The Burning Time (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 5)

by James Philip

“We lack strategic depth,” he reminded the man who was presently, Commander of all Soviet Land, Air and Sea Forces, Minister of Defence, First Deputy Secretary of the Soviet Union, and the third most senior surviving member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Chuikov did not care for his plethora of grand titles because he still liked to think of himself as a simple soldier’s soldier. “We cannot allow ourselves to be embroiled in static battles,” Colonel-General Babadzhanian insisted. “We must strike before the West can mobilize.”

  “The KGB assures me that the West is preoccupied with its problems in the Eastern Mediterranean,” Vasily Chuikov countered. “Maskirovska, Comrade Colonel-General! Maskirovska!”

  “Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti,” Babadzhanian snorted. “I don’t remember those bastards warning us Krasnaya Zarya was about to seize the Samara Military District and start shooting our last fucking ICBMs at the British!”

  Chuikov did not disagree. The KGB had assured the Politburo that it was so safe to send a high-level diplomatic mission to parley with the Romanian leadership that it had sent its own Second Secretary, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov along for the ride! If Andropov ever got out of hospital he would have the analysts responsible for that appraisal publicly eviscerated. Chuikov let Babadzhanian continue uninterrupted.

  “There are worrying signs that the Americans and the British are stepping up their aerial reconnaissance activities. They seem to be targeting increasingly sensitive areas.”

  “The Americans haven’t sent any more U-2s,” the older man grunted. “Maybe we’ve shot them all down?”

  Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian frowned.

  Chuikov chuckled and held up his hands.

  “Things are what they are, Comrade,” he said, his ugly, evilly cherubic features creased, “you can’t have your precious paratroopers back quite yet. And that’s that! They are still tidying up the mess in Romania.”

  Both men knew that was a laughable understatement.

  The forces sent to put down Krasnaya Zarya had ended up having to block a major Yugoslav Army mechanized thrust towards the Romanian border. With Krasnaya Zarya gutted as a fighting force other, previously loyal and reliable units had crumbled and in places a rout had only been averted by an airlift of elite shock troops earmarked for Babadzhanian’s ‘Southern Push’ into the line. The Romanian ‘fuck up’ – there was no other appropriate description for what had happened in Bucharest – had already delayed the launch of Phase Two of Operation Nakazyvat by three weeks. Eight tank brigades ought to have been racing south by now. If he ever got his hands on that little shit Ceaușescu he would rip off his fucking head! The interrogation of captured senior figures in the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej regime, including high ranking Securitates, conclusively proved the Romanians had been planning to play a double game all along. They had seen Krasnaya Zarya as a direct threat to the survival of the Romanian State, breathed a collective sigh of relief when most of the lunatics and zealots departed to rape and pillage in Greece and the Balkans; and then panicked when the missiles began to fly. By the time Kosygin, Andropov and Chuikov had flown in to Otopeni Air Base large tracts of the country were out of control, civil war was spreading like wildfire and the leadership was looking for a way out.

  Some kind of appeal to the West; it wasn’t exactly clear what Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had had in mind because the only man he seemed to have confided in was Ceaușescu. The KGB wanted to give Ceaușescu’s wife ‘the treatment’ but neither Brezhnev nor Kosygin thought that was a good idea. If Ceaușescu ever re-surfaced he was far more likely to be reasonable if his wife and kids still looked more or less the way they did the last time he saw them. Of course, if he turned up dead then the KGB could do whatever they wanted with the little shit’s bitch wife and his whining brats.

  “You know as well as I do, Comrade Colonel-General, that Phase Two cannot be launched until the Navy is ready,” Chuikov told his subordinate. “That business at Constanta completely fucked up the Navy’s plans.”

  Actually, the Navy had ‘fucked up’ its own plans by needlessly shelling the dockyards and in the process, blowing up its own arsenal and setting fire to its own oil storage facilities. If the Navy had waited a couple of days minesweepers would have cleared the deep water channels and re-opened the port without a single shot having to be fired in anger. The Red Air Force was almost as bad as the Red Navy. They had bombed and strafed several forward air fields in Bulgaria and Anatolia, destroying scores of their own aircraft on the ground and killing hundreds of irreplaceable air and ground crews. The former NATO air base at Incirlik had been wrecked by a high-altitude raid by seven Tupolev Tu-95s, in which over ninety tons of high explosive and incendiaries had been scattered across the target, rendering it unusable for weeks.

