Chapter 110
Chapter 110
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 110
Chapter Title: Darkest Hour (3)
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June 23, 1940
Northern British Isles, Scapa Flow Naval Base
Upon the calm, tranquil sea where the sunset descended.
While the imposing sight of Royal Navy warships filling Scapa Flow, casting shadows across the harbor, was a source of pride, the words that escaped the admiral's lips lacked any enthusiasm.
“How dull.”
The admiral who muttered this, James Somerville, commander of Force H, let out a long yawn and turned his gaze to the sea.
“Dull indeed.”
Arthur Power, captain of the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal standing beside him, voiced his agreement.
“We wouldn't have rushed the preparations if we'd known it would come to this.”
“Still, isn’t it better to be home than with the Far East Fleet?”
“That’s true.”
Admiral Somerville readily agreed. The Malayan region, guarded by Britain's Far East Fleet, was damnably hot. He wondered how those fellows were doing now.
The fleet Somerville commanded, Force H, had been prepared as a pressure tactic by the British Cabinet, wary of France's suspicious cooperative relationship with Spain and Italy.
It was scheduled to be stationed in Gibraltar to apply pressure should France ignore Britain's demand to back away from Italy, but when France ultimately yielded to the British ultimatum, Force H's mission was canceled.
Thus, his task force—including the British Empire's newest aircraft carriers, Ark Royal and Illustrious, along with the battlecruiser Hood and the battleship Valiant—was now docked in the harbor, waiting indefinitely.
“Tsk, at this rate, I’ll never get promoted.”
“Haha, they say a soldier’s best days are when he’s just collecting a paycheck, don’t they, Admiral?”
Despite Captain Power’s words, Admiral Somerville couldn’t hide his discontented gaze as he looked out at the needlessly placid sea.
“Even so, I don’t like seeing Scapa Flow this idle.”
During the last war, or when tensions were high because of Hitler, the Royal Navy had laid plenty of anti-torpedo nets and had destroyer flotillas conducting regular patrols, maintaining an ironclad defense in preparation for a possible surprise attack.
But with the advent of the Halifax government, the budget was drastically cut, and as the threat of war virtually disappeared, the navy also scaled back on activities that ‘ate money but had little immediate meaning’.
Sailors’ pay had already been cut, leading to much discontent, and with no clear enemy, they couldn't possibly maintain wartime levels of frantic patrols and harbor defense work. That all cost money, too.
“It’s unsettling.”
Admiral Somerville muttered softly while looking at the calm sea, then turned to Captain Power and spoke again.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it? To feel more anxious about losing my post in an era of peace.”
“Well, isn’t that the life of a soldier? Still, I think it’s better for us to be seen as superfluous than for us to be earning our keep.”
Hearing Captain Power’s reply, Somerville gave a wry smile and said.
“Yes, perhaps you’re right. Well, our shift is almost over. Let’s go for a drink.”
“Sounds good!”
Unaware that it was the eve of war, the two men sought solace from their boredom in drink.
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June 24, 1940
Northern British Isles, Scapa Flow Naval Base
In the dead of night. The sea at Scapa Flow was calm, but beneath the surface, the French Navy’s state-of-the-art Redoutable-class submarines were approaching.
The French Navy knew full well that a head-on confrontation with the Royal Navy was suicide. They had meticulously prepared, squeezing out every possible method to strike the British main fleet at Scapa Flow and buy time.
And fortunately for them, Scapa Flow, known as an impregnable fortress during the last war, was now virtually defenseless due to Britain’s circumstances.
U-boat commander Günther Prien—who in the original history had to painstakingly navigate not through the main entrance but from the side, between the wreckage of ships sunk by the British to block submarines, just to land a blow on a Scapa Flow under ironclad defense with intense patrols—would have been furious to learn of this.
The crews of the French submarines waited for their captain's command, tense and holding their breath, their eyes fixed on the clock.
A mix of excitement at landing a blow against the world's strongest navy and fear of having to face that mighty enemy from now on gripped them.
