by James Philip
It might simply have been because he was at a fairly low ebb at present, what with his own wife playing doctors and nurses with his little brother, his being on the wrong end of a Regimental cold shoulder and generally being at something of a loose end in Oxford; but for the first time in his life he found himself rather envying married couples like Diana and Airey Neave.
Catching himself brooding he snapped out of it.
He would get over this passing mal de mere sooner or later and it never did any good feeling sorry for oneself.
“Ah, Frank,” Airey Neave grinned conspiratorially. He was a ruddy-faced, witty man whom Frank Waters suspected longed for the old brotherhood of the Second War, to relive the life and death exhilaration of those Colditz days and the long ‘home run’ back to England. “We’re just waiting for one more arrival. Come on through to the dining room. You know Nick Ridley, of course.”
The Secretary of State for Information greeted the newcomer warily. The thirty-five year old Member of Parliament for Cirencester and Tewkesbury was still getting his feet under the table at his ministry. Trying to fill the unfillable shoes of the late Iain Macleod would have been hard enough at the best of time. In the wake of the prorogation of the House of Commons and the banishment of all MPs not deemed to be essential to the ‘smooth functioning of the war economy and the governance of the state’, from their comfortable rooms in Oxford back to their constituencies, or country seats in the case of many Tory back benchers, he had unexpectedly found himself in the middle of a political firestorm; cast in the role of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s chief apologist and propagandist at absolutely the worst possible time. The bags under his eyes and the greyness in his face told their own story.
It had not helped that an incorrigible old throwback like Lieutenant Colonel Francis St John Waters, VC, refused point blank all blandishments to be employed as a walking, talking ‘good news story’ to lighten the indigestible and distasteful realties of the national crisis that daily oppressed the British people.
“Colonel Waters and I have spoken a couple of times this week,” Ridley admitted reluctantly.
Diana Neave pressed a glass into the soldier’s hand.
“I’d offer you Sherry but despite the entreaties of our Portuguese allies the Ministry of Supply still hasn’t put Jerez Sherry – which the Spanish are desperate to sell to them to earn foreign exchange - high enough on the ‘Priority Shipping List’, Frank,” she apologised.
The SAS man was in no mood to refuse two fingers of extraordinarily palatable Scotch Whiskey.
“These are terrible times, dear lady,” he chortled wryly as he raised the glass to his lips.
“I can’t get used to you without that dreadful moustache you wore for all those years,” Diana Neave confided, her lips quirking with mischief.
This drew a mischievous chortle from the warrior.
“The damned thing made me look like something off a Great War recruiting poster,” Frank Waters explained candidly, without confessing that lately he had begun to feel as old as Field Marshall Kitchener - the man on those famous Great War posters - had been when they were printed in 1914 and ever afterwards. Old and somewhat worn, not a condition that he planned to succumb to any time soon. “Is one permitted to inquire the name of the personage for whom we are waiting?”
“Yes. You are allowed to ask. But I’m not allowed to tell you!”
“Ah.” The man drew the obvious inference. “Enough said.”
Airey Neave had started recounting old war stories when, about twenty minutes later there was a commotion in the corridor and a staccato rapping on the door to the Neave family rooms.
A fierce looking Royal Marine stepped into the lobby, glanced around and stood aside, watchfully fingering his Sten gun.
Frank Water’s had not realised he still looked that dangerous!
A familiar-looking Royal Marine major entered.
Sir Steuart Pringle nodded acknowledgement to Waters – the men had been on convivial ‘nodding’ terms for many years – but did not salute. Saluting was a tricky business when one was hefting a Sten gun.
“The room is safe, Ma’am.”
Ma’am!
“I was so glad when Airey told me that you would be able to come tonight,” Margaret Thatcher told Frank Waters, entering the claustrophobic rooms like a minor deity set upon expelling the moneylenders from the temple.
Inexplicably, the most cynical old soldier in England stood before the Angry Widow bathed in the enthralling radiated warmth of her smile, fixed to the spot by the steely blue in her eyes.
