Soviet Domination - A Red Dawn story

[hussar01]

Well it lloks like Mexico is a failed state with little oppurtunity to improve. Will the US anex parts of Mexico as a result of all this? Baja but the border Mexican states as well?

[crackpot]

Yeah. Ominous. Like P&S ominous. What will it be? Strategic exchange or lead poisoning at the Kremlin? My money is on at least some level of nuclear escalation.

Remember, The only winning move is not to play.

[James G]

Dec 23, 2018 22:33:08 GMT lukedalton said:

Hope that vengeance had bring joy and warm on the life of the people that ordered the attack , for a full five minutes, because a single life will not be long enough to see Mexico fully rebuild...and it seem positionated to become ITTL version of Somalia with all the fun and games that this mean.

Seem that in this TL the idea of create wall at the border will not considered an idiocy but probably something a little controversial but still perfectly reasonable to accept , at least in the form of a serious feasibility study

For decades, Mexico will be doomed due to that attack, events before, and events to come. Somalia might be a 'good' comparison. Some in the US will regret this and history will judge the United States badly, yet others will see what they did as justified.
A future border wall would probably be a long-term occupation zone instead. Many Mexicans will also want to go north away from their country for good too.

[James G]

Dec 24, 2018 8:34:08 GMT hussar01 said:

Well it lloks like Mexico is a failed state with little oppurtunity to improve. Will the US anex parts of Mexico as a result of all this? Baja but the border Mexican states as well?

Exactly how that will all play out is something I am thinking on. Once the war is over, I plan for a big epilogue of the future so we'll know then. Annexation might sound great though two of those nukes cities - Hermosillo and Chihuahua - aren't that far from the US. Baja is home to Democratic Mexico too and, will not liked in New York, they do represent a government.
As said, I have yet to decide on this. Plus, the war isn't over and the end will factor into that a lot.

Dec 24, 2018 11:41:52 GMT crackpot said:

Yeah. Ominous. Like P&S ominous. What will it be? Strategic exchange or lead poisoning at the Kremlin? My money is on at least some level of nuclear escalation.

Remember, The only winning move is not to play.

Ah, we shall see! US submarines going into a Soviet SSBN bastion (there's one in the Kara Sea with more subs too) will always be a bad idea.
The Soviets played their nuclear hand against the US and came off burnt. They played it against China and got burnt. They didn't learn the lesson the first time but maybe they might have by now.

[James G]

(322)

Early April 1985: North America (two of three)

Further Army of the United States units had been released starting April 1st to join other ARUS elements who did so a month beforehand. Coming under operational control of the US XI Corps was the 41st Infantry Division, a formation raised in Pacific North-West. Arguably, the 41st Infantry still needed another month to prepare in terms of equipment issuing rather than the training of the men but they were sent forward despite missing some key bits of equipment. None of these were deemed wholly vital to the ability of the 41st Infantry to fight. In the eyes of the XI Corps’ commander, and that of his superior at the head of the First United States Army, all the hold-ups with the division had been bureaucratic and it was utterly stupid to keep them waiting in the rear. The XI Corps took the incoming reinforcing division to replace the 82nd Airborne Division which transferred to army command: the ‘defenders of Denver’ and those men who had retaken Colorado Springs were wanted elsewhere. The fight that the XI Corps had, along with the Canadian Corps on their left flank, was no longer anywhere near Denver, Colorado Springs or in Colorado anymore. They entered New Mexico at the beginning of April as they chased after the retreating Soviet Twenty–Second Guards Army. The Soviets kept moving fast but it was impossible for them to break free of the pursuit after them which sought to fix them in-place for their destruction. Every day and every night of fighting saw them lose more men to the advance of Allied troops who chased after them into New Mexico.

Across northern New Mexico, ABC troops (Americans, British and Canadian) from the Allies fought through early April. The Canadians, joined by the British, put on far better overall performance than they had done last month up around Pueblo… that being in the eyes of their American allies. This time they took a lot of ground and overrun the enemy to a degree which pleased the First Army command. Too much caution had been used at Pueblo, the Americans had said; caution was certainly what they had employed, their allies agreed, but only because it was necessary there and then against a dug-in opponent. Firstly around the town of Raton and then further down the course of Interstate-25, the Canadian Corps engaged Soviet forces on the run and were able to do much more. They used their overwhelming numbers far better in easier terrain to move across. British troops would end up going the furthest south when they reached the crossroads around Springer. They had leap-frogged ahead of the Canadians and barred the way for the Soviets caught behind. The enemy was squeezed in between a great victory won north of Springer through April 9th–10th. Once that was done with, they held in-place the next day while dealing with prisoners taken as the rest of the Canadians caught up. Planned operations were for them all to start moving onwards through the rest of the month as the Canadian Corps followed I-25 as it wound through north-central New Mexico first to Las Vegas (not the Las Vegas; this was a lesser-known but more historic town of the same name as the city over in Nevada) and then onto Santa Fe. That would hopefully then put them behind the rest of the Twenty–Second Army running from the Americans. Another battle was envisioned somewhere in the general Santa Fe area to finally finish off the Soviets before entry could then be made into Albuquerque all before the end of the month.

The XI Corps was following that same line of thinking with its advance through north-central New Mexico as it chased after other Twenty–Second Army elements. The 4th & 37th Infantry Divisions joined with the 41st Infantry, plus the former Berlin Brigade and national guardsmen in armoured cavalry regiments too (the XI Corps was rather large now), in fighting the Soviets through the mountains, forests and the wilderness of Indian lands. They managed to get hold of the 120th Guards Motorised Rifle Division one last time and give that Soviet unit a final defeat. For many months, the 120th Guards Division had been repeatedly engaged and taken losses after losses yet kept on fighting despite everything thrown at it. No more. Now it was caught, right in the valley of the very upper reaches of the Rio Grande. There was that final reckoning and a fantastic victory was won. The 41st Infantry played its role well in that and did what they had come here to do: fight and fight well. Soviet Airborne paratroopers with their 76th Guards Division slipped away though and out of what eventually because the trap for their Soviet Army comrades. They went east and west, into the mountains as their division split apart. What they didn’t do was stick together nor go south. This gave the XI Corps less urgency to make an immediate pursuit and rather recover its strength before finishing them off too. The 174th Infantry Brigade (the men from West Berlin) was assigned during that short break to urgently assist the 82nd Airborne and thus didn’t get to stop moving for a few days. The First Army, though its own higher headquarters of the Rockies Command, had been tasked to take emergency action against convoys of trucks which had escaped the main fighting and were right out over in the west near the Arizona state-line. On US Route-64 and -491, there were POWs being moved. Possibly they were going to Albuquerque the long way around; there was possibly too that they were going to be disposed of using rather unpleasant means. A good few thousand men – Americans but also some Canadians and maybe even a few Brits too – were in those convoys. Questions were asked as to why a wait of a day or two couldn’t come until the 174th Brigade and 82nd Airborne were more prepared. The reason why this couldn’t happen wasn’t given and it was understood by those lower down the chain-of-command that something was going on that demanded action be taken very soon. The Americans went after them. The 82nd Airborne made company- & battalion-sized combat parachute drops (the first time in the war that they had done this!) while the 174th Infantry went cross-country in a mad dash to link-up with those drop-zones. A lot went wrong but elsewhere things went as planned: it was all drawn up so fast and luck had to be factored in. Revolutionary Mexico guards, led by KGB officers, put up a fight but they weren’t prepared for what they faced when the Americans were able to conduct their arrivals properly and hit them with battle-hardened soldiers. The majority of the convoys were captured and the POWs within liberated. Two convoys weren’t liberated though, both near the town of Farmington on Route-64. Attacking American troops were held off after mis-drops and bad communications occurred. The prisoners were dragged from the trucks once those were stopped. The KGB had orders for what they had the Mexicans with them do despite this happening earlier than planned. Several hundred POWs were slaughtered and the KGB then made escape attempts while leaving the shooting parties behind to face the music. As expected, when the Americans caught up with them, the soldiers of Revolutionary Mexico were given ‘field justice’ in many cases. Only by the end of the day and the orders which came to stop fighting did the 174th Infantry and 82nd Airborne understand why the rush had been on to do what they did early on April 11th and not leave it a day or two more.


