In the absence of other specific countermanding orders from ComSixthFleet you will seek out and destroy the enemy and render all POSSIBLE assistance to allied units and authorities!
Bernard Clarey had been in command of United States Submarine Force Pacific at the time of the Battle of Washington. This meant that when the Chief of Naval Operations floated his name as the C-in-C of the newly recreated Sixth Fleet neither the White House, or more importantly, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Curtis LeMay, had raised objections to Clarey’s nomination. Bernard Clarey’s hands were clean. He had had nothing whatsoever to do with the naval comedy of errors which had resulted in the October War, and had had nothing whatsoever to do with the provocative operational ‘demonstrating’ of the Enterprise Battle Group in the Western Approaches to the British Isles at the time of the Operation Manna Convoys, or with the subsequent unprovoked harassment and bungled attack on the British nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought. That this unwarranted, wholly illegal attack had taken place in international waters and that in attempting to frustrate it an American vessel, the nuclear-powered hunter killed USS Scorpion, had been sunk by torpedoes deployed by Grumman S-2 Tracker aircraft flying off the Enterprise, spoke — in Curtis LeMay’s and the President’s minds — as ample testimony to the idiocy of a certain clique of highly placed naval officers at the Pentagon and at Atlantic Fleet Headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. Any man ‘soiled’ by contact with this clique was permanently ‘damaged goods’ in Washington. Thus, when the Chief of Naval Operations had put Clarey’s name into the hat his nomination had literally, gone through on the nod.
However, the manner in which he had assumed command — at less than forty-eight hours notice — at Gibraltar still left a bad taste in Bernard Clarey’s mouth. Rear-Admiral David Torrance, his predecessor in command of the Independence Task Force had been summarily dismissed when the Chief of Naval Operations concluded he was dragging his feet about the true battle and sea readiness of his command.
Clarey had not known David Torrance very well but the two men were fellow veterans of the Pacific War against the Japanese and of the later Korean conflict. Torrance had always been a vaguely political — there was no such thing in the United States Navy as an overtly political — officer with the sort of family connections, rich Southern Democrats, who despised everything John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his ilk stood for, and worse, had felt free to periodically declaim as much. Torrance had done himself no favours the previous year while on a courtesy visit to Madras when he had disparaged both the former colonial power, Great Britain, and the post October War foreign policy of the Kennedy Administration. In front of his Indian hosts and the representatives of the international press at an official public function, he had made a series of less than complementary remarks about the way the [United States] ‘Navy was being run post-war’ and how it would be ‘a good thing if the Royal Navy, what’s left of it, was driven from the Indian Ocean’. In some accounts he had boasted the Independence could ‘do the job in five minutes’ if the President had the ‘guts to size the nettle’.
Against this backdrop Torrance’s fate was sealed when rumours about poor morale within the ranks of his Task Force reached the Navy Department in its new Philadelphia Headquarters on the New Jersey shore of the Delaware River, and it subsequently emerged that the Independence’s much discussed ‘catapult troubles’ had been gravely overstated. The axe had fallen with a sudden, decisive ruthlessness which would have been inconceivable before the trauma of the Battle of Washington.
Nevertheless the affair still left a bitter tang in Bernard Clarey’s mouth; for he was a man who harked after a more honourable time when a man’s word was his bond and his oath of service inviolable. Moreover, he had understood that in sending practically every senior officer on David Torrance’s Flag Staff back to the States he was effectively ending each and every man’s career in the US Navy. He had felt even worse about that.
Although it was now painfully obvious that his predecessor’s lack of enthusiasm to join the fight had had potentially disastrous consequences for the fragile re-constructed US-British alliance; but for the one-eyed atypical decisions of a man he had known and respected for more years than he cared to recollect, the consequences of David Torrance’s tardiness and lack of appetite for the fight would probably have been substantially mitigated and the worst effects of the present crisis averted.
Bernard Clarey had watched the tall, bear like lump of a man that was Rear Admiral Laverne Detweiller jump down from the Sea King which had collected him from his flagship, the USS Mahan, and stalk, bowed beneath the still churning rotors towards the bridge.
If Detweiller’s modern guided missile destroyers had been patrolling Maltese waters — as they were supposed to have been — it would not have fallen to two small and hopelessly out-gunned Royal Navy ships to stand alone against overwhelming enemy forces. If Detweiller’s ships had been in the gun line with HMS Talavera and HMS Yarmouth Laverne Detweiller would be a hero by now rather than the villain of the piece.
The man whose singular blunder had done more to torpedo Anglo-US relations in a day than any man since Boston tea party on the night of 16th December 1773; stalked past the assembled operations staff to confront his new C-in-C. Not so long ago Detweiller had commanded the most modern and powerful naval squadron in the World. His flagship had been the brand new eighty thousand ton nuclear powered super carrier the USS Enterprise; in company had been the nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser USS Long Beach and half-a-dozen of the most state of the art warships in Christendom. Then one day the Long Beach had been sunk and the Enterprise so badly damaged by a two megaton air burst that without the assistance of escorting British destroyers, her fires would surely have consumed her. Over a thousand Americans had died that day, hundreds more had been injured, many terribly burned by the thermonuclear fireball which had suddenly bloomed above Detweiller’s seemingly invulnerable, all-conquering little fleet.
Detweiller had not behaved badly in the aftermath, but in hindsight he had been slow to publicly give the Royal Navy due credit for its efforts in saving those who could be saved from the Long Beach, and in acknowledging the desperate risks its ships and men had taken to save the Enterprise. The USS Enterprise had limped back to Norfolk where she was expected to be in dockyard hands for most of the next eighteen months; Detweiller left to command his much reduced squadron but stateside, questions had been asked about what cost the disaster had wrought on him. In a funny sort of way when Bernard Clarey had received Detweiller’s signal, belatedly transmitted eight hours after he had departed Malta that he intended to exercise his squadron ‘south of Sicily’ prior to joining Clarey’s fleet for ‘familiarization evolutions’ it had come as no real surprise that he had left the British in Malta completely in the lurch. Had Admiral Sir Julian Christopher, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations not ‘counted’ on the presence of Detweiller’s powerful ‘Malta Squadron’ of at least four fast, modern warships to safeguard the Maltese base in the absence of the Mediterranean Fleet, it was inconceivable that he would have so comprehensively denuded its defences in favour of the forces he had sent to re-conquer Cyprus.