by James Philip
Kurochnik was under no illusion that when Babadzhanian spoke of ‘enemies’ he was looking over his shoulder, rather than to his front at the weak Iranian and British forces which 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army was about to crush beneath the tracks of its massed T-62s.
However, this was not to say that Kurochnik was over-confident or in any way complacent about the coming battle. His experiences in the early stages of the campaign back in Iranian Azerbaijan had reminded him, not that he had needed reminding, that Operation Nakazyvat had been mounted and conducted on the basis of ‘intelligence’ that did a disservice to the description ‘shit useless’. If the Iraqi Army had put up any kind of fight or if the British Royal Air Force had continued wrecking roads, knocking down bridges, and turning towns along the southern lines of advance into rubble, Operation Nakazyvat would probably have stalled just south of Baghdad. Granted, no plan survived first contact with the enemy but the invasion of Iran and Iraq had been prosecuted on a wing and a prayer. It was an absolute miracle that things had turned out so well.
That was the problem, of course.
That day when he had been standing on the roof of the City Governor’s house in Urmia after his paratroopers had taken the city with negligible casualties, he had been asking himself exactly the same questions he was asking himself now. South of Baghdad the Red Army had motored towards the Persian Gulf as if it was conducting summer manoeuvres in the Ukraine.
So why do I have a nagging suspicion that I am about to put my hand into a meat grinder?
Until he had walked into the room and seen for himself that Comrade Marshall Hamazasp Khachaturi was as ill as worried staffers – all loyal men who had been with him, in some cases since Budapest in 1956 – had claimed, Kurochnik had been planning to voice his mounting concerns about the veracity of the ‘big intelligence picture’.
He had also meant to raise his worries about whether a ‘bridging plan’ that involved two battalions of combat engineers towing a hundred and fifty pontoons down the Arvand River from Basra – assuming bombing did not destroy the pontoons in the meantime – could be guaranteed to throw two bridges across the Karun River when the time came. Over-running Khorramshahr was one thing, getting across the Karun River and sustaining operations south of it was another altogether. He was an airborne commander; heavy duty combat engineering and the prospect of handling large armoured formations in the heat of what was likely to be the most serious fight of the whole campaign was alien to him.
However, looking at Marshal Babadzhanian he felt guilty for even considering worrying the great man with his own pathetic worries.
“The bastards won’t know what’s hit them, sir!” Puchkov promised grimly.
Kurochnik’s last doubt died.
“We’ll roll straight over the bastards!” He agreed grimly.
Babadzhanian rallied briefly, forcing a deathly, ashen grimace.
Chapter 42
Thursday 2nd July 1964
Prime Minister’s Rooms, Hertford College, Oxford
Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson had watched the storm clouds gathering, and braced himself for the flood that would almost certainly sweep the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom to perdition. In hindsight he was very much afraid that his plotting and scheming around the fringes of the unfolding disaster might, when one day it came to light it surely would, damn him to a particularly dark place in the purgatory into which future generations of historians would surely assign most of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers.
Oddly, his conscience was clear.
It had been necessary to hamstring Egypt; otherwise Nasser would have sought to take advantage of the inevitable catastrophe unfolding in the Persian Gulf; that in turn would have led to a never-ending war with Israel and probability, rather than possibility that other Arab countries, fomented by and to the long term profit of the victorious Soviet Union would be sucked in. At least he had succeeded in limiting, for now, the damage always providing the United States came to its senses in time to deter, or physically obstruct Soviet ambitions to conquer the Arabian Peninsula.
Confronted by so many ifs and buts, by so many unquantifiable clauses and caveats, possibilities and disasters, one could only do so much. He ought to have recommended that British and Commonwealth forces be withdrawn before this final, inevitably bloody denouement; but Margaret Thatcher would never have stood for that.
She had drawn her line in the sand and that, was that!
Had she taken any other stance the resolve of the Chiefs of Staff might have crumbled and the UAUK would have fallen anyway. Geopolitical grand strategy had ever been the ineluctable product of impossible choices and a raft of decisions made under equally impossible circumstances.
