A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 1 (Timeline 10/27/62)

by James Philip

  Marija could not wait to return to their lodgings at Corpus Christi College that evening. Her husband was still black and blue, sore and healing under his new uniform so she had been gentle with him. It was the first time they had made love since the morning of the Battle of Malta when her adorable, clever, honourable and unbelievably stupidly courageous husband of less than six weeks had done his absolute level best to get himself killed!

  Yesterday morning there had been a message from Iain Macleod’s Private Office asking if she and Peter could attend a short meeting at Oriel College. In welcoming the couple into his lair the normally charming, ebullient Minister had been unusually diffident.

  ‘A decision has been made,’ he had hesitated, ‘by me, actually, on the advice of the Director General of the Security Services, to permanently embargo any information relating to the arrest and execution of your brother, Lady Marija,’ he had explained.

  They had been on ‘Iain’ and ‘Marija’ on the flight back to England.

  ‘Might I inquire why, Mr Macleod?’ Peter had interjected, betraying no hint of censure.

  ‘Firstly, full disclosure in this matter will almost certainly give more comfort to our enemies than anybody connected to the dead man.’ At this juncture he had looked to Marija with apologetic eyes. ‘Secondly, you had to know, you both had to know because you will become, if you are not already, public figures who will, inevitably, be confronted with rumours and suchlike in the coming years. Frankly, knowing what really happened will help you avoid, let us say, offering inadvertent hostages to fortune. I should tell you that Samuel’s widow, Rosa, has already been fully apprised of the situation and has undertaken to go along with the ‘official line’. She seems to be a most sensible young woman. She stipulated the proviso that a certificate be issued legally assuming that Samuel had in fact perished when HMS Torquay was sabotaged earlier this year. I believe she considers herself to be affianced to Lieutenant-Commander Hannay and that the possession of this ‘certificate’ will facilitate their marriage at the earliest possible time.’

  The Minster of Information had made no attempt to sweeten the pill.

  ‘The fiction that Samuel was an innocent dupe of Red Dawn zealots murdered onboard HMS Torquay will be the official line herewith. Your brother Joe has not been briefed in this matter, nor have your parents in Malta. They can never know the truth about Samuel.’

  Marija had been angry and shocked, belatedly understanding why her brother Joe had been kept in hospital in Cheltenham. While he was in hospital and she was here in Oxford they could not share inconvenient secrets.

  ‘So,’ she had objected, ‘I must now lie to my family about my brother?’

  ‘Yes,’ Iain Macleod had confirmed. He had spread his hands wide, imploring the young couple to understand.

  ‘Look, we live in a world in which all the old courtesies and decencies are buried under a layer of radioactive ash. Most of the people in this country are hungry a lot of time, there’s hardly any electricity; very few private citizens have their own cars, most people work for the ration tickets that feed their families. There is no real economy, all things considered life is pretty miserable, and there isn’t much we, as the government can do about it. And that was before this thing in the Middle East blew up in our faces. If we lose the oil from Abadan we’ll be completely at the mercy of the bloody Americans again. If that happens, goodness only knows what will become of us. But, and it is a huge but,’ the Minister for Information declaimed, raising a hand as if in salutation, ‘in the next few days Barry Lankester’s film about the heroes of the Talavera and her brave Captain’s fairy tale princess wife will be on every movie screen in the land.’

  Marija had pulled a disapproving face.

  ‘You are a princess, my dear,’ the man had told her, rather sternly. ‘And Peter is genuine British hero straight out of the pages of Boys’ Own!’ Iain Macleod had had to pause for breath at this point. ‘And if you think I am going to deny the British people the chance to bask in a little of your reflected glory you are sadly mistaken!’

  Pat Harding-Grayson had been Marija’s sometime companion most of the last week. Marija had met the ‘Prime Ministerial twins’ twice, once for tea in Margaret Thatcher’s rooms in Corpus Christi. The Prime Minister had been somewhere else on business, which had been a pity. The twins were bright and friendly; particularly Carol who had asked her a series of polite questions about Malta, Mark had only wanted to know about the big battle.

