Willie Whitelaw desperately wanted to jump in; but something held his tongue. Something that was ineluctably unspoken in the didactic certainty of Michael Carver’s uncommonly sure-footed delivery.
“That is not to say that we will not eventually be obliged to pack up our camps, depart with our tails between our legs and leave the region to the tender mercies of the Soviet invader,” Carver went on. “In the time available to us, say perhaps a month, two if we are very lucky, we can strengthen our air presence with a view to achieving local air superiority over the Persian Gulf, fly in infantry reinforcements and begin to collaborate with friends, and possibly former adversaries in the region in whose best interests it would be to form mutual defence arrangements. Specifically, this would involve building on existing professional relations between members of the British officer cadre in the region and the commanders of the surviving units of the Iranian Army positioned around Abadan. It means negotiating with the Saudi Arabian authorities to gain access to the US ‘War Stores Depots’ located at Al Jeddah, Riyadh and Damman-Dhahran, and fully opening the former US Air Base at the last of those places to our aircraft. Thirdly, we must make our peace with Egypt. I repeat, at any cost we must make out peace with Egypt. Because if we don’t make peace with that country then we shall never, never, expel the Red Army from the northern shores of the Persian Gulf. It goes without saying,” he added ominously, “if we don’t expel the Red Army from the Gulf, say before the autumn of this year, in a few years from now the whole Middle East will be a fabulously oil rich Soviet Republic dedicated to the downfall of the Western World.”
The Secretary of State for Defence mulled this wordlessly, knowing now that there was more, much more to come and that what he had intuitively misidentified as ‘defeatism’ was nothing less than brutal pragmatism.
“Within the framework of those assumptions and caveats,” Michael Carver continued, “I have recommended the following to the Chiefs of Staff.”
A pause for one last reflection.
“One; that we reinforce our existing garrisons in the theatre outside Iraq and Iran as best we may in terms of men and materiel. Two; that we withdraw the Basra garrison to Abadan. This has already begun. Three; that we make no attempt to interdict the Soviet invasion until such time as the leading elements of the spearhead of the Red Army approach, or ideally, have passed Abadan on the western side of the Shatt al-Arab to invest the Faw Peninsula. Four; at that time limited offensive demonstrations should be mounted to give the impression that it is our intention to make a stand at Abadan to cover the withdrawal of our forces at that place. Five; that all the facilities at Abadan be destroyed prior to our departure. In the mean time the RAF must establish air superiority over the Persian Gulf, Southern Iraq, Kuwait and the Western Desert of Iraq. Six; that we must begin to build up whatever mobile force resources permit, in Kuwait if necessary but ideally for deployment in northern Saudi Arabia. Seven; that at such time as the Red Army — by then with most of its surviving equipment in a poor state of repair and its manpower exhausted — digs into position along the northern shores of the Persian Gulf, offensive operations should be launched from the west and the east to cut the Soviet lines of communication mid-way between Baghdad and Basra.”
Willie Whitelaw stared at the other man.
“Cannae,” he murmured.
Michael Carver nodded. Among his numerous accomplishments he was a military historian who had — before the October War — anticipated a retirement spent writing of old battles and campaigns, including those in which he had participated in the Western Desert, with a view to debunking no small number of popular myths about Erwin Rommel’s career prior to Bernard Montgommery’s arrival in the desert in 1942.
Every fighting general dreamed of master-minding his personal Cannae, of engineering and fighting a war-winning battle. Every subaltern at practically every staff college learned about Cannae but only once in a generation, or maybe two or three or four generations, did a general officer actually glimpse a fleeting opportunity to ‘Cannae’ his enemy.
The technology and the mobility of warfare had changed since that August day of the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC in Apulia in southern Italy but the principles of war remained the same. On that day over two millennia ago the Army of the Roman Republic under the command of the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro, had been enveloped and destroyed by the much smaller Carthaginian army of Hannibal. The Romans had become so pre-occupied battering at the apparently weak Carthaginian centre that the powerful wings of Hannibal’s army had swept around it, and much like a giant meat grinder, chewed the massed legions to pieces. Classical sources spoke of only fourteen thousand of the eighty-six thousand legionnaires of the Roman Republican horde escaping the slaughter.
“Yes, sir,” Carver agreed. “But first we must let the ground over which our enemy is advancing and the privations of that country take its toll on him, and,” he looked hard at Willie Whitelaw, “by hook or by crook you must find me an armoured corps with which to Cannae these blighters!”
Chapter 19
Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann followed the other officers filing into the great carrier’s long, low Wardroom. He had only just come off watch where he was three-quarters the way through qualifying to stand as Officer of the Deck (OOD) unsupervised. Standing watch on the bridge of the US Navy’s biggest ship — the Kitty Hawk was over a thousand feet long, displaced over eighty thousand tons fully loaded, had a four acre flight deck, carried over eighty aircraft and helicopters and had a crew of well over five-and-a-half thousand men — was roughly akin to being in command of a floating air base capable of steaming at thirty-three knots, or in land lubber’s money, better than thirty-seven miles an hour. Walter Brenckmann did not think he was going to get used to that any time soon.
He had joined the super carrier while she was still in dock at Kobe undergoing a routine overhaul. Completed in 1961 the Kitty Hawk had been in need of a ‘two year service’ and now she was as good as new, working up to full combat efficiency with her re-constituted air wing and some six hundred new officers and men rotated into her company during the refit period.
Twenty-eight year old Walter Brenckmann only occasionally — he was far too busy most of the time — thought about the surreal days of last December when briefly, he had been at the eye of the US Navy’s scandal of the century.
The chain of command of the Polaris boats of Submarine Squadron 15 based at Alameda in San Francisco Bay had been compromised; rogue firing instructions and targeting coordinates had been issued to at least one boat, the USS Sam Houston (SSBN-608). Even though he was wholly blameless in the affair; other than having been instrumental in bringing the ‘problem’ to the attention of his superiors, he had wrongly as it turned out, suspected his naval career was over. Instead, he had been promised a place on next year’s Nuclear Boat Command Course and in the mean time he had been posted to the Kitty Hawk, the flagship of Carrier Division Seven, as Assistant Anti-Submarine Officer and been given the opportunity to qualify for OOD duties.