by James Philip
Chapter 34
Thursday 25th June 1964
Victor B.2 ‘The Angry Widow’, 20 Miles East of Krasny Kut, Saratov Oblast, Soviet Union
After topping off her fuel tanks from a No 207 Squadron Valiant at thirty-three thousand feet over the Caspian Sea, The Angry Widow had turned towards the Ural Mountains. In the days before the ‘off’ there had been endless speculation about what might remain of the pre-October War Soviet air defence system; secretly nobody had thought any aircraft could possibly penetrate this far into Soviet territory – no matter how devastated it was – without getting shot down. But then nobody had really anticipated that the air defence environment this far inside the Soviet Union would be so electronically ‘dead’. There were lights on the ground, here and there, but no big settlements, no hubs of any kind of industry and radar activity was so sparse as to make it child’s play to navigate between the few widely separated lukewarm ‘hotspots’.
Thus far the crew of The Angry Widow had come across nothing to contradict the intelligence assessment of the mission briefing officer: ‘The western and previously most populous areas of the Soviet Union west of the Ural Mountains are not dead zones, in fact we believe many millions of people still survive to inhabit all bar the most hard hit places. Sections of many large cities survive damaged but habitable and in the countryside significant communities were untouched by the direct effects of the bombing.’
However, from what The Angry Widow’s instruments reported the threads that bound modern societies together – electricity, telecommunications and industrial organisation – had been comprehensively cut to shreds in the lands over which it had flown. If large numbers of people still lived beneath the Victor’s flight path as it weaved and jinked across the great hinterland, they were not living as they had before the cataclysm. If the evidence of the electronic warfare panel was to be taken at face value, great swathes of the Soviet Union had literally been bombed back into the Stone Age.
Squadron Leader Guy French remembered the night of the October War, dodging the plumes of nuclear strikes across a landscape where huge firestorms raged, whole forests were burning and EMPs – Electro-Magnetic Pulses - had eventually trashed every piece of ‘hardened’ radio, radar, guidance and bomb aiming kit on his Avro Vulcan.
Reports of the recent raids on targets in southern Iraq had talked about massively ‘beefed up’ Soviet missile defences and the southward ‘creep’ of a formidable co-ordinated Red Air Force air defence command and control system. A Vulcan flying out of Damman-Dhahran and two Cyprus-based Canberras had gone missing on operations over Basra and Al-Qurnah in the last week and other missions had been forced to abort short of their targets in the face of increased enemy fighter activity. Baghdad had been ‘off limits’ for last ten days; a thirty mile zone around the city having been saturated with surface-to-air missile batteries.
Ahead of today’s operation the Intelligence boys at Akrotiri were speculating that the Soviets might have risked weakening the air defences of ‘the homeland’ to ‘stiffen’ the air cover over their ground forces in Iraq. Guy French was sceptical about that; he would wait and see what awaited The Angry Widow and the other three 100 Squadron Victors east of the Urals. The Moon was rising in the eastern sky, painting the bomber’s way to its target, still two hundred miles distant.
Each of the four Victors carried different bomb loads. City of Lincoln, the Squadron CO’s kite carried a ten-ton Grand Slam and four thousand-pounders in her belly, The Angry Widow a pair of six-ton Tallboys, Eight East thirty-six one thousand pound general purpose bombs, and Remember London an eighteen-ton mixed cargo of two thousand pound ‘blast’ munitions and magnesium and phosphorus based incendiaries.
The City of Lincoln and The Angry Widow had come out on top in the ‘Grand Harbour Bombing Contest’, and thus earned the right to cart the biggest bombs to Chelyabinsk, or more correctly, to a suspected bunker complex located some distance to that city’s north-east. The ‘also rans’ in the ‘contest’ were tasked to bomb the centre of the built up area of the city from fifty thousand feet at the same time the two ‘winners’ descended to nineteen thousand feet to strike at the suspected ‘command and control centre’ six miles away.
