Lions Will Fight Bears - Britain in World War Three, Spring 1988[{locked}]

[James G]

Eighty–Five

In Germany, the second day of the war was very much like the first was.

The approach of dawn heralded artillery barrages of nightmare proportions for those in the firing line. Aircraft and helicopters sped across the sky trying and failing to be shot at. Men and armoured vehicles crept around seeking cover and then being killed and destroyed when detected. Other armed men jumped at shadows and felt the hair rising on the back of their neck at the slightest sound which was out of place.

While many soldiers died, others were left wounded by combat: their screams were as bad as their sobs. Homes, businesses, churches, factories and bridges were destroyed in explosions while others were gutted by fires. Civilians suffered just like military personnel did: most, but not all were on the western side of the frontlines.

This was late 20th Century warfare: continuous and all-consuming.


None of the first day objectives for either the First, Second or Third Western Fronts had been met. The field armies that formed these army groups had failed to smash through the defensive lines of NATO ground forces in any appreciable manner, let alone achieve a breakthrough that second echelon forces might be able to exploit.

Marshal Ogarkov had been in contact from Moscow with Marshal Kulikov (the latter had until very recently been the former’s superior) and tore into him for being responsible as Commander West-TVD for those failures. In turn, Marshal Kulikov had ripped into the three Colonel-Generals commanding his army groups. Korbutov, Snetkov and Shokov all faced the wrath of their commander and were reminded how STAVKA was now lead by Marshal Ogarkov, a man they really didn’t want to let down if they knew what was good for them.

On the war’s second day, those army groups in Germany were to achieve their objectives, Marshal Kulikov made clear, no matter what the opposition. He had informed his subordinates overnight that there could be no more excuses from them regarding the strength and depth of NATO defenses nor the bad weather hampering the efforts of the men under their command. A breakthrough had to be made but a general advance was equally expected as well all across Germany.


The losses incurred the day before when so many helicopters were downed when delivering three divisions of paratroopers to their doom had been immense and had disrupted Soviet Army aviation missions to a great degree. There were brigades of airmobile troops assigned to Fronts and specialized parachute & airmobile independent battalions attached to field armies: all of these had not gone forward on their heli-borne assault missions. Many of those aborted missions had been to establish key positions or to take important terrain as part of planned penetrations of NATO forces on the ground, but other airmobile assaults had been part of a deception effort to draw away the defenders of West Germany from the true initial objectives of RED BEAR. When those airmobile assaults didn’t occur, plans were thrown into awry in many places.

After gathering up as many helicopters as possible, those airmobile units were committed to compliment what was in effect a rehash of the first day’s attacks westwards. The brigades and battalions of ‘landing-assault’ troops were sent forwards to support fresh ground attacks. Success couldn’t be reinforced, as per Soviet Army doctrine, because there had hardly been any of that; instead, what were new attacks were made.

Artillery and dedicated air power was concentrated on sections of the frontlines not only where NATO units were known to be weaker than elsewhere through deployment but also where intelligence pointed to stocks of ammunition available to the defenders not being that great as well. The GRU had conducted extensive pre-conflict and battlefield intelligence to rate which NATO units had seen a major increase in weaponry as the armed forces of the West mobilised and which formations hadn’t. NATO weapons dumps in Western Europe were emptied early on when their armies moved into combat positions but there had been a great effort made by the West in shipping ammunition across from weapons dumps in the United States too. Not all of that was on the ground in Europe – much of what was currently in the process of being shipped over was to be attacked by Soviet submarines – and ready yet for use.

Two of these big assaults using concentration of force against defending NATO forces believed to be in a weaker position than others were made on March 15th.

*​

In the British Second Army sector on the North German Plain, the Soviet Second Guards Tank Army conducted an attack with its left-wing against Bundeswehr units again. This time screening forces were positioned to guard against a flank attack by the West German 11th Panzergrenadier Division which had forestalled the previous days attack and the 94GMRD was joined by the East German 1MRD in crashing into the West German 3rd Panzer Division. That Bundeswehr formation had yesterday seen one of its three combat brigades dispersed all over the place is assisting the Dutch to their north, their fellow Bundeswehr soldiers to the south and also helping German Territorial units finish off Soviet paratroopers on Luneburg Heath. The two remaining brigades were located in good defensive positions but on terrain suitable for the mass movement of advancing armour… once that armour got going.

Howitzers, mortars and rockets preceded an intense air attack involving three air regiments of fighter-bombers and another of tank-hunting Sukhoi-25 Frogfoots. Dismounted infantry armed with anti-tank missiles for dealing with West German armour and other infantrymen with flamethrowers for engaging infantry bunkers went forwards beneath this. Soviet and East German helicopters filled the skies – many on attack missions, but then more laden with airmobile infantry and armour.

The Soviet losses here were immense, but the firepower that they unleashed was equally tremendous. The Bundeswehr units on the ground hunkered down in their defensive positions as this attack went on and that was just what the Soviets wanted them to do. Gepard anti-aircraft guns and Roland tactical SAM launchers faced specific attacks upon themselves, not just the ground units which they were meant to be defending. When infantrymen armed with shoulder-mounted SAMs tried to take-on helicopters a barrage of rockets would come their way.

The Soviet Second Guards Tank Army had the ammunition to expend.

And then came the attack. The two divisions moved side-by-side through minefields that combat engineers were trying to disable and establish safe transit lanes across. Leopards and MILANs fired at the Soviets and East Germans only to be counter-engaged by those forward dismounts when they did so. Only once this ground force got moving did the transport helicopters start darting for their landing sites where Spetsnaz reconnaissance units were already in-place.

The 38th Guards and 83rd Independent Landing Assault Brigades – from the Belorussian Military District and the Northern Group of Forces respectively – were both assigned to General Korbutov’s First Western Front. Neither had been deployed the day before, but both were now sent forwards. The 38th Guards Brigade landed in farmland around the villages of Schnega, Kulitz and Harpe and the 83rd Brigade came out of their helicopters around Suhlendorf. This abandoned localities were behind West German frontlines in the north of their assigned defensive zone: in fact near the boundary between the Dutch I Corps and the West German I Corps. Helicopters were shot down, but not in great numbers like the day before. In addition, this time they didn’t take off and fly back eastwards again through NATO air defences but rather specialised ground crew were with them to allow the complicated flying machines to have ad hoc ground bases for a few hours to operate from.

Underslung from helicopters had come quite a few armoured vehicles to operate with the airmobile riflemen and for them to ride in too. The BMD-2 infantry fighting vehicles were armed with a 30mm cannon, machine guns and an anti-tank missile launcher. ASU-85 self-propelled guns had an 85mm cannon and a mounted machine gun. BTR-D armoured personnel carriers had grenade launchers and light machine guns. 2S9 self-propelled mortars had a 120mm weapon. All of these vehicles gave the riflemen with the two brigades great flexibility and they were rapidly rolling all over the area moving not only down little country roads but across fields too. Bundeswehr rear-area troops from the ‘security battalions’ with the 3rd Panzer Division moved to engage them, but the Soviets kept manoeuvring around them and had greater firepower at-hand.

This double attack, at the front and in the immediate rear, broke the West Germans. Their 7th Panzergrenadier & 9th Panzer Brigades shot through much of their on-hand ammunition and no more was fast coming forwards through the rear-areas to replace that. Soviet and East German infiltration efforts had been very successful in destroying the interlocking fields of fire from defensive units: the Bundeswehr crumbled here.

T-64 and T-72 tanks smashed through collapsing West German positions and towards the airmobile troops waiting for them in the rear. Around them the men of the 3rd Panzer Division fought on as well as they could though found themselves being pocketed everywhere they made their stands. The 94GMRD took Dahre and the East Germans – still with only three combat-manoeuvre regiments instead of the standard four – captured Diesdorf: these villages were communications centres and roads from them led further westwards. Though their frontlines had been broken and big groups of troops surrounded, smaller Bundeswehr units were falling backwards and these made stands wherever they could or tried to melt away into cover to conduct ambushes wherever possible in an uncoordinated but effective fashion.

Soviet Second Guards Tank Army headquarters at once threw more air support forward towards the attacking divisions and ordered them to keep going to break clear of this opposition. A breakthrough was underway and nothing was going to slow it down or stop it… especially with both the 16GTD and the 47GTD being readied now to plunge forward into the gap being torn in NATO lines.


The major Soviet effort here to smash through the 3rd Panzer Division wasn’t something that was going to go unnoticed by NATO. The soon-to-be smashed division had been screaming for aid since the enemy attack got underway. Aircraft from the 2 ATAF were sent into this area of Lower Saxony and did engage both helicopters and aircraft with success. However, there was a misunderstanding of how many losses were incurred among Soviet helicopters: pilot reports of kills were very optimistic and AWACS radar images didn’t show helicopters returning back eastwards. Therefore, the commander of the West German I Corps didn’t understand how effective the airmobile landing had become and that when the ground forces tore through the frontlines they would be reaching a wide area already scoured of Bundeswehr troops.

Soviet tanks were almost ten miles deep past the destroyed forward defences, aiming for the north-south running Highway-4, before Generalleutnant Clauss realised just how shattered one of his divisions were. No help was immediately available from his other two divisions and he thus requested that General Kenny release either the Americans with their US III Corps or the Anglo-German Kampfgruppe Weser.

The US III Corps was the strategic reserve for the British Second Army and General Kenny had no intention of yet committing that formation to action unless a Soviet tank army (one of three of four tank divisions, not just named as such) came into play. Instead the two NATO divisions sitting in hidden positions north of Hannover were to head off the Soviet attack. Both the British 3rd Armoured and West German 7th Panzer Divisions were those ‘NATO invasion forces’ that so much Soviet air and artillery bombardment had been targeted against, yet neither formation had been located by the enemy. They were perfectly located to move up to the scene of the Soviet breakthrough and had firepower and well-trained troops to do that.


When the Kampfgruppe Weser met in contact with the Soviet Second Guards Tank Army, the first fighting took place just before midday near Bodentiech. A recce squadron with Scorpions and Scimitars fast tracked vehicles from the 9th/12th Royal Lancers had led the 33rd Armoured Brigade up there to clash with the East Germans. British Challenger tanks were right behind those reconnaissance vehicles and conducted a meeting-engagement to blunt the momentum of the onrushing T-72s before the following infantry could get involved. Air power and artillery from both sides were soon involved and mass casualties followed, but the East Germans came to a halt.

To the right, a little bit south, the 4th & 6th Armoured Brigades slid into the gap between that East German force and the Soviets that the Bundeswehr were about to engage. After all, Kampfgruppe Weser was a counter-attacking force and not rolled for holding ground.

The 94GMRD seemingly parried the first attempt by the 7th Panzer Division to halt its drive towards Highway-4 through the Hankensbuttel area. It’s tanks and the armoured vehicles carrying missiles smashed Bundeswehr reconnaissance troops and drove onwards… right into a hasty ambush position. An L-shaped, two-sided kill zone had been created by one of the West German brigades to tear into the 94GMRD’s advance guard and the motorised rifle regiment following straight behind. Before the Soviets could even begin to withdraw, fight their way out or manoeuvre their other regiments around, the two other Bundeswehr brigades came into from both sides in a pincer move.

Now the Soviets had had one of their divisions torn apart just as they had only a couple of hours before done to a West German one.

From up near Bodentiech, down to Hankensbuttel and eastwards past Dahre Diesdorf to the abandoned frontlines positions from this morning near the Inter-German border, this whole region of West Germany was now a scene of utter carnage. Tanks and vehicles lay broken and burning everywhere along with helicopters and aircraft that had struck the ground. Fields and roads were pockmarked with holes from explosions from artillery or mines. Thousands of soldiers – West German, East German, Soviet and British – all lay dead or wounded everywhere.

And the fight was not over yet.

The two remaining British brigades moved to cut off the East German line of retreat while the 33rd Brigade held that short division in-place near Bodentiech. They also cautiously expanded their influence eastwards linking up with shattered elements of the 3rd Panzer Division as they did so. The 7th Panzer Division kept it’s 19th Brigade around Hankensbuttel and did the same as their British allies in moving tanks and escorting infantry east. There were Soviet airmobile troops to be engaged, but this time the West Germans had the upper hand as they were the ones with heavier equipment. Kampfgruppe Weser was now trying to scoop up any cut-off and retreating infantry and smaller tanks forces it could find to re-establish some sort of frontline before those tank divisions that NATO air intelligence was reporting were moving westwards could come into play.


Having their two attacking divisions ripped apart so quick as they were came as a shock to the Soviet Second Guards Tank Army headquarters. The army commander had those generals at the front reporting that NATO had trapped them and was pounding them with artillery and aircraft-delivered bombs while at the same time General Korbutov was insisting that tank divisions be moved forward. NATO air power was now all over the battlefield though. There were reports coming in that American Apache attack helicopters were appearing in great numbers along with British and Luftwaffe Tornados.

There were six hundred tanks with the pair of tank divisions though – an immensely strong force.

The 16GTD & 47GTD crossed the border and entered West German territory at the border crossing near Salzwedel and in that general area. Both divisions were harassed by air attacks which Soviet fighters failed to effectively fight off and then mines started going off under tanks and vehicles. It was quickly realised that NATO was firing artillery from far off that was delivering mines in a scattered fashion everywhere that dedicated mine-hunting units were being overwhelmed trying to combat. Delays were caused behind knocked out vehicles and alternate routes sought for movement. Rather than the fast-moving spearheads that the Second Guards Tank Army headquarters intended their two tank divisions to be, they were instead lumbering sloths with units getting tangled up and seemingly under constant attack.

The Elbe-Seitenkanal (Elbe Lateral Canal – an artificial waterway connecting the Elbe and the Weser) stood not far over the border and the tank divisions moved to cross that not particularly wide waterway following the bridges laid by combat engineers earlier in the day. Distant NATO artillery, big 203mm howitzers, were shelling those pontoon bridges though and despite the best efforts of combat engineers, the bridges were operating at an intermittent rate. Further delays were caused here even when the tank divisions had their own bridging units construct temporary floating bridges for their own use.

All the while, General Korbutov, getting it in the neck himself down from Marshal Kulikov, was screaming at the Soviet Second Guards Tank Army commander to get those tank divisions through the gap ahead that was rapidly closing up.


Neither trapped division to the west was willing to lay down and die even when surrounded. At Bodentiech and Hankensbuttel the British and West German brigades surrounding the remains of divisions couldn’t crush those forces caught in their traps without extra numbers, especially in dismounted infantry. German Territorial troops from the 63rd Brigade were on their way though that would take time.

All other attention for that time was focused on trying to get the rest of Kampfgruppe Weser, along with the 3rd Panzer Division’s 8th Brigade (which had been rushed into the area from where it was previously absent), into defensive positions so that when those Soviet tank divisions arrived they wouldn’t be able to move forward any further. Soviet airmobile troops needed to get beaten and stragglers from the East German 1MRD and the Soviet 94GMRD rounded up.


Eventually, the NATO forces would win this race to be in position first. It would take the Soviet tanks too long to reach them and by them improvised defences were established. There would be consequences for this on both sides.

General Kenny had committed a portion of his mobile tank-heavy reserve forces to battle and Kampfgruppe Weser would no longer be available to act as a counterattack force until it was replaced on the frontlines with other units suitable for defensive operations… which General Kenny didn’t have at-hand yet.

The Soviet Second Guards Tank Army commander would lose his command position and face a court-martial; General Korbutov was relived his subordinate wasn’t arrested and/or shot by the KGB while at the same time his own future was threatened by that failure. The First Western Front had shot its bolt for the day too. There were still many other combat formations available either at the front – all of which had been attacking but failing to break through all day – as well as his ‘tank army’: the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army. However, the only successful penetration of NATO lines on the North German Plain during the day had been beaten back.

The First Western Front was going to have to try again elsewhere either during the late evening or early the next day.

*​

The strategy of using airmobile units to seize the rear areas of forward defensive positions, concentrating air and artillery power in one place and hitting what were regarded as weak formations was tried further south with tactical failures but strategic success.

The US V Corps had taken a battering the previous day and all through the night but had fought to hold its ground and stop the Soviet Eighth Guards Army from getting through the Fulda Gap. The 8th Mechanized Infantry & 3rd Armored Divisions, with the 11th ‘Blackhorse’ Cavalry Regiment out front, had done everything that they had been trained for. Elements of the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division, which had arrived from Fort Carson in Colorado in the early stages of REFORGER, had assisted West German Territorial troops in apparently crushing Soviet paratroopers who were dropped throughout the US V Corps rear areas.

A hell of a lot of ammunition had been expended though and while the paratroopers from the Soviet 106GAD had been bled white and pocketed, they hadn’t been wholly beaten. During the night some units had linked up with others and were holding on to some key terrain, especially on the Vogelsberg and Rhon high ground. Autobahn-66 ran between these two terrain features from the burning town of Fulda down to Gelnhausen; this road was what the United States Army defined as their ‘main supply route’.

Helicopters carrying airmobile troops from the 35th Guards and 39th Independent Brigades landed all over both stretches of high ground. Some armoured vehicles were brought along, but there was snow on the higher ground and General Snetkov in command of the Second Western Front didn’t rate their effectiveness in such circumstances. There were losses among the helicopters, though with fast interceptors from the Soviet Sixteenth Air Army flying top cover, NATO fighters didn’t intervene and only ground anti-air defences came into play. The bulk of both brigades got on the ground and joined scattered groups of paratroopers in coming down from the high ground and trying to squeeze the main supply route in a vice. The plan was to force the Americans to commit their 4th Mechanized Infantry Division there to defend that logistics route and not to have it intervene northwards.

Of course, the Americans did this. There was no other choice for Lt.-General Woodmansee in this situation: to lose those logistics units would mean the destruction of the US V Corps as a fighting force. M-60 tanks and M-113 armoured infantry vehicles from the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division went straight into the fight and the main supply route became a battlefield…

…just as the Soviet Eighth Guards Army attacked again to get over the Fulda River and head southwest.


The Blackhorse Cav' fought very hard alongside the 8th Mechanized Infantry & 3rd Armored Divisions but intensive, non-stop combat had taken its toll. Men were at the stage of physical collapse from exhaustion and combat stress. The Soviets concentrated artillery in rolling barrages that just wouldn’t let up. When they made their attack, the two motorised rifle divisions from their field army that hadn’t been committed the day before were sent into action after passing through the lines of the other two: the 93GMRD (pre-war based in Hungary) and the 57GMRD (the victim of the overnight B-52 attack) couldn’t complete the mission.

The 27GMRD & 39GMRD each had over two hundred tanks on strength along with three hundred other armoured vehicles. Much of the 34th Guards Artillery Division, plus the field army’s own artillery brigade and every other piece of artillery present, was thrown into combat. Fighter-bombers and Su-25s flew close air support for the troops on the ground. There were infiltration efforts to get among the American positions.

The US V Corps started to fall back over the Fulda River when General Woodmansee realised that his forward formations were going to be overrun and destroyed otherwise. It was the sensible choice. Some men were left behind and a few units overrun during the retreat but the bulk of the US V Corps did manage to get back across the river into pre-built defensive positions on the western side of the water.

A benefit to withdrawing behind the river was that those fresh Soviet divisions now had to try and cross it. Every fixed crossing point was blown up in the face of the Soviets and all potential crossing points for a combat assault long ago pre-scouted and zeroed in by defending artillery. The Americans at once started firing across the water at bridging units setting up and mercilessly slaughtering foolhardy troops sent across in assault missions. Unless the enemy used paratroopers, airmobile troops in great numbers or weapons of mass destruction, they weren’t getting past this river-line defence by direct assault that didn’t involve a wide flanking manoeuvre.

Or unless the whole US V Corps logistics network was bloodily torn apart.


The paratroopers and the airmobile troops raped the main supply route.

They tore into the lightly-armed supply and rear-area units along that Autobahn and the nearby minor roads alongside it throughout the Gelnhausen Corridor. Multiple attacks from platoon- to battalion-sized formations kept on coming despite every effort of the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division to put a stop to this. One brigade of mechanized infantry and tanks was committed at first before it was quickly realised that such a low number was inadequate. The second brigade was brought into the conflict zone before even the third brigade – thus the whole division – had to become involved in fighting off the dismounted infantry attacks that wouldn’t stop. Convoys of logistics vehicles were backed up at each end of the corridor making them prime targets for Soviet air strikes as a result of this, but those units inside the corridor had to fight for their lives while screaming into their radios for assistance. Fires from burning fuel trucks, explosions from ammunition-carrying vehicles and gunfire from overwhelmed military policemen went on all day.

The Soviet forces lost the battle for the main supply route but so did the Americans too.

NATO had overnight used their aircraft to smash the Soviet deep rear-area logistics network, but the effects of those bombing missions by the UK-based 3ATAF weren’t going to become apparent for several days. In comparison, this Soviet offensive to tear apart US V Corps main supply route had immediate effects.


By the evening, General Otis (the commander of the US Seventh Army) was going to be talking to General Woodmansee about the need to abandon the excellent forward position in the Fulda Gap that the US V Corps had established. The Americans were going to have to withdraw even further back – opening holes on their flanks with the West German III Corps and US VII Corps that would have to be closed – if they wanted to continue fighting in this war using ammunition, fuel and the myriad of other war-fighting supplies that they needed.

*​

The Soviets hadn’t broken through in Germany like they were meant to but on the North German Plain one of the major mobile reserve formations assigned for counterattack had been committed to a defensive mission while in Central Germany the US V Corps was in a forward position that was unsustainable due to major supply issues.

What this would mean for the third day’s conflict in Germany was yet to be seen.





Eighty–Six

Daylight conventional air raids began against mainland Britain on the afternoon of the war’s second day.

Soviet aircraft flew from bases in Poland and transited through the occupied airbases in southern Norway – for refuelling purposes, not rearmament as no supply ships had yet to reach there – before crossing the North Sea to strike at Britain. These aircraft were from the Soviet Forty-Sixth Air Army, a DA command, which used long-range raketonosets and also strike-bombers attached from FA units. The skies over Sweden were become more ‘contested’ than they were the day before and NATO was trying to re-establish air control over southern Norway, but the majority of those aircraft were getting through the bottom half of Scandinavia only to be challenged in force by at-sea elements of the RN and the British Isles -based RAF.

Badgers, Blinders and Backfires along with two regiments of Fencers (the latter from the Soviet Thirty-Fourth Air Army in the Trans-Caucasus Military District, part of which sent to Eastern Europe) flew against military and civilian targets in Britain with mixed results. They struck many targets, but others were missed due to a variety of factors such as poor guidance for their missiles and bombs, weather interference and passive defensive methods employed by the British. There were losses incurred too as the UK Armed Forces strove to impede these strikes from taking place.

Between three hundred and three hundred and fifty miles of water lay between the Norwegian coast and Scotland… in a straight line. Soviet aircraft flew roundabout routes to reach their targets, but there was plenty of aviation fuel available to them to do this from stocks captured on the ground at Flesland and Sola as well as from airborne tankers that they employed for strike aircraft with shorter-range. In doing so, a major effort was made to get around British defences by coming at the UK mainland not just from the direct northeast facing threat axis but from the northwest, the north and the east too.


Scotland and then afterwards Ulster and northern England came under attack from these air attacks.

North Sea oil and gas industry infrastructure in Scotland came under severe bombardment. The terminals for landing unrefined oil and natural gas drilled from platforms out to sea were bombed at both Cruden Bay and St. Fergus. Peterhead and Aberdeen, both on Scotland’s eastern coastline, were hit hard and civilian casualties inflicted there as the services support for North Sea oil and gas was targeted. On the Shetland Islands, Sullom Voe was left in flames visible for miles while Flotta in the Orkney Islands saw immense explosions after missile impacts.

The Firth of Forth saw the return of Soviet firepower. The evening beforehand had seen long-range cruise missiles fired by Bears devastate Rosyth naval base, this time the bridges over the estuary were struck at. The upstream Kincardine Bridge had bombs dropped on its roadway but was knocked out of action when the swinging central section – which moved to allow ships to pass further upstream to Alloa – had short-range laser-guided missiles fired into it. The Forth Road Bridge and the Forth Bridge (the latter for trains) were bombed too though not to such an effect that they were left unusable. Bombs meant for the petrochemical refinery at Grangemouth, a facility which had suffered that major arson-related fire back in February, missed their targets and smashed into the suburbs of Falkirk.

The East Coast Mainline railway that brought trains up from Northumberland into southeastern Scotland was a target for attacks on transport in Scotland though with little luck achieved in this effort to knock out this major route. Better luck was had putting holes in the track of the West Coast Mainline from Cumbria up to Glasgow; the holes from bomb hits could be repaired but parachute-retarded weapons laid hundreds of small anti-personnel mines around the impact points to disrupt those repairs.

Of military targets, the RAF airbases and the RN facilities on Gare Loch came under attack. The runaways and infrastructures at the airbases were targeted for destruction and so too were parked aircraft. There were RAF Lightning and Tornado interceptors in Scotland, but also naval-rolled Buccaneer bombers and many other aircraft present. British, American and even West German maritime patrol aircraft involved in the North Atlantic naval war operated from Scottish airfields and the USAF also had many airborne tankers calling those airbases their temporary home. Soviet military efforts to smash these military targets were just as important as the attacks on civilian targets.

In Northern Ireland, the sectarian violence that had been going on since February there was interrupted by explosions not caused by homemade bombs. Missiles slammed into RAF Algergrove and these caused an immense loss of life at the medical evacuation point that the US military had chosen to temporarily set up there to deal with combat casualties being flown back to the United States. Soviet targeting of the airbase had been due to the military activity there with aircraft, not especially an effort to kill already-wounded men, but the intentions didn’t matter to those killed. St. Angelo Barracks was another aviation facility that came under attack with this helicopter base that was normally used for British Army operations in Ulster being bombed due to its two runaways, even if neither was that long. To strike at such a base with as much force as they did made British Intelligence wonder just what the Soviets were thinking in hitting St. Angelo and they had to conclude that their enemy had faulty intelligence.

Across northern England, bombs and missiles smashed into the ground across Northumberland, Cumbria, Tyne & Tees, County Durham, Yorkshire and Lancashire. There were airbases and civilian airports being used for military purposes that the Soviets attacked, though here in England their efforts were mainly directed against civilian targets. Power stations, road bridges, important sections of railway lines and fuel storage sites came under attack. There were civilian casualties from these strikes, mostly when Soviet weaponry went off course or targeting information was wrong.


Pre-war it had been anticipated that Soviet air attacks against Britain would take place and the thinking had been that they would come from long-range aircraft coming down over the North Atlantic as well as from medium-range aircraft flying from East Germany across Schleswig-Holstein and over the North Sea: the threat axis from southern Norway hadn’t been foreseen.

A trio of RN Type-42 missile-destroyers were out in the North Sea with their Sea Dart SAMs to help defend against such expected missile attacks from over the water there. HMS Birmingham, HMS Exeter and HMS York were joined by six frigates on anti-submarine and anti-warship (expected to be Baltic Fleet missile boats) duties there. Exeter was initially too far to the south to aid in the sudden effort to combat Soviet aircraft routing through southern Norwegian airspace, but Birmingham and York were quickly in the firing line. They launched missiles against inbound and outbound aircraft while York was lucky avoid a flight of Fencers – operating far from their airbase in the Georgian SSR – that went after it with anti-ship missiles… Birmingham and the frigate HMS Penelope weren’t so lucky.

Brand-new Kh-31A (NATO AS-17A Krypton) supersonic anti-ship missiles fired from Su-24Ms hit both RN vessels just before dusk when they were east of Scotland. Birmingham had only just been re-accepted into RN service after a refit; she was hit by one missile in the rear superstructure where the hangar was located after shooting down a pair of inbound missiles. There were many deaths, much fire and a lot of damage, but she would remain afloat and could carry on with her anti-aircraft duties. The nearby Penelope took the impact of the majority of the missiles targeted against the bigger destroyer and neither her Sea Cat SAMs or anti-aircraft guns could save her from three missile impacts all down the starboard side of the ship. Fires raged from bow to stern and then bad damage control procedures allowed one of her Exocet missiles to detonate: the three others of her anti-ship missile battery followed.

Exeter would later steam northwards to link up with the York and the damaged Birmingham to position themselves northeast of Aberdeenshire to try to more directly intervene with Soviet air activity coming out of southern Norway despite the dangers of being directly targeted themselves.

RAF interceptors were trained to perform their air defence missions of mainland Britain and they did just what they had spent so long exercising for. Radar stations on the ground and high-flying USAF E-3s directed the Lightnings and Tornados against tracked contacts when those could be detected. There were Soviet efforts with electronic jamming and low-flying missions below the horizon to avoid a lot of this defensive effort, some of which succeeded, but the RAF maintained the upper hand overall. They shot down bombers over the North Sea and the southern reaches of the Norwegian Sea too. Efforts by the enemy to hit the airbases from which those interceptors flew caused the RAF many problems though and having to deal with that was one of the main causes behind many air attacks attaining success.

One of the USAF squadrons of F-15A interceptors soon joined the RAF in air defence missions due to all aircraft in Britain being under the command of the 3 ATAF. The F-15s were flying from Norfolk and took over the zone of responsibility that RAF Phantoms had first been assigned to across East Anglia and Lincolnshire. Those two squadrons (twelve of the FGR2 version and fifteen F-4J(UK) models) would move northwards to RAF Leeming later in the day and the Tornados from there would transfer to Scottish bases. Rapier and Hawk SAM batteries – manned by RAF and American crews respectively – joined in the anti-air effort with some success, but faced the difficulty of having radars that didn’t have anywhere near the range to detect missile-firing aircraft and thus could only go after Fencers when those strike-bombers appeared on their radar screens.

Soviet aircraft shot down over the sea usually meant death for the aircrews. Several bombers came down over the British mainland though, with those men aboard escaping from their doomed aircraft. HSF detachments from across Britain did very well in reacting well to enemy aircrews falling from the sky via parachutes. These volunteers raced to landing sites and tried to maintain the rules of warfare when they got their hands on such prisoners of war. However, they couldn’t be everywhere at once and it took time for them to reach Soviet aircrews now stranded in the UK. It was not escape into the countryside of such people that the HSF was focused upon but rather keeping those men alive from the worryingly-frequent attacks by British civilians against them.

This was ‘interesting’ duty for a force expected pre-war to spend their time in conflict either being atomised in nuclear fire against strategic infrastructure or fighting off waves of Soviet Spetsnaz commando teams.


While these air attacks were going on and also being defended against, the scale of them caused immediate reactions and considerations of what to do about them at the highest military levels in Britain.

Admiral Fieldhouse, as Chief of the Defence Staff, was ultimately responsible as the country’s most senior military officer for the defence of Britain at home and abroad. He was at the Northwood bunker northwest of London when the missiles and bombs started crashing into Britain and soon his headquarters was flooded with reports of damage inflicted from across the north of the country. That morning had already seen his beloved RN take terrible losses up in the Norwegian Sea and there was also in his mind the understanding that the British Army across on the North German Plain had suffered immense casualties in the previous day’s fighting.

His position didn’t allow Admiral Fieldhouse to dwell on matters and allow the losses to affect him. He had to command his country’s armed forces to fight the war that Britain hadn’t asked for. His Vice-Chief, General Richard Vincent, was at the MOD in Whitehall in close contact with the politicians there. General Vincent reported back to his superior that Thatcher and Younger were taking the news of military casualties better than he expected, though that they both insistent that something needed to be done to stop the attacks on civilians in Britain from the day before and that of today from continuing.

Moving a few warships and some RAF fighters around wasn’t going to be enough to satisfy them.

Admiral Fieldhouse was already ahead of his deputy there. He didn’t want those attacks to continue as they were either and, while not wanting to lose focus on the military efforts taking place in northern Norway and in West Germany as well as the naval war at sea in the North Atlantic, he already had his operations & planning staff at work. It was decided that the 3 ATAF would tonight focus some of its long-range bombing effort against the Soviet-held Flesland and Sola airbases to smash those facilities with the RAF Buccaneers from RAF Lossiemouth assisting them due to the absence of Soviet Navy surface vessels at sea.

Air power alone wasn’t going to be enough, especially since there were intelligence reports that long-range SAM systems had been flown into those Soviet-held Norwegian bases to defend against such attacks. In the North-Eastern District – covering northeastern England – was the recently-formed Independent Guards Brigade, a British Army formation with two battalions of Foot Guards, one battalion from the Parachute Regiment pulled from Ulster and Territorial Army artillery, engineers and light armour attachments. It was an ad hoc force established to act as a strategic reserve for Britain and the Soviet presence on the ground in southern Norway was now regarded as a major threat to the country.

As soon as possible, that brigade was going to be sent into action following on from RN and RAF efforts to stop or even greatly restrict the scale of air attacks ravaging Britain.

[James G]

Eighty–Seven

During the Napoleonic Wars, the French Empire, the great European land power of the late 18th Century, had eventually crumbled due to the failure to subdue British military power at sea. No invasion of the British mainland could commence, Britain’s international trade couldn’t be stopped and thus the economic assistance that Britain gave to its on-off Continental allies wouldn’t cease. The Kaiser’s German Empire of the early 20th Century built an impressive ocean-going battle fleet that was able to provide a force to be reckoned with in the Battle of Jutland, yet was unable to challenge the Royal Navy effectively at sea: the maritime blockade of German-led continental Europe brought down the Kaiser. Hitler’s Germany put minimal effort into building itself a fleet of surface warships capable of challenging British sea power. Where the few major surface combatants came up against the Royal Navy they were eventually lost in battle, even if they did go out in a blaze of glory on occasion. Being unable to control the seas that surrounded his empire, Hitler was vanquished like Napoleon and the Kaiser before him.

Britain was joined in the 20th Century by the United States as great powers with powerful maritime forces fighting against continental land powers. The advent of submarines changed everything with Germany in both the First and Second World Wars finally having a weapon to challenge the naval will of those ‘Atlantic Powers’, yet once again there only came failure despite moments of peril for those seafaring nations – Britain in particular.

In decades of preparation to fight the Third World War, the Soviet Union, a land power on Eurasia, had built itself naval forces to contest control of the world’s oceans and also for propaganda efforts. There was an understanding that Western military forces in Europe would need to be reinforced and resupply from North America and that the Germans had had the right strategy in both world wars in trying to stop such an effort by using submarines. The Soviet Navy was supplied with many ocean-going submarines armed with missiles and torpedoes to engage the Atlantic Powers at sea out in the sea routes between the two continents. There were warships and naval aircraft for other missions, but those submarines were built to succeed where Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler had failed before in destroying the ability of nations not on the European landmass to win conflict there using their control of the sea.

*​

Troops, aircraft and urgently-needed supplies and equipment could be transported across the North Atlantic from the United States to Western Europe by air with near immunity from hostile Soviet action. The West had the strategic transport aircraft and civilian airliners that could be pressed into military service to this to an extent that the Soviets could only dream of doing themselves. Since REFORGER and LION had commenced, the skies over the North Atlantic had been full of aircraft heading east and west wearing the colours of air forces from the NATO nations as well as airliners from several dozen different American and European private airlines. Aircraft from the Dutch national airline KLM and the West German Lufthansa had joined with British Airways in flying to the United States and moving men and light equipment from military bases there to Europe. American Airlines, Pan-Am, TWA and United Airlines had flown military dependants and other civilians back home when heading west and on their flights east they had moved the men of seven United States Army divisions to Norway, Denmark and West Germany initially before helping to move another three (forming the XVIII Corps) during the final stages of REFORGER. There were not only strategic transport aircraft and airliners in the skies, but air-freighters from private aviation companies too, many of which carried bulky cargoes across to Europe; in particular assisting in the transportation of light equipment for the US 9th Motorized Infantry & 10th Light Infantry Divisions to Schleswig-Holstein and Narvik respectively. The warehouses of military supplies in Western Europe had long since been emptied of their contents and the barracks there near ghost-towns, but the United States (and Canada somewhat) was the ‘arsenal of democracy’.

If NATO could have moved everything by air then they would have. Yet, its logistics system for transporting tens of thousands of tons of ammunition, military equipment, replacement tanks & armoured vehicles and countless other supplies depended upon movement by sea of that heavier cargo. There were ports up and down the Eastern Seaboard and then all across Western Europe which were to see the transit between of freighters, container ships and tankers. Only the United States of all the NATO nations maintained a specialised fleet of merchantmen for military purposes only (the Fast Sealift Ships of Military Sealift Command (MSC) being of particular note); the other countries relied wholly upon civilian shipping. That wasn’t to say that the Americans could move everything by those ships crewed by naval reservists, not by a long way, it was just that they had the extra bonus of having such shipping.

The registration of shipping in tiny countries worldwide for flags of convenience was no hindrance for NATO. Ships were owned by Western companies and if those organisations didn’t agree to having their vessels put to use for military purposes, then they could easily be requisitioned. The latter rarely happened for patriotism and pragmatism intervened in the overwhelming majority of cases: what would be the benefit for international shipping companies in aiding the worldwide geopolitical intentions of the Soviet Union?

There were many plans laid on through the previous decades in how to put to use all of the shipping available. Tankers could carry vehicle, aviation and industrial-use fuel across the North Atlantic. Container ships would be laden with specific goods in each metal container so that there could be a rapid transportation from warehouse-to-ship and then from ship-to-frontlines. General cargo ships could store loads in their hulls and others on their decks. If damage was done to port facilities by enemy wartime action, ships would be rerouted to others. Naval control parties from NATO nations, working with or without ‘friendly’ local civilians, would control the loading and unloading of ships and where labour was needed in port cities, such manpower could be organised with ease due to local conscription.

Everything was planned for: this is what the West was good at doing.

REFORGER (the American military term covered all NATO sea-logistics operations) wasn’t just about getting military forces and everything that they would need to fight in-place in Europe before conflict erupted there though. Rather, it was an ongoing effort once the first shots had been fired. A constant, endless stream of ammunition, weaponry and supplies was going to be fed across the North Atlantic as the United States took on the responsibility of keeping much of the forces of its NATO allies in the fight. The biggest, richest and most powerful member of that Western alliance had long ago taken on that burden even if many in the United States didn’t wish for that heavy duty to fall solely upon their nation.

It did though and it was something that had to be accepted if forward defence of the United States and the maintenance of its worldwide position of influence was going to remain.

There had been incidents of sabotage at Western European ports to interfere with the shipping efforts of REFORGER pre-war and then the bloody last-minute attacks inside the American homeland too. As terrible in terms of the loss of lives as these were, there was no appreciable affect inflicted upon the continuing REFORGER operation by any interference on land by Soviet-led or -influenced forces. Only at sea, with their submarines and long-range maritime aircraft, would enemy action be able to cause any disruption to the seaborne logistics efforts to keep the fighting going on the European continent supplied by North America.


Before RED BEAR brought about overt hostile Soviet action, convoys had already been formed up of civilian shipping now with a military tasking. Those ships heading from Europe or other locations worldwide across the North Atlantic to the United States and Canada (St. John’s, Halifax and Charlottetown were rather important) were instructed to meet-up with others and naval escort became available. None of those ships going eastwards laden with military equipment left their Eastern Seaboard ports alone and instead formed up into convoys too.

The West had been organising trans-Atlantic convoys since the First World War. There was much value in sending ships individually across the North Atlantic at high speed and moving fast, but convoys of many ships moving at the top speed of the slowest vessel, defended by warships and maritime helicopters, was regarded as the best method of safely transporting the necessary war-fighting equipment needed across the ocean. A few high-speed vessels would make trans-Atlantic runs alone later in the war, but in the first few days there were just convoys making the voyages either way.

The civilian – and also MSC – ships in those convoys were crewed by men from a wide variety of nations… and so too were their escorts. Warships from the NATO nations joined them in providing close-in and near-distant support. Senior naval officers marshalled the ships across the ocean and guarded them against threats as best as possible. The US Navy had the largest number of vessels assigned, but there were many RN warships too. In addition, the Canadian, French, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese Navys were at sea alongside West German Navy warships designed for ocean-going purposes as opposed to the smaller ships that they had for Baltic Sea service. Helicopters were based on the vast majority of the warships and these were assigned to the mission that most of the warships had: searching the waters below for submarines.

Operating in distant support of those convoys, though with a mission focus on offensive rather than passive defence of the REFORGER operation, were other collections of NATO warships. Cruisers and destroyers searched the skies with their radars looking for Soviet maritime aircraft to fire upon while other destroyers, frigates and even corvettes hunted for submarines. There were lone vessels but also groups of warships from two up to as many as eight (in a few cases) which formed naval task forces across the North Atlantic and the a-joining seas. They were actively hunting Soviet submarines and aircraft and took on a multi-national character like the convoy-defence flotillas did.

Maritime patrol aircraft of various models and ranges flew from land bases on both sides of the North Atlantic. There was mid-air refuelling available to assist in extending the range of many of these aircraft, though not all were suitably equipped to have their endurance increased like this. The RAF flew Nimrod MR2 jet-powered aircraft from Scotland and Cornwall on missions out over the North Atlantic hunting submarines and sometimes carrying anti-ship missiles just in case a Soviet warship might have used clandestine means to sneak out into the open ocean. Most NATO maritime patrol aircraft were propeller-driven though. The French and West German Navy’s all operated French-built Atlantic aircraft, with the West Germans moving theirs from vulnerable airbases in Schleswig-Holstein (they couldn’t fit inside HAS’) to Scotland. The Dutch Navy, the Portuguese & Spanish Air Forces and the Canadian Forces (the latter with their own, specialised version) all operated P-3s though the inventories they operated paled in comparison to the number flown by the US Navy. American-crewed P-3s filled the skies over the North Atlantic with two thirds of the nearly four hundred of these aircraft in US Navy service hunting for Soviet submarines that were expected to be attacking the sea routes between North America and Western Europe.

The three US Navy fleet carriers assigned to Striking Fleet Atlantic and all three RN light carriers had been committed to the Norwegian Sea, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t any naval fighters available to work alongside SAM-equipped warships to combat Soviet maritime aircraft. The French Navy had the Foch at sea with its F-8 interceptors and the Spanish Navy had sent their light carrier Príncipe de Asturias to sea after a rush commissioning to fly its Harriers from. Neither the French F-8s or the Spanish Harriers had the range nor the missiles carried to take on Soviet maritime bombers but they could engage lone Bears should those scouting aircraft move into positions where the carriers were operating from. Land-based fighters were flying from airbases on both sides of the North Atlantic and many of them had better range, extendable by airborne refuelling too.

All told, NATO military forces dominated the seas and the skies across the North Atlantic.


