by Stuart Slade
“Ta. So Curtin cleaned you out before he left, then?” asked Fadden, leaning back into a deep armchair with his whisky and soda.
“They had a bit of a shindig before they left.” Locock eased back into his own armchair. “And, with all the comings and goings, the staff have been a bit busy. Have you read Dickey’s report yet?”
“The Casey Enquiry into matters of Security and Intelligence? No; it’s still on my desk, although I did see your minute about a committee.”
“Well, the committee can wait a little,” nodded Locock. “But I was hoping you’d read it, as I need to twist your arm on some funding.”
“Oh, the spies need paying, do they?”
“It’s more a matter of the estimates.” Locock rubbed his ear. “I need to pry half of Naval Intelligence out from under the Naval Board and into my office, and I thought grabbing them by the budget might be the easiest way to do it.”
“Half?” Fadden was puzzled. “Of Naval Intelligence … ? It looks like I do need to read that damned report.”
“Under the circumstances, Casey felt he needed to pick a winner for us to build on, rather than try to start something new from scratch, and apparently the chap running Naval Intelligence is best we have.” Locock shrugged. “Putting it directly under the department of Prime Minister and Cabinet seems about the only way to short circuit a lot of petty jealousy and obstructionism. I get the impression the old boy system we have worked well enough in peacetime, when everyone knew who they needed to talk to; but now, with people going everywhere and new faces all over the place … Do you remember Strahan mentioning the Governor General was our principal source for overseas intelligence?”
Fadden nodded. “Aye, and I didn’t need Frank Strahan to tell me either.”
“No? Well you might have mentioned it to me chum,” smiled Locock. “In any case, it seems the good Sir Alex gets a great deal of his information from Long. It’s the only way he’s found to get around your precious civil servants and the all the bloody bureaucracy. We are just not used to taking that sort of thing into account on a day to day basis and we must,” said Locock firmly.
“Well it’s not generally all that useful,” shrugged Fadden. “A few ominous whispers and vague hints without much a fellow can get his teeth into. About as much use as weather forecast for Wednesday a week.”
“No? Then it would not have helped us any to know the Thais were wooing the Hong Kong trading houses?”
Fadden looked a little stunned. “You’re joking?”
“No, but I wish I were. Dicky has seen the correspondence; dated correspondence. Apparently Long passed it up to the ACNB, but somewhere between the Navy Board and anywhere useful, it vanished. There’s something big stirring there and we don’t know what it is. And then there is that wretched coup attempt in India. Halifax loyalists trying to get back into power. We think that’s over, but how do we know? The Halifax people could be regrouping and planning another attempt while we sit here speaking…
“We need this, Arthur; we need this. You keep telling us we need to trim expenditure and maximize tax revenue.
“Oh, it’s only temporary.” Locock said, lying through his teeth. “The Committee will sort out a permanent structure, and then you can punt Long back into the wilderness if it makes you happy.”
CHAPTER EIGHT: GIVE AND TAKE
Over Buna Field, Kenya,, October 19th, 1940
It was a set-up. The Italians had got into the habit of sending Ro-37 reconnaissance aircraft over the area occupied by allied troops escorted by a flight of four CR.42 fighters twice a day. The aircraft would cruise over the allied lines with almost perfect impunity. If the South African Hawker Furies showed up, the CR.42s would move to intercept them and the obsolete old fighters would be forced to flee.
Today, things would be different.
The Hawker Furies would take off from Buna all right. They would move to intercept the Italian reconnaissance aircraft as normal. The CR.42s would move to attack them, also as normal. Only there was a new element to the situation. Flying high over the battlefield, four Tomahawk Is were waiting in ambush.
The first of the fast, heavily-armed fighters to appear in Kenya, their job was to drive the Italians out of Allied air space. The reason was quite simple. The 12th King’s African Division had arrived and was moving into the line alongside the South African Division. Along with the 11th King’s African Division, the three divisions would mount a counterattack that would drive the Italian Army out of Kenya. So the planners hoped.
