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

by James Philip

  If America actually needed Middle Eastern oil right now it would have been different but it did not, nor would it need Arab oil, or have to contemplate any of the compromises and accommodations that came with ensuring its smooth uninterrupted supply, it in the foreseeable future. Given the lack of competition for what, pre-October War had been relatively scarce reserves of well head crude, American domestic requirements could presently be easily satisfied from internal US production, Central and South American, even Indonesian oilfields and according to recent geological surveys, eventually from Alaskan fields. In the absence of competition from other modern industrialised competitors, the abundance of Middle Eastern oil was in the short to medium-term - five to ten years according to which economist one spoke to - superfluous to American needs.

  Fulbright was a pragmatist. Foreign policy was not about making friends it was about doing what was right for one’s own country. America had enough problems of its own without another war. Besides, once the fighting was over somebody would have to pick up the pieces afterwards and potentially that was a much more lucrative deal...

  “I had expected better of you, Bill,” Lord Franks, the urbane, scholarly man who had cut an increasingly embattled figure in Philadelphia in recent weeks said sadly, as the two men shook hands.

  Fulbright raised an eyebrow.

  “How so, Oliver?”

  The British Ambassador viewed the bigger man thoughtfully.

  Fifty-nine year old Oliver Sherwell Franks had been Ambassador in Washington between 1948 and 1952. He was a man used to being around powerful men and intimately acquainted with the ways, means and nefarious mores of Realpolitik. Yet even he had been somewhat taken aback by the hypocrisy and cynicism evident in the most recent pre-meditated craven foreign policy u-turn of the Kennedy Administration.

  That he had seen the volte face over the US-UK Mutual defense Treaty coming for some weeks made it not less unpalatable. The furore over the false, presumably State Department sponsored stories, about the late Sir David Luce’s prospective elevation to the post of Supreme Commander All Allied Forces (Mediterranean) had been the final signpost on the road to the Administration’s perfidy.

  The signalled ritual denouement of the ‘special relationship’, this time most likely permanently was to be stage-managed around the forthcoming Philadelphia Summit. The networks and the press had already been primed to expect the President to stand up for ‘American’ vital strategic interests, to confront ‘unreasonable demands from its European Allies’, and not to ‘fly in the face of the expressed will of Congress’.

  Not for the first time Lord Franks had asked himself if the Kennedy Administration knew what it was doing? He was desperately seeking some indication that somebody in the White House understood, really understood, that the World was going to be a very difference place the day after America betrayed its own soul?

  “I am not one of those people who believe that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of those who went before us,” Lord Franks said resignedly. “However, it seems obvious to me that the United States has forgotten the consequences of its decision to shun the League of Nations and its isolationist stance in the 1930s. We in the old world eventually forgave you for coming late to two World Wars, because everything turned out for the best in the end. Now it seems that after weeks and months of fine words; the Administration plans to leave us in the lurch. Very much in the manner of a suitor who has had his sordid pleasure with his putative partner under false pretences and subsequently jilted her at the altar.”

  Fulbright’s face was suddenly a hard mask.

  “And you have the nerve to ask me ‘how so’?” The Englishman observed with such impeccable civility that it almost but not quite veiled his quietly seething contempt. “Presumably, it was your people encouraged the Argentines to invade the Falkland Islands?”

  The Secretary of State visibly flinched at this softly spoken accusation.

  “That’s nothing to do with us, Oliver.”

  “No. What else does the CIA have up its sleeve? Further rabble rousing in Ireland, perhaps? Or should we expect miscellaneous assassinations throughout the Commonwealth? Or perhaps, another attempt to murder the surviving members of the Royal Family?”

  The directness of the attack had rocked the veteran Senator from Arkansas back on his heels. It was all the more shocking because Lord Franks seemed oblivious to the presence of the senior State Department staffers who had witnessed every word he just said.

  “Clear the room please!” Fulbright barked.

  Lord Franks waited until the doors closed at his back.

  “The first duty of a politician is to get elected, Oliver,” the Secretary of State said grimly. “Do you honestly think that if Jack Kennedy loses in November that the first thing his successor will do is buddy up to the old country?”

  Oliver Franks shook his head.

