Tales of Brave Ulysses (Timeline 10/27/62)

by James Philip

  “Do you know if my parents are okay?”

  “I’m sure they’re fine,” the man in the bed was assured. “They would have had plenty of time to get down to the shelters. From what I can gather there was a detachment of Welsh Guards deployed throughout Sliema and Gzira and they made short work of the parachutists who came down in their neck of the woods.”

  Peter patted his brother-in-law’s shoulder.

  “You did brave deeds yesterday, brother,” he added. “Whereas, this rascal,” he jerked a rueful look in the direction of Petty Officer Jack Griffin to whom his newly acquired scars simply complemented the old, “and I were just doing our duty. What you did was, well, beyond the call and truly heroic.”

  Peter did not know if the man in the bed registered his words.

  He patted Joe Calleja on the shoulder again.

  He stood up, looked down on the somewhat shorter red-headed Petty Officer. Jack Griffin was built like a mobile brick wall with muscular arms that might have been modelled on those of Popeye the sailor man. Jack Griffin’s left eye was closed to a bruised and bloodshot puffy slit and blood oozed persistently through bandages protecting hastily sutured wounds on his brow and at his throat. Notwithstanding, nothing short of a direct order was going to detach him from his Captain’s side.

  So that, after a brief explanation, was what Peter Christopher gave him.

  “I have to return to Marsa Creek shortly. The Acting C-in-C wants to transmit Talavera’s After Action Report to England this evening. Mr Weiss looks like he’s out for the count,” he went on, trying not to sound overly concerned. The doctors speculated that his friend’s worsening concussion was actually a blast related injury which may have caused bleeding on the brain. He had been rushed into one of the three available operating theatres as soon as a table became free. “In Mr Weiss’s absence I need you to find Lieutenant Reilly. He is to meet me at the Kalkara jetty at seventeen-thirty hours.”

  Peter Christopher watched his self-appointed guardian angel trot off down the corridor. Jack Griffin had been a several times demoted Leading Electrical Artificer in his Radar and Electrical Division on the Talavera the night of the October War. Griffin’s bad reputation had come before him and Talavera’s then Executive Officer, Hugo Montgommery, sadly killed at the Battle of Cape Finisterre in December, had practically given up on the man. Simply put, Jack Griffin was one of those men who got to be angry about everything when he drank too much, or when he had too much time to think about the many and varied ills of the World. He was also very bad at taking orders from people he did not like or respect, and despite a decade in the Royal Navy he had never really got used to the idea that the word ‘discipline’ applied to him, too.

  ‘You seem to have got a bad name for yourself, Griffin?’ Peter had asked him upon first acquaintance. In those pre-war days Talavera had been at Chatham running acceptance trials after her radical conversion from a World War Two fleet destroyer to a fast air detection escort designed to act as long-range air defence pickets for the fleet’s big carriers, the Ark Royal, Eagle, Victorious and Hermes. When the ship had finally been handed over to the Navy by the Chatham Royal Naval Dockyard, her officers and men had been horrified by the abysmal standard of the work that had been carried out. Although the external fabric of the destroyer had been sound, the internal fitting out was so bad as to be positively dangerous having been completed with little or no reference to the authorised plans and schematics. The watertight integrity of the ship had been compromised by cableways knocked through bulkheads; and the new deck houses accommodating sophisticated radar and communications equipment, and the generators which powered these critical systems were prone to flooding in heavy weather. Peter’s division had had to rewire and reroute over fifty percent of the Talavera’s cableways, caulk and repair compromised bulkheads and modify the relays and switches governing the output of the new generators before sea trials could commence.

  And at the outset he had inherited Jack Griffin.

  ‘Never mind,’ he had told the man who had been the bane of all of his predecessors on half-a-dozen previous ships, ‘I’d give you a pep talk but that would probably go in one ear and out the other.’

  It had been about then that Jack Griffin had begun to suspect he was not dealing with another green, well-meaning but essentially malleable young officer.

