A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 1 (Timeline 10/27/62)

by James Philip

  Margaret Thatcher had aware that certain members of the Kennedy Administration had never supported the US-UK Mutual Defence Treaty, and that others close to the President were getting ‘cold feet’ about it. However, when Jack Kennedy had offered to come to England to ‘iron out’ recent ‘local difficulties’ she had taken this as a token of good faith on his part. Likewise, the visit of General Johnson to set up a ‘skeleton headquarters staff’ in England ahead of the formal announcement that, in due course, he would take over as Commander-in-Chief of All Allied Forces in the Mediterranean. Presciently, several of her own ministers, notably Tom Harding-Grayson her Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins and Barbara Castle, her fiery Labour Minister had said aloud what many of her confidants took for granted; that ‘putting all the United Kingdom’s eggs in any kind of American basket is a mistake’.

  Although she had been disappointed that the Kennedy Administration was reluctant to discuss matters ahead of the visit other than in terms of generalities, a week ago she had genuinely hoped for the best and secretly prepared herself for the worst. In hindsight the ‘worst’ had turned out to be unimaginably bad.

  In less than an hour last Monday everything had changed. The atrocities at Brize Norton and Cheltenham, both perpetrated by terrorists using modern state of the art equipment sourced from US military arsenals, the body blow of the news from the Middle East and the confusion in the immediate aftermath of the downing of the two jets had briefly paralysed the machinery of government.

  Special Air Mission 26000, the President’s aircraft, had landed away at RAF Conningsby; and the plane bringing members of the government of the Irish Republic to England had been instructed to turn around and had flown straight back to Ireland...

  There was a quiet knock at the door.

  “Come!”

  Sir Henry Tomlinson, the greying, tired-eyed Head of the Home Civil Service and Secretary to the Cabinet of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom – UAUK - entered the former Don’s rooms. As always he had a large hard back notebook under his arm.

  “Cabinet has assembled, Prime Minister,” he informed her. “And awaits your convenience.”

  “Thank you, Sir Henry.”

  The older man - he was in his sixties and she still only thirty-eight – viewed his Prime Minister with a quiet, almost fatherly pride. Notwithstanding that the recent disasters had taken a heavy physical toll on her, or that not even her immaculate coiffure or marvellously presented matching blue top and skirt over a pure cream blouse could mask her near exhaustion she was undoubtedly in control, and magnificently unbowed.

  The Cabinet Secretary held out a hand for his Prime Minister to steady herself. Margaret Thatcher might project an image of indestructibility; he knew that she was anything but. Less than a fortnight ago she had lost the man she loved – Admiral Sir Julian Christopher – and every day since it seemed some new disaster had befallen British arms or prestige, with each successive body blow further undermining her grip on the premiership and the nation’s place in a World that was ever more horribly dangerous.

  “What are the papers saying about the Cabinet reshuffle?” Margaret Thatcher inquired brusquely as she cautiously stood up, attempting to find her balance without provoking fresh waves of pain from her damaged lower back.

  “Very little,” Sir Henry Tomlinson said. “The ‘Irish measures’ seem to be attracting the most attention.”

  “Hum!” The Prime Minister sighed.

  Since neither the Kennedy Administration nor the Government of the Irish Republic thought that smuggling advanced weapons across the North Atlantic to enable ‘criminals’ to shoot down aircraft in England was a big thing; the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom - the UAUK - had taken steps to ensure that in future both would understand exactly how big a thing it was!

  One hundred and eighty-nine people – one hundred and forty-seven men, thirty-six women and six – three boys and three girls under age of ten – children had been killed in last Monday’s terrorist outrages. There had to be consequences or those complicit in those ‘war crimes’ would go on to commit further, heinous atrocities in the name of their godforsaken cause. Margaret Thatcher felt personally responsible for ensuring that there were consequences.

  This was not the time for half measures.

  One. As of midnight yesterday the trans-shipment of goods of any description to ports or airports or by road from the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic was absolutely prohibited.

