by James Philip
A Line in the Sand
The Gulf War of 1964 – Part 1
By James Philip
Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2016. All rights reserved.
Cover Artwork concept by James Philip
Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design
Author’s Note
‘A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 – Part 1’ is Book 7 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62.
It is April 1964 in a World in which the ‘swinging sixties’ never happened.
Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are poised to pour down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers like wolves upon the fold. The Shah of Iran is dead, Tehran has been destroyed by a nuclear strike; in Iraq there had been a coup d’état and a bloody civil war has broken out. Only a handful of British tanks and a few thousand widely scattered Commonwealth troops around the oilfields of the Middle East stand between the Red Army and mastery of the Persian Gulf.
The whole Middle East is in turmoil. The Suez Canal is blocked; the British staging bases in Malta and Cyprus are wrecked and in America Congress has refused to ratify the US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty.
In the United States the overwhelming popular mood is one of ‘America First’. The ‘victory’ of the October War has never seemed more pyrrhic, or all the death, destruction and grief more futile than it does in the second week of April 1964. The beleaguered British and Commonwealth forces in and around the Persian Gulf must face the fact that the cavalry – in the form of the slowly rebuilding American military colossus – is not about to come to the rescue any time soon, if at all, ever again.
Faced with a war in the Persian Gulf that it has neither the materiel, or in some quarters the will to fight, the West – what remains of it after the disaster of the Cuban Missiles War of October 1962 – faces a humiliating, crushing catastrophe of a kind that will alter the balance of global geopolitical power for a generation.
Has the nightmare of the October War been in vain?
Only one thing is certain; the World is about to be turned upside down again.
The Timeline 10/27/62 – Main Series is:
Book 1: Operation Anadyr
Book 2: Love is Strange
Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules
Book 4: Red Dawn
Book 5: The Burning Time
Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses
Book 7: A Line in the Sand
Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon
Book 9: All Along the Watchtower (Available 2017)
Books in the Timeline 10/27/62 – USA Series exploring the American experience of Armageddon from an entirely American point of view are now available:
Timeline 10/27/62 – USA Series:
Book 1: Aftermath
Book 2: California Dreaming
Book 3: The Great Society
Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country (Available 31st December 2016)
Book 5: The American Dream (Available 2017)
* * *
To the reader: firstly, thank you for reading this book; and secondly, please remember that this is a work of fiction. I made it up in my own head. None of the fictional characters in ‘A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 – Part 1 – Book 7 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 Series’ - is based on real people I know of, or have ever met. Nor do the specific events described in ‘A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 – Part 1– Book 7 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 Series’ - have, to my knowledge, any basis in real events I know to have taken place. Any resemblance to real life people or events is, therefore, unintended and entirely coincidental.
The ‘Timeline 10/27/62 Series’ is an alternative history of the modern World and because of this real historical characters are referenced and in many cases their words and actions form significant parts of the narrative. I have no way of knowing if these real, historical figures would have spoken thus, or acted in the ways I depict them acting. Any word I place in the mouth of a real historical figure, and any action which I attribute to them after 27th October 1962 never actually happened. As I always state – unequivocally - in my Author’s Notes to my readers, I made it all up in my own head.
The books of the Timeline 10/27/62 series are written as episodes; they are instalments in a contiguous narrative arc. The individual ‘episodes’ each explore a number of plot branches while developing themes continuously from book to book. Inevitably, in any series some exposition and extemporization is unavoidable but I try – honestly, I do – to keep this to a minimum as it tends to slow down the flow of the stories I am telling.
In writing each successive addition to the Timeline 10/27/62 ‘verse’ it is my implicit assumption that my readers will have read the previous books in the series, and that my readers do not want their reading experience to be overly impacted by excessive re-hashing of the events in those previous books.
Humbly, I suggest that if you are ‘hooked’ by the Timeline 10/27/62 Series that reading the books in sequence will – most likely - enhance your enjoyment of the experience.
Contents
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Author’s Endnote
Other Books by James Philip
A Line in the Sand
The Gulf War of 1964 – Part 1
[Book 7 of the Timeline 10/27/62 Series]
By James Philip
Chapter 1
Monday 13th April 1964
RAF Faldingworth, Lincolnshire, England
After a wet and dreary, almost wintery weekend when dawn broke over Lincolnshire the sky was clear and the first rays of the morning Sun brightly illuminated the low-loaders queuing along the perimeter road. Several of the ugly vehicles were hauled by big Scammell tank transporters, including several of World War II vintage which had been recovered from half-forgotten mothball depo
ts after the October War.
The light of the new day fell across the fresh camouflage paint on the slab sides of the big tractors; and as each periodically fired up its engine clouds of acrid yellow grey smoke belched from their exhaust stacks, hazing the still Lincolnshire air.
