by James Philip
The Captain of the USS Iowa digressed for a moment; he literally could not help himself.
“Somebody ought to start looking for a chest full of medals for your guys on those two destroyers you sent out to attack the Soviet heavies,” he observed gruffly.
Dan French frowned.
“We sent ships out to fight the enemy?” He vaguely recollected that the frigate HMS Yarmouth had been running post-refit trials for the last couple of days but had no knowledge of any other ‘big’ ship available to his friend, the C-in-C, Sir Julian Christopher.
“HMS Yarmouth and HMS Talavera,” the American reported, not able to hide his concern that the Englishman apparently had no idea what he was talking about. “Yarmouth decoyed the heavies from the north and the Talavera dove straight at them and put fish into both the bastards!”
That explains why the shelling stopped a while back!
“I thought Talavera was still in dockyard hands?” Dan French speculated before he decided it was for the best to keep his mouth shut.
“I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it. She ran at the bastards for ten, maybe fifteen minutes before she launched her fish,” Anderson Schmidt declared. “One destroyer up against a goddammed dreadnought and a cruiser. By the time she was in close at least two of the Krupny class escorts must have been shooting at her too!”
“What happened to Talavera and Yarmouth?” Dan French demanded dry mouthed.
“Yarmouth is on fire off St Paul’s Bay. She may still be under weigh but she’s trailing a lot of smoke. The USS Charles F. Adams is manoeuvring to offer all assistance at this time. HMS Talavera is in a sinking condition approximately ten miles off Sliema. The USS Berkeley is alongside her standing by to take off her people.”
Dan French took a deep breath.
“Thank you, Captain Anderson.”
There was a brief pause.
“What are your orders, sir?” The American asked.
Dan French recognised that this was the first time in his life an American serviceman had ever said that to him and meant it. He swallowed hard, looked around the room at the worried, haggard faces.
“Park your ship off the Grand Harbour breakwaters and carry on the good work, Captain Schmidt,” he said. “Oh, and keep this channel open, if you please.”
“Affirmative, sir!”
Dan French surrendered the handset.
“It seems that the cavalry has arrived, gentleman.” There was a hubbub of relief and an undercurrent of muttered dissent to the effect that the cavalry ought to have been on the scene all along, which the Deputy Commander of all British and Commonwealth Forces on Malta immediately quashed. “We will leave the recriminations to the politicians,” the man who, with a heavy heart, assumed he was now probably the man in charge in Malta added grimly, “it is not the business of any man under my command to cast the first stone.”
This said he headed for the door.
“Right! I’ve had enough of skulking down here. Somebody find me a bloody gun!”
Chapter 6
12:35 Hours (GMT)
Friday 3rd April 1964
Leinster House, Kildare Street, Dublin
Sir Ian Morrison Ross MacLennan had been the British Ambassador to the Irish Republic since 1959. He was a seasoned diplomat and considered by his peers in England to be a very ‘safe pair of hands’. Having joined the then Colonial Office in 1933 after graduating from Worcester College, Oxford, he had previously served with distinction as High Commissioner in Southern Rhodesia between 1951 and 1953, in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland until 1955, returning to London for two years as Assistant Under-Secretary of State at the Commonwealth Relations Office, before undertaking his next High Commissioner stint between 1957 and 1959 in Accra, Ghana during the run up to that nation’s independence. In all his overseas postings the fifty-four year Ambassador had formed close and lasting friendships and connections men and women who were often instinctively hostile to British interests, but nowhere more so than in Dublin. Insofar as it was possible for an interloper representing the former imperial power – a power still distrusted and loathed throughout the twenty-six counties – to have built ‘bridges’, few men could have done more than Ian MacLennan in the years he had been in Ireland. Not that many ‘bridges’ had been built in recent months as the strife in the north worsened and passions burned ever more brightly in the south in the aftermath of the October War.
