HMS Bulwark left on her next cruise with the Commando embarked in the early months of 1961. This time we were to test out our newly acquired helicopter techniques in East Africa. We were to sail to Mombasa, where the Commando would disembark and move to a nearby game reserve, which we would use as a training ground for helicopter assault.
On the journey across the Indian Ocean, I was appointed the Commando’s ‘Mess Deck Officer’, whose duties were to ensure that our Marines were properly accommodated and looked after on board. One of my heroes at the time was Nelson, who had been loved and respected by sailors throughout the Royal Navy not just for his ability as a commander but for his dedication to the welfare of ordinary sailors at a time when conditions on board were extremely harsh. He introduced a set of standards for sailors’ accommodation that included a minimum space, measured in cubic feet, to be provided for each man below decks. I discovered that the space allowed to each man on Bulwark, with a full Commando embarked, was actually below the limit set by Nelson in 1802 (albeit in Bulwark the space was airconditioned). I enjoyed the job enormously, made myself something of a thorn in the side of the ship’s authorities and once again discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that I really enjoyed getting involved in pastoral issues to do with welfare and well-being.
One of my duties as Mess Deck Officer was to give references as to character for Marines who had to appear at ‘Commander’s Table’, where shipboard discipline for relatively minor misdemeanours was dispensed. On one occasion I had to appear in this role for a Marine in my troop who had come aboard ship late at night very much the worse for wear and had been sick over the Duty Petty Officer, which was not a good thing to do. However, when he appeared before the Commander for punishment, none of the witnesses could be found, so no evidence was submitted beyond a bald statement of the facts on the charge sheet. I was then required to give my character evidence, which I did, saying that he was a Marine of good standing, etc., etc. After this the Commander passed judgement, in the best traditions of naval discipline at the time. ‘Marine X, you will have twenty-eight day’s stoppage of pay. And if there had been a shred of evidence against you, I would have put you inside!’
While the publicly stated purpose of our visit to Kenya, then still a British colony, was to train, there was a deeper purpose too. The Congo conflict was just erupting at this time, and numerous atrocities were being committed, including against the white settlers. This had sent shock-waves through Africa, and there was a fear that the instability would spread to Kenya. We were there to provide for the contingency that extra forces would be needed to maintain order in the Colony. So the Commando had a warm welcome when we arrived, not least from wives and daughters who had been sent to Kenya for safety by their menfolk in the Congo. Some members of the Commando took their responsibilities to protect these unfortunate unaccompanied females further than, I suspect, husbands and fathers had intended when they sent them to ‘safety’ under the protection of British forces amongst the palm-fringed beaches of the Mombasa coastline.
Our next stop was in Aden, to try out our helicopters in desert conditions. Sand in the engines was the biggest hazard here, on some occasions causing complete engine seizure. I was in one aircraft flying above the Aden desert at maybe three thousand feet, when, instead of the deafening clatter of the rotors above my head, there was suddenly an eerie and disconcerting silence. Fortunately, helicopter rotors in such circumstances behave like sycamore seeds and slow the descent of the aircraft, a process called autorotation. Provided the pilot times the final manoeuvre for landing (called ‘flaring’) and there is a flat place to land, such a descent can be managed without major mishap. We were lucky and made it down without damage or injury, but it was nerve-wracking, nevertheless. One pilot during this time so mistimed his final ‘flare’ before landing that the rotors came down and chopped off the helicopter’s tail – causing some discomfort, but no injury to his passengers.
While we were in Aden, some of us hitched a lift up the desert to an isolated forward fort called Dhala, to spend a few days with the Marines of our sister unit 45 Commando, who were fighting the insurgents in the Radfan mountains of northern Aden, where we experienced for the first time what it is like to be shot at in anger. Although there were some quite sharp engagements during these operations in the Radfan, our experiences were of nothing more than sporadic firing at our base from a good distance away. There is a very distinct ‘crack and thump’ when a live bullet is fired at you – the ‘crack’ being the noise of the bullet breaking the sound barrier as it leaves the muzzle of the weapon, and the thump, which comes a few milliseconds later (depending on the range), the sound of its impact. We had been taught about this in training, but now for the first time we experienced it in practice.
This being the first time we had been ashore for some time, our nights off tended to be pretty boisterous affairs. I was with some Marines from my Troop in the local servicemen’s club one night when a fight developed with soldiers from an army regiment based in the Colony. The RAF police were called, and I tried to escape by retreating into the Gents and hiding in one of the cubicles. Here I was found by one of my Marines, who arrived in full RAF police uniform, complete with RAF guard dog. He explained that the policeman had tried to arrest him, but he had dealt with the situation (I didn’t ask how) and ‘borrowed’ his uniform and the dog. He then escorted me past the RAF police cordon as his ‘prisoner’, complete with dog, which we let go when we were well clear.