The Soviet Navy was out to challenge that dominance.

Submarines from the Kola Peninsula and Soviet Black Sea Fleet assigned ones previously in the Mediterranean had entered the North Atlantic in the initial Soviet mobilisation long before it was decided to launch RED BEAR. When that fateful decision was taken to go to war, many more submarines headed to interdict those key supply lines that were to feed the NATO armies. Some detected NATO efforts to track them and there was an urgent rush to break away from that intimating shadowing before World War Three commenced; other Soviet submarines weren’t even aware that they were being tracked with weapons locked-on to them.

Following on from the very first salvos of missiles and torpedoes fired in the war’s opening minutes (against ships near the Azores and then to strike at warships with Striking Fleet Atlantic), throughout the whole of the North Atlantic and the a-joining waters Soviet submarines and then naval aircraft battled NATO forces for the first two days of war.

The noises from the engines and propellers of multiple ships which formed convoys was something that couldn’t be hidden. Sounds travelled far and wide underwater, though often not in a linear fashion. Hydrophones picked up the thrashing of water and engineering noises from great distance and thus submarines closed-in towards what was then identified as convoys. Individual NATO warships, targets of equal importance for the submarines as per their mission orders – something which would later change –, were harder to locate among the width of the ocean but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t be.

The NATO navies were actively searching for those Soviet submarines with every detection system that they had. Sonobuoys floated across the ocean’s surface, hydrophones which had long ago been placed on the ocean’s floor listened and every warship, aircraft and NATO submarine used their listening systems. Tricks were tried to lure Soviet submarines towards improvised traps: a noisemaker would be launched where submarines were expected to be operating while warships lingered nearby in silence.


Where the clashes occurred between Soviet and NATO forces the engagements were fierce, deadly and not always over quickly either.

A convoy travelling out of the Canadian Maritime Provinces, with a joint Canadian-RN-Dutch escort, and bound for Cherbourg and Le Havre on the northern French coast was attacked in two individual attacks by different submarines. The attacks took place on either day with the first resulting in a Dutch frigate and two freighters being sunk for no return; the following attack saw a container ship being hit before the offending submarine was pounced upon by the RN frigate HMS Arrow and sunk by a pair of torpedoes.

A Canadian destroyer and a US Navy frigate both battled against a Soviet November-class nuclear-powered submarine at the southern end of the Denmark Strait. That submarine was racing towards the North Atlantic proper between Greenland and Iceland and hoping to take advantage of the destruction caused at Keflavik that had kept NATO maritime patrol aircraft grounded. The warships and the submarine both fired upon each other several times using torpedoes without hits being confirmed before HMCS Kootenay hit the November with falling rounds from its big ASW mortar.

The West Germany destroyer Rommel was sunk off the Virginia coastline when it was taking part in a hunt against a Soviet submarine clearly setting up for an ambush against a convoy coming out of Norfolk. US Navy SH-60B Sea Hawk helicopters tried to avenge the loss by attempting to torpedo the attacking Soviet submarine, but to no avail.

One of those traps for submarines using noisemakers paid off when a Sierra-class vessel blundered into a US Navy submarine – USS Albuquerque – waiting nearby with torpedo tubes already flooded and its sonar in passive mode ready to silently detect prey. Lightning-fast Mk.48 torpedoes smashed into the Sierra and when the pressure hull blew it made one mighty, ear-splitting sound.

Another big convoy of civilian ships under escort, also bound for France, faced an attack by an Oscar-class submarine that opened fire with a full barrage of anti-ship cruise missiles. Two of those Shipwreck missiles had launch failures and electronic countermeasures plus anti-missile guns put a stop to another three, but eleven missiles hit the heavily-laden ships and escorting warships. Cargoes of war material along with many sailors went to the bottom of the ocean and the only consolation from this engagement for the NATO navies after they had failed to sink the attacking submarine was that it would now have to make it all the way home from the middle of the ocean to re-arm.

During the second day, more attacks came from Soviet submarines though NATO wasn’t lying down and taking the blows without hitting back. The Spanish Navy was equipped with much American naval weaponry and one of their ASW frigates sunk an enemy submarine four hundred miles southwest of Ireland; not long afterwards one of their P-3s assisted in the successful hunt for another submarine near the western entrances to the Straits of Gibraltar.

Portuguese and Belgian warships, while few, helped guard the convoys at sea and the tiny Royal Moroccan Navy made an appearance at sea after King Hassan II firmly put his country behind the Western war effort.

Maritime patrol aircraft had played a big part in the first day’s engagements, but during the second that role increased as their surface-search radars located quite a few Soviet submarines on the surface. Those submarines at sea which were diesel/electric needed to snorkel after spending much of the first day engaged in combat missions when they just couldn’t do so. Nimrods, Atlantics and P-3s jumped at the chance to engage such targets and managed to get several of these submarines themselves or guide the efforts of other NATO military assets which would attack the detected targets. One of those successes was achieved by the Wasp helicopter operating from the old HMS Plymouth – a warship which had been due for decommissioning soon enough – being assisted by a French Navy Atlantic.

This was just some of the naval activity on and below the surface that took place in the war’s first two days.


In the skies, in the time period between their attack on Striking Fleet Atlantic and then against the RN Task Force, raketonosets from the Soviet Northern Fleet made appearances out over the North Atlantic.

Surveillance-roled Bears guided them towards an attack made late on March 14th in the middle of the ocean against the convoy heading for Normandy that had already been hit by missiles from an Oscar. A regiment of Backfires thundered across the sky and then launched Kitchen cruise missiles towards plotted targets who weren’t firing waves upon waves of SAMs skywards, just a few. The majority of the remaining ships who had survived the earlier submarine-launched attack were sunk by those cruise missiles with four NATO warships being destroyed too. This was a major loss for NATO to suffer, made worse when there was no air interference against those Backfires.

Two separate Backfire raids came again overnight and in the early morning of March 15th. The raketonosets were only loaded with one heavy cruise missile so that they could carry more fuel, but the extra range allowed them to operate much further south where NATO opposition was expected to be even lighter.

USS Mobile Bay, the AEGIS missile-cruiser leading that little task group, and whose missiles had much earlier in the day killed five missile-armed Bears, was again in action when Soviet aircraft again came back into the range of its radar. The Backfires launched against the Mobile Bay and the warships with it before the SAMs from the cruiser would be put to effective use against those aircraft and then twenty-five cruise missiles raced through the sky. Many Kitchens were downed, but they came in mighty fast and there was unexpected interference to the Mobile Bay’s defensive efforts from the nearby scouting Bear using electronic countermeasures.

USS Dale was hit by two missiles that would later cause her to be abandoned due to major fires engulfing her while the destroyer USS Semmes and the frigate USS Bowen were lost too as the task group suffered badly. Mobile Bay and the two remaining destroyers escaped damage but there shouldn’t have been any hits achieved with the AEGIS-equipped cruiser having far more SAMs than inbound Kitchens.

The early morning Backfire attack that targeted the Foch and her escorts wasn’t as fruitful for Northern Fleet Aviation as their attack on the US Navy had been or the strike against the RN would be not long afterwards. This third attempt to go after a carrier group – the Foch was accompanied by the Jeanne d’Arc, with the cruiser acting as an ASW helicopter carrier – was met with resistance when an F-8 interceptor downed the lone Bear tracking the formation right at the crucial moment. Several of the raketonosets turned on their own shorter-range radars and found themselves suddenly being fired upon by a pair of interceptors that got lucky and launched R-530 air-to-air missiles at them. The F-8s were far from their carrier and only being kept aloft by Super Etendard strike-fighters conducting mid-air refuelling for them using buddy-tanks. The loss of their scout followed by a sudden close-range missile attack by fighters (which managed to take down four Backfires) caused a mission abort for the naval bombers. The unexpected seemingly strong air activity was thought to be a sure sign that intelligence had been wrong and there were more opposing fighters than there were; the Backfires flew home while another regiment soon afterwards hit the RN up in the Norwegian Sea.

The French Navy had been lucky… though they would regard what they achieved as fantastic victory: pour la gloire!!!


Meanwhile, NATO had been waging its own offensive war using submarines against the Soviets. There were NATO submarines at sea in the North Atlantic, but many more up in the Norwegian Sea and beyond.

The RN had sent a total of thirteen submarines up into those northern waters before warfare commenced. HMS Sovereign had been sunk after torpedoing the Soviet carrier Kiev, but she was just one of many vessels. The US Navy had many of their submarines ready to take on the Soviet Northern Fleet near its bases as well while there were many Norwegian coastal submarines also eager to get into action.

USS Batfish took a major ‘kill’ when Harpoon anti-ship missiles from the submarine were launched at close-range against Soviet warships in the Barents Sea protecting the coastline and three of those (a fourth was shot down) hit the anti-submarine cruiser Admiral Nakhimov. Two impacted the massive superstructure on the vessel while the warhead on the third missile detonated on the missile-armed foredeck. Several heavyweight SAMs there blew up themselves afterwards and allowed immense fires aboard to get out of control and have the Soviets lose this ship.

HMS Torbay out in the Norwegian Sea managed to locate, track and then sink one of the few Oscar-class missile-submarines that the Northern Fleet had. This submarine was torn apart when underwater and its fearsome Shipwreck missiles weren’t going to be used against convoys at sea. Soon after that engagement the little HMS Ocelot tried to engage a Tango-class submarine nearby but the Soviet Navy submariners of that vessel got the upper hand over their British enemies and destroyed the Ocelot first.

Other submarine-on-submarine encounters took place as the NATO navies tried their best to take on the Soviets far from those all-important sea lanes through which the massive REFORGER logistical effort was using. Over the two days, a pair of US Navy submarines would join the Ocelot and a Norwegian submarine in being destroyed but in exchange another five Northern Fleet submarines would be blown apart when underwater too.


The war at sea, the Third Battle of the North Atlantic, was costing many sailors their lives and was an ongoing matter with no let-up at all for either side.





Eighty–Eight

With what was regarded as what only could be deemed contempt, Turkey wasn’t attacked by Soviet forces until the night of the war’s second day. The country was an important member of the NATO alliance, maintained a strategic geographic position by anyone’s estimate and held powerful military forces of its own while also being host to American combat assets.

And the Soviets left Turkey alone for almost forty hours.

If NATO had understood Soviet military thinking in why it had launched RED BEAR then such a course of action – or rather inaction – would have made sense to them. Of course, to the West the military offensive launched worldwide was all about conquest while as far as the Soviets saw it they were defending themselves from imminent hostile attack. The Turkish Armed Forces, while large, could never be mistaken for an offensive force that could in anyway threaten the Soviet Union unless used as cannon fodder for the armies of larger NATO nations.

What few American military forces arrived in the country were regarded as defensive in nature and deployment too. Turkey’s position between Europe and Asia, between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, was something that could be exploited politically post-conflict and not during open warfare. The Soviets watched with interest but not in alarm as Turkey moved around its military to defend its eastern border with the Soviet-controlled Caucasus, its southeastern border with Soviet-aligned Syria, its southwestern and western borders to guard against Greek military threats (as imagined as they were), its northwestern border against the mobilised but stationary Bulgarian Army and its northern shoreline against possible attacks across the Black Sea. To effectively talk itself into a situation where it saw itself surrounded by enemies wanting to attack it was a situation that Soviet efforts had not made to convince the government in Ankara of, but was something that was of great benefit to the Soviet Union.

USAF aircraft had arrived in Turkey along with their supporting infrastructure of men and supplies while an aircraft carrier was sitting in the Aegean Sea behind the entrance to the Turkish Straits; there were American marines ready to move into Turkey too. It would have been better for Soviets strategic interests if even more American military forces, even those from other NATO nations, had deployed into the country, but there was the consolation of the Turks requesting and then receiving a mass of American military supplies routed to them instead of NATO forces in West Germany.

Post-war, once NATO had been defeated in Western Europe and the threat of Barbarossa #2 smashed, the Turkey could be dealt with at leisure along with the rest of Southern Europe.


Unfortunately, as was the case elsewhere too, NATO didn’t want to play by the scenario that Chebrikov and his top people in Moscow wanted. Thirty-six hours after RED BEAR had commenced far away from the Black Sea region, Turkish and American aircraft begun conducting limited offensive air missions against Soviet Navy warships. Those warships were on defensive missions as far as the Soviets were concerned, but that wasn’t a view shared by the pilots of the F-4s and F-16s (both types of aircraft flown by Turkish and American pilots) as they bombed and fired missiles against several warships at sea.

Military forces in the southwestern portions of the Soviet Union had been detached from their peacetime commands and sent to East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia as part of the initial Soviet defensive mobilisation and then the hasty reinforcement on the eve of offensive action. Soviet Army forces had departed in great numbers with all six field armies that were home-based in the Ukrainian and Moldavian SSRs moving to Eastern Europe; only the Thirty-Second Army Corps in the Crimea, some understrength divisions in the eastern Ukraine and the forces in the North Caucasus & Trans-Caucasus Military Districts remained behind. The three air armies from the Soviet Air Force based in the Ukraine were in Eastern Europe and the Thirty-Fourth Air Army in the Caucasus was missing offensive units; aircraft of the Air Defence Forces across the region and fighters from the Air Force in the Caucasus remained. Two thirds of the Soviet Naval Aviation raketonosets located in the Crimea were in the Kola Peninsula leaving only a regiment of older Badgers after the Backfires had departed and there were some medium-range Su-17 naval attack-fighters left too.

Only the Soviet Navy had stayed behind in strength, particularly with its impressive surface flotilla. It was warships of the Black Sea Fleet that were attacked midway across the body of water between the Soviet Union and Turkey when ‘aggressively patrolling’ a barrier line that they had set up. A destroyer, two frigates and a missile boat were hit with the only return being a lone aircraft: a shiny, factory-fresh Turkish Air Force F-16C struck by naval SAMs.

In retaliation, Badgers from the 124th Maritime Missile Aviation Regiment at Gvardeskoye airbase in the Crimea flew southwards and fired AS-6 Kingfish anti-ship cruise missiles at Turkish Navy forces north and northeast of the Black Sea entrance to the Turkish Straits. The Turks defended their ships with all that they had – SAMs, anti-aircraft guns and electronic countermeasures – but their warships fell prey to multiple impacts from supersonic missile impacts and the task groups that they had were shattered.

Moreover, across western Turkey the airbases at Bandirma, Balikesir and Eskisehir were struck by more impacting cruise missiles fired from Blinder bombers with Long-Range Aviation. These facilities were located in Asia Minor and were home to American aircraft as well as the Turkish aircraft which had struck at the Soviet Navy. Nike-Hercules missiles raced up to combat the bombers overflying Turkey and so too did fighters and interceptors. Unlike the Badgers which had gone after naval targets and escaped without losses, those Blinders were not going to get away clean.

Afterwards, further clashes at sea and in the air took place. Neither side was willing to engage in direct ground combat with each other, but aerial and maritime engagements quickly became common place. The Soviets were quite happy to do without fighting the Turks, but when they started, they went into the fight with much gusto.


The rest of the Eastern Mediterranean and then down through the Middle East saw very little military combat at the beginning of World War Three.

The Syrian and Libyan regimes, friendly as they were to Moscow but at the same time not client states to the Soviet Union, postured and manoeuvred their military forces into somewhat combat positions but didn’t attack NATO military forces or Western-aligned nations. Israel found itself left alone when it had been anticipating that Syria may launch attacks against the country while the United States was busy elsewhere but instead President Assad in Damascus ordered no military action of the sort. The aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy remained in position between Sicily and Libya with aircraft ready to be unleashed against targets in the North African desert. The Libyans were passive though, especially with the Egyptian Army moving in force towards the Libyan-Egyptian frontier in what was clearly an intimidating move.

*​

In the Pacific, war had opened there with Soviet air strikes commencing against American and Japanese air and naval bases in Japan as well as air-launched missiles being fired against US bases in South Korea. The absence of the Soviet Navy warships or a major number of detected submarines at sea had allowed the Americans to let their guard down right on the eve of conflict with a foolish belief that the Soviets were to remain passive in the Pacific while aggressive in Europe.

The commander of Pacific Command, Admiral Hays, the overall headquarters for US-dominated military forces from East Asia to Alaska and Hawaii, lost his job hours after war begun due to this prevailing attitude among his subordinate command spread far and wide.


More Soviet submarines than expected had managed to get to sea and they were responsible for multiple barrages of missiles unleashed against land targets and also naval flotillas throughout the first two days of war. Japan, South Korea and Alaska came under attack by the Soviet Air Force, but where the United States Armed Forces had bases on islands across the Pacific, cruise missiles hit them. The US Navy’s Pacific Fleet was – if it had been concentrated all in one group as it wasn’t going to be – the strongest naval force on the planet, but it was stung hard by multiple attacks.

Eventually, the majority of those missile submarines at sea had empty missile tubes and had to make the long, dangerous journey home and thus giving the Americans a reprieve, but they left much destruction behind them. Guam, Wake Island and Hawaii were struck by missiles fired from offshore as these American possessions and the country’s fiftieth state were attacked. Clark airbase and Subic Bay naval base in the Philippines were attacked as well as the harbours full of shipping in Singapore. Okinawa saw more attacks than these other locations combined with the American military bases there struck at – British Gurkhas on that island suffered casualties too.

The aircraft carriers Midway, Ranger and Constellation were at sea in the Western Pacific when RED BEAR begun and each was positioned ready to either help defend Japan or attack the Soviet mainland (the latter mission only if political constraints allowed that). The US Navy was expecting maritime Badgers and Backfires to take on the carriers, but instead it was cruise missiles from submarines which were fired at these ships and their escorting groups. The Ranger was the only initial casualty with multiple missile hits occurring sixteen hours into the war and the huge vessel eventually being abandoned due to fires aboard fast getting utterly out of control. Constellation was hit early on March 15th by a lone missile and damage done, though like the Midway, she would continue to fight.

Constellation aided in Japanese and USAF efforts to stop Soviet aircraft from attacking the Japanese Home Islands while the Midway (with the battleship USS Missouri with her task force) was soon sent on a daring mission to have some of its aircraft raid Soviet targets in the Kurile Islands after Hawaii had been attacked.

On the ground in South Korea, Japan and Okinawa there were three American combat divisions and neither of those saw initial fighting. The 2nd Mechanized Infantry Division was deployed into combat positions alongside their South Korean allies waiting for a North Korean invasion that was never going to occur. The 25th Light Infantry Division had been flown from Hawaii to Honshu a week beforehand (All Nippon Airways played a major part in that deployment) and waited for Soviet paratroopers and/or naval infantry to arrive on Hokkaido or in northern Honshu. The 3rd Marine Division had assembled on Okinawa ready to go to South Korea or Japan but instead at first stayed right where it was. American troops were dying in their thousands in Europe, but in the Pacific they waited and waited.


Alaska and the nearby Bering Sea were heavily-defended against an expected barrage of attacks that when they came were only pinprick strikes. On the ground, almost the entire contingent of the Alaska Army National Guard ‘went native’ and spread itself out across the United States’ largest state ready to harass any invasion attempt. The 6th Light Infantry Division had its pair of organic combat brigades joined by a brigade of reservists out of Minnesota and was formed up around its bases in the central portion of Alaska. Canadian troops from the 1st Mechanised Brigade-Group arrived in the Anchorage area to join the joint US-Canadian ground force command while Canadian reservists were assembling at Whitehorse across the border in the Yukon Territory. American combat aircraft already in Alaska were joined by Air National Guard interceptors and strike-fighters from several US states ready to join in the repelling of any invasion and major conventional air attacks.

Two US Navy aircraft carriers – the Nimitz and the Carl Vinson – were in the Bering Sea while other American warships, joined by Canadian vessels too, patrolled the northern reaches of the Pacific. Should the Soviets try to make what would have to be a suicidal attempt at an invasion of Alaska and thus the North American continent, then they were going to run into all this firepower at sea along with what was on the ground and in the air.

There was no intention on the part of the Soviets to do so though; not even airmobile or amphibious raids against isolated spots in the Aleutian Islands or on the Alaskan Panhandle as the Americans feared. Their efforts were focused on disrupting any attempt by the United States to try the Lehman Doctrine and distract Soviet war efforts in Europe by attacking in the Far East. The vast majority of their military effort was thus made in having the Americans chase their tails across the Pacific and causing them as much trouble as possible so they couldn’t concentrate and attack the Soviet homeland in strength. Air attacks were flown against targets in Alaska with radar stations on the western coast and military facilities in the Aleutian Islands all struck at, but for these small efforts a great deal of American military power had been tied down in defence rather than preparing for offence.

*​

The first days of the war were an ordeal of great magnitude for Finland.

The Helsinki Government tried its very best to walk a tightrope between trying to keep its independence and having to accede to the demands of its huge neighbour to the east who wanted to use portions of the nation’s territory for the military attacks on neighbours to the north and southwest. Soviet demands were near overbearing and while Helsinki wanted no part of the war that Moscow was launching against its Norwegian and Swedish neighbours, there was no other option available than to allow those ultimatums to be met less the country suffer the fate of the other Scandinavian nations. By declaring a state of emergency and enacting tight censorships alongside military mobilisation, the Helsinki Government wished to keep its people in the dark about what was going on with Lapland being used for the transit of Soviet military forces less rash action be taken.

The Soviet Ambassador in Helsinki – a new man, a suspected KGB officer who had arrived in late February – threatened Finland and its people repeatedly while constantly reminding his hosts of agreements signed at the end of World War Two allowing the Soviet Union to defend itself from attack with its army on Finnish territory. The Military Attaché from the fortress-like Soviet Embassy made sure that the politicians in the little Scandinavian country understood that there were three more divisions of the Soviet Army that hadn’t entered Finland yet, but could do so at any moment and not go through Lapland but rather into the denser-populated southern portions of the country should the Soviet Union wish to undertake warfare further into Finland.

Enforced blackouts darkened the country at night and there were major communications and transport restrictions in-place for Finnish citizens. Aircraft from the Finnish Air Force stayed on the ground and warships remained in port, yet there were Finish soldiers in every town and city ready to maintain order should civil disturbances break out in opposition to what was occurring in the north of the country. Embassies of NATO and other Western nations were closed with diplomats from them leaving Helsinki peacefully but fast on Finnair flights that went to Belgrade of all places. No one outside the top levels of the Helsinki Government and the security service knew that former prime minister Kalevi Sorsa was inexplicably murdered in his home by what were thought to be Soviet operatives; only post-war would it be revealed that he had been objecting to this state of affairs and therefore chosen for an assassination to intimidate others with similar views.

The Helsinki Government found itself intimidated by its own armed forces in addition to Soviet assassins. The Army in particular had memories of the winter of 1939 and how their predecessors had stood up to the Soviets then. As Soviet forces crossed deeper into Lapland, supposedly fighting off an invasion that the Finnish Army knew hadn’t been launched by NATO, the military presence across the country got more prominent. The politicians had first directed that men put on uniforms, but that got out of hand and troops appeared everywhere. When the Helsinki Government issued instructions to the military to vacate certain locations in the north, passing on Soviet demands, the military took longer each and every time to do as they were told.

The situation that Finland found itself in was one that it hadn’t asked for, but was ongoing and only going to get much worse for all involved with the politicians losing control, the military seeing itself as having no choice but to take control and the Finnish people frightened of what the following days would entail.

[James G]

Eighty–Nine

Soviet diplomats had been fast in working worldwide to present Chebrikov’s directive that the world should be made to believe that World War Three erupted due to an attack on the Soviet Union launched and one immediately countered. The ‘Big Lie’ was an absolute failure with world leaders rejecting it almost universally. Western governments could provide proof that the Soviets launched an unprovoked war of aggression in addition to the evidence that intelligence operatives and diplomats of sovereign nations gathered themselves.

Trying to gain allies, even diplomatic support, for his war was a catastrophe for Chebrikov and thus the country which he illegally ruled.


Across Europe, neutral nations watched as Soviet explosives blasted NATO countries to pieces and their armies crossed the Iron Curtain. Other neutral nations in Northern & Western Europe had portions of their territory invaded or bombed as well as politicians being assassinated in clear support of Soviet war aims. The situation in Finland was one matter, but when it became apparent that the Swedish Prime Minister had been murdered and that country’s armed forces struck at without warning there could be no doubt which opposing side was doing wrong. Shannon Airport on the west coast of Ireland was an initial target for Soviet missiles and then Soviet commandoes – presumably on their way to attack British military installations in Ulster – engaged Irish Defence Forces in Donegal. The murder of the chief of the Austrian military intelligence service was brought to wider attention than it might not have been with Europe in the midst of war and the small country wanting to quietly stay out of the way had the brigadier who was targeted had not been killed in his home when dining with an old friend who happened to be the Chinese Military Attaché to Austria.

Yugoslavia and Romania, both socialist nations who considered themselves independent of the Soviet Union, faced intense and hostile pressure from Moscow to aid Chebrikov’s war aims and this didn’t endear them to the Big Lie. Across Southern Europe, Italy and Greece may both have failed to honour their commitments to the NATO alliance but the governments in neither nation believed that the United States had led NATO nations into a war of aggression.

Switzerland had mobilised its armed forces on March 13th and its air force had been patrolling Swiss skies since then with interceptors flying twenty-four hours a day in all weathers. The government in Bern had no belief in Soviet falsehoods about NATO attacking first; nonetheless they gladly welcomed French and West German diplomats who presented direct evidence of Soviet belligerence. There was no intention on the part of the Swiss to go to war on the side of either opposing armed camp yet at the same time there would be quiet support from the country on a diplomatic level for the West… and of course Swiss banks and the financial market there remained open even as the rest of Europe shut down on a monetary and trade basis.


Morocco’s entry into the war with a few warships in the North Atlantic and an offer to send some troops – a few thousand of varying quality – to Turkey was a sincere effort by the country. Neither this nor the diplomatic support of several West & Central African nations for France (Chad, the Central African Republic and Gabon) brought World War Three to Africa: the full-scale fighting in Angola did that.

RED BEAR was a God send for South Africa, especially with Cuba’s attack upon the United States. The country was always going to be a partner of the West in a war with Soviet-led nations, but it could have just been a ‘co-belligerent’ had the Castro brothers in Havana been a bit smarter. The attacks on Florida made South Africa’s attacks deep into Angola seem to be in support of the United States, despite them being planned beforehand and not directly related. South African forces would further engage Angolan and Cuban forces in southwestern Africa and the country would become a full ally of the West. Peacetime economic sanctions due to Apartheid were forgotten with the need for South Africa’s mass natural resources ready to be exported with haste to its new firm allies worldwide.


Egypt’s President Mubarak unilaterally moved portions of his army towards the border with Libya once fighting erupted in Europe in what he regarded as a shrewd move to keep the Middle East out of World War Three and thus keep himself secure: Mubarak was far from a fool. Libya at once was focused upon Egyptian intentions towards them rather than joining a Soviet war against the West, one which Colonel Gaddafi would have ordered his armed forces to take part in had he known that it was going to start as it did.

Israel and Syria, allies of the United States and the Soviet Union respectively, both faced off against each other across the Golan Heights and in Lebanon. Neither nation wanted to take part in the war with Israel worrying that such involvement of itself would put it on a target list should the Soviets resort to nuclear weapons and Syria’s Assad fearing an Israeli nuclear attack upon his country without superpower constraints imposed upon Tel Aviv. There would be border skirmishes on the Golan and fierce fighting between proxies in Lebanon, but the two countries both remained officially at peace.

Throughout the rest of the Middle East, the majority of the rest of the autocratic countries remained neutral in public but provided diplomatic support to the West. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf States had all been supporting the fighting in Afghanistan with oil money and intelligence efforts and this was a major factor in the instant siding with the United States. Iraq and South Yemen were both Soviet aligned, yet each country was far away from any Soviet support, had no stake in the war and had been callously disregarded by Moscow beforehand. Oman was an active participant in the war as its housed American marines ready to intervene in the region though its small but Western equipped military forces wouldn’t take part in the conflict.

In Iran, the country’s leaders denounced both West and East… which neither side took much notice of as busy fighting each other as they were.


Fighting that took on the tone of near civil war rocked several parts of Pakistan, from the cities of Karachi and Lahore to the tribal borderlands next to Afghanistan, when war broke out elsewhere in the world. Pakistan security forces moved to quell the disturbances while also trying to investigate their causes. Later, the government in Islamabad would inform their allies of convenience in both the United States and China that the KGB had been behind the civil strife in an apparent effort to keep Pakistan from interfering in Afghanistan while the Soviets were focused upon fighting the West.

Soviet warships had fled to Indian ports before warfare commenced and they were de jure interned by the New Delhi government though this was only a legal fiction. India didn’t buy the Big Lie from Moscow but still was willing to quietly support their Soviet allies as long as it was just in this small way. The country wasn’t going to side with the West yet neither did India have any intention of joining World War Three.


Any hesitation that Japan had about joining the United States in war went away within minutes of conflict erupting when air and missile attacks occurred on its territory. Japanese military forces and installations were targeted just like American ones were.

South Korea had mobilised its full armed forces in the weekend before RED BEAR in the face of silence from its neighbour and implacable enemy to the north. What Kim Il-sung was thinking was a worrying mystery that no answer was given to knowing. Soviet missiles hit American airbases in the country and the government in Seoul stood with their allies though they could offer no further support throughout East Asia and furthermore were instead busy requesting that United States reinforcements arrive in South Korea rather than be deployed elsewhere. Kim Il-sung and his North Korean regime issued no official statement of the usual sort of propaganda that came from the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ in support of – or even against – Soviet military actions.


The answer to why North Korea said or did nothing, like other issues in Asia, came down to China.

China’s leaders regarded the Soviets as Western Imperialists like the British, French and Dutch had been in Asia before World War Two and how they regarded the United States had been since then. Chebrikov wasn’t a communist like he proclaimed to be or even a socialist: he was seen as a fascist prepared to set up colonies worldwide to exploit for Russian – not Soviet – gain. His predecessors had done the same in Mongolia and would do so if they could in Vietnam and North Korea too if they gained enough influence. Border disputes with the Soviets, over land stolen by Russia from the Chinese people, had turned bloody in the late Sixties and had never been resolved.

The Chinese had no intention of joining a Soviet-led war though at the same time wished for peace in East Asia. Chinese diplomats informed the United States that they wouldn’t appreciate any Taiwanese involvement in an American-Soviet conflict (Taiwan had an efficient if dated navy) and would make it clear to both Vietnam and North Korea that China would intervene against them if they sided with Moscow. This was covered in diplomatic language, but the message was clear enough for State Department diplomats to understand.

Of course the intentions of China were for their own benefit, but with their diplomacy they kept much of Asia out of the war.


Singapore and the Philippines were both attacked as American allies by Soviet naval forces; their governments were quick to join the West against Moscow. Other Southeast Asian nations remained neutral though there were some diplomatic efforts made in support of the West as Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia all remained aloof from the fighting directly.

Both Australia and New Zealand joined the war, though New Zealand waited until late in the war’s second day once the scale of Soviet actions became apparent. Australia already had a naval task force heading towards the Western Pacific and there were aircraft in Malaysia ready to move further northwards – Okinawa was the preferred destination – and Soviet worldwide actions only reinforced the position of the Canberra Government that there was no other choice but to aid their American allies. For New Zealand, the United States wasn’t a direct ally due to differences pre-war between Washington and Wellington over nuclear weapons deployments aboard US Navy warships. However, New Zealand had sent a frigate to the Middle East when the RN had withdrawn to concentrate on the North Atlantic and that vessel joined with the US Navy's Enterprise carrier battle group ready for combat.


Central & South American governments came out in full support of the United States. In a post-war world, unless it was devastated by nuclear weapons, the Americans were always going to be pre-eminent throughout the hemisphere so this was as much to do with pragmatism as well as these Latin American nations having anti-communist governments. Nicaragua and then Cuba had set themselves on a course of hostility towards the United States and the former had paid dearly for that.

Cuba’s actions alarmed several of these governments through the foolishness of how inflaming the Americans would be not good in the long-run for their countries too in any post-war attitude to Latinos, but nothing could be done apart from every nation on the mainland except Argentina declaring war on Cuba. Military assistance was offered to the United States as limited as that might be in the circumstances.

The Soviets would only have left-wing rebel groups across the hemisphere as their allies alongside doomed Cuba.


Away from the Northern Tier countries in the Warsaw Pact, Soviet direct allies for their war with the West and that rapidly-growing list of allies of theirs, were few and far between.

Cuba had jumped in with both feet while Angola had been forced into the war. In Eastern Europe, Hungary wasn’t important in Soviet plans and Bulgaria did as instructed by mobilising its armed forces but nothing more. Mongolia and Afghanistan were home to Soviet garrisons and puppet governments that officially went to war with the West but their actual involvement was non-existent.

Ethiopia’s Derg forgot the assistance given in 1977 to it and publically declared neutrality. Communist Albania followed this principle of abandoning the Soviets on the public stage as well.

No one wanted to stand with the Soviets unless they were made to.

*​

In the half-deserted Washington – anyone who could afford to had left the city – Ambassador Dubinin went to the State Department an hour after war had began to see Chuck Grassley. There was a Swissair flight waiting at Andrews airbase, but before that Dubinin had another message to deliver to the US Government.

Details of what was said, the ‘ultimate ultimatum’ as it later became known, were only revealed twelve years later during the 2000 Presidential Election campaign: such was the secrecy surrounding it. Through his ambassador and the Secretary of State, Chebrikov communicated directly with President Reagan (bypassing the Hot Line at the Pentagon which wasn’t used during the war) only once to state that if nuclear, chemical, biological or radiological weapons were used against Soviet or Soviet-led military forces then there would be an overwhelming retaliation. Chebrikov was holding Reagan personally responsible for the actions of other Western nations armed with such weapons too. No negotiation would be made on the matter and all Dubinin had to say was that the Soviet Union had no intention of making use of such weapons first whatever the military circumstances.

Once Dubinin was gone, and Grassley himself on his way out of Washington up to New York and the United Nations where he would spend much of the war, the Secretary of State would inform his president that he didn’t believe the validity of the Soviet demand upon the United States. The Soviets would surely use such weapons if their country was being invaded or facing massive and overwhelming conventional military defeat outside their borders.

As a newcomer to the Reagan Administration, Grassley wasn’t involved in later discussions surrounding this matter where Frank Carlucci, Howard Baker, Colin Powell and William Webster were. Grassley’s assessment was part of their talks on this issue because he had been the one dealing with Dubinin personally, but his opinion was only minor. Reagan’s key advisers believed that the Soviets would use weapons of mass destruction at a moment of their choosing, when they saw either strategic or tactical advantage in doing so. Webster also put forth the notion that Chebrikov was trying to be really clever and put immense strains on the NATO alliance by having the United States keep a suspicious eye on the British and French less they use weapons of mass destruction that would result in the deaths of millions of Americans.

Something that Reagan’s advisers didn’t inform their President about was a later comment from Grassley that he made upon some reflection. The Secretary of State was up in New York and had been thinking about exactly what Dubinin had said and its hidden undertones. He told the grouping of the Defence Secretary, the White House Chief-of-Staff, the National Security Adviser and the Director of Central Intelligence that he believed that Chebrikov was trying to show a somewhat reasonable side to him; the Soviet leader was showing that he was thinking of post-conflict relations by saying that it wasn’t his intention to destroy the United States in nuclear fire. Grassley’s thoughts on this were communicated just before news came that Cuba had attacked the United States directly and so they certainly weren’t pondered over aboard the E-4 Domesday Plane that Reagan and his top people were aboard circling high over the Carolinas due to the sudden focus on Florida.





Ninety

Throughout the few hours of darkness, fighting continued across northern and western Scandinavia. Soviet forces tried to meet their objectives and build upon the successes that they had in the Arctic stages of RED BEAR while NATO and Swedish forces tried their best to stop them.

Each opposing side inflicted losses upon the forces of the other as they waited for daylight to arrive and the chance to further their war aims.

*​

The three combat divisions on the left wing of the Soviet Sixth Army’s wide advance entered the Finnish Wedge in strength. The 54MRD was in the lead with the 37MRD close behind and then the 71MRD slowly trailing the two others but preparing to break away and cross the river to the west when daylight came. This night-time movement of more than forty thousand troops (the divisions and separate engineering units) was known to be a risk by the field army’s commander due to the thick snow on the ground and the terrible weather, but the army’s left wing needed to be in-place by the morning.

PT-76 light tanks, MT-LB armoured personnel carriers (plus MT-LBU specialised armoured support vehicles), BTR-60 armoured infantry fighting vehicles and 2S9 self-propelled mortars rolled up Highway-21 through Kuttanen and towards Vukkuri. There was significant off-road movement too with the MT-LBs and MT-LBUs having a low ground pressure and being able to travel over broken terrain better than the other armoured vehicles and the mass of trucks with this movement.

NATO couldn’t miss this drive up towards the edges of the defences of the Fortress Norway position and the British especially didn’t like the idea of such a large armoured force bearing down upon their lone battalion of Paras. Special forces teams on the ground reported-in and then a lone Dutch NF-5A light fighter (the Royal Netherlands Air Force had a squadron of these committed to the north of Norway) flashed over the advancing Soviets to get a better visual confirmation. SAMs lanced upwards and knocked the little aircraft to the ground but Soviet mobile flanking units couldn’t get anywhere near the commandos that melted away when confronted with overwhelming fire power.

3 PARA hadn’t been committed to its position inside the Finnish Wedge to suddenly withdrawn at the first sign of trouble. Brigadier Chaundler made sure that there would be air support available for his Paras and was pleased when both RAF Harrier’s and US Navy A-6Es – now flying from Evenes – were promised to be available to add to the fire power from some of his own dedicated armed helicopter support.


Using an L-shaped ambush, 3 PARA hit the advance guard of the 54MRD hard about fifteen miles (as the crow flies) short of the Norwegian border. The 790th Independent Reconnaissance Battalion was in the lead along with elements of the 251st Motorised Rifle Regiment. Soviet PT-76s and MT-LBs blew up in spectacular fashion when MILAN missiles hit them or when they ran over anti-tank mines buried in shallow graves in the snow. Command vehicles, those with distinctive antenna denoting them as such, were a firm favourite for the Paras designated as missilemen. When crewmen tried to escape from burning vehicles and infantry deployed from others, the Paras had fields of fire carefully zeroed-in for their bulky 12.7mm heavy machine guns and lightweight 81mm mortars. Anti-personnel mines, some spread by helicopter, assisted in the slaughter that became of the Soviet troops whose red blood stained the white snow.

The Soviets fought back. The 54MRD wasn’t an elite unit, but this was the Soviet Army after all who knew all about indoctrination and turning men into machines. Cowardice was something that would guarantee a firing squad and no soldier, even one serving for a totalitarian regime, likes to see his friends and comrades killed. Vehicles crewmen braved murderous barrages of missiles to close and engage with their attackers and men ran through walls of machine gun fire. Try as they might though, the Soviet troops had a terrible time in trying to fix and engage British positions. The Paras had quickly learnt all that they could about this ground from where they fought and weren’t prepared to be flanked or overrun; they kept falling back into further positions, especially when Soviet artillery and mortars started falling.

Night vision goggles, which had been ‘borrowed’ from American war stocks, were put to good use by some of the Paras to engage spotted leaders of men who tried to get the Soviet troops organised and into the fight where they would have numbers on their side. The immediate effort by the 54MRD to commit the rest of the 251st Regiment quickly into the fight was broken up with more MILANs fired from positions so far silent and further back down the line from the front of the ambush.


The 54MRD had it’s own artillery regiment under command with towed 122mm howitzers, multiple-barrelled rocket launchers and potent anti-tank guns. Those D-30 howitzers and the BM-21 rocket launchers were quickly called into action with some firing requests actually made rather close to where Soviet troops were fighting and dying. The artillery was rapidly in action with a fierce barrage launched against the Paras who heard the distant rumble just before they got the warning to get their heads down in the foxholes that they had struggled so hard to successfully build. That warning of incoming artillery came from RAF liaison officers on the ground with 3 PARA who were in radio contact with Harriers operating over the battlefield. The Harriers swooped in low and dropped 500lb high-explosive bombs across many of the artillery batteries with their infrared systems helping them immensely against such active targets.

The RAF saw the loss of two of the four Harriers used by SAMs with both pilots killed, but 3 PARA took heavier casualties from the interrupted artillery barrage. 122mm shells fell among the deployed so far from home and so did unguided rockets of equal calibre – more than fifty Paras were killed, a tremendous loss in a single enemy barrage.

Oftentimes in combat, when faced with an artillery barrage or in the face of the enemy using close air support, troops from one side will rush forward to close in combat with their enemy on the ground so that no more shells of bombs will be employed by the side with fire support in an effort not to kill their own men: 3 PARA stayed in their foxholes. Their Soviet opponents had suffered under the barrage worse than they had from ‘friendly’ artillery and that usual strategy was not something that they wished to try tonight. Instead, they waited for further Soviet advances to be made…

…which didn’t take long in coming.


The two other motorised rifle regiments of the 54MRD were unleashed by the deputy divisional commander, a Colonel who had just seen his General go forward to artillery concentration before NATO aircraft started bombing them. One regiment went straight up the highway to push through the battered 251st Regiment while the other regiment tried to move off-road to the right-hand side. In addition, there was still the divisional tank battalion to be committed to action if this fresh push to overrun the ambush ahead didn’t work.

This movement of many armoured vehicles came at the moment when air support from both sides appeared over the battlefield at the same time. Nine A-6s came in from the north laden with Rockeye cluster bombs (carrying thousands of anti-tank bomblets overall) as well as Sidewinder air-to-air missiles for self-defence. Soviet Mi-24 Hind helicopters had been ordered airborne at that time too to aid in the covering of vehicles on the ground. The pilots of the attack-bombers and the armed helicopters were all operating in zero visibility with only their radars and infrared systems to aid them. Snow fall over the region effected detection while there were itchy trigger fingers among Soviet SAM operators on the ground. The lead flight of a quartet of A-6s fired off Sidewinders against some of the Hinds when they were at once spotted and then carried on with their bomb runs – each aircraft had four bombs each with just short of two hundred and fifty bomblets. Three of those helicopters went down without knowing what was going on and then came SAMs being launched from the ground too.

