by James Philip
In 1955 the Red Navy had been no more than a coastal defence force equipped with obsolete equipment; but in the years before the Cuban Missiles War Gorshkov had laid the foundations for a massive twenty-year expansion. Under his plans the Red Fleet would eventually possess over three hundred submarines, a third of them nuclear powered by the early 1970s, modern destroyers, cruisers, and a national, and hopefully, an international infrastructure of bases and ports to give the Red Navy a truly ‘global reach’ to match that of the US Navy which dwarfed the shrinking maritime power of the old British Empire.
October 1962 had changed all that.
The Northern Fleet had ceased to exist in the war; as had the Baltic Fleet. The Black Sea Fleet had been luckier, but not much and its surviving strength had subsequently been largely expended in the battles with the British and the Americans in the Mediterranean. Only in the Pacific had a small part of the new fleet that Gorshkov dreamed of building survived intact. Five Project 659 nuclear powered submarines had been under construction in hardened pens, or at sea, running trials or on patrol on the day of the war. Other ships had been completing on the slips of the Leninskiy Komsomol Shipyard, at Komsomolsk-na-Amur in the Far East of the USSR. Amur had been targeted by at least one ICBM and several bomber strikes; two B-52s had been shot down within twenty miles of the yards where the K-151 had been under construction. Fortunately, the nearest big bomb had gone off over twenty kilometres north of the yards, and the city around it had been only lightly damaged. While out in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan the US Seven Fleet had ruthlessly hunted down submarines and ships of the Pacific Fleet, Amur had been ignored, presumably already marked down as ‘destroyed’ on US Navy target lists.
Since the Cuban Missiles War two new, improved Project 659 boats had been laid down although the construction of both vessels had progressed slowly due to lack of prioritisation. K-1 and K-2 were respectively twenty-four and thirty-one percent complete at this time, reactor fabrication was on schedule and both boats might be in the water as early as this time next year. Elsewhere at Amur anti-submarine patrol boats, small guided missile frigates and destroyers were approaching completion.
The rebirth of the Red Navy had begun...
The big airliner was turning off the main runway when the lights in the cabin flickered.
Once, twice and then went out.
The thunderous roar of the four great fifteen thousand horse power Kuznetsov NK-12MV power plants seemed to pause, then pick up again at a much lower output. The whole aircraft lurched, juddered as if the brakes had suddenly been applied and released before its momentum carried it forward again.
Gorshkov leaned forward in his seat and looked out of the window at the lights of the suburbs of Bagdad straggling sporadically across the north eastern horizon in the night.
The whole cabin suddenly lit up, so brightly that it was as if an anti-aircraft searchlight had been pointed down the length of the fuselage.
The light had originated somewhere to the west.
Had it been to the east the Soviet Minister of Defence would have been blind; his retinas burned out by the thermonuclear airburst.
Chapter 51
23:09 Hours
Thursday 2nd July 1964
The Angry Widow, at 33,000 feet approaching Safwan, Iraq
“GONER!” The navigator/radio operator reported tersely.
Squadron Leader Guy French knew that even at this altitude the distant flash of thermonuclear explosions would probably not be visible but he turned his head to glance sidelong anyway. There were some human responses no man could avoid.
The 617 Squadron boys had their job to do; he had his.
Their job was half done; his was just beginning.
“Come up by ten knots, skipper,” he heard in his helmet from the navigator/bomb aimer. “Two-zero miles to run. Repeat two-zero miles to run on my mark. MARK!”
The bomb bay doors were opening.
Guy French felt the increased drag tugging back on the controls through the multiple powered servos and gears that physically separated his hands from the huge bomber’s control surfaces.
“Negligible air defence activity,” reported the EWO – the Electronic Warfare Officer – dispassionately.
The Red Army had advanced at such breakneck speed that in the end it had fallen in an exhausted, disjointed jumbled heap in and around the port of Umm Qasr and spread itself randomly across the Faw Peninsula; more in the fashion of an exhausted horde, a rabble than a conquering army. The spearhead tanks had out run their supply lines, their communications, and the range of the Red Air Force. In recent days the RAF had surrendered the skies south of Basra, fallen back as if it was ceding the field to an obviously superior enemy, despite knowing that the invaders had no meaningful air defence command and control capability anywhere south of, or indeed, over that city.
Lately, Guy French he wished he still had a picture of Greta, his dead fiancée. Greta and he would have been married a year by now but for the October War.
She had died that night of the war and all his personal possessions had gone missing in the confusion of the days and weeks afterwards. The Squadron had thought he was dead for nearly a week and by the time he had been reunited with his old billet it was as if he had never existed in the first place.
Sometimes he struggled to conjure Greta’s face in his mind’s eye; it was as if his memories were inexorably eroding the farther he travelled from the man that he had been before the cataclysm. He had come so far already that what he had mistakenly believed was a lust for revenge, was really simply a quest for justice. If the dead were forgotten, or if the living left them too far behind then what had the whole dreadful business been about in the first place?