  Pat tended to materialise whenever there was a possibility Marija was going to encounter ordinary people, or worse, the gentlemen of the press. Pat was, it seemed, Marija’s chaperone.

  Marija realised passengers were disembarking from the Hercules. She was a little taken aback when the first person she recognised walking down the ramp was Clara Pullman. Clara looked...different. The other woman smiled towards Marija, but waited in the shadow of the Hercules’s tail plane.

  Maria took her appearance as her cue to approach the aircraft, paying no heed to the other passengers emerging from the Hercules.

  Clara waved, glanced back into the cargo bay.

  Rosa appeared, walking stiffly but hardly limping at all.

  She stepped onto the cold tarmac.

  “Sister!” Marija screeched, completely oblivious of the half-dozen cameras clicking thirty feet to her right. In her excitement she almost but not quite forgot that she could not run. That was a mistake she had made back at the beginning of February and fallen flat on her face; ensuring that the first time the man she had loved half her life actually laid eyes on her, she looked like she had been beaten up!

  Compromising she hurried, threatening to skip.

  In moments Marija and Rosa fell into a joyous embrace.

  A man in a wheelchair swathed in blankets, his face hidden by the rim of a hat drawn down over his brow, was pushed around the young Maltese women by a stoic middle-aged woman with straw-coloured hair shivering in the chill of the northern spring. The man glanced at the two young women as they trundled past. He said something to the woman propelling his chair forward, she retorted with an impatient snort.

  In their delight to be reunited neither Rosa nor Marija even noticed their passing.

  They laughed, sobbed, clung to each other in relief and...hysteria.

  For both of them the last week had been a giddy rollercoaster of extreme emotions and for reasons that only they could understand, there was nobody in the world either of them needed to be with more at that moment.

  They had been very distant sisters-in-law until Samuel had disappeared, presumed dead in the wreck of HMS Torquay in January. Then Marija’s friend and protector, Jim Siddall had been killed by a booby trap bomb investigating Sam’s workshop and Rosa badly injured. Rosa had been shunned, virtually disowned by her own family and Marija had befriended her; what else would she have done in the circumstances? Thereafter the two women had been inseparable until a week ago when Marija had flown to England. To be together again was sublime.

  The women stood back.

  Rosa bit her lip.

  “I can never tell Alan,” she whispered, knowing her sister would understand.

  Marija blinked back tears.

  Both the women were misty eyed, close to breaking down.

  “Peter knows,” she murmured, aware that other people were approaching. “But nobody else can ever know.”

  Rosa nodded, tears trickling down her cheeks.

  The sister hugged again, this time clinging to each other for dear life as if they were afraid they were about to be parted forever.

  Chapter 6

  Monday 13th April 1964

  Corpus Christi College, Oxford, England

  Margaret Thatcher swept into that morning’s appointed Cabinet Room to an accompaniment of scraping chairs and a stentorian chorus of ‘Good morning, Prime Minister’. Last Thursday, in consultation with her deputy, James Callaghan the leader of the minority Labour and Co-operative Party element of the totterin
g Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, it had been decided to alter the structure of the government machine and to create a formal ‘War Cabinet’. Today was the first meeting of that new sub-committee of the full Cabinet.

  Several members of the UAUK had objected to their exclusion from the ‘inner circle’, one – Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for Labour – had protested bitterly about ‘the decision to go to war’ having ‘gone through on the nod’ before Cabinet had had an opportunity to ‘discuss it’. The feisty Member of Parliament for Blackburn had not, however, resigned over the issue.

  Margaret Thatcher had reminded all her colleagues that if they could not support her in this ‘hour of crisis’ that they ought to seriously consider their ‘positions now rather than later’.

