Lions Will Fight Bears - Britain in World War Three, Spring 1988

James G

Gone Fishin'
One Hundred & Eighty

Before the arrival in the North Sea late on the Friday night of the US Navy warships USS America and USS John F. Kennedy, HMS Invincible had been the only aircraft carrier in the Baltic Approaches region. There were Soviet aircraft operating from Jutland while enemy efforts had denied NATO the effective use of land-based air power from the North Sea coast of West Germany and the southern reaches of Norway while Sweden was forces concentrated its air efforts elsewhere. Only from the British mainland as well as the Netherlands had there been airbases where aircraft of NATO could be in close proximity to the North Sea, the Skagerrak and the Kattegat. The Invincible, with sixteen aircraft aboard, had been of limited effectiveness despite the best efforts of the RN to provide airborne coverage for allied warships in these waters.

But then the big ships of the US Navy arrived from the Mediterranean.

Those two massive fleet carriers which dwarfed the lone RN light carrier in size, crew and the number of aircraft carried came up from the south through the English Channel along with their escorts and also the battleship USS New Jersey: another warship which again dwarfed the Invincible. It was just a little bit demoralising for the RN to have to see those carriers arrive to ‘save the day’, as they knew the Americans would be boasting, while they had been struggling to hold the line here against enemy air efforts after the Soviet Baltic Fleet’s surface forces had been earlier stopped from coming through the Danish Straits. Of course, the RN wasn’t about to let the US Navy know how upset they were nor even how actually relieved they were too

That just wouldn’t be done.

Yet, at the same time, with the arrival of the America, the Kennedy and the New Jersey, the Invincible and other RN warships present were now freed from their current mission which they had struggled with. They were now to be released from trying to combat the immense threats from Soviet land-based aircraft to concentrate on planned amphibious and airmobile operations in the region with victorious British troops in what was planned to be another tri-service military operation in the Baltic Approaches… therefore it wasn’t all bad news.


Just as the British suspected, the US Navy was flush with a little bit of overconfidence that their appearance in the North Sea was going to instantly win the war here. Between them the two carriers carried one hundred and forty plus combat aircraft while the guns and missiles mounted on their warships were plentiful. This was a formidable striking force, yet it would be operating in constricted waters not over the open ocean and thus vulnerable in many instances to a determined enemy attack if that opponent could show a little bit of imagination.

For now, as they crossed the North Sea and steamed past the Dutch coast aiming for the widest part of this stretch of sea between Britain and mainland Europe, the America and the Kennedy announced their arrival to the enemy. The carriers started launching Tomcat’s first to have those interceptors range far and wide ahead of the strike aircraft which were to be following them. There were liaison officers from both the 2ATAF and the 3ATAF which had joined the carriers earlier in the day so that flight operations from the carriers could be coordinated with them, and the entrance into this airspace of multiple US Navy went smoothly. The NATO air forces had taken many losses during their own operations and were very welcoming of the influx of what were reinforcements for them operating from mobile airbases complete with their own airborne radar, inflight refuelling and electronic warfare assets in addition to the specialised intelligence assets and wide-area air defence systems which the US Navy had too.

As the Tomcat’s set off for the German coastline and crossed friendly lines above East Frisia, they at once searched the skies using their own radars for hostile contacts which the Hawkeye’s behind them were picking up over to the east. The skies were rapidly darkening and the Soviets operated few aircraft at night due to near-effective NATO air dominance in the hours of darkness, yet there were contacts spotted. Intelligence pointed to these being Soviet Air Force Fulcrum’s and Flanker’s or Flanker’s and Foxhound’s in service with Soviet Air Defence Force’s units pushed forward over Eastern Europe far from their home bases. Either way, those fighters and interceptors were about to get a surprise…

…in the form of air-to-air missiles which they had yet to encounter over the skies of Europe: Phoenix missiles.

A squadron from each carrier was airborne and these started launching their missiles from just short of a hundred miles away to break up the Soviet flights kept back near the Inter-German Border and hopefully down many of those too. The US Navy was aware that their long-range missiles were best used against bigger targets that these, yet the lightning-fast missiles should come as a surprise and were being ‘escorted’ by waves of electronic warfare efforts to cover their approach. There were still more Phoenix missiles carried upon these Tomcat’s as well as Sparrow’s with a shorter-range too, but for now that first wave was away.

Corsair’s, Hornet’s, Intruder’s and Prowler’s followed the Tomcat’s on what was to be an Alpha Strike mission: US Navy parlance for a land-attack strike. When back in the Mediterranean, the two carriers had carried some US Marine aircraft too, but those had been left behind there now flying from bases on the Turkish mainland. Nonetheless, the America and the Kennedy had both had their air wing’s heavily-reinforced pre-war and now there was a little bit more room aboard each vessel for those which remained. These aircraft involved in this evening’s Alpha Strike got airborne with many weapons carried knowing that they weren’t going to operate too far from their carriers. There were plenty of divert locations for them to go to in an emergency as the US Navy’s airborne refuelling capabilities were usually covered by other strike aircraft with buddy-tanks (or occasionally the US Marines too with KC-130 aircraft) and that wasn’t something which was being done in strength tonight as all efforts were focused upon hitting the enemy hard with as much available strength as possible.

The Soviet interceptors were taken by surprise by the appearance of Tomcat’s firing Phoenix missiles at them when their intelligence had nothing like those on their threat boards: such aircraft were meant to be in the Barents Sea or the eastern Med. With the specialised efforts of a couple of EA-3B electronic warfare aircraft (conversions of the heavy A-3 Skywarrior bomber) playing their games, the Fulcrum’s and Flanker’s encountered at distance took many losses. The US Navy had been sharing intelligence between it’s fleets and also with NATO allies and really gave the Soviets engaged a lesson in the successful application of intelligence-driven electronic warfare. The Tomcat’s afterwards increased speed and edged further ahead of the strike aircraft coming behind them hoping to chase down survivors of their first missile barrage and making sure that NATO again owned the dark skies above Europe.

There were brand-new versions of the Hornet strike-fighter flying from the America – the F/A-18C variant – and these were fast into action among the older Corsair’s, Intruder’s and Prowler’s. Anti-radar missiles and close-in jamming came from the latter aircraft, while the attacking aircraft dropped bombs and fired short-range land-attack missiles. These aircraft didn’t join the Tomcat’s in going as far as deep into East German airspace and instead stayed above occupied portions of West Germany. The US Navy was operated this evening in support of the 2ATAF so their aircraft could have a temporary stand-down for a short period of emergency but necessary maintenance after their aircraft had been busy all day and so they attacked tactical targets in support of the British Second Army. Those targets ranged from identified command posts for ground forces to the fire support assets of those ground forces: artillery, tactical missile batteries, and helicopter parks. There were attack runs made by Corsair’s with cluster bombs over positions of Soviet tanks while Intruder’s put bombs atop pontoon bridges which Soviet engineers had over the Oker River near Braunschweig and Wolfenbuttel. The Hornet’s were focused against Soviet Army Scud missile-launchers and went after those in many identified hidden locations where they had been spotted by careful reconnaissance made by 2ATAF efforts.

Enemy SAM activity was known to be weak yet the US Navy was still prepared for the worst with those Prowler’s and then many strike aircraft having at least one anti-radar missile carried. That intelligence on the sorry state of air defences was correct though with few functions radars supporting SAM’s to attack and opposition instead coming from anti-aircraft guns. Some of these were radar-guided, but many were aimed visually and using infrared: targets much more difficult to engage for now. With no enemy aircraft to challenge them and very few SAM’s, only four US Navy aircraft involved in the Alpha Strike were lost before the mission was over. These strike aircraft had been flying rather high rather than the low-level attacks favoured by land-based aircraft with the 2ATAF, yet these losses were staggering for their lack of success on the part of the enemy; double figures had been expected.

As to those Tomcat’s, the aircrews would later claim nineteen victories for themselves using their missiles with another one called for crediting using guns. Detailed analysis of gun camera footage and radar data, as well as collaboration by other pilots, would lower that number from twenty down to fourteen confirmed kills, which was still a high number. This was off-set against the losses to the Tomcat’s of three of their own. America-based VF-102 had a Tomcat lost over the Harz Mountains when a Soviet Fulcrum fired an infrared-guided AA-11 Archer missile at it in an unfortunate close-range engagement which the US Navy aircrew should have avoided when facing such an agile aircraft. VF-14 flying from the Kennedy suffered the other two Tomcat casualties as those aircraft went down over East Germany with one being struck by a missile from a Flanker fired at distance and another taking a hit from an S-300V SA-12 Gladiator SAM. With the latter, NATO was still struggling to deal with the S-300 series of missiles as they represented the best of the SAM capabilities of the Soviets and though few in number were proving exceptionally deadly. In addition, the supply efforts to keep such strategic air defence systems working were functioning, even if intermittently, enough to make them a real risk to NATO aircraft flying deep into enemy territory.

Regardless, the Alpha Strike in support of the ground forces across the North German Plain had been a major success. The attacking aircraft flew back to their carriers escorted by further Tomcat’s though there was always a watch kept on any Soviet raketonosets efforts as a threat to the America and the Kennedy despite intelligence saying that those flown by Soviet Naval Aviation which remaining flying (and there weren’t many of those) were in the Kola Peninsula ready to be soon finally destroyed by Striking Fleet Atlantic.


The New Jersey hadn’t been part of the Alpha Strike due to the battleship, which had just steamed halfway around the world, having been detached from the carrier group. Instead, the warship with her nine sixteen-inch guns, dozen five-inch guns and thirty-plus Tomahawk cruise missiles was with a trio of escorts and heading towards land.

The British would soon be in need of the services of her weapons in their planned military operations in the Baltic Approaches and although the crew didn’t yet know the details of the mission which they were on, they were eager to get underway with it after such a long journey.

The North Sea was turning into an area where NATO naval power was concentrating stronger as every day the threat in the North Atlantic got weaker, yet away from the two US Navy carriers and Invincible too with their air missions, the New Jersey was to lead surface action warfare here despite all of those smaller destroyers, frigates and missile boats with their firepower being nothing like that of the big battleship.





One Hundred & Eighty–One

The view of the Soviet military when it came to POW’s was that such captives were useful. They were tools of propaganda, of intelligence gathering, of negotiation value and could be physically put to work too. This was a pre-war policy when it came to any hypothetical war with the West that in such a scenario, those enemy soldiers which fell into their hands held worth that was there to be exploited to further the goals of not only the Soviet Armed Forces but of the state too. The value of the individual lives of enemy POW’s meant nothing to the Soviets yet they knew that the soft West had a vastly different opinion and that too was something to be made great usage from.

During the first week of warfare, what the Soviet and their Northern Tier allies of the Warsaw Pact did with POW’s captured from NATO forces followed those plans made a long time ago. More than sixteen thousand enemy soldiers were captured during the immense battles with NATO forces across Denmark and West Germany and these were at once transported backwards from the frontlines as those moved further forward in the other direction. Almost two thirds of those POW’s which the Soviets took into their custody weren’t frontline combat men or downed aircraft pilots, but rather support personnel assigned to NATO rear-areas which were overrun during offensives, especially those on that Friday when chemical weapons were used and the Soviet third echelon armies struck. Those who weren’t massacred by attacking units in the heat of victory after they had risen their hands – which was regular occurrence – were ‘processed’ and then moved away to be put to use.

There were Americans, Belgians, Brits, Canadians, Danes, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards and West Germans all taken in great number with token numbers of Luxembourgers and Portuguese too. Many were wounded while other had suffered mistreatment at the hands of their initial captors. They were those who were frightened into silence and those who fought back. Many sought to escape prolonged captivity after regarding their capture as a temporary and unfortunate matter; depression swept over others at the thought of the fate which awaited them in the hands of the enemy. The captures had occurred in West Berlin, along the battles for the area immediately west of the Inter-German Border, across Schleswig-Holstein and into Jutland, from the armoured drives westwards once the Soviet armies had finally managed to break free of NATO fixed defences and also from pilots shot down. There were so many POW’s and a lot more than anticipated.

The Soviet Army took charge of those captured in combat with the exception of those Bundeswehr, Luftwaffe and even Bundesmarine (there were quite a few West Germany Navy ground defence troops for their bases who saw action) personnel who were turned over to the East Germans. Once military police units from the Warsaw Pact armies, who were many times assisted by rear-area troops when there was great number of captives, handed them over, the POW’s met their true fates. Even pilots and aircrew didn’t go to the Soviet Air Force as some might have expected, but the Soviet Army instead along with those GRU and KGB personnel in support. Certain men and officers were identified and immediately removed by those spooks for their own purposes, yet the vast majority went through initial questioning where the standard response of ‘name, rank and serial number’ was met with a fist or a boot and more information demanded at the barrel of a rifle. Immense trails of paperwork were at once created in holding centres set up across occupied portions of Denmark and West Germany as information was collected here before trucks started moving POW’s eastwards.

Draft plans for dealing with POW’s had been put into practise overnight as the true camps for these captives were established in open fields across East Germany and western parts of Czechoslovakia. Weary of the dreaded NATO Barbarossa #2 taking place in part even if the Soviet Army had struck first to pre-empt that, the Soviets wanted their prisoners far away from liberation brought about by enemy action. Barbed-wire and improvised minefields were erected with haste to trap those POW’s out in the open while any structures were built for official use only. These camps would be for the enlisted men and those officers which the intelligence services had no interest in and for now the Soviets themselves just wished to keep confined. Later, these men would be put to work in planned rebuilding efforts and then possibly released as part of any negotiated settlement with NATO, yet for now they were left alone… all alone. There was no shelter or no access to medical treatment for them just the very basic food rations and filthy, stagnant drinking water given. The Soviet Army had nothing to spare but bullets for those who tried to escape or make attempts to organise as a rebellious force. It could be argued that this was an act of premediated mass murder yet it was just that there was no care about the fates of these men. Those who survived this captivity were meant to be put to a real use at a planned later stage, yet they were fast forgotten by their captors.

During the second week of the war when the numbers of POW’s gained diminished but still occurred, things changed. The intelligence services still took their catch of those who they were interested in – and there were quite a few instances of mistaken identity with this effort – yet the collapsing Soviet supply situation was in no way capable of moving large numbers of POW’s to the rear without that effecting other more important warfighting operations.

POW camps were established in occupied territory and in locations where many in the Soviet Army’s rear-area services regarded as far too close to the frontlines. Again there were basic food rations and the water given was near undrinkable along with an utter lack of medical attention for those wounded, but being closer to the frontlines was a slightly better experience for those captives. They could hear the rumble of artillery and the thunder of aircraft flashing above them and so they knew that the fighting was still ongoing. US Army and Danish soldiers from Lubeck were in these latter camps and so too were more US Army soldiers from Einbeck. British TA paratroopers who had surrendered after the last of the opposition in small cities and big towns such as Braunschweig, Hildesheim and Salzgitter had finally been crushed arrived as well and these men told stories of how they had fought building-to-building in the big anti-tank traps which those places had been. Some men from the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division which had been crushed in central Hessen went sent up against tanks came to the camps and then there were Dutch soldiers who had evaded initial capture on the Luneburg Heath when their army collapsed before finally being caught. Finally, there were those few captured at the frontlines too since the first weekend of the war and aircrews of NATO aircraft shot down.

There were fewer men in a state of shock at their capture as those in the first waves of NATO POW’s had been and more fighting men than rear-area service troops too. Even some Green Berets, as physically and mentally damaged by brutal enemy interrogation as they were, showed up along with a very few SAS men as well. Morale was still terrible among the captives yet they knew that the war was far from lost overall even if they had been taken prisoner by the enemy.

Many of these camps which housed the second wave of NATO soldiers captured were in occupied territory which saw liberation just as Soviet planners had feared when first BLACKSMITH and then the Germany-wide NATO counter-offensives finally got underway late in the war’s second week. In those they found scenes of horror awaiting them which even while that had occurred over a short period of time, weren’t something which anyone was ready for. Those prisoners which had caused their captors any difficulties had been murdered without even the pretence of justice and their bodies dumped in ditches for the flies and wildlife. Female military personnel in the camps told of serious sexual assault and rapes – often in gang-rape form – which had occurred before they were lucky enough to end up in these POW camps… other women had been brutally murdered after being used as they were by their first captors. There were ethnic minority soldiers who told of horrible fates to many of their comrades who weren’t Caucasian. Much of the enlisted ranks of the US Army in Europe were black servicemen while the military forces of the British, the Dutch and the French all had small but not insignificant members of distant African heritage serving among them. There were other minorities too serving in NATO armies – Filipino-Americans, Nepalese Gurkhas and French Pacific Islanders as a few examples, in effect anyone different to the eye – who had faced similar racist treatment that ranged from vicious beatings to lynching.

The scale of such war crimes, unorganised and not officially condoned by the Soviet Army but occurring with immense frequency to military personnel captured as it was already known to have been the case with civilians, was enough to tax war crimes investigators for the next few thousand years. What was of urgent attention first though were dump sites for the bodies of captured NATO soldiers where their remains lay either in the battlefields where they had fallen or at other locations… and then talking to the guards and security personnel from the camps who hadn’t managed to flee in time.


Those POW’s which the Soviet intelligence services removed from initial captivity would have liked to have been inside those camps, even the ones deeper in enemy territory and far from the possibility of liberation by friendly ground forces, rather than where they ended up. The incident with how General Shalikashvili with the US Army – captured at Lubeck and then coerced into assisting in the surrender of the defenders of Einbeck – was just one example of what occurred with these intelligence-driven efforts to have the POW’s put to effective use for Soviet goals.

Spying efforts pre-war as part of peacetime espionage efforts had given the Soviets much information as to the command structure of the NATO militaries. They knew who was in command of what, where and when. This was important, but of greater value was staff appointments within the armed forces of the West and thus those with access to information which the GRU wanted. The knowledge in the heads of the captives was to be drained through what were rarely subtle methods and instead through brute-force. The threat of being shot was one thing, but torture was regarded as being even more effective. There was too little value seen in physiological torture as that was time-consuming; the directed use of fire, limb removal and castration of those who they wished to give over information, of even their comrades standing/seated next to them, went a long way as far as the Soviets were concerned. The Soviets understood that many in the West regarded torture as being something which would produce poor results as men would say anything under pain, yet they didn’t want confessions or subservience but rather information instead that was often time-sensitive. Moreover, the fear that torture brought out in their captives was anyway often enough for them to get what they needed, especially when brought home by the screams and then subsequent disfigurement or death of those who it was used against.

The GRU wanted certain officers to issue false orders for the support of military operations and had most accomplishment with that when Shalikashvili had been used in that lone incident. They tried the same trick – though, admittedly, on smaller scales – elsewhere yet found that radio orders were better than personal attempts. The trick for the GRU was to move fast with their captives to act as senior officers bringing new orders yet that was a hard thing for them to achieve due to NATO radio security measures and the knowledge that officers were missing presumed dead or captured. Other captives had to be identified as knowing the correct radio codes and also whether anyone involved on the other side in the targeted operation was aware of the fate of that military officer to be used. This just got far too complicated for the GRU to do in a real-world situation where battle was being waged and the frontlines of combat were fluid. Small, isolated victories were gained but the incident at Bad Salzschlirf was always going to remain the biggest success there.

Many captives were taken for their perceived use as tools of propaganda.

The relatives of important Western political and military figures were snatched away from their comrades to be held for later use in KGB ransom efforts. Pictures, hand-written letters and audio recordings – even in a select few instances videos – were created using these people ready to be sent when the time was right to those free and safe in the West who cared about their loved one trapped in Soviet captivity pleading for their life. This was part of a long-term effort and one which was greater in effort involved, yet the hope was that when these hostage efforts were put to use, there would be much success as some of the POW’s used here for these purposes were the close relatives of some very important people with real power and influence.

Other propaganda efforts involving POW’s held by Soviet intelligence personnel were meant to have immediate effects. The same media efforts – photographs, letters, voice recordings and some videos too – were used to create statements which POW’s were to make to be broadcast in their home countries as well as worldwide where the Soviets were able to at least try to do that. Certain individual captives were selected by the KGB for their perceived attributes. There were female military personnel, young male soldiers with good looks, those who were exceptionally articulate, ethnic minorities and others with language skills who were selected for this. They were to follow the Soviet script and if they didn’t they would face instant execution as an example to others present. Other signs of dissent were punished in the same manner: those who tried sending messages by blinking in morse code, using sign language, crossing their fingers, shaking of the head and using language nuances where they thought that those involved in the propaganda efforts wouldn’t be wise to this. The actual propaganda was of multiple elements with pleas for an end to the war, lies being told about how the war was being fought, falsehoods about so-called war crimes by NATO and suchlike alongside what the KGB thought would be clever efforts to sow discord by playing on race issues in the West and tales of failed cooperation between allies; there were even outright boasts made by the captives of the strength of Soviet arms against those of their own nations as a propaganda move made from a different approach. This barrage of propaganda efforts went to the home countries of those used in them, to neutral nations and also to be put to use in the Soviet Union too.

The interrogations of those with information, those held hostage and those making propaganda statements created paperwork for those who were involved in it just like with the actual ‘processing’ done at the POW camps where those captives were ignored and left to die as the initial planned needs for them came to naught. No thought was paid to where that evidence might eventually – sometime in the future – end up and the possible consequences for those who gathered it from their captives.





One Hundred & Eighty–Two

The Northern Tier countries of the Warsaw Pact were integral to the military operations being conducted by the Soviets. The combat forces, the resources and the territory of East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia had all been put to use by them and continued to be of great importance. Without the presence in the war of these three nations, the Soviets wouldn’t be able to continue fighting the war as they were on the territory of their enemies rather than on their own.

Pre-war, right from just after the Moscow Coup late last year, controlling these nations was paramount and this continued as the war was fought.


In Poland, General Jaruzelski tried his best to maintain the firm grip on power which he had there. He spent the war in his nation’s capital though did so above ground and not in a bunker as he knew others were doing. There were very few NATO air attacks against Warsaw and the sunglasses-wearing General Jaruzelski (he had suffered from snow-blindness when in Siberia during the early stages of WW2) was a fatalistic man with the opinion that if one of those bombs that fell upon the city during the rare air attacks managed to kill him then that was his fate.

Poland’s leader played little active part in the war himself; he gave General Siwicki as the Minister for National Defence as much freedom as that man wanted… though there was in actuality very little of that as the Soviets were in control. As it was across the rest of the Northern Tier countries, Soviet military officers were integrated within their armed forces at the highest levels as while General Siwicki signed the orders for the army, the navy and the air force, it was the wishes of these non-Poles that were followed. Polish troops fought alongside their Soviet comrades in Germany, Polish warships worked with the combined Baltic Fleet and Polish aircraft flew offensive and defensive missions in conjunction with Soviet aircraft while responding to Soviet orders on the ground. Only in name did the Poles have any sovereignty with their armed forces.

The slaughter of Polish military servicemen when locked in combat against NATO forces as they supported the Soviet’s RED BEAR offensive into Germany and the wider parts of Western Europe was something which was at first unknown to General Jaruzelski. He wasn’t made aware of the scale of the losses suffered and was only told that NATO opposition was fierce yet victory after victory was being won where Polish troops were involved. It could be argued that he didn’t want to know; General Jaruzelski didn’t seek out answers like that as he instead met with his Party comrades and also spoke to his people every night on the radio. The Soviet line was followed with Poland’s leader telling his countrymen how the West had attacked first and that the Soviets, Poles and other countries were pushing those aggressors back with a view to a peaceful settlement. There was no talk of the purges which occurred late last year to the Solidarity movement nor the Soviet terrorism unleashed against the West in the lead-up to war, just mention made of how the war was being won on behalf of Socialist nations involved. When American and sometimes British aircraft struck at transport links in Poland, General Jaruzelski was again lying to his people as he told them mistruths about such military action commenced over Poland.

As the wheels came off for the Soviet cause, and the war really started to bite home in Poland, General Jaruzelski had no choice but to better take notice of what went on in his country and abroad with his nation’s military. The Soviet stripping of food and fuel from his country along with the trashing of Poland’s economy for their direct, short-term military needs causes chaos. Poland was really suffering from very targeted NATO air attacks too which smashed apart the shipyards on the Baltic, what seemed like every road and rail bridge over rivers throughout the western part of the country and then the bombardment of power stations which supplied the country with its electricity… which provided everything from street lighting to heating homes to keeping drinking water supplies going. There were no civilian trucks left in the country while factories making not only industrial products but consumer goods were forcibly brought under Soviet military control. Local co-opting of Polish security forces by the Soviets meant that Polish civilians were slaughtered when they complained and then there were the excessive Soviet forced conscription of other Polish civilians for general labouring duties no matter who they were and where their skills were needed.

Polish troops in Germany had been accidentally gassed by Soviet chemical warfare attacks and then massacred too in NATO retaliation. Polish marines on Zealand and Polish paratroopers in Norway took horrific casualties in combat yet those were nothing in comparison to those among the regular tank and motorised rifle forces employed in Germany when faced with NATO combat forces. The Polish Navy was effectively destroyed trying to break out of the Baltic while there were very few Polish aircraft flying either across in Germany and soon enough at home too.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Orzechowski resigned from the government and then had a sudden, unexplained ‘fall’ in his home that killed him: the fate of the man didn’t appear to be an accident and suspicion fell upon Poland’s Soviet allies with this regarded as a murder committed by them. Before his death Orzechowski had spoken of how Poland was being treated as a leper worldwide with the demonising of the country occurring even among neutral nations with guilt by association for the terrorism, the disturbing reports of civilian massacres inside foreign occupied territory and the fact that Poland was one of the countries regarded as having attacked many respected neutrals. The country had no friends and the often uncomfortable fact – for the ruling Communist Party that was – where the outside world saw Poland as an unfortunate victim of the Soviets pre-war had evaporated: however the war ended, Poland was never going to have any more than a few token friends worldwide.

General Jaruzelski became aware of the intensive physical surveillance upon his person which came from Soviets within his personal entourage. They were apparently there for his security and to advise him on the course of the war, yet they openly riddled the ranks of his companions of anyone who might have harboured doubts about the war while also blocking access of many people who wished to see him. He was openly lied to at first when he was told bad news with the statements that such things were falsehoods and enemy propaganda before no one would openly give him bad news and therefore it was instead whispered to him before such confidants of his soon disappeared too. He started to believe that documents he was signing weren’t what would finally gain his signature for distribution to those who needed to see them and there were occasions where he heard replays on the radio of himself speaking where what he had said had been subtly changed or even – outrageously! – replaced in certain instances with the voice of someone impersonating him.

Then the news came of problems with the Polish Army in Germany. He was at first informed that traitors had rebelled and starting killing their own officers as well as Soviets before there was conspicuously no mention of that again to him. He was told secrets by his ever-dwindling numbers of those fellow Poles he saw personally that there was a rebellion spreading though through further Polish military units across in Germany; no matter how hard the Soviets tried to stop it, the rumours of Soviet murders of Polish troops were spreading and then other Poles would react to that.

Yet… what could General Jaruzelski do about all of this? The Soviets had taken his country into this war and were ready to use the most extreme measures to keep the situation that way with Poland being raped for the wishes of their so-called allies. He alone would be shot and replaced in an instant if he moved openly even in the smallest of ways against them and all the while his power was diminishing anyway. Such a hypothetical rebellion of his own against the Soviets wasn’t what he could do, let alone was brave enough to do either. The Polish military officer who had risen to the very top here in his own country had always been a personal coward and would continue to remain so as irreparable damage was done to the country which he had always claimed to love.


Down in Czechoslovakia, Gustav Husak had been ‘replaced’ as leader on the eve of war by the KGB. They had taken him away to be shot and buried in an unmarked grave just outside Prague. This was a situation laced with irony as he had been told following the Soviet reassertion of active control over Eastern Europe following the Moscow Coup that he was about to be assassinated by his political opponents and therefore had given his support to the arrest and removal of his Politburo comrades Adamec, Jakes and Strougal… men who lay in unmarked graves very far away in distant Siberia.

Vasil Bilak, another Slovak by birth, had taken control of Czechoslovakia afterwards and did the Soviets bidding as the war got underway and as it went on. Czechoslovak military forces fought alongside their Soviet comrades in Germany with attacks made westward. There was much hard fighting and many losses taken among those forward deployed forces. At home, Czechoslovakia was bombed by NATO aircraft, especially the border areas and then later throughout the western regions of the country. Bilak stayed in a bunker near Prague with Soviets on-hand to ‘protect’ him. He was fed lies about the conduct of the war yet being the man that he was, Bilak ate them up and would have no sign of dissent among his limited entourage.

There was a limited rebellion of some reserve troops back in his native Slovakia and then Czechoslovakian troops were gassed by both their Soviet allies and then NATO forces; he heard nothing of these events. As the Soviet military tore apart his country for support from the unwilling civilian sector, again Bilak new nothing. Like General Jaruzelski it could be argued that he too didn’t want to know what was going on. Instead, his concern was his power and the purges he launched of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party directed as they were in written orders from his bunker. His country outside his safe location was being torn apart but he knew nothing of that and instead had his attention focused elsewhere. The war was rather an annoyance as things couldn’t be done with it going on. However, his Soviet advisers assured this weak-willed man that once it was over and victory was won for the Soviet cause, the contribution of him to that conflict wouldn’t be forgotten.

Bilak dreamt of victory coming soon all the while living comfortable and safe while the terrors of World War Three, many being inflicted upon his countrymen, when on outside.


Erich Mielke was no General Jaruzelski or Vasil Bilak. He had willingly taken his country into the war without being pushed, coerced or mislead by the Soviets into doing so. During the conflict there was nothing that Mielke should have known about that he wasn’t aware of. He was personally briefed at many occasions by senior Soviet intelligence and military figures too with honest appraisals of the situation given to him. The level of official support given to the Soviets from the East German authorities reflected how he was treated along with his thirty year service as head of the Stasi.

Despite being a full general with the East German Army, Mielke actually had no concern for the military losses which were suffered by his country’s armed forces. They were just tools to be used and when they were spent fulfilling goals which he was fully committed to, he wasn’t going to shed a tear. The destruction of the military with their uniforms, traditions and history was in fact seen as a bonus. East Germany was protected by the Soviet Army and many in the military of the country he ruled were regarded as future enemies of his too. He had his personal army anyway with the Stasi-controlled Felix Dzerzhinsky Guard Regiment (more than eleven thousand strong) and other paramilitary forces controlled by the Party. Damage from NATO air attacks was severe yet could be rebuilt with slave labour from West German military personnel treated as such. Shortages at first with civilian goods and then that Soviet military control of many aspects of civilian life for their purposes were not something he bothered about as it was necessary for the war effort and also worked for his own benefit too as public anger turned towards ‘Russians’ rather than his regime. The pre-war influential Lutheran churches in East Germany and any sign of dissent – real or imagined – in the East German Communist Party were crushed and hidden behind the effects of the war.

But as the war turned against Mielke’s Soviet sponsors and then started to pose a danger to his regime, he started to worry. He had grand designs for ruling significant parts of West Germany after the conflict was over, maybe all of it, yet NATO was resisting far too much and then started to take back what they had physically lost. Those NATO bombs which fell did more damage than he thought that they could and there were troop reinforcements constantly being assembled in the West and moved to Europe while the Soviets struggled to move their own forces across Eastern Europe. There was a demand first made for the men of the two East German Army guard units employed around Berlin – the Friedrich Engels & Hugo Eberlein Guards Regiment’s – to be removed from their security duties in the capital to be deployed protecting Soviet supply links on the ground; Mielke considered these soldiers to be needed where they were despite them being military not Stasi troops. The Soviets wanted many of the Border Guards soldiers deployed in occupied parts of West Germany to be removed from their specialist occupation duties to fill in gaps in the frontlines too; again, Mielke didn’t want to lose these necessary security forces to face probable destruction in destructive and deadly fighting against NATO troops. Moreover, the Soviets wanted too for the East Germans to start conscripting several hundred thousand older men with previous military experience to undertake fast-track training so East Germany could apparently begin to ‘pull its weight’ at the frontlines. Such people were needed trying to keep his country functioning though and having them armed facing the temptations when so for possible rebellion wasn’t what Mielke desired to see either.

Mielke had always done what the Soviets wanted of him. In 1931 he had killed those two Weimar Government policemen in Berlin – he boasted of this after he returned to Germany following WW2 but would state he had been fighting the Nazis – on higher orders which had ultimately been approved by the Comintern. During his exile in the Soviet Union he had betrayed his fellow Germans during the Stalin’s Great Purge. He had gone to Spain during the civil war there in the late Thirties to rid the ranks of Franco’s opponents of those who had fallen from favour with Moscow. During the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Mielke had been with the partisans as a German-speaking intelligence operative and risked a horrible fate had Hitler’s forces of evil managed to get their hands on him. Back in his native Germany, he had done all that the Soviets wanted of him there with the Stasi including having East Germany actively provide support for countless left-wing terrorists to operate against the West while the Soviets could deny such connections of their own. When Chebrikov, a man he considered to be a personal friend, had removed that initial troika put in-place in East Berlin to replace Honecker, Mielke had finally achieved his ultimate goal in life as the leader of his nation; as a price the Soviets had wanted him to seize West Berlin. He had again done as they wanted even despite the possibility he believed that such an action might bring about a nuclear war with the targets for those warheads being in his country.

All he had asked for was that the Soviet Army defeat the West on the battlefield… which he started to believe that they were going to fail to do.

Military defeat in West Germany meant a NATO invasion of East Germany to complete that. The Soviets he associated with had an unspoken view that such a thing would bring about a situation where Chebrikov in Moscow would stop that with the threat of nuclear war, something which he knew the West didn’t want just like he didn’t. Mielke, a pragmatist, had to consider the possibility that that might not be the case. Chebrikov was another one who didn’t want to see the ultimate weapons of war used and a NATO drive on Berlin might commence even with such empty threats being made.

Would Chebrikov risk Moscow for Berlin when the poker chips were ICBM’s? There was a young KGB Lieutenant-Colonel, a Leningrad native who had been in Dresden for the past few years working with the Stasi there and on the eve of war added to the ranks of advisers with Mielke when it came to Soviet wartime intelligence operations ran out of East Germany who had made this remark to Mielke. This dour but impressive spook had become close to Mielke as the war went on and spoke of such a thing in a carefully-chosen moment. He further speculated on what causes would halt a NATO invasion of East Germany if that spook’s own homeland wouldn’t shield Mielke’s regime with nuclear weapons. Never the fool, Mielke was aware that he was being ever-so-slightly manipulated, yet he understood the line of thinking: East Germany should have it’s own weapons like those to protect itself with.

If the course of the war wasn’t turned back in favour of Mielke’s sponsors, then East Germany would have to acquire such weapons to stave off any possible invasion. The young spook with the KGB remained with Mielke and would certainly be able to help with such a thing… yet only if the war situation got so bad that there was no choice but to have that outcome occur.





One Hundred & Eighty–Three

Throughout late Friday, Marshal Korbutov had the armies under his command across Germany pull back in a series of tactical withdrawals. He had permission from a disappointed Marshal Ogarkov at STAVKA to do this yet there had been no other choice really. Had those series of retreats not been authorised, the Warsaw Pact armies sitting on West Germany territory could have easily been routed when NATO attacked again as expected in the morning and the situation could easily come about where soon the fighting would be on East German and Czechoslovakian territory.

There were parts of his forces spread across the front in extreme danger of being cut off and annihilated should those not be pulled back and gaps had opened up elsewhere that NATO assaults could pour through. This couldn’t be allowed to happen and so the rush, improvised orders had been cut for those withdrawals.

Of course, this wasn’t an easy thing to do. For units in the midst of combat to suddenly pull back several miles into the rear towards a certain geographical feature was very hard to achieve. They had to break combat enough with those engaging them, use screening forces to halt a chase after them and then rush to instantly prepare to turn back around and fight again where they were meant to. With those formations on the verge of being pocketed by advancing NATO forces, those troops had to leave behind their own defensive positions which they had long been comfortable in and then squeeze through a gap when advancing enemy pincers hadn’t yet closed to then move to new, unprepared positions. This all had to do done whilst facing skies that were full of enemy aircraft and the unwillingness of those opponents to go along with these withdrawals without moving to stop them from being successfully achieved.

Those orders from Marshal Korbutov had been for screening forces to be used to cover the retreats of his main combat forces. Those units assigned to act in such a screening role had to be sacrificed for the greater good and it wasn’t a duty anyone would relish doing. A formation would have to be deemed not-important enough to be saved from encirclement and destruction and moved into the way of advancing NATO forces at the correct moment. It would too have to be strong enough to cause a delay to the enemy without being pushed aside and bypassed so that it could fulfil its projected role. Combat support and even service support units – non-fighting formations – couldn’t effectively be used in such a way and so it was frontline combat troops which would have to be expended like this and therefore lessening the number of those which were to be saved.

During a retreat, even a highly-organised one planned over a period of time beforehand, there was always going to be panic and disorder in places. Some units wouldn’t get their orders in time or those wouldn’t be properly understood: in the middle of battle this would be difficult. Discipline could easily break down as the act of a mass withdrawal would panic troops and even cause some to decide that that was the correct moment to rebel. In addition, there would be occasions where not enough time was given for a certain formation to move from one location to another and the enemy took advantage of that.

Nevertheless, despite all of these difficulties, Warsaw Pact forces across Lower Saxony, down through Hessen and into northern Bavaria begun those withdrawals.


The Soviet 3GMRD – the victors of the Battle of Hamburg – had already been assigned to move across the lower reaches of the Elbe to support the Polish First Army before the French had smashed most of that latter formation apart. The reinforcing Soviets assisted what Polish forces they could link up with in deploying across the countryside on the western side of Autobahn-7 down to as far as the crossroads and major communications centre of Soltau. There were many weak points with the 3GRMD being fragile like the Poles were and then there being severe discipline problems with those Polish units too, but the French had overextended themselves and were held from breaking through for now… this stretch of the new frontlines was almost twenty-five miles long and wouldn’t hold off a determined attack should one come as expected when the next morning came.

The new frontline ran west from Soltau to near Verden where the right wing of the Soviet First Guards Army had stopped the French from following the eastern bank of the Aller all the way down to link up with the British. This was a crucial point of the new Soviet defences as this area had to be held due to what was to the immediate south. Supporting the Soviet First Guards Army was the 27th Independent Guards Motorised Rifle Brigade: a formation from Moscow which had come to Germany as a Front-level reserve formation due to its combat effectiveness. It’s tank battalion had rushed into battle with the French in the late evening and been sacrificed in stopping them while the infantry and artillery had then helped establish the new frontlines.

The position near Verden, as far forward as it was, was of vital importance as Soviet forces deployed there allowed the corridor over the Aller behind to be kept open. Between that river on the northern side and the Weser and Leine rivers to the south, the rest of the Soviet First Guards Army along with the Soviet Eleventh Guards and part of the Fifth Guards Tank Army’s had been deployed on the frontlines but spent the night racing to move north and then back eastwards. Their crossings over the Aller were being destroyed faster by NATO aircraft than they could be established, but tens of thousands of men and thousands of tanks were being pulled out of what could easily be a pocket to rival the 1941 Battle of Smolensk if NATO managed to close it and encircle them. In the darkness, confusion reigned and those skies were full of attacking aircraft, but as many men and tanks had to be pulled out of there as fast as possible.

The Soviet Second Guards Army held the frontlines along the Aller after facing their defeat by the British. From near Schwarmstedt down to Celle, these Soviet troops who had been smashed apart in places and elsewhere suffered from mutinies where officers had been killed by rowdy men, was holding on knowing that should the British I Corps attack again they were in much trouble and the narrow river here was not much of a barrier.

There was a massive gap in Marshal Korbutov’s lines east of Hannover. The Polish Fourth Army there was not worthy of that name and it was only due to the weakness of the enemy inside what had been the Hannover pocket that no advance had been made through them towards Braunschweig and the Inter-German Border beyond. Intelligence pointed to a massive influx of supplies reaching the British and West German troops there though and that was of extreme concern. There were KGB field security troops among those Poles and these were some of those who manned the new frontlines that were placed far back running from Celle to Peine and then further southwards following the Funse River upstream. Airmobile troops joined these security forces which had decimated those rebellious Poles along with survivors from the 10GTD & 12GTD: formations with the Soviet Third Shock Army smashed apart earlier in the war. These reorganised brigade-sized forces were shadows of the mighty formations which they had once been, but were all that was available. Their new lines were far back and littered with mines hastily spread between them and the NATO forces just to the west. Should an enemy attack occur here, Marshal Korbutov knew that these troops wouldn’t hold.

After the spectacular failure of the Soviet Twenty-Second Guards Army to defeat the Americans ahead of them and get over the Leine west of Hildesheim, those beaten troops remained where they were on the eastern side of that river. Two badly-managed divisions remained with the Taman Guards and the Kamtemir Division tasked to construct defences fast less the US III Corps finish what they had started there. Their positions ran from near Hildesheim down to Alfeld in a compact stretch of the new frontlines where the hope was that they could stop any follow-up attack across the river.

The Soviet Seventh Tank Army and the Polish Second Army, those pair of field armies which had started withdrawing before anyone else, had made it back to the Leine south of Alfeld all the way down to the northern reaches of Hessen. Some units had been sacrificed in slowing down the Belgian-US advance, but that hadn’t been a major NATO effort. The Soviets and Poles here had managed to break free of a direct chase and so where they got back to the Leine there were many smaller forces left ahead as breakwaters to break up the enemy as they closed up. The town of Einbeck, where the US 1st Cavalry Division had been smashed and the remains surrendered, was one such place with a Polish regiment now there in what was a good defensive position geographically waiting ready to be engaged by NATO forces trying to push them out of there.

The Soviet Twentieth Guards Army was almost unrecognisable from its pre-war order of battle. It had been used as a second echelon field army for RED BEAR and then later reorganised again to hold a narrow stretch of the frontlines south of Gottingen. Now it was being withdrawn back northwards after only a few days before coming south. It was sent along Highway-3 and then Autobahn-7 while facing furious night-time air attacks where its air defence ammunition was almost spent. There were plans to have it arrive along the Funse by morning yet that wasn’t going to happen at the slow rate it was moving.

In the general area around Kassel in northern Hessen, the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army remained where it was. The Bundeswehr III Corps hadn’t moved during the day and all Soviet intelligence, which Marshal Korbutov hoped was correct, pointed to it being unable to do so for the time being. This area was soon to become a salient again, though with Soviet forces now providing a bulge in NATO lines rather than the other way around.

The Schwalm River, as it ran through central parts of Hessen down to the Vogelsberg was to be the new frontlines for the Soviet Thirteenth Army… what remained of that field army anyway. This involved a major withdrawal in the face of the advances of the US IV Corps, but the national guardsmen who had advanced to the Lahn River here weren’t going to be able to chase the Soviets. Giessen, which the Soviets had previously fought so hard to keep the Americans away from, was abandoned with haste in the retreat back east which as much hasty damage being done by demolition to the road and rail links around that major town.

South of the highest peaks of the heights of the Vogelsberg, there was a situation similar to that with the forces at danger being trapped between the Aller, Leine and Weser rivers. The Soviet First Guards Tank and the right wing of the Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army’s had been facing encirclement being as far west as they were and so the orders came for them to pull back towards this new stretch of the frontlines being established between that high ground and the Gelnhausen area. Rearguard elements were being left behind throughout the Wetterau region to delay the progress of the US VI Corps and the French II Corps following them while those raiding forces under command of General Schwarzkopf were still running amok through the left wing of the Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army. Those West German Territorial troops who had held on to the centre of Frankfurt through everything thrown at them had finally been relieved by NATO forces during the withdrawal backwards.

Marshal Korbutov had the newly-arrived Soviet Third Guards Army move into the Gelnhausen Corridor and parts of the Spessart. These fresh troops were to block any further northward advances of the Americans and keep them a long way away from the approaches to the Inter-German Border. Pulling back from the previous frontlines and in behind them was the East German Third Army as the plan was to split what remaining formations with that field army were combat effective among the Soviet Third Guards Army and the Soviet Eighth Guards Army to the east which had taken so many losses during the day when fighting the US VII Corps.

Further south, through eastern Bavaria, those Soviet and Czechoslovakian forces remained generally in-place where they were waiting for the French and West German forces to strike later than their NATO allies elsewhere. There had been some small-scale assaults made during the day in what was believed to be an effort to through them off balance, but it was thought that they could hold off what would be weak attacks. The fourth echelon Soviet Eighteenth Army arrived with its new troops to further release other units and was pushed towards the frontlines as well in Bavaria though, like with the third echelon Soviet Fourteenth Guards Army, with reflection Marshal Korbutov realised that it would have best been deployed in northern or central Germany rather than in the south as it was.


Everywhere where the Soviet, East German, Polish and Czechoslovakian forces fell back to so that new frontlines could be created they rushed to set up defences against what was expected to be coming their way again in the morning. Rivers, hills, woodland and marshy ground were chosen as terrain features upon which to build those new frontlines. Infantry was deployed ahead with tanks and artillery behind them. Further back, guarding crossroads and valleys, natural routes for enemy advances, would be more tanks along with dependable anti-tank guns big their fantastic stopping power when properly used.

This was the plan anyway.

In reality, those withdrawals were faced with determined NATO efforts with air power and lighter ground units moving in the dark to make them as difficult as possible for the Soviets to achieve along with all of the other problems which such a large scale series of retreats involved too. So much went wrong with the process of withdrawing hundreds of thousands of Warsaw Pact soldiers as they were pulled back over a great distance.

There was too much equipment to be withdrawn and not all that was to be destroyed and left behind was either. The process of withdrawing in the darkness when faced with constant danger of enemy attack was overwhelming for many units and they could do what was asked of them. There were discipline problems on countless occasions and attempts at mass desertions. Service support elements were given lower priority than combat and combat support units and therefore supply, maintenance and medical units were left behind when they should have been the first to move.

The whole withdrawal schedule slipped further and further behind and barely any major formation was getting into place ready for first light. Even those which did were not going to be in any fit shape to fight after being awake all through the previous day and the night too.

Aside from these important matters on the ground, Marshal Korbutov had over the past two days either directly lost or withdrawn from almost all of the NATO territory taken in the offensives last Friday in what would be regarded elsewhere as a wholesale defeat of Soviet arms.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
One Hundred & Eighty–Four

A rifle section on patrol along the Donegall Road with the 3 QUEENS battle group made the discovery in the early hours of March 26th of what was many years later referred to in all media mentions as the ‘South Belfast House of Horrors’. A pair of RUC policemen with the regular British Army soldiers were directed towards a house along a small terraced road leading off this major thoroughfare and the soldiers came with them. The information which they had been given was that there was a weapons dump in the house located within this stronghold of loyalist paramilitary activity yet there was a weariness on the part of those who went to investigate as a trap was expected.

No gunfire met the soldiers and policemen with them, just scenes of horror.

The house had been empty of tenants for more than a month beforehand and was bare of furniture and many household fittings too. In-place of those was blood and bodies. In every room of the house, including the small cellar where a hole had been dug in the floor as at attempt at a burial site, gruesome killings had taken place. There were bullet holes in the walls, the floors and the ceilings. Improvised manacles for binding hands were found while there were blood-stained hoods dumped there too. Instruments used for torture – pliers, hammers and steam irons – were discarded everywhere as well.

Initially, the soldiers believed there were up to a dozen bodies here but that was a gross underestimation after the pit down in the basement was evacuated of the human remains in there too. Nineteen people had been dumped here and it was thought that maybe more had been killed here and their bodies taken elsewhere. Other evidence later gathered by RUC forensic teams pointed to there have being up to ten perpetrators of the massacre committed here based upon fingerprints and personal effects located.

The victims of the killings here, those tortured and then shot, were not all fully identified even after the passage of time. Those who were named were all Catholics with ties to republican politics and the IRA active in Belfast with two of those being citizens of the Irish Republic. Most of the Donegall Road was a Protestant area with a heavy loyalist presence from the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the killers from that group had carefully chosen those who they wished to kill here from across the city.

More troops and many policemen flooded the area afterwards and they were met with stony silence when they started to try to question neighbours and other residents of the Donegall Road. No one knew anything. They hadn’t seen or heard a thing, especially not the screams and gunfire which would have come from the house where it was determined that the activities there had been going on for at least a week. There were no attacks on the soldiers or policemen from the UDA men in the area yet many suspected loyalist terrorists were known to be carefully watching the activities surrounding the house in question as well as attempts at trying to get locals to talk.

After the bodies found had been removed along with plenty of evidence, the scale of official activity was scaled back due to necessary commitments elsewhere across the city and the wider Ulster too. An efficient guard was put upon the house and there were plans for further acts of investigation to take place there. However, a furious fire broke out inside the house late in the day despite the fact that it was meant to be protected and then the local fire brigade were unable to respond due to commitments elsewhere too. The house was gutted by that fire and what evidence there might have been remaining was destroyed after the petrol-driven blaze did a very effective job in gutting the whole building.

The house would later have to be pulled down as it was structurally unsafe.


With the identification of the bodies recovered from the Donegall Road, investigators were hampered by the state which many of them were in. The men were naked and the faces of many caved in. There were fingerprints quickly taken from the corpses and at that point the RUC was able to start understanding why these people had been targeted for such gruesome fates as they had been by what had to be extreme UDA activity to smash Republicanism in Belfast once and for all so that those Catholics in the city who currently remained after many had been driven out would have no one left around to protect them.

Of those identified quickly, three of the deceased were known terrorists with convictions of IRA activity in the past and there was a strong suspicion by the RUC that they had continued their pre-incarceration actions once released. Another two men whose fingerprints were used to find out who they were had connections to IRA terrorism too. None of these men were innocent and no tears were going to be shed on their behalf by those who identified them as they had been involved in shootings and bombings across Belfast for several years. Each was known to be mid-ranking figure within the IRA from across parts of western and southern Belfast who the RUC’s intelligence gathering efforts had recently lost track of.

Identification efforts with other bodies pointed to three more of them being figures involved in local politics and another being what the RUC referred to afterwards as a ‘VIP’. The trio were Republican political organisers from south Belfast with both Sinn Fein and the moderate SLDP. They were well-known politicians across the city who represented the Catholic community.

That VIP was quickly identified as being Gerry Adams, the MP for Belfast West. He hadn’t been seen in several weeks and the thinking on the part of the authorities was that the absentee member of the House of Commons had left Ulster and gone to the Irish Republic like Alex Maskey – the Sinn Fein member of Belfast City Council – was reported to have done so. Instead, he had been kidnapped at some point and taken to the Donegall Road to be tortured and executed in the South Belfast House of Horrors.

These identifies of these nine men were quickly confirmed – with Gerry Adams this was helped with the scars on his body from the failed attempt on his life four years ago when he had been shot then – yet it would be very difficult with the remaining ten victims. It would take a while for who they were to become known and there was little pressure from above for this to be achieved too with everything else that was going on in Ulster and with World War Three raging. In addition, elements within the RUC with suspected links to the UDA and other loyalist terrorists were thought to be behind efforts to delay not just those identification efforts but to block the investigation into the massacre which had taken place too. MI-5 also became involved and they made sure that it was some time before there was any public mention made of the fact that Gerry Adams was one of those bodies removed from the Donegall Road; their rationale was that Ulster was already undergoing an undeclared civil war complete with ethnic cleansing occurring and the news of his death would only inflame that.


The previous December had seen the car-bombing murder by the IRA of the influential UDA organising figure John McMichael. Not a terrorist himself – the UDA wasn’t a prescribed terrorist organisation despite the wishes of many for it to be –, McMichael had been assassinated in what was later thought to have been a loyalist feud with the IRA being the unwitting triggermen for that internal strife. Nevertheless, the rank and file of the UDA and also those higher-ups not actually ‘in the know’ had been waiting since then for the opportunity for revenge.

During Transition to War and then with the pull-out of the majority of the British Army from Ulster, organisations like the UDA and others had been gearing up for the ethnic cleansing which they unleashed once war came. The IRA and other republican paramilitary groups struck first, those on the loyalist side believed, yet the situation there was muddled with tit-for-tat beatings, shootings and bombings resulting in civil war breaking out across Ulster. Both sides did some horrible things while attempting to justify their actions. Belfast and parts of County Derry (but not the city) would see Catholics evicted en mass from their homes and be left with thousands of empty homes after the conflict finally came to an end while isolated Protestant communities in the rural west and south were left vacant of their former residents too. There were bodies to be recovered everywhere while refugees from the fighting fled elsewhere within Ulster or to the Irish Republic and Scotland.

Those who committed the massacre on the Donegall Road were UDA men from across the city. It was authorised from high-up and certainly assisted by official figures: elements of the RUC providing intelligence and some of those soldiers from the UDR believed to have been involved in the kidnappings leading to the murders. To snatch their victims from their homes and hiding places and then to take them to the scene where they were killed was a major effort which couldn’t have been easily done without a lot of external help. Some of the actual men on the ground who did the killing would later be named in the media abroad when they became more ‘prominent’ during the later post-war years in Northern Ireland: men like J. Adair, M. Courtney, W. Dodds and M. Stone among them – killers and gangsters with fearsome personal reputations known to boast of their involvement in the killings which took place during the civil war.

Those organisational figures were never publically identified though despite their names being known to the British, Irish and even American governments.

The killings which were committed on the Donegall Road were to achieve just what the RUC initially believed about them. Gerry Adams was a spectacular coup for the UDA when in the main they had spent a great deal of time going after those republican figures which they did to deny them the ability to lead resistance to UDA activities across the city. Those victims unidentified by initial enquires were IRA men with wide terrorism experience: men who planned gun and bomb attacks to be committed by their followers and were key to the organisational structure of what remained of the IRA in Belfast. The UDA had decided that the city was to be free of republicans and Catholics and killing such people who wouldn’t remain when others had already fled would achieve that goal of theirs. The brutality of the murders themselves was down to the men involved yet those above them knew that that was going on.


While the events which became the South Belfast House of Horrors were shockingly horrible, they were only the tip of the iceberg and before the last of the sectarian strife had come to an end across Ulster, there would be many more discoveries made of similar, if somewhat less large, murder scenes like that one.





One Hundred & Eighty–Five

After almost two weeks of war, the Soviets had yet to invade Japan… or even Alaska. The North Koreans hadn’t attacked across the DMZ into South Korea either. There had been no Soviet-Chinese war taking place as it was thought there might have been. Air and naval activity on the part of the Soviets in the Western Pacific and occasionally out wider in the world’s biggest ocean had almost come to an end and they were now struggling to defend themselves from American-led Western attacks on the Soviet homeland.

Along those Pacific shores of the Soviet Union the concentration of Western military power grew stronger all the time. Japan had fully mobilised its military forces so that the country could provide a valuable contribution alongside the deployed forces of its allies which were inside Japan: those from the United States in the main yet there were detachments too from Britain, Australia and also Singapore. With those troops and aircraft in Japan were the warships from several more nations too in the nearby waters. Chile and New Zealand had a few warships alongside naval vessels from the other navies of the West (apart from the RN which didn’t have a warship east of Gibraltar) as those two countries made the necessary effort to defend their allies against Soviet aggression.

However, it was the military power of the United States which was dominant in this region and at the forefront of operations against the Soviets. There were US Army forces in Alaska (joined by a brigade from the Canadian Army), in Japan and in South Korea. The US Marines had a significant strength deployed south of Japan ready to move to there or to the Korean Peninsula, whenever the need arose for a deployment to either. Likewise, the USAF had many aircraft gathered in Alaska, Japan and South Korea joined by some reinforcing ANG elements too. The US Navy presence in the northern and western reaches of the Pacific dwarfed that of the other US armed services with three carriers remaining at sea (the Ranger had been lost on the war’s first day and the Midway under tow heading for Subic Bay in the Philippines) alongside the battleship Missouri and a deployment of almost eighty warships and thirty plus submarines available.

This immense US military deployment, especially at sea and in the air, was regarded as being instrumental in keeping the war being fought along the shores of the Soviet Union and in its skies rather than in Japanese waters and skies. As the Soviets struggled to defend themselves they were unable to influence the North Koreans into attacking southwards, something regarded as a nightmare scenario which could cost hundreds of thousands of lives there.

Yet… there as the war went on and it became clear that no invasions were going to occur by either the Soviets or the North Koreas, there were calls from many in the relocated key elements of the US Defence Department for some of those military forces in the Pacific to be redeployed. From his location at Raven Rock Mountain Complex, Frank Carlucci first lobbied President Reagan and the NSC for the transfer of what he referred to as ‘assets’ from the Pacific to Europe. Carlucci was not a popular figure and regarded by many with the NSC has having terrible people skills and there was a general relief that he had left the Doomsday Plane to set himself up at Raven Rock.

Following Reagan’s incapacitation, Carlucci’s ideas for removing some of those so-called assets – i.e. fighting men – away from the Pacific theatre received a surprisingly welcome ear in the form of Acting President Bush. The two men were far from close and Carlucci didn’t believe that should Bush win the Presidential Election late this year (campaigning for this had been suspended for the time being though no one seriously considered the possibility that it would be delayed let alone cancelled) he would lose his position. However, within hours of taking his Oath of Office, Bush had made a statement to the American public over the airwaves concerning his commitment to fighting, and winning, the war with the Soviets. He was very receptive to the Defence Secretary’s ideas for redeployment of some US military forces from the Pacific theatre though recognised that that wouldn’t be an easy thing to do.

Carlucci could point to how troops and ships had been moved from the Caribbean region to Europe yet in the case of the latter it was fought that it was best that the US Navy maintain its strong presence in the Pacific as they were the ones taking the war to the Soviets. Moreover, it could take several weeks for a major redeployment of an aircraft carrier along with escorts to travel halfway around the world to Europe. The US Marines could be flown to Norway or even the Baltic Approaches though while it would be easy to move the men themselves, all of their equipment and their amphibious assault ships would again have to cross the globe to get to Europe. Instead, Carlucci proposed to Bush that some elements of the US Army and the USAF be removed from the Pacific.

From Alaska, the men of the 6th Light Infantry Division – with two regular brigades and the 205th Brigade of USAR reservists – were slated to be flown to Norway. Operations were being considered to go southwards from Finmark into Finnish Lapland and there were already US Army light forces there. There was much equipment already in-place and the command staff of the US XVIII Corps, which had lost control of the 24th Mechanized Infantry & 82nd Airborne Division’s recently (with the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division having been destroyed in combat), was already there in Finmark taking charge of the 7th & 10th Light Infantry Division’s. Those US Army forces were cold-weather trained and could do much good in the Arctic conditions in Finmark and Lapland. Behind them, they would leave Army National Guard units from Alaska and Oregon along with special forces troops to guard against Soviet commando incursions there in Alaska as the Canadian 1st Brigade was also soon to be flown out of there as well. The Canadians would take some time to get to Western Europe due to the need to move its heavy equipment, but the 6th Light Infantry Division could be moved very fast indeed.

In South Korea, the 2nd Mechanized Infantry Division was there in-country along with much support elements of the US Eighth Army that included men from a brigade of California ARNG troops which had gone there rather than with the 40th Mechanized Infantry Division to Germany. The 2nd Mechanized Infantry Division had three brigades of regular troops including one of lighter units that had experience in helicopter operations. There was additionally a highly-trained USAR battalion – the 100/442 INF home-based across US Pacific islands – in South Korea as well. Carlucci wanted to fly that third brigade out of Korea along with that battalion of reservists, all of which were light infantry troops capable of airmobile assault operations, and bring them to Germany. The 25th Light Infantry Division in Japan along with the brigade of Hawaii ARNG troops would remain in-place due to the Japanese feeling safe with such numbers of American troops there yet Carlucci wanted to have plans made for their redeployment should the situation in the Pacific change. He told Bush that having so many experienced troops deployed in the Pacific where there was no chance of them seeing action when US ground forces were taking immense losses every day in Europe wasn’t something that should continue.

Three numbered air forces with the USAF – the 5th, 7th and 13th – were in the Pacific with almost five hundred combat aircraft assigned after being reinforced in places by Air National Guard units. A-10’s, F-4’s, F-15’s and F-16’s were all deployed to fight off Soviet invasions but instead many of them had been taking the war to the Soviets alongside US Navy aircraft flying from aircraft carriers and also in a few cases land bases too. Carlucci wanted the A-10’s in Alaska and the F-4’s in Japan (the latter having come up from the Philippines) to transfer to Europe along with those troops selected for the move. These aircraft had seen little action and unless an invasion came, they were too needed more elsewhere with the capabilities which they offered. He was taking about less than eighty aircraft, which he said wouldn’t make that much of a difference either in the Pacific or in Germany, but such a boost in the skies over northern Norway really would.

There were still warehouses across the United States full of military supplies being emptied for the movement of military wares to combat zones. Europe always had first priority, yet much had gone to the Pacific theatre too. Carlucci wanted to shift the vast majority of those logistics efforts towards Europe and allow what was in the Pacific to be used up there rather than being continuously added to when it wasn’t being put to use. The US Navy and the USAF would still continue to receive what they were getting, but he sought to stop all of those supplies for the US Army being sent where they were when nothing in the way of combat supplies already in-place had yet to be used.

Carlucci’s redeployment plans for certain US military assets were put to the NSC by Bush. The Acting President was aboard the Doomsday Plane – the same one which Reagan had had his stroke aboard – yet was making plans for spending more time on the ground. The NSC flying with him was a rather divided body when it came to what Carlucci wanted and then there was Secretary of State Grassley on the ground at the UN in New York who warned that the South Koreans in particular were going to be unhappy with the removal of one American soldier from their country when all they could talk about was a North Korean invasion, let alone a brigade of them. Questions were asked over the opinions of military commanders in the Pacific to these planned redeployments and Carlucci reacted with anger to the hints that he had Admiral Crowe browbeaten into agreeing with him and therefore making sure that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had his lower-level senior commanders endorse what Carlucci wanted to do.

To Bush, arguments of this nature aside were started by those who were unhappy at his legal assumption of presidential powers in-place of Reagan. There were individuals within the NSC who shouldn’t have been present during meetings where they were causing trouble and trying to damage the war effort for their own gains. He gave his approval to Carlucci’s planned moves to shuffle USAF and US Army assets around as well as logistical support before he decided that unofficial attendees at NSC meetings were no longer going to be present aboard the Doomsday Plane. He was on his way to Greenbrier and afterwards there would be less people on the plane when it left there.

Meanwhile, orders were cut for troops and some aircraft to start leaving Alaska and South Korea. These would be moving to Europe as soon as possible and would be just ahead of the first waves of the US Army’s II Corps forming up across the United States ready to also go to Europe next week.

[ US ARMY ALASKA – deployed in Alaska
41st Oregon ARNG Light Infantry Brigade
207th Alaska ARNG Light Infantry Scout Group
6TH LIGHT INFANTRY DIVISION
1st Light Infantry Brigade
2nd Light Infantry Brigade
205th Reserve Light Infantry Brigade
US IX CORPS – deployed in Japan
29th Hawaii ARNG Light Infantry Brigade
25TH LIGHT INFANTRY DIVISION
1st Light Infantry Brigade
2nd Light Infantry Brigade
3rd Light Infantry Brigade
US I CORPS – deployed in South Korea
3rd California ARNG Mechanized Infantry Brigade
2ND MECHANIZED INFANTRY DIVISION
1st Mechanized Infantry Brigade
2nd Mechanized Infantry Brigade
3rd Light Infantry Brigade
US III MARINE EXPEDITIONARY FORCE – deployed around Okinawa & Guam
3RD MARINE DIVISION
1st Marine Brigade
9th Marine Brigade

US II CORPS – discharged & retired soldiers as part of the US Third Army
14th Armored Cavalry Regiment – from Fort Knox, KY
173rd Airborne Brigade – from Fort Bragg, NC
4TH ARMORED DIVISION – from Fort Polk, LA & Fort Riley, KS
1st Armored Brigade
2nd Armored Brigade
3rd Armored Brigade
5TH ARMORED DIVISION – from Fort Benning, GA & Fort Stewart, GA
1st Armored Brigade
2nd Armored Brigade
3rd Armored Brigade
6TH ARMORED DIVISION – from Fort Bliss, TX & Fort Hood, TX
1st Armored Brigade
2nd Armored Brigade
3rd Armored Brigade
23RD MECHANIZED INFANTRY DIVISION – from Fort Irwin, CA & Fort Carson, CO
1st Mechanized Infantry Brigade
2nd Mechanized Infantry Brigade
3rd Mechanized Infantry Brigade ]





One Hundred & Eighty–Six


Thatcher wanted her War Cabinet, her whole government in fact, to come up out of their bunkers on a permanent basis. The British Prime Minister thought that this would be the best thing to be done as it would begin the process of things starting to normalise somewhat. The war was still ongoing on the Continent, yet for the country to be able to continue to fight there needed to be a stabilisation. To be prepared to at any moment dive back into deep below ground shelters while nuclear warheads went off above destroying the country made such matters impossible. Ministers were scattered up and down the nation and the House of Commons hadn’t met since the week before war was declared. Only a dictatorship could be effectively run in the manner which the country currently was and the thought that Britain was effectively being governed in such a manner as that left Thatcher – who was a true democrat – disgusted.

The decision wasn’t an easy one for the Prime Minister to make and it came after a long period of reflection. Since TtW had begun more than three weeks ago, she hadn’t wanted to enact the measures that had come into play, yet there had been no choice if the country was going to hold together in the face of the war. Yet, the country wasn’t holding together as the war progressed as those measures taken had gone too far and too much damage had been done. The War Cabinet had been focused too much on the fighting taking place on the ground in Germany, at sea and in the skies over the Continent, where more attention should have been paid on the utter destruction being caused at home.

The problem wasn’t the bombs which Soviet bombers had dropped upon the country nor the pinprick but bloody Spetsnaz attacks carried out by the enemy but rather what the British people were doing. Hardly anyone was working and everyone was living in fear. There was no trade, domestic or internal. Towns and cities had seen extreme acts of criminality taking place and were left burnt out in places. Families had broken down when separated by restrictions caused to movement. Children weren’t being educated as schools remained shut. Food rationing might be making an effort to eventually make the country heathy but it was causing outrage with those who decided that they weren’t getting enough. The censorship which was meant to keep people calm and deny information to the enemy was instead causing widespread resentment along with suspicion. On a political level, the coalition National Government wasn’t operating in any fashion and its critics were free to do their worst without any evidence that it could function.

There were shortages occurring with military supplies at the frontlines in Germany with Britain being unable to provide for its own armed forces. War stocks from the United States and other countries were keeping the British Armed Forces fighting yet this was a situation which couldn’t go on indefinitely. The military needed to be supplied with goods manufactured within Britain, using the mass industrial base which was there, rather than coming from finite foreign stocks. There were plans to even further expand the British Army with those conscripted young men yet those soldiers would have to have something to go to war with rather than hand-me-downs from the Americans.

The beginnings of the major effort to get the country moving again, starting with a move out of the bunkers and recalling Parliament, was to be announced by Thatcher to her colleagues who remained beneath Whitehall once this morning’s War Cabinet briefing was finished.


As there always were, many subjects were discussed by the War Cabinet.

The still-unresolved issue with the Netherlands and its government’s wavering commitment to the war was a matter which the War Cabinet was briefed upon. Tom King and Christopher Curwen spoke of how after the passage of eight days since that supposedly secret vote there had been no action taken by the Dutch. They had voted to leave the war after receiving confirmation that the remains of their army had been gassed by the Soviets after previously being utterly destroyed in conventional combat and before the Americans had undertaken FIREBOWL as retaliation. There had been no further votes made to reverse that decision after Queen Beatrix’s negative response when she heard of the decision and after their monarch’s demise, the Dutch government had been busy dealing with the after-effects of this. It was believed now that the Dutch were aware the several of their allies – Britain and the United States foremost – knew about that vote and there was the possibility that they had moved further with that in utmost secrecy, yet neither the Foreign Secretary nor the MI-6 Director-General believed that. There was intelligence which pointed to the Dutch showing no interest in the continued movement around their country of American battlefield nuclear weapons (it was thought that should they be determined to carry through with their withdrawal they would at least monitor these movements) and the cooperation at the tactical, local level on the ground with NATO forces and supplies moving through their country. Royal Netherlands Air Force F-16’s were still flying and the warships of the Royal Netherlands Navy were still working alongside NATO forces in the North Atlantic and the Baltic Approaches.

With this information, the War Cabinet decided that the Dutch decision had been made in the heat of the moment when at that point in time despair had set in. There wasn’t any malice in that vote: the Netherlands hadn’t been about to actively turn on their NATO allies by joining up with the Soviets. Neither was there any direct betrayal in the time of need undertaken… as was widely regarded throughout NATO when it came to Italy and Greece deciding before war erupted to not honour their treaty commitments. The Dutch were still fighting and working closely with Britain and the rest of NATO and were acting like that vote never happened. For now, Britain would do the same yet in the future that matter would be returned to.

The incapacitation of President Reagan was discussed at length.

Thatcher had previously met with Acting President Bush when he was Vice President and he was a man to be respected. He was a Cold War Warrior like she and Reagan were and the untroublesome transfer of presidential powers to him was something which was to be favourably looked upon. A trans-Atlantic telephone call had been made between the two of them and the Prime Minister had sought his assurances that he intended to continue the war; of course he had been. The commitment in his voice had convinced her that there was no reason to worry though at the same time King told of the backchannel messages he was getting stating that Bush felt that he had something to prove in stepping into Reagan’s shoes and was truly going to finish the war to an absolute conclusion where there had been thinking before that with Reagan that might not be the case.

Thatcher wasn’t swayed with such talk, especially when it sounded as if Reagan’s commitment to the war was being called into question. He had discussed with her the fact that the Soviets had thousands upon thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at the West and that always needed to be taken into consideration. At the same time, the Prime Minister yet she remained firm in her belief that there was nothing to be concerned about with the Acting President’s approach to the war either: he wasn’t the sort to ‘go wobbly’, she told the War Cabinet, nor ‘go crazy’ either.

The military situation in Germany took up much further discussion. The British-led counter-offensive – BLACKSMITH – had turned into a NATO-wide push to retake much captured West German sovereign territory and this was all good news. Losses taken, especially to those reinforcing British troops with the 7th Armoured Division, were brought up and that wasn’t pleasant to hear when so much hope had been pinned upon them. It was explained that where they had been sent into battle as part of the flank for the drive from Hameln to Hannover first and then on from Hannover to the Aller River put them in such a position where they would take casualties. Engaged Soviet forces, George Younger had explained, had fought to not be encircled by BLACKSMITH and they had been stopped from counter-attacking on the flank of the British I Corps only by the 7th Armoured Division fighting as hard as it had. Nonetheless, many losses had been inflicted before the attacking Soviets had stopped trying to cut off the British advance and withdrawn away northwards.

As the War Cabinet was being briefed on the latest plans for further British military involvement in the Baltic Approaches region, Norman Lamont – the Chief Secretary to the Treasury – raised issue with the codename for the latest, upcoming operation there. Lamont was an irregular attendee at these meetings despite being in Whitehall with part of the wider Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson usually dealt with financial matters. Thatcher was always prepared to listen to him when he was present even if she didn’t frequently agree with him, yet she quickly found herself in agreement with his negative reaction to the name Operation POTATO.

Younger explained that like all British military exercises and operations, randomly generated code-words were created by the MOD’s computers to stop those names being identified as pertaining to planned action. Yet… POTATO? The troops on the ground would hear this from their senior officers and so too would journalists later when as part of the Prime Minister’s attempts at returning to somewhat normality they would be given briefings. It was hardly an awe-inspiring name for something very big and important. General Vincent tried to halt this discussion from going where he saw it moving yet, once again, he was forced to bow to the politicians here as they again unnecessarily interfered in what he thought were matters they shouldn’t be concerned with. POTATO was the code-word already in use in orders delivered to units taking part and which allied forces were to respond to. The politicians would have none of that though and he was browbeaten by them into making a change: PORTER would be the new name, a slight change though one which the War Cabinet better liked.

Northern Ireland Secretary Kenneth Clarke had meant to have come to Whitehall to brief the War Cabinet on the latest distressing news from Ulster – nothing from there was ever any good as far as Thatcher and her colleagues were concerned – yet a delay with his flight meant that he was running rather late. They spoke about the latest developments in The Troubles there and were briefed by Antony Duff, the Director-General of MI-5. He had fallen from Thatcher’s graces after what she regarded as his failings pre-war yet he held onto his role for the time being while knowing his days were numbered in that position. Duff told the War Cabinet that the civil war was continuing and ethnic cleansing was turning into near genocide in places. Nothing could be done to stop it from continuing as it was now, not with the war being fought on the Continent. He spoke of massacres and unarmed civilians by terrorists – from both sides – and the inability of anyone to stop what was going on. There were questions put to him about rumours which had reached Whitehall of some instances of official collusion with loyalist paramilitary forces yet Duff discounted those as ‘Sinn Fein / IRA propaganda’: a term which several members of the War Cabinet were uncomfortable with as they had heard that before form the loyalist terrorists.

It was decided that Kenneth Clarke’s delayed arrival would see a much more detailed briefing given on the matter… something which several attendees noticed made the MI-5 chief uneasy to hear.


Once these matters were discussed, Thatcher turned the War Cabinet meeting back to her agenda for calling the gathering. Lamont was here with a few others for this, men like Home Secretary Douglas Hurd who had come from his Regional Seat of Government bunker at Crowborough in East Sussex and a few other key people.

It was time to start getting the government back together and doing their job. The threat of Soviet nuclear warheads was still there yet Britain needed to be effectively governed and that couldn’t be done how it was at the moment.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
One Hundred & Eighty–Seven

There were many reasons why the success achieved in the previous days with NATO’s continuing counter-offensive to retake occupied parts of West Germany didn’t carry on through the third day, March 26th.

There were no great swaths of territory recaptured and no substantial enemy forces defeated in full-scale battles. To those outside looking in, NATO seemed to no longer before moving forward fast and deep into the enemy rear on the Saturday like they did on the Thursday and especially on the Friday too. Yet there was intensive fighting all the way across Germany with men dying by the thousands and much movement taking place. It was just at the end of the day, when looking at the map, the battle-lines seemed to have not moved very far indeed.

What must be remembered though was that when NATO had previously struck, its attacking forces had torn gaps in Soviet defences which troops and tanks poured through to seize undefended areas of the enemy rear; these had been immense undertakings where ammunition and fuel expenditure was prolific. Afterwards, the Soviets had fallen back of their own accord ahead of the armoured spearheads chasing them into what were in many instances positions which could be better defended due to terrain factors. NATO had to reposition its attack elements and also bring up supplies to strike again, all the while moving both through what was in many places a nightmarish environment of smouldering countryside, broken transport links and delaying actions by small enemy units being sacrificed to slow them down. Neither side had anticipated such delays occurring with NATO initially being confident of driving the enemy out of most occupied portions of northern and central Germany and the Soviets fearing that that would be the case too.

In southern parts of Germany, French-led NATO forces tried to pound their way past enemy defences ready and waiting for them who weren’t on the verge of collapse either. There had been no withdrawals made here and the defenders actually outnumbered the attackers after the recent arrival in occupied parts of Bavaria of the Soviet Eighteenth Army with its fresh troops coming from reserve formations home-based across the southern parts of the Ukraine. There were few successes made here with these French and Bundeswehr forces and in many places their advances were stopped cold.

In the skies above the fighting on the ground, more battles raged. This was the thirteenth day of the war where both sides, despite multiple reinforcements, were rather depleted in the air and were being rather careful with what aircraft remained. There were still several thousand available to each side, yet the murderous losses inflicted in earlier operations had taken their toll and whereas beforehand there would be general patrol missions flown in multitude now instead when aircraft took to the skies they went up with a direct rather than speculative purpose. The aircraft of both sides benefited from the lack of Soviet SAM’s filling the skies during their battlefield missions as throughout the conflict quite a lot of Soviet losses had come from missiles fired by those who were meant to be their comrades. With NATO aircraft, they could carry more weapons without the need for as many anti-radar missiles to be carried as had previously been the case beforehand and their escorting electronic warfare aircraft had fewer SAM threats to focus upon and therefore could better direct their efforts against those remaining active. In the daylight skies, fighters and strike aircraft still clashed with each other and many times those on attack missions were forced to release their ordnance so that they could defend themselves.

Soviet aircraft defending themselves from NATO fighters therefore couldn’t attack enemy forces on the ground to slow down their advances to contact, yet at the exact same time there was little on-hand tactical air support for NATO ground forces either. Their much-needed air support was engaged in dog-fights all across the sky instead of bombing enemy units ahead of them to better allow their forward passage.

Storm clouds had been rolling in off the distant Atlantic during the night arriving over mainland Europe and then over Germany through the day. Meteorological intelligence – an always underrated aspect of warfare – had been put to use by the opposing sides during the conflict and each knew that there was going to be much bad weather arriving through March 26th. Air operations were planned and conducted around these expected storms, but their effect on ground operations today was quite something else. The fierce downpours were rather extraordinary in the amounts of rainwater which they unleashed and the results of them were something to see to believe. The war was being fought throughout the countryside where that rainwater turned everywhere to mud where men and vehicles very quickly struggled to move through this; mud also disguised the presence of mines and had a demoralising effect upon many soldiers too. Rivers and streams were filled with this rainwater and as they ran downstream to their ultimate destination at the sea, there were blockages caused by earlier instances of fighting as crossings had been fought over. Those blockages mixed with fast-flowing water had multiple effects upon military operations and Germany was a country littered with waterways. Those storm clouds darkened the skies even further than they were already – since the outbreak of the conflict, an unending unnatural thick black cloud full of toxins had hung above the country – and this lack of what should have been full daylight further slowed down progress on the ground with military operations also preforming best with as much natural daylight as possible.

The opposition which NATO ground forces met when moving forwards to attack the main body of the enemy who had retreated came from those units left behind as delaying forces exceeded all expectations. All across the front, company- & battalion-sized combat units had been instructed to remain where they were as everyone else pulled back. These units were left at crossroads, on hill tops and at river crossing points rather than in forests, in towns or in other locations where they could be bypassed and ignored. Ammunition was left with them along with orders to hold where they were against enemy advances as very soon stronger forces would arrive to relieve them. This lie was issued due to the need to keep those delaying units fighting as they waited for the supposed return of their comrades in number at some mythical later date; they had to be told this less the commanders realise that they were being sacrificed and decide to commit an unauthorised withdrawal or decide to surrender.

A small selection of these units saw their commanders wise up to the situation which they had been left in and surrender to the advancing NATO forces while at the same time there were some Polish units – where the men had heard of those stories of massacres by the KGB swirling around which had now got out of control – that mutinied and killed anyone who tried to stop them, even their own fellow Poles who were their officers. Nevertheless, these incidents aside, the delaying units did just what they were meant to. They drew NATO attention towards them and fought for as long as they could waiting on relief that was never going to come. Logistics units were soon to be brought up behind the main combat forces and NATO couldn’t have these enemy units active in the rear, especially as they were generally mobile forces with small numbers of tanks and armoured vehicles rather than just dismounted infantry. Each delaying unit needed to be engaged in all-arms assault to destroy them rather than see them scattered and this took a long time to achieve.

All across Germany lay mines… tens of thousands of them. There were anti-tank mines, anti-vehicle mines and anti-personnel mines. Some were pressure sensitive, others were rigged to trip-wires while there were a few ‘exotic’ mines too which would go off using an oscillator for sound-detonation or certain vibrations nearby. Many mines hadn’t been laid in the correct manner during the heat of battle and may never detonate no matter what the circumstances or could explode at any time without external interference. There were extensive minefields in certain locations and just a few laid elsewhere. Many were booby-trapped against removal (a grenade with the pin removed placed beneath a live mine was an effective manner of doing this) while others were ‘reinforced’ by adding dummy mines all around them designed to look just like them. Placing mines throughout open fields and along valleys where enemy advances might take place was a popular location for mines to be laid and so too were inside holes in road surfaces blasted by artillery hits. However, mines were generally laid in front of or sometimes around defensive positions where the fighting had long moved away from in addition to command and supply centres in the rear to protect them yet those had long since moved on too.

NATO forces moving to chase the retreating Soviets found that they continuously suffered casualties, plus immense delays, from these mines which were all across the areas which they advanced through. These were placed in the expected locations though also where such weapons weren’t expected to be too. What was disturbing for many was that many of the mines were laid by other NATO forces too and that these weapons placed by their allies to kill the enemy instead caused losses to NATO forces. In earlier retreats, NATO units had hastily scattered mines to delay onrushing Soviet forces and effective records hadn’t been kept of their locations. Specialist minesweeping forces – from men armed with metal detectors to rocket units relying on brute force instead – were overwhelmed by such requests for them to assist and could only do so much. Impatient NATO officers commanding advancing units who tried to bully their way past mines without such help quickly regretted such foolishness.

All of these factors combined to cause a slowdown across almost the entirety of the frontlines throughout Germany and make sure that when contact was made with Soviet forces it was greatly delayed. However, in many instances, especially where those opposing forces were weak, NATO units attacking did make some headway against them before the hours of darkness returned again.


Just where Marshal Korbutov had feared his lines were weak in the north, the French shattered what remained of the right flank of the Polish First Army. Too few units assigned as delaying forces did their job properly and the positions which the Poles and the reinforcing Soviet units assigned there tried to hold were extremely weak.

Autobahn-7 was no true defensive position. It was just a stretch of highway running across where the frontlines were with countryside either side and villages nearby. There were no major hills nor rover features. Control over the road had long ago been fought over and this part of the Luneburg Heath which the highway traversed remained littered with the twisted, burnt remains of tanks and armoured vehicles while there were also many unburied corpses too. The French drove towards it in the fading evening light though aiming to cross the tarmac-covered surface and defeat the Polish forces which would be withdrawing across it further into the Luneburg Heath. The French V Corps attacked with the 6th Light Armored and 9th Marine Light Infantry Division’s and those light armoured divisions had the support of a regiment of tanks assigned from the 10th Armored Division whose parent formation was the nearby French III Corps. The transfer across of those fifty AMX-30 tanks was instrumental in crushing the Poles as the tracks on the tanks were able to move much better through the wet mud than the wheeled AMX-10RC and ERC-90S’s which formed the initial French armoured component. Polish units folded in their wake and the Soviet troops were mainly left to fight the French on their own.

The ruins that were the town of Bispingen fell to the French first and then they managed to get across the rapidly-swollen Luhe River, which was usually little more than a stream, yet not this evening as rainwater thundered towards the nearby Elbe. Amelinghausen also came under French control with the roads which ran through there and with that seizure the French finally came to a halt with their armoured drives. The rest of the 10th Armored Division was on their way to join them as it had been reassigned to French V Corps but there were too many obstacles – natural and man-made – for the advance to continue until first light. Where the French were positioned now would allow them to move southwards heading for where the British were and if those two NATO forces could link up on Luneburg Heath they were going to trap an awful lot of Soviet soldiers just to the west of them.

Those British forces had one hell of a time fighting on the northern banks of the Aller through previous battlefield and hadn’t got very far indeed. They destroyed what remained of the Soviet Second Guards Army after tearing lumps out of it the previous day, yet behind those Soviets which were holding them back (after some iron discipline in the form of ‘friendly’ bullets had been put back into them) further Soviet forces slid back eastwards. There was an almighty rush to keep moving for the Soviets and they faced the same problems that NATO did with mud, lack of air support and mines everywhere that nowhere near enough of those forces previously along the Weser were going to react apparent safety to the east. West German territory between the Weser and the Leine was theoretically back in NATO hands yet it hadn’t been reconquered just abandoned by the Soviets.

East and southeast of Hannover, NATO was unable to push forward hard against the Soviets as they re-established their lines. Too many delaying actions were successful for the Soviets and NATO too had to bring up supplies and reinforcements for their own planned further moves which were now being planned for the following morning. Resupplied British and Bundeswehr units from Hannover passed through the Polish Fourth Army – which was now no more a fighting force – to head slowly in the direction of Braunschweig-Wolfsburg. The US III Corps and the neighbouring Belgian I Corps were swapping control over formations assigned during this time too: the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division joined with the American corps command while the British 5th Infantry Division linked up with the Belgians. On the other side of the frontlines, Soviet forces were being shuffled around too, especially the overworked Soviet Twentieth Guards Army.

In central Hessen, the US Fifth Army had its national guardsmen try to close up with the Soviets which had fallen back as they had by faced all of the obstacles met elsewhere too. Delaying units were blasted out of where they were trying to hold while supply convoys made the difficult journeys forward across shattered road links due to the need to avoid the countryside as it was full of mines and all of that terrible mud.

South of the heights of the Vogelsberg, the Soviets had fast re-established themselves guarding the entrance to the Gelnhausen Corridor and round to the Spessart. The invasion routes attempted earlier in the war could be used to strike back towards East Germany too it was realised, yet they weren’t going to be left open for the Americans and the French to head back towards the Fulda Gap though. East German units were used to plug gaps where the Soviets were spread thin as their field army had been disestablished and those fire support assets distributed elsewhere too.

Schwarzkopf had his US V Corps brought over the Main River to join with his lead strike elements and also spent some time with the senior Spanish Army officers whose division had assisted in his strike efforts the day before. There were two further Spanish divisions fast moving into Germany after mobilising a while ago now but having suffered supply problems before finally approaching the battlefield. They were going to join NATO lines between his command and the US VII Corps and he was busy finding capable staff officers to join them as liaison personnel. This was actually a job for General Otis as US Seventh Army commander yet Schwarzkopf did this effortlessly without making waves. The Spanish liked him especially well and he put the diplomatic skills which he had acquired throughout his career to great use here.

The US 1st Armored Division managed to reach Karlstadt after failing yesterday to recapture that major communications centre in the Main Valley. Enemy forces had been expended trying to stop them then and today the US Army rolled into here and now the US VII Corps sat positioned to plan for a drive eastwards towards Schweinfurt and there Franconia beyond. Enemy forces ahead were those of the Soviet Eighth Tank & Eighteenth Army’s: the former which they had beaten late last week in open battle there and the latter just arriving and judged to be rather weak as most of that formation’s attention had been drawn towards French moves against it.

When daylight came and the weather was expected to clear up, NATO was going back on the offensive again and this time hoped for better success than today.





One Hundred & Eighty–Eight

The Finns waited until they were ready before they struck against the Soviet forces occupying parts of their country. The deadline which they had given had come and gone and Soviet commandoes may have launched a murderous assault into Helsinki, but only when they were confident that they could achieve their goals did the Finns finally make their long-awaited move. Their aim was to rid those occupying forces of control over airports and roads connecting Lapland with the Soviet mainland to the east and they began their military moves during the late evening just after dark.


In the southern reaches of Lapland, there were Soviet airheads at the airports near Rovaniemi and Kuusamo. Both facilities had long ago been cleared of any Finnish civilians yet remained near towns and there were extensive Soviet ground patrols made with the expressed intention of protecting those airheads from what they declared were ‘NATO commandoes’. The runaways were used by transport aircraft for refuelling and divert locations too during the initial moves by the Soviet Sixth Army invading Norway far to the north. After those flights had long since ceased, both airports remained in Soviet hands and they had seen very little activity before the most recent complete lack of Soviet flights through Finland imposed by the Soviets themselves. Troops and air support ground personnel still remained at both places though and in number. They had set up defensive positions and turned back Finnish military officers approaching with white flags to try to talk to them and used gunshots to do that.

Both airports were hit by intense Finnish artillery barrages the moment that the sun dipped below the distant western horizon as Soviet-built D-30 howitzers in Finnish hands blasted them. The Finns rapid-fired their guns and then against each airport came ground assault conducted on foot by the men of the Pori-Jaeger Brigade. This was a formation from the southwestern parts of the country brought north and used here as the men who formed the ranks were deemed trustworthy and very efficient. Each attacked facility was attacked by dismounted men moving through the deep snow covering marshlands near to each and easily got in among the scattered Soviet defensive positions to start eliminating them. Artillery was directed from general harassment to targeted hits against machine gun bunkers and mortar positions as the Finns took their time. They had plenty of man-portable heavy weapons and used these carefully to support pinned infantry. Their opponents were being attacked from all sides and were nowhere near as trained in combat operations as the Finnish were: these were rear-area troops with the Soviet Air Force. More Finnish Jaeger troops were brought forward in light armoured vehicles which mounted weapons of their own, especially at the centrally-located Rovaniemi. That airport, bigger with more defenders, fell first to the Finns and was in their hands within a couple of hours. Out to the east, near the Finnish-Soviet border, the resistance was stronger. The Soviets there felt like they weren’t that far from home and had never truly believed that they hadn’t been abandoned as they had. Nonetheless, eventually the Finns overwhelmed them too with the thousand-strong attacking battalion crushing the Soviet force less than seven times their strength.

The splitting up of this brigade of Finnish troops in two different locations far apart had been deliberate as they had been long trained for this type of assault and Finland didn’t have that many forces to spare. Those specialised assault light infantry had quickly done their job and ripped through the points of resistance which sat alongside two of the three major highways which ran north into Lapland proper. There were mechanised forces and some tanks too following them which avoided the fire-fights which the Jaegers got into but whose supply lines needed to be secured before the Soviets could possibly melt away from the initial contact points. There was no chance of this as the Finns killed and captured those Soviets at the airports and then chased what few remaining survivors into the snow and hunted them down so they couldn’t come back and cause trouble again.


There were three highways running northwards into the Arctic reaches of Finland: Highway-21 which straddled the Swedish border in the west, Highway-4 in the centre which went through Rovaniemi and Highway-5 in the east. Each one saw a brigade of Finnish Army mechanised troops move up them through the night as they slowly moved deeper into Lapland. Soviet supply elements had ceased using these, but there were still roadblocks and garrison forces arrayed along them and these came into contact with the Finns retaking their territory.

Official Finnish policy was to deny that they had NATO assistance, yet there were some Swedish and US commandoes on the ground operating ahead of the Finnish Army. Those scouting elements directed the Finns towards such enemy positions and they first tried the approach of calling for surrender and only afterwards attacking in strength to eliminate resistance to their passage. Some Soviet units actually did surrender, yet those were isolated incidents. In the majority of cases, the night was lit up by gunfire and small explosions.

Most Finnish armour was in the southeastern portion of their country with the majority of the fully-mobilised Army facing the Soviets massed in Karelia yet a handful of T-55 tanks and MT-LB tracked armoured personnel carriers were present to provide heavy support for the infantry used to take on enemy forces detected. These versions of Soviet weaponry weren’t top of the range models but were far from ‘monkey-model’ versions sold by the Soviet Union to their Arab client states. They were more than a match for the light Soviet forces which they encountered during the night-time advances northwards and assisted the infantry in rolling up all encountered opposition in a timely fashion so the Finns could advance. There were many places where it was feared that blockages could have been created by dropping bridges and such like so the Finns had plenty of combat engineers with them. However, it was instead found that none of that was done as these rear-area security troops with the Soviet Sixth Army hadn’t done anything like that to halt the advances towards them. Those units were desperately short of ammunition too and with no heavy weapons to back them up.


Like with the Finnish Army, most of the Finnish Air Force was concentrated in the southeast. Swedish-built Draken’s and Soviet-manufactured MiG-21’s were on strip-alert and airborne in some cases in a high pressure environment waiting for all-out war to commence with the Soviets across the border. There were many British-built Hawk light attack-fighters supporting those aircraft yet there were also some Hawk’s up in the north flying tonight in support of the moves into Lapland. These were Hawk-51 versions, specially manufactured for Finland and those in the skies over Lapland were from training units flown by instructors and trainees in the later stages of their education. Rockets and gun-pods were carried by the Hawk’s as they were outfitted for ground attack missions.

On two occasions the Hawk’s went into action. First they assisted the Northern Jaeger Brigade – coming north from Oulu at a tiny village called Pello along the Swedish border – to overcome stubborn Soviet resistance and then again along Highway-4 near the communications centre of Vikajarvi where the Savo Jaeger Brigade was temporarily held up. In both cases, the ground forces would have eventually succeed but faced with the prospect of heavy casualties from defensive fire it was thought best to bring in air support and let the fast and nimble Hawk’s do what they were good at. Soviet air defences this far in the rear of the Soviet Sixth Army – its fighting positions were facing north and west – were minimal with mainly anti-aircraft guns firing, yet a man-portable SAM did take down one Hawk near Vikajarvi.

This Finnish air activity was unofficially coordinated with both the Swedes and NATO. The Finns didn’t want to see their aircraft shot down as suspected Soviet aircraft by marauding NATO fighters and their new allies provided tactical air control parties on the ground to assist in that close air support flown. Distant friendly radar coverage for the Finns also gave them protection from any Soviet fighter interference coming from the east yet there wasn’t any of that yet making an appearance above their country.


The Finns chose to move through the night as this was their own country and they didn’t expect serious opposition from Soviet forces ready to meet them this far south. They attacked outposts and distant communication links as they headed through the darkness so that by the time the morning came, they would arrive in the northern parts of Lapland where they expected much stronger Soviet resistance to occur. At Ivalo and Kittila there were major garrisons around the Soviet-held airports at those locations while the Finnish Wedge was full of those defeated, but still well-armed Soviet ground troops. Extremely poor road links came west from the Soviet Union into Lapland from across the border in the northeast yet they too would be littered with enemy forces as well.

All of these portions of their country were due to be liberated by the Finns starting at first light and they were to be joined too by American forces starting to move southwards from Finmark in those portions of Norway recaptured previously from the Soviets. The US Army was sending light troops deep into Finland to meet up with Finnish forces while US Marines were meant to be making an assault eastwards to liberate those few remaining Norwegian areas across the lower reaches of the Tana River near Kirkenes and the Varanger Peninsula. Finland was to pull its weight in this effort yet their intention was solely to liberate their own country no matter what other nations not in their position might have wanted in a geo-political sense.


The bulk of Finnish military might was deployed facing Soviet Karelia… what had only less than fifty years ago been Finnish Karelia. Their tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery and aircraft, backed up by a lot of infantry and extensive minefields as well as preparations for wide-scale demolition works, was all positioned facing the Soviet border across the southeastern parts of Finland. A defensive posture was generally maintained, yet a pair of armoured brigades were standing ready to advance in counterattacks should the need arise. The defensive doctrine which the Finns had here was for light units to soak up Soviet attacks coming over the border while heavy units then went to work in tearing apart the advancing spearheads. Withdrawals were planned and while that happened, stay behind units would allow Soviet forces to pass over them before later unleashing chaos in the enemy rear. The marshy terrain was to be made use of to channel Soviet armour into ambushes while Finnish infantry would withdraw on foot knowing that they couldn’t be chased by tanks when doing so.

The true hope of the Finns was that all these plans weren’t going to have to be put into action though.

Finnish intelligence pointed to the fact that the reinforced Soviet Thirtieth Guards Army Corps was across the border and had been positioned near avenues of advance into Finland since the eve of war breaking out. They were sure that there were three combat divisions with this field army sized force including one of the Soviet’s right flank alongside the two in the centre. It was expected that the Soviets wanted the Finns to know these formations where in-place ready to attack should Finland do as it had done this evening. Recent information from the Americans with their satellite said that the Soviets there were weak and without supplies; the Finns didn’t trust that intelligence as what could really be seen from a satellite and it was hardly likely that in two weeks of staying still the Soviets there had used up their fuel and ammunition. Instead, the Finns were waiting for that Soviet force to roll into their country and they therefore had to be prepared to fight it no matter how much they wished that that wasn’t going to be the case.





One Hundred & Eighty–Nine

There were many media figures in the West who made their name with the coverage they provided during the war. Print journalists and broadcast reporters would be remembered for the stories which they filed and the memories of those on the home front during the war of the conflict would be forever shaped by what they read and heard from many of these media personalities who became household names. Careers were made and there were book deals as well as a lifetime of recognition for those who became famous reporting on the war from the perspective of the West.

The war was also dangerous for many in the media too. More journalists, reporters, photographers and support crews (producers, cameramen and researchers out in the field) were killed during the Third World War – in real terms and proportionally too – than in any other major conflict since the beginnings of the modern media. Many found themselves deliberately targeted by the Soviets and their proxies as the media of the West was seen as a propaganda tool for the United States and its allies, yet the majority died during military operations as the war was never confined to the direct frontlines and there wasn’t often a ‘safe’ rear from the media to operate from either.

Across Western Europe and in Canada too, the media found themselves under government control. There was no fair and unbiased reporting as media outlets came under censorship: moderate in some cases and severe in others. The sapping of morale was feared along with the leaking of information which might be of use to the enemy. Plenty of governments had fears over the politics of many of those in the media too and worried over what they might try and do if they were not kept under the most stringent control. There was legislation written in parliaments pre-war and this easily came into play on the eve of conflict so that the media was subservient to the wishes of their country’s leaders.

In the United States, things were a little different with self-censorship imposed by media companies with instructions coming down from on high that there was to be cooperation with the US Government and the Pentagon. Internally, the newspapers, radio stations and television stations censored themselves with experienced senior people working with the authorities to clear anything being printed or broadcast first-hand. As expected, there were a few problems with this on the technical side and there were also quite a few resignations of staff who had objections to this as they felt that their valued First Amendment rights were being violated… it would take many years for the majority of these people to gain work in the industry again in the post-war United States.

Media based in neutral countries reported on the war more freely and in many instances earned the ire of NATO. There were Austrian and Swiss journalists active in the western sides of the frontlines yet their government eventually worked with the West in tightening restrictions on what was reported by them to the international audience. The Italian media was free of constraints from its own government and said and wrote what it wanted and only movement restrictions imposed when journalists were active in NATO countries hurt their efforts to let the world know what was going on behind the frontlines. Italian freelance photographers were a big feature of the war in the West and were known for their daring and sometimes fatalist stupidity. There were rumours that both the CIA and the NSA, along with support from the French DSGE, eventually assisted in causing ‘technical difficulties’ on the ground to Italian media, further helped by local Italians too, yet none of that was ever proved. Still, television stations had power outages, some printing presses were burnt down and certain journalists were apparently threatened for filing stories regarded as unfriendly to the West. Such accusations were denied but they would continue to be made for many years afterwards. In the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and China, regions unaffected by the war, state-run media broadcast reports from the war yet there was very little on the ground journalism undertaken.

Through Eastern Europe and through the Soviet Union, foreign journalists who were foolish enough to remain there as war approached, weren’t treated properly by the Soviets. They were regarded wholesale as spies and detained right before war broke out no matter what country they came from. Quickly, KGB efforts released many from what were regarded as friendly nations yet the remainder stayed locked up. There had been a desire for reporting on the war ‘from the other side’ for many of these people and they very quickly regretted that notion that the Soviets were going to allow them to do anything like that.


What NATO wanted was for the media to be on their side. They were out to control the message being put across via news channels to civilians in their own countries, what their own troops might hear and also what those in uninvolved nations would be told. That message was simple: NATO had been attacked without provocation and while suffering setbacks, wasn’t losing the war to the Soviets.

They didn’t want the media to report that Hamburg had fallen to the Soviets or that the Dutch Army had been defeated in detail whilst engaged in combat. News reports that US national guardsmen had arrived in strength through ports in western France and that operations like EAGLE PUSH and BLACKSMITH were to take place were equally not desired either. Morale and public opinion was of great importance and so too was denying this information to the Soviets along with everything else that NATO had to worry about.

This sort of thing could generally be understood by the media, but it was the small things that caused problems. Interviews to be broadcast with civilians fleeing from the Rhineland across into Belgium and France were seen as detrimental to morale but the media regarded this as a matter of human interest. Where stories were written for publishing about areas of eastern England closed to civilian movement due to immense air activity these would provide confirmation for the enemy should their agents read them that that part of Britain remained a hub of important activity. Even where the media might wish to report on hotbeds of unemployment around certain European ports suddenly coming alive with jobs loading and unloading ships in what seemed like a morale-boosting story wasn’t what NATO wanted to see either due to the intelligence that that would provide to the enemy.

NATO military forces were aware that they were upsetting the media with their reporting restrictions but then they were after all fighting for the freedom of the West so that journalists would be free to move around as they did and try to report on these matters. It was often hard to get such people to understand that even when they were trying to help, they could do wrong.


When war broke out, on the western sides of the frontlines the media was at first seemingly everywhere. Civilians claiming that they were freelance reporters kept popping up and many of them had cameras and communications equipment. They tried to get pictures, video footage and conduct interviews where military operations were underway. Across Norway, Denmark and West Germany, the already harassed civilian authorities couldn’t control their movements and it was up to the NATO military forces to try to do so. Many were quickly accredited to Public Affairs teams yet the majority tried to roam independently and conduct their business. They found themselves caught up in air attacks or artillery barrages, ambushed by Soviet Spetsnaz teams who wanted their vehicles & identities and also detained by NATO military police units keeping them back from the fighting. The journalists would explain that they had a public interest right and that they were only seeking the truth, but these reasons usually feel upon deaf ears as they were pushed back for their own safety and that ever-present worry that if captured they would reveal information unwillingly to the enemy.

Those accredited journalists were usually with big media organisations which NATO military forces previously had dealings with. They remained far in the rear at headquarters units and with what they regarded as their ‘handlers’ from Public Affairs teams. News packages were prepared for them and briefings given too. Dealings between the military and the media differed with different nationalities and things were far from being done the same way, yet, generally, those who remained in the rear saw very little of the war. There were occasions where they did face danger and when that occurred it was very real though as headquarters posts were often the targets of stand-off attacks.

The media worked to not only file stories delivering back to their organisations up to the minute information but also to give themselves background information for future articles as well. They were far away from home and working hard in a dangerous environment where they quickly found that they had little friends. Those travelling independently were taking immense risks though those who were under the semi-protection with NATO military forces also faced danger too. There were instances where some journalists were detained first by specialist military police teams and then later representatives of NATO nation’s intelligence services under the suspicion of either knowingly or unwitting attempting to pass information to the Soviets. The vast majority of these allegations would later result in nothing more than a removal of those journalists from near the frontlines and an expulsion back to their own countries, yet there were arrests made of some of those detained with a view to legal action to be later taken against them.

Media personnel were killed and wounded everywhere and not just near the fighting either. They faced all sorts of dangers being near the fighting from enemy action to even friendly fire occurring at other times too. Wearing a bullet-proof vest bearing the word ‘PRESS’ and a white helmet didn’t do any good when faced with the explosion of an artillery shell or a bomb dropped by an attacking aircraft. Soviet air attacks against Western Europe meant that the media was again often in the firing line too when bombs fell on cities and against military targets back further west.

World War Three wasn’t a healthy environment for those reporting the news.


The US twenty-four hour cable-access news channel CNN really made a name for itself and many of its correspondents during the war. Home-based in Atlanta, CNN had been making waves before World War Three, but it was at the forefront of reporting on the conflict to its American audience back home and much of its coverage was further broadcast around the world too. Presentation was a big factor in this success and so too were the personalities involved in its wartime coverage.

The attractive female correspondent Christiane Amanpour and her male colleague Bernard Shaw played a major role in CNN’s wartime coverage. Both were in Germany before and during the war first reporting on REFORGER and then the conduct of the war. The former was initially at US V Corps rear headquarters while the latter was with the US Seventh Army main headquarters. Neither was the shy and retiring type yet they were likeable personalities who used their attributes to allow them to do their job very well. They filed stories and made broadcasts from Germany on how the war was progressing with the US Army in central Hessen. What they could say was censored on-site and then back at CNN where senior producers and a retired general had been brought in to work at the Atlanta offices, yet neither was about to put themselves and their fellow countrymen at risk on purpose. Their voices and pictures – video footage wasn’t coming direct from them though their words were broadcast over other images – quickly became known to the American public.

Shaw remained with US Seventh Army though Amanpour managed to ‘roam’ a bit. General Woodmansee and she had a good personal relationship and the US V Corps commander knew that she was actually a good morale booster for the troops in the field. She travelled with a pair of Public Affairs officers and also a small military police detachment throughout US V Corps’ rear and the special treatment given to her did cause some ruffles. Amanpour was a Briton with Iranian heritage and as a thirty year-old female civilian travelling around escorted by the US Army asking questions, conducting interviews and having video footage shot didn’t always go down very well with some. During the mad rush to withdraw back across the Main River and thus abandon the ground which the US V Corps had at first fought so hard to keep the Soviets out of, Amanpour and her small party were almost caught in a Soviet long-range rocket barrage harassing that withdrawal and they were very lucky to escape unharmed. She was later refused a request to go forward with the US Army when EAGLE PUSH failed though General Woodmansee had been ready to give her plenty of off-the-record comments afterwards to explain what had gone on there not only on the battlefield but politically too. Unfortunately, another one of those enemy rockets, a Soviet Scud theatre ballistic missile, then hit US V Corps headquarters when Amanpour was present.

The CNN correspondent was killed outright along with nine others including the Vice Chief of the US Army General Arthur E. Brown who had come to Europe to look into the circumstances surrounding EAGLE PUSH. General Woodmansee lost both his legs in the blast from the rocket warhead and was soon on his way out of Germany leading to General Schwarzkopf, who had accompanied General Brown at first, taking over command of the US V Corps. Post-war, General Woodmansee would contribute to a memoir concerning Amanpour.

Shaw survived a close encounter with the enemy himself as he furthered CNN’s reporting efforts from Germany with the US Army. Days after his colleague lost her life, he was with a column from US Seventh Army headquarters moving to a new location as it did twice a day – which was an immense but necessary effort – when that particular column ran into roadblock supposedly manned by West German Territorial troops checking for ‘Soviet infiltrators’. It turned out that those soldiers were actually Spetsnaz tracking the regular movements of that headquarters and there was a furious fire-fight. The Spetsnaz had underestimated their opponents on this occasion and were defeated: Shaw would later relate an edited version of this to his audience back home without going into specifics but with the drama still there.

Other American journalists with the print and broadcast media had equally dangerous encounters with the enemy and gained access in many places where others couldn’t or were present at momentous events too. Nevertheless, CNN’s correspondents in central Germany really made a name for themselves during the war and Amanpour’s tragic death contributed to that.


The British media was extremely tightly regulated due the war and in the immediate build-up to the conflict breaking out too. The BBC had come under state control, the independent ITV taken off the air at first and newspapers ceased being published for some time. These measures were taken as part of the overreaction that was Transition to War and were later eased in places, yet the British media wasn’t let off the leash. Experience from World War Two and what had been witnessed with the role which the US media was regarded as playing in the American defeat in the Vietnam War brought about this control imposed from Whitehall.

Like every country in the West, Britain had serious and professional journalists as well as its fair share of tabloid reporters who really couldn’t give a damn. The war to them was just another story and once newspapers were allowed to go to print again – with the censorship which they had to deal with certainly causing open revolt among their American counterparts had that been attempted in the US – they tried to carry on with business as usual… only to find that the British government wasn’t having any of that. Pool reporters were assigned to the military and civil servants restricted what the media back in Britain could hear, see and say.

There were some journalists – and others – who didn’t want to play by these rules though. Members of the British media deemed themselves as freelance journalists and tried to leave Britain to go to report on the fast-approaching war; almost all of them didn’t get very far as Britain worked effectively in the immediate pre-war period to shut down its air and sea borders for exclusive military use only. Of course, no barrier is ever full-proof and some of these freelancers managed to get through including a lone woman who travelled to the Netherlands the day before the war from Harwich in Essex after gaining entry aboard a ship carrying military vehicles to the Continent. Polly Toynbee was this woman who made that short overnight journey across the North Sea and then moved further across Western Europe afterwards. She was a successful semi-public figure back in Britain who regarded herself as having good reason to effectively flee her country against government wishes and decide to act like the journalist that she clearly was not in the middle of a war zone.

Toynbee had handed in her resignation at the BBC where she worked as the Social Affairs Editor with BBC News before the organisation had come under complete government control. Regarded as a socialist, a humanist and a campaigner for feminism by many, Toynbee had left Britain to try her hand at journalist after not being able to stomach the events back home with what she regarded as her country turning into a fascist dictatorship. Word had reached her of the detention by MI-5 of all of those left-wing intellectuals and she had – wrongly – thought that the Security Service would be coming for her next. So off she went to the Continent ready to write stories on the war from there and to add her political opinions to these. What she was hoping to see, who she was hoping to talk to and where any articles which she wrote were going to be published were all questions to be later answered.

For several days, Toynbee had a lot of luck. She managed to get deep into West Germany and across the North German Plain towards the operational zone of the British I Corps initially south of Hannover. There were those who were sympathetic to her because when she wanted to she could talk people round and get her own way. Eventually though that luck ran out and she was arrested by the Royal Military Police deep in the British rear after indignantly refusing an offer by them to assist her as a British citizen in getting back to the UK and verbally abusing them… or so their official report said anyway. Holding someone like Toynbee in detention wasn’t what the Red Caps wanted to do and they legally had no ground to do so, something which Toynbee repeatedly pointed out. Before this situation could be resolved with Toynbee removed from Germany and as far away from the Red Caps who were unlucky enough to have her in their custody, NATO frontlines collapsed on Friday March 18th following that Soviet gas attack. As the rear area support elements of the British I Corps fell back Toynbee and her escorts were separated in the confusing situation and the lone Land Rover which she was inside with a pair of Red Caps was hit with machine gun fire from a Polish BMP-1 armoured vehicle. Both military policemen were killed and the vehicle destroyed while Toynbee was left unharmed and in a bit of a state at what she had witnessed as enemy armies had torn through so much of the NATO rear.

The Poles handed this captive over to the KGB as they had no idea what to do with her but were sure that she must be of some importance – a dissident of some sort, they believed – and the KGB would want such a person in their custody.

To Toynbee, the Soviets weren’t socialists, even if they protested that they were in the form of the name of their country. They were totalitarian Stalinists who threw their enemies in gulags or psychiatric hospitals instead of them letting work for their national broadcaster. She regarded herself as lucky that she wasn’t immediately shot or tortured because she was certain that the KGB was just as aware of her politics and her influential beliefs as MI-5 and the British government was. The city of Karl-Marx-Stadt, formerly known as Chemnitz, was where she soon ended up and in a detention camp where the KGB had established deep inside East Germany for all sorts of captives of a non-military nature including journalists and the odd defector. Once the KGB had spoken to her, they had quickly taken the measure of this forty-one year-old Briton and realised that she wasn’t a spy like they believed most journalists from the West were but rather a propaganda tool that could be put to use for their own ends.

Toynbee was to be finally given the chance to write articles which would be used to try to influence opinion back in Britain. This wasn’t going to be a pleasant experience at all for her but her wishes were hardly something that the KGB worried over.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
One Hundred & Ninety

Intelligence from Denmark which NATO had access to about the situation on the ground in Jutland wasn’t very substantial. There were plenty of senior people who weren’t happy that PORTER – formerly known as POTATO – was to go ahead with only little reconnaissance done beforehand. The risks were known to be great for a British-led invasion to retake Jutland, but the rewards were very tempting too.

In the early hours of March 27th, long before the sun rose that Sunday morning, British soldiers arrived via clandestine means from the air and sea into Jutland.


Paras of the Pathfinder Platoon – an independent formation with the Parachute Regiment – were dropped from a low-flying RAF Hercules transport deep inland in the Aalborg area just after three o’clock local time. This unit had almost doubled in size for war service after reservists with previous time served had re-joined their old formation. There were fifty-one men who jumped out of that Hercules into the unknown and they quickly landed near Aalborg Airport just across the Limfjord on Vendsyssel-Thy Island. Plenty of weapons were with these Paras as well as communications equipment, but for now they were only meant to use the latter.

Their mission was to establish over-watch positions outside the airport and then to guide-in the arrival once it got light of the lead elements of the 5th Airborne Brigade, their fellow Paras. They were not supposed to get into a fire-fight but rather keep their eyes open for any deviation in what was reported to be the strength of the defenders here. 1 PARA was to arrive in the drop zones which the pathfinders were inside and then assault the airport to allow that to be later used as a landing site for the rest of the brigade coming in afterwards once it had been taken.

Unfortunately, that lack of on the ground information came into play here in the worst possible way. The Paras had only been on Danish soil for less than half an hour when they were engaged in combat… with members of the Danish Resistance. The open fields where they chose to land was right where a force of irregular guerrillas was moving through to launch an armed raid against Aalborg Airport. These well-armed and highly-motivated Danes stumbled into the British soldiers and the two sides started fighting each other in the dark. Neither knew who the others were and assumed that they were the enemy. There was only one Danish speaker among the Paras and he was killed at once while only a few of the Danes spoke English. Gunfire was exchanged between the two sides with many of the Danes using captured AK-74 assault rifles which they had taken from Soviet and East German soldiers who they had previously fought against. Finally, after there were plenty of dead on both sides, did the fighting stop when the two opposing forces realised just who they were engaging and the killing stopped.

By then though it was too late.

Aalborg Airport was a joint civilian and military facility pre-war with two squadrons of Danish F-16’s flying from there and sharing the runaways with airliners. As Jutland had been overrun and other airbases captured in airborne assaults, the Danes had wrecked the facility by blowing up the tower, hangars and fuel storage while also putting huge holes in the runaway as well as scattering mines all over the place too. Once East German tanks had arrived, they had found a useless facility and kept on moving right up to the northernmost reaches of Jutland. Behind them had come Soviet Air Force personnel with the Soviet Fifteenth Air Army and these specialists had deemed Aalborg Airport utterly wrecked but capable of being repaired and reused with time. Efforts had been made to clear debris and also repair the twin runaways there: Danish civilians had been forced against their will to assist in this any many had been killed or maimed with mines planted by their countrymen. It had been recognised that NATO might wish to retake the facility at some point so a mixed battalion of East Germans and been assigned here with their tanks and infantry to guard against that.

The fighting just to the west of them in the middle of the night with a hell of a lot of automatic weapons fire being used was heard and seen by these East German troops. They weren’t sure what was going on, but their commander decided that the best thing to do was for his alert company to at once head in that direction to find out. T-72 tanks and BTR-60 armoured personnel carriers rolled out of Aalborg Airport and raced towards where the fighting had been observed taking place.

The arrival of the East German armour caught both the Paras and the Danes wholly off-guard. Both sides were trying to deal with their wounded, making apologies to each other and trying to coordinate further activities. All of a sudden came the arrival of wheeled vehicles mounting machine guns followed by tanks racing behind them. The Resistance did what they did best and quickly scattered – they knew that their chances of being successful in such an engagement were non-existent and it would be best to return another time – but the British stayed where they were and fought back. This wasn’t suicidal bravery or anything like that, just all that they could do when caught in such a surprise as this.

Very quickly the Paras were overwhelmed and were either dead or prisoners soon enough.


Royal Marines with the Special Boat Service (SBS) landed on a stretch of beach near Frederikshavn to the northeast of Aalborg. The SBS had so far played a minimal role in the war due to their small size and the orders for them to be involved in the guarding of oil platforms in the North Sea. The wellheads had been capped and the platforms guarded against Soviet Navy commando efforts yet instead of attacks which the SBS could protect against, many of the British and Norwegian oil platforms had been bombed in air attacks with varying degrees of success. A small part of the SBS had gone to Norway with the rest of the Royal Marines and then assisted them near Kristiansand and now led the way for them to land in Denmark too.

The beach was between the villages of Strandby and Apholmen along the Kattegat and sheltered from the worst of the weather and the Atlantic swells coming into the Baltic Approaches from the distant Atlantic. HMS Onslaught dropped the SBS party off and then the submarine slipped away to assist in the protection operations for the amphibious ships due to soon arrive after the commandoes had scouted the way. The beach itself was just as it had been observed from the air and free of defences and the SBS moved fast away from there and inland. The railway track which ran parallel to the beach was crossed and found free of obstacles too along with Highway-40. Everything was just as it had looked from air reconnaissance and clear of defensive efforts to guard against an approach being made to land near Frederikshavn and take it from the rear rather than in what would only be a foolish direct assault. However, the SBS quickly found that the village of Elling was home to a garrison of East German tanks and other armour. That village was a mile inland and thus within range of the fire support which the Royal Marines were going to have in support of them, but the enemy garrison there was a highly mobile force rather than just a defensive position which could be taken on with naval gunfire support and air attacks. The SBS suspected that at the first sign of trouble the East Germans there would quickly be able to disperse all over the nearby countryside and should their tanks get anywhere near the landing beaches, then they were going to cause plenty of destruction.

Air reconnaissance hadn’t spotted this concentration of enemy armour right near the landing beach and the SBS had arrived only a few hours before the Royal Marines were due to start landing in strength. They started to make their reports back to the amphibious command centre for the seaborne landings as part of PORTER – the patched-up amphibious ship HMS Fearless – back in the Skagerrak and waited for orders as to what to do next. Those East Germans in Elling at once caused immense debate to break out there among the senior personnel. There was talk of an air strike or for warship guns to open fire upon the village yet what the SBS men on the ground were saying about their view that the East Germans were ready to roll out of their garrison with haste had to be taken into consideration. What was needed was an airmobile element to the landings to land troops near Elling armed with anti-armour weapons to quickly engage the East Germans moving away. However, that couldn’t be put together in the immediate time-frame as troops were already being loaded into landing craft freeing up what Sea King helicopters were available for moving howitzers and supplies. Should those helicopters being used to transport troops even if such Royal Marines were to be sent in a mission which they weren’t prepared for, the anti-air threat to helicopters during immediate landing operations needed to be looked into and correct landing zones identified before the SBS could move to them to act as pathfinders.

All of this would take too long to arrange and the scheduled landing time was fast approaching.


USS New Jersey was to provide fire support for the British 6th Light Division as it put its Paras and Royal Marines into Jutland first followed by the Foot Guards and Gurkha units attached too in that formation of Britain’s elite ground forces. The battleship was in the Skagerrak and on its way to the Kattegat with its sixteen-inch guns ready for action. A trio of escorts were with the New Jersey and this quartet of US Navy vessels were moving slowly and in radio silence towards their destination. There were signs that there was radar activity coming from several ground stations on Jutland yet it was believed that the effective stand-off jamming being conducted against those radars by US Navy aircraft flying from both British and Norwegian airbases would be blinding those against any form of tracking the New Jersey. Moreover, it was believed that even if the Soviets were able to get a partial fix on the American warships steaming towards the Kattegat they had no assets in-place to mount an effective strike against the New Jersey and also would soon have their attention focused elsewhere.

This was far from hubris on the part of the US Navy in this instance as the intelligence which they had allowed them to act on this assumption that their battleship, along with other NATO warships, would be able to traverse the Skagerrak almost unmolested. The Soviets had no raketonosets in the Baltic Approaches region, their conventional air capability had been limited by air combat and their Baltic Fleet defeated several days ago trying to break out from the Oresund into open water. What wasn’t known was that the Soviets had recently brought batteries of land-based missiles into Jutland right under the noses of NATO reconnaissance efforts.

The 27th Independent Coastal Missile Regiment, part of the Soviet Baltic Fleet’s Coastal Troops, had moved one of its battalions into Denmark over the past few days. The batteries with their self-propelled launchers had come from Kaliningrad and travelled with great secrecy onto the Jutland peninsula and then across to Vendsyssel-Thy Island. Their mission was to support an upcoming renewed effort for the Soviets to move what warships remained of theirs out into the North Sea at a later point but for the meantime to provide defence of the coast. This battalion which was deployed here had a pair of batteries each with four transport/erector launch (TEL) vehicles that mounted six missiles: forty-eight missiles could therefore be carried by batteries which also had mobile radar posts and vehicles carrying electronic counter-countermeasures equipment too. These missiles were versions of the RK-55 missile which NATO knew as the SS-N-21 Sampson – a submarine-launched anti-ship cruise missile – and something which the unsigned INF Treaty was supposed to have eliminated. These here in the Baltic Approaches were armed with conventional warheads, not the thermonuclear ones which that treaty had been all about, and were regarded by the Soviets as being something which their enemies knew nothing about.

They were absolutely correct in that judgement in the form that NATO had no idea that such weapons were far away from the Soviet Union itself and being deployed here by the Soviet Navy.

Acting on information from their radars, which were undergoing much interference in their tasks of tracking NATO warships, the first of what was hoped to be many barrages of RK-55’s (which NATO would later deem the SS-C-4 Slingshot) was fired at four surface targets identified moving through the Skagerrak on a course taking them eastwards. The airwaves were at once filled with what was intense electronic interference to hide the approach of the cruise missiles and the TEL’s which fired quickly started moving as the eight-wheeled vehicles fast got underway to avoid counter-battery fire. Twelve RK-55’s burst from the coast and were sent towards the distant targets at high subsonic speed after their booster rockets had been discarded. The Slingshot was a new system with a whole range of technical bugs and in this first ‘live’ firing a total of four missiles – a third of those fired – didn’t work like they were meant to with crashes, going wildly off-course and even a mid-air explosion. Nonetheless, the remaining eight flashed above the Skagerrak guided towards the targets which they were being sent against.

