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

by James Philip

  ‘Communications were still dreadfully unreliable,’ he told one historian many years after the event. ‘It is hard now to convey how, well, confusing the situation seemed from whatever angle one looked at it. I think the consensus in Canberra was that it could not possibly do any harm sending one bluff, straight-talking Navy man up to Singapore to have a chin wag with another!’

  Even in old age[31] Maltravers was a larger than life, jovial presence graced with irrepressible optimism and good humour.

  ‘I’d bumped into your grandfather,’ he reminisced cheerfully, ‘only once in my career – back in the Second War when I was with the Illustrious in the Med in forty-one - I was flabbergasted when he actually remembered me!’

  Maltravers had been struck by the calm professionalism of the C-in-C’s Headquarters at Sembawang, its easy informality and the sense that whatever was going on elsewhere the Royal Navy was in charge in Singapore.

  ‘Who the Devil did you upset to get yourself posted attaché on the other side of the World, Maltravers? The C-in-C asked me as he shook my hand. I’d been expecting everybody to be down in the dumps because of the affair in the Sea of Japan but the chaps were in excellent heart. The Admiral had worked the two carriers – Ark Royal and Hermes – practically into the ground and they and their escorts were on the way back south ready and willing to take on all comers. Neither the Ark or the Big H were back at Singapore – they were still several days steaming to the north – but Julian Christopher and his Staff had jumped ship at Tokyo and the RAF had flown them back to Sembawang on one of the shuttle Comets which had just arrived from Middle East Command; incidentally, the same plane that I later hitched a lift on to get from Canberra to Singapore. When I explained that I had made the mistake of telling a chum of mine at The Rag, the Army and Navy Club, that I fancied a return to the East – I was there during the war, you see – and that never was a saying more true than that one should be careful what one asks for, he laughed like a drain!’

  In Julian Christopher’s absence at sea the commando carrier HMS Albion and the new light cruiser, Tiger had arrived at Sembawang. The destroyer Carysfort – which had not yet returned - was still undergoing rushed essential maintenance at Aden.

  Albion had unloaded 2nd Battalion 40 Commando, the men of which were settling into the now somewhat overcrowded Royal Marines barracks; 1st Battalion 42 Commando having been due to be rotated back to the United Kingdom – probably via Aden and Malta – as soon as their ‘relieving’ unit arrived in the Far East.

  Frank Maltravers had brought copies and abstracts of damage assessment reports from the United Kingdom. These papers had reached Canberra in the first diplomatic bags to be carried to Australia on the recently initiated air ‘shuttle’ operated by RAF Transport Command from its base at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.

  These documents made for grim reading.

  London, Liverpool, Lincoln, the Medway Towns, Gravesend, Canterbury, and the towns of the Isle of Thanet were all gone. Hull, Leeds and York, and large tracts of East Anglia were badly damaged or impassable due to fallout. A big bomb had gone off in Morecombe Bay and wrecked everything on its shores for miles around. There were no casualty figures at that time and even in some of the areas less badly wrecked by the bombing it was likely that civil society had broken down. Presently, British Forces abroad were ‘on their own’ until further notice while the Interim Emergency Administration in Cheltenham struggled to reassert its writ across England.

  ‘The funny thing was that the more we learned about what had happened the more some of us drew a collective sigh of relief. The worst might have happened,’ Frank Maltravers remembered, ‘but an awful lot was still intact. The West Country had got away Scot free, just like Wales, Ireland, Scotland, most of the northern industrial heartlands and the Midlands, with all its factories where practically everything from clothes pegs to cars to V-Bombers was actually made had hardly been scratched. The London and Liverpool docks were out of action for God alone knew how long but the Channel coast and its ports all the way from Falmouth to Dover were still open, on the East Coast Hull was a mess but Immingham, its chemical works and its refineries had survived, the North East, its docks, shipyards, heavy industry and coal fields was practically all in one piece. To all us old salts who had been through the Second War well, once the penny dropped that actually we had got off quite lightly, all things considered we all started looking at each other and saying not everything is lost! For us it was just like the forty-five do, just unimaginably worse and we carried on because what else where we supposed to do?’

