George Washington's Ghost

The former Executive Officer of the Achilles seriously doubted ‘the natives’ were remotely ready to take over, let alone to fight the Emden. He remembered coming on board the Achilles to re-commission her. It had taken at least a couple of months to master the old ship’s ways and to build the proficiency necessary to operate her efficiently. Building up her fighting power had taken much longer. By the time she was engaging those cruisers in the Windward Passage the old girl had been in mid-commission, at a peak of battle worthiness. However, from what he had seen of the locals thus far, and the slovenly habits of the men manning the

San Miguel the locals literally did not have a clue!

Giving them big modern ships like the Emden ‘to play with’ was an accident waiting to happen.

Good riddance was all he had to say about it!

Down on the dock many of the Concession’s wives had come down to greet the Emden

’s arrival, children had been allowed out of their Saturday morning classes – the Concession was a little piece of Germany transplanted to the tropics with the same rigid school week and hours, five-and-a-half days as per the standard model of the German Empire – and there was an almost festive atmosphere. The Concession’s military band was blasting out tunes from home while saluting guns had swapped whiplash reports with each other on shore and on the cruiser.

It was all a hollow pretence, an act to show the Dominicans that it took more than the guns of a museum ship anchored in the bay to intimidate them!

Von Schaffhausen was hoping that Captain Wallendorf would have up to date news about the other ships of the Vera Cruz Squadron, and the latest fighting in the region. He no longer trusted anything he received from the Wilhelmstrasse, and the Dominicans jammed the British Empire Broadcasting Corporation’s wavelengths. According to the regime on Santo Domingo the Royal Navy had been annihilated by the hand of God, and the true warriors of the Cross were rampant in the southern territories and colonies of New England. Elsewhere, the Windward and Leeward Islands would soon fall like ‘rotten fruit’ into the hands of the one true faith. Invariably, all this tended to be happening in a ‘sea of blood’; which was a little too crass to be taken seriously by von Schaffhausen, or by any of the other sensible Germans of his acquaintance.

The only thing which had really surprised him since the Battle of the Windward Passage – a shameful affair that offended practically everything von Schaffhausen believed in – was that San Juan had not been bombed by a swarm of British aircraft, or bombarded into smithereens by naval artillery. In fact, but for the hyperbole and hysteria of the Dominican governing regime, the Weser episode and that old ironclad moored opposite the waterfront below his office window, he would not have known that this island was at war with the most powerful, and ruthless, empire that the world had ever known.

Peter Cowdrey-Singh watched the Emden tying up, and gangplanks being secured. The German Minister, who seemed a decent type, had confided that the two heavy cruisers, Breitenfeld and Lutzen, and the still dry-docked Karlsruhe

 – which Achilles’s Sea Foxes had handled so badly – were to be, or had already been, handed over to wholly Mexican or Cuban crews, and the other ‘light cruiser’, a sister ship of the Emden, the Breslau was to be crewed wholly by ‘Hispanics’ from Santo Domingo’s western neighbour, Hispaniola. All the surviving German destroyers had been taken over by the ‘Mexicans’, the erstwhile New Granadans, who seemed to be the brains behind everything that the Triple Alliance did.