Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  In the spring of that year everything had happened so fast that, from a purely selfish point of view, he had never had time to appreciate, or to enjoy, the unspeakable, unquantifiable thrill of commanding one of Her Majesty’s fleet destroyers, meeting and finally – what a fool he had been – falling, or realising he was already in love, he did not know which, with Marija had been like a dream. As for Talavera’s battles; they had not laid a finger on him at the time, but they had changed him forever.

  It was as if he had been in some way, cheated. He told himself that was stupid: goodness, how lucky could a man be?

  He had survived at least three battles he had had no right to survive, and he had married the woman who was, and would always be, the love of his life. So, what right did he have to feel sorry for himself?

  And goodness, what adventures Marija and he and their friends had had together in the last four years!

  The Petty Officer at the head of the Eagle’s gangway cried out: “Liverpool coming aboard!”

  Peter resisted the temptation to object.

  Formally, he did not take command of HMS Liverpool until tomorrow at around eleven o’clock. Yesterday, her dock had been flooded and tugs had towed her out into the tidal waters of Wallabout Bay, before warping her alongside the fitting out dock. Eagle would be moved into the vacated dock on Monday, wind and tide willing.

  He saluted the Eagle’s Commanding Officer, a greying Commander, appointed for the duration of the transfer operation.

  The carrier was riding high on her loading marks, showing several feet of red-leaded hull plating above the waterline, her hangar empty, and like her magazines and store rooms, echoing caverns. She was a floating hulk, capable to manoeuvring under her own power, and steaming on two of her turbines, otherwise she was no longer a warship.

  “Permission to come aboard, sir?” Peter inquired, saluting the Ensign he knew to be flying at the carrier’s stern jack staff, and then the officer at the head of the gangway.

  The bosun’s pipe ceased to trill.

  Four other officers from the Liverpool followed him on board as he walked onto the hangar deck. He planned to address the men who would be coming over to the Liverpool, some nine officers and two-hundred-and twenty-four other rates, exchange pleasantries with his counterpart on the Eagle and get back to the dockyard.

  There were too many things to do; and never enough hours in the day. Now that the cruiser was afloat again, he yearned to wrest her from dockyard hands.

  The transfer crew was on parade, at attention.

  That was never going to do!

  “At ease, men,” he called. He gestured with both hands. “Come closer, gather around. This will be short and sweet, then those of you with passes can run off to the liberty boats and sample the delights of New York!”

  Oddly, those ‘delights’ and the city’s attractions were little diminished by the wrecking of Midtown. The city, like America, had adjusted. In adversity was opportunity, and other than the jagged scars on the city’s skyline, and the dead zone around the site of the Empire State Building, much had been repaired, made good, safe and the rest of Manhattan was as bright, loud, breezy and as in one’s face as it had ever been. Likewise, undamaged Brooklyn and the Long Island shore of the East River was as replete with all the dives and ‘attractions’ sailors in any port, anywhere craved before they stumbled back to their ships.

  “To those of you joining the Liverpool next week, I’ll welcome you properly at that time. You may have heard we shall be sailing her home with a lot of unfilled berths on board. That is true. All that means is that there will be a lot of spare berthing space! So, make yourselves comfortable while you can!”

  He paused, exuding confidence he did not entirely feel.

  “A lot of you will have become very attached to the Eagle over the years. She’s a fine ship. She’s distinguished herself valiantly; you’ve all distinguished yourselves, everywhere you have served. In a few months, she’ll be as good as new and back with the fleet. If the yard does half as good a job on her as they’ve done on the Liverpool, she’ll be the match of any other ship in the world!”

  Returning on board the Liverpool that afternoon he found a Royal Marine guarding his stateroom. At sea he would live in his cubbyhole cabin on the bridge, situated on the right-hand side of the compass platform, opposite the similarly cramped cabin of the ship’s navigator.

