by James Philip
What Margaret Thatcher said next dumbfounded all her political colleagues. If she had produced a freshly caught flat fish – perhaps, a Dover Sole - from her handbag and gone around the room slapping each man in face with it, she could not possibly have prompted looks any more astonished.
“Intern those vessels,” the lady decided. “Immediately.”
“Margaret,” Airey Neave said, starting to object before he thought better of it. He glanced to Sir Richard Hull. “Er, can we actually do that, CDS?”
The soldier nodded.
“There might be bloodshed. But yes, we can have,” he smiled “a shot at it.” He looked around the room. “It happens that after his previous experience relying on the US Navy the C-in-C Malta and Admiral Grenville, C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet had their staffs develop a set of contingency plans for exactly this kind of situation. Although, I’d hasten to add none of us saw this particular thing coming.”
Margaret Thatcher’s expression was icily severe.
But in her topaz blue eyes there was a glint of grim...mischief.
“You’re telling me that you already have plans in hand to intern the US Navy vessels docked at Malta and Gibraltar, Sir Richard?”
“Yes, Prime Minister. I took the liberty of activating them as soon as I received the first cables from Admiral Davey and General Carver’s request for Arc Light strikes against the USS Kitty Hawk Battle Group in the Gulf.”
“We will await the arrival the Chief of the Air Staff before considering that latter request,” Margaret Thatcher decided tersely. “How soon can we arrest the ships of the Sixth Fleet?”
The Chief of the Defence Staff tried not to smile; it seemed as if he had read the mood and the resolve of his Prime Minister perfectly. While all the wise men around her might have vacillated in this hour of crisis she had – instinctively, intuitively – acted. Exactly as he had anticipated she would react, decisively and with unshakable resolve.
Since the soldier had already issued the orders to Air Marshall Sir Daniel French in Malta to act against the US Fleet at five o’clock local time in Malta, Margaret Thatcher’s question was one that he could answer with great exactitude. Again, he checked his watch.
“In about two hours from now, Prime Minister.”
“Very well. Do it!”
Chapter 66
03:30 Hours
Friday 3rd July, 1964
Khorramshahr, Iran
“This is Frank Waters talking to you from the front line in Khorramshahr,” said the dusty former SAS man after he had finished coughing the dust and drifting cordite smoke out of his lungs. While he tried very hard not to hurry, or to speak with the urgency of a man who has a train to catch; every instinct in his body told him that if he and his BBC news crew did not get out of the ruins of Khorramshahr soon they would never get out.
After the Soviets had driven into the first trap the Red Army had done exactly what it always does in such situations. It tried to do the same thing again; with predictably even more bloody and fiery results which had left practically everything combustible in the wrecked town burning fiercely.
“This is truly heroic stuff!” Frank Waters exclaimed cheerfully. “I’ve just pulled the cotton wool,’ actually it was strips of a field dressing, “from my ears and they are still ringing like bells with the sound and fury of our guns!”
The trouble was that it was only a matter of time before the Red Army went to Plan ‘B’. Specifically, it would saturate the whole area with artillery fire, and then it would attack again with everything it had. If downtown Khorramshahr had been a bad place to be a couple of hours ago it was going to get massively more uncomfortable very soon now.
“This will be a very short report. The surviving anti-tank squads are starting to pack up. I don’t know what the Centurions around us will do. I honestly don’t know how they can possibly extricate themselves from the town. The whole place has been fearfully knocked about. I can’t imagine how the Soviets are going to get T-62s through the streets. Streets! Well, there aren’t any streets anymore!”
Frank Waters paused, partly to get his breath, partly to think about the brave men who had died and were about to die attempting to hold back the next tide of Soviet tanks. He ought to have worked out Michael Carver’s game plan a lot earlier than he had; but then that was why he was a freebooting lone wolf, and Carver was the British Army’s greatest living tactician.
