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

by James Philip

  [88] Pandemic ‘influenza-like’ plagues ravaged the United States in 1963, 1964 and to a lesser extent in 1965; killing as many, if not more Americans as had died in the Cuban Missiles War itself. The worst outbreaks were in New England, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania and the ‘bomb-affected’ regions in the first half of 1963.

  [89] I could not write about this period without writing about my parents and what my mother once called the ‘terrible serendipity’ of the events that eventually ‘made your father come to his senses’. For those of my readers who may be familiar with ‘their’ back story I apologise in advance, craving their indulgence in the hope that in the coming pages I can add a ‘new take’ to the well-known story.

  [90] From one of my mother’s letters to my father before the October War. Mother was an inveterate letter writer all her life. Many of her letters to my father do not survive, lost when HMS Talavera was sunk at the Battle of Malta in April 1964. Those that survive from before that event happened by chance to be among personal possessions shipped ashore to ‘lessen the risk of fire and to generally de-clutter vessels with over-large wartime complements’, my father once explained to me.

  [91] Author’s conversation’s with his mother; who, bless her was invariably more forthcoming about ‘things’ than my father, constrained by his ‘English’ reserve.

  [92] The photograph was taken by this author’s grandmother, Joan Christopher.

  [93] Commander M. Seiffert (USNR) at that time on a long-term unpaid voluntary secondment to the staff of Royal Navy Hospital Bighi from US Sixth Fleet, Naples.

  [94] My Aunt Elspeth once speculated – mischievously – ‘what would have happened to us all in 1964 if Peter had never been Marija’s pen friend?’ It is a question many historians have pondered down the years!

  [95] Talavera’s modernisation had been paused for some three months in 1962 due to the re-design of her CIC and ongoing labour disputes at Chatham Dockyard. My father also spent several weeks at the Marconi Research Laboratories in Essex.

  [96] The photograph, the negative of which survives, was taken on Wednesday 18th July 1962, my father’s 26th birthday.

  [97] The Office of the Supply Officer, Portsmouth Royal Naval Base.

  [98] Somewhat anachronistically, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar was still the flagship of the Home Fleet and although dry-docked still very much a working ship.

  [99] The ‘courtesies and kindnesses’ shown to a ‘stranger in a strange land’ in those difficult times was a thing Walter Brenckmann never forgot; he later recollected that ‘I always looked forward to my occasional visits to the Talavera’ and that when ’Peter Christopher and I met again many years later those memories were still with me even though our countries were, sadly, once again at odds’.

  [100] His mother had died the year after he was born; his father in 1907.

  [101] A thing that was hard to do under the Australian electoral system where proportional representation sometimes had the perverse effect of denying a majority party (like the Labour Party in 1961) the opportunity to form a government.

  [102] Arthur Fadden had led a coalition with the UAP from 29th August 1941 to 7th October 1941. He famously quipped that he was ‘like the Flood: he had reigned for 40 days and 40 nights’.

  [103] McEwen had also begun to lay the groundwork for an agreement with the Soviet Union!

  [104] The Australian Lower House, or ‘Parliament’.

  [105] In the event on 1st January 1964 following the successive crises of November-December 1963 in US-UK relations, the Australian Labour Party was formally ‘invited’ to participate in a National Government with its leader, Victorian-born Arthur Caldwell becoming Deputy Prime Minister and the key ministries being divided between Liberal, Labour and Country parties in the ratio 5:4:1.

  [106] Edward Heath had decreed that as of 1st December 1962 the former ‘War Office’ would be renamed ‘Ministry of Defence’, to reflect the fact that his administration was preoccupied with ‘defending the nation’ and not ‘making war’ on third parties.

  [107] Allegedly, this was explained as a ‘technical adjustment to more accurately reflect the reality of the current World situation designed to enable the banking system to make the necessary steps to protect and guarantee its liquidity in the short to medium term’. Actually, it made it virtually impossible for UKIEA agents to secure orders in the United States and the trickle of food and fuel already being made ready for delivery to the United Kingdom was effectively suspended.

  [108] Once minimal oil supplies from the Persian Gulf began to arrive in England the pound edged up to $0.40 reaching a 1963 high of $0.47 in September of that year. ‘Dollar Parity’ was not to be achieved and sustained again until mid-1965.

  [109] In the event HMS Belfast and the destroyers Cavendish and Carysfort paid ‘courtesy calls’ to the archipelago in late October and early November 1963 before steaming for the North Atlantic.

  [110] US authors refer to these ‘battles’ as the First and Second Battles of Kharg Island.

  [111] Taken verbatim from the diary of the Rt. Hon. Edward Heath, 7th March 1963.

  [112] The United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa.

  [113] Sir Thomas was subsequently raised to the peerage in April 1965.

  [114] Quoted verbatim from the diary of Rt. Hon. Edward Heath, 4th April 1963.

  [115] The United States subsequently claimed to have ‘deployed’ 847 warheads, it is now ‘believed’ that RAF V-Bombers dropped between 50 and 60, but there are no reliable figures for the Soviet side although some sources report the deployment up to 175 warheads ‘in the West’, mainly against European targets, and up to 80 in the East, against China and Japan.

  [116] The official death toll of the war in England and Wales has never been adjusted from the figure of 12,800,000 issued by the Government in 1965 with a note that ‘this total does not include deaths from natural causes’. See Appendix 3|Casualties, Population and Demographics for more details of this understandably contentious subject.

  [117] See Appendices for Extracts from the Interim Reports of the Cabinet Committee into the Cuban Missiles War which I include in this book to give the reader a feel for the grimness of the era.