When anti-aircraft gunfire filled the skies too along with all of those SAMs the second flight of A-6s avoided the centre of the battlefield where all the ‘action’ was to loop around to the east before swinging back west and then escaping via Swedish airspace. Over a hundred armoured vehicles, the 281st Regiment, slowly moving across difficult terrain suddenly came to their attention though and the US Navy pilots had no hesitation in dropping their cluster bombs over these instead. One A-6 was hit and exploded in mid-air when a SAM struck it – the Soviets seemed to have an endless supply of such weapons – but that was only after that aircraft and the other four with it had dropped their weapons. Though they didn’t know it, the US Navy had just saved 3 PARA from being surrounded and certainly doomed.


The stocks of MILAN missiles brought with 3 PARA fast ran out and rounds fired from Carl Gustav recoilless rifles struck Soviet vehicles with success but didn’t knock them out of action like the bigger missiles did: infantry squads from MT-LBs and BTR-60s would generally escape from those hit vehicles. 3 PARA was never meant to make a stand and so the Paras started to fall back to rally positions when friendly air cover was overhead.

That air cover came in the form of Gazelle and Lynx helicopters from the Army Air Corps. The smaller helicopters had rocket pods and light machine guns with the bigger helicopters armed with TOW missiles. Neither model could compete with the Soviet Hinds when those appeared though. Air-to-air missiles were fired from the Hinds at the Gazelles and the Lynxs with reasonable success. Only the intensive ground fire that was decidedly ‘unfriendly’ and the lack of numbers of Hinds after those American A-6s had got lucky allowed the British helicopters to avoid an aerial slaughter: nonetheless, four of the fifteen helicopters committed were shot down aiding the withdrawal of the Paras on the ground.

Behind the retreat that the British were making, the Soviet artillery was being readied to fire again after the initial devastating air attack when more RAF Harriers came back for a re-run of their attack. Three swooped in low this time and dropped more 500lb bombs, especially focusing on trying to hit the BM-21s that had so hurt 3 PARA before. Air Operations staff from the Soviet Sixth Army had been on the radio to the 54MRD’s air defence commander just beforehand complaining about Soviet helicopters being shot down and so no SAMs filled the skies to challenge the Harriers, which afterwards escaped without losses.

Fleeing as fast as possible to their rally points where Chinook helicopters were soon to pick them up, 3 PARA left behind a scene of carnage. Nearly eighty of their comrades had lost their lives and another thirty plus badly-wounded men were being dragged away with them. In addition, crew-served weapons – MILAN firing posts and M2 heavy machine guns – had been left behind alongside a lot of other equipment in the rush to get away before the Soviet troops could finally sort themselves out. It would be a while before 3 PARA could again conceivable see action, but they had caused a hell of a lot of damage.


54MRD was shattered with two of the three motorised rifle regiments having taken upwards of fifty per cent losses. The artillery regiment had suffered to heavy bombing strikes and the reconnaissance battalion was wiped out nearly to a man. The third rifle regiment had taken a few losses but was combat effective along with the independent tank battalion (that formation had forty T-80 main battle tanks on strength whereas both the 37MRD & 71 MRD fielded old T-55s) and both were ready to go northwards along Highway-21. The main road was littered with burning Soviet vehicles as well as mines on and off-road though. There was now no way that the division was going to reach the Norwegian border before dawn to be ready to attack fixed defensive positions there. Instead, the weaker 37MRD was going to have to move through the smashed division with engineers trying to clear the effective minefields laid. 71MRD was due to make a sharp turn to the west, cutting across the most-northern reaches of Sweden just south of this battlefield and through a barren valley between the mountains, but would now move much slower than planned due to worries over a similar ambush.

As planned, the Soviet movement to contact had been badly delayed, though NATO forces had taken heavy losses in doing so in men and aircraft.


One Soviet objective in this area had been met though with two companies of airmobile troops from the 36th Brigade loaded into what few transport helicopters remained down at Enontekio and reaching the Saana peak. This snow covered mountain rested just a couple of miles from the Norwegian frontier and the Soviet troops who occupied it and the lowland where Highway-21 ran right alongside it were now inside the Skibotn Valley then ran across into Norway. It was a commanding position from where artillery observation would be very effective and a good forward raiding point.

NATO aircraft would appear in the morning though to respond to this seizure and that response wouldn’t be pretty.

*​

While British attention had been focused upon the top of the Finnish Wedge, with the Norwegians and the United States Army gathering forces to meet a Soviet drive out of there, US Marine Corps senior officers had been looking further to the north and east at the situation around Alta. The right wing and the central columns of the Soviet ground advance had been converging towards there ready it seemed to afterwards come at Fortress Norway from that direction too along the jagged coastline.

During REFORGER, the II Marine Expeditionary Force (II MEF) had been assigned to Norway with the 2nd Marine Division and 2nd Marine Air Group under command. A brigade (the 6th) from the division had been tasked for the Mediterranean, but two more of Marines were sent to the top of Scandinavia. A flotilla of amphibious ships had brought the 4th Brigade and a lot of equipment and supplies across the North Atlantic while the personnel of the 8th Brigade had been flown in to meet up with stored weapons. During peacetime, Norway hadn’t wanted foreign forces in-place on its shores, but with REFORGER the Marines linked up with everything that they had long ago stored inside Norway. There was also some Canadian military equipment in warehouses that wasn’t going to be used after the Ottawa Government had decided to concentrate its troops in southern Germany rather than in Norway.

Marine Reservists – a battalion of riflemen from Massachusetts and tanks from upstate New York – had further boosted the US Marines contingent in Norway with the bulk of the forces behind deployed on the ground in the Narvik area while their assault shipping was spread along the Vestfjorden using natural cover against air or missile attacks.

II MEF wasn’t a defensive force but rather seen by the US Marines as a counterattack force designed to strike from the sea against invading forces. The deceased Commander Northern Norway had wanted to employ II MEF in Fortress Norway holding ground and the overall AFNORTH commander had acceded to that request on a political level. The new commander on the ground up here in the Arctic – another Norwegian – was more amenable to the suggestion when put to him that the II MEF could be put to better use in attacking the Soviets before they concentrated in strength. He had agreed to 3 PARA going down into the Finnish Wedge and was as well talked into letting the US Marines go off and effectively do their own thing.


Throughout the night, helicopters transferred Marines to amphibious ships that were racing out of the shelter offered by the Vestfjorden and steamed out into the Norwegian Sea. A CH-46D Sea Knight and a CH-53E Super Stallion, both heavy-lift helicopters, crashed during these missions to get the men they were carrying aboard fast moving ships with the crew and Marines being rescued from the former helicopter but everyone aboard the latter being lost.

Five big amphibious assault ships were to where the Marines were flown by helicopters all during the hours of darkness. USS Saipan, USS Nassau, USS Guadalcanal, USS Austin, USS Nashville and USS Trenton all had big flight-decks for those Marines to land upon while other amphibious support ships were present in the armada that was racing to reach the target area to send the II MEF into action. Getting there before dawn was not going to happen due to the time delays in gaining authorisation and ensuring air support for their operation.

That air support came in the form of Striking Fleet Atlantic. The losses from the AV-MF air attack had been bad and many defensive missiles had been expended, but the carrier group was still functioning after a limited re-supply. The two aircraft carriers were undamaged and many aircraft flew from their flight-decks. One ship detached itself from the bulk of Striking Fleet Atlantic and joined the half dozen big amphibious assault ships: USS Wisconsin. Six of her nine barrels for her main gun barrels were still operational and could throw massive sixteen-inch shells into action in support of the US Marines; the battleship had her dozen five-inch guns as well as the batteries of Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles. Naval Gunfire Support was soon to be employed by the US Navy up on the Norwegian coastline.

Absent from the flotilla of US Navy amphibious ships were their RN counterparts. British ships that would carry Royal Marines (and a battalion off Dutch marines too) had stayed behind in the Vestfjorden for the time being. The Royal Marines were meant to contribute a third combat brigade to the II MEF order of battle, but Brigadier Robin Ross had been adamant that his 3rd Commando Brigade wasn’t going to the Alta area. There had been confirmation of this from the War Cabinet back in London and so the Royal Marines stayed behind waiting to be used as a ‘fire brigade’ force elsewhere.

Many naval reconnaissance Bears had been shot down over the past few days and NATO intelligence wondered whether the Soviet Navy would continue to send them far out over the North Atlantic in the face of such opposition to them. However, northern Norway was much closer to the Kola Peninsula and there were also Ilyushin-38M May maritime surveillance aircraft that could be flown on reconnaissance missions from there too. The Bears and Mays would guide Backfires towards the II MEF’s ships should they get the opportunity, especially with those raketonosets having such a ‘good’ war as they were. There was a great deal of nervousness with this operation, but the US Marines were eager to go and get into combat to deny Soviet forces the opportunity of taking the communications centre that was Alta and then massing to come at Fortress Norway in strength.

When morning came, the worries would either be confirmed or be avoided.

*​

Two squadrons of RAF Buccaneer S2B maritime-rolled attack-bombers had been sitting inside HAS’ at RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland since the war’s opening waiting to conduct maritime strike missions. No. 12 and No. 208 Squadrons had stocks of Martel and the newer Sea Eagle anti-ship missiles ready to smash into Northern Fleet warships that were expected to sortie into the open ocean. With no sign of that happening, the Buccaneers were released overnight to the 3 ATAF's direct control in a land-attack mission alongside RAF Tornados and USAF F-111s.

There were two separate strike missions made against the Soviet-occupied portions of southern Norway with the Buccaneers being present in each using their Martel missiles in the anti-radar role. Sola airfield was hit first and then Flesland airbase. RAF Lightnings provided fighter cover for stand-off missile attacks and then low-level bomb runs. The runaways were targeted at both facilities and so too were SAM-launchers that the Soviet paratroopers had with them. In addition, towed howitzers that were on the ground to support the paratroopers were sought out so that they couldn’t intervene in the next day’s planned landing operation.

There was varying success in these attacks, particularly with the 3 ATAF wanting to concentrate its strength in repeating their first night’s air attacks over Germany. Not as many aircraft as first envisaged were launched against Bergen and Stavanger and it would have been better if F-15s had been present for close-in fighter support. Six NATO aircraft were downed by SAMs and a flight of MiG-25s transiting through Flesland. One of the two runaways at Sola was littered with anti-runaway bombs enough to stop flight operations for a while though the other would soon be cleared for use. The lone tarmac strip at Flesland was closed for flight operations for some time when not only was a heavily-laden Il-76 Candid transport aircraft bombed on the runaway itself – and its cargo of aircraft-delivered bombs being flown in detonated – but one of the F-111As used in the air attack smashed into it too and broke apart into seemingly hundreds of pieces.

That second runaway at Sola and the long taxiway at Flesland could still be used afterwards, especially for fighter aircraft in the case of the latter rather than the arrival of big transport aircraft. The SAM and artillery batteries on the ground had been hit at though with only moderate damage. Optimism prevailed in NATO ranks though that they had done a lot of damage and their plans for the next day would be able to go ahead, especially with HMS Invincible coming southwards at full speed to assist in those.

[James G]

Ninety–One

Two mornings in a row had seen a massive Soviet ground assault come at first light after the hours of darkness beforehand had seen air activity and immense artillery barrages. General Kenny, British Second Army commander, didn’t expect anything less to happen on the third morning.

Throughout the night, as bombing missions were conducted close to and far behind each side of the frontlines, General Kenny had his engineers at work. Many of the initial frontline defences had been slowly abandoned all across the front and so there were many more to build. Anti-tank and anti-personnel mines were laid in their thousands, anti-vehicle ditches were constructed and obstacles left littering the countryside. Using tree trucks and earth, thousands of fighting positions for tanks and armoured vehicles were assembled; many more foxholes for infantry were built with men’s bare hands. The focus was on creating fall-back positions and overlapping fields of fire so that the British Second Army could continue fighting to defend Soviet efforts to break out onto the North German Plain.

Two days of warfare had seen the Soviet First Western Front get nowhere. The penetration made yesterday had been counter-attacked and that area quickly drowned in further defences on the ground there.

Up on the Luneburg Heath, the Dutch I Corps had been fully committed to battle and had held up the right-wing of the Soviet Second Guards Tank Army. The towns of Lunenburg and Uelzen had been abandoned, but the Dutch had established blocking positions several miles away from Autobahn-7. Small fires raged across empty fields and woodland while little villages had been shelled into ruin. Unless a major Soviet effort was made, the Dutch were going to hold their ground.

The West German I Corps had lost one of their divisions – the remaining troops of the 3rd Panzer Division now being reformed in the rear rather than at the front as was first tried – but the British 3rd Armoured Division was now under command. To the east of Celle and looping around Wolfsburg to the north and east this mixed Bundeswehr and British force was holding its ground. The remainder of the Soviet Second Guards Tank Army and the East German 1MRD with the Soviet Third Shock Army had had shot their bolt and were not going to be making any further major combat operations.

Holding the majority of the Soviet Third Shock Army and the Polish Second Army away from Wolfsburg, Braunschweig, Wolfenbuttel, through the Harz Mountains down to Goslar and then Gottingen were the British I Corps (reinforced by the 2nd Infantry Division) and one of the divisions of the Belgian I Corps. These five divisions were holding a large portion of ground and were in the most vulnerable position of all those troops under General Kenny’s command.

Two groups of uncommitted reserves were still sitting ready. The US III Corps was waiting to be sent into action when Soviet second echelon made an appearance. There was more than a little eagerness on the part of the Americans to get themselves into battle after being denied the chance to do so the previous day. The second reserve group was the Kampfgruppe Weser, now with the Belgian 16th Armoured Division replacing the missing British unit and serving alongside the West German 7th Panzer Division. The Bundeswehr troops had seen combat the day beforehand with some mild losses taken while the Belgians were hesitant about seeing full-scale fighting: there was no rush on the part of Kampfgruppe Weser to be committed again to the fight.

Three opposing field armies had been committed into action on the North German Plain with a fourth one – identified by NATO intelligence as being the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army – being ready to move forward in exploitation. The British Second Army outnumbered this force of Soviet, East German and Polish troops, though there were other field armies lined up behind ready to come forward and overwhelm General Kenny’s command once the way could be opened up for them to do so.


Just as General Kenny feared, the Soviet Third Shock Army and the Poles smashed hard into his forces south of Braunschweig with a clear ultimate aim of striking for the distant Leine and Weser Rivers. The usual mass barrages of artillery came first, though there was only a slight delay before the major ground forces started moving rather than a wait until those howitzer shells, mortar rounds and rockets had done their worse. Tactical surface-to-surface missiles were used in abundance on this occasion and ground attack aircraft pushed their attacks home despite fierce NATO fighter opposition.

It was almost like the attacks on previous days hadn’t been really serious.

There were no attacks made against random targets behind the battlefield where NATO forces weren’t gathered, but rather against British and Belgian support troops in the rear. There was much counter-battery fire directed from those NATO gunners against the mass of Soviet and Polish artillery, but the latter had far more guns to spare.

Four separate divisional-sized attacks came across the frontlines as the morning brought a storm of wind and rain all across the North German Plain to add to the maelstrom of gunfire and explosions.

There were few dedicated reconnaissance units involved on the Soviet and Polish side because such formations had been massacred in previous attacks. Divisional and regimental reconnaissance battalions and companies had been torn apart and only platoons attached to individual combat-manoeuvre battalions were available. In addition, there were few infiltration attacks made by dismounted infantry to sneak forward using stealth and get among the lines of the defending troops to hit them as the main body of attacking troops came forward. SAM-launchers, mobile anti-aircraft guns and Tunguska combined missile & gun vehicles were present in great numbers to defend against the air attacks the begun the moment the divisions got moving.

On the right, the Soviet 21GMRD passed through the lines of the battered 120GMRD while three Polish motorised rifle divisions made attacks further down the line. The troops were pushed forward by senior commanders in the face of immense defensive fire that should have caused them to pause and try a find a way around such withering fire directed against them. Polish Air Force MiG-21s, so far held back for air defence missions deep inside East Germany, were released in great numbers to cover the advancing ground troops and – though their pilots weren’t told this – become missile bait for NATO aircraft.

Lieutenant-General Peter Inge was quick to realise that his forces were in trouble. Even the Belgian 1st Infantry Division, which had been holding its ground remarkably well for two days, was reporting that it couldn’t hold back the tide of attack while his British Army formations were in even worse trouble.

The British 1st ‘Rhino’ Armoured Division had for two days been fighting off attacks from the Soviet 120GMRD and destroyed that formation… at a great cost to itself with the Rhino Division at less than half-strength effectiveness. When engaged by a fresh combined arms division rolling towards it, the Rhino Division couldn’t hold its ground anymore. The following two formations in-line – the 5th Infantry and 4th Armoured Divisions – were each being engaged heavily with only the terrible weather and set-piece ambushes using massed anti-tank missile teams slowing down the fresh Polish troops being thrown against them in a sacrificial fashion.

After talking with his superior, General Inge was forced to order his troops to start falling back through their defensive lines. There were safe passage lanes through minefields to be used and anti-tank ambushes would be set up everywhere with stay-behind troops to delay an onrush of Polish armour. Until the attacking Soviet and Polish troops would be strung out some and heavily damaged the most prudent thing to do if the NATO position here was to be held was to withdraw.

NATO aircraft were at once committed in great number to the battle that went on all through the morning as the British and Belgian troops on the ground commenced their ‘retrograde manoeuvre’.

The Soviet and Polish troops meanwhile kept advancing.


Far to the south, Soviet forces built upon their previous day’s success in occupying the majority of the Fulda Gap and kept on moving forwards. The Soviet Eighth Guards Army had been battered in overcoming the forward defences of the US V Corps but the army commander had pushed his men on all through the night. There were penal battalions consisting of men who were insubordinate, defeatist and malcontent which were pushed towards the new American lines by KGB men with machine guns: among such men were former senior officers stripped of their ranks and now privates, including one who had been the general commanding the shattered 93GMRD only the other day.

Three divisions advanced forwards with two in front (27GMRD & 39GMRD) and one trailing behind (the 79TD). The US 8th Mechanized Infantry Division had torn holes in the attacking 27GMRD the day before but there had been a cut in forward supply to the American troops and they had shot through so much of their ammunition that it was thought prudent by Major-General Calvin Waller to withdraw further backwards into better defensive ground. Alongside Waller’s command, the 3rd Armored Division pulled back further from the frontlines as well and better anchored its right flank on the positions now established in the Gelnhausen Corridor by the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division. There was broken terrain everywhere with steep hillsides and long valleys to be guarded, as well as Soviet paratroopers and airmobile troops still running around causing chaos, but to pull back as far as it did during mid-morning, the US V Corps believed that the incoming Soviet advance could be curtailed ahead of them in carefully-selected kill zones.

The quick actions of the Americans threw Soviet plans into disarray. Neither motorised rifle division hit any enemy force of major significance and the trailing tank division wasn’t pushed forward to follow-up any advance. General Snetkov was furious when he found out how the grand offensive forward that was going to stop him from getting shot wasn’t working out like he wanted to: the army commander in-place was relieved of his command and one of General Snetkov’s protégé’s quickly dispatched to take over. The Gelnhausen Corridor was still open to attack and it was down there that General Snetkov wanted the 79TD to advance… followed by the Soviet First Guards Tank Army. That tank division was quickly employed like a motorised rifle division and given much air and helicopter cover, the latter of which soon became engaged in furious air-to-air battles with American Apache helicopters.

As the morning wore onwards, the 79TD moved into the Gelnhausen Corridor from the northwest and begun to push back the American troops there using the weight of numbers that it had with regard to tanks: three hundred T-80s. The M-60A3 tanks fielded by the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division scored many good hits on these heavily-armoured monsters and so too did many anti-tank guided-missile teams, but there were so many of them and the Soviet tanks kept on coming. The 79TD took Neuhof and then ran through Flieden – two burning towns along Autobahn-66 – with the intention of reaching the entrance to the Kinzig Valley.

Like the attention focused by the British Second Army on the Harz Mountain’s western slopes, the US Seventh Army now saw that everything in their sector depended upon keeping the Soviets out of the Kinzig Valley. So much ammunition had been shot through and supplies were running out while everyone was waiting on resupply from the United States, but the new frontlines had to hold.

The coming battles of the approaching afternoon were going to be all important.





Ninety–Two

The drive northwards from the Kiel Canal up across Schleswig and across the West German-Danish border to reach Jutland didn’t take long for the pair of assigned East German Army tank divisions. After beginning their drive before dawn, they reached the border crossings near Suderlugum and Flensburg before 11am. The airbases at Eggebek, Husum and Jagel had all fallen into their hands during the run northwards though the naval base at Eckernforde had been bypassed due to stubborn resistance there. Nevertheless, despite Eckernforde and the Bundeswehr still holding onto Hamburg, the East German Fifth Army now controlled almost all of Schleswig-Holstein and the way ahead deep into Jutland was open for it to strike deep into.

However, the hold over this large region by occupying force was still rather tenuous as proven the day before… and was something that became painfully apparent on the war’s third day.

The 7TD & 9TD came to a stop in the border area when they ran out of fuel. They had gone through their entire divisional stocks of fuel which was needed for the hundreds of tanks, armoured vehicles and other vehicles under command in reaching as far north as they had, but no fuel trucks had come north to meet them. The West Germans had systematically stripped the region of civilian fuel supplies to leave nothing but a barren, dry wasteland for the East Germans. Promises had been made that fuel would be sent forward, but the 6th Panzergrenadier Division had done so much damage the day before that there were few fuel trucks left. Those remaining trucks had been assembled overnight to run north together behind the advancing tank divisions, but armed helicopters flying from the big Hamburg Salient made short work of them when they were out of Autobahn-7.

The Soviet 3GMRD still had fuel available, but this division was still unavailable for combat operations northwards as three regiments were engaged in squeezing the troops pocketed in Lubeck and also keeping the Bundeswehr troops in Hamburg for breaking out again on further raiding missions.

Those immobilised tanks at the entrance to Denmark quickly found themselves once again targeted by NATO air power, a situation made worse by their dry fuel tanks. The tanks couldn’t be manoeuvred into defensive emplacements expect with extraordinary effort in doing so and USAF F-16s rained bombs and missiles down upon them. SAM-launchers and anti-aircraft artillery units put up protective fire at first but then no resupply for them came up the blocked main roads that were obstructed with burning fuel trucks.

NATO intelligence quickly realised what was happening and urgent calls were made for further air support to take advantage of this situation where two tank divisions were sitting ducks and ready to be wiped out.


On Zealand, Soviet numerical weakness on the island truly started to show by this point in the war.

Danish troops from all across Zealand had moved overnight to enclose the Soviet naval infantry in an ever-tightening ring. No longer were these troops reacting to enemy light armour ranging seemingly everywhere: those tanks and armoured vehicles were concentrated trying to break into Copenhagen. Therefore, the Danes were able to bring their troops forward with little fear of attack to combat the naval infantry away from the frontlines near their nation’s capital.

There had been a hundred British-built Centurion tanks (constructed in the 1950s) on Zealand when the invasion had taken place and more than thirty had been lost to Soviet action over the first two days. The Danes should have massed them together and overwhelmed the lesser-armoured PT-76s, but had panicked far too much and used them in smaller groups. Forty plus of them guarded the approaches to Copenhagen with the Zealand Division, but the remainder were with smaller formations in the centre and west of the island. Those tanks had moved forwards under the cover of darkness and were unleashed in daylight.

Two battalions from the Zealand Life Regiment with motorised infantry, supported by nineteen of those Centurions, smashed into Soviet lines from the southwest and made a dash towards Koga itself. The harbour there was the centre of Soviet presence on Zealand and couldn’t be lost.

Helicopters attached to the 336th Guards Brigade were fast into action and made the Danish early morning advance come to a quick halt long before Koge could be reached, but a massive dent had been smashed through the perimeter of the naval infantry beachhead established on Zealand and Soviet troops cut off in many places. The naval infantry struggled to move themselves from exposed southern positions and then found that the Danes attacked once again after the helicopters were clear from the sky.

The 336th Guards Brigade was a small force with only two thousand four hundred men landed on Zealand on the morning of the 14th. By the 16th, nineteen hundred of them remained, but then another four hundred were either killed or captured by the Danish moves to smash them from the rear. It was a disaster for the 336th Guards Brigade, only compounded by their continuing failure to fulfil their earlier promising position of being within touching distance of taking Copenhagen but then pushed back from the city by NATO troops dug in there.


All across the Baltic Approaches, RED BEAR was now facing abject failure.

[James G]

Ninety–Three

Throughout the Eighties, formations of the United States Army National Guard (ARNG) had been undergoing re-armament and enhanced training regimes to allow the use of the long-established Total Force policy with regard to the ARNG being ready to serve overseas should the situation be necessary. ARNG units were present in every state – as well as in several territories too – and represented a huge wealth of American military manpower. Their equipment was often near up-to-date with certain states lavishing money on their under-command formations to equip such battalions, brigades and divisions for full-scale warfare. Getting them men who manned such formations fully trained for warfare was a complicated process with them being volunteers limited to the traditional ‘one weekend a month, two weeks a year’ policy, but the Pentagon had been making the effort.

All through early 1988, as the international situation got worse with Soviet hostile intentions becoming apparent, orders had gone out from the Pentagon for individual states to partially mobilise their ARNG forces. There were units assigned to NATO duties in Europe as per long-term tasking and many of those were stood up. Armour & infantry units, artillery formations, combat engineers, aviation assets and service support elements would all be needed in wartime Europe fully supporting the full-time regulars and the US Army Reserve (USAR).

Doing this brought about all sorts of problems. These citizen soldiers all had jobs and families that they didn’t want to be away from off training while state legislatures and governors didn’t agree with the President and the Pentagon over the need for their national guardsmen to be training for a foreign war that might not happen. The financial and social implications, as well as those annoying political ones, restricted the training and readiness of ARNG formations.

REFORGER didn’t see the movement of any ARNG unit while almost the entirety of the USAR went overseas to Europe. With REFORGER being a political move as much as a military one, it was thought just a little too much to deploy tens of thousands of national guardsmen overseas at such a stage. Instead, many formations across the country entered training grounds vacated by those troops already sent overseas and at once began ever further intensive preparation for possible combat while at the same time the political fiction could be maintained that they might not be deployed in Europe.

The catalyst for the ending of this fiction on the part of the Pentagon was the shooting down of those French aircraft on their way to drop humanitarian supplies over West Berlin. This act was one that secretly propelled the Soviet Union on the path to war, but it was also what made Secretary of Defence Carlucci request that President Reagan federalise the National Guard. Aviation assets from all fifty states – many of which flew advanced aircraft – joined ARNG units in coming under Pentagon command rather than those of their state governors. There were problems with this in Massachusetts and Minnesota, for different reasons in each, but there was general success in conducting a full mobilisation.

Ten divisions and twenty-two combat-manoeuvre brigades (or brigade equivalents) represented the ‘teeth’ of the ARNG. The fifty brigades – the divisions each had three – and two armoured cavalry regiments were spread nationwide from Alaska and Hawaii to Texas to New England and to Puerto Rico. Five of those divisions were assigned to NATO command for wartime operations alongside seven independent brigades and both reconnaissance regiments. Not every formation was fully ready for overseas deployment; this situation was mirrored with combat support and service support units as well.

Working off modified plans for conflict in Europe and also worldwide, the Pentagon moved as fast as possible to deploy the ARNG to where it was thought that its formations were going to be needed. There was a special focus made on getting high-readiness units in-place first, though the intention was for the whole of the ARNG to eventually be moved overseas or around the country itself to assist in national defence.

In Alaska, the brigade-sized 207th Infantry Group had been joined by the 41st Light Infantry Brigade from Oregon. Hawaii’s 29th Light Infantry Brigade left the Pacific island chain and deployed to Japan as an independent field formation with the US Eighth Army’s IX Corps there. Florida’s 53rd & Puerto Rico’s 92nd Light Infantry Brigades, neither of which was a high-readiness force with overseas commitments, both moved into defensive positions… something regarded as an excellent piece of preparation when Cuba entered the war and there were fears of commando operations being launched across the Caribbean.

Those ARNG units assigned to NATO were the main focus of the effort to get national guardsmen overseas and ready for full-scale warfare though.


Fort Sam Houston in Texas’ San Antonio was home in peacetime to the command staff of the US Fifth Army, a headquarters without operational units. The army commander Lt.-General William Schneider received orders late on March 10th that the US Fifth Army was being activated and sent to a near-certain war in Europe. ARNG formations exclusively were being attached to General Schneider’s army and he was to form his command up not in the continental United States but rather abroad: in western France.

Two corps commands – the IV and VI Corps – were activated from paper plans while six ARNG divisions and two independent reconnaissance regiments were all assigned to the Fifth Army. Much military equipment for General Schneider’s command had already been gathering at many ports on the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast ready to be shipped over, though more would be needed to be removed from storage sites nationwide. The men of his field army would all fly over, but everything else would have to be shipped across the North Atlantic… waters expected to be infested with Soviet submarines once hostilities commenced.

This reserve army that the Pentagon was sending to Europe was something that no other NATO power could muster and move over such a great distance as the United States prepared to do. However, General Schneider and those staff officers assigned to the US Fifth Army were all aware that they were commanding national guardsmen, not regular soldiers. There was immense patriotism among the tens of thousands of men that made up the ranks and many had military experience during previous full-time service, yet there was no getting away from the fact that this was still a formation of part-time soldiers sent as what was in effect a desperate measure because the West didn’t have nowhere near as many regular soldiers as the Warsaw Pact – the Soviet Union in particular – ready to be thrown into battle. What the US Fifth Army could actually achieve in combat was up for debate… with worrying answers given in private.


Using container ships and all eight fast sealift ships of the Military Sealift Command, most of the vehicles, equipment and supplies that the US Fifth Army would need began to arrive in western France late on March 16th. Five of those fast sealift ships had been in two big convoys that had come across the North Atlantic (having left before war had erupted) but were detached at the last minute from the collections of ships heading for the English Channel ports and instead sailed for Brest, St.-Nazaire and La Rochelle. The ship’s captains had been fuming during their journeys over having to keep up with the slowest ship in the convoys that they had been part of when they would have preferred to make daring high-speed runs – at thirty-three knots – across the North Atlantic themselves as modern day blockade runners.

Reaching these ports, they found that neither had yet to see air or missile attacks made against them by Soviet forces. A minefield had been detected on the approaches to Brest, but the French Navy was all over that and had swept a channel through those mines as well as declaring that they had sunk the submarine involved in placing it too. Ashore, unionised longshoremen who were patriotic Frenchmen as well waited ready to begin the process of unloading these first ships bringing the US Fifth Army to Europe.

Into Brest and St.-Nazaire came three ships: USNS Bellatrix, USNS Pollux and USNS Capella. Each displaced more than fifty-five thousand tons and they were loaded with tanks, armoured vehicles and other military equipment. Preparations had been made for the roll-on/roll-off facilities at both French ports to be best used so that the cargoes aboard the trio of ships could fast be unloaded and, if possible, the ships could depart tomorrow to head back across the North Atlantic. This cargo being unloaded at Brest and St.-Nazaire belonged to US IV Corps units: national guardsmen from Georgia, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.

At La Rochelle, the ships USNS Algol and USNS Altair docked and from them cargo for the new US VI Corps began to be unloaded. ARNG formations from Arkansas, California, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming would man some of these tanks and armoured vehicles. The roadstead at La Pallice was a very busy place and there were some worries over the potential of Soviet commandos – thought to be active in the interior countryside – making a dramatic appearance, but that was a fuss over nothing. The US VI Corps was going to land here on these ships and ones following afterwards.

For the next three days, the ships carrying the rest of the equipment for the US Fifth Army would arrive at these three ports, plus at Lorient and Nantes too, and then men of General Schneider’s command would begin flying in.






Ninety–Four

The Soviet attack on Fortress Norway came with both the 37MRD and 71MRD rolling through the positions of the beaten-up 54MRD and attacking into Norway territory through both Finland and Sweden. The 37MRD went straight up the final stretch of the Finnish Wedge and into the Skibotn Valley whereas the 71MRD moved in a northwestern direction and cut across the northernmost sliver of Swedish territory before entering Norway towards the Malselva Valley. These attacks came at first light and ran straight into the defences on the ground that Norwegian, British and American troops positioned there to defeat such an attack.

With a trio of divisions in the attack rather than just the pair – even with the assistance from the independent tank battalion and the remaining artillery from the 54MRD – the initial strike into the Fortress Norway position might have had more success. There would have been more forces available on the ground to manoeuvre around NATO defensive forces and a chance at a major exploitation effort when those Western troops were on the ropes.

Yet, at the same time, the left wing of the Soviet Sixth Army’s strike was hampered by other factors that would have come into play whether or not British paratroopers the evening before hadn’t so thoroughly trashed the 54MRD. To begin with, there was no strategic or even tactical surprise in the attack. NATO knew exactly what the Soviet Army was going to do just by looking at its pre-assault deployments and too the manner in which Swedish sovereignty had been abused since the outbreak of war. There was time for NATO forces to position themselves accordingly after their forward air and special forces reconnaissance spotted such a large force entering the Finnish Wedge, a geographic location only useful for an attack northwards into the heart of long-prepared Norwegian defences.

The Soviets couldn’t have anticipated that two squadrons of land-based US Navy FA-18Cs, plus another squadron (with the -18A model) flown by US Marines, more than thirty state-of-the-art multi-role strike-fighters, suddenly appearing over their formations right before the attack commenced and shooting down Soviet covering fighters while at the same time launching a fierce air-to-ground attack. Those Hornet strike-fighters caused a lot of destruction before heavy snow started to fall, especially to the three dozen wheeled vehicles that formed the striking arm of the 182nd Independent Rocket Artillery Regiment: more than twenty of those BM-27 Uragan multiple-barrelled rocket-launchers were destroyed before they could unleash their barrages of high-explosive rockets in support of both attacks.

The equivalent of two divisions overall – a mix of NATO forces – was expected to be positioned facing southwards against where the Soviet Sixth Army was meant to strike with those force belonging to separate commands which wouldn’t be able to work together well at first. Instead, even with Norwegian forces deployed facing in a northeastern direction in the Kafjorden area and the US Marines having one of their brigades at sea, there was still a force almost equal to three combat divisions on the ground where the attack was made with excellent command & control established between the various multinational forces. Rather than outnumbering their opponents, the Soviets were instead outnumbered themselves and attacked prepared defensive positions in bad weather – this was a recipe for failure.


The drive through the very top of Sweden and into the eastern reaches of the Malselva Valley could have taken the 71MRD to Skjold and then the strategically important Andselv area… had the Soviet division not ran into both American and Norwegian ground forces.

The United States Army had its 10th Light Infantry Division in this region with the two combat brigades, plus plenty of artillery and aviation support (the latter somewhat curtailed in the snowfall that hit northern Norway today), alongside the Norwegian 5th Brigade; this Norwegian formation being one of their better-armed and -organised units. Contrary of popular perception, the 10th Light Infantry Division was not mountain trained as it had been in WW2, though it was capable of operating in mountainous areas: among valleys for example. It was a ‘light infantry’ formation without tanks or heavy armoured vehicles and consequently it had been easily deployed from New York’s Fort Drum to Norway as part of REFORGER. There was no regular third combat brigade as part of the 10th Light Infantry Division and the assigned ARNG formation – the 27th Light Infantry Brigade from New York – had remained behind. Nevertheless, the men of the division were well-trained and motivated soldiers who went to Norway with much weaponry and capable of fighting in a full-scale war.

Commandos forward on reconnaissance – Green Berets from the USAR’s 11th Special Forces Group – spotted the first Soviet advance coming eastwards and it was noted that the attacking 71MRD was moving with one motorised rifle regiment up front behind the divisional reconnaissance assets while two remaining heavy regiments were moving behind them. There was little room in the eastern reaches of the valley coming westwards and the broken ground was covered with thick snow. In the absence of helicopter support due to the weather, some of the Green Berets conducted the first attacks launching TOW missiles at long range against command vehicles identified by their mounted antenna arrays. These pinprick attacks were dealt with by heavy return fire with mortars and missiles of their own, though unfortunately it was realised that the Soviets weren’t slowing down for such flanking attacks.

However the 71MRD came to a stop when its leading units hit the immense minefields laid south of the frozen lake Litle-Rostavatn though. Norwegian combat engineers had been very busy in planting hundreds of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines all over the area. PT-76s and MT-LBs blew up when they ran over these and infantry were killed in their dozens when they dismounted from vehicles. The minefield bled the divisional reconnaissance battalion white before Soviet engineers could clear improvised routes through this minefield and the lives of such skilled men were at great risk when hidden artillery observers started directed artillery fire from long distance at them. The 10th Light Infantry Division had three battalions of howitzers while the Norwegians had a battalion of their own. Such artillery were put to great use in not only targeting those engineers but stranded light tanks and armoured personnel carriers too.

The delay caused by the minefield allowed the defenders ahead to get into even better positions and they moved to engage the Soviet troops moving towards the communications centre of Skjold at the heart of the Malselva Valley. There were Norwegian troops operating in BV-202 armoured personnel carriers and even on snow-mobiles who moved fast across the valley sides and harassed the Soviets down below them. American soldiers from the 3/17CAV – the divisional reconnaissance squadron – tried to keep up with the Norwegians in using their HMMWV jeeps fitted with snow tyres, though they missed their helicopters a lot. With little chance for an ambush before the 71MRD reached the Malselva River itself, which when there it would have an opportunity to spread out, the NATO defenders sniped at their enemy from distance and waited for the weather to hopefully clear before that engagement could happen.

As luck would have it, just before the two opposing sides did clash in battle on the ground, the clouds did clear some and the snow stopped for a while. It was the Soviets who were able to react first to this, not NATO aircraft. Multiple flights of Sukhoi-17M2s came westwards and tried to drop their bomb-loads on NATO ground forces known to be operating in the Malselva Valley. They did get lucky on occasion and caused some casualties, but only through lucky hits – the Americans and Norwegians on the ground had concealed themselves very well. Redeye and Stinger man-portable SAMs chased after retreating Soviet aircraft though no NATO fighters appeared in time and the troops on the ground were left furious at their lack of air cover. This was all just a (bloody) prelude for the main fight in the valley though.

The 71MRD managed to get its regiments spread out with the 210th Regiment on the left and the 219th Regiment on the right with the 74th Regiment and the tank battalion (Soviet Army motorised rifle divisions in the Arctic and Caucasus often weren’t assigned a tank regiment as those elsewhere were) behind them. Surface-to-surface missiles slammed into the empty Skjold after lancing across from their firing positions in Finland and towed 2A36 howitzers from the army-assigned 5th Independent Heavy Artillery Regiment joined the 71MRD’s own artillery in massed fire missions.

Under the cover of this barrage, though without their own helicopter support because the clouds quickly closed back in again bringing more snow, the Soviet troops advanced. Losses were expected from the defenders, though no more than two brigades of Norwegian reservists were reported to be in-place according to intelligence reports. This major miscalculation cost the Soviets dear as waves of missiles and then artillery shells flew away from fortified positions all along the approaches to Skjold. The NATO forces here didn’t have a fixed linear position that the Soviets could focus upon, just strong-points in the hillsides with interlocking fields of fire. American counter-battery fire hurt the Soviet artillery force and efforts to close with NATO forces met with minefields arrayed to funnel advancing infantry and tanks into kill-zones.

The 71MRD brought forward its tank battalion in an effort to race towards Skjold and get behind the NATO positions all across the valley. The forty T-55 tanks lumbered across broken ground with their numbers being thinned from anti-tank mines and then long-range anti-tank missiles. The battalion commander was among the casualties and very soon afterwards so too was his deputy; company commanders took charge and prepared to follow their mission orders, but couldn’t agree among themselves which was to have the ‘honour’ of charging into Skjold first.

The Norwegian Army had something to say about that.

There was an anti-tank company assigned to the Norwegian brigade with sixteen armoured vehicles. Half of these were tracked M-113s fitted with twin-launchers for the TOW missile; the NM-142 vehicle was well-armoured. In addition, there were eight NM-116s as well. These were up-gunned, up-armoured and re-fitted M-24 Chaffee light tanks now in the ‘tank-destroyer’ role like the NM-142s were. Moving fast and in pairs of either missile- or gun-armed vehicles, the anti-tank company struck at the Soviet T-55s from multiple directions in a co-ordinated attack.

The T-55 could absorb head-on hits from the 90mm main guns that the NM-116s mounted, but not sideways or rear strikes; there was no protection offered against the heavyweight TOW missile. More than half of the tanks were wiped out in the space of five minutes for only a trio of Norwegian vehicles knocked out in return. To make matters worse, when the tanks pulled back there was further confusion in the ranks with company commanders forgetting how they were meant to defer to the man with most experience and instead arguing over the best course of withdrawal to take. This led the tanks to soon be moving all over the battlefield. A pair of them blundered into ‘friendly fire’ while another was blown up when it drove into a Soviet artillery strike. The demoralising defeat of the heavy tank force was witnessed all across the battlefield by other Soviet troops while those men in the NATO positions cheered such a defeat.

Clear skies soon afterwards brought aircraft and helicopters from both sides with USAF F-4s battling Soviet MiG-27Ks and therefore neither getting their bombs delivered onto ground targets. Mil-24 helicopters made an appearance in some number and NATO ground commanders were worried over the effectiveness of such armoured machines until AH-1F Cobras from the 2/25 AVN turned up and air-to-air helicopter duels ensued rather than Hind’s on attack missions. Under all of this air activity, the Americans lead a small-scale counterattack that soon turned into a full divisional advance that included the Norwegians too when it became how ready to flee that the Soviets were. There was an organised withdrawal, not a rout, but the Soviets pulled back too fast and left many units trapped behind and a battlefield littered with broken but repairable equipment that they should have taken with them.

Norwegian armoured vehicles and American Green Berets followed the 71MRD as it withdrew back east and soon reported back that the Soviets had only gone as far as the area to the south of the frozen lake where earlier they had run into that immense minefield. They would be back, probably during the following day, but for now a famous victory had been won.


Up in the Skibotn Valley, the fighting took on a different character.

In an attempt to follow their earlier success throughout the war with airmobile units, especially across Finmark and Lapland, a reinforced battalion from the Soviet 36th Brigade was sent forward in heavy-lift helicopters from the Finnish Wedge northwards. There were vehicles underslung beneath the helicopters and interceptors in the sky to provide fighter cover. However, the 37MRD (Reinforced) at once faced a defeat when SAM’s were fired at the helicopters. These were NOAH – Norwegian versions of the HAWK – models and a platoon of three launchers operated by the Norwegian Air Force was in the Skibotn Valley. These medium-range missiles with potent warheads smashed into Mil-6 and Mil-8 helicopters with ease and explosions lit the sky.

