< World War II - Darkest Hour (3) >
June 23, 1940
Northern British Isles, Scapa Flow Naval Base Upon the calm and tranquil sea as the sun set.
The majestic sight of the Royal Navy warships filling Scapa Flow, casting their shadows over the harbor, was a heartening one, yet the words that ca from the admiral watching it lacked any enthusiasm.
"How dull."
Muttered the admiral, Jas Sorville, commander of Force H, as he let out a long yawn and turned his gaze to the sea.
"It is dull indeed."
Next to him, Arthur Power, Captain of the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, expressed his agreent.
"If I'd known it would be like this, I wouldn't have rushed the preparations."
"Still, isn't being ho better than being with the Far East Fleet?"
"That it is."
Admiral Sorville readily agreed.
The Malaysian region guarded by Britain's Far East Fleet was hellishly hot. He wondered how those chaps were doing now.
The Force H led by Sorville was a fleet prepared by the British Cabinet to apply pressure, wary of France's suspicious cooperation with Spain and Italy.
It was scheduled to be stationed at Gibraltar to exert pressure should France ignore Britain's demand to back away from Italy, but as France ultimately yielded to Britain's ultimatum, Force H's mission was canceled.
So his mobile fleet, including the British Empire's newest carriers Ark Royal and Illustrious, the battlecruiser Hood, and the battleship Valiant, was moored in the harbor, on indefinite standby.
"Tsk, at this rate, my promotion is shot."
"Haha, they say a soldier is at his best when he's a wage thief, don't they, Admiral?"
Despite Captain Power's words, Admiral Sorville couldn't hide his dissatisfied gaze as he looked out at the needlessly calm sea.
"Even so, I don't like seeing Scapa Flow this idle."
During the last Great War, or when tensions were high because of Hitler, the Royal Navy would lay out plenty of anti-torpedo nets and have destroyer flotillas conduct regular patrols, maintaining an ironclad defense in preparation for a possible surprise attack.
But under the Halifax administration, the budget was drastically cut, and as the threat of war virtually disappeared, the Navy also reduced activities that 'just cost money and had little imdiate aning'.
The sailors' pay was cut, leading to much dissatisfaction, but without a proper enemy nation, they couldn't run frantic patrols and harbor defense works as if it were warti.
That, too, all costs money.
"I'm anxious."
Admiral Sorville muttered softly while looking at the still sea, then turned to Captain Power and spoke again.
"To think I'm more anxious that my position might disappear in an era of peace, how ironic."
"Well, isn't that just what a soldier is? Still, I think it's better for us to be walking on eggshells than to live in an era where we have to earn our keep."
Hearing Captain Power's reply, Sorville gave a bitter smile and said.
"Yes, perhaps you're right. Well, duty is almost over, let's go for a drink."
"Excellent!"
Unaware that this was the eve of war, the two n sought out alcohol to relieve their boredom.
-
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 newest Redoutable-class submarines were approaching.
The French Navy knew very well that a head-on confrontation with the Royal Navy was suicide, and they had ticulously prepared, squeezing out every possible thod to strike the British main fleet at Scapa Flow and buy ti.
And luckily for them, Scapa Flow, known as an impregnable fortress during the last war, was now almost defenseless due to Britain's circumstances.
U-boat captain Günther Prien, who in the original history had to perilously navigate not through the main entrance but from the side, through the wreckage of ships sunk by the British to block submarines, just to land a blow on the ironclad-defended Scapa Flow, would be banging his head against the ground if he knew.
The crews of the French submarines, tense and holding their breath, awaited the orders of their captain, who was staring only at his watch.
A mixed feeling of excitent at landing a blow on the world's strongest navy, and fear of having to face that mighty enemy from now on, seized them.
The submarine captain had little faith in the Japanese-made torpedoes, the so-called Type 95 sothing-or-other that Pri Minister La Rocque had praised as a 'secret weapon', but there was no turning back now.
He could only hope that those torpedoes were worth as much as the pride of the Grand Army, the SOMUA tanks that had repelled the German armored units.
The captain, who had heard his superiors' pathological order to strictly adhere to the ti to the point of neurosis, stared only at his watch, and as the operation ti approached, he gave the order with a hand gesture.
At last, the submarines that had been holding their breath surfaced, and periscopes began to rise in the dark sea.
Upon the sea, where the dim night sky was just beginning to brighten.
The sight of the magnificent and enormous Royal Navy main fleet ships covering Scapa Flow made the captain swallow dryly, but he calmly ordered his n to aim the torpedoes.
Finally, the ti was at hand.
"Vive la France."
As the captain muttered softly, the sonar operator suddenly reported.
"Uh, torpedo, has been fired!"
It seed so idiot, unable to bear the tension, had fired first. The captain cursed and shouted.
"Damn it, which idiot was that! We fire too!"
"Tubes 1 through 3, fire!"
It ended up becoming a sequential firing, but dozens of oxygen torpedoes began to cleave through the sea, heading for the Royal Navy's main fleet ships moored at Scapa Flow.
-
June 24, 1940
Southern British Isles, Radar Base near Plymouth Harbor Just as dawn was breaking.
The radar operator, who had been dozing off on dawn watch at the radar base, nearly fell over before barely coming to his senses.
"Whoa."
"Hey, if the duty officer catches you like that, you're toast."
"Sorry, sorry.
But isn't staring at a radar screen just inhumanly boring?"
The radar operator grinned at his colleague's nagging, then turned his gaze to the radar and his face turned puzzled.
"Huh, what's that?"
"Eh?"
The radar was clearly showing sothing approaching the British mainland at high speed from the direction of Brest.
And a huge number of them, at that.
"W-Where's the duty officer?"
"Went to the latrine.
You know he's constipated, right?"
