Author’s note: discerning readers will quickly realise that the ships described in this AH profile are basically the ‘Sangamon’ class escort carriers of WWII, slightly modified and ordered into production earlier than on OTL.
The appointment of Captain 'P-V' Patrick-Vyselton to the appointment of Chief of the Canadian Naval Service in 1937 was a surprise to many Royal Navy officers. A surprise in so much as P-V was being offered a job which seemed well below what he entitled to expect, even though it meant promotion to Commodore (First Class). Perhaps even more surprising was that P-V himself seemed quite happy to accept the position.
Certainly, he was qualified for it as a highly professional naval officer, and certainly he'd been born in Canada, in 1892, the son of a doctor practicing in Kingston, Ontario. But in 1911 he'd left his homeland to join HMS Dreadnought as a midshipman and since then his entire life had been his career in the Royal Navy, give or take his marriage and family. And it was an English girl he had married, a debutante from a family of landed gentry.
In fact P-V’s achievement in love matched his impressive achievements in the service, all of them rather against the odds, since he was unimpressive in appearance, short, sallow skinned and bespectacled. Indeed, he feared for a time that his poor eyesight might lose him his commission. Yet P-V was a naval officer who seemed to sail through all his difficulties with a following wind. One of his traits which became quickly apparent was a keen appreciation and understanding of applied science. It was a characteristic which served him well on the navigation, heat and steam, mathematics and electrical instruction courses at the Royal Naval College, and especially well during gunnery instruction at Whale Island.
Yet he also shone at sea, serving mostly on cruisers and destroyers in his years as a junior officer. And in between P-V earned excellent marks on a war staff course, a technical staff officer course and in various staff appointments in the UK and on overseas stations. He must certainly have been highly regarded by his superiors to have survived the savage naval budget cuts during the depression years without even a pause on the promotion ladder. Especially so for an officer who was eccentric enough to learn to fly at his own expense and even more eccentric in wanting to specialise in carrier aviation. A desire which was gratified to some extent with a spell as First Lieutenant of the Hermes. A small carrier, the smallest in the fleet at eleven thousand tons displacement, but the first purpose built aircraft carrier ever designed anywhere in the world.
Which of course raises the question of where it all went wrong for Patrick-Vyselton? Because by the late 1930’s the Royal Navy was beginning to come out of its interwar coma. Money was becoming available again, ships were being built, capital ships which needed captains. Captains who would enjoy the status that comes to an officer who commands a major fleet unit. PV must certainly have hoped -- must have expected -- an appointment worth all his dedicated service. Instead he was offered the booby prize in the career lucky dip barrel -- the job of running the Royal Canadian Navy. And the RCN in 1937 effectively consisted of six destroyers and a few minor ships. Total manpower, officers and men, including reservists, numbered less than four thousand. It would have taken an extremely gifted prophet to have anticipated that over a hundred thousand Canadians would end up wearing naval uniforms. But perhaps Patrick-Vyselton was foresighted enough to see a glimpse of the future -- he certainly behaved as if he owned a crystal ball.
In fact it was his total belief in his own judgement which eventually banished P-V to a mere dominion’s navy. That, and one ship, the Ark Royal. The first modern built carrier the Royal Navy owned, P-V desperately wanted to take command of the Ark. She was a fine, well designed carrier, and he was sure that with some sister ships, and some decent aircraft, the Royal Navy could quickly catch up a lot of lost ground in the use of sea borne air power. P-V was appalled when he discovered that the Admiralty had decided to follow on from the Ark Royal with the armoured Illustrious class carriers, designs loaded down with thousands of tons of protective plate and a huge array of guns. Which meant that they would be expensive, years late in getting into service and with reduced hangar capacity compared to the Ark Royal. The armoured carriers would also be limited by their reduced radius of action and crowded crew spaces.
P-V made no secret of his opinion that relying on anti-aircraft guns and armour plating to protect a carrier from air attack was an outdated concept. Simple calculations proved that a 1,000 pound AP bomb would be quite capable of penetrating the 3 inch armoured flight deck of the Illustrious. All the armour would do then would be to trap the blast inside the hangar deck where it would do the most damage. What the fleet really needed was high performance naval fighters, lots of them, and the carriers to make sure they were in the right place at the right time.
P-V's mistake was probably in bluntly informing a group of admirals -- a golden braid of admirals, perhaps, as a collective noun -- that the United States Navy already possessed dive bombers and bombs which could gut the RN’s planned future carriers. And where the USN led, the German air force was likely to follow.
His reluctant listeners simply couldn’t follow his reasoning. British carriers were primarily designed for surface combat in another battle of the juggernauts like Jutland. How could any warship not be improved by more armour and guns? Let the Fleet Air Arm just find the German fleet and their job was done. British battleships would then deal with the enemy in the way they’d always done. Any senior officer who wasn’t fully behind that doctrine could only be a piece of grit in the smooth functioning of the Royal Navy.
As clearly as if we had heard the words spoken, we can be sure that at least one Sea Lord must have passed a comment to the effect that if Patrick-Vyselton was so fond of the Americans, perhaps he'd better go and live next door to them again.
So sentence of exile was duly passed and P-V found himself boarding a ship, along with his sea chest, his children, and a wife bravely bearing up at the prospect of living in a log cabin surrounded by hungry wolves. The Canadian way of life was not clearly understood by many English people at that time.
P-V must have spent a lot of time during his transatlantic voyage watching the grey waves in the pensive mood of a commander overlooking a prospective battle field. Certainly, there was at least one other naval officer thinking along exactly the same lines as P-V was.
An officer with equally strong belief that a war was coming to the Atlantic sea lanes. An officer just as sure of his ability to win the duel with the weapons of his choice.
The officer’s name was Kapitan zur See Karl Doenitz, at that time commanding the German Navy’s 1st U-boat flotilla. As it turned out, both Doenitz and Patrick-Vyselton were right in their respective ideas. It was just that one of them was a little bit more right than the other. In the long term, we're still not quite sure which one of them it was. In the short term it was -- in Wellington's words about another battle -- a damned close run thing.
Doenitz’s weapon of choice was the U-boat. P-V’s was the aircraft carrier, and in his already strongly expressed opinion the USN was leaving the Royal Navy well astern as the Americans developed their own naval air arm at an astonishing speed Not, of course, that he could hope to emulate the Americans in any meaningful way. The entire Canadian navy he was going to take over could have just about have been lifted out of the water and dropped onto the massive flight decks of the Lexington and Saratoga. They were fleet carriers, with crews in the thousands, dozens of aircraft aboard and capable of over thirty knots.