The slow, methodical business of moving nuclear bomb components from dispersed sites across the old airfield to the assembly bunkers had continued unabated while the big transporters came and went for over a hundred hours now. Shifts of ordnance technicians and changes of the guard – eight hours on, eight hours off – succeeded one after the other until to the men and women of 92 Maintenance Unit, Faldingworth Nuclear Bomb Store (Permanent Ammunition Depot), night and day slowly merged into an unbroken, meaningless continuum. At regular intervals technical teams were escorted out to the concrete ‘hutches’ – small above ground ‘hardened’ structures where the fissile cores of individual weapons were stored – and returned to the big ‘Special Munitions’ assembly bunkers with their heavily shielded loads. Every hour, sometimes one, or perhaps, two warning alarms would sound, the great steel blast doors of the complex would roll open, and another bomb, or pair of bombs, would be unhurriedly, carefully trundled out to be gently hoisted onto the low-loader that had been summoned forward to bear it away to its designated ‘Forward Permanent Ammunition Dump’.
Most of the high-yield weapons were being sent to the FPADs – in former years, the modified ‘bomb dumps’ – at the RAF V-Bomber stations at Conningsby, Scampton and Wyton; while eleven low-yield, Hiroshima size bombs, were scheduled to be transported to the Royal Naval ‘Special Weapons Depot’ at Fort Nelson near Portsmouth for future deployment onboard the aircraft carriers HMS Ark Royal (currently in dockyard hands), HMS Eagle and HMS Hermes (both based in the Mediterranean).
At the gates to RAF Faldingworth each departing transporter would pick up an escort of machine-gun armed Land Rovers, Ferret armoured cars and at least one truck load of heavily armed infantrymen before setting off for its final destination. Striking out ahead of each convoy RAF Regiment detachments cleared all the roads, and units of the 4th Infantry Division, based in Lincolnshire continuously patrolled and ‘secured’ the countryside around all the routes between Faldingworth and the V-Bomber stations awaiting the deadly cargoes. Different security arrangements were being developed to transport the ‘Navy’s eggs’ south to Portsmouth in either a single large, or two smaller ‘fighting columns’.
RAF Faldingworth was in the eye of the approaching storm.
A State of Emergency had been declared within hours of the atrocities at RAF Brize Norton and at RAF Cheltenham a week ago; and one hundred and seven hours ago the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had unilaterally declared war on the Soviet Union.
RAF Faldingworth had come into existence as a decoy airfield called Toft Grange in July 1942. On completion it had become a Bomber Command satellite station of RAF Lindholme; between August 1943 and February 1944 hosting 1667 Heavy Conversion Unit. Then in the spring of 1944 the Lancasters of No. 300 (Polish) Squadron had taken up residence at Faldingworth, staying until the official disbandment of the Free Polish Air Force in 1946.
Although the old wartime airfield was unsuitable for the operation of the new generation of post-war fast jets, Faldingworth survived the disposal programs and various rationalizations of the late 1940s and 1950s as Bomber Command was re-shaped ahead of the formation of the V-Bomber Force.
Soon after No 92 Maintenance Unit had started operating at Faldingworth in 1948, the RAF had determined to concentrate its ordnance in a small number of strategically located depots - under a 1950 plan codenamed ‘Galloper’ - rather than in literally scores of local sites as had been the historic practice. The new ‘Permanent Ammunition Depots’ or PADs, would accommodate purpose built bunkers, assembly and handling facilities. It was initially envisaged that the new PADs would be at Binbrook, Conningsby, Waddington, Scampton, Hemswell and Faldingworth. However, it was one thing making a decision; another entirely implementing it. Between the original ‘staff decision’ in 1950 and the planned opening of Faldingworth and the other PADs, Britain had acquired nuclear weapons and it was belatedly appreciated that storing thousands of tons of conventional bombs on the same sites as the new ‘special weapons’ posed very obvious, and possibly insuperable problems. Safely storing and handling the new ‘special weapons’ like Blue Danube, the RAF’s first ‘homemade’ atomic bomb, required wholly different and vastly more complex skills and procedures than those appropriate to managing even the most advanced conventional munitions. Secrecy and security were paramount; and after much treasure had been wasted and large areas of countryside had been dug up to bury unnecessary and redundant concrete bomb dumps, plans for most of the Permanent Ammunition Depots were scaled back or quietly abandoned.