  ‘If you want to be chucked out onto Civvy Street,’ Peter had told him. ‘That’s fine. Just carry on the way you have been carrying on. Right now the ship is a mess and I don’t have time to waste mucking around. Either you are on my side or you are not. A chap like you ought to be well on his way to his Chief’s stripes by now. So, that’s that for the pep talk. As of today you have a clean slate with me. Make me regret it and your feet won’t touch the ground. You’ll be on the beach so soon you won’t know what hit you.’

  Peter had stuck out his hand.

  ‘Make up your mind. That is the contract. Shall we shake on it?’

  Jack Griffin had been so astonished that he had stuck out his hand without thinking. A contract was a contract and he had shaken on it. The October War had happened a few weeks later and the rest was history. He had felt responsible for the man who had been his divisional officer, who had later become his ship’s second-in-command, and latterly his Captain, ever since.

  Peter Christopher had never been a man to over-analyse or deconstruct personal or service relationships; things were what they were and chemistry was an odd thing. He had always been happiest in the company of men who did not take things for granted, men who thought for themselves and had the courage to be accountable for their own good and bad decisions. Characters like Jack Griffin were worth their weight in gold, the heart and soul of any crew.

  “Are you fit for duty, Jack?” He asked, man to man rather than three-ring Commander to his ship’s most newly promoted Petty Officer, as soon as Jack Griffin returned from delivering his message to Lieutenant O’Reilly.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Good. In that case I have a couple more errands for you. First off I need you to find the Master at Arms and ask him to report to me at his convenience.” He thought carefully about the next ‘errand’. “The telephone system is down across the island. So I also need you to deliver a personal letter to my wife in Mdina. And if after she has read it she decides to return with you to Valletta, I want you to personally escort her. Things are a bit of a mess between here and Mdina so detail off a couple of fellows who know how to handle themselves. In the event there’s any trouble. Any questions?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’ll have the letter ready for you in about half-an-hour. You can set off then.”

  Peter Christopher watched Jack Griffin doubling away.

  “That man is a maniac,” Joe Calleja muttered from his hospital bed, but not without a tinge of admiration.

  “Yes,” his brother-in-law agreed. “Just thank God he’s on our side!”

  Finding a place where he could sit down and compose a note to Marija was a less than straightforward business. The occasion and the circumstances in which he was writing to his wife demanded something polished, endlessly perused and edited, re-edited and lovingly crafted but he had no time or energy for that.

  In a few minutes he had to get back to Marsa Creek to write his report of HMS Talavera’s role in the Battle of Malta. With Miles Weiss hors de combat he hoped Dermot O’Reilly, Talavera’s navigator would be able to fill in gaps in his recollection of courses, speeds and the general sequence of things and have the presence of mind and wit to correct any obvious mistakes or omissions. Some time tomorrow the first flight into Luqa would bring journalists, men from the Ministry of Information, and several as yet unidentified VIPs all of whom he was, apparently, expected ‘to humour’. He hoped that sometime in the next few hours somebody would find him a uniform which actually fitted him. Air-Vice Marshal French’s Chief of Staff had promised him ‘all that will be sorted out’; but given the situation he had to be some kind
of magician if he really believed that. Most of all Peter wanted to hold his wife in his arms; until he held Marija in his arms again nothing would convince him what he had gone through yesterday had been worth it.

  Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann found him scribbling his missive to Marija in an old storeroom.

  Jack Griffin hovered at the Master at Arms’s shoulder.

  “If you would give us a couple of minutes, PO Griffin?” Peter put to the junior of the two men and the red-headed man made himself scarce. He turned to the older man. “I gather Lieutenant Hannay discharged himself from the hospital, Mr McCann?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was a bench in one corner of the dusty room at the back of the old Zymotic – fever – wing of RNH Bighi. Peter waved his senior non-commissioned officer to take a seat.

