaten New Caledonia, while holding back the bulk of their forces, keeping them in being, as it were, for some as yet unspecified ‘revenge’ mission later in the year.”
Darby dragged his eyes away from the big ships across the channel and the pair of Goshawks coming in to land on Drake Island.
“New Caledonia?” He asked distractedly.
“If you twisted my arm,” the Fleet Operations officer guffawed, “I’d plump for the Solomons, that would threaten us in the Coral Sea and threaten New Caledonia; with plenty of room for the Combined Fleet to manoeuvre and potentially the opportunity to raid Brisbane, or Nouméa on New Caledonia, or if they really want to go for broke, maybe, a raid on Auckland.”
All of which sent a cold shiver down Henry Darby’s spine.
Chapter 13
The Presidio
San Francisco
California
The view across the Golden Gate Strait was an awesome thing, Isabella decided, standing on the ancient, crumbling ramparts of the old Mexican fort. Of the carnage and devastation wrought during the British assault on it in the autumn little was to be seen. Scaffolding propped up the most damaged walls, the dead had been buried within days and the maimed carried down to the Hospital Ship Linnaeus, a great, white hulk of a vessel which had entered the bay within days of the invasion, and was still anchored many months later at Hunter’s Point, serving as the new colony’s principle general and surgical hospital.
They said it had taken the invaders over a month to make safe the last of their pernicious lurking, unexploded ‘booby-trap’ bombs here at the Presidio and in and around the small naval dockyard. There were still signs posted on buildings and nailed to trees picturing the hideous devices and warning readers not to approach, under any circumstances within thirty feet, about nine metres, if they discovered one of them. Apparently, a Royal Navy clearance team had spent nearly a week surveying every inch of the Hacienda Vallejo estate just to be on the ‘safe side’, prior to the Mexican delegation’s arrival.
It was such a clear day that Isabella could see all the way past Richardson Bay, the air only minutely fouled by the smoke rising from the cook fires of the ramshackle log cabins and hovels of Sausalito and the huge work camp she had been told had been set up at a place called San Quentin a little farther to the north east beyond the headland on the other side of the bay. To her right, Alcatraz Island – where in the nineteenth century at least two Governors of Alto California had exiled political opponents – stood stark and menacing, the cold, racing tidal waters of the bay lapping and scouring at its rocky shores.
Isabella and her father had not been so much surprised, as astonished by the level of activity in both the southern and northern bays and as if to emphasise this, in the distance the foreshortened form of a large, grey warship emerged from the rapidly dissolving haze out to sea.
“That will be the Culloden,” Major General John Pope, the Royal Engineer who was the acting Governor of the San Francisco Development Zone. “She was in dockyard hands at Norfolk at the time our unfortunate contretemps broke out last year. I think they sent her straight out here via Cape Horn because she’s scheduled to carry on working up, and no doubt, exercising with other ships destined for the Pearl Lagoon in the coming weeks.
Anchored off Alameda Island, Isabella could count at least five more warships, destroyers and what she guessed was another cruiser, that was forgetting about the patrol boats, some of them quite large and the giant floating dry dock which had, she had learned yesterday, followed the San Patricio into the bay while she and her Papa were dining on board the Athabaskan. The massive vessel dwarfed the heavy repair ship HMS Tonbridge, moored nearby at Hunter’s Point. Onshore, the sites of two very large and other smaller, dry – or graving docks – were being excavated on the western coastline of the southern bay and apocryphally, others were also planned in the far, hazy northern reach of the great natural anchorage. Farther to the south east she could see two dredgers working to deepen and widen the navigable channel. If this was not impressive enough, as the heat began to blur the air to the east, she could make out three distinct settlement areas, vast tented camps and ant-like darker dots, vehicles moving, and skeletal cranes swinging above whole estates of regimented, wood-framed cabins and numerous larger buildings.
John Pope, the man project managing the resources pouring into San Francisco, an engineer who had cut his teeth building railways in India in his youth with features burnished by the glare of the sun in countless foreign places since, wore the burden of his responsibilities with affable optimism. Somehow, he managed to convey the impression that he was actually having the time of his life. But then managing chaos was what Royal Engineers spent their entire careers doing, Isabella supposed.
Isabella was ‘supporting’ her Papa as the new landlords of California gave the Consul General the grand tour; presumably, to hammer home the unassailable fact that they were the ones in charge now!
Of course, John Pope and his officers would have thought it unforgivably crass to have rubbed it in overmuch. No, they faithfully held to the line of: ‘This is exactly the sort of thing you would be doing in our place but for the war; oh, and by the way, thank goodness all that unpleasantness is well and truly over and done with now!’
Isabella’s Papa was a master of nodding appreciation, and when appropriate, voicing voluble admiration at the right diplomatic junctures, a dignified, gentlemanly presence with whom the British officers conducting their tour were completely at their ease. However, unlike her father, Isabella was bursting with questions and although she tried to be a wallflower, rather monopolised the conversation as they were driven from one locale to the next.
HMS Culloden, rust-streaked from her twelve-thousand-mile passage from New England via the bottom of the world, was edging onto emergency mooring buoys out in the bay when the party clambered out of their cars at the vast Hunter’s Point construction site. The cruiser’s eight 8-inch main battery rifles were jauntily elevated to about thirty degrees and she was flying a blizzard of flags from her forward and main masts, with hundreds of her men lining the side as a saluting gun boomed to signify her manoeuvring past the Port Admiral’s flag.
