by James Philip
The sky was torn to shreds by another salvo.
Far away the ground was convulsing, as if from a earthquake.
Now 115-millimetres rounds from the surviving T-62s – several of which were partially screened by other knocked out tanks - were whistling overhead. A loud ‘CLANG’ nearby registered a hit on a Conqueror. This time the round ricocheted away.
Within a minute two British tanks had brewed up.
Frank Waters cowered in the bottom of the trench with the others.
The 4th Royal Tanks had made the Russians bleed again.
Now there would be a price to pay.
Chapter 75
11:45 Hours
Friday 3rd July, 1964
USS Kitty Hawk, 28 miles west of Kharg Island, Persian Gulf
“NOW HEAR THIS! NOW HEAR THIS!”
Flying operations had been suspended temporarily approximately sixty seconds before the public address had demanded attention throughout the flagship of Carrier Division Seven.
“THE FLEET COMMANDER WILL ADDRESS THE SHIP’S COMPANY!”
Like the majority of the USS Kitty Hawk’s five-and-a-half thousand crewmen Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann had been on duty twenty hours straight by then. Down in the carrier’s CIC exhausted men manned their consuls and updated plots, more than once the Fleet Anti-Submarine Officer had had to pat a man’s shoulder to ensure that he was awake.
Nobody was talking about it but one did not need to be any kind of clairvoyant or mind reader to know that a lot of the men in the CIC, and many of the airmen who had taken part in last night’s operations against the Centaur Battle Group – a grand name for an obsolete old World War II British carrier, a New Zealand frigate and a couple of small ASW escorts – felt sick to their hearts. Walter Brenckmann suspected that he was not the only man who was ashamed of the actions the Navy he had loved and served his whole adult life. Away from the cloistered, ‘in the know’ men in the CIC or those whose duty stations were on the bridge, it was anybody’s guess what percentage of the Kitty Hawk’s complement honestly believed last night’s action had been anything other than an act of gross, unforgivable betrayal.
Pure bloody murder by any other description...
“This is Admiral Bringle,” the gruffly confident voice declaimed. The words reverberated down corridors, echoed in the bowels of the ship; seemingly falling upon a man’s ears from several places at once.
In the CIC fans whirred, multi-coloured lights blinked, men conversed in low, hushed tones, comms links beeped for attention, operators acknowledged in low tones, spoke softly ignoring the ship wide broadcast.
“A lot of you will have questions about yesterday’s self-defence operations and what they mean for Carrier Division Seven’s ongoing mission in this theatre.”
Walter Brenckmann fought to keep his expression neutral.
“At seventeen hundred hours – local time – yesterday Carrier Division Seven acted to enforce a maritime de-militarized zone, a DMZ, covering the entire Persian Gulf west of longitude 50 degrees east.”
Men in the CIC were looking up from their desks; the yeoman standing at the Battle Board had turned around and glanced to their officers. There was no ‘DMZ’ demarcated or delineated on the Battle Board, nor any large area marked in red labelled with the legend ‘bomb everything in this box’.
“What the fuck is a DMZ?” Somebody muttered in the gloom from behind Walter Brenckmann’s left shoulder.
Obligingly, Rear Admiral William Bringle elucidated further.
“The extent of the de-militarized zone was agreed with the leadership of the Soviet Union as part of a broader agreement to avert the possibility of friction in the Middle East involving the United States in a new global war with Russia.”
In that moment there was a horrible, sepulchral silence in the CIC. It was as if time stood still for a second before normal sights and sounds took over again.
“The President and the Troika, the Collective leadership of the Soviet Union have, in the interests of World peace agreed a five year bi-lateral Armistice between our nations.”
Walter Brenckmann thought his head was on fire.
Had the US Sixth Fleet launched another sneak attack on the British Mediterranean Fleet?
When, not if, the British retaliated would it be with nukes...
My Mom and Pa are in England...
As his mind roiled frantically through the horrifying possibilities of this new madness something happened to him that had never happened before. He rushed to the edge of, and teetered for some moments on the precipice of unreasoning, blind...panic.
