by James Philip
He was moved to observe:
‘In future all admirals should ideally be shot at in an aeroplane while they are still young.’
That same year he flew in the operations against the Vichy French Fleets at Mers-el-Kébir and Dakar and claimed three ‘shared’ kills before 803 Squadron re-formed flying Fairey Fulmar fighters (still no match at all for a Messerschmitt Bf109...c’est la guerre) serving on the brand new fleet carrier Formidable.
Something can be gathered of the exhaustion sometimes experienced by Fleet Air Arm fliers in war that Gibson later claimed to have slept through the Battle of Matapan in which three Italian cruisers were shot to pieces by the Mediterranean Fleet’s battle line.
Shortly afterwards his luck very nearly ran out; wounded he attempted to land his damaged Fulmar on the Formidable with just one wheel of his undercarriage down, hit the island bridge, cart-wheeled over the forward 4.5-inch gun position and went over the bow of the carrier then manoeuvring at better than twenty-five knots. Nobody quite knew how he had lived through that but the destroyer Hereward had picked him out of the water.
By the end of 1941 he had used up several more of his ‘lives’. The Sunderland flying boat taking him to Gibraltar to assume command of No 802 Squadron was shot up by a German aircraft, then the ship he was on, flying Grumman Martlet fighters (still not really a match for a Bf109, but getting closer), was torpedoed by U-741.
All clouds have a silver lining, et cetera...
It was this mischance which meant that he did not transfer to the escort carrier Avenger, which herself was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of all bar a dozen men in 1942. Instead he was posted as Senior British Naval Officer, Naval Air Station, Miami.
After the war, in 1949, he was flying a Sea Fury (more than a match for a Bf 109 but – unfortunately - half-a-decade too late) over the English Channel when its engine seized and he had to ditch. This he had thought was ‘it’, the plane hit the water and he was momentarily trapped, drowning basically, in his cockpit before by some fluke his parachute opened and dragged him to the surface.
Spells as Commander (Air) on the carriers Indomitable and Glory, and on terra firma in charge of shore stations must have been a bit tame but eventually, after a stint as Deputy Director of the Air Warfare Division at the Admiralty he had been given command of the Ark Royal[58]; which he had promptly run aground proceeding up the Hamoaze to Devonport. The Navy did not approve of things like that and he had been court-martialled and reprimanded before it was realised that the buoys marking the deep water channel had been put in the wrong place!
Once that unpleasantness was out of the way Gibson had commanded the Ark Royal faultlessly during her Far East deployment. Few men in the Fleet knew its ships and men, its capabilities and its flaws better than Don Gibson and more importantly, he enjoyed the absolute trust of the C-in-C British Pacific Fleet.
Time and again Julian Christopher would repeat; it is not the ships it is the men in them that matter.
‘Ships achieve nothing; men everything.’
A little over five weeks after the October war the British Pacific Fleet had been reorganised and exhaustively exercised in its new fighting order of battle, its major components were in or on the way to Australasian ports, and in league with the Government of Sir Robert Menzies its new and vital mission was slowly, surely being refined.
Chapter 15 | Winter’s Bane
Thursday 17th January 1963
Government House, Cheltenham
From Margaret Thatcher’s first floor office window the Grandstand of the race course, some two miles distant was hidden in the blizzard. The snow had begun falling again a day ago; now the latest snowfalls lay on the icy crust of earlier drifts and Gloucestershire, like most of the country was imprisoned by the deep freeze.
The elaborate central heating system of the rambling mock-Tudor grandiose mansion requisitioned by the UKIEA as its headquarters had broken down; and the moment she moved more than a few feet away from the few glowing coals in the office’s small hearth she started to shiver. She had sent the twins – Mark and Carol - down to the old basement servants’ quarters where the small combined Royal Marine and Royal Military Police guard detachment always kept a roaring fire. The wives and dependents, including half-a-dozen young children who had accompanied ministers, military officers and civil servants to the newly established compound – Nissen huts and prefabricated huts had been starting to surround the old house before the snows – tended to migrate towards the warmth on days like this. Next to the ‘guardhouse’ basement the kitchens were the only rooms in the whole building which were always warm, struggling to feed the long queues of hungry mouths. Each day the porridge and the soup became more watery, and everybody seemed hungrier and colder.
The mansion had belonged – for all they knew it might still belong to – a Fleet Street press baron whose papers had taken a vitriolically ‘hard line’ over the developing Cuban Missiles Crisis...
October already seemed like another age...
The war had been less than twelve weeks ago but it might have been twelve years.
Airey Neave had returned from his latest foray with a stash of chocolate and sweets, humbugs, for the twins. She had been horribly conflicted accepting his booty. She was the one responsible for feeding the nation; how could she look herself in the eye if she ‘cheated’?
‘Don’t get religious about this, Margaret. I’ve handed other packets of sweets to the troops in the building. It’ll make them feel better about things handing them out to the children. Dole them out little by little. It’ll help keep young Carol’s and Mark’s spirits up,’ her friend had assured her.
In the fortnight after she arrived in Cheltenham Margaret Thatcher had been too relieved, traumatised also, to stop and ask herself the most obvious questions.