  The captain’s stateroom was down in officer country, buried in the superstructure beneath the bridge, above the level of the armoured deck. The compartment, like the whole ship, reeked of fresh paint, oil and here and there the burning of welding torches. There was still extraneous equipment, cables, ropes and intolerable mess, clutter everywhere. He recollected Talavera’s decks strewn with debris and tools, the clanging of hammers, the sparks flying, the pumps clunking rhythmically, morning and night, and tried to banish those images. Talavera was gone, lying broken in several hundred feet of water off Malta’s rocky eastern coast, close to the graves of the two ships her torpedoes had crippled, and left as sitting ducks for the big guns of the USS Iowa.

  He used to think that the faces of the men who had died that day would fade; some days they were with him always; although not so much lately, in his dreams. Marija said the time to worry was when he could not remember those faces, and there was a truth in that. But he would not have been human had he not worried that one day, if he ever had to con another ship – perhaps, even this ship – into battle again, that those flashbacks might fall upon him all at once, and make him hesitate when his men were depending upon him the most.

  Some of this he had confessed to his wife, the rest she had guessed.

  ‘You did the right thing that night at Lampedusa, husband,” she had said. “And when you followed Captain Davey and the Scorpion beneath the stern of the Enterprise. You saved us all when you ignored your father’s orders and charged at those big Russian ships. You will always do what you think is best. Without fear, because that is the man I married.”

  Ironically, having married expecting to be apart often, possibly for months on end, as fate would have it, they had always been together in the last four-and-a-half years, partners in life, united in purpose and it would have been odd, if they had not both been a little thoughtful about their coming separations.

  The first of these would soon be upon them; Marija, Mary Griffin and the children had been booked on the Queen Elizabeth for passage back to the British Isles. They had talked about Marija staying in America another month, decided in the end that it would be better – given her advancing pregnancy – for her to travel sooner rather than later.

  Ever positive, Marija was looking forward to making a new family home in England, and gently dismissive of Peter’s worries for her in a strange land: ‘It is not as if I will be among strangers,’ she had reminded him, ‘for you and I, that is impossible these days!’

  Inevitably, back in England they would be no less celebrities than they were here in New York, or had been in Australia. There had been a crowd, and countless photographers waiting to glimpse them at Honolulu Airport, Los Angeles, Washington and at Idlewild Airport in New York; that was their life and there was nothing they could do about it.

  Captain Solomon Phelps was waiting for Peter in his stateroom. He had spread the contents of a couple of bulky Manila files across the conference-dining table which occupied most of one corner of the compartment.

  “Crewing manifests?” Peter inquired, smiling welcome.

  The older man nodded.

  It felt different being on board a ship afloat, albeit tied up alongside; a ship was only alive when she was in the water. Notwithstanding, that at present she was not under her own power, her machinery dormant, tied to the land not only by her mooring lines but by snaking umbilicals carrying electricity, and soon, oil to fill several of her bunkers.

  A crew could not just walk on board a ship, especially a big ship like the Liverpool. The cruiser was going to have to be progressively
‘turned on’ as her systems were methodically tested, and her hundreds of compartments, spaces and endless cableways, pipes and ducts were inspected or inhabited. The men already in New York would be joined in barracks by the drafts off the Eagle, and day by day from now on, by teams and divisions, they would come up the gangway, make their berths on the ship, and fed into the rushed, pell-mell activation process already well in hand under the supervision of the cruiser’s Executive officer and Chief Engineer.

  Earlier that year, forty-three-year-old Commander Adam Forsyth Canning, had briefly, been the Naval Attaché at the High Commission in Ottawa, ‘treading water waiting for the Liverpool’s modernisation to be completed.’

  Although his father had retired from the service as a Chief Petty Officer instructor at the Royal Navy Submarine School, at HMS Dolphin, based at the Fort Blockhouse shore establishment at Gosport; Canning had never served in submarines.

  He was a balding man who, as a nineteen-year-old midshipman had been on the Warspite, as the battleship had pounded German shore batteries, on D-Day. He had ended the Second War as an acting sub-lieutenant on another battleship, the King George V, in the Pacific.