Every precaution had been taken to ensure that the Tomahawks would achieve complete surprise. They hadn’t been based at Buna, in case their presence was detected. Instead, they’d used the aircraft’s long range to fly in from Mombasa where they had been uncrated and assembled. They would land at Buna after the mission was over. Then another flight of four Furies would go to Mombasa to receive the new fighters instead.
Looking down, Pim Bosede saw the Furies closing in on the Ro-37. Above them, the CR.42s peeled off and started their dive on to the South African fighters; hoping, this time, to get close enough to engage before they made their escape. The four Furies curved away, once more running for the interior of Kenya. The Italian fighter pilots wouldn’t chase them too far from the Ro-37. The CR.42s continued to give chase, their pilots fixed on the biplanes in front of them.
The Tomahawks closed the gap quickly. The Curtiss fighter was almost 100 mph faster than the CR.42. It had 200 horsepower more and its extra 2,000-pound weight meant it could dive that much faster. Bosede saw the CR.42s swelling quickly in front of him. The Italian pilots weren’t fools; they kept a watch out for an ambush exactly like this. But they were used to the relatively slow pace of conflicts between biplanes. Now, they were up against modern monoplanes. The situation had changed much faster than they had ever experienced before. The Tomahawks grew from almost-invisible dots to full-sized aircraft, painted olive drab except for the snarling red-and-white shark’s teeth marking their noses. The Italians started to swerve out of the way. It was too late.
Bosede saw his gunsight slide along his target’s fuselage. The CR.42 could easily out-turn the Tomahawk. Delaying fire would simply give it a chance to escape the ambush. Bosede squeezed the trigger on his guns. He heard the heavy thud of his two nose-mounted .50-caliber machine guns joined by the faster rattle of the four .303-cals in his wings.
The enemy fighter lurched as the stream of bullets tore into it. Bosede could have sworn he heard the whumph noise as the fuel tanks exploded. The CR.42 became a streaming comet of flame. The Italian pilot threw up his arms in a hopeless gesture to protect his face from the fire that engulfed him.
First kill.
Bosede didn’t try to maneuver. The American who had given him his painfully brief lessons in how to handle the Tomahawk had made that very clear. Don’t hang around to dogfight with biplanes. Dive on them, shoot them up and then climb away to repeat the process on somebody else. The Tomahawk climbs almost 700feet-per-minute faster than the CR.42; you will be clear of the battle before the Italian pilots can do anything about it.
Bosede did a wingover at the top of his climb and surveyed the chaos underneath. His victim had gone; nothing but a cloud of black smoke to mark its grave in the sky. Another CR.42 was spinning down; smoke and flames poured from its fuselage. A white flower erupted behind it. The Italian pilot had bailed out and was riding his parachute down. A third CR.42 was just a pyre of smoke from the ground. That left the fourth and last. It was heading north, trying to escape from the battlefield. A pair of Tomahawks were already closing in on it. Escape was a faint hope. A little to the west of the battle, the Ro-37 as already trying to escape from the disaster; the Furies had turned and were chasing it.
Bosede pushed his nose down again and went into a long dive that would bring him behind and below the Ro-37. Tracers flashed out from the single gun in the aft cockpit as the Italian pilot tried to evade.
It did him as little good. Bosede’s
six machine guns tore into the flimsy biplane. The two crewmen lurched around in their seats. Its crew dead, the Ro-37 peeled over into a long dive that quickly turned into a fatal spin.
Second kill.
The airfield at Buna was only a few minutes away. Bosede knew the way there well. He saw the runway before him and only just remembered to lower his undercarriage before carrying out a neat three-point landing on the long grass strip. Hoping nobody had noticed the near-goof, he taxied to the hangars before turning off his engine. That was when he saw how the Tomahawk was surrounded by ground crews who had run out to see the new fighters.
Petrus van Bram listened to his story of the fight with something close to amusement. “Do you realize, Pim, that your four fighters shot down 11 CR.42s and three Ro-37s in that dogfight? That’s what we get if we add up all the claims you four are making. And that’s not including the Ro-37 my Furies shot down. A great air victory, I believe?”
