by James Philip
Chapter 70
06:45 Hours
Friday 3rd July, 1964
Field Command Truck, 3rd Imperial Iranian Armoured Division, Ahvaz-Khorramshahr Road
Major General Hasan al-Mamaleki smiled broadly in the half-light as the tall, dusty figure of Major Julian Calder emerged out of the dust and smoke. The Red Army had started shelling the desert north of the Karun River some miles east of Khorramshahr where, presumably, it suspected some kind of threat might be brewing. The bombardment was ineffectual, other than it had created a drifting haze which completely obscured al-Mamaleki’s southern positions from aerial observation. More important the shelling told him that the Red Army had no idea whatsoever where the bulk of his forces waited, hull down and heavily camouflaged, dispersed across some dozen square miles of undulating, gully-broken desert and scrub land to the north of his headquarters positioned eight miles east of Khorramshahr.
“I’d given you up for a bad deal, Julian,” the commander of the 3rd Imperial Iranian Armoured Division guffawed.
Calder was the younger of the two men by seven years, a man who had seen battalion and SAS service in Cyprus, Malaysia, Kenya and Iran before the October War. Officially, he was Lieutenant General Michael Carver’s personal liaison officer to al-Mamaleki. Calder was, in fact, rather more than just a humble ‘liaison’ staffer. He ran al-Mamaleki’s ‘field intelligence’ company and commanded No 7 Squadron of the Special Air Service Regiment. His men had infiltrated both Basra city and the industrial sprawl on the eastern bank of the Arvand River, fought a couple of sharp actions with Spetsnaz troops probing the Allied defences south of the Iraq-Iranian border, and had been in no small way responsible for the Red Army’s apparent ‘blindness’ ahead of its current offensive.
“I confess I had a couple of moderately sticky moments on the way back,” the Englishman confessed ruefully. “The C-in-C asked me to find out what had happened to a mutual acquaintance of ours. Frank Waters, he works for the BBC now but he’s still just as accident prone as always!”
“I thought the Russians had had him shot until I bumped into him a few days ago at the C-in-C’s headquarters,” the Iranian guffawed. The two men had not spoken face to face for several days, Calder having been ‘out and about’ in the field and al-Mamaleki having the native common sense not to interfere in ‘SAS business’. Throughout the Englishman’s absence he had sent back a string of situation reports keeping him fully abreast of the extraordinary preparations for battle of the 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army, and the veritable dog’s breakfast mess the Russians were making of co-ordinating the activities of their western and eastern armies.
“No such luck, I’m afraid,” Julian Calder smiled ruefully.
Neither main reacted as a rain of Katyusha rockets carpeted a half-mile long stretch of the Ahvaz-Khorramshahr road to the west.
“Anyway, I did the decent thing. I took him and his colleagues back to the river and told them to make themselves scarce.”
The ground shivered as new shells landed a mile or so to the north-west.
“The blighters have got no idea where we are,” Calder observed. He might have been discussing the state of play at a cricket match at Lord’s.
“What news?” The Iranian inquired politely. Al-Mamaleki’s only outward sign of nervous tension was the distracted way in which the forefinger of his right hand involuntarily stroked his magnificent bushy black moustache in moments of contemplation. His staff had gathered around him and the newcomer. “Do you think the Russians have really swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker?”
Julian Calder grimaced and shook his head.
“If we’d written them a prompt sheet they couldn’t have been more obliging. Somebody must have put a red hot poker to this chap Kurochnik’s nether regions. Babadzhanian or Kulikov, or whoever’s responsible for putting an airborne commander in command of so much armour must have had a brainstorm. We think the Russians must have lost sixty or seventy tanks in and around Khorramshahr in the first couple of attacks. We took several prisoners; I didn’t have much time to talk to them but it seems that the spearhead units were under the impression they were about to breeze straight down to the Karun River, clear the southern bank with tank and artillery fire and call down the bridging units they’ve got moored all along the river at Basra. Our chaps were still withdrawing from Khorramshahr about an hour ago. If and when the first T-62s make an appearance on the north bank of the Karun they’re going to find themselves in the sights of a score of Centurion 105 and Conqueror 120-millimetre rifles at pretty much point blank range!”
