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

by James Philip

  There was no great celebration when the convoys docked. Oh, one dare says that church bells were rung in the shires; that in Cheltenham members of the hard-pressed UKIEA rested, for a day or two, more easily in their cold beds. There was no time for Julian Christopher to bask in the approbation of a grateful nation. He might have been killed in the attack on Balmoral Castle shortly after he returned to the United Kingdom. It was on that day that he probably saved Margaret Thatcher’s life; but a little over four months later he was dead, mortally wounded defending his Headquarters in Mdina from Soviet Spetsnaz at the height of the Battle of Malta.

  In recognition of his services to the nation commanding the British Pacific Fleet as it ‘brought home the Operation Manna convoys’ a grateful nation created Julian Christopher a baronet before he departed for Malta and his fate.

  His gallant death in Mdina defending his Headquarters conjured comparisons with that of ‘China’ Gordon[125] in Khartoum in 1885; although in Julian Christopher’s case retribution fell upon his slayers within minutes and hours rather than many years. And of course, Malta, unlike Khartoum, never fell.

  The ‘Christopher baronetcy’ is a hereditary honour which traditionally would have passed exclusively down the male line of a family. Except in this case because in 1966 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II graciously made an order in Council[126] altering the ‘Christopher baronetcy’s protocols of inheritance’ so that upon my father’s death thereafter the title will pass to his oldest surviving offspring regardless of their gender; thus this author need never fear being ennobled other than by dint of his own efforts, and sooner or later my dear, esteemed sister Elisabetta will probably become the only real ‘Dame’ – capital ‘D’ – with tenure at the University of California, Berkeley.

  I like to think that the ‘Fighting Admiral’ would have been proud of the family he hardly knew, and the middlingly good fist we have all made of getting on with our lives in this post-October War World.

  Appendices

  In the United States the Kennedy Administration took over a year to promulgate a Commission into the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War, and another year passed before this semi-public ‘inquiry’ actually convened.

  This exercise has become more commonly known as the ‘Warren Commission’. There was no similar farrago or quasi investigation, or hand-wringing exculpation in the United Kingdom, nor if one studies Hansard[127] or contemporary studies into the attitudes of the survivors and their political representatives in the years after the war was there at any time in the 1960s ever any great public appetite for a ‘national inquest’ into the catastrophe. Consequently, there is little societal animus in the United Kingdom – other than in academic circles – about the culpability or otherwise of the Macmillan Government.

  The British attitude in the mid to late 1960s seemed to be that it was best to let sleeping dogs lie; judgement would be left to future generations who, inevitably, and predictably have dissected the events of October 1962 and thereafter with forensic, positively pathological intensity with ever greater enthusiasm the farther Mankind moves away from the reality of those dreadful times!

  Whereas Chief Justice Earl Warren’s ‘Commission’ rapidly turned into a three-year long witch hunt which, eventually, in late 1967 published a report that was later repudiated by three of the Senators – two Democrat and one Republican – who sat on it, in the United Kingdom there was and remains to this day a sense that the magnitude of the disaster was so great that to rake over the coals in such an undignified and partisan fashion was in some way profoundly disrespectful to the dead.

  In any event, in the aftermath of the cataclysm unlike the ninety percent of Americans who awoke to a normal world on the morning after Armageddon initially wondering what all the fuss was about, the British people could not afford the luxury of years of unproductive, and essentially pointless divisive politicking. Some popular historians have compared the five years after the October War as analogous to the period 1914-1917 and 1939-1941 when Britain found herself fighting ‘alone’ while the American colossus ‘sat on the sidelines’ in effect, ‘coming to terms with its own existential angst’.

  It was of course, more complicated than that. The Cuban Missiles War was an unmitigated disaster for all Mankind, and it is a fundamental misunderstanding to imagine that any democracy, let alone one as vast and complex as the United States, could not have been traumatised by the scale of the global catastrophe that it had unleashed on 27th October 1962.

  However, although there was no equivalent to the Warren Commission in the British Isles; in mid-1964 the then Unity Administration of the United Kingdom (UAUK) instituted a ‘Committee in Cabinet’ with the specific remit to report on what ‘had happened’ – rather than ‘why it had happened’ - during the Cuban Missiles War and more importantly, ‘to inform and to guide the Government of the day on the mid- and long-term implications for policy of that conflict and its aftermath’.

  Strictly speaking, the ‘Cabinet Committee into the Cuban Missiles War’, operated as a sub-committee of the Cabinet chaired during its eleven year existence by either the Home Secretary, or from May 1965 the Secretary of State for National Reconstruction. Beginning in February 1965 it produced twice yearly classified ‘Findings, Summaries, Reports and Recommendations’ documents for circulation to ‘relevant departments of state’.

  Over the years these ‘FSRR’ papers were leaked with ever-increasing frequency as Government Departments and the political parties clashed, and election after election, the priorities for re-building and re-generation shifted due in no small measure because of the ongoing tensions resulting from the United Kingdom’s – in many ways radical - post-colonial ‘agenda’.

