“I can’t recommend the coffee, sir,” the young man, barely more than a boy apologised, “but the tea is usually drinkable at this time of day.”
A few minutes later the US Naval Attaché to the UKIEA was nursing a chipped mug of bitter black tea in his hands while he contemplated the absurdity of the world in which he now lived.
Other than Major Cummings initial terseness Brenckmann and his men had been treated with respect and courtesy. There’d been no real personal animosity, no unpleasantness and despite the fact he wasn’t exactly free to leave on his own cognisance, the British seemed a little sheepish about putting him to such inconvenience.
“Sorry to keep you and your chaps hanging around, sir,” announced a woman’s voice — sing song and cheerful — to break into Brenckmann’s thoughts as he stared into his tea.
A brunette in a WREN’s uniform stood framed in the door.
“I’m not quite sure why they asked me to explain things,” the girl, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, went on, “but the Garrison has asked the Navy to send up somebody to verify that you are who you claim to be, sir. I think the Navy are a little busy at the moment so there might be a delay. We’re terribly sorry about that…”
“Busy?” Walter Brenckmann inquired wryly.
“Operation Manna,” the kid replied, bewildered that he had to ask such a silly question. “I think everybody’s convinced you fellows will try to interfere in some way!”
The American would have cracked up laughing at the young woman’s sudden horror when she realised that she’d probably betrayed a huge national secret to a potential enemy. Except, it wasn’t remotely funny. In fact it was proof positive that everything he’d been telling his superiors for the last few months was true. The Brits had worked themselves up into a frenzy and if CINCLANT made a single wrong move the Navy was going to find itself in a shooting war that it wasn’t remotely expecting, ready or prepared to fight.
Chapter 13
The manoeuvring bell clanged. Green grey water came over the bow as the destroyer pitched into the teeth of the gale, the whole ship shuddered and seemed to pause before she surged forward again, steadying onto the new heading.
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher had seized the arms of his chair in the amidships CIC upon hearing the warning bell. Now he relaxed. Talavera had been taking a battering in the cross seas for over an hour as she manoeuvred onto the flank of the Ark Royal Battle Group.
The weather had been uniformly foul ever since Talavera had steamed out of Portland Harbour into the teeth of a Force 7 Channel blow that had rapidly become a full gale. Meeting up with the frigates Rhyl, Lowestoft, Plymouth, the brand new first in class, Leander, she’d exercised with the other ships for eighteen hours testing communications, conducting offset live fire trials and generating as much radio ‘noise’ as they could without making it obvious that they were attempting to impersonate a much larger flotilla than they actually were. Then the four ships had split up, Leander slowly heading back to Devonport to carry on making good the mechanical faults and deficiencies resulting from her rushed commissioning, Rhyl, Lowestoft and Plymouth to sweep for submarine contacts in the northern Bay of Biscay, and Talavera to relieve her sister ship Corunna. Corunna had suffered damage to her mid-ships and after deckhouses in recent heavy weather, and this combined with being too long out of dockyard hands had reduced her maximum speed to around twenty-six knots and severely curtailed her efficacy in her primary air defence role. Talavera and her older sister had crossed within a few hundred yards of each other, each ship flashing salutes and good wishes to each other as they rose and fell, one out of sight of the other, in the long Atlantic swells as the latest storm front passed over the Western Approaches.
Peter Christopher had tried to gauge the weather damage to Corunna’s upper works from his position wedged against Talavera’s bridge rail. Leading Seaman Jack Griffin had tried to do the same from several feet higher up the destroyer’s forward lattice mast and got knocked black and blue for his trouble. It seemed two big waves had washed away many of Corunna’s life rafts and her whaler, and although most of the external aerial wiring had survived intact water had got into her CIC and the adjacent radar and generator rooms. Peter had always suspected the construction of the new deckhouses was too flimsy to withstand rough weather overlong but that was a trade off to be expected when grafting a surfeit of modern technology onto a 1940s hull. Short of offloading the 4.5 inch forward battery there was no way to remove sufficient top weight to facilitate the construction of more substantial deckhouses so high above the waterline. Every ship that had ever gone down a slipway was a compromise between speed, capacity, structural robustness and seaworthiness. Talavera’s deck houses were stiffer, much more heavily caulked constructions than those of her earlier sisters and he’d personally supervised the re-welding of countless less than immaculately executed major welds while she was still in dockyard hands before the war. Perhaps, Talavera’s deck houses would be drier than those of her sisters but only time would tell.
Talavera had the distinction of being the last of her class commissioned into the Royal Navy. Laid down late in the Second World War on 29th August 1944 at the yard of Messrs John Brown and Co on Clydebank, she’d not been launched until 27th August 1945 and then only to clear the slip and in expectation of immediate scrapping. The majority of unfinished War Emergency Program ships like Talavera were summarily disposed of in the years that followed, but Talavera, after lying half-built for four years, was taken in hand and eventually commissioned into the Royal Navy on 12th November 1950. In an act that was typical of Admiralty bureaucratic muddle she’d promptly been mothballed after a single, eighteen month commission in home waters, and but for the decision to convert six aging battle class destroyers into so-called Fast Air Detection Escorts, she’d probably have gone to the breakers by now.
For all that Talavera had been laid down over eighteen years ago she was a relatively young ship. Or as the Captain had once called her: ‘An old sports car with hardly any miles on the clock!’ Moreover, her youthful vigour had been massively enhanced by the radical nature of her conversion. Of the original ship only the hull, engines, funnel, forward superstructure and her main armament remained. A huge new lattice foremast had sprouted immediately abaft the bridge — the base of this great structure straddling the entire forty feet beam of the ship — topped with a four ton Type 965 AKE-2 double bedstead aerial. A Type 293Q fire control array was mounted on a platform beneath the huge bedsteads. Aft of the single broad, raked funnel all torpedo tubes and light AA armament had been discarded and a big, blocky deckhouse containing generators and radar rooms had been welded to the main deck. Between this new superstructure and the old aft deckhouse, a new relatively slender lattice mainmast carried a Type 277Q height finder dish and several Electronic Warfare Support Measures (ESM) and Direction Finding (DF) aerials. The existing after deckhouse had been extended and strengthened to mount a quadruple GWS 21 Sea Cat Surface-to-Air-Missile (SAM) system, while on the cramped quarterdeck the ship retained its original Squid Anti-Submarine (A/S) mortar.