In the end the RAF had constructed only two ‘special weapons’ PADs; Faldingworth and a twin facility, located at Thetford Heath in Suffolk, known as RAF Barnham. The two PADs had ‘opened for business’ in 1957 and 1956 respectively. While Barnham had survived the October War physically intact, over half its personnel had died on the night of the war off base and many of the unfortunate survivors of the nearby Soviet air burst strike over what was otherwise rural East Anglia, had subsequently died of radiation sickness. In February, March and April last year Bomber Command had mounted a salvage operation to remove all remaining ‘nuclear stores’ from Barnham to Faldingworth, and to the pre-existing secure ‘on station special weapons bomb dump’ at RAF Scampton.
For most of the last year Faldingworth had accommodated a mixed inventory of Blue Danube and Red Beard tactical – Hiroshima-type free fall devices – and Yellow Snow city-killer bombs. In the dreadful jargon of these things, Blue Danube and Red Beard came in various ‘flavours’ with 15-kiloton and 25-kiloton warheads; and Yellow Sun in variants with a tested 400-500 kiloton, and an untested 1.1 megaton capacity. Until two months ago several American dual key bombs and missile warheads previously held at V-Bomber bases, had been stockpiled at Faldingworth but these had all been handed over to the US Air Force Radiological Materials Recovery Task Force based at Greenham Common near Newbury, under the terms of the ‘US-UK Mutual Assistance Treaty’ initialled in Washington in January.
Until the end of March 1964, No 92 Maintenance Unit had been systematically recovering, making safe and storing the bomb casings, the ‘physics packages’ and the fissile elements of over eighty percent of the United Kingdom’s entire nuclear arsenal. A major part of its work recently had been processing the consignment of over thirty warheads secretly brought back to England from the officially unacknowledged ‘special storage facility’ at Singapore in the holds of two modified merchant ships, and in the air-conditioned ‘special magazine compartments’ of the Ark Royal and the Hermes under cover of Operation Manna the previous autumn.
Just a week ago Faldingworth had been implementing plans to operate on a ‘long-term’ secure ‘care and maintenance’ level, involving the mothballing of one of the two ‘assembly bunkers’. Days before the outrage at Tehran, and notwithstanding Red Dawn’s nuclear strikes in the Mediterranean in early February, Margaret Thatcher’s government had issued revised ‘special weapons’ policy guidance directives to the RAF based on the assumption that another ‘all out’ nuclear exchange was ‘unlikely in the foreseeable future’. Therefore, henceforward the reduced V-Bomber Force and the Royal Navy’s ongoing nuclear ‘throw’ should be reduced to and maintained at a ‘prudent minimum deterrence level’ rather than a ‘first strike level’.
In practice this had meant that by mid-summer less than forty free fall weapons would be available for deployment at any one time; of which only ten Read Beard Mark I 15-kiloton, and ten Yellow Sun bombs with 400-kiloton Green Grass warheads should be immediately available to RAF bomber squadrons based in the United Kingdom. Under the new arrangements all Royal Navy-held nuclear weapons would be brought ashore to the two ‘secure depots’ at Fort Nelson in Hamps
hire and Rosyth in Scotland pending transfer to Faldingworth.
A week was a very long time in this brave new post-October War World. Now Faldingworth’s row upon row of squat, ugly fissile ‘Hutches’ were being methodically emptied, and its bomb assembly shops were working non-stop to enable the RAF and the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm to wage all-out nuclear war at the press of a button.
Chapter 2
Monday 13th April 1964
Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) Headquarters, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
Although Tehran was over six hundred and fifty miles away as the crow might fly from Dhahran, fifty-four year old Thomas Barger, the Chief Executive Officer of the Arabian American Oil Company, sensed the seismic shift beneath his feet as he stood looking out of the windows of his second floor office across Half Moon Bay towards Al Khobar – half lost in the mid-day heat haze – where he had first set foot in Arabia some twenty-six years ago.
The Cuban Missiles War had not directly touched Arabia; there had been no radioactive fallout clouds and bizarrely, in the first weeks and months after the cataclysm things had seemed oddly unchanged. However, lately the aftershocks had been arriving almost daily. One by one the old assumptions about the nature and reach of American power had been subtly undermined in Arabia in ways he feared had been largely discounted or dismissed out of hand back in the United States. Now the unthinkable had happened; the Soviets – whom the ‘best and the brightest’ in America had declared vanquished – had destroyed Tehran and had invested the mountains of Northern Iran. Whether the Red Army poured through the passes of the Zagros Mountains, out onto the plains below the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, or drove south across the great rocky plateau of central Iran mattered not one jot. In either case the oilfields of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, and the biggest refinery complex on the planet at Abadan in the south, and everything in between lay at the mercy of the Russians. Even if the Soviets only – and even this was an incalculably nightmarish ‘if’ – planned to capture the Iraqi and Iranian shores of the Persian Gulf, American hegemony and what little remained of European influence in the Middle East was about to disappear in a huge oily cloud of smoke.