Warsaw Concerto, page 20
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Over the last eighteen months la Marine de la Révolution – the Navy of the Revolution – nominally the Mediterranean wing of the Front Internationale, had concentrated its administration in the big coastal cities, Toulon and Marseilles, Perpignan in the west and in the surviving towns and principalities of the Côte d’Azur, making what alliances it could, with the Italian warlords squabbling amongst themselves for suzerainty over the shores and the waters of the Ligurian Gulf.
That the Navy ‘faction’ had been permitted to organise itself and to exercise an element of independence from the FI’s powerbase in the Auvergne, was both a recognition that it commanded significant military assets – in addition to the ships at Villefranche it also controlled what was left of the French Air Force, a few score of mostly unserviceable aircraft, and several pre-war arsenals.
‘The Mediterranean Fleet’ was the jewel, albeit rusting, in the crown; the ships of the old Atlantic Fleet had either been destroyed in the war, rotted at their moorings, or been scuttled to avoid capture by the British at Brest or in one or other of the Biscay port enclaves.
The problem was that the ships in Villefranche Bay were no more than a ghost fleet.
Albeit, a ghost fleet ‘in being’.
Not fit to steam or fight but one day, well, who knew?
The Fleet Commander, the commanding officer of the battleship Jean Bart liked to sit on the bridge of the leviathan most afternoons. It was a quiet place where he might have a contemplative smoke, or read a book, escape for a few hours the hard choices he knew that one day soon, would surely swim, like a hungry shark, back into his life.
On a bright, sunny day the light danced off the aquamarine blue waters of the anchorage upon which the rotting, half-forgotten glory of the old French Navy swung about its anchors.
It helped – a lot - that he was not a man overly prone to regrets.
What was done was done; they were where they were.
There was nothing to be gained by crying over spilt milk…
Long before the Royal Navy had relaxed its retaliatory submarine blockade of the Bay of Lions in mid-1965, la Marine de la Révolution had begun rebuilding the least wrecked parts of Toulon and Marseilles. Finding the courage to ignore the most hysterical diktats of the Central Committee in Clermont-Ferrand, and abandoning the stupidly wasteful political re-education policies mandated by the idiots in Clermont-Ferrand, the Navy had got on with re-opening the smaller ports and harbours, and prioritised the reinstitution of the regional agricultural cycle. This, combined with the forced restoration of the inshore fishery – only a small number of fishing boats had previously continued to ply their trade in defiance of the British in coastal waters – ensuring that the whole available fishing fleet was back at sea had, in no small measure, alleviated the worst of the food shortages.
While it probably - nobody in the south knew for sure what anybody was thinking in the Auvergne - galled the ‘northern leadership’ of the FI that what remained of the once proud French Navy was still bottled up in Villefranche-sur-Mer, broadly speaking, in the south, the view had been, at least until recently, that: ‘things could be worse’. Moreover, while there were no dockyard facilities in the sheltered deep-water bay at Villefranche, the yards at Toulon had been sufficiently repaired by last summer to make possible the planned dry-docking of several of the bigger surviving ships.
The high command of la Marine de la Révolution had, for the first time in over four years, some small reason to be cheerful and soberly, a little more optimistic about the future.
Especially, on an exceptionally clement winter day like this!
Contre Amiral – Rear Admiral - René Leguay stepped through the open, armoured door of the compass platform of the battleship Jean Bart, and stood in the balmy grey afternoon, moving to the wing of the flying bridge to look down the long port flank of the leviathan as the bow anchors roared out.
Regrettably, he feared his days of sitting alone on the bridge smoking his cigarette and reading a good book of an afternoon were gone.
That morning he had edged the Jean Bart as close inshore as he dared – out in the bay there was no bottom for fifty to ninety metres - and now he waited patiently, with the cultivated insouciance of a man who felt it was very important that anybody watching him had good reason to believe he knew exactly what he was doing, waiting with no little trepidation to discover if the monster was going to drag back on her chains.
