Unfortunately, the fragmentary information he was getting was beginning to suggest that the forward brigade of the 18th Siberian Mechanised Division no longer existed, courtesy of the RAF. Some idiot had halted the leading tank regiment on open ground north of the city to ‘consolidate and to re-group’ before entering Baghdad in daylight. Nobody yet had a count of how many tanks and other vehicles had been destroyed. Moreover, until somebody started counting body parts there would be no reliable head count. What was already clear was that courtesy of the RAF the 18th Siberian Mechanised Division did not currently exist as a fighting unit; and that its wrecked tanks and the scorched and blasted bodies of as many as a thousand of its men now blocked the road into Baghdad from Baqubah.
Baqubah was another problem.
The centre of Baqubah was now in ruins and the road to the north and the south of the city cratered ‘to Hell’ according to the pilot of the helicopter he had sent up there to give him a reliable situation report. No traffic was going to be passing south through Baqubah for at least forty-eight hours.
There was something deeply disturbingly, and sickeningly pragmatic about the way the British waged war, Major General Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov was realising. The British pretended to be gentlemen; and that the ‘rules of war’ were inviolable but when a thing needed to be done they were utterly ruthless. If the only way they could block a road was to destroy the town around it then, so be it. When they needed a sledgehammer they used it; when they needed to be more surgical, out came the precision tools kept at the bottom of their bombing toolbox. Shortly after the Siberians had been hit north of the city, there had been a series of smaller raids targeting oil storage tanks and the city’s water treatment and pumping stations. Huge pillars of filthy grey black smoke now bubbled up from ruptured oil tanks and half the city had no clean water this morning. In addition, Al-Rasheed air base — even if the Red Air Force had had the balls to fly its precious aircraft this far south — was self-evidently out of commission, as was a second airfield on the western outskirts of the city.
Puchkov was asking himself: When is the first big bomb going to drop on one of the key bridges across the Tigris?
As a result of the bombing the next thing that was going to happen was that some of the Iraqi soldiers who had gone to ground a day or two ago would stop shitting themselves and suddenly rediscovered their courage.
It was still over six hundred kilometres from where he stood to the shores of the Persian Gulf. Puchkov had yet to fight a proper battle; and already he had lost half his T-62s. His boys badly needed to rest up, to repair and to overhaul equipment.
Most of all he needed air cover.
Puchkov looked towards the centre of Baghdad some ten or eleven kilometres to his north west. He had less than three thousand troops and somewhere between thirty and forty tanks — and perhaps as many other armoured vehicles — in a city with a population of perhaps one-and-a-half million people. There had to be twenty or thirty thousand Iraqi Army troops hiding, invisible in the backstreets. He had known Operation Nakazyvat was always going to be fraught with peril but right now, if the Iraqis rose up against the invaders the whole enterprise was going to end in humiliation and defeat.
Babadzhanian was right when he had told him that ‘Baghdad is the key, seize Baghdad and we will have a lodgement in this country that nobody will ever kick us out of!’ However, Puchkov did not believe that his commander had imagined for a moment, not even in his worst nightmares, that Army Group South would be this stretched out, disorganised and frankly, worn down at this stage of the invasion with the job less than half-done.
He took one last look around.
Puchkov sighed and then he wheeled around and began barking orders.
Chapter 47
The RAF had re-arranged the seats in the mid-fuselage section of the modified long-range Comet 4 jetliner to facilitate mid-air conferences and meetings. Two groups of six previously forward facing seats had been reduced to four seats each, with the two pairs of seats nearest the nose of the aircraft turned around. In the gap between the seats a table had been installed, likewise a direct telephone link to the cockpit, where cutting edge scrambler and secure communications kit had been installed enabling VIPs to continually be in contact with their offices and staff back in the United Kingdom, or wherever else they needed to be in contact with while they were in the air.
That afternoon Margaret Thatcher, her Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft, Foreign Secretary Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson and Alison Munro, the Minister of Supply and Transportation in the UAUK had convened to discuss the latest news from the Middle East and the South Atlantic. Peter Thorneycroft and Alison Munro’s inclusion in the Prime Minister’s delegation, and the absence of a representative of the Chiefs of Staff or of a senior officer of Security Service was no accident. If the Kennedy Administration or any subsequent administration in Philadelphia wanted to have any meaningful long term ‘alliance’ or ‘understanding’ with the United Kingdom it was going to have to be one that was mutually beneficial to both parties outside the sphere of military or security co-operation. In these last two respects the Prime Minister felt herself to have been personally ‘let down’ by her transatlantic ‘friends’; in future Anglo-American relations would be placed on a firm ‘financial’ foundation, or not at all. She had, therefore, left her military advisors at home because they ‘had little or no time to spare discussing hypothetical matters pertaining to the national security of the United Kingdom with Johnny-come-lately friends who could not be relied upon in a crisis!’
The ministers gathered around this small table high above the stormy North Atlantic understood that they had been invited on this ‘mission’ to the United States, to extract a quid pro quo that was to be measured in strictly monetary terms from the United States government in exchange for the United Kingdom’s continuing global ‘co-operation and toleration of American commercial interests’.
Grand strategy had not worked out as planned; therefore a different accommodation was to be sought. The time for fine sentiments was over.
Today, the first item on the agenda was a briefing on the current ‘strategic situation’ of British and Commonwealth forces; just so that everybody was on the same page when ‘the Americans’ started asking individual members of the delegation questions.
The news from Middle East, from Persian Gulf Command Headquarters at Damman in Saudi Arabia was good, and bad. Rather like a proverbial curate’s egg, it was very hard to know what to make of it.
An RAF photo-reconnaissance Canberra based on Cyprus had been attacked by two Soviet fast jets in the vicinity of Baghdad the previous day. The aircraft, flying at fifty-three thousand feet had successfully evaded the enemy fighters; but it was the first time the Red Air Force had appeared over central Iraq and it was a bad portent of what was to come as the enemy consolidated its territorial gains, developed forward air bases and missile defences and progressively impaired the bombing campaign’s ability to blunt the Soviet drive south. In this connection the RAF had wisely ‘drawn in its horns’, mindful of the principle of conservation of resources. Every available aircraft would be needed in battles to come, and in increasingly MiG-infested airspace risking the loss of a V-Bomber or a Canberra cratering a road or knocking down a bridge in the middle of nowhere was a mug’s game.