  Contemporary historians have drawn parallels with the fallacy of a Cold War strategy based on the fear of MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – and the disastrously flawed thinking underpinning the inter-war (1918 to 1939) so-called ‘Singapore Strategy’, the single most catastrophic blunder in the long catalogue of military thinking in the history of the British Empire.

  What goes around; comes around. Nuclear deterrence was supposed to end all wars; obviously, it did no such thing, nor could it ever achieve such a thing. Over four decades previously imperial defence planners in London had promulgated an ambitious naval policy to ‘deter’ Japanese aggression in the Far East which mandated the building of a great naval base guarding the Malacca Strait and the sea lanes to India and Australia at Singapore.

  Singapore, Winston Churchill had confidently declared would be ‘the Gibraltar of the East’.

  Situated at the northern tip of Singapore facing across the Johore Strait which separated the island from Malaya, Sembawang was that great naval base, impregnably fortified and protected by the 15-inch naval rifles sited at Changi and Buona Vista, and other heavy guns at the Fort Siloso, Fort Canning, and Labrador batteries, and the fighters and bombers based at RAF Tengah and at RAF Sembawang. On paper it was indeed the ‘Gibraltar of the East’ except in reality it never was and could never be anything of the sort; because when the moment of decision came there was no great fleet to send to Singapore, its defending aircraft were pathetically few in number and mostly obsolete, and its great guns pointed out to sea not northwards in the direction from which the victorious Japanese 25th Army was actually approaching.

  HMNB Sembawang had been completed in 1939 at the – for the time – unheralded, unthinkable cost of over £60 million. Covering over twenty-one square miles of territory and featuring the then largest dry dock in the World, a huge floating dock and so much fuel storage capacity that it could keep the entire Royal Navy at sea for the best part of half-a-year the British had been forced to try – not very successfully – to demolish it in the desperate hours before the island fell to the Japanese in mid-February 1942.

  The Singapore Strategy was as bankrupt in its era as nuclear deterrence was that December day in 1962 when Frank Maltravers realised, that entirely accidentally he was present at one of those – in retrospect – moments when history takes a new, unexpected turn.

  Churchill had called the fall of Singapore ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’[32]; the cornerstone of Imperial defence policy in the Far East had been an exercise in ruinously expensive wishful thinking. Rather, one might observe, like much of the strategic thinking post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  As Captain Stephen Roskill[33] insightfully observed of the failed Singapore Strategy ‘the concept...had, perhaps through constant repetition, assumed something of the inviolability of Holy Writ’. So it was again two decades later when US paranoia over the installation of a handful of batteries of Soviet medium-range intercontinental ballistic missiles – placed with an insane reckless abandon by a Kremlin populated by old men with a collective death wish – on a poverty-struck island some sixty miles off its Floridian southern coast, ineluctably lit the fuse to World War III.

  Everybody had believed that nobody would be so stupid as to start a nuclear war; and everybody had been wrong...

  ‘We tend to be practical chaps in the Grey Funnel Line,’ Frank Maltravers observed.
‘By then we had come to the conclusion that the boat – the World – had stopped sinking so the only thing to do was to try and get the engines working again and to make the best of a bad deal. In the back of our minds we all knew that the British Isles imported six times as much food as it exported and that practically every pint of petrol and diesel needed to keep the old country running had to be refined from crude oil from the Persian Gulf or the Americas. Basically, if something was not done to get the big steamers back plying the global sea lanes again as soon as possible things were going to get very sticky back in the old country.’

  The problem of course, was that in such a thoroughly broken World in which the economic, fiscal and legal framework which had made international commerce possible was wrecked, how exactly did one set about restarting the seized up great engine of maritime trade?

  Nobody it seemed knew the answer to that question.

  But one man had decided he was going to find it.