It was all Hasan al-Mamaleki could do to suppress a shiver of angst. He had spent most of his adult life attempting to master the art of armoured warfare. Emerging from or around the ruins of Khorramshahr Soviet tanks would be confronted with nightmarishly accurate massed fire at ranges of significantly less than a thousand yards. Anything under two miles was ‘point blank’ for the 105-millimetre L7 L/52 cannons of Michael Carver’s Centurions, and the 120-millimetre L7A1s of his dug in heavy tanks.
“Because of the success of the Khorramshahr blocking action,” Julian Calder explained, making eye contacts around the crowded compartment. It was still cool in the claustrophobic communications truck; in a couple of hours the rising sun would make it intolerably hot, a real pressure cooker beneath its camouflage nets. “Excalibur,” he went on,” has been put back.”
Excalibur was the execution signal for Hasan al-Mamaleki to unleash his entire force of Centurions, M-60 and M-48 Patton tanks against the flank and rear echelons of the enemy above the Karun River; ideally at the moment the enemy’s much depleted and hopefully exhausted spearhead was running into Michael Carver’s ‘stand and deliver’ defence lines several miles south on Abadan Island.
This prompted a narrowing of eyes, and muttered discontent among the staffers surrounding the two men. Hasan al-Mamaleki instantly stilled this with a abbreviated waving away motion with his left hand.
“Jumping a couple of steps forward,” Calder explained as he and al-Mamaleki automatically bent over the map on the bench table. Others respectfully craned their necks to get a better look. “The C-in-C guesses that the enemy will treat his reverse at Khorramshahr overnight as a personal insult. We think this because he’s kept pushing armour into the desert north and north east of the town on a fairly narrow front. The naval bombardment has forced him to lengthen his lines, and no doubt, somewhat inconvenienced him...”
There were muted chortles of amusement around the map.
“In any event we’re going to give the Red Army an even bloodier nose when it tries to move us back from our positions on the southern bank of the Karun River above Abadan. We have no intention of holding indefinitely but we do plan to kill as many of the enemy’s tanks as we can before we pull back to the prepared defence lines around the air base and within the refinery complex. My best guess is that the enemy will either pause to lick his wounds at that stage, or basically,” Calder shrugged and grinned mischievously, “put his head in the noose as fast as he can later today and this evening.”
It was almost too incredible.
The Red Army was Hell-bent on hurling itself into the carefully prepared meat grinder that Michael Carver had so lovingly prepared for it. Things had gone so well that there was actually an argument for letting the Russians bridge the Karun River virtually unopposed, and for letting 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army pour onto Abadan Island en masse before launching a counter attack.
But no, that would be being greedy.
First the Centurions and Conquerors of the 4th Royal Tank Regiment would be allowed to have their ‘fun’. Besides, it was vital that the enemy believed that he had dislodged the 4th ‘Tanks’ from their positions on the southern backs of the Karun River, if he was to be persuaded to plunge south to his doom with the same blind determination he had shown thus far.
“Do we know what’s going on down around Umm Qasr?” Hasan al-Mamaleki inquired.
Calder sh
ook his head.
“No. Not really. Sorry.”
The plan in the west was for Major Thomas Daly’s small Anzac and British armoured brigade and a regimental-size force of Saudi tanks – some seventy Centurions and M-48 Pattons in total – to move around the flank of the Soviet units laagered in and around the port city of Umm Qasr west of Safwan while gunners south of the Kuwaiti border ‘pinned’ the Russians against that border. The operations had gone ahead despite the absence of intelligence about the extent of the damage, confusion and dislocation caused by the overnight RAF bombing raids in the area. If the Red Army formations around Umm Qasr had survived relatively unscathed then Tom Daly’s armour would be engaged, encircled and destroyed in detail within hours.
