by James Philip
Walter Brenckmann, the Ambassador of the Unites States of America to the court of Blenheim Palace had listened to Margaret Thatcher’s harangue for several minutes before his patience began to fray at the edges. Eventually, he decided that the point had been reached when the only diplomatic option left to him was to make his excuses and to leave the room.
If that was he could get a word in edgewise!
In any event he had come to the conclusion that diplomatic manoeuvring was unlikely to cut much ice with the British Prime Minister. He did not actually disagree with her central thesis that the Maltese Archipelago should not, under any circumstances, have been left undefended. Where he disagreed with the lady was over her preoccupation with rehashing, over and over again from every possible angle, where the underlying culpability for the disaster lay.
He held up a hand and waited.
“Yes, what is it, Ambassador?” Margaret Thatcher demanded. The Angry Widow was at her angriest. Notwithstanding she had not slept for over thirty hours she was breathing fire, flushed with the glow of battle and she was looking for a dragon to slay.
Walter Brenckmann had not thought it was a very good idea for him to sit in on a meeting of the Angry Widow’s War Cabinet. However, Margaret Thatcher had insisted and now he was seated between Airey Neave and Iain Macleod, directly opposite James Callaghan who was sitting in the chair next to the Prime Minister’s empty chair while she paced and well, ranted...
Sir Henry Tomlinson, the greying Cabinet Secretary and Head of what now constituted the rump of the pre-war Home Civil Service sat at the left hand of his Prime Minister. Or rather, he would have if she had not keep jumping up and walking away. Next to him and figuratively slightly apart from everybody else in the room, obviously a little despondent, the Foreign Secretary had thus far sat out the ‘meeting’ in unbroken silence. At times he had he hardly seemed to be paying attention to his surroundings, let alone interacting with his colleagues. The final member of the hastily convened emergency ‘cabinet’ was the Chief of the Defence Staff, the First Sea Lord. Normally the most urbane and courteous of men, Admiral Sir David Luce’s blood pressure was visibly building towards a violent eruption.
“We are fighting a war, Prime Minister,” Walter Brenckmann said coolly. “Many of us around the table have seen a great deal of action and therefore, understand and accept that in combat things sometimes go wrong...”
“Oh, for goodness sake. I’m not interested in old soldier’s homilies!”
“Prime Minister,” the First Sea Lord said, grinding the words out via tightly clenched teeth.
Margaret Thatcher swung on him but although she opened her mouth to issue an angry rebuke she said nothing. There was one man – perhaps, also one woman – in England without whose loyalty and support no Prime Minister could govern in this much altered post-cataclysm far from United Kingdom. The man was Sir David Luce; and the woman was Queen Elizabeth II.
“Julian Christopher was my oldest friend in the Service,” the First Sea Lord continued. “That he found himself in the position he found himself in was not a failure of military judgement; it was a failure of political imagination and co-ordination. Yes, it is perfectly true to assert that had the operations of United States Navy units in the Central Mediterranean been effectively dovetailed with our own activities yesterday’s disaster might not have happened, or at least it might have been substantially mitigated. However, it is not true to assert that the United States Navy is solely responsible for our misfortunes. Frankly, madam,” Sir David Luce concluded, “what transpired yesterday at Malta will happen again somewhere else sooner or later unless your Government starts to listen to the professional military advice of the Chiefs of Staff.”
Walter Brenckmann suspected for a moment, but only a moment, that he had just witnessed the first step in a particularly British coup d’état. However, the First Sea Lord was swift to disabuse him of his mistake.