“At this time the US Ambassador in Oxford, England is delivering a diplomatic note to the British Government mandating a cessation of ALL hostilities in the Middle East not later than one hundred hours local time tomorrow, the 4th of July. I am authorised to inform you that providing British and Commonwealth Forces observe a posture of strict neutrality and non-aggression against US forces elsewhere in the World, that US Forces will adopt a passive operational status...”
Until the next time the President orders us to murder another one of our ‘friends’!
Having dealt with the greatest and most shameful volte face in US history William Bringle moved on, his manner that of a man who was keen to resume ‘business as normal’.
Walter Brenckmann knew that business as usual with the British was not going to be unlikely again in his lifetime.
“Kitty Hawk will shortly reduce speed to permit essential damage control checks to the starboard turbine room, and for damage control teams to assess if additional measures need to be put in hand to prevent further flooding. Fixed wing air operations will cease between fourteen hundred and seventeen hundred hours. Helicopter operations will continue as scheduled.”
Walter Brenckmann had felt nowhere near this bad on the morning after the USS Theodore Roosevelt had flushed her Polaris missiles and almost certainly killed hundreds of thousands of Russian men, women and children, old and young, the infirm and babies in arms alike. On the night of the October War he had done his duty; or at least that was what he had honestly believed he was doing at the time.
Now he was no better than an accessory to murder.
“Carrier Division Seven will remain at Air Defence Condition Two until further notice. Stay alert. Stand to your stations. Do you duty and uphold the highest traditions of the service.”
Walter thought the fleet commander had finished.
“Air Operations will commence against targets in Southern Iraq and Iran at 18:30 hours.”
Men were looking at each other with widening eyes all around the CIC.
“That is all!”
That was the moment Walter realised his naval career was over and that he had taken his last order from anybody on board the flagship. As if in a trance he stepped across to the Commander (Operations) of Carrier Division Seven.
He stood to attention.
“Sir, I request permission to be relieved of my duty station.”
The other man, a fifty year old veteran who had been onboard the USS Tennessee at Pearl Harbour nearly half a lifetime ago had blinked at him before he understood what had been said to him.
“Are you certain of this, Mister Brenckmann?”
“Yes, sir.”
The older man had sighed a very weary sigh.
“In that case, you are relieved. Report to the Captain at your earliest convenience.”
By the time Walter had climbed up to the bridge of the Kitty Hawk he had to stand in line and Captain Horace Epes was visibly agitated, angry-eyed and struggling to keep his emotions in check.
Notwithstanding the likelihood of severe repercussions, in time of war a request to be relieved of one’s duties onboard a US Navy ship at sea remained the right of any officer. In extremity such a request might be construed as cowardice in the face of the enemy, gross dereliction of duty, conduct unbecoming an officer and so on, ad infinitum. But Walter’s country was not at war with anybody
; or rather, it had not to his knowledge formally declared war on another country and the murder of all those brave men on the Centaur and its escorts had not been any kind of act of ‘legitimate self defence on the high seas’. The fleet had attacked friendly ships without warning in international waters; he could not and would not obey the orders of men who were prepared to commit that kind of atrocity in the name of duty.
“Dammit, Brenckmann!” Horace Epes raged, pacing behind his desk in his small sea cabin. “I thought you’d be the last man to associate yourself with mutiny!”
“Mutiny, sir? I have associated myself with no such thing, sir!”
The older man had stopped pacing, shocked to be contradicted.
“I have requested, as is my right as a commissioned officer in the United States Navy,” Walter protested resignedly, “to be relieved of my duties for reasons of conscience specifically so as not to become in any way a mutinous presence onboard Kitty Hawk, sir.”
“You’ll be stripped of all rank and privileges and probably do jail time for this, Brenckmann!”
“Possibly, sir,” Walter conceded, feeling stronger by the second. “But at least this way I’ve got a shot at being able to look myself in the eye most mornings for the rest of my life, sir.”
