Warsaw concerto, p.7
Warsaw Concerto, page 7
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Gorshkov found himself inadvertently mouthing the renewed chorus, caught up in the electric emotion of the occasion.
The entire 2nd Guards Tank Division roared forth in unison.
Long live our Soviet motherland
Built by the people's mighty hand
Long live our people, united and free
Strong in our friendship
Long may our crimson flag inspire
Shining in glory for all men to see.
The sound of the thirty or so MiG-21s, orbiting Tempelhof at a range of about ten kilometres awaiting the signal to commence their first fly past periodically fell across the field as the wind fluked and twisted feebly out of the west.
We fought for the future, we destroyed the invaders
And brought to our homeland the laurels of fame
Our glory will live in the memory of
And all generations will honour her name.
Alexander Shelepin began to walk down the steps to the tarmac where a generation ago, tens of thousands of faithful Nazis had rallied to fete and to acclaim their poisoned Fuhrer. That was a thing the Yankees and the British would remark upon in the weeks to come; by then they would be damaged, their notions of victory and their insufferable capitalist complacency would have been shaken to the core.
The game would be afoot.
Long live our Soviet motherland
Built by the people's mighty hand
Long live our people, united and free
Strong in our friendship
Long may our crimson flag inspire
Shining in glory for all men to see.
Within days the ‘victors’ of the Cuban Missiles War would be forced to confront the fallacy of all their strategic assumptions because by then they would have been reminded that in geopolitical realpolitik the only thing that really mattered, was whose boots were actually on the ground.
Chapter 6
Tuesday 6th December 1966
HMS Campbeltown, 95 miles West of Ushant
“Captain on the bridge!”
Forty-eight-year-old Captain Dermot Flynn O’Reilly, RN, DSO, DSC, Captain (D) of the 21st Destroyer Squadron did not think he was ever going to get used to everybody jumping to their feet and in numerous circumstances, to attention, when he entered a room on land or a compartment on board a ship.
Four years ago, he had been a nobody, a lonely loser slowly contemplating drinking himself into an early grave like his father before him. He had spent time on a factory ship, worked ashore in South Georgia and in the mid-fifties been a mate on a whale hunter down in the South Atlantic; he had loved it down there literally at the ends of the World far, far away from the noise, confusion and complications of life at home but all things come to an end sooner or later. Before the October War the South Atlantic whale fishery had been on its knees, just like the great creatures it had hunted to the point of extinction, and by the time O’Reilly had returned north he too, had been running out of options. He had tried to make a living as a carpenter and mechanic but he always seemed to upset the wrong person, or got talking to the wrong guy in a bar.
Then the war had happened and everything had been turned upside down; and discovering that he was still technically an officer on the Royal Canadian Navy Reserve List, he had ‘offered his services’, been rejected because the RCN had scrapped most of its ships in the late 1940s and was going to take a long time to get its act together. Almost in passing, somebody had suggested: ‘Why don’t you try the Brits?’
Well, after a couple of false starts that had turned out to be the best advice anybody had ever given him in his whole life!
At the time he was de-mobbed back in the winter of 1945-46, after nearly four years on frigates and corvettes on the ‘Atlantic Run’, escorting convoys to and from the United Kingdom he had been the second-in-command of the River-class escort HMCNS St Paul, a battle-hardened, very experienced watchkeeper and oceanic navigator. Serendipitously, it happened that those were two key qualifications that ‘the Brits’ had picked up on in a flash and by the autumn of 1963 he was an Assistant Navigation Officer, Channel Fleet at Portsmouth, attempting to inculcate the basics into class after class of cadets. Without so much as a pause for contemplation the Royal Navy had turned his ‘wavy navy’ reserve lieutenant’s rings into solid, regular ones. In England he had stopped drinking and begun to remember the man he used to think he was before a failed marriage, several bad career choices and frankly, put to one side his inability to re-settle into the mundane routines of civilian life after his years – aged twenty-one to twenty-six in the wartime Royal Canadian Navy – which had brought him so low.