The amount of electronic radiation being broadcast from the New Jersey would have been hazardous to the health of anyone directly exposed to it. The battleship was fitted with all sorts of add-on systems to deal with threats identified and previously combatted during the war. Airborne-, surface- and submarine-launched Soviet missiles would all get nowhere near the New Jersey due to these defensive jamming systems, but there hadn’t yet been encounters with land-based missiles… systems which were believed to be only deployed along the Soviet coast. These passive defences had no chance of stopping the threat yet alone identifying it for what it was until the last minute. Only with a very little time to spare did the radars aboard the New Jersey and its escorts start detecting those eight inbound cruise missiles and then their guns and SAM’s started to try to take them on.

Three cruise missiles were downed, all by Vulcan-Phalanx anti-missile guns, but the other five smashed into the destroyer USS Hayler and the New Jersey. The Hayler took one hit amidships and the resulting blast of the 400kg warhead ripped the warship almost in half and started fires which spread end to end very quickly as there was plenty of missile fuel carried by the offending Slingshot. The other four missiles all hit the New Jersey with those striking along her starboard side into the hull and among her superstructure. The battleship was built during World War Two and heavily-armoured to allow her to defeat large calibre shells from other battleships of that era, yet the Slingshot missiles which struck her had come in very fast and were armed with penetrating warheads. The two which hit the superstructure exploded with their full fury against the outside of that yet the other two managed to get past the armour and inside the vessel before they detonated.

It was fire which would kill the New Jersey. Unexpended rocket fuel fuelled those fires and they started to burn inside the vessel and spread fast. Compartments were sealed under central control yet everything was happening so fast and more and more of the ship was quickly being engulfed. There were heroic efforts aboard to try to stop the spread of those flames but it was a hopeless cause. The New Jersey was soon alight from amidships to her stern and for not much longer could the fires be halted from going forward too. A decision was taken to abandon ship with the wounded and then non-essential personnel getting off first followed afterwards by everyone else.

The battleship which had raced halfway across the world to see action here in the Baltic Approaches was lost before it could commence its first assigned mission of supporting British forces in landing in Jutland.


PORTER could not continue with setbacks like these occurring as they did. It wasn’t known what happened to the Paras on the ground near Aalborg, but the radio silence which soon came from them meant that it would be very unwise indeed to have the rest of the 5th Airborne Brigade start to land there. The SBS reports from near Frederikshavn meant that the Royal Marines who were meant to land along the coast would be facing enemy armour almost straight away. Then, the loss of the New Jersey to missiles of an unknown origin was a double blow as the fire support from that battleship wasn’t going to be available while there were meant to be other vessels soon moving in the area too, many of those loaded with troops.

The operation was going to have to be delayed. No one was yet talking of it being cancelled, but for now no landings could go ahead. What had happened to those pathfinders needed to be discovered and further reconnaissance needed to be done of the Frederikshavn area in case there were other so far unidentified concentrations of enemy armour. In addition, intelligence efforts would have to look into at what missiles had destroyed the New Jersey, where they had come from and if there were any more of them.

The morning was not a good one for NATO designs in the Baltic Approaches area.





One Hundred & Ninety–One

Striking Fleet Atlantic had faced land-based missiles too: Soviet Coastal Troops had fired Sepal and versions of the Styx missile against them. There had come missiles fired from small warships, submarines and aircraft too. The US Navy warships operating off the coast of the Kola Peninsula were often in a shooting gallery where they had to dodge these long-range efforts while trying to concentrate on their purpose here to destroy enemy war-making capabilities here in the Soviet North-West. Losses were taken from these various missiles though none were on the scale as suffered down in the Baltic Approaches and at the same time as they were defending themselves, the Americans were learning all of the time.

The best defence was an active offensive and the US Navy had been attacking those launch platforms yet at the same time as missiles of their own and aircraft went after them they covered themselves in passive defences. These were attachments to warships in the form of antenna and small satellite dishes to direct electronic countermeasures efforts to stop those attacks from being successful. In the all-important technological sphere, the US Navy was far ahead of their opponents yet time and time again missiles were still coming towards them and those losses taken might have only been small, yet they still hurt. All that could be done though was to keep hitting back.

With the majority of the Tomahawk’s being expended as they had during the initial arrival here and the rest kept back for time-sensitive urgent strikes, it was up to the aircraft flown from the flight-decks of the trio of carriers to take the war to the Soviets. Once the naval bases along the coast around the Kola Fjord and then westwards had been hit, airbases further inland had been hit in efforts to destroy aircraft caught on the ground and deny them to other aircraft either airborne or on their way to make up the losses. The Northern Fleet had long ago lost its major warships but there were plenty of smaller vessels which were attacked when they were at sea: frigates, corvettes and missile & patrol boats. Submarine-hunting US Navy aircraft went after submarines too and expended much ammunition if this effort to sanitize the Barents Sea of Soviet subsurface assets like they had done with those on the surface too.

Mainly over land, but on occasion over the water too, Soviet aircraft rose to challenge the US Navy. They were fewer and fewer Soviet aircraft each time with the burden fully falling on the PVO air defence forces after most of the tactical VVS aircraft had been lost. There were appearances made by Sukhoi-15 Flagon interceptors after most of the Flanker’s had gone and the Foxbat & Foxhound force had suffered greatly at American hands. Stocks of SAM’s were running out and while the road and rail links southwards were open allowing for reinforcement, there were hardly any convoys with more coming northwards when there should have been if anti-ship missiles were being brought forward. Some US Navy aircraft were hit and downed in aerial engagements and from ground defences yet those were nowhere near enough to stop the Americans… especially as they were ferrying aircraft across the Atlantic to then deploy to the carriers unmolested.

This disastrous situation couldn’t go on but what were the Soviets to do to counter this?

They had tried everything. The last of the raketonosets had been bombed when on the ground and not dispersed far enough inland on time. Conventional aircraft attacks were not working due to the few number of strike aircraft available and the dominance of the US Navy in the air. Coastal-launched missiles were being deflected by electronic jamming which the Soviets couldn’t counter. Warships and submarines were unable to operate along the coast anywhere near the Americans without being struck at and destroyed.

US Navy aircraft were now flying almost unopposed over the Kola Peninsula. Each time the Soviets tried to counter them their efforts were less successful than the times beforehand and their remaining military assets, especially in the western half of the region near the borders with Norway and Finland, were being slowly but methodically destroyed. The worry was that soon the Americans, maybe in conjunction with the Finns, would be able to start moving troops onto Soviet soil as what remained of the Soviet Army which had been on foreign soil was now beaten there and there was almost no one left to defend the Motherland. This was not a good situation to be in at all when the whole basis of Soviet military strategy was to fight a war abroad not at home.


The North-Western TVD headquarters had moved several days ago from its bunker near Severomorsk far inland down to Kandalaskha, which was almost on the White Sea. There had been an attack on the initial site by laser-guided bombs which had killed many of the command staff and the remainder, along with the commander who had been away at the time, had therefore transferred far enough away to stay out of immediate danger from a follow-up strike. The whole of the Severomorsk-Murmansk area, around the Kola Fjord, had been practically ceded to American aircraft afterwards and while no one was happy with that, it had been the only choice that could be made.

Inside the bunker, little intelligence flowed in concerning where the enemy was. The US Navy was fast in moving its ships around and was becoming very proficient in using decoys to hide the positions of its ships. There was a hopelessness in many of the staff inside the bunker and even the KGB officers assigned to ensure that morale remained high had stopped shooting people who they deemed defeatist as even those soulless men could see that even such actions as those weren’t going to work… that realisation had come after the deaths of many experienced men though.

The headquarters directed the ever weakening counter-strikes against Striking Fleet Atlantic and each time noted their own reported losses. At first, the American carriers had been reported as being sunk until it was realised that such reports were inaccurate while enemy aircraft losses soon stopped being inflated too when it was realised that such losses were actually impossible if again and again the US Navy appeared in the skies above the Kola Peninsula. Orders were given for nuclear warfighting assets to be moved away southwards or to the east while pleas were made for reinforcements of a tactical nature to come northwards. Urgent inquiries were made as to when further SAM and cruise missiles were going to arrive to replace those expended and then there was a call for assistance to come from Pacific Fleet raketonosets aircraft to cross the great width of the Soviet Union and deploy here. However, many of those had been lost – mainly on the ground rather than in air combat – and those remaining were being held back to guard against an amphibious invasion of outlying Soviet islands near Japan.

There were warships of the Soviet Navy in the Kara Sea on the other side of Novaya Zemlya but they were protecting the deployed at-sea force of missile-armed submarines carrying a significant portion of the Soviet Union’s thermonuclear arsenal. Any available aircraft in the central parts of the country so far uncommitted to the war was being sent now in mass movements into Central Europe towards the frontlines there.

The cupboard was bare and there was no help coming for the North-Western TVD despite the urgent need to if not reverse then delay the scale of the further defeats soon to be suffered in this all-important strategic theatre.





One Hundred & Ninety–Two

The Royal Navy was not having a good war. The destruction caused to the Task Force on the second day of the conflict had been gut-wrenching, but then further losses had mounted in dribs and drabs with warships, submarines and support ships being repeatedly lost in engagements. Submarines had attacked with torpedoes and missiles, aircraft had fired missiles of their own plus dropped bombs and used cannons, while there had been further missiles from Soviet warships too. These enemy threats were met in different manners in different theatres of combat yet there was always the surprise element to consider too. The RN had struck back with a lot of forces against their opponents and they had the support of their allies, yet the losses had kept totalling up as victories would often mean walking away with their own wounded too.

This combat was continuous twenty-four hours a day with vessels not even assured that they could be safe in port too when they came home to load weapons or extra crew. The men aboard the vessels of the RN as well as those ashore in support roles (in the latter case there were many women serving too) were tired and having to face danger at all times. Mistakes, often fatal ones, could occur making the Soviets not the own enemy to be encountered. There were rumours on several occasions that some losses which the RN had taken, especially in terms of the submarines officially listed as missing, had been the result of friendly fire. As best as possible, officers tried to keep the morale of the ranks up but wasn’t an easy task in many situations.

The war carried on for the RN and those serving among the Senior Service kept on having to do their duty aboard the many vessels which were still active and fighting.


HMS Brilliant had started the war in British Waters: the frigate had been on ASW duty in the North-Western Approaches north of Ulster and west of Scotland. There had been convoys inbound and outbound through that stretch of the North Atlantic at that time and Britain was deploying its strategic nuclear arsenal aboard its strategic missile submarines. After several days of patrolling there with no sign of the enemy seen and convoys moving away to use the Irish Sea due to the threat of Soviet naval raketonosets activity, the very modern ASW platform that the Brilliant was was needed further out in the wider ocean. The detection systems mounted worked better in deeper seas without interference from coastal noises.

Soviet submarines were active in great number across the North Atlantic during the early days of the war. Again and again, they would strike with torpedoes in the main though occasionally with missiles too against warships hunting them and convoys of civilian ships trying to avoid them. Using long-established procedures practised extensively in peacetime, NATO navies were working together to defend the sea-lanes once war broke out and the Brilliant became part of that effort.

A big and fast warship, the Brilliant carried more than two hundred crew. She had missiles and torpedoes as her main armament rather than the traditional main gun. SATCOM antenna was mounted for secure communications while electronic warfighting equipment came in the form of radars, sonars and jamming systems. When out in the North Atlantic, the Brilliant at first worked alone before joining a multi-national NATO force before returning to her solo duties. Information on enemy air and especially submarine activity was shared with the frigate and she too passed on details to other vessels as the RN’s underground command centre at Northwood outside London.

Two confirmed solo ‘kills’ were achieved by the Brilliant during the first two weeks of war and there was also a partial silhouette painted on both sides of her superstructure too which denoted an ‘assist’. A torpedo dropped by one of the Lynx helicopters carried had impacted with a Soviet submarine midway across the ocean and impact noises had been detected while the frigate’s own mounted torpedo tubes had fired a pair of such weapons against another Soviet submarine with confirmation coming of that strike too. On both occasions, the towed array sonar trailing far behind the Brilliant had at first acquired the contact before a long and difficult, plus dangerous, hunt was made to gain a firm track and then take solid shots at the targeted submarines to hit them when they were deep and liable to be sunk with an impact. The ‘assist’ had come in conjunction with a US Navy P-3C long-range maritime patrol aircraft following-up on targeting information maintained and fed to them by the Brilliant and then dropping its own torpedoes on that third submarine.

During that third successful engagement, the Brilliant had come under direct attack when on the other two occasions it was thought that the enemy didn’t know that the RN was after them until the very last moment when it was too late. A Sierra-class submarine had been that target and had fired off a pair of torpedoes blind moments before the Americans had sunk it: one had spun in wild, aimless circles while the other had smashed into the towed decoy also behind the Brilliant. It was thought that that impact had an element of luck to it after the Sierra’s destruction had meant that torpedo-guidance wires had been cut, yet that wasn’t something known for sure.

Radar images of distant aircraft had appeared on display screens aboard the Brilliant with what its own air-search radar could see and what was downlinked from allied sources too. There had been no possibility of using the carried Sea Wolf missiles against those aircraft due to range issues, yet one of those reconnaissance aircraft had actually been physically seen by many of the crew aboard. A Harrier flying from the Spanish Navy’s carrier in the North Atlantic, back when the Brilliant had been near to that vessel, had downed that Bear and it had crashed into the ocean very near to the RN frigate. The captain had resisted the temptation to smash another missile into the falling wreckage as it came down – just to make sure – and instead launched a boat to rescue Soviet aircrew spotted in the water. That had come with risks involved as the North Atlantic was a battle zone and to hang around trying to help the enemy wasn’t the best of ideas, yet leaving men to die as they would have done had been on that occasion seen as too cold-blooded. Three men had been pulled from the water with one dying moments after being boarded while the two survivors were given medical care and kept under guard for a later transfer.

That rescue had occurred whereas on another occasion wartime need had overruled compassion. The Brilliant had at one point been present when a convoy was attacked and a Liberian-registered merchantmen had been stricken by several torpedoes. The ship and its crew of sailors from all over the world had been left unaided as at that point the offending submarine was being hunted and was still dangerous and there had therefore been nothing that the Brilliant could do rather than expose herself to danger and assist in allowing that offending submarine to get away and sink other ships. Eventually, the hunting efforts of the Brilliant had helped in allowing a Canadian destroyer to sink that particular submarine, but it had been a bitter pill for many of the crew to swallow.

Without having to expend much ammunition, the Brilliant hadn’t needed to return to Britain to rearm like other vessels did. Those aboard were contained within their own little world full of dangers and heard little news from the outside. There were constant alerts and the ship was always a hive of activity even if it wasn’t constantly engaging the enemy. A sailor was swept overboard one afternoon during a storm so typical of the North Atlantic when he really shouldn’t have been and the loss was attributed to errors being made among the junior officers in not making sure that their men were rested enough and not liable to get into a situation where an accident like that would occur. Other crew members missed home and worried about their families. When contact was made twice with tankers for at-sea refuelling – once with the RFA Tidespring (to where the pair of Soviet prisoners went) and then with a US Navy ship – rumours did reach many of the crew about how the war was going. Afterwards, the captain was forced to make an announcement reminding men to do their duty and to not listen to such gossip as some sailors had heard things which they hadn’t liked.

What everyone aboard lived with was the very real danger that at any moment an attack could come against them which would be fatal for their ship and them. As the war went onwards, there were fewer and fewer Soviet submarines at sea after they had either been hunted down or were trying to make their way home for rearmament, yet the waters of the North Atlantic were still very dangerous indeed.


Less than a quarter of the RN’s pre-war strength of submarines went out into the North Atlantic. Instead, they concentrated to the east and north of the UK mainland as well as further northwards into the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea too. Some of those scored major kills taking on big capital ships of the Soviet Northern Fleet yet others didn’t see much – or in a few instances none – action at all in the war’s first few weeks. For those not engaged in attacking the surface forces of the Soviet Navy, their missions were to generally stay out of trouble until, as one senior officer back at Northwood put it, ‘trouble found them’. It was thought pre-war that the UK mainland would come under direct attack from Soviet submarines firing land-attack missiles and many submarines were meant to guard against this by reacting to one strike so another couldn’t be launched by that offending submarine. Other RN subsurface vessels were meant to patrol the Norwegian Sea hoping to stumble across transiting Soviet submarines and therefore protect that sea-lanes across the North Atlantic from these outposts; the ocean was a big place though. Even those submarines with the Task Force or sent towards the coasts where parts of Norway and Denmark had been occupied didn’t see much action as they were again on protective missions or conducting surveillance which often involved the landing of small groups of naval frogmen. It was those submarines up in the far north that would attempt to cover themselves in glory for the RN in this war though many would be lost in doing so.

HMS Turbulent had been tasked to hunt for Soviet amphibious ships when the war started and had patiently waited for those to come steaming around the North Cape and towards the western reaches of Finmark. The submarine had laid in wait for those to come so they could be sunk in a barrage of torpedoes taking Soviet Naval Infantry with them down to the ocean floor. Those ships didn’t come within the first few days and the submarine had been reassigned… only to realise much later that if there had been some more patience on the part of Northwood then that opportunity would have later come there.

The Turbulent instead had moved into the Barents Sea long before the US Navy arrived with their carriers. Surveillance had been the first mission in scouting enemy strength at-sea there while also scouting the approaches towards those many submarine bases for the possible later introduction of further RN submarines laden with mines. The Barents Sea at that point had been a target-rich environment and the Turbulent had eventually been released from her surveillance mission to engage enemy surface vessels. Five warships had been attacked with torpedoes – a frigate, two corvettes and two missile boats – with the confirmed kills of four of those. Another shot had been taken at a Soviet diesel/electric-powered submarine snorkelling at one point on the surface but for inexplicable reasons that attack had failed and instead the Turbulent had fast become the hunted rather than the hunter when aircraft dropped sonobuoys quickly followed by depth charges.

There had been some very near misses in that encounter and the submarine was very lucky to escape with it afterwards being realised that not enough reconnaissance of the immediate area had taken place before that failed attack.

The weapons load for a Trafalgar-class submarine as the Turbulent was was a stock of thirty torpedoes and Harpoon anti-ship missiles. In those engagements, only eight torpedoes had been expended and another sixteen remained along with half a dozen missiles. The thinking had been that with so many weapons remaining, the Turbulent could have spent several more weeks at sea on mission. But then the amphibious ships arrived, coming back eastwards after their failed mission. It wasn’t known aboard the submarine at that point that they had delivered their troops into already-occupied Norwegian territory, but that didn’t matter as the vessels spotted were a set of strategic targets fully loaded or empty.

This time there was no chance of calling on external support for a follow-up attack – in the form of NATO aircraft or even light surface vessels – but regardless the Turbulent made its move. Those ships were heading back to the Archangelsk area and apparent safety, but before then Harpoon’s and torpedoes were fired against several ships. The attack was hurried and not perfect, but still very lethal. Escorting warships were hit too along with the big landing ships. The log book on the Turbulent would record that they confirmed hits upon a destroyer, a frigate, three big amphibious transports (in the Soviet, not the NATO sense) and a suspected tanker. All six missiles and seven more torpedoes were launched in a trio of attacks occurring in fast succession from several angles of attack. Opposition was put up against the RN submarine, yet it got away without a scratch.

The usage of now more than two thirds of the weapons load, along with many fired decoys too, meant that the Turbulent went back towards the UK. What was believed to be a Canadian aircraft came very close to attacking the submarine during this journey home through the Norwegian Sea and no one was happy at what had been very nearly a fatal friendly fire incident as later analysis showed that that aircraft had come very close undetected to the Turbulent.

After a high-speed run, the Turbulent reached Faslane in southwestern Scotland on the second Sunday of the war. The base there had been attacked only once successfully by Soviet missiles fired from raketonosets and when those selected crew who went ashore did they saw some of the debris still remaining. They were told that Rosyth, Devonport, Portsmouth and shipyards too had been badly hit and Faslane was rather lucky in comparison. Once there, a quick transfer of more weapons was made from stores and then the Turbulent was back at sea to continue her war patrol.


The replenishment oiler RFA Tidespring visited Britain far more often during the conflict. This huge vessel fulfilled the role of assisting in keeping the RN’s warships and many of those of Britain’s allies at sea and sustained so they would keep on-station. Fuel was carried by this vessel manned by reservists along with ammunition, food, fresh water, medical supplies and sometimes spare parts for systems too. Three old Wessex helicopters flew from the support ship as well and they played a major role in that ship-to-ship supply effort when at sea but also made an appearance when the Tidespring was in port in assisting with fast-loading.

This veteran of the Falklands War, which had then carried part of 42 Commando to South Georgia six years beforehand, made multiple runs back and forth out into the North Atlantic from RN bases on England South Coast. There were other vessels involved in this too, yet Tidespring fast made a name for herself as she was always available and the professionalism of her crew. Other support ships faced danger and even destruction – those hit by cruise missiles when with the Task Force a major example – yet the Tidespring was regarded as a ‘lucky ship’. Several old sailors aboard hated such a description and tried to hush comments like that from younger men for fear of bringing bad luck, but the name stuck.

Those transfers at sea were assisted by helicopters with underslung loads, yet it was mainly the cranes and rubber pipelines that the Tidespring could do the most of her work. In rough seas and in the dead of night as well as in calm and bright weather the Tidespring did her duty. The loads transferred were never that heavy and some visited vessels received much more than others in need – orders would always come into play – yet the ship didn’t make enemies among others as again and again it showed up. On one occasion, when making a resupply run to HMS Active out in the middle of the North Atlantic, the crew aboard one of the Wessex helicopters dropped grenades into the water when there were reports of a possible submarine. This didn’t help out in any way and was rather silly to be honest, but it showed a determination to help that was quite appreciated.

When coming back to the UK to make fast loadings of stores, the Tidespring twice brought back prisoners. There were those two Soviet aircrew from that downed Bear on one occasion while on another five Soviet submariners rescued by a Dutch frigate after their vessel had been sunk and they had made a miraculous escape. Such people were treated with respect despite being the enemy: that was how the RN was meant to do business. In addition, the Tidespring sometimes returned with casualties too from combat incidents at sea with badly-wounded sailors who there might just be a chance to save with medical care on land rather than aboard the warships from where they came.

Devonport and Portsmouth were where the Tidespring made her visits too, those closed naval towns which had seen several visits by the enemy despite being so far away from what should have been the frontlines. These RN bases on the English Channel with easy access to the ocean beyond had each been hit on multiple occasions by missiles though so too had the urban areas around them: Plymouth was worse off than Portsmouth was. Nonetheless, civilians were then working for the RN to assist in the war efforts taking place as they were undertaking paid labouring duties in a semi-volunteer role. A couple of RN and NATO warships were at each base on a permanent basis as they had taken war damage and arrived on Britain’s shores, but mainly those vessels in port and staying there were civilian ones brought in between the movements of warships and support ships on supply runs; any damaged civilian ships were going elsewhere. The RN bases were being put to use in landing supplies coming across the Atlantic for NATO forces based in the UK and also to assist in civilian relief here through these facilities with all of their cargo handling capabilities and security.

Such efforts, everyone working together, were good for the crew of the Tidespring to witness. They were doing their part in the war and everyone else was doing theirs too.


On the eve of war, the RN had raced to get its hands upon many warfighting assets as possible. Sea Harrier’s and helicopters had been moved from training units to ships while light training aircraft had been assigned to coastal patrol duties around the UK. Retired personnel had come back to the colours and put to use while facilities were fast expanded. In terms of vessels, the RN had struggled to reinforce itself though.

There were a couple of older frigates soon to be decommissioned and therefore being rundown which were hurriedly re-crewed and sent to sea while brand new HMS Sheffield had been hastily commissioned early only to be sunk on the war’s first day. As losses accumulated, the RN didn’t have any real reserves with major vessels to put to sea. All they had was vessels being built for future service and in various stages of construction; six frigates and three submarines.

Those Trafalgar-class submarines being built by Vickers at Burrow-in-Furness were a long way away from getting to sea in any shape to fight when Soviet cruise missiles blasted the Vickers yard on the war’s first day. The Soviets wanted to destroy the capability of the RN to repair submarines there and putting an immediate end to construction efforts upon those vessels was only a bonus. Neither boat was going to see any war service and the hulls for submarines planned to be named Trenchant and Talent were later to be scrapped while the expected Triumph (three years away from planned service) was left smashed up with its future in less but still some doubt.

The frigates were planned to be the latest Type-22’s for the RN with four of the five being the ‘Batch-3’ versions with main guns and the very latest technology fitted, a Batch-2 Type-22 and a newer Type-23. During the countdown to war, as Transition to War renationalised many vital national assets including shipyards (the irony of this didn’t raise many smiles), Coventry and Cornwall left the sites of their construction and were moved away from those locations regarded as exposed: Swan Hunter at Wallsend on the Tyne and Yarrow at Glasgow. These vessels were months away from commissioning and each would join the ranks of the RN during the first days of the war. The other four – the Batch-3’s like the Cornwall and the Type-23 – remained where they were at those two shipyards plus Cammell Laird on Birkenhead. The RN could do nothing itself to defend those hulls and hoped for the best outcome for these vessels whose combined cost was in excess of four hundred million pounds.

It was not to be. All three shipyards faced attack like Burrow-in-Furness did and the hulls of these future ships weren’t outright destroyed, but they did take damage. There was a plan for the future Campbeltown to leave Cammell Laird and be towed across to Harland & Wolff but that wasn’t an official RN policy; the effort was too great for a vessel not expected to see service for six months to a year while Belfast had the sectarian civil war ongoing that it did… plus the shipyard there had been attacked with both of the famous Samson & Goliath cranes being brought tumbling to the ground.

Coventry and Cornwall both did join the RN and soon enough engaged in combat operations. They were fantastic vessels almost in top condition with what many people regarded as only cosmetic additions to be made before they flew the White Ensign; of course, not an opinion shared by all. That was it though. The RN could only raise reserves such as these two shiny vessels along with a fewer older frigates saved at the last minute too from what should have been the process of decommissioning them for scraping or to be sold aboard.


Away from these two new frigates, Brilliant out in the North Atlantic on ASW duties, the Turbulent soon to head back out on war patrol and the Tidespring making its back-and-forth supply runs, the rest of the RN was still fighting despite the difficulties. On the surface of the sea and below, in the air and on land, the Senior Service kept relentlessly taking the fight to the enemy and doing their duty no matter how much it cost.





One Hundred & Ninety–Three

Likewise, the Royal Air Force was having a difficult war where losses just kept mounting and there was no respite from the constant level of operations. Since the very start of the conflict and then twenty-four hours a day since then, the RAF had been in the thick of the action in multiple theatres. If fought countless engagements with the Soviets and tried as best as possible to live up to the standards set in the past in the face of the enemy.

In places the casualties taken, in terms of manpower and equipment, were staggering. Morale dipped alongside assets and so too did capabilities. That wasn’t an across the board situation though as while losses occurred there were too many victories won.


No. 3 Squadron, RAF had gone to war with sixteen Harrier GR3 attack-fighters and almost two hundred personnel. Their home base at RAF Gutersloh in western Lower Saxony had been left behind on the eve of conflict as that fixed location was believed to be highly vulnerable to enemy attack (as was rather quickly proved to be the case) and 3 Squadron had deployed into rough-field locations. All across the German countryside in a triangle defined by the edges of Osnabruck-Munster-Bielefeld, there were pre-scouted sites for the use of the Harrier’s with 3 Squadron along with its partner Harrier squadron at RAF Gutersloh too: No. 4 Squadron. The Harrier’s were dispersed into sheltered locations where there was an improvised runaway and mobile facilities to keep their aircraft flying and the personnel able to be free from direct enemy attack.

As can be imagined, this wasn’t an easy thing to do. Aircraft like the Harrier were maintenance intensive and they just couldn’t be operated from anywhere. There needed to be areas for the technicians to work and the pilots to plan their operations. Adequate shelter from detection and air strike too needed to be put to use while fuel and armaments needed to be fed to the aircraft so they could fight once in the skies. Using multiple sites as 3 Squadron did for several aircraft at a time, along with moving about as they did, was an immense undertaking in terms of logistics, man-hours and concealment.

It was worth it though. The Harrier’s were excellent weapons of war perfectly suited to the tactical role above the battlefields of the North German Plain. Hundreds of hours were spent with the aircraft in the air and engaged in combat missions; often times the same aircraft would conduct five or even six flights in any twenty-four hour period. There were almost three times the number of pilots for the single-seat aircraft than there were Harrier’s and 3 Squadron was able to remain connected to the NATO air logistics efforts so this could be maintained. The 2ATAF provided tasking for the Harrier’s and consequently the aircraft flew missions in support of not just British troops, but those of their NATO allies too.

The Harrier’s carried a pair of mounted cannons and a whole range of external ordnance on their missions: missiles, rockets and bombs. 3 Squadron had its Harrier’s fire their 30mm cannons against a whole range of ground targets, launch Sidewinder’s against helicopters and in self-defence against attacking enemy fighters (not always with much success in the latter case though), unleash waves of SNEB 68mm unguided rockets against enemy troops and drop iron bombs as well as cluster bombs atop tanks and other enemy armour. The Harrier’s usually flew in pairs or in four-ship flights at the beginning of the war though as it progressed there were three-ship or lone flights undertaken. Reconnaissance missions were sometimes flown as well with intelligence-gathering equipment inside pods underneath the Harrier’s and the pilots making visual reports. Bad weather and night-time flying was dangerous, but something which the Harrier’s could do and therefore they fought at all times when needed. There were planned strike missions, armed patrols and alerts for emergency air strikes.

Combat over the skies of Germany was dangerous though and attrition occurred rather frequently at what eventually averaged out at a Harrier with 3 Squadron lost per day. There were replacements that came from the UK – out of war stocks and from training units – but the number aircraft flying kept dropping. In the first two weeks of war, a total of six aircraft arrived: a lone GR1 model, a pair of twin-seat T4 combat-capable trainers, and another trio of the GR3 models. Therefore, by the war’s fourteenth day there were only half of the original number of aircraft flown by 3 Squadron as there had been when the first shots were fired.

The Harrier’s were lost in many manners though none were directly destroyed while on the ground due to enemy action. Three aircraft went down to accidents due to pilot error, weather and foreign object damage (FOD): FOD being the ingestion into the aircraft of external elements. Meanwhile, enemy action destroyed another eleven Harrier’s. There was the danger of SAM’s and anti-aircraft guns as well as hostile fighter aircraft. Losses were taken during attacks as well as before and after them all across the battlefield. Several pilots were killed outright in mid-air explosions or in crashes while others died trying to escape or fell into enemy captivity. At the same time, a total of six pilots lost when their Harrier’s went down did make it back to 3 Squadron through various means. The ground personnel assigned took losses of their own on two separate occasions: five men died when a stray bomb from a Soviet aircraft which wasn’t directed at them blew apart a portable hangar (which was empty) at one of their dispersed locations while another eight men fell to enemy gunfire in an aborted Spetsnaz attack againsta convoy of support vehicles with 3 Squadron as it made its regular moves across the German countryside.

Those who manned 3 Squadron were regular RAF personnel assigned pre-war and those who joined during LION and later too. Those additions to the strength were reservists and fulfilled ground and pilot roles. 3 Squadron needed men with a whole range of capabilities from aircraft engine maintenance to air-strip engineers to tactical intelligence officers. Many of the personnel worked security duties in addition to their long shifts preforming flight-related duties; they were armed with SA80 rifles and provided protection for the dispersed facilities. The RAF Regiment had their 5 Wingsupporting the Harrier squadrons in Germany – 3 and 4 Squadron’s plus No. 233 Reserve Squadron which was the OCU unit usually based at RAF Wittering – and that light armour was to guard the dispersal bases. The tracked Scorpion’s and Spartan’s along with the infantry mounted in the latter vehicles couldn’t be everywhere in strength all of the time and so 3 Squadron had to assist in defending itself.

The men of 3 Squadron, deployed as they were out in the field, heard little of the war outside of their own bubble. The pilots saw much fighting and the staff officers went through intelligence reports yet what was going on elsewhere was rather beyond the majority of the men. West German civilians were encountered often and those were mainly frightened refugees where communication was stopped by the language barrier. 3 Squadron concentrated on fighting the war and taking the losses that they were suffering all the while knowing that those losses couldn’t carry on as they were.


No. 29 Squadron, RAF were based at RAF Lossiemouth in Morayshire throughout the war. Fifteen Tornado F3 interceptors were on strength when the war commenced with more than a hundred personnel assigned. The threat of hostile enemy action to the aircraft in the skies and those on the ground was just as real as it was to those deployed aboard like with 3 Squadron as even at home the RAF had to deal with the danger of Soviet air strikes and commando assaults commencing against them.

The Tornado’s were in action straight away and spent most of the first week of the war constantly in combat. They defended the UK mainland as best as they could from cruise missiles fired at distance from Soviet raketonosets before having much more luck in acting against conventional air attacks. Further missions were flown by 29 Squadron in patrolling out at a distance over the sea where less action was seen, but this too was of vital importance.

Air defence duty consisted of planned patrol missions, escorts for vulnerable support aircraft and rushed alerts to react to enemy action. Often these would be intelligence-driven flights preformed to wait upon Soviet aircraft to show up where they were expected to be within reach of the Tornado’s but 29 Squadron did spend most of their time reacting to the enemy. Aircrews sat in their cockpits aboard a fully-fuelled and heavily-armed interceptor waiting to race down the runaway at Lossiemouth and to climb into the sky towards… when they did they raced away at full-speed in combat take-offs in case there was a Spetsnaz commando on the ground with a shoulder-mounted missile. Information on enemy air activity came from various sources from satellites, electronic eavesdropping aircraft, ground & ship based radars aboard and then radars operating in the UK air defence role: those mobile facilities on the ground and airborne radar aircraft.

Using their Foxhunter radars for active attacks or relying on datalinks from AWACS aircraft, the Tornado’s would launch their Sidewinder and Skyflash missiles at detected targets. The mounted 27mm cannons weren’t used by 29 Squadron during the war as they often found that they had enough missiles to do the job (each could carry up to ten air-to-air missiles though usually carried six or eight when laden with fuel tanks to extend loiter time) and engagements took place beyond the range of the guns. The Tornado’s were interceptors, not meant for dogfighting. In the absence of radar coverage from external sources, the Foxhunter combat radars were capable of locating and tracking multiple targets which the Tornado aircrews would find for themselves on many occasions.

As the war progressed and fewer Soviet aircraft came down over the Norwegian Sea from the north and then enemy long-range aircraft transited less through Norwegian airspace, the threat axis of the RAF’s long-range interceptor force, with 29 Squadron at the forefront of that, moved towards the east. The skies over the Baltic Approaches and then above the North Sea became the new danger zone and from that direction enemy aircraft flew against targets in Britain. The Tornado’s started to operate in the rear behind more tactical fighters and also the weapons systems deployed aboard NATO warships in the North Sea and there became fewer engagements for 29 Squadron during the second week of the conflict. There was thus attention given to other duties such as providing distant escort support for the strike aircraft with the 3ATAF striking deep into Eastern Europe and also for ELINT aircraft flying across Sweden to look deeper eastwards with their stand-off electronic systems. Airborne refuelling from the RAF’s tanker fleet – TriStar’s, VC10’s and Victor’s – was thus undertaken to extend the range of the Tornado’s even further.

Nevertheless, the need to provide UK air defence continued for 29 Squadron. They still scrambled to alerts coming in from the distance as the Soviets continued to try to hit Britain from distance and also conduct over the ocean missions. There were Bear’s to be engaged (those carrying missiles and those engaged in naval reconnaissance) as well as Backfire’s and Badger’s as other big strike aircraft. Intelligence-gathering Coot’sand May’s – versions of the Ilyushin-18 turboprop – would make appearances on occasion as well. Then there were the more tactically-rolled Soviet strike aircraft in the form of Fencer’s and Foxbat’s to be engaged.

Losses for this formation didn’t come in direct enemy contact though they were still caused by wartime missions. Two Tornado’s would eventually be lost with one of those being a crash on approach returning home to Lossiemouth by one interceptor and the other occurring when an aircraft-wide electrical failure caused that tornado to fall from the skies above the North Atlantic down to the surface below: none of those four RAF aircrew survived. Tiredness among the Tornado aircrews was regarded as a major factor in that first crash while there was a strong suspicion that lack of attention to maintenance when on the ground could have resulted in the unexplained circumstances surrounding the second loss. The missions which 29 Squadron ran were often exhausting and required a lot of effort.

Still, with the situation as it was, the Tornado’s needed to stay in the fight and keep doing what they were doing best.


The RAF operated three dozen Nimrod MR2 maritime patrol aircraft at the start of the war with another trio of these conversion of the Comet jetliner being ELINT-configured R1 models. The maritime patrol versions were split between two locations: RAF Kinloss in Scotland and RAF St Mawgan in Cornwall. There were five squadrons flying these old but very-capable aircraft with four being regular units and the fifth being the OCU. That training formation, No. 236 Squadron, fielded just four of the Nimrod’s and had departed St Mawgan two days into the war to free up space there for the regular squadron – No. 42 Squadron – as well as US Navy P-3’s to fly from that extensive location near Newquay.

236 Squadron was transferred across to the Irish Republic and made its new base at Shannon Airport on the west coast of Ireland.

The Irish Deployment, as it became known, was very interesting for the RAF. They were joined there by US Navy P-3’s – the Americans had hundreds of these in service with more being removed form storage throughout the war – and also the multiple visits of airliners in military service plus NATO transport aircraft using Shannon Airport as a stopover point. When Ireland moved to play a major role in the war as a combat casualty centre, the RAF personnel watched as aircraft laden with wounded men arrived to be met by teams of Irish nurses and doctors… some of whom had been here on the war’s first day after the civilian facility was hit by Soviet cruise missiles. That attack had brought Ireland into the war and its unprovoked nature, which Irish diplomats worldwide made sure everyone knew about, allowed 236 Squadron to operate from here where usual pre-war circumstances would certainly have made this deployment impossible.

The Nimrod’s were submarine hunters in the main though did mount the capability for anti-surface missions as well as carrying some very good electronic warfare equipment. Based as 236 Squadron was in Ireland the range of the Nimrod’s allowed them to cover a good portion of the North Atlantic though it was only after submarines which the Nimrod’s were deployed against. The sonars and radars aboard were used with depth charges and torpedoes in this role.

236 Squadron contributed to the NATO war effort in that massive hunt for Soviet submarines at sea below the highway across the North Atlantic for all of those ships laden with what NATO needed to fight the war. The four aircraft ran patrol after patrol with extra aircrews and ground personnel in an effort to try to always have an aircraft in the air. That was an impossible task, yet it was still attempted. Initially, while many contacts were gathered on the sonars and the radars, these Nimrod’s didn’t see the enemy as those turned out to be ghost returns; the North Atlantic was full of animal life, strange noises and fierce waves. The RAF kept flying its submarine hunters from here expecting that soon enough they would see action… and they did.

In the war’s first two weeks, Nimrod’s flown by 236 Squadron assisted in the kills of three Soviet submarines working alongside other NATO forces and also gained an unconfirmed kill of its own upon another submarine where the aircrew aboard the aircraft involved were certain that one of their torpedoes struck home but couldn’t prove that. Many sonobuoys were expended during these engagements assisting other aircraft and warships while also on missions where nothing came of their flights in terms of action. The squadron commander would often brief his men that their efforts kept attacks at bay though and added to the pressure on the enemy when they were at sea left hiding beneath the waves and unable to make attacks in such a strong ASW environment. Some of that morale boosting was down to other circumstances surrounding the Irish Deployment.

Not everyone in Ireland was happy with the country being at war and then there were many more who were furious that the Irish Republic was allied with Britain. Centuries of violent history came into play and many of those who caused trouble were those who remained steadfast no matter what in their determination to have nothing to do with Britain. There was no need for British troops to go into the Irish Republic, even if either London or Dublin was at mind to do that, but the deployment of 236 Squadron to Shannon Airport eventually caused disturbances when some troublemakers learnt of it. Ireland remained a very ‘free’ country during the war with few civil restrictions made. The government had arrested some certain people, though those arrests were very few and had involved terrorist suspects on their way to Ulster. The country’s domestic intelligence efforts were directed against that external situation in Northern Ireland and no attention was being paid at all to Limerick: the biggest city in western Ireland and not very far away from Shannon Airport. Local agitators heard about the presence of British aircraft and ground personnel – made out to be ‘warplanes and troops’ – and, combined with what they were hearing about what was going on in Ulster, action was taken. There was a march organised from the city towards Shannon Airport which was mainly made up of concerned citizens but also many troublemakers made an appearance.

Thankfully, before things got out of hand, Irish police stopped that march from getting anywhere near the airport and there was little actual trouble… the long walk had taken place on a warm day with inadequate marshals. Nonetheless, that focused the minds of many in authority on the situation there and there was talk in Dublin of asking the RAF to move from Shannon Airport less than a week after they had arrived to assist in the defence of the country. 236 Squadron got on with its duties after a few heated days when nothing came of the politics surrounding their deployment. They kept up their hunts for Soviet submarines as they were in Ireland for.

One of the Nimrod’s took part in an engagement like no other Nimrod had during the war: it claimed an air-to-air kill. Back during the Falklands War, the maritime patrol aircraft had been fitted with Sidewinder missiles in case they might be needed in self-defence. Such capability had been retained and the missiles brought to Shannon Airport with 236 Squadron. Late on March 25th, one of the Nimrod’s on the Irish Deployment was several hundred miles out over the North Atlantic when they stumbled upon an unidentified airborne contact during bad weather that was disrupting radar performance. Upon investigation, that aircraft was brought into visual range and recognised as a Bear wearing the colours of Soviet Naval Aviation. Intelligence had said that only a few of them were left flying and none were expected where the Nimrod found this one. Regardless, after making a contact report, the lone Sidewinder missile was fired and that was then observed smashing into the starboard wing of the Bear.

Once that aircraft was seen falling towards the sea below and no longer scouting for its comrades, the RAF aircrew headed back to Shannon Airport discussing where their kill marking was going to go on the fuselage.


These were but a few examples of the war that the RAF was having. Losses were extraordinarily high among some formations and low or near non-existent among others. Replacements in terms of men came from reservists and in aircraft at first from training units; later, the Americans provided many aircraft. Such a situation couldn’t go on for ever as resources would soon run out. The RAF kept fighting where it could though and was still maintaining its tempo of wartime operations.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
One Hundred & Ninety–Four

The weather had cleared up overnight and there was sunshine early on the Sunday morning across Germany; the rain had put out many of the fires burning due to the conflict. Such bright skies weren’t going to cheer up anyone about to be involved in the day’s fighting though as it was to be another day spent trying to cheat death.

Through the night there had been air activity, artillery and missile strikes as well as small-scale infantry combat taking place, but once there was light on the horizon the main business of war got going. Yesterday had brought a slow down to the ongoing NATO offensives across Germany and they were out to try to continue with those today while Soviet-led forces remained trying to reorganise themselves to defend against these as they also desperately sought to regain the initiative by seeking an opportunity to strike back.

Like every other day so far, the clash of arms on the ground was extraordinary intensive as hell incarnate was unleashed on those involved.


Down in Bavaria, the French First Army was forced to try different avenues of approach in moving forward after being initially repulsed. They were facing numerically-superior enemy forces which were in many places dug into positions that they had been prepared to defend for a week now. Those Soviet and Czechoslovak troops there across eastern parts of Bavaria were spread along the Danube River on the left, but in the right remained spread through the forests shadowing Autobahn-3 as that highway connected Regensburg up to Nurnberg. It was in that latter sector where the French had tried to advance yesterday and got nowhere, but today the Bundeswehr units under command struck first with the intention of getting over the Danube.

The West German II Corps was the strongest formation of such a size that the West Germans had remaining. It hadn’t suffered majorly from Soviet chemical strikes late last week like the Bundeswehr I Corps on the North German plain and the Bundeswehr III Corps in northern Hessen had; in addition, the West German II Corps had managed to avoid being engaged in massive pitched battles of manoeuvre. There were three divisions under command as well as a trio of independent brigades and plenty of combat support assets. One of those divisions, the 10th Panzer Division, was semi-independent from the corps command yet was back with the Bundeswehr II Corps today along with both the 1st Mountain (mainly panzer and panzergrenadier formations despite the name) & 4th Panzergrenadier Division’s alongside the brigade of Fallschirmjager’s and the two Territorial brigades as well.

Two attacks were made by the West Germans: one near Straubing and the other at Deggendorf. The Danube was assaulted and the Czechoslovakian troops on the other side the target of the crossing operations and planned follow-up advances into the Bavarian Forest beyond too. Light Bundeswehr units led the way in both assaults. Near the smouldering remains of the shelled Straubing, the 25th Fallschirmjager Brigade went over the river in assault boats and in light helicopters. They faced furious defensive fire and took many casualties, yet the destruction what had been caused by their fire support assets in preparation to defending forces soon paid off as the Czechoslovaks didn’t have the available weapons to truly fight off the Fallschirmjager here. Once those paratroopers had secured several crossing points, they kept on trying to expand their bridgeheads to allow Bundeswehr combat engineers to thrown pontoon bridges over the Danube so that the 10th Panzer Division could begin its advance. Near Czechoslovak-occupied Deggendorf, several miles downstream, the 23rd Gebirgsjager Brigade used the same methods to get over the river as the Fallschirmjager had done. These mountain troops had been kept in reserve all throughout the war until this morning and waiting for a Soviet offensive through Austria to take the West German II Corps and thus southern Bavaria in the rear… one which it was now clear wasn’t going to be coming with the Austrians very prepared to defend their country and the Soviets not having the forces available to do that. These were elite troops used in both assaults and when the Gebirgsjager had the 4th Panzergrenadier Division following them, most of the West German II Corps was now on the move.

By getting across the Danube as fast as they did and then moving through the Czechoslovak Fourth Army, the Bundeswehr found their enemy to be stubborn and strong at first, but very brittle. The Czechoslovaks shot through much of their ammunition and then had hardly any left. Panic infected the enemy as the rampaging West Germans drove through them and liberating occupied parts of their country. Those bridgeheads were expanded sideways somewhat, but in the main, Leopard-2 tanks lead the way in charging northwards towards the Bavarian Forest. A lack of manoeuvrability hampered the enemy as they had immense fuel shortages which the Bundeswehr hadn’t expected either. That was a double-edged sword though as the enemy needed to be physically cleared from fixed points which it couldn’t withdraw from.

Seeing the success which the West Germans were having, the French VI Corps, with its reserve light armour and mountain infantry formations, was instructed to launch small-scale attacks in the Regensburg area to the northwest of where the Bundeswehr were attacking. The intention was to keep the Czechoslovak First Army occupied and unable to move to aid their countrymen. Meanwhile, the more powerful French I Corps remained waiting for the Soviets ahead of them to be significantly distracted too by what the West Germans were doing so once again the heavy units of the French First Army could re-start their offensive against the Soviet Fourteenth Guards Army. Air power and artillery pounded the Soviets for most of the day and only in the early afternoon did the 1st & 7th Armored Division’s start to advance.

They went forward slowly and into a battlefield littered with enemy trenches blasted to pieces and faced counterattacks coming towards them from Soviet forces. The enemy forces ahead should have been able to hold their own if they had stayed in-place, but the decision taken upon high for the Soviet Fourteenth Guards Army to drive its tanks and armoured vehicles forward was a fatal mistake. Fighting on the move and in an environment where the French had dominant air cover cost the Soviets too much and those counter-attacking units were routed. Soon enough the French were across the highway parallel to their line of advance and driving into the main lines of resistance behind those out front. First at Pilsach and then at Hohenfels, two battlefields which would later go down in French military history as famous victories, the Soviets saw a pair of combat divisions routed and even the scattered remnants which should have held up the enemy after the main engagements were unable to do nothing to stop the French I Corps from turning eastwards in the general direction of the Czechoslovak frontier far beyond. That was a distant aim and certainly too far at the moment for the French I Corps, but they kept on moving through the evening until it would later get dark. Their 7th Armored Division on the left – who had smashed the Soviet 180MRD at Pilsach – faced moves by units from the Soviet Thirty-Eighth Army to halt any northward attacks into the flank of that field army and the 1st Armored Division also had some Czechoslovak units sniping at their flank too, but what lay ahead for an advance the next day was just a lone enemy division spread thin over ground which would be hard to defend. Then, maybe, the chance of reaching the Czechoslovak frontier would be real.

These forces of the French First Army which had moved forward as they had had afterwards created a salient between the Bundeswehr II Corps and the French I Corps where the French VI Corps was fighting the Czechoslovak First Army in the Regensburg area. The West German Territorial 56th Brigade, a semi-professional unit and well-equipped, moved from the reoccupied side of the Danube towards those enemy troops during the night so that once morning came those opponents could be dealt with too.


General Otis had been disappointed after the US Seventh Army had failed to move much further forward into the enemy and tear them apart during the Saturday. The tactical situation with the Soviets withdrawing as fast as they had and external factors beyond his control such as the weather and scattered minefields had caused that. To allow the enemy to get away as they had into the Vogelsberg and the Gelnhausen Corridor to the left and to the east of the Spessart towards the Inter-German Border and the edges of Franconia too really had been a failure. His forces were fully mechanised and the range of deep strike assets he had were multiple and every potent so the enemy shouldn’t have been able to escape as they had.

There had been understanding of why this had occurred from General Galvin, but SACEUR himself had warned his fellow US Army officer that back across the Atlantic, after the politicians had been briefed, they had been very unhappy. SACEUR was only trying to warn the US Seventh Army commander of possible future issues with Secretary of Defence Carlucci, but General Otis rather wished that he had been ignorant of that. Consequently, after making his plans for today’s actions, doubt had crept into his mind over whether he was doing too much just to appease the politicians and maybe the scope of his operations were too ambitious…

Instead of pushing further into the northern portions of the Main River as it meandered through northern Bavaria in the general direction of the Inter-German Border against the Soviet Eighth Tank Army (now with significant East German forces attached after the disbandment of their field army), the US VII Corps moved eastwards instead towards Bamberg. That communication centre wasn’t the target of their attack, but rather the US Army here moved to tear into the newly-arrived Soviet Eighteenth Army with its Category C troops who had just travelled a very long way to Germany and were believed to be weak. The corps commander, General Watts, had plenty of intelligence pointing to this and his troops hit their Soviet opponents hard. As was the American way, plenty of fire support was used as ammunition was always cheaper than human life.

The Soviets cracked. First the 36MRD out of the Ukraine and then the 196MRD (a long way from its mobilisation base in Kursk) were ripped apart. The men were out of shape reservists whose morale was rock bottom and who had barely listened to their officers during urgent refresher training. Equipment came in the form of T-55 tanks, BTR-40 open top armoured personnel carriers and AK-47 assault rifles – reliable but old equipment. The Americans M-1 tanks which they faced were firing from great distance while on the move and using infrared targeting systems which could see through artificial smoke. TOW missiles, also coming from distance, slammed into the Soviet reservists too while their infantry barely got a chance to fight as they were either killed in their exploding vehicles or pinned down in trenches. For a long time in this war, the US Army had waited for an opportunity like this to do much damage to the enemy when at distance and when they had all the advantages and it wasn’t wasted.

The US VII Corps skirted Bamberg and the bigger Erlangen too and drove into Franconia. Crossings over the Regnitz River and the Main-Danube Canal behind, both of which were narrow waterways, were taken by infantry platoons mounted in helicopters which found that enemy anti-air assets were rather short of ammunition and were focused upon defending themselves directly rather than anyone else. Some Blackhawk’s and Huey’s were lost with their passengers aboard as such a situation wasn’t uniform, yet enough assault teams took Soviet constructed crossing points. Towards the major town of Bayreuth the VII Corps’ main drive went and the reported enemy rear-area installations reportedly clustered around there. The 172MRD was engaged on the way and dealt with in the same manner as the two other divisions before Bayreuth was entered at dusk by the US Army and they then moved to destroy what they found there in the way of supply dumps (huge but almost empty facilities), vehicle maintenance centres and such like before also stumbling upon many POW camps in the region too, especially to the south of the town where many Canadian troops were located.

The US V Corps moved up against Gelnhausen with General Schwarzkopf having his corps follow the Kinzig River. Soviet delaying forces had caused immense problems yesterday but by today almost of those were gone and now he could start heading for the Fulda Gap far beyond. With the Spanish troops now detached and joining with their arriving reinforcements, he relied upon the dependable 24th Mechanized Infantry Division to lead his command with the 3rd Armored & 4th Mechanized Infantry Division’s following. Those latter formations had taken immense losses during the early stages of the war and had some elements of the destroyed 8th Mechanized Infantry Division with them too. Schwarzkopf was weary of using them in the lead despite the individual reinforcements that had arrived during the war of men, vehicles and tanks as battlefield replacements. He didn’t believe that such a thing would have helped unit cohesion and thus that was why his old division, which had taken nowhere near as many losses in combat, was first to move against the Soviet Third Guards Army.

This field army was made up of Cat. B & C units from the North Caucasus, the Crimea and from Tambov in the western Russian SSR. Again, these men had travelled a very long way and there was much older equipment though also some better weapons of war too with a lot of professional soldiers present alongside those recalled to military service. The 206MRD was deployed around Gelnhausen with the 19MRD behind them in the corridor between the high ground either side of the Kinzig. The other pair of Soviet divisions were in the high ground and also behind the access-way to the Fulda Gap too. This was a formidable opposition for the US V Corps, but Schwarzkopf believed that he could crack it all open as long as everything went just the way he wanted it.

Gelnhausen, long abandoned by all of its citizens (the most die-hards who wanted to stay no matter what had been forcibly moved on), was hit by FAE bombs right at the start of the attack. Authorisation had come at the highest level as these weapons were being treated as a semi-strategic weapon even though before the war broke out they weren’t regarded as such. The weapons effects killed and maimed Soviet soldiers in hastily-built defences around the town by their thousands and left many more in a state of shock as three FAE bombs went off one after the other in a timed sequence to increase the power of the blasts. Artillery and rockets came in next but so too did American tanks – M-1’s and M-60’s – moving fast around Gelnhausen and cutting off the Soviets left alive. To Schwarzkopf, the enemy had decided to have the town and the division there as a blocking unit meant to cause a massive delay to him, but he had his opponents blasted into smithereens.

Elements of the Blackhorse Cav’ were sent ahead towards the valley and they started taking heavy fire from above. The 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment was a shadow of its former self but the survivors knew their business and worked hard to get the Soviets to show their positions for artillery to take those on. Schwarzkopf had wanted a B-52 strike in support of his planned drive forward but with the BUFF’s assigned up in northern Germany had had plenty of tactical air support. F-16’s from on high and A-10’s operating at low-level as USAF assets with the 4ATAF came into play blasted the enemy ahead as the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division started moving behind the Blackhorse Cav’ with its own armoured reconnaissance units in support too. So much fire power was being expended as the US V Corps wanted to avoid direct engagement close up until absolutely necessary.

The 19MRD was soon in the fight in strength. The formation had come from Vladikavkaz in the Caucasus and this was a well-disciplined unit where the men responded to orders to keep fighting in the face of all this fire power directed against them. They took on the American scout units with their T-64A tanks engaging M-1A1’s in many engagements that saw both sides do damage to the other. There were too many US Army tanks present though with superior capabilities as well as that air support which the 19MRD couldn’t deal with after it rapidly shot through its heavyweight SAM’s and had to rely upon man-portable models and anti-aircraft guns. The divisional commander at first thought that he might be able to hold his position as he believed that the Americans would be casualty-adverse, but then his mobile command post was blasted by a flight of low-flying F-4’s with napalm – Schwarzkopf wasn’t pulling his punches – to knock out communications. Company and battalion commanders in their tanks were among the many casualties that the Soviets took themselves and without these key people, the 19MRD started to fall apart. The Soviet military system relied upon orders being passed down and disruption to this caused chaos as no one took charge unless they were ordered to. Soviet units stood and fought where they died instead of being pulled back.

It took the full day for the US V Corps to move up to the town of Wachtersbach following the course of the river and Autobahn-66, but the pair of Soviet divisions in their way were destroyed completely during that. Once command and control was lost with the 19MRD that Americans had ripped them to pieces and that fine formation died under their guns. Afterwards, Schwarzkopf planned to take the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division out of the lead when he drove on further tomorrow, but for now, after achieving his initial aims, he had some of his forces rest while others started moving up into the high ground above them blasting stubborn Soviet defenders who were cut off and refused to surrender out of their positions.

The French II Corps was also under General Otis’ command but they didn’t have anywhere near the success which the two US Army corps’ did. They were pushed against the Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army which had fallen back towards the heights of the Vogelsberg and the rough terrain around there. The field army had taken staggering losses during its time in Germany but was still a powerful force and more than capable of defending the ground it was holding when facing the opponents which they did. After a long pursuit and their own conflict losses yet to be properly made up, the French couldn’t yet beat such an enemy.

The 3rd & 5th Armored Division’s, supported by the remains of the 15th Infantry Division, did their reconnaissance well and had fire support yet were stopped from forward progress by murderous defensive fire. Iron discipline had been installed among the ranks of the Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army and units did as ordered and charged forwards in localised counterattacks to break up French attacks as they were organised. Again and again the French were disrupted from massing enough tanks and armoured infantry of their own while a lot of tactical ballistic missiles were lofted by the Soviets too and sent crashing into the French. Eventually there just came a point where it was suicide for the French to keep attacking and they had to stop trying for the time being. They would try again at a later stage, but only after air power, massed artillery and infantry infiltrators had gone forward in number to do their damage to the enemy.






One Hundred & Ninety–Five

March 27th was the day when the US Army National Guard units deployed as the first wave of ARNG troops in Germany really showed their worth. The US Fifth Army had caught up with the retreating Soviets during the evening and night beforehand and when they struck today to push those enemy units out of their new positions, they did a remarkable job. The Soviet First Guards Tank & Thirteenth Army’s, already broken in previous combat, were ripped apart by the US VI & IV Corps respectively.

The part-time volunteers with the pair of corps commands were tired and many were still in shock at seeing what full-scale conventional warfare was actually like up close and personal, but the national guardsmen fought very well indeed. They had started slow, especially a week ago when they had been rushed forward and sent into battle unprepared, but they were combat veterans now. Necessary intelligence upon the enemy was done properly, correct fire support was assigned and better operational planning undertaken.

The Schwalm River as it ran through north-central Hessen was where the Soviets had fallen back to and this was hardly a strong defensive position for the depleted pair of field armies to defend. In the south, the Soviet First Guards Tank Army couldn’t stop the 29th Light Infantry Division pushing through the hilly ground on the approach towards the town of Alsfeld and then the Soviets here were hit by the 35th & 40th Mechanized Infantry Division’s. Crossings over the river in the general area were blown and many Soviet troops were left on the wrong side, yet the US VI Corps was able to throw its own bridges over the river to maintain their advance. In addition, combat engineers managed to capture a significant amount of Soviet combat bridging equipment which the Soviet First Guards Tank Army had to abandon to pull back tanks and troops instead. That equipment was quickly employed as it was sturdy and simple to use. Alsfeld was only the initial aim for the US VI Corps and afterwards they pushed further into the high ground beyond. There were villages, small valleys and hills which they rolled through and over as they chasing retreating Soviet units which couldn’t make a stand anywhere. Darkness was soon to come and a planned halt for the national guardsmen here, but by the time that came they were in a good position to drop down to the Fulda River ahead of them the next day.

General Schneider wondered whether his right-hand corps was going to get into the Fulda Gap before the regular US Army forces with the US V Corps would get back there into that perfect tank country. His other subordinate command of national guardsmen, the US IV Corps, was also on the Schwalm after moving a good deal forward in a northwestern direction. They stormed the town of Schwalmstadt as major elements of the broken Soviet Thirteenth Army were concentrated around there, but also went over the river to the north of there after making good use of narrow terrain to move whereas they could easily have been held up. While the 50th Armored Division took Schwalmstadt and fought the Soviets who stubbornly tried to hold onto positions outside of that location, the 42nd Mechanized Infantry and 49th Armored Division’s advanced to the left of there. They put their own bridges over the river and then moved forward across the rolling countryside chasing Soviet units fleeing in panic ahead of them and trying desperately to launch artillery-scattered minefields as one method of delaying the Americans. M-60A3 tanks and infantry in M-113’s with the Texan-manned 2/142 INF battalion task force ran into one of those artillery batteries firing those mines and knocked it out in an engagement which saw immense explosions shake the very ground afterwards. Once over the Schwalm, the US IV Corps headed towards Homberg though their main objective was to make their way towards the Fulda as it ran towards Kassel and the salient in NATO lines there.

That American advance there would bring the national guardsmen into the rear of the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army, which was parrying away Bundeswehr attacks against it. The West German’s III Corps was a heavily-weakened force with one active major formation – the 12th Panzer Division – and a multitude of scattered small brigades of regular Bundeswehr and Territorial troops. General Schneider had his forces here attack even though they were too weak to make a dent in the enemy positions as he wanted them to distract the Soviets from what was occurring on their flank. His conscience had to be ignored with such orders given to the West Germans, yet he reasoned that he was saving lives overall as the Soviets were distracted enough to allow his ARNG forces to break open their flank and prepare the way for the anticipated collapse of the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army tomorrow.


In southern Lower Saxony, the Belgian I Corps was holding a large portion of the frontlines against the Leine. Their sector stretched from Hann-Munden (on the Weser) all the way up to Alfeld where the Americans were. The US 5th Mechanized Infantry Division which had previously been under command along with the Forward Brigade detached from the US 2nd Armored Division had returned to American control and the British 5th Infantry Division was now with the Belgians; they also had their paratroopers back under command too along with much artillery which had spent most of the war assisting the British.

The Belgians acting in conjunction with the US III Corps to their left and made attacks over the Leine. They were facing opposition from the Polish Second Army and when smashing into those Poles, the Belgians found that only along the river was the fighting hard going. Once they beat back the initial defenders, the Poles started surrendering all over the place. The Polish Second Army fell apart unexpectedly and with great haste as the Belgians and then the British following them ran through their rear areas. Improvised white flags were waved by units who wished to surrender and the NATO troops here found that many of those units had officers leading those efforts. Military intelligence personnel were rushed forward to talk with surrendering officers who all wished to say that they were no longer willing to fight for ‘Russians’.

There had been many warnings issued to various NATO forces which would be facing Polish units and the Belgians did as instructed and took advantage of this. There were Polish-speaking officers from various nations assigned to race up to those surrendering units and ease the process of having them move out of the way so the advances could continue. Of course, not everyone was surrendering and some Poles, along with enemy units from the Soviet Seventh Tank Army on the flank, kept fighting and this was especially true in the area around Gottingen with the Poles and around Northeim with the Soviets. That once beautiful university city was a ruin and further damage was done there to what remained of Gottingen still standing as British light units closed-in around it, but elsewhere the Belgians kept going… towards the Harz Mountains and the Inter-German Border too. The Soviets couldn’t stop them from bypassing opposition near Northeim and then the Belgians too dropped a battalion of their paratroopers near the town of Duderstadt to guard their flank and those soldiers came up against East German occupation forces which didn’t roll over like the Poles did. Duderstadt would be one hell of a fight for the Belgians and they suffered a reverse their most of that battalion being wiped out, but their main effort went towards the Harz Mountains. They would reach the western slopes of those by the end of the day after leaving the remains of the Polish Second Army behind them broken and near-destroyed with Soviet units about to be squeezed too.

The US III Corps moved to finish what they had started the other day. General Saint as corps commander had been told that the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army had moved up behind the Soviet Twenty-Second Guards Army and there was still the Soviet Seventh Tank Army too. On paper, the opposition that the US Army faced was immense, but none of those field armies were anywhere near full strength and were in a bad state after previous fighting. In addition, that first of the trio was meant to be moving further northwards against the British and West Germans rather than combating him. B-52 strikes conducted at high-level – and well-escorted too by NATO fighters – blasted them with massive area strikes while tactical air power came into play at lower altitudes. General Saint had ARNG helicopters assigned as extra fire support to assist his regular aviation assets and plenty of artillery too.

Avoiding the previous crossing sites near Elze and Gronau, the US III Corps struck further southwards near Bruggen and turned northwest racing for the Hildesheim Forest and the city after which that woodland was named too. The Soviet Seventh Tank Army to the right was flanked while the remains of the Soviet Twenty-Second Guards Army units engaged… just like they had been two days ago. The Soviets couldn’t stop the Americans here, only delay. The 2GMRD and the 4GTD were excellent units before General Saint’s men had ripped them apart and they were also still very stubborn. He kept unleashing fire support assets against them but the Soviets just about managed to maintain enough command and control at the local level to pull back slowly and causing losses to the US Army as they did so.

By the afternoon, the US III Corps were in the Hildesheim Forest and there they really got stuck. The Soviets held on and wouldn’t give in. The woodland was hit with napalm and plenty of intense fires were started with the intention of burning the Soviets out, but they got fast out of control and started to affect the Americans too especially when unexpected winds came into play to fan the flames. General Saint wasn’t about to give in though and therefore issued the orders for an attack on the right with the Forward Brigade being sent towards the ‘Bad Salzdetfurth Gap’. There was a break in the forest where that town lay and a through-route where a major road and the railway ran too. The Forward Brigade raced for there, tore through as they headed north using much support from Apache and Cobra gunships and then reached the tiny Innerste River far on the other side. Afterwards, this formation of tanks and armoured infantry turned back westwards and poured long-range covering fire into Soviets on the other side of the forest. This was a risky manoeuvre with the lone attacking brigade put at risk of being counter-attacked and smashed when rolling fast with no regard for its own flanks, yet close-air support provided tactical reconnaissance that there was no Soviet force nearby to do that. Once behind the forest, the whole Soviet position collapsed and the enemy inside was trapped while those outside started falling back towards Hildesheim.

General Saint let the Soviets do that as he wasn’t going to chase them into that city but rather sort his forces out so that they could stop any major enemy counterattack – which unless all of his intelligence was wrong wasn’t going to come – and also started preparing for a follow-up operation tomorrow now he had just finished off much of his opposition. A lot of ground had been taken but so too had casualties to his command. Moreover, there was still those Soviet forces with the Soviet Seventh Tank Army to the immediate south of him and while they were almost trapped between his command and the Belgians, that was far from a beaten force with many hundreds of tanks under command. He needed to screen against them and get orders from the British Second Army as to what to do next.


General Kenny was naturally pleased with the Belgians and the Americans operating to the right. He had spent the day directing his forces in the centre and on the left forward into battle with British and Bundeswehr units attacking both west and north. While that took up most of his attention, he maintained a careful watch to the right just to make sure that the Belgians especially didn’t get ahead of themselves at a local level and move right up to, even across, the Inter-German Border. He had been personally told by General Galvin – and had SACEUR’s words supported by the War Cabinet back in London – that that border wasn’t to be crossed at all.

The Bundeswehr I Corps was made up of both British and West German troops, even some Dutchmen too, which had been trapped in Hannover for all that time. They rolled through where the Polish Fourth Army had once been and into elements of the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army rushing to meet them. Peine was reached before the Soviets could manage to get into position and then both opposing forces fought themselves to a standstill around that town and to the south of there. In all honestly, the West German I Corps had done more here than General Kenny could expect due to their current lower-levels of strength and what they achieved anyway was enough for the time being there.

To the north, the stronger British I Corps closed up with the French coming in from the west and managed to trap in a pocket many stragglers from Soviet forces withdrawing back from the Weser and long being chased. Intelligence pointed to those units being from the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army, a formation which he anticipated that the enemy would now be writing off, though there were many Soviet Eleventh Guards Army units caught as well. Where the Soviet Second Guards Army had once been there were just prisoners instead with that formation wiped out too after failing to defeat the British I Corps on the Aller and suffering from mutinies which while suppressed, he caused immense disruption. The Iron & Tiger Division’s had done extremely well though quite a bit of the 7th Armoured Division, those old soldiers who had only arrived in Germany a few days ago, was combat ineffective after fighting so hard to at first protect the flanks of BLACKSMITH and then chase the retreating Soviets.

General Kenny’s British troops ended the day in the middle of the Luneburg Heath and not that far from the Elbe-Lateral Canal that sat between them and the border with East Germany. An immense area of occupied territory had been retaken in the past several days and a lot of men lost, but it was worth it for the liberation of the parts of West Germany which his troops now held. He had decisions to make about where to continue advancing towards tomorrow and also discussions to have concerning the hopefully seamless transfer of command over the US III Corps once the US Third Army started to arrive in the next few days. That command headquarters was coming with the new US II Corps and more national guardsmen (lighter, second-line units) and would be positioned on his right between the British Second Army and the US Fifth Army. General Kenny wanted to make sure that he kept the Belgians under his command and that would involve pulling them back from where they were and seeing them replaced in the line after all of their hard work, yet he didn’t want to lose their valuable contribution. He still had their 16th Armoured Division along with the West Germans in the 7th Panzer Division as part of the Bundeswehr IV Corps and the future of that corps needed consideration too as he was now thinking of breaking it apart and sending its combat forces as well as many support assets elsewhere.

These were important decisions to be made… along with the planning as to how far up against the Inter-German Border he was going to advance.


The French joined the British on the Luneburg Heath with their IV & III Corps having moved forward chasing Soviet units which couldn’t stand and fight and had to move further eastwards. The Soviet Eleventh Guards Army hadn’t been up to the task of stopping the French and had been smashed to pieces in places while any Polish units encountered had either been beaten too or started surrendering: the Polish First Army was no more just like the two other field armies which the Polish People’s Army had deployed for the Third World War.

On the left, the French Second Army’s V Corps was now not far from the southern suburbs of Hamburg on the western side of the Lower Elbe. Around the towns of Buxtehude and Buchholz, Soviet troops along with some East German occupation forces were putting up a furious fight which went on into the night, though the French actually had no intention of going into that city’s suburbs. They instead focused upon tearing apart all opposition and especially at distance rather than up close with French artillery firing barrage after barrage forward rather than seeing men going into what could easily become nasty hand-to-hand fighting.

In the areas now under French control after being liberated, the French were busy engaging bypassed pockets of resistance too which their tanks had thundered past but were causing problems to follow-up units. Infantry needed to be sent to work in these locations, but there were many reservists with the French IV Corps which were sent to work doing that and again had much artillery support along with tactical air support given too. Should the worst happen and some mythical Soviet massed armour force occur – intelligence wasn’t always perfect – the French didn’t want those bypassed forces to be relieved and thus ruin any chance of beating off such a hypothetical attack.

In advancing as they had done westwards like the British Second Army, the French Second Army units were now near the border with East German too. Uelzen had been reached by the lead elements of the 2nd Armored Division and Luneburg was just a few miles outside of the control of the 8th Infantry Division. The French had too received orders coming down from high to not get too close to the Inter-German Border. When questioning this, they were told by General Galvin that geo-political implications had to be taken into consideration. The current NATO thinking was that invading East Germany might bring about that dreaded nuclear release at a tactical level which everyone with any sense about them knew would quickly escalate from the tactical to the strategic.


The immense series of defeats suffered throughout Germany during the day, from the Danube up to the Elbe, was overwhelming for Marshal Korbutov’s command staff to deal with. Everywhere his deployed forces were calling for assistance yet there had been none to send. The skies were filled with NATO aircraft too, making sure that even if he had been able to marshal enough air assets to try to slow the tide of NATO’s advances, his aircraft couldn’t interfere.

By sunset, Marshal Korbutov was expecting the telex to come from STAVKA recalling him to Moscow ‘for consultations’… so he could be shot and dumped in an unmarked grave. Instead, all when the communication did come as expected from Marshal Ogarkov, C-in-C West-TVD was told that the head of STAVKA was on his way to Germany himself with utmost haste.

Marshal Korbutov told himself that he might just live to see another day after all, though he had to wonder just what Marshal Ogarkov was coming here for…





One Hundred & Ninety–Six

Movement to contact had taken place the day beforehand, but today the Finns truly went about forcing the occupying Soviets out of the parts of Lapland where they were. The tactical and strategic situations were just right for the Finns to move, especially with American forces moving down from Finmark too across the Norwegian-Finnish border.

Command for the liberation of Lapland was under the First Army Corps based pre-war in Oulu but now operating from the Rovaniemi area in a mobile fashion. There were six combat brigades under command operating on three axis’s of advance. This was complicated for the small organisation that the Finnish Army was with much command and control needed. There were American, Norwegian and Swedish liaison officers with the Finns acting as unofficial advisers with many of those recommending that two rather than three forward attacks be made, yet the Finns were sure about what they were doing and had been planning for this for almost two weeks now. All of their intelligence pointed to their Soviet opponents being weak, cut off and with terrible morale as they were spread across Lapland in isolated fashions and tied to fixed positions. The Finns had massed their forces enough to sweep them away and while grateful for the advice, they were going to do things their own way.

To the east, the town of Sodankyla was moved against by the Finnish Army first. The Lapland Jaeger Brigade had called Sodankyla home before the Soviets had crossed the border and the troops had withdrawn southwards. Now they returned along with the Pori Jaeger Brigade following them. The brigades moved up Highway-4 and -5 and converged upon the location where the Soviets had established a rear-area base for their operations against Norway and Sweden using Finnish territory. Heavy guns were used in assistance to blast Soviet positions though the Finns were aware that no matter how hard they tried to avoid it, Finnish civilians who had refused to leave the town were going to be caught up in that artillery barrage. Sodankyla sat at a major crossroads – therefore why the Soviets were there – and needed to be recaptured to allow further offensive action to take place and also to cut off Soviet forces to the rear.

Once that barrage was over with, the Finns moved forward and against Soviet support troops established there and hopefully whom would have suffered under that attack.

Kittila and the airport there in the centre was moved against by the Savo Jaeger Brigade, the victors of the fight for Rovaniemi Airport. Again, this town was at a major crossroads and where Soviet rear-area troops were established. The Finns used artillery and had some of their Hawk attack-fighters in the air but in this instance those light infantry forces assaulted the airport while around them the 3rd Armoured Brigade moved away in a northwestern direction. This reserve formation had much Soviet-built equipment including T-55 tanks and a few BMP-2 tracked armoured vehicles. The Finnish Air Force pilots in the sky were under strict instructions to be damn careful and not engage armoured vehicles on the ground unless those were directly marked for air attack as the Finnish Army was worried over friendly fire.

As the Finnish infantry wrestled control over the airport away from the occupier, their armour advanced nearby and started following the roads away towards the distant Finnish Wedge. That second brigade had been available to deploy some of its units should there be initial strong resistance at Kittila Airport but as the jaegers marched into there with ease there was no need.

The Northern Jaeger Brigade led the advance up Highway-21 and into Tornio while the smaller Kajanaland Jaeger Brigade followed them. The town rested on the Finnish-Swedish border right at the base of the Finnish Wedge where much of the Soviet Sixth Army was trapped and the Finns knew that the occupier here wasn’t going to roll over. Artillery preceded the attack though it was carefully targeted against suspected Soviet positions rather than as a general barrage. However, here unlike elsewhere, the Finns faced counterbattery fire from the Soviets which knocked out many of their guns. The lesson was quickly learnt with what the Americans called ‘shoot-and-scoot’ but before then many Finnish guns had been destroyed and Finnish gunners killed.

The Finns had meanwhile used their jaegers as infiltrators to get up close to many Soviet positions and started attacking trenches and strongpoints all around the Tornio area. Once they were spotted by their opponents, they opened fire with deadly effect while also calling in reinforcements. Penetrations were soon made through the morning yet the Soviets were at first hanging on and might have stood a chance… had they had enough ammunition. No resupply had come for more than a week and while none of what was available had been used up until now, it was fast expended. Tornio was meant to be an outpost guarding the rear and not a frontline position.

As Soviet machine gunners, missilemen and gunners started to run out of ammunition, their positions fell as the Finnish infantry were pushed forward by their commanders. The Kajanaland Brigade came forward to assist their comrades though casualties still occurred as it took time to completely clear the area of Soviet resistance. There were many fall back positions which elements of the Soviet force here kept trying to withdraw to as they ran out of ammunition and these provided quite a challenge for the Finns to eventually overcome. They would do so by the end of the day though liberating the town and eliminating the Soviets there had cost the Soviets quite a bit.

The 3rd Armoured Brigade had slowly moved across country nearby and avoided the fighting. Again, the formation was available to be committed if needed but the Jaegers eventually had the situation handled. Instead, after taking their time crossing snow-covered terrain meeting many delays, this armoured formation got on the highway north of the town and started entering the Finnish Wedge. They very quickly got involved in running battles with Soviet armour moving down the other way to react to the assault upon Tornio. The Finnish were better armed and had much more precise intelligence upon their opponents than the Soviets did, yet there were quickly plenty of Soviet units involved in this fighting which took place in the late afternoon and into the evening too. Ammunition shortages on the part of the Soviets didn’t allow them to fight for long were encountered but they did again inflict casualties on the Finns.

Air power started to come into play and that changed the whole shape of the battle. The fast and nimble Hawk’s made attacks but so too did Swedish and USAF aircraft. All of those pilots were instructed to be very careful in their strikes so that they didn’t mistake Finnish armour for Soviet armour and in most instances they succeeded in this. Yet, unfortunately, there were some friendly fire incidents where BTR’s, MT-LB’s and T-55’s were engaged from the air when there were no Soviet aircraft present. There had been issues with this on the ground too as both sides were operating similar equipment and there was always going to be a lot of hard feelings after such accidental engagements.

Regardless, such attacks coming from the skies, especially those which took place just before it started to get dark, meant that the Soviets had seen their counterattacks down Highway-21 destroyed and a hole ripped in their lines. They would struggle to plug that gap during the night as while Finnish armour didn’t move forwards without daylight, their Jaegers carried on trying to push the Soviets back.


The US XVIII Corps, now without its airborne units and in effect a wholly different command yet with the same senior staff, came into Finland at the same time as the Finnish First Corps moved forward. Lt.-General Foss ordered the light infantry units under his command to cross over from Norway and to hit the Soviets as hard as possible.

The 6th Light Infantry Division advanced on the ground and via assault helicopters into the northeastern part of Lapland over the Tana River. These regular US Army and part-time USAR troops had only very recently arrived from Alaska and they were exceptionally well-trained in cold weather operations. The main attack was on the ground from Karasjok and heading for Lake Inari. Light vehicles and trucks were used so the men didn’t have to march though it was still a struggle to move following the road taking them into Finland. Engineers constantly had to clear the road of downed trees and mines while snowploughs were needed to move the thick snow on the ground. Opposition to this ground attack was rather light and came from scattered Soviet forces in no position to truly stop the Americans here and so they moved rather quickly only halted by nature.

An airmobile assault was conducted to take Ivalo Airport. The 1/501 INF battalion task force made that attack with helicopters taking them to landing sites nearby and then an attack being made on the ground. Several helicopters had trouble getting that far deep into Finland and there were worries over the viability of the operation but the almost instant collapse of Soviet resistance there made sure that there was success. Afterwards, the USAF flew the 3/3 INF in with those reservists being followed afterwards by ground support personnel from the USAF who fast wanted to turn the airport into a major station. There were A-10’s and F-4’s based back in Finmark who were soon due to operate from here and fly operations further to the east.

By nightfall, the 6th Light Infantry Division hadn’t made it as far as Ivalo, but were not that far away and were sure that they would reach there the next morning. Inari had been reached and it wasn’t far from there down to Ivalo following Highway-4.

The 10th Light Infantry Division and the two brigades of the 7th Light Infantry Division were all over to the west. These US Army troops were using Kautokeino as their base of operations to hit the Finnish Wedge from the western side and to also move against Enontekio. Opposition to their attacks was strong – as expected – yet just like the Finns found out, the Soviets hardly had any ammunition. They fought back to defend themselves when they had bullets and shells, but once those were gone units gave in. The Americans advanced slowly are were weary of mines laid in the snow but they spent the day pushing deep inside Finland and driving inside the positions of the Soviet Sixth Army here.

Once darkness came and General Foss reviewed the progress of his assigned forces, he was very pleased. It appeared that with one final push tomorrow the Soviet Sixth Army would be eliminated and then he could turn his attention to moving his forces fully into eastern Lapland. His orders were firm that under no circumstances was the US Army to go up close to the Finnish-Soviet border, let alone over it, and he intended to obey those. However, he had to wonder what would come next once the business of destroying Soviet forces here in Finland was done and there was his command plus all of those US Marines with the II Marine Expeditionary Force to the north of him. The Finnish Army, the Norwegian Army and the Swedish Army were all here too, not that far away from Soviet territory. If he knew this, then the enemy would do so too…





One Hundred & Ninety–Seven

NATO and other nations allied to the cause of the West in fighting the Soviets had been for a while now mobilising their military forces across the world. Many nations couldn’t provide those warfighting assets which could be put to use at the frontline, though their support in the rears was always valuable and thus freed up resources to be used at the front. When it came to the fight in Germany, while air and support forces were always needed, it was ground troops which NATO needed to have many of here as opposed to elsewhere and it was to Germany therefore where many nations were engaged in the process of sending reinforcements to NATO there for the fighting taking place to liberate enemy occupied territory.


In peacetime, the Belgian Army had nine formations of what were designated ‘Provincial Reserve Regiments’. These were based upon the country’s provinces and varied in size with battalions of motorised infantry and light armour. Two of those had been in Germany since the war started with a mixture of several individual units forming this pair of formations of near brigade-strength while those which remained had been slowly but carefully formed into a fully-capable light armoured division. The 4th Armoured Division was now ready and moved across the border into West Germany to follow the already newly-formed 18th Light Brigade made up of regular troops which had been created from units guarding national strategic sites moving several days beforehand first to join the British and then returning to national command.

This division had been a great struggle for Belgium to create with the troops being available but their assembly and fitting-out delayed by refugee problems across the country (those civilians came from West Germany), Soviet air and missile attacks against Belgium and also gathering enough service support assets to make a complete division which could fight cohesively. Luxembourg had helped out here but Belgium had to provide the majority of these elements and it hadn’t been easy to do. Still, once the 4th Armoured Division was ready to go, it was sent to Germany to join the Belgian I Corps there on the North German Plain.


France had already committed the vast majority of its regular army and many reservists to the fighting in Germany. There were long-established plans drawn up over many years pre-war on forming a trio of reserve infantry divisions which had then gone to the French Second Army in Lower Saxony. The government wanted to keep the remaining reservists in country less civil disturbances broke out should those occur again as they had done so early in the conflict as well as to guard against the possibility that Italy did something crazy and attack across the Alps… France’s allies regarded that as far from a possibility and rather paranoia.

The French Army had many troops deployed across the world from the Caribbean to Africa to the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. Grouped together, these weren’t Colonial Troops in the traditional sense but were referred to as such by many. These units consisted of professional soldiers whose presence so far away couldn’t really be justified with France fighting as it was to keep Western Europe free from hostile Soviet territorial ambitions. Moreover, with the country fully committed to the NATO alliance, those overseas possessions of France were hardly likely to fall to any form of a regional aggressor (if there was one) while the need to maintain the political status quo in parts of Africa wasn’t more important than the future of France as a strong, independent nation.

Air France and also some British Airways and Lufthansa aircraft had been flying these troops from their deployments across the world into southern Germany. They came from Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana in the wider Caribbean region, from Gabon, the Ivory Coast and Senegal in West Africa, from Chad, the Central African Republic and Djibouti further across Africa, from Reunion in the Indian Ocean and from New Caledonia and French Polynesia in the Pacific. More than twenty thousand men were eventually sent from overseas into Germany and they joined up with the French First Army in Bavaria. There were many Foreign Legion troops as well as men locally recruited in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The men only usually came with personal weapons and left behind what heavier weapons they had when deployed so far abroad as France wanted to keep what little remained overseas in terms of heavy weapons there just in case. France could have again called on its allies to assist in the movement of this, but it was hardly like that equipment included main battle tanks or self-propelled artillery instead of the armoured cars and man-portable mortars which it actually was.

There were additionally more than two hundred thousand young Frenchmen being mobilised across the country for military service. These would join later formations which were going to be set up once the French Army was ready and it would be some time before they could conceivable see service while the actual thinking was that the war would probably be over by then. Still, those men went through their intensive training to turn them from civilians into properly trained soldiers just in case.


Portugal had been a founding member of NATO and had long-term plans to send its military forces abroad in the event of a NATO-Soviet conflict. In 1973 Portugal had provided assistance to the US in the emergency logistical effort to resupply the Israelis after the Yom Kippur War (Operation NICKEL GRASS) whereas other European countries had not; that support had come in the form of Lajes Field airbase in the Portuguese Azores, a facility built with NATO funds. After the Carnation Revolution the following year and the influence of left-wing elements in the Portuguese governments which followed, many NATO nations worried over the commitment of Portugal to the alliance. The Portuguese military forces had spent long fighting guerrillas wars across Africa but after that revolution it was felt that they were weakened by underfunding and a lack of political will to keep them what they had once been. Portugal was supposed to send elements of its army to either Italy or maybe Greece in a NATO-Soviet conflict but with every year that looked less and less likely.

Proving their detractors wrong, once Portugal committed itself to the cause in the build-up to war breaking out, the Portuguese at once got their paratroopers and commandoes ready to be sent to Germany instead of Italy or Greece. Those made a stunning introduction to the war as part of the British Second Army’s BLACKSMITH operation to liberate the Hannover pocket. The Portuguese Air Force (A-7P’s and G-91’s in the attack-fighter role) and the Portuguese Navy (a whole range of frigates and corvettes on ASW patrol duties) had already seen action beforehand and continued to do so while Lajes Field played a very important role in the war as a major ASW aircraft base and also a major staging point for trans-Atlantic flights too just as it had done in 1973.

Back in Portugal itself, the Portuguese Army mobilised their 1st Independent Mixed Brigade. This was an over-strength formation of tanks, mechanised infantry and self-propelled artillery supported by combat engineers and a range of supporting assets. To form a division, even a corps, as there were plans to do so was too much for the Portuguese Army, but their brigade was still a very capable force and was well-stocked with ammunition and fuel supplies to last for more than a month in combat if it came to that. The 1st Brigade was transported through Spain, up across France and then through the Rhineland so that it was to finally arrive in northern Germany late during the second week of the war ready to begin operations early in the third week. The Portuguese would be joining the British Second Army with the intention to have them deploy as part of the Bundeswehr I Corps now east of Hannover which was made up of British and West German troops which had been previously trapped in that city and now ready to move east with a vengeance.


Elements of the Spanish Army deployed forward to central Germany in the build-up to war had seen much action there. The 1st Armored Division had been fighting with the US V Corps in several important engagements while the Airborne Brigade had been held back as a strategic reserve and saw little action apart from assisting their fellow American paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division in the fighting at Rhein-Main Airport.

The four combat brigades which had gone to Germany – the 1st Armored Division included its usual two brigades alongside the 1st Cavalry Brigade – had been moved there quickly while a larger, if slightly weaker, force had been mobilised across Spain for eventual movement to Germany too. This was to be the Spanish I Corps with another two divisions plus attachments and would consist of most of the heavy forces of the Spanish Army. The 2nd Motorized & 3rd Mechanized Division’s (the latter including many Spanish Legion armoured units) travelled by rail and road through France like the Portuguese did but then crossed the Rhine into Baden-Wurttemberg to at first form up around Stuttgart. There had been massive Soviet Scud missile strikes against that city and the concentration of NATO rear-area support forces there and the Spanish had taken some casualties there long before they had got into action. It had been planned that they would join the French First Army in Bavaria, but after the performance put in by units already in theatre in Hessen, the Spanish were to join the US Seventh Army.

The Spanish had hundreds of their tanks with them as well as tracked and wheeled armoured vehicles, plenty of artillery and their own mobile SAM’s in the form of tracked I-HAWK’s. Much equipment was Spanish-built, but there was plenty of American- and French-manufactured equipment too that while not state-of-the-art was still of good quality. The Spanish expected to play a major role in further operations as they moved their corps into position between General Schwarzkopf’s US V Corps and General Watts’ US VII Corps.


West Germany was one of the most heavily militarised nations in NATO with large regular armed forces and well-organised reserves. The latter, in the Territorial Forces, had played a major role in the conflict right from the start. They had fought hard and well while taking many losses in many engagements at the front and in the rear too. In addition to organised divisions and brigades like these, the Bundeswehr had ‘Field Replacement Battalions’ with their divisions making them overly large compared to other NATO formations and capable of taking a lot of losses with immediate replacements on-hand. These tied up much manpower available to the Bundeswehr and so did all of those security units (with the Luftwaffe and the Bundesmarine too) scattered all across West Germany guarding roads and infrastructure freeing up other NATO units from such duties.

There were still many more Germans with military experience available across the country though and the Bundeswehr had been busy giving these refresher training and trying to form them up into new units. With Soviet armies in control of large parts of the country and their bombs and missiles falling elsewhere, this had taken longer than thought. Finally though, after organising troops across the Ruhr, the Rhineland and the Saar, a pair of corps had been formed each with a trio of divisions. These six new formations were equipped with a lot of older equipment but with men of much experience.

The West German V Corps was created to move into northern Germany with the Bundeswehr VI Corps slated to deploy towards central Germany. Each would take over the responsibilities and many of the already bloodied troops from the IV and III Corps respectively in a massive reorganisation of the Bundeswehr along the frontlines. Only the Americans planned to add more troops to the ground forces in Germany though the West Germans weren’t far behind in terms of numbers as this was their country after all which their allies were fighting so hard to keep free.


Morocco had been an ally of the United States since the time of US independence. The North African nation had firmly stood with their allies in Washington during the pre-war crisis and once war broke out, King Hassan II had at once given instructions that the Moroccan Army was to deploy a division of ground troops to Europe. Of course, he knew that this would be an immense undertaking for his nation, but he determined that it was to be done… especially as he was promised assistance from the US and other NATO nations, France in particular, in moving that division to Europe.

The 1st Motorised Division was to be an infantry heavy force though with a small but strong armoured component. Morocco had plenty of military equipment in its inventory from the US and France as well as officers which had been trained at the best military academies throughout the West. Hassan II repeatedly visited the camps where the division was being formed up during the process in what he hoped were morale-boosting visits. He was eager to get the troops to Germany so they could do their part and thus guarantee that whatever shape the post-war world took, the US in particular wouldn’t forget the effort which his country had made.

Morocco has a coastline on the Mediterranean as well as the North Atlantic yet there are few ports to the northeast in compassion to the west. Therefore, ships carrying the heavy equipment for the 1st Motorised Division sailed from Atlantic ports as well as from Tangiers on the Gibraltar Straits. Historical issues between Morocco and Spain meant that Ceuta and Melilla – Spanish colonial-era holdings on the Moroccan coast – weren’t used either though many of the ships unloaded cargoes in Spanish mainland ports while others went to Marseilles in France. The Moroccans made great use of airliners from NATO countries when it came to later moving those troops to man all of that military equipment as the two linked up when in Stuttgart at the same time as the Spanish were there. The Moroccans were to afterwards move from there to join the French First Army with the plan for their division – which had many French-speakers within, especially among the more-educated officers – to enter the frontlines as part of the French VI Corps there.


The destruction of the Canadian 1st Infantry Division in combat had been a painful loss for the combined Canadian Armed Forces. The 4th Mechanised Brigade-Group based pre-war in Germany along with the 5th Mechanised Brigade-Group and then the Canadian Airborne Regiment (in affect a reinforced battalion) which had arrived as part of the American-led REFORGER had been smashed in combat with the Soviet Eighth Tank Army when operating with the US VII Corps. Most of the support elements of this division had been destroyed too and with those losses included, the Canadians had lost almost three quarters of their regular ground forces in combat. Only the Danes and the Dutch of other NATO nations had taken worse losses proportionally.

What remained of the professional Canadian Army – the 1st Mechanised Brigade-Group – had moved from Alberta to Alaska in the last days of peace though it had been thought at the time that there was a good chance that no action would be seen there. It had been a political decision rather than a military sound one and even before the first shots had been fired, there had been plans drawn up by elements of the Canadian Army to redeploy that force to Germany with the thinking then that that force might reinforce those there. Therefore, after the 1st Infantry Division had been beaten in battle and it became apparent the Soviets didn’t have the intent let alone the capabilities to invade the North American mainland, the Canadians were able to quickly being the process of transferring those troops in Alaska across to Europe. This was to be a big logistical effort as their much of their equipment needed to come with them after so much was lost in Germany, but the determination was there.

The plan was for those regular troops to join up with elements of the Militia to form a new, three-brigade division in Germany: the 2nd Infantry Division. Some Militia units had been ordered by the government to go to Germany beforehand to assist the US Fifth Army and the deployment of those high-readiness reserve formations – the Canadian Grenadier Guards & Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada – was given first priority in terms of experienced men and supplies. Nonetheless, the Canadians had a large pool of reserves which to mobilise from and were able to make sure that those units being sent overseas were over-strength in terms of men as other formations mobilised but not deploying overseas were left behind not at full strength.

Having the manpower was one thing, equipping and supplying the new 2nd Division was something else. Canada had a tiny number of tanks pre-war with those not in Germany with active units or stored there shipped over fast so that almost all of the Leopard-1’s in service had gone with the 1st Infantry Division to its ultimate doom in northeastern Bavaria. The Canadians ended up short on self-propelled howitzers too as well as heavy engineering equipment. Armoured vehicles and artillery ended up being sourced from the war stocks of the US Army in the end though there were many Canadians in uniform who bitterly complained to their government about this situation of having to take American hand-me-downs when the country should have had reserves of such equipment. As to tanks, the Canadians had some Centurion tanks in storage that had been retired when the Leopard-1 had arrived and the British promised them some too from their own stocks, but only after they had outfitted their earlier-deployed 7th Armoured Division with all of the Centurion’s they needed first.

Canada was thus able to form a second division to go to Europe. It wouldn’t be as heavily-armoured as the destroyed initial formation nor with as much ammunition on-hand (the 1st Infantry Division had seen the supply columns moving to support it too destroyed by enemy action last week), but was the best that Canada could do for the time being. The 2nd Infantry Division was also going to take longer to arrive than the ground reinforcements of other countries. The plan was to send it to northern Germany too so that it would join the French Second Army. Many French-speakers from Quebec were with the formation and it was thought that the Canadians would be best-suited deploying there.


Australia and New Zealand had both committed themselves to supporting the Americans in the Pacific rather than the British in Europe whereas as in the previous two world wars that had been the case. The two nations had small armed forces whose military focus had been on the Pacific for many years with some attention towards the Persian Gulf too.

A reinforced brigade made up of elements of the armies of the two nations had thus been sent to Okinawa first as a staging post before moving to Japan with the thinking that they would take part in the defence of the Japanese Home Islands in the face of a Soviet invasion. Such an attack didn’t come though and the whole strategic situation didn’t point to that occurring. In theory, those light infantry forces could have been flown to Europe but should they have them been deployed there, they would need to be supplied when deployed on the other side of the world. That was just too far away for the ANZAC force to go as a combat formation with the necessary support.

However, the Australian government first and then the New Zealand government afterwards did commit individual soldiers to Europe as exchange officers with both British and American units numbering a few hundred men in various units. Those UK and US officers with armour, infantry, artillery and special forces units didn’t go to Okinawa or Japan as part of that exchange but instead filled out the ranks of other NATO units.

Maybe more could have been done. Australian and New Zealand could have committed themselves to sending troops to Europe in number but the logistical effort of that was considered to be too much of a strain. Some of their warships did go to the Middle East to lighten the burden on the US Navy – which had deployed in strength there pre-war – yet in the Third World War the armies of the two countries wouldn’t see anywhere near the combat that scale of combat that they did in either the First or Second World Wars.


The US Marines were determined to fast-track the deployment of their new 5th Marine Division to Europe. The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Alfred Gray, was a ‘Mustang’: an enlisted man who had made the jump to an officer and then risen all the way to the very top. A true fighting Marine who made sure that everyone knew that every Marine was a rifleman first and foremost, he was left rather unhappy when the strategic situation left most of his servicemen out of the action. It had been a decision of the National Security Council to send the 1st Marine Division to the Middle East and then keep it there where it looked like those Marines would spend the war sitting on their behinds without firing a shot. The deployment of the 3rd Marine Division to the Western Pacific and the reserves of the 4th Marine Division to the Caribbean made sense and then of course the 2nd Marine Division saw action in Norway. Still, with only a quarter of the US Marines in action, General Gray hadn’t been happy. Using the strength of his personality, he forced through the creation of the 5th Marine Division and spent a lot of time down at Pharris Island and Camp Lejeune rather than with the rest of the Joint Chiefs aboard the Doomsday Plane protocol be dammed: his deputy, Assistant Commandant General Thomas Morgan, was there instead.

The 5th Marine Division had last seen action in Vietnam and many of the US Marine retirees had seen action there. Those promising volunteers being quickly transformed into Marines who were taught the basic skills of being a Marine listened to those experienced men as best they could as they tried to take everything in, though the activation and then shipping-out of the division was rather fast and it was hard going. The first stop for the new US Marines formation was southern England where the men were flown to airports at Heathrow and Gatwick while ships carrying their equipment landed at the ports of Dover and Folkestone. Amphibious assault ships which had moved the 2nd Marine Division forward into combat in Norway had meanwhile come south and set about loading the 5th Marine Division. They would have the escort of two aircraft carriers – though, unfortunately not the guns of the sunk New Jersey – for the planned mission which General Gray had insisted upon when he finally went back to the NSC and spoke with Acting President Bush: an amphibious assault against an enemy-held coastline where their presence would make a real difference to the war.


The US Army would be left slightly put out of sorts by the US Marines getting their reinforcements to Europe before the US Third Army could ship over. Inter-service rivalry came into play with this rather than any serious issues; after all, the commitment of the US Marines was much smaller than the US Third Army once it was all ready to move.

Lt.-General Andrew Chambers, the commanding general of this pre-war training formation home-based in Georgia at Fort McPherson had never expected to take the US Third Army to a war in Europe. His command was assigned to a theoretical war in the Middle East or maybe North Africa, not Europe where the US Seventh Army was and any reinforcements were meant to come with the US Fifth Army. However, the situation had demanded the presence of further American ground forces in Europe and General Chambers had a full-staffed headquarters capable of leading multiple corps each with several divisions should those forces be assigned.

A pair of corps commands were assigned to the US Third Army: the US II Corps consisting of those retired US Army soldiers in four new divisions and the US XI Corps with four ARNG divisions, both with many attachments. The headquarters staff of those corps and many in the II Corps came from across the US Army being reassigned though General Chambers’ lost some staff officers to them as well. This was a major manpower effort in itself as many retired officers returning to service as well as national guardsmen from those lower-readiness formations of the US XI Corps didn’t have the necessary experience with the most modern warfighting doctrines of the US Army.

Staff officers with the US Third Army flew out to Germany long before the men who would man the assigned formations were due to though at the same time as hundreds of ships started to load everything needed for General Chambers’ command to fight with at a host of ports on the Atlantic Seaboard and along the Gulf of Mexico coast too. This was a massive logistical effort which was to go alongside the ongoing supply efforts to Europe from North America and made possible by the sea lanes being almost clear of the Soviet Navy’s submarines and raketonosets interference plus the immense numbers of ships available from so many nations. Ships were loaded so that if one went down it wasn’t going to take a brigade’s worth of tanks with it or all the minesweeping gear for a corps. Combat loads were made instead so that when they arrived in Europe men would immediately meet up with the ships and be able to form up at the Dutch, Belgian and British ports where the ships arrived.

As to exactly where the US Third Army was meant to exactly deploy to, General Chambers had been at first expecting to be sent to Hessen or maybe Bavaria. He was later informed that instead it would be northern Germany where he was to take his command and the heavily-wounded US III Corps there would come under his supervision; the XI Corps was bringing with it the 155th Armored Brigade of national guardsmen from Mississippi (deployed initially in Florida to guard against possible Cuban intentions) to add to the strength of General Saint’s corps. When he finally arrived and in-place, alongside his eight divisions, General Chambers realised that there would therefore be twenty-three US combat divisions in Germany with ten of those being from the ARNG and the remaining thirteen regular divisions being of combat veterans and well-experienced men. Such a commitment on the part of his country would dwarf those from other NATO nations, even the West Germans.


After sending those four combat brigades to Germany late last week – three with the 7th Armoured Division – the British Army had been spent when it came to deployable manpower. The TA units left behind were lower-grade formations only suitable for home defence missions and arming conscripted young men was really becoming a challenge as those were coming to the end of their crash-course in becoming soldiers. General Bagnall as Chief of the General Staff – the most senior British Army officer in uniform – had thought this an embarrassment when other countries were doing all that they could to provide fighting men for Germany. He had seen what the French were doing in bringing those troops home from aboard and then spoke to the Chief of the Defence Staff about reversing earlier decisions when it came to British forces left overseas during the build-up of British forces which had been LION.

Admiral Fieldhouse had taken the requests of General Bagnall for some of those still aboard to return to the War Cabinet and been told that Thatcher and her ministers had discussed the matter and come to a positive conclusion. The regular British Army troops in the Falklands were to stay there no matter what but the battalion groups of infantry in both Gibraltar and Cyprus could be reassigned to Germany if they were replaced there by TA formations not necessarily needed for home defence as the Soviet Spetsnaz threat was as weak as it was. Soon enough the men of the 1 R ANGLIAN and 2 COLM GDS in Gibraltar and Cyprus were being transferred back to staging in the UK on aircraft which had previously flown to those two locations TA men from Wales and the West Midlands. When General Bagnall managed to release those highly-trained and well-experienced men from their duties overseas he had also managed to prise the 2 SCOTS GDS battle-group out of the London District too leaving another Foot Guards battalion (the 1 IRISH GDS) as well as many TA units to protect the nation’s capital from… the irrational fear that the government had of an airborne coup de main against London when that was now military infeasible. Too many regular soldiers were sitting out the war in rear locations when men had died by their thousands in Germany. Those three battalions were assigned to a new brigade headquarters which had been set up when General Bagnall had been thinking of moving TA units to Germany instead made up of the best available of those formations left in the UK though had ultimately decided to get his hands on regulars instead: the 32nd Light Brigade.

This new formation – with a historical designation to be proud of – was commanded by a staff officer which General Bagnall had had assigned as one of his aides since the war begun. Colonel Michael ‘Mike’ Jackson had been on the staff on the Joint Service Defence College at Greenwich before being attached to General Bagnall’s headquarters once war broke out and was, at forty-four, considered maybe too old for further promotion let alone a combat command position. The Chief of the General Staff rated him highly though with his aide being a tough former Para who started out his career in the Intelligence Corps and also had a university degree in Russian Studies; these were regarded as important qualities when it came to the political aspects of the war. Jackson was gazetted as a Brigadier and ordered to take command of the 32nd Brigade to lead it into action. The formation was to go to northern Germany and fill the gap in the 5th Infantry Division’s ranks as the Belgian brigade assigned there was to return to its own national corps.

Mike Jackson was to make a name for himself in this war as he led the last of Britain’s major ground forces committed as reinforcements to Germany.





One Hundred & Ninety–Eight

There were later accusations that NATO, especially the US, had no intention of fully committing themselves to the First Geneva Conference; not all of those allegations were forcefully denied. Much of that criticism came from the choice of negotiators sent to the Swiss-sponsored talks at Geneva by the US in comparison to who was sent by other nations. Both held junior ranks in the US Government and while experienced, it was argued that the choice of such people was deliberate to make sure that the talks failed so that the Americans could let the talking be done on the battlefield as opposed to the wishes of some other NATO nations: again, such allegations at wartime duplicity on the part of the US weren’t as strongly denied later on as they could have been.


Under the invitation of the President of the Swiss Federal Council (a first among equals, not a true head of state) Otto Stich, diplomats arrived in Geneva during March 27th when NATO armies were advancing across Germany achieving victory in most places and the Finns were liberating most of their occupied territory too. Flights arrived at Geneva’s international airport which rested right up against the French border and therefore the Soviet foreign affairs spokesman Tikhonov flew in aboard a Swiss Air jet after previously arriving at Zurich with a feeling of extreme paranoia that if a Soviet government aircraft went anywhere near France it was liable to face an ‘accident’. Hotels had been set aside for the exclusive use of several diplomatic parties and there were Swiss troops in the distance and Swiss security agents close by providing protection.

Stich had prosed the conference during the week and made multiple, public appeals to all of the countries involved in the war to send diplomats to Geneva where he and the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs were to act as ‘honest brokers’ to negotiate a peace worldwide. The major nations involved in the fighting along with the smaller ones had all been invited to attend with their representatives in what Stich hoped would be a gathering where at the end there would be an agreement made to bring the conflict to a close even if only a ceasefire was agreed rather than any sort of peace treaty.

Tom King as Secretary of State for the FCO went to Geneva along with David Mellor, his junior minister. The two of them had come to Switzerland with an agenda that included bringing an end to the fighting if they could through the process of beginning to work out a negotiated settlement just as the Swiss had proposed, though both of them were not here to allow the Soviets to play their diplomatic games which they had previously attempted. Tom King had spoken on the flight to Geneva about the 1802 Treaty of Amiens and how Britain wasn’t going to sign anything similar to that where an ill-advised peace treaty to stop a conflict would lead to a greater danger later on.

Senior diplomats including many Foreign Minister’s arrived in Geneva from many nations in the West though from the United States came what many regarded as two middle-ranking officials. Secretary of State Grassley remained at the UN in New York and in his place to Geneva came Richard Armitage and Rozanne Ridgway. Armitage was an Assistant Secretary of Defence with a history of service in both the US Navy and the CIA while Ridgway was an experience negotiator who had led the US side in many US-Soviet talks and served as an Assistant Secretary of State; neither of them were official deputies to either Carlucci or Grassley. They were both seen as hawks by many who were always going to take a very tough line with the Soviets, Armitage especially. Armitage himself had been briefed by the CIA before he had come to Geneva that Stich had been heavily-influenced by a senior aide acting for KGB interests in arranging the conference, while Ridgway had previously had many dealings with the Soviets and Eastern Europeans where she had showed her personal inflexible will on the part of her country… plus she knew that the Soviet KGB had had a hand in the assassination of her former boss George Schulz.


When the beginnings of the conference started to get underway during the late Sunday evening, news by that point had arrived in Geneva from the battlefield telling of great NATO victories and immense Soviet losses. Those senior people who were informed of this knew that it would influence the talks while even those who only heard rumours knew that too as such external events weren’t going to be ignored. Previously, the Soviets had tried to force the West to negotiate from a position of strength whereas now they were in a weakened state. Moreover, the Soviets were now dealing with the Allies, not just the United States.

At the First Geneva Conference, that term was now being officially used by NATO and the other nations worldwide fighting the Soviets and their puppets. The Allies consisted of countries such as Ireland, Sweden, South Africa, Australia and Japan among many others in addition to NATO and were all acting in concert with each other. They were not going to negotiate with the Soviets or any of their aligned nations separately. This threw a major spanner in the works for the strategy which Tikhonov was instructed to put to use this time where he was meant to do that – play one country off against the other to get a ‘better deal’ from his country – whereas in the past those other countries had been pointedly ignored as attention had been upon talking to the Americans only.

Unsurprisingly, the talks fast fell apart before they even got started.

Tikhonov and his entourage would have nothing to do with the South Africans who they deemed ‘racists and fascists’ while also denouncing the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher as a ‘Nazi’ who was ‘representing a defeated nation’. Armitage got into a violent shouting match with one of Mielke’s stooges at the conference who was trying to accuse the United States of committing war crimes in bombing civilian targets inside East Germany and the Assistant Secretary of Defence made counter-accusations of the Stasi shooting surrendered NATO military personnel. Mellor, a passionate man, argued with a translator with the Soviet party to the point where some of those present thought that blows were going to be exchanged. The Soviets had no success with trying to talk with representatives of multiple nations as individual powers and instead met a brick wall of no comprise on the issue that the Allies were united and speaking as one. The Allies themselves were determined not to allow the Soviets to have their way and wouldn’t even listen to Soviet offers for a ceasefire in-place rather than their repeated requests made in unison for what they wanted: a return to pre-war borders, the repatriation of prisoners taken (military and civilian) and an independent international court to prosecute war criminals as well as to decide financial reparations for damage done to their countries through Soviet unprovoked military aggression.


Stich was left unable to control ongoing events at the conference and found that the efforts of his diplomats to have both sides talking failed at every opportunity. He had arranged all of this with the best of intentions and also having ignored an unofficial warning which had come to Swiss Intelligence from the DSGE (originating from the CIA, though the Swiss were unaware of that) over the ultimate loyalties of one of his key foreign policy aides who had been instrumental in setting up the First Geneva Conference. He personally worried that every day that the war was continuing to be fought there ran the very real risk of one side resorting to nuclear weapons and the implications that such events would have for all humanity, not just the Swiss people even with their country uninvolved in the war. There was also the credibility of Swiss diplomacy, maybe even his own position, on the line if the conference was to fail as it was soon apparent that it had.

Diplomats started leaving Geneva early the next morning after only a few hours of talks – or shouting matches, depending upon one’s point of view – had taken place the night beforehand. The war was going back to the battlefields rather than plush hotels and their function rooms with diplomats combating each other no longer but rather millions of soldiers fighting instead.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
One Hundred & Ninety–Nine

During the weekend, MP’s across the country had been recalled to London so that the House of Commons could sit in session early on the Monday morning. There was to be great secrecy with this meeting less the elected representatives suddenly find themselves under attack. Police and even military escort and transportation was offered to many MP’s, especially those travelling from afar, which brought fury in some and thanks from others (with the latter case, those were matters of convenience).

The barricades around the heart of Central London – that ten foot steel fencing – had come down the night before yet there was still a massive security presence in London with troops on the streets and contrails seen in the skies above from fighter jets flying patrols up in the sky. Travel restrictions were still in-place too and many MP’s were without their staffs when they came to the Houses of Parliament. There were a few MP’s missing too with several from Ulster and from areas of the mainland badly damaged by enemy air attacks staying where they were for the time being… and also three MP’s had been killed during the war too. Gerry Adams was one of those (though he had always followed Sinn Fein practise of absenteeism) while the others were a Scottish MP who had been gassed and subsequently killed in Germany when he had gone to serve with the TA in addition to another from a constituency on the South Coast who had been suffered a fatal heart attack when caught up in a Soviet missile strike. Regardless, the Commons was to be full this morning with the vast majority of MP’s from all parties in attendance including most of the Cabinet ministers that had during TtW gone underground to their RSG bunkers but were now back.

John Wakeman as Leader of the House had called the gathering with the full support of the Speaker and the Parliamentary authorities. He had been instructed to do so by the Prime Minister who had expressed a deep concern that Parliament hadn’t met in several weeks when it really should have done so. She had been informed by several sources that there were many MP’s unhappy at the state of affairs in the lead up to the war and then ongoing developments after the outbreak of hostilities in the UK and aboard with the military. The decision had been taken to face those threats head-on, as was her style, though many of her advisers had tried to warn her of the strength of feeling that many MP’s had on the subject as that she could expect a very rough time. Thatcher had never regarded herself as popular, she had mentioned to her political secretary John Whittingdale the night beforehand, and believed that she was ready for her peers when she met with them.

The Prime Minister, plus the wider British Government too, didn’t expect the morning’s events in Parliament though.


Dennis Skinner, the MP for Bolsover, attempted to table an Early Day Motion calling for a Vote of No Confidence in the government. He followed correct Parliamentary procedure with this and such a vote would have been held in the next few days after MP’s were allowed to have their say along with the Prime Minister and her ministers. However, Skinner’s private member’s bill was very quickly blocked and he was left furious with this so much so that he was almost asked to leave by the Speaker for the use of ‘un-Parliamentary language’. Only his pronouncements that he wished to stay to ‘allow democracy to continue’ kept this angry MP in the Commons Chamber; he wasn’t the only one left outraged at this start to the session.

The Commons was meeting in closed session with Strangers absent: there were no members of the media, spectators or anyone else present. Outside the doors there were security personnel ready to whisk away the Prime Minister, the Minister’s and all of those MP’s present in fact at the first sign of trouble as everyone was on knife-edge, but they remained outside though ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. A terrorist or Spetsnaz strike was the main fear though there was also the worry over a bomb or a missile too with so many important people gathered here as they were like this in one known place.

Yet, during the war London had actually remained free of direct enemy attack like Washington and Paris did: the capital cities of nuclear-armed states.

Officially, Skinner’s attempt to force a later vote which he hoped would bring down the government and install a new one who he felt would do a better job (a vote which, honestly even he knew, wasn’t going to gain much support) was side-lined because a tight schedule had been arranged for the session taking place this morning. The Prime Minister, the Defence Secretary and the Home Secretary were all to make statements regarding the war and there would be time for questions to be asked of them from any members who wished to do so, though permission would be granted by the Speaker following Parliamentary procedure. There was no intention of having the Commons sit all day with security fears being the reason given behind this.

When MP’s had been told of this upon their arrival, there had been many adverse comments made… from members of all parties. They had spent a long time away from the Commons and Westminster in general as TtW had planned for MP’s to be back in their constituencies. Strong feelings had been formed, passions inflamed and plots made among those in contact with each other away from Whips. They had seen the effects of how TtW had been put into place and then heard nothing but bad news about how the war was going both aboard and here in the UK too with the country suffering under attack as it was. There were concerns over civil liberty issues, how the national economy had been ruined and what was going on in Northern Ireland. Some MP’s had forthright opinions on military matters while others had theirs on foreign relations. There was a great deal of anger that Parliament had not been recalled until now and also that MP’s who were members of the Privy Council hadn’t been informed as much as they should have been of important matters of state.


Thatcher had worked hard on the statement she delivered to the Commons this morning. There had been a lot of attention to detail with what she intended to say though it was also heavily laced with rhetoric as she intended to remind her fellow Parliamentarians that Britain hadn’t asked for the situation it found itself in and what actions had been taken that many people would disagree with had been done with the best of intentions. Maybe she should have taken better council than she had, though she believed that what she had to say was right. Whittingdale, writing years later, would state that the Prime Minister was acting like it was 1982 and the Falklands where she had been almost assured of Parliamentary support and didn’t really understand her peers in the Commons six years later.

It didn’t go down very well.

The Commons Chamber erupted with interruptions and even a few heckles from members who were upset at what they heard. There was understanding with the Prime Minister’s reminders of Soviet aggression pre-war and the unprovoked attack launched against Britain and the rest of the Allies but not when she defended the measures imposed with TtW. Thatcher didn’t win many over with the proclamations that what had been done was to guarantee that Britain could survive a nuclear war even if that had meant mass arrests and subsequent detention without trial, erosion of basic freedoms for civilians and the across-the-board nationalisations of many institutions. Labour MP’s, SLD members, nationalists from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as more than a few Conservatives too made their feelings known and those distractions were met at first with jeers from the bulk of the Conservatives behind Thatcher in typical tribal fashion before many of them started remembering their own concerns… and also looked across at the Labour members sitting on the government benches as members of the National Government.

The Prime Minister moved on to discuss the bravery of British servicemen and women fighting as well of talking of recent success not just in Germany but in Norway too. A call from a member on the Labour benches of ‘what about Denmark’ went unanswered as Thatcher moved on to talk about British hopes for what an end to the war would look like and the ignoring of that question didn’t go down well either. There came silence from behind her among her fellow MP’s and that contrasted with badly with opposition hostility expressed as loudly as it was. Finally, Thatcher came to the end of her statement where she expressed her sympathy and that of her government for the lives lost – not just British – during the war so far and there finally came some silence where she could talk without massed, repeated attempts at interruptions.

Neil Kinnock had seen several of his shadow cabinet members join the government as Minister’s Without Portfolio on the eve of war and they now sat opposite him with a few other Labour MP’s from the right of his party as well as some members with the SLD; Bryan Gould caught his eye in particular. Kinnock had been side-lined during the negotiations when his shadow cabinet had spoken to the Conservatives but he was today back and on the attack against the ‘National Labour’ MP’s opposite him; Davies, Dobson and Smith prominent there. He actually spent more of his response to the Prime Minister’s statement criticising them directly and indirectly rather than the conduct of the war though that was only apparent to many of those later as they were caught up in the drama of the moment. When the Leader of the Opposition did speak about the war, he focused upon TtW and the delayed recall of Parliament rather than other matters and did land some stinging blows… it was just a shame for his future that the media wasn’t present to see and hear him.

George Younger came away from the encounter with his peers far worse than Thatcher did. The Defence Secretary made a statement on the military aspects of the war and spoke of the defeats suffered but also the victories. He told of how the British Armed Forces were fighting as a leading member of the Allies and the great contribution they were making. What he didn’t expect was the fury that erupted in the form of interruptions and then the few questions put to him afterwards as many MP’s were far more knowledgeable of the military situation than he understood they would be. The rumours which they had heard and the unofficial talks with military officers which had taken place were put to use by members. Younger was asked why those TA troops had been massacred as they had on the North German Plain (the 2nd Infantry Division) and why many more were still back in the UK when every fighting man possible was needed in Germany. He was asked why British airspace had been so thoroughly penetrated as it had been on many occasions with major attacks levelling infrastructure including power-plants, transportation links and shipyards as well as killing thousands of civilians. Then there was the RN committing three carriers to the Norwegian Sea early in the war and losing two of them when naval strategy for many years had been for them to support anti-submarine efforts in the North Atlantic instead: those carriers had air defences inadequate to defend against massed cruise missile attacks and shouldn’t have been sent there they said.

Younger took a verbal battering and didn’t come away from it well.

Douglas Hurd fared better as his speech to the Commons in domestic issues came after Thatcher’s and Younger’s. He was again the target of anger from many members, including a growing number of his own backbenchers, but he didn’t appear anywhere near as arrogant as the Prime Minister had or as rattled as the Defence Secretary had been… maybe he had taken notice of their sufferings. He defended the detainment of suspected subversives though said that many mistakes had been made with those arrests which he had already move to reverse. He spoke of the reversal in recent days of many restrictions on civil liberties too. Hurd had already planned to make these announcements and they took much of the heat off him though he still came under fire from his peers to do with rumours about the failings of MI-5 in the lead up to the war – Roy Hattersley’s murder in the Palace of Westminster was one of these – and then how unprepared the British police had been to deal with civil disturbances brought about by pre-war panic.


After the statements made by the senior members of the government and initial responses from those MP’s given permission from the Speaker to speak, many MP’s were allowed to make statements and pose questions that didn’t actually require a direct response to them. Thatcher and Younger were both still in shock at the treatment which they had received though did handle themselves better, even when the Defence Secretary was taunted by members on the opposition benches that he would soon ‘be resigning’… a speculation which would in the next few days turn out to be reality. There were statements made concerning a country such as South Africa as part of the Allies, whether Britain was still prepared for the war going nuclear, what steps were being made to try to repair the economic damage to the country, how conscription was faring and what exactly had occurred in an Oxfordshire village where a USAF road-mobile convoy with GLCM missiles had run over a young child and the local public reaction to that.

There were voices of support for elements of how the government had been handling things as many previously angry MP’s calmed down and there were always loyal supporters of the Prime Minister. Moreover, instances of tribal politics meant that by the end of the session – which ended much later than planned after the Speaker allowed it to continue – the Prime Minister’s position looked better than it had at the outset with the Conservative benches rallying against the opposition.

However, it had all been a black morning for the UK Government in the Commons. Younger had been left with his credibility in tatters and the Prime Minister greatly humbled. Those MP’s acting under the banner of National Labour worried over their own future too as they realised just how much many of their own party now despised them and wouldn’t understand how they had acted for the greater good of the country. Parliament was again to meet again tomorrow and Kenneth Clarke was due back to speak: there were questions about Northern Ireland that were going to be put to him about the situation there. Thatcher and the War Cabinet had already been briefed by him and been left aghast, but they knew that once he spoke to Parliament a whole new wave of outrage would burst forth.

War was hell but politics could be just as fierce.





Two Hundred

Marshal Korbutov had spent the early hours meeting with his superior from STAVKA, Marshal Ogarkov. The elder man had made a flying visit to East Germany and met with the C-in-C West-TVD at the rear headquarters outside Dessau rather than the mobile, forward headquarters column. The events of the previous day and then preparing for that meeting had meant that Korbutov had once again had very little sleep despite his chief-of-staff’s efforts to try to arrange that. There had been so much to do yet being awake for all the hours that he was meant that mistakes were made by him. Korbutov knew this, but there was always the need for him to be on-hand to issue orders to those under his command engaged in combat, review intelligence data and meet with subordinates. Those beneath him weren’t capable of acting in his absence without making grave errors and only when he was present did things get done!

