Tales of Brave Ulysses (Timeline 10/27/62)

by James Philip

  Marija looked around and up at the semi-circle of tired, worried faces.

  “But that is for the future. The authorities will soon decide the fate of our hospital. Malta is under martial law and that means that sooner or later the British will appoint a new Director of our Hospital. Until then, for today at least, if it is your wish that I assume the role of acting Director, that is what I shall do!” She took a deep breath. “Is that your wish?”

  Marija was almost bowled over with the relieved, smiling chorus of affirmation that greeted her offer.

  Fresh tears tracked down her cheeks as the women of the St Catherine’s Hospital protectively ushered her back inside to begin her work.

  Chapter 37

  14:15 Hours

  Saturday 4th April 1964

  HMS Alliance, Lazaretto Creek, Malta

  Lieutenant-Commander Francis Barrington waved to acknowledge the forward mooring crew’s signal that the boat was secured to the emergency buoy. After nearly forty-eight hours without sleep, he groaned a silent sigh of relief. However, this sigh of relief had been as nothing to his gargantuan release of pent up angst when the big, mean-looking silhouette of the USS Mahan (DDG-42) had hauled into sight early that morning with a mighty white bone in her teeth. The terrifyingly modern and warlike looking guided missile cruiser had slowed to a canter and – just for effect in case the Turkish crew of the old Second World War M-class fleet destroyer Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak had had any second thoughts about surrendering without a fight – turned two slow, menacing circles around both the prize and its captor, HMS Alliance with its automatic quick firing five-inch gun trained on the Turks.

  Relieved of her trophy Alliance had independently made her best speed for Malta.

  It had not been practical, safe or wise to attempt to remove any of the Turkish destroyer’s electronics suite or cipher equipment from her radio room; but Francis Barrington had had every code book and manual wrapped in waterproof seals, packed in cork containers to stop them sinking if they fell in the sea on the short boat ride back to the Alliance, and stowed below under armed guard in a corner of the control room where the priceless treasure had not left his or his Master at Arms’s sight.

  He looked across the Creek to where the big wrecked submarine depot ship HMS Maidstone had settled on the bottom in a stinking soup of her own leaking bunker oil. All of Maidstone’s charges had been out at sea when the bombardment had commenced. The foremast of a minesweeper sunk on one side of the deep water channel into Lazaretto Creek and the fire-scorched flank of the depot ship testified to the violence of the Battle of Malta and the destructiveness of the salvoes which had screamed down into mercifully empty Sliema Creek, and into the midst of the handful of small ships moored alongside the Maidstone. The big depot ship had been hit by at least three armour-piercing six-inch calibre rounds, each of which had plunged into, through and out the other side of her before exploding. One of the shells had gone through several decks and exploded beneath her engineering spaces causing flooding so extensive that she had settled on the bottom within minutes. One of the other hits had demolished a landing craft moored alongside and started an oil fire which had gutted the forward third of the Maidstone. It was miracle that the huge, sitting target had only been hit by three large shells. Half of Manoel Island, hard hit in the American bombing raid in December looked like a Moonscape, and the streets around and leading down to Lazaretto and Msida Creek were bombsites now. The ruins still smouldered and the air still stank of burning.

  To Francis Barrington who had been in Malta – and based in Lazaretto Creek - at the height of the siege over twenty years ago as a terrified sub-lieutenant, it looked as if he had never gone away. Two decades of renewal and rebuilding, of attempting to remake lives and to forget the nightmare of the early 1940s had been for nought. He had had nightmares for years after the war; now he was living those nightmares anew...

  A launch wearing the Harbour Master’s livery bumped gently against the bulge of the Alliance’s pressure hull, and a man in a Commander’s uniform jumped aboard, then another man in civvies.

  “Permission to come aboard, sir!” The officer shouted perfunctorily.

  “Permission granted!”