It was a stunning thing to know, with utter certainty that one’s life had just changed forever.
And to be so totally at peace with the knowledge.
It was all that Frank Waters could do not to drop his whiskey glass and well...drool like an imbecile.
Chapter 16
Thursday 11th June 1964
Habbaniyah Air Base, Anbar Province, Iraq
The Mil Mi-6 heavy-lift helicopter in its drab, mottled desert camouflage swooped down onto the packed mud of the pad behind the hastily piled three metre high earthen anti-blast embankments. The RAF had not attacked any target within fifty kilometres of Baghdad for several days; but the wreckage of gutted buildings and several burned out MiG 17s and 21s on the tarmac close to the muddy waters of Habbaniyah Lake bore testimony to the intensity of the most recent raid. Since then two mobile radar units had been stationed at the base and a battery of S-75, variant V-750(13D) high-altitude surface-to-air missiles positioned to protect the former Iraqi Air Base.
It had been S-75s which had shot down Gary Powers’s U-2 in 1960, and claimed the first victim of the Cuban Missiles War – Major Rudolf Anderson – on 27th October 1962. During the build up for Operation Nakazyvat, S-75s had shot down two more American U-2s operating out of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia over-flying southern Russia. The missiles had a range of approximately forty-five kilometres and an effective ceiling of twenty-five thousand metres. Radio-controlled they accelerated to Mach 3.5 and were fitted with a proximity fuse to detonate its two hundred kilogram high explosive fragmentation warhead within a sixty-five metre radius of its target.
Sixty-four year old Defence Minister and Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov stepped down from the cabin of the Mil Mi-6, and ignoring the guard of honour exchanged salutes with the Commander of Army Group South. The most decorated surviving ‘Hero of the USSR’ was an ugly lump of a man with an evilly cherubic face, and a casual contempt for many of the minor idiocies of the Marxist-Leninist state he had served so valiantly his whole adult life.
Contrastingly, both in appearance and temperament fifty-eight year old Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian, second only to Chuikov in the monolithic hierarchy of the Red Army, could hardly have seemed more different. He was slighter of build, a thoughtful, brooding man who rarely allowed his impatience with ‘the system’ to break the surface of his glacial composure. He had earned his reputation as a brilliant exponent of mobile warfare in the cauldron of Kursk and a dozen other savage battles during the Great Patriotic War; he was the man Nikita Khrushchev had entrusted to crush the Hungarian uprising in 1956. For that he had earned the sobriquet of ‘the Butcher of Bucharest’ in the West – and even in some corners of the Red Army – but he had had no qualms putting down the Hungarian revolution. A door once opened to chaos and anarchy was impossible to shut again without the shedding of the blood of both the innocent and the guilty.
“Those old women in Chelyabinsk are terrified that bastard Shelepin will mount a coup against them if I’m out of the city for more than a couple of days!” Chuikov complained cheerfully. “Sometimes I think you have to have bollocks for brains to be a member of the Politburo!”
Babadzhanian’s own assessment was that not even Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin the mendacious First Secretary of the KGB would be that reckless at a time like this. Shelepin was not the kind of man w
ho liked to leave his finger prints all over the scene of the crime.
“I don’t think it is a required qualification, Comrade Marshal,” Babadzhanian observed quietly. “But it probably helps.”
Chuikov vented a bear-like roar of laughter and for a moment the smaller man was afraid his chief was going to heartily thump him on the back in front of the Red Air Force guard of honour.
Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov had been born into a peasant family at Serebranye Prudy, a village south of Moscow. The eighth of twelve children and the fifth of eight sons he had left school and his home, finding work in a factory making spurs for the Tsar’s cavalry in distant St Petersburg. When he was in a reflective mood or had been drinking too much Vodka, Chuikov would proudly – and loudly - remind anybody within his hearing that all his brothers had fought in the Civil War which followed the October Revolution. Aged only eighteen and already an officer in the Red Army he had fought against the White Russians in the Ukraine, in 1919 he was made commander of the 40th Regiment of the 5th Army fighting Admiral Kolchak’s Tsarist lickspittles in Siberia. Between 1918 and 1920 he was wounded four times, the fourth wound leaving him with fragments embedded in his left arm that after initially leading to paralysis of the limb, had plagued him ever since.
