by James Philip
Carver smiled wanly.
“Oh, and twenty minutes ago my opposite number in Basra radioed me terms demanding the immediate unconditional surrender of Abadan Island.”
Chapter 80
14:35 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
HMAS Anzac, Arvand River
Commander Stephen Turnbull returned to his partially wrecked bridge after his latest ‘around the ship’ tour.
In the heat of the day the upper decks of the Battle class destroyer were a cauldron. A man so unwise as to brush exposed metal against bare flesh recoiled in pain, seared. The haze shimmered off the muddy waters of the river as the ship’s pumps vomited dirty water over the side.
After the Royalist had blown up the MiGs had concentrated on the flagship.
Although HMS Tiger’s fires were out wisps of grey smoke still curled away from her aft superstructure and scorched lattice mainmast. The cruiser was down by the stern, and listing two to three degrees to starboard.
Anzac’s sister the Tobruk had had to beach herself on the Abadan shore after sustaining such severe splinter damage, and likely several sprung keel plates, from near misses. She had settled with her decks above water and her main battery still operable, albeit with a much reduced rate of fire. Her forward magazines had flooded slowly; permitting most of her remaining high explosive reloads to be brought up to the main deck. However, with her boilers off line and most of her generators submerged other than firing occasional blind salvoes, she was pretty much out of the fight.
A big bomb had gone off alongside Tiger’s starboard engine room. The compartment had flooded in minutes and only desperate counter flooding had kept the ship from capsizing. The MiGs had barrelled in shooting rockets, with cannons blazing. After the fourth or fifth strafing run – it was hard to keep count – the cruiser had been enveloped in smoke.
High-level bombers had saturated great tracts of the river and the banks with bombs; few had come close to the ships in the deep channel and mercifully, the drifting dust, sand and smoke from the carpet bombing eventually obscured the ships from the aircraft approaching at low level later in the attack. By then it was likely that the first sight the pilots of the attacking MiGs got of their targets was in the split second after they crossed from desert to the river before rocketing past.
There was a 250-kilogram Red Air Force unexploded general purpose bomb lodged in the Anzac’s engine room bilge. Another bomb had struck her stern a glancing blow and exploded as it hit the water. Only God alone knew how the blast had failed to set off the Squid anti-submarine mortar rounds stored in the shrapnel-torn ready lockers under the stern deck house. One strafing run had turned the destroyer’s funnel into a sieve; another had seen the ship’s main mast carried away by contact with the leading edge of a MiG-21’s wing. The attacking jet had slammed into the desert in a ball of flame a second later.
The most terrifying thing was how fast things went wrong.
Several twenty or thirty millimetre cannon shells had killed half the bridge watch and severed every electrical connection to the foremast air search and gunnery control radars. It had happened in the blink of an eye in the fractions of a single second it took the attacking MiG to ‘look up’ over the western bank of the Arvand River, acquire its target and for its pilot’s hand to close around the firing trigger. The water around the ship had become a maelstrom of spray and exploding shells, the ship had quivered and rung like a cracked bell as rounds crashed inboard; and then the attack was over.
Those who had survived had blinked, looked around and discovered the carnage...everywhere.
No time to be afraid.
No time to panic.
No time to register what was going on until later.
And afterwards...always the blood splashed across the deck and washing away through the new holes, the acrid smell of burning wiring and the moans and the curses of the living and the dying.
Stephen Turnbull accepted a pair of binoculars.
He scanned Tiger through the haze; and then looked beyond the cruiser to where the Diamond was moored, almost aground close to the Abadan shore in a sinking condition. Rocket strikes had disabled the destroyer’s forward turrets and a hit by a bomb like the one wedged in Anzac’s boiler room bilge had detonated on her stern. Diamond had no rudder control and she was down four feet aft.
Of the original five ship gun line only Anzac and Tiger, both badly damaged, remained capable of moving under their own steam.
Thus far Anzac’s butcher’s bill was eight dead and eleven seriously wounded.