But that didn’t mean that smaller, slower aircraft carriers might not have a very useful place in the scheme of things. In fact there were a whole list of useful jobs small cheap carriers could do. The problem P-V had in deciding which roles to promote was that he was squeezed between several different forces, forces which would all somehow need to be reconciled if he was to get his dream ships built. For a start there was the Canadian government, traditionally reluctant to spend anything at all on the Canadian armed forces and especially not on their own navy. Which made some sense because the Admiralty regarded all dominion ships whether Canada, Australia or New Zealand as simply RN ships which the British would use where, when and how it suited the Whitehall Sea Lords.
The Admiralty, on the other hand, was also unhappy about the state of the Canadian navy. One of the RN’s major tasks in the event of war was protecting the thousand or so British merchant ships at sea every day in all the world’s oceans. Whatever Doenitz may have thought, the RN was sure the new British sonar detection technology code named ASDIC would quickly deal with the U-boats. It was the prospect of German surface raiders preying on the British shipping lanes which the Sea Lords’ greatest pre-war concern. The answer to such raiders were cruisers, much bigger ships than destroyers, longer ranged and carrying guns big enough to deal with any raider they were likely to meet under most circumstances. It therefore followed that what the RN wanted the far flung dominions to provide was their own cruisers to help protect themselves from the marauding Kriegsmarine ships. Something which Canada had signally failed to do.
Why was it, their Lordships asked, that eleven million Canadians could only bring a mere six destroyers to the fleet while seven million Australians had six cruisers and five destroyers afloat? Even tiny New Zealand was providing the majority of the crews members aboard the two RN cruisers stationed there.
Not that any of these ships had been built in local yards, with the exception of one elderly light cruiser of the RAN, HMAS Adelaide, which had been laid down in Australia during World War and finally completed in 1922. She was still in service but another expensive and long drawn experiment in building warships locally was unlikely to be repeated by any dominion government. Lacking the technology to manufacture armour plating and big naval guns It was far, far cheaper for them to buy their destroyers and cruisers from the lower waged UK. A point repeatedly stressed to Patrick-Vyselton in the Admiralty before leaving London. His first priority was to somehow cajole a contract out of Ottawa for at least two cruisers to be built in British yards and to make sure “his” navy would be ready to provide the crews for them.
What the Admiralty didn’t know was that V-P had no intention of doing any such thing because he believed that it was the submarine, not the surface raider, which was the most dangerous threat to British merchant shipping: as soon as the shooting started the U-boats would begin turning the Atlantic into a killing ground. V-P and Doenitz, had they had a chance to discuss such matters, would have both agreed that cutting British trade routes with a massive fleet of U-boats was the only way for Germany to win at sea and win the war.
But cruisers were far too big and clumsy to be of any use as anti-submarine warships. Up until now destroyers had been the best possible answer to the below surface threat, though not very effective ones. Certainly destroyers had the speed and manoeuvrability to turn on U-boats like a mongoose hunting a snake. The problem was that these snakes were invisible when hidden below the water. Whether ASDIC would be effective against the new generation of U-boats was still an open question. What V-P knew for a fact was a set of numbers which were never out of his head. During World War German submarines had sunk 4,837 merchant ships. When ships travelled in convoys with naval escorts the rate of sinkings fell by 90%. In 1918 primitive biplane flying boats and small airships had begun flying cover over coastal convoys. The results had been startling.
Of the almost five thousand ships lost during the whole war, precisely five had been lost in convoys which had been protected by both sea and air escorts
V-P therefore believed that the only realistic role for the Canadian navy was going to be protecting convoys from U-boats and the facts screamed out that what the Canadians needed were destroyers and light aircraft carriers. Which meant that his British superiors expected him to fight the Canadian government tooth and nail for hugely expensive cruisers which he didn’t want and which he believed neither Canada or Britain would need as badly as they would need destroyers and carriers.
Except, of course, that the existing destroyers lacked the range necessary to fight the convoys through the wide expanse of the Atlantic. Naval warfare was a maze of contradictions.
It was in hope of unravelling some of his problems that V-P chose to land at New York instead of a Canadian port and then travel to Chester, Pennsylvania, where Sun Shipbuilding was preparing to launch a ship which was, in its way, as revolutionary as any which had ever been built. But it had nothing to do with the US Navy. It was a tanker ordered for the Atlantic refining company and destined to be named the J.W. Van Dyke after the one time President of the company.
There were two unusual things about the Van Dyke. One was that the 18,000 ton tanker was the first large vessel constructed in the US with welding instead of riveting as the primary means of production. Which didn’t mean that the Americans were world leaders in the art of welding: that distinction belonged to the Germans. Thanks to the development of special armoured plate by Krupp the Germans had produced a class of excellent heavy cruisers -- the Deutschland’s -- with 90% of their hulls welded instead of riveted, thereby making them at 15% lighter in displacement than they would otherwise have been. That was one of the reasons why the British press often called the Deutschland’s pocket battleships.
Nor were the Germans on their own in pioneering welded naval hulls. V-P had extensive knowledge of the techniques involved because his favourite ship, Ark Royal, had only been squeezed into the Washington Treaty tonnage allowance by making extensive use of welding -- in fact about two thirds of the Ark Royal’s hull had been welded instead of riveted. So V-P had visited the Cammell Laird yard regularly, intent on finding out the advantages and problems in this brave new world where huge chunks of metal were stitched together like ball gowns by skilled workmen using the newly developed shielded welding rod techniques. The problem was that welders were still a rare breed: Cammell Laird had been required to set up its own welding school to train two hundred of them to work on the Ark.
Still, the trend away from riveting to welding seemed assured to V-P: the advocates of welding claimed to be able to build hulls at least thirty per cent quicker and far more cheaply than yards where thousands and thousands of rivets had to be heated, fitted and hammered home as a ship was built. But was that the way it was working out for a modern commercial builder like Sun?
It was a question that needed asking because the only conceivable basis for an extemporised light carrier was a converted merchant ship design, and almost certainly a tanker design at that. Could it be a welded ship? The Van Dyke would soon start to answer that question in service on the high seas. For the time being, V-P would happily use the evidence of his own eyes on how well she’d been built.
Always on the lookout for potential customers, even unlikely ones, Sun had already granted V-P prior approval for his visit. What really took them aback was that V-P arrived in his smart civilian attire carrying a doctor’s bag with a set of much laundered overalls in it. When Sun had given permission for V-P to inspect the Van Dyke nobody had expected that the Chief of Canadian Naval Staff (designate) had intended to crawl through virtually every accessible compartment.
When he finally came out of the bilges an hour later, covered in grease and oil, V-P's welcoming party had increased considerably by the addition of one Sun Shipbuilding site manager, one comparatively junior American naval liaison officer, and Vice Admiral Emory Scott Land, the man in the whole of the United States V-P most wanted to meet.
