Operation Manna (Timeline 10/27/62 - Australia)

by James Philip

  Tomlinson was a widow, Tom Harding-Grayson divorced and it happened that they periodically met up at the latter’s residence at Sonning near Reading in Berkshire for a weekend away from the intrigues of Whitehall, and to spend long, slow walks putting the World to rights trekking by the Thames.

  Luckily, or perhaps serendipitously, they had still been up in the early hours of Sunday morning swapping opinions on the bottle of Speyside single malt whiskey Sir Henry had brought with him from his Pimlico apartment – in Dolphin Square on the Embankment – when the room momentarily lit up like daylight. They had gone to ground, as men of their generation always did when they thought well, knew, that something had blown up and waited for the building to disintegrate around them. It had not. As one they had opened the windows before the blast over pressure of the relatively distant nuclear detonation hit the house, saving at least the panes in that one room.

  The power had gone off soon afterwards.

  Hurrying to squeeze into the small space below the stairs they had waited for the end. Subsequently, the blast wave from another, thankfully more distant but probably much bigger bomb had made the whole house feel as if it had moved sideways. All the windows had gone by then and roof tiles cascaded down all around...

  In the morning they had gathered what they could carry, found a policeman who directed them to a nearby Army base, identified themselves and demanded passage to Cheltenham. They had both been equally astonished when the Army obliged them.

  Arriving in Cheltenham thirty-six hours later they had been ‘more than a little busy’ ever since.

  They had determined – ruefully - that their job was a little like trying to organise all the King’s, or rather, the Queen’s men to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again after he had had his fall; except infinitely more complicated and – if they were so foolish as to stop and think about it - utterly heart breaking.

  Edward Heath vented a spontaneous sigh of relief at the news that his old friend Iain Macleod had ‘made contact’.

  ‘Iain and Evelyn are in one piece,’ Airey Neave went on, anticipating Heath’s next question: what of his family? ‘No news of Torquil or Diana, as yet.’

  Iain Macleod and his wife were accounted for; their children not.

  Airey Neave did not dwell on this.

  If one stopped to think for a single moment about what had been lost one might lose all hope...

  ‘General Hull’s boys have finished their survey of the Chilmark bunker,’ he went on briskly. Personally, he considered worrying about the suitability of the old RAF ammunition store some seventy miles to the south in Wiltshire as a secondary communications centre for the UKIEA at a time like this was a waste of time.

  RAF Chilmark was an abandoned underground limestone quarry – opened to supply stone for Salisbury Cathedral – acquired by the War Office in 1936. Its tunnels had been strengthened and lined with concrete giving parts of it the appearance of a section of the London Underground - and the rest of the ‘bunker’ generally ‘tidied up’ before the 1939 war. During that war it was utilised as a bomb store and to co-ordinate two other large satellite weapons bunkers at Eastlays and Ridge Quarries at Corsham, and miscellaneous ‘over ground’ munitions stores located at Dinton and Grovelley Wood.

  ‘Basically, the site will need a lot of work to bring it up to scratch.’

  Edward Heath absorbed this.

  ‘We’ll look at Chilmark again in the spring,’ he decided. He gave Neave a hard look, a little irritated by the hint of a saturnine smile playing on the other man’s lips. ‘What else?’

  ‘Your old friend the Member for Finchley has surfaced,’ Airey Neave confided conspiratorially for no other reason than that the memory of his recent meeting with the Honourable Member in question had, unaccountably, cheered him up no end.

  ‘Margaret’s here?’

  ‘Yes. With her twins; understandably, they’re all a little bit shaken up. No news of Denis, her husband, I’m afraid. Apparently, he was staying over in the City when the Russians attacked.’

  A flicker of pain passed Edward Heath’s eyes but then for a fleeting moment he too fought back the urge to threaten a smile.

