by James Philip
Meanwhile, the Royal Air Force was rapidly writing off its exhausted, over-stressed aircraft, in the middle of scrapping three-quarters of its surviving pre-October 1962 inventory, ahead of accepting new Kestrels and TSR2 B-201 Strike Eagles into squadron service. Controversially, it had already replaced its high-maintenance, short-endurance British Electric Lightnings with the slightly less eye-catching but vastly more capable US-supplied McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom IIs. For the moment, the Navy was keeping its dwindling number of De Havilland Vixen sub-sonic interceptors; in due course, these too, would also be replaced by a mix of F-4s and Kestrels. Of the great V-Bomber Force of October 1962 only thirty Avro Vulcans remained – of which perhaps, fifteen or sixteen were serviceable at any one time - flown by 83 and 617 Squadrons. The Handley Page Victors had been phased out completely, while the remaining Vickers Valiants, less than twenty, had been temporarily retained in air-to-air re-fuelling roles, a function soon to be wholly fulfilled by Boeing KC-135 tankers, initially with joint USAF and RAF crews, and like the Phantoms, supplied under the aerospace provisions of the Lend Lease Bill presented to, and passed more or less on the nod, by the House of Representatives last May ( just one of the generous quid pro quos which had emerged from the ‘failed’ Camp David Summit immediately preceding the San Francisco rededication of the United Nations).
At the time, the Nixon Administration had sold the deal to its majority GOP caucuses on the Hill on the basis that it, the United States was getting ample ongoing recompense in terms of technology transfers involving the joint Kestrel-TSR2 and power plant development programs, and that the then head of the British R and D programme, Sir Daniel French, a good friend of the US, was slated to be the next head of the RAF.
As for the Royal Navy, like the RAF a major beneficiary of American largesse, it had seemed like most of the surface fleet was in dry dock or awaiting a yard berth, or paid off into reserve at the conclusion of the French campaign. Apart from the nuclear boat construction program at Barrow-in-Furness and at Rosyth, and the transfer of vessels from the US Navy Reserve Fleet - two fleet carriers (planned, only one of which had thus far been fully commissioned into British service due to manpower shortages on the UK side), three cruisers and over twenty gunship destroyers, not forgetting eleven other major units including cargo ships and big, ocean-going tankers, only four home-built ships had been delivered to the Navy in the last eighteen months, and all other planned new builds had been suspended since May last year, including three of the new Leander class general purpose frigates which had been on the stocks when the Treasury axe fell.
Actually, by the spring of last year, practically every surviving pre-October 1962 ship in the Navy had been steamed to destruction. The only two remaining ‘British’ cruisers, the Lion and the old Belfast had been retired, the former so worn out and with so many critical mechanical defects that she was now moored at Devonport as the headquarters tender for the 4th Escort Group, and the latter, despite recent radar and upgrades and the installation of two quadruple GWS-20 Seacat surface-to-air missile launchers, was a museum piece, which had been partially deactivated and replaced HMS Liverpool, the former Baltimore-class heavy cruiser USS Fall River, as the Home Fleet Gunnery Instruction Ship moored at Portland.
The true state of the Navy was best illustrated by the fact that by May last year, there had only been one fully operational fleet carrier in the Navy’s locker, the much modernised Second War veteran HMS Victorious. Both of the ‘big’ carriers, the Ark Royal and the Eagle had been worked so hard that they were in need of lengthy overhauls, quite apart from extensive systems refurbishments and updates if they were ever to return to service. Ark Royal was coming to the end of a keel to bridge modernization planned to allow her to remain in active service at least another fifteen to twenty years, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The original plan had been for her crew to move straight onto HMS Indefatigable, formerly the USS Franklin Delano Roosevelt (CV-42) but for a variety of reasons, that had never happened. Not least because the Midway class carrier was far too big for most of the available dry docks in the United Kingdom – other than one at RN Rosyth, and the berth at Southampton reserved for Cunard’s two eighty-thousand ton ‘Queens’, and in any event, the Navy simply no longer had the spare qualified manpower, some four thousand plus men, required to operate her. The Navy’s manning problems had been so acute last year, as ships de-commissioned and short-service men were released, that Fleet Air Arm pilots and back-seaters converting to F-4 Phantom IIs, had had to be sent to Virginia where the USS Forrestal was based at Norfolk to complete their training.
