Coincidentally, given that by then it had been determined that he would be posted to the Achilles, an older ship whose crew spaces had been progressively shrunk over the years by the need to incorporate more and more space-consuming modern weaponry and equipment, combining the posts of assistant surgeon and second-in-command of the ship’s Flight Division saved ‘a scarce berth’, and was therefore, an ad hoc accommodation entirely acceptable to the cruiser’s captain.
‘Apparently, that was also a major consideration,’ Abe had joked, having discovered that Achilles’s commanding officer was none other than the senior post captain in the Atlantic Fleet, the Honourable Francis Stanley Jackson. Jackson’s father had been Achilles first captain back in 1949; now the son was ending his career on the valiant old ship. The Royal Navy liked to square circles, to arrange things to be as balanced and ship-shape as possible.
During her forthcoming commission in the Caribbean the Achilles would be the senior ship on station, the flagship of the Jamaican, Windward and Leeward Flotillas. Flying his Commodore’s Pennant would be a fitting way for a distinguished officer like Francis Jackson to bookend his career. From the outset, Abe had realised that the Navy like to do things ‘the right way’.
It took about an hour to sign off all the paperwork required to fly Serial RN937-3◦– a Mark IV all-metal monocoque fuselage construction with stressed-aluminium surfaced wings SFBC Sea Fox seaplane◦– out of the charge of No 823 Royal Naval Air (Operational Training) Squadron.
This achieved, the two officers quickly mounted up, fired up the seaplane’s Preston Rapier seven-hundred horsepower liquid-cooled V-8 engine and after a cautiously overlong run across the water took to the air for the forty-mile flight north-east to rendevouz with the Achilles.
Despite the season it was a clear, almost windless day.
The Sea Fox was typical of the seaplane types in the RNAS’s inventory. It was a good, sturdy, reliable machine but aging, borderline obsolete, relatively slow with a maximum level-flight speed of around one-hundred and fifty knots and capable of carrying only a clutch of three or four two-hundred-pound bombs. There was a wheeled and a float plane version of the aircraft; the former had a forward-firing 0.5-inch belt-fed machine gun, the model Abe was flying today only had a single 0.303-inch calibre Mark IV Enfield Small Arms Factory patent drum-fed machine gun operated by the occupant of the second, rear cockpit, otherwise the Sea Fox was defenceless.
The aircraft was a throwback to before the age when big ships had all-seeing electronic marvels like ELDAR; before in fact, the original small experimental aircraft carriers◦– the forerunners of the giants now coming into service◦– were even twinkles in naval architects’ eyes.
Tellingly, no ship built in the last fifteen years incorporated hangars, catapults, or any provision for carrying on board aerial reconnaissance aircraft. It was only the old ships in the Fleet, like the last surviving 1950s trade route protection cruisers and several of the more venerable big gun capital ships of the battle line that carried any kind of air arm. Once upon a time even the heftier fleet destroyers would have carried a flimsy float plane, an early death trap version of the Sea Fox or the Bristol VIIs Abe had flown in Canada.
Abe heard his navigator’s voice in his ear.
The intercom on a Sea Fox was a rudimentary bundle of brittle cables still operated by crude switches inconveniently placed by the crew members’ knees low in the cockpits.
“Visibility must be at least twenty miles today, skipper. We ought to catch sight of Achilles sometime in the next ten minutes if we carry on along this heading. Out.”
“Roger, Ted.”
The cruiser had a homing beacon and powerful transmitters which it was not going to use unless it had to. Captain Jackson had drummed it into his crew that ‘one operates as if one is at war because that is the only way to train for war’. Constantly broadcasting one’s presence was not good practice, so HMS Achilles moved about like a wraith…
Nonetheless, Abe soon spied the tell-tale shimmering grey plume venting from the cruiser’s single funnel, faintly above the horizon some fifteen degrees to the east of his current course. He banked the sea plane and began to climb.
He hit the speak button.
“Get your camera out, Ted. Over.”
The Achilles’s executive officer, a fierce, bearded man in his forties was determined to make the ‘old man’s last commission a ‘bloody memorable one’ and one of the things he had mandated was that upon his retirement his crew would gift Captain Jackson the best possible set of aerial photographs of ‘his’ ship, one of the few tasks that a Sea Fox was actually marvellously suited to perform.
Two fixed cameras: one pointing directly below the aircraft and another to port, sited between the pilot and the observer positions, and a hand-held high-resolution 1.5-inch 6x-zoom camera operated from Ted Forest’s cockpit meant the aging workhorse was, in the right conditions, a very capable photographic aerial reconnaissance platform and today, the ‘conditions’, particularly the clarity of the atmosphere and the sunshine threatening to poke through the thinning overcast off Chesapeake Bay, were damned nearly ‘ideal’.
As to HMS Achilles, the last of the much-loved Hero class ‘trade route protection’ light cruisers, well, only a man without a heart could not fall in love with her long, elegant, somehow ‘classy’ lines. She was a real lady, every inch the perfect expression of a school of naval architecture now cruelly overtaken by the onrushing pace of technological advances.
The first ship of the Hero class of light cruisers had been launched as long ago as 1944, Achilles, the eighth and last ship of the ‘first group’, six years later as budget cuts, changing construction techniques and political wrangling had delayed practically every major building programme in the late 1940s.
Achilles had been one of the first major warships in which◦– to reduce weight and reduce costs◦– large parts of her hull had been welded rather than rivetted. This innovation had reduced her tonnage from the 7,500 ‘light’ tons of the class ‘leader’, HMS Hector, to 7,130 and shaved nearly ten percent off her original ‘in commission’ price tag. Moreover, in the long term it had ensured that unlike her six older sisters her hull had been able to accommodate a raft of modifications sufficient to ensure her retention in the Fleet well into her third decade of service.
Ironically, the radical re-design of the second group of so-called ‘Improved Heroes’ involving using different, supposedly higher performance lighter-weight machinery sets had ultimately doomed that whole sub-class to early appointments with the breakers during the latter 1960s, whereas, Achilles with her◦– essentially original 1950s◦– half-a-dozen ‘heavy’ old-fashioned Admiralty 3-drum boilers and tried and tested, more or less un-modified 1930s geared reduction turbines, had just gone on steaming, year after reliable year.
Achilles’s Engineering Officer boasted that even though he had never ‘got anywhere near opening up all the taps’ the cruiser had ‘clocked up’ over thirty-one knots on high speed trials a few weeks before Abe had joined the ship.
The cruiser had been in dry-dock in January for a routine minor refit during which upgrades to her gunnery ELDAR, new breeches for her three-inch high-angle anti-aircraft auto-cannons had been installed, she had received a paint job from the keel upwards and her port inner screw had been replaced. This latter had belatedly resolved a problem first logged over five years ago which had limited the shaft to one-hundred and fifty revolutions per minute, reducing the ship’s top speed to about twenty-nine-and-a-half-knots.