  Two. The United Kingdom had asserted the absolute right to stop and search any vehicle, aircraft or vessel at sea on route to, or suspected to be on route to the Irish Republic.

  Three. Diplomatic relations with the Irish Republic had been suspended indefinitely.

  Four. In the absence of effective action by the Irish Republic the United Kingdom reserved the right to strike at – after the event or pre-emptively in self-defence - and destroy, without let, hindrance or notice ‘terrorist’ targets within the Irish Republic.

  Two days ago a third terrorist, a former British army non-commissioned officer, had been captured in Gloucestershire. The man had been living rough in the country. When cornered he had tried to kill himself but only succeeded in shooting off most of his right ear.

  Margaret Thatcher had authorised the use of ‘special interrogation techniques’ on all three IRA men in custody. It was the first time she had signed off on torture but she had done it without a qualm.

  “Via the Swedish legation the Irish Prime Minister is claiming that our quote ‘Imperialist bully boy tactics amount to a blockade and that it will inevitably lead to a second great famine,” Sir Henry Tomlinson declared, his tone blandly neutral.

  “Well,” Margaret Thatcher huffed irritably, “he should have thought about that before he allowed the IRA to embark on a proxy war in support of his party’s avowedly ‘United Ireland’ platform!”

  The Cabinet Secretary would have reminded his Prime Minister that although the Irish Taoiseach’s Fianna Fáil party did in fact still publicly pay lip service to the goal of reuniting the six counties of Ulster with the twenty-six counties of the south, it no more wanted to actually attempt to govern the north than it wanted to discredit itself with its natural constituency by going to war with the IRA. However, right now the Prime Minister’s emotions regarding the person of her Irish counterpart, former IRA man Sean Lemass were too raw, and the feelings abroad in the country were too febrile for the voice of reason to have any chance of prevailing. Perhaps, there would be time later when reason might have a chance to be heard?

  Privately, Sir Henry Tomlinson was a little surprised, and enormously relieved that the extraordinary force of nature that was Margaret Thatcher, had – for all her faults and inexperience in government – firmly vetoed any ‘loose talk’ of immediate military action, or reprisals, against the Irish Republic.

  In this troubled age a wise man was always thankful for small mercies.

  Chapter 4

  Monday 13th April 1964

  Hall of the People, Sverdlovsk

  Fifty-eight year old Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian was the last of the hastily called conference’s participants to arrive; having flown up from the Advanced Headquarters of Army Group South at Ardabil in Azerbaijani Iran that morning at first light.

  As his Mil Mi-6 helicopter had rattled over the miraculously intact city of Sverdlovsk from the airport, Babadzhanian had secretly wondered how long the Yankees and the British would leave this untouched place and others, like Chelyabinsk to the south unbombed. It now seemed likely that had the collective leadership – with whom he was meeting that afternoon – authorised a second city-killer strike on Baghdad after the destruction of Tehran that Kennedy, and or, his lackeys the British, would have attempted to complete the work they had left unfinished in the Cuban Missiles War.

  The other thing he wondered about; and this was a thing that was probably giving the collective lead
ership more than a little pause for thought, was why the Americans had let that woman be the one to issue the ultimatum?

  ‘The Soviet leadership is hereby given notice that any further use of nuclear weapons by it, its allies or its proxies will result in an all out strike by the United Kingdom against the forces of the Soviet Union and any surviving concentrations of population or industry within the former territories of the Soviet Union, or in any territories deemed to now be under Soviet control.’

  There was no mention of Yankee B-52s or missiles standing ready in their invulnerable silos in the American Midwest.

  Just: ‘RAF bombers stand ready at the end of their runways at four minutes notice to go to war. Other RAF bombers are airborne at this time ready to strike within minutes of the receipt of the order to attack!’

  Babadzhanian did not speak English. However, he had listened to the woman deliver her message a dozen times; trying to learn what lay beneath the words. Although he did not understand the words she was saying – other than in the translation, obviously – he completely understood the unbending steel in that woman’s voice.

