Warsaw Concerto, page 25
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Zhou thought that strategy was an accident waiting to happen. He seriously doubted that the governments in Washington or in Oxford were anywhere near as paranoid about the Troika’s intentions, as Alexander Shelepin and his comrades were about those of the West; but that seemed to be a thing the Soviets were working to exacerbate.
Nevertheless, he held out a straw; just to see how strongly the wind was blowing.
“Presumably, there will be Polish, East German, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian and other delegates in San Francisco?”
Semichastny nodded.
“And representatives from Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece and Turkey.”
Zhou Enlai tried not to smile.
The Yankees and the British would never ‘wear that’.
The French would be back on the Security Council, as would Chiang Kai-Shek’s ambassador, ludicrously masquerading as the spokesperson for the Chinese people. It remained to be seen if the United Kingdom would honour its commitment under the Hong Kong Treaty to propose the removal of Chiang Kai-Shek’s ‘China’ from the new United Nations’ top table. Or whether the Commonwealth co-signatories of that treaty would support the admission of the People’s Republic to the forum.
As yet, the People’s Republic, representing over ninety-five percent of the Chinese population had only been offered ‘conditional observer status’ in San Francisco, a thing likely to be challenged on the floor of the chamber by the ‘Formosans’, still by an accident of history – like the French - one of the five-members of the old Permanent Security Council along with the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union.
The inaugural session of the re-born United Nations was still provisionally scheduled for late January or early February. It was going to be an interesting…circus, Zhou suspected, inwardly smiling. It was going to be fascinating to discover exactly who was, and was not, unaligned in the new assembly.
From the disenchantment of his hosts he divined that they were, understandably, less sanguine about the prospect.
Alas, angry men rarely made wise decisions.
Nonetheless, as he contemplated the tide of feelings swirling around him in Sverdlovsk, Zhou Enlai could not completely put to one side, a vague sensation that he was missing something.
Something very important; and that worried him.
Chapter 22
Monday 12th December 1966
Hertford College, Oxford
The national press spoke with a united voice that morning. Images of Soviet tanks and MiGs dominated the front pages of The Manchester Times, and The Guardian, The Evening Standard, The Birmingham Express, The Mail, and even The Daily Worker, published these days in Wolverhampton, and The Daily Sketch, produced locally at Cowley, in Oxford, reflected what they took to be the nation’s outrage.
THE RED ARMY IS BACK!
CHECKPOINT BERLIN!
SOVIET RALLY IN BERLIN!
THIS CANNOT STAND!
BARBARIANS AT THE GATE!
Not even the editorial of the The Daily Worker attempted to place the blame for this ‘outrageous provocation’ at the Prime Minister’s, or necessarily, even the government’s doorstep. Nonetheless, there was a subtle subtext in many pieces inferring that for all the Prime Minister’s strident rhetoric, the Soviets had in some sense been ‘allowed’ to ‘get away’ with reminding the whole World that the USSR’s voice demanded to be heard.
There had been a flurry of telephone calls and unexpected visitors to the Prime Minister’s chambers at Hertford College overnight and that morning. Had Parliament not risen for Christmas the previous week, there would probably, have been ‘Hell to pay’ on the back benches, more than one editor had noted.
In fact, several Tory backwoodsmen had already contacted Margaret Thatcher’s Private Office and demanded of Ian Gow, the Lady’s Parliamentary Private Secretary and tireless Chief of Staff, that the House be recalled. Requests which had been politely, indefatigably rebutted.
The Prime Minister had gone over to Christ Church to breakfast with the Foreign Secretary and a gang of her most senior ministers, leaving Frank Waters at a loose end.
He and his wife had ‘had words’ before they returned to Oxford from Kent, a thing not helped by the unutterably vile weather which had turned the journey into a seven-hour nightmare. Roads were blocked by fallen trees, the wind was so strong at times that the vehicles in the convoy had very nearly been blown off the road, and driving through the ruins of London the rain had started to come down like the worst monsoon the former SAS man had ever experienced.