The submarine commander had little faith in the Japanese-made torpedoes—the Type 95 something-or-other, as they called it—that Prime Minister La Rocque had praised as a ‘secret weapon’, but there was no turning back now.
He could only hope those torpedoes were worth trading for the Somua tanks, the pride of the great army that had repelled Germany’s armored divisions.
The captain, who had been pathologically ordered by his superiors to adhere strictly to the time to the point of neurosis, stared at his watch until the operation time drew near, then gave the signal with a hand gesture.
At last, the submarines that had been holding their breath surfaced, and periscopes began to rise from the dark sea.
On the sea, where the dark night sky was just beginning to lighten.
The sight of the magnificent and massive Royal Navy capital ships covering Scapa Flow made the captain swallow dryly, but he calmly ordered his men to aim the torpedoes.
Finally, the time was at hand.
“Vive la France.”
As the captain muttered softly, the sonar operator suddenly reported.
“Uh, torpedoes… launched!”
It seemed some fool, unable to handle the tension, had fired prematurely. The captain swore and shouted.
“Damn it, which idiot was that! Fire ours too!”
“Tubes one through three, fire!”
It ended up being a sequential firing, but dozens of oxygen torpedoes began to slice through the water, heading for the Royal Navy’s capital ships docked at Scapa Flow.
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June 24, 1940
Southern British Isles, Radar Station near Plymouth Harbor
Just as dawn was breaking.
A radar operator on the dawn watch at the station, dozing off, nearly fell over before snapping awake.
“Whoa.”
“Hey, if the duty officer catches you, you’re screwed.”
“Sorry, sorry. But isn’t it just inhumanly boring to stare at a radar screen all day?”
The operator grinned sheepishly at his colleague’s chiding, then turned his gaze back to the radar and his expression turned to one of confusion.
“Huh, what’s that?”
“Eh?”
The radar clearly showed something approaching the British mainland at high speed from the direction of Brest.
A great many somethings, at that.
“Wh-where’s the duty officer?”
“Went to the latrine. You know he’s constipated, right?”
Even as the two spoke, the number of ‘somethings’ on the radar screen was rapidly increasing, and the operator’s face turned pale.
“What is this? What the hell? Is it a drill? But these numbers! The radar must be broken, right?”
“Son of a bitch!”
He didn’t know what was happening, but it was clear that something big was going down.
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June 24, 1940
Northern British Isles, Scapa Flow Naval Base
“Gah, cough!”
Admiral Charles Forbes, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet responsible for defending the British Isles, had been knocked over by a sudden impact on his flagship, the battleship HMS Rodney. He was now struggling to his feet, wracked with pain.
Outside, explosions and vibrations continued to rock the ship, signaling that this was no ordinary situation.
“A-Admiral!”
Helped up by a subordinate who had rushed to his side, Forbes managed to get to his feet and asked urgently.
“Wh-what’s happening!”
“W-we’re under attack!”
“I have eyes and ears, man!”
Forbes shoved his subordinate aside and scrambled outside. The first thing he saw was the sight of the battleships HMS Royal Sovereign and HMS Royal Oak, broken in two and sinking into the sea.
The outdated Revenge-class battleships, with their poor anti-torpedo protection, had been unable to withstand the immense destructive power of the Japanese oxygen torpedoes.
The admiral, his face a mask of shock, scanned his surroundings with a trembling gaze. He was horrified to see even his own ship’s sister, HMS Nelson, listing so heavily it looked ready to founder and settle on the seabed.
A significant number of the capital ships docked at Scapa Flow appeared to have sustained heavy damage. The surprise attack had come just as most of the crew were waking up, and Royal Navy sailors were now scrambling out in a frenzy.
Before the admiral’s eyes, a destroyer that had identified the submarine attack and just begun cutting through the water to start anti-submarine patrols was rocked by an explosion.
“M-mines!”
“Watch out!”
Despite the chaos of the surprise attack, the Royal Navy fleet displayed excellent fighting spirit, trying to hunt down the submarines, but the presence of mines forced them to halt.
