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

by James Philip

  Undeniably, what happened next sowed a lingering mistrust between the two extant largest navies on the planet; and caused a relatively minor diplomatic incident a generation of historians would label as the event which finally torpedoed the ‘special relationship’ and what was left of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

  Personally, this author regards this latter clause as a little overblown but then it is the job of emeritus professors of history to discern patterns and trends in past human experience that other, mere mortals frequently – apparently in their learned opinion – either fail to notice at all, or if we do notice them, in our callow ignorance misinterpret.

  What is not in any doubt is that when the news of what came to be called the ‘Saint Paul Incident’ reached Wellington, Canberra and Cheltenham, and to a lesser extent Pretoria, New Delhi and the Persian Gulf, alarm bells began to ring.

  Was this the first signal of some heavy-handed attempt by the United States to become the World’s naval policeman?

  A fear common all around the globe was that after its ‘total’ victory in October 1962 that the Kennedy Administration might take steps to aggressively enforce its particular vision of ‘democracy’ and ‘capitalism’ upon weaker nations.

  Perversely, the one thing nobody had expected was for the US to completely disengage from practically all its former, now wrecked from end to end or terribly damaged, European allies. The notion that now ‘the Europeans’ had done their duty by taking the bullet – well, hundreds of nuclear bullets – for the US that they would be treated in effect, as inconvenient clients now surplus to requirements to be preyed upon by rapacious American bankers and industrialists acting with the tacit, if not implicit, authorisation of the Kennedy Administration, would have honestly beggared the imagination of most surviving Europeans. Everybody still assumed that sooner or later Uncle Sam would come to Europe’s rescue; as had happened in 1917, 1941 and again in the 1940s and 1950s with the Marshall Plan. The notion that apart from keeping garrisons and attack squadrons in Spain and meddling half-heartedly in the fractured, mainly fascist and organised crime-driven politics of post-October War Italy that Washington would almost completely turn its back on its former European and Australasian allies would not fully sink in until President Kennedy trumpeted his infamous, massive ‘Peace Dividend’ cuts to the US military in the late spring of 1963.

  When the commanding officer of the Otago, Commander John McKenzie[74] was summoned to speak to the captain of the USS Saint Paul on the ship’s TBS – ‘Talk Between Ships’ VHF Radio – he was somewhat perturbed to be tersely instructed to ‘suspend his ship’s ongoing evolutions and to withdraw from the area’.

  McKenzie had demanded to know who he was speaking to.

  Captain Franklin ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald[75] had won a Navy Cross as a Lieutenant junior grade on the doomed USS Vincennes (CA-44) at the Battle of Savo Island in 1942. By all accounts a fearless, customarily jovial officer with a bull horn voice even his friends sometimes found him a little over-powering.

  His small task force – the Baltimore class heavy cruiser Saint Paul, the Forest Sherman class destroyer Hull (DD-945), the Gearing class destroyers Everett F. Larson (DD-830) and the Henry W. Tucker (DD-875) – had been taking a battering in the worsening sea conditions and shortly before he spoke to McKenzie, Fitzgerald had learned that two men had been washed overboard from the Tucker.

  Fitzgerald’s mood seemed in tune with the weather.

  ‘Otago is in international waters, sir,’ McKenzie reminded the American, curtly. ‘I may steam where I please in these waters. No captain in Her Majesty’s Royal New Zealand Navy takes orders from the United States Navy. What is going on here, sir?’

  ‘That’s none of your goddam business, son!’

  McKenzie had been standing on the bridge of the Otago and the words of the captain of the fifteen thousand ton American cruiser reverberated around the compartment.

  ‘What is your business in these waters, sir?’ The New Zealander had inquired coolly.

  ‘I am here on a humanitarian search and rescue mission.’

  ‘In that case I and my command are at your disposal, sir.’

  ‘The operation is ongoing and your ship’s radar and sonar ‘suites’ are incompatible with those on my ships. Please stand off to the north.’

  John McKenzie was starting to get hot under the collar at this juncture.

  ‘My destination is Nouméa, sir. If you don’t want my help I shall proceed directly to that port as planned.’

