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

by James Philip

  The Commander of Army Group South often found his Red Army comrades thick-headed, too obsessed with what they saw on the map to stop and consider what lay beyond the roads, towns, cities and symbols. Campaigning was not a mere matter of breaking through defence lines or negotiating the terrain, of logistics or of manuever or of entrenchment and position. Understanding ‘the ground’ was only a part of soldiering. Understanding one’s enemy was much more important.

  With a full-strength Guards Tank regiment and a few hundred infantrymen Babadzhanian could have held Ardabil against the rest of 3rd Siberian Mechanized Army for a month; the Iranians had had as many tanks as any of his front line regiments and a garrison of over a thousand men billeted inside Ardabil, and yet, barring the activities of a handful of stay behind snipers, hardly a shot had been fired in defence of the city.

  Ardabil!

  Ardabil; the city from which the Safavids had set out to conquer the whole of Iran and to create a new Muslim Persian Empire that at its zenith had ruled all of modern day Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, the North Caucasus, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain and Afghanistan, as well as large areas of Turkey, Syria, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan for several hundred years.

  As one day the USSR would again rule all those places and many, many more!

  How could a true patriot abandon a place like Ardabil without a fight?

  Tabriz, two hundred kilometres to the west would be unlikely to fall like such a ripe, low hanging fruit into the palm of his hand like the ancient city of Ardabil; in war one accepted a gift from the gods without demur for those gods were fickle, ready to turn on one without warning at any moment.

  “What’s going on in Tehran?” Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian demanded, abruptly curtailing his private reverie.

  “Comrade Colonel Kurochnik reports that the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment is holding the perimeter of Tehran Mehrabad Air Base without difficulty at this time, Comrade Colonel General!”

  Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik was a reliable man overdue for promotion. Although he had been wounded in action against Krasnaya Zarya fanatics in Romania less than six weeks ago, he had insisted on jumping over Tehran with his men and if Babadzhanian was certain of anything, Kurochnik would have been in the thick of the action ever since.

  Maskirovska.

  Dym i zerkala, smoke and mirrors.

  The art of persuading one’s enemy to stare so fixedly at one hand that he never sees the sucker punch coming with the other.

  Kurochnik and his men had done their job to perfection; decapitated – literally – the usurper Pahlavi regime, reduced the capital of Iran to a seething, panic-stricken, uncontrollable disaster area, and now he was drawing the entire Tehran garrison onto the Mehrabad airfield partially encircled by the south western suburbs of the city. After dusk every available Tupolev Tu-95 Bear bomber would attack Tehran, their bomb loads targeted to destroy the transportation infrastructure – roads, railways, bridges – with the aid of criss-crossing navigation and targeting beams broadcast from within Mehrabad air base. In the confusion the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment would be airlifted out of the combat zone before the final devastating act of the Tehran Gambit of Operation Nakazyvat was enacted.

  Babadzhanian’s southern flank – specifically the flank of 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army - had to be shielded before Ardabil could become the great staging post for a logistics train which would eventually stretch all the way from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf via Sulaymaniyah in Iraq.

  Understandably, the question of how to shield 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army’s ever lengthening, completely exposed left flank had been the most heated topic of debate during the planning of Operation Nakazyvat.

  Conventional thinking dictated that nothing short of a third – non-existent – tank army would suffice for such an arduous and militarily challenging task; but Babadzhanian did not have a third army and even if he had had such an army, he would not have wasted it facing south of 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army’s line of march towards an enemy that might never come. In the end the Minister of Defence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, like Babadzhanian a veteran and ‘hero’ of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, had slammed his fist on the table and ended further debate by declaring: ‘We do it the way comrade Amazasp Khachaturovich says!’

  The greatest living Soviet soldier’s cherubically evil face had creased into a wicked grin as he employed the patronymic form of Babadzhanian’s name – which because of his Armenian-Azerbaijani upbringing he himself rarely used – and came down on the side of the only man in the room he trusted to carry out Operation Nakazyvat.

  ‘We let the mountains cover the southern flank!’

  But first the Iranian state had to be de-coupled from its antiquated, corrupt feudal command and control system. In the Iran of the Pahlavi Dynasty nothing happened without the permission of a member of the small governing elite around the person of the Shah. Everybody, everywhere in the Shah of Iran’s kingdom looked to Tehran to do its thinking for it, and at the end of the day, to command it to do whatever needed to be done.

  Iran was like a great slumbering bear.

  Cut off the bear’s head and the body of the immensely powerful and dangerous beast would be helpless for weeks, perhaps months while Colonel General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s two armoured armies trundled through its northern mountains and gathered on the northern flood plains of the tributaries of the Tigris and the Euphrates ahead of the great thrust south to the warm waters of the Persian Gulf.

  Chapter 42

  10:45Hours (EST)

  Saturday 4th April 1964

  The White House, Broad Street, Philadelphia

  The Giraud Corn Exchange Trust Building a few hundred yards down from City hall, the temporary home of the House of Representatives was neither white nor was it in any sense a house. However, as a statement of the grandeur and majesty of the office of the President of the United States of America it was monumentally impressive.

