by James Philip
It all rather smacked of fiddling while Rome burned.
Al-Mamaleki was rightly disgusted and appalled by what had happened. Under the regime of the Shah career military officers got used to the idea that occasionally, one was liable to be ordered to shoot at fellow Iranians. That was the way of things, the natural order of affairs. However, slaughtering fellow soldiers for no better reason than that they had the misfortune to be commanded by an imbecile was another thing, dirty, and dishonourable.
He was about to vent a little more of his disgust when both men felt the ground twitching beneath their feet and a few moments later, the very distant, drum roll of thunder from the west. It was like somebody was hitting the crust of the earth with a giant hammer many, many miles away. As one man they hurried into a nearby building and went up to the flat roof.
There was nothing to be seen.
Basra was over forty miles away as a crow would fly and the haze was too impenetrable. Nevertheless, both men guessed what was happening; the Russians were bombing the city. Not a hit and run raid. This was a sustained pounding by strategic bombers dropping hundreds of big bombs.
If anybody had doubted the enemy’s intentions before there could be no doubt now.
The Russians were coming.
Chapter 51
Tuesday 2nd June 1964
HMS Hampshire, 27 miles North of Cap Matifou, Algiers, Algeria
A balmy Mediterranean afternoon had darkened into a warm summer night as HMS Hampshire cruised west at eighteen knots. She was returning from her second ‘fast run’ to Cyprus carrying an additional consignment of huge World War II vintage Grand Slam and Tallboy bombs to the military port at Limassol, and her officers and men were basking in the satisfaction of a job well done. On the previous ‘trip’ the big guided missile destroyer had taken onboard all thirty-eight nuclear warheads recovered from the wreck of HMS Blake and successfully conveyed them home, stopping off briefly at Malta and Gibraltar to deliver respectively four and six devices. Back in Portsmouth a tanker had come alongside to refill her empty fuel bunkers and within an hour of unloading the last of the remaining ‘warheads’ she had been towed across the harbour to the ammunition wharf to take on a second load of monstrous conventional bombs. A month ago the Hampshire had been a brand new ship with a green crew, that evening she was a fighting ship which had earned her first laurels, and her complement of over five hundred men was justifiably proud in the knowledge that their new ship had won her spurs.
However, that was not to say the cruiser-sized destroyer was as yet any kind of well-oiled fighting machine because she was anything but. The Hampshire had been rushed to sea because the cupboard was completely bare and eighty percent of her crew were still painfully raw recruits. Although superficially she looked a mean, lean fighting ship; presently her fighting capabilities and her capacity to defend herself from attack were negligible. She had been sent to sea too fast, too many compromises had been made in her design and construction, and few of her planned weapons systems and hardly any part of her electronics suite – the big Type 965 air search bedstead apart – had actually been installed before she was commissioned.
Hampshire was the second ship in the first tranche of four County class guided missile destroyers scheduled to join the Fleet. The Counties had been designed and re-designed throughout the latter 1950s; their blueprints tugged this way and that by the old ‘gunboat’ adherents and dangerously eccentric ‘missile’ men at the Admiralty. The Counties had eventually been laid down as hybrid cruiser-destroyers, nearly twice the size of the preceding Daring class and by the command of the then First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten belatedly redesigned around the ‘beam riding’ GWS1 Sea Slug missile system. By then the role of the Counties had become the air defence of the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers, a task currently in the hands of the much smaller modified Weapon and Battle class vessels.
The story of the Counties was a sorry one; a cautionary tale which might have been a metaphor for the Royal Navy’s broader struggle to come to terms with its post-empire role in the World.
After many delays and false starts it was envisaged that the first batch of at least eight Counties would be commissioned in 1962 and 1963 with a missile system, Sea Slug, that was already obsolete and the accommodation of which dangerously compromised the battle worthiness of every ship it carried, with a equally obsolete mid-1950s radar suite.
Not that HMS Hampshire, had she been completed as specified – even with her already old-fashioned Sea Slug system – was not a potentially formidable adversary. As designed with her advanced COSAG – combine steam and gas – turbines, her two twin Mk 6 4.5-inch turrets forward, GWS Sea Cat launchers, the much derided Sea Slug launcher, and her anti-submarine helicopter she was hardly any kind of pushover. In fact, with her full armament set and competently handled by a well-trained and experienced crew her built-in obsolescence might have been greatly mitigated in any number of combat scenarios.
The problem was that within the Royal Navy everybody knew that too many compromises had been made to accommodate Sea Slug; and that practically none of those compromises ought to have been acceptable in a fighting navy in the 1960s. Basically, most of the aft third of the Counties above the waterline had had to be gerrymandered around the Sea Slug system and nobody thought that was in any way a very good idea.
If a future historian of post-1945 British naval architecture wanted a classic example of muddle-headed thinking, both in terms of what was required in a modern fighting ship and exactly what kind of enemy one thought one was fighting; the Armstrong Whitworth Sea Slug and its eventual deployment in the Counties was an object lesson.
