by James Philip
For the first time Peter Christopher had a clear view of all the shipping in the Grand Harbour. The Big Cats, HMS Lion and HMS Tiger were moored fore and aft to emergency destroyer buoys opposite Corradino heights, beneath which in deep bunkers and tunnels lay the primary naval arsenal of the Mediterranean Fleet. Beyond the cruisers the chimney of Marsa power station belched grey smoke. The P and O liner Canberra – her outline broken by her drab camouflage - was berthed under the ramparts of Floriana. The landing ships and many of the pre-loaded transports were anchored on the other side of Valletta in Marsamxett, cluttering Lazaretto and Msida Creeks. Two big fleet oilers lay deep in the water, filled to their load lines in Kalkara Bay, where as Talavera emerged into the waters under the bows of the Big Cats, the three aircraft carriers that were vital to the success of the forthcoming operations in the Eastern Mediterranean slowly came into view from the destroyer’s bridge. The Commando carrier HMS Ocean was nearest – she would sail with the assault force – and behind her HMS Eagle’s bulk hid most of the smaller HMS Hermes from sight. The Eagle had been two-thirds of the way through a radical reconstruction at Portsmouth at the time of the October War. The rebuild had begun in 1959 and progress had been slow; however, in her new incarnation Eagle was a significantly more modern and capable weapon of war than her half-sister, HMS Ark Royal, the worn out heroine of Operation Manna. Fully loaded, the Eagle displaced over fifty-four thousand tons – making her nearly twice the size of the Hermes – and carried an air group of over forty aircraft. In the distance, HMS Sheffield still stood sentinel just inside the northern breakwater. The battered old cruiser had already surrendered over two hundred men to bolster the complement of HMS Belfast, the Flagship of Task Force Alpha. After the Fleet had sailed for the Eastern Mediterranean the Sheffield was to be sent home with a skeleton crew.
A thin tendril of smoke was rising from the Belfast’s after funnel and a host of flags were flying from her halyards, both fore and aft. Inboard of the Flagship the tall masts of three US Navy ships were a veritable forest of aerials. Elements of Rear Admiral Detweiller’s ‘American Squadron’ had departed the Grand Harbour in company with a convoy of US Navy stores, ammunition ships and tankers that outnumbered the handful of modern anti-aircraft and submarine missile destroyers and frigates at his disposal. The story was that the logistics ships were part of the USS Independence’s task force. The American super carrier was still at Gibraltar by all accounts.
“Slow ahead PORT!”
Peter Christopher waited until her felt the deck under his feet responding.
“Slow astern STARBOARD!”
And then: “Helm AMIDSHIPS!”
HMS Talavera’s bow swung towards the east.
“Stop BOTH!”
The Captain of the elderly Battle class destroyer had no intention of tiptoeing nervously out of harbour.
“Slow ahead BOTH!”
Lieutenant Dermot O’Reilly stepped up to his commanding officer’s shoulder. He was a tall, bearded figure with weathered features of a similar stature to the younger man. He followed Peter Christopher’s gaze up to the left where the Commander-in-Chief’s flag flew above the Saluting Battery.
“Starboard TEN!”
The destroyer responded; Peter Christopher judged the delay before his next helm command too effect.
“Helm AMIDSHIPS!”
Dermot O’Reilly tried not to grin too broadly.
HMS Talavera was not about to leave harbour like a thief in the night, juggling revolutions on her two screws, or with a flurry of constantly adjusted helm orders. Her Captain had pointed her at the middle of the northern breakwater and was letting the ship pick up speed; two or three cables short of colliding with HMS Sheffield’s starboard side Talavera would swing to the right and by then, with her turbines half-ahead, race out of port with the élan of a salmon leaping a waterfall.
The Fighting Admiral’s son had style.
It was around noon when the destroyer surged through the wide gap between the lighthouses marking the ends of the northern and southern breakwaters of the Grand Harbour and, with a bone in her teeth, sprinted out to sea.