C-in-C West-TVD couldn’t see that his line of thinking here was a fast track way to lose a war with everything centralised in his hands and him having no faith in those below him. He understood that he was making mistakes but dismissed those as trivial matters when they clearly weren’t… In addition, Ogarkov’s arrival had meant that Korbutov had put on a false façade full of confidence and made promises which he couldn’t keep less he get that dreaded telex recalling him back home to be shot.

This certainly wasn’t the way to achieve what Ogarkov had told Korbutov he wanted done and neither would help with the promises C-in-C West-TVD had made too.

*

The war in Germany for the Soviet-led Socialist Forces had been going terrible since it began with moments of optimism being only false hope. From the opening air and then airmobile moves which failed to break apart the enemy all the way up until yesterday when NATO had driven Korbutov’s forces almost back to their start-lines, there had been immense difficulties. On several occasions, especially last week when the third echelon ground forces had been introduced, it had appeared that victory was almost within grasp but then the enemy had recovered themselves after the Socialist Forces had overextended themselves. Ogarkov, back in Moscow, had a better understanding of what was going on at the frontlines than Korbutov there understood and had explained why things had gone wrong before his subordinate could.

The NATO armies and air forces had been prepared for RED BEAR to be unleashed against them both militarily and psychologically. They had their defences in-place and reserves ready to react. The Socialist Forces had to expend all of their first-rate troops to brake though those defences and then use chemicals before second-rate troops could make advances which were eventually held. The introduction of third-rate forces had only made the situation worse too. Numerical advantage had meant nothing for the Socialist Forces, only more opponents for NATO to tear apart. Ogarkov had moved on to explain how the both the GRU and the KGB were fighting their own wars – for their own objectives – alongside that fighting being done by the Soviet Army and its supporting allies and such actions often clashed with what first Kulikov and now Korbutov were trying to do. It was them after all, who had caused all the problems with the Polish Fourth Army; after their failure to suppress a small rebellion there had turned that into a major revolt, what had happened? Hannover hadn’t fallen and NATO had counter-attacked there while afterwards that enemy move had brought down the whole front as news spread amongst the Poles of what the KGB had done to their fellow countrymen. Interference in the domestic affairs of the Northern Tier Warsaw Pact countries had played a major part in the breakdown of the logistics system that was meant to keep the ground and air forces of the Socialist Forces fighting at the front supplied too, though those actions only exasperated an already rotten system on the verge of collapse even before it was hit by enemy action and domestic interference.

The KGB was meant to be crippling the enemies will to resist while the GRU was meant to be physically striking against them with the agents that they had always boasted of having ready to act. How had any of their actions truly assisted the military efforts to win the war? Ogarkov spoke of how the opposite had been achieved. The GRU had not delivered timely intelligence of either a strategic or tactical nature that it was meant to do upon NATO and their titbits of information usually was useless or, worse, false. All that expended effort had been for naught while the many times planned conventional military attacks had been called off or delayed for the sake of apparently important intelligence activities had only damaged the overall cause of the Socialist Forces in winning the war.

Ogarkov moved on to tell Korbutov of how NATO had fought much harder than expected while also not doing what was expected of them. The West Germans had made nowhere near the level of emotional mistakes in defending certain parts of their country when it made no strategic sense to as it had been anticipated they would. The US Army was not a drug-addicted unruly mob who would collapse with a strong push. The armies of smaller countries had fought like lions and then there was the British Lion which had roared too as what was anticipated to be a weak military effort for Britain had been a false assumption. NATO aircraft were bombing deep into Eastern Europe and they had won the naval war too making the Soviet Union open to their attacks from the sea as well. The mighty technology of the West, which they had a distinct lead, had put them in this position but so too had their will to truly fight where they had been thought ready to collapse after being hit hard.

For a moment, after Ogarkov had finished, Korbutov had had a wild thought that he was going to be told by the head of STAVKA (effectively a one man body) that a surrender was necessary as the war was lost for the Socialist Forces… that was just a flight of fancy though, especially with a man like Ogarkov.


Ogarkov tasked Korbutov with doing whatever it would take to keep fighting. The armies under his control, now mainly consisting of Soviet troops, were to maintain the combat with NATO on enemy territory for as long as possible though withdraw back into East Germany and Czechoslovakia if that was what it would take. Units were to be sacrificed in delaying actions and counterattacks made to break-up the enemy even if those troops committed to such moves were ultimately going to be doomed in the long run. Complete control over discipline was to be the responsibility of the Soviet Army’s own military police – the Commandant’s Service – rather than the KGB and Ogarkov assured Korbutov that he had already authorised that and any objections were to be brought to him personally.

Meanwhile, Ogarkov was going to do two important things. Firstly, there were competent Soviet Army personnel acting under his express orders arriving across Eastern Europe who were going to do their best to sort out the supply situation. There were supplies, it was just a matter of moving them forwards and to those who needed them too: it was all a matter of will, the head of STAVKA said. He was also going to bring fresh troops to the West-TVD. There were still many ‘rear-area protection’ divisions sitting in the western portions of the USSR full of reservists and young conscripts too: those would move forward first and would be thrown into battle. Moreover, the rest of the huge Soviet Army, which was sitting in the Caucasus, in Central Asia and in western parts of Siberia, was to come to Germany as well. Those in eastern Siberia and the maritime parts of the Far East were to stay where they were, but another forty to fifty divisions could, Ogarkov said, be brought into Europe within the next week to two weeks where they could win the war. The West was mobilising all of those out-of-shape reservists they had and Ogarkov dismissed them – his intelligence knew nothing of the British 7th Armoured Division which had already seen action nor the soon available US II Corps – while he was certain that political difficulties in the countries of the West would make it some time before they could form up conscripts into professional soldiers; Ronald Reagan the enemy was out of action and George Bush was regarded as a weakling. At the same time, the Soviet Union already had the men available and armed and it was only a matter of moving them across from one side of Eurasia to the other…


Korbutov had been told that he was to continue leading the Socialist Forces to eventual victory despite the setbacks suffered so far. He had been asked whether he could and given a positive answer to that and then told by Ogarkov that he had faith in his subordinate.

It had been an unbelievably foolish thing to say when Korbutov really should have just admitted that he was out of his depth and not able to fulfil his responsibilities. He didn’t believe that he could hold NATO back and spent most of his time fearing for his life to say nothing of the issues he had with not trusting anyone else to do their duties that he was meant to delegate to them as any proper commander should.

*

By the time the skies had gotten light, after Ogarkov had left, Korbutov had gone back to his travelling, forward headquarters. Reports of fighting were already coming in thick and fast from across Germany with something odd going on with the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army in northern Hessen and the West Germans attacking down in eastern Bavaria tearing through the Czechoslovaks again like they had the day before. The main focus was always on the North German Plain and central Hessen though and Korbutov paid attention to the first reports of fighting occurring there as NATO forces pushed against his defending Soviet troops to force them back in the direction of the Inter-German Border.

While this was going on, Korbutov let his mind wander to things that were said earlier with Ogarkov and also what hadn’t been said too. In the case of the latter, he recalled his the head of STAVKA hadn’t mentioned Chebrikov once neither the Party. He had always previously received news of the faith that the General Secretary and the wider Party had in him and his men – what zero good that did anyone! – but there hadn’t been a mention of either at all earlier today. Korbutov had to wonder what that had meant…





Two Hundred & One

The intelligence business was a dirty business in peacetime.

Officers with national intelligence organisations conducted their business through underhand means using deception, coercion and blackmail. Spying was done through agents who were betraying their countries. When things went wrong, intelligence officers would usually walk away and leave those traitors to face the music as to risk themselves, let alone their organisation, wasn’t the done thing. Governments had other interests to consider and the small matter of one foreign national left at the mercy of their own government to face imprisonment, torture or even death didn’t hold enough weigh. If it wasn’t those traitors left behind, then it would be their own personnel whose life and the knowledge that they had in their heads that would be at risk. It wasn’t like the movies where there would be a climatic fight and the winner would get the girl after saving the day; intelligence officers needed to act with care and remain undetected. Sometime mistakes were made and lives lost, but that was rare: it was those agents who suffered when the professionals walked away.

Violence was never meant to be part of intelligence work either, especially not between different organisations. They were supposed to collect secret information that the other side didn’t want them to have and to also guard against such information being leaked from their own side. What was the point in killing those doing the same? All that would bring, intelligence organisations worldwide knew, was retaliation… and then counter-retaliation and therefore counter-counter-retaliation until officers of both sides were killing each other for no reason as well as – of greater importance – not doing their job of espionage and counter-espionage. Outsiders, even innocent bystanders, might get hurt as some of the more daring aspects of intelligence work was done by those involved, but intelligence officers were meant to leave their professional opponents alone and only those traitors caught up in all of this were meant to face risk. Maybe these weren’t morally correct actions and they were certainly not written codes of conduct, but this was how things had been long done.

War changed everything: the gloves came off.

Intelligence organisations worldwide, those which conducted foreign espionage and domestic counter-espionage, those whose governments were involved in the conventional war or even neutral in that, fought during the Great Intelligence War where all the unwritten rules were forgotten and many lives were to be lost.


Disruption, chaos and general stupidity set in fast among those who were experienced in the intelligence business and those who were amateurs… even before either the clash of armies occurred that might have been expected to cause all of the disorder. There were too many priorities, too many interests and too many agendas to follow for those usually skilled in the business of clandestine intelligence work who were tasked to protect their organisations as well as to do further duties now that the great clash of civilisations had finally occurred. Peacetime was one thing but where the fate of nations was concerned so much more was at stake. Alliances had to be maintained no matter what, enemies stopped from their nefarious plans despite grave danger and strategic, up-to-the-minute intelligence gathered. No longer were governments worried about negative publicity nor the political effects of letting their intelligence operatives off the loose; it was all about doing whatever it would take to fulfil the wartime agendas of governments involved in the conventional war or those who wished to remain outside.

Intelligence officers on the frontlines worldwide were pushed to do the unthinkable and many of them weren’t up to this. Yet, at the same time, many believed that were, even if that was a foolish notion. They weren’t trained killers, they weren’t special operations soldiers and they didn’t have the capabilities to act anything like they really were: men who acted in the shadows now forced out into the light.

The Great Intelligence War was to be nothing like any national intelligence organisation had ever fought beforehand and one which none of those actually wanted to fight either.


The battlefields where this conflict was fought were spread across the globe inside neutral nations mainly and also in countries of the Third World. So much of the Old World and the New World was involved directly in the conventional part of World War Three and in those locations diplomats (who intelligence operatives disguised themselves as during peacetime) had been withdrawn or in a few places even expelled. It was different in neutral nations even with many governments trying their best to stay out of the conflict by attempting to keep a lid on the activities of foreign nationals in their countries. They were thinking that it was peacetime though, not that with countries fighting for their very survival that orders had been given for intelligence personnel to do what they had to.

Locals in those countries were expended quickly and spooks started engaging each other. Guns were the favoured weapon, not martial arts or even poison darts and such exotic tools like in the movies. Spooks who were not trained in how to use guns started using them regardless to shoot other who they believed were their opponents. Chaos erupted worldwide where nations desperate to stay out of the war got caught up in nasty small-scale conflicts between intelligence operatives. Quickly, ultimate objectives, the reasons why the shooting started, were forgotten as one side tried to take out the other side no matter what. Many countries were furious at this and started arresting with a view to deport those involved or in other cases shooting back at these foreigners in their countries killing people. Early on aides to presidents and prime ministers were being targeted for assassination along with exiles from nations at war before visiting diplomats trying to woo countries on to one side against the other were being shot at. Then spooks were shooting at each other and innocent bystanders were getting caught up in this along with local security forces too.

It all quickly became chaos. Panama City, Buenos Aires, Vienna, Rome, Algiers, Lagos, Beirut, Amman, Islamabad, New Delhi and Jakarta were just some of the cities worldwide where these shootings started to occur but there were countless smaller places were violence erupted too. National governments were overwhelmed in some places, though generally they soon acted forcefully to put a stop to this. All foreigners from countries at war – diplomats, suspected spooks, journalists, students and expatriates – were rounded up and arrangements made for deportation; especially from India where there had been blood spilt and in China were there hadn’t been. Where their own nationals who had been drawn in, those pawns which had survived, they were detained too though in many countries they were in serious enough trouble that their very lives were at risk by their own governments. There were many countries which had no interest in joining the conflict raging across the globe and they did what intelligence agencies had done: everything possible to protect their own interests.

Most active in the Great Intelligence War were the two Soviet intelligence services – the GRU and the KGB – along with the big and influential ones from the West: the CIA, MI-6, the DSGE and Mossad from ‘neutral’ Israel: Egypt’s Mukhabarat was also caught up in the bloody conflict despite the Egyptians being officially neutral like the Israel’s were meant to be too. Smaller intelligence services would like the bigger ones lose many of their officers in what afterwards no one could understand the chain of events which brought matters to that stage. East Germany’s Stasi, the Cuban DGI (before the Revolution and ceasefire) and South Africa’s National Intelligence Service all fought too like the larger organisations.


Afterwards, the question that would be asked was what all of this had achieved? What big intelligence coup’s had been brought off by the East and the West? Why had all of those professional intelligence officers died like they had across the globe? No countries entered the war or suddenly flipped sides because of all of this. No great achievement was made. There were just bodies and angry governments. Both Israel and Egypt would afterwards believe that they had kept the Middle East free of conventional warfare though others would say that it was the deployed US military forces there along with selfish agendas of dictatorships that did that. Indonesia hadn’t joined the conflict, yet what benefit to one side or disadvantage to the other did that bring? India remained neutral in the war and so did China and many other nations too.

The Great Intelligence War had achieved nothing and was pointless.





Two Hundred & Two

Private James Gregory didn’t have anyone to wish him ‘Happy Birthday’.

He was nineteen today but there was no cake, no celebrations and no family present. Some of his mates were nearby, but others were gone – dead or wounded – and those who remained were concentrating on keeping themselves alive rather than their friend’s birthday.

For Jimmy, as his buddies with 6 Platoon called him, this was to be a day where he would too try to stay alive in the middle of the war taking place all around him, though he was also thinking about what should have been a day where there was all attention upon him like it had been when he was a child.

It wasn’t to be a good day for him.

*

6 Platoon was part of B Company with 2 R ANGLIAN, which was a mechanised battle-group part of 22nd Armoured Brigade with the remains of the 1st Armoured Division. This infantry formation had started the war with twenty-seven enlisted men and one officer and travelling in FV432 tracked vehicles. Those vehicles were long gone and now 6 Platoon were dismounted infantry sometimes moved in lorries; there were only sixteen men and the Lef-tenant remaining from those who had gone to war with Jimmy.

They had all been his mates – apart from the Lef-tenant, of course – even if his personal relationship with individual members sometimes got ugly. 6 Platoon was a tight-knit community especially as they had been deployed in peacetime here to Germany and based at Celle, not far from where they were today. There had been Trevor, Matt, Danny, Teddy Russell, Knobby, Knocker, Bates, Craig, Stu, Chalky, Sam Carrots, Paul, Mark, Billy, Big Bill, Gareth, Parky, Rob, Paddy, Luke, Tommy, Mike, Steve, Jonny Boy and Alistair. Sergeant Neil McMasterson – referred to as Masters behind his back, not to his face – was the real authority for them all rather than their distant Lef-tenant who they all dismissed as a typical ‘Rupert’. Jimmy had been with them seven months while others had only been with 6 Platoon for a few weeks, but, no matter what, they were his mates and the lads he had gone to war with. They were mainly from places up and down Eastern England and most were young working-class lads. Knobby, Knocker and Big Bill were all old soldiers with many years of service and were Corporals, but Jimmy and everyone else were either Privates or Lance Corporals with only a few year’s service. Masters was a man to be feared but he was a fair man too. Each and every one of them all had been true characters and the best set of mates that Jimmy had ever had.

Then war had come and they had started dying all around him. For more than two weeks now, Jimmy had watched his mates die with the worry that he was next in line. Yet, at the same time, injuries could be worse than death. He’d seen some of his mates ripped apart and scream horribly before being rushed away to hopefully survive and not join the dead.

Matt had been killed. Danny and Bates both evacuated injured. Stu had been killed even though he was officially ‘missing’ after an artillery shell blew him to pieces. Paul and Big Bill were dead while Rob had been taken away with his legs left in his foxhole. Luke had been killed by the enemy while Tommy had been run over by a Chieftian tank driven by an idiot with the Queen’s Own Hussars. Steve was someone else missing while everyone would always remember Alistair’s death. Three of those mates of his had been with Jimmy in his eight-man rifle section and he had been particularly close to them.

He would never forget them.


The war for Jimmy and 6 Platoon had been a crazy affair. They had been deployed waiting for it to happen for what had seemed like a month and living rough in the German countryside. Twice they had conducted major redeployments through the night with no reason given and no actual idea where they were sent. What had been going on in the lead-up to war breaking out had been told to them in a hurried and simplistic fashion: the enemy was lining up to attack here and at home too and 6 Platoon was going to stop that. Jimmy had blacked any more of that out for he hadn’t wanted to worry about other matters – his family back home in Peterborough chief among those – though he wished now that he had listened. Now it was about fighting to stop himself and his few remaining mates being killed though he would have liked to know what it was all about.

Once the shooting started, the war became a series of manoeuvring to avoid contact and then sudden, swift and deadly exchanges of gunfire. When first in the FV432’s, the enemy wasn’t seen as Jimmy and his mates were carried in the back of those vehicles but them they had soon been dismounted and dug foxholes and trenches. The Lef-tenant had told Masters to have the men fire against the enemy when they were detected and Jimmy and his mates had obeyed their Sergeant. There had been artillery, mortars, rockets, aircraft, helicopters and machine guns. One fight soon started to merge into another. The enemy could apparently be moving to the flank and 6 Platoon would have to move. They would race back to their vehicles at rally points and everyone would be worried about tanks or aircraft. The casualties started coming, slowly but surely.

Every day soon became the same. For several days, Jimmy was told that they were all stuck in a large surrounded position around the city of Hannover though he’d never been sure of the accuracy of that. He didn’t have access to a map, they stayed away from civilians and he was only a young Private who wasn’t told things like that. Their Rupert had been worried at that time by it had all been a blur to Jimmy. He had fought in open fields, among houses, in blackened farmer’s fields, in gullies and ditches, alongside streams, in woodland and beside railways tracks. There’d been under artillery barrages and there’d been gas alarms sounded. Sleep had come in fleeting moments and the food he ate wasn’t remembered. Jimmy was always thirsty. He was covered in cuts and bruises and insect bites. He had a headache that he couldn’t shake and that he had been given foul-tasting pills for. There was dirt and mud everywhere over his body and uniform: he hadn’t washed either in weeks. There were no drills and no rest. Patrols were ran night and day and fighting came unexpectedly.

He’d killed his fellow man. Jimmy had lost count of them men he had shot at with his SA80 rifle. He’d bayoneted a man too and been told that that soldier was a Russian. There were shouts and screams in foreign languages at times. Gareth and Parky had afterwards told him that those were just young men like they were: far away from home and told to fight here in Germany for politics and politicians. Masters had told the two of them to shut up. Every memory just merged into one confusing series of events that he couldn’t sequence into an order afterwards. They’d been attacking and defending. 6 Platoon was often withdrawn with haste but then sent back forwards. The enemy would either hold or fold. Bullets would whizz towards him and miss… sometimes hitting his mates. He worried whether he was going crazy far too many times as the fighting just kept going on and on and on. Peacetime training hadn’t prepared Jimmy nor the rest of 6 Platoon for this. When on exercise they would have a break when the necessary time came and return back to barracks. People weren’t firing real bullets during training and there were no exploding shells going off with deafening blasts right nearby.

On a couple of occasions, Jimmy had sobbed. He hadn’t cried, just let a few tears fall from his eyes before he fast wiped them away. He was certain that no one had noticed even though he had seen Teddy Russell, Chalky and Jonny Boy all sob at some point too. He didn’t know why he had sobbed as he had done, but he had when he had been alone and scared and maybe that was why… or had it been after Alistair had stood on that landmine and lain bleeding to death in the field covered by enemy machine guns while 6 Platoon helplessly hid nearby as he screamed for his mother and for God’s mercy for an hour before finally dying?

Jimmy kept fighting because he had no choice. Every bullet he fired from his rifle was aimed in the direction of the enemy and he hoped that they were being made good for each one fired diminished the chance of one of his mates getting shot. Masters worried over ammunition for them all and eventually the light machine guns had to be given up when all they received was bullets for the SA80’s. Tommy, killed by his own side and a good friend of Jimmy, had been the platoon mortar-man and after that tank had crushed him 6 Platoon no longer had a light mortar available either as that weapon had been smashed apart too. Masters told all the men to shoot with greater accuracy and to not waste their rounds. Jimmy had tried that and so too had the others; he blamed such a shortage of ammunition for the death of his section leader Big Bill.

Despite all the gloom and the depression, Jimmy had some moments where he and his mates had a laugh; if he hadn’t then he would have gone crazy by now. There was that night when that enemy soldier – Russian, East German, Polish… whatever he was – had appeared right among their lines out of nowhere and surrendered to them in broken English but assumed that they were from the ‘Royal American Regiment’. Where he had got that idea from no one knew! They had watched a tanker with the Queen’s Own Hussars (the two battle-groups were tasked to operate together within the 22nd Brigade) stand up in his turret of his tank and then fall out and into a muddy ditch in the most comical of fashions, ruining his smart uniform as he did so. 6 Platoon had giggled at a dirty joke told by the always filthy Stu about a girl and a couple of soldiers but then really laughed when he had walked into a spider-web and fought that with his bayonet in an escape… but then that eight-inch artillery shell had blown him apart during a withdrawal being made the next day and there was no time to recover what remained of him.

*

Lef-tenant David Toomey was their platoon commander. He was only a little bit older than Jimmy yet everyone thought of that Rupert as just a boy who without them, and especially Masters, would be as helpless as a baby. Jimmy didn’t think that was necessarily true, but he never objected when the others said that and often found himself verbally agreeing because they were his mates. In peacetime he’d been the perfect officer but in war he was a frightened man who had a haunted look that gave Jimmy the creeps. No ill fate was wished upon the man by Jimmy – he didn’t want him killed or maimed – but the Rupert needed to be gone from 6 Platoon. He was a distracting influence on them all with the look of worry which he wore and the terror that was apparent in his eyes at the first sign of enemy action. Jimmy had been told that 5 Platoon had gone through a total of three platoon commanders in two weeks of war and other junior officers were being replaced so he had to wonder why Lef-tenant Toomey remained where he was.

This morning, on Jimmy birthday which everyone had forgotten about and he didn’t want to mention, the Lef-tenant led them forward in an attack which he had Masters relay to them. As scared as he was, the Lef-tenant was out ahead of them as they came out of the treeline where they were staging from and moved carefully across a field and then up a sloop towards a hill a few hundred yards off whose summit was hidden with trees and undergrowth. The top of that hill apparently looked down over a highway on the other side and there were meant to be enemy infantry there in some sort of hold-up role: Jimmy and the others were told that they were blocking forces meant to impose a delay and were unsupported. 6 Platoon would make the final attack after their approach right behind some artillery that was supposed to strike the enemy there and they were to move in to finish off what defenders remained. Masters gave them the usual pre-mission talk on watching for landmines, keeping an eye on their flanks, remembering to use proper fire-and-manoeuvre and to respect the rules of warfare during their attack when faced with wounded or surrendering enemy soldiers.

Strategic objectives, field army plans of manoeuvre or political objectives were all not mentioned. The villages and towns beyond and the name of that highway wasn’t important and so Jimmy and 6 Platoon weren’t told about that. They were infantry being sent against an enemy-held position atop a small hill to root out those holding it.


Jimmy was shot fifty yards from the trees. He would afterwards say that he heard the particular crack of the rifle that fired at him and braced himself for it; those who listened to the story would nod their heads knowing that that was just how Jimmy told the story. Two bullets from a Soviet-built AK-74 assault rifle in the hands of an East German soldier hit him. One struck the rear of his boot on his left foot with a CRACK and flew away spinning wildly after such an impact and the injury here would be a massive bruise that would have stopped Jimmy from walking properly for at least a week had he not also been hit by the other bullet in the left thigh too. That bullet went through his torn combat trousers, into his skin then muscle beyond before hitting bone and afterwards going back out the other side of the leg it was tearing through and finally fabric again. Jimmy was knocked to the ground as his leg collapsed under the trauma of such a wound being inflicted. He screamed out in pain, pain like he had never suffered before. His mates all around him all had their attention drawn to him as he was on the ground grabbing his shattered leg with both hands and howling.

Masters shouted for them to find cover and locate the source of that gunfire and also called out to Jimmy that he’d be seen to as soon as possible so he just had to hold on. Jimmy didn’t hear any of that though; he passed out from the shock.


An hour later, Jimmy woke up momentarily when the field ambulance he was in went over a pothole in a country road being used for medical evacuation routing east of Hannover’s ruined suburbs. There was a busty young nurse leaning over him telling him that everything would be okay and he needed to rest. He tried to talk but couldn’t; he wanted to ask if she was his birthday present. Jimmy had been about to tell her that she was beautiful and not inquire after his wounds; the morphine made it all seem unreal… even the nurse…


Later that evening, Jimmy was conscious again. He didn’t know it, but he was in a rear-area hospital near Hannover Airport. That military run facility was treating casualties from both the Allies and Socialist Forces and Jimmy was just one of many being attended to this evening. The morphine and the after-effects of surgery took their toll on his mind but he soon figured that out. It took a little while longer for him to realise that he couldn’t hear the sounds of artillery or gunfire like he had for the past two weeks in a continuous fashion. Then, further time passed before he remembered why he was here and being shot.

Jimmy struggled to move his arm and then reach down to his wounded leg to feel just where he had been shot. It didn’t take long to realise that his left leg was no longer there and neither did much time pass before Jimmy sobbed himself to sleep. How could he be a soldier fighting with his mates when he only had one leg?


Four days would go by before Jimmy would reach the Queen Elizabeth Military Hospital in Woolwich, South-East London. His journey across Europe had been by ambulance and ferry to Calais and then by a specially out-fitted coach talking wounded men like him back to military care facilities in the UK. He had calmed down quite a bit and was looking forward to the promise of a visit from his family…

…yet, despite it all, Jimmy wanted his leg back and to re-join his mates fighting in Germany.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Three

Acting President Bush had his base of operations no longer aboard the Doomsday Plane airborne twenty-four hours a day but rather on the ground instead. A fleet of helicopters were ready to depart with him and other senior people from Mount Weather at a moment’s notice to meet the assigned E-4B and other aircraft nearby, but for now Bush was running his temporary administration from the ground… or rather beneath the ground as the facilities here at Mount Weather were all inside this imposing natural structure towering above northern Virginia as part of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

ABC News had flown a helicopter over the site managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) five years beforehand as part of a programme speculating on locations and protocols for US Continuity of Government Operations so it wasn’t as if Mount Weather was a super-secret facility as many would have liked it to have been. Nevertheless, where Bush was now basing himself and the NSC at Mount Weather meant that he was close to Congress which remained at the nearby Greenbrier and also Washington too. Frank Carlucci wasn’t far away either being up at Raven Rock and Bush felt that this FEMA site was a far better location than other, distant sites of a smaller and more anonymous nature that had been suggested. Should the country be attacked with nuclear weapons then he wouldn’t remain on the ground but for now, with World War Three still non-nuclear, Mount Weather was where its executive branch was functioning from.

There was over six hundred thousand square feet of space below ground at Mount Weather with extensive and secure communications facilities. There were no major urban centres nearby but good access to transportation links. Security was excellent with a massive Secret Service presence on-site and a battalion of District of Columbia ARNG military policemen detached from their parent unit and deployed out here in rural Virginia. An airborne exclusion zone had been set up too so that no unauthorised aircraft or helicopters could approach.


Bush had the NSC meet this evening (it was gone Midnight in Europe) to discuss the conflict overseas as well as matters of national importance closer to home too. At the beginning of the gathering, the health of President Reagan was discussed first before anything else. There was a telephone conference with his doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital where he laid comatose and Bush had many questions for those doctors with Reagan. Twice in the past few years Reagan had been there and Bush had on both short occasions taken on the role of Acting President though this time it appeared that it would be a much longer period of time – possibly for good – that he would be standing-in for Reagan. The doctors there told the NSC that the President had been deliberately put into a coma otherwise he would have died after his stroke. They needed time and further assistance from specialists; Bush promised them whatever they needed and he vowed to the NSC afterwards that he would make good on that promise too.

The war and the course of that was why the politicians, the military officers and the senior spooks were here at Mount Weather and that took up the majority of their meeting. Carlucci (on the telephone), the Joint Chiefs and Colin Powell – who Bush had decided to keep on as National Security Adviser as the man was regarded as irreplaceable – briefed the NSC of how things were going worldwide mainly from an American perspective though also making much mention of the military actions of the other Allies too.

In northern Norway, the 2nd Marine Division was pushing for Kirkenes to liberate that remaining part of Finmark still occupied by the Soviets and facing tough opposition in the Arctic environment there. They were on course to get as far as the Soviet border within the next couple of days advancing as they were though. Across in Lapland, US Army light infantry units had linked up with the Finns and were now fully engaged against what Soviet forces remained in the Finnish Wedge. A digital map was shown to the NSC and Powell explained how from all sides the Soviet perimeter was being shrunken there. In southern Norway, those Soviet paratroopers which had arrived in the Oslo area on the war’s fifth day had finally been ejected from their positions near the Norwegian capital after Swedish and local Norwegian forces finally got their act together and eliminated those isolated forces.

NATO aircraft had been busy over the Baltic Approaches trying to find and eliminate Soviet coastal missile batteries after the loss the New Jersey early yesterday. The loss of life there had been great at the US Navy was still reeling from the sinking, though aircraft from the two carriers redeployed from the Mediterranean were striking back with vengeance. That sinking of that WW2-era battleship had come alongside British failures to conduct landings in Jutland though the NSC was told how the British were soon to try again. Their second attempt was going to coincide with the landing of the US 5th Marine Division soon enough and both amphibious assaults were anticipated to bring much success once they begun… and much reconnaissance effort was done first. Meanwhile, on Zealand, the Helsingor position that the Danes and Swedes were holding after Copenhagen had been lost a week ago was reporting a lack of any major enemy activity and the Swedes had been reinforcing their forces there after initial setbacks to make sure that when they advanced as planned, they didn’t meet defeat again.

In northern Germany, NATO forces there had spent the day continuing their advances eastwards. They were almost at the Inter-German Border in many places, especially the French on the left of the North German Plain and the Belgians on the extreme right. British, West German and US troops with the understrength III Corps were still moving forward in the centre and pushing back Soviet forces which they encountered. The fighting there was very hard going with many casualties being inflicted to NATO ground troops as they met enemy blocking units holding on to hopeless positions just to slow them down. In the skies above them, aircraft with the 2ATAF were now in almost complete control of the aerial battlefield not just in the hours of darkness but in daylight too.

The US Fifth & Seventh Army’s were facing enemy forces trying to hold them back too and there remained many bloody engagements for them too as they were fighting through central parts of Germany yet at the same time they had advanced far and deep in many other places. The Soviet-held Kassel Salient had been overrun by national guardsmen and they had destroyed a major enemy force in doing so while the Fulda Gap was being approached from the west by General Schwarzkopf coming up the Gelnhausen Corridor. The NSC listened to Powell as he spoke of how the commander of the US V Corps – who many people on the ground in Germany were now calling ‘Patton’, for many reasons – had done what many had regarded as impossible and advanced most of the way up Autobahn-66, defeating all of those before him. Soon enough he would reach the end of the Kinzig Valley and reach that tank country ahead where he would be heading for the Inter-German Border too. US Army troops in northeastern parts of Bavaria were pushing to retake Franconia and also closing-in upon East Germany there as well.

In southern Germany, French and West German forces were winning engagement after engagement with enemy forces and had smashed apart Soviet and Czechoslovakian units alike as they headed for the border with Czechoslovakia. They were making slightly slowly progress due to terrain and the number of enemy forces encountered and thus trying to stop them, but they were moving eastwards without halt.

Above both central and southern Germany, NATO air forces – led by the USAF – had dominance of the skies above the battlefields beneath them as well as ahead of the frontlines too all the way up to East German and Czechoslovak territory. The NSC was told how air units with the Socialist Forces were now being defeated in detail through superior electronic capabilities put to use by the Allies as well as their inability to learn from their errors. They couldn’t adapt and stuck to their doctrine while NATO had learnt the hard way and was now tearing them apart. Sometimes the enemy would get lucky, especially with some of their most advanced fighters and certain SAM units, but those were rare occasions.

The briefing was due to move forwards to conflict zones elsewhere afterwards though the NSC moved to talk for a while about the self-imposed stop-lines the NATO was currently following when it came to enemy territory. It had been previously agreed by Reagan with the NATO Council back before the war even begun that should there arise a situation where a counterattack took NATO forces eastwards, they wouldn’t enter enemy sovereign territory on the ground. Air operations were something different, but no soldiers were to cross into East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland or even the USSR no matter what. With Poland being so far from the frontlines and the Soviets having all of those nuclear warheads still pointed at the US and the wider West, what the NSC talked about here was adapting that policy with regards to the other two countries which were making war upon the Allies. Bush stated that he wanted to see West Berlin liberated and that Prague was somewhere else that he believed NATO should send its soldiers too if, as he put it, the Czechoslovaks ‘didn’t see sense’. He believed that those countries which had taken part in an unprovoked war of aggression would need to be invaded to fully end this conflict on the terms of the Allies. Maybe full occupation might be too much, but he wanted to see them invaded if NATO troops needed to cross border lines to defeat the enemy.

That decision of the Acting President’s raised no objection at Mount Weather – neither from Carlucci or Grassley (still in New York at the UN) over the telephones – and would be presented to America’s allies as soon as possible.

Back to the war itself, the strategic air campaign over parts of Eastern Europe was still ongoing. There were losses still being taken but the ability of the enemy to move reinforcements was minimal according to all intelligence while their supply transportation network was effectively destroyed. Weary of such a statement, Bush and Grassley both questioned that, but were told that all information pointed to such a situation. Poland had been especially targeted with its rail network bombed to smithereens and links through Poland were the key even more than those further west in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. There was an upcoming big air attack targeted against Berlin mentioned too and the NSC was briefed on the plan for that which was due to take place in the next few hours.

At sea, the North Atlantic and the waters around Europe had been dangerous for the US Navy and NATO naval forces early in the war yet losses hadn’t been as high as they could have been. Almost forty American major warships and more than a dozen submarines had been lost – NATO losses were double that – but the control over them was now in NATO hands. Soviet land-based naval aviation was non-existent after two weeks of war while their capital ships were either sunk or hiding in the Kara & Black Sea’s. The mighty Soviet submarine arm had expended itself and what vessels remained were apparently all trying to head home with few weapons left so that they could try to resupply from bases smashed to pieces by Striking Fleet Atlantic’s relentless air attacks on the military bases along the edges of the Kola Peninsula. Those sea-lanes were open for exclusive NATO use and the danger of attack against all of those ships at sea supplying Europe was now minimal.

Warfare on a small scale in the air and at sea around Turkey continued while the Middle East remained quiet; there was still plenty of US military combat power deployed in the Persian Gulf and ashore in Oman as well as several of the Gulf States too. There was mention made again like during Reagan’s NSC meetings about withdrawing some US Navy forces from there but again it was decided to keep what was there in-place. Oil flowing from the Middle East was keeping the Allies fighting and the US protected it there at source and during the initial stages of its transport throughout the world.

In East Asia and the Pacific, the war was still generally at a stalemate stage. The Allies and the Socialist Forces had checkmated each other with so much combat power deployed by each side yet most of it unable to directly combat the other. Bush asked how his decision to divert some resources away to Europe had been reacted to by those members of the Allies there and was told by Carlucci and Grassley that there had been the few expected grumblings but no more. The Soviet coast was still facing air attacks – from the US Navy and Allied aircraft out of Japan – and the Soviets were launching a few of their strikes back at Japan, but there remained no instances of ground combat where so many troops from both sides were posited yet not directly facing each other.


Casualties were discussed by the NSC, those suffered by the US in particular. The latest figures available to be presented to Bush were almost at the fifty thousand mark in terms of dead, wounded, missing and captured.

This was a staggering figure.

The US Marines had lost many men in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay and then some more in their advance across Finmark pushing towards the Soviet border. The USAF had seen personnel lost not just in aircraft but on the ground at attacked airbases too. Then there was the US Navy with all of those ships sunk including the carrier Ranger in the Pacific, the New Jersey in the Baltic Approaches and the cruiser Virginia which had all been big ship losses where most of their crews had been lost while hundreds of sailors had died aboard the carrier Forrestal in the fires there which had knocked that ship out of action. It was the US Army – including USAR and ARNG units assigned – which had taken the bulk of American military losses in the war though. It wasn’t just frontline troops but many in the rear which had become casualties of war in this great loss of life which had taken place on such a small time-scale. The wounded men were another matter too with so many of them with life-changing injuries.

It was explained that the number of losses wasn’t something that a lot of people were yet to understand. US Army Chief of Staff General Vuono told Bush and the other politicians meeting at Mount Weather that the men on the frontlines couldn’t possibly realise how many of their fellow soldiers had been killed or wounded as the war was so fast-moving and units were constantly engaged in mobile conflict. Such numbers were kept from the ordinary fighting men and junior officers to keep morale up and Vuono explained that if such a thing were to get out and sink in among those fighting, there would be a major drop in morale. The peacetime US Army in Europe which had been reinforced by regulars and afterwards by those Reservists and national guardsmen had all been taking major personnel losses but were still fighting; winning the war depended upon them not understanding how many of their fellow soldiers weren’t going to be around afterwards.

The NSC was briefed too on morale issues when it came to US military personnel released from POW camps in retaken portions of West Germany during the fighting there late last week. Of the sixteen thousand NATO military personnel rescued: six and a half thousand of those had been American. All of these had officially been listed as ‘missing’ before the wire pens where they were kept out in the open like animals had fallen to advancing NATO troops. There were a few USAF pilots, though it was mainly soldiers which were rescued from levels of depravity which the NSC had previously been briefed upon. Bush again showed his anger on this matter and queried how war crimes investigations were going regarding the treatment of female prisoners and those of ethnic minorities especially which the Soviets had been holding as well of those POW’s who never made it to camps like those and were shot where they had surrendered when unarmed. He wanted to know what reconnaissance efforts were being made to locate further camps which there had to be located eastwards back in enemy territory and what plans were being made with regard to those.

The movement of the US Army’s final expected group of major ground reinforcements heading for Europe was talked over. Those old soldiers and the national guardsmen who would accompany them – the US II Corps and the US XI Corps respectively – were going through their final stages of training now while convoys of ships were underway and crossing the North Atlantic. When those ships started landing, the soldiers would be flown over to join them. The US Third Army was expected to be in-place ready to fight by the end of the week but there was an eagerness that both Powell and Vuono had to calm on the part of many members of the NSC to rush that. The national guardsmen with the US Fifth Army had been rushed into action last weekend and suffered accordingly due to them not being truly ready at first; they would be a much stronger force than they currently were had that hadn’t happened.


The meeting turned afterwards to diplomatic matters.

The outcomes of the failed attempt at ceasefire talks in Geneva the night before, which had been aborted almost as soon as they got started, were covered. There hadn’t been much hope for those and what Armitage and Ridgway had to say in paraphrased reports was discussed and so too was what Grassley was hearing at the UN in reaction from that. He was preparing for a trip to Europe later this week before planning to return again to stay on the ground in New York, but his work at the UN with other representatives of the Allies and diplomats from other nations was important. The Soviets and the few Socialist Forces countries had very few friends left on the international stage; Grassley was leading the effort to further reduce that number. Bush reminded him that he wanted the policy of offering inducements to countries to join the Allies kept up but to keep those vague for the time being and not to make any firm commitments. His Secretary of State was walking a tightrope with such a contradictory course of action, but it was to remain ongoing.

Cuba again come up in discussions as that matter remained unresolved. The ceasefire was holding and US Marines plus some downed USAF aircrews were back in the US after transferring through The Bahamas from Cuban custody. Guantanamo Bay still remained in Cuban hands though and the military was in-charge down there after the people had deposed Castro and then those generals had wiped out the spooks who tried to take charge in the aftermath. The original desire for the US to see Cuban Exiles allowed to return was still being refused by the Cubans and so negotiations were stalled. Cuban air attacks on the US mainland as part of their surprise attack had the American public, as well as Congress, regarding those strikes as another Pearl Harbor. Less than a hundred civilians had been killed in Florida compared to the almost two thousand more in Hawaii, Alaska, Seattle and parts of New England when Soviet attacks had come early in the war, but Cuba was still being vilified more than even the Soviets were.

Bush confirmed Reagan’s earlier policy that those Cubans who wished to return home – and certainly change the political, economic and social make-up of their country – should be allowed to and that Guantanamo Bay couldn’t be allowed to remain held by the Cubans. Maybe there was a solution in the long-run, but for now, that was the policy he was to follow as well.

Northern Ireland was mentioned when discussing international relations as part of the war. Again there was pressure coming from Congress with this as many of the elected representatives in secluded luxury at the Greenbrier Resort had been hearing disturbing reports for a while now coming from Ulster of what was happening there. The NSC under Reagan had discussed that a while ago after the Republic of Ireland had complained furiously about the effective genocide and ethnic cleansing going on there but that had been ignored for wartime unity. Grassley stated that the British were aware of what was going on and were far from pleased but couldn’t stop the killings there as taxed as they were with the conventional war on the Continent. CIA Director Webster spoke of how upset Thatcher was at the issue and she had already reacted politically, but Britain didn’t have the capability to act decisively there even with Ulster being an integral part of Britain. Something had to be done about this though, Bush told the NSC, for the events there taking place inside a nation with the Allies – especially one like the UK – just couldn’t continue.

South Africa’s role in the war was another matter so too was China’s absence from the conflict. The NSC covered other issues away from international affairs to do with the US economy and the latest news of emergency internal security following the terrorist attacks which had occurred across the country in the few days before the war and once it got started. Continued preparations for nuclear war should that break out were also talked over and then there was a late interruption with a NSA staffer delivering to his boss General William Odom two urgent notices which the NSA chief soon shared with the Acting President and the others. He told them that there was satellite intelligence – photographs and ELINT – of a massive further military mobilisation taking place across wide parts of the Soviet Union that could result in further Soviet troop reinforcements showing up in Germany at some stage. Moreover, the second dispatch sent to him, hot on the heels of the first, spoke of what he called ‘interesting developments’ in Moscow…

…after all that had happened since late last November, there were actually few gasps around the secure room where the NSC was meeting when they heard that latter piece of news whereas a year ago such news certainly would have caused great shock.





Two Hundred & Four

Operation CERTAIN VENGEANCE was an American-only affair; USAF assets alone were used in the air attack against East Berlin with many of those beforehand and afterwards returning to their NATO assignments with 2ATAF, 3ATAF and 4ATAF. Carlucci had been instrumental in conceiving the mission before Bush authorised it and the strategic bombing was planned by his senior people at the Raven Rock facility in Pennsylvania where the operational side of the Department of Defence had transferred to rather than those ‘out in the field’ forward in Europe. For several weeks now, since West Berlin had been captured and then the East Germans had taken part in the war in a major way, the mission had been postponed several times as aircraft were needed elsewhere and there were other priorities.

However, in the early hours of Tuesday 29th March CERTAIN VENGEANCE got underway.


A total of twenty-six aircraft were involved with less than a third actually conducting the direct bombing attack against Berlin itself; those others provided support for the mission. The USAF had pulled together multiple assets as CERTAIN VENGEANCE was a mission which came from the very top. The eight strike-bombers assigned for a low-level attack run on Berlin would have four fighter-interceptors covering them nearby from above while there would also be a pair of air defence suppression aircraft with them too. A trio of heavy bombers with cruise missiles being fired against further air defences would precede the air strike, four airborne tankers were assigned in support for mid-air refuelling before and after the mission, there were three stand-off electronic warfare aircraft, an AWACS aircraft for mission control and a strategic reconnaissance aircraft flying high and fast at a distance to give mission feedback.

The FB-111A’s, F-15C’s and EF-111A’s came from airbases in the UK first and were met by KC-135R tankers above the Netherlands before they transited through 2ATAF airspace. Aircrews aboard the single- & twin-seat aircraft going into East Germany airspace were nervous but still confident in their mission as they knew the level of support assigned to them. They had a full mission brief beforehand on everything that they needed to know – the targets for attack, enemy defences, the weather and emergency landing sites – and knew that their aircraft had been heavily-serviced beforehand. These fourteen aircraft flew over Holland and then above the North German Plain fast heading towards the frontlines and enemy territory beyond.

Three B-52G bombers acting as missile-carriers tonight had been launching missiles when over Belgium long before those attacking aircraft got over mainland Europe. These aircraft had come from Britain too but hadn’t flown that far forward: just to their launching points. The B-52’s had each fired a dozen AGM-86C CALM missiles, an experimental version of the usually nuclear-armed -86B ALCM with a blast-fragmentation warhead instead. Technicians from Boeing had been involved right up to the last minute with those missiles when on the ground as the CALM’s were something very new. Those missiles were out ahead of the strike aircraft and their escorts while the B-52’s were on their way home.

Providing stand-off support for the mission were those three electronic warfare aircraft and the airborne radar platform which remained back far from the frontlines too. The RC-135V reconnaissance aircraft and two EC-130H jamming aircraft had battle-staff fully focused upon the entry and planned egress of the attacking aircraft and those cruise missiles as well. Then there was the E-3B with its radar seeing several hundred miles ahead over the horizon with a very accurate radar picture of the skies.

Finally, the last aircraft involved in the mission came down towards East Germany from over Sweden and then the Baltic but was staying away from Berlin. This was a SR-71A; an unarmed supersonic strategic reconnaissance aircraft. Extra mission pods hung beneath the aircraft tonight and its flight plan was to take it high above East Germany behind Berlin to the east as the strike was conducted there so its own systems and those extra ones carried tonight could record enemy responses for further analysis later.

Getting all of these pieces together and acting together in concert had been difficult, but after two weeks of warfare, along with decades of training, the USAF knew what it was doing.


The CALM’s entered enemy airspace first flying fast and low. They were using terrain contour matching guidance rather than the planned GPS navigation which was the ultimate idea for the missile in a conventional role and they were still very experimental. Three of them had mis-fire launches from the B-52’s and another four had further failures in-flight; post-mission analysis would point to too many modifications being made to these missiles in the rush to produce them and send them across to Europe. The others soon started striking multiple targets across East Germany though and hit known strategic air defence sites far back from the frontlines. Batteries of SA-10 and SA-12 SAM’s along with radars associated with these top-tier systems were targeted by those cruise missiles flying in beneath radar coverage and so too were several airfields near Berlin where some of the première air defence interceptors were based. There weren’t enough missiles to knock out most of the SAM batteries nor shut those interceptor bases, but plenty of disruption was caused by the sudden arrival of these missiles which the enemy didn’t detect for what they were until they started impacting.

The attack aircraft went forward in two waves of seven aircraft each: four strike-bombers, a pair of fighters and a defence suppression aircraft. Those F-15’s stayed high with their radars being lit up once they were deep insideEast Germany while the versions of the Aardvark down low had swept their wings back and kept their own active systems in stand-by mode. Penetrations were made through the weakened air defences while the fighters up above were soon shooting off many air-to-air missiles: they had distant warning coming from the E-3 back over the Rhineland for assistance.

CERTAIN VENGEANCE had begun with some of the strategic SAM sites with those more modern air defence missiles being struck at though there were plenty of air defences around Berlin in the heart of East Germany. The focus with those CALM’s had been to hit defences around the approach and exit routes for the aircraft going deep, but not all of them had been hit and then there were others unknown too. Such an issue had been factored into the heavily-worked plan for this mission though and that was why there were those EC-130H aircraft flying over the Weser in northern Germany as the strike package reached Berlin. Targeted rather than blanket electronic jamming came from the antenna which festooned from the pair of aircraft and was directed against air-search radars and those of SAM systems. The lone RC-135 further back was assisting in this as the aircraft aboard that bigger aircraft were working in real-time to identify threats coming online. Therefore, a whole lot of electronic jamming was being directed against the enemy’s defences in the Berlin area.

With time being short before the Soviets and East Germans were able to react, the pair of strike packages coming in from the northwest and the southwest raced in towards Berlin. The unarmed EF-111A’s were in the lead with those stretched FB-111’s behind them carrying heavy weapons loads of bombs. The Raven’s were working hard at the tactical level with further jamming and much of that was generalised as they themselves were facing the same threats as the strike-bombers following them. The night-time sky was black up above beneath thick cloud cover which was over central parts of East Germany tonight, but from the ground there came flashes of unnatural light: tracer rounds from anti-aircraft guns and missile launches too. They raced towards all of that though as their targets lay ahead where those defences were trying to protect.

Four targets in East Berlin had been highlighted for attack, all of which were deemed of a strategic nature and were to be treated to a low-level bombing attack where it was hoped accuracy would be great and destruction assured. These were ‘regime symbols’ as far as Carlucci at Raven Rock was concerned and their bombing would be a sign to the East German regime of how determined that United States was to have its vengeance for the role played in the war by East Germany starting from the seizure of West Berlin.

The party headquarters of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the ruling communist party in East Germany, was targeted by the first two FB-111’s on their bomb run coming up from the southwest and across West Berlin into East Berlin. They faced extensive anti-aircraft fire from multiple batteries firing into the sky after warning had been given of the approach of aircraft on an attack run. Most of that fire was wildly inaccurate and the USAF aircrews had to think that no one on the ground was worrying over just where all those 57mm high-explosive shells were going to land and whether they would do more damage over all that the bombs which they carried…

The building slated for destruction had been identified from long-time intelligence and last minute satellite observation too: this information had been fed into the nav/attack computers aboard each of the strike-bombers who went to hit it. Last-minute jinxing to avoid anti-aircraft fire complicated the bomb-runs made though and therefore the attack wasn’t perfect. Mk.82 and Mk.83 bombs were dropped from the USAF aircraft and those 500lb and 1000lb bombs – ten fell away from each FB-111 – didn’t all strike their target. In the main, the front of the building and the nearby street outside suffered the immense destruction when those warheads went off aboard the bombs dropped, yet there was still much damage done and there was certain to be much propaganda achieved when the citizens of East Berlin were able to see what destruction had been wrought.

The Palast der Republik wasanother target where the propaganda effect was sought by attacking it. The remaining FB-111’s coming in from the southwest bombed that immense complex which East Germany’s ruling regime used as a showpiece of their country. Their rubber-stamp Parliament met there and it also housed many official state functions. Bombs fell atop this building too with much greater accuracy and when they went off they thoroughly wrecked it. Fires were soon started afterwards which the civilian fire service of East Berlin was soon struggling to cope with when the morning came.

The other two targets inside East Berlin were the headquarters of the Stasi in Lichtenberg and the Ministry of National Defence at Strausberg. Much of the functions which usually took place at both had been moved out before the war started though while again they were targeted for propaganda effect they were still in use in a limited fashion. Erich Mielke also had his office in the former location and a stated aim of CERTAIN VENGEANCE was to send a message to him.

One of the FB-111’s heading for the Ministry of National Defence building was shot down seconds before dropping its bombs. That aircraft with the 393rd Bombardment Squadron (part of the 509th Bomb Wing based in peacetime in New Hampshire but now flying from the UK) was hit by a Soviet Army Tunguska combined gun and missile tactical air defence system. Rapid-firing 30mm guns and short-range SAM’s had been blasted from this tracked vehicle which was crewed by East German soldiers with the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment after it and several others had recently been transferred to their control. At short-range it was a deadly system and it blew apart much of the wings and rear fuselage of the FB-111 hit.

The Ministry of Defence Building was still bombed though and so too was the Stasi headquarters; a further Tunguska system at the latter location tried but failed to hit the strike-bombers engaged there. Much destruction was again caused at each location as those bombs fell away from the aircraft overhead coming in at only a hundred feet above urban terrain. The noise of those aircraft approaching at speed was one thing, but then the blasts were even louder. Afterwards, it seemed like everyone in East Berlin had heard the attacks commence, especially as the sleeping city had already been awoken by defensive weapons firing but not conspicuously silent air raid sirens.

As the Americans started their egress, one of the EF-111’s was lost too. The F-15’s up above had been overwhelmed by so many enemy aircraft filling the skies – MiG-29’s in both Soviet and East German markings – after those targeted airbase hadn’t been closed effectively by the CALM missiles. The USAF fighters had fired off many air-to-air missiles and were almost out of such weapons that they could only give a radio warning that several enemy fighters had reached the centre of Berlin before that EF-111 fell to a short-range missile fired by a MiG-29. The remaining attacking aircraft with CERTAIN VENGEANCE engaged afterburners while still above the city to start their escape while activating jammers and deploying chaff. Anti-aircraft guns continued to fire and SAM’s were being lofted, but they managed to get away and were glad to hear a report coming from the distant E-3 that one of those MiG-29’s which had reached Berlin to strike at them seemed to have been hit by a ‘friendly’ SAM and wasn’t giving chase.

The whole strategic air defence network throughout East Germany was alive though and it was taking a lot of effort for the distant jamming efforts to cancel out their effects. The remaining aircraft of the strike packages were meant to route around enemy air defences but not all of them had been plotted and many were very effective. An SA-13 battery guarding a major Soviet Army mobile communications column for rear-area command and control, travelling north of Berlin on East Germany’s rather good road network, reacted to enemy aircraft nearby and started firing SAM’s skywards. These came fast and unexpected before anyone with the USAF – over East Germany or far away to the west – knew about it and another two FB-111’s were hit with missiles. One of those would keep flying but the other blew up mid-air in a fireball which would take the lives of the aircrew aboard.


Three of the fourteen aircraft which had made the deep strike mission failed to return though CERTAIN VENGEANCE was a major success as those losses were regarded as minimal for what was achieved. Major strategic targets had been bombed right in the hard of East Germany’s capital with such damage being of immense propaganda value to where Berliners were concerned. The SR-71 uninvolved in the actual strike had made its high-speed reconnaissance run as the bombing attack was going on and the intelligence which that brought back later would be of great value too in seeing how the enemy reacted to such a mission against Berlin.

After all, this was just going to be the first air attack against Berlin.





Two Hundred & Five

Throughout March 29th, troops with the British I Corps remained fighting on the eastern edges of Luneburg Heath and pushing for the Elbe-Lateral Canal and the Inter-German Border beyond that. They fought against cut-off enemy forces which were unable to retreat backwards with the shattered remains of the Soviet Second Guards Army and other enemy forces purposely left behind in fixed positions to delay them. With a trio of heavy divisions including many tanks – Centurion’s, Chieftain’s and Challenger’s – the British Army tried to fight a battle of manoeuvre through the broken terrain but instead much of the fighting was an infantry affair. The threat to the advancing tanks which slowed them down and relegated them to a support role came from a mass of dismounted Soviet infantry armed with man-portable missile-launchers in abundance along with plenty of towed anti-tank guns which were being fired at distance. Infantry had to move against these threats to allow the tanks to operate, but this was a slow process.

General Inge, the field commander, was left very frustrated with the slow progress of the day. He understood of course the need to root out the enemy from their plethora of temporary fixed positions, but everything was so slow. Only late last week he had led his command on that daring thrust forward from Hameln through Springe and towards Hannover tearing past the enemy but advances like these were tiresome.

Nonetheless, the British Army was advancing and driving towards the border with East Germany.


Advancing as they did on a narrow front between French forces to their north and newly-arrived Bundeswehr troops to the south, the British I Corps set about crushing all opposition before them. Artillery and air power blasted the way ahead of them, though with the latter fire support much of that wasn’t British: the RAF’s tactical air assets had suffered heavily during the conflict and there weren’t enough of them anymore in Germany to be as effective as needed.

The 7th Armoured Division was on the left-hand side of the attack. Infantry out front mainly advanced on foot though there were a few instances where they remounted their vehicles and darted forward through holes opened up. It was frustrating and hard work for these old soldiers as the enemy they encountered wouldn’t understand that the best thing for them to do would be to surrender rather than keep fighting as they were. Many of the division’s veterans had spent time here on Luneburg Heath as part of countless training exercises during their previous time with the British Army. It was different now though. The pine trees had been felled, blown up or burnt down. The seemingly endless dry, sandy soil was now nothing but mud after being churned through so many times by vehicles during recent periods of wet weather. The bogs that littered the terrain were still there yet many of them were exceptionally dangerous now as unexploded ordnance littered them after contact fused hadn’t gone off with impact. It was a blackened and miserable environment with drifting smoke always present and choking men as they tried to fight their opponents through trenches, foxholes and strongpoints. The woodland that was all across the heath, especially here in the eastern parts, was set amongst hilly ground and while the main bodies of trees were no longer standing: their remains were still there with bases of trunks still rooted into place and on the ground the rest of the trucks along with branches. As the area had been fought over for a sustained period of time, the ground was littered too with the remains of that fighting. There were even some bodies and body parts encountered by the men fighting here today and they were horrified to realise that these had been here more than a week, even up to two weeks, and greatly attacked by nature.

The Iron Division was in the centre and its regular soldiers had too seen much of Luneburg Heath in peacetime too. Two of the 3rd Armoured Division’s combat brigades had fought in the particular area where they returned to during the first week of the war when they had acted as part of the counterattack force which had been Kampfgruppe Weser. They remembered the success which they had then though the reverses suffered afterwards elsewhere were recalled too. Combat veterans as they were, the men of the Iron Division were generally young but certainly not foolhardy. They attacked the enemy stubbornly holding on in a determined and careful manner by bringing heavy weapons to bare upon their opponents. The Soviets which they encountered were in the same position as they had been when they were trapped in Hannover and did fight just as tough before being overwhelmed. It was hard going for these attacking troops especially as they were still suffering immense shortages. They had been relieved almost a week ago but then gone straight back into the attack as the division was rolled forward with few breaks. Much gear and even weapons had been abandoned with in the latter cases there being absolutely no more of certain ammunition available for those specialist weapons. Their divisional commander, Major-General Jones, wanted to be the first to reach the canal ahead, get over it and then have his men cross the border into East Germany too. With that latter aim he had, he wouldn’t be able to do that as orders stated not to, but that didn’t stop him hoping to be in a position to do so when he was finally free of not just political constraints but also the damned enemy which just wouldn’t give up when beaten…

On the right was the 4th Armoured Division. The men of the Tiger Division were all combat veterans too who consisted themselves the very best of the British Army at the moment as they had conducted BLACKSMITH to liberate Hannover and then drove on afterwards first northwards before leading the way eastwards too. They were fighting now with the river Aller on their flank where the Bundeswehr was retaking Gifhorn and on their way towards Wolfsburg, but across open countryside rather than urban and suburban terrain. The parts of the Luneburg Heath which the Tiger Division fought across today were less hilly and with fewer patches of dense if ruined woodland; there were also less boggy regions too. This gave them a greater opportunity to advance as the enemy forces which they encountered struggled to find natural defensive points which to make a successful stand at before they were blasted out of them. Soviet infantry with their man-portable weapons often found themselves unable to find suitable cover too while the bigger towed anti-tank guns that the Soviet Army was currently relying upon for defence while the main body of their surviving tank strength was reorganised were exposed as well. These factors led by terrain allowed the 20th Brigade first to reach the Elbe-Lateral Canal with the 11th & 33rd Brigade’s soon following too. Tanks had finally been leading the infantry, instead of that being the other way around as it shouldn’t have been for a major offensive drive as planned. With those tanks that reached the narrow waterway running across their line of advance came Royal Engineers rolled in the assault bridging mission. Those close support sappers were well-armed themselves and some assisted in unexpected mopping-up operations near sections of the canal to be crossed before they started moving their equipment into position. Vehicle-launched bridges had already been laid over the canal from versions of the Chieftian but the Royal Engineers parties which came forward started moving their bigger, stronger structures into place. Pre-fabricated bridge sections were being brought forward to get move of the Tiger Division over the canal before darkness came…

…but instead there was just a general alert issued. The Soviets hadn’t been withdrawing in panic but rather marshalling their forces. A stroke of luck with last minute air reconnaissance allowed that alert to be issued that gave the Tiger Division a short warning that a regiment of enemy tanks was coming their way towards their crossings. The enemy had moved probably too early, but they were coming fast and in strength. T-72’s and BMP-2’s were suddenly all over the crossing sites made across the canal on the eastern side after emerging from concealed ambush positions and massing for their strikes. NATO air power was quickly on its way, but first the Tiger Division and the Royal Engineers with them were drawn into a furious fight. The British would eventually hold as the warning given had allowed them just enough time to prepare but it had been a very close run thing. A Soviet regiment had been smashed but several hundred British soldiers and sappers had been killed while quite a few tanks and specialist engineering vehicles knocked out. Many of the crossing sites were wrecked and those that hadn’t been had still been identified to the enemy so that even after their ground attack had failed, the Soviets could still launch artillery and tactical missiles at them.


It had been a tough day’s fight for the British I Corps with an enemy which wasn’t beaten just withdrawing away and only making a real fight of it when they wanted to. The semi-successful ambush against the Tiger Division was followed by others made in the evening too against the 7th Armoured Division and the Iron Division as well. The Soviets were trying to defeat those forces fast enough to catch up with their main body of withdrawing troops seeking better defensive positions and they made the British Army pay for its advances to close up to the Inter-German Border.

Nonetheless, the day’s fighting was still a great success. General Inge was able to report back to his superior General Kenny that his troops were almost there at the entrance to East Germany now and were still combat effective ready to go further.

There were other events that were currently making anything like that impossible though; political matters. The will was there with many people from politicians to generals to go over the border, but until those leaders with the Allies could fully understand what was going on in Moscow, that would – for now – not happen.





Two Hundred & Six

Marshal Ogarkov’s coup was very different to the one which his predecessor Marshal Akhromeyev had taken part in less than four months before.

This time there were no hit teams ambushing targets in their beds in the dead of night for elimination and then a fabrication for public consumption of what had occurred. Instead, the Soviet military made an open move to get rid of the terribly ineffective leadership which was in place in the Kremlin now that they had been dragged into an unwanted war with the aim that only acting as they did would save the Motherland. Ogarkov felt that he had good cause and was sure of much support… if not then the Soviet Army had the guns to make any fight suicidal for anyone trying to stop the military take-over he planned.


Chebrikov wasn’t necessarily the problem. He was a cruel and ruthless murderer, but since the war had started he had been hiding in his bunker apparently fearful of assassins from the GRU coming to get him. He had no more influence over the KGB despite remaining as that organisation’s chairman. The central government had come to a halt with the war being fought and so he had no control or support among the Party. The Soviet people had no love for him and few had any idea as to what influence he had as their leader. The military which Ogarkov was the professional head of despised Chebrikov and were far from happy fighting for him.

Ogarkov had Soviet Army officers – captains and majors from the Moscow Garrison who he knew were reliable – take control of the Kremlin with ease as they led a small but well-armed force there and Chebrikov was removed from his bunker after his own bodyguards had been intimidated into standing down and surrendering the madman underground. Chebrikov had been taken away and shot without any form of trial as Ogarkov knew that to try to detain him would only lead to further problems down the road. What use was a blabbering fool of a Chekist to anyone anyway? Elsewhere, those idiots who were allies to Chebrikov in the top levels of the KGB and the senior people from his nemesis at the GRU were also removed from their places or work (the coup took part during the afternoon) to face summary execution too at the most convenient time. Ogarkov had gone after people who were fighting their own war against the West and hurting the necessary attempts of the military to do so.

Away from Moscow, orders went out to Soviet military forces at home and deployed abroad to detain senior KGB and GRU personnel deployed with military formations in political supervision and intelligence positions. Those orders weren’t even hidden as they were broadcast quite openly so that there was little need for sneaking around. Those targeted for detainment heard what was about to happen to them and many took the wise course of surrendering while proclaiming their innocence. A few men tried to avoid being held by the soldiers moving against them, but these were doomed attempts and would only see their lives being lost. These orders from Ogarkov were in his name and were welcomed everywhere they went. For more than two weeks, the armed forces had been fighting against the West but had had their efforts hampered by those spooks. The KGB and the GRU were meant to be supporting them, but instead only caused obstruction and were blamed for the many, repeated failures… even if many of those weren’t their fault. In addition, there were countless senior military men who had failed to achieve objectives when fighting the enemy or had been accused of defeatism. The KGB had been shooting many of those while the GRU had been seen as the ones responsible for much of that by blaming those generals for their own failings. Again, this wasn’t always true, but it was what the military wanted to believe and thus acted upon when Ogarkov started issuing his orders.

Those murders at the highest levels and the arrests out ‘in the field’ had left both intelligence organisations leaderless. There remained tens of thousands of personnel, many of them well-armed, spread from Germany to the Kola, from the Caucasus to Central Asia and from the depths of Siberia to Vladivostok. These spooks were all important in keeping order throughout the state, making sure that puppet allies stayed under control and sometimes even doing what they were meant to in supporting the military operations underway. They couldn’t all be stripped of their positions or shot out of hand, especially not with the war going on: that would cause a civil war and while the military would win that, it would certainly allow for the defeat of the Soviet Union abroad which Ogarkov was trying to preserve. He needed these people no matter how much he despised their now removed leaders and the manner in which those middle and lower level ranks of the organisations conducted their business.


The Soviet Union was now in the hands of Marshal Nikolai Vasilyevich Ogarkov.

He was seventy years old and a career military officer. Recognised as a supreme strategist in the theory of modern warfare, he had first come to the attention of the West following the downing of KAL007 in 1983: that South Korean airliner shot down with the loss of two hundred and sixty-nine people aboard. Ogarkov had given statements to the media concerning that where this Soviet action, seen by many as an act of cold-blooded murder, had been defended. Intelligence sources in the West had got hold of some of his later writings and these had been read by military figures who believed that they would one day have to fight the Soviet military.

Ogarkov was a Russian – not Soviet – patriot who believed wholeheartedly that the uniformed service of the state which he served were the ultimate guardians of stability in his country when faced with the traditional enemies of his nation. His own politics would be deemed right-wing in the West though such a concept in the Soviet Union was different. Ogarkov was an authoritarian who deemed political compromise, democracy as practised in the West and any form of opposition to the traditional Russian way of life as something to be violently fought against until utter defeat.

He had no wish to be a dictator himself though had come to realise that Chebrikov wasn’t up to that task. Apart from that foolish Chekist, who else was there who would lead the Soviet Union at this time where its military forces were on the verge of defeat? There was only himself, he had decided, and his sense of patriotism drove him to act as he did. He would lead his country because there was no one else that he thought could do that at the moment in an adequate manner. As to the war which the country had become embroiled in, he was determined that that should be finished as soon as possible, yet on Soviet terms. Those armies of the West which were fighting against his country were massing to eventually invade the necessary security zone of Eastern Europe established more than forty years ago and then enter the Motherland afterwards. To defeat this attempt at a second Barbarossa, Ogarkov was going to lead his country to defeat them with military means. The West had larger economies, surrounded the Motherland and also would have a long-term advantage in convention military power, but for now there was an enormous amount of military potential untapped within the country which hadn’t been put to use by Chebrikov. Ogarkov decided that he was going to unleash this all against the West and defeat them on the battlefield before, with time, the enemy could effectively marshal their numerical strength and finish off the Soviet Union. The war would be fought on the territory of other nations too, far from the Motherland where it had been in the first Barbarossa.

The orders were sent out once Ogarkov was sure of his position for the biggest mobilisation since June 1941 of the remaining military might that the Soviet Union had and meanwhile Ogarkov prepared to show his countrymen what a leader they had now. He had never been comfortable in front of the camera, so Ogarkov spoke to his country on the radio: what he regarded as an excellent medium of communication. The Motherland’s new leader called on his people – civilians and the military alike – to fight for their freedom from planned hostile foreign occupation. He called for a total war on behalf of the people and promised them that he would lead them in that to ultimate victory, one which would be achieved soon as well.

Afterwards, Ogarkov set about doing that and in the correct manner too now that the military was in charge and free from those previously restricting political considerations.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Seven

Making certain that the war would be won for the Soviet Union which he now led was Marshal Ogarkov’s priority; everything else was secondary. He had to defend his country at all costs and there could be no allowances made. The threat which came from the West, now full of vengeance, could only be stopped with a full commitment to combat rather than what had been in many instances a somewhat half-hearted attempt beforehand.

The war had been a disaster; there was no getting away from that. After the period of time that had elapsed up until now, the West should have been defeated on the battlefield and be now pleading for a ceasefire while offering all sorts of concessions. Ogarkov was convinced that if Chebrikov had listened to him from the start, then Soviet armies would still be on the offensive rather than the defensive as they now were. Too much attention had been focused upon politics though and the state within a state which was the intelligence services had been allowed to do as they wished. The West was powerful but at the same time it was divided and there was weakness there.

Everything had gone wrong though with RED BEAR and there didn’t seem to be any way to fix that situation now. Ogarkov no longer cared for the initial reasoning of the war taking place; all he was focused upon was ending it as soon as possible and achieving the best outcome for his country. The only way that he could see his nation emerging from all of this was to achieve victory on the battlefields of Eastern Europe. That was where the Motherland would be defended from invasion and where the armies of the West would have to be fought to a standstill. He anticipated this not being an easy task yet at the same time believed that it would work, especially under his personal direction.

As to the future, Ogarkov didn’t see himself as some sort of Bonaparte-type figure: he only wanted to lead his country to victory in this war. He had already identified someone in particular who he thought best to lead the nation after a successful conclusion though considered it rather dangerous to propel that man to power now fearing that his chosen candidate would end up being overthrown before the war commenced. The troika which had removed Gorbachev had then fought amongst themselves with Marshal Akhromeyev being murdered first and then Chebrikov killing Shcherbytsky… Ogarkov had then moved against Chebrikov. This pattern would only be continued unless someone put a stop to that using strength and such strength could only come following military victory.

Of course, before his visionary future plan to save his country in the meantime could take place, there was a war to be won first. Ogarkov had identified five key war-winning measures that he would personally oversee.


Firstly, military efforts in the Soviet North-West and in the Far East would continue to try to defend the country in those locations as much as possible. Offensive military assets had been near destroyed and much damage had been done to those defensively orientated, but the nation needed to be protected by every means possible against further air and naval attacks. Ogarkov had no fear that the West would invade with troops into the North-West or the Far East at this point in time; such moves would only come unless the Soviet position in Europe had collapsed and they were already marching on Moscow via Germany and Poland. His orders were for the Soviet military forces in those areas to hold out and protect Soviet soil as best as they could. In addition, in some of Chebrikov’s more lucid moments before he had descended into madness, Ogarkov had been assured that KGB influence operations had made the West understand that to directly invade Soviet soil would bring about a nuclear response. Maybe in time that threat would lose credibility among them, especially if their armies were tearing across Poland, but for now Ogarkov was certain that Murmansk or Vladivostok weren’t going to be captured by occupying troops.

The intelligence services which had caused so much damage to the war effort would remain active despite Ogarkov despising them as he did. However, he had successful neutered them at the top and knew for a while they would be subservient to his wishes. He wanted them to do what they were supposed to do not what they had been doing. Ogarkov sent firm instructions that the KGB was to maintain the political security of the Soviet Union and serve the countries interests in helping to secure control over the populations behind the frontlines on Europe’s battlefields. Moreover, the Third Chief Directorate with its KGB officers assigned to Soviet military units for political control was being disestablished with immediate effect. As to the GRU, Ogarkov wanted them preforming the role in which he thought they should be doing too: supporting the military efforts in their reconnaissance role. He told the surviving senior people within that organisation that they were to cut their ties with their operatives abroad at once and focus all attention on the tactical situation at the frontlines in Europe.

To win the military conflict in Eastern Europe so as to bleed the West dry, Ogarkov had mobilised all of those military forces across major parts of the country. Regulars and reservists held back beforehand – including half of the forces down in the Trans-Caucasus Military District which were defending against a Turkish attack that was never going to materialise – were to be pushed into East Germany, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere to defeat NATO in its counter-invasion. With these being tasked for a defensive mission, Ogarkov knew they wouldn’t need the extensive service support assets which weren’t there to supply them seeing as they only had to hold ground not take it: he believed that these troops he was forming-up into improvised field armies and sending into Eastern Europe could hold the lines there.

The supply problems across Eastern Europe which were being exasperated by external factors were going to be solved, Ogarkov had determined. He had committed the necessary personnel to make that happen who all had firm instructions that ammunition, fuel and food must get through to his soldiers fighting at the frontlines. The stocks of these were available but getting them where they were needed and on time too had become an immense problem that was having a disastrous effect upon wartime operations. Ogarkov wanted those supply links fixed with those originally tasked to do that job replaced wholescale, resistance from the Poles in particular to this movement which was becoming a problem ruthlessly crushed and also a reinforcement of air defences behind the frontlines to stop NATO air attacks destroying those supply links. Poland was seen as the key to the supply problems and Ogarkov made certain that his orders were firm that where the difficulties were present there was to be nothing to stop them anymore no matter what affect it had there in that country.

Lastly, Ogarkov gave the order for the Soviet Fourth Guards Army to finally commence their offensive which he had long been in heated discussions with Chebrikov about. In western Hungary, the Soviet Army had assembled a trio of combat divisions into this field army there ready to defend against any NATO moves to use Austria as a springboard for an attack deep into Eastern Europe. Such a sneak offensive from there didn’t look possible with assistance from the Austrians when an examination of how Vienna was behaving was undertaken, yet Ogarkov knew that if he was in the shoes of NATO’s senior generals in the West then he would be thinking about using Austrian territory with or without their consent. From there, NATO forces could move deep into Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Ogarkov had for some time been now wanting to counter that by moving first with the lone division left there from the pre-war Southern Group of Forces and the two reserve divisions from across the Ukraine moved in afterwards; after his assumption of power he decided to go ahead with not so much the fear of the West moving first but to knock them off balance. The weak Hungarian Army would be instructed to follow the Soviet Fourth Guards Army in their attack due to the strong numbers of Austrian soldiers fully mobilised across their nation and the enemy would have no choice but to move their own forces into that Alpine nation. Again this would go with the strategy of fighting the West on their territory and as far away from Soviet soil as possible. Ogarkov had issued the orders for the Soviet Fourth Guards Army to strike as soon as possible and much of their supplies were going to come from the Hungarians for the time being too.


There was no hesitation in Ogarkov when he issued these instructions, just as there hadn’t been when he had given the go ahead for his coup to depose Chebrikov. He considered himself a soldier and a patriot who was only doing his best for the Motherland. Russia came first even before the rest of the Union for him though he still wanted to maintain the grip that his people had upon their necessary empire. When foreign soldiers had been on Russian soil beforehand they had caused untold suffering to the Russian people as so he would do everything that it took to make sure that didn’t happen again.

A major part of ensuring that if his strategy for defeating NATO on the battlefields of Eastern Europe didn’t work was the posturing which he had the Soviet nuclear arsenal undertaking. Everything he knew about the West told him that that divided as they were, they would never launch a nuclear attack first. They might be fearful of one commencing under his orders, yet they wouldn’t land the first blow. If everything else failed, the Soviet Union was always going to survive due to its nuclear arsenal.

Ogarkov had no fears over that such a certainty wouldn’t be enough to ensure that the endgame he desired would be the result of this war.






Two Hundred & Eight

‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’…

Initially, when the first attempt was made at PORTER three days beforehand, the British military forces assigned along with their allies had taken a knock back in trying to land in Denmark and open up the Baltic for exploitation. The defences hadn’t been scouted properly resulting in the near disaster of landing in a well-defended area and the subsequent loss of the American battleship New Jersey too. Moreover, contact hadn’t been made with the Danish Resistance on the ground either and such an oversight where it wasn’t realised how strong such a force was had cost Britain dear. With hindsight, such mistakes were plain to see and everyone agreed how easily they could have been avoided.

This time, however, the British had done their homework and were sure that they were much better prepared for their mission. This wasn’t Norway where the then separate elements of the 6th Light Division had been operating in friendly territory where the enemy held onto isolated outposts: instead, Denmark was fully occupied and would be a much tougher task to take on. A great deal of reconnaissance was undertaken across the northern reaches of Jutland in the past few days and special forces soldiers had been sent in ahead to not only act as pathfinders but to scout where ‘friendly’ local armed militias were operating too so that contact would be made with them. Long-range missile defences had been located from the air and then attacked with intelligence flowing back that the vast majority of such mobile assets had been knocked out and the remainder too busy trying to hide their location rather than defend the occupied coast.

Moreover, the delay in the landing operation had brought an increase in time to prepare in other fashions too with further fire supporting assets being gathered – though none which could truly replace the New Jersey – as well as better arrangements made for the transport of the troops assigned for the assault. PORTER had been put together in a rush and there were still going to be problems that would crop up, though now it was hoped that as many wouldn’t be of a serious nature as they would have been beforehand.


Due to local tidal conditions, the Royal Marines – moving ahead of their sworn enemies the Paras – landed on the coast of Jutland an hour before dawn. They arrived along the beaches north of Frederikshavn just as they had planned to on the Sunday in landing craft though also came ashore by helicopter too in places with anti-armour teams being dropped off at key points. The darkness hampered the assault in some ways by forcing carefulness and thus slowing things down, but it was certain that their enemy on the ground from the East German Army was in no way prepared for an assault to come at such a time.

The Royal Marines named their assault beaches RED, GREEN, BLUE and YELLOW for ease of operations and their inland sites were numerically coded following the BLACK keyword. Reinforced company groups of rifleman came off fast landing craft along those beaches while helicopters raced inland to deposit more naval commandoes at the BLACK sites. BLUE beach was the scene of a horrible surprise when anti-personnel landmines were stumbled into in the darkness while at BLACK #3 a nearby anti-aircraft gun blasted several Sea King helicopters with many 23mm shells. These instances of resistance were painful but they weren’t going to defeat the landing operation here.

Those assault landing craft and helicopters had raced back to the Royal Navy amphibious group offshore to get more men for a return while there were other vessels assisting too. The amphibious capability of Britain in terms of assault shipping had been badly hurt earlier in the war yet with the time to marshal assets, the Royal Navy group had got some help. There were some Norwegian vessels present ferrying troops and equipment ashore and so too were refugees from the once mighty localised amphibious fleets of the Danish and West Germany navies. The five Berbe-class ships crewed by Germans were especially useful with their shallow bottoms and their beaching capabilities so that vehicles could drive straight off them.

The whole area north of Frederikshavn was soon swarming with Royal Marines. They were getting air support from a couple of RAF Harriers operating from the decks of the carrier HMS Invincible nearby and knew that for the time being that ship would stay there protected by its own RN Sea Harrier’s for air defence. Eventually that carrier would have to move to more open waters but with it being less than thirty miles away at the time of the assault many missions could be flown from the aircraft based aboard. Close air support missions were called-in by the Royal Marines as they moved inland and while such attacks weren’t always brilliantly effective they did raise the morale of the attacking naval commandoes.

The local defences near the landing beaches came in the form of the East German tank battalion based at the village of Elling. There was infantry in Frederikshavn, but those tanks were the major threat to the Royal Marines getting ashore and securing the harbour facilities in the area including those in that bigger town as well as at the smaller Strandby. Harrier’s had dropped cluster bombs across the garrison that the East Germans had established moments before the landing stages of PORTER begun and then those Sea King helicopters flown by Royal Navy crews had started to drop of men from R Company, 41 Commando nearby. These were veterans of the fight against Soviet tanks at Skibotn and had shown their worth there in engaging such vehicles.

Moving on foot away from their landing sites where the departing helicopters had dropped them off, these Royal Marines took upon East German T-72’s like they had smashed Soviet T-80’s. MILAN missiles were fired first at distance and then Carl Gustav rockets close-in. The East Germans tried to fight back yet their manoeuvrability was hampered by unexploded cluster bomb munitions and the fact that their enemy had somehow predicted their deployment routes away from their garrison… those SBS soldiers already present had already taken a look at the ground and observed track marks from a recent deployment exercise conducted.

Then there came the rumble of massed gunfire from offshore that was similar to a battleship opening fire. The New Jersey might have been gone, but to partially make-up for that loss there was the presence of the West German gun-armed cruiser Deutschland. This was a training vessel for the Bundesmarine and had spent the war up until this point hiding along the Norwegian coast as while a big vessel the Deutschland had few weapons, especially for self-defence in the modern age. Yet she did carry a quartet of 100mm rapid-firing guns and was a capable military asset because of that. Those guns started firing at targets around Elling and such shots were guided by men on the ground.

The actual effects of the rounds weren’t that spectacular and those 100mm shells only knocked out lighter support vehicles and killed men rather than destroying tanks. Nonetheless, the East German tank crews initially panicked at the naval gunfire and then the men stalking them on the ground with man-portable weapons. More and more T-72’s were destroyed or disabled. TOW missiles started coming from Lynx helicopters also flown by Royal Marines – 3rd Commando Brigade Air Squadron – and some of those had successful strikes against further tanks. Eventually, the East Germans were pinned down and some crews started to abandon their T-72’s. It would take some time to finally subdue the rest of the garrison but for the time being the armoured threat to the landing beaches was over with.

Further troops came ashore as the skies got lighter and above the Royal Marines those Sea Harrier’s on fighter patrol found themselves engaged by a flight of Polish MiG-21’s scrammed to intercede in the landing. Despite coming low and fast behind what they thought was capable electronic jamming, a NATO-manned Sentry airborne radar aircraft flying out of Norway detected that attack long before the Poles could get close. The Sea Harrier’s were vectored into ambush positions and then started launching missiles on cue. Several MiG-21’s went down but a couple got away with fast evading; one in particular went fast over the landing area and engaged its cannon in a crazed attack as it sped past. A Sea King laden with further Royal Marines as reinforcements was shot down and crashed with many men aboard becoming casualties, yet even this couldn’t stop the arrival of the full brigade into Jutland.

An effort was being made to spread out from the landing beaches and to take over a large portion of enemy-held territory as fast as possible. Frederikshavn was approached though strong resistance was met at first before helicopter support was called-in and more gunfire from the Deutschland and Royal Navy ships offshore. Of greater importance for the time being though was to make a physical connection with the Paras landing near Aalborg.


5th Airborne Brigade’s contribution to PORTER was their landing at Aalborg Airport. The fire-fight a few days ago near here which had caused their Pathfinder Platoon to be wiped out when unfortunately engaging members of the Danish Resistance had put the mission to recapture this facility at threat, yet the airport was too important for its position and the fact that parts of the facility had been under repair after initially being wrecked in a deliberate sabotage effort when organised Danish military resistance on Jutland had collapsed. An SAS team held back in the UK for strategic missions had been sent to Aalborg to replace those dead pathfinders and they marked out landing zones for the air-drop of 1 PARA into the area as well as making sure that this time no eager locals interfered.

Just as dawn broke and following on from an air attack coming from RAF Tornado strike-bombers, Paras started jumping from low-flying Hercules aircraft near Aalborg Airport. The mobile SAM systems which the East German occupying troops and Soviet Air Force ground troops operated had been bombed and also jammed negating them, but there were many launches of man-portable shoulder-mounted SAM’s against the transports. One Hercules was struck and had part of a wing torn off which would mean a flight to nearby Sweden rather than back to the UK so an emergency landing could be made in that Scandinavian country, but apart from that those short-range SAM’s were thankfully ineffective enough to not disrupt the parachute assault.

The available light and favourable weather allowed 1 PARA to successfully hit their correct landing zones. They touched down to the north of the airport in open fields marked out for them and were hastily formed up by their officers. The battalion of riflemen came with light equipment but a lot of weaponry for fire support, with mortars and big machine guns being dropped alongside the men. They set off quickly to attack and seize the airport ready for the rest of 5th Airborne Brigade to arrive through there.

Danish Resistance fighters attacked Aalborg Airport on cue and showed great courage in attacking defended positions to keep the enemy occupied. There had been worries on the part of the British over their ability to make a stand-up fight, yet the civilian militia in this area had recently been stiffened by a few professionals who had arrived when the SAS had the day before. These special forces soldiers were from the Jaegerkorpset – the ‘Hunters Corps’ – and were trained in all sorts of unconventional warfare roles. Many of their comrades had been lost in action during the war but most success had been had working with stay behind missions. The unorganised Resistance had shown its worth during the conflict though and the Jaegerkorpset was starting to assist them in places.

By the time the garrison was fully deployed and getting ready to use their mobility and heavy armour in defence of the airport to take on the Resistance, the first of the Paras started to arrive in the area and coming from the opposite direction. Outposts spotted the British approach and the word went out but there was little time to get ready for an attack which 1 PARA was now excelling at after such operations in Norway. There would be a fierce fight for Aalborg Airport with the defenders being outmanned, trapped in one place and then having to suffer under the barrage of air attacks coming against them.


There were plenty of American aircraft in the skies above Jutland with the US Navy and the US Marine Corps committing aircraft to support their Operation BLACK PYTHON along the western coastline. British aircraft weren’t as numerous but were still present as Invincible was offering support for the ground troops employed and then there were also some aircraft flying long distance. Among those coming from afar were some older aircraft wearing the colours of the Royal Navy but based in the southern reaches of Norway.

Royal Navy operated aircraft and helicopters were flown by the Fleet Air Arm (FAA). Before war commenced and during the LION preparations for the conflict, the FAA had mobilised aircraft from storage, from training formations and trials units to reinforce those already in active service so that a large combat force could be assembled to support wartime operations. There were many helicopters serving aboard plenty of ships and then almost every single Sea Harrier naval fighter had ended up flying from the three aircraft carriers sent to the Norwegian Sea. Soviet raketonosets had then blasted the Illustrious and the Ark Royal on the war’s second day and the wrecks of such ships had destroyed many FAA Sea Harrier’s. There had been no more available and the air group aboard the Invincible had been left with a slowly-dwindling supply of these fighters to defend the Royal Navy at sea.

Some fixed-wing aircraft remained in FAA service though and these didn’t initially see combat action as they were deemed incapable of such in the high-threat environment encountered. French-built Falcon-20and Jetstream aircraft built by British Aerospace were flown with the Fleet Requirements & Air Direction Unit (FRADU) to allow pilots to gain flight experience over water. These had a wartime role in maritime surveillance around the British Isles and had been doing such a thing to the west and south where the threat axis from enemy aircraft was less but it was thought that small ships might try to land enemy commandoes. Also with the FRADU were a total of twenty-six attack-fighters: subsonic Hawker-built Hunter’s. These aircraft were arguably twenty years out of date and operated in the training role with the FRADU. Their armament had long been removed and there was no capability for the operation of modern electronic warfare equipment.

Nonetheless, with Britain being short of everything at the moment and the FAA having taken the losses which it had, just under half of those Hunter attack-fighters (the GA11 variant) had been hastily fitted with gun & rocket pods and sent to Norway. They were meant to support the Royal Navy in engaging small enemy surface vessels though had yet to see action in such missions with the enemy having the remains of their Combined Baltic Fleet kept back to the south of Zealand. The Americans had assured the British that their carrier-based aircraft had eliminated that Soviet missile battery that had destroyed the New Jersey and then further hit other coastal defence missile sites that the enemy had established in Denmark too. There was plenty of photographic intelligence to point to this and the US Navy had the motive to destroy such targets as they had their BLACK PYTHON operation ongoing as PORTER was.

Some of those Hunter attack-fighters had still been assigned on the counter-missile patrol just in case and that turned out to be a very wise decision indeed.

A pair of these aircraft were racing along the eastern coast of Jutland during the PORTER landing operations. They were at a low altitude and burning up much of the fuel carried in their external tanks and soon to turn towards Sweden where they were meant to be refuelled on the ground before a return to Norway. Eventually the plan was for the Hunter’s to be based in Jutland, probably at Aalborg but maybe elsewhere like at Karup if the Americans didn’t make it a US-only base, but for now they had a limited range. The pilots of the two aircraft were visually scanning the coastline during their dash and looking for mobile radar station rather than what they thought would be concealed missile batteries.

They got lucky and detected a small convoy of wheeled vehicles near a place called Als. There was no civilian road traffic in Jutland, it was all military, and gunfire erupted towards them from what was thought to be an anti-aircraft gun. That fire wasn’t accurate though and the Hunter pilots were both instructors with plenty of experience and much gusto. Their aircraft broke formation and split up while heading inland to come back again towards the convoy before it would try to scatter. Their guns and rockets were armed and they expected to do a lot of damage to what was thought to be a radar platform along with communications and security personnel. Instead though, as they made a quick and sudden attack run, it was realised that they had found some missile-launchers instead. That would mean that a radar vehicle supporting these was elsewhere, but this was still a better target. 20mm cannons roared and plenty of 68mm SNEB rockets were fired before the attack was broken off. A few SAM’s chased them but the Hunter’s went back down low just above the waves and rocketed away towards distant Sweden.

It hadn’t been those brand-new Slingshot missiles engaged – as those had been destroyed by the Americans – but rather some older Sepal missiles travelling into a launch position. The platoon engaged and smashed by the FAA attack-fighters was part of the surviving portion of a battery with Soviet Coastal Troops and getting ready to follow-up on intelligence about NATO ships in the Kattegat. Another platoon elsewhere was meant to join them in a massed attack of supersonic missiles which while not guaranteeing success when faced with NATO jamming surely would have achieved something. Instead, that attack as planned now wasn’t going to be taking place.

The Hunter’s had done their part very well indeed.


Meanwhile, British forces continued to arrive in and take charge of northern parts of Jutland. Nearby was also seeing the US Marines make their own landings too…





Two Hundred & Nine

At first glance on a map, the Danish and West German coastline along the North Sea appeared perfect for a wide range of landing operations to take place there. Many locations seemed like they would be suitable for the US Marines to get ashore and advance across the narrow stretch of land to the Baltic shore beyond and therefore cutting off all enemy forces located north of such a drive. A better look at the map would tell a different story though, one which would first be evident by the lack of ports along that western shoreline. Those were located out to the east and on the Baltic and not facing the Atlantic. Instead, what the western coast of Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein had was mud… and lots of it.

The waters offshore were known as the Wadden Sea and they extended all the way up from the coast of the Netherlands eastwards to Hamburg and then northwards up along the Danish shoreline. There were many beaches with seaside resorts present, but then there were the extensive mudflats too. These were hidden and exposed by tidal activity as well as being well-marked in many places. Nonetheless, while channels leading to many ports, especially down towards the south, had long been cleared for shipping, further northwards this was not always the case. The mudflats could be overflown by helicopters and the channels traversed by landing craft, yet their constricting presence made them unattractive for naval gunfire support missions for landing operations that warships would bring and also allow for the enemy to predict the courses of heavily-laden ships bringing in supplies. The US Marines couldn’t go into combat in a full-scale landing operation through areas where those offshore mudflats were in they wanted to pull off their mission without taking what were expected to be heavy casualties.

However, once the mudflats came to an end there was the Danish port city of Esbjerg. The harbour here was deep-watered and sheltered from the rough sea swells and those mudflats were some distance away. There were extensive inland communications links away from Esbjerg as this was a major port with peacetime sea links to Britain and elsewhere along the North Sea coast. Jutland was narrow at this point and the Baltic shore was very close by on the other side. There had been some damage done to that port by evacuating Danish troops in the war’s first week as their country was overrun, but the facility was still relatively intact and would certainly suit NATO’s purposes. As to the defenders, elements of the East German 7TD had been identified along with some reserve infantry units which had come up from Hamburg; this wasn’t a strong opponent and there had hardly been any fixed defensive works constructed either that the US Marines would have to overcome.

All in all, a landing around Esbjerg was very appealing for the US Marines and BLACK PYTHON was something desired at the highest levels for the strategic opportunities a landing in Jutland presented, especially if it could be done with haste and with little friendly casualties.


The 5th Marine Division was a wartime ad hoc formation put together in a hurry. It lacked basic administrative elements that a peacetime formation would have and there was little unit cohesion where officers and men were used to serving alongside each other. It’s various elements were composed of retired riflemen along with reservists and those who filled staff and training billets. In addition, it was understrength in combat formations as well as combat support units. The equipment fielded was old and often mismatched.

Despite these problems, the 5th Marine Division was still capable of the mission assigned to it in conducting a landing operation on the Danish coast. The enemy forces were similarly weak in numbers and it was certain that those East Germans expected to be encountered didn’t have the motivation and morale that the US Marines assigned did. There was plenty of fire support available and the Marine Riflemen knew that. They were keen and eager to get into combat, especially with the news that three quarters of the regular US Marines were sitting on their behinds and twiddling their thumbs in the Pacific, the Middle East and the Turkish Straits while the 2nd Marine Division had been heavily engaged in Norway. To show the world what the US Marines could do was something that the men making up the 5th Marine Division were pretty eager to do.

It was put up or shut up time.

Amphibious shipping to support them had come from the Norwegian Sea in part though mainly from the reserves along the US East Coast. Recently-retired and stored vessels had been hastily-crewed and sailed across the North Atlantic; carried in them had been assault landing craft and helicopters too. Off the coast of southern England, the 5th Marine Division met up with those ships and then the convoys of vessels headed towards Esbjerg under air cover supplied by the carriers America and Kennedy.


The landing at Esbjerg was conducted with two main assaults commencing either side of the city to the northeast and the southwest. Regimental Landing Team 28 (RLT 28 – the reformed 28th Marine Regiment) conducted their landings via their assault craft in the former area with the aim of moving into the city slowly and taking on the expected stand that the East Germans would make there. CH-53A Sea Stallion heavy-lift helicopters flown by Marine Reservists from Dallas brought in towed 155mm howitzers to selected firing positions and also much ammunition for those guns too so that RLT 28 wouldn’t be alone.

A bigger landing with many more troops involved, especially in the first wave rather than in the build-up fashion to the north, came in the southwest with RLT 26 & RLT 27. These three-battalion task forces arrived on beaches and moved in-land fast towards several sites identified as garrisons where the East Germans were. Marine Hornet’s flying from the US Navy carriers offshore had already hit those locations but there was a fear that such attacks might not have been successful as they looked on gun camera footage. The enemy had had a long time to dig-in here and these were professional soldiers too.

Several outposts were engaged on the way as the US Marines moved inland and they took on those quickly as electronic warfare teams with the Marine Riflemen reported many radio calls being made from such enemy positions. Such haste turned out to be the best of decisions as there was soon a lot of artillery fire coming from inland towards the direction from where the US Marines had landed. Counterbattery fire was plotted to eliminate such guns so far yet unseen but that was never going to be immediate.

There was air activity in the skies above the Marine Riflemen on the ground. They had their armed Cobra helicopters acting in support, those Hornet’s flown by fellow US Marines and then US Navy aircraft flying missions too. Opposition came from short-range East German Army air defence systems which couldn’t always be jammed and then there were some Soviet fighters that made an appearance during the early stages of BLACK PYTHON too. The aim was to keep those Soviet aircraft from getting either at the troops on the ground or at the landing craft heading back to the amphibious ships too. Missiles criss-crossed the skies and both sides too casualties in the air, yet the landings were still going unmolested.

An understrength battalion of tanks came ashore behind the Marine Riflemen and were racing to catch up with them. These were up-armoured M-60’s with the 5th Marine Tank Battalion, another brand-new unit. They were careful in crossing the beach in case it was mined and then moved inland behind the Marine Riflemen they were to support. The Baltic shoreline far in the distance was where they were heading towards, though that would be after much fighting had been done first.


A side operation with BLACK PYTHON was the landing made by a company detached from one of RLT 28’s battalions. Using helicopters, these US Marines arrived on Sylt which was an island-shaped peninsula in the far north of West Germany. German Territorial troops had withdrawn here early in the war with a view to trying to hold on against all the odds. An initial attempt to push them out had been repulsed and they had managed to hold on here. The causeway linking Sylt with the mainland was blockaded and the West Germans present here who were on their own had used their extensive supply of artillery and anti-aircraft guns to hold out.

The small airstrip was judged by the US Marines to be suitable for their own operations with some improvements made as it would sit right on their flank. They moved troops there first this morning with their assault into Jutland though engineers and then aviators would be following them soon afterwards.

The landing on Sylt was a firm success though the Germans rescued there didn’t feel like they were in a position to be rescued as the US Marines treated them like they were being. These reservists had held out for a long time and their pride told them that this was a firm defensible position. Regardless of this small side issue, Sylt was now going to be a firm supporting base. The US Marines were on the European Continent to stay and Sylt would be a part of that.





Two Hundred & Ten

The invasion of Austria commenced at dawn on Wednesday March 30th.

Colonel-General Aleksey Arsenevich Demidov, the peacetime commander of the Southern Group of Forces (SGF) and now controlling the Hungarian Front, ordered the Soviet, Hungarian and Czechoslovak troops under his command forward into battle in what he personally feared was going to be a very tough fight from which few of those would end up surviving when it was all over.

The reason behind this concealed dread that the operational commander had was down to how unconventional the invasion was; typical Soviet military strategy was not to be followed with the strike across into Austria. The long-term plans which the SFG had and which had long been exercised would have seen a massive contribution from paratroopers, airmobile troops and large numbers of strike aircraft accompanying a huge ground assault. With that ground attack there would have been multiple axis’s of advance to link-up with assault troops flown forward where thousands of tanks would have been involved. Many warfighting assets would have been wasted in feints to draw away attention while there would have been an immense amount of long distance fire support to blast apart the enemy far away from the battlefield in it’s supposedly safe rear areas.

None of this happened with the attack General Demidov led into Austria. He didn’t have the manpower, he didn’t have enough aircraft and he didn’t have men to waste. His task was to get his troops deep into Austria and engage the Austrian Army – and the expected NATO troops soon to reinforce them – as soon as possible on a tight timescale so that the objective of pinning enemy attention there in the country as far away from Soviet-controlled territory as possible could be achieved.


The Soviet Fourth Guards Army led the main attack into Austria.

The three divisions assigned – the regular 254MRD and the reserve formations 50TD & 126MRD – had all been assembled in the northwest of Hungary for the past week and moved towards the border on command. Artillery, heavy mortars and rockets preceded their advance aiming to hit Austrian defences just over the border while there were also tactical missiles used to hit targets further back. On the right-hand side those two reserve formations moved after coming up from the area around Gyor and following the main roads leading directly towards Vienna. They were side-by-side in their attack rather than the tank division following the motorised rifle formation and spread over a wide area aiming to smash through enemy lines. Meanwhile, on the left came the 254MRD moving from the border salient around Sopron; General Demidov had instructed the field army commander to commit all three divisions at once rather than delay the movement of the latter as an exploitation force as he would have preferred to himself because higher orders from STAVKA demanded this mass attack.

Just as expected, the attacking Soviets ran into the best units of the Austrian Army sitting facing that expected invasion route. For weeks now the Austrians had been fearing such an attack like this and had tried their best to maintain their neutrality by diplomatic means and also making sure that their nationwide mobilisation was visible to all. That strategy hadn’t worked so it was now up to the men on the ground to do the job of defending Austria with their lives. There were four light infantry brigades organised as free-standing separate combat formations (light tanks, towed anti-tank guns and artillery were assigned) in the area of the main attack coming over border along with three regiments of Territorial troops as well. These light formations were all well-armed and dug-in well into fixed positions covered by heavy weapons to shoot into defined kill-zones. They had multiple fall-back positions and had set up mazes of traps in the form of mines and physical blockages. Civilians had been cleared from the towns and villages near the border and evacuated far back deep into Austria. The Danube Valley and Vienna were where the invader would surely advance towards and such a move was planned to be halted before it reached there.

The initial clash of arms was just as each side projected it would be. The Soviets ran right into the Austrian defences and tried to overcome them with their fire support and mobility, yet found that the Austrians were clinging tenaciously to their own territory. Only when the tactical situation demanded it did the Austrians fall back and they certainly weren’t adverse to localised counterattacks too. Man-portable anti-armour weapons fielded by autonomous anti-tank teams (using recoilless rifles as ATGM’s were banned by international treaties from Austrian service) caused chaos in areas of ground won by the attacking Soviets and the T-55’s fielded by their two reserve divisions really took the brunt of such defensive efforts. Far more artillery fire missions than planned had to be fired to blast whole areas to nothing just to kill those defenders and that ammunition expended had been tasked for later missions. Where the 254MRD attacked in a planned move to head towards Vienna from the south, those regular troops had just as many problems as the reservists. Again, they had to blast their way forward with artillery just to get anywhere and they weren’t able to overrun the defences just push them back.

Overall, the wartime strategy of Austria involved making the country very difficult and also costly for an attacker to take, especially at the outset. Its army was trained to defend the borders and there were also many fixed fortifications in place as well to assist the troops on the ground and out in the open. The turrets from tanks retired from active service with the Austrian Army littered many strategic points along the borders with plenty of thought going into their particular siting so that they would be along anticipated invasion routes. Tanks built in Britain, the United States and also the Soviet Union had been retired through the years yet their main weapons served as gun emplacements in fixed position protected from attack. Along the Austrian-Hungarian border there were many of these weapons and they were soon in the thick of the action.

What the Austrian Armed Forces didn’t have was a modern air force… and they surely needed one on the morning of the invasion. Even an adequate number of point-defence fighters, backed-up by suitable mobile ground control, would have assisted them greatly in defending their country from the damaging if limited series of air strikes which came their way. Thirty plus Saab-105O attack-fighters were in the inventory of the Austrian Air Force while the planned soon arrival of Draken interceptors from Sweden was currently on hold due to Sweden being involved in the war. These turbojet-powered aircraft were in no way capable of defending Austria and struggled to survive as the Soviets flew three times as many aircraft above Austria in the invasion’s opening hours and those were all of much better quality with superior weapons and combat systems. The Saab-105O’s were blasted out of the sky when they got airborne and the few which survived long-range missile attacks beyond visual range had no bases to return to afterwards. It was a massacre… yet it couldn’t be argued that the Austrians weren’t aware of the limitations of their tiny fleet of combat aircraft.


The troops on the ground fighting the Soviet Fourth Guards Army were of good quality and were considered to be enough to seriously delay and invasion coming along the expected invasion route. However, full mobilisation had allowed Austria to field heavier combat forces in reserve and organised in a three-brigade fashion into the 1st Panzergrenadier Division. This was a NATO-type formation well-equipped and with the best troops available. It had been assigned the counter-attacking role and was located behind those combat units right at the frontlines. The local geography of the eastern part of Austria south and east of Vienna would allow for mechanised movement towards the capital and that was where the 1st Panzergrenadier Division was waiting. A tight rein was kept on the division with its tanks and mechanised infantry by higher headquarters though it was anticipated that it would soon see action smashing into the most threatening enemy attack and tearing that apart.

Other formations of the Austrian Army were elsewhere in the country. There were many small units in static roles guarding key positions though other forces located along the border with Czechoslovakia and the rest of the Hungarian frontier, including small counter-attacking forces too.

North of Vienna, Czechoslovak reservists assigned to the Hungarian Front under General Demidov edged towards the border and over that into Austrian defences there. A bigger effort was made right to the west in the direction of Linz, yet that didn’t meet any major progress. It was hoped that the Austrians might be distracted by this and move mobile forces in that direction, yet the almost instant failure on the part of the Czechoslovak troops here wasn’t going to cause such a reaction as the border defences actually held back the invader. This truly messed up the overall operational plan to a great degree and more capable troops certainly should have been assigned there: the Soviet Fourth Guards Army was supposed to be in Linz after four or five days following a bypassing of the urban area that was Vienna and a drive up the Danube Valley towards Germany.

Such plans always looked great on paper though…

The Hungarian Army was not something feared anywhere in the West and not in the Eastern Bloc either. Hungary spent less on defence than other nations behind the Iron Curtain and the country’s living standards were thus higher than elsewhere… despite the intense political repression at home. The four Soviet divisions with the SFG pre-war were relied upon by the Hungarian leadership to defend their nation yet three of those had gone to Czechoslovakia and East Germany in the immediate build-up to World War Three erupting. Hungary had been forced to mobilise its poorly-equipped and badly-led military under Soviet instruction yet three weeks on continued exercise and preparation for combat only brought forth those failings with the men under arms and domestic troubles at home. Orders had come through from STAVKA – directly bypassing the civilian Hungarian Government – for the Hungarians to attack Austria though even with such a weak force and these were followed.

Operating as the First Hungarian Corps with a total of eight mixed-arms brigades under command, the invasion was launched from springboards around Gyaloka, Szombathely and Csorotnek. From the northernmost of the three towns a pair of Hungarian brigades were to cover the flank of the Soviet 254MRD and maybe provide manpower for attacking fixed defences which the Soviets were struggling with though that would depend upon tactical circumstances. Those other six brigades were to strike west following the roads leading into Austria with the distant city of Graz being their ultimate objective… such an aim was almost laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.

The Hungarians crashed into another pair of light infantry brigades which the Austrians fielded and who had the support of Territorial troops on the ground and more bunkers up high with tank turrets. Well-aimed fire from 105mm guns which were once mounted atop Centurion tanks did immense damage to Hungarian armoured units though so did 85mm & 90mm cannons from retired Charioteer’s and M-47’s. Hungarian military equipment was old and operated by inexperienced and badly-trained crews who even if they had wanted to be committed to this mission didn’t stand a chance. The lone heavy brigade of Austrian troops behind the forward troops remained waiting for the Hungarians to make a major effort to get far from their start-lines though very quickly there was talk of that formation going northwards instead.

There had been some morale problems with the Soviet reservists assigned to the invasion and a few isolated cases of disobedience from Czechoslovak units too immediately before and during the invasion. In these cases such incidents were quickly and harshly dealt with and examples made. Outright mutiny came from within the ranks of dozens of Hungarian units though and field police units couldn’t contain these at all. Officers were murdered, men refused to attack and groups of soldiers set off to defect en mass to their supposed enemies in Austria. Such actions were exploited by the Austrians too as their Kurassier light tanks charged forwards leading dismounted infantry into gaps made by trouble in the Hungarian lines.

The First Hungarian Corps was soon in disarray and while inside Austria and large in number, it was hardly a real threat after the trouble which erupted within its ranks and the countermoves to exploit that.


Those fears that General Demidov had right before the invasion were quickly shown to be true. Within a few hours of the cross-border attack beginning he was sure that all was lost with the mission and by midday there were no doubters among his staff of this opinion of his when he chose to make it verbal. The reports of the tough fight being put up at the border against the Soviet Fourth Guards Army and then the failures of the Hungarians on their flank told him much but then so too did the intelligence gained on what the enemy was up to. Overflying Soviet aircraft had been unable to locate the Austrian heavy force known to be waiting ready to counterattack so they could begin the process of attacking it from the air and the plan for a successful invasion depended upon such a thing. The Austrians needed to commit their heavy forces early, especially against the right flank of the Soviet Fourth Guards Army so that the stronger left flank could surge forward. The enemy wasn’t co-operating with that plan though and the Austrians were doing a very effective job of defending their country with what they already had at the border.

Matters got worse as the day went on with intelligence pointing to more capable opposing aircraft being encountered in Austrian skies. There were some NATO fighters coming down from Germany which meant that the grand strategic plan was working in that respect, but also making appearances were Italian aircraft too. These had come up over the Alps and were attacking Soviet aircraft over Austria on clear offensive missions… that wasn’t supposed to have happened at all and General Demidov knew that it wasn’t going to be fun to have to report such news back up the chain of command to STAVKA. Marshal Ogarkov had got rid of the KGB people who used to be with his headquarters as part of the Third Chief Directorate and so he didn’t have to fear being shot by a Chekist on a trumped-up charge of ‘defeatism’ yet he knew that such intervention on the part of the Italians with their aircraft would probably mean there would be troops too following them: that would be the end of the Austrian invasion and might lead to an invasion of Hungary instead.

Such a result would be the complete opposite of the whole concept of invading Austria in such a manner at this stage in the war.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Eleven

Whilst the fighting was spreading elsewhere, the vast majority of the combat taking place in World War Three remained within Germany. It was here where the massed armies of the two opposing sides were gathered and locked in their epic struggles to defeat one another.

This was where the war was going to be decided, everyone was sure, and where the vast majority of those lost in the conflict were going to meet their end.


In the northern portions of West Germany, there were two army group commands in-place there commanding NATO troops with a third on its way. In size these equated to the Front-level command structure employed by the Soviets though the armies fielded here by the Allies remained of a multi-national character, especially the British Second Army. There were American, Belgian, Portuguese and West German troops under General Kenny’s command while the French Second Army also had some West Germans with them along with a scattering of Dutch troops too who had survived the near total destruction of their previous command formations. Command problems between these combat units from different nations were few and far between due to the pre-war NATO structure and now only came about due to language problems after they had all shared combat and bled together. Units which had started the war under one headquarters were now somewhere totally different and formations with a clearly-defined structure before the first shots had been fired were now mixed-and-matched with others. There were new units which had been stood up – at the highest levels too – and then many others which had been disestablished.

The Northern Army Group had been the peacetime command formation on the North German Plain but what NATO forces were there now were almost unrecognisable after two and a half weeks of combat. Many troops remained in operational areas where they had spent their military service exercising over and therefore knew the ground well while others remained a fish out of water somewhere far from home and full of the unexpected.

General Kenny and his French counterpart were both leading their commands towards the Inter-German Border. They had political instructions to not go over that defining line, though there was pressure too coming to get as close as possible to there so that the last lingering portions of West Germany held by the enemy could be liberated. The population which had been caught the wrong sides of the frontlines was known to be suffering immensely under occupation and those West Germans needed to be liberated as soon as possible.

Moreover, there was also an unofficial race underway.

Senior military officers from several armies – in particular the British Army, the French Army and the United States Army – wanted to be the first to reach the border as a matter of pride for themselves and their organisations. Then there were the junior officers and the fighting men themselves who were all now well-aware of not only the treatment of West German civilians but also their fellow soldiers who had first fallen into enemy captivity and then been lucky enough to be rescued afterwards. Many men had returned to service though as battlefield replacements with different units and they brought with them horror stories of what the Soviets had done; some of these tales were exaggerations but many were very real indeed. The men wanted to liberate more of their fellow soldiers who remained prisoners of the enemy but they also desired a terrible vengeance too and considered the best way of doing that was to get into the enemy’s territory and give them a beating on the battlefield there.


The French Second Army was pushing up against Hamburg’s southern reaches still though avoiding the edges of the urban area and instead isolating those East German security forces encountered who were occupying the city. Fierce resistance was put up in places, yet those men who the French were combating were far from professional soldiers and all the dedication to the cause didn’t make up for the fact that they had no idea how to combat real fighting men. The French also moved eastwards towards the Elbe either side of the city; along the Elbe Estuary their moves were less contested than further upstream in the area around Luneburg. The Inter-German Border was not far away and again there were incidents where political troops from the East Berlin regime were engaged and fought against, but at the same time Soviet troops encountered here fought well too.

French tactical intelligence pointed to these being from the Soviet 3GMRD and that formation had gained a wealth of combat experience during this conflict. The Soviets were overcome with force of numbers as the French had the numerical advantage in this fight but the Soviets didn’t give in easy. They fell back to the Elbe and thus the border with the French hot on their tails aiming to reach that river but wouldn’t yield from those positions. The information concerning this unexpected development was shared up the chain of command by the French III & V Corps to their headquarters with the French Second Army, which soon afterwards was to confirm that other NATO forces were reporting the same issue in isolated but growing locations.

Throughout the day, senior NATO commanders started informing their political masters that a sudden boost of morale had infected many enemy units even with the continuing series of ongoing defeats they were suffering. It was speculated at the highest levels that this was due to Marshal Ogarkov taking over and political issues with the field formations being resolved but at the same time it was not anticipated to be in anyway generally effective overall.


The British Second Army was almost three times the size of the French-led army group on their left and operating over a much larger area. The units under command were all still engaged in chasing the retreating Soviets back towards the border though still some distance away in many places. There were plenty of enemy forces who weren’t about to roll over and be beaten nor withdraw and so the NATO forces under General Kenny’s command had to smash through them.

His British and Bundeswehr units remained along the Elbe-Lateral Canal and pushing towards the Wolfsburg area as well. Those new formations that the West Germans had put together after long being formed up in the Ruhr and the Rhineland were by now seeing action; three divisions had come under command full of old soldiers. This was the combat which many of them had been trained to fight in during their years as conscripts and afterwards thought that they had avoided when released from military service in the years leading up to the war. Now they were back in uniform and issued with older equipment – like what they were used to – and finally putting those soldiering skills which they were remembering to use. In some quarters there had been worries over whether they would be up to the job, yet General Kenny had never had a doubt about that. The NATO armies were all doing this and the West Germans were also defending their country too.

The enemy counterattack against the British I Corps yesterday had stung those assigned forces to that command greatly yet the British were recovering here. There had been many air attacks undertaken and long-range artillery missions commenced though through the Wednesday the British remained on the western side of the canal making sure their hold over the left bank was secure and building up their strength. A major push was planned for tomorrow and so before them all the necessary pieces needed to be in-place. With enough marshalled troops and plentiful fire support, once they got moving on the Thursday morning, the British Army planned to reach the Inter-German Border before anyone else could.

Operating in the area around Braunschweig and Salzgitter, and now across the narrow Oker River, the Americans were pushing forward too. Their US III Corps was still understrength and waiting reassignment to the US Third Army when that command formation along with reinforcements came into play, but before then it was advancing towards the Inter-German Border. Their troops got into a major fight around the forest at Oderwald that was particularly vicious and costly, yet they were still winning engagement after engagement, if slower than beforehand. The famous Helmstedt Crossing – also known as ‘Checkpoint Alpha’ – was not that far away from them though at the moment it was out of their immediate grasp. If the US III Corps hadn’t taken the losses that it had done earlier in the war then things might have been different, however…

Many former POW’s returned to the US III Corps and this number was proportionally higher than anywhere else in northern parts of West Germany. The United States Army believed in having a very fast turn-around time with those soldiers freed from enemy captivity especially due to those returning to the US III Corps as having not been long as prisoners of the enemy. Some men were of course brought back to serve with their colleagues too early and were soon to suffer from mental and emotional problems, yet the vast majority showed little immediate signs of complications. They were generally as mad as hell as what had happened to them and at what they had witnessed happening to others and wanted to take the fight to the enemy rather than sitting in the rear dwelling on it all. This wasn’t a uniform approach being made everywhere else and certainly wasn’t always going to be the best thing to do, yet for now the US III Corps was benefiting from the increase in manpower. While not boasting about it to his superior General Kenny, the US III Corps commander General Saint was actually hoping that maybe he could get to Helmstedt before anyone else reached the Inter-German Border due to the infusion of manpower.

The race was on… though there were still a hell of a lot of the enemy on West German sovereign territory and sitting between NATO troops in northern Germany and the border which they were trying to reach.





Two Hundred & Twelve

The advance towards the Inter-German Border continued elsewhere too along with liberated occupied portions of West Germany and then, of most importance, smashing apart the enemy forces arrayed against NATO as well.

Three more army groups were assembled running southwards from the edge of the operational area of the British Second Army down to the Austrian border and these all had a multinational character too. The US Fifth & Seventh Army’s were still combating the Soviet forces opposing them and pushing forward like everyone else while maintaining their make-up of primary American formations though with Spanish and West German troops assigned too. The French troops which had been with the latter formation had left that command effective last night with a view to transfer southwards to join the French First Army (with French, Moroccan and Bundeswehr forces assigned), but with this morning’s events in Austria that deployment was being altered. Those men with the French II Corps – which had been deployed forward in Germany pre-war – were not going to the Danube area in eastern Bavaria but were being tasked further southwards…


Of particular note with the day’s fighting in central parts of Germany was what many referred to Lt.-General Schwarzkopf’s attempts to seemingly win the war single-handed with the US V Corps. Though it was unprofessional, there was a lot of jealousy and backbiting when it came to the corps commander’s attempts to get the command he had recently taken over and then led into multiple successful engagements back into the Fulda Gap. His superiors were more than pleased with the drive and determination that he had, yet many of his peers were not so much and did ask what was the point in returning to that region apart from settling the issue of pride.

US Seventh Army commander General Otis and most importantly General Galvin as SACEUR were both behind Schwarzkopf’s offensive to return the United States Army to the rolling open terrain of the Fulda Gap as this was perfect tank country. Once there, the US V Corps would be able to smash apart the enemy forces opposing them in open battle rather than in more challenging terrain elsewhere and also reach the Inter-German Border. The 82nd Airborne Division, which had only seen action at Rhein-Main Airbase / Frankfurt International Airport and an aborted engagement trying to recapture the airfield at Hanau so far in this war, was committed to support Schwarzkopf. The two combat brigades assigned were transported by helicopter into multiple airmobile assaults during the entrance into the Fulda Gap before then being left behind when the tanks of the 3rd Armored & 24th Mechanized Infantry Division’s overtook them. There was intense Soviet opposition to this advance on the ground and also in the air where enemy aircraft were encountered in numbers not seen for a while. 4 ATAF assigned assets struggled against such opponents especially as there was no intelligence that such numbers would show up to oppose the US V Corps’ attack like they did, yet that did mean that other aircraft weren’t operated elsewhere at the same time.

Soviet and East German forces on the ground assigned to the Soviet Third Guards & Sixth Guards Tank Army's didn’t benefit greatly from the air support that they were given and the elements of those two field armies engaged in battle were unable to stop the Schwarzkopf. There was pressure on both their flanks from further American units on their right and Spanish troops to the left too. They were unable to stop the United States Army from getting out of the Gelnhausen Corridor into the open countryside and from then charging towards the Fulda River and the stretch of Autobahn-7 that ran through the area. A retreat was made back towards the border but many units with the Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army were given permission to fall back to the town of Fulda. From there they would be right on the Americans flank and also holding that major communications point therefore denying effective NATO control of the region until they could be blasted out of their new defensive positions.

The battle for control here wasn’t over yet, though Schwarzkopf was hardly on his own and when his advance continued into the next day more American ground forces would be entering the fight here.


The French II Corps was tasked initially to move towards the Nurnberg area and then move down to the Bavarian Forest to link up with their countrymen already pushing towards the Czechoslovak frontier along with the Bundeswehr. It was anticipated that they would make this journey quickly as traffic control procedures were already in place to facilitate such a transfer and transport was all assembled. The Soviet invasion of Hungary changed the plans there though and all of a sudden the French were tasked to head for Munich with immediate effect though with a follow-up for them to then reach the Passau and Salzburg areas. Austria had long been maintaining its neutrality and combined with the chaos that the sudden invasion brought inside their country, there was no speedy contact made in terms of a liaison between their military forces and those of NATO.

General Galvin had ordered such a move because he believed that soon enough NATO troops were going to be needed in Austria as the flank there wouldn’t be allowed to be turned should the Austrians suddenly face a collapse. He couldn’t see into the future and adequately yet predict that they would hold and therefore had to do his job and react to the unexpected. Senior French Army representatives at his headquarters set about organising that redeployment and there were no political issues with such a move.

However, this was never going to be an easy affair.

It was a long way down to Austria and while NATO aircraft had the upper hand in the air war against the Soviets, they didn’t have air dominance or anything close to it. Such a redeployment could be badly delayed by long-range enemy air attacks and then there was also the enemy’s use of tactical missiles to be taken into consideration too. NATO troops in French uniforms weren’t going to appear overnight in Austria no matter how much anyone wanted that to happen.





Two Hundred & Thirteen

The politicians met in Brussels earlier than planned. Events drove the rescheduling of the summit between senior government figures from NATO to gather in Belgian capital before the plan had been for them to assemble, especially Marshal Ogarkov’s coup in Moscow.

US Secretary of State (SecState) Chuck Grassley flew across the Atlantic and so too did the Canadian Foreign Minister while Tom King also came by aircraft. Other politicians came by aircraft and helicopters from across Europe and there was a major military effort undertaken to guarantee that their arrivals were free from external interference. On the ground too, Brussels was flooded with Belgian security troops to reinforce those already in the capital as there remained a fear that enemy commandoes or domestic subversives (Belgium, had like most of Europe, seen their fair share of the activities of these treasonous terrorists) might try to launch a bloody intervention.

The SHAPE complex at Casteau near Mons would usually have been where the North Atlantic Council (NAC) would meet, but Lord Carrington as Secretary-General had removed the political command structure of NATO from there before war broke out. Multiple separate locations were used for NATO to continue to function with the necessary administration done across small towns throughout Belgium south of Brussels: schools and other non-essential government buildings not in use became home to these efforts as much of the non-combat support functions of the command had temporarily ceased. As to the NAC and its high-level diplomats, those men had been inside a security zone in the heart of Brussels which the Belgians had set up in a similar fashion to that ‘ring of steel’ which had been in place in London. They were based at several hotels set aside for their use though most inter-NATO cooperation was now occurring either at the tactical level with army group headquarters in the field or with telephone links between heads of governments in bunkers. Nonetheless, NATO was still in Belgium and the support network was there for foreign ministers to meet as they needed to.

