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

by James Philip

  Peter did not think Westmoreland would have sought him out in the first place unless his masters had worked out that in an odd way, each man performed similar roles at the ‘symposium’. They were undeclared, unacknowledged ‘honest brokers’.

  “The Prime Minister can,” the younger man suggested, “for example, unilaterally lift the sanctions against the Irish Republic at a time of the President’s choosing. Say, to coincide with the Democratic convention next month?”

  Westmoreland mulled this for a moment.

  The ‘blockade’ on Irish ports imposed after the atrocities at Brize Norton and Cheltenham in early April was like a knife in the side of the Kennedy re-election campaign.

  “The Prime Minister is also prepared to give an undertaking that the United Kingdom will refrain from sending Ambassadors to individual states.”

  “We could veto that, anyway,” Westmoreland pointed out.

  “You could,” the younger man acknowledged. “But that would look like weakness on your part.”

  The American grinned; the hero of the Battle of Malta had been well-briefed by his principals.

  “We could give the Red Army a free hand in the Middle East and hold the Arabian Peninsula as a British fiefdom,” Peter Christopher went on, playing Devil’s advocate.

  “You’re talking about making a separate peace with the Soviets?” Westmoreland checked, not liking the idea one little bit.

  “Perhaps, but only after we have fought them first, sir.”

  Westmoreland wanted to cut the young Englishman off at the knees, except he could not because he felt...guilty. Once again his country had betrayed its oldest ally; and this time the Brits would never, ever forgive the United States of America.

  “And we will fight them, sir,” Peter Christopher promised. “Not at long-range with missiles and bombers but on the ground. With cold steel if it comes to it. On that you may depend.”

  Westmoreland nodded.

  “Presumably, that’s what you’ll tell the President tomorrow?”

  Peter met the older man’s gaze.

  Lord Franks and Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson had warned him that ‘things are so bad that both sides will be looking to explore back channels at this symposium’, and patiently walked him through his script.

  The United Kingdom and the United States were no longer allies other than in respect of existing military arrangements; such as those currently in place in the Mediterranean under which the US Sixth Fleet ‘co-operated’ in ‘theatre defence’ measures with the British and Commonwealth forces in situ. It was anybody’s guess how long those ‘arrangements’ would persist but in the present rapidly cooling climate none of them were likely to be renewed or redefined in the foreseeable future, and most, therefore would eventually wither on the vine. In the event of a change of US policy in years to come nobody in the United Kingdom took it for granted, or necessarily imagined it to be in any way desirable, that there would be a groundswell of opinion in the old country to restore the former, NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – defence pact which had failed the country so badly in October 1962, and in the months since.

  What was the point of signing a mutual defence treaty when you knew, you absolutely knew from very painful experience, that the other party could not be trusted to fulfil its side of the bargain?

  It was better by far to place future relations on a new, firmer footing and to move on.

  “If the President asks,” Peter Christopher confirmed. “Yes, sir, that is exactly what I will tell him.”

  Chapter 53

  Tuesday 2nd June 1964

  French Navy Ship Cassard, North of Cap Matifou, Algiers, Algeria

  The consignment of seven P-15 Termit anti-ship missiles had been flown into the Marseille–Marignane Air Base of the Provisional Government of Southern France five months ago. Initially intended to be just the first batch of a much larger arsenal of former Red Navy and Red Air Force guided munitions recovered by Krasnaya Zarya salvage teams operating in the ‘dead zones’ of the Crimea and the Ukraine, they had been transported in pieces by river and sea and then overland to territories under the control of Red Dawn insurgents before being dispatched, one missile per flight, to the movement’s agents in France.