Despite his title Land was no longer in the USN, although he’d certainly left his mark on it. From 1932 until April of 1937 he’d served as head of the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair. Taking shrewd advantage of FDR’s New Deal government spending, Land had presided over the largest peacetime construction programme in the USN’s history: two aircraft carriers, eight heavy cruisers, nine light cruisers, sixty five destroyers and twenty two submarines. It was no wonder that he was considered the best politician in the Navy. There had therefore been some surprise when the Admiral had retired early: surprise muted by his almost instant appointment of deputy chairman of the Maritime Commission. Whereupon many people suddenly remembered that Land had been a friend and naval adviser to Franklin Delano Roosevelt since 1914.
The United State Congress passed the act setting up the Maritime Commission in 1936, said Commission to be charged with the task of rebuilding America’s dwindling fleet of merchant ships by launching fifty ships each year from then on. The political head of the Commission was Joseph P. Kennedy whilst Land handled all the technical decisions. What was not so self evident was that Land’s job still included serving the Navy’s interests, because many of the planned new civilian ships had to be suitable for supporting naval operations if needed, and no need was more important than the perceived requirement for fleet tankers. So when Land was visiting Sun and heard that the next head of the Canadian navy was on board the Van Dyke and involved in a deep technical discussion with a welding supervisor about using powdered carpenter's chalk mixed with carbon tetrachloride to check for cracked welds, the Admiral wanted to know what the hell was going on.
And V-P was delighted to tell him exactly why he was so interested in the Van Dyke. Because Land was one of a breed of officers that were almost unique to the United States Navy at that time: not only a shipping expert but an aviation expert as well. He had attended Pensacola flight school and qualified as an aerial observer; from 1925 to 1928 Land had been assistant chief of the USN’s Bureau of Aeronautics; in 1928 he had taken extended leave to become treasurer of the Guggenheim Fund for Promotion of Aeronautics. He’d received a pilot’s licence at the age of fifty. And it also happened that Land had a cousin well known to the American public as a flyer of some renown, a certain Charles A. Lindbergh.
If, to use today’s language usage, V-P felt he needed a reality check on his ideas, Admiral Land was one of the very few men whose opinion he would have regarded with the utmost respect.
We still don’t know if V-P somehow managed to time his visit to Sun Shipyard on a day when he knew that Land would be there or whether the meeting was purely serendipitous. What we do know is that the American Admiral and Canadian Commodore struck up an instant rapport, though it was slightly dented when Land asked P-V if he was contemplating using the Van Dyke's design as the basis for his proposed aircraft carrier.
P-V answered no, she was rather too small and slow, though he was deeply interested in her construction and the Van Dyke's other unusual feature, her turboelectric drive. The ship he really wanted to know more about was the new fast tanker prototype that Sun was preparing to build.
“How the hell do you come to know about her?”
“I have a lifelong subscription to ‘Popular Mechanics’, sir.’’
It wasn’t an entirely flippant answer. American publications seemed to have no qualms at all about publishing detailed information on US defence policies and equipment. They therefore provided an endless source of fascinating material for those who wanted to know about such things. P-V had in fact learnt about plans to build the lead T3-S2-A1 fast tanker from the US Naval Architects’ Journal.
“No, sir, the truth is that I’ve spent years learning all I can about the USN’s efforts to develop some way of efficiently refuelling at sea. It’s an idea I’ve been trying to push along in my own navy but the Admiralty isn’t seriously interested. They already have harbours and refuelling facilities available to them all over the world. But I’d be happy to tell you what I’ve heard. Of course I’ll quite understand if you don’t wish to make any comment afterwards.”
“Pour yourself some coffee and carry on, Commodore. This should be interesting.”
“Yes, sir. Well, in 1917 the US Navy was required to send the Fifth Destroyer Division across the Atlantic to operate alongside the Royal Navy in anti U-boat operations. The problem was that the destroyers didn’t have the range to cross the pond. So the navy purchased a tanker to refuel them in mid Atlantic. Captain Dinger took charge of her, being the Navy’s foremost authority on liquid fuel. His executive officer was a very capable engineering Lieutenant called Chester W. Nimitz. It was Nimitz who made the arrangements for fuelling the destroyers by towing them alongside the oiler and rigging the fuel hoses on wooden saddles suspended from the tanker’s cargo derricks. It was the first at sea refuelling operation ever carried out in wartime and it was remarkably successful.
“According to what I’ve read the tanker was able to fuel six destroyers in ten and a half hours, passing over seventy tons of oil to each one. The tanker was able to pump across about a hundred and fifteen tons of oil every hour. Very impressive, especially for a first time effort.”
“So are your sources of information, Commodore. Can I ask if you’ve heard about anything else we’ve been trying out in that line?”
“Well, as I understand it, the big problem with ship to ship fuel transfers is the viscosity of the oil. You can warm it up on the tanker for faster pumping but if any part of the fuel hose is allowed to settle in the sea the oil inside is quickly cooled and therefore the pumping rate drops dramatically. I have heard that your navy has been experimenting for a long time with some kind of a tensioning device to be fitted to the stern of tankers so they can tow a ship and still maintain a taut fuel hose suspended from the towing line. But as far as I can gather the diameter of the hose the device can handle has been a limiting factor. There’s also a problem with how slowly the ships have to proceed whilst the refuelling is going on. My best guess is that the USN has decided that over the stern refuelling is not the way to go.”
“If the Royal Navy not interested in the subject, Commodore, why are you?”
“Sir, I have some good Canadian destroyers which are limited in their ability to search out any potential enemy because of their range. I’m interested in building a light carrier using a tanker as my base design. The thought occurs that if the carrier could be fitted with some spare bunker tanks it might be possible for it to take some destroyers with it on a long trip. Though that would only be possible if the destroyers could be refuelled from the carrier whilst underway.”
“Yes, that is an interesting thought, isn’t it? Can I ask if you have you anything else to say on the subject?”
“The obvious answer, sir, is that somebody else must have had much the same thought because both the Lexington and the Saratoga have been modified to fuel destroyers steaming alongside them and both ships used the method very successfully in Fleet Problem 16 three years ago. I also understand that many captains still regard it as a dangerous procedure, especially in poor weather. So I’ve tried to find out more about the subject for myself.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sir. As soon as I heard about my Canadian appointment I managed to borrow a destroyer for a few days and a torpedo recovery vessel to play the role of a tanker. The thing which really interested me was Captain’s Dinger’s original opinion that it would be easier to deal with the ship handling problems if the towlines were dispensed with altogether. So I told the recovery vessel to steer a constant course into the wind while the destroyer steamed alongside, trying to keep station close enough for a hose on a derrick to be passed over.
