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

by James Philip

  Chapter 24 | Marija & Peter

  Monday 4th March 1963

  HMS Talavera, Fareham Creek, Portsmouth

  It had been over a week since the radically modified Battle class destroyer had been towed out of the tidal basin of Portsmouth Naval Base and moored in her allotted position in the ranks of the ‘ghost fleet’. One after another the ships of the Home Fleet had been laid up, many like Talavera still fully manned; so many modern, already somewhat weathered, grey prison hulks condemned to swing around their chains for want of oil to fill their empty bunkers.

  Lieutenant Peter Christopher[89] viewed the destroyer through the drizzle – more fine ice and slush than rain – as the barge carrying shore duty men back to their ships approached the destroyer that was now his only home on the planet.

  He had inherited a flat in Bayswater in his mother’s will. It had been left jointly to him and his sister but Elspeth had gone off to Australia back in 1958 and sent him the keys in her ‘goodbye and good luck’ letter. In truth he had spent so little time at the place – it had been where his mother had gone to hide away and drink, Elspeth said – that it had never felt like home. The same could be said for the flat he had shared with a couple of other officers, submariners so they were odd fellows, in Strood across the River Medway from Chatham while Talavera’s long reconstruction was going forward at a positive snail’s pace. There was no more Bayswater, of course. Or Strood; and both the chaps he had shared that house in Strood with had bought it on the night of the war. So right now as he eyed the modernised Battle class destroyer through the murk he was looking at ‘home’; not that this was a problem, he had felt as if he ‘belonged’ from the moment he set foot on her cable-strewn, filthy decks in the graving dock at Chatham the best part of a year ago.

  Perhaps, it was Talavera’s marvellous array of state of the art – for the Royal Navy, anyway – widgets and gismos, or just the way she looked with her giant towering lattice foremast topped off with the great black four-ton double bedstead Type-965 air search radar, or simply that her lines, despite the worst efforts of the shore bound naval architects and the workshy jobsworths who had overseen her reconstruction, had somehow survived all the monkeying about above main deck level.

  No amount of ‘monkeying about’ could spoil those lines.

  In any event a man was never ‘homeless in the Navy’. The Grey Funnel Line always looked after its sons and he was incredibly lucky to have fallen in with such a fine bunch of men before the World went mad.

  He knew he ought to be moping, worrying about fallout and basically...despairing.

  But what was the point of that?

  He saw the erosion in so many men’s eyes.

  They had given up hope.

  Personally, he had found himself since the war.

  He had never really known where he was going or what he was doing before that night last October. He had been hungry – ravenously hungry - for knowledge, to learn everything there was to be learned about his specialisation, electrical engineering a field that touched every aspect of future naval operations, and to qualify as the best radar, communications and electronic warfare officer in the fleet. That had been ‘it’; the rest of the time he had just been having fun. True, that ‘fun’ had almost got him into a lot of trouble with a charming girl with tanned legs right up to her shoulders at Simonstown, and a sweet, entirely suitable potential life partner – apart from the fact he did not love her – girl in England but Judith was still in South Africa, and Phoebe Sellars, who had broken off their engagement as soon as she realised his heart was literally, not in it, was dead for all he knew.

  His engagement to Phoebe, a lovely girl who would have been the perfect wife for an aspiring naval officer had been a watershed in his life. He had proposed marriage on the spur of the moment and not realised what he had done until he had confessed all to...Marija.

  ‘Have you told her about me?’ Marija had asked rhetorically[90].

  No, he had not told Phoebe about her...

  ‘You and I tell each other everything,’ Marija had reminded him. ‘If I was your wife I would not put up with it. I would insist that you stopped writing to that brazen Mediterranean temptress! Three is company, as you English say!’

  Talavera had been at sea running radar trials on the night of the war; had she been at her normal berth at Chatham she would have been vaporised by the one megaton ground burst which had wiped the Medway towns – Chatham, Strood, Rochester and Gillingham – off the map.