  At first nobody in Marseille had had the first idea what to do with the disassembled missiles. Technicians were due to come from the east in February and March with other, equally lethal modern weapons systems but they never came and later when the Provisional Government learned of the fighting enveloping the Aegean, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and Rumania they had realised that they were alone. Or rather, they had believed that they were alone for several weeks until commissars from Chelyabinsk had flown into Marseilles-Marignane to formally re-establish fraternal comradeship with their Krasnaya Zarya ‘brothers’. Shortly afterwards a handful of the previously promised missile technicians, and a small detachment of KGB troopers had arrived at Marseille-Marignane, to assume ‘guard duties’ for the Soviet ‘technical delegations’ that were to be established at Marseille and Perpignan on the coast, and to the beleaguered Soviet ‘diplomatic mission’ in Clermont-Auvergne, the capital of the Revolutionary Provisional Government of South France.

  Progress was painfully slow; while the French viewed Russian claims that there was a shortage of suitable transport aircraft, it was undeniable that there were very few suitable ‘secure’ air bases in the territory under the direct control of the Provisional Government. That ‘territory’ although large geographically, was far from contiguous and the writ of the Central Committee based in the Auvergne, probably ran in less than half of the country they actually claimed to govern. Moreover, all the parties agreed that if the British or the Americans discovered that there was a Soviet presence on French territory ‘too early’ it would invite pre-emptive bombing raids or other ‘problematic’ consequences likely to spread alarm among ‘the people’. In fact the need to maintain secrecy was so paramount that it justified ‘exceptional measures’.

  Smoke and mirrors.

  Over three-quarters of the French Mediterranean Fleet had been destroyed in port on the night of the October War, with only a few submarines and ships at sea, and the Ajaccio Squadron based in Corsica having survived the cataclysm.

  Nobody in Clermont really trusted the Navy.

  In the bitter fighting that had eventually resulted in the formation of the Provisional Government in Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne the previous autumn, the Navy had remained aloof. In Brittany, navy men had stiffened the resolve of the North Atlantic ‘communes’ to resist the regime in the Auvergne. Even when the Ajaccio Squadron had accepted overtures from Clermont-Ferrand to return to the ‘patriotic fold’ when it re-established relations with the Army Junta which had seized control of Corsica after the October War; doubts had remained.

  Many Navy men had recoiled at serving the zealously Marxist-Leninist regime in Clermont; they had been purged. Those who had sworn loyalty to the new South France-Corsican Axis took comfort from the fact that onboard their ships they were not at the mercy of the regime’s secret police and regiments of ‘citizen spies’. Besides, in a World so obviously devastated by the October War most men ached for the opportunity to belong again to something, anything that resembled France and the majority of the men manning the ships of the Ajaccio Squadron had no real idea of the magnitude of the disaster which had befallen their country.

  In Corsica and throughout revolutionary France there was little news of the outside World, which most French men and women assumed to have been swept away by the war. The Provisional Government had made it a crime to possess a radio in the reconstituted prefectures under its writ, the Government dealt in printed proclamations and local rabble rousing rallies, occasionally broadcasting exhortations and calls for national fraternity to the disease-ravaged population. It was believed that Paris and the cities of the north and the east had been consumed in the fires of the war, as had the great Atlantic ports. Across the English Chann
el the United Kingdom was a strange and alien place. An enemy to be feared, its every attempt at communication shunned. All that mattered was the ideological purity of the revolutionary republic, which henceforth would exist apart from the rest of Europe, safe in its own ideologically pure enclave.

  The piecemeal domain of the Provisional Government stretched from the Côte d'Azur in the south east nearly to the Atlantic coast of the Pyrenean Basque country in the west, inland as far north as Orleans and as far east as Dijon. Regime propaganda claimed that the wrecked Atlantic ports of Bordeaux, Royan, La Rochelle and St Nazaire were all now within the grasp of the Provisional Government and that several expeditions had returned to the Auvergne after ‘probing the radioactive ruins’ of Versailles and Paris. However, there were also rumours of independent armed communes in and around Paris, in Brest, Normandy and in and around several northern cities, and of Provisional Government’s ‘expeditions’ being bloodily repulsed; but loose talk was dangerous and nobody passed on gossip about contacts with British and German ‘search parties’ or more ominously, ‘raiding parties’.

