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

by James Philip

  “I can’t tell the Prime Minister that!”

  Michael Carver sipped his tea, wrinkling his nose. He had tasted worse in the Middle East recently, but not much worse. Notwithstanding the World had gone to Hell in a hand basket the last couple of years; politicians remained the same!

  The First Sea Lord, Sir Varyl Begg spoke.

  “I’m the new boy in this, er, class,” he prefaced self-effacingly. “However, the logic of the situation in the Gulf is compelling, Minister. Self-evident, in fact because even if we had unlimited treasure to pour into the defence of Abadan – which we do not - and more importantly, its refinery complexes those self-same invaluable assets would inevitably be destroyed in the course of their defence. The political ramifications of the actual situation on the ground in the Middle East are one thing, sir. The military realities are another completely; unless of course, Arc Light is back on the table?”

  Willie Whitelaw vehemently shook his head.

  Arc Light was the code word for a ‘first’ nuclear strike.

  “We have several V-Bombers positioned at QRA in the region,” Air Marshall Sir Christopher Hartley, the Chief of the Air Staff observed. “We have now established small stockpiles of tactical and strategic free fall bombs at Malta, Akrotiri on Cyprus, Dhahran in Saudi Arabia and at Aden...”

  The Defence Minister turned on his three senior professional military advisors, ignoring Michael Carver, the bringer of disastrously bad news.

  “Is that what you gentlemen are recommending?” He demanded, his customary urbanity disintegrating. With an effort he recovered his composure. Coolly he asked: “That we resolve this matter by starting another nuclear war?”

  Michael Carver’s voice cut across the sudden, cringing silence.

  “No, Minister,” he declared irritably. “It may well come to that but that is not the main substance of my recommendations to the CDS, this meeting or to the government.”

  Willie Whitelaw said nothing for several seconds. He was too busy blinking with bewilderment to form coherent words. Presently, he ran a distracted hand across his brow.

  “What exactly are you recommending, General Carver?”

  The most junior officer in the room was not about to hurried. Not for the first time he involuntarily patted the still folded maps before him on the table top as he carefully deployed his thoughts.

  “My recommendations are predicated by two general assumptions, Minister. One; that we can expect little or no assistance from our American allies on the ground in the Middle Eastern Theatre of Operations. Two; that it will not be possible to transport sufficient quantities of heavy equipment, armour, artillery and the thousand and one things required to sustain a large, Corps or multi-division mechanised force in the field, from the United Kingdom to the Persian Gulf in time for it to be deployed in good order to interdict the Red Army’s operations in Iraq. The former assumption must be hedged around by political caveats; however, even if – and it is a big ‘if’ – the Americans believe that their interests in Arabia are seriously threatened by the Soviet invasion of Iran and Iraq I would be remiss factoring in a significant contribution from them that I do not honestly believe will be forthcoming. The latter assumption is simply a statement of fact; we do not have the time – or for that matter the fully stocked depots in the United Kingdom – to enable us to massively reinforce our existing garrisons in the theatre.”

  Willie Whitelaw desperately wanted to jump in; but something held his tongue. Something that was ineluctably unspoken in the didactic certainty of Michael Carver’s uncommonly sure-footed delivery.

  “That is not to say that we will not eventually be obliged to pack up our camps, depart with our tails between our legs and leave the region to the tender mercies of the Soviet invader,” Carver went on. “In the time available to us, say perhaps a month, two if we are very lucky, we can strengthen our air presence with a view to achieving local air superiority over the Persian Gulf, fly in infantry reinforcements and begin to collaborate with friends, and possibly former adversaries in the region in whose best interests it would be to form mutual defence arrangements. Specifically, this would involve building on existing professional relations between members of the British officer cadre in the region and the commanders of the surviving units of the Iranian Army positioned around Abadan. It means negotiating with the Saudi Arabian authorities to gain access to the US ‘War Stores Depots’ located at Al Jeddah, Riyadh and Damman-Dhahran, and fully opening the former US Air Base at the last of those places to our aircraft. Thirdly, we must make our peace with Egypt. I repeat, at any cost we must make out peace with Egypt. Because if we don’t make peace with that country then we shall never, never, expel the Red Army from the northern shores of the Persian Gulf. It goes without saying,” he added ominously, “if we don’t expel the Red Army from the Gulf, say before the autumn of this year, in a few years from now the whole Middle East will be a fabulously oil rich Soviet Republic dedicated to the downfall of the Western World.”

