by James Philip
A tug’s whistle repeatedly blared a warning.
HMS Aisne seemed for a moment as if she might drift broadside on against the persistent south easterly wind blowing down the length of Sliema Creek. Then a tug moved under her port bow and in a mad churning of the shallow waters pushed the destroyer’s head around to face towards Valetta.
“The British are scared of something,” Marija Calleja’s twenty-two year old brother Joseph declared, grinning. Joe worked in the docks at Senglea when he wasn’t on strike or organising demonstrations against the ‘occupying power’.
Marija folded her arms, hugging herself as if there was a sudden chill in the air in the balmy Mediterranean night.
Brother and sister stood in the road looking down to the harbour.
In the distance the red-hot jet pipes of jets taking off from the RAF base at Luqa climbed into the night, the rushing thunder of their engines falling down to the ground like some ill omen from the gods.
“Don’t you think that if ‘the British’ are afraid of something,” Marija suggested, unaccountably vexed by her little brother’s smug complacency, “that perhaps, we ought to be also?”
This thought hadn’t occurred to Joseph Calleja.
“Why?” He asked before he switched on his brain.
“The British have hundreds of soldiers, they have jet fighters and bombers and big grey warships with guns and space age missiles,” she reminded her brother patiently. “Why would they be afraid of anything?”
“Ah...”
03:58 Hours
HMS Dreadnought, Barrow-in Furness, Cumbria
Lieutenant-Commander Simon Collingwood had donned an anti-flash balaclava, pulled on a Parka and climbed up the ladder to the small cockpit on top of HMS Dreadnought’s great shark fin sail. He expected another airburst any moment but he felt, in his bones, that he needed to see, with his own eyes, what was going on. It simply wasn’t the same seeing it through the periscope.
There were two small fires near the northern dockyard gate and more, larger fires in the town beyond. Within the Vickers Armstrong Industries Yard the brilliant arc lighting was off although here and there the standard pole lights survived. There was dust and grit in the wet air, he could taste it. In the middle distance he saw hand torches weaving through dockyard machinery. He stared hard at the access ways and roads around Dreadnought’s graving dock. They were strewn with small pieces of debris, otherwise clear. There were no bodies on the ground within his field of vision and he sighed with relief.
His relief was short-lived.
There were big fires flickering distantly across Morecambe Bay. Heysham, Lancaster, Cairnthorpe, places he knew well would have been hit hard. He tried to get his mind into gear. It wasn’t easy; he was numbed to the core with the terrifying enormity of the disaster. The bomb must have airburst somewhere over the Bay several miles away or he wouldn’t still be here. None of them would still be here if it had gone off much closer.
Collingwood snatched the trailing bridge microphone, clicked it on.
“Can you hear me down there?”
There was a burr of static.
“Yes, sir,” acknowledged the man at the talker station in the crowded control room fifty feet beneath Collingwood’s feet.
“Everything is still intact up here. I want the galley up and running. I’m sure our guests would appreciate tea or hot chocolate. Somebody can bring me a flask of tea when that’s organised.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Collingwood was amazed at how calm he sounded.
Given that his pulse was racing and that under his layers of protective clothing he was sweating like a pig despite the frost of the Cumbrian night, he didn’t know how he could possibly sound that calm.
The horrors of nuclear war had seemed so banal, surreal a year ago at the staff college course he and the other prospective members of Dreadnought’s wardroom cadre had attended at Devonport.
‘We think the most likely scenario is that both sides will shoot themselves dry as fast as they can,’ the chief instructor had concluded. ‘Basically, once the thing kicks off there’s no point holding fire. You either hit the other fellow with everything you’ve got as soon as you can or you lose. So, we might be talking about a war that’s over in hours, five or six bar a few afterthoughts. The aggressor’s first strike, and whatever counter strike the non-aggressor can mount while under attack. That’s it. After the first strike command and control doesn’t exist. After the first strike everybody goes underground, under the sea, or if you’re on a surface vessel, as far out to sea as you can get as fast as you can hoping to lose yourself in the vastness of The world’s oceans...’
