The Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 2 (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 8)

by James Philip

The battle ought to have been a foregone conclusion; that in its aftermath the biggest warship in the world had briefly been reduced to walking pace was testimony to naked courage of the vanquished.

  Nearly three hours had passed since the final shot was fired.

  Since then Kitty Hawk had worked back up to twenty-seven knots and resumed normal air operations.

  Walter glanced at the ship’s chronometer repeater above his head.

  02:49.

  Crewmen had brought round jugs of strong black coffee a few minutes ago.

  No threats were visible on the big Battle Board in the middle of the compartment, and everybody spoke in low, ultra-controlled tones. It was all very bloodless; or rather, conscienceless although Walter Brenckmann wondered if that was quite true. On reflection he decided that unconscionable probably better described what had happened in the last few hours.

  The enemy – the British, the Australians and the New Zealanders – had, once they realised they were under attack, fought back like lions. He had watched it all in slow motion as the symbols and nomenclature displayed on the Battle Board had told the whole disgraceful story.

  Initially, he had honestly believed that there had been some terrible mistake.

  Then he had realised that what was going on only looked piecemeal, knee-jerk, and unpremeditated because the crew of Hawkeye Zero-Three, sent to loiter over Southern Iran over an hour in advance of the battle had refused to be any part of the atrocity. What had been a choreographed, meticulously executed slaughter had suddenly had to be improvised very nearly out of thin air by the shell-shocked duty operations team in the carrier’s CIC.

  ‘NOW HEAR THIS! NOW HEAR THIS!’

  The speakers had boomed and Admiral Bringle’s dead pan baritone had filled the air.

  ‘IN ACCORDANCE WITH EXECUTIVE ORDER ZERO-ZEVEN-EIGHT SLASH SIX-FOUR CARRIER DIVISION SEVEN IS AUTHORISED TO CLEAR ALL HOSTILE SHIPPING FROM THE PERSIAN GULF AND CONDUCT OPERATIONS TO SECURE AND MAINTAIN AIR SUPERIORITY OVER THE COASTAL REGION BETWEEN THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ AND DAMMAN-DHARHRAN.’

  In the CIC men had been giving each other bewildered, quizzical looks by that juncture. The unreality had deepened the next moment.

  ‘SHIPS AND AIRCRAFT OF THE AUSTRALIAN, BRITISH AND NEW ZEALAND EXPEDITIONERY FORCE DEPLOYED IN THE GULF HAVING FAILED TO DISENGAGE AND DESIST IN OFFENSIVE OPERATION IN IRAQ AND IRAN ARE FORTHWITH TO BE REGARDED AS HOSTILE. CARRIER DIVISION SEVEN WILL DISCHARGE ITS DUTY. THAT IS ALL!’

  Walter had contemplated requesting permission to be relieved of his duties in the CIC; he would have in the event he had been asked to play any direct part in the night’s foul business. Instead, he and his ASW watch had been passive, horrified witnesses; his threat table having remained empty throughout the ‘action’.

  The Coontz class guided missile destroyers William V. Pratt (DLG-13) and Dewey (DLG-14) had shot down two aircraft shortly after they launched from HMS Centaur, approximately seventeen nautical miles north of the Kitty Hawk. The cruiser Albany (CG-10) had flushed two Bendix Talos long-range naval ‘beam riding’ surface-to-air missiles less than a minute later.

  Almost as an aside to the naval battle which unfolded south of Kharg Island, the two F4 Phantoms sent to intercept Hawkeye Zero-Three were engaged by air defence systems in the Abadan area, and forced to engage full reheat to escape out to sea.

  Working up to flank speed the converted World War II era heavy cruiser Boston (CAG-1) – whose conversion had left her forward triple 8-inch turrets in place – had manoeuvred astern of the flagship to bring her broadside to bear on the frigate HMNZS Otago, at a range of approximately fifteen miles.

  Otago had begun to fire on the approaching Coontz class destroyers – then still seven to eight miles away – with her twin 4.5 inch guns. HMS Centaur’s other escorts, the ASW frigates Palliser and Hardy, the former some three miles closer to Kharg Island than the carrier at the beginning of the action, and the latter two miles astern, had immediately increased speed and steered to put themselves between Centaur and the ships of Carrier Division Seven. These two smaller ships, each displacing a little over a thousand tons with a maximum speed of around twenty-five or six knots, only carried a handful of anti-aircraft cannons between them and nothing else for protection against air attack.