Although he had requested an operational sea-going role the day he set foot in England, he had got to the point where he imagined his papers were lost until, out of the blue, he had received orders to join HMS Talavera at Malta.
At the time he thought he had died and gone to heaven; drunk and disorderly in Ontario to Navigation Officer and third in command of a Battle class fleet destroyer attached to the Mediterranean Fleet in the blink of an eye!
“What news of the Leith?” O’Reilly asked of the officer of the watch, Lieutenant the Honourable Keith Moss, a keen, as yet understandably still a little nervous twenty-four-year-old Public School and Cambridge-educated electronic warfare specialist, and a very newly qualified watchkeeper, who, very occasionally, had already – in manner and gesture - reminded him of his friend and former commanding officer, Peter Christopher.
But only in little things…
When O’Reilly had joined HMS Talavera, she had been in a pretty sorry state, shot up more than somewhat from going inshore – he had not believed anybody did that sort of thing these days - to tow the crippled frigate Leopard off that shoaling lee coast off Lampedusa under heavy fire from land-sited enemy anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. The destroyer’s captain, David Penberthy, had lost a foot and every third or fourth man he encountered that day he reported aboard had seemed to have an arm in a sling, a battered face or was limping heavily.
He had stepped onto the ship.
‘I say!’ A man had called from the port bridge wing. ‘You wouldn’t be O’Reilly, by any chance, would you?’
He had opened his mouth to speak, got no farther.
‘I’m Christopher,” the other man had shouted cheerfully. “I’m in charge at the moment! Come on up to the bridge!’
He had found Peter Christopher and his equally youthful Executive Officer, the ship’s immensely personable gunnery officer, Lieutenant Miles Weiss, deep in conference with a pair of electrical artificers standing amidst a chaos of ripped up and trailing cables. It transpired that there was so much splinter damage – and there had been so many through and through hits by close-range anti-tank solid shot rounds – that ten days after the Lampedusa action much of the ship was in effect, having to be hastily re-wired.
‘Sorry the old girl is in such a mess,’ Peter Christopher had grimaced as salutes were briefly exchanged, introductions completed – including to the two electrical artificers one of whom turned out to be Jack Griffin, O’Reilly always remembered that - and hands warmly shaken by the officers.
Given that he had been the best part of twenty years his new captain’s age, and to look at a tall, bearded, weather-beaten figure, and now very much the – very - old man of the destroyer’s wardroom, and Canadian to boot, he had genuinely feared for his reception on Talavera. Yet that first meeting had blown away all his niggling worries that his experiences of a long-gone war might be deemed irrelevant in the modern age, or that he would be seen in some way as an old fogey, an anachronism.
Not so long after that – in the aftermath of Red Dawn’s misbegotten and mercifully, botched attempt to nuke Malta - he and Peter Christopher had conned the old destroyer under the inferno raging on the USS Enterprise’s stern. And then, a few weeks later no sooner had they retrieved the gallant old destroyer from dockyard hands, at the beginning of April 1964 they had had Talavera shot from under their feet…
“Leith reports heavy vibrations on her port shaft above one-hundred revs, sir.”
The five destroyers under O’Reilly’s command were among the first of the Fletcher class US Navy – World War II vintage - vessels transferred to the United Kingdom last winter. Most of them had been in reserve, not exactly rotting but in a state of deactivated, semi-suspension for ten to fifteen years. Several had seen extensive service in the Second War, and at least one of them still showed the signs of repaired major battle damage deep in her bowels.
In her former life his own ship, HMS Campbeltown had been the USS Schroeder (DD-501), the ‘youngest’ of the five Fletchers presently comprising 21st Destroyer Squadron. The first eight Fletchers to arrive in British waters had been renamed after Scottish towns, the Campbeltown’s sisters today were the Perth, formerly the USS Jenkins (DD-447), the Berwick, formerly the USS Hudson (DD-475), the Dundee, formerly the USS Stevens (DD-479) and the Leith, formerly the USS La Vallette (DD-448).
