The Second Battle of Britain - a Soviet Sealion

91 – The Mighty Mo


USS Missouri was back in action. Using all nine of her sixteen-inch guns, the Mighty Mo opened fire on Iranian positions first on the island of Greater Tunb before moving to Lesser Tunb. These small patches of land in the middle of the Persian Gulf were treated to a barrage of gunfire from the battleship. Naval gunfire support was coming in support of the US Marines which assaulted each in battalion-sized operations. There were also aircraft, attack helicopters and other warships which opened fire but none of those could do what the Mighty Mo did. Huge shells rained down upon the islands where Iranian military forces – no civilians – could be found. Using satellite images gathered beforehand and also live footage beamed back from a Pioneer drone above, those shells pummelled everything in sight. There wasn’t an inch of ground on either island which the guns on the battleship couldn’t reach. Fire was directed at multiple targets at once with each of the nine guns in the trio of gun turrets being independently aimed. The shelling continued until each target assigned was destroyed. The Missouri moved on. She sailed at flank speed down to Abu Musa, an island to the south. There were more Iranians here who were unready under naval gunfire and had US Marines on their island. The Mighty Mo gave them the same treatment that their comrades a little to the north received too. This came at the end of the fight for Abu Musa and helped to finish off the last of the Iranians.

The fire missions eventually ceased. The Mighty Mo was back on the move, now heading back north. There was a far bigger island out in the Gulf yet with this one much closer to the Iranian shore rather than out in the middle of the water. Qeshm Island was shelled by the Missouri too. The big guns threw shells into military targets around its edges and also far inland. There were restrictions though on where those shells could fall. Qeshm was an island with a civilian population close to a hundred thousand, alongside the estimated fourteen hundred Iranian military personnel there. It was also somewhere that the US Marines weren’t landing upon this morning so there was no current need to flatten it as was the case with the other ones. However, the Americans wanted the Iranians present to think that an invasion might be coming their way and so imitated that they were softening Qeshm up by using the Mighty Mo here. Once done ‘servicing’ her targets, the battleship moved on. There were more islands up ahead. By this point it was late morning and the amphibious assaults onto islands in the Straits of Hormuz had begun several hours beforehand. On Hormuz, resistance had been overcome and that island almost within spitting distance of the Iranian coast at Bandar Abbas was in American hands. Larak was a different case. The Iranians here had been hit with naval shelling already as well as bombed from above when even napalm had been employed. They were still fighting though, denying the US Marines victory. The 9th Brigade, US Marines who’d arrived here from Okinawa, were seeing their first fight of the war and having a difficult time on Larak after finding Hormuz easier to take. Now the Mighty Mo was here to change that. All nine main guns, plus the twelve five-inch secondary guns too, opened fire against Larak. Other US Navy warships were doing the same as well. They, along with the Mighty Mo, fired until the US Marines no longer needed this intensive barrage and the Iranians had been silenced.

The Iranians made an attack upon the Missouri afterwards. She’d been taken under fire before in recent months when the Iraqis had tried to hit the battleship during bombardments of the stretches of Saudi & Kuwaiti coastlines which they had held. Lone missiles, sometimes a pair had been fired at the Mighty Mo. None of them had gotten through the defences of herself and her escorts. As the Mighty Mo moved up to near Hormuz, to start shelling Qeshm Island again at its very eastern end following reported helicopter activity there, the Iranians fired a total of five missiles at her from three directions. They didn’t all come at once but did burst from hidden mobile launchers across a short ten-minute period. These were Chinese manufactured Silkworms. None was supersonic and neither managed to reach the battleship. Her escorts here for anti-air & anti-missile work shot down each one in turn without the Missouri having to use her own self-defence Gatling guns. How much damage any of those Silkworms could have done to the Mighty Mo was debatable but the US Navy didn’t want to have to find out. Soon afterwards, the Iranians put many vessels to sea from out of Bandar Abbas. It had been somewhere raided ahead of the landings and the Iranians had been hurt bad, but they were aware that there was a battleship just offshore. There was a desire to hit it, even sink it. Such an achievement would have much military value as well as striking quite the propaganda blow. With these speedboats and fast attack craft, even with all of her guns, the Mighty Mo might have had some difficulty. She wasn’t alone though. US Navy aircraft came in to protect the battleship and those warships with here from a certain swarm attack of high-speed boats. The Iranians didn’t get far away from Bandar Abbas with what boats survived the massacre from above, turning back of fleeing to Qeshm in the end. As to the Missouri, she sailed away unscathed.