The airmobile effort to reach Skibotn at the northern end of the valley was at once abandoned.

Across the border from Finland came the lead reconnaissance elements of the 37MRD… and straight into withering defensive fire. The road that entered the valley was narrow with steep mountain sides at the entrance from Finland and the Soviets ran into a deployed brigade of Norwegian reservists. There were no outer defences of minefields and commandos to harass the Soviets during their approach march, just three battalions of light infantry dug-in across the snow-covered valley armed with man-portable heavy weapons. BRDM-1 armoured cars and BTR-60 armoured personnel carriers loaded with scouts erupted in furious explosions when 84mm anti-tank rockets from Carl Gustav recoilless rifles slammed into them. The Norwegians had howitzers nearby too: towed M114 guns that packed one hell of a punch.

Minefields covered company-sized strong-points throughout the valley entrance and the Norwegians had a lot of machine guns sited to cover defensive arcs of their own as well as neighbouring positions. It was their intention to hold out for at least the morning and maybe even all day if the Soviets were frightened off at the prospect of taking as many casualties as they might.

The Soviet divisional commander was shocked at such furious defensive efforts right on the border but he had a mission to perform. The night before had seen the arrest of the shamed commander of the 54MRD and that man’s fate wasn’t going to be pleasant. The 37MRD’s artillery was thus unleashed, a regiment reinforced with what guns had been taken from the 54MRD after the effective disbandment of that formation. 122mm and 152mm high-explosive shells, along with 122mm rockets, blasted the sides of the valley ahead as artillery spotters carefully directed every gun available against each strong-point in a methodical fashion to blast the Norwegians away.

Fast becoming aware of just what was going on and the fate that lay in store for them, the men of the Norwegian 13th Brigade wavered. Officers couldn’t stop men from abandoning their posts and heading for distant rally points away from the Soviet artillery fire directed where the defences were. The Major in-command of the brigade’s anti-tank company – NM-116s and NM-142s again – and the Lt.-Colonel commanding the 13th Brigade’s artillery both managed to keep their men under command, though the infantry were in disarray.

Behind the forward-deployed 13th Brigade, and into whose lines those units with unit cohesion remaining fell back towards, was the Norwegian 4th Infantry Division. This was a newly-established command, though one which paper plans for the creation of had long existed. Another three brigades of reservists manned this unit as it was positioned all across the Skibotn Valley in further defensive positions through with a strong armoured counterattack force ready to move forward to engage Soviet forces in a battle of manoeuvre.

By mid-morning, the 37MRD was again moving forward with only enough room being available for just one motorised rifle regiment to deploy on a narrow front at first. The MT-LBs carrying infantry travelled away from the road running towards distant Skibotn with light tanks and other vehicles sticking to that paved road that armoured snowploughs tried to keep clear. The valley got wider further northwards, deeper into Norway though and the 37MRD’s commander wanted to have his two regiments moving side-by-side.

The Soviets ran into heavy Norwegian defences before that.

Again there were strong-points all over the valley that the Norwegians manned. The 4th, 12th and 15th Brigades were deployed to channel the Soviets into kill zones for their machine guns, artillery and all of the minefields laid in the previous few days in a crazed effort to kill and main each and every invader. From hidden positions, Norwegian artillery opened fire as soon as the Soviets were in range and then the battalions of infantry on the ground clashed with slow-moving Soviet vehicles who struggled to engage Norwegian dismounted infantry in the snow-covered terrain. Air support for both sides was minimal with NATO aircraft facing heavy anti-aircraft defensive fire while Soviet aircraft found that E-3 airborne radar aircraft were directing interceptors towards them before they could get over the battlefield to drop their bombs.

The 37MRD had their own battalion of T-55 tanks and the battalion of newer T-80 tanks from the 54MRD under command too. Seeking to overcome the Norwegian defences fast rather than allowing the situation to become a long drawn-out matter as it was, the 37MRD’s commander had the two tank battalions rush forward as one tidal wave of armour right past the Norwegian strong-points and charging up the road towards Skibotn. It was a daring move with no infantry support, let alone engineering, air defence or supply units moving in what was a modern day cavalry charge, but one which appeared to pay off. Leopard tanks, the gun-armed NM-116s from four brigades and missiles from NM-142s also with those brigades all took the Soviet tank force under fire though that was a disjointed effort when faced with fast-moving tanks all tearing past defensive positions and not standing still to fight. The Leopards in particular – two companies of them were assigned to the 12th Brigade – did very poorly when faced with such opponents, even against the T-55s which on paper they should have slaughtered. A blinding snowstorm was ongoing at the time and the Soviet tank advance was crazy but the performance of the usually-deadly Leopards was not good.

The armoured juggernaut was very quickly past those forward defences and into the Norwegian rear areas. There were supply, maintenance and medical units on the road and either side on the valley sides, though the tanks didn’t stop to engage such service support units where they didn’t have to. Unlike an American or British division for example, the Norwegian 4th Infantry Division was short on such units apart from what was barely necessary. Lightly-armed men were massacred by tanks thundering past, but it was all over very quickly.

Following the road, it was fifteen miles from the scene of their breakthrough to the town of Skibotn. British troops from the 5th Airborne Brigade were just to the west but off the main road and the tanks missed an opportunity to tear into paratroopers resting from the previous day’s fighting and light infantry being alerted to move down southwards. Instead, they kept on racing for Skibotn…

…where the Royal Marines of 41 and 45 Commando were encamped.

The ‘door’ behind the tanks had closed as the Norwegians recovered and closed off the road while pinning the bulk of the 37MRD at the southern end of the Skibotn Valley. However, up at the northern end T-55 and T-80 tanks entered the village after which it was named. They thundered into the village whose locals had abandoned it on government orders but who hundreds of Royal Marines now called home instead.

A furious battle at once raged for the village between those Royal Marines and seventy-three heavy tanks – big and impressive armoured monsters who were fast going to run out of ammunition but before then whose crews were going to put up an epic fight.

[James G]

Ninety–Five

US Marines from the 2nd Marine Division began landing around the Altafjorden in the late morning after delays due to a submarine scare caused them to miss their scheduled early morning arrival. When it was later discovered that the submarine in question which had come so close to both the Saipan and the Guadalcanal had been Norwegian rather than Soviet, the Americans were rather annoyed… to put it mildly.

Last minute intelligence showed that forward Soviet reconnaissance units had reached the eastern shoreline of the fjord an hour before the US Marines set about getting ashore and so part of the landing was considered a ‘forced entry operation’ by those involved rather than the wider scale ‘unopposed landing’. The quick defeat of such a small Soviet force as was encountered allowed the US Marines to gain a quick if bloody victory and actually help boost morale throughout the Marine Riflemen of the 4th & 8th Brigades when news of it spread rather than cause long-term angst over not getting on land before the Soviet Army arrived in the area. Armed helicopters flying from the decks of the bigger Guadalcanal had engaged and destroyed the reconnaissance battalion from one of the Soviet motorised rifle divisions approaching the area, but it was regarded as a victory for the Marine Corps as a whole.


US Marines from the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment (3/2 MARINES) were the first ashore with helicopters depositing the battalion’s leading elements around the villages of Leirbotn and Kviby. There were expected to be survivors on the ground from that shattered Soviet reconnaissance battalion or even commandos, but the Marine Riflemen and the accompanying Force Recon teams couldn’t find any enemy to be engaged. Assault hovercraft and fast landing craft then begun to arrive and they brought ashore tanks and armoured vehicles. The US Marines was an ‘all-arms’ force with everything that its Marine Riflemen would need for combat support all under command and little reliance on sister-services.

M-60A3 main battle tanks, LAV-25 armoured personnel carriers & reconnaissance vehicles as well as plenty of HMMWV jeeps quickly arrived on the ground after rolling out of their landing craft. Two of the rifle companies of 3/2 MARINES quickly mounted the LAV-25s and the HMMWVs while the third company waited behind to be transported forward in another helicopter assault should the need arise. As the lead element of the operation, 3/2 MARINES now moved off in an eastwards direction. Four miles away, between which lay a little valley perfect for armoured warfare, lay the E6 Highway and the US Marines were to reach and hold a stretch of that before it reached the Altafjorden further to the southwest. Their initial opposition would be the thick snow on the ground which had to be fought through.

Across the rest of the sheltered Altafjorden, the majority of the rest of the 2nd Marine Division arrived after the first landing assault to the east. The six big amphibious assault ships that remained offshore at the entrance to the Altafjorden – protected by warships and aircraft from Striking Fleet Atlantic – had brought eight thousand US Marines with them up from the much bigger Vestfjorden and all of these were to come ashore. Helicopters were put to great use in conducting the landing operation, though there were also many landing craft used too making slower runs back-and-forth than the helicopters though carrying greater loads of men, vehicles and supplies.

The town of Alta lay in the southeastern reaches of the fjord named after it with the Altaelva River emptying into the Altafjorden alongside it and mountainous terrain in the distance in all directions. The Norwegian Army garrison here had been abandoned and then blown up with demolition charges (the Independent Alta Battalion had joined the new Brigade Finmark) and so too had the little civilian airport. The locals had all left as part of the mass evacuation of Finmark mandated by the Norwegian authorities. The US Marines – the rifle battalions were the 2/2 MARINES, 2/4 MARINES, 1/8 MARINES and 2/8 MARINES – thus found a deserted town when they arrived with deep snow engulfing the streets and cold, dark buildings. The lone bridge over the Altaelva River was down after being carefully blown up and there were warnings issued to the Marine Riflemen to stay away from the area around it as minefields had been sown there.


There were Norwegian liaison officers with the 2nd Marine Division, a few of which were men who knew that Alta area well and had served here. They were under orders to accompany the US Marines and were left with conflicting feelings when they arrived ashore. On the one hand, for the Americans to have their marines here was a good sign as this part of their beautiful country was about to be defended from enemy seizure rather than be left to the mercy of the Soviet invader. However, such officers were all widely-experienced and well-schooled military men who understood the notion of withdrawing in the face of a stronger enemy to a better defensive position. The Norwegian Army had not pulled back to the Fortress Norway position on a whim: it was decades-long strategy that they had employed. Even with the knowledge that allied NATO forces would deploy into Norway, the defendable terrain protecting an advance coming up from the Finnish Wedge as well as to the immediate east of the Lyngenfjorden was where the Norwegian Army was prepared to fight from and where allied assistance was supposed to concentrate too. The Norwegian 6th Infantry Division – with the bulk of Norway’s professional soldiers – was back there and standing ready to fight the Soviet troops fast approaching Alta.

Initially it had been thought that three Soviet divisions would transit through Alta on their way down to the Lyngenfjorden. However, the 131MRD was soon stuck in eastern Finmark trying to get past special forces teams making its journey hell along with extensive demolition that closed off their avenues of advance. Instead, the two divisions which had moved through the top of Lapland and entered southern Finmark closed-in upon Alta. They had come up from Karasjok to Lakselv first – where the 131MRD had failed to link up with them – before moving further westwards. The 69MRD mad moved cross-country in a straight line while the 77GMRD had followed the E6 highway by taking a looping route northwards before coming down towards Alta.

To those Norwegians with the US Marines, this two-division force vastly outnumbered the 2nd Marine Division in a manner which the Americans found disarmingly not something of great concern. There were seven regiments with the pair of divisions (the 77GMRD was the only Soviet Sixth Army division with a tank regiment rather than just an independent battalion) and what amounted to thirty-two combat-manoeuver battalions were fielded. In opposition, the 2nd Marine Division had brought just seven battalions with them after leaving their Marine Reserve battalions behind. Five battalions of Marine Riflemen, one battalion of tanks and another of armoured vehicles were all that consisted of the combat-manoeuver force on the ground and the Norwegian liaison officers were unimpressed by this small force which, in theory at least, was going to be outnumbered more than four-to-one by the invader. The strategy that the US Marines were going to undertake here at Alta was something else to give dread to those outsiders who were told of it because they doubted that it could be done.

The 2nd Marine Division expected that the Soviets would attempt to bypass Alta once they ran into the first ambushes that were being set up far away from the town. The highway was important, though it wasn’t everything and the Soviet Army wasn’t tied to roads like Western forces were. A regiment, maybe two at the most, was expected to be used to screen Alta while the Soviet divisions rumbled onwards. Instead of allowing this, the US Marines wanted to tear into Soviet flanks the moment that their enemy tried to manoeuvre around them and take control of this portion of central Finmark. Lakselv to the east could be seized in an airmobile counterattack, the Americans contended, and that much damage done to the 69MRD & 77GMRD that those divisions wouldn’t get anywhere near Lyngenfjorden – the Norwegian Army could move eastwards afterwards away from their defensive positions to join in the expected rout of the Soviet Sixth Army’s right-wing. There were AV-8B Harriers that could be operated from improvised air-strips and naval gunfire support available. The 2nd Marine Division could not only hold Alta, its confident senior officers assured their Norwegian liaison officers, but could turn it into a base of operations from where the war in northern Norway could be won from.

It was a bold plan indeed.


The destruction of the 77GMRD’s reconnaissance battalion by helicopter-missile attack was an unwelcome surprise for the Soviet troops advancing westwards. That battalion had already suffered grievous losses from more than two days of warfare when faced with minefields, commando attacks, extensive demolitions and the occasional air attack by roving Norwegian F-16s. At sixty per cent strength when attacked by AH-1T Cobra attack helicopters, the reconnaissance battalion had been moving towards Kviby when its light tanks and armoured vehicles were blown up after pop-up missile attacks and then fleeing troops massacred by machine guns and rockets. This diversion off the main road that it had originally been following had been due to reports of possible Norwegian forces operating in that area which the reconnaissance troops were meant to engage in-force before carrying on with their main mission of scouting the way ahead for their parent division. Radio signals from a Force Recon team on the ground ahead of the landing by 3/2 MARINES had brought about this situation where the battalion was engaged and the 2nd Marine Division making their strong landing there.

This destruction of their dedicated reconnaissance unit forced the commander of the 77GMRD to commit the reconnaissance companies from two of his motorised rifle regiments forward to lead the way for his division while wondering just what had caused such an enemy reaction to his west. The Kviby-Leirbotn area was to be bypassed by his division heading towards Alta by there were American helicopters operating in that area. A request was sent up the chain of command for the Soviet Seventy-Sixth Air Army to commit aircraft to scout westwards while the ground advance continued. Before an acknowledgement could come for this request there was the rumble of thunder out in that direction… but it wasn’t thunder.

The USS Wisconsin had last fired her guns in anger in 1952 against North Korean targets. Today, thirty-six years later, the Wisconsin – still wounded from being struck two days beforehand in the Soviet raketonosets attack – opened fire in anger again against a stretch of the E6 where a pair of its remotely-piloted vehicles (RPVs) had spotted the lead regiment of the 77GMRD. From a distance of fourteen miles away, shells from six of the working sixteen-inch gun barrels flashed across the sky and begun landing after less than a minute’s flight time. Those half dozen shells were all fused for ground burst and slammed into the highway and the troops moving along it. Unnoticed by those dying on the ground, cameras mounted in the RPVs overhead then helped the guidance of another six shells that arrived thirty seconds later. The guns on the distant Wisconsin could fire two rounds a minute and they were did just that with the rate of fire changing so that one round from each gun arrived every five seconds in a ripple-effect rolling barrage that moved away from the paved E6 highway as the Soviets desperately tried to get out of the firing coming from a monster of a warship that was quickly found to be untouchable in response.

Efforts by the 77GMRD’s trailing artillery regiment to direct counter-battery fire against the Wisconsin were woefully inadequate. The battleship wasn’t stationary and was heavily-armoured anyway; those shells fired in its general direction by Soviet howitzers came nowhere near it and even if they had they wouldn’t have had any important effect. Nevertheless, the artillery had exposed its position and using directional-finding radar, plus confirmation from one of the RPVs, the Wisconsin soon returned fire. The battleships’ big guns were busy and the smaller five-inch guns weren’t in range, but the Wisconsin had other weapons available.

All four missiles from one of the Mk.141 quadruple-launchers were fired and these RGM-84D variants of the Harpoon missile raced away from the battleship. The Harpoon was an anti-ship missile in design though it did have a land-attack capability when used at short range against fixed and unhardened targets. Harriers flying from the amphibious ships, part of a force heading inland to find and attack the 69MRD, would soon be following the missiles in engaging the Soviet artillery, but for now the barrage of Harpoon missiles represented the Wisconsin’s response to being taken under fire.

Meanwhile, those Soviet troops of the 77GMRD’s 481st Regiment died under the barrage of massive shells sent against them. The E6 highway was now blocked for the time being with the Soviet division moving towards Alta from the northeast not going anywhere.


Away to the east, aircraft flown by US Marines managed to locate elements of the 69MRD moving westwards. Harrier pilots used infrared detection systems to guide them towards the heat given off by hundreds of vehicles moving through the snow-covered wastelands of central Finmark; detachments of Marine Riflemen tasked to Force Recon duties had been deposited by helicopter onto many peaks overlooking roads too. The Soviet division was manoeuvring around the hilly ground of the Stabbursdalen National Park and taking its time in doing so when the first air attacks began.

Two attack squadrons usually based at MCAS Cherry Point in North Carolina, VMA-231 and VMA-331, had come to the Altafjorden with the bigger amphibious ships and the Harriers were flying from the flight-decks of those mini aircraft carriers once all of the helicopters laden with troops and then later supplies had gotten clear. Each squadron was assigned twenty aircraft in peacetime though with accidents and maintenance issues, four of those were unavailable for flight operations over the Altafjorden and the surrounding area. Another four aircraft had been re-tasked with attacking those guns that had so foolishly fired upon the Wisconsin, but there were still more than thirty Harriers available to attack the 69MRD as it was strung out in its forward movement westwards.

SAMs raced up from the ground followed by mass barrages of anti-aircraft artillery shells, but the Soviets took losses from dropped bombs and strafing with canon fire. Three Harriers would eventually fall to defensive fire, yet they had helped destroy a significant portion of the Soviet division that they attacked and left it routed and in confusion. For the time being, the 69MRD was going nowhere as it struggled to recover from the air attack that it had suffered all the while knowing that those aircraft would be back.


Without directly engaging Soviet forces in close combat battles, the 2nd Marine Division had been able to halt the advances of the pair of divisions closing-in upon Alta and aiming to move from there down to the Lyngenfjorden area in what NATO commanders expected to be a night-time attack into the Norwegian 6th Infantry Division. Stand-off striking assets, naval gunfire and concentrated air power, had been used by the US Marines to do immense damage to the Soviet Sixth Army and thus bare minimal casualties had been suffered on the American side.

However, it was realised that eventually the 69MRD & 77GMRD were going to pick themselves up off the ground and start moving westwards again. Once that happened, ground elements of the 2nd Marine Division were going to get into the fight no matter how much that was avoided. The plan remained the same though: to not allow the Soviets to understand that there was a strong US Marines force at Alta which needed to be directly engaged and thus the 2nd Marine Division could pick its own fights.

Only time would tell whether this strategy would work.





Ninety–Six

The Soviet seizure of the airports outside Bergen and Stavanger on the southwestern coast had caused a great deal on chaos in southern Norway. Unlike in the northern part of the country, where the military was effectively running things, civilian control was meant to be in-place across the southern regions of the Scandinavian nation. Pre-war, it was believed that there may be Soviet air attacks and maybe some commando activity, but there had been no expectation that Flesland and Sola Airports would fall into enemy hands nor of what would happen with neighbouring Sweden being as comprehensively attacked as it was.

A selection of Norwegian military forces had remained behind in the southern part of the country including the equivalent of four brigades of troops and two fighter squadrons. The infantry from the brigades of reservists – including the full-time battalion of guardsmen from His Majesty’s The King’s Guard – had been deployed at ports, harbours and around Oslo and those on the southwestern coast had seen some action when faced with Soviet commandoes, where they didn’t put up even a respectable fight much to the chagrin of their NATO allies. The dozen F-16s (single and twin-seat models) and the nineteen NF-5As that had started the war flying from Gardermoen and Rygge military airbases had performed much better though they had taken heavy loses through the several days of trying to combat Soviet air activity.

The Norwegian government – safe in their bunkers outside Oslo – at first believed that their troops in the areas around Bergen and Stavanger would be able to deal with the airborne landings and in a fit of ill-advised arrogance assured their NATO allies that the airports would be recaptured within hours. When faced with well-motivated and heavily-armed paratroopers, those troops sent towards both airports faced defeat and withdrew back to guarding the coastal cities from attacks that weren’t going to come. The defence of the Haakonsvern naval base at Bergen (which was within range of the light artillery with the paratroopers at Flesland and soon left near unusable) as well as symbolic royal and government buildings in Oslo became of more importance to the Norwegians than the two airports, especially when no more troops were flown in and those occupying paratroopers did nothing but hold onto what they had seized.

Of course, the Soviets used the airports and the airspace above them for their air attacks against Britain and there was also the possibility as far as NATO was concerned that those damn troublesome Backfires might be sent on a southern routing through that airspace to break out in the Norwegian Sea in this direction. In response to NATO requests that the Norwegians once again try to recapture the airports, the response from the politicians hidden in bunkers, who overruled the military men on the ground who were willing to act, was that Norway needed its Americans and British allies to deal with the Soviet occupation because they were unable to.

Reagan’s advisers and Thatcher’s War Cabinet both fumed at this attitude from their allies in Oslo, especially as their troops would soon be fighting and dying for Norwegian sovereignty up in Finmark. While realising the danger of leaving the Soviets unmolested on the ground where they were, the Americans really didn’t have the troops to spare to attempt to retake Flesland and Sola; Britain wasn’t exactly flush with available men either. However, the strategic threat to the UK mainland from Soviet air activity utilising southern Norway was too much and the War Cabinet in fortified London decided that action had to be taken. 3 ATAF tactical strike-bombers had bombed the Soviets during the night of March 15th/16th and the RN was tasked with sending HMS Invincible – along with the remains of the battered Task Force – southwards to provide air support. The British Army’s main strategic reserve, the Independent Guards Brigade, was thus assigned to southern Norway to do what the Norwegians couldn’t, or rather, wouldn’t do.

This newly-raised formation was only small though and not large enough to take on the two divisions of paratroopers on the ground in Norway, even if there was the promise that some assistance would be given from Norwegian troops on the ground. Intelligence pointed to a lesser number of Soviet paratroopers at Flesland and there was further intelligence that airlifts of weapons and supplies had been less frequent to there than to Sola. Therefore, Flesland Airport was targeted for recapture with the aim of establishing a major force on the ground after success there and making an eventual move against Sola once an initial victory had been won.

Much of this planned operation, codenamed ‘ROOK’, depended on the enemy unwilling co-operating with British and Norwegian plans though.


Like all aspects of RED BEAR worldwide, the Soviet airborne seizure of selective parts of southern Norway had been applied from long ago drawn-up plans for wartime operations but fused together in what historians would later regard as a monumental screw up. The whole of the Soviet strategic operational plan to defeat the West involved operations such as that to capture Flesland and Sola taking place alongside other offensive moves where there was little coordination. Later exploitation operations that NATO feared didn’t come where military theory stated that they should; for example, Soviet Naval Aviation raketonosets didn’t use the air corridor across southern Norway as feared.

With the landing operation to take the airports outside Bergen and Stavanger, important parts of the detailed plan to make use of such facilities weren’t put into practise. RED BEAR had been launched only days after it had been authorised with very little preparation made. There had been no ships at sea on clandestine missions loaded with vital supplies to arrive near the captured airports after the paratroopers had taken them. Commando teams weren’t on the ground before the airborne troops arrived (though they weren’t really needed in those instances despite the plans calling for them). In addition, rather than one lone division being assigned to the mission on Norway’s southwestern coast, two divisions had been used instead. One of those divisions was short of a regiment, but there were still many more troops than planned for landed far behind enemy lines. When the necessary logistical effort was made to supply those troops, there was a shortfall sent to them.

This is what happens when military action is taken in a rush.

The Soviet forces in Norway were thus left short of a lot of what they needed. There was plenty of ammunition and basic supplies for the men who had landed to seize both Flesland and Sola as they had brought much with them during their landings, but there were logistical problems with follow-on forces. The 7GAD & 76GAD were more than just a collection of paratroopers who needed rifle ammunition and food. Their wounded from the initial fighting needed on-site medical care or evacuation, their artillery and SAM-launchers would need heavy and bulky resupply and fuel for the armoured vehicles in use needed to be brought in.

Moreover, with the intention being that Flesland and Sola would become airbases for detached Soviet Air Force assets, further logistical difficulties were caused. Aviation fuel had been captured when the airports were taken but this was for the use of transport aircraft and such like, not high-performance jet fighters. Once the matter of providing fuel for those fighters was dealt with – not an easy task at all – then ammunition for those aircraft would also have to arrive along with everything else to support flight operations from the ground from communications equipment to maintenance gear to aircraft engine starter carts. Protected revetments for fighters needed to be constructed and not everything to do that had been captured on the ground; it was the same with equipment to repair expected bomb damage.

The list went on and on.

An-22s and Il-76s, and even a few massive new Antonov-124 Condors, were tasked with supplying the paratroopers and also turning the two airports into fully-operational airbases. It would have been better to send what was needed by ships, but the sea-lanes were under NATO control and thus everything had to go by air. The Swedes soon began to recover from the initial crippling air attacks upon their country and some of their aircraft made appearances in the skies attacking heavily-laden transport aircraft. There were fighters that provided escorts for the transports flying to southern Norway and back, but some aircraft went down and took their precious cargoes with them.

Fuel for both ground vehicles and for aircraft arrived in fuel bladders. These big rubber tanks, flexible and rather useful, were flown in after being pushed into the back of transport aircraft when on the ground in Poland. This was a very uneconomical manner in which to move fuel around but it was the only option available. Artillery & mortar shells, battlefield rockets and rifle ammunition came in by aircraft-delivered wooded crates and so too missiles for SAM systems. Unloading these supplies on the ground in Norway meant the use of paratroopers preforming manual labour due to worries over the reliability of Norwegian civilians who the Soviets were wary of pressing into doing this back-breaking work, especially with what was known about undercover Norwegian agents being active across the country. Equipment that the Soviet Air Force aircraft making use of Flesland and Sola were to use came in by air too and this needed to be unloaded and then later positioned in-place where it was needed before the airports could be made use of for combat flight operations rather than just as a ‘pit-stop’ for refuelling.

Soviet logistical officers were given a nightmare task when it came to southern Norway.


British Paras hadn’t been air-dropped into combat since 1956 when taking part in Operation MUSKETEER to seize entrance to the Suez Canal during the Suez Crisis. On operations in Northern Ireland and in the Falklands, Paras had gone into action on foot, in vehicles, aboard helicopters and by sea.

The airborne assault undertaken by 2 PARA over southern Norway at midday on March 16th 1988 was thus something special for the men of the Parachute Regiment.

Hercules C1 propeller-driven transports in RAF colours, covered at close-range by Phantom fighters and in the distance by Tornado interceptors, carried 2 PARA across the North Sea from their staging areas at RAF Finningley and at Newcastle Airport. Originally the idea had been for faster, jet transports to take 2 PARA across to Norway but the Paras wanted slower aircraft to allow them to conduct their jumps at low-level against a coastal target; being high and fast would mean that casualties could be inflicted in great number from being blown into the sea.

The drop zone for 2 PARA was southwest of Nesttun, a town to the south of Bergen proper to which urban sprawl was encroaching upon. The forward lines of Norwegian defences of the outskirts of Bergen were to the south of the town while the nearest Soviet positions were at Radal: a small stretch of abandoned no-man’s land lay in between. Norwegian special forces troops had snuck forward and marked out landing zones in the no-man’s land right before the Paras started to jump out of their low-flying aircraft. There was artillery fire directed against Soviet positions right before the Paras started to descend out of the midday sky from Norwegian guns directed against targets by SAS men already on the ground ahead of the inbound Paras.

2 PARA was still scattered over a wider area than the plan called for due to difficult local conditions brought on by the wind blowing between the inland mountains affecting their progress. Nevertheless, enough men landed in the correct drop zones placing them in very close proximity to Soviet positions which had just been shelled by Norwegian 105mm howitzers (the American-built towed M-101 model). Those Paras at once reached their rally points and were soon enough involved in combat with opposing Soviet paratroopers who reacted rather slow to the British landing right in the middle of the abandoned areas between them and the previously-placid Norwegians.

The Norwegian commander of the Brigade Bergen carefully managed to follow his orders from the government while also at the same time disobeying them. He was supposed to keep his troops defending Bergen and Haakonsvern, though the men of his battalion from the 10th Infantry Regiment were not directly engaged in either defensive effort and positioned around Nesttun instead. Those troops, along with the two batteries of guns positioned behind them, joined in the British efforts to fight against the Soviets outside Radal. Throughout the early afternoon, British Paras and Norwegian reservists fought to seize Radal and the road junction there in that town connecting the highway from Bergen towards Flesland with local roads. There were intense Soviet defensive fire to stop them from doing so with the 108th Guards Airborne Regiment putting up one hell of a tough fight to try and stop them from seizing this forward line of their defences of the Flesland area… only once they got in-place though.

Two battalions from 108th Regiment were both in the area though these units hadn’t been ordered to construct dug-in defences because their commanders didn’t believe that the Norwegians would attack. Rather than living in trenches or foxholes, there were plenty of empty homes of Norwegian civilians who had fled. The paratroopers had been billeted in these (somewhat) warm homes rather than living out in the field. There were defensive positions from where the men were supposed to fight from and they were ordered into these once the Anglo-Norwegian attack started, but the men moved slowly for they weren’t eager to get out of the warmth offered by their sheltered accommodation and into the snow.


Providing air support to the Paras on the ground came RN Sea Harriers and RAF Harriers flying from the Invincible. The light aircraft carrier had steamed southwards after being the air attack inflicted by Soviet Naval Aviation and the RN fighters aboard had been joined by six RAF ground attack aircraft removed from a training unit in the UK. Operating from a position northwest of Bergen and moving in a zig-zag pattern under heavy electronic interference to defeat Soviet efforts to attack her, the Invincible launched her aircraft in small flights towards the Nesttun-Radal area.

Bombs fell away from the Harriers and there was gunfire from their cannons too. Overall the actual effects of their action weren’t that great, but their presence in the sky boosted British morale while at the same time lowering Soviet confidence. Those men of the 108th Regiment didn’t seen any Soviet fighters in the sky supporting them and when SAMs were launched up at the attacking British aircraft, those missiles seemed to dart around the sky in crazy patterns before then falling back down, sometimes behind Soviet lines too.

Away from this air activity to the east of Flesland, three ships arrived in southern Norway not long after the Paras did. The RN frigate HMS Alacrity had escorted the two commercial ferries and the large merchantman across the North Sea while later protection had been offered by the long-range missile coverage from the destroyers Birmingham, Exeter and York operating at a distance. The trio of ships had come across from Tyneside and raced at full speed towards Bergen during the night with those aboard worried at all times over the threat of enemy air or submarine attack. There were many men and much equipment aboard that couldn’t afford to be lost and even when arriving in Bergen there were fears that the ships could be attacked at any moment.

Brigadier W. Richard Mundell, the former deputy commander of the North-Eastern District but now in charge of the Independent Guards Brigade, was aboard one of those North Sea ferries that brought troops, some armoured vehicles and many lighter vehicles across to Bergen. He and his command staff would have liked to have flown across to Norway but the Soviets held the only capable air facility within the area. Getting the men off the ships and then everything that they had brought with them too was an immediate priority for him before he would take his command down to the south where 2 PARA was fighting.

There were two battalions of Foot Guards aboard the ships – the first battalion of the Coldstream Guards and the second battalion from the Grenadier Guards – and getting those men off didn’t take very long; none of them wanted to share the fate of the Welsh Guards at Buff Cove in the Falklands six years earlier. The ferries that had brought those men also carried the TA crews of the Ferret and Fox armoured cars (taken from storage and manned by ex-service personnel who had been mobilised during TtW), plus some unarmoured Land Rover jeeps: all of which from a squadron of the Queen’s Own Mercian Yeomanry. This company-sized formation was usually based in Staffordshire and they were a long way from home now. Coming off the ferries too – they were roll-on/roll-off ships – were trailers carrying half a dozen howitzers towed by trucks. This artillery was from another TA unit, the battalion-sized Honourable Artillery Company, which had sent a battery of brand-new L118 Light Guns across to Norway as the artillery component of the Independent Guards Brigade. Trucks laden with ammunition, supplies and lighter equipment also had to come off the ferries and into Bergen’s suddenly busy port.

The third ship, a civilian merchantman of thirteen thousand tons, was carrying cargo in its holds and on the deck. Crates filled the internal compartments of the ships and these would needed to be unloaded so that all the supplies inside could be taken ashore, but first the bigger crates inside and on deck in which helicopters were packed had to be carefully lifted by cranes away from the ship. There were eleven Gazelle and Lynx helicopters aboard, all based pre-war in Ulster and now acting as the aviation element for Brigadier Mundell’s command. There was equipment aboard this ship for the TA engineering unit attached to the brigade too as well as for service support formations. The men who manned these units and who formed the ‘tail’ of the Independent Guards Brigade as opposed to those Paras and Foot Guards who were the ‘teeth’ had come across on the ferries by what they needed to allow them to perform their necessary roles had come on the bigger merchantman.


The fighting around Radal went on throughout the afternoon and into the evening. The third battalion from the 108th Regiment, as well as a battalion from the 119th Regiment in their light armoured vehicles, reinforced those initial Soviet paratroopers who had been so suddenly thrust into combat. On paper, the Anglo-Norwegian force attempting to seize the area around the town appeared to be outnumbered two-to-one by such an opposing force, yet there was air support available to them from the RAF Harriers and the Soviets moved their men forward far too slowly. It was believed by the NATO commanders that the Soviets were worried that a bigger attack against Flesland was coming by either air or sea direct into the airport and they were keeping the main body of their forces back to defeat such an effort.

It had been hoped that the communications centre of Radal could have been taken before darkness started to arrive but 2 PARA was unable to do so. The Paras had fought hard alongside their Norwegian counterparts, but they didn’t have the numbers on their side plus they often faced Soviet armoured vehicles trying to hit their flanks. The liberal use of MILAN anti-tank missiles had helped defeat those efforts and then some of the helicopters started to appear in the skies after flying from Bergen firing their TOW missiles to aid in that effort. Nonetheless, the Paras had done well enough and the rest of the Independent Guards Brigade started to arrive in the area. During the night there were plans for UK-based 3 ATAF aircraft to again strike hard at Flesland (F-111s, Tornados and Buccaneers but not B-52s despite British wishes when faced with strong Norwegian opposition to such a notion) while once morning came Brigadier Mundell would send his full brigade into action. There would even be some politicking made overnight to try to get the Norwegians to commit more ground forces: this was their country after all.

For the time being, the British Army had established a reasonably secure foothold in southern Norway and were positioning themselves ready to retake Flesland Airport. Unless the situation changed with an inrush of support or a realisation that no other force was coming in by air or sea in a further assault, the Soviet 7GAD there was going to be in major trouble once dawn arrived and NATO forces attacked again to force them out.

[James G]

Ninety–Seven

Soviet efforts to win the battle for Germany, and thus the war, continued throughout the afternoon of March 16th. As they had done during the morning, maximum effort was made to smash through out onto the North German Plain through the Harz Mountains axis as well as entering the Kinzig Valley to reach the Gelnhausen Corridor on their way towards Frankfurt. The commanders of the First & Second Western Fronts were being pushed by Marshal Kulikov, himself fearful of Marshal Ogarkov’s reaction to continued failure, and there was no let-up in attacks to finally force the issue in Germany to a successful conclusion. Everything was quickly being thrown at the twin drives in northern and central Germany with the initially committed field armies being supported by massed air and artillery assets with second-wave, tank-heavy field armies each designated as an ‘Operational Manoeuvre Group’ (OMG) about to move in behind them.

Opposing the moves undertaken by Generals Korbutov and Snetkov, Generals Kenny and Otis saw that the moment was fast approaching when they would need to commit their own large reserves to the battles within their defensive sectors. Half-measures had been considered earlier in the day, but the Soviet drives westwards were so powerful that forward defenses – beaten down after more than two days of continuous fighting – were crumbling under the weight of those. NATO air liaison officers had told the Briton and the American that road and rail bridges all across East Germany and into western Poland had been knocked down into the rivers below them denying the efforts of the Warsaw Pact to send supplies forward in massive convoys. Yet at the same time Generals Kenny and Otis knew that there were still hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops who were unaffected by those air attacks as the formations that they were assigned to had integral ammunition and fuel stocks. The battles were going to be won at the front; it was too early for those rear-area air strikes, as strategically effective as they were, which also took their toll on aircraft and weapons-stocks, to yet have a deciding effect.

*​

The Poles, along with the Soviet 21GMRD, pushed the British I Corps backwards towards Autobahn-7. For many years NATO commanders had wished that this major highway had been further back from the Inter-German border as it was such a major supply route running north-south through West Germany. The road had already been cut to the south though in the Fulda Gap and the British Army couldn’t keep it out of Polish and Soviets hands in their defensive zone either.

The 5th Infantry & 4th Armoured Divisions abandoned any effort to fight for the paved stretch of highway and concentrated in getting back to the natural position available on the banks of the Leine River. From Brockenern down to Northeim, a large area east of that river was given up in the face of attacking Polish troops who couldn’t be stopped. Intense fighting continued with no breaks and no mercy shown. On several occasions, battalion-sized battle-groups from both British divisions found themselves nearly surrounded and had to fight hard to escape from Polish envelopment efforts. Only the support offered by NATO aircraft overhead and the general inferior quality of Polish equipment when compared to much of what the British fielded allowed the withdrawal to take place without formations being overrun, yet at the same time the divisions suffered immense casualties.

Just to the north, the line of defensive positions strung by the 1st Armoured & 2nd Infantry Divisions from Braunschweig past Salzgitter to the Wartjenstedt-Derneburg-Holle area, which ran nearly horizontal on the map as opposed to vertical, collapsed in the face of penetration efforts made by the Soviet 21GMRD and a supporting Polish division. The men of both defending divisions here had faced too many attacks beforehand while those attacking formations consisted of fresh troops. Where battle-groups further south had managed to escape efforts to trap them behind the lines, here there was failure met in the effort to withdrawn back in a northwestern and western direction.

The 2 R ANGLIAN battle-group (infantry in FV432 tracked vehicles from the second battalion of the Royal Anglian Regiment along with a squadron of Chieftian tanks from the Queen’s Own Hussars) managed to get itself enveloped north of the small village of Gustedt and then the TA infantry of the first battalion of the 51st Highland Volunteers – volunteers from along the eastern coast of Scotland – got trapped near Stiddien, a burning locality west of Braunschweig. The parent formations to which these battle-groups were assigned to, the 22nd Armoured Brigade and the 52nd Infantry Brigade, lost greater numbers of men than in these envelopments in direct combat as the Soviet troops they were facing kept on coming despite all defensive efforts to fight them off.

A new defensive line was already in the late stages of construction from where the pair of northernmost positioned British I Corps were to fight from should they need to withdraw as they now did. This again ran in a near horizontal fashion and Royal Engineers along with West German Territorial troops were withdrawn from finishing it and grabbed their weapons to help the remains of the 1st Armoured & 2nd Infantry Divisions as they entered those defences. From near Peine across to Hildesheim and then to the Elze-Gronau area on the Leine, the British struggled to get into position. Much of the 1 WELSH GDS battle-group (Foot Guards mounted in FV432s along with more Queen’s Own Hussars tanks) was lost during this withdrawal in the area around the village of Lesse, but nothing could be done to stop that from happening; the Welsh Guards hadn’t been fast enough in pulling back.


The British withdrawal further back westwards left West German forces outside Braunschweig and Wolfsburg at the head of what became a salient position with Soviet forces either side of it and East Germans at the head. Generalleutnant Clauss, the West German I Corps commander, had been informed by his counterpart General Inge that the British had no choice but to withdraw or they were going to be torn apart trying to remain in-place.

Protecting his now exposed right flank became an immediate priority for Generalleutnant Clauss if he was going to hold onto Braunschweig and Wolfsburg. The two cities were still home to thousands of West German civilians who had refused official orders to flee westwards. Moreover, as a German, he had no wish to see them fall into Russian hands. A request was made for Kampfgruppe Weser to be released to support the West German I Corps; almost immediately this request was denied and General Kenny sent orders for the 1st Panzer Division to withdraw back westwards itself to align its flank with that of the British I Corps.


Meanwhile, 2 ATAF aircraft flying reconnaissance missions deeper into the Soviet rear spotted armoured columns rolling westwards across the south parts of Upper Saxony. Around such places as Oschersleben, Quedlinburg and Halberstadt – which were communications centers southeast of Magdeburg – there were what were identified as three full-strength tank divisions moving towards the Inter-German Border. Intelligence had previously pointed to the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army being stationed south of Magdeburg and that field army was now on the move. A fourth division, reckoned to be the Soviet 35MRD and thus identifiable via air reconnaissance by having less tanks, was reckoned to still be in the Magdeburg area.

The movement of those tank divisions heading for the scene of the breakthrough that was being made in British lines was news that General Kenny had been fearing all day. He was thankful that reconnaissance had spotted the movement – though it would have been hard to miss more than nine hundred tanks advancing – rather than it coming as a last minute surprise, but… that was the only thing to be thankful about with that.

There were bridges over small waterways like the Bode River in this area, but they were of no consequence in providing any barriers to movements after NATO aircraft had been dropping bridges across East Germany. At multiple points any narrow water barrier was quickly crossed using bridging vehicles and the tanks and armoured vehicles rolled over them. To send NATO tactical strike aircraft eastwards was going to take time for them to be assembled and for pre-strike planning to take place before any major air attacks could commence. For the time being, the forces of the British Second Army were on their own.

It wouldn’t take that long for those trio of tank divisions to reach British lines south of Braunschweig and attempt what General Kenny could foresee would be their major effort to smash his forces; the Soviets were going to try their OMG deep into his rear and shatter the British Second Army. He had his own reserves though, fresh troops which had been kept back from the frontlines and earlier calls for them to be used and orders were sent for the US III Corps to start moving.


The US III Corps was in West Germany with three combat divisions – the 1st Cavalry, the 2nd Armored and the 5th Mechanized Infantry – along with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, the attack helicopters of the 6th Cavalry Brigade, three field artillery brigades and a host of service support assets. The men manning these formations had flown over from their home bases in Texas and the American South-West to link up with vehicles, equipment and supplies located in POMCUS sites across the Low Countries and West Germany. In addition, before the fleet of Fast Sealift Ships had been shifted to moving the ARNG units of the US Fifth Army, top-of-the-range military equipment had been shipped over on those vessels to further boost the capabilities of the US III Corps.

