Operation Manna (Timeline 10/27/62 - Australia)

by James Philip

  In any event as the QRA V-Bombers in eastern England scrambled, the missiles began to fall on England and the General War Order was broadcast, Julian Christopher found himself in command of – on paper at least – a formidable fleet.

  HMS Hermes had recently arrived ‘in theatre’ to relieve the Ark Royal. The latter had been scheduled to remain ‘on station’ long enough to exercise with the Hermes ahead of steaming home via Mombasa, Durban, Simonstown and Gibraltar, returning to her home port of Portsmouth sometime in January 1963. In addition, a third ‘commando’ carrier, equipped with helicopters of the 845 and 846 Royal Naval Air Squadrons and a battalion of 40 Commando, Royal Marines, HMS Albion was at that time on passage in the company of the modern cruiser Tiger in the Indian Ocean, and due to join the fleet within days.

  At that time the only other ‘big’ ship in the fleet was the Second World War light cruiser HMS Belfast. Belfast had been scheduled to return to England that summer – probably to pay off into the Reserve Fleet - but as her replacement, the new cruiser Tiger had suffered minor grounding damage while still in United Kingdom waters in the spring her delayed arrival had necessitated the retention of the Belfast at Singapore for another six months. The crew of the old cruiser had been away from home for well over eighteen months and every man onboard was itching to set sail for England; preferably at the very moment the Tiger dropped anchor in the muddy waters of the Johore Strait off Her Majesty’s Naval Base Sembawang.

  Also under Julian Christopher’s command was 8th Destroyer Squadron, the 3rd and 6th Frigate Squadrons, several older converted World War II escort vessels operating as survey ships, the eight thousand ton maintenance ship HMS Hartland Point, the 108th Minesweeper Squadron – essentially the Hong Kong ‘inshore squadron’ – comprising eight Ton class coastal minesweepers – and the 7th Submarine Division, something of a skeleton ‘flotilla’ awaiting reinforcement by more capable modern ‘boats’ ostensibly able to support ‘special forces’ troops. Discounting patrol craft and armed launches the British Far East Fleet boasted around twenty-five major warships of which some twenty were fully operational at the time of the October War. To support these ‘fighting ships’ there was a motley fleet train of oilers, cargo, landing and ammunition vessels.

  However, if the numbers were impressive much of the materiel was not. The majority of the ships under Julian Christopher’s command were World War II builds and several, like the venerable old Belfast – a veteran of the Arctic Convoys, the sinking of the Scharnhorst, the Normandy and the Inchon landings – were tired, and about to steam home to be paid off into the reserve.

  Ark Royal and Hermes were 1945-designed carriers somewhat modified post-war to enable them to operate modern sub-sonic jet aircraft.

  The 8th Destroyer Squadron comprised four modernised[15] World War II-vintage ‘C’ class (Cavendish, Cavalier, Caesar, and Cassandra) and a single post-war ‘Battle’ class (Barrosa, the Fleet’s one Fast Air Direction destroyer) ships.

  The 3rd Frigate Squadron was made up of three aging Loch class anti-submarine frigates too slow to operate with the carriers.

  The 6th Frigate Squadron had four of the newest – mid to late 1950s-built – ships in the theatre (Blackpool, Yarmouth, Llandaff and Brighton) but even these vessels were under-gunned and minimally equipped for ‘air action’.

  The small ships of the Inshore Squadron at Hong Kong were permanently based in that port; with their crews rotating at eighteen and thirty month intervals back to the United Kingdom.

  Optimistically, Julian Christopher’s ‘fleet train’ was probably adequate to support about half his order of battle at sea, albeit on a parsimonious scale in comparison to that available to the mighty US Seventh Fleet based at Pearl Harbour, Subic Bay in the Philippines, Kobe and other bases in Japan.

  Onshore the facilities of the huge Sembawang Naval Base which included one of the largest graving docks in the World were partially mothballed for want of manpower and cash; likewise, the facilities in Hong Kong had been neglected since the Korean conflict a decade ago and it had become the practice to send ships all the way to Malta, Gibraltar or Aden for routine refits.

