For Queen and County

[James G]

February 10th 1990
The Teutoburg Forest, North Rhine–Westphalia, West Germany

Squadron Leader Ford and those Rockapes who served under his command had spent all of two days now without seeing any more of the enemy. Wing Commander Lewis, heading up the RAF Regiment’s 5 Wing during its wartime operations supporting the Harrier Force, had told him that during the war’s first few hours a whole brigade of Polish paratroopers (acting in the commando role) had been deployed west of the River Weser and throughout the northwestern parts of West Germany. Intelligence pointed to more than a hundred scattered groups which had arrived on the ground after being sacrificed as they were and most of those appeared to either have been finally beaten in engagements with rear-area NATO forces or gone into hiding now. There were Soviet forces too that Ford’s II Squadron had been active in defending against with those less-numerous forces causing far more death and destruction than the Poles. Nonetheless, they hadn’t been seen active in the past couple of days either.

Instead of combat, there had been patrols around those dispersal sites as the Harrier’s remained very busy indeed but with no threats to meet them on the ground. In addition, Ford and his men had been watching the mass movement of West German civilians who had decided that they had no other choice than to make themselves refugees within their own nation.

From cities, towns and villages across the most populous nation in Europe, West Germans were leaving their homes and heading away from danger. They worried over fighting taking place where they lived as the frontlines edged closer to them all the time. There were fears over air attacks too, especially among those from the larger urban areas, as those locations where communications links converged up as they did had been attacked already and those who lived there dreaded further strikes. Official instructions from local and national authorities were for the population to stay in their homes unless they were officially evacuated as the roads needed to be kept clear for military traffic; civilians had also been told that they faced danger when moving due to Warsaw Pact air attacks upon those who had already fled their homes. The civilians weren’t listening though. They had heard the rumours of what the enemy was already doing to civilian areas under occupation, they knew that the enemy was constantly getting further westwards ever closer to them and they all knew the horror stories from the last war with the Soviets.

The city of Bielefeld was seeing people fleeing in great numbers from it. All of the roads nearby apart from the Autobahn (with military police units maintaining it as clear for supply convoys) were full of civilians in a whole range of vehicles and also on foot. Under orders which he fully agreed with, Ford had his men stay away the routes being taken during this exodus. There was a risk of his men being caught up all of that them will being unable to move away should they need to and also as the fear was that those unorganised convoys of civilians would attract the attention of the enemy: throughout the war civilians moving in such a manner had been targeted from the air in what had to be deliberate attacks. Furthermore, Ford also worried over the attitudes of some of those distressed people when it came to seeing armed soldiers around them.

Misunderstandings were easy to make in war.

Those fleeing their homes and heading away from Bielefeld – either from there or from other places as they came through the city – were in this immediate area moving in a general southwestern direction towards the Ruhr and the Rhineland… or maybe further out of West Germany into the Low Countries or France. That brought them through the Teutoburg Forest on their way to those locations which the refugees believed would have more safety than where they were. Most stuck to the roads which ran through the heavily-forested ridges and maintained a focus on keeping heading forward though there were stragglers everywhere who were either lost, taking a break or had decided that they might even find safety here in this region.

At the dispersal site where Ford currently was there were currently operations ongoing preparing the trio of Harrier’s here for flight tonight. These aircraft had been busy on close air support missions for seven days now and their aircrews had faced great danger when flying though also on the ground too. The RAF ground personnel – technicians, aircraft mechanics, those who refueled and rearmed the Harrier’s as well as those focused upon staff work – had shared that danger as well. They were all under intense pressure to keep these aircraft flying and Ford’s men were present to keep them safe. What he didn’t want to see was disruption to this from the presence of civilians.

His hope was that those West Germans running away would stay clear of this location. The dispersal site was in a clearing within the forest and back from a minor road. There should be no reason for civilians to come near though if they did they would politely be moved on. Ford didn’t want to see them stop nearby drawing attention to the Harrier’s and those who worked upon them. In addition, he feared that the humanitarian plight that many refugees might have would affect such necessary work that was taking place with the RAF aircraft. He wasn’t heartless, but… had to be realistic.

Keeping these aircraft flying and those working on them safe had to take priority over everything else.

Information on the movement of those civilians kept coming into Ford’s command vehicle with regards to sightings of major groups moving along important routes as well as continued requests from 5 Wing for information themselves. Ford’s superior’s staff wanted to know where those people were located too. There was contact too with the local West German Territoralheer command as VKK-345 was requesting status information from NATO forces in their operational area about the civilians. Ford presumed that they wanted to try to better control those refugees by knowing where they were though he was feeling rather overwhelmed by their constant requests with regard to that. He had a worry too that if things continued as they were with the security threat on the ground to the Harrier’s weakened, and more civilians kept on coming with the West Germans needing to know all about the, his men might be ordered to do more than just report those they came across.

Ford did not want his men, who were trained as a light armoured reaction and patrol force, tasked for military police duties because that would be a waste and not allow an easy turn back to their primary duty should matters change on the ground.

As he briefly considered how to make sure that that didn’t happen, Ford also pondered over how this mass movement of civilians was affecting West Germany. How would the authorities be able to deal with those refugees when they ended up where they did? Would the West Germans be able to manage, especially if the tide turned into a flood? What kind of pressure would that put on their already strained country?



February 10th 1990
Minden, North Rhine–Westphalia, West Germany

It wasn’t just Major Slater who was furious at the new redeployment orders and who reacted strongly to them when issued. His fellow squadron commanders from the three other company-sized light armoured TA units – those who commanded the Yeomanry and Hussars from Ayrshire, Cheshire and Northumberland – were just as mad as he was to be told that they were to head back westwards across the river. Slater and his fellow officers had all been keen to do something else rather than wait around outside Minden for several days as the morale of their men sunk as it did. However, to be told that they were to effectively retreat without firing a shot was just too much.

Lt.-Colonel Hopkins, the commanding officer of the Queen’s Own Yeomanry, motioned with his hands for silence before trying to explain. “Gentlemen, we’re moving to Sulingen because that is where our orders from Fifteenth Brigade call for us to relocate to. Once there, we will link up with the rest of the brigade and become part of the new corps command positioned to defend against an enemy crossing operation over the Weser.

We need to get moving as soon as possible. Your concerns are noted, but the orders stand. Get back to your commands and prepare to move.”

That was that. Hopkins had no further explanation to give apart from that outline of why they were to move. He walked away afterwards and left his squadron commanders standing where they were inside this building within the war-ravaged Minden.

There was no mood for mutiny but everyone here was still rather upset. Major’s Green and Watson (the Cheshire Yeomanry and the Northumberland Hussars) both gave sad shakes of their heads and muttered something to each other that Slater missed while Major McCarthy turned and spoke to him. “What an idiot. If there is a valid need for us to more, then she should have explained that properly rather than brush us off like he did!

For days now,” the commander of the Ayrshire Yeomanry continued, “we’ve all been sitting around doing nothing. My men are restless, my officers and restless too. No one is happy with all of this, Andrew – especially when we have a regimental commander like him.”

“I couldn’t agree more, Tom.”

There was more that Slater wanted to say yet he kept it all in. These were his fellow officers of equal rank all like him angry at what was going on but he felt it best that he maintain discipline and not explode with anger. It probably wouldn’t be the best in the long run to keep all of this bottled up inside him, yet he didn’t feel like exploding at the moment and airing his opinions fully like the others were.


Soon enough, Slater was back at the field encampment where the Yorkshire Squadron remained hidden from air observation. There were sentries posted and he went through their security checks – glad to note that they were firmly on the ball – and to meet with his own officers who had been alerted to his return. His deputy, Troop Leaders and key headquarters staff were all waiting for him and what news he had brought back from meeting with the regimental commander.

Slater told them straight: they were pulling back now away from here to new position away to the northwest.

“Respectfully, Sir, but may I ask if they’ve lost their minds! What is going on? We should have gone into action day ago, not sat here hiding from the enemy, and now they are pulling us back like that!” The comment from one of his subordinates – who led 2 Troop, a platoon-sized element of Fox’s – bordered on insubordination.

“None of this will go down well with the men, Sir.”

“Are they sending us to this Sulingen place for us to dig-in? Surely they understand that we are best fighting on the move and sitting targets when still?”

“Sir, this is the most… this is just ridiculous! We cross the North Sea, race across Holland then Germany to get here before sitting around for three days before being told to pull back west! I don’t understand the thinking there.”

Slater didn’t directly respond to the remarks made individually. He waited for his officers to get what they wanted to say out of their system. He noted how Chris Wood said nothing when the troop leaders did along with the company sergeant-major as well. He turned to his deputy and arched his eyebrows at him with what he regarded as an unspoken invitation to speak his mind.

Wood said nothing though.

Once everyone had finished, Slater did what was necessary even if he didn’t agree with it. “We have our orders,” he begun, “are we will follow them and leave personal feelings on the matter aside for the time being. The whole regiment, the brigade and in fact the whole of the Second Division is in the same boat as us in being given these new redeployment orders. I can assure you that your concerns are widely shared.

It is a strategic move that we are undertaking. The majority of the B.A.O.R is holding their ground in the greater Hannover area. The enemy’s main axis of advance appears to have shifted to the north and it doesn’t look like a move made because they are desperate to break through but instead one fully planned out.

We will be part of the large concentration of NATO forces – British-led from what I understand – positioned to stop a move over the Weser River from succeeding. I do not foresee us using our armour fixed in-place, Graham,” he specifically addressed Lieutenant Yates’ concern over their Fox’s being used in a static role, “but rather as intended as fire support for the infantry when they are on the move. The limitations with the Fox’s are well known.”

He paused and waited for anyone to have any further comments to add though didn’t expect any seeing as they should have all said what they had to say.

When no one else spoke up, he finished what he was saying: “We’re moving in an hour. Let’s get everyone and everything ready to go and make preparations for the journey too. It should only be a short trip and we’ll fast get settled in and ready to fight when needed to.”

The meeting came to an end with that. Slater remained in severe disagreement with all that was going on and knew that he was very far from alone, but orders were orders. Those were legal and military justifiable decisions being made by those positioned above him in the chain of command and all that he could hope was that they knew what they were doing.



February 10th 1990
Diepholz, Lower Saxony, West Germany

Lieutenant-General Maguire was certain that he knew what he was doing.

He would have told anyone who asked that his planned deployments with the new Allied II Corps were the only thing which could be done with what troops there were available to him and the overall strategic situation. His command was to operate as a reserve for NORTHAG to protect against an enemy breakthrough across the Weser River. He therefore needed to concentrate what forces he had assigned to him where the best possible place for them would be to defend against such an enemy move.

However, what he had available were those forces that remained after the command had been raped as it was being set up. Assigned West German, Dutch and Belgian units – combat and non-combat – had been transferred out of their assignment to the Northern Territorial Command with the deceased Territoralheer officer whom Maguire replaced having not put a stop to such a thing. There had been long-standing West German plans for reservists from across the northern parts of their country to be joined by smaller forces from their allies to create a composite corps command to fight in Lower Saxony. Such plans now looked like a joke to Maguire as he had seen not just all of those Dutch units reassigned to their national corps command (the Netherlands I Corps was fighting on the other side of the Weser) but a significant portion of the West German units, in particular the armoured formations, committed to the fight several days before he took command. There were still Belgian forces with the Allied II Corps though they were not a like-for-like replacement for what had been lost.

If it wasn’t for the political need, then he believed that his command should have been designated as the British II Corps, not the Allied II Corps. This was because there were now large numbers of British troops under operational command: far more than there were others from NATO countries. He had the pair of British divisions, each with three brigades of infantry assigned along with light armour. There were Belgians too: the equivalent of another pair of brigades and again mainly infantry rather than tanks or other heavy armoured vehicles. That lack of armour was the reason while Maguire had spent all of yesterday leading an ultimate successful effort to regain control of a third Territoralheer combat brigade to add to the other two he had been left with when Generalleutnant Muller had been killed. West German home defence brigades in the northern part of their country had totaled six before the outbreak of hostilities with tanks and mechanised infantry under command. A pair of those well-equipped and organised units were either destroyed or near-destroyed up in Schleswig-Holstein with another one lost the other day in fighting north of Hannover when it took the full brunt of a Soviet tank division striking forward to link up with East German paratroopers. A fourth one – the 52nd Brigade – had been sent to recapture Nordholz Airbase and Cuxhaven along the North Sea coast from the Soviet airborne forces which held those places; it had been this formation which Maguire had retrieved to bring back to the Allied II Corps.

By this evening, there were effectively four NATO divisions under Maguire’s command soon to be ready to take on the enemy should they defeat stronger NATO forces east of the Weser and cross over.


Diepholz was more than thirty miles back from the river. It was a communications centre with road networks converging upon it as long as lighter rail links. Maguire was far from happy having his headquarters here and would soon be moving on as this wasn’t his choice of locations to run the command of formations that were expected to be soon in battle. He anticipated that Soviet air attacks would soon come here – that they hadn’t yet was a surprise – and the town was far too distant from where he expected the fighting along the Weser to take place to have effective control of the upcoming battles.

As to those battles themselves, he was planning that they would be fought the day after tomorrow. This wasn’t guesswork or hoping for the best but due to the summary of the military situation as it was at the moment in the north of West Germany with regards to the enemy’s advances and the failure of other NORTHAG units to stop the Soviet-led invasion. Both NORTHAG’s staff and his own were involved in creating that time-frame.

The ‘where’ that the Allied II Corps would see combat was a wholly different matter.

It was clear that the Soviets were pushing for the Weser. The river ran across their line of advance for a continuation of their attempt to conqueror West Germany and crush NATO’s armies underfoot (under-tank would be a better description) as they did so. It couldn’t be avoided by them as there was no way to outflank it due to its course from near Kassel towards the North Sea. Soviet field armies moving across the North German Plain after successfully fighting their way across the Lüneburg Heath had no choice but to move across the river if they wanted to advance further towards the Netherlands, the Ruhr and the Rhineland. From anywhere between the coast and the general Minden area the Soviets were expected to try to cross. There would be a variety of factors involved from where their forward spearheads managed to push back NATO forces on the eastern side to where they deemed to be suitable crossing sites meeting their own needs to where they regarded their follow-on forces behind the spearheads as having the best chance of defeating NATO forces on this side.

It would be the enemy’s decision as to where they crossed the river when the time came.

Those NATO forces on the other side at the moment were falling back towards the river with what Maguire had been informed by his new superior, the commander of NORTHAG, as haste to join him in stopping the Soviets on the Weser. The British I Corps was to remain on the other side but the Netherlands I Corps, the US III Corps and the West German I Corps were retreating. His information said that of the three corps commands the Dutch were in a bad shape though not as weakened as the West Germans were from their desperate fighting to defend their own soil. When it came to the Americans, their early losses when the war opened as chemicals rained down on their REFORGER bases appeared to have been overrated at the time in terms of casualties though had delayed them from getting into the fight: now that they were almost at their authorised strength in terms of formations assigned they had no choice to fall back like the NATO forces around them in the face of the enemy armoured onslaught.

There were no French troops under NORTHAG command. Long-established plans for a French corps to fight in Lower Saxony had changed on the eve of war with France concentrating on defending central and southern parts of West Germany instead of being spread out everywhere. Maguire could understand that reasoning though at the same time knew how such a decision had negatively affected NORTHAG who had been denied their fighting strength. His Allied II Corps was meant to partially replace the missing French alongside the Americans who were bringing further reinforcements of their own to assist NORTHAG. Therefore, when the enemy assault crossing over the Weser came Maguire’s men were to join with the other NATO forces where the French should have been.


Those forces under Maguire’s command were second- even third-rate troops. Such a description wasn’t a slander against those he was to command but a cold hard fact. The Belgians were regulars who ran training units as well as reservists who had long ago done their conscription with an expectation that war duty would involve staying at home not fighting in West Germany. Those West German forces came with plenty of armour and transport yet again they were rear-area units with planning for them long involving their use behind the frontlines, not on them. His own British forces were a collection of regular and TA troops who had been scattered across Britain and abroad before the war started. Many had NATO-assigned missions in peacetime, but others didn’t. Again, like the Belgians and West Germans they would be best either used at home for internal security duties or behind the frontlines dealing with enemy flank attacks or airborne assaults rather than meeting the main enemy advance head-on.

Lack of armour (those West Germans had old M-48 tanks and his few British armoured forces had no significant tank numbers) was one matter, but so too was chemical warfare equipment. The majority of his men had training in how to operate in a chemical environment – even the reservists – but little modern equipment from personal suits to be worn to decontamination gear. The Soviets were still using chemicals at the frontlines in places with weather conditions being a major factor and the same was true of NATO use of such weapons. There were political limitations imposed by the West Germans each time nerve gases and other chemical incapacitates were used when NATO did so with the Soviets using theirs at time with no apparent other objective than to kill and terrify civilians. Therefore, Maguire’s men could expect to be fighting in a chemical environment when they had limited capabilities to do so. The situation was that desperate though that the risks of those weaknesses had to be pushed to the side alongside everything else because the Allied II Corps would be needing to fight the enemy head-on soon enough.

It would be a battle that Maguire wasn’t looking forward to fighting. He had no doubt that wherever the Soviets decided to come across the river they would make an effort against his men: their reconnaissance efforts would deem the Allied II Corps as weak and vulnerable to attack.

[James G]

Chapter Nine – Traitor

February 11th 1990
Outside Silly, Hainaut, Belgium

Entering the school classroom which served as office for the Permanent Representative, Second Officer Whitaker realised that she must have made an error. There were three men in here, one in uniform and two in rumpled suits, and none of them was the Foreign Office diplomat.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I must have the wrong room.” Whitaker was a little embarrassed at her stupidity. She couldn’t understand how she had mixed up where the head of the UK mission to the NAC had his office with that of someone else…

“You’re Second Officer Laura Whitaker, yes?”

Whitaker was turning and about to go back out of the door when one of those standing inside spoke to her. She turned back to look at the trio of them again and responded: “Yes, I am. How can I help you?”

Politeness had kicked in along with the concern over whether the voice that had spoken had come from the man in uniform.

“It’s you that we wish to talk to. Close the door behind you, Laura, and come in and sit down.” It was the military officer speaking. She saw by his uniform insignia that he was a Royal Military Police brigadier and someone she certainly had to obey when given an order such as he had.

Whitaker did as instructed. She noticed how all of them had their attention focused upon her as they themselves took seats on the other side of the desk which usually served for the purposes of the Permanent Representative and beside it too.

Each of the three serious-looking men faced her with, as before, the brigadier speaking in-place of everyone else.

“I’m Brigadier Frank Evans. This is Julian Richards from the intelligence service,” he looked to his right and then across to his left, “and Sam Douglas in an American counterpart of Julian’s.

I have a question for you, Laura. Can you give me an honest answer?”

“Yes, Sir.” Whitaker knew something important was going on and feared that she might be in trouble. She couldn’t think why exactly that might be the case and would fight her corner if accused of something that she hadn’t done. The brigadier was the one talking to her though those two spooks – ‘from the intelligence service’ and ‘an American counterpart’ meant to Whitaker MI-6 and the CIA respectively – were here for more than to just show their faces.

“Are you a traitor?”

“Absolutely not, Sir. I am no such thing!”

Again, Whitaker’s reply was automatic yet it was completely truthful and that was why it had come without even the hint of a pause to consider what she had been practically accused of. She was entirely the opposite of a traitor!

“Then why, I must ask, have you spent the last week cavorting with a traitor and passing him information: sensitive, top-secret information which certainly has been passed onwards to the enemy. You have been having clandestine sexual relations with this man despite the need to be focused upon your duties, a man who has been betraying his country and murdering those who have been getting in his way. This man is now missing; this traitor and your lover.

Explain yourself.”

There should have come a smile afterwards, then the trio before her would have burst out laughing at their unpleasant joke. They couldn't have been serious, they must having been playing a foolish joke with such remarks made by the brigadier and the other two here for a perverse reason to watch.

Yet, there was nothing like that.

Just silence and all eyes fixed upon her with expectant gazes.

Oh my, are they serious?

“Sir,” Whitaker begun her desperate response, “I really have no idea what you are talking about?”

“Really?”

“Are you talking about David, Sir: David Baxter. Because…”

The brigadier cut her off: “Yes, I am talking about your fellow traitor, David Baxter.”

“But… he can’t… it just doesn’t… no...”

Whitaker broke down at that point. The shock and outrage was gone and there came the realisation that what was being said – about David, not her – was true and she had been fooled.

“Tell me how it all started please, Laura. Start at the beginning and we’ll listen to you.” With a kind, compassionate, almost-grandfatherly tone the spook by the name of Richards addressed her.

She started her tale…


Whitaker told them everything. She started where they had asked her to and finished with when she had last seen Baxter. Everything in between was muddled in places and not in chronological order and she also kept going back and mentioning things she had forgotten to say earlier.

The tears hadn’t come strong and had soon ceased; Richards had given her a tissue. She had been mighty embarrassed when mentioning that she had Baxter had made love though seeing as it had already been said by the brigadier she found it easier to tell them that than if it hadn’t already been talked about.

She was truthful with them and didn’t lie. It was abundantly clear that to do so wouldn’t have the best consequences for her. Whitaker explained how she was helping her country when Baxter had told her that Mackenzie was a foreign agent aiming to hurt it though had stopped providing Baxter with what he asked for when she had been upset at his apparent confession that not he, but ‘his organisation’, had killed her fellow military officer. She told those listening how she knew he was lying though believed that he was deceiving her over that and until just a few moments beforehand she had been certain that her actions were those of a patriot, even a misguided one.

No interruptions came from the brigadier, Richards nor the American. They didn’t nod nor shake their heads; no physical reactions that she could read were expressed. Whitaker had been unable to tell whether they believed her or not. She didn’t know if they were considering her as a traitor still or believed her when she said that she must have been fooled. These people were just impossible for her to read.

As she had explained it all, Whitaker had felt shame. She had gotten past the embarrassment of telling these strangers how she had fallen in love with Baxter when he had shown her kindness following the near death experience they had both experienced and then relating how they had made love. Instead, the shame came in the main from hearing it all, from her own lips, at what had happened with how she had committed what was now clear to have been espionage for the benefit of her country’s enemies. Telling those listening how she had stolen documents and surreptitiously passed them onto Baxter made it all so obvious that she had been doing the wrong thing. At the time, such requests from Baxter to do that, including how to cover her tracks to avoid detection, had appeared to be the right thing to do when he had told her of Mackenzie’s alleged activities… but it was different when said aloud.

She was an idiot, a fool and had been so easily manipulated.


When she was done, and now successfully fighting back the tears that threatened to reappear, Richards had a question: “You said you last saw Baxter at just after Seven local time last night?” He checked his wristwatch. “So… more than nine hours ago, yes?”

“Yes.”

Richards turned to the brigadier. “That correlates with what we have, Frank.”

All three of them nodded and Whitaker struggled to understand the importance of that.

“Sir, may I ask what happens now?” She spoke to the brigadier herself. “If you are going to hunt down David and bring him back to… make him talk and confess, then I can help. I know him rather well and I would really want to assist in every way I can to make up for…”

“No.” He cut her off with such a firm statement, even if it was only one word, that she instantly understood that there was no argument on the matter to be allowed.

It had seemed like the best thing to say. She had wanted them to know how she desired to firmly make amends for all of her mistakes. In all honestly, she realised that she wouldn’t have been much of a help, but she would have liked to see Baxter caught. He had put her in this situation and she wanted a revenge upon him.

“We’ll need to properly debrief you, Laura.” Richards spoke less harshly to her and with, again, than comforting tone. “Sam’s people will have some questions too and I am certain that you will be helpful to our American allies too as you will us.”

Whitaker was thinking of an adequate response to show how sorry she was and that she was innocent of all that Baxter had done. Before she could say anything more though, the brigadier had something to say.