After Aden, Bulwark returned to Singapore, where we continued developing our helicopter techniques, this time in the jungle. But we hadn’t been in port for long before we were off once again for a second Indian Ocean tour. Our first call was at Karachi for a courtesy and refuelling visit. On our second day in port, I was in a bar with some friends when the Royal Marines Police came in and ordered us back on board the ship as quickly as possible. The Commando was scrambled back to Bulwark, which cast off in haste from Karachi dockside and thundered off at full power towards the Persian Gulf. All the unit officers were then called to a briefing. The Iraqi dictator of the time, General Abdul Qassim, we were informed, had amassed what were estimated to be 30,000 troops, including tanks, on his southern border and was preparing to invade Kuwait, which had just received its independence from the UK. Other British units were being mobilised to defend Kuwait, but they could not get there for days. We were the closest and would be first on the scene. Our objective was to take and hold the port and airport, until reinforcements arrived.
Poor old Bulwark! She was known colloquially as ‘The rusty B’, and we used to joke that her plates were so rotten that the only thing that held her together were the layers of paint covering up the rust. She didn’t need a torpedo to sink her – a can of paint remover would have been quite enough! She was, moreover, a dignified old lady and not used to rushing places any longer, let alone gallivanting off up the Gulf at a sustained and rivet-popping thirty-odd knots.
As she surged through the sparkling waters of the Persian Gulf, we prepared, as we thought, for action against a hugely numerically superior force. There was much checking of kit and weapons, much studying of maps and old aerial photographs, much briefing and rebriefing for D-day and, amongst us younger officers at least, much nervousness. Our preparations varied between the meticulous and the bizarre.
My commander’s pre-D-day (known as D –1) preparations for what we all thought would be a heavily opposed landing the following day, fell clearly into the latter category. He was a much respected and admired, but slightly eccentric soldier. He called us young officers together and, as I remember it, briefed us as follows: ‘Now, when we have completed our assault and driven the enemy out, our next task will be to win these Arab johnnies’ hearts and minds. And I have decided that we shall do this by putting on a show of Scottish country dancing!’ And so, wearing army blankets for kilts, we paraded on the bucketing deck of HMS Bulwark in 45° centigrade, with action in prospect the following day, and were
instructed in the intricacies of the eightsome reel – which remains, to this day, the only ballroom manoeuvre that I feel confident of being able to execute pretty well flawlessly.
Fortunately for us, when our helicopter-borne assault landed in the Kuwaiti port of Mina Al Ahmedi, in the middle of a sandstorm, the Iraqis were nowhere to be seen. The intelligence about the situation in Kuwait, however, was confusing. Some said the Iraqis were still on the Kuwaiti border, others that their forward elements had reached the strategic Mutlah Ridge above Kuwait city (thirty years later, during the first Gulf War, this was the site of the ‘Highway of Death’ – the infamous ‘turkey shoot’ in which a retreating Iraqi armoured column was decimated by US airpower in terrible scenes of carnage).
The Commanding Officer called me in and gave me instructions that I was to lead a night patrol clandestinely up on to the Mutlah Ridge, seek out a suitable helicopter landing site and mark it out with fluorescent panels, so that the Commando could mount a dawn helicopter-borne assault the following morning.
I assembled a small hand-picked group of my Marines and briefed them. We then blackened ourselves up for night operations and set off bravely. We carried out what I thought was a skilful and silent infiltration onto the ridge, found our site and laid out our panels, expecting at any time to bump into a much larger Iraqi force. And, so far as I could tell, we completed our task without detection.
But what would happen when dawn broke and the Iraqis saw us? There was very little cover and we stood out extremely prominently, gathered as we were around our brightly coloured fluorescent panels, which I was sure would make just as good aiming points for enemy tanks as they would landing-site markers for friendly helicopters. I started to dread profoundly the coming of the dawn and what it would bring. So I am not sure whether it was relief at not being a tank target or embarrassment at our failure of fieldcraft which predominated the following morning, when, as dawn broke, we discovered we were surrounded, not by Iraqi tanks but by curious Bedou and their goats, who had watched and tracked our every clandestine move!
The following four weeks were spent under the scorching July sun peering from flimsy holes dug in the desert sand into the swirling dust, out of which, at any moment, we expected the mighty weight of several Iraqi tank divisions to emerge. In the end however, the ‘thin red line’ held, and the Iraqis stayed away long enough for the lumbering British machine to deliver enough forces to Kuwait to provide an effective defence, leaving our puny, lightly equipped 600-strong Commando to go home to Singapore.
The rest of our training tour was quieter, but by no means boring. We went up to the jungles of northern Malaya, to learn the silent arts of jungle warfare; how to live off the jungle; how to see it as a friend and, above all, how to navigate its trackless wastes. It was on one of these jungle map-reading lessons that one of us asked our instructor, QMSI McKay, a giant of an Australian from 1 Royal Australian Regiment, if he had ever been lost in the jungle? ‘Naw,’ he drawled, ‘never lorst, but I was once temporarily misplaced for about fourteen days!’