General Kenny had positioned them prior to RED BEAR commencing to the west of Hannover on the eastern side of the Weser River between Nienburg and Minden. Soviet air reconnaissance had been searching for them, but passive defensive measures had kept the US III Corps hidden from any air interference.

This American armoured force was designed for the counterattack mission rather than sitting in defensive missions and this offensive posture was reflected at once in the orders sent to them during the afternoon of March 16th. Rather than being sent to reinforce the British troops pulling backwards or the Bundeswehr units readjusting their lines, General Kenny instructed his American formations to slowly approach the area around Laatzen. This would have the US III Corps already across the Leine and ready to move either directly eastwards or to the southeast. They would wait until the Soviet Twentieth Guards Amy was actually committed to action engaging and trying to overrun British or West German units and then be unleashed against the flanks of the Soviets.

The Americans were fielding the latest versions of the M-1 Abrams tank and the M-2 / M-3 Bradley armoured vehicle. Their M-109 self-propelled howitzers and M-270 MLRS rocket launchers were excellent pieces of artillery. There were AH-64 Apache attack helicopters and potent OH-58 Kiowa airborne scouts. The quality of many of the field grade officers and the fighting men overall was considered to be very high. All of the hopes of General Kenny in fighting off the coming Soviet attack were concentrated in what the Americans should be able to achieve with their corps moving forward and lurking ready to strike when the time was just right.


As expected, the three approaching tank divisions entered West Germany and moved through the rear areas of the Polish Second Army. There were Soviet Army traffic management personnel present on the ground to direct the movements of the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army through the Polish rear areas. Such officers reported directly to the First Western Front’s headquarters staff and had been having a very tough time in keeping certain roads and access routes clear of Polish forces waiting for their Soviet comrades to arrive and use such routes. At the same time, as it had been since Warsaw Pact ground forces had first crossed the border, such officers found themselves targeted by hidden snipers all across occupied territory. Soviet military intelligence pointed to NATO special forces teams on the ground being briefed pre-war about the value of killing such men and that was proving to be very true. Counter-snipers had been assigned soon enough to protect against such a dedicated NATO effort, but those protection forces couldn’t be everywhere and nor did they have the numbers to do so either.

British and West German snipers had ‘fun’ this afternoon in going after such officers trying to direct the tank divisions as they came across the border line and started moving further westwards. These stay-behind units, usually of just two men, had faced great adversary operating as they were in the midst of the activity of the armies of the Warsaw Pact, but they had kept their heads down initially when heavily-armed Polish assault troops had advanced to engage frontline NATO forces and only started making their presence known against lighter-armed rear-area units. The targeted killings of traffic officers hindered movements in certain places though the overall effect wasn’t enough to cause any serious delay despite some great successes in hitting such people from great distance and causing the occasional traffic snarl-up.

The three tanks divisions were the 7GTD, the 20TD and the 90GTD. The first division was assigned in peacetime to the Soviet Third Shock Army, the 20TD had been in Poland with the Northern Group of Forces while that third division was assigned to the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army pre-war. Each had been held back from the fighting like the US III Corps had been and had also avoided what efforts had been made by NATO aircraft to bomb rear-area formations. There were T-64 and T-80 tanks, BMP-2 and BTR-70 armoured fighting vehicles and rested infantrymen with the trio of divisions in this OMG. In addition to these Soviet Twentieth Guards Army tank divisions moving forwards, a pair of Polish tank divisions were to attack in conjunction with Polish motorised rifle divisions further southwards engaging other British troops. General Korbutov’s First Western Front was making a truly massive tank attack.


The Soviet Twentieth Guards Army entered combat after passing through the lines of the Polish 4MRD between Salzgitter and Wartjenstedt. British units ahead were reported to be retreating in disarray – so said the Poles – and there was wide, open and generally flat countryside all the way northwest towards Hannover.

The 20TD was on the right-hand side of the three division advance with orders to reach the stretch of Autobahn-2 in the Lehrte area before turning westwards to loop around the northern outskirts of Hannover and head towards the big airport there. In the center, the 7GTD was to at first race directly for Hannover in a straight line – thus directing NATO efforts to defend that city from an armoured assault – before making a turn to the west around Sehnde-Rethmar and approaching Laatzen. Finally, on the left-hand side, the 90GTD would bypass Hildesheim and follow the route of Autobahn-7 up towards Laatzen. Laatzen had been identified as a location for a major crossing operation to take place across the Leine and extra combat bridging units followed the pair of divisions which would close in upon the town. From Laatzen, the 7GTD & 90GTD were to then move northwards again in an effort to circle around Hannover to the west.

Further orders would then be issued depending on NATO reactions to this advance and it was not known at that point that the Laatzen, the focus of the planned crossing operation over the Leine as part of the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army’s attack, was home where American forces were concentrating. General Korbutov was waiting for the opportunity to engage the US III Corps, but he was unaware that they were already so close to the frontlines.


Straight away, the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army found that the Poles had been a little too optimist in their assessment of the British troops ahead. There had been no apparent malice in the statement (or so it was hoped, anyway) that the British were falling back, but there was no rout of the British Army going on. The 20TD ran into TA infantry units at first who put up a decent fight despite them being light units before the 7th Armoured Brigade – the Desert Rats – put up one hell of a fight for the area around Lengede. Challenger tanks (manned by the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment) and Warrior armoured vehicles (supporting the 1 STAFFORDS battle-group) were engaged by T-80s and BMP-2s to the west of the village along the narrow Fuhse River. The British were trying to get across that waterway over bridges thrown across by the Royal Engineers while the Soviets were at first going to construct their own crossings before deciding to take the British ones by force.

Fierce fighting slowed down the divisional reconnaissance battalion, the motorised rifle regiment and one of the 20TD’s three tank regiments as the British wouldn’t roll over and accept their defeat… even with a hundred Soviet tanks committed. The Soviet divisional commander was then forced to send his two other tank regiments away further to the west in a diversionary move. Unfortunately, while those further couple of hundred tanks in the pair of regiments were moving into place with armoured cars and bridging units ahead of them, NATO aircraft appeared in the sky. The 7th Brigade had forward artillery and air observers who remained calm under pressure and directed the inbound RAF Harriers and USAF A-10s against those flanking units rather than those still trying to crush Lengede and its defenders. The 20TD had plenty of anti-air assets available from radar-directed anti-aircraft guns to self-propelled & towed SAM-launchers. There were NATO aircraft knocked out of the sky yet others managed to drop their bombs and fire their cannons into Soviets tanks and armoured vehicles.

The delay incurred by the diversion away from Lengede and then the time it took for the 20TD to sort itself out after the air attack wasn’t something that had been planned for. Moreover, the motorised rifle regiment (with its own attached tank battalion broken up among the regiment’s armoured infantry units was) was left behind when the 20TD started advancing again to screen against further efforts from the British 7th Brigade to attack… yet the Desert Rats were pulling away in a northern direction themselves as they guarded the beaten-up 12th and 22nd Brigades from further attacks from the Soviet 21GMRD.

Meanwhile, the 7GTD raced forwards and ran into further TA infantry units from the 52nd Infantry Brigade. D Squadron from the Duke of Lancaster’s Own Yeomanry, a company of armoured cars and light Saracen personnel carriers (old vehicles taken from storage), a formation which shouldn’t really have been on the ground in Germany, was torn apart by T-64 tanks and the men from Blackpool and Preston massacred. The majority of the third battalion from the Royal Regiment of Wales was similarly torn apart when trying to stand up to main battle tanks moving fast and with excellent combined arms fire support. Only near the village of Hohenhameln was the 7GTD delayed from its looping drive towards Laatzen when a trio of Striker anti-tank missile-launchers opened fire from hidden positions against the 4th Reconnaissance Battalion. Each tracked vehicle launched five Swingfire stand-off missiles and these lanced towards the tanks and reconnaissance vehicles racing forward. A second volley was soon fired before the Soviets could work out what was going on and more tanks and armoured vehicles were blown up. Mi-24 Hind helicopters, flying in support of the 7GTD’s advance, probed forward to investigate and then found themselves attacked by Rapier SAMs whose launching vehicles had come much further forward than usual. This little effort to slow down the rampaging Soviets paid off as the attacking British units managed to evade detection during their escape while the 7GTD came to a temporary halt.

TA infantry formations from the 15th Infantry Brigade – men from County Durham, Northumberland, Tyneside and Yorkshire – were given a momentary reprieve to continue their withdrawals away from the Soviets tanks racing towards them.

The 90GTD had no trouble in crossing the wooded Vorholz region and soon reaching the stretch of Autobahn-7 that ran through that hilly region of woodland. British infantry fled away from them and was observed going to ground when the onrush of T-80 tanks charged towards them. The small city of Hildesheim was rightly expected to be an anti-tank trap on a grand scale – there were well-armed West German Territorial troops there with a plentiful supply of anti-tank missiles – and so it was bypassed as the tank division made their drive up towards their target of Laatzen. Some armoured formations followed the Autobahn though the majority of the division was moving off-road and rolling across the hilly countryside.

Everything was going excellent with their progress… until the skies ahead became dark with modern day locusts.


The shattering of the British I Corps’ northern positions came quicker than either General Inge or his superior General Kenny had anticipated. The 1st Armoured & 2nd Infantry Divisions had been in full retreat towards defensive positions when hundreds upon hundreds of Soviet tanks had torn into them. Neither division was in any fit state to make any more than a delaying action stand and when such things were tried lighter units were near annihilated. The plan to push the US III Corps into the identified flanks of the Soviet OMG was thus going to occur too late if the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army was allowed to penetrate even further into the British rear and tear apart precious service support units. The flank of the West German I Corps would be threatened too by the Soviet tanks if they kept on advancing as they were.

Both the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 1st Calvary Division had reached Laatzen and crossed over the Leine in the face of British logistics and maintenance troops pouring over the river in the other direction. The two formations were being trailed by the rest of the US III Corps, but there was no time to spare. A quick intelligence summary pointed to the Soviet tank division in the center (the 7GTD) being the greatest danger to NATO forces with the one on the Soviet left (the 90GTD) being of next greatest importance in needing to be stopped. Attack helicopters from both formations, reinforced by those from the 6th Calvary Brigade, filled the skies to fly ahead first and scout where exactly the Soviets were so ground units could be best positioned to ‘meet-and-greet’ them.

In addition, the Apaches and Cobras were ordered to thin the enemy ranks too.

TOW and the newer Hellfire missiles flew from the mass of American attack helicopters along with Hydra-70 unguided rockets. The Apaches had 30mm chain guns while the modernised Cobras mounted three-barrelled 20mm mini-guns. There had been long-term studies made of how Soviet armour was trained to react to enemy helicopter attacks done pre-war by the US Army’s Aviation Branch and recent experience from helicopter crews operating down in the Fulda Gap and in northern Bavaria. However, the helicopter-versus-tank engagements undertaken by Apaches and Cobras southeast of Hannover this afternoon were on a much larger scale than anything previously practiced or tried.

Almost a hundred American attack helicopters made repeated attacks when operating in small flights of two or four, in addition to one big air cavalry squadron-sized strike of eighteen Apaches all operating together. Kiowa scouts buzzed across the sky all around the striking helicopters finding targets for them and guiding missiles in while also using their own weapons on occasion too. There was a squadron of Belgian F-16s hastily tasked by the 2 ATAF as immediate fighter cover for the retreating British forces on the ground and some of these strike-fighters used their Sidewinder missiles to assist the attack helicopters in destroying Soviet helicopters which tried to interfere.

Mobile anti-air assets of the Soviet divisions being attacked on the ground were the first targets to be attacked before reconnaissance vehicles and command tanks were hit. Mobile headquarters columns for battalions and regiments – usually consisting of specialised BTR-70s with antenna arrays that made them identifiable if a skilled helicopter crew knew what to look for – were another favourite target for the Apaches and Cobras. They didn’t fly deep behind Soviet lines as there was the real fear of heavyweight SAMs flying towards them from strategic air defence assets, but there were still plenty of targets at the front to be hit.

The 7GTD and the 90GTD was badly damaged as coherent fighting units by the helicopter attacks. Many of those predatory locusts were downed by defences in response yet there was widespread Soviet casualties to the extent that both divisions were forced to halt forward operations for a short period of time to recover. New field commanders had to be assigned to units which had lost those while the survivors of attacked reconnaissance and escorting advance guard formations needed putting back together. Anti-air assets which had survived targeted strikes against them needed immediate resupply less those helicopters come back. This was all going to take time and unknown to the command staff of the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army that time that their pair of tank divisions spend recovering the American ground forces ahead of them were moving forward into counterattack positions ahead of them.


American helicopters didn’t trouble the 20TD on the right, but their A-10 aircraft did. The remains of one of the USAF squadrons based pre-war in Britain – the 78th Tactical Fighter Squadron (78 TFS) with thirteen of its original eighteen aircraft left over after several days of intense air combat supporting the West German I Corps – was in the air engaging the Soviet tanks that were now moving along the West German’s flank. The forward units of the British 1st Armoured Division had been bypassed and were moving northwards while the 20TD was tearing into the Rhino Division’s rear and hitting support units. Around such villages as Lahstedt, Oberg and Munstedt the A-10s struck and they tried to have some of the success that the Apaches and Cobras had had to the west.

23mm and 30mm anti-aircraft shells from ZSU-23-4s and Tunguskas along with SAMs either from man-portable or vehicle launchers rose into the sky to engage the A-10s. A flight of East German MiG-23s then arrived to further attack the USAF attack aircraft and shot down a few A-10s just like ground fire did.

Before the survivors of the 78 TFS withdrew back northwards after facing greater opposition than expected they had done damage to the 20TD but not enough to cause any appreciable delay. Less than thirty tanks and armoured vehicles had been knocked out by the cannons that the A-10s mounted and that wasn’t enough to stop the 20TD, even with a quarter of the division behind them and still involved in screening against a further attack by the British 7th Brigade, one which the Desert Rats were still in no shape to undertake.

There was a gap now opening up in NATO lines where the 20TD was driving towards. To the south and west of Peine and near Autobahn-2 – which marked the current corps boundary between the British and Bundeswehr forces – there were defensive positions that no frontline combat forces had yet to man. The terrain was more than suitable for tank operations and open for exploitation by the trio of tank regiments that the 20TD had moving forwards.

The afternoon was turning to evening and while the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army was failing in its role as a fast-moving OMG in the center and on the left, a gap had opened up on the right…

*​

The Second Western Front pushed the Soviet First Guards Tank Army forward into the Kinzig Valley behind the 79TD from the worn-out Soviet Eighth Guards Army. This OMG consisted of three tank divisions as well as an attached motorised rifle division for infantry support in guarding the flanks of a penetration effort.

The 79TD had been near destroyed in pushing the US 4th Mechanized Infantry Division back as far as Schlüchtern, right at the entrance to the all-important valley that ran in a southwestern direction, and then the Soviet First Guards Tank Army moved through its lines hitting the Americans ahead with a fresh division of T-80 tanks just after midday. Finally, the Americans started to crack, especially in fierce fighting to seize the commanding heights of the hill at Landrücken.

There were surrenders offered by companies of infantry when their M-113 personnel carriers were all knocked out and the supporting tanks had fled to reposition themselves. Artillery batteries of mobile guns that found themselves cut off also gave up and improvised white flags waved. There can never be any honour in surrender, but the Americans made an effort even when humiliated by the Soviet troops who took them prisoner and strip-searched them before shackling men to one another.

While the defensive line that the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division had ran had been ripped open in the center and individual units surrendered, the scattered elements of the division weren’t all about to give up. Discipline held in battalions and companies as they fell back into the hills either side of the valley and started to withdraw backwards. The 79TD, broken down into battered regiments, gave chase but it was easier to withdraw then to pursue through the hills of the Vogelsberg and the Spessart, especially when that broken terrain had been littered with mines and traps to deter an advance.


Away from such scenes of exhausted and cut-off men giving up after they had no other choice but to do so, the Soviet First Guards Tank Army kept on advancing. The Soviet 11GTD was in the lead with the 9TD following close behind them. The pair of divisions were moving fast down the narrow valley which had been the scene of so much fighting the day before between their paratrooper comrades and American rear-area troops. The highway and railway line were both blown up in countless places while it seemed that every single piece of ground had been fought over. There were still burning vehicles, buildings alight and woodland fires burning… to say nothing of the corpses that littered every patch of hidden ground. Unexploded ordnance from previous fighting was a major hazard too.

For the Soviet tank crewmen who looked out of their vision blocks it was almost like a part of hell that they were driving their tanks through.

After Schlüchtern, the next major town in the Kinzig Valley was Steinau. The 11GTD rolled past there to the northwest but then found that they were counterattacked in strength directly to the west of the town by General Otis’ operational reserves.


The US Seventh Army had less directly-tasked reserve forces under command than the British Second Army. Instead, the majority of the French First Army – less the detached and independent French III Corps in the Ruhr area – was positioned in the central parts of West Germany around Frankfurt and Stuttgart. The French had two corps consisting of seven divisions (plus a parachute division under army-level command) ready and waiting as a strategic reserve. What forces that General Otis had for immediate reinforcement of threatened areas were the US XVIII Airborne Corps, a Canadian division and a Spanish division. The Canadians had been committed to assisting the West German II Corps in eastern Bavaria late the day before while the US XVIII Airborne Corps consisted of only one ‘heavy’ division alongside the 82nd Airborne & 101st Air Assault Infantry Divisions.

This shortage of immediate reserves meant that when the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division effectively broke around Schlüchtern the US Seventh Army only had the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division and the untested Spanish 1st Armored Division on-hand ready to oppose the Soviet OMG aiming to race further forwards and reach West Germany’s economic heartland around Frankfurt. Both divisions had been moved forward into this area of danger during the late morning after the fighting around Neuhof and Flieden and they were then committed to action in the early afternoon.

French and USAF aircraft along with US Army attack helicopters flew attack and air defence missions for the pair of NATO divisions as they undertook a coordinated joint counterattack strike near Steinau. The Spanish had moved through the burning town and lanced northwards towards Autobahn-66 aiming to either hit the lead Soviet tank division in the rear or, even better, smash into the OMG between the first two divisions in-line. The division fielded American- and French-built equipment alongside some of which had been constructed in Spain itself. Their AMX-30 tanks and VEC-M1 reconnaissance vehicles that led this assault were very capable though like the M-113s that carried much of the infantry assigned were just not survivable against the weapons that the Soviets turned against them when the threat was detected.

Thankfully for the Spanish, the assault by the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division head-on into the 11GTD took the majority of the Soviet’s attention. The brazen commander of this American division led his command forward in a whirlwind attack where flanks were forgotten and the intention was to sting the Soviets so much that they ended up chasing their own tails all over the battlefield that the Americans had chosen to fight over. Soviet air support in the form of combat aircraft and attack helicopters found themselves fighting NATO aircraft and helicopters whereas the usual dominating Soviet artillery struggled to hit Americans units that weren’t fighting from fixed defensive positions but were rather attacking.

After the initial hammering that they took, the Spanish recovered, especially their formations tasked as cavalry. The movement forward of the 9TD to push past the battles that the 11GTD and Americans were having ran into fast-moving Spanish vehicles that didn’t always knock out their opponents but did a lot of damage to them. Of course the Spanish were taking more damage themselves than they could eventually sustain to remain effective as a fighting division, but for the time being they caused the second tank division in-line to be stalled from continuing the advance of the Soviet First Guards Tank Army.

Then the Soviet 32GTD made an appearance by approaching the battlefield around Steinau with the 6GMRD coming up behind them ready too to be thrown into combat. The American artillery unleashed a massive strike mission with M-110 howitzers firing massive 203mm high-explosive shells and MLRSs firing their rocket barrages after readying themselves for such a thing, but the damage done was nowhere near what was expected to be achieved was. To gain a direct hit upon a tank or an armoured vehicle with an artillery shell was all about getting very lucky while the Soviet infantry had yet to be deployed in strength for the ‘steel rain’ of rockets to hurt them. Soviet counter-battery fire was fast this afternoon and many American guns were knocked out in the return strike.

Air power again was tried with the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division using its own Cobra gunships rather than relying on those from the US V Corps 12th Aviation Brigade and the 18th Aviation Brigade from the US XVIII Airborne Corps. Those Cobras had some success but those kills of Soviet tanks came with losses of their own. No matter what was tried, the 32GTD & 6GMRD passed through the lines of the stalled 11GTD & 9TD to hit the Americans and the Spanish hard.

The Spanish fell back through Steinau and moved away southwest towards the village of Ahl. They fought a furious rear-guard action as they did so, taking even further casualties in addition to what they already had, and managed to open up a gap between themselves and the 6GMRD that followed them. This was only done by sacrificing ‘expendable’ smaller and lighter units… but when is human life ever expendable?


The 24th Mechanized Infantry Division withdrew as well when it realised that it couldn’t stop the 32GTD from advancing. General Woodmansee was trying to marshal fast-moving columns of the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division that had fled through the hills around the Hausen area – a few miles southwards where the Kinzig Valley narrowed again – and wanted the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division there along with the Spanish too. In addition, the 3rd Armored Division had seen a brigade forcibly detached from it to reform an ad hoc 4th Mechanized Infantry Division in that area.

The battle, as far as the US V Corps commander was concerned, was not over with yet as he still had forces available to fight and the Soviet First Guards Tank Army was going to have to try again if it was going to get out of the Kinzig Valley and its tight confines.

The fast-approaching evening would see further intensive combat here in central Hessen just like it would up north near Hannover and Laatzen.





Ninety–Eight

Months after the end of World War Three, one particularly witty satirist (a prerequisite for such a profession) would pen a well-regarded feature article in the New York Times entitled ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Organised’. He would win himself a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing with his summary of the fall of the Castro Regime in Cuba that began on March 16th.

The New York Times article would tell the true story of the revolution in Cuba away from what was said in wartime propaganda and afterwards by politicians engaged in the dark arts of spin. What really happened down in Cuba would be revealed to the public in that award-winning feature piece.

*​

Schoolchildren in the West study famous revolutions that have occurred throughout history giving them as adults a general idea of such ones as the overthrow of Charles I in England in the mid Seventeen Century, the French Revolution in the late Eighteen Century, and the Russian Revolution in the early Twentieth Century. The events leading to the deposing of the previous regimes and the ultimate outcomes of them are taught. However, in particular with these three examples, an understanding is not always gained by those young learners concerning how those who ended up ruling their nations afterwards weren’t at the forefront of instigating the initial events.

Oliver Cromwell didn’t challenge his King from the outset to establish his Protectorate. Likewise, Emperor Napoleon was only a young artillery officer in Corsica when Louis XIV was deposed. During World War One it wasn’t Lenin’s communists who forced Nicholas II to abdicate though they did launch the second revolution of 1917 in Russia. Not all revolutions were like these, yet these three examples were important because of their influence in the mind of the general public.


The initial public perception in the West by those with access to censored news stories that their governments gave them was that those who ended up running the Provisional Government in Havana had launched their revolution with that intention. They were treated as freedom fighters who had ‘braved the wrath’ of the ‘cruel regime’ of the Castro Brothers to ‘liberate their island nation’. However, that was far from true. Those Miami Exiles who returned to Havana did so after the revolutionary events and played no part in igniting them nor leading them either. It was the poor, oppressed Cuban people, ordinary men and women, who toppled the Castro Brothers and then found themselves being lorded over by exiles returning from Florida, many of whom hadn’t been on Cuban shores for a very long time indeed.

A true people’s revolt – one which would warm the heart of any anarchist or Trotskyist – rocked Cuba and overthrew the established order there.


Cuba was taken to war by the Castro Brothers without any regard to the wishes of its people. Radio Havana and government-controlled newspapers across the nation declared that the country was at war with the United States following American military attacks being launched first against Cuba. The Big Lie was an easy one to tell by Fidel and Raul just as Chebrikov in Moscow had assured the world too. Immense military successes on the part of the Cuban Armed Forces were then extolled and Cuba was assured that imminent victory, one which would further the socialist paradise that the Castro Brothers had built, against the hated imperialists to the north was only days away.

And then the Americans started bombing Cuba.

For two nights, American aircraft not only hit military installations across the country – many of which were near populated areas – but what were deemed ‘regime targets’ in Havana were also attacked from the air. Government ministries and suspected bunkers underneath the city were smashed while the power and water supplies to the Havana were knocked out. It was the same in other cities across the nation too as Pinar del Rio, Matanzas, Santa Clara, Cienfuegos, Camaguey, Santiago de Cuba and Guantanamo were all struck with American bombs that smashed regime targets and the utility supplies including nationwide telephone links as well as electricity and drinking water. Telecommunications were left alone though due to CIA requests that its propaganda outlets in Florida needed to communicate with Cuban civilians by hi-jacking radio and television signals.

The Cuban Government declared to its people that those air attacks would only strengthen the country’s resolve and that the Americans were murderers of innocents. The idea was that such bombing would turn the people against the United States even more than they were already expected to be as Cuba was a patriotic nation. This line of thinking seemed logical and was something that worked in outer countries fighting in World War Three… but it didn’t pay off in Cuba.

The people blamed their rulers for the American air attacks.


When rioting rocked Havana and several other cities and big towns on the morning after the first night of air attacks this generally came in response to the reaction of the security forces to looting that took place by criminal elements of Cuban society. Ministry of Interior troops turned their guns on such people and many others who weren’t involved in such activity got caught up in the crossfire. Eventually, things settled down and the security forces were after what they deemed ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ who had been suddenly active in anti-regime action by trying to organise protests and attacking official buildings.

The second night’s bombing of Cuba was even worse though and really broke the hold that the security services had over the people. B-52s filled the skies and so too did land- and naval based tactical aircraft. Military bases were attacked in spectacular fashion and regime targets were hit again, often inside the cities. Command and control started to break down and when morning came people on the streets who were worried about the future started looting like criminals who had survived the previous day’s crackdowns. There was no shortage of food (any more than usual anyway in a poor nation like Cuba) but ordinary people started stealing it from shops. Ministry of Interior troops were requested by the civilian police to control such outbreaks of lawlessness, but the breakdown of communications nationwide between such forces was really starting to have an effect. The Americans had been busy smashing telephone exchanges and radio antenna used by the military and security forces. Senior people were dead from the American bombing too and orders from those in-charge still alive struggled to get through to what were becoming the frontlines.

Severe rioting erupted for the second morning and this time it couldn’t be stopped. In Havana and elsewhere that rioting led to unplanned but very deadly attacks against police and security forces buildings at first before – almost naturally it seemed – buildings housing offices of the Cuban Communist Party were attacked. The people were fighting the security forces now and that was where such representatives of their government who had led them into this war were to be found. Outright murder was committed by both sides in countless instances nationwide and the violence kept on spreading throughout the morning and later into the day.


Raul Castro, the Minister for the Armed Forces, had been one of those ‘regime targets’ that the Americans had gone after and his bunker on the outskirts of Havana had been hit very early in the morning. Intelligence from a Cuban defector who had intimate knowledge of the location and structure of the below ground communications facility had been put to good use by the United States and the bunker was hit and destroyed.

The death of the youngest of the Castro Brothers was something that would take time to confirm by the Cuban Government as well as the Americans. In the meantime, the effect of his demise was quickly felt when security forces started requesting that military units across the nation be assigned to assist them in dealing with civil disturbances that showed no signs of dissipating despite the lack of weaponry that the rioters had when compared to the police and Ministry of Interior troops. Raul Castro commanded the Cuban Armed Forces with an iron fist and all orders for the conduct of military operations had to go through him. This centralised system of control, everything in the hands of one man, was a dangerous method of military control but one favoured by dictatorships such as Cuba where the only real threat to the regime was thought to come from a military doing as it wished.

Permission was not granted by the dead Raul Castro for the military to intervene and thus troops stayed watching the coastline for an American invasion and manning anti-aircraft guns, the latter of which had been failing spectacularly in their mission of defending the island from attack.


Without soldiers moving to assist them, the security forces couldn’t stop the tide of attacks that only grew in intensity and number. Once people got away with smashing and torching one government building they dared to attack another. Decades of repression exploded in an orgy of violence where all that had never been risked before in opposition to the regime was tried now. Hundreds upon hundreds of rioters died under the gunfire from the security forces, but thousands, even tens of thousands more took their place. Medium-sized towns and then smaller localities were soon hit with violence too.

The whole of Cuba was up in arms in revolt against their government and no one was leading them in doing so.


Fidel Castro thought that he was the leader of Cuba and he was in his own bunker – missed by American bombs which had come close but not close enough – concentrating on other matters while his regime fell apart. The death of his brother was something that he would ever find about either because he was busy in the last few hours his life struggling to have his orders followed for a re-establishment of communications with Cuban forces in Angola fighting the South Africans. The effects of the American bombing of Cuba had been reported to him as best as possible by military messengers and the DGI had tried to get him to listen to their reports about how the war was going in Europe, but Fidel Castro found himself engrossed by the situation in South-West Africa. He actually believed what others regarded as propaganda that his forces there were fighting for a socialist paradise to be established there as it was in Cuba. The cut in communications – brought about by American bombing which he regarded as no more than a nuisance – was something that drove him to fury and distracted him from everything else.

Until news was brought to him that ‘Pepin’ was dead.

Jose Alberto Naranjo Morales was one of Fidel Castro’s top advisers and a long-time friend back from the establishment of the regime nearly thirty years beforehand. Naranjo – or ‘Pepin’ as he was known – had been the Mayor of Havana before heading the domestic policy team of advisers around the Cuban President. He had been above ground and out and about in Havana trying to find out first-hand what was going on with the rioters when he and his party were attacked by a vengeful mob which had only recently seem many of their own number cut down by security forces.

Upon hearing of Pepin’s demise, Fidel Castro started to pay attention to what was going on up in the city above him. News quickly came that the situation was out of hand with civil disturbances across the city. The military was not responding to civilian requests and waiting on word from Raul Castro; his brother was left without a clue as to why Raul hadn’t acted yet to assist the civilian authorities.

The violent civil strife was citywide and there was a lot of violence near the area around the bunker deep below the ground where Fidel Castro was living out the war in luxury. He was safe there as American Intelligence knew nothing about the location and also would have one hell of a hard time using electronic detection means to track down the President’s attempts at communications. Access was through secure entrances guarded by men loyal to the President himself, not any outside institution or leader.

Yet… Fidel Castro wanted to go outside and see the killers of Pepin. His security team was aghast at his declaration that he would talk to the protesters in person – well, address them through a megaphone behind a wall of bodyguards – no matter what.

Within twenty minutes Fidel Castro was literally being torn limb from limb by the enraged mob. With a lack of guns, the poor people of Havana used improvised weapons to defeat his bodyguards and get at their President. He was the symbol of their oppression, not their socialist champion. Aged sixty-two, Fidel Castro was lynched in the streets and his body parts scattered by morbid trophy hunters eager to claim a piece of him. There was no video or photographic evidence of this event and for decades afterwards there would be conspiracy theories that a double had been killed and the Cuban President had escaped, yet his death certainly did happen on Havana’s streets that evening in a revolution that was only a few hours old but had already changed the world.

The Cuban regime fell with his death, though the country and the rest of the world didn’t yet know it. It would take days for the news to get out and momentous geo-political events in the Caribbean would follow. For now though, the unorganised and leaderless revolution was still going and remained as bloody as the death of Fidel Castro was.





Ninety–Nine

The US III Corps did what General Kenny wanted of his American counterattack force and stopped the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army cold during the evening of March 16th. Around Rethen and Gliedingen, near Sehnde and across in the Hamelerwald Forest, the trio of tank divisions that had gone charging forwards were hit by the Americans moving forward to stop them and the Soviet advance came to a halt.


The 90GTD came off the worst from the meeting engagement between the opposing forces when it first ran into ambush positions hastily set up by elements of the 3rd ‘Brave Rifles’ Armored Cavalry Regiment before the rest of that brigade-sized tank-heavy force led the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division into an attack. The Soviet tanks had been rolling towards Laatzen but the ambush by the Brave Rifles to the east of Rethen stung them hard before the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division crashed into the main body of the division from its right-hand flank around nearby Gliedingen. The 5th Mechanized Infantry Division – including the USAR reservists of the 157th Mechanized Infantry Brigade home-based in Pennsylvania – did remarkable damage to the 90GTD as the Soviets were moving forward to attack the anti-tank ambush at their front and had momentarily neglected to have sufficient screening forces on their flank to stop a penetration deep into their centre. With more time and better planning, the Americans could have taken apart the 90GTD rather than just fight it to a standstill as it tried to protect itself rather than advance, but there was still enough damage done to the Soviets to call the attack against it a stunning success.

The 1st Cavalry Division (an Armored division in all but name) met with the 7GTD around Sehnde as the Soviets were just about to switch their axis of advance. Pilot reports from aircraft flying forwards on strike-reconnaissance missions reported to the commanding general of the Soviet division of approaching armour but those reports weren’t treated with enough seriousness and so the strength of the American attack came as a surprise to those attacked. The 7GTD had been preparing to brush off an attack expected to come from British armour in regimental strength at the most, not a full division of American tanks and mechanized infantry. There were three hundred and thirty plus M-1 Abrams tanks with the 1st Cavalry Division and these went up against nearly as many T-64s in fierce engagements where the newer American tanks didn’t always walk away as winners. Nevertheless, an encirclement was conducted of the majority of the Soviet division in a pocket around Sehnde with those smaller units of the 7GTD that managed to escape fleeing back southwards in disarray chased as they did so by American attack helicopters and the divisional cavalry reconnaissance squadron.

In the Hamelerwald Forest, between Lehrte and Peine, the understrength 20TD came unstuck when faced with the tank cannons and anti-tank missile teams of a pair of brigades the 2nd Armored Division. The Soviet tanks came out of the woodland and couldn’t get back to the rolling countryside either to the north or west. Autobahn-2 ran through the forest for just over a mile and that stretch of road being used as a major NATO supply route was cut here, but that was the only victory that the 20TD could pull off before withdrawing back to the south and southeast after taking losses. Those weren’t as severe as the two other divisions had had inflicted upon them, but the 20TD had run into an impenetrable wall of cannon and missile fire.

There was a third brigade of the 2nd Armored Division, its ‘Forward Brigade’ based near Bremen in West Germany in peacetime while the rest of the division had been at Fort Hood in Texas, and Major-General Roger Price, the divisional commander, had sent that formation forward away from the engagement with the 20TD to cut off the anticipated retreat of the Soviets. The Forward Brigade had looped around the Hamelerwald Forest to the southwest and lanced towards the Mehrum Power Station on the northern banks of the nearby stretch of the Elbe-Weser Canal. West German engineers had been in the process of carrying out demolitions there when overrun less than an hour beforehand by the fast-moving 20TD. There was a bridge over the little waterway too that the Soviets had captured intact to aid their own advance, but that was recaptured and fell into American hands. Meanwhile, the 2nd Armored Division’s Forward Brigade had slammed into the rear supply convoys of the 20TD and its tanks and infantry shot up more than a hundred trucks loaded with fuel, ammunition and supplies. They had just missed the chance to hit the divisional artillery regiment, but destroying these supply elements as they did had as much value as the destruction of those guns would have been. More importantly, the Americans were now sitting on the line of retreat for the 20TD.


Darkness started to fill the distant eastern skies ahead of those victorious American troops and behind the beaten Soviets. The men of the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army started to withdraw backwards in the best order that they could after being hit as hard as they were by well-trained and heavily-armed opposing forces on the attack rather than sitting in defensive positions waiting themselves to be struck at. There were major discipline issues among both the 90GTD & 7GTD during the evening though not really with the 20TD. The latter division found itself having to continue fighting to stop American efforts to squeeze them into submission while the pair of divisions to the west of them had been ordered to withdraw and this had an effect upon the demoralised men.

KGB men from the Third Chief Directorate, the department of the state’s secret police responsible for military affairs, quickly organised armed parties to shoot a fair number of those who were panicking and causing disorder (as an example to others), as well as men from a motorised rifle battalion with the 7GTD who foolishly talked openly among themselves of abandoning their responsibilities and surrendering to the Americans. The fear of being shot by one’s own side in a firing squad, and the consequences for family back home, restored much order though the KGB officers rooted out the ringleaders of trouble and ‘re-assigned’ them to penal battalions.

As to the Americans, there was celebration among the tired men of the US III Corps after their successes. The men knew that they had won a great victory and stopped a Soviet tank army cold with minimal losses on their own side. Much ammunition had been used though and quite a lot of tanks, armoured vehicles and other equipment had been destroyed by enemy action. The 2nd Armored Division was in a better shape that the other two divisions and was engaged in a pursuit of the retreating Soviets as well as cutting off their retreat, though the 1st Cavalry & 5th Mechanized Infantry Divisions, along with the Brave Rifles, each needed time to sort itself out to be ready again to conduct major combat operations.


Dusk arrived by half past six that evening and there was no light left in the sky less than thirty minutes later. There was still fighting southeast of Hannover in a triangle of combat now defined at that city to the northwest, Braunschweig to the east and Hildesheim to the west, yet the physically drained men were all preparing for night and the expected lull in fighting then. However, the field commanders of NATO and Soviet troops alike tried to keep their men doing their duty. There were pockets of British infantry all across the area who had been isolated when the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army’s tanks had raced forwards, but who had afterwards been left alone and not surrounded and defeated in detail. Earlier in the day the Poles and the Soviet 21GMRD had acted in such a manner, but the trio of tank divisions that had raced forwards before running into the Americans had been too busy with their advance to do so.

The British forces, from tiny squad-sized units all the way up to a full battalion – the latter being the seventh battalion of the Light Infantry, TA volunteers from County Durham – now fled towards the lines of British, West German and American forces in the area. The darkness brought out the worst fears in men, especially those in an intensive war zone, and there were some unfortunate instances of ‘friendly fire’ when often lost British troops approached NATO lines to try and re-establish contact with their allies. This was bound to happen and wasn’t something good at all, but nothing could be done to stop such occurrences – thankfully they were just few and far between.


The darkness brought the arrival over the battlefield below of 3 ATAF aircraft flying from Britain. F-111s and Tornados arrived in force to take over air duties from the 2 ATAF formations that had been conducting air operations all day, though those strike-bombers were on different missions to the more tactically orientated aircraft that had been active during the hours of daylight. In response to instructions from General Galvin, in command of all ground and air forces across the whole of Europe under NATO control, and against the personal wishes of the 3 ATAF commander, those strike-bombers conducted missions against Soviet Twentieth Guards Army and the Polish Second Army just to the south.

The bombing missions resulted in strategic strikes made in a tactical environment. The 3 ATAF struck the Soviets and Poles just behind the frontlines and up to a depth of fifteen miles back eastwards. There was a marked shortage of ‘smart’ bombs remaining back in Britain after the stocks of them had been depleted hitting bridges and command bunkers so the strike-bombers attacked with ‘dumb’ bombs. There was no fantastic camera footage available to commanders back in Britain of bridges being downed in spectacular fashion, just explosions documented by reconnaissance pods in black-and-white taking place across open fields, woodland and in small villages.

The combat supporting assets of the divisions that had attacked forward were targets for the bombs that fell away from the aircraft. Those strike-bombers were carrying more ordnance than they had on missions the two previous nights because they were closer to their bases in Britain tonight. The pilots and weapons officers aboard also weren’t as worried as they usually were about being shot down. Yes, the Soviet and Polish field armies had extensive battlefield air defence assets, but those weren’t regarded as dangerous as those strategic air defences operated much further behind the frontlines and deep into Eastern Europe. Moreover, should their aircraft be shot down and they were to eject, there was much less of a chance that they would end up as POWs as comrades of theirs certainly had when downed over the far side of East Germany and across in Poland.

Some aircraft did go down to anti-aircraft guns, SAMs and Warsaw Pact interceptors, though with air defence suppression aircraft and escorting fighters in numerous attendance, the USAF F-111s and RAF Tornados suffered fewer losses than usual tonight.


As the night got later and NATO air activity continued, Soviet aircraft were flown forwards to challenge those bombing attacks and also try to conduct their own attacks against the US III Corps and the shattered remains of the British I Corps. There was nowhere near as much effort put in to this on the part of the Soviets as NATO was doing, yet there was some success to be had.

General Korbutov purposely kept the bulk of his assigned air assets back for missions that he wished to send them on at dawn the following morning. NATO aircraft owned the night-time skies as far as he was concerned and it was a waste of pilots and aircraft to try to challenge them when it was dark. The Soviet Fourth & Twenty-Sixth Air Army’s had already taken immense losses during three days and nights of war and what remained was needed for what he had planned for the next day.

Before darkness had fallen over the battlefield, General Korbutov had been in contact with Marshal Kulikov, with his superior relaying instructions and demands from Marshal Ogarkov in Moscow. The head of STAVKA has asked about those ‘NATO invasion forces’ and wanted to know whether they had been engaged in battle – on West German soil that was – or, even better, destroyed. General Korbutov had replied that as far as his intelligence sources were able to tell, the American corps in northern West Germany as well as the Anglo-German ‘Weser Corps’ had both been committed to action by NATO. STAVKA had then informed him that overnight the First Western Front was to be reinforced with two field armies from the Polish Front (which was effectively being disestablished though had only really been active as a holding force), namely the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army and the Polish First Army. With those, plus all of his own forces that he could muster, General Korbutov was to attack everywhere again the following day. He had protested that this was not the doctrine of reinforcing success which was central to how the Soviet Army was supposed to fight, but STAVKA, Marshal Kulikov had assured his subordinate as he was relaying messages, wanted such an attack to take place all across the frontlines no matter the opposition, the terrain or the state of those attacking forces involved.

Even if a breakthrough couldn’t be made, then it was still to be tried to further wear down what were known to be already weakened NATO forces.

General Korbutov was also told that the same instructions – to attack all across the frontlines with all available forces – had been issued to Generals Snetkov and Shokov as well and that STAVKA was expecting success all across Germany on March 17th.

*​

Down in central West Germany, fighting in the Kinzig Valley continued into the evening of the 16th just as it did up near Hannover. Once it got dark major combat operations slowed to a crawl as everyone waited for daylight again, but before the sun set across in the far western skies, there was another fierce battle to be fought.

