A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 1 (Timeline 10/27/62)

by James Philip

  Mahabad was a name coined only as recently as 1936, and between 1942 and the end of 1945 it had actually been occupied, like swathes of Northern Iraq and Persia, by the Red Army. That was why Army Group South had such good maps of the region and it had been possible to develop the movement plans of both 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army and 3rd Caucasus Tank Army, using the first hand experience of surviving veterans who had actually served in the region during that period.

  “What’s the latest news from Kurochnik?” He demanded as he strode into the forward Headquarters of the 10th Guards Tank Division. Men had leapt to their feet and stood to attention like marble statues on his arrival.

  “Comrade Major General Kurochnik reports harassing attacks on his perimeter for a second night, sir!” Babadzhanian was told. “Not so bad last night but he still lost another thirty men.”

  Using the bulk of his remaining airborne troops to leapfrog ahead and secure Urmia on the right flank of the two passes through the mountains into Iraq had been a risk; but a risk which had seemed entirely calculated at the time he had signed off on it. Babadzhanian hated this wooded mountain and valley country; there was no visibility, no easy way to root out enemies hiding or dug into the forests or lurking in the rocky gullies high above the narrow roads. Everywhere he went the locals civilians looked at him and his men with dull, inscrutable eyes. He mistrusted their passivity, their muteness; it was as if the people in the villages, towns and cities of Azerbaijan viewed the invaders as simply the latest interlopers to march through their lands and would soon be gone. In a way they were right, lines of communication units were ‘occupying the ground’ behind his tanks but that was all. That the Shah was dead mattered little to these people of the mountains. Up here in the wilderness of the north and west what went on in distant Tehran was of little consequence, one set of overlords was the same as any other.

  Babadzhanian brief visit to Sverdlovsk had been a waste of time made bearable only by the decision to release two of the five infantry brigades held in the inappropriately named ‘strategic reserve’ at Chelyabinsk. The men of the brigades in question were mainly conscripts, and no doubt swelled by men who recognised that life in the Red Army was marginally better than in a penal battalion; nonetheless, he could use the brigades to free up ‘real soldiers’ currently engaged on guarding his lines of communication. The harsh truth was that there were no ‘real soldiers’ available to replace casualties like the two hundred dead and wounded veteran airborne troopers in Urmia in the last forty-eight hours.

  Up until a week ago there had been a regimental-size mechanised garrison at Urmia, equipped with at least half-a-dozen American supplied M-48 tanks, supported by mobile artillery and a company-sized transport unit. Thus far Kurochnik’s paratroopers had only been up against fiendishly pre-positioned demolition charges and booby traps, and pinned down by small arms fire and sniping. So where were the tanks that had been in Urmia a week ago?

  In the country to the west of Mahabad a couple of well positioned tanks – or at a push a man with a machine gun or a rocket launcher, in fact – could block one or both of the vital passes needed for the armour steadily rumbling down the road from Tabriz and Bonab.

  Babadzhanian’s two powerful tank armies; on paper they had a combined order of battle of some fifteen hundred tanks, two thirds of them modern T-62s, over two thousand other armoured, or all-terrain vehicles and a strength of approximately two hundred and forty-five thousand men, of whom about half were front line ‘effectives’, was currently strung out across hundreds of kilometres of mountain and upland valley roads. His unstoppable ‘iron fist’ was presently, in purely military terms, the biggest traffic jam in the World!

  Whereas, 10th Guards Tank Division had raced ahead – wearing out its T-62s and exhausting its men – at breakneck speed investing or bypassing towns and villages, never resting in one place more than a few hours, ninety percent of the rest of Army Group South was, to Babadzhanian’s mounting exasperation crawling, nose to tail in its wake like a huge, bloated, lethargic caterpillar. The trouble was that because he only had transporters for one in four of his main battle tanks the roads all the way back to the border were littered, and sometimes blocked, by broken down T-58s and T-62s, not to mention countless miscellaneous cars, trucks and fuel bowsers. Even though he had known this would happen and he had planned for it – there were fifty salvage and recovery teams led by Red Army combat engineers patrolling the ‘lines of advance’ roads, repairing breakdowns and clearing the way for the endless convoys – Babadzhanian fretted constantly about the slow pace of advance of his main force.