At around the time of the Cuban Missiles disaster Sir Ian and his wife Margherita had been beginning to look forward to his mooted next posting in New Zealand; but that blissful vision had been snatched away from them as had so much else by the war. Neither of their adult children had survived the night of war; both had disappeared without trace like so many other parents’ hopes for the future. Afterwards, there was only duty to fall back upon, no matter how onerous or pointless it sometimes seemed in Dublin, the drably hostile capital of the Irish Republic.
The British Ambassador had received the Taoiseach’s note requesting an urgent ‘interview’ while breakfasting that morning with Anglo-Irish friends in Wexford. Inwardly, he had groaned because it was invariably the case that whenever the Taoiseach – the Irish Prime Minister – or his colleague, the Irish Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken, summoned him at short notice it was invariably to deliver a new denouncement of perfidious Albion’s ongoing colonial malfeasance. Like all insecure and only superficially united administrations preoccupied with looking over its shoulder most of the time, the Fianna Fáil Government of Taoiseach Sean Lemass, was intensely sensitive to the least suggestion of a slight or insult, large, small or simply imagined towards his person, party or country and the mere continuing existence of the six northern counties of Ulster partitioned from the island of Ireland back in the early 1920s still hung over Dublin like a dark cloud.
Everybody knew the history; but it was not until an Englishman came to Dublin that he understood what that history meant. Under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act (1920) Ireland had been partitioned north and south on 3rd May 1921. But the Act had solved little. Under its provisions the entire island of Ireland had become the Irish Free State on 6th December 1922 which ought to have been but was never going to be the end of the affair; on the 7th December 1922 the Parliament of Ulster had formally opted not to join the new Dominion of the British Empire and thereafter the ‘Irish Question’ had remained malignantly unresolved, a festering canker. To the majority of undeniably decent, peace-loving Irish folk Sir Ian MacLennan was, therefore, the living embodiment of Oliver Cromwell’s ghost and there was nothing he could say or do to win over hearts and minds. Other that was, than to take the slings and arrows that inevitably flew his way with unflappable, unfailing good grace.
It had been with a weary sense of ‘here we go again’ that he had finished his breakfast, bid farewell to his wife and their hosts - there was no point dragging Margherita back to the bear pit of Dublin since he planned to return to Wexford as soon as possible - and driven in the company of the customary Irish Army escort the eighty miles back up the coast road to Dublin. Stopping briefly at the British Embassy in Merrion Square near Leinster House, the home of the Oireachtas Éireann, the Parliament of the Irish Republic to collect the latest Foreign Office telegrams, he had immediately set off again for his ‘interview’ with the Taoiseach.
In the back of the Embassy Bentley he had glanced at the latest telegrams.
It seemed the Argentine had seized Port Stanley on East Falkland. And South Georgia...
That did not sound like good news.
Malta was under attack...
By whom?
The Ambassador rifled through the other telegrams; none of which shed fresh light on either the situation in the South Atlantic or in the Mediterranean. Did the Irish know something about these widely separated incidents? No, that was hardly likely. There were few more parochial administrations on the planet than the one in Dublin. He brought himself up short; knowing he was b
eing unfair. The Irish might have escaped direct attack in the October War but they were as much its victims as the United Kingdom. Sporadic American aid had taken the edge off the hunger on the streets of Irish towns and cities immediately after the war; otherwise austerity had bitten hard throughout the twenty-six counties and contrary to what many people in England believed, the government in Dublin wanted nothing to do with the near civil war in the six northern counties of Ulster. Not least because although it had shamed the Fianna Fáil Government of Sean Lemass to accept it, the food ships diverted – apparently at Margaret Thatcher’s direct intervention – from the Operation Manna convoys to both Belfast and Dublin during the past winter, had probably stopped thousands of Irish men and women starving to death.