  A minute later Francis Barrington and the two visitors were crammed, very much in the fashion of three sardines in a can designed for two in the Alliance’s Captain’s claustrophobic bolt hole of a cabin aft of the control room.

  Francis Barrington’s guests had come to take possession of his treasure.

  Neither man seemed very grateful for his or his crew’s endeavours or remotely interested in hearing the account of his capture of a destroyer on the high sea. A word of thanks would have been nice; even if he had not so much captured as simply received the surrender of the old Turkish destroyer.

  He tried to make polite conversation with his guests.

  “Funny old world,” he observed. “The last time I set eyes on the Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak was back in 1942 when she was being towed into Gibraltar after a U-boat had blown off her stern. Of course, back in those days she was HMS Marne. I can’t wait to go onboard her and have a good look around. I shouldn’t be surprised if you can still see the join where they welded her new stern on, what!”

  The visitor in the commander’s uniform, a fleshy middle-aged man with a receding hairline and large florid hands that suggested he had never done an honest day’s work in his whole life, eyed Barrington with suspicion.

  His civilian companion was obviously uncomfortable in small spaces and constantly glanced at the bulkhead inches above his head.

  “Presumably, every member of your crew knows about what you transferred across from the destroyer?” The Commander asked brusquely.

  “I should imagine so, sir.”

  “Do they or don’t they, man?”

  “I don’t know, sir. But,” Barrington shrugged, “everybody will know by now that we brought something important back onboard from the prize.”

  The Commander pulled out a folded sheet of paper and started to read aloud.

  “Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Fleet to Officer Commanding Her Majesty’s Submarine Alliance. Be advised that Alliance is hereby quarantined. Alliance will remain moored in Lazaretto Creek until further notice. All shore leave is cancelled until further notice. Officer Commanding Alliance may expect to be summoned ashore periodically but may not depart his command without an armed escort. Any man discovered to have communicated any information about the capture of sensitive materials from the Turkish Navy Ship Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak will be liable for prosecution under the Treachery Act (1940), The Official secrets Act (1911, 1920 and 1939) and the War Emergency Powers Act (1962 and 1963).”

  Within minutes HMS Alliance’s treasure had been loaded onto the visitors’ launch and the submarine was officially ‘quarantined’.

  Barrington climbed to the top of Alliance’s tall fin where he was shortly joined by his second-in-command, Lieutenant Michael Philpott.

  “Heroes to lepers in five minutes flat, sir,” he complained cheerfully. “How long do you think we’ll be sitting here twiddling our thumbs, sir?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Number One.”

  “Sitting out here in the Creek will be hard for some of the men.”

  “I know.” It would have been even worse if Alliance had not so recently joined the 2nd Submarine Squadron. Few men of her complement of five officers and fifty-six other ranks had connections to the island, girlfriends and the like. Nevertheless, it was not going to be much fun for anybody if Alliance’s quarantine lasted any length of time. It was one thing being cooped up onboard at sea on patrol; another entirely killing time in harbour without the possibility of a run ashore.

  The younger man – Philpott was eighteen years Barrington’s junior – gazed thoughtfully at HMS Maidstone. The Creek was rocky so the nine thousand ton depot ship had probably sprung several keel plates when she had settled on the bottom. Most of his personal kit – dress uniform and th
e like – was still in a locker somewhere on the slab-sided submarine depot ship. Moreover, it made him more than a little nervous to know that as there was only six or seven feet of water under the boat if there was another attack like yesterday’s, Alliance would not have the option of submerging to escape the incoming shells.

  Francis Barrington was reading his mind.

  “I think a repeat of yesterday’s excitement is the least of our worries, Michael.”

  Chapter 38

  13:20 Hours (GMT)

  Saturday 4th April 1964

  Corpus Christi College, Oxford, England

  “My second doomsday scenario,” Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson explained, professorially, “concerns Mesopotamia, specifically, Iran and Iraq,” he half-smiled, “and of course, their oil fields and the largest oil refinery in the World on Abadan Island.”