“Admiral Detweiller was undoubtedly ill-advised in removing his powerful modern flotilla from Maltese waters, coincidentally, unknown to him at exactly the worst possible moment. That said his actions were entirely explicable. He wished to exercise his ships in preparation for joining the United States Sixth Fleet. The fact that Admiral Christopher acquiesced without protest for fear of prompting an Anglo-American diplomatic furore was equally explicable in a situation in which each man sat in a separate and independent chain of command. There was a reason why Churchill and Roosevelt appointed a man like Dwight Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces first in the Mediterranean and then in overall command of the D-Day Landings, and other Supreme Commanders in every other major theatre of the 1945 war, and post-war that NATO adopted exactly the same practice. The reason was that broadly speaking, that system of command worked. Even as we speak there is still no Supreme Commander of all allied forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of operations.” He sighed, and shook his head. “Or anywhere else despite the nonsense one is hearing coming out of Philadelphia on the subject!”
The Prime Minister glared at the head of the Royal Navy.
Around the table brave men blanched, uncertain as to how the woman, much younger by many years than any other member of the assembled War Cabinet, was going to react.
Walter Brenckmann had tried and failed to persuade Margaret Thatcher to take the rapidly developing public relations fiasco over reports that Sir David Luce had been appointed – independently by the UAUK – Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean seriously. She was convinced that it was a ‘storm in a teacup’ and that the British Ambassador, Lord Franks would ‘sort it out’.
“Who pray do you recommend,” the Prime Minister inquired, “that I recommend to the President of the United States of America to fill that august position, Sir David?”
The First Sea Lord visibly winced at the dismissive tone of the woman who until thirty-six hours ago every man around the table had honestly believed was the saviour of their nation.
Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson, since December the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland coughed.
“If I might say a few words please, Margaret?”
All eyes turned to the brilliant man who had been Sir Alec Douglas Home’s - his predecessor’s - post-October War Permanent Secretary and the real power behind the throne at the Foreign office during the year after the war. Attempting to rebuild a foreign policy after so many of the countries previously friendly to the United Kingdom’s interests had been destroyed by its closest ally, and in a World in which every single old certainty had been extinguished overnight was a profoundly messy business. It was a testament to his talents that relations with the Commonwealth had been buttressed so swiftly and effectively in the months after the war as to allow the putting together of the Operation Manna convoys. Those convoys, masterminded by Julian Christopher and diplomatically facilitated by his sure hand, had saved the nation from starvation, wrack and ruin in recent months. Arguably, the relationship he had already built in the last three months with Dean Rusk’s successor at the American Department of State, J. William Fulbright, had done as much to cement the growing US-British rapprochement as had Margaret Thatcher’s ability to ‘connect’ – publicly at least - with President Kennedy.
The Prime Minister resumed her seat at the table.
“Carry on please, Tom.”
The man made an effort to sit up straight in his chair and to shrug off the terrible cloying weariness which fogged his mind. Alcohol, melancholy and a predisposition to tell his political masters the truth – as he saw it – had relegated him to an obscure sinecure within his department in the two years before the October War. The alcohol and the melancholy had also caused his wife, Pat to divorce him in despair. His decline had torpedoed a meteoric career which might one day have concluded in his winning the job currently filled by his oldest surviving friend in Christendom, Henry Tomlinson.
“The time has come,” he prefaced, whimsically self-deprecating, “the Walr
us said, to talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax.” He quirked a tired grimace in memory of a time when he still remembered how to laugh. He wondered what Lewis Carroll would have made of the age in which they now lived? “And of cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot; and whether pigs have wings.”
Margaret Thatcher was suddenly less angry, her steely blue eyes less accusative, less cobalt hard.
“Tom, are you quite yourself?”
“No, Margaret,” he replied gently. “I am not and forgive me for saying this, neither are you,” he continued before she could slap him down for his impertinence, “and at a time like this it is very important that you know that your friends are on your side.”
The silence was threatening.
Presently, Margaret Thatcher pursed her lips, squared her shoulders and with the briefest of sniffs, fixed her friend in her sights.
“The thoughts of the Walrus and the Carpenter aside, Foreign Secretary,” she said with the severity of a disappointed schoolmistress, “what other thoughts would you care to share with us this morning?”
Tom Harding-Grayson sucked his teeth as he collected his ideas.