  Notwithstanding the shortcomings of his ships – which were many and varied – and the run down condition of his bases, Julian Christopher was not a man overly prone to dwell on such piffling things. Now that the blight of National Service and its slew of time-serving, unwilling ‘conscripts’ was finally more or less washed out of the Armed Services[16] well over ninety percent of the men under his command were professional Naval personnel for the first time since the 1930s.[17]

  Upon being informed late on the morning of Sunday 28th that the General War Order had been received, Christopher had coolly instructed his Staff to have a ‘fast launch’ waiting to carry him out to the Hermes, which was then anchored off Sembawang.

  Everybody subsequently recollected that he was the calmest man in the Fleet that day.

  Hermes had the newest, best communications kit in the Fleet therefore Julian Christopher had determined that was where the Commander-in-Chief needed to be on.

  In theory the General War Order required a carefully choreographed tactical response from the forces in the Far East, as they did elsewhere around the globe; including ships putting to sea, aircraft coming to the highest possible alert state, troops drawing ammunition and moving to pre-designated forward lines, and so on.

  But nobody had actually believed things would come to this pass...

  Unsurprisingly, there was an element of pure paralysis.

  Never was the old saying that ‘no plan survives contact with the enemy’ more true than that day in the Far East. Whereas back in the United Kingdom the flash signal ‘EIGHT EAST’ basically told the RAF to obliterate everything it could east of the 8th Meridian; there was no equivalent crystal clear operational directive in effect in Singapore.

  In Hermes’s CIC – Command Information Centre – Julian Christopher digested the confused initial reports, and perhaps, sensing if not panic then abject despair in the air, he peremptorily cut short discussion and speculation.

  ‘All ships with fifty percent full bunkers will raise steam and proceed to War Station Alpha. All other operational units will come alongside to fuel and remain in port awaiting further instructions. Get me the RAF on the radio, please.’

  Christopher’s conversation with fifty-two year old Air Marshal Sir Hector Douglas McGregor, DSO, the Air Officer Commanding Far East Air Force – and nominally, his superior officer at the time - was brief, civil and to the point.

  ‘My ships will not engage the enemy unless or until they are fired upon. Can you assure me that the RAF will adopt a similar tactical posture at this time, Sir Hector?’

  New Zealand born McGregor had commanded No 213 Squadron at Biggin Hill in 1940, thereafter been Station Commander at Ballyhalbert – where his Spitfires were responsible for defending Belfast – and by 1943 risen to be Deputy Director, Operations, Intelligence and Plans at the Headquarters of Mediterranean Air Command. Later as AOC – Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief - in the Levant after the Second World War he had commanded No 2 Group and among other roles he had held down positions such as Director of Guided Missile Development and C-in-C Fighter Command. In other words, like Julian Christopher he had seen far more than his fair share of war and frankly, if a large part of the World had just gone to Hell in a fiery handcart he had no appetite to unnecessarily top up the already over-flowing well of global misery.

  Together, the two men concurred that in the absence of direct orders to the contrary ‘Arc Light’ – the option to employ nuclear weapons against Her Majesty’s foes – was ‘off the table’.

  This brief conversation also established that, pragmatically, Christopher would henceforth be ‘theatre commander’ and that McGregor would be his deputy on land in Singapore.

  After some difficulty the C-in-C of the Army’s Far East Command, Lieutenant-General Sir Joseph Howard Nigel Poett, DSO & Bar, a fifty-five year old vet
eran of the battle for Pegasus Bridge on D-Day and of the savage winter fighting in the Ardennes, and like both Christopher and McGregor serving out his last posting under the colours before retirement, was contacted and ‘apprised of the Navy’s and RAF’s perspectives on the situation’.

  Julian Christopher suggested that all British, and by extension, all attached Commonwealth Forces in the Far East would stand on the defensive until further notice. Consideration of ‘offensive deployments’ would be delayed indefinitely, or at least until such time as everybody had a better ‘feel’ for what ‘the Devil was going on in the north’.