“It turned out to be very difficult at first, though it did get easier the faster we moved. We also found it helped to maintain station if we were thirty feet away from the other ship rather than forty, but any closer and their bow wave knocked us around badly. The problem was in judging the distance exactly. Then the destroyer captain suggested passing a line between the ships with distance marker flags attached to it. We began to get much better results after that. In calm conditions we found we could make a high speed approach at 30 knots until the destroyer’s bridge was level with the target ship’s stern, go full astern for ten seconds, then make turns for 15 knots ahead and drop straight into position. It took quite a while to get the hang of it, but we managed.
“Not the next day though, because the weather was pretty bad. We managed to get into position and stay there but it was a slow and very careful piece of ship handling; I’ll swear the captain’s hair was turning grey as I watched him. Rough weather broadside to broadside refuelling is not something you’d do unless it’s really necessary.
“Of course I still don’t know anything very useful about the right size of the booms, the correct sort of hoses to use, what emergency cutoffs need to be installed and so on, but at least I’m sure the required ship handling is possible.”
“Possible for destroyers, anyway?”
“Yes, sir. Refuelling anything larger than a destroyer is something I think I’ll leave to the USN to find out about.”
“Commodore, we recently had an interesting experience along these lines. The Lexington and three destroyers were ordered to Howland Island with all despatch to search for Amelia Earhart. Howland Island is seventeen hundred miles from Hawaii, there are no refuelling facilities there and the Lex was enroute from San Diego when she got her orders so she had to bunker up again before heading for Howland. The problem was that dredging operations were under way at Pearl which prevented the Lexington from entering. The only alternative was for her to lie offshore off and have the fuel brought out to her by lighters. Which was a great idea, except that the Lex and her task force would have been anchored up for days bringing aboard the fuel spoonful by spoonful, with the American public and the American press demanding to know what was wrong with the US Navy.
“Luckily there was a tanker in the area which transferred over three thousand tons of oil to the carrier in a single day, so she was able to head straight out to the search area. Apart from flying her planes the Lex was also able to act as a floating gas station for her destroyers. So the Navy was saved a major embarrassment and the utility of tankers seems to have finally been hoisted aboard by the Navy brass.
“Of course this is a rather sensitive area, Commodore, but perhaps no one will mind if I ask you some questions, as one friendly Naval officer to another. Which class of warships do you consider the greediest for fuel?”
“Aircraft carriers, sir. Because they need to work up to top speed into wind to launch and retrieve their aircraft, and then they have to remain at top speed to catch up with the rest of the fleet, except in the unlikely event that the required course of advance is exactly the same as the desired wind direction.”
“So, assuming, as we both seem to, that refuelling at sea becomes necessary during some future war, what technique would you advocate?”
“Broadside on, at about ten to fifteen knots, with no towlines. Even if you could solve the technical problems of over the stern refuelling, both ships would have to move so slowly that they’d be easy targets for submarines or enemy aircraft.”
“Alright then, Commodore, what sort of tankers would you like the Royal Navy to acquire?”
“Well, sir, tankers are no use unless they’re with the fleet. So they have to be able to keep up with the fleet’s average speed of advance. Of course I don’t know what speed the USN planners have in mind for their fleet but as far as the tankers are concerned I’d be hoping for at least seventeen knots on trials -- that would translate to about sixteen knots fully loaded and with a foul bottom after three months at sea."
“And the fastest tanker in the world right now does thirteen and a half knots, flat out.”
“The fastest commercial tanker, Admiral. The ‘Dithmarschen’ class are reported to be capable of 20 knots or more at top speed.”
“We haven’t heard much about those ships, Commodore. I’d like to know more, if that’s possible?”
“As a matter of fact we, the Admiralty that is, have had some luck there because two of the class are on the ways in Danzig. Danzig of course is overwhelmingly German but run by the League of Nations as a free city in the Polish corridor and we have some Polish friends with very good connections into the yards. They’ve been able to tell us that the ‘Dithmarschens’ are intended to be tankers and supply ships for German warships in foreign waters. It's the only way a navy with no overseas bases can maintain even a handful of ships a long way from home.
"As for your question about what sort of support ships I’d like the RN to order, the fanciful answer seems to be the ‘Ditmarschens’. They do the whole job in one fast moving package. A capacity to load 10,000 tons of oil and internal bunkerage enough to travel 12,000 miles at 15 knots on her diesels. They also carry large supplies of ammunition, provisions, spare parts and water. They’re equipped with excellent workshops and a fully fitted out hospital. Three six inch deck guns for self protection plus they have an excellent light anti-aircraft fit.”
“Remarkable ships indeed, Commodore if you’re information is correct and I believe it is. Any idea on how many are building?"
“We’ve identified three so far. The Ditmarschen and the Westerwald almost ready to be launched in Danzig, and the Altmark in Kiel.”
“They must be able to refuel and reprovision at sea. Any idea on how they intend to do that?”
“We’ve heard they’re to carry large boats to transfer stores and there’s been one reference to special kind of inflatable hose. The obvious deduction is that it must be meant to float in the sea. Which in turn suggests an over the stern method.”
“How can they be so fast and long ranged? What’s their length and SHP?”
“About five hundred and eighty feet, sir, and over twenty thousand horsepower from four MAN diesels. And if I know anything about the Germans they’ll have done an excellent job in designing the hull lines.”
“I guess so, Commodore. We’ll you’ve shown me a couple of cards in your hand and I suppose I can guess at another one. You’d like to know whether our new fast tanker blueprints could be used as a basis for a light carrier for the Canadian Navy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, there are plenty of senior officers in the US Navy who would spit rivets at the idea of co-operating with the British in any way, and red hot rivets at that. But the way I see it right now I’m just exploring the idea of a joint research project with our Canadian buddies over the border with a view to strengthening the defences of the Western Hemisphere. Is that how you see it, Commodore?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you understand that nothing at all will happen unless the man in the White House gives an approving nod in our direction?”
“Yes, sir.”
"So, Commodore, I suggest you approach Prime Minister King and make very sure he's on board with the idea of building your ship in Canada. Bring me a letter from him, your hand to my hand only. If Mr King does want to go ahead I'm prepared to do some lobbying for you in Washington. And I'll tell you now that you've gotten a stronger hand to play than you might be expecting. Both countries could be doing each other a real favour here.
"By the way, have you thought of a name for your new ship yet?"
"I thought about calling it the Fort Nelson. Fort because it's such a common place name in Canada and the US, and Nelson to keep the Royal Navy happy."
"Don't you have a Fort Churchill up there somewhere? Just in case you ever need it."
P-V had leaned back in his chair and laughed.
"Sir, the one thing I can absolutely guarantee you is that Winston Churchill will never be put in charge of the Royal Navy again. Governor of Port Royal during the days of the buccaneers is much nearer his mark."