  Any kind of guerrilla insurgency, of worse, airstrikes by the Yankees or the British would be a disaster. As it was the sheer weight of his tanks and the volume of vehicle movements over ill-maintained and crumbling roads was destroying the very routes upon which all the ammunition, fuel, food and the thousands of things vital to sustain the drive south depended.

  The situation would not be anywhere near as critical if the Red Air Force was doing its job. The useless pricks flew a few token fighter sorties over the line of march; dropped a bomb or two now and then and whined constantly about the ‘lack of forward operating bases’. The Iranians, or perhaps, the Iraqis had shot down a couple of Red Air Force reconnaissance aircraft over the Zagros Mountains three days ago and since then the ‘flyboys’ had virtually given up ‘breaking trail’ for his men on the ground.

  The Red Air Force was supposedly subordinate to him in this operation, ‘supposedly’ being the operative clause. He had fired off angry signals to Sverdlovsk, hoping somebody would light a fire under the Red Air Force’s collective arse, but he was not holding his breath waiting for a response.

  Babadzhanian leaned over the man at the unsteady plot table.

  Viewed from the south Urmia dominated the ground to the north, sitting squarely between the lake on the right and the Zagros Mountains on the left. Presently, the spearhead of 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army was trundling down the road to Miandoab on the right, to the left 50th Airborne Brigade was holding Urmia, albeit taking casualties in the process. Problematically, if the garrison at Urmia had already decamped those casualties were in vain and Babadzhanian probably had armour – granted, a relatively small force – positioned either on his flank or threatening to block the road to Piranshahr.

  He cursed under his breath.

  He looked up, manufactured a saturnine smile for his men.

  “I hate these fucking mountains!” He declared, knowing that he could afford to speak his mind in the company of fighting men such as those who surrounded him.

  This prompted half-hearted smirks.

  “Right,” Babadzhanian decided. “There ought to be enemy tanks somewhere between here and Urmia. How quickly can you put together a battle group to move up the road to Urmia to seek and destroy them?”

  The question was posed with a jovial intensity to the commander of the 10th Guards Tank Division, a man of his own age with a weather-beaten face and a shaven head that exhibited the white, gnarled scars of the day back in 1943 when a single German Tiger tank had knocked out three of the four T-34s of his troop in a clearing in the Taiga outside Kursk. His gunner had put a seventy-five millimetre round through the side of the Nazi behemoth but not before the Tiger’s eighty-eight millimetre canon had put a solid shot into his tank’s engine compartment.

  Major General Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov had been with Babadzhanian in Budapest in 1956, and was one of the trusted veterans whom he had consulted in drawing up the original plan for Operation Nakazyvat. The ‘Piranshahr spearhead’ was safe in Vladimir Puchkov’s calloused hands.

  “Urmia’s over a hundred kilometres up the road,” Puchkov thought out aloud. “I don’t have the fuel to get half-way. Not up that road.”

  Babadzhanian smiled thinly.

  The two men understood each other completely. They were moving through country in which the enemy was everywhere, but nowhere in sufficient strength to mass against t
he invader. Puchkov’s ‘drive’ up the road towards distant Urmia would be noticed within hours and with a little bit of luck it would release the pressure currently being applied to Kurochnik’s paratroopers in the city. This and the air strikes Babadzhanian was going to demand happen later this afternoon. He was perfectly happy to start shooting Red Air Force officers if that was what it took to get action!

  “Just make it look like you mean business, Vladimir Andreyevich.”

  “Oh, I’ll do that, sir! I’ll have my boys on the road in two hours,” the commander of the 10th Guards Tank Division promised, a grin forming on his lips and the light of battle glinting in his grey green eyes. For a tanker he was a big man, six feet tall and as broad as a bear. Around him the men of his headquarters staff were smiling.