Notwithstanding their age there was no question that the ‘Fletchers’ were excellent fighting sea boats, and although the Leith was currently operating on only one-and-a-half of her two shafts she had had no trouble keeping up with the battle group proceeding in cruising order overnight. Unfortunately, in the next half-hour the flagship, HMS Victorious, was going to work up to twenty-seven or eight knots and start landing the seven Blackburn Buccaneer S2s of 801 Naval Air Squadron, thus completing taking on board her full complement of thirty jet, turboprop aircraft and helicopters, ahead of commencing Exercise Gascon – an intense week-long schedule of war games involving other carrier borne aircraft from the Eagle Battle Group, anti-submarine evolutions with British conventional and American nuclear hunter killer boats, and several UNREPs, under way replenishments at sea with Fleet Auxiliaries – at fourteen hundred hours ZULU.
O’Reilly glanced at the map table.
“Ascertain Leith’s best sustainable speed, if you please.”
His all too short time on board Talavera serving with Peter Christopher had changed Dermot O’Reilly’s life, more than that, he had emerged from those days a changed man. Even when Talavera had been steaming down the guns of those battleships off Sliema and the ship was being shot to pieces around them, his friend had never really raised his voice, every order had had a ‘please’, or an ‘if you would’ attached to it and yet Peter had been in complete, iron control of both Talavera and himself from start to finish. And afterwards, learning that his father was dead he had never stopped – for a single moment - being O’Reilly’s, and all the other survivors of the nightmare’s, Captain.
Peter Christopher had been the same man when he had jammed Talavera’s bow under the stern of the USS Enterprise as he had been that day he welcomed him a board in Sliema Creek, the same man stepping into the cold oil-fouled waters as Talavera’s back finally broke, the same man through all the kerfuffle after the Battle of Malta, and the same man who had found himself standing on the steps of the Philadelphia White House two years ago, in the hours after the second Battle of the Persian Gulf asking President Johnson to ‘give peace a chance’ in the wake of the sinking of the USS Kitty Hawk.
“Leith reports her best sustainable speed is twenty-four knots, sir!”
Not enough…
“Leith will stand out to the east to give the fleet room to manoeuvre,” he decided. Then. “Report Leith’s status to Victorious, if you please.”
Presently, the Dundee was holding station two miles ahead of the carrier, the Campbeltown was approximately three cables off the flagship’s starboard beam, and the Perth and the Berwick were a mile astern to port and starboard respectively.
Normally, a modern carrier battle group would have a separate anti-submarine element but the Fletchers were of that generation when destroyers were still expected to be ‘all-rounders’, radar pickets, anti-aircraft and anti-submarine escorts. So, while Campbeltown had had one of her five-inch guns – No 3 – removed, lost one of her quintuple-tube twenty-one-inch torpedo launchers, and had her depth charge projectors and rails removed, essentially to reduce weight topside ahead of the modifications required to compensate for the additional weight topside of her updated communications suite and to accommodate her increased complement as a ‘Leader’, her sisters still bristled with all the normal weaponry of any of their World War Two-vintage fleet destroyer sisters.
O’Reilly’s fourth ring had been awaiting him when he paid off HMS Cavendish arriving back in England escorting the first of the big ‘transfer’ cruisers – the USS Des Moines (CA-134) – to Devonport last winter.
The first congratulatory telegram had arrived from the British Embassy in Philadelphia.
Well done Captain D.F. O’Reilly, RN. Fully deserved and proof positive that the Navy does actually know what it is doing sometimes. Best regards from Peter and Marija.
The ‘Brits’ had backdated his ‘regular’ seniority to April 1940 regardless of the fact he had been, in Royal Navy terms, ashore between 1946 and 1962. He had since learned that a number, but by no means all, other returning ‘reservists’ had been treated likewise. In any event, in recognition of his service in the Mediterranean aboard Talavera, in the Channel and the unpleasantness in Philadelphia while in command of the Cavendish, the Board of Admiralty had, without further ado, promoted him, sent him off on a succession of staff college courses and war games, set him to work getting the first of the Fletchers back into service and four months ago, given him command of Campbeltown and 21st Destroyer Squadron based at Portsmouth.
