by James Philip
Detweiller had been operating under direct orders from the office of the Chief of Naval Operations. While he had limited freedom of manuever within the scope of those orders his ‘over-riding consideration at all times’ was specifically ‘the safeguarding of the Maltese Archipelago with a view to ensuring that it was a secure base for future Allied operations.’ Electing to exercise all one’s ships several hours steaming time from the base that he was supposed to be and had been ordered to safeguard simply did not cut the mustard. One of the reasons the CNO had left four large modern US warships ‘swinging around their anchors’ at Malta was because the advanced radar and communications suites they carried was supposed to be filling in the gaps and backing up the unreliable and much degraded British radar defences. Those ‘radar defences’ had been targeted by Italian Regia Aeronautica US-supplied A-4 Skyhawks and by four 100th Bomb Group B-52s in early December last year and then virtually destroyed by the EMPs – electromagnetic pulses – emitted by the two Red Dawn ICBM near miss air bursts which bracketed the archipelago in February. It was recognised by all parties that without Detweiller’s ships Malta did not have a functioning air defence system, and absolutely no over the horizon radar early warning capability.
A week ago Detweiller had complained about his ships having to ‘swing around their anchors’; the Chief of Naval Operations had tersely suggested he urgently remedy the situation by sending them to sea to operate as ‘radar pickets’ as per his ‘general operational brief’. It beggared belief that Detweiller had interpreted this ‘suggestion’ as a licence to remove himself from Malta.
If Bernard Clarey had his way Detweiller ought not to be just drummed out of the service but court-martialled for neglect of duty and negligence. Moreover, had he known in advance what the ‘imbecile’ had planned he would have driven his fleet directly into Maltese waters; probably arriving off Malta at least thirty-six hours ago. The Independence’s air group would have made short work of the enemy fleet long before it got within gun range of Malta. Hell, it would have been a goddammed turkey shoot!
Instead, hundreds, maybe thousands of people on Malta were dead and the British had been left to fight what might well turn out to be the most crucial battle of the war in the Mediterranean alone! What ought to have been a stunning demonstration of American armed military might had become a gut-wrenching humiliation.
The door of the admiral’s sea cabin, a relatively spacious and luxurious space some four yards by three buried in the great steel tower of the USS Independence’s bridge superstructure, clicked shut and the two admirals paused to assess their relative positions.
“For what it’s worth,” the big man grunted, “I personally discussed and cleared my squadron’s movements with the British C-in-C.”
Bernard Clarey would have reacted angrily if Detweiller had been offering any kind of apology or explanation. He said nothing and waited for the other man to continue.
“Talavera,” he sighed. His pique at being summoned to the flagship had evaporated; it was as if setting foot on the Independence’s flight deck had brought the inevitability of his situation home to roost. “Talavera was one of the British destroyers that saved my hide,” he shrugged, “heck, all of our hides on the Enterprise when that nuke went off next to the Long Beach.”
The new commander of the US Sixth Fleet had thus far only learned the sketchiest of details of the desperate battle off the eastern shores of Malta between two hopelessly outgunned and outmatched British ships, the old World War II vintage destroyer Talavera and the newer anti-submarine frigate Yarmouth, with a Turkish dreadnought, and one, perhaps two fifteen thousand ton Sverdlov class Soviet cruisers and an unknown number – possible as many as seven or eight in total - escorting frigates and destroyers. Notwithstanding, from what he had already learned he was frankly, in awe. He honestly had not believed that in this day and age two captains could possible throw their ships against such overwhelming odds in such a way.
It was, well, Nelsonian...
“Heck, Chick,” the big man sighed, employing Clarey’s nickname throughout the higher echelons of the US Navy, shaking his head. “What I wouldn’t have given to be beside those guys when they dove at that goddammed Turkish battleship and that Sverdlov cruiser!”
Bernard Clarey nodded grimly.
There was no room for sentimentality in high command.