  He and Margaret Hilda Thatcher had had a rocky relationship, mended somewhat in recent years after he – exerting his influence as Tory Chief Whip – had put his not inconsiderable weight behind her campaign to be the Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Finchley in the 1959 General Election. The lady had been trying to get into the Commons since 1951; she had met her husband, a well to do divorced businessman some years her senior while campaigning at Dartford. In those days she was financing her campaigning by working as an industrial chemist for J. Lyons and Co in Hammersmith.

  Researching emulsifiers for ice cream...

  It was a funny old World...

  She had qualified as a barrister – as a taxation specialist - the year she was carrying the twins. That was 1953 so the children, Carol and Mark would be nine now...

  A Government Chief Whip prided himself on knowing everything about his ‘flock’. He had known she would be a breath of fresh air at Westminster long before she made her maiden speech in the House. Unsurprisingly, she had made her mark early, successfully placing a private members bill before Parliament which, when it became law in 1960 had compelled local councils to hold their meetings in public. Soon afterwards she had defied the leadership but earned the approbation of many of the Party’s natural supporters by voting for the restoration of ‘birching’ as a legal corporal punishment sanction.

  Harold Macmillan had promoted Margaret Thatcher to a junior front bench position a little over a year ago, making her the youngest woman – aged thirty-six – to ever hold such a high government post. Now it seemed as if the driven, unconsciously charismatic force of nature that was Margaret Hilda Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter from Grantham who had rubbed so many of Supermac’s geriatric backwoodsmen up the wrong way, had fought her way to Cheltenham to serve...

  Edward Heath had been contemplating placing Airey Neave – his best political ‘fixer’ – in charge of the still as yet to be formally established Ministry of Supply. He had stayed his hand the last twenty-four hours because Airey was doing such invaluable service ‘running’ the politics of the Oakley complex.

  ‘You and Margaret get on very well?’ He put to the hero of Colditz, his tone a little distracted.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Neave confessed. ‘Life’s never boring around Margaret, what!’

  Heath thought for another moment.

  ‘I need you to carry on doing the sterling work you’ve been doing finding out what’s going on and liaising with the various elements of the Emergency Administration as it,’ he hesitated, ‘develops. But how would you feel about working with Margaret at Supply?’

  ‘Er, I hadn’t really thought about it.’

  ‘She’d be the Minister, you’d be her chief of staff and carry on being the Emergency Administration’s trouble shooter, Airey,’ Heath explained, half-expecting the other man to rebuff him out of hand.

  Airey Neave frowned for a moment; and then his lips quirked into a grimace as he considered the proposition.

  He grunted distractedly, as if struck by a thought that tickled his sense of humour.

  ‘That might be fun,’ he declared.

  Chapter 9 | Sea of Japan

  Sunday 11th November 1962

  USS Midway, Sea of Japan

  Fifty year old Alabama-born Vice Admiral Thomas Hinman Moorer had only taken command of the United States Seventh Fleet a fortnight before the World went mad. Today, Moorer is a little known, peripheral figure in the tumultuous events of the first half of the 1960s but just after the Cuban Missiles War he was probably the US Navy’s brightest star. At the time of his promotion to rear admiral in 1958 he had been the youngest officer of flag rank in the service and by 1962 he was being talked of as a ‘shoe-in’ as a future Chief of Naval Operations.

  Raised in Eufala, Alabama he was the son
of a dentist father and a teacher mother who had showed an innate aptitude for mechanical engineering and the natural sciences at an early age. In fact, he was a precocious youth, at Cloverdale High School in Montgomery at the age of fifteen he was his school class valedictorian, and when aged twenty-one he graduated from the US Naval Academy – where he had worn the blue and gold varsity football uniform as a linesman throughout his four years at Annapolis – it was with such distinction that he automatically earned a commission in the Navy.[26]

  Moorer had trained as a naval aviator, qualifying as a pilot at Pensacola in July 1936 and as fate would have it his was one of the first aircraft to get into the air when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour on 7th December 1941.