Other American paratroopers – though those with far less experience; men with the ARUS-formed 11th Airborne Division – were fighting with the US XVIII Corps in south-central New Mexico. They were joined too be incoming reinforcements released from the final stages of training and fitting-out in the form of the 13th Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 34th Infantry Division. These formations moved towards Truth or Consequences and the Elephant Butte Reservoir just in time to aid the 11th Airborne. While the rest of the XVII Corps was dealing with an attack by Cuban and Nicaraguan forces trying to approach the bridgehead held on the Rio Grande / Interstate-25 position coming up from the south, the men facing northwards faced an attack coming downstream towards them. These were Czechoslovaks and they did very well in battle over on this side of the North Atlantic. Sent across at the end of last year as the 2nd Motorised Rifle Division – one of the better units of the Czechoslovak People’s Army – they had seen, as the East Germans had done with their division, the Soviets take a lot of their equipment and ammunition to help form their own units following naval losses. The Czechoslovaks were reformed into a brigade with extra men put on security duties through central New Mexico. The mechanised infantry brigade was kept as a reserve unit in the Albuquerque area and dispatched following the XVIII Corps’ penetration deep into the rear to form one of the two pincers moving on the 11th Airborne. Czechoslovak artillery preformed the best. Their RM-70 multi-barrelled rocket-launchers and DANA self-propelled guns were used very effectively to cause maximum casualties among the Americans and moved about rapidly to avoid counter-battery fire plus American aircraft. The guns covered assaults by tanks and mobile infantry. The 11th Airborne fell back and back again. Retreat was the only thing to do otherwise they would have been overrun. Thankfully, before the Czechoslovaks could crush them, the 13th Cav’ showed up to save the day. Thank God for the Cav’! The Czechoslovaks were halted before the 34th Infantry came forward and retook the ground lost while pushing the enemy back to where they had come, expanding the bridgehead as they did so before orders from above caused a stop to the fighting come the end of April 11th. As to the American paratroopers, they would claim victory afterwards because they hadn’t been beaten yet their ranks were thinned greatly by the dead and injured. Their saviours too took many losses in their first time in combat, all while holding off a determined enemy assault. Pre-battle intelligence coming from Europe said that in Bavaria, the French had kicked the Czechoslovak’s behind (though things were more even when the Czechoslovaks had been encountered in Austria) yet it was the Americans here who had been on the wrong end of the fight against such opponents. Truth or Consequences held in the end though and that was what mattered overall.

The rest of the XVIII Corps was fighting downstream against those Cubans and Nicaraguans who’d come up from the wider El Paso area before the threat from out of New Mexico by the Sixth US Army fully materialised. The regiment of Soviet Airborne paratroopers who should have been with them going upstream – following I-25 too – were re-tasked to the west and they were missed; the Panamanians weren’t at all. At Hatch first and then near to Caballo Lake, the 1st Infantry & 101st Air Assault Infantry Divisions held off their opponents while making a planned withdrawal where they made use of the ground and the ‘surprises’ which they left behind for those in pursuit. The surprises were a lot of mines (the Americans noted carefully where they left these; they were aiming to go back south in the coming weeks) as well as a lot of water. From the Caballo Dam, the waters of the Rio Grande were released: this had been building up from all that melting snow once the Spring Thaw had occurred far to the north in the Rockies. The dam wasn’t blown, it was just a case of a lot of water being released from it… at a rate of pushing forty thousand cubic feet a second. There was no tidal wave of anything dramatic like that downstream but instead just a giant bog formed. The ground below through which the Cubans and Nicaraguans moved was sodden and it slowed them immensely. American aircraft and helicopters picked off tanks and infantry carriers from above to further weaken and enemy which kept on coming, just at a torturous rate of advance.

Once the enemy reached the Caballo area, it was all spread out and arrived piece-by-piece. Some of the Cubans had swung away to the east to get out of the way of all that water. They found the uneven, rocky terrain a nightmare to cross when the 101st Air Assault was up there and the Cubans wouldn’t be making an outflanking move here. The main fighting was in the valley below the dam and the 1st Infantry engaged the rest of the Cubans and the Nicaraguans there in a fight lasting almost a whole week. It was a one-sided affair and the attackers knew that. Requests were made for it to be called off from the officers involved because this was just impossible. Those were refused: Truth or Consequences must be reached from behind to achieve the southern pincer in response to the Czechoslovak’s northern pincer. Therefore, it continued right up until the very end of the fighting. The Americans had to keep their divisions here to maintain that fight, all the while wondering what idiot would keep ordering these men to go forward into the free-fire zone which they firmly had set up.


Over in Central Texas, early April saw the Battle for Austin: ‘for’, not ‘of’. The city which was the Texan state capital wasn’t fought over directly. Instead there was a lot of fighting nearly with the intention of winning control of it and its transportation links before eventually taking it. The fight was mainly between American national guardsmen facing soldiers of Revolutionary Mexico though there were many Cubans engaged as well because Austin sat within their operational area up and along the Interstate-35 corridor. The once proud Cuban Second Army – which had ripped apart the US Army III Corps in the war’s first few weeks – was a shadow of its former self yet there remained thousands of Cubans left and they had the capability to fight. As the Third United States Army used moved in from the north and east, while maintaining a static blocking position to the south, intelligence said that that Cubans would cut and run away to the west. Analysis by NISS’s military intelligence operatives stated that due to events down in Cuba – an outline, let alone any specifics, all unrevealed to the Third Army – the Cubans would be looking to save their army. That was correct… but incorrect as well. The Castro Brothers in Havana had that intention but their men in the field weren’t under their direct command. The Soviets gave the orders and the Cubans stood their ground. Between Belton at the top end and San Marcos to the bottom, with Austin the middle, the fight for the I-35 Corridor went on through early April. The Cubans were far better opponents than the Mexicans yet the latter were no pushover when on the defence. They had to pounded down where they were dug-in and completely overcome. The Cubans sought battles of manoeuvre instead. The different actions of these two allies doing what they did caused the Americans all sorts of issues. If it was done on a bigger scale over a far greater area, the Third Army would have taken a lot longer to do what they did. However, there weren’t enough Cubans and the area of operations was small enough to manage this situation once the Americans were able to understand what was going on. In fight after fight, they dealt with the Cubans first and then surrounded the Mexicans. Over to the west was the rise of the Balcones Escarpment with the Edwards Plateau up above. That formed an effective barrier behind the I-35 Corridor and a natural obstacle which to pound the Cubans against before turning back on the Mexicans.

Late on April 10th, the 26th Infantry Division – American national guardsmen from New England – took Bergstrom AFB outside Austin from the dug-in defenders as they completed a partial envelopment of the city. They were going to start moving inwards the next morning and weren’t looking forward to an urban fight. Orders came to hurry that up, again unexplained. That was attempted but it couldn’t be done at the speed that orders originating all the way from New York wanted. A flurry of messages came promising full support in terms of extra firepower and aircraft all to take the city by the end of April 11th. Regardless, it just couldn’t be done. No one on the ground knew why there was this urgency. Troops from Revolutionary Mexico were making their last stand there and taking Austin just wasn’t going to happen with the speed desired. To say New York was disappointed was an understatement but political desires and military reality don’t always mix.

North of that fight, in parts of Texas opposite the Red River and also west of the Dallas–Fort Worth area, the Soviet Seventh Tank & Twenty–Eighth Armies (what was left of each anyway after the disasters of March) fought against a major counteroffensive by the Seventh US Army. The Americans were on the advance now after stopping what had come their way last month. The Soviets fell back away to the west and southwest; their southern escape route was cut by what the Third US Army was doing. The retreat was pretty organised and not a mad dash to escape. There was space to fall back into and it was a fighting retreat done well. An attempt to cut it off, where the US II Corps came over the Red River and tried to turn the rear of the Seventh Tank Army, failed when a lot of Soviet tanks showed up there and held the Americans off. However, despite that and other instances of the Soviets doing well while falling back, they were still falling back. They went deeper into Texas away from its outskirts yet they couldn’t keep this up forever. The Americans broadened their frontage as the days went by and across the rear they dropped Green Berets and Rangers aplenty at key points. These men scouted the way rather than trying to stop the Soviets from going backwards and sought to provide the Seventh US Army with a victory at some point by identifying where they could catch the Soviets in a real fight. The thinking was that it would be around Abilene – the general area, not exactly that town – in the end where that would occur, sometime later in the month. As was the case everywhere else though, at the end of the eleventh day of April, the fighting came to a close. Final victory on the battlefield would eventually elude the Seventh US Army when they’d done so much hard work ready to see it come.

[lordroel]

Dec 24, 2018 18:19:11 GMT James G said:

(322)

Early April 1985: North America (two of three)

Further Army of the United States units had been released starting April 1st to join other ARUS elements who did so a month beforehand. Coming under operational control of the US XI Corps was the 41st Infantry Division, a formation raised in Pacific North-West. Arguably, the 41st Infantry still needed another month to prepare in terms of equipment issuing rather than the training of the men but they were sent forward despite missing some key bits of equipment. None of these were deemed wholly vital to the ability of the 41st Infantry to fight. In the eyes of the XI Corps’ commander, and that of his superior at the head of the First United States Army, all the hold-ups with the division had been bureaucratic and it was utterly stupid to keep them waiting in the rear. The XI Corps took the incoming reinforcing division to replace the 82nd Airborne Division which transferred to army command: the ‘defenders of Denver’ and those men who had retaken Colorado Springs were wanted elsewhere. The fight that the XI Corps had, along with the Canadian Corps on their left flank, was no longer anywhere near Denver, Colorado Springs or in Colorado anymore. They entered New Mexico at the beginning of April as they chased after the retreating Soviet Twenty–Second Guards Army. The Soviets kept moving fast but it was impossible for them to break free of the pursuit after them which sought to fix them in-place for their destruction. Every day and every night of fighting saw them lose more men to the advance of Allied troops who chased after them into New Mexico.