Thankfully, for the Senior Service there was an end in sight for the worst of the travails it had suffered in the last year. When the Ark Royal emerged from dockyard hands sometime that autumn, it was hoped – although there was now talk of the heavy cruiser Liverpool’s planned modernisation taking priority - that the Eagle would undergo the same overhaul-modernization, not dissimilar to that which the US Navy had carried out on its own Second War later Essex class carriers. Eagle, now berthed at Devonport with a much-reduced crew, capable of steaming but not operating fast jets, had been supplemented by the loan of the Second War-vintage Essex class carrier USS Randolph (CV-15) – renamed HMS Formidable – currently moored within a few hundred yards of the Eagle, and largely mothballed after it had proven impractical, some wags said ‘too much bother’ - to operate her with a reduced crew as a helicopter carrier.
To all intents, the Formidable had been consigned to the Reserve Fleet; although to have publicly admitted as much would almost certainly have given rise to transatlantic tensions. Not least, on the floor of Congress. However, the decision not to attempt to fully man either ship had taken the pressure off the rest of the surface fleet and permitted, for the first time since 1962, the Royal Navy to reinstitute pre-war recruitment and training programs, and to identify whom, among its emergency war draft intakes, it needed to retain. So, slimmed down somewhat since the end of the French campaign, the service was actually significantly more fighting fit than it had been at any time in the last five years.
Given the increasing integration of the US-UK military machine, the Prime Minister was constantly being struck by the dissonances in her personal relations with Richard Nixon, and the rumbling deep-seated differences between the allies – America, the United Kingdom and many of the members of the New Commonwealth, Australia and New Zealand particularly, less o South Africa - on a score of vital strategic fronts.
Admittedly, most of that boiled down to the White House’s China-South East Asia Policy, which the Foreign and Commonwealth Office viewed as an accident waiting to happen; mercifully, on the other side of the world!
However, on the subject of the renewed ‘special relationship’ with Washington, even Tom Harding-Grayson, her quietly Machiavellian Foreign Secretary, never less than owlishly sceptical about the ‘specialness’ of any relationship with the Americans, took the view that ‘if military co-operation and technological partnerships paper over the cracks, it was best not to rock the boat.’
Margaret Thatcher was in two minds about that.
Her Secretary of Defence, Viscount De L’Isle was decidedly pragmatic: ‘Washington calculates that by arming us it means the Soviets know that they will never be able to turn us against the United States again, no matter the political hue of the administration in power in Oxford.’
The fact of the matter was that by any objective measure of accounting, the US Treasury was picking up the tab for well over half of what otherwise, would have been a cripplingly unsustainable burden of domestic and overseas, UK defence expenditures.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” the Prime Minister declared as she made her entrance. Military briefings had been daily, sometimes twice or thrice daily events earlier in her premiership; but in the last year, they had become increasingly occasional diary commitments, or like this one, called at her request over a week ago, as part of the briefing process ahead of her forthcoming tour of Franc
e, Malta, Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan and India.
The overseas ‘tour’ would be her first, other than three trips to the United States, for over a year, and much to her irritation the papers were saying the expedition marked her ‘recovery’, signalling an end to her period of mourning.
It signified neither; inwardly, she had not ‘recovered’ or in any way ‘got over’ the loss of her late husband and knew that she never would; and as for mourning, all she could do was to try not to fall back into the bottomless well of grief which had all but paralysed her in the wake of Frank’s death…
Today she was dressed in a dark blue skirt and jacket, a cream blouse, and the only jewellery she wore was her wedding ring.