  It was a miracle Phase Two had only been delayed another twenty-eight days.

  “All the Navy has to do is demonstrate in the southern Aegean, Comrade Marshal. A couple of cruisers and few destroyers can manage that!”

  One of the reasons Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov had not wanted a face to face interview with either Babadzhanian, or his equivalent ground forces commander in the west, or his naval or air force counterparts was that after the Romanian fuck up, it was vitally important that there should be no further breaches of security. The final planning for Phase Two of Operation Nakazyvat had therefore, been rigorously compartmentalised; meaning that none of the senior commanders knew in detail what any of the other commanders were tasked to do, or necessarily, what resources had been or would be allocated to them. For example, Babadzhanian, as ground forces commander in the East had no ‘need to know’ that the mission assigned to the Black Sea Fleet and the former Turkish vessels now incorporated on its roster, had been dramatically upgraded following the degradation of the British Royal Navy’s offensive capabilities during Phase One of Operation Chastise. The Red Navy, supported by the Red Air Force was now tasked with seizing and maintaining control of the Eastern Mediterranean and destroying what survived of the British Mediterranean Fleet and any American warships that were so ill-advised to approach Cyprus. While it was understood that the USS Independence, one of the Yankees’ so-called ‘super-carriers’ was currently at Gibraltar, the British only had a couple of small aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. The Red Air Force bombers and fighters scheduled to move to forward bases in Greece and Crete ahead of the launch of Phase Two should make short work of these ‘little’ carriers. In any event, Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian did not need to know about the naval aspects of Operation Chastise. He had quite enough to worry about preparing his two mechanized armies for the Blitzkrieg into Persia and Iraq.

  “We shall let the Navy worry about that,” Chuikov growled. “I personally selected you to command the most vital element of Operation Nakazyvat. I don’t need you worrying about shit that isn’t your responsibility, Comrade Colonel-General.”

  Babadzhanian had commanded the 20th Tank Brigade at the Battle of Kursk, the greatest clash of armour in history; and spent the rest of the Great Patriotic War driving the Nazis all the way back to Berlin. In an army replete with gifted and accomplished exponents of armoured warfare, few could match Babadzhanian’s accomplishments. The trouble was that the man knew it and humility was not his strong suit. Chuikov did not care; if anybody could drive the eight armoured divisions of the two tank armies waiting like giant murderous coiled springs in the Caucasus, fifteen hundred kilometres south from the northern border of Iran across mountains, burning deserts and the floodplains of two of the planet’s greatest Rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, all the way to Abadan and Basra on the Persian Gulf that man was probably Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian.

  “Don’t even think of trying to go over my head to the Politburo!” Vasily Chuikov barked with jovial menace that would have sounded hollow coming from any other man.

  Chapter 27

  Wednesday 4th March 1964

  USS Iowa, Phi
ladelphia Naval Dockyard

  The cold spring air of the grey morning shimmered with the heat rising above the aft stack of the battleship as the tugs hauled the eighth hundred and eighty-seven feet long forty-five thousand ton deadweight of the USS Iowa, out into the main channel for the short journey to the Fitting Out Basin. A flotilla of small boats bobbed on the murky waters of the Delaware River as the horns of the circling patrol boats discouraged the overly curious or excitable among the bystanders and the massed media people, from getting too close to the leviathan.

  The USS Iowa’s nine 16-inch 50-calibre Mark 7 Naval Rifles had been raised to their maximum elevation of forty-five degrees. That was a nice touch by the Navy, thought Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Vice-President of the United States of America as he stood on the bridge of the behemoth surrounded by a crowd of TV men, jabbering press people – men and women – and a scrum of jostling photographers.

  The battleship’s captain, a lean grey-haired man who had commanded one of the USS Iowa’s sisters during the Korean War ignored the interlopers.