In his concluding remarks the Squadron Commander had cheerfully told the crews of the four Victors – to a man veterans of the night of the October War - that this was a ‘press on at any cost job’ and the decision to mount the operation on a full Moon night had been calculated to ‘send the enemy a message’.
The message in question was presumably that only mad dogs and Englishmen flew over hostile territory by the light of the Moon...
The chaps had taken this in good heart; it was not as if any of them wanted to live forever. The men of the V-Bomber Force had been a fatalist crowd before the war; now, well there was a general acceptance that they had all been living on borrowed time ever since that night.
Guy French ought to have been more interested in exactly why the bunker complex outside Chelyabinsk was so important that it justified the likely loss of four irreplaceable Victors, and the risking of three Valiant tankers and two Vulcans flying electronic counter measures missions deep into former Soviet airspace. But the why was so much less important than the immediate how, that the former was completely subsumed by the latter. Flying the mission was everything, the reasons why incidental. That was the way it had been on the night of the October War, and the way it must have been for his father when he was flying Lancasters over Germany in Hitler’s War.
Theirs was not to make reply. Theirs was not to reason why. Theirs was but to do and die. Into the valley of Death flew the twenty men of No 100 Squadron...
It was all he could do to suppress a mischievous chuckle beneath his chaffing oxygen mask. Death was too good a fate for a man who could so shamelessly misquote Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Homeric ode to the egregiously gallant folly of a former age.
Flying at the speed of a rifle bullet The Angry Widow rocketed east above the Ural Mountains.
The navigator’s voice sliced through his co-pilot’s thoughts.
“Initial Point in sixty seconds on my mark...NOW!”
The mission profile called for a rapid high speed descent at the commencement of the bomb run over ninety miles short of the target. In moments flaps would be extended, air brakes activated, throttles dragged back and the huge bomber would literally drop like a stone into the darkness. Anybody watching on a ground-based radar screen would suspect that his contact was out of control, crashing.
“THIRTY SECONDS!”
“Pay attention everybody,” the Aircraft Commander drawled. “Hold onto your straps.”
“TWENTY SECONDS!”
“Instrument check, co-pilot,” the man in the left hand seat inquired solicitously.
“A-OK. All readings are nominal, sir.”
“Jolly good!”
“TEN SECONDS!”
The roller coaster ride was about to begin.
“FIVE! FOUR! THREE! TWO! ONE!”
“Showtime,” the pilot grunted as the flaps and air brakes extended into the near supersonic airstream ripping over and under the Victor’s wings and along its space age fuselage, as the four great Rolls-Royce Conway turbojets buried in her wing roots rapidly spooled down to half-power.
It was like being simultaneously punched in the stomach and dropped off a cliff.
Both pilots lurched forward hard against their straps; and experienced the uncanny sensation of their intestinal tracts attempting to exit their bodies via the top of their heads.
It was a miracle The Angry Widow did not shed her wings in protest; which, all things considered was the reason that in the normal course of things one simply did not do this sort of thing to a ‘beast’ like The Angry Widow.
Unless, of course, there was a job to be done.
Guy French wanted to yell his exhilaration to the glowing yellow orb of the rising Moon.
In that moment of monumentally heightened, alm
ost erotic awareness when everything was suddenly so immediate the Moon seemed so close that if he reached out he could touch it...
Chapter 35
Friday 26th June 1964
HMS Alliance, Lazaretto Creek, Malta
Lieutenant-Commander Francis Barrington snapped to attention as the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations stepped onto the deck of the submarine. High above his head a skull and crossbones adorned black Jolly Roger flag flew from the jury-rigged rope and tackle attached to the boat’s raised attack periscope. Down on the pressure casing the crew was dressed on parade, sweating in the late morning heat.
Air Marshall Sir Daniel French acknowledged Barrington’s salute and smiled a quick, wolfishly predatory smile.
“Another damned fine job, Commander Barrington,” he declared loudly, so that everybody heard it. “Another damned fine job done by a damned fine boat, captain!”
“Thank you, sir.”
Alliance’s return to Malta had been a royally celebrated affair.