“You are a disgrace, Second Officer Whitaker.” There was utter hatred in his face as he stared at her; she met his gaze because she had to. “You bring ignominy and dishonour on the uniform which you wear and the service in which you are a member.

Men and women in uniform are fighting and dying as we speak as they do their bit for their Queen and their Country. What have you done? You have betrayed your country and all those who serve alongside you.

Shame on you.

Shame on you for forgetting your duties and your morals with your adulterous relations with David Baxter. He may be a traitor but he is a married man too.

Shame on you for dishonouring the faith shown in you in your posting here with all of the lies you told and all of your filthy behaviour.

Shame on you for being taken in like you did so easily by a traitor.

Shame on you for how you knew whose hands Lef-tenant Colonel Gordon Mackenzie – a dedicated servant of his country – had died at and did nothing about.

Shame on you.”



February 11th 1990
Tromsø, Troms, Norway

There was nothing underhand in what Lieutenant Leigh was doing as he observed the fighting that Z Company was taking part in so he could afterwards brief his commander on the situation with regards to the city of Tromsø. His presence and mission was known by the company commander and the platoon leaders too with Leigh one of them only until a week ago. He was free to observe what he wanted and Leigh was kept as safe as possible while doing so. Those whom he had spoken to throughout the morning we eager for him to see the situation that they were in without hindrance because they knew that the battalion commander was of the mind to make sure that Z Company, along with the rest of 45 Commando, was not pushed any further into the city than it already was. With their commander’s adjutant present, a trained combat officer himself, this was someone that they all wanted to see the truth.

That truth was that should 45 Commando make a final effort to finish off Soviet forces holding onto the centre of Tromsø than the battalion would face unacceptable casualties and be rendered incapable of further combat action.


Leigh was present this morning as there remained fighting taking place around Tromsø between its defenders and those aiming to eliminate them more than recapture the city. He watched the combat taking place at the frontlines in a few instances while also spoke with junior officers and senior enlisted men. Lt.-Colonel Wilson had instructed him to do so and he obeyed his orders.

Z Company, like X & Y Company’s, and with all three formations given support by W Company acting in the fire support role, fought to kill off the Soviet marines who wouldn’t give up the fight for this city. Their enemy was one that had fallen back as far as it was going to and was dug-in all around the inner parts of Tromsø among the ruins of buildings where they had concealment and cover. There was plenty of sniping in the place of regular combat between attacking, retreating and counterattacking groups of men as well as many ambushes taken against any major effort by the Royal Marines to edge forward. In response, heavy weapons were brought to bear from those which were man-portable to those fired from distance. Again and again though, return fire came as the Soviets refused to give in or at least allow themselves to be easily defeated.

Hesitancy was what Z Company practiced in combat here. There was no desire upon the leaders nor the fighting men themselves to suffer any more casualties than they already had and those would only come if they were foolish enough to attempt to advance into the killing fields which their enemy had turned the streets of Tromsø into. They fought their enemy at distance and only when certain that those defenders had been killed when a building was brought down or set alight around them would them edge forwards – slowly, ever-so-slowly – to confirm that. This was something regarded as painstaking slow by other outside observers who weren’t in the same position as Leigh was but was absolutely necessary.

Furthermore, something of great significance too, was the presence of civilians as well. There were still thousands of them alive in Tromsø and stuck behind enemy lines. Further fighting would kill many more than who had already lost their lives during the occupation and the active resistance that came with that. None of Leigh’s fellow Royal Marines wanted to see any more of them killed, especially at their hands, and that would certainly happen should they go any further forward.

The Soviets had been defeated all across Tromsøya Island and the strategic importance of holding it would return to the control of NATO forces, not the Soviet invaders. Control of the city on the island wasn’t as important as long as those remaining defenders were bottled up inside and unable to break out or in any way harass those making use of the airport and the harbour facilities here now that the UK/NL Landing Force had achieved their objectives.

The problem was that not everyone understood it that was and Leigh’s superior needed evidence to make his case to those above him in the NATO chain-of-command that fighting house-to-house for Tromsø was not something that should be done at this time.

*

Leigh met with his commander just before midday at the battalion command post. He reported on what he had seen and heard as he summarised the situation at the front. Wilson nodded throughout, clearly agreeing with the impressions gained by Leigh, and had no criticisms for what was said about how 45 Commando would be unable to complete the mission to fully take Tromsø without suffering immense casualties in doing so. There had been a few other voices beforehand who had said that such a belief was defeatist yet those dissenting opinions carried no weight with Wilson. Leigh’s commander had had his own beliefs reinforced by the visit to the frontlines and he was visibly pleased with what he was told.

Soon afterwards, there was a meeting with Wilson’s own superior, the commander of the Dutch marines and the senior Norwegian officer for the military region which encompassed Tromsø and Tromsøya Island. Leigh was asked to give an even shorter summary at that meeting and the there was an equivalent report from a junior Dutch officer too who had also been right up on the frontlines. Those representing the upper command structure of the forces of Britain and the Netherlands who had just retaken this Norwegian territory then explained to that Norwegian their reasons for not moving into the city itself.

CASTLE had been launched to defeat the Soviet Naval Infantry forces here in battle and destroy them as a fighting force. Taking the airport and the seaport, now also clearing mines laid in nearby waterways, were the mission priorities of that so that Tromsøya Island could be used for further offensive operations to retake more occupied parts of Norway. Those Soviets who had been here had been pushed back after suffering a major defeat and weren’t going to be reinforced as they certainly soon would have been to make this a major enemy base. It was unfortunate that the enemy had fallen back into the city but they were reported to be at less than a third of their strength and could be contained there. 45 Commando’s losses totaled seventy men dead and wounded – with the Dutch losses comparable – and finishing off the Soviets could double, even triple such numbers. There was also the certainly that in wrecking the further combat power of the British and Dutch forces in doing that many more Norwegian civilians trapped in Tromsø would lose their lives too.

This wasn’t something that they were prepared to do – those officers here – and their own senior commanders were telling them the same thing.

If the Norwegians really wanted to fully finish off the last of the enemy in Tromsø then no one was going to stand in their way. Those Soviets were cut off and fast running out of ammunition with a hostile population behind them consonantly attacking them in the rear. There was a firm belief that they would soon be inclined to surrender or maybe the men there might mutiny against orders to keep on fighting. Regardless, there would be no Anglo-Dutch forces fighting house-to-house for the city.


Afterwards, Leigh joined Wilson in returning to the tactical command post for 45 Commando. The state of NATO-Norwegian relations was a matter far above his official duties. He was a junior officer on the ground and only his posting had allowed him a window into that world and certainly not an active, decision-making role. He had his opinions though, even if he was to keep them to himself. From everything he had learnt so far in the ongoing war much of what had occurred in Norway had been avoidable. He believed that while the Norwegians had fought well when they had, that fighting had not taken place often enough: British, Dutch and American forces had recaptured large parts of their territory for them. The Norwegians had waited far too late to mobilise for war – relying on diplomacy to intervene at the last minute – and when they had the bulk of their regular forces had been deployed in the wrong place to meet the initial enemy blows. No combined arms invasion of a significant strength came west across the mainland through the Arctic regions of Norway towards their main defensive positions but instead there had been all of those airborne and amphibious assaults against key points. At sea and in the air the Norwegians had fought back and their irregular volunteers with the Home Guard had been very active while the majority of their regular army had been in the wrong place. Now the Norwegians were really showing their capabilities as they moved troops about and those men fought very well, but that was after elite NATO forces had fought to retake those locations seized by the Soviets and the Norwegians were mopping up the last of the resistance.

The Norwegians, he believed, would certainly retake Tromsø with the UK/NL Landing Force looked on and prepared to fight elsewhere using Tromsøya Island as a base to do that from. They were moving troops here right now to do that, making use of the recaptured facilities on this island. Ships and aircraft – Norwegian and in the service of other NATO nations – were moving men and equipment; there was also the planned move using American assault hovercraft who had been active off Andoya to bring some Norwegian armour here.

Aside from all of this, there was something else to deal with at the command post: incidents that concerned those accused of collaboration with the enemy that were occurring within the operational area where 45 Commando was active at the front and in the rear.


Since arrival on Tromsøya Island the other day, contact had been made with resistance forces here. The local Home Guard had assisted SBS teams in getting 45 Commando ashore in an unopposed landing. They had also been able to provide much tactical intelligence as well as been instrumental in making sure that the Soviets were, and remained, tied up engaging them as well as the UK/NL Landing Force. These were brave civilians who had taken up arms to defend their country and suffered greatly for that. They fought for Norway and its people with a furious passion.

Leigh could only respect such people for all that they had done and continued to do so here and elsewhere across Norway.

At the same time, they were also deciding who was a traitor to Norway and who wasn’t… and killing those who fell into the former category. In the space of just a week these civilians had turned into guerillas and were acting as guerillas did: with their own rules of warfare. Enemy prisoners captured stood a good chance of surviving custody as these Norwegians weren’t overtly mistreating them let alone shooting them. That had been done by the Soviets in Tromsø – by the small KGB and GRU detachments who had arrived with the Naval Infantry rather than those Soviet marines – but not by the Home Guard.

They were shooting their own people accused of working for the enemy though and doing it enough to have note taken of it by 45 Commando and to bring a decision to intervene. Those who stood accused of being traitors to their country deserved to be judged by a court of law or at least organised field police before any sentence could be handed down. If such traitors were killed when armed then Leigh reckoned that he and many of his fellow Royal Marines could accept that, maybe ignore it. What they were seeing was firing squads used to dispatch bound and blindfolded men and this being done on a regular basis.

With permission from higher authority, and the Norwegian military told about action being taken pending their own arrival in number to bring control here, 45 Commando was going to stop this. Representatives of the Home Guard forces active here were now at the battalion headquarters and were going to be spoken to and told to stop doing this at once.

Leigh was apprehensive – to put it mildly – about how such people were going to react when told that they were to stop doing that or Royal Marines were going to be used to stop them.



February 11th 1990
Ahrbergen, Lower Saxony, West Germany

The Soviet Army hadn’t learnt lessons from the conflict on a tactical level. The Divisional and Corps intelligence staffs had said so in their intelligence summaries issued to brigade commanders and they were perfectly correct in this. They were still acting like it was the first day of the war as they fought in exactly the same manner on the attack with no deviation from their standardised doctrine. There was no flexibility in how they pushed forward and as they inevitably came unstuck they tried to extricate themselves in the same fashion as beforehand with the same results.

If so many deaths weren’t being caused, if so much destruction wasn’t being done and if the stakes weren’t as high as they were it might have been amusing.

Brigadier Johnson wasn’t one to take comfort in the enemy’s misfortune though, let alone allow himself a smile. While the Soviet Army elements the Desert Rats were engaging worked towards their own demise it was his men who were on the NATO side of that fighting and there were still casualties being inflicted. When armoured vehicles with command antenna were identified and subsequently targeted first there would always come return fire. It was the same with lures leading the enemy into an ambush on the ground as there were friendly losses at the same time even in ultimate success.

The big, cumbersome bear that was the Soviet Army fighting to conqueror West Germany may have left itself open to attack but it lashed out at all times without all of its enraged might given an opportunity.


The Soviets had been attacking all morning.

They were from the 207th Motorised Rifle Division (207MRD), a ‘Category A’ formation based pre-war just across the IGB. Johnson had been informed that they had been part of the successful attack to devastate the West German I Corps on the Second Guards Tank Army’s right flank: afterwards, when the exploitation field army behind them moved forward, the 207MRD was redirected southwards. There remained about half of the division left now and it had been sent towards where the Desert Rats were southeast of Hannover to fight both Johnson’s command and the 12th Armoured Brigade too. These were all combat veterans with top-of-the-range weapons and equipment – what was left after fighting as hard as they had against the West Germans anyway – yet remained firmly committed to their operational doctrine. It was costing them dear and they were unable to achieve what had to be their minimal objective of attempting a crossing over the Hildesheim Canal let alone operating on the western bank. The Soviets didn’t have any manpower advantage and were attacking defending troops behind a geographical barrier with the ground ‘prepared’ as it was. When that was combined with the inability to do anything new, the 207MRD was not in a position to defeat the Desert Rats.

Artillery and air power from both sides were involved in the battle though the majority of the fighting was taking place on the ground. The defended position which the Desert Rats were positioned to protect was the Hildesheim Canal yet that was a very narrow waterway. Assault bridges could be used to cross it given the right circumstances and the western bank wasn’t highly-favourable for a major static defensive effort that would be needed if holdings it western banks was the objective… and the 7th Armoured Brigade was a mobile force too. Instead, as per his orders as well as British Army doctrine for fighting with a formation such as the Desert Rats – plenty of tanks and mechanised infantry – Johnson had his men in the main across on the eastern side of the canal.

There were villages and open fields were the Desert Rats were engaging the enemy in. Extensive minefields had been laid and demolitions made to channel the Soviet attacking forces into kill-zones. Years of planning had gone into this and added with recent real-world wartime experience it was working. Johnson had three of his four battalion-sized battle groups, those mixed arms units, fighting and they were doing exactly what was expected of them and exactly the same as what had been done to the Soviets earlier in the war right up near the IGB. Vehicles with extra antenna were always hit first for they carried not just commanders but fire support liaison teams too. Tanks fitted with mine-ploughs were also given priority for destruction as well as tracked vehicles with multiple ATGM launchers moving towards flanking positions. Only then were the main bodies of attacking enemy columns directly attacked once chaos would have set in. There were heavy guns brought to bear from distance and air support called in too. Johnson had his battle groups moving around the battlefield too rather than staying still. To try to fight staying still would rob them of all of their advantages and allow the Soviets to do what they were able to do better than NATO tactical forces on the battlefield: move forwards taking losses so that in the end their opponent was either crushed or retreated.

Such had been done to the West Germans on the Lüneburg Heath, Johnson had been informed, and elsewhere to the Dutch and more West Germans further north too. Fighting a mobile battle on the ground of his choosing – at a local level anyway – was how he was determined that that wouldn’t happen to the Desert Rats here. It was supposed to have been the East Germans with their motorised rifle division of reservists coming from the Braunschweig area that the Desert Rats were meant to have engaged. The intelligence on the enemy’s dispositions and intentions had been wrong there with those East Germans now to the south moving against Hildesheim itself and a Soviet division here aiming for the Hildesheim Canal instead. In the place of old T-55 tanks and BTR-50 wheeled infantry vehicles, there were the latest T-80 tanks and BMP-2 & BTR-80 armoured vehicles. This was actually more of a favoured opponent though for while the East Germans were suspected to follow Soviet doctrine (and probably would) that was a certainty when it came to the 207MRD. This formation was what the Desert Rats were best suited to fighting as they were predicable whereas the East Germans might have done things differently.


While the majority of his men were on the other side of the canal, and many of them unfortunately losing their lives alongside their opponents, Johnson had his mobile command post on the western side. There were covered areas around this small village that he was making use of to conceal his own presence from physical surveillance while his communications were made using antennae arrays that moved too so that they would be targeted. When it came to going after the tactical command-and-control of NATO combat forces in the field, Johnson knew how effective the Soviets were at that. Again, there was predictability but that was in the form that unless such facilities were on the move in a continuous fashion they would be attacked. High-explosive artillery shells, barrages from multiple-barreled rocket-launchers and aircraft firing missiles from distance would pile on; nerve gases were often used in such strikes too with the Soviets being damn serious in their efforts to go after headquarters and communications elements.

On his maps he had the battlefield covered with his operations and intelligence staffs busy keeping track of everyone involved on both sides. This information was of vital importance as to know how the Desert Rats were doing in each engagement and where the enemy was – and where they were moving too – meant life of death for Johnson’s men. In addition, external links with Division and fire support assets ran through here too.

During the early afternoon, in the midst of the battle for the Hildesheim Canal, there came messages broadcast over the airwaves which Johnson and his staff became aware of. They were at the time keeping up to date with what was going on around Hildesheim itself as the TA paratroopers there (two battalions under the tactical command of the wartime-only Parachute Regiment Group) engaged the East Germans with all of their anti-tank weapons. However, in place of the usual massive Soviet electronic interference over the airwaves in their sometimes successful attempts to jam them through the method of blocking out everything with white noise, there came something different.

A West German Army liaison officer translated it for Johnson as his men worked to find a new set of frequencies to use in the face of Soviet efforts to ‘channel-hop’ across as many as possible. In German, pronouncements were made that NATO was not only losing the war against Warsaw Pact forces attempting to ‘liberate’ West Germany and Continental Europe too, but certain Western nations were preparing to ‘abandon’ the West Germans and others too. There was talk of a meeting in Geneva where ‘America and England’ tried to betray their ‘so-called allies’. The details of this were vague, but those broadcasts claimed outside confirmation of this. Moreover, there were accusations that ‘any German’ who ‘fought for Bush and Thatcher’ was a ‘traitor’ and would later suffer ‘the rightful justice of the people’.

Johnson knew this was all baloney. He regarded the attempt at psychological warfare like this to be not worth the effort for the Soviets and reckoned that such broadcast stations would come under very severe attack soon for they would be high-powered transmitters capable of long distance use in an actively hostile electronic environment. Such statements as those, which included instructions for West Germans to lay down their arms if their officers wouldn’t tell them ‘the truth’ about what apparently had been said in Geneva, weren’t important to him. What was happening in Hildesheim, located between his flank and that of the neighbouring 22nd Armoured Brigade (who were fighting the Poles coming northwards) was of greater significance to him at the moment, though second of course to the ongoing battles his own men were fighting. Therefore, within moments of being told what those broadcasts had said, he forgot about them after confidently assuring himself that they meant nothing in the grand scheme of things.

[James G]

February 11th 1990
The Liebenburg Forest, Lower Saxony, West Germany

It wasn’t paranoia: there were hunters of men in the Liebenburg Forest.

Trooper Jones and his fellow SAS soldiers knew full well that those groups of Polish soldiers weren’t here for no other reason than to track down NATO commando forces. Their actions confirmed that as they searched carefully and cautiously through areas of natural cover as they took their time and protected each other at all times from what they regarded as all conceivable threats. This was clearly a reaction to events the other day when that communications relay tower had been brought down and thirty or forty Poles killed. To do that as successfully as they had was bound to bring some sort of response though this was a strong countermove indeed.

The Poles were now scouring the forest. They were looking for the men who had killed their comrades for what would be personal revenge though of course the legitimate military reason too of engaging enemy forces within their rear area. Jones was certain that if he was in their shoes, back with his home regiment – the Royal Regiment of Wales –, then he would be doing the same thing.

McSherry as team leader agreed with Jones on this and so did Fryatt as well. Bishop though had a difference opinion to his trio of fellow special forces men. The Londoner, whose home regiment was the Royal Green Jackets, believed that those Poles were searching for them not because of what they had done the other day but rather that they had been tipped off that they were active in this area. When asked to explain further what he meant by a patient McSherry, Bishop had stated that there was a good chance that they had been betrayed somehow by a traitor somewhere. After the death and destruction which they had wrought the other day, they had moved onwards afterwards as planned elsewhere to guard against the enemy – once recovered – coming to look for them. That had been done and they were quite a considerable distance away but there were now Poles all around them as they remained hidden and effectively trapped.

Someone had given away their position, he had said, and he would like to know who so he could personally deal with that traitor.


Jones didn’t believe Bishop’s theory of someone on their own side far in the fear serving them up to be killed or captured by the enemy and was convinced that the Poles should be given more credit than that. Their army might have been subservient to wishes of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military high command and not used to the best of their capabilities at all times, yet they were still a highly-trained and effective force… at least those he had seen in combat operations rather than on sentry duty when they thought they were safe.

This was something anticipated due to intelligence briefings given to SAS teams who were to operate in areas where there was an expectation that they might encounter Polish forces. Previous uniformed opinions about how the Polish military would be found in terms of morale was stated as something that was false: they would fight and not try to surrender or desert at any given opportunity. The Polish military was regarded as ‘politically reliable’ to the new regime in Warsaw. That had come about due to the change in government there late last year and the subsequent bloody purges and new indoctrination among their country’s armed forces.

Concealed under camouflage on the side of a hill, with the others nearby, Jones now watched the Poles as they operated below him. Everything was true as far as he could see, especially with these men who appeared to be professional soldiers from an elite unit rather than conscripts or reservists forced back to their colours.

These men were moving ever so carefully as they went about the task set for them. They were talking no chances in how they searched the general area as they moved through the undergrowth, among the trees and along a forest trail. The flanks were protected and there were rear guards posted too. Jones believed that they were not just looking for the men they were hunting themselves but also where they might have been hiding previously too in looking for unnatural disturbances in the ground.

They could look all they wanted for the SAS team hadn’t made use of that immediate area below at all.

With his weapon in his hands ready to be put to use, though at the same time the words of McSherry ringing in his mind reminding him to not do anything rash and endanger them all, Jones started to pay attention to one of the Poles in particular. This man was an officer and someone who even among all the other clear professionals below really looked like he knew what he was doing. Select Polish military officers, like a few East Germans and Czechoslovaks too, had spent some time abroad in foreign fields of combat far away from Europe as ‘volunteers’ under Soviet tutelage hunting for guerillas fighting against Moscow-backed regimes. This could easily have been one of those who’d been to Latin America, Africa or Asia. The Pole had his eyes everywhere. He was prepared for combat and didn’t express any visible sights of fear. Others with him were on edge yet he was not. There was confidence there in that man that while he knew there was danger somewhere and he wasn’t able to see it directly, he still felt confident in his ability to meet that head-on… and overcome it too.

Jones decided that this tall, brown-haired man who had a scar along the left side of his face – maybe a combat wound? – would be the first man he’d shoot at if it came to that. McSherry was to be the one to fire first if the Poles were to catch a hold of their trail and come close enough that the most prudent thing to do was to open fire. Should that happen, Jones stared at the man he would then immediately afterwards fire his own rifle at. This would be someone who would lead these men in action at a very competent level and therefore it would be absolutely vital to eliminate as soon as possible.


The Poles moved on; Jones didn’t have to take his shot.

They didn’t look above them at where the four men were hidden and prepared to engage them. The officer who had had Jones’ attention followed behind the searchers and continued onwards out of his field of view as the rest of them did too. This wasn’t the moment to relax though and Jones continued to remain perfectly still and concealed just in case the Poles came back either by accident or design. He concentrated on trying to hear all the sounds of the forest this afternoon for the signs that the Poles were coming back though instead there was only the distant rumble of manmade thunder from artillery as well as the sounds of aircraft up in the skies too.

But the Poles were gone and Jones along with his three fellow soldiers hadn’t been located. They would set about moving soon though and getting far away for the enemy had come mighty too close for comfort and also been well-prepared to take them on in combat. Jones had to be honest and admit to himself that while he would have gotten some shots off and probably killed that Polish officer, they still would have been in a whole world of trouble if it had come to a fight.

He allowed himself to take an exaggerated deep breath – making the only noise he had in the last ten minutes – and finally removed his finger from the trigger of his rifle.



February 11th 1990
Mahon Road Barracks, Portadown, County Armagh, Ulster, Great Britain

In the words of her husband, 2 UDR had been ‘castrated’. The far more polite term which Sergeant O’Brien preferred was that the battalion had ‘had its wings clipped’. Whatever phrase was used, crude or not, they were no longer on operations as before. There was no more active patrolling through Bandit Country and seeking to engage terrorists along the border with the Irish Republic. Instead, they were confined to guard duties around military, police and civil installations. There remained the ever present danger of bomb and gun attacks coming from the enemy – the IRA and the INLA – though those fights would no longer be ones which 2 UDR would seek out.