  He was a veteran of the disastrous Dutch East Indies Campaign. At the controls of a PBY – Catalina – flying boat of Patrol Squadron 101 (VP-101) on Thursday 19th February 1942 he survived an attack by Japanese fighters, crash-landing in the sea north of Darwin, Australia. Wounded in the hip by shrapnel he and his crew were promptly picked up by a Philippine freighter, the Florence D; and then shipwrecked anew when the merchantman was dive-bombed by more Japanese planes. Taking charge of the situation he had led the survivors to land in two lifeboats, drawn a large SOS in the sand and waited. Fortuitously, two days later an Australian aircraft had spotted the message and on his return to friendly territory Moorer had been awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.

  Three months later he won a Distinguished Flying Cross for valour flying supplies in and taking out wounded men from the beleaguered island of Timor. Promoted to Lieutenant-Commander he had gone back to VP-101, serving with the squadron for much of the Pacific War until he was appointed as commanding officer of Bombing Squadron 132 (VP-132) – a training posting – prior to transferring onto the Staff of the Atlantic Fleet.

  Promoted Captain in 1952 at the age of forty he had attended the Naval War College, served as an Aide to the Secretary of the Navy and commanded the Currituck class seaplane tender USS Salisbury Sound (AV-13). Fondly regaled as the ‘Sally Sound’ the big tender – operating out of Okinawa, Taiwan and Luzon – had periodically served as the flagship of the Taiwan Patrol Force during Moorer’s tenure in command. Later in the 1950s he was a protégé of Admiral Arleigh M. Burke, whose assistant he became when the great man became Chief of Naval Operations.

  After conferring with CINCPAC – the legendary Admiral Harry Felt – in Honolulu on the morning after the night of the October War, Moorer had flown to Okinawa and hitched a lift out to the flagship of Carrier Division Six, the USS Midway (CV-41) to take personal command of all ‘war fighting’ and ‘emergency relief work’ in the Western Pacific.

  By the time Julian Christopher’s two small carrier battle groups sailed into the Sea of Japan Moorer was reasonably confident the ‘war fighting’ part of his mission was over. Several small Soviet warships had been engaged and destroyed by his aircraft – mainly in the Sea of Okhotsk – and a slew of Russian fishing and merchant vessels arrested and escorted to ‘ports of internment’ on Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu.[27] Additionally, several presumed enemy submarine contacts had been engaged with non-nuclear guided munitions and depth charges, one east of the Kamchatka Peninsula after a suspected ‘possible’ torpedo attack on one of Moorer’s destroyers. Seventh Fleet had suffered no combat casualties[28] in this ‘cleansing of the battle space’ phase of operations; although in the near Typhoon storms of the previous week two men had been washed overboard from a fleet oiler, and scores of others had suffered ‘rough weather’ injuries on storm-tossed ships which had been continuously at sea ever since the night of the war.

  Moorer had watched the British ships approaching from the south with increasing irritation. Until he was absolutely confident that Soviet naval and air forces – such as had survived in the theatre – represented no further threat to his ships, navigation in the North Western Pacific, or to the Japanese main islands the last thing he wanted was a superfluous ‘allied’ force getting under his feet. He did not know why the British had come north in the first place and now the two interloping carrier groups were about to trespass into the overlapping operational areas allocated to his own three, closely integrated Task Forces.

  When signals had begun arriving requesting the diversion of ships from his fleet train to conduct the UNREP – Underway Replenishment – of the British ships it had been the last straw.

  Had Moorer been operating in the North Atlantic, Arctic or in the Mediterranean unambiguous, long-standing standard operating procedures and protocols would have governed the operations of his and Julian Christopher’s ships; the chain of command would have been set in stone, and basically everybody would have known where they stood and what, exactly, was expected of them. However, out here in the Pacific – an American Ocean – nothing was clear. Even back in 1945 when the British had sent a huge fleet – one that dwarfed Julian Christopher’s present command – to the Pacific to join in the war against Japan, the US Navy had bitterly resented and resisted the ‘British interference’ in its own mission.