  “You look all in,” he observed when the older man hesitated. “Sit down for a few minutes. Nobody will see you slacking in here, Master.”

  “No, sir,” Spider McCann admitted, gratefully resting his battered and aching frame but in absolutely no way entirely comfortable sitting down in his Captain’s presence.

  “Mr Hannay,” Peter explained, putting down his pen in mid sentence. “Mr O’Reilly, you, Jack Griffin and dozen fittest survivors from the crew will report to RAF Luqa not later than sixteen hundred hours tomorrow. A party from the Yarmouth is being mustered separately and will meet us all at the air field. I’ve been promised fresh Blue No. 3, or No. 4 dress, I don’t know which, for officers and men so we can all be kitted out presentably for the flight to England on Monday.”

  Spider McCann’s eyebrows arched.

  This told the younger man that he badly needed to organise his thoughts a little better.

  “Ah, sorry, I should have mentioned that first really. We’re being flown back to Blighty to meet the Queen and I assume, the Prime Minister and sundry senior officers and worthies. There may not be room on the planes flying back to England for everybody but I’ve been assured by the C-in-C, Air Vice-Marshal French, that any Talaveras left behind will be offered a posting back in England in due course rather than being automatically reassigned to the Mediterranean Fleet’s manning pool.” He glanced down to the half-written letter on the edge of the rickety table at his elbow. “I’m writing to my wife to let her know what is going on. The powers that be have requested that she fly back to England with us but,” he shrugged, “that will be up to her. I’m sending Jack Griffin to Mdina to find my wife and to deliver the letter. I’ve ordered him to detail off a couple of our people to go with him.” Forcing a smile he continued: “Can I leave it to you to round up Mr Hannay, to select the men to accompany us back home, and to let the other chaps know what is going on, Master?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Mr Reilly will be accompanying me back to HQ at Marsa Creek. Hopefully, he’ll remember more about the twists and turns we put Talavera through after we cleared the Grand Harbour than I do!”

  Spider McCann grinned.

  Peter returned his grin.

  “When we were charging towards those big ships yesterday everything seemed so simple. Now,” he shrugged, “well, that was then I suppose, and this is now.”

  “That’s the Navy for you, sir. If it isn’t one thing it’s another!”

  Peter Christopher nodded.

  “Thank you, Master.” He picked up his pen. “If you could tell PO Griffin to hang around for another ten minutes please. This letter will be ready for him to take to Mdina by then.”

  Chapter 41

  17:45 Hours (Local)

  Saturday 4th April 1964

  Residence of the Military Governor, Ardabil, Northern Iran

  In the mind of Colonel General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian, the commander of Army Group South, the early investment and capture – hopefully largely intact – of the city of Ardabil was the first and most important litmus test of the viability of Operation Nakazyvat. If Ardabil, some seventy kilometres from the Caspian Sea and less than half that from the border with Azerbaijan could not be taken swiftly, it augured nothing but ill for the rest of the campaign in the mountains of Northern Iran.

  Babadzhanian had no pretensions to be a great strategist. He was a fighting soldier, a tank man with a profound understanding of, and a virtually unparalleled experience of armoured warfare who believed in fighting battles step by step, constantly reappraising successes and failures and ruthlessly exploiting the weaknesses exposed by each probe or counter punch. He had planned for most conceivable possibilities; he had even planned for a scenario in which the Iranian units stationed on the border were capable of not just mounting a robust, in depth defence but also of retaining a limited capacity to launch narrow front counter attacks against the exposed flanks of his armoured columns tens of kilometres inside Iran. The only thing Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had not factored into his plans was that the Iranian army – British and American trained and equipped, albeit with older surplus kit, some of it of World War II vintage – would surrender en masse as soon as the initial bombardment lifted, and then melt away before the T-62 led spearheads of 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army. Less still had he dared to imagine that the relatively small airborne force dropped to seize the small Iranian Air Force base north of the city of Ardabil would take the airfield intact with the loss of less than ten casualties, and that the fleeing defenders would panic the whole of Ardabil into surrender while the first T-62s of the 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army were still snarled up along the narrow roads fifteen kilometres north west of the city.