“I relieve you of your command, Admiral,” he intoned, taking no pleasure or satisfaction in his work. “Your kit and personal possessions will be recovered from your flagship, the USS Mahan, circumstances permitting. In the mean time you will remain onboard the Independence as a guest of the wardroom. You will be accorded all respect and privileges consistent with your rank but I must request you to understand that in any other circumstances you would be under arrest at this time.”
Rear Admiral Laverne Lucas Detweiller made an approximation of standing to his full height – if he had tried too hard his head would have hit the steel beam above it – and came to attention.
He looked the younger man in the eye.
“I made a mistake,” he said grimly. “A mistake, that’s all.”
“I know that, Det. But the way things are these days people like us can’t afford to make mistakes.”
Chapter 12
07:32 Hours (EST)
Friday 3rd April 1964
British Embassy, Bellfield Avenue, Philadelphia
Having spent the previous evening at a reception in the Philadelphia White House, and subsequently talked long into the early hours of the morning with the United States Secretary of State J. William Fulbright, the British Ambassador had hoped to be able to enjoy a brief ‘sleep in’ that morning before he rose to commence his next eighteen hour working day. Since arriving in America in January Lord Franks had adopted a punishing regime under which he rose early and retired very, very late. Normally rising between five and six o’clock, today he had asked not to be roused until eight.
Oliver Sherwell Franks had previously been British Ambassador in Washington between 1948 and 1952; but that had been in another age when the World had seemed a safer, saner place and whatever their differences and foibles, the British and the American governments had – after a difficult period in the first years after the 1945 war – played the diplomatic game observing in the main the courtesies appropriate between old and trusted allies. When he had first been in Washington in the late 1940s India and Pakistan had just been granted independence and regardless of how botched and bloody this first great de-colonization exercise had turned out to be, the Americans had greeted it with guarded approbation. They too had once been British subjects and notwithstanding the ‘old country’ had just ‘helped them’ to win the war in Europe and to a lesser extent, the war against Japan, most Americans instinctively resented and mistrusted ‘the British Empire’ and everything it stood for.
In the aftermath of the October War the United Kingdom’s remaining ‘white’ dominions, and virtually all of its still ‘white’ former dominions – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Southern Rhodesia - even the newly ‘republican’ South Africa - and a raft of colonial outposts including Singapore, Hong Kong and miscellaneous island dependencies scattered across the Pacific and the South Atlantic – had in effect, circled the wagons around the dreadfully mauled former mother country. In the United States, itself sorely damaged and bleeding, the sudden unity of the ‘British Commonwealth’ – the Commonwealth of Nations formed in 1931 had formally ceased to be the British Commonwealth after World War II but American commentators and most politicians had not yet caught up with the fact yet - had been in stark contrast to the reluctant and the qualified, nervous ‘loyalty’ it enjoyed from fellow members of the ‘Americas club’ and the open hostility of the former European colonial outposts in the Caribbean, many of whom had been badly affected by fallout from the destruction of neighbouring Cuba and received no help or compensation from Washington. In short, to many Americans it had seemed lately as if they had no ‘real
friends’ in the World; while the United Kingdom, which in the eyes of many in the United States had somehow ‘let down’ America, had somehow emerged from the war with a ‘new empire’.
The depressing thing was that there were still people in the State department and within the President’s inner circle who clung to this belief.
Of course nobody at the British Embassy would ever publicly intimate that far from the United Kingdom having in any way, shape or form ‘let down’ its trans-Atlantic ally; if anybody had ‘let anybody down’ it was the Americans who had done all the ‘letting down’. This was the rampaging five ton African bull Elephant drawing breath in the corner of every room that nobody wanted to mention each time the ‘two old allies’ sat down to ‘talk turkey’. Consequently, the British side was never going to forget it, or lightly take the word of any President, or of any senior member of any American Administration on trust any time soon. Only deeds counted in this brave new post-cataclysm age.