The appointment of Captain 'P-V' Patrick-Vyselton to the appointment of Chief of the Canadian Naval Service in 1937 was a surprise to many Royal Navy officers. A surprise in so much as P-V was being offered a job which seemed well below what he entitled to expect, even though it meant promotion to Commodore (First Class). Perhaps even more surprising was that P-V himself seemed quite happy to accept the position.
Certainly, he was qualified for it as a highly professional naval officer, and certainly he'd been born in Canada, in 1892, the son of a doctor practicing in Kingston, Ontario. But in 1911 he'd left his homeland to join HMS Dreadnought as a midshipman and since then his entire life had been his career in the Royal Navy, give or take his marriage and family. And it was an English girl he had married, a debutante from a family of landed gentry.
In fact P-V’s achievement in love matched his impressive achievements in the service, all of them rather against the odds, since he was unimpressive in appearance, short, sallow skinned and bespectacled. Indeed, he feared for a time that his poor eyesight might lose him his commission. Yet P-V was a naval officer who seemed to sail through all his difficulties with a following wind. One of his traits which became quickly apparent was a keen appreciation and understanding of applied science. It was a characteristic which served him well on the navigation, heat and steam, mathematics and electrical instruction courses at the Royal Naval College, and especially well during gunnery instruction at Whale Island.
Yet he also shone at sea, serving mostly on cruisers and destroyers in his years as a junior officer. And in between P-V earned excellent marks on a war staff course, a technical staff officer course and in various staff appointments in the UK and on overseas stations. He must certainly have been highly regarded by his superiors to have survived the savage naval budget cuts during the depression years without even a pause on the promotion ladder. Especially so for an officer who was eccentric enough to learn to fly at his own expense and even more eccentric in wanting to specialise in carrier aviation. A desire which was gratified to some extent with a spell as First Lieutenant of the Hermes. A small carrier, the smallest in the fleet at eleven thousand tons displacement, but the first purpose built aircraft carrier ever designed anywhere in the world.
Which of course raises the question of where it all went wrong for Patrick-Vyselton? Because by the late 1930’s the Royal Navy was beginning to come out of its interwar coma. Money was becoming available again, ships were being built, capital ships which needed captains. Captains who would enjoy the status that comes to an officer who commands a major fleet unit. PV must certainly have hoped -- must have expected -- an appointment worth all his dedicated service. Instead he was offered the booby prize in the career lucky dip barrel -- the job of running the Royal Canadian Navy. And the RCN in 1937 effectively consisted of six destroyers and a few minor ships. Total manpower, officers and men, including reservists, numbered less than four thousand. It would have taken an extremely gifted prophet to have anticipated that over a hundred thousand Canadians would end up wearing naval uniforms. But perhaps Patrick-Vyselton was foresighted enough to see a glimpse of the future -- he certainly behaved as if he owned a crystal ball.
In fact it was his total belief in his own judgement which eventually banished P-V to a mere dominion’s navy. That, and one ship, the Ark Royal. The first modern built carrier the Royal Navy owned, P-V desperately wanted to take command of the Ark. She was a fine, well designed carrier, and he was sure that with some sister ships, and some decent aircraft, the Royal Navy could quickly catch up a lot of lost ground in the use of sea borne air power. P-V was appalled when he discovered that the Admiralty had decided to follow on from the Ark Royal with the armoured Illustrious class carriers, designs loaded down with thousands of tons of protective plate and a huge array of guns. Which meant that they would be expensive, years late in getting into service and with reduced hangar capacity compared to the Ark Royal. The armoured carriers would also be limited by their reduced radius of action and crowded crew spaces.
P-V made no secret of his opinion that relying on anti-aircraft guns and armour plating to protect a carrier from air attack was an outdated concept. Simple calculations proved that a 1,000 pound AP bomb would be quite capable of penetrating the 3 inch armoured flight deck of the Illustrious. All the armour would do then would be to trap the blast inside the hangar deck where it would do the most damage. What the fleet really needed was high performance naval fighters, lots of them, and the carriers to make sure they were in the right place at the right time.
P-V's mistake was probably in bluntly informing a group of admirals -- a golden braid of admirals, perhaps, as a collective noun -- that the United States Navy already possessed dive bombers and bombs which could gut the RN’s planned future carriers. And where the USN led, the German air force was likely to follow.
His reluctant listeners simply couldn’t follow his reasoning. British carriers were primarily designed for surface combat in another battle of the juggernauts like Jutland. How could any warship not be improved by more armour and guns? Let the Fleet Air Arm just find the German fleet and their job was done. British battleships would then deal with the enemy in the way they’d always done. Any senior officer who wasn’t fully behind that doctrine could only be a piece of grit in the smooth functioning of the Royal Navy.
As clearly as if we had heard the words spoken, we can be sure that at least one Sea Lord must have passed a comment to the effect that if Patrick-Vyselton was so fond of the Americans, perhaps he'd better go and live next door to them again.
So sentence of exile was duly passed and P-V found himself boarding a ship, along with his sea chest, his children, and a wife bravely bearing up at the prospect of living in a log cabin surrounded by hungry wolves. The Canadian way of life was not clearly understood by many English people at that time.
P-V must have spent a lot of time during his transatlantic voyage watching the grey waves in the pensive mood of a commander overlooking a prospective battle field. Certainly, there was at least one other naval officer thinking along exactly the same lines as P-V was.
An officer with equally strong belief that a war was coming to the Atlantic sea lanes. An officer just as sure of his ability to win the duel with the weapons of his choice.
The officer’s name was Kapitan zur See Karl Doenitz, at that time commanding the German Navy’s 1st U-boat flotilla. As it turned out, both Doenitz and Patrick-Vyselton were right in their respective ideas. It was just that one of them was a little bit more right than the other. In the long term, we're still not quite sure which one of them it was. In the short term it was -- in Wellington's words about another battle -- a damned close run thing.
Doenitz’s weapon of choice was the U-boat. P-V’s was the aircraft carrier, and in his already strongly expressed opinion the USN was leaving the Royal Navy well astern as the Americans developed their own naval air arm at an astonishing speed Not, of course, that he could hope to emulate the Americans in any meaningful way. The entire Canadian navy he was going to take over could have just about have been lifted out of the water and dropped onto the massive flight decks of the Lexington and Saratoga. They were fleet carriers, with crews in the thousands, dozens of aircraft aboard and capable of over thirty knots.