Either the anchors held their ground or not.
He had given himself just enough sea room to turn the outer shafts, and hopefully, hold the monster in position just long enough to try again. He took an angle on Ponte Passable. Then another. He sighed with quiet relief; the ship was holding position.
When to drop the stern anchors was a thing that required very fine judgement. Ideally, he would prefer to have had them ferried twenty or thirty metres clear of the stern by a tug but he had no tugs. Well, no tug-master he trusted with the job, which, when all was said and done was exactly the same thing as having no tugs at all. He had toyed with the idea of dropping the stern anchors while the ship still had way on her.
It was too late for that now.
He re-checked the angle to Ponte Passable.
He gave the order to shorten up the forward chains.
The forward capstan motors ground noisily, unhappily.
Resisting the temptation to shut his eyes and cross his fingers, René Leguay signalled to the quarterdeck crew to release the stern anchors.
The whole giant ship shuddered.
Leguay had served on the Jean Bart’s sister ship, the Richelieu at the very end of the Second War. He had been on the bridge when the great ship anchored off Sembawang Naval Base at Singapore, an interesting but not very illuminating experience as the battleship had been mined – setting off a magnetic mine – in the Malacca Straits only two days earlier. He, at the time a very junior Enseigne de vaisseau de première classe
(ensign, first class, the equivalent of a sub-lieutenant in the British Royal Navy) had been a mute, invisible observer as the ship’s commanding officer - Captain Merveilleux du Vignaux – had masterfully navigated the severely wounded behemoth to her appointed buoy.
René Leguay had joined the Richelieu when she visited Toulon in October 1944, ahead of sailing for Casablanca for a refit, which was eventually completed at Gibraltar, ahead of the battleship joining the British Eastern Indies Fleet at Trincomalee, Ceylon in March 1945. He remembered those days with a fond nostalgia.
A midshipman on board the aircraft carrier Béarn, interned at Martinique in July 1940, Leguay had not returned to the war until the spring of 1943. The crew of the Béarn, deemed ‘pro-Vichy’ by the British and the Americans had been quarantined on the de-activated carrier watching her aircraft, unloaded on the dockside, rotting in the tropical climate and scavenged by local ‘entrepreneurs’ as the war passed it by. On board the Richelieu, like other former men from the Béarn, it had taken a long time for him to shake off his crewmates suspicion that he had been a closet collaborator, a Vichy-man at heart.
The Béarn had been brought back to France after the war to serve as a floating barracks at Toulon, where she now rested, a derelict, half-sunken hulk on the bottom of the inner harbour, a bleak testament to the not so glorious recent past of the French Navy.
The Richelieu had been a horribly ‘smoky’ ship when Leguay joined her, a thing only partially cured by a boiler-overhaul in Durban, South Africa, in July and August 1945 before she sailed to re-join the Fleet at Trincomalee just in time for the Japanese surrender. It had been while she was on the way to liberate Singapore that she had set off a magnetic mine – uncomfortably adjacent to her starboard side – and ended up limping to Sembawang around mid-day on 1th September 1945.
Leguay, his left arm in a sling as a result of his being thrown from his bunk when the mine went off, had had to remain aboard the battleship as many of his Wardroom comrades went ashore, as part of the landing party escorting General Leclerc to the ceremony, at which Admiral Mountbatten received the surrender from General Seishirō Itagaki, a man rightly later executed for his part in the heinous war crimes committed against Allied prisoners of war and the civilian population of Singapore…
In those long-lost days, it almost seemed as if he had been living in a World mitigated by a sense of natural justice. Afterwards, he had genuinely believed that he would never again have to live through the purgatory of the Vichy years, or witness again the dreadful spectacle of the emaciated ranks of the survivors of the Japanese…
All that misery now paled into insignificance in the madness of the present age. He shook his head, tried to focus on the here and the now.
It was some minutes before he determined that the Jean Bart was riding securely on her anchors.