Those diplomatic Permanent Representatives to NATO who regularly sat on the North Atlantic Council from the various countries which were meeting several times a day along with their aides had been at the forefront of ironing out differences between their countries whilst they were all at war. Their task was to make sure that matters ran seamlessly behind the scenes so the troops at the frontlines wouldn’t have to receive conflicting orders from their national commands and NATO field commanders, but rather just from the latter. This certainly wasn’t an easy task, especially when things had gone wrong, yet it was something that was being maintained throughout the conflict. The NAC was meant to be a forum for senior government officials like foreign ministers or heads of government to meet as well as the Permanent Representatives and such was the case late this evening when the aircraft and helicopters arrived in Brussels.


The historic Hotel Metropole in the heart of Brussels was where Grassley, King and the others met. This location was inside the protected zone within the Belgian capital and had been used throughout the war to host various diplomatic figures staying within the country. It wasn’t very spacious as a conference location, but it was secure.

Tom King had come to Brussels with the newly-appointed Armed Forces Minister Michael Howard MP. The two of them had flown over from London and been engaged in discussions concerning their country’s role in the conflict. Howard had only just replaced Ian Stewart when his colleague had resigned at the same time George Younger had as Defence Secretary but he was quickly on top of his brief. They spoke about the future strategy for the war which Thatcher and the War Cabinet had agreed upon and also the unofficial hints they had been given about what Grassley and the Americans would want. The two of them got on well as would be able to make sure that a perfect united front would be put on at the conference when the NAC started talking.

When Grassley arrived, the SecState was met by Richard Armitage who had come up from Geneva. These two hadn’t got on well in the past during the former Iowa Senator’s short time as SecState and this was to continue. Both had different ideas and weren’t afraid to tell the other that there was a major schism between such. Nevertheless, they had instructions from Bush and were to follow those despite their personal feelings over those.


The NAC met to discuss the conduct of the war and more importantly the future of such fighting too. West Germany was nearly all liberated while Norway was in the same position and NATO forces were fighting to push the enemy out of Denmark as well. As these efforts continued, the borders of not just the Soviet Union’s allies but also that nation itself were very soon to be reached unless there was a dramatic turnaround in fortunes. On the eve of the conflict, directives had been issued that in any counter-attacking scenario, those borders were not to be crossed on the ground with troops invading such nations.

Matters had changed since then though, especially in how many NATO nations regarded the regimes of their enemies as being pure evil. There was plenty of evidence of the atrocities which had been committed against civilians and captured military personnel alike and this went alongside the war of aggression launched against multiple nations. There hadn’t been any sympathy for those regimes beforehand; now there was just pure rage directed against them. The general feeling expressed before this NAC gathering was that in continuing the war, NATO had to make sure that the enemy was defeated in detail. To just push them back over their borders wasn’t enough: they had to be stopped from attacking again.

While this had been a generally wide opinion, it wasn’t a uniform one. There were different views on how this was to be done in addition the feelings of several nations which had joined the Allies – which now overlapped with NATO – that invading the Eastern Bloc could only lead to that dreaded thermonuclear response. Such a fear was evident within many though not all believed that that would come should East Germany, Poland or Czechoslovakia be attacked.

Some hostility was present too among these allied countries senior representatives with beliefs of betrayal, lack of commitment to the NATO cause and the view that the wishes of some nations – especially those not official NATO nations – shouldn’t hold as much weight as those who had committed more than those in this conflict from the beginning.


The fourteen NATO nations which had been at war with the Soviet-led Socialist Forces since the start had their foreign ministers here: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and West Germany. The Finnish, Irish and the Swedes had all sent top-level officials and then there was the Italian Foreign Minister who was a last-minute arrival as well. Such a gathering of people speaking different languages required multiple translations and advisers for all of them. Without the long-standing NATO structure under Lord Carrington there would have been a lot of chaos yet at the Hotel Metropole things were kept under control. Everyone was allowed their say… within the confines of diplomacy.

Tom King and Michael Howard both tried their best to help maintain the unity that they felt should have been present. Nothing was spoken openly about that vote that the Dutch Cabinet had taken early in the war to seek a way out of the conflict and the views of the Finnish, Irish and Swedes were listened to. When it came to the Italians, these two British ministers put a lot of effort into keeping the peace there as quite a bit of hostility was still being felt to the decision of the Rome government to first sit out the war and now to suddenly announce they were entering the conflict at this late stage.

The Americans were setting the agenda at this meeting though and the NAC was forced to follow their lead in discussions. Grassley and Armitage both put the wishes of Acting President Bush forward that the Eastern Bloc, not the Soviet Union, needed to be invaded. The liberation of West Berlin was a key war aim that the United States wished to see undertaken alongside the destruction of the regimes in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. These two men spoke of Poland and now Hungary too as further enemies which should be invaded so that the regimes in both could be brought down as well.

There was much support for this, though opposition too.

Those fears over nuclear war were present but so too were others over what the future would bring with successful invasions: were there any plans for what would happen on the ground in those nations should their regimes be toppled and Soviet military forces pushed out? There were still other enemy forces holding onto other parts of NATO territory and elsewhere with significant parts of Denmark in Soviet hands along with the very northern reaches of West Germany and now parts of Austria too. Shouldn’t those be liberated first before attention was focused upon Berlin and Prague, let alone Warsaw and Budapest? Several NATO nations were suffering domestically from the effects of the war and not just those who had been partly occupied either. Assistance needed to go into rebuilding and civilian relief as there had been internal chaos in many countries.


The first night of the conference ended late so that those present could get some sleep and also contact their home governments. Nothing had yet to be decided and further talks were needed. There hadn’t been a major break with inter-NATO relations and no one had stormed out of the NAC meeting, yet there was plenty of diplomacy to be undertaken before a final series of decisions could be made. However, at the same time, everyone was aware that events on the battlefield could change matters at any time and they needed to keep that in mind as well.





Two Hundred & Fourteen

Throughout the evening and night following the joint Soviet and Hungarian invasion of Austria, forces of the Italian Army moved into that country too. Theirs was an unopposed move which came across the Alps and through the mountain passes until like the fierce opposition being put up to the east. Immense convoys on the roads and rail snaked over the border as the fully-mobilised Italian Army set off for warfare beyond their own frontiers.

There was some movement by air, but mainly the Italians moved on the ground. They had been planning this move for a long time now and every effort was made to make it as seamless and fast as possible. Fighters patrolled the skies above while there were anti-air defences moving with the convoys. Helicopters transported selected groups of armed men forward to link up with Austrian rear area defence forces at key points where there was a fear of enemy commando operations to block key routes while a big effort was made on the ground by combat engineers to advance with the vanguards to scout for explosives laid in preparation to disable the cross-border movement at other vulnerable points. As it turned out, it wouldn’t be enemy action that delayed the Italians and neither problems with the Austrians letting them cross into their country, but the scale of their own effort in moving so much so fast over limited access points through the Alps which would cause the Italians the problems which they encountered.

Strategic thinking for the Italians throughout the Cold War was that in a scenario where fighting broke out they would have to face an attacking enemy – Warsaw Pact forces were not actually named directly in studies for political reasons – approaching their country from the northeast. Austria and Yugoslavia lay in that direction and as those plans covered Italy fighting as part of NATO against the Eastern Bloc, it was assumed that Warsaw Pact forces would come through those countries in number towards Italy and its army. There were numerous variants of the general war plan covering this to do with either or both neighbouring countries being invaded first and then the level of involvement that either had in such an invasion too – Austrian neutrality and Yugoslavian active assistance were the more numerous versions – but the general concept for what the Italian Army was meant to do remained the same: they were to fight to defend Italian territory as far as possible beyond those borders inside the territory of their neighbours. Other military threats to Italy were foreseen as coming across the Adriatic and in the central Mediterranean as well (enemy naval action possibly combined with small-scale maritime commando strikes) but to the northeast was where the threat lay.

Consequently, the Italians had the majority of their active military ground forces in that area with air and missile support also positioned to act too in the northeast region along the borders with Austria and Yugoslavia. In peacetime, there were heavy ground forces there along with lighter units for Alpine operations. More mobile troops could be called upon along with airborne troops too so that full scale battles on terms that the Italian Army would set could be achieved rapidly without those forces having to travel a long distance throughout the country first. Supplies and transportation assets were also gathered throughout the northeast as well with the intention that those were on-hand too rather than having to be waited for in a wartime scenario. The best minds in the Italian military had long put plenty of thought into how the Italian Army, along with the Italian Air Force and even the Italian Navy as well, would fight for the cause of keeping Italian sovereign territory clear of an enemy invader aiming to enter the country across the Alps to the north or through the plains directly a-joining Yugoslavia.

The political decision made in Rome to stay out of the war when it broke out was opposed in many quarters. NATO allies of Italy had extended enormous pressure and reminded the country on multiple occasions of treaty commitments. Italians politicians had reacted furiously to the decision to stay out of the conflict while there had been a lot of discontent in parts of the intelligence services as well. As international trade collapsed with the war affecting that and then intentional economic moves by the United States, the Italian economy had suffered immensely leading to bankers and financiers turning against the government’s decision to stay out of the conflict. At the same time, there remained many people in the country who were pleased that Italy wasn’t involved in the fighting taking place elsewhere and causing all of that death and destruction. Many politicians fought to keep the government committed to its course of action and the influential trade union movement wasn’t in favour of war either. Ordinary civilians weren’t out marching and demanding that their country go to war either and when they expressed their views those were that they were glad that the war wasn’t killing Italians.

The government hadn’t stayed out of the war because they supported Soviet interests nor because they were opposed to the ideals of the West either. Italy would suffer greatly in any conflict internally and with military losses expected to be heavy whatever the outcome… as they had been in the past two world wars. That was why that decision in the build-up to conflict erupting had been made.

Meanwhile, the Italian military had been forced to remain neutral in such ideological clashes. Those at the top issued clear instructions down the chain of command that the country’s armed forces were to following the legal instructions of the government and not to take any hostile action anywhere; with there being no fighting on Italy’s borders this was something which was able to be done. Military officers who tried to express their opinion in public against the decision to stay out of the conflict – or even those who wished to support that – were silenced. However, like the armed forces of every country in Europe, those of Italy were fully mobilised and prepared for warfare. Political instructions were for this to take place should the conflict spread though no guarantees were set by the politicians to the generals of what would be done exactly in certain situations. There still remained a distant threat to the country from the northeast, the generals had argued, and there needed to be preparation to meet that head-on should the time come.

The Italian Expeditionary Army had thus been formed up in the northeast in case war did spread close to Italy and into neighbouring countries where the only sensible course of action for Italy to take would be to intervene. Peacetime command structures had three corps’ headquarters already in-place controlling over-sized combat brigades; the Italian Army had done away with divisional organisation only eighteen months beforehand. With reserves being called back to uniform in selected places and the deployment of units out of their barracks into combat positions in the field, the Italian Army stood ready to face combat abroad. The politicians had been made to understand that the military would insist on such a thing should either Austria or Yugoslavia become involved as the generals weren’t going to allow a potential invader to seize entrance points towards Italy. This hadn’t gone down well with Rome yet the politicians had enough problems trying to keep their domestic opponents under control and then fighting off not one but two attempts at a coup to topple the government: one by KGB and/or GRU agents working with native Italian left-wingers and the other by what appeared to be the Americans & French supporting Italian spooks in trying a right-wing coup. The military had been kept out of the politics with those as security forces loyal to the government put down such attempts to topple them from within and therefore the generals kept their focus on events in neighbouring countries as well as enlarging their mobilised forces.

A fourth corps command was established in the northeast (including a brigade of mechanised Carabinieri troops) to control reinforcements brought into the region and further supporting assets for the Italian Expeditionary Army gathered up. There were multiple exercises run where the government was informed that defensive preparations were being made with these… yet the politicians weren’t exactly aware that to the Italian Army that meant exercises involving rapidly moving to the borders to cross those rather than defending Italy on Italian soil as they led Rome to believe. On various occasions, certain military officers raised objections with their superiors at how the military was treating their legally-elected government with these deceptions yet disciplinary measures were enacted to detain and silence such people. The generals weren’t about to allow such moral objections to stop them from defending their country and their people and knew also that they weren’t actually breaking any laws.

In the long-run, such a situation would have reached breaking point and possibly that might have been in the same manner as had occurred in Finland. However, then came the invasion of Austria, which was just what the generals had been worried about but at the same time were ready to react too.

Immense pressure was put on the politicians to react when Austria was invaded. The generals reminded them how this wasn’t the first time in this conflict and probably wouldn’t be the last either where a neutral nation had been attacked by the Soviets and their lackeys: Finland, Ireland and Sweden were perfect examples of that. Even if there had been any sort of justification for an invasion into Austria, the government was reminded of the long term defensive security strategy of Italy when it came to the northeast. Along with the pressure being exerted from the military to act, common sense broke out among many in Rome too. They could see what the generals were saying was true and realised that Italy would have to be next in the firing line for the Soviets and their seemingly crazy desire for military and thus political domination of the European continent. A lot of pride would have to be swallowed diplomatically and there would be economic and social problems, but no other choice remained but to act to intervene.

Diplomatic moves were made to gain Austrian approval for the Italian Expeditionary Army to cross the border but before that permission could be sought Rome did give authorisation for the Italian Air Force to deploy already alerted aircraft on combat missions: of a defensive nature. The interpretation of this was up to the generals though and they took what many would consider advantage of that. Starfighter interceptors flew into Austrian air space and started engaging Soviet and Hungarian aircraft while Tornado strike-bombers and G-91 attack-fighters begun hitting ground targets east of the Graz area where the Hungarians had entered Austria. Arguably these were offensive missions, but then they were defensive at the same time as far as the Italian military was concerned.

In the main, it was with the Italian Expeditionary Army which combat to defend Italy was to be gained with. The four corps’ commands all had standing orders for their combat and combat support forces to start moving with their supporting assets. Intelligence conducted while both Austria and Italy were still neutral had pointed out where the Austrians had deployed their military forces nationwide and especially on routes through which the Italians wished to advance. As diplomats started talking, German-speaking Italian military intelligence officers were already making localised radio contact with the Austrian Army and then there came personal contacts on the ground in Austria made after helicopter flights. Some problems did occur – nothing ever goes to plan in wartime – yet there was overall success met.

What did cause issues though was the massive push the Italian Expeditionary Army made all at once over the border. There weren’t enough passes through the Alps and nowhere near enough transport aircraft and helicopters available. Traffic jams quickly occurred while those trapped within those looked nervously skywards waiting for an enemy air attack to come. Though they didn’t know why at this stage, they were fortunate that external events elsewhere caused the non-reaction of the Soviets to this massed movement of exposed military forces.

Assisted by the Austrians and unmolested by the Soviets, the Italians would quickly sort themselves out and get over the Alps in one piece ready to set off for battle. Their heavy forces would move further northeast towards the Graz area with screening forces in the rear and into western parts of Austria as well… to establish links with NATO in Bavaria and aim to spread goodwill on the ground if that couldn’t be achieved by the country’s foreign minister in Brussels. There were shipments of ammunition stocks for NATO military forces in Germany as well as civilian relief supplies ready to go straight through the Brenner Pass, past Innsbruck and towards Munich in a bribe that the Italian military believed would be taken. Moreover, there was also the intention to send parachute forces to Vienna as well.

Italy intended to secure its own territorial sovereignty far from its borders and while the current strategy of the Soviets was in effect to do the same, in the case of the former that was with allies on the ground rather than enemies as the latter had found everywhere they went.





Two Hundred & Fifteen

The Great Intelligence War still remained active in many locations around the world despite the losses taken by those involved and the rapidly approaching withdrawal from the playing field of Soviet spooks operating away from home. The Greek capital of Athens was where there was still kidnapping, shooting and murders occurring on a regular basis in a tit-for-tat fashion that had long since moved away from intelligence gathering and espionage and the local authorities were unable to handle this. Professional spooks and hired killers (in the latter category many weren’t even locals but rather foreigners living in Athens) were still combating each other in the shadows though their actions sometimes occurred out in the open too. It was all rather pointless when viewed from the outside, yet those involved all believed that they were doing the right thing.

Officially, Athens and the rest of Greece was a country at peace while most of the rest of Europe was at war for the third time this century. There had been no foreign invasions of its soil and nor where there any signs that such a thing was soon to occur killing Greeks like had happened in previous wars which had torn through the continent. However, at the same time, Greece was suffering greatly because of the war.

The economy was destroyed with the collapse of international trade and then a deliberate effort made by the US Treasury to ruin the liquidation of many Greek banks and finance companies in a serious form of economic warfare. NATO warships were present in number throughout the Aegean Sea and they made it clear with their physical present who ruled the waves there; Turkey was taking advantage of its strengthened position following this. At home, there had been clashes up and down the country between pressure groups from the left and from the right with marches and demonstrations that oftentimes turned to violence. With many ordinary Greeks being out of work, this situation was only exasperated. Many Greeks had been called up for military service and were along the borders with neighbouring Balkan nations as well as on islands in the Aegean and on Cyprus too. That should have kept many potential young troublemakers off the street, yet there had been a high desertion rate and in many cases weapons had been taken by those young men leaving their military units. Civil war was thought to not be long off.

Therefore, Greece had little concern for the foreigners who wished to kill each other in the backstreets of Athens because they had more pressing issues to deal with. Other countries may have taken the drastic steps of deporting such people en mass yet there were so many other things going on that the Greek government had no time to get round to this.


The British diplomatic and intelligence presence in Athens had been greatly reduced in the immediate build-up to the conventional side of World War Three erupting and then after the great clash of armies involved. Like many other NATO nations, Britain had tried to put pressure on Athens to honour its treaty commitments and stand by their allies in their time of need. Even once warfare had opened, there were still efforts made to get Greece to come onside and evidence was presented by British diplomats to the Greeks of Soviet atrocities committed. Eventually, the Foreign Office realised that this was never going to happen and many of the mid- & lower-level staffers at the Embassy were withdrawn from Athens. Diplomatic relations weren’t cut and the Ambassador remained in-place, yet members of staff with key skills were needed elsewhere for other duties.

As to the spooks, their numbers in Athens were cut back by hostile action. MI-6 had a small staff pre-war in Athens of intelligence officers and more had arrived in the build-up to war so they could support diplomatic efforts overtly and conduct covert actions as well. Once war broke out in the battlefields of Europe and the gloves came off elsewhere in the shadowy world of intelligence operations, British agents started going missing, being seriously wounded and being killed. They battled against Soviet agents also in Athens who were following an agenda that soon turned from keeping Greece neutral in the war to getting personal vengeance for their comrades and friends. During such conflicts, Athens Station lost their superior officer on-site and many talented intelligence officers who really shouldn’t have been running around with guns like they were in a James Bond movie.

Amongst this bloodbath – and as it was elsewhere – there remained attempts to do real espionage and intelligence work. MI-6 headquarters in London and Director-General Curwen were repeatedly sending out instructions of tasks to be undertaken. The British spooks which remained in Greece were for example to talk to a figure high up in the Greece security services or to discover if a certain politician in the government was being blackmailed by the Soviets or whether a ‘person of interest’ was using Athens as a base of operations for their own nefarious activities in relation to the war. All the while as these orders were being acted upon, British spooks faced immense danger to their lives.


One of those tasks that Century House sent to the overwhelmed Athens Station was to watch for the arrival of an Irish national at the main international airport coming in from Belgrade. His name was Sean Garland and someone with a history of much interest and concern to Britain. Intelligence pointed to him supposedly travelling across Europe after being recently in Moscow and attempting to get back to his native land… Belgrade and Athens were stops on his way. There were meant to be at least two bodyguards with him, maybe even three and they were not harmless people.

Garland was the General Secretary of the Worker’s Party of Ireland, a Marxist organisation with long-established links to the Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA). For some time now there had been intelligence pointing to him trying to establish links with Soviet and Eastern European regimes behind the Iron Curtain so that he could improve his party’s ‘internal security’ and this guaranteed that he would draw the attention of Britain’s intelligence services if his activities were just limited to that. Of course, his activities weren’t just limited to this. Garland was a terrorist who’d acted against Britain many times in the past and the goal he sought to achieve was the end of democracy not just in Northern Ireland but in the Irish Republic too: the result would be what MI-6 believed would be a totalitarian state that Britain couldn’t abide by. Before conflict erupted – and his own nation was attacked despite being a neutral – Garland had left Ireland by means which MI-6 wasn’t sure about but had been reported to be in Moscow. Shcherbytsky had encouraged many politicians of fringe far-left groups to come to the Soviet capital to build bridges with them and men like Garland had been eager to do that.

What Garland was up to, what his intentions were and what his thoughts were about the departed Shcherbytsky and that man’s ilk were unknown. There was no intelligence as to the scale of his links to the KGB or any other Soviet organisation. The true support that his party of himself had back home in Ireland, especially when he returned as he planned were further unknowns. What was certain was that he was trying to make his way back to Ireland by travelling through several neutral nations, using a false identity and accompanied by men who may or may not have been Soviet intelligence agents.

It had been decided in London that Garland and others like him must be stopped. The situation with the Irish Republic’s feelings about events in Ulster was very tense and someone like Garland was a threat to that, even if he only posed small danger. The British spooks in Athens were told to detain him and to do it in a clandestine manner if possible, but no matter what to make sure that they picked him up at the airport when he arrived from Belgrade so that the trail on the man wouldn’t run cold.


The ‘snatch’ mission at Ellinikon International Airport turned out to be a disaster.

Greek security forces weren’t about to allow armed men to try to seize an airliner passenger from an arriving aircraft and nor threaten fellow passengers with that man with automatic weapons. On edge as they were, they decided to shoot at those in the restricted area of the flight-line who had guns and keep shooting until such men were on the ground.

Three MI-6 agents, a local ‘contractor’, two of Garland’s bodyguards (fellow Irish nationals) and Garland himself were all killed by Greek security troops who had two of their own lose their own lives when the foreigners treating their country like it was the Wild West returned fire. Civilians present ran for their lives in a short but furious exchange of gunfire and then afterwards further security personnel were all over the scene establishing a cordon to keep the interested away.

MI-6’s Athens Station lost half of its remaining manpower and was wholly comprised afterwards when another Greek national hired as muscle-cum-shooter was arrested and soon spilled everything he knew.

It was all for nothing as well. Like all those other Western nationals which the once all-powerful Soviet security services had interests in and were using for their own ends, Garland had just been cut loose and had been ejected from Moscow along with many people like him. MI-6 would never be able to interrogate him and find out the secrets in his head nor listen to the plans he had been trying to put together back in his homeland to rid the island of Ireland of capitalism and bourgeois democracy to be replaced with his dream of a worker’s paradise.

In addition, Britain had just hammered another nail in the already closed coffin of Anglo-Greek relations. In the short-term damage would be done to the UK, yet those in Greece didn’t yet realise the long-term consequences. What else could they have done though? Like their actions throughout, they were only looking after their own sovereignty and what they regarded as the interests of their own people as most of the rest of the world seemed to have gone truly mad.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Sixteen

The USAF-led series of strategic air attacks deemed Operation THUNDERSTORM had commenced as soon as it had gotten dark the evening before, but before the sun came up on the morning of the last day in March those strikes far to the east intensified. American combat aircraft took advantage of the so-called ‘Austrian Gap’ and streamed through a hole in the enemy’s battered but still functioning strategic air defences to hit targets deep inside Eastern Europe via an unexpected direction. Military and government installations – the latter being ‘regime targets’ – were bombed from Hungary up through Czechoslovakia and into southern Poland too.

Those aircraft had come from across mainland Europe and Britain too with F-15’s and F-16’s acting in the fighter role providing protection for many B-52 and F-111 strikes. Many of those B-52’s had only been released from their strategic nuclear role held back in the United States and their presence was truly felt as they were able to deliver a lot of ordnance to targets far away from their bases. Soviet air operations of a planned offensive nature (against locations in western Austrian and also the Alpine passes with Italy) were greatly disrupted by the sudden intrusion into supposedly ‘safe’ airspace especially as the NATO air forces in many ways had got the measure of their opponents. There were air battles across the dark skies to go with the destruction caused on the ground and both sides took losses, yet the winners and losers were clearly defined.


THUNDERSTORM was something that USAF planners with the numbered multi-national air forces across Western Europe had long wanted to undertake. There were far too many other missions that needed their attention and the needs of the alliance were always paramount beforehand above everything else. However, beginning with the air strike against East Berlin the night beforehand – CERTAIN VENGEANCE – the USAF was now being given permission to undertake such politically-orientated strikes that met American-centric war aims with NATO assigned assets. There was a balancing act both militarily and politically, but this was a course of action wanted at the highest levels of power and the USAF was doing as instructed.

The plans formulated in the build-up to and during the war for THUNDERSTORM for these air attacks focused upon that aptly-named Austrian Gap. The country remained neutral and though it had a large army once mobilised, its air force and air defences were minimal. NATO and Soviet aircraft had violated the skies above Austria though not in a deliberate fashion. Therefore there was a large geographically open patch of sky that neither side was putting to use in their air operations as diplomatic needs took precedence.

NATO had stripped some air defence assets away from their positions facing Austria as no Soviet air attacks had come through that route into Bavaria and West Germany and notice had been made of how weakened the already minimal air defences that the Soviets had on the other side of Austria were becoming too. A strategic opportunity had opened up yet politics hadn’t allowed such a thing to be taken advantage of.

Then had come the Soviet-Hungarian invasion of Austria and permission from on high for THUNDERSTORM. The USAF also considered the risk that the enemy would take advantage themselves of the skies above Austria and this was only another factor in the decision to act first.

To the east of Austria lay all sorts of targets that were regarded as almost open to a massive air strike. There were cities with political significance where the damage which could be wrought by a few well-placed bombs was hoped to have major propaganda implications. Enemy rear area logistics centres – such as they were anyway – were located that far deep in Eastern Europe tucked away. There were transport links that were being used to replace those already smashed further to the north and west and these made tempting targets as well. Then there were the airfields and communications points, further fixed targets, which had so far been unmolested by NATO air power.

There had been a lot of frustration surrounding the refusal to allow THUNDERSTORM to go ahead but once it did the USAF went at it with all that they could spare from other operations and then some too.


Budapest and Hungary on the western side of the Danube as it ran north-south through that country was hit on a smaller scale by THUNDERSTORM air attacks but struck had nonetheless. B-52’s dropped bombs from high altitude over military bases outside the city and then some bridges over the Danube just outside the urban area of the Hungarian capital. More military bases throughout the country were attacked too while railway links were attacked; with the latter the aim was to disrupt movement of military forces by bombing marshalling yards and bridges. There had been a planned air attack directly upon the very heart of Budapest where government buildings were located though upon the request of the CIA those weren’t hit with a last-minute change to the flight plan of the F-111’s heading that way.

Bratislava was the capital of the Slovak Socialist Republic, one of the components of the theoretical federation that was Czechoslovakia. Here in this city also by the Danube, there was no last-minute halt to the bombing of political targets. Several government and communist party buildings in the heart of Bratislava were bombed while there were further attacks against military targets throughout western parts of Slovakia too. A political goal was being sought here and it was one where tensions within Czechoslovakia were meant to be strained as this part of the country had yet to see the effects of war brought home.

Across in the Czech Socialist Republic, the other half of the union, military targets and communications links in Moravia (the eastern part of the Czech lands a-joining the bigger Bohemia) were bombed by the USAF. Again these were further areas so far almost untouched by the war and the opportunity was taken to hit rear areas through much of the support network for the armies of the Soviets and the combined Socialist Forces at the frontlines were using. Brno was particularly hard hit due to the rail links in and around that city and if there were political outcomes due to that, then those would only be an added bonus as far as the Americans were concerned.

Further past the Austrian Gap lay southern Poland again with transportation links, military bases such as airfields & supply centres and important cities as well. Aircraft taking part in THUNDERSTORM were focused upon those military aims yet some were tasked to try to exasperate what were already reported to be tensions on the ground throughout Poland. There was care taken to try the utmost not to kill civilians as collateral damage but the cities of Katowice and Krakow were still attacked despite the knowledge that civilian losses were inevitable. Bombs fell upon regime targets there and the railway links over which so many freight trains coming from the Soviet Union were using and some USAF aircraft even dropped dispersing containers from which thousands of propaganda leaflets floated away from.


F-15 and F-16 fighters used external fuel tanks to extend their range and had less weapons carried due to such a need on the THUNDERSTORM missions. Those fighters were not assigned to directly escort the B-52’s and F-111’s but to rather run long-range patrols to scour the skies of enemy aircraft. Their presence caused immense panic over the parts of Eastern Europe where they flew as Soviet transport aircraft were scattered all over the place trying to avoid them after panicked calls from ground controllers.

Those fighters engaged some of such easy targets as those big aircraft bringing men and high-priority supplies forward. Then there was a force of Soviet Blinder bombers staging out of Hungarian airfields on their way to try to bombs the Alpine passes through which the Italian Army was crossing that was caught when airborne and who had yet to meet their own fighter escorts. Such aircraft were slaughtered when airborne and USAF fighter pilots came away with impressive score tallies for such an engagement.

When they engaged in combat against more capable foes, those American fighters found their opposition confused and far out of their comfort zone. The Hungarian and Czechoslovak rear-area air defence interceptors fell prey to them as these were not pilots who had been in a full-scale war for more than two weeks like those flying aircraft with USAF colours. Massacres occurred in the skies between mismatched opponents but when was warfare ever meant to be fair?


Along with THUNDERSTORM, there were also Italian Air Force aircraft flying long-range missions across eastern parts of Austria and into Hungary. Tornado strike-bombers flew many low-level attacks of a general tactical nature against targets with the Soviet and Hungarian forces invading Austria though some of a semi-strategic nature too.

Italy had only just joined the war and didn’t have the combat experience that the USAF did. The Tornado crews were lucky that they faced weak opposition already being torn apart by the Americans as being out of the NATO structure for as long as they had been during combat meant that they had yet to receive what would soon become a tidal wave of intelligence on enemy tactics, capabilities and more importantly weakness in the electronic systems field.

Having remained neutral as they had also meant that Italian air missions over Eastern Europe weren’t co-ordinated with the USAF. The 5ATAF had packed up and left Italy before war erupted and then wartime experience had brought about new ways of doing things for NATO air forces. There were quite a few close calls during the THUNDERSTORM and Italian air missions where aircrews on both sides almost mistook the other for the enemy and nearly opened fire. Italy was fast working to reintegrate itself within the NATO wartime structure yet that was going to take some time. For now they were acting independently and that wasn’t something that could last if they wanted to achieve something worthy in this conflict with their air force and their army too.





Two Hundred & Seventeen

Across Scandinavia, there remained portions of three of the four countries there occupied by hostile foreign forces and efforts continued to finally rid the territory of the nations of Norway, Finland and Denmark of those remains of armies from the Socialist Forces. Sweden joined its neighbours in maintaining this effort and there were military forces from NATO nations – Britain and the United States especially – assisting in this. The aim was to rid mainland Northern Europe of the invader and by the end of March 31st, only one Scandinavian country still had sovereign territory under foreign occupation.


In the far northeastern reaches of Norway, the US Marines made their final push towards the Soviet border. The battalion of Dutch marines which had sat frustrated in the rear throughout the entirety of the conflict in Norway finally saw some action as they came under the operational command of the US 2nd Marine Division following the departure the week before of the British Royal Marines who they had initially been assigned to. At the coastal port of Vadso on the Varanger Peninsula, the Dutch wiped out Soviet rear-area forces dug in there trying to hold on after long being cut off and also successfully captured the nearby civilian airport intact too in the face of an enemy failure to conduct demolitions. They had plenty of assistance from fire support offered by the US Marines, yet the Dutchmen knew that it was their hard fighting the first time in combat which had been the main factor in their victory.

Vadso had been the last enemy position held on the Varanger Peninsula but there had remained Soviet ground forces across eastern Finmark which the US Marines took on and overcame. There were temporary bridges over the lower reaches of the Tana River to help with the logistics effort and many small air strips set up for the land-based deployment of ground-attack Harrier’s. M-60 tanks, Cobra helicopter gunships and plenty of old but effective towed artillery gave the Marine Riflemen all the help they needed in advancing in a march southeast following the E6 highway and past Kirkenes all the way to the Soviet border. They had a tough fight to take Kirkenes itself but elsewhere they met Soviet forces which just couldn’t put up an effective stand against them. The US Marines found that the Soviet Army had weak units here after all their best troops had long been beaten and cut off across in the Finnish Wedge yet they remained surprised that their enemy wasn’t fighting harder for the direct approaches to their own soil.

Orders came for the 2nd Marine Division to go no further than the downed road bridge at Elvenes, which was located just short of the Soviet border itself. The Marine Riflemen were almost within touching distance of the enemy’s soil but such an order was firm and left no room for exploitation in the form of armed reconnaissance ahead of anything like that. As could be expected, the US Marines were rather aggravated at this as there technically was still parts of Norway unliberated. Those were near desolate places to the south of where their lead units ended up though and the stop order was in effect.

There was no time for celebrations after the victory which they had won, especially when that had come right in the face of naysayers who had said that what they had achieved first at Alta and then beyond through Finmark couldn’t be done. Small groups of the enemy were cut off all behind their lines and needed to be blasted out of hopeless positions which they clung on to. There were POW’s to be disarmed and transported back to Lakselv as well. On top of this, the US Marines had to deal with the effects of the occupation on this part of Norway where there was widespread devastation, minefields & unexploded ordnance that needed attending to and then a distressed population as well. Norwegian civilians would eventually be assisted by Norwegian Army units behind the Marine Riflemen but they first came to their liberators for help. They pleaded for assistance due to hunger, medical needs and the fates of missing relatives. This was a traumatic experience for many of the young US Marines who had been expecting scenes of wild joy at their arrival rather than such unpleasantness.

Away from such matters as those, there still had been a victory won and out of Norway the invader had finally been evicted.


Back to the west, the remains of the Soviet Sixth Army were finally brought to surrender in the small part of Finland where they had been holding onto in a forlorn attempt to await their own liberation. The Soviet troops there had been beaten in battle, cut off from external assistance and then crushed between enemy forces from all sides but they had stubbornly tried to hold on. Their ammunition was almost all expended and that was the final cause for the wave of surrenders that happened among individual units there not any of the other important factors like hunger, the lack of fuel or their strategic situation.

Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian and American troops moved in from their positions surrounding the Soviets here and started the process of disarming them. There had been some trouble within the Soviet Sixth Army due to mutinies taking place in the lead-up to the surrender and so the NATO and Allied troops went in heavily-armed themselves expecting trouble yet they found that the men they encountered had only wanted to fight their officers and the KGB rather than the opponents which they had meant to be fighting. There were tens of thousands of prisoners to deal with all trapped within the Finnish Wedge and many of them were in a sorry state. Malnutrition was rife and so were frostbite injuries to say nothing of those wounded in combat who had only had the most basic of medical care. Compassion overcame many of the men who ended up dealing with these POW’s, even those who had previously greatly demonised their enemy after their own countries had been invaded.

This wave of POW’s were all quickly set to be removed from Finland under a previous agreement made among the victors. They were to be transported northwards into Norway for processing by NATO troops rather than to either Finland or Sweden, neither of whom wanted them. Both latter countries had a lot of internal problems to deal with and the resources to handle such a number of men who would be a drain just weren’t there.

Agreements hadn’t been made about the war booty that came with such a large enemy force destroyed though and this would cause some heated discussions to take place. The Soviets had been short of fuel and ammunition for all of their tanks, armoured vehicles and howitzers but there were still a lot of these weapons of war along with man-portable weapons. The armed forces of all three nations present all set about gathering up this horde of combat equipment along with other items like trucks, engineering supplies and such like for removal so that they could find good use for it.

General Foss, the US XVIII Corps commander, refused to play peacemaker when asked to as his orders were to stay out of it. Personally, he regarded such arguments between supposed allies as petty but more importantly foolish in the long-run. They were all meant to be on the same side and he believed too that a lot of what was being near fought over was junk that would never actually see proper use in the armed forces of either nation due to maintenance issues and lack of suitable spare parts as well as ammunition to fit many of the weapons. He reported back to higher command that such disagreements he witnessed weren’t going to help matters in the future conduct of the war. No one was shooting at each other or even threatening to, but such actions taken to seize war booty from allies before they could get their hands on that were far from what should have been happening if everyone was going to stay on the same side to the end of this war.


The war had brought occupation to most of Denmark and it was going to take some time to liberate that country despite the best efforts to do so as fast as possible.

The easternmost island of Bornholm remained under Soviet occupation – just like it had at the end of World War Two in an unfortunate occurrence – and it seemed like that would continue for some time with it being so far away. Falster, Lolland and Mon were three other large islands that formed part of Denmark and these were in the south of the country where Polish troops remained in-place holding them. Those were of a limited number but the geography meant that like Bornholm there would be no liberation expected anytime soon bearing a complete enemy collapse. Instead, Zealand and Jutland were where the Danes and the Allies were fighting for the time being to eject the invader from Denmark.

The Helsingor Bridgehead had held out following the loss of Copenhagen and most of the rest of Zealand. Danish and Swedish troops had initially made plans to evacuate across the Oresund but then enemy attacks had stopped being so fierce and stalemate had occurred. For more than a week, those trapped there in the northeastern edge of Zealand had been eager to break out. The Swedes wanted to gain revenge for the defeat they had suffered when first arriving in too much haste while the Danes wanted to liberate their capital city. Sensibly, their commanders had waited for preparations to be made in the form of gathering reinforcements – especially heavy armour – and stocking up on supplies. The air and naval situations had improved and then intelligence had pointed to the enemy on Zealand being worn out with those Soviet and Polish naval infantry left unsupplied and on their own.

Finally, the break-out occurred and the much stronger forces of the Allies than originally in-place moved out of the Helsingor Bridgehead to smash the enemy holding onto the rest of Zealand. Polish naval infantry was encountered first and torn through by Swedish tanks and other heavy armoured vehicles while Danish infantry battled against the concentration of Soviet naval infantry in the area around Hillerod. The main advance by that Swedish armour was towards Copenhagen in the distance yet they knew that it would take some time to get there and they didn’t rush either. Their fear was over Polish troops being bypassed by fast-moving tanks and reappearing to harass supply columns and other supporting assets. Therefore they took care to engage all enemy units which they came across and pushed them back. Some arguments came that this gave the enemy too much time to withdraw yet the risk of moving too fast was seen as a greater danger.

A leap-frogging operation was made by the Allies on Zealand though as Danish troops were transported by a fleet of Swedish Army helicopters to seize the much damaged Vaerlose Airbase ahead of the main advance. Swedish versions of the AB-204 and AB-206 light transports made low-level approaches at speed to drop off Danish airmobile-trained infantry to enter that facility and engage Soviet Air Force personnel there. Just like with Aalborg Airbase on Jutland and the British effort at that location, the Danes here had watched as the enemy patched-up a major airfield previously damaged in combat and by demolitions conducted beforehand by retreating Danish Army forces. The Soviets had been repairing Vaerlose with a view to making use of it themselves and the Danes were very grateful for that effort put in and showed the invader the scope of that gratitude…

With the initial success met here on Zealand, all signs pointed to a successful operation to retake the island especially as there were many Swedish reinforcement ready to come across the Oresund once there was room for them to deploy and enemy attention was certainly focused elsewhere for the time being.


In Jutland, PORTER and BLACK PYTHON continued with the British 6th Light and US 5th Marine Division’s fighting hard to liberate Danish territory there and make sure that the Soviets became aware of the threat to their Baltic right flank by their presence.

With the successful seizure of the Aalborg area by the Paras, there hadn’t been an opportunity for the East Germans on North Jutland Island to get across the Limfjord and onto the mainland. The main connections for such a movement, especially an armour heavy force like the East Germans were, were in British hands and combined with the amphibious landing, PORTER achieved its initial objectives of making a rapid landing and eliminating the enemy threat. Making sure that the rest of the 6th Light Division was able to be safety brought into Jutland was meant to be the main priority once Aalborg and the Limfjord crossings were taken though for the men on the ground further engaging the enemy by pushing forwards was what they were more interested in. A substantial portion of the East German 9TD had suddenly been cut off by this manoeuvre and needed engaging where it was trapped yet many middle- and junior-ranking officers wanted to race deep down into Jutland to link up with the US Marines coming in from the North Sea coast with the belief that the rest of that division would be joining its sister formation in that direction and thus open to attack. Such thinking was often encouraged in junior men, but the senior British officers involved in PORTER remained wary of doing something as foolhardy as that.

The East Germans had plenty of tanks and heavy armoured vehicles while the British remained a light infantry force with only small amounts of armour assigned and let alone on the ground. That needed to be assembled and air power in the form of combat aircraft and armed helicopters were to be used to smash apart the East German tanks encountered so that an avoidable defeat wasn’t occurred. Permission was given for probing missions to push southwards yet the main focus for the time being was building-up in strength and dealing with the cut off and dangerous enemy first. The Royal Marines and the 5th Airborne Brigade were sent against the East Germans on North Jutland Island and when the Guards Brigade arrived they would be moving southwards.

As to the US Marines operating away from their landing sites around Esbjerg, there were similar issues present. Junior officers wanted to sweep all the way to the Baltic at once while those in more senior positions realised that while desirable such a course of action was dangerous. The East German 7TD may have been unable to stop the landings taking place but they were an effective counterattack force at a tactical level. US Marines piloting Harrier’s, Hornet’s and Skyhawk’s broke up many tanks attacks that the East Germans undertook but there was a lot of enemy armour present. Again and again this was encountered in battles which the Marine Riflemen on the ground struggled to deal with as the enemy certainly knew how to put their T-72’s and BMP-2’s to use.

The East Germans had reacted fast to BLACK PYTHON and caused the US Marines plenty of trouble. Superior fire support eventually made sure that overall the 5th Marine Division kept on moving forward though much slower than many involved would have liked and certainly with more casualties than everyone wanted.

Lead units of the US Marines reached the area around the towns of Holsted and Brorup, following the route of the cross-Jutland highway E20 running from Esbjerg to Fredericia, before they finally were forced to stop. Enemy resistance inland was getting too tough and more Marine Riflemen needed to be brought forward and especially tanks. The dash had taken them almost halfway across the width of Jutland in less than two days but there were also strong enemy forces to their north too which couldn’t be left unmolested. Combat was soon joined ahead and on the flank and casualties would mount up, yet there was still great success with BLACK PYTHON despite the temporary halting of the forward march. The hope was soon to get going again and reach the Baltic… just once the enemy had been properly dealt with.





Two Hundred & Eighteen

Soviet bombers and cruise missiles had done a lot of damage to the infrastructure of parts of Britain and that had compounded that civilian strife in the immediate pre-war period when TtW had come into effect in the drastic manner which it had. Power supplies, military-related industries and transportation links had all had immense harm done to them with the war from internal troubles and external attacks. Yet, Britain remained standing with a functioning government that was making sure that as much effort as could be possibly spared was going into repairing some of the destruction caused where wartime priority needs were met. This was particularly true with regard to the country’s ports and major airports as these were vital for the continued war effort.

Acting as a major rear-supply distribution centre and troops transfer station, Britain’s transportation infrastructure was a hive of activity. Ships and aircraft were making constant use of a multitude of facilities throughout the nation while repair and urgent construction work to expand many of these went on around them.

Along the coastlines to the west, the south and the east there were many fine deep-water harbours with a lot of infrastructure and transport links. Britain was a maritime country and it was from these where the now departed Empire had begun. The ports in the west lay on the Clyde, at Merseyside, through South Wales and along the Bristol Channel. Those in Devon, Dorset, Hampshire and Kent were in the south while to the west they stretched up from the Thames Estuary to Essex on to Humberside as far as the North-East and then along Scotland’s North Sea shore. There were ships arriving in these from all over the world and then departing too bound for further global destinations. They brought in not just military-related equipment for onward transfer but food and fuel to assist the British population. Many of these ports were badly damaged while others remained fully-operational while at a lot of them there was urgent work going on to re-establish cranes, railway sidings and such like to expand their capabilities. Minesweepers and minehunters were afloat along with armed patrol boats near the ports searching for signs of enemy action; in the case of mines there had been quite a few instances where vessels had been damaged or even sunk by such weapons of war laid clandestinely by the enemy.

Military airbases operated by the RAF, the Royal Navy’s FAA and the USAF were hives of activity but so too were civilian airports nationwide. TtW had brought a stop to commercial flights and ground private flights before aircraft were taken into military service. Facilities like Heathrow and Gatwick in the south along with other airports up and down the country were operated by the UK Armed Forces now though with large numbers of NATO military personnel operating from them in support. Airliners, commercial freight aircraft and military transports were making use of their big runaways and passenger-handling facilities to move soldiers through the UK. Some of those were going onwards to the frontlines in Germany while others were being routed elsewhere forward. Coming back through the UK and out again in the other direction were a lot of empty aircraft on their way to bring more soldiers to Europe but also medical flights too. At several locations and not just at the airports, civilian aviation infrastructure had been attacked by the enemy and great losses taken to air traffic control and aviation fuel storage. Some of those strikes had come on the ground from commando type forces which had caused havoc in the early stages of the war. Nonetheless, what damage had been done was eventually overcome, even in haphazard form, with time.

Away from just the movement of equipment, supplies and fighting men there came the establishment at several ports and especially at smaller civilian airports of rear-area repair and maintenance facilities for warships and combat aircraft. This was in the main an undertaking by the US Armed Forces who viewed Britain as a generally secure base of operations from where they could establish temporary locations to assist in the upkeep of their warfighting assets. Many of their own bases on the European continent had been severely damaged while those back home in North America were very far away from the frontlines. Britain was perfectly-placed to house such work being done on warships and aircraft, especially major aircraft repairs to allow those to keep flying. Equipment and workers had been brought in and facilities put to use for these efforts; the British Government approved of such measures as this was part of their NATO commitment and it also helped give many British people some work on the support side of those operations.


Keeping Britain in the war was costing the country an absolute fortune and all of that incurred debt.

War-emergency Treasury reserves had long been depleted and there had been an utter failure in an admittedly half-hearted attempt to sell Government bonds domestically. American banks had worked with the US Treasury Department to provide loans to certain Allies at extremely favourable terms (guaranteed by the US Government) so that they could continue to fight when their own economies had been brought to a halt. Britain was thus able to sustain itself though there were fears from many that this was a very dangerous long-term solution for the country’s future. Jobs were created in many places supporting the war effort in all sorts of roles and many people took them because they had found themselves in desperate straits. Not everyone was behind this, especially many trade union figures due to the banning of such organisations among such workers in sudden wartime positions – this would cause an immense legal row in the courts for years to come –, but there was a big propaganda push being made across the country for people to get behind the war. There were instances where that was overdone but it was generally becoming a success with the British public being as patriotic as they were in the face of a foreign enemy.

Nonetheless, Britain wasn’t united behind the war effort like it had been during World War Two.

Party politics had returned with a vengeance in Parliament and there remained a great deal of domestic opposition to the conflict despite Britain being attacked as it had been. There was still a high level of crime going on with so many police officers serving in uniform abroad and TA soldiers at home being unable to do their job in their absence. Schools remained closed and sporting events were still cancelled for the foreseeable future. War damage had been greatly disruptive in many places. Major road & rail bridges, power stations and industry that the enemy had regarded as of a military support nature had been attacked and many of those strikes had been far from pinpoint in their accuracy. Then there were all of those people put out of work when the domestic economy crashed. Much of the NHS remained on a war-footing while a lot of firefighting equipment had been pulled out of cities and hidden in the countryside in case of a nuclear strike. To many, Britain remained broken and would never recover so there was widespread despair among a lot of people.

In addition, the casualties of war among not just the military but civilians too were very high and the knowledge of those – direct and indirect – was the cause of more despondency among others.


Direct military attacks against the UK mainland by the enemy had been getting less frequent as the war went on. The initial wave of cruise missiles launched by raketonosets and submarines had been intense and then there had come commando attacks despite the best efforts at security to guard against them. When conventional bombing raids had come across the North Sea from the Baltic Approaches area, they too had caused much damage and loss of life.

The combating of these from Britain and its NATO allies had taken many forms from the hunt for enemy submarines at sea to a better focus in long-range air defence and British troops going to southern Norway. The enemy had used up many of its one-shot assets as well, especially after the Spetsnaz forces operating on British soil had committed their attacks and then been hunted down eventually. There was still a nationwide blackout in effect (questions remained over the actual effectiveness of that in the face of modern navigation systems) and a lot of combat assets were deployed to defend the country. Some attacks were still occurring yet those were a rarity now.

The country had suffered greatly from these though and along with the other domestic effects upon the country, some were beginning to ponder whether Britain would ever be the same again.





Two Hundred & Nineteen

Several days after it was signed, the agreement reached in the capital of The Bahamas would become known as the Treaty of Nassau. The US Secretary of State would fly across from Europe for that short ceremony while the lead member of the Cuban Military Council (formerly the Chief of Staff of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces) General Ulises Rosales del Toro would come up from Havana to add his signature in person too.

There were always anticipated to be many negative reactions to what was agreed in Nassau from all quarters, yet both sides believed that the settlement that was trashed out meant that there would be peace in the Caribbean, a viable future for Cuba and honour settled on the American side for what had occurred when Cuba had unexpectedly entered the war. The ceasefire would become a permanent peace treaty so that Cuba could be saved from the risk of further destruction and the Americans would be able to concentrate their efforts on fighting the Soviet Union and its puppets in Eastern Europe.

Regardless, the details agreed were always going to cause upset and resentment to many.


John Whitehead – Deputy Secretary of State – and his assistants from the State Department were those on the American side who were responsible for negotiations on behalf of their country. The Cubans sent many military figures from the senior Ochoa at first to junior-ranking officers specialising in military intelligence and foreign relations alongside their military careers to Nassau. Del Toro would eventually oversee the aspects of the agreement made in series of talks with the Americans and those he had sent there ended up being his ears and his mouthpiece instead of being like Whitehead was for the Americans. For The Bahamas, Prime Minister Pindling considered the talks and then the subsequent treaty a crowning achievement for himself and his country that would see him and his nation do well in the future. He had been busy in recent years trying to repair his country’s position following the revelations in the early Eighties about how The Bahamas had been used as a transit base to flood the United States with illegal drugs and was certain that the Treaty of Nassau would greatly help there.

Those at the talks on Nassau from the American and Cuban sides had been generally isolated from the outside world. They had communications with their governments back home but were cut off from external sources of pressure in a deliberate fashion so that their discussions couldn’t be influenced by any form of protest or back-channel lobbying. The Bahamas could control who came into their country and get near the diplomats better than if such talks had been on the ground in either the US or in Cuba. Of course, their home governments could still be influenced by those with an agenda, yet the intent was to keep those at the talks away from such outside impact; there were too many personal interests from people and groups who wanted to have their input into what was going to be agreed at Nassau.

The Treaty of Nassau would cover all aspects of relations between the United States and Cuba from those of an historic nature to the present wartime conditions and into the future as well. There had been so many issues from those who attended the talks in Nassau to go through there and in consultations with their governments back home that at times it had been felt that no settlement would ever be reached. One was though and it was in those details where the controversy following the treaty would come from.

*

A major foreign policy objective of the United States – and thus one with domestic importance too – was the status of the Cuban-Americans. There were exiles from the regime which the deceased Castro Brothers had deposed who had made their home in the United States and then those born to Cuban parents while in America as well who many considered to be Cubans as well. Generally, these people were opposed to the communist regime on the island while retaining their desire for the overthrow of that before they could return there. They were a major domestic political force and so too were their supporters.

The policy of the Reagan Administration, which was what Whitehead’s brief had covered even after Bush had become Acting President, was that the return of such people to their homeland was desirable for the interests of the United States. Such freedom to travel backwards and forwards between their homes in America was what was wanted along with the influence that such people would bring to Cuba… and then the domestic political effects in the United States too.

del Toro and his fellow Military Council had all risen to their positions by being good communists, but they all considered themselves Cuban first. They had a fear – and one which would prove correct in the coming years – that such people would want to do just as the Americans wanted and make changes to Cuba. Such people were their countrymen though and the Military Council knew that their country would need to go in a different direction in the future if it was to survive. The people had overthrown the old regime therefore finishing off communism on the island and then their own actions as the Cuban Armed Forces had made sure that there could never be a reconciliation with the Soviets.

The Treaty of Nassau would allow any Cuban – even one born abroad – who wished to return to Cuba to do so. In addition, those who had claims of property lost in the Revolution of 1959 and afterwards as well were to have those issues addressed. At the suggestion of Whitehead, an international panel of experts (all of whom were agreeable to the Cuban and US governments) would make the judgements on what would be claimed in compensation and how that was to take place with the Deputy Secretary of State agreeing to the Cuban wishes of an assurance that as long as no direct property was removed from their current owners that would be acceptable; they didn’t wish to incite another revolt among the people by taking land but money being paid was something they were willing to allow.


The Military Council consisted of generals and a few admirals all of whom were professional military officers. These men had done the wishes of the Castro Brothers under what they claimed was duress. As part of the treaty, military officers with the Cuban Armed Forces (the term ‘Revolutionary’ had been pointedly dropped) couldn’t face any action in the United States in terms of criminal or civil charges for what others would regard as war crimes during the short conflict or beforehand too on other occasions. This was for military personnel only, the Americans agreed, not those from the intelligence world or politicians.

As part of this commitment that del Toro had Whitehead assure him of to protect his own, Cuba also wished to see the return as soon as possible of all Cuban military personnel captured in the fighting in southwestern Africa with South African forces. The Cubans were very unhappy at what had occurred there and were alarmed at how the South Africans took their time to stop destroying the Cuban Army even after the US-Cuban ceasefire had gone into effect. Cuban wanted all prisoners back, again without any charges laid against them for any sort of alleged crimes. Cuba had promptly returned all American POW’s as a sign of good faith during the talks in Nassau, they had reminded the Americans, and wanted their own officers and men back from Angola.

An agreement on this was reached so that those soldiers and their personal effects – not weapons – would be brought home by the Americans, not the Cubans (who would have struggled to do that anyway) and especially not by the South Africans either. del Toro’s representatives in The Bahamas at the talks had made clear their distaste for the racists in Pretoria but Whitehead had been forced to counter against his own personal feelings on the matter that South Africa was an ally of the United States in this war. Under usual circumstances when dealing with the Cubans, under the Castro regime, a diplomat such as him could have spoken of the outright racism of the Havana regime to Cubans of an African heritage and there could have been back-and-forth accusations made, but such things weren’t said in Nassau for the sake of diplomacy in addition to proclamations made from the Military Council about human rights in their country.

Cuba would be getting its troops brought home and families across the island nation would be pleased with that. Opponents in the United States to the Treaty of Nassau would take objection to the involvement of the American military in doing such a thing especially with the war going on and ships and aircraft needed elsewhere, but del Toro had been insistent on this and there was also an unstated American aim of a political nature here too: such returning soldiers would be grateful it was hoped of the United States bringing them home from South African captivity and would also tell tales of the defeat of Cuban arms in such a spectacular fashion as had occurred in Angola.


Once the Treaty of Nassau was signed, Cuba was then to enter the Allies by declaring war upon the Soviet Union.

This flip-flopping in diplomatic terms was something else that the Americans saw as something of great importance. Cuba had been left in a bad way by the conflict with the US and without the usual pre-war support of the Soviets it wasn’t going to have the logistics to deploy men abroad to fight with the Allies elsewhere in the world. The Cuban Armed Forces operated Soviet equipment and followed their doctrine; again, a presence of Cuban military might – such as it was – wasn’t really going to help the Allies. There wasn’t a military aim for the United States in having Cuba join the war though, just a diplomatic one.

Every single Latin American country would now be at war with the Soviet Union from Mexico down to the bottom of South America. Panama and Argentina had been pressured into doing so while the new regime in Nicaragua that the Contras had established with CIA support had declared war too. The neutralist government in Costa Rica had even been browbeaten into becoming one of the Allies. Across the Caribbean, many of the small island nations had done so too leaving only a few countries in the Western Hemisphere not involved and none of those remaining had any ties to the Soviets.

Acting President Bush had pushed for this even when Whitehead had told him that it would be difficult to get the Cubans to agree, yet the determination to force the Cubans to join the war with the Allies had been there. The Military Council had been weary of this but when they understood that they wouldn’t have to contribute anything meaningful to the cause they had gone along with it albeit with reluctance.


Diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba were to be fully restored. Embassies were to open in both Washington and Havana with the probable establishment of Cuban consulates in Miami and maybe New York as well.

Whitehead couldn’t get del Toro’s representatives to agree on any form of security treaty that would come with this restoration in direct inter-government relations due to the Military Council stating that they intended to hand over power ‘soon’ (their words on that matter) to a civilian government yet that wasn’t something which the United States pushed for overall. It was spoken about as both were with the Allies, yet there was no immediate need. The thinking on the part of the Americans was that there needed to be some agreement on Cuban military power so that never again could they attack the United States as they had done on its own soil. It would have been very difficult to get the Cubans to go along with that for it would have looked like an attempt to force a disarmament of them though the plan had been to offer them a pledge to not interfere in the domestic affairs of Cuba.

Such a thing didn’t work out and the Americans didn’t get what they wanted here. The Cubans were rather annoyed at the suggestion but then del Toro had sent word from Havana that if the United States wanted a joint security agreement then he would also want that to be linked to that request since talks started about America providing Cuba access to foreign loans to fix their economy now that they were about to declare war upon their biggest financial supporter.

The mess here with both sides wanting something that the other couldn’t give meant that it was left alone for now. The Treaty of Nassau would establish in its text the groundwork for something like this in the future so that discussions could come there, but there was nothing real in affect. Cuba wasn’t going to gain access to international loans with American help and in the long-term that would have some major negative effects to which both Whitehead and del Toro could only partially foresee when they concluded their talks on that matter.


Then there remained the issue of Guantanamo Bay, which the resolution to brought about most of the later opponents to the US-Cuban peace agreement.

When the Cubans had attacked the United States, they hadn’t just bombed the American mainland at Key West and outside Miami hitting military bases there but had too conducted an overwhelming infantry assault upon the military base at Guantanamo Bay. Immense casualties had been taken on both sides with the US Marines and the few US Navy personnel there putting up a furious if short and doomed defence while the Cuban Army having put all it had into taking the facility fast regardless of their own losses. del Toro and his fellow military officers had been distancing themselves when at Nassau from the air attacks made on Florida – blaming that all on the Castro Brothers – as they knew how the Americans had reacted to that politically, but for them Guantanamo Bay was something else.

It was Cuban soil which had been illegally held by a foreign aggressor which they had every right to retake in times of warfare. Of course, that was not how the Americans saw the matter. There were treaties going back throughout the Twentieth Century concerning their right to use Guantanamo Bay and they wanted possession of it back. Above everything else, resolving this issue was of greatest importance for both sides. There could have been no Treaty of Nassau if the matter of Guantanamo Bay wasn’t dealt with; it couldn’t be sidestepped as it was paramount to both sides.

The Military Council feared that to return to the previous situation where the Americans were free to do as they wished when it came to Guantanamo Bay following their own handover of it back to them would mean civil disorder on the scale that saw Fidel Castro lynched by the Havana mob. Anarchy would breakout island-wide with military units rebelling alongside the people. Guantanamo Bay was just that important to the Cuban people.

Should the Americans have let the status quo remain with the Cubans keeping their occupation, then any political figure involved would no longer have a career in office. It would be seen as the greatest of all capitulations and a personal betrayal to the men and women who had died there. The US Government didn’t have to fear being violently overthrown by the mob like the Military Council did if they gave in, but it was almost the same thing…

It was Prime Minister Pindling who approached them with a solution to this matter. He had stayed out of the details of the US-Cuban talks on other issues but intervened here in what the Americans later realised was something that had actually came from a back-channel move made by the British through their Commonwealth representatives in The Bahamas. The UK Government wanted the United States wholly focused on Europe while Pindling was thinking of his own prestige, but still what would be suggested would generally be beneficial for the goals of both the Americans and the Cubans.

US military forces would return to Guantanamo Bay within a month’s time and be allowed to re-establish their naval and air bases there. The Americans would pay for all of the necessary repairs and construction work themselves with Cuban enterprises doing this paid work not American or foreign companies. The remains of the fortifications which had been destroyed during the Cuban assault would be torn down and instead there would come a simple security fence manned by a joint US-Cuban guard force. Inside the facility there would be Cuban military personnel stationed as observers working similar to military attachés that would come with the re-establishment of formal diplomatic relations and such people would sit on a joint panel to oversee that the US military activities there didn’t threaten Cuban interests.

An initial offer made by the Americans of fifty years was negotiated down to just a tenth of that for their presence there. After that five year period, the United States would withdraw from Guantanamo Bay though there would remain the legal right for the Americans to return military forces subject to joint approval should the security of the United States be threaten by what were deemed ‘external threats’. Cuba would then run a military base there for their own purposes as long as it was kept functioning for such a possible return by the Americans and if they had trouble paying for the upkeep, then the United States could make payments for that. All backdated rent for the facility owed to Cuba would be paid (not really a significant amount) and beginning from the day American forces returned, that amount would greatly increase too.

Cuban sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay would be reaffirmed in the treaty signed in The Bahamas though the wording would state that the status on jurisdiction had changed to allow further Cuban control with their observers having some veto on what went on there. By May 1993, Cuba would have absolute physical control of the facility when the Americans departed.

Even with the diplomatic wording used in this part of the Treaty of Nassau, there were expected to be problems on the ground there when it came to what the Cubans could stop happening during that time the Americans remained and then when it came to possible later American military use as well. Nevertheless, what was to be put into a legal guarantee was the most that either side was willing to accept and it was understood that domestic public consumption was key. The US Government and the Military Council would both have trouble selling this to their own people yet recognised the trouble that the other would too.

*

Within the United States during those ongoing talks in Nassau, the US Government had come under intense pressure when it came to how to act when it came to the Cubans. The ceasefire had been fiercely opposed by many and then any sort of talks made also strongly objected to. There were very few calls for a settlement with Cuba compared to those who objected to continued fighting with the Soviets… and there weren’t many doing the latter either. Cuba’s attack on the United States had made the country angry from coast to coast and from those of all sorts of political persuasions came passionate emotions.

Reagan and then Bush had both been away from the ghost-town that was Washington during the early stages of the war but as lobbyists, activists and even some politicians started returning to a city which many thought would be vaporised first should the war go nuclear, those opponents gathered together and became stronger by concentration. When such people had been scattered they had been outspoken in their opposition to Cuba but together they were a real danger. Calls were made for the ceasefire to be broken by the Americans and for Cuba to be bombed again and even invaded. There were demands that a military operation to retake Guantanamo Bay be mounted at once as news leaked that the Defence Department did have one planned with the troops and military assets available in the region; any success with Operation TROPIC JUSTICE was doubtful to the planners with the few assets available but those loud voices didn’t care about that.

Across the country there were protests concerning Cuba with so many Americans having strong feelings on the matter. As expected, this was stronger down in Florida and then the Governor Bob Martinez got involved. He had a reputation to repair after domestic troubles with a sales tax the previous year and the Republican Governor there believed that the best way to do that was to follow the call of the crowd in demanding that there be no talks with the Cuban generals for a settlement just for them to be deposed. Bush and other figures in his party had tried to talk him into calming the situation down but Martinez went too far and there was an ugly instance where FBI agents had to raid a warehouse in Miami where weapons were being assembled by an ad hoc ‘Liberation Army’ (a few hundred people at most) getting ready to invade Cuba a la April 1961. Martinez publically defended such people when those caught with those weapons which included heavy man-portable items like mortars, rocket-launchers, and heavy-calibre machine guns were arrested on weapons charges. Martinez himself was the son of Spanish immigrants and he was an example of those not of Cuban extraction themselves who took it upon themselves to fight for this cause – some with the best intentions of Cuba at heart and others doing so in an opportunistic fashion.

Whitehead came under attack as it was known that he was in Nassau talking with the Cubans and this diplomat who was serving his country the best way he knew how faced a torching of his private home in New York while he was abroad doing that. Certain newspapers ran stories concerning his personal life which were of a slanderous nature in another effort to change the course of events.

As Congress met at Greenbrier, there was much attempted interference in the US-Cuban talks coming from there. America was a democracy yet sometimes the actions of its politicians when it came to particular matters leave admirers disgusted. There were Congressmen and Senators who were working for interests that sought to scupper any agreement with Cuba while at the same time there were a few with genuine feelings on the matter who were unhappy with any sort of agreement being made with Cuba that wasn’t a diktat. Arguments and inflammatory statements came from Congress with regular fashion when it came to the situation with Cuba.

In later years, when discussing the matter, Bush would state that if the country hadn’t been at war with the Soviets and thus media attention generally elsewhere, the opposition to the Treaty of Nassau would have inflamed the American public to such a degree that it never would have been signed by his Secretary of State. He would also spoke of the trouble that would later occur when the treaty went to Congress for approval and what happened there.


For the time being, once the talks in The Bahamas were finalised and they waited for the Treaty of Nassau to be signed, some other matters outside of the text of the agreement were dealt with.

del Toro and the Military Council had authorised the disclosure to the Americans during those talks of some nuggets of intelligence to help sway the discussions. They knew that there would be great influence coming from the US Intelligence Community towards what was finally agreed upon and set out to buy some goodwill; the Americans weren’t fools and realised this yet took what was on offer because to not do so would only harm them.

The DGI had been crushed by the Cuban Armed Forces as senior people from that intelligence service had tried to maintain the Castro regime even without the deceased brothers. Many of those people had been killed alongside their Soviet puppet-masters at that military base when the Cuban Army had struck though other DGI officials had decided that their lives were more valuable that a principle. The decision was taken to give the Americans intelligence that wouldn’t harm the new Cuba and then of course a new intelligence service would be set up in the long-run.

Using that information from the Cubans, the Americans had formally arrested a female Defence Intelligence Agency analyst who was a spy for the DGI and then detained pending a decision an academic who advised the State Department when it came to pre-war policy towards Cuba. Both people had ideological motives for their activities and were secret supporters of the Castro regime. These were the opening offers which the Military Council gave the Americans on the promise of a lot more and once those talks were finished to a satisfactory degree in Nassau, the floodgates opened.

The US Intelligence Community was made aware of all sorts of figures who worked for the DGI currently and in the past. There were few spy rings but instead individuals in positions of power and influence. Some had acted for Cuban interests because they were true-believers yet more had been either brought or blackmailed into doing so. Their names and evidence against them was handed over in a tidal-wave of information that also included details of KGB activities in the United States that Cuba was aware of and then lists of people in Cuba that were wanted by the Americans. These defectors, exiles and even criminals were all promised to the Americans now that there was a peace between the two nations and diplomatic relations were to be restored. It was expected that the Americans wouldn’t make public the arrests of spies for the time being but the Military Council would televise the arrests of many people in Cuba which were known to be wanted by the US Government with the knowledge that such events would then play well to the American public.

Again, the Americans wouldn’t be foolish enough to know exactly what the Cubans were doing here in building bridges from one side.

There were very few United States military forces remaining in the region prepared to act against Cuba. The carrier Coral Sea was now in the Barents Sea while the training carrier Lexington had taken her place the US Navy had hardly made a like-for-like replacement with those vessels. USAF combat assets were minimal with the units involved waiting at any moment for a release order to come so they could redeploy to Europe. When it came to troops there remained the regular 193rd Infantry Brigade deployed in Panama with some elements in Puerto Rico now and the lone brigade from the 7th Light Infantry Division in Nicaragua slated to transfer to Norway but possibly Denmark now once the threat of further conflict was resolved. US ARNG troops from Florida and Puerto Rico were still in-place in both their home stations with the understrength 4th Marine Division (many assets deployed elsewhere) nearby.

That planned attack against Cuba, TROPIC JUSTICE, should it have been authorised was meant to land in southeastern Cuba to retake Guantanamo Bay though it had many doubters due to the limitations of military assets gathered. Peace now meant that these and the combat support assets positioned to assist the combat forces could all be redeployed elsewhere. The Lexington, the national guardsmen and a select few Marine Reservists were instructed to remain in theatre once the agreement was settled in Nassau, but the combat aircraft, the regular troops and the US Marines would all now leave the region to go to Europe. This wasn’t the biggest influx of American reinforcements, but all would come in handy where they went.

Finally, in an another immediate outcome of the Treaty of Nassau, of much later note within the United States domestically, some smiles were raised when the world of sport moved as it often did in a diplomatic fashion. The Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, an outspoken and widely-known figure, announced that he was putting together a team to make an immediate trip to visit Cuba. There were quite a few players who quickly announced they would be going to the country once everything was arranged and then some media drama about others who weren’t showing an interest in going. A series of expedition games were planned to show goodwill using sports as a means of that.

Throughout the conflict, nationwide sporting events across America had been cancelled; football, baseball, hockey, basketball, motorsports and golf prominent among these but in no way exhaustive. Those athletes were regarded as superstars with many of them having important public images. Some chose to express their views to the media throughout the war with the overwhelming majority (but not all) publicly supporting the war effort and US military personnel abroad. In the absence of organised events, extra training sessions occurred for those sports stars yet others wanted to take part in the war effort as best they could. There were plenty of volunteers for the military and then others who joined figures from the music industry and Hollywood in events to ‘support the troops’ at home and abroad. Across the United States there was still the fear of nuclear holocaust yet at the same time with the conflict being as conventional as it was there were plenty of echoes of World War Two.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Twenty

The position in the UK Government of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was considered by many to be a thankless task. It was a dangerous one too on a personal level with the Cabinet member undertaking the role facing arguably the greatest threat to their life within the government… as very recently exemplified by the assassination of John Major who had been killed very shortly after taking up the position. Ken Clarke, whom Thatcher had assigned as Major’s replacement at the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), had moved from the role of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to the NIO and knew all about the risks involved. Yet, at the same time, the ambitious Clarke knew that if he could succeed here then he could rise very high indeed in the government.

Foresight wasn’t available to him but Clarke’s wishes would come true and only three years later he would be in Downing Street…

Meanwhile, Clarke was forced to use all the political capital he had along with the force of his will to bring a halt to the terribly violent events going on in Northern Ireland. He was the minister responsible for Ulster and under his watch the situation had become one of civil war in the Province. There was ethnic cleansing and genocide taking place and that had to stop. Earlier measures had been tried and failed due in part to the external effects of the ongoing war, yet Clarke had come to realise that even such a factor as World War Three ongoing couldn’t mean that the murderous mayhem could continue. If the only way to stop that was through a draconian approach then that was the way it had to be. He had requested that Thatcher and the War Cabinet give him what were in effect dictatorial powers to address the issue and those were granted. Only with the powers that allowed the NIO to take complete control of the security forces and local government in Northern Ireland was he able to do this.

Nothing else had worked and this was the final result of all previous failures.


Major had been killed by the IRA and Soviet intelligence agencies had shipped weapons to the INLA in two pre-war events which had lit the fuse in Northern Ireland. However, while those Republican terrorist groups had been active in the internal conflict which commenced in Ulster after the shooting started with the Soviets elsewhere, it was Loyalist terrorists which had truly committed the worst of the atrocities that had then started taking place. That wasn’t something that many had wanted to accept for the Loyalists were seen as the ‘good guys’ – even if slightly misguided – while the Republicans were meant to be the ‘bad guys’. It was the former, not the latter who had started driving tens of thousands of innocent civilians from their homes and then committed massacres across Northern Ireland while the latter had reacted to these and done terrible things too those had been nowhere on such a murderous scale. Too many people had their political careers staked on the fact of who were the good guys and who were the bad guys and this had at first hampered Clarke’s attempts to deal with the crisis in Ulster as it got worse and worse with every passing day.

The Northern Ireland Secretary at first just hadn’t been believed and his reports side-lined by those who didn’t want to hear the truth. However, once tens of thousands of refugees had started to stream into the Irish Republic bringing with them tales of unimaginable horrors and then there had come identical reports coming up the chain of command through the British Army, the thinking elsewhere had changed. In addition, the reaction to all of this which had come from Dublin and then the United States – especially in the case of the latter nation – had piled on the pressure to act. The War Cabinet in London and then Parliament once it had finally met both had demanded immediate action and given Clarke what he had asked for. The conventional war with the Soviets still dominated the political scene but no one could allow the civil war to continue in Northern Ireland once there was repeated, overwhelming and confirmed evidence of what was occurring there.

The new Defence Secretary Cecil Parkinson – who had only taken the role upon the personal request of the PM and only for the duration of the conflict – had repeatedly stated to the War Cabinet his position in support of Clarke that this was happening on British soil and those people from both sides of the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland were British citizens!


Members of both the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) would protest furiously when orders came down from Clarke that their organisations were being taken under the direct command of the British Army and that they were all to answer to orders from professional soldiers instead of their own senior officers. The MI-5 presence of the ground came under command of the British Army too and again there was a lot of anger at this as well yet the Prime Minister was far from happy with what she regarded as the less-than-stellar recent performance of the Security Service so this went through as Clarke wanted. Each organisation was full of decent, honest and hard-working men and women though at the same time there were many members who had looked the other way when the atrocities were occurring and gone as far in some instances to aid and even take part in those. It was impossible to weed out the honest from the dishonest and Clarke had had to take this step because there was no time to be fair.

British soldiers from the mainland might have had many general sympathies with the Loyalist agenda and a hatred for the IRA but there wasn’t a connection between them and those committing the killings at a local level. Moreover, full-time soldiers responded to orders much better than those on the ground with a vested interest in helping those who they mistakenly believed were right. Clarke knew that he would be making even more enemies than he already had that might cost him dear in the future but he still went and did this because there was no other option that he could see.

There had to be the rule of law imposed and he put his faith in the British Army.


General Pascoe had been transferred out of his position as head of Northern Ireland Command and his place taken as commanding British Army forces in Ulster by General Charles Guthrie who had been serving as Assistant Chief of the General Staff. Pascoe hadn’t gone quietly and reminded those at the MOD that before war erupted in Europe he had seen his command stripped of troops and complained bitterly about this with warnings that the situation would fast get out of control. He hadn’t foreseen what would eventually occur in scale but his warnings had been there. Clarke had lost faith in the man though despite knowing just how hard Pascoe had been doing in such a difficult role due to the fact that the soldiers under his command had in far too many cases unwittingly done the bidding of those involved in the murders and mayhem. One of the worst example of this was Force Research Unit: a British Army manned covert reconnaissance organisation (part of 14 Intelligence Company) thoroughly implicated not just in collusion with Loyalist killers but also believed to be committing murders too. Clarke had this unit disbanded, its men sent back to the mainland and an NIO-led investigation started in to what had been done by these supposedly intelligence operatives.

Two battalions of regular British Army troops had remained in Northern Ireland following the LION deployment of the UK Armed Forces elsewhere and both of those were left understrength with many combat support units moving to Germany to join other formations with the reasoning that heavy weapons and engineering specialists weren’t needed. Pascoe and then Guthrie would have used such men for patrol duties because they were trained soldiers yet those wishes there had been overruled. In their place and also to replace other regular troops who had departed there had first come men from TA formations such as 4 PARA and then other units of less-capable reservists from the western parts of mainland Britain. Even those part-time Paras didn’t have the necessary training to allow them to keep the peace in Northern Ireland when they arrived as they ended up like the regular soldiers with 1 LI & 3 QUEENS chasing their tails and being deceived as civil war broke out. There needed to be an acclimatisation period and those reservists from the UK mainland who had been rushed in had missed out upon that.

Eventually thought, the soldiers all became aware of what they were facing in Ulster. They discovered the after-effects of massacres which had taken place, they witnessed homes being burnt down in an organised fashion as communities were burnt out and they came under fire from civilians with guns who then tried to melt back into the population. Military officers working with the UDR, the RUC, MI-5 personnel in Northern Ireland and also local authorities all started to understand that there was an undercurrent of cooperation between those organisations and many of those committing the violence. At the same time, the soldiers also understood that the violence wasn’t all one sided either; the Republican terrorists were out killing innocents just like the Loyalists ones were and made their own claims of ‘self-defence’ as well.

Guthrie’s instructions from Clarke upon taking over were to make sure that his men were ready to act when he got the political authorisation to act and the general did just that.


When it begun, Clarke’s solution to the problems in Northern Ireland was shockingly effective. He wasn’t a political or military genius it was just a case of him acting at the right time and with enough support behind him for what would have normally been regarded as too terrible to contemplate now being the only thing that could be done.

Martial law came into effect in Ulster.

The war zone that the Province had become was treated just like that with dusk-to-dawn curfews, a lifting of previous restrictive rules of engagement and the introduction of military courts. The soldiers were not going to look that other way due to the needs of someone’s political agenda and they were free to engage the enemy when they saw fit. There were always going to be objections back on the Mainland about this with the claim that it was ‘un-British’ but the only choice was a continued state of anarchy which had already claimed thousands of lives if the worst estimates were true. With complete military control over other elements of the security services on the ground in Ulster and then the NIO bringing in people from London to take control of the local authorities, the aim was to bring law and order back to Northern Ireland.

For those committing the acts which were now being treated as war crimes, the sudden unleashing of the British Army against them was a shock. No longer could they rely on being warned through back channel contacts of an impending security operation and there came a sudden end to the intelligence on where to find their ‘enemy’ which they were being supplied though those friendly sources. British soldiers opened fire at will rather than being forced to follow a complicated set of ROE: there was little hesitation on their part either to delay that because of all the horrors that they had seen beforehand and not been allowed to act against.


British military operations to end the violence came with two major operations to begin that process. The higher formations of the 3rd and 39th Brigade’s unleashed their men in wide-scale operations to the west and south respectively against those judged the most dangerous enemies first with the intention of hitting them so hard that they would collapse. Afterwards the soldiers would then conduct smaller operations elsewhere of an aggressive patrol nature after these first shock-and-awe strikes.

The first battalion of the Light Infantry (1 LI) battlegroup was the lead tactical unit for the mission deep into the west to stage an assault operation that bore all the hallmarks of a real combat operation around Enniskillen in County Fermanagh. The regular soldiers were joined by UDR men strengthening their ranks yet under tight discipline. Arriving at dawn in convoys of light armoured vehicles from several directions, the soldiers moved throughout the countryside surrounding the town rather than in there itself and focused upon the roads running northwest, west and south away towards the border with the Irish Republic. Catholic civilians from County Fermanagh and beyond had been travelling along these as they fled Northern Ireland only to be face robbery, rape and murder by Loyalist terrorists acting like brigands of the Middle Ages. Such killers had base camps, transport and stocks of weaponry to support them in their effort and had thought themselves to be invulnerable to any attempt to stop their activities… until they came up against some real soldiers.

The resulting clashes were a one-sided affair. 1 LI attacked those base camps with overwhelming firepower and then struck at those who tried to flee fighting. Men who thought that they were tough when killing unarmed civilians got a taste of their own medicine in being cut down with impunity. There had been no warning from their usual sources of any sort of operation even being planned against them just the biggest ambush which they could have ever faced. After the numbers among them of the unlucky and the foolish had been killed those with a bit of common sense who remained started surrendering to the British soldiers. They hoped to wiggle their way out of trouble by playing on patriotism and then rely on a later civilian court case where in the meantime witnesses against them would have moved on or could be intimidated. What they weren’t expecting was to be stripped to their underwear, hog-tied and then shipped off to a distant detention camp without any access to supporters or even a friendly solicitor. Their captors didn’t want them to trade information in return for being let go and instead quickly gave them military trials where the evidence against them that they were suspected war criminals was enough to see them detained until an undefined later date. Word would soon spread fast about this and such a thing was hoped to reach others engaged in similar actions elsewhere.

Down in South Armagh, the IRA men there were always going to be a tougher nut to crack than the Loyalists around Enniskillen. Elements of the SAS and some UDR troops had suffered greatly in trying to defeat the terrorists here which had established a war zone along the border with the Irish Republic but they had badly stung the IRA as well. Yet operations had been hampered by a refusal to allow crossing of the border over into the Irish Republic to engage those who fled after attacking and even Clarke hadn’t been able to get permission for that to occur. The IRA had their bases outside of Ulster and slipped across to fight the security services where they had much local support whenever they wished. 3 QUEENS – again with extra manpower from the UDR under command – were given the task of stopping this with the mission orders being for them to defeat the IRA once and for all from coming across and attacking security services infrastructure on British soil.

Using some helicopters but mainly travelling cross-country in a several fleets of Land Rovers, 3 QUEENS closed the border by moving from above and in from the northwest. They moved fast to seize the main crossing points and then spread out from there from company-sized groups down to platoons and fire squads. Plenty of ammunition and supplies were taken with them to allow them to operate out in the countryside in a mobile fashion on foot and in their vehicles patrolling the border area just inside Ulster and taking on those who tried to challenge them. Very quickly those fights came with the IRA though while successes came they weren’t as effective as the Enniskillen operation as the border was long and porous. Everywhere that the IRA and 3 QUEENS clashed in a stand-up engagement the British soldiers would win but the IRA really knew this terrain well and understood how to slip away from a pursing enemy. Of course, killing those IRA men was a major objective for 3 QUEENS yet so too was stopping them coming across the border doing their worst. Intelligence pointed to a wholescale stop order going out through the ranks of the South Armagh Brigade’s cross-border activity units and then local supporters on the ground on the British side of the border quickly realised that they were mismatched against a regular force of soldiers like this who they couldn’t observe up-close and pin down in an attack.


Clarke’s gamble was working. Martial law and the concentrated application of military power was putting a stop to the activities of the worst groups of offenders in the civil war. Once those initial operations were completed those troops would be joining the reorganised UDR and specialised RUC units through which Guthrie might as well have taken a flamethrower to get rid of the bad guys in retaking the rest of Northern Ireland for the forces of law and order.

Britain was no longer going to stand for ethnic cleansing, genocide and wholescale murder taking place on its own soil.





Two Hundred & Twenty–One

The British Army had taken many losses in this war and faced some extremely tough fighting beforehand all across the North German Plain as well as in parts of coastal Scandinavia.

At times there had been crippling defeats and even with victories so many men had been killed, wounded or ended up in the hands of the enemy. The fighting which took place on March 31st when crossing the Elbe-Lateral Canal and reaching the Inter-German Border ahead of the rest of NATO was up until that point probably the fiercest instances of all combat undertaken. The corps-level attack made came following much preparation and four complete divisions were assembled for an attack over a relatively small area where there was control of the air and much reconnaissance done to gain knowledge of the enemy, but still that enemy made the British Army bleed almost white.

The race was won to set foot on the borderline but it came at a great cost.


General Inge pushed the British I Corps – a command formation somewhat unrecognisable from its pre-war order of battle – forward across what had once been the defensive sector defended by the Bundeswehr. Many of his men knew the terrain and they had plenty of West German military personnel on-hand with them to assist. All of the gathered intelligence was put to use as well, especially when it came to where and how the opposing enemy forces were positioned ahead. Those defensive forces were under the command of the Soviet Second Guards Army and included elements which had been part of the Second Guards Tank and Third Shock Army’s pre-war. These troops had been pushed backwards from their previous occupying positions along the lower reaches of the Weser all the way to the border and his mission was to defeat them on this side of the dividing borderline rather than just let them withdraw into East Germany. This hadn’t been what he had initially wanted to do but the orders had come from General’s Kenny and Galvin to defeat the enemy in battle rather than letting them escape. Therefore there had been that halt order to stop at the waterline that was the canal and build-up strength while also letting the Soviets dig in.

Due to these orders and the time the Soviets were allowed to prepare for the British assault, the mass casualties even among a stunning victory were taken.


In the push over the Elbe-Lateral Canal and the drive to the border beyond that, the 3rd & 4th Armoured Division’s remained in the lead for the combat with the 5th Infantry & 7th Armoured Division’s behind and ready to come forward in support. Infantry units from the Iron & Tiger formations were used but armour was needed as well to advance under the intense artillery barrage coming over their heads and then the air attacks that took place as well. The majority of the Soviets were dug-in yet they had some tank-heavy mobile forces positioned ready to launch counterattacks and the British were expecting this… just not in how they were undertaken.

Once over the narrow waterline that was the canal, the British went through minefields and banks of barbed wire hastily-laid to slow them down. The ground itself was pure mud after previous instances of heavy fighting here earlier in the war and then a lot of recent artillery barrages. Soviet machine guns, mortars and missile teams opened up on the British and they returned fire with their own heavy weapons. The men on the ground – both British and Soviet – took some time to engage each other directly as their fire support assets at first did all the damage but once they clashed up close and personal the fighting was intense. The British had a numerical advantage yet that wasn’t decisive here. At the same time, the Soviet troops deployed were under firm orders to stay where they were and defend what they held unlike the British where junior officers were given greater freedom to manoeuvre.

The intention on the part of the Soviet Second Guards Army to hold many of its defending forces where they were wasn’t so that they could be needlessly slaughtered. Instead, the dug-in defenders were meant to provide suitable distraction for the British so that Soviet tanks could defeat the attacker. Those tanks operated in platoon- and company-sized attacks with the small numbers charging out of cover and into the British attacking units. Tactical reconnaissance efforts at the front were looking for battalions and regiments, not these smaller units that did their assigned task of tearing into the British. Aircraft above swooping in low in the face of SAM’s and anti-aircraft guns along with soldiers on the ground armed with man-portable ATGM’s broke up these attacks alongside Centurion’s, Challenger’s and Chieftain’s yet there were many losses taken.

The Soviet Army was showing that it could defend territory when it wanted to at a tactical level and a lot of effort had to be employed to overcome that.


Nonetheless, the British I Corps drove onwards. They pushed their opponents back to the borderline and then fought them along that. Despite orders to the contrary, there were British units that went over the Inter-German Border at a local level though never more than a mile or two before their commanders pulled them back. Some latitude was given – effectively a nod and a wink so to speak – to allow Soviet units that were eventually trying to retreat as the day got later to not escape unharmed. The fixed border defences on the East German side were those of a pre-war nature and weren’t as impressive close-up as they had looked from a distance through decades of intelligence work.

Estimates from General Inge’s intelligence staff after the day’s fighting came to a close informed him that two thirds, maybe even three quarters of the enemy had been destroyed in the fighting by his attacking pair of divisions without the need to bring up his follow-on forces. At the same time, the expenditure of ammunition had been immense as the enemy had to be blasted out of their defensive works and then there was the equipment and human cost to the Iron & Tiger Division’s as well.

The corps commander spoke to the British Second Army headquarters afterwards and General Kenny was told that the mission to reach the border had been achieved with the desired results of smashing the enemy ahead apart as well. Congratulations came but also questions over own losses suffered as the army group commander was too a British Army officer as well as the commander of multi-national forces here on the North German Plain. Both men agreed that the British I Corps was worn-out and would need another halt before going any further eastwards and anyway such a thing as that would depend upon politics first too.

General Inge inquired over what decisions had been reached in Brussels if any…

*

In Central Germany, General Schwarzkopf would be greatly disappointed when he later found out that the British were the first to physically reach the Inter-German Border and not his troops. The US V Corps commander had his tanks on that borderline by the early afternoon of the last day in March yet the British had done that in their operational sector by midday. In a typical example of the certain type of diplomacy he was known for when dealing with his allies-cum-rivals, he would send his congratulations to the British afterwards… but also challenged them to race for Berlin too where he anticipated winning this time.

Across the Fulda Gap, the US Army forces under Schwarzkopf’s command spent the day fighting to not only reach the border with East German not that far from their grasp but also against Soviet forces throughout the general area. The drive was made across the Fulda River up to the border by the 3rd Armored Division while the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division moved against the town of Fulda and its new defenders, the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division widened the operational area to the southwest pushing against the enemy in the hills of the Rhon and then the 82nd Airborne Division concentrated against crushing pockets of resistance bypassed. The need for several different operations to take place throughout the countryside already littered with the refuse of war limited attention that could go into that push on the border though Schwarzkopf still gave it priority.

Once the narrow river was bounced, the Americans did like the British and pushed Soviet forces back into East Germany and followed them too just a little bit. A whole arsenal of high-powered anti-tank guns manned by East Germans met those US Army invaders and stung the 3rd Armored Division badly. Several individual unit commanders wanted to launch major assaults against these guns but were overruled and ordered to withdraw back over the border. Schwarzkopf would later make sure that the brigade commanders involved were not reprimanded for this intrusion across the Inter-German Border as he claimed they had been following his orders for ‘armed reconnaissance’ and he would also personally brief the 3rd Armored Division concerned how once political permission was given to invade – which he expected to occur soon enough – those anti-tank guns with such long-range wouldn’t be a surprise and would certainly get attention paid to them.

Around Fulda, the Soviets who had fallen back then had allowed themselves to become cut off and surrounded. The US V Corps was given extra artillery support released from US Seventh Army reserves of heavy eight-inch howitzers brought of storage in the mainland United States and shipped to Germany. These were used to blast away at the troops who had dug in around Fulda and keep them in-place there rather than defeat them; the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division would move against them in time on their own terms once the battlefield was suitably prepared.

As to the 24th Mechanized Infantry and the 82nd Airborne Division’s, those troops under Schwarzkopf’s command made physical contact with the Spanish I Corps on their right in the high ground and eliminated most of the strongest pockets of enemy resistance in the centre.


Through all of these simultaneous operations that the US V Corps had ongoing (over a small area nonetheless) there were furious air battles going on above them. Enemy aircraft had remained in greater number than elsewhere in the skies over the eastern reaches of Hessen and across the border above Thuringia. There was no intelligence that the 4ATAF or the higher command of Allied Forces Central Europe had as to why this was the case and therefore many suspicions were raised as to the reasoning behind this.

Were the Soviets trying to hide what was going on further eastwards? Was there some sort of mass attack being hidden as it was prepared?

Those questions couldn’t yet be answered though plenty of work was going into trying to find out the circumstances behind the continued strong Soviet air presence in the region. Meanwhile, for those involved in the air combat all that mattered was doing their duty by completing their missions and also staying alive. There was air combat in the hours or daylight and in the darkness, at all altitudes and with the opposing sides sometimes seeing each other and sometimes not. Fighters tried to protect their own troops from enemy air attack while attack aircraft tried to bomb those on the ground and then there were reconnaissance aircraft also in attendance on the airborne battlefield.

From the ground below came missiles that were launched against those aircraft as both American and Soviet forces tried to defend themselves but then there also came much longer range missiles from deep inside East German too. These were modern SAM systems against which NATO air forces had had some success but still struggled to deal with overall. The S-300 systems – known as the SA-10 Grumble and the SA-12 Gladiator / Giant – were being supplied as priority cases over older, less-capable systems and giving NATO aircraft a lot of problems. These lanced across the sky and hit aircraft from distance including many Soviet aircraft too. Specialist NATO electronic warfare teams were engaged in struggles against these though of course there were always other missions they had to undertake too from enemy communications interception to countering Soviet long-range jamming efforts.

There was some speculation that the enemy was trying to use fighters to defend strategic SAM batteries yet that was discounted as that had been tried and failed by Soviet allies in the Middle East in the past.

Something was certainly going on though across in Thuringia far from the frontlines and while NATO did know what that was yet, they weren’t sitting on their behinds thinking that they’d won the war here yet and it was time to take their eyes off the ball.





Two Hundred & Twenty–Two

Despite the claims of detractors, NATO wasn’t dominated either in a military or political fashion by the largest members of the organisation in peace or war. The United States wasn’t in a position to force the rest of the alliance to do its bidding as the organisation was a truly democratic body with the wishes of all members actually meaning something. It certainly would have been easier if NATO had been like the Warsaw Pact where the largest and most powerful nation – even nations – made all the decisions and everyone else did as they were told, yet that simply wasn’t the case.

Acting President Bush wanted NATO to agree to his wishes that there should be an invasion eastwards and diplomacy was the key to that, not intimidation, bribery or brute force. Therefore, it was taking some time to get an agreement among the meeting of the North Atlantic Council (NAC) in Brussels for such a strategy to be accepted even with many member nations supporting the American’s wishes.

The diplomats meeting in the Belgian capital were representing their home countries and the interests of those not just the needs of the military alliance which those nations were members of. As they took part in discussions within the NAC framework, at all times those factors needed to be taken into consideration. The strategy which NATO took for continued warfare needed to adequately reflect the needs of each of the countries who had their diplomats gathered.


What the NAC remained discussing was the proposal put forth by the United States for an invasion of East Germany and Czechoslovakia to go alongside the continued efforts at liberating the remains of Denmark in Soviet hands and also the parts of Austria recently forcibly taken. Liberating West Berlin was a major part of this but so too were the war aims of collapsing the regimes of the Warsaw Pact nations which had taken part in the war launched by the Soviet Union as well as destroying the military forces of the Soviets and their puppet regimes in battle.

This was regarded as a sound political and military strategy by many yet there were still a few nations which were opposed to it and there were also objections from more as to how it was to be achieved despite agreeing overall.

The Netherlands and Norway, through their representatives in Brussels, were opposed to an invasion of Warsaw Pact territory. The foreign ministers of both nations pointed out the great losses in this war so far suffered by their own countries and those of their neighbours and then also the risks that they believed were very apparent in striking eastwards… namely those of Soviet nuclear weapons. It was made clear to the NAC that the governments of the two countries believed that the mission of NATO was to defend the territory of those nations part of the alliance and not to invade other countries no matter what wrongs had been done. The Dutch viewed the situation as being too costly for NATO when so much damage had been done at home while the Norwegians also made this point they were also rather worried about a nuclear response.

Then there was the West Germans whose country had been fought over so furiously and was utterly destroyed in many places. They were behind the proposal to advance upon West Berlin and liberate that city from foreign rule yet their wish was for full attention to be paid to that rather than elsewhere such as in Czechoslovak and even assisting the Austrians to a great deal either with Austria not being a member of the alliance. There were concerns from the West Germans too over the effects of toppling the East German regime as they believed that if such a thing was successful, their own future would be imperilled as they would have to deal with the after-effects on the ground of such a success rather than other countries.

Like the West Germans, the French were opposed to military attention being directed elsewhere apart from the liberation of West Berlin and the last remaining portions of West Germany in enemy hands. It was many of their own military forces who were currently positioned facing Czechoslovakia and also heading towards Austria to join the Italians but those had been moved under NATO command. The French weren’t happy at having to work with the Italians whom they regarded as traitors and such a thing would be necessary in further efforts to strike into the heart of the Warsaw Pact through Austria. Their position on Austria wasn’t the same as the West Germans for the French were prepared to help defend that nation; their concern was that their troops would be fighting alongside the Italians and no one else would be doing that.

The Danish foreign minister was still reminding his fellow representatives that much of his country was still under enemy occupation with all the horrors that was bringing. He expressed thanks on behalf of his nation for all the sacrifices made beforehand and still ongoing in fighting to liberate his nation, but Denmark was a NATO member with its capital and much of its population still in enemy hands. Denmark needed to be rid of the enemy and while invading East Germany could assist in that, his nation’s needs were still very important.

Ireland and Sweden, both nations not formal members of NATO but with the Allies and therefore invited to the NAC conference, expressed fears over going too far. They weren’t opposed to an invasion of the Warsaw Pact like the Dutch and the Norwegians were yet they believed that it would be more costly than anyone yet anticipated. The representatives of these two nations expressed fears that the Soviets would only use such an invasion for their own purposes in justifying their own apparent ‘defensive efforts’ to open the war. Whereas governments worldwide had cut their ties with the Soviets since the conflict had started with only a very few nations supporting them and then only diplomatically, such an invasion would instead – the Irish and Swedes believed – see a growth in the domestic peace movements slowly starting to begin across the West among the citizens of nations already at war. Both nations had been stung by the conflict by enemy attacks at home and by combat losses abroad (only the Swedes in the latter case) but many of their populations were opposed to open warfare and would oppose an invasion eastwards. It was pointed out that there would be similar events in many other nations too and other countries needed to consider this.


Belgium, Britain, Canada, Spain and Portugal all remained firmly behind the American proposal to take the war eastwards as their heads of governments had first stated when first approached by the United States. These nations understood the needs of others but believed that many of those concerns were short-sighted. Evicting the Soviets from NATO territory by forcing them back over the border would only mean that the regimes which had sent those invaders westwards would survive and the armies of the enemy were free to be reconstituted at a time of their choosing. A second attack could come soon afterwards or maybe after a delay when NATO was focused upon rebuilding and not with the current wartime strengths that it had.

Taking aboard the worries of domestic peace movements which the Irish and Swedes had pointed out, those points were used instead as a reason to continue the war and invade the nations of the Warsaw Pact now while such movements were small and near-irrelevant before they could grow into something strong.

With the Americans themselves, as it was their proposal they pushed the most strongly for it and tried to counter all hesitation and opposition too. The Soviets had started this war with an unprovoked attack against NATO on its military forces as well as civilians and it was the position of the US Government that an end to the regimes of those who had launched that war was the only realistic solution. The Soviets themselves were a different matter with their nuclear weapons though a defeat on the battlefield was believed to be enough to bring them down rather than outright invasion. When it came to nuclear weapons, the Americans along with the British and French had their own pointed at the Soviets and with such postures as both maintained ready to destroy the other, the Americans regarded NATO nuclear warheads as effectively countering those of the Soviets. Should the enemy have ever intended to use them, they would surely have used them first and a later attack would only mean the certain destruction of the Soviet Union.

The diplomats at the NAC were assured by the Americans that their strategy of invading East Germany and Czechoslovakia – with a view to moving into Poland and Hungary afterwards as well – would mean the liberation of remaining NATO territory as well… and wasn’t West Berlin the territory of a NATO nation? Enemy forces in the Baltic would be cut off and caught in a vice alongside the joint US-British effort in Jutland to destroy them and then the Danish-Swedish efforts on Zealand. In Austria, giving full assistance to the Austrians and the Italians who were now fighting alongside their allies after a delay meant that Soviet arms were going to be defeated there like elsewhere. The armies of the Soviets needed to be crushed, the Americans believed, for they would only return again if not defeated in battle on the soil of Warsaw Pact nations across Eastern Europe.

Moreover, there were other factors to take into consideration.

The naval war had been won and the air war was tilting in the favour of NATO. NATO forces could reinforce and move forces around if not at will then with a great deal of safety. Diplomatically the Soviets were beaten and they were surrounded by hostile nations or those displaying a strongly-armed neutral stance. This meant that they were on the ropes and the time was perfect to strike right now.

In the hands of the Soviets and their puppet regimes were tens of thousands of POW’s from across the NATO nations alongside those millions of Danes, West Germans and now Austrians too (though not so much in the latter case) as civilians under occupation. With those prisoners from the military forces of the Allies, there had already been many confirmed stories of abuse against them and the remainder in the hands of the enemy as well as innocent civilians needed to be saved. There was a moral obligation to liberate all those who needed to be freed and one which the Americans argued that NATO couldn’t ignore.

Ogarkov’s coup d’état in Moscow was regarded by the US Government as a major factor in why NATO needed to strike eastwards and as soon as possible too. This field marshal who had taken control of his country was a firm military-man and not really a political figure. It was believed that he was someone who could, unlike Chebrikov, could be willing to make a sincere peace with the Allies but only following a series of major defeats on the battlefield. The little intelligence that had come out from behind the Iron Curtain when it came to Ogarkov said that he was a strong-willed patriot and nobody’s fool yet believed far too much in his own military prowess. To smash apart the armies which he commanded would mean that he would be willing to engage in serious talks unlike those initiated by Chebrikov.

The chances of victory in an invasion eastwards were strong, the Americans put forth, and not least by what was currently going on in Poland. Those masses of Soviet troops that had recently been mobilised right before Ogarkov took over and certainly on his orders were heading towards the frontlines in Germany but first they would have to go through Poland. There had been plenty of NATO effort gone into stirring up trouble on the ground there amongst the Poles with their natural hostility towards Russians and the Soviets in particular yet at the same time domestic issues had come into play. American intelligence pointed to a full-scale civilian revolt, maybe even a military rebellion in places, due to start at any moment and the movements of all of those Soviet troops through Poland was sure to do that. With Poland up in flames against the Soviets, a defeat of their armies on the battlefields of East Germany and Czechoslovakia was certainly assured. Ogarkov wasn’t thought to be power mad with a wish for a last gasp victory for international communism and was only believed to be interested in defending his country… which meant Russia. There was even the hope that maybe by thinking of his beloved Rodina a possibility would come where he would let the Soviet Union collapse to save Russia and there would be no more threat to Western Europe after that.

*

While the diplomats put across the concerns of their nations, the fighting continued on the battlefield and news of what was going on there was something that of course affected those talks. The minute details of combat weren’t important over narrow rivers crossed and divisions engaged, but rather the long advances made and the defeats of armies. This was important overall yet at the same time there was the personalities involved in the discussions at Brussels that took on even greater significance than that especially as how those representatives used the results of those battles to further their diplomatic aims.

Both Grassley and King as US SecState and British Foreign Secretary had taken up their roles in the immediate pre-war period and were both still rather new on the diplomatic field. Yet, in comparison, these two were now old hands at diplomacy when it came to some others which attended the NAC meeting in Brussels as the senior foreign affairs representatives of their nations. The presence of coalition governments in certain nations in wartime along with the lack of faith in previous holders of office and also in a few cases of Soviet KGB/GRU activity meant that there were many new faces. The Danes, the Dutch, the Irish and the Spanish all had new foreign ministers after reorganisations at the top levels of their government and then the Swedes were present with a new foreign minister too after there had been that wave of assassinations in Stockholm when war broke out as the Swedes hadn’t taken enough precautions.

Italy had a new Prime Minister but Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti remained at his post and came to Brussels knowing full well that he was not going to be the most popular person present. Just like Andreotti was as a former prime minister now a foreign minister instead, Joe Clark from Canada remained in his pre-war role as Minister for External Affairs though he came to Brussels a rather troubled figure after an attack on his person in the war’s first day by a supposedly long-term loyal political aide of his who had attempted to kill him on behalf of the Soviet GRU. Clark had come away from that terrifying experience physically unharmed though many thought that there was a different sort of damage done to the man.

Second-tier ministers and civil servants acting as professional diplomats were with the foreign ministers and there was also Lord Carrington and other NATO officials in Brussels. Clashes were always expected to occur as the situation with the ongoing war made the atmosphere tense and then there were matters spoken of too bluntly as well as not talked about when everyone pretended that they didn’t know something.

With such a gathering of personalities engaged in discussions that on occasion got a little heated to discuss the proposal to advance eastwards, there were some incidents which were bound to occur.


Michael Howard was passed a message in a surreptitious manner by Frits Korthals Altes, the new Dutch Foreign Minister who had replaced Wim van Eekelen after the latter had resigned last week. Howard had never met the man before and had been engaged in small talk using a translator during a break for lunch when he was slipped a small piece of paper. He handed that to one of the MI-6 officers in Brussels with him and King after reading the short English text printed and then made a sterling effort to carry on afterwards as if nothing had happened.

Howard didn’t know why he had been chosen to be the recipient of a message explaining that there was a group of Dutch ministers who were seeking support to oust Lubbers and the last of his supporters in the Dutch national government and nor was he able to speculate what would happen with that. He believed that there should have been other methods of contact that the Dutch should have tried rather than through him and was left rather confused by that clandestine approach as well as thinking of what the end result would be there.

The Finns had a representative of their military government in Brussels and this Major-General with the Finnish Defence Forces was acting as the de facto foreign minister for his country for the time being. There was a clash between him and the new Swedish Foreign Minister when the Swede inquired when the Finnish Defence Forces were going to return control of their country to a civilian government and the Finn replied that the situation was still too dangerous for that. In response, the Swede pointed out that while his government had been stung by assassinations by foreigners and his country faced direct attack, Sweden had stuck with civilian democracy rather than a regime led by the military. This upset the Major-General who viewed such comments in light of the complicated history between the two Scandinavian countries as once again being an example of Sweden trying to interfere in the internal affairs of his nation.

Both sides were certainly at fault for a lack of tact on the part of the Swede and an overreaction by the Finn yet such men weren’t professional diplomats and they had already expressed diverging opinions on the future conduct of the war. The sour taste left in the mouth of the Finnish Major-General after such a clash of words was thought by many to be partially responsible for a further later incident at the NAC meeting.

Before that, Andreotti had found himself confronted by Jean-Bernard Raimond but managed to use some of his diplomatic charm to not allow a potential clash with the French Foreign Minister to occur. The French were most-displeased with the conduct of Italy before it had entered the war even more than the Americans had been and Raimond had been reminding Andreotti of how even the Moroccans had come to assist Europe yet Italy had stayed out of the conflict. The Italian was able to divert blame onto his former prime minister and also congratulated Raimond on his achievements with Morocco before other events at the conference took the attention of everyone.

A security officer with the West German diplomatic party pulled his gun upon a Portuguese junior diplomat in another incident as the West Germans were on edge. A misunderstanding had taken place and the latter had gotten too close to the former’s protective charge resulting in near gun-play. This was hushed up but it revealed the ongoing tension taking place in Brussels and the rather frightened Portuguese man in question needed some time to calm down afterwards while his Foreign Minister hadn’t been at all pleased when Portugal had had its soldiers recently give their lives for West Germany.

Richard Armitage found himself most upset at a comment from that Finnish Major-General when it came to how Finland viewed the continuation of the war and there was a clash between the two men that made many present wince. Finland was still angry at how the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki had been bombed by an American aircraft resulting in the death of Finns present there in an event which they believed could have caused the Soviets to invade Helsinki proper rather than just occupy parts of Lapland. Armitage defended that strike by a USAF F-117 aircraft as something that had kept southern Finland from being occupied like many parts of the north had been as KGB operations from there had been instrumental in coercing the Finnish government to stay placid as their country was used to attack Norway and Sweden. Moreover, Armitage also pointed out that from the Embassy the KGB and the GRU had directed efforts to obtain passports for their Spetsnaz terrorists to enter countries in the West undercover to kill innocent civilians. There came a comment next by the Finn that his country may request that ‘foreign forces’ on its soil might be ‘asked to leave’ now that the Soviets had been ejected from Finland; he didn’t directly refer to the victorious light infantry troops of the US Army’s XVIII Corps but Armitage was sure that that was what he meant.

The threat to ‘bomb Finland back to the Stone Age’ was made by Armitage in response. The Assistant Secretary of Defence believed that Finland was threatening to do to his country like they had done to the Soviets and exploded with anger in a very undiplomatic manner that shocked even those who eventually ended up agreeing that such a comment from the Finns was rather unfriendly to say the least after the Americans had helped liberate Lapland and shed blood in doing so.

The Finnish delegation wouldn’t walk out of the NAC meeting but they didn’t take an active part in further discussions.

*

Incidents aside, a decision was made by the end of the day. NATO soldiers had reached the Inter-German Border and were poised to cross it in force. To stop and wait for a political decision was something that senior military officers were telling the politicians wasn’t a good idea as it would allow the enemy to recover some and these comments were understood to be a pressurising factor for those in Brussels.

It was the strength of the American arguments that won the day though, especially as there was support for what Grassley was asking on behalf of Bush from several other foreign ministers present. The war couldn’t be halted at this point and needed to be fought to the finish, everyone eventually agreed though there were plenty of concessions made and promises undertook to satisfy many objections.

Word immediately went out to the military forces that the borders with East Germany and Czechoslovakia were no longer stop-lines. General Galvin then flashed a signal to his subordinate commanders that Operation ABOLITION was to begin at once… and with earnest.





Two Hundred & Twenty–Three

Austrian military strategy was based around planning for the worst case scenario of defending their country against a Soviet-led attack coming from the east. Their defences were positioned to guard against an attack launched from Hungary with supporting efforts made from Czechoslovakia in the north and northeast as well. Guarding their rear areas from paratroopers and airmobile troops was another element of this plan as well and so with full mobilisation the Austrian Army was large and well-equipped with a wide spread across their nation.

Before the invasion occurred, the Austrians had military intelligence specialists analyse combat operations taking place throughout Germany. Those officers assigned as observers with the Bundeswehr and the French Army in Bavaria stayed well away from the fighting itself as Austria had been neutral but they had been able to understand the tactics employed by the Soviets on the attack and NATO efforts to defend against these, in particular counterattacks. The danger to Austria from Soviet forces in Hungary and the armies of their puppets was further planned against following these observations made and at the last few days of peace that Austria had there had been some small but not insignificant changes made to defensive structure to protect the nation.

Along the border with Hungary, through Burgenland, the Austrian Army was positioned with light infantry units scattered across the countryside through defensive works. There were fortifications with heavy guns from tank turrets up high with those weapons zeroed-in upon the natural avenues of approach. More light infantry units were deployed in hidden positions where they were supposed to hide until being overrun and attack enemy units from the rear in the heat of battle. Then, there were the heavy forces that the Austrian Army had in the form of the 1st Panzergrenadier Division located southeast of Vienna and the 3rd Panzergrenadier Brigade east of Graz. These forces were meant to engage the enemy after they had been blooded first and deliver a sharp counterattack to smash apart those attacking forces which had made it through everything else.

The heavy forces were the best-equipped units of the Austrian Army with their tanks and the majority of their mechanised armoured fighting vehicles as well as self-propelled artillery. Naturally, the Austrians positioned them to guard against enemy intrusions into Vienna and Graz and also hid them from overhead observation as well in a large effort at concealment. The fate of the nation would depend upon the Austrians keeping these units intact and ready to strike so that they could save the Republic from being overrun and occupied.

Such an approach on the part of the Austrians would cause them a major problem though. They didn’t want to commit these heavy forces until the time was just perfect and they were held back waiting for that moment. The senior command of the Austrian Army were the ones who were to issue the orders for them to move and not the local commanders on the ground because such formations represented all the mobile striking power available. Austria’s new allies in Italy and the NATO nations fighting in Germany were moving their own forces towards the eastern parts of the Republic though were still some distance away. The Austrians were dealing with the invasion themselves for the time being and so couldn’t afford to throw away their heavy forces at the wrong time and allow the Soviets to take Graz or, even worse, reach Vienna and strike into the heart of their capital like they had in 1945.

However, the Austrians waited just too long and had the heart ripped out of their army on the approaches to Vienna.


It took the Soviet Fourth Guards Army a day and a half – including much night-time fighting as well where casualties caused by ‘friendly fire’ were immense – to push through all of the outlying Austrian defences. Thousands of Soviet soldiers and hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles were expended in combating the light infantry and fixed defences that the Austrians had deployed to slow them down but they eventually got clear. A total control of the skies above them helped in this achievement as the Austrian Air Force couldn’t intervene and NATO combat aircraft had yet to make an appearance over the battlefield either. A lack of Austrian SAM’s and the inability of the anti-aircraft guns fielded instead made sure that for the first time in this war Soviet Army helicopters were able to play an important role as well.

On both sides of Lake Neusiedl (often called the Sea of the Viennese) and into the northern parts of Burgenland, the Soviets drove forwards with the remains of their three divisions and towards Vienna. There remained plenty of harassment against their flanks and in the rear but they were chasing Austrian infantry units which were on foot while they themselves were in tanks and armoured vehicles. More and more of their opponents were crushed as this took place and the way ahead was open. Finally, at this point, there came reports from attack helicopters roaming ahead on scouting missions that Austrian heavy armour had been spotted moving forwards to engage them.

There were three combat brigades with the 1st Panzergrenadier Division and one of those consisted of motorised jaegers while the other two had those tanks and the armoured vehicles which had been so jealously kept back. The Austrian Army had planned to keep this formation together as a complete formation when employing it yet they were faced with the invading Soviets having made gains in two separate locations either side of that lake more than a dozen miles apart. There was no other choice available and so the division was split into two parts in a hasty decision whereas for the past several weeks everything had been about those parts working together as a whole. The timing was off and the heavy forces should have been committed earlier, but this last minute order to break the formation apart really was to be the death of the 1st Panzergrenadier Division.

To the west of the heavily-forested Leitha Mountains, where Autobahn-3 came up from Sopron in Hungary and through many towns south of Vienna, the Austrian 9th Brigade came forward to take on the Soviet 254MRD. Aircraft and helicopters had spotted the Austrians approaching and engaged many of the M-60 tanks and other armoured vehicles first and then the Soviets made a multiple regimental attack using a flanking manoeuvre to the west as well. Austrian observers had seen this attempted against NATO forces in Bavaria and watched how it had been countered, but they didn’t have attacking aircraft of their own, the necessary air defences to defend themselves and they didn’t have the numbers to take the losses which the Soviets came.

Everything went so fast with the Soviets all over them. Early model M-60’s blew up when hit from the air and then on the ground while Kurassier’s & Saurer-4K/4F’s were also torn apart. There was much bravery on display from the Austrians yet they were overwhelmed and T-64 heavy tanks backed up by scout cars carrying missiles which did them great harm. The infantry of the 9th Brigade was unloaded from their vehicles less they be killed when those were hit yet they were not ready to fight when the enemy appear and tore into them. Austrian artillery wasn’t in place and engineers hadn’t got out their equipment to start sewing minefields or constructing barricades. Supply trucks carrying ammunition forward were hit and so were command columns as well. Multiple-barrelled rocket launchers that the Soviets had couldn’t be countered and nor could their massed divisional artillery either. In Bavaria, NATO had aircraft and counter-battery artillery fire but the Austrians had none of the former and the latter wasn’t ready in time.

The 9th Brigade was destroyed before it could fully get into the fight and these professional soldiers of Austria along with their valuable equipment were all lost.

The rest of the 1st Panzergrenadier Division, the 4th & 6th Brigade’s, engaged the right wing of the Soviet Fourth Guards Army with those reservists there striking south of the Danube Valley. The Austrians weren’t fast enough to reach the road and rail communications centre of Bruck an der Leitha where the terrain narrowed between the mountains and the river and so attempted to launch a hasty attack against the flank of the Soviets moving westwards along the path followed by the highway coming from Gyor across the border in Hungary. Soviet control of the air was key here and they spotted the Austrians moving against them as well as being able to take many shots at them first before the clashes on the ground occurred. There were impromptu ambushes laid that the Austrians blundered into in their haste and they paid dearly for their last minute attack. The trucks with the infantry and then the tanks supporting the panzergrenadiers all faced an alert enemy that tore them apart piece by piece.

What Austrian units the Soviet 50TD & 126MRD (Category C formations) didn’t destroy in open battles of manoeuvre here as these reservists following their warfighting doctrine perfectly, they surrounded and blasted at with artillery while making sure they wouldn’t hold up the advance… which was driving upon Vienna International Airport just ahead. That huge facility was located outside the city along the Danube Valley and right up ahead. There had been enemy air activity in the form of Italian aircraft present in that area; there was the possibility that maybe troops had arrived. Nonetheless, hundreds of tanks were being pushed that way and behind them the rest of the 1st Panzergrenadier Division had been destroyed in a battle which it hadn’t been ready to fight away from strategy meetings.


The Soviets had been perfectly correct to have paid attention to the airport located at Schwechat. Italian fighters were overhead there and above other parts of Austria as the Folgore Parachute Brigade arrived into Vienna International Airport. This reinforced formation had four battalions of paratroopers, another battalion of paratroopers from the training school at Pisa and airmobile artillery & engineers. They were all in the process of being flown into the airport just as the Soviets made their breakthrough and came with many heavy man-portable weapons but not with any armoured vehicles yet.

The Italian Army had assumed that in an invasion of Austria the airport at Schwechat would have been seized in an airmobile assault as it was located between the border area where the Austrian Army would fight and Vienna. Its wide open spaces were perfect for such an assault and they had been planning to recapture it with their paratroopers before the Soviets would set themselves up properly. When that attack never came they moved in anyway due to the need to establish a large airhead in northeastern Austria as part of the planned operations to assist the Austrians in stopping the Hungarians before they got to Graz and then driving northwards through the border areas to hit the Soviets in the flank before they could take Vienna. That operational concept of the Italian Expeditionary Army involved the Austrian 1st Panzergrenadier Division doing the role which the Italians thought that it would in assisting the lighter units in bleeding the Soviets dry in the border regions and so it came as a major shock to them when the Austrians did their own thing and deployed their heavy forces later than they should have and all for nothing too.

The heavy forces of the Italians were still a long way away from Vienna and the eastern part of the Danube Valley where they were planning to end up once their offensive got going but now their paratroopers were sitting right in the way of part of a Soviet combined arms army bearing down upon Vienna and the only organised opposition standing in the way of that.

The Folgore Brigade was in for a tough fight indeed and got little notice of what was coming their way directly towards them from not just the east but now the south too. Those paratroopers were right in the firing line…


Diplomats in Brussels had been discussing how they would make use of the Soviet incursion into Austria to counter-invade Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The news hadn’t reached them though and wouldn’t until after their discussions had finished that the Austrian forces outside Vienna had collapsed and unless the Italians were able to pull off a miracle, a whole lot of that country was soon to fall into enemy hands.

NATO would have to instead defend what remained of Austria free of the Soviet Army rather than using the country’s geographic position at the heart of Central Europe as a springboard for their own attack. Ogarkov’s apparent mistake that NATO senior commanders had been pleased to see occur as it looked like the Soviets were to come unstuck in Austria now appeared to be not such a major error at all. Things could change with time, but at the moment the situation on the ground there was going to cause a lot of headaches… as well as taking the lives of many too.





Two Hundred & Twenty–Four

The loss of Vienna International Airport to enemy control was a major blow for the Italian Expeditionary Army and its moves to combat the invasion of Austria. That airhead in the northeast of the country was planned to be very important in their operations and without it those would suffer. Nonetheless, it wasn’t the case that the Italians suffered a defeat there and neither was it won in any sort of victory by the Soviet Fourth Guards Army either.

The peacetime theoretical strength of the two divisions on the right wing of the advancing Soviet field army was just short of five hundred tanks yet such a number had been greatly lowered to almost half that figure after serious maintenance issues even before the Austrian-Hungarian border was crossed and then there had come many more tanks knocked out of action in combat with the Austrian Army. Nevertheless, those hundreds of tanks which still did drive upon Vienna by way of its outlying airport were still far too great in number and capability for the Italian paratroopers deployed ahead of them to take on. They had rather a lot of man-portable heavy weapons, including dozens upon dozens of MILAN missile-launchers, but no heavy armour of their own nor any time to construct major anti-tank defences. There only obstacle in the way of the Soviets driving towards the airport was the narrow Fischa River and that was far from a defensive position in any way.

The commander of the Folgore Parachute Brigade requested permission to withdraw and was granted such a thing very soon after some of his forward reconnaissance detachments operating in jeeps had disastrous clashes Soviet armoured scout cars along the Fischa River. Austrian Territorial troops had been demolishing bridges there with pre-planted explosives and then taking on vehicles fording the river, the enemy was too strong and the Italians realised the futility of making such a foolish stand. At the same time, they didn’t make a panicked withdrawal from the airport even though they were in a great hurry. Working with further reservists from the Austrian Army, the airport was to be wrecked and nothing of value left for the Soviets heading towards it. Explosions ripped apart structures and tore giant holes in the runaways while aircraft sitting on the ground – generally commercial aircraft which were in a non-flying condition – were blown up as well. Thick plumes of smoke filled the skies and went high up into the atmosphere all around the airport and Italian combat aircraft operating nearby had to avoid this.

Back towards Vienna the Italians withdrew and past the petrochemical works to the Schwechat and Liesing Rivers. These were again shallow waterways where defending them would be difficult but the Italians moved fast to reach these last natural barriers before Vienna to set themselves up there through the night knowing that they could then be able to make a fight of it in the morning and hopefully by then be reinforced. Special forces troops with the Folgore Brigade (those commandoes with the 9th ‘Col Moschin’ Parachute Assault Battalion) set alight to much of the industrial areas ahead of the new defensive position chosen and in doing so hoped that this would further slow down the enemy from pursing the Folgore Brigade in withdrawing as they did.


The Italians were left with a wide open flank to their right though, stretching away to the west and south of Vienna. The paratroopers which had fallen back from their airport didn’t have the manpower to cover such a gap and of course still remained without any armour when the terrain over which the Soviets were advancing was perfect for a tank assault rather than where such a thing might be halted like in mountains or an urban area. There were many towns south of Vienna but highways too and where Austrian Territorial troops made a stand they were bypassed by the Soviet 254MRD as it kept on driving to Vienna aiming to reach the outskirts of that city before darkness fell.