  Margaret Thatcher’s expression had turned thoughtful. Lack of sleep and the corrosive effect of her grief left her feeling alone and threatened as she sensed the fractures forming within the circle of her closest ministers and advisors. An enemy fleet had contrived to sail undetected to Malta and bombarded the archipelago for the best part of an hour unmolested by a garrison denuded of men, equipment, aircraft and ships currently involved – over a thousand miles away - in the biggest combined operation mounted by British forces since Suez to retake the island of Cyprus. But for the suicidal gallantry of the captains and the men of two small Royal Navy warships and the belated arrival of three powerful United States Navy vessels, an airborne assault on Malta might have overwhelmed the available local defence forces and achieved defensive lodgements on the main island. It was not inconceivable that Malta might even, briefly, have fallen into enemy hands.

  All of which palled into nothing compared to the dreadful empty pit of loss and despair that threatened her capacity to lead her country at this time of crisis. Admiral Sir Julian Christopher, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations was dead, as were a long list of other senior officers and prominent Maltese political and civic leaders apparently pre-targeted by fifth columnists and Red Dawn assassins at the height of the airborne invasion. There was as yet no reliable count for either civilian or military casualties; but both counts were expected to be very high. Worse, as the bombardment from the sea had progressed the shelling, at first concentrated on the airfields of Luqa, Ta’Qali and Hal Far, and the Admiralty Dockyards in the creeks around the Grand Harbour, had become indiscriminate, wreaking dreadful carnage and destruction across great swaths of Valletta, Sliema, Floriana, Birgu-Vittoriosa, Cospicua, Senglea and Paola. Malta’s main power station had been hit by several shells, island-wide telephone communications were down and several hospitals had been attacked, in some cases by squads of parachutists. ‘Hit squads’ had burst into the main civilian hospital and gunned down doctors, nurses and patients alike... It was unspeakable... If a small detachment of the Welsh Guards had not intervened there would have been a massacre.

  What sort of people were they fighting?

  It was as if her enemies were goading her to retaliate with nuclear weapons...

  Margaret Thatcher squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to think rationally. She could not afford to let her personal emotions intrude on the decisions she had to take in the coming hours and days. Although the ships of Vice-Admiral Bernard Clarey’s newly constituted United States Sixth Fleet had thrown an impenetrable protective cordon of aircraft and warships around the Maltese Archipelago, and were offering all possible assistance to the authorities on land, Malta’s agony was very nearly complete.

  Julian Christopher was dead...

  And now her Foreign Secretary was about to give the War Cabinet an impromptu history lesson which presumably had a wickedly apposite sting in its tail!

  The bastards had murdered Julian Christopher!

  Tom Harding-Grayson opened his mouth to continue but before he could speak again there was a sharp knock at the door and a flinty-eyed woman stalked into the room. The men around the table made to rise to their feet but the newcomer waved jerkily for them to sit down.

  “I did not join the Government to be relegated to the sidelines the first time there was a crisis, Prime Minister!” The newcomer complained angrily.

  Margaret Thatcher positively bristled.

  “Nobody has relegated anybody to the sidelines, Mrs Castle,” she retorted tartly. “Yesterday’s events compelled me to call an emergency War Cabinet consisting of all those Cabinet Ministers in Oxford. I was given to understand that you were spending the weekend in your constituency in Blackburn?”

  Fifty-three year old Barbara Anne Castle was a sparsely made, not over-large woman with auburn to ginger hair with a habit of leaning towards an opponent in debate as if she was leaning into a storm.

  “Oh...”

  “Pray take a sea,” the Prime Minister said icily. She did not like and never would like Barbara Castle. “The Foreign Secretary was about to conduct a tutorial.”

  Tom Harding-Grayson took this barb in his stride.

  “I don’t know how much colleagues know about the murky histories of Iran and Iraq?”

