“We’ve had to send three off to the Pacific with Somerville,” said Pound, “ but that still leaves us three with Home Fleet, and three more at Alexandria.”
“The more the merrier,” said Tovey, but it’s not the ships I’m thinking of now, but the planes they carry. “Look what the Japanese accomplished at Pearl Harbor. Why, they’ve practically re-written the textbook on how to equip and utilize their carriers at sea. In the Pacific, every operation they undertake is centered on their carriers. Their naval air arm is simply superb, and on that score, the F.A.A. could not hope to match them. Now, we have adequate fighters. The Martlet and Seafires are coming along nicely, and giving us good capability for fleet defense. The Albacore is there as a torpedo bomber, but gentlemen, we need a better dive bomber. The Fulmar simply won’t do, and without a decent aircraft in that role, we’re like a boxer with one arm tied behind his back.”
“The Buccaneer is coming along nicely,” said Pound. “It will be a dual purpose aircraft, taking either torpedoes or bombs, just like the new model the Americans are working on, the Avenger.”
“We might want to have a look at that plane if we can talk them out of a few. Putting better strike aircraft on our carriers gives us some real offensive punch. The days of fluttering in with Swordfish are long over. Jerry is building aircraft carriers, and they’ve got the Stuka. We’ve all seen what they can do with that combination. God forbid they ever develop a good torpedo plane.” There was a moment of silence at that, and the Admirals took Tovey’s words to heart.
“I’ll put in a word to Admiral King concerning those Avengers,” said Pound. “Frankly, our projection of power at sea has always been built around the battleship, but you may be on to something here, Admiral Tovey. HMS Glorious has done well with those old Stringbags, and now she has Martlets and the Albacore.”
“It wasn’t the planes,” said Tovey, “it was the man that sent them out to do the job. We need more like this Captain Wells.”
“Yes,” said Pound, “he certainly put Bretagne and Provence under the sea, but we paid a high price for them—France…”
That statement fell like a hot coal in cold water, and there was a silence about the conference table, until Tovey lifted his chin and responded. “I might add that he sunk those ships on orders from the Admiralty, and against the wishes of his senior Commanding Officer on the scene, Admiral Somerville.”
“I’ll not dispute that,” said Pound, “but we must admit that was one situation we might have handled differently. Had it not been for Churchill’s bullying, things might have gone otherwise.”
“It isn’t what we might have done that matters now,” said Tovey, “but what we might yet do. I daresay Hitler is probably wishing he hadn’t crossed the Soviet border as he did. And there will be time enough for all of us to sit with our regrets in a cold dark closet before this war is over.”
“But we’ll muddle through,” said Fraser.
“Aye,” said Tovey. “That we will.”
Chapter 8
It was one of the most difficult decisions Churchill would make in the entire war, and he stared at the letter he had just received from Wavell with an almost unbelieving expression on his face. The prospect being put to him now by his Theater Commander seemed preposterous, and yet, as he read on, the cold military logic in Wavell’s arguments could not be denied. Now he sat with his newly appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, relieved to have him at hand now instead of Field Marshal John Dill, a man Churchill never fully appreciated, and one he quietly maneuvered out of the chair he now gave Brooke.
Given the central role he would play in planning the war, Churchill had found it necessary to take Brooke aside and confide the one great ‘truth’ to him that had shaken the history to its very foundation. Brooke was absolutely amazed, as any man might be upon hearing such a story, but when Churchill handed him a photograph taken in Siwa of Kinlan’s battalion of heavy Challenger IIs, the General had removed his eye glasses, and leaned in very close.
The shock of knowing he was looking at men and machines from another time, Britain’s far flung future, was almost too much to take. Churchill confided he felt the same way, until the reality of what he was looking at finally banished all the arguments his mind put forth as to his own insanity. With those men, those machines, the Allies could win the war.
The Heavy Brigade was now something Churchill treasured beyond the worth of all the Crown Jewels and all the gold in the nation’s treasury. He had in that single brigade, the means of decisive victory at any time and place of his choosing. Beyond that, Kinlan knew the outcome of the war, even as Fedorov had. He was a road map to the victory Churchill was laboring to bring about, yet was isolated there in the Middle East, far from the War Cabinet, and all the decisions that would have to be made there.
At one point Churchill thought he would summon the man to London, and keep him at his side to navigate the stormy waters ahead, but the young Russian Captain Fedorov had convinced him of the danger inherent in the knowledge of future days.
“Knowing what once happened will not necessarily bend the course of this war to follow the same path,” he had told Churchill. “In fact, simply knowing the outcome of any battle could become a fatal poison in the brew. It removes the uncertainty from your thinking, and could introduce a cavalier attitude to the decision making process that might be fatal. For it was only in the dark of the night, with enemies on every side, beset with fear and that awful uncertainty, that you could truly weigh the risks, and the consequences of the choices you had to make. I could hand you a book that would lay out every battle, every misstep and lost opportunity, every advantage before you, but that would take the passion of life out of you, and without that, you would never be the same man again. Understand?”
“I suppose I do,” Churchill had said. “It would be like knowing the outcome of every flirtatious proposal you might make to a lady, and whether you might win through to capture her heart, among other things. Would a man risk his pride and honor to woo a woman he knew he could have at his whim? I think not. There would be nothing at stake, and he could therefore neither feel the elation of his conquest, nor the pain of his loss should he fail. Yes, Mister Fedorov, I do understand what you are saying.”
So it was that Fedorov remained very careful and cautious with the information he had on the outcome of the war, and he had also privately urged Kinlan to be equally reticent. “These men may know they can win this war, but not how, not by chapter and verse. They must write this history themselves now, with the sweat of their brow, and the blood of the men they send to do battle. Besides—from everything I have seen, this entire history seems to be a house of cards. Change one thing and the whole of it could come tumbling down. We have no way of knowing which events could cause such a catastrophe. We can speculate and guess, but never know to a certainty. Tell them everything, and the weight of all that knowledge could be too difficult for them to bear.”
The weight had seemed that way to Churchill, and he eventually decided he had to bring someone ‘inside’ on the truth of the matter, someone with dignity, authority, and the broad respect of his peers—someone like Sir Alan Brooke. He needed a foil to his own mind on the war, and Brooke would become that for him, though he would once write of Churchilclass="underline" “A complete amateur of strategy, he swamps himself in detail he should never look at, and as a result fails to ever see a strategic problem in its true perspective.”