CHAPTER EIGHT
If ever there was a clash of personalities in all the arguments and wrangles that there had been down the years, it was here and now, between the Defence Secretary and the First Sea Lord. To John Nott, Sir Henry Leach was the archetypal Nelsonian admiral, who would no doubt have been in his element on the deck of a ship in battle, but who was essentially a throwback, unbending in his view of the Navy and its place in the world – frankly, the worst kind of admiral. To the First Sea Lord, John Nott was equally the worst combination, both a politician and the archetypal cold, calculating, impervious accountant.
Certainly, Henry Leach had the Navy in his blood. From the moment he was born in 1923, his father, John, a naval officer himself, was in no doubt that his son would join the Navy. And so it was.
Henry Leach was still a Dartmouth cadet when the Second World War broke out. His first ship would have been the brand new battleship HMS Prince Of Wales. But, when his father was appointed the ship’s commanding officer, that had to change. John Leach would be Prince Of Wales’ captain throughout her short, tempestuous career. He would be on the bridge when she duelled the German battleship Bismarck in the Denmark Strait, and would watch in disbelief when the battle-cruiser Hood exploded before his eyes. He and his ship would convey Winston Churchill to his secret rendezvous with President Franklin D Roosevelt off Newfoundland in August 1941, at which the two leaders would agree the Atlantic Charter that would form the foundation of the post-war international system. Churchill and Leach Senior obviously hit it off. ‘I took a great liking to our captain, Leach,’ the Prime Minister wrote. ‘A charming and lovable man and all that a British sailor should be. ’1
But Churchill would also be instrumental in the decision that sealed Captain Leach’s fate. Father and son were to meet four months later in far-off Singapore. It would be their last encounter. Prince Of Wales and the elderly battle-cruiser Repulse had arrived as Force Z, a highly-publicized show of force in the Far East, amid growing concerns about the threat from Japan. The group should have included the aircraft carrier Indomitable, to provide air cover, but she had been damaged after running aground in the West Indies, and no replacement was available. Whether her presence would have decisively altered the fate of Force Z will never be known. Captain Leach and hundreds of others were lost when Prince Of Wales and Repulse succumbed to a Japanese air onslaught. It was a terrible personal loss for young Henry. He would later rationalize the whole operation as ‘a classic example of political expediency leading to the misapplication of too little force too late’. 2
Henry Leach was to play a small part in Royal Navy history himself before the war was over. By now a young lieutenant, he was in charge of the four 14-inch guns of ‘A’ turret aboard the battleship Duke Of York, a sister ship to Prince Of Wales, when she encountered the German battle-cruiser Scharnhorst on that dark, cold, stormy Boxing Day of 1943, and pounded her to destruction in the last such big-gun surface action by a British battleship.
Thirty-eight years later, he was now standing at the summit of the naval establishment. Henry Leach certainly had an old-fashioned sense of what was right and proper, as well as a very clear-cut perception of what was right and wrong. He also had, to some, a rather stiff and forbidding air, and the bearing of a man out of his time. Others certainly saw a gentleman of the old school, and someone of great courtesy and charm, and they respected his deep attachment to his Service and his fighting spirit, even in the context of the corridors of Whitehall. Most of those who knew him well had a deep affection for him and what he represented. And he had enormous experience on his side.
The frustrations of the two chief protagonists in this tussle were soon bubbling over.
Nott was frustrated at what he saw as the refusal of the Naval Staff, led by Leach, to co-operate. Henry Leach was angry that John Nott appeared to have his mind made up, and would refuse to listen. And the First Sea Lord was not going to do the Defence Secretary’s dirty work for him. Each was clearly dismissive, and even disdainful, of the other’s methods and mind-set.
In this angry atmosphere, the chiefs of staff seemed unable to reach any kind of consensus position. None of them were eager to co-operate with the new Defence Secretary, or saw much military justification for further defence cuts. Some of the old inter-service antagonisms, especially between the Navy and the RAF, bubbled to the surface. But it seemed pretty clear pretty soon that it was the Navy that was most in the line of fire. That was where John Nott saw that he had room for political manoeuvre, and it was the Navy’s budget that seemed most overblown.