Michael Carver meant to bleed the Red Army white and in so doing block and delay its approach to the northern bank of the Karun River. He would let the T-62s come onto his defences, on and on and when the leading regiments had been decimated several times over, challenge the beggars to get across the two or three hundred feet wide slow moving muddy God-given water barrier of the Karun River south of the town. Then when he had the 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army’s spearheads fully engaged across the river on Abadan Island he would unleash Hasan al-Mamaleki’s 3rd Imperial Iranian Armoured Division on the invaders’ left flank.
The Red Army had charged Michael Carver’s guns so fast that it had not had time neither to fully study and understand the battlefield, nor to appreciate the clinical pragmatism its adversary’s mind. Sometime later today the entire – by then badly bloodied - first wave of the Soviet assault force would be backed up between the Karun River and the urban sprawl of the Basra Industrial Area the other side of the northern border with Iraq. If everything went according to Carver’s plan the defenders of Abadan would be directly to the enemy’s front in pre-prepared lines beyond the Karun River, Iranian armour would be poised on its left and the ABNZ floating gun line would threaten its right hand flank.
“Stop recording!” The old soldier commanded.
“Frank, what are we doing?” Brian Harris asked.
“We’re getting out of here, old boy.” Frank Waters was already on his feet, oblivious to the rifle bullets pinging through the ruins and the periodic crash of the nearby Centurions’ L7 105-millimetre cannons. “If we don’t get to the bridge across the Karun River before the engineers blow it we’ll be done for!”
In retrospect coming across the river a second time had been an unbelievably stupid thing to do. That thus far none of them had sustained so much as a scratch was a miracle. However, this was not the time to make an admission of that kind in front of ‘the men’.
“Just follow me! Don’t stop for anything unless I go to ground!”
The very first tinge of grey was beginning to rise above the eastern horizon as the dishevelled and shell-shocked BBC men stumbled after their leader. They headed south, each man falling over rubble, cursing, picking themselves up and carrying on.
When Brian Harris fell he was instantly jerked to his feet by Frank Waters, who slapped him on the back.
“If we have to run, chaps,” the old soldier declared, “drop your kit and keep your heads down!”
Frank Waters had snatched the leaden weight of the film box from the cameraman and slung the sound man’s haversack over his shoulder. This latter was full of all manner of widgets and tools that the SAS man could not have named or identified for love or money. However, to a man accustomed to carrying a fifty pound pack on his back and an armful of automatic weaponry in his arms, he carried his lighter, somewhat unwieldy burdens relatively easily despite having lost condition during his recent confinement and starvation. Soon, he was halting every minute or so to chivvy along his other, less fit and hardy colleagues.
Brian Harris collapsed on a sprained ankle.
“Put your arm around my shoulder, old man,” Frank Waters commanded and they limped onward, surrounded now by the defenders of Khorramshahr walking and trotting, in remarkably good order south towards the river.
“Where the blazes do you think you fellows are going!” Shouted a man who jumped down from a Land Rover which had crunched to a halt nearby; the motley BBC crew had just emerged from the rubble into the pre-dawn twilight.
“Across the bally bridge!” Frank Waters shouted, gasping for
breath.
“Well, well, well,” the other man exclaimed, mightily amused, “I confess thought General Carver was pulling my leg when he said you idiots had come up here!”
That was when the first salvo of the renewed Soviet barrage fell north of Khorramshahr in and around the crater field which had once been the town’s railway station.
“Get in the bloody car!”
“We won’t all fit in,” objected one of Frank Waters’s charges.
“Just get in, chaps!” The former SAS man barked in his best parade ground bawl.
“Calder,” the BBC men’s saviour introduced himself to Frank Waters’s colleagues as the bombardment fell on Khorramshahr proper a few hundred yards away. “Julian Calder. “I’ve been running messages back and forth to our Iranian allies. Fine chaps, all of them. They’re positively itching to come to grips with the infidels. 3rd Imperial Armoured Division was raised in the area around Tehran, a lot of the chaps regard the coming battle as a chance to exact God’s justice on the invaders!”
