“CIC to Bridge. Point Alpha! Repeat Point Alpha!”
“Very good, EWO,” returned the Captain’s relaxed drawl. Captain David Penberthy’s position when the ship was closed up at actions stations was a somewhat moveable feast. The Navy hadn’t yet got used to the new science and technologies of war and individual commanders tended to be reluctant to bury themselves in the sterility of their ship’s Combat Information Centres when nothing specifically prohibited them from fighting their ship from the bridge. Today the Old Man was on his bridge while his Electronics Warfare Office — twenty-seven year old Lieutenant-Commander Peter Julian Christopher — to all intents, controlled and managed the battlefield around HMS Talavera and her two consorts.
Operation Albion was going to be a long-range gunnery engagement. The battle plan assumed — a calculated risk — that even this close to the enemy shore the largely antiquated Spanish air force was unlikely to pose a threat to the three destroyers of Task Force 1.2. HMS Ark Royal, steaming seventy miles off shore was flying a four Sea Vixen CAP over the target and in the unlikely event any attacking aircraft got past the CAP the three destroyers’ GWS 21 Sea Cats and 20-millimetre cannons would be more than capable of dealing with World War Two vintage Dorniers and Heinkels.
Peter Christopher saw the other destroyers forming up astern of Talavera on the tactical plot. Ark Royal’s Sea Vixens were circling over the port of Santander at thirty-three thousand feet. Otherwise, the plot was empty.
“Spanish forces have invested Gibraltar and cratered the only available runway capable of operating fixed wing aircraft. Two days ago HMS Albion struck a submerged mine entering Algeciras Bay in Gibraltarian territorial waters. Shortly thereafter HMS Cassandra was mined and destroyed by a secondary magazine explosion with heavy loss of life. Some twelve hours after her mining HMS Albion was towed into a dry dock. Nearly two hundred naval personnel are dead or missing and many others were injured.”
The Captain’s voice had rung with righteous anger as he addressed the crew in the minutes before the ship closed up for battle.
“A state of war now exists between the United Kingdom and the fascist republic of Spain!”
There had been no jeers, only resignation in the faces of the men in Talavera’s gloomy CIC.
“If the last year has taught us anything it is that actions speak louder than words. The Spanish probably expect there will be diplomatic overtures. They might even anticipate that we will meekly surrender Gibraltar to their tender mercies. If that is what they expect they are going to get a very nasty surprise in the next few hours!”
Resignation had become grim determination on the faces of the men around Peter Christopher. The die was cast.
“While Talavera, Aisne and Devonshire are shelling Santander, Task Force 1.1, made up of elements of Hermes’s screen will be administering the same medicine off Cadiz. While that is going on four of Hermes’s Buccaneer’s will attack shipping in Cadiz Roads. I have also been notified that Bomber Command V-Bombers will conduct precision attacks with conventional munitions on several military targets in the Spanish hinterland and in the Madrid area at around the time we will be going into action.’
Peter Christopher had never been of an overly bloodthirsty disposition. He hadn’t joined the Navy to get himself killed or to kill anybody else. He’d joined up because it was expected of him and because the Navy promised to allow him to play with all manner of new and exhilarating toys. When he’d first come on board Talavera his cup had run over. The ship was a veritable smorgasbord of brand new and experimental radars, communications and electronic warfare counter measures devices. He’d discovered technologies onboard the reconstructed and modernised destroyer that he’d previously only read about in science fiction comics. Some days when he was sitting in CIC — if he actually had a minute or so of spare time to think — he felt like Dan Dare. However, even Talavera’s easy going, unwarlike EWO’s blood was up today. There had been an unprovoked, murderous attack on two Royal Navy warships entering harbour; and that could not be allowed to go unpunished.
“Point Bravo!” Jack Griffin, once the destroyer’s talismanic bad apple but now its beating heart announced.
“Time to run?” Peter Christopher asked, checking the timings on the plot.
“Six-zero seconds, sir.”
The Bridge speaker confirmed the clock was running down.
The three destroyers would open fire as one.
Thereafter, they would fire broadsides at will across the isthmus upon which the city of Santander perched, into its port and onto any shipping sheltering within that the Sea Vixens identified.
Each destroyer had a broadside of four 4.5 inch Mark IV 45 Calibre guns in two twin turrets mounted forward of their bridge superstructures. Theoretically, the 4.5 inch Mark IV 45 gun had a rate of fire of between 12 and 15 rounds per minute but in the current seas and to accommodate corrections fed back into Talavera’s CIC by the high-flying Sea Vixens, effectively the rate of fire was going to be as low as ten rounds per gun per minute.
In an action timed to last no more than ten minutes this still meant that around twelve hundred rounds — each weighing 55-pounds with an eleven pound bursting charge — would fall within the city and port.
In a former age Peter Christopher and many — possibly the majority — of those onboard HMS Talavera would have baulked at attacking a civilian target, which just happened to be an enemy naval base, without warning. However, his personal well of pity and the last of his pre-war moral scruples about such things had gone out of the window when he’d heard what had happened to HMS Albion and HMS Cassandra in Algeciras Bay.
“Thirty seconds!”
Talavera’s main battery was slaved to the CIC.
Peter Christopher watched radar ranges constantly updating the firing solution, noted the periodic modification of the elevation and traverse of the guns in the twin turrets. It would have seemed so bloodless, so straightforward to an impartial bystander; it was anything but. If he’d fed the wrong assumptions, the wrong targeting co-ordinates into the system Talavera’s fire would land hopelessly short or long and potentially, kill entirely the wrong people…
Thou shalt not kill…
He was going to be killing people he’d never know, never meet and who had never done anything to personally hurt to him or his. At some level he was reconciled to that. That after all was the nature of war. However, surrounded by the marvellous multi-faceted technologies of making war, of killing, he knew himself to be viscerally disconnected from the nightmare of the reality he was about to orchestrate in the streets of city he had never visited, never seen and that would never be the same again.
“Twenty seconds to run!”
“Check range to nearest coastline?”
“Eight point seven nautical miles, sir.”
Peter Christopher studied the plot.
“Eight point seven miles, aye,” he repeated. “CIC to Bridge. The board is green for a full calibre shoot!”
“Ten seconds!”
“Main battery pointers match!”
The report was superfluous; so much was automated.
“Five seconds!”
Four…three…two…one…
The ship shuddered as the four guns of Talavera’s main battery spat fire towards the distant lee shore.
Chapter 28