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

by James Philip

  Everybody really, really imagined she was finished at that point.

  She was not. Not quite yet.

  “Policeman of the World!” She said scathingly.

  There was a horrible silence.

  It was J. William Fulbright who eventually broke the unquiet quietness. He coughed and sat forward, resting his arms on the table. He sought out and held eye contact with Margaret Thatcher.

  “Just for the record the Argentine government is not at this time any kind of ‘client’ of this Administration, Prime Minister. President Francesconi’s government is completely beholden to the supposedly ‘moderate’ Blue faction of the Argentine military. The country is actually run by the Head of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, General Juan Carlos Onganía and by the Internal Affairs Minister, General Osiris Villegas. We have no control over these people and they do not listen to anything we have to say to them. There has been an embargo on military sales to the regime since the last coup back in the fall.” He spread his hands. “Speaking personally, I have a degree of sympathy with the, er, thrust of many of your observations. However, nobody has betrayed anybody here.”

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy had fallen silent.

  He rested his chin on his left hand.

  On that long ago inauguration day in January 1961 he had dreamed of what might be achieved in the next four years. He was a different man then, a young man still but not now. He had had the power to destroy the world but not to make all Americans equally free. He had had no power to stop madmen attempting to murder Martin Luther King on a public stage in Atlanta in February; no power to persuade an increasingly bucolic ‘America First’ Congress that there was a world beyond the boundaries of its debating chamber. Ultimately, he had had no power to extend the aid and succour that he yearned to offer to the infuriating, unique woman who had probably not yet finished berating him for his many and egregious transgressions. The reality was that even had he wanted to send US troops to the Middle East he had none to spare; the US Army was fully occupied holding the line in Chicago, rooting out insurgents in the Cascades and the length of the Rockies, attempting to keep the lid on the powder keg cities of Birmingham, Jackson, Atlanta and a score of other places. The news from Iran had been like the match that lit the proverbial blue touch paper, the whole of the South seemed to be on fire and worse, he was running for re-election.

  The way things where shaping up if the ‘America First’ front runners got their act together he was going to be the first President ever to lose every single state of the Union in a General Election in November.

  Whatever happened, he could not let those people win.

  In the cruel calculus of these things if the price of keeping the barbarians from the gates of the city was drawing down the final curtain on the British Empire that was a price worth paying.

  Pragmatically, if what it took to hold back the darkness was for John Fitzgerald Kennedy to become the cheerleader of the ‘America First Movement’, so be it.

  “Margaret,” he drawled, raising his face. “For all our failings I honestly believe that the future of freedom, democracy and reason in the World depends upon the survival of the Unites States of America. Ultimately, civilization rests in our hands. You may think this no more than hubris. You may think me bad, perhaps mad. It may just be that you and I won’t ever see things the same way. None of that changes the reality of the situation.”

  Margaret Thatcher visibly bit her tongue.

  The President’s green eyes were resigned.

  “The Sixth Fleet will render what assistance it may in the Eastern Mediterranean. Secretary of State Fulbright will facilitate what alliances and material aid can be secured from other parties in the Middle East. The USS Kitty Hawk will sail to the Indian Ocean, officially to assist in the evacuation of the dependents of US citizens and in other non-specific emergency relief work.” He pursed his lips, let this sink in. “But that is all.”

  “I see,” the Prime Minister acknowledged sulkily.

  “Publicly, I will continue to take your government to task over its ‘Irish policy’. What aid can be sent to the United Kingdom will continue to be sent, but if Congress blocks all routes then that will be that. America has turned its back on internationalism. The mantra is now America First and I must follow that drum or this time next year, well, who knows?”

  Oddly, now that the man had confessed his sins Margaret Thatcher’s excoriating hostility cooled. The man had the dead of the October War on his conscience and now he was about to prostitute himself before the American people. In politics, she reflected, there were no right or good decisions; and sometimes the only realistic choices were between the lesser of two unthinkable evils.

  “I came here to demand that we, together, draw a line in the sand,” she said quietly, her tone that of a woman spurned, “I had in mind drawing that line in the deserts of Iraq or Iran. It never occurred to me, not for a single minute, that what you had in mind was drawing that line in the sand on the beach at Hyannis Port, Jack.”

  Chapter 17

  Thursday 16th April 1964

  Mohammadyar, West Azerbaijan, Iran

  Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Harold St John Waters, VC, of the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment felt that he ought to be more surprised by the observational skills – or as witnessed by his experience of the last few days, the marked absence of the same – of the average Red Army soldier, whether he was an officer or a blank-faced private soldier. Honestly and truly, if he had been given the run around for two days and two nights in Urmia, not once setting eyes on one’s enemy and had consequently had a large number of his chums blown to bits and picked off by snipers, he would certainly have been paying a little bit more attention to their surroundings than these chaps!

  Merging into the background in this country was a doddle!