Several times while he was ‘on shore’ he had been asked to brief senior officers about his time whaling in the Southern Ocean. His audiences were interested in everything he could tell them about South Georgia and the waters around it; and most especially, what he recollected about those times when he had been on supply runs from the whaling stations on South Georgia to East Falkland and the River Plate.
He had tacitly assumed that the ‘high ups’ in the Admiralty were simply culling background information for future exercises or staff college war games.
That said, it was hard not to be aware that a lot of people in the Royal Navy still regarded the Falkland Islands as unfinished business and spat in disgust when the word ‘Argentine’ or anything pertaining to that country was mentioned in polite company: the ‘Argentine’ now occupied the archipelagos of the Falklands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, those places were lost and nobody was going to fight a full-scale war – because that was what it would entail – to take them back.
And why in God’s name would one do a thing like that, anyway?
So that the fourteen hundred, give or take, surviving Falkland Islanders – Kelpers – now mainly resettled in the British Isles and the Maritime Provinces of Canada could one day return to their cold, wet, windswept homes, which in any case had it seemed, long been demolished by the invaders?
Or so that Her Majesty’s Government could reclaim the now abandoned South Georgia whaling stations, the rotting legacy of an industry that had already destroyed itself by dint of its own unmitigated greed and reckless profligacy?
Apart from a handful of whalers the permanent population of South Georgia before the Argentine takeover had been precisely…nobody. And as for the South Sandwich Islands, apart from a few Argentine meteorologists who had occasionally visited those godforsaken storm-battered rocks, only seals and penguins could survive there!
Such were the honestly forthright opinions he had offered the senior officers who had quizzed him about his time in the Southern Ocean.
No, they had quickly assured him, there would be no new war in the South Atlantic. And besides, presently, the Government had other, rather more pressing matters on its plate!
That was no lie!
Reconstruction, for one, and among other things the small matter of the war in France, constant worries about whatever was going on the other side of the Rhine in West Germany and Central Europe, small preoccupations like how it was going to carry on feeding the nation, and a list of other worries he probably did not really even want to know about. The World was a dangerous enough place as it was without going looking for new wars!
O’Reilly had thought often of his friends in Philadelphia that spring as the dreadful news streamed in from the US about the nuking of the cities, and the obscenity of the atrocities committed daily by the rebels in the Midwest. He had felt helpless, sitting thousands of miles away.
Thankfully, Peter and Marija Christopher were now in in Canberra, Australia – a blissful oasis of peace and tranquility – well into the latest leg of their global odyssey which had begun, like his, on that fateful day in April 1964 when those big Russian ships – dinosaurs in that age before the October War – had steamed over the horizon and begun to systematically bombard the airfields, dockyards, and military bases of the Maltese Archipelago.
That was the day he had conned the Talavera at breakneck speed out of the Grand Harbour through a forest of shell splashes; the day that all that had stood between the collapse of British power in the Mediterranean had been two small, hopelessly outgunned and outmatched Royal Navy ships…
Momentarily, he caught himself wool-gathering.
That would never do!
Although the first eight Fletcher class ‘transferees’ had been allocated to the 21st Destroyer Squadron, three vessels were still ‘re-activating’ and ‘crewing up’ after refitting with modern air search, gunnery direction radars and communication suites. So, for the moment, he had four (and-a-half) middlingly combat-ready – experience had taught him that you never knew if a ship was truly combat ready until a fight started - Fletchers to hand, and they were going to be tested to the limit in the coming days.
The weather forecasted for the Western Approaches was appalling in the next few days; in former times Operation Gascon might have been delayed a few weeks but he and the battle group commander, forty-three-year-old Commodore Henry Conyer Leach had been of one mind on the subject: the lesson of the Second War and our experience in the Mediterranean and elsewhere in the years since, is that one must always train as if it was for real!