Chapter 76
11:55 Hours
Friday 3rd July, 1964
HMS Tiger, Arvand River
After the first attack Anzac, Tiger and Diamond had anchored a few hundred yards up river. A clutch of bombs had fallen in the Arvand some distance from the Tobruk and the Royalist, still anchored above El Seeba. Then it had gone quiet until eventually, just as Anzac manoeuvred to ‘break track’ up river, the Red Air Force had returned.
The men manning the Bristol Bloodhound batteries had waited until the approaching high altitude Red Air Force bombers trespassed deep into their engagement envelopes. And then, in ones and twos the twenty-five feet long two ton missiles had thundered into the air. Propelled by two Bristol Thor ramjets and four Gosling solid fuel boosters each Bloodhound was travelling at nearly four hundred miles per hour by the time it left its launcher. Within the next thirty feet of its climb it went supersonic, accelerating through seven hundred and fifty miles an hour. Three to four seconds after launch its four boosters detached; by then the rocket had reached Mach 2.2 and had already identified its target.
Rear Admiral Nicholas Davey had watched the grey rocket plumes of the Bloodhounds climbing at impossible speeds towards the invisible approaching bombers with dreadful awe. Nothing had really prepared him for how quickly and how violently war was conducted in the modern age. The power and the accuracy of weapons was horribly magnified by technological advances; he just felt very old, a relic from another bygone age. In comparison with the mayhem being wrought in Southern Iraq – thousands of people, possibly tens, or scores of thousands must have died in the last twenty-four hours – Peter Christopher’s death run in the Talavera now seemed like the last hurrah of an older, somehow more chivalrous World. This war in the Gulf was being fought with radar controlled gunnery, guided weapons capable of smiting an enemy at thirty miles at the flick of switch; or by tanks with guns so big that targets two to three miles away were sitting ducks.
The Centaur and her escorts had been like lambs to the slaughter; World War II type ships with modern radar but with everything else against them. The aircraft flying off the decks of the Kitty Hawk were ‘space age’ marvels to the men of Davey’s generation; the deadly surface-to-air missile systems carried by all the big American ships like something out of a Flash Gordon movie. His ships had had no chance, to run, to surrender, let alone to fight back.
It must have been pure bloody murder...
The first MiG-21s had rocketed across the Arvand River like raging silvery wraiths too fast for any gun to bear on them. Tiger’s quick firing automatic twin 3-inch mounts had cranked around belatedly trying to acquire a target. The Bofors guns of the destroyers had put up a largely ineffectual ‘wall’ of fire; and the MiGs screamed through it untouched.
Huge geysers of water erupted ahead and on the shoreward, starboard side of HMNZS Royalist.
Davey ran to the side of the bridge to look back as Tiger groped slowly west, nearly a mile distant from the other ship. Royalist was still moored fore and aft, broadside on to the river bank.
Momentarily the six thousand ton five hundred feet long cruiser disappeared behind a wall of white water. There was a flash, a louder, sharper explosion which rumbled across the muddy water easily distinguishable from the dozen near misses.
The spray slowly cleared, the water around Royalist churned.
The ship seemed to be rolling from the punches; aft of her second stack black smoke and ripples of crimson fire walked across her superstructure; ready use 2-pound 40-millimetre reloads exploding.
Royalist’s two forward twin 5.25-inch high angle turrets had trained a point east of due north. All four guns discharged in an oddly ragged salvo.
Nick Davey groaned inwardly.
One bomb run and Royalist was already reduced to working her main battery under local control.
Tiger’s forward and starboard 3-inch turrets had begun hurling rounds into the northern sky at a rate of one per barrel every three seconds. The cruiser’s ‘state of the art’ automatic main and secondary batteries were notoriously prone to breakdowns but by some miracle everything was still working, albeit with less than optimal rates of fire. The 3-inch mounts were allegedly capable of throwing thirty rounds per barrel per minute into the air, rather than the twenty Tiger’s Gunnery Officer was hoping to sustain. The fact that Tiger’s guns had never really worked properly had always clouded another issue; the ship’s relatively limited magazine capacity. In the unlikely event the big guns could ever be persuaded to fire for any length of time without a jam, or a major mechanical or electrical failure, the ship would shoot herself ‘dry’ in twenty to thirty minutes.
