Several points held Murphy’s attention, even as he reorganized his task groups. The Soviet SAG operating just over the horizon had not yet taken any aggressive action. For the past week, the admiral had kept a strike force of A-6 Intruders and F-4F Phantoms armed with anti-ship missiles in constant orbit around the SAG. Without a carrier to land on, this group would soon need to head for Crete, leaving the Soviets to operate freely. There was also the question of several Foxtrots operating in the area, though no contacts had been reported in the past hours. As for Task Group 60/61, there could be no question of its leaving Souda Bay until the SAG tagging it could be neutralized. Murphy could only hope that the communists would not start lobbing missiles into a (nominally, at least) neutral port. The most important question, however, and the question upon which all else hinged, was this: “Are we at war?”
In Washington, men who had seen far too little sleep and far too much frustration over the past weeks briefed a bedraggled President Nixon on the budding catastrophe in the Mediterranean. Obviously, the Soviets, serious about stopping the Israeli advances in Syria and Egypt, had used the accidental missile firing to justify removing the major threat to convoys of troops and weapons to the Middle East. Kissinger placed calls to the Soviet Embassy as well as to Moscow—none were immediately returned. A frantic call to Israel stressed the need for an immediate cease fire before the war expanded even further. Nixon finally ordered the Joint Chiefs to do whatever they could to localize the situation and to prevent Soviet troops transiting to the Middle East. Meanwhile, Kissinger would try to establish talks with the Soviets.
In Moscow, the events took everyone by surprise. No one had any idea why the Americans had fired on a reconnaissance plane, much less why a Soviet cruiser had attacked an American task force. Were the Americans planning to send troops to Israel? Had their navy actually attacked the Soviet SAG to prepare the way for their amphibious group to move in that direction? Too many questions and too few answers confounded the Politburo. Brezhnev ordered the situation localized while talks could be established with the Americans.
Thus, the messages transmitted to the commanders of Sixth Fleet and Fifth Ekskadra from their governments through their respective military hierarchies, though couched in different languages, sounded much alike: “Keep your distance, don’t expand the conflict, but don’t let them push you around or introduce troops to the Middle East.” Unfortunately, there was an awfully large number of planes and ships crowded into the Mediterranean, too many to avoid the occasional shove.
The amphibious transport USS Iwo Jima had entered the Mediterranean on the afternoon of October 24. Its battalion of Marines and their helicopters had been meant to relieve a battalion already on duty with TG 60/61; now ship and men, as well as its two escorting frigates, would reinforce that unit. At 0900 on October 25, the force plowed through the sea at flank speed, bound for Souda Bay, seemingly unaware that it was being stalked.
The skipper of the Soviet nuclear-powered submarine (SSN) Red March had received his orders to stop American troops from interfering in the Middle East an hour earlier—he had been tagging the imperialist transport since it transited the Straits of Gibraltar. By 1000, he had positioned his vessel for a perfect shot at the transport and one of the escorts. Then, at the instant that he ordered torpedoes fired, the task group began a puzzling evasive turn. Seconds later, as an American torpedo intercepted his own boat, the captain understood that the target had known about him all along. In the sky above, the crew of Gloria’s Goodies, an Orion P-3C of VP-45 slapped hands and cheered, having now validated their recent victory in the fleet ASW competition. Over the next 20 hours, VP-45 would add three additional Soviet subs to its tally.24
At 1125, the executive officer of the Independence informed Admiral Murphy that initial damage estimates, though severe, had been inaccurate. His fires were under control, enough of the deck to handle landings had been patched, and he expected to have one catapult operating within 20 hours. Including the planes circling the Commie SAG, he could put 28 fighters and bombers back in the air (even if slowly) as soon as the catapult had been repaired. He requested permission to land his air group rather than divert it to Crete, where it could well be denied refueling rights. Murphy concurred—even a few planes would be better than no carrier air until Roosevelt reached the area in another 40 hours. In the meantime, he drew his own AAW vessels in tighter, and shifted control of the screen from Independence to Little Rock.
