Warsaw Concerto, page 27
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Whether or not those ‘blows’ remotely compared to what he and his Fletchers had just survived in the Western Approaches and the English Channel…well, that would be a thing for the meteorological fraternity to debate for decades to come!
The storm of the century…
That was what the commanding officer of the 21st Destroyer Squadron had decided this one was. A so-called once in a century storm, although there may not actually have been a blow like this in the Channel since as long ago as 27th November 1703. Right now, the barometer was plunging towards 970 millibars. In 1703 it had been recorded that the glass fell as low as 973, apocryphally, inland there had been unlikely tales of it plummeting into the 950s during that night.
Even inside the ‘shelter’ of Portland Harbour the wind, veering erratically from the west-south-west to a point north of west gusted with such ferocity that Campbeltown lurched sideways as if pummelled by a great, invisible fist, while rain, driven horizontally struck her upper works like a mighty volley of freezing watery bullets.
Dermot O’Reilly watched the weather pushing and pulling at the thirty-thousand-ton deadweight of the Victorious as she struggled to anchor.
Beyond the carrier the unmistakable silhouette of the Baltimore class heavy cruiser HMS Liverpool – formerly the USS Fall River (CA-131) – periodically emerged from the squalls. The Royal Navy had nominated the old cruiser as its Home Fleet Gunnery and Midshipmen Training ship, so she too would be full of green-faced, very sea sick youngsters and new recruits.
Several merchantmen had taken refuge in Portland, and near the Liverpool one of the new Leander class general purpose frigates rode on a long bow cable, slowly swinging to port and then starboard, her captain – very wisely - not risking dropping a chain astern. This was an observation which confirmed to O’Reilly that he was not the only man in the anchorage asking himself if this storm was something…different.
In November 1703 there had been widespread damage – destruction, actually – from the West Country to Kent, thousands of trees blown down, roofs and chimneys ripped off, hundreds of ships blown off their quays and moorings in the Port of London and thousands of men lost at sea. Ships of the line of the Channel Fleet moored in the Downs off Deal had been blown onto the Goodwin Sands and hundreds of men drowned, other vessels had cut their chains and been blown all the way to Holland in riding out the tempest. The original Eddystone Lighthouse at Plymouth had been destroyed, a troop convoy sheltering at Milford Haven had had thirty vessels driven onto the shore, one ship which was dragged from its moorings in a Cornish river eventually grounded on the Isle of Wight, some one hundred and eighty miles away eight hours later, in the Bristol Channel parts of the Somerset Levels were flooded and subsequently under water for weeks, and as far north as Cambridge in the Fen country, windmills were destroyed and buildings left without roofs.
Now that must have been a Helluva storm!
The wind hit the port side of the Campeltown like an unexpected blow to the solar plexus, the destroyer staggered.
“One-quarter astern PORT!” O’Reilly called without thinking, reacting at a purely intuitive level. “Prepare to drop the forward starboard anchor!”
This needed to be timed to a nicety.
The ship might easily drag fifty or a hundred yards downwind and he did not want to have to try to shorten his chains on a night like this. Especially, not when everybody else was having to do exactly the same thing to free up navigation within the harbour. He guessed the chop was running at four to five feet even in the lee of Portland.
Peter Christopher had told him about the time the Talavera had put into Portland before she steamed out to meet the first Operation Manna convoy.
‘We were in a hurry. We had just four or five hours, then we had to get our skates on. It was the only time I can ever remember Hugo Montgommery’, the destroyer’s then Executive Officer, ‘ever being less than paranoid about the old girl’s paintwork!’
Talavera had gone alongside a rusty old tramp steamer being employed as a makeshift ammunition barge, to stuff as many munitions as possible into her empty magazines ahead of joining the Ark Royal battle group, shepherding the first of the big Operation Manna convoys across the Bay of Biscay.
‘There was a chop in the anchorage that day and the two ships ground together like nobody’s business. A month or so later when Talavera was dry-docked at Gibraltar nobody could tell for sure whether her underwater damage had been caused by a tidal grounding at Portsmouth in 1963, or by that scruffy bloody tramp steamer bumping against us at Portland!’
