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

by James Philip

  “My people don’t understand how you can be so focused on economic, monetary and reconstruction at a time like this, Margaret?”

  The woman shrugged.

  Then met his look with unblinking intensity.

  “I will draw a line in the sand, Jack,” she said very quietly. “We will at the very least halt the Soviets at the Saudi Arabian border. Hopefully, we and our other allies, a coalition of the willing as it were, will hold that line in the sand until America comes to its senses.”

  “What if America doesn’t come to its senses?”

  Margaret Thatcher’s expression became a little vexed.

  “I will hold that line in the Sand and someday America will come to its senses or you and your successors will regret it for all time, Jack.”

  Her conviction stopped him dead in his tracks.

  There was no flexibility, no possibility of taking a step back. The line in the sand had been drawn and that was where she planned to stand regardless of the cost.

  “Okay, you want a new Marshall Plan?”

  “I thought we’d call it the Fulbright Plan.”

  “Okay...”

  “We get the Fulbright Plan, American companies are allowed back into the United Kingdom and eventually, as the continent begins to recover, Western Europe,” she frowned, “although not France, the way things are at the moment. We will put aside all discussions relating to our future military alignment. Providing, that is, the Fulbright Plan is launched in the next few weeks...”

  Jack Kennedy held up a hand, which she ignored.

  “The US Treasury can underwrite long-term loans from American banks to the UAUK which will, in turn, be converted into joint UK-US Government bonds, gilts, at the end of their term. In accounting terms this will equate to a massive asset injection into the vulnerable balance sheets of America’s largest financial institutions; which in turn should allow them to begin to start lending again to customers in the United States. The Fulbright Plan will begin to pump hundreds of millions of dollars back into the US economy, and coincidentally, American consumer’s pockets in time for the November Presidential election. I am reliably informed that you can instruct your Treasury to make the necessary executive orders to certain key ‘strategic financial institutions’ under the existing ‘War Emergency Powers’ vested in your person. I’m sure that Congress will object but there isn’t enough time between now and November left for them to impeach you. And besides, there are several things that I can do which will greatly strengthen your re-election campaign.”

  “Jericho won’t get me re-elected, Margaret.”

  To the man’s astonishment Margaret Thatcher smiled. Instantly, she shed half-a-dozen years, and her eyes shone with the light of battle.

  “Don’t be so sure about that, Jack,” she retorted. GCHQ had only been able to decipher a tiny proportion of historic intercepts and other traffic collected in the last two months; it simply did not have the capacity to handle the great mass of signals. The National Security Agency in Maryland possessed exponentially greater resources, when it got its hands on Jericho it would be amazed. “In any event, I am giving you Jericho as a token of good will to do with as you please. Give me the Fulbright Plan and I’ll give you some other things you can use to beat your opponents over the head with!”

  Jack Kennedy raised an eyebrow, his heart pounding.

  “It goes against the grain,” the woman went on, “but I can normalise the UAUK’s relations with Irish Republic with a stroke of the pen. It goes without saying that I would expect authorities on this side of the Atlantic to actively combat the smuggling of weapons and other contraband to Ireland.”

  The man waited, for the first time realising that the British Prime Minister was about to work her way down his own wish list.

  “The proposed diplomatic mission to the West Coast Confederation will be the only high profile UAUK mission in the United States apart from the Embassy in Philadelphia. The UAUK will undertake not to entertain diplomatic representatives from any individual State in the Union, or enter into any state-specific trade or other agreement.”

  “I can announce that?”

  “Yes. Moreover, at a time of your choice my government will welcome your statesmanlike intervention to act as an honest broker between the Argentine Republic and the United Kingdom over the war in the South Atlantic.”

  “Are you actually prepared to negotiate over the status of the Falklands?”

  “No. But if the Argentine withdraws its forces without harming British citizens and provides full information as to the fate of members of the garrison, the war may end in due course.”

  “What else are you offering me, Margaret?”

  “When Chief Justice Warren applies to the UAUK for British witnesses to testify before his Commission into the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War, I will veto those requests on the basis that it would be inappropriate for British officials to be in the limelight in the middle of an election.”