Thank God for a rocky bottom!
The sea bed of the Côte d'Azur was littered with the boulder fields deposited by glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age, some the size of houses or bigger. Just the sort of thing he needed to hold a battleship steady at her moorings!
Leguay was forty-four-years-old.
Back in October 1962 he had been a relatively junior Capitaine de Corvette, equivalent to a Lieutenant Commander in the British Royal Navy. In moments of despair he reminded himself that it was an ill wind that inadvertently, randomly blew no little good fortune.
He was a tall, hawk-browed man with unblinking grey-green eyes who had come to prominence – he had never been political and therefore, escaped suspicion and liquidation by the FI maniacs who had first seized power in the south - in the early days of the post-war emergency. Before he knew it he had been elected Chairman of the Toulon Committee of Safety, thence, basically, because he was surrounded by middlingly useless leftist apparatchiks and fools, he had swiftly risen to the top of the local regime as it painfully morphed into a regional administration – parallel to and loosely aligned to that in Clermont-Ferrand – along the whole reach of the French Mediterranean coast, under the guiding hand of his small band of relatively junior former officers of the French Navy.
A man with staff college training, disciplined habits and a capacity, born of years of service experience – sometimes acquired in one or other of the Republics far flung colonies – was worth a thousand of the FI’s brainless commissars!
Most of those idiots had been bank clerks, trades union malcontents, or minor local government hacks; none of them seemed to know their arses from their elbows most of the time!
René Leguay had always known that sooner or later, a true believer would emerge in Toulon and inevitably, that would be his downfall. However, rather than wait to be ousted, or assassinated by a rival – a thing that happened frequently in the south – or otherwise consigned to the cold, he had voluntarily stepped aside at a time of his choosing, to take command of what was left of the Mediterranean Fleet.
In a movement so fragmented and so introspective as the Front Internationale, a man needed the loyalty of his own followers if he was to survive the internal machinations of the ‘revolutionary state’. Thus, for the last ten months he had been working, as unobtrusively as was possible so as not to attract too much attention in Clermont-Ferrand, to restore the dockyards of Toulon, the vital first step towards the restoration of the battle-readiness of his ships, and to develop a new, previously totally absent, esprit de corps within the Villefranche ‘ghost fleet’.
This far, a ‘beginning’ was all that had been achieved.
And a modest one, at that.
Even to claim that the rebuilding of the fighting power of his fleet was anywhere near to being a fully-fledged ‘work in progress’, would be to hugely overstate the case but in this brave new world a wise man was always grateful for small mercies: two big dry docks had finally been brought back into service at Toulon, both nominally under his control; and the Mediterranean Fleet had a semi-functioning deep-water home port at Villefranche-sur-Mer, that was as yet, still not completely under the direct control of those morons in the Auvergne.
That constituted a real start!
Moreover, while René Leguay might know that the ‘French Mediterranean Fleet’ was a collection of hulks swinging around its anchors at Villefranche, he was cautiously confident that nobody in Clermont-Ferrand knew it, or for that matter, cared, and if he was lucky, very lucky that might actually give him half-a-chance of, given another year or two, of restoring his command to a thing his country might again be proud of one day.
Although, inevitably, that was a dream forever wrapped in caveats. For one, there was no port in France capable of refitting, let alone overhauling – at least to pre-war standards – any of his ships. Which meant that if the Fleet was ever to be fully restored, it was going to have to happen somewhere other than in La Belle France.
His plans were hopes, pipe dreams which might be scuppered in a moment if the FI started a new war in the Mediterranean, because if that happened, he had no illusions that he – and all his people – were well and truly…screwed, as he had heard so many of his former US Navy comrades aver.
