Babadzhanian’s armies had operated under a number of different names prior to the start of the campaign; now 3rd Caucasus Tank Army and the 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army and all attached Red Air Force and Navy forces committed to Operation Nakazyvat came under the umbrella of Army Group South. Smoke and mirrors, Maskirovska had served its purpose; the first great blows had been struck and complete surprise achieved.
“No serious resistance yet,” the other man replied. Although he was the younger man by only half-a-dozen years in age, in looks he might have been ten to fifteen years Chuikov’s junior. “What is the news from Malta and Cyprus, Comrade Marshal?”
“Admiral Gorshkov seems to have caught the British and the Yankees with their pants down around their ankles at Malta,” Chuikov chortled wickedly. “Reports were still coming in when my plane landed.” He turned sombre. “As for Cyprus, well, that’s going as well as expected. The British have come ashore in force in the west and the south. If we hadn’t withdrawn our MiGs and out best people from the island we’d have lost them all by now. Unless the British decide to fall back on Malta — which they probably won’t — they’ll over-run the whole island in a week or two.”
Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian sighed, unable to veil his vexation.
“So what you are saying is that we pissed away all those ships and paratroopers at Malta for nothing?”
Chuikov thumped his subordinate on the back.
“We shall see. If we really have caught the British and the Americans ‘asleep at the wheel’ as our western friends say, who can say what will happen to the morale of our enemies’ civilian populations…”
Low overhead several jet fighter bombers screamed south.
In the near distance the thrumming of many, many helicopter rotors approached from the north; all the while the clanking, revving, roaring engines of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and wheeled vehicles of every size and description rolled past the command centre.
Maskirovska.
Smoke and mirrors; dym i zerkala.
Neither of the old soldiers had really believed they would get away with launching Operation Nakazyvat — Operation Chastise, the ‘push south to the sea’ — without the enemy discovering its true objectives long before the Red Army was ready to pull the trigger. Nevertheless, thus far all the early indications were that the subtle Russian art of Maskirovska had worked its charms to perfection. The long term effects of the surprise attack on the British island fortress of Malta — albeit achieved at the cost of the sacrifice of irreplaceable ships and airborne troops, not to mention the inevitable burning of practically every intelligence asset the Soviet Union possessed in the Central Mediterranean — were as yet incalculable. What was not incalculable was that Operation Nakazyvat had commenced unmolested by the British or the Americans, and apparently, completely surprised the rag tag Iranian forces protecting the Shah’s long rocky northern borders with Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Intelligence reports from within Iran had indicated the Shah had moved his best units, including two new Centurion-equipped Tank regiments from the north to the south in recent months. Apparently, according to agents in Tehran, this was to ‘intimidate the British at Abadan and the threaten Basra in Iraq’. The Shah was known to fiercely detest his Iraqi neighbours and to constantly fret about every new concentration of troops in Basra Province opposite Abadan Island. It seemed Baghdad and Tehran had been too busy watching each other to notice the danger gathering in the north.
“I expected at least token resistance on 3rd Caucasus Tank Army’s right wing,” Babadzhanian admitted. The four Tanks Corps of that Army had been split into two widely separated semi-independent commands. On the far right of the line two corps would drive down the road to Marand north of Tabriz from jumping off points at Nakhchavin and Julfa on the Armenian-Iranian border, taking advantage of the relatively good going before seizing the northern approaches to Tabriz. Joined by two corps coming over the mountains it was hoped that resistance in the city would be swiftly extinguished. The massed tank corps of both the 3rd Caucasus Tank Army and the 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army would then be funnelled through the passes of the Zagros Mountains down onto the rocky floodplains of the great rivers of the near east, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Powerful divisional strength columns would spread out across Kurdish northern Iraq, investing and subduing the cities of Mosul, Erbil, Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah, with the capture of this latter city signalling the true beginning of the push to the south.
Sulaymaniyah was the key to northern Iraq. Guarded by mountain ranges on all sides — the Azmer, Goyija and the Qaiwan ranges in the north and east, by Baranan Mountain in the south and the Tasluja Hills in the west and watered by the River Tanjaro, a tributary of the distant Tigris, Babadzhanian regarded Sulaymaniyah as the natural anchor, the pivot of the envisaged headlong blitzkrieg he had designed to sweep all before it without pausing to draw breath until Basra and Abadan were in his hands and his tanks were parked on the northern shore of the Persian Gulf.
His greatest fear was that either the British or the Americans would grasp the significance of Sulaymaniyah in time to somehow, in some way, sufficiently bolster the notoriously corrupt and inept Iraqi Army so as to enable a blocking force to be positioned around or within the city, or worse, barring the northern approaches to Baghdad to the south.
The operational plan for Operation Nakazyvat mandated the capture of Sulaymaniyah not later than D+25. If the armoured spearheads of both his Tank Armies were not rolling south by D+26 there would be no reasonable expectation of investing Abadan by D+45, or of securing a significant defensive presence along the northern shore of the Persian Gulf not later than D+55.
The calendar was his worst enemy.
The British and the Americans were not fools; sooner or later they would wake up to the threat to the oilfields of the Middle East and the inevitable total disintegration of their dreams of World hegemony. When they did finally ‘wake up’ it was not beyond the bounds of possibility and imagination that they might conceivably contrive to place sufficient firepower in his path to slow him down, or even to stop him dead in his tracks short of his objective. Everything depended upon the shock and the speed of the offensive; and upon how quickly beleaguered Iran and Iraq’s partially estranged former Imperial masters reacted.
“I still think we should have gone after the top men in Baghdad too,” Vasily Chuikov remarked philosophically.
Babadzhanian shook his head.
“Chop off one Iraqi leader’s head and another man will immediately step into his place, Comrade Marshal. If we get unlucky the new man might actually have some rudimentary grasp of military tactics!”
Chuikov guffawed asthmatically and jammed a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. An aide-de-camp rushed forward and a match flashed in the relative gloom of the makeshift command centre. The great man briefly disappeared behind a cloud of foul-smelling tobacco smoke.