by James Philip
“Let me be clear,” he sighed. “Axiomatically, if at any time the US Navy interdicts again our operations in the theatre the likely outcome is our total defeat and the surrender of the strategic initiative to the Soviets, regardless of how badly we have mauled the Red Army and Air Force in the meantime.”
The Deputy Prime Minister, James Callaghan had recently arrived and now sat slumped ashen faced in a chair next to Margaret Thatcher. A Westland Wessex helicopter stood ready to whisk him back to Chilmark, where Peter Thorneycroft, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the last surviving Tory grandee from Harold MacMillan’s pre-October War Cabinet, waited to assume the premiership in the event of a new nuclear cataclysm which destroyed Oxford. The ancient Don’s common room had become the ad hoc governmental ‘situation room’ as the crisis became ever more dangerous.
Admiral Sir Varyl Begg the First Sea Lord stepped forward into the small area cleared in front of the big map of the Persian Gulf hurriedly pinned to the wall over the stone hearth. Although it was the middle of the night it was still warm, growing increasingly humid in the crowded room.
“I have an update on the situation in Malta,” he announced, coolly businesslike. “There are currently nine major US warships moored in the Grand Harbour and one other in Marsamxett Anchorage. Among the large warships are the aircraft carrier Independence, the battleship Iowa and the nuclear powered guided missile frigate Bainbridge. Submarines of the 2nd Submarine Squadron and destroyers and frigates of the 23rd Escort group have taken up positions adjacent to the Iowa, Independence, Bainbridge and three other American vessels in the Grand Harbour from which they can train their torpedo tubes on those...targets. HMS Alliance, recently returned from her triumphs in the Western Mediterranean is presently covering the USS Leahy in Marsamxett. Thus far there have been no untoward scenes. C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet has gone onboard the Independence to consult with his counterpart, Admiral Clarey. At Gibraltar the situation is less clear cut. Several American ships have been ‘detained’, but one, the USS Berkeley which had previously raised steam in preparation for a dawn departure ignored instructions to hove to and is currently standing off Algeciras Bay. No shots were fired. The Berkeley, you may recollect, is the vessel whose captain imperilled his command to stand by HMS Talavera after the Battle of Malta and was again, coincidentally, on the scene to offer assistance to HMS Hampshire when she was attacked last month by the French. Units of the US Sixth Fleet currently at sea have been warned not to approach Royal Navy warships, and that all ports and air bases under British sovereign control are denied to them until further notice under pain of being fired upon.” He looked around, hesitated in case there were any questions.
Tom Harding-Grayson raised a hand.
“Walter Brenckmann is still trying to clarify the situation with the State Department,” he explained wearily. “The poor fellow is beside himself...”
Everybody in the room felt nothing but sympathy for the decent, honourable man who had the misfortune to occupy the post of United States Ambassador to the Court of Woodstock. Brenckmann and his charming wife Joanne, were, to the majority of those now gathered to discuss all out war with America, the absolute epitome, the perfect representation of the nation that they had all wished that they were still dealing with.
Tom Harding-Grayson looked to the Chief of the Defence Staff and then back to Margaret Thatcher.
“Sir Richard is right,” he remarked sadly. “We must fight the United States in the Persian Gulf. And we must do it now before the Americans transfer even more powerful forces to the region.”
“They’ve already got the biggest bloody aircraft carrier in the World in the Gulf!” William Whitelaw retorted angrily. “How on earth do we fight a ship like that?”
The First Sea Lord stepped into the fray.
His calm was that of a dead-eyed gunslinger in a movie.
“The Kitty Hawk is just a ship, Minister. Make enough holes in her below the waterline and she will sink. Just like any other ship.”
William Whitelaw’s deputy, Lord Carington had taken hold of his friend’s elbow.
“Willie,” he murmured, knowing the other man was at the end of his tether. “Last year when the USS Enterprise was conducting war games in the path of the first of the Operation Manna convoys Sir Varyl’s predecessor and the Chiefs of Staff of the other services developed detailed contingency plans for just this kind of sad scenario.”