However, the imponderables were what they were; there was no point crying over split milk or the potentially disastrous naval situation in the Persian Gulf. Sooner or later the Red Air Force would inevitably appear over the southern battlefield and discover that it owned the skies; and nobody knew how quickly that would turn the tactical situation east of the Arvand River on its head. Or for that matter, how long the ABNZ gun line moored north of Al Seeba could survive when it came under sustained attack from both the shore and the air.
Chapter 71
07:15 Hours
Friday 3rd July, 1964
HMAS Anzac, under weigh in the Arvand River north of Al Seeba
Commander Stephen Turnbull was grateful for the pall of smoke from the burning oil tanks of the huge refinery complex. The wind at higher levels had moved around two points since dawn, carrying the worst of the smoke off to the north and north-east; but down below one to two thousand feet the smog had created a haze under which he suspected the ships of the ABNZ gun line would be virtually invisible to high flying enemy aircraft.
Given the deteriorating ‘seeing’ conditions after the long night’s fighting had slowly petered out – the ‘front’ was quiet apart from desultory half-hearted counter battery fire – the captain of HMAS Anzac was not that surprised when Rear Admiral Nicholas Davey’s barge came alongside the destroyer.
The two men shook hands at the rail and the newcomer smiled broadly at the hastily convened reception committee.
“Let’s have no ceremony, Stephen,” he suggested.
Turnbull despatched the others back to their duty stations and the two men made their way up to Anzac’s open bridge.
“Things seem to have gone better than we could possibly have hoped last night,” the commander of what was left of the ABNZ Persian Gulf Squadron told Turnbull loudly, clearly not bothered who overheard their exchange.
The destroyer’s captain and the portly Englishman were of an age, give or take a few years. They shared comparable combat experience and shared a streak of obstinacy a mile wide. They were also two aging warriors who had a fine eye for taking advantage of their foe’s every mistake.
We assumed the Red Air Force would have been all over us by now,” Nick Davey pronounced. “The Yanks would have been here by now if they had the guts for it!”
This latter was boomed with such volume that men on the amidships 40-millimetre Bofors cannons probably heard it.
“Clearly the bastards don’t!” He added for good measure. “I have spoken to General Carver and he has invited me to ‘reposition’ several of our ships upstream. We can just about reach parts of southern Basra but we can’t actually see what we are doing from down here. With your permission, Stephen,” he went on, his tone very much that of a friend asking a brother officer a favour, rather than a superior officer issuing an order to a subordinate, “I propose to take Anzac and Diamond up river with Tiger.”
Taking big ships farther up the Arvand River, perhaps as far as Basra, was of course suicidal.
“The RAF have still got over thirty Bloodhounds spooled up waiting for trade,” Davey continued, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “They can knock down anything that comes within thirty miles of these parts.”
Stephen Turnbull did not need long to think about Nick Davey’s invitation to place his command in even greater harm’s way.
“When do we weigh anchor, sir?”
“The moment my barge casts off. Tiger and Diamond will follow directly.” Davey turned away, resting his hands on the bridge rail. In a quieter, somewhat sober voice he explained: “If it comes to it I plan to take Tiger, Anzac and Diamond as far upstream as the southern point of Om-al-Rasas Island. There we shall moor up again on the western side of the main channel. If we moor up to the east the proximity of the river bank may obstruct direct fire into the enemy’s flank and rear. If necessary, I will take Tiger all the way up to Basra.”
Turnbull absorbed this.
If the worst came to the worst Davey meant to sink the cruiser in the main channel. But that was looking too far ahead, in the meantime the object of the exercise was to get up river to enable the Tiger and the two destroyers to pour fire into the enemy at what, for the Tiger’s 6-inch and Anzac and Diamond’s 4.5-inch main batteries was point blank range.
“Permission to lead the squadron, sir?”
“Granted, sir,” Nick Davey chuckled.
As the smog of burning oil tanks and battle drifted north the day had broken crystal clear over the desert and marshes of the Faw Peninsula to the west. A little south of west great plumes of black smoke rose like pillars salt over some long lost mythical condemned biblical city. No man could have lived through the last twenty-four hours and not suspected that he was living through times around which latter generations would weave endless new mythologies. There had been three ‘wars to end all wars’ in the twentieth century and none of them had done anything other than to make the next war inevitable.