For example: why exactly had she been appointed Minister of Supply, Energy and Transportation?
At first she had not realised how much she had changed.
It was as if the October War had broken and subtly re-made her.
Her anger never went away.
Her beloved husband Denis, the man who had been her rock was gone and for what? The greater glory of the Pax Americana? Around Cheltenham her colleagues were already calling her the ‘Angry Widow’ behind their hands. Let them, the only thing she did not understand was why nobody else was as angry, bloody angry, as she was!
However, if her outrage was never far beneath the surface there was another thing which was, in its way, as disorientating. It was a conundrum that she could not solve; unlikely as it seemed she was Airey Neave’s superior in the developing hierarchy of the Emergency Administration and yet he had accepted her as more than just an equal.
She still thought it would have made a lot more sense for her to be working for Airey; not the other way around and yet he seemed perfectly happy acting as her deputy and chief of staff with a roving, very nearly free-wheeling portfolio.
As was her way she had confronted him.
‘Why didn’t you insist on being the Minister, Airey?’
The hero of Colditz, a bone fide surviving national treasure in a land sorely in need of men of his ilk, had smiled.
‘If I learned anything in the last war it was that the right people need to be in the right jobs, Margaret. I think we shall make an excellent team.’
None the wiser they had ‘carried on’ as before.
The peculiar thing was that knowing she had Airey covering her back she sometimes got a little ‘over enthusiastic’ and unnecessarily put her exclusively male colleagues’ noses out of joint.
Airey had counselled her about that.
‘No harm done. No harm lighting a few rockets under the bottoms of slackers...’
Margaret Thatcher stared at the falling snow.
The winter had locked the whole country in its frigid embrace. The roads were impassable, even the railways were grinding to a halt. The so-called ‘Comet shuttle’ to distant Commonwealth la
nds had been suspended. God alone knew how many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people were freezing to death in bomb damaged houses...
The latest cables from Canberra, where the newly formed British Military and Supply Mission under the command of Commodore Donald Gibson, suggested that attempts to ‘collect’ United Kingdom registered merchantmen in ‘friendly ports’ under the protection of the British Pacific Fleet, the East African Squadron, and the South African Navy, was beginning to produce results. Julian Christopher’s frigates had already ‘rescued’ a number of ‘interned’ and variously ‘detained’ vessels, and set about re-opening the freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf. This latter promised to turn back on the ‘Abadan tap’. Abadan was the largest oil refinery complex on the planet and if it could be ‘turned back on’ and tankers regularly convoyed to England the reliance on – to date, unforthcoming – fickle American largesse would be greatly reduced.
Thus far only five ships from American ports had docked and unloaded cargo in British ports since the first week of November. Tanker traffic from the US refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, and US owned and operated concerns in the Caribbean had not yet restarted. Moreover, since the Americans had yet to re-establish anything like a full diplomatic presence in the British Isles; this was clearly not a thing the Kennedy Administration attached any, let alone a high priority to in the near future.
It was her department which had the job of despatching ever more desperate, increasingly humiliating pleas for assistance to the State Department in Washington. The Americans claimed the US Navy was still ‘making safe the North Atlantic sea lanes’ for shipping, or that ‘Congressional approval was required before significant aid can be sent...’
Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord and as of 1st January confirmed in post as the Chief of the Defence Staff, had told her that the US Navy was worried about ‘rogue Soviet submarine operations’ in the wake of the recent war. The Royal Navy had seen no evidence of this either in ‘European or northern waters’ where several submarines had been tasked to patrol, and continued to patrol, since the end of hostilities.
The First Sea Lord had proven a most approachable and accommodating officer. His ships were presently escorting coastal traffic, and several Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessels including oilers were presently engaged shipping emergency supplies from undamaged depots in Scotland and the West Country to ports on the East Coast.
The sudden onset of the cruellest winter in living memory had made the overland transportation, especially of bulk goods, impracticable for days on end. Even before the first heavy snows the war-degradation of the road and rail networks and the terrible detritus of the refugee columns in the weeks after the war, had effectively blocked many routes. Fallout had been a nightmare in the weeks after the attack; less so now that survey teams had identified the main ‘hotspots’ and ironically, the rain of autumn and the heavy snowfall had put an end to the wind-blown dispersal of irradiated dust and other airborne particulates. In the spring that might again be a worry and could possibly be for at least another year or so according to the ‘experts’; but ‘another year’ was so far ahead in an unknowable future as to be completely invisible below the event horizon of Margaret Thatcher’s world.
She would let the ‘physics safety teams’ worry about that.
There was a knock at her door.
Margaret Thatcher forced a smile as fifty-three year old Peter Thorneycroft the UKIEA’s Minister of Defence[59] stepped, a little diffidently, into the office. Thorneycroft had been the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Harold Macmillan’s Cabinet in 1957 and 1958 before resigning and falling out of favour. A handsome, dignified man he was one of the few surviving Party ‘grandees’, a calming presence in Government House, unlike that other more recent addition to the Emergency Administration, the restless, argumentative bundle of energy that was Iain Macleod, the Chairman of the Conservative Party and newly designated Minister Without Portfolio.
