by James Philip
Back in England the UKIEA had got most of the coal-fired power stations back ‘on line’, and begun to rebuild and re-direct the working sections of the half-wrecked electricity distribution grid. Presently, petrol and diesel were in such short supply that only the armed forces and a very short list of other ‘essential services’ were apportioned an ever-decreasing monthly usage quota.
The first grand gesture would be followed by individual ships, and small convoys of merchantmen returning home whenever they were loaded via oiling stations in South Africa – Durban, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town – and Port Stanley for the ships traversing the Southern Ocean east of New Zealand. And all the while the rest of the merchant fleet – now gathering in Australian waters – was awaiting the accumulated surpluses of the continent including sufficient grain to supply the bread ration in the United Kingdom for three months ahead of the massed autumn return to England.
There would be three separate giant Operation Manna convoys, each escorted by its own battle group whose flags would fly in the Ark Royal, Hermes and the Belfast. The cruiser Tiger would lead a ‘support group’ of fast destroyers and frigates ready to come to the aid of any of the other battle groups. Ark Royal and Hermes would lead their charges west across the Indian Ocean to the Cape; Belfast and Tiger would shepherd their ‘lambs’ across the Southern Ocean to Tierra del Fuego, Cape Horn and the Falklands. Thereafter the convoys would steer north to make landfall at Ascension Island before running for home.
In England the undamaged ports of Southampton, Portsmouth, Portland, Devonport, Bristol, Glasgow and Belfast were to be made ready to receive ships from early November onwards.
There would be as many as a hundred merchantmen of all descriptions in each ‘big convoy’.
In the meantime ‘normal’ sailings had to be resumed, even if it was at a tiny fraction of the pre-war frequency. The tankers were a beginning, hopefully in their wake scores of other British registered ships – the whole merchant marine had effectively been requisitioned by the Emergency Administration within days of the war – could be corralled and put back into service.
It was a tall task.
At the day of the October War there were around three-and-a-half thousand vessels of over 500 deadweight tons on the United Kingdom Shipping Register, including the largest tanker fleet by tonnage – approximately 18% of that in service - in the World. Nearly a hundred-and-fifty thousand men served in the British Merchant Marine. Moreover, although British shipbuilding had been in slow decline for many years at the time of the war something like fourteen to fifteen percent of all global maritime construction was under way in British yards.
In theory Operation Manna envisaged assembling a relatively small proportion of this maritime cornucopia in Australasian ports.
One is bound to say ‘shame on you’ to those historians who now decry the ‘modest’ scale of the three ‘famous grand convoys’ that straggled into British ports in November and December 1963 and throughout January 1964.
The ‘minimisers’ point to the fact that the three ‘big’ convoys combined unloaded the equivalent of less than two months ‘normal cargo’ in the United Kingdom. What is forgotten is that in the previous six months at least the same amount of ‘cargo’, predominantly oil, petrol and key food staples, had been carried to home ports, just enough to stave off mass starvation for the surviving two-thirds of the population of England.
Moreover, after the three ‘grand convoys’ safely returned to the United Kingdom a significant proportion of British Registered merchantmen and tankers – requisitioned by and under the control of the authorities - were, broadly speaking, all in the ‘right places’ and thereafter, began again to go about their normal business insofar as such a thing was possible in that era. With the exception of the acute oil shortages in the immediate aftermath of the Battles of the Persian Gulf[110] in July, August and September 1964, caused by the dislocation of Iranian and Arabian oil supplies, the United Kingdom never again in modern times faced such dire shortages in essential foodstuffs and fuels.
All this was still in the future that afternoon onboard HMS Centaur, a ship whose name will forever be linked with pivotal moments in post-October War history.
Chapter 27 | Shaping the Future
Prime Minister Edward Heath had prevented Margaret Thatcher from ‘over-complicating the Gulf talks’ by accompanying the Foreign Secretary overseas.