For the two men briefly looking each other in the eye on the bridge of the Australian destroyer ‘the future’ was a thing that neither of them was likely to have to confront. At least, not any future beyond the next few hours because they and most, if not all of their men, were steaming towards their fate; for them this was the last battle, one final trial by fire.
It was as he was leaving Anzac that Nick Davey turned and in a low, confidential tone turned to Stephen Turnbull.
“Whatever happens,” he murmured, “It has been my honour to serve with you. God be with you and your brave ship, Stephen.”
Then he was gone, clambering clumsily down the rope ladder, dropping into the strong arms of the men in his barge.
Stephen Turnbull watched the boat drift away from Anzac, turn ponderously and head back to the flagship.
Anzac’s stern began to swing towards to shore as her aft anchor clanked up out of the muddy waters of the Arvand River.
“SLOW ASTERN PORT!”
The destroyer dragged back on her forward chains.
“ALL STOP!”
“SLOW AHEAD STARBOARD!”
The bow anchor came out of the water.
“SLOW AHEAD BOTH!”
“WHEEL AMIDSHIPS!”
Astern HMS Diamond was emerging into the main channel behind the bulk of the flagship, and grey, wispy smoke was rising from both of Tiger’s funnels.
“RUDDER! FIVE DEGREES STARBOARD!”
HMAS Anzac, by the grace of God the bearer of the most honoured name in Australasian history, glided into the swirling two to three knot current of the great waterway of the Mesopotamian cradle of human civilisation.
“Tiger’s cut her chains, sir!”
Stephen Turnbull smiled a wolfish smile.
Without a tug nudging, or pre-positioned warps there was no way a big ship – Tiger was over eleven thousand tons and a lot deeper in the water than either Anzac or Diamond – like the flagship could elegantly, or safely, manoeuvre off a lee shore that was literally feet away when the current was pushing against her five hundred and fifty feet long hull as if it was a giant sail. Turnbull’s counterpart, Harpy Lloyd, had done the pragmatic thing. Dropped two of his anchors in the mud, gone half-astern on his port outer shaft, and half-ahead on his starboard outer shafts;
and presumably, prayed the current would not beach his ship on the western mudflats when he cut his stern anchors adrift.
Turnbull glanced around in time to see the cruiser’s bow swinging into the stream and then he focussed on finding the centre of the deep water channel.
“AIR CONTACTS BEARING TWO-NINE-FIVE!”
There was a short delay.
“NO IFF!”
The Red Air Force had made a belated but extremely unwelcome appearance.
“FIVE! NO, BELAY THAT! EIGHT BOGEYS AT ANGELS THREE-ZERO! RANGE SIX-EIGHT NAUTICAL MILES!”
Stephen Turnbull did some ad hoc geometry in his head.
The enemy was coming in from over the Syrian Desert of Iraq on a heading which would carry it over Basra on the way to Abadan.
Why fly a roundabout course over the desert?
“NEW AIR CONTACTS BEARING ZERO-ONE-ZERO! MULTIPLE CONTACTS AT ANGELS FOUR-ZERO...”
Over the bridge speakers the amplified voice of the CIC speaker betrayed a momentary spasm of...panic.
“AIR ATTACK! AIR ATTACK! NEW AIR CONTACTS BEARING THREE-FIVE-ZERO! VERY LOW LEVEL! CBDR! REPEAT CBDR! AIR ATTACK IMMINENT!”
CBDR: constant bearing, decreasing range.
Collision course; or more prosaically stated there were several aircraft heading towards the gun line at very high speed.
The Anzac’s Bofors cannons started pumping shells into the space the CIC guessed the approaching Red Air Force aircraft would probably be whistling through in excess of five hundred knots within seconds.
Anzac had no precision surface-to-air missiles systems; just the latest versions of old-fashioned World War II ‘pom-pom’ guns.
It was at times like this Stephen Turnbull had always found the rhythmical pumping of the Bofors oddly comforting...
Chapter 72