The entire 2nd Guards Tank Division roared forth in unison.
Long live our Soviet motherland
Built by the people's mighty hand
Long live our people, united and free
Strong in our friendship
Long may our crimson flag inspire
Shining in glory for all men to see.
The sound of the thirty or so MiG-21s, orbiting Tempelhof at a range of about ten kilometres awaiting the signal to commence their first fly past periodically fell across the field as the wind fluked and twisted feebly out of the west.
We fought for the future, we destroyed the invaders
And brought to our homeland the laurels of fame
Our glory will live in the memory of
And all generations will honour her name.
Alexander Shelepin began to walk down the steps to the tarmac where a generation ago, tens of thousands of faithful Nazis had rallied to fete and to acclaim their poisoned Fuhrer. That was a thing the Yankees and the British would remark upon in the weeks to come; by then they would be damaged, their notions of victory and their insufferable capitalist complacency would have been shaken to the core.
The game would be afoot.
Long live our Soviet motherland
Built by the people's mighty hand
Long live our people, united and free
Strong in our friendship
Long may our crimson flag inspire
Shining in glory for all men to see.
Within days the ‘victors’ of the Cuban Missiles War would be forced to confront the fallacy of all their strategic assumptions because by then they would have been reminded that in geopolitical realpolitik the only thing that really mattered, was whose boots were actually on the ground.
Chapter 6
Tuesday 6th December 1966
HMS Campbeltown, 95 miles West of Ushant
“Captain on the bridge!”
Forty-eight-year-old Captain Dermot Flynn O’Reilly, RN, DSO, DSC, Captain (D) of the 21st Destroyer Squadron did not think he was ever going to get used to everybody jumping to their feet and in numerous circumstances, to attention, when he entered a room on land or a compartment on board a ship.
Four years ago, he had been a nobody, a lonely loser slowly contemplating drinking himself into an early grave like his father before him. He had spent time on a factory ship, worked ashore in South Georgia and in the mid-fifties been a mate on a whale hunter down in the South Atlantic; he had loved it down there literally at the ends of the World far, far away from the noise, confusion and complications of life at home but all things come to an end sooner or later. Before the October War the South Atlantic whale fishery had been on its knees, just like the great creatures it had hunted to the point of extinction, and by the time O’Reilly had returned north he too, had been running out of options. He had tried to make a living as a carpenter and mechanic but he always seemed to upset the wrong person, or got talking to the wrong guy in a bar.
Then the war had happened and everything had been turned upside down; and discovering that he was still technically an officer on the Royal Canadian Navy Reserve List, he had ‘offered his services’, been rejected because the RCN had scrapped most of its ships in the late 1940s and was going to take a long time to get its act together. Almost in passing, somebody had suggested: ‘Why don’t you try the Brits?’
Well, after a couple of false starts that had turned out to be the best advice anybody had ever given him in his whole life!
At the time he was de-mobbed back in the winter of 1945-46, after nearly four years on frigates and corvettes on the ‘Atlantic Run’, escorting convoys to and from the United Kingdom he had been the second-in-command of the River-class escort HMCNS St Paul, a battle-hardened, very experienced watchkeeper and oceanic navigator. Serendipitously, it happened that those were two key qualifications that ‘the Brits’ had picked up on in a flash and by the autumn of 1963 he was an Assistant Navigation Officer, Channel Fleet at Portsmouth, attempting to inculcate the basics into class after class of cadets. Without so much as a pause for contemplation the Royal Navy had turned his ‘wavy navy’ reserve lieutenant’s rings into solid, regular ones. In England he had stopped drinking and begun to remember the man he used to think he was before a failed marriage, several bad career choices and frankly, put to one side his inability to re-settle into the mundane routines of civilian life after his years – aged twenty-one to twenty-six in the wartime Royal Canadian Navy – which had brought him so low.