At 1345, the SSN USS Lapon skulked in the Aegean Sea, dodging Bears on Soviet ASW patrol and waiting for the reported Moskva SAG to reach its location after exiting the Dardanelles. Since the carrier Moskva was an ASW specialist, it represented a grave danger to the Lapon and every other American SSN operating in the Mediterranean. Lapon’s skipper did not know whether to be sad or happy when the SAG appeared on the horizon with a Kynda Class cruiser at its center instead of the carrier. He had time to be neither as the escorting destroyers spotted his boat and commenced an attack. Firing in self-defense, Lapon managed to sink the cruiser and an escorting destroyer. Severely damaged during the attack, the submarine lay on the bottom for two days before repairs allowed it to limp into Athens. The Naval Unit Citation presented to the vessel the following December was richly deserved.25
By sunset on October 25, the situation in the Mediterranean had long passed the stage of “exceedingly tense.” In other skirmishes around the basin, Fifth Eskadra had lost a submarine, several Bears, and two destroyers. Sixth Fleet had suffered as badly, tallying two submarines, three frigates, and two replenishment vessels lost or presumed lost. Both sides had damaged vessels limping for friendly or neutral ports. Worse, the situation had almost exploded in the Atlantic when a confrontation between an American Task Group and a Soviet SAG off the coast of Norway nearly resulted in an exchange of fire instead of a scraping of paint after two destroyers collided. Across the seven seas, forces of both nations eagerly sought an advantage in a most dangerous game of hide and seek. Meanwhile, diplomats sought to end this meaningless conflict which threatened to end the world in fire.
The politicians spent most of October 25 in the usual recriminations—an admittance of wrong-doing meant an unacceptable loss of face in the game of brinkmanship so often played during the Cold War. In the emergency UN Security Council meeting called for the afternoon and evening of that day, both countries walked out at different times as aides brought in messages of new “atrocities” at sea. Interestingly enough, the loudest cries for an end to the fighting came from Egypt, Israel, and Syria. Not a shot had been fired in the war-torn Middle East that day, and plans appeared to be in order for a permanent cease fire being in place by midday of October 26. Perhaps a nameless Egyptian captain on the Suez front explained the situation best to a reporter from the Times Post: “If Soviets and Americans begin to toss nuclear missiles, we [Arabs and Israelis] will have no quarrel remaining for we will all be in Paradise or Hell.”26
At 2311, the two superpowers finally agreed to UN Resolution 401, which called for an end to hostilities at 0800 (1400 in the central Mediterranean), October 26, disengagement of all forces in the Mediterranean, a three month moratorium on all shipments of arms to the Middle East, and a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, the following month to determine the causes of the incident. In other words, the ice could begin to reform as the war again grew cold. Decisions made at the eleventh hour, however, often leave time for one last bout of fiery misery.
Bloody Finale on the Wine Dark Sea
As night fell across the Mediterranean on the last full day of the Middle Eastern conflict, Admiral Murphy decided to spring his vulnerable amphibious task group from Souda Bay. Three days earlier, the gunboats of Patrol Division 21 had shifted from Naples to Souda Bay. The mission fell to them. At 0120 on October 26, Antelope, Defiance, and Surprise exited the bay at flank speed to eliminate the two missile-armed Mod-Kashins monitoring TG 60/61 in the Sea of Crete. The skipper of Antelope, overall commander of the three-ship unit, rem
arked to his exec that he looked forward to testing his newly installed RIM-66B surface-to-surface missile system on the “damned Reds.” An educated man, he even spared passing thoughts for Homer’s description of these waters as “the wine-dark sea,” and how the deep, dark Greek red wine looked so much like blood.