Across northern New Mexico, ABC troops (Americans, British and Canadian) from the Allies fought through early April. The Canadians, joined by the British, put on far better overall performance than they had done last month up around Pueblo… that being in the eyes of their American allies. This time they took a lot of ground and overrun the enemy to a degree which pleased the First Army command. Too much caution had been used at Pueblo, the Americans had said; caution was certainly what they had employed, their allies agreed, but only because it was necessary there and then against a dug-in opponent. Firstly around the town of Raton and then further down the course of Interstate-25, the Canadian Corps engaged Soviet forces on the run and were able to do much more. They used their overwhelming numbers far better in easier terrain to move across. British troops would end up going the furthest south when they reached the crossroads around Springer. They had leap-frogged ahead of the Canadians and barred the way for the Soviets caught behind. The enemy was squeezed in between a great victory won north of Springer through April 9th–10th. Once that was done with, they held in-place the next day while dealing with prisoners taken as the rest of the Canadians caught up. Planned operations were for them all to start moving onwards through the rest of the month as the Canadian Corps followed I-25 as it wound through north-central New Mexico first to Las Vegas (not the Las Vegas; this was a lesser-known but more historic town of the same name as the city over in Nevada) and then onto Santa Fe. That would hopefully then put them behind the rest of the Twenty–Second Army running from the Americans. Another battle was envisioned somewhere in the general Santa Fe area to finally finish off the Soviets before entry could then be made into Albuquerque all before the end of the month.

The XI Corps was following that same line of thinking with its advance through north-central New Mexico as it chased after other Twenty–Second Army elements. The 4th & 37th Infantry Divisions joined with the 41st Infantry, plus the former Berlin Brigade and national guardsmen in armoured cavalry regiments too (the XI Corps was rather large now), in fighting the Soviets through the mountains, forests and the wilderness of Indian lands. They managed to get hold of the 120th Guards Motorised Rifle Division one last time and give that Soviet unit a final defeat. For many months, the 120th Guards Division had been repeatedly engaged and taken losses after losses yet kept on fighting despite everything thrown at it. No more. Now it was caught, right in the valley of the very upper reaches of the Rio Grande. There was that final reckoning and a fantastic victory was won. The 41st Infantry played its role well in that and did what they had come here to do: fight and fight well. Soviet Airborne paratroopers with their 76th Guards Division slipped away though and out of what eventually because the trap for their Soviet Army comrades. They went east and west, into the mountains as their division split apart. What they didn’t do was stick together nor go south. This gave the XI Corps less urgency to make an immediate pursuit and rather recover its strength before finishing them off too. The 174th Infantry Brigade (the men from West Berlin) was assigned during that short break to urgently assist the 82nd Airborne and thus didn’t get to stop moving for a few days. The First Army, though its own higher headquarters of the Rockies Command, had been tasked to take emergency action against convoys of trucks which had escaped the main fighting and were right out over in the west near the Arizona state-line. On US Route-64 and -491, there were POWs being moved. Possibly they were going to Albuquerque the long way around; there was possibly too that they were going to be disposed of using rather unpleasant means. A good few thousand men – Americans but also some Canadians and maybe even a few Brits too – were in those convoys. Questions were asked as to why a wait of a day or two couldn’t come until the 174th Brigade and 82nd Airborne were more prepared. The reason why this couldn’t happen wasn’t given and it was understood by those lower down the chain-of-command that something was going on that demanded action be taken very soon. The Americans went after them. The 82nd Airborne made company- & battalion-sized combat parachute drops (the first time in the war that they had done this!) while the 174th Infantry went cross-country in a mad dash to link-up with those drop-zones. A lot went wrong but elsewhere things went as planned: it was all drawn up so fast and luck had to be factored in. Revolutionary Mexico guards, led by KGB officers, put up a fight but they weren’t prepared for what they faced when the Americans were able to conduct their arrivals properly and hit them with battle-hardened soldiers. The majority of the convoys were captured and the POWs within liberated. Two convoys weren’t liberated though, both near the town of Farmington on Route-64. Attacking American troops were held off after mis-drops and bad communications occurred. The prisoners were dragged from the trucks once those were stopped. The KGB had orders for what they had the Mexicans with them do despite this happening earlier than planned. Several hundred POWs were slaughtered and the KGB then made escape attempts while leaving the shooting parties behind to face the music. As expected, when the Americans caught up with them, the soldiers of Revolutionary Mexico were given ‘field justice’ in many cases. Only by the end of the day and the orders which came to stop fighting did the 174th Infantry and 82nd Airborne understand why the rush had been on to do what they did early on April 11th and not leave it a day or two more.


Other American paratroopers – though those with far less experience; men with the ARUS-formed 11th Airborne Division – were fighting with the US XVIII Corps in south-central New Mexico. They were joined too be incoming reinforcements released from the final stages of training and fitting-out in the form of the 13th Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 34th Infantry Division. These formations moved towards Truth or Consequences and the Elephant Butte Reservoir just in time to aid the 11th Airborne. While the rest of the XVII Corps was dealing with an attack by Cuban and Nicaraguan forces trying to approach the bridgehead held on the Rio Grande / Interstate-25 position coming up from the south, the men facing northwards faced an attack coming downstream towards them. These were Czechoslovaks and they did very well in battle over on this side of the North Atlantic. Sent across at the end of last year as the 2nd Motorised Rifle Division – one of the better units of the Czechoslovak People’s Army – they had seen, as the East Germans had done with their division, the Soviets take a lot of their equipment and ammunition to help form their own units following naval losses. The Czechoslovaks were reformed into a brigade with extra men put on security duties through central New Mexico. The mechanised infantry brigade was kept as a reserve unit in the Albuquerque area and dispatched following the XVIII Corps’ penetration deep into the rear to form one of the two pincers moving on the 11th Airborne. Czechoslovak artillery preformed the best. Their RM-70 multi-barrelled rocket-launchers and DANA self-propelled guns were used very effectively to cause maximum casualties among the Americans and moved about rapidly to avoid counter-battery fire plus American aircraft. The guns covered assaults by tanks and mobile infantry. The 11th Airborne fell back and back again. Retreat was the only thing to do otherwise they would have been overrun. Thankfully, before the Czechoslovaks could crush them, the 13th Cav’ showed up to save the day. Thank God for the Cav’! The Czechoslovaks were halted before the 34th Infantry came forward and retook the ground lost while pushing the enemy back to where they had come, expanding the bridgehead as they did so before orders from above caused a stop to the fighting come the end of April 11th. As to the American paratroopers, they would claim victory afterwards because they hadn’t been beaten yet their ranks were thinned greatly by the dead and injured. Their saviours too took many losses in their first time in combat, all while holding off a determined enemy assault. Pre-battle intelligence coming from Europe said that in Bavaria, the French had kicked the Czechoslovak’s behind (though things were more even when the Czechoslovaks had been encountered in Austria) yet it was the Americans here who had been on the wrong end of the fight against such opponents. Truth or Consequences held in the end though and that was what mattered overall.

The rest of the XVIII Corps was fighting downstream against those Cubans and Nicaraguans who’d come up from the wider El Paso area before the threat from out of New Mexico by the Sixth US Army fully materialised. The regiment of Soviet Airborne paratroopers who should have been with them going upstream – following I-25 too – were re-tasked to the west and they were missed; the Panamanians weren’t at all. At Hatch first and then near to Caballo Lake, the 1st Infantry & 101st Air Assault Infantry Divisions held off their opponents while making a planned withdrawal where they made use of the ground and the ‘surprises’ which they left behind for those in pursuit. The surprises were a lot of mines (the Americans noted carefully where they left these; they were aiming to go back south in the coming weeks) as well as a lot of water. From the Caballo Dam, the waters of the Rio Grande were released: this had been building up from all that melting snow once the Spring Thaw had occurred far to the north in the Rockies. The dam wasn’t blown, it was just a case of a lot of water being released from it… at a rate of pushing forty thousand cubic feet a second. There was no tidal wave of anything dramatic like that downstream but instead just a giant bog formed. The ground below through which the Cubans and Nicaraguans moved was sodden and it slowed them immensely. American aircraft and helicopters picked off tanks and infantry carriers from above to further weaken and enemy which kept on coming, just at a torturous rate of advance.

