The Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 2 (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 8)

by James Philip

  “Wheel amidships. Steady on three-five-zero!”

  In the west the sun had set. Briefly, its afterglow traced the black line of the coast of the Faw Peninsula. This far south the land on the Iraqi side of the Shatt al-Arab was marsh and desert, a delta wilderness untrammelled by modern asphalt roads. In this part of the Gulf everybody went everywhere by boat, and even in the burning heat of summer the main waterways never dried up. One road, from Basra ran down the extreme western edge of the marshes to the port of Umm Qasr, otherwise the Faw Peninsula was a watery estuarine world populated by the Marsh Arabs; who lived on their boats, or in the dunes or in houses on platforms raised above the seasonal floods on stilts. Umm Qasr was more accessible than Basra, via year round deep water channels north of Warbah Island or by the channels between that island and Bubiyan Island to the south. In a saner age Umm Qasr would eventually have become Iraq’s gateway to the World.

  When the Soviet High Command looked at southern Iraq it would see that Basra might be the key to Abadan, and the anchor for a drive east into Iran across the plains below the foothills of the Zagros Mountains; but Umm Qasr would be its long-term warm water port, and the key staging post for its future southward expansion into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

  Nobody had updated any of the navigation charts for the northern Persian Gulf since before the October War. Apart from the tankers feeling their way up to Abadan, and occasional visits by warships, there were only small boats on the Arvand River. Umm Qasr had been closed to international shipping since the previous year’s coup in Baghdad. The ABNZ – Australian, British and New Zealand - Persian Gulf Squadron needed to re-establish the limits to navigation not just up to Abadan but beyond it to Basra in the east, and to Umm Qasr in the west. And it needed to do it now so that detailed planning could be undertaken for Operation Cold Harbour.

  If and when the Commonwealth ground forces - with or without its Iranian friends in the Abadan sector and possible Egyptian and Saudi ‘allies’ in Kuwait and Arabia along the southern border of Basra Province - ever came to grips with the Red Army they were going to need all the help that the RAF and the Royal Navy could give them. Therefore, Rear Admiral Nicholas Davey, the man in charge of the ABNZ Persian Gulf Squadron badly needed to know the limits of navigation on the Shatt al-Arab and the approaches to Umm Qasr.

  ‘I want to know how far up river I can take my cruisers, Tiger, Royalist and the rest of my gun line,” the Squadron Commander had explained to Turnbull over beers in the wardroom of the flagship four days ago. ‘The Moon will be on the wane in a few days. As soon as Sydney is loaded for another run up to Abadan I want you to ‘ping’ as far up the Arvand River as you can get without actually drawing the fire of the Basra garrison. Don’t poke the wasps’ nest too hard but bring me back a chart with the current deep channel.’

  The two men were unlikely kindred spirits; both had carved their own path in life without reference to, or a great deal of respect for the normal proprieties of their respective services. Davey had got away with it because he had never entertained ambitions of high command, and to a degree, because he enjoyed the firm friendship and indirectly, the patronage of Julian Christopher. Davey and the late ‘Defender of Malta’ had raced America’s Cup contenders between the First and Second World Wars, two whole decades before the name ‘Christopher’ had became synonymous with British Bulldog grit, determination and outrageous courage in the brave now post-October War World. Davey had commanded the 7th Destroyer Squadron at Malta at the time of the February nuclear strikes, his ship, HMS Weapon and Peter Christopher’s Talavera – a name now emblazoned across the Commonwealth as an immutable symbol of the best of the old World and the modern Royal Navy – had recklessly steered under the stern of the burning American super carrier USS Enterprise to fight her fires and more than likely, saved the great ship that day. Later Davey had commanded the 23rd Support Group off Cyprus during Operation Grantham, the successful retaking of that island from the Red Dawn horde. He had been the obvious man to send to the Gulf where élan and a cavalier disregard for ‘the facts on the ground’ were more important than the ‘steadiness’ and ‘reliability’ that the Royal Navy usually preferred in its flag officers. Moreover, Davey was one of those men who had an innate capacity to get on with everybody. In swiftly and successfully melding his rag tag ABNZ ‘flotilla’ into a fighting force which was significantly more than the sum of its old-fashioned, disparate parts, it was very hard to see how any other man could have achieved so much so swiftly as ‘Nick’ Davey.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for ages, Commander Turnbull,’ the gregarious, somewhat portly Squadron Commander had declared, smiling broadly and sticking out a meaty right hand to welcome the captain of HMAS Anzac three days after the Australian had tweaked the beard of Davey’s counterpart onboard the USS Kitty Hawk, the flagship of the US Navy’s immensely powerful Carrier Division Seven.