When she had lost her first husband, Denis, consumed anonymously like untold millions of others in the cataclysm of that dreadful Saturday night in late October 1962, the survival of the twins had been foremost in her thoughts and as soon as she reached Cheltenham, Ted Heath had brought her straight into his emergency administration. Those had been terrible days; but at least she had not been spared the space or time to dwell upon her loss.
Losing Frank Waters had been different. Although she had only known ‘The Colonel’ less than three years, with him by her side, everything had seemed possible. They had been a perfect partnership, and she had never acknowledged how much she had come to depend upon him until it was too late.
Often, she dwelt on the crushing despair of those days in Australia after the news of his death had arrived.
Poor Marija, she and Peter and Pat Harding-Grayson had been afraid she was so distressed she might do herself harm. And she might have but for their friendship, and…love. Her memories of those days, that first week or so after the black cloud enveloped her were blurred, confused. She remembered confessing to Marija that she had been thinking of trying for another baby; the Queen had done her national maternal duty, after all, and her government was extolling women of child-bearing age to think of the future…
All that was wanderlust now.
One never really got over the loss of a loved one.
Had Frank not seemed so…indestructible, otherwise she would never have allowed herself to commit, invest so much, everything of herself, in fact, in him. It was a thing she would not, and could never do again.
The pain was always with her; it just dulled a little with time.
It was funny how reunions, encounters with friends, supporters made some days more bearable than others. Marija’s letters from Australia, Pat Harding-Grayson’s unobtrusive mother-hen quasi-management of the social side of Prime Ministerial life, even the nonsense of unattached male members of the administration and party queuing up to stand by her side at official engagements was, now and then, touching. Tom and Pat, and Airey and Diana Neave had been absolutely marvellous with the twins, and quietly refused to let her hide them away from the world.
Frank had always felt the twins were too sheltered…
The twins missed Frank desperately, especially Mark who had got on so well with his step father…
The Hannays, Alan and Rosa, had come to tea yesterday afternoon, and stayed most of the evening, their two ‘bambinos’ distracting the Prime Minister from her red boxes and their stacks of position, policy and briefing papers.
Most nights it was a mercy, a comfort to trawl through the contents of those boxes because other than for an hour or two, she rarely slept unless she was exhausted.
Alan and Rosa had told her all about their time in Pasadena while Alan had been attending college there, and fascinatingly, offered her a number of marvellously insightful thoughts upon the complexities of Californian politics. She had naturally assumed that California, the President’s own state, was a banker for him in the coming November’s election. Not so, apparently, because although the scandals of the Warwick Hotel and Operation Chaos raged less fiercely than this time last year, people remembered that Richard Nixon had said, at the height of the crisis in early 1966 that the ‘buck stopped with him’, and that he would not run for office again.
Margaret Thatcher had always suspected that would come back to haunt the President, sooner or later.
She smiled tight-lipped at Commander Alan Hannay as she made eye contacts with the men who had risen to their feet at her entrance. Alan was present in his role – a short-term arrangement prior to his return to sea duty – as Rear Admiral Henry Conyers Leach’s Chief of Staff.
The forty-five-year-old former commander of the task force which had liberated the French Mediterranean Fleet from Villefranche-sur-Mer, and it now seemed probable, triggered the collapse of the nihilistic Front Internationale regime in Southern France last year, had been appointed Director of Operational Planning of the Royal Navy at the beginning of February, and had literally, grabbed Alan Hannay for his new Staff, when encountering him, allegedly wholly by chance, in a corridor of the new Admiralty Building in Portsmouth.
In the absence of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Varyl Begg, presently in Scotland visiting Vice Admiral Sir Simon Collingwood’s fiefdoms on the Gare Loch and at Rosyth, he had asked Henry Leach, a man pencilled in as the likely deputy of the next First Sea Lord upon Begg’s planned retirement later that year, to stand in for him at this meeting.