Once the enemy reached the Caballo area, it was all spread out and arrived piece-by-piece. Some of the Cubans had swung away to the east to get out of the way of all that water. They found the uneven, rocky terrain a nightmare to cross when the 101st Air Assault was up there and the Cubans wouldn’t be making an outflanking move here. The main fighting was in the valley below the dam and the 1st Infantry engaged the rest of the Cubans and the Nicaraguans there in a fight lasting almost a whole week. It was a one-sided affair and the attackers knew that. Requests were made for it to be called off from the officers involved because this was just impossible. Those were refused: Truth or Consequences must be reached from behind to achieve the southern pincer in response to the Czechoslovak’s northern pincer. Therefore, it continued right up until the very end of the fighting. The Americans had to keep their divisions here to maintain that fight, all the while wondering what idiot would keep ordering these men to go forward into the free-fire zone which they firmly had set up.


Over in Central Texas, early April saw the Battle for Austin: ‘for’, not ‘of’. The city which was the Texan state capital wasn’t fought over directly. Instead there was a lot of fighting nearly with the intention of winning control of it and its transportation links before eventually taking it. The fight was mainly between American national guardsmen facing soldiers of Revolutionary Mexico though there were many Cubans engaged as well because Austin sat within their operational area up and along the Interstate-35 corridor. The once proud Cuban Second Army – which had ripped apart the US Army III Corps in the war’s first few weeks – was a shadow of its former self yet there remained thousands of Cubans left and they had the capability to fight. As the Third United States Army used moved in from the north and east, while maintaining a static blocking position to the south, intelligence said that that Cubans would cut and run away to the west. Analysis by NISS’s military intelligence operatives stated that due to events down in Cuba – an outline, let alone any specifics, all unrevealed to the Third Army – the Cubans would be looking to save their army. That was correct… but incorrect as well. The Castro Brothers in Havana had that intention but their men in the field weren’t under their direct command. The Soviets gave the orders and the Cubans stood their ground. Between Belton at the top end and San Marcos to the bottom, with Austin the middle, the fight for the I-35 Corridor went on through early April. The Cubans were far better opponents than the Mexicans yet the latter were no pushover when on the defence. They had to pounded down where they were dug-in and completely overcome. The Cubans sought battles of manoeuvre instead. The different actions of these two allies doing what they did caused the Americans all sorts of issues. If it was done on a bigger scale over a far greater area, the Third Army would have taken a lot longer to do what they did. However, there weren’t enough Cubans and the area of operations was small enough to manage this situation once the Americans were able to understand what was going on. In fight after fight, they dealt with the Cubans first and then surrounded the Mexicans. Over to the west was the rise of the Balcones Escarpment with the Edwards Plateau up above. That formed an effective barrier behind the I-35 Corridor and a natural obstacle which to pound the Cubans against before turning back on the Mexicans.

Late on April 10th, the 26th Infantry Division – American national guardsmen from New England – took Bergstrom AFB outside Austin from the dug-in defenders as they completed a partial envelopment of the city. They were going to start moving inwards the next morning and weren’t looking forward to an urban fight. Orders came to hurry that up, again unexplained. That was attempted but it couldn’t be done at the speed that orders originating all the way from New York wanted. A flurry of messages came promising full support in terms of extra firepower and aircraft all to take the city by the end of April 11th. Regardless, it just couldn’t be done. No one on the ground knew why there was this urgency. Troops from Revolutionary Mexico were making their last stand there and taking Austin just wasn’t going to happen with the speed desired. To say New York was disappointed was an understatement but political desires and military reality don’t always mix.

North of that fight, in parts of Texas opposite the Red River and also west of the Dallas–Fort Worth area, the Soviet Seventh Tank & Twenty–Eighth Armies (what was left of each anyway after the disasters of March) fought against a major counteroffensive by the Seventh US Army. The Americans were on the advance now after stopping what had come their way last month. The Soviets fell back away to the west and southwest; their southern escape route was cut by what the Third US Army was doing. The retreat was pretty organised and not a mad dash to escape. There was space to fall back into and it was a fighting retreat done well. An attempt to cut it off, where the US II Corps came over the Red River and tried to turn the rear of the Seventh Tank Army, failed when a lot of Soviet tanks showed up there and held the Americans off. However, despite that and other instances of the Soviets doing well while falling back, they were still falling back. They went deeper into Texas away from its outskirts yet they couldn’t keep this up forever. The Americans broadened their frontage as the days went by and across the rear they dropped Green Berets and Rangers aplenty at key points. These men scouted the way rather than trying to stop the Soviets from going backwards and sought to provide the Seventh US Army with a victory at some point by identifying where they could catch the Soviets in a real fight. The thinking was that it would be around Abilene – the general area, not exactly that town – in the end where that would occur, sometime later in the month. As was the case everywhere else though, at the end of the eleventh day of April, the fighting came to a close. Finally victory on the battlefield would eventually elude the Seventh US Army when they’d done so much hard work ready to see it come.

Another great update James G

I think World War III will end before we reach the 200 pages of this thread.

[archangel]

Mexico is large, and with a post war stabilization force, after 15 years of rebuilding, they can be a well functioning country.

[James G]

Dec 24, 2018 21:18:45 GMT lordroel said:

Dec 24, 2018 18:19:11 GMT James G said:

(322)

Early April 1985: North America (two of three)

Further Army of the United States units had been released starting April 1st to join other ARUS elements who did so a month beforehand. Coming under operational control of the US XI Corps was the 41st Infantry Division, a formation raised in Pacific North-West. Arguably, the 41st Infantry still needed another month to prepare in terms of equipment issuing rather than the training of the men but they were sent forward despite missing some key bits of equipment. None of these were deemed wholly vital to the ability of the 41st Infantry to fight. In the eyes of the XI Corps’ commander, and that of his superior at the head of the First United States Army, all the hold-ups with the division had been bureaucratic and it was utterly stupid to keep them waiting in the rear. The XI Corps took the incoming reinforcing division to replace the 82nd Airborne Division which transferred to army command: the ‘defenders of Denver’ and those men who had retaken Colorado Springs were wanted elsewhere. The fight that the XI Corps had, along with the Canadian Corps on their left flank, was no longer anywhere near Denver, Colorado Springs or in Colorado anymore. They entered New Mexico at the beginning of April as they chased after the retreating Soviet Twenty–Second Guards Army. The Soviets kept moving fast but it was impossible for them to break free of the pursuit after them which sought to fix them in-place for their destruction. Every day and every night of fighting saw them lose more men to the advance of Allied troops who chased after them into New Mexico.

Across northern New Mexico, ABC troops (Americans, British and Canadian) from the Allies fought through early April. The Canadians, joined by the British, put on far better overall performance than they had done last month up around Pueblo… that being in the eyes of their American allies. This time they took a lot of ground and overrun the enemy to a degree which pleased the First Army command. Too much caution had been used at Pueblo, the Americans had said; caution was certainly what they had employed, their allies agreed, but only because it was necessary there and then against a dug-in opponent. Firstly around the town of Raton and then further down the course of Interstate-25, the Canadian Corps engaged Soviet forces on the run and were able to do much more. They used their overwhelming numbers far better in easier terrain to move across. British troops would end up going the furthest south when they reached the crossroads around Springer. They had leap-frogged ahead of the Canadians and barred the way for the Soviets caught behind. The enemy was squeezed in between a great victory won north of Springer through April 9th–10th. Once that was done with, they held in-place the next day while dealing with prisoners taken as the rest of the Canadians caught up. Planned operations were for them all to start moving onwards through the rest of the month as the Canadian Corps followed I-25 as it wound through north-central New Mexico first to Las Vegas (not the Las Vegas; this was a lesser-known but more historic town of the same name as the city over in Nevada) and then onto Santa Fe. That would hopefully then put them behind the rest of the Twenty–Second Army running from the Americans. Another battle was envisioned somewhere in the general Santa Fe area to finally finish off the Soviets before entry could then be made into Albuquerque all before the end of the month.