But that didn’t mean that smaller, slower aircraft carriers might not have a very useful place in the scheme of things. In fact there were a whole list of useful jobs small cheap carriers could do. The problem P-V had in deciding which roles to promote was that he was squeezed between several different forces, forces which would all somehow need to be reconciled if he was to get his dream ships built. For a start there was the Canadian government, traditionally reluctant to spend anything at all on the Canadian armed forces and especially not on their own navy. Which made some sense because the Admiralty regarded all dominion ships whether Canada, Australia or New Zealand as simply RN ships which the British would use where, when and how it suited the Whitehall Sea Lords.
The Admiralty, on the other hand, was also unhappy about the state of the Canadian navy. One of the RN’s major tasks in the event of war was protecting the thousand or so British merchant ships at sea every day in all the world’s oceans. Whatever Doenitz may have thought, the RN was sure the new British sonar detection technology code named ASDIC would quickly deal with the U-boats. It was the prospect of German surface raiders preying on the British shipping lanes which the Sea Lords’ greatest pre-war concern. The answer to such raiders were cruisers, much bigger ships than destroyers, longer ranged and carrying guns big enough to deal with any raider they were likely to meet under most circumstances. It therefore followed that what the RN wanted the far flung dominions to provide was their own cruisers to help protect themselves from the marauding Kriegsmarine ships. Something which Canada had signally failed to do.
Why was it, their Lordships asked, that eleven million Canadians could only bring a mere six destroyers to the fleet while seven million Australians had six cruisers and five destroyers afloat? Even tiny New Zealand was providing the majority of the crews members aboard the two RN cruisers stationed there.
Not that any of these ships had been built in local yards, with the exception of one elderly light cruiser of the RAN, HMAS Adelaide, which had been laid down in Australia during World War and finally completed in 1922. She was still in service but another expensive and long drawn experiment in building warships locally was unlikely to be repeated by any dominion government. Lacking the technology to manufacture armour plating and big naval guns It was far, far cheaper for them to buy their destroyers and cruisers from the lower waged UK. A point repeatedly stressed to Patrick-Vyselton in the Admiralty before leaving London. His first priority was to somehow cajole a contract out of Ottawa for at least two cruisers to be built in British yards and to make sure “his” navy would be ready to provide the crews for them.
What the Admiralty didn’t know was that V-P had no intention of doing any such thing because he believed that it was the submarine, not the surface raider, which was the most dangerous threat to British merchant shipping: as soon as the shooting started the U-boats would begin turning the Atlantic into a killing ground. V-P and Doenitz, had they had a chance to discuss such matters, would have both agreed that cutting British trade routes with a massive fleet of U-boats was the only way for Germany to win at sea and win the war.
But cruisers were far too big and clumsy to be of any use as anti-submarine warships. Up until now destroyers had been the best possible answer to the below surface threat, though not very effective ones. Certainly destroyers had the speed and manoeuvrability to turn on U-boats like a mongoose hunting a snake. The problem was that these snakes were invisible when hidden below the water. Whether ASDIC would be effective against the new generation of U-boats was still an open question. What V-P knew for a fact was a set of numbers which were never out of his head. During World War German submarines had sunk 4,837 merchant ships. When ships travelled in convoys with naval escorts the rate of sinkings fell by 90%. In 1918 primitive biplane flying boats and small airships had begun flying cover over coastal convoys. The results had been startling.
Of the almost five thousand ships lost during the whole war, precisely five had been lost in convoys which had been protected by both sea and air escorts
V-P therefore believed that the only realistic role for the Canadian navy was going to be protecting convoys from U-boats and the facts screamed out that what the Canadians needed were destroyers and light aircraft carriers. Which meant that his British superiors expected him to fight the Canadian government tooth and nail for hugely expensive cruisers which he didn’t want and which he believed neither Canada or Britain would need as badly as they would need destroyers and carriers.
Except, of course, that the existing destroyers lacked the range necessary to fight the convoys through the wide expanse of the Atlantic. Naval warfare was a maze of contradictions.
It was in hope of unravelling some of his problems that V-P chose to land at New York instead of a Canadian port and then travel to Chester, Pennsylvania, where Sun Shipbuilding was preparing to launch a ship which was, in its way, as revolutionary as any which had ever been built. But it had nothing to do with the US Navy. It was a tanker ordered for the Atlantic refining company and destined to be named the J.W. Van Dyke after the one time President of the company.
There were two unusual things about the Van Dyke. One was that the 18,000 ton tanker was the first large vessel constructed in the US with welding instead of riveting as the primary means of production. Which didn’t mean that the Americans were world leaders in the art of welding: that distinction belonged to the Germans. Thanks to the development of special armoured plate by Krupp the Germans had produced a class of excellent heavy cruisers -- the Deutschland’s -- with 90% of their hulls welded instead of riveted, thereby making them at 15% lighter in displacement than they would otherwise have been. That was one of the reasons why the British press often called the Deutschland’s pocket battleships.
Nor were the Germans on their own in pioneering welded naval hulls. V-P had extensive knowledge of the techniques involved because his favourite ship, Ark Royal, had only been squeezed into the Washington Treaty tonnage allowance by making extensive use of welding -- in fact about two thirds of the Ark Royal’s hull had been welded instead of riveted. So V-P had visited the Cammell Laird yard regularly, intent on finding out the advantages and problems in this brave new world where huge chunks of metal were stitched together like ball gowns by skilled workmen using the newly developed shielded welding rod techniques. The problem was that welders were still a rare breed: Cammell Laird had been required to set up its own welding school to train two hundred of them to work on the Ark.
Still, the trend away from riveting to welding seemed assured to V-P: the advocates of welding claimed to be able to build hulls at least thirty per cent quicker and far more cheaply than yards where thousands and thousands of rivets had to be heated, fitted and hammered home as a ship was built. But was that the way it was working out for a modern commercial builder like Sun?
It was a question that needed asking because the only conceivable basis for an extemporised light carrier was a converted merchant ship design, and almost certainly a tanker design at that. Could it be a welded ship? The Van Dyke would soon start to answer that question in service on the high seas. For the time being, V-P would happily use the evidence of his own eyes on how well she’d been built.
Always on the lookout for potential customers, even unlikely ones, Sun had already granted V-P prior approval for his visit. What really took them aback was that V-P arrived in his smart civilian attire carrying a doctor’s bag with a set of much laundered overalls in it. When Sun had given permission for V-P to inspect the Van Dyke nobody had expected that the Chief of Canadian Naval Staff (designate) had intended to crawl through virtually every accessible compartment.
When he finally came out of the bilges an hour later, covered in grease and oil, V-P's welcoming party had increased considerably by the addition of one Sun Shipbuilding site manager, one comparatively junior American naval liaison officer, and Vice Admiral Emory Scott Land, the man in the whole of the United States V-P most wanted to meet.