  While she had no inclination to attempt – like Winston Churchill – to fight this new war single-handed, she had no intention of allowing ministers who ought to be solely focused on their own department’s domestic responsibilities to be ‘distracted’ by military and strategic considerations that were in no way their ‘proper business’. In the current crisis the fact that she honestly did not think that she would still be Prime Minister in a few weeks time was oddly liberating.

  “Please,” she enunciated primly, “everybody sit down.”

  Margaret Thatcher eased herself into the hard chair that one of her Royal Marine bodyguards, a walking wounded survivor from the Brize Norton atrocity, had brought down from her Private Office in the minutes before the War Cabinet convened. Like his charge, the man – Corporal David Sampson, on detached service to Oxford from his unit, 45 Commando - had moved stiffly as he shepherded the Prime Minister to her place at the long oval table positioned in the middle of the commandeered former ground floor common room. Sampson, like several of his ‘oppos’ who had suffered minor wounds at Brize Norton, having refused to go on the sick list was restricted to ‘inside duties’.

  At least one of Margaret Thatcher’s AWPs escorted her everywhere, even inside the medieval walls of Corpus Christi College. Like their comrades of the Black Watch in the Royal Protection Company, the Royal Marines of the Prime Ministerial Bodyguard had taken the ‘outrage’ at Brize Norton a week ago as an unforgivable slight to the proud escutcheons of their units. Notwithstanding the circumstances and the death and wounding of so many of their brothers in arms, each and every man regarded the attack upon and the harming of their respective charges as being a profoundly personal insult.

  The AWPs former commanding officer, Captain Hamish McLeish a Charterhouse educated, charming, red-headed former England rugby player, who had always treated Margaret Thatcher as if she was a senior member of the Royal family, had died of his injuries three nights ago. The Prime Minister, noting the look in the eyes of her AWPs, had taken his replacement, thirty-five year old Major Sir Steuart Pringle aside and reiterated that she ‘did not want anybody getting shot just because they inadvertently look at me in the wrong way!’

  ‘Oh, absolutely not, Ma’am,” the Royal Marine had promised.

  Margaret Thatcher had sighed with undiluted exasperation.

  ‘Ma’am is how one addresses Her Majesty the Queen, Major Pringle,’ she had complained, wondering if she ought to be addressing the man as Sir Steuart, given that he was, strictly speaking, 10th Baronet Pringle? ‘I am just the Prime Minister. Therefore, Prime Minister or Mrs Thatcher will suffice in future.’

  The Royal Marine had smiled toothily at her.

  ‘Your wish is my command, Ma’am,’ he had acknowledged, his face a mask of taciturnity.

  She had given up the unequal battle at that stage. Humbled that her faithful AWPs seemed to think nothing of dying for her; they could jolly well address her however they wished!

  “Thank you, Corporal Sampson,” she murmured, dismissing her limping minder. “I shall be occupied in here for some time. I shall be very unhappy if I discover later that you have not taken this opportunity to rest your injured ankle in the meantime.”

  “Yes, Ma’am!” The Marine replied respectfully as he briefly came to attention.

  “Good. I’m glad we understand each other,” she declared, uncertain if either of them actually remotely understood each other, deciding that other than in their suicidal devotion to her she hardly understood her brave AWPs at all.

  The man turned and marched painfully out of the room, his booted feet clumping loudly on the bare boards. The big oak doors shut at his back and the cast of characters confronted with the nation’s latest disaster waited for their beleaguered leader to kick off proceedings.

  Margaret Thatcher was in no hurry; the best estimate was that the first Red Army tanks could not possible reach the northern shores of the Persian Gulf in less than thirty days. Anything could happen in that time. She looked around the Cabinet table which today, seemed sparsely occupied.