  Overnight Julian Christopher had posted new orders to the Far East Fleet[34]. Coincidentally, the previous evening David Luce had confirmed – in a C-in-C’s eyes only cable – that his friend’s son had survived the war unscathed: ‘Lieutenant P.J. Christopher having served with professional distinction on the night of the war’.[35]

  Henceforth the newly arrived Tiger and Albion, and their escorts, Cassandra, Yarmouth and Brighton would remain at Singapore prepared to ‘deter’ Indonesian territorial ambitions and to support the civil power in Borneo as required.

  The 3rd Frigate Squadron’s old Loch class ships would be deployed as guard ships on stations where otherwise Royal Australian Navy vessels would need to patrol – in the Java Sea and in the waters around New Guinea - to ensure the freedom of navigation.

  The rest of the fleet, in three ‘sailing’ rather than fighting groups, led by Ark Royal, Hermes and the Belfast would steam south for Australasian ports.

  Given that the next Comet ‘shuttle’ flight stopping off at Singapore on the way down to Canberra was not scheduled for another four days – an indication of how parlous immediate post-war communications still were - Frank Maltravers had been looking forward to spending several days in the company of like-minded Navy men. However, all that had gone out of the window within minutes of his being taken aside by the C-in-C.

  ‘Cavendish is topping off her bunkers and readying to sail on the tide. I’ve brought her captain onshore to beef up my Operations Staff and given the ship to Simon Cassels.’

  The visiting Naval Attaché had been sensitive not just to what he was being told but the older man’s tone. Like all successful – in the Navy officers tried to avoid using words like ‘great’ – commanders of men he understood that it was not just what a man said, or even what he achieved that was the real measure of his leadership, it was the way in which he commanded.

  Simon Cassels was a relatively newly minted Lieutenant-Commander who had been in command of one of the 108th Minesweeper Squadron’s Ton-class boats at Hong Kong a month ago.

  He was a ‘sound man’ by all accounts who had caught Julian Christopher’s eye before he was sent out to Hong Kong.

  ‘I’ve promoted Cassels to Commander with immediate effect,’ the C-in-C had explained to Frank Maltravers, ‘and given him orders to make all haste to Perth. Cavendish will carry despatches and a team of liaison officers and communications specialists under your command to ensure that when the Ark, the Big H and the Belfast arrive in Australian waters they will always be able to talk to each other. The Governor General will insure that there is a plane waiting for you in Western Australia to whisk you to Canberra the moment you disembark. The plan is that Cavendish will rendezvous with the fleet oiler HMAS Supply[36] at Christmas Island so that thereafter she may proceed to Perth at maximum speed.’

  The old ‘C’ class destroyer had cleared Angler Bank off Changi and worked up to twenty-seven knots as she steered almost due east out of the Singapore Strait. With sea room out in the South China Sea Simon Cassels had pointed his new command’s razor sharp bow to the south, and confident that ‘opening all the taps’ was not going to break the old ship had sent her racing south-south-east past the Indonesian islands guarding the coast of Sumatra towards the Sunda Strait where Anak Krakatoa rumbled perennially to the west of the island of Java.

  ‘We made rendevouz with the Supply five miles north of Christmas Island thirty-four hours after clearing the Johore Strait,’ Simon Cassels wrote shortly before his death[37]. ‘The oiler’s crew were still learning their business so refuelling took a couple of hours longer than it ought but we all knew the Aussies had moved heaven and earth to get the Supply on station in time to meet us, so there were no recriminations! The run down to Perth was a slightly less madcap thing than that down through the Sunda Straits. At full speed Cavendish would have been dead in the water two to three hundred miles north of Perth – with the taps fully open she had about twelve hundred miles in her legs whereas our destination was – give or take – a sixteen hundred mile run. In those days there were no oiling stops north of Perth so it was a matter of fine calculation getting to Freemantle without running the bunkers completely dry. As it was we must have been sucking sludge out of the bottom of the bilges by the time we tied up!’

  HMS Cavendish had made the passage – in excess of two thousand six hundred nautical miles in a few minutes over four days. The half-a-dozen surviving members of her crew this author has spoken to or corresponded with over the years all claim it was ‘the ride’ of a lifetime.