The Campbeltown’s motion eased appreciably as she pointed her bow into the storm.
“Let go forward!”
The Campbeltown shivered as the anchor chain rattled out.
Dermot O’Reilly stepped over to the bridge speaker who handed him his microphone.
“Put me on the ship-wide circuit please.”
He waited, received the nod to continue.
“This is the Captain speaking!” His voice booming over the Tannoy was very nearly drowned out by the thunder of the wind. “We’ve safely anchored in port. We will secure the ship from cruising stations. All hatches to the main deck will remain dogged down. Only essential personnel are permitted to go topsides. For all the new men aboard, that was what it is like to be in a real storm. I plan to walk the ship in the next couple of hours. That will be all.”
A goodly number of his people would be very badly shaken up.
Captains needed to show their faces at times like this.
Even at anchor the destroyer moved under his feet as if she was in a seaway making a dozen knots.
Heck of a storm…
He continued to gauge the movement of the deck under his feet. The ship had only dragged back a few yards on her forward chains and seemed, at last, to be riding easier.
He gave orders for the aft anchor to be dropped.
Then the Campbeltown winched slowly forward until the stern chains ‘took’.
O’Reilly waited a quarter-of-an-hour before he was happy the ship was safely moored.
He ordered that No. 3 and No. 4 boilers be kept ‘lit’, just in case Campbeltown had to cut her chains to avoid a ship blown off its position inside the harbour.
“Good. You have the bridge Mr Wakely,” he nodded to the officer of the watch.
He went forward, first to where he knew the messing spaces would be a disaster area filled with men who had never realised that one could retch for so long, or so painfully on a completely empty stomach.
He found himself thinking about Peter Christopher moving among Talavera’s survivors - to a man walking or bloodily incapacitated, wounded - clogging the decks and corridors leading the USS Berkeley’s main and auxiliary sick bays in the hours after the battle of Malta.
Peter himself had been badly knocked about; Marija had confided to him that she had picked nearly a dozen small pieces of shrapnel out of his back the day after the fight, nevertheless, he had still been their captain, known exactly what was expected of him as if by the manner born, and played his part with an aplomb Dermot O’Reilly knew he could never hope to match.
The thing was to do one’s best.
To always be the best man and the best commanding officer that one could possibly be.
That was the Christopher way!
Tonight, he was recollecting a lot of conversations he had had with his friend on Talavera. Peter’s habit was to come onto the bridge after dark to chat with the officer of the watch. Apparently, David Penberthy, Peter’s mentor had always done the same thing. No Captain slept the undisturbed sleep of the angels at sea.
‘How are things?’ Peter would inquire. Hot chocolate would be forthcoming. The fat would be chewed, man to man. His friend had been particularly intrigued by O’Reilly’s time on convoy escorts during the Second War, apparently The Cruel Sea was one of the few novels he had read as a boy, he had been much more interested in science fiction, physics and electronic wizardry, ‘until I discovered girls, of course’.
His father, the Fighting Admiral had commanded escort and later in the war, ‘hunting groups’, mercilessly harrying German U-boats…
Another war, another age…
Peter had been ‘down south’ on the customary Royal Navy sub-lieutenant’s rites of passage World, or in his case, half-way around the World cruise, in the wardroom of HMS Leopard, and briefly witnessed something of the mood and the majesty of the Southern Ocean. One night the two men had talked about old mariners’ tall stories of freak, ship-drowning waves, eccentric winds and ice storms fit to shred a man’s sanity.
Miles Weiss, Peter’s best friend from his Dartmouth days, had in passing, marked Talavera’s new navigator’s card the day he came on board: ‘the Captain’s not one of those chaps who shouts at people or gets angry for no reason; he likes to treat fellows like human beings’. Notwithstanding, O’Reilly had still been surprised, unnerved initially, how personable – within the confines of discipline – his youthful commanding officer seemed to be with all and sundry. That was not to say that there had not been a tempered steel edge to the man. After what he had done at Lampedusa – literally, saved the day by steaming directly towards clear and present mortal danger – nobody had taken his relaxed, seemingly casual ‘command style’ at face value. If a man like Peter Christopher ever raised his voice or gave you a hard look, you knew you were in trouble.