  Sixty-one year old Captain Anderson Farragut Schmidt had left the US Navy in 1957 to manage his family’s stud farm in Maryland. He had freely confessed to the Vice-President that ‘patriotism be dammed, sir’, and that nothing short of the command of ‘one of the Iowas’ would have induced him to return to active service. Schmidt was one of those old-time military types whose dignity was impermeably impenetrable; amidst the near chaos on the bridge of his ship he stood alone, aloof as if surrounded by an invisible armoured cloak.

  Today was a shameless campaign publicity stunt for the Kennedy-Johnson Presidential ticket; the President would have been the star of the show – the unimaginably iconic theatricality of the Iowa being transferred from the Naval Inactive Maintenance Facility of the Philadelphia Naval Dockyard to the up-river Fitting Out Basin was something a candidate for public office could not buy for love or money – had not he and Bobby decided at the last minute that the forthcoming Mid-West Democratic Primaries and the delayed, Iowa Caucasus could not be taken for granted despite the pollsters’ predictions of a landslide. Even though there was no prospect whatsoever of a realistic Democratic opponent suddenly emerging from the back woods it did no harm to take local wannabees and malcontents seriously in the first rounds of an election campaign. The Vice-President was not about to complain about the President’s absence. He was the one who had ended up standing on the bridge of a battlewagon looking decidedly Presidential. Not so long ago the Kennedy brothers would not have let him get anywhere near a jamboree like this; it was an indicator of how relations at the top of the Administration had improved since the Battle of Washington that the President, the Attorney General and he had reorganised the schedule of the ‘top team’ for the next five days over coffees and Kentucky bourbon without a single cross word yesterday afternoon.

  LBJ had not met Captain Schmidt until that morning.

  The commanding officer of the Iowa was not a man easily, if at all, impressed by politicians. That said, he was an old-fashioned gentleman whose apparently mild-mannered exterior clearly masked the soul of a workaholic, albeit paternal slave-driving martinet. According the Admiral David McDonald, the Chief of Naval Operations, ‘Battlewagon Schmidt’ was the US Navy’s last ‘great battleship man’. Schmidt was a gunnery expert who had cut his teeth in the ‘battleship navy’ of the 1920s and 1930s, been a senior member of the original design team for the Iowas, Gunnery Officer, then Executive Officer of two of the four ships in the class late in the Pacific War. He had been onboard the USS Missouri when the Japanese Surrender was signed and commanded not one, but two of the leviathans in the years before, during and after the Korean conflict.

  The Iowa’s safe transfer up river was the responsibility of the River Pilot and the tug masters but Anderson Schmidt had fired up two of Iowa’s eight Babcock & Wilcox M-Type boilers and reactivated one of the four Engine Rooms. If something untoward happened he was ready.

  ‘There are four Fire Rooms,’ the lean Richmond-born Virginian had explained, making the entirely reasonable presumption that a Texan Vice-President of the United States of America was unlikely to know his arse from his elbow onboard a Navy ship, ‘or Boiler Rooms, as the Brits call them’, he explained. ‘The Fire Rooms each have two boilers, and each Fire Room is located forward of its respective Engine Room. Iowa has four shafts, each with its own Fire Room and Engine Room. Assuming she’s not been long out of dockyard hands and her bottom is relatively clean, the ship can make twenty-seven knots with just four of her eight boilers lit. If we want to steam faster we need to fire up everything we’ve got!”

  Over a thousand of the Iowa’s two thousand three hundred man crew had already reported aboard. As David McDonald had promised, this was an ‘old man’s ship’. Apart from a small cadre of cadets and junior grade lieutenants there were no boy sailors or young men on the Iowa. It was likely that the average age of the battleship’s crew would be in the mid-thirties, perhaps, older. In the rest of the US Navy it was not unusual to find over half a ship’s complement aged under twenty-three years of age.

  ‘The Chief of Naval Operations wants the old girl in action inside two months,’ Captain Schmidt had smiled, ‘so that’s what Admiral McDonald gets. You can’t train a green kid much in two months. Back in the war,’ the Pacific War of 1944 to 1945 when the four Iowa class ships first came into service, ‘it took us six months to a year to shakedown these beasts. But calling back all my old-timers, well, that’s music to my ears, Mr Vice-President.’