Mrs Thatcher’s shopping list has already been communicated to the Naval Mission in Canberra and Alec’s [Lord Home’s] conversations with Sir Robert [Menzies] will be much simplified if they remain on the basis of two old friends privately discussing matters. Alec and I agree that in the same fashion that Rab Butler, William Beveridge and Anthony Eden as Alec’s wartime predecessor in the forties consciously stepped outside of the crises of their age, we must also look to the future. While presently there may not be much realistic scope for considerations of rebuilding our educational system, or reinstating a saner welfare state, we as a government would be shirking in our duties if we neglected vital questions concerning our relations with Commonwealth and other nations if and when the day comes when the World slowly recovers from the recent cataclysm.[111]
From the perspective of half-a-century down the road the ‘New Commonwealth’ which grew out of the Commonwealth Mutual Assistance and Free Trade Agreement initialled by the ‘Founding Five’[112] in New York in the spring of 1965 is often wholly credited to Margaret Thatcher and Lord Home’s successor Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson.[113] Although the latter had a hand in the behind the scenes long-range diplomacy behind Operation Manna, Margaret Thatcher’s ‘input’ to the process was at best peripheral throughout 1963. She was, in any case, otherwise occupied fighting – tooth and claw on many occasions – to manage the nation’s dwindling supplies of everything, and her over-arching obsession was always to simply feed the British people.
Alec has returned from the Middle East in better heart than he has been in since the war. I think the sunshine and the warmth has done him a power of good. He is much encouraged by the tone of the conversations he enjoyed with Sir Robert. He and Sir David [Luce] briefed Cabinet this morning. Of course Margaret will never be satisfied but I think I speak for many colleagues when I remark upon the kindness of our friends in this dark hour. The anticipated loading schedules of the ships which will arrive in the big convoys in the late autumn, and the normalisation of a significant, possibly as high as ten to twenty percent of pre-war maritime traffic between the Commonwealth and the United Kingdom in the coming months at last gives us hope that we shall be able to avoid a repeat of the post-war catastrophe of the current season.[114]
There had been little that the Emergency Administration could do to ameliorate the immediate post-war ‘die off’ in the dreadful winter of 1962-63. Opinion may still be divided over whether it was a true ‘nuclear winter’, mainly or in part caused by the effects of the explosion of so many[115] fission and hydrogen warheads in the atmosphere. The winter of 1962-63, in which the last snow did not fall until the middle of April in northern England and night time temperatures did not rise above zero between 16th December 1962 and 21st March 1963, was the coldest since 1739-40, and on a par with the conditions in 1683-84 during a period that many meteorologists now call the ‘little ice age’ in Europe.
The debate is largely academic, over eight million people probably perished in England on the night of the war, and the best part of another five million of their injuries, exposure, sickness and malnutrition directly attributable to the war.[116] In a way it was a miracle that the death toll was not double or treble what it actually was in the brutal deep freeze. As it was the atrocious weather hamstrung and delayed any hope of a rapid reactivation and recovery of those parts of the economy which had escaped direct damage in the war.
That winter the industrial powerhouse of the unscathed Midlands was largely cut off from the rest of the country by blizzards and viciously cold, freezing winds that shutdown the railway network, brought down
electricity lines, froze and ruptured water and gas pipes and some days made it virtually impossible for people to venture outdoors. In many places the snow lay so deep for so long that it was only when the ‘great thaw’ began in April that bodies, perfectly preserved in the ice began to be found in their thousands lying where they had fallen weeks or months before, their strength exhausted, their lives extinguished by the merciful cold.
Those were brutal times that shocked and traumatised even veterans like Edward Heath and others of his Second World War generation, from whom the majority of his ministers and all the senior soldiers, air men and sailors were drawn. They had all seen dreadful things in their younger days, lost friends in awful circumstances and those who had been in Germany after Hitler’s war knew what it was like to live in a totally wasted, starving landscape. They had all hoped and prayed never to have to go through all that again; yet now it had happened again in their own land and the starving, desperate, hopeless people outside the gates of the Government compound at Cheltenham were their own kith and kin. One shudders even to contemplate the dimensions of the nightmare.[117]
Over dinners, working breakfasts and long private walks on the flight deck of HMS Centaur Alec Home and Robert Menzies, deliberately separating themselves from their military hosts and guardians began to flesh out what a ‘new Commonwealth’ might look like in the changed reality of the post-war age.