“Damned good to bump into you again, Julian,” Frank Waters bellowed above the roar of the Land Rover’s labouring engine and the spinning of its wheels in the sand. He was half-sitting on Brian Harris’s lap, the rest of the crew were clinging on for dear life in the back of the Land Rover, painfully perched on their equipment boxes.
Calder, the younger man by a few years was one of the Regiment’s – 22nd Special Air Service Regiment’s – coming men. He and Frank Waters had had as little to do with each other as possible before the October War and since, notwithstanding that Calder had been his deputy in Iran at the time of the Soviet invasion in April. It spoke volumes for the mess he had got his ‘BBC team’ into that he was so inordinately glad to see the other man.
“The anti-tank boys were extricating themselves from the ruins,” he explained. “I took that as our cue to make a run for it. I hope all our chaps get back across the river...”
“The engineers have orders to blow the south bank pontoons when the first T-62 is half-way across!”
“That’s the spirit!”
In the darkness columns of men were trudging and shuffling down to the river.
“We’ve got all our Conquerors hull down a couple of hundred yards back from the south bank,” Julian Calder explained in the gloom as he braked the Land Rover to a slow crawl. His passengers assumed he had slowed to negotiate the slope down to the first pontoon. The structure bridging the slow moving river was robust enough to support the weight of a couple of Centurion Mk IIs, and at a pinch, a pair of T-62s but a lighter vehicle could easily run out of control when it encountered the undulating steel roadway.
The Land Rover stopped short of the bank.
“You fellows can walk the rest of the way. I’m going to get back to General al-Mamaleki’s HQ if I can!”
Chapter 67
04:45 Hours
Friday 3rd July, 1964
HMS Tiger, Arvand River north of Al Seeba
Rear Admiral Nicholas Davey had anticipated that his ships would be in a lot of trouble a lot sooner. However, as the hours had passed and the gun line of the ABNZ Persian Gulf Squadron – from the vanguard to the rear; HMAS Anzac, HMS Tiger, HMS Diamond, HMAS Tobruk and HMNZS Royalist – had strained at their anchors on the northern side of the main channel of the Arvand River less than a hundred yards from the shore of Abadan Island, their crews had been no more than distant, passive witnesses to the battle going on around distant Khorramshahr.
The four 6-inch guns of the Tiger, the eight 5.25-inch guns of the Royalist and the fourteen 4.5-inch guns of the three destroyers were elevated to deliver long-range plunging fire on the first of a dozen pre-ordained one mile square boxes north of Khorramshahr.
Like everybody else Nick Davey had confidently expected the Red Army to have invested and fortified the west bank of the Arvand River; that it appeared the Russians had neglected to so do frankly boggled his imagination. By rights the gun line ought to have had to fight its way up river, instead it had arrived in prime position to join the land battle without a shot having been fired in anger.
What were the Russians thinking?
Were they really that confident the war was over bar the shouting?
Not that Davey was in any way complacent to have been the grateful beneficiary of such an unexpected lapse on the enemy’s part. His ships would be sitting ducks if and when the Russians got their act together; horribly vulnerable to long-range artillery fire and attacks by fast jets. Given that either eventuality would be an extremely bad development he could not for the life of him work out why the Soviets had not yet done...something.
To have allowed the squadron to get so far up river unchallenged was criminal. Right now if any of his ships got hit they would ground on the Abadan shore and carry on fighting; if need be the destroyers, and probably Tiger rather and Royalist might advance up river. The destroyers were shallow enough in the water to get all the way up to Basra if the worst came to the worst.
First light was only minutes away.
For the last three hours the fire fight north of the Karun River had blazed; each time the Red Army was repulsed it gathered itself anew and flung fresh blood and iron at the defenders. On Abadan Island fuel tanks were burning and the smoke from the huge, uncontrollable infernos was slowly spreading across the entire battlefield. High above the ships in the gun line air search radars and gunnery ranging sets showed a sky bereft of aircraft.
