All fall down, p.8
The Halls of Montezuma (New England Book 8), page 8
Cutting off the Mexicans in Texas was only half the battle; in many ways the easy part. The enemy had been caught by surprise and been powerless to stop the 79th Division’s land cruisers reaching Laredo and moving north to cut the San Antonio Road, the one modern highway connecting the largest centre of population in the territory to the Rio Grande country. Built in the years of peace, supposedly to facilitate the settlement of the border country by New Englanders, it had become the Mexican Army’s invasion route that spring.
Now, that road was funnelling the bulk of the Mexican Army of West Tejas south west onto the guns of the Las Lomas Battlegroup, while a few miles to the south west, preparations were in hand for the assault on the defences of Laredo.
Major General Archibald Sinclair met Washington outside his Forward Headquarters’ communications tent. He saluted crisply and the men shook hands. Mugs of coffee were pressed upon them as the two generals moved inside to peruse the big map stapled to the ad hoc situation room trestle table.
“Our patrols report that a lot of the mining activity in front of the town is AP, they don’t seem to have many AV mines to hand,” Sinclair told his commanding officer.
Washington looked at the hastily marked mine fields.
“That makes sense, they’ve only just woken up to what’s going on and I guess our Goshawks must be making the roads west of the Rio Grande impassable during daylight hours.”
AP (Anti-personnel) mines tended to be small, lightweight, easily transported in bulk; whereas, heavy duty AV (anti-vehicle) devices not so, and having laid tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of them along the Sabine River Line, the Mexicans probably did not have huge supplies of them readily to hand.
“Can our ‘floggers’ clear safe lanes through these?” Washington asked, indicating the two thickest concentrations of mines.
‘Floggers’ were modified Conqueror Mark Is with a terrifying ‘chain flail’ – actually ten chain ‘flails’ mounted on a fast-turning drum – spinning on a twin boom welded to their ‘bows’. Basically, they were designed to drive through minefields churning up whatever nastiness the enemy had buried in its path, thereby clearing a twenty to thirty feet-wide ‘safe’ path. Or, if one was being precise, a ploughed field over which infantrymen or vehicles could then advance with relative impunity.
From mines at least…
“They won’t arrive here for another day or so,” Sinclair apologised. Only three Mark I Floggers had loaded with the 79th Armoured Division, antiquated machines scheduled to be returned to the United Kingdom for storage, and none of them had the high-revving raw power, or the drive train to support it, to keep up with the fleetness of foot of the Division’s Conqueror IIs. “But yes, having seen the beasts at work, I’m fairly confident that they’ll do the business.”
Washington could tell the other man was troubled by another matter, one that had also given him more than one sleepless night.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he declared.
The two men wandered out into the cool morning sunshine, both still clutching their coffee mugs, moving to a low bluff where they could gaze towards Laredo, still shrouded in the haze some two miles distant.
George Washington had asked his GSO 3 (Intelligence) to brief the Englishman about ADBL Mark IIs.
Area Denial Bomblets…
There was no two ways about it; they were wholly evil devices.
Little larger than a cricket ball the sophisticated anti-personnel bomblets had two equally wicked modes: one, factory default (FD1) in which after sunset on the day of activation they would automatically self-destruct; or two, ‘full area denial mode’ (FADM) in which the hateful things remained live until defused or otherwise detonated…for ever.
It was rumoured that at the time of the summer ceasefire full production of the Mark IIs had been on indefinite hold at the top-secret Royal Armouries Small Weapons Factory at Johnstown in the Monongahela Valley. Subsequently, a decision had been taken to hold back its first deployment until a ‘substantial’ stockpile had been created. This decision had been reviewed again in the planning phase of OPERATION DOWN WIND – the attack on the Santo Dominican port capital of San Juan; only to be vetoed at the last minute because there was insufficient time available to train the specialist bombardiers required to safely configure the new Mark IIs onboard the two carriers involved in the operation.