  The Secretary of State for Defence mulled this wordlessly, knowing now that there was more, much more to come and that what he had intuitively misidentified as ‘defeatism’ was nothing less than brutal pragmatism.

  “Within the framework of those assumptions and caveats,” Michael Carver continued, “I have recommended the following to the Chiefs of Staff.”

  A pause for one last reflection.

  “One; that we reinforce our existing garrisons in the theatre outside Iraq and Iran as best we may in terms of men and materiel. Two; that we withdraw the Basra garrison to Abadan. This has already begun. Three; that we make no attempt to interdict the Soviet invasion until such time as the leading elements of the spearhead of the Red Army approach, or ideally, have passed Abadan on the western side of the Shatt al-Arab to invest the Faw Peninsula. Four; at that time limited offensive demonstrations should be mounted to give the impression that it is our intention to make a stand at Abadan to cover the withdrawal of our forces at that place. Five; that all the facilities at Abadan be destroyed prior to our departure. In the mean time the RAF must establish air superiority over the Persian Gulf, Southern Iraq, Kuwait and the Western Desert of Iraq. Six; that we must begin to build up whatever mobile force resources permit, in Kuwait if necessary but ideally for deployment in northern Saudi Arabia. Seven; that at such time as the Red Army – by then with most of its surviving equipment in a poor state of repair and its manpower exhausted – digs into position along the northern shores of the Persian Gulf, offensive operations should be launched from the west and the east to cut the Soviet lines of communication mid-way between Baghdad and Basra.”

  Willie Whitelaw stared at the other man.

  “Cannae,” he murmured.

  Michael Carver nodded. Among his numerous accomplishments he was a military historian who had – before the October War – anticipated a retirement spent writing of old battles and campaigns, including those in which he had participated in the Western Desert, with a view to debunking no small number of popular myths about Erwin Rommel’s career prior to Bernard Montgommery’s arrival in the desert in 1942.

  Every fighting general dreamed of master-minding his personal Cannae, of engineering and fighting a war-winning battle. Every subaltern at practically every staff college learned about Cannae but only once in a generation, or maybe two or three or four generations, did a general officer actually glimpse a fleeting opportunity to ‘Cannae’ his enemy.

  The technology and the mobility of warfare had changed since that August day of the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC in Apulia in southern Italy but the principles of war remained the same. On that day over two millennia ago the Army of the Roman Republic under the command of the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro, had been enveloped and destroyed by the much smaller Carthaginian army of Hannibal. The Romans had become so pre-occupied battering at the apparently weak Carthaginian centre that the powerful wings of Hannibal’s army had swept around it, and much like a gi
ant meat grinder, chewed the massed legions to pieces. Classical sources spoke of only fourteen thousand of the eighty-six thousand legionnaires of the Roman Republican horde escaping the slaughter.

  “Yes, sir,” Carver agreed. “But first we must let the ground over which our enemy is advancing and the privations of that country take its toll on him, and,” he looked hard at Willie Whitelaw, “by hook or by crook you must find me an armoured corps with which to Cannae these blighters!”

  Chapter 19

  Tuesday 21st April 1964

  USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63), 187 miles West of Tarakan, Celebes Sea

  Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann followed the other officers filing into the great carrier’s long, low Wardroom. He had only just come off watch where he was three-quarters the way through qualifying to stand as Officer of the Deck (OOD) unsupervised. Standing watch on the bridge of the US Navy’s biggest ship – the Kitty Hawk was over a thousand feet long, displaced over eighty thousand tons fully loaded, had a four acre flight deck, carried over eighty aircraft and helicopters and had a crew of well over five-and-a-half thousand men – was roughly akin to being in command of a floating air base capable of steaming at thirty-three knots, or in land lubber’s money, better than thirty-seven miles an hour. Walter Brenckmann did not think he was going to get used to that any time soon.