  The destroyer’s gunnery officer, Miles Weiss, was chatting with Leading Electrical Artificer Jack Griffin at the head of the gangway when Peter stepped off the barge and trooped up the steps. Ever since the war every ship had stationed armed men on deck while in port.

  Jack Griffin had an FN L1A1 Infantry SLR slung over his right shoulder. Miles Weiss, whom Peter had met when they were fresh-faced – well, even more fresh-faced than now - sub-lieutenants in the Wardroom of the fleet carrier Victorious, stamped his feet in the suddenly flurrying snow and returned his much taller friend’s salute.

  Like Peter, Miles Weiss was one of the new breed of specialist, ‘technical’ officers. It so happened that his ‘specialism’ was in every imaginable method of propelling a projectile out of a barrel. The two men had immediately picked up the trails of their past friendship. Peter was the older by a year and the senior in rank by a few months but such things were incidental on a destroyer; each man was the head of his own division, and the two junior watch keepers trusted each other with their many, and these days, often irreconcilable professional vexations.

  Peter had grinned at the battered, prematurely weathered face of the muscular ginger-bearded rating beside his friend.

  ‘Goodness, I’ve only been ashore a couple of hours,’ he quipped, ‘how on earth could you have got yourself on a charge in that time, Jack?’

  The use of his Division’s one-time black sheep’s Christian name gave the lie to any manner of rebuke.

  The Leading Rate grinned broadly.

  They all spent far too much time locked below during the regular ‘radiation alerts’ and many men, notwithstanding the wintery conditions, actually volunteered for stints of deck duty to ‘blow away the cobwebs’.

  Talavera had a brand new set of filters in all her vents, one could tell because every time she executed a prolonged ABC – Atomic Biological Chemical warfare - ‘lockdown’ the ship became an increasingly humid, thick-aired steel bucket with sweating steel walls and dripping bulkheads. Such was the price of keeping the ‘muck’ out of the ship.

  Down below Peter returned to his cabin to change out of his cold weather clothes. His was a two-man cabin; one he still had to himself because Talavera had never been fully manned. In harbour he left the three familiar, reassuring framed photographs on the claustrophobic compartment’s small writing desk.

  One was of his father, his mother and his sister on the day he passed out of the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. That was over seven years ago in another lifetime. Peter had had very little to do with his father since his mother’s death. He had only heard the Admiral had gone out to the Far East by reading about it in the Navy Gazette. That day at Dartmouth his father had been distant, his mood at odds with the proud smiles of his mother and sister.

  ‘The Christophers graduate at the top of their classes,’ the hero of those long ago Malta convoys, and the former implacable U-boat hunting commander of elite Western Approaches escort groups had observed. ‘Not half-way down the list.’[91]

  The Admiral had been displeased that the Navy was sending him back to University. The Christophers were seagoing, fighting sailors not ‘technicians and staff flunkies’.

  The second picture was of the Calleja siblings. He gazed at the faded monochrome portrait of Marija aged twelve, her elder brother Sam, and younger brother Joe on a balcony with the Grand Harbour at their backs. Marija – having put aside her crutches - had her arms around Sam’s waist and Joe’s shoulders. Sam
was half-frowning, Joe was grinning guiltily and Marija was laughing with her long dark hair streaming in the breeze.

  At the time the picture was taken[92] the Admiral had commanded a cruiser squadron based at Malta and - having despatched his sister and he to boarding schools in England – his mother had gone out to join their father in Valletta for the last six months of the posting. In Malta, his mother, had thrown herself into the social whirl of the Mediterranean Fleet and devoted her spare time to ‘good causes’. Malta had been wrecked by bombing during the war and in those years the reconstruction was painfully slow; with many Maltese still living among the ruins and hospitals operating in a fashion that would never have been tolerated in England.

  When Peter’s mother had encountered Marija she had been in a year-long interregnum between a series of major operations that a remarkable naval surgeon called Reginald Stephens and his surgical registrar and assistant, Margo Seiffert[93] hoped would eventually enable the crippled ‘Heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu’ to one day, walk again unaided by crutches or sticks.

