‘This is the Captain!’ The Old Man had announced over the Tannoy about an hour or so out of Norfolk. ‘In the morning we shall be rendezvousing with units of the Atlantic Fleet to conduct gunnery, anti-aircraft and anti-submarine evolutions. Thereafter, we will steam directly for Bermuda where we will top-off our bunkers, and take on fresh produce before steaming for the Caribbean. Divisional Commanders will be authorised to issue six-hour shore passes to their people while we are at Bermuda. That is all!’
The next day Achilles had joined a second, albeit modern◦– only half-a-dozen years in commission◦– light cruiser, HMS Culloden, a couple of miles astern of the battleship Tiger, which in company with the heavy cruiser Naiad had conducted a ‘full-bore shoot’.
Even at that distance the battleship’s broadsides had torn the air asunder like thunderclaps. Each time she unleashed a salvo the great ship had disappeared behind billowing clouds of smoke. It had been the most remarkable and the most sobering thing Abe had ever seen in his whole life.
Later that day Achilles had ranged up alongside the behemoth and delivered despatches from Norfolk via breeches buoy. A passive observer from the unobscured elevation of the catapult rails, Abe had stared in mute wonder at the castle of steel surging effortlessly through the rising Atlantic swell at fourteen knots, asking himself, not for the first time, what on earth those lunatics had thought was going to happen when they crashed speed boats and flimsy old aircraft into a thing like that!
Achilles and Culloden had had their own ‘shooting match’, engaging each other at a range of nearly thirteen thousand yards at speeds of up to twenty-eight knots, their respective gun directors configured to shoot with a six-degree targeting offset.
There had been a frissance of excitement through the ship when one of the Culloden’s broadsides fell only two hundred yards astern of the Achilles half-way through the exercise, otherwise both ships had fired with ‘commendable accuracy and near optimal rates of fire’ throughout the eighteen-minute-long exercise. According to the ‘umpires’, who subsequently analysed the ‘gun plots’ adjusting for the mandatory offsets, Achilles would have been bracketed seven times and hit at least three; Culloden bracketed nine times and, because she was a bigger ship, probably hit five or six times.
Needless to say, Captain Jackson authorised a second tot of Grog for the entire crew that evening!
This was also a Navy tradition: when one division or department excelled their triumph belonged to the whole ship. Culloden was not just the bigger ship◦– by at least three-and-a-half thousand tons◦– with twelve to Achilles’s eight main battery rifles but her turrets were much more highly automated, and therefore, theoretically able to put approximately twice the weight of metal in the air at any one time. To have performed so well against a newer, larger vessel which also had a marginally superior ‘ELDAR suite’ was the highest possible compliment to Achilles’s combat readiness.
But then, allegedly, every captain in the Atlantic Fleet blanched at going up against◦– one on one◦– a ship under the command of Captain the Honourable Francis Jackson, RN.
On the third day out from Virginia the weather had been too stormy for safe flying operations and Abe had spent the day conducting the morning sick parade, and later signing off the ship’s registry of medical supplies.
Yesterday, the ship had turned south and worked up to twenty-three knots to be in position to make Bermuda in the middle of the calm spell forecast for the following day.
Twenty minutes ago, Abe’s CO’s Sea Fox had launched off Achilles’s catapult. Now, after much ‘messing about’ to hoist his own aircraft onto the launching rails and a short delay loading the firing charge to the aging, somewhat temperamental assembly, his charabanc was ready to launch.
Abe had never actually launched off a moving ship. In fact, this was his first catapult launch and he was not entirely sure what to expect.
Both Sea Fox seaplanes were being ‘jettisoned’ before the cruiser began to pick her way through the reefs and shoals protecting the superb natural anchorage within the elongated half-circle of the one hundred and eighty or so islands◦– the remnants of ancient volcanoes◦– of Bermuda. Apparently, the wheeled, land-plane Sea Fox was going to be stored on the catapult while the ship was in harbour and more equipment◦– depending on who one asked◦– was going to be installed therein, or removed, meaning that one of the float planes was going to have to be part-mothballed, its wings folded back, fuel tanks and lubricant reservoirs drained, its gun unloaded for safety before they could be re-hoisted onto Achilles as ‘deck cargo’ for the journey south.
To Abe it seemed like an unnecessarily complicated way of doing things.
‘Yes, of course we could just unload the kites alongside the dock in Bermuda,’ Ted Forest had agreed, ‘but then this way the deck crew, the Section Commander and you, get the experience of a catapult launch while the ship’s under way. The Old Man is a tartar for using every opportunity to train his people.”
Now Abe was waiting to be shot off the Achilles as she idled along in the thankfully benign Atlantic swell. His eyes were rivetted to the launch officer standing below the right-hand end of the catapult rails.
‘Look, there’s nothing to it,’ Ted Forest had assured him. ‘We make sure the kite is locked down, run up the engine to full power, wait a few seconds to check that everything is hunky dory, the launch officer gives you the nod,’ a chopping down of both arms like a linesman at Wimbledon signifying that a close line call was good, ‘then the crew releases the brake, we wiz forward and a second later the impellor charge goes off firing a blast of compressed air into the back of the sled and the next thing you know we’ve gone from nought to sixty knots in no time flat and we’re in the air!’
Abe held the throttle up against the stops.
The Sea Fox thrummed and vibrated, desperate to surge ahead.
Before him there was nothing between the blur of the propeller and the shores of the Iberian Peninsula thousands of miles away. He raised his right hand, thumbs up and quickly grabbed the control stick, bracing himself.
The launch officer’s arms came down in the approved manner.
The ball is good…
The aircraft began to move.
There was a popping BANG, Abe was pressed back in his seat and in the blink of an eye the Sea Fox was airborne. Gentle pressure on the stick and they were climbing away from the cruiser.
“I told you it was a piece of cake!” The man in the rear cockpit chortled over the intercom.
Climbing to fifteen hundred feet Abe circled the cruiser once, then again before waggling his wings and turning south towards the long, low sprawl of the archipelago protecting the finest natural anchorage for hundreds of miles in any direction.
Achilles’s two float planes had taken off with only about thirty minutes fuel in their tanks so there was no real scope for ‘sightseeing’ or the usual ‘malarkey’ that ‘RNAS types got up to’.
Abe throttled back and tried to detect the navigable channels between the reefs through which the cruiser would have to tiptoe to get into the deep water of the Great Sound at the south-western expanse of the archipelago. He was struck by how crystal clear the blue water was and how easily he could see every lurking shoal just beneath the surface.
There were two destroyers tied up in the inner basin of the Navy Dockyard, and a big tanker◦– presumably off-loading its cargo◦– at the oiling jetty refilling the ‘tank park’ on Ireland Island. Achilles’s first Sea Fox had already put down and was taxiing through the gap in the breakwater between Cross Island and the isthmus to its north.