Notwithstanding that in terms of both dimensions and weight the Victor was the largest of the three V-Bombers — The Angry Widow’s maximum certified operational take-off weight was around ninety tons — Guy French had once seen a Victor B.1 perform a series of loops and astonishingly, a barrel roll at the Farnborough Air Show of 1958. For such a big aircraft the lightness of her power-assisted controls and in extremis, the judicious employment of her main wing and tail plane mounted tail brakes gave ‘the Beast’ astonishing acrobatic agility. Or at least that was what Guy had been told by the old hands on 100 Squadron, chaps who generally seemed to know exactly what they were talking about. He had been fascinated to learn through the ‘squadron grapevine’ that the earlier Victors had had a curious ‘self-landing’ capability; apparently once a fellow had lined a ‘beast’ up with the runway, as the airspeed bled away close to the tarmac during final approach the aircraft would spontaneously flare as the wing encountered some kind of mysterious ‘ground effect’, allowing the tail to go on gently sinking earthward resulting in a soft landing without the pilot having to do anything other than keep the kite on the straight and narrow.
Over the target The Angry Widow had come down to twenty-eight thousand feet, approximately half her service ceiling to bomb. From over fifty thousand feet free fall bombs could go anywhere. The boffins said NDS would put a bomb load with four hundred yards — a tad under a quarter-of-a-mile — of a target from that altitude, which was fine for a three-and-a-half ton Yellow Sun bomb fitted with a four hundred kiloton yield Green Grass warhead that was going to knock down anything within several miles of ground zero, but not so good if you wanted to wipe out a communications centre, block a road or crater a large amount of turf that the enemy planned to, or was actually moving across at the time. Theoretically, the ‘mean circular bombing error’ from below thirty thousand feet might be as low as fifty yards; which, all things considered, was ‘close enough’ if one was in the business of unloading nearly forty thousand-pound general purpose high explosive free fall bombs; with the purpose of obliterating all sentient life inside a mile-square patch of somebody else’s real estate.
Of course, down that low, one was in no man’s land if the enemy had fast jet interceptors or any kind of properly configured surface-to-air missile capability in the vicinity of the target. The intelligence people said the Russians were in a mess; and not to worry about things like that for a while. This joyous situation was not going to last so the idea was to make hay while the sun shone because Guy French, for one, had no illusions about how well fitted The Angry Widow was for real low level operations — down on the deck type sorties — against heavily defended targets.
Magnificent as she was, a ‘beast’ was not the airframe for that particular kind of dance. When it came to that sort of war things were liable to get very bloody very fast.
In the meantime he would discover sometime in the next few minutes if he was going to have to land The Angry Widow, or if she would do it for herself.
Life was good on a morning like this.
Chapter 46
The city had fallen without a fight. Or rather in a city which bore the unmistakable and widespread signs of the bitter battle between opposing factions of the Iraqi Army, the fighting had abruptly ceased, the combatants had thrown down their weapons, abandoned their tanks and melted away into the modern urban sprawl of the ancient capital of the Abbasids the moment the Red Army had appeared on the scene.
In the mid-1950s the West had viewed Iraq as a potential bulwark against Soviet aggression but Iraq had always been a weak link, a likely fracture point in any defensive regional alliance. It was a non-country, an artificial construct arbitrarily created at Versailles, distrusted by its neighbours and despised by the Iranians. Post-Versailles, the Hashemite monarchy inflicted on the so-called ‘Iraqi’ people in 1921 had been a truly dire foundation upon which to build a meaningful national identity. The only surprising thing was that it had taken until July 1958 for the Hashemite regime to be overthrown in a bloody coup d’état. And bloody it had been; with King Feisal II, Crown Prince Abd al-Ilah, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Said and numerous members of their families butchered during the coup.
The monarchy, having shrugged off several previous attempts to overthrown it — with British and American assistance — most notably during the Al Wathbah Uprising in 1948 and the Iraqi Intifada of 1952 had been swept away in an orgy of bloodletting and a revolutionary movement eventually led by Abd al-Karim Qasim had set about systematically purging ‘imperialistic’ and basically, foreign, influence from Iraq. Following years of Western sanctions, the regional economic collapse in the wake of the October War had kicked the ground from under the feet of the revolutionary government last year. After pursuing policies which deliberately exacerbated both religious and ethnic tensions, setting Kurds against Arabs, Sunni Muslims against Shia at the same time that non-Iraqi workers had been driven out of — and their absence had subsequently crippled — the oilfields, Abd al-Karim Qasim himself had been assassinated and the revolution overturned in a new coup mounted by a cadre of mainly Sunni Army officers. Thereafter the Army had cracked down hard on opposition, conducting a reign of terror against the Kurds of the north, while simultaneously making threatening moves against Abadan and the Emirate of Kuwait in the south, signalling its long-term intentions towards the latter by declaring it a ‘Province of the State of Basra’.
Not surprisingly, as soon as it became known that the Red Army was on the move south the fragile Iraqi — ‘nationalist’ now rather than ‘revolutionary’ — government had shown all the resilience of a crystal decanter hurled against a brick wall. It had splintered and the resulting infighting had soon development into a civil war, fought in the main in and around the capital, Baghdad. The fighting had continued right up until the moment the first T-62s of the 10th Guards Tank Division had rolled into the north eastern outskirts of the city.
Major General Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov had already decided he hated Iraq by then. He hated Iraqis, he hated the deserts, the mountains, the shitty roads, the bad water, the way the food always seemed to have sand or grit in it, and most of all he hated an enemy who would not stand and fight!
Not that it was the Iraqis who were the real problem.
Standing on the roof of the house overlooking Al-Rasheed Air Base surveying the columns of smoke rising over the northern suburbs, and the charred, smouldering wreckage all around him, the last thing he was worrying about was the prospect of some belated Iraqi Army counter attack attempting to expel his exhausted tankers from the city. No, his problem was the British. Specifically, the British Royal Air Force, and to a lesser extent, the Red Air Force which thus far in this war had been as much use as a eunuch in a whorehouse!
Presently, his 10th Guards Tank Division held the northern and eastern sides of Baghdad, basically, those areas west of the Tigris, the great river which meandered through the city like a giant python. Strictly speaking, any claim that he ‘held’ Baghdad was of dubious provenance, all his boys actually ‘held’ were several scattered enclaves, or ‘bastions’ ahead of the arrival of the 18th and 22nd Siberian Mechanised Divisions.