  The building had been selected by the Vice-President. Lyndon Baines Johnson had single-handedly taken upon himself the burden of removing the apparatus of government from battle-ravage Washington to Philadelphia that spring. The great project remained a work in progress but Philadelphia had now been the de facto capital city of the Republic for nearly two months. Back in Washington the removal of the governmental bureaucracy had enabled the accelerated clearance of the debris of the Battle of Washington, and permitted rebuilding to commence uninhibited by having to constantly work around the living organs of the national administration.

  LBJ had stopped looking for sites for the Philadelphia White House when he walked through the doors of the bankrupt Giraud Corn Exchange Trust Building. Its proximity to the relocated House of Representatives apart – a double-edged sword if ever there was one - the building recommended itself for its interim role in many ways. It was truly grand - obviously ‘presidential’, it was built like a fortress and had a huge vault, a likely bomb shelter in these troubled times – and possessed a surfeit of rooms within it and its adjoining thirty-one storey office block sufficient to accommodate not just the Presidential Staff but the new Philadelphia offices of both the State and the Treasury Departmental bureaucracies.

  The Corn Exchange Trust Building itself was a magnificent rotunda designed by the Architect Frank Furness in 1908 as a reproduction of the Pantheon in Rome. The exterior structural fabric of the great edifice was constructed with nine thousand tons of Georgia marble; and the interior with Carerra marble quarried in Italy. A relief of Stephen Giraud, the bank’s founder was carved above the colonnaded entrance, and the oculus of the rotunda’s one hundred foot diameter dome was one hundred and forty feet above where reception parties greeted all high profile visitors to the Philadelphia White House.

  Today only a small party was waiting to intercept Lord Franks as he hurried inside after braving one of the angry spring showers roving acros
s the city. His bodyguards held back, shaking the water of the battery of umbrellas which had failed to completely keep their charge dry in the downpour.

  “My, my,” the British Ambassador exclaimed ruefully, “I swear that it never used to rain so hard in the old days.” The brim of his hat was dripping wet and the lenses of his spectacles were blurred with water.

  J. William Fulbright had made a point of coming downstairs from his office to be seen greeting his visitor. He shook his friend’s hand and smiled sombrely. This morning Philadelphia was like an agitated hornet’s nest; positively buzzing with anti-British sentiment.

  He led Oliver Franks towards the stairs.

  “The President is flying back to Philadelphia tomorrow morning,” the United States Secretary of State confided. “He’s as worried as I am about the news from the Mediterranean. Bob McNamara’s as mad as a March hare about what happened at Malta.”

  The British Ambassador had heard more than one troubling account of the Secretary of Defence’s somewhat fraught dealings with the high command the United States Navy. The latest he had heard of the affair of the sinking of the USS Scorpion in December – an incident in which HMS Dreadnought, the Royal Navy’s only nuclear-powered submarine had been damaged by a torpedo launched by a Grumman S-2 Tracker flying off the USS Enterprise – was that it was still the official view of the Navy Department that the American submarine had been sunk by the Dreadnought. At the very moment the newly formed US Sixth Fleet was fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean senior officers in Philadelphia were still peddling bare-faced lies, scurrilously politicking against British interests in the heart of the relocated seat of the American government.

  Oliver Franks would not have been at all surprised if the malicious rumour that the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom had become so infuriated with the lack of progress in reinstating a unified - NATO, North Atlantic Treaty organisation – integrated high command for ongoing and future Allied operations in the Mediterranean and possibly elsewhere, that it had unilaterally taken matters into its own hands and appointed Admiral Sir David Luce as Supreme Commander, had originated from within the upper echelons of the US defence establishment. If he had been a betting man he would have wagered its most likely source was the Navy Department, newly relocated just across the Delaware River in New Jersey.

  The resultant furore had given a new focus to all those in the United States who believed that in the aftermath of the October War the only way forward was to pursue a ruthlessly ‘America First’ policy. People who subscribed to this view bitterly resented every grain of corn, drop of oil, and every cent in aid that went overseas; particularly when that precious treasure went to prop up a former ally who, in many American eyes, had ‘let them down’ on the night of the war.

  Problematically, very few people in America yet understood that President Kennedy had launched a massive pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw pact Allies without consulting with, or forewarning its closest NATO ally, and that far from hanging back at the critical moment the United Kingdom had only known that war had been declared when the first Polaris missiles broke surface in the Norwegian Sea and the first Soviet missiles began to hurtle over the horizon on terminal trajectories targeting London and the English East Coast bomber bases of the RAF’s V-Bomber Force, over forty percent of which had been destroyed on the ground.

  “What is the mood in England?” William Fulbright asked as soon as the two men were alone in his palatial office. Heavy blast drapes made the room a little gloomy unless the lights were on and armed Marines stood guard outside the Secretary of State’s door.