Although he had requested an operational sea-going role the day he set foot in England, he had got to the point where he imagined his papers were lost until, out of the blue, he had received orders to join HMS Talavera at Malta.
At the time he thought he had died and gone to heaven; drunk and disorderly in Ontario to Navigation Officer and third in command of a Battle class fleet destroyer attached to the Mediterranean Fleet in the blink of an eye!
“What news of the Leith?” O’Reilly asked of the officer of the watch, Lieutenant the Honourable Keith Moss, a keen, as yet understandably still a little nervous twenty-four-year-old Public School and Cambridge-educated electronic warfare specialist, and a very newly qualified watchkeeper, who, very occasionally, had already – in manner and gesture - reminded him of his friend and former commanding officer, Peter Christopher.
But only in little things…
When O’Reilly had joined HMS Talavera, she had been in a pretty sorry state, shot up more than somewhat from going inshore – he had not believed anybody did that sort of thing these days - to tow the crippled frigate Leopard off that shoaling lee coast off Lampedusa under heavy fire from land-sited enemy anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. The destroyer’s captain, David Penberthy, had lost a foot and every third or fourth man he encountered that day he reported aboard had seemed to have an arm in a sling, a battered face or was limping heavily.
He had stepped onto the ship.
‘I say!’ A man had called from the port bridge wing. ‘You wouldn’t be O’Reilly, by any chance, would you?’
He had opened his mouth to speak, got no farther.
‘I’m Christopher,” the other man had shouted cheerfully. “I’m in charge at the moment! Come on up to the bridge!’
He had found Peter Christopher and his equally youthful Executive Officer, the ship’s immensely personable gunnery officer, Lieutenant Miles Weiss, deep in conference with a pair of electrical artificers standing amidst a chaos of ripped up and trailing cables. It transpired that there was so much splinter damage – and there had been so many through and through hits by close-range anti-tank solid shot rounds – that ten days after the Lampedusa action much of the ship was in effect, having to be hastily re-wired.
‘Sorry the old girl is in such a mess,’ Peter Christopher had grimaced as salutes were briefly exchanged, introductions completed – including to the two electrical artificers one of whom turned out to be Jack Griffin, O’Reilly always remembered that - and hands warmly shaken by the officers.
Given that he had been the best part of twenty years his new captain’s age, and to look at a tall, bearded, weather-beaten figure, and now very much the – very - old man of the destroyer’s wardroom, and Canadian to boot, he had genuinely feared for his reception on Talavera. Yet that first meeting had blown away all his niggling worries that his experiences of a long-gone war might be deemed irrelevant in the modern age, or that he would be seen in some way as an old fogey, an anachronism.
Not so long after that – in the aftermath of Red Dawn’s misbegotten and mercifully, botched attempt to nuke Malta - he and Peter Christopher had conned the old destroyer under the inferno raging on the USS Enterprise’s stern. And then, a few weeks later no sooner had they retrieved the gallant old destroyer from dockyard hands, at the beginning of April 1964 they had had Talavera shot from under their feet…
“Leith reports heavy vibrations on her port shaft above one-hundred revs, sir.”
The five destroyers under O’Reilly’s command were among the first of the Fletcher class US Navy – World War II vintage - vessels transferred to the United Kingdom last winter. Most of them had been in reserve, not exactly rotting but in a state of deactivated, semi-suspension for ten to fifteen years. Several had seen extensive service in the Second War, and at least one of them still showed the signs of repaired major battle damage deep in her bowels.
In her former life his own ship, HMS Campbeltown had been the USS Schroeder (DD-501), the ‘youngest’ of the five Fletchers presently comprising 21st Destroyer Squadron. The first eight Fletchers to arrive in British waters had been renamed after Scottish towns, the Campbeltown’s sisters today were the Perth, formerly the USS Jenkins (DD-447), the Berwick, formerly the USS Hudson (DD-475), the Dundee, formerly the USS Stevens (DD-479) and the Leith, formerly the USS La Vallette (DD-448).