  The trick seemed to be to squat down on one’s haunches by the roadside and look disinterested in everything for hours on end, occasionally holding out one’s hand and muttering something that sounded vague Azeri – Farsi did not cut it around here if you were supposed to be begging – and nobody, absolutely nobody gave a fellow a second look providing you remembered not to look up while there was anybody near enough to see the colour of your eyes. The locals all seemed to have grey or tawny brownish eyes; his blue eyes would have been a dead giveaway that he was anything but local. If he ever got back to base; Stirling Lines in dear old Herefordshire as opposed to the embassy in Tehran which he was reliably informed no longer existed, he was going to have some fine old tales with which to regale Mess.

  ‘Frank’ Waters was hot, sore, hungry and feeling his age. Although he was only forty-six; the trouble was most of the last twenty-five of those years had been hard years. He had almost bought it twice in the Western Desert, and again in Yugoslavia near the end of the Second War. He still had bomb fragments in his back from that cock up in Oman five years ago, and in the two decades between the excitement of playing hide and seek with the Afrika Korps and this latest little jaunt he had acquired a litany of minor injuries and breakages in training and other escapades. Vexingly, he still had intermittent mild Tinnitus in his left ear off from that time that bloody frog had caught him in flagrante delicto with in his marvellously pneumatic wife in Algiers; in the subsequent undignified melee the gun had gone off a tad too close to his head for comfort...

  Anyway, what with one thing and another he was fairly close to half-way towards admitting that he was getting far too old for this sort of lark. Diving back into the fray had been immense fun but he had been around long enough to know when it was time to make oneself scarce.

  Now, he had decided, was one of those times.

  The Iranians he had been ‘training’ were outraged when he had told them that he and his men were ‘off’. The locals were good sorts, just not very pragmatic. There was nothing wrong with dying for a good cause; but dying simply to make a point or in the name of one’s family honour well, that was just plain stupid. Waters had ordered hi
s boys to saddle up and as they drove south the first line of Napalm strikes had illuminated the night at their backs. Fortunately, the two Land Rovers were five miles south by then.

  A couple of his boys had been with him for years; the newer recruits had got squeamish over executing the prisoners. The Rules of War! What did the idiots think was going to happen if the Red Army got its hands on them? As for leaving ‘prisoners’ wandering about the countryside bursting to tell their ‘comrades’ all about British SAS men sneaking about in the night!

  Waters slowly stood up.

  Life had been so much easier in those long ago days charging about Cyrenaica with the Long-Range Desert Group. That was the ticket, none of this endless walking about in the sun pretending to be a bloody beggar!

  Funny old thing, war...

  “We’re stringing the aerial now, boss,” he was told as he picked his way into the trees where the Land Rovers were parked half-way between the Mahabad-Urmia Road and the mud brick ruins of what had every appearance of being a very ancient abandoned village.

  “Keep up the good work, lads!”

  Frank Waters’s tone was relaxed, jovial. Out in the field he was an entirely different man to the ‘barracks officer’ that everybody tried their best to keep out of the way of. Back in the fifties in England and in his postings to the embassies in Bonn, Rome and Buenos Aires he had felt like he was in prison, a tiger caged, distracted now and then by predatory liaisons with other men’s wives, bored beyond measure in his own ill-considered, ill-starred marriage. After the unmitigated ‘fun’ of the war years peacetime soldiering had been, well, a mighty letdown and whenever he was at a loose end it was in his nature to go looking for trouble. The wasted years in foreign embassies, interspersed with stints training men straight off the Selection Course in Hereford and the on the Brecon Beacons had brought out the worst in him. Of course, there was a silver lining to most clouds – as any old soldier will tell you that – and eventually the people back home had got so fed up with him that they had banished him abroad.

  His boys had gone in ahead of the invasion force at Suez in 1956; that had been a fiasco but a jolly good bash. He had chased Mau Mau killers through the Kenyan bush, hunted down communist insurgents in Borneo and Islamist fanatics in Oman and Yemen, served two tours on Cyprus where the women were irresistibly dark-eyed, and been on Malta at the time of the October War. The whole Cuban Missiles nonsense had seemed to him, even from a distance of thousands of miles, to be the most monstrous cock up by everybody concerned. On the bright side it had opened up a wealth of opportunities for incorrigible cases like him!

  Back in the makeshift ‘camp’ Frank Waters’s mood was almost hearty.

  Not even the thought of stale black bread and some kind of half-rancid sausage – all they had left of the food they had purloined clandestinely exploring Urmia after the Red Army had moved in – could dent his good cheer. When it got dark they would move out, try and find a secluded place in the mountains to hide up; somewhere farther south from which they could sortie to snatch prisoners, and properly eyeball the traffic passing into and out of Mahabad. Command would need to know exactly what they were dealing with if this thing was half as bad as it looked.

  Whoever was in charge on the Soviet side seemed to know what he was doing. He could not know that the garrison of Urmia had mounted up in anything that had wheels or tracks and ‘run away’ to the north to hide in the hills; so he was doing the sensible thing, sending a column up the road to Urmia to block any hostile force coming south; a few tanks, a couple of anti-tank guns and a company of infantrymen hefting RPG – rocket propelled grenade - launchers and heavy machine guns. And high in the sky there were suddenly the silver arrows of fast jets, circling, patrolling, waiting for business. Not that any of this was ‘rocket science’. One look at a map and any soldier with two brain cells to rub together would know that the road from Qoshachay-Miandoab to Mahabad was the key ‘choke point’ in the advance of the Soviet armour. Anything, absolutely anything which seriously threatened the right flank of that long, exposed road across the high plain into the foothills of the Zagros Mountains was potentially a monumental disaster waiting to happen.