The Angry Widow was travelling at nearly a mile a second, a giant barb-shaped rifle bullet racing towards the pre-selected AP – aiming point - where she would automatically release her bomb load in a five-second minutely choreographed ‘dispersal pattern’ designed to do the most damage, kill the most people and to make it as hard as possible to clear up the mess afterwards.
The rain of ruin began to fall from the Victor’s bomb bay.
Hundreds of incendiaries, phosphorus and magnesium sprinkled with Napalm bomblets, cluster bombs with hundreds of deadly, killing and maiming sub-bombs ejected just above the ground or scattered across the target area creating a booby-trapped, lethal environment covered in small deadly anti-personnel mines to inhibit the rescuers and salvagers.
A dozen high capacity thin-skinned blast bombs levelling everything within a hundred feet of their impact points; and a clutch of general purpose bombs burrowing deep into the ground before exploding within a microsecond of landing, or delay-fused to explode only when the medics were attempting to treat the injured and recover the bodies of the dead.
The bombs went on falling...
Guy French’s father had regaled him with tales of how a Lancaster would bound upwards when her bombs dropped; the Victor hardly trembled under his hands as her deadly cargo began its descent, evenly, smoothly unloading, the contents of her cavernous bomb bay spilling earthward in a precisely choreographed automated sequence which balanced the creation of the optimum possible bedlam on the ground, with a release sequence that neatly and evenly distributed the peak stresses imposed on the V-Bomber’s airframe.
“NO HANG-UPS!”
Guy’s father had once told him about the day he brought a two thousand pound bomb with a live delayed action fuse back from Essen. Nobody had known how much longer there was to run on the timer. He had landed away from base and the bomb disposal boys had carted the bomb off to a nearby quarry where it had exploded five minutes after they drove away from it.
That was when he saw – or perhaps, imagined that he saw – the momentary very distant lighting flash of the first of the 617 Squadron Yellow Suns shining above Dulaim Province over four hundred miles away to the north-north-east.
The Angry Widow’s radio operator called out: “GO
NER.”
Both of 617 Squadron’s Vulcans had dropped their eggs.
Chapter 52
23:14 Hours
Thursday 2nd July 1964
Governor’s Palace, Basra, Soviet-occupied Iraq
Marshall of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had collapsed in a heap in the officers’ latrine. By the time several worried, panicking members of his staff found him he was unconscious in a spreading pool of bloody faeces and vomit.
In practically any other army Babadzhanian’s deputy would have immediately been informed of his superior’s incapacitation and assumed temporary command of Army Group South. In practically any other army the nearest available medical practitioner would have been called without delay to attend to the stricken man. But then in practically any other army everybody would have known who exactly - in the Army Group Commander’s absence or incapacity - was now in charge. However, in the Red Army nothing was ever simple, and the general rule of thumb was that ‘if in doubt, pass a decision up the line’. Or, in cases where this was particularly problematic, ‘try to find somebody else to make the decision that you ought to have taken’.
The situation was further complicated by the fact that earlier in the day Babadzhanian had sent his nominated deputy – largely sidelined ever since the two men had disagreed about the balance of forces committed to the respective western and eastern thrusts of the drive south from Baghdad - forty-seven year old Lieutenant General Semyon Konstantinovich Kurkotkin had been sent north to Baghdad to ‘keep that bastard Andropov out of our hair until we’ve sorted out Abadan!’ Relations between the two men had deteriorated further when Kurkotkin had had the temerity to remind his superior officer that the chain of command ought to be preserved intact until Abadan was ‘sorted out’. The two men had parted on extremely bad terms.
Although Babadzhanian sometimes allowed key field officers to get close, and occasionally to be taken into his confidence, he was an old-style officer; a subordinate obeyed his orders or there was trouble. It did not help that Kurkotkin, a Muscovite, was known to be a favourite of several senior members of the surviving ‘Moscow clique’ within the Red Army high command, a younger, post-Great Patriotic War group which until a few days ago had been kept firmly under the gnarled thumb of Babadzhanian’s recently murdered mentor, Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov.
Strictly, in Kurkotkin’s absence the next man in line to stand in for Babadzhanian was forty-two year old Lieutenant General Viktor Georgiyevich Kulikov, a nakedly ambitious man who made no secret of how much he resented having had ‘a jumped up fucking paratrooper like Kurochnik’ given command of 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army’s armoured push to the south. Kulikov had personally communicated his unhappiness to the Defence Ministry the day before the bombing of the Kursk Bunker. In retaliation Babadzhanian had broadcast his mistrust of Kulikov by promoting his own man, Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov, the hard-charging commander of the 10th Guards Tank Division to command the corps which was, at this very minute, moving up to the start line to begin the assault on Khorramshahr.