Not that this had particularly discommoded either husband or wife. No, it was the cloud of their first, relatively brief, and in the great scheme of things, minor ‘row’ which now preoccupied him.
The old soldier had been in more than one woman’s bad books in his time. Wet stuff off a duck’s back, and all that! The thing was that he did not recollect ever feeling this conflicted about any past spat, as he felt at that moment. He knew full well that he and the Lady were bound to have a difference of opinion sooner or later, life was like that, he had just not realised that he would feel this guilty about it!
The bloody woman had put a spell on him!
Oddly, he adored her none the less.
It was a funny old World…
“Ah, I wondered where you were skulking, Frank!” Margaret Thatcher exclaimed impatiently as she looked into the old Porter’s cubby hole at the foot of the stairs up to the Prime Ministerial rooms.
The old soldier had been deep in thought and was, unaccountably, a little startled to be caught by surprise. He had gone outside for a soothing smoke but it had started to pour with rain again; a bad augury for the second wave of the furious storm sweeping across the British Isles that was so panicking the meteorological fraternity.
Hurricane force winds in the Channel!
Gusts of wind up to a hundred miles an hour over the southern half of the country!
A whole month’s rain falling in less than twenty-four hours!
A little rain and wind never hurt anybody…
But this was ridiculous!
Getting to his feet he heard the rain lashing at the windows, and tried to arrange his facial muscles so as to represent a middlingly cheerly aspect to the love of his life.
The Prime Minister frowned at her husband.
Her severe expression crumbled in a moment.
“Oh, I’m sorry, darling,” she gushed suddenly. “I was thoughtless at Penshurst. Once Michael Carver had set out his stall, I was wrong to ask you to try to pick it apart. You were right to be guarded about your thoughts on Operation Watch on the Rhine’. Just so you know, I have profusely apologised to the CDS. He was very gracious about it all, actually…”
Frank Waters blinked at his wife.
He had assumed that at some point he was going to have to get down on his knees, possibly prostrate himself at her feet, and beg her forgiveness. That was fine; looking back he had plenty to be penitent about, granted, although not in respect of his conduct vis-à-vis the Lady, with and to whom he had been a perfect gentleman, a veritable preux chevalier, every inch the gallant knight errant in fact.
Did she just say what I thought she said?
Apparently sensing his bewilderment his wife stepped up to him as he rose to his feet, pecked his cheek and then, thinking better of it planted an unusually wet kiss on his lips. In a moment she had allowed herself to be wrapped in her husband’s arms.
“It’s nothing really,” Frank Waters muttered. “People don’t know the intolerable weight you bear on your shoulders, my dear. You know if you need to have a swipe at something, somebody, I’m always here…”
Was that my voice?
“Oh, Frank,” his wife groaned, “what would I do without you?”
Much to his discomfort, he had been invited to speak to several of the issues the War Cabinet had been discussing.
Right now the most intractable problems were in France, and along the Rhine, and General Sir Michael Carver, by the Grace of God Chief of the Defence Staff – in his most magisterially professorial way - had had to remind the politicos of at least half-a-dozen very unpalatable home truths which, unfortunately, a somewhat testy Prime Minister had turned to him – an ex-SAS man whom Michael Carver had once, and for all he knew still regarded, as little better than a bandit – in the forlorn hope, no doubt, of rebutting the wisdom of the greatest British general of the age, the man who had defeated two Soviet tank armies, no less, in Iraq and Iran with less than an understrength armoured corps at his disposal!
Michael Carver’s considered analysis of the state of play had seemed to Frank Waters, to be pretty much spot on and moreover, this was exactly what he had told the Lady and her by then weary, and understandably cheesed-off senior ministerial lieutenants.