The XI Corps was following that same line of thinking with its advance through north-central New Mexico as it chased after other Twenty–Second Army elements. The 4th & 37th Infantry Divisions joined with the 41st Infantry, plus the former Berlin Brigade and national guardsmen in armoured cavalry regiments too (the XI Corps was rather large now), in fighting the Soviets through the mountains, forests and the wilderness of Indian lands. They managed to get hold of the 120th Guards Motorised Rifle Division one last time and give that Soviet unit a final defeat. For many months, the 120th Guards Division had been repeatedly engaged and taken losses after losses yet kept on fighting despite everything thrown at it. No more. Now it was caught, right in the valley of the very upper reaches of the Rio Grande. There was that final reckoning and a fantastic victory was won. The 41st Infantry played its role well in that and did what they had come here to do: fight and fight well. Soviet Airborne paratroopers with their 76th Guards Division slipped away though and out of what eventually because the trap for their Soviet Army comrades. They went east and west, into the mountains as their division split apart. What they didn’t do was stick together nor go south. This gave the XI Corps less urgency to make an immediate pursuit and rather recover its strength before finishing them off too. The 174th Infantry Brigade (the men from West Berlin) was assigned during that short break to urgently assist the 82nd Airborne and thus didn’t get to stop moving for a few days. The First Army, though its own higher headquarters of the Rockies Command, had been tasked to take emergency action against convoys of trucks which had escaped the main fighting and were right out over in the west near the Arizona state-line. On US Route-64 and -491, there were POWs being moved. Possibly they were going to Albuquerque the long way around; there was possibly too that they were going to be disposed of using rather unpleasant means. A good few thousand men – Americans but also some Canadians and maybe even a few Brits too – were in those convoys. Questions were asked as to why a wait of a day or two couldn’t come until the 174th Brigade and 82nd Airborne were more prepared. The reason why this couldn’t happen wasn’t given and it was understood by those lower down the chain-of-command that something was going on that demanded action be taken very soon. The Americans went after them. The 82nd Airborne made company- & battalion-sized combat parachute drops (the first time in the war that they had done this!) while the 174th Infantry went cross-country in a mad dash to link-up with those drop-zones. A lot went wrong but elsewhere things went as planned: it was all drawn up so fast and luck had to be factored in. Revolutionary Mexico guards, led by KGB officers, put up a fight but they weren’t prepared for what they faced when the Americans were able to conduct their arrivals properly and hit them with battle-hardened soldiers. The majority of the convoys were captured and the POWs within liberated. Two convoys weren’t liberated though, both near the town of Farmington on Route-64. Attacking American troops were held off after mis-drops and bad communications occurred. The prisoners were dragged from the trucks once those were stopped. The KGB had orders for what they had the Mexicans with them do despite this happening earlier than planned. Several hundred POWs were slaughtered and the KGB then made escape attempts while leaving the shooting parties behind to face the music. As expected, when the Americans caught up with them, the soldiers of Revolutionary Mexico were given ‘field justice’ in many cases. Only by the end of the day and the orders which came to stop fighting did the 174th Infantry and 82nd Airborne understand why the rush had been on to do what they did early on April 11th and not leave it a day or two more.


Other American paratroopers – though those with far less experience; men with the ARUS-formed 11th Airborne Division – were fighting with the US XVIII Corps in south-central New Mexico. They were joined too be incoming reinforcements released from the final stages of training and fitting-out in the form of the 13th Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 34th Infantry Division. These formations moved towards Truth or Consequences and the Elephant Butte Reservoir just in time to aid the 11th Airborne. While the rest of the XVII Corps was dealing with an attack by Cuban and Nicaraguan forces trying to approach the bridgehead held on the Rio Grande / Interstate-25 position coming up from the south, the men facing northwards faced an attack coming downstream towards them. These were Czechoslovaks and they did very well in battle over on this side of the North Atlantic. Sent across at the end of last year as the 2nd Motorised Rifle Division – one of the better units of the Czechoslovak People’s Army – they had seen, as the East Germans had done with their division, the Soviets take a lot of their equipment and ammunition to help form their own units following naval losses. The Czechoslovaks were reformed into a brigade with extra men put on security duties through central New Mexico. The mechanised infantry brigade was kept as a reserve unit in the Albuquerque area and dispatched following the XVIII Corps’ penetration deep into the rear to form one of the two pincers moving on the 11th Airborne. Czechoslovak artillery preformed the best. Their RM-70 multi-barrelled rocket-launchers and DANA self-propelled guns were used very effectively to cause maximum casualties among the Americans and moved about rapidly to avoid counter-battery fire plus American aircraft. The guns covered assaults by tanks and mobile infantry. The 11th Airborne fell back and back again. Retreat was the only thing to do otherwise they would have been overrun. Thankfully, before the Czechoslovaks could crush them, the 13th Cav’ showed up to save the day. Thank God for the Cav’! The Czechoslovaks were halted before the 34th Infantry came forward and retook the ground lost while pushing the enemy back to where they had come, expanding the bridgehead as they did so before orders from above caused a stop to the fighting come the end of April 11th. As to the American paratroopers, they would claim victory afterwards because they hadn’t been beaten yet their ranks were thinned greatly by the dead and injured. Their saviours too took many losses in their first time in combat, all while holding off a determined enemy assault. Pre-battle intelligence coming from Europe said that in Bavaria, the French had kicked the Czechoslovak’s behind (though things were more even when the Czechoslovaks had been encountered in Austria) yet it was the Americans here who had been on the wrong end of the fight against such opponents. Truth or Consequences held in the end though and that was what mattered overall.

The rest of the XVIII Corps was fighting downstream against those Cubans and Nicaraguans who’d come up from the wider El Paso area before the threat from out of New Mexico by the Sixth US Army fully materialised. The regiment of Soviet Airborne paratroopers who should have been with them going upstream – following I-25 too – were re-tasked to the west and they were missed; the Panamanians weren’t at all. At Hatch first and then near to Caballo Lake, the 1st Infantry & 101st Air Assault Infantry Divisions held off their opponents while making a planned withdrawal where they made use of the ground and the ‘surprises’ which they left behind for those in pursuit. The surprises were a lot of mines (the Americans noted carefully where they left these; they were aiming to go back south in the coming weeks) as well as a lot of water. From the Caballo Dam, the waters of the Rio Grande were released: this had been building up from all that melting snow once the Spring Thaw had occurred far to the north in the Rockies. The dam wasn’t blown, it was just a case of a lot of water being released from it… at a rate of pushing forty thousand cubic feet a second. There was no tidal wave of anything dramatic like that downstream but instead just a giant bog formed. The ground below through which the Cubans and Nicaraguans moved was sodden and it slowed them immensely. American aircraft and helicopters picked off tanks and infantry carriers from above to further weaken and enemy which kept on coming, just at a torturous rate of advance.

Once the enemy reached the Caballo area, it was all spread out and arrived piece-by-piece. Some of the Cubans had swung away to the east to get out of the way of all that water. They found the uneven, rocky terrain a nightmare to cross when the 101st Air Assault was up there and the Cubans wouldn’t be making an outflanking move here. The main fighting was in the valley below the dam and the 1st Infantry engaged the rest of the Cubans and the Nicaraguans there in a fight lasting almost a whole week. It was a one-sided affair and the attackers knew that. Requests were made for it to be called off from the officers involved because this was just impossible. Those were refused: Truth or Consequences must be reached from behind to achieve the southern pincer in response to the Czechoslovak’s northern pincer. Therefore, it continued right up until the very end of the fighting. The Americans had to keep their divisions here to maintain that fight, all the while wondering what idiot would keep ordering these men to go forward into the free-fire zone which they firmly had set up.


Over in Central Texas, early April saw the Battle for Austin: ‘for’, not ‘of’. The city which was the Texan state capital wasn’t fought over directly. Instead there was a lot of fighting nearly with the intention of winning control of it and its transportation links before eventually taking it. The fight was mainly between American national guardsmen facing soldiers of Revolutionary Mexico though there were many Cubans engaged as well because Austin sat within their operational area up and along the Interstate-35 corridor. The once proud Cuban Second Army – which had ripped apart the US Army III Corps in the war’s first few weeks – was a shadow of its former self yet there remained thousands of Cubans left and they had the capability to fight. As the Third United States Army used moved in from the north and east, while maintaining a static blocking position to the south, intelligence said that that Cubans would cut and run away to the west. Analysis by NISS’s military intelligence operatives stated that due to events down in Cuba – an outline, let alone any specifics, all unrevealed to the Third Army – the Cubans would be looking to save their army. That was correct… but incorrect as well. The Castro Brothers in Havana had that intention but their men in the field weren’t under their direct command. The Soviets gave the orders and the Cubans stood their ground. Between Belton at the top end and San Marcos to the bottom, with Austin the middle, the fight for the I-35 Corridor went on through early April. The Cubans were far better opponents than the Mexicans yet the latter were no pushover when on the defence. They had to pounded down where they were dug-in and completely overcome. The Cubans sought battles of manoeuvre instead. The different actions of these two allies doing what they did caused the Americans all sorts of issues. If it was done on a bigger scale over a far greater area, the Third Army would have taken a lot longer to do what they did. However, there weren’t enough Cubans and the area of operations was small enough to manage this situation once the Americans were able to understand what was going on. In fight after fight, they dealt with the Cubans first and then surrounded the Mexicans. Over to the west was the rise of the Balcones Escarpment with the Edwards Plateau up above. That formed an effective barrier behind the I-35 Corridor and a natural obstacle which to pound the Cubans against before turning back on the Mexicans.

