by James Philip
Al-Rasheed Air Base, South West Baghdad
The city had fallen without a fight. Or rather in a city which bore the unmistakable and widespread signs of the bitter battle between opposing factions of the Iraqi Army, the fighting had abruptly ceased, the combatants had thrown down their weapons, abandoned their tanks and melted away into the modern urban sprawl of the ancient capital of the Abbasids the moment the Red Army had appeared on the scene.
In the mid-1950s the West had viewed Iraq as a potential bulwark against Soviet aggression but Iraq had always been a weak link, a likely fracture point in any defensive regional alliance. It was a non-country, an artificial construct arbitrarily created at Versailles, distrusted by its neighbours and despised by the Iranians. Post-Versailles, the Hashemite monarchy inflicted on the so-called ‘Iraqi’ people in 1921 had been a truly dire foundation upon which to build a meaningful national identity. The only surprising thing was that it had taken until July 1958 for the Hashemite regime to be overthrown in a bloody coup d’état. And bloody it had been; with King Feisal II, Crown Prince Abd al-Ilah, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Said and numerous members of their families butchered during the coup.
The monarchy, having shrugged off several previous attempts to overthrown it –with British and American assistance – most notably during the Al Wathbah Uprising in 1948 and the Iraqi Intifada of 1952 had been swept away in an orgy of bloodletting and a revolutionary movement eventually led by Abd al-Karim Qasim had set about systematically purging ‘imperialistic’ and basically, foreign, influence from Iraq. Following years of Western sanctions, the regional economic collapse in the wake of the October War had kicked the ground from under the feet of the revolutionary government last year. After pursuing policies which deliberately exacerbated both religious and ethnic tensions, setting Kurds against Arabs, Sunni Muslims against Shia at the same time that non-Iraqi workers had been driven out of – and their absence had subsequently crippled - the oilfields, Abd al-Karim Qasim himself had been assassinated and the revolution overturned in a new coup mounted by a cadre of mainly Sunni Army officers. Thereafter the Army had cracked down hard on opposition, conducting a reign of terror against the Kurds of the north, while simultaneously making threatening moves against Abadan and the Emirate of Kuwait in the south, signalling its long-term intentions towards the latter by declaring it a ‘Province of the State of Basra’.
Not surprisingly, as soon as it became known that the Red Army was on the move south the fragile Iraqi – ‘nationalist’ now rather than ‘revolutionary’ – government had shown all the resilience of a crystal decanter hurled against a brick wall. It had splintered and the resulting infighting had soon development into a civil war, fought in the main in and around the capital, Baghdad. The fighting had continued right up until the moment the first T-62s of the 10th Guards Tank Division had rolled into the north eastern outskirts of the city.
Major General Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov had already decided he hated Iraq by then. He hated Iraqis, he hated the deserts, the mountains, the shitty roads, the bad water, the way the food always seemed to have sand or grit in it, and most of all he hated an enemy who would not stand and fight!
Not that it was the Iraqis who were the real problem.
Standing on the roof of the house overlooking Al-Rasheed Air Base surveying the columns of smoke rising over the northern suburbs, and the charred, smouldering wreckage all around him, the last thing he was worrying about was the prospect of some belated Iraqi Army counter attack attempting to expel his exhausted tankers from the city. No, his problem was the British. Specifically, the British Royal Air Force, and to a lesser extent, the Red Air Force which thus far in this war had been as much use as a eunuch in a whorehouse!
Presently, his 10th Guards Tank Division held the northern and eastern sides of Baghdad, basically, those areas west of the Tigris, the great river which meandered through the city like a giant python. Strictly speaking, any claim that he ‘held’ Baghdad was of dubious provenance, all his boys actually ‘held’ were several scattered enclaves, or ‘bastions’ ahead of the arrival of the 18th and 22nd Siberian Mechanised Divisions.
