by James Philip
If the Abadan garrison and Hasan al-Mamaleki’s tanks could inflict a significant reverse on the enemy; then it might be possible to mount some kind of flanking, or spoiling attack in the Umm Qasr sector; ‘might’ being the operative clause.
Notwithstanding, preparatory schemes needed to be thrashed out to cover the relatively small number of remotely likely eventualities.
The scenario under consideration today was one in which several of Nick Davey’s ships fought their way through the narrow waterways into the basin of Umm Qasr, the southernmost port of Iraq; enabling Major General Tom Daly’s small Anzac-led armoured force currently gathering in Kuwait to pin the Soviet forces likely to be in position south of Basra in place. Simultaneously the Commonwealth garrison of Abadan Island and Hasan al-Mamaleki’s armour would draw the Red Army into battle east of the Arvand River in a killing ground of the Allies’ choosing. Critical to this calculus was Davey’s main ‘gun line’; several destroyers and the cruisers Tiger and Royalist which he would have to fight the best part of fifty miles up the Arvand River from the mouth of the Shatt-al-Arab. ‘Fight’ being the operative word because on top of the virtually intractable problems of navigation in the waterway – probably at night – the whole length of the left bank of the river as his ships steamed slowly north would by then inevitably be in enemy hands, and presumably, emplaced with all manner and calibre of guns and rocketry.
The first time Michael Carver had spoken of the Navy’s part in Operation Lightfoot, Nick Davey’s reaction had been cheerfully resigned.
‘My word, this sounds like Aboukir Bay all over again.’
Carver had not immediately been on the same wave length as the Navy man.
“Battle of the Nile, old man,” Davey had explained. “Nelson took his battle line into the shallowest water between the French Fleet and the shore! Pretty much the sort of thing Peter Christopher pulled off on a smaller scale at the Battle of Lampedusa a few months back.”
The soldier was a little disconcerted by how readily and enthusiastically the sailor had taken onboard his land-lubberly tactical concept for the coming campaign.
‘So, you don’t think the whole idea is insane?’
Davey had sobered.
‘I’ll lose a lot of ships and men. Perhaps, all my ships and most of my men,’ he had declared, phlegmatically. ‘But you don’t have enough artillery in the whole theatre to fight a battle half this size; I do, therefore, the Navy has to steam into Um Qasr, and forty or fifty miles up the Shatt-al-Arab.’
‘Oh, I thought you’d tell me I was an idiot,’ Michael Carver had confessed ruefully.
Nick Davey had chuckled.
‘What was it John Cunningham said when he was C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet at the time we were losing ships hand over fist evacuating Crete in 1941?’ He had contemplated a moment. ‘Yes, I remember; something along the lines of it taking the Navy ‘three years to build a ship, but three hundred years to build a tradition’. If memory serves me correctly he concluded ‘the Navy will continue with the evacuation of Crete!’
Chapter 22
Monday 15th June 1964
‘The Angry Widow’, 170 miles South West of Akrotiri, Cyprus
From the minute Guy French had walked through the gates of RAF Cranwell as a nervous, wide-eyed boy a little less than eight years ago he had spent most of the time preparing for war by continuously honing his flying skills. On that day in 1956 he had hoped to fly fighters, a Hawker Hunter or one of the other fast, agile silvery magnificently loud and outrageously nimble machines he had seen cavorting around the skies at Farnborough, at countless other air shows and at the various air bases at which his father had been posted during his childhood. However, fate had decreed that he was not destined to fly single-seaters and that he was to be a bomber man.
He had been promoted to flight lieutenant a year before the October War; flown a Vulcan to the Baltic that night and to his and the rest of his crew’s - not to mention everybody at RAF Brize Norton where he had landed as dawn broke that awful morning – astonishment he had survived. Six of the nine No 83 Squadron Vulcans which had sortied from Scampton that night were never heard of again; all three surviving Vulcans had had their electronics suite burned out by EMPs – the Electronic Magnetic Pulses radiated by big bombs – and had been grounded for weeks and in some cases months, after the night of the war.
