by James Philip
The post-cataclysm World drama was playing out at a thousand different levels in a million different places and every man and every woman had to come to terms with it in their own way. Throughout the Fleet many were in denial, carrying on as if nothing had happened. Some men wrote their weekly or fortnightly letter, or send post cards back to wives, children, relations or girlfriends they knew in their hearts to be dead, as if nothing had changed. Others carried the black dog of despair on their backs. Below decks tempers could quickly fray, now and then fights broke out for no reason; and inevitably, some days there was a long line of men awaiting summary judgement at Divisional, Executive Officer’s, or the Captain’s table especially on the bigger ships which tended to have less tightly knit crews than the destroyers and frigates.
A man could be at sea for months on a carrier the size of the Ark Royal, or even the Hermes and still encounter new faces most days; whereas on a C class destroyer like the Cavendish with a crew of less than two hundred after a month or two at sea everybody knew everybody else’s secrets. Such was the Navy; such was life at sea.
Julian Christopher was not one of those admirals ever overly trouble by theories of command. As a young man his heroes had been Jellicoe and Beatty the two Great War commanders of the Grand Fleet. They were two completely different kinds of men: John Jellicoe quietly methodical, imperturbable and soft spoken, the master of his profession literally from keel to masthead; and David Beatty, who had led the battlecruiser force at Jutland with cack-handed bulldog gallantry, was hard-charging, arrogant, the very epitome of the senior officer who rarely if ever troubled himself with the minutiae of his trade. Jellicoe engendered respect and fondness in his men, Beatty was a prima donna who seemed to hardly give the men under his command a second thought; but the Grand Fleet would have steamed at full speed into the very jaws of Hades if either man had hoisted the appropriate order at the halyard of his flagship. Both were great leaders of men: Jellicoe could have lost the war in an afternoon at Jutland in 1916; Beatty might have destroyed the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet that day had he been in command, but at what cost?
Jellicoe had casually wandered about his flagship and visited other ships almost incognito, shunning ceremony, sought out the lowliest in his fleet, wanting to know about everything and every man.
Beatty had gone everywhere with a large retinue, disinterested in the ‘lower decks’ of his castles of steel and was endlessly preoccupied polishing his credentials as the ‘fighting admiral’ of his day.
Julian Christopher was as at home in a boiler suit in the Ark Royal’s turbine rooms or on his flag bridge seventy or eighty feet above the heat and steam and deafening noise in the bowels of the great ship. He could talk to a stoker or a gunner or an aircraft fitter man to man, without in any way ‘speaking down’ as easily as he could discuss steaming orders with his officers. And yet if there was a ‘Jellicoe’ in his innate personability and lack of airs and graces as he strolled easily ‘below decks’ there was a streak of the pure ‘Beatty’ warrior in his soul.
This latter had sustained him onboard HMS Polyphemus as the Stukas and Junkers 88s had hunted her after she had shot herself dry off Crete in 1941; and it sustained him now.
Every instinct was urging him to take the fleet home.
Return to England...
To do what can be done...
But whatever his heart – the reckless David Beatty side of him - was telling him the measured John Jellicoe part of his makeup, was counselling caution, delay and asking: What is the greatest service I can perform for my Queen and my country?
Twenty-one years before in the maelstrom of battle south of Crete the answer had been obvious; to do or to die but that was then and this was now and he was not just in command of a cruiser or an escort group. To all intents he commanded half the active fighting power of the whole Royal Navy, including two of its three biggest operational carriers, and the fact he was presently half a world away from home was a fait accompli.
Although, consistent with the Far East Station’s War Plan Julian Christopher had formally requested docking and replenishment facilities for his ships in Australia within twenty-four hours of the October War contrary to later myths and legends, he had not immediately offered to place the fleet at the disposal of the Australian government.
However, by the time Ark Royal dropped anchor in Moreton Bay he had briefed his Staff that this was what he proposed to do, albeit with ‘operational caveats’. He had cabled his intentions to David Luce, explaining that ‘in the altered situation in which sustaining the Fleet in being for a protracted period will be impossible without the support of the Australians. He reasoned that a return to wartime [1945] mutual support arrangements consistent with British obligations under the AMDA Treaty and other long-standing Commonwealth understandings was the only thing that made sense. From this it followed that the axiomatic quid pro quo must be an acknowledgement of the primacy of the Australians in their own south western Pacific sphere’. In other words the Fleet could only continue to operate – and remain fully operational, combat effective - in Australasian waters under ‘joint flag’ protocols.
On the evening of 29th November Julian Christopher and his Flag Captain, Donald Gibson, boarded a Westland Wessex for the forty mile flight to the Royal Australian Air Force Base at Amberley some thirty miles south west of Brisbane where shortly after midnight a Vickers Viscount carrying Sir Robert Menzies and his Defence Minister, Athol Townley touched down.
In retrospect the secrecy surrounding this first face-to-face meeting between the grand old man of the Commonwealth and the ‘Fighting Admiral’ seems overblown.
At the time nobody was taking anything for granted.