The small airfield at Voslau was put to use as a forward point by the Soviets here with a temporary refuelling station set up with haste to assist their helicopter operations. Mil-8 Hook and Mil-24 Hind helicopters both made attack missions instead of airmobile operations as the speed of advance was being maintained on the ground and there were also several attacks made by Italian aircraft which while flying from distance caused the losses of several helicopters heavily-laden with troops. Voslau turned out to be a trap though as local Austrian commanders on the ground had wired the place for demolition but hidden the charges along with a small selection of volunteers with mortars also out of sight nearby. Once it was starting to be used by the enemy and fuel was spotted as arriving, blasts were set off and fireballs of aviation fuel lit the darkening skies followed by the arrival of mortar rounds coming in from all directions.

This success here couldn’t stop the Soviet armour from rolling further and further north and reaching the towns of Perchtoldsdorf, Brunn am Gebirge and Vosendorf when darkness came. These were right at the southern reaches of the city near industrial areas where there were numerous Austrian reservists digging in. Fires had been started and immense demolition work was going on as the Austrians caused epic destruction to the area to throw a blockade in front of the Soviets. Such an advance had come to a halt for the night anyway as the Soviet Army wasn’t going into an urban area in the darkness and the orders for them from the Fourth Guards Army had been to move to the northwest as well. The woodland of the Lainzer Tiergarten, broken and hilly terrain west of the city, was where the advance was meant to go next and end at the military airfield at Langenlebarn before reaching the Danube Valley. Such an objective as part of a wide flanking manoeuvre had been too far for the Soviets to reach yet they still had come a long way.

Through the night, as the Soviets cleared their rear areas, they engaged Austrian troops out front as well with probing attacks to keep them occupied and the pressure upon Vienna. Civilians were streaming out of that city as further Austrian reservists poured in to join those already there along with the Italians trying to set up defences against an expected assault in daylight. As this was being done, the 254MRD was being reorganised after the fighting it had undertaken and the losses taken during two days of combat. The once four-regiment formation was now no more than an oversized brigade in strength. The men were tired and there had been some major discipline issues involved when they had moved through Austrian towns as wholescale looting, rape and murder had gone on inflicting grave injustices to the Austrians who hadn’t managed to flee. The divisional commander cared nothing for the civilians and instead worried over his unit cohesion and whether the men would respond to orders to start advancing again to fight the enemy rather than see opportunities everywhere for personal riches and enjoyment; Austria was a culture shock for them coming from their barracks in Hungary.


The Italians had set their forward headquarters up just outside Graz with the command organisation having being airlifted forward along with security troops before the first of the heavy forces arrived in the city and started to deploy using the road network around it. Such an arrival had come just before the Austrian heavy forces were smashed outside Vienna and at once the danger to the paratroopers sent forward there to that city’s airport had been realised. The airlift had stopped and been re-diverted in part to Langenlebarn yet that facility was far too small for any large aircraft as the Austrian Armed Forces mainly used it for helicopters and the runaway was not suitable for C-130’s which the Italians were flying… it was also a long way away from the Folgore Brigade.

The paratroopers outside Vienna couldn’t be abandoned and the fight which they were surely to have at first light would be fatal for them if the Italian strategy in Austria didn’t change. Those Hungarian forces marching on Graz had already been stopped by the Austrian forces in the southeast yet in the northeast was where the enemy which the Italians were in Austria to fight were now located.

A decision was made for the flanking attack upon the Soviets to now be redirected towards where they were located not where it was thought they should have been by this point. Such a reorientation of objectives had to be made and so new orders were issued for the leading Italian units not already too far into the southeast to instead go directly northwards aiming for Vienna. A night-time movement would be difficult and there would be issues with units getting lost and tired men expected to fight in the morning, yet that was the only choice available for the Italians.

It was the Ariete Armoured and Julia Alpine Brigade’s which were tasked to move through Styria and towards Vienna. The heavy armour and light infantry – the latter which could be moved by trucks and multiple helicopter lifts – with these two formations quickly got underway heading northwards with the objective being the woodland of the Lainzer Tiergarten. They would be following roads that wound through central parts of Austria and operating under some air cover but still suspected a troublesome journey on their way.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Twenty–Five

As was the case with NATO ground forces in Europe, the air forces assigned had seen significant changes made before the conflict erupted and during the war too. Pre-war needs were vastly different to those once the shooting had started with losses, reinforcements and strategic needs directing those changes made at all command levels. Politics was another factor with commanders from certain nationalities being appointed to command new headquarters often but not always with the nation providing the most forces having one of their officers appointed.

As the conflict had gone on there had been a transformation in NATO air forces operating in Europe.

The newly-created First Allied Tactical Air Force (1ATAF) had assumed command of NATO air assets operating in northern parts of Norway at first and then throughout the whole nation soon afterwards. Norwegian personnel had staffed the 1ATAF yet it was in no way comparable in size or capabilities to those of a similar name operating elsewhere with it being an ad hoc formation created mid-conflict. The desire on the part of the Norwegians to have the rest of NATO at least appear to take seriously their political needs had been important here but then there had been the justification used that with so many different air units operating across the country those needed a higher headquarters to give geographical command.

In the Baltic Approaches, those NATO units which had been assigned to the 5ATAF had not lasted long under that command organisation which had moved up from Italy just before the war broke out. The 5ATAF had seen its airbases on the ground captured by the enemy and many aircraft either lost in combat, destroyed on the ground or having to flee to Norway where they ended up with the 1ATAF when that was established there. Again, this had never been a large organisation and much of it had been thrown together after leaving Italy. With the entry into Denmark of the Royal Marines and the US Marines there had been some discussions within NATO of re-establishing the command but they had yet to come to much as RAF aircraft in support were operating from Norway and the US Marines had their air support either on amphibious ships or temporary airstrips on land alongside a determination to keep their aircraft in direct support of themselves.

The majority of NATO aircraft operating in Europe were at the beginning of the war with 2ATAF, 3ATAF and 4ATAF as this trio of large numbered air forces were deployed across West Germany and into the Low Countries as well as in Britain. These were all under the command of Air Chief Marshal Joseph Gilbert, an RAF officer acting as Commander Allied Air Forces Central Europe (AAFCE). Gilbert’s headquarters ranked just below General Galvin in the NATO hierarchy and had been at Brunssum in Holland before the war begun but moved away from the fixed headquarters and subsequently operated in a mobile fashion. There came the addition of the French Air Force as a separate but subordinate command under AAFCE afterwards and this position he filled was a major responsibility for a capable commander like Gilbert was; the RAF enjoyed the prestige of having one of their command all air operations over Western Europe and into Eastern Europe too.

NATO air reinforcements, primarily American, arrived as the war went on yet Gilbert remained in charge yet as his staff grew there was a greater contingent of USAF officers over other nationalities. Such pressure was exerted for a second controlling headquarters to operate alongside his under an American with a north-south split similar to the ground forces yet that ultimately came to nothing. Those in support of AAFCE argued that Gilbert’s staff was needed to implement overall operations from a central headquarters to ensure that there were no clashes of priority and to also ensure that the rear-area support network was all under one command too rather than two as some wanted with a USAF general officer acting in a similar fashion with an identical headquarters created for no apparent reason. AAFCE had been following pre-war expansion doctrines and Gilbert was doing a good job there in making sure that even with growth in assets this NATO command still functioned as it was meant to.

What did occur instead of a split at AAFCE was the dividing up of assets at the next level down. Those three numbered air forces and the French had ended up controlling too many assets from combat aircraft to support aircraft to air defence on the ground with each at times struggling to do this. The French First Air Force became the 7ATAF (in western parts of Turkey was the 6ATAF) and then between the geographic areas of operations covered in Germany by the 2ATAF and the 4ATAF came the new 8ATAF. This new organisation was staffed mainly by USAF officers right over where the majority of their ground forces were operating. The threat to the British mainland had greatly decreased and so proposals to split the 3ATAF – which had been made throughout the conflict with conflicting responsibilities for such a command – were again rejected there.

This reorganisation, especially with the creation of the 8ATAF in central parts of Germany, came into effect at the same time as the US Third Army was being activated (so that it could support that army group and the US Fifth Army too) and political permission had come for ABOLITION to commence.

NATO ground forces were moving into Warsaw Pact territory and the air forces above them were thought to be better organised to support them as well as playing their role in the general war effort too.

ALLIED AIR FORCES NORTHERN EUROPE
First Allied Tactical Air Force – operating in Norway in a tactical role
ALLIED AIR FORCES CENTRAL EUROPE
Third Allied Tactical Air Force – operating in the UK in strategic & tactical roles
Second Allied Tactical Air Force – operating in northern Germany in a tactical role
Eighth Allied Tactical Air Force – operating in central Germany in a tactical role
Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force – operating in central Germany in a tactical role
Seventh Allied Tactical Air Force – operating in southern Germany in a tactical role
ALLIED AIR FORCES SOUTHERN EUROPE
Italian Air Force – operating in Austria in a tactical role
Sixth Allied Tactical Air Force – operating in western Turkey in a tactical role


No. 74 Squadron, RAF had originally been assigned to the 3ATAF with air defence duties of Britain as its wartime tasking. This squadron with Phantom F3 fighters had started the conflict based at RAF Wattisham in Suffolk before moving to RAF Waddington when the air threat to the UK mainland had been at its height. There had been fourteen aircraft assigned originally and these were slightly-modified F-4J’s (their popular designation) which had previously served in the US Navy. Armed with air-to-air missiles and fitted gun-pods, the Phantom’s had played their role in the defence of Britain rather well and especially at high-altitude where their General Electric engines had given better performance than if Rolls Royce models had been fitted like the case was with other Phantom’s in RAF colours.

Nineteen enemy aircraft had been confirmed as shot down – Soviet raketonosets and long-range strike aircraft coming over the North Sea in seventeen days of conflict – by 74 Squadron. Skyflash and Sidewinder missiles along with the six-barrelled 20mm cannon attached had done their worst to the enemy and there was much evidence that many more of the enemy had been damaged enough to be confident that they never made it back to where they had come from. These victories had come with the cost being the loss of six Phantom’s assigned.

The one-to-three loss rate had been much better than RAF units across Germany had taken yet was still hard among the men who manned the formation from the pilots and navigators to the ground crews even if five of the twelve aircrews had eventually made it back to the squadron. When RAF Waddington had been attacked on three occasions during 74 Squadron’s time there, the cruise missiles and Fencer’s which had struck hadn’t managed to damage or destroy any aircraft on the ground yet more than three dozen ground crew assigned to the formation had lost their lives in these attacks. Such losses had again hurt the morale of the unit and it had taken a lot for that to recover as well. 74 Squadron was a ‘family’ for the majority of those men who served within it even those RAF reservists who had arrived to add to its personnel numbers for the war.

As air attacks on the UK dramatically decreased, the need for the Phantom’s with 74 Squadron to remain where they were had nearly disappeared.

43 Squadron had left Scotland at the beginning of the week and headed across to southern Norway where they soon joined the air campaign there made in support of the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines and then 74 Squadron had been ordered to stand down and redeploy across to the Continent. They were to be reassigned to the 2ATAF instead operating in the battlefield fighter role with their remaining eight aircraft being a necessary reinforcement to the weakened NATO fighter force above the North German Plain. Experience in conflict not only with the Phantom’s themselves but many other NATO air combat units meant that the enemy’s air tactics and electronic combat capabilities were believed to be understood and 74 Squadron was going into that fight as best prepared as possible. Some ground crew – technicians and staff officers – were to remain behind in the UK at RAF Waddington where in place of the departing 74 Squadron a new formation was to be stood up with a view to moving across to the Continent soon enough too.

For now, before dawn on the morning of April 1st, 74 Squadron was now flying over the heads of the men of the British Second Army about to enter East Germany.


No. 13 Squadron, RAF had been flying Canberra reconnaissance aircraft before being disbanded six years previously. The formation had had a glorious history before then and at the MOD it had been high on the list of units to be reformed if possible in a wartime scenario with various plans for what aircraft it would field.

Aircraft from the AMARC site in Arizona had been arriving in the UK for some time now with the RAF taking a total of fifty-eight Phantom’s from the Americans to wear RAF colours. These aircraft were the F-4E & F-4S versions built by McDonnell Douglas for the USAF and the US Navy. Hasty work had been done on these aircraft when in the UK by British and American military personnel assisted by civilians and this was done at military facilities across Britain. The aircraft were to be designated as the FGR4 in RAF service with four squadrons flying them (a dozen aircraft each) along with a conversion training unit also set up. Everything was done quickly and many of those due to fly them being former USAF and US Navy aircrews as the RAF didn’t have enough personnel immediately available and the new FGR4’s were different from what were previously operated as well.

Like the other new formations, 13 Squadron was to fly their new Phantom’s in the strike-fighter role with an emphasis upon ground attack missions. RAF Phantom’s hadn’t undertaken such a role in many years with those in the UK and assigned to Germany having focused upon air combat but there remained the skill base for this even though it was small and then there were the Americans assigned to work with the RAF who did have the recent experience.

It was still taking some time though to get these new aircraft and units into frontline service. The RAF was standing-up the new formations in the UK where last minute training could take place alongside work being done on the aircraft to make them compatible with armament, communications and fuelling conditions of the RAF. To have them thrown straight into combat over Germany just wasn’t desirable as such a thing as that would have been outright murder.

Meanwhile, formations such as 43 & 74 Squadron’s with the Phantom’s which they had been flying with for some time already had been moved across to the fight the air battles over the Continent.





Two Hundred & Twenty–Six

Having a military career before entering politics wasn’t seen as something necessary like it was in the past. In Britain this was more the case than it was for example in the United States. However, at the same time, serving your country in the armed forces was something always regarded highly when it came to later public service and many took that route even if such a thing wasn’t necessarily planned.

British military personnel came from all backgrounds and there were some of those who had intentions of a later career in politics. For many this would never occur yet others were already on that path to Parliament.

A few of such people were with the British Second Army as it started to advance forward this morning across the Inter-German Border and into enemy sovereign territory.


Second Lef-tenant Desmond Angus Swayne was a former school teacher and now a banker who had served with the Combined Cadet Force and recently joined the Territorial Army. He was a rather ambitious young man who had last year stood as the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Pontypridd in South Wales. That was a Labour stronghold and Swayne had been lucky to get nearly twenty per cent of the vote there but he was looking forward to the next general election and finding a seat to challenge for next time when mobilisation had come. Rather than join the regiment which he had recently been assigned to – the Queen’s Own Mercian Yeomanry (QOMY) – Swayne was instead attached to the headquarters troops with the Northern Army Group before it became the British Second Army. He didn’t go to Norway with a squadron of the QOMY nor stay with the bulk of the regiment in East Anglia assisting in anti-Spetsnaz duties there but rather to Germany.

The British Second Army relied mainly upon West German Territorial Troops for Lines of Communications (LOC) duties yet each nation with forces assigned to this command on the North German Plain had some of their own men acting in this role too. The fighting troops at the frontlines needed a continuous supply and keeping the connections open and available to them was a valuable task. It could also be dangerous too with the enemy out to disrupt those LOC’s and therefore Swayne had been given a command of a platoon of TA men from various units detached to serve in this role so that his little command could combat efforts by the enemy to sever these links that ran back from the frontlines.

For weeks now, the platoon which Swayne had led had been very busy and been active across a huge area. They had guarded convoys with ammunition, fuel and all sorts of other supplies going forwards full and coming back empty. There had been assistance given at times to the Royal Military Police and other similar NATO detachments in escorting POW’s back to the rear. At other times Swayne had led his men to try and hunt for escaped POW’s and also the odd enemy aircrew seen bailing out of doomed aircraft. There had been the need for this small detachment to join with other NATO forces in the massive withdrawal late in the war’s first week backwards with haste across the Weser and then when BLACKSMITH later got underway to go back across the Weser Swayne and his men had been involved in that too.

War was hell, as Swayne had found out to his cost. He had seen the wounding and deaths of many of his own men and then seen the effects of war on many others including a lot of civilians caught up in the cross-fire. When that Soviet gas attack had come he had witnessed the after-effects of that too yet at the same time there had been even worse sights during conventional fighting too. There had never been any time to stop and truly reflect about what was going on as Swayne had led his men all over the place oftentimes receiving conflicting orders where it was suddenly decided that there was a more urgent need for his men elsewhere.

Like most of those serving with the British Second Army beneath general officer rank, Swayne had no idea up until last night concerning the political situation with talks ongoing in Brussels about the future of the war. He was aware that the border was being approached but he was a junior officer with more pressing concerns than NATO strategy. It came as a surprise to him though when he was told that at first light, the British Second Army with its British, Belgian, Portuguese and West German components (the Americans with their US III Corps had just been reassigned) were to enter East Germany. He didn’t think that that was a good idea at all with how the Soviets and their puppets would react to that.

Who was going to ask his opinion on that though? He was just a junior officer obeying higher orders of his senior military commanders and those politicians like he wished to be who made the decisions.


Guardsman Michael Alan Penning was a firefighter from his native Essex who had spent six years in the British Army between 1974 and 1980. Afterwards he had joined Essex Fire Service while remaining as a reservist at first liable then volunteering to be called up should the situation warrant this. He had political views but had not yet decided upon whether he would want a career in politics. When mobilisation came with TtW, Penning was at first told he would be not be recalled to active service due to his profession and a government desire to see people like him in essential public services not deployed aboard. He had appealed against this though and gained a dispensation to instead put back on his military uniform.

The Grenadier Guards was Penning’s own regiment and they had a battalion rolled as armoured infantry in Germany and a second battalion tasked as light infantry that went to North-East England to join the Independent Guards Brigade. Penning was a late addition to mobilisation and it wasn’t as if the Grenadier Guards or any other prestigious Foot Guards unit were short of manpower following the initial return to active service of many guardsmen. Therefore, Penning had been sent to Germany on attachment to the Northern Army Group headquarters like his future Cabinet colleague Swayne was. Once there he was assigned to be part of a security force to assist with the work of detachments of the Intelligence Corps deployed in Germany as this combat support arm of the British Army would be having its specialists deploying not just in the rear but through the frontlines too.

Penning did his duty throughout the conflict and saw many interesting sights. The Intelligence Corps had a wide role and those armed security troops assisting them were more than just guard dogs for them, especially an experienced and well-educated man like Penning. There were combat observations to be made of enemy tactics and equipment and then prisoners to be spoken too; many were enemy POW’s but some of these were released NATO personnel too. When Soviet headquarters units were overrun in the course of combat or the abandoned locations of them discovered following advances documents were often found and needed examining. Penning and men like him escorting the intelligence officers were put to use in all sorts of roles helping with this. There had come a few instances of combat as sometimes armed enemy stragglers had had to be dealt with and Penning had remembered his combat training for his previous service as well as his refresher training in mobilisation too so that when he saw action he did his duty.

This morning, as the advance got going, Penning remained with the Intelligence Corps and was still in his security role for those officers he had been with throughout the conflict as they prepared to go to work inside East Germany. There were jobs to be done just like on the western side of the Inter-German Border but it was anticipated by many, including Penning himself, that things would be different across on the eastern side. His duty remained as it had been since he had put back on his uniform and he was eager to keep carrying that out.


Lef-tenant George Iain Duncan Smith was another reservist who after leaving the Scots Guards seven years ago had entered the field of business. He had married well – his wife was the daughter of a Baron – and became active in politics when standing for the Bradford West constituency for the Conservatives last year and losing in a not unrespectable fashion. Smith, or ‘IDS’ as he was better known, hadn’t been too upset and was anticipating fighting for another seat when the next general election came with a view to making his new career in politics. Even before mobilisation, IDS volunteered his service back to the British Army before such a thing became compulsory for former officers like himself yet he didn’t officially put back on his uniform until TtW begun… in later years, when he was at the height of his political career, comments that he had previously made stating that he had done so before it was compulsory would be shown to be ‘misleading’.

IDS had joined the 2 SCOTS GDS battalion battle-group and become second-in-command to a specialist detachment under a full-time Captain that numbered a reinforced platoon. These guardsmen remained in the UK and became part of what was deemed the ‘Royal Duties Force’; several British Army formations taking part in Operation CANDID. CANDID covered providing military support for the efforts of protecting senior members of the Royal Family during wartime. There were detractors that called CANDID a waste of manpower and equipment in the face of the Soviet land threat in Germany yet the policy of the MOD was that CANDID was necessary due to the possible capabilities of the enemy in their intent to do harm to the Royal Family in wartime; soldiers and even armoured vehicles were to be provided to assisting civilian security forces in protecting senior Royals.

The CANDID-assigned platoon which IDS was with had travelled to North Wales with the Met. Police and Security Service personnel guarding the Prince of Wales and his family. It had been IDS himself who had issued the order for his fellow guardsmen to fire upon those intruders at the Caerwys Rectory hideaway chosen to keep the heir to the throne ‘safe’ and he had had no hesitation in doing so. The Royals had afterwards left Flintshire and gone to Cumbria for an even more secluded location with IDS first travelling with them before later being reassigned back to the rest of the battalion in London. He had received an official commendation for his actions in preventing what looked like a Soviet assassination attempt (this would play a role in his future political career) and was also promoted to Acting Captain. In London, the Scots Guards were busy assisting the civilian authorities in protecting the heart of the city behind the Ring of Steel which had been erected and IDS had served in a staff function. He had been eager to see action once combat had erupted on the Continent and had requested a transfer as a casualty replacement to the 1 SCOTS GDS fighting on the North German Plain. That hadn’t come through and IDS had gritted his teeth for more than three weeks while stuck in Whitehall guarding the city against the supposed threat of Soviet paratroopers which everyone in uniform seemed to understand just weren’t ever going to come.

Thankfully, IDS had finally been given his desired opportunity to see action again when Brigadier Mike Jackson’s 32nd Light Brigade had been activated and 2 SCOTS GDS assigned to cross to Germany. IDS was allotted to the battalion’s operations staff in a frontline role and he had played an important role in getting his fellow guardsmen ready for their advance across the border this morning into East Germany. There would be plenty to do, not least assisting in the destruction of the enemy on their own territory and gaining revenge for all the British Army soldiers already killed in this war.

IDS was finally happy.


Captain Patrick John Mercer was a regular officer with the Worchester & Sherwood Foresters Regiment (1 WSFR battle-group) and on the promotion list with his battalion at Oakington Barracks in Cambridgeshire when mobilisation occurred. 1 WSFR received many reservists to stiffen its ranks as it was deploying abroad with those officers and enlisted men linking up when it arrived in Germany. Mercer was second-in-command of a rifle company within the battalion and was naturally worried for himself and those with him as the threat of war became ever more real with every passing day, but at the same time he was ready to do his duty. As a career officer with the British Army his personal politics were meant to remain just that yet he was known among many of his peers for not keeping silent upon many of his beliefs.

The outbreak of war saw 1 WSFR fight with the 6th Armoured Brigade as part of the Iron Division. Once committed to combat midway through the war’s first week there had been heavy action on the counterattack and then later a planned withdrawal back to the Weser that went wrong and saw the 3rd Armoured Division end up in the Hannover Pocket. Mercer’s commanding officer had been killed in the fighting and he had assumed acting command with at first there being plans for an officer of Major rank to retake command yet with the conflict costing so many British lives nothing came of that, especially with Mercer’s unit being among those trapped behind enemy lines. 1 WSFR fought during its encirclement against those surrounding it and then when the BLACKSMITH operation liberated them Mercer had been one of the many officers silently relieved that that had occurred when it did for he had believed that they were all doomed trapped as they had been.

Losses among Mercer’s command had accumulated as war went on and been hard to take yet he had been forced to shut that out and try to inspire those beneath him to accept that as a natural part of warfare. At the same time, he allowed his men to do whatever it took to beat the enemy back from their attempts to kill his men and did avert his gaze when certain things occurred. Mercer believed that in wartime peacetime standards had to be sometimes put aside.

During the push eastwards after BLACKSMITH towards the Inter-German Border, Mercer had on quite a few occasion approached the 1 WSFR command staff asking to make his unofficial promotion official – he wanted to be an Acting Major – and been left frustrated when they explained that there were more pressing matters to be dealt with such as liberating the rest of West Germany from foreign occupation. His actions were excused by his battalion commander who knew that Mercer could lead men even if there had been a few minor instances that others might consider unworthy conduct for an officer though far below any form of insubordination.

Mercer was just that type of officer.

When given the order to take his much-depleted company forward this morning over the border into East Germany, Mercer immediately did as he was instructed. He was taking the fight to the enemy and like so many of his fellow British Army soldiers was keen to repay the damage done by the enemy. He was rather keen on getting busy heading for Berlin like all of the talk from senior ranks was all about.


Captain Crispin Jeremy Blunt came from a military family with his father having retired from the British Army as a Major-General. After completing his officer training at Sandhurst, the younger Blunt had read Politics at university for three years – getting heavily involved with student politics while there – and then joined the regular forces with the 13th/18th Royal Hussars (13/18 RH). This was an armoured recce formation based at Tidworth Camp that had many wartime contingencies and while Blunt was with the 13/18 RH he deployed overseas to Cyprus for peacekeeping and in training missions to Schleswig-Holstein in Germany where it was anticipated part of the regiment would go in wartime.

The 13/18 RH deployed to Germany under the new LION plans for mobilisation rather than the previous COMPASS and formed the division reconnaissance battalion of the new 5th Infantry Division. Blunt, like many others, thought that this was the best move possible for being far out on the flank in Schleswig-Holstein away from the rest of the British Army would have been fatal for the 13/18 RH and other formations meant to be assigned there under COMPASS with a NATO commitment in that region. In the build-up to war, the 13/18RH exercised furiously for their defensive role at the head of the division they were supposed to support once the fighting started though also undertook much counter-attacking training too along with tank and infantry forces.

When war came against the Soviets it was unlike Blunt have ever thought he would see. Hundreds upon hundreds of enemy armoured vehicles and tanks had stormed across the Inter-German Border under immense barrages of artillery, rockets and bombs. It had been one hell of a frightening experience for all involved.

Blunt was assigned command of a platoon-sized Troop within a Squadron of the 13/18 RH. He commanded a detachment of Scorpion and Scimitar armoured vehicles in taking the fight to the enemy which mainly saw him protecting the repeated withdrawals that were made again and again. Luck, nothing more, saved the lives of him and his men when the 5th Infantry Division suffered under the lone Soviet chemical barrage of the war and afterwards he led his men and some other survivors with the 13/18 RH during the retreat back over the Weser when that came. Later he took part in the BLACKSMITH offensive and then combat again on the eastern side of the Weser with the 13/18 RH being a shadow of its former self. His determination to lead by example and his strong personal faith kept him going yet he truly felt the strain of warfare upon him.

When the orders came for this morning’s attack over the border into East Germany, Blunt kept his own feelings on that matter to himself. He had seen enough of war and feared that many more of his men were going to die in invading the enemy’s homeland yet he himself had no input in that decision and would just have to do his duty like everyone else.


Second Lef-tenant Eric Stuart Joyce would in later years become a Labour Party MP unlike Swayne, Penning, Smith, Mercer and Blunt who all sat in Parliament with the Conservatives yet like them he would eventually rise high in the later post-war years too.

As an eighteen year old he had joined the British Army as an enlisted man serving with the Black Watch first as a Private before rising to a junior NCO rank. Joyce would take a sabbatical to attend a technical college and then university for six years before returning to uniform the year before war broke out with officer training to commence at Sandhurst. He had wanted to join the Royal Army Educational Corps once his training was complete with a desire to help those who hadn’t had access to the education he had yet still wanted to further their military careers.

Mobilisation cut short Joyce’s training and he was ordered to leave Sandhurst and head back to Scotland to his hometown of Perth. At Queen’s Barracks there – which was a TA post rather than the historic location from where the name was taken – Joyce was at first tasked to assist in the urgent refresher training of elements of the 51st Highland Volunteers mobilising there ready to go to Germany. He wasn’t happy at seeing such unprepared TA soldiers being sent off to what he feared would become a nuclear war in Germany yet he followed orders and did just that. At the same time, Joyce did make a request to go to West Berlin to join the Black Watch there which was denied though in later years he would argue against allegations that he only did so because everyone else was and he was coerced into doing so. Had he gone to West Berlin it would have been very likely that he wouldn’t have survived the war…

Once the TA soldiers were gone, Queen’s Barracks became a transit station for further reservists throughout central parts of Scotland where men were given more training on an individual basis before they went to Germany as combat replacements: Joyce showed no official desire to leave Perth even after open warfare began but it wasn’t going to be his choice there.

Very quickly the MOD decided that soldiers like Joyce were going to link up with many retired soldiers not on the reserve list to create hastily-formed emergency war formations for service on the Continent. Those like Joyce were in non-combat roles while the retired men were in their late twenties and thirties with recent experience in the British Army who were generally volunteers. Soon enough, the 7th Armoured Division had been put together along with other formations and Joyce found himself with the former. With Saracen armoured vehicles taken from the vehicle driving training school at Leconfield and personal weapons from storage, Joyce was part of an infantry battalion designated 2 BW: the second battalion of the Black Watch. Many Scottish soldiers joined this and a second battalion of the Royal Scots and then those men became part of the new 21st Armoured Brigade. Some had a lot of recent infantry experience though others hadn’t been in uniform for many years.

Joyce had worried over how well they would all fare in combat and had feared the worst; when combat was joined with the enemy as part of the BLACKSMITH operation this had been shown to be true. The 7th Armoured Division had walked away from their fights in the Suntel Forest and around Wunstorf as victors but the cost had been heavy. Joyce had seen his men fight and die in blocking actions there and then there had later come an incident of friendly fire when B-52’s had dropped bombs upon the Black Watch. When afterwards they had advanced behind the lead attacking units of the British I Corps towards the Inter-German Border there had been more casualties inflicted. The men had needed proper refresher training and experience in less demanding roles, Joyce had said time and time again, yet no one had listened to him.

When the order came this morning for the invasion of East Germany, Joyce wasn’t necessarily opposed to that itself yet he was now against this war that he was involved in overall for all the loss of life that it meant. He wanted to scream at those above him the question of was all this worth it?


General Kenny knew none of these men personally and nor would he meet any of the six during the war or in the immediate post-conflict period either; there were tens of thousands of men under his command. His concern was with his orders that he had got from General Galvin with SACEUR instructing him and other army group commanders that they were to lead their forces across the border into East Germany; likewise there had also been messages from the War Cabinet (new Defence Secretary Cecil Parkinson foremost) for that advance to get underway as soon as possible. ABOLITION as an operational plan was still a work in process in many places with only general concept yet decided upon rather than the countless smaller intricacies of such a huge military operation. Nonetheless, he was instructed to advance eastwards with the knowledge that planners were working on those.

The British Second Army moved across the Inter-German Border at first light to play their part in ABOLITION.





Two Hundred & Twenty–Seven

‘Abolition: the act of abolishing a system, practise or institution.’


NATO forces crossed over both the Inter-German Border and the Czechoslovak-West German frontier with the objection of abolishing the system of government in-place in both East Germany and Czechoslovakia. This was their political objective as decreed by their governments though on the ground with those engaged in the invasion eastwards the immediate objective was one of a military nature.

On the other side of those borders were huge armies of the Socialist Forces. They were primary Soviet yet there remained East German, Polish and Czechoslovak troops on the battlefields too. Such armies had been beaten in battles on West German territory and chased back across the Iron Curtain after suffering immense reverses yet they remained active. NATO armies had got the measure of them and had beat them yet a change of fortunes was always possible.

In addition, not far behind those armies and moving westwards were a lot more Soviet troops that had recently been mobilised ready for combat. These were regarded as much weaken in terms of combat strength with older men and less-capable equipment… but there were still a lot of them.

NATO forces needed to engage those forces – those already in play and the reinforcements coming towards them through Poland and causing chaos as they did so – as soon as possible less they make another attack into West Germany. So many men, so much equipment and so much effort had been expended in the victories pushing back the armies of the Socialist Forces and there was a worry that the cost would be even greater on the second occasion.

The time to do that – the only time – was right now starting on April 1st.

*

In the north, the French Second Army struck against the lower reaches of the Elbe and its defenders first before turning towards the Inter-German Border in an area where they were sure their opponents weren’t going to be expecting an attack.

Reserve infantry units with the French IV Corps remained pushed up against the southern reaches of Hamburg and along the Elbe Estuary, but to the southeast of there with armoured assaults towards the river opposite the downed crossings at Geesthacht and Lauenburg. The reorganised French V Corps undertook this manoeuvre with light armoured units in the attack yet along a narrow frontage to push enemy forces on the western side of the Elbe back towards the water before low-flying transport aircraft filled the skies. Immense artillery barrages had carefully targeted anti-aircraft guns and suspected SAM positions before the French Second Army made their second air assault operation of the war here but this time not very far ahead of their ground troops.

It was the 11th Parachute Division which again was dropped behind the enemy with that formation understrength following previous engagements yet still combat capable. Once over the Elbe, the French paratroopers attacked the defenders on the northern bank from the rear and especially their armour while bridging units came forward to get the troops with the 9th Marine Light Infantry Division over the Rhine.

The French took plenty of casualties and met extremely stubborn defenders who despite being on the flank of where the main French effort was expected fought very hard indeed. More French infantry units, those with the 4th Airmobile Division (no more than a large regiment despite the name), pushing forwards to secure the crossing sites so that several bridges of a temporary nature could be erected while the two West German towns were cleared of the main bodies of resistance.

Soon enough, as the morning went onwards, the French III Corps arrived and came across the Elbe. The enemy was reacting in pushing some of their forces out of East Germany westwards across the nearby stretch of the Inter-German Border but these weren’t enough as it was still believed that the French were going to strike a little further upstream. In addition, there were further French paratroopers on the Elbe-Lubeck Canal, just inside West Germany there, holding many of the crossing points. Those men were lightly-armed and in a potentially dangerous situation, yet they held their nerve in the face of the enemy who was still trying to figure out what was going on.

Four French divisions with the III Corps – the 2nd & 10th Armored, the 6th Light Armored and the 8th Infantry Division’s – were to be pushed over the Elbe and into Holstein with the intention of then turning eastwards to engage Soviet forces along the Elbe slightly further upstream. Each formation had taken heavy losses earlier in the war and were nowhere near as strong as they were, but they were pushed forward fast with the certainly of their commanders that they were going to knock the enemy of balance. Far to their north there were British and American marines fighting in Jutland proper, but they were here at the very base of the peninsula hitting the enemy where it wasn’t expecting to be struck.

The French soon went over the canal.

The French III Corps used its two armoured divisions to do that and enter East Germany into Mecklenburg-Vorpommern from the flank. The two other divisions with that corps were to start to follow the Elbe-Lubeck Canal going towards that city on the Baltic shores where intelligence said that there were nothing but East German security troops present and plenty of logistics assets meant to be supplying the troops fighting in Jutland. As to the rest of the French Second Army troops across the Elbe with them, they would now be able to start an approach towards Hamburg now again without the fear – unless the intelligence was wrong – of major enemy interference in this sector.

The French had successfully turned the Soviets flank and the risk here had paid off.


Significantly larger than the French Second Army was the British Second Army. This latter formation had a multi-national make-up rather than the exclusively French former. Some elements of General Kenny’s formation had yesterday evening gone over the border only to be pulled back very quickly with the wait for political authorisation, yet the whole of the army groups wasn’t ready to plunge across the Inter-German Border as only part of this huge command had reached that point.

On the left, the Bundeswehr-British IV Corps (once known as Kampfgruppe Weser but now very different in make-up and role) operated across the northern portions of the Luneburg Heath with a view to reaching the Wendland: a small portion of Lower Saxony that in peacetime had been a salient jutting forwards to the east. That was located near the Elbe and was beyond the towns of Luneburg and Uelzen which, along with a portion of the Elbe-Lateral Canal, formed the enemy positions ahead of them. There were three divisions under command with the exploitation force assigned being the 7th Panzer Division and the two leading twin attacks the new 17th Panzergrenadier Division and the British 1st Armoured Division. The 17th Panzergrenadier Division consisted of mobilised Bundeswehr former soldiers operating old equipment taken from storage along with the Territorial Brigade that had been stuck in the Hannover Pocket. The British formation which the West Germans were attacking alongside was almost unrecognisable from what had gone to war nearly three weeks ago now with regular, TA and Portuguese troops making up its ranks.

The IV Corps pushed forward aiming to reach the Wendland and thus the frontier with East Germany knowing that great success wasn’t expected of them. Other efforts either side of them were supposed to be the main attacks here in North Germany and their mission was to keep the enemy concentrated everywhere rather than where the real danger was. Despite this, those troops involved fought and died today advancing forwards into murderous enemy defences all the while screaming for fire support that was apparently too busy elsewhere. They would push the enemy out of Luneburg and Uelzen and also rout them along the canal ahead yet getting into Wendland and reaching the Elbe was just a little too far. Nonetheless, they still beat the enemy arrayed against them in open battle once he was blasted out of his defensive positions and did their job of keeping eyes upon the area with the hope that when they tried again the next day, they should get to those distant objectives.


When inside East Germany the day beforehand, for some of those involved it had seemed like a holiday excursion. Of course that hadn’t been the case, but many were caught up in the excitement of the event of actually getting over the border. Coming back today, everyone with the British I Corps knew that they were in for a fight and that was certainly true. The British Army entered Upper Saxony (Sachsen-Anhalt) into the Altmark region and went straight into heavy fighting.

The enemy here had many fixed defences but was also fighting a mobile battle too just as they had done right on the other side of the border yesterday. Small tank detachments engaged attacking British forces taking on infantry positions in ambush manoeuvres and co-ordinating those with intensive artillery and rocket barrages. Electronic warfare units with the British were extremely busy in breaking up these combined arms counterattacks by using radio jamming and signal triangulation for their own artillery yet the Soviets here were again showing they knew how to fight on the defence. For the corps commander, General Inge, reaching the communications centres which were Gardelegen, Salzwedel, Tangermunde and especially Stendal were important for future operations inside the enemy’s homeland but eliminating the heavy armour which the enemy had was paramount to his mission first. Many Soviet tanks encountered were showing extra armour plate fitted externally to them and whereas this had been done in an ad hoc fashion beforehand it appeared to be more organised now. The Soviets had been busy up-armouring their tanks and such additions to the defences of these tracked monsters made them harder to take down. Intelligence had pointed to this and preparations made but going up against such an enemy countermove like this was very challenging… and cost a lot of casualties that he couldn’t afford to take.

General Inge was expecting other Soviet defensive moves like their counterattacks, the extensive minefields and the small specialist detachments of Spetsnaz acting in a stay-behind manner (who managed to kill Major-General Rous, the Tiger Division commanding general in a stroke of luck) it was just that those combined with the nasty tank shock slowed things down. The British Army spent the day fighting inside East Germany and wasn’t defeated but its attack wasn’t achieving the hoped for level of success… yet.


Nearby, General Kenny’s two other operational corps commands, the Bundeswehr VI Corps and the Belgian I Corps, started the day inside West German territory with the intention of reaching the Inter-German Border and only with a stroke of good luck could they expect to cross it at this point.

The fighting to clear West Germany they engaged in took place around the smouldering urban areas of Wolfsburg and Braunschweig and in the border areas east and south east of there. For the Bundeswehr, including the two newly raised formations making up their number, pushing the Soviets out of West Germany was all that mattered to them and there were times where commanders couldn’t stop junior men going too far in that effort and having to deal with the consequences of fighting a very capable opponent who while had suffered many reverses hadn’t been beaten yet. The Belgians had recently redeployed and traded operational area with the Americans on the eastern side of the Oker River. Their troops took greater care while still aiming to destroy the enemy but a level of measured caution was always there due to their commanders not wanting to sacrifice any more lives than possible here. In doing so and with the Bundeswehr on their flank doing what they were doing, the Belgians managed to get to Checkpoint Alpha before sunset and have some of their men take the extensive East German facilities on the other side. Helmstedt had fallen to a careful attack they made and retreating Soviet forces from there had been caught in the open while pulling back ready for NATO air power to blast them.

Then the Belgians had crossed over the Inter-German Border in that area. There was going to be great propaganda value from this the Belgians knew and they were mighty proud of themselves in taking this facility. Moreover, where their leading armour units had ended up at Checkpoint Alpha meant that they had cut the line of retreat for the enemy forces fighting the Bundeswehr and that was a further success for them.


The US Third Army was still not available for combat action with its newly-arrived formations still getting standing up ready to see action soon, just not today. At Einbeck – the town where the 1st Cavalry Division had made its doomed stand – Lt.-General Chambers was busy setting up his headquarters yet at the same time he wasn’t about to have his men be idle where ABOLITION was concerned. The US II & XI Corps needed another day but the US III Corps was also now under his command after leaving the British Second Army. These combat experienced if somewhat weary men had just been transferred slightly southwards into his planned operational area and were a potent striking force that he wasn’t going to have doing nothing for the day when the Europeans were busy invading the enemy’s homeland.

The US III Corps was sent tearing towards the East German frontier south of the Harz Mountains. General Saint as corps commander was instructed to have his troops attack in a southeastern direction with the aim of entering Thüringen though afterwards and once the II Corps were ready start making a turn across the high ground that was criss-crossed with roads back to the northeast. All intelligence pointed to the enemy being rather weak in this sector and certainly with nothing capable of putting a stop to a reinvigorated US Army when on the attack.

Just as hoped, the US III Corps reached the Inter-German Border and went over that. They headed for the communications centres of Nordhausen on the left and Leinefelde on the right. Only two divisions were involved in the attack – the weaken 2nd Armored & 5th Mechanized Infantry Division’s – yet the US III Corps would soon be assigned the 6th Armored Division while the US II Corps would join them the next day with three of its own heavy divisions as well.

An immense amount of fire power was expended in this effort as the Americans didn’t want to slow down unless they had to and any suspicious lump of mud or hilltop covered in undergrowth got the full-on artillery or attack helicopter treatment. So much ammunition had been flowing through the NATO-controlled sea lanes and this was being put to use here like it was everywhere else yet now destroying the enemy East Germany rather than parts of the allied West Germany. This was a country which was going to be laid waste to if the troops within the US III Corps had the chance to and they were sure that their newly-arriving fellow soldiers with the rest of the US Third Army would be feeling the same when it came to this as well.


The US Fifth Army with its Bundeswehr and national guardsmen would spend the day fighting to reach the Inter-German Border throughout northern Hessen.

West German troops with the new V Corps (which had replaced the hollow shell that was the III Corps with recently-created units adding to those which remained, primarily the 12th Panzer Division) fought east of Kassel to push against the Werra River that ran near the border. There was much high ground and thus areas suitable for enemy defensive operations, but their opponents were weak in number after recent shattering defeats and couldn’t make the best use of that. The West Germans were eager to tear apart the Soviets inside their territory and combatted them with their usual fury eager for revenge.

Along the middle reaches of the Fulda River upstream through Bad Hersfeld and down as far as Hunfeld those national guardsmen with the US IV & VI Corps also fought to liberate West Germany. They took part in tough fighting that was regarded as a sideshow to everyone else but them involved in the life and death struggles that took place to secure the western side of the river and push over it towards the border beyond. The enemy wasn’t giving ground easily here and so the national guardsmen took plenty of casualties in pushing forward.

The centre and right flank of the US Fifth Army had much extra NATO reconnaissance assets assigned to it in its efforts to close up to the border here with the advance heading towards Thüringen. This went alongside efforts being made south of them as well as everyone was wary about what the enemy were doing up ahead and deep inside East Germany there.


Schwarzkopf as US V Corps commander had his theories about what was leaving everyone puzzled. His analysts had presented him and his operations staff with intelligence pointing to Thüringen being the staging ground for a major enemy counter-counterattack being planned to strike back westwards again. That was based upon the belief that when those reinforcements arrived in East Germany after coming through Poland in great number they would all mass in one area rather than being split up as beforehand and then strike for the Rhine. Such a strategy made sense to him as if enough men were gathered with enough forward supplies waiting for them they could move forward taking on all comers and drive westwards even with heavy casualties being inflicted. NATO forces were not overwhelming in number anywhere and liable to such an attack if the enemy went about it the right way and with preparation too.

Such an attack, if he was right about it, would come through the operational area where he had his men fighting yet he wasn’t about to let that start anywhere on West German soil. Schwarzkopf led his men back into East Germany again after concentrating his men due to the enemy forces trapped inside the burning town of Fulda surrendering late last night and the progress of the Spanish on his right flank giving him more freedom to move. Out of the Fulda Gap the US V Corps advanced… and straight into heavy enemy defences across the border.

Schwarzkopf was driving for the Werra Valley ahead and then the Thüringen Forest on the other side of that. His aim was to defeat the enemy defences in these regions and then head towards the communications centres which were the towns of Gotha, Erfurt, Weimar and Jena beyond. When reaching those, if he was correct in his judgement, he would be engaging a huge enemy force there but, thankfully, he and the US V Corps weren’t in this war on their own.


Striking from northern parts of Bavaria to clear the last parts of this region of West Germany of the enemy were the rest of the US Seventh Army: the Spanish I Corps and the US VII Corps. General Otis – whose intelligence staff didn’t agree with Schwarzkopf’s smaller team on what the enemy was up to yet had no answers of their own – was playing a more leading role in the command of these two corps commands than with the US V Corps. Schwarzkopf had too many proponents back in the United States who were willing to allow him to do almost as he wished on the back of all of his success so far and for the time being General Otis knew that the wise thing to do was to let that occur. He was the senior commander and still gave the orders, yet Schwarzkopf knew how to fight and didn’t need a great deal of oversight.

Reaching the border was the objective for the rest of the US Seventh Army with a view to later crossing it. The Spanish took over part of the US VII Corps previous operational area and went northwards from parts of the winding Main Valley already in NATO hands up towards the frontier with a drive being made upon the Coburg area. This town and the area around it were being used for East German propaganda purposes in a manner which they were making their usual disaster about and was also regarded by General Otis as being a gateway into entering Thüringen from the south. When the Spanish struck in the area they ran into plenty of enemy resistance from East German troops though then moved a little to the east in a wide flanking manoeuvre. Through a lot of accident but some design too, Spanish tanks soon rolled over the Inter-German Border and found themselves inside East Germany around the nearby town of Sonneberg. Little actual fighting took place in conventional terms here but there afterwards came guerilla activity that the Spanish had to make a lot of effort to effectively counter once darkness approached. NATO intelligence found that the local authorities had organised Free German Youth groups as a resistance force and such a thing was very effective in Sonneberg. Later in the night, despite misgivings high up in NATO of a political nature, the Spanish pulled out of the town centre area while still remaining inside East Germany outside the urban area. They were determined to go back in the daylight and address the issue though…

The US VII Corps was still pushing in a northeastern direction though Franconia aiming for Hof. That West German town was regarded as a key communications centre for an advance into Saxony to head for the industrial centres of Zwickau, Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz) and then Dresden. These were key war aims if ABOLITION was to live up to its name and were accessible to a strong advance following the highways heading away from Hof. The US Army troops here were pushed against enemy forces that were strong yet were more willing to give ground than expected. Naturally cautious, the Americans found that they had done the right thing as they edged forward as the Soviets they encountered were trying to be clever with immense armoured traps laid using hidden forces ready to counterattack from the flanks and plenty of minefields laid to cut off escape routes from such traps. Instead of failing into that or trying to deal with it carefully, the US Army here had assistance from the USAF in unleashing relentless air attacks. They wouldn’t be getting to Hof today nor seeing the border, but the intention was that by tomorrow that would be possible especially as air strikes were meant to go on all night.


An invasion of East Germany couldn’t be undertaken without a simultaneous attack into western parts of Czechoslovakia. The French First Army was deployed in eastern Bavaria and it was the French – along with Bundeswehr forces – which were going to have to undertake that mission despite Acting President Bush pushing for the destruction of the Prague regime. Moreover, the issue with Austria was something else to figure in as well.

Pilsen was the key to Czechoslovakia as far as the French were concerned and it was towards there they ultimately hoped to go with the majority of their forces while the West Germans covered their flank and then further French troops alongside some Canadian reinforcements coming to Bavaria would assist the Italians in Austria. This would have to be a major operation with the large amount of territory to be fought over and then the numbers of Soviet and Czechoslovakian troops to be engaged. The enemy had never been able to spread out effectively through Bavaria and that had cost them yet that also meant that they remained bunched-up along the border areas through those forests that separated the West Germany from Czechoslovakia.

The French attacked with an aim of driving on the border just as everyone else was doing throughout April 1st though they knew that it was going to be tough going. Their objective would be to clear West German territory then focus upon getting an offensive going towards the Pilsen area. Everything got off to a good start, including the deployment of the Moroccans in their first instances of combat but this was all going to take some time.

*

ABOLITION was underway all across Germany.

NATO troops engaged in the fight went into battle with chemical warfare protection and behind them tactical nuclear forces were on alert too: an invasion of Warsaw Pact territory was something that had caused worries over an enemy nuclear response of a possible tactical nature. The political directive had been clear through that this was to take place and nothing was going to stop the Allies until the mission was complete.

Other factors remained in-play though especially those hundreds of thousands of Soviet reinforcements starting to pour through Poland and then the fighting in Austria as well that couldn’t be ignored while ABOLITION was ongoing.






Two Hundred & Twenty–Eight

The orders were issued in both verbal and written forms in Marshal Ogarkov’s own name and certainly would have made damming evidence at future any war crimes trial. There were multiple witnesses to these orders on the Soviet side, with the Poles and to later intelligence efforts made by the Allies as well to look into what went on inside Poland.

All and any forms of resistance within Poland to the movement of Soviet forces through their country was to be crushed with the utmost violence and intimidation efforts were to be made to discourage this occurring in the future again with disproportionate force used.

The early stages of the Great Polish Rebellion had been underway for some time now with Polish troops under Soviet officers as part of the Socialist Forces disobeying orders at first and then mutinying in places. Across Poland there had been civil unrest where violence had taken place yet at the same time much non-violent action had been taken too on the part of Poles with strikes, human blockades and intentional sabotage of the war effort. Measures responses had been undertaken – by Soviet standards anyway – and intelligence-led efforts had been tried to defeat these as well. In addition, NATO had been stirring up trouble as well to add to the already negative reaction of the Polish people to the war efforts.

Ogarkov had had enough of ‘playing nice’ with the future of his own country hanging in the balance and politics were pushed aside. He cared not one iota about Polish-Soviet relations now or in the future, just victory on the battlefields on the other side of Poland where it lay geographically between those and the Rodina. The gloves came off and his orders to be as harsh as possible on any and all resistance were going to be followed.

The Great Polish Rebellion truly would get going once his instructions were followed.


Those masses of Soviet troops which had been mobilised inside the Soviet Union and Ogarkov had ordered to move to East Germany with utmost urgency needed passage through Poland. The only viable way to get those men and their equipment to the battlefields was by transiting Poland as all other options were too much trouble. The train ferry service running from the Lithuanian SSR to Mukran on the island of Rugen could only take what would be small cargoes overall and despite being still operational was liable to an enemy attack that would close it at any time. Rail lines that ran from the Ukrainian SSR into Czechoslovakia and hence to East Germany were long and again not able to carry enough for the immense transfer required. There were aircraft available to move men in great numbers but certainly not everything else from the thousands of tanks to heavy equipment to supplies… those were also being used for other supply missions that were keeping key units stocked with certain missiles and such like.

It was through Poland on the railway lines that the extraordinary large Soviet Army force needed to move as the road links were poor and couldn’t compare to those rail links that connected the Soviet Union with Poland through multiple points and with a lot of infrastructure in-place. Hundreds upon hundreds of freight trains were to make back-and-forth journeys between East Germany and western portions of the Soviet Union and to make use of the rail transportation infrastructure in Poland. There had been a lot of damage done by NATO aircraft dropping bombs in the west and some home-grown acts of sabotage elsewhere throughout the country, but continuing repairs were to make good that damage and allow the trains to keep running.

Those trains weren’t meant to stop inside Poland unless it was absolutely necessary as there was a war going on; the soldiers weren’t sightseeing. Yet, circumstances would of course mean that they would and it was when they did that trouble occurred with the rebellious Poles.


Railway lines throughout most of Europe – both sides of the Iron Curtain – used the European Standard Gauge on their tracks with the result being that trains, passenger and freight alike, could criss-cross the Continent with ease between different countries. However, the Soviet Union used the Broad Gauge with their railway networks. While this at first glance appeared to be something minor – the difference in width was very small to the layman – for those involved in transportation it was anything but that. Trains couldn’t cross from European nations such as Poland straight into and across the Soviet Union due to different width’s being used upon the tracks. They had to stop and either the passenger & freight carriages be lifted onto new undercarriages in a time-consuming process even with automation, or everyone and everything aboard those trains needed to depart and load onto new trains using the different gauge. There were locations used on the main railway lines were newer systems were used and this Variable Gauge alternative was being made available elsewhere but that was a long drawn-out process.

This significant constraint in rail transportation between two allied nations had been in place since either was the modern country which they were today despite much talk through many years about making a change so that those railways in the Warsaw Pact countries would be compatible with those in the Soviet Union or, even better, making Variable Gauge available everywhere. Meanwhile, at cross-border locations along the frontiers between both nations there were multiple change-over points where trains either came to an end, they were lifted onto a new undercarriage with wheels and axles (a process known as a ‘Bogie Exchange’), or slowed down so that Variable Gauge could be put to use.

The Soviets were using all of the railway lines that they could as they moved across into Poland and the issue with the gauges came into play for them to a significant extent. Trains came to a stop or slowed down greatly in railway sidings inside Poland. These were far enough away from the frontlines that NATO aircraft hadn’t done damage to such places from the air yet on the ground there had been a few instances of sabotage beforehand from Poles trying to destroy this infrastructure. There was now a determination for that to not happen again and so Polish workers had been expelled en mass from such locations and Soviet railwaymen (who had been conscripted in a special category) operated such systems. For Soviets to replace Poles like this left the thousands of latter out of work and thus angry while the former struggling to operate systems that they understood yet were different from what they had expected.

The changing of gauges slowed things down to a great deal and then near several of those sites from where Poles had been expelled there were disturbances from unemployed workers who weren’t happy at ‘Russians’ taking their jobs.


Elsewhere in Poland, railway bridges over many of the country’s biggest rivers in the west had been bombed by NATO aircraft who often made repeated attack missions to make sure that if those structures above water weren’t destroyed the first time they would be bombed until they were. Those bridges above the Oder, the Warta, the Netze and parts of the mighty Vistula had been brought down and the rail connections cut.

Soviet-led efforts using their engineers and ‘encouraged labour’ on the part of local Poles had been made to construct new crossings where the old one were destroyed. There were temporary structures put in place and new air defences assembled to stop these being blown up like the ones which they replaced. Such hasty work mainly in the form of pontoon bridges over which track was laid was remarkable in its scope and the speed which these were constructed yet these were nowhere near as strong or as sturdy as those there beforehand. Heavily-laden freight trains couldn’t go over most of these new bridges due to their weight and so the solution that was the unloading of cargoes on one side of the river, the trains to go across and then the cargo – human and material – to be re-joined with the trains on the other side.

Everything possible was done to reduce delays where this occurred but of course something could also go wrong… especially with NATO aircraft knowing where the crossing points were and dropping bombs for disruption purposes over men and equipment exposed out in the open. Those on the ground waiting to get across rivers learnt to hate the sound of F-111’s on their egress.

Trouble between Poles and Soviets flared at these locations when locals and ‘Russians’ interacted.


Elsewhere, there continued to be the arrival in Polish ports along the coast of ships bringing their wares from Soviet ports further along the Baltic. Warehouses with military equipment and stores throughout the Baltic States and the Leningrad area had been emptied and ships made the journey down to places such as Gdansk, Gdynia and Swinoujscie (the outer port for Szczecin) as this cross-water travel cut down on transport times. Replacing the dockworkers wholescale at such places was too much effort for the Soviets so they brought in plenty of their own supervisors and security troops to oversee the locals Poles.

Again, trouble flared in these locations as the Soviets treated the Poles like they were their slaves and their answers to any form of resistance was the barrel of a gun. Homemade bombs started to be used by certain Poles who had been pushed too far and there were also instances of arson and outright sabotage to answer the Soviet actions.


The Soviets soon found that they couldn’t rely upon the Polish security forces to the extent which they should have and this was evident in the mass disturbances that took place in Warsaw throughout the night of March 31st / April 1st.

Pro-democracy campaigners inside the city had been for weeks now trying to organise a big march through the very heart of the capital city calling for free and fair elections to take place in Poland. With the war going on and attention focused elsewhere they had first believed that this would have been less difficult than usual but instead of just combating security agents from the Polish UB the Soviet KGB had been active in Warsaw arresting and even killing the organisers. It had seemed like the march would never take place as time and time again those trying to get it going were caught by their oppressors. Finally, though more and more people got involved in organising such an event and these weren’t the usual people too. The ongoing war brought out fears in many people and they were looking for an outlet for those… which they found in what was starting to be called the Warsaw Underground.

The weapons of the Warsaw Underground had before been illegal printing press but in reaction of the overtly brutal crackdowns made lethal weapons had been gathered and had been used in a few instances for self-defence purposes only. With the march which they arranged and then led, such people – all of whom considered themselves true patriots – kept their clubs, knives and pistols on them but out of sight as they tried to lead a peaceful march. There had been calls made over radio waves that may or may not have been created by the West for them to rise up and depose their government but such a thing wasn’t viable. Instead, the march through Warsaw was meant to make a big show and encourage more people to join their cause rather than at this early stage bring about true change.

More people than anticipated turned out for the march and there were nowhere near enough marshals to direct people as well as a crowd that wasn’t prepared to listen to those who were apparently in charge and with lofty intentions. The pro-democracy march became an unruly mob soon enough and then took on the character of a riot when security forces in Warsaw tried to break it up and start arresting some of those taking part. There were protesters everywhere though who were heading in all sorts of directions through the centre of Warsaw. The organisers had lost control and the Polish security forces were not strong enough to take on such an unpredictable mob who soon started committing acts of violence themselves.

Arson, looting and assaults occurred throughout the centre of Warsaw. Poles fired on Poles and Molotov Cocktails as well as paving stabs were thrown. Some security troops decided to stand aside after refusing to obey orders to shoot the mob and where these instances occurred there was often a break in the lines of the security forces through which the mob moved and attacked anyone in authority who they came across.

With the war going on to the west and the need to assist in the railway movements to the east, Warsaw wasn’t at that point a stronghold for the Soviets. Nonetheless, they did have a presence in the city as it was the Polish capital and when the violence erupted they took notice. There were fears that the government was about to be overthrown and also that Soviet building and personnel in the city might be attacked as well. What Soviet security troops could be quickly gathered up were assembled and sent against the mob to drive them right out of the heart of the city in lightning assaults using automatic gunfire of an indiscriminate fashion. The Poles themselves would kill more of their own people than the Soviets would, yet the method in which the Soviets did their killing was brutal but effective. They stopped the government from being overthrown and then let Polish security forces chase the mob out of the city centre into the suburbs throughout the night and into the morning.

The Battle of Warsaw had been a bloody affair and what happened there rather confusing to most of those involved and both factors would make sure that when other Poles heard about it the worst possible reactions would follow.

After the deaths in Warsaw, the Great Polish Rebellion was now truly underway and taking place while the Soviets were trying to move their armies through the country on the way to save the war from being lost in Germany.





Two Hundred & Twenty–Nine

Drawing NATO air and ground forces into Austria rather than allowing them to focus upon Denmark, East Germany and Czechoslovakia had been Ogarkov’s reasoning behind invading the neutral country and NATO wasn’t foolish enough to believe that there had been any other reason.

Why invade with such small forces otherwise?

Clearly, the new Soviet leader hadn’t considered how prepared the Italians were to react and nor that NATO air forces would immediately launch the strategic air attack that was THUNDERSTORM, but, nonetheless, Ogarkov had sent troops into Austria so that NATO would do the same. Understanding that didn’t mean that such a game couldn’t be played though, especially not with ABOLITION underway and therefore the threat to the flank of the part of that operation that was the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Italians had a large force moving into Austria and this would (roughly) equate to eight NATO-sized divisions when reinforcements were counted but those troops still had a long way to move. A gap opened up through which the French First Army in Bavaria could possibly have its flank turned and vitally important rear-areas put at risk unless that army group committed troops to the ongoing fighting in Austria.

The French II Corps had been chosen to be hastily redeployed and these troops had come from victories in central Hessen when operated under American command down through Bavaria heading southwards at speed. There were three combat divisions with this force though each formation was might have been named as such yet was in reality a large bridge that had taken many losses engaging the Soviets beforehand during several weeks of fighting. Their orders were to get inside Austria and head along the Danube Valley from the Passau area to link up with the Italians and what Austrian forces remained still operating around Vienna. Czechoslovak reserve forces operating from their territory had been very ineffective in attacking Austria also heading for the Danube Valley and Linz in particular and the Soviets were far away outside Vienna. General de Corps Jacques de Zelicourt was tasked to move with caution but speed deep into Austria and do battle with the Soviets there as far to the east as possible.

Entering Austria alongside the French II Corps was the Canadian Army’s reformed combat force in Germany.


Two weeks ago, the Canadian 1st Infantry Division had been near-destroyed at the Battle of Ludwigschorgast when fighting as part of the US VII Corps in Franconia. They had gone up against a much stronger opponent in a mobile battle and misjudged what should have been a flanking attack against an unawares enemy to turn that into a head-on engagement where the Soviets also had tactical air support available in number. The majority of the professional strength of the Canadian Army had been lost in that fight and a lot of bad feeling had remained with those few survivors which managed to escape from what became a massacre. Afterwards, those elements not destroyed in that battle – one which ultimately didn’t mean anything to anyone but those involved – had been pulled back from the rest of the fighting in Bavaria and kept as an infantry reserve first for the VII Corps and then the US Seventh Army.

The following week had seen some Militia units arrive in Germany and fight with the national guardsmen that formed the US Fifth Army yet those troops had only consisted of two light infantry battalions and their efforts again arguably didn’t make much of a difference to the war effort. Canada was committed to NATO, and the Allies too, and there had been a political decision made in Ottawa straight after that defeat on the battlefield that the country’s armed forces would continue to pull their weight. At sea in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Canadian naval forces made a significant contribution while there were still many Canadian combat aircraft (capable Hornet’s and older Freedom Fighter’s) operating in Germany. As to the Canadian Army, the substantial rear-area logistics network in Bavaria that they in-place remained assisting American, French and West German forces which remained fighting.

Regardless, the Canadian Army still wanted a return to the fight and to get some measure of revenge as well as restoring some national pride. Forty years ago, Canada had deployed a full field army to Germany in the closing stages of World War Two and to be left out of this conflict on the battlefields just wouldn’t do.

The 2nd Infantry Division had been formed up in Germany so that Canada could get back into that fight. Regulars from Alberta that had at first moved to Alaska pre-war were transported all the way to Germany along with their equipment and the 1st Brigade became the first standing unit of the new division. Two other brigades were formed up alongside them – the 2nd & 3rd Brigade’s – using the few troops which remained in Germany and Militia units already in Europe and coming from Canada itself. With those Militia formations, several of the more prestigious units were chosen (with furious infighting going on between regimental supporters back home) to be the building blocks of combat units with reservists from others which wouldn’t go to Germany adding to their number. Canada didn’t have a large standing army but it did have many former professional soldiers either in the Militia or recently retired from active service.

The combat equipment used by the Canadians was second-hand in the form of Centurion tanks from British stocks (Canada had sold most of those previously operated to Israel), French light armoured vehicles and American personnel carriers & artillery. What little armoured vehicles the Canadians had themselves were put to use and so too were many French trucks as well. Therefore, while having some tanks and other armour, the Canadians were far from a strong force in terms of combat power and would face even greater danger on the battlefields of Germany than they previously had when going up against the Soviet Army or even the ground forces of their Warsaw Pact puppets too. The lesson with that had been learnt the hard way indeed and during the creation of the 2nd Infantry Division this had been something thought about to a great extent. Ammunition stocks for the Canadians came from their own and then some of that recent Italian delivery had been diverted their way especially with the Canadians being located where they were when it arrived in Germany.

The original idea had been for the 2nd Infantry Division to operate in northern Germany with the French Second Army there and for the Canadians to maybe even see action near Hamburg or in Schleswig-Holstein. Such a concept had come from NATO higher-ups though and wasn’t what the Canadian Army wanted at all. Their supply base was still in southern Germany along with what troops the rest of the division was to form-up around and such a move to the north didn’t make sense. Staying with the French was still considered key with language and logistical links so Bavaria it was and Munich in particular.

When the order came for the French II Corps to move into Austria, the Canadians went with them. They travelled via Autobahn-8 to Salzburg and entered Austria at that point… just ahead of the French Army crossing the Inn River and the Danube at several points near Passau. It was believed that the Canadians would have much better luck in Austria than they did in Franconia with experience that could only come from such a defeat as they took as well as operating alongside heavier forces of the French and Italian armies.


There was still a distance to travel of almost two hundred miles for the Canadians from Salzburg to Vienna – as the crow flies and therefore much longer by road – and it was going to take some time for them to arrive where the fighting was.

Meanwhile, over to the east, Italian and Soviet forces were now engaged in combat near Vienna…


CANADIAN 2ND INFANTRY DIVISION
1st Battalion, The Canadian Airborne Regimentalready in Germany
1st Mechanised Brigade
1st Battalion, The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantryfrom Alaska
2nd Battalion, The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantryfrom Alaska
3rd Battalion, The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantryfrom Alaska
The Lord Strathcona’s Royal Canadian Horse (armour)from Alaska
2nd Reserve Infantry Brigade
1st Battalion, The Black Watch of Canada [Militia]newly-arrived
1st Battalion, The Governor-General’s Foot Guards [Militia]newly-arrived
1st Battalion, The Princess Louise’s Fusiliers [Militia]newly-arrived
The Royal Canadian Hussars [Militia] (armour)newly-arrived
3rd Reserve Infantry Brigade
1st Battalion, The Canadian Grenadier Guards [Militia]already in Germany
1st Battalion, The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada [Militia]already in Germany
2nd Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regimentalready in Germany
The Fort Garry Horse [Militia] (armour)newly-arrived
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Thirty

Almost without exception, those countries actively involved in World War Three felt the presence of traitors within them. Moreover, there were many nations not involved in the war whose citizens which chose to betray their country adversely affected them too. Treason crossed all ideological lines and those of age, race and gender too in a global fashion.


People betrayed their countries of birth for a plenitude of reasons.

There were those that did so because they wanted to and those that had no choice in the act. Some were motived by hating their nation or its system of government and wishing to see the end of that, and then there were those who thought that they were the only ones could better their nation. Others were coerced with the act of blackmail into treason; along similar lines, trickery was often used with clever third-party, false flag deceptions facilitating betrayal. There were traitors who wished for pleasures, riches and power of their own which they believed they deserved. Treason came in the form too of those with the belief that they knew best and they were doing the right thing. And, of course, there were those who betrayed their own nation because they could and therefore they would.

Traitors had been despised throughout history often with the same level of contempt reserved for military deserters or in the modern era those who abused children. Even those who history proved were doing the right thing were vilified for what they had done. Arguments were made that no one had the choice of where they were born and so treason against their country of birth as a concept was wrong but such excuses of a supposedly moral nature weren’t given the time of day. Only those who successfully got away with treason with few people or even better no one knowing came away from the act as a winner for public perception of treason was always one of disgust.

Britain suffered the consequences of the actions of traitors acting against the nation during the conflict due to various reasons with some managing to remain undetected in their treason. Yet, at the same time, there was much success against such people who were betraying the UK as well.

*

Fenton–Smyth came from a familial background of privilege yet at the same time much expectation. He was well-educated and had many connections with the elite within Britain. A servant rather than a leader, his position in life meant that he still had much personal power through influence.

With his background, Fenton–Smyth had long ago secured himself a role within the Establishment as a supposedly loyal and trusted aide to members of the Royal Family. His duties were extensive yet hardly arduous where he provided administrate tasks and was always available to offer advice should it be requested. After spending many years working for the Queen Mother, Fenton–Smyth had for the past two years been with her eldest grandson and the heir to the throne. There were plenty of secrets about both the Prince and the Princess of Wales that he knew yet keeping such things to himself was what was expected of a man like Fenton–Smyth as his duty was to them rather than to anyone else.

He had secrets of his own though and wished to maintain for if those were exposed he would face public humiliation, the loss of everything that he had and quite probably a stiff prison sentence too where someone such as himself certainly wouldn’t enjoy. Last year a foreign man had referred to those as ‘unspeakable acts’ when the process of the treason which Fenton–Smyth would undertake first begun. No one would ever find out about these nor see the evidence of those, Fenton–Smyth had been told, as long as from time to time some requests which were asked of him were fulfilled.

During Transition to War, the Prince of Wales and his family had departed their usual residence at Highgrove and been whisked away to a hideaway in North Wales; specialist policemen, an MI-5 officer and a detachment of soldiers had gone with them along with a few indispensable aides like Fenton–Smyth. That movement along with the location of where they went was meant to be a secret from almost everyone.

However, during the tensions in the early part of the year, those who blackmailed Fenton–Smyth had instructed him that if such a thing were to occur in a situation where wartime precautions were taken, he was to act to give information as to such a location. He hadn’t wanted to think about why those who held sway over his future wanted to know that for the Royal couple and their two young children would certainly in grave danger in such a situation. Nonetheless, when that happened and the move made to the theoretically anonymous Caerwys Rectory took place, Fenton–Smyth had recalled those threats being made and made a telephone call from a private residence within the village to an unlisted number somewhere in London. Nothing was said during that call, but two days later there had been a shooting incident within the grounds and a pair of bodies afterwards recovered.

Fenton–Smyth was soon airlifted out of the area along with the Royals by helicopter and to an even more secluded location elsewhere while the presence of two armed intruders at Caerwys Rectory – one male, one female and both unidentified – had become something of a mystery to everyone apart from him. There was no way that he could contact his blackmailers after arrival in Cumbria with the far more intensive security precautions taken there. Fenton–Smyth was also left in a troubled state that he desperately kept to himself with the thoughts of what could have happened had those men from the Scots Guards not been so alert but at the same time every day waiting upon the confrontation that would come following the release of his own secrets.

Of course he thought of suicide on many occasions and running away too… though never of giving himself up and admitting the truth.

Throughout the course of the war, the treason which Fenton–Smyth had committed would remain undetected.

*

Dear was a Wing Commander with the RAF. This mid-level staff officer had a long and distinguished career with that organisation and had served his nation well in many peacetime roles during that time. Approaching the end of his career, Dear was assigned a senior role at the MOD where he commanded fellow military officers as well as civilians in a wartime planning role so that the RAF would be able to fulfil its NATO role. It was a desk job that required a lot of work to be done and also many secrets to be kept.

Dear betrayed his country for money. He had many years ago now come into contact with the KGB and it was him who offered them access to intelligence that he would steal for a fee. The Soviets were rather tight with money, Dear had always found, yet they were rather professional in their dealings with him and he believed that unless something very serious went wrong he would never be caught. The money which he gained from them was used to help him maintain the lifestyle he wanted and kept him and his family comfortable. What he gave to the Soviets was what he chose, not what they asked for, and his belief was that war between Britain and the Soviet Union never would erupt due to the nuclear arsenals of each so what did it matter if he gave the KGB some information which they would never put to use? It was only technical data that he handed over, much of it what the layman wouldn’t understand, and intelligence that he was certain wouldn’t harm his nation for there would never be a war where the possession of it by the other side wouldn’t harm his fellow RAF comrades nor his country.

Then NATO mobilised.

Those radar frequencies, radio codes, deployment plans, weapons capabilities studies and such like which Dear had long been handing over to the KGB were now in the hands of the other side – Dear never thought of the Soviets as ‘the enemy’ – and could be put to use if the shooting started. The certainty that Dear held over war never occurring was shown to be false as every day following mobilisation there came more and more warning signs that it was about to happen. He came to realise that everything he had handed over did actually mean something and would harm a lot of people. Dear cut off any form of communication with his contacts and hoped that MI-5 had rounded up such people but his concern was of what he had done, how he had harmed others rather than anything else… though he wasn’t about to turn himself in.

Unfortunately for Dear who always believed that he was in control, he really wasn’t. His main GRU contact in London, to whom he passed all of that information to, had decided to defect to Britain after deciding that he didn’t like the new form of government in his nation: Dear was one of several people whose names he gave to his MI-5 interrogators.

When they came for Dear, the Security Service took him away and presented him with the GRU officer who had told them about him as well as details of his treason. Dear defended himself by telling MI-5 (and the Defence Intelligence Staff personnel brought in too) his reasoning behind his treason and dismissing the counterpoints over how he had only done what he had for financial gain. He believed that he could get away with what he had done by explaining how sorry he was and how he really hadn’t meant any harm to his country nor those who wore the same uniform as him.

Before the war was over, while being held in a specialist detection centre, Dear would have ‘an accident’ where he slipped over when at the top of a flight of stairs and fell down them. He had multiple head injuries and those were more than he should have had with such a fall, yet no one in authority ended up losing any sleep over such a minor detail in that autopsy report. Much worry instead had been over repairing the damage that Dear had done rather than what became of the arrogant traitor.

*

Vaughn had long ago served in the Royal Engineers and spent many years as a British Army NCO. He was approaching fifty years of age when mobilisation for war came yet he wasn’t called up due to that age and an injury to his one of his hands which he had suffered many years ago while on active service that left him with the use of only one of those. His duties when in uniform during peacetime had been in the field of explosives for demolition purposes and since he had left the British Army he had maintained a strong interest in such a thing.

There had come anger to Vaughn after his injury and the small payment he had received to assist him after he left uniformed service along with the pathetic excuse for a pension he received as well. There was no work available for a man like him with the use of only his left hand and he wasn’t the sort to take offered charity either therefore leaving him without much to do since retirement. He stewed and plotted revenge upon those who had betrayed him by leaving him in the situation he was in.

Sometimes his anger was again the military brass while other times he hated those bureaucrats at the MOD who had forced his retirement. Then he would silently rage against politicians before turning back against senior generals with their rank and privileges. He was never confused, of that he was sure, but he was always angry and wanted revenge.

Vaughn didn’t have any secrets and then the idea of treason was something that made him angry too. He wanted to do something though, something to get back at those who had forgotten all of his years of loyal service. When war came to Britain, Vaughn had a large stock of illegally-gathered military-grade explosives in his possession and knowledge in his head. He had an idea to hit back for revenge and also show that he could put all his skills to use despite being classed as ‘disabled’ by the MOD.

On the war’s second day, Vaughn blew up a major section of an underground pipeline providing aviation fuel to military airbases in Southwestern England. He knew where the pipeline ran as it cut through the countryside and where there were access points for maintenance. Such places weren’t physically guarded and he got access so that he would place a lot of explosives and then flee before almighty explosions made the ground shake afterwards. Vaughn’s bomb had a greater effect than he anticipated and caused epic amounts destruction.

The Security Service afterwards were on the hunt for the perpetrator of his attack but they never came across Vaughn. The thinking was that a GRU agent had been responsible and probably working with the Soviet Spetsnaz team active at that point in the region, not someone like him. His treason would never be revealed and the blow that Vaughn had struck to those in the military hadn’t killed anyone but he shown that he could have still be useful had he not been as unfairly cast aside as he had been.

*

Cutting had for many years worked for the Security Service with their counter-espionage department. He had been a career spook keeping his country safe from those of a foreign nature who wished to do Britain harm. At the same time, he had been actively betraying his nation and handing over state secrets to the East German Stasi. He had kept his long-held socialist beliefs to himself all of the time he was with MI-5 and eventually starting assisting the Stasi so that he could help bring about a better future one day for his country and his fellow Britons.

He understood socialism better than anyone he worked with and knew in his heart that for all of its faults, the British people would be much better off with such a system of government.

Three years ago, Cutting had come damn close to getting caught in the act of passing information to the Stasi by counter-intelligence people from his own organisation. They had moved too quickly though and he had just avoided being caught in the act. What evidence there was against him was circumstantial and not physical so he didn’t face prison just the termination of his employment and the knowledge that MI-5 knew.

Cutting had left the country afterwards and moved through France, Italy and then Yugoslavia. There was a local girl in Croatia to whom he got involved with and maybe he would have ended up spending the rest of his days there… until the Stasi showed up. They had at first thought of taking the girl hostage but instead had talked Cutting into returning to Britain and doing their bidding. He had returned home to the UK using a different name as one of the many Britons who came back to the country from abroad on the eve of war and managed to not be recognised when coming back. Once he had made that journey, Cutting had gone to a location on the edge of London and met up with the people the Stasi sent him too: a detachment of specialist East German commandoes hiding out waiting for a radio signal.

The reason behind Cutting being sent to link up with these well-armed East Germans was so that he would assist them in assaulting the Security Service’s headquarters once war was imminent. Cutting knew the lay-out of the building and was meant to guide the commandoes as they moved through the complex moving down anyone who stood in their way with their assault rifles and grenades. It was to be a quick raid to kill as many British intelligence officers and their staffs as possible before Cutting was supposed to help them get away afterwards.

Back in Zagreb, this had all sounded something that Cutting thought he could do. There were people there at MI-5 headquarters who were only doing their jobs and didn’t deserve death yet he believed that the organisation was morally corrupt as a whole and needed to be destroyed so that socialism could come to Britain. Not a fool, Cutting knew that it would take more than just that, but he would be playing his part. When back home though, his view had changed. He knew that the protection of such a place wouldn’t be that strong as it sat outside the Ring of Steel thrown up around the very heart of Central London (the Security Service’s main building was just south of the river) but it did sound like a suicide mission. He understood that he wouldn’t be coming out of there alive and, in addition, before he died he would be responsible for the deaths of many innocents.

Cutting again committed an act of betrayal as only hours before the attack was meant to take place, right on the eve of war, Cutting made a telephone call to a certain number. There was some incredulity on the other end of the phone to the person he was talking to – another former MI-5 man who had left the organisation in much different circumstances than his own – but Cutting had made the man believe him. Afterwards, Cutting had fled from the East Germans and their hideout and made a run for it. He still had his false identity and the Stasi was going to be very busy with the war.

His conscience was clear afterwards and Cutting believed that he had done the right thing.

*

The Donaldson Gang was the name later given to a group of seven radicals active in Gloucestershire who committed treason in a spectacular fashion. Led by a woman after which they were named, these traitors to their country undertook an armed raid against a military facility in the region with the belief that they would be aiding their view of ‘the war effort’ by their actions. Support for them pre-war came from a GRU officer living undercover in Britain with a legend who helped arm them and structure them into the tight cell-like organisation which they became. Members of the Donaldson Gang were known radicals supporting a rather disturbing anarchist agenda but the GRU had them doing their bidding and also staying out of sight in the pre-war period.

The war which the Donaldson Gang believed they were taking part in was one against the oppressive military-industrial complex as exemplified by the presence of American military aircraft at RAF Fairford in the form of B-52 bombers. They knew that those aircraft would be carrying nuclear warheads ready to kill innocent Russian civilians and the belief was such weapons of war needed to be destroyed. Their leader had taken all assistance given by the Russian who had assisted her in planning the attack against RAF Fairford while at the same time despising him and planning to have a reckoning with him too as the KGB (who she thought he was part of) was almost as bad as the American military. The guns were taken first and so too were the specialist maps showing defences at that facility, but the leader of the Donaldson Gang had it in her heart to kill that Russian as well afterwards…

For seven people in two vehicles armed with AK-47’s to try to take on the security force guarding RAF Fairford during the first week of the war was rather foolish. Such an attempt didn’t actually get anywhere near the base as they were spotted several miles away moving off-road through the countryside. The base was on alert for Spetsnaz and thus the reaction against the Donaldson Gang was therefore justified in a military sense.

The USAF had the regular 7020th Security Police Squadron assigned to RAF Fairford in peacetime and the 7026th Squadron had joined them there in the build-up to war when assets deployed to Greece had left that country. These men and women were all armed and fielded some good equipment including heavy man-portable weapons like mortars and heavy machine guns as well as four-wheeled M-706 armoured cars. It was a pair of the latter which engaged the Donaldson Gang before they could reach the perimeter wire with their machine guns blasting apart the vehicles used by what the USAF deemed terrorists.

Such was the end of the Donaldson Gang and their ideas of saving the world from nuclear apocalypse by blowing up those American aircraft based in Britain.

*

Henry had had no idea that be been betraying his country. Up until the moment he died, he had thought that he was helping his country. He had always known that he was never the smartest of men and people thought of him as maybe a bit simple, but there was no malice in him. He had always tried to be a good person and wanted to do the right thing.

When his parents had died, they had left him the family business: a small rural petrol station in Suffolk that came with a garage for fixing cars. Henry knew about cars if nothing else and could repair any old banger. Hardly anyone ever stopped for petrol anymore since a new main road had been built several miles away as part of a bypass but he still did some business fixing cars plus there was plenty of money left to him too. He never read newspapers and hardly watched the television so his understanding of world affairs was from second-hand knowledge yet when Transition to War had come he knew there was some danger to Britain. Henry had a long-term friend though who told him about what was going on and explained things to him, a friend from Ipswich in the used car trade who often brought vehicles by for Henry to repair. They would talk and drink tea in the flat above the garage where Henry fixed vehicles and Henry’s friend, who was well-travelled, would tell him about what was going on overseas in places that fascinated Henry.

War with foreigners meant grave danger could come and Henry’s friend had explained to him that there were some people in more danger than others. These were people protecting Britain against all sorts of dangers and they needed a place where they would stay safe. Henry had been asked to help and he surely did that.

The ‘peace activists’ from abroad arrived and Henry’s friend stayed with them in the garage premises. No petrol supplies had come to the business Henry ran and the garage remained closed too so that those people he was protecting stayed safe. Henry was told that it was best that he didn’t know, but he understood that: protecting the country was more important than his curiosity. He fixed up several vehicles that that Henry’s friends were going to use for their ‘peace mission’ and made sure that they were left alone to do what they needed to do, whatever that was.

And then the night before the Spetsnaz team raided RAF Mildenhall Henry’s friend snuck into his room and cut his throat with a bayonet. Henry had no idea why he was killed by his friend while one of the peace activists looked on. He had done everything that they asked of him and given his friend so much help in doing what was right in protecting innocent people elsewhere yet they butchered him like they did.

Henry died not understanding how he had been taken advantage of as he had been.





Two Hundred & Thirty–One

Mielke knew what ABOLITION meant for him: death. He would either die at the hands of his countrymen, be killed during the invasion or maybe hung after a show trial conducted by the Allies. The moment that he was told that NATO was invading East Germany, he at once knew that his time was soon to come to an end.

There was no other endgame that he could foresee apart from his own death.

The regime that he led and therefore him at the head of that were soon going to be brought down by the armies of capitalism that had started to cross the Inter-German Border with Berlin as their clear goal. He commanded no major armed forces of his own to stop those invaders and it was clear that the Soviet Army couldn’t do that either. The few briefings that Mielke was getting now from those sent by Marshal Ogarkov to see him were full of bluster and promises of a turnaround in military fortunes soon enough yet from his own sources, plus his own intuition, he knew that everything he had built here was doomed to fall soon enough.

The armies of America, Britain, France and maybe even West Germany would end up in Berlin and marching down the Unter den Linden before going on through the Brandenburg Gate. Following that would come the final destruction of the regime here and the enslavement of the people to the West with their bankers, free markets and money lenders. Everything the he and so many others had worked for would be crushed and, as the saying went, buried under the ash heap of history.

Propaganda in West was already depicting him in the same vein as Hitler and Mielke suspected that his name would afterwards be mentioned alongside that fascist for the rest of human history.

To know this and to not be able to stop it was suffocating…

…but then there came the offer of a possible salvation.


The KGB officer that the now departed Chebrikov regime had assigned to him refused to share the same sense of dread as Mielke did. Vladimir Vladimirovich had suffered the ignominy of being ignored by his fellow countrymen who wore military uniforms as the KGB had been brought down by Ogarkov, but Mielke had observed the man who had become his closest adviser take that better than he thought he would. Vladimir Vladimirovich had seen the top levels of the KGB cut down by the Soviet Army and suffered personal insults from such people but he remained with Mielke and carried on doing his duty. The man from Leningrad was faithful to the cause no matter what.

In addition, Vladimir Vladimirovich was also blessed with what Mielke regarded as exceptional cunning. He had a daring mind that sometimes would think the unthinkable and when Mielke would listen to the younger man he would always remain impressed at what went on there inside the head of such a man as his KGB adviser. There was nothing that Vladimir Vladimirovich didn’t think through to the end and have a solution for that would make sure that every angle was covered. He was, of course, sometimes burdened with the arrogance of youth, but that didn’t take away from the fact that behind that blind faith came logical thinking.

Mielke was sure that if a man like Vladimir Vladimirovich had been in charge of the Soviet Union instead of Ogarkov or even Chebrikov, then such a situation as this with the armies of capitalism crossing the border would never have occurred.

Vladimir Vladimirovich returned to the notion he had put to Mielke some time ago about a manner in which East Germany could avoid these troubling fears which the elder man had: possession by the regime here of their own nuclear weapons and the threat of using them to stop the destruction of what Mielke had built. Vladimir Vladimirovich stated that they still could be ‘acquired’ if the risk was willing to be taken in doing that and then it could be quite simply put to the West that they needed to stop their invasion or some of their cities would be destroyed. He added that if Ogarkov hadn’t been such a fool then the Soviet Union could bring to a halt offensive NATO operations which were destroying its military forces.

Mielke needed to do what Ogarkov dared not to and scare the West enough to bring an end to the war.


The strategy which Vladimir Vladimirovich put to Mielke was elegant and thus typical of what was expected from him.

Those thermonuclear warheads along with delivery systems for semi-strategic use would be stolen in a daring operation so that East Germany could become a nuclear power in one swoop. These would then be secretly deployed to hidden locations where they would be safe from attack and thus not be taken as a threat that could be countered. Messages would be sent to several NATO nations threatening the capital cities of their nations if the invasion didn’t stop; Vladimir Vladimirovich thought it best to threaten Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain as well as most-importantly West Germany. None of the nuclear powers in the West would face such intimidation just these nations which were part of NATO and especially in the case of West Germany key to that alliance’s invasion of East Germany. By that point, the West would know that Mielke’s regime had these weapons and would suspect that he would be prepared to use them to stop the toppling of East Germany without knowing it was all a bluff.

Mielke didn’t want to use such weapons for he believed that NATO would launch their own afterwards against East Germany and Vladimir Vladimirovich stated that if such a thing were to be done all that would be achieved would be slaughter on a global scale: Soviet forces in Germany would be killed by NATO nuclear weapons and Ogarkov would have to strike back. What good would that do in achieving the aim of keeping East Germany free from foreign occupation? No, instead, the threat had to be made to those nations so that political pressure would break apart the NATO alliance and bring a halt to the invasion.

Vladimir Vladimirovich assured Mielke that there were still many people of influence left within the Soviet Union who while not knowing about this beforehand would still go along with it afterwards. The two of them had nothing to fear from Ogarkov as he would be browbeaten into accepting this as it would ultimately favour his own goals of keeping the Soviet Union safe from invasion itself. East Germany would therefore force the NATO armies to leave first as their alliance broke apart and then the Soviet Army would go too without an enemy to fight. Mielke could afterwards concentrate on rebuilding all the damage which had been done. Nuclear weapons frightened so many in the West that in the medium- to long-term too, East Germany wouldn’t be threatened by a vengeful West. There might be talk about destroying the country but those would be hollow… as long as there were no nuclear attacks made first by Mielke.

Everything would depend upon those NATO nations accepting the bluff as a real threat but Vladimir Vladimirovich believed that they would. There would be arguments among themselves as the talk would be of stopping the war now after West Germany and Norway had been liberated and Denmark nearly so too with all the cost that such a thing had achieved in the terms of lives. The West Germans would fear the destruction of their cities in a nuclear conflict and wouldn’t allow an invasion to continue while the other threatened nations wouldn’t want to see their cities atomised too.


Faced with the alternative of his own death and convinced at the brilliance and cunning of Vladimir Vladimirovich, Mielke committed himself to such a proposal. He didn’t see that he had any other choice at all with all other options off the table following recent events.

There was just the small matter of acquiring those weapons but Vladimir Vladimirovich had what he said was a perfect plan for doing that to begin the process.





Two Hundred & Thirty–Two

The plan which General Demidov was meant to follow was for the heavy forces of the Austrian Army to be broken before Vienna and then the city to be surrounded by a drive around the outside of there to the west. Despite immense losses taken, the plan had initially been very successful and at the end of the second day’s fighting in Austria everything seemed on course for further victory.

But then troops under his command ran away and went on a rampage.


Those conscripts and reservists with his three combat divisions as well as the army-level support formations of the Soviet Fourth Guards Army lost their discipline through the night and broke free from their encampments. Towns around Vienna and the outskirts of that city saw hordes of angry men take out their frustrations upon those who lived within those. The men wanted women, they wanted drink and they wanted revenge for the deaths of their comrades. Junior officers who stood in their way along with the understrength field police units were cut down by the rioting soldiers who deserted en mass throughout the night.

Thousands of Austrian civilians anywhere near the scenes of the fighting during the daylight had fled as fast as possible from the advancing Soviet Army and those who had chosen to remain behind that night in their homes were to regret that decision. Wild gangs of men broke down doors into homes looking for the pleasures they would take from women as well as any alcohol they might find. No one could stop them, especially as these men regarded the Austrians as ‘Germans’.

Along with the rapes and the drinking came extreme and sometimes thoughtless cases of theft alongside destruction. Arson was the main factor in this wave of destruction that the soldiers would unleash but so too was the smashing of what appeared to be every window in sight and then looting of commercial premises. The men wandered everywhere they could doing their worst and far away from their encampments so that even if their superiors were able to muster a disciplined force to come after them and somehow make an attempt at restoring order, that would be impossible. There were soldiers everywhere moving mainly on foot but also in motor vehicles they stole in many other cases so that they could get far away and seek their pleasures elsewhere. None wanted to serve in the Soviet Army and being in Austria offered them a chance for escape.

Meanwhile, Austrian civilians suffered hell being unleashed upon them.


Demidov had been warned by the 254MRD divisional commander that there had been some outbreaks of trouble within the ranks during the latter part of the previous day, but he was in no way expecting what occurred and for it to be as widespread as it was. All of a sudden, Soviet soldiers everywhere just decided that they were going to do as they wished and desert. They took their rifles with them and some even attacked their fellow soldiers who wouldn’t desert with them as they departed. Whole formations simply became no more with up to eighty, even ninety per cent of the men in certain units no longer under the control of their officers and running lose.

A somewhat student of history, Demidov didn’t think that an army had broken like this ever beforehand and certainly not in such a short space of time. He could afterwards piece together many of the reasons why this had occurred though.

During their time in Hungary, the men of the Soviet Fourth Guards Army had believed that they weren’t going to see warfare and they had been glad of that. Rumours had come to them of the terrible fighting elsewhere that had taken so many lives while they had remained inactive and away from combat; when they were moved forward to the Austrian border they hadn’t been happy. Ogarkov had disbanded the KGB’s Third Chief Directorate right on the eve of the invasion of Austria and all of a sudden there was no external oppressive control being exerted. The KGB was feared but the men soon realised that they were gone and no one had replaced them while the only real authority above them now were their officers. Once in Austria, the conscripts and reservists had never expected such fierce resistance to be shown to them. So many of them had seen comrades killed by the Austrian Army in bloody battles along the frontiers. Their officers hadn’t stopped them from taking out personal revenge upon captive POW’s and that had been a major error as the sense of discipline was lost there. Such things like this had happened in occupied portions of West Germany, Demidov had been told, when men went on the rampage murdering, raping and stealing alcohol after eyes were averted when they killed prisoners but those had been small affairs put down by KGB security units with harsh repressions.

Finally, there was all that Austria had to offer armed men if they deserted from authority. Much of the frontier area in West Germany had been abandoned by civilians before the conflict started there and even when the Soviet Army made great advances, there still weren’t that many civilians for them to capture, especially young women. There, teenage girls and women up to the age of thirty, even older, were not something to be found as they had heard tales from their grandmothers of what happened in eastern parts of Nazi Germany when the Soviet Army invaded in 1945. Austrian women hadn’t fled in such disproportionate numbers like they had in West Germany with many remaining in Austria to be taken advantage of. Drink was in greater abundance in eastern parts of Austria than it was West Germany and Demidov was actually suspicious of that fact as if it had been left in-place to be stolen and to therefore intoxicate his men.

When Ogarkov heard of sudden evaporation of the manpower strength of the Fourth Guards Army and therefore that Demidov would be unable to carry on with his advance during the third day of the invasion, there was an immense tirade delivered down the radio to him. Demidov faced a much greater problem after that long verbal onslaught he faced over the airwaves.

The news came that the Italians were about to hit the flank of the army that practically didn’t exist anymore which he was supposedly meant to be in command of.


The two brigades of the Italian Expeditionary Army sent in a northeastern direction rushing towards Vienna to relieve the paratroopers flown into that city reached the outer positions of the Soviet Army just before dawn. Helicopters – of which the Italian Army operated a substantial number – lifted small groups of lightly-armed Alpine soldiers ahead of the tanks and armoured vehicles on the roads in a leap-frogging fashion to cover them from highpoints above. Those men from the Julia Brigade assisting the Ariete Brigade came into contact with civilians fleeing southwards and were able to make sure that local Austrian authorities on the ground were able to re-direct traffic away to not hold up the advance. During some of those encounters between soldiers coming north and civilians streaming south during the early hours, the Italians heard some rather odd tales of Soviet behaviour in what appeared to be organised attacks on civilians taking place but they couldn’t make sense of that…

Regardless, they moved onwards eager to get on with their mission of reaching Vienna and the Folgore Brigade there before the Soviets completely surrounded the city.

Contact with the enemy occurred first at Neunkirchen and then very soon afterwards at Seebenstein just before daybreak. These were towns along the route which the Italians were following and were meant to be just outside the Soviet occupied area following their move from Sopron in Hungary up towards Vienna from the south. Neither town was a large urban area but both were ablaze as the Italians approached them with helicopter crews not wanting to operate in the dark near all of that smoke. Civilians were streaming out of both places and rushed past the Italians for the most part with the few who spoke to them through interpreters telling of robbery, rape and destruction going on.

As the Italians flooded into such places on the ground, their tanks and armoured vehicles sometimes met rifle fire but nothing more than that and certainly not in any organised fashion. Gunfire was returned and infantry soon deployed where they found that all they had heard was true. Everywhere there were mobs or individual Soviet soldiers on the rampage. They were doing as they wanted as an orgy of violence was unleashed.

The Italians put a stop to that where they could.

Trying to get the enemy to stop through threats wouldn’t work and so the Italians had to start shooting them. Their disciplined soldiers were forced to do this because their opponents couldn’t listen to reason when they were surrounded and would attack them either with their rifles or anything to hand. Some of the sights which the Italian soldiers saw moved them to violence of their own and their own officers had to be careful in dealing with that too.

The Soviets were over a wide area which could take a very long time to clear though spread out as they were. More infantry than was available was needed to properly stop what was going on and there was also the pressing need to maintain the advance. The commander of the Ariete Brigade made a radio call requesting assistance from the Carabinieri only to be told that the mobilised 11th Brigade was still on the other side of the Alps. The advance couldn’t stop though. A choice had to be made between fully stopping this wave of violence or getting on with the mission and that Generale di Brigata was glad that the Generale di Corpo d’Armata above him and in command of the Fifth Army Corps was the one who was responsible for the order for the advance to continue.

The much bigger town of Wiener Neustadt lay ahead and it was towards that communications centre the Italians advanced towards. Some of their military police remained behind along with a battalion-group of Alpine infantry to assist them, but the majority of the force headed towards that town where air reconnaissance conducted the night before had shown it to be the location of the service support elements of the Soviets driving on Vienna and lightly guarded by screening forces. The aim was to tear through that area and then go around the Soviets from the rear to reach Vienna.

Towns either side of the Autobahn were avoided in the push for the small airport at Wiener Neustadt and Soviet soldiers moving down the road engaged when they displayed aggressive actions but otherwise ignored in the race to push onwards.


Wiener Neustadt was in a worst state than the smaller towns further south had been. The Italians arrived there just after dawn after bypassing defences that were unmanned. Anti-tank guns and trenches were empty and so too were tanks as well. Instead, they found fires smouldering in the town and a lot of sleeping and drink-induced drowsy men everywhere they went. The Italians fast set about getting weapons away from such men before they had slept it off and also securing what else they could find of military value. Rocket-launchers, mobile air defence vehicles, fuel trucks and such like all got special attention as the Italians seized what they could get their hands on.

It appeared to be that this situation was going to repeat itself all the way to Vienna with the right flank of the Soviet Fourth Guards Army either asleep, in a drunken daze or dead all up the highway.


Much closer to Vienna, right on its southeastern outskirts, the Italian parachutists and Austrian reservists manning the hastily put-together Schwechat River line didn’t receive the early morning attack which they expected. During the night there had been suspected penetrations made towards their lines by individuals and small groups of men which they had opened fire upon thinking those to be infiltrators, but during the day it was realised that those men were deserters instead.

The two divisions arrayed before them had collapsed into anarchy like the 254MRD did. Those men in the 50TD and the 126MRD were reservists not conscripts but they still decided to desert during the night. Some had gone towards the Italian lines and been killed in the darkness, others had made foolish efforts to cross the Danube to their north – where Austrian small boats armed with heavy machine guns cut them down – but most of them had moved southwards through the countryside outside the city heading for towns and villages in that direction. Rape, robbery and arson occurred in these locations as the Austrian people suffered grave personal injustices.

Aware of what was going on just across the narrow river line from which they were defending against an attack which not looked very unlikely to occur, Austrian troops positioned alongside the Italians moved into the towns of Zwolfaxing first and then into the bigger Himberg. Their troops opened fire against all who resisted them and killed many Soviet soldiers who were not operated in a disciplined fashion and then withdrew once all civilians had been evacuated from such destroyed places back to Vienna.

Seeing the success which the Austrians had, the Folgore Brigade came back over the Schwechat River and then advanced towards the airport which they had abandoned the day beforehand. These paratroopers without any armour of their own were in theory advancing to conduct against a heavily-armoured numerically stronger force, but in reality found that the enemy was an empty shell of what it had been only yesterday. So many of the Soviet soldiers here yesterday were gone with only a thousand or so remaining now. There was some resistance from reorganised formations of men who had remained behind and would fight for their country yet such Soviet efforts weren’t strong enough at all to stop the Italian paratroopers.

Vienna International Airport came back under Italian control and there was much regret at the immense damage they had themselves done here the day before with their demolitions to key parts of it.


In a military sense, the invasion of Austria was over. However, there remained tens of thousands of Soviets inside the country and dealing with them would remain an immense task for the Italian forces who had ridden to the rescue of the Austrians. At the same time, those French and Canadian forces entering Austria from the west would now no longer have an enemy to fight here.

They would have to go elsewhere to see combat…





Two Hundred & Thirty–Three

Losses occurred by NATO aircraft engaged in operations throughout the European theatre came in many forms. Aircraft undertaking combat missions, preparing to go into battle, providing rear-area support duties, moving men & equipment about or being held back for a wide range of tasks suffered destruction from various means that didn’t always occur due to enemy action.

The USAF, fielding the largest force in Europe with the Allies, conducted a staff study a couple of weeks into the war into the circumstances surrounding the loss of its combat aircraft (excluding those necessary electronic support and transport aircraft as well as the few helicopters fielded). The result of this calculation was that five per cent of the losses had come from accidents when airborne not resulting to enemy action, eleven per cent from enemy destruction when on the ground – either commando raids, tactical missile strikes, bombing raids or when airbases were overrun (the latter in Denmark) –, seven per cent from regretful ‘friendly fire’ incidents of all kinds, twenty-eight per cent from airborne combat with enemy aircraft and then the remaining forty-nine per cent from enemy ground-based air defences of both a tactical and strategic nature.

That last figure was remarkably large and significantly higher than those air-to-air losses suffered; half of all aircraft destroyed were so due to enemy ground defences.

Other NATO air forces would see similar numbers in combat aircraft losses, with variations of course, but they didn’t look into such things with great detail as the Americans did believing instead in getting on with the fighting rather than navel-gazing. Perhaps the European NATO air forces were correct in that, but these numbers were regarded as important to know by the USAF so they could understand what was going on with the air war. What they also would have liked to have been aware of was what were those numbers for the Soviets too? Surely the Soviet Air Force and their Soviet Air Defence Force formations assigned were taking more losses in air combat than from NATO ground defences?

The extraordinary large commitment of American air power to Europe meant that the USAF didn’t want to see its aircraft and aircrews lost for no reason. The entire pre-war European-based assets had been engaged in combat along with most of the US-based tactical air assets of the regular USAF along with most of the USAF reserves and then large numbers of Air National Guard combat aircraft as well. Moreover, strategic bombers and then aircraft from AMARC flown by newly-raised units had followed as well. More than a hundred combat squadrons had been involved in the fighting through Scandinavia, across Germany and into Eastern Europe as well.

It was important to know why so many aircraft had been downed, especially when it came to enemy defences in the form of anti-aircraft guns and SAM’s.


The most effective way of avoiding losses from ground defences was to evade them either physically or behind electronic interference. There were many USAF formations dedicated to their destruction while the majority of aircraft on combat missions carried weapons of their own to engage such defences as well in necessary self-defence. It wasn’t always known where such defences would be and this especially was the case as war went onwards with the enemy getting rather adept in some cases with hiding such weapons until the optimal moment for them to perform their task.

Pre-war studies had identified that large losses would be incurred from air defence systems deployed on the ground in a wartime scenario. The USAF operated aircraft such as the A-10 Thunderbolt designed to take a lot of damage from such systems and then fielded direct attack missiles for use against those defences as well as stand-off electronic warfare systems to defeat them. It was known how widespread the use of anti-aircraft guns and in particular SAM’s were with Warsaw Pact forces and so these preparations were taken.

The USAF itself didn’t operate air defences of their own and had their airbases in Europe defended against by their NATO allies operating Hawk and Rapier SAM’s. The US Army and the US Marines had invested heavily in such systems for defending themselves from the air on land and then there was the US Navy too with its missile-armed warships for air defence. Regardless of not operating air defences of their own, the USAF still understood how important they were especially to their projected enemies in the Warsaw Pact. The Soviets invested a great deal in such systems and there was much overlap in capabilities for air defence from the tactical level up to strategic use throughout their armed forces and those of their allies.

Throughout the Cold War, the USAF had understood the threat posed to their aircraft in a hot war from such air defences. The Israeli’s and then themselves tangled with Soviet-supplied systems over the skies above the Middle East and Vietnam. Aircraft were lost but much valuable intelligence was gained not just on such systems but also the strategy behind their use. There were intelligence coup’s as well to add to understanding Soviet-built air defences from defectors to smuggled copies of manuals to the capture of intact systems like in Grenada in 1983 and in Chad the year before World War Three erupted. Satellites and high-flying reconnaissance aircraft looking sideways could see some of the operations of such air defences with their peacetime deployments, how they moved in exercises and electronic information was ‘swallowed’.

True combat experience against such systems in a full-scale war was always going to be where the USAF learnt about how such defences would affect their missions and while it was anticipated that such lessons would be hard, no one had believed the scale of losses would be as great as they turned out to be.


Multi-barrelled anti-aircraft guns and older low-level SAM systems took their toll upon the USAF during the war by damaging and destroying many aircraft. Despite evasion tactics and pre-war knowledge of them, they were still formidable especially in how the Soviets deployed them in great number with many recent modifications to their electronic systems. What really hurt the USAF though – and contributed significantly towards that forty-nine per cent figure – was what the Americans soon started calling ‘double-digit SAM’s’.

NATO code-named many Soviet weapons with an easy-to-use classification system. For surface-to-air missiles, those were given the prefix ‘SA’ (SA: surface-to-air) followed by a number with newer systems being assigned higher numbers and also a simple word as well to stop combat confusion by having both used together. By the time World War Three broke out, NATO was using classification for Soviet SAM’s which required two digits.

There was the SA-10 Grumble in use by the Soviet Air Force & their Air Defence Force for strategic high-altitude defence; the SA-11 Gadfly deployed in the semi-strategic role for the Soviet Army; the SA-12 Gladiator / Giant with the Soviet Army for strategic air defence; the SA-13 Gopher tactical system for forward units with the Soviet Army; the SA-15 Gauntlet with the Soviet Army for battlefield anti-aircraft protection; and the SA-19 Grison system attached to the mobile gun/missile platform Tunguska. Meanwhile, the SA-14 Gremlin, SA-16 Gimlet and SA-18 Grouse were designations for shoulder-mounted SAM systems while the SA-17 Grizzly was a yet un-fielded upgrade of the SA-11. All of these missile systems had their own Soviet designations yet NATO relied upon their own classifications. In later years, the term ‘S-300’ for the SA-10’s and SA-12’s would enter the wider lexicon and so too in places would the Tunguska name as well though during the conflict between the Allies and the Socialist Forces the code-names were those by which such systems were referred to.

These newer SAM systems were deployed by the Soviets across Europe as well as on occasion by the military forces of their puppets too. Supported by some of the best Soviet radar technology available, communications links over which data could be shared and effective command-and-control procedures especially in the case of the strategic systems, the double-digit SAM’s caused immense problems for attacking aircraft. The missile batteries moved around a lot and were very high up the list for priority resupply. They had well-trained crews who had been fully-briefed on known NATO air tactics. However, there was little initiative allowed among the missile crews when it came to breaking away from established operational procedures and their effectiveness would also be dampened during the conflict by chronic supply problems despite their status as well as NATO learning to adapt to them especially in the electronic warfare arena.

In tactical engagements against NATO aircraft, there were plenty of SA-13 systems available on their tracked chassis’ which were to take down many aircraft and the SA-19 missiles fitted to the Tunguska backed up by four rapid-firing guns was starting to replace the gun-only ZSU-23-4 systems when open warfare broke out. Only a few SA-15’s were encountered and they weren’t always fully-functioning due to major technical issues, but when they did they were very dangerous as well for NATO aircraft.

At distance and in high-altitude engagements, the SA-10’s, the SA-11’s and the SA-12’s made their presence felt. This missiles would lance into the sky and strike against NATO aircraft on strategic missions with great frequency and high kill rates. Some of their supporting radars systems had NATO code-names as they were known about yet others were not and neither did defence analysts in the West know about the specialist Polyana command-and-control system that linked together such missile batteries to make them as effective as they were. In addition, super-secret OTH radars operating from deep inside the Soviet Union itself provided assistance to strategic air defence missions which these SAM’s were undertaking as several of the batteries with such weapons guarded politically-important sites inside Eastern Europe.

Patchy intelligence of the double-digit SAM’s was available before the war started and once it did more became available to NATO. Once aircraft started encountering these systems during engagements data on them was available as well as the efforts of electronic warfare aircraft as well. Moreover, some SAM batteries were investigated on the ground when they ended in NATO hands during counter-offensives as well as commando activity in the enemy’s rear. This was regarded as the best way to defeat them especially after some of the successes which they scored.

The USAF was very upset when one of their F-117 stealth strike aircraft was downed when attacking Kaliningrad by an SA-10 and then two more were lost soon afterwards to another SA-10 and then a SA-12 when attacking targets in Poland and Czechoslovakia respectively. These aircraft were believed to be invulnerable to SAM’s in Soviet service though that misconception was proved wrong. Other long-range strike aircraft flying with 3ATAF on deep strike missions were hit by such missiles at great distance from hidden launch sites that rapidly moved afterwards. Double-digit SAM’s accumulated many kills and really hurt the USAF along with the air forces of other NATO aircraft.


That study concerning losses which the USAF took came alongside requests from senior NATO people for something to be done to seriously degrade the capabilities of the Soviet’s most effective weapon against attacking aircraft. Electronic warfare was realised as being the key to this though it was put forward that an offensive strike needed to be done rather than passive means as previously used to counter those air defences on a strategic level.

In undertaking this, the USAF would heavily improvise upon an Israeli military operation in 1982 called MOLE CRICKET 19 but, of course, add their own spin to that… as well as giving it a better name.

*

Operation FLAME RAPIER commenced after darkness fell on April 1st. The USAF sought to destroy multiple strategic SAM sites throughout East Germany early in the operation using a little cunning and the follow that up with a big attack upon East Berlin that would make the CERTAIN VENGEANCE strikes look like pinpricks as well as hit some other targets of a political value inside the country as well.

The assets used in the mission were like before all from the USAF tasked to NATO usually but detached for this American-only mission that had political approval at the highest level back home.


Drones were launched to start the mission.

From specialised versions of C-130 aircraft came smaller remotely-piloted aircraft but there were also larger aircraft that lifted off from the ground too, aircraft which had once been F-100 Super Sabre fighters and F-106 Delta Dart interceptors. These aircraft were normally used in peacetime as aerial targets and they would be again fulfilling that role again this evening. Specialist electronic equipment was fitted to many of them from radar transponders to increase their size on enemy radar screens to electronic warfare pods whose capabilities it was believed that the Soviets knew about.

Those drones flew across from West Germany above the Inter-German Border and over enemy territory. Quicker than expected, they started to come under attack with SAM’s being directed against them from the ground. They were at various altitudes and in groups that would resemble the strike packages normally used against targets inside East Germany. Once they came under attack, the operators of some of these drones would try to guide them out of the way to make their presence seem all the more realistic though most didn’t have real-time control exerted over them. Either way, many of these targets fulfilled their role perfectly and were shot out of the sky by SAM’s coming up from the ground.

Soviet missile crews on the ground were having great success this evening and would claim countless kills.

While that was aerial destruction was taking place, back to the west it was being watched on radar screens by aircrews aboard several USAF aircraft in the skies tonight. AWACS aircraft on NATO missions were feeding data to Rivet Joint and Compass Call aircraft where battle-staffs for FLAME RAPIER analysed what they received. The drones were being knocked down due to enemy action while others would soon start to crash when they would eventually run out of fuel but for now they had the complete attention of the enemy. They were expecting such an attack like this and in the darkness had no idea that they were wasting their precious stocks of missiles as they were.

What the USAF was monitoring from its stand-off aircraft were communications between SAM batteries and higher control that they could detect (if not yet decode properly) as well as where those SAM’s were being launched from. There was a window of opportunity for a strike to be made against such targets that was known from previous intelligence gathered on Soviet SAM operations. After firing, missile batteries as well as command headquarters would move to new positions. This wasn’t something that would be done in an instant with those systems even though they were mobile detachments.

F-111’s and FB-111’s flying from their bases across England were already airborne over the Low Countries waiting for the confirmation of many suspected sites to be confirmed and then orders were issued to them.


When the strike aircraft arrived over East Germany, some were unfortunately caught by surprise and lost. There were SAM batteries which hadn’t been detected or where the intelligence concerning them was faulty. Moreover, both the East Germans and the Soviets still had some of the elite interceptor units active and warnings made to USAF aircrews from AWACS aircraft weren’t always enough to save them from distant missile shots. Nonetheless, those losses to the strike aircraft were much smaller tonight than usual especially as most of the strategic SAM batteries were shutting down operations and in the process of moving location to somewhere else. Free-fall bombs as well as many television-guided models fell away from those aircraft and started hitting their targets.

SAM batteries are extremely susceptible to damage. There is always plenty of sensitive equipment attached from communications antenna to radar dishes. The missile-launchers themselves aren’t armoured and neither are the mobile power generation plants. Plenty of men are needed to operate them and they are needed to work outside in the open too. If they can be located, hidden as they usually are, they are targets where a lot of attack came be done in a bombing run.

All across East Germany, far back from the frontlines and especially in the south through Thuringia but also around Berlin, the USAF bombed these many of these sites in a coordinated attack.


There were B-52’s assigned to FLAME RAPIER too and these flew over the North Sea first after coming out of their bases in Britain as well. US Navy fighters met them and escorted them above enemy-occupied Schleswig-Holstein though the focus of the US Navy at the minute was supporting the US Marines and the British in Jutland. Soviet fighters were engaged at distance there by Tomcat’s and then the massive B-52’s started launching missiles. They weren’t going any further eastwards due to the results of the SAM strikes being unconfirmed but didn’t need to either.

AGM-86 cruise missiles of the newly-converted conventional warhead variant left the aircraft before they turned back around to head home. The cruise missiles continued onwards and hit airfields throughout the northeastern and the northern parts of East Germany. They slammed into runaways, hangars and structures present with the aim of disrupting flight operations from these for some time to come. Many enemy aircraft were expected to be caught up in such attacks due to other 3ATAF air activity ongoing over East Germany yet it was known that knocking the fighter force out flying from them for good was going to be too much to ask for now.


FLAME RAPIER continued through the night with F-117’s making their appearances over East Germany too. They went deeper than the F-111’s and the B-52’s and flew lone missions with the Bandits still weary of SAM activity against them.

Strikes were made from these aircraft against high-value targets including suspected command posts, logistics points and several transportation links. Going after re-established crossing points the enemy had put up over the Elbe inside East Germany and the Oder on the Polish border were important to the overall war effort and bombs fell upon these too.

However, despite the reported excellent results against SAM’s earlier in the evening, one of the F-117’s was successfully engaged by an SA-10. The aircraft in question was hit by missile fragments along its port wing and suffered major damage. The pilot made an attempt to fly his aircraft back west so that he and his aircraft wouldn’t fall into enemy hands but this wasn’t to be. He soon had to eject when he lost control less he loose consciousness. He didn’t know it, but his aircraft would be near obliterated when it did hit the ground and enemy intelligence teams wouldn’t get much from it… although there had been a successful effort made with that by the Soviets in Poland with another F-117. Events would see that there was little significance in the future yet the USAF would still be rather disappointed.


F-111’s again returned to the skies over East Germany before midnight. The remaining strategic SAM system wasn’t expected to have recovered and many airfields in the north home to interceptors were known to be still knocked out of action.

There were two mission goals with this final part of FLAME RAPIER. The first was a return to Berlin with three times the number of aircraft than beforehand against attacking regime targets. Those raced towards the city and avoided much defensive fire coming from the ground there before making their attacks from distance. During CERTAIN VENGEANCE there had been overhead bombing with the propaganda effect sought of having Berliners hear the aircraft above them. This time, bombs were delivered in the ‘lob-toss fashion from distance so they were thrown at their targets rather than dropped from above.

The city was rocked by explosions across the eastern half while in the occupied western parts those suffering there under the Stasi administration heard the blasts over the wail of air raid sirens and the noise of hundreds of anti-aircraft guns firing. The fires from the blasts of the targeted buildings would in many place rage throughout the night and the whole of the city would know that despite what they were being told daily about victory after victory occurring, the West was still striking back right here in the capital of East Germany.

A small force of F-111’s avoided Berlin and flew near the Baltic coastline on a course for Poland. They didn’t go that far but instead attacked a target close to the border and one of a political nature: the immense Schwedt oil refinery. This facility which was at the end of the Friendship pipeline crossing Eastern Europe was hit by many carefully-placed bombs designed to cause maximum damage and not just destroy operations there, but let everyone nearby know too. The fires caused would later be seen from Szczecin across the border while soon enough it was hoped that many people in East Germany would know about it too through word of mouth.

These attacks on Berlin and Schwedt were ordered by Acting President Bush and the NSC. The rest of NATO had been informed of them but they were taking part outside of the NATO command structure. Mielke’s regime in East Germany had been selected by the Americans to truly feel the force of US combat power. Schwedt had been targeted alongside Berlin not just for the effect on the war effort that would see a reduction in fuel supplies taking place but in what several European politicians would also speculate afterwards was something more too. With the destruction of such a facility there would be many problems in the post-war world with bringing oil from a reformed or reconstructed Soviet Union (or successor state) to Western Europe. When later questioned about this, the Americans would show ignorance at such a suggestion, yet Schwedt would be the first but not the last similar facility to be destroyed in such a manner by American hands alone.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Thirty–Four

The task assigned to Lt.-General Andrew Chambers, US Army was one that most of his peers would have in public regarded as a golden opportunity but in private as a personal nightmare.

General Chambers had been ordered to create an army in the midst of an ongoing war ready to go off and finish that war off yet at the same time to see everything he needed being taken away from him as he did that. The US Third Army was meant to be hastily built within the United States and then deploy to Germany to win the war there. As he was trying to do this, General Chambers had to face the constant loss of men and equipment elsewhere as urgent needs overrode his own. This was a never-ending process from conception to final deployment along the frontlines ready to go into battle and it almost drove him to insanity.

However, finally, the US Third Army was ready. There were a lot of shortages and the already in-place US III Corps had gone charging off into East Germany the day beforehand when ABOLITION was authorised, but the US II & XI Corps were to be at last sent into battle as well.


National guardsmen from across the United States formed the lighter formations with the US XI Corps and those men were sent into the Harz Mountains. Their mission was to clear that area of enemy forces known to be dug-in there and such a mission was expected to be rather costly even with the generous supporting fire power assigned to them in terms of artillery and air support when needed.

Those men assigned were from ARNG formations home-based across New England and the wider North-East as well as the Mid-West too. Much training had been conducted with them since mobilisation occurred on the eve of war and there had been arguments that they needed a lot of heavier equipment yet General Chambers sent them into action. The Harz Mountains would rest on his left flank during the drive into East Germany and there were many Soviet and East German forces which had withdrawn into there. To leave them unmolested, even surround them for siege warfare, wouldn’t do due to their numbers and how that would leave them positioned to break out into not just his supply lines but those of the British Second Army to the north.

Such enemy forces needed to be destroyed… plus the US XI Corps needed to be bloodied somewhat to; a factor left unstated but understood by many. There were later planned uses for the four light-rolled divisions with that corps command and they wouldn’t be useful if they remained ‘green’. The Harz Mountains would provide them with a challenge yet one which would hopefully make them capable of undertaking more demanding tasks later.


US Third Army controlled independent units not assigned to its combat corps mainly in the form of combat support and service support units yet also combat formations as well: a pair of separate airborne brigades.

There was the brigade from the 82nd Airborne Division (1st/82nd Brigade) detached from that formation which had first seen action in Nicaragua before the conflict with the Soviets turned to shoots being fired and the paratroopers serving then being sent to assist the US III Corps in operations on the eastern side of the Weser. These widely-experience men had taken losses in Central America and Germany but remained combat-capable and were still regarded as elite. In addition to them there was the new 173rd Airborne Brigade. This second formation was like his US II Corps with recently retired US Army soldiers making up most of its numbers along with those coming towards the very end of their peacetime training becoming combat soldiers earlier than expected. Its component units were from the historic World War Two formations like the 501st & 506th Infantry Regiment's with four battalions of paratroopers whereas the 1st/82nd Brigade had only three battalions.

There had been many voices calling for the two brigades to be merged together under a single command – the designation ‘17th Airborne Division’ had been touted – but nothing had come of that. General Chambers didn’t have the manpower to form a new divisional headquarters when he was already as stretched as he was nor did he want to assign supporting assets that he didn’t have available to such a new formation. The brigades were to be kept separate he had decreed, especially as the 82nd Airborne Division would eventually want back their men and they had plenty of influence throughout the wider US Army.


Manpower issues for staff roles and rear-area services were a major problem elsewhere with his command too, especially with the US II Corps. Like the 173rd Brigade, combat soldiers had been found and so to those in artillery, aviation and engineering roles as the US Third Army had been able to stop such people being reassigned elsewhere during the pre-deployment stage. Such ‘ring-fencing’ hadn’t occurred with others not undergoing urgent refresher training though and so many of his key people that would keep his fighting soldiers fighting had been taken away from him to replace men elsewhere with the US Fifth & Seventh Army’s.

The US II Corps was able to field three brand-new divisions (a fourth assigned to the depleted US III Corps) and an armored cavalry regiment with a lot of older men and equipment yet their rear-area support services were much smaller than peacetime organisational structures. This was a big deal as logistics needs demanded a lot of manpower alongside transportation coordination personnel, military police, medical care teams and military intelligence staff. Of course this was understood throughout the US Army and it was known that the US Third Army was suffering shortages in this field yet the other two field armies had been engaged in fighting and had taken losses that needed replacing with urgency.

When General Chambers ordered the US II Corps forward this morning, he sent them effectively chasing the US III Corps so the former could get into battle alongside the latter. The expectation was for this to occur later in the day deep inside East Germany. General Saint’s command was fighting to cross the Helme River in the northern reaches of Thüringen east of Nordhausen; US II Corps was to join them in crossing there and then move alongside them in an eastern direction. The plan was to move deeper into enemy territory and head for less broken ground than originally encountered in the direction of Halle on the Saale River. There were phase lines already drawn up by General Chambers’ staff for the advances to be made for this to go alongside directives coming from SACEUR when it came to areas of operation inside East Germany.