Captain Hardress Llewellyn ‘Harpy’ Lloyd, Tiger’s commanding officer joined Davey on the open, completely exposed upper, flying bridge. Lookouts scanned the western river bank with powerful binoculars and two squads of Royal Marines had mounted 50-calibre heavy machine guns on the port bridge rail.
The continual distant thunder of exploding shells rumbled across the Minushahr Peninsula, the great bulge of land formed by the meander of the Arvand Rover below Khorramshahr.
“I’d have thought the Yanks would have made an appearance by now,” Harpy Lloyd observed, his tone one of mild disappointment. “Perhaps, they don’t have the stomach for a man to man fight?”
Nick Davey sniffed the fire-tainted air.
“Yes,” he sighed. “Well, hopefully as soon as we’re finished with the Russians we’ll go back down river and deal with those bastards!”
He deliberately said it loudly enough for everybody on the bridge to hear what he said. He wanted everybody on the flagship to know that their Admiral was not about to take a single backward step.
The Tannoy blared.
“EXECUTE WORKERS PLAYTIME!”
Nick Davey chortled.
The waiting was over.
“Repeat EXECUTE WORKERS PLAYTIME in sixty seconds from this...MARK!”
HMS Tiger’s CIC had maintained a live communications uplink with Michael Carver’s Royal Artillery Command Centre, the latter situated in a bunker near the abandoned airstrip. Tiger’s and Royalist’s guns remained independent but Anzac, Diamond and Tobruk’s main batteries were slaved to Anzac’s gun director table, an old-fashioned mechanical computer but none the less efficacious for it.
“Workers Playtime, indeed!” Tiger’s Captain guffawed in the stillness before the storm.
Both men were stuffing pads of cotton wool into their ears, and around the bridge others were compacting wads of material or donning clumsy ear defenders. Nick Davey was already half deaf in his right ear from his time in the Mediterranean in 1941 and 1942; none of the guns his squadron was shooting were real ‘deafeners’ like the ones he had been too close to in the forties, but they were going to be loud enough!
Loud enough to wake Lucifer himself!
“I was beginning to think the Army had forgotten all about us,” Davey remarked ruefully.
“I think everybody will know we’re here in a few seconds, sir!”
The salvo bell clanged loudly throughout the ship.
The whole ship – all eleven thousand tons of her – flinched.
As one the battle l
ine disappeared behind a wall of muzzle flashes and grey cordite smoke as twenty-six naval rifles unleashed a crushing high explosive rain upon the Queen’s enemies over ten miles to the north.
Chapter 68
03:25 Hours (GMT – 3 hours behind Gulf time)
Friday 3rd July, 1964
Common Room, Hertford College, Oxford
“There are two things which we must not lose sight of,” Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull prefaced, looking around the hastily convened council of war. Senior officers and Cabinet Ministers had been drawn into Hertford College throughout the small hours of the morning, and the ‘hot lines’ to the Chilmark Command bunker under the Chilterns carried constant updates from Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.
“One,” the soldier prefaced grimly, “the purpose of the land battle for Abadan and the south west of Iran is not to throw the Red Army out of Iraq, or even necessarily to hold onto Abadan Island in the longer term. It is to blunt the Red Army’s capacity for major aggressive operations in the foreseeable future, and to embroil it in a war of attrition with our forces and those of our Iranian allies.”
The Chief of the Defence Staff sucked his teeth.
“Second, while it remains on station in the upper reaches of the Persian Gulf the USS Kitty Hawk and its attendant battle group represents a deadly threat to all our forces in the Middle East, continuing to endanger all attempts to forestall Soviet ambitions in the region now, and in the days, weeks and months ahead.”
The old soldier had wondered if he actually needed to spell out the reality of the situation in the Persian Gulf. He had opted to be safe rather than sorry on this, if not on any of the other desperate matters demanding his immediate attention.