  Babadzhanian saw it and was heartened.

  In the Red Army traditionally everything was subservient to discipline; but blind obedience alone was not enough in modern warfare fought on the move with increasingly complex and deadly weapons. By reputation Puchkov was a ruthlessly hard taskmaster. However, like Kurochnik, trapped up in Urmia he was a martinet with a heart of gold whom his men tended to follow with almost suicidal devotion. Like both of his two pugnaciously aggressive subordinates, Babadzhanian too understood that while men would sometimes obey an order to follow one into the jaws of death, only a real leader could persuade them to do it willingly.

  Such leaders were scarce in the Red Army, as perhaps they were in any army. When one recognised the abilities of a man such as Kurochnik or Puchkov, Babadzhanian was duty bound to give them the opportunity to express their talents and occasionally, to guard their backs when things went wrong. He had no intention of leaving Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik ‘out on a limb’ at Urmia.

  “Carry on,” he said. Babadzhanian did not need to tell Puchkov his business. While he might have specified the strength of the force to be sent, timescales, specific objectives; that was wasting time when one was dealing with a man of Puchkov’s proven professional abilities and experience. The Army Group Commander turned to the communications officer. “Do you have a secure scrambler link to the Air Force?”

  Within a minute Babadzhanian was telling the numskull at the other end of the line at the forward Red Air Force Controller Station outside Tabriz exactly what needed to be done before nightfall along the roads into Urmia from both the north and the south.

  How was Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik supposed to do his job when the Air Force lacked the gumption to carpet bomb the ground beyond his perimeter? Sometimes, he really did not believe, even after all these years, that he still had to explain these things to the idiots running the Red Air Force.

  Slamming down the handset in disgust he shook his head.

  “Get me Comrade Major General Kurochnik on the line!”

  Babadzhanian drank foul camp fire coffee from a metal mess tin as he waited.

  “I’ve ordered the Air Force to burn you several hundred metres of clear ground to the north and the south of the city,” he informed his hard-pressed airborne commander.

  “That should stop the bastards creeping up on my boys tonight, sir!” The other man had chortled, seemingly without a care in the world. “We found a depot with brand new Yankee radios. The locals had never unpacked the bloody things! I reckon they had at least eight tanks based here, sir. Yankee M-48s judging by the spares inventory of the workshops on the outskirts of the town. They pulled out so fast they didn’t have time to wipe out the maintenance schedules posted on the walls of the garages!”

  “You had a tough night again last night?”

  “This thing doesn’t feel right, sir. My boys reckon there were hostiles infiltrating the central areas of the city around midnight. If it wasn’t for the sniping I’d get on with a systematic house to house search.”

  “Do you still think you have hostiles in the city?”

  “I’d put money on it, sir. I reckon we’ve got two, maybe three shit hot snipers operating in the city. My boys can’t even get close to them. They’re acting like a team, covering each other’s backs. The sort of thing our Spetsnaz boys are trained to do. From what I’ve seen of the Iranian Army,” he went on, the words dripping with contempt, “I wouldn’t have thought they were capable of playing these games with my boys.”

  Babadzhanian digested this. Unable to form a settled opinion he ended the conversation. Kurochnik did not need him to tell him his business any more than Puchkov.

  Having come down to Mahabad to stand at the cutting edge of the great sword the collective leadership had place in his hands, to symbolically lead from the front, Babadzhanian badly needed to step back and think.

  Back in Tabriz his headquarters staff – like all staffs in the Red Army – looked to him to do its thinking for it. Down here the minutiae of divisional movement, deployment and logistics was Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov’s problem. Here in Mahabad Babadzhanian could stand to one side and ask himself if things were really going as well as they seemed to be going.

  He was confident that Kurochnik would hold out, block the road south and therefore protect his vulnerable right flank should Iraqi or renegade Turkish Army units decide to get involved, which was unlikely. He had gambled that the Yankees and the British would initially be too shocked to react; and not recover in time to mount a sustained aerial attack on his forces while they were at their most vulnerable, stretched out in convoy along hundreds of kilometres of mountain roads.