  Later studies of the tactical plot of the Otago indicated that a direct course would have taken the frigate close to the eastern edge of the Saint Paul task group’s search grid. McKenzie could easily have gone closer inshore to New Caledonia, or as easily made passage around the northern island of the New Caledonian archipelago, Panan, and steamed down the east coast of Grande Terre – the main island - rounding its southern tip to run up to Nouméa.

  However, there was a principle at stake.

  McKenzie had no idea what the American interlopers were doing unannounced and uninvited in these southern waters and frankly, he did not like Fitzgerald’s attitude. Moreover, unless he got a little bit closer to the US ships his radio, communications and sound rooms were unlikely to discover anything new or useful about the cruiser and its consorts.

  ‘Good day, sir.’

  McKenzie had turned to his Navigation Officer.

  ‘Those fellows must have a tanker somewhere?’

  ‘There’s nothing on the plot, sir. Mind you, in this weather if I was the skipper of an oiler I’d be hiding behind Grand Terre right now.’

  McKenzie had mulled this for a few moments.

  The ship was gyrating horribly under his feet; she would ride more easily with her stern to the sea if he did as he was bade and departed to the north east.

  He came to a decision.

  He was damned if he was going to be told what do by a bad-mannered Yank!

  ‘Plot a course that bisects the eastern quarter of our visitors’ search grid, please.’ And as an afterthought: ‘Stand down the sonar room.’ The moment he turned the Otago’s head to quarter the seas she would roll like a bottle of pop in a millstream. ‘Let’s have everybody below decks, while we’re about it.’

  Withdrawing seven or eight miles towards Grand Terre keeping the US squadron well within range of his ship’s radars McKenzie had gone below to mull his options, and to regain control of his temper.

  ATTENTION CINC WELLINGTON CINC CANBERRA CINCBPACFLT IMMEDIATE AND SECRET STOP HAVE ENCOUNTERED FOUR US SHIPS CA73 DD830 DD875 DD945 PRESENTLY ONE FOUR TO ONE NINE MILES ESE MY CURRENT POSITION STOP US SHIPS CONDUCTING SEARCH AND RESCUE OPERATIONS STOP CO CA73 ORDERED OTAGO TO RETIRE NORTHEAST WHEN MY COURSE TO NOUMEA IS SOUTHEAST STOP PLAN TO REMAIN ON STATION OBSERVING US SQUADRON STOP WILL TEST USN ELINT CAPABILITIES AND INTENTIONS BY STEERING FOR NOUMEA BEFORE REVERSING COURSE STOP WILL AWAIT DEVELOPMENTS STOP FUEL RESERVE FOUR TWO PERCENT STOP SEA STATE EIGHT STOP PLEASE ADVISE IF OTAGO SHOULD STAY ON STATION STOP MCKENZIE CDR MESSAGE ENDS

  The signal’s receipt was acknowledged within seven minutes by all addressees but then nothing had happened for over two hours.

  Otago’s next signal well and truly set the fox among the chickens.

  ATTENTION CINC WELLINGTON CINC CANBERRA CINCBPACFLT IMMEDIATE AND SECRET STOP USS SAINT PAUL FIRED MAIN BATTERY WARNING SHOTS ACROSS MY BOW AT 1613 LOCAL AND DD830 STEERED TO BLOCK MY COURSE STOP WILL WITHDRAW TO NORTH EAST AND OBSERVE US OPERATIONS STOP MCKENZIE CDR MESSAGE ENDS

  In fact the USS Saint Paul had fired two nine gun broadsides with a director ‘offset’ of approximately five degrees at the Otago at a range of seven miles. The nearest shells had landed six to seven hundred yards off the frigates port bow. Meanwhile the Everett F. Larson had worked up to twenty-seven knots and come tearing directly at the Otago, her signal lamps winking angrily demanding the New Zealand ship turn away to the east. The American destroyer had then adopted a shadowing posi
tion some three miles astern of the frigate. Thereafter, the Otago’s communications with Fleet Headquarters were beset with difficulties due to persistent US Navy jamming.

  Thing had started happening in a hurry after that.

  It was the speed at which things started happening which later prompted questions as to whether or not Julian Christopher had been waiting, primed like a spring, for the first opportunity to avenge the humiliation of being driven out of the Sea of Japan back in November.

