The Halls of Montezuma (New England Book 8) by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

Friday 1st December

Armada Catolica de Cuba Ship El Rey Felipe II, Guantanamo Bay

Commodore José Antonio de Pareja y Mariscal had had very little time to reflect on ‘the honour’ of being appointed to command his country’s last fleet. Attempting to instil a sense of purpose, and to assert his authority in any meaningful way on the shell-shocked, angry and frankly, mutinous officers of his battered armada was to say the least, no ‘walk in the park’ as his New England acquaintances might have said during that diverting period when he had been Naval Attaché at the Cuban Legation in Philadelphia five years ago. As if he did not have enough on his plate, he was getting mightily impatient with having to constantly massage the fragile egos of a stream of VIP visitors to the flagship.

The priests were the worst; they seemed to think that God would sort everything out; whereas, the politicians, most of them self-important Army men who had fought might and main to remain as far as possible from the actual fighting, were simply going through the motions, again as his Philadelphian friends would have said: preoccupied primarily with ‘covering their arses.’ On the other hand, at least they understood that this was probably going to end badly, and that the worst was still to come. If he had not known it before he knew now that it was impossible to tell what a Cardinal actually thought about anything.

Most of the troops in the still large – several hundred square miles – but increasingly less contiguous bridgehead in the Floridian, Alabaman and Georgian lands of the New England South East were Cubans and Mexicans. The situation was so chaotic up there that there was no way of reliably establishing how many men had already become casualties, been lost in the wilderness or captured by the enemy but the general assumption was that between seventy and eighty-thousand of the one-hundred-and-thirty thousand men who had landed on New England soil east of the Delta were trapped in a series of ‘pockets’ between Tallahassee, the borderlands of the Colony of Georgia and the fringes of the largely impassable Okefenokee swamps.

Nevertheless, it had been made clear to Mariscal that his mission was fighting a convoy through, at any costs, to bring home the survivors of the six brigades of Cuban marines, infantrymen and a couple of battalions of ‘Soldiers of the Cross’ – an estimated forty-five to fifty-five thousand men – believed to be attempting to fall back on Tallahassee, from whence an operation to create and preserve a ‘fighting beachhead’ was to be conducted to allow the majority of the trapped troops to be ‘lifted’ off the beaches of the Eastern Gulf of Spain.

OPERATION DELIVERANCE.

Given that the people in Havana did not even know – or if they did know they were not telling the locals in Guantanamo – who was now in command of the Florida end of this ‘operation’, Mariscal, and his officers, none of whom were the

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