  The men on the destroyers Surcouf and Cassard operated therefore, in a regime-managed bubble of ignorance, shielded from the ongoing torment of their countrymen and women at home. For the last eighteen months both ships had been based in the unbombed haven of Ajaccio, separated from the nightmare at home, and anybody openly displaying ‘ideological unreliability’ tended to be sent ashore, never to be seen again. On Corsica, notwithstanding that martial law prevailed, if a man kept his mouth shut and repeated the right mantras then life was, if not good then tolerable. Nobody had shut the whorehouses, drink was cheap and the Navy presence was largely self-contained, and most of the time, above politics. Out at sea it was almost possible to forget that in late October 1962 the old World had been blown away and that now the very air men breathed was invisibly poisoned.

  Three nights ago the Surcouf and the Cassard – two of the three surviving ships of the twelve vessel T-47 class of fleet destroyers built for the French Navy in the mid-1950s – had slipped their mornings and, darkened from stem to stern, made for the open sea.

  The crews of both ships had assumed that this was just another exercise. The sudden appearance of the United States Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean in recent weeks had kept both ships in harbour while the high command decided what to do; most of the men on the Surcouf and the Cassard had assumed this mission would simply be to monitor ship movements between Gibraltar and Malta along the North African coast. It was a game they had played often, using their turn of speed – even with fouled bottoms from respectively two, and two-and-a-half years without being dry docked the Surcouf and the Cassard could sustain twenty-eight to thirty knots – to hold targets at arm’s length on their radar plots. Their orders had always been to passively observe, and to immediately disengage if a target showed hostile intent. That was all the Ajaccio Squadron had done for most of the last year; watched, listened and collected intelligence on British shipping in the Western Mediterranean basin. Anything was better than swinging around anchor cables in port week after week, month after month, doing nothing.

  It was four weeks since the Cassard’s conversion had been completed and in the days since her crew had wondered if they were going to be allowed to ‘play’ with their new ‘toys’. The destroyer’s rear gun turrets had been remover and the decks plated over, and two bulky missile launching pylons and a new radar mast raised over the after superstructure. The two disassembled P-15 missiles had been stowed in the ungainly, ugly new deck house that now spoiled the ship’s formerly elegant lines aft of the second funnel.

  The missile launchers which had replaced two of the three twin five-inch turrets which had been sent ashore were bulky, top heavy-looking structures normally shrouded in grey tarpaulins. Within an hour of leaving Ajaccio the ‘missile crews’ – under the direction of Russian ‘experts’ - had been ordered to begin assembling the first P-15.

  It had taken nine hours to assemble and load the first missile onto the first launcher; and another five to load the second. Then the tests had begun before some thirty hours after departing Ajaccio, the missiles were fuelled and declared ‘ready’ for launch.

  All the while the two destroyers had been forging south across a metre high cross swell into a fluky south westerly wind. As was customary the destroyers observed complete radio silence, communicating with each other only by signal lamp. At night they ran without lights, reducing speed to fourteen knots. On previous missions the ships of the Ajaccio Squadron had loitered south of the Balearic Islands, or ENE of the Straits of Gibraltar, or a hundred miles north of the Algerian coast and silently waited, often for as many as six or seven days. Traffic along the normal pre-war trade routes was sparse, advertised only by distant radar emissions. In past operations the Ajaccio Squadron had gathered intelligence about those radar ‘signatures’, tracked the air traffic east and west, never risking visual contact. Two months ago the Surcouf, in company with Duperre class destroyer La Bourdonnais, had inadvertently strayed into the ‘engagement envelope’ of the modern American warships escorting the old battleship USS Iowa; their radars suddenly blinded by a fog of jamming the French ships had had turned away and run north at flank speed. This first encounter with modern American vessels had been a chastening experience; running through the night with no way of knowing if the enemy was in pursuit.

  Last night the two warships had crept within twenty miles of Algiers before seeking sea room before dawn. The Cassard and the Surcouf had come to battle stations two hours before dusk and both ships had made revolutions for twenty-six knots.

