Nobody yet really had a feel for whether the Soviet ‘halt’ in the Baghdad area was a good or a bad thing. While Jericho spoke to the mess the Soviets were in it did not answer the main question.
Had the Red Army run out of steam?
Or was this simply a re-grouping ‘pause’ before it rolled south with ever greater and unstoppable momentum?
The Iraqi Army had melted away before the invaders abandoning large numbers of armoured and other vehicles to the Russians. Infuriatingly, this was going to make good some of the losses the invaders had incurred in the mountains, and to the rigors of campaigning over ground inimical to tracked and untracked vehicles alike.
On the positive side Jericho was revealing that the first V-Bomber strikes had panicked the Soviet High Command to the extent that several senior officers had been peremptorily recalled, to ‘account for their actions’ back home. Moreover, all the indications were that the Soviet forces who had reached Baghdad thus far had only managed it by ‘living off the countryside’ and were short of everything from reloads for 115-millimetre guns of its T-62s to spare parts for radio sets. Evidently, the system for supplying rations to the troops had completely collapsed long before the leading elements of the two Soviet Armies, 3rd Caucasus Tank Army and 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army had broken through the high passes in the Zagros Mountains into northern Iraq.
Meanwhile the plans for Operation Cold Harbour, the naval element of Operation Lightfoot, Lieutenant-General Michael Carver’s plan to stop the Red Army in its tracks in Basra Province, were looking somewhat fanciful. As was the whole concept of Operation Lightfoot because it was anybody’s guess whether the garrison at Abadan would soon be under attack from Iranian and or Iraqi forces, or caught in the middle of a regional Iranian civil war between the factions vying for hegemony now that the Shah was gone.
In either event Case Zero-One of Operation Lightfoot might have to be invoked at as little as twenty-four hours notice; specifically, the controlled demolition of the main facilities on Abadan Island, and the commencement of an emergency evacuation of British and Commonwealth forces and all western civilian workers by sea and air.
Once invoked Case Zero-One would render the larger objectives of Operation Lightfoot null and void.; and ‘Case Two’ would be invoked. Powerful armoured forces and supporting arms would be built up in Kuwait ready to either hold static defence lines, or to mount a major ‘spoiling’ attack against the enemy with the purpose of making any immediate further invasion of Kuwaiti or Saudi territory impractical, hopefully for as long as possible. At that stage there might be a chance of some kind of ‘peace conference’ or, alternatively, the Kennedy Administration might by then have come to its senses; although nobody thought that was remotely likely.
In the South Atlantic things were getting grim.
The Argentine ‘Army of Liberation’ on East Falkland had threatened to take hostages from among the civilian population and shoot a dozen or so of them every time a British submarine attacked a ‘vessel in the illegal exclusion zone of death’. After the sinking of the Argentine aircraft carrier Indepencia by HMS Oberon, apparently with the loss of as many as six hundred lives — the loss of life had been unnecessarily heavy because her escorting destroyers had steamed over the horizon at flank speed rather than standing by the stricken carrier — Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Venezuela had all broken off diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom and closed their ports to British and Commonwealth, registered ships, impounding or interning several vessels at that time.
One submarine, HMS Orpheus, had succeeded in landing a small group of Royal Marine SBS — Special Boat Force — men on the south coast of East Falkland near a settlement called Fitzroy several days ago but no word had yet been heard from it.
Worryingly, the Argentine authorities were still refusing to issue any information about the fate of the eighty-two man strong Royal Marine garrison of the Falkland Islands. Also, missing and ‘unaccounted for’ was a Royal Navy detachment of seventeen men undertaking a hydrographical survey of Falkland Sound, the stretch of water separating East and West Falkland. Meanwhile, after being held incommunicado under what amounted to house arrest in the British Embassy in Buenos Aires for nearly two months the United Kingdom’s diplomatic mission was only now being permitted to depart the city.
In an act of pure political pique the Argentine government had declined to allow the fourteen men and three women of the pre-war, somewhat reduced diplomatic presence, to fly out of the country, forcing them to take the arduous overland route to the Chilean border.
Chile was another imponderable; a friendly neutral at the outset of the crisis Argentina had offered to end the long-standing dispute between the two neighbours over the sovereignty and navigational rights to the Beagle Channel — the stretch of water at the foot of the South American continent which permitted ships to transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific without having to brave the storm-wracked waters of Cape Horn — and the Chilean government, eager to avoid a shooting war with its neighbour had softened its former condemnation of ‘the Malvinas aggression’. Worse, it had publicly withdrawn its invitation to ‘offer sanctuary to damaged British warships’.
To the Argentine the Falkland Islands were ‘Las Malvinas’, cruelly stolen from the young republic in the 1830s by a rapacious John Bull at the point of a gun. Across the entire South American continent other ‘oppressed and impoverished’ former European colonies were jumping on the Buenos Aires bandwagon. This would never have happened if the United States, which had treated the Americas North, Central and South as its national ‘sphere of influence’ for much of the twentieth century, had not selectively abdicated its responsibilities since the October War. After decades of gerrymandering in the political and economic life of tens of millions of South Americans the Kennedy Administration had by default, disengaged from the fray leaving chaos and even greater instability in the wake of its withdrawal. J. William Fulbright, Dean Rusk’s successor at the State Department had tried to put a brake on the process but much of the damage had already been done; which was precisely why the Falklands crisis had come as almost as big a shock to the Americans, as it had to Margaret Thatcher’s Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.
“I confess, Prime Minister,” Alison Munro, Secretary of State for Supply, Transportation and Energy — the woman responsible for ensuring that the British people did not starve and that the sinews of war were kept as healthily robust as possible — retorted when Margaret Thatcher threw open the floor for discussion, “that I had not realised you planned to confront the Administration with the consequences of its foreign policy volte face in such uncompromising terms?”
Margaret Thatcher allowed herself a grim smile.
She had had her doubts about bringing the older woman into the Cabinet when she moved her old friend and mentor Airey Neave into the hot seat at the new Ministry of National Security. Although Alison Munro had not been an unknown quantity — she had had many dealings with her in her year at Supply in Edward Heath’s immediate post-October War Interim Emergency Administration of the United Kingdom — she had worried that she was inviting a bull into a china shop. Airey’s reassurances to the contrary had swayed her in the end and Alison Munro had stepped into the breech as if to the manner born, even if she and her Prime Minister were sometimes temperamentally and intellectually at cross-purposes.