Page 153 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

trade. This contretemps, evidently an attack launched upon a US destroyer by
North Vietnamese gunboats, seems in retrospect to have been a set-piece casus
bello that those of us who thought about it believed to be very odd, even at the
time. It may be recalled that the US Navy reported two attacks upon USS Maddox,
attacks which resulted in a single bullet-hole being found on the destroyer, and
little apparent damage to the gunboats. This ‘battle’ seemed so unlikely as to be
risible; I had seen enough US warships in Naples, Barcelona, and the UK to know
that US warships were well-armed and their crews highly trained. The North’s
navy, on the other hand, was tiny and comprised mainly motor gun-boats, vessels
quite incapable of taking on a modern destroyer with heavy guns, aerial support
and great manoeuvrability. It would seem that even now the actual events have
not been fully revealed, but this ‘action’ permitted the US to escalate the War
and, eventually, suffer a fate reminiscent of Dien Bien Phu. Perhaps it was ‘the
fog of war’, but it seemed more a signal of the perfidy of the United States. Harold
Wilson was right to keep out of the mess.

A straight and rapid run across the Indian Ocean, as usual, ended in Aden.
However, this charmless place had further deteriorated; an uprising against
British rule had escalated, perhaps partly on account of neighboring Oman’s civil
war, a conflict arising because of its senescent ruler’s antipathy to anything that
he thought modernising occurring in his antiquated land (he reigned under a
decrepit British suzerainty), or, more likely, because of the Nasser’s virulent pan-
Arabist policies. There had recently been sporadic unrest in Aden, particularly
in ‘The Crater’, and as a consequence all members of the crew were prohibited
from going ashore (no great loss, it should be said). Parenthetically, it seems
in retrospect absurd for Britain to even bother with the ‘hold onto the empire’
sensibility, Aden having lost all strategic importance to the Commonwealth
with the independence of South Asia. Indeed, though the situation got worse (as
will appear), British tenacity rapidly dissipated, much to the detriment of those
Aden-nationalists who sought independence, for envelopment by Yemen was the
all-too-foreseeable consequence. Indeed, the Law of Unintended Consequences
operated after escalation of the unrest in the following months; why is there no
comparable Law of Foreseeable Consequences?

My much more mundane concern when we arrived in Suez (which is a
virtually unvisited port other than for anchoring to await a suitable convoy) was
mail. Unfortunately, and probably because we were ahead of our posted schedule,
a problem unknown to Khyber, there was none there for me, and having sent a
‘reminder’ to Heidi about my 21st, I was anxious to see if my plans accorded with
hers; perhaps I would perforce have to spend the evening with the ever-reliable
Jacqueline … actually, a pleasing prospect.

The penultimate port was Le Havre. It was its usual drab self (although it
being December 4th the chances of it being anything else were, well, remote).

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