Late on April 10th, the 26th Infantry Division – American national guardsmen from New England – took Bergstrom AFB outside Austin from the dug-in defenders as they completed a partial envelopment of the city. They were going to start moving inwards the next morning and weren’t looking forward to an urban fight. Orders came to hurry that up, again unexplained. That was attempted but it couldn’t be done at the speed that orders originating all the way from New York wanted. A flurry of messages came promising full support in terms of extra firepower and aircraft all to take the city by the end of April 11th. Regardless, it just couldn’t be done. No one on the ground knew why there was this urgency. Troops from Revolutionary Mexico were making their last stand there and taking Austin just wasn’t going to happen with the speed desired. To say New York was disappointed was an understatement but political desires and military reality don’t always mix.

North of that fight, in parts of Texas opposite the Red River and also west of the Dallas–Fort Worth area, the Soviet Seventh Tank & Twenty–Eighth Armies (what was left of each anyway after the disasters of March) fought against a major counteroffensive by the Seventh US Army. The Americans were on the advance now after stopping what had come their way last month. The Soviets fell back away to the west and southwest; their southern escape route was cut by what the Third US Army was doing. The retreat was pretty organised and not a mad dash to escape. There was space to fall back into and it was a fighting retreat done well. An attempt to cut it off, where the US II Corps came over the Red River and tried to turn the rear of the Seventh Tank Army, failed when a lot of Soviet tanks showed up there and held the Americans off. However, despite that and other instances of the Soviets doing well while falling back, they were still falling back. They went deeper into Texas away from its outskirts yet they couldn’t keep this up forever. The Americans broadened their frontage as the days went by and across the rear they dropped Green Berets and Rangers aplenty at key points. These men scouted the way rather than trying to stop the Soviets from going backwards and sought to provide the Seventh US Army with a victory at some point by identifying where they could catch the Soviets in a real fight. The thinking was that it would be around Abilene – the general area, not exactly that town – in the end where that would occur, sometime later in the month. As was the case everywhere else though, at the end of the eleventh day of April, the fighting came to a close. Finally victory on the battlefield would eventually elude the Seventh US Army when they’d done so much hard work ready to see it come.

Another great update James G

I think World War III will end before we reach the 200 pages of this thread.

Thank you.
We shall see about that. there is an end to the fighting itself - most of it but not all - and then what comes in response to that.

Dec 24, 2018 23:55:30 GMT archangel said:

Mexico is large, and with a post war stabilization force, after 15 years of rebuilding, they can be a well functioning country.

You're not wrong, but not in this situation. Mexico will need outside help and no one will be in a position to give that. Not the US, not Europe, China or anyone else. That will be the issue.

[James G]

(323)

Early April 1985: North America (three of three)

Not that far away from San Antonio, the city’s mayor, Henry Cisneros spent the beginning of April waiting for the city to be liberated. Back from where Stormin’ Norman had his US V Corps fighting Revolutionary Mexico troops there, there was a gathering of FEMA forces along with those from several aid NGOs as well. Both had been involved in the efforts undertaken in Houston following that city’s liberation last month and would be moving into San Antonio once it was taken by the US Army as well. Lessons had been learnt from the reoccupation of Los Angeles when it came to the immediate response made to liberated cities. FEMA – semi-militarised due to its wartime role; conscripts not sent to the Army of the United States had been assigned to FEMA – had many security personnel alongside all those tasked for medical aid, getting the electricity on & drinking water running and engineering missions. The American Red Cross and other independent aid groups would be joining them going in. Cisneros was planning to enter his city along with them, hot on the heels of American troops. This was his home city, the one which he had left in October right before the Cubans arrived. He regretted leaving yet he knew full well that if he stayed then he would have long ago been killed. Moreover, this Hispanic-American politician from Texas wouldn’t have ended up in the office of the presidency twelve years down the line had he stayed either… but that was something for the future.

General Schwarzkopf’s men fought to take San Antonio away from its occupiers. He personally wanted the city but he was also being told from above that it must be retaken with haste. Following events over in Mexico, a massacre of civilians inside was feared. There were also many enemy forces there – not just men from Revolutionary Mexico – who all sat between the V Corps and the Rio Grande. Should they get away, they would join those down in the Lower Valley along the border and bolster the defences there. These factors all combined to see the V Corps drive forward into a strong position where there were fixed defensive lines. The 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment along with the 6th Armored Division secured the corps’ southern flank against the Soviets there while the 5th Infantry was fighting scattered Cubans to the north around San Marcos. Out in front were the 24th & 29th Infantry Divisions, the latter being the last of the second wave of ARUS units made available for April operations. They drove onwards through the opposition outside of the city and pushed right up against it in a semi-circular fashion. Strong air and artillery support was given to them though many times, last-minute wave-offs were made of incoming bombs and shells due to the presence of civilians escaping from the city during the fighting. Inside San Antonio there was a lot of shooting where men who should have been fighting on the outskirts were killing others inside. News from back home – confusing but horrible events – had come to the commander in the city and he had been instructed by his political officer that vengeance must be taken. Mexican civilians had been killed therefore American civilians must be too. Orders were given for firing squads to start doing that. However, while it is easy to order such a thing, to have masses of civilians killed by soldiers in an organised fashion is never easy. To shoot unarmed innocents after a guerrilla attack or in the heat of the moment is one thing but trying to do this over and over again to groups of the helpless lined up for that is not easy. It isn’t easy on the junior officers nor is it easy on the men in the firing squads. Maybe the first group will be shot, then the second… yet after a while it takes its toll and soldiers (no matter which army they serve) struggle to do it. In cases, officers and men shot at each other in munities which came from refusals to undertake their orders. Elsewhere, officers would declare to their superiors that they had killed all that they could find and had now run out of bullets too. Any mass slaughter needs strong-disciplined men driven by pure hatred which needs to be indoctrinated into them. Officers needed to be the sadistic and bloodthirsty type who aren’t afraid of the later consequences which would come. There were few men in San Antonio who fitted that bill, especially once the initial killing had stared and more were brought before them. Male prisoners begged for their lives, women screamed and children cried. Killing them all just was too much to be done in any meaningful fashion beyond initial fusillades of bullets. While all this was going on, the Americans outside forced their way into San Antonio.

Rather than killing civilians, if not on the frontlines trying to defend the city, then those Mexicans inside should have been destroying everything that was inside which would be useful for the Americans to later use. San Antonio was one of the most important rear area sites for the war effort, comparable to places such as Albuquerque, Brownsville, Corpus Christi and El Paso. It was full of the ‘unsexy’ stuff that armies need to keep fighting in the field with logistical infrastructure, vehicle maintenance sites and big communications set-ups: there was also a lot of ammunition in the city, all of which delays had seen it not sent onwards. Explosives and fire would have made a mess of all of this. It was all left alone, ready for the Americans to take. That they did. The 24th Infantry entered San Antonio first followed by the 29th Infantry not long afterwards. Starting April 8th, they began to clear the city. The military bases were the objectives set for them: to reach the pre-war existing American ones and the new post-invasion sites established by the Cubans and the Soviets. In between them lay much of the city and so the two divisions were tasked to secure them as well. During their fighting, prisoners were taken. Neither the 24th nor 29th Infantry Divisions were full of those who would kill everyone they came across who threw down their weapons and up their arms. However, many potential POWs were gunned down, especially those who weren’t quick enough to surrender or who had blood on their hands. There were sights that the American soldiers saw that they couldn’t forgive every enemy soldier they got their hands on for. Through the second and third days, much more of the city fell under American control. Fires started on April 10th and these were a big deal. By that point, those FEMA elements outside the city were already inside and there were firefighters among them in number. This had been another issue learnt from Los Angeles though this time it wasn’t criminals looting and committing arson but instead accidents and the results of a lot of heavy fighting. There were groups of Revolutionary Mexico soldiers caught and pinned down who were blasted with heavy weapons which caused several fires to rage. So much of San Antonio was already destroyed but it wasn’t going to burn down fully as it might otherwise have done.

On the fourth day of fighting in the city, Schwarzkopf received word to hurry up and finish this off. He wasn’t told why though his commander at the head of the Third US Army made it clear that there would no longer be much time to continue with this. A final push was ordered where the inner parts of the city as well as north-western portions (with fewer military sites and less opposition) were overrun. Third Army flew in a media team to record the scenes of the last bit of the liberation; this ABC News crew had been held back from everything else going on the city, missing what other camera teams witnessed with the horror seen, to be present for a staged event where San Antonio was announced as captured by the Third Army’s commander on the ground there. Schwarzkopf missed that event. He was busy moving the 24th Infantry to the southern side of San Antonio ready to move onwards. V Corps would leave the 29th Infantry here but everyone else was going south into the Rio Grande’s Lower Valley and all the way to Brownsville. There were Soviet forces there along with Cubans and more Mexicans. He thought he had more time but he didn’t. That stop order came and the V Corps was going nowhere… for now anyway.