  To her left was her deputy, fifty-one year old James Callaghan, the big, lugubrious man who behind the scenes was fighting a dogged rearguard action to hold the rump of the Labour and Co-operative Party together. The sitting member of Parliament for Cardiff South and Penarth, he was also Secretary of State for Wales. Ultimately, the fate of the UAUK was in his hands; for if his Party split away from what remained of the national government of ‘Unity’ there would probably have to be a General Election and nobody around the table knew what was likely to happen if the country went to the polls in the middle of a new war.

  Beyond Callaghan sat the forty-eight year old MP for Abingdon, Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave, DSO, MC, the newly appointed Secretary of State for the Intelligence Services as the head of a new Ministry of National Security, a department created at Margaret Thatcher’s diktat to ‘rationalize, amalgamate and electrify’ the ‘complacent, incompetent, fragmented dog’s breakfast’ that comprised the United Kingdom ‘intelligence community’ in the wake of the ‘disastrous failures of MI5, MI6 and the other intelligence organs which have comprehensively undermined everything we have achieved since the war!’

  Airey Neave had escaped from Colditz, joined MI6 and been the man who read the indictments to the leading surviving Nazis at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal. Following the October War he had been Margaret Thatcher’s number two at the Ministry of Supply, after Defence the most important department in the land, before stepping into her shoes on her elevation to the Premiership. He remained her closest, most implicitly trusted friend in government and he had been the obvious man to take on the poisoned chalice of the re-organised ‘Intelligence Brief’.

  Sir Henry Tomlinson, the Cabinet Secretary sat to the Prime Minister’s right, and beyond him Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson, until December the Permanent Secretary in the post-October War Foreign Office. With the death of his predecessor, Sir Alec Douglas Home in the regicidal attack on Balmoral, he had been co-opted into the Cabinet by the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath. Recognised as one of, if not the finest mind in Whitehall before the war and in the way of these things sidelined because of it, like Airey Neave he was one of Margaret Thatcher’s closest friends and confidantes.

  Fifty year old Iain Norman Macleod, the Minister for Information – basically, the UAUK’s principal propagandist and apologist – also held the posts of Leader of the House of Commons, and Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party. In normal times he would have been Margaret Thatcher’s political bellwether and conscience; however, in the five turbulent months of her Prime Ministerial career to date he had been far too busy fighting fires and plugging the gaping holes below the waterline of the ship of state to worry about anything so ephemeral as the state of the Party in the country, or any of the normal minor politico-ideological or doctrinal schisms over which a man in his position would have endlessly obsessed prior to the cataclysm.

  Across the table to the Prime Minister’s right sat the Secretary of State for Defence, forty-five year old William Stephen Ian Whitelaw the MP for Penrith and the Border. He was a man well thought of in the Party, possibly a future leader even though he had only been
elected to Parliament in 1955. Margaret Thatcher was beginning to suspect her bossiness and impatience with the old-world courtesies and niceties of the pre-war age somewhat irritated ‘Willie’ and that clique of landowning, public school and Oxbridge educated old-school Tories to which he was intimately affiliated. Educated at Winchester and later Trinity College, Cambridge, Whitelaw had distinguished himself serving with the Scots Guards in World War II and at the time of the October War had been Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour. But for illness he would have joined Edward Heath’s post-war United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration and, alongside Iain Macleod and others been in pole position to step into his shoes...

  The Prime Minister caught herself in mid-thought.

  There would be time enough to worry about conspiracies and the shifting ground beneath her feet another day. The Chiefs of Staff of the three armed services flanked Willie Whitelaw.

  To his right sat General – soon to be promoted Field Marshall - Sir Richard Amyatt Hull, Admiral Sir David Luce’s successor as Chief of the Defence Staff; the United Kingdom equivalent to the American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. The fifty-six year old veteran of the Italian campaign and the final battles in North West Europe of the Second World War had been the last Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), a post abolished in Edward Heath’s time. The professional head of the British Army was a no-nonsense, quietly bluff man upon whom the most senior military post in the kingdom had naturally devolved.