by James Philip
Personnel apart, he had already disbanded 8th Destroyer Squadron and 6th Frigate Squadron and re-assigned their ships to the three envisaged battle groups; while the old Loch class ships of the 3rd Frigate Squadron would now become 1st Inshore Support Group based in Singaporean waters. The three other old frigates – lightly armed or completely weapon less – presently engaged on despatch and survey work, the Alert, Cook and Dampier had been ordered to assume guard ship duties at Hong Kong, Tonga and Fiji respectively. Meanwhile the most capable and seaworthy Royal Fleet Auxiliaries were currently loading at Singapore and Hong Kong ahead of deployment with the three new battle groups.
‘I’ll recap the revised Fleet sailing order,’ Julian Christopher explained. The Admiral’s day cabin on the Ark Royal was a lot less palatial than many would expect on a ship of the Ark’s size. The cabin was crowded and already a little smoky despite the whirring of the air conditioning fans.
Everybody was drinking tea as was customary on these occasions.
‘Ark Royal will operate under my flag with Barrosa, Cavendish and Blackpool in company.’
The Ark Royal was the biggest beast in the Fleet so axiomatically, Barrosa, the newly converted high speed Air Detection (a long-range radar picket) destroyer would stick close to the Ark. Blackpool was a Whitby class anti-submarine frigate. Cavendish was an old gunship destroyer with similar anti-submarine capabilities to the other two escorts.
The Hermes group included Caesar and Cavalier, sisters of the Cavendish, and the Llandaff was a second, modern Air Direction frigate but lacked the turn of speed of the older ‘gunship’ destroyers. Rear Admiral Nigel Grenville would fly his flag in Hermes.
The third battle group under Sam Gresham’s command would initially comprise the old cruiser Belfast, the ‘C’ class destroyer Cassandra, and the two Whitby class frigates Yarmouth and Brighton. When the commando carrier Albion and the cruiser Tiger arrived in theatre Gresham’s battle group would be renamed ‘Albion Battle Group’, and units of his command re-allocated ‘as operational requirements dictated’.
‘Ark Royal and Hermes will proceed north and offer assistance as required to the Japanese and the American authorities in those areas impacted by Soviet nuclear strikes.’
Other than that there had been strikes on the northern island of Hokkaido in the Sapporo area little was known of the Japanese situation. Some reports which spoke of further strikes on the northern and western shores of the main island, Honshu, were as yet unconfirmed and already every new snippet of information was being treated with extreme suspicion in the absence of corroborative evidence.
Nobody was saying it; but everybody was thinking it: Sapporo was, give or take, some four thousand nautical miles from Singapore and there were large US Navy forces based in Kobe, Sasebo and Yokosuka much better placed to assist the local civil authorities in the provision of emergency and disaster relief.
‘We have no mission at this time,’ Julian Christopher told his captains. Beating about the bush was not his style. ‘To my mind there are two imperatives. One, at a time like this our people need to be doing something. The morale of our men is vital to everything we may achieve in the future. Two, the World has just been turned on its head and this fleet – previously, operating on a mainly peacetime footing – needs to get to sea and exercise for war if it is to be in any condition to fight a war in the coming days, months or years.’
He had let this sink in.
‘Right now Far East Fleet is the guarantor of the freedom of navigation in these waters; potentially we are the glue that will bind Australasia and the nations of the Pacific Commonwealth to whatever is left of the old country. We need to be on top of our game and we need to be ready for anything.’
It was one of those days when there were a lot of pauses to allow men still reeling from the enormity of what had just happened back home to absorb, and to come to terms with the ‘new norms’ of their professional lives.
‘While the Ark and Hermes go north the ‘Belfast group’ will mind the shop in the south. Its task will be to patrol the approaches to the Malacca Strait, to make its presence felt and to be as visible as possible in the South China Sea and the Java Sea. Unlike the Ark Royal and the Hermes battle groups, the Belfast group will not operate as a squadron in hand other than for specific missions. Obviously, if and when Albion and Tiger arrive, and if and when Carysfort gets back to Singapore I will revisit the deployment of individual units throughout the fleet.’