When he did not get the responses that he was looking for from the services, John Nott turned to his own civil servants and scientific advisers. And to him and his team, the Navy’s views of strategy, and how an East-West conflict might unfold, were out of step with how the rest of NATO saw things. It had come as a shock to Nott when he had arrived at the Ministry of Defence to discover how thin the Alliance’s defensive line on the Central Front was, and in particular how few days it would take before its stockpiles of ammunition in Europe would be exhausted and it would face the prospect of having to ‘go nuclear’ to stem a Warsaw Pact tide of advance, raising huge doubts about the transatlantic reinforcement issue.
Henry Leach and his fellow admirals were faced with the same challenge as a generation of predecessors. The Navy argument, of course, was that the war would not necessarily be short, indeed that wars rarely follow a predicted course, and that to prepare only for a short conflict would critically weaken the West and undermine its options and its chances of maintaining an effective deterrence strategy. It would, in effect, be to plan for defeat.
The other, related argument was a more technical one, over how best to organize any kind of maritime defence. In this regard, Henry Leach’s irritation was directed as much at John Nott’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Ronald Mason, as it was at the Defence Secretary himself. Mason did not minimize the Soviet maritime challenge. On the contrary, his view was that, such was the scale of the Soviet submarine, missile, and air threats in the north-eastern Atlantic now, that the Navy’s cherished ASW task forces centred on ships like Invincible would essentially be sitting ducks in the face of what would be a hail of Soviet weaponry. The better option was a barrier defence of the GIUK gap with more emphasis on submarines and land-based maritime patrol aircraft like the RAF’s Nimrod, and more money for better torpedoes, since it was doubtful that the Navy’s current weapons could even hit the Russians’ deepest-diving submarines.
In Nott’s mind, the thrust of his review was clear. The Army and the RAF would have to bear some cuts, but the bulk would fall on the Navy. It would mark a strategic shift. The maritime commitment was, in effect, to be demoted in the country’s list of defence priorities. This and Ronald Mason’s scientific analysis would be the basis for a significant cut in the Navy’s surface fleet, the ending of the mid-life modernization programme, and this permitted also big savings in dockyard support. And one of the carriers would have to go. That was the way that the financial numbers would be made to add up. And, in John Nott’s view, with fewer refits, the actual available numbers of ships would not fall as much as the overall figures suggested.
Nott’s own thoughts had crystallized during a visit to the United States in March. He and his key staff stopped off in Bermuda on the way back. It was there that they began drafting the document that would be the foundation for his review, and it would become infamous in naval circles at the time as the ‘Bermudagram’. The final document, just ten pages long, was dated 16 March 1981.
Essentially, it revealed the Defence Secretary’s hand and thinking. It declared that the ideas contained in it ‘may seem radical but taken as a whole they are designed to be a source of future strength [emphasis in the original] to defence. We are all agreed that we cannot go on as we are. ’
But it was all set in the conventional Whitehall and NATO mind-set on the strategy for handling an East-West conflict. And thus it was what most of the Navy had feared. Although there was much bitter argument to come, what was set down in outline here was what would emerge in public three months later. There were adjustments for the RAF, and some reductions for the Army ‘which will just permit the Brussels Treaty strengths to be fulfilled’.
As for Britain’s maritime effort in the eastern Atlantic and the Channel, ‘that should concentrate on the deployment and protection of ballistic missile submarines with free access to their bases, the security of our continental reinforcement ports and, in conjunction with the United States Navy, the disruption of Soviet maritime activity with the aim of containing it north of the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap. This will have to be at the expense of UK effort in the direct protection of reinforcement shipping …’
There should, the memo went on, ‘be a sharp change of direction in our surface ship plans reflecting the switch away from direct defence and the protected convoy. ’ There was not yet the firm intention to sell one of the Invincibles, but a clear hint that they were no longer at the heart of John Nott’s vision of the future, but were seen more as part of ‘an imaginative and positive look at our naval role outside the Eastern Atlantic and Channel in peacetime including, for example, limited deployment of the new Invincible class ships, in a wider role alongside the United States Navy.’ The Royal Marine Commandos would be retained, but ‘no provision is to be made for specialist amphibious shipping’.