News of HMS Cavendish’s race to Perth to beat the ‘Comet shuttle’ to Australia with the latest despatches, and word of the arrival ‘any day now’ of more British ships in Australian waters had already begun to vie for front page space with the ongoing dramas of the England cricket tour, prognostications of varying gloom about background radiation levels, and simmering anti-American outrage.
The last thing Julian Christopher or the Australian Prime Minister wanted to do was feed the febrile atmosphere further nutrient.
Chapter 14 | Sydney Harbour
Friday 7th December 1962
HMS Ark Royal, Sydney Harbour
News of the secret briefing cum conference at RAAFB Amberley nine days before between ‘Australian ministers and Admiral Christopher’s Staff’ had leaked out in the days before the Ark Royal, escorted by the Cavendish[53] – her crew looking forward to a long run ashore after their recent spells of hard steaming – the Barrosa, the Llandaff which had caught up with the flagship as she departed Brisbane, and the destroyer HMAS Voyager[54], had slowly edged into Sydney Harbour.
That first day and night in the city was given over to civic and naval ceremonial, and for a squadron wide ‘open day’ on which the citizens of Sydney were to be invited onboard[55].
Among the first visitors on Friday morning – before the dignitaries arrived – were Pat and Elspeth Etherington and their two young children, the latter being carried onboard with the utmost care from the waist of the Admiral’s Barge which had transported the little family, Captain Francis Maltravers, and a party from the consular mission in Sydney across the millpond waters of the harbour to the Ark Royal ahead of the forthcoming ‘bean feast’.
‘I had had no idea how huge the ship was,’ my Aunt reminisced fondly.
‘As we got closer it was like a great big wall of grey steel. It was still quite early, the best part of the day before it got too hot. Nearer to the ship one felt and heard the distant thrumming of powerful machinery. Pat was in seventh heaven because he had been promised a guided tour of the whole boat. I confess I was dreading meeting my father again. We had parted horribly; I had said things which I probably ought not to have said the last time we had spoken but after we’d handed the children to sailors to carry onboard and half-a-dozen handsome young officers
had fussed around me to make sure I got up the gangway safely in ‘my delicate condition’, I was suddenly standing in front of the Admiral...and well, I just couldn’t remember why I had been so bitter for so long. Mind you, it was a little strange; your grandfather had organised a reception line for us in the hangar deck as if we were visiting royalty. I think he was much more nervous than I was; I don’t think he started to relax until I asked him if he would like to hold Michael.[56] As soon as he picked up Mikey everybody started cheering!’
Things were a little more formal when the Premier of New South Wales, Robert Heffron and the Mayor of Sydney came onboard the flagship a couple of hours later.
Elspeth and her children watched the comings and goings for an hour or so from the privileged heights of the Ark Royal’s flying bridge while her husband clambered through the bowels of the monster with one of the carrier’s Engineering Officers as his personal guide. Later, my aunt and uncle were introduced to the great and good of New South Wales before a meal was served beneath awnings on the vast flight deck.
‘Afterwards, I felt a little guilty. I ought to have written to your Father,’ she told the author years later, ‘but I couldn’t, I felt as if I’d forgiven everything. I hadn’t, I’d just forgotten, for a while at least – I know it sounds silly - I thought I might be letting Peter down. It was probably for the best that in the end we both made our peace with Father in our own, separate ways. I saw him several times before the Fleet sailed for home; and once he drove out to St Leonards. He spent most of the time talking engineering and ship systems with Pat but that was okay, it was nice just to be normal. Not to be angry. It was funny; he knew everything about Peter’s ‘progress’; that he’d almost made a fool of himself with a girl in South Africa, and again with a girl in England. We both knew about your father’s pen friend in Malta; we both agreed that Marija seemed like a really sensible person and that it was a pity that they’d – your father and your mother – had never actually met face to face in all the years they’d been pen friends. Your grandfather said yes, I’ll have to do something about that when I get home. We thought he was joking. It was a peculiar time. We all thought the world had got the madness out of its hair and now that the Soviets were finished things would settle down. How wrong we were...’
The pomp and ceremony, the open days and the parties on deck, the flags flying, the big grey warships anchored in Australian harbours became the focus of the whole nation over the next six months.
Meanwhile, Julian Christopher and his Staff were beginning to develop the principles and objectives first discussed at Amberley with Sir Robert Menzies and Athol Townley into practical operational proposals to put, initially, before the Australian and New Zealand Governments.
Both the Australian and the Royal New Zealand Navy had fully mobilised - their combined strength was roughly equivalent to that of the British Pacific Fleet (minus the carriers and cruisers) – and been placed on a war footing. There were plans to expand both Navies with new builds but that was for the future; time was short and little could be achieved in the coming months without the help and technical resources of Julian Christopher’s Fleet.
To simplify the chain of command Julian Christopher suggested, quoting, some say misquoting, authorities granted to him as C-in-C Far East Station under the AMDA Treaty, placing his ships under the operational control of Vice Admiral Sir Wilfred Hastings ‘Arch’ Harrington, First Naval Member and Chief of the Naval Staff of the Royal Australian Navy. Thereafter, when they were not in port flying the flag British ships were intensively exercising with Australian and New Zealand vessels and together the three Navies began to patrol the Southern Pacific, quartering the seas from French Polynesia in the east to the Straits of Malacca in the west, and from Christmas Island to the fringes of the Antarctic ice pack. Onshore, by the autumn of 1963 four new frigates[57] were under construction in Melbourne and Sydney to replace the three Charles F. Adams class destroyers previously ordered from American yards, the first tranche of new ships for an Australian Navy which would eventually double in size over the next few years.
