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

by James Philip

  The two Soviet diplomats had had to be moved from Claude Betancourt’s hideaway in Connecticut because newsmen had begun sniffing around the small town of Wethersfield, and gotten far too close for comfort to Oak Hill. Fulbright thought that was a pity, Camp David was way too public for his liking. Secure, but public; even before the President started using it as a transit camp for the families of British diplomats bombed out of Philadelphia, there had been far too many low level staffers and Administration members’ wives and children roaming the place.

  It did not help that the President kept allowing considerations of ‘right and wrong’ to get in the way of taking care of business for the nation. Personally, like Jack Kennedy, Fulbright would have much preferred an internationalist agenda, for the US to be the World’s peacekeeper and a good friend in need to its oldest European ally. Unfortunately, they did not live in that kind of World anymore. The option to be the global ‘good guys’ was pie in the sky. Yes, even now a second massive nuclear attack would obliterate the Soviet Union for all time; but no, that was not about to happen, leastways not under this President. Therefore, an accommodation had to be made with the Russians so that the resources necessary to rebuild the Union might be made available.

  Given that the armed rebellion in Chicago had now erupted – like the putrescence from a ruptured cancer – across northern Illinois and across Wisconsin, potentially threatening to spread across great swaths of the Midwest any remaining appetite for ‘foreign adventures’ had withered on the vine. If the disaster – there was no other word to describe what was going on in Wisconsin – was not contain fast the whole Midwest west of Lake Michigan might become a battlefield. While that was going one in the Deep South there were riots in the streets of the big cities most days, and in the background there was the secessionist agenda of the West Coast Confederation. Until the last week or so this had been the problem that trumped all others on the President’s agenda; not least because Governor Pat Brown of California, the most populous state in the Union was standing, virtually unopposed in the forthcoming Democratic Primary in his state meaning that at the upcoming Atlantic City Democratic Convention he was likely to bring one in four of all votes – and delegates – to Boardwalk Hall.

  Pat Brown was going to come to Boardwalk Hall with a list of demands the President could not refuse. Pat Brown – once upon a time a Kennedy loyalist – had become the king maker, or if he wanted, the king slayer. While Lyndon Johnson had been allowed to play the role of the Administration’s elder statesman, secure in the knowledge that he would be on the JFK Presidential ticket in November things had seemed under control; but a week ago LBJ had retreated to his ranch in Stonewall, Texas.

  The trouble was that as many as three, possibly four or five other states were had been waiting to see what happened with the West Coast Confederation; specifically, what lengths the Administration would go to buy off California, Oregon and Washington State, before they too joined the states’ rights campaign in earnest. Right now attention had shifted from the West Coast to the Midwest but nobody in the Administration had worked out if, or how, it helped or hindered the preservation of the Union, or Jack Kennedy’s chances at Boardwalk Hall.

  One way or another the Secretary of State knew he had to make a deal with the Russians; preferably before rather than after the Administration completely lost control of events.

  There was no shortage of commentators who already thought that had happened.

  Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy’s people had fallen out and piece by piece the President had reneged on the Administration-saving compact he had made with the wily Texan in the dark days of December. Bobby’s friends had undermined LBJ behind the scenes and the news – as yet unannounced officially – that the Apollo Moon Program, publicly acknowledged to be Johnson’s personal project, had been the last straw. The break between Jack Kennedy and his Vice President had become inevitable after what LBJ viewed as the ‘disastrous outcome’ of the Cape Cod Summit.

  Nobody really knew if LBJ’s retreat to his ranch in Texas was permanent. Most insiders suspected that the litmus test would be if his man, Marvin Watson, resigned as White House Chief of Staff. Thereafter, the Administration would face the nightmare prospect of its most senior – oddly, least sullied in the eyes of the American people if polls were to be believed – member pissing into the tent from the outside in the run up to the Atlantic City Convention.

  Fulbright would have despaired if it had made any difference.

  Curtis LeMay had informed the President that the situation in Illinois and Wisconsin was ‘out of control’, that ‘the insurgency’ now threatened the entire Midwest.

