by James Philip
One recent hiccup for the ‘Commonwealth Family’ had been the withdrawal of South Africa, whose apartheid politics were anathema to other sub-Saharan African countries and to many others within the Commonwealth, but political blustering aside filial, cultural, economic and strategic imperatives had ensured the British connection to ‘white’ Southern Africa remained robustly intact.
However, although in the Second World War Britain had been sustained by ‘the Empire’ few seriously believed in the days and weeks after the Cuban Missiles War that ‘the Commonwealth’ would do likewise.
However, the strained but unbroken ties between the old country and apartheid, unrepentantly Afrikaner-led South Africa ought to have been an object lesson to the doom-mongers. Blood is thicker than water and the connective tissue of long-established trade and shared geopolitical vital interests are the imperishable sinews of all great alliances.
More to the point the Commonwealth was a thing built by and resting upon sea power and the freedom of navigation of the World’s oceans. Notwithstanding Britain’s years of post-war Imperial retrenchment the Royal Navy was still everywhere. Granted, not in the strength it was in the Far East; but there were ‘guard ships’ on ‘stations’ throughout the Commonwealth, in the Caribbean, at Simonstown, Mombasa, cruising off remote Pacific islands, in the Persian Gulf, based at Aden, stopping off at Port Stanley in the Falklands; there were destroyer and frigate squadrons in the Mediterranean, ships patrolling seas and oceans thousands of miles from home. Every fresh-faced cadet inducted into the Royal Navy viewed his first ‘world cruise’ as a rite of passage. British submarines surfaced off remote islands in the Southern Ocean, roamed the Mediterranean and watched over the Horn of Africa. The Royal Navy was, and could be, anywhere, a constant reminder of the glory that was the Pax Britannia in a way that RAF jets overflying distant lands eight miles high, and isolated detachments of infantrymen could never hope to match.
‘Nothing’ as Julian Christopher was to remind his countless interlocutors throughout 1963 ‘conveys power, influence, and let’s face it, comfort in one’s hour of greatest need quite like the sight of a bloody great big grey warship dropping anchor in one’s waters!’
Julian Christopher candidly admitted to his second-in-command in Singapore, Nigel Grenville[48], and later to journalists that like everybody else he had been in a state of shock in the days after the war. Similarly, he was to admit that he had mishandled the ‘Midway Affair’ – although most historians agree that the incident reflects little credit on the US Seventh Fleet either – because ‘it was not until at least a fortnight after the shooting stopped that I belatedly realised that the fleet under my command might have a bigger role to play in the new situation’.[49]
The ‘new situation’ was that large areas of the British Isles and its industrial infrastructure had actually survived the war. London and other places had been laid waste and millions killed but there was still something worth fighting for and that made all the difference.
As the Ark Royal steamed south for Australasian waters Julian Christopher’s Staff, reinforced by a small regiment of civilians – colonial civil servants and miscellaneous ‘experts’ plucked from Singaporean schools and colleges – pored over the maps of the Commonwealth and began to analyse the statistical realities of global trade. There were military problems aplenty in the post-October War age but they were as nothing set against the humanitarian disaster inevitably unfolding across much of the Northern Hemisphere. It was winter now in the blasted home lands and in the spring the fallout would lie on the ground. The Administration in Washington had made pious statements about ‘succouring our allies in their hour of need’ but men of Julian Christopher’s generation remembered only too well how slowly – and how hedged around with conditions – had been the first aid to reach the embattled British Isles in the 1945 war. More than once that ‘aid’ had very nearly been turned off and but for Roosevelt railroading ‘lend-lease’ through and past a reluctant Congressional roadblock, God alone knew what would have happened in those dreadful years when Britain stood alone against the Nazis...
This time around the Interim Emergency Administration in Cheltenham would have no gold with which to crease American palms, and promises of ‘aid’ were meaningless unless or until the first ships docked and began to unload their cargoes of the aforementioned ‘aid’ at British ports. Kind words and good intentions never filled empty stomachs.
