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

by James Philip

  The President of the Egyptian Republic – Nasser had been head of the United Arab Republic, which had merged Egypt and Syria between 1958 and 1961 before infighting in the Syrian regime had torpedoed the alliance – liked to remind his guests that the Heliopolis Palace was so large that a narrow gauge railway had been installed in the basement running the entire length of the building!

  Nasser understood that the great Palace impressed the British hardly at all; Americans only when they paused long enough to actually notice their surroundings, and most Arab visitors – although they admired some of the Moorish Revivalist and Islamic characteristics of the imperialistic hubris of the former French and British overlords - privately asked each other what all the fuss was about? The point about the Heliopolis Presidential Palace was that it impressed the people that Nasser actually wanted to impress, the Egyptian people.

  J. William Fulbright was Nasser’s latest US Secretary of State. First he had had to deal with John Foster Dulles. President Eisenhower’s man in the State Department had been preoccupied with propping up the Shah of Iran and in meddling in Asian and Southern American affairs. Notwithstanding that Dulles had been against the Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956, within months he had violently taken against Nasser and by 1958 American arms shipments had ceased. Dean Rusk, President Kennedy’s first Secretary of State had broadly held to this ‘anti-Egyptian, anti-Nasser’ line; effectively driving Egypt into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, meaning that most of Nasser’s Army and part of his Air Force was now equipped with relatively modern Russian equipment. The first time Nasser had met Fulbright, the new man had seemed to be a much more pragmatic man than either of his predecessors, and much less concerned with ‘old history’; but now, like his predecessors he was clearly flexing his muscles.

  Before flying to Cairo, Fulbright had spent two days in Tripoli, the one stable major city in Libya still nominally under control of the Italian colonial regime. This administration was partially estranged from the Fascist Tuscan league government of the Italian homeland; a situation the Americans badly wanted to remedy as a bulwark against Egyptian territorial ambitions in Cyrenaica. The rest of Egypt’s western neighbour was slowly fragmenting into warring tribes and enclaves and, for the time being, nobody was doing anything to extract the oil reserves which eventually, would be Libya’s economic salvation.

  It was Nasser’s working assumption that Fulbright’s main interest was in sufficiently pacifying the warring factions in Libya to facilitate the influx of US-based oil companies. On a previous visit he had acted virtually as the agent of American companies interested in clearing Suez Canal at Ismailia and developing the recently discovered oil fields in the Sinai. These previous meetings had left the President of Egypt undecided whether Fulbright was a statesman or simply the overseas representative of corporate America.

  Nasser was none the wiser if Fulbright had the remotest understanding of anything in the Middle East, uncertain if Fulbright realised that members of Nasser’s High Command viewed the events taking place in Iraq and Iran as a ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to ‘annexe’ the ‘failed Libyan state’ and bring it under ‘the protection’ of an Egyptian dominated ‘commonwealth’. Libya was falling apart, rapidly becoming a threat to itself, its neighbours and to the free movement of seaborne traffic along the North African coast. An Egyptian military intervention in Libya could be seen, if handled correctly, as a statesmanlike act of kindness rather than aggression throughout much of the Arab world.

  Nasser prided himself on being a realist. He yearned for pan-Arabist unity but recognised that ‘unity’ could never be bought by war, especially not when the entire region was already like a powder keg ready to blow up. Everywhere was chaos, new threats encircled Egypt at the very time his regime had embarked on a program of massive social and economic reforms. Too many of his people still lived in poverty, worrying daily where their next meal was coming from. Egyptian industry, such as it was, was incapable of sustaining the country without external meddling. While he dreamed of a cultural revival to throw off the shackles of the colonial past, his people needed him to concentrate on projects like the High Aswan Dam, not foreign adventures. His people needed food, jobs, schools for their children and hospitals for all, not just the rich and the lucky. Moreover, while Nasser’s personal popularity with the masses remained his real powerbase, there were always plots and coups rumbling just beneath the surface. Problems never arrived singly; there were Red Army tanks in northern Iraq and Iran, on his western border lay a lawless Libya, the Suez Canal was blocked and therefore the income from it indefinitely suspended, his attempts to support republican rebels in North Yemen had alienated the pro-western elements of the Saudi Royal Family, and now the American Secretary of State had demanded an audience at forty-eight hours notice.