  His mother had been captivated by the vivacious, laughing Maltese girl child in the wheelchair. In retrospect those few months were possibly the happiest of his mother’s life. She had become tremendously friendly with Marija’s mother, an unlikely friendship given that she was the daughter of English country gentlefolk and Marija Calleja senior, the proud descendent of honest Sicilian peasant farmers. Before his mother returned home she had asked Marija if she would consider writing to a pen friend in England. At that time she had had in mind Elspeth, Peter’s elder sister but Elspeth had been mortally offended by the idea of a pen friend several years her junior – Elspeth was then nearly sixteen and Marija still just eleven - and in any event, that sort of thing was not her cup of tea[94]. So it was that Peter – only some one hundred and twelve days Marija’s senior - had become the English pen friend of the Heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu.

  Nothing quite so ‘grounded’ Peter Christopher as the portrait Marija had sent him shortly before the war. It was a specially posed, studio head and shoulders monochrome picture, six inches by four, which he had had mounted in a silvery frame in Edinburgh while he had been on a two-month secondment to the Ferranti Radar and Telecommunications Research Laboratories at Crewe Toll ahead of re-joining Talavera.[95] There was a small crucifix on a slender chain hanging from her neck. Her skin was clean and clear, her eyes focused a little off camera to show her face in half profile. Her hair was pulled back in a traditional, and to contemporary eyes, almost Edwardian way and her expression was intent rather than serious, her eyes were smiling[96].

  Shortly before the October War confirmation had come through that Talavera’s first post-modernisation deployment would be to the Mediterranean; there to relieve her sister, HMS Agincourt, for a planned two year attachment to the 7th Destroyer Squadron based at Sliema Creek at Malta.

  ‘I’d never been a choir boy,’ my father freely admitted in later life ‘however, by then I had grown up just enough to know that it was time to settle down. I had my career in the Navy and I was having a whale of a time; but something was missing and it was not until the year before the war that it suddenly dawned on me that I had already met the woman I was meant to, pre-destined if you like, to marry when I was twelve years old. Well, I say met, of course back in March 1963 we had never actually met face to face. I did not even know what your mother’s voice sounded like although, oddly, when eventually we did meet, I discovered I had been hearing her voice for years!’

  That day Peter Christopher sat at his desk in his tiny shared cabin – he was a tall man in a navy which still built its ships for men of, seemingly less than average stature – and began to write a letter to my mother with his latest news.

  Just to let you know I received your letters of 12th January and 22nd January. They were relatively lightly censored this time but at least the mail is beginning to ‘get through again’ which I suppose is a hopeful sign.

  Over here the winter weather has come back, hopefully only for a short, sharp ‘snap’.

  There has been a lot of talk around the ‘ghost fleet’ here in Fareham Creek of a forthcoming general reorganisation of the Home Fleet along the lines of the old wartime Home, Western Approaches and Channel commands.

  Last week Talavera was going to be detached to Western Approaches; basically to shepherd Canadian merchantmen backwards and forwards across the North Atlantic (not a lot of fun at this time of year!). But that was cancelled; no reason given!

  Yesterday several ships were ‘warned’ off for ‘tropical service’, Talavera included. The rumour is that we may be sent to reinforce, or relieve, I don’t know which, ships from my father’s British Pacific Fleet.

  Today we learned that this ‘warning’ was just a ‘provisional measure’. The Fleet was at sea quite a lot immediately after hostilities ceased in October and I think that must have used up a huge amount of bunker oil. Very few tankers have docked in the British Isles since the war, hence so many of our ships are tied up here in Portsmouth, Portland and Devonport.

  What with one thing and another we might be sitting here twiddling our thumbs for months...

  My father’s letters to my mother tended to be quite upbeat even when he was clearly conveying disappointing news. In fact HMS Talavera was to remain inactive until the late autumn of 1963, at anchor for so long in congested waters that she twice ‘bottomed’ in the mud of Fareham Creek on low equinoctial tides.