Supervising the manning the radios here this evening in Portadown, O’Brien was content at the state of affairs as it currently was. She pretended otherwise and had nodded agreement at the right moments when others had complained about how the 2 UDR was being treated. Yet her firm belief was that this was all for the best with how things had gone in the past. There were no longer any incidents taking place in Catholic communities in South Armagh. Arrests based on ‘suspicious behaviour’ – in other words being Catholic – were no longer happening nor houses of such people being burnt down. Those arrested and held prisoner weren’t being shot when ‘trying to escape’. There was no longer any need for cover-ups and lies to be told.

This was why she was not outraged at the recent turn of events as others were.


The radio room was a traditional role for a Greenfinch. It was considered a non-combat role which women serving in the Ulster Defence Regiment were only meant to undertake. Recently female soldiers like her had been doing far more dangerous tasks but with the 2 UDR sent back to their barracks now O’Brien and the other women were sent to the do communications duties and administrative tasks.

Still weary from that bomb blast that had left her only physically unharmed, certainly not emotionally unscathed, O’Brien sat in the corner of the windowless room ill at ease in the chair by the only wall which didn’t have a bank of electronic equipment. Along each of the other sides here in this space there were bulky and old-fashioned receiving and transmission equipment as well as encoding and decoding systems too. This was the main battalion communications post and all of this was necessary; it also needed to be replaced with something more modern too.

The headache which O’Brien had wasn’t coming from being so near to all of this electronic gear nor the stuffiness of the radio room where the air was as stale as it was. The dull pains she felt in her knees and lower back wasn’t from the uncomfortable chair either. Despite what Michael had said earlier to her when he had seen the strain on her face when reporting for duty here, this physical suffering didn’t even come from the IRA bombing which she had walked away from.

O’Brien was certain that she was in this agony due to psychological factors. No one had diagnosed this and she hadn’t told the doctors that had seen her about the pains she was affected with: she just knew in her heart why she suffered as she did in her body.

Her friend Jacqueline had been killed when standing only a few feet away from her whereas she had emerged unscathed from that bomb. Then she had been accused of being in part responsible for all that had gone on down in Bandit Country and there had been an attempt to coerce cooperation from here where she would betray those she knew and loved. Turning traitor was what she had refused to do and her reasons for doing so were because while she was told it was the morally right thing to do, and maybe it was, she just couldn’t do that.

To say these issues weighed heavy on her mind would be a vast understatement.

Those working in the radio room with her were fellow UDR soldiers, male and female. There was a clock mounted on the wall and O’Brien saw that she had less than an hour more on duty here – it was a two-hour task – and didn’t expect that in that remaining time there would be anything for her to do as there hadn’t been for the last hour. Her fellow soldiers here knew exactly what they were doing and there wasn’t much of that either. All that was needed was for someone senior to be present in case there was an emergency reported with where the 2 UDR was deployed guarding many places and the battalion’s superiors needed alerting so they could react to any incident.


The telephone on the desk beside her rang and interrupted her thoughts about how long she had to remain here. At once, she answered the call.

“O’Brien speaking.”

“Hello, Claire. How are you feeling?” It was Major Jackson, the commander of D Company.

“I’m fine, thank you, Sir.” The little white lie was automatic.

“I’m glad.” He sounded truly genuine. “Erm… I have some news, but I don’t want you to worry about it.” There came a pause where O’Brien could do nothing but worry with such a statement as that. “Michael is in with Captain Warren and I’m not sure how long that will take.”

“I see.” Again, O’Brien said the first thing that came to mind. Of course, she took in what was being said yet didn’t want to express that openly even to Jackson whom she knew and trusted. That investigator from the Army Legal Corps was now actively harassing her husband and she was concerned at the potential that could come from that despite the meaningless assurance just given.

“There is nothing to fear, Claire. He’s not under arrest and there is nothing that this officer from the mainland can do at the moment to detain him.” Another of those pregnant pauses. “I didn’t want you to hear this from someone else who might not know all of the facts of the matter and cause you alarm.”

“Thank you for letting me know. Should I…?”

“Oh, no.” Jackson cut her off before she could finish and presumed that he knew her question. “Stay where you are down there and then come up here afterwards and see me. We’ll talk then. Just don’t worry in the meantime, Claire.”

To leave her post at the moment wasn’t what O’Brien had been about to request.

“I’ll stay here then, Sir.”

“Excellent, excellent. As I said, there is nothing to be concerned about and it will all sort itself out in the end.”

“I hope so.” If Jackson had been here he would have seen the brave face O’Brien was putting on this in terms of not just her tone of voice. “I’ll get back to my duties then, Sir.”

“Oh, yes. Go right ahead, Sergeant. Just one last thing,” once more there came yet another frustrating break over the connection with the company commander, “remember that we are all standing with you and Michael.

Goodbye.”

“And to you, Sir.” O’Brien replaced the telephone receiver and shook her head.

When was this all going to be over?



February 11th 1990
The North Atlantic

Lieutenant-Commander Hedges wasn’t sure what exactly he was here to achieve as his Sea Harrier circled low above the warships gathered around the surfaced submarine below. He couldn’t see anything down there visually and little through his infrared display either; no one below could see him too in the dark nighttime sky above. Regardless, his orders – even if he disagreed with them because there was no real point to it all – were to orbit above the pair of frigates which were surrounding the surrendered Soviet vessel. Air cover was required and he and his fighter was deemed as just that.

Those warships were HMS Brave and SPS Cataluna, the latter that Spanish vessel which he had overflown the other day and was one of several NATO vessels up here with the RN in the GIUK Gap. Both of them were near to a submarine that had surfaced after being attacked by a helicopter from the Brave and were assisting in rescue operations to recover crew members from that enemy vessel who were abandoning their submarine. Hedges hadn’t been informed of the scale of the damage that the submarine had been taken nor whether there was a chance or a motivation to recover it. All he knew was that the crew were surrendering and being evacuated. The decision had therefore been made to send him this was to provide air cover.

Another Sea Harrier had been launched from HMS Illustrious to take his previous place in the sky though Hedges didn’t believe that there would be an opportunity for whomever was flying that second fighter to see any action. Enemy air activity had been non-existent in recent days. Of course, should there be a need, he would race off to join the other Sea Harrier if hostile aircraft were spotted but that didn’t look likely. He would stay here, he could only assume, making these lazy circles in the sky above what was going on below.


The lack of Soviet aircraft coming southwards in the direction of the Lucky Lusty and the other warships was something that Hedges and his fellow 801 Squadron pilots were fully briefed upon. As those who were to fly air defence missions in support of the carrier and the warships alongside the Illustrious in these waters they were all being kept up-to-date on what was going on. That air-sea battle which had taken place the other day where the Americans had smashed apart the Soviet flotilla off the Lofoten Islands had been followed up by amphibious landings to recapture isolated parts of northern Norway which the Soviets had been holding on to. Again and again, there had been attempts by the enemy to sink the Americans carriers there along with the amphibious ships too.

Soviet air power had met failure there.

The overall effect of this was that there were no more flights being made down the Norwegian Sea by the Soviets. They no longer had any forward airbases where fighter cover could be established as they broke out from over land to the sea. Instead with those airbases either closed or being reused by NATO forces, there was far too great of an immediate threat to long-range aircraft now. Moreover, there was a greater need to attack those NATO ships closer to what (few) remaining parts of Norwegian territory was held along with where what Soviet warships were left were making a withdrawal northwards.

What did this all mean for 801 Squadron?

They were to stay with the Lucky Lusty because the carrier was to remain in these waters guarding the warships on anti-submarine duties. There were still submarines at sea which needed tracking and engaging. The Soviets were sending their subsurface forces out into the North Atlantic even if their surface and naval air forces had taking the battering which Hedges had been informed that they had. Those submarines heading for the open waters on the other side of the GIUK Gap were on a mission to strike at ships making journeys across the ocean engaged in supporting the war effort. Hedges didn’t have much of an idea as to what the exact situation was with losses to shipping and how many submarines it was believed that were already in the North Atlantic but he knew that it was of vital importance to keep as many from getting there as possible so that no more could join those already in-place. Keeping those trade routes open was of undoubted strategic importance for the war effort.

The submarine on the surface below him was one of those that the warships engaged in defending the GIUK Gap had engaged. Many had been confirmed sunk with others believed to be damaged enough from attacks to stop them being useful in an attacking role. There were not just those warships along the defensive line but also NATO submarines and land-based maritime patrol aircraft as well. This one was the first that he knew of that was in such a situation where it had been hit, brought to the surface and the crew were abandoning it as they surrendered to NATO forces.

Hedges wondered to himself what would happen to those sailors that were being pulled from the freezing water below. He didn’t know how many that there were and whether any of them were injured… or even if that was a nuclear-powered submarine and if any of them were suffering from the effects of radiation. Regardless, he expected that they would be treated correctly as prisoners of war aboard the Brave and the Cataluna and would probably be soon transferred elsewhere away from those warships. It was their future afterwards that he thought about. The view amongst his own side, any decent person at least, could be that as legitimate prisoners they to be cared for as best as possible just as the hope was NATO prisoners were being too. When the war came to an end at some later stage – whenever that was – those men would be returned home as part of any peace or ceasefire agreement. How would their own side see them though? Would every man from the Soviet side be treated like those who ended up in enemy custody during World War Two were when they were each deemed a traitor? It was possible, he believed.

This was all something for another time though. For now he had to continue doing what he was doing and flying his aircraft where he had been ordered to. When he got back to the Illustrious he could think about that some more. At the moment he had a fighter aircraft to pilot and that really should have had all of his attention instead of other matters that were only a distraction.

[James G]

Chapter Ten – Friendly Fire

February 12th 1990
Above East Germany

Frankfurt an der Oder was on the far side of East Germany, located just on the western side of the border with Poland. It was damn far away from RAF Brüggen and on the other side of an extensive and very capable integrated air defence system (IADS). To fly there from NATO airbases in the Rhineland meant crossing occupied parts of West Germany where the Warsaw Pact had their forward SAM, anti-aircraft guns and radars before then going over the width of East Germany where those defences were far more established than those on occupied soil. Away from the ground-based weapons of that IADS network there would be too a mass of interceptors and other fighters in the sky and all in the way too. Moreover, the enemy IADS and hostile aircraft would be there for a flight back home as well.

Flight Lieutenant Fletcher was heading towards Frankfurt an der Oder this morning.


The Tornado strike-bomber carrying him and Hunt on such a mission wasn’t alone. There were many other NATO aircraft rolled for deep strike operations all heading for the crossings over the River Oder along the border. More Tornado's in RAF and West German Luftwaffe colours were going towards the transport links over that river laden with weapons as well as American F-111’s in several variants. Fighters and electronic warfare aircraft were in the sky supporting them in their mission to follow-up what had been done earlier in the night when the Oder crossings had first been so heavily targeted then.

Fletcher’s brief was to finish what already had been started. There was reported to have been successful strikes against the major fixed road and rail links over the river and partial success when bombing the newer temporary crossings which had sprung up in wartime. There had been secret stealth aircraft flown by the Americans in those attacks while many of the Tornado’s from No. 1 Group flying from the UK and F-111’s based there in East Anglia too had used many ‘smart bombs’ to achieve what they had. There were still many of those small crossings standing as well as major efforts already underway there on the ground to repair what destruction had been wrought. The bombing of those remaining bridges and the ferry sites was to be carried out using ‘dumb bombs’ including cluster weapons to destroy engineering equipment… and kill skilled engineers working in the darkness.

The reason so many aircraft were being used in such a mission as this where they had to go through the enemy’s defences as they were was that the Oder had to be closed to several Soviet tank armies which were moving into place to cross over from Poland into East Germany. Fletcher had been briefed alongside other Goldstars’ aircrews – and presumably everyone else on this massive strike operation had been too – that those third echelon invasion forces needed to be stopped. NATO was struggling immensely at the minute to deal with the first and second waves of Warsaw Pact troops that had struck west and would be in a lot of trouble to deal with further reinforcements coming from inside the Soviet Union even if they were second-rate forces.

Again and again, it was said before Fletcher flew tonight that the enemy’s ability to get over the Oder into East Germany must be stopped.

The weather over East Germany tonight was terrible. There were thick, low clouds dropping torrential rain everywhere. Regular gusts of wind were driving those clouds, the rain and anything in the sky to the east. Thunder and lightning was predicted too as the natural storm over the country at war below threatened to try to match the manmade storm in levels of ferocity. Fletcher had his night vision goggles on so his world inside his aircraft, away from the effects of the weather outside, was all green and black; different shades of those two colours meant different things. His terrain following radar was guiding his aircraft as he raced low above East German heading towards the Oder ahead. Berlin was over there past his port wing and he was leaving the distant images of that divided, war-torn city behind as he continued for Frankfurt an der Oder. He took a moment to wonder why there was reportedly still no word from NATO forces there and the only apparent answer was that communications jamming was behind that as he had been told that satellite images had shown fighting there as recently as yesterday afternoon. Those powerful jammers which had to be active there weren’t affecting his aircraft at the moment with his own counter-jamming systems active. Fletcher and his navigator/bombardier were receiving regular updates from the AWACS aircraft controlling their mission with radio and radar images being shared about enemy air activity despite what was happening with regards to the fight for Berlin.

Their own systems were working fine too. The radar allowed Fletcher to follow the ground as he stayed low and out of the detection range of most detection systems linked to the IADS. Behind him, Hunt’s systems located where those enemy defences were before they could see the Tornado. Avoidance was being used rather than trying to jam those systems and expose Fletcher and Hunt to attack by them. By using these combat systems and the flight features of the Tornado GR1, they moved further and further eastwards towards their targets. Others were getting involved in the fight against the ground defences and hostile aircraft but the two of them flew onwards.

Soon enough, Fletcher saw lightning up ahead… or what he thought was lightning. He brought the Tornado in from a southwestern direction after turning at the final flight checkpoint above the village of Müllrose and towards Frankfurt an der Oder to see the streaks flight. Those weren’t lightning strikes coming down from the clouds but instead missiles going upwards. Closer to the ground there were repeated flashes of light which Fletcher believed was anti-aircraft fire.

This wasn’t going to be fun…


The big highway bridge and the railway crossing, those major fixed links over the river, were already down along with another road bridge just north of where they lay connecting the East German border town with Slubice on the Polish side. Between those two urban localities was where Fetcher had been directly told to target with the plan being for him to drop his bombs against either riverbank where he or Hunt were able to make out viable targets. Fletcher could pick out the river there where a canal coming from the east met the Oder. There were all sorts of shapes that caught his eye as he now flashed over Frankfurt an der Oder itself that looked like they might be pontoon bridges and ferries in the river as well as what could have been engineering vehicles on the Polish side near to the water. He was still seeing everything in green and black though and there was now plenty of distractions to affect his judgment on whether he had the correct target. There were repeated flashes of gunfire and the wail on warnings from his aircraft’s combat systems.

What did Hunt have?

“Vince…?”

“Keep going straight!” There was an instant, excited call from behind Fletcher. “Follow the river: I have plenty of targets.”

Hunt was excited while Fletcher was mildly terrified. Ahead of him there had to be hundreds of anti-aircraft shells in the sky and probably a couple of SAM’s launched from shoulder-mounted launchers as well. They were too low, too fast and had their jamming systems active to give protection now against more lethal air defences but that still didn’t mean this bomb run was full of countless risks.

Fletcher had to keep going though flying like this so that those on the ground below weren’t going to get any chance to get away from what was coming.

“Bombs released! Bombs released!”

Immediately, there came the feeling through the centre stick of the Tornado attempting to rise up in the sky with the weight of the 1000lb high-explosive unguided bombs being set free to let gravity take them to where they needed to go. Fletcher applied enough pressure to the stick to keep him from being sent off course while too maintaining his firm grip on the throttle as well. Going any higher at the minute or losing speed would mean more exposure to enemy fire. He was turning the aircraft though, to get out of the line of fire now the attack had been made. Those on the ground were going to have to deal with six of those bombs, and another six from his wingman right behind, but in the meantime they were still firing at him and he needed to be free less they eventually get lucky as he feared the defenders might.

The Tornado went above the northern part of Frankfurt an der Oder at full speed. Breaking the sound barrier over an urban area was something Fletcher had never done before and he had a pang of guilt at the terror he could be bringing to those East German civilians below him at this but he had no choice. He was out of here and heading back home as fast as possible. The bombs which Hunt had dropped surely had done the hoped-for damage and Fletcher hadn’t seen any fighters over the river crossing area no repeated launches from powerful SAM systems. He could only assume that plenty of damage would have been done and the crossings over the Oder there closed for the time being.

That had to be the case. NATO air power was surely strong enough to stop those further enemy reinforcements, all those thousands of tanks and tens upon thousands of men, from reaching the frontlines further west.

There was still an enemy IADS to cross on the way back to Brüggen and the danger of enemy fighters. It wouldn’t be an easy journey but then neither had the one here. As was always the case during the past week and a bit of war, Fletcher had the fear friendly fire as much as enemy fire. He wouldn’t be happy to have done all of this and to be shot down by his own side on the way home.



February 12th 1990
St. John’s Wood Barracks, Westminster, Central London, Great Britain

Lance Corporal Rose, Fenton and the youngsters were back on guard duty again this morning. Sprigg was still saying he was ill and not with them; the longer was wasn’t present then the more soldier-like the rest of them were. Of course they weren’t fully-trained and capable of being wholly trusted to act with direct supervision but that wasn’t the point. Rose had more trust in them now with their rifles carrying live ammunition and spent less time worrying about what they were going to do when he or Fenton wasn’t looking.

It was a bright and chilly morning in London. The city remained quiet and Rose hadn’t heard any reports of further trouble occurring with protesters. In addition, as far as he knew anyway, there had been no enemy air or missile attacks upon the Greater London area by the Soviets or their allies in overt acts of open warfare against Britain’s capital. There had been enemy commando activity across parts of Britain though those special forces – the Spetsnaz – hadn’t struck in London (that anyone could be sure of at least); domestic terrorists were a different matter indeed. An enforced blackout over the city was in effect during the hours of darkness and there were restrictions on movement in key areas though not a full curfew. Alongside protests there had come a massive rise in crime though as advantage was taken of the wartime situation.

On the news there continued to be little direct information on the fighting abroad. Only brief outlines were given of how the war was going and that was mainly in the form that Western Europe was still under enemy occupation in certain places and battles were commencing not just on land but at sea and in the air too. Reported atrocities committed by the Warsaw Pact against captured troops as well as civilians were given plenty of coverage in the place of details of certain battles or how far into West Germany the enemy had advanced. People were told about the National Government and had heard from their Monarch too. Patriotism was being extolled with those at home being told to support the troops fighting not just aboard but defending the mainland UK as well.

Nonetheless, like most people, Rose himself was waiting for what he believed was the inevitable: thermonuclear destruction of London.

It was the one thing that no one was talking about and yet the one thing certainly on the mind of almost everyone. There were very few people now running around screaming ‘WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE WHEN THE RUSSIANS DROP THE BOMB’ like had been the case when the war started but the assurance that nearly everyone had about the outcome of this war was that. The way in which Rose saw it was that if the Soviets won the war on the Continent Britain wasn’t going to give in to such a defeat there on the battlefield and the only solution for the Soviets would be nuclear warfare. At the same time, should NATO do the impossible and beat them in a military fashion, the Soviets would launch their nuclear-tipped missiles rather than be willing to accept such a defeat.

These were depressing thoughts to be having but he couldn’t stop himself from feeling this way. Right at the beginning of the conflict he hadn’t felt this way – when it seemed like most people did – though as the war went on he had become more convinced that that was how it was all going to end. There would be a flash and London would be gone… along with a lot of other cities worldwide. The only consolation, the only thing that kept him from sinking into despair was the need to do his duty before then and the knowledge that he probably wouldn’t feel a thing when that moment came.


A lorry came along Ordnance Hill – the residential road along which the main gate sat – and Rose’s attention came off his internal thoughts about how this would all end as he looked at that approaching vehicle. It was a standard Bedford in the expected army camouflage. There were three men all in combat fatigues in the front cab and they were heading this way. Everything looked as it should be but something wasn’t quite right. What was wrong with the image he was seeing he didn’t know but there was something.

“Andy, the truck!” He called out to Fenton who was like him standing out in the sunshine and pointed that way before turning to the five youngsters who were out here too. “Spread out and find some cover! Don’t ask questions and don’t do anything unless I do it first.”

“He’s coming pretty fast!” Fenton, moving fast across to where the guard booth was, where the radio was had realised what Rose wasn’t able to put his finger on. The lorry was approaching them far too fast. They weren’t expecting anyone to be coming here and certainly not in this fashion.

Myers called out to him. “What do we do, Mister Rose?”

“Don’t do anything yet, but all of you listen to me and Corporal Fenton.”

They were all far too bunched up together as the lorry started to turn towards the main gate without even attempting to slow down. Rose still wasn’t sure exactly what was going on but he didn’t have the time to consider the motives of those in that approaching vehicle. Time was running out and it was tearing towards where they were all standing here. He was with Fenton whom he trusted explicitly and others whom he doubted the character of. The youngsters were all armed and he had told them to follow the lead set by him and Fenton but had the worry that they might panic and blind fire their weapons.

He didn’t want to be a casualty of friendly fire caught up when bullets were fired wild!

Upon that thought occurring came the noise of the brakes on the lorry being engaged to create an almighty shriek. Rose watched as one of those in the front cab, the man on the passenger side came out of the opening door and crash into the ground. The windscreen shattered at that point and there was a sea of red liquid everywhere across what remained of it. The lorry then struck the guard booth, just to the side of the main gate.

This all appeared visually in what seemed like slow motion though that wasn’t the case with the rattle of automatic rifle fire and then the impact of a moving vehicle against something solid and stationary.

Fenton nor Acott were nowhere to be seen: they had been at the guard booth. Connor and Donaldson were both standing to the side of the lorry firing upon the front cab. Read was on the ground with blood all around his unmoving form. From where he was on the ground beside Rose, Myers shouted: “Kill ‘em, kill ‘em.” Then he joined Connor and Donaldson in firing his SLR at the crashed lorry too.

Rose didn’t join them. He stayed crouched down with his rifle in his hands and his eyes upon the scene of chaos before him. He had no idea what was going on and kept telling himself that he wasn’t going into a state of shock.



February 12th 1990
Wiechendorf, Lower Saxony, West Germany

Guardsman Taylor had left the village along with Bates during the night and it was proving to be a wise decision. To have remained sheltering there would have certainly meant that they would have been discovered by the occupying troops who were now in control of Wiechendorf. Those soldiers – who they were both pretty sure were East Germans, not Soviets – had gone through every house, every building and everywhere else as they took control. That anti-tank gun position which had on the outskirts of the village was now gone and there was no sign of Wiechendorf being a major enemy defensive strongpoint; instead it was under full occupation with the implications for those few West Germans who had decided to brave it out and stay not looking good. Those civilians had all been rounded up during the night and loaded into trucks which had then headed east.

Taylor had no idea where they had been taken to.

After witnessing that, Bates had said in the early hours that the two of them must now be very far behind the frontlines now. All of those East German soldiers were armed and organised yet they didn’t look like combat troops but rather paramilitary forces who were going about the tasks set for them with only the danger of air attack or the actions of guerillas rather than meeting regular NATO ground forces in battle. Seeing nothing to disprove such an idea, Taylor hadn’t argued that conclusion.


Through the night and into this morning, Taylor and Bates had remained hidden in nearby woodland again. They had been disciplined this time with keeping watch and Taylor had managed to stop himself from falling asleep when it was time for Bates to be sleeping. The food which they had taken with them had been eaten and the water drunk while Bates had had a few cigarettes too: the latter much to Taylor’s displeasure with the worry that that would allow them to be detected.