“Yesterday, I was preoccupied with the fate of South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands and the Falkland Islands thousands of miles away in the South Atlantic. I am still perturbed on account of those distant, windswept rocks and their few tens and hundreds of people. But somehow, the annexation of those places rather palls into insignificance in comparison with the national humiliation and tragedy which has befallen us in the Central Mediterranean. This said my greatest fear is that in retrospect we may look back on events in the South Atlantic and the Mediterranean as singular disasters in a global train of irreversible setbacks the seeds of which may already be in motion.”
The First Sea Lord stirred.
“My staff is worried about the reports coming out of Tehran,” Sir David Luce remarked neutrally. “And then there are the reports of troop concentrations in the Caucasus.”
“Surely,” Airey Neave offered, “Operation Grantham has got off to a good start? Our troops went ashore practically unopposed on Cyprus, I understood?”
Sir David Luce nodded but held his peace, returning the floor to the Foreign Secretary.
“Before Christmas,” Tom Harding-Grayson reminded his colleagues, “we very nearly went to war with the USA and Italy, and we did actually go to war with Spain almost entirely on account of various parties hearing one thing and understanding another. Then later we were achingly slow to recognise the threat posed by Red Dawn in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans and Turkey. Frankly, we still don’t know the half of what the old Soviet regime was up to creating a monster like Krasnaya Zarya. Now we have had to throw everything we’ve got at Cyprus to regain at least one secure base of operations in the Eastern Mediterranean; on the grounds that it is an essential prerequisite of a future Anglo-American campaign to restore civilisation and decency to Crete, the Aegean and the eastern littoral of Anatolia. In itself, that is a task which might be the work of a generation, assuming we ever take it on in the first place.” His rheumy grey eyes tracked around the faces of his friends and colleagues.
The ticking of a clock on the wall behind him sounded unnaturally loud.
“So, to recap. Yesterday,” Tom Harding-Grayson continued reflectively, “I was worried about the South Atlantic, and now in the wake of the disaster which has befallen us at Malta, I am suddenly worried about what might be going on in the mountains of the trans-Caucasus and elsewhere. And ever since I heard the first news of the Battle of Malta I have been asking myself where the next blow will fall?”
James Callaghan stirred.
“And have you come to any conclusions, Tom?”
“Yes and no,” the Foreign Secretary prevaricated. “But I keep asking myself what we could do now – if we could actually do anything at all, that is – if we were faced tomorrow by a re-run of the Abadan Crisis of a decade ago?”
Chapter 31
12:20 Hours
Saturday 4th April 1964
Emergency Command Centre of the Military Governor of Malta, Marsa Creek
Duminku, or as the British knew him ‘Dom’ - a diminutive of his Anglicized name Dominic - Mintoff involuntarily broke stride as he was ushered out of the ramshackle temporary office of the Acting Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces on Malta. His waiting bodyguards – hulking men most of whom had deserted him at the height of the bombardment the previous day, a fact he was unlikely to forget in a hurry – very nearly fell over each other as their leader halted.
Dom Mintoff gazed at the bloody, battered angular frame of the young man in the ill-fitting borrowed United States Navy uniform dozing, his handsome head lolling, in the chair outside the C-in-C’s makeshift office in the old seaplane hangar.
A lump came reluctantly to his throat as he briefly contemplated what that exhausted; ridiculously youthful destroyer captain had done the previous afternoon. The Americans would have rescued Malta sooner or later but the two small British ships which had suicidally hurled themselves at the enemy fleet had by their valour and courage saved countless lives across the Maltese Archipelago. By their actions they had cut short the agony, probably by hours; once the shelling had stopped the surviving Soviet parachutists had surrendered in droves, knowing that Malta would not, could not possibly fall. The killing had ended; and hundreds, more likely thousands of his – Dom Mintoff’s – people were still alive on this new day because of the selfless bravery of that bruised and no doubt, traumatised young officer and his men.
