James Philip - Empire Day

Virtually overnight aircraft carriers, until then the poor relations of the battlefleet equipped with flimsy, short-range and low performance first and second-generation propeller driven scouts and fighters, had never needed to be over-large. However, in the coming age in which it was anticipated that heavyweight jet-powered aircraft ten times the weight and operating with landing and take-off speeds perhaps five to six times faster than their lightweight forebears would have to be accommodated, it was clear that the new breed of fleet carrier were going to have to be huge beasts.

Both the ships under construction in the monstrous Wallabout Bay dry docks were forty-thousand-ton behemoths with flight decks nearly a thousand feet long. They were to be equipped with great steam catapults capable of flinging twenty-ton aircraft into the air and of steaming at up to thirty-three knots. At yards around the Empire – at Halifax in Nova Scotia, Rosyth in Scotland, Birkenhead on the River Mersey and East London on the Thames, and at Norfolk in Virginia – other King George V class ships were on the slips.

‘Why the Devil didn’t I know anything about this atomic business?’ The King had demanded that momentous day in July1962.

‘It was not felt that you needed to know, Your Majesty,’ he had been informed.

The Empire’s ‘bomb project’ – code-named ‘Blue Danube’ – had been, and still was mainly based in New England, albeit a long way away from the curious eyes of most colonists in Tennessee, the badlands of the Dakotas and the mountains and forests of British Columbia. Other than that the Empire had its own ‘bomb’ – tested in 1966 off Christmas Island, and subsequently at the Montebello Islands, off the Pilbara coast of Western Australia in 1967 and 1968 – the man in the street throughout the Empire was blissfully unaware of the true history of the Anglo-German and now Anglo-German-Russian nuclear bomb race.

Thank God…

“Good morning, sir.”

The respectful salutation broke the King out of his brooding introspection. He turned to face Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Packenham, Flag Officer Commanding 5th Battle Squadron.

Like his monarch Packenham was wearing his Blue No. 3 – general duties – dress uniform. There would be plenty of time later to don their full No. 1 ceremonial ‘rags’. For the moment they were comfortable in their double-breasted reefer jackets over white long-sleeved shirts and blue ties. Although the King was entitled to wear a rig which boasted enough gold braid to sink a medium-sized barge on his jacket sleeves – he was after all, among other things, Admiral of the Fleet – he never wore more than the four rings he had earned in his years of professional service when he was onboard a Royal Navy ship.

“I gather the weather is set fair, Tom?” The Squadron Commander had been at Dartmouth with the King and the two men and their families had been very close ever since. Time and again in recent years William Hugh George Albert Hanover-Gotha-Stewart – he had always been called ‘Bertie’ in the family and by his wide circle of friends in the Navy – had been thankful for those long years of grace when he had lived as a relatively normal man, and for the large number of ‘real’ lifelong friends he had made in that interregnum. One such was Tom Packenham.

“Yes, sir.” The two men gazed at the other ‘Lions’ moored astern of the flagship like immovable castles of steel rising out of the cold waters of the bay.

The battleships and their escorts were streaming huge Union Jacks at their bow and stern jack staffs, and White Ensigns and battle flags carrying the names of the actions in which they, and their namesakes had fought in since the birth of the Royal Navy from their towering steel fore and aft masts. For all that there had been no great war since the 1860s there had hardly been a year during the last century when the Royal Navy had not seen battle.

In a funny way the shock of the atomic age had initially pacified many previously dangerous hot spots around the globe; temporarily quashing the persistent local, often very nasty, colonial spats and uprisings which were the bane of the all mature Empires. Lately, trouble seemed to spark where one least expected it; one year prompted by the threat of famine in Bengal, the separatist movements in South East Asia, tribal conflict in Arabia, this or that clan feuding with its neighbours in sub-Saharan Africa, piracy in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean, or the latest unrest along the desert and mountain wilderness border between New England-Nuevo Spain. People too easily forgot that it was less than twenty years since a rebellion against the Spanish authorities in Florida had drawn in sympathetic militias from the neighbouring colonies of Carolinas and Georgia, during which the Mississippi Counties of Louisiana had sent raiders into Texas – Tejas, the eastern department of the State of Coahuila – in a clumsy land-grab that had almost embroiled the rump of European Spain in a Mediterranean war and caused a North Atlantic stand-off between the antiquated Spanish Fleet and the Royal Navy off Cape Trafalgar. Things had escalated so far out of hand that at one juncture Spanish troops threatened to assault Gibraltar!

The idea that the Spanish would contemplate pitting a rag-tag collection of obsolete ironclads against the might of the battle line of the Mediterranean Fleet was frankly absurd; nevertheless, the Government of the day in England had fallen over that particular debacle.

These days, the trouble was that one never knew where the next problem was coming from! As the first of the King’s Prime Ministers had remarked when asked what worried him the most: ‘Events. Events, sir!’

“My father always used to say that it made him nervous when the sun shone on Empire Day,” the King guffawed softly. “That was why he hated to go abroad in July.”

His old friend echoed his mood.

“What is it they say? The two things you can rely on in England are that it will rain but never enough to stop Australia or the Philadelphians beating England at cricket!”

The two men had switched their gaze to the old-fashioned ironclad moored in the grey waters between Governor’s Island and Red Hook. The twenty thousand ton white-hulled battleship belonged to a generation twice removed from that of the Lion and her mighty sisters.

The Nuestra Señora de la Santísima Trinidad had been the pride of the Armada de Nuevo Española when she was launched in 1927; that she was nominally still the flagship of the Gulf of Spain Fleet was in part a testament to the decline of the once formidable Spanish Navy, and also a minor but presumably calculated slight to her English hosts. The Spanish had sent the old ship – she had been dry docked in Havana for over ten years acting as the non-operational flagship, essentially the shore-based headquarters of the small but otherwise relatively modern Cuban Squadron – up to New York simply to make a statement about how little importance the administration in Madrid attached to the day.

“They say they removed the breech blocks of her big guns and de-activated the hydraulic trains for both turrets,” the King said, thinking out aloud.

The calibre of the guns of the old battleship’s main armament was the same as that of the four Lions’ and all thirty-one of the big-gun capital ships on the current Navy list; but HMS Lion’s guns were 15-inch 42-calibre Mark V versions of a naval rifle found to be so reliable and accurate that it had been the standard heavy gun of the Royal Navy for over five decades. Its characteristics – including how to adjust gunnery tables to compensate for barrel lining degradation during its 150 to 180-round service life – were intimately understood, and over the years it had been established that its design maximum range of approximately 33,500 yards could be safely extended, by supercharging with additional propellant well within the bursting tolerance of the barrel, to 37,800 yards. Moreover, although the Royal Navy had always prided itself on its ability to put the greatest possible weight of metal in the air at any one time in a battle, by tradition and pragmatic trial and error it had been proven beyond reasonable doubt that the optimum ‘accurate’ rate of controlled fire of the Mark V was approximately – give or take three or four seconds – two rounds per minute. Theoretically, five rounds every two minutes could be fired, but this always tended to reduce the effectiveness of the ‘shooting’.