  Initially, the major surface units of the British Far East Fleet would disperse out to sea. Meanwhile McGregor’s Canberra bombers and reconnaissance aircraft would fly intensive intelligence gathering – mainly electronic eavesdropping, ELINT, missions – while Poett’s widely dispersed forces would do what they could to preserve civil good order.

  All three commanders concurred that the sensible thing to do was to make ready ‘as best they could’ and see what ‘happened next’. The situation was bad enough already without doing anything likely to make it worse.

  Both McGregor and Poett later confessed that not to put too fine a point on it the three senior commanders in the Far East had no better idea of what to expect the day after a nuclear war than anybody else on planet Earth.

  Chapter 4 | On the Beach

  Sunday 28th October 1962

  St Leonard’s, Sydney, Australia

  Elspeth Joan Etherington[18] a thirty-one year old ex-patriot Englishwoman was five months pregnant with her third child on the morning after the war.

  She and her husband, Patrick had led a peripatetic life since moving to Australia. ‘Uncle Pat’ was an amiably driven Ulsterman from Coleraine, County Londonderry who had lived and worked in England ever since he came down from Oxford who had met Elspeth at a party in Knightsbridge in 1957. They had married at the conclusion of his university-deferred National Service – as a subaltern in the Royal Engineers in Aden and Singapore – in July 1958, three weeks before they boarded the Orient Steam Navigation Company liner SS Orchades at Southampton bound for Australia.

  An idyllic wood-boarded house in the quiet suburb of St Leonard’s was Pat and Joan Etherington’s fast-growing family’s fourth ‘halt’ on their whistle stop journey around the vastnesses of the great southern continent. Uncle Pat was one of the men who designed and oversaw the building of bridges, docks, roads and railways – these days we might call him a ‘Managing Engineer’ or a ‘Project Engineer’ – and his talents were hugely in demand in the expanding post-war Australia of the fifties and early sixties. This author’s first cousin Michael Patrick had been born in Perth, his sister Joan Elizabeth in Melbourne and now it looked like young Pat’s and Joan’s little brother or sister was going to be born in Sydney.

  ‘It was all so exciting. New places, new friends, yes it was exhausting with two very young children but everywhere we went there was always a welcoming circle of wives to help out. Even when Pat went off up country on one of his little ‘jobs’, or was away for weeks on end in Brisbane or Adelaide, I was never lonely. The first time we met Pat had talked all evening about Australia; he had served with Aussies in Singapore and spent two months as an instructor with the Navy in Melbourne while he was in the Far East in 1956 and could not wait to get back. I had no idea what to expect when we stepped off the SS Orchades at Perth but frankly, once I found my feet I felt like Cinderella at the ball. Well, right up until the Cuban Missiles disaster. We all knew ‘On the Beach’ was just a fictional thing, a movie, that’s all...but I would be lying if I said that deep down, and I wasn’t alone in this, I think we were all the same; I started waiting for the radiation to arrive that day. It was dreadful, I looked at Pat and Joan, I felt the baby kicking in my tummy, and well, thinking back I probably went to pieces a little for a while after that...’

  Of course, after the initial shock came denial.

  ‘We all felt disconnected from whatever was going on at home. We were worried but in those days England seemed so far away that it was almost as if London was a place on another planet. We looked around and nothing had changed, the bridge was still there in Sydney Harbour, the weather was the same, people were still going down to Bondi Beach in the evenings. I know it must sound dreadful but unless you picked up a newspaper or turned on the radio nothing at all changed in those first weeks. I suppose it was about a month later that it really sank in. I cannot imagine how awful it must have been for those who had relatives in England.’

  Many years later my Aunt confided to me:

  ‘You won’t believe me but I had no idea father, your grandfather, had been given such an important job at Singapore. I suppose I had cut myself off from home, even Peter, your father, after mother died and we came to live in Australia. If anybody had told me the next time I would see my father it would be as his guest onboard the Ark Royal in Sydney Harbour; or that the next time I would meet my little brother he would be, of all things, the Governor-General of Australia[19] you could have knocked me down with a feather! My goodness, those were strange times!’

