The Englishman nodded.
Chapter 43
Pipes twittered as the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Varyl Begg, marched down the gangway from HMS Triumph, the slab-sided former aircraft carrier which had been converted into a heavy repair ship, a floating dockyard by any other name. He blinked as he emerged from the shadows into the dazzling afternoon sunshine and stepped onto the deck of the cruiser.
The twelve thousand mile high speed run from Malta, with a forty-eight hour refuelling stopover at Simons Town at the Cape, had taken a heavy toll on HMS Tiger. The rigors of that twenty-three day passage had worn down both the ship and her crew and Rear Admiral Nicholas ‘Nick’ Davey, who had joined the ship in South Africa after flying down to Pretoria for meetings with the Republic’s Prime Minister and other cabinet colleagues to discuss a possible South African contribution to the assembling ‘Middle East Task Force’, had reluctantly shifted his flag ashore to permit the cruiser to come alongside the heavy repair ship HMS Triumph to address her most pressing mechanical needs.
The First Sea Lord had determined that he wanted to see, and to be seen, on as many of the ships of the ABNZ Squadron assembled in the Persian Gulf as possible during his forty-eight hour visit, and his host had been delighted to oblige him; hence the meeting onboard the cruiser.
“Welcome aboard Tiger, sir,” Rear Admiral Nick Davey declared proudly.
The other man looked around at the tangle of cables and the dismantled equipment in every conceivable state of repair strewn everywhere in a decidedly un-Navy like way.
“Good to be out here at last,” Admiral Sir Varyl Begg retorted.
“Sorry about the mess, sir,” Davey remarked. “I need Tiger back at sea in five days time and there’s rather a lot to do!”
“That’s hardly surprising after her run around the Cape.”
Dispatching at least one ‘big ship’ from the Mediterranean Fleet the ‘long way around’ the Cape of Good Hope to the Persian Gulf had been a largely symbolic gesture, a thing primarily designed for public consumption back home. Ideally, the ‘big ship’ would have been an aircraft carrier but unfortunately the Royal Navy had run out of seaworthy options in that regard; Ark Royal was in dockyard hands in Portsmouth, the Eagle could not be spared from the Mediterranean, Hermes was in Gibraltar undergoing major repairs to her starboard turbines, and repairs to HMS Victorious, currently being ‘patched up’ at Malta were anticipated — assuming she was not written off as being not worth repairing — to take a year to eighteen months once she was, most likely, towed either to Gibraltar or Portsmouth. The other ‘carrier’ in the Mediterranean, HMS Albion, was actually a ‘commando’ or ‘helicopter carrier’; and although she would have looked good on the front pages of newspapers she too was badly in need of time in dockyard hands, having been repaired in an unholy rush after her mining in Algeciras Bay back in December. Albion was currently unable to steam at more than twelve knots. Albion’s sister, Bulwark, similarly converted to the role of a ‘commando’ carrier, had remained in the Pacific when Centaur, the Navy’s least modified ‘aircraft’ carrier, sporting an obsolete radar and electronics suite and incapable of operating the most modern fighter and strike fast jets had been, quite literally, the ‘last carrier standing’. Basically, the Royal Navy’s cupboard was somewhat bare and the only available ‘big ships’ capable of a long, hard steam around the Cape had been one of the two ‘big cats’.
Tiger’s surviving sister ship, the other ‘big cat’, the Lion had stayed in the Mediterranean, acting as the Eagle’s guard ship. HMS Hampshire, the newly commissioned second ship of the new cruiser-sized County class guided missile destroyers had been provisionally pencilled in to join Tiger; but then she had been requisitioned to transport big bombs out to Cyprus for the RAF and to carry away the nuclear warheads salvaged from the wreck of the big cats’ sunken sister, HMS Blake in Limassol Harbour.
The Navy had run out of ‘big ships’.
The South African government had offered to send the Type 12 frigate President Steyn, and the old ‘W’ Class former Royal Navy destroyer Jan van Riebeeck to the Persian Gulf but after much discussion it was decided that for purely logistical reasons, the Republic’s contribution should be limited to sending as many as four battalions of mechanised light infantry to the theatre utilising locally available shipping. Davey’s mission to the Cape after a brief stopover in Pretoria had been as much to co-ordinate the South African Navy’s supporting role in the submarine blockade of the Falklands Archipelago and the islands of South Georgia, as it was to supplement the motley fleet coalescing in the Persian Gulf.
“When I was in South Africa the government there was mightily impressed with the line we’re taking over the Falklands,” the junior man remarked to the professional head of the Royal Navy. “I think they’d been beginning to ask themselves where it left them if and when we started retrenching, sir.”
Sir Varyl Begg guffawed and shook his head.
“I think we’re all asking ourselves that,” he confided. “We might have lost David Luce and Julian Christopher but their spirit lives on. Dammit, after what Julian’s boy did at Malta nobody in the Service would be able to look at themselves in the mirror if we started taking backward steps now.”
Nick Davey nodded enthusiastically.
Deploying the Oberon and Porpoise class boats to the South Atlantic had been a brave thing to do. Fortunately, they had a government that did nothing by halves.
Thank god!
The ongoing war operations in the South Atlantic came under the umbrella of Operation Sturdee, named in honour of the First World War victor of the Battle of the Falklands, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Frederick Charles Doveton Sturdee. The three two-hundred nautical mile Total Exclusion Zones — TEZs — had accordingly been named ‘Invincible’ (the Falklands Archipelago), ‘Inflexible’ (South Georgia), and ‘Glasgow’ (the South Sandwich Islands). At the Battle of the Falklands in December 1914 it had been the battlecruisers Invincible — Sturdee’s flagship — and Inflexible which had battered the out-gunned armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau of Admiral Maximillian von Spee’s German East Asia Squadron to pieces, in company with the light cruiser HMS Glasgow.
Nick Davey was less of a naval historian than many of his contemporaries; until his retirement from the service shortly before the October War, he had been much too busy living life to the full to bother overmuch with history books. Looking back he had spent a large part of the first half of his career mucking about in racing yachts and chasing women with his greatly lamented recently deceased old friend Julian Christopher.
Notwithstanding, he had once met an old salt from HMS Glasgow — the only British ship to have been present at the debacle of the Battle of Coronel in which von Spee’s guns had demolished a much weaker Royal Navy Squadron off the Chilean coast on 1st November 1914 — and the Battle of the Falklands five-and-a-half weeks later. He could not remember the old salt’s name, both men had been a little the worse for drink at the time, but he did remember that the man had told him that at one time during the Great War the Glasgow’s mascot had been a pig called ‘Tirpitz’.