Notwithstanding their age there was no question that the ‘Fletchers’ were excellent fighting sea boats, and although the Leith was currently operating on only one-and-a-half of her two shafts she had had no trouble keeping up with the battle group proceeding in cruising order overnight. Unfortunately, in the next half-hour the flagship, HMS Victorious, was going to work up to twenty-seven or eight knots and start landing the seven Blackburn Buccaneer S2s of 801 Naval Air Squadron, thus completing taking on board her full complement of thirty jet, turboprop aircraft and helicopters, ahead of commencing Exercise Gascon – an intense week-long schedule of war games involving other carrier borne aircraft from the Eagle Battle Group, anti-submarine evolutions with British conventional and American nuclear hunter killer boats, and several UNREPs, under way replenishments at sea with Fleet Auxiliaries – at fourteen hundred hours ZULU.
O’Reilly glanced at the map table.
“Ascertain Leith’s best sustainable speed, if you please.”
His all too short time on board Talavera serving with Peter Christopher had changed Dermot O’Reilly’s life, more than that, he had emerged from those days a changed man. Even when Talavera had been steaming down the guns of those battleships off Sliema and the ship was being shot to pieces around them, his friend had never really raised his voice, every order had had a ‘please’, or an ‘if you would’ attached to it and yet Peter had been in complete, iron control of both Talavera and himself from start to finish. And afterwards, learning that his father was dead he had never stopped – for a single moment - being O’Reilly’s, and all the other survivors of the nightmare’s, Captain.
Peter Christopher had been the same man when he had jammed Talavera’s bow under the stern of the USS Enterprise as he had been that day he welcomed him a board in Sliema Creek, the same man stepping into the cold oil-fouled waters as Talavera’s back finally broke, the same man through all the kerfuffle after the Battle of Malta, and the same man who had found himself standing on the steps of the Philadelphia White House two years ago, in the hours after the second Battle of the Persian Gulf asking President Johnson to ‘give peace a chance’ in the wake of the sinking of the USS Kitty Hawk.
“Leith reports her best sustainable speed is twenty-four knots, sir!”
Not enough…
“Leith will stand out to the east to give the fleet room to manoeuvre,” he decided. Then. “Report Leith’s status to Victorious, if you please.”
Presently, the Dundee was holding station two miles ahead of the carrier, the Campbeltown was approximately three cables off the flagship’s starboard beam, and the Perth and the Berwick were a mile astern to port and starboard respectively.
Normally, a modern carrier battle group would have a separate anti-submarine element but the Fletchers were of that generation when destroyers were still expected to be ‘all-rounders’, radar pickets, anti-aircraft and anti-submarine escorts. So, while Campbeltown had had one of her five-inch guns – No 3 – removed, lost one of her quintuple-tube twenty-one-inch torpedo launchers, and had her depth charge projectors and rails removed, essentially to reduce weight topside ahead of the modifications required to compensate for the additional weight topside of her updated communications suite and to accommodate her increased complement as a ‘Leader’, her sisters still bristled with all the normal weaponry of any of their World War Two-vintage fleet destroyer sisters.
O’Reilly’s fourth ring had been awaiting him when he paid off HMS Cavendish arriving back in England escorting the first of the big ‘transfer’ cruisers – the USS Des Moines (CA-134) – to Devonport last winter.
The first congratulatory telegram had arrived from the British Embassy in Philadelphia.
Well done Captain D.F. O’Reilly, RN. Fully deserved and proof positive that the Navy does actually know what it is doing sometimes. Best regards from Peter and Marija.
The ‘Brits’ had backdated his ‘regular’ seniority to April 1940 regardless of the fact he had been, in Royal Navy terms, ashore between 1946 and 1962. He had since learned that a number, but by no means all, other returning ‘reservists’ had been treated likewise. In any event, in recognition of his service in the Mediterranean aboard Talavera, in the Channel and the unpleasantness in Philadelphia while in command of the Cavendish, the Board of Admiralty had, without further ado, promoted him, sent him off on a succession of staff college courses and war games, set him to work getting the first of the Fletchers back into service and four months ago, given him command of Campbeltown and 21st Destroyer Squadron based at Portsmouth.