The first problem with Sea Slug was its limited capability. It was a first generation surface-to-air ‘beam-riding’ missile installed in a ship expected to serve in an environment dominated by fast jets and hugely more capable second, third and fourth generation guided weapons. Even at the time of its operational trials in the mid-1950s high flying targets like the Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 which could fly at well over five hundred miles an hour were at the very ragged edge of Sea Slug’s ‘engagement envelope’. Basically, Sea Slug was subsonic and a target flying at high altitude at over five hundred miles an hour virtually had to fly – in a very straight line – right over the top of a County to be remotely endangered by Sea Slug.
The second problem was that the Sea Slug missile was gigantic, twenty feet long and weighing in at around two tons, and not even the cruiser size Counties were anywhere big enough to properly accommodate a single double launcher. Worse, because the missile’s propellant was inherently dangerous and unstable – a liquid oxygen petroleum Devil’s brew – and it was impossible to locate the missile magazine below the waterline, in battle a single unlucky hit by a relatively small round could easily result in the whole ship blowing up.
Thirdly, because Sea Slug was a first generation system it relied on big, heavy Type 901 fire control and Type 965 air search radars which needed to be mounted as high as possible in the ship, drastically reducing how much other vital war-fighting equipment could be installed in a superstructure that was of necessity, lighter in construction and therefore less resilient to than it otherwise would have been to battle damage.
In the event, HMS Hampshire had gone to sea with all the accumulated deficiencies and structural shortcomings caused by the need to accommodate Sea Slug; but without the questionable boon of actually having either a Sea Slug launcher installed in her stern, or any other missiles to shoot. Not only had she been commissioned in such an ungodly rush that she had no long-range air defence capability (Sea Slug); but there had not been time to wait for her short-range missile defence system (Sea Cat) to be delivered from Short’s factory in Belfast either. In addition, the need to weld steel cradles for the RAF’s super bombs – Grand Slams and Tallboys – on her helicopter platform had made it impossible for her to operate an anti-submarine and reconnaissance helicopter. Finally, her Type 901 fire control radar, althoug
h installed, was inoperable making it impossible to shoot her only ‘live’ weapons system – her 4.5-inch guns – in anything other than local line-of-sight mode.
Hampshire had left Malta thirty-nine hours ago, where every man onboard had been given the option of an eight hour run ashore. North of Bizerta, Tunisia, ground stations along the North African coast had begun to track the big destroyer’s progress. The ship had followed the coast, careful to stay at least twenty miles from land. Tonight the lights of Algiers glimmered distantly, their dim glow beneath the southern horizon illuminating the clouds. The weather was changing and Hampshire was running ahead of a sharp Mediterranean storm; on a smaller ship the crew would already have felt the gathering motion of the destroyer under their feet.
Many ships had reported distant ‘radar shadows’, contacts at the edge of their radar plots in these waters south and east of the Balearic Islands. It was known that several French and Italian warships had survived the October War, as had the entire, albeit antiquated Spanish Navy. The US Sixth Fleet had buzzed Spanish destroyers in this region in recent weeks but no allied vessel had been harassed in these waters, but the operational status of the surviving units of the French Fleet remained unknown; that fleet’s affairs having been very low on the priority lists of British and Commonwealth forces in the theatre of operations.
Prompted by the sudden declaration of a ‘no fly zone’ over French airspace by the Provision Government of South France, Malta-based submarines and aircraft had begun to show a little more interest in the doings of the French; but not that much more interest. What with one thing and another, the Mediterranean Fleet had been too busy lately to worry overly about what the French were up to.
The inexperienced rating manning the big green Type 965 repeater screen in the CIC – Command Information Centre – situated directly beneath HMS Hampshire’s bridge had been keeping an eye on the two contacts almost directly north of the destroyer. They had appeared late in the afternoon at extreme range and slowly closed to approximately nineteen nautical miles.
The Officer of the Watch had casually ordered him to ‘keep an eye’ on the anonymous ‘friends out there...’
“Sir!” The man at the Type 965 repeated called in alarm. “Something’s happening!”
Suddenly there were men at the operator’s shoulder.
“What the Devil is that?” Somebody asked.
Where there had been two contacts now there were three.
The new contact was travelling impossibly fast...
“SOUND AIR DEFENCE CONDITION ONE!”
Klaxons began to screech.
“Label that incoming contact Bandit One. I want reports! Keep them coming. Bearing and range and speed. Only bearing and range and speed!”
“CONSTANT BEARING DECREASING RANGE!”
Collision course...
“RANGE ONE-FOUR MILES!
The ship began to heel into a turn to port, her engines racing. There was no need to ratchet up Hampshire’s advanced combined gas and steam turbines, down in the bowels of the ship the engineers just ‘turned on’ the power at the press of a button. The destroyer picked up speed.
“BANDIT ONE ON CONSTANT BEARING!”
“RANGE ONE-ONE MILES!
“BANDIT ONE SPEED ESTIMATED AT SIX-ZERO-ZERO KNOTS!”
A fourth contact, moving as impossibly fast as Bandit One winked into life on the big green repeater screen.
“BANDIT TWO ON CONSTANT BEARING DECREASING RANGE!”
“RANGE ONE-EIGHT MILES!”