‘When we were tied up in Fareham Creek the spring after the war,’ Peter had confided one night, ‘not that there was real spring in England in 1963, the winter seemed to go on forever; I sat down and tried to work out, broadly speaking, how much fallout, radiation, and the amount of dust and ash from burning cities, particulates from wrecked oil refineries and well heads, smoke from forests set alight and that sort of thing might have ended up in the atmosphere. I didn’t have much else to do, frankly. We were all at a loose end. It was an interesting mathematical question, albeit one I couldn’t hope to answer with any degree of exactitude. In the end I reckoned that perhaps many tens of millions of tons, possibly hundreds of millions of tons of muck and something like thirty or forty times the radiation released by all the atomic testing since 1945, may have been blown into the stratosphere and after a year or so, would have started falling back to earth.’
O’Reilly had not known the younger man very well in those days. He had listened quietly, respectfully.
‘All the numbers I’ve seen indicate, as one would expect, that the background radiation peaked soon after the October War and presently, we are in a fifteen to twenty-year period when the half-lives of most of the really pernicious isotopes – of Iodine and Strontium – are running down their first emission cycle. So, the background will be more or less what it is now for perhaps, a decade to come before it starts dropping down to mean levels of anywhere between two to five times pre-war indicators.’
That had been chilling enough.
What Peter had said next had sounded like idle speculation at the time, but now…
‘Back in 1815 a volcano called Mount Tambora, down in Indonesia, erupted with such violence that it threw so much gas and debris into the atmosphere that in the British Isles – on the opposite side of the planet – and in fact, everywhere, 1816 became known as the ‘year without summer’. It seems that the whole World was ‘dimmed’ by the eruption cloud for several years; there were famines and, in some places, never-ending winters in 1816, 1817, 1818 and even 1819. Winter in the Northern Hemisphere in 1962-63 might have been the first of many ‘nuclear winters’ because of all the smoke, ash and so forth thrown up into the stratosphere by the war…’
They had quietly batted this notion between them for some minutes. If Peter was right then the weather, or rather, the climate, might have been at least temporarily, ‘unbalanced’ by the October War to such an extent that the character and length of the seasons would be altered, that is, winters lengthened or shortened, summers wetter or possibly, transformed into lengthy periods of drought.
In this scenario it was not inconceivable that storms at sea, Hurricanes in the Atlantic and Typhoons in the Pacific might occur with greater frequency, or increase in severity and duration. Therefore, weather phenomena previously regarded as exceptional, might be a feature of the coming years. So, although the ‘Great Storm’ of 1703 had turned out to be a once in two or three-hundred-year meteorological quirk; it was not inconceivable that storms like it, or worse, might now occur every two or three years…
Conditions in the fo'c's'le were as O’Reilly had expected them to be. Viewing the chaos and the utter prostration of so many of his men, not for the first time in the last few days he reflected that he was really glad that nobody had actually been trying to sink his ship.
Except, of course, maybe God…
And there was not an awful lot he could do about that!
Chapter 24
Monday 12th December 1966
Embassy of the United States, Oxford
“The President has asked us to stay on for another year,” Joanne Brenckmann explained to the Prime Minister and her husband as the Ambassador poured drinks.
Margaret Thatcher made a concerted effort to pretend that this was news to her. It was not easy because Tom Harding-Grayson and Airey Neave had forewarned her of this development several days ago. Both her Foreign Secretary and the national ‘Security Supremo’ had heard ‘whispers’ from their own sources in Washington DC, and from careless – to be fair, ‘relaxed’ was probably a better word given the near total thaw in transatlantic relations in the last year - US Embassy officials.
However, this was the first opportunity the two couples had had to speak freely, confidentially, their various aides and chaperones having just departed the room in the old timber-framed residence in the shadow of Oxford Castle.
