by James Philip
That she was likely thinking a lot less about him than he was about her did not trouble the old soldier. His wife was the bally Prime Minister, after all, what!
That said, separation was beginning to play on his mind.
He missed her…
Moreover, all this sitting around waiting for the storm to abate had not helped; not one little bit!
Alan de Boissieu was contemplating the map, a coffee cup in hand.
“I wish I knew what to make of the Russians bombing the Villefranche fleet,” Frank Waters confessed to his friend as he joined him at the big wall map of France.
“Yes,” the other man agreed, a little absently. He blinked, emerged from his thoughts. “It is very curious. The timing, especially. They could not have known that the Royal Navy had already seized,” he grimaced, rephrased this: “agreed the neutralisation of the ships at Villefranche. Thus, the attack must have been otherwise motivated…it is all very, curious.” He sighed. “Sir Michael may be right when he suggests it smacks of a certain strategic dissonance on the part of our Russian foes.”
Up until then the assumption had been that the Soviets – given that everybody viewed the Front Internationale as straightforward agents of the monstrous Krasnaya Zarya abomination – would fight tooth and nail to succour their ‘ally’ in France.
“If I may, an appropriate analogy may be the Mers El Kébir affair,” de Boissieu remarked, a note of apology underlying his words, “that sad business succeeded in putting a part of the French Fleet out of reach of the Axis powers, but it did nothing whatsoever to weaken the grip of the Vichy regime in French North Africa, enabling those traitors and cowards to cling on to power for well over another two years. To bomb the fleet that way, it is almost like the Nazis attacking Mers El Kébir first. It makes no sense…”
Frank Waters was uncharacteristically contemplative for a moment.
“Maybe the Russians were afraid those ships would fall into our hands?”
“But that infers they did not trust their friends in the Auvergne to keep them safe?”
“True,” the former SAS man agreed. “But either way, we have those ships and they, Maxim Machenaud’s crowd in Clermont-Ferrand, or Admiral Gorshkov’s merry men in Sverdlovsk, don’t!
The two men could hear the armoured vehicles, jeeps and trucks in the main square starting up their engines, revving hard. The cold had been so intense that motors had had to be fired up every two or three hours to ensure that lubrication oils did not start to separate out or engine blocks freeze solid.
Snow ploughs had been deployed that morning for the first time in four days, to start to clear key roads behind the front, and work had also begun to re-open the rail lines from the channel ports. Engineer battalions stood ready to advance with the troops, repairing roads, rigging temporary bridges and re-constructing, if necessary, several railways to enable the Anglo-French logistical chain to keep up with the fighting troops. Having been stood down a week ago, everything was slowly gearing up anew, this time in a frigid, wintery world.
The winter storm had wrecked the original plan; presently, there was no prospect whatsoever of poorly-equipped militia units advancing side by side with the front-line assault battle groups, nor any realistic hope of Free French forces moving forward in an unbroken ‘broad front’. In the snow and the anticipated thaw conditions a week hence, volunteer regiments would bog down, most likely suffer ten times as many casualties from the cold and the wet than from enemy action.
Pertinently, faced with an army of irregulars, fighters better attuned to guerrilla, asymmetric warfare, in those self-same – by any standards, diabolical campaigning conditions – the men of the British Expeditionary Force on the right, and the mainly regular, well-trained and armed assault formations of the Free French Army supported by all the armour, artillery and the whole Army’s supply train – which otherwise would have been dispersed along the whole front – might, conceivably, still sweep everything before them all the way to the foothills of the Massif Central in a matter of days.
The gamble – for that was what it was – was worth the candle.
And they were going to gamble the whole house on it!
Chapter 30
Monday 6th February 1967
USS United States, San Francisco Bay
Sir Roy Jenkins, the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations (Designate), had been caught unawares by the Prime Minister’s delayed arrival on the West Coast, having arranged – as a connoisseur of fine wines - for a visit to the Napa Valley to get better acquainted with Californian viniculture. Unknown to the Prime Minister he had also received a note from his putative boss, the Foreign Secretary suggesting that since there would be little opportunity for confidential discussions on the first evening at the Presidio that he join the party that morning on the USS United States.
The full United Nations Assembly was not due to be called to order until Friday afternoon; the coming days were reserved for ‘arrival’ and ‘familiarisation’ sessions, and to allow the delegations staying on board the former Atlantic Blue Ribbon holder to settle in and to conduct pre-conference ‘get-to-know’ and ‘exploratory’ off the record encounters and meetings.
Margaret Thatcher viewed the long, black shapes of the two Polaris submarines moored outboard of the twenty-thousand-ton depot ship USS Hunley (AS-31) off Almeida as the British convoy and its escorts drew up at the quayside. Now anchored only some sixty yards offshore the USS United States filled the visible horizon, blanking out the city of San Francisco on the opposite side of the bay. The drive across the city and the Bay Bridge to Oakland and thence, down to the naval base had taken – notwithstanding police outriders hurrying the cavalcade through the traffic - the best part of fifty-five minutes, seemingly a further disincentive for the British delegation to base itself at the Presidio.