Tiger had over a hundred dead and injured.
Things could have been worse; the Red Air Force had not been back for over three hours.
Turning his glasses to the north and north-west the smoke shrouded everything.
“The flagship is signalling, sir!”
Turnbull watched the winking Aldis Lamp on the cruiser’s bridge.
DAVEY TO ANZAC STOP TIGER WILL ADVANCE UP RIVER BEFORE SUNSET STOP WILL YOU JOIN ME SIR MESSAGE ENDS.
Chapter 81
14:45 Hours
Friday 3rd July, 1964
The Governor’s Palace, Basra
The offer of ‘terms’ had been Lieutenant General Viktor Kulikov’s idea. The Acting Commander of Army Group South; what was left of the exhausted invasion force which, in the last three months, had driven over fifteen hundred kilometres from the Caucasus to the shores of the Persian Gulf, had understood the moment he walked into the Governor’s Palace that the British meant to bleed his army white. Even if things had not looked so disastrous in the west around Umm Qasr, to his mind the burning ruins of the refineries on Abadan Island were not worth the death of a single Red Army conscript. The Persian Gulf was an American Sea; the British could be shelled, bombed and blockaded into submission with minimal further casualties.
“Continuing the assault is madness, Comrade Defence Minister,” Kulikov protested as soon as he was alone behind closed doors with Admiral of the Fleet Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov. Gorshkov had walked into the headquarters like Christ come to cleanse the Temple, a man on a mission who viewed the battlefield chaos in the western Faw and in the eastern Khorramshahr-Abadan Sectors as ‘messes’ he was going to personally ‘clean up’.
Gorshkov had demanded tactical briefings on all developments in the last twenty-four hours, listened angrily and ordered the amphibious assault on the Abadan bank of the Karun River to go ahead ‘without delay’. That was over two hours ago; around the time the Red Air Force had finally got the message that the High Command meant it when it said ‘cease operations south of Basra’.
Even as Kulikov tried to reason with Marshal Chuikov’s successor fresh Marines and Naval infantry held back for precisely this moment were piling into pontoons and anything that would float down the Arvand River. Moving forward covered by the smoke pall hanging over the Khorramshahr battleground, two companies of combat engineers supported by the remnants of the tank regiments decimated overnight were to bridge the Karun River as soon as the southern shore was secured. In less than ninety minutes the 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army would commence the biggest artillery bombardment of the entire war; with the gunners having orders to carry on firing until they ran out of ammunition.
“We offered the British honourable ‘terms’,” Gorshkov snapped irascibly. “Have they responded?”
“Well, no...”
“We should have driven on into Kuwait,” Gorshkov went on. “Calling a halt around Umm Qasr was inviting a counter attack. I don’t know what Babadzhanian was thinking!”
Kulikov scowled.
Whatever his personal and professional differences with Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian, the man had been a gifted and competent field commander who had worked miracles in the last three months. To have got this far south with both his armies more or less intact – although inevitably worn out, weakened as much by the hostile terrain and sickness as by enemy action – ought to have been the crowning glory of Babadzhani
an’s career.
The setback at Umm Qasr and the brainless repeated frontal assaults on the Khorramshahr-Abadan Sector where it was suspected, if not actually known, that the British had had several months to prepare a ‘defence in depth’ had been entirely self-inflicted catastrophes. Twenty-four hours ago the Red Army was the master of the battlefield, now an enemy armoured force of unknown strength had cut the Basra to Um Qasr road and was threatening the southern approaches to the city, and 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army had become embroiled in a dreadful World War II type battle which had already consumed one in three of its tanks.
To compound the worsening ‘tactical’ situation the last two squadrons of Red Air Force Tupolev Tu-95s strategic bombers, had been virtually wiped out by British surface-to-air missiles that morning. Moreover, operating from bases in Central Iraq at ranges known to be well beyond their operational endurance, two in three of the MiG-21s sent in at low level to attack enemy armour in the desert north of Umm Qasr, British warships in the Arvand River, and targets of opportunity on Abadan Island had failed to return.