Except you couldn’t do any of those things if you were on board a ninety-five percent complete nuclear submarine that was sitting in a dry dock!
Simon Collingwood didn’t know how long this real, hot war was going to last. The one thing he couldn’t afford to assume was that it was already over. His mind was ticking through the possibilities, the practicalities. He had two hundred people sheltering on his boat. In the morning there would be more. They had to be fed, watered, sustained, protected. By him. Until somebody told him otherwise they were his responsibility now that the world had gone mad.
He clicked the microphone switch.
“Captain to talker.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Put me on tannoy.” Collingwood waited for the acknowledgement. “This is Simon Collingwood, acting Captain of Dreadnought. I’d like to welcome aboard all non Dreadnoughts. The situation topside looks a little grim but there haven’t been any further big bangs since that last one which appears to have been over open water in the middle of Morecambe Bay.” Try not to be too bloody cheerful man! “Right now you are in the safest place. Dreadnought’s pressure hull is like several inches of armour plating,” which was a complete lie, “so what we’re going to do is sit this thing out until we know it is safe to go back outside. It is dark up here but there is enough light to be able to tell that the town of Barrow is still intact. I daresay a lot of windows have been broken but everything still seems to be standing. This is one of those times when we all need to stick together. While you remain on Dreadnought I am responsible for your safety. Please stay calm. Everybody, please stay calm. If there is any fresh news I promise I will pass it on to you as soon as I can. Captain, out.”
Collingwood heard a sound behind him and a bulky figure in a parka and white balaclava like his own emerged from the open hatch at his feet.
Lieutenant Richard Manville, Dreadnought’s Supply Officer, was an oddly clumsy, well-proportioned man of around six feet in height. Submariners tended to be smaller, wiry men like Collingwood himself but Dick Manville was one of the new breed of University educated, short-commission – seven or thirteen year men rather than ‘lifers’ like Collingwood - entrants to the underwater club.
“Well said, sir,” the newcomer declared, breathlessly as he straightened to his full height in the cramped cockpit. “The Chief asked me to tell you we have thirty-six Dreadnoughts onboard, and one hundred and eighty-one assorted guests, including thirty-two youngsters under the age of twelve. We’ve got enough fresh water for a couple of mugs of tea for everybody but not a lot else in the larder, I’m afraid, sir.”
Collingwood grimaced under his balaclava.
“I don’t want any foraging parties going ashore until it is fully light, Dick.” He eyed the malevolent night around the sail. “Or until such time as the whiz bangs have stopped.”
The younger man was staring at the fires in the town.
“Understood, sir.”
“I’m going to come below in about ten minutes. Get the Chief to organise a relief up here.” Collingwood was thinking ahead. He needed to be seen in the crowded spaces of the boat, to be a visibly calming presence. Then he needed to be making plans to get Dreadnought out of this dock and taking her somewhere where she would be safe.
05:35 Hours (04:35 Hours GMT)
S
liema-Gzira Waterfront, Malta
Marija Calleja and her brother Joe had walked down to the waterfront. She was wrapped in a shawl over her coat, he just wearing his tattered and torn dockyard monkey jacket over his grubby work clothes. They sat on the sea wall, swinging their feet, watching the black silhouettes of the darkened warships desperately raising steam, crabbing out of Sliema Creek. Across the water on the tip of Manoel Island the Headquarters of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet was a ferment of dark noise. HMS Phoenicia sat inside the great medieval fortress walls first raised by the Knights of St John overlooking both Marsamxett and Sliema Creeks.
A consequence of Marija’s childhood and adolescence mostly spent in hospital was that she was inordinately well read by the standards of her peers. Everybody thought she was the most bookish of women, a mine of useless information, in fact. However, there were compensations. For example, on a night like this she could fall into the well of her thoughts and contemplate the history and the traditions of her people drawing on an unusual wealth of background facts.
