He had known that this new war had been coming a long time; only the fools in Philadelphia had not noticed the writing on the wall, turned a blind eye to the emissaries of the Mexican Republic who had travelled these lands with impunity, salting the battlefield and seducing the unwary and the Catholic-minded to defect, or leastways, to stand aside when the armies of New Spain came north to reclaim what, to a man, its fighting men believed was their birth right.
There had been many times over the years when he had asked himself if he ought to try to do something about the malaise but he had fallen out of contact with old friends from his Army days; and wanted only to build a new, second life in this country; God’s own land.
George Washington met the eye of the dapper, dark-eyed man beside the young pilot. Unlike Torrance, who seemed relieved to be able to pass on the burden of command; Sergeant Fielding was giving him a very odd look.
As if he had seen a ghost…
The older man returned the salutes.
Oh, well!
What will be; will be.
He looked around the room, made eye contacts with two men who had until then, been anonymous in the crowd.
“William, Israel,” he said, in that moment taking command. “Take a couple of men with you down to Trinity Crossing. Requisition that bulldozer they’ve been using to lay out the new town square and any tractors you can lay your hands on. While you’re at it, shake out anybody who hasn’t reported for militia duty as yet, and summon the townsfolk to a public meeting in the Chapel for six o’clock this evening. I will address the County at that hour. Any questions?”
There were no questions.
George Washington turned to Greg Torrance.
“You will command all pilots and air crew. Please report to me later this day how many aircraft are airworthy. You spoke of building a radio?” This was posed rhetorically. “Good. We’ll need more than one. Once you have got us back in contact with headquarters, send technicians to the local farmsteads and haciendas; most of the estates and ranches have their own radio sets. Borrow them if possible, otherwise, requisition them.”
“Yes, sir,” the two CAF men chorused.
“That is all. Please carry on.”
Chapter 16
Monday 1st May
Portsmouth Admiralty Dockyards, Norfolk, Virginia
Commander Alexander Lincoln Fielding, sporting the ribbon of his newly acquired Navy Cross on the left breast of his uniform jacket beneath his wings, wandered with the other officers from the Perseus, back down the length of the huge, drained graving dock. No 4 Dock was one of three at Portsmouth which had been extended by some one hundred and fifty feet to accommodate the Navy’s big carriers. The dimensions of the dock and the ship in it boggled the human imagination. Leastways, it boggled Alex Fielding’s credulity, and as anybody who had ever met him could attest, he was not a man easily impressed!
The great, looming hulk of the wounded, thousand-feet-long, forty-four thousand ton – that was just empty! – HMS Ulysses blotted out the sky above his head as it rested on a thousand, precisely placed wooden blocks positioned so as to evenly spread the weight of the leviathan. Everything about the mighty, beached whale of a ship was stupendous, from her keel to the top of her island bridge she was higher than most skyscrapers, her four enormous three-bladed screws could drive her through the water at over thirty-three knots – that was thirty-seven-and-a-half miles-an-hour on land – and she needed a crew of over three thousand men to steam, fight and to launch and recover her design complement of eighty-two fighting aircraft.
Two things had saved the leviathan when that torpedo had ruptured and ignited – by one of those cruel twists of fate that war manifests struck her Achilles heel – the aft high octane fuel main and sparking a fire, initially on the rearward hangar deck which, fanned by the movement of the ship, had roared unstoppably up onto the flight deck where the last of the carrier’s Sea Eagles, fuelled and bombed up had been neatly lined up for take-off.
Much of what followed had already been intensely analysed; inevitably, and fundamental questions had been asked about the design of the Royal Navy’s huge new fleet carriers.
What had been learned – nothing quite so accelerated ‘learning’ as actual battle experience – was both troubling and oddly, reassuring.
It had been a pure fluke that the torpedo had hit where it had and caused a theoretically improbable rupture in a heavily armoured high-octane conduit. However, despite this the Ulysses had survived.
Lessons…
Firstly, the fire had broken out, and the seat of that fire had remained, contained within the armoured box of her hangar deck, which ran over two-thirds of the length of the vessel, and despite the main fire main also having been cracked by the torpedo hit which was the cause of all the problems in the first place, the hangar deck’s integral fire suppression system had, on its first test in earnest, almost certainly saved the day.
Secondly, although the fire had spread – via the after aircraft elevator – to the flight deck where several aircraft, their fuel and bomb loads had been consumed in the blaze; fortunately, the majority of the Ulysses’s aircraft had already taken off, and the deck crew had managed to push five of the ten aircraft still on deck over the side before the fire engulfed them and their munitions had started ‘cooking off’.
Several bombs – including three five-hundred pounders – had exploded on the flight deck and the fires, up top, had raged for well over an hour-and-a-half most of the damage had turned out to be relatively superficial. The design concept of making the flight deck an integral ‘strength deck’ had been wholly vindicated. Likewise, the associated concept of building the hangar deck as, in effect, a giant armoured box, had ensured structural integrity was never threatened and that once the wreckage of the four planes undergoing servicing near the seat of the fire had been cleared away, and the stern elevator repaired – probably the most challenging element of the repair program – the ship would swiftly be back in business.
As to the flight deck, the dockyard was already peeling and cutting away the distorted, splintered plating directly above the still intact armoured roof – up to three inches thick – of the hangar deck, preparatory to ‘resurfacing’ the rear four hundred and forty-seven feet of decking.
Obviously, nothing was as simple in practice as it was in theory; the landing systems had been destroyed, as had the hydraulic mechanisms tensioning the ‘traps’, the steel hawsers, wires that ‘caught’ a plane when it landed, and light anti-aircraft weaponry and other equipment had been wrecked but essentially, the ship was sound and it was confidently predicted, that in between six and eight weeks she would be ready to re-join the Fleet.
As yet, the dockyard had done nothing about the fifteen feet wide by seventeen feet high hole caused by the explosion of the submarine-launched single torpedo – one of at least four launched at the carrier, apparently – which had struck the ship’s port side approximately sixteen feet below the waterline between frame fifty-six and fifty-seven, some two hundred-and-thirty-five feet forward of the stern.
The ship’s plates were twisted inward as if Ulysses had been hit by a giant sledgehammer.