Brood of the Eagle

By J.E. Macdonnell

The three Seafires were diving and zooming, banking and diving again at the gun-positions. But the big Barracudas, coming in on a set line, made easy targets. A stream of tracer bit into the body of the left-hand bomber of the third flight and Haining felt his guts tighten as its nose dipped.
He did not see the third lot of torpedoes strike and as he came around again he could see the dam clearly enough, and he saw it was still intact. It was then the first doubts slid into his brain and charged him with failure. He had assumed twelve torpedoes would smash that concrete into a water-pouring cleavage. He had assumed ... now it looked as if he could be hellishly wrong ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Mar 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215997567

J.E. Macdonnell

JAMES EDMOND MACDONNELL was born in 1917 in Mackay, Queensland and became one of Australia’s most prolific writers. As a boy, he became determined to go to sea and read every seafaring book he could find. At age 13, while his family was still asleep, he took his brother’s bike and rode eighty miles from his home town to Brisbane in an attempt to see ships and the sea. Fortunately, he was found and returned to his family. He attended the Toowoomba Grammar School from 1931 to 1932. He served in the Royal Australian Navy for fourteen years, joining at age 17, advancing through all lower deck ranks and reaching the rank of commissioned gunnery officer. He began writing books while still in active service.Macdonnell wrote stories for The Bulletin under the pseudonym “Macnell” and from 1948 to 1956 he was a member of The Bulletin staff. His first book, Fleet Destroyer – a collection of stories about life on the small ships – was published by The Book Depot, Melbourne, in 1945. Macdonnell began writing full-time for Horwitz in 1956, writing an average of a dozen books a year.After leaving the navy, Macdonnell lived in St. Ives, Sydney and pursued his writing career. In 1988, he retired to Buderim on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. He died peacefully in his sleep at a Buderim hospital in 2002. He is survived by his children Beth, Jane and Peter.Macdonnell’s naval stories feature several recurring characters – Captain “Dutchy” Holland, D.S.O., Captain Peter Bentley, V.C., Captain Bruce Sainsbury, V.C., Jim Brady, and Lieutenant Commander Robert Randall.

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The three Seafires were diving and zooming, banking and diving again at the gun-positions. But the big Barracudas, coming in on a set line, made easy targets. A stream of tracer bit into the body of the left-hand bomber of the third flight and Haining felt his guts tighten as its nose dipped.

He did not see the third lot of torpedoes strike and as he came around again he could see the dam clearly enough, and he saw it was still intact. It was then the first doubts slid into his brain and charged him with failure. He had assumed twelve torpedoes would smash that concrete into a water-pouring cleavage. He had assumed ... now it looked as if he could be hellishly wrong ...

J E MACDONNELL 20: BROOD OF THE EAGLE

By J E Macdonnell

First published by Horwitz Publications in 1960

©1960, 2024 by J E Macdonnell

First Electroninc Edition: March 2024

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate

Series Editor: Janet Whitehead

Text © Piccadilly Publishing

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Chapter One

THE TWO OFFICERS stood side by side on a busy fitting-out wharf at the huge shipbuilding yards of Vickers-Armstrong watching the last stages of the ship’s securing. The men were dissimilar in build—Admiral Gormley short, barrelled, and of hard enough frame; Captain Styles of a tall spartan length as though his juices had been desiccated by the winds and suns of heaven under which he had sailed for thirty years.

In most else they were the same, stamped by identical moulds of training and experience and discipline. They stood in the same manner, with their hands clasped behind their backs and their feet straddled, as if in subconscious appreciation that the solid deck of the wharf might without warning begin to roll and heave.

They were clothed in the same dark-blue serge uniforms and white caps, gold gleaming on sleeves, with the difference that where the captain wore four rings, the admiral’s marks of rank rode up almost to his elbow. He carried three thick rings, capped by another golden band almost an inch wide.

He was a full admiral, and while Styles’s eyes were directed appreciatively at the ship, his left ear was ready and appreciative of what his companion might say.

For the moment Gormley was silent. He, too, stared at the ship, and his face, burned like the captain’s to a tough brown leatheriness which years of this cold grey climate would never soften, was worried and thoughtful. There was nothing in his expression of the quiet and restrained pride to be expected of a senior officer gazing upon a new ship.

