By now the Spanish would know that Perseus had left Hampton Roads; and the enemy high command would be worrying about a single big carrier at sea, possibly about to launch an attack somewhere…
If all went well the Triple Alliance would have no idea what had hit it when the combined Air Wings of two of the new super carriers struck!
In addition to the two big gun capital ships, the Princess Royal and the valiant old Indefatigable, both with eight-gun 15-inch main batteries, there were four heavy cruisers with a total of thirty-two 8-inch guns, seven light cruisers armed with a total of fifty-eight 6-inch guns and nineteen fleet destroyers now in company. Thirty-four warships covering nearly thirty square miles of ocean on a mission to strike the Triple Alliance a series of blows designed to send shock waves all the way back to México City, and to halt, as bloodily as possible, the enemies’ run of victories at sea.
‘Forget all that nonsense about knocking the Triple Alliance out of the war with a single punch. That isn’t going to happen. Whatever people say about the ships and the crews we have, and they do not, this is going to be a bloody long fight. Not a one round knock-out but a twelve to fifteen round slog. We weren’t ready and they were; we thought they had second rate kit, they do, but they also have some good ships and men, too. Mostly, we could not legislate for the existence of submarines that, moreover, the enemy was actually prepared to use against us outside his own coastal waters. Or, for that matter, the large number of modern aircraft he seems able to whistle up at the drop of a hat. So, having tried to do this the elegant way, we’re going to have to get our hands dirty!”
Those had been the words of Rear Admiral Sir Anthony Parkinson, Flag Officer, Task Force 5.1.
Parkinson was by repute, one of the Navy’s finest minds, a man who had written a book back in the 1960s about the problems facing a Navy trying to come to terms with the quickening pace of technological progress, and the dilemmas inherent in attempting to reform traditional tactical doctrines given that it had not been involved in a major shooting war for over a hundred years.
Alex Fielding, the Commander of Perseus’s Scout-Fighter Group, had wondered if Parkinson was going to be a straw man, obsessed with the minutiae of tactics and planning. In fact, thus far he had turned out to be a ‘details’ man; but not in a bad way.
‘Courage and a carry-on spirit will only get us so far; the object of the exercise is not to be, per se, heroic, it is to defeat the enemy any way that we can without incurring unnecessary casualties and loss of materiel!’
Parkinson had been unrelentingly grim in his pre-sailing address to his senior officers.
‘There’s no point having a bloody great big sword if you are not prepared to twist it once you have stuck it into the other fellow. Forget about playing up and playing the game. We did not want, or start this war. We are losing this war precisely because we chose not to make warlike preparations for it lest we inadvertently provoke it. The time for that sort of circular argument is over. The gloves are off. It is going to take time to mobilise the industry and the manpower of New England and the Empire to defeat the Triple Alliance and its allies; until then all we can realistically hope to do is to staunch the flow of blood from the wounds we have already sustained, and to give the enemy something to think about. Something he won’t forget in a hurry, if ever!’
The Spanish believed they had knocked one of the Atlantic fleet’s much-vaunted big aircraft carriers out of the fight; well, there were plenty more of them in the rest of the fleet and the transatlantic transfer of the Hermes was just the start. A signal that the tide was about to turn as progressively, more and more of the military muscle of the Empire was brought to bear upon the Triple Alliance.
Operation East Wind had one minor, and one major objective and a single, over-riding purpose: to send a very specific message to the Spanish high command.
Be very, very afraid!
Under the auspices of Operation East Wind, Task Force 5.1 was to calve off two of its heavy cruisers, the Naiad and the Sussex and four destroyers – as Task Force 5.11 – to seek out, engage and to destroy the Spanish squadron cruising the northern Lesser Antilles, the so-called Leeward Islands, each of which including the former French colony of Guadalupe, were either crown dependencies or, like Antigua, newly and somewhat experimentally endowed with limited dominion status. The Spanish had twice bombarded English Harbour and the island’s capital, St John’s in the last week; hit and run raids which had as yet done little damage to the small naval base but nevertheless, caused over a hundred casualties, and understandably, no little panic. It seemed the ‘raiders’, which had switched their attention to Plymouth on the neighbouring volcanic island of Montserrat within the last twenty-four hours, were old-fashioned coal-burning ironclad cruisers in company with a gang of several three or four stack torpedo boat destroyers. In the breaks between attacks it was assumed this motley collection of antique warships rendezvoused with one, perhaps a couple of small ‘coalers’ to top off their bunkers, before deciding who to ‘pester’ next. The original scare stories about Spanish marines coming ashore on Antigua had now been discounted.
Both Naiad and Sussex carried long-range, fairly nimble two-man Southampton Seaplane Company Gimlets, single-engined amphibians, for over-the-horizon reconnaissance, gunnery spotting and if required, search and rescue missions.
Meanwhile, the primary mission of Task Force 5.1 was to attack the capital of Santo Domingo.
The order of service went something like this: one, sink everything that floats in San Juan Bay and its adjacent anchorages; two, destroy all port facilities including dry docks, maintenance sheds, oil and coal depots; three, bomb Santo Domingo Government House and its associated Legislative Council complex; four, attack targets of opportunity in and around the city, and; five, all scouts not required for top cover over the target would attack, at low-level the major air base – one of only two on the main island – some six miles east-south-east of San Juan Bay.
This latter attack would commence approximately five minutes before the first wave of Sea Eagle torpedo bombers swept in over San Juan Island from the north at dawn on Monday, less than thirty-six hours hence.
‘We are not going to be squeamish about this,’ the Task Force Commander had said, proceeding to make his intentions unambiguously, brutally transparent, ‘if civilians, churches, or Germans loitering near the docks within the boundaries of their Concession get killed, that is just too bad. I’ll say it again. We did not want this war. We did not start it. The Triple Alliance sowed the whirlwind, now its members are about to start reaping the wind. Let me be plain about this: the reason we are going for the Dominicans first is because they are the most ideologically inimical to our way of life. Granted, their Hispanic and Cuban allies claim the same sort of Hell-fire thing but we now know that it was the Dominicans who were behind the Empire Day atrocities two years ago. Now, as they say, the whirlwind will visit San Juan. So, as I say, let us not be squeamish about this!’
To emphasis the point, orders had been issued that no aircraft was to bring back bombs or torpedoes, or external ‘drop’ fuel tanks. If there was no ship worth torpedoing, or easily identifiable ‘military objective’ available – for example if the whole area was obscured by smoke – then pilots were to climb to five thousand feet and release their fish ‘somewhere’ over San Juan city; likewise, unused bombs and superfluous drop tanks were to be discarded over ‘the target area’.