Unfortunately, the fragmentary information he was getting was beginning to suggest that the forward brigade of the 18th Siberian Mechanised Division no longer existed, courtesy of the RAF. Some idiot had halted the leading tank regiment on open ground north of the city to ‘consolidate and to re-group’ before entering Baghdad in daylight. Nobody yet had a count of how many tanks and other vehicles had been destroyed. Moreover, until somebody started counting body parts there would be no reliable head count. What was already clear was that courtesy of the RAF the 18th Siberian Mechanised Division did not currently exist as a fighting unit; and that its wrecked tanks and the scorched and blasted bodies of as many as a thousand of its men now blocked the road into Baghdad from Baqubah.
Baqubah was another problem.
The centre of Baqubah was now in ruins and the road to the north and the south of the city cratered ‘to Hell’ according to the pilot of the helicopter he had sent up there to give him a reliable situation report. No traffic was going to be passing south through Baqubah for at least forty-eight hours.
There was something deeply disturbingly, and sickeningly pragmatic about the way the British waged war, Major General Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov was realising. The British pretended to be gentlemen; and that the ‘rules of war’ were inviolable but when a thing needed to be done they were utterly ruthless. If the only way they could block a road was to destroy the town around it then, so be it. When they needed a sledgehammer they used it; when they needed to be more surgical, out came the precision tools kept at the bottom of their bombing toolbox. Shortly after the Siberians had been hit north of the city, there had been a series of smaller raids targeting oil storage tanks and the city’s water treatment and pumping stations. Huge pillars of filthy grey black smoke now bubbled up from ruptured oil tanks and half the city had no clean water this morning. In addition, Al-Rasheed air base – even if the Red Air Force had had the balls to fly its precious aircraft this far south - was self-evidently out of commission, as was a second airfield on the western outskirts of the city.
Puchkov was asking himself: When is the first big bomb going to drop on one of the key bridges across the Tigris?
As a result of the bombing the next thing that was going to happen was that some of the Iraqi soldiers who had gone to ground a day or two ago would stop shitting themselves and suddenly rediscovered their courage.
It was still over six hundred kilometres from where he stood to the shores of the Persian Gulf. Puchkov had yet to fight a proper battle; and already he had lost half his T-62s. His boys badly needed to rest up, to repair and to overhaul equipment.
Most of all he needed air cover.
Puchkov looked towards the centre of Baghdad some ten or eleven kilometres to his north west. He had less than three thousand troops and somewhere between thirty and forty tanks – and perhaps as many other armoured vehicles - in a city with a population of perhaps one-and-a-half million people. There had to be twenty or thirty thousand Iraqi Army troops hiding, invisible in the backstreets. He had known Operation Nakazyvat was always going to be fraught with peril but right now, if the Iraqis rose up against the invaders the whole enterprise was going to end in humiliation and defeat.
Babadzhanian was right when he had told him that ‘Baghdad is the key, seize Baghdad and we will have a lodgement in this country that nobody will ever kick us out of!’ However, Puchkov did not believe that his commander had imagined for a moment, not even in his worst nightmares, that Army Group South would be this stretched out, disorganised and frankly, worn down at this stage of the invasion with the job less than half-done.
He took one last look around.
Puchkov sighed and then he wheeled around and began barking orders.
Chapter 47
Monday 1st June 1964
Flight UK1, Mid-Atlantic en route for New York
; The RAF had re-arranged the seats in the mid-fuselage section of the modified long-range Comet 4 jetliner to facilitate mid-air conferences and meetings. Two groups of six previously forward facing seats had been reduced to four seats each, with the two pairs of seats nearest the nose of the aircraft turned around. In the gap between the seats a table had been installed, likewise a direct telephone link to the cockpit, where cutting edge scrambler and secure communications kit had been installed enabling VIPs to continually be in contact with their offices and staff back in the United Kingdom, or wherever else they needed to be in contact with while they were in the air.
