Treacherous Moon: The Twelfth Carlisle & Holbrooke Naval Adventure by Chris Durbin

Author:Chris Durbin [Durbin, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

High Command

Monday, Sixth of April 1761.

Argonaut, Eight Leagues West of Belle Isle.

The outlying frigates came into sight at noon, and then, one-by-one, the sails of the invasion force appeared, breaking the purity of the horizon until it was entirely obscured over a wide arc to the west. Holbrooke lost count, but it looked like over a hundred and twenty ships in all, between ships-of-the-line, frigates, sloops, bomb ketches, fire ships, transports and storeships. They were all moving slowly but purposefully before the light westerly airs, with barely a hint of the usual Atlantic swell. It was the sort of perfect spring weather that all sailors knew wouldn’t last; it would be blown away with the next gale to come ripping in from the wild oceanic wastes.

Albach let out a low whistle. It was beyond anything he’d seen before, and it conveyed a sense of the British determination to bring the war onto French soil more than any mere words could do. He watched in wonder as the troop transports appeared behind the battle squadron.

‘How many soldiers would each of those transports carry?’

‘Oh, anything up to a company. They’re of no standard design as you can see, in fact they’re almost all chartered from the regular shipping companies – West Indiamen, east coast colliers and the like – and they’ll go back when their work is over. The army likes to keep its men in tactical units even at sea, I’m sure you can imagine why. And a company can muster almost any number of men that the colonel sees fit – or that he can recruit – so it’s quite a puzzle to use the available tonnage to its best advantage.’

Albach nodded. He’d never been involved in an amphibious operation, but he’d witnessed the deadly complexity of the withdrawal from the beach at Saint-Cast from a defender’s perspective, over the sights of his battery of French guns. He could easily imagine how difficult it would be to organise the units immediately before the landing, and how many boats would have to be used just to bring the platoons, companies and battalions and all their equipment together before the assault. Of course, it would be completely hopeless to leave it until after the men had been put ashore. Just conceivably it could be done if the enemy granted the attacking force a week of grace before launching a counterattack, but no sane commander of a defence force would do that. If a seaborne assault was to be defeated, it had to be done at the high-water mark, otherwise it became a regular engagement between two field armies, a wholly different problem, and the defender’s natural advantage would be lost.

‘Of course it’s a similar consideration for the supply ships. You’ll be aware of the vast amount of ammunition that a field gun battery needs, and it must be delivered ashore at the right time and to the right units. The same goes for all the supplies. You soldiers may not like to hear it, but an attack on an enemy’s coast is largely won or lost in the port of embarkation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.