  None of his tanks had yet reached the city as Colonel General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s Mil Mi6 Red Air Force helicopter bumped down onto the verdant lawn of the elegant compound just outside the old city of Ardabil.

  Paratroopers rushed forward to form a circling, protective honour guard for the Army Group Commander. Salutes were exchanged.

  “I respectfully recommend we get under cover, Comrade Colonel General,” shouted a lean, hook-nosed major over the thrumming of the rotors directly over his head, “there are still several enemy snipers active in the city.”

  Babadzhanian nodded his curt acknowledgement of the warning but marched unhurriedly towards the mansion of the former military governor of Ardabil. Inside it was cool, almost cold and nobody had started to clear up the mess the previous occupants had left in their headlong rush to escape. The conqueror had little time to waste admiring the intricate and colourful tessellation of the mosaic floors under his feet, or the hand-painted Farsi sayings on the wall and ceiling tiles at each doorway. It was all Babadzhanian could do to contain his elation at such a bloodless victory. In a matter of hours his deepest fears had proved to be groundless, and each and every one of his theories about the intrinsic dissonance and incoherence of an Iranian state – founded upon a throne stolen by a usurper dynasty which but for the meddling of the British and the Americans could have fallen at any time in the last decade – made up of religious and ethnically diverse and incompatible communities, had been vindicated. Ardabil was a case in point; its population was mainly Azeri, not Iranian. Most families in Ardabil traced their origins not to Iran, but to Azerbaijan where in times within living memory many had been forced to flee because of religious persecution or economic necessity, or had simply been driven south in one of the minor tribal and border wars that had afflicted the region from time immemorial. Many of the Azeris in Ardabil and the surrounding country felt themselves to be at least half-Russian Azerbaijani; to some, possibly a sizable minority, the Red Army tanks and Red Air Force jets rumbling through their villages and thundering across their skies were liberators.

  Big maps were spread across a table roughly dragged into the centre of what must have been some kind of banqueting hall the day before. Technicians wearing the tabs of the Fourth Guards Tank Regiment on their uniforms snapped upright as the Army Group Commander entered the room.

  “Carry on!” Babadzhanian barked.

  The technicians were from his Headquar
ters Company, sent forward the moment the commander of the under-strength airborne company which had secured the nearby air base had, on his own initiative, pushed on into the northern suburbs of the city. During the great Patriotic War Babadzhanian had been slow to fully appreciate the marvels of modern communications technologies; but his experience putting down the counter revolutionary uprising in Budapest in 1956 had taught him exactly what went wrong if unit and army level command communications nets lost contact one with the other. In Hungary he had ended up with tanks and infantry in the wrong places at the wrong times; the ‘Budapest Action’ would have been a dirty, bloody business whatever he had done but if he was asked to repeat the affair he would have done his business faster, with co-ordinated crushing brutality. Back in 1956 his armour had moved in according to an overly rigid plan and then everything had gone to Hell. It had not mattered in the end, the uprising had been put down and his masters in the Kremlin did not care how it had been done. However, he had known what had gone wrong and he had learned valuable lessons from the experience, every one of which he had rigorously applied to every facet of the planning for Operation Nakazyvat.

  Babadzhanian leaned over the map table, resting his clenched fists on the map of north eastern Iran. He still could not believe that the Iranian Army – albeit garrisoning the city in battalion rather than the regimental strength he had anticipated - had fled Ardabil, the city that guarded the tomb of Sheikh Safi-ad-din Is'haq Ardabili, the twelfth and thirteenth century poet and the Kurdish Sunni founder of the Safavid Dynasty. The very name of ‘Ardabil’ came from a root which meant ‘holy town’ or ‘holy place’; to abandon such a city without a fight spoke of a people and an army ripe for conquest.