by James Philip
It was too awful to contemplate. It was the Suez crisis of 1956 all over again except exponentially worse; back in 1956 President Eisenhower had only threatened to sell the pound sterling and to withdraw existing credit lines. Now an American President was holding a gun at a British Prime Minister’s head.
It ought to have been a moment of...defeat.
Strangely, it was a moment of blinding clarity that suddenly brought things into pin-sharp focus.
The United States had been talking to the Soviets behind the back of its former ‘special’ ally.
Carrier Division Seven had been sent into the Persian Gulf to stab British and Commonwealth forces in the back.
There was a heavy knocking at the door and a Royal Marine rushed in brandishing a flimsy message sheet which he breathlessly presented to the Prime Minister.
SECRET AND IMMEDIATE STOP ATTENTION FIRST SEA LORD AND ALL COMMANDS STOP FLAG OFFICER COMMANDING ABNZ PERSIAN GULF SQUADRON TO ADMIRALTY STOP AIRCRAFT AND SHIPS OF CENTAUR BATTLE GROUP ATTACKED WITHOUT WARNING BY US FORCES IN THE GULF SOUTH OF KHARG ISLAND STOP EXPECT IMMINENT AIR ATTACK ON ABNZ GUN LINE STOP THE GUN LINE WILL STAND ITS GROUND STOP ENGLAND EXPECTS STOP DAVEY MESSAGE ENDS.
In that moment Margaret Thatcher was beyond fear, her anger was like ice in her veins, exploring every pore in her body. Her thoughts slowed, turned coldly, once, twice and then again around the altered reality of the World.
She offered the message sheet to the Chief of the Defence Staff.
“This is,” he fulminated disgustedly, “this is, disgraceful, I don’t...”
“Believe it, Sir Richard,” the Angry Widow said softly. She raised the telephone to her ear.
“Margaret, I...”
She ignored Jack Kennedy’s preamble to a plea to be heard out.
“President Kennedy,” the woman retorted frigidly. “I took you for many things. Some of those things were uncharitable, others it now seems, unjustly creditworthy. As we speak the United States Navy is murdering British and Commonwealth sailors, airmen and in all likelihood soldiers in the Persian Gulf. Once again you have attacked my people without warning, their blood and the blood of all those who will die in the next few days, weeks and perhaps, years will be on your hands for all time.”
Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull had passed Rear Admiral Davey’s message to his political master. Willie Whitelaw was staring at it in blank disbelief.
He looked to Margaret Thatcher with desperate eyes.
The lady was glacially calm.
“Mr President,” she enunciated clearly, her tone so implacable that it made the hairs on the back of the necks of all the men in the room stand up in sympathy. “Once again it seems as if the United States has stabbed Great Britain in the back...”
“Margaret, I...”
“As we speak American airmen and sailors are murdering British and Commonwealth personnel in the Persian Gulf.”
There was a hissing silence on the line for several seconds.
“Margaret, I’m receiving news as we speak...”
“Mr President, I will not let this stand!” Margaret Thatcher had spoken softly but to those who had heard her words it felt as if she had shouted them in their face. “Do you hear me?”
The Prime Minister was trembling with an incandescent rage that threatened to see the phone in her hand hurled across the room. Her teeth were gritted so hard she had to pause to consciously relax her facial muscles before she could continue. The words which came out of her mouth were those of a stranger, a woman whose acquaintance she had never previously made. Those around her could be in no doubt that in that moment she was channelling the terrible righteous anger of the whole nation.
“Do you hear me, Mr President?”
“Yes, I hear you, Prime Minister...”
“This will not stand,” the woman said, her voice trembling with deadly intent. “Be assured that I will use every gun, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon that I have at my disposal...”
She broke off to snatch a ragged, spitting breath.
“Every weapon that I have. I swear I will avenge this betrayal one day. Do your worst. I will fight you with my own eye teeth if I have to!”
The man at the other end of the transatlantic line was literally lost for words.
Around Margaret Thatcher the room was dreadfully quiet.
