Lord Healey CH MBE PC

ROYAL AIR FORCE HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL 31 (Incorporating the Proceedings of the Bomber Command Association’s 60th Anniversary Symposium) 2 The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the contributors concerned and are not necessarily those held by the Royal Air Force Historical Society. Photographs credited to MAP have been reproduced by kind permission of Military Aircraft Photographs. Copies of these, and of many others, may be obtained via http://www.mar.co.uk First published in the UK in 2004 by the Royal Air Force Historical Society All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing. ISSN 1361 4231 Typeset by Creative Associates 115 Magdalen Road Oxford OX4 1RS Printed by Advance Book Printing Unit 9 Northmoor Park Church Road Northmoor OX29 5UH 3 CONTENTS RECOLLECTIONS OF A SECRETARY OF STATE FOR 4 DEFENCE – The Rt Hon The Lord Healey CH MBE PC HOW DECISIVE WAS THE ROLE OF ALLIED AIR POWER 17 IN THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC, 1941-1945? by Sqn Ldr S I Richards SUMMARY OF THE MINUTES OF THE SEVENTEENTH 47 ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING HELD IN THE ROYAL AIR FORCE CLUB ON 10 JUNE 2003 FEEDBACK 51 DEREK WOOD – AN OBITUARY 55 BOOK REVIEWS 56 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BOMBER COMMAND 82 ASSOCIATION 60TH ANNIVERSARY SYMPOSIUM HELD AT THE RAF MUSEUM, HENDON ON 12 OCTOBER 2002 UNDER THE CHAIRMANSHIP OF AIR MSHL SIR JOHN CURTISS KCB KBE 4 RECOLLECTIONS OF A SECRETARY OF STATE FOR DEFENCE The Rt Hon The Lord Healey CH MBE PC I should perhaps start by saying that there is no specific theme to what I have to say. I was invited to speak in general terms about my time at the MOD and what follows amounts to a kaleidoscope of impressions. As the Chairman said in his introduction, I took over at Defence in October 1964, somewhat to my surprise, I have to say, but very much to my pleasure. As I drove down from Leeds, where I had been fighting my seat, I heard that Khrushchev had been forced to resign. By the time I had reached London I had also learned that China had exploded her first nuclear weapon. It looked as if I was going to be in for a very interesting time, and so it was. I did six years at the job and there is much to be said for such a lengthy involvement. After three years in post, I was, as is usual, offered the opportunity to move to another position, but I knew that if I stayed for another three years I would actually know more than any of the people who would be advising me, because you poor chaps never get more than three years in the job. That may be more fun than staying put for six years, of course, but I think that we do pay a price in terms of lack of continuity. Being Secretary of State for Defence was by far the most enjoyable period of my political career. It took me to exotic places which I would never otherwise have had a chance of seeing, like the long valley of the Hadramaut in Southern Arabia and the jungles of Borneo. But, above all, I met people, in all the Services, and Civil Servants, with whom it was a real pleasure to work. There were two key personalities when I arrived at the Department. The first was Dickie Mountbatten, who served his last year in post as CDS with me. He was a brilliant, but extremely vain, man, and not all that easy to get on with, although we remained friends until he died. The other was his scientific adviser, Solly Zuckerman, who again remained a friend for life. But of all the Servicemen I met, the people I got on best with and liked the most were those of the RAF. In my opinion, the most outstanding airman in my time was Neil Cameron. He was the RAF member of my Programme Evaluation Group – do any of you remember the PEG? It was a group of very able middle 5 rank officers who were required to take an overall ‘defence’ view and thus to think completely independently of their parent Services. That very nearly cost Neil his career, because, after he left that job, the RAF simply wouldn’t promote him. He saw no future in the rest of his career until, quite by accident, I met Andrew Humphrey, an air marshal at the time, walking down Whitehall and explained the problem. He said that he would certainly do something about it, and he did. As a result, Neil went on to become Chief of the Air Staff and finally Chief of the Defence Staff; he was an outstandingly able man, who tragically died of cancer only a few years after leaving the air force. There were many others who remained friends for the rest of my life. Nebby Wheeler was one; Sir Freddie, of course. Paddy Coulcher, who was actually a little after my time, was another, and one of my best friends was Sam Elworthy, who was CAS for much of my time at the Ministry, although we rather lost touch when he went home to New Zealand after leaving the Service. The biggest problem I had to face when I took over was funding, because the Cabinet decided that they were going to have to cut defence spending very heavily. That made life very difficult, of course, both for me and for everybody in the Services. I recall that when I used to talk to Staff Colleges I always started off by saying that I felt like the Indian Chief who, at the beginning of a very hard winter, called his tribesmen together and said, ‘Now boys, I’ve two bits of news for you, one bad, the other good. The bad news is that there’s going to be nothing to eat this winter except buffalo shit, and the good news is that there’s going to be plenty of it around.’ And so, indeed, there was! The one thing that I absolutely insisted on – something which was immensely unpopular with the Foreign Office, of course – was that we could not cut defence spending unless we cut commitments as well. I had a terrific inter-Departmental fight with the Foreign Office over this, but, in practical terms, the eventual outcome meant ending our military role east of Suez. In truth there had been very little real point in our holding on to our colonial possessions east of Suez, because ever since 1870 it had actually been costing us more to be there than we earned by being there. In many cases withdrawal was strongly opposed by the local governments because the presence of British 6 Forces had acted as a stabilising factor. But the 1960s saw movements for national independence beginning to get a grip and the British troops who had been seen as a stabilising influence at the beginning of the decade gradually began to be perceived as an irritant. As such, their presence became increasingly provocative and, in the main, the local people wanted to be rid of them. I decided that the sensible thing to do, because this was still the middle of the Cold War of course, would be to concentrate our Forces in Europe and to withdraw most of those still stationed in the Middle and Far East. It was a very, very painful job, but I insisted on doing it, providing we got rid of the associated commitments at the same time, and we did. Under the prevailing circumstances, all of this was, I believe, inevitable but it was a very difficult time for the Services and, of course, for me as Defence Secretary. Following on from the withdrawal, I had to make another painful decision, which was to do away with our big aircraft carriers. Indeed I had actually ordered the next one, CVA-01, myself. Since we no longer had troops stationed east of Suez, however, it was very difficult to justify the retention of the big carriers and they had to go. It later turned out, of course, that we were wrong, because most of our active fighting in recent years has been in relatively small campaigns, east of Suez and elsewhere, in which we did need carriers, perhaps not big ones like the CVA-01, but at least the ‘through-deck cruisers’, the first of which was actually ordered during my time. They have, I think, proved to be of immense value in permitting air power to be made available – in small numbers, of course – but we were not fighting the Russians or the Germans. This sort of thinking could be extended to other kinds of heavy equipment. Except for a World War, it could be argued, for example, that we didn’t really need tanks; armoured personnel carriers were likely to be of more practical use. But all of this has to be seen against the backdrop provided by nuclear weapons. I had been fascinated by nuclear weapons ever since the first bombs were exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war. I was absolutely delighted at this development because I had been in Combined Ops in the Mediterranean and was fully expecting to be sent out to the Far East to go ‘island hopping’ across the Pacific. To find that this problem had suddenly disappeared was a sheer delight! 7 Lord Healey considered the, almost bloodless, Confrontation with Indonesia to have been his most successful enterprise.

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