  While both his armies - 3rd Caucasus Tank Army on the right and 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army on the left, and his Army Group mobile artillery – were equipped with a small number of tactical, essentially battlefield nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union, what was left of it, no longer possessed a viable strategic first strike strategic option. Apart from a couple of dozen turboprop Tu-95s and a handful of operational jet Myasishchev M-4 Molot long range bombers the Red Air Force had no means of attacking the continental United States of America. Although some kind of attack might be mounted against the British, all the available intelligence suggested that the United Kingdom retained a functioning air defence system, so even this ‘option’ was to all intents, theoretical and therefore not to be trusted. Possessing nuclear weapons was no use unless you could use the damned things!

  This was clearly not a problem for the British or for the Americans. In the last seventy-two hours RAF V-Bombers had moved into position at Malta, Cyprus and at Dhahran in Saudi Arabia.

  Babadzhanian did not believe for a single moment that the Red Air Force’s claims to have rebuilt ‘an impregnable umbrella of radars, missiles and fighters’ over the ‘home cities of Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk’ was worth a bucket of bear shit!

  The Yankees and the British did not need to waste missiles on what was left of the Mother Country, they could simply fly across it and bomb it a will!

  Besides, somebody somewhere had had to call time on the madness.

  Of the great cities of the Soviet Union only Sverdlovsk, until 1924 Yekaterinburg, remained. Many towns and smaller cities elsewhere had survived the Cuban Missiles War, but Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk and all the others ‘great’ cities were seas of rubble. That places like Odessa on the Black Sea coast, and areas of the southern Republics, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan survived, or that towns and bases in the wilderness of the Siberian steppes, or that places like Tomsk or Barnaul had escaped the war, mattered little because at least two-thirds of the pre-war population of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had been consumed by the fires and practically everywhere there had been famine and disease, and unspeakable hardships beyond sane comprehension. That, after all, was why the decision had been taken to fight on; to wrest back something of that which had been lost, to seize and hold clean, unburned land with sufficient natural resources to be able, someday to alleviate the catastrophic situation of the Mother Country.

  Sverdlovsk’s population had been around eight hundred thousand before the war, since then it had doubled. The surviving cities had become beacons for the survivors, each one an oasis in a cold, foodless, shattered landscape. Even though killer epidemics swept through the overcrowded city, and the daily food ration was barely enough to keep the young, the old and the infirm alive, the factories of what had been the Soviet Union’s fourth or fifth largest city had become the anvil upon which the first halting steps towards national reconstruction and rebirth had been hammered out the previous spring.

  Sverdlovsk had first become a centre of heavy industry under the Five Year plans of the 1930s. Later when Soviet industry was relocated east out of the reach of the advancing Germans in 1941 and 1942, the great Uralmash - an abbreviation of ‘Urals Machine-Building Plant’ – facility became the keystone of a massive expansion in national industrial capacity. During the Great Patriotic War Uralmash built blast furnaces, rolling mills, presses, cranes and drilling and drag-line equipment for the mining and metallurgical industries of the Urals and Siberia. Guns, armour plate, the hulls for tanks and self-propelled artillery poured out of the factories of Sverdlovsk. After that war, Uralmash was redesigned and rebuilt, and production had largely switched to peaceful outputs but always with the caveat that in the event of war, the factories would turn ploughshares back into swords. Thus Uralmash, having escaped the Cuban Missiles War, was now the grate smoking hub of the new Soviet Union’s war production. There had been arguments about further dispersal; in the end the concentration of all the Mother Country’s surviving eggs in the single basket of the Sverdlovsk-Chelyabinsk ‘undamaged zone’ had been the only way to ensure that at least two full strength mechanised armies could be put into the field, and as importantly, in theory at least, mechanically sustained for a sixty day campaign...