Nobody needed to tell an Irishman or woman about the tragedy of war and the last thing most Irish people south of the border wanted was a shooting war with their wounded but infinitely more powerful and potentially vengeful neighbour across the other side of the Irish Sea. However, if anybody in England had anticipated the charity of the unexpected food ships arrival – barely publicised or acknowledged at the time - in Dublin to ameliorate ancient hatreds, they would have been rudely disabused of that hope by the upsurge of violence in the north in recent weeks.
Sir Ian MacLennan was a little surprised to discover that the Taoiseach was not alone in his rooms at Leinster House. Frank Aiken, the Minister for External Affairs and Lieutenant General John McKeown, Chief of Staff of the Óglaıġ na hÉıreann – a title literally translated as ‘Irish warriors’ but more prosaically descriptive of the ‘Irish Defence Forces’ - rose to their feet when the British Ambassador was shown in.
Sixty-six year old Frank Aiken was no friend of the United Kingdom but if he had ever been one he had long ago ceased to be a blanket ‘Brit hater’. The former IRA – Irish Republican Army – veteran of the Civil War and one of the longest serving members of the Dáil, the Irish Parliament, had been a campaigner on the European and wider World stage for de-colonisation, equality, peace and nuclear disarmament before the October War and like most old soldiers, he had no appetite for a new civil war in Ireland that might entrench the current partition of the island for another generation.
A tall, thin man with a brush moustache Aiken stepped forward and shook Sir Ian MacLennan’s hand, greeting him with a solemn nod of his head.
Lieutenant General John McKeown had lost the sun-burnished tan acquired during his pre-war tour as Commander-in-Chief of the United Nations Force in the Congo. His conduct of that operation had earned him high praise and respect well beyond the boundaries of the Irish Republic and raised the profile not just of the small Irish Army, but of the whole nation in the eyes of professional military contemporaries abroad.
McKeown’s presence troubled Ian MacLennan.
As did the worried look on the face of the Taoiseach because it was unlike Seán Francis Lemass to betray anything of his underlying misgivings in the presence of the Ambassador of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.
“Good day to you, Ambassador,” the Irish Prime Minister said in Gaelic, quirking a momentary wry grin as hands were shaken.
Ian MacLennan had not been a Gaelic speaker when he was posted to Dublin; since then he had acquired sufficient of the language to make polite conversation and to sometimes – if his interlocutors spoke slowly and they had Dublin accents – to follow the gist of conversations.
“And to you too, Taoiseach,” he replied in kind. His ghastly, very ‘English’ pronunciation rarely failed to raise at least a half-smile even on the lips of even the most partisan of Irish nationalists. “Might I inquire,” he went on in his own native tongue, “after the health of the President. When I left Dublin earlier in the week I was led to believe that Mr de Valera’s condition had stabilized?”
The sixty-nine year old New York born President of the Irish Republic, Éamon de Valera had been rushed to hospital over a fortnight ago and as yet, no public announcement had been made on his illness. The Republic – Eire – without the man who had been its guiding hand for the best part of five decades of war and economic and diplomatic struggles would be another, very different country. A country even less well understood both by its own people and by MacLennan’s clients back in England.
“The Uachtarán na hÉireann has not given up the fight,” the Irish Prime Minister said, as always insisting on using the Gaelic version of titles and ranks. “We pray that he will pull through this travail.”
The other three men nodded concurrence with this sentiment.
The four men in the cool, strained atmosphere of the Taoiseach’s comparatively old-fashioned, almost Spartan room understood only too well that relations between the British and the Irish governments had reached a new nadir that spring. The fact that the British Ambassador spent most of his time out of Dublin to avoid providing an easy ‘static target’ for an assassin in the Republic’s capital city was eloquent testimony to the ongoing crisis.
The chairs in the room were neither new nor threadbare, simply well-used and a little tired. The description might have applied to the nation beyond the walls of Leinster House; a country trapped in a cycle of dreary stagnation. The saddest thing was that Ian MacLennan knew that appearances were misleading and that but for the recent war and the troubles along the northern border, the Irish Republic might already be taking tentative steps towards a brighter, more optimistic and prosperous future.
