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.
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.