Raúl Castro was assassinated at the beginning of April.

Fidel’s loyal brother had seen the writing on the wall last month when the Soviets suffered all of those battlefield reverses in New Mexico and Texas. Cuba was building new armies to replace those lost in California and Texas and Raúl had believed that with them, plus fresh Soviet forces, the war in North America could be won. But then the Americans stopped the Soviet’s attack into Oklahoma and then began their multiple attacks across the entire front. Before the end of 1985, he could imagine the Americans having by then liberated their own soil, occupying large parts of Mexico and ready to invade Cuba. It would have been best for Cuba to no longer be involved in the war by that point. Fidel still believed what Moscow said and told his younger sibling that they could still win this yet Raúl wouldn’t accept that. Quietly, he started trying to open contacts with the Americans. His aim wasn’t to turn on his brother but instead save them both and everything that they had rather than pay the ultimate price for making the mistake that they had. The plan had been to make a trade with the Americans in the end. Raúl expected a whole lot of drama to play out but he had bargaining chips to play with. There were tens of thousands of American POWs in Cuba – more than there were over in Mexico – and Cuba still held onto the Florida Keys as well. Raúl thought he knew what he was doing and his play was being made in secret. It wasn’t though as one of his closest aides was on the KGB payroll.

The KGB put a bullet in his head, dropping him with a sniper in public. Cuba wasn’t walking away like that. The Soviets wouldn't stand for that betrayal. However, if they’d found out a few days later, or waited to act a little longer, things might have turned out differently for Raúl. Alas, that wasn’t to be. Fidel lost his brother and he was made to understand that no it wasn’t the Americans, it was the allies of his regime that he was bound to who had done this. They’d do it to anyone else who acted against them too.


Because the cessation of fighting wasn’t foreseen by the United States, at the time that it happened there was a major amphibious operation underway down in the Caribbean where US Marines were going into action. This started three days beforehand and once it became clear that major offensive operations would come to a halt, this disrupted Operation Caribbean Pirate. This consisted of assaults underway in the Virgin Islands, both the American and British possession there, against the Cubans. There was a battalion from the Coldstream Guards that the British Army sent down from Bermuda (where it was on security duties) to take part in the post-assault missions because there were islands there which were Crown possessions yet it was in the main an American-only affair. The Virgin Islands were next to Puerto Rico and in Cuban hands since the war started. They’d been taken when undefended to be used for their airports and naval anchorages. In February, Soviet hospital ships not sunk had run aground there and the Americans had afterwards taken a good look at what was here including the defences. Those weren’t much. It was decided that they could be retaken and used not just to keep Puerto Rico firmly secure but, of greater-importance, the Americans themselves would make use of the Virgin Islands’ bases established by the Cubans to exert control over the Caribbean to stop Soviet air and naval traffic. Recent French activities in the Caribbean too helped make this possible as well.

The 2nd Marine Division made the landings. They hit the beaches on St. Croix and St. Thomas plus also the British-owned Tortola. Cuban defenders were encountered on these islands but the US Marines came here for a fight which they knew they could win. These Marines had fought previously in Florida against raiders – replaced there by the recently-raised 6th Marine Division, who were rather disappointed to be left behind rather than coming south – and the Cubans they encountered were of lower-calibre than Cuban commandos and Soviet Spetsnaz. Much of Caribbean Pirate was conducted from Puerto Rico with US Air National Guard aircraft supporting US Marines aircraft flying out of there. There were amphibious ships, just not that many of them due to the proximity of Puerto Rico to the landing sites. St. Thomas and Tortola were fights won very quickly though St. Croix was harder than expected. There were a lot of Cubans on that island and their local commander had long-planned for a defence of this island in case of a day like the one which came when the US Marines showed up. Caribbean Pirate envisioned a quick victory there, one which didn’t come. Later on, St. John and Virgin Gorda – two more islands in the chain – were due to be assaulted next but the St. Croix delay slowed everything down.

When the fighting stopped on April 11th, there were still Cubans holding out on St. Croix while the British Army was having a parade in Tortola’s Road Town. Caribbean Pirate was on its way to being a hugely-successful mission, more than it already was, but it was cut off mid-flow due to events elsewhere in the world far beyond the control or knowledge of the men fighting for these idyllic tropical islands.

[crackpot]

Brilliant work James. Merry Christmas!

[usnvet]

Good job mentioning Las Vegas, New Mexico in there! It stood in for the town of Calumet, Colorado in the 1984 movie.

[James G]

Dec 25, 2018 2:37:24 GMT crackpot said:

Brilliant work James. Merry Christmas!

Thank you; more to come!

Dec 25, 2018 2:58:45 GMT usnvet said:

Good job mentioning Las Vegas, New Mexico in there! It stood in for the town of Calumet, Colorado in the 1984 movie.

Thank you. Ah, someone spotted that!

[James G]

(324)

Early April 1985: Europe (one of two)

As was the case over in North America, full-scale and organised fighting came to a close across Europe. Time differences meant that while it stopped on the other side of the North Atlantic at midnight on April 11th (Eastern Standard Time; earlier in the night further west), the stoppage in Europe came on the morning of April 12th 1985. That would mean something for the history books. For now though, the fighting was over… most of it anyway because not every gun fell silent.

***

On the North German Plain, what was left of the Soviet armies there, trapped inside a vice formed by EDA forces ahead and the British behind them, were squeezed like a ripe grapefruit until they gave in. They’d been cut off and ran out of ammunition. From all sides, and from above too, their many opponents pilled on the pressure until there was no longer any fight left in them. Dramatic events occurred inside where KGB political officers argued with Soviet Army officers and at times there were shots exchanged to follow the threats made. Nonetheless, in the end, there was contact made with those outside by either radio messages or the waving of white flags by dispatched emissaries. East and south of Hannover, the remains of the Third Shock and Twentieth Guards Armies gave in. None of this was authorised from higher command posts at neither Wunsdorf nor Legnica and certainly not from Moscow either. This occurred regardless of that with surrenders – not a ceasefire but complete surrender – made through April 3rd to the 9th. EDA and Allied POWs were handed over while tens of thousands of Soviet and East German soldiers went into custody the other way. Large amounts of their weaponry also fell into the hands of their captors too. In addition, the EDA and the Allies received a huge intelligence boon when they got their hands on some very important people, pieces of equipment and even a large amount of documentation: the latter really should have been destroyed. This was a fantastic victory won for the defenders of West Germany. For their opponents, it was a defeat that was completely unacceptable and the ‘betrayals’ made by surrendering generals were promised to be punished.

Away to the north, Soviet and East German troops fighting in Holstein sought to withdraw back into East Germany. They had Spanish troops (under temporary EDA operational command) trying to cut off their line of escape by reaching the Baltic and a lot of EDA forces ahead of them including many French troops moving down from Scandinavia to finish them off. There was permission given for the right wing of the now-destroyed Soviet Second Guards Tank Army – the left wing had been lost last month out on the North German Plain – to pull back. This was a ‘retrograde operational manoeuvre’: it certainly wasn’t a retreat or a withdrawal in any official manner from the Soviet’s point of view. They could call it what they wanted to but they still ran back to East Germany. The Spanish put their tanks between the Soviet 94th Guards Motorised Rifle Division and its way out. They were punished for this on the ground but held on until the West Germans could get their panzers to aid them in keeping the Soviets on the northern side of the border to be destroyed there before a final surrender was made. The East Germans managed to get away, pulling what was left of their 8th Motorised Rifle Division out. They fought their way through other Spanish troops and some Danes too. Once back across the border, they had the twin water barriers of the Elbe-Lubeck Canal and the Schaale River between them and those who’d failed to stop them from getting away. However, the East Germans were never going to be able to defend that line against the mass of the enemy on the other side once those there reorganised themselves. An end to the fighting worldwide stopped them from facing what the Soviet’s 94th Guards Division had done: utter destruction.

Down in Hessen, French and West German efforts to keep the Soviet Eighth Guards Army fixed in-place by launching attacks against their frontage saw further French troops, those moving up from Bavaria, start breaking into their rear. The French 1st & 4th Armored Divisions pushed forward East German penetrations into the top of Bavaria back out and then chased them back into their own territory. Entry was made into the Werra Valley. Following that river downstream would take the French through difficult terrain where a defender would be in a good position to make them bleed, maybe even stop them eventually, but before then, the French had their tanks moving because there was no one who could do that. French Foreign Legion light troops inserted by helicopter engaged the East Germans inside Thüringen on the western side of the Thüringenwald: a range of forested mountains which was a far-better defensive position than the Werra Valley. That kept the East Germans busy as they worried that the French were going eastwards and deep into their country. The French moved northwards though. Eventually, the morning of April 12th saw them come to a stop. They had yet to cut off the Soviets over on West German soil and past the Fulda Gap but were well on their way to doing that when the stop order came. Neither the Soviets nor the East Germans had any significant forces available to plug the French advance down the Werra and with only a few days more, the Eighth Guards Army would have been fully cut off while on the wrong side of the Inner-German Border.