Seán Francis Lemass had been born John Francis Lemass in Ballybrack, Co. Dublin in 1899. He was the second of seven children. As a child his family had called him ‘Jack’. At school he excelled at mathematics and history but aged fifteen he had lied about his date of birth and joined the rebel Irish Volunteers. Enlisted into A Company of the 3rd Battalion, whose adjutant was Éamon de Valera he had become ‘Seán’. Arrested after the Easter Rising in 1916 during which he and his brother Noel had fought at both Moore Street and at the General Post Office, the British had released him because of his youth. Nonetheless, he had spent much of the rest of his early life fighting the occupying power.
Lemass had been one of Michael Collins’s ‘Twelve Apostles’, men of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA responsible for a series of murderous attacks on British agents operating in the city. A veteran of the War of Independence and later the Irish Civil War, Lemass’s life had been unusually blighted by loss. He had accidentally shot and killed his own twenty-two month old brother Herbert with a revolver in January 1916. In 1923 his twenty-five year old elder brother Noel was kidnapped and later murdered by pro-Treaty men under the command of Emmet Dalton, a close confederate of Michael Collins. Those terrible days when true Irishmen had routinely killed each other over the clauses of a British mandated Anglo-Irish Treaty – over whether Ireland should, or should not be partitioned – still overshadowed later generations. The armed struggle between the Irish Free State and its colonial overlords was long over and nobody in that room in Leinster House wanted a return to those days, but the partition of the thirty-two counties of Ireland in the 1920s had settled nothing and they could never pretend otherwise.
The four men sat down, settling uncomfortably.
“You’d best tell Sir Ian the bad news, General,” Sean Lemass sighed, passing a weary hand involuntarily across his face.
Lieutenant General John McKeown sat stiffly upright his chair. His gaze zeroed in on the British Ambassador.
“You will be aware, Sir Ian,” the soldier prefaced, his tone businesslike and unapologetic, “that since the unfortunate incidents which occurred in December...”
“The attempted regicide of Queen Elizabeth and her family at Balmoral,” Sir Ian MacLennan interjected urbanely, unwilling to let the magnitude of the outrage pass. The attempted assassination of the Monarch was not an ‘unfortunate incident’ it was an obscenity!
“Quite so, Sir Ian,” the Chief of Staff of the Irish Defence Forces agreed softly. “Since that ‘incident’ we have, as you know, at the request of Her Majesty�
��s Government, taken a close interest in traffic in and out of Casement Air Base, its associated logistics depot, and at the site of its sister establishment adjoining Shannon airport. At the same time Customs officers have been instructed to closely monitor trans-Atlantic shipping movements into and out of Irish ports.”
Sir Ian MacLennan’s expectations of a session in which he was to be the butt of his hosts’ displeasure began to dissolve. Something else was going on. The men around him were sending out unfamiliar signals. They were worried and perhaps, even a little afraid.
He said nothing.
The United States had taken over and massively expanded Casement Air Base in the months after the October War. Denied the use of its bases and facilities in the United Kingdom the United States Air Force had wasted little time upgrading its lodgements in Spain, and lengthening the runways at what had previously been a small Irish Air Force field at Casement, approximately nine miles from the centre of Dublin, hurriedly building a large prefabricated military camp which had grown to cover several square miles of the rolling green hills to its north and west. Giant radar and communication towers had sprouted from within the high-fenced compounds and hordes of American servicemen and civilian contractors now roamed the bars and streets of the capital most nights. The capital’s pre-war dingy back streets had spawned several new ‘red light districts’. Decent folk, especially women aged between eighteen and forty, ventured out alone onto the streets of Dublin at their peril after dark. It was well known that many of the well paid American GIs and ‘contractors’ treated ordinary Irishmen and women with condescension and openly expressed the view that they had been posted to a ‘third world country’.