It was painfully obvious that they needed to leave where they were. The two of them were going to end up gaining the attention of the enemy soon enough. They could fight when that occurred with the chances of surviving an engagement, even against paramilitary troops, being slight due to there only being two of them. They would surrender too, though Taylor was certain that he didn’t want to become a prisoner of war and Bates had expressed his opinion that he too didn’t wish for that.

They should go westwards, he believed.

Bates had said that that would mean running into the rear of the main body of the enemy but Taylor was of the view that there wasn’t going to be a counterattack coming to rescue them if they continued to stay where they were. They two of them couldn’t agree to move and so they had stayed here with Taylor continually kicking himself for not being brave enough to leave on his own and start walking westwards. He knew that he needed Bates despite despising his fellow soldier. Together they stood a far better chance of surviving this that separate. But, of course, that meant staying with Bates and the horrible racist bully that he was. There had been none of that behaviour since they had both been cut off and left behind, yet Bates was still Bates.


Just before midday – according to Bates’ watch anyway, something that like the man Taylor didn’t trust – there was an explosion inside the village. It wasn’t very large in terms of noise or fire and it was only the smoke which came afterwards and then the realisation what the dull thud that they had heard had been that they understood that a blast had occurred there. That smoke drifted out of Wiechendorf and towards them while around the village they first heard loud shouts and then the sounds of gunfire. Automatic rifles were used but so were pistols as well.

There was nothing discernible that the two of them could make out when they looked towards the village to try to see what was going on there. The smoke continued to pour out of somewhere making Taylor wonder just what had been blown up to burn as fiercely as it must have been. He therefore couldn’t really see those firing their guns there past a few glimpses of running men. It was all very confusing.

Bates soon gave up on that and instead started packing up what supplies they had left. He told Taylor that they really should move a little bit further on and deeper into the woods in case whatever was going on in the village spilled out of there. Taylor didn’t want to run away though as he was hoping that the end result of the fighting taking place might be beneficial for the two of them. He couldn’t see how disappearing would be a good idea.

As he was explaining this to Bates, in more than a whisper, Taylor heard the crack of a rifle firing a single shot.

Bates had been standing up instead of crouching down like he was but after the sound of that gun firing Taylor’s fellow soldier was on the ground. Half of his face was missing and instead there was a bloody pulp there.

Bates was dead!

Taylor was trying to process this sudden event when all of a sudden there came the rustle of the undergrowth being invaded by someone else. He turned his gaze away from bates and reached for his rifle but before he could get a proper hold of it there was a rifle barrel in his face. Slowly he raised his eyes to look at the man who he was sure was about to shoot him like he had Bates.

“American?”

The question came with a German-accent who struggled with such an English word. Taylor locked eyes with the man who had that AK-74 in his face and shook his head. He realised that the man who had him at his mercy didn’t look like a soldier by the state of his clothing and personal gear and tried to work out what that meant.

“English?” Another question came.

This time Taylor nodded his head. He didn’t know what to say to the man and could only give physical responses.

“I am sorry,” the rifle barrel was moved away and a hand touched Taylor’s shoulder, “I thought you two were… come with us. We can survive but we must move.” The German man’s English wasn’t too bad though he was still struggling to say what he wanted to so that Taylor could understand. Taylor looked around and saw that ‘us’ meant the others all around him; they all wore tattered uniforms identifying them as West German Army soldiers he thought.

“Why?”

The West German pulled him up off the ground. “Come or they will kill us. Come.”

These men had just killed Bates. They had shot him without warning when he was right beside Taylor. The two of them were on the same side as these West Germans who must have been on the run like Bates and he were as so it had all been an accident, a case of friendly fire. Bates was still dead though, his life taken in an instant like that for ultimately no good reason.

Regardless, Taylor went with these men as they ran into the woods.



February 12th 1990
RAF Machrihanish, Argyll & Bute, Great Britain

There had been what the Americans called a ‘blue-on-blue’ incident in the early hours when an F-15 flying from RAF Machrihanish had accidentally shot down a Tornado F3 over the North Sea. This had occurred during the darkness in the midst of a large air battle over the water where there had been strong enemy air activity and confusing radar images due to electronic interference. The F-15 pilot hadn’t even seen the Tornado which he had engaged let alone meant to fire upon that aircraft which one of his Sparrow missiles had blown apart; he had been shooting at a Soviet Flanker. Confirmation had come afterwards from studying the recorded images which had been gathered from the NATO-crewed AWACS which had been monitoring and controlling the air battle that friendly fire had been the cause of that Tornado going down. Another Tornado had been downed by an enemy missile and there had been losses to both the Americans and Soviets as well.

Word had gotten out though… and fast.

Air Commodore Cooke wasn’t angry at what had happened like many reportedly were. These things occurred in war where mistakes were made and those on the same side turned their fire on their allies in error. The RAF had only three days ago shot down a Royal Netherlands Navy P-3C Orion while the day before that a Phantom F3 returning to it’s Suffolk base had been engaged by a Rapier SAM defending that facility and brought down too. Friendly fire certainly wasn’t limited to the skies above and a-joining Britain as well: it would be occurring everywhere as accidental clashes between those on the same side took place.

There would be an investigation at a later stage into what exactly the circumstances were and whether anyone was to blame. Cooke had been told that the Tornado had been returning back to RAF Lemming after suffering major damage from a misfiring of a Skyflash missile during an engagement (the missile warhead had apparently detonated seconds after launch) when it crossed the aerial battle zone between F-15’s and Flanker’s. It’s radio wasn’t working and there was confusion as to the exact location which it had been in when the Americans had opened fire; it appeared too that they hadn’t been informed about the damaged Tornado. This was all just preliminary information though with nothing concrete yet.

Those F-15’s under Lt.-Colonel Martinez’s command were still his responsibility and so Cooke had come across to Machrihanish again to talk to the senior men here to quickly smooth things over. Martinez had apologised for what had happened though that had been a personal statement rather than anything official; he couldn’t do the latter due to procedural issues with admitting responsibility in an official manner at such an early stage. Cooke had accepted that and then spoke to a group of F-15 pilots briefly giving them a pep-talk. He wasn’t aware whether one of those men was the one who had fired that missile against the Tornado and killed the two aircrew aboard and hadn’t wanted to know if one of them had been either. His short talk had been about Allied unity and telling them that Britain was grateful for all that they were doing for the air defence of the country.

There were plenty of things that he didn’t say when here though and would keep to himself. What Cooke would have wanted to see would be for an immediate announcement within the RAF and USAF forces flying from British airbases letting everyone know that what had happened had so that the rumours came to an end. He and Martinez had discussed the blue-on-blue but no one else was to meant to talk about it. The secrecy surrounding such things was there due to the need for an investigation later to not be prejudiced as well as to keep up morale.

All that keeping things quite meant was that rumours would continue and morale would be negatively affected. However, there was nothing that he could do. Cooke’s hands were tied on the matter. He had his duty to do and that meant following established procedure – in public anyway – and obeying the rules of the RAF on matters such as keeping friendly fire incidents if not secret then something not to be openly discussed.


During his meeting with the F-15 squadron commander, after they had finished discussing the unpleasantness with Americans being responsible for British military deaths, Cooke and Martinez now discussed what those F-15’s had been involved in over the past few days and nights. When flying from here in southwestern Scotland, those fighter-interceptors had been active over the North Sea on strike escort missions as well as extended air defence patrols. The F-15’s had been making use of KC-10 Extender tankers to fly pretty far away from the airbase on the Kintyre Peninsula and into combat.

B-52 Stratofortress bombers were flying from British bases now joining the strategic strike force assembled before the opening of hostilities of F-111’s and Tornado GR1’s tasked to operate deep over the Continent. There had been losses to those smaller aircraft incurred as they penetrated enemy airspace over East Germany and Poland but they carried on undertaking their targeted bombing missions because the need for them was so great. Now those F-111’s and Tornado’s had been joined by B-52’s though the much larger aircraft had been tasked with more tactical missions operating over occupied territory in West Germany instead of over sovereign Warsaw Pact soil. To provide escort for these bombers was too much of a demanding task for the hard-pressed RAF interceptor force to do with their focus on protecting Britain and so the F-15’s which Martinez was commanding had several times now flown missions to directly protect the strike missions of the B-52’s rather than those aircraft going further east. The USAF officer explained how two or four F-15’s at a time had been going with groups of the big bombers when they made their bomb runs – at different altitudes each time for a variety of weapons effects – over West Germany to defend them against enemy interceptors going after vulnerable aircraft such as B-52’s.

Cooke asked Martinez about something he had heard concerning the strike-bombers who were tasked with that deep operations role. Was it true that there was now a crippling shortage of ‘smart’ munitions after the use of so many against high-value targets?

Martinez stated that he didn’t know the truth of that – he had heard the same thing – but suspected that it was probably the case. So many laser- & television-guided bombs had been used already in the war and he couldn’t imagine that many were left now. It was reportedly the same with the massive glide bombs that the B-52’s had used at times too: only a certain number had been constructed and their extensive use had depleted stocks. With time those could be built up again but that time wasn’t available.

What did this all mean?

It meant, as far as Cooke – an air defence specialist – understood it, that NATO’s air forces were in trouble when it came to their strategic bombing campaign. They relied so much on their air power to bomb the Soviets from the air especially with their technology when it to came to bomb guidance. To drop those bombs on target and from a safe distance was a big force multiplier allowing them to do more than could be done with ‘dumb’ bombs. When the conversion kits ran out to make ordinary unguided bombs as accurate as they were then the advantage that NATO had in the air was diminished.

And that was something of great significance when there were Soviet field armies moving across Eastern Europe over transport links that hadn’t been destroyed and heading for the frontlines where NATO’s ground forces were struggling as they were.

[James G]

February 12th 1990
The Liebenburg Forest, Lower Saxony, West Germany

Scarface had returned.

It was the late afternoon and those Poles hunting for the SAS men in the forest had come back with that man wearing such a distinctive scar among them as their leader. Trooper Jones again had the barrel of his rifle pointed at the officer with his finger resting on the trigger. A gentle squeeze would send a three round burst of 5.56mm bullets towards that man to take him out and – hopefully – leave the rest of the Polish troops leaderless. All he needed was the order to fire.

Jones waited for McSherry to give permission for him to kill this man who was imperiling them all.

Though he couldn’t see his team leader, Jones knew where he was: off to the left and at the base of that tree there. As Bishop and Fryatt were, and Jones himself was too, McSherry would be lying flat on the ground surrounded by mud and leaves. He would be soaking wet with all of this rain falling and no overhead cover to give him shelter. Being unseen by the enemy on the ground, rather than looking from up above, was what mattered though and Jones’ team leader would certainly be invisible to anyone trying to locate him unless they physcially wandered directly into his prone figure.

Looking over briefly at where McSherry was, Jones mentally willed for the order to come to open fire. The Poles might have been some distance away and looking in the wrong place for them at the moment but they were again doing what they had been doing yesterday with such careful searches. Jones regarded them as more vulnerable now than they would be close up and believed that McSherry should give the order now to shoot at them to bring their searching to a stop. These men knew what they were doing and went about it in such a determined fashion. This all made Jones certain that they had to be eliminated with haste. No order came though and so he carried on watching Scarface and the others moving closer and closer.

It was an intolerable situation to be in and Jones knew that something had to change soon. They couldn’t go on like this with these Poles continuing to hunt them as they were and allowed to do so unmolested.


As to how this group of Polish military personnel were able to locate them – near enough anyway – once again hadn’t been something Jones had yet to talk about with his three fellow soldiers. For the second time in two days these enemy troops were right on their tail. McSherry had moved them several miles overnight and they had thought they had shaken lose the trail that the Poles had picked up only to find now that Scarface had returned. Once the Poles had been spotted, very quickly McSherry had had them all hide and get their weapons ready to fight though again with the firm instruction that he would open fire first if that was necessary and no one else was to do so unless ordered.

Jones was sure that if he had been given the opportunity, Bishop would have once again mentioned his now firm belief that they had been betrayed by someone. When he had said such a thing yesterday that had been dismissed as paranoia, but now it did seem that that might possibly be the case. Jones wasn’t aware who in the chain-of-command above had access to the operational areas where the four of them were to operate exactly within the Liebenburg Forest yet that didn’t matter after more than a week of war; they had moved far from where they were initially assigned to conduct their raiding and harassment of the enemy’s rear areas. Bishop’s concern might have been spot on though for like yesterday, McSherry had briefly used the radio again. He hadn’t said exactly where they were when reporting in though if there was a traitor in-place somewhere back on the other side of the frontlines then there could have been a manner in which the general area of where they were was passed on to the enemy or maybe the Poles had been told to track the signals to find them. However that had worked, the exact details aside, the more Jones thought of it now, as he carried on watching Scarface supervise his men, the more it seemed likely that something like that had occurred where their position had been betrayed.

He couldn’t see any other way in which the Poles were hunting them as they were.

With so much peacetime practice, Jones and the others knew how to stay undetected in hostile territory such as this forest. There were no people to spot them and give away their presence. There were plenty of hiding spots to make use of. All traces of their physical presence was moved where possible each time they stopped. They stayed away from known tracks and kept away from the few roads as well. Nothing was discarded carelessly with all that they brought with them either carried in their packs or buried.

But still they had been first found and then followed here.


Scarface stopped walking for a moment and bent down to pick up and then examine something from the ground. Whatever the Polish officer had in his hands, Jones couldn’t make it out due to its small size. His full attention was on the leader of these hunters as he tried to decipher just what had attracted Scarface’s attention.

Then there was gunfire.

It took all of Jones’ inner strength to not squeeze the trigger. His rifle barrel followed the Pole’s movement in dropping down in an instant but he didn’t open fire on the man as it was with immediate affect clear that the sounds of gunfire weren’t coming from McSherry, Bishop nor Fryatt. It had been the distinctive rattle of AK-74’s firing.

Somewhere between fifty to a hundred shots were gotten off. Between those and then afterwards there came a great deal of shouting. Jones kept taking his eyes off the prone Scarface, who had moved into some cover, as he looked away to try to work out what had happened out ahead where the Poles were. Each time he returned to stare at Scarface he remained where he was and soon enough was using a hand-held radio too.

All of that fire had been from Soviet-manufactured assault rifles with no pistols, machine guns or grenades used. The Poles had either been shooting at each other in an accidental friendly fire incident or they had engaged someone else – other NATO forces or possibly West German guerillas – using such weaponry as they did. Whatever the cause, there were plenty of Polish dead and the hunting effort for Jones and his fellow SAS soldiers had come to a halt.

Any moment now, Jones was sure that McSherry would give them the signal to move. Once he met up with his team leader, Jones would ask if what exactly had happened was known and also talk to McSherry about his serious concerns over the use of the radio again. The idea struck him – as he continued to target Scarface with his own rifle – to suggest to his team leader that maybe they shouldn’t use the radio overnight nor tomorrow and see if the Poles picked up their trail again. If he was wrong, then he was wrong… but he didn’t believe that he was.



February 12th 1990
Near Steyerberg, Lower Saxony, West Germany

Major Slater watched aghast as the SAM smashed into the helicopter flying above the Yorkshire Squadron. There was a flash and a roar and then the wreckage of that struck BO-105 started falling towards the ground.

“That was one of ours!” Slater called out. “What idiot did that?”

His outrage was delivered to no one in particular. There were two others inside the Fox with him, the gunner and the driver, but both of them were busy with their tasks and Slater was sure that they would have gotten used to now to his expressions of anger which had been made all day. He had vocalised his ire because he needed to though. That was a Bundeswehr attack helicopter shot down in an outrageous friendly fire incident by someone among the Queen’s Own Yeomanry with a shoulder-mounted Blowpipe. It was the last thing he needed to have happen, especially since that helicopter would have been one of many doing their best to support them during their withdrawal back towards Steyerberg and the River Aue.

They needed all the help that they could get and so losing that air support had brought forth Slater’s fury. There were Soviet paratroopers moving south from their Nienburg airhead complete with airmobile armoured vehicles, and their own armed helicopters support too, as they operated on the flank out of the main enemy ground forces which had gone over the Weser there. Already the majority of the Northumberland Hussars along with the seventh battalion of the Light Infantry had been lost as the enemy moved along the western side of the river downstream.

This was far from the right time to be shooting down friendly helicopters!


The smashed remains of the BO-105 were left behind as the Fox’s and Spartan’s under Slater’s command continued with their retreat away from Liebenau. The infantry behind was falling back faster towards what was to become the 15th Infantry Brigade’s new main line of resistance along the Weser tributary which was the Aue with the Yorkshire Squadron to act as the rear-guard. Opposing them was the advance-guard of the oncoming Soviets with their BMD-2 armoured infantry fighting vehicles, BTR-D armoured personnel carriers and many variants of these lightweight tracked vehicles. Those approaching vehicles were carrying Soviet paratroopers in some cases while others were acting as forward armoured scouts. Around Liebenau the Soviets had smashed apart part of the 15th Brigade using heavy fire support but also their maneuverability to maximum effect when on the defensive: Slater was going to stop them doing that to him as the Soviets advanced.

Slater had the Yorkshire Squadron operating in small groups with covering positions established by one group when another fell back. This leap-frogging approach was something that they had long trained to do when attacking and he was now having his men doing it as they retreated. They had recently escaped the grasp of the Soviets and were hopefully falling back faster than the enemy could move forwards. The plan was for when the enemy did make an appearance they would be mistaken in believing that the Yorkshire Squadron was open to attack as it retreated.

He didn’t have that long to wait to find out whether this was the case or not.


Inside the four-wheeled armoured vehicle which was the Fox were Sergeant Ball acting as Slater’s gunner and Lance Corporal Lloyd driving. The three of them had been engaged all day in operations across the battlefield where they had covered a wide area moving with the Yorkshire Squadron though not directly in combat. Ball and Lloyd had overheard the radio transmissions which had been made from Slater as well as what he had listened to over the squadron and regiment nets. Slater hadn’t involved them in that and had them instead take over some of his own duties as vehicle commander while he was busy on the radio in keeping an eye out for the enemy in the form of dismounts, helicopters and armoured vehicles.

It was one of the latter which Ball spotted. He shouted out to alert Slater that he had a BMD-2 in sight coming from out of the trees to the left as he moved to get the Fox’s main gun ready. Slater quickly found the target and called for Lloyd to be ready to move. Then he gave the order for Ball to open fire.

The Fox was fitted with an L21 RARDEN cannon as it’s main armament. There was a coaxial 7.62mm machine gun, but the L21 was the primary weapon. A three-round burst of 30mm armour-piercing shells was fired by Ball and these were sent towards the turret of the enemy vehicle where intelligence information said that the armour was weakest.

There was a series of flashes and then the blasts which came from explosions, all of which lit up the rapidly-darkening evening sky. The target appeared to be if not destroyed then knocked out of action and that was good enough for now; Slater hoped that there had been paratroopers carried so more damage than just the loss of one vehicle would have been done to the enemy.

The radio came alive immediately afterwards with another Fox engaging a second BMD-2 that had too just appeared with little warning. Slater had to force himself to pay attention at the moment to the need to make sure that his own vehicle withdrew successfully from this firing position into a new one before he could discover all that had occurred. The enemy’s advance guard had been encountered and two of their leading vehicles had been attacked before they could strike at the Yorkshire Squadron. This was only the first clash though and not likely to be the end of it all. He expected far more combat all the way back to the Aue and then more fighting there when he and his men would be called upon to directly assist the infantry in holding the line there to deny the enemy the ability to expand their bridgehead over the Weser any more than they had.

Before then though, there would be plenty more clashes with the oncoming Soviets.



February 12th 1990
Alta, Finnmark, Norway

They were back in the trench again, sheltering from the effects of the enemy bombing. Corporal Edwards and the rest of them had jumped in again into the mud and snow to get away from the falling bombs that for the third time today the aircraft above were dropping upon the Para’s in and around Alta. The word had come that the Soviets had terrible accuracy when undertaking such air strikes during the hours of darkness: Edwards didn’t know if that was true as there was so very little that he could see. All that there was were the flashes, the loud blasts and the rattle of anti-aircraft guns which the Norwegians had brought with them when they had arrived late yesterday. Around him were his mates and he couldn’t see their faces but he knew that they were all there.

All of them were in this together.

When the bombs hit the ground and exploded, Edwards couldn’t feel them. He heard and saw the explosions but didn’t physically detect the ground beneath him move as he believed that it should. He supposed that all of the snow which was several feet deep across Alta soaked up the impacts of them. There had been few casualties in earlier bombing attacks with everyone saying that the snow did just that and he could only assume that that was the case. There was now a reason to be thankfully for all of this snow which had so hindered the Para’s like he here in this Norwegian town by slowing their movements like it had.

Where were the Soviets bombing? It couldn’t have been the British and Norwegian troops directly for the enemy surely would have known that across the whole area there were air raid trenches like the one which he was in. If Edwards had to guess he would have to think that it would be the airport and the harbour. It was those facilities which had brought the Soviets here first and then the Para’s to come here and wrestle control of Alta away from them. How much more damage were the Soviets going to do if those were what they were bombing again now? Edwards had seen both places, smashed and ruined as they were. The Norwegians had set off demolition charges before or during the invasion and then the Soviets had done the same when they were being beaten here the other day to destroy what was left.

So, if the Soviets weren’t bombing there then where were they aiming to drop their bombs on then? It didn’t make sense to him.

Sergeant Proctor had said before for them all not to worry about what he called The Big Picture. Their platoon sergeant had been firm in telling them all again and again that they needed to focus on the here and now. Rumours of what was happening elsewhere were to be ignored. None of them were grand military strategists. They didn’t serve on the battalion intelligence staff and The Lieutenant would tell them what they needed to know when they needed to know that. Those Para’s under his command should just focus upon their duty. This had all come with his usual frustration and the explosions in rage which everyone found amusing to see the man have.

Edwards couldn’t help himself but thing about The Big Picture though. He had been doing so since they first arrived in Norway and were subsequently cut off but the scale of the Soviet incursions into the rear areas. Successes had come in retaking almost all of those invasion sites but then they had been sent here all the way to Alta. He hadn’t seen a map of northern Norway in a very long time and had struggled to recall where Alta was. The town was somewhere in the middle between Narvik and the Soviet-Norwegian border though, a very long way to the east. That meant that they were far away from the coast where there was naval air support and also some distance apart from where the majority of other NATO troops would be too.

2 PARA was out here almost on its own with just a small force of recently arrived Norwegians alongside them.


Looking up at the pitch black sky above, Edwards realised that he hadn’t heard any aircraft in a while nor any bombs falling. His mind had been elsewhere because the bombing hadn’t been as terrifying as it had been before and he had been able to distract himself.

“Is it over, Paul?” O’Donnell was right beside him here in the trench.

“Dan, we all thought you’d gone to sleep!” O’Donnell laughed and so did a few others.

Para banter. It didn’t have to make sense but that didn’t matter because they were all mates.

“They stopped,” Massey spoke up, “because one of them bombed another.”

“What?” Edwards didn’t understand, it didn’t make sense what Massey was saying.

Mortimer tried to explain: “Little Jennings says that one of them came in low and another one dropped it’s bombs atop of it. He called it ‘friendly fire’.”

“And we’re listening to that kid now?” This was just silly.

“He’s a clever lad that Jennings.” This time Grant added his opinion.

“I should have stayed asleep!”

They all broke out in laughter at that and Edwards was pleased to be hearing that. These were his mates and their approval of his wit was something to be enjoyed. War was hell, they said, but being with your mates, those you trusted even when in such danger, made it all a little less bad.

There was also the knowledge that his side was winning to cheer Edwards up. 2 PARA had done its job here despite it all and he was sure that the war was being won elsewhere too even with worse setbacks than they had encountered here. It was inconceivable to him that he could be wrong in that – admittedly uninformed – judgment.