Last night Alliance had been visited by Vice Admiral Grenville, C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet and earlier that morning the newly designated Acting Prime Minister of the Maltese Archipelago, Dom Mintoff and several other senior members of his ‘all party’ civil administration had come aboard.
The avenger of the ‘Hampshire atrocity’ had been greeted out at sea by the Battle class destroyer HMS Oudenarde and over-flown by RAF Hawker Hunter fighters as she passed east of the Grand Harbour breakwaters and steamed into Marsamxett. The ramparts of Valetta had been crowded, likewise the ruins on Manoel Island with cheering and waving civilians and service personnel.
Malta itself still seemed wrecked from end to end.
Valletta’s skyline was smashed and smoke blackened; in Lazaretto Creek the old depot ship Maidstone still sat on the bottom, traces of bunker oil escaping through the surface booms fouling the crystal clear waters. Work was still going on to clear a wreck from the main channel and a new mole was being built to shelter Msida Creek from the east winds that blew down Marsamxett carrying the dust from countless streets half-blocked with rubble and debris.
The orders for Alliance’s next deployment had been awaiting her return.
Alliance will make good defects, refuel, re-arm and victual for a thirty day war patrol and return to home waters not later than ten days after arriving Lazaretto Creek, Malta. Alliance to draw charts for Western Approaches, Bristol Channel and Irish Sea and make passage at best submerged speed to HM Naval Base, Barrow-in-Furness. There to report to Flag Officer 10th Submarine Squadron. Alliance to advise arrival date by secure communications after completing passage of Straits of Gibraltar. Promotions: Barrington, F.H., to Comdr., Philpott, M.J., to Lt.-Comdr, effective return to home waters.
Nobody knew very much about the 10th Submarine Squadron other than it was the personal fiefdom of thirty-eight year old Rear Admiral Simon Horatio Collingwood, the man who had commanded HMS Dreadnought on her first two war patrols, the Royal Navy’s anointed ‘nuclear boat supremo’.
Francis Barrington had no idea what use an old – albeit substantially modified – World War II designed ‘A’ Class boat like Alliance would be up in Barrow, allegedly, the place where the Navy’s undersea fleet of the future was to be built.
He would worry about that when he got home. In the meantime the damaged port shaft which had cut shot Alliance’s patrol in the Gulf of Lion, courtesy of a randomly dumped French depth charge, needed to be repaired and that was going to be a dry dock job. Later that day he had an interview scheduled with Commodore Renfrew, the Admiralty Dockyard Superintendent but he entertained no expectations of jumping the queue. One of the big US Navy missile destroyers based at Malta had just taken up residence in Dock No 2, and HMS Victorious, resembling a half-burned hulk rather than a fleet carrier was moored in Kalkara Creek waiting to get into Dock No 1. Every ship in the Mediterranean Fleet was either broken or worn out and the influx of dockyard workers from the Clyde and the Tyne, had found it hard going stepping into the shoes of the Maltese workers killed and injured in the Battle of Malta.
Barrington had assumed that Air Marshall French would simply want to shake a few hands and depart; in fact he asked for ‘a tour’ of the submarine and insisted on shaking every man’s hand. Such was the C-in-C’s propensity to stop and chat that he was on Alliance well over an hour before his anxious aides contrived to drag him ashore to his next appointment.
Alliance’s place in the blockade of the French Mediterranean coast had been filled by HMS Anchorite, an unmodernised sister boat which – until the last couple of months - had had at least two superior claims to fame than Francis Barrington’s command. Firstly, in 1960 Anchorite had been the first Royal Navy submarine to visit Tonga since the Second War, and secondly, Anchorite was the only boat in the Fleet which had had a rock named after it; specifically, a previously uncharted ‘rock’ in the Hauraki Gulf off Auckland which it had discovered by employing the well known hydrographic mapping technique known throughout the surface as ‘inadvertently colliding with it’.
Returning to Malta on one shaft Alliance had been routed well away from the Corsican waters in which she had exacted revenge for the sneak attack on HMS Hampshire.