She is, he said at last, in a deep and vibrant voice, a complete waste of time and money.

Captain Styles was not at all shocked by this strange and confidential opinion; apparently it had been expressed before. Nor did it make him sycophantically and silently in agreement.

She hasn’t been proved yet, sir, I admit—but with the way Hitler’s coming along in Europe it shouldn’t be long before she is.

One way or the other, Gormley agreed grimly. But you’re biased, Styles. He looked up with a twitch of a grin. She’s your new baby, naturally she will revolutionise naval warfare.

I believe she will, sir, Styles answered with a quiet surety in his voice that made the admiral squint at him curiously, and a little pityingly.

Look, old chap, Gormley said with a kind of wearied definiteness, when she’s commissioned you can fly off thirty or forty bombers, each aircraft with a five-hundred-pound bomb, perhaps a little more. With my fleet of four battleships I can fly off thirty-two one-ton shells every minute—and assure their landing on the target with a damned sight more accuracy. Heavens above man, you can’t deny that! You were gunnery yourself—before you were saddled with this vulnerable monstrosity!

The captain’s answer was subdued not because he was dealing with a much superior officer, nor even because he had heard these arguments a dozen times before: his patient quietness of tone was engendered by the fact of his complete and secretly enthusiastic faith in his new command.

"I can’t deny it, sir. Nor can you deny that the range of your one-ton bricks is not much more than fifteen miles. When she’s completed, Eagle’s brood will deliver their eggs from two hundred and fifty miles away, more if necessary. And over minefields and shallows and into guarded harbours."

"Eagle’s brood ... Eggs ...! Gormley snorted. Good Lord, Styles, you never used to talk rubbish like that! I suppose it’s the new vernacular of your flying harebrains?"

Not altogether, sir, Styles smiled. They do have their own peculiar expressions, but they’re somewhat more expressive—and unprintable—than mine.

Humph! Gormley grunted.

He stared again at the carrier’s grey bulk, now securely clasped by her strong links of wire to the wharf. His stare was sceptical, and his mind was worried. He had known and liked Styles for many years. Once, before a brilliantly-fought destroyer action in the Great War had catapulted him ahead in promotion, he had been friend and messmate to this long, lean captain beside him now. He recognised his fine seamanship and experienced fighting ability, and he had no doubt that now the Royal Navy was again at war, Styles would reach admiral’s rank.

But the fellow had insisted on being given this command of a new ship in a naval branch untried in war. If the carrier proved an expensive experimental failure—as he had no doubt she would—or if she were sunk, then Styles would have wasted all that time. Time when other captains of destroyer flotillas and cruisers and battleships were winning their laurels and gold rings in conventional naval warfare.

Admiral Gormley was by no means a conservative old shellback—he had initiated several important advances in big-ship gunnery, and his method of attacking a submarine contact with a group of destroyers was to prove very effective later on in the Atlantic.

But this thing! An acreage of vulnerable flight-deck—one shell there would make an ungodly mess. And planes which hoped to penetrate a battleship’s sixteen inches of armour-plate with five-hundred- or one thousand-pound bombs! Even his own monsters, flung out at a velocity of two thousand miles per hour, would find that penetration difficult.

He stared at her and he thought that the metal and money and time wasted in her building would have produced a couple of heavy cruisers or half a battleship. He said:

All right, Tony, I’m off before I damage my blood pressure. Without being pessimistic, I fervently hope for both our sakes that you and your ship never sail in my fleet. I don’t like to see any sort of ship savaged to death.

I doubt if you’ll have to worry about that sir, Styles smiled. Our sailing together, I mean. All we’ll need is a destroyer escort. We can take care of enemy cruisers ourselves.

And battleships?

Well ... that might be a different proposition. Though a few torpedo-bombers might have something to say even about a battleship.

I suppose enthusiasm is to be commended—even in an Officer who should know a damned sight better, Gormley said sourly. Then he looked up into the captain’s face and suddenly he smiled. Styles had seen that transformation over many years, yet the effect never failed to surprise him. Gormley’s smile broke up his granite face into an expression warm and almost puckish.