Much as the Red Air Force in Iraq was complaining at the injunction to cease operations south of Basra; frankly, if it kept losing aircraft at the rate it had that morning it would shortly cease to exist as a fighting force.
Ground operations on the eastern bank of the Arvand River would continue; Gorshkov planned to leave what was left of the British Navy in the Persian Gulf to the tender mercies of the Americans.
“With respect, Comrade Minister,” Kulikov objected. “There is no guarantee that the promised American air support will materialise. Air support is useless if we can’t co-ordinate it with our ground forces!”
Gorshkov viewed the Red Army general with hard, cold eyes.
He would have been lying if he was not uneasy about allowing the United States to ‘inflict peace’ on the region. He was especially unhappy about the prospect of allowing US Air Force B-52s to overfly newly acquired Soviet territory, or to have to rely on tactical air support from aircraft flying off the USS Kitty Hawk. The Strategic Air Command heavy bombers would already be in the air, a corridor having been designated for the eight B-52 and their four KC-135 tankers all the way from the Arctic to the Persian Gulf.
He was in a race against time.
He needed Red Army tanks ‘on the ground’ on Abadan Island before the Yankees inflicted their Pax Americana on their former British allies. Whatever had been negotiated in Sverdlovsk the map of Iraq and the Middle East was going to be redrawn according to where the front line was at one o’clock tomorrow morning. Possession was the law and he was going to grab as much ground as he could in the hours remaining.
Expending every available Tu-95 and MiG-21 in that morning’s operations had been countenanced because the Troika – the collective leadership of which he was the military member – did not trust the Americans to fulfil their obligations under the five-year US-USSR Non-Aggression Pact. Supposedly, if the British fought on the US bombers would administer the coup de grace in the Abadan sector in the early hours of tomorrow morning; carpet bombing the enemy armour bottling up Umm Qasr and threatening Basra in the south west, before annihilating the surviving garrison of Abadan Island. In the meantime the US Navy would ‘mop up’ the survivors of the so-called ABNZ Persian Gulf Squadron at first light. But Gorshkov did not believe it; the Americans were too squeamish. At any time between now and the scheduled ‘end of hostilities’ the America Eagle might retract its claws.
Gorshkov shut his eyes, took several stentorian breaths.
Until a few hours ago Operation Nakazyvat had succeeded beyond the Politburo’s wildest expectations. The West’s stranglehold on the oil of the Middle East had been broken forever, the Motherland had seized warm water ports, and the Red Army had humiliated the murderers of October 1962. And then that idiot Babadzhanian had weakened his hold on the Faw Peninsula so that he could dash what remained of his armies against the rock of the fortress of Abadan!
Now the Soviet Union was locked in a battle it could not afford to lose, a battle it had only hours to win before the Americans flew in to steal the Red Army’s glory!
“We must fight on, Kulikov,” Gorshkov growled, fixing Kulikov in his coldly phlegmatic gaze. “We will take Abadan. We will expel the enemy from the desert around Um Qasr. Afterwards, we will rebuild our armies, our air force and our navy. One day we will be the equal of the Americans again. Mistakes have been made for which you are blameless. You will be rewarded for your loyalty this night, Comrade General.”
There was a respectful rapping at the closed door.
A sweating Major of the staff marched in.
“The British have replied to our earlier message, Comrade Minister!”
Gorshkov stared at the sheet of paper.
“I don’t speak English. What does it say?”
The junior officer swallowed nervously, taking back the sheet.
He hesitated momentarily and then translated at a rush.
“Ya sozhaleyu, chto eto ne praktichno dlya menya, chtoby prinyat sdachu vsekh sovetskikh voysk na vostochnom beregu reki Arvand. Podpis, Mikhail Carver, General-leytenant.”