  In this the twelfth year since the Free Officers had toppled the corrupt regime of King Farouk, Gamal Abdel Nasser was acutely aware that nothing was ever quite so straightforward as it seemed. Just when he had imagined the World was an impossibly complicated place in which few, if any of the really important things were resolvable in his or any other man’s lifetime, Fulbright’s visit threatened to throw another wild card into the great game.

  Had the Americans got wind of the meeting he and Sadat had had with the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson and Field Marshall Hull, the Chief of the United Kingdom Defence Staff at Sharm el-Sheikh three days ago?

  After that short, terse conference beneath a hurriedly erected tent on a desert air strip – one of those ultra-secretive meetings where all aides and flunkies were banished well out of the hearing of the participants – Nasser and Sadat had looked at each other in stunned silence, as if daring the other to confirm what they had just been discussing only minutes before. Both men understood that for all their bluster and obsession with protocol and ‘form’ that the British could – if push came to shove – be the most ruthlessly pragmatic people on earth. Even so, what their guests had broached in the cold of that Arabian night had rocked the two men to the very core of their beings.

  Seven-and-a-half years ago a British Prime Minister had likened Nasser to Hitler and Mussolini, and plotted with the French and the Israelis to invade his country and to remove him from power. The resultant Suez Crisis had very nearly fractured the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’, fatally undermined what was left of the British Empire, driven Anthony Eden from office, and changed the political centre of gravity of the whole Middle East for a generation. And yet in that tent in the desert in the middle of the night in Sinai, a British Foreign Secretary and the most senior officer in the British Army had baldly invited the Egyptian Republic to reshape the map of the Middle East...

  Gamal Abdel Nasser and Muhammad Anwar El Sadat strode confidently into the reception hall where J. William Fulbright and his overlarge coterie of suited and stern-faced staffers awaited their pleasure.

  Three days ago both Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson and Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull, had made the effort to acquaint themselves with sufficient of Nasser’s mother tongue to greet him in his own language, and to contritely apologise for suggesting that the rest of their exchange be conducted in English.

  But no American Secretary of State ever made that sort of concession to a mere Arab. So, at both Nasser’s and Sadat’s shoulder stood interpreters.

  The American Ambassador, sixty-one year old John Stothoff Badeau, an Arabist who understood Egypt and the Middle East better than practically any other living American with whom Nasser enjoyed frank, friendly and mutually respectful personal relations, read the runes and did his best to hide his dismay. The Kennedy Administration had sent him to Cairo in 1961 to ‘mend fences’ but almost immediately cut the ground from beneath their ambassador’s feet by taking Israel’s side in the United Nations and by describing Nasser’s regime as ‘Castro-like’, and Nasser himself as a ‘socialist’, and a ‘Soviet stooge’.

  It was Ambassador Badeau who st
epped forward and introduced his chief to Nasser in Egyptian, signalling that he planned to be his Secretary of State’s translator.

  Nasser looked J. William Fulbright in the eye.

  The American met his stare, unblinking.

  That was when Nasser knew that although Fulbright must have heard about the meeting with the British in the Sinai; he had not yet drawn any of the obvious conclusions. If he had he would have brought senior military officers with him rather than the pale-skinned, sweating State Department second-raters standing at his back.

  For all that the US Sixth Fleet, with its big grey warships swinging around their anchors in the Grand Harbour at Malta like some occupying armada pretended that it had made the Mediterranean an American sea, it was only the British who actually had the will and the courage to fight.

  Before J. William Fulbright had opened his mouth to speak Nasser, and at his side, Anwar Sadat, were already redrawing their thoughts about the proposition put to them at Sharm-el-Sheik.