Presently, that was not a thing Nick Davey had the time or the wherewithal to think about.
Three more MiGs hurtled in from the west at six hundred plus knots. They were flying so low their afterburners kicked up great rooster plumes of sand and dust as they crested the bank on the Faw side of the Arvand and their iron bombs hit the water.
The splash from one bomb kicked high, flicked up and over the port wing of one jet. The aircraft went straight into the water and disintegrated into tens of thousands of pieces of disarticulated, twisted, splintered metal before the pilot knew what had killed him. But Nick Davey was not watching the wreckage of the supersonic fighter cart wheeling to destruction; he was following the malevolent dark forms of the Russian bombs as they skipped across the water towards Royalist.
Two bombs bounced straight over her.
Another detonated in the water near her stern, or perhaps just under it.
And then the final bomb, probably a thousand pounder crashed into her port side just ahead of her bridge.
The old cruiser shuddered.
Nothing seemed to happen for some seconds.
And then the whole amidships section of the ship crumbled inward and instantly, with mind-numbing swiftness, Her Majesty’s New Zealand Ship Royalist blew up.
Chapter 77
09:30 Hours (GMT – 3 hours behind Gulf time)
Friday 3rd July, 1964
Hertford College, Oxford
Joanne Brenckmann had insisted on accompanying her husband to his interview with the British Foreign Secretary. Superficially, Oxford seemed unnaturally calm given the enormity of the events in the Middle East but of course nobody outside government and military circles yet knew of her country’s unspeakable perfidy. Things would be different when the magnitude of the betrayal became widely known.
Joanne’s husband had shown her the latest telegrams from Philadelphia.
He had spoken twice to Secretary of State Fulbright overnight and then, an hour ago to the President. A month ago Jack Kennedy had concluded a secret compact with the British Prime Mini
ster; now he had reneged upon it – as apparently he had planned to do from the start - because he thought that was the only way he was going to get re-elected.
Things had gone from bad to worse. Overnight there has been a battle in the Persian Gulf in which the US Navy had sunk three British and one New Zealand warship with heavy loss of life.
Joanne’s husband had not been prepared to accept Secretary of State Fulbright’s account of that action, or of the news of the ‘draft peace treaty’ with the USSR on trust and had demanded, politely and respectfully – because Walter was the most courteous and civil man she had ever met – to speak to the President. His conversation with Jack Kennedy had been short, less than two minutes and afterwards her husband had just shaken his head when she tried to speak to him about it.
It was only now as they waited in the reception room on an idyllic, sunny Oxford morning looking out over the manicured lawn of the Old Quad of Hertford College that Walter Brenckmann could bring himself to confide all to his wife.
“The President thinks the British are Hell bent on dragging us into a another war with the Russians,” he had told Joanne, “he says the Providence was sunk by a British submarine in a quote ‘obvious act of provocation’ and that Admiral Bringle, the CO of Carrier Division Seven, met with his counterpart, Admiral Davey of the Australian, British and New Zealand Persian Gulf Squadron giving him prior warning that he intended to maintain a ‘maritime neutrality zone’ in the Gulf. Apparently Davey ignored him. Last night we attacked and sank the British carrier Centaur and three of her escorts. It would have been no contest even if we hadn’t attacked them without warning...”
“Walter,” she whispered in horror. “That’s impossible!”
“Kitty Hawk was damaged in the battle. Not badly, but badly enough to delay planned air operations against British targets in the Gulf today. I am to communicate to the British that if they do not undertake to cease all operations in the region by one o’clock tomorrow morning local Gulf time that Carrier Division Seven will mount ‘massive’ attacks against the surviving units of the ABNZ Squadron, Abadan and other targets in the Gulf.”