That afternoon Margaret Thatcher, her Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft, Foreign Secretary Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson and Alison Munro, the Minister of Supply and Transportation in the UAUK had convened to discuss the latest news from the Middle East and the South Atlantic. Peter Thorneycroft and Alison Munro’s inclusion in the Prime Minister’s delegation, and the absence of a representative of the Chiefs of Staff or of a senior officer of Security Service was no accident. If the Kennedy Administration or any subsequent administration in Philadelphia wanted to have any meaningful long term ‘alliance’ or ‘understanding’ with the United Kingdom it was going to have to be one that was mutually beneficial to both parties outside the sphere of military or security co-operation. In these last two respects the Prime Minister felt herself to have been personally ‘let down’ by her transatlantic ‘friends’; in future Anglo-American relations would be placed on a firm ‘financial’ foundation, or not at all. She had, therefore, left her military advisors at home because they ‘had little or no time to spare discussing hypothetical matters pertaining to the national security of the United Kingdom with Johnny-come-lately friends who could not be relied upon in a crisis!’
The ministers gathered around this small table high above the stormy North Atlantic understood that they had been invited on this ‘mission’ to the United States, to extract a quid pro quo that was to be measured in strictly monetary terms from the United States government in exchange for the United Kingdom’s continuing global ‘co-operation and toleration of American commercial interests’.
Grand strategy had not worked out as planned; therefore a different accommodation was to be sought. The time for fine sentiments was over.
Today, the first item on the agenda was a briefing on the current ‘strategic situation’ of British and Commonwealth forces; just so that everybody was on the same page when ‘the Americans’ started asking individual members of the delegation questions.
The news from Middle East, from Persian Gulf Command Headquarters at Damman in Saudi Arabia was good, and bad. Rather like a proverbial curate’s egg, it was very hard to know what to make of it.
An RAF photo-reconnaissance Canberra based on Cyprus had been attacked by two Soviet fast jets in the vicinity of Baghdad the previous day. The aircraft, flying at fifty-three thousand feet had successfully evaded the enemy fighters; but it was the first time the Red Air Force had appeared over central Iraq and it was a bad portent of what was to come as the enemy consolidated its territorial gains, developed forward air bases and missile defences and progressively impaired the bombing campaign’s ability to blunt the Soviet drive south. In this connection the RAF had wisely ‘drawn in its horns’, mindful of the principle of conservation of resources. Every available aircraft would be needed in battles to come, and in increasingly MiG-infested airspace risking the loss of a V-Bomber or a Canberra cratering a road or knocking down a bridge in the middle of nowhere was a mug’s game.
Nobody yet really had a feel for whether the Soviet ‘halt’ in the Baghdad area was a good or a bad thing. While Jericho spoke to the mess the Soviets were in it did not answer the main question.
Had the Red Army run out of steam?
Or was this simply a re-grouping ‘pause’ before it rolled south with ever greater and unstoppable momentum?
The Iraqi Army had melted away before the invaders abandoning large numbers of armoured and other vehicles to the Russians. Infuriatingly, this was going to make good some of the losses the invaders had incurred in the mountains, and to the rigors of campaigning over ground inimical to tracked and untracked vehicles alike.
On the positive side Jericho was revealing that the first V-Bomber strikes had panicked the Soviet High Command to the extent that several senior officers had been peremptorily recalled, to ‘account for their actions’ back home. Moreover, all the indications were that the Soviet forces who had reached Baghdad thus far had only managed it by ‘living off the countryside’ and were short of everything from reloads for 115-millimetre guns of its T-62s to spare parts for radio sets. Evidently, the system for supplying rations to the troops had completely collapsed long before the leading elements of the two Soviet Armies, 3rd Caucasus Tank Army and 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army had broken through the high passes in the Zagros Mountains into northern Iraq.
Meanwhile the plans for Operation Cold Harbour, the naval element of Operation Lightfoot, Lieutenant-General Michael Carver’s plan to stop the Red Army in its tracks in Basra Province, were looking somewhat fanciful. As was the whole concept of Operation Lightfoot because it was anybody’s guess whether the garrison at Abadan would soon be under attack from Iranian and or Iraqi forces, or caught in the middle of a regional Iranian civil war between the factions vying for hegemony now that the Shah was gone.