Doctor Margo Seiffert found Marija and Rosa sitting on the grass staring out to sea at the retreating destroyer. Stiffly, she joined them in the sunshine in the garden. She felt a little guilty that she still had not got around to properly thanking Marija for smoothing over things with the senior people at the hospital.
“I made sure I stayed well away from Surgeon Captain Hughes’s office,” she assured her protégé quickly. In fact she had walked most of the way around the Royal Naval Hospital Bighi to make absolutely certain she did not encounter anybody she was likely to upset. “They’ve developed your x-ray, Rosa,” she announced.
Both the younger women waited expectantly.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get you some cotton wool to put in your ears.”
Rosa did not immediately understand what this had to do with the x-ray of her lower left leg, and frowned.
Marija touched her arm.
“The electric saws are very loud,” she said sympathetically, speaking from long experience.
“You shouldn’t walk home,” Margo went on. “Hopefully, we can find you a wheelchair. You won’t want to put much weight on the leg for a week or two but it should be as right as rain this time next month.”
The older woman gazed out to sea.
She loved coming back to Bighi where she had worked for so many years with Surgeon Captain Reginald Stephens. Marija gave her too much credit; Reggie had been the one whose infinitely patient, methodical, god-gifted surgeon’s hands had eventually put her back together. After Reggie had died Margo had not returned to Bighi for over three years; she could not face it, instead she had buried herself in her all-consuming project in Mdina. The Women’s Hospital had actually been Reggie’s idea and it could never have got off the ground back in the late 1940s without his support. He had pulled strings, called in favours, wined and dined the people that mattered, quietly championed the cause of the ‘auxiliary nurses of Malta’. She hoped that the man who had been, belatedly, the love of her life approved of what she was doing now. Often, Margo was afraid she was spreading herself too thinly, wearing herself out but what else could she do? There was so much to be done and so little time. Today she had been at her desk in Mdina at dawn, worked for two hours, jumped in a car to come to Bighi, stopping off on the way to meet Dom Mintoff, the Leader of the Maltese Labour Party; ostensibly to stop his people intimidating the families of the men and women she was attempting to recruit into the Medical Directorate of the Malta Defence Force. The man was polite, charming in the insincere way of all born politicians. Mintoff had made the right noises and this morning, and for a change he had not surrounded himself with his obligatory coterie of heavies, so perhaps, that was progress. After that meeting she had walked straight into the orthopaedic clinic at Bighi. Women and children before lunch; men in the afternoon. This evening she had a meeting scheduled with the Commander-in-Chief’s ‘logistics staff’ about equipment and facilities for the MDF Medical Directorate, then she was hoping to catch up on whatever had happened, or gone wrong in her day long absence from the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women.
It did not help her cause that delegation had never been her strong suit. Delegation always felt like abdication...
Margo blinked.
In the distance the ululating banshee howl of air raid alarms was shrieking across the waters of the Grand Harbour and creeping ever closer, each siren picking up and re-broadcasting the dreadful clamouring of its nearest neighbour as the dreadful sound surged around and between the great ships moored below the women like grey castles of steel floating on a sparkling azure carpet in Kalkara Bay.
Marija was already helping Rosa to her feet.
Chapter 36
Easter Monday 30th March 1964
Istanbul, Turkey
Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was nothing if not an extraordinarily pragmatic man. He had spent
his entire adult life fighting one or another war; he had survived purges and bullets alike, always treating his survival with the phlegmatic insouciance of a man to whom physical danger meant little. His recent experience in the dungeons of the Romanian Securitate had been no more than a curious adjunct to a life of violence. He was not a personally violent, or a vindictive man. To the contrary, he was a professional soldier who understood that taking things personally was almost invariably a bad mistake. Taking things personally blurred one’s judgement and besides, revenge was a dish best served cold.