I’m off, he said again, nice launching, wasn’t it? I’ll see you later. Martha is dead keen on making this party tonight a roaring success. I’ll expect you about sevenish. Oh, by the way, he turned back, Anne wants to meet some of these fly-boys of yours. The idiocy of youth ... Bring along a few—but no more than three, mind. Fly-boys! We had an old saying, Tony—only fools go to sea. I add to that—only birds fly. When you’ve got men who do both ... He broke off, shrugging. Tonight, then.

Tell Martha I’m looking forward to it. And Anne will get her wish.

Gormley nodded, and his face returned to its natural mask of sternness. Styles saluted formally and watched the squat figure driven off in the staff-car before turning back to his ship.

Slowly he walked right down her length, from bow to stern. It took him some time, for Eagle was a bit more than seven hundred and sixty feet long. Not much more than two hours before she had been resting, dry, on the slips. Then Gormley’s wife had swung the champagne bottle.

The traditional gesture had done something more than merely create a spectacular and dress-soaking splash—it had operated the mechanism which had allowed the 25,000 tons of steel to slide down the heavily greased slipway. Dragging tons of old anchor-cable behind her to lessen the impact, Eagle had met the first cold kiss of the salt water she was to know for so long.

Now, brought round by careful tugs, she was at the fitting-out wharf, where her great engines and sixteen 4.5-inch guns, her bridges and boats and miles of wiring, the aircraft lifts and mobile cranes and nests of Bofors and pom-poms would be fitted. All this, even under the war-speeded tempo of the dockyard’s work, would take many months. But Captain Styles could wait—he was profitably filling-in that time.

On a nearby R.A.F. airfield he had arranged for part of it to be set aside for practice landings and take-offs for those of his pilots he had managed to get sent up here. An odd system of wires had been stretched across the runway, and the regular R.A.F. pilots watched with amused interest, and something of Gormley’s scepticism, as the Fleet Air Arm boys came hurtling in to jerk to a bone-jarring stop in a hundred feet.

That’s all right here, on solid ground, ran the general consensus of opinion—but how about at sea, in a high wind, with the air-strip lifting as much as thirty feet just when you were about to touch-down?

But Styles and his young men pressed on regardless; he keenly enthusiastic, they impressed and affected by his attitude. There had been carriers in the Royal Navy before, of course—Eagle’s namesake had been one of the earliest, converted from a cruiser—but this present command of Styles’s was in a totally different category.

She was the biggest and fastest carrier ever built for the Royal Navy, the latest addition to a small branch of the Service which had not yet been blooded in a major war. Her effectiveness was wholly theoretical—as Admiral Gormley had been at persistent pains to point out. Captain Styles was devoted to the task of proving her effectiveness in actual combat; and his feelings in the matter were influenced not a little by the enthusiasm of his band of young pilots.

He stopped abreast of the red-painted and upright slabs of steel which would be moulded into her bridge, or island. He looked forrard and aft along her length. She was not, he had to admit, of the graceful lines of a cruiser or battleship. Her bow, instead of being a knife-edge of parting steel, was covered over with its round-down, a great overhanging lip of metal. But that round-down was shaped deliberately in something the same curve as an aircraft’s wing—at a speed of thirty knots a wind would come sweeping back and up over that steely lip, lifting the aircraft skyward.

Her broad stern was similarly covered, and her whole flight-deck was sweetly free of obstructions, making an adequate, if tight, landing area.

And she was his. To take into action and prove the worth of her long-hitting arm and refute the admiral’s disbelief; or to see her expensive tonnage ignominiously sunk by the enemy ships she was designed to handle.

He walked slowly on towards the stern, and he was thinking that perhaps old Gormley had some justification for his opinion—certainly a couple of well-directed heavy shells could make a hell of a mess of the flight-deck, and that eventuality, with most of his air-strength upstairs, was too grim to contemplate. Besides, as regards the rest of her hull, she had no armament at all capable of holding off a battleship, or even a cruiser. Her guns were designed for anti-aircraft fire, and though effective enough against enemy planes, they would be pop-gun calibre when laid on the armoured steel of a big surface ship.

But there, he reassured himself for the hundredth time, you had the main purpose of a carrier—to strike back with bomb and torpedo at the enemy before he could get in range of you with his guns, no matter how heavy. Fifteen-inch cannon were useless against a fast-diving aircraft. By confining a battleship to the use of his anti-aircraft armament you were reducing his gunnery effectiveness to equality with your own.

And, of course, there was the mobility. At this early stage of the phony war there had been