“My own eye teeth,” the Angry Widow ground out between clenched teeth. “May you rot in Hell!”
Jack Kennedy said something that she did not catch as she clunked the receiver back in its hooks with such force that the two cups of tea on the table next to her stepped an inch to one side slopping most of their contents into their saucers.
Margaret Thatcher looked around the circle of shocked faces.
Presently, she focused on General Sir Richard Hull.
“I will,” she said very slowly, “not let this stand,” she informed the Chief of the Defence Staff. “All options are on the table,” she added, “including Arc Light.”
Chapter 59
01:07 Hours
Friday 3rd July, 1964
HMS Tiger, Arvand River, south of the Minushahr Peninsula
The cruiser reverberated with the rushing clank of chains as her anchors ran out at her bow and stern while her screws held her steady against the current. The ship’s motion changed as her shafts stopped turning and the anchors bit into the bottomless silts of the main channel.
In the north the sky was torn with Katyushas and the flash of exploding ordnance flickered like a distant electrical storm through the clouds of dust and smoke.
HMS Tiger’s two main battery turrets had trained to starboard. Likewise the two twin three-inch mounts which could be brought to bear on that beam. For now the guns remained silent; awaiting their call. Astern of the flagship the destroyer Tobruk and the old Second World War anti-aircraft cruiser Royalist were riding on their anchors, broadside on to eastern bank of the river, their bows pointing approximately due west.
Rear Admiral Nicholas Davey had read the emergency signal twice, digested its contents swiftly, and returned to the cruiser’s bridge.
He had handed the decrypt to his Flag Captain.
Hardress Llewellyn ‘Harpy’ Lloyd looked up.
His tone was bleak.
‘Et tu, Brute?’
Davey was having trouble choking back the bile rising in his throat. He had held off signalling the other ships of the gun line and addressing the cruiser’s crew until he knew – until he absolutely knew – what was going on. Of course he had known the moment he received the first message, broadcast in plain text, from HMS Centaur. Since then the reports of the Fleet Air Arm pilots of the carrier’s handful of airborne Sea Vixens and Scimitars had confirmed and amplified the magnitude of the betrayal.
One by one those gallant voices in the sky flying above the atrocity had fallen silent as the Kitty Hawk’s F-4 Phantoms, and the advanced surface-to-air missiles of the carrier’s escorts methodically hacked Centaur’s aircraft out of the sky. Three Sea Vixens tasked to suppress a suspect Red Army ‘concentration area’, where several dozen armoured and other vehicles had been spotted by a high-flying Canberra photo-reconnaissance mission thirty-six hours ago; had turned back intent on targeting Carrier Division Seven. Amidst the jabbering of American airmen gloating about their ‘kills’ it was impossible to know if the Sea Vixens had got through.
Nick Davey thought it unlikely.
Centaur would have been a sitting duck; her aircraft helpless when the enemy turned on them without warning. The old carrier’s escorts; the Otago, a Rothesay class general purpose frigate, and the two Blackwood class anti-submarine frigates Hardy and Palliser had nothing with which to fight off a sneak overwhelming air attack. Otago had a quadruple GWS 21 Sea Cat launcher but she probably would not have had time to spool up her birds before the enemy was on top of her. The New Zealand frigate’s twin 4.5-inch main battery and single 40-millimetre gun was practically useless against fast jets, likewise the Ha
rdy’s and the Palliser’s three Bofors cannons. Hardy and Palliser both mounted 21-inch torpedo tubes; but again, they were no use against fast jets!
Thus far the enemy had left the fleet oiler Wave Master, trailing some miles behind the Centaur Battle Group escorted by the Ton class minesweeper Bronington unmolested. However, from the signal sheet Davey had just handed to his flag captain this was a situation the US Navy was about to address.
Wave Master and Bronington were too far away to communicate via normal ship-to-ship VHF scrambled radio and in any event the enemy attack had been accompanied by heavy multi-frequency jamming. The Royal Fleet Auxiliary Wave Master was a Second World War build which had been laid up in Singapore awaiting disposal for scrapping at the time the October War. Her communications suit was not so much basic, as antediluvian. Hence the plain text Morse code signal she had dashed off before the US Navy’s jamming silenced her for good.