  Canning had about him a reassuring air of unfussy competence, although Peter suspected that his second-in-command could be a real tartar if a subordinate did not come up to scratch or failed to demonstrate the right attitude. He was married, with three teenage sons, with his wife, safe at home in Hampshire. He was a typical Royal Navy officer – if such a thing existed – in that he had progressed unhurriedly, step by step to his present substantive rank as recently as mid-1965; he was a gunnery specialist, who had commanded a minesweeper, been the gunnery officer of the Lion in 1963 and 1964, and the executive officer of the fleet destroyer, Affray for fifteen months in 1966 and 1967, before a short posting to the South Atlantic Planning Group in Scotland, and subsequently his temporary sojourn in Canada.

  If he resented the fact that his Captain was over ten years his junior, or flying in the face of all normal standards, had been ‘jumped’ from lieutenant to post captain in less than eighteen months in 1963 and 1964, and over four years later still remained the youngest four-ringer in the service, Adam Canning had hidden it very, very well in the week or so of their acquaintance to date.

  Peter hoped that his manner – he had never been a ‘shouter’ and he was not about to become one now – and his preference for collegiate, rather than dictatorial man management, a habit deeply ingrained by his experiences in America and Canberra in the last four years, would make it easier for the older members of the cruiser’s wardroom to accept him.

  “These drafts look awfully short of long service men,” Solomon Phelps observed philosophically.

  Peter shrugged.

  “One of my father’s favourite tropes was that it wasn’t the material of the men one commanded that mattered; it was what one made of them that was the mark of a good captain.”

  Latterly, he had delved into some of the accounts of the men who had fought with the ‘Fighting Admiral’ in the Mediterranean in the Second War. Of course, he had not been an admiral in those days, that ‘fighting’ appellation had been added by his enemies at the Admiralty, not on account of his wartime exploits – which were many and uniformly distinguished both as a cruiser captain, and later in the North Atlantic, as the relentless commander of a legendary U-boat hunting group – but because no man in the Navy had fought so hard to stop the post-war decline in the fighting strength, and capabilities of the surface fleet. Legend had it that the last insult had been to delay his retirement age, and to give him command of the British Far East Fleet at Hong Kong, briefly raising his father’s expectation that he would be the next First Sea Lord; but Peter had never believed that, it simply did not ring true. He had always tacitly assumed that his father’s final, pre-retirement posting to Singapore had been the result of an amicable compact with his good friend, Admiral Sir David Luce, a man much better suited to the high politics of the First Sea Lord’s role than his father could, or would ever wish to be.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, his father had had the last laugh over his detractors. He had master-minded the Operation Manna convoys, re-written the Royal Navy’s contract, and alliance with the navies of Australasia, and against the odds, held the line in the Central Mediterranean long enough to prevent the complete collapse of British, and western influence and power in the Mediterranean in 1964.

  Despite his own notoriety, Peter had always regarded his own part in the bigger story of those days as being peripheral. He had just happened to be at the right place – or perhaps, the wrong place – at the key moment and thereafter, all he had done was to discharge his duty.

  Solomon Phelps guffawed, shook his head.

  He was about to say something when a knock at the door forestalled him.

  “Come in!” Peter called.

  Adam Canning stepped into the cabin, removing his cap, followed by Liverpool’s Engineering Officer, Evan Griggs.

  Griggs was the taller of the two men, more lined, his expression customarily one of earnest concentration, as if his mind was constantly moving on to the consideration of the next problem as he worked his way down a very long list. Whereas, Liverpool’s Executive Officer was leanly constructed, wiry; Griggs was burly, four-square, with broad shoulders suggestive of a life spent manhandling recalcitrant heavy machinery.

  “Our American hosts are keen to see the back of the Liverpool,” Phelps declared. “I’ve warned them Liverpool will need a couple of weeks to bring on board the drafts in barracks…”

  Griggs stirred.