  If the United States really was disengaging from its former – mostly unspoken – commitments East of Suez then the rules of the game had just changed.

  Suddenly, sitting on the fence awaiting developments was no longer an option.

  Chapter 26

  Thursday 14th May 1964

  Advanced HQ, 3rd Caucasus Tank Army, Sulaymaniyah, Iraq

  Major Generals Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov and Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik snapped to attention as Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian walked into what had been – up until seven days ago - the dining room of the residence of the Military Governor of Sulaymaniyah.

  It went without saying that the aforementioned officer had decamped, as had most of his men, heavily encumbered with their wives, children and looted chattels as soon as they had discovered that a column of Red Army tanks was coming down the road towards Sulaymaniyah from Dokan in the north. The Red Air Force had wanted to bomb the road south; Babadzhanian had vetoed the idea. Roads clogged with refugees and the remnants of a fleeing army would block any attempt by the enemy to mount a counter attack on Sulaymaniyah; the Red Air Force needed to save every rocket and bomb because it was abundantly clear that Army Group South’s supply and communications lines were an unmitigated shambles.

  Partly, this was because two armies were attempting to traverse some of the worse tank country on earth – the Alborz and Zagros Mountains - in the face of guerrilla interdiction and occasional locally devastating, air attacks but mainly it was because the Army Group’s hastily thrown together quartermaster corps was simply not up to the job. Babadzhanian had already sacked the commander of that organisation, a supposedly reliable officer with good pre-war Party connections, but God himself was not going to turn around the disastrous ‘supply situation’ overnight. Right now his army and its air force was going to have to fight with what it had to hand and basically, he was not going to waste any bullets or bombs, let alone critically scarce aviation fuel ‘shooting up’ an already fleeing enemy.

  “I visited the western bridge over the Tanjaro River. Well, what’s left of it,” Babadzhanian announced conversationally to the two men he now regarded as the best fighting generals in Army Group South. Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov, commanding officer of the 10th Guards Tank Division had driven his armour through impossible country at breakneck speed and at times got so far ahead of the following units that he had completely lost touch with the rest of 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army for days on end. Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik had parachuted into Tehran at the outset of Operation Nakazyvat, had led the 50th Guards Airborne Brigade at Urmia, and now commanded the 3rd Siberian Mechanised Division.

  In the next twenty-four hours Babadzhanian planned to unleash his two hardest charging generals on separate, but vital new adventures. His armies were strung out across northern Iraq all the way back to Azerbaijan; any other man might have called a halt, waited for the logistical nightmare to resolve itself and for his armoured formations to regain some semblance of coherence on the plains around Sulaymaniyah.

  Any other man at any other time.

  The politicians back in Chelyabinsk were panicking. If they had not been so terrified of Defence Minister Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, the other two members of the collective leadership, Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin and Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev would have had Babadzhanian’s head by now. Unfortunately, not even Chuikov, the most decorated soldier in the history of the mother country had been able to stop the idiots inflicting that maniacal shit Andropov and his brainless fucking KGB troops on Army Group South!

  Babadzhanian got angry just thinking about those bastards crawling around his armies looking for traitors, deserters and so-called fifth columnists. Any remaining sympathy he felt for Comrade Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, Deputy First Secretary of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti – who had by all accounts had a rough time of it in Bucharest before the Red Army had put down those Krasnaya Zarya fanatics - had evaporated within twenty-four hours of his arrival in Iraq. The bloody man seemed intent on taking out his anger not on the enemy but on Babadzhanian’s soldiers, who had quite enough on their plates getting through the mountains, conquering half of one country and the whole of another, without having to look over their shoulders all the time worrying about the fucking KGB!

  The Army Group Commander took a series of deep breaths to help collect his thoughts. Babadzhanian needed no encouragement from above to press on. If he once permitted the invasion to descend into a war of attrition along fixed defensive lines all would be lost.