  Normally, ‘Cabinet documents’ would not have officially seen the light of day for at least thirty years, or in some cases fifty, or even sixty years subsequent to their date of origin.

  Pragmatically, the Government bowed to public pressure – accepting the argument that the fragmentary, piecemeal dissemination of unrelated papers was inherently damaging to the moral authority of the nation in World forums – and began to release the Reports of the Cabinet Committee into the Cuban Missiles War in annual batches under modified ‘ten-year’ rule ‘arrangements’.

  The papers for 1964-65 were placed in the Reading Room of the Public Record Office in Oxford at one minute past midnight on the morning of Thursday 1st January 1975.[128]

  The transparency of the British Government in annually releasing the unexpurgated reports (and a wealth of supporting data, testimony and analyses) initially disappointed US-centric historians, not to mention the diehard conspiracy theorists plying their trade in Washington DC, because it shed very little new light on the ‘causes’ of the October War and tended to support much of what had already been known or surmised; but by the early 1980s the releases had provided an invaluable cornucopia of primary source material for researchers interested in understanding the United Kingdom’s role in the events of the post-war period.

  In the United Kingdom the quality and the provenance of much of the information contained in the yearly FRSS ‘releases’ disarmed the conspiracy theorists; whereas in Washington the partisan, heavily censored findings of the Warren Commission prompt controversy and fury even now.

  Another factor was that FRSS documents were apolitical by design since the whole process was the invention of that remarkable Civil Servant Sir Henry Tomlinson, Cabinet Secretary to both Edward Heath and for the first years of her premiership, to Margaret Thatcher.

  By the spring of 1965 the Cabinet Committee into the Cuban Missiles War, under the astute chairmanship of the then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins[129] had a combined military and civilian staff of over a hundred; and from the outset its reports offer a compelling and cogent oversight of the immense dilemmas – many of them irreconcilable – and the possibilities confronting not just the people of Britain, but those of the Commonwealth and the wider World in those years after the catacly
sm.

  In making the – somewhat arbitrary – selection of extracts from the ‘1965-66 archival treasure trove’ contained in these ‘Appendices’ the author’s concern has been to provide the general reader with a ‘taste’ of the kind of World our parents and grandparents lived in, and the stark nature of many of the decisions facing our leaders in those years immediately after the October War, rather than to reproduce a larger and more representative selection of documents in the initial 1975 FRSS release.

  The author freely acknowledges that others – with academic and literary credentials far superior to his – might have chosen different ‘extracts’ to illustrate the realities of that age. A major proportion of the Committee’s output was in the form of tables of statistics and graphs illustrating minute shifts in this or that ‘trend’ or ‘mean differentiation’. The author, limited by space constraints, has chosen just three self-contained abstracts, essentially executive summaries of reports hundreds of pages long comprising tens of thousands of words and innumerable statistical tables of almost impenetrable detail and complexity. For the hardened researcher literally shelf upon shelf, volume upon volume of ‘full’ reports are available in the New National Records Office in Oxford; I make no apology for doing my utmost to make this tome accessible to the general reader!

  It is his hope that the contents of this volume will whet the appetite of general readers, encouraging them to investigate for themselves the wealth of material now becoming available on the ‘real’ history of the 1960s.

  It is the author’s hope that readers will get a flavour of the everyday as well as the ‘grand strategy’ picture of those tumultuous times.

  The extracts reproduced herein are reproduced by the kind permission of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, Oxford.

  Appendix 1|The War of 27th-28th October 1962

  Extracts from the First Interim Report of the Cabinet Committee into the Cuban Missiles War and the mid- and long-term implications for policy of that conflict presented to Her Majesty’s Government on Friday 5th March 1965, and reproduced herein by the kind permission of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

  ________

  The War of 27th-28th October 1962

  Revised Summary (January 1965)

  Subsequent to the first iteration of this report the following matters of fact have been clarified to the Committee’s satisfaction in respect of events on the night of the war.

  The Actions of the Armed Forces

  1. Prompted by reports from early warning stations and observations of preparations by US Air Force Personnel in East Anglia to launch dual-key Thor medium-range ballistic missiles the General War Order (GWO) was initially broadcast to all stations at 02:42 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

  2. There were delays in sending the GWO to all ‘war stations’ and it is likely that a significant number of those ‘stations’ never received the same.

  3. RAF Bomber Command had previously ordered the launch of at least eight V-Bombers currently on Quick Reaction Alert (Status) at three East Coast bases at 02:39 GMT, the Duty Officer at Command Headquarters at High Wycombe issuing the ‘scramble’ instruction while attempts were made to communicate with the C-in-C Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Kenneth Cross.

  4. On the night of the war Bomber Command operational reports indicate that of the 117 V-Bomber type aircraft (Vickers Valiants, De Havilland Victors, and Avro Vulcans) to hand (that is, serviceable and available for operations), 41 took off before the first Soviet nuclear strike on the mainland. The operations code ‘EIGHT EAST’ was first broadcast by Bomber Command HQ at 02:48 GMT and re-broadcast continuously to all aircraft in the air until 07:54 GMT on the morning of 28th October 1962.