  Solomon Phelps paused to allow him to say his piece.

  “I won’t deny the yard has done a good job on her, sir. Below decks, leastways; I know Captain Christopher is working through a long list of defects with the new sensing and communications suite; but mechanically, things are looking good. We’ve got no leaks, everything we’ve tested in the boiler and turbine rooms is, as they say over here ‘good to go’. But fourteen days will run past us in no time…”

  Peter nodded.

  “I always anticipated issues with the radars; the communications problems are inevitably, solely down to the complexity of the new installations. On that subject, the yard is still working on the main battery gun directors.”

  None of his frustration got past he phlegmatic, wry good humour.

  The yard had completely removed the cruiser’s ‘old’ radar suite and ripped out every 1940s and 1950s aerial they could find; replacing the old ‘fit’ with equipment that made Talavera’s October War long-range air search and fire control systems seem positively antediluvian!

  Once Peter got the Liverpool’s new sensor suite worked up, on line and manned by operators who knew what they were doing, he was going to have eyes so far over the horizon, that if the ship was in the Straits of Dover he would be able to see an aircraft in the air at a range of up to a hundred and fifty miles north of the White Cliffs, or as far south as Paris. And as for the fire control system… He was astonished that his Executive Officer, a traditional gunnery man, was not constantly drooling at the mouth!

  “So,” Solomon Phelps prompted, looking to Peter. “We think we can run machinery trials off the East Coast in what? Two to three weeks, gentlemen?”

  Peter was aware that Canning and Griggs were reluctant to offer a hostage to fortune.

  “How do you feel about splitting the difference?” He asked the two men. “That would mean pushing back into the bay in say, ten days from now?”

  Both men nodded.

  The yard’s contract specified fourteen days of acceptance trials. Problematically, full trials were not going to be practical with less than a third of the cruiser’s peacetime complement aboard, and weapons testing impossible.

  “Okay,” he grinned. “That means we’ll get under way on the 3rd or the 4th of November, gentlemen!”

  Chapter 69

  Saturday 26th October, 1968

  Married Quarters, Offutt
Air Force Base, Nebraska

  Caroline Zabriski was glad to be home, leastways, the only real home that she and Nathan had had the last couple of years. And this time, she was not just paying a running visit before catching a flight back to Minnesota. May Ellen and Sally Jane were back in Bismarck, North Dakota with her favourite nephew, Sam, and the man they had given evidence against had, along with all the other ‘headline defendants’ been executed.

  That had been televised, live to the nation and the networks had fought tooth and nail, and probably claw, for the rights to broadcast the circus.

  Caro had not watched, neither had May Ellen or her daughter. She understood why the authorities – the White House – had allowed the executions to be aired; she had just not thought it was either appropriate, or a very good idea. Three of the first dozen condemned, including the only woman, had died badly. Thomas Myles, poor, tragic Veronica Myles’s husband, had soiled himself and begged, plaintively sobbing for mercy. The woman, a matron from a ‘baby farm’ camp outside Milwaukee, had broken down, started screaming, and as the trap door opened beneath her feet she had been reciting from the Book of Revelation as the drop had snapped her neck. When one of the other men dropped, the rope had literally, decapitated him. By most accounts, as these things went, with over a minute between each execution as the cameras panned slowly down the line, it had been nearly a quarter-of-an-hour of unmitigated ghastliness.

  Richard Nixon must have believed he would get credit for being a strong man when he signed the orders…

  Nelson Rockefeller could have stopped it – the TV show – but he had not.

  Who had been advising him?

  Heinrich Himmler from beyond the grave?

  Ambassador Brenckmann had told Walter Cronkite: ‘I won’t be watching it. The War Crimes Tribunal had every right to sentence those people to death; it does not, vested in it by any statute that I am aware of, have a God-given right to humiliate those found guilty, regardless of their crimes. I had hoped that we, as Americans, were better than that. When I am in the White House, we will be better than that!’