The US Third Army had no official ultimate objective yet beyond Halle as the flank of the US Seventh Army was meant to reach nearby Leipzig eventually; leaving the US Fifth Army to as yet unspecified ‘other tasks’. Berlin was where General Chambers was expecting to go ahead of everyone else including the British who had designs upon that city too.


As the 14th Cav’ led the US II Corps racing into East Germany, ahead of them came an airborne assault to secure their line of advance and create chaos in the enemy’s rear. The paratroopers with the 1st/82nd Brigade were dropped at and around Allstedt Airbase with the 173rd Brigade possibly to join them at a later stage depending upon how matters worked out with that. This Soviet air facility had been badly damaged throughout the war and hadn’t contributed much to the war effort due to repeated NATO low-level air strikes. Last night, FLAME RAPIER air operations had done more damage and as dawn arrived so too did American paratroopers. There was a vicious fight at the airbase itself between its defenders and attackers with those men out to take it being soon afterwards joined by reinforcements coming in from flat parts of the nearby countryside.

The much-bombed facility was more than thirty miles from the most forward positions near Nordhausen but right on the line of advance planned for the US II Corps. It was half way to Halle and alongside the main highway running eastwards too. In taking it and then expanding operations from there, the aim was to divert immediate enemy attention towards it while also getting ready to use such a place as a helicopter facility for onwards advances too.

Allstedt Airbase came into US Army hands after several hours of fighting to root out defenders stubbornly holding on and work at once begun to start localised offensive operations from here with the paratroopers on the ground. There were some fears over being dropped too far ahead but news quickly came that the rest of the US Third Army was on its way and making fast progress towards them.


Like it was elsewhere, the US Army was now firmly establishing itself throughout many parts of East Germany. The border areas themselves had been secured in most places and advances deep were now being made. The enemy was yet in a position to stop them and was being either destroyed or pushed back almost everywhere it was encountered.

ABOLITION appeared to be turning into a rout, though everyone knew that this was a war far from over yet.





Two Hundred & Thirty–Five

Likewise, the British Army was pushing forward too… still with mounting casualties that showing no sign of decreasing.

General Inge was driving his British I Corps across the Altmark region and towards Stendal. That town was a major communications centre with road and rail links converging upon there along with a nearby airbase. Past it was the Elbe and therefore General Inge’s orders were to secure the town so that a later advance could move that way. Moreover, taking Stendal would allow the British to be in a position to outflank Soviet forces to the south of them in the wider Magdeburg area holding up the Bundeswehr at the Inter-German Border.

Just as it was the case with the Americans to the south of them, the British had ultimate goals further eastwards… but first they needed to take Stendal against an enemy determined not to yield.


The Soviets understood the importance of Stendal just like the British did. To lose control of the town, the communications links around it and the wider area on the western side of the Elbe would mean wholescale defeat not just for the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army itself but for the whole defensive position in northern Sachsen-Anhalt as well.

Stendal couldn’t fall.

Unrecognisable from its pre-war or even RED BEAR organisation, the Twentieth Guards Army was tasked to hold on and blunt the advancing British. For more than a week, the British I Corps had been advancing eastwards despite all obstacles thrown at them. Now the Soviets were going to stop them for not doing so here would mean disaster.


The resulting clash that occurred throughout the day around Stendal left the region looking like significant parts of West Germany did. A mobile battle was attempted to be fought by two mechanised opponents but instead the fighting became one of static nature when such moves were checked by the other. The first move made by General Inge for a combined tank and infantry assault was met by an armoured counterattack that was only just detected in time; the British had learnt their lesson on the other side of the border. The counterattack was then met by a counter-counterattack which, inevitable led to a counter-counter-counterattack before stalemate started to ensue with mobile movements and infantry dismounted from their armoured vehicles.

For the casualty-averse British, this was the best outcome as their men were less likely to be killed on foot rather than in their vehicles. The Soviets had the men to spare and human losses were dismissed by field commanders, but they didn’t have the fuel to keep fighting on the move as they had tried to. Infantry started slugging it out at rifle range while tanks and artillery gave fire support.

Stendal wasn’t defended by the Soviets like elsewhere with extensive manmade fortifications consisting of trenches, strongpoints and minefields. They had wanted to keep their forces mobile to take on what were believed to be weaker British forces while at the same time the British had chosen this opportunity to use their mobility for once in a set-piece battle. When the casualties mounted for one side and the fuel started to run out for the other, the infantry battlefield was like it hadn’t been in some time for either side and they tried to take advantage of this. Dismounted soldiers were pushed forward by their commanders to keep advancing as there were little physical blockades only the gunfire of the enemy.

The fighting took place to the north, the west and the south of Stendal while the garrison town was blasted from the air. In peacetime, Stendal had the feel of a frontier garrison with the big Soviet Army base located nearby and then the military airbase in close proximity too. Today it became a battlefield when it was attacked from distance as the British struck at Soviet artillery located within the town firing from supposed cover and also to deny the use of roads crossing it to move around troops. General Inge secured some air support too from the 2ATAF and aimed to have those roads blocked by falling bombs as well.

The East German authorities hadn’t allowed residents of the town to officially evacuate – there had been much ‘unofficial’ movement though – and immense casualties started occurring there as a result of the fire support the British were given. While there were some voices of caution among General Inge’s staff over the damage done to the town, the assumption was made that it would have been evacuated with it being so close to the fighting: why would Mielke want martyrs? Alongside civilians who the British unfortunately killed there were some members of the militia forming up even if they didn’t know about the presence of such men.

The battle for Stendal would see the first large-scale use by the East Germans of organised militia. Locals were press-ganged into fighting though there was nowhere near the expected level of opposition to this with the propaganda that East Germans had been subjected to throughout the conflict playing a major role in this. East Germany wasn’t Poland and while no one liked the Soviets, they weren’t seen as the enemy; the invading NATO armies were. As the day wore onwards, groups of militia were pushed towards attacking British units in multiple places. They were, of course, no match for fully-trained professional soldiers yet they ‘ate’ a lot of bullets and caused casualties of their own despite the massacres which their numbers would eventually suffer. These men wearing improvised uniforms, armed with old weapons and employing dubious military tactics were cut down in droves as they died for what they believed was a good enough cause, that being the defence of their country against what they were told were ‘imperialist aggressors’.

Troops with the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army remained the main organised force defending Stendal and it became clear eventually by the time the afternoon came that they weren’t going to fall back. General Inge had considered putting all effort into a push north of the town, past the airfield, and charging for the Elbe where he planned to drop his Portuguese paratroopers in a late-in-the-day airborne assault. The enemy was regarded as weaker in this section than elsewhere but his intention appeared to have been understood by the other side as they moved their own forces around despite all the destruction being done to them. He was forced to call off that planned heavy assault with his tanks as there were still far too many Soviet infantrymen around with man-portable anti-tank weapons and those were joined by the bigger gun and missile systems of the Soviets too.

Orders were issued for the British units out-front to make tactical withdrawals into defensive positions and to at once start to fortify them. They were told that if they were chased by the enemy in doing so they should rapidly turn around and strike back – just as the Soviets had been doing to them since the Luneburg Heath – but their ultimate aim was one of withdrawal for the time being. This was all to be done in a localised fashion to open up gaps between the two opposing armies so that artillery could come into play in a better fashion with fewer constraints to avoid friendly fire. General Inge had received permission from General Kenny to do this though given instructions that while his troops held the line through the rest of the day and the coming night too, he was to prepare to attack again tomorrow with a view to avoiding the tactical defeat suffered today.

For the Soviets, there wasn’t any time for any sort of jubilation. They hadn’t won a victory, just avoided defeat. Their successful defence of the Stendal position had come at an immense cost and for much of the battle there had been a fear that the British would realise how little fuel for manoeuvre there was available as well as the critical low supply of ammunition too. A lack of any more air defence missiles was one thing but to be running low on artillery and tank shells was something else entirely and of greater danger. The Soviet Twentieth Guards Army wouldn’t be able to hold off another determined attack and only the extensive use of ‘cannon-fodder’ today in terms of the East German militia sent off to die like they had had actually saved the situation. They started digging-in and therefore reversing the strategy that had been so effective today but only due to those limitations in terms of what they didn’t have to fight with.

When the British I Corps and the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army would meet again in battle, the fighting wouldn’t be anything like it had been today.





Two Hundred & Thirty–Six

For the Allies, April 2nd was regarded as the day that the Battle of Denmark was finally won as they established near complete control over the archipelago on land and in the a-joining waters. However, the Danes themselves wouldn’t regard the conflict to liberate their nation as coming to a complete close for several more weeks, but even they understood that the day was something rather special.

Troops from the United States, Britain, Denmark and Sweden – in conjunction with naval forces from those nations plus the Netherlands and West Germany – completed the final phases of the fighting in Denmark as BLACK PYTHON, PORTER and operations on Zealand came to a suitable conclusion. In addition, and also continuing to fight after April 2nd, the generally unorganised Danish Resistance played a major role too in liberating large areas of the country from hostile foreign occupation.

A major victory for the Allies, with NATO at the forefront of this, was achieved in the Baltic Approaches that opened up all sorts of geo-strategic opportunities for the future.

*

In Jutland, British forces and the US Marines overcame the final desperate opposition from the cut-off East German forces which they encountered and completed the liberation of the peninsula.


The decision to take their time and thoroughly engage the East German 9TD where they found them paid off for the British. There remained that temptation to rush forward and deep down through northeastern Jutland from the forward airhead at Aalborg, but the 6th Light Division was tasked instead in smashing apart their opponents in carefully-fought engagements instead. There was plenty of air support on-hand for the British and they needed this with the opposition being a tank division with a lot of armour. While many East German tanks were immobilised by lack of fuel, the T-72’s encountered were still tough targets to eliminate. It was the same situation with the other armoured vehicles which the enemy fielded in number where again even though many didn’t manoeuvre to fight, they still had impressive firepower.

British Paras, Foot Guards and Royal Marines had countless small engagements against such armour and were also thankful that while the East German infantry they came up against could fight very well when they had to, such soldiers were really at a loss without their mobility. Vicious small-scale fighting between men on foot took place south of Aalborg as the British used the mobility which the East Germans no longer had to destroy their combat power as well as their will to keep resisting. That air support was there in terms of British Army helicopters and some Sea Harrier support yet the US Navy carriers offshore really made their presence felt for the British too even if they remained focused upon giving more aid to the US Marines. Furthermore, there was the constant assistance given by the Danish Resistance in the rear behind the East Germans which hurt them very bad as well.

During their fourth day on the ground in Jutland, the 6th Light Division overcame the immobile East Germans who they fought. They started to see small-scale surrenders taking place among their opponents and then were greatly helped by a flight of US Navy A-6 strike-bombers which blew apart the field headquarters of the enemy destroying what command-and-control was left. When enough of the 9TD was judged to have been destroyed, and accurate reconnaissance done, only then were selective units pushed forward fast like many junior commanders wanted to across the flat plains of Jutland and charging far away from Aalborg southwards. The East Germans during their invasion had used the terrain to their advantage for such moves and the British did this today with the port town of Arhus and the still-smashed Karup Airbase being reached by sunset. These were small detachments in helicopters which made such moves but found that there was no one to stop them taking such vital locations.

Britain’s light infantry forces achieved their mission goals as PORTER effectively came to an end.


US Marines with their 5th Marine Division ended the day on the eastern shores of the peninsula after focusing their attention on crushing their opponents before them as they drove across the narrow waist of Jutland. They reached the waters of the Little Belt which separated Jutland from the island of Fyn when men from RLT 27 took Fredericia unopposed. The Marine Riflemen were disappointed when they found the two big bridges down and would have to wait before going over to Middelfart on the other side… ‘Middle-fart’ as they jokingly called it would have to wait until the next day to welcome them.

The final stages of their advance, where there had previously been hold-ups due to tough fighting with the East German 7TD, had come following a late morning surrender ceremony at the town of Vejen. Inside that town, much of which still burning during the short meeting which took place there, the two opposing divisional commanders met and agreed to terms to allow the East Germans to surrender the fight for this part of Jutland and allow the US Marines to afterwards race down the highway to Fredericia on the Baltic side of Jutland. The 7TD’s commander had called the meeting after his division had been shattered in combat and were suffering from multiple serious problems such as a lack of ammunition & fuel, crippling losses and a terrible strategic situation. The US Marines signed an agreement to treat the POW’s properly and accept responsibilities for the care of the wounded before then sending Marine Riflemen forward at speed in M-60 tanks, HMMWV light vehicles and helicopters to various locations not just to the east but south and north too; they were just beaten to Arhus by British soldiers with the Coldstream Guards arriving there an hour beforehand.

That East German surrender was localised and not authorised by the East German Fifth Army staff which remained across the border in still-occupied Schleswig-Holstein… but then the headquarters there with only two reserve divisions under command had bigger things to worry about like the French attacking them from the rear. As to the US Marines, they gained permission from the commander of the Allied Army Denmark across on Zealand yet that was no more than a formality due to the Danish general in theoretical command of all NATO and Allied ground forces in the Baltic Approaches being more concerned with matters there. Real excitement for the victory which was won in southern Jutland would be back in the United States where soon afterwards the Reagan Administration would be trumpeting the news for the world to hear that ‘the Socialist Forces occupying Denmark had surrendered’.


Jutland had been effectively liberated yet there would remain a lot of fighting to be done still. Soviet and East German rear-area security units who had held sway over many parts of the peninsula were still active and there would be selected East German Army units (part of the 9TD) which wouldn’t accept such an agreement. British and American troops would still need to engage such forces who remained combating the Danish Resistance and so there would fighting ongoing even after the big battles had settled most matters in Jutland.

*

Zealand mattered a great deal more to the Danes than Jutland did. This wasn’t something they were saying in public, but it was the reality. In addition, evicting Soviet and Polish forces from that island meant a hell of a lot to the Swedes too and that was where a good proportion of their army was located in fighting to free their neighbour’s sovereign territory.

The Helsingor Bridgehead had greatly expanded during the past few days and from there Danish and Swedish forces had been breaking out across Zealand. Copenhagen had been invested yesterday and drives made south and westwards across the island pushing their opponents back. The Soviet and Polish naval infantry which had almost taken the island were finally defeated today in open battles before they could make an attempt to get to the southern coast with hope of some sort of rescue. The Danish shoreline along Koge Bay, where the first landing had been made right at the start of the war, saw Swedish tanks present fighting retreating Soviets while the Danes liberated the important communications centre of Ringsted and tore apart Poles trying to hold that town. They were overrunning retreating occupying troops aiming to get away to the south aiming to make a run for the islands of Falster and Mon knowing that the weak forces there would be open to an easy defeat if they weren’t bolstered in numbers by naval infantry fleeing from Zealand.

When the Danes and Swedes retook control, they had found that the stories coming from previously-occupied parts of the island about the harsh control over the population brought in were certainly true. There had always been some who doubted the horror stories of the reprisals against civilians for the acts of the Danish Resistance, but there would be no more of that after what was seen through the eyes of soldiers and then cameras crews afterwards. Danish civilians had greatly suffered during the occupation and the evidence was everywhere.

Those occupiers who didn’t manage to flee rushed to be taken prisoner to escape acts of vengeance taking place. The Danish Resistance was out in the open now and then there were civilians too out for blood. It wasn’t a good time to be wearing a Soviet or Polish uniform at all. As to collaborators, only a very select few were encountered. Some of these had fled with the enemy while most had unfortunately been lynched by their fellow Danes. There had never been much collaboration, but those who had taken part in it – for what they claimed was the greater good of the Danish people though more often than not personal gain – had been dealt with. The professional soldiers were under orders to secure and protect POW’s but had no instructions when it came to collaborators… and so looked the other way.


Copenhagen had been surrounded the day before and inside that city there had been a few thousand Polish troops at first trying to stop an uprising by the civilians trapped there. They hadn’t been very successful in that and had taken many losses making the situation untenable and with their senior officers plotting an organised surrender. However, the naval infantrymen themselves had then started to revolt as Poles had previously done in Germany and were now doing back home.

The senior officers for the most part ended up being killed by their own men and then the defenders on the frontlines facing the Swedes investing them started surrendering in droves. In an astute move, the Danes were allowed into their capital first with a small detachment leading the way while the larger Swedish units followed behind them. The Danes wanted to be seen to be liberating their own capital and it made sense for the swedes to let them do that.

By the day’s end, the Danish flag was flying from both the Amalienborg and Christiansborg Palace’s. Gunshots would go on through the night as the city wasn’t ‘secure’ with Polish deserters causing some trouble which the Danes were very displeased with and the rest of the Allies were uncomfortable when they heard about as it didn’t fit their propaganda message, but Copenhagen was back in Danish hands.

*

The Oresund had been under joint NATO-Swedish control for some time now with the stretch of water between Zealand and the Swedish coast being used for movement of shipping both ways. Just to the south, the wider Koge Bay had been a no-man’s land for both Allied naval forces and those of the Combined Baltic Fleet with the westernmost stretches of the Baltic still seeing a strong presence of warships from the Socialist Forces. Their bigger ships had been defeated during the Battle of the Baltic Exits more than a week ago, yet there remained plenty of smaller warships, coastal submarines and extensive minefields too there.

For some time now, the plan had been to push a strong flotilla of warships through Koge Bay and into the Baltic proper but only after a strong and multi-capable force had been assembled. Moreover, external threats needed to be dealt with too in the form of enemy land-based aircraft and dangerous coastal missile batteries which threatened such a flotilla formed by the Allies to take the war into the Baltic.


The offending battery of brand-new Slingshot missiles which had sunk the battleship USS New Jersey had been eliminated by a naval air strike by the US Navy two days after that shocking event. Aircraft from the USS John F. Kennedy had found and bombed that battery with revenge being foremost in their mind and then later Royal Marines had led a NATO intelligence-gathering team to that location once they were ashore in Jutland. Physical evidence alongside intelligence gathered through radar detection had pointed to another battery being in operation with more missiles located elsewhere in Denmark and such a thing had afterwards been proved correct when further NATO vessels came under fire.

That second battery was pinpointed as being on Soviet-occupied Mon when there came two firings over consecutive days of Slingshot missiles from there towards the Oresund. On the first occasion, six missiles had lanced towards the West German cruiser Deutschland and an accompanying Bundesmarine frigate. Those two warships put up a lot of anti-aircraft gunfire but had little chance against such a supersonic missile attack of the nature they faced. The cruiser and its smaller escort were both hit and sunk after the strike against them with many casualties being taken. There was also a lot of apprehension afterwards throughout the NATO navies with the term ‘Slingshot threat’ gaining a real significance. Intelligence teams had gone to work in trying to locate where those missiles had come from and then a reconnaissance mission flown at distance from the carrier USS America had taken place over Mon. It was a small island and the EA-3B aircraft – the electronic reconnaissance version of the Skywarrior bomber – had all systems active to try to detect their prey. Unfortunately, the hunter became the hunted when a SA-11 Gadfly SAM shot up from the ground and blew the aircraft apart with all seven crewmen lost. There were recriminations afterwards with the defence that there had been no suspicion beforehand of such a capable SAM system there although at the same time accusations that more care should have been taken with lives and such an aircraft shouldn’t have been alone and so deep into enemy territory.

The Slingshot threat was getting out of hand and was keeping the Baltic in Soviet hands.

Then came the second missile firing as again cruise missiles lanced away from Mon and into the Oresund to strike at heavily-laden ships carrying Swedish military stores across to Zealand. The Swedes were furious when three vessels were sunk and this came on top of the effective ceding of the Baltic to the enemy allowing their southern coastline to remain at the mercy of the Soviets. However, at the same time, that second firing was a blessing in disguise. There were a pair of US Navy EP-3E Aries land-based aircraft active over the Baltic Approaches at that time – back in safer skies – and they picked up much intelligence before and during that strike. The missile batteries radars had become active only a minute before the firing and in what was determined to be acquisition mode; someone else was doing the searching for them either in the form of smaller ships closer to the Oresund or even men on the shore somewhere. Those radar signals were quickly worked on and the data shared far and wide.

There was some discussions over an Alpha Strike coming from the America or the Kennedy to send aircraft to Mon but the Slingshot battery was very mobile based upon trucks that would be camouflaged and in hiding places hard to spot from the air. Such aircraft would have to fly a long way and hunt from the air for such vehicles while under probable SAM fire and possible enemy air interference as well. That would involve too much risk and a lot of aircraft when the carriers were assigned to other tasks and the current weather situation in the rough North Sea was already causing them problems. Instead, the electronic intelligence was fast put to use in-theatre and externally.

On March 31st, the Dutch Navy’s frigate HNLMS Tromp, fresh from earlier war service in the North Atlantic, left the Oresund under orders to steam southwards into Koge Bay. The ship wasn’t to be sacrificed as extra defences were added and it was a capable vessel, yet NATO was seeing how they could respond to the Slingshot threat now they had made what they regarded as advances in the electronic arena. The missile radars were then detected again in acquisition mode pre-launch and the Tromp prepared to defend itself. At the same time though, several aircraft in US Navy and RAF colours to the north along with a mobile ground station in Sweden started combating those radars. The frequencies were fixed upon and immense jamming directed against them in a very targeted manner. Fast reactions came as the enemy tried changing things about and NATO had to counter that, but no cruise missiles came lancing at the Tromp. The victory won was more than just about stopping that attack though; the failed effort the Soviets put in to keep trying with their attack exposed them to more surveillance of their electronic capabilities.


Following the incident with the Tromp as well as some less dramatic events with electronic warfare against other coastal radar sites for older missiles that NATO believed it could counter, the flotilla staging for a while now to enter the Baltic did so on April 2nd.

There were destroyers, frigates, corvettes, missile boats, some specialist electronic warfare ships and a lot of mine warfare vessels – no cruisers, battleships or aircraft carriers made the transit through the Oresund. These ships on the surface were joined by submarines below the waves which were generally small vessels though the US Navy did deploy two large nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarines that were carrying land-attack Tomahawk cruise missiles. There was still a threat to these ships from that Slingshot battery but it was one believed to be manageable. What concerned the NATO navies more were enemy land-based aircraft, smaller warships with missiles, submarines and minefields. These were all to be engaged in the western end of the Baltic in a forward maritime defence of liberated Denmark.

*

On land and in the nearby waters, Denmark and the Baltic Approaches were now back in NATO hands. They were on the attack too, especially at sea where they moved to challenge their opponents in an active manner.

Allied Army Denmark, the newly-created unified command for the ground forces in the country reporting to General Howlett in Norway as Allied Forces Northern Europe commander, had achieved its mission. Its components in Jutland of British and American light forces were basking in their glory even though they still had some work to do in securing that peninsula. However, there were soon to be calls for those forces to be transferred out of Denmark to be put to use elsewhere. These would be made by those senior people who were already trying to decide what to do with the US Army light forces leaving Finland and moving back into Norway (the trio of light divisions with the US XVIII Corps) as well as the released US Marines from the Caribbean as well.

There would be many thoughts as to where to send these forces with them having seen action (apart from those Marine Reservists from the Caribbean) where they performed well to be taken into consideration so that they wouldn’t be wasted on any sort of garrison duty when every available capable man was really being needed in continuing to take the fight to the enemy.

There were plenty of possibilities open elsewhere but of course in the Baltic too…





Two Hundred & Thirty–Seven

‘Power comes from the barrel of a gun.’

The (misquoted) saying was the mantra of Marshal Ogarkov as he now led his country during World War Three. As far as he was concerned, all that mattered was military might as only through force of arms could his country be saved from the destruction which it faced. Politics, diplomacy and economics would have to play second fiddle to the pressing military needs of the Soviet Union if it was to survive this conflict.

This was why he hadn’t set himself up in the Kremlin – or below it like Chebrikov had been – but rather was out in the field as the war raged. He had appointed bureaucrats to run things domestically and those men had no power base nor could they challenge the Soviet Army and therefore he saw no threat to the war he was waging from internal sources. Only external dangers could harm his country and he was out to combat them.

Since his seizure of power, Ogarkov had been on the move. His top advisers and key aides, all of whom were military officers mainly from the Soviet Army yet with some from the other uniformed services too, travelled with him across the western parts of the country first of all before they moved into Eastern Europe. There was a large physical security contingent as well and those armed men were at all times with him and his senior people as they travelled by road, rail and air from location to location for several days before arriving in Poland late on the third Saturday of the war.


Before reaching Legnica and the huge military command complex there – which had been visited by USAF bombers but with little overall damage done –, Ogarkov had been visiting various locations throughout his country. He had been to military sites and civilian installations taken over by the armed forces through the Moscow, Baltic, Belorussian, Kiev and Carpathian Military District’s. There had been a body-count left in his wake and while he had taken no personal enjoyment from that, he knew that the deaths which he had ordered as he moved around were truly worth having done.

Ogarkov hadn’t been killing enemies, real or perceived, but instead ordering the executions of senior officers or high-ranking staffers of theirs that were clearly deserving of such a fate. While men were fighting and dying in Germany to keep the Soviet Union free from foreign invasion, there were many safe back home profiteering from that conflict. Ogarkov was someone who could forgive a few personal vices that a man might have, but not interference with the war effort through theft. There were countless occasions where he visited a military site and the senior people there were accused of stealing ammunition, fuel or other military supplies to be sold on the black market. Some of those accused had been doing this for years while others had only done it once. Little evidence was needed against them for a short trial that usually lasted no more than an hour and then afterwards there would come a firing squad. Those who had taken what was sold to them – criminal gangs or greedy civilians – for their own uses or to sell onwards themselves were to face later justice less fatal than those in uniform who were committing what Ogarkov regarded as the ultimate act of treason though would be punished too.

Treason made Ogarkov’s blood boil.

While he was having people shot for theft, Ogarkov had gone to those locations to spread a lot of fear with his personal presence too. He had taken power and promised his field commanders that he would sort out the supply situation. Stealing was only a small part of the problem; what had been causing the crippling shortages was ineptitude, lethargy and laziness. There were too many fools in key positions with in the supply network for the men fighting and dying at the front, too many officers who were taking their time and too many personnel who clearly couldn’t be bothered to do their duty to the Rodina. Ogarkov hadn’t been having these people shot just stripped of their positions and demoted to the rank of private no matter what their time in service was nor their connections elsewhere.

He wanted everyone to do their duty!

When his party would arrive at rear-area supply bases everyone there would see what would happen to those stealing and those failing in their duties. At once, there would be a flurry of activity and Ogarkov made sure that the people left in charge after he left weren’t going to be the ones who would revert to the previous situation. He needed military supplies to get moving westwards to follow all of those new troops he had sent to Germany as the soldiers fighting needed ammunition, fuel, food and all the other necessary supplies that an army depended upon. So much had gone wrong in the past with the immense logistical network, especially back within the Soviet Union itself, but he had been out to fix it.

Ogarkov believed that his visits to those places would solve everything…


Arriving in Legnica by air, Ogarkov had no idea how he had diced with death by taking such a flight. He and his staff arrived aboard an Ilyushin-80 jet aircraft – a modified Il-86 transport fulfilling the strategic command-and-control role – escorted by a flight of four interceptors. The aircraft had come from Brest in Belorussia above Poland and flew high across clear skies. Far off in the distance, over Germany, an E-3B Sentry airborne radar aircraft with a USAF crew but on a NATO mission had detected the big aircraft escorted by fighters and special interest had been paid. The larger airplane was misidentified as an Il-86 Camber VIP-transport (the two aircraft were near identical) and the presence of an escort made the radar operators aboard that NATO aircraft believe that it was carrying someone important. Of course, there was no suspicion that Ogarkov himself was aboard but the thinking was that there would be important personalities being transported nonetheless. There had been a trio of F-15C Eagle’s available with fuel and weapons carried that would have allowed them to make a long distance interception all the way into Poland to engage that aircraft with Sparrow missiles at beyond visual range but then enemy air activity over East Germany unrelated to Ogarkov’s flight became more urgent.

Had those F-15’s gone after those aircraft heading for Legnica and successfully engaged the big transport, things might have gone very differently with the war. Ogarkov had centralised control in his personal hands and the fall out form his death could have been very messy in a strategic sense. Alas, those F-15’s were tasked elsewhere.

Legnica remained the rear-area headquarters for the West-TVD. Like the deceased Kulikov before him, Marshal Korbutov as Ogarkov’s commander at the front moved his mobile command post around all over East Germany yet Legnica was still important. Much staff work was done here from operations planning to intelligence work to trying to command the supply network. Before the KGB had had its wings clipped, that organisation had had a large presence here too keeping an eye on everyone and arresting military officers on trumped up charges of disloyalty, disobedience and defeatism; the Third Chief Directorate was no more and there were many of Ogarkov’s trusted people already at Legnica before he arrived.

Instead of treason, when he arrived in Legnica, Ogarkov instead found panic. He had been informed before he had arrived that there were immense civil disturbances going on in Poland but only once on the ground in the country – admittedly in an out of the way location where Soviet military personnel were in the majority – did he realise that full extend of that.

The Great Polish Rebellion was living up to its name.

Nearby Wroclaw was in full revolt, he was told, and the same was occurring in other Polish cities such as Krakow, Lublin, Lodz, Poznan, Szczecin, Gdansk and Gdynia. The situation in Warsaw was apparently under control but elsewhere the Polish people were rising up against their own government. They had engaged Soviet forces as well and that resistance to the Soviet war effort making use of their country was regarded as being more focused than the fighting against their own national authorities.

Ogarkov never had much time for Poland before the war as he didn’t rate the country very highly as it was one that had always allowed itself to be used by other nations, but throughout the course of the conflict he had come to regard the Polish people with contempt. First their soldiers had mutinied as they had done and then passive resistance had broken out across the country to the use of communications links. Now, they were killing Soviet soldiers trying their best to support their comrades fighting in Germany. Like he had had elsewhere when he was made, Ogarkov had what his staff called ‘an incident’ when he came to understand what was going on in Poland. They secretly feared for not just his health but their own well-being. He had a furious and explosive temper and was likely to take out his rage on those who brought bad news rather than those responsible for what had gone wrong.

It seemed like the whole of Legnica heard Ogarkov rage like a madman.

Ogarkov screamed that his orders when it came to resistance from the Poles were not being followed. He again declared that the most severe measures were to be taken even if those were arguably out of proportion. Anyone who stood in the way of the war effort was to be shot; there was to be no holding back with that. He declared that he cared nothing for any feelings of the Poles, not even General Jaruzelski who remained an effective prisoner in Warsaw anyway. The railways, the roads, the airfields, the ports, the rivers and the canals of Poland were all too important to lose control over. Without them being put to maximum use, the war couldn’t carry on being fought and the NATO armies stopped across in East Germany.

Red in the face and with spittle flying, Ogarkov demanded to know why his orders weren’t being followed and, more importantly, who was to blame?

Soon enough, Ogarkov himself decided who was to blame and started issuing orders dismissing officers he had recently appointed to command the security effort in Poland. His orders were sent from Legnica out to general officers across the country dismissing them from their post, demoting them to the rank of private and assigning them to a penal battalion at the front. As was his usual style since he had launched his coup, Ogarkov had his orders sent out un-coded so that the message would be understood far and wide. Those who would replace the men he dismissed were issued with the same instructions as their predecessors and reminded that Ogarkov really was quite serious in what he was saying.


Ogarkov hadn’t come to Legnica just to blow his top.

Korbutov flew in from East Germany in a heavy-lift helicopter with some of his key aides for a meeting between the two of them back in ‘safe’ Poland. Both understood that the commander of the West-TVD couldn’t be away from his headquarters for long with the ongoing situation across the border to the west and Ogarkov didn’t plan on keeping his senior field commander too long in his company.

A briefing took place between the two men in uniform and that concerned the current military situation. Ogarkov had previously had many briefings on what was going on with the war effort at the front though those had come from second-hand sources rather than the man himself he had entrusted to win the war. What happened in Germany would decide the war as far as he was concerned. NATO needed to be stopped there so that they could advance no further eastwards. Korbutov was the man tasked with undertaking this and Ogarkov wanted to know from him in person the situation as it was. He demanded no fluff, no false promises and especially no lies either.

Korbutov told him the truth.

NATO was still advancing. Their armies were still moving forward and winning victory after victory. At times they had been checked and even heavily-blooded, but they were still managing to advance every day. Now that the vast majority of previously-held West German territory had been recaptured, they were moving deep inside East Germany too. The aggressive defence which had been tried wasn’t stopping them and he was waiting upon the arrival of those extra hundreds of thousands of men now starting to pour into Poland.

Ogarkov asked whether Korbutov could hold back the armies of the West with those extra men and the answer – after a pause which Ogarkov was left uncomfortable with – was a yes… as long as Operation WOLF was pushed forward in timescale first. That was meant to occur when the mass of reinforcements arrived as a double blow against the invading NATO forces, but Korbutov wanted permission to launch WOLF early. He said he had the forces assigned to that ready to go and couldn’t wait any longer, especially with the delays occurring in Poland.

Consent was given and NATO would tomorrow find out what WOLF was in something both men hoped would be a very unwelcome surprise to them.


As the briefing came to an end, Ogarkov had a further question which he wanted Korbutov to give him an honest to as well: how was the situation in Germany with the East Germans? Were they still loyal or on the verge of acting like the traitors that the Poles were?

Korbutov truthfully answered that as far as he knew Mielke in East Berlin was still committed to the war effort like he always had been and would remain loyal.

How was he to know of the bombshell that Mielke was planning?





Two Hundred & Thirty–Eight

Cecil Parkinson had been tasked to manage Britain’s war effort and it was a task which he was determined to do to the best of his ability. The new Defence Secretary – who had previously turned down the offered role of Northern Ireland Secretary before Ken Clarke was appointed to Ulster – was only filling such a position until the end of the conflict yet in that time he set out to do everything that he could to make sure that what was done was done right. His Prime Minister had faith in him, the War Cabinet the same and hopefully Parliament would quickly come to understand that he was going to give the job everything that he had.

Having just returned from a late evening War Cabinet briefing beneath Whitehall, Parkinson soon afterwards met with the country’s senior military officers out at Northwood. A helicopter had flown him there out into Hertfordshire to meet with those generals, admirals and air marshals at the underground operations centre there.

The military officers all knew Parkinson well and he had maintained a working relationship with them throughout the conflict before he took up George Younger’s old post and Parkinson hoped that that would continue. There were some in the government who were still rather put out at the actions of these men during the alter stages of Transition to War when they had approached the government with what many saw as a worrying set of demands, but Parkinson had agreed with what they had done that and supported them. He never had any fears of the threat of a military coup… this was Britain after all, not the Soviet Union! Nonetheless, the views of those senior people in uniform were very important and they held great power even if they had no wish to use that.

The Defence Secretary understood that for him to successfully fulfil his role he needed to maintain a good working relationship with such senior officers.


When at Northwood, Parkinson found Admiral Fieldhouse and General Bagnall concerned about the day’s events at Stendal. They were unhappy at the casualties inflicted there as the British I Corps had failed to break the Soviet defences around that town. The Defence Secretary was brought up to speed on that operation and it was explained to him the strategic value not only of that East German town but the attempt to smash its defenders too. The advance in that area of General Inge’s combat command couldn’t continue to the Elbe, much less over it, unless the Soviets there had either been broken in battle or forced to withdraw.

The subject of wartime casualties had been a major talking point at the War Cabinet briefing which he had attended earlier. The PM and her senior ministers were very worried over the reported rates of losses occurring and feared that eventually there would have to be a reduction in commitment, especially on the ground in Germany, if such numbers of men killed, wounded and missing continued to rise. The political and diplomatic implications of doing anything like that were too terrible to contemplate so Parkinson had been tasked to find another solution.

Men died in war; he understood that and so did his fellow politicians. Everyone could understand that British servicemen weren’t being needlessly sacrificed and the best efforts were being made to stop casualties but modern warfare was just so bloody that immense losses were always going to happen. Faced with an inability to bring that to a halt – unless the government was prepared to do the unthinkable… which it certainly wasn’t – instead Parkinson had agreed with the War Cabinet’s instructions to find more troops.

Younger had previously told the PM that there were no more troops and the country’s senior military officers had said the same thing. Almost the entire regular strength of the British Army less the important garrison left in the Falklands and those deployed in either Northern Ireland or on Okinawa (the Gurkhas in the latter) was currently fighting in Germany and in Denmark. The TA had deployed its better-trained units to Germany and seen them slaughtered there while spread thin elsewhere deploying less-ready men to Ulster and Gibraltar as well as maintaining key security roles at home. With those latter TA units, it had previously been explained that they weren’t suitable for warfare in Germany and couldn’t be quickly trained for such a mission as had previously been suggested by the politicians. The majority of the British Army’s training forces had been rather hastily sent to Germany before the war broke out and what remained was needed training all of those young men mobilised as conscripts so they could later see service.

Parkinson explained to the Chief of the Defence Staff and the Chief of the General Staff that he regarded them as looking at the situation the wrong way with the TA. Those formations which they were thinking of broken up as they were all across the country may have been not trained as a fighting force for modern warfare, but there were many men within them who had previous military service and would only – in his opinion – need a small amount of refresher training. Since taking office he had been briefed that when the 7th Armoured Division and the 29th Light Brigade were thrown together with the recalled soldiers to man them, TA men who had requested to join their old comrades had been refused permission to do that and ordered to remain in the units which they were assigned too on security duties. The threat to the UK at home from enemy commandoes and especially domestic armed insurgents had never really justified such a large number of men as had been committed at first and that threat had been lessened as the war went on. There were too many men, specifically those with individual high levels of experience, remaining on static guard duties inside Britain who could be put to use fighting in Germany.

His belief was that they should leave those units in which they served and deploy to Germany to act as combat replacements.

As expected by Parkinson, General Bagnall wasn’t happy with this and neither was General Chapple (C-in-C UK Land Forces) who was also at Northwood for the Defence Secretary’s visit. These were high-ranking British Army officers and practical men who well understood what he was saying. Their protests weren’t to do with pride, them being deliberately obtuse or anything selfish like that but rather at the breaking of unit cohesion with those TA units when the men Parkinson was talking of were deployed aboard. They also worried over whether the domestic security threat truly had decreased as the current belief was that it had.

The Royal Navy officer Admiral Fieldhouse had a wide-ranging understanding of military affairs being in the role that he had as the professional head of the UK Armed Forces. He could see the point being made by his two counterparts in uniform as perfectly logical but at the same time Parkinson was correct in what he was saying too. There were plenty of experienced soldiers sitting across the country on guard duty who would have had been in Germany if they hadn’t have been assigned to the wrong formation. Such men could fast replace many of the casualties and therefore, in theory, stop more from occurring by their presence. He therefore agreed with what the Defence Secretary wanted and reminded General’s Bagnall and Chapple that there was still the Home Service Force with those older volunteers now fully-deployed across the country on security duties. These soldiers were far from any sort of ‘Dad’s Army’ and when they had been tested during the conflict they had performed well.

Parkinson asked for and was to receive and extra six thousand soldiers released from security duties in the UK to fight in Germany.


Air Chief Marshal David Craig held the position of the Chief of the Air Staff and had been the chosen senior officer who had approached the government on March 5th with that ‘quiet intervention’ that would many years later become something of a talking point in certain circles. He was the most senior RAF officer in uniform and a former Vulcan bomber pilot; Parkinson had done his National Service with the RAF and got on well with the man whereas others in government hadn’t.

Questions were asked concerning RAF operations as well as the efforts being made to combat the losses which had been taken by Air Marshal Craig’s organisation. Those newly-arrived Phantom’s from AMARC in the United States and the hurried training going on with aircrews for those multi-role fighters were discussed and then there came Parkinson’s queries over whether the RAF could direct any more of its UK-based combat aircraft towards missions over Germany.

There had previously been the transfer of the two squadrons of Phantom’s tasked with air defence duties out of the 3ATAF to the Continent-based 2ATAF. What remained solely for that mission, the Chief of the Air Staff reminded Parkinson, were Lightning F6 and Tornado F3 interceptors as well as Hawk T1’s. Those aircraft were far from suitable for such a tactical role above the battlefields of Germany though the Tornado’s were already assisting Buccaneer B2 naval strike aircraft over the Baltic Approaches. If there were any extra combat aircraft that could be sent, Air Marshal Craig would deploy them just as he was rather soon going to do with the new Phantom’s in RAF colours.

As to the Royal Navy, Admiral William Staveley, the First Sea Lord, repeated what he had told Parkinson upon the Defence Secretary’s appointment that many of the RN’s ships from the North Atlantic were moving into the Baltic. The submarine threat from the Soviets was now rather minimal and the surface threat to the sea-lanes across to North America had long ago been dealt with. Destroyers and frigates were moving towards the Danish Straits ready to go into the Baltic while many submarines still remained in northern waters.

Losses for the RN earlier in the conflict had been crippling – especially those on the war’s second day when the Illustrious and the Ark Royal had been sunk in that raketonosets attack – but during the past week those had eased off to a large extent. The Senior Service had been hurt and Parkinson had been told that it would take years for them to recover from the losses taken in terms of vessels and trained sailors too. Admiral Julian Oswald, the C-in-C Fleet, wanted to talk about making long-term plans in case the war went on for a long time with regards to making emergency orders for warships but Parkinson had to direct the meeting away from that for the time being. To think of what Admiral Oswald was hinting at – building ships in a six months to a year period so that they would see eventual combat – was too much at the moment not even three weeks into the war.


The briefing moved on to the matter of supplies.

Britain had almost exhausted its pre-war stock ammunition. Bullets, shells and missiles were nearly all used up now in the fighting against the Soviets. There had been much sharing with NATO allies but apart from the United States, the rest of the alliance was in a similar or worse position with what they had previously had of their own stockpiled beforehand. There had been those warehouses across the North Atlantic that the Americans had emptied and shipped the contents of to Europe but from what the senior military officers Parkinson was meeting with knew those were running out too. Munitions expenditures had been like casualty projections: all very wrong indeed.

In Britain as well as through much of Western Europe, war damage and civilian strife had made sure that there couldn’t be any major arms manufacturing going on for some time despite the best efforts to try to do that. The bombing of munitions factories were on thing but supply chain problems were the main cause of that inability to manufacture ammunition for the NATO armies.

Parkinson reminded the men in uniform that factories in the United States and Canada were working flat out to address this and newly-produced munitions were already arriving. Moreover, other nations which formed the Allies were manufacturing ammunition too while there were countries such as Egypt and Israel which were semi-secretly shipping more to the Allies. General Bagnall asked about Australia and Japan where he had heard those two nations were engaged in large scale munitions manufacturing but such ammunition was apparently being kept in the Pacific where no ground fighting had yet to take place.

It was suggested to the Defence Secretary that maybe he might wish to talk to those countries, or better even the Americans, about such war supplies being sent to Europe as well as being kept for any fighting which may or may not occur in Asia. There was military fuel in the form of oil coming from the Middle East and being processed in refineries which hadn’t been damaged or destroyed by wartime action so with Britain’s share of that being available there was manoeuvrability, but bullets, shells and missiles were needed as well.


Finally, the briefing turned to strategy. Parkinson listed to Admiral Fieldhouse explain SACEUR’s aims with ABOLITION and what that meant for British forces fighting as part of that operation.

The British Second Army was to continue advancing into East Germany with reaching the Elbe currently being their task at the moment. This would put British troops closer to Berlin than anyone else and therefore in a position to reaching there first. That, Parkinson interrupted, wasn’t official at the moment but what he and the War Cabinet wanted. However, the current situation with Stendal and its defenders needed to be addressed first before that could carry on the Defence Secretary was told when the briefing got back on track. Moreover, General Inge’s troops there couldn’t advance all by themselves and would certainly have to have the Bundeswehr and the US Army right alongside them with support from the Belgian and Portuguese troops also in-theatre.

Supporting the British Army would be the remaining RAF presence in Germany with those assigned to the 2ATAF doing so in a tactical role. There were also Tornado strike aircraft still with the 3ATAF based here in the UK undertaking strategic missions within the NATO framework for ABOLITION.

In the Baltic Approaches, the war was being wrapped up now and those troops there with the British Army and the Royal Marines would join with elements of the RN assigned for further roles. Such a matter would soon be addressed by the North Atlantic Council when it met again, Parkinson told them, and he was then informed that the senior officers here with him at Northwood hoped that such a decision on that would be taken soon. There were a lot of capable forces in that region who couldn’t be left twiddling their thumbs.

Norway’s liberation meant that there was currently only a security role for the few British troops there; the RAF had moved its aircraft down to the Baltic Approaches. In the nearby seas there remained those submarines of the RN in the place of a major surface force with the submarines continuing their wartime missions in Soviet waters and making a major contribution to what was occurring there. The orders remained the same for enemy warships and submarines – what remained of them anyway – to be sunk with the war effort undertaken there to the full most like it was everywhere else.


Despite all of the problems that the UK Armed Forces were currently facing, chiefly in the form of casualties taken, they were still fighting and driving back their enemies. Parkinson got what he wanted from this meeting and afterwards would be very busy in addressing many of the matters discussed.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Thirty–Nine

Striking Fleet Atlantic had run out of viable targets to strike in the Kola Peninsula several days ago.

Those military bases hit when they first arrived had been attacked again for a second, even third time in some cases to destroy them rather than just knock them out of action as had been the case the first time. Aircraft flying from the decks of the three US Navy carriers were lost during the bombing runs made over the Soviet North-West yet those losses weren’t that great considering the scale of operations. Moreover, using a long supply line with ferry flights, many replacement aircraft had arrived to take the place of those lost. Naval bases, submarine yards, airfields, coastal radar & missile stations, communications posts and command centres had been attacked by the US Navy over and over again without the Soviets being able to stop those from occurring. What remained of the Soviet Navy’s Northern Fleet at sea didn’t have a home to go back to and there remained fewer vessels at sea every day as more and more of them had been hunted down too.

Eventually, there was little point in maintaining the presence in the southwestern part of the Barents Sea for Striking Fleet Atlantic. The threat to Norway and northern Finland too was gone for good as the Soviets couldn’t defend themselves let alone attack the Allies in Scandinavia. There had been a retreat southwards from the coast of their few remaining defensive forces of aircraft and SAM’s and while such forces were still in range for US Navy aircraft, there were no more offensive warfare assets to target. Such a victory had come at a cost but it was regarded as worth the losses for the added political effects of making the Soviets abandon their previously heavily-defended coastal regions.

With no justifiable reason to keep the mighty assembly of naval power staying where it was when there were missions elsewhere, the grey-painted US Navy warships had departed. Many submarines, including several from the Royal Navy too, remained behind off the Kola coastline, but Striking Fleet Atlantic had gone further eastwards.


Vice-Admiral Jerome Johnson, the peacetime commander of the US Navy’s Second Fleet and currently commanding Striking Fleet Atlantic, had been tasked by Defence Secretary Carlucci to move into the eastern parts of the Barents Sea instead. In that direction lay further military targets of value that had so far been untouched by the war and the belief was that those too could be eliminated by Johnson’s aircraft as the air defences in this region had previously been stripped bare to support the doomed efforts made by the Soviets to the west.

To the east of the Barents Sea lay the island of Novaya Zemlya and then the Kara Sea beyond that: military targets in both were not to be attacked by Striking Fleet Atlantic. On that huge island and the enclosed sea behind it the Soviets had many strategic nuclear forces and they were to be left alone along with the defensive assets arrayed to support them. It was to the south of the Barents Sea where Johnson was tasked to send his aircraft next and in that direction lay the entrance to the White Sea. The cities of Arkhangelsk and Severodvinsk were down there and full of further military targets that the US Navy was to destroy like they had done around Murmansk and Severomorsk.

Operating technically as part of the NATO through SACLANT headquarters at Norfolk in Virginia – which was a command equal to that of General Galvin as SACEUR –, Striking Fleet Atlantic was in reality undertaking missions now focused upon US-centric goals. Previous engagements in defence of NATO interests in the North Atlantic had been fought and won despite losses taken when the Roosevelt had taken near-fatal damage and then the Forrestal had been burnt out. With that earlier mission over with, Johnson had come up to the Barents Sea to perform a role for the geo-strategic interests of his own nation. The targets which he had been sending his aircraft against to the west and now those planned to be hit in the south would in many ways make it impossible for the Soviets to conduct offensive military operations at sea for many years to come.

There would be no functioning naval bases for their use in a post-war world, no support facilities for any raketonosets they might later bring into service and no civilian ship & submarine manufacturing centres left standing. These were political objectives of the United States and one which Striking Fleet Atlantic, now with only US Navy vessels present, were tasked to carry out.

Arkhangelsk and Severodvinsk were at the mouth of the Northern Dvina River where that river entered the White Sea. The enemy defensive forces which had retreated from the northern parts of the Kola had fallen back as far as Kandalaskha but even then Arkhangelsk and Severodvinsk were still further south. To get close to them to fully bring the might of his air power to bare, it would have been best to enter the White Sea rather than remain outside. Such a mission would have been suicidal though in such restricted waters. The air threat to Johnson’s flotilla was negligible and he believed that he could deal with coastal-launch missiles (Slingshot’s hadn’t made an appearance) but there would be minefields, small warships and coastal submarines there.

Instead, Striking Fleet Atlantic stayed outside the White Sea and the aircraft launched from the carriers had to take extra fuel with them at the expense of bombs and as much air-refuelling as possible had to be done.

Before dawn on the morning of Sunday April 3rd, Johnson sent his aircraft into battle again. There were Tomcat’s for long-range fighter missions, Hawkeye’s for airborne radar duties, Prowler’s for electronic support in a strike escort role and then Corsair’s, Hornet’s and Intruder’s for attack missions. Multiple missions were launched against many targets from the carriers Coral Sea, Eisenhower and Saratoga.

One flight of Intruder’s was sent on a special mission as those bombers carried laser-guided munitions with them to be directed carefully against a specific target by men on the ground…


There had previously been a total restriction on the use of NATO soldiers entering sovereign Soviet territory on the ground. This had been decreed at the highest levels so that when Striking Fleet Atlantic had arrived off the coast of the Soviet North-West aircrews had been told that there would be now CSAR missions launched to rescue them should they go down overland. Such a thing hadn’t played well with the men who flew those aircraft, but the orders had stood. The decision to launch ABOLITION had changed things even though that concerned East Germany and Czechoslovakia – where some CSAR missions had been flown to rescue downed aircrews – with new orders coming into effect from Friday just gone. Only the Americans were flying aircraft over parts of the Soviet Union and at that point US Navy along the coast of the Soviet Far East before Johnson brought Striking Fleet Atlantic back into action.

The change in the rules over CSAR had also affected the US Navy in that permission had been sought for them to make selected incursions with fighting men on the ground to conduct commando missions along the Soviet coastline. Each mission would have to be approved high up and could be cancelled at any moment should it be decided that such a thing might raise nuclear tensions too high, but the go ahead had been given. Acting quickly once the previous restrictions had been lifted as they had been on stand-by waiting for that permission, a small team of US Navy SEAL’s had arrived on the shores of the Soviet Union along the White Sea. A team of these elite commandoes had come ashore from a specially-outfitted submarine and set about their assigned tasks near Severodvinsk.

The immensely-important PO SEVMASH submarine facility was where the SEAL’s deployed around ahead of those Intruder’s inbound. Before the naval bombers arrived they struck against a nearby SA-10 Grumble SAM battery assigned to defend the facility and then afterwards used hand-held designators to ‘light-up’ the industrial targets for destruction. It was a dangerous mission for them and there had been a lot of apprehension – often covered by bravado – but they were well-trained and their mission was planned with what they hoped with perfection.

GBU-16 Paveway-II bombs fell away from Intruder’s and the 1000lb high-explosive warheads went off where they were meant to. There had been no defensive fire from the military defences guarding this civilian facility as the SEAL’s had taken out command-and-control for those and then there was a second, smaller bomb blast after those which had come from the laser-guided bombs. The SEAL’s had placed an explosive device at the building housing the assigned damage control team for PO SEVMASH and killed several key people with that who were meant to be first responders to a major incident.

Quickly, the SEAL’s departed the scene and into nearby hides which they had so they could escape once darkness returned during the night. This would be for them the most nerve-wracking part of the mission as there later became a hunt for suspected saboteurs – the presence of the SEAL’s wasn’t expected – and they had to stay quiet and still, but they remained undetected and would later make their coastal rendezvous.

Behind them, the PO SEVMASH facility was left badly damaged and no submarines would be built or repaired there for a very long time indeed.

The SEAL mission had been codenamed Operation SMASH – a deliberate coincidence on the part of its planner at the tactical level – and directed by a US Navy Lt.-Colonel who had been meant to stay aboard the submarine from where the team involved operated from. The knowledge in that man’s head and also his age, not least the enemies he had within the US Navy’s hierarchy, were the reasons behind that order… yet he went on the mission anyway with the prepared excuse of a ‘communications mix-up’. It was an act of insubordination which he was willing to risk everything on but believed he would get away with because while he had many foes he also had a great deal of supporters too.

In later years, after post-war retirement from the US Navy, that SEAL by the name of Richard Marcinko would forge a more public career. Better known as ‘Dick Marcinko’ or ‘Rouge Warrior’ with his book Red Cell, his name would be well known in certain circles when it came to talk of SEAL’s and military special operations, though the US Navy itself would have much preferred that that wasn’t the case at all.





Two Hundred & Forty

The ‘surprise factor’ with Operation WOLF was nowhere near what Marshal’s Korbutov and Ogarkov hoped that it would be. Their offensive with the mass of combat formations which they believed to be hidden in southern parts of East Germany didn’t achieve the shock which they wished that it would and catch the NATO forces which those were unleashed against – those from the US Army and the Spanish Army – utterly unawares. WOLF remained something which hadn’t been foreseen occurring when it did and on such a scale yet at the same time it was an offensive which those it was unleashed against were mentally prepared for.

The aim with WOLF was to disrupt the Americans as part of the NATO invading forces so that their advance would be pushed back. This would create a large salient to the north of them where British, Belgian and West German forces were but, of greater significance, allow those fifth echelon forces soon to arrive in East Germany some breathing room to deploy and defeat the invasion. It was a good operational concept but one which was ultimately doomed due to ongoing battlefield reconnaissance efforts which removed that necessary surprise factor.


Throughout the conflict, reconnaissance efforts had been taking place by both sides in the strategic theatre and also at a tactical level. Warfare wasn’t just about direct combat and logistics: intelligence was a key element on par with those other two. To have an understanding of your own opponent’s current strength and deployments as well as what they were capable of in the medium- and long-term were of vital importance. It would do no good to ignore what was going on say ten or twenty miles from the front with enemy reinforcements moving forward and both opposing sides heavily committed reconnaissance forces at the tactical level to this effort. In addition, being able to understand what your reconnaissance efforts had seen was a vital part of military intelligence as well. When that failed, operations such as WOLF would be successful but when reconnaissance and intelligence combined effectively such offensive were destined to be unsuccessful.

Early in the conflict, NATO intelligence efforts had noted that Soviet divisions assigned to the first and second echelons of RED BEAR had been pushed forward until crippling losses smashing through fixed defences made them combat ineffective. Once losses went past the fifty per cent mark, or even higher, those formations had been pulled from the frontlines and withdrawn back into the rear. Such formations were crossed off the list (so to speak) of available enemy units and attention was focused upon those which replaced them in the third and then the fourth echelons too.

Standard Soviet military practice was to do this whereas NATO armies tried their best to keep adding reinforcements to their divisions unless far too many losses came at once and that formation was written off. Several Soviet formations were observed through tactical intelligence efforts as being withdrawn and condensed into brigade-sized formations during the conflict and when this observed NATO was surprised but not overtly concerned as those new units consisted of men who knew they had been beaten in battle and were shown when combat was met to have rather low morale. The brigades were numerous, but there still remained many divisions missing from the Soviet order of battle in Germany and the majority of those had consisted of Category A troops forward deployed across Eastern Europe pre-war and now replaced at the frontlines with other troops from inside the western reaches of the Soviet Union. Pinpointing where the remains of those divisions had been moved to so that observation could be made as to whether the Soviets would rebuild, disestablish or merge such formations was a priority task for NATO reconnaissance efforts yet at the same time there were many priority tasks.

Following the massive Soviet offensive during the first Friday of the war when the chemical warfare attacks took place and that third echelon of attacking forces broke through the frontlines in many places, those reconnaissance efforts lost track of where the broken divisions had moved to and what was happening with them. Finding out what was going on slipped down the list of priorities as strategic weapons reconnaissance became even more importance and also the near collapse of NATO at that point. Afterwards, attention was focused upon the Soviet fourth echelon forces and then the NATO counter-offensives. Still, there remained some efforts to find out about those divisions as there remained a great number of men and tanks with them and this increased as NATO prepared for ABOLITION.

Throughout eastern parts of Thüringen and into western parts of Saxony, there had been that heavy concentration of double-digit SAM’s which had caused the loss of many aircraft on reconnaissance missions over those regions into the third week of the war. Suspicions were raised over what the Soviets were defending though there were many different viewpoints taken as to what that was ranging from super-secret wonder weapons to an immense series of forward rearming centres for Ogarkov’s fifth echelon forces about to come into battle. Quite a few intelligence analysts – still tasked with other duties though and not able to give this their full attention – maintained the belief that those earlier near-destroyed Soviet formations were concentrated in those regions getting ready for battle again in whatever tactical arrangement they might be. There were missing units in the current order of battle from the Soviet Eighth Guards & First Guards Tank Army’s (as well as a few from the later committed Soviet Thirteenth Army) as well as East German units from their initially successful attack into northern Bavaria. Intelligence regarding the identity of units on the frontlines was always changing but there remained many formations not identified and those hadn’t been wholly destroyed down to the last soldier just heavily-decimated.

Therefore, there was an awareness on the part of NATO’s field commanders, especially those engaged in operations in the southern part of East Germany, that at some point there remained the strong possibility that such forces would be encountered. They might be met as individual units or massed together and at varying degrees of size and composition. These would be well-trained troops with combat experience who would be fielded good equipment. As to morale and the qualities of the leadership of such forces, those remained unknown too. Regardless, NATO was not going to be dumbfounded should such units make a reappearance in the enemy’s order of battle.

*

The US V Corps was right in the firing line when WOLF was unleashed. To their left the national guardsmen with the Fifth Army’s US VI Corps was also struck at and so too were the Seventh Army formations to the right of Schwarzkopf’s command with the Spanish I Corps and the US VII Corps. All four corps commands were in the way of an offensive launched against them by a total of thirteen Soviet and East German divisions nearly at full-strength (elements of the Soviet Third Shock Army were present as well) which had been rebuilt during the past couple of weeks. In comparison, these four commands fielded just short of that number of near equal size formations themselves between them and the attacking units were spread out rather than condensed.

The clash was decided not by numbers though but rather the lack of surprise on the part of those on the offensive. WOLF called for these forces to blunt the advances being made by NATO by hiding them with an attack while they were used to going up against those on the defensive, but the planners of that offensive hadn’t realised that their opponents were rather used now to spotting a Soviet-led attack before it came with their tactical reconnaissance assets.


Throughout the early hours of the morning, after midnight, all sorts of warning sights had been flooding in to the American and Spanish forces just inside the Inter-German Border and – in the case of the US VII Corps – just on the other side about what was coming their way.

Both the US Army regular corps in the way of WOLF had military intelligence brigades assigned to them pre-war which had fielded many elements including full-time long-range surveillance company’s designated as part of the 51st Infantry Regiment: E & F Company’s with men trained in behind-the-lines patrolling to gain intelligence similar to the dedicated stay-behind teams but with a more ‘active’ role. D Company (with Vietnam-era heritage like the two others) had been created on the eve of war with reservists arriving in Germany, while the Michigan ARNG had send men from F Company with their 425th Infantry Regiment who were similarly trained as well; these further men had joined the regular soldiers. These elite men had seen much action throughout the conflict and taken plenty of casualties though combat replacements had made up their numbers even if those new men didn’t have all of the experience of those they replaced. Many of the surveillance detachments out front operating in the forward patrol role several miles up ahead of where the main body of troops were, ahead of the Cav’, had started to report-in during the night about gathering enemy armour where there previously had been none.

NATO aircraft on night-time attack missions reported some observations made from the heavy presence of anti-aircraft fire where those defensive assets would be with Soviet Army divisions to glimpses of large numbers of tanks and other armoured vehicles moving about. There was other intelligence too urgently transmitted to US Seventh Army headquarters from the USAF concerning coded signals which their electronic intelligence aircraft were gathering but couldn’t decipher yet bore all the hallmarks of those used by Soviet Army formations in the field. Wartime experience had erased many (though not all) peacetime delays when it came to sharing of intelligence between different branches of the US Armed Forces; what the USAF was gathering was taken note of especially when what was being observed on the ground came in too.

Knowing how the Soviet Army preferred to move with their offensives at first light and the time it took to collate all of this intelligence into a reasonable picture, there was only a few hours warning given to those on the way of WOLF. Of course this was better than no warning at all, but everyone involved on the NATO side surely would have liked some more time… maybe they could have launched a spoiling attack if they had had enough warning.


Out of the four corps commands which were engaged by these new/old Soviet forces, the US V Corps certainly weathered the storm better than the other three.

Schwarzkopf had been wrong about the type of surprise that the enemy had waiting deep inside Thüringen but he had had his subordinate commanders prepared to face an unexpected enemy move in whatever form it might have taken better than his peers. There had never been a belief in him that the Soviets were going to sit back and let the US Army roll in East Germany without making a real fight of it and he also knew how the Soviet Army liked to be what he called ‘sneaky bastards’ with their offensives; his extensive military education had taught him all about maskirovka.

Acting quickly, Schwarzkopf had his Blackhorse Cav’ elements withdraw from their forward positions out ahead. There were objections from the commander of what remained of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment who wanted to remain in the good positions which his men held, yet Schwarzkopf was concerned over losing such a force when the reported four enemy divisions hit them not just with tanks and infantry but with the expected barrages of artillery and rockets which surely would be coming too. The Blackhorse Cav’ didn’t fall that far back though, just far enough to get out of the worst effects of the suspected barrage coming their way. To join them in their fall-back positions, he had his newly-raised 191st Mechanized Infantry Brigade push forward from the rear with the infantrymen and anti-tank missile teams under that command set up new positions. The 191st Brigade was composed of former personnel from the 8th Mechanized Infantry & 101st Air Assault Infantry Division’s who had been liberated after short stays in enemy POW camps as well as wounded men returning to service from the war’s first few engagements and selected USAR individual reservists who had recently come from the United States. These men were well-armed, generally well-experienced and ready to go: Schwarzkopf pushed them into the new frontlines by dawn while keeping his three heavy divisions back.

The Soviet attack hit thin air.

An immense barrage of artillery and rockets came just like Schwarzkopf knew it would though that was a rather short affair with a lot of munitions being quickly fired before that barrage ceased. Supply difficulties, despite Ogarkov’s ‘interventions’, were still causing great harm to the Soviet war machine and that was reflected in an artillery strike that lastly barely ten minutes. Following this came the first appearances of Soviet armour rolling forward with the clear intention of hitting his own forces which were supposed to have suffered under that artillery barrage. Schwarzkopf didn’t intervene when the enemy did that and wanted them left confused by what was going on there but at the same time he had everyone else ready. His plan was to have his forward forces slow down the enemy when those met and then unleash some of his massed helicopters against them. There were more than a hundred Apache and Cobra gunships with the reinforced (from ARNG and USAR forces) 12th Aviation Brigade all with stand-off anti-tank missiles… then he would counterattack with his heavy forces quickly getting ready for that. This operational plan of Schwarzkopf, while thrown together with haste in the tactical sense, was part of the long-term strategic thinking by him and his staff to react to a major enemy attack against the US V Corps.

The plan worked perfectly.

Three Soviet and one East German divisions (US Army intelligence would afterwards designate them as the 27GMRD, 32GTD, 39GMRD and East German 11MRD) smashed into Schwarzkopf’s men along the high ground which ran through the central parts of the Thüringen Forest. This was extremely rough country for mechanised movement and across there the day before the US V Corps had been blasting away at dug-in forces defending natural strongpoints before reaching the highest points and starting to move down to the eastern side. Schwarzkopf’s ordered withdrawal meant that his men went back up high and allowed them to look down upon their opponents coming towards them when battle was joined. The movement of Soviet armour through this terrain and especially trying to climb upwards was immensely difficult for them to do. They ran into ambushes everywhere with the Americans firing down upon them from above; a terrible tactical situation to be in. The Blackhorse Cav’ and those men with the 191st Brigade were outnumbered but they were holding good positions which they put to use. Anti-tank missiles from vehicles and deployed by men on foot were used to a great extent with little actual tank fire taking place. TOW missiles repeatedly struck the Soviets and East Germans as they tried to advance with those weapons striking the top of their tanks and other armoured vehicles where the armour fitted was weakest. Soon enough, with the knowledge that medium-range anti-helicopter defences would be weak, Schwarzkopf ordered that the 12th Aviation Brigade join the fight too. Those gunships would pour in more TOW missiles though not follow up those attacks with their guns or short-range rockets for there remained a lot of defensive fire directed against them that had little success but when it did the Apache’s and Cobra’s were in a whole world of hurt.

For more than two hours, Schwarzkopf let his forward troops and his helicopters do the work of stopping the Soviets from achieving their objective of getting up onto the high ground and then down the western side. The heights of the Thüringen Forest belonged to the US Army as far as he was concerned and he wasn’t prepared to see them surrendered. He spoke to General Otis at US Seventh Army headquarters and told his superior that he was going to hold and didn’t need any extra assistance offered; moreover, Schwarzkopf didn’t object when the West German Territorial 55th Brigade was released from US V Corps control to move to the north of where they were and assist the US VI Corps. Those reservists had fought extremely well during the conflict on multiple engagements with the US Army and Schwarzkopf would want them back with him but for now they were needed to help the national guardsmen who weren’t having the success which he was despite being hit with a smaller force and not all across their frontlines.

General Otis also gave permission for Schwarzkopf to unleash a counterattack too. There had to be an unfortunate delay until air support from the 4ATAF could come into play in number but once that was available – including the first combat appearances in the conflict of F-105 Thunderchief’s alongside other aircraft ‘liberated’ from the AMARC facility in Arizona – then the V Corps could come down off the high ground and roll forwards. When that did commence, the 3rd Armored and 4th & 24th Mechanized Infantry Division’s went charging forward towards victory. There had been no change in the Soviet tactics during their own push despite these being rebuilt formations which had been used for WOLF. Once command vehicles were identified and taken out early chaos would reign in the enemy ranks with company, battalion and regimental commanders no longer there to give orders. Flexibility wasn’t evident as the enemy which the US Army faced didn’t know what to do when things went wrong. The US Army had been learning throughout the conflict and adapted to real world challenges as opposed to peacetime operational tactics but their opponents were still treating the war like it was the first day.

Schwarzkopf was able to set his trio of divisional commanders the objectives of reaching Gotha and Arnstadt as immediate goals with the aim of being able to reach Erfurt and Weimar being not too unrealistic either. These towns and cities were major communications points deep within the generally flat Thüringen Basin and on the way to the ultimate objective of Leipzig. Tearing through the battered remains of those forces assigned to WOLF to get that far was something which the US V Corps now set out to do.


The 107th Armored Cavalry Regiment as well as the 35th & 40th Mechanized Infantry Division’s, all ARNG formations with the US VI Corps, fared not as well as Schwarzkopf’s command. They were on the flank of where the Soviet forces with WOLF struck and in the northern reaches of the Thüringen Forest. An immediate withdrawal to allow the attacking enemy to hit nothing but empty positions hadn’t been ordered and the national guardsmen with the Cav’ from Ohio and West Virginia suffered greatly in this and needed to be rescued from the mass of Soviet armour which engaged them. Once heavier forces arrived and experience of how to break up the enemy’s armoured attack was brought to use, the US VI Corps was able to stabilise the situation when air cover came into play too. The assistance of the West German’s moving to support them wasn’t needed when it came to it yet for a while it had been a close-run thing indeed. General Schneider as US Fifth Army commander, who had taken a lot of criticism during the conflict, much of that unfair and due to unrealistic expectations of the forces he had available, would later that day be relieved of duty by SACEUR. The heavy losses taken by the US VI Corps which even when they stopped the Soviet attack were too great and further offensive operations couldn’t be undertaken by those two divisions. What Schwarzkopf did with the US V Corps to the right and then their fellow national guardsmen with the US IV Corps achieved on the left afterwards throughout the rest of the day meant that the Soviets would achieve nothing overall, but that wasn’t the point: the US Fifth Army again had been shown to be lacking and General Schneider would pay for this with his job. It was unfortunate as it could be argued that blame didn’t rest with him, but it was what ultimately his responsibility as the overall commander.

The Spanish reacted fast to the attack coming their way from three Soviet divisions just like the US V Corps. Quickly they withdrew their forward elements on the eastern side of the southern reaches of the Thüringen Forest which they held up into the high ground above. Unfortunately, hold-ups occurred with the shifting of forces and when the Soviet artillery barrage commenced many were caught out in the open. That barrage wasn’t very long but the Spanish were hurt by it. When engaging the enemy from above they fired MILAN missiles down at them and made good use of their artillery in the defensive role as well. A counterattack was launched once Schwarzkopf had his underway – there remained a large liaison effort between the Spanish I Corps and the US V Corps in-place before the Spanish had their corps activate and their troops had fought under Schwarzkopf’s predecessor – but it was rather limited in scale. Only the 1st Armored Division attacked and moved from their position in the rear at Ludwigsstadt up the Loquitz Valley towards Probstzella; this was the route of the important railway line linking East Germany with West Germany and that latter town had only just been withdrawn from in the haste to take a step back ahead of the Soviet advance. After Probstzella, the Spanish were aiming for the Saale Valley at Saalfeld to later continue their advance as part of ABOLITION.

The remaining four divisions assigned to WOLF – three Soviet and one East German – attacked the US VII Corps where it was fighting just inside West Germany. The 2nd Cavalry Regiment withdrew backwards and were joined by the 174th Mechanized Infantry Brigade (like the 191st Brigade, the 174th Brigade contained liberated POW’s as well as some USAR men too) in making an identical stand like the V Corps did with a mass of anti-tank weapons. There was intense fighting as the Soviet storm was weathered across the very northern reaches of Franconia as the enemy struggled to get forward when aircraft from the 4ATAF blasted away at their columns of armour waiting to deploy. The frontlines which the VII Corps held were far from linear and staggered so that flanking fire at distance, especially when the 11th Aviation Brigade joined in with their helicopter gunships, caused much damage to them. General Watts unleashed his own counterattack later in the morning using the 1st & 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division’s while keeping the 1st Armored Division back as the Old Ironsides were still not regarded by him as being fully up to strength with all of its wartime losses. The border area was reached by the afternoon and then crossed so the US VII Corps could join the US V Corps as having a presence inside East Germany. The Soviets were unable to achieve their aims here due to General Watts’ soldiers understanding how to fight them on the move without a change in tactics from the enemy. Reaching the town of Plauen inside Saxony, along the major highway which would take the US VII Corps towards Dresden under long term plans for ABOLITION, would be too much for the day, but the US VII Corps was on target to do this in the future as they had beaten back their opponents.


WOLF had been a failure. All of that rebuilt combat strength had been effectively wasted in attempting a surprise offensive detected before it was unleashed. Afterwards the Soviets would clearly pay for not only waiting to use such troops when their fifth echelon forces arrived, but also not fixing the inherent problems at a tactical level when on the attack.

ABOLITION had only suffered a minor delay.





Two Hundred & Forty–One

The utter collapse of the Soviet Fourth Guards Army outside Vienna didn’t mean that the mission to aid the Austrians and the Italians by NATO forces coming down from Germany was a wash out. The French II Corps, with the attached Canadian 2nd Infantry Division under command, had entered Austria before that news came that Soviet troops had deserted in their tens of thousands and the orders had at first stayed the same for them to keep moving deeper into the country. There was at first the concern that maybe that news might have been overblown and then afterwards came the realisation that even with the stories from the east being true, there remained much for the French and Canadians to achieve by travelling through Austria…

…such as the open border with Czechoslovakia to the north of the Danube.

A small and very ineffective attack had come from out of Czechoslovakia into Austria when the invasion began with an effort to advance down to Linz halted early on and not far from the border between the two countries. The French First Army had been assigned the mission of invading Czechoslovakia as part of ABOLITION. Those French, Moroccan and Bundeswehr forces fighting in Bavaria were closing in from the west, but there was an opening to the south. Orders went out to General Zelicourt to change the axis of his advance.


The majority of those French troops which entered Czechoslovakia today were combat veterans who had seen action in Hessen stopping the Soviets from reaching the Rhine at Wiesbaden. The II Corps consisted of the 3rd & 5th Armored Division’s, two formations based pre-war in West Germany, and the 15th Infantry Division which had joined them after moving in from western France.

During the past week, France, like the rest of NATO and the wider Allies, had moved reinforcements into Germany for the fighting there and those extra men that joined the divisions with General Zelicourt’s combat command. France maintained a strong reserve force in peacetime with more than four hundred thousand soldiers and most of those were mobilised when the regular forces were in the lead up to the war; a significant portion of these were armour and infantry units alongside an extensive logistics commitment. The French IV Corps was created to go to northern Germany and join the French Second Army but many other reservists formed battalion-groups which joined those formations with the French First Army. Units such as those with the French II Corps were thus able to make their numbers back up following losses and while the reservists may not have been as well trained as those men which they replaced, they were still of good quality and saw some fighting before going to Austria to give them experience in combat. Moreover, when France had brought back to Europe the majority of its troops deployed overseas in Africa and the Caribbean many of these had gone to commands such as the French II Corps too with those regular troops further strengthening the formations tasked first to act as the reserve for the First Army and then as the corps detached for service in Austria.

Behind the French II Corps came the Canadians with their newly-raised formation ready to go into battle in support of their allies.


General Zelicourt had gathered his forces north of the Danube around the Austrian towns of Freistadt and Gmünd. The attack he launched today moved up to and across the Austrian-Czechoslovak border where the first engagements came with Czechoslovakian reservists. There were no border defences like those famous ones from the 1930’s just plenty of fences and razor wire to keep Czechoslovak citizens inside and from escaping to the West. The twin axis’ of advance the French II Corps took would lead them towards their first objective: Ceske Budejovice, also known as Budweis.

Ceske Budejovice was a large manufacturing town famous for its breweries but also with other industries present too. Plenty of road and rail links converged upon the town and those running northwards headed towards the distant Prague. Taking the town would be an undertaking which the French believed that they could do with the forces available and place them deep inside the Czech part of this Warsaw Pact nation and right in the rear of Czechoslovakian efforts to defend their border with West Germany from the incursions which were already taking place there.

Once inside Czechoslovakia, the French smashed the light opposition forces thrown against them in what were hardly fair fights with the mass of tanks and other armoured vehicles which they put to use against generally dismounted infantry with barely a few heavy weapons. There was an expectation based upon intelligence that at some point, probably the next day or maybe even the following one, combat would be met with heavier forces though that wasn’t confirmed and again such units would be manned by reservists with older equipment that was anticipated to be issued with little in the way of fuel and ammunition. Militia was also expected to be faced from the moment that the border was crossed and organised by the Czechoslovak Communist Party with ‘stiffening’ from the StB security forces.

Those expected Militia were encountered, but not in the manner that had been foreseen. Instead, as French troops headed towards Ceske Budejovice they came across fighting taking place inside villages and small towns on the way. According to strategic intelligence reports, Poland was supposed to be up in arms, but it was found that it was in this little part of Czechoslovakia where the locals had risen. Militia units which had recently been formed in southern Bohemia as the French had moved towards the border had turned their guns on the authorities and civil strife had broken out. There was little organisation but a lot of killing taking place with so many men suddenly armed and far from happy at the ongoing war.

French forces met with these mutineers and assistance was given to both sides by the other in taking down all resistance to the ongoing advance. However, despite the vicious fighting which was starting to look like the beginnings of a civil war as those fighting the regime didn’t have the full support of the local population, these events didn’t speed up the French advance. There were many localised delays brought about in talks with armed parties who while not opposed to the French presence had their own goals. There was also a lot of anger from many Frenchmen when they witnessed massacres taking place in many places of what they were told were the ‘communist oppressors’ but what they regarded as unarmed local officials. It wasn’t thought that this uprising going on along their invasion route was taking place in other places through Czechoslovakia yet the French knew that if it was, then they would be witnessing a lot of bloodshed throughout the country as they continued their advance to liberate it when local civilians were already engaged in that process themselves in their own bloody fashion.

*

Away to the east, Austrian and Italian forces near Vienna and the Hungarian border were in a somewhat similar situation. They were dealing with localised issues on the ground that made sure that they couldn’t make lightning advances forward though there was a difference in the situation which they found themselves in.

Thousands of Soviet soldiers who had deserted their posts were still roaming across the Austrian countryside. There remained many acts of terror committed by them against the locals though at the same time there were many who actually now had decided that maybe they hadn’t made the best of decisions as they thought of their families back home suffering for their desertion. Without possession of maps and locals who were of course very unfriendly, the Soviet soldiers were lost in a strange land where they couldn’t talk the language. Many still wanted drink, women and treasure yet there were other needs too like food and shelter from the elements. At times some of these deserters banded together under leadership of a charismatic or outspoken figure who managed to draw his fellow former soldiers to him but such groups were in a crazy state of flux without real organisation and a struggle between those who wanted to lead and others who thought that they should.

Without organised opposition to stop them, the Italian Army moved fast to spread themselves across eastern Austria. They had now deployed all four corps commands inside their neighbouring country: the Fourth Army Corps was in the west and yet to see any fighting, the Fifth Army Corps remained closest to the enemy and then the Third & Sixth Army Corps’ were moving up behind them. A mass of helicopters was available to move around Italian troops along with plenty of light vehicles and they were undertaking what was in many respects a police action while still trying to get into position to see ‘real’ combat action too. Those thousands of troops had deserted and crippled the Soviet Fourth Guards Army but the command nucleus and much of the supporting elements of that field army remained in uniform inside Austrian territory. There were also the Hungarians who had crossed the border and while their advance had been checked and they were going nowhere fast, they still remained as an organised force even if the threat from them was minimal indeed.

The aim now was to throw the remains of the invaders out of Austria while making sure that all those engaged in rape, robbery and murder were stopped from doing so. It was a challenge but one which the Italians – supported by the shattered Austrians – could do. Afterwards there would be discussions about what to do next with regards as to whether a counter-invasion was on the cards though at the moment there remained a job to do here first.





Two Hundred & Forty–Two

General Hans-Henning von Sandrart was the high-ranking senior officer involved in the decision-making process which upset many divisional and brigade commanders within the British I Corps. The order came down from General Galvin above as SACEUR through von Sandrart’s headquarters as commander of Allied Forces Northern Germany and then to General Kenny before reaching General Inge and then those men who were unhappy at what they heard, but they unfairly focused upon the Bundeswehr general as he had been labelled recently in Western propaganda as the ‘Hero of Hannover’. He had been trapped there and led British and West German forces caught up in that pocket for some time before the relief had come with the British-led BLACKSMITH. Afterwards, von Sandrart had effectively had his responsibilities halved when his Bundeswehr comrade Generalleutnant Henning von Ondarza had taken upon command of Allied Forces Southern Germany – the whole headquarters had once been Allied Forces Central Europe – but there had remained much bad feeling directed against the Hero of Hannover due to a belief that he was taking all of the credit for the efforts made by the British Army.

This was all very unprofessional and actually quite unfair as von Sandrart hadn’t done anything wrong, but it was there.

Those orders which caused a lot of resentment concerned the axis of advance today for the British I Corps to change from their previous direction of eastwards to head southwards instead. Stendal remained in enemy hands and trying to take that town yesterday had cost a lot of men but the British were to go in the direction of the city of Magdeburg instead. The Bundeswehr and the Belgians needed assistance, those under General Inge’s command were told, in reaching there and therefore ridding the western side of the Elbe of strong Soviet forces. There was no actual insubordination, but there were many questions asked over whether the effort really needed to be made at the behest of a German especially when there was plenty of intelligence that the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army defending Stendal was on the verge of collapse.

Nonetheless, orders were orders and while von Sandrart’s name was unfairly cursed by many, those British officers did their duty. The 3rd, 4th and 7th Armoured Division’s moved south through Sachsen-Anhalt heading for Magdeburg while the 5th Infantry Division – along with corps’ reserve assets in the form of Paras – remained behind near Stendal.

*

Brigadier Mike Jackson had his men with the 32nd Guards Brigade deployed just east of Stendal near the Elbe rather than around the town like the rest of the division his command was attached to. The bridges over the river at Tangermünd were down and with recent heavy rains which had fallen the Elbe was certainly far too wide: there were no crossing operations taken place as part of a withdrawal across the Elbe. There were Bundeswehr forces off to the north and the squeeze was being put in the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army, so for now Jackson and his men had orders to maintain that pressure by their presence. There was no threat of any sort of offensive action taking place with all fuel stocks for the Soviets apparently spent and no more coming. Therefore, the day had been looking like it would be one of watching and waiting for Jackson.

Late in the morning, while artillery rumbled and created rubble, Jackson was informed of something important and what would change things by his brigade chief-of-staff: Major Frederick Viggers reported that there was a party of Soviet officers at the frontlines where the Coldstream Guards were who had approached under a makeshift white flag.


Jackson met with the trio of Soviets soon enough with Viggers alongside him and a US Army officer that his divisional commander had insisted attend too no matter what the enemy wanted to discuss. The American, who had turned raced to the scene in his HMMWV from nearby Gardelegen, who held the same rank as Jackson but was not in the same chain of command; it was the Briton who was in charge here in meeting with the Soviets today.

Speaking in Russian, Jackson dealt with the Soviets in a firm but courteous manner. They had asked those Coldstream Guards men who they met for a senior officer and Jackson explained that at the moment he was all they were going to see. The Soviets consisted of a full Colonel and two Major’s. Viggers identified them as a regimental commander and his intelligence and supply officers. They appeared to be maintaining a façade as Jackson could tell with outward calm but a sense of fear underneath; he didn’t think that they were scared of him or being where they were, but of something else.

The Colonel explained that he and his officers, not just the two with him but most of his command staff and other officers within the regiment he commanded, wished to surrender themselves to the British Army as soon as possible. Jackson quickly picked up on the lack of comment over the fate of their men and that it was just officers who wished to surrender themselves and his belief came that they were fearful of their men. Standing orders were for any opportunities like this to be taken advantage of and promises made in such cases that couldn’t be met (as long as those weren’t outrageous) so that the war would be won as quickly as possible. With assistance from Viggers, Jackson set about arranging how that was going to take place while also informing his superiors up the chain of command of the situation he was facing with the commanders of a Soviet regiment wanting to surrender: a gap was clearly going to be opened in the enemy’s lines.

The American with Jackson and Viggers was Brigadier-General J. H. Binford Peay. This US Army officer had previously been the executive officer (operations) of the battle-destroyed 101st Air Assault Infantry Division. He had missed the destruction of the division which he had served in two weeks ago down in Hessen when those light infantrymen had gone up against Soviet tanks; he had remained back at the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division’s headquarters and had been quite upset since at the waste of lives then in a battle which the Screaming Eagles shouldn’t have fought in. Though he didn’t know it, Viggers had been in a similar situation as himself as the British 1st Infantry Brigade which he had previously served in had lost most of its men in battle (to nerve gas) while men like him in the rear with that formation’s command staff had survived. Had they had time to talk, they could have maybe found much common ground and even a bond. But, alas…

Afterwards, Peay had been reassigned to the recently-formed Allied Military Control Commission along with military officers from several NATO armies along with diplomats too. Such men as Peay were to administer East German occupied territory behind the frontlines and they had a very important role to play in future military control over civilians in East Germany from providing them with basic human needs to also getting rid of the organs of the dictatorship which Mielke in Berlin had inherited when his Soviet masters had put someone like him in power. However, as it turned out in this instance Peay was unneeded here as what was discussed wouldn’t need his direct assistance though he remained with Jackson. He was of course a bit put out by this but there was nothing to be done apart from the watch and learn how the British dealt with these surrendering Soviets here at Tangermünd.

During the period between the conclusion of the meeting where the Soviet officers had announced their intention to surrender themselves – therefore leaving the regiment in which they served with no one in-charge – and that taking place, there were some further exchanges between these gathered officers. None of the Soviets spoke English and only Jackson spoke Russian so the conversation was slow, but it was far from idle chit-chat. Jackson asked about the condition which the Soviets were facing with the war being as it was and gained answers that held some truth though there was also a stubborn pride displayed by those Soviets even if the midst of their surrender; they remained patriotic and proud of the Soviet Army… despite being about to desert from that organisation.

Peay had Jackson ask what these junior men thought of Ogarkov rather than questions directly relating to war itself.

‘Bonaparte’: that was what these men giving up called their leader. They were extremely contemptuous of him with one of those Major’s spitting on the ground at the mention of his name. Jackson, Peay and Viggers had all heard from intelligence reports that Ogarkov was widely admired throughout the officer class for many reasons not least getting rid of Chebrikov and smashing apart the KGB as he had done. They wondered whether this feeling was widespread or if what they were witnessing was an isolated incident…


The mechanics of this selected surrender were complicated. Those officers that wished to surrender had made the British aware, though in a roundabout manner, that they wished to flee from their men before those soldiers mutinied and Jackson had been told that he was to do everything in his power to allow that to happen. There would be chaos within the enemy lines when that happened but the orders came down that such a thing would be of an advantage for the future. Jackson requested further instructions as to what was to occur afterwards in particular was he to attack the enemy once they had lost their commanders, but was told that that wasn’t to be.

Those higher up were playing a ‘game’ which he wasn’t to be part of nor privy to the details to but he would follow his orders.

Twenty-three Soviet Army officers departed from their regiment from Lieutenant’s up to their Colonel. They fled their lines in a hurry and were unable to not attract the attention of those other officers they left behind nor the ordinary rank-and-file soldiers. Behind them, there was the expected chaos but those men got away with their lives with the fear that if they had stayed they were going to face death back there.

Jackson thought the whole thing a rather distasteful affair.

He could understand the strategic thinking beyond Tangermünd as news of what occurred – the truth but also exaggerated accounts, half-truths and even outright lies too – spreading for later effect, but he still hadn’t been happy to be part of it all. He didn’t consider those Soviet officers involved to have any honour. If he had been in the shoes of their Colonel, he wouldn’t have done that. Viggers and Peay both listened to Jackson as he explained that if the situation was reversed where he was serving an oppressive and illegal regime but too junior to do anything about that while taking part in a war where he was clearly on the current losing side, then he would have surrendered himself and made sure that his men were well looked after too. To abandon them as their officers had done here wasn’t something that he was pleased to have witnessed let alone taken part in. There would be the benefit to his career for the ‘successful’ incident and if this even in a small way helped shorten the war and cause less deaths then that was a good thing, yet it still gave him near nausea.

There would be other later incidents throughout the conflict where Jackson, among countless others, would feel the same way… but this was war.





Two Hundred & Forty–Three

When later discovered through intelligence means, the events of the night of Sunday April 3rd near two small towns in eastern Saxony would be regarded by governments in the West as state secrets despite it not directly effecting them. All information was buried and no one who wasn’t privy to those details was meant to know. Even several years later, when it was thought that no harm could come from the public being told about what occurred at Bischofswerda and Koenigsbrueck and such knowledge would be of useful political value in the post-war world, it was all hushed up. Like the pre-war Ultimate Ultimatum concerning the nuclear threat made by Chebrikov to the United States before the fighting broke out, when it came to the nuclear incident which occurred there in Saxony, the public were kept in the dark about it.

Information would eventually emerge, first through some speculation and patchy details, before the Germans told the world, though that would occur in the early years of the Twenty-First Century and almost a decade and a half later. There were other secrets – again which probably would not cause any harm – hidden from the general public too for a variety of reasons as always had been the case with governments and wars which they fought.

What could have happened as a result of events at Bischofswerda and Koenigsbrueck caused this secrecy to occur and all knowledge of that to be jealously guarded.

*

Those two towns lay to the east of Dresden between that East German city and the Polish border. Garrisons of the Soviet Army lay around each and the formation which the men and equipment at both were under the command of was the 119th Independent Rocket Brigade. This was a Soviet Army unit under peacetime control of the Group of Soviet Forces Germany before being transferred to KGB control when RED BEAR commenced but in the days before an overt attack against the 119th Brigade took place all Third Chief Directorate personnel had been reassigned.

Plans made before the Moscow Coup in had been for the formation to be disestablished when the INF treaty with the United States was signed, yet Gorbachev – the ‘face’ of that treaty – had been deposed. The 119th Brigade had remained functioning with its men and weapons: the latter being a complement of twenty-seven TR-1 Temp-S intermediate-range ballistic missiles known to NATO as the SS-12 Scaleboard. Like the newer SS-20 Sabre and SS-23 Spider systems, these tactical weapons were regarded as a strategic threat to NATO due to where they were deployed geographically close to their presumed targets in Western Europe, the ability of their operators to hide their positioning at a tactical level due to mobility and the thermonuclear warheads which they carried.

The INF Treaty negotiations had seen an agreement where these Soviet weapons would be banned while NATO weapons such as the Pershing and the GLCM would suffer the same fate. Scaleboard missiles with the 119th Brigade were still in service during March 1988 though.


World War Three was a conventional conflict with the very limited use of chemical weapons and the lack of biological or nuclear weapons being deployed. With the latter, despite what had been said at the White House back before the first shots were fired, tensions remained extremely high with such systems. Aircraft, warships, submarines and silos all housed nuclear-capable bombs and missiles on both sides with four of the nations engaged in warfare – the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France – having their stocks deployed and ready to be put to use as soon as the other side used their first. The intentions of their opponents weren’t known, but the assumption had to be made that at any given moment the first nuclear detonations would begin.

To not be prepared for nuclear warfare when no one wanted such a thing would be foolish and potentially cause national suicide.

On both sides of the frontlines in Europe, there remained nuclear forces standing ready. There were warfighting assets engaged in tactical missions who had nuclear weapons stored ready to be loaded and used while there were too dedicated strategic platforms in-play too kept back from the fighting but close to it. On several occasions, nuclear weapons and their launch platforms had come under attack in what were officially regarded as accidental engagements where eagerness, carelessness or faulty intelligence saw platforms attacked by the other side. Most of these incidents occurred in the West with NATO systems being attacked by Soviet weaponry and there had been panicked moments on such occasions along with great suspicion from some that such ‘accidents’ were nothing of the sort. Twice there had been NATO attacks on Soviet dedicated strategic nuclear systems when aircraft on bombing missions deep into East Germany in the first instance and Poland in the second had bombed road-mobile missile platforms; the Soviets had been very apprehensive about those being accidents with a lot of drama occurring as well but nothing further had come from those air strikes in terms of missile launches.

The fog of war meant that neither side could ever be sure what the others intentions were when such incidents occurred yet other factors were taken into consideration when those happened and there hadn’t been an overreaction despite some close calls.

Those strategic missiles deployed across East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Army were all mobile and travelled throughout those nations in a continuous fashion. They remained far back from the fighting and in ‘secure’ rear areas not moving too much of a distance away from their garrisons so that support for them wouldn’t be difficult but at the same time not tied to such fixed locations known to the enemy. This was a huge effort keeping convoys of missile launchers and supporting vehicles on the move day and night with irregular intervals between movements from one area where cover was sought to another. There was security in the form of armed parties travelling with the convoys – and decoy convoys too, just to confuse a potential opponent in an elaborate maskirovka – and reaction forces moving about as well rather than being fixed in one location less they too become a target for enemy action.

The coordination involved for this along with the manpower was an immenseundertaking and quite demanding. The effort was made though when resources were tight everywhere else due to the strategic implications of failing to protect such weapons. The enemy would have to find them and then engage them and in doing so would have to expend a great deal of effort of their own.


The standing orders as to what action to take should these mobile missile platforms be attacked had been long-established: there was a launch-on-attack policy, what the West would call ‘use-them-or-lose-them’. Should the missiles when at their base or on patrol in peacetime or during conflict come under direct attack then they were to be fired against the priority target within their targeting database without waiting for further orders. There was a specific set of circumstances as to what form of an attack would justify such an action taken by junior commanders but it was standing policy that whether it be a military or civilian target which the missiles were aimed against at that time, should those weapons systems come under an air or commando attack then they were to open fire rather than see the missiles destroyed or fall into the wrong hands.

Such orders were part of a deterrence factor to make sure that the missiles were never attacked. The Soviet policy on this was that the West and NATO in particular were meant to be aware that mobile strategic missile systems deployed in Eastern Europe were operating under such guidelines and thus a safety net against attack was in place; unofficial contacts from diplomats to spooks had told the West this. Officially this launch-on-attack policy wasn’t regarded as a gamble, just a security measure but it certainly was a foolhardy risk. There had always been much caution on the part of many wearing the uniform of the Soviet Army as well as plenty of politicians that such a policy was very dangerous for if something went wrong and a mistake was made then a nuclear attack would be made without political authorisation. However, it was meant to ensure that the missiles weren’t to be engaged at all and therefore the policy wouldn’t have to be put to the test with the result being to accidentally start a nuclear war.

It was quite a gamble but one which had been in play for a long time…

…until Ogarkov seized power.

The new Soviet leader was not willing to allow such orders to stand to those missiles in Eastern Europe just like they were with submarines armed with SLBM’s beneath the Kara Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk. He regarded the threat to such weapons systems from accidental encounters with the enemy as very real indeed and this had already been proven. On both occasions before he had taken power when mobile missile platforms in East Germany and Poland had faced enemy action there had been a refusal on the part of the officers involved with such attacks against them to follow procedures and open fire against their distant targets. If they had done so then the West German city of Bremen and RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire would have been blown to smithereens with the world then plunged into an accidental nuclear war. Those junior men had realised that the attacks against them were not of a strategic nature but rather aimed at their assigned air defences which had attempted to engage those aircraft involved. Such decisions were soon justified when it was realised what had occurred – there hadn’t been a NATO nuclear attack beginning – but mistakes had been nearly made and nuclear Armageddon had come far too close to occurring not once but twice.

As soon as Ogarkov had taken power, he had changed those orders.

Nuclear weapons were not to be used by Soviet forces anywhere without higher authorisation and certainly not at the judgement of junior men forward deployed under attack in a wartime theatre. Looking into the situation, Ogarkov had found out that Chebrikov had made the mistake there of thinking he was in-charge of such matters and had threatened the United States as he had without understanding how a nuclear war could very easily have been started without his say so… Chebrikov was dead now and Ogarkov had yet another reason to be pleased at the passing of such a man as that. The new orders were for strategic weapons systems such as the mobile missile platforms in Eastern Europe to destroy their weapons rather than launch a nuclear attack on their own whim in the face of enemy action. There was no ifs nor buts with that: Ogarkov issued that order and there was no one he was going to listen to telling him that maybe more options should have been given to individual commanders on the ground (or beneath the sea as it were with the Soviet Navy’s strategic missile submarines).

KGB Third Chief Directorate personnel who had previously been assigned to such weapons systems were all now departed and reassigned elsewhere on internal security missions within East Germany. Ogarkov had put his faith in the Soviet Army officers and soldiers operating such weapons and the support functions with them as these were what he regarded as his comrades not damn Chekists. Those who had been with the missiles had all been tasked far away from their previous duties as real soldiers were now doing their previous tasks. This was yet another security measure of Ogarkov’s as he feared an accidental nuclear war which would destroy the country he was trying to save… a possible ‘incident’ involving the KGB and those missiles was one of his fears as such people and their schemes had brought his country this close to ruin and he believed that they could only do worse should they be given the chance to.

However, he hadn’t taken into consideration that there might be others interested in those missiles.

*

Also to the east of Dresden and near where strategic missile systems with the 119th Brigade were currently deployed, soldiers of the East German Army had been gathering in secret for the past few days. More than two hundred paratroopers were assembled at a military base outside the town of Bautzen and these men had previously served with the East German 40th Independent Air Assault Regiment during its operations in the Baltic Approaches. Such men had all been carefully screened and removed from their regiment before it started fighting with the French Second Army near Lubeck. They were officially all wounded after combat at Karup Airbase and later at Arhus too yet none showed any signs of suffering from any injuries when in Denmark and could now have been with their comrades in Schleswig-Holstein.

Instead, they were in Saxony tasked to take part in a secret mission.

High-ranking senior officers from the East German Army briefed the men on their task… though it wasn’t known to the soldiers that these were actually personnel with the Stasi and the KGB instead; of the latter one a Colonel who had come from East Berlin. Regardless, the men were used to taking orders and their own regimental political officer was there at Bautzen. They were informed that a renegade Soviet Army unit had mutinied nearby and seized control of strategic nuclear weapons with dire consequences if those weapons were used. Many of the men involved had experience in dealing with such a situation in peacetime training exercises where they had taken part in practising seizing such weapons from the enemy in conflict. This would be a similar operation though a focus was to be on capturing such weapons and their supporting infrastructure intact rather than allowing any damage to come to any of it.

This mission, they were told, was authorised by Marshal Korbutov as the supreme commander of the Socialist Forces in Europe as well as Chairman Mielke. The paratroopers had the experience and there was much faith placed in them. They were to go into action where their task would be difficult but they were elite soldiers who had all operated under fire before and achieved their mission without failing in their duty. The renegade Soviet soldiers which they encountered would be traitorous scum and there was no need to take prisoners either; that point was hammered home to the paratroopers.


Late on the Sunday evening, just after the sun set, a collection of vehicles started to roll out of the barracks near Bautzen. There were passes for the convoy to get through traffic control points and their officers led them into battle in what they were told was a justifiable cause where they would do their duty. A few of the original paratroopers assembled – a couple of officers – were missing but no comment was passed on them. None of the soldiers knew that there had been some secret doubts raised and such sceptics of an outlandish story like this kidnapped before being shot during the pre-deployment stage of the mission.

This detachment of East German paratroopers headed towards certain areas of the Saxony countryside near Bischofswerda and Koenigsbrueck to do battle with the ‘traitors’ serving with the 119th Brigade. They went after Scaleboard missiles, TEL launch vehicles, missile-reload transport vehicles, trucks for engineering assistance & parts storage and command vehicles. Those who had sent them out to do this and who stayed behind were expecting that by dawn they, and thus East Germany, would have at the very least at least a dozen thermonuclear warheads and the means to launch them under their control while there would be only dead bodies left behind and plenty of confused Soviets.

There would be plenty of blood spilt tonight.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Forty–Four

Three weeks ago, Colonel Alexander Ivanovich Lebed had been in Norway. He had jumped into Norway with the forward command group of the 76th Guards Airborne Division when Sola Airport was seized and even saw a little action there. A couple of Norwegian reservists had felt the power of the AKS-74U assault rifle which he had had in his hands and he had been very proud to serve his country in battle there.

Unfortunately, another Norwegian had shot Lebed soon afterwards during the small-scale fighting and the then First Officer of the 76GAD had been badly wounded. Against his will, he had been evacuated out of Norway back to East Germany where the division in which he had been the second-in-command of had staged from. There had come a short period of enforced rest at a military hospital near Potsdam after surgery to remove a bullet from his shoulder and all the while Lebed had argued that in his opinion he was fit enough to return to the fight which developed there in Norway when the British arrived to retake Sola Airport.

Later, he had been told that the 76GAD had surrender there in Norway and he had been mad at his comrades for doing that and dishonouring the fine traditions of the formation in which he had served. Actually, only one regiment of the division had officially surrendered and the rest fought to the end so his anger was misplaced, yet he didn’t know that.

Reassignment orders had come which had tasked Lebed to Marshal Korbutov’s headquarters staff and he had not been very happy at all to be what was in effect a glorified messenger delivering instructions in person to field commanders where it was thought necessary to do that. Others like him, often lightly-wounded combat veteran officers who had fast returned to duty, told him that this task was career-enhancing though Lebed had his career mapped out already in the Airborne Forces rather than a true staff role. Further new orders had come late last week re-tasking him to do the same role for Ogarkov like he had been for Korbutov. Lebed hadn’t met his new commander until the latter came to Poland this weekend just gone but he had done tasks as instructed by that man verbally giving orders to senior men in the field. None of this had filled him with joy as he only wanted to see action again.

This morning in Saxony, Lebed was fulfilling a different role for Ogarkov. As he was starting to believe was his unfortunate fate he was denied combat again though he did get to see some ‘action’.


Loud comments of ‘fucking German hooligans’ and ‘traitorous scum’ were heard by several Soviet Army officers with Lebed at Bischofswerda. These were military intelligence staff of a junior rank to the man who was now in command of the investigation as to what had happened here. That was something crying out for experience that could be brought by the KGB but instead there were just these Soviet Army officers with their foul-mouthed commander here in Saxony.

Lebed had been told that today was some sort of religious holiday for those in the West though he was sure that their fighting troops wouldn’t be stopping their invasion to celebrate whatever ‘Easter Monday’ was. He had work to do himself and had been busy with that since long before dawn. Having just emerged from a tent when an improvised field hospital had been set up on the edges of this woodland outside Bischofswerda, Lebed would swear again before he went over to the junior men with him on this rush assignment.

Those with him reported to him what they had found out here at the third site they had visited this morning and how that information went with everything else that they knew. Here at this location where elements of the 119th Brigade’s 1150th Rocket Battalion had been ambushed during the night the situation elsewhere had repeated itself: in the dead of night there had come a gas alarm and then dismounted soldiers had struck trying to kill those Soviet soldiers manning the vehicles which carried nuclear-armed missiles as well as supporting elements. Such an effort had been hastily and bloodily fought against but when the situation was on the verge of being lost, demolition charges were detonated destroying what the attackers had come to either destroy or take for themselves. Afterwards, the attackers had withdrawn leaving many dead bodies behind from both sides though also a few fatally-wounded men of whom questions were asked and identities established.

Those who had struck here had been East German paratroopers making claims that they were under orders to put down a mutiny.

Such a story, when first heard, sounded ridiculous yet with a little bit of contemplation it was one from which sense could be made of. Lebed had come to understand why that had been told and how it had worked too. There was plenty of physical evidence to support that in the form of bodies and the few men who had told such tales, like the young East German corporal suffering from soon-to-be fatal wounds which he had just seen, had been in no position to lie.

There were seven separate sites like this one where the remains of the equipment manned by the 119th Brigade lay smouldering while there were only bodies at an eighth where the defenders had fought off their attackers without resorting to destroying their equipment. Almost the entire combat strength of that strategic-armed formation had been lost along with several hundred Soviet soldiers either killed by a nerve gas agent or by bullets from soldiers meant to be on the same side as them. Overall, in terms of weapons fielded, the loss was minimal yet this wasn’t something that couldn’t be ignored or put up with. There was also a clean-up operation to take place after the destruction caused; the charges used by the brave men with the 119th Brigade who had faced gas fired by mortars and then gunfire in the dark had been effective in destroying the missiles as weapons but the warheads contained within needed safe removal. This wasn’t something which could be rushed even though the desire to do that was imperative.

Lebed wasn’t alone in believing that there would be a reckoning with those responsible, but he hoped that he would be the one to carry that out.


Other junior men under Lebed’s command were currently tasked by him on duties across this part of Saxony. They were talking to uninvolved personnel involved in traffic management and communications duties as well as field police troops. Wounded Soviet Army missilemen were being spoken with and then there was the officer in-charge of rear area security for this region as well. All of the details as to how what took place last night needed to be known to find out the useful knowledge to put to use to identify who was behind what had happened so that it wouldn’t be able to occur again. Lebed had been informed that other strategic missile systems across East Germany, not just in Saxony, were on alert as well unless another such attack was in the offing while there were also Spetsnaz soldiers under Ogarkov’s personal orders removing further nuclear weapons from two storage sites in Brandenburg that the East Germans previously had access to: Himmelpfort and Stolzenhain.

With the knowledge of what had actually occurred, Lebed now had the task of finding out the how and the why it had been done. Those attackers had been deceived by someone with very nefarious intentions indeed and whoever that was had managed to gain access to intelligence pinpointing where the missiles with the 119th Brigade would be located when they were attacked. Where had the nerve gas used in the attacks come from was something else which Lebed would have to discover along with where those weapons were meant to have been taken and by what means should the operation to seize them have been worked.

Knowing that men from the East German Army had been the ones who assaulted those locations which he visited didn’t mean that that shattered organisation was actually responsible for the killing unleashed. Most of their ranks were either dead or prisoners of NATO forces. Moreover, the East German Army itself wasn’t regarded as having the will to try to get away with something like this with Lebed believing that their men had been used.

Ogarkov had tasked Lebed with this duty during the night and told the younger man that his immediate suspicion – one related before many facts were known – was that the KGB were responsible. Ogarkov hadn’t said what had brought him to that conclusion, but Lebed didn’t need to understand the thinking there: it was clear that the hand of the Chekists was behind all of this. No one else would have dared do such a thing as this.

There were plenty of questions to be answered when identities were revealed and motives told and Lebed would have a lot of work to do. He had been trusted to lead this enquiry though and finish it to the end come what may so he set about doing just that. His first task would be to find out where those KGB men who had previously served with the 119th Brigade as Third Chief Directorate officers had ended up and who they had been involved with since then.

To him, this sounded like the best way to get started on finding out the truth of the whole affair. Lebed knew that it was going to cause a lot of trouble but he was ready for that and he wouldn’t be alone either… he had the guns of the Soviet Army behind him.





Two Hundred & Forty–Five

“This is a summary of the headlines at midday on Monday April the Fourth from the B.B.C World Service.

Churches across Britain are reporting record attendances yesterday during Easter Sunday services. There were sombre gatherings offering prayers and reflecting upon the loss suffered by many during the ongoing war affecting the country, Europe and much of the world. A statement released by the Government announced that senior members of the Royal Family, including Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, attended church services too though further details there were not forthcoming.

Additional remarks by the National Government stated that the thoughts and prayers of the Prime Minister Missus Margaret Thatcher were with the families of service members and also those not in uniform affected by the war, in particular those who have suffered the loss of loved ones.

In other news, there are expected to be discussions again tomorrow between senior figures in the Labour Party not part of the coalition National Government. Members of the Opposition in Parliament will be holding a meeting at an undisclosed venue concerning their level of support with off-the-record statements promising a ‘re-evaluation’ of the role of the Opposition within the National Government. There are several reports that consideration will be given to formally expelling Members of Parliament from the Opposition Front Bench who formally joined the National Government last month from the Labour Party though these remain unconfirmed.

No comment on such reports has been made from the Labour Party itself nor those Minister’s now serving with the National Government.

On the Continent, there has been an official statement made by NATO senior command that Erfurt and Magdeburg, two East German cities, have fallen to troops from the Allies with both of those locations seeing what was described as ‘moderate’ fighting to take them from the Socialist Forces. Further fighting during the advance into East Germany towards occupied West Berlin continues along with additional efforts to liberate West German territory in the north around Lubeck and the outskirts of Hamburg too with ‘severe’ levels of fighting reported in those places.

A briefing for the press in Whitehall this morning by the Ministry of Defence stated that British forces deployed in Germany with the NATO armies remained fully involved in the fighting. Efforts to liberate West Berlin as part of the commitment by the Allies to do so would continue yet there were no figures released upon the latest numbers of casualties suffered during that.

Mister Kazimierz Sabbat, President of the Polish Government-in-exile, issued a statement from London calling for the armed forces of the Allies to remember that Polish troops caught up in the fighting on the Continent were there against their will and were victims of the conflict too. The President asked that those men be in the thoughts of all along with those citizens of Poland now attempting to liberate themselves within their own country from oppression. He called too on the British Government, as well as those of the Allies, to recognise his long-standing government as the only legitimate representatives of the Polish people and for all assistance possible to be given to those fighting in Poland to free themselves.

There are reports that further rebellions have broken out within the territory of the Soviet Union itself in parts of Central Asia and the Caucasus region against the regime in Moscow. The National Government has made no comment with regard to this though there are unconfirmed reports that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is monitoring such events. News from these places within the Soviet Union has been hard to verify but there have been recognised sources within Turkey which state that fighting in the Soviet Republics of Georgia and Armenia along with many smaller Autonomous Republics in the Caucasus has been taking place; fighting there is said to have taken on an ethnic dimension as well as against the security forces.

Many rationing restrictions for food will be suspended this week across Britain with a widening of the lifting of such limits for domestic consumption that began last week. The National Government will make a statement later today confirming what will be freely available and families across the country can expect to benefit from this. This comes following the recent spate of arrivals of large food shipments into the country from South America and the National Government is reported to be keen to make such foodstuffs available at once to the public. There remain restrictions in-place with regards to alcohol and tobacco. Restrictions on the use of petrol will stay as they are due to wartime shortages while the moratorium on payment of electricity, gas and water bills will stay active. The weekend’s lifting of the night-time blackout is reported to be have been received well across the control and the National Government has announced that there will be no changes made there.

Protests in Yugoslavia continue with citizens of many of that nation’s constituent republics engaged in demonstrations against the regime. Access by the international press to cities such as Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana remains forbidden with many foreign journalists including those from the B.B.C having been evicted from the country following the start of the protests. There have been many reports that violence has erupted alongside these protests and away from the big demonstrations in the cities there have been observations made of violence occurring too in this historically violent region.

Discussions in New York at the United Nations are still ongoing concerning a motion put forward by several nations, Britain and the United States among them, to expel the Soviet Union and other countries of the Socialist Forces alliance from that international body. Such efforts have previously been rebuffed with strong objections made against such a course of action yet new diplomatic initiatives to gain support from further countries for such a move are underway. The National Government has repeatedly stated that it would be in the best interests of the world community to do such a thing though protestations from many Third World countries, including many within the Commonwealth, were instrumental in those past failures and reportedly show no sign of ceasing.

There will be another summary of the news headlines again in an hour at One o’clock.”

*

“Good morning, this is C.N.N broadcasting from Atlanta and we are here with the early morning international news headlines.

United States service personnel remain committed overseas to the ongoing war against the Soviet Union with what is now the largest series of simultaneous military operations ever conducted by those in uniform before. Official figures released show that the reintroduction of the Draft was responded to with immense positive results with less than two per cent of those called-up refusing mobilisation of America’s young men. Alongside these official figures, unofficial numbers point to thousands of women volunteers across the country joining their male counterparts in offering to serve themselves before the Draft came into place with many of those now preforming vital non-combat roles for the U.S Armed Forces.

Fighting continues to take place across the globe by American forces who are joined of course by those in uniform with many other nations defending freedom with the Allies. Liberating occupied portions of West Germany, Denmark and Austria remain key objectives for the war as stated by the Defence Department – relocated to an undisclosed location on a continued temporary basis – as well as ridding West Berlin of foreign occupation too. There has been confirmation that Norway and Finmark were both cleared several days ago of hostile troops and major combat operations in most of Scandinavia have come to an end. Secretary of Defence Carlucci, in a statement made to the C.N.N and other elements of the American media, added that military operations continued ‘around the periphery’ of the Soviet Union but wouldn’t be drawn on where those locations were and what that combat involved only to say that it remained of a conventional nature.

Secretary of State Grassley, in a separate statement, announced that the ‘armies of democracy’ were on the move though and once again stated that the intention remained for a peaceful settlement to be reached with the Soviet Union and its allies which would bring an end to the conflict.

There has been little recent news concerning the health of President Reagan though it is known that he remains in a medically-induced coma at a location which is being kept secret. Friends and supporters of the President have asked for prayers for his health to continue and affirm the hope that those will be heard. Moreover, Acting President Bush mentioned President Reagan last night when he spoke to the American public and repeated that message as well as assuring his listeners that the very best medical care was being given.

Congress is due to start hearings tomorrow with regard to the conduct of the war and also events leading up to the Soviet and Cuban attacks. There has been strong words exchanged in public between many Congressmen and Senators from both parties offering different viewpoints and such antagonism is expected to be seen during closed sessions when they begin. Cuba’s attacks against Florida and the recent peace treaty agreed in The Bahamas are expected to cause tension during those hearings, which has stretched bipartisan support of the war to the limit, but so too are discussions concerning warfare in Germany and in the North Atlantic against Soviet-led forces.

Sources close to the Defence Secretary have stated that he is angry at such plans to call senior military figures before Congress when they are engaged in warfare with enemies of this country though there have been denials from figures within Congress that requests have been made to hear testimony from generals and admirals currently deployed abroad. Military set-backs early in the war within the so-called Fulda Gap and in the Norwegian Sea are believed to be the subject of such inquires where Carlucci isn’t eager to see those in uniform recalled home. Furthermore, F.B.I Director Sessions is also anticipated to be called before Congress to answer questions in closed hearing concerning the apparent lack of preparation to combat the many deadly terrorist attacks by foreign commandoes which have taken place against American citizens here at home.

Speaking from Havana, Grassley was met by large crowds yesterday when he unexpectedly visited there after signing the Treaty of Nassau in The Bahamas. The Secretary of State spoke of his ‘pleasant surprise’ at such scenes with ordinary Cubans out in the streets in their tens of thousands cheering his arrival to have closed-door meetings with Cuban military officials there. This morning has seen Cuba become the sixty-fourth nation to declare that it is in an active state of war with the Soviet Union; two other countries have already joined them earlier today bringing that number even higher as Egypt alongside the island nation of Antigua & Barbuda have become members of the Allies.

Full trading on Wall Street is expected to start tomorrow. The shut down during the first week of the war and the subsequent two weeks of partial trading will come to an end with what Treasury Secretary Baker yesterday stated would be a ‘sensible response’ to how the war is going. Other leading world markets are due to open soon but the New York Stock Exchange will be the first among them and setting the pace. Security measures will remain tight in a physical sense and there will be some S.E.C control over market trades made too; Baker is expected to meet with many figures from the financial markets to address their concerns regarding what role the S.E.C will play in the oversight of certain elements of trading. Stocks in defence industries but also other war-related industries are expected to rise heavily with investors reported to be looking forward to tomorrow morning.

Military and civil authorities in Texas, Virginia and Wyoming are urging citizens in those states to not try to assist in ongoing efforts to track down foreign commandoes on the run there. Deaths have already occurred as many Americans have taken it upon themselves to do their patriotic duty in defending their country and while gratitude has been expressed by many, including Acting President Bush, there have been warnings that such Spetsnaz terrorists are extremely dangerous and will not hesitate to kill. Texas State Guard troops, deployed by Governor Clements to support the military, have reportedly seen action in western parts of Texas combating such an extraordinary threat as this to ordinary Americans.

The F.C.C has confirmed that had recently met again with media outlets including C.N.N to discuss reporting restrictions regarding the war. There has been some controversy over First Amendment rights with accusations of attempts at censorship made, especially concerning the murder by suspected Spetsnaz terrorists on the eve of war of C.I.A Deputy Director Robert Gates. Gates, a long-term Republican figure with a record of public service, was killed in one of the first incidents of terror here in the United States before war broke out in an ambush against his motorcade that took the lives of five others too. News of this slaying didn’t break for more than two weeks with broadcasters and the print media respecting the wishes of the Reagan Administration here. Other protests have been lodged concerning journalists working abroad in combat zones where again agreed restrictions in the interests of national security were broken in places by figures high up in Defence Department.

Further credible reports have emerged overnight from inside Germany both sides of the now shattered Iron Curtain concerning atrocities committed there in the now infamous P.O.W camps that the Soviets and their allies had up and running there. Acts of tortures and massacres have been shown to have occurred along with disturbing stories of sexual abuse against female service personnel held too; C.N.N has been told that war crimes investigators are engaged in the process of gathering evidence. Further to this, we will have a special report Live after this news summary from one of our correspondents on the ground inside East Germany at one of those camps where viewers are reminded that many images of an unpleasant nature are likely to offend.

Now, we shall go over to East Germany and our reporter outside the town of Arnstadt for that special report.”

*

“This is the voice of the Radio Moscow World Service’s English language afternoon news.

The brave soldiers, sailors and airmen of the armies of the Socialist Forces continue to fulfil their Internationalist Duty in combating the war of aggression unleashed by the Capitalist, Imperialist, and Fascist powers. Foreign invasions against the Motherlandthrough Eastern Europe continue yet there are strong efforts being made to defend the Democratic German Republic and the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic from invaders on their way further east. The fighting remains a struggle but one which those upholding the moral duty to defend the people against enslavement will emerge from victorious.

Cowardly pilots from the air forces of the NATO powers – Americans, English, and Germans among them – have repeatedly bombed civilians across Europe as they unleash their war to conqueror the continent and attempt to approach the gates of the Motherland. The great cities of reunited Berlin, Warsaw, Prague as well as free Hamburg have been struck at with workers and their families slaughtered by merciless attacks. Heroic efforts have been made to save lives by the men charged with stopping this murder from occurring. The German city of Stendal has recently joined this tragic list where the blood of innocents has been spilt with countless casualties caused there among those who were unable to defend themselves against killers unleashing death the skies.

Those in the West are unapologetic for their actions and counter the truth with cruel denials, elaborate fabrications and vicious lies.

Military actions by French Government, who claim to be socialist but instead whose actions resemble those of a pack of wild hyenas, to join with the West Germans and the NATO powers betray the ideas of the French Republic and the wishes of its people. Protests against the regime there have been met with harsh reprisals that shame such a nation. The long-standing traitors hiding in London from the rightful justice of the Polish people – Sabbat and his cowardly cohorts – create lies about a nation which has no need of them. Counter-revolutionary activity in Poland is whipped up by those with perverted dreams of personal powers but the majority of the Polish people are working with their government and aided by their allies here in the Soviet Union to put a stop to that with earnest.

Across the developing Third World, nations who not long ago rid themselves of the shackles of Colonialism have been forced back into involuntary servitude by their illegal rulers who have no mandate from their people. Country after country across the Americas, Africa and Asia have had their allegiance brought by Western banks to make war too upon the Soviet people; rulers enrich themselves while their people starve. Chief among them is South Africa and the racist fascists in Pretoria who have declared war upon the native peoples of the continent. The West have allied themselves with these modern-day Nazis and do not care about the horrors that will be inflicted upon all those who stand in the way of Pretoria’s colonialist dreams of the Boer with his foot upon the necks of those from Cape Town to the Congo.

Marshal of the Soviet Union Nikolai Vasilyevich Ogarkov has again called upon the Soviet people to remain steadfast in their support for the war. He has reminded his comrades across the nation that the men in uniform at the front are fighting to save the Motherland from an invasion on the scale of Hitler’s Barbarossa; those at home need to do their duty to the state as well whether they be at the factory, in the fields or in their homes. Waste, idleness and ill-discipline behind the lines will only mean death to those in uniform with the ultimate consequences of failure being too terrible to contemplate for all.

Abroad, there are millions of progressive people who only want peace like the people of the Soviet Union and its many fraternal allies want too. These heroes reject the actions of traitors displayed elsewhere in the world and the morally-bankrupt policies of collaborators and are fighting as well to liberate the workers in their countries.

The Motherland stands with such righteous fellow comrades in distant lands and their sacrifices will not be in vain while their achievements will be celebrated.

Peace remains something which the enemies of the workers in the Motherland will not allow. Again and again they reject the most sincere efforts to work together to bring an end to the death and destruction. Marshal Ogarkov had declared that he will continue to work towards bringing an end to the war which was launched against the Soviet people by those cowardly murderers abroad yet at the same time with every breath he will fight to protect the nation the invasion which is being attempted again by those in the West.

The Soviet people have a message for those who wish to kill their valiant soldiers and enslave them in their own country: we will fight to stop you and we shall emerge the victors.”





Two Hundred & Forty–Six

British troops weren’t involved in the capture late yesterday of Magdeburg as that was left to Bundeswehr forces moving in from the west, yet their approach towards the East German city from the north had assisted in the collapse of enemy opposition there. Challenger and Chieftian tanks serving within the Tiger Division had reached as far as Wolmirstedt and the east-west running Elbe-Weser Canal just ahead throwing enemy efforts to contain the advance by the Bundeswehr VI Corps. Leopard-1 tanks of the recently-formed 16th Panzergrenadier Division had been advancing along the other side of that waterway running through the middle of northern Germany and physical contact was made with them afterwards, but the British I Corps stayed on the northern side of the canal.

Defined operational areas had been mapped out for ABOLITION and those were being stuck to with the result being that the West German VI Corps took control of Magdeburg. There remained pockets of enemy resistance inside the city where East German Militia units, abandoned by what Soviet forces had managed to flee towards the Elbe to try to cross that river, and those would be dealt with by the West Germans rather than the British.


The Elbe-Weser Canal became the southern boundary of the British I Corps area on the western banks of the Elbe and stretched northwards up as far as Stendal. Above there and along lower parts of the Elbe there was the Bundeswehr IV Corps manning the river line as far as Wittenberge. To the south, General Kenny had his Belgian forces deployed southwest of Magdeburg and pushing for the Saale.