The Americans and the Spaniards made a stand near Hausen. On the right where those Spanish troops that had done so well earlier but suffered many losses while to the left was the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division; behind and in reserve stood the ‘new’ 4th Mechanized Infantry Division with the three original combat brigades merged into two weaker ones plus the attachment of that tank-heavy brigade from the 3rd Armored Division in addition to the independent West German 55th Reserve Panzergrenadier Brigade. The defensive position of this mixed NATO forces was improvised but good from a terrain point of view and it was believed that they could hold the Soviets back here especially if the Soviets could be channeled by the features of the ground into only bringing one division forward at a time and thus left unable to conduct a multi-division attack.


The resulting Battle of Hausen was afterwards regarded as a draw for those forces involved with stalemate occurring after a three hour battle. Both sides achieved what they wanted from the fight, though everything didn’t go as planned.

The 6GMRD was slotted forward first through the 32GTD – causing traffic chaos which was one of the several reasons why the Soviet First Guards Tank Army commander would later lose his position (but not his life) – and into the attack with its BMP-2s, BTR-60s and BTR-70s armoured vehicles delivering infantry straight into battle. T-80 tanks and a whole lot of artillery acted in concert, but to break through both the American and Spanish lines the Soviets used this infantry-heavy approach. M-1 Abrams and AMX-30 tanks, supported by NATO armoured vehicles and many dismounted anti-tank missile teams, broke up these regimental-level attacks yet in doing so positions were exposed for counter-fire by Soviet tanks. An advance forward by the 6GMRD’s tank regiment (the 80th Tank Regiment) with the support of the 47th Independent Tank Regiment from Soviet First Guards Tank Army command was then crippled by maintenance issues. Many of the tanks in both regiments suffered multiple breakdowns at the crucial moment when they were pushed forward at full speed. They had been left idling with the engines on all day and necessary maintenance work hadn’t been done. Less than seventy per cent of those tanks from the two formations moved forward on command and this failure to mass sufficient strength would lead to a dismissal of the commanders of both regiments.

Those tanks that did move forward attempted to engage spotted American and Spanish armour to do it plenty of damage from when the 32GTD came forward again. Tank-on-tank duels at distance and then at closer range were fought alongside the limited use of attack helicopters by both opposing sides in an environment where there were many anti-air assets deployed. The Soviet tank regiments couldn’t force the NATO tanks to pull back nor knock out anywhere near enough of them and soon the 32GTD was pushed forwards. The division’s motorised rifle regiment was directed against the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division to gain the attention of the Americans while the three tank regiments moved against the Spanish 1st Armored Division, a formation which they anticipated as being weak and easy to overrun.

The Spanish fought extremely hard and were assisted by the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division moving its third combat brigade, the formerly independent 197th Mechanized Infantry Brigade, to the right and counterattacking the Soviets flank. There was a battalion of tanks and two of infantry with the 197th Brigade as well as plenty of M-901 anti-tank vehicles with their TOW missiles in support of that mechanised infantry which aided in the mission of destroying the T-80s of the 32GTD. As to the Spanish themselves, they didn’t roll over and die like the Soviets thought they would… they hadn’t earlier in the day and wouldn’t again no matter how badly they had suffered on the modern battlefield. Their armoured cavalry units were depleted, but still went forwards in counterattacks against heavily-armoured and well-armed Soviet attacking forces to save infantry units threatened by combined arms assaults.

However, despite the Spanish bravery and the 197th Brigade’s support, the 32GTD managed to break through the Spanish lines and split the division into two (unequal) parts. The 32GTD then moved to roll into the Americans from the rear.

Standing in the Soviet’s way was the 1st Brigade from the 3rd Armored Division. Two battalions of M-1 tanks and one of infantry in M-2 armoured vehicles stopped the 32GTD’s advance guard and the tank regiment following it before then parrying a further flanking effort on the part of the enemy to get into the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division’s rear. The rest of the division quickly moved to seal off the breach in NATO lines right at the point of penetration and pocket the 32GTD. This effort was meeting some success before intelligence came from the 4 ATAF – flying aircraft above in support, especially a lot of A-10 tank-busters – that the two Soviet tank divisions met earlier in the day further up the valley were rolling forward again. The 9TD & 11GTD had been hurt earlier, but they were still combat effective. The move to surround the 32GTD had to be broken off and rather any further progress of the unit impended so that the Spanish would be brought back into the NATO lines and readiness made to halt the pair of Soviet First Guards Tank Army divisions coming down the Kinzig Valley.

From a distance those approaching tank formations were engaged with air power and then artillery firing anti-tank mines ahead of them but the ground fighting was where the major ‘action’ was. The Soviets were too slow in moving through areas of earlier fighting as vehicles of the 6GMRD littered the battlefield and there was a lot of unexploded ordnance to be avoided. Fighting from positions that they had got to know perfectly only hours beforehand, the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division engaged the tank divisions and also got help from a battalion of the West German 55th Brigade with forty M-48A2 tanks on-hand as well. The onrush of armour was brought to a stop by massed NATO firepower and an unwillingness where there had been an earlier determination on the part of the Soviets to keep going no matter what the defences were.

Darkness came and the ground fighting petered out in the Kinzig Valley with the Soviet First Guards Tank Army now more than halfway to Gelnhausen and the rolling, open countryside after there all the way to Frankfurt: somewhere wide enough for several tank divisions to operate side-by-side rather than bunched-up behind one another.


The Americans considered the Battle of Hausen a success because they had stopped the Soviets without losing too many men and not seeing formations destroyed by massed enemy armour.

Conversely, for the Soviets they had a victory too. They hadn’t broken through the NATO forces, but had engaged many opposing forces in a fixed battle where reserve forces of the US Seventh Army had been committed to and couldn’t withdraw from now. The Soviets had plenty of reserves of their own back deeper in East Germany where NATO was fast running out of units to commit to threatened positions.

Here in Hessen, as up near Hannover, the Warsaw Pact was winning the battle for Germany even if that wasn’t yet fully apparent to themselves let alone NATO.

[James G]

One Hundred

The fighting in Skibotn was short but extremely violent. The Soviet tanks that had arrived in the village were engaged by Royal Marines in a furious battle that lasted less than an hour though left hundreds of men dead; Skibotn was destroyed during the fighting.


The seventy-three tanks that reached Skibotn were from the 82nd Independent Guards & 420th Independent Tank Battalions (assigned to the 54MRD and 37MRD respectively). No infantry carriers, other armoured vehicles or trucks came with the tanks to Skibotn and they were thus completely alone deep behind the frontlines in the middle of the Skibotn Valley. Seven tanks had been lost breaking through the Norwegian positions to the south though the battalions maintained unit cohesion during their advance to reach the shores of the Lyngenfjorden with the pair of Lt.-Colonels commanding the battalions keeping control over the men driving their tanks. It was only when they reached the village, and its surprised defenders, did things start to go very wrong.

The ‘Bootnecks’ from 41 and 45 Commandos – battalion-sized formations of Royal Marines – were greatly surprised, to say the least, at the sudden arrival inside Skibotn of the enemy. The men found that Soviet tanks had arrived in the village where they were stationed from out of nowhere and had come down the highway from the Finnish Wedge to suddenly deploy around the junction where the E6 highway was as well as at the small harbour on the shores of the fjord. With seemingly no concept that the Royal Marines were now all around them, the tanks took up blocking positions with their cannons facing outwards in all directions.

Following orders quickly issued from their battalion commanders to junior officers already rushing to get their men ready for action, the Royal Marines started to move to combat this intrusion deep into the NATO rear up here in northern Norway.

Being light infantry units, 41 & 45 Commandos were armed with a wide array of man-portable weapons rather than armoured vehicles. The Royal Marines as a whole could deploy from any mobile platform – tracked vehicles, landing craft, helicopters and trucks – yet the expectation was that they were also going to end up fighting as a dismounted force and thus had to have the mobile weaponry to take with them to do just that. The training staff, recruiting officers and reservists that made up 41 Commando along with the veterans of the Arbroath-based 45 Commando had come to Norway with all the light weapons that they could carry in anticipation of possibly ending up in a fight against Soviet armour. The thought was that they would be possibly part of a flanking or screening force guarding against enemy penetration by light tanks and mechanised troops rather than launching an amphibious or airmobile assault directly like their comrades in the other two Commandos deployed to NATO’s northern flank.

Therefore while no one had directly expected that more than seventy tanks would arrive in Skibotn before the Royal Marines had actually been committed to action, this wasn’t something utterly shocking that they had no idea how to deal with.

There were fire support teams with the infantry forces of the Royal Marines and these fellow Bootnecks were the ones who were armed with and were to operate the heavy weapons that had been brought to Skibotn. There were medium and heavy machine guns, mortars, shoulder-launched SAMs, recoilless rifles and anti-tank missile-launchers with those fire support units who were meant to provide assistance to the assault rifle and light machine gun armed infantry on the battlefield. In today’s fight for this little village that had seen the intrusion of Soviet tanks in great number, the infantry weren’t really going to be effective against tanks that had absolutely zero infantry of their own with them and so it was the fire support teams who went into action. There were expected to be much use for the infantry in going after crewmen from engaged tanks who might flee on foot when their vehicles were damaged or ran out of ammunition, but it was to be a fight that those who manned the heavy weapons would lead.


There were thirty-five T-55AM tanks of the 420th Battalion that had arrived in Skibotn and which took up positions facing north as well as back to the east from where they had come but where NATO forces were known to be too. These modernised main battle tanks belched thick black smoke as their engines were left idling, a fact that would have really helped them should they had tried to fight from the less than perfect ‘hidden’ positions that they had tried to slot into. Even without that tell-tale engine smoke being given off, the white-painted tanks sitting among a village where little snow had fallen was hard to miss.

Carl Gustavs and MILANs were used by the Bootnecks to engage the 420th Battalion. The men of P and R Companys, two units established with 41 Commando during TtW as part of LION, thoroughly enjoyed watching the rockets and missiles fly as they slammed into the big tanks. Those T-55s with extra antenna which identified those as command vehicles for company and battalion commanders were targeted first before the Royal Marines moved onto others.

As would be expected, the crewmen in the T-55s weren’t placid when they came under attack. They returned fire in the general direction towards where they and their comrades in other tanks had taken fire. There were 12.7mm heavy machine guns mounted atop the T-55s and coaxial medium machine guns of a 7.62mm calibre; these were used to fire back at the missile-men who took the 420th Battalion under fire rather than the big 100mm cannons. To use the coaxial machine gun the whole turret had to be turned to face the direction of attack while the tank’s loader would have to raise himself out of his hatch to use the DShKM heavy machine gun. The latter response exposed the loaders to fire directed from the infantry-rolled infantry supporting the fire support teams while turning the turret each time to try to engage new targets took time.

Multiple T-55s blew up while sitting still before frantic radio commands were issued by senior men who had survived the first barrages for the tanks to move. They were to get up and out of the ditches that they were in, from behind buildings and out of the partial cover offered by bare trees to engage those who were taking them under fire. Some of the quicker-reacting tank crews, as well as others that got lucky, managed to return accurate fire upon the Bootnecks and strike back hard against those trying to kill them; the British weren’t getting away with their attacks unscathed.

Nonetheless, the 420th Battalion very quickly took major losses and with rockets and missiles striking them from further positions when they moved, order broke down in the ranks. None of the three companies of T-55s was effectively able to engage their attackers which appeared to be all around them and tanks were being blown up in fireballs all around. Crews would flee from badly damaged tanks either carrying their personal weapons or with their hands in the air in attempts to hopelessly fight back as well as surrender. The Bootnecks were prepared for either action and the infantry enjoyed showing how well they would fight in addition to presenting themselves with a little bit of honour when accepting the surrender of their opponents.

Half of the tank strength of the 420th Battalion was lost within fifteen minutes of combat. The Royal Marines had suffered losses themselves but they were still capable to taking on the rest of the T-55s. Ammunition issues affected them somewhat with most of the missiles used up but there were still plenty of rockets for the Carl Gustavs. In addition, the lightweight mortars that they had were broken out and smoke rounds then dropped on the tanks. This was not to confuse or obstruct the vision of those inside the now mobile targets, but rather to guide in the air support that their radios were promising them was hastily being diverted towards Skibotn.


45 Commando engaged the 82nd Guards Battalion in a similar fashion. They went after the T-80BV tanks that had emplaced themselves in such an arrogant fashion in the centre of Skibotn and on the western edge of the village. When hit with Carl Gustav rockets the explosive reactive armour fitted to the Soviet tanks kept them from suffering major damage though such defences couldn’t stop MILAN missiles ripping into those hit with these weapons. Turrets were seen flying through the air when stored ammunition aboard some of the destroyed T-80s exploded, while others just died fiery deaths. There wasn’t a loader assigned to these tanks and so the vehicle commander had to raise himself from his hatch to fire the NSTV heavy machine gun when that was used in defence instead of the coaxial machine gun. When several tank commanders were killed by gunfire from the Royal Marines, especially effective sniper fire, the T-80s used high-explosive fragmentation (HEF) shells fired from the main gun instead to defend themselves.

There were only a few HEF shells aboard the T-80s shot out of the smoothbore 2A46 cannons and they were quickly used up, but these caused immense loss of lives to any Bootnecks caught in their path when they exploded. A distance was set before one was fired for the shotgun-type blast to tear apart the 125mm round and shrapnel filled the air. Afterwards, the PKT machine guns were used and the Royal Marines could take cover, but those HEF rounds killed plenty of Bootnecks.

With part of the 82nd Guards Battalion being inside the village, many of Skibotn’s houses were soon set alight when those tanks blew up or fired rockets missed the tanks and hit them instead. Thick smoke filled the air and through that T-80s lumbered out of their previous positions to engage their attackers while also moving to avoid being stationary targets. Royal Marines on foot chased after tanks at times to try to engage them and the crewmen partially protected inside.


A flight of three Norwegian F-16s arrived in the clear skies above Skibotn while the fight was going on below. These aircraft had been on a ground attack mission towards the southern end of the Skibotn Valley but had been diverted at the last minute to assist the Royal Marines. Unfortunately for the Bootnecks on the ground, with everything happening so quickly their air liaison officers were not in-place nor operating on the same radio frequencies as the Norwegian pilots were. If this had been a planned engagement then that would have been the case, but there was no ground-to-air coordination in this instance. The Royal Marines received warning at the very last minute that aircraft were inbound and that they were going to receive close air support. The majority of them managed to find any cover that they would but not everyone got the word to do so in the midst of battle… even then there wasn’t always the best cover available.

Unguided 500lb high-explosive bombs fell away from the F-16s with the Norwegian pilots being instructed to look for coloured smoke that the Royal Marines were meant to mark their targets with using mortars and grenades. Those strike-fighters had approached very fast though and the pilots were worried about non-existent SAMs. There was smoke bellowing from hit tanks and burning buildings too.

Seemingly the whole village exploded when the bombs went off. Some tanks were hit though many bombs missed their targets and instead struck buildings as well as sheltering Bootnecks on occasion too.

There was death and destruction everywhere.


The air attack did hurt 41 & 45 Commandos with losses taken from ‘friendly fire’ but the Soviets came off worst. A total of eight tanks had been hit by the falling bombs and fragments of them – with the latter the results of the explosive reactive armour had been as interesting as earlier when rockets slammed it the T-80s – whereas thirteen of the seventy-three had been destroyed beforehand and another nine badly damaged. Nearly half of the tank strength in Skibotn was out of action and soon tanks started running out of machine gun ammunition. So much had been used in sustained bursts of fire rather than carefully-targeted bursts and there was absolutely no resupply available.

This lack of any more ammunition brought about different reactions inside those tanks affected. Some crews decided to surrender, others decided to race towards their comrades to (hopefully) be protected by them while further tank crews decided to do nothing and just hope they weren’t attacked if they weren’t firing back. The kill numbers kept on climbing while the Royal Marines lost less men per engagement and were especially happy – though somewhat confused – by Soviet actions to race around hopelessly or sitting still doing nothing.

The men of 41 & 45 Commandos reported to their battalion commanders that they had knocked out forty tanks and then soon afterwards they were claiming fifty kills. Those commanding officers instructed their men to keep up the good work while also assuring them that while there wasn’t going to be any immediate resupply to bring them more MILAN missiles there was a detachment from the 5th Airborne Brigade racing towards Skibotn with infantry carrying missiles of their own as well as some armoured vehicles from the Life Guards.

The Bootnecks weren’t happy at all at that news about the 5th Brigade coming to rescue them as they knew that the Paras made up the ranks of that formation: rivalry between the Bootnecks and the Paras was legendary. However, there was an error in that judgement because it was men from the first battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers who were racing in light vehicles following Scorpion armoured vehicles towards Skibotn. In the meantime, the Royal Marines tried to finish off the Soviets because they didn’t want to be ‘rescued’ by their great rivals.

Events were moving fast though and the battle would be over before the elements of 5th Brigade could arrive.

Tank crews who still had machine gun ammunition started to surrender when in reality the two battalions still could have joined together and fought their way out of Skibotn away to the southwest or the north with the Royal Marines eventually being unable to keep up. There were not that many senior officers remaining to order such an escape and anyway morale had plummeted after the fighting as well as the air attack. There were instances of fighting among some crews inside their vehicles where fists, pistols and even light assault rifles were used yet generally if a tank crew decided to surrender each man was involved in such a decision.

Others crews while fighting for their lives became aware of their comrades surrendering around them. There were a couple of ugly scenes when tank crews who wanted to keep on fighting despite the hopelessness of the situation fired on others who were giving up. The Royal Marines had in those instances had to stop the passionate desires of surrendered men to grab weapons and fight their comrades when such people were meant to be prisoners.

In the end there was just one tank left from the seventy-three which was fighting before it was finally dispatched. The crews of thirty-one had surrendered while the other forty-two had been destroyed or damaged enough to force them out of action. Each tank either burning or was destined to end up taken away by NATO forces. There were more than a hundred prisoners for the Royal Marines to deal with, some of whom were wounded and received identical treatment to those in the impromptu field hospitals that were set up to the Bootnecks who had been fighting them not long beforehand.

Two Soviet tank battalions had been taken apart after their unplanned and eventual ineffective crazy advance deep into the NATO rear but they had hurt the Bootnecks who had fought them. Dead and wounded men of 41 & 45 Commandos amounted to almost a third of their ranks and much ammunition had been expended. The 5th Brigade was distracted from sending the battalion-sized battle-group it had been planning to aid the Norwegians with too; the convoys of trucks would turn around and have to go back southwards with no one in Skibotn for them to fight.

British forces had won a great victory in Skibotn but it had been a costly victory indeed.




One Hundred & One

Thatcher’s War Cabinet met very late on the Wednesday evening at Q-Whitehall. This was an extended bunker below the streets of Central London nowhere near as deep as the Central Government War Headquarters out in Wiltshire at Corsham, yet Q-Whitehall wasn’t designed to protect its occupants from nuclear attack as that distant facility was.

There had been talk during the day of bringing back to London several other members of the wider Cabinet to join in with discussions ongoing about the war but the PM had vetoed that idea due to her worries that there could still be an eruption of nuclear conflict at any moment. The argument had been put forth that the ‘ultimate ultimatum’ delivered by the Soviets to Reagan concerning the use of nuclear weapons meant that such people would be able to return but Ambassador Price from the US Embassy had told Thatcher that his President wanted that kept secret and not to get out. Moreover, and in her opinion of greater importance, those senior Secretaries of State were needed where they were running the country on a regional basis while the War Cabinet could concentrate on the vital issues of defence and foreign affairs.

The War Cabinet met with military and intelligence chiefs to discuss those matters of the war as it was being fought – particularly with regard to the UK – as well as international developments related to World War Three that had significance for Britain.


Vice CDS General Vincent – who remained at Q-Whitehall while Admiral Fieldhouse was at the below-ground Northwood command centre – was responsible for briefing the politicians on military matters. Twice daily since last Friday he had been informing the PM and those around her over the progress of the war not only from the all-important perspective of how it was affecting Britain and her armed forces but elsewhere too. It was a difficult task for General Vincent as he was a British Army officer who had to describe the losses taken on the ground in Germany and elsewhere while remaining emotionally detached from it all because the politicians needed clear and concise information. He knew how to do his job and thought that he was doing it well, but there were many times where he wished he was in Germany being able to do something, anything about what he was hearing and having to report.

This evening he had many matters to inform the War Cabinet about.

From French military channels there came news from West Berlin had now fallen to East German, Polish and Soviet forces. British communications with its surrounded troops – and diplomats too – had been cut moments after war erupted and the Americans had reported the same thing. The French though had maintained limited contact as Soviet troops from their garrisoned force in the eastern part of city (the 6th Independent Guards Motorised Rifle Brigade) had first taken on the surrounded Americans while East German troops had used artillery to attack British and French forces. Later penetration efforts had been made by East German commandoes into the British garrisons that they had surrounded, the French had informed London, but now those military and diplomatic complexes inside West Berlin were all now in Warsaw Pact hands after three divisions of reservists from the Polish Fourth Army had rolled into the divided city during the day. Apparently there had been a major break-out effort made by the NATO forces in the city rather than staying placid and waiting to die, but the French were saying that that had failed miserably with those forces being so deep behind enemy lines and wholly surrounded.

More than three thousand British troops based in West Berlin lay either dead or in enemy captivity to say nothing of West Berlin civilians caught up in what would have been fierce fighting.

There was news from Brigadier Mundell’s troops fighting in southern Norway that said that they were now approaching that airport outside Bergen in conjunction with some Norwegian forces and were preparing to assault it tomorrow. It had been hoped that the issue could have been forced in a night attack, but there were too many Soviet defences located that needed to be crippled by air and artillery strikes overnight before the attacking British troops could move forward in the morning. Flesland Airport and the nearby airspace was no longer being used by Soviet aircraft though there was still some activity enemy around Sola Airport outside Stavanger that General Vincent said would have to be dealt with too to complete the mission in southern Norway.

That issue with Flesland and Sola brought the Vice CDS to talk about the continuing if less frequent Soviet air attacks on the UK mainland. Scotland had been struck hard by those with northern England and selected parts of eastern England also attacked. Military bases and parts of the civilian infrastructure had faced attacks with much damage done and loss of life inflicted upon military personnel (not only British service personnel) and civilians. Soviet bombers had been shot down by RAF and American interceptors in response though there had been a worrying trend where bombers were hit after their attacks had been launched. Of course those aircraft could not return again to attack, but their initial attacks had been devastating in places.

In certain areas of the country, Soviet air attacks had brought about some worrying domestic disturbances afterwards. Malcolm Rifkind had worked tirelessly in Scotland during TtW to bring the outbreaks of civilian trouble to a halt, and set an excellent example elsewhere, but he had reported to the War Cabinet independently of what General Vincent was now reminding them of that there had been outbreaks of rioting, looting and the breakdown of civil order in places after air attacks had come.

Scotland was further the subject of the briefing tonight when the Vice CDS spoke about Soviet commandoes known to be in the UK after arriving pre-war. Operation GORDON down on the South Coast had been the only success against such teams until earlier today when elements of the TA and the RAF Regiment around RAF Kinloss had detected and engaged Spetsnaz troops about to attack the mass of NATO maritime patrol aircraft flying from there and the satellite airfield at Milltown a dozen miles away to the east. Those Spetsnaz men were cut down by accurate fire and near massacred by machine gun fire though one man was in RAF custody and interrogators from the DIS were on their way to talk to him.

Moving to Germany, the War Cabinet was told how the day’s battles south and east of Hannover had gone. As was his duty, General Vincent told them the truth: the British Army had taken fearful losses and suffered many reverses. If it hadn’t been for the timely arrival of the American corps assigned as strategic reserves and the application of concentrated NATO air power, the left flank of the British I Corps would have been destroyed rather than just badly beaten as it had been. Belgian troops had assisted the right flank of General Inge’s command in keeping themselves intact and capable of fighting. There had been thousands of casualties inflicted across the formation with many individual units overrun and no longer able to fight. General Inge was writing off the 2nd Infantry Division – made up of TA units from infantry to service support troops – and merging what remained of that formation with the scattered 1st Armoured Division.

March 16th had been a black day for the British Army… but so too had been the preceding two days were plenty of casualties had been taken during those as well.

The Royal Navy was in a bad way as well. After yesterday’s loss of a dozen ships with the Task Force in the Norwegian Sea, there had been further losses elsewhere in addition to those before the Soviet raketonosets had done all that damage and sunk both the carriers Illustrious & Ark Royal. The RN had put as many ships and submarines to sea as possible before war broke out including vessels on the verge of being decommissioned and on their way to the scrapyard or sold aboard. Weapons and warfighting systems from other vessels which just couldn’t make it into active service had been stripped in an ad hoc fashion to be used on those that could and that situation had been the same with men to man the ships.

The losses that the RN had taken during three days of warfare were terrible. The destroyer HMS Southampton had been sunk out in the North Atlantic earlier today while four frigates had gone down below the waves out there on convoy escort and anti-submarine duties over the three days of war: HMS Beaver, HMS Sirius, HMS Scylla and HMS Apollo. The frigates Sheffield and Penelope had been lost of the northern and eastern coast of Britain and so too had two further frigates: HMS Phoebe and HMS Achilles. Then there was HMS Ariadne that had been lost while in the Irish Sea while hunting a Soviet submarine attacking merchant ships landing cargoes in British ports.

Sixteen warships had been sunk by enemy action with another one put firmly out of action (Battleaxe) and damage done to another ten; the RN had entered the war with fifty-one warships so that meant that it was now down to two-thirds strength. There were losses to support ships and those vessels of the RFA too, all of which were on RN missions. Four of the twenty-six submarines in RN service were known to be lost – HMS Torbay, HMS Sovereign, HMS Splendid and HMS Olympus – with another three not answering messages and presumed lost, including the little Ocelot.

The RAF had taken fierce losses where they had been deployed abroad over Germany and Norway as well as having seen some of those kept back in the UK lost too. Harriers, Jaguars and Phantoms in both overseas theatres as well as Tornados used in tactical strikes in Germany had been shot out the sky by Warsaw Pact fighters, anti-aircraft guns and SAMs or destroyed when on the ground by bombing or commando attacks. Many of those aircraft based back in Britain – interceptors, airborne tankers, airborne radar aircraft, maritime patrol aircraft, specialist stand-off electronic reconnaissance aircraft and a wide variety of transports – had been knocked out in addition to those lost closer to the frontlines.

Radar stations and SAM detachments across the UK had been lightly damaged by air attacks because of the difficulty for bombs and missiles to strike them with accuracy in isolated and hidden locations, but RAF airbases across the northern parts of Britain had been attacked with great intensity and many deaths inflicted. Overall, the RAF had been hurt very hard with aircraft destroyed and men killed in great numbers with losses that just couldn’t be sustained at the rate at which they were occurring.


The Defence Secretary knew all of this information as well as General Vincent did and George Younger informed the War Cabinet of further military-related issues. Britain had no military reserves of any significant number left for further use on the ground, at sea and in the air. Everything that the UK Armed Forces had to offer had now been committed to battling the enemy as Britain was just like Western Europe was fighting for its very existence only with what it had.

TA units which were better trained that others who had remained at home in the UK had been committed to action in Germany and had suffered terrible losses. Those ground reservists that remained behind in the UK were needed to stay in-place along with the very few Regulars left to provide security support for the civilian authorities, keep a lid on the situation in Ulster (which was a difficult task) and guard against a sudden Soviet airborne coup de main in London. After the Independent Guards Brigade had been dispatched to Norway there were no troops left to move overseas. In the build-up to war, just after the worst instances of civil disorder had been reduced and before war erupted, there had been a sudden influx of volunteers to join the British Army. In their tens of thousands men had wanted to sign up out of a patriotic duty. There had been refusals of some men for a variety of reasons, but most of these volunteers had been sent to training sites across the nation. However, those men were only a few weeks into their basic training while plenty of instructors from Infantry & Armour Schools had left Britain to serve overseas; there wasn’t much equipment to train these volunteers on too.

Britain couldn’t build a new army overnight as such things took too long… and Soviet bombers had targeted a few vital factories that had made tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery pieces as well just in case Britain could perform such a miracle there. New RN warships weren’t going to be built quickly even if every possible effort was made and it was the same with new aircraft to provide for the RAF. This wasn’t the 1940s were such things like that could be done with rapid haste.

Younger explained that this meant that if the situation on the ground in Germany, the naval circumstances at sea or the air position changed for the worse Britain had nothing more to commit for a very long time to come.


The MI-6 Director-General and the Foreign Secretary both briefed the War Cabinet on important foreign developments. Curwen and Tom King both spoke of how Italy and Greece were still maintaining their ‘neutrality’ but nations such as Sweden and Ireland were now officially at war with the Soviet Union and its allies. Further afield, countries such as Iran, India and China – important nations with capable armed forces – were all remaining on the side-lines despite their hostility to the West and pre-war Soviet leanings. Much of South America was diplomatically supporting the United States and thus NATO, while South Africa was crushing the Cuban-aligned regime in Angola while also making Western governments understand that they were allies not just co-belligerents.

This was the good news alongside what was the bad. MI-6 had intelligence, which was supported by some intelligence gained by the DSGE, that there had been discussions among Chancellor Kohl’s own War Cabinet – hidden in their Rhineland bunker – concerning ‘seeking terms’ with the Soviets. Curwen made it clear to the War Cabinet that Kohl and no one else of any great influence were behind such an idea, but it was something that had been discussed. The West Germans were seeing their country blown apart, part occupied and tens of thousands of West Germans already lay dead. The Bundeswehrhad been torn apart and that was another factor in the West Germans thinking about a way of ending the war. The same intelligence said that Kohl’s government was still committed to defending their nation and remaining within the NATO alliance, but it was something to watch. Younger told his colleagues that they did need to consider how to react should the worst happen and the situation came where the West Germans wanted to get out of the war.

War Cabinet figures such as Lawson and Parkinson interrupted the briefing at that point by asking why such a thing needed to be considered when NATO was winning. Britain had been hurt but could still fight and so could the rest of Europe as long as American supplies and men were moving across the North Atlantic and every nation remained united too. Younger had to remind the Chancellor and the Energy Secretary of the matter that almost all available reserves for use in Germany apart from the French Army had now been committed to action and those apparently endless stocks of war supplies coming from the United States were finite, not infinite.

There was further intelligence from behind the frontlines that across in Slovakia where a pair of tank divisions made up of Czechoslovak reservists had apparently rebelled. This information came from CIA sources and the two formations were reported to have clashed with Czechoslovak and then Soviet security troops trying to kill the leaders of such a revolt. What those men wanted and what they could actually do were unknown factors, but that rebellion had occurred and was turning into a distracting effort for the enemy.

Parkinson and General Vincent both inquired over the effect that this might have in Eastern Europe. Could this be the first sign of a mass uprising against the communist regimes from Poland through East Germany to Czechoslovakia? Tom King cautioned against such thinking in conjunction with Curwen. No one knew about what that one revolt of a few thousand troops was about nor was there any sign of it being part of bigger pattern: the forward-deployed troops of all three nations were fighting just as hard as those of the Soviet Union. In addition, while Radio Free Europe and Voice of America were making propaganda broadcasts eastwards, which no one knew how many people were hearing or believing those, the Soviets controlled all news behind the frontlines. For months now Moscow had reasserted direct control over those nations and put new leaders in powers. There had been mass arrests of any opposition figures and dissent already crushed before the war. Soviet propaganda wasn’t only telling the world that they were winning the war after they had been attacked first but the same thing was being said across Eastern Europe too.

It was far too early to be thinking of the people of Eastern Europe rising up in revolt before those people heard the truth that the war wasn’t being won and that NATO hadn’t started it all.


Another foreign affairs matter was raised before the War Cabinet by Thatcher herself. She told her colleagues of how she had heard from Ambassador Price that all was not well with President Reagan. The seventy-seven year-old had spent the entire period of the war so far aboard an aircraft in addition to being airborne in the few days beforehand too. He was fearful of his country coming under nuclear attack at any moment. Seen as the ‘leader of the free world’, Reagan was reported feeling the strain of leading not only his country but the West against the Soviets and their allies.

Price’s candid comments had made Thatcher think that he was trying to tell her something more too. She expressed her worries that the US President’s health – physical or mental – might be in danger and thus the PM wanted the War Cabinet to think about the implications of that and keep it in mind. Such a thing as the health of Reagan mattered for Britain’s future.

[James G]

One Hundred & Two

The Soviet Navy’s Northern Fleet was having a terrible war.

In the crisis pre-war a powerful surface flotilla had been sent forwards into the Norwegian Sea to intimidate NATO naval forces but instead those warships had been threatened themselves by superior Western naval forces. Before the first shots had been fired, that surface flotilla had been withdrawn back to the Barents Sea when it had later faced attack by RN and US Navy submarines.

Now, tonight, Admiral Gromov was leading a weakened surface flotilla westwards again towards NATO naval forces that outnumbered by several orders of magnitude not only in quantity but in quality too. He had written a letter to his wife before he had left and it was one which was effectively a suicide note. Admiral Gromov did not expect the neither himself or his ships would return to the Kola Peninsula afterwards.

The plan was for the flotilla to steam westwards tonight during the hours of darkness and move southwards before morning came so that Admiral Gromov would have his nine missile-armed warships off the Norwegian coast northwest of the Tromso area by first light. NATO naval forces were known to be operating in that general area and the warships were meant to work alongside the Oscar-class missile-submarine that Admiral Gromov would rendezvous with as well as naval reconnaissance Bears and missile-carrying Backfires in attacking them. Everything was supposed to come together once the forces were in place and reconnaissance assets located enemy warships: the Soviet Navy was meant to show their comrades in the Soviet Army what combined arms warfare was all about.

In the meantime, the massive amphibious landing force that was trailing behind the fast warships was meant to put the men of the Navy’s 61st & 175th Naval Infantry Brigades ashore at Andenes, Harstad and Tromso. They had their own escorts, slower and less capable vessels that Admiral Gromov had, and were meant to be protected at a distance by his warships influencing events by engaging NATO naval forces.

Only an idiot could have dreamed this all up.

A political toadie back in Moscow with STAVKA had certainly created this whole operational concept as some sort of gesture to keep themselves from getting shot for the Soviet Navy’s utter failures in the war so far. Fleet Admiral Vladimir Nikolayevich Chernavin had been at the helm of the Navy’s command when war broke out though rumours had come that Marshal Ogarkov had got rid of him and replaced him with some political appointee from the Pacific Fleet; Admiral Gromov didn’t doubt that for a minute because he knew that Admiral Chernavin, a student of the great Gorshkov would never had issued orders like these.

Orders they were though, official orders straight from STAVKA that Admiral Gromov had no choice but to follow.


Admiral Gromov’s battle group was designated as ‘7th Operational Squadron’ and was racing away from the Barents Sea at flank speed. The slowest vessel, the helicopter carrier Leningrad, managed her top speed of thirty-one knots (a fantastic effort for her engineers) and so the other warships maintained that speed too. Waves of electronic jamming were emitted from some of the warships themselves as well as from stand-off land-based naval aircraft that were flying in support of the 7th Squadron in an attempt to avoid classification and disable targeting rather than try to hide Admiral Gromov’s command. There was some zig-zagging employed too so that any NATO submarine which might want to give chase would have a tough time keeping up… though such an undersea vessel would have to avoid the depth charges and mines being laid behind the 7th Squadron.

The first check-point with the westward advance was the North Cape. There were known to be NATO submarines in this area; diesel/electric-powered British or Norwegian vessels. Free from the danger of roving NATO fighters, Il-38M May maritime patrol aircraft patrolled this area ahead of and when the 7th Squadron passed through. The slow, turboprop-powered aircraft dropped sonobuoys into the water in abundance while waiting to pounce with torpedoes and depth charges.

Admiral Gromov was on the Kirov – where he’d been throughout every minute of the war so far – as the battlecruiser moved westwards. Its radar systems for navigation, air defence and targeting for its huge arsenal of guns and missiles were all inactive at the moment though on stand-by to be activated within an instant should the need occur. The other ships of the 7th Squadron were all silent with regards to emitting radar and radio signals with all contact between them being made by flashlights in morse code. Every half an hour, a burst signal was received by satellite giving Admiral Gromov a radar picture of the seas ahead gathered from the air and any intelligence that was deemed valuable for him to need to know.

This was one hell of a ridiculous manner of action and one that he was sure would bring about the demise of the 7th Squadron and his own death. The warships had powerful radar systems that could see very far forward on the surface and in the air. There were jamming systems available that could hide the warships behind a wave of interference and also break-up any enemy missile attack. Admiral Gromov was forbidden from using them though due to the reasoning that the 7th Squadron should be able to arrive unexpectedly in the morning far to the west without any tell-tale jamming to give the game away. That was understandable, in some ways, but at the same time with the Northern Fleet’s surface flotilla about to be immensely outnumbered then its commander wanted every advantage open to him.

Moscow said no though.


Passing the North Cape after midnight, the 7th Squadron took a gentle turn to the southwest as it continued on its forward course. There were still friendly aircraft in the sky and Admiral Gromov knew that those were fighters from the Soviet Seventy-Sixth Air Army forward deployed to Banak Airport at the base of the Porsangerfjorden. Those were aircraft that he couldn’t see or hear, but he knew that they could be up above him escorting the Il-18s that were still providing him with anti-submarine warfare support. Those latter aircraft were meant to broadcast a coded warning over the radio if such a threat from a NATO submarine was detected – one which the 7th Squadron wasn’t meant to respond too – and attack while Admiral Gromov would bring his warships around such a threat. There had yet to be any reported submarines since the Barents Sea had been left behind and Admiral Gromov was left wondering if they had slipped past them all…

When the 7th Squadron passed by the lonely Ingoya Island, there came a broadcast of an enemy submarine being detected. One of the Il-38 had a contact with its sonobuoys and was charging towards what was believed to be a small and fast Norwegian Kobben-class boat, one which was quickly attacked. The reported position was plotted on the chart in the Kirov’s command centre – an internal compartment from where the battlecruiser and thus the 7th Squadron was to be fought from – before Admiral Gromov gave a simple order for the massive ship to alter course slightly. Signals via flashlights were moments later being sent to the other ships as they all moved to take an adjusted course.

Within minutes of this came the shouts from sonar operators aboard the Kirov and other warships of torpedoes being heard in the water. The reactions from Admiral Gromov and other senior men were to shout that those four torpedoes were all coming from the wrong direction: the Norwegian boat now being attacked was to the south not the northeast! However, those torpedoes were bearing in from that direction nonetheless.

HMS Conqueror – of Falklands fame – had been trailing the 7th Squadron for more than an hour before attacking with Tigerfish torpedoes aiming to strike at the Soviet Navy ships from behind. The sudden thrashing of propellers even harder than they had been when those ships changed direction had been the moment when the Conqueror’s captain chose to launch his attack because this had indicated that the enemy was distracted at that moment. With six torpedo tubes available, another two were kept loaded with more Tigerfish should there be an emergency where they were needed for immediate self-defence while the four that were now empty were quick to be reloaded as the submarine relocated into a new attack position.

It was dark and the weather was terrible with a fierce rainstorm and thick clouds blocking out the moon. Thirty foot waves lashed the ships as they crossed the water. This were not good conditions at all to be sailing in yet alone to be undertaking rapid manoeuvres in response to inbound torpedoes. Admiral Gromov’s ships were lucky that none of them collided as signalmen tried to coordinate with each other while wire-guided torpedoes closed in upon their targets no matter how hard those targets tried to somehow manoeuvre out of the way.

The Kresta(2)-class anti-submarine cruiser Admiral Isakov was the first Soviet ship struck by the torpedoes from the Conqueror. Two torpedoes slammed into her starboard side forward and amidships. There were immense roars when the explosives went off then the awful noise of inrushing seawater. A warning had been broadcast through the ship’s pipes at the last moment for the men to brace for impact as also as a call for the watertight doors below the waterline to be shut but nothing could have prepared the conscript sailors and inexperienced officers aboard for the force of the impact. The cruiser shook from bow to stern and everyone inside the ship felt those hits that the Admiral Isakov took.

There were detailed orders for what each man aboard was meant to do should the cruiser be struck by torpedoes. Compartments were meant to be evacuated and damage control parties were to form up. That was all great on paper and when exercised beforehand, but the past few days had been a traumatic experience for those aboard. ‘Wartime discipline’ had been enacted by the Political Officer and he had had some of the sailors form a firing squad for a trio of young conscripts to be shot on the ship’s foredeck that very afternoon for petty acts of insolence. Instead of setting an example and making the men frightened and thus obedient, that act had had the opposite effect and put everyone in a rebellious mood. The attack upon the Admiral Isakov ignited those feelings of rage and the sailors aboard started attacking their officers when such men tried to get them to form up for damage control. Instead they all wanted to get off the ship and into the life-rafts. Anything was better than being aboard an unhappy ship as the now-doomed cruiser was… of course those rebellious men hadn’t yet seen the waters into which they were going to flee.

The missile-destroyer Okrylyonnyy was hit by the third torpedo from the Conqueror. This Sovremennyy-class warship was struck when the lone Tigerfish exploded underneath her stern. The engine room was instantly flooded and those in that compartment quickly drowned. Even worse, her back was broken by the impact as the blast had been fierce but the ship was already under great strain as just before that impact an emergency stop had been ordered in an attempt to avoid the impact by a sudden reversal of course. In ear-splitting and terrible noises the ship started to tear itself apart into two unequal pieces.

Conqueror’s fourth torpedo never struck its target. The ASW-destroyer Vice-Admiral Kulakov had been rapid firing its RBU-6000 anti-submarine rocket launcher to drop its payload at close-range all around the path of the incoming torpedo. The Udaloy-class warship was very fortunate indeed with the one in a million shot impact that intercepted the inbound torpedo very close to the ship. Three dozen rockets had been expended but their use had been worth it as the Tigerfish blew up within sight of those on deck.

The sounds of impacts against targets were heard by the sonar operators on the Conqueror as it fled the expected counter-barrage from the Soviets and it was believed that all four torpedoes had hit three ships that they were aiming for. There was no time to linger and attack again straight away; the Conqueror would try again later for the noise of so many ships travelling as fast as those were would be enough to hear from great distance. Unselfishly, a broadcast was also made from the RN submarine concerning the course, speed and estimated composition of those ships too for other NATO assets – ships, submarines or aircraft – to join the action.


Admiral Gromov had no choice but to leave the badly-wounded Admiral Isakov and the sinking Okrylyonnyy behind. The 7th Squadron had a mission to preform even if it was one believed that was insanely stupid. He regretted the loss of life and also knew that he would miss the missile battery of supersonic P-270s from the Okrylyonnyy to add to the anti-ship missiles carried on the Kirov and other vessels yet this was war and such things had to be expected.