In either event Case Zero-One of Operation Lightfoot might have to be invoked at as little as twenty-four hours notice; specifically, the controlled demolition of the main facilities on Abadan Island, and the commencement of an emergency evacuation of British and Commonwealth forces and all western civilian workers by sea and air.
Once invoked Case Zero-One would render the larger objectives of Operation Lightfoot null and void.; and ‘Case Two’ would be invoked. Powerful armoured forces and supporting arms would be built up in Kuwait ready to either hold static defence lines, or to mount a major ‘spoiling’ attack against the enemy with the purpose of making any immediate further invasion of Kuwaiti or Saudi territory impractical, hopefully for as long as possible. At that stage there might be a chance of some kind of ‘peace conference’ or, alternatively, the Kennedy Administration might by then have come to its senses; although nobody thought that was remotely likely.
In the South Atlantic things were getting grim.
The Argentine ‘Army of Liberation’ on East Falkland had threatened to take hostages from among the civilian population and shoot a dozen or so of them every time a British submarine attacked a ‘vessel in the illegal exclusion zone of death’. After the sinking of the Argentine aircraft carrier Indepencia by HMS Oberon, apparently with the loss of as many as six hundred lives – the loss of life had been unnecessarily heavy because her escorting destroyers had steamed over the horizon at flank speed rather than standing by the stricken carrier – Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Venezuela had all broken off diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom and closed their ports to British and Commonwealth, registered ships, impounding or interning several vessels at that time.
One submarine, HMS Orpheus, had succeeded in landing a small group of Royal Marine SBS – Special Boat Force – men on the south coast of East Falkland near a settlement called Fitzroy several days ago but no word had yet been heard from it.
Worryingly, the Argentine authorities were still refusing to issue any information about the fate of the eighty-two man strong Royal Marine garrison of the Falkland Islands. Also, missing and ‘unaccounted for’ was a Royal Navy detachment of seventeen men undertaking a hydrographical survey of Falkland Sound, the stretch of water separating East and West Falkland. Meanwhile, after being held incommunicado under what amounted to house arrest in the British Embassy in Buenos Aires for nearly two months the United Kingdom’s diplomatic mission was only now being permitted to depart the city.
In an act of pure political pique the Argentine government had declined to allow the fourteen men and three women
of the pre-war, somewhat reduced diplomatic presence, to fly out of the country, forcing them to take the arduous overland route to the Chilean border.
Chile was another imponderable; a friendly neutral at the outset of the crisis Argentina had offered to end the long-standing dispute between the two neighbours over the sovereignty and navigational rights to the Beagle Channel – the stretch of water at the foot of the South American continent which permitted ships to transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific without having to brave the storm-wracked waters of Cape Horn – and the Chilean government, eager to avoid a shooting war with its neighbour had softened its former condemnation of ‘the Malvinas aggression’. Worse, it had publicly withdrawn its invitation to ‘offer sanctuary to damaged British warships’.
To the Argentine the Falkland Islands were ‘Las Malvinas’, cruelly stolen from the young republic in the 1830s by a rapacious John Bull at the point of a gun. Across the entire South American continent other ‘oppressed and impoverished’ former European colonies were jumping on the Buenos Aires bandwagon. This would never have happened if the United States, which had treated the Americas North, Central and South as its national ‘sphere of influence’ for much of the twentieth century, had not selectively abdicated its responsibilities since the October War. After decades of gerrymandering in the political and economic life of tens of millions of South Americans the Kennedy Administration had by default, disengaged from the fray leaving chaos and even greater instability in the wake of its withdrawal. J. William Fulbright, Dean Rusk’s successor at the State Department had tried to put a brake on the process but much of the damage had already been done; which was precisely why the Falklands crisis had come as almost as big a shock to the Americans, as it had to Margaret Thatcher’s Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.
“I confess, Prime Minister,” Alison Munro, Secretary of State for Supply, Transportation and Energy – the woman responsible for ensuring that the British people did not starve and that the sinews of war were kept as healthily robust as possible – retorted when Margaret Thatcher threw open the floor for discussion, “that I had not realised you planned to confront the Administration with the consequences of its foreign policy volte face in such uncompromising terms?”