were crushed by the force of explosions and fragments that ripped through the deck from above. In less than a minute hundreds of men were dead and many horribly burned.
The fireball dissipated. A stunned silence punctured by random exploding munitions was rapidly followed by a flurry of reports and activation of the ship's damage-control system. The captain knew that his ship was hurt badly. The helmsman reported loss of steering, followed rapidly by the report that there was a complete loss of propulsion despite the fact that the engine room had escaped damage.
The captain quickly deduced that the missiles which had hit his ship in the stern had damaged the rudders and the screws. Already he could feel the Franklin slowing. The captain turned his full attention to saving his ship while escorts around the carrier scurried in a vain effort to track and kill the attacker.
Though the captain and the surviving crew would struggle against the inevitable for hours, the Franklin was mortally stricken. Too much damage had been caused to too large an area too fast. Power lines and water mains that were needed to fight the spreading fire were ruptured.
Many members of damage-control parties had been swept away in the first minutes of the calamity. By midmorning the fire was out of control.
Reluctantly the captain turned his crew's efforts from saving the ship to saving as many of the men as possible. The transfer of the wounded was begun and preparations for abandoning the ship were made. When the Franklin finally rolled over and sank in the early evening of 16 June, she took twelve hundred men and a piece of each survivor with her.
Like everyone else on the staff, Lieutenant General Horn was confused as to what the Soviets were up to. On one hand they attacked the U.S.S. Franklin and on the other they maintained the same routine patrol patterns and activities throughout Southwest Asia that they had been running since the U.S. had gone into Iran. Even the Soviet carrier group in the Indian Ocean was maintaining its past level of operations without any hint of deviation.
Initial reports from Iran showed that ground and air operations were at the same level as they had been for the past four days. The first satellite photos of the day showed that the Soviet 28th Combined Arms Army was where intelligence had projected it would be at first light.
Soviet aircraft continued the same level of operations north of their self-imposed limit.
Only the submarine attack was out of the norm.
There had been a lively debate between the intelligence officers of each of the services and the Joint Staff as to what was happening. Many felt that the commander of the submarine had jumped the gun and had launched his attack too early (as had happened just prior to the invasion of Finland in 1940, when a Soviet artillery officer had fired a preparatory bombardment twenty-four hours too soon). Another theory was that the Soviets were simply trying to slip in a cheap shot, hitting just one ship in the hope that they could provoke the U.S. into overreacting or could take out a major warship without the U.S. reacting at all. A few believed that the Soviet attack was meant as a warning, an attempt to scare the U.S. off from going deeper into Iran.
One young naval commander had even put forth the idea that the sinking of the Franklin had been an accident, that someone had gotten excited in the heat of the moment and fired.
Whatever the motivation or reason, the facts were that a Soviet submarine had attacked a U.S. warship in international waters and, according to reports so far received, had caused tremendous damage and hundreds of deaths.
The President had asked for recommendations from the Joint Chiefs of Staff by midnight. An initial briefing on the situation, followed by presentation of several recommendations, had taken less than an hour.
Horn now had thirty minutes to review the situation and present to his boss, the Chief of Staff of the Army, his recommendation on not only what should be done in response to the attack but also what changes, if any, the Army needed to make in current plans and operations. The Navy was already preparing to initiate operations against Soviet forces in the immediate area. The Chief of Naval Operations had ended his briefing to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by saying laconically, 'Just give me the word, and those bastards are history.'
Horn believed that the attack was a warning and an intentional act. The 17th Airborne and the 28th Marine Regiment had consolidated their toeholds in Iran and were expanding them. The 12th Infantry Division's lead elements were landing at Bandar Abbas at that very moment. The convoy carrying the 10th Corps's equipment was entering the Indian Ocean. The Air Force was well established and in strength in Iran and Oman. These developments, coupled with intelligence reports that the Soviets were having severe logistical problems complicated by guerrilla activity along their lines of communication, led Horn to the conclusion that the Soviets were desperate.
Desperate people do desperate things in an effort to correct the situation.
Horn intended to recommend that the U.S. retaliate in kind immediately.
The current situation and Soviet logic and actions reminded him of the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. The rabbit, finding himself with one hand stuck on the Tar Baby, hit the Tar Baby with his free hand, only to get it stuck. When that happened, the rabbit kicked the Tar Baby in an effort to teach the Tar Baby a lesson and free himself. That also failed. The rabbit continued to attack the Tar Baby until he was so stuck that he had no hope of freeing himself. The Soviets, with one hand stuck in the fight against the Iranians, would now find their other one stuck dealing with the U.S.
Navy. Horn's only concern was what would follow. Would the Soviets continue to fight the Tar Baby until they were totally committed or would they see the light and back off?
The crews of the aircraft carrier Gorki and her escorts had been at general quarters for over two hours without a clue as to why. Aboard the Gorki all they knew was that something out of the ordinary had happened. The officer on duty had roused the Admiral before dawn.
Shortly after that the fleet went to general quarters and began to take evasive maneuvers. At first light half of the Yak-36 fighters had scrambled from the Gorki. It wasn't until 0800 that the ship's captain had begun to release the men for breakfast and then only one third at a time. While the men ate, no one dared speculate or inquire as to why the unusual behavior. They would be told in time, one petty officer said, if they needed to know.
Admiral Boleylev and his staff would not have been able to give their men a clear answer if they had wanted to. They were operating in the dark just as the crews of their ships were. The call to general quarters, the evasive maneuvers and the combat air patrol were in reaction to a series of reports that were not clear and could mean anything. The first report, with which the duty officer had woken the Admiral, was that there had been a sudden and unexplained surge of encoded communications traffic from the American carrier battle group operating to the north of them in the Arabian Sea.
They had even intercepted several uncoded ship-to-ship communications from the U.S. S. Franklin and her escort that talked about transfer of wounded and survivors. This had been rapidly followed by an increase in air patrols by the U.S.S. Hornet's carrier battle group to the south of them and initiation of electronic jamming of the Gorki's long-range radars. The Gorki was now running blind.
Boleylev sat in the officers' mess but could not eat. The only reason he was there was that he needed a break.
His stomach was upset by acid from too much coffee and from nerves. He was pushing himself too hard. Not that he had much of a choice. The orders given to him before they sailed from Vladivostok were to proceed to the Indian Ocean, where his fleet would put pressure on and harass U.S. naval forces. On order he was to neutralize the base at Diego Garcia and commence operations against U.S. convoys headed into Iran.
The Gorki and the task force built around her were outnumbered in ships three to one and in carrier aircraft four to one. Rather than Boleylev's putting pressure on the Americans and harassing them, the Americans were doing it to him.
There were two carrier battle groups, one north of him, built around the U.S.S. Franklin and the battleship U.S.S. Utah, and one south of him with the U.S.S. Hornet. The day before, the Utah had detached itself from the Franklin's battle group and headed south toward the Gorki. Contact had been lost shortly before nightfall yesterday. This worried Boleylev, especially since patrols from the Gorki had so far failed to find the Utah that morning. In addition, the normal morning recon flight made by U.S. aircraft had not yet been reported. The two U.S. carrier battle groups tracked the Gorki constantly and alternated 'practice' strikes against Boleylev's task force daily in an attempt to keep him off balance and wear down his men. On one such occasion, all the planes from both carriers