Rather than stooge around Scampton like a lost soul he had volunteered to fly transport aircraft, ending up in the left seat of a Comet 4 for an age, been bumped up another rank and given command of a flight of three of the beautiful machines. Then a few days after the Brize Norton and Cheltenham atrocities in April, he was offered – completely out of the blue - a chance to retrain on Victors. Having got used to the idea that he was going to be stuck in Transport Command forever and a day, he had leapt at the chance to fly out to Akrotiri to join No 100 Squadron. The rest was history; and now nine hours into a training exercise like no other he had ever flown, he was beginning to get used to the idea that the war was about to get very serious.
The Angry Widow, the Handley Page Victor B.2, to which he was assigned as second pilot, had taken off from RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus at 13:05 hours. With full fuel tanks and a fourteen ton mixed cargo of general purpose, blast, cluster and incendiary bombs crammed into her cavernous bomb bay, the bomber had climbed to forty-seven thousand feet and flown a jinking course to the west terminating fifty miles short of the Maltese Archipelago, flown south to within forty miles of the Libyan coast at Tripoli, then east to a point seventy miles north of Alexandria to rendezvous with a No 214 Squadron Vickers Valiant tanker at thirty-two thousand feet over the Eastern Mediterranean as it began to get dark.
The first pilot, an older Squadron Leader with nearly seven years seniority over Guy French, and his co-pilot were tasked to fly one hour on, one off throughout the scheduled fourteen hours and ten minutes of the exercise; and it happened that the first airborne ‘pit stop’ fell in one of Guy’s ‘slots’,
It took three attempts to mate The Angry Widow’s airborne refuelling boom with the Valiant’s trailing fuel drogue and it was fully dark by the time the Victor’s outer wing tanks had been ‘topped off’.
Breaking away Guy French had eased the big bomber all the way up to fifty thousand feet prior to levelling off.
“Bombs gone!” The navigator-radar officer cried from his position, facing backwards, in the rear of the crew compartment over Nicosia. However, the aircraft did not leap forward, unburdened of its bombs for this was the first of three planned ‘spoof’ bomb runs.
Turning west and south the bomber repeated its earlier erratic track towards Malta, this time overflying the island of Gozo at twenty-two thousand feet, turning in a wide clockwise circle to commence its second ‘spoof’ bomb run, bleeding off height as it ran down the eastern coastline of the main island, lining up with the Grand Harbour’s northern breakwater.
This time the simulation was not of a mixed high explosive and fire bomb ‘package’ spreading death and destruction across a broad swath of a heavily populated urban landscape but for a precision attack employing two six ton general purpose Tallboy bombs. For this part of the exercise, and for the second planned run – this latter simulating the dropping of a ten ton general purpose Grand Slam weapon – the accuracy of the ‘drop’ would be assessed by comparing radar and electronic records from The Angry Widow, with specially calibrated ground-based radar and tracking systems pre-positioned in and around the Grand Harbour.
The Angry Widow was the second of four 100 Squadron Akrotiri-based Victors scheduled to fly this ‘war simulation exercise’ so there was a healthy element of competition in finding out which aircraft eventually came out on top of the ‘bombing tree’.
Climbing away into the night The Angry Widow headed for a second in-flight refuelling rendezvous with a Valiant tanker far out at sea.
Ahead of this exercise the Akrotiri-based Victors had been withdrawn from operations over Iraq and 100 Sq
uadron personal restricted to the station until further notice.
It could only mean that the war was about to get deadly serious.
Chapter 23
Tuesday 16th June 1964
Kennedy Family Compound, Hyannis Port, Massachusetts
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America stared distractedly out of the windows across the cloudy seascape of Nantucket Sound.
“Take a seat, Mac,” he murmured. “You look all in.”