[James G]

Chapter Eleven – Loyalty

February 13th 1990
The Øresund, the Baltic Sea

The Mk.8 main gun on the foredeck of HMS Campbeltown was in action as the frigate provided naval gunfire support to the NATO troops on land in the Copenhagen area. 114mm high explosive shells were raining down upon what were reported to be enemy positions surrounding the Danish capital as moves were made to finally lift the long siege of the city.

Captain Brooks felt his warship vibrate every time one of those shells was fired. Every two of so seconds another round was blasted off from the automatic gun and flew towards land where their targeting was provided by those fighting there. This sustained rate of fire couldn’t last for that long but for now the enemy which were on the receiving end of the barrage would be not having a good morning. He would have liked to have been up on the bridge watching the gun firing though he had been called back to the Operations Room before he could do that as first one than a second urgent EYES ONLY message had been received. Those two communications had not come from Allied Naval Forces Baltic Approaches (NAVBALTAP) whose operational command he was under but rather from Northwood and the Commander-in-Chief Fleet (CINCFLEET). Since reading them both, the latter arriving moments after the first, he hadn’t left this internal compartment.

The first confirmed something which he had heard overnight but had doubted because the implications of that were extremely worrying and Brooks hadn’t wanted to believe it. However, it was now official that the West German Navy’s frigate FGS Bremen had entered the Swedish port of Helsingborg at the northern end of the Øresund. That vessel had spent the war beforehand on convoy escort duty in the North Atlantic before being transferred to the Baltic area in recent days; yesterday she had broke away from her assigned patrol station in the Skagerrak and refused to answer radio communications from neither NAVBALTAP or independent West German command. There had been fears over enemy action, maybe a maritime commando operations to seize control of her (however that would work), but no, instead, once in Helsingborg there had been a radio declaration.

The crew of the Bremen had announced their ‘neutrality’. They hadn’t defected, they weren’t requesting political asylum and there hadn’t been a mutiny aboard. Instead the officers and crew together – so the announcement said anyway – had decided to take themselves out of the war and stay neutral.

The second message from CINCFLEET informed Brooks of something of far greater surprise: the use of thermonuclear weapons. Northwood told him that there had been the employment of those weapons of mass destruction overnight in South Korea. The Americans had fired several devices in what they were already declaring was a successful effort to stop the North Korean armies cold. CINCFLEET didn’t tell Brooks whether those were tactical or strategic weapons employed and where exactly in South Korea they had been used, but that really didn’t matter as far as he was concerned.

The nuclear genie was out of the bottle and such was why he had been informed of that development.


Everyone in the Operations Room was busy. Brooks stood among them overseeing their work with no need at the moment for his direct input. These fully trained men had all taken part in real combat situations since the war had begun to back up all of their peacetime practice. They had learnt many valuable lessons and no one here had shown any overt signs of panic.

As the main gun fired on those targets on land, the Campbeltown was moving. To be stationary and doing so would be suicidal as it would leave the warship open to counter-battery fire. At the same time, Brooks’ command couldn’t move fast though as it was a very difficult task to keep the accuracy of the shelling being undertaken from a moving vessel. Guard was being kept to the threats which the Campbeltown faced as well. Air and missile attacks were expected to come at any moment and so too action against surface and subsurface threats. The Øresund remained dangerous waters to be in and that was the case twenty-four hours a day with no let up.

Whilst those present worked with the radios, radars, the sonar as well as liaising with the bridge where the Officer of the Deck was manoeuvring the Campbeltown, and the flight of the Normandie helicopter was being controlled, Brooks turned his mind to those messages and what they meant.


When it came to the Bremen, the message from CINCFLEET used the word ‘barratry’ in relation to what had gone on aboard. There was no mutiny where the crew rose up in violence and refused to do their duty but instead lawful orders were defied by those aboard as the warship went to Sweden. While the difference might not mean much, it was an important point in Admiralty Law and entirely relevant at the moment with the conflict raging against the Warsaw Pact. Those aboard that West German vessel had come to the decision that they wanted no further part in this war and withdrawn from it in an orderly fashion forgetting their loyalty to their country because they mustn’t have believed in the war.

Such a thing was something very important. It showed that West Germany was in serious trouble in the mood of those who served among its armed forces. While this was only one warship, the circumstances there were what mattered. The Bremen had spent the majority of the war in the North Atlantic protecting the convoys being across the ocean supplies to keep their country and those fighting to defend it in the war. Now, at the moment where they were being brought into the Baltic Approaches to fight up close with the enemy, those aboard the Bremen had done such a thing as that. The mood aboard that ship and the access to information that they had would have been deciding factors. What exactly had occurred aboard wasn’t known at the minute; what mattered was that rather than fighting to defend their country those men aboard had chosen not to take part in that. They hadn’t defected or surrendered to the enemy either, just sought a neutral nation and declared their neutrality. It was an extraordinary thing to do and Brooks couldn’t think of an occasion in wartime before when it had happened before. He was sure that there was, it was just that such an occurrence must have been so long ago.

The choice of Sweden was something else to consider. The wounded USS Kidd had come very close to heading for Malmo the other day when struck by those Soviet missiles that the Campbeltown had managed to defeat but ultimately her captain had decided that the risk of internment by the Swedes was too grave to risk. It had been thought earlier in the conflict that in the face of its neighbours being invaded in such a manner as they were, plus Sweden having its air space and waters infringed by the Soviets who anyone reasonable could see were launching an illegal war of aggression, that the Swedes would enter the war on the side of the Allies. They had done no such thing though and instead acted forcefully to defend their own sovereignty with the Soviets backing off from trying to push them around. With the Swedes remaining neutral and stating firmly that they wished to stay that way, should the Kidd have put into port there after taking the damage which she had then she would have been interned for the duration of the conflict and been unable to leave no matter what the Americans or the rest of NATO and the Allies said to the Swedes.

Now the Bremen had so purposefully put into port there with the certainty too that the warship wouldn’t be able to leave while the war was still underway. There would have been plenty of thought put into that by those aboard the Bremen, Brooks believed, and he feared that there was a good chance that this would only be the first, not the last, incident too.


The issue with the use of nuclear weapons was something else that he gave thought to as the Campbeltown continued to fire upon the Soviet Naval Infantry near Copenhagen.

That message from CINCFLEET told Brooks (in what it didn’t state) that the use there by the Americans had been unilateral. They hadn’t retaliated in kind to North Korean use of such weapons or the Soviets doing so – the message would have said otherwise – but rather acted on their own. He had heard very little of how the war was going on the Korean Peninsula since the North Koreans had attacked there against American and South Korean forces alongside the Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. The situation would have had to have been pretty desperate though for the Americans to use their nuclear weapons though. He wondered whether it had been a case of the North Koreans about to overrun Seoul or encircle large numbers of American troops. There was also the possibility that the South Koreans might have been facing a military or political collapse too. Whatever was the motivating factor, those weapons had been used there.

The incident with the Bremen had surprised Brooks more than what had occurred in Korea; the latter was of even greater concern though than a West German warship declaring its neutrality. Nuclear warfare was something that Brooks had studied as part of his career in the RN for weapons of mass destruction were deployed aboard certain warships and submarines. The Campbeltown had come to the Baltic Approaches without any of the nuclear depth bombs which her helicopters could have carried due to not all vessels carrying such weapons at all times with their deployment being a periodical affair. He had all the knowledge in his head of how those WE177’s were to be used if the orders came to drop them from Lynx helicopters to destroy enemy submarines. It was his duty to know the correct procedures and how to get the best weapons effects even if Brooks personally hoped to never see them expended in combat.

Just because he had none aboard and the issue with their use so far being on the other side of the world, it didn’t mean that the war hadn’t changed for the Campbeltown. CINCFLEET hadn’t informed Brooks about the use of nuclear weapons just to pass on such news as a matter of courtesy.

Everything had changed now, everything.



February 13th 1990
The Teutoburg Forest, North Rhine–Westphalia, West Germany

The Harrier’s with No.’s 3 & 4 Squadron’s were leaving their forward airstrips in the Teutoburg Forest and heading for new dispersal sites to the southwest. The plan was for them to be further back from the ever-approaching frontlines and across in the western parts of Münsterland near the West German-Netherlands border. With the Soviets having their forces across the Weser in great number now and efforts being made to push them back over so far unsuccessful, the decision had come down the chain of command for the movement to be made so that the Harrier’s were caught on the ground by fast-moving advance columns of tanks. There was a gap of fifty miles or so between where the Soviets were at Nienburg and the dispersal sites with a many NATO ground forces in between the two, but the danger was thought real. After all, the Soviets were meant to have been stopped from even reaching the Weser and now they had most of a field army over that river and operating on the western side.

Squadron Leader Ford had watched many of the Harrier’s fly out of the forest and away to their new locations though of course it wasn’t as simple as that for the evacuation to be completed as easily as that. There were aircraft which weren’t currently in a flying condition and then there was all of the equipment, stores and personnel too which had kept those aircraft flying that also needed to be moved out of here. Moreover, there were his men and that of the other RAF Regiment squadron under the command of 5 Wing who needed to be transferred across to the new locations.

Furthermore, this wasn’t officially an ‘evacuation’ either. No, instead, it was what Ford had been told was no more than a ‘geographical transfer’.

He hadn’t laughed when he was informed of such a description for this evacuation.


There hadn’t been an armed clash with Polish paratroopers nor Soviet Spetsnaz for two days now. Ford knew that there would have to still be some of those enemy raiding forces active but their numbers had been greatly thinned and he reckoned that their ammunition and supplies would be giving out after being this far to the west for their tenth day now. The Soviets especially might be busy with other tasks such as readying themselves for the arrival of ground forces so those could be guided through roads which crossed the high ground upon which the forest straddled; a few of the Poles might be positioned to do the same though he personally doubted that no matter what intelligence summaries from 5 Wing and the Territoralheer said on that matter.

When it came to the Poles there was further intelligence which said that certain survivors were expected to be by now ready to give in as they forgot their loyalty to their cause. Again, Ford was skeptical of such ideas.

Just because the remaining enemy forces were no longer actively seeking out those who Ford’s II Squadron was to protect it didn’t mean that contact with them would come. There were roads which needed to be used, roads which the enemy would be active near as they lay in wait. Would they pass up an opportunity to attack a valuable column of combat forces? Maybe or maybe not. Either way it didn’t matter for Ford wouldn’t know whether they would nor could he be sure of the intelligence which he received upon enemy intentions.

Faced with all of these unknowns, along with what he regarded as hopeful assertions coming from intelligence staffs rather than factual knowledge, Ford had made sure that his men were ready for anything. He reined-in his patrols and reorganised his command at an operational level so that there was maximum, and flexible, fire power available. There were only to be a few columns of those who needed protecting and each would be heavily guarded. Speed would be key in the movement out of the forest and down the western slopes so that they could all head for the Gütersloh area where the West Germans had a better handle on the security situation. There were many more roads that could be put to use when out of the high ground and Ford would be pleased to be on those as he took his charges away from here.


It was mid-morning now though and a bright day as well after the weather had cleared up a big allowing for some sunshine. Therefore, this was not the time to be making their move out of the Teutoburg Forest. The advantages of moving in daylight were outweighed by the disadvantages.

With the natural light offered there would be more of an opportunity to see enemy forces on the ground who might be moving to engage them. There would also be less of a chance of Ford’s columns getting lost as was the fear that they might do; the Teutoburg Forest was often a confusing place for those traveling through it. Nonetheless, daylight would bring the risk of being spotted by the enemy on the ground here in the high ground and then especially when down below around Gütersloh too. There was the issue too with the continued flow of West German refugees. Ford had been told that during the night they stayed where they were with regards to how far across West Germany they had moved whereas in daylight they were back on the roads again and refusing to be controlled by West German military police efforts.

Ford didn’t want to see his men and those he was protecting caught out in the open and stuck among the crowds of unruly internal refugees with enemy air activity being as strong as it was recently. Plenty of those Soviet aircraft were being knocked out of the sky by what Ford had been told was superior NATO aircraft but there were still far too many of them. His own men could fight in the darkness here against enemy infantry on the ground and he would do his best to make sure that the chances of them getting lost were negated as much as possible.

He wasn’t prepared to see those under his command and protection massacred from the air like so many civilians had already been when they were on the roads and Soviet aircraft appeared above bombing and strafing indiscriminately.



February 13th 1990
Schliekum, Lower Saxony, West Germany

The tiny village of Schliekum lay right on the western bank of the Weser between Hannover and Hildesheim. It had been officially evacuated of its residents though there were still a few West German civilians who refused to leave despite official orders from the authorities and the clear dangers of staying too when the locality was being used by the British Army as a rear headquarters. Brigadier Johnson admired their stubbornness though at the same time believed that those who refused to leave were foolish too: soon enough Schliekum would come under enemy attack.

The tactical command post of the 1st Armoured Division – the Rhino Division – was mobile and operating ‘in the field’ as it changed location on a constant basis to avoid enemy attention in the form of air, missile or commando attack. There still needed to be a rear base where administration matters on an operational scale were conducted though and Schliekum was that. For the past three days it had been located here and would soon move again; the frequency of those movements just didn’t match those of the tactical headquarters.

It was the divisional commander’s place to be with his operations, intelligence and communications staffs and he was usually with that field headquarters where he could fight the Rhino Division from. The combat brigades and all of the necessary combat support and service support elements that were directly engaged in the fighting against the Warsaw Pact forces inside West Germany were controlled from there yet he would still come to his rear headquarters at times too. This morning was one of those occasions where he called together many of his key subordinates for a quick and personal briefing before they all returned to their own headquarters.

Johnson had left the Desert Rats under the operational control of his chief-of-staff and raced to Schliekum with only the knowledge that his superior wanted his attendance; he had no idea what the briefing was to cover.


They were told about South Korea first off.

The divisional commander gave a short summary of what had happened there with the Americans using tactical nuclear weapons to stave off a massive encirclement of their own troops and most of the South Korea Third Army with detonations to the east and southeast of Seoul. There were only North Korean troops on South Korean soil, those here were told, and no Soviet military forces. The decision had been made by the Americans and the South Koreans to act as they had done to reverse a desperate situation and there had come approval (afterwards) from NATO and the Allies.

Due to the location of those nuclear strikes – on the other side of the world – and the fact that the North Koreans, not the Soviets or the Warsaw Pact, had been struck the official judgment from on-high was that a response in kind wasn’t expected to occur. The expectation was that there would be no Soviet nuclear strikes in response. The Warsaw Pact wanted to overrun Western Europe and their troops were in close contact with NATO forces, thus making any use by them of nuclear weapons detrimental to their own cause. Employment of such weapons away from the battlefields in West Germany wasn’t anticipated either due to the certainty that the Soviets would have of swift retaliation delivered upon them.

This is what Johnson and those with him were told by their commander when it came to the strategic situation. Those assurances that there would be no enemy use of nuclear weapons were given as fact too in such a manner where argument against them wasn’t to be given any traction.

It wasn’t just what had happened across on the Korean Peninsula which Johnson and the others were told about though.

There had been ‘issues’ with the West Germans, the divisional commander related to his subordinates, when it came to their ‘loyalty’. There had been many incidents throughout late yesterday and overnight where West German military forces had refused to fight in places. There had been incidents where so-called neutrality was declared and units either marched away from the frontlines or stayed where they were refusing to follow orders. On other occasions, West German military forces had entered neutral countries – Sweden and Switzerland – where possible and interned themselves in those nations. These were ‘isolated’ and ‘few and far between’, but they had occurred.

There had been a barrage of enemy propaganda which had been affecting West German morale with effects seen on the military situation and domestically too. False orders had been transmitted in places and there were too message going over national channels to West German combat units outside of the NATO chain-of-command. Every effort was being made to reverse this, especially from the West Germans themselves; the divisional commander assured them that calming of the situation and efforts to keep the West Germans onside would prevail. In addition, he wanted to assure his subordinates that no matter what, the British Army, along with the rest of NATO, was committed to defending West Germany come what may.

If the fighting wasn’t taking place here, it would be closer to home.


Johnson and the others were told if they had questions or comments now was the time to ask and air them, yet the unspoken rule of remembering their duty and discipline was present.

The commander of the 12th Brigade asked first about what he had heard when it came to the Soviets getting over the Weser to the north of here in the Nienburg area. Where the Soviets across the river there?

Johnson didn’t think that the divisional commander had meant that he was willing to hear questions on that but answered nonetheless. Yes, the Soviets were over the Weser but they were soon to be pushed back over by the Americans as well as lighter British Army units too… and plenty of NATO air power.

The division’s senior Royal Engineer spoke up on how his men worked alongside West Germans in every aspect of their work; he mentioned too that there were further Bundeswehr and Territoralheer military units supporting the Rhino Division everywhere from forward air controllers to signals troops to supply units. His work depended upon them, the whole division depended upon them, the whole of NATO depended upon them. The West Germans provided immense ‘host nation war support’ for the NATO armies fighting to defend their nation as well as their own combat power too. Were his men to have to watch them now and worry at every moment that they were about to give in?

The reply given was that should there be anything that those fighting alongside the West Germans wanted to pass up the chain-of-command then they should do so at once. The divisional commander repeated that what had occurred was isolated and not widespread; he believed that it was his duty to inform his subordinates of such actions elsewhere though so they were not caught unawares if the worst happened.

After such remarks, Johnson’s superior asked if there was anyone else who wanted to add anything to the discussion. He looked at Johnson with an expectant glance.

Johnson had so much to say, but failed himself and said nothing. There was only one word in his mind and he wouldn’t utter that here.

Defeat.



February 13th 1990
The North Atlantic

Orders had come earlier in the day for Lieutenant-Commander Hedges to prepare aircrew and aircraft under his command for a transfer in the coming days from HMS Illustrious to HMS Invincible. A minimum of five pilots and three aircraft and a maximum of seven of those under his command as well as four Sea Harrier’s – the numbers would depend upon external factors – would be removed from 801 Squadron here in the North Atlantic and join 809 Squadron afloat in the North Sea. When and how was still to be figured out but in the meantime Hedges was to select which aircrew and aircraft were to leave this carrier and fly to the other one. There would be briefings conducted beforehand of the threat environment while men and machines would be brought up to peak condition. The same was to happen with the Sea Harrier’s deployed aboard HMS Ark Royal too with three or four of those fighters and associated aircrew attached to 800 Squadron also to move to Invincible as well.

The air threat to both the Illustrious and the Ark Royal was judged to be minimal at the moment. Both aircraft carriers were needed where they were though providing protection for the warships on anti-submarine duty and the majority of the Sea Harrier’s aboard both would remain where they were along with their parent commands. Those that would be joining the Invincible, a carrier ‘up threat’ and engaging in combat operations with great regularity now, were to go where there was a more pressing need for them rather than where they currently were. Hedges had been told that the war-formed 809 Squadron had taken losses in combat which had to be replaced if the Invincible was to be able to carry out its mission there closer to the enemy than the other two RN carriers were. Reinforcement was thus to come from the other pair of carriers with Sea Harrier’s and their pilots, with the latter being especially those who had seen action too.

Shamefully, for the briefest of moments, Hedges had considered sending 809 Squadron pilots who weren’t his best. He wanted to keep those with combat experience with him here in 801 Squadron so should the situation take a turn for the worst – if the Soviets turned things around over the GIUK Gap and suddenly were able to operate aircraft here – he would have his most capable warriors.

That was only a momentarily lapse though; no officer wearing the uniform of their country and given the responsibility that he had should do such a thing as that.

Four names were added immediately to the mental list of those Hedges would send: Murray, Price, Quinn and Reynolds. He needed more names that those but those were his first choices. He had faith in all of them and each had seen combat in this war with disappointments not forthcoming from neither. These were men who had shown loyalty to him, their unit and their country and he would return that by telling them how much belief he had in each so as to have them transferred to the fighting over the North Sea rather than twiddling their thumbs as they were rather unused here.

Hedges was thinking of more names from 801 Squadron when Commander McGuigan stuck his head through the open doorway into the compartment where Hedges had his work station. Breathlessly, he blurted out what he had come here to say: “David, one of your Harrier’s has gone down!”


When in Air Operations, Hedges was brought up to speed on what had happened with Lieutenant Paul Reynolds and his Sea Harrier.

Launched off the flight-deck of the Illustrious not an hour ago, Reynolds had taken his fighter up on airborne patrol away to the north over the waters between the Faroe Islands and Iceland. The Sea Harrier, armed for air-to-air combat, had flown high in the thinner air to conserve fuel and stayed above several land-based maritime patrol aircraft as well as helicopters launched from warships. One of the Sea King AEW2A’s had first provided radar coverage before Reynolds had come under the operational tasking of an American E-3 Sentry flying from Keflavik. Realistically the threat board was bare when it came to any danger from enemy fighter interference to those other aircraft engaged in anti-submarine missions also in the same airspace – though flying lower – and there was also a flight of F-15 Eagle’s also from Keflavik that the Americans had on station as well. Nonetheless, Reynolds had been where he was in the gatekeeper role just in case a sneak attack was made by the enemy towards the warships behind and below him where in such a situation even a lone Sea Harrier could make a difference firing Sidewinder missiles against a flight of enemy maritime strike aircraft… should the Soviets have any of those left capable of coming this far out over the ocean.

On several radar screens, Hedges was told by McGuigan as Air Officer Commanding aboard the Illustrious, Reynolds’ fighter was observed rapidly losing altitude in what hadn’t looked like a controlled fashion. Urgent radio calls had gone unheeded and the Sea Harrier was tracked as it merged with the surface.

HMS Cumberland was the closest on station and at once one of the Lynx’s from that frigate was ordered to get airborne and race to where the Sea Harrier had hit the ocean while the Cumberland itself followed. There was a Canadian P-3 (designated by the Canadians as a CP-140 Aurora) closer to the location of the impact but they were engaged in a search for a possible Soviet submarine and had to stay with that duty. When the Lynx arrived no debris was found on the surface nor below the water either when the sonar was engaged. Further analysis from what the Cumberland’s own radar had depicted the Sea Harrier not falling in one complete piece but rather one large part and multiple smaller ones too. There was a hunt for Reynolds’ personal rescue beacon using multiple channels though that wasn’t located and the news from what the Cumberland had on its radar storage data bank suggested that there had been no major separation made from the aircraft during its fall that suggested that he might have been able to eject.


Reynolds was a friend.

He was Hedges’ subordinate but still someone who he was close to on a personal level. They had flown together and socialised together. Hedges had a trust in the man when in the air and not too. Now Reynolds was dead.

Hedges thought of Reynolds’ wife and his two little girls.

Hedges recalled banter between them when off duty, and sometimes on too.

Hedges recollected the very last moments together that they had had together at lunch when they had briefly spoken before Reynolds’ had started to get ready to fly.

Hedges mourned his friend’s passing.

There was nothing that he could do. He couldn’t help in any rescue effort or even interject to stop that being called off very soon as it was bound to be in light of evidence that Reynolds hadn’t survived and there were other pressing needs for aircraft, ships and men. All that Hedges had was the feeling of being helpless to at least bring back his friend’s body.

On top of that, no one knew what had happened. There was talk of an explosion aboard based on what little was known though that was only an assumed guess rather than any fact. Enemy action was impossible based upon where the Sea Harrier was in the sky when it had started falling towards the ocean. There were no aircraft reported and should there have been a submarine which had surfaced without being spotted and fired a SAM upwards (it had happened to low-flying NATO aircraft during this war), such a missile wouldn’t have had the range to get at Reynolds’ altitude. An accident therefore must have taken Reynolds’ life and incurred 801 Squadron’s first loss of the war but all of the details of that might forever be unknown.

And Hedges would have to live with that, again unable to do anything about what had happened.