“Yes, sir,” the First Sea Lord confirmed urbanely, “I think the Chief of the Air Staff is best qualified to discuss the counter strike that our forces in the Theatre are presently developing ahead of the Government’s yea or nay for the final go ahead.”
Air Marshall Sir Christopher Hartley was a big man with a presence to match; the sort of bluff, man’s man who was always in motion. He was also one of those men able to effortlessly communicate his physical size and effervescent personality down a telephone line. His voice boomed out of the speaker, filling the room.
“There is only one way to tackle one of these American carrier battle groups,” he explained cheerfully. “Ideally, I’d like a couple of submarines tickling the sonars of some of the Kitty Hawk’s escorts, muddying the tactical picture, as it were, but we’re going to have to work with what we’ve got in the Gulf!”
The airman paused to let this minor caveat sink in.
“What we’ve got is six, perhaps as many as eight V-Bombers, serviceability permitting, seven Canberra medium strike bombers, approximately a score of fighters; a mixture of Hunters, Scimitars and Sea Vixens. And,” he quirked an almost self-effacingly, “three turboprop Gannets which somebody thought might be useful because they can each carry two of the US Navy’s 10-inch Mark 43 homing torpedoes. The Americans supplied us fifty Mark 43s to play with before the October War; they wanted us to buy them instead of spending the money developing our own version, but that’s by the by. The Gannets and the torpedoes are sitting in a hangar at Damman, so we might as well use them!”
Margaret Thatcher was glacially still.
Waiting, waiting, waiting...
“The Canberras are being collected together at Riyadh. Half of them will be loaded with up to nine five hundred pounders and a couple of thousand pounder general purpose bombs. The rest will carry thousand pounders and rocket pods under each wing. The fighters are mostly at Damman or at emergency bases in Kuwait. Some of the Sea Vixens and the Scimitars will carry anti-ship missiles, small jobs mostly for nuisance value. We may get a few extra five hundred pounders or small depth charges on the pylons of the Sea Vixens. The Hunters we’ll restrict to the dog-fighting role.”
The Chief of the Air Staff took a gulp of air.
Still Margaret Thatcher had not moved. In fact while Hartley had been speaking she had not so much as twitched a muscle.
“The V-Bombers,” he went on. “One Valiant and one Vulcan will be armed with a single Blue Danube nuclear weapon.”
Hiroshima sized atom bombs.
The airman waited again.
Nobody fainted or ordered his arrest so he continued.
“One Victor will carry a single Grand Slam. One Victor will carry two Tallboys. A second Vulcan will carry eight two thousand pound general purpose bombs. The two remaining Valiants – I am hoping that two will be available – will carry twenty-one thousand pound general purpose bombs.”
“Blue Danube, Sir Christopher?” Margaret Thatcher asked softly.
It was suddenly so silent in the crowded room that distant birdsong might have deafened the men around the Angry Widow.
“Yes, Prime Minister. Both weapons to be set to initiate at three thousand feet once the aircraft carrying it attain operational ceiling.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed but she said nothing.
“When the aircraft carrying the Blue Danubes are shot down the wreck of each aircraft will proscribe a ballistic arc towards the enemy fleet and explode at the appointed altitude...”
There were mutters of dissent, shock, horror.
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br /> “In the confusion,” the Chief of the Air Staff barrelled on - much in the fashion of a sprinting lock forward dismissively handing off potential tacklers in a rugby match at Twickenham - several of our fighters will approach the surviving units of Carrier Division Seven at sea level, hopefully drawing the enemy’s CAP down at the moment the other five V-Bombers and the Canberra force attack, each aircraft approaching the enemy fleet from a different altitude from a different point of the compass. While all this is going on the three Gannets will creep in at wave top height and drop their torpedoes at long range. The sound of multiple torpedoes in the water ought to make a fine old mess of the Kitty Hawk’s Battle Board!”
William Whitelaw was struggling to maintain his composure.
“All our experience is that attempting to bomb ships with conventional unguided bombs from high altitude is a waste of time, Sir Christopher?”
