NOVGO.NET Chapter 686: The Ghost of Hughes
Chapter 686: The Ghost of Hughes
The Admiralty boardroom in Whitehall was filled with the stench of dread.
The walls seemed to sweat with the drizzle clinging to London that morning; the windows were grey with mist and shame alike.
Around the long table, Britain’s senior admirals sat like men who had just stepped out of a funeral, each avoiding the other’s eyes, each knowing whatever illusions they had held about the war at sea had already been stripped bare in the Channel.
The First Sea Lord cleared his throat.
The rasp of it sounded older than his years.
“Gentlemen… we have lost the Channel Fleet.”
No one spoke. The words hung like smoke, heavy and choking.
The reports lay on desks, casualty lists trickled in from Portsmouth and Plymouth, cables described shattered escorts and scattered survivors, but hearing it aloud was a knife across an old scar.
An older admiral, his face lined with salt and age, finally spoke. His voice cracked with something between anger and despair.
“They destroyed us… utterly. As if it were 1914 again. The same damned humiliation. Superior aim, superior doctrine, and their cursed aircraft.”
He ground his teeth. “We spent twenty years vowing never again. And yet here we sit.”
The comparison was no hyperbole.
In 1914 the Germans had surprised the world with precision gunnery and the daring use of torpedo aircraft that slipped beneath the Royal Navy’s guard.
Britain had told itself the ghost was buried with the last war. Ghosts, however, remember.
Another admiral struck the table; wood rattled under his palm.
“Superior aim? They hit our ships with missiles from beyond our range! We scraped a hit on a single destroyer, and that was luck, not skill.”
He buried his head in his hands, the hiss of his breath sharp with shame.
“For twenty years we built and rebuilt, trained and retrained, chasing the Reich’s specter. We thought we had surpassed them. Our new carriers, our modernized battleships, our doctrine of convoy and escort…”
His hand clenched. “All of it torn to pieces in a single day.”
A secretary’s pen scratched at frantic speed.
The room’s hush tightened until Admiral Tovey, the youngest man there but no novice, spoke with the measured cruelty of sense.
“We built our fleet for the last war. The Germans built theirs for the next.”
Heads turned. The First Sea Lord gestured. “Explain.”
“Our intelligence misled us,” Tovey said.
“We watched their Pacific operations: the Bismarck Sea, blockades around Formosa, patrols across the East Indies. We catalogued heavy cruisers, light cruisers, destroyer flotillas. We concluded: a cruiser navy, lean and long-ranged. We told ourselves that was the Reich’s future.”
He let the sentence hang like shrapnel. “But what if we were not watching the future? What if we were watching the past?”
The remark landed like shellfire. One admiral muttered, “You mean…”
“Yes,” Tovey said flatly.
“Those hulls we catalogued in the Pacific may have been relics they had not yet replaced. We mistook leftovers for the cutting edge. Meanwhile, their true fleet and doctrine were being forged at home, unseen and untested until now.”
An older man swore.
“So we prepared to fight a generation of vessels already obsolete by the time they dismantled the Japanese in ’33?”
The First Sea Lord tapped ash into a tray and stared at the table.
“Their aircraft alone… God. Turboprops faster than anything we have, with on-board radar and guided weapons; their gunnery runs had a precision we barely understand. Our Hurricanes and Spitfires may hold air over Kent, but at sea their strike aircraft slaughtered us. Our carriers could not defend themselves. Looking back, we had no chance.”
Irony tasted bitter.
Britain had mocked the Reich’s “supercarriers” as vanity; those leviathans, nuclear hulks ringed with missile destroyers and teardrop subs and a sky full of advanced turboprop strike fighters, had turned the Channel into a hunting ground.
Mockery had become fear.
A vice-admiral leaned forward, voice hoarse.
“Do you realize what this means? Every convoy, every landing, every attempt to reinforce France will sail under the shadow of annihilation. We cannot contest their sea lanes. We cannot guarantee our own. If this holds, the Atlantic itself may no longer be ours.”
The thought iced the room.
For centuries the Royal Navy had prided itself mistress of the waves.
Now that title smelled of rust.
Admiral Cunningham, who had been silent, spoke with hard resignation.