  The American people did not know that yet.

  After the Battle of Washington the Administration had been united, and buoyed by the President’s renewed vigour and appetite for the fight that spring his re-election had seemed against all the odds...possible. And then the hammer blows had begun to rain down. In truth the Administration had been torpedoed below the waterline as early as that February day when Doctor Martin Luther King had been shot. King had lived but scores of his supporters had died in the panic at Bedford-Pine Park in Atlanta, trampled in the resulting panic. Then there had been the nuclear strike on the USS Enterprise in the Mediterranean; a strike that went unanswered; and in April the double humiliation of the Battle of Malta and the surprise Soviet invasion of Iran and Iraq. In hindsight, the most disastrous mistake had been to fail to eradicate the canker of rebellion in Chicago before it was too late. Sacking Major General Colin Powell Dempsey, - the man who had ‘dealt’ with similar insurgencies in his own native state, Washington, later been instrumental in restoring peace to the countryside around DC, and been entrusted by the Chiefs of Staff to ‘bring Chicago back under the rule of law’ - in April at the behest of Illinois and other Midwest Kennedy loyalists had split the Administration. It had been a point of no return; ever since then the Administration had been drifting and JFK’s poll ratings had plummeted.

  Curtis LeMay had also told the President that things were what they were. That it was time to deal with what was in front of us, not argue about the way we think things ought to be. The train for that debate had already left the station. The country was falling apart and it was high time somebody did something about it.

  That was what today’s conference with the Soviets was about.

  The President’s priorities were: one, to somehow – at any cost – to win the Democratic nomination; two, to restore the rule of law to the Midwest; three, to do whatever was necessary to keep the three West Coast states in the Union; and four, to avoid at all costs a new global war. If an essential pre-condition for achieving any, or all of the above included coming to an accommodation with the Soviet Union - an enemy ninety-nine percent of the American public had been given to believe, by their President, had been vanquished for all time only eighteen months ago – then that was a price that was going to have to be paid.

  On the undercard of the Administration’s ongoing, ever-deepening woes was the small matter of somehow preventing Doctor Martin Luther King’s March on Philadelphia turning into Governor George Wallace of Alabama’s stepping stone to the Presidency in November. If Jack Kennedy could have backed out of his commitment to Doctor King to stand beside him on the steps of City Hall – the temporary home of the House of Representatives – he would have done it in a flash but there were some promises a man simply could not walk away from.

  The last six months had been a Hell of a rollercoaster ride!

  Before joining the Administration Fulbright had taken it as read that the sons of a monster like Joe Kennedy – heck, the man had had one daughter lobotomised to stop her embarrassing the family, and ostracised another for marrying outside of the Catholic faith – must have been born with mile-wide ruthless streaks. In retrospect if he had realised how conflicted Jack Kennedy was about October 1962, and how desperate Bobby was to be a least seen doing the right thing; he might not have accepted the offer to
take the late Dean Rusk’s place at the State Department. A man was perfectly entitled to have his own, profoundly held beliefs and to live according to his own ethical and moral code; but if he was to conduct his country’s affairs abroad he had to leave all that behind him. Astonishingly, given all that had happened neither of the Kennedy brothers understood that...yet.

  Fulbright and Bobby Kennedy emerged into the bright sunshine and strolled the short distance to the heavily bugged ‘Soviet Chalet’, two Marines falling into step with them as their feet crunched on the freshly gravelled pathway.

  “I feel bad about this, Bill,” the Attorney General admitted.

  Fulbright ignored the admission.

  “Jaw jaw is better than war war, Bobby,” he retorted quietly.

  The younger man was not convinced.

  “This whole thing feels wrong to me, Bill. The Brits are actually fighting the Russian in Iraq. Right now. They aren’t just going to pull out if we ask them. Heck, Bill,” the President’s younger brother hissed, “the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says sending the Kitty Hawk into the Persian Gulf is asking for trouble! It’s not like Curtis LeMay is the kind of guy who gets spooked by his own shadow! Don’t you think he’s got a point? I don’t care how strong the Soviets may or may not be, there’s no way they want to pick a stand up fight with us. We ought to be playing hardball. And we ought to be talking to the Brits about this.”