  HMNZS Otago was a more capable ship, albeit no match for any of the larger more modern US ships she was up against. She had a quadruple GWS Sea Cat surface-to-air missile launcher and – depending upon which intelligence report one accepted – either six or twelve torpedo tubes. Palliser and Hardy both had two twenty-one inch torpedo tubes.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Somebody asked in disbelief when it was patently obvious what the Centaur’s outgunned and outmatched escorts were doing.

  Walter Brenckmann had watched the tragedy play out on the Battle Board with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach and the bitterest of bile rising in his throat.

  This was HMS Talavera’s and HMS Yarmouth’s death run off Malta all over again, except this time the British and the New Zealanders’ enemy was exponentially more powerful and with every aircraft the Kitty Hawk launched off her catapults the odds became more impossible.

  There was dumb horror when Otago’s Sea Cats scored a ‘lucky hit’ on one of the four A-4 Skyhawks falling on her like vultures on a carcass. The surviving pilots coolly reported near misses and a hit amidships with a thousand pound general purpose bomb.

  Walter tried and failed to imagine the scene playing out fifteen miles away in the night. Across a watery battlefield lit with star shells, flares and the flash of guns Kitty Hawk’s Phantoms, Skyhawks and Intruders were homing in on their targets guided by the invisible electronic fingers of their radars. The air search and gunnery sensor returns from all the big ships of Carrier Division Seven were constantly being fed back into the Kitty Hawk’s CIC, updating the Battle Board in real time. It was a space age battle being found with blood and iron; in the bowels of the great carrier it was hard to remember that the labels and tracks on the Battle Board told and foretold the death of incredibly brave men.

  The Otago was dead in the water; still shooting back at the Dewey and the William V. Pratt as the range closed

  The Boston switched its fire from the Otago to Centaur.

  The carrier held her course.

  How courageous was that?

  She kept on launching aircraft until either a hit from one or more of Boston’s three hundred and thirty-five pound high explosive shells, or a bomb from one of the circling A-6 Intruders put a hole in her flight deck.

  HMS Centaur had turned away to the north.

  Two A-4 Skyhawks caught up with her; turning her into a floating torch within minutes.

  The Dewey and the William V. Pratt stood off Otago’s starboard bow and poured 5-inch rounds into her as the Boston relentlessly closed the range with the sinking aircraft carrier. The Palliser and the Hardy were left to the Air Group.

  To Walter Brenckmann the ‘whole show’ was an object lesson in exactly why the management of fluid modern battlefields ought not to be left in the hands of competent men with clockwork minds.

  Rear Admiral Bringle never once came down to the CIC during the battle; leaving its conduct to his Flag Captain, Horace Epes and Kitty Hawk’s Commander (Operations), a man who had spent most of the last twenty years ashore lecturing at Annapolis and in staff jobs in Washington DC. The man clearly thought he was refighting the Battle of Midway!

  Achieving local air superiority trumped all other considerations. After that knocking out the enemy’s carrier was the thing that really mattered. Thereafter, the Otago had to be ‘dealt with’ because it had the most capable radar and communications suite in the Centaur Battle Group. The ASW frigates were ‘no real threat’ so they could be ‘sorted out later’.

  In the course of the battle over half Kitty Hawk’s airborne ‘assets’ were committed north of the ‘engagement zone’ enforcing ‘air superiority’ over large tracts of empty air space above Southern Ir
aq and Iran and the Persian Gulf around Kharg Island. Those assets ought to have been killing ‘enemy’ ships. It was only when first HMS Palliser and shortly afterwards, HMS Hardy approached within eight miles of the Kitty Hawk’s guard ship, the gun-denuded missile cruiser Albany that the Operations Officer had...panicked.

  Suddenly, the bombs wasted on the already burning and dead in the water Centaur and in trying to end Otago’s absurdly unequal gunnery duel with the Dewey and the William V. Pratt, meant that bar two F-4 Phantoms flying top cover, everybody else’s bomb racks were empty. The situation was further exacerbated by the fact that four of Carrier Division Seven’s major surface units had not been required to, let alone ordered to either engage the enemy, or to put themselves in a position to so do.