  The Cassard shuddered; the roar of the igniting rocket motor of the P-15 Termit ship-to-ship missile screamed into nearby compartments and filtered into every corner of the three thousand ton warship at 20:08 local time that evening. Many men braced for the half-expected premature detonation of the weapon.

  But there was no massive secondary, ship-wrecking explosion.

  Instead, the two-ton missile climbed into the night rapidly leaving the Cassard behind in the darkness.

  NATO nomenclature for the P-15 ignored the Soviet ‘Termit’ – which translated as Termite – and used the reporting name of Styx or the designation SS-N-2. The P-15 had been developed by the Soviet Raduga Design Bureau in the 1950s as part of the Soviet Union’s investment in ship-to-ship guided weapons as a quick fix to address the numerical and technical inferiority of the Red Navy’s surface and submarine fleets. The Red Navy had been wiped out in the Second World War and even by the time of the Cuban Missiles War it remained tiny in comparison to the combined US and British armadas. Hard hitting ship-to-ship missiles like the P-15 were a pragmatic attempt to even up the odds.

  The P-15’s onboard analogue based electronics were primitive by Western standards and its radar sensor a basic conical scanning device; but the object of the exercise was to produce a large number of practical, working missiles as soon as possible rather than to perfect technologically state of the art weaponry at some indeterminate future date. Early models had been powered by a turbojet – the Styx was, after all no more than a much enhanced, modified homing V-1 type system – made many times more lethal by a decade of advances in electronics and rocketry.

  Fuelled with highly acidic liquid propellant which started aggressively corroding the missile fuselage the moment it was loaded, the P-15 had a launch weight of 2,340 kilograms, a maximum speed of just short of the speed of sound and an effective range of about forty kilometres. Because of the rudimentary nature of the mechanisms injecting propellant into the main rocket motor and the booster slung under the P-15’s belly, even operating at extreme range there would always be a significant amount of unburned fuel in the missile when it reached its target. Taking advantage of this incendiary design by-product, the warhead, a half-ton hollow charge located behind the fuel tank in the weapon’s nose, would always detonate with an enhanced fuel-air blast. Activated at approximately eleven kilometres from t
he target the P-15’s homing system was programmed to descent at a terminal attack angle of between one and two degrees to the horizontal.

  The P-15 was not infallible, quite the opposite in fact.

  However, employed against a single target that had had no inkling of an imminent attack, that had no operative ECM – Electronic Counter Measures – on line, or working chaff launchers installed with which to fill the atmosphere with alternative radar noise and targets, the known fallibilities of the P-15 would be largely untested.

  In the Operations Room of the Cassard the radar repeaters and the constantly updating gunnery director plot showed the two P-15s – launched within less than two minutes of each other – streaking unerringly towards the target.

  High on the bridge of the destroyer lookouts saw the first flash of the huge fuel-air detonation on the southern horizon; counted the seconds to the second strike knowing that they had already hit their enemy.

  The track of the following P-15 merged with that of the target and disappeared; but there was no visible second explosion.

  Following the letter of his orders the commander of the Cassard turned his ship’s bow to the north and demanded full power. Within minutes the two French warships were creaming away into the night while far to the south their victim lay dead in the water.

  Most likely sinking.

  Chapter 54

  Wednesday 3rd June 1964

  Yacht Gretchen Louisa, Nantucket Sound

  The mood overnight had been one of grim resolution. If the news from the Mediterranean that HMS Hampshire had been attacked without warning and seriously damaged with heavy loss of life was bad; the subsequent intelligence confirming that the attack had been carried out by a pair of French destroyers was of a wholly deeper shade of black.

  It transpired that the activities of the ‘Ajaccio Squadron’ had been sporadically monitored by high-flying Canberra photo-reconnaissance aircraft operating from Malta, and occasional electronic eavesdropping flights by one of the two Avro Shackleton anti-submarine and maritime reconnaissance turboprop aircraft based at Gibraltar, since the Battle of Malta. These over flights had not been mandated because anybody seriously contemplated that the small French flotilla based on Corsica was any kind of threat; but in response to the Provisional Government of South France’s surprise declaration of a no fly zone over former French territory.