In effect Australia’s decision to be – with British and possibly Commonwealth assistance – independent of the US military umbrella was made in Sir Robert Menzies’s mind as he read the first telegrams about a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere. The presence of the British Pacific Fleet had merely ‘jump started’ the process.
However, the biggest and in retrospect the most significant decision that came out of the Amberley and the ‘first’ Sydney talks was to use ‘the fleet’ to restart maritime trade in the Southern Hemisphere and to gather British and Commonwealth registered merchant ships ‘stranded’ or ‘trapped’ in foreign ports in Singaporean, Hong Kong, or Australasian waters.
Many ships were in fact ‘laid up’; their crews unpaid and preyed on by unscrupulous local agents, their captains unable to sail because they could not afford to re-fill their empty bunkers. Many vessels had been cynically seized, opportunistically appropriated by the authorities in the ports where they had sought sanctuary in the days after the war, and in the Indian Ocean piracy – unknown for years – was now making it hazardous for single unarmed ships to ply normal routes across those waters. Even in the faraway Persian Gulf the great, unscathed jewel of the Empire, Abadan, eyed lasciviously by the Shah’s regime was mothballed; and for the tankers moored empty in the Shatt al-Arab with the Suez Canal closed to them there was no safe passage to be had back to England south around the Cape of Good Hope, or to anywhere else.
Never was the White Ensign so needed upon the World’s oceans. In time of war – and under the provisions of the War Emergency Act – a C-in-C on a foreign station had the right of requisition over every British registered merchant ship.
Therefore, on 9th December Julian Christopher despatched cables to the harbour masters of every major port in the Pacific and Indian Oceans formally requisitioning every ship over two thousand five hundred deadweight tons on the British Register.
Any persons detaining or preventing freedom of navigation to said ships or naval personnel executing this requisition notice will risks sanction and blockade...
Captains who failed to bring their vessels to one of the nominated ports would be liable to prosecution; or if unable to comply for reasons beyond their control they were to report same to a representative of Her Majesty’s Government at their earliest convenience.
By implication any harbour master holding one of Her Majesty’s ‘requisitioned’ vessels would be, at some future date, held accountable for his actions.
Moreover, it was generally made clear that if necessary Julian Christopher planned to send his frigates and destroyers to ‘collect’ waifs and strays, and if anybody got in his way they were going to regret it.
In reality it was fervently hoped that the lost sheep could be collected with a minimum of fuss and bother and to this end, in consultation with the Governor General and the High Commissioner in Canberra it had been agreed to establish a much enlarged ‘Navy Office’ to liaise with the Australian civil authorities and with Sir Wilfred Harrington’s Staff at the headquarters of the Royal Australian Navy.
Originally, Julian Christopher had considered asking the Naval Attaché in Canberra, Frank Maltravers to take on the job of setting up and running this office but after talking matters through with his Flag Captain on the Ark Royal, decided that Captain Donald Gibson was temperamentally better suited to the role envisaged.
Gibson was the senior man and in the normal course of events, as soon as he had brought Ark Royal home from the Far East he had been slated for promotion to Commodore and to a high profile Staff appointment in Whitehall.
Advancing the Ark Royal’s captain one rank four months ahead of schedule, Julian Christopher sent Gibson ashore with a twenty-man team – mainly supply officers and logisticians drawn from half-a-dozen ships, and appointed Frank Maltravers to command his flagship.
Few men in the Royal Navy had enjoyed – and somehow surv
ived - such an action packed or colourful career as forty-six year old Don Gibson in his twenty-nine years in the Navy.
Joining the RNR – Royal Naval Reserve – in 1933 as a midshipman he had served on the battleship Nelson and the destroyer Wanderer before learning to fly.
His adventures had really begun in earnest flying Sea Gladiator biplane fighters of No 802 Squadron off HMS Glorious against Messerschmitt Bf109 fighters and modern Luftwaffe bombers many of which had a faster straight line speed than his obsolete ‘fighter’. He had had a stroke of luck flying ashore before Glorious sortied into the North Sea at the height of the Battle for Norway, only to be sunk in a surface action by the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, a tragedy in which over fourteen hundred men died and not one of Gibson’s former 802 Squadron comrades survived.
It was the period when the ‘Phoney War’ of the winter of 1939-40 ended with a bang. Finding himself flying a Blackburn Skua fighter-bomber (only slightly less obsolete than the Sea Gladiator) with No 803 Squadron off the old Ark Royal he had subsequently participated in a suicidal attack against the ships responsible for sinking the Glorious at Trondheim.
‘Everything went wrong. The attack was carried out in daylight and against fierce flak defence, and was an abject failure. Of 15 Skuas, eight were shot down and their crews killed or captured.’