  Babadzhanian shivered at the thought that, if he or his comrades of the collective leadership made a single mistake, Sverdlovsk might go the way of Moscow, Kiev and all the other great cities of the motherland.

  Defence Minister Marshal of the Soviet Union sixty-four year old Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, stepped up to Babadzhanian and slapped him jovially on the shoulder. It was the first time the two men had met since Babadzhanian’s ‘battlefield’ promotion three days ago.

  “Cheer up, Comrade Marshal,” Chuikov observed, chuckling like a bear with an ulcer, his gnarled oddly cherubic features creasing this way and that as he smiled.

  Babadzhanian straightened to attention before the other members of the collective leadership, nodding respectful acknowledgments before stepping forward to shake hands and exchange the ritual kisses.

  The years were catching up with sixty year old Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin. His face had a grey hue and his eyes were rheumy, when he breathed his chest rattled and as soon as he had greeted the newcomer he sagged gratefully back into his seat at the over-large pine table aligned with one end of the rectangular hall.

  Fifty-seven year old Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was the de facto ‘chairman’ of the ruling triumvirate. Unlike his old friend Alexei Kosygin he was in good health, radiating bull-like strength and confidence. Throughout his career people had underestimated Brezhnev’s feral intellect and his innate political nous, and like every man who had risen through the Party during the Stalin years he was as tough as an ox and a born survivor.

  He and Kosygin were alike and superbly matched in that respect. Of the two Kosygin had been closer to Stalin, so close that he had daily feared for his life and never left home without updating his wife on what to say to the secret police – the NKVD in those days - if he failed to return, or if they knocked on the door in his absence. Brezhnev had been Nikita Khrushchev’s man, leapfrogging Kosygin in the Party pecking order in the years before the Cuban Missiles disaster; but both men were wise enough to put past differences and old suspicions behind them.

  “Comrade Alexei Nikolayevich and Comrade Leonid Ilyich,” Chuikov guffawed, “are nervous that the advance has stalled around Tabriz, Comrade Marshal?”

  Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had been born in Armenia. Chuikov was one of the few men alive who sometimes employed the Russian form of his name, Amazasp Khachaturovich Babadzhanyan, which he detested. For all that he was a soldier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics he was no Russian, proud of his ancient Armenian ancestry and his roots in a culture that pre-dated
the upstart ‘Russian’ interlopers of the last millennium. That today the Minister of Defence had not troubled to tease him was a good sign, confirming that no matter how panicked the civilians in the room were by the setbacks and delays in the Zagros Mountains, Chuikov was relaxed.

  “Tabriz is too heavily garrisoned to be taken by an airborne assault,” Babadzhanian stated. “Even if my airborne component had not been critically weakened by the Malta operation,” he paused, tempted to point out that he had objected to that ‘unnecessary diversion’ at the time, “I decided that the surviving elements 51st and 53rd Guards Airborne Regiments were better employed securing the lightly defended communications hub of Urmia. This blocking operation has been entirely successful and casualties thus far have been minimal. Leading elements of 3rd Caucasus Tank Army have now bottled up the weak Iranian force defending Qoshachay. A reconnaissance unit has patrolled twenty kilometres west of that town to the outskirts of Mahabad which is only lightly undefended. Mechanised units of 3rd Caucasus Tank Army will probably be in Piranshahr near the Iraqi border by the end of the week.”

  The Commander of Army Group South spoke with calm, detached professional assurance.

  “What about Tabriz?” Kosygin asked quietly.

  “The garrison has little or no armour or artillery. Iranian air activity is non-existent. Frankly, local partisan groups are giving my boys more problems in that sector than the troops inside the city. We control all the roads into the city. We have partially disrupted the city’s water supplies. 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army is now relieving 3rd Caucasus Tank Army, freeing it to resume the advance south. Once we have significant armour and sufficient logistical backup in depot at Mahabad, brigade-strength battle groups will be deployed west to the north of Dukan Lake and south to break through the Iraqi border defences opposite Erbil.”