  Back in 1945 the Royal Navy’s contribution – in theatre with a fleet train so ramshackle that the US Navy was continually having to waste resources badly needed elsewhere to keep the ‘Brits at sea’ – had been peripheral to the operations of the giant US fleets ranging the vastnesses of the Western Pacific.

  The more things change the more they remain the same...

  The Commander of the Seventh Fleet had tried to be diplomatic.

  He had inquired what ‘aid and assistance’ the British Far East Fleet was equipped to ‘deliver to the authorities onshore and at sea off Hokkaido?’

  Minimal sea lift and limited medical assistance...

  The US Air Force had already opened new air bridges from California via the Hawaiian Islands while Seventh Fleet co-ordinated a massive resupply and evacuation operation across Hokkaido. Emergency field hospitals had been set up, food and fuel depots established and several thousand additional US servicemen were ashore supporting the ‘civilian powers’. It was hard to see what the British could add to the effort; in fact their presence was likely to disrupt the existing smooth-running operation.

  There had been at least three megaton-range strikes on Japan’s northern main island. One had obliterated Sapporo; others had devastated parts of Kitami and Kushiro. The death toll was now estimated to be in the high hundreds of thousands with perhaps a quarter of a million people variously injured requiring hospitalisation. Many of the survivors had appalling burns, or were blinded and the one thing Moorer knew for an absolute certainty was that the British Far East Fleet was not about to land the thousand specially trained burns trauma doctors and nurses that he actually needed right now!

  Another big bomb had targeted the Sendai prefecture on Honshu Island causing damage and injuries in the city of Sendai and wasting the countryside to its south and east. Two offshore strikes – mercifully several miles distant – from the port cities of Niigata and Akita had caused widespread relatively minor damage on land and less than a thousand fatalities, although an apparent double strike on the island of Sado some twenty-five miles west of Niigata had wiped out its fifty thousand or more inhabitants.

  ‘Admiral Christopher,’ he explained over the scrambled TBS – Talk Between Ships – UHF radio net. ‘I have given your requests and suggestions careful consideration.’

  Normal communications were still so ‘screwed up’ by the fallout in the atmosphere - or so the experts claimed - to make radio communications ‘over the horizon’ a lottery. In an attempt to mitigate this according to the Midway’s ‘theatre situation board’ the British had left a trail of coastal minesweepers and merchantmen in their wake – strung out like a ball of wool so that they could relay messages back to land bases which still possessed surviving hard-wired land and undersea cable links back home - all the way north. Nobody knew when the ‘broadcast conditions’ would return to normal; presently, in communications terms the situation was analogous to th
e planet being bombarded by wave after wave of massive solar flares.

  Julian Christopher’s voice, static-assailed and liable to peculiar attenuations as it alternatively boomed and faded in the headset, was coolly measured.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, Admiral.’

  Moorer had considered taking this call in his stateroom.

  In the end he had remained in the Midway’s CIC. Nothing he was going to say to the Englishman needed to be in any way confidential.

  ‘I regret that I cannot accede to any of your requests for logistical support and in the prevailing operational circumstances I must decline your offer of assistance.’

  One of Julian Christopher’s ‘suggestions’ had been that his two carrier battle groups take up ‘screening positions in the Sea of Japan and at the entrance to the Sea of Okhotsk to ‘free units of the Midway Task Force for other duties’. He had taken it as read that he deferred to Moorer in all ‘operational matters’ pertaining to the joint deployment of the two fleets.

  ‘Furthermore,’ Moorer went on, ‘I must request that to avoid our forces becoming unnecessarily entangled in the presently problematic communications environment, that you immediately withdraw your ships from the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea.’

  Chapter 10 | Gibraltar of the East

  Saturday 17th November 1962

  HQ British Far East Fleet, HMNB Sembawang, Singapore

  Rear Admiral Sir Francis Maltravers[29] has always been a little coy in his recollections of why exactly the British High Commissioner in Canberra,[30] in consultation with the Governor General, had despatched him to ‘brief’ the C-in-C Far East Station after the humiliation of the ‘Midway Incident’ in the Sea of Japan.