[James G]

February 13th 1990
Tromsø, Troms, Norway

One hundred and sixteen Soviet Naval Infantry marines and officers surrendered at 13:00 local time here in Tromsø. Almost all of those were walking wounded, including the major who was the acting commander of the last of those who still had been able to fight but had been convinced to give in. A further two hundred and fifty plus seriously wounded enemy marines had an hour ago passed into NATO custody here so they could be given urgent medical care following the ceasefire pending the short negotiations which Lieutenant Leigh had been a witness too.

Those enemy casualties were going to be an immediate drain upon the medical capabilities of the joint British, Dutch, Norwegian and (arriving last night) American forces which were making use of Tromsøya Island. The few prisoners which didn’t need such attention were far easier to deal with: they’d all be loaded upon one of the transport ships and sent to Narvik.

The surrender ceremony had been a short affair and with little drama to it. Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson had brought along Leigh and he had witnessed the NATO officers talking formally with the senior surviving Naval Infantry officer and getting him to sign a piece of paper so that he and his men officially surrendered themselves. There had been plenty of NATO personnel present with just that major and a captain of the KGB – a rather scared looking man, no doubt full of worries – from the Soviet side there. In addition, media teams from several nations of the Allies as well as a few from countries neutral in this war were also present. Out of earshot of everyone else, Wilson had told his battalion adjutant that this was something which the whole ceasefire-cum-surrender here in Tromsø had been delayed for. The Soviets had wanted to give up far earlier this morning but they had been made to wait while NATO senior officials flew journalists and cameramen here so that a rather big deal could be made of the beaten enemy forces surrendering here.

There was a much larger force of Soviet marines down at Harstad and news from here would be forcibly shared with them to try to get them to give in too… in addition, events here would be shared worldwide and given great significance by NATO and the Allies.


For a couple of days now, 45 Commando had been out of the low-level fighting which had continued around Tromsø before the Soviets eventually caved in. The Norwegians had taken over as planned with their regular soldiers being joined by those irregular guerillas which had caused so many difficulties with their vengeful behaviour. Taking the city building-by-building, street-by-street had been what the Norwegians had wanted to do despite everyone else on Tromsøya Island – British, Dutch and American – believing that that was a foolish idea which would see many deaths for the sole reason of stubborn pride on the part of the Norwegian and loyalty to a doomed cause from the Soviets.

The Royal Marines had moved over to the western side of the island where the Dutch were and joined the Cloggies there at the airport. Engineering work had been ongoing to conduct emergency repairs to get it operational past the patch-work repairs which had been initially done to the runaway. There was some specialist heavy equipment present but also a need for manpower there and 45 Commando had been involved alongside the Dutch and the Norwegians in sometimes back-breaking work to clear rubble from the limited fighting there. Many of those Royal Marines there had joined everyone else in diving into cover when a surprise enemy air raid had come: a low-flying Soviet Sukhoi-17 Fitter had made an attack run. That Dutch warship which had provided escort for the CASTLE assault, HNLMS Piet Hein, had fired a barrage of SAM’s and taken down the attacking Fitter resulting in an ejection of the pilot. Whilst that enemy flier had then been rescued from the waters surrounding Tromsøya Island, those on the ground who had sought shelter had picked themselves up, dusted themselves down and carried on working.

Wilson had said that the men were happy when they were busy, especially doing something that they knew was worthwhile. Leigh hadn’t been so sure that his commanding officer had the correct grasp on the mood of the Royal Marines who served with 45 Commando though there had been no verbalised complaints made as far as he knew. Regardless of whether or not the men had been content to act as manual labourers for a day or two that they had done so.

The reasoning behind this had been to keep them busy because a decision had to be made as to where 45 Commando and the rest of the UK/NL Landing Force was to move to so they could carry on with their place in this war. Both the Royal Marines and the Dutch Cloggies were well-trained and now combat-proven elite troops whose deployment into a battle against Soviet forces in Norway could easily be the tipping point in winning an engagement. Yet there had been nowhere for them to go. The 3rd Commando Brigade had achieved their objectives back to the west in retaking enemy-held territory from isolated Soviet forces there closer to Narvik and where the Para’s with the 5th Airborne Brigade had struck they too had been successful. In addition, the Americans and the Norwegians had as well managed to defeat the enemy in the fighting which they had undertaken. The decision by NATO command to launch multiple attacks over a wide area against almost all enemy forces spread all over the place had been justified in the successes made. Only the unengaged forces around Harstad remained and those Naval Infantry were going to be attacked by the Norwegians in a slow-moving overland assault where hard fighting was expected with the Soviets dug-in there; not a fight which the striking power of 45 Commando would be useful in.

Leigh had heard his superior discussing the ‘where’ with those higher in the chain-of-command that they were to move to next. There had been surprise that the fighting on Tromsøya Island had gone as it had with 45 Commando doing what they had so fast in defeating the enemy in open engagements and pushing them back to the city in such a quick fashion. No one seemed to have had any plan for further deployment though all were in agreement with Wilson that the Royal Marines here couldn’t stay where they were not fighting an enemy that still had parts of Norway occupied. Across in eastern parts of Finnmark – at Lakselv as well as across near the Soviet border on the Varanger Peninsula and in South Varanger – there were still Soviet forces on sovereign Norwegian soil.

That was where Leigh was expecting that 45 Commando would soon go, off to the east. He anticipated that they would link up with the 3rd Commando Brigade, maybe even the Para’s too, and go fighting there to fully defeat Soviet forces inside Norway. How long that would take he didn’t know. There were some of his fellow junior officers who said that the war was over here in Norway but he didn’t agree. Maybe it had been won, but it wasn’t finished.

He wondered how much longer it would last and couldn’t say yet he was certain that it might be at the very least another month, maybe more.



February 13th 1990
Near Steyerberg, Lower Saxony, West Germany

Both regimental and brigade intelligence summaries had said that the Soviets were to conduct a ‘diversionary attack’ southwards along the Weser valley. There was meant to be ‘light to moderate’ strength in such a move with ‘limited fire support’ due to the main effort being ‘away to the west against the Americans’.

Everything Major Slater had witnessed today gave lie to such statements; the enemy had attacked in strength with this clearly being a major offensive.

It was no longer light airmobile armour and paratroopers mounted in those vehicles attacking forward against the 15th Infantry Brigade but what rather had to be a full division of regular motorised rifle troops in what had to be divisional level numbers. There were main battle tanks and tracked infantry fighting vehicles. Self-propelled guns and anti-tank missile carriers were present too. Thousands of Soviet infantry moved southwards with those tanks and armoured vehicles while above them came thousands of shells in flight and at least a hundred aircraft on strike missions. In the way of this assault, and crushed in its wake, had been the 15th Brigade. That formation of British TA infantry and Yeomanry light armour was no more. There were a few scattered survivors left, Slater among them.


The Yorkshire Squadron was now down to less than a third of its strength. Men were dead and missing, others wounded and evacuated. Six Fox’s and one Spartan remained and if Slater again sent them up against T-64 tanks he would see the immediate destruction of them and the deaths of those – including himself – inside his remaining vehicles. It was getting dark now as evening had arrived on this cold, short February day where so many men had died. He had his shattered command spread out through the fields south of the burning town immediately to the north with infantry all around them. The men of the Yorkshire Volunteers and the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers were digging furiously into the frost-covered hard ground to get themselves some cover ready for when the enemy next turned his attention upon them. Slater had his vehicles find some ready-made cover though his fervent hope was that the enemy would leave them alone… a forlorn hope really. The Soviets might be busy enough following the course of the Weser down its western bank but turning directly westwards to cover their flank would eventually occur.

When, not if, they finally got around to doing that, Slater fully expected there to be a battle where the last men of the 15th Brigade made a fight of it yet it would be one which they would lose.

A Lt.-Colonel from the brigade staff was the senior surviving officer from what Slater understood. That man had been on the radio with panic in his voice telling those who he could reach to dig-in, hold firm and wait for the Americans to arrive and relieve them. That wasn’t someone whom he wanted to be under the command of, not with that evident terror in his tone over the radio. Slater had been alarmed that command had fallen to such a man as that who seemed to have no idea what he was doing. He was issuing orders to units which were no longer combat capable and seemingly getting those who were left really to launch a counterattack at some point. Slater knew that his squadron was the last of the armour left as the majority of the Queen’s Own Yeomanry had been destroyed. The gunners with the 101st Regiment Royal Artillery Volunteers were dead and their howitzers lost. The infantry had taken shocking casualties with few sub-units combat capable and all with transport let alone any armoured vehicles to take them safely into battle. In short, the 15th Brigade was unable to defend itself let alone threaten the enemy.

The man at the top who had taken over didn’t understand that though. Slater had answered his call when it had come and informed the man of his situation with regards to his negligible combat strength and his observations of everyone else plus the ground ahead where the enemy could expected to be found. He had strongly recommended that no counterattack be made. There had come a curt acknowledgment to that before the Lt.-Colonel had moved on to contact others he could reach over the radio network: again and again the same responses had come as Slater had listened in because his new commander was on open channels.


Sitting in his seat as vehicle commander, Slater watched through the sights what was going on outside. The hatch above him was down and the overpressure system on due to the known lingering chemical threat: gas had been used in significant strength earlier by the Soviets and caught many men unprepared therefore dooming them to a horrible death. His view of the men digging as they were was thus limited but he could still see many of them at work. Hundreds of men from three different battalions of TA infantry – recruited from across Yorkshire and the wider North East – were constructing personal firing positions with shovels, spades and their bare hands. They all wore their bulky chemical warfare suits and had their weapons nearby as they dug. They were all waiting for the shells and the bombs to start falling again and then the tanks and infantry to come across the ground rushing towards them.

Slater was waiting for the same thing. His Fox was positioned behind a hedge giving some coverage to observation from the front. The main gun and the machine gun were pointed eastwards across the flat fields where when the time came those weapons would open fire in a last gasp hurrah so when the Yorkshire Squadron finally went out, it went out with a bang.

As he stared at those outside, he moved to looking further too and beyond those men who had made it back this far away from the fighting earlier. He wanted to see if there was anyone else coming this way apart from the enemy which he expected soon enough. There had been men who had returned to their units throughout the afternoon after walking and running this way after escaping the enemy’s attention. Many were in a bad way yet all had wanted to continue the fight to get some measure of personal vengeance against those who had killed their friends.

Captain Chris Wood was out there somewhere. Slater’s friend, his second-in-command and a very good man hadn’t fallen back with the Yorkshire Squadron nor shown up among those scattered men who had reached here. He had been told that Wood’s Fox had blown up when a BMP-2 fired upon it but that didn’t mean that Wood was dead. There was always the chance…

If his friend was still alive, Slater would want to help him. His loyalty to the younger man demanded that he do that yet he had no idea how that could occur. If alive, Wood could be anywhere. He could be hiding with the enemy all around him. He could be injured and trapped. He could be a prisoner with all the mistreatment by the enemy which would come with that.

Slater didn’t know the fate of the man he had so long served alongside and so couldn’t do anything for him. All that he was to do was to sit here waiting for the enemy to make their move to cover their flank and turn against him and his fellow British volunteer soldiers here. They would fight when it came to that but there was no doubt in his mind how that would turn out.



February 13th 1990
St. John’s Wood Barracks, Westminster, Central London, Great Britain

Yesterday's failed attack upon St. John’s Wood Barracks was far from an isolated incident. The terrorist action which had taken the lives of three men and boys who served alongside Lance Corporal Rose had been part of a far wider picture. There had been similar events elsewhere in London, across other parts of Britain and throughout the wider Western World too. Under higher instruction but not direct supervision, armed attacks had been launched by terrorists and separatists on a massive scale. Bombs had gone off and gunshots made alongside incidents such as what had happened here with men in vehicles trying to force their way into military installations – in addition to political targets as well – all throughout February 12th. Most of these were reported to be failures with only a scattered few successes for those who undertook them.

Then there was the body-count too.

A warning had been issued beforehand giving an indication of what was coming. Rose, like it appeared everyone else had as well, had been informed of that far too late for it to have mattered. There had been some sort of communications mix-up where word wasn’t sent out on time for those on sentry duty at military bases to be on their guard for when the Soviets sent their proxies to do their dirty work for them. Moreover, that alert had downplayed how wide-scale and the seriousness of what was coming.

Upon being told that, Rose had had nothing to say. Being given such information afterwards meant nothing, except to those making excuses for others losing their lives.


Spooks in and out of uniform remained all around the barracks and the neighbouring streets too. Those senior officers who had been here last night were all gone now but the people whose field was intelligence were still here. Rose himself had spoken with both civilians from MI-5 and uniformed military intelligence personnel; such people had had conversations with many others here as well as him. They all wanted him to go over the exact sequence of events plus provide insights too which he had been unable to give. What he had seen and heard was all that he knew, not anything else along the lines of whom might have provided assistance in the form of information to those who struck here.

How could he know such information as that? Moreover, if he had, it certainly wouldn’t have been information that he would have kept to himself. His fellow soldier Fenton had died at the hands of those who had tried to kill him as well while Acott and Read – those two youngsters – had lost their lives here as well.

Rose had a firm loyalty to not just his Queen and his Country but those who wore the same uniform as he.


One of the spooks who was still here after almost off of them had eventually left was a young Intelligence Corps NCO by the name of Sergeant Meredith Wright. Rose had been immediately struck by her professionalism and down-to-earth attitude when he had spoken with her. Maybe he was a little bit attracted to her as well despite the large age disparity between them. Her physical attributes weren’t important though, he reminded himself over and over again, but rather how she went about her job here.

Wright had him walk her through the scene of the attack again now. She went about it slowly and carefully, asking gentle questions and asking questions that those others hadn’t. Rose could understand that she was on his side and not looking for someone to blame but rather to understand it all. Away from the two of them the deployed sentries were now far from the main gate and the lorry which remained in-place against the outer wall and atop of where the guard booth had once stood. The bodies of Fenton and Acott had been removed from underneath that vehicle and Read’s remained taken from the road on which he had fallen. Also now removed where the corpses of the three attackers.

Walking with her and listening to Wright’s questions, Rose relived the entire short engagement. He spoke of how the seven of them had been on duty and the lorry had come racing up the road towards the main gate. Fenton had gone rushing to sound the alarm while he had ordered the youngsters to spread out but wait for him to give the word to open fire. He explained how one of those in the lorry had jumped out of the vehicle as it turned and violently slowed down either exactly at the same time as or right before one of the youngsters – possibly Acott though maybe Read, not one of the other three – had opened fire upon it. Then the guard booth had disappeared when the lorry crushed it as the vehicle came to a stop. More gunfire had come with Read dying in that along with at least one of the attackers. Rose had moved forward to try to regain control of the situation as further shots had rang out with the rest of those terrorists being killed here by the youngsters who he had feared that would have been incapable of giving combat should they meet it.

He was about to ask Wright if anything more was known about the identities of those who had attacked St. John’s Wood Barracks when she gave him the most strangest of looks. Rose couldn’t understand why. He had recovered after those few unfortunate moments yesterday when he had momentarily needed a moment to compose himself – in the middle of that gun battle – and was certain that he was okay; okay enough not to have mentioned that to anyone at all who wanted to know what had occurred here.

But the way she looked at him…

…because he was back down on his knees again, frozen and going into shock again at the overwhelming senselessness of it all.



February 13th 1990
Portadown, County Armagh, Ulster, Great Britain

Sergeant O’Brien had repeatedly requested that she be allowed to join one of the patrols which went out of base and into Portadown. Resistance had come from above to her doing so yet she had managed to convince Michael – free for now from interrogation by outsiders – that she was capable and it would also be good for her too. That resistance had therefore eased and so tonight she was able to walk through the centre of the town alongside her fellow UDR soldiers.

Pushing the pains aside and telling herself that she was imagining those, O’Brien moved with the others through the commercial areas of Portadown back on operations with those whom she owed to and received loyalty from.


Like everywhere else, Portadown was under a curfew. Martial law wasn’t in effect and so the civilian authorities remained in charge yet the heavy restrictions upon movement were enforced by those in the military alongside the civilian police of the RUC. This meant that between dusk and dawn no one was supposed to be out of their homes unless they had either specific permission to do so or there was a genuine emergency reason. In this divided town that had kept somewhat a lid on inter-community violence and also maintained law and order.

None of the shops which O’Brien and the others walked past had been looted. There had been no major civil strife here with goods being stolen from them. It was the same in the light industrial areas where those buildings hadn’t faced arson attack. Elsewhere in Ulster, especially in Belfast and Londonderry, the situation was the opposite when it came to looting and burning as those two cities had seen major outbreaks of such crimes taking place as the war had raged abroad and also here in Northern Ireland too. She knew that it wasn’t like this everywhere across Portadown too. The transportation infrastructure of the town, in particular the railway links which made Portadown such an important communication centre, had been attacked by terrorists beforehand.

But this part of the town hadn’t been affected by that.

The streetlights were out and there was no light coming from inside any of the buildings too. The UK-wide blackout was still being enforced with the official word that it would deny targeting to enemy aircraft on bombing missions. Like many, O’Brien doubted that such a move to cover the British Isles in darkness – the Irish Republic had independently decided to do the same despite being a declared neutral – during nighttime would stop Soviet bombs from falling when there would be very modern navigation systems used. Nonetheless the blackout was what had been ordered and so everywhere was covered in darkness.

All of those in the patrol with which she was, including herself, had been issued torches though. None shone that bright when fully engaged yet were sufficient for the tasks at hand. These were used to aid their own movements though the middle of Portadown and to look for any signs of mischief. Doors at the front and rears of premises were checked to make sure that they were shut as well as gates and windows too. There was also looks made for physical disturbances inside such places too so that even if someone had covered their tracks externally they might be spotted by mess they had left inside when engaged in stealing or causing wanton damage.

The torches were also used to search for anyone who might be out past curfew and trying to hide from detection.


“Sergeant, to your left!” Corporal Duffy called out to her with great urgency. In an automatic motion, O’Brien turned to her left with her rifle barrel swinging that way too along with the torch attached to the top of it. Her finger was right on the trigger and ready to apply the necessary pressure.

There was no need for that though, despite how alarmed she had been in the manner in which Duffy had alerted her and everyone else.

It was a dog which her torch illuminated and her rifle was poised to shoot.

“What’s wrong with you, Eddie?” Collins or O’Malley, one of those privates, responded harshly to Duffy. Plenty of guns were upon the dog before it run off with haste.

“I thought that…” And, he didn’t finish what he had to say.

“You frightened the Sergeant.” Another voice, again either one of those two privates, challenged their fellow soldier who may have been technically senior to them in rank yet had just managed to earn their scorn. Part of that was probably because he was the replacement for the deceased Billy Gallagher and there really was no one who could replace a man like that.

O’Brien was far from frightened, just annoyed. “Cut that out will you. Let’s get moving again.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Will do, Sergeant.”

“I’ll lead off, Sergeant O’Brien.”

They were back underway again. The four of them carried on walking slowly through their patrol area with eyes open and ears perked. Anything and everything gained the attention of at least one of them as they prepared themselves for all eventualities. There could be looters or arsonists out tonight. Maybe they might run into someone about to plant a bomb or lay and ambush. The chance was that someone could be out breaking curfew for non-nefarious reasons. Possibility there might be another dog which they would encounter.

Either way, they were to carry on with their patrol looking and listening to their surroundings.

As they did so, O’Brien moved to the rear and let the others take the lead. She kept her attention on what was about but also on the platoon radio net through the headphones she wore attached to her helmet. This meant that she was able to stay aware of her wider surroundings too. Far too much had come as a surprise in the past two weeks – the final few days of official peace and then the opening of hostilities – and she didn’t want to be surprised again. Everything was pointing to the war continuing for a long time on the Continent yet Ulster was far from at peace despite the temporary stabilisation here.

O’Brien suspected that soon enough the situation here would fall apart again and the UDR wouldn’t be patrolling empty streets looking for curfew-breakers but rather back into combat once again.



February 13th 1990
The Damme Hills, Lower Saxony, West Germany

The mobile tactical headquarters column of the Allied II Corps was in retreat like many of the multi-national combat forces under command. Lieutenant-General Maguire’s command staff were trying to make a safe and organised withdrawal of all elements of the Allied II Corps to better deal with the continued attacks by the Soviets which hadn’t ceased with the fall of darkness several hours ago. Fighting on the ground usually petered off during the night, but that wasn’t the case at the moment. The enemy appeared not to be concerned about its attacking units blundering around in the dark and being shot up because they were doing the same to Maguire’s NATO forces which too weren’t as strong other regular troops with different corps commands that had better training to operate, navigate and fight without natural light.

Reports continued to be brought to him of ongoing clashes everywhere throughout and outside the assigned area where his men were meant to fight as they were dragged into combat all over the place. One portion of the Allied II Corps was being crushed in the Weser Valley by Soviet forces moving south and rolling over them, other elements were being pushed back as they were intermixed with the Americans towards the general Osnabrück direction (Maguire’s command column included) while more of his men were retreating away to the west trying to shake free of pursuing enemy forces right on their tail and not allowing them to make a stand where they might have had a chance.

All told, the formations under Maguire’s command, those he had led into battle, were being beaten and there was nothing which could stop this happening.


Among the woodland of the forested ridges which were Damme Hills, Maguire had brought his column to a temporary halt just after eleven o’clock local time. Communication on the move was something that could be done yet it wasn’t the best method of commanding such scattered, multi-national units as those he had assigned to him. The Allied II Corps had senior officers, a large staff and a wealth of junior personnel among the headquarters who needed to set up somewhere out of site for a short time to function properly. Under the natural cover of nature, and away from the enemy air targeting of Autobahn-1, a temporary stop site had been chosen. Vehicles were parked, tents erected and generators got going. Sentries were at once posted and staffs assembled behind their protection. Away from the command post communications array were raised as well – from high points – and wires strung so an attack on them wouldn’t immediately effect those who were using those to talk with those in the field.

Maguire assembled his top-tier staff.

“Johann,” he spoke first to his Operations Officer, a senior Territoralheer man, “give me an update on what we know of our situation, please?”

Generalmajor Schatz was a very capable officer who Maguire had inherited when taking over the West German reserve headquarters from which the Allied II Cops had been created. He was the model of professionalism typical of German military officers and Maguire had nothing but admiration for the man’s organisational ability and his knowledge of warfare.

His English was pretty good too: “Sir, we are spread out all over the place.” He picked up his pointer and moved to the map before them. “The British Fifth Division and two Territoralheer brigade groups are here to the west. They are being pushed back towards Vechta at the moment by enemy raiding units all over the countryside. Every time they have attempted to make a stand they had been hit in the front and also had their flanks and rear opened up too. They are withdrawing back towards the Autobahn at the moment; that is your British units and the Fifty-Second Brigade. Meanwhile the Sixty-Fourth is still trying to hold onto the roads around Lohne and appears incapable of effective maneuver at the moment.

With us, falling back towards the Kanal,” he meant the Mittellandkanal which ran east-west across West Germany, “are the Belgians, Territoralheer Fifty-Third, British First Brigade – two regiment-groups and two brigades, all combat-capable – as well as most of the corps rear-area assets.

Finally, off to the east, and with enemy forces between us and them now in strength, what is left of both your British Fifteenth and Forty-Ninth Brigade’s being pinned back against the Weser as the Soviets roll down the wrong side of the river. Those two formations are with the Second Division headquarters and a shadow of their former selves.”

Though he already knew it, seeing where Schatz pointed to on the map and with him verbalising it all, forced a sense of dread to almost overcome Maguire. His men were scattered and beaten. They were withdrawing in all directions and struggling to stay together when they did so, while others died where they fought as they were unable to get away from the armoured juggernaut which continued to tear them apart.

He turned to another one of his key people, his Intelligence Officer Brigadegeneral Kurt Hahn: “Kurt?”