  Fulbright groaned out aloud.

  “We tried that, Bobby,” he retorted. “Remember? Jack told Premier Thatcher the way it was and she came out with all that crap about ‘drawing a line in the sand’. Remember? She as good as called the President a coward in front of the rest of the Administration.”

  “Yeah,” the President’s younger brother conceded. “But then she came over to Hyannis Port and played nice. She didn’t make any demands that embarrassed Jack. Heck, she even offered us a way to ‘big up’ the balance sheets of some of the Wall Street banks who expect the Treasury to bail them out, Bill. And she promised to help us out when the Warren Commission sits...”

  Fulbright sometimes despaired of know it all college boys like the Attorney General.

  “What this country needs isn’t ‘allies’ who expect us to always be there to back them up. What this country needs is peace. If the President gives this country peace the people will forgive him, us anything, Bobby.”

  The President’s brother did not reply.

  “Peace is worth fighting for,” Fulbright continued grimly. “If we have to we’ll put ourselves between the Soviets and the British in the Gulf. It won’t be pretty but if that’s what we have to do to make our peace with the Russians, so be it!”

  Chapter 21

  Sunday 14th June 1964

  Khorramshahr Railway Station, Iran

  Rear Admiral Nick Davey was not the sort of old sea dog who normally felt like a fish out of water on land. Today his discomfort arose out of the stifling heat and a morning spent studying the latest charts of the Shatt al-Arab, its adjoining waterways and the maps of the surrounding desert and marsh lands.

  There were very few Iranian civilians left in Khorramshahr. Those who had not moved out of the town, fleeing across the Arvand River into Iraq or north away from the recent fighting tended to keep a low profile. Their home was now an armed camp periodically shelled – at extreme long-range in a somewhat random and desultory fashion – by troops still loyal to the Provisional Government in Isfahan; and subjected to hit and run night raids by fighter bombers of the Red Air Force. However, although neither the shelling nor the bombing was a serious inconvenience to the allied forces entrenched in and around Khorramshahr; the same could not be said of the latest clandestine hydrographic surveys of the Shatt-al-Arab. The results of the latter threatened to scupper Operation Cold Harbour, the naval component of Operation Lightfoot.

  Lieutenant General Michael Carver, Commander-in-Chief of All Commonwealth Forces in the Middle East, and Major General Mirza Hasan Mostofi al-Mamaleki, officer commanding all Imperial Iranian Forces within the KAMDZ (Khorramshahr-Abadan Mutual Defence Zone), had listened to Nick Davey’s briefing with the polite interest of men who did not really fully comprehend what they were being told.

  Or at least, that was what he had thought until the two soldiers had brought him out to the railway station, more a halt in the margins of the urban area of the town where buildings transitioned into the arid, rocky wasteland of the desert.

  Michael Carver pointed into the north east where the great curve of the Arvand River, the part of the Shatt al-Arab that swept down from the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers north of Basra, past the eastern side of that city, and onwards to the south down the western flank of the Khorramshahr-Abadan position.

  “Hopefully, the RAF can be persuaded to leave the one surviving pontoon bridge standing over the Arvand River connecting Basra to Iranian territory untouched. Fortunately, the Red Air Force doesn’t seem to be able to hit anything much smaller than a city neighbourhood,” he prefaced. “Basically, the RAF has been asked to leave the Basra suburbs nearest to the Arvand alone because the last thing we want is for the Red Army to arrive in the city and discover that the bridge is down and that most of the biggest barges have been sunk at their moorings. The object of the exercise is to get Marshal Babadzhanian to commit significant forces on the eastern side of the Shatt-al-Arab and to do our level best to destroy those forces in detail.”

  “In and around Khorramshahr,” al-Mamaleki grinned wolfishly as he stroked his magnificent bushy moustache.