Already by then the mood music from Washington had set alarm bells ringing. For all its fine words the Kennedy Administration had failed to prioritise emergency aid to its bomb-wracked European allies and now five months on, millions who might have lived had the United States mobilised and rushed to the assistance of the United Kingdom, France and others in the same way it had, initially at least, to the Japanese, were dead.
Tellingly, although Washington had belatedly staffed a skeleton embassy in Cheltenham, its military mission was unashamedly more preoccupied with recovering 'US military assets’ from British soil and compiling ‘damage assessment surveys’ in respect of US assets ‘in country’ than it was in materially assisting the UKIEA in dealing with its ongoing, heartbreaking humanitarian disaster.
Few people now realise that a greater tonnage of petroleum products was offloaded at British ports between December 1962 and April 1963 from tankers carrying cargoes manufactured in South African synthetic oil plants, than from the United States. Given that in 1962 the US was the globe’s largest producer of crude oil, producing roughly twice that of Venezuela and the Soviet Union and at that time over four times as much annually as Saudi Arabia and nine times as much as Iran, and was pre-war the supplier of more than half of the United Kingdom’s ever-increasing thirst for unrefined crude, it can be imagined how desperately the sudden severance of this transatlantic ‘oil line’ crippled the country in its hour of greatest need.
Several American tankers already in transit to the United Kingdom and Europe had actually turned around in mid-ocean in the days after the War.
Thereafter, the international oil business – always a notoriously ‘dollar on the barrel head’ trade – had seized up. Everywhere, that is, except in the Caribbean and continental North America where tankers plied the waters between Venezuela and the Gulf of Mexico skirting the fallout blighted, mainly European past and present colonies Washington treated like lepers despite the fact that their troubles all arose out of the thermonuclear immolation of Cuba. While the rest of the World ran out of oil, and the wells of Arabia and the rest of the Middle East were capped for want of shipping; there was briefly a veritable glut of cheap crude oil throughout the Americas. It was only after US suppliers cut back production to push prices back up[118] that the US Administration gave a second thought – prompted by Wall Street - to its clients in Saudi Arabia and the parlous position of the Saudi Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco). Even that came as a knee-jerk reaction to the news that the British had re-activated the tanker routes around the Cape; meaning that US ships could ‘get a free ride’ without the US Navy having to lift a finger.
Alec Douglas-Home and Robert Menzies saw the World as it was; a place in which old-fashioned loyalties, values and plain decency seemed to have been abandoned by the ‘bully on the block’.
Menzies later admitted that he was plagued by the thought that if the Kennedy Administration could ‘betray’ the British so shamelessly – not so much on the day of the war because at this remove it is clear that the US had little control over the vagaries of hostilities once the first missiles were in the air – but afterwards; then what price Australia’s fate in some future ‘World calamity’?
From time to time the two men must have paused to gaze north to where the Sunderland-built BP tanker British Loyalty was slowly sinking deeper towards her loading lines at the southernmost pier of the vast Abadan refinery complex.
All the tankers in the initial ‘gaggle’ re-opening the pipeline around the Cape were BP ships, among more than a hundred BP Tanker Company vessels requisitioned by the UKIEA. History repeats; back in 1939 the whole ninety-three ship BP fleet had been taken into Government service.[119]
British Petroleum had rebuilt its fleet since Hitler’s War. In 1962 its ships had still carried as much as fifteen percent of the global sea trade in crude oil. Several of its newer vessels were the super-tankers of the day – 67,000 deadweight tons – and the company had plans to build several 100,000 ton ships capable of transporting up to twenty-five million gallons of ‘black gold’.