The howling gale blasting relentlessly through the English Midlands had ensured, regardless of the Herculean noble efforts of Steuart Pringle’s Royal Marines and the local constabulary to keep them dry, that the Prime Minister and her husband had arrived a little wet and wind-blown. Now the storm battered at the windows and whined angrily around the chimneys thirty feet above their heads with ever-mounting malevolence.
“Oh, really…”
“Damnedest thing!” Walter Brenckmann complained wearily. “The dumbest thing is that although I know the President isn’t being ‘political’ about it; that’s exactly the way the media back home will play it!”
The Soviet ‘demonstration’ in Berlin had had an understandably electric effect in Washington. Rather unfairly, the US media was accusing the Administration of being ‘asleep at the wheel’. Overnight, a little more of the war-winning sheen had washed off the Presidency. What made it worse was that the White House had made it known that tentative State Department ‘feelers’ had previously been extended to the Soviet Troika that autumn about a possible summit between Chairman Shelepin and Richard Nixon, after the upcoming re-dedication of the United Nations. Several possible venues had been floated, the Presidio on San Francisco, Hawaii or perhaps Malta, where the Indian-Chinese peace in the Himalayas had been negotiated and last year, enshrined in a ‘document of understanding’, a non-engagement treaty by another name. There had been talk of inviting Alexander Shelepin to Washington…
“What will you do, old man?” Frank Waters inquired solicitously, of Walter Brenckmann.
“Honestly?” The Ambassador passed a dry Sherry to the Prime Minister and a tumbler of Kentucky Bourbon to her husband. “I don’t know.” He glanced to Joanne who pursed her lips in sympathy. “We don’t know!”
Joanne Brenckmann smiled a tight-lipped smile.
Whenever she was in the same room as Frank Waters, she found herself flirting with the old soldier, a thing her husband would gently tease her about.
“We plan to pop back to Washington early in the New Year. Just a visit, you understand,” she explained. “We’ll see what happens after that.”
“The last time we chatted about it you were lukewarm about running for office?” Frank Waters remarked, looking to the US Ambassador.
“Lukewarm!” The other man snorted. “Four years ago, Jo and me were planning to sell up and move down to the Florida Keys, ever since then we’ve been,” he hesitated, cracked a wry grin, “busy!”
The two couples settled in arm chairs before the old house’s seventeenth century hearth where a modest fire crackled and glowed.
“We’re torn,” Joanne Brenckmann confessed, not pausing for a moment to consider how odd it was that the only two people in Oxford to whom she could trust any secret, or with whom she could safely share any private confession, should be the British Prime Minister and her ex-Special Air Service spouse. “We were so looking forward to going home. Forget the political stuff, we have so much to catch up with; like getting to know our grandkids better, for example. It has been great seeing so much of Junior,” her eldest son, Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann (junior), was attached to the newly formed Joint Nuclear Strike Command, the executive officer of the Polaris submarine USS Theodore Roosevelt in Scotland, “but we’ve got so much catching up to do with the other boys and their wives back home!”
There were a lot of people in the Democratic Party who already took it as read that Walter Brenckmann would take a shot at the Presidency in 1968, not least because – if he wanted it - he had been offered the support and the financial muscle of the wealthy and influential Betancourt family, and it was not exactly as if the Democrats were spoiled for obvious alternatives.
True, Bobby Kennedy might put his hat into the ring. Another candidate might be Pat Brown, the Governor of California. An outsider was the fifty-two-year-old Senator from Maine, Edmund Sixtus ‘Ed’ Muskie.
The trouble was that JFK’s younger brother carried the legacy of his failure – in league with the then Secretary of State, the late Dean Rusk – to prevent the Cuban Missiles Crisis ‘going hot’, and nobody knew what new revelations and accusations were likely to emerge about his part in the tragedy, when in the fullness of time, the provisional report of the ongoing Warren Commission into ‘the Causes and Conduct’ of that war was published sometime in 1967.