The two carriers sailed the next day.
Julian Christopher stayed behind in Singapore for another seventy-two hours before leaving Air Marshal Sir Hector McGregor in ‘theatre command’ while he departed to ‘exercise the fleet’. During this period he and his RAF and Army counterparts thrashed out interim plans, one of which concerned despatching officers to Canberra and practically every other remotely friendly capital in the region laying the groundwork for inter-service and more importantly, inter-governmental co-operation in the ‘current dangerous situation’.
Christopher’s officers took a very simple message with them; there will be no piracy in these waters while I command Far East Fleet, the United Kingdom will honour all its treaty obligations and that he personally intended to do whatever was necessary to prevent further Soviet-backed aggression in the region.
This latter clause was blatant sabre-rattling since everybody knew, or strongly suspected, that both Ark Royal and Hermes had nuclear weapons stored in their armoured ‘physics packages magazines’, and that there were several V-Bombers based at Singapore.
‘I learned, or rather, I re-learned a lesson I ought not to have needed to re-learn taking the Ark and Hermes north into somebody else’s sea,’ Julian Christopher privately confessed to David Luce over a year later[22]. ‘But I couldn’t resist finding out exactly how much the World had changed. I think if I hadn’t taken the carriers into harm’s way like that I’d probably have made much worse mistakes later. Burn one’s fingers badly enough the first time one puts them into the fire; and one does one’s level best to avoid repeating the exercise a second time!’
Ark Royal had left two of her De Havilland Sea Vixen interceptors behind to transport the C-in-C and his flag lieutenant[23] to the carrier which was working up its newly reinforced air group some one hundred nautical miles east-north-east of Brunei Bay, ahead of steaming north. Even unarmed with over-wing fuel pods fitted a flight over open sea of between six and seven hundred miles was hardly routine for the pilots of the two jet fighters; especially, as their back seats were occupied by passengers not their usual navigator/radio/weapons officers.
In the event Julian Christopher’s aircraft suffered an electrical failure two hundred miles from the nearest land and was forced to cling onto the second Sea Vixen’s wing tip through worsening weather conditions for the rest of the flight. It was dark before the two Sea Vixens – with only five to ten minutes fuel reserve – eventually thumped down onto the deck of the carrier as she thundered north.
Chapter 7 | UKIEA - Cheltenham
Sunday 4th November 1962
Government Communications Headquarters, Oakley, Cheltenham
Forty-six year old Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave, DSO, MC paused at the half-open door and knocked lightly, before entering the small first floor meeting room the Prime Minister had requisitioned for his private office.
Prime Minister...
That still sounded, well, odd...
It had taken Neave the best part of two days to travel the forty or so miles from his constituency family home in Abingdon in Oxfordshire to the nominated temporary seat of the Emergency Administration in Gloucestershire. He had been one of the first to arrive at Oakley; primarily because with his links to the security services and his wealth of wartime military friends and contacts, he was one of the few men – or women - in British politics who actually knew something about the nation’s criminally neglected civil defence and war governance plans in the event that the unthinkable happened. As indeed it ha
d happened a week ago.
Temporarily ‘parking’ his wife and teenage children in the safe hands of the Commandant of the Abingdon Garrison, home to a mechanised infantry battalion and custodian of a sprawling Army and Air Force base depot, Neave had set off for Gloucestershire with an escort of heavily armed ‘toughs’, large soldiers hefting Sten guns on the nightmare journey in a borrowed Land Rover. The roads had been clogged with people moving – they knew not where – in panic, there were roadblocks everywhere, and tall tales of saboteurs, with every hamlet and village instituting its own local ad hoc vigilante ‘guard’ and ‘watchmen’ gangs to keep ‘strangers’ out of their domains and to protect ‘their food’. For all Airey Neave knew he had driven through lethal clouds of fallout from the missile strikes which had obliterated the capital; he might, even now be dying of radiation poisoning...
No, that was no kind of attitude for a time like this!