  Frank Waters had recommended somebody in Middle East Command got his act together and bombed the road to buggery. Not for the first time in his eventful career his advice had thus far been ignored.

  “Have we got through to the boys in Abadan yet?” He inquired, throwing off his hood. He liked to think he looked like a Bedouin; actually he suspected he looked like a dirty peasant and smelled worse.

  “Still working on it, boss.”

  A man offered Waters a mess tin with what looked like steaming mud in it. He took it gratefully, deliberately not asking what today’s version of ‘tea’ was brewed from. It tasted like it might have been brewed from crushed tree bark and had the subtle bouquet of burned Camel dung. The old soldier hardly noticed, it was warm and wet and had been boiled long enough to kill most of the bugs.

  Waiting for the radio link to be established he lowered himself to the ground and looked around the ‘camp’. There were two men out on picket duty, and including him five loitering in the vicinity or sitting on the ground around him and the clumsy, boxy radio transmitter with its improvised whip and long wire aerial. He had lost two good men back in Urmia; his fault. He ought to have pulled out of the town sooner, at least an hour or so before he belatedly concluded the game was no longer worth the candle.

  He put the thought to one side.

  “We need to steal one of those old American charabancs we’ve seen the locals driving around in,” he decided, no more than thinking out aloud.

  After the 1945 war the Americans had pulled out with such indecent haste that they had left hundreds, possibly thousands of big Ford and Dodge four and six-wheeler Army trucks behind in Iran. Over the years the locals had resurrected a lot of them, obviously so because they were trundling up and down the roads even this far north. In fact these trucks – all rusty and belching huge volumes of poisonous smoke – were pretty much ubiquitous, so much so that nobody, not even the Russians, gave them a second thought or look.

  “After tonight we’re going to have to ditch the Land Rovers. The chaps up in Urmia will have told HQ in Mahabad what they were up against by now. It won’t take the enemy long to figure out that rascals like us are on the loose.”

  There were sage nods of agreement around Waters.

  That was when he knew what he was going to do next and a saturnine, predatory smile began to quirk at the corners of his mouth. He chuckled, tickled pink with the idea.

  In his best Moskva Russian he said: “My sobirayemsya delat' vid, byt' Russkimi, tovarishchi.”

  We are going to pretend to be Russians, comrades...

  The idea did not instantly go down a storm with the three non-Russian speaking troopers nearest to him, mainly because they did not understand a word of what their leader had just said.

  The man at the radio smiled broadly.

  “We’re going to dress up like Russians,” he explained.

  “My budem imet', chtoby ukrast' nekotoryye formy i gruzovik pervym. No my mozhem sdelat eto,” Frank Waters went on, liking the idea more with every passing second.

  “We are going to have to steal some uniforms and a lorry first,” the other Russian speaker translated. “But we can do that.”

  Chapter 18

  Thursday 16th April 1964

  Merton College, Oxford, England

  The Secretary of State for Defence very nearly swallowed his tea cup. It was all he could do not to spontaneously spew his mouthful of tea – a vile, disgusting brew served to the meeting by a surly, disenchanted Merton porter who viewed the presence of the Chiefs of Staff and their political master in his college as an outrageous affront to everything that was right and just in the world – in the face of the man who had moments before made an unforgivably, despicably defeatist statement.

  “What do you mean?” He blustered angrily.
“There’s nothing we can do to stop the Soviets reaching the Persian Gulf and seizing Abadan Island?”

  Major General Michael Carver viewed William Whitelaw, the forty-five year old Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Border with clear, unperturbed eyes. He sighed, exchanged a brief quizzical look with his direct superior, the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Richard Hull whose minutely raised eyebrow and nod gave him leave to reply.

  “Forgive me, Minister,” Carver responded. “I thought that I had been at pains to make my meaning crystal clear?”

  Willie Whitelaw stared at him, his tea cup poised in mid air and his mind racing with bad possibilities and dire premonitions.

  “The tactical calculus is straightforward,” the handsome, patrician general continued. “The enemy has two thousand tanks, over a quarter of a million men and we have less than thirty tanks and discounting the other forces we have scattered around the region, we have approximately three to four thousand fighting troops on the ground. We can inconvenience the enemy with air strikes, and we can make trouble for the Red Army by stirring up and supporting local insurgencies along the enemy’s line of advance – although personally I don’t think the locals will need any encouragement from us to harry the invaders – and we can block the Persian Gulf at the Straits of Hormuz with our existing naval assets. What we cannot do, and what it would be a criminal waste of men and materiel to attempt to do is hold on to Abadan Island.”

  General Sir Richard Hull coughed.

  “Given forewarning of General Carver’s conclusions and the detailed reasoning behind those conclusions,” he said regretfully, “the Chiefs of Staff concur with the view he has just expressed.”

  The Secretary of State clunked his cup and saucer on the table.