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

by James Philip

  Airey Neave had walked on a further two paces before he realised he was alone. He looked around.

  “No, Airey,” Margaret Thatcher said with a school mistress like note of censure in her voice, “it is exactly as bad as I knew it was going to be. No, I did not anticipate that we would be at war with the bloody French when I left for America a few days ago, or that we’d lose Iain last night. But I did anticipate that things would be unbelievably bloody this morning. We’re about to fight a war in the Middle East we cannot win. The country is bankrupt. We cannot afford to feed our people next winter and the Red Army is about to turn off our oil supplies. Things simply cannot be allowed to go on the way they have been going ever since the night of the October War. Either we make a break from that past or we are doomed. As we discussed before I went to Cape Cod, if the price of doing the right thing and getting the best possible deal for our children is my head, then that is a price well worth paying!”

  Airey Neave stared at his protégé, peripherally aware that the other members of the ‘Hyannis Port’ delegation were disembarking from the Comet and giving both him and the Prime Minister very strange looks.

  Margaret Thatcher swept past her friend and he scurried to catch up with her before she got to the first of the two armoured Rolls-Royce’s waiting on the tarmac to carry the senior members of the returning transatlantic mission back to Oxford.

  The Prime Minister’s Royal Marine bodyguard formed a broad tunnel directing the two politicians towards the cars. The Angry Widow’s Praetorians were particularly grim-faced this morning, as if they were looking for somebody to shoot.

  If anybody in Oxford was stupid enough to think that Margaret Thatcher was about to bow to pressure and quit, or in any way go quietly, they had another thing coming to them!

  Chapter 60

  Friday 5th June 1964

  The British Embassy, Philadelphia

  Lady Marija Christopher dispensed with any pretence at decorum instantly she spied her husband at the foot of the stairs in the lobby of the Embassy. She could hear the jeering and chanting of the big crowd outside the high, razor-wire topped wall of the Embassy and had watched the bottles and bricks flying through the air, crashing onto the roofs and the bullet-proof windows of the battered cavalcade returning from the airport.

  “Peter!” She screeched ecstatically and flew down the stairs. Given her propensity to lose her balance and fall flat on her face when she tried to hurry, let alone run, this was an insanely reckless thing for a woman in her condition to do. Or it would have been had she not been absolutely convinced that if she fell her husband would surely catch her.

  This was pretty much what happened.

  “Careful! Careful!” Her husband pleaded, but only after he had wrapped his wife in his arms. He would have made a much bigger thing of ‘being careful’ had he not been too busy hugging and kissing the woman who was the love of his life. Presently, he became aware that he and Marija were blocking the stairs.

  “Oh, dear,” he sighed, leading back Marija upstairs. “The natives outside seem to be unusually restive today!”

  That morning’s ‘demonstration’ seemed angrier and hugely better attended than the usual ‘rent a mob’ affairs that increasingly greeted official events and meetings attended by senior embassy staff in and around Philadelphia. The surging crowds along the road in front of the compound were waving particularly offensive placards, mainly on the themes of ‘GO HOME BRITS!’, demands to cease ‘the Irish genocide’, and various invitations to ‘get your hands off our oil’. Peter had thought this last was a bit rich coming from citizens of this particular gas-guzzling land. The chanting had been vitriolic and apparently, organised, as had the hurling of missiles at the vehicles in the convoy from the airport.

  “I think they are all crazy in this city,” his wife concurred but as always, without malice. “Well, some of the people. Tell me everything!”

  This had to wait a few minutes because Rosa Hannay tripped down the first floor corridor to peck the homecoming hero’s cheek – a feat only made practical because Peter Christopher bent his head down and Rosa literally jumped up on the tips of her toes. Alan Hannay, more prosaically, shook his friend’s hand. Together the two couples retired to a day room overlooking parkland to the rear of the Embassy.

  “I went sailing with President Kennedy,” Peter announced. “We talked about the Navy, his and ours. Oh, and we’re all going to California. I’m to be some kind of special ‘Consul’ to the West Coast Confederation.”

  “California?” Marija laughed. She was suddenly delving into the folds of her frock. She produced an official looking envelope and brandished the letter within. “Margo left me a big house in San Francisco! This is a letter from her lawyers in New York. She left everything she owned on Malta and some stocks and War Bonds she’d left with a bank in Boston to the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, but according to her will she left me her old house at 1217 Haight Street, San Francisco because ‘Marija will enjoy travelling’.

  Peter blinked thoughtfully as he took this in. He and Marija had settled close together on a sofa while the Hannays had pulled up two padded chairs to face them across a low coffee table. He unconsciously patted his wife’s left knee and she instantly took the opportunity to seize his right hand and clasp it to herself.

  “So,” the man checked, “it now transpires that I’m married to a woman of property?”

  “The lawyers say Margo’s younger brother, John, has been living at the house but he seems to have disappeared. It sounds a little mysterious to me. Anyway, if we’re going to California we can visit,” she checked the address again, “1217 Haight Street. It’ll be fun!”

  Peter nodded absent-mindedly.

