All Ashore

Tardily but impressively, a simulated mushroom cloud rose over the coastal hills of Thracian Turkey. Huge amphibious tanks churned up golden Aegean beaches, and troop-laden helicopters scissored down out of azure Mediterranean skies. Then 8,000 U.S. Marines who had come 6,000 miles from Virginia in four weeks, landed in Turkey last week to grab a stake of ground just north of the historic shores of Gallipoli. The tactical problem set for NATO's Operation Deep Water was to assume that Turkey had been invaded from the north, and in 40 days' fighting, the Turkish NATO forces had been theoretically forced back more than 60 miles to the Gallipoli Peninsula. Covered by planes and ships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, the Marines brought in by helicopter heavy gear that parachutists normally could not carry, and then set forth to smash enemy forward positions, wreck supply lines and create such havoc that the beleaguered Turkish defenders of Istanbul could start rolling again.

History and strategic portent lay around them, bright as the Mediterranean sunshine, as the Marines fanned out widely in five-man teams in accordance with the Corps' new antinuclear tactics of "separation and concentration." Flying in, they had glimpsed the Trojan plains where 3,000 years earlier Achilles fought Hector for mastery over the straits dividing Europe from Asia. Just across the bay from their landing point were the cliffs of Gallipoli Peninsula, where in World War I the British, French, Australian and New Zealand invaders suffered 250,000 casualties trying valorously but vainly to capture Constantinople and open a supply route to their Czarist allies. Within the game's allotted three days, the Marines seized the road leading to the Dardanelles straits, the goal which the Anzacs of 1915 had glimpsed so briefly from the heights of Chunuk Bair just before Kemal Ataturk launched the counterattack that wrecked the Gallipoli expedition. This time the Marines joined with the Turks to frustrate an imagined Russian drive for the same goal, a goal for which Russians, Czarist and Communist alike, have striven since Peter the Great said: "I'm not looking for land; I'm looking for water."

As the Sixth Fleet moved in, a sweptwing, twin jet flew in from the Bulgarian coast, and came down low over the massed invasion fleet. Vice Admiral Charles R. Brown radioed his carrier force in the clear: "A possibly hostile aircraft is approaching your area. If it menaces your formation, use sidewinders [air-to-air missiles carried beneath a plane's wings] to prevent photography." But before hastily launched U.S. Navy delta wing Sky rays could catch it, the twin jet scooted home to Communist territory.

At the other end of NATO territory another vast armada maneuvered in the North Atlantic off Norway. Afterward, British Admiral Sir John Eccles commented sharply: "I am not in a position to criticize political decisions, but I say this as a professional man with over 40 years' experience--I cannot carry out my task as given to me at the moment without more forces. In recent years the submarine has, without any doubt at all, gone a very long way ahead of the devices with which we are presently equipped to sound and destroy it."

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