Assault on Zanzibar

by E. C. Williams

  “Seats please, gentlemen,” Ennis said as soon as he had crossed the threshold.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard the good news that Commodore Bowditch is on his way back, and in a schooner he bought into the Navy.” Indeed, this was well known throughout the Force; the radioman who received and decoded the signal told only his twelve best friends, and, of course, within hours the news had spread to every ship, and to the gunner details ashore.

  “What you may not have heard, or heard only in a garbled form, is that our days of poverty and make-shifts are over – the Commodore secured a virtual carte blanche for everything we need, including new vessels, upgrades for our old ones, planes and spares, guns of all calibers, ammo, and engines for new motor-gunboats. I’ve already ordered two new boats of the Mafia Utukufu class, and guns and engines for them. They’ll be armed with one-inchers in the bows, but the new aviation type repeaters. This effectively doubles their firepower as compared to the older single-shot models. These new craft alone, will, with the Mafia and our other motor launches, allow us to blockade Dar es Salaam and deny its use to the enemy as a staging point for reinforcement and re-supply runs to their Mafia Island fighters.”

  The assembled officers cheered and clapped. Ennis stared around the room, his face expressionless, until the noise died away. He stayed silent and stern for a moment of uneasy silence.

  “Now for the bad news: it looks like none of our shiny new toys will be available in time for Christmas. Dave?”

  The Air Boss rose and began passing around a succession of eight-by-twelve aerial photos.

  “These are pics of Stone Town harbor, beginning a month ago – that's the first one – and week by week since.”

  There was silence at first, and then a rising murmur of dismay as the group began to appreciate the meaning of the series. Dave passed around later photos, with a magnifying glass, allowing viewers to discern minute details. When the last photo had gone around the table, the officers were in a state of shock, and the murmurs reached a peak.

  “As all of you can see, there has been a very significant increase in port traffic, with many vessels arriving from the north. Some discharged cargo and left; others stayed.

  “For those of you who missed the details, cargo discharged included guns, both long-barreled AA and shorter anti-ship weapons. And judging from safety precautions taken, there are massive quantities of explosives being unloaded, too. These warlike items are being re-loaded onto other vessels and the guns are being mounted.”

  Ennis paused for this to sink in, then continued: “Also unloaded were large, heavy crates that appear to contain engines. They’re distributing these among several boatyards busily engaged in building small vessels, which can only be powered towboats or gun-launches.

  “Bottom line: The Sultanate, with massive materiel aid from other states within the Caliphate, appears to be preparing a major attack. We can only assume that the target is one of our allied islands in the tropics, such as Nosy Be or Reunion – likeliest of all, Mafia.”

  There was a moment of dead silence in the crowded space, and then the assembled officers burst into a loud cacophony of questions for Ennis, debate among themselves about what actions to take, and general expressions of alarm.

  Ennis let this go on for a few moments, then pounded on the table for silence. “I think it's obvious what must be done – what Commodore Bowditch would do if he were here – attack Zanzibar as soon as possible, catch 'em on the back foot before they're ready to launch their own assault, and hit 'em with all we've got.”

  Someone – Ennis didn't see who – said, “We could pull back to Nosy Be while we build up our force.” This provoked another outburst of talk. Ennis pounded on the table until he once again had silence, glaring around the room.

  “This is not a debate. I did not call for suggestions. Commodore Bowditch left me in charge, and want God is my getuie, I will make command decisions, not take a Dieu maudit vote.

  “But just this once, I'll respond. Withdrawing to Nosy Be would mean abandoning the Mafia islanders to the tender mercies of the Zanzibaris – their former slave-masters. They have been our loyal friends in every respect. Such a shameful betrayal of an ally would stain the honor of the Navy, and of Kerguelen herself, for all time. It will not happen, not on my watch. We will defend this island to the utmost of our abilities. Clear?”

  Ennis glared around the room. No one spoke. Most nodded emphatically in agreement.

