by James Philip
Bill Battle was aware that his credentials bore no serious comparison to those of his esteemed – probably now dead - colleague in London but nevertheless, he was a serious player who had approached his responsibilities in Australia with great diligence. In fact, right up until the first cable came through about the nuclear strikes on Galveston and Florida, he had believed that he was in effect ‘pushing at an open door’ in Canberra; effectively overseeing an ever-accelerating process of closer, deepening US-Australia trade, military and diplomatic links. By October 1962 he had established good professional, and in many cases, personal relationships with several of the movers and shakers of Australian political and commercial life, and was cautiously confident that the warm, firmly established bilateral ties between the two continental powers were strong enough to survive practically any kind of unforeseen setback.
But then the scarcely credible, terrifying cables had started spitting through the rapidly thickening mush of radio noise in the ionosphere and it suddenly became brutally apparent that the overnight war had been an ‘all out’ exchange. Strategic Air Command and the US Navy’s Polaris boats had hit the Warsaw Pact with everything it had and the Soviets had attempted to retaliate in kind against North America, the US’s Western European allies, China and Japan...
It was a nightmare!
Battle had brought a folder of message transcripts to the Parliament Building, suspecting that the Australian Premier and his ministers would still be even more ‘in the dark’ about what had happened in the north than he was.
He arrived to find Robert Menzies in conference with the Minister for External Affairs, Sir Garfield Barwick, and Defence Minister Athol Townley.
Fifty-nine year old Barwick had only entered the political arena in 1958 after a long and distinguished law career. He had been a highly respected High Court judge and served several terms as presidents of the New South Wales Bar Association and the Law Council of Australia. That day his stern judicial presence and quiet gravitas left Bill Battle in no doubt that he, and his country, were ‘in the dock’.
Fifty-eight year old Athol Townley was both shocked and angry. Like Battle he had commanded small motor patrol boats in the Second World War – notably helping to foil an attack on Sydney Harbour by Japanese midget submarines in June 1942 – but if he had ever been seduced by the military might of his country’s post-war superpower ally, today the former commander of the patrol boat Steady Hour and the Fairmile B gunboat ML817, was viewing the American with only very thinly disguised suspicion.
Bill Battle had tried to ignore the frigidity of the atmosphere in the Prime Minister’s rooms. The first time he had visited Parliament House he had been struck by how modest it seemed in comparison to any state legislature or capitol building back home; such hubris as it represented was on a deliberately human scale as befitted such a practical, no-nonsense people as the Australians.
In the process of breaking its imperial bonds, albeit by peaceful negotiated steps the Australians had debated whether Melbourne or Sydney should be their capital. Even after Canberra, situated roughly half-way between the two biggest cities on the continent was agreed – in 1908 - as the site for the capital there had been no hurry to build a Parliament. It was another six years before a competition was organised to design a building.
Then the Great War had intervened and – mostly to keep himself busy – the Chief Architect for the Commonwealth of Australia[21] – had drawn up the plans for the building in which Battle now stood, even though at the time he was convinced that the whole project was a complete waste of money!
Parliament House had not been officially opened until May 1927, nearly twenty years after Canberra was selected as the site for the nation’s capital...
‘You should know that President Kennedy has declared a unilateral ceasefire, Prime Minister,’ Battle stated as soon as the somewhat stilted formalities had been hastily concluded. ‘I had hoped to be able to bring you the full text of his ‘talk’ to the nation but communications are a little bit,’ he shrugged, ‘unreliable at the moment. My military attachés tell me that a great deal of radio and other electrical equipment in the Northern Hemisphere will have been damaged by the electro-magnetic pulses of nuclear detonations and of course...fallout.’
This last word stuck in his throat.
‘Fallout!’ Athol Townley snorted, rising from the chair where he had settled only moments before, unable to contain his roiling angst. ‘What in God’s name have you people done?’
‘Sir, we were attacked...’
Sir Robert Menzies, in any company a greying patrician bulwark of good sense and long, hard-won experience sighed. He viewed the American thoughtfully for some moments then went on reading the cables Battle had given him. Like his fellow ministers in the room he was contemplating the ruin of his life’s work, the immolation of his extended family back in the old country and the bleak prospect of a World in which the destroyers of nations would be kings...
The sixty-eight year old Victorian who, during his first premiership had authorised Australia’s entry into the Second World War, and for four months sat in Winston Churchill’s war cabinet before being undermined at home in his absence and being condemned to what had seemed at the time, to be the political wilderness, now faced the escalating crisis with calm, stoic resignation.
Like Barwick and Bill Battle, Menzies was by profession a lawyer. He had been Attorney General and later Minister for Industry in the United Australia Party – a Nationalist and non-Labour coalition - government of the 1930s. After his fall from grace in 1941 he had led the Liberal-Country coalition to power in the 1949 elections. The Australian Liberal Party was practically his own creation, built around his reassuring presence, implacable commitment to middle-class values and dedication to national unity. His had become the safest of safe hands, promoting immigration to fuel Australian economic development, building ties with the rest of the World while maintaining the historic links with the United Kingdom, and ensuring that his country became a significant player in international affairs. From the early 1940s he regularly addressed the nation on radio, and more recently on TV, very much some kind of latter-day FDR imparting wisdom, reassurance and a sense of unshakable reliability.