Several times while he was ‘on shore’ he had been asked to brief senior officers about his time whaling in the Southern Ocean. His audiences were interested in everything he could tell them about South Georgia and the waters around it; and most especially, what he recollected about those times when he had been on supply runs from the whaling stations on South Georgia to East Falkland and the River Plate.
He had tacitly assumed that the ‘high ups’ in the Admiralty were simply culling background information for future exercises or staff college war games.
That said, it was hard not to be aware that a lot of people in the Royal Navy still regarded the Falkland Islands as unfinished business and spat in disgust when the word ‘Argentine’ or anything pertaining to that country was mentioned in polite company: the ‘Argentine’ now occupied the archipelagos of the Falklands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, those places were lost and nobody was going to fight a full-scale war – because that was what it would entail – to take them back.
And why in God’s name would one do a thing like that, anyway?
So that the fourteen hundred, give or take, surviving Falkland Islanders – Kelpers – now mainly resettled in the British Isles and the Maritime Provinces of Canada could one day return to their cold, wet, windswept homes, which in any case had it seemed, long been demolished by the invaders?
Or so that Her Majesty’s Government could reclaim the now abandoned South Georgia whaling stations, the rotting legacy of an industry that had already destroyed itself by dint of its own unmitigated greed and reckless profligacy?
Apart from a handful of whalers the permanent population of South Georgia before the Argentine takeover had been precisely…nobody. And as for the South Sandwich Islands, apart from a few Argentine meteorologists who had occasionally visited those godforsaken storm-battered rocks, only seals and penguins could survive there!
Such were the honestly forthright opinions he had offered the senior officers who had quizzed him about his time in the Southern Ocean.
No, they had quickly assured him, there would be no new war in the South Atlantic. And besides, presently, the Government had other, rather more pressing matters on its plate!
That was no lie!
Reconstruction, for one, and among other things the small matter of the war in France, constant worries about whatever was going on the other side of the Rhine in West Germany and Central Europe, small preoccupations like how it was going to carry on feeding the nation, and a list of other worries he probably did not really even want to know about. The World was a dangerous enough place as it was without going looking for new wars!
O’Reilly had thought often of his friends in Philadelphia that spring as the dreadful news streamed in from the US about the nuking of the cities, and the obscenity of the atrocities committed daily by the rebels in the Midwest. He had felt helpless, sitting thousands of miles away.
Thankfully, Peter and Marija Christopher were now in in Canberra, Australia – a blissful oasis of peace and tranquility – well into the latest leg of their global odyssey which had begun, like his, on that fateful day in April 1964 when those big Russian ships – dinosaurs in that age before the October War – had steamed over the horizon and begun to systematically bombard the airfields, dockyards, and military bases of the Maltese Archipelago.
That was the day he had conned the Talavera at breakneck speed out of the Grand Harbour through a forest of shell splashes; the day that all that had stood between the collapse of British power in the Mediterranean had been two small, hopelessly outgunned and outmatched Royal Navy ships…
Momentarily, he caught himself wool-gathering.
That would never do!
Although the first eight Fletcher class ‘transferees’ had been allocated to the 21st Destroyer Squadron, three vessels were still ‘re-activating’ and ‘crewing up’ after refitting with modern air search, gunnery direction radars and communication suites. So, for the moment, he had four (and-a-half) middlingly combat-ready – experience had taught him that you never knew if a ship was truly combat ready until a fight started - Fletchers to hand, and they were going to be tested to the limit in the coming days.
The weather forecasted for the Western Approaches was appalling in the next few days; in former times Operation Gascon might have been delayed a few weeks but he and the battle group commander, forty-three-year-old Commodore Henry Conyer Leach had been of one mind on the subject: the lesson of the Second War and our experience in the Mediterranean and elsewhere in the years since, is that one must always train as if it was for real!