  He then paused and took a deep breath, visibly mastering his anger. He went on in a more measured tone: “Besides, from a strictly military point of view, re-taking Mafia after giving it up would be a helluva lot tougher than it was to take in the first place. We can be sure that the Pirates would be well prepared for any such attempt. Mafia is essential to our strategy for, if not winning this war outright, at least fighting them to a stalemate, and we must keep it.

  “Now, as to logistics: this will be a come-as-you-are party, so we can't let shortages of anything – fuel and ammo, in particular – delay us. We'll pool what we have and redistribute it to units per mission requirements.

  “Dave, how many planes do you have that are immediately operational?”

  “Six, sir; four Puffins and two Petrels.”

  “We'll be using all six. Be sure each is in top shape.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “We'll take a break now, while each Captain signals his XO to prepare for immediate action, and conduct a full inventory of fuel and munitions ASAP to be transmitted to Flag when completed.”

  The four vessel skippers left, Murphy to confer personally with his XO, the other three to begin drafting lengthy messages to their seconds in command. Dave followed, hustling up to Air Ops to begin his own mission planning.

  Ennis turned to his Chief of Staff. “Todd, I want a detailed plan for an assault on the vessels of war in Stone Town harbor, plus all the boat yards that have received what we believe to be crated engines, using all of our forces except Mafia Utukufu. I need it yesterday.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Cameron replied, hurriedly gathering charts and photographs, and sweeping up his two subordinates in his wake as he left the wardroom. This left only CWO Landry, who as officer in charge of land forces was an honorary captain. Chief Landry looked questioningly at the Commodore.

  “Chief, your role in this op will be the defense of Mafia Island itself. The only asset I can give you, aside from your landing force, the Nosy Be element, and your Mafia militia, is Mafia Utukufu. I envision a forward defense, with the bulk of your forces right up on the northern beaches. The remaining Re-Re[1] dhows holed up in the creek at Dar will no doubt take advantage of the absence of the task force to surge toward Mafia. But you know the terrain, and the resources at your command, better than anyone, so I won't hamper you with detailed instructions. Your task is the defense of the Island; how you do it is up to you.”

  “My first thought is the same as yours, Commodore; stop 'em on the beaches. But I'll go ashore directly and consult with CSM Richburg and Kamanda Faraji, my senior Mafian officer.

  “Will there be anything else, Commodore? Only, it'll take a while to get ashore to HQ and muster my troops ...”

  “That's all, Chief. Dismissed. And bonne chance.”

  “And to you, sir.”

  Two days later, the task force, led by Albatros's motor sloop, threaded its way through the narrow, winding channel leading from Chole Bay to the sea. Albatros's navigator, Chief Warrant Officer Mooney, was at the conn of the sloop, aided by Tendaji, an elderly fisherman who knew the bay and the coastal waters of the island's east coast like the back of his hand. The sortie was precisely timed so that the last vessel to exit the bay, Roland, following closely upon Charlemagne, cleared the channel at sunset. As darkness fell, a flashing-light signal from Albatros, now flagship, ordered Charlemagne and Roland to detach, forming a separate task group under the command of Benoit Murphy. Because the op order called for strict radio silence, and the two groups would so
on be out of sight of one another, Ennis had no choice but to create a separate chain of command.

  The new two-vessel detachment then stopped engines and hoisted sail. The balance of the force, Albatros and Joan of Arc, also set sail, but did not stop engines, motor-sailing onward and forging quickly ahead of Roland and the carrier. The op order called for Charlemagne, with Roland as escort and plane guard, to sail half the distance to Zanzibar and then launch a five-plane strike, timed to arrive over its targets at sunrise. If all went according to plan, the main force would by that time have arrived off the entrance to Stone Town harbor and be ready to launch its own attack.

  The sailing qualities of the carrier, however, made this sort of precise timing dubious, so Dave had orders to launch his strike from whatever point the detachment had reached that would allow a sunrise attack. (The air attack could have easily taken off from Chole Bay, and been more precisely timed; sailing part-way to Zanzibar was intended to conserve scarce fuel.) Simultaneity of the air and surface attacks was desirable but not essential to the success of the mission.