  Turnbull had steamed Anzac straight into the great American fleet and manoeuvred around the big carrier at high speed, somewhat over-playing the brief Davey had given him. Specifically, he had ‘ordered’ the US Navy to stop broadcasting operationally sensitive operation about ABNZ’s activities in the Gulf and instructed Carrier Division Seven’s C-in-C to stand ready to receive the arrival of his own admiral. Then he had deliberately steered Anzac between the USS Kitty Hawk’s anxiously circling escorts until Davey’s helicopter had landed on the carrier’s deck.

  Turnbull had been anticipating a dressing down for ‘over-egging his hand’ and gone onboard HMS Tiger grim-faced and ready to stand, and if necessary, to fight his corner.

  ‘Julian Christopher spoke very highly of you,’ the Englishman had informed him in a tone which indicated that that was good enough for him! ‘I’d ask for you to be promoted Captain ‘D’ of ABNZ destroyers but you’d only make a scene,’ he had added ruefully, ‘so we shall not go down that road. However, when things start to get sticky Anzac will be at the head of the line.’

  Until that day Stephen Turnbull had had no idea exactly how Nelsonian the Royal Navy had become in the last eighteen months.

  The Royal Navy had saved the old country by mounting Operation Manna from the other side of the World, and fought a latter-day Battle of Trafalgar at the end of last year against Generalissimo Franco’s old-fashioned Spanish Air Force. It had secured the Central Mediterranean, along the way fighting a savage inshore battle to capture the key island of Lampedusa, become embroiled in a brutal war of attrition with Red Dawn in the east, lost and later pulled out all the stops to recover Cyprus from that blight upon humanity. Recently, it had begun to wage a submarine war against the Argentine in the South Atlantic; now it was planning to fight a new, seemingly hopeless, campaign in the Persian Gulf. To paraphrase the words of one famous admiral: ‘It takes three years to build a ship. It takes three hundred years to build a tradition; the Navy will continue to fight!’

  In keeping with this mantra, the spirit of the Talavera and the Yarmouth at the Battle of Malta in early April would outlive the broken corporeal hulls of both ships for another three hundred years, possibly forever.

  It was hardly any wonder that the powers that be in Oxford had sent Peter Christopher, the man of the moment in the fight at Lampedusa, Nick Davey’s right hand man in the fight to save the Enterprise, and the hero of the Battle of Malta to the United States. The Royal Navy had found its new talisman and exemplar and only errant fools would allow a man like that to place himself in harm’s way again so soon.

  The darkness was Stygian in the hours before the Moon rose.

  There was only the muted roar of the blowers, the soft vibration of the ship, and a very nearly imperceptible motion as it pressed up river against the seaward flow. The waters under Anzac’s keel had flooded down all the way from the mountains of Kurdistan and Iran, fresh water mingling with salt as the tide began to flood the lower reaches of the Shatt al-Arab.

  Anzac, Sydney and the trailing minesweepers might have been alone, unseen in the nig
ht.

  “Ten feet under the keel, sir.”

  Then.

  “FIVE FEET UNDER THE KEEL...”

  Anzac’s sharp stem juddered on the sandy bottom.

  The ship, making revolutions for eight knots but travelling at only three or four against the flood of the Arvand River; lurched to a halt in the water.

  Chapter 2

  Friday 5th June 1964

  Heliopolis Presidential Palace, Cairo, Egypt

  From the roof of the Presidential Palace in the heart of Cairo the fires burning in the near distance, the flash and bark of the 100-millimetre rifles of the Soviet-supplied T54s in the streets, the rattle of machine-gun fire and the foul taint of oily, metallic smoke spoke to the utter madness of the hour.

  “Your Excellency,” pleaded the Head of the Presidential Guard, “we cannot stay here. It is too dangerous. It is only a matter of time before the rebels concentrate their fire directly on this place!”

