by James Philip
The RAF Vulcans were carrying ‘maximum mixed HE’ loads of thirty-five five-hundred, one-thousand, and two-thousand-pound free-fall high-explosive iron bombs. Each Canberra carried a single modified four-thousand-pound bunker-busting bomb in its bomb bay, and four five-hundred-pound anti-personnel munitions on under-wing hard points.
The attack plan, although simple in concept was anything but simple in execution; not least because it had been developed by three separate staffs – at Strike Command back in England, and by the Operations Staffs of the Eagle and the Victorious – and then had had to be ‘aligned’ by the Joint Services Operations Group, chaired by the Minister of State, Sir Fitzroy Maclean, MP - at RAF Brize Norton, before being promulgated back to the men charged with carrying it out.
Essentially, the RAF was ‘up high’ and the Navy was ‘down on the deck’, with hopefully, the twain never meeting in the target area. The carrier-based Gannets would monitor the ‘low’ side of business; 360 Squadron’s Canberra B6s, one of which was nominated as ‘master of ceremonies’ would control the ‘high’ end of the ‘party’.
Timing in war, as in life, is everything.
If the Fleet Air Arm’s Buccaneers screamed in low over the rooftops of Clermont-Ferrand thirty seconds early, they would attract the attention of every single gun in the city; if they turned up just thirty seconds late, they could easily end up flying through five-tenths falling bombs.
The Vulcans’ job was to crater runways and to generally obliterate Clermont-Ferrand airport. The Victorious’s Buccaneers were tasked to mop up anything the V-bombers ‘missed’. Meanwhile, 100 Squadron’s Canberras were going after ‘command, control, and infrastructure’ targets in and around the city. Among 100 Squadron’s targets were command bunkers, a power station, two bridges, a communications tower and several large buildings inside the city thought to be Front Internationale headquarters, barracks, depots or vehicle parks. The big two-ton blockbuster munitions would do their worst; the anti-personnel munitions would prevent assistance reaching the hardest hit targets for hours, possibly days.
War was not nice; and nobody in England or aboard the two aircraft carriers was minded to think otherwise.
Nobody needed to tell the C-in-C of Task Force V1, Henry Leach, exactly how nasty and unpleasant war was; his whole adult life had been turned upside down that day in December 1941 when he had desperately searched the dockside at Sembawang Naval Base at Singapore, as the destroyers Electra, Express and the Vampire landed the bedraggled survivors of the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse, sunk by Japanese aircraft the previous day. As each destroyer docked and offloaded its cargo of shocked and injured men, he had searched in vain to be reunited with his father, John Leach, the captain of the Prince of Wales: to no avail, for he had gone down with his ship, one of the three-hundred-and-twenty-seven men who had perished on the battleship in what was, for the Royal Navy, probably the most humiliating defeat of the 1939-45 war at sea.
All things being equal, Henry Leach accepted, it was as well not to allow human frailty, or even decency to enter into military planning. One’s duty was to one’s own side, one’s own men, and to be extremely careful in whom one trusted, and intensely suspicious of any blandishments to rely upon luck or good fortune to make good any deficiencies in one’s preparation or professional competence of others.
Given that no air-to-air interdiction – that is, fighter intercepts – were expected either en route to, or over the target, the two carriers’ Sea Vixens had been assigned a particular role all of their own. Previous ELINT - electronic surveillance - flights over the Auvergne had identified the signatures of short-range guidance radars consistent with those of the deadly Soviet surface-to-air missile systems encountered over Iraq, and elsewhere since the October War. It was the Sea Vixens’ job to hunt down the suspected SS-75 batteries sited in the extinct volcanic mountains surrounding Clermont-Ferrand. Once a battery flushed its birds there was no way to hide its location; and that was where the rocket pods under the fighters’ wings came in.
Henry Leach was in a bullish frame of mind.
To his mind the Clermont-Ferrand show was just the ticket.