I regret that it is not practical for me to accept the surrender of all Soviet forces on the eastern bank of the Arvand River. Signed, Michael Carver, Lieutenant General.
Chapter 82
17:52 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
The Angry Widow, 90 miles West of Haifa, Eastern Mediterranean
Squadron Leader Guy French ought by rights to have been very afraid; instead he was wholly at peace with himself in a way he had not been since that dreadful night in late October 1962. But for the war he and Greta would have been married very a nearly a year. Their first anniversary would have been in a week or so, in fact; their first boy or girl – they had planned to have a brood of three or four of the little rascals – might already have seen the light of day. But it had not been meant to be and now he was at the controls of a Handley Page Victor B.2 cruising at forty-eight thousand feet towards a destiny unimaginable and unthinkable twenty months ago.
Ground stations in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman had been tracking Carrier Division Seven - the Yanks were noisy beggars – by simple radio direction triangulation, ensuring that the RAF knew exactly where to find the murderers.
The idea was to ‘swarm’ the USS Kitty Hawk and her protectors.
Or more correctly, the scheme was to blind the giant carrier and then ‘swarm’ it; for Goliath needed to be brought to his knees by nuclear slingshots before he could be stoned to death.
The briefing officer and his team had been grimly honest pulling no punches even though to a man they knew the score. This was a one way mission and nobody was actually being ordered to do anything. Notwithstanding, squadron and aircraft commanders had been ordered to remind their men that this was a ‘volunteers only’ show and that no questions would be asked, or any man thought any the less of if he decided that it was ‘not for him’.
It was a peculiarity of V-Bomber design that on each aircraft type only the two pilots had ejector seats; the other three ‘back seat’ crewmen basically being left to their own devices in an emergency. On this mission Guy French had ordered The Angry Widow’s ground crew to disconnect the explosive ‘ejection charge’ beneath his seat. Previously such requests had always been vetoed by higher authority; today nobody had batted an eyelid.
Tonight’s order of battle included everything the RAF had to hand capable of operating against the US fleet in the Persian Gulf at twelve hours notice.
Two Vickers Valiants of No 148 Squadron; ‘Fox and Hounds’ carrying a single 15-kiloton yield fission bomb, and ‘City of York’ carrying twenty one-thousand pound general purpose bombs.
“One Avro Vulcan, ‘Baghdad Express’, of No 9 Squadron carrying a second Blue Danube device; and two Vulcans of No 617 Squadron, ‘Jolly Farmer’ and ‘Show a leg’, each carrying a mixed nine-ton cargo of one and two thousand pound general purpose
bombs.
Four Handley Page Victors; two No 57 Squadron B.1s, ‘Merry Widow’ and ‘Burma Star’ each carrying a single six-ton Tallboy and four one-thousand pounders, and the two No 100 Squadron B.2s ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and Guy French’s ‘The Angry Widow’, the former carrying a single 10-ton Grand Slam and the latter two Tallboys.
Five English Electric Canberra medium bombers of No 81 Squadron – which would be refuelled over Sinai by two No 214 Squadron Valiants – were loaded with six one-thousand pound bombs carried internally, and externally with two rocket pods containing thirty-seven 2-inch unguided missiles.
Depending upon serviceability somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five fighters; RAF Hawker Hunters, and possibly several US-supplied Saudi F-86 Sabre and F-100 Super Sabre interceptors, and a handful of Fleet Air Arm Sea Vixens and Scimitar fighters operating from Kuwaiti airstrips would do their best to distract the Kitty Hawk’s combat air patrol and confuse ‘the battle environment’ that the US Navy liked to ‘understand’ at all times.
Almost as an afterthought, three Fleet Air Arm Gannets each equipped with two US-supplied 10-inch Mark 43 homing torpedoes had been added to the order of battle.
The operations staff at Akrotiri which was co-ordinating operations with the RAF’s command centre in Damman had christened the exercise Operation Roundup.
Everything had to happen before sunset in the Persian Gulf.