The British Loyalty was from a past age, a nine thousand tonner with a capacity to carry one-and-a-half times her own ‘empty’ weight.
Of the tankers waiting out in the Persian Gulf, or being ‘rounded up’ by Julian Christopher’s destroyers and frigates, a proportion had already been allocated to the Australian and the South African ‘run’. Menzies’s Government was able to buy oil on the reconstructed ‘World market’ – mainly Venezuelan crude transported via the Panama Canal but only at a premium. South Africa’s situation was different, although it could satisfy a proportion of its requirements from its synthetic refineries[120] converting coal to a variety of petroleum, diesel and lubrication products, it still needed to import crude to ‘fill the gap’.
The United Kingdom’s need was great but there was a bigger picture and no man realised this so early as Alec Home. A man who has latterly become viewed as something of a throwback, out of step with the new realities of post-October War realpolitik; once he had got over the shock of the war, he was perhaps, the first man in England to see the shape of a future which might yet rescue his sorely tried country from its slough of despond.
And in Robert Menzies he found his soul mate.
‘Now that the first of the big tankers are on their way and the weather at last looks as if it is beginning to turn to spring I allow myself to dare to hope that the worst may be over.’[121]
Chapter 26 | Postscript
It happened that a new and in retrospect, somewhat inadvertent but nonetheless nasty, dirty little war erupted as the three Winter Convoys of Operation Manna traversed the North Atlantic and entered the Western Approaches to the British Isles in December 1963.
There was a brief, bloody and completely unnecessary war with Spain, whose Dictator Francisco Franco Bahamonde[122] was too easily gulled into believing that the Kennedy Administration backed his dream of snatching the low hanging fruit of Gibraltar from the grasp an apparently enfeebled United Kingdom.
An unforeseen consequence of this blunder – other than significant collateral damage to several ports and air bases in the Spanish part of the Iberian Peninsula - was the rehabilitation of António de Oliveira Salazar, the most benign[123] of the surviving dictators from before the Second World War, and the re-integration of Portugal into a robust bilateral military and economic relationship with the British Isles which survives, and indeed thrives, to this day.
Coincidentally, in the Central Mediterranean, Italian fascists, in the ascendency in the chaos of post-October War Italy had been c
onvinced that the British were about to pull out of the region, abandoning Malta. An air raid involving aircraft of the Regia Aeronautica designed to hasten this withdrawal, like Spanish belligerence spurred on it was believed by Washington – so ill-advised as to be insane – went unavenged at the time but poisoned Anglo-Italian relations for many years thereafter.
That Britain’s enemies should imagine that the best time to attack its forces at sea and on land in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, was at the moment when most of the Royal Navy was at sea within a few days sailing time of their shores beggars belief.
But then perhaps history really is the autobiography of a madman!
At the time there were many who chose to believe that those battles of December 1963 were just the last spasm of the World tragedy of October 1962; that they might actually be the prelude to a new dark age, a second Cold War every bit as dangerous as the first was a thing few suspected at the time.
My father believed that those battles in December 1963 – ‘pointless, stupid affairs that we neither provoked nor wanted and from which, despite our fortitude we took little satisfaction’ – were crucial in ‘hardening the Navy’ for the trials to come.
‘After Operation Manna and ‘the little fracas’ with the ill-equipped Spanish air force and navy, and with the Italians well, we really were on a war footing after that. In the Navy we felt as if we had fought those convoys through even though we knew we had done no such thing. It was as if everybody back at home believed that no matter how miserable life was, and it was very miserable for a lot of people then and for years after that, that the Navy would never let them down.’
By the time the last convoys had docked and unloaded their cargoes Edward Heath and Alec Home were dead, the former murdered by a mad woman in the Oval Office of the White House on 11th December 1963 in the hours after a coup d’état against the Kennedy Administration had been brutally suppressed, the latter killed in the regicidal attack on Balmoral Castle the previous week.[124]