  In twenty-four hours time Puchkov’s 10th Guards Tank Division would strike towards Jalawla, some one hundred and eighty miles to the south; while simultaneously Kurochnik’s Siberians would race to Kirkuk, over a hundred kilometres to the west to cut off the cities of Erbil and Mosul from the rest of the country.

  Last night the RAF had dropped two very big bombs on the bridge carrying the Sulaymaniyah to Kirkuk road over the River Tanjuro west of the city. The river was still in flood but one of the bombs had landed close enough to the eastern foundation of the structure to so badly undermine it that most of the bridge had collapsed. The second big bomb had left a crater in the road nearly thirty metres in diameter and five deep. During the same raid one, perhaps, two other aircraft had dropped as many as forty one-thousand pound bombs on the city itself.

  The raids marked a step change in the intensity of the war.

  Up until now the Red Air Force had been engaged in a cat and mouse skirmish with the dwindling handful of Iranian fighter bombers – none any kind of match for Mig-21s – and isolated incursions and strafing attacks by Iraqi aircraft, neither of which were in any way co-ordinated, and rarely followed up by second strikes. But last night the British Royal Air Force had taken down a key bridge and turned the centre of Sulaymaniyah into a blasted Hellhole. Any serious thought of using the city as a staging post for the next stage of the invasion had suddenly been rendered null and void; it seemed the enemy – the real enemy – understood what was in his mind and had no intention of permitting Operation Nakazyvat to play out according to his plan.

  Already Babadzhanian had adapted, altered his immediate objectives.

  Forget about subduing the north of Iraq; that would have to wait for another day. He would take Kirkuk, and Erbil and Mosul if he could, quickly without a serious fight, otherwise the latter two cities would be isolated, the roads to the south blocked and the bulk of his forces would head directly towards Baghdad. If necessary he would feed his tank divisions into the fight piecemeal.

  Forty-eight hours ago the plan had still been to command the north, now the priority was the race to Baghdad.

  He looked to Puchkov, the weather-beaten, scarred veteran of the Battle of Kursk who had been with him in Budapest in 1956. That had been a filthy business, not that he had ever lost any sleep over the counter revolutionaries his men had killed in seizing back control of the city. The rebels had hung Hungarian secret pol
icemen from lamp posts in front of the Soviet Embassy; what the fuck did they think was going to happen after that?

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if the British take out the southern bridge over the Tanjuro tonight,” he remarked, apparently idly.

  Puchkov chuckled.

  “I’d best send my combat engineers down that way to put it back up again in the morning, sir.”

  “Yes, you do that.” Babadzhanian sniffed. To cap his woes he had come down with a dose of dysentery the last few days and he was running a fever. That was the trouble campaigning in a country run by fucking savages! “Keeping open the roads west and south is the absolute number one priority at this time,” he added, knowing that the two senior commanders did not need to be told this or to receive his personal imprimatur to do what needed to be done. “Once we’ve got more air strips operating Comrade First Deputy Director Andropov has promised us half-a-dozen penal battalions to repair the roads. Until they arrive round up any able bodied civilians you can find and put them to work.”

  He made eye contact with Puchkov and then Kurochnik.

  “Effective mobile strength?”

  “Fifty percent,” Puchkov retorted, as if this was hardly any kind of problem.

  “Forty percent, perhaps,” Kurochnik reported. He had only been in command of 3rd Siberian Mechanised Division thirty-six hours but did not for a moment contemplate falling back on this as any kind of excuse for any suggestion of vagueness in his report. “That’s forty percent that can move at a couple of hours notice, sir.”

  Babadzhanian looked to the former paratrooper.

  “I want you to seize Kirkuk not later than 20th May.”

  Kurochnik nodded.

  Babadzhanian turned to Puchkov.

  “Think your boys can be in Jalawla by then?”

  “Yes,” the shaven-headed commander of the 10th Guards Tank Division confirmed grimly.