George Washington's Ghost

In addition to the two big gun capital ships, the Princess Royal and the valiant old Indefatigable, both with eight-gun 15-inch main batteries, there were four heavy cruisers with a total of thirty-two 8-inch guns, seven light cruisers armed with a total of fifty-eight 6-inch guns and nineteen fleet destroyers now in company. Thirty-four warships covering nearly thirty square miles of ocean on a mission to strike the Triple Alliance a series of blows designed to send shock waves all the way back to México City, and to halt, as bloodily as possible, the enemies’ run of victories at sea.

‘Forget all that nonsense about knocking the Triple Alliance out of the war with a single punch. That isn’t going to happen. Whatever people say about the ships and the crews we have, and they do not, this is going to be a bloody long fight. Not a one round knock-out but a twelve to fifteen round slog. We weren’t ready and they were; we thought they had second rate kit, they do, but they also have some good ships and men, too. Mostly, we could not legislate for the existence of submarines that, moreover, the enemy was actually prepared to use against us outside his own coastal waters. Or, for that matter, the large number of modern aircraft he seems able to whistle up at the drop of a hat. So, having tried to do this the elegant way, we’re going to have to get our hands dirty!”

Those had been the words of Rear Admiral Sir Anthony Parkinson, Flag Officer, Task Force 5.1.

Parkinson was by repute, one of the Navy’s finest minds, a man who had written a book back in the 1960s about the problems facing a Navy trying to come to terms with the quickening pace of technological progress, and the dilemmas inherent in attempting to reform traditional tactical doctrines given that it had not been involved in a major shooting war for over a hundred years.

Alex Fielding, the Commander of Perseus’s Scout-Fighter Group, had wondered if Parkinson was going to be a straw man, obsessed with the minutiae of tactics and planning. In fact, thus far he had turned out to be a ‘details’ man; but not in a bad way.

‘Courage and a carry-on spirit will only get us so far; the object of the exercise is not to be, per se, heroic, it is to defeat the enemy any way that we can without incurring unnecessary casualties and loss of materiel!’

Parkinson had been unrelentingly grim in his pre-sailing address to his senior officers.

‘There’s no point having a bloody great big sword if you are not prepared to twist it once you have stuck it into the other fellow. Forget about playing up and playing the game

. We did not want, or start this war. We are losing this war precisely because we chose not to make warlike preparations for it lest we inadvertently provoke it. The time for that sort of circular argument is over. The gloves are off. It is going to take time to mobilise the industry and the manpower of New England and the Empire to defeat the Triple Alliance and its allies; until then all we can realistically hope to do is to staunch the flow of blood from the wounds we have already sustained, and to give the enemy something to think about. Something he won’t forget in a hurry, if ever!’

The Spanish believed they had knocked one of the Atlantic fleet’s much-vaunted big aircraft carriers out of the fight; well, there were plenty more of them in the rest of the fleet and the transatlantic transfer of the Hermes was just the start. A signal that the tide was about to turn as progressively, more and more of the military muscle of the Empire was brought to bear upon the Triple Alliance.

Operation East Wind had one minor, and one major objective and a single, over-riding purpose: to send a very specific message to the Spanish high command.

Be very, very afraid!