  The President of Egypt had no intention of cowering in a bunker while others fought for the future of his country; but for the moment Gamal Abdul Nasser was too angry to slap the man down for his presumption.

  There had been other ‘palace coups’ before now, each arising out of the febrile, ever shifting background noise of ideological dissent, religious manoeuvring and the unbridled ambition of mainly, middle-ranking army officers. In a young, revolutionary state such things were to be expected but this uprising was different; both in terms of its timing and its ferocity. Worse, whereas usually the locus of a rebellion was within a particular section of the officer corps or a disaffected divisional staff, tonight elements of several formations had apparently acted in concert. Notwithstanding that he and his deputy, Anwar el Sadat had been aware that something was in the wind, the scale and the expert co-ordination of the putsch had come as a total surprise. It was likely, probable in fact that some of the troops he had stationed in advance at key locations around the city – the radio and television station, the Army and the Air Force headquarters, and protecting government ministries – were disloyal, and that others, in the confusion of the moment, were fighting on the rebels’ side because they had no idea who was actually fighting whom.

  Bullets whistled randomly through the air, clattering and ricocheting, exhausted on the roof around the President and his small group of trusted lieutenants. The searing heat of the summer day had turned to coolness, although somebody accustomed to northern climes would still have regarded the ambient temperature as balmy.

  All of the men around Nasser were of the Nubian Desert; hard men from the south, Upper Egyptians, personally selected by Sadat.

  “We will defend the Presidential Palace,” Nasser decided, his measured tones belying the incandescent rage burning deep in his soul.

  This was the doing of his former Soviet paymasters!

  The doing of those bastards in Chelyabinsk whom his British friends had warned him would do their best to sow chaos in the lands of their enemies ahead of the Red Army’s decampment south from Baghdad!

  Smoke and mirrors!

  Such was the unvarying principle of warfare drummed into his young officers by those duplicitous Soviet advisers who had infested his Army and Air Force as part of the deal to supply tanks and fighter aircraft in the fifties.

  War is not just fought at the front but in the homeland of one’s enemy. War is not simply waged by or against armies, air forces and navies but by one people against another at every level of both societies; industrially, politically by whatever means are to hand. There are no non-combatants in war and every citizen of every country involved is a military target. Pragmatically, sneaking around behind an enemy and stabbing him in the back was a much more efficient way of waging war than mounting a full frontal assault against his main defences!

  But Nasser had known all this long before he treated with the British.

  The risk had seemed calculated; the prize great and the internal threats to his regime manageable. Nevertheless, only two brigades of the Divisions he had ‘promised’ the British had so far begun to move down to Suez to ‘prepare’ for embarkation for the journey by sea around the Arabian Peninsula to Damman and Kuwait City, or in extremis, Abadan Island. The other two brigades of the 1st and 3rd Armoured Divisions, one at full strength and the other in reserve had been held back in Sinai and around the capital. The 2nd Armoured Division had already deployed its assault brigade, the 3rd, west of the Delta ahead of the planned push into Cyrenaica to seize eastern Libya and the key port of Tobruk. Once Tobruk was in Egyptian hands then the resupply of a substantial armoured force in Libya could be contemplated and the conquest of the rest of the potentially oil-rich country would proceed. Given the fragmented, ramshackle condition of the old Italian colony, which was essentially governed by feuding tribes and the dissolute remnants of the former colonial army of occupation, the planned ‘Libyan Campaign’ presented few military ‘terrors’ and ought to have been over and done with long before the autumn...

  Nasser realised he was allowing his mind to walk in places disconnected from the crisis of the moment. Standing on the roof of his embattled Presidential Palace it was too easy to forget that the grandeur of his surroundings and the prestige of his position counted for nothing in this hour of trial. As if to remind him of the dangers of hubris the building flinched beneath his feet as another 100-millimetre round crashed into the river facade of the former Heliopolis Palace Hotel. White hot tracer rounds curved lazily across the sky in the east, and another heavy calibre high explosive round exploded somewhere inside the Presidential Palace with a crunching ‘WUMPH!’

  Nasser drew a scintilla of comfort from the fact that one of the things which had so strongly recommended the great, dilapidated pre-Great War hotel for its current role had been its monumental architecture. Parts of the huge complex were built like a medieval castle and beneath it all lay a warren of subterranean bunkers serviced by a narrow gauge railway running the whole length of the building.