“Sir,” this was another Territoralheer officer though who spoke English with a terrible accent, “the Americans and us are still being engaged by what is the Soviet Twenty–Eighth Combined Arms Army. It does not consist of its peacetime standing strength nor what we originally saw when it first moved across the border a couple of days after the invasion started. There are many attachments now with Soviet, Polish and East German units identified as being present. Their tank strength remains high along with artillery support. If there is a weakness, it will be in infantry numbers now and possibly combat engineering too as so many of both have been expended getting over the Weser and then during their breakout.

Regardless, the Twenty–Eighth Army is…” he hesitated for just a moment, “now their leading attacking force of the greatest strength available to the Warsaw Pact. Air support in the form of fighter-bombers and attack helicopters continues to be assigned. Tactical ballistic missiles and chemical weapons are being used repeatedly as they drive forward.

They are attacking everywhere at the minute now that they are over the Weser. The main focus appears to be to strike west and south due to the Third Shock Army being on their left-hand side yet they have attacked on a northwest axis too – certainly to take tactical advantage at an operational level. The Ems would be their objective when moving west, while to the south they will be aiming for the Kanal first then towards and through the Teutoburg Forest at its western end.”

Hahn pointed to the map that Schatz had left open. “Here in this triangle between Rheine, Osnabrück and Münster will be the focus of their southern strike. They will avoid the worst of the difficult terrain in the Teutoburg and cross the upper reaches of the Ems… the Ruhr and the Lower Rhine is beyond. Those later objectives will be for the follow-on field armies trailing behind them and moving up to the Weser now to follow.

I am talking of the three tank armies which our air power failed to stop.”

This West German reserve officer was talking about the successful invasion of his country by a sworn enemy of the German people. Hahn would know full well about the atrocities being inflicted upon the West German people caught up behind the lines and what was in the works for the rest of his fellow citizens. Maguire caught that in his voice as he spoke that final sentence about the failure of NATO air power when faced with the strategic challenge that they had when it came to those Soviet third echelon armies.

Hahn was a man upset at what was going on and fearful for his country: Maguire understood that completely because he would be the same if the British Isles had thousands of Soviet tanks pouring over them seemingly unable to be stopped. There had been official and unofficial worries over the loyalty to the NATO cause of various West Germans due to what was happening with their nation. It was said many were considering doing the unthinkable and giving up if there was no immediate reversal of the current situation. Maguire wanted to believe that those West Germans such as Hahn under his command would keep the faith that that turnaround could be achieved, but he didn’t know if that was a foolish hope…


Aided by the corps Chief-of-Staff, a Belgian regular army officer, Maguire got to work. He had instructions from NORTHAG’s commander was to what he was to do and set about following them. Orders were issued here which would then be disseminated down to those at the (moving) frontlines where the enemy was being met in combat.

Those Allied II Corps retreating through the Damme Hills area were to change direction and head westwards to link up with those in the Vechta area. To be mixed in with the American Army and their US III Corps command was not a good situation for the war effort as the two forces got in each other way. The Americans were fighting a highly mobile battle – despite retreating too – and the British and Belgian units with them weren’t capable of doing that in such a similar fashion. The ground away to the west, where a fall back towards the Ems could be made, was better for Maguire’s forces to operate in. Behind them would come significant Dutch support on the edges of the Netherlands’ borders. In addition, their role would be to assist in combating the slower-moving Third Shock Army from cutting off West German and Dutch forces trapped on the wrong side of the lower reaches of the Weser east of Bremen: a mission which Maguire had been told his command could achieve.

When it came to the 2nd Infantry Division, the remains of that formation were to fall under the command of the British I Corps. Both brigades which had been on the Weser south of Nienburg were beaten in battle when their infantry on foot had been attacked by the enemy with tanks – what Maguire had always feared yet been unable to stop – and were now cut off from the rest of the Allied II Corps. Those unfortunate soldiers there were to be transferred away from Maguire, something which, with deep regret, he had to be pleased about. Now was the time to fight with what was left, with those who could still fight and it was something that in spite of everything Maguire was determined to do.

[lordroel]

A good page regarding the Netherlands armed forces in the Cold War is called: Netherlands Armed Forces ORDER OF BATTLE 1985

[James G]

Chapter Twelve – Surprise

February 14th 1990
The Øresund, the Baltic Sea

Captain Brooks had been anticipating with dread that at some point yesterday or over night he would be informed that there had been the further employment of nuclear weapons. He had been waiting to be called to Communications to be told that once again such weapons had been put to use somewhere else apart from in South Korea. It was a pleasant surprise that he hadn’t received such a message of course, though the worry that he had that another Major Event was going to occur had remained.

Whilst waiting, Brooks’ command HMS Campbeltown had been in action again. He had led his warship into a trio of engagements that had taken place in the Øresund against enemy forces near to the occupied shoreline around Copenhagen. There had first been the firing of a volley of Sea Wolf missiles against a pair of heavy transport helicopters attempting to fly away from the collapsing Soviet-Polish position around the Danish capital with both taken out by those surface-to-air missiles. Each Mil-26 Halo was suspected to have been carrying senior officers or key personnel out of Zealand by those on the ground who spotted them trying to make a dash for the East German mainland far away but neither got more than a few miles offshore when the Campbeltown destroyed them.

Afterwards had come the missile-armed corvettes, one after the other. These small warships were active too in the coastal area around where there were attempts at making an evacuation of those which the Warsaw Pact forces hadn’t wanted to fall into victorious NATO hands. Neither Tarantul-class warship would have been able to carry many passengers yet they were there to escort other fast vessels – possible transport hovercraft – which were. As before, external targeting came to the Campbeltown with NAVBALTAP providing the communications link with Danish special forces on the ground. Harpoon missiles were then fired from distance and back came reports that hits had been made with one corvette blowing up when hit and the other left burning bow-to-stern after the crew abandoned ship. Brooks was told the identities of those two warships afterwards: one was the East German Navy’s Rudolf Egelhoffer and the other the Polish Rolnik. Neither of them being Soviet-crewed hadn’t bothered him at all as they were all serving the war aims of the Warsaw Pact.

Finally, there had been a submarine. This vessel – a Kilo-class coastal attack submersible – had attempted to strike at the Campbeltown first when becoming aware of the frigate’s helicopter Normandie about to pounce upon it. Sonar operators in the Operations Room had called out in alert when hearing the sounds of torpedo tubes being opened and flooded aboard that submarine with the implications of that not needing to be stated. Thankfully, the aircrew aboard the Lynx who called the Campbeltown home had been just as ready: that hostile action was all the confirmation which they had needed following last-minute indecisiveness of the possibility that they might have had a West German or Danish submarine below them. A Sting Ray torpedo was dropped into the cold Baltic waters with another one to follow, just to make sure. Before the enemy submarine could get a shot off and as the Campbeltown started to take emergency precautions, the torpedoes hit and killed their target.

Such had been Brooks’ day yesterday. This morning he expected much of the same when it came to fighting against Warsaw Pact forces in this stretch of water between Denmark and Sweden. The enemy was being defeated on land and were losing the last of the territory that they had there. His warship might or might not be called upon again to give naval gunfire support to those NATO troops there, but the Campbeltown still had many other weapons available to deal with air, surface and subsurface threats in the general area. There were many other NATO warships in the general area too as well as friendly aircraft above due to the now more favourable air situation over this part (not all) of the Baltic Approaches. Back in the Operations Room now, with the sun soon to rise outside, he wondered what would happen afterwards. The fight to break the encirclement of Copenhagen had been successful and the enemy driven back almost into the sea there. Here on the water the Combined Baltic Fleet had withdrawn their beaten forces to the south and were using smaller warships and submarines to conduct less dramatic moves than they had earlier in the war. The next stage in what NAVBALTAP should be ordering the Campbeltown to do, as far as Brooks saw it anyway, was to move southwards towards the East German coast.

The war certainly had a lot left to it and there would be plenty for NATO forces to do down there. Brooks was apprehensive about going so close to the enemy as he surely would be sent yet at the same time eager to get on with it rather than wait. Pressure could certainly be applied to the Soviets and their allies fighting in West Germany through their flank and attacks southwards against that could only hurt them.

He would wait upon those new orders, confident that he could fulfill them as the Campbeltown and her crew would continue to play their vital role in this war.



February 14th 1990
Calais, Pas-de-Calais, France

Second Officer Whitaker was not under arrest.

She was here in Calais with an ‘escort’ instead in the form of two senior NCO’s. The male warrant officer and the female chief petty officer were Regulators, the RN’s name for their military police. Those two had travelled with her from Belgium after Whitaker’s several days in an extensive debriefing as part of her journey back home to Britain. A short trip across the Strait of Dover awaited and then further onwards to a destination that she had not yet been told. There had been at least one of these two with her at all times so far and she expected that to be the case until they all reached where they were going.

Calais had been targeted heavily by the enemy during the war with Whitaker able to see much of the damage that had been done here from bombs and missiles. She and her escorts were waiting on a cross-Channel ferry to arrive though because despite all of the destruction here Calais was still operational. That ship was late for reasons unknown and so Whitaker was forced to wait like everyone else who was also supposed to be traveling this morning.

There were many others here in Calais all waiting to go across the English Channel.

Whitaker had asked to come along to the seafront while they waited and neither Regulator had objector. She could tell that the two of them were frustrated with their duty as they felt that they would have been best employed elsewhere. They were both distracted too by all that they were seeing and not paying as much attention to her as they had been late yesterday when they left the Belgian countryside and during their overnight travel. This was pleasing for Whitaker and the decision which she had made as to her fate; the surprise that she had for them was certain to catch them completely unawares with therefore no possible of intervention.

It was just getting light and Whitaker was joined by the two Regulator’s near the seafront. She was looking ahead out towards the water while beside her the warrant officer stood and behind the junior NCO was. They were looking that way too yet they were paying attention to the scene while she was instead focused upon the pistol worn in the service belt of that man. She stared at it out of the corner of her eye and started counting down from three.

Three.

Two.

One.

Whitaker turned and grabbed for the weapon. She grabbed a-hold of it as best as she could and tried to yank it free from the belt. The Regulator called out in what appeared to be shock while there was a more determined call from behind before she felt the woman pulling on her. Regardless, Whitaker fought to get her hands upon that pistol and did her best to ignore all of the pain suddenly coming for all directions as she struggled with these two.

She needed that weapon so she could become free.

Before, she had been pushed and pulled from all sides though now, even when trying to put everything into her aim to get that weapon, Whitaker felt a punch land. The woman behind her hit her in the neck with her fist and then did so. Following that came a sudden weariness and her hearing went. She sought to keep her eyes open and keep on struggling for with that pistol she would be the one making the decisions about her future and no one else.

Then another punch came.

Whitaker’s eyes closed as she told herself that she might be about to lose consciousness.

No, she screamed inwardly, I need to…



February 14th 1990
The Liebenburg Forest, Lower Saxony, West Germany

Trooper Jones and his fellow SAS men had been put at risk by their use of the radio.

Whether it had been a traitor giving them away or the enemy tracking their transmissions using complicated interception means still mattered overall though the importance of that was an issue for later. The here and now, what was important at the moment was that by not using the radio throughout yesterday and again through today those Polish commandos which had been hunting them beforehand were absent. Keeping those trying to track and kill them unawares of where they were meant not being in communication – or even just listening to higher orders without responding – with those on the other end of the radio.

Jones had agreed with both Bishop and Fryatt when the three of them had aired their views when it came to the radio to their team leader McSherry. They still had their mission to preform and didn’t need higher guidance for that. The Liebenburg Forest and the surrounding area was still an active engagement zone for them to operate in with enemy rear area forces all open to being attacked. That was what they had been sent here to do without coordination from above. McSherry had pointed out that being so far behind the frontlines changed hat situation somewhat with a need to have an understanding of the general state of the war so that they could better undertake their assigned mission. Nonetheless, he had agreed with those who he served with that to take a break from using the radio might allow them to shake lose those Poles led by Scarface when nothing else had worked.

McSherry had been a bit taken aback when that had worked, yet it hadn’t been a surprise to Jones and the other two.

With distance between them and the Poles, they were now back looking for the enemy. False trails and lures had been laid – as well as a few mines too – during the evasion of the enemy pursuers and there was a confidence that they were nowhere close. Therefore it was time to go after the logistical and communications network of the Polish Second Army that it had established throughout occupied West German territory to support their fighting forces at the front. There continued to be the use of roads through the forest that the Poles were using as this area of woodland ran north-south across their east-west links.

Fryatt had spotted a pair of trucks moving slowly and in their direction. Those aboard would be on guard against threats against them yet nonetheless when Jones and the other two joined their colleague they saw that there was still a clear opportunity to do some damage to the enemy here. Making this area a no-go zone for the enemy, or at least where they were frightened to travel through, was what they were here to do and so they started to make their move.



February 14th 1990
Wademark, Lower Saxony, West Germany

Guardsman Taylor was pulled apart from the West Germans who he had been captured with. The four of them who had surrendered with him when faced by a full platoon of well-armed East German soldiers were shoved to the left when they got out of the truck after him while he was dragged away to the right.

The shouting came again with the hoarse words from his captors. As he had quickly learnt, Taylor kept his head down and his mouth shut. These soldiers had no patience for him as a prisoner, let alone a black prisoner either. During his short period of custody Taylor had already discovered what the colour of his skin meant to those who truly held his life in their hands. It marked him out as someone to be physically beaten and verbally abused: he was certain that this was just the start of it too.

There was no name of this town that Taylor was able to see after he was pushed to the floor and took a moment to look up at his surroundings. He was in a small square in what appeared to be the middle of this West German locality. There were burnt-out and smashed-up shop fronts. Some cars had been set on fire too while others were in various stages of damage. People had died here with blood stains in the roads and on the pavements – that was recent too because it had rained yesterday evening.

With his head back down after those stolen glances, Taylor tried to understand what was being said by those standing up near to him. Those East Germans were all so loud as they spoke to each other and there must have been an ongoing argument. He had a feeling that it concerned him but he didn’t know if that was the case or not.

What could they possibly be arguing about if they were on the same side? Taylor regarded the East German military as similar to the British Army in the way in which there would be an organised hierarchy and strong internal discipline. Someone would always be giving orders and those below would obey them.

So why the arguing?

Unless, it dawned upon him as he dared raise his eyes just a little bit, not everyone here was from the regular East German military or even East German. Those who were almost shouting at each other right besides and above him could be from elsewhere…

“You, get up!” In English, one of those armed and in uniform around him called to Taylor and then tugged on his shoulder.

He raised himself up of the ground to stand ahead of the man before him yet forced himself to not meet the man’s eyes.

“You will come with me.” This wasn’t a native English speaker though someone who didn’t sound German either. “Hurry yourself. Follow.”

As he was told to do, because the consequences of disobeying were too severe to consider, Taylor walked after the man with his hands still bound behind his back as he did so. Those ahead of his new captor stepped out of the way as they walked towards a parked car.

Who was this man? And what did he want with his British Army captive?



February 14th 1990
Near Alta, Finnmark, Norway

Corporal Edwards wondered whether he would be buried here in Norway.

Once he died, which was going to be soon enough, would he be interned in a grave in Norway with other British, Norwegian and NATO troops who had fought here – even Soviets too – or would his remains be flown back home. If it was in Norway, how would his mum get here to visit his grave? Would Harriet and Jessica make the journey here as well? If it was back home in Britain where he would be buried where would that be exactly?

He had stopped screaming after bringing himself under control. The pain was still there though numbed somewhat by the painkillers he had been given. Private Jennings, laying beside him on the ground because he had been ordered to by Sergeant Proctor to give Edwards some comfort in his final moments, had said that the cold would take away the pain too. It was the injections which he had been given in haste that had done the trick though with all of those chemicals flowing through him: Edwards was sure of that.

Now laying back as he was Edwards was unable to see the blood anymore. When he had been first shot five, maybe ten minutes ago he had stared at it as it oozed out of the wounds in his belly. When it had landed upon the snow-covered ground below him the sight of that had brought about some of that screaming for it wasn’t just the pain but the instant knowledge that he was going to die. Edwards had at once understood that he was going to bleed out and die here because trapped and under enemy fire like he and everyone else was, there was only so much first aid from the combat medic that could be given to him. He needed doctors, surgeons and a field hospital not a boulder to have been dragged behind as he had been.

Gunfire carried on around him as he tried to move his mind off the worries about being buried so far away from home, family and loved ones. There were still those stragglers and hold-outs who had escaped from Alta when 2 PARA had retaken the town. Such people, The Lieutenant had said before they had set off on their patrol this morning, and too before Edwards had been shot, were either Soviet commandos or political officers who didn’t want to join their comrades in custody and were capable of conducting a surprise attack when they considered themselves in danger. They were out in the frozen countryside in the freezing and harsh conditions. These people would be desperate yet still motivated to fight even when they had no hope of successfully evading capture for long.

The platoon commander had said that such people would be dangerous.

Edwards’ mates, his fellow Para’s, continued firing upon the enemy. He had heard them shout that there was more than one of them out there with long-range weapons in the form of sniper rifles. Proctor had spread them out from where they had initially all dived into cover once Edwards insides were opened up and a countermove was underway to take the enemy from all directions with a controlled manoeuvre to eliminate the enemy. He wasn’t to be part of that though. Instead Jennings had been left with him and told to provide comfort.

Letting the eager young Para who just wanted to be everyone’s friend hold his hand as he died didn’t bother Edwards. He would rather it would have been someone else, someone he was close to, but Jennings was all that he had.

Edwards closed his eyes and tried to let the remaining pain do its worst. His own wish was the took his body home afterwards because he didn’t regret anything and more and wanted some peace.

[James G]

February 14th 1990
Queen Elizabeth Military Hospital, Woolwich, South London, Great Britain

Corporal Rose had been told that he needed rest; he hadn’t argued with that assessment of what would do him best especially when it came in the form of an order too.

There were many others in this military hospital to where Rose had been sent. He was in a ward where those with him were suffering from ‘nervous conditions’ and ‘unspecified emotional issues’ to use the euphemisms which had been thrown about with abandon. All sorts of military men like himself were in beds here after something had happened with them and Rose joined them in keeping quiet and not complaining. He had fast picked up on the sense of comradeship he had found upon arrival where in such a pleasant surprise what had brought those here wasn’t discussed upon them yet they were all in this together and remained servants of their Queen and Country.

In other parts of the hospital, Rose had learnt, there were many other men in uniform who were here for other reasons. Wounded fighting men – and a few women too – were being returned from the Continent and elsewhere to places such as this hospital for treatment. There were those who had taken life-threatening injuries from combat and others who had suffered from the effects of chemical warfare too. Some came here for surgery and other major treatment while others were at the hospital to recuperate.

Rose would have liked to have offered his help. He had considered asking if maybe he could talk with some of the other patients here to try to assist them in even the smallest ways or maybe to do something more such as help provide security here. The memory of yesterday, right before he had come here, was still overly present though where he recalled what had happened when he had broken down and ended up in that state which he had. There was the shame of that but also the feeling of inadequacy too as he was no longer able to actively serve and had been taken away from his duties.

As to that shame, Rose had been told not to have that feeling. He had been assured that it was not his fault that the pressures of the situation he had been in had got to him and caused the outcome which had happened. There were many others like him, strong and capable men, at this hospital who had all been unfortunate to suffer different personal reactions in relation to combat than others had.

Rose had nodded and offer no disagreement there yet in his heart he didn’t belief that at all. He was convinced of his own failings as a man and as a soldier and would forever have to live with those. He would keep them internalised but they would always be the case.



February 14th 1990
The North Atlantic

Lieutenant-Commander Hedges was back flying again this afternoon.

He was up in his Sea Harrier over the ocean and above the NATO warships which remained stationed in the GIUK Gap combating Soviet submarines. Below him on those vessels from the Royal Navy and others – the Canadians, Dutch, French and Spanish all had warships there alongside their British counterparts – there was apparently quiet celebration at events earlier in the morning. Before he had left HMS Illustrious to get airborne Hedges had been told that two more Soviets submarines had been sunk by those NATO forces in the past few hours, adding to the already many claimed successes against enemy submerged contacts. Moreover, both of those were this time reported to be heading back north rather than south through the GIUK Gap.

Those submarines must have been heading home to rearm before planning to go back to attacking NATO convoys, he had understood, but their journey had been cut short.

There had been talk among other officers aboard the Illustrious that Hedges had overheard, and some of his own pilots with 801 Squadron had joined in with, about when the Soviets were going to give up and realise that they had lost this war. Their naval forces in the form of maritime aircraft, warships and submarines had been massacred in combat with NATO. Early in the war they had got some lucky shots in with surprise strikes and done a lot of damage but the tide had turned and irreversibly so too. Surely they must understand that they had lost the naval war?

Hedges didn’t think this was arrogance or victory disease as one vocal dissenter of what had become a general opinion aboard the Illustrious had said. Rather, it was a widespread narrow view of what was going on shared by those involved only one part of the war and only with little information given as to what was happening elsewhere. Hedges had been briefed on wider developments by Commander McGuigan though he himself knew that there was much more that he wasn’t aware of. Away from this one particular theater of conflict where NATO forces were always going to be strong, on what was effectively their own ground and fighting a war which they had for decades prepared for in this form, other things were happening. The situation on the ground in West Germany was actually the opposite of what was occurring here with Warsaw Pact armies moving forward and unable to be stopped.

The contribution which Hedges and his pilots with their Sea Harrier’s present over this conflict zone was important. So too were those NATO warships and all of the other NATO naval and maritime air forces over the Atlantic protecting the air and shipping routes over the North Atlantic. Without the successes met in combat over, on and below the ocean there was a good chance that the war on the Continent would have ended by now.

At the same time, what Hedges was hearing from there was enough to make him seriously worry about how this was all going to end. That earlier dissenting voice had said that maybe there was the chance that the Soviets wouldn’t care that their naval efforts in the North Atlantic had met failure as long as they continued to win on land with their invasion of Western Europe which would give them overall victory.

As he continued to fly on another long patrol, Hedges wondered how that would play out. He was sure that even with the enemy still moving forwards in West Germany, NATO would hold together there for there would have to be an understanding that as with the naval war the ground war could surely be turned around too, just with time.



February 14th 1990
Near Borken, Lower Saxony, West Germany

Squadron Leader Ford watched as one of the West German-based Harrier’s came into land at a new dispersal site far away from the frontlines.

Some of his men with the RAF Regiment II Squadron did the same as the sight of the landing done in such manner distracted them like he from their duties momentarily. To watch as one of those aircraft made a vertical landing almost in the manner of a helicopter into a hidden location was exciting to witness even if it had been observed several times before by everyone with the mobile guard force for these aircraft.

This particular Harrier came back with what looked like battle damage. There were long, thin missiles mounted on the wingtips – Sidewinder’s he reckoned – but on one of those wings there were holes and scorch marks. Ford was only able to get a brief glance at those but it was clear that someone had taken a shot at that aircraft. Not a pilot himself, Ford still knew that it must have been a terrifying experience for that man who flew the aircraft yet he had brought his Harrier back and it was still in flyable condition and sure able to go back out again soon enough to carry on taking the war to the enemy.

This cheered him up after more than a few other events of the day which had been rather disheartening.

There had come word down the chain-of-command that enemy raiding columns of armour were all over the West German countryside far away from where the frontlines were. Those frontlines themselves were fluid and especially porous now with Warsaw Pact forces having broken through them. There were tanks, tracked & wheeled armoured vehicles and even armed men on motorcycles that had driven forwards aiming to engage NATO forces wherever they found them. Many of them were reported to have been stopped and destroyed after being cut off from proper support in the form of supplies and any form of flank security but others hadn’t and had got very far. Moreover, the way in which Ford understood it, the enemy high command wasn’t overly concerned if those raiding groups were beaten as they were: they were clearly expendable and causing the chaos which could be expected when they appeared everywhere as they did.