Despite his title Land was no longer in the USN, although he’d certainly left his mark on it. From 1932 until April of 1937 he’d served as head of the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair. Taking shrewd advantage of FDR’s New Deal government spending, Land had presided over the largest peacetime construction programme in the USN’s history: two aircraft carriers, eight heavy cruisers, nine light cruisers, sixty five destroyers and twenty two submarines. It was no wonder that he was considered the best politician in the Navy. There had therefore been some surprise when the Admiral had retired early: surprise muted by his almost instant appointment of deputy chairman of the Maritime Commission. Whereupon many people suddenly remembered that Land had been a friend and naval adviser to Franklin Delano Roosevelt since 1914.
The United State Congress passed the act setting up the Maritime Commission in 1936, said Commission to be charged with the task of rebuilding America’s dwindling fleet of merchant ships by launching fifty ships each year from then on. The political head of the Commission was Joseph P. Kennedy whilst Land handled all the technical decisions. What was not so self evident was that Land’s job still included serving the Navy’s interests, because many of the planned new civilian ships had to be suitable for supporting naval operations if needed, and no need was more important than the perceived requirement for fleet tankers. So when Land was visiting Sun and heard that the next head of the Canadian navy was on board the Van Dyke and involved in a deep technical discussion with a welding supervisor about using powdered carpenter's chalk mixed with carbon tetrachloride to check for cracked welds, the Admiral wanted to know what the hell was going on.
And V-P was delighted to tell him exactly why he was so interested in the Van Dyke. Because Land was one of a breed of officers that were almost unique to the United States Navy at that time: not only a shipping expert but an aviation expert as well. He had attended Pensacola flight school and qualified as an aerial observer; from 1925 to 1928 Land had been assistant chief of the USN’s Bureau of Aeronautics; in 1928 he had taken extended leave to become treasurer of the Guggenheim Fund for Promotion of Aeronautics. He’d received a pilot’s licence at the age of fifty. And it also happened that Land had a cousin well known to the American public as a flyer of some renown, a certain Charles A. Lindbergh.
If, to use today’s language usage, V-P felt he needed a reality check on his ideas, Admiral Land was one of the very few men whose opinion he would have regarded with the utmost respect.
We still don’t know if V-P somehow managed to time his visit to Sun Shipyard on a day when he knew that Land would be there or whether the meeting was purely serendipitous. What we do know is that the American Admiral and Canadian Commodore struck up an instant rapport, though it was slightly dented when Land asked P-V if he was contemplating using the Van Dyke's design as the basis for his proposed aircraft carrier.
P-V answered no, she was rather too small and slow, though he was deeply interested in her construction and the Van Dyke's other unusual feature, her turboelectric drive. The ship he really wanted to know more about was the new fast tanker prototype that Sun was preparing to build.
“How the hell do you come to know about her?”
“I have a lifelong subscription to ‘Popular Mechanics’, sir.’’
It wasn’t an entirely flippant answer. American publications seemed to have no qualms at all about publishing detailed information on US defence policies and equipment. They therefore provided an endless source of fascinating material for those who wanted to know about such things. P-V had in fact learnt about plans to build the lead T3-S2-A1 fast tanker from the US Naval Architects’ Journal.
“No, sir, the truth is that I’ve spent years learning all I can about the USN’s efforts to develop some way of efficiently refuelling at sea. It’s an idea I’ve been trying to push along in my own navy but the Admiralty isn’t seriously interested. They already have harbours and refuelling facilities available to them all over the world. But I’d be happy to tell you what I’ve heard. Of course I’ll quite understand if you don’t wish to make any comment afterwards.”
“Pour yourself some coffee and carry on, Commodore. This should be interesting.”
“Yes, sir. Well, in 1917 the US Navy was required to send the Fifth Destroyer Division across the Atlantic to operate alongside the Royal Navy in anti U-boat operations. The problem was that the destroyers didn’t have the range to cross the pond. So the navy purchased a tanker to refuel them in mid Atlantic. Captain Dinger took charge of her, being the Navy’s foremost authority on liquid fuel. His executive officer was a very capable engineering Lieutenant called Chester W. Nimitz. It was Nimitz who made the arrangements for fuelling the destroyers by towing them alongside the oiler and rigging the fuel hoses on wooden saddles suspended from the tanker’s cargo derricks. It was the first at sea refuelling operation ever carried out in wartime and it was remarkably successful.
“According to what I’ve read the tanker was able to fuel six destroyers in ten and a half hours, passing over seventy tons of oil to each one. The tanker was able to pump across about a hundred and fifteen tons of oil every hour. Very impressive, especially for a first time effort.”
“So are your sources of information, Commodore. Can I ask if you’ve heard about anything else we’ve been trying out in that line?”
“Well, as I understand it, the big problem with ship to ship fuel transfers is the viscosity of the oil. You can warm it up on the tanker for faster pumping but if any part of the fuel hose is allowed to settle in the sea the oil inside is quickly cooled and therefore the pumping rate drops dramatically. I have heard that your navy has been experimenting for a long time with some kind of a tensioning device to be fitted to the stern of tankers so they can tow a ship and still maintain a taut fuel hose suspended from the towing line. But as far as I can gather the diameter of the hose the device can handle has been a limiting factor. There’s also a problem with how slowly the ships have to proceed whilst the refuelling is going on. My best guess is that the USN has decided that over the stern refuelling is not the way to go.”
“If the Royal Navy not interested in the subject, Commodore, why are you?”
“Sir, I have some good Canadian destroyers which are limited in their ability to search out any potential enemy because of their range. I’m interested in building a light carrier using a tanker as my base design. The thought occurs that if the carrier could be fitted with some spare bunker tanks it might be possible for it to take some destroyers with it on a long trip. Though that would only be possible if the destroyers could be refuelled from the carrier whilst underway.”
“Yes, that is an interesting thought, isn’t it? Can I ask if you have you anything else to say on the subject?”
“The obvious answer, sir, is that somebody else must have had much the same thought because both the Lexington and the Saratoga have been modified to fuel destroyers steaming alongside them and both ships used the method very successfully in Fleet Problem 16 three years ago. I also understand that many captains still regard it as a dangerous procedure, especially in poor weather. So I’ve tried to find out more about the subject for myself.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sir. As soon as I heard about my Canadian appointment I managed to borrow a destroyer for a few days and a torpedo recovery vessel to play the role of a tanker. The thing which really interested me was Captain’s Dinger’s original opinion that it would be easier to deal with the ship handling problems if the towlines were dispensed with altogether. So I told the recovery vessel to steer a constant course into the wind while the destroyer steamed alongside, trying to keep station close enough for a hose on a derrick to be passed over.