John Nott and his civil servants would always insist that they had taken great account of the Navy’s arguments, but they had been encouraged by chinks in its armour. During that March visit to the United States, Nott returned convinced that the US Navy had left the Royal Navy behind in its view of how the defence of shipping across the Atlantic would be conducted. The Americans’view, at least as far as John Nott’s civil servants saw it, was that there would be fewer convoys, and therefore less need for convoy escorts.
And then there were the perceived differences within the Royal Navy’s own senior ranks. Nott and his staff saw a marked difference in outlook between most of the admirals in Whitehall and the leadership at the Navy’s operational headquarters in Northwood. They believed that the then C-in-C Fleet, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, himself a submariner, was more sympathetic to the barrier defence case, and the greater emphasis on submarines and maritime patrol aircraft. If a choice had to be made for the sake of saving money, then that was the one that he would make, even if he would not say so in public.
Fieldhouse was known to love his submarines. But he would also complain later, as First Sea Lord, about ‘sea blindness’, an inability to understand the importance of maritime affairs in modern Britain, and especially in Whitehall. And he would be an active proponent of the need to maintain an ‘out-of-area’ capability beyond NATO, for which he saw great need for big aviation ships like the Invincibles.
However, another who confessed some sympathy for the arguments was Fieldhouse’s predecessor at Northwood, Admiral Eberle, who had gone on to be the Commander-in-Chief, Naval Home Command. Earlier, in the mid 1970s, he had been the flag officer in charge of carriers and amphibious ships, when the Royal Navy still had the old Ark Royal, and so could contribute a proper strike carrier group to NATO. But he had doubts about NATO’s whole maritime approach at this time, and wondered if carriers were more of a liability than an asset, especially the British ones. He was more concerned about the anti-submarine effort, and the GIUK Gap, than the carriers. 3 And there were others, too, who looked at the Navy and worried that it was trying to do too much, and felt that something had to go.
For Henry Leach, it was a maddening irony that the Navy was being accused of backward and closed thinking, when to him it was clearly the scale of the British military contribution on the Central Front, agreed thirty years previously, that was the anachronism and anomaly. But it was enshrined in a treaty, and the government had rejected the idea of attempting to tamper with it as part of a wider NATO reform. In his minutes and memorandums, which he sent all the way up to 10 Downing Street, he tried to press home what he saw as the magnitude of the implications of what was being proposed: a historic unbalancing of the Royal Navy that would significantly reduce both Britain’s and NATO’s military options and would seriously lower the nuclear threshold in Europe.
He decided that he had to seek a meeting with Margaret Thatcher, which was his prerogative as a Chief of Staff. After some delays, an appointment was agreed. John Nott suggested that the First Sea Lord should go alone. But Henry Leach, while appreciating the thought behind the suggestion, insisted that the Defence Secretary should be there too.
Margaret Thatcher received the two men rather coldly, Henry Leach felt. The First Sea Lord put forward his proposition, that what was really needed was a redeployment of the British Army of the Rhine. He also argued that the thrust of John Nott’s proposals had been rushed, and that the alternatives had not been properly considered.
It was to no avail. On 25 June 1981, John Nott published his defence white paper, officially designated Cmnd 8288, and entitled ‘The Way Forward’. In terms of detail, only two instead of three of the new Invincible-class carriers would be kept in service, with a greater emphasis on their possible usefulness for out-of-area operations beyond NATO. The number of operational destroyers and frigates would come down from around sixty-five to forty-two, with a further eight in reserve. The two amphibious assault ships would go. And, among a list of other seemingly peripheral savings, the ice patrol ship HMS Endurance would be withdrawn. Chatham dockyard was to be closed, and Portsmouth run down. The Navy’s manpower would be cut by between 8, 000 and 10, 000. Much was made of the fact that the number of nuclear-powered Fleet submarines would continue to rise to a total of seventeen, although that was just one above the existing plan.