“Forgive me, sir,” the airman apologised, quietening sombrely. There was a moment of hissing static which filled the crowded room. “If I mistakenly gave you the impression that what I had in mind was a flat and level attack from on high, that was the farthest thing in my mind. The object of the exercise in exploding the two Blue Danubes somewhere in the vicinity of Carrier Division Seven, the subsequent attack at sea level, and the dropping of small homing torpedoes in the water is to create a tactical environment in which the enemy is so confused, that he is unable to bring his infinitely superior aerial and ship-based fire power to bear on our V-Bombers.”
There was another pause.
When the Chief of the Air Staff went on there was deadly purpose in his voice.
“Given the mobility of the target and the vagaries of bombing such a target from high altitude all V-Bomber crews will be instructed to dive bomb the USS Kitty Hawk.”
Chapter 69
06:40 Hours
Friday 3rd July, 1964
Army Group South Headquarters, Basra
The whole southern eastern horizon had seemed to be on fire as Lieutenant General Viktor Georgiyevich Kulikov’s commandeered Mil Mi-6 Red Air Force helicopter raced low across the marshes north of Basra. Back at the Headquarters of his 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army at Al Qurnah practically every piece of the communications equipment which had been ‘live’ or in any way functioning at the time of the two big air bursts west of Baghdad was dead, and enemy artillery had subsequently cut all the land lines to Basra. Now he was cursing the idiotic last minute ‘fucking about’ with the command structure of Army Group South which had left him impotently sitting on his hands when everything south of Al Qurnah had so obviously, gone wrong.
Khorramshahr was burning, splashes of fire tore up the desert and the ruins either side of the Iraqi-Iranian border opposite Basra, and rippled across Abadan Island thirty miles away. Meanwhile, beyond Basra the sky was dark with huge pillars of smoke; something bad had happened down around Umm Qasr.
Kulikov had known Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian for over twenty years. He had never liked the Army Group Commander; but liking and respecting were two entirely different things. Babadzhanian had managed the Red Army’s invasion of Iran and Iraq with cool professional mastery. Despite having been given less than half the tanks and men he needed to do the job until a day ago Operation Nakazyvat had been – in the round, the normal military setbacks and foul ups notwithstanding – a truly brilliant feat of arms. Or rather, it had almost been a brilliant feat of arms; Kulikov had always counselled against a headlong assault on Abadan Island.
There was no military necessity to attempt to ‘take Abadan’ on the run; that was just a line Babadzhanian’s Staff had inserted in the original plan to appease the old women in the Politburo. If the morons back in Russian wanted the Red Army to ‘storm’ the most heavily defended ‘island’ – that is, a place surrounded by ‘serious water barriers’ – they ought to have given the Red Army the tools to do fucking the job! For example, a couple of brigades of properly equipped combat engineers to bridge the Karun River, for example and several regiments of airborne troops to seize a bridgehead! But no, everything had had to be done on a shoestring, and this year not long before the Red Army might actually have been restored to something more than a shadow of its former glory. Worse, the frittering away of the Army Group’s airborne component – first in the diversion at Malta, later in the Tehran operation and the speculative ‘leap forward’ to seize Urmia – was about to come back to haunt Army Group South. Without those irreplaceable assault troops there was no way to seize a bridgehead on Abadan Island without first forcing a contested river crossing. Operations of that kind were always ruinously costly; which was precisely why wise commanders normally husbanded their airborne troops with such exaggerated care. When you needed those boys you really, really needed them and not having them now was going to hurt like Hell!
Kulikov was a practical man.
One fought battles with the men one had and he could live with all that; fighting men got used to being asked to do stupid things. But twenty-four hours ago Babadzhanian had gone over his head and ordered that every available serviceable tank and his best, most carefully held back mechanised assault regiments should be thrown against well-prepared, dug in enemy defence lines around Khorramshahr.
It was madness!
Nobody seemed capable of getting it into their heads that once this force – approximated two tank corps beefed up with the entire Army’s mobile artillery component and every available combat ready infantry unit that could be brought forward in time – had been expended then the battle for Iraq was over.