Where to ‘call home’ had been a subject of discussion that morning at breakfast, the Prime Minister having indicated that she had found her lodgings ‘most satisfactory’ and ‘enjoyed the view’ from her apartment window of the Golden Gate Bridge. The length of the journey to the Almeida Naval Base had complicated the debate but those close to her knew she was not easily going to be swayed. Nevertheless, there was an odd disenchantment within the group at the idea of being ‘cooped’ up on a boat for as long as a week with a bunch of potentially quarrelsome strangers. Moreover, that morning Roy Jenkins had put a call through to Tom Harding-Grayson confirming that the US ‘top team’ planned to base itself in a mansion ‘in the hills’, rather than ‘slumming it’ with the ‘hoi polloi’ on ‘the big boat’.
Jenkins saw absolutely no profit in the Prime Minister making herself a sitting target for ‘all comers’ aboard the converted liner, especially given the absence of the President and his Secretary of State, speculating that: “Perhaps the US Navy or the Marine Corps could be prevailed upon to provide a fast boat or possibly, a helicopter, to speed daily transit to and from the conference venue?”
This had swiftly hardened into a specific request by the time one of the Navy launches loitering in a line to carry dignitaries, had ferried the party out to the USS United States.
The request somewhat perturbed the State Department’s Head of Protocol.
“We shall remain at the Presidio,” the British Prime Minister declared when the man had politely begun to make difficulties.
The Administration’s attitude, disdain if one was being brutally honest about it, for the whole ‘Rededication Process’ at the acrimonious Camp David Summit had sparked unhappy memories of the abortive Manhattan Peace Process initiated in JFK’s time, quietly allowed to run into the sand by LBJ and subsequently, abandoned by the Nixon Administration after the old United Nations Building had been badly damaged in the New Year’s Eve nuking of the Empire State Building.
At one level the Prime Minister – and everybody in her party, also – understood the Americans’ natural preference for bilateralism rather than internationalis
m; after all, the US was the top dog in the World militarily, industrially, economically. Foreign compacts such as the Commonwealth Mutual Assistance and Free Trade Agreement, the Hong Kong Treaty with the Communist Chinese, the developing internal Commonwealth trade ‘understandings’ excluding or limiting the freedom of operation of US companies, not to mention the web of British and Commonwealth highly secret ‘relations’ with powers across the Middle East, had already, in its view, unfairly shut the US out of many of its post-1945 markets, and artificially inflated the prices of many of the raw materials desperately needed by its now booming economy. Moreover, it had come as no surprise that the Americans had been selectively deaf to the British – reflecting the perspective of the new Commonwealth – position that if the US negotiating posture was that it should be free to attempt to ‘pick off’ or ‘cherry pick’ weaker nations at will, expecting the rest of the world to sit back and do nothing, that was no way to justly conduct international relations, and certainly no good reason to frustrate the re-inauguration of a global forum for the settlement of disputes between nations. Which actually, somewhat ironically from the US Administration’s bilaterialist perspective, in a world ungoverned by general tariff and security arrangements, ought to be a common sense way forward.
Tellingly, at Camp David the US side had clearly regarded its idea to build on the presently ruined, inactive framework of the 1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a ‘world-wide organisation to regulate trade’, as deserving of a much higher priority than setting up a new ‘talking shop of the nations.’ As it happened, the British were in no way hostile to the concept of creating a bigger, better, more inclusive GATT, especially if its long-term objective was the progressive elimination of all disincentives to international trade. That is, if it sought to get rid of tariffs and taxes and to open up all markets to British exports. When it came to discussing trade, nobody was selfless, and nobody’s motives were snow white.
Richard Nixon had taken offence when Margaret Thatcher had likened the US model of international relations to a ‘cartel designed to disadvantage smaller countries.’
In fact, there had been broad areas of agreement, genuine concord on a large number of issues: defence, technological transfers in a raft of spheres, and educational exchanges practically all of which were in the British favour. Undertakings to continue the ongoing diplomatic rapprochement between the US and the Commonwealth, and heads of agreement had been signed permitting Gulf Oil, Standard Oil of California (SoCal), Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, Mobil, and Texaco to buy back into the Arabian oil fields and the re-building of the Abadan Oil Refinery complex by buying stakes – short of a controlling holding - in British Petroleum and Anglo-Dutch Shell. On paper, despite the discordant headlines, in the round, the two allies had agreed on vastly more than they disagreed about; problematically, where they disagreed, they seemed literally, oceans apart.
Unfortunately, because the Nixon Administration had not got, nor was likely, to get everything it wanted from its British allies, or from the forthcoming United Nations gathering, it was sulking. Which was extraordinary, given even a cursory glance at the credit side of the international ledger.
For example, it was taken as read that the two country’s policy towards the Soviet Union was in lock-step, and likewise, that their mutual commitment to NATO and a raft of other security-related concordats, rock solid. North America and the United Kingdom already formed what was, in effect, a free trade zone in which it was assumed the three economies would automatically become more integrated, regardless of the Canadian and British commitments under the CMAFTA umbrella. Practically speaking, exporting and importing via Canada and the United Kingdom, or setting up overseas offices in either country was a free pass for American manufacturers and financiers into the whole New Commonwealth Free Trade Area, in itself a much better deal for North American manufacturers and agricultural producers than before under the old GATT arrangements.