“In 1914 they humbled us with accuracy and innovation; the world learned Britannia could bleed. Now they have done worse: they have shown Britannia can drown. We cannot out-build them quickly enough if their industrial base is truly this advanced. We cannot out-train them if they have already rewritten naval warfare’s rules.”
The First Sea Lord rubbed his temple.
“Then what do we do? Abandon France? Let the Channel become a German lake?”
No one wanted to voice the truth: that France already looked doomed, and that Britain might soon face direct threat if the Reich chose to turn its new navy toward the Isles.
Again it was Tovey who cut the dark with reason.
His voice was low and brittle with resolve.
“We adapt. We learn. We survive. It will take years, but we must begin at once: new weapons, new doctrines, deeper intelligence. It’s time the Americans, the Dominions, and our other allies pull their weight. Otherwise …”
“…this war is already lost,” finished the First Sea Lord, and the table shuddered with the admission.
They nodded, some grim, some defiant, each carrying the same shadow in his eyes.
Outside, London’s drizzle tapped against the glass like a clock: not counting hours, but measuring survival.
—
Across the Atlantic, in Washington, the drizzle fell as sleet.
The White House cabinet room was no warmer in mood than Whitehall.
Newspapers lay spread across the table, their headlines screaming of catastrophe:
CHANNEL FLEET SUNK, GERMANS DOMINATE SEA AND AIR, FRANCE FALTERS.
President Franklin Roosevelt leaned on his cane, jaw clenched as he scanned the assembled secretaries and military chiefs.
The atmosphere was tense, brittle, men staring at one another with the same haunted disbelief as their counterparts in London.
General Marshall broke the silence.
“If these reports are accurate, Mister President… the Germans command the seas. They can cut us off before we even cross the Atlantic.”
Roosevelt’s eyes flicked to Admiral Stark.
The Chief of Naval Operations looked twenty years older than he had a week ago.
“It’s true,” Stark said quietly. “We are not facing the High Seas Fleet of 1914. We are facing something ripped straight from the future itself. Missiles, radar, nuclear power… a doctrine built decades ahead of ours. If Britain cannot hold the Channel, how are we to project power across an ocean?”
The words fell heavy.
And with them came another ghost: Charles Evans Hughes.
Twice elected President in this altered world, the man had kept America neutral during the Great War, arguing that intervention would only exhaust the nation for another European quarrel.
He had been derided as timid, shortsighted.
Roosevelt had built his career denouncing that legacy, promising America would never again “shrink from its duty.”
Now, with the Channel Fleet at the bottom of the sea, the legacy looked different.
Secretary of State Hull cleared his throat.
“I fear Hughes may have been right. By staying out, we spared ourselves the quagmire. By joining now… we may have doomed ourselves.”
Roosevelt’s cane tapped the floor once, sharp. His voice, when it came, was low, almost hoarse.
“You’re saying my policy, my insistence that we stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and France, has put us in the path of a storm we cannot weather?”
No one answered, but silence was answer enough.
Admiral King, never one to soften words, finally spoke.
“Mister President… the German Reich has rewritten the laws of war. Their naval power eclipses anything we can field. Their air arm is slaughtering the RAF. Their armored columns have broken France in days where once it took years. If we continue down this road, America may suffer the same fate as Britain, humiliation first, invasion second.”
The cabinet fell into uneasy muttering.
Some spoke of accelerating aircraft production, others of rushing new carriers into commission, still others of retreating to a strictly defensive posture in the Western Hemisphere.
Roosevelt slammed his palm flat on the table.
“Gentlemen, this nation does not retreat.”
His eyes blazed, yet behind them was something else, a flicker of doubt, the awareness that history might not forgive him if America’s entry ended in disaster.
The room quieted.
Nobody dared mention the mass mobilization of Germany’s allies who had not yet even begun to enter the fray.
Millions of Russians, Italians, Spaniards, Hungarians, and Greeks now moved to encircle France along with their German comrades.
Meanwhile Britain could not even send material aid through the English Channel, let alone men with it.
For the first time in his presidency, Roosevelt looked less like the master of destiny and more like a man haunted by the possibility that his greatest opponent, the ghost of Hughes, had been right all along.