  Early in the ‘action’ Walter had queried this; suggesting that the Charles F. Adams class destroyers Towers (DDG-9) and Lawrence (DDG-4), or the Forrest Sherman class John Paul Jones (DD-931) or Du Pont (DD-941) ought to supplement the fleet’s ASW screen in the absence of the Dewey and the William V. Pratt on Carrier Division Seven’s northern flank’.

  He had been tersely requested to mind his own business.

  In the event the commanding officers of the Towers and the John Paul Jones had taken matters into their own hands. Both ships had come careening around the stern of the carrier to engage the two small Royal Navy frigates steadily forging ever closer to the Kitty Hawk.

  War is chaos, chaos is war...

  That was not the way it was supposed to be!

  Carrie Division Seven had been on a peacetime goodwill cruise until a few days ago and as a result it had gone to war with a poorly drilled operations team, without a Plan ‘A’, or ‘B’ and by the time those two British frigates had got within torpedo range of the flagship if there had ever been a Plan ‘C’, nobody had shared it in advance with anybody else in Kitty Hawk’s CIC.

  If Kitty Hawk’s crew had been driven hard for the last two months things would have been different; but you simply could not build a ‘team’ in the middle of a battle. It mattered not that Carrier Division Seven had crushing might on its side; too many of its senior officers were fighting from memory, trying to read the moves from a text book.

  Walter had left his post and walked across to the Operations Officer.

  ‘Those ships carry the British Mark Eight torpedo, sir,’ he reported.

  The other man had been so intent on studying a nearby consul that he started with alarm.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They might already have launched torpedoes at us, sir.’

  ‘Yes, yes...’

  Walter had pointed at the Battle Board.

  ‘I recommend we deploy the Lawrence and the Du Pont to arrest the fleet oiler attached to the Centaur Battle Group, sir.’

  ‘Arrest?’

  ‘British Royal Fleet Auxiliary oilers do not mount any ordnance, sir.’

  The tanker had been escorted by a smaller vessel, probably one of the Ton class minesweepers the British had had stationed in the Gulf before the Soviet invasion of Iran and Iraq.

  It had got away into shallow water pursued by salvoes of 5-inch shells from the chasing destroyers.

  RFA Wave Master had been boarded by men from the Du Pont and was presently being escorted back to the rest of the fleet.

  Both HMS Palliser and HMS Hardy had been sunk; Palliser by naval gunfire from three destroyers, Hardy by a single thousand pound bomb which had capsized her in less than sixty seconds.

  The Kitty Hawk had belatedly begun to make a turn away from a ‘possible’ torpedo attack. That had baffled Walter; surely you always turned towards the approaching missiles. A ship’s bow was much less prone to catastrophic damage than its stern; it was basic seamanship.

  The torpedo had detonated somewhere inconveniently adjacent to where the carrier’s starboard outer propeller shaft exited the hull.

  The shaft had not been fractured, nor the propeller lost.

  What had happened was that the shaft had become deformed – probably only bent out of alignment by a degree or two – while it was turning at ninety percent of maximum revolutions.

  Before the shaft could be stopped it had opened up three-feet wide rent in the aft hull around the shaft, wrecked every bearing in the long tunnel within the ship carrying it back to the machinery spaces; and torn the guts out of the after turbine in Engine Room Four. Kitty Hawk had taken on nearly fifteen hundred tons of water and her flank speed had been reduced from over thirty-three knots to around twenty-seven, sufficient, given a healthy wind over the bow to conduct normal flight operations. Counter-flooding and pumping bunker oil from one side of the ship to the other had already stabilised her minor starboard list, and nobody had been killed or seriously injured by the hit.

  The worst thing was the knowledge that nobody thought it was over.

  Two aircraft, the A-4 taken out by Otago’s Sea Cats, and an A-6 Intruder – most likely shot down by one of Centaur’s Sea Vixens – had been lost. A single hit from a 4.5inch round fired by the New Zealand frigate had killed seven men on the Dewey and injured another five. Otherwise, the battle had been bloodless on the American side.

  Walter Brenckmann felt the carrier heel into a new turn.

  He watched the compass repeater steady onto a new bearing.

  North-north-west; farther into the Gulf.

  All the better to twist the knife deeper into one’s friend’s back.