It was, by any measure, a very significant pruning. The nod towards an out-of-area role was the smallest of small consolations. Henry Leach was seething. But what would he do?
As the Nott review unfolded, the Navy Minister, Keith Speed, had become increasingly uneasy and frustrated, not least because he felt that he was being excluded from much of the deliberation. When, at a constituency meeting, he made a speech which seemed at odds with the policy that was evolving, he was asked to resign. When he refused, Margaret Thatcher dismissed him. He was given a hero’s send-off by the Navy department at the Ministry of Defence, and was personally escorted from the building for the last time by the First Sea Lord. He would be the last Navy Minister. Margaret Thatcher would scrap the post, and those for the other single services as well.
Should Henry Leach resign? He had fought, but he had lost. He was conscious that David Luce’s resignation fifteen years earlier had caused barely a ripple in the body politic. Times, and people’s attention, he thought, had moved on again since then. Leach believed that, if he had resigned, even if the entire Admiralty Board had gone with him, and he thought it might, it would have been a futile gesture. Equally importantly, he felt that resignations were for matters of honour, personal indiscretions or failures, and not for professional disagreements.
One enigma in all of this was the position of the then Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin. He was respected on both the civilian and uniformed sides of Whitehall. He was in a difficult position, since the Chief of the Defence Staff had little real bureaucratic clout at this time, and yet the other chiefs were clearly at odds with each other and with their ministerial boss. Some of John Nott’s advisers would hint that Lewin was probably more sympathetic to their predicament and their proposals than Henry Leach had been. But Lewin had been one of the architects of the concept of the Navy that these new measures were calling into question. Some in the Navy clearly felt that he could have done more to support the Naval Staff.
Might things have been different if there had been someone wilier and more willing than Henry Leach to play the political game? It might have made a marginal difference. But the overall strategic, political, and economic parameters had been largely set. If money had to be saved, it had to come from somewhere, and there seemed – in John Nott’s view – to be only one place where it could come from. The thrust of John Nott’s thinking would probably have been the same, whoever the First Sea Lord or the Admiralty Board had been at the time. And the same differences of perspective within the Navy would have been there to be exploited whoever was the First Sea Lord. Nott and his advisers clearly saw these differences as a weakness. But no institution like the Navy is a monolith. The Conservative government at the time was certainly not either. There has always, in that sense, been more than one Royal Navy, just as there is more than one US Navy.
The fact is that there were very different philosophies and outlooks at work here. John Nott saw the role of the Navy, at this time in history, in a very specific and narrow way. For admirals like Henry Leach – and probably Terence Lewin as well – the whole point of the Navy, and the value of maritime power to a country like Britain, was about something completely different. It was about keeping political and military options open, in both the NATO context and beyond, not narrowing or even closing them, as they believed the Nott formula did.
Perhaps the timing, again, was against everyone concerned. Just as the Navy was being forced to change course again, developments and events elsewhere were propelling maritime thinking in a different direction. In the United States, in February 1981, just a month after John Nott became Defence Secretary, the combative John Lehman took office as Ronald Reagan’s Navy Secretary. He would quickly begin to question the assumptions about how much, or how little, sea power could contribute to the Western defence of Europe. He would describe the barrier defences of the GIUK Gap as ‘a sort of maritime Maginot Line’, as the Americans began to fashion a new, more aggressive US maritime strategy. It was perhaps the most eye-catching element of the Reagan build-up that was getting under way, not least the idea of turning the US fleet back into a 600-ship navy after a long decline of its own. The plan to reactivate and modernize four Second World War battleships was probably the most striking statement of intent.