  Not in disagreement but in despair.

  Whoever came out on top on 3rd November 1964 was so irrelevant to the scale of the crisis in the Middle East, it beggared belief that his American friends had eyes only for the demands of the immediate electoral cycle.

  “If Jack Kennedy gets re-elected in November things will be different,” Fulbright assured the British Ambassador. “The Administration will want to do the right thing by its friends...”

  Lord Franks turned on his heel and walked away.

  “Oliver, I...”

  As the British Ambassador listened to the sound of his own feet ringing on the stone floor he could not help but recall Winston Churchill’s words, voiced in the darkest days of another war.

  ‘We shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone...’

  Chapter 13

  Thursday 16th April 1964

  Merton College, Oxford, England

  The Secretary of State for Defence was the last man to arrive in the ancient room of a displaced College Fellow. Forty-five year old William Stephen Whitelaw, a veteran of the campaign in North-West Europe in 1944 and 1945 was going about his business with a fresh spring in his stride, and an odd lightness of heart. Part of his good humour was because he was feeling fitter and generally better within himself than he had at any time since the night of the October War; but perversely, now that the worst had happened and things looked uniformly grim, this was a time for action.

  Moreover, the great outstanding question left unanswered from the cataclysm – had the USSR been destroyed or just severely mauled? - had now been comprehensively resolved and in the next couple of days he, and everybody else in England would discover exactly what all those fine American promises, hedged around by innumerable abstruse caveats and clauses, amounted to in reality. One way or another within a matter of days the government would know the precise depth of the dark, airless hole into which recent events had pushed it!

  It was 1940 all over again...

  The room appointed for the morning’s conference with the Chiefs of Staff looked out over Mob Quad, a quadrangle of the college that had a middling to fair claim to be Oxford University’s oldest seat of learning. Of course, the other two claimants to this status; Balliol and University Colleges, fiercely disputed Merton’s claim and had done so for centuries. Merton had been founded by Walter de Merton, Lord High Chancellor to both Henry III and Edward I, who had drawn up statutes for a self-governing college and organised endowments to support it in 1264. Balliol’s charter dated to 1263 but thereafter the matter of which college possessed greater intrinsic antiquity was blurred by questions surrounding the physical existence of this or that institution. Merton College – or to give it its full name: The House of College of Scholars of Merton in the University of Oxford - had not actually laid down foundations in its present site in the south east corner of the city until 1274, while the supporters of Balliol and University Colleges made rival pre-dating claim
s.

  In any event, Merton’s Hall, Chapel and front quadrangle were built in the quarter of a century after 1274, and Mob Quad, constructed between 1288 and 1378. The Merton College Library, situated in the Mob Quad was, allegedly, the oldest continuously used academic library in the World. But then Oxford Colleges routinely made so many claims about these things that it was hard to tell which to take seriously.

  In any event, as a Cambridge man Willie Whitelaw tended to take any claim by an Oxford man on behalf of his college with a very large pinch of salt.

  “Dreadfully sorry to keep you all waiting, gentlemen,” he declaimed, shouldering into the room with a sheaf of files under his left arm. “I was bearded by our new Supply Supremo. Mrs Munro doesn’t take any prisoners so I had a Devil of a time making a break for freedom!”

  Privately, the Secretary of State found it a little peculiar to be in a government run by a woman, and was still struggling to come to terms with a Cabinet that was not only led by a woman – albeit a remarkable, if prickly example of the gender – containing two others. He had had as little as possible to do with Barbara Castle, his counterpart at the Department of Labour, a leftie like her was the ideal person to deal with the bloody trade unions; but Alison Munro’s department, the greatly expanded Ministry of Supply, Transportation and Energy, was intimately connected in every way with what his bailiwick was all about; making war.

  From the expression of sympathy on the faces of the three Chiefs of Staff, Willie Whitelaw divined that each man had already had his own baptism of fire at the hands of the second ‘woman of steel’ in the UAUK Cabinet.

  “A most formidable lady, sir,” General Sir Richard Hull, Chief of the Defence Staff remarked ruefully.