  Chapter 65

  00:25 Hours (GMT – 3 hours behind Gulf time)

  Friday 3rd July, 1964

  The Prime Minister’s Room, Hertford College, Oxford

  “The bastards!” Margaret Thatcher spat. “The absolute bastards!”

  The men in the room were staring at their feet.

  “Quite,” Prime Minister, Sir Henry Tomlinson the Cabinet Secretary agreed stoically. Everybody was on their feet and this was never a good thing when the moment called for the most level of heads and the calmest possible judgement to be exercised.

  William Whitelaw, the Secretary of State for Defence looked daggers at Tom Harding-Grayson, who met his angry scrutiny with cool eyes.

  “Dammit,” Whitelaw complained, “we should never have gone down the road of playing fast and loose with the Americans. Undermining them with the Saudis! And all the trouble we’ve caused in Egypt...”

  His voice trailed away when he realised everybody was looking at him as if he was an idiot. Everybody, that is, apart from Airey Neave, the minister in charge of the Intelligence Services, who was viewing him with murder in his eyes. Neave had turned up unannounced only a few minutes ago after deciding, without consulting anybody, that he was not going to ‘skulk about in that blasted bunker at Chilmark while my friends are above ground in Oxford!’

  Everybody tacitly assumed that the notion of being forever parted from his protégé, Margaret Thatcher’s side by the vagaries of war, had been too much for the hero of Colditz.

  “The Yanks undermined their own position in Arabia without any help from us, Willie,” Airey Neave objected testily. “As for Nasser and the Egyptians, we could hardly leave biggest Army and the biggest Air Force in the whole bally Middle East free to stab us in the back at a moment of Colonel Nasser’s choosing!”

  “Well, a lot of good it’s done us!” Observed Peter – Lord, the 6th baron in his lineage – Carington, Whitelaw’s Minister of State and closest political advisor. However, his tone was conciliatory, as if to say ‘well, we did the best we could but all things considered it didn’t turn out quite as well as it might’.

  Margaret Thatcher had used this interlude to compose her thoughts. She waved at the chairs, each threadbare and somewhat careworn in different ways – much like her companions – spread around the room.

  “Everybody sit down please. If we are going to jump up and down every time we hear the next piece of appallingly bad news we shall get nowhere!”

  The Prime Minister looked to Sir Henry Tomlinson, the greying eminence grise who ran the Hom
e Civil Service, and therefore, commanded the sinews of the entire governmental infrastructure of the less than united, United Kingdom. The old man nodded to the Foreign Secretary who had just come back into the room.

  “I took it upon myself to talk to Ambassador Brenckmann,” Tom Harding-Grayson explained. For the first time that anybody could remember he looked and sounded utterly exhausted. “Walter is beside himself,” he groaned. “Nobody in Philadelphia is taking his calls. Everybody at the embassy is a state of near catatonic shock, actually.”

  “It’s not too late for us to put out some kind of statement of our peaceful intent,” William Whitelaw suggested. “Something to, er, hold the line until tempers have cooled...”

  The Chief of the Defence Staff, Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull shook his head as the other man spoke.

  “With respect, sir,” he groaned, “I have a nasty feeling that it is already too late.” He looked at his watch, a habit he was trying to curb.

  Not yet one o’clock in the morning Greenwich Mean Time – not that Greenwich existed any more, courtesy of the Yanks – which meant it would be dawn at Abadan in an hour or so.

  “Look,” he went on, “we always knew we were getting into murky waters deploying Arc Light...”

  “The Americans would probably have stabbed us in the back regardless of Arc Light,” Lord Carington remarked philosophically.

  “Possibly,” the soldier agreed. “In any event this, or something like it, was one of the scenarios that we ‘gamed’ at my headquarters. Our ‘gaming’ produced a series of graduated responses; only one of which is actually remotely feasible in the likely short timescales available for us. I say ‘one’, actually there are two possible responses. The other response would be to do nothing. However, it is not my feeling that the government will wish to seriously contemplate doing nothing.”

  Margaret Thatcher tried not to frown too hard.

  “Where else do we think American forces might turn on us?”

  “American naval and air forces significantly outnumber our forces in numerical strength and technical capabilities in the Mediterranean, Prime Minister.” The Chief of the Defence Staff held up a hand because he had not finished. “However, most of the big ships of the US Sixth Fleet are currently tied up in Malta and Gibraltar, Prime Minister. In those ports the US Navy still gives every appearance of docility...”