  Bill Ennis was pacing the weather rail of the Albatros’s quarterdeck, a mug of coffee in hand. He should have been sleeping, to keep his mind sharp for the coming complex air-sea battle – her skipper, Al Kendall, was perfectly capable of conning the force to Stone Town -- but he was too keyed up. He had ordered everyone in the force except an anchor watch to sleep for four hours the afternoon of departure, after nearly two full days of hectic work and planning, to be fresh for the raid.

  He had tried to obey his own instructions, but found his mind had been too full of worries, doubts, and “what-ifs” to drop off. He was betting the farm on one dubious hand of cards, and failure would mean, at best, a prolongation of the war. At worst, it would mean the loss of Mafia Island, perhaps even defeat in the war, and the forced withdrawal of Kerguelen from the tropical Indian Ocean – and thus the impoverishment of the Rock and all her dependencies around the Southern Ocean. He would rather die than report such a result to Sam Bowditch. That’s why, rather than sleeping, he was turning over all foreseeable contingencies in his mind, and planning a reaction to each.

  He was also distracted by regrets over the fierce argument he had provoked with Marie when he had insisted she stay aboard Charlemagne. She had naturally followed him when he shifted his (temporary) broad pennant to the carrier from Albatros, exercising her prerogative as senior medical officer to exchange with Charlie’s surgeon. She wanted to stay close to him, and argued that, as the Navy’s senior doctor, her rightful station was the flagship, whichever vessel it might be. But Ennis, knowing that Albatros faced a fierce battle with an uncertain outcome, thought only of his wife’s safety, and finally won the argument by resorting to simply issuing a direct order. This of course did not sit well with Marie, and her temperament was such that he knew that this was not the end of it.

  Far astern, Dave Schofield was also awake. He was checking the carrier’s dead-reckoning position every fifteen minutes, relying mainly on the miles run as shown on the taffrail log. Ennis had ordered all vessels to fix their position by evening star sights as soon as possible after sunset and share them by signal, so that the force would have a precise point from which to begin their dead reckoning, but, as often happened, clouds rolled up from the south, disrupting the process and making the fixes flashed by each vessel varying and dubious. Luckily, Dave, in the last-but-one vessel to exit, had enough daylight to fix an initial position by visual bearings: tangents on several obvious geographical points on the island.

  He could have easily delegated the simple task of plotting estimated positions to a midshipman, but the Air Boss was far too amped up to trust anyone but himself to do it. In between plots, he paced the quarterdeck with Benoit Murphy, also unable to sleep.

  After plotting one DR, Dave remarked to Murphy, “Captain, we should be halfway to Zanzibar by now, but we’re not even close.”

  “I’m hardly shocked, Dave,” replied the skipper of the Charlemagne. “As I said at the planning meeting, this tub ain’t exactly a flash sailor, and besides, the currents inshore of the African main are unpredictable.”

  “With your permission, then, Skipper, I’ll start the countdown on a launch now.”

  “You’re the Air Boss, Dave. Go ahead and do what you think best.”

  As if launched by a catapult, Dave darted forward to the Air Ops shack, shouting for all pilots to muster.

  That near the equator, night and day were roughly equal, giving Albatros and Joan, motor-sailing at their best speed, just enough time to motor-sail from Chole Bay to Stone Town during hours of darkness. The fact that they had had to begin departure just before sunset meant that a Zanzibari observer on the shores of the bay could have radioed a report to Pirate HQ. The fact that Chief Landry’s Askaris patrolled the shores of the bay regularly, and task force comms had not intercepted any such message, did not fully satisfy Ennis that the raid could achieve complete surprise. But when the brief tropical morning twilight revealed the battery at the entrance to Stone Town harbor dead ahead, within two sea-miles, and there was no sign of alarm, he then only had wait for the arrival of his air support.

  As soon as that thought reached his conscious mind, the sun’s bloated orange upper hemisphere began to appear in the east, and simultaneously he heard the first deep concussions of aerial bombs. Dave’s calculations had been precise to the minute. Their dead-reckoning, too, had been good; the raid element had flown blind, in the dark, to a point east of the island, then turned west to arrive over the target just as the sun rose behind them – right in the eyes of the AA gunners. They could not know if their navigation – “navi-guessing”, the pilots called it, with no instruments but a magnetic compass and an air-speed indicator, both of dubious accuracy -- had been correct until the moment, at first light, when they could see the island’s east coast.