History was after all, in most ages the autobiography of a madman.
That was the only lesson of history.
“Margaret,” the Foreign Secretary said, trying not to plead. “Much as we all hope that things turn out for the best in the Gulf we must prepare for other,” he shrugged apologetically, ‘eventualities.’
Tom Harding-Grayson had got into a lot of trouble playing Devil’s Advocate before the October War, and he expected to be in even deeper water soon. Nevertheless, he stuck to his guns.
“We have done our best. We have stood by our ‘friends’ in the Middle East. We have tried to do what we can. The crisis has immeasurably strengthened our ties with Australia and New Zealand and the rest of the ‘white’ Commonwealth but now we are looking down the barrel, as it were. I hope and pray that things do not turn out as badly as they might; but how long will our strengthened ties to our Commonwealth allies survive if there is a massacre...”
The Prime Minister gave her friend a sympathetic, quizzical look as she raised her tea cup to her lips. With the moment of decision drawing very close she had discovered a new serenity. Knowing that there was nothing to do except wait for the latest news, good, bad or disastrous and that there was absolutely nothing more that could be done to influence the outcome of the forthcoming trial by fire was perversely...comforting.
It fell to Willie Whitelaw, the gaunt-faced Defence Minister - who looked at his wit’s end - to remind the Foreign Secretary that the die was cast.
“Whatever happens,” he sighed, “there will always be politics on the other side, Tom.” There spoke the old soldier who had fought from Normandy to North West Germany with the 6th Guards Tank Brigade in 1944 and 1945, who had seen too many friends and comrades killed before his eyes in those days to have any illusions about the coming battle.
The Prime Minister put down her cup and saucer.
The trio were sitting around a table in the pool of late afternoon sunshine streaming in through the old, leaded windows which overlooked the ivy-festooned Old Quad. At this time of the evening Cabinet and Private Office staff mingled on the lawn of the Old Quad, chatting, enjoying cigarettes, standing or sitting in small, confidential groups taking advantage of the Prime Minister’s recent edict relaxing the Draconian ‘security regime’ within the walls of Hertford College. The College was surrounded by a veritable ring of steel and her AWP – her faithful Royal Marines informally styled themselves Angry Widow’s Praetorians - patrolled the corridors. The ad hoc ‘body guarding arrangements’ of the early part of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership were a memory and she had mandated a more pragmatic approach, at least within this sanctuary. Down on the lawn lovers would be flirting, old friends complaining about their minister’s foibles, exchanging gossip, behaving like normal people ought to behave in a ‘normal’ World.
“I wish,” she remarked, lost for a moment in her thoughts, “that I still believed. If I still believed I would pray for our safe deliverance.”
Tom Harding-Grayson was suddenly aware that his friend’s mesmeric steely blue gaze had settled on his face.
“I feel sometimes as if the situation with the Americans is my fault, Tom.”
“No, no, no,” Willie Whitelaw objected instantly.
The woman raised
a hand.
“I ask myself what Winston Churchill would have done in my place,” she explained. “Franklin Roosevelt was an isolationist President of a Depression-wracked isolationist nation. He was the original ‘America First’ man of the twentieth century; whereas, Jack Kennedy was, and probably still is in his heart, an internationalist, a man who has travelled the globe, a decorated war hero who studied at Oxford, who spent many of his formative years here in England when his father was Ambassador to London. Unlike FDR, Jack Kennedy actually likes us. And yet he and I have been unable to build any kind of ‘special relationship’, let alone a war-winning coalition of the kind Roosevelt and Churchill built in the 1940s.”
The Foreign Secretary roused himself.
“Winston Churchill was half-American, Margaret. He was in his sixties by the time he became Prime Minister. The man had had a lifetime in politics and government, he was a bestselling international author, perhaps the most famous and well-known Englishman in Christendom by the time he and Roosevelt started talking Realpolitik in 1940. You must not be hard on yourself. You began from a standing start; Winston Churchill had had a forty-year run up, forty years at the top table before he faced his great test.”
