Code names of military operations
By Manohar Malgonkar

TIME magazine of February 5, 1999 published a letter from a citizen of Israel expressing surprise that "the U.S.A. and Britain chose the name ‘Desert Fox’ for the attacks on Iraq" because that was the nickname the British had given to a famous German General who had outsmarted them again and again in the fighting in North Africa during World War II, Erwin Rommel.

"For Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to approve the use of the name ‘Desert Fox’ raises serious doubts about their understanding of the Middle East," the writer laments.

Why the American and British who are the chief protagonists of taking a tough line with Saddam should have chosen that name seems obvious enough. It will be recalled that the code name for the United Nation’s war against Iraq eight years earlier had been ‘Desert Storm’. By calling these new air strikes by a similar-sounding name they want to create the impression that ‘Desert Fox’ is only a followup operation of ‘Desert Storm’. Some countries who participated in ‘Desert Storm’ are not so sure, and are lukewarm in their support of ‘Desert Fox’.

All very well. But when did military operations begin to get code names? They surely weren’t there at the beginning of the century. In Peter Fleming’s ‘The Siege of Peking’ which tells the story of this century’s very first war, there is not a single code name for any of its operations. What seems quite unbelieavable about that particular conflict is that the enemies of the two World Wars fought as allies against the Chinese! The Russians, the Japanese, the Germans, the British, the Americans and the Italians combined together to wage war against the Chinese.

China was ruled by a Dowager Empress and all these world powers were seeking to grab little bits of Chinese territory. That was when some of the Chinese people declared war on these ‘Goat-headed’ foreigners who worshipped a ‘Pig god’ who lived as privileged people in a fortified enclosure called the ‘Legation Quarter’ right in the heart of Beijing. The local Chinese commander joined the rebels, who were known as the Boxers, and declared hostilities against these foreigners by surrounding the Legation Quarter with troops.

The siege lasted for 55 days during which some 70 people from these diplomatic missions died and twice that number were wounded. They were rescued by a composite military force representing all these countries. In the ‘British’ contingent was an Indian battalion of Sikhs and Rajputs who, incidentally, were the first to overcome the defending Chinese troops and break into the Legation Quarter:

"More and more sepoys poured through, their faces strained by fatigue. Women crowded round them, touching them, patting them, even trying to kiss them."

But the exploit of our soldiers has made me stray from my theme. The point I wish to make is that, at the beginning of this century, military operations were not given code names. Ironically, one of the chapters in Peter Fleming’s book bears the heading ‘Operation Babel’. But that was not what the operation itself was called; it is Fleming’s way of emphasising the polyglot assemblage of a rescue column and the lack of cohesion among its participants.

Code names don’t seem to have come into use till quite late in the World War. The earlier plans of the High Command merely bear numbers, such as PLAN XIV, OR PLAN XVII. And this must have led to a great deal of confusion among those who were to implement these plans: Were they on PLAN XIV or PLAN XVI?——one may have been to capture an enemy position, and the other to withdraw to a prepared position. It is not until we reach the quite staggering scale of slaughter of Verdun that we come across a ‘code-named’ operation.It was a sort of last-ditch assault planned by the Germans, and given a deceptively romantic name:‘May Cup’.

‘May Cup’ was an unmitigated disaster.By contrast, all accounts of the World War II are positively peppered with code names. The fifth (of six) volumes of Winston Churchill’s ‘The Second World War’,has as many as four code-named operations under the very first letter of the alphabet: Accolade, Anakin,Anvil and Avalanche. At that, no matter how many of these operations there were, the mother of all of them, and also of all military code names, too, is Operation Overlord: the cross-channel invasion of Europe in 1944.

But by then code names seem to have been adopted by other armies too. The Japanese army which had occupied large parts of eastern China launched a massive drive in 1944 to conquer the whole of China. That operation they code named Operation Ichigo, (priority.)

Even the Raj’s army in India still run by bumbling curry colonels and a war strategy honed on skirmishes with Pathan tribesmen, had taken enthusiastically to calling their planned operations by code names. When it became clear that the Japanese were going to march into the Empire’s preserves, India Command decided to send a force to Malaya to counter the Japansese threat. They called it ‘Operation Emu’.

Emu, for the record, went belly-up, just as Ichigo and May Cup had. The very first wave of Japanese advance in Malaya finished them off.

In 1945, with the war in Europe over, and Japan now the only enemy to be dealt with, the same creaking engine of war, India Command, got put in charge of a military operation on the colossal scale of Overlord: of organizing a seaborne expedition to drive out the Japanese from South East Asia. That operation they code-named Button.

As a staff officer in the Area Headquarters in Madras, from where the expedition was to set off, I was caught up in the torrent of coded messages that we were required to transmit to the various units that were to take part in Button. What sort of hash were the bumblers at Delhi going to make of this operation? The enemy troops were battle-seasoned, fanatic and strongly entrenched. To cater for the anticipated casualties, Avadi, near Madras, became a veritable Hospital Town. It will be recalled that it was at about this time that Jawaharlal Nehru had affronted the Viceroy Archibald Wave II hold wave, by calling into question his record of generalship, as an expert in withdrawals.

And now these same people were mounting Button.

Mercifully, Operation Button never got off the ground. The atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war. The thousands of beds in the Avadi Hospital remained unoccupied.

After the British pulled out of India, our own General Staff had a field day inventing code names for soft-target operations. So Hyderabad was Polo, a macho game, and Goa a pre-conceived victory, Vijay. The habit seems to have been so catching that even a military housing project acquired a code name: Amar.

I see from the newspapers that nowadays there is no military operation which does not have a code name, and even that, under the umbrella of the code name for an operation there are subsidiary operations, too, which get their own code names. So in the wake of Desert Storm which brought Saddam Hussain to his knees, there is the process of keeping him in discipline, which is being taken care of by Desert Fox. But the inspecting team sent to Iraq to unearth its stock of nuclear and biological weapons too had coined code names for whatever they were doing. The head of the American team who got himself a reputation as being a Rambo, invented Operation Shake The Tree as well as Operation Alpha Dog.

But none of these code names catch the flavour of the very first code name thought up by the Germans 80-odd years ago: May Cup.