No matter how blurred ‘the facts’ were, or were likely to become in the future, Lord Franks knew exactly what had happened on that night late in October 1962. The United States had launched a massive all out pre-emptive first strike against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact enemies, without first warning its ‘oldest ally’. The first that Harold MacMillan’s government had known about the war was when the early warning radars in the Yorkshire had detected the first Polaris missiles breaking surface in the Norwegian Sea and proscribing sub-orbital trajectories towards the east. By then it had been too late to implement the most rudimentary of civil defence measures or to even sound the air raid sirens left over from World War II; plain language ‘war warnings’ had been flashed to all British forces on land, sea and air by men who knew they would shortly be dead, and the code ‘EIGHT-EAST’ – you are hereby authorised to attack all designated war targets - had been flashed to the V-Bomber bases on the English East Coast more or less at the moment the first Soviet missiles had popped up over the horizon. Shortly thereafter, the dying had begun.
“Lord Franks!”
The British Ambassador blinked bleary-eyed at his First Secretary. The man was irritatingly wide-awake, although his tie was at half-mast betraying that he too, had only recently been awakened.
“Something has happened in the Med,” the man explained. “At Malta, we think. There are already journalists, photographers and a couple of TV trucks outside the Embassy and,” his tone said that the news got worse, “the Secretary of State says he has to talk to you. Urgently, sir.”
Although Oliver Franks had never planned to be a diplomat and had had few old friends either in the pre-war Foreign and Colonial Office or in its much reduced post-October War reincarnation, he had been an obvious choice to replace Sir James Sykes who had been assassinated during the Battle of Washington in December. Serendipitously, he loved America and respected Americans of all mainstream political persuasions and had a wealth of contacts garnered during his earlier period in Washington. More important, there was a calm, gentle method in everything he did. He was that rare thing; a man whose life had prepared him for exactly the challenges confronting him in Philadelphia during his second sojourn in America.
“If you’d inform Secretary Fulbright’s people that I will be happy to take his call in five minutes time please,” he decided, stifling a yawn and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He stepped into his dressing gown and stuffed his feet into his slippers. “I will take the call in my office. Be a good fellow and organize a pot of tea please.”
Oliver Frank’s ‘office’ was a large, airy room with – during daylight hours rather than at this time of day – a view of the sprawling campus of La Salle University to the north, and Wister Woods to the east and south spoilt only by the two armoured personnel carriers of the Pennsylvania National Guard permanently posted just beyond the Embassy compound’s razor wire topped steel mesh fence.
The Ambassador trudged down the stairs and entered his working sanctum accompanied by two assistants, both very young and like the First Secretary, vexingly bright-eyed and bushy tailed!
Bill Fulbright wants to talk to me ‘urgently’ at a time of day when neither of us – were we in our right minds – would want to discuss anything of substance?
Oliver Franks pondered this thought as he settled behind his desk, eyeing the phone next to his right hand as he began to work through the possibilities ahead of hearing what inevitably was going to be very bad news.
His calmness was no act. He was as unflappable as he seemed. A lifetime of service had taught him to see past the emotional and the emotive, to cut logically to the heart of a matter and if it was humanly possible, form opinions and judgements with equanimity. Although in practice this was harder to do – especially in a crisis – than say, he had learned to master most of his fears and now this ‘trick’ served him and his country well.
Born in 1905 Oliver Franks had been too young to fight in the Great War. A graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford, he had pursued an academic career between First and Second World Wars. In the 1930s he had been Provost of Worcester College, and then between 1936 and 1946 – a period interrupted by war service - Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. During Hitler’s War he had joined the Ministry of Supply, rising to become its Permanent Secretary, and after 1945 he had dutifully encapsulated the lessons learned during the war in Central Planning and Control in War and Peace, a document which had been at Margaret Thatcher’s elbow – in her pre-prime ministerial role as Minister of Supply in Edward Heath’s United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration - and remained the source ‘bible’ for much of the work of the Ministry of Supply. A man of the middle, moderate left of British politics, Franks had been a close personal friend of Clement Atlee, the Labour Prime Minister between 1945 and 1951, and of Ernest Bevin. It was Bevin, the first post-1945 Foreign Secretary who had tempted him away from Queen’s College, where he was Provost, to head the British mission to discuss the Marshal Plan. Later as Ambassador in Washington he had been intimately involved in the negotiations which resulted in the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). In time he had become the Chairman of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation, and had spent the eight years before the October War as Chairman of Lloyds Bank.