Thanks to background radar clutter, the American ships closed to within 20 miles of the Soviet SAG before being spotted on radar. That range closed even further as the Mod-Kashins turned to bring their stern-mounted SS-N-2c missiles to bear. The Russians still managed to release missiles first, at almost the same minute as the rapid-fire 3-inch mounts on the gunboats speckled the destroyers with hits. Antelope released chaff and held a steady course as it salvoed two missiles at each of the Soviet destroyers. Defiance, struck amidships by a Russian missile, slewed to port and began to sink. The remainder of the squadron continued to close the Soviets, who turned to allow their forward twin 76mm turrets to bear. Then the American missiles struck. One of the destroyers disappeared in a small mushroom cloud as a hit ignited sympathetic explosions in its missile magazine. The other seemed to shrug off a single hit and continued to plaster Surprise with 76mm fire. In flames, its weapons silent and crew dead or overboard, the small warship coasted to a stop.
Desperately, Antelope’s skipper held his vessel on a direct course for the remaining destroyer, even after a hit disabled his single gun mount. He saw no options—if the Soviets survived they would fire on the anchorage. Over the address system rang words seldom if ever heard on modern warships: “I intend to ram. All hands gather midships and stern. Prepare for boarding action.” There were not enough weapons in the arms locker to equip even a fraction of the men, nor time to distribute them. The crew snatched whatever was to hand: spanners from engineering, cleavers and knives from the galley, a scalpel from sickbay. One petty officer, discovering nothing sharp lying about, ran to his cabin and grabbed a fifth of Jack Daniels. Sprinting on deck, he grinned at his men and took a long pull from the bottle before swearing to “break it over a Commie head.”
The Antelope struck the Soviet destroyer at an angle, bow crumpling as it embedded itself in the destroyer’s engineering spaces. Stumbling, lunging, or crawling the surviving Americans crossed to the deck of their enemy. The cries that filled the night were primal, the product of years of ice-cold hatred released in minutes of hot passion. Even as the joined vessels began to sink, men screamed and hacked and choked and shot each other. Nor did they stop until the blood-red waters closed over them. Hours later, as dawn brought light, the ships of TG 60/61 pulled only two American and five Russian survivors from the sea.27
A Poem Revisited
Two men leaned on the taffrail of the USS Aubrey. Once they had been young men, but that had ended sometime in the past few days. One, an officer, looked at his watch—0238, October 27, 1973. And things were normal again, as if the world had not changed at all.
“Lieutenant Gadsden, sir?” whispered the petty officer at his side.
“Yes.”
“We caused it. Didn’t we, sir? All that death for nothing and our ship caused it.”
Gadsden considered for a minute, then sighed: “No. I don’t think so. Our parents and our grandparents, maybe they caused it when they taught us to hate and fear, and follow orders without question. No. It was just another accident in a long string of human beings having accidents.”
“I think I understand that poem now, sir,” the petty officer could see that the man beside him had no idea what he was talking about: “The one about ice and fire, sir. Hate—ice—has brought us to this Cold War. But the hate turns hot so quick, and if we can’t stop it, then the world will end in fire.”
The two exhausted men looked into each other’s eyes, and through them to some time a thousand yards and more away, when their world would end in fire or ice.
The Reality
The events of this story, up to and including the DefCon 3 alert of October 25, are true. Fortunately, Sixth Fleet and Fifth Eskadra miraculously managed to avoid any direct confrontation while Egypt and Israel, heavily pressured by the major suppliers of weapons in the Middle East (the United States and the USSR) agreed to the cease fire on October 26. The naval stand-off in the Mediterranean between the superpowers did continue for another week, by which time the USSR had superiority in quantity if not quality of warships. But with tensions abating in the Middle East, the situation returned to its Cold War norm by late November.
Lieutenant Gadsden, the petty officer, and the USS Aubrey are fiction. The same should be said of the captain of the Admiral Ushakov and the crew of USS Antelope. That should not be taken to mean that men and ships of their ilk never existed, as many readers who served in the Mediterranean in 1973, or at other times and places, will realize. Could circumstances have combined to make this story, or some form thereof, a reality? Oh, yes. History records numerous accidental discharges of weapons, incorrectly aimed shells, and munitions that exploded at the wrong time and place. In almost every case, however, human error played a part. It is a testament to the training of the navies on both sides of the now defunct Iron Curtain that such human errors were minimized in the Mediterranean in 1973.