Scapa Flow, where the Royal Navy’s greatest strength was concentrated, had suffered immense damage from the submarine fleet’s surprise attack. As if that weren’t enough, the French Navy had even mobilized older submarines as minelayers to pin down the British fleet.
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June 24, 1940
Southern British Isles, Portsmouth Naval Base
Although the urgent report from the radar station sent at dawn had arrived, most of the British high command, roused from their sleep to receive it, reacted with disbelief.
Had Halifax given them some prior warning, it might have been different, but with no omens whatsoever, no commander could have initiated a wartime response based on a mere report of suspicious movements from an allied nation.
After all, the experience of a radar operator seeing a massive number of objects rapidly approaching on his screen was bound to be different from that of generals receiving the same information on paper.
The British high command only grasped the full situation after receiving an emergency telegram that Scapa Flow was under attack.
But by then, French aircraft had already reached southern England.
“T-take cover!”
“Aaargh!”
British soldiers scrambling to man the anti-aircraft guns were riddled with bullets from the machine guns of French Bréguet 693 ground-attack aircraft and fell.
The proud members of the RAF (Royal Air Force) were either destroyed in their fighters as they tried to take off or were forced to watch in despair as their hangars and aircraft were obliterated by bombs before they could even get inside.
The ordeal of Britain’s pride, the Royal Navy, did not end at Scapa Flow.
“E-enemy aircraft approaching!”
“Hard to port! Evasive maneuvers!”
The captain screamed the order, but with its fighter escort already lost in an overwhelmingly outnumbered engagement, there was little an aircraft carrier could do against the incoming enemy planes.
The carriers HMS Courageous and HMS Hermes twisted and turned frantically against the swarming enemy aircraft, but in the end, they were overwhelmed, battered, and sunk.
The escort ships meant to protect the capital ships were attacked while still docked in the harbor, unable to form up in time and forced to fight individually. The Channel Fleet's battleships, HMS Resolution and HMS Revenge, being obsolete, also took massive damage from torpedo bombers.
The French Air Force did not spare the HMS Queen Elizabeth, which was undergoing a refit in Portsmouth.
The battleship that had been a mainstay of the Royal Navy for many years took multiple torpedo hits from French Latécoère 298 torpedo bombers. It flooded completely and sank, and the Royal Navy could do nothing to stop it.
But what shocked the British people most of all was the destruction of Admiral Nelson’s legendary flagship from the victorious Battle of Trafalgar, the ship-of-the-line HMS Victory, which was shattered by bombs.
The French Air Force, having thoroughly ravaged the defenseless bases and naval forces in southern England, finally withdrew only when belated reinforcements arrived from airbases in central England and their own fuel ran low.
But the heavily damaged Channel Fleet, before it could even begin to manage the aftermath, faced the desperate news that the French Navy was approaching.
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June 24, 1940
London, the Capital of Britain
Since early morning, Halifax had been trembling, telegram in hand, his face a picture of disbelief.
The peace in Britain he had tried so hard to protect alongside his colleague Chamberlain was slipping through his fingers, turning to dust.
“Denouncing Britain’s betrayal of its long-standing ally France… termination of the alliance… and a declaration of war…?”
Halifax’s voice was hollow as he read the telegram from the embassy, his expression one of wanting to deny reality.
“Prime Minister.”
“Th-this can’t be. H-how could an alliance that has lasted so long… Didn’t they withdraw from Italy…?”
“Prime Minister!”
Halifax only turned his unfocused gaze to the First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound, when the admiral shook him by the shoulder. Admiral Pound bit his lip.
“Prime Minister, we are under attack!”
“A-attack? Us? S-stop them. You must… stop them. The Royal Navy…”
“That same Royal Navy has been ambushed! Scapa Flow, Portsmouth, Plymouth—they’re all burning!”
“N-no, that’s impossible. This can’t be happening, it can’t…”
Admiral Pound clicked his tongue at the sight of the half-catatonic Halifax and roared.
“Damn it all! If you don’t pull yourself together right now, the British Empire is finished!”
The day that would later be known in Britain as the ‘Day of Betrayal’ had only just begun.