“It turned out to be very difficult at first, though it did get easier the faster we moved. We also found it helped to maintain station if we were thirty feet away from the other ship rather than forty, but any closer and their bow wave knocked us around badly. The problem was in judging the distance exactly. Then the destroyer captain suggested passing a line between the ships with distance marker flags attached to it. We began to get much better results after that. In calm conditions we found we could make a high speed approach at 30 knots until the destroyer’s bridge was level with the target ship’s stern, go full astern for ten seconds, then make turns for 15 knots ahead and drop straight into position. It took quite a while to get the hang of it, but we managed.
“Not the next day though, because the weather was pretty bad. We managed to get into position and stay there but it was a slow and very careful piece of ship handling; I’ll swear the captain’s hair was turning grey as I watched him. Rough weather broadside to broadside refuelling is not something you’d do unless it’s really necessary.
“Of course I still don’t know anything very useful about the right size of the booms, the correct sort of hoses to use, what emergency cutoffs need to be installed and so on, but at least I’m sure the required ship handling is possible.”
“Possible for destroyers, anyway?”
“Yes, sir. Refuelling anything larger than a destroyer is something I think I’ll leave to the USN to find out about.”
“Commodore, we recently had an interesting experience along these lines. The Lexington and three destroyers were ordered to Howland Island with all despatch to search for Amelia Earhart. Howland Island is seventeen hundred miles from Hawaii, there are no refuelling facilities there and the Lex was enroute from San Diego when she got her orders so she had to bunker up again before heading for Howland. The problem was that dredging operations were under way at Pearl which prevented the Lexington from entering. The only alternative was for her to lie offshore off and have the fuel brought out to her by lighters. Which was a great idea, except that the Lex and her task force would have been anchored up for days bringing aboard the fuel spoonful by spoonful, with the American public and the American press demanding to know what was wrong with the US Navy.
“Luckily there was a tanker in the area which transferred over three thousand tons of oil to the carrier in a single day, so she was able to head straight out to the search area. Apart from flying her planes the Lex was also able to act as a floating gas station for her destroyers. So the Navy was saved a major embarrassment and the utility of tankers seems to have finally been hoisted aboard by the Navy brass.
“Of course this is a rather sensitive area, Commodore, but perhaps no one will mind if I ask you some questions, as one friendly Naval officer to another. Which class of warships do you consider the greediest for fuel?”
“Aircraft carriers, sir. Because they need to work up to top speed into wind to launch and retrieve their aircraft, and then they have to remain at top speed to catch up with the rest of the fleet, except in the unlikely event that the required course of advance is exactly the same as the desired wind direction.”
“So, assuming, as we both seem to, that refuelling at sea becomes necessary during some future war, what technique would you advocate?”
“Broadside on, at about ten to fifteen knots, with no towlines. Even if you could solve the technical problems of over the stern refuelling, both ships would have to move so slowly that they’d be easy targets for submarines or enemy aircraft.”
“Alright then, Commodore, what sort of tankers would you like the Royal Navy to acquire?”
“Well, sir, tankers are no use unless they’re with the fleet. So they have to be able to keep up with the fleet’s average speed of advance. Of course I don’t know what speed the USN planners have in mind for their fleet but as far as the tankers are concerned I’d be hoping for at least seventeen knots on trials -- that would translate to about sixteen knots fully loaded and with a foul bottom after three months at sea."
“And the fastest tanker in the world right now does thirteen and a half knots, flat out.”
“The fastest commercial tanker, Admiral. The ‘Dithmarschen’ class are reported to be capable of 20 knots or more at top speed.”
“We haven’t heard much about those ships, Commodore. I’d like to know more, if that’s possible?”
“As a matter of fact we, the Admiralty that is, have had some luck there because two of the class are on the ways in Danzig. Danzig of course is overwhelmingly German but run by the League of Nations as a free city in the Polish corridor and we have some Polish friends with very good connections into the yards. They’ve been able to tell us that the ‘Dithmarschens’ are intended to be tankers and supply ships for German warships in foreign waters. It's the only way a navy with no overseas bases can maintain even a handful of ships a long way from home.
"As for your question about what sort of support ships I’d like the RN to order, the fanciful answer seems to be the ‘Ditmarschens’. They do the whole job in one fast moving package. A capacity to load 10,000 tons of oil and internal bunkerage enough to travel 12,000 miles at 15 knots on her diesels. They also carry large supplies of ammunition, provisions, spare parts and water. They’re equipped with excellent workshops and a fully fitted out hospital. Three six inch deck guns for self protection plus they have an excellent light anti-aircraft fit.”
“Remarkable ships indeed, Commodore if you’re information is correct and I believe it is. Any idea on how many are building?"
“We’ve identified three so far. The Ditmarschen and the Westerwald almost ready to be launched in Danzig, and the Altmark in Kiel.”
“They must be able to refuel and reprovision at sea. Any idea on how they intend to do that?”
“We’ve heard they’re to carry large boats to transfer stores and there’s been one reference to special kind of inflatable hose. The obvious deduction is that it must be meant to float in the sea. Which in turn suggests an over the stern method.”
“How can they be so fast and long ranged? What’s their length and SHP?”
“About five hundred and eighty feet, sir, and over twenty thousand horsepower from four MAN diesels. And if I know anything about the Germans they’ll have done an excellent job in designing the hull lines.”
“I guess so, Commodore. We’ll you’ve shown me a couple of cards in your hand and I suppose I can guess at another one. You’d like to know whether our new fast tanker blueprints could be used as a basis for a light carrier for the Canadian Navy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, there are plenty of senior officers in the US Navy who would spit rivets at the idea of co-operating with the British in any way, and red hot rivets at that. But the way I see it right now I’m just exploring the idea of a joint research project with our Canadian buddies over the border with a view to strengthening the defences of the Western Hemisphere. Is that how you see it, Commodore?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you understand that nothing at all will happen unless the man in the White House gives an approving nod in our direction?”
“Yes, sir.”
"So, Commodore, I suggest you approach Prime Minister King and make very sure he's on board with the idea of building your ship in Canada. Bring me a letter from him, your hand to my hand only. If Mr King does want to go ahead I'm prepared to do some lobbying for you in Washington. And I'll tell you now that you've gotten a stronger hand to play than you might be expecting. Both countries could be doing each other a real favour here.
"By the way, have you thought of a name for your new ship yet?"
"I thought about calling it the Fort Nelson. Fort because it's such a common place name in Canada and the US, and Nelson to keep the Royal Navy happy."
"Don't you have a Fort Churchill up there somewhere? Just in case you ever need it."
P-V had leaned back in his chair and laughed.
"Sir, the one thing I can absolutely guarantee you is that Winston Churchill will never be put in charge of the Royal Navy again. Governor of Port Royal during the days of the buccaneers is much nearer his mark."
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