Bosede flushed. It was obvious that the air battle had been much more complex than he had realized. But, he was quite sure that it had been his guns that had killed a CR.42 and the Ro-37. His memory of the kills was so clear, so positive.
“Petrus, I… .”
van Bram held up his hand. “Pim, we have reports coming in from the Army who watched the battle from the ground. They will confirm your CR.42. They saw it explode in mid-air the way you describe and say only a single Tomahawk attacked it. But there were six aircraft firing on that Ro-37 and nobody can say who really killed it. At best, you have a small part of it. But, I will ask you to forgo that small part and allow me to credit one of the Furies with the kill. It will be very good for their morale after so many weeks of achieving nothing.”
Bosede thought for a second. He knew in his heart that it had been his guns that had brought down the Ro-37, but he could see how a kill would encourage the remaining Fury pilots. He nodded.
van Bram slapped him on the back. “Good man. Get your aircraft ready for a fast take-off. After this day’s work, the SM-79s will be paying us a visit and we would not wish to be caught on the ground like the Rhodesians.”
Back by the hangars, Bosede saw the ground crew reloading his machine guns and fuelling up the Tomahawk. He saw something else; a single red-white-green roundel painted under the cockpit. The crew chief stepped back with a proud grin on his face. He had waited a long time to paint a kill mark on one of the fighters in his care.
“Sergeant, please do something for me. On the nose, paint the name Marijke, please.”
“Your wife, sir?” The sergeant asked the question as he went to get a pot of white paint.
“No. I don’t know where the name came from. It just popped into my mind somehow. As if she was telling me her name herself.”
Jardine Matheson House, Thanon Witthayu, Bangkok, Thailand
“We’re running out of time, Your Highness. All the intelligence we are receiving suggests that the Japanese will move on Hong Kong in the very near future. We have a couple of months, at most; perhaps much less than that.”
Princess Suriyothai smiled politely at the businessman who sat before her. The builders of the new office block had done her proud; the facility was complete and as modern as any in the Far East. The new communications system was also being built; the choke point there was the underwater telegraph cable needed to improve the capacity of the link. There were only a limited number of suppliers of such cable and orders for it were placed months in advance.
“I think you have longer than you believe, Simon. The Japanese cannot move on Hong Kong at the moment since they are painfully short of troops. The war in China is already grinding them down as it absorbs more and more of their army. They will move on French Indochina first, since doing so will close off the most important remaining supply line for the Chinese forces.
“They call this force the Indochina Expeditionary Army and it is commanded by Major General Takuma Nishimura. It has as its main element, the Fifth Infantry Division, commanded by Lieutenant General Akihito Nakamura, supported by two independent infantry brigades and a cavalry regiment. The Fifth Infantry Division will need to be detached from that force before the Japanese can contemplate an assault upon Hong Kong. We intend to make sure it cannot be so detached.”
“How do you plan that, Your Highness.” Keswick had his own sources of information; they had reported the quiet mobilization of the Thai Army. Some of the German advisors training that army had also spoken to Keswick; their comments made him realize that The Ambassador’s claims of her army were not exaggerations. His question was curiosity, not doubt.
Suriyothai understood that perfectly.
“We intend to take the southern half of Indochina, all the way to the Mekong. That gives us a strong defensive line and puts our army in a position to dominate the rest of French Indochina. The Japanese will be forced to keep their Indochina Expeditionary Army in place. They will have to bring additional forces down for the seizure of Hong Kong and that will take them time.”
“An ambitious plan, Your Highness. When will you start?’
“In eight weeks. As soon as the Americans have had their feelings soothed.”
HMS Warspite, Alexandria Harbor, Egypt
“Another ship lost to us.”
Wavell’s voice was heavy with disappointment. HMS Ramillies was in the shipping channel, heading out for Gibraltar and home. She was the latest in a long line of departures. Some ships were heading for their new home port of Gibraltar; others going all the way back to Britain and an uncertain future. The only really good news was that Ramillies would be the last. She had been drydocked in Alexandria for months; that was the only reason she had stayed so long.