  “Yes, indeed!” Willie Whitelaw dumped himself at one of the two vacant chairs around the old – everything in Merton was ‘old’ – common room table which had been brought into the room for this conference. “I was informed on the way down to this place that the Prime Minister’s plane has landed at Philadelphia and her party has arrived safely at the Embassy.”

  General Hull cleared his throat.

  “I briefed Charles Elworthy on the current military situation before I came across to Merton College, Minister,” he explained, merely as a matter of form. Air Marshal Sir Charles Elworthy was the UAUK’s ‘military legate’ to the Kennedy Administration, an increasingly thankless post that would soon be, if it was not already, redundant. “I also took the liberty of asking Major General Carver to attend Merton College this morning with a view to making himself available to report directly to the Chiefs of Staff and, yourself.”

  “I understood the poor fellow was only due to fly into Brize Norton an hour ago?” The Secretary of State queried.

  “Just so, Minister. He should be here in the next few minutes.”

  Willie Whitelaw gathered his wits.

  The Prime Minister had decided that whatever came out of her ‘summit’ with President Kennedy, that the United Kingdom would ‘draw a line in the sand’ in the Middle East. Abadan Island and any government in the region willing to resist the Soviet invasion of Iran – and inevitably, soon Iraq – would be defended by British arms to the limit of the nation’s resources.

  Colleagues had already come to Whitelaw and observed that ‘the PM seems to be a bit one-eyed about all this’, but actually for all her faults, the woman was right about the one vital thing; if the country stood back and let the Red Army drive to the northern shores of the Persian Gulf it would be the end of Great Britain. He, like his Prime Minister, did not want to live in that Britain.

  “Before we attack the meat of today’s session,” he decided, turning to the new First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Varyl Begg. “Where are we with Operation Sturdee, First Sea Lord?”

  Operation Sturdee – named for Admiral Sir Frederick Charles Doveton Sturdee, the victor of the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914 – was the codename for the planned deployment of as many as eight modern conventional Oberon and Porpoise class submarines in response to the Argentine seizure of the Falklands Archipelago and other British territories in the South Atlantic.

  “HMS Walrus and HMS Cachalot are two days out from Devonport bound for Simons Town, Minister. HMS Olympus and HMS Oberon are currently making ready at Gibraltar. They will sail for the Cape within the next forty-eight hours. Three other Oberons and Porpoises are being made ready for operations in the South Atlantic. The Ice Patrol Ship Protector has successfully rendezvoused approximately mid-way between South Africa and South Georgia with the South African destroyer Jan van Riebeeck and the frigate HMS Llandaff. All onboard the Protector are reported safe and well. At least four Oberons and Porpoises will be on station around the Falkland Islands not later than 18th May, Minister.”

  The day before the Battle of Malta the air force of the Argentine Republic had bombed Port Stanley and Argentine Marines masquerading as whalers and scrap metal dealers had landed on South Georgia, seizing the settlement of Grytviken. At the very time Malta was coming under bombardment from ships of the Red Navy, and nearly two thousand paratroopers and Spetsnaz of the Red Army were swinging beneath their parachutes over the most important British base in the Mediterranean, two thousand Argentine soldiers were coming ashore at Port Stanley on East Falkland and raising the white and blue flag of the Argentine Republic over government house. There were unconfirmed reports that the small force of Royal Marines ‘defending’ the distant archipelago had fought practically to the last man and there were, apparently, gruesome stories in the newspapers in Buenos Aires of captured ‘British soldiers’ and ‘Imperialistic criminals’ – civilian administrators - having been ‘shot while resisting arrest’.

  “Very good,” Willie Whitelaw acknowledged. “I will advise the Prime Minister that an ultimatum should be broadcast as planned to the Argentine authorities and to all South Atlantic shipping, that as of 1st May all vessels encountered within a two hundred miles ‘total exclusion zone’ around the archipelago will be attacked and sunk without warning.”

  Serendipitously, there was a businesslike knock at the door.

  “Major General Carver is here, Minister,” Whitelaw’s new private secretary, thirty-three year old Christopher Chataway, the former athlete and broadcaster, announced.

  The Minister glanced to the Chief of the Defence Staff, who nodded.

  “Ask General Carver to join us please.”

