“All of which will be academic if Franco’s Army marches into Gibraltar.”
General Sir Richard Hull scowled: “With respect, sir,” he remarked tartly, “with 3rd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, 2nd Battalion 4 °Commando, a company of garrison troops and over two hundred rounds of ammunition for every large artillery piece emplaced on the Rock, the bloody Spaniards are not about to march into Gibraltar.”
“Nevertheless, the place is besieged, Sir Richard.”
The Chief of Staff of the British Army couldn’t deny it no matter how sorely tempted he was to argue the point.
“With respect,” David Luce offered, “I suspect that Franco’s preference will be to blockade and starve us out. Ark Royal or Hermes’s air groups could shoot down his whole air force and Belfast or one of the big Cats — sorry, the modern cruisers HMS Tiger and HMS Lion — could make the Spanish positions around Algeciras Bay and the coast to the north east untenable for the enemy.”
The First Sea Lord’s words provided a crumb of comfort to his listeners. What they did not do and what they made no attempt to do was pretend that the precarious balance of power in the Mediterranean hadn’t just shifted at the worst possible moment. The Royal Navy was stretched near to breaking point by irreconcilable competing strategic demands. Operation Manna had stripped the Mediterranean Fleet of many of its modern ships and those that remained were fully engaged ‘showing the flag’ and attempting to ‘maintain a visible presence’ in waters over which the Royal Navy’s control was at best, tenuous. The need to keep ‘showing the flag’ and the demands of Operation Manna had left the Navy critically weakened in Malta, virtually absent from the eastern Mediterranean and as it had turned out, horribly exposed at Gibraltar.
“I issued a turnaround command to the Lion and her screening destroyers as soon as I got word of the mining of HMS Albion and HMS Cassandra,” the Admiral reported. These five ships had been tasked to make a show of force along the French Riviera, proceed into the Ligurian Sea and to pay ‘courtesy calls’ at Genoa and Naples, collecting intelligence as they went. The small Squadron was operating independently under the rules of ‘the Christopher Protocol’; which basically meant if in doubt open fire. “Unfortunately, even making their best cruising speed they won’t make the Straits of Gibraltar in the next seventy-two hours. Lion has sufficient fuel for a high speed run but the destroyers will need to top off their bunkers to keep up with her. To do that the squadron will need to rendezvous with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Cherryleaf which only cleared Malta for the original pre-arranged rendezvous position at around noon our time yesterday in company with the destroyers Scorpion and Broadsword. I have also tasked 4th Submarine Flotilla to redirect Cachalot and Sealion to the Rock at their best surface speed. Both boats were tasked to patrol the Bay of Biscay in support of Operation Manna. Theoretically, they might be off the Rock within seventy-two hours.”
Jim Callaghan was sombre.
“What other ships are available within the Mediterranean theatre?”
“About half-a-dozen destroyers and frigates, and a number of smaller units at Malta. And 3rd Submarine Flotilla. HMS Sheffield arrived at the island a week ago but she’s still working up and some of her equipment was removed before the war when she was placed in the Reserve Fleet. Very few of the units based at Malta are actually fully operational. Other than Sheffield, at least two of the larger ships are in dockyard hands.”
Airey Neave coughed politely.
“May I make an observation, Minister?” He inquired, giving Jim Callaghan a look which was apologetically ironic.
“Of course,” the big man shrugged, turning determinedly sombre. “You are the resident escape expert in the room, Airey.”
This drew a sullen mutter of scoffing amusement.
“That’s good of you to say so, Minister,” the ruddy-faced former resident of Colditz chortled, “it is just that it seems to me that although things look a bit sticky at the moment; what with the dreadful events at Balmoral, Franco flexing his muscles at Gibraltar and dear old Staveley-Hope making up grand strategy on the hoof,” he held up a hand to placate a bristling First Sea Lord, “no offence intended Sir David,” he said quickly and went on before he lost the floor to an outraged complaint he couldn’t bat away so easily, “aren’t we rather forgetting something in all the excitement?”
“For goodness sake, Airey!” Ian Macleod snorted.
“Seriously, chaps,” Airey Neave continued unabashed, “I’m dreadfully sorry about the Earl of Home, obviously, and the young Prince, but the Queen, the Premier and Margaret are all in one piece and this Gibraltar imbroglio notwithstanding, we’re the fellows who still command the Mediterranean. Well, if we’ve still got the moral fibre to command it, that is. Yes, Operation Manna is the one thing we must support with all our might but that doesn’t mean we can’t act decisively elsewhere.” He held up his hands to forestall the objections of the three Chiefs of Staff. “Yes, yes, I know we can’t afford to expend or worse, lose, irreplaceable ships and aircraft, let alone the men in them. But we can’t afford to hold our military assets back and watch our strategic position erode to such a point where all the blood and treasure in the world won’t save the day either. Gentlemen, it is time we stopped worrying about our weaknesses and began to look to our strengths. I know there are a lot of things we can’t do; but there are a lot of thing that we can do.” He grinned puckishly, as if he was delivering a pep talk to the Colditz Escape Committee in that cold German castle in 1942. “For example, we still hold Malta. Always assuming we can stop dear old Staveley-Pope giving it away to the pirates, that is. Likewise, we hold Gibraltar and I’m probably not the only chap around this table who thinks it’s high time we took the gloves off with that bastard Franco…”
Jim Callaghan sighed.
Airey Neave was only saying what they all thought, putting voice to what had been unthinkable a month, a week or even a few days ago to confront a reality that Edward Heath had travelled to Balmoral to articulate to the Sovereign.
It was all the Deputy Prime Minister could do to suppress a visible shiver of apprehension.
Chapter 22
They’d had to walk most of the way up the mountain and then they’d been parked on a bench outside a checkpoint while they waited for word to be sent up — and down — the Rock. The bench had a stunning view of the entire sweep of Algeciras Bay, now polluted with the effluent from HMS Albion’s breached forward bunkers and the flotsam and jetsam that still bubbled to the surface from the grave of HMS Cassandra. Off the port of Algeciras the two Spanish destroyers that had patrolled the Straits of Gibraltar while the carrier had fought to stay afloat now lay at anchor in the middle of the Bay, watching developments beneath the beleaguered last bastion of the old world in the Iberian Peninsula. To the observers on the Rock who’d witnessed the herculean struggles of the previous afternoon it seemed as if the two Spanish warships were sulking.
At a little after twenty-three hundred hours last night the waterlogged hulk of HMS Albion had been dragged and pushed into Dry Dock Number One, where after seven hours of counter flooding she’d been stabilized sufficiently to allow the pumps to begin to drain the dock. In Gibraltar people were running up and down the streets shouting the news — every tiny development — all night long. Households had broken out their last bottles of wine, there had been a peculiar morning after the party the night before mood in the air as the man in the uniform of a Commander in the Royal Naval Reserve and his companion, a blond shapely woman in the uniform of a WREN Third Officer had emerged from their dingy hotel off Main Street to begin their quest to find, speak to and hopefully, not get shot by the Military Governor of the Colony.