by John Hackett
The government had ordered Headquarters United Kingdom Land Forces to take whatever action in support of Birmingham was possible without detriment to its ability to withstand further nuclear strikes. Headquarters West Midland District was ordered within minutes of the strike to provide what assistance it could in the Birmingham area.
By mid-afternoon that day twelve major units from the regular and volunteer armies, together with units of the RAF Regiment, amounting to some 10,000 men, with logistic and medical services and some fire-fighting equipment, were being deployed on emergency relief operations. Units drawn from West Midland, Eastern and Wales Districts, including the Mercian Yeomanry and men from the Light Infantry Depot at Shrewsbury, were deployed to Wolverhampton, Stourbridge, Halesowen, Solihull, Sutton Coldfield, Walsall and Brownhills. Here the local authorities had retained some semblance of local control and rescue and relief operations were therefore already under way in some form or other. The military units brought with them vehicles, communications, tentage, blankets, medical assistance, engineer equipment and fire-fighting equipment. Most important of all, they were organized bodies of men, capable and under disciplined control.
By the evening of the same day the emergency committees nominated in peacetime had come into operation. These committees included representatives from the police, fire-fighting services, ambulance services and medical authorities. With liaison officers from military relief units the emergency committees now took control of the deployment of rescue and relief operations during the recovery phase. It was evening before troop deployments were complete and before the emergency committees had a chance to take stock of the situation within their areas. With no electricity and fires still freely burning almost everywhere, little could be done other than attempting ad hoc rescue and relief operations with existing facilities, while plans were made for a major effort at recovery from dawn next day.
By the early morning of 21 August the Sub-Regional Headquarters at South Yardley had managed to establish radio and land communications with central government and with emergency committees in the surrounding towns. It was thus able to co-ordinate the activities of all the emergency committees, which were by now backed by their own surviving emergency facilities and military help.
All surviving hospitals were still being besieged by crowds of casualties needing treatment. There were few doctors available either in the hospitals or in the surrounding areas. Most of the roads were still impassable to vehicular movement, so fire-fighting, rescue and ambulance teams could not approach the scenes of worst damage. There were no telephones and no electricity. Gas supplies had by now been cut off. The water distribution system had failed in many places, which made fire-fighting more difficult still. There were many thousands of slightly wounded people with no accommodation and no means of feeding themselves. Looting of damaged commercial premises was becoming widespread as some looked for food while others hoped for material gain. Many people were trying to leave the area, clogging the roads with their vehicles and preventing the effective deployment of emergency services. Fires were still burning in many places, and the thousands of bodies littering the streets and lying amongst the destroyed buildings threatened a future hazard to health.
The weapon had fortunately exploded at such a height as not to cause extraordinarily high levels of radiation over the area. Emergency teams were able to operate wherever they could be deployed without concern for radiological hazard. There would have been extensive and dangerous radioactive fallout if the device had been exploded closer to the ground. A very large area downwind of Birmingham which might have been significantly affected by radioactive fallout was thus not placed at risk.
As the day of 21 August wore on the emergency services, with military support, began to make some headway in restoring order to the devastated area. Emergency committees established road blocks at many places throughout the towns to reduce the movement of refugees. Specific evacuation could now be mounted to move casualties into other hospitals in the Midlands. Reduction in refugee movement also allowed the emergency services access to the roads, where these had been cleared, so that further rescue operations could be carried out. Relief centres were set up in suitable surviving buildings such as schools, assembly halls, community centres and cinemas. Emergency supplies of food were established at the centres so that those being sheltered could be adequately fed. Strong police and military guards were mounted at all hospitals to control the access of injured people. Patrols of police and military also operated throughout the area, wherever movement was possible, to check looting, which was widespread. Emergency teams, reinforced by military and ad hoc groups of local citizens, were organized to carry out further rescue operations and to gather in all those casualties who had remained unattended so far. Casualties so collected were passed through control centres where they were allocated to categories of treatment, including first aid, attention at local hospitals where possible, or evacuation to other hospitals in the Midlands. Military communications greatly improved the co-ordination of operations. Some headway began to be made at last in assessing the extent of the disaster and in allocating priorities.
The task of restoring order and of rescuing and providing succour to the injured was still enormous in relation to the resources available. Fires were still raging, thousands were still dying where they lay, many people remained buried alive. Scattered crowds wandered about in a state of shock and there was frequent violence amongst those who thronged around the hospitals, relief centres and food stores, all of which were now under police and military guard. Police and military were armed and in many cases had to use force, sometimes even with weapons, to maintain control.