  He had joined the super carrier while she was still in dock at Kobe undergoing a routine overhaul. Completed in 1961 the Kitty Hawk had been in need of a ‘two year service’ and now she was as good as new, working up to full combat efficiency with her re-constituted air wing and some six hundred new officers and men rotated into her company during the refit period.

  Twenty-eight year old Walter Brenckmann only occasionally – he was far too busy most of the time - thought about the surreal days of last December when briefly, he had been at the eye of the US Navy’s scandal of the century.

  The chain of command of the Polaris boats of Submarine Squadron 15 based at Alameda in San Francisco Bay had been compromised; rogue firing instructions and targeting coordinates had been issued to at least one boat, the USS Sam Houston (SSBN-608). Even though he was wholly blameless in the affair; other than having been instrumental in bringing the ‘problem’ to the attention of his superiors, he had wrongly as it turned out, suspected his naval career was over. Instead, he had been promised a place on next year’s Nuclear Boat Command Course and in the mean time he had been posted to the Kitty Hawk, the flagship of Carrier Division Seven, as Assistant Anti-Submarine Officer and been given the opportunity to qualify for OOD duties.

  After departing Japanese waters three weeks ago; Carrier Division Seven had visited Manila in the Philippines, before conducting ‘shake down’ exercise in the Celebes Sea. There was talk of a ‘good will’ cruise down to Perth in Western Australia; Walter did not think that was very likely since relations between the Australian and New Zealand governments and the Kennedy Administration were still ‘strained’, according to the last letter he had received from his mother. She was in England now with Pa, and from what he gathered relations with the ‘old country’ were also somewhat ‘strained’ at present although Ma said she and ‘the Ambassador’ had already made a host of new friends ‘in Oxford’.

  Half-a-dozen letters had caught up with Walter in Manila.

  Gretchen Betancourt, whom he had once gently rebuffed, had sounded as if she was genuinely much more her old self. She had been very badly injured during the fighting in Washington DC in December; hurt in the explosion in which Under Secretary George Ball had died and later shot twice by insurgents. Not that she was the sort of girl to allow a little thing like that to keep her down for long. The only daughter of New England Democratic Party elder statesman Claude Betancourt – who had been the late Joseph Kennedy’s go to corporate litigator – Gretchen was a woman in a hurry. Notwithstanding she was hardly back on her feet and in no way fully recovered from her injuries she was, it seemed, now engaged to be married to Walter’s younger brother Dan, and about to start ‘defending’ the leaders of last year’s coup d’état!

  As for Dan, according to Gretchen he had got himself a ‘nice little sinecure on the Warren Commission’. Dan had appended a short note to his fiancée’s long, chatty letter: ‘Try not to run the ship aground – we’ve only got the KH and the Independence until they fix the Enterprise and get the other big boats back to sea! Take care, big brother.’

  The Brenckmann family was settling down; a second letter from Ma had conveyed the news that his kid brother, Sam and his girlfriend Judy had ‘tied the knot’ having produced a daughter, Tabatha Christa a fortnight or so before Christmas.

  Gretchen’s letter had alluded to but largely brushed over the ongoing ‘situations’ in Chicago and the ‘mountains in the West’. However, she had not mixed her words about the ‘disgrace’ the ‘Administration has allowed to go unchecked in the South’. These were subjects that Walter knew little about and had passed over in his reply to the woman whom he had only met half-a-dozen times in his whole life but for whom, and with whom, he had formed a strange, possibly unbreakable affinity in the fateful December days before she went back to Washington DC, and very nearly died for her temerity. He was glad she was marrying Dan. Dan loved Gretchen in ways Walter knew he could not. Besides, Dan was in Gretchen’s thrall, and more than that Dan was the sort of ‘good man’ who would always be there for her when she needed him most.

  Having served most of his career in the Navy in submarines where one never told anybody anything about proverbial ‘diddly squat’, it was a joy to be onboard the Kitty Hawk, and for the while at least, a part of the ‘visible’ Navy. This had enabled him to write back admitting that he was on the ship that he was actually onboard, actually naming places he had been and even sharing one or two pieces of harmless service gossip about his actual duties.

