“We cannot go forward with an enemy at our rear, Comrade Colonel-General,” Chuikov said with blunt good humour. He looked to the third man in the room of the old palace overlooking the grey waters of the Golden Horn.
Sergei Georgiyevich Gorshkov had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy by Nikita Khrushchev as long ago as 1956. Nikita Sergeyevich had given the then forty-six year old Admiral one simple directive: to build a fleet not just to rival, but to equal and to better the combined fleets of the United States of America and its allies. It was Gorshkov who had ordered — on his own initiative — the dispersal of the Soviet Fleet in the hours before the Cuban Missiles War. In the Arctic and the Baltic the order had come too late, likewise in the Far East, where the surface units and submarines which had escaped the Yankee bombs and missiles had been ruthlessly hunted down by the American 7th Fleet in the following days. Only the Black Sea Fleet had survived as a coherent fighting entity. Several ships had been destroyed in dock, others had been too close to big strikes but two-thirds of the Fleet had sailed for partially wrecked Odessa in the Ukraine, and the intact ports of Constanta in Rumania and Varna in Bulgaria.
The western operations built into Phase Two of Operation Chastise risked the loss of the entire Combined Black Sea Fleet; consequently, unlike the other members of the Politburo in their snug bunkers and dachas in the East, Chuikov had never taken Admiral Gorshkov’s acquiescence to the ‘naval plan’ within Operation Nakazyvat for granted. In exactly the same way Chuikov’s power base would evaporate overnight if the ‘Push to the South’ failed or if his surviving armies were destroyed, Gorshkov would probably be finished if all his big ships were sunk. Problematically, if he went along with the current plan all his ships and submarines would almost certainly end up at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
“What are your thoughts, Comrade Admiral?” Chuikov asked.
What was the point beating about the bush?
“Better is the enemy of good enough, Vasily Ivanovich,” the greying man with the dark moustache replied. “The current plan is deficient in several respects with regard to naval operations.”
“The Fleet must demonstrate,” Chuikov retorted flatly.
“I don’t tell you or Babadzhanian how to fight tank battles!” The other man’s irritation flashed for a moment before the inscrutable mask fell back into place. “Nor do I presume to tell Petr Kirillovich,” he glanced to Colonel General Koshevoi, “his business. Colonel-General Babadzhanian has confided to me that if all goes well in the West his job in Persian and Iraq is likely to be much easier. That is enough for me. The Soviet Navy will do its duty. However,” he sighed and stepped nearer to the Red Army men, “I foresee no scenario in which recklessly throwing away the Fleet in a series of uncoordinated piecemeal actions furthers the goals of Babadzhanian’s push.”
Chuikov decided there was no harm hearing what Gorshkov had to say. The Commander of all Soviet Forces hunched his broad shoulders in what might have been a shrug.
“What do you have in mind, Comrade Admiral?”
“A single nuclear-powered submarine, the British Dreadnought, completely destroyed the attempt to land forces on the eastern beaches of Cyprus. A single submarine in less than an afternoon, Comrades. It was because of that single action that the first wave failed to carry the island by storm.”
Chuikov and Koshevoi raised eyebrows but said nothing. The failure to seize the whole of Cyprus to secure its use as a viable base for future operations, and as a bulwark against further British aggression in the Eastern Mediterranean basin had been the one strategic setback in Phase One. Other things had gone wrong but only the situation on Cyprus had caused real difficulties.
“Our people on Malta report that HMS Dreadnought has been sent back to the United Kingdom for repairs. However, it is believed that at least three American submarines with similar capabilities have now taken up position East of Malta. It is reasonable to assume that these vessels will be deployed to the seas around Cyprus, or used to ‘block’ the Cyprus-Crete gap into the Eastern Mediterranean, or to remain in the vicinity of Malta. For example, if I was Admiral Christopher in Malta, I would ask the Yankees to place one submarine in a patrol box say, one hundred kilometres wide by fifty, mid-way between the western tip of Crete, and the Maltese Archipelago.”
Gorshkov’s eyes were cobalt hard.
“By concentrating all available air, surface and undersea units against one of the Yankee submarines,” Gorshkov continued, “it might be possible to drive it away, or to minimise our losses. That would be ‘good enough’ to improve the value of a ‘demonstration’ to distract the attention of our enemies from the real danger. But, Comrades, I suggest that we do ‘better’.”
“What did you have in mind?” Koshevoi asked, growing impatient. First the Politburo had ordered the recovery of all viable tactical nuclear warheads to the Naval Armoury at Odessa, then Chuikov had obliged him to waste time purging the bloody Romanians from his command area, and now Gorshkov wanted to re-write the whole fucking operations plan for Phase Two!
“Comrades,” the Admiral prefaced, clasping his hands behind his back, “Only one thing will stop the British and the American’s throwing us off Cyprus.”
“What would that be?” Chuikov asked, beginning to see where this was going. Gorshkov was thinking bigger than Koshevoi dared. The strategic objective of all operations in the West had become to mount a giant ‘demonstration’ to keep the British and the Americans off balance while Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s two Tank Armies raced south from the Caucasus to seize the Persian and Iraqi oilfields at the head of the Arabian Gulf. Once Babadzhanian’s tanks were parked along the northern shores of the Gulf the whole Arabian Peninsula would be at the Soviet Union’s mercy.
“We must seize back the whole of Cyprus,” Gorshkov said flatly. “Without Cyprus, Crete will eventually fall and the enemy will have the option to ‘island hop’ north towards our exposed and weakly defended southern flank. If the enemy holds Cyprus the countries of the Levant and perhaps, even those of Arabia will still have hope. Babadzhanian’s tanks can pick off countries one at a time but if he has to worry about his flanks he’ll never get to the Arabian Gulf. So we must take Cyprus and we must hurt the British and the Americans so badly, that they leave us with the spoils of our victory in the east. Even if they leave us undisturbed for a few weeks or months we will amass such strength on the ground that they will never drive us back.”
Chuikov did not disagree with a word he said but Gorshkov was missing the point. Either they won this war quickly or they were completely fucked. If Babadzhanian’s ‘push to the south’ stalled there were no new tank regiments to throw into the line. Once the cutting edge of mobile front line units in Koshevoi’s western sector were gone, that was it.
Operation Chastise was the Soviet Union’s last throw of the dice.
“I will give you your ‘demonstrations’ against the Task Force the enemy is sending to Cyprus,” Gorshkov promised grimly. “But nothing will prevent the loss of our strategic hold over the Anatolian flank of the Trans-Caucasus, and the exposure of the right flank of Colonel-General Babadzhanian’s push to the south other than a direct attack on, the seizure and destruction of the enemy’s one vital strategic outpost in the Central Mediterranean.”