  Willie Whitelaw had not been remotely surprised when he had discovered that the man the CDS had sent out to the Persian Gulf to ‘report on the situation’ was forty-eight year old Major General Richard Michael Power Carver. The Secretary of State’s custom rose to his feet and extended his hand to the newcomer.

  “How was your flight back, General?” He inquired solicitously as the newcomer was ushered into the room by Chataway.

  Michael Carver viewed Whitelaw thoughtfully for a moment. Carver was a tall, handsome man with a superficially aquiline, praetorian dignity that gave strangers the impression that he was overly haughty, and inclined to purposefully distance himself from the milieu of those around him.

  “Bumpy, sir,” he said, the merest suggestion of wry humour in his hard grey eyes. He was carrying a somewhat careworn attaché case in his left hand and his uniform was creased, as bone weary as the man inside it. “Especially, the landing at Malta to refuel.”

  There was a noisy interruption as a tea trolley was pushed, rattling and creaking into the room by a co-opted Merton College porter whose sulky attitude made it abundantly apparent that the sooner his ‘Fellows’ were reinstalled the better.

  Earlier Willie Whitelaw had asked Sir Richard Hull if what he had heard about Carver was true. The Chief of the Defence Staff had guffawed at this.

  ‘He’s related to Wellington on his mother’s side and some people maintain he looks a bit like the old Iron Duke. I don’t see it myself in the paintings of the great man and I’m sure Michael Carver would be mortified by the suggestion. He was at Winchester as a boy,
detested it by all accounts. Afterwards, he went on to Sandhurst when he was eighteen; that would have been in 1933, hated that too at first. Legend has it that he almost went to New Zealand to train as a priest but fortunately somebody talked him out of it.’

  Whitelaw liked the CDS personally and deeply respected his calm professionalism. He had hit it off with the bluff old soldier from the outset; his relations with Hull immeasurably reinforced by his meticulous disinclination to meddle directly in military affairs. Both men had been in Germany at the end of Hitler’s War and broadly speaking, until the disaster of October 1962, they had earnestly hoped never to see the like again.

  ‘In any event, in 1934 Carver passed out top of his class at Sandhurst,’ the Chief of the Defence Staff had explained. ‘He won the King’s Gold Medal, the Anson Memorial Sword, the prizes for economics, military history and military law, and won a five year Army Scholarship. A year or so after he left Sandhurst he got into a set to with dear old Percy Hobart,’ Percy Cleghorn Stanley Hobart was the man who had written ‘the book’ on British Army armoured warfare tactics in the years before the Second World War, ‘apparently old Hobo Hobart once felt moved to have a chat with him about insubordination. Hobart was a one off, he really was. The story goes that he told young Carver that the secret of success in the Army is to be sufficiently insubordinate!’

  Both men had chortled at that juncture.

  ‘Carver almost resigned his commission around 1938. He’s not a very clubbish sort of chap, not a man who really enjoys mess life and all that and I think he was bored stiff in the pre-war Army. Some clot had sent him out to Egypt as the transport officer at a camp near Heliopolis. Still, it turned out all right in the end. Hobo Hobart brought the 7th Armoured – you know, the brigade that ended up being The Desert Rats – out to the Middle East and suddenly Carver was back in the thick of things; as he was for most of the Second War, actually. Like all the other chaps who were there in Egypt from the start he traipsed up and down the North African coast for a couple of years until Monty arrived to sort things out, then he was in Italy, and Germany of course. By the end of the war, still just thirty he was a brevetted Brigadier in command of 4th Armoured Brigade. Like everybody else he reverted to his substantive rank, captain, when the Army shrank back to peace time proportions. A lot of good men just went back to Civvy Street because of that; Carver stayed in the service even though it took him the best part of fifteen years to work his way back up to substantive brigadier. That was when he got command of the 4th Brigade in West Germany in 1960. In between he’d held key technical posts with the Ministry of Supply, been head of exercise planning at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe, and held senior staff posts in East Africa and so on. He was Director of War Plans between 1958 and 1960.’ The Chief of the Defence Staff had finished his peroration with the opinion that: ‘Practically everybody in the Army who knows him, even the people he’s upset, think he’s the cleverest man they’ve ever met.’