Regardless of his problems and disputes with Chuikov, some small part of Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian would always be in awe of him. As the two men marched towards the command tent sheltered within the bomb-damaged base buildings, he could not but be aware that he was walking in the shadow of the man who had commanded the 4th Army in the invasion of Poland 1939, and the 9th Army in the Russo-Finnish War of 1940 when he had still been a humble subaltern, no more than a company commander. In 1942 when Babadzhanian had commanded battalions and regiments; Chuikov had commanded, successively 7th Guards Army and 62nd Army on the western bank of the Don River. It was Chuikov who had held Stalingrad, Chuikov who had turned the tide of the whole war, Chuikov who had driven the Nazi invaders all the way back to Berlin, where it had been Chuikov who had personally accepted the surrender of the ruined German capital from General Helmuth Weidling in May 1945.
Inside the command tent the great man extracted a cigarette from a crushed pack and half-a-dozen of Babadzhanian’s officers simultaneously attempted to strike matches for the Minister of Defence and Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army. Soon foul-smelling smoke filled the air.
Chuikov coughed asthmatically, looked around and grinned complacently because he was never more at home than in a makeshift field headquarters hundreds of miles away from the next nearest Politburo member.
“How are our ‘hard chargers’ doing, Comrade Hamazasp Khachaturi?” He inquired as he stood over the map table with his Army Commander.
Babadzhanian tried and failed to suppress a smile.
Major Generals Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov and Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik were not just ‘hard chargers’, they were natural born ‘hard chargers’. Babadzhanian had known as much about Puchkov for many years. Puchkov was a man of his own age with a weather-beaten face and a shaven head that exhibited the white, gnarled scars of the day back in 1943 when a single German Tiger tank had knocked out three of the four surviving T-34s of his troop in a clearing in the taiga outside Kursk. His gunner had put a seventy-five millimetre round through the side of the Nazi behemoth but not before the Tiger’s eighty-eight millimetre canon had put a solid shot into his tank’s engine compartment. Kurochnik had come to the Army Commander’s attention after his brilliantly aggressive handling of his mission in Tehran at the start of Operation Nakazyvat. Since then he had distinguished himself at Urmia in Iranian Azerbaijan, and in ruthlessly subduing the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. Since the Tehran action Babadzhanian had promoted him two ranks and given him command of the spearhead division of the eastern ‘push’ south.
With his Army Group stretched out along dirt roads all the way back into the Zagros Mountains of Iran, his logistics in turmoil and less than a third of his remaining fighting force in any condition to resume the drive south; Babadzhanian had made the best of a bad deal. High command was not about identifying the best of all possible options in any kind of ideal, perfect world; it was about retaining the initiative and throwing every available tank, man and bullet into supporting whatever one decided was the least worst choice.
Such decisions were not, in Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s experience as difficult as outsiders, or historians later made them out to be. A week ago he had confronted the dilemma of waiting until everything was in place for an overwhelming southward advance; or of striking immediately before the Iraqi Army – what was left of it – and or the British and their allies got their act together. It was no decision at all. Not even the consideration that if he waited another week or two he would probably be sacked had significantly impacted on his deliberations. The only decision was to unleash the two available under-strength tank corps which had coalesced in the Baghdad area as soon as possible.
The terrain between Baghdad and Basra – some four hundred and fifty kilometres as a crow might fly, nearer five hundred and fifty along what passed for roads in this part of the world – was rocky desert, marshland and the variously inundated flood plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. There were only two roads, two feasible lines of advance and the country over which his men would be advancing was too poor, barren and frankly, medieval for his armour and mechanised units to attempt to ‘live off the land’. While the idiots back in Chelyabinsk understood none of this; Chuikov understood it perfectly. In fact during the planning of Operation Nakazyvat both men had agreed to minimise the ‘critical constraints’ that would inevitably blight large scale mobile operations south of Baghdad. The collective leadership and the rest of the Politburo would have ‘wet their breeches’ if they had known the half of what awaited the Red Army in the deserts and marshes of southern Iraq.