In moments of quiet reflection, it troubled him that he had no real feel for how likely this was; but then it was already far too late to try to explain to those murderous bastards in the Auvergne, how ill-prepared his fleet was to defend the Republic’s southern coasts…
Wisely, he had decided that, if it was at all possible, it was probably best to leave Maxim Machenaud, and his psychopathic disciples in the dark about true state of readiness of the Fleet. They would find out soon enough, in the meantime he planned to carry on enjoying his promotion to rear admiral and his command of the Jean Bart, superficially the mightiest ship in the Mediterranean, and the other rusting castles of steel lolling about their moorings in what was undoubtedly, his sadly diminished country’s most picturesque natural harbour.
That day the one thing which really troubled René Leguay was that an uninformed observer, viewing his ships from a distance might walk away with the impression that there was a formidable fleet sitting, deplorably idle in Villefranche. And nightmare of nightmares, that observer might get the idea in his – or her – head, because there were mad men and women in Machenaud’s inner circle in Clermont-Ferrand, that all that apparent mighty fighting power ought actually to be employed in the historic ongoing proletarian struggle against the revisionist, capitalistic foes of the new French Soviet collective…
It was not as if this was an entirely fanciful fear.
From far enough away what was left of the French Mediterranean Fleet could not but look impressive, especially his mighty flagship, the Jean Bart; albeit returned from Toulon from a refit that was more of an emergency resuscitation than an overhaul.
Admittedly, the Fleet was not quite the collection of derelicts it had been a year ago. Most of the ships at Villefranche-sur-Mere had more than a tincture of oil in their bunkers, each was semi-crewed again – several still only to skeleton levels, although not to anything like a small proportion of their former peacetime cruising complements – and Leguay’s captains, now he had quietly removed the dead wood, had finally begun to get their commands spruced up, their men exercising their weapons and, wonder of wonders, periodically turning over their engines, stirring the cool, clear water under their sterns and disturbing the long accumulations of seaweed on their anchor chains.
Problematically, he was very afraid that in politicking to get the supplies, and at some stage, hopefully, the munitions his ships lacked he may have attracted just a little bit too much attention to Villefranche.
It was a fine line between battling for one’s cause to get hold of the things he needed to keep the ghost fleet in being; another not giving the impression that he and his ships were raring for a fight. Had it not been for the fact the fleet would have run out of bunker oil, its pumps would have stopped and eventually vessels would have started to sink at their moorings, he would have simply hunkered down at Villefranche and hoped, above hope, that the people in the Auvergne had forgotten all about them…
Troublingly, he had heard rumours while he was in Toulon, that Maxim Machenaud’s people in the Auvergne wanted, at some stage, to bring their Soviet paymasters down to ‘review’ the Fleet.
René Leguay recognised that it was one thing for him to know – and for other Navy members of the ruling Workers’ Committee in Toulon to tacitly acknowledge - that la Marine de la Révolution was a floating pile of junk barely capable of fighting its way out of a cardboard box; but another entirely to let the Russians, with their recent history of aggressively attempting to requisition everything that floated, in on the secret.
Appearances could be and were dangerously deceptive.
For example, the Jean Bart, all two-hundred-and-forty-eight metres and forty thousand plus tons of her with, her eight great 380-millimetre naval rifles in two giant quadruple turrets jauntily elevated at twenty degrees for her return to Villefranche, cut a fine sight; from a distance she was a wall of steel bristling with guns designed to cleave through the water at nearly fifty kilometres an hour. At first glance she looked invincible, impregnable in her new, very nearly pristine grey paint. Unfortunately, no matter how efficacious a new paint job was in combatting rust it did absolutely nothing to properly crew-up or to re-activate the engineering and electricals systems required to transform a virtual hulk into a functioning warship. Critically, in lieu of her ‘normal’ complement of some fifteen hundred fully-trained men the Jean Bart was currently ‘manned’ by a motley collection of around four hundred and eighty ‘volunteers’, many of whom had only ‘volunteered’ on the condition that family members were given sanctuary on board the battleship. Thus, the great ship was also home to some six hundred women, children and miscellaneous ‘dependents’ and ‘associates’ of its ‘official’ crewmen.