  Much has been made of the fact that Ark Royal and her screen sailed so soon after the Otago’s second signal; a thing which has wrongly given rise to more than one conspiracy theory down the years. Coincidentally, Julian Christopher’s flagship, the cruiser Belfast and the destroyers Barrosa, Cavendish and HMAS Vampire were at that moment making ready to go to sea the next day to participate in Exercise Southern Wind One in Tasmanian waters. This ‘war game’ in which the Australian light carrier HMAS Melbourne, escorted by HMAS Vendetta, Derwent and Quiberon would be pitted against the Ark Royal battle group in a thirty-six hour long ‘engagement’ had been specifically designed to ‘iron out any major problems with the new integrated command arrangements’. To facilitate this both task groups would be commanded by Australian officers, with fifty-four year old Rear Admiral Alan McNicoll[76] flying his flag onboard the Belfast. Thus, in the event all five ships had at least one boiler ‘lit’ at the critical moment and were, to all intents, ready to move at less than two hours notice.

  Notwithstanding, Julian Christopher put to sea in such a hurry that the Ark Royal’s squadron left over a hundred men onshore and there was no time to disembark Alan McNicoll’s staff from the Belfast.

  ‘Actually,’ McNicholl wrote after his retirement from active service some years later, ‘I was dining with the Captain of the Belfast[77] when the balloon went up. He was a marvellous fellow. He’d got his George Medal making safe mines in Alexandria, he’d survived three air crashes in North Africa and once during the siege of Tobruk he had swum a mine he could not defuse out of the harbour. Another time he was with Fitzroy Maclean in Yugoslavia. I thought I’d had an ‘active’ war but Morgan-Giles rather put my little adventures in the shade!’

  This somewhat underplayed McNicoll’s own long, varied and very distinguished naval career. Like his new flag captain, he too was a George Medal holder[78]. He had married his wife, Ruth in Brighton just before the outbreak of war in 1939, when he was posted to HMS Victory, the flagship of the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth. A spell onboard the cruiser Fiji had preceded his ‘Alexandrian interlude’ defusing munitions, later he had served on the battleship King George V which was then tasked with screening the Arctic Convoys in the event the Tirpitz sallied forth from her Norwegian lair. He had seen service in the Sicily landings, been on the planning staff for the Normandy Landings and post war, commanded destroyers, the heavy cruiser HMAS Australia and chaired the planning committee for the British nuclear tests on the Montebello Islands before filling a succession of prestigious staff posts at home. Like many Australian officers he had spent the greater proportion of his career on attachment to the Royal Navy; so walking up the gangway to be welcomed onboard the Belfast had been like ‘coming home’.

  ‘Julian Christopher asked us both to come over to the Ark,’ he recollected, ‘and told us that Americans had started bossing about the Otago and that both governments – the Australian and the New Zealand – weren’t going to put up with it!’

  Shooting across the bow of a ‘friendly’ ship in international waters simply was not done.

  The other aspect of the affair was that ‘we were genuinely curious as to exactly what the Americans were up to out there’.

  This was a question that was to remain – publically at least - shrouded in mystery for several decades although it was known within months by the British, Australian and New Zealand governments that the Galveston Ranger had actually been the USS Akona, a two-thousand ton wartime built former seaplane tender which had been packed from stem to stern with state of the art electronic intelligence gathering equipment.

  Renamed the Galveston Ranger the Akona had been masquerading as a hydrological survey ship leased by the US Navy supposedly crewed with civilian contractors – but actually by the US Navy and the CIA - and in the eighteen months leading up to the October War she had been roaming the Southern Ocean and the more remote Polynesian archipelagos of the central Pacific monitoring the activities of Russian fishing and whaling fleets. Subsequent inquiries were to establish that the Akona had spent at least five months in this period ‘loitering’ off the Barrier Reef ‘surveilling Australia’s east coast and the hundreds of miles of ocean between it and the North and South Islands of New Zealand.

  Everybody knew that everybody else spied on everybody, friends and foes alike and that sort of thing had never really been a problem before 27th October 1962 if only because nobody actually talked about it. So long as a discreet veil of secrecy was drawn over such operations everybody could pretend that they did not go on all the time. Problematically, if and when they became matters of public record there was always the possibility of a damaging diplomatic spat.

