“I’m sure the Foreign Secretary will be communicating that to Crown Prince Faisal in Riyadh, Sir Richard.” Margaret Thatcher could hardly credit that the Saudi Arabian government was still haggling over the terms of its only possible salvation. The way the Saudis were behaving it was as if they honestly believed that the Red Army would stop at the Kuwaiti border! Ever since the USS Kitty Hawk had arrived in the Arabian Sea the Crown Prince had been trying to play off the two old trans-Atlantic allies against each other!
“Provisional plans,” Willie Whitelaw, the Defence Minister sighed, “are being made to land Egyptian forces directly on Kuwaiti territory. The port facilities at Damman are better, obviously, but if the Saudis are going to make difficulties, well,” he opened his hands, “we shall just have to get on with it.”
The Saudi government — a conglomeration of feuding members of the nobility who had more in common with medieval satraps in a Byzantine court than any kind of modern twentieth century administration — was schizophrenic about the presence of foreign troops on its soil. For some reason the presence of the USS Kitty Hawk and her escorts in the Arabian Sea had convinced a substantial faction within the ruling elite that the United States — against all the evidence — had not actually abandoned the Kingdom. At one level this naively wishful thinking ignored the fact that presently, the US did not actually need Saudi oil; and on another level, flew in the face of the equally persuasive consideration that if it lost Abadan, the United Kingdom did need that oil. Who did the Saudis think was more likely to fight to stop the oil tap being turned off?
Tom Harding-Grayson advised that the Saudis be allowed to play out their internal contradictions. The first priority was the use of air bases, port facilities and transit areas in and around the Damman-Dhahran area; and the question of the American war stores depots should not be permitted to muddy the waters. Other than the thousands of free fall bombs — of every imaginable non-nuclear type and size — stored in the war stores depots, little else in those great ‘weapon dumps’ in the desert was actually usable by the British or the ANZAC — Australian and New Zealand — forces currently being built up in the region. The US military used different calibre naval shells, tank rounds and small arms bullets, and the one hundred and fifty tanks — mainly M-48 Pattons — ‘parked’ in Jeddah and outside Riyadh had been partially disabled by the US Army prior to its pull out the previous autumn. Likewise, many of the artillery pieces and armoured personnel carriers required ‘reactivation’ before they could be deployed. It seemed that American planners had assumed a sixty to ninety day ‘de-mothballing’ window ahead of any future emergency, and de-commissioned equipment accordingly.
Tom Harding-Grayson was probably right in asserting that the Saudis still had not worked out that the reason the Americans had left mostly old, obsolete, disabled equipment and thousands of tons of World War II-type ordnance — bombs and shells — in Arabia was that they never intended coming back. Or rather, if they ever came back it would be with modern, state of the art weaponry.
“Well,” Margaret Thatcher sighed, “I’m sure that Tom will eventually persuade the Saudis that this is their fight, too. In the meantime we should focus on the positives. In this connection I spoke again to both the Australian and New Zealand High Commissioners yesterday evening. No words of praise are sufficient to express my personal gratitude for the sacrifices they are making to help us.”
Everybody around the table was astonished that their Australasian Commonwealth friends had dug so deep so quickly. Within days of the first tentative inquiry the Australian Navy had started strengthening HMAS Sydney’s flight and hangar decks to carry forty-one ton Centurion tanks, begun mobilizing reserve units and marching small airborne and special forces formations onto transport aircraft bound for the Middle East. New Zealand had raised two rifle battalions, and hurriedly found enough men to crew and fight the old cruiser Royalist — for many years relegated to the role of a training ship — and dispatched them to the Indian Ocean. When the Australian government was asked if it was prepared to release HMS Centaur, the aircraft carrier that Julian Christopher had left at Sydney to ensure that the Australian Navy always had at least one aircraft carrier available for operations, the Australian government had taken less than twenty-four hours to confer and agree to the Admiralty’s plea.
At the last count there were thirty-nine Australian Centurion tanks and nearly six thousand ANZAC fighting men ashore at Damman in the Persian Gulf. In addition to the Australian Navy destroyers Anzac, Tobruk and Voyager, some twenty Westland Wessex helicopters were to be operated from the deck of HMAS Sydney as soon as she had finished unloading her cargo of Centurions.
Those Centurions — including twenty-three up-gunned Mark IIs — were priceless. Although eight thousand troops had so far been flown into Kuwait, Abadan and Dhahran from the United Kingdom and Cyprus as yet, no heavy equipment had reached the Persian Gulf from England or the Mediterranean. Moreover, apart from the cruiser HMS Tiger and a few smaller ships which had made best speed around the Cape taking nearly a month to reach the Arabian Sea, no significant naval reinforcements other than the Centaur and the ANZAC contingent had yet reached the theatre.
Last night the Australian High Commissioner had proudly reported that a second consignment of eleven Centurion tanks — previously mothballed Mark Is of Korean War vintage — were loading onboard a ‘fast transport’ at Sydney bound for the Gulf sometime in the next few days.
Sir Richard Hull was no less impressed with the ANZAC contribution than his Prime Minister but he could not allow himself to be carried away with the ‘good news’. Once the full ANZAC contingent was ashore Michael Carver would have a very capable single armoured ‘brigade’, supported by a British infantry ‘brigade’ guarding Kuwait and the approaches to north eastern Saudi Arabia. In other words he would have an approximately ‘division-sized’ formation in position to halt an ‘Army’ that outnumbered his units by somewhere between three-to-one and six-to-one in tanks, artillery and men. Potentially, the situation of the Abadan Garrison was much, much worse. Carver had thirty or so tanks and about four thousand men under his direct control; if the local Iranian commanders let him down the Red Army would wash over his handful of Centurions like a tsunami.
“The other problem with the Saudis,” the Chief of the Defence Staff went on, “is that unless they permit either or both of our, and the promised Egyptian forces expected to start arriving in theatre before the end of June to move to jumping off points west of the Kuwaiti border we will not be able to properly exploit the opportunities presented by that ground.”
Margaret Thatcher gave him a vexed look.
“May I be honest with you, Prime Minister?” The soldier inquired, smiling sternly.
“Of course, Field Marshall.”
“Without the Egyptians, or the Saudis any other course of action other than static in-depth defence in Kuwait will be impractical. In that event sooner or later the Soviets will out flank our line and we shall be in a fine old mess. At Abadan everything depends on the Iranians.”
Willie Whitelaw stirred uneasily, his jowly features rolling with angst.
Operation Lightfoot, Michael Carver’s ambitious plan to ‘Cannae’ the Red Army north of Basra remained a pipe dream. Presently, it was much more likely that the only viable strategy was going to be to dig in along the northern border of the Emirate of Kuwait, withdraw from Abadan and attempt to deter the Russians from interdicting seaborne trade — the passage of tankers — in the Persian Gulf with air and sea power. It was a strategy of last resort and in many ways of despair, that only delayed the evil day when the Soviets extended their malign influence over the entire Arabian Peninsula.