  He was struggling to adjust to ‘normality’.

  He had spent much of the last three days watching a British Prime Minister writing the longest and most comprehensive political suicide note in history. She had been doing the right thing for all the right reasons and yet, her own people would almost certainly crucify her when she got home.

  Less than a hundred yards away in the road in front of the Embassy there was a baying mob, gloating over Jack Kennedy’s self-proclaimed humiliation of the ‘old country’; and back in England Margaret Thatcher would shortly be confronting another, possibly crueller and even more unforgiving Parliamentary mob, baying for her blood.

  And yet here he was, reunited with his wife and his friends contemplating, quite literally, several balmy seasons in the sun in distant California. It was as if the war in the Middle East was nothing to do with him; or as if the fall of the shooting star which had been Margaret Thatcher’s premiership was happening in another, disconnected world.

  A small voice in the back of his mind warned him against writing off the Angry Widow. Nothing in her demeanour last night at Otis Air National Guard Air Base had given him any inkling that she planned to meekly accept her supposedly inevitable downfall back in England.

  If he had learned anything from the whirlwind rollercoaster ride of the last few months it was that when all was said and done, they lived in a funny old World.

  He glanced ruefully to his wife and his friends.

  “Yes, it will be fun,” he agreed. “I think we all deserve a little of that.”

  Chapter 61

  Friday 5th June 1964

  HMS Alliance, 5 miles west of Capu di Muru, Corsica

  The French submarine had clattered across the Alliance’s bow at a distance of about a mile-and-a-half, surfacing twenty minutes later as it entered the southern reach of the Gulf of Ajaccio.

  Lieutenant-Commander Francis Barrington had let the noisy gatecrasher go on her way unmolested; he had other, bigger fish to fry. Creeping along at barely four knots, he had worked Alliance closer to the coast guessing that the two T-47 class destroyers approaching from the south west would steer almost directly towards Capu di Muru and then use it as a navigational way point to enter the broad sweep of the great natural harbour to the no
rth.

  Unlike the French submarine which had announced its presence from afar, Alliance’s most recent refit and modernisation had streamlined her hull and significantly quietened her machinery. Already a quiet boat when she was running on electric motors with all inessential equipment turned off, she could be, given helpful sea conditions – today there was a light chop running on the surface – like a wraith, deathly quiet at low speeds.

  Neither of the oncoming French destroyers was using active sonar.

  And helpfully, they were steaming very nearly in line ahead.

  If Barrington had been in command of either of those ships – given that they had committed an act of war against a powerful foe with a long vengeful sword arm – he would have been zigzagging as if his life depended upon it right now. The Mediterranean was a big sea and it was axiomatic to Barrington that the place one’s new enemies would come to look for one was at one’s home port; therefore, until he was safe inside the anti-torpedo booms which he presumed protected the inner harbour of Ajaccio, he would have been pinging his active sonar like mad and manoeuvring erratically so as to make it as hard as possible for anybody to compute a firing solution.

  However, this was not apparently how the modern French Navy comported itself.

  “RANGE TO FIRST TARGET TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED YARDS. MARK THIS BEARING!”

  The plot confirmed the angle on the bow and fed the information into the torpedo director.

  “RANGE TO TARGET NUMBER TWO THREE THOUSAND YARDS. MARK THIS BEARING!”

  The periscope slide down into its well.

  Lieutenant Michael Philpott updated the plot.

  “They’ve come up to fourteen knots, sir.”

  Francis Barrington nodded.

  The bastards wanted to cut a dash when they steamed into the Gulf of Ajaccio!

  “UP PERISCOPE!”

  Again Barrington took a range and bearing for each target and dipped the periscope head beneath the waves.

  “Targets have steadied at fourteen knots, sir.”

  “Very good. Open tubes one to four. I plan to ‘air’ the attack periscope again in,” he checked his watch, “thirty seconds. We’ll take final ranges and bearings and shoot as soon as the torpedo director calculates a firing solution. Your target will be the leading ship, Number One. Minimum spread.”

  Once Alliance’s Mark VIIIs were on their way he would reverse course and bring the boat’s stern tubes to bear on the second destroyer. Hopefully, by the time the stern fish were away the crew in the forward torpedo room would have had time to reload one, perhaps two of the bow tubes.

  Periscope up.

  “RANGE!”

  “BEARING!”

  The targets’ course and speed was unchanged.

  The firing solution was computed.

  There was a short, breathless delay.

  ‘Firing solution confirmed, skipper,” Michael Philpott reported.

  “FIRE ONE!”

  “FIRE TWO!”

  “FIRE THREE!”

  “FIRE FOUR!”

  “Helm. Ten degrees left rudder, if you please!

  “ALL FISH ARE RUNNING TRUE, SIR!”

  The Mark VIIIs were in the water; there was nothing more that Francis Barrington or anybody else on the Alliance could do about them, other than wait for the first detonations.

  The control room talker was counting down the time to impact as the submarine turned to present her two loaded stern tubes to the still, as yet, unsuspecting targets.