  The President thought about it.

  “The affair of the USS Scorpion is still unresolved,” he said, thinking aloud.

  The Prime Minister nodded.

  “The log of HMS Dreadnought and all relevant sonar and operational data will be made available to the Joint House Committee investigating the sad loss of the Scorpion. Royal Navy officers will make themselves available for interview under oath by members of that Committee in England at the Committee’s convenience.”

  “This is going to get brutal, Margaret,” Jack Kennedy declared, his drawl a friendly, pleasant contrast to the starkness of the political consequences of this ‘private chat’ on the porch of his father’s old summer house.

  “Give me the Fulbright Plan and you can tear me to shreds in public, Jack. Paint me as ‘angry’ and ‘unreasonable’, or just plain ‘pig-headed’. If the worst comes to the worst we can conduct bad-tempered transatlantic megaphone diplomacy. I don’t care. Just give me the Fulbright Plan and I’ll fight our war in the Middle East.”

  The President of the United States of America sucked his teeth.

  Nobody would believe a word of this if he recounted this conversation in his memoires. Heck, he would not believe it himself!

  The Angry Widow had just given him a shot at getting re-elected in the fall.

  Honest to God; he had not seen that coming.

  Jack Kennedy offered his right hand; Margaret Thatcher shook it.

  The man and the woman viewed each other warily.

  Each asking themselves if they had just made some kind of Faustian pact which would later be their undoing...

  Chapter 58

  Friday 5th June 1964

  HMS Alliance, 14 miles WSW of Ajaccio, Corsica

  The two French destroyers had slowed, like two thoroughbreds after a long gallop, to a relative canter as they neared the Bay of Ajaccio. Clearly they were timing their arrival in their home port for the middle of the day; no doubt expecting a heroes’ welcome. The two approaching warships, identified as the Surcouf and the Cassard, had been sighted by a Royal Air Force Canberra flying out of Malta around sunset last night. HMS Alliance had been ordered to close in to the coast to maximise the chance of intercepting the murderers.

  Lieutenant-Commander Francis Barrington stepped across the control room to study the slowly developing attack plot. If the enemy held their present course and speed it would be less than an hour before they were in range of the four heavyweight Mark VIII torpedoes loaded in Alliance’s forward torpedo tubes, or the Mark VIII and the Mark XX passive-seeker acoustic homing torpedoes ready and primed in the boat’s two stern tubes.

  Having only ‘dropped’ the snorkelling tube and switched to battery power less than an hour ago the atmosphere in the boat was still fresh, albeit tainted with the dubious aromas of hydraulic oil, other lubricants and the as yet only a vague hint of rotting vegetables and perspiration.

  Alliance had actually been submerged for seven straight days, closed up on electric motors
during daylight and running with the snorkelling tube – or ‘snork’ – raised to run on her diesels and to re-charge her electric batteries at night. Insofar as anybody on board knew, she had not been sighted and her presence remained unsuspected by the small French squadron based in Ajaccio. The night before last Alliance had crept to within two miles of the entrance to the harbour; the locals had been having some kind of firework display. Possibly, they had been celebrating their ‘victory’ off Algiers.

  Francis Barrington did not have a lot of time for an enemy with whom one was not actually at war who launched a sneak attack, and neither did any other man onboard the old, albeit somewhat modernised, Amphion class submarine.

  The Amphions had been the last class of Royal Navy submarines laid down during the Second World War, although only two of the sixteen boats eventually commissioned – Amphion and Astute – had actually been launched before the end of hostilities. They were designed as long-range versions of the previous ‘V’ class, ostensibly intended to fight in the Pacific. After 1945, thirty of the forty-six boats ordered were cancelled and the remainder variously modified in one or two, sometimes three phases over the years to incorporate World War II lessons, new equipment based on captured advanced German U-boat plans and hulls, and the great strides which had been made in electronics and sonar technology since the end of Hitler’s war. The Amphions were the Royal Navy’s last class of ‘submersibles’ – vessels that operated best on the surface but which could also operate beneath the surface – rather than true ‘submarines’ like the boats of the later Porpoise and Oberon classes which could stay submerged with relative ease for long periods, and operate almost as effectively underwater as above.