But it was not just on the maritime front that things were moving. Just as John Nott was making his own judgements and calculations, army strategists and theorists in the United States were putting together a new concept that would become known as Air-Land Battle 2000. It formally emerged in March 1981, in the midst of the British review. In a few years it would be approved as a NATO doctrine called Follow-On Force Attack (FOFA). The idea was that the revolutions taking place in intelligence, surveillance, and targeting technology would allow the West to counter a Soviet attack with deep strikes at the enemy’s legions of reinforcements – the follow-on forces. That way, the theory went, NATO could decisively slow down a Soviet advance. Crucially for NATO’s navies, even in a purely Central Front scenario, that would buy time for the Alliance’s own transatlantic reinforcements to become a much more critical part of the East-West military equation.
Of course, the Reagan build-up – and the new forward US maritime strategy in particular – sparked their own controversies. The issue of the vulnerability of surface ships was also being at least as hotly debated in US defence circles as it was in British ones. And Ronald Reagan was not embarking on a plan for a 600-ship navy at the expense of the other US armed forces. He was putting more money into all of them. That was a level, and breadth, of commitment that Britain just could not contemplate. But it was still telling that, on each side of the Atlantic, the political establishments in London and Washington looked at the same problems of Western defence, and came up with radically different approaches with dramatically different effects. The United States was, of course a superpower, while Britain was still in the doldrums, politically and economically.
If the Naval Staff had been able to grasp some of this, it might have made a difference. As it was, the generalized case for British maritime power, as espoused by the Navy, did not seem to cut much more ice with John Nott than it had with Denis Healey.
And perhaps the Navy had lost its way somewhat as well, at least as far as actually putting its own vision into practice was concerned. If so, that had happened over a period in the 1970s, not just during the rushed few weeks in the spring and summer of 1981 when John Nott was putting his review together. It laid the Navy more open to the charge that its vision was not affordable, and could not be sustained by a country like Britain.
The Navy had embraced the concept of a largely defensive, ASW, NATO-orientated fleet to a great extent, plus enough spare capacity to retain some level of world-wide capability. If it had embraced some of the other options to deliver it earlier on, it might have had a more robust case to put to the Nott team, and thus lessened the blow. Cheaper helicopter carriers, for example, to supplement the Invincibles and get more of the crucial Sea Kings to sea might have made more sense than holding on to the Navy’s older, bigger, obsolescent destroyers. And maybe it should have embraced one of those cheaper frigate designs earlier and more eagerly. The warnings were already there, in the price tag of the Type 22s and the programme of gutting and filleting the Leanders at two-thirds the cost of a new ship.
It might have addressed the vulnerability issue more urgently and more flexibly as well. As all the world’s navies took stock of the shock destruction of the Eilat, the Royal Navy’s particular focus had been on the fact that the missiles which sank her had been fired by relatively small Egyptian patrol boats. So its main response was to arm its ship-borne helicopters with missiles of their own, in the hope that they could take on such patrol boats before they got in range. In terms of the wider anti-ship missile threat, the Navy was putting most its eggs in the very expensive basket of the Sea Wolf anti-missile missile. But it would never be able to afford to equip all its ships with this weapon.
However, a group of engineers in the United States decided that their response would be to marry an old idea with some new technology. They took a modern version of the Gatling gun, attached it to its own, very precise radar, and called it the Vulcan-Phalanx. It produced a weapon that could, with great accuracy, hose the air with shells in the path of oncoming missiles. The first experimental weapon was produced in 1973. It looked rather unassuming. Some would liken it to a Dalek from the Doctor Who television series, others to the dustbin-like robot, R2-D2, in the Star Wars films. But tests seemed to confirm its potency. By 1978, production had been agreed, and a US Navy warship was fitted with a first full system in 1980.
Tony Wolstenholme had pushed hard to have it fitted to Invincible. But, at this stage, Royal Navy interest seemed low. It certainly did not figure in the options that the working group finally considered when improvements were being studied for the third Invincible-class carrier, Ark Royal, while she was being built. It would have meant spending money, of course, but perhaps a digestible amount if there could have been savings elsewhere – perhaps even some of the savings that John Nott would impose, but in the context of a fleet more palatable to the admirals, and more capable overall.