Planning for it had commenced several days before Task Force V1 had departed Gibraltar and the need to keep his ‘strike assets’ rested and ready, and to avoid operations likely to deplete his squadron’s ‘punch’ in the interim, had very nearly forced him to order the premature destruction or scuttling of the French Fleet at Villefranche. In retrospect, that would have been a damned shame but thankfully, Dermot O’Reilly, with his customary good sense and a large slice of luck, had managed to extricate the surviving French ships and mother goose them all the way south to Malta with a bare minimum of casualties. Well, leastways, on the Royal Navy’s account, the unfortunate French had lost well over three hundred dead and missing, presumed drowned, according to O’Reilly’s latest count, in that blasted Russian bombing raid.
Leach comforted himself with the knowledge that but for Dermot O’Reilly’s Fletchers throwing up a distracting barrage the Soviets might have done for the whole French fleet!
It paid to be grateful for small mercies.
He guessed the public relations people in Malta were having a field day with the new French recruits to the cause! No doubt, when the news broke about today’s operation the papers back home would shout headlines proclaiming the double body blows inflicted on those Krasnaya Zarya bastards in the Auvergne…
It seemed that a 100 Squadron Canberra and one of the Eagle’s Sea Vixens were missing over enemy territory. The fate of the crews was as yet, unknown.
There was another thud overhead.
That was another aircraft down safely.
Even with the under-wing fuel tanks his Sea Vixens would be getting thirsty soon. The weather had been marginal earlier in the day, and it was no better now. The first time he had served on board a carrier he had spent endless hours watching air operations in all weathers, marvelling at the skills of the men who hurtled off the bow, hurled like a crossbow bolt, and landing back aboard, seemingly throwing their screaming steeds at the stern traps…
Thump!
The roar of jets, throttles pressed up against the stops, faded instantly telling all those below that the aircraft had caught a wire. Already, the fighter’s wings would be folding inward, and deck crews waving it towards a parking space or the forward elevator; the next aircraft would be approaching, the traps – steel hawsers raised off the wet deck, tensioned hydraulically – would be scraping back into position across the wet steel. There was nowhere at sea, or possibly, on land, more intense than the deck of an aircraft carrier at sea at night recovering its birds.
Thump!
In the background the ‘Air Circuit’ was open so that the men in the CIC could remain, viscerally, in contact with the real world of carrier flight operations in their cocooned, de-humanised cave buried deep in the bowels of the ship.
“WAVE OFF! WAVE OFF!”
For several of the pilots in the returning planes this would be their first experience of real, shooting operations. It was to be expected that even men with tens, possibly scores or more of carrier landings in their log books, having recently undergone the trial of battle – life or death – faced with a night landing back on Victorious as the ship battered into a relenting, none the less fierce ‘blow’, were on high-energy personal journeys of pure, unremitting self-discovery.
Henry Leach glanced up at the radar repeaters on the nearby bulkhead. The Kent and the Belfast were giving the Flagship a wide berth, respectively one and two miles to starboard and port. Farther out the four destroyers and two frigates of the 21st Destroyer Squadron formed the outer ring of the Task Force, with the assault ship, HMS Fearless just inside the protective screen some seven miles to port.
More than once Leach had considered peremptorily ordering Dermot O’Reilly and the Campbeltown to re-join the fleet at best speed; stopped himself each time. However, once the French
ships had been extracted from Villefranche, politically, they had assumed near iconic stature amongst the Free French and getting them to safety had suddenly become Task Force V1’s absolute top priority.
Henry Leach chuckled under his breath.
Dermot O’Reilly’s three Fletchers would have topped off their bunkers by dawn; after that he might be back in contact with the Task Force within as little as twenty-four hours. For Dermot’s speedy greyhounds, a fast seven to eight hundred mile run in a day was nothing.
Thump!
The instant a pilot felt his wheels touch he thrust the throttles into the red.
High-performance jets did not so much land, as crash onto the deck of a carrier and were brought to a sudden, juddering halt within fifty yards by the traps, throwing crewmen forward into their straps like rag dolls.
Arrested, the pilot swiftly throttled back to idle.
The aircraft moved off the traps.
Already the Landing Deck Officer (LDO) and his crew would be studying the next aircraft lining up for approach. The pilot would already have his eyes on the landing board: red was too high, green okay, yellow too low. Multiple reds or yellows meant a fly around; yet everybody knew that men who only watched the lights, or fixated, counting the dots were the sort of men who flew into the stern or regularly overshoot the traps.