‘We intervened in France for political and humanitarian reasons,’ the Chief of the Defence Staff had re-iterated with quiet cerebral authority. ‘Our object was to seize key French Channel ports, to protect the same with buffer zones to facilitate the evacuation of thousands of helpless refugees and to provide safe havens for others. Inevitably, there was subsequently a significant element of mission creep, partly because we had not anticipated the resilience of the French resistance to the interlopers from the east and the south, or the sheer numbers of survivors – refugees – who had flocked to the Channel ports or who required urgent evacuation on humanitarian grounds directly to the United Kingdom. To date, well over a million-and-a-half persons have been taken in by your Government, Prime Minister,’ he had reminded Frank Waters’s wife. ‘In addition, approximately three hundred thousand persons rescued since the winter of 1964-65, have subsequently returned to the Continent, many to join the Free French Forces currently in control of France north of the Loire, and those contiguous liberated coastal territories from Biscay to the Skagerrak, and the left bank of the Rhine as far south as Koblenz. Given the resources at our command what has been achieved in France has been remarkable, far beyond expectations. However, with the notable exception of recent operations conducted under our direct control exclusively by British troops south of the Loire to recover part of the Poitou which may, in due course, enable us to lay siege to the port of La Rochelle, Allied regular and irregular forces in France and the near Continent are somewhat stalemated. Given that winter is upon us, with a vengeance, if the storms in the Channel now sweeping the country, are any omen, the weather may offer us a two to three-month period of tactical stasis in France but thereafter, we will have no option other than to face up to a number of very unpalatable decisions.’
That was the crux of it.
‘Operation Watch on the Rhine,’ the Chief of the defence Staff had prefaced, turning grim. ‘Assisted by some thousand or so Free French commandos, many of them former Foreign Legion men, the SAS and the Royal Marine SBS contingents – totalling at any one time between three and four hundred effectives – have been keeping ‘eyes on’ and on occasions, turning back clearly hostile parties attempting to cross the Rhine into Belgium and France. These forces have also been gathering intelligence, periodically, by mounting patrols deep into former West German territory on the eastern bank of the Rhine. To date we have lost over thirty men killed and as many injured in skirmishes, firefights and ambushes with personnel positively identified as Red Army Spetsnaz, Pioneer and forward communications units. Several Red Air Force surface-to-air missile battery sites have also been attacked in the Moselle, and in the North Rhine-Westphalia sectors. In some areas: the Palatinate, the Moselle and in the ruins of Cologne, Dusseldorf and Bonn, and around Strasbourg and Karlsruhe, the Red Army is configured as an army of occupation, albeit only, so far as we can tell in company or battalion strength with very little armour apart from a handful of salvaged US Army tanks.’
Carver had been asked why his men had not stopped the steady influx of ‘hostile parties’ into France?
‘They have significantly reduced the rate of infiltration, Prime Minister. A thousand or so men operating on hostile ground reliant upon air drops for re-supply and their wits for their daily survival, can achieve only so much. However, I believe that their existence, their mere presence on the ground has deterred perhaps, seventy to eighty percent of the influx we might otherwise have seen in the last six months. Presently, the snow is lying several feet deep along both banks of the Rhine above Wesel and Emmerich near the Dutch border, effectively freezing all movement across the river. Hopefully, for a month or two to come.’
There had been suggestions that Red Army troop concentrations ought to be ‘more actively harried’.
The Chief of the Defence Staff had reminded the meeting that it had been his impression that the Government did not want to advertise the ongoing, relatively low-level war on the Rhine to the World at large.
Had the Government’s policy changed?
No, it had not…
What were the Soviets really up to in Germany?
‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ Carver had replied succinctly. ‘They see an opportunity; they have taken it.’
Nobody had had an answer to that!
‘Inevitably, the situation on the Rhine plays into the bigger picture in France, and by implication, the Low Countries,’ the victor of Abadan and the al-Faw Peninsula had continued, discussing the widening rift between the ambitions, expectations and military capabilities of the Free French – who nominally provided over ninety percent of the fighting manpower on the ground – and Margaret Thatcher’s government.