CENTAUR AND OTAGO DESTROYED OR IN SINKING CONDITION STOP HARDY AND PALLISER CONDITION UNKNOWN STOP TWO HOSTILE SURFACE UNITS CLOSING MY POSITION AT HIGH SPEED STOP BRONINGTON DETACHED WITH ORDERS TO MOVE INSHORE STOP THE BASTARDS ATTACKED WITHOUT WARNING STOP GOD SAVE THE QUEEN MESSAGE ENDS.
Davey looked to Tiger’s captain.
“They’ll have picked this up at Abadan and re-broadcast it to C-in-C Land Forces. Resend it to Fleet Headquarters in England anyway please.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In the meantime with your permission I will address the crew, Captain.”
He was passed a handset.
“This is Admiral Davey,” his voice echoed around the ship. “A short time ago we received news of an unprovoked attack on the Centaur and her escorting vessels by aircraft and ships of the United States Navy. The Centaur and the Otago have been sunk and there is no word of the Hardy or the Palliser. It is likely that the gun line will also come under attack in due course. However, our mission remains unchanged. We have come up river to fight the enemy at our front. If and when we are attacked by the cowards at our backs, we will deal with that as best we may.” He paused, looked around at the grim determination on the faces of the men of the bridge watch. “All that we can do now is stand to our stations, to do our duty and to fight like Hell!”
This reverberated around the ship.
“That is all. God save the Queen!”
Nick Davey handed the microphone to the small man at his shoulder, not initially realising who it was.
Fleet Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann took the handset and surrendered it to the boyish bridge talker to stow in its cage on the nearby bulkhead.
“My apologies, Mister McCann. I didn’t know you’d returned to the bridge.”
“Things will get warm soon, sir,” the other man observed, stoically calm as if what happened next was of no real concern of his.
Davey chuckled lowly.
“This sort of thing must be getting a little ‘old hat’ for you, Mr McCann?”
The senior Chief Petty Officer in the Royal Navy pondered this respectfully.
“Aye, sir,” he confessed. “I’d say that as we’re anchored with about eight or nine feet of water under the keel this big cat isn’t going to sink that far,” he shrugged. “When we get clobbered, I mean. So that’s on the plus side. The other times the Yanks tried to sink me Talavera had several hundred feet of water under her keel, thousands most likely that time off Cape Finisterre. After the Battle of Malta she went down in about a hundred fathoms they say. I thought my time had come that night Captain Christopher took the Talavera inshore off Lampedusa. Then there was that time that Phantom got blown off the deck of the Enterprise in February and it looked as if it was going to land on Talavera’s bridge,” he quirked a rueful smile, “right up until a sea carried the ship to leeward and the plane just clipped us on the way down. So this is well,” he sighed, “more of the same I suppose. Except it’s different every time, just like when I had the honour to serve with you and Captain Christopher’s father in the Med all those years ago. If you’ll forgive my impertinence, sir.”
“God, those were days,” Nick Davey recollected fondly, before his mind turned over less fond memories. He had been on HMS Resolution – part of Force H along with the battlecruiser Hood and the battleship Valiant - that day in July 1940 when the battleship’s 15-inch guns had fired on the French Fleet anchored in Mers-el-Kebir. That had been an act of treachery but had the French Fleet fallen into Adolf’s Hitler’s hands the Germans would probably have won the war...
So what was treachery?
What was treachery and what was simply the evil of war?
How would historians view tonight’s betrayal in a hundred years time?
Chapter 60
01:26 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
Basra Industrial City, 3 kilometres north of the Iranian border
The virtual loss of all radio communications did not have any immediate effect on the launching of the attack. The Red Army method was to issue orders, demarcate objectives and timescales and to expect its commanders to ‘get on with it’. Directives had been issued, the operation was supposed to proceed on ‘tramlines’, with senior commanders intervening only if necessary. The problem was that now the firing gun had been fired the absence of normal communications made it very nearly impossible to actually know what was going on at the front. Yes, unit commanders were expected to do what had to be done to achieve their own objectives; but no, broader tactics and the management of combined forces was the job of divisional and corps leaders and none of them had functioning radio communications with their troops.