His message was simple and it struck a chord with the silent majority of all Australians.
I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole...
He had won election after election and nobody imagined Australia would ever have any Prime Minister other than Menzies until such time as he decided to retire.
But that day it must have seemed as if fate was mocking the great old man of Australian politics. As long ago as 1951 Australia had signed the ANZUS – Australian, New Zealand and United States – mutual defence agreement. For over a decade he had been aggressively expanding his country’s diplomatic and trading footprint across the Asia-Pacific Region, committing troops to the Commonwealth struggle to guarantee Malayan independence and to suppress Indonesian interference in Borneo, and building relations with India, Ceylon and a host of other countries under which foreign students flooded into Australian colleges. One trade deal after another had been signed and under him Australian determination to play its full part in World affairs had become a central plank of his personal political manifesto. In a very real sense Australia had come of age on the World stage under Robert Menzies’s leadership.
There had been times over the last few years that the Cold War had seemed an awfully long way away from where he sat, the master of Parliament
House, in Canberra. Back in 1956 he had briefly fallen out with the Eisenhower Administration over its treatment of Britain over Suez; but even that ‘disagreement among friends’ had been finessed, and to all intents, discounted, forgotten by the autumn of 1962.
But now...
For all Menzies knew England, from whence his nation had sprung, was no more; and a nation like a great tree, no matter how tall must fall if its roots perished. That day beneath his mask of solemn gravitas the cricket-loving, anglophile Prime Minister of Australia was very nearly bereft. The previous day he had been looking forward to the forthcoming Ashes Series between Richie Benaud’s rebuilding Australian team and Ted Dexter’s English tourists, and anticipating with immense pride Her Majesty the Queen’s forthcoming state visit to Australia which had been scheduled to take place in the spring.
Now...that evening all across Australia civilian and military authorities were dusting off neglected civil defence ordinances, scrabbling to find out what they were actually supposed to do the day after Armageddon.
Robert Menzies looked at the US Ambassador for some seconds, hardly trusting himself to speak.
On the beach...
We’re all on the beach...
‘Until a few hours ago I was under the impression that under the terms of the Five Eyes Agreement,’ this was an open-ended intelligence sharing treaty between the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand that went back to the World War II grand alliance, ‘and the ANZUS Treaty that the United States was obliged to consult its allies before going to war, Ambassador?’
Bill Battle had shifted uneasily in his chair.
‘I suspect that things moved so quickly...’
‘Was London consulted?’
‘That would be my assumption, sir.’
Athol Townley grunted barely veiled contempt.
‘So your story is that the British freely consented to being bombed back to the Stone Age?’
The American Ambassador felt his face flushing hot.
‘No, sir!’ That was the moment it began to dawn on Bill Battle – as during the days after the war it must have for many of his country’s ‘surviving’ ambassadors around the globe – that nobody was about to thank the United States for winning an all out global thermonuclear war.
Robert Menzies picked up the single phone on his desk.
He waited patiently: ‘If he has arrived would you ask the Governor-General to come in please.’
Bill Battle later wrote that his ‘heart fell like a stone’.
William Philip Sidney, 1st Viscount De L'Isle, VC, GCMG, PC, had got to know Robert Menzies well in the 1950s when he was sent to Australia to liaise with the Australian government over the testing of atomic weapons at the Montebello Islands off the coast of Western Australia, and at Emu Field and Maralinga in the South Australian outback. The two men had become firm friends and upon the unexpected sudden death of the former incumbent, Lord Dunrossil, Menzies had immediately recommended he be replaced by De L’Isle.
Bill Battle gaped in astonishment as the Englishman marched into the room in his full vice-regal finery.
‘It was the most bizarre thing I ever saw!’
He had of course, completely missed the point.
Most Americans believed at the time, and probably still do, that the British Empire was acquired by sheer brute force of arms. It was not. It was aggregated – fairly randomly, almost accidentally, in fact - over the centuries mainly by dint of pure bloody pig-headed stubbornness. Basically, the British – Scotsmen, Irishmen, Welshmen and Englishmen and women, of course – never know when they are beaten. As foes across the ages have discovered eliciting the surrender of this or that British garrison, army, enclave or country is never, ever an admission of defeat; rather, it is no more than a preliminary gambit in a much, much longer game. In terms of contractual negotiations, a mere ‘offer to treat’. The Soviets could no more eradicate the British by obliterating the United Kingdom, than they could stop the sun rising on the morrow over Siberia. The British were everywhere that they had transplanted their civilization, their values, foibles, faults and underlying steel.
In this dreadful hour the Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia was sending a not very coded message to all and sundry.
We shall never surrender!
Hands were shaken, and pleasantries exchanged as if the meeting had been called to discuss the order of seating at an official dinner or reception in Parliament House.