Although in the sixties and even now Julian Christopher is generally hailed as the architect of what was to become ‘Operation Manna’, he personally never claimed that title. However, it would be remiss not to state herein that among the planning scenarios he instructed his much expanded Staff to undertake in late November and early December 1962 he specifically prioritised two contingencies: firstly, how best to deploy and maintain Commonwealth forces in the Southern Pacific, the waters of South Eastern Asia and the Southern Oceans to guarantee the security of Australasia; and secondly, to consider the viability of and the timescales involved in ‘convoying essential strategic supplies from the Southern Hemisphere to the British Isles’.
But when all is said and done Julian Christopher was a professional fighting sailor and his first duty was to ‘protect’ his country’s interests, people and commerce. In early December 1962 his thoughts turned around ensuring global freedom of navigation, keeping the sea lanes open.
The real architect of Operation Manna and the reinstatement of the seaborne trading routes of the Commonwealth was the Prime Minister of Australia, Sir Robert Menzies.
Chapter 13 | Moreton Bay
Wednesday 28th November 1962
Moreton Bay, Brisbane
The men of the Ark Royal were still getting used to their new C-in-C’s methods; Julian Christopher had two operating speeds: dead slow or full ahead! The Ark had made the passage through the South China Sea, through the Sunda Strait and east along the southern coast of Java through the Timor, Arafura and Coral Seas at an average speed of over twenty-five knots. One of her two escorts, the frigate Llandaff, with a design top speed of only twenty-four knots had eventually been left behind in the South China Sea with orders to ‘rejoin the flagship at your best speed’ in Brisbane, or if that proved impossible, Ark Royal’s next port of call, Sydney. In the meantime the great aircraft carrier had pounded away from the slower Type 61 frigate in company with her sole remaining escort, the Battle class destroyer Barrosa. Both ships had refuelled from the Australian oiler HMAS Supply south of Cilacap, Central Java and Barrosa had come alongside Ark Royal east of Cairns for a quick ‘top up’ before the two ships picked their way inshore through the Great Barrier Reef.
HMAS Parramatta (DE-46), a Type 12 frigate built under licence by the Cockatoo Island Dockyard in Sydney had come out to escort the carrier and her consort into the deep water channel and anchored nearby Ark Royal shortly after dawn.
Already by mid-morning am ever growing flotilla of launches and yachts had come out to welcome the Royal Navy while the Ark Royal’s Westland Wessex helicopters were busy shuttling from the bay to the land and back again. One of the first dignitaries to disembark on the flagship’s great flight deck was Frank Maltravers, despatched to Brisbane by the British High Commissioner to communicate the latest digests of information from the old country, sharing a ‘ride’ out to the Ark Royal with three representatives of the touring England cricket team.
The small cricketing delegation was led – albeit only nominally, Maltravers belatedly realised - by none other than the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal of England, no less! The two other ‘cricketers’ were Edward Ralph ‘Ted’ Dexter and the Reverend David Sheppard. Of the three men it was the England Captain, twenty-seven year old Dexter who made the lasting impression on the forty-five year old Naval Attaché.
‘Ted has a presence about him. The Grand Old Duke was a cheerful, rather Gilbert and Sullivan sort of fellow, a pleasant enough blusterer, but Dexter was the only man who was in no way diminished when Admiral Ch
ristopher walked into the compartment. The two men had never met before that day but you could tell they had each other’s measure, and respect from the outset...’
Dexter later wrote of that first meeting with Admiral Christopher: ‘A man of a little above my own height, grey blue eyed and with a commanding presence that instantly galvanised the room when he entered, the ‘fighting admiral’ who had so distinguished himself in command of destroyer and cruiser squadrons in the Second War, told us the bad news without flinching, and then, and I shall never forget this as long as I live, declared; no matter, we still have the Navy and while our ships still float there will always be hope.’