Out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to their master, Babadzhanian’s staff officers never really seriously considered informing the commander of 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army of the Army Group Commander’s collapse. After all, Marshal Babadzhanian would probably be back on his feet in the morning, or in a few hours, or days at the worst; and nobody needed the disturbance of a new man marching in and interfering with the smooth functioning of the Army Group Headquarters. Everybody was confident that that was what Marshal Babadzhanian would think too; and anybody who did not think that way was not about to risk the wrath of the great man by inviting Kulikov into his headquarters without direct orders from...somebody in authority.
The other dilemma was that Babadzhanian’s staff knew that they could not just call in any doctor; because that was a sure fire recipe for spreading any number of alarmist rumours. Compounding this problem was the fact that the headquarters surgeon was currently visiting a field hospital in the south of the city, and doctors in general were incredibly scare commodities in this part of the World. Thus, initially the only medical help on call was a pair of frightened medical orderlies, two youngsters no better trained than stretcher bearers, possessing only the most rudimentary knowledge of first aid. Thus, while trusted runners were despatched in search of ‘reliable’ doctors, it happened that the senior ranking officer in the Red Army lay on a soiled cot in a back room of his headquarters babbling feverishly, shitting and pissing himself in between convulsions oblivious to everything going on around him.
And then, at approximately 23:15 hours with 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army only minutes away from launching the biggest set piece armoured assault since the Great Patriotic War ended in 1945; the headquarters of Army Group South lost radio communication with Baghdad, Umm Qasr and the forces about to pour south across the Iraq-Iran border on the eastern bank of the Arvand River above Khorramshahr.
At the critical moment as the great offensive swung into effect 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army lost the ability to co-ordinate its attack with the Red Air Force and its own artillery; and most of its key field commanders were suddenly robbed of the wherewithal to actually command the units rolling south. What had been up until then a closely marshalled, choreographed juggernaut rumbling irresistibly across the border had become, in a split second, like Goliath blinded by a slingshot, blundering sightlessly towards its fate.
Chapter 53
23:15 Hours
Thursday 2nd July 1964
Basra Industrial City, 3 kilometres north of the Iranian border
The Western oil and shipping conglomerates which had achieved footholds in southern Iraq before the Second World War, the forces of occupation during and after that war and at various times since, the French, British and US combines that had sought to establish and maintain a presence in Basra Province, had colonised the eastern bank of the Arvand River opposite the city. From small beginnings these interests and concessions had spread along the left bank of the great river, and begun to extend inland until they had created the ugly, disorganised industrial sprawl which now squarely across the path of the advancing Red Army north of the Iraq-Iran border.
The Iraqi Army had abandoned the eastern bank after its abortive sortie into Iranian territory north of Khorramshahr in April; subsequently, sporadic shelling had driven out the last civilians and in the weeks since there had been widespread looting and the random burning of workshops and trading stores.
On the right hand wing of the armoured leviathan coiled to hurl itself at the Iranian forward positions across the border the skeletal ruins would inevitably hinder progress. The street plan of the old ‘industrial’ area would also tend to channel armour, mobile artillery and motorised infantry columns down predictable ‘tramlines’. However, on the left the armoured spearheads and their supporting guns and shock troops could surge down towards Khorramshahr over relatively open, good ground.
2nd Siberian Mechanised Army held all the cards but only a fool would risk gifting a weaker foe the opportunity to attack an exposed flank. In mandating that the advance go ahead on the widest possible front Major General Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik’s new Corps Commander, Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov had demonstrated, for all his predatory gung ho tanker’s appetite for haste, that he was not about to completely throw caution to the winds.
The two men stood in the semi-darkness beneath an awning stretched between two BTR-60 eight-wheel armoured personnel carriers. Fifty metres away the Arvand River poured down towards the distant Persian Gulf. Other vehicles, including BTR-40 armoured transporters and several thin-skinned trucks were parked in the surrounding ruins. Such was the advanced mobile headquarters of the 19th Guards Tank Corps.
The former paratrooper had explained that Lieutenant General Kulikov, the man in charge of the army on the eastern bank of the Arvand River, had issued direct orders demanding that the two wings of the ‘assault force’ should advance
in an ‘unbroken line’.
Puchkov grinned wolfishly.
“Fucking old woman!” He grunted. Having just been appointed to command the greatest deployment in battle of Soviet armour since the Great Patriotic War he had no intention of ‘pussy footing around!’ He was a veteran of Kursk, the most epic clash of armour in history, and Marshal Babadzhanian had not sent him across the river to ‘play chess’ with the enemy. The men of Army Group South were tired, hungry, there was sickness – dysentery, typhus and cholera in the ranks – and its equipment was worn out. The once invincible invasion force was a pale shadow of the all-conquering armies which had massed in the Caucasus in the months before Operation Nakazyvat; the three hundred and seventy tanks moving up to the start line were all that they had left – every single tank that was still capable of motoring for another twenty-four, or at a pinch thirty-six hours – and if he, Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov did not get the job done quickly ‘the job’ was probably was not going to get done at all!