We did not, however, overlook the opportunity to have a good time, when we could. On one occasion, after I had been with some friends to see Ben Hur, I was standing up in the bucket seat of a friend’s MG imitating the great chariot driver, as he raced a colleague in a Riley far too fast down a local jungle road. My friend misjudged a bend, ran out of road and into a very deep drainage ditch (they were known as monsoon ditches), which sheered his front axle off and catapulted me over the bonnet and clean through the flimsy walls of a nearby shed, cutting my nose rather severely (I was extremely fortunate not to suffer worse). After the accident had been cleared up we returned to camp, where someone said that I ought to see the unit Doctor, a naval Lieutenant Commander eponymously surnamed Mends, and known by all as ‘Doc Mends’. Though much loved by the Marines, Doc Mends operated on the basis that Marines were indestructible and therefore didn’t need mending. So, he reasoned, if they claimed to be ill or damaged in some way they were obviously malingering. On one occasion I had sent one of my Marines to see Doc Mends because he complained he couldn’t sleep. Somewhat to the Marine’s surprise, given Mends’ well-known aversion to offering treatment to the sick, the Doctor agreed that not being able to sleep was indeed serious, and something had to be done. He then pulled out a prescription pad on which he scribbled something and, putting it in an envelope, instructed the Marine to take it to the Quartermaster immediately. This struck my Marine as a little odd but, being an obedient fellow, he did as he was ordered. The envelope was duly handed over to the Quartermaster, who opened it and read the Doctor’s prescription, which instructed ‘This Marine is to return his bedding at once.’
Despite Doc Mends’ reputation, on this occasion my friends decided that he should be called. He was woken and given the brief details of what had happened and who it had happened to. His reply was, ‘Silly young fool – tell him to come and see me in the morning,’ after which he turned over and went back to sleep. My colleagues concluded that the best medicine now was to take me and my bleeding nose to the Sergeant’s Mess bar, where we stayed until five in the morning. When I went to see the Doctor the following day he decided on stitches, but did not feel it necessary to give me a local anaesthetic while they were inserted. The combination of the natural sensitivity of the nose area and the fact that by then the skin round the wound had hardened, compounded by an imperial hangover, made this an extremely painful procedure. The scar on my nose marking Doc Mends’ handiwork has stayed with me all my life, as has the suspicion that this was a clear breach of his Hippocratic oath and intended less to heal me than to pay me back for being the cause of his rudely interrupted slumbers.
Our tour finally over, we returned to UK and the last phase of our training. This involved spending time with each of the Royal Marines’ specialist wings: heavy weapons, cliff assault, mountain warfare, assault engineers, landing craft, the SBS, etc.
It was during this period that, together with one of my fellow officers, I bought my first car, called ‘Baby May’, for the princely sum of £10 off a colleague who was going abroad. At the time I could not even drive. But I still thought it a worthwhile investment, since my co-owner agreed to drive for me whenever I wanted. This was not only convenient, it was also necessary. For driving Baby May was strictly speaking a two-person affair. These, of course, were the days before the Road Test, and so there was effectively no restriction on what kind of vehicle could be put on the public highway. Even so, Baby May attracted some attention. Her chassis and engine were those of an old Austin Seven, upon which a makeshift body had been assembled from plywood panels by someone with only the most rudimentary grasp of carpentry. She had her original glass windscreen, but the rest of her windows were made of Perspex of a rather flimsy sort, the whole being tastefully set off in lively colour scheme of luminescent yellow and a particularly bright pillar-box red. She had two other unique features (as if all the above was not unique enough).
The first was that her radiator block was cracked and leaked water at the rate of about two cupfuls an hour. This deficiency was easily remedied, though, because – as her previous owner pointed out to us at the point of sale – when removed, the external radiator filler cap revealed a circular aperture just large enough to snugly take the mouth of a Gordon’s Gin bottle. We could thus drive the car with a full gin bottle of water stuck into the radiator aperture and fully visible to the driver. When the gin bottle was empty, it required only a brief halt for the co-driver to leap out, exchange the empty bottle for one of the full ones from the stack we always carried in the boot, and then we could resume our journey. We reckoned that Baby May could do some twenty miles on a gallon of petrol and some thirty on a gin bottle full of water.
Her second distinguishing feature was that her electrics had been reconstructed from wiring and crocodile clips bought at Woolworths. And this, in the end, was her undoing. Before the end of our training we sold Baby May on to a fellow officer under training
. One summer’s day, while he was driving her on Exmouth sea front, weaving his way between the holidaymakers – most of whom clearly believed this was some kind of comic turn the local Council had put on for their amusement – Baby May’s dashboard suddenly burst into flames. To the holidaymakers, this was all part of the entertainment. But my colleague knew it was not funny at all, because Baby May’s petrol tank operated on gravity feed and was situated between the now burning dashboard and the engine. He retreated to a safe distance, from which he bravely tried to encourage the amused spectators not to get too close – but this only seemed to confirm to them that this was indeed all a joke. Fortunately, we could never afford to fill Baby May’s tank and always ran her near empty, so, even though her Perspex and hardwood body burnt with a merry blaze, no harm was done – apart from a black smudge on the kerbstone which was all that was eventually left of poor Baby May. The black mark at the site of her demise was still just visible more than thirty years later, when in 1998 I visited Exmouth on an election campaign tour as Leader of the Liberal Democrats.
A Fortunate Life Page 9