McGeorge Bundy had been pacing the floor attempting to reconcile his conscience with the advice he had just given his President. The others in the room were deathly silent. They had listened to their President’s long telephone conversation with Lyndon Johnson, nobody saying a word as the Vice-President’s voice echoed, clicking and hissing around the big room on the ground floor of what, in happier times, had been called the ‘Summer White House’. LBJ’s tone had been sourly dismissive; that of a man whose wise, well-intentioned counsel had been dismissed once too often.
The men in the room had been drinking black coffee and smoking - several of them chain smoking - all afternoon.
The President sighed.
“Ask Ted Sorenson to join us please,” he said. “The way things are looking sooner or later we’re going to have to present the American people with a new narrative. We’ll need Ted for that.”
Nebraskan born thirty-six year old Theodor Chalkin ‘Ted’ Sorensen had become the then Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s chief legislative aide as long ago as 1953. He was the President’s special counsel, advisor and de facto go to chief speech writer. Riding the runaway political rollercoaster of JFK’s caravan in the decade before the October War had been an exhilarating, frightening, marvellously disconcerting and fulfilling experience for the son of the Danish American former Attorney General of Nebraska who had graduated top of his law school class before heading east to seek his destiny.
Ted Sorensen had been the man who wrote the eight minute speech Jack Kennedy had delivered to the Union on the morning of Sunday 28th October 1962. That had been the speech that everybody believed had stopped the bleeding.
Before the war Ted Sorensen was one of the Administration’s quiet men, discreet and forever at the edge of the frame in any picture in which he inadvertently appeared. He was one of the few irreplaceable gears in the engine room of the White House machine. Jack Kennedy had once referred to Sorensen as his ‘intellectual blood bank’. Sorensen was the man who had crafted Kennedy’s inauguration speech, the man behind the immortal phrase ‘ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’, which had so caught the imagination of not just America but of the whole Western World. No man had done more to create the Presidential aura around JFK than the unassuming, modest lawyer who now entered the room blinking behind his horn-rimmed glasses.
Sickness had sidelined him throughout most of 1963; sickness both physical and of the spirit from which he knew he would never fully recover. However, he had eventually come back because his President had needed him.
Jack Kennedy waved his friend to a nearby vacant wicker chair.
The President sat in his rocking chair, ashen but apparently relaxed despite the weariness etched in his no longer young face.
Over the last week Sorensen had been pondering how best to counter the lies and half-truths about the President’s family and personal health circulating in the national press. He knew the President’s sister Rose Marie had been in a home in Wisconsin for many years; the poor woman had suffered mental illness all her life. The ‘Dr Feelgood’ accusations about the quack shots German-born Max Jacobsen had given the Chief Executive around the time of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the debacle of the Vienna Summit with Khrushchev in 1961, were harder to tie down and impossible to parry other than by point blank denials.
The problem was that everybody in DC had known about the President’s ‘alley cat’ relations with half-a-dozen women, mistresses, conquests and ‘friends’, many of whom had had less than upright connections. He was supposed to have slept with Marilyn Monroe for goodness sake! Some of the stories were preposterous, especially that one about his ‘inaugural fling’, they had all very nearly frozen to death on the steps of the Capital Building that day! The problem was that whereas, before the October War no newspaper man in Christendom would have dreamed of reporting that the President had seduced a Mafia kingpin’s mistress, or ‘banged’ a debutante on his way to his inauguration in January 1961, the old taboos and understandings were starting to fall by the wayside. Presently, the whispering campaign was like a leak in a dam, just about controllable by plugging each small breach as it occurred. Inevitably, at some stage the dam would burst. Explaining away rumours and tall stories was one thing; this hastily convened ‘war council’ at Hyannis Port was another and everybody around Ted Sorenson seemed to be in denial. Whatever else happened in the next few months these rumours were going to destroy his friend if he did not get out there and fight back. Blanket denials were no good, it was too late for that; and now it seemed that there was something much, much worse in the wind.