‘I gather Airey is off on his travels again, Margaret,’ the newcomer observed apologetically. It was nearly three in the afternoon, about the time the former Press magnet’s staff brought around the tea trolley. The harassed ministers of the UKIEA had started using this interruption to their ‘endless sixteen to twenty hour days banging their heads against walls’ to take a break from their troubles and to catch up on the woes of their colleagues.
Thorneycroft looked forward to his brief ‘chats over a civilised cup of tea’ with the slowly expanding Emergency Administration’s youngest, and still solitary, female minister. Notwithstanding the opportunity to enjoy the company of an attractive woman – she was that, even though she was paler and thinner than he recollected pre-war – alone among his colleagues she was often indefatigably positive and refreshingly, aggressively intolerant of the despair elsewhere in Cheltenham. She was also – and this was a thing he had not realised in his passing pre-October 1962 acquaintance with her – quite the most intelligent woman he had ever met with the exception, perhaps, of the novelist and socialite globe-trotting ex-wife[60] of Sir Alec Douglas Home’s new Permanent Secretary, Tom Harding-Grayson, who had turned up at the gates of the Government compound forty-eight hours ago.
Margaret Thatcher broke out of the circle of her thoughts and ushered her visitor to a threadbare arm chair.
‘Do sit down, Peter,’ she chided him. ‘Oh dear, you look all in!’
‘The meeting about the ‘war economy’ went on almost all night,’ he explained, although not in any sense in complaint. ‘I’m afraid Iain and Ted are at loggerheads. Iain thinks we’re going down the road to a Marxist command state and Jim Callaghan clearly wanted to throttle him. It’s ridiculous; even if we could print money – we can’t because we haven’t even got a press that’s up to the job – worrying about the national debt and fiscal management is completely putting the cart before the horse in the present situation!’
The grocer’s daughter from Grantham had been excluded from that particular conference in that particular smoke-filled room. Airey had been invited but he was in the New Forest trying to find out why the Fawley Oil Terminal and refinery complex, a not over-large but potentially important strategic installation was still in effect, shut down. Lying across Southampton Water from the city on the eastern bank coastal oil tankers ought to be queuing at its piers...
She realised she was getting angry again.
She took a very deep breath.
‘Do you know that at this moment there are as many as thirty large British merchant vessels detained in American ports – Atlantic ports – because the companies that own them no longer exist, or are bankrupt and shipping agents in the United States have obtained court orders holding those vessels against debts allegedly owed to them?’
Peter Thorneycroft nodded.
‘We haven’t got any money,’ Margaret Thatcher went on, ‘and our colleagues are arguing over the rights and wrongs of appropriating ‘private property’ when the matter at hand is feeding, clothing and healing our people!’
The City of London was gone, there was no Bank of England, no accounting of what the Government owed, or was due and in any event debtors and creditors either no longer existed or had no meaningful way of calculating monies ‘unsettled’ at the date of the war. Up and down the land the surviving branches of banks and building societies had records of numbers, amounts but little actual ‘specie’ and in any event inflation was already so severe that ‘cash’ was virtually worthless. There were only two kinds of practical ‘tender’; barter and the trade in UKIEA ration coupons (although thus far the ‘coupon system’ had only been fully implemented in four of the twelve ‘Regional Government Areas’, in southern England).
‘In the Second War the Government just requisitioned whatever it needed,’ she complained.
‘The Wartime Coalition was in a position to pay compensation, Margaret,’ the Secretary of State for Defence countered gently.
‘We can’t even afford to get our ships out of internment
in North America,’ she retorted. It was becoming clear that such ‘US aid’ that was likely to be delivered in the next few months was going to be on a dollar on the barrel head, or bag of grain basis, paid for – if her colleagues in the UKIEA ever stopped wringing their hands – by the liquidation of British companies’ extant balances and commercial concerns in America. Given that the value of the pound sterling had plummeted below parity - £1 to $1 – within days of the October War, American banks and conglomerates were snapping up investments which had taken a hundred years to build up for a song at criminally low bargain basement prices. Worse, an army of American lawyers was systematically preying on the proceeds of the ongoing ‘fire sale’ supposedly seeking compensation for European and ‘other losses’, sustained mainly by US banks in England. The Kennedy Administration had sat on its hands throughout; presumably assuming the whole disgusting business would be counterbalanced by retaliatory actions by and on behalf of UK institutions in New York and elsewhere. But there were no ‘counter suits’ because while Wall Street had survived the war unscathed; Strategic Air Command had singularly failed to protect the City of London.
Peter Thorneycroft remained silent.
One Air Marshal had recently remarked to him – he was fairly certain but not entirely sure, in jest – that ‘if we had known how things would turn out we’d probably have sent the V-Bomber Force west not east!’ It was bad enough being on the wrong end of a nuclear war without having one’s friends promptly set about methodically robbing one blind the moment the shooting stopped.
It was significant that while the United States had still not reinstated anything more than a skeleton diplomatic presence in England, that State Department officials had already paved the way for ‘business missions’ to prey on the assets of paralysed British companies in Africa and Australasia.