And then the Governor-General, the essentially non-executive representative of the Australian Head of State, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (if she still lived, or if not her then her successor whomsoever he or she should be), fixed Bill Battle with a coolly sad gaze.
De L’Isle belonged to one of England’s oldest families, able to trace his descent back to King William IV via his mistress Dorothea Jordan. Eton and Magdalene College, Cambridge educated he had served with the Grenadier Guards in France and Italy in the 1945 war.
In June 1940, shortly after his return from the disastrous French campaign, he had married the daughter of Lord Gort, the commander of the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force so recently rescued from France in the miracle of Dunkirk.
As a company commander De L’Isle had won his Victoria Cross leading an attack on a German strong point at Anzio. Having dashed into the fray shooting a Tommy gun from the hip, he was seriously wounded – shot through the buttocks - but despite severe loss of blood he had refused to relinquish command of his troops until the action was over. In true English style whenever quizzed about where about his person he had been hit he always replied ‘in Italy!’
The ribbon of the Victoria Cross worn prominently on his breast that day in Canberra had been made from material taken from one of his father-in-law’s uniforms.
That is the other thing about the British; history is always with them, at their shoulder not on it, looking over their works and steadying their hands when the going gets tough.
At that time De L’Isle’s wife Jacqueline who was only forty-eight, was terminally ill but duty always came first. The couple – who had five children - had brought their four youngest offspring to Australia to inhabit and to enliven Yarralumla, Government House in Canberra; a thing that had intrigued the Australian press and greatly enhanced their public popularity. As their mother’s illness progress two of De L’Isle’s daughters, twenty year old Catherine and her fifteen year old younger sister Anne, had begun to step in to fulfil her role as a hostess.
Notwithstanding De L’Isle’s donning of his ceremonial regalia at public ‘occasions’ and for the performance of his official duties in Parliament House and elsewhere, he was no ‘stuffed shirt’ of the old colonial school. He had trained as an accountant before the Second War, served as Secretary of State for Air in the 1950s and although he looked – magnificently - the part of a proto-typical imperial pro-consul, he possessed ‘the common touch’.
‘Well,’ the hero of Anzio declared quietly, shifting his attention back to Menzies, ‘this is a fine old mess, isn’t it!’
Chapter 6 | Singapore Sling
Wednesday 31st October 1962
HMS Ark Royal, Singapore
Julian Christopher was brutally honest when he called his captains onboard HMS Ark Royal that morning. Overnight he had finally made contact with Fleet Headquarters in England.
An ‘Interim Emergency Administration’ was in the process of forming at Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, taking advantage of the communications infrastructure of the two GCHQ – Government Communications Headquarters – establishments located at Oakley and Benhall on the outskirts of that undamaged town. Long-range radio broadcasts were still impossible but via stations in the English West Country and surviving transatlantic and former Imperial cable links – all of which had been requisitioned exclusively for high priority strictly military and emergency traffic – messages could now be securely relayed around the World within hours.
Christopher ha
d discovered that his old friend David Luce was ‘acting’ First Sea Lord and that the Home Fleet – about half the operational Royal Navy – was still ‘in being’. He had immediately responded by reporting that his own command was likewise still ‘in being and ready for operations’.
David Luce had made him C-in-C all Naval Forces ‘east of Suez’; theoretically adding half-a-dozen destroyers, frigates, submarines and a clutch of minesweepers and Royal Fleet Auxiliaries – several of which were in transit - to his command, albeit scattered from Aden to the Falklands Archipelago.
ACT INDEPENDENTLY TO SAFEGUARD STRATEGIC INTERESTS OF HMG WITH A VIEW TO THE PRESERVATION OF YOUR FIGHTING POWER.
That was typical of David Luce!
Do what you can, old man; but for goodness sake don’t start another war!
Since the day-night of the war both the Ark Royal and the Hermes had taken onboard every available aircraft fit for carrier operations; both having previously been equipped with reduced ‘peacetime’ air groups.
‘We are at war stations, gentlemen,’ Christopher told his captains. ‘And we shall remain on the alert until such time as we have established without a shadow of a doubt that the war is over.’
The day before he had re-organised the Far East Fleet into three ‘fighting’ battle groups and two ‘inshore squadrons’; ahead of the arrival of the commando carrier HMS Albion, her helicopters and 2nd Battalion 40 Commando, Royal Marines.
Normal practice on the Far East Station had been for the Vice Admiral Commander-in-Chief to be predominantly based on land, normally Sembawang in Singapore, while the Fleet at sea was commanded by the Rear-Admiral in theatre. Coincidentally, it so happened that the forty-eight year old commanding officer of HMNB Sembawang, Commodore the Honourable Samuel Anson Gresham, having been advanced to rear admiral in the forthcoming January Gazette was in the process of handing over to his successor ahead of flying back to the United Kingdom to prepare for his next posting, at Fleet Headquarters, Northwood. Presented with a ‘spare’ flag officer and a whole raft of new and unanticipated operational priorities, Julian Christopher had not hesitated to ‘wring the changes’.