At the time it was still very fresh in the minds of the small cadre of senior officers in the ADBL Mark II ‘need to know’ circle, that there had been so many casualties during the weapon’s developmental phase that the Mark I had been discarded and thereafter, every aspect of the Mark II’s design revisited, resulting in the current ADBL which, which although it was even more unpleasant for anybody so unfortunate as to be on the receiving end, was – allegedly - relatively ‘safe’ to handle and to make live.
On their operational debut in a raid on a Cuban air base and the port facilities at Guantanamo Bay, all the ADBLs had been fused FADM.
There was still a critical shortage of ADBLs, with the Perseus and the Hermes starting OPERATION ROUGH RIDER carrying two-hundred-and-fifteen and three-hundred-and-four devices respectively, representing practically every available production bomblet at the time they had departed to join the Task Force. The plan was that the surviving fourteen Sea Eagles and five lightened and de-gunned Goshawk IVs – the latter equipped with fifty-gallon drop tanks to enable them a few minutes loiter time over the target – would carry all two-hundred-and-eighty-seven available ADBL IIs on the planned pre-assault overnight raid against five key strongpoints identified within the Laredo defensive perimeter.
On this occasion the fiendish devices would be fused FD1.
Not out of any consideration for the defenders, rather so as to enable the assault force to scythe through the town and across the river like a hot knife through butter without sustaining significant casualties.
Well, in theory…
ADBL IIs were inert until fused by a tiny propeller-like ‘spinner’ during the first one thousand-five hundred feet of their descent. At approximately eight hundred feet above sea level a small parachute deployed, causing the munition to land softly. While it remained dark the device was relatively harmless, albeit with the caveat that according to the Royal Armouries, it was accepted that perhaps as many as one in five, might never go wholly ‘live’ because each bomblet’s miniature photo-voltaic activation cell required at least three or four minutes of direct or ‘strong’ reflected sunlight – normal room lighting would not work, although the direct beam of a powerful torch would – to complete its activation cycle.
Assuming successful activation, one of two things happened. If it was moved – a heavy nearby footfall would suffice - it detonated, filling the immediate environment around it with tiny shards of glass and metal out to a radius of about twenty feet, with a blast potential capable of throwing a, nearly always dying man, through the air. In FD1 mode, if not detonated by the time nightfall arrived, or if some foolhardy brave bomb disposal man had a death wish and approached close enough to place a light-excluding hood over an unexploded ADBL, a few minutes after its ignition cell ran out of power, it automatically self-destructed. That is, in this powered-down state it was supposed to detonate of its own accord. This latter had been a non-negotiable design requirement; troops taking the ground ‘denied to the enemy’ did not want to be blown to pieces themselves.
As for the significant percentage of Mark IIs which did not activate or self-destruct, well, other than by destroying them with explosives or rifle fire, there was no safe way to defuse them…
It went without saying that for both the old soldiers, that this way of waging war went against the grain. It offended George Washington’s sensibilities in exactly the same way it did Archie Sinclair’s.
Apparently, the troops who had occupied the Mexican fortifications at San Francisco – by then transformed into an abattoir - had resorted to rolling hand grenades into the vicinity of unexploded ADBL IIs after several men had been killed ‘pussy-footing around’ with them.
“I won’t say I’m happy about the assault plan, sir,” the Englishman said quietly.
George Washington chewed this over.
“This is my country we’re standing on right now,” he replied. “My country, and those people,” he raised his mug and pointed to the town lying astride the Rio Grande, “came here to take it from me. So, this is personal for me, Archie,” he sighed, “just so you know for future reference.”
The Commander of the 79th Armoured Division could easily have chosen to be offended by this. In fact, the Englishman suspected that many of his contemporaries would have taken great umbrage; but then Washington’s reputation came before him; notwithstanding he was a colonial he was one of those rare colonials who did not expect the British Army to do all his fighting for him.
Sinclair nodded.
“I’ll bear that in mind,” he promised.