Worse than that, once his army had been chewed up the last trained, professional cadres of the pre-Cuban Missiles War Red Army would be so depleted that it would take years to train replacements. When his boys were gone who would there be left to rebuild the new Red Army?
The helicopter flared out, hit the ground and rolled for several seconds before coming to a juddering halt in the murky, smoky half-light in an impenetrable cloud of sandy dust. Instantly Kulikov stepped down to earth he was aware of the corrupt taint of smoke and fire in the air.
One of the Army Group Commander’s flunkies had tried to stop him flying down to Basra. Kulikov had demanded to speak to Babadzhanian’s deputy, but forty-seven year old Lieutenant General Semyon Konstantinovich Kurkotkin had apparently boarded a plane for Baghdad the previous day and not been heard from since.
Kulikov had asked: ‘If Comrade Marshal Babadzhanian cannot speak to me who the fuck can?’
Perversely, it made a kind of sense to send Kurtotkin, a ‘party general’ to Baghdad to keep the newly appointed Commissar General of Iraq from meddling in military matters while the fighting continued. Everybody was going to have to work out what sort of a new broom Vasily Chuikov’s successor, Gorshkov, was going to be and in the meantime there was a war to won.
However, sending Kurtotkin away just before the denouement of the Iraq offensive was insane. Babadzhanian must have been out of his mind fucking up the chain of command hours after he cut Kulikov out of the loop and ordered the attack on Abadan to go ahead forty-eight hours early.
Kulikov was still roiling with indignation that the Army Group Commander had ‘parachuted in’ his man, Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov, the hard-charging commander of the 10th Guards Tank Division to command the ‘shock’ corps now embroiled in an artless, old-fashioned frontal onslaught on the Khorramshahr Sector of the British and Iranian defences above Abadan island. It was fucking ridiculous! The right thing to have done would have been to preserve Army Group South’s fighting power, to saturate the south of the country with anti-aircraft missiles and to wear down the Abadan garrison by blockade, bombing and the employment of the whole of his 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army’s artillery. Some fifty percent of the latter was still strung out along virtually impassable roads ruined by the passage of hundreds of tanks fifty to a hundred kilometres north of Al Qurnah. Kulikov had pleaded with Babadzhanian to give him another week to bring up ‘the guns�
��; then and only then, could the operation to ‘strangle’ the Abadan ‘pocket’ commence. What was going on now was...madness.
The way things were going if the Iranian Army got its act together it could suddenly become a big problem! His field intelligence staff admitted that it had no real ‘feel’ for the threat posed to 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army’s left flank as it advanced down the eastern bank of the Arvand River by ‘surviving Iranian armour north and north-east of the Khorramshahr-Abadan defence area’. That idiot Puchkov and that fucking jumped up paratrooper Kurochnik – in Kulikov’s experience he had never met a senior paratrooper who had not landed on his head once too often – had launched their attack on Khorramshahr like some kind of suicidal galloping cavalry charge with no real idea what was in front of them. And when this had started to go horribly wrong they had just done exactly the same thing again!
The distant thump of guns faded as he strode angrily into the old colonial mansion which Babadzhanian had taken as his headquarters.
“I demand to speak to the Army Group Commander!” He barked, his feet ringing on the marbled floor as he burst into the cloistered coolness of the former Governor’s Palace on the banks of the Arvand River.
An exhausted, greyly ill man in the uniform of a Lieutenant-Colonel of the Staff stepped forward, his expression was hangdog. The man seemed...broken.
Kulikov stopped dead in his tracks.
He swallowed hard, feeling sick.
“What is going on?” He demanded tersely.
“Comrade Marshall Hamazasp Khachaturi died a few minutes ago, Comrade General. We have attempted to inform the Army Commander’s deputy, but General Kurkotkin is believed to be in Baghdad...”
“Who the fuck is in control here?” Kulikov asked, already knowing the answer.
Nobody...
Army Group South, exhausted by three months of continuous campaigning over some of the worst ground on the planet was locked in a major battle that it did not need to fight; and nobody was in control of...anything.