David Sheppard, the thirty-three year old Cambridge University and Sussex opening batsman who had only returned to first-class cricket the previous summer after a four year sabbatical conducting ‘missionary work’ in London’s East End, was Maltravers recalls, ‘rather subdued, like a pre-occupied vicar and nobody on the Ark had the foggiest idea what he was doing onboard’[50].
Julian Christopher had arranged for two members of his Staff to brief visiting Brisbane notables, the cricketers and the pack of press and radio men who made their way out to the flagship that day on the latest news from home and abroad.
Several Australian journalists reported that ‘the Admiral struck an anti-American tone’ that was ‘generally shared by all those onboard the British flagship’.
‘I don’t agree with that,’ Ted Dexter told this author when he was interviewed for this book’s companion history[51]. ‘I honestly think that he and his people were just telling it how it was. Personally, I never felt, certainly not at that time, any particular animus towards the United States. Looking back it was remarkable how little anger there was that the US had, in effect, blown up half the world over a few rockets on Cuba.’
It was the day many of those present learned of the full horror of the cataclysm. Until then they had heard rumours and opinions, a variety of the speculative best and worst scenarios and hoped, above hope, that things were not quite as bad as they might have been; but that day the blinkers were removed and the true magnitude of the disaster was writ large.
It was believed that European civilization north of the Alps and the Pyrenees was gone bar parts of southern and western France. The message from home was that although everybody was ‘doing their best and pulling together’, the situation was ‘dire’.
On the bright side the Royal Navy, a handful of vessels moored or docked at Chatham on the night of the war apart, was intact and ‘fully operational’ in home waters and on ‘all foreign stations’.
However, nobody pretended this alleviated the grimness of the prospects. It was feared that at least ten – possibly as many as fifteen – millions had died in England alone and shortages of fuel and foodstuffs, and the non-availability of modern medical services across large areas of the country ‘boded ill’ in the coming months.
There were as yet no casualty lists, nor were there likely to be in the foreseeable future if ever. The destruction was so widespread and the chaos so crippling that the Interim Emergency Administration was too busy simply working to ‘mitigate the continuing die off’ in the wake of the war to worry about things like that.
‘Die off’ was an expression which even now curdles the soul. That a government in a first world country in the second half of the twentieth century should be left with no other policy priority than to somehow, in some way slow down the rate at which its traumatised, terrified, sick and starving people were dying was – that awful winter - the true measure of the cataclysm visited upon the British people by the madness of the warring superpowers. The very young and the old were the most vulnerable, and few people with pre-existing debilitating medical conditions or handicaps survived that first winter. For the seriously injured, especially the badly burned, death came as a merciful release. Thereafter malnutrition and the bitter, never-ending cold began to erode the survivors, a third of whom were forced to live out the months after the war in bomb damaged, leaking, unheated and unheatable homes. Petrol supplies soon ran out as fuel was reserved for the use of the military and the emergency services, millions of tons of coal stockpiled at regional dumps could not be distributed for want of fuel and lorries and in any event the snow and ice soon blocked most major roads, and there was no remotely nationwide postal or telephone system in the United Kingdom again until the summer of 1963.
Tragically, most pre-war ‘emergency planning’ had assumed normal peacetime strategic reserves – of food and fuel in the main – would survive a future war. Instead, at least six weeks supplies for half the nation was obliterated when London and Liverpool were destroyed, and those depots meaningfully maintained at various other ports and designated industrial and commercial sites across England were, like the coal stocks, inaccessible because the rail and road network was paralysed in the weeks after the war. By the time the UKIEA in Cheltenham finally established official RSGs – Regional Seats of Governments – in England in mid-January 1963 under conditions of martial law, civil society even in the unbombed areas was breaking down.
Had it been known in those weeks just after the war that no substantial ‘American aid’ would actually reach British ports until June 1963 and that thereafter, this ‘aid’ would proceed at a trickle and stop and start without notice, the UKIEA would have despaired. Had it not been for the lifeline shipments of grain from Canada and the occasional tanker returning from Abadan or the Caribbean that first spring the ‘die off’ might have been even worse...