“She’s no real loss; her engines are done for. With her in a squadron, we’re hard put to hold 15 knots. She and Royal Sovereign look good on the homeward bound list, though. With Malaya still in Gibraltar and Warspite here, we’re still in business. We haven’t done badly, Archie. I still have a fleet here and it’s a damned good one. And the fleet at Gibraltar is nothing to be sneezed at: a battleship, two really modern cruisers and eight destroyers. We’ve got both ends of the Mediterranean covered; for the moment, anyway.”
Wavell wasn’t entirely convinced. He’d looked at the standard naval reference book before coming to Warspite for this meeting. The count had shown four old but rebuilt battleships in Italian naval service, with at least two more modern ships due to enter service at any time. Six to one was bad odds. Then there were the seven heavy cruisers, a dozen light ones and more destroyers than he could shake a stick at. He honestly couldn’t see how the small squadron left here in Alexandria could secure his seaward flank.
“Andy, with Graziani stuck at Mersa Matruh, what happens at sea could be decisive. I’ve got a coordinated offensive planned. The South Africans in Kenya will push north while O’Connor tries to take down Graziani’s supply base with a division-sized raid. If we can destroy those supplies, Graziani will stay stuck and we get a breathing space to sort out East Africa and the Horn. Even more critically, with any Italian advance in Africa stalled, the Germans might think twice about executing the Noth Plan.”
Cunningham looked at him quizzically. “The Noth Plan. I keep hearing about that. Do you really believe it’s serious?”
Wavell grimaced. “Every time I look at it, I try to logically persuade myself that it is a nonsense; a scheme dreamed up by some wild-eyed theorist who has never commanded troops in the field. Just as I am succeeding, I remember all the other wild-eyed schemes the Nazis have come up with and how they have then made work. We can’t afford to assume it’s not serious and, to be honest, there’s quite a lot of evidence to suggest that the Nazis are really thinking along these lines. There’s all the political trouble in Iraq, for example, and we know the Germans are trying to cozy up to the Turks. They’re also making friendly noises to Subhas Chandra Bose. You heard he escaped from detention at his home in Calcutta after the mutiny and has turned up in Germany?”
“
So I heard. That mutiny was a bad do all around.”
Wavell agreed. The attempt by a handful of units under the command of traditional-minded officers to reestablish links with London had already caused some regrettable ramifications. The escape of Bose was one of them. On the other hand, it had the perverse effect of solidifying the rest of the Indian Army behind the accelerating Indian independence process. The ideas of India continuing the war and Indian independence were becoming intertwined, despite all Gandhi’s attempts to separate them. A major Commonwealth victory right now, with Indian troops at the head, would cement that. But, one battleship against six? Four cruisers against almost twenty? Eight destroyers against sixty?
“What I need is for Graziani to be cut off from supplies. When our raid takes out his main supply dumps, the Italians will try to run convoys through to replace the lost supplies. They’re short on road and rail capacity to move them, but if they get replacement supplies ashore, that will make the difference between a serious inconvenience and a major reverse. Andy, you have to stop those supply convoys from getting through.”
Cunningham nodded thoughtfully. “We can do it.”
He saw the disbelief on Wavell’s face and crushed down a moment’s irritation. Halifax may have stabbed Churchill in the back but he, Cunningham, commanded a picked squadron of the Royal Navy and had virtually a free hand in how he used it. That was the one great thing about the present situation. With the de-facto decision to ignore messages and orders from London, he could use his fleet the way he knew it had to be used.
“Don’t worry about it, Archie. I know the numbers look bad. But remember, the Italian fleet is spread all over the Mediterranean and Red Sea. They have to worry about keeping ships in service and they have all too many other responsibilities. We have just one and we can concentrate all our power on that single mission.”
And we’re the Andrew and the Italians are not. And there are just one or two other things we have running for us.
Tomahawk II Marijke, Over the Buna Front, Kenya