Vice Admiral Grenville had cheerfully informed him that after Alliance had ‘done her execution’ the RAF had ‘flattened most of Ajaccio and the surrounding countryside’, apparently, ‘just to make a point’. Since then the boats of the 2nd Submarine Squadron – five Amphion class boats reinforced with a pair of new, advanced and very stealthy ‘O’ class ‘Oberons’, Oracle and Otter – had ‘pretty much bottled up what’s left of the French Mediterranean Fleet in Toulon and Marseilles and put the lid on any ongoing coastal traffic’. It seemed everybody was a little jealous that Alliance had ‘stolen all the glory’ before the enemy had run for cover.
Francis Barrington had profusely apologised for being greedy and Grenville, a ruddy-faced, four square man who probably would have been on his element on the quarterdeck of one of Nelson’s ships of the line at Trafalgar had guffawed enthusiastically.
The Commander of HMS Alliance watched his latest visitor’s barge chug towards the near shore along the western rim of Lazaretto Creek. The roads had been re-opened through the ruined houses in Msida and Gzira, wisps of grey smoke rose here and there in the urban sprawl from the cooking stoves lit by families returning to their bombed homes.
“It’s all very well being honoured and feted by the great and the good, sir,” Lieutenant Michael Philpott observed ruefully, “but it makes a nonsense of watch rotas and work schedules!”
Barrington chuckled.
“Be thankful for small mercies, Number One,” he counselled sagely. “The last time we did something heroic the same people who are queuing to come onboard and pat us all on the back had us put in quarantine for a fortnight.”
“Very true, Skipper,” the younger man concurred. Sobering a little he added: “It will be good to get home before the end of summer after the last couple of winters.”
Standing on the deck of the submarine in tropical whites with the sun beating down so fiercely that exposed metal was hot enough to sear unprotected flesh, or to flash fry an egg in seconds it was a little incongruous to be thinking of English winters. They had assumed Alliance would be stationed at Malta for the foreseeable future, and in a World which could come to fiery end in a moment that had seemed like forever. Now they were looking forward to going home and it mattered not one jot that they had no real idea what awaited them in England.
Barrington looked to his wrist watch.
It would be noon in a few minutes.
“Normal harbour stations from twelve hundred hours, Number One. Send as many men ashore as we can spare. Our people deserve an opportunity to let off a little steam.”
Chapter 36
Saturday 27th June 1964
Kursk Bunker, Chelyabinsk, Soviet Union
One of
the two six-ton bombs which had landed within the security perimeter of the bunker complex, had demolished a gymnasium where over a two hundred slave workers and political offenders assigned to Penal Battalion 507, had been sleeping. The whole building had collapsed and a fire fed by a ruptured gas main had eventually consumed the entire structure. Had anybody survived the blast of the huge bomb they might have been rescued from the wreckage before the fire took hold; had that is, anybody cared or had the fire fighters not been fully occupied elsewhere.
A second six-ton – a so-called Tallboy - bomb had struck the edge of the four-metre thick reinforced cupola protecting the central, ‘command bunker’ from where the Red Air Force directed the air defence of the ‘Sverdlovsk-Chelyabinsk Defended Region’. The bomb had carved some fifteen feet into the earth passing through the metre-thick roof of the broad circular communication walkway between the air defence centre and the ‘political bunker’, where senior Party and Red Army and Air Force leaders and their families sheltered in a still deeper warren of tunnels and rooms some twenty metres underground when there was an air raid alert.
In comparison with the modern deep bunkers around Moscow which, ironically, very few senior Party figures had been able to reach before the first American missiles arrived on the night of the Cuban Missiles War, the Kursk complex was relatively shallow and built to survive an attack with Hiroshima-size bombs exploding not on top of, but ‘air bursting’ near it. Some thought had been given to the ‘survivability’ of the facility if attacked with large conventional precision munitions but, not much. This was hardly inexplicable since the notion of Yankee or British bombers flying this deep into the Soviet Union carrying six and ten ton ‘earthquake’ bombs would, prior to October 1962 have seemed risible, if not laughable.