  Therefore, even with the ‘snork’ up Alliance was of that generation of Royal Navy submarines that became ranker and her combat efficiency compromised the longer she was on ‘war’ patrol.

  For all that, with her modern sonar and a ninety percent charge in her batteries HMS Alliance was nobody’s pushover.

  “We will hold at six-zero feet for another thirty minutes before we come up for a quick look around, Number One,” Francis Barrington informed his executive officer, twenty-four year old Lieutenant Michael Philpott.

  The younger man repeated back the instructions.

  “We seem to have a knack of being in the right place at the right time,” Alliance’s Commanding Officer observed ruefully.

  Philpott chuckled.

  Two months ago Alliance had accepted the surrender of a Turkish destroyer off Malta and inadvertently captured a pile of Soviet code books and cipher machines. For her temerity Alliance had been quarantined in Lazaretto Creek at Malta for nearly three weeks before re-provisioning and oiling for the current war cruise.

  If Michael Philpott had had any lingering misgivings about ‘the skipper’ before the Battle of Malta, they had been swept away in the last couple of months; the man had an uncanny unflappability and a grace under pressure that rubbed off on everybody around him. Nothing got under his skin, he never raised his voice, he was the crew’s ‘skipper’ and father figure.

  “There’s time for everybody to have a hot drink and a sandwich before we start hunting in earnest,” Barrington decided, pushing back his cap on his balding pate.

  Life was full of surprises. Yesterday was his forty-third birthday. He had been a reservist – a solicitor’s clerk in an English county town, Winchester in Hampshire - for over fourteen years by the time of the October War and had only been called back to the colours as late as last autumn. The last time he had been in Mediterranean waters it had been as a terrified sub-lieutenant on an old U-class boat – the Unbroken – but at least he had known who was trying to kill him in those days. These days, who knew? Red Dawn? The old Soviet Union? The Turks? The Americans? Sicilian and Algerian pirates and smugglers? And now the French!

  Alliance had been operating in the waters west of Corsica for the last seventeen days. Barrington had used this time to methodically observe the habits and the courses steered by the sporadic traffic entering and leaving Ajaccio, and clinging close to the western coast of the big island. It was the knowledge he had gleaned that gave him a high degree of confidence that he had placed Alliance in the optimum position to intercept the two returning destroyers. It was a confidence buoyed by the fact that while he had been in these waters he had detected only negligible sonar activity, and no indication whatsoever that the French Squadron bottled up in Ajaccio had any notion that it was under surveillance.

  Ever since the ‘Provisional Government’ somewhere in southern France had broadcast a warning for aircraft not to overfly its territory – back around the time of the Battle of Malta – the boats of the 1st Submarine Squadron based in Lazaretto and Msida Creeks at Malta had been re-tasked to patrol in the Western rather than the Eastern Mediterranean. The US Navy had a pair of nuclear attack submarines somewhere at large in the east and the bellicose noises coming out of Clermont-Ferrand had found new work for the otherwise idle Amphions. Alliance’s sisters Alderney and Auriga, both recently arrived in theatre from England, were loitering respectively in the Gulf of Lions watching over Marseilles and Toulon, and patrolling the waters off the Côte d'Azur.

  The general intelligence picture in the north eastern Mediterranean Basin prior to the arrival of the Amphions had been distinctly ‘spotty’. For example, although it was known that there was trade between Corsica, Sardinia and the Balearic Islands to the east, it was not known if this went on with or without the sanction of Franco’s government in Madrid, or whether there was any contact or co-operation between Spanish and former French, or Italian naval units based at ports like Ajaccio on Corsica, or Cagliari on Sardinia.

  RAF photo-reconnaissance flights and the activities of the 1st Submarine Squadron were slowly filling in some of the gaps in the picture, establishing that parts of the Mediterranean coast of France had been completely devastated, while others, like St Tropez and Nice in the east and Perpignan in the west were undamaged. The Alderney and the Auriga had recently confirmed that the ports of Marseilles and Toulon, both hard hit during the war were partially navigable, and that several as yet unidentified ‘large’ surface warships were anchored in the inner harbour of the latter.