“SPEED FIVE HUNDRED KNOTS INCREASING THROUGH FIVE-FIVE ZERO KNOTS!”
In the Hampshire’s CIC nobody was actually afraid.
Not yet.
The terror came a little later when the men in the room realised that the impossibly fast contacts barrelling towards the big destroyer at close to the speed of sound were missiles.
Missiles with HMS Hampshire’s name written on them.
Chapter 52
Tuesday 2nd June 1964
Kennedy Family Compound, Hyannis Port, Barnstable, Massachusetts
The President of the United States of America had opened the first session of the ‘informal’ US-UK ‘symposium’ with the declaration that tomorrow he planned to ‘go sailing’.
Margaret Thatcher had received this news stoically because she could hardly claim it was any kind of bombshell. Shortly before the parties convened in the hurriedly ‘opened up’ dining room of old Joseph Kennedy’s summer home from home, Peter Christopher had passed her the President’s hand-written note inviting him to join him ‘on the waters’ at ‘eight sharp tomorrow AM’.
Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson, the Angry Widow’s Foreign Secretary had chuckled out aloud, much to the Prime Minister’s displeasure.
‘Margaret,’ he had soothed emolliently, ‘if FDR could have his old English Navy chum Winston Churchill, JFK can have his surely?’
Peter Christopher had felt a little like the meat in a sandwich wedged between two rocks with a hammer. He had still not fully digested what the Ambassador, Lord Franks, had put to him the day before about his becoming, in effect, the United Kingdom’s emissary to the West Coast Confederation of States. Notwithstanding that the last time any American ‘state’ had attempted to form any kind of ‘confederation or confederacy’ very bad things had happened, and he really did not want to take is pregnant wife and his friends into the middle of somebody else’s war, nothing in his life and career to date had remotely prepared him for such a ‘diplomatic role’. He might have felt a little better about it if he had had the chance to talk to Marija, but all the phone lines in the British delegation’s hotel in New Bedford had been humming with official business or been reserved exclusively for ministerial use last night.
Marija had already made light of having been whisked off to not one but two foreign lands almost immediately after their marriage; however, underneath her placid acceptance of being transplanted thousands of miles from her home in Malta, he suspected she was as disorientated by recent events as he was. And then there was the baby...
“May I join you?”
Peter had been staring out to sea to where the USS Southerland was slowly quartering the approaches to Hyannis Port. He was at a ‘loose end’ with no formal role in the proceedings other than to stand at the Prime Minister’s shoulder as required. Officially, there was no ‘military component’ to the US-UK ‘symposium’; and apart from the troops guarding the compound and the surrounding countryside, and the sailors out in Nantucket Sound nobody was in uniform.
Fifty year old General William Childs ‘Westy’ Westmoreland was attending the ‘Cape Cod Dance’ – as the event was derisively referred to in the new ‘Philadelphia Pentagon’ – as an observer on behalf of his boss, Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. Like his political master Westmoreland was intrigued by how sure-footedly the British had played, and were continuing to play, their ‘poor’ military hand in the Middle East. The selective use of air power, the ongoing attempts to make new alliances and rebuild old ones, and the way a ‘penny packet’ formation of British armour had intervened decisively early in the imbroglio to frustrate – frankly lunatic – Iraqi ambitions at Khorramshahr, was deeply impressive. It was something of an object lesson in the shrewd employment of limited resources.
The Pentagon had been closely monitoring the British and Commonwealth - mainly Australian but with significant contributions from both the New Zealand and South African governments, the latter in assuming Royal Navy duties in the South Atlantic in support of Operation Sturdee - build up in the Persian Gulf with mixed feelings.
Before the Soviet invasion of Iran and Iraq, J. William Fulbright had been talking about ‘bottling up’ the contradictions of the Middle East, and of moving towards a ‘balance of power’ that guaranteed the long-term security of American oil reserves in Saudi Arabia. All that had blown up in Fulbright’s face when the Red Army had moved into Iran; suddenly the real consequences of ‘America First’ and the withdrawal of
US ground, air and sea forces from the Arabian Peninsula had come home to roost...
Peter Christopher turned to face the shorter, stockier man.
“By all means join me, sir,” he half-smiled, recognising Westmoreland.
“This is a heck of thing?” The older man remarked. The rumours about the British sending ‘an ambassador’ to the West Coast had been ripping up the corridors of the State Department for several days. With the Administration’s attention focused inward on the forthcoming Presidential race and the thrust of federal business flying in the face of two decades of State Department thinking and advice, somebody badly needed to get their eyes back on the ball.
“What’s that, sir?”
“The damned fine mess we’ve both gotten ourselves into.”
“Oh, that,” Peter Christopher murmured. “At least this conference isn’t about preventing our two countries from going to war, sir.”
“That’s something,” Westmoreland grumped. The two men stared out to sea for several seconds. “The President can’t give your boss any of the things she wants.”
“That’s all rather above my head, sir.” He sighed. “But for what it’s worth I think you’re mistaken. In part, that is, sir.”
“There’s no way the President can sell a transatlantic ‘free trade zone’ to the American people in election year. As for loans and subsidies, that’s a non-starter.”