  If the Presidential Guard stayed loyal nothing short of a corridor by corridor, room by room bloodbath costing the traitors hundreds, perhaps thousands of casualties was going to prise the Heliopolis Palace from his hands.

  “Leave men on the roof to act as spotters,” Nasser commanded. “The rest of you come with me to the Command Room.”

  There was smoke from the small fires burning in rooms on the river side of the building, and the air was full of pulverized brick dust as Nasser led the phalanx of heavily armed troops down into the bowels of the old hotel.

  General Mohamed Abdel Hakim Amer, the forty-four year old Chief of Staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces straightened to a semblance of attention as his leader marched into the dimly lit basement at the heart of the Heliopolis Palace. Problematically, since the headquarters of the Army and of the other armed services were located nearby, little treasure had been invested in command and control facilities within the Presidential Palace other than the installation of modern communications equipment, including systems for scrambling telephone and wireless links.

  Amer and a small cadre of loyal officers and men had rushed to the Presidential Palace as soon as it became clear that the rebels had either seized the Army headquarters building, or that it had fallen to traitors within it. Amer was a tall, lean man who had been born in the Al Minya Governate of Upper Egypt. He had graduated from the Cairo Military Academy in 1938 and played a prominent role in the overthrow of King Farouk in 1952. Subsequently, Nasser had promoted him four ranks in installing him as Chief of Staff in 1956; and soon thereafter he had had the thankless task of commanding Egyptian forces against the better equipped French and British invaders during the Suez War. In the aftermath of that war Amer had railed against Nasser for provoking an ‘unnecessary war’ and for attempting to blame the military – him actually – for the shortcomings in the Egyptian military exposed by it. Nevertheless, Amer had survived and following the nuclear strike on Ismailia in February, Nasser had nominated Amer as ‘Second Vice-P
resident’ after Sadat because notwithstanding Amer’s proven limitations as a military high commander, he was nothing if not a staunch regime loyalist.

  “We think Sadat is still holding out at the radio station,” Amer reported, saluting cursorily. “I think we have a situation where several units are inadvertently fighting on the ‘wrong side’, Mr President,” he added sourly.

  “Who do we know is loyal, Hakim,” Nasser asked brusquely, joining the Chief of Staff at the hurriedly populated map table in the middle of the claustrophobic makeshift command centre.

  “Well,” the other man hesitated. “Most of 2nd Armoured, pretty much all of 8th Mechanized and from the lack of incoming indirect fire I’d guess that all the local artillery commanders are loyal.”

  The building shook from two rapid impacts.

  “What about the Air Force?”

  “Those bastards are probably waiting to see what happens!” General Amer grunted disgustedly.

  Gamal Abdul Nasser stood tall, puffed out his chest.

  “Get me Air Marshal Mahmoud on the scrambler.”

  Amer raised an eyebrow.

  Nasser scowled: “Tell his staff that if he doesn’t come to the phone I’ll have him publicly fed to the bloody Nile crocodiles!”

  An orderly brought the President of Egypt dusty coffee as he waited in an anti-room. Periodically, shells crashed into the monumental brick and stonework high above his head. It worried Nasser that there was as yet no direct word from Sadat at the radio station.

  “Profound apologies for my brief unavailability, Mr President,” the Chief of Staff of the Egyptian Air Force apologised through the swooping and dipping attenuation, clicking and crackling of the scrambled line between the Presidential Palace and the Air Ministry building less than a block away. “We had a few local problems that needed to be resolved in the headquarters.”

  Mohamed Sedky Mahmoud had held the rank of Wing-Commander at the time of the 1952 revolution when, aged thirty-eight, he had been appointed Chief of Staff of the then small and antiquated Egyptian Air Force. Born in the Dakahlia region of the delta he had been the first Egyptian Instructor in the Air Force on his graduation from the Abu Swair Aviation School in 1936, and the first native Chief Instructor in 1944. At the time of the overthrow of King Farouk he had commanded the Almaza Air Base. Like Amer he had faced – albeit more muted – criticism after the Suez War but survived not because of any outstanding qualities of leadership or strategic or tactical acuity but because he was loyal.