  “Steady on two-seven-zero degrees,” Barrington ordered the helmsman, his tone calmly conversational. “Wheel amidships.” Then quietly to Michael Philpott. “Tell me when were level at sixty feet please.”

  As soon as the sound of underwater explosions rumbled across the mile of sea between the T-47s and the Alliance, Barrington planned to ‘air’ the attack periscope to take another periscope range and bearing to reset the torpedo director.

  Francis Barrington waited patiently.

  A Mark VIII torpedo was a beast of a weapon. Weighing in at over a ton-and-a-half, with a speed of over forty knots and tipped with an eight hundred pound Torpex warhead it was a proven ship-killer. Two of the four fish in the first salvo had been set to run at ten feet with contact detonators, two were set to run at twenty feet with magnetic exploders. The shallow running fish would hit a thin-skinned target like a destroyer like an express train, probably bursting into and exploding deep within the hull. The deeper running magnetic-fused fish would, if they exploded beneath a ship’s hull, break its back.

  “Level at sixty feet, skipper!”

  The sound of a single heavy explosion pulsed through the water.

  Francis Barrington resisted the urge to punch the air with elation; he waited for a second detonation. When it did not come he stepped to the periscope.

  “UP PERISCOPE!”

  Chapter 62

  Friday 5th June 1964

  The House of Commons, King’s College, Oxford

  Enoch John Powell, the Honourable Member for Wolverhampton South West was no more than a shadow of his former self. With his ruined face atop an emaciated, pain-wracked body he cut an increasingly sad, outcast figure. He had waited patiently, like a horribly mauled big cat gathering his strength to lash out one last time at his tormentors.

  He had listened with disinterest to the leader of the Independent Labour Party’s excoriating condemnation of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s record. Michael Foot, the wild-haired, passionate, well-meaning and profoundly decent man around whom the disaffected rump of the old Labour Party and Co-operative Party had coalesced in the spring, was, in Powell’s view not so much an idealist and a putative national leader in waiting but a dangerously naive fool. An idealistic innocent who did not understand that the real danger to the UAUK and to Margaret Thatcher lay not on the opposition benches in the House of Commons, but from within the body of her own supporters. In years past he would have had a better feel for which of the Prime Ministers ‘loyal’ colleagues and key ‘parliamentary friends’ was – like Brutus - planning to strike the first blow.

  “Mister Powell!” The Speaker called.

  The chamber fell silent as the terribly wounded parliamentary beast slowly rose to his feet and his good eye fell upon the faces of men who had once been his friends and allies, who were watching him now with mistrust and no little despite. That was to be expected, even in times such as these the Conservative Party honestly believed it had a right to govern.

  Why then would it forgive a turncoat such as he?

  “Tributes,” Enoch Powell declared, his voice afflicted these days by a hoarseness that added a desperate gravitas to his words, “tributes have been paid to my old friend Iain Macleod. That he and I became adversaries will be a great sadness to me the rest of my days. Those days will be short, I am sure, but I sincerely grieve for my old friend nonetheless. This House has lost one of its greatest sons and I know not when we will see his like again.”

  For the first time he fixed his stare on the prim, tight-lipped face of the Prime Minister. Enoch Powell had noted how tired and thin the lady seemed; unlike others on his side of the House he had not made the mistake of thinking, for a single moment, that the Angry Widow was in any way a spent force. However, it would have been unnatural had she not been reflecting upon the disasters of recent months.

  “I shall not attend this House again,” Powell stated. “My time has come and gone, like that of other members of this House.”

  Behind him men jeered at the government benches across the chamber.

  Enoch Powell slowly rounded on the noisiest of the hecklers.

  “Have you no pride?” He asked angrily, bitterly. His disdain was professorially scathing, his contempt for the dour men and women clustered around Michael Foot and his acolytes icy. “What manner of fool seeks to take Party advantage of a nation’s catastrophes?”

  When there was a muttering of support from the government benches his manner was, i
f possible, even more contemptuous.

  “In May 1940 this House met to debate the fiasco of the Norwegian Campaign. That debate, sometimes called the ‘Narvik Debate’, led to the fall of one Prime Minister and the elevation of the man who eventually led this nation out of the slough of despond to victory.”

  In April 1940 the ‘Phoney War’ in Europe had ended and German troops had conquered Norway; the British government’s attempts to hold back the German tide had been – a particularly bloody naval victory at the port of Narvik apart – shambolic and ended in humiliating withdrawal. Two days after the ‘Narvik Debate’, Hitler had invaded France and the Low Countries, and within weeks only the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ had prevented the United Kingdom from losing the war. Every member of the House of Commons had lived through that war, and some had actually been in the House during the two days of that debate. The Conservative government of Neville Chamberlain had, in parliamentary terms, prevailed in the end with its majority of two hundred cut to eighty-one but thirty-nine Conservatives had voted against their own ministers. There had been no subsequent vote of confidence in the government; everybody had simply understood that things could not be allowed to go on the way they had been ‘going on’ since the outbreak of war in September 1939. Chamberlain, the man who had proclaimed ‘peace in our time’ less than two years before, had had to go.