‘In a sense we are victims of our own success,’ Michael Carver had explained, speaking unhurriedly just to make sure his listeners heard every word he said. ‘Originally, we intervened in Northern France to save tens of thousands, that was before it became evident that there were hundreds of thousands to whom our succour was the difference between life and death. Our latest estimates are that as many as five to six million persons now rely upon Allied military and humanitarian aid in France, Belgium, Holland and in the Oldenburg-Bremen-Hamburg corridor linking the Low Countries to the Danish peninsula. This vulnerable population now also depends for its defence upon the Allied forces garrisoning the frontier, presently numbering some one hundred and thirty thousand French and thirty thousand British and Commonwealth regular troops, and as many as half-a-million irregulars, or militiamen drawn from local populations. The frontier, insofar as it exists as a coherent entity, is inherently porous the father towards the Rhine it stretches until it ceases, for practical purposes, to exist in the Ardennes-Moselle sectors. Central France is effectively indefensible, which is why the situation in Southern France and east of the middle and upper Rhine is deeply worrying and why I authorised the ongoing offensive operations to the right of the Loire Line, because what we cannot, under any circumstances allow to happen, is for the hostile forces based on the Massif Central; Red Dawn sympathisers, possibly direct Soviet proxies, to mount offensive operations against the centre of the Loire Line or join up with insurgent forces currently operating in the east. It is my hope that Brigadier Bramall’s planned push south towards the Garonne will pin the enemy in place until the spring, when hopefully, we may be able to increase our force levels, or hopefully, there will be a meaningful injection of fresh ‘assets’ from our Allies, enabling a stiffening of the resilience of the French units holding the most vulnerable, eastern end of the line on the continent.’
At this juncture the CDS had looked around the table.
‘Let me be clear about this; I regard the Rhine, and the whole of what was once West Germany to be an open flank threatening everything we have thus far achieved in France. Further, I take very seriously the threat that the existence of strong, well-entrenched Soviet-supporting and presumably backed, hostile forces based in the Massif Central and other, hostile likely Soviet proxy elements controlling the whole of the south below the line Poitiers-Bourges-Dijon-Besancon, effectively holding Allied forces in situ to counter the southern threat, may eventually render our position in France untenable unless we contrive to change, in some way, the terms of engagement. Obviously, if at some stage the confidential assurances we have received from our US friends bear fruit, in terms of boots on the ground, this will greatly alleviate many of our present strategic concerns. That said, we are where we are, in the event of a major, sustained offensive against Allied forces in France, mounted from both the east and the south, the resources available in theatre might not be sufficient to hold the line.’
The Lady had not wanted to hear this!
‘We,’ Michael Carver had reminded the Prime Minister, ‘have neither the men nor the materiel to adequately reinforce our forces on the Continent at this time. Other than two battalions of the Parachute Regiment and a miscellany of battalion-sized formations refitting, re-training or simply recuperating in the British Isles – perhaps, seven thousand five hundred combat effectives – we possess no tactical reserve.’
‘What about the Royal Marines?’
’40 Commando is in the Persian Gulf, 41 Commando is in Singapore, Borneo and training in Australia, 42 Commando is still in Canada as per post-rebellion mutual support agreements with the US Administration and the Canadian Government, cadres of 43 Commando are stationed at Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malta and in Cyprus, 44 Commando is now operating as the training formation of the Corps, and 45 Commando is in Norway and Sweden. 46 Commando is currently forming in the West Country and will not be considered operational until June of next year, at the earliest.’
The Chief of the Defence Staff had reminded the Prime Minister of the British Army’s ‘other’ deployments: ‘Including troops in Northern Ireland there are seventy-four thousand men – and women in auxiliary, supporting and increasingly, technical roles – based in the British Isles of whom approximately twenty-three thousand five hundred men are in front line combat units at varying levels of operational readiness and preparedness. The majority of these men are in units resting, training, re-forming or assimilating new equipment. For example, the 4th Tank Regiment is undergoing familiarisation with the new Chieftain main battle tank in Wiltshire and Dorset.’