There was a rendezvous to make and the 7th Squadron kept on course to do so.

When passing by Soroya Island a few hours later, Admiral Gromov lost his air cover from the Il-38s as they could no longer be adequately protected by land-based fighters. His own fighters, the dozen Yak-38M jump-jets aboard the Baku, weren’t flying in this weather and therefore couldn’t protect those slow maritime patrol aircraft. Helicopters were launched instead from several ships including the Baku and the helicopter carrier Leningrad to undertake ASW missions. They still struggled with the weather too with some returning to the ships from where they were launched. Many more sonobuoys were dropped and so too were a pair of torpedoes from a Kamov-27 Helix helicopter against a spurious contact.

The satellite-delivered reconnaissance picture came from Fleet Headquarters in Severomorsk soon enough and showed Admiral Gromov that naval reconnaissance Bears had detected airborne radar aircraft associated with American aircraft carriers. Their positions were plotted and gave an indication of where those carriers that hadn’t been sunk on the war’s first day might be now. With this everything was going well enough for the 7th Squadron to be where they would need to be to attack those carriers after the planned submarine and raketonosets strike.

Admiral Gromov’s hopes were raised that maybe, just maybe things might work out…


…then there were the warning alarms sounded of hostile missile-targeting radars tracking his ships.

When the seven remaining ships all switched on their radars to locate and prepare to defend themselves they found contacts all across the sky from the west to the southwest to the south. Dozens of aircraft were plotted in the night-time sky flying high and emitting active signals from their radars that identified them as American naval strike aircraft. If those aircraft were carrying air-launched Harpoon anti-ship missiles as it was thought they would be by the use of specific targeting systems associated with that model of missile then they would very soon be in strike range.

Air defence for the 7th Squadron was co-ordinated from the Kirov. The battlecruiser had the most potent anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems of the Soviet Navy with the S-300 (NATO: SA-N-6 Grumble) mounted and ninety-six radar-guided SAMs for the dozen octuplet launchers. There were electronic jamming in the skies as well as those targeting radars but the Kirov achieved a ‘burn through’ with her own electronic warfare systems and SAMs started filling the skies. The Kirov fired towards all of the distant threats with missiles lancing towards distant aircraft with the hope of taking them down before they could launch themselves.

Within minutes though those radar contacts started to disappear. There were still missile-targeting radars active in the sky but no aircraft: the SAMs were chasing after ghosts. Sixteen had been fired at contacts that weren’t there.

Alarms sounded once again this time with more aircraft racing towards the 7th Squadron from the southeast. The Kirov fired again – another sixteen missiles were lofted skywards in fiery blazes – before Admiral Gromov could realise what was going on after those contacts disappeared. The 7th Squadron was being deceived and was firing precious missiles against targets that weren’t there while also giving the NATO reconnaissance aircraft that must be in the sky (and staying undetected) fine-tuning intelligence about how the air-search and SAM radars on the Kirov worked. He was in trouble though because he couldn’t ignore such phantom attacks for fear that they could turn out to be real and at the same time it was clear now that the 7th Squadron had been detected several hours away from reaching its attack point far away to the southwest.

Admiral Gromov was giving himself a pounding headache while thinking of what to do when those air defence alarms sounded again. Aircraft were detected to the west, low and in great number with signals identifying them as American A-6 naval strike aircraft. He screamed at his electronic warfare staff to sort out their equipment to tell the difference between spoof contacts and real ones while also looking at the chart to see which of his ships was positioned furthest to the plotted inbound aircraft: it was the Slava-class missile-cruiser Admiral Lobov.

The Admiral Lobov was the other warship under his command with S-300 missiles (sixty-four were carried in her arsenals) and Admiral Gromov sent orders for some of those to be fired. He used the radio to instruct the cruiser’s captain directly because now there was no longer any point in trying to hide their presence; though he didn’t know it this would be an extremely fatal mistake for him personally.

A barrage of SAMs were lofted by the Admiral Lobov skywards and this time the plotted inbound aircraft didn’t disappear afterwards. On the radar screens in the Kirov the 7th Squadron’s commander watched as the unseen NATO jammers tried to fill the sky with extra interference but failed in their attempt to hide aircraft turning away and increasing speed while chased by SAMs faster than they were. The tracks of the missiles soon closed with multiple targets and Admiral Gromov watched a total of eleven aircraft be downed. Unless something was very wrong with what his radar was depicting, plenty of NATO aircraft trying a sneak attack under the cover of fake attacks had just been downed trying to attack his ships.

The air defence alarms sounded for the fourth time. This time it was to the south where aircraft were being tracked. The Admiral Lobov was ordered to fire more S-300s with those soon flying above the other warships and lancing towards targets far off that were soon found to be false again. The 7th Squadron was expending many SAMs for some gain but was now in a position where it was open to attack and clearly under a lot of surveillance. Admiral Gromov was soon back on the radio talking to his captains reminding them to have their missiles standing by to launch at any time against threats they were directed on to by the Kirov. In addition, he ordered the ships to change course and head west for a while. He was too close to land where attacking aircraft could hide in the background interference offered by the inland mountains while also aware of the fact that there was no specific rendezvous point and location where he was to meet the further attacking assets.


NATO naval assets soon returned to attack though.

Admiral Gromov heard a mayday radio broadcast from one of the reconnaissance Bears after it had been hit by missiles fired from what it declared where American F-14 fighters and that aircraft was one of those meant to be aiding him searching for surface targets of his own. There were many long-range anti-ship missiles aboard his ships all needing targeting data and that Bear would have of been of assistance in that.

Not long afterwards came a submarine alert from one of the Ka-27 helicopters and then the Admiral Lobov declared it was under torpedo attack. A follow-up report came that the cruiser, with S-300 long-range SAMs and P-500 (NATO: SS-N-12 Sandbox) supersonic anti-ship missiles, that it had been struck by a trio of torpedoes and was going down. The captain requested assistance in getting his crew off from his holed vessel, but Admiral Gromov had to deny that appeal to save the others and undertake his mission.

The submarine that had hit the Admiral Lobov was the USS Phoenix. The American vessel had raced towards the Soviet ships after hearing the broadcast from the Conqueror that the Soviet Navy was at sea with its big warships and then located the 7th Squadron by listening to the sounds of its engines and propellers from a great distance. Mk.48 torpedoes had been used and the Phoenix wasn’t finished yet with its attack. Pencil-thin antenna had been raised by the submarine before its attack and the intelligence specialists aboard had found what they were looking for: multiple coded radio signals coming from one ship and being responded to by others. After its torpedo tubes were reloaded and one kept ready for emergency use, the Phoenix fired a trio of Harpoon missiles at close range.

The Harpoon was subsonic missilethough it still packed a fearsome punch with a big warhead and its ability to ‘sea-skim’. Soviet air defences were alert and multiple-barrelled anti-missile guns as well as short-range SAMs engaged the Harpoons but those missiles had been launched from just over a mile away by the brave – even reckless – commander of the Phoenix. Two missiles were downed but the third crashed into the port side of the Kirov above the waterline but below the superstructure. It tore through the outer hull and then denoted inside with its five hundred pound high-explosive warhead. This wasn’t a fatal kill for the massive Kirov and damage control parties moved fast to tackle the fires started, but the Harpoon had denoted deep inside its target in the general area of the internal command centre. That compartment was one of many instantly filled with fire and its occupants – Admiral Gromov among them – killed instantly.

Anti-submarine rockets, depth charges and torpedoes fell into the water all aiming for the Phoenix but the American submarine evaded these efforts to destroy it and kill its crew.


As the senior surviving officer (the command staff of the 7th Squadron had all been aboard the Kirov), the captain of the Leningrad took charge of the battle group. He ordered all available anti-submarine efforts made and also SAMs to be fired against any attacking aircraft.

He didn’t have long to wait for his orders to be carried out.

As the 7th Squadron steamed westwards aiming to get away from the attacks being launched against it, aircraft contacts were detected once again. S-300s were lofted by the still-smoking Kirov and the targets did their now usual disappearing act. That ‘attack’ had come from the southwest before one came from the northwest that also brought the further firing of SAMs – the last of the S-300s too – against further airborne ghosts.

The Phoenix had followed the 7th Squadron and the Conqueror also returned after trailing the Soviets for the past few hours. Both submarines were unaware of each other and they could have had a friendly fire incident had they been approaching from the same general area rather than far apart as the expectation was that the Northern Fleet’s battle group would have its own submarines in attendance. Staying apart from each other though – through accident not design – both took shots at the 7th Squadron.

The ASW-cruiser Admiral Makarov was positioned right between the Baku and the Kirov as close in defence for them but this second Kresta(2)-class cruiser was hit by the Phoenix like its sister ship had been torpedoed by the Conqueror. A pair of torpedoes hit this ship and blew off her bow and holed her port quarter and while she wasn’t in danger of sinking, the Admiral Makarov was dead in the water afterwards and left behind by the other ships who were all now seemingly running away. The Conqueror returned to fire four Tigerfish again and those impacted both the Leningrad and the Sovremennyy-class missile-destroyer Rastoropnyy. The latter only took one minor hit and would survive this attack but the Leningrad was holed badly along her starboard side and took on a lot of water in a short space of time. The seventeen thousand ton helicopter cruiser developed a list that kept on getting more dangerous until there was an almighty splash of water before she toppled over and turned turtle in the water in epic fashion. The few remaining Soviet ships which could steam ahead were long gone by this point but her assassin had stayed behind and filmed this on the television camera mounted to her periscope (the night-time footage wasn’t that great, but enough to be used later for British propaganda efforts). The Conqueror then went and finished off the Admiral Makarov giving the submarine four kills in total tonight and thus with her Falklands War sinking of the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano the RN was now an ‘ace’ with five confirmed kills while serving in two wars – all of which were capital ships too!

The seventh time that aircraft were spotted by radar inbound SAMs of lesser range and capability were fired. There were software problems with the Kinzhal (NATO: SA-N-9 Gauntlet) SAM system aboard the Baku that denied the Soviets these missiles at the crucial moment when the inbound air attack was real. Other missiles were fired just as they had been each time, but offensive jamming systems targeted the guidance radars of those SAMs.

The hunted had become the hunter as Striking Fleet Atlantic sent its aircraft against the 7th Squadron. A-6s and A-7s in the attack role, supported by EA-6B Prowler close-in and EA-3B stand-off electronic warfare aircraft, launched waves of Harpoon missiles against the surviving ships. One of those squadrons – VA-37 with A-7s flying from the Forrestal – had been wiped out only a few hours before but the other squadron (VA-105) was present for this final attack. A further nine aircraft would later be lost, but the cost was considered worth it by the US Navy.

Shrike anti-radar missiles and Harpoons were launched by the US Navy aircraft whose pilots were all eager for those pathetic little Yak-38Ms to come off the Baku and try to engage them.

The Yak-38Ms stayed aboard their carrier as they weren’t ‘all-weather capable’ like the US Navy aircraft were and they were to go down with the Baku. That aircraft carrier with the immense missile battery on her foredeck was hit by six American missiles and set alight from bow to stern. The fires raged out of control and she was finished. The Vice-Admiral Kulakov – so lucky earlier – was hit in similar fashion by four missiles and was left alight and later abandoned but its crew into the fierce North Atlantic weather as well.

The Kirov was heavily targeted by multiple American missiles and seven hit the ship all along her length. The radars were smashed and the superstructure torn holes in where fires were started. On her foredeck, the Metel anti-submarine missile launchers (NATO: SS-N-14 Silex) were hit by a Harpoon and the warheads of the torpedoes inside those unused missiles as well as the fuel for the Metel’s themselves all exploded. When all the airborne missiles that were going to hit had and the Americans had flown away, the battlecruiser was still afloat. Heroic efforts were being made aboard to keep her afloat…

…before the Phoenix returned and fired torpedoes at the Kirov. A barrage of three Mk.48s were enough to put huge holes down her port side that seawater poured into fast. The Phoenix was then waiting to watch the results of its kill but was too close to the surface and unfortunately there were still Soviet Ka-27s in the sky even though they had nowhere to land. A torpedo was dropped on the American submarine and major damage done. Eleven crewmen would escape before the submarine took the rest of the crew below the waves with it and those US Navy men joined the hundreds upon hundreds of Soviet sailors on the ocean’s surface.

There was just the Rastoropnyy left afloat. The destroyer raced away northwards at thirty-two knots firing anti-submarine rockets behind her and the amazing scene of a total of eighteen Ka-27s buzzing around her with panicked aircrew all radioing the ship asking for her to stop so that they could ditch alongside and be rescued. The danger of American aircraft returning and the worry over further submarine attack made that something that wasn’t going to happen though.


By dawn, there were P-3 Orions circling over the scene of the naval fighting where no ships remained. Inflatable life-rafts were dropped into the water around scattered groups of men who had clung to life where so many around them had lost theirs. Some of those desperate men in the water were witness to the arrival of the USS Wisconsin that had raced northwards during the night from the Altafjorden – over the howling protests of the US Marines – to fight the Soviet Navy, especially the Kirov. The Americans aboard the battleship were furious at being denied the chance for such a fight but still took part in rescue missions to get Soviet sailors out of the water and to afterwards take them back to Alta after the fuss that the US Marines managed to kick up to get the battleship back.

A lot of people would have liked to have seen the results of an engagement between the Kirov and the Wisconsin but that was not to be.

Unknown to the battleship’s crew a Soviet submarine was a one point only twenty miles away. An Oscar-class missile submarine with its battery of SS-N-19 Shipwrecks – the same missiles that the Kirov had gone down with unfired – didn’t met with Admiral Gromov and his 7th Squadron and would afterwards head further out into the Norwegian Sea while sending a message back to Severomorsk asking for further instructions.

Then there was the ‘lucky’ Rastoropnyy. The destroyer’s good fortune ran out when it was only thirty miles away from the North Cape area and the air cover offered by heavy patrolling from maritime patrol aircraft. There were those heavily-loaded amphibious ships full of troops in that area turning around at that point of the morning and the Rastoropnyy was supposed to provide further escort for them. The little Norwegian submarine HNMS Stord fired a total of six torpedoes (the Kobben-class boat had eight tubes) at the destroyer and five of those eventually struck home, with an appreciable delay between impacts. No warship can take that much damage especially from 533mm torpedoes all hitting along one side. Like each and every other ship of the doomed 7th Squadron, the Rastoropnyy was sunk and took most of her crew with her too with the Stord doing just as the Conqueror had done hours before and getting away clean.





One Hundred & Three

B-52G bombers based in England with the 3 ATAF had been sent on previous night-time and pre-dawn missions all across Germany. There had been thirty-two of them before World War Three broke out flying from RAF Fairford though enemy action and a few accidents had dwindled the air fleet down to twenty-three by the early hours of the war’s fourth day.

All of those remaining strategic bombers, flying close together behind a wall of electronic jamming and with fighters providing cover close-in and at a distance, were sent against tactical targets this morning long before the sun started to rise in the distant skies to the east. Their bomb-bays were fully loaded with free-fall bombs designed to be carefully dropped so that a wave of explosions led by a concussion effect would advance towards ground targets and destroy those as well as everything around them.


During the night, NATO intelligence had detected a Soviet field army – correctly identified as the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army based in peacetime across the Baltic Republics – moving towards the Elbe north of Magdeburg. All fixed crossings over the river had been bombed until they were knocked down despite losses but there were many improvised crossings in-place over one of Europe’s major rivers there that the Warsaw Pact had been using. From up at Wittenberge down to near Stendal in Upper Saxony, engineers had thrown a total of thirteen pontoon bridges over the Elbe and those bridges were guarded by anti-aircraft assets. The 3 ATAF had not previously attacked these due to their lack of strategic value: none could carry loads of great significance and such crossings were easy to repair when individual sections were hit by falling bombs.

However, the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army was moving fast towards those bridges through the night with its own attached bridging engineering units ahead of the mass of tanks, armoured vehicles and infantry installing many more pontoon bridges over the Elbe. NATO reconnaissance aircraft on missions far forward of the frontlines detected the enemy engineering activity on the ground while dodging SAMs and interceptors seeking to stop this effort. It was thus clear that the Soviets were planning to quickly push this field army over the river in a hurry and try to get four, even five combat divisions across and into Altmark – the lightly-populated northern part of Upper Saxony – ready to advance further westwards for a dawn attack... if they could move quick enough that was.

The B-52s had been assigned by General Galvin to act in support of either the British Second or US Seventh Armys. With the intelligence gained of a major effort to effectively ‘bounce’ the Elbe and send the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army towards the wounded Dutch and Bundeswehr forces on the North German Plain, the bombers were sent towards those bridges at three a.m. in the morning with the aim of destroying not only those lightweight structures but the forces crossing them as well as the nearby areas too so that such bridges couldn’t be quickly repaired or replaced.


Also in the soon-to-be light skies above northern Germany were several air fleets of other bombers. These were heading westwards, not east as the B-52s were, and escorted by fighters just like the USAF bombers were with distant tactical targets in sight.

The trio of regiments from the Soviet Forty-Sixth Air Army consisting of Badgers and Backfires carrying free-fall bombs in their internal weapons bays. They had lifted off from their forward bases in Poland and were aiming to cross the North German Plain and make high-altitude bombs runs against the French III Corps in the Bielefeld area west of the Weser. The French had moved forward from their positions north of the Ruhr during the night and Soviet intelligence pointed to these strategic reserve forces for the British Second Army (though remaining for the time being under command of the French First Army) preparing to advance even further eastwards in daylight. Marshal Kulikov had personally ordered the air strikes and wanted them to take place in a staggered fashion to allow the targeted troops to emerge from hasty covered positions into a new wave of destruction.

Escorting those bombers were interceptors that had recently moved into Eastern Europe from bases in the Soviet Union itself. The Soviet Air Defence Force (PVO) – a wholly independent military air arm unconnected to the Soviet Air Force (VVS) – had been tasked with providing multiple air regiments for Western Strategic Direction to use in escort of long-range bombing missions as well as providing interceptor cover over East Germany after VVS fighter units had faced days of severe losses. The Second, Fourth, Sixth and Eighth Air Armys had all seen several regiments removed from flying wartime patrols over Soviet territory waiting for American bombers that hadn’t come to instead now being airborne over East Germany where there were enemy aircraft that needed to be engaged. There were immense problems with command-and-control and vastly different tactics used by the PVO as opposed to the VVS but firm orders had come from STAVKA that the interceptors from the Soviet homeland were needed near the frontlines.

Those interceptors sent to East Germany were mainly specialised versions of the MiG-23 outfitted with weapons and communications for beyond visual range air-to-air missile engagements at great distance. Soviet, East German, Polish and Czechoslovak pilots had used the MiG-23 greatly during the past three days and many of these fighters had lost engagements with more modern NATO fighters. The intention with the transfer of these air defence regiments forward was to not direct replace those lost aircraft in dog-fights with NATO fighters but rather to combat enemy aircraft at distance as the pilots were trained to do so and the MiG-23s were meant to do. In addition to those seven MiG-23 regiments, there was also the transfer to East Germany of an understrength regiment of brand new Sukhoi-27P Flankers as well, which had come all the way from the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya.

It was Su-27P interceptors from the 641st Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment who broke away from their escort mission of guarding Backfires about to raid the French on the ground around Bielefeld that attacked the B-52s and put an end to their operations with the 3 ATAF.


Warning of the inbound flight of eight Su-27Ps (another sixteen with the 641st Guards Regiment stayed with the DA bombers) thundering across the skies and above the rain clouds came late for the USAF bombers and their Dutch F-16s acting as distant escorts. The skies were full of electronic interference coming from Soviet stand-off jamming aircraft that the NATO E-3 airborne radar aircraft had trouble dealing with. The Soviets were using brute-force techniques to directly target the frequencies used by the APY-1 radars on those E-3s that were airborne and trying to provide radar coverage to not only the B-52 strike but other air-to-air and air-to-ground missions too. Eventually, the multi-national members of the crew aboard the airborne radar aircraft managed to overcome that jamming – and also direct a pair of F-15s to lance towards one of the most-identifiable sources of that jamming and launch a long-range missile attack against that aircraft – and they spotted those Soviet interceptors.

The radio broadcast of inbound Flankers was made though they were suspected to be VVS interceptors not those flown by PVO pilots.

There were eleven F-16As in the sky covering the B-52s from distance. Their parent formation, 315 Squadron, had started the war with eighteen of these single-seat fighters all built in the Netherlands though five had been lost in combat and another two were unavailable tonight. Sidewinder and Sparrow missiles were carried along with armament for the 20mm M-61 Vulcan cannon. 315 Squadron at once turned towards the threat axis to the southeast and then lined up missile shots using their own radars that they switched on into active mode rather than relying on information being fed to them (using the NATO Link-11 data transfer system) from an E-3 in an unreliable electronic environment.

Unfortunately for the Dutch pilots there were already missiles in the air before their Sparrows could be effectively targeted.

The 641st Guards Regiment had attacked using R-27 missiles (known to NATO as the AA-10 Alamo) fired from thirty miles away. Each interceptor fired a pair of these with two missiles failing to achieve proper break-away but the rest lancing towards their targets at Mach 4.5. The Su-27Ps took immediate evasive action after their missile firings though were still in a position to follow up their attack with another barrage of R-27s as well as keeping shorter-range missiles ready for the bomber formation which they were set to engage.

The radar warning systems fitted to the Dutch fighters picked up the tracking radars of the inbound Soviet missiles and alarms sounded. R-27 missiles had yet to be encountered by NATO aircraft so far in the war – the models flown by the VVS had yet to have these deployed – and there was only patchy intelligence concerning them. 315 Squadron thus had little information on what missiles were closing in on them, yet they did their best as jamming equipment was activated while the formation broke up to widen the gaps between aircraft and so that each fighter’s defensive systems didn’t interfere with those of another.

The R-27 missiles slammed home into their targets. The jamming was defeated and so too was the Dutch attempt to use infrared flares when faced by semi-active radar-guided missiles. Even when the F-16s tried climbing, diving or jinxing all over the dark skies there were bright flashes of light as the missiles exploded upon impact with their targets.

Only one of the eleven F-16s survived the Soviet missiles and that aircraft lost its starboard wingtip. Its pilot struggled to bring his aircraft back under control before he made impact with the ground below and just about managed to do so. His F-16 was out of the fight though and needed to make a landing somewhere very soon.

315 Squadron had been utterly defeated before it was ready to fight.

Behind those defeated F-16s, RAF Phantom FG1s – with No. 228 Squadron, a training unit operating in Scotland pre-war but now in Germany and with aircraft flown by instructors – moved away from providing close escort to the bombers and raced towards the Soviets at full speed with their jamming pods active. They carried Sidewinder and Skyflash (the latter being the British equivalent of the Sparrow though with a little longer range) missiles and were ready for a fight with the best that the Soviets could throw at them. The intention was to fast get into range and put themselves in between the fast approaching Flankers and the bombers, bombers which were turning away to the north slightly and speeding up while still aiming for their targets inside East Germany.

More R-27s were launched with this time each Su-27P just firing the one instead of two. The same interceptor whose missiles misfired beforehand had problems with this launch too so only seven air-to-air missile shot off towards the RAF Phantoms… just as the half dozen British fighters launched their Skyflashs.

The missiles fired by each side criss-crossed the sky and electronic warfare support engaged by both the Su-27Ps and the Phantoms had little effect: only the destruction of the launching aircraft, whose radars guided the missiles to impact, could really influence events.

The R-27s were faster than the Skyflashs.

The Phantoms exploded in mid-air with five of them being hit once and the sixth one taking a pair of impacts. Three of the RAF pilots managed to eject but the other trio of highly-experienced men weren’t able to and died with their aircraft either in instant fireballs or trapped inside as pieces of the Phantoms fell towards the ground far below. In contrast, despite the destruction of their launch platforms, the Skyflash missiles had their own radars fitted. The majority of the guidance for them was provided by the now dead Phantoms but that little radar was put to use. Two Skyflashs achieved impacts and struck a pair of Su-27Ps disproving the pre-war NATO fears that if engaged the Flanker might be near invincible.


Shooting down Dutch and then British fighters wasn’t what the Su-27Ps were being tasked by their mobile ground control stations to do: they were meant to go after those unprotected bombers. There was still one R-27 on each of the six remaining 641st Guards Regiment interceptor along with four R-73 short-range missiles (NATO: AA-11 Archer) and one hundred and fifty rounds in their GSh-30-1 cannons. They increased speed and started to climb even higher than they were to catch up with those bombers who were still heading eastwards and now wholly unprotected.

The Soviet pilots detected the launch of SAMs from below them and those missiles climbing upwards into the sky before they were ready to attack the bombers. The PVO pilots were trained to work in conjunction with SAM batteries back over Soviet territory, but those launchers were manned by PVO personnel not those men of the Soviet Army. 2K11 Krug (NATO: SA-4 Ganef) and S-300V (SA-12 Gladiator) strategic missile systems were firing at the bombers ahead of them and the 641st Guards Regiment pilots screamed obscenities into their radio mikes when seeing those on their radar screens. Those missilemen below them were terrible shots and their SAMs hit nothing… thankfully including their fellow countrymen.

The B-52s approached those temporary crossings over the Elbe that they were out to bomb from the Stendal area. They were making a turn to the north aiming to follow the river downstream while relying upon their passive defensive systems to defend them along with the quadruple 12.7mm machine guns in their tails. This was a serious error to make and the mission should have been aborted when this deep inside enemy airspace yet the B-52s had got so far and near to their targets and didn’t want to abandon their bomb run at such a point.

The squadron commanders airborne with their bombers wouldn’t have to face the inevitable questions at a court-martial afterwards for what they did after losing their fighter escorts.

Keeping the one remaining R-27 missile in reserve along with one of the R-73s too, each Su-27P launched a trio of the latter model of missile one after another when the range to the bombers ahead of them was twelve miles. These were infrared-guided missiles and the 641st Guards Regiment pilots used their helmet-mounted displays to point and shoot them. The heat being given off but the big B-52s on this cold night made such targeting easy and the R-73 was a fantastic missile; the PVO pilots didn’t know that that was the reason why there were still Soviet MiG-29s (armed with the R-73 too) flying over the skies of East Germany which had been challenging NATO aircraft earlier in the night when most other Warsaw Pact aircraft were grounded due to enemy air superiority during the hours of darkness.

The defensive guns on the B-52s along with the flares and deployed chaff didn’t help the bombers at all. Three waves of six missiles came in to the bomber stream before they could line up over the first ground targets and B-52s started to be hit. Some were struck in the wings, others in the tail and more in the fuselage sections. There were epic airborne explosions when live weaponry in the bomb-bays went off though most of those aircraft just had parts of them chopped off and massive damage caused. Bombers that were generally in one piece though fatally damaged started falling from the sky and entering rapid spins that would cause the aircrews aboard who couldn’t bail out to lose consciousness before they were smeared into the ground.

The R-73 missiles got fifteen B-52s and then the Su-27Ps moved in with their cannons to finish off the remaining eight.

Finally abandoning their bomb run – the squadron commanders had been aboard those B-52s downed – those bombers that were left scattered. Some entered dives while others broke north or south. Tail guns were fired again though this firing was wild and ineffective. In comparison, the Su-27P pilots took their time in going after their targets and lining up their shots carefully. Their cannons only had a small magazine and every 30mm bullet was valuable. High Explosive Incendiary (HEI) and High Explosive Incendiary-Tracer (HEI-T) rounds were fired towards bombers trying everything that they could to get away with hits causing immense damage when they struck.

Five B-52s were taken down by the cannon-firing Su-27Ps and the remaining trio were spread all over the sky and heading in different directions at different altitudes. The 641st Guards Regiment pilots had to get permission from their ground controllers before they were allowed to fire off R-73 missiles again, and this only came after it was confirmed that no other NATO aircraft were this far inside East Germany and needed the particular attention that the Su-27s could offer them.

The last of the B-52s were then fired upon, hit and destroyed.


Such a loss of Dutch and RAF fighters as well as the entire strategic heavy bomber force sent to smash those river crossings was a mighty blow for NATO to swallow. Other, more grievous losses had been inflicted elsewhere during the war and would continue to be but when the news came the next day to the 3 ATAF's air staff concerning those un-bombed pontoon bridges over the Elbe there would be many negative emotions.

NATO intelligence hadn’t realised just how fast the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army had been able to ‘bounce’ the Elbe and get into Altmark. By dawn that field army would be ready to attack the NATO forces further westwards after conducting a rolling attack where they hadn’t stopped moving to allow a massed pre-attack artillery strike or anything like that. Had those river crossings been hit by the B-52s, such an action wouldn’t have mattered anyway.


Away from that unfortunate bit of later news, the other Su-27Ps which had joined MiG-23s in escorting Soviet Forty-Sixth Air Army bombers westwards saw action where they weren’t as successful as that squadron of the 641st Guards Regiment who scored so many kills.

Belgian and USAF fighters attacked those Badgers and Backfires that went for the French III Corps around Bielefeld as well as taking down interceptors. There were still many bombs dropped though neither the Tu-16 nor Tu-22M could carry as many bombs as those doomed B-52s could. Soviet targeting was rather inaccurate too due to factors such as weather, faulty intelligence on exactly where the French troops were and the interference from NATO fighters.

Bombs crashed into the Teutoburg Forest near the West German city and along the route of Autobahn-2 – where the French were located – but also smashed into the outskirts of the city itself as well as neighbouring localities; such bombing attacks were nowhere near as effective as they should have been.

When the Soviet bombers and interceptors would later return home after their concentrated strike mission, there would be many aircraft missing from their ranks and too many inaccurate claims of damage wrought that apparently had done long term damage to the French III Corps and temporarily knocked it out of action.

[James G]

One Hundred & Four

The Soviet Sixty-Sixth Artillery Corps had deployed into Poland first and then later to East Germany from the Carpathian Military District in the western Ukraine during the built-up to RED BEAR. Two artillery divisions, plus attachments coming from as far afield as the Kuban Peninsula, had been transported by fast rail transport all the way across Eastern Europe with the men who would crew the heavy mortars, howitzers, multiple-barrelled rocket-launchers, tactical missile-launchers and all the necessary ammunition being flown forwards. Kept back from the initial first three days of warfare, the Soviet Sixty-Sixth Artillery Corps had seen no action until the morning of March 17th when its assets were put to use in firing against targets westwards.

The range of weaponry employed by the Soviet Sixty-Sixth Artillery Corps was immense.

There were 2S4 Tyulpan self-propelled mortars that fired massive 240mm rounds westwards while 2B11 towed mortars launched rounds of 120mm calibre. 2S1 self-propelled howitzers fired 122mm high-explosive shells while 2S3s and 2S5s launched 152mm shells and 2S7s were armed with 203mm rounds. Those mobile guns were supported by towed howitzers: D-30s with 122mm shells, D-20s and 2A36s of 152mm calibre and a few brand new 2A65’s firing rounds of the same size as well. There were BM-21 and BM-27 rocket-launchers with 122mm and 220mm unguided projectiles; thirty foot long Luna-M rockets (NATO: FROG-7) had been launched in abundance too from their mobile launchers. R-17 and OTR-21 tactical missiles (NATO called these the SS-1 Scud and SS-21 Scarab respectively) were available from their mobile launchers to strike deep into the enemy’s rear.

All of this artillery was used alongside artillery already attached to the heavily-engaged Soviet Second Guards Tank Army as well as that assigned to the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army and the Polish First Army in opening fire along a forty mile stretch of the frontlines on the North German Plain. From around Lunenburg down to around Bad Bodentiech (south of Uelzen), at the eastern end of the Luneburg Heath, hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of artillery opened fire and sent projectiles arching over the heads of Soviet and Polish troops that advanced right before dawn. There were aircraft in the sky too, but these were deliberately routed away from the flight paths of all that weaponry that fell atop Dutch and Bundeswehr troops in the way and on the other side of the Elbe-Seitenkanal.

Hellfire was unleashed and then Warsaw Pact troops went straight into action underneath it.


Part of the Elbe-Seitenkanal had been the frontline separating Bundeswehr troops from the beaten exploitation forces of the Soviet Second Guards Tank Army after Kampfgruppe Weser had been in action late on Tuesday. The West Germans had re-established major defensive positions west of the waterway while keeping smaller forces near the canal to break up and crossing operation first before the majority of the Bundeswehr troops in the area could get into action. With the damage done to the Soviet Second Guards Tank Army in that battle on the war’s second day it was thought that the Soviets in this area were incapable of launching major combat operations again. Just to the north, the Dutch had fallen back from the canal and the narrow Ilmenau River to a position anchored on the Luhe River and then down across the Luneburg Heath west of Uelzen back towards the Bad Bodentiech area and the connection with the West Germans.

The senior staff of the Dutch I Corps were of the opinion that no further attack from the enemy forces who had engaged them early in the war – again from the Soviet Second Guards Tank Army – was going to attack them again and this thinking was reflected up the chain of command to the British Second Army. When ammunition supplies from the rear were being delivered to the units at the front, the Dutch had been at the bottom of the list for such resupply because it was thought that they had enough munitions already at-hand and the Soviets would attack elsewhere.

Such a line of thinking would cost the Netherlands the loss of the majority of its professional army today.

One Soviet and five Polish divisions were committed to the attack that went ahead once there was light in the sky. Three were pushed forward first with the other three to follow right behind them without the usual delay of waiting for an opening to be created and all available second wave forces being thrown at that weak point of the enemy. The belief was that the Dutch I Corps was weak everywhere and multiple two-division attacks – with one following the path of another – would shatter and scatter them.

The little Luhe River ran through Altesland: an area of reclaimed marshland behind Luneburg. The Dutch 4th Armoured Division had chosen not to defend such a thin river line but instead had established infantry strong-points in battalion strength across the wide area with tank-heavy forces positioned as mobile reinforcements. Two brigades of the division were split up over the area in this manner with a third brigade concentrated as a counterattack force. To their south was the Dutch 1st Armoured Division emplaced across the Luneburg Heath from near Amelinghausen down to Bad Bodentiech with a similar arrangement.

These Dutch forces had beaten back the Soviet 207MRD in the war’s first days when that lone division – which after it had been reinforced with a tank training regiment had a strength in tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery nearly equal to their own – had come across the border and pushed aside screening forces before taking Luneburg and Uelzen. The Soviet division had used maximum effort to get as far forward as they had been and this had been helped by a Dutch desire to withdraw from exposed forward positions so that their position didn’t cause a bulge, a salient in NATO’s lines.

The 207MRD was now under Polish command and was one of the three first-line divisions pushed forward that had another following. With a Polish motorised rifle division either side of it, the 207MRD went to crash through the Dutch I Corps at the junction point between the two divisions of theirs: the resulting Battle of Amelinghausen was a disaster for the Netherlands. Units from both forward Dutch divisions were involved at first in fighting to the east of the town before those were directed by higher command to focus upon the set-piece attacks against their parent divisions by two Polish divisions either side. Instead, the Dutch 5th Reserve Infantry Division rolled towards Amelinghausen with one of its brigades with the aim of stopping an enemy effort to get between the other divisions and open a whole in the Corps’ lines.

The Dutch 5th Reserve Infantry Division had seen fighting early on March 14th when engaging Soviet paratroopers on the Luneburg Heath. The reservists had fought hard and well, but they had faced confused and uncoordinated attacks by helicopter-delivered paratroopers who were scattered over a wide area away from mutual support. Around towns such as Schneverdingen and Soltau and along stretches of both Autobahn-1 and Autobahn-7 – major lines of communication in northern Germany – the Dutch had hunted down and defeated those Soviet forces. They had taken losses as that hadn’t been a one-sided fight even though it had been over rather quick. Rather a lot of the Leopard-1 & -2 tanks fielded by the division had been knocked out by man-portable anti-tank weapons before the paratroopers had been defeated and such losses hadn’t been replaced. Deployed around Schneverdingen, Soltau and Bispingen, a brigade from each of these towns moved forward towards the Luhe River, onto the Luneburg Heath behind Uelzen and towards Amelinghausen: the 53rd Brigade was the formation involved in the latter move.

Polish Air Force MiG-21R reconnaissance-fighters were active over the whole region flying ahead of their field army and were being engaged by SAMs as well as NATO fighters hastily directed towards area. One of those managed to get a confirmed sighting of the 53rd Brigade coming up from Bispingen and other air assets were directed that way… those arrived after the Soviet Sixty-Sixth Artillery Corps gave the Dutch brigade some attention too. Huge Luna rockets and smaller ones from BM-27 launchers crashed into the 53rd Brigade as it foolishly followed roads to get to Amelinghausen as quickly as possible and these weapons took their toll on the Dutch. YPR-765 armoured vehicles loaded with infantry and M-113s carrying armoured engineers offered some protection to the men inside them but not enough when faced with a direct hit. The Soviet gunners supporting the Poles fired for effect with a whole lot of rockets being directed against the Dutch and much of that having success. Polish-crewed Mil-24s were soon airborne trying to follow-up this rocket barrage with weapons of their own and while they too had some success, Gepard twin-barrelled 27mm radar-guided anti-aircraft guns as well as missilemen armed with Stingers hit plenty of those helicopters as caused them to withdraw after initial achievement with their ambush tactics.

The 53rd Brigade reached Amelinghausen and then moved to deploy to the east of the town into the countryside there to guard access to the road links that converged here. Loses had been suffered back on the war’s first day and during the move up from Bispingen this morning but the brigade commander still fought that he could win an engagement with the enemy even with so much artillery effort that they were using and a report that a whole division was charging towards him. The Dutch didn’t get into their planned defensive positions in time, let enough to start work on any foxholes, bunkers and armoured strongpoints before T-80 tanks arrived in strength as advance guard elements of two Soviet regiments moved towards Amelinghausen. Frantic engagements erupted with Dutch Leopard-1s failing badly in trying to knock out Soviet T-80s and then when infantry deployed with Dragon man-portable anti-tank weapons those also didn’t fare to well against the armoured steel beasts that filled the fields east of the town. The Dutch had some of their tracked YPR-765s fitted with twin launchers for TOW missiles and these did better than the other weapons used to engage Soviet tanks, yet many of them had been lost to the massed rocket attack due the move up from Bispingen. Dutch tanks were blown up in great numbers when hit by conventional rounds fired from the 125mm cannons that the T-80s had as well as missiles from those tanks as well as other armoured vehicles that arrived soon after the Soviet tanks did.

The 53rd Brigade, with three combat-manoeuver battalions fielded, soon faced a pair of Soviet motorised rifle regiments with a total of eight battalions. There had been previous losses on both sides, but the Dutch were still heavily-outnumbered. The brigade commander started to withdraw his command back towards the town with the aim of fighting to the west and those issues were ordered over radio links that Soviet electronic warfare units were listening in upon. A whole battalion of howitzers (these from the 207MRD’s own artillery regiment) had been waiting for the use of such radio links by one man and the guns were turned lose upon him when enough information was gathered: the command group was smashed to pieces and most of the brigade’s senior officers killed with their commander. This artillery strike came right at the moment when the 53rd Brigade’s individual battalions were being given orders as to where to withdraw to and thus confusion reigned.

The 207MRD took advantage of this.

Caught in the middle of pulling back in an uncoordinated fashion, the Dutch were routed. The tank battalion, the pair of mechanised infantry battalions, the engineer company and the reconnaissance company attached from the 5th Reserve Infantry Division’s battalion were all smashed to pieces as Soviet armour and then infantry entered the Amelinghausen area.

Meanwhile, with the Dutch being crushed in that town by their Soviet comrades, the Polish 11TD advanced westwards just to the south and past the left-hand flank of the Dutch 1st Armoured Division. The Poles lanced through the countryside moving fast as they did so and using their infantry and anti-tank supporting assets to engaged any fixed resistance they encountered so their tanks could reach Bispingen. T-72s manned by Polish troops reached that town and then crossed over the upper reaches of the Luhe River before making a turn to the northwest and crossing Autobahn-7. They were moving fast as the Polish First Army commander knew that NATO attention was going to directed towards his 11TD just as it was on his two other tank divisions.

In the Westergellersen-Kirchgellersen area the 15MRD had pushed aside Dutch forces from their 4th Armoured Division to allow the trailing 16TD to advance upon and reach that all-important highway too. Further south, the 8MRD was engaging the Dutch 1st Armoured Division on the Luneburg Heath east of the town of Munster and the 20TD was manoeuvring behind them waiting to move. The 52nd Brigade of the Dutch 5th Reserve Infantry Division had rushed to support the defence of the Luhe River and been beaten back while the 51st Brigade – a tank-heavy force with Leopard-2s compared to the infantry-heavy other brigades – was holding onto Munster. All across their front the Dutch I Corps had been beaten or were soon to be while their heavy reserves already had been committed leaving only an independent infantry brigade (the 101st Brigade) as the only counterattack force that they had.


To the south of the Dutch, the West German I Corps – now with British units attached – was engaged by the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army at the same time as the Poles moved to the north. A triple penetration effort was made here with three motorised rifle divisions moving first and three tank divisions rolling behind them. The Bundeswehr and British troops did better than the Dutch did but the massed artillery strike along with Soviet aircraft lingering over the frontlines rather than concentrating on deep strikes where they would face stronger NATO fighter opposition, was too much. A withdrawal was organised back across territory that had been defended at all costs beforehand and some of which had been retaken on March 15th in the counterattack by Kampfgruppe Weser.

The communications centre of Eschede was seized by airmobile forces of the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army’s 139th Independent Landing-Assault Battalion right at the beginning of the field army’s attack. The helicopters transporting those troops and their equipment took losses during the flight in and afterwards stayed in-place while the 139th Battalion was contained in Eschede. This apparent ‘failure’ to open up the rear was nothing of the sort though because Bundeswehr troops couldn’t effectively use the road links around the town during their planned withdrawal backwards as the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army moved forward in strength as armed helicopters from there caused chaos with that.

The 3rd Panzer and 3rd Armoured Divisions – Bundeswehr and British troops – fought delaying actions against two Soviet divisions advancing towards them. They withdrew to the north of Eschede towards the Ortze River while keeping orientation in defensive efforts with the Dutch 1st Armoured Division. The units attacking them were identified by intelligence methods as being the 16MRD & 26GMRD from the Baltic Republics, which were what the Soviet Army deemed ‘Category B’ units. The artillery and air support that those formations had made up some for the lack of overall quality of the fighting troops but the pair of NATO divisions chose to withdraw due to the tank divisions following the 16MRD & 26GMRD edging forwards looking for pinned NATO units to bypass with armoured thrusts.