“You should also know,” the Texan continued, “that I personally requested the employment of ADBL IIs. And no, I am not about to warn the Mexicans what’s coming. I don’t give a shit about their casualties; but I do care - a lot - about ours. The other side of that river is Nuevo Granada; and we’re the ones who are a long way from home.”
Chapter 11
Monday 27th November
The Foreign and Colonial Office, Whitehall
When the Prime Minister had accepted, very reluctantly, that his oldest friend, George Walpole had retired from politics and that his decision was final, pragmatically, he had swiftly sought a prospective safe pair of hands to step into his shoes.
As often happens in these situations, politics being what it was, the man Hector Hamilton, the surprise landslide victor in the recent General Election had offered the keys to the Foreign and Colonial Office to was significantly less convinced that he was a safe pair of hands, than His Majesty’s First Minister of the Treasury and Prime Minister imagined. Fifty-eight-year-old Sir Robert Townsend Farquhar had never been a confidante – if anybody other than Hector Hamilton, and it was rumoured, maliciously, across Whitehall, Lady Emma had even been – of his esteemed predecessor. In fact, like many career diplomats with decades of overseas service under his belt, he had always been intensely suspicious of Sir George Walpole and practically all of the man’s works. Not least because Walpole had departmentalised the FCO, or as old timers like the 12th Baronet Townsend-Farquhar of Mauritius had once complained, divided the globe into cells managed by ‘cults’ of specialist functionaries who behaved as if they had no idea, or cared, what else might be going on in the rest of the world.
Now that he was in ‘the hot seat’ and beginning to unravel a little of what had been going on in the august corridors of the FCO castle on St Charles Street, the new man at the helm was in a state of shock, much in the fashion of a captain clinging to the wheel of his ship as it drifts, ever-faster, onto a rocky lee shore in the middle of a tempest!
Farquhar had never, not in his wildest, fever dreams – of which he had had more than one in his time in the tropics – conceived of the half of the Machiavellian plots, subterfuges, conspiracies, or the plain simple duplicity, double-dealing on a truly heroic scale, which had preoccupied the man who, a few electoral blips apart, had bestrode the Imperium during a dozen of the last fourteen years, or the utter chaos he, presumably tacitly aided and abetted by Hector Hamilton, had left roiling in his wake. The bloody man had undermined the very foundations of the Empire and as the collapse began to gather pace, he had brazenly set fire to the wreckage!
Farquhar had heard rumours over the years about how both the Empire – and the Germans, as was to be expected – were attempting to find ‘ways around’ the Submarine Treaty; like the majority, although he now discovered by no means all of his fellow former Ambassadors and Principal Officers of the Diplomatic Service, his Government had shamelessly driven a coach and horses through the single most important international concordat since the treaty of Paris over a century ago!
In retrospect, it seemed that Hector Hamilton’s first administration had signed the Submarine Treaty on the basis that whereas there were any number of remote, wilderness places where the Empire could quietly carry on developing nuclear power and weapons, building submarines and perfecting new generations of ELDAR, command and control systems, advanced high-performance aircraft, guided missilery and the complex digital technologies that enabled instantaneous, absolutely confidential global communications, that there was hardly anywhere in the German Empire, the Reich, where their co-signatories to the treaty could surreptitiously ‘hide’ their malfeasance!
As for the debacle in New England…
Even now that he had read some of the key papers, obtained full access to all the correspondence, inwardly digested the same, and carefully considered the implications through the darkness of more than one sleepless night and spoken to a raft of experts and analysts, he still could not believe that Philip De L’Isle and George Walpole, and countless fellow conspirators in the Imperial Security Service and the higher echelons of all the armed services, had entertained that madness let alone diligently worked towards its current catastrophic denouement for most of the last five years!
God in heaven, the King could have been murdered by Catholic zealots on Empire Day two-and-a-half years ago and without mincing words about it, the Governor of New England and the British Foreign Secretary had connived together to allow – no, that was too tepid a statement – conspired to ensure that those outrages happened!