False modesty be damned Neave realised that he could not afford to be ill, let alone die. Hardly anybody in Cheltenham had a clue what they were doing and his country needed him. It might have been that his life to date had specifically prepared him for his present role at the heart of the nascent – as defined by the relevant regulations – United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration.
Neave, the first British officer to make a successful ‘home run’ back to England from the notorious Oflag IV-C – better known to the general public as Colditz Castle – had worked for MI9 and read the indictments of the top Nazis at the Nuremburg Trials. At Eton in 1933 he had written an essay predicting that Hitler’s rise to power would result in a general European war, studied law at Merton College, and received a territorial commission in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in December 1935. At Oxford he had read the complete works of Carl von Clausewitz in preparation for what he knew lay ahead of his generation. Having never really stepped out of the secret world of MI5 and MI6, after failed attempts to get into Parliament he had finally won the seat of Abingdon in 1953. Had he not suffered a heart attack in 1959 he might have found himself if not in Harold Macmillan’s cabinet – over half the positions were reserved for or occupied by the Prime Minister’s relations and miscellaneous connections by marriage – then at least with a prominent middle ranking ministerial portfolio.
However, never a man to dwell or fret over such ‘minor irritations’ he was presently doing what he had always done, ‘making himself as useful as possible to his country’.
There were two men in the room with the Prime Minister – actually the War Emergency Act specifically designated the man who was primus inter pares, first among equals ‘First Minister’ but nobody was very enthusiastic about that – who glanced at the newcomer.
‘We were wondering what had become of you, Airey,’ the Right Honourable Edward Richard George ‘Ted’ Heath, remarked, forcing an exhausted half-smile.
The other men in the room, the recently arrived ashen-faced leader of the Labour and Co-Operative Party, fifty year old Leonard James ‘Jim’ Callaghan, and the Acting First Sea Lord, fifty-six year old Admiral Sir David Luce half rose to their feet. Of the three men Luce was fresh-faced, his uniform immaculate.
‘Sir David has been in contact with the Far East Fleet,’ Ted Heath explained, waving Neave to pull up a chair. ‘But you’d best give us an update on the latest developments nearer to home first.’
Airey Neave and the man who was - de facto - his Prime Minister had never really got on. They were different kinds of men, where Neave was outgoing, clubbable, Heath was stiff and awkward in the company of people he hardly knew – something of a handicap in political life when ideally, one wanted as many ‘people one hardly knew’ as possible to like and to vote for one – and almost pathologically incapable of tolerating fools gladly or otherwise. He was also a man who gave the impression he was arrogant, aloof, when the people who knew him best knew for a fact that he was neither.
In that era it was still rare, virtually unknown, for a senior Conservative politician to have emerged from Edward Heath’s lower middle class background. Heath had got where he was by sheer intellectual acuity, hard work and dedication to duty. His scholarly brilliance had got him into Oxford, made him a star of the Union at Balliol and seen him rise to the rank – aged twenty-eight - of Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army by VE-Day.
Before the Second War Heath had begun to train for a career in the law; after it he changed course, passing out top of the Civil Service exam and joining the Ministry of Civil Aviation where he had worked briefly under the remarkable Alison Munro, then charged with creating a network of British civilian airports. Heath and the Civil Service had soon parted company, politics beckoned and after a spell as the news editor of the Church Times – he was a devout Christian and a life-long lover of classical and church music – he had entered Parliament as the MP for Bexley in 1950. By the mid-fifties he was the Government Chief Whip, the keeper of all Conservative MPs’ secrets. In 1959 he had joined the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Labour. Later promoted Lord Privy Seal he had been entrusted by Harold Macmillan with the onerous task of negotiating Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community; a matter that had hung on a knife edge threatened by Charles de Gaulle’s veto at the time of the Cuban Missiles Crisis.
Airey Neave momentarily fixed Sir David Luce in his sights as he gratefully sank into his chair.
‘Julian Christopher’s fleet is intact,’ the First Sea Lord and acting Chief of the Defence Staff explained. ‘Ark Royal and Hermes are proceeding north to offer assistance to the Japanese.’