Also, otherwise engaged, was the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Michael Carver, who was in Malta and due to precede the Prime Minister to Cyprus, Israel, Jordan and the Indian sub-continent, paving the way for the military side of the premier’s tour. The CDS was represented by fifty-one-year-old General Sir Peter Hunt, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France between 1965 and the summer of last year; who had commanded the western sector of the front during the victorious Anglo-French offensive of last spring. His knighthood had been among a slew of well-earned ennoblements in the subsequent Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Knowing that his two fellow Chiefs of Staff were not scheduled to attend the Situation Room that afternoon, the newly installed Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshall Sir Daniel French, had sent Air Marshall Sir Denis Spotswood, the magnificently moustachioed fifty-one-year-old C-in-C of Home Defence Command, to represent his service’s interests. Coincidentally, Sir Daniel and his wife, Lady Rachel, were scheduled to dine with the Prime Minister at the Neave’s residence in Oxford tomorrow evening.
Viscount De L’Isle had originally not planned to be in Oxford, however, a trip to Canada had been cancelled at the last minute and he had arrived with Sir Fitzroy Maclean, MP, one of his three ministers of state.
Representing the Cabinet Office, Sir Henry Tomlinson had deputed his protégé, thirty-year-old Robin Butler to minute the proceedings.
Ostensibly, today’s conference was simply a briefing session to update the Prime Minister on the progress and implementation of the wide-ranging Defence Review mandated by the Government in July 1967.
Her instructions had been unambiguous: ‘Everything is on the table, all options consistent with the Defence and Foreign Policy of Her Majesty’s Government are to be considered with a view to radically modernising and streamlining the entire national defence establishment.’
The only areas which were sacrosanct were: one, the planned undersea fleet and the UK’s concomitant investment in the Joint UK-US Polaris Nuclear Strike Force; two, the retentions of a seaborne ‘air’ component (aircraft carriers); three, the retention of a significant amphibious warfare capability (the Royal Marines and at a minimum, the two existing twelve-thousand ton Landing Dock Ships, HMS Fearless and HMS Intrepid); four, consistent with three above, the retention of one airborne brigade (three active parachute battalions and at least two in reserve ready for ninety-day activation); five, sufficient destroyer or frigate type warships for effective trade route protection; six, the maintenance of overseas bases at Malta, Cyprus, Alexandria and Abadan; and seven, a nominal ground and air presence in France at the invitation of the French Government.
By its nature the ‘review’ was a huge exercise, complicated by the Government’
s invitation to ‘think the unthinkable’ and the involvement of the Cabinet Office, Treasury officials and industrial ‘time and motion’ experts in every service’s dedicated ‘Defence Review 67 Team’.
Big questions were being asked.
What do we mean by the air defence of the British Isles?
And in the missile age how is that best achieved?
What happens to the V-Bomber Force now that US-British Polaris-armed submarines have commenced ‘deterrent patrols’?
Is the international situation stable enough for us to risk significant structural manpower cuts to the Armed Forces?
Can allies be relied upon to provide overseas bases in times of crisis if we pull out of Aden, or Singapore, or leave the defence of the Cape in the hands of the South Africans?
Problematically, there were more questions than answers and the Prime Minister well-understood that there were severe, genuinely felt reservations about any cuts in the United Kingdom’s defence capabilities or spending. Inevitably, there was also an element of the British version of ‘pork belly’ politics in the great debate; and numerous honourable members of Parliament with defence contractors, ports, army bases or airfields in their constituencies who were rightly proud of, and indomitable defenders of their associations with the Armed Forces, sometimes dating back decades or centuries and did not want to see them go.
However, the reality of the situation was that had the United States not been prepared to refit – pragmatically, rebuild – the Ark Royal and the Eagle, essentially, for free, the Royal Navy’s carrier force would have been reduced to just the Victorious, by modern standards a relatively small platform, and the Hermes, five thousand tons smaller and still beset with seemingly insuperable mechanical troubles. Basically, the national piggy bank was empty and the country could not afford to carry on pouring twenty to thirty percent of its much reduced, post-October 1962 revenues into its military. The time had come when schools, hospitals, transportation infrastructure and at last, general reconstruction had to be the great national priorities.