  It was just as well that Ennis couldn’t know it, but that was almost the last thing to go right for the Republic of Kerguelen Navy’s Task Force One that bright tropical morning.

  Both Albatros and Joan had their motor boats manned and ready to launch, engines warmed and running. Each splashed into the water and motored at top speed toward the harbor battery on sighting the island. They swung wide to keep the AA hulk between them and the battery’s long bronze three- and four-inchers. Their mission was to destroy the AA platform so that a two-plane flight of the air element could peel off and destroy the battery itself without meeting enemy fire. Staff believed that the hulk would be unable to depress its AA tubes enough, or in time, to defend itself before the boats’ 75mm recoilless rifles reduced it to a flaming wreck.

  But the aerial photos had been of insufficient detail to reveal the fact that the hulk also mounted two three-inch breech-loading anti-ship guns. Their crews opened fire with remarkable alacrity for gunners supposedly caught sleeping, and one round struck the Joan’s boat squarely, striking down most of her crew and causing the boat to sink at once. Ennis and Kendall froze in shock, watching as the Albatros’s motor sloop pressed gamely onward, firing rapidly, but now changing course at quickly-repeated random intervals to throw off the enemy’s aim.

  Ennis recovered his voice, and shouted, “Recall the motor sloop! Schooners fire at will on that hulk!”

  Red flares called attention to both signals, each sent simultaneously by flashing light and flag hoist, and the motor sloop turned to head back to Albatros – too late. Both of the hulk’s guns scored simultaneous hits on the sloop, which simply disintegrated in a cloud of splinters, body parts, blood, and sea water.

  Both schooners were now firing steadily on the hulk, and scoring hits, but at that moment the two-plane element tasked with taking out the battery appeared overhead, turned, dropped down on the deck, and made a skip-bombing run toward their target. The AA gunners on the hulk, disregarding the fact that their vessel was being shot to pieces around them, focused on the aircraft. The planes were in their most vulnerable attitude – low, and flying a
lmost directly toward the AA guns. Each was hit multiple times. One apparently tried to crash into either the hulk or the battery, but overflew both, by mere feet, to crash into the harbor beyond. The other managed to veer off and head out to sea, but before making it very far simply fell apart in midair from flak damage. A parachute appeared, having barely enough time to open before falling into the sea. Without motor boats, the schooners were helpless to do anything for the pilot anytime soon.

  As planned, at this point in the raid, the hulk should have been destroyed by the gunboats, the battery by the airplanes, and all four vessels entering the harbor to sink and destroy the shipping at leisure. Instead, they had lost two gunboats and two planes, and the schooners were still outside, engaged in a gunnery duel with the battery.

  A long-range gunnery duel: Albatros and Joan stood off at the extreme effective range of the Pirates’ smooth-bore bronze three-inchers, but still well within the range of their own 37 mm rifles. But the battery was well-fortified, and neither solid shot nor shell seemed to have much effect on its rate of fire.

  No plan survives contact with the enemy Ennis thought bitterly, remembering a military truism he had read somewhere.

  In the distance, planes were visible, circling over the harbor, bombing and strafing. Ennis hoped that meant that they had destroyed their first targets, the boatyards. Visible, too – and audible -- were the results of the bombs: Towering waterspouts tainted with smoke, sometimes, gratifyingly, also bits of wreckage; the deep “crump” sounds of the explosions following a split-second afterwards; several columns of smoke arising from shoreside.

  Ennis suddenly smacked himself on the head as it occurred to him that, although two gunboats and two planes had been lost in the effort, the AA hulk had in fact been destroyed by fire from the schooners, and the battery was now vulnerable to air attack. He shouted to his phone talker and dictated a brief signal for relay to radio, and thence flash transmittal to the Air Boss, to that effect, with an urgent demand for an immediate air strike.