James Philip - Empire Day

Each of the Lions had supposedly been built to the same ‘class pattern’ but a professional eye could pick out a myriad of minor distinguishing differences between the great ships; service refits, retrofits and upgrades to their upper works, masts, ELDAR aerials and arrays, and communications antenna which readily identified each as being unique.

For example, third in the line was the Queen Elizabeth, the least modified of the four ships still operating with her original ELDAR rig and twenty-year-old main battery gun directors. Of course, to a casual observer, or at a distance all of the Lions seemed identical, virtually indistinguishable from the smaller heavy cruisers Ajax and Naiad flanking the flagship.

All the visiting Navies had been allocated anchorages in the Lower Bay either side of the ships of the 3rd and 5th Cruiser Squadrons, the nucleus of the Americas-stationed East Coast Fleet. Presently, the flagship of the ECF, the massive battlecruiser Indomitable, was dry-docked at Norfolk having been in collision with a merchantman in Chesapeake Bay a month ago. Nevertheless, her two sisters, the thirty-year old Invincible and Indefatigable swung around their chains in the middle of the Lower Bay dwarfing practically every other ship other bar the visitors from Kiel.

The German Empire had sent the 2nd Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet across the Atlantic with a bevy of escorting destroyers. Just to remind the Royal Navy that if it neglected the Home Fleet the North Sea and the Atlantic sea lanes might not be forever the British ‘ponds’ they had been for most of the last two hundred years.

The Imperial German Navy, numerically and technically second only to the Royal Navy – upon which it modelled its organisation, training, operational practices and traditions – had sent three of its most formidable capital ships to New England.

The Kaiser Wilhelm, and her sisters the Grosser Kurfurst and Friedrich der Grosse were fifty-thousand-ton leviathans with main batteries and systems of armoured protection mirroring that of the Lion and the subsequent Victory class battleships currently serving with the Home Fleet. Many naval architects regarded the Kaiser Wilhelm class as improved ‘copies’ of the Lions, and possibly superior and more robust gun platforms, given that the first of them had only been laid down some years after the Lion had been commissioned. The Germans had always refuted any suggestion that they had ‘copied’ the design of the Lions, rightly pointing out that the Kaiser Wilhelms had adopted a significantly different hull form.

They were almost as long as the Lions but seven or eight feet broader in the beam, with their main armoured deck – protected by a 6-inche shell of Krupp cemented steel – positioned seven feet lower in that wider hull, a thing made necessary because their machinery was supposedly more modern, and therefore lighter than that of the Lions, necessitating the redistribution of weight lower in the hull to thus maintain the optimum metacentric height (GM) – the distance between a ship’s centre of gravity and its centre of buoyancy – to ensure that the ship remained a stable gun platform.

German naval architects tended to aim for a slightly higher GM number – as many as two to three feet higher – than their British counterparts. For the Kaiser Wilhelms the number was between nine and ten feet; for the Lions around six to seven feet when they were fully loaded. This meant that the German ships were stiffer; faster in the roll and less comfortable sea boats in heavy weather, and the British slower to swing back through the horizontal making them intrinsically better gun platforms in any kind of seaway.

In terms of gunnery speed of roll had been the crucial thing throughout most of history, certainly since the first cannon went to sea. Nowadays, it was less so, with gyroscopic gun directors capable of identifying the exact moment the ship was level regardless of the speed of the roll, and electrical fire circuits synchronising salvos and broadsides with that critical ‘moment’.

The King was old-school about these things.

The Kaiser Wilhelms were built to fight in the North Sea or the Baltic, His ships were built to fight in any ocean anywhere in the World in any conditions.

The King mulled this and other questions as he studied the three German monsters moored to starboard of the immensely more ascetically pleasing, if less durable silhouettes of the two Formidable class battlecruisers. The Formidables, with their thin deck armour would be no match for the Kaiser Wilhelms in a stand-up fight despite the fact that they carried comparable main batteries.

The battlecruisers belonged to a bygone age.

He guessed that any of the Lions would be a match for the newer German pretenders. He did not understand why the Imperial Navy had allowed its architects to put that armoured deck so low in their ships. What use was an unsinkable steel raft if most of the men in the ship were on top of it?

It was all academic; the British and German Empires were allies, after all…

Cassandra’s signalling lamp was clattering noisily – the device was a modified searchlight with shutters that banged open and shut with metallic insouciance as messages were exchanged – on the port bridge wing.

The King had briefly been lost in his thoughts.

He blinked back to the here and the now.

“Sorry, my dear,” he apologised, realising belatedly that his wife had spoken to him

“Was that an explosion, Bertie?” She asked with barely contained alarm.

The King – who had been a gunnery specialist in his early naval career and was therefore a little deafer than he ought to be for a man still only in his late middle years – had been staring at the forward main battery gun director position of the Grosser Kurfurst.

He followed his wife’s gaze, past the looming bulk of the Invincible and the Indefatigable towards the narrows where he could just make out the Tiger, the rearmost Lion of the 5th Battle Squadron.

He blinked in disbelief.

There was a crimson flash and a roiling mushroom of grey-black smoke.

And then, distantly, another.

Jamaica Bay Field, King’s County, Long Island

Alex Fielding had had a good morning. After he got back from taking Albert Stanton over the fleet he had taken to the air with one of the Manhattan Globe man’s competitors and now he had nearly a hundred pounds sterling in his pocket! The last dope had paid him a twenty pounds bonus for taking a detour north over Wallabout Bay so he could snap a few pictures of the Polyphemus lying on her side. From all the activity on the half-submerged hull it seemed likely that they were still trying to get people out of the sunken ship. Just the thought of being trapped in the darkness with the water rising around him gave him nightmares.

He hated confined spaces…

Anyway, somebody else’s misfortune was usually somebody’s opportunity and so it had proved for him. As if he had not already had a good morning when he looked up from refuelling his trusty Bristol V it was to see his next ride getting out of her car. She was almost on time, too. No problem, he had had to go under the cowling to monkey about with the plugs anyway when he had landed.

“I’m the Honourable Leonora Coolidge, Mister Fielding,” the woman announced.

Even if she had not been smoking a cigarette and Alex had not just splashed a pint of 87-octane gasoline down his pants she would have been the sort of woman who made him nervous.

She had turned up in a chauffeur-driven Bentley and she was dressed in the sort of flying leathers and boots only very rich people and strippers wear in public.

Alex took an involuntary step backwards.