Timeline 102762 Countdown to War 01 The Autumn of Empire: October 1961 by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Saturday 28th October 1961

River Hamble

Hampshire, England

It was getting late in the year to go sailing but then the tall, distinguished man at the wheel of the old yacht had never been a great one for taking the road well-travelled. Not usually, was a great one for introspection or entertaining existential regrets.

However, that day sixty-year-old Vice Admiral Julian Wemyss Christopher found himself reflecting that had he not allowed himself to be carried along by the tide of events, so many, many things might have been different; for example, he might not be estranged from both his children and he certainly would not have spent the last years of his recently unnaturally extended naval career running so hard to catch up with younger and in many respects abler officers, who had caught him up, ranged alongside him and left him behind in their wakes in the last decade.

He would have had a lot of regrets, had he believed in such things, certainly more than he customarily admitted to himself. He took the view that life was what one made of it; that you made your own luck and you lived with the consequences of your own mistakes. He had had more than enough second chances, fresh starts and now…his time had run out. He could have no complaints; the Navy had allowed him to defer his retirement first one and then another two-and-a-half years, on the flimsy – positively wafer-thin - grounds that his loss of seniority before the thirty-nine war was on account of his ’extra-curricular service in the cause of the Empire in the best traditions of the Service’ which, as everybody knew, was stuff and nonsense. He had spent the later ‘roaring twenties’ and most of the thirties chasing America’s Cup glory – and as assiduously, shamelessly, women – and allowed his naval career to fester and rot. Fortunately for him, the Admiralty took the charitable view that his well-publicised at the time and since, ‘good war’ had made up for that. It had helped that by the later 1940s, the venerable and very senior flag officer whose wife he had scandalously bedded before the war was dead, and the tragedy of her subsequent suicide forgotten in the long, murderous years of his supposedly ‘good war’.

In hindsight, he was not sure having a cruiser shot to pieces, and a destroyer sunk under one’s feet equated to having had a ‘good war’ but then on the plus side of the equation, his hunting group had ended up with a tally of eight German U-boats depth-charged into oblivion in 1943 and 1944, and had not ill-health – exhaustion and a brush with tuberculosis – side-lined him in the spring of 1945, he might have flown out to Ceylon to take command of the old county class heavy cruiser Denbighshire in time to con her into harm’s way, rather than into Tokyo Bay…well over a month after the Japanese had surrendered on the quarterdeck of the USS Missouri.

It was all ancient history.

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