“He should have taken out that tanker first,” said Wells, which prompted Somerville to smile. He liked this young man. Wells was thinking like an Admiral here, and not a hot headed cruiser Captain. Get that tanker and you have hurt the enemy’s ability to operate here by a good measure. Yet Sanford, probably eager to blood his ships in battle, had elected to get after the German warships, and had been exchanging occasional salvos with them at ranges too long to matter in the present sea conditions.
“Yes,” said Somerville, “get the pawn the enemy offers you first before you think to exchange Knights. That is what I would have done. The question for us now is whether we can delay here any longer. Mountbatten is in the Indian Ocean southwest of Java, and there are rumblings of trouble brewing there. My orders were to assure the safety of this convoy to Freetown, then get down around the Cape to join the Eastern Fleet. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave these German ships to Captain Sanford and his two new cruisers.”
“Then we’re heading south sir?”
“That will have to be the order, Mister Wells. Admiral Tovey has been after me to get moving, and so it’s down to Freetown with us tonight. Godspeed Captain Sanford, and wish the man luck.”
That decision was going to take HMS Formidable out of the equation in the little drama shaping up off the African Coast. The weather was going to render carrier operations null and void for the next day in any case, or so it seemed. Unable to wait, Somerville turned south in haste now, as he had a very long way to go. Formidable had 6400 nautical miles to travel before reaching Mountbatten. At 24 knots, and with one stop at the Cape to refuel, he was looking at 12 days to the Java coast. Now he was worried he would arrive too late to lead the Eastern Fleet in any meaningful way to stop a planned enemy invasion of Java. He might not get there until the 9th or 10th of March, and by that time, the Japanese might already be well established on that island.
He expressed these concerns to Wells, wondering what the young Captain thought. “Well sir,” said Wells, “if Monty is hard pressed, we may end up having to cover his evacuation to Australia.”
“Possibly,” said Somerville. “But getting him to Darwin might be difficult at that point, particularly if the Japanese have managed to get planes on Timor and Bali, or even Java itself. In that instance, and considering the enemy is fond of covering their invasions with carriers as well, we may have no other choice but to fall back on Perth to the south, or simply pull out to Colombo.”
“I don’t think Montgomery would like that,” said Wells. “The action is likely to move to Darwin after that, which is where he’d want to be.”
“Precisely, but we may not be able to get him there. If this does come to pass, then Churchill will probably send his Rock of the East back to North Africa. Wavell wants him back there for his next operation, or so I’ve heard—the Rock of the Middle East.”
“He’s a good man, east, west, or anywhere else,” said Wells, and Somerville agreed.
Yet events were soon about to change near Java, and in a most unexpected way. At the moment, the little chase then underway in the Atlantic was going to matter more than either Somerville or Wells knew. For they had no idea what Kaiser Wilhelm and Goeben had hidden below their heaving decks….
Pitch black. There was still heavy cloud cover, and the moon was long gone, the sun still more than an hour off. Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad continued to probe their way northeast, slowly creeping up on the German raider by occasionally increasing speed. Radar was the only thing with a hold on them now, and Captain Sanford closed to 14,000 meters, risky as that was. He reasoned that the shorter the range, the flatter the trajectory for those heavy 15-inch rounds. His 152mm belt armor might then take the hit instead of the 50mm deck armor.
Though it had fewer guns, Kaiser Wilhelm was still a much bigger dog at 35,500 tons full load. The German ship had 200mm armor on the main belt and conning tower, with 120mm on the decks. From every account, their optics and gunnery were also very sharp, and they had already put a good number of ships under the sea, Suffolk being the last victim to feel their hard bite.
Cruisers have no business in a fight with a battleship, thought Sanford. That’s what I might have in front of me in another 90 minutes with the sun. Yet by God, I’m one hell of a cruiser, and with Sir Galahad at my side we’ve twenty 10-inch guns to bring to that argument, while they have only six. We’re going to get hits, and our throw weight will hurt that ship, I’m sure of it. The weather is still overcast, but the rain is abating, and the dawn promises clearing skies. That may not be good.
I’d rather fight it out in the haze grey, ship to ship. But come sunrise we’ll be just 100 kilometers south of that enemy field at El Aaiun. They’ll likely have recon planes up, no matter what the weather holds in store. That hardly matters. Kaiser Wilhelm will have radioed our position, and they bloody well know we’re coming. So the Bofors may be just as important as my 10-inch guns at dawn. With Somerville off to Freetown and points south, we’ll have no air cover ourselves, and can’t even launch our seaplanes with the sea running this high.
So it will come down to the guns and armor, unless we get swarmed by enemy planes. The sun will be in front of them if they run east for the coast, and they’ll be silhouetted. This time we’ll have the blanket on, at least until the sun gets up a bit.
He looked for his coffee mug, finding it cold after the long night. He managed about four hours sleep, in the small ready/rest room he kept off the bridge, just big enough for a cot. They had fired three salvoes from A turret that night, just to check gun ranging, and harry their quarry. As they could not see the shell falls to judge range, that exercise was fruitless, and did more to jangle the nerves of the crew than anything else. The enemy never altered course, and continued on, now at an even more sedate 18 knots. It was as if they were daring him to come on up and have a go.
That was what Sandy Sanford planned to do at first light. But he kept a rabbit’s foot in his pocket just the same. He had it thirty years now, and it always brought him good luck. He was going to need it that morning if he persisted on this course, but as fate might dictate, this time expressed in the will of the Admiralty, he would soon find himself on another heading.
The flight of the Goeben did not pass without notice. There, lurking on the convoy route south to the Cape Verde Islands, the British submarine Trident under Commander Sladen had been diverted from a planned sortie into the North Atlantic to serve as a security patrol between the Canary and Cape Verde Islands. The boat should have been hunting Prinz Eugen and Admiral Sheer as they thought to transfer to a Norwegian port, but the former was sunk, and the latter was quietly sleeping at Kiel in this history. So Trident was well south of the Canaries when it came across a solitary merchant ship, moving in great haste to the southeast.
It wasn’t part of any convoy in the region, as warning concerning the German raiders had diverted most of that traffic. After reporting the sighting, Sladen soon received an Admiralty order to follow, with an indication that this ship might be a German auxiliary that was known to be operating in the same region. The British had made a very good guess, for Sladen was now slowly creeping in the wake of Ermland, en route to its planned rendezvous with the Goeben. A little faster in the heavy seas, Ermland slipped away, and Trident radioed its last reported position. Realizing that Captain Sanford’s cruisers were very near the location, the Admiralty sent him a perplexing order on the morning of Feb 27th. He was to turn about and pursue this contact.