Major General Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik had no idea what was going on along the Iranian border north of Khorramshahr. He had sent motorcycle ‘runners’ forward to report but as yet none of them had returned; in the meantime a handful of spare radio sets had been discovered, and previously discarded sets were being hurriedly cannibalised for working parts. This might help him talk to other headquarters but the problem remained that he was not hearing anything from his assault units. He had a timetable which predicted where given units would be by a certain time; but no way of finding out if that timetable was already hopelessly behind or ahead of schedule.
Leaving a small radio relay party in the ruins of Basra Industrial City he was moving up onto the heels of the first assault wave. The communications ‘problem’ was not about to be solved quickly and he needed to know what was going on at Khorramshahr.
The initial short, sharp softening up barrage had petered out as individual artillery batteries exhausted their ammunition quotas. Once their stocks of ordnance fell to sixty percent the guns fell silent and prepared to advance south. Every assumption was that the T-62s of the 19th Guards Tank Corps would over run the defenders of the Khorramshahr Station line; swiftly brush aside the feeble Iranian armoured presence east of the town and take command the north bank of the Karun River well before dawn. At some stage a cursory surrender demand would be communicated to the British. If that offer was rejected artillery and combat engineering units would be brought up to bridge the river and to support the final assault on Abadan Island. The final offensive of the Iraq War would surely sweep all before it...
Such was the plan.
Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov, the cavalier veteran tanker whom the Army Group Commander Marshal Babadzhanian had inserted into the command chain of 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army, mainly to stop its existing commander Lieutenant General Viktor Georgiyevich Kulikov stealing his thunder, was so irrepressibly bullish that he had completely discounted the ‘minor communications problems’ the Army was experiencing.
“Look. All that’s between us and the British on Abadan Island are a few rag heads driving kit that can’t hurt us at any kind of range, and a slow-flowing river our engineers can bridge with their eyes closed! Maybe the British will give us a proper fight. Our boys deserve a little fun!”
“With the comms net down we could be walking into a trap,” Kurochnik objected respectfully.
/> Puchkov viewed him with something akin to sympathy.
If you had spent you whole career being thrown out of aircraft with a gun and couple of magazines of ammunition and told to make the best of a bad deal; any man would be a pessimist.
“You go forward,” he grunted. “I’ll sort out the fucking traffic jam up here!”
The ‘traffic jam’ was actually the Army Commander’s responsibility but he was still sulking about his treatment at the hands of the Army Group Commander. Kulikov it seemed, had felt that right from the outset of Operation Nakazyvat Marshal Babadzhanian had treated him like a ‘sergeant major’, not an equal in the great crusade to restore the pride of the Red Army and win for the Motherland a place in the sun. At this critical moment in the campaign Kulikov was therefore, still sitting in his headquarters over thirty kilometres away in Al-Hartha nursing his wounded pride.
With the radio net down for all the good he was doing in Al-Hartha the Army Commander might as well have been in the mountains of the Moon.
Chapter 61
01:44 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
Khorramshahr, Iran
The main barrage had fallen to the north and the east of the town. Having studied the map by torchlight to refresh his mental picture of the lay of the land hereabouts, Frank Waters assumed that the Red Army had been hitting positions in and around the Railway Station, and more than somewhat preoccupied with the extensive trench lines and the amateurishly camouflaged anti-tank revetments fanning out from the eastern side of the town all the way down to Karun River. He had wondered what was going on out there until belatedly he had realised nothing was going on; and that the real defensive works were farther east under so much camouflage netting that people were liable to inadvertently fall into them.
The intensity of the opening barrage had slackened noticeably after about a quarter-of-an-hour, continued in a decidedly desultory fashion for another ten minutes and ended in something of a whimper.