Both the 7th & 9th Marine Amphibious Brigades had taken part in those seizures of the five islands – there were others in the Gulf too in addition to Qeshm but only that large one was militarised to an extend like the seized little ones were – which the Mighty Mo had assisted with. They’d faced Revolutionary Guard forces across them. The Iranians had been dug-in and waiting for this. They couldn’t stop what came though despite trying ahead of the landings with fighters and then on the islands with everything that they had to hand. Firepower was very important in the American victory. There was no denying that having a ship like the Mighty Mo in support – plus many, many aircraft – was important in the victories achieved, especially in seeing them all done within a few hours. However, the US Marines had won the day. They’d go up close and personal with the Revolutionary Guard and outfought them. It had been hard work, costly work too. American casualties (dead and injured) would be close to three hundred. Abu Musa and Larak in particular had been brutal fights. The Iranians inflicted casualties during the close-in fighting yet also managed to get a few lucky shots in too when the US Marines were vulnerable: bunched up on the move. They took out several Amtracs coming out of the water using rockets in ambushes on beaches already declared ‘clear’ and also managed to use a man-portable SAM to bring down a Sea Stallion transport helicopter as well. They’d tried to go after the amphibious ships offshore too. Should they have hit them with the few missiles fired out and the weapons mounted to speedboats which unsuccessfully ran the gauntlet of American fire, casualties for the US Marines & US Navy might have reached a thousand… maybe. That could have been enough to see the Americans call it a day and abort their landings. That wasn’t to be though. Apart from where the Iranians had established themselves so strongly on Qeshm, surrounded by all of those civilians there, the US Marines had taken away Iran’s offshore military garrisons. They’d been making attacks on Coalition targets in the Gulf from these and fortified the islands to try to stop their loss. Now those islands were the temporary property of the US Marines. When it came to Abu Musa and Greater & Lesser Tunb, the UAE wanted back what they considered stolen from them back in 1971 though that question was for another day.

When sailing away from near to the taken lump of volcanic rock which was the circular-shaped Hormuz, the Mighty Mo soon had a shadow. During the previous months, the Soviets had been using warships – including at times their own immense man-of-war, the battlecruiser Frunze – to stay near to the Missouri while she was active in the Gulf. This wasn’t done without pause but often enough. When sailing overnight from where she’d been near to Kuwait, that previous shadow, a destroyer, had been left behind. Now it was a submarine. The Soviet Navy was changing how it was operating when it came to shadowing the Americans. They would be keeping that underwater vessel as close as possible to the Mighty Mo all the time. The weapons load on that submarine consisted of a couple of missiles as well as a stock of torpedoes conventionally-armed torpedoes and also nuclear-tipped.


All of this fighting out in the Gulf was separate from what too occurred on the same morning. The Iranians lost control of those islands yet overran Iraqi soil. Their full-scale invasion of Iraq began.

The chemical attacks that Iraq had launched had done little to delay what was coming nor caused the Iranian many casualties as they had assembled themselves. Rashid had seemingly promised more of that if Iran didn’t back off. Khomeini had heard the threat, measured it as one of weakness, and issued orders for his army to carry on regardless. Given the word, they moved into Iraq. There were multiple attacks down the majority of the length of the long frontier. The Iranians had over a dozen divisions assigned to the mission of taking Iraq. Not all of them could go straight into action but the plan was for all of them to join in. The biggest attack was the one heading for Baghdad though there were others too in the north and south. The Iraqis fought them at the border. They were unable to stop the invasion though. Iraq’s war with America and the Coalition had seen the nation’s military strength crippled. The Iranians, even when facing alerted defenders, marched into Iraq and either crushed those who stood before them or forced them to flee. Projections in Tehran had them arriving on the outskirts of Baghdad within a week… Coalition intelligence summaries didn’t disagree.

One section of the border where the Iranians didn’t move was down in the very south. They already had their troops in Basra and pushed up against the Shatt al-Arab too. The Americans were on the other side of the narrow stretch of no-man’s land established between the two. There was no forward movement here and no shots exchanged. That was the case today. Things wouldn’t be the same tomorrow.