  As always the Senior Service was running to keep up!

  Francis Barrington assumed similar ‘watches’ to those which had been instituted in recent weeks by the Amphions in the Eastern Mediterranean would have been urgently commenced on the supposedly devastated Atlantic Brittany and Biscay ports of France, and now and then, high altitude photo and ELINT – electronic intelligence – sorties were being flown over or in the vicinity of other similar previously neglected ‘places of interest’ on the French mainland.

  “SUBMERGED CONTACT BEARING ZERO-THREE-FIVE!”

  Barrington’s thoughts crystallised in an instant.

  “Stop both! Pass the word for silent routine!”

  Chapter 59

  Friday 5th June 1964

  RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, England

  Airey Neave took the Prime Minister’s arm and leaned close to speak confidentially into her ear the moment he greeted her at the foot of the steps as she disembarked from the RAF Comet 4. His friend looked tired after her overnight flight back to England, and he completely understood how she must be dreading the reception that awaited her in Oxford where the Commons was already gathering to unleash its inchoate anger and scorn upon her head.

  “I’m sorry, Margaret,” he whispered, “but I have some very bad news. Normally, I’d have given you a chance to catch your breath but this won’t wait.”

  The Prime Minister’s stride faltered.

  “Who have we lost?” She asked simply in the manner of one who has already been robbed of too many loved ones, friends and close colleagues by the cruel fates of this brave new post-cataclysm world.

  “Iain,” Airey Neave said. “Iain Macleod died last night. We all knew he was unwell. He was at his desk around midnight. They think he had
a massive heart attack or perhaps, a stroke. There was nothing anybody could do for him. I’m sorry...”

  Momentarily, Margaret Thatcher was afraid she was going to faint. The moment passed, leaving her feeling a little sick and nauseas and oddly...afraid.

  Iain Macleod had been the living embodiment of one nation Conservatism before the October War and after it the intellectual wellspring of both Edward Heath’s and her own administrations. With Airey Neave, Iain Macleod had been her rock. He had been Leader of the House of Commons, the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party and the government’s tireless propagandist and apologist as her Secretary of State for Information. It had been Iain Macleod’s behind the scenes manoeuvring that had handed her the premiership, and without his advice, support and patience she would have fallen flat on her face a score of times in the last six months.

  How can I carry on...

  Instantly, the Prime Minister picked up her pace and hardened her face.

  “Poor Evelyn,” she murmured. “Is somebody with her?”

  Iain Macleod had met Evelyn Hester Mason, née Blois in September 1939 while he was awaiting his call up when Evelyn had interviewed him for a job as a volunteer ambulance driver. Later, after her first husband had been killed in the war they had married in January 1941. Neither of the Macleod’s children, a son and a daughter, had survived the October War and its immediate aftermath; twenty year old Torquil having disappeared on the night of the war and Diana, having died aged eighteen – probably from cholera - the following February. It was a miracle that in this unkind age Evelyn, who had been afflicted by meningitis and polio at the age of thirty-three in 1952, had survived to outlive her husband.

  “Pat Harding-Grayson has been with Evelyn since Iain’s body was discovered.”

  “Good. What else has gone wrong since yesterday?”

  “The Chiefs of Staff are up in arms over ‘surrendering’ Jericho,” her friend reported grimly. “That’s par for the course, I suppose. I think President Kennedy’s address to the American people announcing that we’d quote ‘backed down over Ireland and invited the US to broker a peace deal in the South Atlantic’, and the inference that JFK had basically wiped the floor with us, well, you specifically, at Hyannis Port came too late for most of the papers, thank God! It goes without saying that we’re being accused of being the greatest traitors since dear old Neville Chamberlain. Enoch Powell and that blighter Michael Foot have already been on the radio this morning talking about Munich, appeasement and ‘peace in our time’. As we anticipated there is an EDM,” in Parliamentary parlance and Early Day Motion, “before the House calling for another Vote of Confidence.” The man groaned out aloud. “It’s much worse than any of us imagined it would be, Margaret. And now poor Iain’s gone...”