In past ‘Border Wars’, the Navy had generally been deployed in a blockading role during which there had been only a handful of minor engagements – between small ships or patrol boats in coastal waters – with Las Armada de Nuevo Granada remaining steadfastly in port and the Cuban, Dominican and other ‘unfriendly’ powers in the region carefully preserving their neutrality so as to avoid incurring the wrath of perfidious Albion.
This time around nobody in Norfolk imagined the Triple Alliance was going to use that ‘play book’. Not after what had happened to the Achilles and was still going on down in Jamaica.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding that the ‘Make Ready for War’ signal had been sent out to all ships and stations under Cuthbert Collingwood’s command over twenty hours ago, nobody in the Situation Room that morning was taking anything for granted.
Theoretically, it was not too late for the Cubans to hand over the men and ships which had sunk the Achilles; or for the agents of the Triple Alliance to desist their operations on Jamaica and withdraw their forces. Thereafter, it would be up to the diplomats to hammer out a new peace.
That of course, was a pipe dream. Practically speaking, the war had begun and the forces of the Commonwealth of New England and the Atlantic Fleet were in motion. The genie was well and truly out of the bottle and nothing short of a miracle was going to persuade it to obediently get back into it.
The Army Liaison Officer was completing his briefing.
It was an accident of history that to all intents, there was no standing apparatus of high-level integrated military or industrial command in New England, or across the Canadian provinces. In the past the wartime appointment of a Supreme Commander had been a thing stoutly resisted, an article of faith among the First Thirteen seemingly from time immemorial. It was almost as if the individual colonies were afraid that such a military ‘supremo’ might, like Caesar, one day cross the Rubicon to enslave them.
Thus, there was War Plan West Texas (covering operations west of the Mississippi), War Plan East (covering operations east of the great river) and War Plan Anson (in respect of the Atlantic Fleet’s operations and ‘obligations’ under the other two ‘Plans’ in the Atlantic, the Caribbean and in the Gulf of Spain).
Technically, all land forces and Colonial Air Force squadrons, were under the command of the Chief of Staff of all North American Colonial Forces, Field Marshall Lord George Everard St John Markham, GCB, CBE, DSO and Bar, MC, but the post had been a largely ceremonial institution ever since the Great War, as witnessed by the fact that Markham was a seventy-nine-year-old former Indian Army man promoted field marshal upon his retirement from active service nearly fifteen years ago.
Pragmatically, if there was such a thing as a commander of New England land forces it was probably, implicitly if not acknowledged elsewhere, the fifty-eight-year-old Quartermaster General of New England, Lieutenant General Sir Vivian Macmillan Clinton, KCB, OBE, MC, a direct patrilineal descendent of Sir Henry Clinton, one of General William Howe’s commanders at the Battle of Long Island in August 1776.
Unfortunately, Clinton had only been appointed at the end of last year and made very little progress – due to obstruction by several colonies, Virginia, Delaware and New York in particular – in integrating colonial militias into larger, New England brigades and divisions. While the Governor of New England had, and had always had, the prima face right to raise, disband, and deploy the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Regiments of a given colony’s or territory’s militia anywhere in North America, no Governor had attempted to use such powers since the era when the suppression of revolution was the over-riding concern of Government House. Consequently, there was not now, and there had never been, any New England equivalent to the Indian Army, mainly because the First Thirteen, and their two belated associates, New Hampshire and Vermont, had always been vehemently opposed to the creation of such an army. The argument went something like: We are loyal New Englanders; we have no need of an Army of Occupation. And besides, since they had never had to pay anything like the full cost of the British and (other) non-American Empire troops deployed on their territory – for their defence – in previous wars, the legislatures of the East Coast colonies really did not see why they should be inconvenienced by the onerous price of such an army.
The defence of New England was, after all, as much a vital interest of the rest of the Empire as it was in, say, Virginia or Massachusetts. As Governors of New England had attested down the years, you could always tell a Virginia planter a mile away, but in practice you could never tell him anything!
“Air activity over the Rio Grande sector is greatly increased in recent days. This has curtailed our own reconnaissance activities,” the Army Liaison Officer, a Major with the tabs of the 4th Maryland Fusiliers on his collar, explained stoically. “However, the picture emerging from radio intercepts and the analysis of the same, coded traffic, indicates that the Mexicans,” most Army men called the citizens of New Granada, ‘Mexicans’ these days, “have elements of at least seven divisions concentrated within ten miles of the front. It is hard to know for sure but we strongly suspect that if and when they come over the border, they will send columns north into the Indian Country, possibly developing aggressively into the Colorado Territory later. However, it is likely that the main weight of attack will fall on our forces in West Texas. Particularly the further west one goes this is truly dreadful campaigning country. There are still substantial native populations, Apache, Arapaho and other tribes who basically, we have more or less allowed to get on with their own affairs for years now. One imponderable is that we simply do not know whether the tribes will be friendly, or hostile to the Mexicans. Frankly, we don’t have enough men down there to fight the Mexicans, let alone the damned Apaches and Cherokees, and so forth. Those fellows are the finest irregular soldier-warriors on the continent; to us the terrain is our enemy, to them it is their friend.”
Until he assumed command at Norfolk, Cuthbert Collingwood had not been aware that successive Governors of New England had abandoned concerted attempts to ‘pacify’ the native tribes of the South West as long ago as the late 1940s. Peaceful co-existence had become the mantra with large parcels of ‘Indian Land’ set aside with all settler and other grants automatically voided by any New Englander who trespassed on that country.
The Colonial Air Force Liaison officer, a one-legged Wing-Commander in his forties with a chest full of meddle ribbons and a bushy handle-bar moustache, reported that four scout and two bomber squadrons were forming on ‘the Great Plains’ and should join the Border Air Command – BAC – within the next few weeks. Presently, there were six scout and five bomber-ground support squadrons stationed in the ‘Border Sector’, a force comprising approximately one hundred and sixty aircraft ‘ready for operations’.
Three of the scout squadrons were equipped with the Goshawk Mark II; even so, a hundred and sixty aircraft to cover seven to eight hundred miles of threatened ‘border’ seemed to the Navy men around the table as inadequate as the fifty-five thousand men of the nominally four-division strong Border Army, sometimes popularly referred to in the press as the ‘Army of the Rio Grande’ or simply the ‘Rio Grande Army’.
Both the Army and the CAF men stated the patently obvious when they said, more or less in chorus: “Hopefully, the Royal Naval Air Service will be in a position to assist us if the worst comes to the worst.”