  That was why when on the evening of Monday 11th February a fire broke out in the Akona’s – Galveston Ranger’s – machinery spaces and she lost all power in heavy seas west of Grand Terre the Seventh Fleet immediately despatched its nearest units to assist the foundering spy ship, rather than re-broadcasting a general call for assistance.

  At this remove it is believed that the SOS signals received by the Otago were probably sent out as the Akona was sinking by a radioman who had worked out that US Navy was still too far away to save his, or his crewmen’s lives.

  The reason Captain ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald of the USS Saint Paul was so ‘touchy’ about Otago approaching too close to the ‘search and rescue’ zone was that his orders mandated that his ships were to prevent ‘unauthorised persons’ recovering bodies from the water, and – perhaps more important – to recover any embarrassing ‘emergency intelligence packages’ which might have been buoyed ahead of the vessel’s sinking.

  While the majority of the Akona’s secrets went to the bottom of the Coral Sea with her it was believed that a number of these sealed and buoyed ‘packages’ - actually water-proof pressurized boxes, or metal crates containing ‘highly classified material and equipment’ - would have automatically floated off the ship’s deck as it sank.

  Nobody has ever established exactly what was in these ‘packages’.

  The best guess is that the Akona had been spying on the British Pacific Fleet and collecting raw signals traffic between Canberra, Wellington and ships at sea for several weeks, and almost incidentally, conducting hydrographical surveys of the waters around Lord Howe Island in the Tasman sea some four hundred miles east of Port Macquarie, and Norfolk Island, some five hundred and sixty miles to its north east.

  One conspiracy theory holds that the US Navy had been ‘scouting’ suitable remote ‘secure launch areas’ for its Polaris-armed ballistic missile submarines in both enemy and ‘friendly’ seas; if this was so this information would have been intensely damaging to the already strained US-Australasian relations had it been known at the time.

  We shall probably never know.

  What we do know is that British, Australian and American warships very nearly fired upon each other in the failing light of the afternoon of that late February afternoon.

  Chapter 20 | Winston Field’s Hour

  Saturday 16th February 1963

  Sydney Cricket Ground, New South Wales

  That day other dramas were playing out in Sydney while Julian Christopher’s ships pounded east to confront the USS Saint Paul’s task group.

  After a tumultuous first day the English batsmen had toiled to leave the Fifth and final Test Match of the Ashes series finely balanced when the gathering overcast had signalled a premature close to the second day’s play.

  So much attention was focussed on the cricket field in
those days that the sudden departure of the Ark Royal and her escorts from Sydney Harbour had gone almost but not quite unnoticed. Australians had got used to the comings and goings of the great grey warships from their ports and reading the rumours about the latest diplomatic moves.

  Unknown to most people Ted Dexter, the England cricket captain had been – by some accounts, peremptorily - summoned to the telephone in the Secretary of the New South Wales Cricket Association’s office at a little after eleven that morning to take a call from the Governor General, Viscount De L’Isle.

  The Australian papers were filled with vitriolically partisan and – to modern eyes, shockingly jingoistic, borderline racist and frankly, at best intemperate and at worst shocking - reports and editorials about the tempestuous incidents of the previous day’s play in which the English[79] fast bowler David Larter had been warned for ‘dangerous and intimidating’ bowling and banished from the visitors’ attack after he had demolished the Australian batting more or less single-handed.

  No transcript of Dexter and the Governor General’s conversation which by common consent lasted at least twenty, possibly twenty-five minutes was made, or if one was, it no longer survives but De L’Isle’s personal papers make clear that he and his Staff had closely monitored the MCC[80] tour and had gone to great pains to extract the maximum ‘moral boosting’ benefits for the British public back home, in throughout Australasia, and the greatest possible ‘Commonwealth re-building’ value from it. What the Governor General specifically did not want was for a sporting ‘misunderstanding’ to in any way undermine relations between the Antipodes and the old country at, it happened, the very moment the Governments of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Rhodesia and South Africa were finalising the framework of the most ambitious long-term international aid agreement in history.[81] Such an endeavour was only possible with the whole-hearted support of the peoples of those countries and De L’Isle did not want what happened on a cricket field to jeopardise the remarkable groundswell of good will that presently existed in those widely separated lands, particularly in Australia!