Sorensen had known he would be summoned once the Vice-President had spoken. Bobby Kennedy and Bill Fulbright had come back from Camp David with angry resignation in their eyes. Robert McNamara had flown into Cape Cod like a corporate closer, and Marvin Watson, LBJ’s man and since the spring the White House Chief of Staff had become increasingly unobtrusive, almost anonymous. Things were going badly in the primaries, in the country, everywhere. Then that morning Claude Betancourt had driven into Hyannis Port and Ted Sorensen had known that this conclave was ‘the big one’, literally, ‘make or break’ for the President’s re-election campaign.
Sorenson wondered if his friend planned to throw in the towel.
The President seemed lost in his thoughts.
“Things are going to Hell,” Bobby Kennedy said unhappily as Sorenson sat down, nodding acquaintance to the other men in the room. “Things are going to have to change. In fact, pretty much the whole shebang is going to have to change. Not today, or tomorrow, but sometime before the Convention.”
The Attorney General’s older brother stirred.
“We wouldn’t do this if there was a better way, Ted,” he explained, apologising before the younger man had any real notion what there was to be sorry for. “There’s a storm coming,” he added vaguely. “A perfect storm. There’s what’s going on in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. There’s the Egypt thing, nobody knows how that will turn out in the end, or how Nasser will play things once he’s stopped purging his Army and Air Force. There’s the economy at home, stalled again; we actually need things like the,” he paused, quirked a wan half smile at his stern-faced Secretary of State, “Fulbright Plan to mend Wall Street’s balance books but we’re going to have to print an insanely large amount of money to do it. And if we do it, we can’t talk to the American people about it.” Again he hesitated, shaking his head and gasping a sad guffaw. “Even though whatever happens we have to do it; unless we want to get ourselves into another stand-off with the British which might be unavoidable, anyway...”
Ted Sorensen tried very hard not to frown in confusion.
“The thing is,” Bobby Kennedy interjected. “It isn’t going to be enough to do things behind the scenes. We actually have to be seen to be doing things. Big things; things that are hard but that speak to the American people and that will need to be carefully timed and finessed...”
“Before the Convention,” the President re-iterated, “maybe, starting in the next couple of weeks, or early next month.” Jack Kennedy stopped rocking in his chair and fixed Ted Sorensen in his green-eyed gaze. “We’ve been talking to the Russians, Ted.”
“The Russians?” Sorensen asked in bewilderment.
“Yes.”
Bobby Kennedy coughed and his brother raised a hand, indicating for him to explain.
“Secretary Fulbright and I went to Camp David to meet with former A
mbassador Dobrynin and UN Representative Zorin. We discussed what an open-ended US-Soviet non-aggression pact would look like.” He balked at what he was about to say for a moment. “And what concrete measures would need to be put in place on both sides to make such a pact work in practice. Given recent history we both agreed that mere words will not suffice.”
The Secretary of State leaned forward.
“We,” Fulbright growled, “made certain demands of the Russians, and they made counter demands. As we speak Representative Zorin is in the air flying to Sverdlovsk to confer with the collective leadership of the USSR. He took with him the President’s Special Emissary, Ambassador Thompson, and draft proposals designed to be the basis of future urgent negotiations.”
Ted Sorensen was feeling a little like Alice must have felt when she fell through the looking glass.
“What are we offering them and what do we get in return, Mr Secretary?”
The men in the room were looking to him to sell this to the American people; to put the right words in the President’s mouth, to make poison sound and taste like fine wine. Before he could do that he had to know what the bottom line was and to understand how bad things got if the deal did not get done.
“The Red Army halts at the northern borders of the Emirate of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Thereafter, an international peacekeeping force will be deployed in those countries and in southern Iran, creating a permanent ‘buffer zone’ to guarantee that there will be no further Soviet territorial incursion in the region. One year from the date of the end of major hostilities in the Persian Gulf the Soviets will bring to the table a proposal for comprehensive global nuclear disarmament. In the meantime a conference will be convened on neutral territory to discuss redrawing the spheres of influence in Europe agreed at Yalta in 1945. This will be a precursor forum for the discussion of long-term reconstruction planning for Western Europe and the ‘viable’ areas of the Soviet Union. At this time the matter of war reparations will be indefinitely shelved.”