Southern Front General Order S/07/114/X ordering the rounding up and ‘disposal’ of all Romanian citizens and former members of the Romanian Armed Forces in the Istanbul Military District arose not from the anger – which Chuikov still harboured at his treatment in Bucharest, or on account of the indignities meted out to his comrades, First Deputy Prime Minister Kosygin and to Second Secretary of the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti Andropov – but because when one found a nest of vipers in the grounds of one’s country dacha, a wise man stamped it out without stopping to ask each individual snake if they meant to bite one. The ongoing arrests and summary executions constituted no more than a sensible exercise in military good housekeeping.
“The action was necessary, Comrade Marshal,” the man with the wrinkling, sly peasant’s face agreed, “but those Krasnaya Zarya fanatics systematically wiped out the KGB in this part of the World before they remembered they were supposed to be launching Phase One of Operation Chastise. I am having to employ military police units and several battalions of regular troops. A lot of the people we’re after were in bed with Krasnaya Zarya and this city is rotten with deserters and traitors.”
Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was not unsympathetic to his subordinate’s problems. Command of the Soviet ground and air forces in the West was a poisoned chalice and only a good man – a man loyal to the very core of his being to the Party and the Revolution – would have accepted it in the first place.
Back in late October 1962 Turkey had ceased to be a country by the time the bombs had stopped going off. The Anatolian heartland of Asia Minor had fallen into tribal chaos in the days after the war and subsequently, the apparatus of the old Turkish state had survived only in Istanbul, where elements of the army and navy had briefly coalesced around the rump of the former regime. Elsewhere, ethnic and religious violence had swiftly destroyed the connective tissue of the nation. Krasnaya Zarya had eventually seized Istanbul as if it was a ripe, low hanging fruit and brought a brutal and merciless rule of law to its streets. Senior Turkish military men had gladly allowed themselves to be incorporated into the conqueror’s ranks; how else would they have survived? The remnants of Turkish army units had been incorporated into the Krasnaya Zarya horde, and officers from the Soviet Black Sea Fleet put in command of many of the obsolete and near obsolete ships and submarines – Western hand me downs - that had once been the guardians of the Hellespont.
Fifty-nine year old Colonel-General Petr Kirillovich Koshevoi had commanded a corps at Stalingrad. His troops had been among the liberators of Sevastopol, and later captured Konigsberg in that war. At the time of the Cuban Missiles War he had been the Commander of the Kiev Military District, buried in his command bunker outside the city for nearly a week after the attack. For Koshevoi no sacrifice was too high to avenge the suffering of the Mother Country.
“We cannot go forward with an enemy at our rear, Comrade Colonel-General,” Chuikov said with blunt good humour. He looked to the third man in the room of the old palace overlooking the grey waters of the Golden Horn.
Sergei Georgiyevich Gorshkov had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy by Nikita Khrushchev as long ago as 1956. Nikita Sergeyevich had given the then forty-six year old Admiral one simple directive: to build a fleet not just to rival, but to equal and to better the combined fleets of the United States of America and its allies. It was Gorshkov who had ordered – on his own initiative - the dispersal of the Soviet Fleet in the hours before the Cuban Missiles War. In the Arctic and the Baltic the order had come too late, likewise in the Far East, where the surface units and submarines which had escaped the Yankee bombs and missiles had been ruthlessly hunted down by the American 7th Fleet in the following days. Only the Black Sea Fleet had survived as a coherent fighting entity. Several ships had been destroyed in dock, others had been too close to big strikes but two-thirds of the Fleet had sailed for partially wrecked Odessa in the Ukraine, and the intact ports of Constanta in Rumania and Varna in Bulgaria.
The western operations built into Phase Two of Operation Chastise risked the loss of the entire Combined Black Sea Fleet; consequently, unlike the other members of the Politburo in their snug bunkers and dachas in the East, Chuikov had never taken Admiral Gorshkov’s acquiescence to the ‘naval plan’ within Operation Nakazyvat for granted. In exactly the same way Chuikov’s power base would evaporate overnight if the ‘Push to the South’ failed or if his surviving armies were destroyed, Gorshkov would probably be finished if all his big ships were sunk. Problematically, if he went along with the current plan all his ships and submarines would almost certainly end up at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
“What are your thoughts, Comrade Admiral?” Chuikov asked.