“I wonder if the British would have put their headquarters on Manoel Island if they’d known that originally it was Malta’s plague island?” She asked out aloud, baiting her little brother to say something nonsensical.
“Best place for them!” Her sibling retorted. He opened his mouth to continue but tonight the unreality of what was going on had unsettled him to the point where he didn’t know what to think anymore.
Marija let it go in silence, swiftly falling back into her thoughts.
Manoel Island had originally been called l’Isola del Vescovo or, in Maltese, il-Gżira tal-Isqof which translated roughly as ‘the Bishop’s Island’. And so it had remained until post medieval times when in 1643 Jean Paul Lascaris, Grandmaster of the Knights of Malta, had built a quarantine hospital – a lazaretto - on the island, in response to the periodic waves of plague and cholera brought to Malta by visiting ships. The island hadn’t obtained its modern name until the 18th century, renamed in honour of António Manoel de Vilhena, a Portuguese Grandmaster of the Knights of Malta under whose leadership the original Fort Manoel was built in 1726. At the time the fort was a marvel of 18th century military engineering. Some uncertainty existed as to the guiding hand behind the original plans for the structure. However, the general consensus was that the grand plan was the work of one Louis d’Augbigne Tigné, somewhat modified by his friend Charles François de Mondion. The latter was actually buried in a crypt beneath the fort. Bombed repeatedly by the Luftwaffe in the early 1940s Fort Manoel – currently named HMS Phoenicia - retained its impressive internal quadrangle parade ground and arcade. The baroque chapel of St. Anthony of Padua within the fort’s walls had been almost totally destroyed by bombing in March 1942 but had subsequently been rebuilt as the base chapel, albeit not quite in the magnificent style of its pre-German war pomp.
Some ten minutes ago the brother and sister had gazed at the tall, threatening, elegant bulk of a British cruiser feeling its way past the rocks at the foot of Manoel Island and the seaward end of Tigne Point. Now HMS Broadsword, the last of the 7th Destroyer Squadron’s big beasts was finally moving. The dirty, sulphurous waft of smoke from her thin rear stack blew down the length of the Gzira waterfront.
Valetta across the water was still in total darkness.
There were soldiers with rifles on the streets and sailors trying to jump on the last boats back to their ships, hundreds of civilians like the brother and sister milling, aimlessly, sleepily as army trucks spilled away from the nearby Cambridge barracks vehicle pool.
Marija gazed at HMS Broadsword. With her tall forward lattice mast, big bedstead radar and strange thin second funnel she lacked the lithe grace and greyhound lines of so many of the British destroyers that she’d seen in Sliema Creek over the years.
In years gone by she and Joe had often come down to the Creek, sat on the sea wall swinging their feet, killing time, teasing each other. They’d always been the closest of the three Calleja siblings, sharing the same dry, mischievous sense of humour. Tonight in the minutes before the first hint of the pre-dawn twilight the skies above the island were full of jet engines. The roar buffeted their senses, making the whole world reverberate.
A British soldier rested the butt of his rifle on the ground a few paces to Marija’s right. She heard the scratch of a match, a flame flared as the man lit a cigarette.
“Excuse me,” she asked. “Do you know what’s going on, sir?”
“I ain’t no ‘sir’, love,” the man chuckled, stepping closer. Like so many of the men posted to Malta this man had a very British gruff affability, as if he knew he was mostly among friends even if lately, there had been rumblings and outbreaks of hostility. It was unusual even for those Maltese who most fervently wanted the British to go home to harbour any real personal animosity towards individual soldiers, sailors or airmen. “As for ‘what’s going on’, your guess is as good as mine.”
“Why all the guns, Tommy?” Joe Calleja inquired, without the mocking edge he’d have injected if he’d been at a Maltese Labour Party rally, or on the picket line outside the gates of Senglea Dockyard.”
“Tommy?” The soldier guffawed.
“My brother has no manners,” Marija apologised in a tone of voice that let the other man know that she was scowling ferociously at her sibling.