The phone rang with brutal suddenness.
“Sorry to call you at this time of day, Oliver,” growled the familiar voice of the United States Secretary of State.
“Please don’t apologise, Bill,” the British Ambassador replied evenly, as if he was greeting an old friend at a quiet, private reception. “I am at your disposal. To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”
“My people woke me up thirty minutes ago,” the other man explained tersely. “Somebody started the rumour mill running last night about the situation in the Mediterranean. The guys on the duty desk at the State Department just logged it to begin with and then my liaison officer at Defence reported there was some kind of communication breakdown with Malta.”
Oliver Franks said nothing.
He and Missourian James William Fulbright had been born just fifty-two days apart and the two men shared a great deal more in common than simply the year of their birth. They were unlikely kindred spirits, if not in their politics but in their uncannily shared appreciation of the ‘big global picture’. Of all the men closest to the President only three had really impressed Oliver Franks – Lyndon Johnson, the Vice-President; Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defence; and Fulbright – and of the three Fulbright had instantly struck him as being the most impressive.
Fulbright, who was still – by dint of Congressional dithering and obfuscation - officially the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations had been appointed as the late Dean Rusk’s replacement as Secretary of State on Christmas Eve 1963. He was a formidable man physically, intellectually and politically, a man of conviction and surprisingly contrary views. In retrospect many people now believed that if President Kennedy h
ad had the nerve to install him at the State Department in the spring of 1961; things would have turned out very differently when the Soviets attempted to base medium range ballistic missiles on Cuba. The reason why Jack Kennedy had not appointed Fulbright secretary of State at the outset of his Administration was because he was an unrepentant Southern Democrat and that at the time his unshakable commitment to multilaterism – regardless that it accorded perfectly with the President’s own personal but publicly understated internationalism – would actually have sat much more comfortably with the expressed foreign policy agenda of an administration run by JFK’s rival in 1960 for the Presidency, Richard Nixon. Such were the contradictions inherent in the American way of doing politics.
The Secretary of State had been the junior United States Senator for Arkansas for nearly two decades, a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from as long ago as 1949, and the committee’s Chairman for the last four years while remaining a convinced segregationist. It had been this that was probably the clinching argument that had handed Dean Rusk his seat at the top table back in 1961. Yet famously Fulbright had been had been the only member of the Senate to vote against a 1954 appropriation for Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, under the purview of which McCarthy’s ongoing unholy inquisition against alleged Un-American Activities was pursued in the 1950s. A former Rhodes Scholar and attorney who had been admitted to the bar in Washington DC as long ago as 1934, he had gone into politics while he was lecturing in law at the University of Arkansas, first being elected to Congress in 1942.
To Oliver Frank’s mind, keenly tuned to the nuances and the convoluted ways and means of the American political system, Bill Fulbright was exactly the sort of independently minded and almost quasi-religiously motivated political animal whose success was utterly incomprehensible to most non-Americans. To an outsider his liberal multilaterism and opposition to right-wing anti-libertarian dogma, or to any trammelling of civil liberties by the government seemed to sit diametrically opposed to – and apparently irreconcilable with - his trenchantly avowed racist segregationist position, and the gusto with which he had helped filibuster, for example, the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Only in America could a man have made his mark sponsoring a program - the Fulbright Program in 1946 - providing for educational grants in overseas countries to promote understanding between the United States and those countries; and a few years later vehemently object to the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1954 Brown v Board of Education case, whereby Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren had ruled that Kansas’s State-sanctioned segregation of public schools amounted to a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. Only in America could a man like William Fulbright have prospered, and eventually, become the safe pair of hands into which his President had belatedly entrusted the nation’s bankrupt foreign policy.