But all that was still in an unknown and unknowable future. Nobody really believed that Uncle Sam would leave the old country in the lurch.
Nevertheless, ‘while our American allies have promised emergency aid,’ Admiral Christopher informed his guests, ‘such aid has not thus far materialised.’
There was little doubt that the United States had ‘won’ the war. Several American cities had been destroyed but it was believed at the time that the Soviet Union had been wrecked from end to end; very much in the fashion that Eastern Europe, Germany, Austria and the Low Countries – and probably, Scandinavia – had also been ‘put to the sword’.
Although everybody assumed it had ‘all started over Cuba’ nobody knew who had fired the first shot. Notwithstanding, President Kennedy had already claimed, repeatedly, that when Texas and Florida came under attack he had had no choice but to do the ‘only thing which might save everything that we hold dear’.
Many diarists recorded a growing angst about the tone of JFK and his acolytes; there was something plaintive in the constant self-exculpatory narrative that soon began to suggest that the Americans were a little ‘miffed’ that the rest of the World did not seem to appreciate the ‘good deed that they had all been done’ by Uncle Sam.
At first people put this down to the shock of the war.
The Kennedy Administration believed they had saved the World; and while only a minority of the survivors abroad actually regarded JFK and his cabal as a bunch of murderers if you blow up the World you have no right to expect everybody to be happy about it!
The US Ambassador to Canberra was genuinely shocked when a reporter suggested to him that Australians would think twice about buying ‘blood-stained American goods’ in future.
‘The British special relationship with Washington cost them ten million dead,’ another journalist posited rhetorically, ‘why should we have anything to do with an ally like that?’
There had been two suicides in the early hours of the second morning the Ark Royal was in Brisbane. The body of Lieutenant-Commander Victor Tremayne, the C-in-C’s secretary and flag lieutenant was discovered in his cabin shortly after a muffled gunshot was heard in an adjacent passageway.
‘...I know that I am letting the side down but I do not see any future. I joined the service to defend everything I hold dear and I have failed. We have all failed...’
In his brief suicide note he also apologised profusely for the ‘inconvenience and disturbance’ the
manner of his death would entail for the ‘crew of the Ark’.
Another man, a twenty year old cook had been seen to walk to the port side of the flight deck and – clutching what looked like one of the heavy chocks used to ensure aircraft did not move while they were being tied down in heavy weather – calmly stepped over the side. A boat was launched within minutes but in those waters, infested with sharks attracted by the gash regularly thrown over the side of the big ship it was impossible to search for let alone hope to recover the young man’s body.
Ordinary Seaman Kenneth Brown was the eleventh of forty-one deaths to be logged as ‘suicides or probable suicides’ by the British Pacific Fleet in the year following the October War. Given that during this period some ten thousand persons served in the Fleet the remarkable thing is that the incidence of suicide was so low.[52] Much of the credit for this must be laid at Julian Christopher’s door in leading the Fleet with such charismatic purpose and for successfully promoting an esprit de corps that men under his command proudly and spontaneously spoke of for the rest of their lives.
It was typical of the ‘Christopher style’ that on the evening after the suicides he addressed the crew of the Ark Royal thus:
‘We have lost two more shipmates, comrades in arms both. We are living through troubled times; there is no shame in a man admitting to himself and his God that his life has run its course and that he can no longer bear the unbearable. For we who remain it is our duty to watch over each other; to be our brothers’ keepers. We are the lucky ones. We are the survivors. We are the ones who find ourselves among friends, comrades, shipmates embraced by the family of the Navy and its long and honourable traditions. No matter how bleak things may be at home we have it within our power to be a great force for good in this post-war world. We have lost two good men since we anchored in this bay; I pray that if we watch over each other, stand to our duty and move forward with courage and in hope that we will lose no more good men like Ordinary Seaman Ken Brown and Lieutenant-Commander Vic Tremayne. Both men will be remembered, like every other man onboard in these troubled times, with equal distinction on the Ark’s roll of honour.’