In response Margaret Thatcher quirked an unhappy smile.
“He was a great man. The greatest man of our century,” she retorted sadly.
There was a knock at the door.
A woman in a faded twin set entered and delivered a folded note to the Prime Minister.
Margaret Thatcher read silently.
“The Argentine Forces of occupation on East Falkland have just released photographs of the execution of ten civilian hostages in front of Government House in Port Stanley,” she said dully.
When she looked up there was tempered steel in her eyes.
Chapter 43
Thursday 2nd July 1964
HMAS Anzac, 35 miles east of Bandar Bushehr, Persian Gulf
The Battle class destroyer was closed up at Air Defence Station One as astern the ships of the gun line slowly disappeared into the gathering dusk. The battle plan for Operation Cold Harbour had been torn up around noon upon the receipt of the latest intelligence from Abadan and England.
Something had happened and HMS Centaur’s Westland Wessex helicopters had fetched the captains of every ship in the Umm Qasr and Shatt al-Arab gun lines to a hastily called conference. The old carrier and her escorts, HMNZ Otago, and the anti-submarine frigates Palliser and Hardy had been loitering forty miles astern of the ‘gunboats’, from where her Sea Vixens and Scimitar interceptors could screen their advance north.
Rear Admiral Davey had greeted his captains in the carrier’s wardroom with no little bonhomie but wasted no time getting down to business.
‘Within the next twenty-four hours the enemy will assault the Allied defences north of Khorramshahr.’
Commander Stephen Turnbull had asked himself how Davey could possibly know that for certain; while not for a minute doubting that he was utterly certain of it. Ever since Anzac had arrived in the Gulf he had been struck by the confidence of not just Nick Davey, but by the C-in-C, General Carver, and the commander of Australian Ground Forces, Tom Daly, in the ‘intelligence picture’; today the Fleet Commander had not been just ‘confident’, he had been convinced.
‘This and other factors mean that the focus of Operation Cold Harbour will be to provide the closest possible fire support for Allied land and air forces in the Abadan Sector.’ He had grinned broadly. ‘The RAF has undertaken to deal with the Russians in and around Umm Qasr, while we busy ourselves with the work that needs to be accomplished in the Shatt al-Arab.’
The gun line was to be led by Anzac.
‘To my mind,’ Nick Davey had explained to his band of brothers, ‘when in years to come good men talk of our deeds the name Anzac should be the first on their lips. Tonight we fight as men of the Commonwealth dedicated to the rightness of our cause. Anzac will blaze the trail!’
At that moment there had, very briefly, a suggestion of a tear in Stephen Turnbull’s eye.
‘Second in line will be Diamond,’ Davey had continued, nodding acknowledgement to the captain of the newly arrived Daring class fleet destroyer. ‘The flagship will follow close astern of Diamond; and after Tiger, the Tobruk, with Royalist bringing up the rear.’ These latter two ships had been slated to bombard Umm Qasr until the change of plan. ‘The minesweepers Tariton and Stubbington will hang back two miles behind Royalist. In the event any of the ships in the gun line are sunk or have to be abandoned, Tariton and Stubbington will sweep up survivors who are washed down river.’
Davey had given the youthful lieutenants commanding the two small Ton class minesweepers a meaningful look and added: ‘I don’t want either of you fellows getting ideas above your station and attempting to engage the enemy with your pop guns!’
Both men had been crestfallen to receive this injunction.
‘Gentlemen,’ Nick Davey had announced soberly, ‘Anzac will lead us across the bar of the Shatt al-Arab at twenty-two hundred hours tonight. Captains may independently engage any target of opportunity on the Iraq side of the Arvand River in the event the gun line is fired upon. Please be mindful that the main battle will be nearer Basra than the Gulf shore; so keep your powder dry for as long as possible.’
There were housekeeping and operational contingencies to spell out.