He was expecting that later today, maybe tonight his men would meet the enemy in battle. Ford had them as ready as possible with all men on alert and weapons readied to limit the surprise factor of their appearance so far away from the Weser. Still, if his Scorpion’s, Spartan’s and Land Rover’s met fast-moving main battle tanks the fight would be rather one-sided…

In addition, there had come orders for Ford to report in to British command when it came to receiving instructions from VKK-334. This was the Territoralheer local command in the Borken area, identical in all but number and geographic area to VKK-345 which he had reported to when near Bielefeld. Those West German reservists who were in the local area were here for general security and had wide operational control over any and all NATO forces also based here. As before, the complicated command arrangements were for Ford to report to 5 Wing (that headquarters had moved here) but also to work with the West Germans too.

5 Wing had now passed down firm instructions when it came to orders from VKK-334. If there were any messages giving orders to II Squadron then Ford was to confirm those with the RAF Regiment field headquarters before acting upon them. When he had asked for clarification he was told that there was an almighty political crisis with the West German leadership in their bunker and following on from that orders were being issued which weren’t authorised from NATO command.

That hadn’t been something which Ford had wanted to think about the implications of yet it was exactly that which was foremost in his mind at the moment.



February 14th 1990
Tromsø, Troms, Norway

Lieutenant Leigh informed his battalion commander that the UK/NL Landing Force headquarters on the radio was no ready for him and was then excused from the radio room by Lt.-Colonel Wilson.

He now walked back to the main operations room where command of 45 Commando operated from as the Royal Marines with the battalion were busy preparing to leave Tromsøya Island. Leigh found that most of the maps, radio gear and everything else here was almost all packed up now just as the fighting men should have done with their personal equipment elsewhere too. There was one map still pinned up and he wandered over to that past the battalion’s senior officers and company commander’s present to have another brief look.

Nordkjosbotn was some distance away to the south. That village was on the mainland and sat at an important highway crossroads where the main road linking Tromsø to the south met the all-important Norwegian coastal road that connected Narvik with Finnmark. It had been bombed by the Soviets and they had had their airmobile raiding forces there at earlier points in the war though now that communications centre was firmly in NATO hands and the roads which converged there being made full use of.

45 Commando was today to begin making its way to Nordkjosbotn.

There was already a fleet of small boats waiting alongside the Tromsøysundet so that narrow strait between here and the mainland could be crossed by the Royal Marines. Afterwards there were trucks waiting too on the mainland ready to follow the road southwards to Nordkjosbotn. Leigh had been present when the plan by the battalion staff to make that move had been approved by Wilson though like them he still had no idea as to where they were to go after that. No decision had still been made by the higher-ups as to where 45 Commando should be sent next apart from to take them there to that central location. As was expected of him, Leigh had kept his thoughts on the matter to himself unless he was asked to express them by his commander.

He remained rather annoyed too at the lack of firm decision-making from those above despite all the recent evidence that that shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise.

Leigh stepped back from the map and turned around just as Wilson reappeared in the operations centre. His commander wore a look on his face that Leigh instantly recognised as meaning that something was seriously wrong.

What was up?



February 14th 1990
Portadown, County Armagh, Ulster, Great Britain

Sergeant O’Brien forced herself not to throw up at the sight before her here in the basement of this Portadown house.

“I thought you should see this, Sergeant.” Private Duffy was standing beside her though rather than aghast at the scene of unimaginable horror here he was instead looking rather pleased with himself at being the one who had alerted O’Brien to all of this.

“I’ll call in it.”

She could have stood where she was and used the radio there but instead went back up the stairs to the ground floor. Leaving the basement was necessary; otherwise she might have collapsed and her body would have joined those rotting there.

O’Brien contacted the platoon commander and told him where she was and what had been found. There were a dozen, maybe more bodies all stacked together in a small below ground space underneath a house near to the boundary between the Catholic and Protestant districts of Portadown. There was blood on the walls, blood on the floor and blood on the ceiling. Those bodies were not of those who had been shot but rather butchered with what had to have been knives or other sharp implements. They wore handcuffs, had hoods pulled down over their faces and were all stripped naked.

The bodies had been here for not very long at all.

She needed assistance and assistance fast. There needed to be the beginnings of an investigation to determine what had happened and also to start speaking to people who lived in neighbouring houses: many of whom had clearly feigned surprise when soldiers under her command had started asking initial questions before she got here.

Upon confirmation that help was on the way, Michael came on the radio and spoke to his wife.

“Are you okay, Claire?”

“Yes, I am.” She really wasn’t.

“I’ll make my way down there as soon as I can.”

“Okay.” O’Brien really didn’t know how to response even with Michael’s comforting tone over the airwaves.

“Do you know what’s happened there?”

“A bloodbath. It’s just horrible, really horrible.”

“I’ll be there soon.”

The conversation ended on that with Michael promising as he always did to turn up and save the day.

This time things were different though. What had happened here would mean something more than anything else that O’Brien had heard or seen since the outbreak of low-level civil war in Ulster had begun. That was meant to have been brought to an end, but no one had told those who had slaughtered all those here.

[James G]

February 14th 1990
RAF Leuchars, Fife, Great Britain

Air Commodore Cooke was told that Magic One Six was directing a Luftwaffe Boeing-707 to land at RAF Leuchars; there was an in-flight emergency necessitating the landing in addition to the fact that those aboard were defecting.

“Defecting?”

Group Captain Walker, the station commander here, was whom Cooke asked such a question of which displayed how incredulous that was.

“That it what the Sentry is saying, Sir. She’s a West German V.I.P transport coming over the North Sea and was already in contact with Magic One Six,” (the US Air Force E-3B Sentry) “discussing their situation, yet we didn’t hear that as it was over a private channel. There appears to be some trouble with passengers aboard and the captain asked to land.”

“Where was the Boeing heading?”

“I would think to the States, Sir, yet there would be a fuel issue with that.” Walker wasn’t someone who knew all the answers at the moment, though he knew more than Cooke did.

“What a day.” Inside the bunker that was the operations centre here that Cooke had only recently arrived at to deal with other matters at RAF Leuchars he walked over to the radios. “Let them know we’ll be expecting the aircraft.

Then, Group Captain, let us get everything arranged on the ground. Make sure there is a clear runaway for them and we’ll direct them away from the flight ramp to the side. We’ll have the Snowdrops alerted as well and they’ll come with me when we go and meet this aircraft.”

Cooke gave these instructions for a standard operating procedure that would be taken if an aircraft in a similar situation was to arrive at an RAF station. This wasn’t an exercise where the exact same thing had been thought out and practiced but those procedures were still the same due to the similarity. The aircraft would be sent to an isolated spot of RAF Leuchars and then the RAF Police – the ‘Snowdrops’ as they were nicknamed – would secure the ground around it as well as accompanying Cooke when he went to meet those aboard.

After giving those orders, there was to be a fifteen minute interval before the Boeing arrived. Cooke left the main work area for the operations centre and went to Walker’s office to the side. He closed the door there and contacted the switchboard so he could contact his superior across at RAF Pitreavie Castle in private without listening ears. He needed to report in and try to get a better grasp of this situation which had come as a complete surprise.

A West German military transport with those aboard wishing to defect to Britain? Trouble among the passengers aboard? That American airborne radar and combat control aircraft giving the Boeing permission to land at RAF Leuchars after beforehand spending time talking to the aircrew over the radio which no one here had picked up?

This was something serious and he needed guidance from above in exactly how to act because of all of the political and diplomatic implications coming his way with this aircraft and passengers.



February 14th 1990
Steyerberg, Lower Saxony, West Germany

Major Slater was told by the commander of the Bundeswehr combat engineers who had joined with the mixed TA and Yeomanry force in Steyerberg which Slater commanded that his men were responding to ‘lawful orders’ to ‘retreat to the west’.

There had been no lawful orders which Slater had heard of. Nothing had come down the multi-national NATO chain-of-command and instead the West Germans – even as apologetic as they were – were withdrawing from here because they were responding to national orders from their new government in direct contravention of their NATO obligations. The response which had come to Slater’s counterpoint had been a shake of the head, another apology and then the West German’s starting to leave the burnt-out town.

Those well-armed and unbeaten regular soldiers were leaving their British allies who they had fought with here in such a desperate defence high and dry.

As they left, Slater observed the West Germans being let through a gap which the Soviet troops surrounding the town had opened up in their lines. Those Bundeswehr men were not being disarmed or taken into custody but allowed to march away. Slater had a feeling that there was too much confidence in them that out of sight and away from here, when they were unawares and thought that no surprise could come upon them, there might be a different fate in store for them: especially the officers. Nonetheless, the Soviets were letting them pass and take away about a half of the defenders of this town which was cut-off.

There wasn’t much doubt in his mind now that the Soviets would soon be in possession of Steyerberg after this betrayal by his one-time Allies. All of the remaining British troops here were reservists who had been beaten in open battle and then pounded when they had fallen back here as a last gasp effort to keep on fighting for as long as there was a reasonable chance of offering significant and effective resistance. That could no longer be the case without the West Germans present.

Slater decided that the only just thing he could do was to contact his superior and ask for permission to surrender. He wouldn’t defect, declare neutrality or accept an offer to march away – all of which would be a cheap propaganda victory for the enemy – but surrender. His position was untenable and those men under his command would be killed for no reason when the Soviets resumed their attack now that they had won their little game which they had played with the Bundeswehr forces which had been fighting here.

He wasn’t looking forward to captivity yet there was nothing else to do.



February 14th 1990
RAF Brüggen, North Rhine–Westphalia, West Germany

Flight Lieutenant Fletcher and the other RAF pilots and navigator/bombardier’s had been left waiting in the briefing room for almost two hours now without word as to what was going on.

Like the rest of them, he naturally assumed the worst: that they were to be prepared to undertake strike missions with WE177 thermonuclear bombs. Their Tornado GR1’s would be loaded with those weapons whose variable yields and various methods of employment would already be determined. He and Hunt would be given a set of targets – two, maybe three at the most – and sent against them and those on the ground.

Would he obey his orders when they came for nuclear release?

Of course he would. That was his duty. There would be no hesitation from him when ordered to go begin the process of destroying the world and humanity alike. He wore the uniform of the RAF and had long ago swore his oath to his Queen and Country. When receiving lawful instructions he would put his personal feelings on the matter and make his bomb runs.

There was no other reason for what remained of the Goldstars – No. 31 Squadron, RAF – which was a nuclear-capable formation to be stood down from combat operations as it was and the aircrews gathered together and cut off from everyone else. They were to get their target briefs, given a short statement of geo-political developments which had brought about the nuclear decision and then sent off to unleash Armageddon. That was how it had happened in exercises and that was how it was going to occur now in a real wartime situation where someone had taken the Ultimate Decision.

If Fletcher and the others weren’t to be sent on strike missions with their WE177’s free-fall bombs then what other reason could there be to have them stood down?

There were the fighting troops at the front who needed their support in tactical air roles and missions to be undertaken into the enemy’s rear areas as well. By being on the ground, even with the Tornado’s and the aircrews in supposedly bomb-proof bunkers (which weren’t, as proved by selected enemy attacks here and elsewhere), they were left open to being hit when most vulnerable.

It had to be a stand-down waiting for a nuclear weapons release that Fletcher was talking part in for he could see no other reason for the air war over the front to have come to a stop for the Goldstars like it had. It was dark outside now and good flying weather. Some rumours he had heard yesterday and earlier today about concerns over the West Germans on the verge of giving up were false as far as he was concerned and that just couldn’t be the reason for this.

No, he assured himself as he continued to wait, the situation must be one of the world about to be set alight. He would take part in that with the certainty that he could do what was expected of him and not live to see the aftereffects. Fletcher was certain that was why the stand-down of the Goldstars was currently happening, not anything as silly as the West Germans giving their allies the worst Valentine’s Day surprise imaginable!



February 14th 1990
Near Giften, Lower Saxony, West Germany

Brigadier Johnson cursed the stupidity of the new West German government and those who were following their ridiculous, short-sighted call for a unilateral ceasefire to begin less than two hours from now at eight o’clock.

They were fools. They were idiots. They were too stupid to see they had been tricked. They had no loyalty to those who had fought and died for their freedom. They had to know the consequences of believing Soviet promises but their absurd stubbornness to accept that the worse wouldn’t happen had won out.

Johnson had never thought that those who led this modern, democratic and vibrant nation would make the decision to doom themselves and all of their countrymen. His surprise wasn’t shared by everyone though plenty of others had like him refused to accept that what they had heard from Division was true.

Yet it was: the West Germans were throwing in the towel as they were.

Orders were for a withdrawal to begin at once. The Soviets and their Warsaw Pact lackeys had preempted the ceasefire by already bringing their attacks against NATO forces – not just the West Germans to a halt – starting about an hour ago. They had ceased their air and artillery strikes, stopped attacking forward and pulled back in most places their armour and infantry units. Those withdrawing enemy forces hadn’t gone far – a mile or too from forward positions where the Desert Rats had been ripping them apart – and were still in sight.

Johnson had been told that the British I Corps, including many West German units which had put themselves under British command ignoring their new government’s orders, was going to pull back the other way…

…across the Weser.

The river was a considerable distance away and the withdrawal there would be hazardous with regard to whether the enemy chose to take advantage of the situation: they hadn’t made any ceasefire agreement with the rest of NATO and others with the Allies. Moving back there would reassert what strength NATO had left on the ground in West Germany by giving them a place which they would defend better than the forward position which currently was the Hannover Salient.

Johnson's command, the 7th ‘Desert Rats’ Armoured Brigade, was to be part of the rearguard for that movement. There were many other troops which were already starting to head for places such as Hameln where they could get over the Weser at natural crossing points. He and his men would play a role in that and continue to do their duty despite others forgetting theirs.



February 14th 1990
Zweeloo, Drenthe, The Netherlands

Lieutenant-General Maguire was informed that the small battle near Dorpen on the River Ems had resulted in a victory for men under his command against those East German tanks who had reached that point so far to the west.

Such fighting had concluded during and after the appointed time of the ceasefire without regard to that where Belgian troops with the Allied II Corps had followed their orders and struck against the enemy who had their tanks on the riverbank and crushed the majority of the East Germans before pocketing the remains. He had given his explicit permission for the attack launched there to cut off that deep penetration by the Warsaw Pact and was more than pleased to see that he would be able to repeat up the chain-of-command to NORTHAG’s commander that a victory had been won on the Ems.

Clearly hamstrung by their own orders to stop attacking and undertake no more offensive action with the approach of the West German-Soviet ceasefire, the East Germans had been easy pickings for such a defeat as they had taken at Dorpen. NATO aircraft had joined in assisting the Belgians including a B-52 strike as only the Americans could do!

It was going to be one of only a few pieces of good news for the day for his superior and Maguire would make certain that the message got through.

As to the Allied II Corps itself, the formation was now running at less than half strength in terms of combat power than when it entered the fighting the other day. By tonight, there were no West German units of significant strength left under command as they had been lost in battle or had refused to follow orders and cross the western parts of Lower Saxony to get over the Ems and establish new positions. A third of Maguire’s British troops had been defeated and crushed though he still had the other two thirds as well as the vast majority of the Belgians too. There were now some Dutch forces – light infantry reservists admittedly – linking up with his remaining men to start to shore up a strong defensive position on and behind the river line.

A surprise had come in the form of the Dutch where Maguire had been informed that what he had earlier been told about the situation in their home country had been overblown. The government of the Netherlands had wavered with very real fears that the end was nigh for NATO but had ultimately changed their minds; the fighting at Dorpen, almost right on their borders, had been one of several instances which had assisted in that about-face. His chief intelligence officer had said that the open worries over whether the Dutch would falter in their commitment to the war had been a factor in the decision which the West Germans had taken to request a ceasefire from the Soviets. That might have been the case but, regardless, the Dutch remained with their NATO allies in the end.

To have lost the Netherlands too would have been a fatal blow in NATO being able to maintain the fight on the Continent. The communications links through the Dutch ports (even after they had been bombed as they had) and the road network were vital. So too were the airbases and airstrips across the country especially when linked with the ground-based air defences to provide a solid line of defence. The Dutch were important too for their military contribution on land, at sea and in the air. Moreover, politically the NATO alliance wouldn’t afford to lose another member with the West Germans having abandoned their allies, at least the leadership anyway.

As to that fight, Maguire’s instructions from above were complicated.


NATO and the other countries which were the Allies had not accepted the ceasefire between West Germany and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. That was not something that his command was bound by like all the rest of those actively fighting against the enemy’s war of aggression. Officially, NATO was ignoring that ceasefire and the policy was that the West German change of government was illegal and therefore those men of theirs who surrendered, marched away from their fighting posts or stood where they were declaring neutrality were in rebellion and disobeying orders. From where Maguire now had his command post outside this village in the eastern part of the Netherlands, that was the message which was being broadcast across the Allied II Corps.

In practice, practical matters were different from the public message. Orders had come down from NORTHAG to Maguire that even before the ceasefire came into effect he was to make sure that all of his men pulled away from the enemy and got back over the Weser to take advantage of the lull in fighting that Warsaw Pact forces were bringing about by ceasing their attacks forward as they were. The enemy clearly wanted to demonstrate their intentions to get the rest of NATO to go along with what the West Germans had done but he was to ignore that game which they were playing and instead withdraw from all positions to the east of the river and get over to the western side. This meant withdrawing in the face of the enemy but at the same time a golden opportunity had been there to salvage more of the Allied II Corps than would have been possible had the ceasefire not come into effect like it had.

Dorpen had been an exception though with the fighting there to be completed to knock out the enemy’s furthest reaching attacking force before the withdrawal back over the river tonight.

Maguire was told that his command was to hold the new frontlines between near Papenburg down to Lingen. It was quite a long stretch to defend yet with the main body of the enemy – the Soviet Third Shock Army – far away it was possible for now. To the north would be the parts of the Dutch I Corps which had withdrawn from Bremen area and once they reached the Ems in larger number their area of responsibility would grow with the Allied II Corps having its own shortened as the enemy approached. There would be the American III Corps to the south, also on the Ems as upstream the river narrowed and came from the east. Any West German forces which remained following their legal orders would be brought under command of Maguire's corps or the other two with Maguire being told that there would be plenty of those, especially regular troops rather than reservists.


The Allied II Corps was to fight on the Ems to defend the sliver of West Germany territory behind as well as the sovereign soil of the Netherlands too. Maguire had firm orders that NATO was to continue to oppose the Soviets. Once political wrangling had been overcome with the West Germans the fight was back on.

[James G]

Epilogue – No Surrender

February 15th 1990
Wiston House, West Sussex, Great Britain

The Minister for State at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office George Morris had arrived here at this country house in the early hours and knew that it might be several days before he could leave. His brief was work with the West German Exiles – as they were starting to be called back in Whitehall – to get them to agree on a combined course of action which included returning home to their own country and standing steadfast for their nation.

No one had said that it would be an easy task.

There were all sorts of people from West Germany who had arrived in Britain in the past few days using various means. There were diplomats, intelligence figures, politicians and military officers who had flown into the country or arrived by sea. Many of them had brought family too – even a few mistresses – with not all of them being urgently redirected down to this FCO-managed facility usually put to use as a conference centre. Not all of those people who declared that they were exiled themselves in the face of what was happening back home were important enough to be sent here and the families of all were elsewhere too.

Those who had been brought here were to be free from personal distractions, the aim of the UK Government was, so they could sort out the mess back in their own country which they had run away from.

Instead of working together towards to the plan of action which Morris’ superiors in government wanted, those here at Wiston House did what he had expected of them: they disagreed on everything that those British diplomats here tried to get them to discuss. The West Germans here were those who had fled their nation because they believed that a ceasefire with the Soviets by their new government would ultimately bring about a fate for themselves that included a bullet in the back of the head. Morris had to concur with such an assessment as anyone foolish enough to think that what the new government which had emerged from their bunker under the Rhineland and set themselves up in the city of Aachen would be any good for West Germany was either naïve, foolish or a damn liar. They were now being encouraged by their British hosts to go back home and sort that mess out there with the intention to keep their country in the war against the Soviets. They would have to return and get rid of the new government for that to happen.

It was mentioned again and again here that they feared that they would be one way or another end up in the hands of the Soviet KGB. They might be arrested, they could be kidnapped or there might be quasi-legal criminal proceedings to detain them. Either way, they said that that would be their fate. As before, Morris had to agree with such an assessment despite his silence on the matter due to the public position of his own government as wanting them all to return back to West Germany.

Such was why the Minister for State knew that he couldn’t be leaving here anytime soon: these West Germans were smart enough to flee ahead of their executions and weren’t going to voluntarily go back to them.


Ken Ferguson arrived late in the afternoon and Morris was glad to get away from the West Germans and talk with the senior civil servant from the FCO. Men like Ferguson who those who really ran Britain as they worked in all levels of government refining and implementing the decisions made by politicians. Morris’ guest from Whitehall was someone he knew and trusted rather well as an extremely capable member of the Diplomatic Service.

News from abroad when it came to West Germany delivered by Ferguson was far better than what he was dealing with here.

Under normal circumstances to hear that a country such as West Germany – the largest economy in Western Europe, a vital ally – had now three different governments all which claimed legitimacy would have been rather alarming. These were not times of normality though, the Third World War was raging. Alongside those who were now in Aachen who had agreed to their unilateral ceasefire with the Warsaw Pact, there was another self-declared government who had set themselves up in Flensburg and a third down in Munich.

Each claimed to be legitimate. None wanted the break-up of their nation nor wished enmity to their Britain, NATO and the Allies. In Aachen they wanted an end to the war while in Flensburg and Munich the wish was for a continuation of the fighting against the invading Soviets. Ferguson stated that those latter too political groupings had little differences between them apart from location and make-up. The reason why there was two of them rather than one had come about due to fast reactions hostile to Aachen and communications issues; both were expected to merge very soon to present a united front against Aachen and the Warsaw Pact too.

What was coming from those dissenting West Germans politicians who stood in opposition to their colleagues who had given in was that there was to be no surrender to the Soviets. They were not going to abide by the ceasefire no matter what the Soviets or their fellow countrymen did or said while there were still invading troops on their soil. There would be no comprise agreements made and they weren’t about to give in and betray their allies like those in Aachen had done. They regarded what had happened when the Chancellor had been deposed by the Foreign Minister as unconstitutional as well as wrong.

Ferguson’s news on this matter was gratefully received. Those in Flensburg and Munich shared the position of the UK Government and all those fighting against the Warsaw Pact and their illegal war of aggression. This war was far from over and there would be no surrender to an enemy such as they had.

Now he was to bring this news from their own country to those at Wiston House and make the best use of it with them.


THE END

[stevep]

Well finally made the end and see why there's going to be a 3rd chapter. Also an inevitable resumption to the war. Even if the Soviets were willing to keep their armistice and just control west Germany their not going to now given that many Germans as well as NATO won't accept it.

Think Wittacker did the wrong thing trying to esacape. Whatever the plan she's going to come under much more supition than before.

Hope Slater's forces don't suffer too badly but can't see any alternative to surrender and especially with the continued western resistance their going to face a very rough time , as is Rose, although he may have a better time of it than the 4 West Germans who were captured with him, who may already be dead.

Looking forward to chapter 3. Has that been completed let or is it still being written. Must admit I'd rather the latter as the mass data dumps of chapters make it difficult to keep track of everything. [Although possibly its just me getting old. ]

Anyway many thanks for a fascinating, if depressing read.

Steve

[lordroel]

Jan 28, 2017 17:23:30 GMT stevep said:

Looking forward to chapter 3. Has that been completed let or is it still being written. Must admit I'd rather the latter as the mass data dumps of chapters make it difficult to keep track of everything. [Although possibly its just me getting old. ]

Anyway many thanks for a fascinating, if depressing read.

Steve

As far as i can see it is still ongoing.

Also as Steve has said, a fascinating but if depressing read.