Through eastern parts of Bavaria, driving the invaders off West German soil and back into Czechoslovakia was something that the EDA was incapable of doing. However, at the same time, those invaders were in no position to do anything more going forward. The Czechoslovak First Army had been driven all the way back to their home country while the Soviet Thirteenth Army remained stuck behind the Danube. French forces which could have pushed into Czechoslovakia – the regime in Prague feared a drive on Plzen then Prague afterwards – were instead split with half holding the frontlines and the other half sent north into Thüringen instead. As to the West Germans facing the Thirteenth Army, they had taken those heavy losses in retreat last month and could only hold their position. Furthermore, the situation across in Austria, where Warsaw Pact forces had driven as far west as they had, even when stopped, meant that they led to an extremely long right flank which they had to worry about and the West Germans thus couldn’t ignore that. The end of the fighting only brought an end to exchanges of fire rather than a cessation of any major advances.


Last month, both the French and the West Germans had disputed with the British – representing the Allies – the notion of crossing the Inner-German Border and fighting on East German soil. The Soviets would use nuclear weapons, Paris and Bonn said; not unless we are driving eastwards on a Berlin-Warsaw-Minsk-Moscow axis had come the reply from London. British forces had crossed over the border during their advance to get behind the Soviets on the North German Plain. They had gone north-to-south, rolling down along that border on both sides when on their rampage through the Soviet’s rear areas and thus dooming their armies at the front. No use of nuclear weapons had occurred. April then saw that French incursion of their own down in Thüringen where this time they went south-to-north across East German soil, again not far from the border and not driving on Berlin with an ultimate destination which could be construed as Moscow. For Allied and then EDA troops to be even stepping on foot inside East German alarmed many people in both camps – politicians and military officers – over the danger of this. It was the stupidest game of chicken that was being played, they said: seeing if the Soviets would blink when the fate of Europe was at stake in terms of a nuclear apocalypse. No matter what the naysayers said, that border was in many cases nothing more than an interesting line on a map.

That fighting along the Inner-German Border that the British had got themselves into away to the east of Hannover got bigger in early April. The British Second Army had used its I Corps to drive far ahead and link up with the EDA’s forces to trap all those Soviets in that massive pocket before it was squeezed into submission. The Spanish were detached to EDA commend with the Dutch transferred the other way: the Dutch were under British command and were fighting too as part of the squeeze. This left the British III Corps to be deployed to cover the east-facing flank along the Inner-German Border and just over it. There was a division of TA troops – well-trained men – along with the brigade sent from the Republic of Ireland. There had been British airborne & airmobile troops with them yet their fight at Gifhorn to open the way across the Aller River so the I Corps’ armoured divisions could drive forward had seen them detached away. The 6th Airborne Division was transferred back to the III Corps come April 1st when those TA units and the Irish found themselves in serious trouble. The Soviets had used gas before against them though hadn’t followed that up with a ground attack as expected. Instead, a different opponent engaged those Allied troops there.

East German’s border guards – the Grenztruppen der DDR – were often seen by those in the West as those at the border crossings into their country and also those high up in watchtowers above the Berlin Wall. The passport inspectors at the crossings over the Inner-German Border and around West Berlin were Stasi agents in Grenztruppen uniform though. As to those seen at the Berlin Wall, they formed only a portion of the Grenztruppen. This was strongly-militarized and heavily-indoctrinated armed force which was part of the East German military. In peacetime, its strength was close to forty thousand which included duties along the Inner-German Border, surrounding west Berlin and along the Baltic coastline; barely a few hundred men guarded border crossings with Czechoslovakia and Poland. The numbers had dramatically increased with East Germany at war and the Grenztruppen had seventy thousand men in service once reservists were mobilised. Like the rest of East German’s armed forces, they were stretched everywhere – including many men inside West Berlin along with the Stasi’s own military force: its Felix Dzerzhinsky Regiment – and that everywhere included their fight with those invading troops in Thüringen and too up in the North German Plain. They’d been sent to fight to defend East Germany’s borders and that didn’t include a static sentry role either.

The Irish 6th Infantry Brigade was the furthest east of any Allied or EDA unit not in Bavaria. They were inside the Wendland, a rural area next to the Elbe which jutted forward. There had been some tough fights here with retreating Soviets rear-area units last month where they had been lucky not to encounter anything stronger. Gas attacks had hurt them but the Irish had a lot of protection and mass casualties didn’t come. The Wendland was West German soil which was reoccupied and through here the Irish were instructed to hold the flank. It wasn’t meant to be an easy mission and it certainly wasn’t. Moving on foot, two regiments of Grenztruppen fought the Irish. Those East Germans had man-portable weapons including heavy machine guns, mortars, SAM-launchers and RPGs. The latter were especially effective at striking against Irish light armoured vehicles. SAMs were used against helicopters while the other weapons targeted Irish infantry. They fought across the Wendland and the Irish held back what was an advance to drive them out of here and far back from near to East German soil. Further support from above was requested but denied. The British believed that the Irish could hold their ground there and, if not, a retreat would be authorised as the Wendland wasn’t that important overall to hold. The Irish fought on, raging against the British Army for their perceived betrayal on leaving them out here on their own, but giving everything they had at the same time. They would be very glad when the end to the fighting eventually came. This fight was one which the Irish Defence Forces would long regret ever getting involved in.

Fighting on East German soil, over the border in the Altmark region, the British 8th Infantry Division was joined by the 6th Airborne Division in engaging far larger numbers of Grenztruppen. The East Germans had artillery support – towed 122mm guns – to back up their other lighter units of half a dozen regiments of dismounted men. Those men were sent on the attack. Led by specialist border reconnaissance detachments, the East Germans pushed and pushed again. They were quite the opponent. However, ultimately, not matter how hard they tried, they weren’t forcing the British out of their bridgehead into East Germany. The British had tanks with them and control of their air. Grenztruppen heavy guns and their man-portable weapons just weren’t going to win the day against them plus the larger numbers of British soldiers. What they could do was make this a bloody fight for the British like they did to the Irish on the flank. The fighting raged through little villages where crossroads were, inside wooded areas and across farmland with multiple fights over and over again. Each side lost men dead and injured for no appreciable gain overall in any strategic or political sense. They fought on because that was what higher orders demanded. As was the case with the Irish nearby, when the fighting came to an end, those here in Altmark were very glad it was over and done with. Anything would be better than this unnecessary bloodshed.

[lukedalton]

Dec 25, 2018 0:02:04 GMT James G said:

You're not wrong, but not in this situation. Mexico will need outside help and no one will be in a position to give that. Not the US, not Europe, China or anyone else. That will be the issue.

 Hoping that the reason outside help can't be give is not that the rest of the world is something out of Twilight 2000 with anarchy reigining everywhere and with just an handfull of national goverment still having the bare capacity to just exist and have some degree of control on their territory; all due to the aftermath of a massive nuclear exchange.

In a more optimistic interpretation, it's not that patch things in Somalia has been easy and even now, after almost 30 years and various military intervention things are extremely chaotic and with a goverment that barely control just the capital. Mexico will be worse as more damaged and more big, with plenty of heavy weapons (tank included) around; the USA will have to rebuild itself and frankly they will face a continuous low level fight like Iraq if they try occupation as they are the least loved people around. Not saying that if they have the mean they will not try to occupy the border states of former Mexico so to shorten the border, just that will be a nasty job.

Europe will need to rebuild West Germany aka the economic engine of the continent while at the same time try to absorb East Europe (i doubt that even in a draw the Warsaw Pact will continue to exist for more than a couple of months due to the economic damage and the war loss), so they will have little to spare for Mexico...even because if they will go to help some third world country, the North African one will get the priority due to the distance and the demographic/economic repercussion.

China will be a mess beyond any mess and South Korea and Japan very busy to rebuild and try to stabilize the economy of the region

[Dan]

I'm looking forward to finding out why the fighting is stopping.
This could be a case of the Americans calling it to a halt with the threat of nuclear war if the Soviets don't agree immediately, (especially if the subs in the Bastion are sunk very fast from very close range), "the war is done, we could prosecute it to the Polish border and still win, or, you could get smart and we'll stop things now. Your choice..."

The alternative is that the Soviets are in the process of "realigning the dynamics of the Politbureau away from the Fascists, counter revolutionaries and wreckers that have subverted the peaceful government of the Soviet Union".

I am looking forward to finding out how it happens.