Attitude, speed, rate of descent, am I on the right flight path…or not.
The LDO would be watching the lights like a hawk, the wave off man with his big white paddles constantly acted as if he was in the cockpit, indicating if the incoming aircraft’s wings were level. Just before landing he would fold those paddles across his chest to authorise the pilot to put down; if something was wrong, he would be the one that did the waving off.
Him, the Flight Crew in the Operations Centre in the island bridge superstructure and anybody else who had arms to wave!
If in doubt: wave off!
Every deck landing was analysed, assessed, picked over by the LDO and his team. It sounded arcane, to be judged by one’s peers every time one survived a landing but when you were dumping a fifteen-ton fast jet – ‘empty’ a Sea Vixen was thirteen tons and a Buccaneer fourteen, so both would be around fifteen or sixteen tons for most landings, especially if a fellow still had ordnance on board - on a tiny, moving metal airfield in the middle of a big, cold sea that did not give a damn if you lived or died, it paid to remember that your first bad mistake was liable to be your last one too.
Thump!
Henry Leach thought that landing sounded different, heavier.
That had to be one of his Buccaneers landing.
Chapter 45
Sunday 12th February 1967
United Kingdom Embassy, Washington DC
Sir Nicholas ‘Nicko’ Henderson had been looking forward to tucking into a relaxed family luncheon on his arrival back at 3100 Massachusetts Ave NW, from church that morning. However, he and his wife Mary and teenage daughter Alexandra had been intercepted as they entered the residence, rudely spoiling any notion of a quiet family meal.
It seemed that a certain Lady Rachel French had, apparently ‘turned up unannounced’, if not to say, ‘out of the blue’ and asked to speak to the Ambassador.
The Duty Officer, a relatively junior member of Chancery Section newly arrived from England, had not really known what to do with the lady. Nor had he asked her for proof of her identity, asked the Security Department to do more than simply accompany her to the waiting room in the public area of the main building, nor had they had her searched, as was the normal drill for any person not expected at the compound.
“She claims to be the wife of Air Marshal Sir Daniel French…”
A claim made problematic to the young officer since the lady had a discernible ‘Eastern European accent’ and was dressed ‘somewhat in the fashion of a…model.’
Henderson had apologised to his wife.
“I shall be late joining you for lunch,” he bemoaned ruefully.
Mary Henderson accepted this without demur; life was never dull at the Embassy in Washington!
The Ambassador gave orders for ‘Lady French’ and any belongings she had brought with her to be searched in the normal way; and, assuming nothing untoward resulted, thereafter for her to be escorted to his office.
He would have asked the chargé d'affaires to join him but his deputy was staying with old friends in Connecticut that weekend; the poor fellow was still recovering from his latest brush with ill-health since his arrival in America last year.
Sir Nicholas was still a little miffed not to have been ‘in on the ground floor’ at the re-inauguration of the United Nations in San Francisco. That said, from what he was hearing the whole affair was something of a dog’s breakfast. Foreign Office colleagues accompanying the Prime Minister on the West Coast, were appalled by their hosts’ attitude and the cack-handed organisation on board the USS United States with diplomats and delegates being treated as ‘virtual prisoners.’
In any event, no matter how he felt about missing out on the West Coast jamboree – Mary and Alexandra would have loved to visit San Francisco – as things had turned out, it was probably for the best that he had stayed behind in DC to ‘mind the shop.’
In fact, the more he thought about the aftermath of the Camp David summit, and the mixed messages which were still seeping out of the woodwork, vis-à-vis the still, moderately rude health of the US-UK reconciliation, contrasted with the astonishing revelations emerging about Operation Maelstrom, he was ever more convinced that he was almost certainly, in the right place at the right time. His deputy was a fine fellow with immense experience of government and pre-October 1962 diplomacy but he had yet to establish good relations with key operators on the Hill, and he really had not come to terms with the changed realities of the modern age, bless him…
For example, he would definitely have got so hot under the collar about The Washington Post’s allegations concerning the CIA’s surveillance operation, and the activities of the ‘dirty tricks department’ of the Office of Security at Langley, directed in the main at the persons of Henderson’s predecessors in Philadelphia and DC, Sir Peter and Lady Marija Christopher and their staff, that he would have almost certainly sparked a new diplomatic rift with the Nixon Administration. Yes, on balance, it had been for the best that he and Mary had still been in Washington to face down, and generally play down the outrage Her Majesty’s Government was entitled to express, and to blithely assure all and sundry that the ‘special relationship’ was alive, kicking and all in all, in remarkably fine fettle.