What was the point beating about the bush?
“Better is the enemy of good enough, Vasily Ivanovich,” the greying man with the dark moustache replied. “The current plan is deficient in several respects with regard to naval operations.”
“The Fleet must demonstrate,” Chuikov retorted flatly.
“I don’t tell you or Babadzhanian how to fight tank battles!” The other man’s irritation flashed for a moment before the inscrutable mask fell back into place. “Nor do I presume to tell Petr Kirillovich,” he glanced to Colonel General Koshevoi, “his business. Colonel-General Babadzhanian has confided to me that if all goes well in the West his job in Persian and Iraq is likely to be much easier. That is enough for me. The Soviet Navy will do its duty. However,” he sighed and stepped nearer to the Red Army men, “I foresee no scenario in which recklessly throwing away the Fleet in a series of uncoordinated piecemeal actions furthers the goals of Babadzhanian’s push.”
Chuikov decided there was no harm hearing what Gorshkov had to say. The Commander of all Soviet Forces hunched his broad shoulders in what might have been a shrug.
“What do you have in mind, Comrade Admiral?”
“A single nuclear-powered submarine, the British Dreadnought, completely destroyed the attempt to land forces on the eastern beaches of Cyprus. A single submarine in less than an afternoon, Comrades. It was because of that single action that the first wave failed to carry the island by storm.”
Chuikov and Koshevoi raised eyebrows but said nothing. The failure to seize the whole of Cyprus to secure its use as a viable base for future operations, and as a bulwark against further British aggression in the Eastern Mediterranean basin had been the one strategic setback in Phase One. Other things had gone wrong but only the situation on Cyprus had caused real difficulties.
“Our people on Malta report that HMS Dreadnought has been sent back to the United Kingdom for repairs. However, it is believed that at least three American submarines with similar capabilities have now taken up position East of Malta. It is reasonable to assume that these vessels will be deployed to the seas around Cyprus, or used to ‘block’ the Cyprus-Crete gap into the Eastern Mediterranean, or to remain in the vicinity of Malta. For example, if I was Admiral Christopher in Malta, I would ask the Yankees to place one submarine in a patrol box say, one hundred kilometres wide by fifty, mid-way between the western tip of Crete, and the Maltese Archipelago.”
Gorshkov’s eyes were cobalt hard.
“By concentrating all available air, surface and undersea units against one of the Yankee submarines,” Gorshkov continued, “it might be possible to drive it away, or to minimise our losses. That would be ‘good enough’ to improve the valu
e of a ‘demonstration’ to distract the attention of our enemies from the real danger. But, Comrades, I suggest that we do ‘better’.”
“What did you have in mind?” Koshevoi asked, growing impatient. First the Politburo had ordered the recovery of all viable tactical nuclear warheads to the Naval Armoury at Odessa, then Chuikov had obliged him to waste time purging the bloody Romanians from his command area, and now Gorshkov wanted to re-write the whole fucking operations plan for Phase Two!
“Comrades,” the Admiral prefaced, clasping his hands behind his back, “Only one thing will stop the British and the American’s throwing us off Cyprus.”
“What would that be?” Chuikov asked, beginning to see where this was going. Gorshkov was thinking bigger than Koshevoi dared. The strategic objective of all operations in the West had become to mount a giant ‘demonstration’ to keep the British and the Americans off balance while Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s two Tank Armies raced south from the Caucasus to seize the Persian and Iraqi oilfields at the head of the Arabian Gulf. Once Babadzhanian’s tanks were parked along the northern shores of the Gulf the whole Arabian Peninsula would be at the Soviet Union’s mercy.