George Washington's Ghost

“William, Israel,” he said, in that moment taking command. “Take a couple of men with you down to Trinity Crossing. Requisition that bulldozer they’ve been using to lay out the new town square and any tractors you can lay your hands on. While you’re at it, shake out anybody who hasn’t reported for militia duty as yet, and summon the townsfolk to a public meeting in the Chapel for six o’clock this evening. I will address the County at that hour. Any questions?”

There were no questions.

George Washington turned to Greg Torrance.

“You will command all pilots and air crew. Please report to me later this day how many aircraft are airworthy. You spoke of building a radio?” This was posed rhetorically. “Good. We’ll need more than one. Once you have got us back in contact with headquarters, send technicians to the local farmsteads and haciendas; most of the estates and ranches have their own radio sets. Borrow them if possible, otherwise, requisition them.”

“Yes, sir,” the two CAF men chorused.

“That is all. Please carry on.”

Chapter 16

Monday 1st May

Portsmouth Admiralty Dockyards, Norfolk, Virginia

Commander Alexander Lincoln Fielding, sporting the ribbon of his newly acquired Navy Cross on the left breast of his uniform jacket beneath his wings, wandered with the other officers from the Perseus, back down the length of the huge, drained graving dock. No 4 Dock was one of three at Portsmouth which had been extended by some one hundred and fifty feet to accommodate the Navy’s big carriers. The dimensions of the dock and the ship in it boggled the human imagination. Leastways, it boggled Alex Fielding’s credulity, and as anybody who had ever met him could attest, he was not a man easily impressed!

The great, looming hulk of the wounded, thousand-feet-long, forty-four thousand ton – that was just empty! – HMS Ulysses blotted out the sky above his head as it rested on a thousand, precisely placed wooden blocks positioned so as to evenly spread the weight of the leviathan. Everything about the mighty, beached whale of a ship was stupendous, from her keel to the top of her island bridge she was higher than most skyscrapers, her four enormous three-bladed screws could drive her through the water at over thirty-three knots – that was thirty-seven-and-a-half miles-an-hour on land – and she needed a crew of over three thousand men to steam, fight and to launch and recover her design complement of eighty-two fighting aircraft.

Two things had saved the leviathan when that torpedo had ruptured and ignited – by one of those cruel twists of fate that war manifests struck her Achilles heel – the aft high octane fuel main and sparking a fire, initially on the rearward hangar deck which, fanned by the movement of the ship, had roared unstoppably up onto the flight deck where the last of the carrier’s Sea Eagles, fuelled and bombed up had been neatly lined up for take-off.

Much of what followed had already been intensely analysed; inevitably, and fundamental questions had been asked about the design of the Royal Navy’s huge new fleet carriers.

What had been learned – nothing quite so accelerated ‘learning’ as actual battle experience – was both troubling and oddly, reassuring.

It had been a pure fluke that the torpedo had hit where it had and caused a theoretically improbable rupture in a heavily armoured high-octane conduit. However, despite this the Ulysses had survived.

Lessons…

Firstly, the fire had broken out, and the seat of that fire had remained, contained within the armoured box of her hangar deck, which ran over two-thirds of the length of the vessel, and despite the main fire main also having been cracked by the torpedo hit which was the cause of all the problems in the first place, the hangar deck’s integral fire suppression system had, on its first test in earnest, almost certainly saved the day.

Secondly, although the fire had spread – via the after aircraft elevator – to the flight deck where several aircraft, their fuel and bomb loads had been consumed in the blaze; fortunately, the majority of the Ulysses’s aircraft had already taken off, and the deck crew had managed to push five of the ten aircraft still on deck over the side before the fire engulfed them and their munitions had started ‘cooking off’.