However, as Babadzhanian surveyed the map of the mountainous terrain of Northern Iraq it gave the commander of the ‘Great Push to the South’ little satisfaction to know that second only to his immediate superior, Marshal of the Soviet Union and Defence Minister of the USSR, Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, he was universally regarded as the finest living exponent of mechanised warfare in the Red Army. Hannibal had only had to transport a few elephants across the Pyrenees; in comparison his own task was positively Herculean!
What made things even worse was that because of time constraints and uncertainties about the mobility and availability of the mechanised infantry, airborne and Ministry of Interior police troops detached to put down the Red Dawn insurgency in Turkey, Greece and Romania, and the need to keep the strategic goals and specific military objectives of the forthcoming endeavour, Operation Nakazyvat — Operation Chastise — secret there had been no time or scope to war game the movement plans, or any of the critical stresses those plans would inflict on the Army Group South’s logistics train, below the level of Corps commander. Moreover, the results of the handful of paper ‘war games’ that had been ‘fought’ had not been encouraging. Of necessity Operation Nakazyvat had too many moving parts, and every assumption about the fighting power of the units involved and the supply chain which would eventually stretch all the way back to the Urals had had to be hedged around with countless complex caveats.
The icing on the cake impossibly late in the day had been the Central Committee’s endorsement of the imbecilic ‘Malta adventure’. Babadzhanian had been livid when he had learned what was envisaged and regardless of the short-term success or failure of the lunatic enterprise in the Central Mediterranean — which was more likely to stir up a hornets’ nest in the mid to long term than to deny the British and the Americans Cyprus as a base of operations against his exposed right flank — undertaking the operation had delayed his offensive by a further two weeks and robbed him of over two thousand invaluable and irreplaceable highly trained Spetsnaz and airborne assault troops and as many as one hundred and forty vital transport aircraft. Of the twenty-nine thousand men initially detached to fight ‘somebody else’s fires’ in the west, less than a third had so far been returned to him in good combat order meaning that significant elements of the 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army, responsible for taking Ardabil would — if the Iranians got their act together at some stage — probably now have to be permanently detached to police his lines of communication and to provide at least a ‘picket line’ guard for the impossibly long exposed southern flank of his advance.
The purity of his strategic vision which had once been so clinically simple, so marvellously unadorned with superfluous and distracting requirements had been shamelessly watered down and hamstrung, while leaving its original goals unaltered.
Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian would have lost sleep worrying but there was nothing he could do about it now. He had a job to do and he intended to get on with it. In the final moments before the opening artillery barrage he steeled himself for the trials to come, hardened his heart and resolved that whatever happened, his tanks would one day reach the warm blue waters of the Persian Gulf.
The map of Northern Iran described the obstacles in his path perfectly.
First there was the towering barrier of the Alborz Mountains curving around the southern Caspian Sea from the Soviet border all the way to Tehran and beyond far into the eastern deserts of Iran towards distant Afghanistan. A single tank corps, or perhaps two, from either of his armoured armies could hold the line of those mountains forever and a day against all comers. Which was good to know but he actually needed those corps to drive west south west from their first targets, Tabriz and Ardabil, on across the high plateau on the other side of the Alborz Mountains and burst through the narrow passes of the even more formidable obstacle of the Zagros Mountains which guarding Iran’s western border with neighbouring Iraq. The Zagros Mountains stretched from Anatolia to the Persian Gulf and only when his tanks had crossed them and swept down onto the plains of the head waters and tributaries of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers could the real ‘drive to the sea’ commence.
Several fools in Chelyabinsk — the current seat of the collective leadership of the Party and the State — had tried to mandate a drive south straight across the rocky plateau of central Iraq. Fortunately, Vasily Chuikov had put the fools right before Babadzhanian had got wind of the scheming behind his back. Yes, it would be better to just cross just one mountain range. Yes, crossing the Zagros range was likely to be expensive in terms of men and machinery. But, and it was a big but, since the object of the exercise was to invest and if at all possible, capture Basra and more importantly Abadan Island, both of which lay on the western side of the Zagros Mountains it ought to have been obvious even to the brainless Party apparatchiks in Chelyabinsk that those mountains needed to be crossed at some stage! Had they no understanding of the tenets of blitzkrieg? What did the fools think he meant when he talked about waging a ‘lightning war’ in the preamble to his operational overview? There could be no ‘lighting war’ on the barren wastes of the rocky central plateau of Iran! What if something went wrong? Advancing with the Zagros Mountains to his right and the Alborz Mountains at his back his forces could easily be destroyed in detail by British and American air strikes, or die a death of a thousand tiny cuts inflicted by remnants of the Iranian Army and local guerrillas! How could the people in Chelyabinsk not see that by crossing onto the floodplains of the great rivers of the ancient world — thereby utilising the best available ground for his tanks and the hundreds, thousands of vehicles which carried the ammunition, fuel and food needed to sustain a ‘lightning war’ — and by putting the major topographical obstacles behind the invasion force at the point when it was at its most coherent, freshest and most optimistic, rather than later when it had already been fighting for its life at the end of a dangerously tenuous supply chair for at least a month and probably longer, was not a fundamentally sound military plan?