  “ADMIRAL ON DECK!”

  Every man snapped to attention as Rear Admiral William Bringle strode down the avenue of officers accompanied by the Kitty Hawk’s commanding officer, Captain Horace Epes.

  Fifty year old Bringle had been the carrier’s first captain, commissioning the Kitty Hawk three years ago to the day at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The US Navy like to do things in style, and everybody in the compartment realised that on the commissioning anniversary there was a real possibility that the Commander of Carrier Division Seven might be about to make a big announcement of some kind.

  “Stand easy, gentlemen.”

  There were over a hundred and seventy officers, forty percent of them naval aviators from the Kitty Hawk’s Air Group, crushing into the Wardroom with latecomers arriving all the time, since the summons had been sudden and without any prior warning.

  Bringle, the Tennessee born Commander of Carrier Division Seven had graduated from Annapolis in the class of 1937. His first ship had been the Saratoga; thereafter he had trained as a naval aviator at Pensacola. At the time of Pearl Harbour he had been CO of Cruiser Scouting Squadron Two operating off the cruisers Omaha (CL-4) and Savannah (CL-42). Later in the Second World War he had been involved in the invasion of Southern France in 1944, and the latter stages of the Pacific War, flying off the escort carriers Wake Island (CVE-65) and Marcus Island (CVE-77). He was the holder of the Navy Cross, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the French Croix de Guerre, had been CAG – Commander Air group – on the fleet carriers Tarawa (CV-40) and Philippine Sea (CV-47) before a spell as Executive Officer of the Hornet (CV-12) in 1953. Successively Head of the Operational Intelligence Branch of the Chief of Naval Operations staff and then Personal Aide to the Secretary of the Navy; he had been a shoe-in to command the Kitty Hawk in 1961, and his promotion to Rear Admiral in 1962 just before the October War, inevitable.

  Walter Brenckmann had learned to recognise the type, the sort of driven, utterly competent, reliable leaders of men who naturally gravitated to the top of the service. Brindle was one of those guys. When he entered a room everybody knew he had arrived; and when he was about to say
something you knew, you just knew, that you needed to be listening with every sinew of your being.

  The Commander of Carrier Division Seven took the microphone.

  “I’ll keep this short and sweet, gentlemen,” he declared. “You will have heard the Commander-in-Chief’s address to the nation last weekend in which he outlined the Administration’s ‘America First’ foreign and military stance under which the strategic interests of the homeland, and specifically the defence of and the economic wellbeing of the Union will heretofore be the primary ‘guiding light’ of the remaining months of President Kennedy’s term in office. In the last twenty-four hours the Navy Department has issued the following orders to all ships and sea and shore establishments.”

  Walter Brenckmann wondered if he was about to hear that the ‘peace dividend’ u-turn was about to be reversed, again. That the Navy was to halt its re-mobilization and that the big carriers and cruisers were not after all to be retrieved from mothballs and sent back to sea. It would be the ultimate betrayal of the service but not entirely any kind of surprise given recent history.

  “This is to inform all serving personnel in the US Navy that the ships listed for return to service under ordnance January/Re-activation/010364 will return to service as per the plans drawn up by the Department.”

  Okay, there was going to be no immediate u-turn.

  “Operations. General. All ships at sea and shore establishments will assume the lowest state of alert DEFCON FIVE until further notice or unless specifically warned to assume a higher state of readiness.”

  The Administration had had a big bust up with the British over what was going on in the Middle East but nobody was reaching for their guns right now. Walter Brenckmann breathed a silent sigh of relief.

  “Ongoing operations. Subject: Naval Operations against forces of the former Soviet Union and or, affiliated or co-belligerent forces. In the Mediterranean Sea current rules of engagement remain unchanged; that is, US Sixth Fleet will continue its peace keeping mission in support of the British Royal Navy and may at discretion of CINCMED take such pre-emptive aggressive action as is necessary to protect Sixth Fleet ships and vessels in company with same.”