It was almost incidental that the conspirators in Philadelphia and London had not, strictly speaking, intended to allow things to get quite so out of hand. Not even George Walpole would have knowingly permitted the King and the Queen to stray into harm’s way; that at least, had been an accident. An accident which, incidentally, had if the documents were to be believed and Farquhar had already developed a healthy scepticism for the voracity of the ‘record’ his predecessor had bequeathed him, horrified Walpole to the core and very nearly prompted his resignation.
Farquhar had no idea – and neither did anybody else, it seemed – how many people had died so far in the War with Nuevo Granada and their Triple Alliance allies. What was known was that virtually the whole pre-war Atlantic Fleet had been fought to a standstill in the Gulf of Spain at the very moment those ships might be needed elsewhere; in the North Sea, or the Mediterranean or perish the thought, as it was looking ever more likely, in the Pacific. It was utterly bizarre, what in God’s name had George Walpole been thinking?
There had been a raft of other, jolting surprises when his new Permanent Secretary had briefed him. Not least that unbeknown to him his predecessor had had the ability to instantly, and securely, communicate with Ambassadors and the military stationed half-way around the world. This was particularly galling for Farquhar, who had been the Empire’s Minister to the Court of Tsar Pyotr IV in Leningrad for four years until last March!
‘We never installed the technology in Russia,’ he had been informed, a little dismissively, ‘it was never considered necessary, because nothing happens faster than the best speed of a horse-drawn cart over there.’
Notwithstanding, the new Foreign and Colonial Secretary had already decided that the new ‘magical’ communications technology was a decidedly double-edged sword.
Now he was speaking to Lord Edward Clive, Governor of Singapore and Southern Malaya, and the ranking diplomate in the Far East with the ease that he might have been speaking to him across a table at the Athenaeum, a Pall Mall club they had both been members of for over a quarter of a century.
“So?” He asked, not for the first time in recent days very nearly lost for words. Needless to say, for a man known for his loquacity and his facility to communicate fluently in a clutch of languages, it was very rare for him to be lost for words. “Your understanding is that our policy in the Far East is to ‘put up a good show’ and decamp, leaving the Empire of Japan in control of the Western Pacific, Ted?”
Although Farquhar had known the former Director of the South East Asia Company of the Americas for many years; like many of his fellow permanent secretaries he had never felt entirely comfortable dealing with high-profile ‘imports’ to Imperial administration who had spent most of their careers in…commerce. People like Clive, notwithstanding his impeccable lineage, tended to see everything in transactional terms likely to obscure the long-term shape of the FCO’s pre-Walpolean orderly vision for the management of the Empire and its relations with its competitors and allies alike. Not to put too fine a point on it, Farquhar mistrusted the crassness of the merchant classes and hated it when his carefully constructed mantras and assumptions were questioned by…outsiders.
Like Robert Edward Maskelyne Clive, 11th Baron Clive of Plassey and Walcot!
Which made it all the more maddening that the Governor of Singapore, privy to the excellent intelligence provided by his former Company’s ‘mercantile mafia’ in the Far East was so obviously better informed than him!
The Empire had only survived so long because everywhere it had, to some degree, adapted to local and regional cultural customs and ethnic and religious milieus. Therefore, odd as it seemed nobody batted an eyelid in the FCO about a situation in which British and Empire forces were fighting a war with the Spanish in the Gulf of Mexico, and enforcing a partial trade embargo on Old Spain involving a de facto blockade of the Straits of Gibraltar; while, at the same time in the Far East, imperial administrators and businessmen continued to peacefully co-exist with the Spanish rulers of the Philippines, actively facilitating ongoing trading and quasi-diplomatic links regardless of whatever was happening on the other side of the world. In Old Spain ‘British’ interests had been purged, if not by the forces of the King Emperor or the Catholic Church – the Inquisition – then by the mob; whereas, in the Far East, it remained business as normal.
