Two points might be added here. I hope my conspiracy and its doings are fun, but in the end I incline to the view I attribute to Morris in his last speech, that Nolan as portrayed ‘would very likely have done just as he did do’ if there had been no conspiracy. And as for whether the historical Nolan really misled Lucan on purpose, we shall never know. Still, I rather think he did. True, he had a lot of luck with the incompetence that surrounded him, but it was the sort of luck that comes the way of murderous maniacs.
With exceptions like Nolan’s discourse, most of my London and St Petersburg scenes (sequences 1, 2, 4, 6–8) are fiction. The Crimean sequences, 3 and 5, are largely factual, here and there closely so. For instance, Nolan’s face-to-face diatribe against Lucan, Cardigan’s remarks about siege warfare, Paget’s questions about the significance of the two flags (and the cannonade that interrupts them), Campbell’s words to his men, Morris’s exchange with Cardigan, the text of the order to Lucan (verbatim), Nolan’s placing himself beside Morris, Lucan’s talk with Cardigan just before the charge, the incident of Paget’s cigar and Cardigan’s orders immediately following, the momentary lull in firing, the circumstances of Nolan’s death and what Cardigan and Scarlett say about it afterwards are all matters of record. That record comes chiefly of course from what survivors of the battle wrote about it subsequently, and if one sometimes feels that they remembered with advantages, the capacity of human beings to say memorable or melodramatic things at great moments should not be forgotten.
Morris’s version of the numbers killed and wounded in the charge is taken from p. 272 of The Age of Reform (1938) by E. L. Woodward.
1941/A
I — The Pacific Operation
… The Imperial Fleet that sailed from the Kuril Islands in the last days of November was the most powerful naval force ever assembled. It consisted in the first place of eleven battleships. The largest of them, Yamato, in which Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto flew his flag, was at 68,200 tons displacement one of the two largest battleships ever built, the other being her sister ship Musashi, then uncompleted. Each of their nine 18.1-inch guns (the biggest ever carried afloat) fired shells weighing 3,220 pounds. Top speed was a remarkable 27 knots to a range of 7,200 miles.
With the exception of the sister ships Nagato and Mutu, each bearing eight 16-inch guns, the other battleships in the Grand Fleet carried 14-inch primary armament, altogether providing a broadside of eighty pieces. Speeds of 22.5–28 knots could be attained. All the above ships could launch up to three aircraft via catapult.
The accompanying carrier component was likewise uniquely strong at the time, consisting as it did of no fewer than nine vessels, from the impressive sister ships Soryu and Hiryu with their capacity of seventy-one aircraft each and their top speed of 34.5 knots, to the smaller Taigo with her twenty-seven aircraft and 21 knots. In aggregate these ships carried the prodigious total of 380 aircraft.
Six heavy cruisers, fourteen light cruisers, sixty-six destroyers and nearly one hundred other craft, including a sufficiency of tankers for refuelling purposes, accompanied the capital ships.
Divided into four forces under vice-admirals, this unparalleled armada set its course due east. It passed hundreds of miles to the north of the main Pacific base of the US Navy at Pearl Harbor, the objective of an earlier strike plan now superseded. The change of plan had been largely the personal doing of Yamamoto, who had never wavered in his conviction that Japan could only hope to defeat America in a short war, the shorter the better.
Thanks to miracles of organization and the most rigid security, the Grand Fleet assembled intact and on schedule off the Californian coast, far enough off to be below its horizon. The four forces maintained for the voyage across the Pacific Ocean had become two, separated by some hundreds of miles, in fact the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
At first light on 11th December, the Japanese fleet commenced bombardment of these two prosperous and populous cities with every gun that could be brought to bear, while every aeroplane capable of flight took off on bombing and strafing missions into their harbours and business and residential quarters. Complete surprise was attained. Of the initial salvoes, one heavy shell struck almost the precise centre of what was at that time the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world, opened only four years earlier, the Golden Gate Bridge at the entrance to San Francisco harbour. The bridge sustained great damage and there was some loss of life.
After a prearranged interval, the two forces ceased fire, turned into line abeam and steamed inshore, a change of location designed partly to permit greater accuracy and to conserve aircraft fuel, but also, at least as important, to leave the helpless citizens in no doubt of who and what it was that brought them destruction and death. The ships of the battle-fleet went to their new stations and recommenced bombardment, whether of the cities themselves or of shipping and harbour and other installations. The aerial attacks had continued without pause.
Shortly before 10.00 hours a tender or other small boat was observed approaching the waterborne forces bearing a rough-and-ready white flag. This impudent excursion, which could have claimed nothing conceivable in the way of legal standing or significance, was swiftly and properly dealt with. On orders of the Admiral himself, the destroyer Shimakaze closed with the intruder at top speed and rammed her amidships, cutting her clean in two. The remnants rapidly sank, those persons who had survived the impact being helped on their way by small-arms fire and grenades from Shimakaze’s deck.
By then or soon afterwards, large parts of both cities and their outskirts were ablaze. Visibility on this clear, sunny winter’s morning had at first been excellent; now heavy clouds of smoke drifted across the target and ascended hundreds of feet into the air. Massive explosions occurred at intervals. One especially severe and prolonged disturbance in the San Francisco area has been taken to indicate a seismic shock induced by the bombardment in an area notoriously subject to earthquakes, but material evidence is lacking.
Despite increasing difficulties of ranging and targeting, the Japanese warships and warplanes prolonged their assault on the two coastal cities until breaking off the action shortly before noon. Already large parts of the afflicted areas had been destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of their people lay buried in the rubble or lay dead or dying in what had been their streets. Sentimentalists have suggested that the attack was needlessly prolonged and excessive damage and slaughter inflicted, perhaps forgetting the first objective of the Californian operation, viz. the delivery of the maximum possible shock, not only locally but throughout the United States. It could be asserted with some confidence, in the light of subsequent events, that those Americans who lost their lives in and around Los Angeles and San Francisco did so, albeit unknowingly, in the service of their country.
When the cease-fire came and all aircraft were safely returned, the fleet drew off. The whole of it with one exception began the long voyage home across the Pacific under the command of Vice-Admiral S. Toyoda. The exception, the giant battleship Yamato, whose ammunition had been conserved, started off on her way to a fresh target some 3,500 miles to the south-east, a target of such importance that Admiral Yamamoto had insisted on attending to it personally.
The naval forces assaulting the Californian cities had met with negligible resistance. A number of obsolete US warplanes made feeble, uncoordinated attempts to close with the vastly superior Japanese aerial armament, but in almost all cases these were shot out of the sky at ranges too great for them to return effective fire. Even considered solely by the standards of warlike profit and loss, the Pacific operation was the most successful in history.