“No offence taken, love,” the soldier assured her. He leaned his rifle, a black metalled FN L1A1 SLR on the sea wall next to the woman. He positioned himself with several feet between him and the siblings, and sucked on his cigarette as he stared at HMS Broadsword slowly creeping past. “No offence,” he repeated. “Don’t ask me what I’m doing here. All I know is that this is a better billet than Mönchengladbach on a winter’s night like this.”
“Mönchengladbach?” Marija asked, a smile quirking her lips and brightening her voice in the night.
“Second Battalion got posted to Mönchengladbach in Germany. My lot got sent to the Med. My company to here, the other two to Akrotiri. That’s Cyprus. Most of my lot are either knee deep in snow in Germany right now, or dodging petrol bombs from terrorists in Cyprus. Me, I’m here in what ought to be a little piece of paradise. Once in a while somebody gets a bit snotty, like your young man, here. But me and my mates know even the snotty ones don’t really mean anything by it.”
“He is my little brother,” Marija confessed.
“No accounting for family,” the man sympathised, taking another drag on his cigarette.
“You really don’t know what’s going on then?”
“I know it ain’t no exercise.”
“My name is Marija,” she volunteered spontaneously.
“I’m Jim Siddall,” the soldier replied, touching his brow with the back of a hand shielding his cigarette.
Marija saw for the first time that the man was in his thirties with sergeant’s stripes on his arm. She waved into the gloom in her brother’s direction.
“This is my brother Joe.”
“Yes, I know.” Another chuckle, utterly lacking in malice. “We’ll arrest him another night, perhaps.” Marija was about to morph into wounded tigress defending her brood mode when the sergeant went on. “Just make sure you keep him out of harm’s way tonight. People are a bit trigger happy tonight. So, you take care, Miss Calleja.”
Marija looked up at him as he got to his feet.
“What is going on, Sergeant Siddall?”
“I don’t know, love,” she said, his face illuminated by the red glow of his cigarette. “For all I know it’s the end of the world.”
Chapter 7
An extract from ‘The Anatomy of Armageddon: America, Cuba, the USSR and the Global Disaster of October 1962’ reproduced by the kind permission of the New Memorial University of California, Los Angeles Press published on 27th October 2012 in memoriam of the fallen.
While it would be wrong to blame the catastrophe on a cabal of senior American military officers – gathered around General Curtis Lemay -
who believed that the Cuban crisis was a dangerous symptom of growing Soviet nuclear bravura, there was an awareness in the Pentagon, and elsewhere in the Washington intelligentsia that the atomic dominance enjoyed by the USA since 1945 was coming to an end. Whether we can extrapolate this ‘feeling’ among the decision making caucus in and around the Kennedy White House, into a pre-disposition that if there was to be a war then it was better to have that war while America still held the advantage – or a belief that such a war might still be in some meaningful way ‘winnable’ – is unclear, and inevitably much of the byzantine politicking beneath the surface will remain opaque forever.
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at JKF or his brother, Robert’s confessionals! Rumours of secret journals and memoirs penned by key member of the Kennedy Administration have tormented historians for decades; they may exist but are unlikely to see the light of day while any of the key players or their close family relatives is still alive. Without them we must work with the sources that we have, and these are limited. Remember, the Cuban Missile Crisis that spawned the October War and unleashed so much grief down the years since happened in an age before ubiquitous email and SMS traffic, when paper trails were exactly that – paper trails – relatively easily edited, amended or in extremis, burned or shredded as dictated by political circumstances.
It may be significant that thus far nobody has managed to get their hands on a ‘smoking gun’. There may not be a ‘smoking gun’. In the absence of a ‘smoking gun’ we cannot, at this remove, prove that JFK, or any of the other key decision makers fully realised the massive strategic nuclear strike superiority of Western forces over their Soviet counterparts. Likewise, because the paper trail is so scratchy – whether by design or accident – we cannot say for certain that if they had fully understood their position of overwhelming strategic superiority, it would have changed anything.