The British Second Army was now fully deployed in combat operations inside Sachsen-Anhalt and had pushed enemy forces back against the Elbe with few of those managing to get over that wide river in an organised fashion let alone with their heavy equipment. There were scattered pockets of resistance everywhere in the rear and along isolated positions of the riverbank that were now the priority in combating before they could be further advances eastwards. Supplies and engineering equipment needed to be brought forward before the Elbe could be crossed in strength too and while that was ongoing the threat to those logistics links from cut-off small groups of the enemy was dealt with.

The best method that the British Army had found for dealing with stubborn enemy forces hold-up in surrounded locations was to blast them into surrender using stand-off weapons such as artillery and air support too, when the latter was available, before moving in with infantry to mop up. The Belgians copied the British approach as they too worried over the scale of the casualties which they had taken in this war so far, but the Bundeswehr believed in rooting out the problem on the ground with careful infantry assaults which while supported by artillery were done by hand. As a slowdown in forward operations came into play for the day ready for the next big advance, these different methods of dealing with the many enemy units surrounded in the rear were put to use throughout captured enemy territory.


Troops from the Royal Regiment of Wales’ first battalion (1 RRW) serving within the 20th Armoured Brigade and part of the Iron Division were deployed in the area around the smouldering Mahlwinkel Airbase located between Stendal and Magdeburg. The nearby village after which that captured facility was named along with many others in the immediate area had been bypassed during the push southwards yesterday but today there was an effort for the Welsh soldiers to smash the enemy forces which had retreated into them. The airbase itself was used as a base of operations for the British troops dismounted from their tracked vehicles and they struck out in several directions through the day.

Italian-built Mod-56 guns – designated the L5 Pack Howitzer in British service – had been taken from storage and used by the British for behind the lines operations when artillery support was needed for the past week. Self-propelled guns and newer towed artillery like the L118 was being utilised in the frontline role but the old L5’s were still very useful. 1 RRW conducted small-scale operations around the edge of the cordons which those guns fired inside of with aggressive patrolling and sniping to assist in wearing down the enemy. The guns kept up a good rate of fire though of course there were problems with them which had brought about their removal from frontline service some years ago and the artillery fire wasn’t always as effective as it should have been. Explosions ripped through the villages which Soviet troops and East German irregulars had barricaded themselves in while the British infantry outside waited for the right moment to strike.

Bertingen was attacked first with a full company attack taking place there. There were some Soviet soldiers present there but mainly East German Militia and the village had been identified early on as somewhere open to attack. A distraction effort was made by one platoon of 1 RRW before the other two made the main effort which came up the road from the south and not from the open fields to the east or the woodland to the west. There was plenty of initial return fire from the defenders who hadn’t been wholly broken by all of the artillery unleashed against them, but their resistance was brittle and they couldn’t deal with the effective fire and manoeuvre tactics put to use by their opponents. This was something which the British Army excelled at – small-scale infantry fighting tactics – and they took down their weakened opponents fighting at first on the edge of the village and then inside it. An improvised casualty aid station was found that the East Germans had been using to treat their large number of wounded and the Welsh soldiers made sure that help was sent there before moving through buildings that weren’t on fire and around ones which were seeking out the last remains of resistance. Rifle shots came out of windows often down towards them and the soldiers here were glad that they had recently had a deployment to Ulster – which hadn’t been enjoyable at the time – so they could deal with that. Here the rules of engagement were different and hand-held rocket-launchers were used to put a stop to such sniping though they did go inside such places afterwards to make sure that the enemy there was dead. Soviet troops inside Bertingen surrendered once the 1 RRW were inside the village and while there weren’t many of them this was a happy occurrence as they were better trained than the irregular East Germans who couldn’t bring the attack to a halt.

There were losses taken by the 1 RRW by the end of the engagement, but these would be regarded as minimal and a great deal lower than they would have taken had they had not been given the artillery support they had which had done so well in softening up the enemy first.

Cobbel and Uetz, two nearby villages, were attacked in the same fashion. A couple of hours of artillery barrages then a company-sized infantry attack brought the crushing of opposition at both. Again there remained stubborn resistance from highly-motivated Militia forces organised by the East Germans but those men armed with nothing more than assault rifles and with the bare minimal training couldn’t compete with what was thrown against them. Soviet soldiers in those villages were rear-area men who quickly realised that they too couldn’t stop the attacks coming against them and they gave up the fighting quickly than the locals who they certainly didn’t want to die with.


Mahlwinkel was bigger than the trio of smaller villages and the British knew that it would be tougher to take.

Yesterday, armour with the Blues & Royals had rolled through this location on the way southwards and fought on the move against ineffective sniper fire and also plenty of RPG’s fired against their Challenger’s too. They had continued on afterwards but done much damage there before barricades were assembled by the defenders who stayed in the village. These were mainly Soviet military personnel from both the Soviet Army and Air Force cut-off but believing that they could follow orders and hold out; there weren’t as many East German Militia present.

There was a crossroads at Mahlwinkel and a major if quite wrecked railway line ran alongside it. Civilians had been seen leaving the village before the artillery started and the 1 RRW was glad of that following rumours that had recently swept through the battalion that in other East German towns and villages many innocents had recently been killed. Soviet soldiers and East German Militia were fair game but no one liked knowing that they were responsible for the deaths of women and children. The use of heavier weapons than just the assigned battery of guns manned by Royal Artillery reservists had this been authorised.

A pair of French Mirage-5F attack-fighters – originally built for Israel but due to diplomatic reasons in the late Sixties now in Armee de l’Air service – commenced a low-level air attack against the village moments after the British guns had ceased fire. They dropped many high-explosive bombs upon the village with the particular 500lb bombs used chosen due to the lethality of their fragments. Plenty of enemy troops would hopefully be caught in the blasts of these and this was the signal for the afternoon attack to begin.

All three rifle companies with the 1 RRW were used in the operation against Mahlwinkel with the fire support company as well bringing dismounted weapons. The threat to armoured vehicles moving slow among buildings remained high and the FV432’s were all being serviced for planned operations tomorrow, so the Welsh soldiers moved on foot like they had at Bertingen, Cobbel and Uetz. Their machine guns and mortars were used to great effect during the warm-up to the assault and then MILAN missiles were fired against observed enemy strongpoints on the village’s edges which had returned fire. These blasts tore holes in those defences and the infantry were quick to take advantage of that. The Soviets weren’t expecting the British to come at them so quickly.

The first move by the 1 RRW was a feint to the northwest and designed to draw attention. It certainly did and the Soviets rushed to counter if before the two main attacks came from the southwest and the east. Outer defensive lines fell with the latter two attacks though there were rapid withdrawals made further into the village. Many buildings were fortified with hasty work done to them and the Soviets trying to make each one a strong-point that could give flanking fire to others engaged. This was something that the British weren’t prepared to carry on with as their intention was not to suffer mass casualties fighting a battle which the enemy was prepared for.

Corrected artillery fire was called down upon many building from where the stiffest defences was coming from as the 1 RRW had its men draw back. Those Welsh soldiers watched as houses and public building crumbled and burnt. In a few cases men would emerge from them with weapons in hand and shots were taken at those though in most cases the survivors of careful attacks like this were hurt or even on fire and were left alone. More MILAN missiles flew against other buildings during the lull in the artillery barrage as guns changed position just in case counter-battery fire was being organised against them and during that time there came the first few instances of surrenders.

Soviet troops started emerging from undamaged buildings without weapons and with their hands in the air. On their guard, the Welsh soldiers would let such men come to them while keeping them covered in case of an elaborate trap, but they instead found men willing to give up who knew that they were beaten. Quickly the few surrenders turned into a flood as more and more Soviets gave themselves up. A few did keep firing and complicated matters so that artillery and missiles had to be used again to kill die-hards who wouldn’t quit, but eventually all organised resistance came to an end.

There were still some East Germans who weren’t going to play along though.

Intelligence reports had filtered down throughout the NATO armies engaged in ABOLITION about expected strong resistance from East German Militia and almost everywhere they were encountered they put up a hard fight. To NATO soldiers the determination which was shown would have been something to be respected from ill-trained fighters if they weren’t aware of atrocities committed by Mielke’s regime against captured POW’s but West German civilians too during their occupation on the other side of the Inter-German Border. British troops especially who were based in Germany generally had strong feelings as they lived among the latter in peacetime while were of course very upset at what had happened to their fellow solders when held prisoner. If East Germans wanted to surrender then that was all well and good, if not…

Assistance was given by some captured Soviets in showing access to strongpoints manned by East German Militia and those were attacked with grenades and bayonets fitted to rifles after artillery strikes had done their worst. Tough fighting hand-to-hand ensued and there were some gruesome incidents.

Mahlwinkel was secured before sunset.





Two Hundred & Forty–Seven

POW camps set up by NATO were located all across Western Europe and far back from the frontlines. There was a desire to keep prisoners taken as far away as possible from possible liberation by the enemy in the face of a counterattack but no desire to spend too much effort shipping them overseas. Belgium, France and Spain were the locations where the majority of these camps ended up being located though there were some inside Norway and Sweden too: no POW camps were set up in West Germany even on the western side of the Rhine.

Decades worth of staff planning had gone into POW camps through the NATO framework though also conducted individually by the armies of the West. Staff officers had spent much time on such a task with reviews of old plans and new ideas regularly undertaken. There had been exercises too were the construction of camps along with filling them with ‘the enemy’ had been practised and much of that had been rather realistic too. Military police units, regulars and reservists, had been tasked that in wartime they would run these camps with intelligence officers assigned too. How to feed, clothe and provide medical care to POW’s taken as well as to guard them had been gone over time and time again.

However, there couldn’t be an accurate assessment made of how this would all work out in wartime. NATO had no idea as to how long such a war would go on nor whether it would stay conventional. The willingness of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops to surrender could only be guessed at and so too how they would react once inside camps. Numbers in terms of prisoners and thus guards were something which NATO armies would only find out when conflict came.


Caen in Normandy was the site of one of the many POW camps established by NATO in northern France. It was manned in the main by Frenchmen though there were some American and Canadian personnel assigned in staff and intelligence roles. It was located outside of the city where much fighting had occurred during the latter stages of World War Two but judged to be very far away from any conflict during World War Three.

This POW Camp was what was deemed ‘Category P2’ by NATO meaning that it was for political officers serving within the armies of the Socialist Forces with low and medium ranks. There were no enlisted men here nor officers from the regular armies of the enemy, just those from the security services captured during the fighting. Soviet KGB personnel, Stasi officers and a few Polish and Czechoslovakian prisoners were here and they had been treated rather well with two separate visits made from international observers from the Red Cross after such people had been to visit other POW camps in Normandy with E1 and O2 ratings: those for non-commissioned officers and lower-ranking officers respectively.

Life at Caen-P2 was rather unexciting for those held there and those who guarded them. Normandy was a very long way from the frontlines and little news trickled in from the war. The prisoners didn’t cause any trouble though they had little to do about worry over what their futures might be. NATO intelligence officers had spoken to them but not been overly aggressive with them despite the fears by these men of what might be found out about their activities. The guards themselves manned the camp that was built next to a quiet and out of the way military base with the belief that if some of the POW’s managed to find a way to escape they wouldn’t get very far nor achieve anything much.

The political officers held had either been recognised by their uniforms as being what they were or denounced by conscripted men under their command. Some of their colleagues had even been murdered during the stages of surrender by such men and the political officers were all glad to be alive. The crimes which had committed under their watch, sometimes with their involvement too, were what they worried about and the repercussions from possible war crimes proceedings. What they were asked, usually in cursory manner, about their roles in maintaining political control over the fighting men captured with them was barely a worry when in comparison with that other knowledge which they preferred to keep secret.

Some among the number of POW’s here at Caen-P2 had turned on their fellow prisoners for their own benefit. They had told those with all the questions about things they knew when it came to others so as to benefit themselves; NATO intelligence officers had been looking to play that angle and it was easily done. Such people were promised much for their cooperation even if it was suspected – as it was the case – that this was done to protect their own misdeeds. A few of those gave themselves away to their fellow prisoners by accident and then there were a couple of isolated incidents were the deaths of those men occurred and no one would confess knowledge of what happened. The Frenchmen guarding them didn’t appear to give a damn and these crimes went unpunished for the time being.

Against this backdrop of secrets, lies and murders, POW’s continued to arrive from the frontlines. These men were trucked-in after coming from Germany and in some cases Denmark too with those political officers quickly joining the ranks of their fellow countrymen inside Caen-P2. What news of the war was asked of such men but there were also rumours that came with them. The POW’s at the camp in Normandy heard a story that took hold among them: all political officers were going to be handed over to the West Germans who would at best have them clearing minefields or at the worst have them all shot in revenge for the invasion of West Germany. The story didn’t have to be true – and it certainly wasn’t – but it was something that very many of the prisoners soon started to believe.

Caen-P2 erupted in a riot. The usually docile and frightened political officers here suddenly turned on their guards and killed several with makeshift weapons with a large attempt escape being made. Where the men were planning to go and plans after getting free weren’t something made, they just wanted to make sure that they weren’t handed over to the West Germans as retribution.

The riot would end in further bloodshed as the French eventually put a stop to it with shots being fired at those trying to escape and control retake of the camp using further gunfire to go in and break up the trouble. Identified troublemakers were to be moved elsewhere and the bodies of the dead buried. This was all rather unpleasant and many questions were asked afterwards, but the French had no choice to act in this manner and it was the only solution. Life at Caen-P2 would afterwards return to ‘normal’ and the worst fears of the surviving POW’s weren’t to be met.


Across in Belgium, NATO had establish an O1 POW camp near Kortrijk. Senior military officers captured in battle were held here outside the city where a camp for them had been constructed at an unused industrial site.

NATO intelligence officers from several nations visited this facility and attempted to question the men who held the rank of Colonel and above held here who served in the armies and air forces of the militaries of the Soviet forces. These men would know a lot of things, much of which would be time-sensitive, that NATO wanted to understand. There weren’t any visits by outsiders to Kortrijk-O1 despite no laws being broken here with regard to how POW’s were meant to be treated. There had been some discussions higher-up among senior NATO intelligence staffs about ‘certain ways’ to interrogate these high-ranking prisoners but political orders were for no such thing to take place and even then there was a feeling that those tasked to do anything like that would refuse on moral grounds. Psychological pressure was thus used here along with many instances of deceptions being made against the captured officers to tell them things that certainly weren’t true so that they would talk.

Some intelligence did come from these efforts though it honestly wasn’t that great and none of it was any value in terms of unlocking key secrets of allowing war-winning strategies to be used on the battlefields.

These Soviet officers had a lot of concerns regarding their futures that were along similar lines to the political officers at Caen. They worried that they were going to be shot when they returned home by their own side rather than the Germans; surrender during wartime was punishable by that mean especially in their case. In the heat of battle, these men had done just that with thoughts then of the immediate consequences rather than what would occur later. Even with Ogarkov’s seizure of power, it wasn’t like the organs of the state had disappeared and everything had changed back home. These officers all expected that they would end up in an unmarked grave but couldn’t see a way of avoiding that.

At Kortrijk-O1 the men here waited for the eventual return to the Motherland which would come at the end of the war. Some would take their own lives while here in Belgium while others would make efforts at beginning the stages of defection; most though just waited for their fate at the hands of their countrymen when they returned home as they didn’t see any other choice.


POW’s held by NATO and listed in both the E1 and E2 category were separated by nationality as military officers were but unlike political officers. It was thought best that control over such groups of men would be better undertaken in doing things this way with Soviet, East German, Polish and Czechoslovakian enlisted men kept apart from others. Most were conscripts of NCO rank though there were many technical enlisted men who had stayed in the armies of their country after their conscription was up and were making a career such as it was; the latter all went to E1 camps. Most of these camps were for E2 prisoners though, men which had no choice but to wear the uniform of their country. The numbers of these men far outweighed all others and that was reflected in the number of facilities for these POW’s.

Pau-E2 camp was located on the slopes of the Pyrenees Mountains that separated France and Spain. Military police reservists from Portugal assisted the French here in guarding these men as French numbers were stretched thin elsewhere and the Portuguese were committing a large effort to the war even if the number of men which they had on the frontlines in Germany wasn’t that large.

There were Polish enlisted men at Pau-E2 and these were men captured early in the war fighting in Germany and then later with many coming from southern Norway too. A lot of cooperation took place between the POW’s here and their captors but also a few deaths of prisoners too killed by their own countrymen not for assisting NATO intelligence efforts but rather for trying to hinder those. The Polish here were very cooperative even if they couldn’t offer much in the way of information that would be useful to those holding them.

When news reached the men here in the south of France about the Great Polish Rebellion, their guards were glad that there had been segregation by nationality across POW camps and no Soviets – or ‘Russians’ as the Polish called them – held here too or the security situation would have fast got out of hand. The prisoners were very angry at what they were hearing about how the Soviets were treating first their fellow comrades in uniform and then later Polish troops at home.

At first there had been a flood of arrivals of men at Pau-E2 but the numbers stopped growing a few weeks into the war. The guards were asked by some of their captives as to why no more of their countrymen were arriving when their appeared to be room for more POW’s. Answers weren’t forthcoming and the captive men, bored and with nothing to do but worry, invented their own reasons why no more Poles came to the camp. They decided that the Russians were killing Poles and that was why no more were being taken prisoner by NATO forces on the frontlines. In reality, there were very few Polish troops left fighting NATO and what captives were being taken were sent to other POW camps closer to the fighting to save upon stretched transportation, but those at Pau-E2 didn’t know that and suspected the worst.

Elections had already taken place among them – a show of hands rather than anything that would suit international election observers – for leaders and these approached the guards asking to speak to senior NATO people. A Canadian Brigadier eventually showed up with the management of POW’s being a multinational affair and he spoke Polish, with that officer being informed by the representatives of the prisoners that they wished to form a volunteer army to fight for NATO. Their enemies would be the Russians and they would need arms, supplies and equipment, but they would be loyal and would fight as bravely as possible.

Tactfully, the Canadian officer made them aware that such things would take a lot of time to organise and be dependent upon political factors. He promised to take their case higher up the chain of command and to offer his support to it though cautioned that the Poles at Pau-E2 might have to wait a very long time indeed. As can be expected, there was a lot of disappointment in that response though the Poles felt that at least they had been listened to and treated with respect. They started organising themselves as best as possible ready for the one day when they marched alongside new allies and would return home with their heads held high… and guns ready to shoot Russians.


Thirty POW camps were opened within the first two weeks of the war with that number doubling a fortnight later. NATO manpower to guard those prisoners was being stretched even with nations as part of the Allies who weren’t committing large numbers of fighting troops helping out; countries such as Ireland, Portugal and a few South American nations. There was also the issue with suitable locations running out with Britain and the Netherlands not wanting any POW camps, a decision made not to ship or fly such men across the North Atlantic and the Scandinavian countries not willing to take any more as in the case of Norway and Sweden with Denmark still under partial occupation.

West Germany was thus chosen as a location to open further POW camps. The fighting had moved far to the east and soon inside East Germany and Czechoslovakia so the risk of such captives being ‘liberated’ was very low. There were sites identified in the Rhineland and guards were to be provided by the West Germans themselves. Many Territorial Troops who had been engaged in rear-area security duties during the early stages of the war, and seeing plenty of action in many places, had already been formed up into the new formations stood up as the Bundeswehr expanded but there were still many men available that could be used at POW camps following the immense scale of mobilisation by the West Germans.

Some questions were asked about the diplomatic effects of Germans guarding POW’s but those were regarded as uncalled for by many and rather insulting. POW camps were to open throughout the Rhineland ready for further surrendering enemy troops and while NATO intelligence officers would assist in operations at those and food would come in from elsewhere, West Germans would guard the men.

NATO remained working together on this and old prejudices were being pushed aside with so much shared experiences during the conflict of blood being spilt.





Two Hundred & Forty–Eight

Three army-groups were being currently fielded by the US Army for operations in East Germany with ABOLITION operations. Each of these consisted of a trio of corps with seven of those being American-manned. Hundreds of thousand combat soldiers were within these with regulars based pre-war in West Germany and the United States as well as national guardsmen, reservists and discharged soldiers alongside them. They had a difficult task of fighting to invade the homeland of the enemy facing strong opposition across much difficult terrain.

Current plans were to soon rearrange the structure of American forces involved in the invasion. The US Fifth Army would be removed from frontline operations with many of its combat and combat support forces being reassigned to those with the US Third and Seventh Army’s as well as the bulk of the service support elements too in the form of supply, transportation and communications units. US Army forces within the US Fifth Army were almost exclusively ARNG units and they had been roughly handled during the conflict. Their deployment to Germany in the midst of the conflict had been far too rushed with more expected to be done by them than they were capable of. At times, they had even done more than they should have but the cost had been terrible too.

Such plans for this large-scale reorganisation were ongoing and not yet ready to be put into play. There was much fighting going on meanwhile as commanders and staff officers prepared to move around as the US Army raced as do what the British and West Germans had been doing to the north of them in getting so far deep into enemy territory. There was plenty of reconnaissance ongoing as to watching the newest wave of Soviet troops rolling westwards through Poland and therefore the further into East Germany the US Army got the better to meet them there.


The objective of the US Third Army was the city of Halle and the River Saale.

National guardsmen operating on the flank remained fighting in the Harz Mountains where enemy resistance to be blasted out of defensive positions persisted but the main effort was to break out of the Helme Valley. The US II Corps had caught up with the US III Corps during the night, and expanding upon the airborne assault which had taken Allstedt airbase yesterday, that pair of combat commands with their heavy forces set about achieving the objective set by General Chambers today.

That operation against Allstedt had allowed for the movement of the heavy forces to come in from the west as Soviet positions had been taken from the rear but the US III Corps had yesterday failed to get much further eastwards approaching Halle directly. General Saint had pushed forward but faced strong dug-in defences which needed to be carefully pounded before a major advance could take place. Guns had fired throughout the night against the villages of Bornstedt, Osterhausen and Farnstadt with six- and eight-inch shells while rockets from new MLRS systems were used too. Much of that artillery fire was directed against Soviet air defences on the ground ahead so that air power could come into play with shells fired from howitzers being just as effective as specialist anti-radar missiles fired from aircraft. What air defences remained free of artillery barrages soon ran out of ammunition and with that jets and attack helicopters came into play so that in the morning the US III Corps could move forward into battle.

The 2nd Armored & 5th Mechanized Infantry Division’s, veteran formations now, waited behind the new 6th Armored Division which was assigned to lead the attack through battered enemy positions. Major-General Fred Franks – another officer like US II Corps commander Lt.-General Gordon Sullivan removed from a training command to serve in this war as so many US Army senior officers were – conducted a careful attack that made slow progress at first but found that the defences his troops faced were brittle. They couldn’t stand up to an assault like he unleashed upon them with fixed positions useless to tanks and mechanised infantry manoeuvring around them under heavy covering fire and then the mobile counter-attacking forces which the Soviets had being engaged too. US Army gunships worked under close supervision spotting enemy armour and distance and engaging those first before heavy forces on the ground could move from ambush positions. The Soviets would have interfered which such moves with greater effect than they did if they had strong mobile air defences or even better air support but they had neither and paid the price. Soon enough the two following divisions were moving forward to exploit the gains made by the 6th Armored Division in the lead.

Breakout came in the late morning. A three-division attack commenced with those led now by the 116th Armored Cavalry Regiment with highly-trained national guardsmen from Idaho and Oregon. There was some bypassing of opposition which the Americans knew they were going to have to deal with afterwards as such forces couldn’t be left in the rear but the main line of enemy defences had been broken and they drove on Halle. The tanks and armoured vehicles fielded crossed the countryside and went down roads with hold-up mainly occurring when they met anti-tank ditches and minefields; the former crossed with assault bridges mounted atop armoured vehicles and the latter having safe-passage lanes blasted through them by specialist engineers working quickly so the advance wasn’t slowed down.

Soviet dismounted missilemen hurt the US III Corps though and so did the repeated appearance of hidden anti-tank guns and snipers firing at short-range. These methods of defence by the Soviets in eventually breaking up the momentum of the US III Corps had been faced before but their presence was still felt and they brought a slowdown. Halle was just too far to reach before the daylight started to fade as those efforts to stop the US Army on the move didn’t halt them but did make their mission goal for the day just too much to achieve. The city was left beyond grasp with immense defences observed around it that would have to be dealt with – the plan was to move around the city’s flanks rather than go through the centre of it – at the same time as the Americans would have to clear out the bypassed forces in their rear.

Nonetheless, US III Corps still emerged the victor from the day’s battles with intelligence pointing to the remainder of the Soviet Thirteenth Army being unable now to conduct any more mobile operations and any hope of any further offensive action, even localised, gone for good.

US II Corps conducted a left-hook manoeuvre on the northern side. Sullivan had his men strike across hilly ground moving northeast through the eastern slopes of the Harz Mountains and across the line of retreat where Soviet forces avoiding the attacks of the US XI Corps were moving. The formations under his command had been bolstered by a few veterans of the US III Corps recently joining but mainly consisted of those former US Army soldiers recalled to service on the eve of war.

The advance here to the Saale had caught their opponents off-guard and certainly not set up to try and stop them with the usual defences encountered elsewhere. Again during manoeuvre warfare the Soviets fought in the manner which they had throughout the conflict. Their tactics remained the same, their command structure was inflexible and their fire support was too tied doctrine as well. When combined with the shortages which they suffered and the ability of the US Army to keep their own high, this was fatal. The US Army knew exactly how to defeat the Soviets as they had learnt and adapted on the battlefield.

Around the town of Eisleben came one of the fiercest clashes of the day. Hundreds of Soviet tanks, similar numbers of armoured vehicles and thousands of infantry were left strewn across the battlefield. Smoke from burning wrecks rose into the air afterwards after poisoning the lungs of those on the ground who breathed it in first while below there came the screams and moans of those who lay dying across the fields and along the nearby roads. This was a battle fought by the 23rd Mechanized Infantry Division which had spent only a short time training for such an engagement like this but when it came to fighting a real-life opponent they did an excellent job. The formation had a famous history and those who had been thrown into making the unit come alive again when forming up in California and Colorado would add another battle honour to the Americal Division which had fought glorious battles on Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Leyte and in Vietnam. A major enemy attack which the Soviets had considered to be an ambush on the move using concealed marshalling of heavy forces had been detected through aerial reconnaissance and electronic eavesdropping and then smashed to pieces as it got going.

The Battle of Eisleben would in later years be something studied in detail at Leavenworth and other military staff colleagues worldwide.

The Saale north of Halle was reached late in the day and a couple of daring thrusts by elements of the 14th Cav’ took several bridgeheads over that by steaming through retreating enemy units trying to flee. These were temporary bridges built by Soviet engineers and conscripted East German manpower in response to the destruction of permanent crossings by NATO air power, but the 14th Cav’ was able to take them and establish positions on the eastern side of the river. Units from the 4th Armored Division soon reinforced them at these locations and while stopped from getting much deeper before darkness, the Saale had been crossed near Brucke, Friedeburg and Wettin. The plan was for advances to be made from those crossing sides tomorrow when the advance would continue.


Bundeswehr units with the US Fifth Army had been withdrawn from the frontlines pending transfer northwards while the national guardsmen who formed the remainder of the command spent the day consolidating what they held and eliminating previously bypassed opposition from the day beforehand. After Schneider had been sacked from his command role his deputy had taken over before a new man was named and those consolidation efforts were made.

The US IV Corps – with the 42nd Mechanized Infantry and 49th & 50th Armored Division’s – had avoided yesterday’s WOLF attack and fought near the town of Muhlhausen. East German Militia units had harassed them through the night operating from there and today those were engaged in daylight with the predictable results of when untrained irregulars went up against heavily-armoured real soldiers. Soldiers with the New York ARNG afterwards moved against Muhlhausen in an effort to test the waters as to what defences remained strong in the town and found that there were very few defenders there no longer with ammunition stocks to put up a fight to stop it being captured.

Further national guardsmen under command with the 49th Armored Division, part-time soldiers from Texas and Louisiana, struck to the south during the day concentrating on eliminating Soviet troops active in the area around Bad Langensalza and along the nearby upper reaches of the Unstrut Valley. Most of the encountered Soviets were on foot with machine guns mounted on M-60 tanks and M-113 personnel carriers making short work of them. Often times RPG’s would lance back at the vehicles which fired upon them which didn’t even dent the tanks but would sometimes cause casualties within the tracked personnel carriers. Reaction times among crews of those latter vehicles varied with those who had faced similar attacks before being better prepared. Such losses were very hard on the national guardsmen and they quickly learnt to be far more cautious in advancing where there might be enemy armed with such weapons and ‘hosed’ such areas first with heavy weapons. As to fixed positions where enemy forces were fighting from, these were few and far between in this area with concealment efforts not that effective to those on the ground as opposed from the air. Tank guns opened fire on these and so too did missiles fired by dismounted national guardsmen to blast them apart. Throughout the day, fighting would continue in this region with both sides taking a lot of losses and some, particularly on the American side, asking whether it was all worth it due to the overall strategic situation.

The US VI Corps had been hurt yesterday when hit by that sudden Soviet offensive that had come from nowhere against them and if the successes of WOLF against them had been repeated elsewhere then then most of the US Army in Germany certainly wouldn’t be having their current triumph. The majority of the losses taken had occurred with the 107th Armored Cavalry Regiment being almost completely destroyed along with elements of the 35th & 40th Mechanized Infantry Division’s suffering grave wounds too. Immense efforts by those two divisions had weathered the storm unleashed and pushed the attacking Soviets back therefore breaking them but as well as the American committed units too. Those forces involved remained today where they were along the Horsel River engaged in near static combat with each other following the previous day’s excursions.

The town of Eisenach also sat along the Horsel and into this historic location many Soviet forces pushed back yesterday had retreated into to join a major East German Militia presence there. US VI Corps intelligence pointed to a number approaching seven thousand, maybe more armed enemy soldiers here and with other advances being made elsewhere in Thüringen such a force couldn’t be left in the rear even if it was cut off. Ammunition stocks in the town were high too with missiles, shells and small arms; short-range SAM’s in number were launched against NATO aircraft and US Army helicopters flying nearby.

Orders were sent for the 29th Light Infantry Division to move against Eisenach. This formation was composed of national guardsmen from Virginia and Maryland with a noted history before them when during World War Two the ‘Blue & Gray Division’ had stormed the beaches of Normandy. Eisenach wasn’t Normandy though and there wasn’t going to be a repeat experience of that epic struggle here where so many lives were lost. Perimeter defences were set up with engineers working to lay minefields to block such a force inside so that when darkness came parties couldn’t launch forays outwards. A battalion of light troops from Virginia’s 116th Infantry Regiment went up into the high ground of the nearby Thüringen Forest alongside artillery units with lightweight guns. Soon enough Eisenach came under barrage from careful fire directed by experienced gunners looking down upon their targets. They aimed for hidden artillery and missile positions within the town and found those for the shells that came from their M-101 howitzers. Wartburg Castle escaped the artillery fire as the East Germans hadn’t sited any defences there but there was a lot of damage done to other parts of the town with a lot of history to them. In addition, a battery of M-198 guns with longer range and bigger shells under divisional command was given a mission order from higher command which turned out to be from the very highest levels indeed: they opened fire against an industrial facility that was VEB Automobilwerk Eisenach, a major car manufacturer. The gunners involved did their duty in destroying that target before they moved on to other tasks and weren’t aware of the significance as yet another important piece of East German’s economic infrastructure had jet been destroyed in a deliberate effort to meet political objectives.

As to the rest of Eisenach, with the defences being currently so strong, the intention was to keep it surrounded and attack from distance to avoid needless casualties for now.


General Otis as commander of the US Seventh Army remarked during the day that his forces were a magnet for stronger Soviet opposition to ABOLITION with more attention being focused upon them than others. This was due to yesterday’s events with WOLF being unleashed against his troops and then today’s increased air activity to try and stop them too. The daytime skies were filled with Soviet aircraft which became targets for NATO fighter pilots raking up kills as those tried to make strong air attacks against the US Army on the ground. Aircraft wreckage would litter the ground after such engagements with the Soviets being on the losing side though managing to take some of their opponents with them too. Despite all efforts there was still much effort being made by double-digit SAM units as well yet once such systems were identified after announcing their presence with launches they were attacked either physically or with electronic means.

Aerial engagements took place in great number through the morning but eased off come lunchtime and into the afternoon. Following that General Otis took the opportunity to make his first crossing over the Inter-German Border to visit his new forward headquarters being set up near Suhl in the middle of the Thüringen Forest. His staff rated the risk of even an escorted helicopter flight being too dangerous not just from enemy fighters but also Soviet stragglers left behind armed with shoulder-mounted SAM’s hidden in that high ground so he went by road instead. That apparent ending of Soviet air activity was only a lull though and it suddenly recommenced while the US Seventh Army commander was on the road. An air strike upon his convoy where an already-damaged Sukhoi-25 Frogfoot attack-fighter came out of nowhere at low-level despite much aerial surveillance taking place would take his life less than an hour after he had entered East Germany for the first time. Blame would come afterwards as to the lack of security and the careers of many of his headquarters staff would suffer while at the same time others would argue that such things happened in wartime.

Meanwhile, the trio of corps’ under his command spent the day doing what they had been doing yesterday: pursuing a beaten enemy. On the left was the US V Corps, in the centre came the Spanish I Corps and on the right, moving into Saxony rather than further into Thüringen, was the US VII Corps.

Coming down from the highest reaches of the Thüringen Forest, Schwarzkopf had his troops advance upon the twin targets of Erfurt and Weimar yesterday. His forward spearheads had reached the former yesterday and got mighty close to the latter. There were smashed Soviet formations, patiently rebuilt, left in his wake as he drove his forces onwards through them. The lower ground was perfect tank country for a heavily-supported heavy-armour advance and Schwarzkopf revelled in such a chance to go at the enemy like this. Hesitation from his subordinates wasn’t encouraged only carefully-planned daring to get far forward and right into the rear of the Soviets.

Today, Schwarzkopf set his commanders the task of striking further to the northeast and to the edges of Thüringen. The lower reaches of the Unstrut and the garrison town of Naumburg were the stated objectives with the desire to be halfway to Leipzig by the fading of daylight. The lower ground of the Ilm Valley was to be used with a flanking attack made through high ground on the left-hand side. Enemy aircraft were engaged as the advance got going by his air defence assets which travelled with the US V Corps and Schwarzkopf was pleased to see his tracked M-163 Vulcan anti-aircraft guns back in their traditional role of engaging aircraft (this was an art) instead of how they had recently been used against East German Militia when the multiple-barrelled 20mm guns had been called in to assist there. Stinger’s mounted by missilemen and tracked Chaparral SAM’s were put to use too and Schwarzkopf wondered whether any of the new Avenger systems – HMMWV’s with missiles and guns carried – would reach his command soon.

Away from the air threat, there were the usual dangers on the ground that the enemy liked to put to use against his advances today. From his travelling command post, Schwarzkopf issued repeated instructions warning of dangers from underestimating the Soviet Army even as it was being smashed to pieces. They still fielded high-quality lethal military equipment in number that was capable of doing a lot of damage to his command and killing many men. Speed was what he believed in but so too was taking care not to miss dangers that those subordinates of his needed to be aware of.

By sunset, Naumburg had been entered and the garrison there a ghost town after everyone present had been issued arms and called to the fight while at the same time the Unstrut River was crossed too. Schwarzkopf had his forces on both sides of the Saale and would be able to make an advance tomorrow unopposed by terrain against Leipzig as his orders from on high were. Then came the news that General Otis was dead and while saddened – he had got on well with his superior since his sudden thrust into a combat command role – Schwarzkopf couldn’t help thinking that the death of that man would mean opportunity for himself. It was a sad but true fact that wartime would bring promotion and he certainly knew that he would deserve such a position as commander of the US Seventh Army. He made sure that his staff was engaged in plans for further offensives while waiting on word to come.

The Saale Valley was also important for the Spanish. After beating back the attack against themselves yesterday morning that had followed the course of that river as it wound its way northwards with strong forces moving across hilly terrain to the east of there too. Enemy forces up high needed to be engaged and destroyed as their positions not only looked down upon the combat forces closing in on the city of Jena but also threatened the supply columns that moved up the Saale Valley behind the advancing troops. That fighting on both fronts continued today with the Spanish taking losses but giving more damage to a beaten enemy which was withdrawing time and time again as the Spanish Army – well versed now in all arms warfare in Germany – beat them back.

South of Jena, the Spanish sent several battalions of their Parachute Infantry Brigade into action with an airborne drop followed up by an airmobile assault (Schwarzkopf sent some helicopters to assist them) into Goschwitz. This village lay at a crossroads where road and rail links met and an area where Soviet defensive forces were in-place facing the approach of heavy forces coming towards them. Those troops landed in the high ground to the immediate west in an area probably not the best for such an assault as the hills that looked down below were very steep, but when the Spanish did get established following losses taken during the landing from the terrain they were able to focus on the enemy below them… with the Soviets below distracted by their presence too as the Spanish shot down at them and also guided-in close air support.

That move to distract the defenders of Goschwitz paid off for the Spanish with a successful ground attack being made against there against incomplete defences and then the final drive being made upon Jena. Outside that city during fighting there through the evening the Spanish took part in fierce fighting with dismounted Soviet soldiers and East German Militia but there were no tanks or heavy armoured vehicles present. They ended up taking about half of the city and pushing the defenders back in disarray to the north where they would be engaged through the night by small infantry teams but now the Spanish would focus upon following instructions from above issued earlier (one of General Otis’ final acts) for them to re-orientate their advance northeast tomorrow for continuing directly northwards would bring them into Schwarzkopf’s operational area rather than moving into open space to the right as he instructed them too.

General Watts had his US VII Corps divisions bypass Plauen but sent his 174th Brigade into there to clear out the strong opposition which had been withdrawing into the town since yesterday. Plauen was right at the base of the Autobahn that he planned to use as the axis of his advance moving deep into Saxony and up towards Zwickau, Karl-Marx-Stadt and then ultimately Dresden and couldn’t be allowed to be left unmolested alone. The fighting there was to be fierce with the now depressingly usual foolish attacks made by East German Militia who didn’t stand a chance and the losses suffered in taking it regretted, but there was no other choice available due to Plauen’s strategic geography.

The main advance went up that highway where construction started in the Nazi era had never finished linking Bavaria to Saxony and towards Zwickau. Heavy fighting took place along its length inside East Germany and throughout the countryside and villages that lay nearby. Encountered Soviet units made good use of terrain but couldn’t operate on the defence in a mobile fashion just like they failed in the static role. The 1st Armored Division along with the 1st & 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division’s – manned by combat veterans now joined by replacements – showed just how well-versed they now were in defeating the Soviet Army in open battle. Air attacks came with tactical strikes that sometimes got through and Watts was furious with his 4ATAF liaison officers who could only respond that their pilots were still doing a mighty fine job in stopping the majority of the attacks from taking place.

Zwickau was an important mining and industrial city along with major communications links. Taking it was vital for Watts’ mission in Saxony while holding it had been deemed of the highest priority for the Soviets. Their troops here were survivors of a long retreat all the way from Hessen with attachments gathered up as they withdrew – certainly not forces which could be called reinforcements with any truth – and beaten too many times in ongoing battles. Right outside Zwickau, as three US Army divisions conducted a full corps attack over a wide area with plenty of fire support, the Soviet Third Guards Army came apart. Some men mutinied and started killing their officers while others abandoned their positions to flee forwards or to the rear. There were no KGB security units present with the Third Chief Directorate being disbanded last week and rot had set in with men who had had enough. Tankers, infantrymen and gunners just gave up and stopped engaging the attacking Americans who rumour had it were unstoppable. Over the space of a couple of hours in one afternoon a complete field army just dissipated as a fighting force seemingly in an instant.

Watts had his tanks drive onwards while his military police units rushed into collect prisoners and infantry units engaged die-hards who weren’t giving up. Strategic reconnaissance reports had pointed to Karl-Marx-Stadt up ahead as having a major concentration of enemy intelligence activity going on at many facilities there and Watts’ own military intelligence staff raced to catch up with his lead elements. Surprising everyone, tanks with the Big Red One reached there by nightfall… Dresden wasn’t that far ahead either.


April 4th 1988 was a day that was going to enter the annals of US Army history as one of much victory but there was a strong suspicion among many that there were going to be plenty more days like today here in East Germany.





Two Hundred & Forty–Nine

Britain’s war wasn’t just fought on foreign battlefields between recognised combatants; there were fights at home in the political arena where the fights commenced with as much ruthlessness as lives were taken in battle.

The National Government, established during the political chaos of Transition to War, lasted twenty-eight days before it collapsed. Those members of Kinnock’s Labour Shadow Cabinet who had joined a unity coalition for what they believed was a greater good all decided to leave their posts as Minister’s Without Portfolio due to the immense pressure which they were under. Those five politicians couldn’t any longer serve within the National Government and their departure came after a late night meeting at Downing Street on the Monday night at the beginning of the war’s fourth week.

Denzil Davies, Donald Dewar, Frank Dobson, Bryan Gould and John Smith would all return to the Opposition benches in the House of Commons when it met again tomorrow morning and would face a tough time back with their colleagues. There had been plans afoot to publically expel them from the Labour Party as that organisation took a lurch to the left despite under it centralist leader Neil Kinnock who at that point was unawares as to the ground shifting beneath his feet.

The Prime Minister was saddened to see the collapse of the National Government – David Steel with his Social & Liberal Democrats remained yet infighting among them too made their presence rather embarrassing and the whole coalition a moot point without those from Labour – but was very understanding of the situation those MP’s had been in as their colleagues turned against them with the venom that they did. Dewar and Smith had been especially effective in serving their country in helping to at first calm down the domestic chaos that had overtaken the country and then afterwards working to help heal wounds. Detractors of Thatcher would in later years claim that she had schemed and plotted to keep them with the National Government to weaken the Labour Party for many years to come in fractures and recriminations though in her memoirs those allegations would be rubbished… but still the claims would be made and those who believed them weren’t about to believe her word over their own deeply-held beliefs.

Regardless, there was still an effective British Government left governing afterwards. Reshuffles didn’t have to be made as none of the departed Labour MP’s had held ministerial briefs. Rioting was no longer tearing the country apart either following assistance giving in calming the situation and unless the war took an unexpected terrible turn for the worst, the nation wasn’t on the verge of internal collapse as it had at certain points looked like it had been before the National Government came into effect. Other members of Thatcher’s government were glad that the coalition was over with as they had had to hold their nose when working alongside those from Labour, Dobson and Gould especially, due to serious ideological differences.


Most of the wider Cabinet met in Downing Street afterwards in preparation for the House of Commons sitting in the morning in another closed session. Many of these ministers had spent a great deal of time in dispersed bunkers throughout the country during the first weeks of the war preparing to govern what remained of the country in a post nuclear attack scenario. Nerves had been frayed in the tension of that and they had afterwards returned to London when the judgement was made that such a threat of thermonuclear holocaust was now a remote possibility.

In their absence, the War Cabinet had been running the country following what amounted to Royal Decrees authorised by orders-in-council during TtW. Cabinet government and Parliamentary democracy had been side-lined due to the grave dangers perceived in those difficult times, yet the missiles hadn’t come and the country was still standing. There were now issues that certain members of the Cabinet wished to see addressed when they couldn’t be beforehand and these were discussed this evening in what many would deem ‘lively debates’. Thatcher didn’t face a Cabinet rebellion but there was a lot of tension between several members of her government over what had been done in their absence.

Economics dominated the Cabinet meeting.

Emergency Treasury reserves had been spent in the pre-war LION mobilisation and then there had come that massive secret loan from the United States which while interest free would eventually have to be paid back. Tax revenues at the minute were exactly zero and even if the government had been willing to sell off the nation’s gold reserves – something which no one would want to do except if Britain was in the most dire straits – there didn’t look like there would be a buyer for those at a price the country would be willing to accept. West Germany had done that with its gold reserves being sold on the open market and the embattled Bonn government would regret the prices they accepted when their gold bullion was moved their areas of safe storage in bank vaults below New York across those underground facilities to the areas where other nations stored their gold. Without the knowledge of the public, saving accounts had already been raided with bonds issued in their places as every penny and pound that could be found to support the war effort was currently being spent. Private enterprise nationwide had almost ceased to exist and international trade was only just starting up again into Britain with all of that being war-related whether of military goods or food supplies to keep the country fed.

The war had brought about an economic disaster of unimaginable magnitude all so that that Britain could keep fighting. Nationalisation had occurred reversing dear-held Conservative policies and the financial market in London which had been booming pre-war remained closed for fear of what would occur there should it reopen and the truth unfold. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lawson had overseen the destruction of the national economy so that Britain could fulfil its role in defending itself and Western Europe during those dire days but now, as the situation had been reversed with military victories occurring on the battlefields, it was time to look at what the future might bring.

There were moments were Cabinet members held their head in their hands when they fully grasped what had been done to finance the war. They had been told that military equipment and supplies had been shared between NATO and the Allies without costs in terms of purchase or rent with every nation chipping in with what they had so that others could use. While that was true, what hadn’t been understood was that other things had to be paid for. Britain’s domestic energy production had been attacked directly by enemy bombs and so too its oil refineries. Coal and fuel for tanks, ships and planes had to be brought on the world market where even deals made with nations supporting the Allies still had come with a cost even at ‘friend prices’ invoked. It was the same thing with food to keep stomachs full and a lot of construction equipment to make hasty repairs and build new facilities at speed. This all cost a great deal while paper money could be printed for domestic use those overseas wanted ‘real’ money.

If this hadn’t been done though, it was asked in response to exasperated comments, what state would the country be in now if defending Britain hadn’t been given the highest of priorities above everything else?

The realisation of the cost in financial terms overshadowed other aspects of that late evening meeting where further news from the war came to do with how it was being fought abroad. Even the latest casualty figures, when added to those already incurred, didn’t have the same sort of effects. Clarke spoke of the vastly-improved situation in Northern Ireland and Hurd of how great strives were being made to combat domestic crime rates. King was away on a visit to the United States with the intention of seeing Bush there so Mellor standing in for him at Cabinet spoke of continuing successes in foreign relations.

However, the minds of those in the Cabinet were on the economy. They worried over how a solution to all of this mess created was going to be found and whether anything would work. Tomorrow’s session in the House of Commons was pushed to the back of their minds with what the Opposition having to say when they were expected to attack the government’s conduct during the war being regarded now as of little consequences with a country that was in effective not just broke but likely to be in serious debt for decades to come. Depression hit many of them as they finally understood the financial consequences of this war for their country.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Fifty

The first elements of Ogarkov’s fifth and final echelon of combat armies arrived on the Polish–East German border during the early hours of April 5th. Trains and road convoys laden with mobilised troops from across the western and even central and southern parts of the Soviet Union came upon the Oder and Neisse Rivers that separated the two countries and prepared to start their crossing operations over what turned out to be – due to external factors – a formidable water barrier for them.

There were forty divisions in total and combined with all the necessary supporting elements more than six hundred and fifty thousand men who should have now been moving into East Germany (along with eighty-six hundred tanks) to put a final stop to NATO’s invasion going any further. This was meant to be the final hurrah of Soviet arms on the battlefield and would be too… just not in the manner which Ogarkov thought it would be.

Less than half of the number of men who were meant to reach East Germany to stop that country falling would make it to those rivers along the border instead of all of them as planned.


A quarter of a million Soviet Army reservists didn’t answer the call of mobilisation and make an appearance when they were supposed to. There were some of those who managed to wrangle semi-official approval for not showing up as they were engaged in ‘vital war-work’ that would mean they had to stay at home but in the overwhelming majority of cases there was just the non-appearance of such men at the mobilisation centres across Soviet cities and towns. The totalitarian state that was the Soviet Union had failed in something which its very foundations were built upon: having its citizens too frightened to oppose official decrees. Letters were sent to homes and broadcasts made over the news calling up these men but they simply didn’t turn out. There were worries over the consequences for those involved but not outright fear that would force them to obey official instructions to do their duty for the Rodina.

Another hundred thousand men meant to be serving in those divisions and field armies supposed to roll into East Germany in a tidal wave of hardened soldiers and overwhelming armour didn’t get from their mobilisation stations to the Oder-Neisse. There were transportation delays on the way though the Soviet Union and men deserted in droves at every given opportunity as the thought of what lay ahead of them at the end of their journey wasn’t something that they wished to see. Others were caught up in the violence with the Great Polish Rebellion and either ended up engaged in fighting civilians there or re-tasked to guard important locations; desertion rates when within Poland were low and also fatal to those who tried it.

Ogarkov had no idea as to these numbers. He had been made aware of the failures in mobilisation where speed was considered necessary over getting everyone ready in-time but believed in was in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds. In addition, the scale of desertion rates during transit was again something he wasn’t aware of. When he would much later find out and hear excuses about delays in confirmation of numbers he wouldn’t be best pleased to say the least.

‘The plan’ had been for the ten field armies to cross into East Germany between Frankfurt-an-der-Oder and Gorlitz north of the Czechoslovakian border. They would have moved as one westwards to link up with those reorganised Soviet Army forces in the southern parts of East Germany and defeated the Americans from penetrating any further than they had at that point been just past the Inter-German Border. There would have been the last air reserves unleashed too along with air defence provided by the latest-model SAM’s on the ground. Once the Americans were pushed back over the border the fifth echelon would have turned to the north to deal with the British and the West Germans after striking against the strongest opponents first before going after those rated as weakest. However, delays to them and then the NATO advances had seen the air defences ruined, the reorganised troops already in East Germany fail with WOLF and then air reserves committed early. The fifth echelon therefore wasn’t on its way to meet friendly forces waiting for it far to the west as planned and nor with external support too already in-place. When the armies started to reach the Polish-East German border although they approached it in the planned location, they were far from one coherent force either with units stretched all the way back across Poland.

Ogarkov’s grand strategy to win the war using these troops had been doomed before it even got started.

*

NATO military strength was also purposefully put to use to make sure that ABOLITION wouldn’t be interfered with by those hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops which were meant to be riding to the rescue. Their movement across Poland had been watched by satellites and reconnaissance aircraft as well as electronic snooping too with the resulting chaos that was caused there. Fighting those troops as far to the east as possible was desired but even better would be to make sure that as few as possible reached East Germany and those who did get that far wouldn’t be in a fit state to combat those NATO forces moving further forward every day.

The 3ATAF had been on standby to change the focus of its air attacks from strategic targets across East Germany and into Poland – in the latter case many of the transportation links near the border – to stop the onrush of Soviet reinforcements. Crossings over the Oder and the Neisse from the very few original structures still standing to all of the newer temporary ones, along with the defences around them, were to be targeted again and again once the moment occurred that they were reached by Ogarkov’s fifth echelon.

In the early hours of this morning, with all intelligence pointing to the time being right to act, RAF and USAF aircraft with the 3ATAF went into action against tactical targets along the banks of those rivers.


The large swathes of East German territory now in NATO hands after being captured in recent days meant that the areas where aircraft with the 3ATAF struck at were not that far from friendly airspace. What once would have been deep strike missions to fly though a hundred or more miles of enemy airspace before making the approach to the target were now considered to be at medium-range. The 3ATAF was still based in southern and western parts of Britain but forward refuelling could take place over East Germany itself now rather than far back over the Low Countries or the Rhineland meaning that more weapons could be carried and there were shorter periods where the aircrews faced high levels of risk. Ground-based air defences had been overrun in great number during the past day especially and while there had been a boon in intelligence gathered from on-the-ground inspections made by NATO air officers travelling with the ground forces that also meant that there were fewer defences between the frontlines and the targets… with the possibility that the enemy wasn’t going to get a chance to repair their SAM network either too especially if the border between Poland and East Germany could be shut.

Tornado GR1’s, F-111 and FB-111 variants in strike packages, F-117’s on lonely missions and formations of B-52 bombers were also joined by more Tornado’s and plenty of F-16’s too on temporary assignment from the 2ATAF and the 4ATAF to strengthen their efforts due to those factors changing how NATO air power was to operate this morning. Crews had been on stand-down through the night with the hope that the enemy wasn’t aware of this morning’s plans and when the aircraft started filling the skies laden with weapons and meeting tankers, there was no surprise ambush waiting for them just targets… plenty of those.

There were road and rail crossings all along the river with more than fifty confirmed as targets for air attack this morning along with the defences around them. Most bridges had recently been constructed in a temporary fashion with the wrecks of others put in-place before them very nearby. These couldn’t carry the weight of those which they replaced and there were always going to be bottlenecks around them of trains, vehicles and men who were secondary targets to the crossings themselves. Defences would consist of guns, missiles and even aircraft expected yet none of that would come as a surprise to NATO as these had been met beforehand.

At three o’clock in the morning, hundreds of NATO aircraft flew towards these.


The East German town of Forst sat just back from the Neisse. This was a small manufacturing centre with state-controlled textile industries dominating the employment sector. Young men had gone off to war and plenty of those in their late Twenties and early Thirties had too though not as many as had might been had the East German’s been more cooperative with Soviet efforts to mobilise East German manpower. Factories across the town had been forcibly made to produce uniforms for soldiers in recent weeks. The Stasi had a presence in the town here to keep the people in line though the locals were glad that there were few Soviets to be seen. Nearby at the river, the big railway bridge and the small road bridge providing connections to Poland had been downed in fantastic night-time explosions early in the war though no casualties had been caused within the town. That was the way that the inhabitants of Frost would rather have the war and when they heard on the radio that the ‘evil American and English Imperialists’ were on their way eastwards invading East Germany there didn’t worry themselves greatly over that; it was better than having the Soviet Army back again like in 1945.

The townspeople weren’t aware that a complete Soviet field army of mobilised reservists from the eastern reaches of Siberia was due to be moving through Forst later today. They were enjoying a night’s sleep when the screams of air-raid sirens pierced through the silence of dreams and then came the sounds of anti-aircraft guns that drowned out those.

Above came a flight of four RAF Tornado strike-bombers which flashed over the town at low-level. A last minute change of routing had come due to enemy short-range SAM’s being present along their projected course with the diversion made over Forst out of necessity. There was the almighty roar of their engines that then masked the noise of the guns firing blind up into the sky at them after those had silenced the air-raid sirens. Windows rattled and a few buildings shook; East German citizens woken in the night didn’t know what was going on with some thinking that they themselves were under attack!

This is the R.A.F wishing you an early good morning.

Then the explosions came, just to the east along the river. Blasts that would wake the dead thundered one after another for what seemed like an entirety though in actuality for less than a minute. Warm gusts of air would blow across the town afterwards with the concussion effects from the blasts with more windows rattling and again a few less-sturdy buildings shaking.

Those Tornado’s were from No. 14 Squadron, a formation assigned to the 2ATAF in the tactical role which had started the war with a dozen aircraft and then had a few replacements added but was now done to only eight combat-capable strike-bombers. Those four on this mission – the others were tonight sent again targets further north – had carried a heavy load of ordnance with them tonight each consisting of a pair of air-to-air missiles for self-defence, shells for the 27mm cannon and five 500lb high-explosive bombs. They had conducted their attack against four of the bridges in the Forst area aiming for the two temporary railway bridges that replaced the downed heavyweight crossing providing a major link and two of the three identified roadway crossings as well. Some bombs fell astray and missed their targets either falling into the river or to the ground though those of the latter that smashed into Poland struck military targets there with trains and trucks present. Anti-aircraft guns had fired at them but that was wild and the Tornado’s got away without damage.

There came two more attacks made against the crossings over the Neisse near Frost during the early hours with the second of those striking against alternate targets just inside Poland when intelligence showed that the bridges were down. Four USAF F-16C’s with the 4ATAF arrived less than a quarter of an hour after the RAF and put more bombs onto those bridges already hit plus the untouched fifth structure too. Further explosions shook the town and there was also a lot of anti-aircraft fire. One of the USAF took major wing damage when 23mm shells smashed into that F-16 and the pilot diverted to an alternate strip in occupied East Germany for an emergency landing there rather than the bailing out over enemy territory; he made it but the night-time touchdown at an airfield he had never been to before when damaged caused his aircraft to be written off with him only just escaping with his life from the wreck.

The RAF and USAF had conducted low-level strikes near Forst yet the pair of Belgian F-16’s which made the third attack came in over the area at medium-level and above anti-aircraft gunfire. USAF F-15’s firing from distance had downed a pair of enemy MiG-23’s coming towards them and they then took their time in lining-up an attack against the collection of trains and trucks on the eastern side of the river. Bombs fell away from their strike-fighters and fireballs erupted below with the expectation that they had hit fuel trucks. A huge conflagration would be left behind them across in that part of Poland and much damage was assured to have been done there like those who had come before them tonight had done to the bridges.


Forst was a good example of the successes had all along the borderline where that followed the rivers separating Poland and East Germany in what had been deemed Operation HAMMER. There were some costly partial achievements won in a few places elsewhere, but in the main the air strikes did what they were meant to do in smashing the crossings before they could be put to use and also attacking forces waiting to use them too. A massive B-52 raid in the Gorlitz area was a good example of victories like Forst and so too were a devastating (but costly with seven aircraft lost) when F-111’s hit the crossings south of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder.

Steel structures fell into the water everywhere and even those still standing were more often than not unusable due to giant holes in them that betrayed their now instability. Fires raged on the eastern banks though in a few cases on the western side of the rivers too.

This wasn’t a one-off series of air strikes. NATO aircraft would continue to strike throughout the morning with plans to keep this up as long as necessary. There wouldn’t be as many aircraft involved as in the first attack yet there wouldn’t have to be either. Post-strike reconnaissance would show where further attention needed to be paid and then there would be air strikes aimed at engineers trying to make good the damage done. Moreover, behind those downed crossings would come further targets of enemy troops being held up ready for the crossings to be reopened and therefore further worthy targets for air attacks. Ogarkov’s fifth echelon would be stuck in ‘friendly’ territory unable to move as further formations joined those already unable to cross the Oder and the Neisse making redeployment impossible.

There was a certain feeling that even with some leakage, a dam had now been created that would be impassable. The war was now NATO’s to win to the west of that across East Germany with the enemy forces there effectively cut off with no supply, no reinforcements and a victorious army soon to complete ABOLITION.





Two Hundred & Fifty–One

There never had been any doubt as to who would assume Otis’ role as commander of the US Seventh Army following his untimely death due to enemy action; Schwarzkopf was the immediate and only option as far as those who would make the decision mattered.

He had taken on the role of US V Corps commander in an emergency and done exceedingly well there in leading them back to the Inter-German Border, across it and then deep into East Germany. There had been other factors of a strategic nature in play yet it was determined that his aggressive leadership style and the daring that he encouraged among his subordinates had made that possible. Schwarzkopf had worked hard to assist the propaganda war with his deft handling of the media and worked extremely well with allies too, especially the West Germans and the Spanish. His pre-war Pentagon role was not just a desk job but a stepping stone to higher things after he had previously served as the commander of the US I Corps based in the Western United States with Schwarzkopf being talked of for promotion at that point from a three-star Lt.-General to a four-staff full General to assume command of either US Southern Command or Central Command.

Most of his military career hadn’t been on deployment in Europe like his peers within the US Army yet he had served in West Germany for a short period of time before in addition to service in Vietnam, Alaska and the mainland United States. There had too been his appointment to be the deputy commander of URGENT FURY in Grenada five years ago where his star had shone and those of others had faded.

With the NATO command structure as it was, the appointment of a new US Seventh Army commander was General von Sandrart’s to make with that Bundeswehr officer being next in the chain of command. General Galvin as SACEUR was de facto the man to give the order for Schwarzkopf to assume the duties of the deceased Otis but he deferred to those above him. The role that the US Seventh Army had in this war was something of political significance and so its commander was chosen back home among the senior brass and the politicians. Acting President Bush, Defence Secretary Carlucci and US Army Chief-of-Staff Vuono all wanted Schwarzkopf in-place at once. They agreed with SACEUR that there was no one else who could fulfil that role that they wished to see the US Seventh Army’s commander doing.

von Sandrart, someone who had made himself unpopular with many in the British Army, risked making enemies in the US Army too though with his actions. As C-in-C Northern Germany, he was controlling the five army-groups (soon to be four though) of NATO forces invading East Germany and also operating in the far northern parts of occupied West Germany. A week beforehand he had been welcomed Lt.-General Edwin Burba to his headquarters with that US Army officer preforming what many would regard as a ‘spare heir’ role. Burba was a widely-experienced career officer who knew the business of soldiering and had been sent to Europe to stand ready to replace senior US Army officers killed in battle or otherwise leaving their command. The thinking behind this was that Burba would be up to speed on all aspects of the war here in Germany with knowledge of those operations and NATO personnel here rather than should someone like him be needed such a man wasn’t coming across the North Atlantic at short notice into an unfamiliar environment. Burba was attached to von Sandrart’s headquarters as his top-level liaison with the US Army in an unofficial position where he was effectively waiting for someone to die.

Burba was put forward for commander of US Seventh Army by von Sandrart for SACEUR’s approval the moment that it was confirmed that Otis had been killed; Burba was asked whether he could fill that man’s shoes and confirmed that he could as he was doing the duty of a soldier and obeying a senior officer. General Galvin hadn’t been made aware of this though and when he was given the affirmative from the NSC to have Schwarzkopf appointed there were now two men who the same job had been given to. The reasoning of von Sandrart in acting fast and entrusting such a role to someone well-experienced and who had a good personal relationship with (they had spent much time together in the past week) was perfectly correct and the NATO command structure meant that it was supposed to be his choice; Burba was also someone who was regarded as capable too.

Yet… he wasn’t Schwarzkopf and wasn’t chosen by the highest levels of the US Government either.

Keeping in mind how to act in an honourable fashion as was expected of officers with the US Army, General Galvin visited von Sandrart’s mobile command centre located at that time near Paderborn. He saw the Bundeswehr general and Burba there and told them that his wishes were for Burba to take over from Schwarzkopf leading US V Corps with Schwarzkopf then replacing Otis. There were no raises voices, no disagreements and that was the matter solved with everyone seemingly coming away from that meeting happy enough. Many years later, one of SACEUR’s personal representatives at the time in the form of then Major David Petraeus would mention that meeting in his memoirs that covered his service in World War Three and other conflicts afterwards and give a different take on how that meeting went, especially when it came to how von Sandrart reacted as his wartime authority being overruled for what he saw as political interference.

While officially not related to what Petraeus would call the ‘Paderborn Showdown’, immediately following the Third World War the US Congress would enact laws that went alongside long-term feelings that US military forces abroad would not be subservient to the wishes of foreigners in a combat situation, even close allies.


Not present at Paderborn but rather inside East Germany, Schwarzkopf received word of his new appointment during the night and relinquished command of US V Corps temporarily to his deputy and travelled to US Seventh Army’s forward headquarters. He quickly reviewed the status of his new command from the positions they maintained to the available strength to the supply situation. He held quick meetings with foreign liaison officers and personnel from intelligence agencies who had operatives with the US Seventh Army. Then was too a military intelligence summary and then an operations plans meeting that Schwarzkopf had attended during his first night in charge; his appointment came at a very busy time.

When reviewing what Otis had planned for the next stage of operations during ABOLITION, Schwarzkopf had decided that while he had no disagreements with what continuing operations were planned, he believed that there needed to be more done for the US Seventh Army to undertake its mission properly. SACEUR had expressed much faith in him and stated that the NSC back home was expecting that the US Seventh Army lead the way ahead of the rest of NATO in conquering East Germany. Schwarzkopf had thus decided that several planned operations which had been put on stand-by but with forces assigned ready to go, were to take place during the following day.

Early on the Tuesday morning, as NATO aircraft closed the Polish-East German border, the new US Seventh Army commander made a couple of gambles with offensives he ordered though the risks had been calculated and judged to be worth taking.

*

Just before dawn broke with the skies still being dark but only in moments about to lighten, US Army helicopters arrived at several points along the Weisse Elster River with Blackhawk’s, Chinook’s and Huey’s all touching down along both banks and air assault troops rushing from these before the helicopters flew off again. This waterway ran through the East German countryside south of Leipzig and right across the operational areas where the US V Corps and the Spanish I Corps – on the left and in the centre of the US Seventh Army – were meant to advance now as they turned to the east rather than heading northeast as before. The urban centre of that large city was to be left alone and so too were the operational areas slated for the US Third Army advancing around Halle as per orders from above and this waterway presented a barrier up-ahead. Otis had planned to have it attacked from the ground and its defenders engaged there but Schwarzkopf had seen intelligence pointing to its weak defences against an airmobile assault and decided that it wouldn’t be a barrier any more.

Apache and Cobra gunships had travelled with the transport helicopters and poured fire onto Soviet troops in blocking points at the three locations where a battalion of air assault troops landed at each of those. These US Army soldiers had recently arrived in Germany from Korea and served with the 2nd Mechanized Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade but were now with the 82nd Airborne Division. Similar missions like this, though not on the same scale, had been planned for them in Korea should the stand-off with the North turned to war there and so they had the training for an airmobile attack like they were thrown into. Those battalions – 1/503 INF, 2/503 INF and 1/506 INF – were at once engaged in fights to take temporary bridges built by the Soviet Army over the Weisse Elster. These were just like those being destroyed over the Oder and the Neisse off to the east with demolition charges being in-place too. Vicious combat erupted as they tried to seize as many of the pontoon and assault bridges over the narrow waterway as possible before they were blown up by defenders taken by surprise but who fought back with much bravery.

Both the US V Corps and the Spanish were soon making their advances to meet the airmobile troops fighting through smashed enemy units to make the link-up before those exposed light units took too many casualties in seizing bridges to be used.


Beyond the Weisse Elster lay the flat and fertile Osterland region which was south of Leipzig. Schwarzkopf was sending his forces towards there with the intention of rounding the city to the south and then moving back northwards again tomorrow heading for the Mulde River and then the Elbe too; there were many water barriers that crossed his planned line of advance. Another river lay in that region and again across his line of march with bridges assembled in wartime across that that too were guarded and wired for demolition.

More of his light troops, this time paratroopers with the 82nd Airborne Division’s two regular brigades, were sent in a simultaneous operation to seize them to. Twice as many troops conducted four air-drops over targeted locations along that river too with landings made on both riverbanks. The assault on the Weisse Elster was a tactical operation just ahead of his troops but the planned seizure of the crossings over the Mulde took on a more strategic fashion with the paratroopers here being committed so far forward. There was the chance that they wouldn’t be relieved until the late evening, maybe even the next day, yet Schwarzkopf knew that to construct his own bridges would take a lot of time and these already in-place would certainly be destroyed once the enemy realised what was going on with the US Seventh Army striking like this.

Fierce battles again erupted for control of bridges south of Leipzig when the paratroopers arrived in small-scale fighting where everything was at stake for those involved.


Schwarzkopf took another gamble to the south with the US VII Corps already deep inside Saxony. Zwickau had fallen yesterday and the edge of Karl-Marx-Stadt reached when the majority of the Soviet Third Guards Army’s fighting strength had collapsed and Schwarzkopf ordered the advance to continue aiming for Dresden even without stopping to engage what few organised enemy forces remained. To reach that city would put US Army troops very close to Poland itself, shut off communications between East Germany & Czechoslovakia and achieve a political victory that his appointment was meant to fast bring about. Watts was ordered to make a rush for Dresden to reach there today and if not then get very close to it.

As was his style, Schwarzkopf made the US VII Corps commander aware that he was to take all necessary measures to defend his flanks as long as those went hand-in-hand with the desired result of reaching Dresden. He had seen the reconnaissance reports and the intelligence summaries showing what scattered and weak enemy forces there were in Saxony and expected the US VII Corps to act accordingly. However, very quickly it became clear that there were some who didn’t share Schwarzkopf’s understanding of how he thought warfare inside East Germany was to occur. The enemy was in in disarray and was to be treated as dangerous but on the retreat and without central command-and-control not like they were at the beginning of the conflict.

Colonel Eric Shinseki – a brigade commander within the 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division – incurred Schwarzkopf’s ire during the day and learnt the result of that. Orders went down for Shinseki to be relieved of duty for ‘indecision’ and ‘ill-haste’ for actions when that colonel was leading the advance behind the 2nd Cav’. Fights with Soviet forces making a stand in the area around the town of Hainichen had distracted the drive up the Autobahn towards Dresden and the delays caused by by-the-book methods to deal with enemy tanks and armoured infantry there rather than bypassing them meant that bridges further up ahead were blown up before they could be taken and that city reached. There were arguments made that even without the fighting around Hainichen where what amounted to a regiment-sized force of the enemy was smashed apart wouldn’t have mattered as the Soviets were always going to blow those bridges… but Shinseki was still relieved of duty.

Dresden wouldn’t be reached today.


Everything about the command style employed by Schwarzkopf was different to how things had been done before. He was brash with those who disagreed with him and short with subordinates who he told were still in a peacetime state of mind. He wanted results and results fast. When those come those who achieved them would enter his favour and would be rewarded with more responsibility.

Some unfortunate instances aside, Schwarzkopf very quickly won over everyone he worked with. The US Seventh Army had done exceedingly well beforehand in holding back the Soviets – but only just – and then counter-invading East Germany. With Schwarzkopf in command those who served within it very quickly came to understand that he aimed to have them win the war rather than other parts of the US Army or NATO forces also taking part in ABOLITION.

During the day as Schwarzkopf was making his mark, he was visited by further intelligence operatives regarding activities around Karl-Marx-Stadt. East German Militia units, based around their KdA paramilitary, were within that city in number alongside some Soviet forces of lesser number; they had been bypassed with US VII Corps striking elements moving away to the northeast rather than going into that city. Schwarzkopf was told that there was plenty of strategic intelligence that Karl-Marx-Stadt was home to many enemy intelligence activities and while many personnel with the KGB, GRU and Stasi had fled expecting the city to become a battlefield others remained. There were offices and other facilities there along with special prisons were high-value captives had been taken to during the conflict and were reported to still be held. Asked what they wanted from him, Schwarzkopf was told that a major effort was needed to take the city so that such facilities could be seized and prisoners released.

As expected, such a request didn’t go down too well with Schwarzkopf. He was being asked to assign forces engaged in forward operations as part of ABOLITION to attack an urban target in the rear where heavy and strong resistance was expected. The information he was given on the ‘intelligence sites’ was patchy and his own military intelligence people doubted the veracity of much of those estimates. It sounded to him like a way to see thousands of his soldiers killed for what could be very minimal gains. At the same time, Schwarzkopf realised that he couldn’t not act against such enemy activities of an unconventional nature going on in Karl-Marx-Stadt.

He asked that the spooks come back to him with a real plan that contained better intelligence than what they had given him while he also moved to seek guidance from SACEUR on this issue.

Meanwhile, all across southern parts of East Germany, the US Seventh Army would spend the day advancing as more and more of that country fell under the occupation of the Spanish Army and the US Army.





Two Hundred & Fifty–Two

The Allied Military Control Commission (AMCC) grew very quickly during the war beyond the size and task that it had originally been planned to perform. What begun as nothing more than a tidying-up exercise to establish an organisation to deal with the planned occupation of East Germany after the Brussels meeting decided to launch ABOLITION increased multiple times in scale and mission. The West Germans had forced the AMCC on their NATO allies with the intent that they shouldn’t alone have to deal with the burden of East Germany and the responsibilities of occupation were thus shared.

Providing food and medical care for East German civilians as NATO armies moved through their country increased to assisting the internal refugee problem inside the areas under occupation – the latter not foreseen and especially not in the numbers that eventually were. Disarming East German Militia units became another function and the occupation authorities then had to deal with a crime wave that took off where theft, mindless destruction, violence and murder occurred with alarming frequency throughout their rear areas. Furthermore, the AMCC would be tasked with overseeing war crimes investigations as well in a combined NATO effort rather than at first attempted by individual nation state armed forces.

What was first agreed in Brussels as what many thought was a very small exercise became a burdensome mission equal to the invasion very quickly.


NATO – and the wider Allies too – had a moral obligation as an occupying military power to care for civilians of their battlefield enemy that fell into their care. Soviet, East German and other Socialist Forces occupation authorities had failed in that duty but there had been a determination to not do the same with East Germany and also Czechoslovakia; possibly Poland too. While a military organisation, the AMCC was staffed with many civilians as well from NATO nations and these were not in East Germany to act like the occupiers had done in West Germany. Volunteer organisation from many Allied countries submitted themselves to overall control of the AMCC later and there were many official observers attached as well; the AMCC was kept ‘honest’ by this as well as continued West German reminders that those in East Germany were ‘Germans too’.

As expected, there were many voices of influence calling for harsh rule to be imposed upon those in East Germany who fell under NATO control but such people were ignored. War criminals were hunted down, the illegal authorities there disbanded and the destruction of the dictatorial regime sought but at the same time the people were cared for too. Those who wanted to initially fight were dealt with by military units engaged in combat missions but as the AMCC did its work there was found to be no basis to the assurances from naysayers that there would be deadly domestic resistance to ‘invaders’… and therefore best to treat everyone encountered like an enemy. Nations of the West had fought many wars across the world where they failed to make that distinction on the ground between enemy combatant and soldier and turned the native population up in arms against them.

Popular opinion would in later years credit the influence of Sweden, the Low Countries, Ireland and various international NGO’s in making the AMCC the success that it was though at the same time the role of the United States was largely forgotten (much to American chagrin) despite all their efforts in terms of manpower, food and medical supplies.

The humanitarian objective went hand-in-hand with military goals too. NATO did not want to have to face extensive civilian-based attacks on their military forces still engaged in wartime operations with an insurgency being regarded as the worst possible outcome for ABOLITION. There was plenty of opposition from semi-organised East German KdA irregulars but to face true guerilla warfare inside East Germany was not in any way wanted. Doubts over what the AMCC could do were there and plans were made to deal with other outcomes though when initial successes were met the support given to the AMCC was increased and the role that organisation had planned for it expanded.

Events which occurred in the early stages of the invasion of Czechoslovakia – where the AMCC at first played a very limited role due to initial French resistance to their presence (even though they signed an agreement in Brussels) – showed what could have happened in East Germany and the thinking was that it could have been much worse in the latter with its larger population and better access to arms for civilians.

A lot of careers for civil servants and soldiers would be made within the AMCC and their time spent with the organisation would see their personal futures brightened. Meanwhile, East Germany’s civilians during the occupation would have food in their bellies, shelter from the elements and not run the daily risk of being killed.


NATO military officers with the AMCC would be mainly tasked with security assistance and logistics roles: it was the Allied Military Control Commission after all. There were other duties that those in uniform preformed though that didn’t make it into the propaganda efforts undertaken to show how magnanimous in victory NATO could be.

AMCC military personnel were present where surrenders of Soviet forces occurred making sure that the interests of the interests of the Allies were always maintained with such men involved in the details of such battlefield agreements. This was in the main an administrative function though with the unspoken agenda of making sure that everything was always kept above board. Countries were fighting alongside each other across East Germany yet the fact was recognised that selfish interest could come into play if there wasn’t an outsider present just to make sure.

A more overt role was the presence of AMCC personnel to detain ‘personalities’ who fell into the custody of NATO troops during their combat operations. Acting in conjunction with operatives from various national intelligence agencies, these military officers were tasked to make arrests before high-value prisoners of a political nature were transferred to the custody of spooks. Personalities such as important East German politicians and regime officials were those of interest who while technically civilians couldn’t be treated as military POW’s to be sent to camps across Western Europe. AMCC officers were the ones who took the former high-ranking East German politician Egon Krenz – Honecker’s former deputy before the after-effects of the Moscow Coup caused the fall of the old guard and the rise of Mielke – from the custody of Spanish troops in Jena where they had come across him before West German security services then took him away for detention. They were there too when US Army medics tried desperately to save the life of the former spymaster Markus Wolf from a self-inflicted gunshot with the intention of him ending up with CIA personnel on the way; unfortunately for the spooks Wolf and the secrets in his head were lost when he died in the back of an ambulance version of the tracked M-113.

War crimes investigations were not assigned to the AMCC upon creation but soon became a major area of their activities. These took place on both sides of the Inter-German Border – leading to some initial difficulties with West German authorities until political discussions occurred – and would spread far from East Germany into Scandinavia, Denmark and Austria as well as Czechoslovakia when the French became more amenable. Many NATO reservists who were civilian police officers in peacetime would assist in this and there would in later stages come the aid of FBI expertise as well though the AMCC remained the sole investigating authority.

There were POW camps and bodies dumped near battlefields (when soldiers were shot after surrendering) to be combed over looking for clues as to perpetrators with in the latter many unfortunate results attributing blame to NATO units showing ill-discipline as well; such enquires were political dynamite when NATO troops were accused of shooting men who had surrendered but evidence was there to attest to that in many cases. Civilians had been killed in areas occupied by Soviet troops and those of the Socialist Forces and their murders needed investigation along with evidence pointing to organised mass rapes and even torture for tortures sake. West German civilians who had fallen into the hands of East German organised occupation had suffered gravely with many of those later being transferred into East Germany too. Soviet reprisals in Denmark against civilians for the actions of the Danish Resistance would see a lot of investigation being done yet, at the same time, the re-established Danish authorities would actively block enquiries made as to some of the actions undertaken by civilian volunteer ‘patriots’ against the occupier there that were argued by some in the AMCC to be war crimes too. Furthermore, the chaos unleashed by Soviet deserters in Austria was another big task to clear up with diplomacy having to come into play when the Austrians wanted to themselves deal out their own version of justice instead of the AMCC taking charge.

Perpetrators of the war crimes investigated would see many different fates. The majority couldn’t be identified by name and instead commanders would be blamed for their actions of their men with varying degrees of guilt assigned depending upon circumstances. Those who were identified and could be detained were placed under the control of the AMCC; there were plans to try them in military courts or the civilian justice systems (domestic or international, again depending upon the circumstances) afterwards for their crimes. Some of those named were dead or missing and would thus escape the justice which the AMCC was charged to bring like all of those whose identities remained unknown.

What the AMCC was able to do was to provide answers and while justice would have been preferred, this was what was able to be delivered. Sometimes mistakes were made or there was deliberate interference in their war crimes investigations but there was far more success than failure and at least those who lost their loved ones in the war either in uniform or not to illegal activities would stand a very strong chance of finding out what had happened and maybe even see those guilty punished in certain cases too.





Two Hundred & Fifty–Three

NORTHAG had always been a true multi-national organisation during peacetime and its wartime successor the British Second Army was just the same. Despite the name and the British commanding general, more Bundeswehr personnel manned the formation that those from the UK. Politics had decided that this wasn’t to be a German field army though and so General Kenny led the command with staff, soldiers and support personnel from not just NATO nations but other members of the Allies now adding their men too. The pre-war structure remained in part but in other ways the British Second Army didn’t resemble the formation which had started the war.

The Dutch had gone from fielding a full corps to now just a lone combat brigade that was composed of survivors from many smashed units. The Belgians had reorganised their corps command several times and had now grown substantially with the addition of many reserves not just at the frontlines but with a major role played in the rear-area logistics network. The Bundeswehr’s IV & VI Corps were wartime creations with the old West German I Corps disbanded; those new commands had more than a third of their combat strength from wartime-raised formations plus an Anglo-Portuguese division attached as well. As to the British, their corps command had seen much internal change with many new additions arriving to replace so many men lost in earlier battles. American and French units which had joined the British Second Army during the conflict had transferred back out along with some of the support links they had provided too bringing changes that required extra assistance to be sought. There were soldiers from the Irish Republic on lines-of-communications duties and Portuguese paratroopers who had seen action. Both Brazil and Chile had promised aid in terms of manpower and while that was taking some time to arrive, such extra forces would be welcomed as both countries were making sure that those men they sent to join the British Second Army were the best-trained and best-equipped that they had.

After suffering major reverses where it had been driven back to the Weser and also faced the pocketing of major forces in the Hannover area, the British Second Army had struck back and driven the enemy to its starting lines at the Inter-German Border… then beyond. Now deep inside East Germany, General Kenny had his command inside the enemy’s homeland ready to go even further. Today was the day where his left flank and those in the centre would cross the Elbe after preparing the way ahead while his troops on the right were to link up with the Americans; that latter move by the Belgians would seal the fate of more than a hundred thousand of the enemy who had failed to withdraw from West Germany fast enough and gone through the Harz Mountains.


The logistics network that the British Second Army operated itself was connected to the immense supply grid which supported NATO forces operating across the Continent. NATO and Allied rear-area services were inter-connected throughout West Germany and back into the Low Countries and France with further expansion down to Iberia but in the main across the seas to Britain, North America and the rest of the world.

Fuel pipelines and their associated pumping, loading and unloading facilities snaked throughout the rear areas providing the petroleum that tanks, armoured vehicles and every other moving vehicle used at the frontlines but also throughout the rear used. At times civilian facilities not destroyed during the war were put to use but this was in effect something established during the conflict in an ad hoc manner and constantly expanding. Oil from the Middle East, the America’s and now too from parts of the North Sea as some war damage was repaired was transported to refinery facilities and then moved onwards to those who needed it to keep the business of war ongoing.

There were communications cables strung that also criss-crossed the rear-areas behind those fighting at the front. NATO forces didn’t just rely on radio links to communicate but also more secure fixed links too. Civilian radio-telephone links had suffered massive destruction during the fighting and those which remained where not regarded as secure. In addition, there were broadcast antenna erected too for radio broadcasts to take place along with the fixed links as well.

Medical stations and field hospitals were in-place throughout the rear along with the support network for ambulances. Casualties from the fighting were transferred through these and treated at various points depending upon need. Those who would require long-term care went further westwards with those who had suffered injuries which wouldn’t need such attention kept close to the frontlines so they could return to their units as soon as possible. Many civilian hospitals had been damaged or destroyed during the fighting and those that remained had reverted to use by civilians so NATO was operating their own now here on the Continent while making use of non-military ones far away from the frontlines.

Supply trucks moved throughout Western Europe between coastal ports deep into occupied parts of East Germany and everywhere in between. The supply links for ammunition, food & drinking water and replacement equipment were staggering in their complexity. There were way stations and distribution centres located in countless locations to handle the movement of goods forward and also backwards too operating on the tactical and strategic level. Experts in this field were supported by the inexperienced with the manpower involved far outnumbering troops at the frontlines. The constant movement of supplies going where they were supposed to and on time with the correct loads was key to keeping those fighting the war inside the enemy’s homeland supplied and this was no small undertaking. NATO knew that this was where the Soviets had seen extreme chaos and they were determined that their supply system wouldn’t meet such failures.

West Germany had been fought over by armies numbering in the millions. There was damage done on a scale that was unimaginable in-places while in other the fighting had been so brief that the infrastructure seemingly remained untouched. Overt sabotage to deny what was there in terms of communications and supply links had taken place to keep such infrastructure from the hands of the enemy but at the same time the business of war had caused destruction. Soviet air, missile and commando attacks had taken place into the Low Countries and France as well smashing apart bridges, railway lines and utility links as well. There was unexploded ordnance, minefields and other discarded weapons of warfare everywhere from crashed aircraft to burnt-out tanks. Buildings had been brought down, rivers blocked and forests set alight. Clearing up this destruction would take years and cost a fortune. In the meantime though, the logistics network needed to be maintained and that took priority over the wishes of civilian authorities to commence clearing and repairs. Roads and railway lines needed urgent repairs and temporary bridges were constructed over rivers and canals. Civilians were put to work – often just for food and shelter – in assisting engineers in doing this with the focus on keeping fuel moving, communications and medical services functioning and those supply trucks shuttling goods back and forth.

Without all of this important ongoing efforts in the rear, no one would be going about the business of war at the frontlines inside East Germany.


Dawn on Tuesday April 5th came with a massed attack over the Elbe from up near Wittenberge down as far as Schonebeck along with the move south of that latter town to link up with the US Third Army along the Saale. General Kenny pushed his troops forward in Operation ANVIL after a day and a half of preparation in terms of artillery barrages, stockpiling of immediate supplies and the marshalling of his forces ready to strike.

The Bundeswehr IV Corps went across the river in three divisional-sized crossings between the Wittenberge and Stendal areas. They tore through enemy efforts to establish blocking positions that were only partially complete and drove eastwards with the 17th Panzergrenadier Division on the right being assisted by Fallschirmjager paratroopers (a battalion-sized units from the remains of the 27th Brigade gutted when defending the Weser was used in place of a request for the Portuguese here) in also taking bridges over the lower reaches of the Havel River near Rathenow as well. Soviet troops and East German Militia fighting from fixed positions which had been pounded beforehand put up furious fights in many places but crumbled in others. The British 1st Armoured Division, with its integrated Portuguese brigade as well as many TA men, fought near Havelberg and the flooded areas around that town where the Havel met the Elbe and the Schleusenkanal all combined. Water covered much of the ground and slowed down their advance yet localised flooding also hampered the defenders too. Bloody clashes took place and Havelberg was not a battle going to be forgotten after the war. With the 17th Panzergrenadier Division to their south and then the actions of the 7th Panzer Division at Wittenberge who quickly struck east, the British here faced being left behind before surrenders started taking place among their opponents with Soviet soldiers throwing their hands up and weapons down while KdA irregulars also realising that they had been beaten. Nonetheless, Havelberg was one hell of a fight for those involved which left many bodies behind.

General Inge moved the British I Corps over the Elbe alongside the West Germans. He took advantage of much weaker enemy opposition on the other side to send armoured spearheads pushing forward throughout the day to reach further stretches of the Havel downstream and push for the important town of Brandenburg too. Elements of the long beaten Soviet Twenty-Second Guards Army were present though where some of the legendary Taman Guards and men from the Kamtemir Division were met in battle these were not in fighting shape. The Americans had ripped such prestigious formations apart last week in fighting inside West Germany and here in East Germany the survivors were a shadow of their former self… without any decent stocks of ammunition left too. Their efforts at armoured counterattacks were regarded as half-hearted at best and when the Soviets tried to fight from fixed positions these were overcome too. Lake Plauer sat between Brandenburg and the right-hand elements of the British I Corps but General Inge sent the Iron & Tiger Divisions to reach crossing points over the Havel to the north of there at Premnitz and Pritzerbe before they lanced down in a move with a southeastern orientation. Many anti-tank guns opened fire from defences around Brandenburg and minefields were encountered especially to the west of there, but the British I Corps closed in upon the town before sunset and surrounded it to the north, east and southwest leaving few access routes for any evacuation or hypothetical reinforcement to come. The river barrier that was the Havel, sitting ahead of their line of advance at dawn, had been turned and General Inge had his men halfway to Potsdam now…

West German troops with the Bundeswehr’s VI Corps crossed the Elbe either side of Magdeburg and raced forwards to the east. The terrain which they rolled across was generally flat and open while opposition was very weak once clear of the riverbanks and those blasted defensive positions there. The town of Burg on their left flank was bypassed as enemy forces fell back into there and the newly-raised 13th Panzer Division had lots of luck catching Soviet tank forces preparing for a counterattack around the crossroads at Ziesar; a fantastic victory was won here with the Bundeswehr men left grinning ear to ear and not worried over later comment that those T-64’s and T-72’s had barely enough ammunition for a fight. Zerbst Airbase was taken by the 1st Panzer Division – survivors of the Hannover pocket – as they struck to the southeast securing the flanks of the West German VI Corps advance and reaching the eastern banks of the Elbe north of Dessau at Rosslau before the Americans could get there as was the desired outcome of SACEUR with operational areas. By the end of the day, the West Germans were ahead of schedule and their forward spearheads were further east than the British at Brandenburg with nothing to stop them going much further east tomorrow apart from orders which would come directing them to take a turn to the northeast.

The Belgian I Corps did as instructed and slammed the door shut behind slowly retreating Soviet troops trying to get out of the Harz Mountains and away from the US national guardsmen there driving them back. Leopard-1 tanks supporting mechanised infantry ripped through retreating units that were already harassed by air power and also falling back in the Magdeburg direction unawares that that was already NATO-held. There was a significant number of troops who refused to believe that they were beaten who were squeezed between the Belgians and those men from the US XI Corps coming from the west. Stubborn refusals to surrender from the enemy were met with heavy and well-aimed fire to smash resistance apart from Soviet formations long ago beaten in open battle but with commanders living in false hope that they would make something of their terrible situation. The Belgians attacked from distance rather than take casualties up close as this was regarded as foolish when faced with a retreating enemy like who they faced and especially one who now posed no threat to the course of the war. By the end of the day, the business here would be almost done with just a few hold-outs remaining that the national guardsmen were coming down from the high ground to deal with and therefore freeing up the Belgians for their planned redeployment with the British Second Army elsewhere.

General Kenny still had designs on getting to Berlin before anyone else despite what the higher-ups were currently saying about a multi-army advance with a combined set-piece attack. The Americans with their US Third & Seventh Armies were still very far away to the south while his forward elements were at Brandenburg.

The race for Berlin was still on as far as he was concerned.





Two Hundred & Fifty–Four

NATO’s invasion of Czechoslovakia was meant to go exactly like that of East Germany though with ABOLITION operations taking place in this Central European nation being limited by geographical factors to the Czech Socialist Republic (Czech SR) rather than the whole country. Prague was the immediate goal with long-term aims being set at reaching the internal border with the Slovak Socialist Republic, but at the same time an acceptance that maybe taking Bohemia and reaching the edges of Moravia might be enough. Far fewer NATO forces were assigned to the mission which was to be conducted by the French First Army – an army-group with several component corps and multi-national in character – yet that didn’t mean that there was any less importance assigned; weaker opposition on the ground was expected.

With hindsight, NATO forces would have been much stronger due to the situation on the ground brought about during the invasion where larger numbers of men were really needed to commence immediate occupation duties.


Entering the Czech SR from the west and the south, NATO troops found that their arrival brought about the instigation of a civil war. Ahead of, around and within the areas held by their occupying troops various groups were set against each other in armed opposition to the other. Militia’s had been raised at the last minute in haste and these struck first against organs of the state attempting to liberate themselves from communist rule while there were violent repression efforts made against these guerilla-type groups. Soviet and Czechoslovak troops fighting to oppose the invasion were drawn into this conflict at once and distracted from their assigned role of stopping NATO troops from striking deep into the Czech SSR. Disorder reigned especially due to the disorganised fashion of what NATO intelligence officers first called the ‘Czech Resistance’ – something which when heard of by their political masters instructions were given to support – and then different attempts made to stop this resistance from the authorities ranging from pleas for calm, appeals for patriotism to outright armed engagement.

It was civilians who fought in these battles at first but then came the intervention of the retreating Soviet and Czechoslovak Army’s; when those better-armed organisations intervened the bloodshed became far worse than it was at first with their greater reliance on heavy weapons. Militia groups, rebels and those supporting the authorities, had access to light weapons yet then came the use of tanks and heavy artillery. The beaten armies of the Socialist Forces formations pulling back were given orders to fight to secure their line of retreat and anyone who got in their way was to be treated just like their NATO opponents. As can be expected, there were many Czechoslovak troops – especially those who were Czechs – who then rebelled against such orders and added to the number of different actors engaged in fighting the civil war.

Those who lived in the Czech SR, especially its western and central regions which formed the historic Bohemia, had faced NATO air power unleashed against them during the war. Air strikes launched by those with the 3ATAF on strategic missions had done a lot of damage and caused many civilian casualties which had first helped official propaganda be believed that the Socialist Forces held the moral high ground in the conflict. However, Soviet reactions to having their logistics links to the east severed and therefore taking whatever they wanted from the local population had soon reversed much of that. Many Czech civilians had their personal property stolen or found themselves forcibly conscripted into backbreaking construction work while local authorities looked on helpless and wondering why their leader Vasil Bilak didn’t come to their aid. When news came that NATO troops were invading from out of West Germany and then from Austria as well, Czechs who were close to the borders of those countries were faced with the prospect of war affecting them even more than it already had done so. Some revolted, some fled, but many just stayed where they were in their towns and villages not wishing to go against the state but at the same time frightened of what was to come.


There were Bundeswehr, Canadian and Moroccan troops alongside French troops with the French First Army. These formed four corps commands with most of the men having seen much fighting inside Bavaria already in holding back the Soviet-led RED BEAR offensive and then pushing those attacking troops to where they had come from. They were chasing a beaten enemy whose combat strength had been smashed apart with reports of low levels of supplies and certainly terrible morale.

The French I Corps had crossed the border Czechoslovak-West German border in the northwest moving from the Franconia region of Bavaria into Bohemia there. The town of Cheb had been taken to the left but the main effort was made heading for Plzen instead of initial plans to head for Karlovy Vary (also known as Carlsbad) and areas along the Czechoslovak-East German border. This was a tank-heavy force which the French were using here and its drive towards the city of Plzen was aided by the French VI Corps – with lighter French forces plus the Moroccans – assisting to the south.

The West Germans with their Bundeswehr II Corps were moving through the Bohemian Forest in a northeastern direction deep into the Czech SR and aiming for the trio of towns of Klatovy, Strakonice and Pisek as immediate goals. However, they were ready to change the direction of their advance as needed either north to aid the attack upon Plzen or east to support the French II Corps.

That initial fast-moving incursion into Bohemia from the south towards Ceske Budejovice by the French II Corps had slowed down somewhat but was still underway. Canadian troops were fighting alongside their French allies here in trying to reach that important communications centre against last minute strong opposition.

In the skies above the French First Army there were many aircraft now flying under command of the 7ATAF which were undertaking in the main tactical missions though sometimes those of a semi-strategic nature as well. Hundreds of NATO aircraft here had scoured the skies of opposition from an enemy which was now focusing everything left that they had in their aerial arsenal in (failing) operations above East Germany. Only SAM’s threatened aircraft with the 7ATAF over the Czech SR and most of those could now be handled rather well.


Throughout the day, the French First Army drove onwards. Plzen was approached and battles commenced around that city with a major engagement fought near Dobrany Airbase and also intense fighting taking place in the southern part of the city where many industrial areas were located. Czechoslovak troops were few here and it was mainly retreating Soviet Army elements that the French combated though there were militia units too who remained loyal to the regime.

Moroccan troops on the march to Plzen found themselves caught up in the middle of armed civil disturbances around the town of Stod which soon spread to nearby villages there: Hradec and Strelice. Following orders, the Moroccan troops pulled back and then pushed onwards to take part in the effort to seize the city not knowing that in those small villages massacres were occurring as government forces there defeated rebels and killed hundreds who had fallen back from Stod and been surrounded. Only afterwards did what happen at Hradec and Strelice become known but by then the conventional war had long moved on away to the east and these acts of the civil war were not regarded as holding much immediate importance.

Further south, where the Canadians were assigned to assist the French II Corps, a light armoured detachment with the Fort Garry Horse rolled into the tiny village of Lhotice on their way to secure a major crossroads north of Ceske Budejovice. There was a massacre ongoing there where rebels had the upper hand over government forces and were lining unarmed civilians up to shoot them. Canadian troops put a stop to this and tried to disarm the militia units they encountered here only for resistance to be met. Several soldiers were shot and a couple of up-armoured jeeps blown up with petrol bombs… with questions there asked as to where the locals got the fuel from for such weapons. The six-wheeled Cougar armoured vehicles that these reservists from Manitoba fielded returned fire with their big 76mm cannon and machine guns to eliminate their attackers in a furious response from the Canadians here only trying to liberate such people. Further Canadian soldiers, reservists with the Black Watch of Canada, quickly flooded the area after arriving in trucks and distracting the parent formation of the 2nd Infantry Brigade from its mission.

No one in NATO was interested in taking sides in the ongoing civil war apart from instructions given to not stop the destruction of the communist regime, yet soldiers on the ground were seeing things that they were unhappy with and the Canadian experience at Lhotice was just one of many examples of that.

Ceske Budejovice would join Plzen by the end of the day in being in NATO hands while the Bundeswehr had reached their objectives as well; their new orders were to head towards Pribram and support French forces either side of them in heading for Prague. As this conventional fighting continued, messages were being sent up the chain of command as to the situation in the Czech SR with what was being observed with questions asking for clarifications on earlier orders about ignoring what was witnessed and driving onwards with the advance. Those taking part here in ABOLITION were not happy to be what many regarded as accomplices to acts of slaughter taking place against the helpless… not when their official mission was to liberate Czechoslovakia.

*

Italy had entered the war to secure the defence of their country by stopping the Soviets from taking Austria and therefore being in a position to later advance over the Alps. That war aim of the government in Rome had been stated several times in public as well as private to their erstwhile NATO allies; Italy had to think of itself and wasn’t interested in goals such as ABOLITION or the complete destruction of the Soviet armed forces.

There were now Italian troops all across eastern parts of Austria engaged in pushing the Hungarians back home and eliminating what few organised Soviet troops were in the Vienna area as well. Those thousands of deserters from the Soviet Fourth Guards Army were being rounded-up as well in support of Austrian efforts to rid the countryside of those bandit-type groups which had sprung up as well as individual ‘maniacs’, as the Austrians deemed men roaming the countryside on their own causing mayhem.

Victory in Austria had been won with what turned out to be ease though helped out by other factors too. The question now was what to do next…?


There remained much hostility with regards to Italy from several other nations at the neutrality declared at the beginning of the conflict. France had sent troops to the Alps and the United States had prepared mission orders for aircraft to bomb military targets within the country. This had come from what Sir Dereck Thomas – the British Ambassador in Rome – stated was a ‘with us or with them’ attitude taken early in war and something he reported back to Tom King at the FCO as being ‘unsurprisingly unhelpful’.

Once Italy entered the war and engaged Soviet forces in Austria first in the air and then on the ground that hostility only somewhat eased. Italy sent immense stocks of ammunition across the Alps and into West Germany for use by NATO forces there after factories within the country had been busy working twenty-four hours shifts under government orders (with all the resulting problems that caused the Italians) to manufacture bullets and shells ready to be loaded upon trucks and trains. Food had been sent to help German civilians too along with tents and blankets for the homeless. Such gestures were regarded as a cynical attempt at blackmail by many to win favour after what was regarded as a betrayal when war erupted.

The West Germans had been supportive of Italy at the Brussels summit last week but other nations had refused to change their tune. Some called this short-sightedness while others would declare that the Italians couldn’t be trusted. Italy remained outside of the NATO central command structure after the Brussels meeting and while there were some co-operation efforts in Austria, in the main to do with air tasking, those were cordial at best. Italian-Austrian relations were now immensely strong with much distrust in Italian-NATO relations.

Italy didn’t therefore consult with NATO about it follow-up actions after securing Austria although NATO was made aware of what they had planned.


Counter-invading Hungary wasn’t seen as a viable course of action for the Italian Expeditionary Army to take. Hungary’s best troops had been beaten in battle on Austrian soil but behind them lay many reservists rushing to man long-established border defences with more of those going up with speed. The Hungarian countryside within twenty miles of the Austrian border was being torn up with anti-tank ditches, blockades and minefields all put into place to make an invasion extremely costly. There was much propaganda being put out by the Hungarians too that was judged by the Italians to be enough to make sure that a real fight would come from a clash on that border with casualties expected to be high.

Moving into Hungary would mean committing almost all of the Italian Expeditionary Army too and that was now not something that was deemed the wisest of moves with what was occurring in neighbouring Yugoslavia. There were civil disturbances and political dramas going on there at the moment and Rome wasn’t sure how that would work out. Warships from the Italian Navy were already secretly in-strength throughout the Adriatic though it would be troops and aircraft that would have to be put to use in Yugoslavia should the very worst happen there – fears of civil war with an ethnic dimension were high on Italy’s list of the ‘very worst’ – and therefore they couldn’t be committed to Hungary where an invasion would be a major undertaking.

Instead, it was decided that a limited operation would still take place in Central Europe to maintain the security doctrine of securing Italy’s northeastern borders in the long-term. Elements of the Fifth Army Corps around Vienna with their tanks and paratroopers were issued with orders to make the short journey from there to Bratislava.

The Italians were going to find out if those earlier reports that the Slovaks were ready to rise up in revolt like the Poles were true and such a manpower commitment on the part of the Italians wasn’t expected to be too large.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Fifty–Five

Extract from:
My War; The Heroic Deeds Of A Soldier, by General Alexander Ivanovich Lebed.
Part 14: That Fateful Day

I came to realise during that fateful day, April 6th, as I undertook my duties, that the war was lost. Others claim that they knew beforehand yet I maintain that at the mid-point through the fourth week of war that the signs finally became clear for all to see that the Soviet Army had been defeated and the war could no longer continue… even though, to my immense disappointment and for the sons of the Rodina,it would carry on. We had been defeated in battle and there was no turning back now for our adversaries were in the ascendancy with no hope of stopping them.

The night beforehand I had been busy in the city of Dresden engaged in further investigations due to the events of several days ago in the forests near there. There were Chekist personnel who had faced reassignment from their past duties and who had knowledge that I needed to undertake the tasks assigned. As was the case whenever I dealt with such people, there was hostility but it was on both sides.

A Chekist always thinks that he is a better man than a soldier yet every soldier knows that a Chekist is nothing more than toilet scum.

I needed answers and gaining those took much of my time. I had rested for the night in a simple barracks with bare comforts and my sleep was broken due to bombing attacks made by Western aircraft. I had to return to Zossen [Author’s Note: A major Soviet military facility south of Berlin taken over from the Nazi’s post-1945] for further duties there to collate information gained with my subordinates. To take a flight was far too dangerous and therefore I travelled by road. My driver had been informed that because of enemy air attacks the shortest route – north along the Autobahn – was out of the question but a diversion was to be taken.

The nearest bridge over the Elbe open to northbound traffic that morning was at Torgau. I could have misused by high-priority travel pass as a representative of STAVKA and crossed that river at an earlier point yet I chose to do the honourable thing and trust my driver to reach Torgau where afterwards I could make my return to Zossen.

Panic was evident everywhere from what I could see out of the windows as we headed along roads following the course of the river. At towns such as Meissen and Riesa, locations I had only known on the map as being along the Elbe, smoke bellowed into the skies around them that morning following bombing attacks not just against bridges but at traffic jams where the Soviet Army had been held up from movement across too. Cowards and miscreants had fled and were being hunted down nearby for deserters cannot be allowed to go unpunished in wartime; this justice I approved of as I passed it by. What alarmed me was the actions of officers with the army which I served who I found reason to talk to when we needed to stop. No one was following their orders correctly. I asked many who gave them orders to withdraw back to the river as I saw them doing when the American Army was in the other direction. I inquired of others as to why they were abandoning their wounded. Discipline was gone and maybe I at that point regretted for a few foolish moments how the Chekists had been drummed out where before they would have put a stop to that…

…yet I knew too of all the lives of good, loyal officers they had taken in acts of murder when they claimed they were only inflicting discipline.

Torgau was another location where there was panic and disorder. No one there was following orders and the focus was on self-preservation rather than the fates of their comrades-in-arms. I was horrified at what I saw there with cowardice and lies being the order of the day. Traffic jams went far to the south of the town and I was forced to finally use my pass giving priority to my duties there to get ahead of many vehicles. I spoke to a senior man with the Commandant’s Service [Author’s Note: The Soviet Army’s military police force] and explained my duties with STAVKA and he was happy to let me pass; I felt compelled to inform him that there were many private automobiles in the queues with what I suspected to be East German civilian officials mis-using travel authorisations to abandon their posts ahead of the Western invaders and he promised to address that issue.

Arriving in Torgau at that moment nearly took my life. A daylight air attack commenced against the town with its bridges and the military traffic thus being the targets. There were American tactical bombers in the skies above that morning – F-111 Aardvark’s I was later told – dropping guided bombs at low-level. The best decision was to abandon our vehicle and so my driver and I did so while keeping out weapons with us in the hope that maybe we could be of help: we both joined hundreds of men in firing up into the sky though, I must regret, that of course no one at the time realised that what bullets are fired skywards must always fall back down somewhere and there will always be those unlucky caught up in that.

I digress…

In daylight, those American aircraft with their swept-back wings were like vultures. They killed men by their hundreds below them with their bombs and even sheltering as I was forced to do so I could see the damage which they wrought. River crossings assembled during the conflict to replace earlier permanent structures were destroyed one by one with the steel falling into the river below taking trucks and soldiers with them. In my short tenure on Marshal Korbutov’s staff before reassignment I had learnt how maskirovka efforts had kept such bridges from being destroyed by night-time air attacks and been impressed. Here in daylight such concealment efforts meant nothing. Four separate air attacks came in, one after the other, and the bridges all went down closing these vital crossings over the Elbe that morning.

Where were the defences? I witnessed no anti-aircraft guns firing nor rockets lancing skywards chasing those bombers. There was a series of attacks on nearby hilltop positions, generally on the northern side of the river a few miles away, that I assumed where defences were meant to be located yet there was no protection offered from those. It occurred to me then that the defenders of Torgau had no ammunition because I was certain that they hadn’t abandoned their posts less they would not have been attacked as they were with such violence.

Torgau was very important to keep open as a crossing point supplying the troops fighting against the invasion coming from the Americans but those bombers had been unmolested. I realised at that point that the aircraft of the invaders were doing as they wished and there was nothing to stop them anymore.


Only by the late evening did I reach Zossen. I had contacted my staff during the delay to inform them and relay the information that aircraft were roaming at will with news relayed back that it was the case elsewhere too and not just along the Elbe. As I would discover airfields across East Germany were finally being closed due to targeted enemy action and ground defences running out of their final stocks of ammunition… and they were not going to reopen to our comrades in the Air Forces at any point.

My duties remained the same since they had been when issued two days previous: find out exactly who had been behind the attempt at the seizure of the special weapons in Saxony and killed so many Soviet soldiers while doing so. I knew that it had been the work of Chekists though the identities of the masterminds behind such an infamy were hard to acquire. It took much hard work to get those who knew the truth to talk and those who knew anything only knew some. I had come to believe even at that early point that there was one man at the top of such an infamous, treasonous conspiracy and he would be ultimately found in Berlin.

As I talked with my loyal subordinates – all patriots like myself fighting against traitors and their schemes to enrich themselves – we discussed Berlin among ourselves. Zossen along with Wunsdorf, Sperenberg and Juterbog [Author’s Note: Further Soviet military facilities of great importance and which would remain so throughout the later stages of the war in East Germany] were all far from the fighting at that time and away from Berlin and what was going on there.

The Hitlerite and his Gestapo – Mielke and the Stasi – were starting work on their immense ‘ring of mud’ around the city to the west and south. I was told how they were constructing with slave labour from West Berlin immense barriers that could block access to Berlin. It had been going on for several days but that was when I first heard of it. I remember cradling my head in my hands when I was told.

Nothing done beforehand had stopped the invaders even trying to steal special weapons from us. But there was that fool in his bunker – just like the fascist forty years before – with his foolish dreams that he could stop the inevitable. It was the Soviet Army that had been the guarantor of his regime and we had been defeated in battle; his latest crazy plan would come to nothing.

That Hitlerite was who we had allied ourselves with and allowing him to do that was the last desperate straw. I knew that the end was coming but no one else did… at that point anyway.





Two Hundred & Fifty–Six

HMS Bristol entered Rostock’s inner harbour through the Seekanal in the mid-morning sunshine.

Upon calmly making her way inside without the benefit of so much a harbour pilot, there was no effort to hide or disguise her identity apart from the lack of pendants bristling in the wind. There were weapons trained upon the Royal Navy ship as she slipped into the inner waters of a major East Germany Navy – Volksmarine – facility here on the Baltic coastline, but none of those opened fire upon the destroyer.

Like his crew, Bristol’s commanding officer, Captain Alan West, was more than a little nervous. At any moment something could go wrong. Maybe they’d strike a mine or the harbour bottom if the charts he had been issued with were a little bit wrong. Someone on the shore could disobey orders and revert to patriotism with a cannon or missile fusillade instead of letting the British warship arrive unmolested like this. Perhaps word had got out and the Soviets knew what was going on here and right now they had aircraft heading this way? The Bristol was near-defenceless making this approach and the loss of life could be appalling if the worst occurred.

There was no resistance though, just unarmed men that Captain West observed from his position up in the bridge ready with towlines along the nearest quay. Bristol was going to peacefully dock here and behind her were coming other ships too but those and other NATO forces would have to wait for now until confirmation came that the offer of ‘neutrality’ was real…

…that would only come after Captain West had Admiral Theodor Hoffmann, commander of the Volksmarine, aboard his warship.


The need for operational security and the safeguarding of intelligence meant that Captain West nor his crew were told of the specifics surrounding what had occurred with the East Germans making contact.

When the order came earlier this morning for the Bristol to depart from her assigned operations in the Koge Bay and race southwards, there was only a little information given and just enough for the job to be done. The commander of the Volksmarine, Captain West had been briefed, had made contact and wished for NATO to be aware that what remained of his command were declaring their so-called neutrality in the conflict between NATO and their own masters in Berlin. As a gesture to show their good faith, military facilities under the command of the Volksmarine along the Baltic would not put up any resistance to use by NATO forces; Admiral Hoffmann would come aboard the first vessel to arrive in Rostock to arrange this in person.

It had been decided that the Bristol was to be used to find out if this offer was genuine: Captain West and his crew would probably pay with their lives if it wasn’t. The one-of-a-kind Bristol had only recently arrived in the western stretches of the Baltic after spending the pre-war mobilisation and then the early stages of the conflict in the English Channel not far from her homeport of Dartmouth. With few armaments fitted and a crew of reservists, the Bristol had been undertaking patrol duties that weren’t that dissimilar from her peacetime training role… though with the danger of sudden attack which could have come at any moment even in the English Channel. The need to replace losses in earlier combat as well as the build-up in the Baltic had then brought the destroyer into a much more dangerous war-zone such as the waters to the north of East Germany were.

What hadn’t been stated was that the Bristol was expendable if something went wrong. Captain West did understand and followed his orders even if he didn’t like the idea of that. Should things go wrong he would try and fight his way out of here even if that might prove as naturally feared rather impossible. He had seen his ship sunk from under him beforehand when in the Falklands – he had commanded the unfortunate HMS Ardent during the conflict in 1982 against the Argentineans – and if that happened again at least this time he would get some payback. Moreover, there were Sea Harrier’s from HMS Invincible not that far away on-call as well, just in case.

Two helicopters had brought senior NATO officers aboard along with some translators during the approach to Rostock and those officers were to meet with Admiral Hoffmann with Captain West’s duties to get them there. If everything went as planned, he knew that he would eventually get his own rewards in time for this would be a high-profile mission – after it was over – as he had the eyes of many senior people upon him.


The Volksmarine officer was escorted aboard and he came with a couple of aides and one of those spoke for Admiral Hoffmann when the East Germans boarded. Captain West gladly accepted the kind words spoken about the seamanship of his crew in bringing the Bristol into Rostock without a pilot and by avoiding the mines that NATO had been informed about. Before handing over discussions to the senior people also aboard, Captain West was able to observe his ‘enemy’ briefly and how he carried himself.

The war had seen the Volksmarine smashed to pieces alongside the naval forces of the Poles and the Soviet Baltic Fleet. They had inflicted many losses upon NATO and Swedish forces themselves, but had ultimately suffered defeat when they couldn’t control the air situation and their last-ditch land-based missile defences had been countered by electronic warfare. Nonetheless, Admiral Hoffmann didn’t look like a defeated commander and held his head high with his uniform carefully pressed and his boots & buckles shinning. He was committing treason as far as Captain West was concerned in doing what he was even though the official line was to not mention that and go along with this façade of ‘neutrality’. Naval anchorages like this one at Rostock but also much further to the east at Peenemunde were apparently covered as well as the civilian harbours currently under Volksmarine control again at Rostock, at Wismar and at Neustadt in occupied West Germany. Moreover, from what Captain West understood, Admiral Hoffmann shattered command controlled the airfields at Laage inland from Rostock and the big facility near Peenemunde as well.

All of this was suddenly about to be handed over to NATO without a shot being fired and also without the knowledge of the regime Admiral Hoffmann’s served nor the Soviets.

Captain West knew that for several days now NATO forces had been preparing to make a move against the East German coast. There were light troops coming down from Norway along with marines – both from the Royal Marines and the US Marines – that were meant to be soon conducting a landing operation somewhere that he hadn’t been told the location of yet. A forced landing like that would have required the support offered by the Bristol and everyone was expecting such an operation to be very bloody indeed. Now the gates were being opened before them by those who held all the keys.


With the Bristol being part of the RN’s Dartmouth Training Squadron, there were facilities aboard where compartments had been turned into classrooms after the destroyer had left her active role to go into standby as she was before LION called for all available assets to go to sea. Captain West remained on the bridge while talks took place in several of those and once those were finished he was given orders to send a pre-arranged signal to other NATO forces offshore that that dialogue commenced aboard had been successful. He quickly bid farewell to Admiral Hoffmann through the translator and saluted the man too upon the prompting of one of his own service’s senior men; Captain West had been unsure whether it was the correct thing to do seeing as the RN and his country were still at war with the East Germans but again did as he was instructed to with that.

Within thirty minutes the first of the ships following the Bristol arrived and Captain West watched its progress following his lead.

RFA Sir Lancelot had nearly been sunk three weeks ago in the Vestfjorden but the landing ship had been very lucky and avoided torpedoes from that Soviet submarine in those constricted Norwegian waters that knocked her sister-ship RFA Sir Bedivere out of the war. Fortune had again smiled upon the ship when in the Skagerrak supporting PORTER and the Royal Marines landing in Jutland when avoiding mines there though this morning’s run following the Bristol could have been fatal had last-minute intelligence upon further mines not been given by Admiral Hoffmann before the heavily-laden vessel came into Rostock. Without damage and with a Volksmarine pilot who came out to bring her in, the Sir Lancelot docked at a quay in the civilian part of Rostock a short distance away from Captain West’s vessel in the naval anchorage.

Royal Marines but also amphibious-trained Royal Engineers from the British Army were fast off the vessel and all over the harbour area which had seen several wartime visits from NATO aircraft on deep-strike missions. They went to work in assessing damage done from bombs and removing demolition charges too after those were pointed out to them. As to the Bootnecks who came with the engineers, those soldiers had many duties. There were two full companies of them from 40 Commando as a forward security detachment with duties ranging from over-watch of the Royal Engineers to also taking charge of prisoners. NATO hadn’t been aware until those senior officers who had come in with the Bristol were told that fighting had taken place in Rostock during the night when Volksmarine personnel engaged Stasi and Soviet Navy forces there. The armed men under Admiral Hoffmann’s supervision had struck hard and with much violence to disable communications first and then disarm their former comrades-in-arms. Most of those who had found that their former allies suddenly turned upon them had died, taking many of their attackers with them, but some prisoners had been gained too: the East German sailors wanted rid of these people as quick as possible.

Captain West had meanwhile pulled his destroyer away from its temporary anchorage leaving it afloat in the shallow waters of Rostock’s inner harbour known as the Breitling. He left the bridge and went down to the command centre – within an internal compartment – were he monitored other events on the radio and from information gained by radar. Though not party to the overall plan, he understood that as fast as possible other ships were moving this way while helicopters would be in the sky bringing in men. He believed that Laage Airbase, some distance to the south, would very soon be seeing troops arrive there and the beach at nearby Warnemunde would too. Furthermore, he could only speculate on other operations elsewhere possibly involving Wismar and Peenemunde too. Operational security remained tight especially if everything had gone wrong upon arrival here and he and his crew had fallen into the hands of the enemy.

He was waiting now for the first sign of the enemy reacting. How long the Soviets would take to find out he didn’t know, but he didn’t believe that the rest of the time he would spend here would be very dull.





Two Hundred & Fifty–Seven

The role of SACEUR meant that while General Galvin was the ultimate commander for all NATO and Allied forces involved in the Third World War within Europe – on land, in the air and at sea in a-joining waters – his was also a political position with policy and diplomatic functions to perform. There were subordinates to carry out the tasks he set as he made the major decisions on the conduct of the war yet at the same time he wasn’t involved in every single action undertaken. He spent his time far in the rear and away from danger often meeting with politicians and diplomats as well as the media on occasion fulfilling the role needed for a supreme commander.

Therefore, a lot of trust had to be placed in his subordinates so that the war was fought along the guidelines that he set. Many times when problems arose he had personally intervene to solve them and these would often occur through personality clashes – especially among those of different nationalities – though also when those junior in position to him within in command structure in-place failed to obey instructions. He also had to smooth over issues where political decisions made at a national level interfered within the chain of command too as one country did something for their own benefit which affected others as well as the overall conduct of how the war was being fought.

This was not a job for just any soldier and there was of course the ‘legend’ that was his immediate predecessor General Bernard Rogers; someone who was a favourite of many European military officers and politicians before he had run afoul of the Reagan White House last summer. General Galvin was not General Rogers and would never be despite the wishes of some in Europe that he was.

At the outbreak of war, SACEUR’s mobile headquarters, on the move in a rapid fashion across the Low Countries and parts of the Rhineland to avoid enemy targeting efforts, had been on constant alert for a simple code-word to be flashed to them: ALPHABET. That would have indicated that a nuclear attack was underway meaning that all efforts made ready to fight a conventional war had been rendered moot. Such an alert hadn’t come and instead had come several weeks now of conventional conflict between massed armies fighting across Europe and SACEUR’s area of operational responsibility from the North Cape to the Turkish Straits.

Battles had been won and lost in sometimes epic struggles. More and more countries had joined in the fighting here in Europe with their armed forces submitting to his command as well though in a few cases having much stronger national government links than others, further complicating his task. His forces had seen several waves of reinforcements raised domestically within Europe and coming from overseas – in the main from the United States mainland – but at the same time numbers thinned after being committed to action. There had been several moments when things had gone wrong and SACEUR had been worried that he was about to see the ultimate failure occur and the enemy win, especially during the first Friday of the war, but his forces had prevailed eventually and fought their way back from what had on occasion looked like doomed positions.

His role meant that every loss suffered was ultimately down to him as every success was too. Those fighting the war here in Europe were all under his command and so he had to accept responsibility for all that happened: claiming credit for success wouldn’t come without accepting the blame for failure too.

Being heavily involved in the political side of the war as he needed to be dealing with the North Atlantic Council, talking to the NSC back home at least once a day and also meeting often with diplomats from various nations meant that not every decision was made by him. His two deputies – the Briton General Akehurst and the West German General Eimler – fought the war on his behalf through the regional commanders in Northern (Scandinavia), Central (Germany) and Southern (Turkey) Europe with General Galvin overseeing those. During the conflict he would also issue orders directly at times to commanders of his field armies and the big multi-national numbered air forces as well.

Staff officers with SACEUR’s mobile headquarters, sometimes called in jest ‘the travelling circus’, often decided what information he saw and what he didn’t need to have brought to his immediate attention. This was a very important task with judgement calls having to be made with the possibility of grievous errors being made; those on SACEUR’s staff were chosen well and knew that doing their duty even in a minor role correctly would see them follow an excellent post-war career path.

Colonel Dair Farrar-Hockley from the British Army and Major David Petraeus with the US Army were two of those on General Galvin’s staff. These two staff officers were tasked as official briefers and personal representatives to SACEUR with the burden of assisting in making sure that the supreme commander wasn’t overwhelmed while fulfilling his role but making sure nothing important was left out either. Their days and nights were full of ‘excitement’ and a lot of travel too as they were sent all across Europe to talk with officers in the field and observe ongoing matters of interest to SACEUR as well as trying to nip potential troubling issues in the bud.

Both men – along with other officers like them also attached to SACEUR’s staff from other armies – often found themselves in situations were there was an opportunity for them to use their own military experience to intervene where they saw something being done wrong or an officer in a position that they could fill needing replacement. Their duty to General Galvin’s staff remained though and they had to fulfil the tasks given to them as there were many others just as capable who would do what was needed.


Late this evening, SACEUR did what he usually did at the end of daylight hours and assembled his key staffers for a briefing on the day’s fighting before later issuing overall instructions for the next day. His rolling convoy had come to a stop and tents were set up while security teams spread out to secure the area. Officers with roles in operations & plans, intelligence, logistics and co-ordination with allies were gathered before General Galvin.

Farrar-Hockley led the briefing and did what he always did in going through the day’s military events. The now relatively minor action (compared to elsewhere) taking place in in the far north of and to the southeast of Europe was covered by the British Army officer with input given on occasion from others. Germany and the western half of Czechoslovakia dominated current military operations taking place though.