  Thus far, his gamble had paid off.

  However, it would all be for nought if the enemy attacked his armoured spearheads in the two high passes to the west at Piranshahr and Sardasht.

  Chapter 12

  Wednesday 15th April 1964

  State Department, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  The Secretary of State anticipated that the forthcoming summit would be a bloody affair but he was confident he held all the cards that mattered. Not least among these was the unassailable fact that nobody in the Administration had ever given the British any kind of undertaking, or guarantee that American armed forces would participate in any military adventure ‘east of Suez’. The British might have implied the existence of such implicit unwritten promises in the tone of the soon to be defunct US-UK Mutual defense Treaty; but that however, was their problem.

  The President had only agreed to the ‘Philadelphia Summit’ for domestic political consumption. How better to explicitly proclaim one’s ‘America First’ credentials than by spurning a fresh British demand to get involved in yet another one of their interminable post-colonial wars?

  The recent firestorm over the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s alleged attempt to appoint a British Supreme Commander of All Allied Forces in the Mediterranean had satisfactorily poisoned the well, and now the rebirth of the Soviet Menace in the Middle East had serendipitously created a ‘magic moment’; one of those once in a generation ‘moments’ when the public imagination and the national consciousness might be seized by a re-born charismatic leader. And that was exactly what John Fitzgerald Kennedy planned to do at the Philadelphia Summit.

  America First!

  It was no coincidence that the morning papers were carrying more ‘leaks’ purporting to prove ‘beyond doubt’ that the USS Scorpion had been sunk last year – not in error by US Navy Grumman S-2 Tracker anti-submarine aircraft flying off the USS Enterprise – but in a ‘cowardly pre-planned attack’ by an unnamed Royal Navy ‘super silent advanced diesel electric submarine’ operating as HMS Dreadnought’s ‘backup’.

  Fulbright blanched somewhat at the heavy-handedness of the rumour mill; he wondered at how newspaper editors and TV producers could look themselves in the eyes of a morning. Newsweek apart everybody else seemed only too happy to accept every unsubstantiated piece of nonsense that spewed out of the House of Representatives, or from anybody who had ever been associated with the Administration.

  Ben Bradlee, Bureau Chief of the newly relocated Newsweek Office in Philadelphia had been trying
to get Fulbright to give him an interview for weeks but the Secretary of State knew better than to humour Bradlee. Jack and Bobby Kennedy had tried to tempt him back into the fold in February but Bradlee had not bought the ‘party line’. Presently, the media was playing the Administrations tune with just enough discordant notes to make it look as if it was not entirely in the President’s pocket; but the last thing anybody in the Philadelphia White House wanted was a former Kennedy family insider like Ben Bradlee getting his hooks into what was actually going on.

  In the last forty-eight hours more inflammatory stories had emerged from ‘sources within the Sixth Fleet’ detailing how ‘inept and incompetent’ the British forces in the Mediterranean had been to quote, allow an ‘obsolete big-gun Soviet invasion fleet to creep up on Malta undetected’. Fulbright was painfully cognisant that these ‘reports’ neglected to mention that the powerful US Navy squadron assigned to provide long-range radar coverage for the Maltese Archipelago, and its primary seaborne defence against airborne and seaborne attack had gone missing during the critical hours. It was telling that nobody in the Navy Department had lifted a finger to contradict the latest ‘Scorpion lies’ or the new rash of misinformation coming out of the Mediterranean. As for the Administration; three brass monkeys could not have been any more publicly ‘neutral’ about the undermining of the alliance supposedly set in stone by the US-UK Defense Treaty signed in January.

  Fulbright took little or no pleasure in his part in the campaign; but politics were politics and nobody got any prizes for coming second in a Presidential race. More to the point, while stabilising the situation in the Mediterranean was entirely defensible as a being in the immediate vital national security interests of the United States, right now a major war in Iraq and Iran was not.