By the morning of 22 August some semblance of order had been established in neighbouring towns such as Wolverhampton. Here all fires had now been extinguished or had burned themselves out, and the combined efforts of police and military were at last able to maintain some degree of law and order in the streets, while rescue operations went on in damaged buildings and the further evacuation of homeless and injured to other areas was arranged. Compulsory billeting had allowed shelter to be found for most of those still wandering the streets. Some military effort was now becoming available to probe further towards the centre of the devastated area and to carry out rescue and relief operations in the innermost ring of towns surrounding the city of Birmingham. Most of the surviving populations of these towns had already left them and had arrived in the outermost ring of towns. There they had been given shelter and such medical help as existing facilities allowed. Nevertheless, within the innermost ring of towns, in places like Dudley, many thousands of injured people still lay amongst the rubble of their homes and countless others were buried beneath the ruins. The extent of damage in this area was so great that only minor relief was possible.
The Sub-Regional Headquarters within the city of Birmingham had by now realized that little could be done for most of the city area. Fires had largely burned themselves out but the devastation had extended over such a wide area that the capacity of rescue teams, already engaged in rescue attempts in the towns of the inner periphery, was severely limited. It was evident that the resources in the area were hopelessly inadequate to begin to attempt rescue operations in what remained of the city of Birmingham itself. This would have to wait until national resources became available. The city was therefore cordoned off along the line of the motorways to the north and west and along the line of the River Cole and the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal to the south and east. It was ordered that no rescue or relief operations would be mounted within this area for the time being. The cordon was strongly manned by police and military units and access into the city area was forbidden.
By limiting the deployment of available relief resources in this way the Sub-Regional Headquarters was able to make some headway in organizing and administering the area outside the cordon.
Many thousands of seriously injured were now dying daily and sanitary conditions had deteriorated to such
an extent that there was widespread danger of disease. Police and military units were forced to the frequent use of firearms in maintaining law and order amongst the droves of injured and often dispirited people who overcrowded the limited accommodation and swamped all medical facilities. Evacuation of the injured was proceeding as fast as possible but the numbers were so great that it was becoming increasingly difficult to find suitable destinations for them. Further attempts were being made at clearing major roads around the city of Birmingham, but with the resources available only those in and out of the towns concerned could be cleared. It was obvious that a major evacuation of the entire area would have to be carried out, leaving behind only personnel essential to further rescue operations.
Londoners had seen the flash and heard the detonation of the nuclear explosion over Birmingham. While they watched the high mushroom cloud gather and disperse the government was already taking action. Civil and military staffs started immediately to put into operation contingency plans for nuclear attack. It was announced that the Prime Minister would speak to the nation on television and radio at midday.
Central government was already established away from London. On 4 August the first stages of the plans for evacuation had been carried out, with token staffs setting up in underground war locations. The main bodies of civil and military headquarters soon followed. Everywhere throughout the country the regional centres for joint civil and military control, located underground and well-protected, and subordinate sub-regional centres, had from the outset been fully operational. At the head of each was a minister of Cabinet rank, with representatives of all essential military and civil authorities. Procedures were well-practised. Communications had long been hardened against bomb damage and interference, even from the electro-magnetic pulse generated by a nuclear detonation.
Conventional air attack on many parts of the country had already been heavy, particularly on ports, power stations and communication centres, with severe damage and heavy loss of life. Fears of further nuclear attack were widespread. As a result, it was not immediately possible to divert to the stricken cities and towns in the vast circle of damage more than a comparatively small proportion of the units of United Kingdom Land Forces. Police and civil defence forces were under heavy strain. The voluntary groups trained by local authorities to cope with civil emergency, as well as conventional or nuclear attack, and the RAYNET Ham radio communications linked to the local authority and public utility radio networks were invaluable. Equipment stockpiled by local authorities, acquired by grant-aided purchase in the recent past or more recently still by requisition, was a godsend. Against the background of the damage done in Britain in the past few weeks by conventional air attack the Birmingham disaster could have pushed the national situation out of control. What had been done for civil defence in the preceding few years was just enough to prevent this.
Delegation of power over military and civil defence resources had become the responsibility of the Headquarters of UK Land Forces. Representatives of the Prime Minister, the naval, air and military commands and the civil agencies controlling essential services were assembled there, in well-defended underground bunkers, hardened against attack or interference to communications, containing all necessary equipment.
The news media had used all their resources to cover the Birmingham disaster — though for the first twenty-four hours after the detonation all pictures from the scene were banned. Approach by road to the towns of the countryside surrounding Birmingham was impossible. Visual cover was therefore only obtainable through oblique scanning from the air. There had been commentary all day on television and radio. When the Prime Minister broadcast, she explained what had happened in the first nuclear attack on a British city — indeed upon any city in the Western world — and outlined what was being done to provide relief. She repeated urgent advice that all people outside the disaster area should stay where they were; no one could yet know whether, or where, in the United Kingdom there might be another attack.
The Prime Minister then went on to announce that the enemy had in his turn been struck by nuclear attack, with even greater force than that used on Birmingham. This was the first official intimation in the United Kingdom that the Soviet city of Minsk had been destroyed.