  [118] Yes, the big oil companies (all US because British Petroleum was nationalised by the UKIEA under the War Emergency Act of January 1963) shamelessly used the Cuban Missiles war as an excuse to extend their reach and to corner the global market. This is a thing which required no further comment!

  [119] Between 1939 and 1945 forty-one of these vessels were sunk, and another two so badly damaged they never went to sea again.

  [120] These synthetic oil plants were modern copies of facilities set up by Nazi Germany in WWII; many founded with the aid of ex-patriot German engineers. The US had sheltered hundreds of rocket scientists, chemical warfare experts and former ‘SS doctors’ after 1945, the South Africans whose ruling ‘Nationalist Party’ was openly sympathetic to the Nazis pre-1939 and to degrees, thereafter, had welcomed ‘refinery’ specialists.

  [121] Quoted from the diary of the Rt. Hon. Edward Heath, 14th April 1963.

  [122] Colloquially known to history as ‘General Franco’.

  [123] ‘Benign’ in comparison to Mussolini and Franco; Hitler, Stalin and Mao were monsters. Salazar, autocratic, didactic, detached and as he got older, less tolerant of dissent and more reliant on his secret police for his authority, was never really in the same league as his fellow old-style dictators.

  [124] But for the twin assassinations which removed with seven days the two leading figures of the UKIEA, Margaret Thatcher would never have become Prime Minister at the end of the send week in December 1963. Or some historians speculate, ever have risen to the premiership.

  [125] Major-General Charles George Gordon CB (28 January 1833 – 26 January 1885).

  [126] This was I think prompted by a request from my Mother, supported – obviously – by my Father. I was not born at the time
so I can claim complete innocence.

  [127] The official record of proceedings in Parliament.

  [128] At the time there was criticism of the fact that – unlike the Warren Commission – the ‘Committee’ had avoided any attempt to substantively apportion blame for the Cuban Missiles War disaster. However, this is to miss the point. The Committee’s reports were from the outset working documents and successive Chairmen were unwavering in their desire to avoid in any way ‘politicising’ its work.

  [129] Roy Jenkins has never been given sufficient credit – in this author’s humble opinion – for the work he oversaw establishing a policy framework in which future reconstruction planning could be sensibly, and pragmatically conducted. People too readily forget that ‘reconstruction’ was just one of many competing priorities for ‘every’ British government in the latter half of the twentieth century and that in the United Kingdom it was Roy Jenkins who correctly identified the main impediments to and the compelling argument for, ‘rebuilding for the future, not the past’.

  [130] In some cases US aircraft and Polaris missiles fired by US Navy ballistic missile submarines targeted the same targets previously or in some cases, later attacked by RAF V-Bombers and subsequent ‘bomb surveys’ were unable to establish ‘who bombed what’ with any degree of certitude. Surviving crews reported delivering 27 ‘special munitions’ (including 23 on mission-designated primary targets).

  [131] There is no way of establishing this for a fact but in this case ‘probability’ has a high confidence level in the absence of any contradictory evidence.

  [132] But not eighty times as destructive since the explosive potential of a given weapon increased by its cube not its factor. That is a bomb four times the size of the Hiroshima bomb (50 kilotons) will only be – all things being equal – twice as destructive, and a 200 hundred kiloton device approximately four times as devastating (and so on).

  [133] At the time the big debate in Government circles was how to treat the problem of the ‘debt overhang’, an unsubstantiated largely nominal ‘moveable feast’ claimed to be owed to US banks, and in some smaller part to the US Federal Government comprising pre- and post-Cuban Missiles War loans and payments which had accrued on effectively valueless UK Gilts. The circular nature of the resulting internal debate runs through this part of the report.

  [134] Following the March 1965 General Election the Committee was initially chaired by Dame Alison Munro (Secretary of State for Supply 1963-65, Secretary of State for National Reconstruction 1965-1966, and later Home Secretary 1966-1970).

  [135] In fact during 1965-66 the population of England and Wales did briefly ‘stabilise’ due to the large influx of refugees from continental Europe but one this ‘surge’ slackened the general population level ‘stagnated’ and dipped again before again beginning a slow recovery in the latter part of the decade.

  [136] The figures for Greater London actually exceed the known population of the London County and Outer London at the time of the October War (8.2 millions). This is because they include many districts ringing the capital whose mortality returns were not included elsewhere.

  [137] The total War ‘Related Deaths’ figure takes no account of those who died of radiation sickness, injury, sickness, or of starvation or for want of winter shelter after 31st January 1963. Later studies in the 1970s indicated that in 1963, 1964 and 1965 there were between 3 and 6 million ‘premature deaths’ in the population of England and Wales alone attributable to factors associated with the war, including ‘degradation of living conditions, health and other societal factors’.

  [138] This was a remarkably accurate figure; subsequent studies put the actual population figure at the time of the report as being between 24.9 and 25.8 million.

  [139] The comparative survival rates in Scotland and Northern Ireland were below but within 10% +/- of pre-war ‘norms’ at this time and gradually ‘normalising’.

  [140] It is now known that over a million people escaped – mainly from France, the majority rescued by the Royal Navy – chaos and starvation in Western Europe during 1965 and settled in the United Kingdom. Throughout the 1960s a steady stream of refugees came to the British Isles (perhaps as many as another one-and-a-half million people between 1966 and 1970) from northern Europe.

  [141] Ironically, immigration from Europe and the Commonwealth – as time went by mostly by younger adults – reversed the decline in population during 1968 and thereafter birth rates began to exceed death rates from 1969 onwards.

  [142] This may sound outrageously racist to our modern ears but at the time political correctness was the last thing on the minds of the report’s authors. Every day they were waking up to a country practically in ruins where food was rationed and people in Government were focussed real ‘bread and butter’ issues.