The only thing that neither man had anticipated was the complete disintegration of the Iraqi state and its armed forces ahead of the Red Army reaching Baghdad. Instead of having to fight a bloody attritional battle for the capital Babadzhanian’s tanks had rapidly crushed all resistance; and had it not been for the RAF’s precision bombing the taking of the city would have been a straightforward ‘police’ operation.
The western of the two roads south had been allocated to 3rd Caucasus Tank Army; this line of advance arrowed south to Diwaniyah and Samawah, bypassing Karbala and Najaf. The latest reports showed the leading elements of Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov’s 10th Guards Tank Division forging south of Mahmudiyah, and extending a small blocking force down the road to Karbala, some fifteen kilometres north of the town of Hillah.
The eastern road belonged to 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army. It followed the western foothills of the Zagros Mountains most of the way down to Numaniyah, Kut and Nasiriyah before merging with the western road south some kilometres north west of Basra. Major General Kurochnik’s 19th Guards Tank Division was sixty miles down the road to Numaniyah, retracing the steps of British and Australian Great War campaigns; campaigns steeped in the sort of ignominy and unnecessary wastage that Babadzhanian desperately needed to avoid.
Babadzhanian pointed to Basra and the force symbols on the map east and south east of the city.
“There are reports of fighting between Iranian Army units around Khorramshahr. We’re short on detail, unfortunately. I should imagine that the Iranians are fighting among themselves over Abadan!”
“According to Comrade Shelepin,” Chuikov guffawed sceptically, “we can forget about having to deal with the Egyptians. And after the ‘accident’ at Damman his people on the ground are saying that the British don’t have anything left to shoot at us with.”
Babadzhanian did not believe that for a moment.
However, he was not about to waste time worrying about it.
The British had ships in the Persian Gulf, a few tanks and aircraft in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and on Abadan Island; ‘a few’ being the operative claus
e. The destruction of the nearest substantial war munitions dump at Damman was a bonus; likewise the confirmation that there would be no Egyptian reinforcements to factor into his calculations. Presently, the British at Abadan were surrounded by hostile forces; friendless across the Shatt-a-Arab in Iraq, and penned in to the north and east by the Iranians.
Now that he had finally launched his tanks towards Basra it was beginning to look as if, against all odds, that the final part of Phase One of Operation Nakazyvat might actually turn out to be something of a cake walk.
Chapter 17
Thursday 11th June 1964
USS Kitty Hawk, Carrier Division Seven, Arabian Sea
Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann junior had studied the CIC – Command Information Centre – battle plot and the thick sheaf of sonar and the other reports he had requested over the last forty-eight hours; and he still did not know how the USS Permit (SSN-594) had managed to continuously stalk the flagship at ranges of less than two miles for thirty-three hours on the fifth and sixth of June. Up until five days ago he had regarded the rumours – wardroom scuttlebutt really – about how the British nuclear boat HMS Dreadnought had played cat and mouse with the Enterprise Battle Group in the North Atlantic for almost a week in November and December last year, with what now amounted to entirely unwarranted, ill-advised haughty suspicion.
This was pretty much the way Captain Horace Epes, the Kitty Hawk’s commanding officer felt about it too, which was bad news for a recently promoted fleet anti-submarine officer. It happened that two days after the Permit arrived in theatre Walter’s chief, Commander Holmes, had been struck down by acute peritonitis; a burst appendix was suspected, leaving Walter to take the flak when the skippers of the ships in the flagship’s anti-submarine escorts ‘ganged up’ to blame Kitty Hawk’s Air Group for the quote ‘deplorable shortcomings in the fleet’s anti-submarine readiness’.