  ‘There is nothing quite like standing on the open bridge of a fleet destroyer making best speed on a brilliant sunny day in a moderate seaway,’ Simon Cassels maintained. ‘Of course, a week after we berthed at Freemantle we needed to dry dock Cavendish to make good all the damage our helter skelter run south had wrought on her Second World War machinery!’

  In the event Frank Maltravers and his ‘advanced guard’ flew into Canberra several hours after the most recent Comet shuttle had landed and departed.

  However, in times of crisis ‘gestures’ matter a great deal.

  The arrival of HMS Cavendish in Western Australia was front page news on every Australian paper, and radio and TV interviews with Frank Maltravers and the dapper, modest captain of the destroyer had infiltrated practically every home in Australia and New Zealand within twenty-four hours.

  Symbolism was everything; the day after Cavendish’s departure for Perth the Ark Royal and the Hermes – both Sembawang bound – received new orders to steam hard respectively for Brisbane and Darwin.

  In the event Hermes was forced to dock at Sembawang to repack a leaking shaft, delaying her arrival in Australia by some ten days.

  Nevertheless, the message was loud and clear.

  The Royal Navy was coming.

  Everything would be okay after all...

  Chapter 11 | Prestbury Park

  Monday 19th November 1962

  The Grandstand, Cheltenham Race Course, Gloucestershire

  Tom Harding-Grayson was both intrigued and vexed to be peremptorily summoned from his lair in the GCHQ building at Benhall at short notice. The new Permanent Secretary of Her Majesty’s Foreign and Colonial Office had been reviewing a briefing paper for his principal, Sir Alexander ‘Alec’ Douglas Home designed to stir – preferably shock – the great man into action. Any action at all would be an improvement; ever since the night of the war Lord Home[38] gave every appearance of being a man in a walking trance. Not that it really mattered at the moment; everything was broken and notwithstanding miscellaneous erratic communications with those Commonwealth nations actually capable of broadcasting over or accessing the surviving undersea cables, normal ‘foreign policy’ was not so much a dead letter, as irrelevant in the present circumstances. The Prime Minister and the military were doing their utmost to restore the rule of law and the writ of the Cheltenham administration but, as people were saying, these were early days...

  ‘I’d have thought the Foreign Office would have been the
first department to sponsor the plan!’ Margaret Thatcher declared with infuriated stridency.

  Tom Harding-Grayson had not had a lot to do with either the Ministry of Supply – which had set up one of its temporary offices in the Tattersalls Grandstand of the ancient race course in the country to the north east of the town in the last week – or its mercurial Amazonian mistress.

  The man and the woman were standing in the empty Festival Restaurant overlooking the Winner’s Enclosure, the Parade Ring and the gloomy, mist-shrouded expanse of the old race course. Although Tom Harding-Grayson was struck by the profound dissonance of the setting and the moment, he doubted his companion shared his sense of the unlikely, or the bizarre. He suspected that her mind was too literal, too focused on the immediate ongoing crisis to be distracted by the ‘mood music’ of her surroundings.

  Down in the old Unsaddling Ring soldiers patrolled with their fingers on the triggers of their L1A1 Self-Loading Rifles (SLRs) eying every movement around them with extreme prejudice. No minister or civil servant went anywhere in Cheltenham without at least two heavily armed bodyguards after last week’s killings.

  Dark rumours circulated about Soviet sleeper agents and fifth columnists, black marketeers and criminals, men and women driven mad by the cataclysm; and the Army had orders to shoot to kill anybody acting suspiciously in the daylight hours in the vicinity of the Emergency Administration buildings or other ‘vital installations’. To be caught out and about in the dusk to dawn curfew being enforced within a five-mile radius measured from the centre of Cheltenham could be a death sentence.

  Nobody knew if they were dealing with an insurgency, a spontaneous insurrection or simply a breakdown of all civilised norms of behaviour. Bombs had been placed under vehicles, fuel tanks blown up and food and other queues could suddenly turn into riots. In Portsmouth Harbour the captain of a destroyer had been shot in the shoulder by a sniper on shore, and repeated attempts had been made to start fires in Royal Navy warehouses. No road was safe from marauding gangs, every policeman had had to be armed, and several hospitals had been ransacked by mobs.