Operation CROWN had started out just as planned meeting the initial set goals and showing all the signs of further success. The game of ‘neutrality’ that the East German Navy high command was playing had meant that access points into East Germany through the Baltic were open. There had been naval and airmobile landings at several points now with troops and equipment flooding ashore and measured thrusts taking place to move inland away from the coast but not too far yet before strength was built up. British forces had come ashore at Rostock with the US Marines to their left at Wismar and on their right the victorious US Army’s XVIII Corps – fresh from their fights in Finmark and Lapland – were at Peenemunde near the Polish-East German border. There were Swedish troops ready to move in behind the NATO forces ashore with airbases being established as well to house combat aircraft. Soviet resistance had come in the form of air attacks and tactical missile strikes but those had been far from effective. As to enemy troops there were few nearby as all attention had been focused elsewhere responding to threats coming from the west and the south.

The British Second Army was now operating within the Havelland: the region between Berlin and the Elbe. This was an area were marshes and lakes were aplenty with canals and small rivers as well as forests. Brandenburg remained a centre of strong resistance and while now surrounded had yet to be subdued with Bundeswehr troops moving in to take it after an aversion on the part of British troops present to get involved in direct fighting inside the town. Across the rest of that region there was sporadic fighting ongoing with Soviet rear-area troops making stands and being eliminated. As per orders, at the moment there were no daring thrusts forward due to the terrain being an ideal spot for sustained resistance by bypassed enemy units and so the focus remained on clearing those out slowly and with much firepower. The edges of occupied West Berlin remained not far away though and almost within reach.

The US Third & Seventh Army’s had travelled a greater distance through East Germany than their allies to the north of them but were fast catching up. They were closing in on the stretch of the Elbe ahead of them with it being not so much a defended barrier to their advance but instead acting as a barrier to enemy movement to escape across it which was hindering their own movement. Current estimates put crossings to be made by late tomorrow once disorganised Soviet resistance could be crushed and that river reached. This would allow both field armies to then make their approach towards Berlin from the south. Major urban areas around cities such as Dresden and Leipzig as well as the big towns of Dessau, Halle and Karl-Marx-Stadt would remain unoccupied behind those advances done and planned. As had been seen at Magdeburg where the West Germans had pushed into that city to capture it, losses would be very heavy in such engagements. East German irregulars were generally well-motivated when defending their homes and wouldn’t easily give up.

In the maps that went with the briefing, SACEUR and his staff were reminded of the operational zones that the major subordinate corps and army commands inside East Germany were meant to stay within. Boundaries either side of their advance weren’t meant to be crossed apart from in a tactical manner so that the advance wouldn’t get bogged down with units cutting across the advance of another. There were friendly fire concerns with this but also keeping logistics links flowing as planned. There had already been some negative reactions to this but such was the plan that was to be followed to keep the advance going.

Also on those maps were other areas of interest within East Germany away from the fighting. There was the easternmost parts of the country behind Berlin and along the border with Poland where air interdiction continued to keep Soviet fifth echelon armies stuck on the other side. There had been some leakage of the line drawn that they weren’t supposed to cross yet no major Soviet force above division size had crossed and even then such formations appeared to be very much understrength with old equipment and out of shape men too. Bombs continued to rain down upon crossings forced over the river and at enemy formations trying to get across the Oder and the Neisse.

Down in the southeastern corner, behind Dresden in a triangle-shaped area defined by that city, Cottbus to the north and Gorlitz on the border there was an area of interest too that was mentioned at this briefing. There had been ‘incidents’ there late on Sunday night and into the early hours of Monday that SACEUR had been made aware of via several intelligence assets to do with Soviet nuclear weapons and an attempt by what he was told renegade Soviet KGB forces to seize some of those. Such a thing had given him and many others visions of a nightmare scenario but it appeared that nothing had come of that. Petraeus spoke now of all intelligence pointing to a gathering of Soviet tactical nuclear forces in that region with mobile missile-launchers and possibly artillery shells and aircraft-delivered bombs with thermonuclear warheads as well. There were already very strict limits attacking targets suspected of being of a nuclear nature for NATO pilots on strike missions through the enemy rear but now there was a concentration of those in one region. It appeared that an effort was being made to withdraw them from East Germany but whether that was into Poland or Czechoslovakia was not yet known.

SACEUR made a firm statement that this situation needed to be monitored with all available means and pilots were to be reminded of their rules-of-engagement again.

When Farrar-Hockley returned to his brief, he spoke next of Czechoslovakia and what was occurring there. The main effort of the French-led invasion as part of ABOLITION there was to reach Prague with – as it was with Berlin – moves from the west and south. The civil war underway there on the ground with several actors involved was slowing that up at the moment rather than enemy action. Delays in advancing didn’t mean a halt to those, far from it, just that the timetable was slipping some. There was also the attack made yesterday from Vienna into Slovakia by the Italians: they had taken Bratislava in a bold move. Little resistance had been met and there was nowhere near the level of civil infighting going on in that region compared to what was being witnessed in the Czech parts of the country. The presence of the Italians there would have clear significance in future events in Czechoslovakia, hopefully for the benefit of the Allies. Indications were that effective organised resistance was soon going to come to an end with the final battles being fought for Prague but the Czechs would meanwhile carry on killing each other.

Satisfied with what he had heard when it came to operations, SACEUR listened to other briefers concerning intelligence and then logistics too.

What forces remained opposing his own throughout East Germany and Czechoslovakia were covered in detail with the best information available being that those were beaten units at the end of their retreat now. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were still all across the two countries – along with some East German and quite a few Czechoslovak soldiers – along with thousands of tanks and other armoured vehicles. They were running out of ammunition, fuel, food and everything else that they needed though. Their air defences were minimal and air support coming to an end. Surrenders were taking place in many places though other troops still made desperate stands even ready to foolishly try to fight hand-to-hand when it came to it but faced with NATO armies fully supplied with ammunition. Civil disorder and defections of figures of authority were taking place with a regular fashion now with military intelligence officers as well as spooks gaining much from events like the latter. Both Berlin and Prague would be the next big battlegrounds, especially the East German capital. There were numerically strong enemy forces gathered around both cities with various estimates on their real fighting strength in terms of ammunition and morale; those would clearly be the deciding battles of this conflict.

As to his own supply situation, there remained a constant supply of almost everything that was needed arriving in a timely fashion to those engaged in conflict under SACEUR’s command. Problems would often crop up with delayed deliveries due to destruction – stocks of refined aviation fuel for air operations were always an issue with so many specialised refineries hit – but those could always be worked around. Now there was the matter of feeding and caring for civilians inside enemy territory which while a task for the AMCC still affected General Galvin as that organisation used his logistics network. He made sure that his best people were on top of that and reminded them at the end of the briefing that just as the Soviets had learnt the hard way, no matter what brilliance was done in strategy and how many troops you had, keeping them supplied was really all that mattered at the end of it all.

Done with the necessary briefings to guide his decisions, SACEUR now set about issuing instructions for what was to be the next day’s operations as ABOLITION continued.





Two Hundred & Fifty–Eight

George H. W. Bush had wanted to be elected to the office of President of the United States this coming November and to be inaugurated in January. He would have had the full support of outgoing President Reagan and had aimed to have the vast majority of the Republican Party behind him. The break-down of relations with the Soviet Union had commenced just as he was in the early stages of his campaigning to gain the Republican nomination though and he had been forced to unofficially suspend his run. The stroke that incapacitated Reagan meant that he had to do his duty and step into that man’s shoes for the sake of the country. Of course, there had been no hesitation in him to become Acting President yet immense demands were placed upon Bush as he now led his nation and, in effect, most of the globe in World War Three.

In addition, there was also a lot of hostility against him too. He was the personal face of the war against the Soviet Union with all the responsibilities that that meant but he also faced all of the criticism that came with that.


Throughout the past thirteen days, with Reagan still in his coma under medical supervision, Bush had been fulfilling his Constitutional role as Acting President. He had plenty of support behind him domestically and internationality and a willingness to do as Reagan was doing and fight this war through to the end where the United States would emerge victorious. It was a conflict that had not been sought and the country had faced harrowing unprovoked attacks that had cost a great deal of lives, but one which was being won. At the same time as victory was being won on the military and diplomatic battlefields, there were many difficulties that had to be faced and dealt with at home.

The United States was currently unified as a country as much as it had been in the early days of World War Two. There was only a very minor vocal opposition to the war – sometimes from surprising sources too – with near non-existent public support for any move to withdraw from the conflict. Public support for Bush was often strong though it was far from universal. There remained many critics of the war and those people focused upon how it was being fought rather than American involvement; a difference not always understood. Some opposition came against Bush’s handling of the conflict, others criticised particular military efforts and then there was disapproval of foreign policy acts undertaken by the administration.

As a democracy, this was all welcomed in theory but it was rather distracting. Attempts were made to influence the course of the war from politicians and civilians as well as some in business and retired military officers. Bush and his senior people were cut off from most contact due to wartime security needs but Congress was still in session and most efforts came through there. There were calls made to be tougher against America’s wartime opponents while others said that restraint was needed due to the ever-present dangers of nuclear war. Certain military strategies were suggested by others while the cost in lives was criticised too. The relationships with countries involved and uninvolved in the conflict to varying degrees was supported by some and decried by others. Supporters and opponents had their own agendas with others unaware that they were in effect acting for the interests of others even if they were sincere in what they believed themselves.

When it came to foreign affairs, there remained opposition to Bush’s decision to negotiate a treaty with Cuba without seeing that country punished as many thought that it should be. Cuba had attacked the United States on its own soil worse than the Japanese Empire had even done and appeared to have gotten away with it to many even if that wasn’t in any way true. South Africa being a major ally of the United States through the role which they were playing in material support for the Allies was another foreign policy headache for the Acting President especially when news came that not only was Namibia and southern Angola under their occupation but that the Pretoria regime now had soldiers in parts of Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique as well in what looked like an attempt to build an empire down there in conjunction with their crushing of internal opposition… any Black African political organisation that voiced any protest met waves of bullets. There were objections to how Taiwan had been brushed aside during the war in favour of what was regarded as keeping China sweet and neutral with that smaller, breakaway country having many friends in the United States but having their offer for military assistance denied so as to not upset the communists in Beijing. Moreover, there was the pre-war invasion of Nicaragua to consider as well as that had involved the Contra resistance with political fall-out from events in previous years still a factor.

Terrorist attacks had rocked the United States on the eve of war and in its first days too with Soviet Spetsnaz later found to have committed many of the more lethal of these strikes. Such commandoes had made further assaults, more of a military nature than against civilian targets, as the war progressed and a lot of effort had to be expended in hunting them down. The US Government was blamed for allowing these acts to take place with criticism coming that there should have been better preparation for them combined with later calls for better efforts to be made to finally eliminate such foreign soldiers. There was plenty of negative response when it was announced that as Soviet soldiers, any captured Spetsnaz were entitled to POW status; there had been calls for them to be shot or at best tried in court. No draconian measures had been enacted in the United States to deal with suspected subversives such as had occurred throughout Western Europe and there hadn’t been an ideologically-driven effort to arrest left-wing figures of influence either. That hadn’t stopped outspoken comment from some figures – on both sides of the argument – calling for such an effort on one hand and others protesting against such a thing without it even being done. Those that were taken into federal custody at once found that they had plenty of friends who were willing to defend them even without knowing any of the facts apart from that the US Government had arrested them due to their the foreign national status or very strong evidence that they were about to commit violent acts against the country. So-called military experts put forth their own plans for how the war should be fought and attacked those undertaken by the administration. There were some outlandish suggestions – dropping the 82nd Airborne Division over Warsaw to aid Polish rebels or sailing up the Gulf of Finland to capture Leningrad – but of course reasonable and often wise ideas too. Because Bush wasn’t doing what was wanted from those outside of the administration he came under attack from them and while it was occasionally in public often private rebukes were worse as his character was heavily criticised.


Many of these issues Bush inherited from decisions made by Reagan and the NSC early on though Cuba was something that he faced a lot of attacks for with the settlement there being a cause for strong domestic opposition. He could point to the benefits of allowing peace in the Caribbean so full attention could be focused on Europe and there were other intelligence-related matters as well, but still there was major opposition to that decision to terminate hostilities for good there and thrash out a treaty with the generals in Havana. Certain congressional figures were briefed on just how many hostile espionage efforts came to an end with Cuban assistance when information from the D.G.I was released: especially a Soviet effort to mail letters and videos to families throughout the United States of their loved ones in KGB captivity with those prisoners pleading for peace. Still, the anti-Cuba efforts remained and dogged him with attacks becoming more and more personal and claims that he was unfit to fill Reagan’s shoes.

As he had being doing when Vice President, Bush made morale-boosting visits to a few locations as he travelled away from Mount Weather and Greenbrier as often as he possibly could. He went to the naval shipyards at Norfolk and Philadelphia where damaged warships were being hastily repaired to visit the workers there. Bush also visited factories in several locations throughout the Mid-West where the war effort was seeing a sudden increase in manufacturing not just of tanks and aircraft but other less high-profile military supplies too. These trips were made with a lot of security and were satisfactory on the ground though overall there was a worry that they weren’t having a great effect overall for him personally with claims from some opponents that the American people would support any President in wartime evening a ‘temporary’ one like he was. Bush didn’t go to the big cities across the nation, especially the economically-depressed ones of many of them where there had been riots, looting and other civil disturbances following waves of panic on the eve of war. It had taken time and a lot of effort to bring to a stop such violence; not everyone had responded to calls for patriotism when they had been acting as if nuclear war was about to come and therefore it was time to steal the latest stereo system or murder their neighbour. Many Americans were ashamed that those events had happened and blamed their government for it all when the truth was that every effort had been made to calm people and then afterwards deal with those committing acts of violence as did they.

Facing the tough challenges that he was at home in the United States had been why Bush had been so clear in his intention to fight the war to a decisive conclusion abroad. ABOLITION hadn’t been his idea, of course, but he was the one who made the decision to sell it to America’s allies and have it implemented. The complete destruction of hostile regimes in Eastern Europe and the smashing of Soviet military power was what he saw as his duty as Acting President but also something that would repair some of the damage done to his own public perception. He was a patriot but he was a politician too and couldn’t ignore the fact that there was going to be an election this November even if everything didn’t go to plan and it had to be fought with a war going on aboard.


Bush had also inherited Reagan’s Cabinet and the top-tier people at the highest levels of the US Government. They were all appointed by his comatose friend and colleague and Bush kept them all on because his role was still a temporary matter; officially everyone was on stand-by for Reagan to return to his duties despite the growing unlikelihood of that occurring. Not everyone was to his liking on a personal level while he regarded others as being incompetent. There were enemies within the Reagan Administration that he had made behind the scenes as Vice President with several key people being aware before the war that should Bush become President they wouldn’t have a role in his administration.

Doing the right thing with this was very difficult. Chuck Grassley had been plucked from seemingly nowhere to become Secretary of State after George Schulz had been assassinated and was doing a fantastic job in working with America’s allies. Bush found himself surprised at how well the man was doing and certainly wasn’t going to replace him in the midst of the war. There were other figures though who believed that Grassley had ‘jumped the line’ with whispered criticism from White House figures. Many of those Bush had been forced to at first remove from the Doomsday Plane when he had taken over there and certainly kept away from Mount Weather; they had gone back to the Washington but still remained in office fighting their political battles against usurpers with Bush becoming another target for them all because he had stuck with Grassley.

James Baker and Colin Powell were other important NSC members like Grassley who Bush was working well with. His fellow Texan who was Treasury Secretary was a key ally before Bush became Acting President and remained so; Powell as National Security Adviser was regarded by Bush as extremely professional and someone also there with calm and apolitical advice.

In opposition to such people Bush was working well with there were those like Frank Carlucci and John Negroponte. The Defence Secretary and Deputy National Security Adviser caused him a lot of grief with how they responded to Congress and also the media too. Bush hadn’t minded one iota when Carlucci had set himself up at Raven Rock and taken Negroponte with him. These two had been conducted what he regarded as self-grandiose measures during the conflict and provided a negative contribution to the war. Carlucci at first had ‘played nice’ but had questioned Bush’s judgement on a many matters – not to his face though – and then seemingly on purpose upset Congress where Bush had to take the flak for that.

Out at Mount Weather, Bush held his NSC meetings with others in attendance over the telephone when needed. There were other gatherings too where not all of his national security team were present and instead Bush was free from many of the political power plays that even in wartime were being undertaken. Baker and Powell were quite often present but so too were some Congressional figures – from both parties – as well as other political figures not in office that Bush knew from his long years in public office. Brent Scowcroft, who Bush knew from the Seventies when both were in office during Ford’s Presidency (the former as National Security Adviser and the latter as CIA Director), was one of those who made regular visits. This evening – night-time in Europe – Scowcroft brought along an academic that he knew well for discussions to do with the war and in particular the Soviet enemy.


Dr. Condoleezza Rice was an associate professor at Stanford University in California. She was a well-known expert on the Soviet Union with excellent credentials within her field and from those from the outside such as Scowcroft who had come to know her. Arriving at Mount Weather was a little intimidating for any civilian with all of the immense security but she adapted fast to her surroundings. The meeting with Bush was an unofficial affair with few formalities and when speaking with her Bush was immediately impressed with the young woman from Alabama and Colorado.

Rice was present to talk about the Soviet Union not herself though and she spoke to an audience of the Acting President, Scowcroft and Powell. There had been a classified briefing given to her beforehand to allow her to understand what was going on with how the war was affecting that country and she was able to combine that with what she knew to talk about what she believed the future would bring.

Not since the Bolsheviks seized power had there been a situation like the Soviet Union was now in. From all the information available, it was clear to see that the country which had chosen to become an enemy of the United States was in the worst possible situation. Their armies had been beaten on the battlefields of Europe in a series of defeats with more of those imminent. Previously subservient allies were betraying them and rebelling with alarming frequency. Their once all-powerful security services which acted so aggressively abroad had been decimated when the heads had been cut off. Foreign trade was no longer active in any manner nor were there any friends of significance left for the regime elsewhere in the world. At home there were rebellions taking place across the reaches of the empire controlled from Moscow through the Caucasus and Central Asia with recent reports of trouble in the Baltic too. Security troops inside the Soviet Union were fighting pitched battles against rebel forces with those in rebellion slowly gaining access to more and more arms and organising better too. Mass mobilisation had failed in its latest attempt showing that repercussions weren’t as feared as they needed to be for a country like the Soviet Union to survive.

Leading the nation was now a military officer who had seized power just like those who had taken it themselves not long ago; past flirtations with the ideas of a military dictator had never got anywhere because it was not something in the Soviet character. Treachery and betrayal were taking place too an alarming degree there against the regime but it was regime figures which had set the example with that in the first place the moment that Gorbachev was deposed.

Rice believed that the Soviet Union was about to fall apart. Things were moving too fast there for the rot to be brought to a halt even if massive intervention was tried. The Soviet Army had been beat on the battlefield and everyone knew it. Ogarkov had no support with even his fellow military officers despising him if the tales of defectors were to be believed. No one could come to the rescue now either internally or externally. Control over the satellite states in Eastern Europe would be lost and also parts of the empire itself.

What did this mean in the long run?

Here Rice was forced to speculate and this she told her small audience she was doing rather than basing everything else upon facts. Ogarkov might survive but otherwise another strongman would emerge. The Soviet empire would fall part due to all of the pressures being imposed upon it and what would be a Russian successor state would emerge; it might have a different name, but it would be Russia-based after many outer regions would escape the grasp of Moscow with the bloodshed that would come from that. Not for a very long time indeed would Russia be able to pose a threat after all the turmoil that would take place inside the remains of the Soviet Union.

Other factors could have to come into consideration though, not least the nuclear arsenal that remained intact and unaffected by the war. No willingness had been shown to use it and intelligence pointed to a tight control being maintained. Rice echoed the sentiment of others who had previously said that the Soviets didn’t believe that nuclear blackmail would work with the United States and there was also the worry that they had that maybe their nuclear arsenal would fail when put to work like their conventional military arms. It was still there though and a force to be reckoned with to make sure that whoever emerged leading a beaten, broken Soviet successor state wouldn’t face complete destruction from abroad. Using it would mean the end of all hope inside any form of a new Russia but having the arsenal intact – even if it was flawed in many ways with suspected technical issues – would mean that no troops from the West would march through Red Square. Pressing the Soviets even harder than they were on a conventional level and letting them fall apart wouldn’t bring about them using their missiles to stop that because it would mean their own destruction, which they were going to painfully do to themselves.

Unless a miracle arrived, Rice finished her briefing by saying, the Soviet Union would soon be no more.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Fifty–Nine

The first of this morning’s reconnaissance flights made over the Berlin area was conducted by an RAF Jaguar GR1 flying from Rheine-Hopsten airbase back across on the other side of Germany. The strike-fighter from No. 54 Squadron – home-based in Norfolk but flying from West German bases during the conflict – flew a lone mission over friendly territory at medium-level before making a low-level run once it approached the Elbe and then headed for enemy-held territory. A safe-passage lane had been followed through air defence zones manned by NATO ground forces with several moments of concern for the pilot when he was lit-up by fire-control radars with the hope that he was just being used for practise and nothing more sinister. No missiles were launched or guns opened fire but it still wasn’t the best of experiences.

Less air defences were encountered over the Havelland despite the presence of the enemy there. The flight plan took the Jaguar around known positions of what SAM’s were active and the altitude taken meant that most radar coverage that survived in the face of the mass of stand-off jamming occurring was avoided too. Heading as far east as Neuruppin, the Jaguar then took a turn to the south on a new course heading for the very western outskirts of the traditional capital of Germany.

Several times the threat receivers went off and the jamming pod that hung beneath the aircraft was switched to the active mode to deal with those directly. Air-search radars for SAM’s were trying to gain a fix on the low-flying aircraft as it raced towards Potsdam all the while trying to hide between terrain features. There was a SAM launch detected at one point but that was classified as a man-portable SA-14 Gremlin and believed to have been fired blind with hope rather than guidance.

The Jaguar was flown by a very-experienced pilot who had made many reconnaissance runs throughout the conflict against much stronger defences than what remained now near Berlin. He had a camera pod also carried and engaged that went approaching several different areas of marked interest as his course took him on several diversions from his generally-southern course getting low-altitude sideways shots as opposed to overhead images taken by other aircraft flying high through the night and also some satellite imagery too. The fixed defences being hastily constructed by the East Germans to guard their own capital and especially occupied West Berlin were what his camera was aimed at so intelligence analysts could look over the minefields, the anti-tank ditches, the earth barriers and the fortified strongpoints.

Opposition to the Jaguar’s reconnaissance flight came again from an attempted SAM launch when the fire-control radar of SA-15 Gauntlet battery tried to lock-on to the RAF aircraft in the Elstal area. In addition to the jamming and camera pods the Jaguar was also carrying a pair of Sidewinder air-to-air missiles as well as two ALARM’s. One of those anti-radar missiles was fired at that radar as the electronic warfare equipment was targeted against it too with the pilot hoping that one or both measures would stop a launch; thankfully for him, a SAM didn’t leave that battery this morning.

Images were captured at the end of the reconnaissance run of more defences around the series of lakes in the Potsdam area including areas where it was thought that anti-tank guns would be set up in strength. Then it was time for the Jaguar to turn back to the west and towards friendly airspace. For the pilot, there was danger in this as he was coming straight towards NATO troops on the ground at low-level in what would look to many like a penetration run to attack them. He activated his IFF at this point and kept in mind that they were meant to be aware of his approach. Again, success was met in crossing back over the frontlines and the Jaguar would head back to Rheine-Hopsten where technicians would be waiting to remove the film for fast developing and transfer to intelligence specialists.


Not long afterwards, a RF-4C Phantom reconnaissance-fighter flown by a Nevada ANG aircrew was making a reconnaissance run towards Berlin from a southern direction when the two national guardsmen didn’t have as much luck as that RAF pilot.

They were heading for the centre of Berlin itself to make a low-level run capturing images of enemy-held airports in West Berlin as well as seeing what shape the fixed defences were to the south of the city when an unexpected air-to-air engagement came. There came the alert too late from a distant AWACS flying to the south over Thüringen that enemy fighters had been detected coming up out of Sperenberg airbase for the Phantom to avoid those; a pair of F-16’s on counter-air duty on the southern side of the Elbe were sent racing to help but they wouldn’t arrive in time.

Unlike the majority of usually-unarmed RF-4C Phantom’s flown by the USAF and the ANG, those with Nevada’s 192nd Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron (as well as an Alabama ANG unit) were armed with and trained in the use of Sidewinder’s. The odds were against the national guardsmen yet they saw that they had no choice but to try their luck and turned to engage the MiG-23’s. Unfortunately, by that point the Soviet fighter pilots had fired first and the Phantom was struck by one of their missiles. The aircraft then crashed near the town of Trebbin with the aircrew ejecting first and then their parachutes bringing them to the ground… where they could have to wait and see whether a CSAR mission was launched to rescue them.

The shoot-down here and the arrival soon afterwards of those F-16’s too late to save the downed reconnaissance-fighter would attract NATO attention’s on the sudden upsurge in air activity that was taking place starting from this morning. Air facilities in the area were to suddenly see a rapid increase in activity and further reconnaissance flights would be flown, though with escorts provided after the doomed mission of that Nevada ANG Phantom.

*

The defences being constructed around Berlin that the Jaguar managed to get a look at but what the Phantom failed to see were what were planned to be a colossal series of fixed positions where a counter-invasion of West Berlin would be stopped from. Huge efforts were going into building barricades to bring to a stop NATO armies approaching the city and this was undertaken by the East German regime with the hope that these would succeed where every other attempt made to bring ABOLITION to a halt had failed.

The Berlin defences were the work of the East Germans, not the Soviets.

Manual labour was sought from West Berlin to work on the defences overseen directly by KdA personnel and with those monitored by the Stasi. Men, women and children above the age of thirteen were tasked with building those defences outside of the city with hand-held tools; there was no personal safety equipment and no heavy machinery. Huge fortifications of earth banks needed to be constructed while wide anti-tank trenches were to be dug. Medical care for those tens thousands of civilians forced into the work was non-existent while food and water were given sparsely. Discipline was harsh and ruthlessly enforced despite the abilities of many to physically do the impossible which was demanded of them. Beatings with improvised clubs were routine but so too were on the spot execution with rifle bullets.

Not in their worst nightmares had the citizens of West Berlin ever dreamed that they would end up in a situation like this slave labour they were forced to do. As can be expected, as a result of the working conditions and then the methods used to ‘encourage’ those civilians to work harder an immense death toll was soon occurring while the actual work undertaken was wholly incapable of preforming the role planned for these so-called defences. One high-ranking Soviet Army officer who had seen much fighting during RED BEAR told the East Germans that NATO explosives would make short work of those defences and they wouldn’t last minutes, but he was ignored.

The construction work would continue until the defences were completed… or all of the workers were dead.


Mielke had paid a visit to a portion of those defences of Berlin when he had left the city late yesterday. Near Ludwigsfelde, located to the south, he had seen work being undertaken by East Germans rather than West Berliners building concrete fortifications and laying minefields along with well-armed Militia troops settling into fighting positions. He had given a short speech and then left with lies later to be told that he knew nothing of what was really going on with the immense loss of life involved in his grand plan to defend the city; there would be documents signed in his own hand detailing his personal instructions on what was to be done.

There were several below-ground structures – what were in effect ‘leadership bunkers’ as American military targeteers like to call them – located below East Berlin yet Mielke had opted not to go down that route of securing himself in a bunker. His enemies were closing in upon him and to many it would seem that the end was coming but he was determined not to do as Hitler had done and disappear beneath ground. Of course, he didn’t have a cavalier attitude to his own fate and believe that he wouldn’t be targeted by NATO: the solution he chose was to stay above ground in West Berlin. He held court in multiple structures within the occupied part of the city preferring the previously French-controlled northwest over the once British and American sectors.

The regime which he now led was in effect just him at the top with no one else of any seniority or significance. There were long-term Stasi men he knew personally as well as bureaucrats running the country though with now half of it under foreign occupation and NATO attacking from their air seemingly at will there wasn’t much need for civil servants apart from those in-charge of security and military defences of Berlin. Foreign diplomats had long since departed so there was no need for external relations, schools were closed so education administrators weren’t needed and hospitals & clinics nationwide had no high authority overseeing them anymore. The business of government here in East Germany was now all about the war and stopping what most feared was the inevitable.

The failure of the attempt to seize Soviet nuclear missiles and their warheads had hit Mielke hard. He had believed that the plan devised by his once-trusted KGB aide would work and the future of the regime would be assured by blackmailing certain NATO states into ending their support for the fighting, West Germany chief among those planned targets of that attempt. The soldiers sent to do that task and then killed meant nothing to Mielke: his only concern was that the Soviets would find out. Vladimir Vladimirovich had assured him that even with failure there were still many KGB operatives willing to cover up all traces of East German involvement and that maybe another attempt could be tried with a different approach. Time was running out though and then Mielke had heard that the Soviet Army was on the hunt for what they regarded as traitors. Again, Vladimir Vladimirovich had showed no outward signs of worry claiming that he could put a stop to that but Mielke had realised that there was a chance that the Chekist was wrong.

As the long-time head of the Stasi, Mielke knew that those who plotted and planned treason always thought that they would never be caught before there came that knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Mielke had in recent days been manoeuvring himself away from what KGB elements remained in Berlin and instead focusing on making sure that his capital wouldn’t fall. There were propaganda efforts to be made to make sure that the people fought to defend their city and he was of the belief that he himself was the one who could talk them into giving everything that they had to saving the East German regime from the imminent destruction that he knew almost everyone feared. In his view of the situation, the West wouldn’t want their soldiers and all of those civilians who remained inside West Berlin to be killed in what would be a mass slaughter trying to take this city. They hadn’t gone into Dresden nor Leipzig, he had been told, for fear of the casualties, and so as long as the defences here could hold, then eventually there would be a chance to bring this conflict to a halt and for him to survive.


Not very far away from where Mielke would make his first series of ‘inspirational’ speeches this morning, a KdA paramilitary soldier standing guard over further civilian slave labourers being assembled to be marched out of West Berlin to add to the ranks of those already dying to build defences rubbed his belly. The man from East Berlin’s Militia tried to remember when he last had a decent meal…?





Two Hundred & Sixty

The US Third Army was still spread over a wide area without a concentration of force nor all assigned forces operating on the same axis of advance. National guardsmen with the US XI Corps remained back to the west finishing up their operations in the Harz Mountains while the newly-assigned Bundeswehr troops with the West German V Corps (having left the US Fifth Army) were in the rear playing catch-up. Only half of the combat strength of General Chambers’ command was now approaching the Elbe yet those were strong forces with assistance already given to going over that water barrier by West German units with the British Second Army which had already seized some crossing sites from the other side.

The US II Corps was operating on the left approaching the Dessau area after coming up from Halle while on the right was the US III Corps. Both moved today to finally get past enemy units retreating in disarray which were slowing their advance and get over the Elbe to concentrate on their mission of closing-in upon Berlin from the south. Organised opposition was few and far between with those which had unit cohesion and especially sufficient stocks of ammunition to put up a real fight causing any real problems. Instead, US Third Army units were running into combat formations which couldn’t defend themselves who were retreating alongside rear-area support elements as well. There appeared to have been a general order given for the Soviet forces present on the southern side of the Elbe to fall back to that river as fast as possible with little clear thinking as to how to achieve that.

The US Army was making that decision a fatal error for all enemy units involved.


It had been at Fort Knox in Kentucky where the 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment had been recently stood-up. Equipment left behind when the unfortunate 194th Armored Brigade had deployed by air as part of REFORGER had been used in part along with other armaments from storage elsewhere. Many of the men who manned the 14th Cav’ came from training units at Fort Knox’s Armor School with other cavalry regiments (parts of the 12th, 13th and 15th Cav’) though most were recently discharged soldiers who had served in other units on active duty such as the 2nd, 3rd and 11th Cav’. The designation for their unit had come after some consideration with the 14th Cav’ being chosen due to sterling historical service during the later stages of World War Two plus recent NATO duty in West Germany too before disbandment in 1972. There was a trio of battalion-sized squadrons of armoured units along with a squadron of armed helicopters and combat support elements in the form of artillery and engineers.

The 14th Cav’ was used during the invasion of East Germany to lead the advance forward with its squadrons functioning sometimes together, other times independently and on occasion directly attached to the divisions of the US II Corps. Their individual numbers ran from the 2nd to the 5th Squadron’s due to the 1/14 CAV having been stood-up in Bavaria earlier in the war from a mixture of separate units to assist the US VII Corps there. Caution was the watch-word within the ranks of the 14th Cav’ with their advance as they sought to make sure that they were not caught out by the enemy by not paying enough attention. Just because one unit was unable to fire off more than a few rounds of ammunition that didn’t mean that the next unit encountered was in the same shape. Many Soviet formations which they ran into were veterans of the fighting on the other side of the Inter-German Border and certainly knew how to fight on the modern battlefield… but so did the 14th Cav’ as well especially with the Soviets still glued to their old way of doing things despite all the reverses suffered.

During the late morning of April 7th, 3/14 CAV, operating out ahead of the 5th Armored Division (formed up in Georgia at Fort Benning and Fort Stewart), ran into opposition which it didn’t expect. Coming out of Dessau and trying to head east away from there were more than a thousand automobiles that blocked the roads. For reasons unknown to the 14th Cav’, the citizens of Dessau had decided to abandon the city and flee with no control over this by the local authorities. There were Trabant’s and Skoda’s everywhere with families packed inside them as well as many loaded with belongings attached to the roofs and rears of those cars. The section of the Autobahn which ran to the east of Dessau towards the downed highway bridge over the Elbe was full – on both sides of the roadway too! – of vehicles that weren’t going anywhere due to lack of fuel, collisions and the way ahead long since blocked when that bridge had been brought crashing down. It had been raining all morning with furious downpours turning the ground away from this paved road and others into mud through which the 3/14 CAV had sent their own vehicles but while that stretch of the Autobahn wasn’t planned to be used, it did run right across their line of advance.

There had been stories that the men of the 14th Cav’ had heard that during the early stages of the war across in West Germany, incidents had occurred like this – though on a much larger scale – where sections of Autobahn’s close to cities near the frontlines had been blocked by West German civilians trying to flee at the last minute. Coordination efforts had broken down and people had taken their cars to the highways only to find that those were unable to be used due to war damage blocking sections of them. In the midst of such chaos had come advancing Soviet forces or counter-attacking NATO troops who had suddenly found their way blocked by such civilian activity. Sometimes there had been efforts to try to clear the civilians before combat was met yet that hadn’t been very successful when tried. Even with the people being forced out of their cars the roads would still be blocked with those vehicles remaining behind and while it would seem at first glance to be possible to run over vehicles with tanks this really wasn’t possible; nor could they be simply pushed off the road with dozers fitted to several heavy armoured vehicles due to their mass as well as sturdy guardrails. Horribly bloody incidents had occurred where civilians had been killed when caught up and effectively trapped between armed clashes while at other times such a mass of people and vehicles had forced combat units from both sides to take detours around such blockages along major routes.

It was armed helicopters flying with 5/14 CAV which first spotted the mass of vehicles with civilians inside them though also people walking through the rain alongside those cars not going anywhere. From what the aircrews could see from above panic was met once those civilians saw the helicopters which could certainly not already help the certain tense situation on the ground there. At the 3/14 CAV’s mobile command post – a couple of tracked M-113’s – it was initially believed that maybe shots could be fired into the air to get the people to scatter and tank fire could be used to blast passages through several points so crossings could be made over the Autobahn for the advance to continue. There was a hurry to get to onto identified crossing sites near Coswig where the 5th Armored Division would cross the Elbe to avoid the whole of the US II Corps being bunched up directly north of Dessau. Yet that first idea as to how to clear the blockages across the line of advance was discarded once a little thought was put into the practicalities of it.

The civilians inside those vehicles might not take heed of the warning shots: they might stay in their vehicles or even shelter underneath them. There would be small children and the elderly that were unable to move as well. Moreover, should blasting civilian vehicles out of the way succeed the wreckage would be something which tanks and tracked armoured vehicles could roll over but the following supply vehicles, not least those of the trailing 5th Armored Division, would have difficulty doing that. Dessau had been not fought over with the US II Corps rolling through there unmet by expected East German Militia resistance: no one with the 14th Cav’ was in the mood to treat these civilians as potential enemies.

Faced with such a situation where issues of practicality joined with those of morality too, the 3/14 CAV squadron commander was forced to report that the way ahead was blocked and that the 5th Armored Division would have to go through the Rosslau crossings north of Dessau rather than move to the east as planned. There was no other choice. The Elbe was still to be crossed yet the US II Corps was going to take longer to do it.

There had been no other choice available though.

*

Schwarzkopf’s US Seventh Army had taken under command the national guardsmen with the US IV Corps and those men previously with the US Fifth Army were moving up behind the forward elements of his command during their own drives to get over the Elbe and finally be free of major river barriers slowing them down.

Crossings would be made by the US V Corps around Torgau with the Spanish I Corps going over at Riesa and the US VII Corps instructed to abandon their direct drive upon Dresden and instead reach the Elbe at Meissen instead. Like the US Third Army, Schwarzkopf’s command still faced a mass of unorganised enemy resistance to the south of the river which was to be torn through before there was a chance it could withdraw ahead of them and establish strong blocking positions up ahead.


CNN’s correspondent Bernard Shaw, who had been with the press pool attached to US Seventh Army’s headquarters throughout the conflict and had extensively covered the fighting from the rear, was today given an opportunity that he just couldn’t turn down. His colleague Christiane Amanpour had been killed back when the fighting was in West Germany and he himself had been with a headquarters convoy which had run into Soviet Spetsnaz, yet the offer to accompany the US Army on the advance – truly reporting from the frontlines – was one that he seized despite knowing the danger. Brigadier-General Barry McCaffery acting as the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division’s second-in-command allowed Shaw to travel with his forward command column from Wurzen on the Mulde River all the way to Torgau.

Whilst REFORGER had been ongoing during the last days of peace, one of the airliners tasked to lift the men of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division had crash-landed when touching down at Rhein-Main Airbase. That Boeing-747 in American Airlines livery had been federalised along with most civilian airliners capable of international flight by the US Government and a failure with landing gear at the last possible moment had caused a terrible crash there near Frankfurt taking the lives of more than five hundred men from Fort Stewart; many of which belonged to the command staff of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division. McCaffrey had been reassigned from his position with the Infantry School at Fort Benning to replace one of those lost officers aboard that doomed aircraft and joined the rest of the 197th Mechanized Infantry Brigade when it left Fort Benning as well to become the third brigade of the formation which he now served within. Weary of the media as most US Army officers were following Vietnam, he obeyed instructions from Schwarzkopf to effectively trust certain journalists to give accurate reports on the fighting as long as they were kept under control: Shaw had been among these who gained plenty of access where most of their colleagues were frozen out and kept far away from the frontlines.

Operating on the left flank of the US V Corps drive to the northeast, the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division made a mad dash across the rolling German countryside. The drama of this attack through weak enemy units to charge for the Elbe was something that Shaw was able to capture for the viewers of the CNN report later shown back home. There were images captured on video from a distance of air and artillery strikes supporting the advance and then close-ups of the damage wrought to Soviet armour caught in those afterwards. Images of surrendered Soviet soldiers furthered the broadcast when made and so too did confident summaries given by McCaffrey of the fighting. Many would later call such reporting as this propaganda but it was certainly something worth watching.

Torgau, Shaw would remind viewers when images were broadcast of there, was where American and Soviet troops advancing into Nazi Germany had met right at the end of World War two and shook hands: Elbe Day. Today there was a last stand put up by soldiers fighting for the Soviet Army to stop the US Army from capturing it along with the bridges over the river which had only recently replaced others knocked down by NATO air strikes. The driving over those bridges by M-1’s, M-2’s, M-113’s and a whole lot of other US Army vehicles was covered in the final stages of Shaw’s report along with the rapid work done by combat engineers to put more crossings over the river here. What he wasn’t able to see was the fighting up close and personal for the town itself when it had been wrestled from its die-hard defenders in the form of KdA units but Shaw did speak to McCaffrey after that had occurred and capture comments from the Brigadier-General about the actions of such Militia.


No journalists were with the US Seventh Army units which moved during the day into parts of Leipzig, Halle and Karl-Marx-Stadt. These urban areas in the rear of the forward advance were entered by small detachments of special forces throughout the day using clandestine methods of entry through outer defensive lines around them. East German Militia forces were known to be very trigger-happy, yet they also had shown much weakness in establishing secure perimeters around the areas which they controlled. After a period of watching the defenders, and testing them too, there came the entrances made into the trio of cities during the morning.

Green Berets teams in Leipzig and Halle went after identified command centres for the KdA. Radio transmissions had been monitored and the sources of those where haphazard control originated from could have been hit with air power but instead soldiers were sent into disable, kill and capture whoever they found there as well as wrecking all the equipment they could find. Upon entry they struck hard and as silently as possible to strike a telling blow against the Militia commanders.

Karl-Marx-Stadt was assaulted by twice as many teams with missions against Stasi and KGB facilities there responding to requests from the US Intelligence Community. Several intelligence operatives from a military background went with the assaulting troops conducting missions against these locations where there were reported to be high-value prisoners of many nationalities held and also document storages. Again, utmost violence was used during the final assaults against hostile forces yet at the same time efforts made to keep the ‘action’ quiet so as to not rouse Militia forces from across the whole city.

These missions met with a lot of overall success due to the planning put into them yet at the same time there was some failure as well, in particular with several of the efforts made in Karl-Marx-Stadt. As believed, the urban areas behind the lines were going to be tough to take with many defenders now entrenched in them not willing to give up yet and surrounded by civilians kept in-place as effective human shields. Orders came afterwards from an unhappy Schwarzkopf that as he originally wanted before he had allowed himself to be pressured into doing the opposite, such places were to be surrounded for the time being and left alone until the defenders had some time to suffer the effects of being cut-off from all outside assistance and realise that their cause was hopeless.





Two Hundred & Sixty–One

Throughout the area occupied by the British Second Army groups of Royal Engineers worked through the day on their assigned tasks. Most of them were clustered inside the operational sectors of General Inge’s British I Corps though there were many inside the Bundeswehr sectors either side of them too as well as some with the Belgians and then of course plenty in the rear too stretching back to and across the Inter-German Border. Thousands of regulars, TA reservists and recently returned-to-the-colours engineers laboured hard with a multitude of tasks that needed to be done. There were those that placed those Sappers at grave risk while others almost ensured safety even in a war zone. Everything done by these men was of great importance and to them their work was even more important than that of tankers and infantrymen at the front fighting in Havelland to push on to reach the edges of Berlin.

Siting, constructing and repairing bridges was one of these essential tasks for sappers. There were rivers and canals over which roadways needed to be laid so that the mechanised forces of the British Army from its combat elements to its support units could cross such barriers. All sorts of structures needed to be placed in the most suitable locations and then laid while there were others already in-place that needed repair from wartime damage or even wear-and-tear. Water barrier after water barrier lay between different parts of the forces involved in ABOLITION providing blockages to movement. Bridges couldn’t be constructed just anywhere due to a need to have them near traffic artery routes as well as taking into consideration security as well from the air but also the ground. In some cases bridges couldn’t actually be laid due to terrain and sappers trained in constructing river crossings put into place small ferries and the necessary support functions for them. There were bridges built in peacetime that remained in some cases, other laid in haste by the enemy during the conflict and then those assembled quickly during the advance. More and more bridges went up over rivers and canals so that enemy action or even structural failure by heavy use of one would allow others to take up the burden. Obstacles downstream from some bridges needed to be dealt with by sappers so that water flowed in the right manner around structures which rested upon the riverbanks and even on the rock below. In other cases there were disabled friendly or enemy armoured vehicles as well as unexploded ordnance or mines nearby on land or in the water which needed to be removed.

Bridges over waterways went up but so too did more across parts of the countryside through terrain features where they might be needed as well. Marshy ground was crossed by more of them as well as gullies where detours around such places would be too long and impede the course of the war. Specialists on construction worked with those with other knowledge when it came to throwing up so many of these structures in addition to making use of what was already to be found.

Other sappers worked to clear minefields and sites of deliberate blockages made along transport routes with obstacles. These weren’t easy tasks and often involved laborious work that demanded careful attention, especially in the case of mines. Nonetheless, where buildings had been brought down next to roads, tree trucks dragged across them or the surfaces blown up to block access this too necessitated attention to be paid. Sappers on these jobs were under pressure to achieve their instructions yet couldn’t rush too much for that would put themselves and others in danger. Pipelines carrying fuel and communications cables for signalling needed to be laid and strung with sappers first assessing the areas where they would run through before setting them up. There was work to be done putting up temporary structures to serve as first aid stations for the wounded and then making sure that headquarters units had working power generation as well as antenna set up in the right place.

Cartographers and those skilled in geographical survey were among the ranks of the sappers fulfilling vital tasks. Not many maps of Germany beyond the Inter-German Border came from first-hand knowledge rather from distant sources and then there had been wartime changes to infrastructure and terrain. The ground itself and the manner in which the rivers ran needed to be surveyed carefully to allow warfare to take place effectively and wasn’t something that could be ignored. Some of this work was done for the purposes of further advances yet much was done to assist combat support arms – siting of bridges and forward air-strips – and also keeping everyone supplied.

Plenty of sappers were right on the frontlines operating in the armoured engineering role. They were armed and travelled in armoured vehicles and faced the same dangers as the combat soldiers they supported. Bridging, clearing of minefields and other obstacles as well as combat demolitions of enemy defensive positions were the missions which they undertook. The sappers here did much of this themselves though they worked closely with gunners serving with the Royal Artillery as well as soldiers in the combat arms to explain to them the best way to destroy enemy positions as well. For example, it wasn’t always the best idea to explode artillery above a trench position but rather to have shells fused for contact burst and lay them along one side of such a structure to cause it to collapse; other fixed positions where opponents were dug into were examined for weak-points by sappers guiding infantrymen to those rather than spending time blasting away at them with little effect.

Armoured engineering tasks for the sappers saw them using tracked vehicles such as the AVRE (based upon the Centurion tank fitted with a whole range of equipment including a short-barrelled 165mm demolition gun), the AVLB (another Centurion-based vehicle with a ready-to-lay bridge atop), Spartan tracked armoured personnel carriers and the CET (a combat tractor). These were highly suitable for the roles which they were used in to assist and transport the sappers around the battlefields when they went forward facing bullets, shells and bombs.

Several Royal Engineers units inside East Germany were soon using captured enemy equipment. A lot of this had come from Polish Army sources but there was also much from the Soviet and East German Army’s as well. They had bridging equipment, mine-clearing tools, tractors & bulldozers and armoured engineering vehicles that in many ways resembled those used by the armies of the West. The sappers found this captured equipment to be generally sturdy and useful yet rather unreliable maintenance-wise as well as certainly not built in any manner with a view for the comfort of its users. Nonetheless, when it was put to use, the sappers made the best of what they had been given as well as diligently making modifications to much of it in addition to doing the same to some of their own equipment based upon what they saw with enemy gear.


Moving through the rear of the British Second Army and closing in upon the frontlines ready to join the fighting there was a brigade-group of soldiers from the Chilean Army. These were some rather high-quality fighting men well-trained and heavily-armed though a motorised force with only some armour.

Chile’s military dictator had sent them halfway across the world in what many of a cynical nature – and who weren’t wrong at all – would see as an effort by Augusto Pinochet to secure his own future. He had taken his country into the war on the side of the Allies early on and sent warships to the North Pacific as well as preparing these troops for their long trip to Germany to link up with the British Army. The national language of Chile was Spanish yet Chile had always been a rather Anglicised country with British volunteers – re: adventurers – assisting in the liberation of the country from the Spanish Empire. Moreover, only a few years ago Chile had provided much behind-the-scenes assistance to British military efforts to retake the Falklands. Sending these troops to Germany as well as proving other aid to the Allies wasn’t just a gesture on the part of Pinochet but a calculated move.

Some apprehension had been shown by the British Army upon the arrival of the Chilean troops to be added to the British I Corps’ order of battle with questions about how useful they might be especially as many seemed to be mountain warfare trained and the armoured vehicles which they had were lightly-armed. Regardless, there were firm political instructions from back in the UK about welcoming the Chileans and SACEUR had also made it clear that with Chile being a member of the Allies willing to send fighting men to Germany where such were needed they were to be treated well and put to use for the benefit of the alliance as well.

Soon enough these soldiers would see some action.


General Kenny had moved his forward command post deep into East Germany now operating in a mobile fashion in the Genthin area, east of the Elbe.

There remained much fighting going on with his forces as the day went on despite the general slowdown taking place with the advance as strength was again concentrated following the advance over the Elbe the other day as well as obstacles met. His troops to the north of the town of Brandenburg were still pushing onwards through with a lot of caution against dug-in defenders spread out of terrain unsuitable for rapid mechanised manoeuvre. Those enemy forces there didn’t stand a chance when pinned down and blasted with waves of firepower yet there were plenty of them there willing to fight as well as other trying to slip back towards Berlin. Brandenburg was now being entered by Bundeswehr troops dismounted but there was also a West German push with their tanks away from there advancing in the general direction of Potsdam. That city was still far off and there were lakes and waterways to the southwest of it providing a good basis for a series of defensive positions, as the enemy was doing, but Potsdam and Berlin behind it were getting closer and closer every day.

Rear-area troops now provided most of the opposition facing his men from the Soviet Army yet there were still scattered groups of frontline combat forces chased all the way back from Lower Saxony that were being encountered. The Soviet Twentieth & Twenty-Second Guards Army’s were no more but their shattered remains which had made that long retreat were everywhere. Ammunition issues for them were very serious now with attempts at bluffs being made often with such forces to allow for retreat as they didn’t have any shells for the tank guns or anti-tank missiles for their ATGM-launchers: these bluffs rarely worked and they were further ripped apart.

East German Militia units in big towns were still present as well. More and more of them had been overcome now with Brandenburg being the only large presence on the line of advance outside of Berlin and Potsdam where they were expected to be encountered. Fanatical fighting came from them at times following high levels of indoctrination with men fighting to defend their homes, yet at other times they just rolled over when faced with superior firepower after putting up half-hearted attempts to make a stand.

NATO policy was now to treat the KdA as an organised paramilitary force and those captured as POW’s. There were recognisable command structures within, uniforms issued and standardised (in-part) weaponry. The East German Militia were not to be treated as guerrillas or partisans, even common criminals as some calls had been made to regard them as, but as a recognised military arm of a nation state opponent. Such a decision had been taken after a series of unfortunate incidents where captured men of the KdA had been ill-treated and in a few cases faced summary field execution upon allegations of war crimes. This had outraged many and especially the West Germans who didn’t like to see their fellow countrymen, even the KdA who had behaved very badly when on occupation duty, afforded such indignity. There were rules of war to follow, the West Germans had argued and whose call had been echoed by others, and NATO should be at the forefront of this even if the other side had done unspeakable things first.

General Kenny had himself been among the many angry when he had heard reports of firing squads following kangaroo courts conducted by some NATO soldiers in the field as this was very immoral. Moreover, recognising those Militia as a proper military force meant that the British Army was covered by the rules of war in a legal fashion when it engaged them in battle like it did using massive amounts of fire support against them rather than wasting the lives of NATO soldiers digging them out of their positions which they often stubbornly held on to; such things could work both ways.

Examining his maps, General Kenny plotted where and how the fighting would continue on the way to liberate West Berlin. There was the outer ring-road, Autobahn-10, that lay far outside the urban boundaries and then the line of defences that the East Germans were constructing before the edge of the occupied portions of the city. Autobahn-10 looped around Potsdam to the southwest before then continuing onwards in an anti-clockwise fashion away to the south. American-led forces were to commence their approaches from that latter direction, but from the west the British Second Army would advance towards the city. It was looking like that would commence starting late this weekend once the battles in Havelland had been fought.

Berlin, he expected, was to be a final, epic showdown where the cost in terms of lives would be high but the political and military stakes even greater.





Two Hundred & Sixty–Two

HMS Brave had spent the morning and afternoon engaged in a series of short but violent naval and naval-air engagements when operating in the western stretches of the Baltic. As part of a multi-national surface flotilla covering the transportation of ground forces into the northern coast of East Germany, the RN frigate worked with NATO and Swedish warships as well as aircraft to combat challenges to the movements of men and equipment behind the forward defensive positions taken up upon the choppy waters.

Smaller surface contacts were the opponents which the Brave fought against, but also enemy aircraft on occasion too. There had been an ongoing determined effort being made by Soviet forces still active in the Baltic to sink ships and down aircraft since yesterday when CROWN commenced. The sudden declared neutrality of the East German Navy’s high command meant that there were of course no Volksmarine vessels present while Polish-manned ships weren’t at sea either following mutinies when back at their home bases. Therefore it was up to the Soviet Baltic Fleet to try and stop NATO pouring units into East Germany from the north and this came after the many reverses already suffered earlier in the war when at first trying to break out into the North Sea and then stop NATO from entering the Baltic in strength. What remained of the Soviet Baltic Fleet, operating from Polish ports (where the situation was often ‘unstable’ to say the least) as well as those along the eastern parts of the Baltic located in Soviet territory, was lighter forces after crippling earlier losses and these couldn’t meet the capabilities of opposing vessels such as the Brave and others.

Mission orders from the Brave and other NATO warships were to keep the Soviets as far away to the east as possible from the lines of communication coming into the German Baltic coastline down from Sweden, Norway and Denmark too. There was an immense movement of forces down into East Germany thrown this back door route to not only conqueror a lot of enemy territory but also to funnel all the necessary supplies in to maintain combat operations there. Those ships and aircraft engaged in their north-south movements, plus heading back north too to reload men and equipment, needed to be protected from attack and the best defence against this was an offensive posture. Warships were not to stay fixed to a position but rather moving around to deny the enemy the ability to target them too as well as to catch attacking Soviet forces before they had reached striking positions. Such basis methods of warfare had to be continually practised or it was believed that the men on the ground in East Germany would be cut off from reinforcement and resupply leaving them wide open to enemy attack there.

Enemy surface contacts came in the form of small warships. Frigates, corvettes, missile & fast patrol boats and minesweepers fitted with weapons (often in an improvised fashion) came westwards alone or in groups. They had mounted guns and missiles as well as torpedoes too. Such vessels were making long journeys with questions asked upon the Brave as well as other NATO warships about why those bases which they travelled from had yet to be attacked in strength from the air including the fuel facilities at them. The naval facilities on Gdansk Bay inside Poland and the Kaliningrad region as well as along the coasts of the Lithuanian and Latvia SSR’s were far away but within range of air attacks. Answers to such questions hadn’t been forthcoming and the surface action took precedence.

There were aircraft too. Not many Soviet aircraft had been sent out over the Baltic, but there were some and these made all sorts of attacks at close-range with bombs and guns in addition to stand-off attacks using missiles as well. There was air cover available for the NATO warships and they had their own air defences, but they struggled more against these than the vessels which they fought for the attacking aircraft were faster and could better hide themselves using terrain over land before making final approaches fast and low over the water.

With those surface contacts, the ability of the Soviet Baltic Fleet to hide its vessels before they struck was very limited. Rough weather could help to avoid radar detection that NATO warships as well as aircraft operating at distance was using to see their approach with waves especially assisting. Regardless, a ship on the surface will almost always been eventually picked up by radar waves especially with moving-target indicator software used in accompanying computers. The Soviets tried jamming and even when this wasn’t overcome or the sources of it directly attacked, the use of such masking only meant the NATO warships could figure out an angle of approach for hostile forces.

In the waters south of the Soviet-occupied island of Bornholm, NATO vessels had seen most of the action as they sought to keep enemy vessels from moving any further to the west. There was an addition motive to make sure that the island wasn’t reinforced by air or sea so that its occupying garrison would soon be of mind to surrender rather than NATO have to fight for the island, yet Bornholm was also a good geographical reference point to run defences south from. It was located far forward and east of the Polish-East Germany border to the south.

Brave had been fighting alongside several NATO warships during her engagements as well as RN vessels including the new HMS Cornwall. That sister-ship had been hastily put to see and commissioned while afloat less it be caught at her builders on the Clyde and bombed there when immobile. Work-ups had commenced afterwards down in the Celtic Sea with a hasty visit being made to Birkenhead at one point following problems with those. There were still civilian contractors aboard and her crew was an odd mixture of old hands as well as inexperienced sailors. Before leaving British waters at the weekend, a lone helicopter in the form of a Lynx HAS3 had been taken aboard: the co-pilot for that helicopter was the Duke of York, fourth in line to the throne. Personally eager to serve just as he had done in the Falklands, Prince Andrew had been given his mother’s approval (this was the Royal Navy after all) to leave his hideaway near Penzance and minders behind to see some action. There had been some discussions on this with the War Cabinet mindful of both the implications of keeping him ‘safe’ as well as the negative political effects of doing that too.

That Lynx with its famous crewmember joined that one flown by the Brave and others from different ships in scouting for Soviet vessels and also attacking them. The helicopters fired missiles and guns of their own while also directing fire coming from NATO warships. Sometimes those helicopters themselves came under fire too as the enemy was far from placid against them like it wasn’t against the warships standing in the way either before the real targets to the west could be encountered.

Despite all of the effort made by a large number of vessels making long journeys, the Soviet Baltic Fleet couldn’t interfere with the mass movement of ships and aircraft into East Germany from the north. There were a very few select successes, but these were minimal. Instead, vessels were sunk and attacking aircraft were downed. NATO had bases to the north, the west and the south now where defensive aircraft flew from with many ships on the water. There were submarines too present taking underwater shots against Soviet vessels before they could strike as well. A massacre occurred with the Soviets being slaughtered and making insignificant gains for all of efforts.

Aboard the Brave, engagements with the enemy slowed down before coming to a halt before the day got late. The frigate had made a sped run back to the west to meet the underway replenishment ship Fort Grange (still carrying her war wound when attacked with the Task Force on the war’s second day) and collect weapons in a hasty transfer and upon returning found that there ceased to be any more targets to engage. The crew wondered as to why this was the case. Had the enemy run out of targets for them to destroy? Were the Soviets marshalling assets for one big night-time effort? Or had whatever remained of the Soviet Baltic Fleet given up? No one knew, but for now the Brave would carry on with her protection duties while CROWN carried on behind her.


There still remained much urgency with the forces assigned to ongoing operations under the CROWN codename. There was intelligence to suggest that Soviet and East German forces in the northern parts of East Germany were of no consequence and Admiral Hoffman had told NATO that the Volksmarine – including the understrength regiment of combat troops it commanded – were the only defenders of the coast, yet there were worries still that some of the intelligence might be inaccurate.

It was hard to believe that the whole coastline and a great distance inland had been left undefended.

Through the three initial avenues of access into East Germany what was still called Allied Army Denmark was funnelling its forces. Swedish Parachute Rangers had during the night landed at Mukran on Rugen Island and on the mainland at Stralsund yet for the time being Wismar, Rostock-Laage and Peenemunde saw the arrival of combat troops and support units behind them.

Moving faster and with more daring than they had done in Jutland, the US Marines which had landed at Wismar had struck inland. The 5th Marine Division had been reinforced by Marine Reservists coming from the Caribbean with those additional men not just bringing their eagerness to fight but also much transport equipment with them too. There had been a lack of a suitable airfield near the city given up without a fight by the East Germans and helicopter landing sites had to be fast constructed ashore, but risks had been taken and the US Marines had sent their tanks forward with Marine Riflemen in wheeled vehicles following them. Late yesterday they had reached the edges of the city of Schwerin to the south while also linking up with French forces which had crossed the Inter-German Border a while ago but focused upon clearing the occupier out of Schleswig-Holstein. Today, efforts were made in getting more US Marines ashore as well as building more landing grounds for helicopters, but there was also some fighting to be done around Schwerin against East German Militia troops. Another important operation was undertaken to send some units to the east to establish fixed communications with the British as well. The US Marines had taken a large chunk of enemy territory at lightning speed but didn’t want to be caught off guard by the enemy counterattack that they were expecting to occur and prove reconnaissance efforts wrong.

The port at Rostock and the airfield at Laage had both come under attack by long-range rockets and tactical ballistic missiles. FROG-7’s and Scud’s had lanced through the skies aiming for both since last night and continued throughout today. The accuracy of them wasn’t great, but there were quite a lot of them sent by the Soviets in what was believed to be more of an attempt to punish the East German Navy’s betrayal rather than for military effect. Laage was closed for a short period after a lucky hit that caused some damage to aircraft, but most of these attacks struck civilians in Rostock rather than the port facilities or the ships arriving there. In addition, Admiral Hoffman lost his life a few hours after his act of handing over the port to the British when trying to talk KdA forces into laying down their arms resulted in his assassination by a suspected Stasi man who had been killed afterwards in a shoot-out. Those Militia units were then crushed by Royal Marines but it had been a bloody affair. Meanwhile, all yesterday and into today British forces flooded in through the access points granted. The Royal Marines had been first followed by Paras and Gurkhas with the 5th Airborne Brigade and now Foot Guards with 9th Guards Brigade. As had been the case in Jutland with PORTER, the British 6th Light Division moved forward carefully believing in concentration of force so no mad dash inland was attempted especially until Laage could be fully exploited. That airbase had been badly damaged in several air strikes by the 3ATAF and while the lone runaway was in use the patch-up repairs undertaken throughout the war weren’t that great. Nonetheless, once organised, the British hoped to be soon pushing much further south though like the US Marines were waiting for what they were certain would be the inevitable enemy counterattack to come their way.

The big airfield at Peenemunde had been taken in a risky manoeuvre by the US Army where they had flown troops into there trusting the assurances of the Volksmarine that all was in-hand to facilitate the initial landings of US XVIII Corps elements. Men with the 3/27 INF, light infantry who had fought in Honduras and Nicaragua during February, had come in aboard a pair of USAF C-130 transports flying from southern Sweden before rushing from those aircraft once they were on the ground. A parachute assault, even an airmobile landing from helicopters would have been preferred by the Americans here but lack of available troops trained in such and the urgency of the situation had brought about that landing. Those initial troops had been joined by the rest of their brigade who had missed the fighting in Jutland and then other elements of the 7th Light Infantry Division from northern Norway. General Foss, US XVIII Corps commander, had chosen these troops first over the objections of others as the 7th Light Infantry Division hadn’t been entangled in non-combat operations in Norway as much as both the 6th & 10th Light Infantry Division’s. Those two formations were on the way to join their fellow light infantrymen though the lead division had spent yesterday and much of today getting assembled on the ground. They were on the coastal island of Usedom and sharing the island, down to the southeast, was the border with Poland and then the port of Swinoujscie; General Foss sent the 7th Light Infantry Division off in that direction while getting ready to have his follow-on forces operate elsewhere soon enough. From Peenemunde there were opportunities not just to get inside Poland a little but to spread out far and wide across northeastern parts of East Germany. Once he could get all of his transport landed – including many examples of captured Soviet vehicles to work with his HMMWV’s and trucks – he saw a massive opportunity to strike inland in several directions taking on any opposition short of a tank-heavy force due to his mobile and well-armed now veteran troops.





Two Hundred & Sixty–Three

The population of West Germany before World War Three begun was more than sixty-one million making the nation the most-populous in Europe excluding the Soviet Union west of the Urals. It was in the main an urbanised nation though with still a significant rural population. Car ownership was very high and there was an abundance of roads and railways linking the nation internally and to its neighbours in the north, further west and to the south.

Using those transport links, more than a fifth of the population left their homes immediately before the conflict opened and during the first week of the war; roughly thirteen million people fled their place of residence. Such a mass movement of civilians was uncoordinated and conducted with little thought apart from to get away from where the war was expected to be fought. Taking place over such a short period of time as well, the magnitude of this mass fleeing of civilians from war was something that hadn’t been seen beforehand in history.

Chancellor Kohl and his government in Bonn had expected that many citizens would flee in fear of their lives. Public announcements were made for people to stay in their homes yet at the same time in the border areas there was an organised evacuation which took place (up to a dozen miles from the Inter-German Border and the Czechoslovak frontier). Other cases of the West German population fleeing in large numbers were expected in private though one internal report stating that as many as two million civilians might move west and south was dismissed as ‘alarmist’. The decision taken to mobilise and call for military assistance from their NATO allies hadn’t been taken lightly and this had been taken into account… but thirteen million people was just an unimaginable number for the West German authorities!

West Germans knew what had happened during World War Two when the Soviet Army had arrived. That may have occurred across in now what was East Germany, but the stories of the rapes and murders were well-known. What was expected was that the rampaging Soviet Army would come storming into the cities and towns where they lived and unleash an orgy of violence and destruction. There were other fears concerning the war too from those who didn’t live anywhere near to the borders in the east but rather near military bases or in the big cities: air attacks and nuclear war.

Those thirteen million who effectively chose to make themselves refugees moved from their homes all across the country. The border areas ended up near deserted yet from out of other locations nationwide civilians left their homes and decided to flee as well. West Germans fled from Hamburg, Bremen, Hannover, the cities in the Ruhr and the Rhineland, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Munich in their millions. Some flocked to airports and railway stations while most crowded into family cars abandoning their homes in pure fear of what would happen should they stay. Millions of young men were being recalled to uniform across the country and they too took to the roads heading for their mobilisation centres.

Such a mass movement of people came during the time when NATO forces were pouring into West Germany as well as when the Bundeswehr was fast rushing to deployment sites. It continued though the last hours of peace and after the shooting started as well. Those on the move did whatever it took to make an effort to leave where they believed that they were in danger including disobeying official instructions when on the move from the authorities trying to direct the immense and unexpected flow of people. Vehicles laden with families would break down when on the move or be struck by falling bombs from Soviet aircraft attempting to blast NATO forces also trying to move through West Germany. There were many instances where forward enemy spearheads crashed into areas where civilians were moving though those were rare early on in the conflict as NATO managed to hold onto most of their forward positions near the borders. When the big Soviet offensive occurred late in the war’s first week, many more civilians, still on the move, were caught up in the fighting though following those chemical warfare attacks and the unleashing of thousands of rampaging Soviet tanks tearing forward.

Casualties among the fleeing civilians were immense during those occasions where they unintentionally attracted the attention of invading forces especially for those caught out in the open. Then there was the horrors of occupation by many when they didn’t get far enough away and had to suffer like their fellow citizens who didn’t flee away from where the East German occupying forces unleashed what was in many ways a modern-day Red Terror.

Those West German who became internal refugees within their own country and who turned into foreign refugees within neighbouring nations generally moved without a set destination in mind and the few that did rarely ended up where they intended to go. Many wanted to leave the country all together and planned to head to the Low Countries, France of Switzerland. Others moved to the western regions of the West Germany even moving towards those big cities where their fellow frightened citizens had decided to flee from. Many had money with them with the aim being to find a hotel to stay or while others had ideas to stay with friends or relatives… most just hoped to go somewhere that they hoped would be safe with the certain knowledge that the authorities would look after them.

Chaos therefore occurred without proper forward planning from those refugees nor their government. The millions and millions of scared and desperate people were just far too many for any organised manner to be undertaken to not just provide them with somewhere to stay but to feed and care for medical needs either. Diseases broke out when makeshift camps were set up without proper sanitary care with many believing that such a thing could never occur in the First World country that was West Germany. Families got separated from each other and there were also many suicides which occurred among the refugees as well when all hope faded among them. Inside the neighbouring countries where many who travelled through borders which were opened up there were attempts made to help them though there were smaller refugee crisis’s going on within those nations too especially the Netherlands. The Swiss eventually gave up and took the unfortunate but necessary step of closing their border with West Germany but the end result of that was an immense build-up of people on that border and then a domestic political crisis at home.

Incidents occurred among the refugees and with those who lived in the areas where their fellow citizens had fled to over issues such as food, criminal acts and also ugly clashes over race. West Germany was home to many ‘Turks’ – guest workers and their families who weren’t naturalised citizens and certainly weren’t all Turkish either – and racism against them was an issue in the country made worse by the refugee problem and also the crisis of war.

Eventually, as the war progressed, the flood of refugees on the move ceased yet the millions of West Germans who had fled their homes were still in great need and spread out far and wide. Several countries as part of NATO and the Allies begun to provide assistance to the West German Government – as well as the Dutch and the Belgians too – to aid these refugees. Tent cities sprung up in the countryside while public buildings in towns and cities were opened to house more refugees. Food and doctors started to arrive as well after some time. Nonetheless, the millions of refugees were still an immense strain upon the authorities of countries struggling with the physical effects of the war.


NATO operations to liberate occupied portions of West Germany and then drive the invaders back into East Germany and Czechoslovakia meant that millions of those refugees were now free to return to their homes as the danger to them had now passed. That was how their government saw the matter, but not how all of those who had left their homes felt about the situation. There was still the fear of nuclear war blasting apart West German cities that many feared while others had heard rumours – sometimes true, sometimes false – that there was immense devastation throughout the areas where fighting had taken place and also where occupation had occurred. Frankfurt and the urban areas in Lower Saxony were heard by the refugees to be utterly destroyed while Hannover was meant to be still smouldering.

For the time being, many West Germans didn’t want to go back to their homes and wanted to stay where they were.

Those that did return faced long journeys across their country which had suffered gravely not just from the direct fighting but from air and missile strikes throughout the rear areas. They were held up by damage wrought to transport links and then too military convoys moving eastwards. Without petrol for their cars they were moved in buses and trucks in an uncomfortable manner and told what they could and couldn’t do as they made their way home.

Those who returned to their homes soon regretted it.

In the eastern parts of the country, there was damage done on sometimes a truly epic scale to their places of residence as well as the areas in which they lived. Looting had taken place not just from foreign soldiers but from their fellow West Germans as well during periods of lawlessness. While household items of value had been stolen, other housewares of no value at all apart from what they meant to their owners were missing too; there was also purposeful destruction taken place within residences. Other homes had been partially or completely destroyed by explosives, demolitions or fire. Some had seen dead bodies left to decay within them while others had been habituated by soldiers billeted inside. Even where a home was untouched the neighbouring area had seen destruction done and of course there were no local services from electricity to running water to shops open. The former refugees despaired at what they found when they came back to where they had lived and so many wanted to go back to where they had been when they had fled. Within the local communities which the refugees returned to they discovered some of what had been happening while they had gone and understood that it would have been far from the best choice to stay behind and try to live under the occupation which had occurred. Enemy soldiers had been one thing but the East German occupation where attempts had begun to socially cleanse those parts of West Germany had been horrific. People had been executed in public; others had been used as slave labour. Industrial goods had been stolen while public buildings and monuments with a history which the East Germans objected to were destroyed. There were tales from the trickle of their neighbours returning who had ended up living under the brief occupation but then there were the empty homes that no one was returning to with a belief that they weren’t fellow refugees yet to return from the west or the south but rather were missing after being taken away by the occupiers for various unspecified means.

The refugees which returned to their homes in western and southern parts of the country, into the large urban areas in particular, discovered that a lot of damage to their residences had been done in their absence too. There had been some looting out to the east but elsewhere inside West Germany it had been rampant. Homes had been broken into and items stolen while much damage had often been done too. There were questions asked as to who were such people and why had no one stopped them from doing this? War damage affected many places too following long-range strikes by Soviet aircraft and missiles that were not particularly accurate. Just as those who returned to their homes in the border areas found, those who had fled from unoccupied regions discovered that even if their own property was fortunate enough to be untouched their neighbourhoods had taken immense damage and public services were out of action.

There continued to be announcements from the authorities which said that things should be soon getting back to normal now that the fighting was taking place in East Germany and not here within West Germany. Yet those refugees who returned home couldn’t imagine when anything would ever be normal again with seemingly no hope of putting their homes and families, let alone their country, back together again.

Meanwhile, many more refugees still remained displaced not yet willing to go back home.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
Two Hundred & Sixty–Four

In later years, Czechs would celebrate April 8th as ‘Liberation Day’. There would be a national holiday in memory of that day that the old regime fell but also to recall that the end of forty years of communist rule had come at a cost too.

Prague was where the collapse of the regime occurred before it was entered by NATO troops as it was Czechs who liberated themselves rather than those French tanks waiting to storm the city’s defences. For Czechs this was something important to remember and so too was that while their capital felt freedom on that day it didn’t mean that the rest of the country had been liberated by that point either.


The French First Army, with its Canadian, Moroccan and West German components in addition to those French troops, had entered Czechoslovakia with the goal of taking Prague. They expected strong opposition during their invasion as the southern element of ABOLITION and such fears had been unfortunately justified. The invasion brought about a vicious civil war that erupted between Czechs attempting to free themselves from the oppression of their government and those fighting to keep the regime in-place. Moreover, as Slovaks attempted to assert their own independence to the east against efforts to stop them from breaking away from the union that was Czechoslovakia, the cost in terms of lives was great. Combat deaths for the invading NATO troops would come mainly from fighting against Soviet and Czechoslovak troops but they were caught up in the civil war too.

The city of Prague, the political centre of the country, had been approached the day beforehand from the west and the south with efforts made to interdict links out of the city to the north and east too. French troops had been positioned to launch an assault to capture strategic points on the edges of Prague such as crossroads and high ground with the combat forces from the other national armies covering the flanks as they made sure that enemy forces wouldn’t pose a risk to that attack. There hadn’t been an intention to push directly into the city in strength though plans were made for small raiding parties to try their luck should gaps open up in the lines of the defenders. Intelligence pointed to Czechoslovak Militia being in great number and the city still being full of civilians; such a fight in urban terrain would be far too costly, the French Army believed.

What wasn’t expected, either by the French nor the authorities in Prague, was that the city would rise up first to free themselves without the need for foreign intervention.

Quite rightly fearful for his own life, Bilak wasn’t in Prague when the end came. He proclaimed that the threat to him from NATO bombers was what had kept him in hidden and secure underground locations throughout the conflict but he truly feared his own people and having a fate such as Fidel Castro had suffered in Cuba. Instead of their General Secretary – only a few months ago put into power by Soviet guns – the people of Prague were ruled over by Communist Party officials who had survived the Soviet-inspired purge Bilak had launched when he had been put into power. These were non-entities who certainly hadn’t endeared themselves to the population with sudden arrests of suspected troublemakers and announcements that the ‘Battle of Prague’ would ‘be fought to the last man’. What those in authority did do, even after all the rebellions launched elsewhere throughout western parts of Bohemia, was arm much of the population of the city who were members of the People’s Militia: the Lidove Milice (LV). Pistols, submarine guns and even heavier man-portable weapons including machine guns and mortars were given to factory workers and other civilians who were all members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and considered ‘loyal’ to the regime. No thought was put into this; standard procedures were followed as the country was facing an invasion and the LV was meant to assist the armed forces in that.

Given arms and with the knowledge gleamed from those who heard propaganda broadcasts from the West that other parts of the country was rising up (the true story of the details of the civil war erupting wasn’t coming through) it really shouldn’t have been a surprise that soon enough the citizens of Prague would revolt. They needed a spark first for the fuse to be lit and that came during the night when further radio broadcasts were made in Czech to them that NATO troops were right outside the city. With that, once dawn came, the first of the shooting started.


For those who lived through Liberation Day in Prague it was one which they would never forget… but their memories were affected when it came to the fine details of the truth of what occurred. Stories would be told and retold, complete with embellishments, of how the whole city rose up as one to defeat their oppressors in a spirit of unity. There would be talk of some of the horrors of the day too when innocents were killed but overall for those who were there they would claim that Czechs were united in taking down those who had long enslaved them in a fantastic victory.

Of course, in reality, Prague was just like the rest of the country during the civil war and it was the same on Liberation Day too. There were many who didn’t support the uprising and others who wanted to stay out of such matters. Many of the women and children killed during the day’s fighting were accidentally killed by those trying to free them not just by troops loyal to the government who fought to stop the destruction of the regime. The role played by NATO troops on the outskirts of the city making sure that all attention had been focused externally rather than internally was forgotten as time went on too.

Fighting took place throughout the city from the centre of Prague into the outlying regions where Czechoslovak Army reservists were manning the frontlines against the French First Army. Gunfire and explosions took place with buildings stormed, monuments toppled and plenty of killing. Huge fires broke out and bodies lay in the streets. There was panic and pandemonium alongside crowds waving flags with one hand and shooting in the air with the other. War crimes were committed when those involved in the revolt killed surrendering opponents in uniform and in civilian clothes; regime troops also killed civilians carrying arms and those not in equal measure.

Eventually, as the day got later and the violence more bloody, LV paramilitary forces in revolt got the upper hand over the authorities and their loyal troops to win the Battle of Prague. They had carried the day due to their numbers and the will to win. There were mass celebrations but also acts of vengeance carried out too. The Soviet Embassy was set alight and so too was the StB headquarters; a massacre of those at the secret police headquarters who had tried to barricade themselves inside took place but the Soviet Embassy was devoid of anyone to be killed there. In Wenceslas Square, there was plenty of celebration despite hundreds of wounded Czechs being treated by doctors and volunteers in buildings alongside this open space as well as efforts to remove many bodies too. Nearby, Prague Castle remained nearly untouched from the fighting after most of those involved in the day’s events had taken the unconscious collective decision to not see it destroyed while fighting for control of such an historical place; other famous sites in the city weren’t so fortunate.

There were no popular leaders of the revolt and Liberation Day ended without a figure that could unite the people of Prague. There were unanswered questions as to where the most recognised opponent of the regime Vaclav Havel was and whether he would lead them? Yet, instead of politics there was celebration instead. Guns were fired into the air by some while others sought out drink; many sudden ‘romances’ begun as well.

A few Czechs sought to make contact with the NATO troops which they had been told were nearby and made radio broadcasts of their own declaring the city free and the regime defeated in Prague. These broadcasts told the French outside that there would be no resistance from the city’s population and in fact there would be assistance in attacking what Soviet and Czechoslovak Army defenders remained outside from the rear. Whether anyone in Prague would be able to do such a thing with any degree of organisation or success was another matter, but those who made those broadcasts were happy and full of confidence.

Prague had been freed.





Two Hundred & Sixty–Five

The armoured clash at Juterbog would be something to remember for those American soldiers who fought in that engagement. The national guardsmen from Mississippi who defeated an ambush attempt by massed Soviet armour there knew that they had won a great victory yet at the same time would acknowledge that it had been a close run thing with the very real possibility that if that ambush hadn’t have been spotted they might have been in plenty of trouble. However, they took part in one of the final clashes of massed armour head-on between the US Army and the Soviet Army and won a stunning victory with minimal casualties; that was enough to make them very proud of the performance which they gave.

Juterbog Airbase and the nearby town after which that facility was named lay south of Berlin and north of the Elbe. It was on the right-hand side of the planned march route for the US Third Army and had recently seen much Soviet air activity in conjunction with other airbases throughout Brandenburg south and east of Berlin. There had been transport aircraft making extensive use of Juterbog with plenty of fighter coverage in the skies to try to protect those aircraft from NATO fighters attempting to prey upon them. Such enemy fighter activity had recently been interfering with the air strikes against the crossings over the Oder and the Neisse along the Polish-East German Border. Bombers from the 3ATAF taking part in the ongoing HAMMER missions there had suffered losses due to a lessening of the areas which Soviet fighters protected – due to NATO advances on land – and the knowledge that those B-52’s, F-111’s and Tornado’s were striking for certain fixed locations.

As to what exactly was behind those transport aircraft flights, NATO did not yet know but was eager to find out. There was speculation that the Soviets were flying in troops that they couldn’t get over the Polish border though that would mean that they were being brought in without heavy equipment; others held the view that wounded men and maybe even captured NATO prisoners were being flown out of East Germany instead. Therefore, in part due to this mystery as well as the geography of where Juterbog Airbase was, it was approached today by American troops heading for Berlin.

Those soldiers were with the 155th Armored Brigade, a formation from Mississippi that in peacetime was independent of higher command yet in wartime was meant to be assigned to the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division. During REFORGER, the 155th Brigade had been sent to the Gulf Coast beaches of Florida instead of with the 1st Cavalry Division to Lower Saxony and spent far too much time there for those who served within the unit guarding against a hypothetical Cuban amphibious invasion that anyone in their right mind knew was never going to occur. Finally transferred to Europe with the US Third Army, these volunteer part-time soldiers from the Twentieth State had come to Germany and were now serving with the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division as part of the US III Corps. Their equipment stored in Belgium for missions with the destroyed 1st Cavalry Division had been already put to use and then lost at Einbeck so everything had to be shipped over from the mainland United States for their use from tanks to infantry fighting vehicles to self-propelled guns to engineering tracks. A little time had been put aside for work-ups when in Europe but the haste of ABOLITION’s launch meant that the 155th Brigade had come over the Inter-German Border to catch up with the rest of the US III Corps and see their first taste of battle today.

Coming up from their crossing points over the Elbe at Elster (General Saint sent his three-division command over the river between Wittenberg and Elster at multiple points), the 155th Brigade went straight towards Juterbog Airbase with the two regular US Army brigades consisting of the rest of the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division on their right aiming for the crossroads at Juterbog itself. The journey was less than half a dozen miles with forward air reconnaissance from aircraft and helicopters almost the minute that the brigade was over the Elbe warning that enemy tanks had been spotted in number up ahead. Bombs, missiles and rockets rained down upon those enemy forces from above with the 155th Brigade’s commander getting plenty of fire support from the air to give those waiting in ambush a rough time while he made sure that his formation was in perfect shape to tackle such opponents. Information flowed in as to how the Soviets started moving once they came under air attack trying to spread out and get ready for American armour coming their way and they did a good job of that even being struck as hard as they were from above and then from long-range artillery support that the national guardsmen were given during their final approach to combat.

Post combat intelligence would identify the Soviet units encountered near Juterbog as being from the 10GMRD. This was a Category B formation home-based in the southern Caucasus and a very long way from home. It was one of those fifth echelon forces that Marshal Ogarkov had moved through Poland and had come to Europe with the majority of its assigned men unlike other formations which were solely reservist manned (or, undermanned). Nonetheless, in trying to get to East Germany the 10GMRD had suffered delays and desertions during the long transfer by rail all the way to Poland, faced guerilla attacks in Poland from rebels there and then been bombed while waiting to get over the border near Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. The four combat-manoeuver regiments had been merged into two weakened combined arms regiments after such damage done before reaching combat with less than a third of the strength in terms of men and equipment than should have been available. Morale for the soldiers was very low and while they had been issued with plenty of fuel and ammunition (taken from other units still stuck on the wrong side of the Oder-Neisse Line) there wasn’t much fight in them. Only the efforts of their divisional commander brought them into battle but he could only do so much and certainly wasn’t a combat veteran… he followed the standard methods long taught in training when it came to manoeuvre to combat and planned to fight that way too.

The clashes took place from early in the morning into the afternoon in a series of meeting engagements with combat at distance and then up close and personal. There were several gaps between the fighting as the 10GMRD withdrew backwards fighting to break contact and the national guardsmen hurried to catch up and keep tearing them apart. Forward defensive positions across the fields south of the airbase were never fully occupied by Soviet tanks coming out of cover around the small villages at the last minute to make use of them and once the 155th Brigade had gone over the railway line that ran across their line of advance they charged forward. Those fighting positions were driven past and the 155th Brigade headed for the airbase beyond going through woodland and over small hills first.

T-62’s and BMP-1’s faced M-60’s and M-113’s in combat and this old Soviet equipment did rather well but the Americans were using very modern combat systems in support as well as now understanding in detail the manner in which the Soviet Army was trained to fight. Command vehicles blew up while others had their signals jammed. Artillery moving into offer fire support was attacked from the air before it could unleash barrages. Soviet flank guards were engaged with long-range anti-tank missiles before they could fully deploy while the advance guard of the main body was avoided by hidden American units so that no warning came to them the battle was to be joined. This occurred when the 10GMRD was on the attack and as it fell back it found that the Americans we shooting mines from artillery into their line of retreat to slow them and then brought attack helicopters into play. Retreating even when under such an attack they found that their national guardsmen opponents gave chase effectively and didn’t allow blocking units sacrificed to delay that pursuit the chance to do their job.

Desperate orders had come over the radio for the 10GMRD to give everything that they had to allow Juterbog Airbase to be evacuated and the divisional commander did his best… at the price of seeing the destruction of what remained of his once proud formation. The Americans tore his regiments to shreds and many of his men started to surrender while others refused to launch suicidal attacks out into the open and claimed radio problems when orders came to counterattack. A lack of willingness on the part of the Americans to close-up and take losses in such fighting was the only reason why that airbase would be evacuated in time and therefore not something which the 10GMRD could be credited with achieving. The 155th Brigade shrunk back from engagements within arms-reach after the first of those occurred killing many national guardsmen in what their brigade commander believed was unnecessary as there was more to win fighting at range where the capabilities of his units were more potent.

There remained further fighting even as the first M-60’s smashed through outer perimeter fencing at Juterbog Airbase. Soviet Air Force personnel there had been organised at the last minute into a dismounted light infantry force with personal weapons and nothing more to go up against tanks followed by armoured personnel carriers mounting heavy weapons too. By that point the 10GMRD ceased to exist and its few survivors scattered so the aircraft engineers, ground crews and missilemen (who had no ammunition for what few launchers they had left) made a very brief attempt to hold on. They were immobile and didn’t have the fire power so their stand barely affected the progress of the 155th Brigade apart from what many national guardsmen just saw as nuisance fire. They rolled across the lone runaway and on the apron towards badly-damaged buildings from wartime air strikes here hunting down anyone left who wanted to fight while they were mounted in tracked vehicles and their opponents were on foot.

Military intelligence personnel arrived in helicopters not long after the airbase was taken and the national guardsmen moved out and away to the northwest. As the day got later they would link up with their new parent division again in advancing upon Luckenwalde this evening yet enemy forces there would be rear-area troops again holding onto improvised immobile defences rather than heavy armour to be met in combat. The men of the 155th Brigade had done very well indeed taking Juterbog Airbase by defeating the strong mobile defenders nearby… and they knew it too so afterwards they would have quite a swagger about themselves.


Juterbog was only one part of the US Third Army’s fight that day and the 4th Armored Division with the US II Corps met similar opposition to what was faced there in fighting off the length of Autobahn-9. The stretch of highway heading towards Berlin north of Dessau was clear of that civilian traffic south of the Elbe but deployed in cover attempting to deny use of that autobahn were further Soviet tanks and mechanized infantry units. Here the Americans fought for much of the morning in mobile warfare against some more enemy formations which had managed to get past the HAMMER air strikes and try to stop or at best delay the attack upon Berlin. Again though, these were shattered units that had most of their fighting strength sapped before they had managed to get into battle. There were grumbles from some of those US Army officers at the USAF failing to keep their promises of shutting the Oder-Neisse Line but those were rather unjustified; only a trickle of the immense fifth echelon forces assigned had managed to get into East Germany and they were not even at half strength when they reached the frontlines.

Assisted by the 14th Cav’ and plenty of helicopter gunships pouring fire into woodland off the autobahn, the 4th Armored Division fought against a mixed unit of armour and infantry from both the 34MRD and the 96MRD. These were Soviet divisions based at Kazan and Sverdlovsk (respectively in the Urals and Volga Military Districts) with reservists manning them; many of those men supposed to be with the formations hadn’t showed up when mobilised back home deep inside the Soviet Union and even less made it to Brandenburg today. The disorganised nature of how the Soviet units were merged only added to the weaknesses which they already suffered with jammed communications and being mercilessly attacked from their air. They were beaten and beaten again in each engagement but kept coming back to make further attempts at combating the 4th Armored Division. There was a feeling among the US Army officers here that these reservists they were facing were either rather patriotic or just insane for they wouldn’t give up until they were dead.

General Sullivan as corps commander eventually got fed up of the delay and pulled his men back to allow an air-strike where F-4’s and F-16’s serving with the 8ATAF in support of the US Third Army dropped several well-targeted fuel-air bombs to cause immense destruction as well as chaos to the enemy. The weather had cleared up making atmospheric conditions just right and those weapons were used very effectively. After the devastation caused by those he ordered the US II Corps back into the attack to mop up whoever remained and get moving up the autobahn towards Berlin.


The US Seventh Army went over the Elbe to the southeast of where the US Third Army was and made lengthy advances against weaker opposition despite being closer to the Polish border where those Soviet armoured forces remained trapped on the other side. Schwarzkopf had his forces swing to the north tearing past hasty defensive positions by immobile defenders who couldn’t make any serious effort to stop them.

Finally free of effective opposition, the American and Spanish units shot forward in what to many was a face to get as far north as possible. Starting from Torgau the US V Corps had the advantage in that yet the Spanish I Corps and the US VII Corps were determined not to be shown up in charging through relatively undefended territory. Those fighting men within the US Seventh Army struggled to keep their guard up when they went for miles without hearing any gunfire or the sounds of explosions and there were a few unfortunate cases where an RPG or a T-12 anti-tank gun would open fire. Such engagements while causing losses were hastily dealt with as those who trying to halt the advance were immobile whereas the US Seventh Army was fully mechanised.

The trio of attacking corps’ each stuck to the main roads with their advances and combat engineers moved with the lead units to assist them in driving forwards when obstacles were overcome. Roadblocks were usually dealt with in advance by Apache and Cobra gunships and then there was the airmobile-rolled 100/442 INF. This battalion of USAR soldiers from the Pacific – garrisoned in peacetime across Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam and Saipan – were tasked to seize key points ahead of the US VII Corps – bridges mainly but also a couple of cross-roads too in platoon-sized assaults as well as a lone company-level airmobile attack. With such assaults from out of the sky the 2nd Cav’ operating in the lead with the 1st Armored Division right behind reached the Schonwalde area by sunset; they were thus almost as close to Berlin as the US Third Army was after travelling twice as far.

In conversation with von Sandrart that evening, Schwarzkopf received further instruction coming down from SACEUR. He had been aware that General Galvin had been getting intelligence on the East German efforts to defend Berlin with their crazy attempt at massive barricades to guard the city to the west and the south and he too had seen the glaring mistake which Mielke had made.

Wasn’t the East German leader aware that he was facing such a mobile opponent as the US Army? Surely it couldn’t have been overlooked that only half of the approaches to the city were defended against and the rest, those to the east, left open to exploitation?





Two Hundred & Sixty–Six

Christmas came early for the intelligence agencies of the West when ABOLITION was launched and NATO troops entered East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Spooks from multiple organisations concerned with espionage activities and military intelligence were suddenly able to enter the country and gain access to people and locations hidden behind the Iron Curtain. There had been much information coming out of Cuba recently yet that had only been second-hand and given over by the Cubans themselves; the opportunity to go into the Northern Tier countries and see things for themselves far outweighed whatever could come from Cuba which had been a Soviet-aligned nation not true puppets like East Germany and Czechoslovakia were.

Many spooks were still involved in the worldwide Great Intelligence War, off playing James Bond and taking the losses that came with gun-play, yet others crossed the Iron Curtain behind the advancing invading armies. There were facilities to inspect from the ground rather from satellite images, people to talk to who had been captured and documentation to be seized so it could be read at leisure.

Santa Claus had fulfilled the Christmas wish list eighth months ahead of schedule.


Not restricted by the operational boundaries of where the British Second Army was operating, British intelligence officers with MI-6 moved throughout both countries behind the ever-moving frontlines. They had security detachments with them in most instances just in case yet as those frontlines moved further eastwards the situation on the ground became much safer as resistance in the rear had been generally crushed before their arrival.

At Magdeburg, MI-6 officers went into the partially burnt-out Stasi regional office in that East German city after West German troops had crushed all resistance from there. There had been a deliberate attempt to destroy the mass of documentation stored there yet those Stasi personnel who had lit those fires to burn all of those records hadn’t been expert arsonists; much of the valuable paper records hadn’t faced the wrath of the flames.

The process begun of removing all of what remained unburnt away to the west and for waiting analysts in Britain. Intelligence had pointed to those files contained details of many foreign espionage operations conducted by the Stasi and so MI-6 would want plenty of time to go over them combined details gleamed with other, external sources of intelligence too.

There were Stasi personnel whom KdA prisoners had pointed out to Bundeswehr military intelligence spooks who had questioned them. As anticipated, there were denials from many that they knew what the Stasi was let alone their service within that organisation – wry smiles lit the faces of many a Briton at hearing this from men who wore the tattered remains of their uniforms – yet others were willing to cooperate and identify key people as long as they were promised safety from retribution from their own people.


British military intelligence officers with the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) paid a visit to Brandis Airbase near Leipzig. The DIS had seen many recaptured air facilities across in West Germany which the Soviets had used as forward points during RED BEAR and then been to other airbases overrun by attacking NATO troops in East Germany too following ABOLITION. Brandis Airbase had been taken by American troops intact though rather than after deliberate destruction had been done by its defenders and was therefore a treasure trove of intelligence information.

In peacetime the facility had been home to a regiment of Sukhoi-25 Frogfoot attack-fighters with the Soviet Sixteenth Air Army yet many different Soviet aircraft had made use of the airbase during the conflict. There were hangars, hardened aircraft shelters and other above-ground structures which like the runaway and taxiways had seen aerial destruction unleashed upon them from NATO aircraft yet below ground there remained untouched facilities. The armouries and the aviation fuel storage structures were something where those RAF men seconded to the DIS wanted to look at but better yet there was the operations centre from where aircraft flown from here and other airbases had been controlled from.

To be able to make detailed investigations of such a site which hadn’t seen sabotage in the form of explosions and fire done was something that the DIS had been rather excited about and their officers at Brandis Airbase weren’t going to be let down.


In Czechoslovakia, NATO troops involved in operations through Bohemia had established a holding facility for ‘personalities’ who had come into their custody at Budweis. KGB and StB personnel and high-ranking military officers suspected to have been fulfilling intelligence roles where being detained there before being despatched to POW camps to the West; there were also some civilians from the ruling regime there after being rescued from fatal fates at the hands of their countrymen.

One of those StB officers had come into the custody of Canadian troops and while at first believing that they were ‘English soldiers’ due to their spoken language had let it be known that he had some information which would be of use to Britain. MI-5 officers were hastily sent to Budweis to talk to the man.

The spook informed the MI-5 team who spoke to him that he was a Slovak, not a Czechoslovakian or certainly not a Czech. The situation on the ground in Czechoslovakia meant that ethnicity was becoming a major issue and so the Britons who came to interrogate him let that go for the time being. What he wanted was his freedom to go across to Slovakia as soon as possible where he had heard that the country was up in arms after the arrival of the Italian Army in Bratislava and the independence of the Slovakian Republic had been declared. Of course, he would need a new identity that didn’t mark him as a StB man and also some money too so he could establish himself…

In exchange for these terms, the Slovak said he had access to documents concerning the ‘English Parliamentarian’ that he had first told the Canadians about who had been on the payroll of his country for many years. At first it appeared to the MI-5 team that he was talking about the former MP John Stonehouse whose previous activities were known about, but this wasn’t the case. Again, the politician who the Slovak mentioned was another ex-MP whose espionage on behalf of Czechoslovak military intelligence (an organisation similar to the Soviet GRU rather than the StB) had long since ceased. However, his political party affiliation was different and of course he was someone else entirely different than who it was first believed some further background intelligence was to be gained about. No, this was to be a whole new ‘outing’ of someone who had betrayed their country for money and the MI-5 officers in Budweis would be all ears as well as promising the Slovak anything that he wanted – with no chance of that happening – for all the information which he had on an individual named Raymond Mawby.


CIA officers in Saxony were taken to a trio of KGB men caught in a very out-of-the-way place named Kothensdorf, a village located several miles away from Karl-Marx-Stadt. These prisoners had been captured by an armoured patrol of the US Army’s 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division operating in the security role which had been pointed in their direction by local villagers. Such men had ripped off their uniform markings but didn’t fool anyone those American soldiers nor the US VII Corps intelligence staff; the prisoners were soon discovered to be First Chief Directorate officers here in East Germany.

Soon enough there came some cooperation from one of the trio while the other two only spoke in very good English of various international treaties – signed long ago in The Hague and at Geneva concerning POW’s – as to their rights… forgetting of course how respectful the KGB had been of such treaties when dealing with captured NATO personnel. Regardless, the pair who didn’t want to talk were left alone while the one officer who wanted to talk was debriefed.

At first, the CIA found what their prisoner had to be no more than titbits of information about various espionage operations which had taken place in the West pre-war and then internal politics within the KGB during the conflict. He wasn’t the finest of catches ever made though as he wasn’t a defector but rather a prisoner they knew that he was worth quite a bit for he certainly didn’t hold all the cards in their dealings and couldn’t really make demands of them. What he could give them in terms of intelligence about espionage operations would be useful in background information but then as they spoke to him more that learnt that he had knowledge of KGB facilities in uncaptured parts of East Germany as well as throughout Poland and Czechoslovakia too: this was certainly very useful information as when such places were entered by NATO troops the CIA could have men right behind lead units ready to seize people and information.


Personnel from the National Security Agency – often referred to in humour as No Such Agency due to its initials – were all over the occupied parts of the Warsaw Pact countries and busy looking at sites for signals intelligence and communications which were found. Many were wrecked either by NATO bombing or sabotage during the retreat further eastwards of Socialist Forces troops, yet even among ruins there was always intelligence to be found in such places.

Those installations of a strategic value got most of the attention with their arrays of antenna and satellite dishes as well as computers and documentation. There was interest in much of that technology where what was used were clearly copies of systems from the West from espionage activities yet at the same time home-grown ideas of note as well.

Examining what was found and shipping it back away to the West would mean that other communications sites identified from satellite images behind the frontlines and far out of reach could be better understood as well as what signals from them possibly read in the future.


There were multiple locations throughout East Germany and Czechoslovakia where the US Intelligence Community believed that thermonuclear weapons of both a tactical and a strategic nature were stored ready to be fitted to launch platforms should the situation warrant that. As the frontlines moved eastwards every day, more and more of these locations, as well as others unknown previously until they were found by troops on the ground, were the scenes of visits by specialist military intelligence serving with the Defence Intelligence Agency.

Wartime needs for coordination had brought such efforts at examining nuclear storage facilities as well as launch platforms under the control of the DIA due to overlap worries within the various US armed services own intelligence operations. All useful intelligence was therefore meant to be collected and analysed centrally before being disseminated… in theory anyway before infighting commenced between men serving the same country but wearing different uniforms.

Regardless to what happened afterwards, the DIA efforts were wide-ranging and met much success though at the same time often frustration too. While some installations were goldmines of intelligence others were useless after purposeful efforts had been made to cleanse them of anything useful for the DIA. Personnel who knew anything had been evacuated like nuclear weapons long before they could be captured by advancing NATO troops and those who were found at such locations were not those with the knowledge that the DIA wanted. More luck was had locating shot-up road convoys of men and material as well as a few downed transport aircraft used in the evacuation efforts from those facilities where there was always information to be gained from such battle damage despite initial violence done.


French intelligence officers with the DSGE were assigned all sorts of roles within occupied territory and one of those tasks given to them was to locate the whereabouts of a French nationals missing and known to be in KGB custody within East Germany: Jacques Delors, the President of the European Commission.

On the eve of war Delors had been kidnapped by an armed group of men in Brussels in an attack which had left five dead and no clues as to who had taken him and why. Belgium had seen the presence of many rear-area security forces yet an escape had been made and a week later there had been broadcasts made in French (in addition to others in English and German when it wasn’t known he wasn’t a native speaker and just reciting lines) from Delors originating from behind the frontlines. Moreover, a video recording of him in both parts of Berlin – east and west – was broadcast too. These propaganda broadcasts spoke of European unity where peace was discussed at length. They were clumsy efforts made with Delors clearly being seen and heard to be scared with emotional strain being evident but at the same time France had been rather upset at such a prominent countryman of theirs being used in such a fashion to denounce their nation and the Allies.

Other broadcasts had been made by the Soviets westwards during the war to extol their propaganda and sometimes would survive jamming efforts by clever frequency-hopping techniques employed by them to get round attempts to block out those radio and television transmissions. One of the best methods in employed was to use frequencies very close to those used by official methods of broadcasting from European news organisation under censorships with the knowledge that jamming would affect those too which were being used to keep morale up at home. As the war progressed, the Americans brought in some very powerful equipment and Delors wasn’t heard from again on the airwaves yet France remained very interested in getting him back alive or at the very least finding out who exactly had been holding him and using him against France so they could get their just punishment.

Several leads were followed while in East Germany for the DSGE yet everywhere they looked they couldn’t find any trace of Delors. There were suspicions that he might be being held in Berlin or possibly caught up inside the surrounded Karl-Marx-Stadt yet at the same time there were fears too that he might have been taken back to the Soviet Union or even lying in an unmarked grave somewhere.


Shallow graves were of interest to West German investigators with the Militärischer Abschirmdienst (MAD) as these military intelligence officers looked into what had happened to Bundeswehr military officers captured during the fighting and turned over to the East Germans. Interrogation of such men were the least of the worries for the MAD but rather unsubstantiated intelligence that they had that these officers had been executed en mass.

Unfortunately, the West Germans found out that this was the case. Enlisted men in Bundeswehr uniform had been in many cases worked to death by the Stasi while others had been badly mistreated during labouring efforts to repair war damage done inside East Germany before ABOLITION commenced. Officers of all grades had been separated from those conscripts and taken away to be at first interrogated for information, MAD investigators found, before being summarily executed once the Inter-German Border was crossed. There had been firing squads made up of Stasi personnel who had done this though with the highest level of written authorisation.

Erich Mielke’s name was all over these acts of callous murder committed against innocent men apparently for no reason at all apart from revenge for the invasion of the country which he ruled. The MAD started collecting as much evidence as possible here for any form of war crimes trial though many among their number believed that no matter what, Mielke wouldn’t be spending that much longer alive anyway.





Two Hundred & Sixty–Seven

The marshes of Havelland weren’t going to stop the advances of the British Second Army towards Berlin. They were troublesome and so too were the scattered but deadly enemy troops fighting around them, but the onwards progress to the east was made. Infantrymen with the 2 R IRISH battle-group (part of the Tiger Division's 20th Brigade) had a furious engagement fighting enemy troops surrounded and who wouldn't yield so had to be blasted out of their positions while enemy wheeled armoured vehicles with long-range missiles had to be chased and defeated in-detail when caught by tanks with the newly-formed 5 RTR (with the 21st Brigade, 7th Armoured Division). It was artillery and especially air power which was truly coming into play now, more so in the latter case as anti-aircraft defences were now few and far between. Fire-power unleashed at distance blasted those few Soviet and East German troops who stood in the way while tanks and infantry moved in carefully to overrun what remaining armed opposition there was. It was methodical and above all careful as orders had come down from the top that here on the approaches to Berlin was not the place to be wasting lives in needless close-in fighting when the enemy could be pounded first under shells and bombs.

In the centre, the Bundeswehr IV Corps and the British I Corps, with the Belgians now moving in behind them too, edged forwards towards the Berlin ring-road that was Autobahn-10. To their right, after completing the crushing of all opposition around the town of Brandenburg, the troops with the West German VI Corps moved in strength against Potsdam. Their initial approaches towards that city outside Berlin’s boundaries had come from a southwestern direction in the preceding days with the 13th Panzer Division – reservists and security troops now manning heavier equipment from storage – and today they were joined by the two other formations which made up the corps which they were assigned to. There was the 1st Panzer Division (with elements of the devastated and disbanded 11th Panzergrenadier Division now part of it) and the 16th Panzergrenadier Division too (which consisted of reservists and security troops plus frontline Territorial troops who had been fighting since the war’s first days) in this battle.

The West Germans didn’t want to see Potsdam destroyed and they knew that there were many civilians there – Germans too no matter what the political differences between governments were – who didn’t deserve to be unnecessarily killed. Therefore there was little in the way of long-range strikes towards the rear-area support units in that city which supported the fighting forces outside of there. Instead, the Bundeswehr fought through the lakes, flooded waterways and woodland outside the city and took the losses suffered which they wouldn’t have done if they had unleashed artillery and air strikes against enemy guns firing at distance and coordinated from communications sites deliberately located within that city packed full of civilians. West German sensibilities on this issue had brought comprise from General Kenny as overall commander despite his deep misgivings about the whole situation.

Those defenders of Potsdam were located outside of the city along water-based defensive lines around Weinberg, Leest and Werder using the winding Havel River and also village strongpoints as well. These were KdA paramilitary troops in the main though retired East German Army officers recalled to service as well as military cadets were also present. Their equipment came in the form of hand-held weapons such as rifles and light machine guns as well as the odd mortar and anti-tank rocket-launcher. Against tanks, heavy weapons mounted on armoured vehicles and artillery given free-fire permission outside of Potsdam these forces stood no chance once the Bundeswehr could get at them.

General Kenny had his attention focused on that fighting outside Potsdam and then afterwards as the West German VI Corps came closer to the city engaged in more fighting on the outskirts. He had some of his staff officers down there delivering reports following observations of the fighting efforts made by the East Germans. Unlike those in Havelland, the defences here were part of those inner defences of Berlin. There were no huge earth-berms like those still going up just ahead of the British troops to the north of here outside the surrounding ring-road and Potsdam’s defenders were East Germans with no Soviets. The presence of East German Army officers, very highly-trained professionals, leading irregular KdA forces was known about and the abilities of those men commanding the efforts of Militia troops outside urban areas was something to keep an eye on.

Anti-tank weaponry in the form of towed guns and missile-launchers appeared to be a favourite weapons put to use by those professional men and when used well those were often formidable weapons. The general immobility of such systems when faced with NATO air cover to deal with the former and massed rocket fire from LARS launchers attacking the latter meant that there was only a surprise factor with such weapons though. Once they opened fire they could be pin-pointed for attack and movement from concealed positions towards other firing points would mean attack from above.

The fighting quality of the defenders of Potsdam was also noted for its intensity as the city lay right upon the very southwestern edges of the Berlin Wall. Parts of that structure had been torn down by the East Germans especially through the centre of the city in a symbolic effort by the regime yet it remained standing near Potsdam. Dedication from the defending troops was expected and met here as those observers from the British Second Army’s operations and intelligence staffs noted even if in the end it only hastened the deaths of those men fighting as hard as they did.

Then came the fighting for Potsdam itself.

Edging closer to Potsdam in the late afternoon and through the evening, West German troops fought in the outer suburbs and met what remained to be strong resistance where the defenders could use their lighter weapons that had failed them outside of the city. There was hesitancy to use strong fire-power close up like there had been at distance which even upset many Bundeswehr soldiers involved in the fight and cause them to rage against political orders not to endanger the lives of German civilians any more than was necessary. Large buildings that could be levelled by explosives were taken floor-by-floor, apartment-by-apartment and then there were civilians everywhere too. These people had been deliberately kept in-place by the regime and only once those Stasi officers with guns either fell down dead or eventually tried to make a run for it were the civilians themselves able to flee and run in every direction across fields of fire. There were many unfortunate cases where West German troops accidentally shot civilians and then many instances too where all evidence pointed to the Stasi shooting civilians too knowing that Bundeswehr attention would be focused upon the cries of the fellow Germans. By the late evening, with only small parts to the west and south of Potsdam in-hand the West German soldiers were ordered to stop advancing as their commanders knew that in the dark losses to civilians would only become greater.

The deliberate use of civilians of human shields in Potsdam was something that caused outrage among the West Germans and also other NATO senior people who found out what occurred during the day’s fighting for the city. They were left angry, frustrated and sickened by the callous behaviour undertaken by their enemy here in doing such a thing when it was clear that this was a war-zone and civilians should have been evacuated.

Moreover, higher up in the chain of command to General Kenny and above there were concerns that such a sight would be seen in Berlin too when that city was entered as part of the liberation attempt. Potsdam had been entered by the Bundeswehr not just because it lay on their line of approach but due to the communications links which ran through it in the form of all those wide paved roads needed for the final push into West Berlin.

Throughout the invasion there had been aversions of NATO forces during ABOLITION to go into urban areas and only the West Germans had done so – Magdeburg as the biggest example of that – over worries about the friendly casualties to be taken in such efforts. Now, there were fears that this use of (their own!) civilians by the East Germans at Potsdam would be repeated in Berlin with West Berliners being put in harm’s way on purpose. All intelligence pointed to civilians still being there inside the occupied sectors of West Berlin and over in the eastern side too with a previous hope that those people would be moved out of the way once NATO troops got into the city. Potsdam now displayed for all to see that the exact opposite was going to be the case; millions of civilians in Berlin were likely to be kept where they were so that NATO troops would have to fight among them against an enemy using them as human shields and fighting from the homes of those civilians as well rather than out in the open.

News from Potsdam went up the chain of command military-wise but also to the politicians too.





Two Hundred & Sixty–Eight

The game was up.

Ogarkov had finally come to accept that the war was lost and the course of events were now being led by others in a manner which was leaving the Rodina imperilled. Everything which had been tried to reverse the tide of defeat after defeat had failed miserably and therefore the only course of action to take was to no longer actively partake in the war going on in Europe any longer.

The Soviet armed forces were to take a bow and exit stage left from the fighting there packing up what remained and marching home.

The reasons for this were many.

*

First in Scandinavia and West Germany, then through East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria Soviet military might had been ruthlessly crushed with immense losses suffered from fantastic reverses. At sea, in the air and most importantly on the ground there had come a complete defeat of Soviet arms at almost every turn with what successes made initially only compounding the scale of ultimate defeat in combat. The technological supremacy of the West when it came to military affairs, what he had warned about for several years and faced much time in disgrace for correctly prophesying of, had triumphed in a fashion to almost make Ogarkov weep.

Early in the conflict, when those victories were accumulating at a fantastic rate, Ogarkov had told Chebrikov that the moment then had been to push on following the deep advances made into West Germany and reach the Rhine before going over that if necessary further westwards. That had been the moment to do such a thing with NATO’s armies on their knees. Yet, Chebrikov, fearful of an uncontrollable escalation from a nuclear weapons release by the West – which, admittedly, Ogarkov had worried over too – had decided to bring to a halt the offensive then a make those foolish efforts at peace overtures that only infuriated the West… following that their fightback had begun.

What had that then brought? The smashing of Soviet military power on occupied soil and then the resulting invasion of the territory of the so-called allies of the Soviet Union. Those fraternal nations were now causing as much suffering to the Soviet cause as the armies of the West. The East Germans and the Czechoslovakians, especially Mielke in Berlin, had gone crazy when faced with NATO troops inside their borders and the Soviet Army unable to stop them due to the defeats incurred earlier in the war.

Czechoslovakians were killing each other in a civil war where brother was pitted against brother there. There were those fighting to topple the regime – which was now, in Ogarkov’s opinion, defeated with Prague lost – and those trying to keep it in power. The Slovaks were fighting against forces trying to keep their federation together while many in the Czech lands were making attempts now to ethnically cleanse Bohemia and Moravia of Slovaks. The Poles were in open revolt partly against their government but mainly trying to kill any Soviet soldier which they could with the result that they were doing more damage to their nation than NATO bombs had done; Hungary was looking like joining them soon enough in rising up as well. Romania, not a member of the Socialist Forces engaged in the war with West, was now privately threatening to ‘intervene’ in Yugoslavia to stop their neighbour from falling apart like Czechoslovakia was unless Ogarkov acted first there. Bulgaria had stayed out of the war like Romania had though on Chebrikov’s command rather than outright refusal to get involved so that an unspecified plan for that country could be put into play at a later date; now Ogarkov was being told that Bulgaria had opened contacts with the West through – of all people – the Turks.

These were the allies of the Soviet Union in Europe and such was their behaviour. Yet none of those compared in any way to the East Germans under that little Hitlerite Mielke who had deliberately gassed and killed Soviet soldiers when trying to steal special weapons from the Soviet Army for purposes unknown but which could only involve gravely threatening the existence of the Soviet state and its people too.

And then of course Mielke was now acting wholly independently from inside Berlin and just gone and done what he had with regards to making those threats to the West all on his own.

Ogarkov no longer believed that allies like these were what his country needed.


As a result of the war, the Soviet Union was in many places tottering on the edge of collapse. Governmental control was breaking down in the outer republics of the union in the southern Caucasus, Central Asia and now the Baltic’s too. There were rebellions, revolts and violence occurring with alarming frequency throughout these regions with other worrying signs that such events might occur elsewhere at some point soon enough too in other parts of the Caucasus, Moldovia and isolated parts of Siberia. Where the people rose up they were quickly crushed but then there would come further outbreaks of violence that were bigger than beforehand and needed even stronger responses.

Ogarkov had been busy distracted from the war going on in Europe in recent days trying to supervise the efforts to stop what was starting to look like the beginnings of succession movements from the union in those places. He found his efforts hampered by local intransigence and then the schemes and conspiracies of the security services against those efforts. The KGB, the GRU and the MVD – all needed by Ogarkov to keep the country together – were against him and were making use of such situations for their own gains. Ogarkov had eliminated all their top people when he had taken power but new men were rising all the time in organisations where everyone seemed to always be intent on conspiring against the state from within to gain personal power. He suspected that much of the trouble was actually instigated by those people and then there had been the suspicious deaths of several key people he had entrusted to restore order in such regions which Ogarkov believed were the work of the security services.

Those spooks and secret policemen were needed by him to keep the country together for the difficult times ahead in the immediate future but many of them seemed determined to break apart the union for temporary personal gains. All attention would have to be focused internally within the country and getting rid of those traitors within would be a tremendous effort that couldn’t be undertaken with a war going on abroad.


The beaten, broken and demoralised Soviet Army was another worry for Ogarkov and the state of that was another reason to give up the fighting in Europe and walk away from that.

He feared for the loyalties of his generals with such men in uniform like himself always hating the security services yet the corrupting influence of them was always there. Other concerns of such men were that they might go rogue and decide to act in a nationalist fashion due to what parts of the union which they were from and involve themselves in ethnic conflicts of the nature already taking place throughout the border areas of the country.

As to the fighting men of the Soviet Army, there were worries over them too… at least those who weren’t dead or in NATO custody. There had been mutinies throughout the war of generally a small scale when fighting abroad though the mass desertion of conscripts in Austria had been something frightening due to how fast it happened and with such numbers. When he had been told that a whole field army deserted as one overnight there had been a moment where Ogarkov had actually thought that all hope was lost.

Currently, with the several hundred thousand troops in Poland kept out of the fighting inside East Germany due to NATO air attacks, and who Ogarkov wanted to march back home, those men weren’t in a position to mutiny. They were fighting for their lives against terrorist attacks launched by Poles at the same time as they suffered under those bombing raids. There was no way that they were going to run away at the moment yet when that they got back home that might be very different unless much effort was expended to make those men remember their loyalty and be fearful of the consequences of disobedience, betrayal or mutiny.

In addition, when it came to the Soviet Army so much of that had been destroyed during the war in terms of men, equipment and the whole doctrine of that organisation. A total of ninety combat divisions – ninety! – had been committed to the fighting and were now no more. Tens of thousands of tanks, other armoured vehicles and pieces of artillery had all joined those formations in being smashed in combat to say nothing of all of those trained Soviet soldiers killed or captured. What remained of the Soviet Army – the weakened forces in Poland as well as what there was left across the nation – were needed to stop Ogarkov’s fear of the Rodina falling apart.

*

There had already been moves made over the past several days on Ogarkov’s orders that would assist now in the new orders he would give for the fighting in Europe to be left to others as he pulled his military forces out. Ogarkov had felt it necessary that with the tides of war having been reversed in Germany and NATO’s armies storming eastwards that wounded men and specialist officers inside East Germany should have been evacuated by air from there into Poland to escape the trap which he could then see being set before it was as now almost completely sprung. When ordering the air evacuation, Ogarkov had been preparing for the worst and now that was occurring.

In addition to getting such people out of East Germany and not allowing them to fall into the clutches of NATO, Ogarkov had already begun the process of moving POW’s captured in combat across into Poland as well. He had no intentions of letting the East Germans do what he feared to such soldiers from the armies of the West. This wasn’t from any moral point of view or compassion that he had but rather because his country would end up being blamed for their fates when Mielke did what Ogarkov suspected would and try to massacre them all. Prisoners were valuable and the numbers of them under Soviet control would be useful later on…

These evacuations would now be joined by the removal of all nuclear weapons that remained in East Germany as well as in Poland and Czechoslovakia back to Soviet territory too. They wouldn’t be left behind to fall into the hands of those former allies nor the West either but rather taken home with their associated launching systems. Escorted convoys would move those special weapons with the troops marching back east too where anyone who wanted to make a real fight of it would be welcome to make their move…

Marshal Korbutov had never been fit for the role of the commander of the West-TVD… yet at the same time the task being set him admittedly too much for any man to achieve. Ogarkov issued orders for his dismissal and recall so that the Soviet Army, and the people too, would have someone to blame. He would keep his life, Ogarkov decided, because the defeat on the battlefield really wasn’t his fault, yet he would have to shoulder the blame there when really it was the Soviet methods of war which he had only tried to follow which had failed rather than him. His deputy would be entrusted with the thankless role of holding on there in East Germany with what troops were left delaying as long as possible any NATO advance to chase the troops from Poland which Ogarkov would save from the debacle there.


There was much danger in what Ogarkov was doing and he was aware of that.

To give up and walk away from the fight as well as the puppet nations in Eastern Europe who were meant to be allies of the Soviet Union were going to upset many people. Unlike Chebrikov before him, he hadn’t purged his nation of all opponents and knew that he could face extreme opposition from many quarters to his decision. As long as he had the guns of the Soviet Army behind him – what remained of that anyway – he believed that he could stay alive and save his country. The security services lacked central command and while still trying to act independent with their own schemes would whimper in fear when faced with massed soldiers threatening them and forcing obedience to Ogarkov… or so he hoped.

Korbutov and the crazy Mielke in Berlin would get all of the blame for what occurred with the war being lost and the Soviet Union itself wouldn’t face destruction nor invasion from abroad either. Quitting now, Ogarkov hoped that his people would understand, was the only thing that could be done and better than having foreigners inside their nation with their guns. Moreover, not an inch of Soviet territory anywhere was going to be surrendered no matter what.

The West had won their battlefield victories but they clearly lacked the political will to dare invade his country and without doing so any demands which they made could be treated with contempt. They had the military forces to at least try to invade through the North-West or the Far East but certainly weren’t going to attempt that due to the nuclear arsenal that the Soviet Union still maintained. Ogarkov understood the West only a little but was certain that they feared the special weapons his country had active ready to be used to stop an invasion even if he himself feared such weapons too with the belief that with one being used all eventually would resulting in the utter destruction of his country and its people.

He could imagine that once the West realised what he had done in marching what forces he had left away from the battlefields in Europe there would be many voices in the homelands of the enemies that his nation had demanding further steps be taken against the Soviet Union. They would want financial reparations, make claims for suspected war criminals and issue calls for such things as territorial adjustments, changes to the political nature of his country and the elimination of nuclear weapons in Soviet hands. They could ask for all that backed up by threats all they wanted: that wouldn’t happen because Ogarkov had taken power and intended now to hold onto it (his initial plan to concede control to a civilian dismissed) to defend the Rodina not serve the wishes of foreigners.

At the same time, others of influence in those countries would be happy with what they would get by Ogarkov’s actions. They had defended Western Europe successfully and tore apart Soviet military might. Ogarkov was leaving behind KGB personnel who still remained inside Eastern Europe for the West to have their vengeance against as well as the regimes there too. Their fears of nuclear war would bring them to agreeing to terminate hostilities as the Soviet Army was back behind its own borders now where fears of a nuclear response would keep them in Europe rather than marching on Moscow.

Ogarkov would be ready for whatever peace treaty terms the west demanded with counters of his own sweetened by the surrendering of tens of thousands of NATO POW’s kept from the bullets of the East Germans.


There remained many things to be done even after Ogarkov started issuing his orders late in the evening of April 8th. He would need to make sure that they were carried out in addition to those people he wanted out of Europe removed by the air evacuation flights and also the effective advance of his armies this time eastwards through a hostile Poland. KGB officers left behind would have to be cut off from all means of escape and then there were those troops on the wrong side of the Polish-East German Border who would have to be sacrificed as well in the final battles with NATO’s armies.

His instructions would face sabotage and even outright disobedience which would have to be dealt with yet Ogarkov believed that they would be followed eventually: he wasn’t exactly alone in thinking that the war in Germany was lost.

Moreover, there was his dependable Colonel Lebed still to complete his final mission there too in gaining some justice for those men killed by the East Germans with KGB assistance during the failed attempt to seize nuclear weapons. Ogarkov hadn’t forgotten about that act of treason and it was something he was still determined to see punished.


As those fateful orders to put active forces out of the war effort were received and acknowledgements came in, Ogarkov had more thoughts on the current situation too. He wondered just how the West was going to react to the most recent threats and demands from that madman that Chebrikov had given power to in Berlin? Such acts as that from Mielke had started the process where Ogarkov had decided to do as he was doing, yet at the same time this particular one would be useful too in causing a distraction of such a magnitude that for some time what he was doing with his beaten armies would hopefully go unnoticed.
 
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