  “We are constructing defence works,” Michael Carver went on, “including hundreds of revetments and hull down positions for our armour designed to channel any invading force down towards the town, and between it and the river or out into the open ground between Khorramshahr in the north where Hasan’s armour will be waiting for them.”

  Hasan al-Mamaleki was jabbing at the big map where the Karun River south of Khorramshahr where it curved around the northern end of Abadan Island.

  “When the Russians get here we will bleed them north of Khorramshahr and in the town before they get to the Karun. Then we will bleed them again as they try to throw bridges across the river. And when they get across the river we will be waiting for them in prepared fortifications three miles south.” The Iranian officer smiled ruefully. “And if everything can be persuaded to go according to plan at the very moment the Red Army makes contact with our defence lines around the airfield on Abadan, my boys will come charging out of the desert to the north east of Khorramshahr and fall upon the enemy’s flank!”

  It sounded marvellous but even an admiral could see the obvious flaws in the master plan. Why would the enemy mount a major assault on the Khorramshahr–Abadan front when all he had to do was surround it, and bomb and starve the defenders into submission? Thereafter, in the face of ever growing local Red Air Force air superiority Nick Davey’s ABNZ Persian Gulf Squadron would inevitably be driven from the seas of the northern Gulf, making the resupply of the Abadan garrison impossible in days rather than weeks. Thereafter, it would only be a matter of time before the garrison fell.

  Nevertheless, he was a great believer in always making plans just in case the enemy did something unbelievably stupid. Such exercises were immensely good for maintaining morale. Prior to flying up to Abadan, itself over thirty miles from the Persian Gulf, Nick Davey and his staff had reviewed Operation Cold Harbour, the naval element of Operation Lightfoot.

  “The main channel,” he informed the two generals, “south of here is about ten metres deep depending on the seasonal flow of the Arvand River. It will be shallower in a month or so. The problem is that the main channel is not uniformly ‘deep’ or ‘wide’, gentlemen, especially once you get this far north.” He jerked his thumb into the west. “Over there is Om-al-Rasas, a bloody great big sand bank through which three separate channels presently flow. The channel on the Khorramshahr side is the broadest of the three and the only one remotely navigable for my bi
gger ships. Stephen Turnbull of HMAS Anzac, whom I’ve spoken of before, reports grounding several times attempting to proceed north of here. The river is deceptive. If you stand on the bank hereabouts and look across to the other side it looks wide and inviting, the trouble is that apart from the deep channel, which moves about a bit without obvious rhyme or reason and sometimes divides into several narrow ‘less’ deep channels, the water is fairly shallow and transient mud banks are always forming and dissolving. This is a marvellous place for mucking about in a small boat, but it’s not so clever if one’s looking to bring one’s gun line up river to support you fellows!”

  Michael Carver already knew this.

  Today’s meeting was to apprise his ground commander, al-Mamaleki, of the issues which might derail the ‘little surprise’ they were concocting for Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian. As yet everything was surmise, a plethora of ifs and buts conditional upon the enemy’s willingness to obligingly put his head in the noose.

  Carver hated any plan which assumed the enemy would be take risks that he personally, would not consider even if a gun was being held at his head. But then he was a student of Soviet military thinking, a scholar of martial history and therefore, he understood that sometimes, just sometimes, apparently the best generals make really, really bad mistakes.

  If any kind of trap was to be sprung it would have to be sprung after, not before, the Red Army had invested not just Basra but the entire Faw Peninsula south of the city. The Allies were too weak on the ground to confront the whole fighting strength of Babadzhanian’s army group; that kind of a fight would only end one way. Moreover, there was no natural defensive barrier like the Karun River – over a hundred yards wide north of Abadan Island – in the west below Basra; so if the hugely stronger invading Red Army was to be drawn into battle it had to be on or around the line of the Karun around Khorramshahr where the terrain would naturally give the defence the advantage. Only in this way could the greatly outnumbered ‘allied’ forces hope to badly maul and possibly, locally, defeat a part of Army Group South. What happened after that was anybody’s guess.