  LBJ felt like a Greek God chatting man to man with the distinguished-looking Captain of the battleship. He did not just look Presidential swapping anecdotes with Anderson Schmidt, he looked positively regal and that image would be flashed across America within hours and across the civilized World in days.

  ‘Tell me about the big guns, Captain Schmidt?’ He had invited his host.

  ‘Before they put a ship into mothballs the Navy makes a call about whether she’s ever going to return to service,’ the officer had explained, formally affable. ‘With the Iowas they hedged their bets. In the mothballing refit they didn’t lock everything down and hardly any essential equipment was removed. But,’ he chuckled, ‘the main and secondary batteries were inactivated. The best way to test the hydraulics and electrics is to elevate the big guns. Strictly speaking the main battery turrets are three-gun, not ‘triple’ turrets. Each gun can be elevated and fired separately, you see, Mr Vice-President.’

  LBJ had not known if the Captain of the Iowa was blinding him with science or simply playing up to the crowd. He had let the man talk.

  ‘Each main battery gun is sixty-six feet long from muzzle to breech face, of which about forty-three feet protrudes from the gun house. Each gun and breech assembly weighs over one hundred and twenty tons. At maximum elevation – as you see them now – each rifle can propel a two thousand seven hundred pound armour-piercing round over twenty nautical miles. When the Iowas first joined the Fleet it was decided that to aid artillery spotters when the ships were bombarding shore targets, each of the four ships in the class should incorporate dye bags into their respective propellant mixes. The USS New Jersey was assigned blue, the USS Missouri red, the USS Wisconsin green and the USS Iowa orange.’

  Captain Schmidt had periodically moved away from the Vice-President to confer with his Navigation Officer, a greying, balding veteran in his late fifties, who was the man actually co-ordinating operations with the Pilot and the tug masters.

  ‘What you can actually see of both the main battery and the ten dual-purpose twin 5-inch turrets of the secondary battery,’ Anderson Schmidt had continued, ‘is only a small proportion of the workings of the turret. Number One and Three main battery turrets extend down four decks below the main deck, Number Two turret placed between Number One turret and the bridge so as to super-fire over Number One turret, goes down five decks. Each turret weighs in excess of two thousand tons. Each turret can be rotated through three hundre
d degrees of arc at a maximum rate of transit of four degrees per second. The main battery can be fired beyond the beam, that is, ‘over the shoulder’ with the barrels of either the forward or the after turrets pointing respectively backwards or forwards. We try to avoid ‘over the shoulder’ shoots because the muzzle blast causes havoc in exposed positions in the superstructure. Back in the day the first time we tried it off Iwo Jima it was like being hit by a Kamikaze amidships,’ the grey-haired old warrior guffawed affectionately in fond remembrance.

  A question had popped into the Vice-President’s head.

  Notwithstanding he was painfully aware of the pitfalls of trying to pretend to know what one was talking about with so many witnesses – each and every one of them aching to see him make a fool of oneself – he had asked a question.

  ‘I believe the big guns only have a finite number of firings during their service life, Captain Schmidt?’

  ‘They do indeed, Mr Vice-President. For all their sound and fury they are tender monsters. Using the propellant available in the 1940s – Nitrated-Cellulose, or as we call it in the trade NC – we got about two hundred and ninety full bore, maximum range ‘heavy’ projectile-size shoots, out of each barrel.’ He waved at the elevated barrels of the great naval rifles. ‘After the Pacific War we switched to SPD, that’s Smokeless Powder using Diphenylamine as a stabilizer, which doesn’t burn as fiercely as NC, which was little better than the old-fashioned cordite mixes used by our first generation dreadnoughts. SPD extended barrel life to around three hundred and fifty firings. Lately, we think we’ve cracked how to extend barrel life into the four hundreds. Magical stuff the ‘Swedish Additive’!’

  LBJ could not stop himself asking: ‘The Swedish Additive?’

  He had instantly wished he could take back the question the moment it left his lips but like an armour-piercing round launched at supersonic velocity from the barrel of one of the Iowa’s big guns he had no way of stopping it short of its explosive landing many, many miles away.