  5. As many as thirty other V-Bombers got into the air but several of these aircraft were not ‘bombed up’. The crews of many of these aircraft took it upon themselves to fly diversionary or electronic countermeasures operations.

  6. Of the seventy plus V-Bombers known to have sortied only 22 returned safely to England. None of these aircraft were fit for operations in the seventy-two hours following the war. In England 16 other V-Bombers were destroyed on the ground.

  7. Bomber Command estimates (from the after-action reports of returning crews and ‘attack signals’ received in England from aircraft which subsequently failed to return from operations) that at least 43 ‘special munitions’ were successfully deployed against targets in Eastern Europe and Western Russia by our aircraft.[130]

  8. RAF Canberra and other aircraft based in the United Kingdom and overseas took no part in hostilities other than to fly immediate post-war reconnaissance and search and rescue missions, and to assist in the movement of troops and the evacuation of priority casualties.

  9. No Royal Naval vessel was lost or seriously damaged at sea on the night of the war.

  10. The destroyer HMS Cambrian and the frigate HMS Wizard, and several coastal minesweepers and patrol boats were presumed destroyed at Chatham. Survey operations have now been completed confirming that Cambrian, Wizard and all other surface vessels present at Chatham were sunk or rendered total constructive losses. Two submarines in dock and a third which sank in the main channel are not deemed salvable.

  11. In the days after the war it was assumed (then and for many months thereafter) that the British Army of the Rhine (comprising at least 71,000 men and at least 90,000 civilian workers and dependents) in West Germany had been completely wiped out.

  12. It is now likely that as many as twenty thousand troops and dependents survived the initial attack. Recent reports claim that remnants of allied and West German military forces have coalesced to ‘colonise’ less heavily damaged areas. Representatives of these groups have travelled into undamaged areas of France, and returned to England; their debriefing has greatly assisted in building the picture of the wholesale devastation of former West Germany and the territories to the east.

  13. The developing situation in the Franco-German-Low Countries regions and the resulting flood of refugees seeking to cross the English Channel is discussed in detail elsewhere in this report.

  Revised Summary (January 1965)

  In the early hours of Sunday 28th October 1962 it is now known that at least thirty-one atomic and/or thermo-nuclear warheads impacted, partially detonated or wholly initiated over or on the territory or the inshore waters of the United Kingdom.

  There is further evidence that other warheads initiated in, or over more distant offshore waters surrounding the British Isles (these incidents are the subject of low priority ongoing specific investigations not warranting separate reports at this time).

  This revised summary includes an illustrative example explanation of the destructive potentiality of nuclear weapons of the approximate size deployed by Soviet forces against targets in the United Kingdom.

  Revised initial casualty statistics and a discussion of population morbidity and mortality in the two year period following the war are addressed in greater detail in the section ‘Casualties and Population’ elsewhere in this series of reports.

  Weight of Attack

  1. Investigations have established that of the 31 (thirty-one) warheads delivered to targets in or around the immediate coastline of the United Kingdom that 24 (twenty-four) were probably[131] delivered via SS-4 or SS-5 MRBM (medium-range ballistic missile) systems based in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States; and 7 (seven) by freefall bombs or stand-off missiles carried by Myasishchev M-4 (codename ‘Bison’), and Tupolev Tu-95 (codename ‘Bear’) strategic bombers which evaded the RAF fighter screen over the Norwegian Sea.

  2. Surviving RAF intercept documentation indicates that 18 (eighteen) of 26 (twenty-six) Soviet bombers were shot down short of ‘targeting range’, and that at least 4 (four) of the remaining hostiles were destroyed after they had made their attacks.

  3. The attack fell mainly on London, the South East, the East Coast and East Anglia where United States and British nuclear strike assets were located. However, there were also three strikes i
n the North West of England.

  4. Although several of the warheads which wholly, or substantially initiated and detonated were of low kiloton yield or possibly, ‘misfires’, the remaining 19 (nineteen) weapons fell within the explosive yield range 700 kilotons (seven hundred) to 1.2 (one point two) megatons of Trinitrotoluene (commonly referred to as ‘TNT’) equivalent.

  Destructive potential of a 1 megaton warhead

  1. Typically an SS-5 MRBM carried a single 1.1 megaton device.

  2. Red Air Force strategic bombers typically carry a bomb load of smaller (kiloton yield weapons) or single massively destructive multiple megaton range weapons. The largest weapon deployed against the United Kingdom by a bomber is believed to be a 3 (three) megaton bomb which exploded over the North Sea, and the smallest, a ‘Hiroshima’-size device which fell off the coast of Scotland.

  3. These paragraphs discuss the case of a 1 megaton missile or bomber-delivered weapon.

  4. The majority of the devices targeting the United Kingdom were configured to ‘air burst’ but this illustrative description also covers the ‘ground burst’ scenario.

  5. The fifty million degree ignition flash of a 1 megaton warhead will light up hundreds of square miles of sea, land and sky more brightly than any summer day in human history. The ‘flash’ actually burns for over twenty seconds.