At the crack of dawn that morning a strike force of eight Sea Eagle torpedo bombers and six dive-bombers, escorted by eighteen Goshawk scouts had sortied from HMS Ulysses – then holding station north east of the Turks and Caicos Islands – against enemy surface units operating in the lee of Little Inagua Island and ‘targets of opportunity’ on Great Inagua.
“You say our Sea Eagles put at least one fish into one of the Spaniards big ships?”
“Yes,” Collingwood confirmed, keen not to over-egg the as yet preliminary combat assessments to hand. In the heat of battle personal accounts and impressions were no always to be trusted; later today the first of the gun camera and bomb-aiming films would become available, likewise more information about the drop points and performance of the relatively new, unproven aerial torpedoes employed. “Another ship, one of their ironclad cruisers took a couple of bomb hits, too, we think. Our Goshawks had a merry old time shooting up the harbour at Matthew Town. We obviously caught the bounders with their trousers down.”
Collingwood did not dwell on such matters.
“Indomitable is under way again. She has significant underwater damage and her starboard turbine rooms are out of commission but she is still capable of making fifteen knots. The plan is to bring her home, well, back to the St John’s River for makeshift repairs, via coastal waters. The RNAS has already commenced anti-submarine patrols to cover Indomitable’s return. I have sent four of Indomitable’s destroyers to join the Devonshire Squadron off the Delta.”
“Devonshire?” The Governor of New England queried, distractedly.
“In Indomitable’s absence, Devonshire’s eight-inchers are the biggest guns we have at sea in the waters of the Gulf of Spain.”
“Ought we to leave her out there, Cuthbert?”
Collingwood had mulled exactly this question overnight.
“Ideally, no. But in the circumstances, the Navy cannot be seen to be pulling out of harm’s way, sir.”
“Quite, quite. Forgive me, I did not intend to give the impression I was, er, jogging your arm, Cuthbert.”
Collingwood had taken no offence.
Jamaica had fallen.
Indomitable was limping out of the fray.
The situation in the Borderlands was nothing short of disastrous.
At times like this, friends needed to stand shoulder to shoulder.
“The Perseus task force is presently steaming south to co-ordinate its operations with the Ulysses, sir,” Collingwood went on. “The Indefatigable has also put to sea with her own gun line, ostensibly to operate independently of both Task Force 5.1 and 5.2. Once we’ve achieved aerial superiority over the seas north of Cuba and Santo Domingo, I plan to send gun lines inshore to bring the war to the peoples of those islands.”
Philip De L’Isle had often discussed the arcane consequences of the rapidly developing new war-fighting technologies with his friend. ‘Air superiority’ was everything, without it the most powerful ships afloat had, in the course of the last twenty years, become horribly vulnerable to attack from the air.
Thus far, there had been no unsettling revelations about the ‘air power’ of the lesser partners in the Triple Alliance. Neither Cuba, Santo Domingo, Hispaniola or any of the other minor players possessed modern scouts or bombers, mostly, their air forces comprised string bag biplanes or slow, first generation monoplanes, and they had no heavy bombers other than a handful of aging ‘clippers’, large seaplanes converted from civilian employment. That said, it was believed that these ‘junior’ partners possessed a very large number of old, otherwise obsolete aircraft and as any military man could attest, weight of numbers was never to be discounted.
Problematically, if the British Empire’s former advantage in quality over quantity had been rendered null and void in the West, it might now be that the one hundred and thirty modern aircraft on the Ulysses and the Perseus, might now be confronting possibly thousands of theoretically less capable aircraft but nevertheless, thousands of them, in the Eastern sector.
“Once Perseus is on station,” Collingwood continued, “we shall start ‘beating up’ the Cuban and Dominican air defence systems, such as they are, and wrecking their airfields. If the beggars are so ill-advised as to place their ships upon the open seas, we shall harry them all the way to the bottom of the ocean!”
Neither man asked what the Royal Navy could do to take the pressure off the hard-pressed colonial forces on the South West Front. Had Collingwood been permitted to station powerful squadrons at Jamaica, or to patrol the western Gulf of Spain with one or other of his carrier task forces, it might have deterred the Triple Alliance. However, such deployments had been viewed as ‘provocative’ in London, now if the C-in-C wanted to command those dangerous seas his men were going to have to pay a heavy price in blood and ships.
Philip De L’Isle had always known that even if things went badly down on the Border, Imperial forces could always play the long game. Specifically, garrison New Orleans knowing that the Delta and the Mississippi itself would be impenetrable barriers to the eastern march of any Mexican army. Likewise, New England could afford to trade tens, and if necessary, hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory in the West to an invading army. Wrecking everything in their rear, retreating colonial forces, scorching the earth, could, eventually simply allow their enemies to wither, starve, die of thirst in the trackless desert they left behind them. Yes, that was a strategy of despair but then no New Englander had been, to date, prepared to pay for a standing army large enough, and well-enough equipped, to defend the thousand miles of contested borders down in the South West.
The Governor of the Commonwealth of New England took absolutely no pleasure in knowledge, and having told his principals in London, repeatedly, that sooner or later local and Imperial parsimony in respect of his Colony’s military preparedness on land, if not at sea, might be their downfall.
De L’Isle changed the subject.
“There were no German nationals on the submarine which attacked the Indomitable?”
“No. The boat has sunk now. My people tell me it is a modified Kaiserliche Marine Type IV. Three hundred and fifty tons, a couple of forward torpedo tubes and a crew of thirty-six. We have thirteen men in custody, all Cuban. The boat was built in one of those big sheds we identified at Havana some years back. They hide the bloody things away in concrete pens at bases along their northern coast.”
Cuthbert Collingwood was disgusted.
“Dammit, we should never have trusted the bloody Germans!”
Philip De L’Isle let this remark go uncontested.
“Well, at least we stole a march on Berlin with all these big carriers you persuaded the Admiralty to build, Cuthbert!”
Both men knew that moves were afoot to send at least one, perhaps, two more of the great ships across the North Atlantic. The only reason movement orders had not already been drafted was that the ‘situation’ of the German Government was as yet, regarded as being somewhat… fluid. With the old Kaiser clearly in terminal decline nobody in Whitehall was entirely sure who, exactly, was in charge in Berlin. Things were so worrying, that practically everybody in Great Britain now fervently hoped that the Crown Prince, in former years regarded as a feckless philanderer and a clear and present threat to global security and the post-Treaty of Paris world order, would emerge as the new German Emperor. For all his faults, it was felt that at least ‘young Willy’ was a man London could do business with.