‘Ah,’ the younger man nodded before, with a conscious effort, he collected his sleep-deprived wits. ‘New arrivals are beginning to come in apace,’ he reported, desperate to sound upbeat.
For the last three days broadcasts had been improvised at hourly intervals calling upon specific ‘persons’ to report to their nominated civil defence stations: service personnel to the nearest undamaged base, key workers in the health, transport and industrial sectors to report to their places of work, local authority workers to report to their town halls, and so on. All surviving members of the pre-war Government were required to communicate with, or to travel to Cheltenham. In the last twenty-four hours leading members of the Labour and Liberal parties had similarly been ‘invited’ to contact, or to come directly to Oakley.
In the meantime the Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force had – between the Chiefs of Staff – ‘divvied’ up the country into ‘control zones’ and a national state of ‘martial law’ was being imposed as a ‘short-term measure’ to attempt to restore order in the lightly or undamaged areas[24].
‘Peter Thorneycroft has just arrived,’ Airey Neave explained, hesitating involuntarily because the insertion of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer - by any standards a leading party grandee - into the half-formed Emergency Administration had endless potential for setting foxes among barely established chicken coops. ‘Peter’s a little the worse for wear so we’ve sent him straight to the infirmary but the medicos think he’ll be fine in a few days. Alison Munro has set herself up in Birmingham, I spoke to her on a very bad line an hour ago and she’s hopping mad about the level of co-operation, or rather, non co-operation she’s getting from British Rail.’
This formidable lady had been transferred to the Department of Transport a while ago; presumably on the grounds that she was far too good at her job at Aviation. Whitehall was ever thus...
Ted Heath sucked his teeth, waited for his ex officio self-appointed chief of staff to continue.
‘Iain has finally contacted Cheltenham,’ Airey Neave continued. He was still a little shocked that so few of the ‘big beasts’ of Harold Macmillan’s Government had survived the war. Thus far other than Ted Heath – who had been an obvious candidate, although by no means the favourite to replace Supermac when the old man stepped down – and Peter Thorneycroft apart, only Iain Macleod, Chairman of the Party and Leader of the House of Commons, and Lord Home,
the Foreign Secretary had contacted Cheltenham and the latter two were unlikely to be able to join the Emergency Administration for some days.
In the meantime the hard-pressed UKIEA was being buttressed by a small cadre drawn from General Sir Richard Amyatt Hull’s[25] personal HQ Staff, Royal Navy men Sir David Luce had summoned from Portsmouth and Plymouth, and was, effectively, being actually ‘run’ by two remarkable senior civil servants.
One was Sir Henry Tomlinson, a man slated to be Head of the Home Civil Service sometime in the mid-1960s, who had walked into the Oakley complex and immediately begun to create, from scratch, exactly the sort of organisational framework envisaged - but conspicuously not taken very seriously before his arrival - in the volume upon volume of unread civil defence and disaster planning files which had gathered so much dust in the last fifteen years.
Sir Henry was sixty years old, a dapper, grey fox of a man with impeccable manners and poise who never, ever raised his voice and who knew absolutely everybody who was anybody. He was perhaps the last – and only – man in England who knew where the people and the resources needed to sustain the sorely wracked country through the coming winter were to be found. In a very real sense he was the man actually ‘governing’ the country as the politicians and the military men struggled to get their collective acts together.
At Henry Tomlinson’s side was his oldest friend, the man who by repute was the cleverest man in Whitehall whose anti-American stance within the hierarchy of the Foreign Office after the Suez debacle had – with what seemed like horrible irony - effectively scuppered his brilliant career in the late 1950s. However, in this hour of direst crisis none of that mattered; in the absence of the Foreign Secretary, ‘trapped’ on his Scottish estates for the time being, it was fifty-nine year old Thomas Harding-Grayson who was pulling the strings of what was left of the nation’s ‘relations’ with the rest of the World, and helping his old friend Henry Tomlinson methodically piece back together some kind of governmental machine.
