"Daniel da Cruz - Texas Trilogy 01 - The Ayes of Texas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Da Cruz Daniel)

In 1912, the year she was launched, the United States Ship Texas was indeed the pride of the
U.S. Fleet, for it was then the most modern and powerful battleship in the world. Its 27,000-ton
displacement was exceeded only by that of the Argentinian battle-ships Moreno and Rivadavia.
The U.S.S. Texas could sail ten thousand miles without refueling-from San Francisco to China
and back-make a flank speed of twenty-one knots-over twenty-four land miles an hour-and had a
main battery of ten fourteen-inch guns in twin turrets, which could fire shells weighing
three-quarters of a ton almost twelve miles. In addi-tion, it had twenty-one five-inch guns as
secondary battery and a thicket of smaller guns for close-in de-fense. The ship was sheathed in
steel armor up to fourteen inches thick.
The "Big T" served with the Allied Grand Fleet in World War I, and lived through some historic
moments. She landed U.S. Marines at Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1914, in one of the last unrepentently
imperialist ac-tions of the United States in Central America. From a platform on her number two
turret, on 9 March 1919, Lieutenant Commander F. O. McDonnell, piloting a Sopwith Camel,
made the first flight from a battleship of the U.S. Navy. A full generation later, the U.S.S. Texas
served successively as flagship of the U.S. Fleet, flagship of the Atlantic Training Squadron, and
with the Neutrality Patrol in North Atlantic waters before the United States formally declared war
on Germany in December 1941.
By then, the Texas was a venerable twenty-nine years old, overdue for scrapping and
replacement by a bigger, sleeker, faster, more heavily armed ship. She got a reprieve when
Japan's stunning victory at Pearl Harbor made clear that veteran ships as well as veteran seamen
to man them would be needed to do their duty-again-if the nation was to survive.
Her first service was in the North Atlantic on patrol and convoy duty. Then its big guns covered the
Allied landings in North Africa. Off Mehdia, Algeria, on 7 November 1942, the Texas fired its
fourteen-inch batteries for the first time in World War II, against Vichy French ammunition dumps
and armored columns at Port Lyautey. When the beachhead was secured, she returned to
Norfolk for overhaul. It was there that Gwillam Forte, with his government-issue bugle, re-ported
aboard.

Shipboard routine aboard the Texas in Atlantic waters failed to fulfill Forte's conception of naval
war-fare. Instead of running gunfights against the Germans, there was running of messages from
the captain to his junior officers. Instead of the acrid stench of gun-powder, there was the greasy
stench of stack fumes. Forte's contribution to World War II, it seemed, would be to stand watch
four hours on and eight hours off, and sound Reveille, Mess Gear, Pay Call, Man Over-board,
Church Call, Tattoo, Taps, and the several dozen other calls that constitute the entire bugle
reper-toire. That was all right with him. It wasn't his war.
D-Day, 6 June 1944, found the battleship off Omaha Beach in Normandy, firing three-quarter-ton
shells into German shore batteries four miles away, and against troop concentrations and enemy
columns mov-ing up to support the defenders. During the nineteen days that followed, the Texas
fired 891 rounds of fourteen-inch ammunition. It gave much better than it got: off Cherbourg a
German 280-mm shell wrecked the bridge, killing the helmsman and wounding thirteen others,
the only casualties of the campaign aboard the Texas. During the thirty-two years since the
battleship had been commissioned, the helmsman was the only man to have been killed in action
aboard.
The following spring, while the U.S. Marines in-vaded and captured the Japanese island of Iwo
Jima in the bloodiest and fiercest battle in Marine Corps his-tory, the Texas stood offshore with
the Amphibious Support Force and bombarded the well-dug-in garri-son of 22,000 Imperial
Marines with nearly one thou-sand shells from her big guns. After reprovisioning in Ulithi, in March
1945, the Texas steamed north again, to Okinawa, to take part in the largest amphibious as-sault
of the Pacific war. There the Texas and other ships of the Fifth Fleet mangled pillboxes and
entrench-ments the Japanese had been constructing for thirty years, paving the way for