The Four O'Clock podcast is a series of stories about our world and the people that keep it moving. In this first episode we look to the past and the Gulf Tanker Wars of 1988 through the eyes of the crew of a Royal Navy frigate, HMS Boxer.
In 1988 the Middle East Gulf shipping lanes were a crowded theatre of operations. At least ten Western navies and eight regional navies patrolled the area. It was the site of weekly incidents in which merchant vessels were crippled. The Arab Ship Repair Yard in Bahrain and its counterpart in Dubai, could not keep up with the demand for repairs to ships attacked by Iranian naval forces in these so-called Tanker Wars.
The Tanker Wars were fuelled by bitter religious and political acrimony, the Iran-Iraq War, was one of the longest interstate conflicts of the 20th century, had spread into the Persian Gulf in 1987. Forced to protect vital petroleum tankers, NATO and Soviet naval forces in the Gulf faced new and old challenges from a variety of Iranian and Iraqi threats. As the war dragged into 1988, there was little prospect of either belligerent raising a white flag making this a dangerous place for British and other International ships operating in the area.