Nicko had been careful not to rise to the bait; to answer every barbed question from the press pack encamped outside the Embassy gates that: one, nobody in England took the allegations very seriously, and; two, that even if there was ‘some minor substance’ in the ‘rumours’, it was nothing that ‘good friends’ could not ‘get over.’
Privately, he was mightily disappointed with more than one ‘old friend’ at the State Department and elsewhere in the DC machine. There had been times in recent days when he had been too angry to talk to anybody at State, and only yesterday he had registered a formal, albeit confidential, letter of protest to the Deputy Head of Protocol demanding a full explanation of his hosts’ blatant flouting of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Immunity. In fact, the more he learned about Operation Maelstrom and the CIA’s, and the FBI’s, failed attempts to spy on Peter and Marija, and their closest friends and colleagues, digging for dirt, anything to discredit, or possibly, to blackmail them with, the more disgusted the British Ambassador became. So, underneath his easy-going, Devil may care public persona that he continued to present to the American media, he was silently fuming. Moreover, he very much doubted he was going to forgive, let alone forget, any of the transgressions against him, his family, his friends or his country, suffered at the hands of his country’s…allies.
Only one thing about the whole sorry affair really mystified him. By all accounts, the Prime Minister had r
emained, relatively speaking, beatifically ‘calm’ about the whole dismal farrago. It probably helped that he had Tom Harding-Grayson and Airey Neave at her side, and between them those two old rogues were no angels, both rascals on a par with Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover any day of the week; albeit Nicko suspected rather shrewder practitioners of the dark arts, and, heaven forfend, nowhere near as brazen as their American counterparts.
Henderson had long ago, determined not to inquire too deeply into the world of the late Sir Dick White, the United Kingdom’s spymaster supreme. It was salutary to remind oneself that the CIA and the FBI did not have the monopoly, any more than the KGB, on duplicity and the foulest of foul double-dealing…
“Nicko,” Rachel smiled impatiently, “it is positively freezing in that dreadful waiting room your people put me in!”
Henderson waved for his guest’s escorting security man – a middle-aged, balding former Special Branch officer – to leave the room before coming around his desk to greet his unwanted visitor.
“You’ll forgive me if I am almost afraid to ask what I can do for you, Lady French,” the British Ambassador admitted, shaking Rachel’s hand and planting a cursory peck on the cheek she offered. “Or are you presently operating under one of your more arcane aliases?”
Rachel shook her head.
“No,” she replied.
“Hopefully, Mary will be organising a pot of tea for us. The normal staff don’t work on Sundays. We shut down most of the Embassy over the weekend these days, we can’t afford to pay the American clerical and ancillary staff, you see. Hopefully, the pound will clamber up to parity with the dollar one day before I retire!”
Rachel smiled.
If Nicko Henderson had been a typical Foreign Office apparatchik she would not have risked coming within a country mile of the Embassy. However, if he had been just another diplomatic time server, hide-bound and unimaginative, his life dictated by red tape and the latest FCO dogmas, Tom Harding-Grayson would never have sent him to the USA, or so forcefully have insisted that he was the best man to buttress, and subsequently replace the Christopher regime. The Machiavellian Foreign Secretary had never been a big fan of Sir Peter Christopher’s regime, the man he called ‘the accidental ambassador’; in hindsight a rare misstep by the old fox, because Peter and Marija had been exactly the sort of people, possibly the only people in Christendom who could have plotted, or stumbled – it hardly mattered which – through the catastrophic denouement of Anglo-American diplomatic relations in the wake of the Wister Park atrocity. And thereafter, somehow save them all from the consequences of the unmitigated disaster of the Kennedy Administration’s bizarre – she assumed, drug-induced – policy in the Middle East back in 1964.