‘Once battle is joined if a ship ahead is disabled or unable to manoeuvre the following ship should pass it to port. That is, between the enemy and the stricken ship. In some quarters this is called the Aboukir manoeuvre in honour of Admiral Lord Nelson at the Battle of the Nile,’ Nick Davey had quipped jovially. ‘I think in later years we will as likely refer to it as the Christopher manoeuvre; in honour of my old friend’s scallywag son Peter!’
The band of brothers laughed together as if they were one man.
‘No ship may stop to give aid to another during the battle,’ the Squadron Commander ordered, somewhat quietening the mirth. ‘Once abreast of Abadan captains will slave main battery fire control to the artillery directors on Abadan Island, or manually comply with all requests for fire support from ashore irrespective of the tactical situation on the Arvand River. The priority is to stop the Red Army in its tracks and give it the bloodiest possible nose; ships in the gun line may support each other at need but not at the expense of delaying or ignoring the main mission.’
Davey made no attempt to sweeten the pill.
‘Captains are ordered to ground their ships and to continue the fight in the event they judge their commands are in danger of foundering.’ He hesitated, as if worried he would choke on his next words. ‘If things go badly it may be necessary to scuttle every ship in the gun line in the main channel to deny its use to the enemy.’ He had moved on swiftly. ‘Line of command. If I am incapacitated Squadron Command passes to Tiger.’ He had glanced at the cruiser’s captain, forty-six year old Hardress Llewellyn ‘Harpy’ Lloyd, a well-liked man had won a Distinguished Service Cross commanding MTB 34 in a fight with German E-Boats in the North Sea in August 1942. ‘After Tiger, Anzac,” Davey had nodded to Turnbull, ‘then Royalist, then Diamond, then Tobruk.’ He allowed himself a rueful chuckle as he fixed his gaze on the two boyish minesweeper captains.
‘If either of you find yourselves in command I suggest you make best speed out to sea and get yourselves underneath Centaur’s air umbrella sharpish, boys!’
The older men in the wardroom had chortled grimly.
Replaying the briefing in his head after his return to Anzac, Stephen Turnbull had been under no misapprehension that Operation Cold Harbour was anything other than a one way ticket to a particular kind of Hell.
Chapter 44
Thursday 2nd July 1964
HMS Tiger, 35 miles east of Bandar Bushehr, Persian Gulf
Rear Admiral Nicholas Davey stared down into the gloom and watched, distractedly as ‘A’ turret swung slowly from port to starboard and back again. The cruiser had taken
heavy seas over her bow in the South Atlantic during her passage to the Persian Gulf and the turret had suffered minor breakdowns and mechanical ‘misalignments’ ever since. Ideally, Tiger would have gone into dockyard hands for a few days to have the problems properly investigated. The turret crew was currently testing the latest ‘fix’.
Davey and his Flag Captain, ‘Harpy’ Lloyd had remained onboard HMS Centaur after the other commanders had been ferried back to their ships, joining the carrier’s captain on deck to greet Rear Admiral William Bringle as he jumped down from the US Navy Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King.
Salutes were exchanged, hands shaken.
The Commanding Officer of Carrier Division Seven turned to the officer at his shoulder, who was carrying an attaché case in his left hand.
‘This is Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann,’ Bringle had said brusquely. ‘He was a member of the reception party that time you came onboard Kitty Hawk, Admiral Davey.’
Nick Davey recognised the younger man. Flying in the face of protocol he stuck out his fleshy right hand in welcome.
‘Yes, I recall Mr Brenckmann.’
“Mr Brenckmann is acting as my flag lieutenant at this time.”
Davey let this go unremarked.
The welcoming committee and the two American officers went below and settled in chairs in the carrier’s captain’s day cabin.
‘To what do we owe the pleasure of your unexpected visit, Admiral Bringle?’ Davey had enquired solicitously. It was the US Navy had requested the ‘urgent conference’, not him.
Bringle had hesitated.
‘I have received new orders to protect US industrial, mineral and shipping interests in the Persian Gulf and authorisation to use lethal force if required. While I am expressly instructed to act independently of all other friendly or neutral forces in the region in my mission, I wish to avoid any inadvertent or accidental clashes between the ships and aircraft of our respective commands.’