Astute readers will have asked themselves one important question as they read this story: “Why did the fictional Confrontation of 1973 not evolve into a nuclear exchange?” There are two good reasons for that path not being taken. First, at no point in my studies of the Cold War have I found a single instance where the politicians of both the United States and the USSR had any doubts that Mutually Assured Destruction would leave no winners on either side. Paranoia does not necessarily lead to suicidal tendencies. Second, it would have been a horrible way to end a story: at this point, dear reader, if you disagree please burn this book to simulate a nuclear firestorm over most of the world’s major cities.
Some readers may not be familiar with Robert Frost’s short poem “Fire and Ice.” First published in Harper’s Magazine in December 1920, the lines fit so well with the dilemmas of the Cold War that Frost almost seems prescient. Please think upon the following lines as you consider the nature of war, whether hot or cold.
SOME say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice…
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Bibliography
Aker, Frank, October 1973: The Arab-Israeli War, Archon Books, Hamden, CT, 1985.
Hagan, Kenneth J., ed., In Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History, 1775–1984, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1984.
Hartmann, Frederick, Naval Renaissance: The US Navy in the 1980s, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 1990.
Herzog, Chaim, The War of Atonement: October, 1973, Little, Brown, Boston, 1975.
Israelyan, Victor, Inside the Kremlin During the Yom Kippur War, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 1995.
Vego, Milan, Soviet Naval Tactics, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 1992.
Watson, Bruce W,. and Susan M., eds., The Soviet Navy: Strengths and Liabilities, Arms and Armour Press, London, 1986.
Winkler, David F., Cold War at Sea: High-Seas Confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 2000.
Zumwalt, Elmo R., Jr., On Watch: A Memoir, Quadrangle, New York, 1976.
Notes
*1. Rear Admiral R.A. Gadsden, USN (ret.), Warbirds Away! (Callihan Press, New York, 2002), p. 7.
2. Zumwalt, On Watch: A Memoir, pp. 337–38.
3. Lawrence J. Korb, “Erosion of American Naval Preeminence,” in Hagan, In Peace and War, pp. 329—32.
4. Watson and Watson, The Soviet Navy: Strengths and Liabilities, pp. 188, 209, 220, 235.
5. Hagan, Peace and War, 336. Note that the Russian designation Eskadra, like the American term Fleet, is applied to a geographic area of operations rather than a set number of warships, desp
ite that its literal meaning is squadron. It also has a number of westernized spellings (for example: “Estrada’).
6. Winkler, Cold War at Sea, pp. 177–210.
7. Israelyan, Inside the Kremlin during the Yom Kippur War, p. 10.
8. All too frequently, researchers will find “Kippur” rendered as “Kipper,” an interesting confusion of historic and gastronomic events.
9. Zumwalt, On Watch, pp. 432–34.
10. Http://members.aol.com/SamBlu82/menu7.html.
11. Http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/latakia.html; Aker, October 1973: The Arab Israeli War, pp. 62–63. The engagement between the missile boats was the first naval battle to feature an exchange of missile fire and the use of electronic counter-measures to defeat incoming missiles
12. OPEC threatened to reduce oil production, thus reducing availability and increasing the cost per barrel, until Israel restored all lands taken during the 1967 War. Though the lands were not restored, OPEC ended the embargo in March 1974 (a clear victory of profit over principle).
13. Israelyan, Inside the Kremlin, pp. 136–37.
14. Ibid., pp. 169–70.
15. The alert status of American military forces is defined by five Defense Conditions (DefCon 1–5). DefCon 5 is normal peace time operations, the lowest level of alert. DefCon 3 calls for military forces to prepare for a potential shooting situation, while DefCon 1 is maximum readiness level.
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