  Ever since the Second World War – in fact, from the moment Empire forces on land, sea and in the air had been contemptuously brushed aside by the Japanese in 1942 – Australia had been edging ever more decisively into a long-term strategic alliance with the United States. Australia and New Zealand had signed up to what amounted to a mutual defence treaty[20] as long ago as 1951 in the days of the Truman Administration. The Pacific was an American ocean and therefore the security of Australasia, and its economic interests inevitably lay beneath the US umbrella. While cultural and commercial links with the old country remained inviolable there was no question that as time went by the relationship with America would become the predominant focus of successive post-war Australian governments.

  The Cuban Missiles War changed everything.

  At first – momentarily - there was a shocked willingness to ‘give the Yanks’ the benefit of the doubt; then within days it became apparent that the ‘Old Country’ had been grievously ‘smashed’, that most of Europe no longer existed and spontaneously, regardless of what Australian politicians, diplomats and military men thought or said about it, the national mood began to change.

  America, it seemed had emerged from the war if not unscathed, then relatively lightly damaged in comparison with all the other protagonists. The Australian papers were reporting that the Soviet Union and China were ‘wrecked from end to end’, that Central Europe was in ruins, and that London had been ‘wiped off the face of the Earth...’

  The horror in the big cities was palpable.

  The United States had been the World’s policeman and yet its friends and allies in the Northern Hemisphere had been offered up like sacrificial lambs to the gods of thermonuclear war. And for what: so that the so-called American way of life might be preserved?

  How many tens of millions of people had had to die so that General Motors could go on selling cars and people in the Midwest could go on eating ‘mom’s apple pie’?

  Whenever President Kennedy or one of his acolytes came on the radio and claimed America had ‘saved the World’ it rang hollow, the boast of a vainglorious bully.

  It was hardly surprising that within days crowds had gathered outside the US Embassy in Canberra and bottles and bricks were being thrown through the windows of US Consulates and businesses in Sydney and Melbourne.

  Chapter 5 | A Fine Old Mess!

  Sunday 28th October 1962

  Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

  The first stirrings of the bitter anti-American backlash were still in the future when Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, the Prime Minister of Australia sombrely ushered the United States Ambassador, into his rooms at Parliament House that evening.

  Putting aside the fact that forty-two year old William Cullen ‘Bill’ Battle, the lawyer son of a former Governor of Virginia, had been Jack Kennedy’s campaign m
anager in his home state and campaign co-ordinator in the south eastern states in the 1960 Presidential race, he was much more than just a political place man. A graduate of the University of Virginia, for whose varsity golf team he had been an automatic pick, Battle had gone into the US Navy after Pearl Harbour where he had earned a Silver Star serving as a captain in the same PT Boat – motor torpedo boat – Squadron 10 as JFK. After the future President’s command, PT 107, had been rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer, Battle had been one of the men who rescued the survivors from the island upon which they had been marooned.

  Admitted to the Virginia bar in 1947 – like the Kennedys – he had been no friend of the civil rights movement in the fifties, representing his state in its courtroom attempts to block the desegregation of its schools. However, ever the pragmatist, Bill Battle had subsequently been central to achieving a settlement with the NAACP – National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – in the wake of a verdict of the Virginia Supreme Court undercutting the state’s historic anti-bellum segregationist intransigence.

  When his old war time friend Jack Kennedy had made overtures seeking his help in the Virginia primary in 1960, Bill Battle had walked straight into the Kennedy fold.

  The incoming Kennedy Administration had been extremely careful whom it placed in the key foreign embassies; although as always there were political and other debts to be paid off, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had ensured that the wealthy ‘place men’ were kept well away from the most important embassies. For example, JFK had asked sixty-four year old veteran diplomat and former OSS – the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA – officer David Kirkpatrick Bruce to go to London. Bruce had previously been Ambassador in France and West Germany, the two other key European postings under both Democrat and Republican Presidents.