Even as the two were talking, the 'sothings' reported by the radar were rapidly increasing, and the radar operator's face turned pale.
"What is this? What is it? A drill? But what's with these numbers! The radar must be broken, right?"
"Son of a bitch!"
He didn't know what was what, but it was clear that sothing big was happening.
-
June 24, 1940
Northern British Isles, Scapa Flow Naval Base
"Kuhuk, cough!"
Admiral Charles Forbes, Commander of the Ho Fleet responsible for defending the British Isles, was knocked over by a sudden impact on his flagship, the battleship Rodney, and was trying to get up, fighting through agonizing pain.
Outside, explosions and vibrations continued to echo, signaling that this was no ordinary situation.
"A-Admiral!"
Supported by a subordinate who had run up frantically, Forbes barely managed to get up and asked urgently.
"W-What's happening!"
"I-It's a raid!"
"I have eyes and ears!"
Forbes pushed his subordinate away and scrambled outside, and the first thing he saw was the sight of the battleships Royal Sovereign and Royal Oak, split in two and sinking into the sea.
The obsolete Revenge-class battleships, lacking adequate anti-torpedo defenses, couldn't withstand the imnse destructive power of the Japanese oxygen torpedoes.
The admiral, with a shocked face, turned his trembling gaze to survey the surroundings, and was horrified to see that even his own ship's sister, the Nelson, was listing so heavily that it was about to bottom out.
A significant number of the main fleet ships moored at Scapa Flow appeared to have sustained serious damage, and with the sudden raid occurring when most crewn were just waking up, Royal Navy personnel were running out in a panic.
Before the admiral's eyes, a destroyer that had identified the submarine attack and just begun patrolling the sea for anti-submarine warfare staggered with an explosion.
"M-Mines!"
"Watch out!"
The Royal Navy fleet, despite being in disarray from the surprise attack, showed excellent fighting spirit and tried to hunt the submarines, but with mines also laid, they were forced to halt.
Scapa Flow, where the Royal Navy's strongest forces were gathered, had suffered imnse damage from the submarine fleet's surprise attack, and as if that wasn't enough, the French Navy had even mobilized older submarines as minelayers to tie down the British Navy.
-
June 24, 1940
Southern British Isles, Portsmouth Naval Base The urgent report sent from the radar base at dawn arrived, but most of the British military high command, woken from their sleep to receive it, reacted with disbelief.
Had Halifax given so prior sign, it might have been different, but without any warning, no commander could initiate a warti response based on a re report of suspicious movent from an allied nation.
After all, the impression of a radar operator seeing a massive number of objects rapidly approaching on screen is bound to be different from that of generals receiving it as a docunt.
The British military high command only grasped the situation properly after receiving the ergency telegram that Scapa Flow was under attack.
But by that mont, French aircraft had already reached southern England.
"T-Take cover!"
"Aaaargh!"
The British soldiers scrambling to man the anti-aircraft guns were cut down, riddled with bullets from the gun attacks of the French Breguet 693 ground-attack aircraft.
The proud mbers of the RAF were either destroyed along with their fighters while hastily trying to take off, or had to watch, dumbfounded, as their hangars and aircraft were destroyed by bombing before they could even get to their planes.
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 scread the order, but there was little a carrier could do against the incoming enemy aircraft after having lost all its escort fighters in an overwhelmingly inferior situation.
The carriers HMS Courageous and Hers tried to turn their hulls and moved frantically against the swarm of enemy aircraft, but in the end, they were overwheld by sheer numbers, battered, and sunk.
The escorts that should have protected the main fleet were attacked while moored in the harbor, unable to form up in ti and forced to fight individually, and even the Channel Fleet's battleships Resolution and Revenge, being obsolete, were taking massive damage from torpedo bombers.
The French Air Force did not spare the Queen Elizabeth, which was undergoing a major refit at Portsmouth.
The battleship that had supported the Royal Navy for many long years was hit by a volley of torpedoes from French Latécoère 298 torpedo bombers, and the Royal Navy could do nothing as she flooded completely and sank.
But what shocked the British people more than anything was that Admiral Nelson's legendary flagship from the victory at Trafalgar, the ship-of-the-line HMS Victory, had been shattered to pieces by the bombing.
The French Air Force, having thoroughly violated the defenseless bases and navy in southern England, only withdrew when belated reinforcents arrived from airbases in central England and they began to run low on fuel.
However, the massively damaged Channel Fleet, before it could even begin to manage the damage, faced the desperate situation of the French Navy approaching.
-
June 24, 1940
London, the capital of Britain Since early morning, Halifax had been trembling, holding a telegram in his hand with a look of disbelief.
The peace of Britain that he had tried to protect with his comrade Chamberlain was slipping through his fingers, turning to dust.
"Denouncing Britain's act of betrayal against its long-ti ally France, annulnt of the alliance, and a declaration of war…?"
Halifax's voice was lifeless as he read the telegram that had arrived from the embassy, his face one of denial.
"Pri Minister."
"T-This can't be.
H-How could an alliance that lasted for so long… Didn't they withdraw from Italy…?"
"Pri Minister!"
Only when First Sea Lord Dudley Pound shook him by the shoulders did Halifax turn his unfocused gaze towards him, and Admiral Pound bit his lip.
"Pri Minister, we are under attack!"
"A-Attack? Us? S-Stop them.
S-Stop them. The Royal Navy…"
"That very Royal Navy has been surprise-attacked! Scapa Flow, Portsmouth, Plymouth, they are all burning!"
"N-No way.
This can't be, this can't be…"
Admiral Pound clicked his tongue at the half-catatonic Halifax and roared.
"This is, damn it! If you don't snap out of it right now, the British Empire is going to fall!"
The day that would later be called 'The Day of Betrayal' in Britain had only just begun.
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