  There was no mention in his letters of the men who had lost all hope, committing suicide to escape the grief and despair of those days. Nor of the men sent ashore because their ‘psychological state’ represented a threat to themselves, their ship mates and to their ships; nor of the regular desertions and the Royal Navy’s struggle to cope with even minor defaulters in the pervading air of listless resignation.

  I met a fascinating fellow earlier today when I was running Talavera’s electrical and engineering ‘list’ over to Captain (S)’s office[97]; a Walter Brenckmann of the US Navy. He’s a WWII veteran of the Battle of the Atlantic and he commanded a destroyer in the Korean do a decade or so ago. He’s a lawyer in Boston in civilian life but the poor fellow has just arrived from America as part of the US Naval Mission. He’s Liaison Officer to the C-in-C Home Fleet, poor chap.

  We got to chatting and I admitted that I’m ‘that’ Admiral Christopher’s son. We had a jolly good laugh over that. Anyway, I invited him to visit Talavera at his convenience which went down well onboard the Victory[98] because frankly, nobody really knows what to do with him. The poor man must feel like he’s escaped from a leper colony. I know everything’s a mess but I think it’s a bit off denying a visitor to our shores the normal common courtesies.[99]

  It is too easy to forget that amidst the chaos, the utter carnage across great swaths of the Northern Hemisphere and the unimaginable scale of the loss of life, that people remained people, that they went on living their lives, surviving as best they could and despite everything people clung onto their sense of humour, they fell in love – and out again – and formed lifelong friendships. Moreover, beneath the international politicking, and blundering, reality was to be measured not in the deeds of great men but in the day to day lives and experiences of individuals living with the consequences of Armageddon.

  ‘History,’ as my Mother was wont to tell kings, queens, presidents and prime ministers, princes and satraps, supporters and detractors alike, ‘is what happens on the street where you live’.

  Chapter 25 | Forgotten Men

  For all that Sir Robert Menzies had towered over Australian and Commonwealth politics for very nearly as long as most people cared to remember, in the General Election held on 9th December 1961 the coalition which he headed had actually been defeated in the popular vote by the Australian Labour Party.

  Moreover, in the voting for the House of Representatives the Labour Party had won over three-quarters of a million more votes than Menzies’s Liberals, winning fifteen more seats.
As if to illustrate the vagaries of the democratic process the Liberal Party’s coalition partners, the Country Party, had won ten thousand less votes than the independent Democratic Labour Party, earning seventeen seats to the DLP’s nil. Therefore, although the Liberal/Country coalition had ended up with sixty-two seats against the Labour Party’s sixty; the ‘government’ which emerged from the election had only achieved the backing of forty-two percent of the electorate, against the largest ‘opposition’ party’s nearly forty-eight percent!

  When therefore, Menzies ‘spoke for Australia’ it could hardly be deemed that it was by public acclamation; nor that he was entirely the master of his own political destiny. Such are the pitfalls of democracy, in Australia’s case complicated by the wild card of ‘proportionality’ intended to, but frequently failing, to ensure that the majority had a built in advantage in any election. Of course, in comparison to British Parliamentary Democracy most Australians would have claimed, regardless of the outcome of a given election that at least they were trying to respect the democratic wishes of the people.

  In politics as in life the law of unintended consequences can often baffle the beneficiaries as much as the psephologists. In Australian Liberal/Country Party coalition governments of the 1950s and early 1960s there was always one man who had a veto over...everything.

  By the night of the October War sixty-two year old Victorian John McEwen, the leader of the Country Party since 1956 had served in coalition governments under Robert Menzies for some thirteen years, initially as Minister for Commerce and Agriculture and from 1956 onwards as Minister for Trade and Industry, two key portfolios.

  McEwen had been orphaned at the age of seven[100] and raised by his grandmother; he was a man who had had to struggle for everything he achieved. Leaving school at thirteen he had worked as a clerk before enlisting in the armed services in 1918. His route into politics with the Country Party had been via his work as a dairyman and later a sheep and cattle farmer around Shepparton in northern Victoria in the early 1920s.