It was a rare, albeit brief, moment of personal humility for the leader of the Maltese Labour Party, a man not overly prone to introspection or known to ever freely give the British the benefit of the doubt.
The forty-seven year former Rhodes Scholar at Hertford College, Oxford, had half-expected to be arrested when the soldiers had arrived at his house. After the October War during the regime of Admiral Sir Julian Christopher’s predecessor he had been arrested several times and spent many frustrating months locked out of the political process. By profession an architect and journalist, Dom Mintoff was the kind of man who was never going to forgive that ignominy. Anybody who knew him understood that holding grudges and never forgetting a slight was in his blood. He had actually been Prime Minister of the colony for three years in the 1950s, and until the October War had been itching to be the first Premier of an independent Maltese Archipelago. But for the war Malta might, even now be preparing for its Independence Day. Unlike other leading Maltese politicians Dom Mintoff was never, ever going to be cowed by or in any way supplicant to the colonial power. Notwithstanding, he had wondered if his summons to the British headquarters was a prelude to another spell under detention, or perhaps, worse.
Dom Mintoff hesitated, tempted to rouse the sleeping naval officer.
If ever there was an Englishman whose right hand he might shake without worrying about who was watching, it was this man.
However, the moment passed.
Another time perhaps?
The Leader of the Maltese Labour Party’s recent ‘interview’ had given him a great deal to ponder.
‘Thank you for coming over, Mr Mintoff,’ Air Vice-Marshal French had said, coming around his desk and taking the suspicious Maltese’s hand. The Acting C-in-C was one of those infuriating Englishmen with whom it was inordinately hard to take offence with or to, no matter that he was an unwelcome foreign interloper, an imperial overlord foisted upon the Maltese Archipelago by a cruel accident of history. French had been punctiliously correct, even friendly, on all their previous meetings despite Mintoff’s calculated attempts to rile him. ‘May I introduce Vice-Admiral Clarey, the Commander of the United States Sixth Fleet,’ the Englishman went on, turning to the balding middle aged American who had risen from his chair when the Labour Party Leader had entered the room.
Mintoff shook hands with the American whose uniform, unlike that of his Britis
h comrade, was immaculately clean and freshly pressed.
Mintoff’s associates had been excluded and the two senior officers’ staffers had left the room. The Labour Party leader was waved to take a seat, and Air Vice-Marshal French and Admiral Clarey had retaken seats behind the C-in-C’s map-strewn desk. The three men had viewed each other like wrestlers circling, attempting to spot the best death grip.
‘I’ve asked my people,’ Dan French said, breaking the sudden tension, ‘to make sure that your people get coffee. Hopefully, they’ll bring some in for us in a minute.’ He sobered. ‘You will have heard the rumours about what happened at Mdina. It is my sad duty to inform you that Admiral Sir Julian Christopher died of wounds sustained defending his headquarters. The garrison of Mdina suffered approximately seventy percent casualties in yesterday’s action before eventually repelling the Soviet invaders. Further, I regret to have to inform you that Mr Borg, the leader of the Maltese Nationalist Party, may be among the dead. He was known to be attending a meeting in Rabat with other senior colleagues. We don’t know the full details yet but it seems paratroopers broke in and murdered,’ he hesitated, ‘everybody. At the height of the battle we believe that several pre-positioned ‘hit squads’ targeted leading Maltese political and business leaders. I fear that many prominent citizens will have been killed or injured.’ The Englishman pursed his lips, sighed. ‘Please take my words at face value Mr Mintoff,’ he requested quietly, ‘I mean what I say when I tell you that it was with no little relief that I learned of your survival unscathed.’
Dom Mintoff had guffawed uncomfortably, unable to take the sentiments at face value. His thoughts were still reeling from confirmation of the news of the death of Sir Julian Christopher and all that it portended for the future of the archipelago and possibly, his own liberty.
Dan French did not linger over this apparent rebuff.