  “Grim,” Oliver Franks replied. “The Prime Minister has taken things very badly. I have learned that she and Admiral Christopher were personally very close. They were at Balmoral at the time of the attempt on Her Majesty’s wife, you know. Apparently, the Fighting Admiral shielded her with his body during the attack and the Prime Minister, well, obviously she wasn’t Prime Minister at that time, she nursed him the night after the attack and afterwards they were, as I say, very close...”

  Fulbright’s eyebrows lifted.

  This was all news to him and as he absorbed the import of the finely calculated confidence the British Ambassador had adroitly shared with him, his worries multiplied.

  “Very close?” He asked, as if he was simply musing aloud.

  “I am led to believe that Mrs Thatcher was affianced to the Fighting Admiral,” Oliver Franks said lowly.

  In his terse trans-Atlantic telephone conversation with his immediate superior, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson had been at pains to impress upon him that this information was only to be divulged if, and when, Franks saw no other way of warning their Allies that what had happened at Malta ought to be the thing concentrating minds, not the nonsense about the who was, and who was not in the frame to be ‘Supreme Commander’.

  Oliver Franks looked the United States Secretary of State in the eye.

  “The couple planned to announce their intention to wed at the earliest appropriate time. The wedding would not have been until the conclusion of Sir Julian’s tenure in Malta. At that time it was anticipated that he would retire from the Service and stand by his new wife in her political career.”

  The United States Secretary of State said nothing.

  Overnight the American Ambassador in Oxford had personally informed the British Prime Minister that Rear-Admiral Detweiller had been removed from his command and would almost certainly face charges of dereliction of duty and negligence on his return to the United States.

  Walter Brenckmann had reported that the Prime Minister had received the news in stony silence.

  Fulbright raised a hand to his brow,

  He sighed long and hard.

  “Hell, Oliver,” he grunted, “this thing just gets worse!”

  Chapter 43

  21:15 Hours

  Saturday 4th April 1964

  St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, Mdina, Malta

  Marija had felt like she was going to swoon with relief – or it might just have been from sleep deprivation and exhaustion – when Dr Michael Stephens knocked on the door of the first floor office of the Medical Director of St Catherine’s Hospital for Women and cautiously stuck his head into the room.

  ‘You might not be so glad to see me when I tell you why I am here,’ he had warned her, entering the office wearing a boyishly apologetic expression. He had stayed on his feet until he had delivered the bad news.

  Under the articles of the War Emergency Act (Dominions and Dependent Territories, 1963) the Director of Military Medicine on Malta decrees that for an interim period of not less than ninety days the temporary Medical Director of the Women’s Hospital shall be Surgeon Lieutenant Michael Cuthbert Stephens, who will henceforth report to his immediate superior, Surgeon Captain Hughes at Royal Naval Hospital Bighi, under whose remit the aforementioned Women’s Hospital will be licensed to continue to operate under the terms of Martial Law now in place across the Maltese Archipelago.

  Marija wanted to hug Michael Stephens; but her pride made her register a somewhat half-hearted complaint.

  ‘St Catherine’s is a charitable establishment which has always operated under the auspices and the financial supervision of the Arch Diocese of Malta. Although,’ she confessed immediately, somewhat undermining the skeleton of a case she had begun to make for the hospital’s ongoing independence, ‘Margo generally got her own way on most things.’

  This had started her crying. She had held off her tears until then because she had convinced herself she needed to be strong for the other women. But now, alone with Michael Stephens she sobbed unrestrainedly. Shyly, and very awkwardly, the doctor who so much resembled a frightening youthful, less rotund version of his famous surgeon uncle who had unaccountably been the love of Margo Seiffert’s life had hesitantly risen and placed a hand on Marija’s shoulder.

  Marija had recovered her composure e
ventually.

  ‘You should be sitting in this chair,’ she had observed, waving at the mess of the office, and at the window where the wind gusted in and out without let or hindrance since all the glass had been blown out yesterday. ‘I honestly don’t know what to do with all this administrative paperwork. I don’t know what I was thinking volunteering to try to be Margo...’

  Afterwards she had walked around the hospital communicating the news to the other women and the patients, men and women, filling every bed and available free space in the building. She and her nurses were only nurses and most of the people being carried into St Catherine’s Hospital were in need of much more than she or her women could do for them. Michael Stephens had accompanied her to start with but as word spread that he, not Marija was the new Medical Director, she had left him to get on with his work.

  “I wondered if I might find you here, Miss,” a gruffly gentle man’s voice said in the gloom as Marija sat alone in the cold inner courtyard of the hospital where Margo had died. She had wanted to commune with her dead friend; but for the moment there was only a shocked silence in her head.

  Marija looked up.

  “Sorry, begging your pardon, Mrs Christopher,” the man muttered uncomfortably, stepping out of the shadows.

  Marija recognised Jack Griffin and spontaneously, smiled which utterly disorientated HMS Talavera’s legendary hard case. It was several seconds before he retrieved his scattered wits.