An unbiased, disinterested observer would have concluded that the British and the American governments had pretty much ‘stitched up things’ between them, and possibly, been minded to discount the few remaining dissonances in the allies’ relationship as of minor, relatively insignificant bearing on their vital local and strategic geopolitical interests.
Inevitably, this ignored the reality; neither the UK nor the US were unbiased, or disinterested parties in the ‘handful’ of disputatious areas separating them.
The United Kingdom was maddened by the Administration’s attitude to the Irish situation. From Oxford the US was both too involved, and in key respects, far too disengaged about the ongoing Troubles. American politicians were far too keen to rabble rouse and condone the activities of Irish Republican insurgents and terrorists, playing to their domestic East Coast Irish lobbies, and the American body politic had at no time acted decisively to stop the flow of cash and arms to the Irish Republic which was fuelling the war in the North. In the last couple of years, the imbroglio had become a nightmare not just for the British Government but for that of the Republic of Ireland also.
If it was not for the low-level war in Ulster, demanding the deployment of over twenty-three thousand military personnel and costing a hundred or so lives – in 1966 there had been two-hundred-and ninety-four British servicemen and Northern Ireland police officers and nine-hundred-and-fifteen civilians, killed, excluding the sixty-one fatalities believed to be IRA men or active sympathisers - most months; in a shattered Europe, the twenty-six undamaged counties of the South, Eire, would by now have been a magnet for old and new industries, a heaven-sent gateway to the New World. Instead, the republic of Ireland was a country under siege from its own people, unable or unwilling to confront its enemies within and therefore, a pariah state to its nearest, over-powerful neighbour. Eire’s economy was not so much in a state of collapse, as of slow disintegration yet it was the United Kingdom, not its avowed ex-patriot allies in the United States, which sent food ships, not cash and guns for the Irish Republican Army, a Mafia-like criminal organisation first and freedom fighting movement second, which seemed Hell-bent on destabilising both the government in Dublin, as well as that of the six counties of Ulster.
‘Help us resolve the security problem in Northern Ireland,” Margaret Thatcher had put to the President, “and there would no longer be any UK objection to the inclusion of the island of Ireland in both the CMAFTA and our existing free trade zone with you in North America.”
Unfortunately, much though popular support for the Irish cause ran high in many cities of New England, the appetite of American entrepreneurs and tycoons for investing in what many still referred to, ignorantly and in the Prime Minister’s opinion, unforgivably, as a ‘potato economy’ remained negligible.
If the Irish problem was seemingly intractable, the American disdain and real anger, was reserved for the Hong Kong Treaty and its implications for the constitution of the re-convened General Assembly of the United Nations, and the make-up of the future Permanent Security Council. This above all else, was the bugbear at the heart of the Administration’s mistrust and lack of enthusiasm for the whole ‘UN Project’.
Under the Hong Kong Treaty protocols, providing the Chinese stuck to their side of the agreement, the United Kingdom was obliged to vote – not lobby or in any way proselytise, just vote – in favour of the removal of Nationalist China, Chiang Kai Shek’s rump regime on Taiwan (to the People’s Republic the fraudulent ‘Formosan running dogs’), and the elevation of Communist Mainland China to the Security Council. This had been no more than a potential embarrassment in the absence of the Russians but hawks in the Nixon Administration had always assumed that the Soviet Union would reclaim its place at the UN table, and now they had been proven right. Sooner or later, the Soviets were bound to question France’s right to sit at that top table, and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the General Assembly would agree. In that event the United Kingdom and the United States could, conceivably, find themselves i
n a minority at the top table of the organisation that they had championed back in 1944.
Which was unthinkable…
Thereafter, the conversation about the third area of contention – the South Atlantic Question - between the two allies had been brief, ill-tempered and on the US side, offensively dismissive.
Margaret Thatcher had sought an undertaking from the Administration that it would support the UK’s call for an international tribunal to determine the fate of the Falkland Islands (previously claimed by both the United Kingdom and the Argentine), South Georgia and the South Sandwich islands (both still internationally recognised British Overseas Territories), and the destruction of the British camp on its allotted slice of Antarctica, by force majeure by the Argentine in April 1964.
Further, the United Kingdom sought, on behalf of the one thousand, three hundred and ninety-seven surviving Falkland Islanders dispossessed and deported from their homes on the archipelago restitution and compensation, and justice for the three-hundred-and-eighty-seven islanders who had been killed, or disappeared during the invasion, during the process of forced deportation, or who had simply disappeared in transit and never reached either the United States or the United Kingdom.
There was also the small matter of the brutal liquidation of the small Royal Marine detachment based at Port Stanley at the time of the invasion, many of whom were suspected to have been executed by their captors after laying down their arms and surrendering.
The Prime Minister also raised the numerous documented cases of rape and torture reported by mainly women, but also by several men, by Argentine troops on the Falkland Islands, and – in the main – by Argentine military policemen and militiamen while they were detained in Argentina.