Her Majesty the Queen with her family, said the Prime Minister, would remain in London, and she, the Prime Minister, herself would, of course, do the same.
CHAPTER 26: A Devastating Response
A few minutes after the detonation of the nuclear weapon over Birmingham, as the huge damage from blast was being followed by swiftly spreading fire, and as millions throughout the British Isles reacted in dumb horror to the emergency transmissions on their television screens and on the radio, the President of the United States was speaking to the British Prime Minister. The time was 1035 hours Greenwich Mean Time, 0535 Eastern Standard Time. It was at once agreed that immediate retaliation was necessary, if only to avoid a catastrophic decline in civilian and military morale. The French President was called and gave his instant concurrence. As the other Allies were being informed instructions were already on their way to two SSBN, one American, one British, to launch two missiles each, targeted on the city of Minsk. The epicentre was to be directly over the middle of the city, at 3,000 metres. Each submarine reported a trouble-free launch, exactly on time, and the multiple warheads from the four missiles, tailored exactly to their task, detonated on target in quick succession. The effect was cataclysmic. It was the horror of Birmingham repeated, only many times worse, scarcely mitigated at all by civil defence precautions. There was no TV or radio reporting of the attack. The news spread nonetheless like wildfire round the world. Its impact was everywhere enormous but nowhere more so than within the Soviet Union and its satellites.
The hot-line was used again, to tell the Soviet leaders that this was a limited attack ordered as an inevitable reprisal and that a reply about negotiation would be given in three days. In the event this proved unnecessary.
This nuclear exchange, carried out on the Soviet side with no pretence of consultation with their subject allies let alone with the regional republics of the USSR, proved to be the trigger which set off the smouldering nationalist explosion. The growth of disaffection and resistance in Asia and in Eastern Europe has already been described. Its causes were the check to Soviet arms in Europe and elsewhere; the fundamental contradiction in the Soviet system as a revolutionary empire — forcing its own subject nations to fight wars of national liberation in Africa while denying them national freedom at home; offers of external help, from China to the Central Asians and from the West to the European satellites; now finally the realization that Russia might well have initiated a nuclear war which could engulf them all unless they immediately separated themselves from Russian control. The outbreaks were quicker and more violent in the East, more subtle but more decisive in Europe.
The Council of Ministers of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic started the ball rolling by securing the adoption by their local Supreme Soviet of a proclamation of secession from the Soviet Union and of independence and non-commitment. The new regime was at once recognized by China, who instituted large-scale military manoeuvres on the frontier. The Soviet commander at Alma Ata prepared to attack the Supreme Soviet building, now guarded by the local police and militia, but, being unaccustomed to taking local initiatives, asked Moscow for instructions and authority. The Kremlin, plunged into preparations for nuclear war and still torn by internal disagreement, was too busy to reply, and the tactical moment was lost. Enthusiastic crowds filled the streets carrying banners proclaiming their friendship for the Russian people and calling on the Russian troops to return peacefully to their own country. The Chinese threat appeared even more dangerous than the local ‘disturbance’, and the general took himself and most of his garrison off to reinforce the frontiers.
Proclamations of independence were equally successful in other republics which bordered on Chinese or Iranian territory and where military a
ctivity on the frontier diverted Soviet troops from their internal security role. In the Uzbek republic, which did not have this advantage, however, the Soviet forces in Tashkent took bloody reprisals against the nationalist leaders and temporarily halted the independence movement. They might in the end have been able to re-establish the situation in other territories, but meanwhile there was more serious trouble in the West which finally gave the coup de grace to the crumbling edifice of Soviet rule.
The annihilation of Minsk also precipitated events on the western borders of the Soviet Union. It was a well-chosen target, close to Poland on the west, capital of the theoretically autonomous republic of Byelorussia, and Ukraine’s neighbour on the north. Both Poland and Ukraine were quick to draw the necessary conclusion that it could be their turn next unless they took steps to change the course of history. In preparation for such an occasion the Polish defence authorities, still able to call on great signals expertise such as the Enigma disclosures had revealed, had secretly arranged direct links to their commanders, separate from the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact network. They now activated these links and instructed all Polish units to stand firm in their positions and resist any, repeat any, other orders to move and any attack on their positions, from whatever quarter. At the same time they made contact with the underground (in typical Polish fashion the authorities and the underground had known perfectly well how to get in touch with each other for some time past) and arranged for them to send urgent messages on their clandestine radio to London, reporting what had been done, asking for confirmation that no Allied attack would be made on Polish positions, and requesting air drops of supplies of essential foodstuffs and communications equipment. A positive and encouraging reply was received and the Polish government quietly prepared a declaration of withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and the isolation of Russian units still on Polish territory.