  “Assume we know nothing, Tom,” Margaret Thatcher growled sweetly.

  “Iran first,” her friend prefaced. “I shall begin with a confession. You should all know that I was greatly involved in the dirty business that put the Shah back into power during the Abadan Crisis of the early years of the last decade. You will recollect that at the time we were so bankrupt that our economy depended almost entirely on oil from Abadan purchased, in effect, with Government guarantees to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company; so when in 1951 the Iranians turned off the tap we were in something of a pickle. Other potential oil producers actually wanted us to pay for oil up front and frankly, we were in no position to do business with anybody on those terms in those days. We very nearly ran out of oil; remember the great smogs of London caused by everybody having to burn coal to keep warm during the winter? Remember how many people that killed off and how impossible it was to carry on any kind of normal life in the city? Similar things happened in Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham last winter because oil shortages forced us to fall back on burning coal to keep warm. Practically all our oil supply problems last year were caused by the dislocation to world shipping by the October War; there was never any shortage of oil. In fact Abadan virtually closed down for four months last year at a time when we were – and of course – still are stringently rationing fuel. In the last three months tankers brought back under our control during the Operation Manna period have been reallocated to the Abadan run and week by week, month by month the fuel supply situation is easing and we are finally in a position to begin to build up a strategic reserve again. If we learned anything last year it was that we cannot rely on American largesse and the future availability of the American registered tankers. I would also point out that the ‘generous’ fuel supplies thus far delivered to these isles from the Gulf of Mexico roughly equates to a tad less than fifteen percent of our target requirements. Without Abadan we are in dire straits, and because of the war situation in the Mediterranean and the fact the Suez Canal remains blocked at Ismailia, in the foreseeable future all our oil must reach us via the long route around the Cape of Good Hope, a route which might potentially be threatened in the event of naval hostilities between ourselves and the Argentine.”

  “We know all this, Tom,” Iain MacLeod complained testily.

  “Yes,” the other man replied blankly, “but we forget it at our peril, Iain. The point I am trying to make is that Iran matters to us more than we like to admit; which is why I insist on harking back to the Abadan Crisis which was not finally resolved until 1954. We and the Americans hardly covered ourselves with glory in that episode. Nevertheless, we – the British and the Americans – successfully prised the oil of Iran out of the hands of the then legitimate, democratically elected Government of Iran, then under the leadership of Mohammad Mosaddegh, a
ssuaged our wounded national pride and all in all, the whole dreadful business was subsequently viewed as a great success. As a result British and Commonwealth forces still hold Abadan Island, the one jewel, actually, the last jewel left in the crown of the Empire. Nevertheless, we should not allow ourselves to be carried away. The important thing to remember about Iran is that one day it will be a regional superpower. Probably, the regional superpower. Not while the Shah is in charge, obviously. The man is a devious and mendacious fraud and an intellectual lightweight only kept in power by the CIA, his secret police and a coterie of corrupt and largely inept generals most of whom are even less cerebrally gifted than him. While the Pahlavi dynasty rules in Iran, the country will never escape its past, never modernise and sooner or later it will be torn apart by ethnic and sectarian strife. If the Shah was to be deposed and a strong government with the backing of the people of Iran not formed immediately, revolution would probably be inevitable. Because of the Pahlavi dynasty’s reign of terror there is currently no viable secular ‘opposition’ in Iran; only Mullahs and other Islamists who are by inclination inimical to our interests in their country and to our very way of life. What price our continued tenure of Abadan Island and our command of the Persian Gulf in the eventuality that the Shah falls?”

  The Foreign Secretary looked around the table.

  “So when I hear reports about unrest in Tehran overnight and rumours of troop concentrations and movements in the Trans-Caucasus, I get very nervous. But enough of Iran. In many ways Iraq is an even more interesting case study.”

  Tom Harding-Grayson was warming to his subject.