Withdrawing southwards of Eschede was the Bundeswehr’s 11th Panzergrenadier Division. The Soviet 1GRMD had attacked this formation with an unidentified tank division following behind. This unit was the recently re-established 23TD: a title held by a unit dis-established in the western Ukraine last year but now composed of independent tank units from across East Germany brought together. Forced apart from their NATO comrades to the north, the 11th Panzergrenadier Division moved in a southwestern direction while also against the Aller River. Soviet tactical missiles had blasted the crossings over that river when the Soviet Sixty-Sixth Artillery Corps had opened fire and thus the Bundeswehr troops were funnelled between the river and Eschede as they moved backwards in the face of onrushing fresh Soviet troops. There were British troops in the town of Celle, though on the other side of the river, but the 11th Panzergrenadier Division was ordered to fall back to the Ortze River too where the Corps’ defensive positions could be realigned.

Possession of Eschede was key to the efforts now by the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army to tear through NATO lines and take the West German I Corps apart as they were doing to the Dutch. The 23TD was sent through that captured town – relieving the trapped airmobile troops as they did so – and then the 40GTD was rerouted from directly following the 16MRD to go through Eschede too. Moreover, those combat bridging units, with men who had been at work all night long without any real rest, were sent forwards to allow not only the shallow Ortze River to be ‘bounced’ but for river barriers further onwards to become nothing of the sort too.

*​

This major effort in the north was conducted at the same time as the First Western Front attacked for the fourth day against the British and the Belgians to the south. The fighting the day before had pushed them back to new positions across the Leine River, but that had been a river barrier in which the NATO troops were willing to make a stand upon because it was a formidable barrier over which only a heavily-committed crossing operation could be made.

Running north to south from near Elze down to Northeim behind the river the British 5th Infantry, British 4th Armoured and Belgian 1st Infantry Divisions were ready to defeat the troops of the Polish Second Army on the other side who were thought about to cross over. The British had taken losses in the previous three days but could still effectively fight while the Belgians had only undertaken a few engagements and were bruised they were just as ready to defeat any crossing.

The Poles spent the day firing across the river instead of trying to get over it. They had their own artillery plus that released from the Polish Fourth Army when reserve units from that formation had gone into West Berlin. A hell of a lot of artillery was fired over the river towards the NATO positions there and the commander of the field army contacted General Korbutov my midday requesting that either he be sent an ammunition resupply or he be allowed to stop firing. The Polish Second Army had a lot of ammunition for its artillery on-hand but it was going through it at a fast enough rate to run out by the end of the day; the army commander was worried about needing to conserve ammunition in case NATO made an attack and also what he could do tomorrow as well.

General Korbutov refused permission at once for the intense artillery bombardment to cease. He said that some ammunition would be sent to the Poles but for the time being it was of vital importance that the British and Belgians be kept pinned down there.

This was part of the First Western Front’s strategic deception effort, one which General Korbutov was undertaking at the behest of Marshal Kulikov. Western Strategic Direction’s overall commander knew that his subordinates opposite number in northern Germany was a Briton and thus it would be reasonably expected that no matter what happened elsewhere, General Kenny would be paying attention to his own national forces on the Leine.

As a side note, the only men to cross that particular stretch of the river today were deserters. Records from the British and Polish sides varied on the number of deserted, for various reasons, but a total of twenty-seven Polish Army men tried to defect by swimming across from Privates up to the rank of a Major of intelligence. Four of them made it; the others drowned or were shot at by their own side and that major was one of those who did survive the swim. A British soldier serving with the first battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment as part of the 8th Infantry Brigade was suffering from personal problems and swam the river eastwards in a foolish move that he regretted within minutes of getting to the other side. He would later disappear into the hands of the KGB to a fate he wouldn’t have wished on his worst enemy.


It was the same in the centre, east of Hannover. The Americans spent the morning of March 17th eliminating the 20TD and also causing immense damage to the rest of the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army. Soviet air support was sent their way, but not enough to save the doomed men there who had been smashed by the US III Corps. The successful counterattack that the Americans had made there into the field army that was General Korbutov’s designated OMG hadn’t worn out those formations enough in Marshal Kulikov’s opinion and they could still be redeployed to the north should General Kenny feel like he could.

The 35MRD, assigned to the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army but which had been held back yesterday, was now sent into action. It moved between Salzgitter and Braunschweig northwards through the town of Vechelde and crossed Autobahn-2 heading for the Aller River between Celle and Grifhorn. A regiment of Sukhoi-25 attack-fighters provided direct air support for their drive that hit the flank of the withdrawing 1st Panzer Division.

Bundeswehr troops put up a fierce fight and won tactical engagements but they were in the process of pulling back as far as Uetze and couldn’t allow themselves to be cut off by this attack as other NATO forces to the west were moving far back themselves. Leopard-2s fought T-80s in fierce engagements that continued from mid-morning into the late afternoon. The 1st Panzer Division managed to get away in the end though major losses had been incurred, especially among the air support emergency tasked to support its withdrawal from being enveloped.

*​

During the day, as it became clear that those two Warsaw Pact field armies were tearing apart the Dutch and part of the West German I Corps, General Kenny called on external support to assist the British Second Army from having those forces on its left-hand side torn apart. His own forces were fully committed elsewhere on the North German Plain and so he needed help from outside his command.

Aircraft from both the 2 ATAF and the 3 ATAF – with crews from the latter being tired after night-time missions and not as suitable for the missions that they were tasked with today as opposed to those in the former – were flown against Polish and Soviet targets on the Luneburg Heath. Artillery concentrations, pontoon bridges, suspected command centres and convoys of trucks bringing supplies directly forward to combat units were engaged. SAMs and anti-aircraft guns fired barrages skywards towards the attacking NATO aircraft and then Warsaw Pact aircraft made an appearance.

A pair of fighter regiments flying MiG-23s from the Soviet Fifth Air Army – a VVS formation based pre-war in the Moldavian SSR – covered the Poles while the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army had two regiments of MiG-29s from the Soviet Twenty-Sixth Air Army protecting them. The fighters stayed above the battlefields below and worked with ground defences in coordinating the fight against the inbound air attacks. Losses were taken, some from their own side too, but this tight rein kept upon VVS aircraft in their direct fighter coverage role worked very well indeed.

NATO air support wasn’t enough to hurt the Polish and Soviet troops still advancing and could only protect their own withdrawing troops from the few Warsaw Pact air attacks that went westwards in this region.


All hope wasn’t in air power though. Air power had never won a war and this massed enemy attack today was recognised by NATO’s field commander General Galvin as being something that could decide the outcome of the war for the worst if it wasn’t effectively stopped by ground forces.

The French III Corps had been slated for detachment from its higher command to support the British Second Army and now was the time for that. The pre-dawn air attacks against it when it was still back in the northern Rhineland had been ineffective at cutting its combat strength. There were three full-strength heavy divisions assigned to the formation with an incomplete ‘airmobile division’ that really only amounted to a pair of infantry battalions along with many transport helicopters – NATO wouldn’t even officially deem such a unit as a brigade let alone a division as the French did. The 2nd Armored, 8th Infantry and 10th Armored Divisions were all considered to be capable formations even if they were a little smaller than the average NATO division. The plan wasn’t to use them to hold ground though as would be required with a bigger force, but rather in the counterattack: a mission which they were trained for and motivated towards.

Moving northwards towards Bremen at first and under fighter cover from Armee d’Aire interceptors, the French III Corps then went onto Luneburg Heath in the early afternoon. The 2nd Armored & 8th Infantry Divisions went to smash into the Poles with the 10th Armored Division aiming to hit the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army in its northern flank. Fast-moving wheeled reconnaissance vehicles and scout helicopters were to lead the divisions into their attacks with the aim of bypassing strong forces moving west and getting into their rear areas. The French aimed to make a raid, not to occupy and hold already enemy captured territory and then get away back westwards again with minimal losses. The Warsaw Pact field armies were meant to pause and reposition themselves, so the NATO plan went, and thus give the British Second Army some time to recover.

Such a plan was excellent in theory but not in reality. Neither the British Second Army staff nor the advancing French understood just how the Poles and Soviets had broken down their attacks into multiple drives that were acting independent of each other today. There was no conservation of fighting force planned by General Korbutov or Marshal Kulikov as these two men were following STAVKA’s orders to smash through NATO’s lines at all costs and get the West to employ its last reserves in northern Germany. NATO was fighting for the here and now, as it had been on every day of the war so far, reacting and reacting again, while RED BEAR called for a little more forward thinking than that.


Near the towns of Tostedt and Rotenburg, both along Highway-75 and just short of Autobahn-1, the French hit the Polish First Army.

The Polish 16TD was hit by the French 2nd Armored Division in what was best described as ‘glancing blow’ before the French tried to get into the Poles’ rear. AMX-30 tanks, led by six-wheeled AMX-10RC, smashed against the side of the tank regiment that was on the Polish right before charging around to try to turn their flank. Casualties were inflicted on both sides and success seemed to be something the French were going to have before they realised that the 16TD was moving very fast indeed and instead of supply units they struck the 15MRD instead which was now following the tank division with half of its strength; the remainder of the division was rounding up Dutch prisoners taken back eastwards.

The 2nd Armored Division managed to untangle itself from what would be a brutal slugging match with Polish infantry that dismounted on foot to make the French take ground the hard way. They kept moving and again tried to go deeper, further eastwards. All that was back that way was towed anti-tank guns that the Poles had quickly and carefully sited on commanding positions to defeat such a manoeuvre to get behind them. Soviet Sukhoi-24s appeared in the skies and made bomb runs against the French and hit their infantry, which was generally still in their armoured vehicles, very hard indeed.

Facing defeat wherever it went to the north, the 2nd Armored Division was pulled backwards towards Tostedt with the aim of looping around and coming at the Poles against from the south. Only the fast and mobile combat units of the division had so far been employed and this should have allowed the French to make an effort of this… yet Polish artillery was firing scatterable anti-tank mines everywhere and the French repeatedly ran into these impromptu minefields.

Down near Rotenburg, the French 8th Infantry Division had similar trouble in taking on the Polish 11TD. The city of Bremen was twenty-five miles away and the Poles were charging towards it with the Soviet 207MRD coming up behind them and ready to react to an attempt to attack the 11TD’s rear just like the French tried. There were tanks cross-assigned to the 8th Infantry Division from the 2nd Armored Division (the former had none pre-war while the latter had plenty) but the fifty AMX-30s weren’t enough to even distract and slow the Polish T-72s so that a flanking manoeuvre could be made. Instead, the Poles rushed forward while the Soviets behind them tried their own envelopment manoeuvre. In just what the French didn’t want to happen, they found themselves fighting to hold ground at the communications centre of Rotenburg. Enemy forces outnumbered them three-to-one and they were in a lot of trouble very soon. The 4th Airmobile Division then arrived by helicopter at several points in the airmobile anti-tank role and this intervention came just in time. There were American A-10s in the sky too with their tank-buster cannons and a joint French-American effort manage to stop both Warsaw Pact divisions from getting past Rotenburg and rushing into Bremen… the cost was the destruction of the 8th Infantry Division’s offensive capabilities though.

Soon enough, the 2nd Armored Division managed to escape the minefields that seemingly came from nowhere and get back to Autobahn-1. They arrived just as the West German Territorial troops there were trying desperately to stop the onrush of Polish tanks who had a goal of reaching the distant port city of Bremerhaven on the North Sea coast. The 2nd Armored Division advanced in a southwestern direction into the flank of one Polish tank regiment and then another before having to slow down because they had bypassed too many smaller units which they hadn’t destroyed. The infantry was forced to deploy to protect the armour and just like the 8th Infantry Division, the 2nd Armored Division ended up in a fight to hold ground instead of raiding the attacking Poles.

A stalemate ensued here too.


The French 10th Armored Division aimed to engage Soviet forces around the Fallingbostel area but first they had to cross both the Weser River at Hoya and the Aller River at Rethem. Unrelated to the French advance, the Soviets attacked the fixed river crossings at both places with Scud and Scarab missiles just before the 10th Armored Division arrived to move over the Weser. The road and railway bridges there were struck repeatedly by ballistic missiles on terminal dives and while not directly destroyed and knocked into the Weser below, they were out of action for the time being.

The French were diverted further upstream to the crossings over both rivers west of Verden where the distance between each waterway was just over a mile, but this took up a lot of time as they had been so close to Hoya when those missiles arrived. After finally crossing over onto the edges of the Luneburg Heath news came from helicopters sent forwards on reconnaissance scouting missions that Polish tanks were charging directly towards them from the Fallingbostel area ahead. There was now no hope of trying to engage the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army as that formation had narrowed its front while the Polish First Army had widened its area of operations. Only by going back over the two rivers behind them, which could at any moment come under missile attack, would the French 10th Armored Division be able to engage the Soviets further south.

Time was passing by though and every minute that the Poles got further westwards meant that the Dutch units that they had bypassed further eastwards were in greater trouble than they already were. A major part of the plan for using the French III Corps as it was involved giving the Dutch Army to the east some breathing space so hopefully some organised withdrawals could be made from bypassed but not surrounded positions. For the French to withdraw back west and then try to advance again further south was thus not going to do their cut off NATO allies any good.

Across the rolling countryside southeast of Verden, down the length of Autobahn-27 towards Walsrode, the 10th Armored Division fought the Poles just as they were meant to. They used stealth and cunning to hit the flanks of the Polish 20TD buy escape any follow-up efforts by the 8MRD. Distracted by the murderous attacks coming at it all along its right-hand flank, the Poles slower down their forward advance to chase the wily French all across the countryside rather than charging for Verden and Bremen beyond.

By dusk, the Poles would reach that town. The bridges there would be blown up and West German Territorial troops were manning a defensive line anchored on where the Aller met the Weser and that line then ran northwards to Rotenburg. The French 10th Armored Division had meanwhile managed to pull away northwards ready to fight again the next day in a raiding role, yet the rest of the French III Corps would be unable to join them in any effort like that.

*​

Unmolested by French interference, the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army drove onwards all afternoon.

The left-hand wing of the field army ended up controlling the whole stretch of the northern banks of the Aller River when the West German 11th Panzergrenadier Division was ordered to cross that river at Winsen and also near Schwarmstedt after events further northwards made any fight for the Ortze River pointless. Midway along that river there were the two NATO divisions that had withdrawn from the Elbe-Seitenkanal along with parts of the Dutch 1st Armoured Division. These British, Dutch and Bundeswehr forces had found themselves inside a rapidly-heating cauldron throughout the afternoon as they concentrated midway along that river with the aim of preparing defensive positions against the onrushing four Soviet divisions. The manoeuvre of the Poles to their north and then behind them into the Fallingbostel area was combined with the threat of the forces directly ahead of them to force a decision for them to get back further westwards. At first the plan was to head southwest and cross the Aller River near Schwarmstedt but the 11th Panzergrenadier Division was there and congestion at crossing points was never going to be a good idea.

Instead, led by the 3rd Panzer Division, the NATO forces raced northwest and tore through the rear of the Polish First Army just after their 20TD and 8MRD had moved through Fallingbostel and got into their fight with the French. There were lightly-armed rear area units to be engaged and the West Germans excelled at clearing them out of their way – here inside German sovereign territory – before the NATO forces then bypassed Soltau and went towards Visselhovede.

Withdrawing westwards at high-speed like this was a bad idea but nothing else could be done. Men were left behind in the rush to get away and to their allies positioned to the west, the NATO force looked like an attacking Soviet or Polish formation. Air attacks brought ‘friendly fire’ upon them before urgent radio messages could convince NATO ground and air units to the west that they were friendly and withdrawing units, not hostile attacking forces using deception techniques to charge upon Bremen.

After those NATO troops got away to the northwest and the 11th Panzergrenadier Division moved southwards, the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army kept on moving until it reached the Aller River north of Schwarmstedt. Losses had been taken but the field army was victorious and had seized a massive area of enemy territory. The expectation with the higher command of the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army was that tomorrow they would advance even further westwards towards Nienburg on the Weser or maybe even south towards Hannover.

As to the Poles to the north of the Soviets, they were badly stung by their engagements with the French and couldn’t achieve the objective of taking Autobahn-1 from the enemy. Nonetheless, they were in touching distance of that major highway and the use of artillery would make it useless to maintaining NATO’s links with Hamburg. Behind the Polish First Army, and slowly falling into custody as they gave up, was much of the Dutch I Corps: professional and experienced fighting soldiers that NATO couldn’t immediately replace and whose loss would have major political effects soon enough in the Netherlands.





One Hundred & Five

For three days straight, the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army had pointedly failed to break through the Bundeswehr forces deployed in northern Hessen. The initial objectives had been for the Soviet and East German motorised rifle troops to advance to and then through the Kassel and Bad Hersfeld areas so that the field army’s exploitation forces could then be unleashed for a further drive either to the west or the southwest. Unfortunately, the Soviet 20GMRD and the East German 10MRD (the latter a reserve formation) had failed to break through in any meaningful way and the West Germans were still holding onto the Fulda River.

Intervention from General Snetkov as Front Commander had kept the 50GMRD and the pair of tank divisions (6GTD & 25TD) back from being committed to an area where it didn’t look like any success was going to be had after the initial failures to get moving through NATO defences. The West Germans were surprised at this lack of a follow-up attack yet knew that they had excellent positions on good defensive ground. With three divisions of their own, plus a brigade of paratroopers and plenty of artillery, the Bundeswehr III Corps expanded its operational area to assist the British Second Army to the north and the US V Corps to give both the Belgians and the Americans some assets to free up in places. Nonetheless, none of the forces directly assigned to the West German III Corps was removed from the area less the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army make a major attack with everything that they had thrown forward.

The Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army didn’t attack westwards against the Bundeswehr III Corps on the Thursday morning, instead its three divisions previously held back were engaged in action further south where previously the Soviet Eighth Guards Army had achieved next to nothing.


The 50GMRD went into action against the US 8th Mechanized Infantry Division west of Hunfeld where the 27GMRD had already pushed the Americans back over the Fulda River. The remains of that latter division were attached to the former for the post-dawn drive once assault units had captured several locations on the river’s western banks so that armoured bridging vehicles (the waterway wasn’t that wide there and pontoon bridges weren’t needed) could be used. The Americans were taken by surprise by Spetsnaz units operating in the river assault roll using fast boats. Fierce battles erupted at the crossing sites, but there was a lot of Soviet artillery being used along with dedicated close air support to force the issue for the 50GMRD. Following those commandos was the 244th Guards Regiment (a merging of surviving motorised rifle troops from the 27GMRD), a formation which parried away American counterattacks against the crossing sites and then counterattacked the brigade from the 8th Mechanized Infantry Division to push it backwards towards Schlitz area. In doing so, regiments from the 50GRMD were given the opportunity to cross.

M-270 rocket-launchers and M-110 heavy howitzers opened up against the Soviet river crossings in a ferocious response, but the 50GMRD was being pushed forward hard into determined opposition with no hesitation allowed. Tanks and armoured vehicles were blown up and many young Soviet conscripts who were far from home were killed, but still the division kept on advancing and expanding its bridgehead over the Fulda River as it did so. A second American brigade soon moved towards the fight in the effort to contain the 50GMRD and when Soviet reconnaissance assets detected the movement forward towards the fighting of that combat brigade, the division’s tank regiment was unleashed.

The 69th Tank Regiment raced towards the Americans with its ninety-four T-72s to hit them before they could get into place to establish defensive positions.

The Americans were spotted by helicopter reconnaissance moving northwards towards the town of Bad Salzschlirf and were then expected to follow the road up to Schlitz. The 69th Regiment moved through the bare Tratzwald Forest as they lanced towards Bad Salzschlirf with the intention of striking the Americans from their flank. Inside the forest where the leaves had long ago fallen from the trees and the undergrowth was extremely thin, the T-72s rolled forward leaving nature smashed underneath their track treads. BRM-1 reconnaissance vehicles had moved ahead of the tanks to establish routes that the tanks would follow but this was easier said than done with the T-72s moving fast through unknown territory and the reconnaissance troopers being very wary of at any minute running to an ambush in the forest from Bundeswehr missilemen. Not all of the trailing tanks followed their instructions as they were meant to and the advance slowed down as battalions intermixed with each other when they weren’t supposed to do and there were instances of foolish tank commanders ordering their drivers to try to knock down trees to speed up the advance where those had stood for many years against stronger forces than a forty ton tanks slowly trying to nudge it out of the ground.

Nonetheless, the regimental commander and his able political officer managed to sort things out and get the units back apart so they were no longer blocking each other’s route of advance. Those tanks that had had trees fall upon them were to be left behind for specialised recovery units to deal with later rather than everyone being held up. There was still a delay incurred though and this meant that the T-72s were not in place in time. Under orders which they didn’t like, the reconnaissance crewmen in those BRM-1s started to engage those Americans moving though Bad Salzschlirf with their mounted 73mm cannon and the dismounted light mortars that they were carrying. There were five vehicles and a good effort was made yet the Soviets could have done with anti-tank missiles here as well as stronger forces to make the attack.

Winning such a small fight wasn’t the aim though; instead the Americans were meant to pay attention to this and slow down from charging through the town to defeat this attack designed to look like nothing more than a nuisance raid.

A company of mechanized infantry from the 1/13 INF was pulled away from its parent battalion and the brigade moving north to counterattack. The M-113 personnel carriers raced forward to deliver infantry and their missile teams against both flanks of the maneuvering BRM-1s while a platoon of M-1A1 tanks with the 2/81 ARM opened fire first while back near the road. 120mm HEAT rounds were blasted away from the Abrams tanks and these slammed into the BRM-1s before the mechanized infantry could get into action. The Americans were firing uphill as Bad Salzschlirf rested inside a valley and the forest was up to the northeast, but all five Soviet vehicles were soon alight and being torn apart by internal explosions. The infantry were then ordered instead to finish off any survivors who wanted to continue the fight or otherwise collect prisoners.

But then the first of the T-72s started emerging from the edge of the tree-line and those tanks rode past the burning reconnaissance vehicles on their way to advance down into the valley below.

A platoon of three T-72s soon became a company of ten and then a battalion of thirty-one. The Soviet tanks fired as they moved and made short work of the M-113s. Dragon and TOW missiles were fired from the dismounted infantry but only four T-72s were knocked out before they were overrun from the hastily position in which they made a stand. The tank platoon that had had so much success against lighter-armed vehicles now faced a wall of Soviet armour advancing towards them and the Abrams weren’t fast enough to react: the whole platoon of four M-1A1s was knocked out before they could even begin to engage the enemy emerging from the forest.

Just as planned, the rest of the 69th Regiment came out of the trees after the first battalion had and another sixty plus T-72s rolled down towards Bad Salzschlirf. That first battalion drove directly forwards with the second aiming to get to the northern side of the town with the third aiming for where the main road came out to the south. Below them, the 2nd Brigade of the US 8th Mechanized Infantry Division struggled to react and also started screaming for help from elsewhere.


After a sufficient period of time to confirm that the majority of the 50GMRD was in action and engaging American troops in number to the west, the 6GTD and the 25TD were sent tearing through the North Fulda Forest to cross the Fulda River at the villages of Hemmen, Ludermund and Kammerzell. Pathways scouted by reconnaissance units leading the way but still the pair of divisions had a lot of trouble moving through such broken terrain. Nonetheless, when they emerged on the northeastern banks of the river they found that the small units of West German Territorial troops in those locations unprepared for them. Small fixed crossings were captured intact when they should have been blown up several days ago while armoured bridging units quickly moved to position bridges carried on the back of converted tank chassis’ into place.

Once over the waterway, the lead scout units of both divisions followed their orders and tried to find routes of advance that would allow the 6GTD & 25TD some room to maneuver. The ground wasn’t suitable for that though and when the bulk of the trailing formations – with six hundred T-64 and T-72 tanks plus hundreds more armoured vehicles – continued to advance southwest units intermixed with each other and immense traffic snarl-ups were incurred. Sorting all of this out took up time… time which the Soviets didn’t have.

At Großenlüder and Bimbach, to bigger localities to the south of the fighting at Bad Salzschlirf, the 6GTD & 25TD went over the unimpressive barrier that was the Luder River. There was stronger opposition facing them as the tank divisions now changed their axis of advance so that they were moving westwards, but West German reservists with hand-me-down light anti-tank weapons – few in number too – weren’t going to cause them any problems. Artillery fire from 2S1 and 2S3 tracked self-propelled howitzers trying to keep up with the fast-moving tanks dropped immense shell-fire on the defenders of those villages and then the tanks rushed forward to overwhelm any survivors of such a barrage of high-explosive.

To the west of Großenlüder, though around Bimbach a little too, the tank divisions moved through the rear-areas of the US 8th Mechanized Infantry Division. They tore through supply, maintenance, medical, military police, transport and headquarters support units, all of whom were wholly unprepared for such an attack when the fighting was meant to be to the north and they were supposed to be ‘safe’ in the rear. The machine guns on the tanks poured fire upon running men in the morning rain and into every truck and jeep that they could find. Mortar fire from trailing units was called up too to blanket the area when some brave soldiers tried engaging the mass of tanks with anti-tank weapons.

Following the tanks came the armoured infantry units in their BMP-1s & -2s along with BRT-60s & -70s. The riflemen aboard the vehicles weren’t dismounted to finish off the scattered logistics units because they would be needed later and the Americans who they passed by in their vehicles at haste mainly lay dead or in frantic states of deep shock. There were security forces with the rear columns of the tank divisions who would deal with such enemy troops, the divisional commanders said in their hasty orders, and the 6GTD & 25TD needed to keep moving. While seemingly not important at the time, the Soviets missed an opportunity here to utterly shatter the American division which had its combat power concentrated to the north and east of where they had advanced through and left these lightly-armed units defenseless in the middle… something that would later become very important.

The tank divisions continued moving westwards and were racing towards Highway-275. Upon reaching the north-south running road, they were to both turn southwards with the ultimate goal of their advance being to reach Gelnhausen before dusk. Their route of advance was meant to take them through undefended areas in a surprise attack which would allow them to make a rapid run across central Hessen to the southern part of the region without crossing the high ground of the Vogelsberg. They would engage the bulk of the US V Corps down there at Gelnhausen as they took them and NATO reinforcing forces in the rear. This was an excellent plan and the type of thinking that Soviet military academies trained its students in creating and executing: Zhukov would have been proud. Those delays in advance right from when back in the North Fulda Forest to the final stages as the divisions closed in upon Herbstein and Altenschlirf on Highway-275 when forced to operate on such a narrow front brought this epic armoured offensive to a final standstill though.


The US V Corps, focused upon the Gelnhausen Corridor, had been slow to realize what the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army was doing in trying to outflank them on a grand scale; the command staff of the West German III Corps was quicker off the mark. It was reports from their scout helicopters, which were operating outside of their ground area of operations but quite rightly on the flanks of that map-defined part of their country, that after being routed through higher channels made the US V Corps that their 8th Mechanized Infantry Division had suffered as it had by hundreds of Soviet tanks pouring through its rear areas. Both the divisional commander General Waller and his deputy had been killed during the tank attack when their mobile headquarters convoy had been shot-up and the report to General Woodmansee came from the departed Waller’s wounded Chief-of-Staff much time later.

Seeing what the Soviets were doing with their tank divisions, there was some grudging respect offered by the Bundeswehr in such an attack despite it being undertaken against their allies and through Germany, not another country’s territory. There was a vow to study the maneuver at a later date, but for now there was the business of warfare to get down to.

The 12th Panzer Division was the reserve for the West German III Corps and the division – with its nearly three hundred tanks and the almost the same number of armoured vehicles – had been kept out of the fighting for the past three days. Its men had been eager to move forward to launch a counterattack in the Corp’s sector where sovereign West German territory had been taken by the Soviet invader, but it had been held back ready for a major enemy offensive. Hidden away under cover in the rear, there had been failed Soviet air and missile attacks against it that had achieved almost no damage. Now, late in the morning of the war’s fourth day, the 12th Panzer Division was on the move: it headed southwards instead of east. From near Fritzlar and Homberg, the Luchs scout cars of the division led the way southwards at high speed down towards Alsfeld at first. The mission orders were for the Bundeswehr troops to advance to Lauterbach, a major communications center to the west of Schlitz. The West Germans had at first thought that the Soviet tank divisions might be heading that way to envelope the US 8th Mechanized Infantry Division, but those orders were modified when it became clear that the invader was chasing the goal of a much bigger target: the rest of the US V Corps further south.

From Alsfeld, the 12th Panzer Division drove towards the village of Stockhausen.

Also from the reserves of the Bundeswehr III Corps riding to the rescue of the Americans moved the 26th Fallschirmjager Brigade. This airborne formation had so far seen no action like the 12th Panzer Division had and its men were also eager to get into action. Trucks moved the men and light equipment of the Fallschirmjager from out of their dispersed field positions across the broken terrain of the Kellerwald through Marburg and towards the area around Highway-275 that the Soviets were charging upon. Small country roads were followed by the trucks and there was some difficulty in using them and small bridges had been demolished this far in the rear and there were nervous Territorial troops who were wary of a deception effort being made by Soviet raiding forces, but the West German paratroopers reached Altenschlirf before the onrushing T-72 tanks of the 6GTD did. They weren’t expecting to fight when reaching that village, rather in the countryside to the east, but things were happening so fast and like the 12th Panzer Division near Stockhausen, the Fallschirmjager was quickly into action.


This area of central Hessen where the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army and the West Germans clashed was on the edges of the Vogelsberg. There were still Soviet paratroopers up there, but they wouldn’t take part in the meeting engagement that took place down below them.

The 25TD met with the 12th Panzer Division just to the west of Stockhausen with the Soviets being surprised greatly by the sight of at first dozens and then later hundreds of Bundeswehr tanks this far in NATO’s rear. At first the thinking was that tanks from one of the armoured formations that the West German Territorials manned were being engaged, but these were Leopard-2s not M-48s. Firing on the move as they hit the Soviets in their flanks before the 25TD could turn in a cohesive fashion to meet them head on, the Leopard-2’s were in their element. Jaguar-2 anti-tank destroyers and missile-armed infantry teams in Marders who coordinated their efforts with the tanks caused the Soviets immense trouble. The divisional advance guard was lost and the 175th Tank Regiment hit so hard that it was deemed combat ineffective less than thirty minutes into the battle. The West Germans kept moving rather than trying to hold ground and Mil-24 helicopters flying in support of the 25TD reported – between being effectively engaged by Gepard anti-aircraft guns – that one of their brigades was looping around to the west and aiming to come at the Soviets from the south too. This was what the Bundeswehr excelled at and something which the Soviets wanted to do themselves but weren’t comfortable having it done to them.

The 25TD knew that it was engaging West German units but it took time for the 12th Panzer Division to be identified as being such. There were shortcomings in the tactical intelligence picture that the Soviets had at this point and that report that a third Bundeswehr brigade was maneuvering to come at them from their other flank was incorrect; instead the 35th Panzergrenadier Brigade was racing to meet the Fallschirmjager at Altenschlirf. Those paratroopers down there only had man-portable anti-tank missile-launchers and were being engaged by the lead units of the 6GTD with all of those hundreds of T-72s.

The Fallschirmjager would like to have thought that they didn’t need to be rescued, but they surely did. The four battalions of paratroopers couldn’t stop the onrush of tanks that was coming towards them. They did have seventy missile-launchers and almost fifty 20mm light cannons mounted on wheeled vehicles but the 6GTD would have eventually crushed them by overrunning their outer positions using their superior mobility and fire-power before pushing the remaining paratroops back into the village that their artillery would have leveled while surrounded by screening troops. MILAN and TOW missiles had struck many tanks but there were too many T-72s for the Fallschirmjager to handle… but then the brigade from the 12th Panzer Division arrived after coming in from the northwest. The 6GTD moved to challenge that intrusion of Bundeswehr armour before the dismounted paratroopers added flanking fire to that stronger effort too.

The 6GTD had to do what the 25TD did just to their north: come to a halt, deploy infantry and artillery, and engage the enemy forces in a set-piece battle at Altenschlirf just like the fight near Stockhausen.


The West German’s had managed to stop the ‘daring thrust’ forward that the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army was making and in the process saved the majority of the US V Corps down in the Gelnhausen Corridor from certain envelopment.

*​

The decision to abandon the Kinzig Valley and cede the Gelnhausen Corridor to the Soviet First Guards Tank Army was something that would later be long discussed at length. There would be much criticism of the withdrawal out of there after so much American (and later Spanish) blood had been spilt to hold it through March 14th-16th at its eastern end and then in the center before the effective retreat early on March 17th. There would be Congressional inquiries post-war while those interested in military history – amateurs and professionals – would argue over the wisdom and also pose several variants of the iconic ‘What if?’ question as to the outcome should that position be held. A fantastic victory was won afterwards, and even with the value of that being strategically irrelevant with later events, the withdrawal was always regarded as an error of great magnitude.

General Woodmansee’s decision to withdraw was made due to important factors on the ground at the time rather than what was discussed with hindsight by those who wouldn’t understand the tactical and strategic implications that the commander of the US V Corps was facing that morning. The drive forwards by those tank divisions from the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army posed a major threat to the forces he had in the Kinzig Valley and he had no idea that the West Germans would be so effective in halting that massed tank drive to envelop him. The actions of Soviet paratroopers and airmobile forces during the war’s first days in the Gelnhausen Corridor to so utterly wreck the logistics assets of his command had been near fatal and armies run on logisitics not tactics. Then there was the overwhelming realization that spending another day defending improvised positions that would soon have to be abandoned before new ones set up in a rush before having to be withdrawn from soon afterwards was killing his soldiers and destroying his formations for no appreciable gain. His forces weren’t suited for defensive operations like that, they needed to conduct warfare like the 12th Panzer Division would soon do if the US Army was going to survive this war.

Under the cover offered by an immense artillery barrage and the depletion of much of the stocks of White Phosphorus smoke available, the withdrawal was made. The majority of the American, West German and Spanish forces (a rearguard was left behind to race away from combat when the time was right) in the valley that ran between the Vogelsberg and the Spessart pulled back fast using coded communications. There were demolitions of buildings, terrain and damaged vehicles that weren’t carried out due to the worry that such things would give away their intentions… though combat engineers working under the supervision of Green Berets did create the most intricate series of booby-traps in the short space of time available.

The withdrawal wasn’t a retreat under fire and so the NATO forces pulled back in good order and into better positions at the western entrance to the valley. Through Wachtersbach and Wirtheim tanks, armoured vehicles and trucks fled backwards towards Gelnhausen itself. The transport available to gather up everyone and move them a distance of roughly twenty miles backwards had been gathered from all available sources in haste, but this was done without much incident. To move on foot was not an option: the only those soldiers who started walking were the Green Beret ‘advisers’ who had been with the US V Corps for more than a week now and the men of 1/75 Rangers who had arrived in the night. The commando teams from the 10th Special Forces Group disappeared into any cover they could find in suburban terrain while the Rangers marched off up into the Vogelsberg and the Budlingen Forest near Wachtersbach.


Unaware that main the bulk of the US V Corps was slipping away from their ongoing attack, the Soviet First Guards Tank Army drove towards their first objective of Wachtersbach. They were engaging reformed elements of the 11th Cavalry Regiment with the Blackhorse Cav' being out front and using massed firepower to tears into what remained of that unit. However, as the 6GMRD and 32GTD did this, it became clear that the Blackhorse Cav' was giving up ground faster than witnessed before and with little effort to hold positions for as long as possible.

Again and again, the Americans were pulling back when faced with massed artillery and tank fire and the Soviets struggled to keep up with them. This series of ongoing ‘shoot and scoot’ actions were what the Blackhorse Cav' had been doing since the opening shots of the war had been fired up in the Fulda Gap, but hadn’t taken place like this before down in the Kinzig Valley. When trying to take advantage of the willingness of the Americans to withdraw, the Soviets kept blundering head-on into traps where missile teams would engage their lead vehicles to halt columns before fleeing as fast as possible. Armed helicopters would appear all of a sudden from behind cover and launch missiles at command vehicles and then disappear before anti-aircraft assets could be directed against them. Anti-tank mines were more present than usual though Soviet combat engineers found them emplaced seemingly in a hurry and easy to defeat as long as one was careful.

The pair of divisions, as beat up as they were after yesterday, pushed onwards and chased the Blackhorse Cav' down to near Wachtersbach. News was sent back to the Soviet First Guards Tank Army HQ of their success though the army commander was greatly concerned by that point at the other information he was receiving of patchy intelligence reports that that massive artillery barrage had covered a major American withdrawal. That hadn’t been as effective as General Woodmansee had hoped and didn’t stop the reconnaissance aircraft from the Soviet Sixteenth Air Army of seeing massed convoys of vehicles rolling southwards.

After small-scale combat outside Wachtersbach, the Blackhorse Cav' then got free of their pursuers and Soviet attacks started hitting thin air.


With great caution though with much blood still being spilt to traps and efforts of Green Berets, the Soviet First Guards Tank Army entered the western side of the Gelnhausen Corridor. After Wirtheim, the bandaged-up 9TD took over the advance with the equally wounded 11GTD following them. The whole of the field army had been hurt the day before but these two divisions had been pulled out of the line of advance late yesterday and rested a little while units within each were merged to reestablish fighting strength. The other divisions were in a worse state and many of the senior command staff thought that this would be the last time that the Soviet First Guards Tank Army would see action.

At Haitz and Hochst, right at the entrance to the Kinzig Valley, that ‘action’ again commenced. The US 4th & 24th Mechanized Infantry Divisions were here with the Spanish and the West German 55th Brigade in support. The NATO forces attacked the approaching Soviets head-on and in flanking attacks rather than trying to defend these villages along the Autobahn just outside Gelnhausen. Counterattacks were followed by counter-counterattacks as the Soviets were quick to realize that they were now engaged in a meeting engagement rather than the usual fighting to overcome fixed positions. While surprised, they were not going to be easily beaten and then 9TD along with the following 11GTD that soon arrived gave a good show of themselves despite taking losses.

In the skies above, while the opposing sides through a hell of a lot of artillery and rockets at each other, interference in the fighting below by air support was hindered by air support from the opposition. Helicopters and aircraft spent too much effort in attacking each other rather than striking ground targets; plenty of these fell from the air and crashed in flames into the ground below.

Back on the ground, the fighting moved closer and closer to Gelnhausen, there was further suspicion at Soviet First Guards Tank Army HQ. The collection of armoured vehicles and trucks from where the field army was commanded had only recently survived an air attack by Luftwaffe Tornado strike-bombers, but that close miss was nowhere near as important as the information coming out of the Gelnhausen area. The Americans were still giving way after all their bluster, but they were fighting with an apparent intention of keeping the 9TD & 11GTD moving towards that town and not spreading out either side. Firm orders were sent for the forward divisions to push sideways – to the north and south – through NATO opposition no matter how strong it was and not be led into some sort of cauldron-style trap.


Those fears of a trap were correct, though it wasn’t one that the Soviets had directly foreseen.

Advancing up from the southwest in a lancing fashion was the French II Corps. Three divisions all separately converged upon Linsengericht (just south of Gelnhausen itself) and were released into the attack right at the most opportune moment. The afternoon skies had cleared up some with the rain clouds disappearing just before the attack and NATO and French aircraft filled the air in great number to give direct support to the thrust of French armour that went forwards.

Where the French had failed up in northern Germany, they had success here in Hessen. Their 3rd & 5th Armored Divisions, with the 15th Infantry Division on the right flank, struck the enemy in a perfect maneuver by hitting the Soviet First Guards Tank Army right between the two Soviet tank divisions. French AMX-30s were all over the Soviets and racing through their units firing as they moved forward heading for West German lines to the north that were to open up for them to then pass through. It was like a cavalry charge of old, an armoured raid like it should be. The French took losses, of course, but the damage they did was fantastic with both Soviet divisions being truly combat ineffective afterwards.

And then the US V Corps made a full counterattack ready to chase those Soviet divisions behind back into the Kinzig Valley towards pinpointed locations where massed artillery would strike once they were identified as being there. Soviet helicopters were shot out of the sky because the air defence bubble had been penetrated on the ground. Fuel and ammunition trucks were targeted and blown up. Hundreds upon hundreds of prisoners were to be taken with thousands of the comrades of those men left dead.


After this, the Soviet First Guards Tank Army was no longer going to be able to advance any further towards the Frankfurt region and, with the stopping of the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army’s attack too, the offensive capability of the Second Western Front had been firmly and finally broken.

Meanwhile, the last appreciable Western reserves in central Germany, just like up in northern Germany, had just been used up.

[James G]

One Hundred & Six

RED BEAR never envisaged conquering a large portion of Bavaria. There weren’t expected to be any of those fearsome ‘NATO invasion forces’ in West Germany’s largest Land and the terrain there wasn’t overall favourable to multiple massed armoured assaults the Soviet military doctrine preferred.

A total of five field armies had been assigned to conduct operations in Bavaria though only two of those were Soviet Army formations. The East Germans had their Third Army operating from the southeastern part of their country that was meant to attack into northern Bavaria while the Czechoslovaks had their pair of field armies meant to cross into eastern Bavaria from western Bohemia. As to those Soviet formations, the Eighth Tank Army and the Thirty-Eight Army had been positioned in western Bohemia too but northwards of those Czechoslovak forces. RED BEAR called for offensive military operations to be conducted into Bavaria with the aim being to fix the attention of both the American and West German armies; the US Army and the Bundeswehr were regarded by Marshal Ogarkov as being the most potent of the ground forces of NATO, an opinion which surely the British or the French wouldn’t be happy to have stated of their armies.

Through March 14th–16th, the Third Western Front may have done its primary mission and held the attention of NATO forces in southern Germany, yet none of the primary objectives that it was meant to have taken had been. RED BEAR didn’t call for the fighting near the border that generally occurred; instead there were meant to have been penetrations made of some depth so that NATO would have been forced to commit large numbers of their heavy units to… formations that weren’t going to be re-tasked to head northwards into central Germany.

The East German Third Army – attached to the Second Western Front at first before being transferred to General Shokov’s command – consisted of four divisions split equally between regular and reserve formations. They had made to efforts to get out of Thuringia and through the US VII Corps towards the important road and rail communications centres of Schweinfurt and Bamberg on the Main River but instead got no further than Bad Kissingen and Coburg. Even then, the East Germans had gutted their divisions getting as far as those two towns and were left in no position for further advances. Only events elsewhere stopped the Americans from counter-attacking, a strike which probably would have pushed the East Germans back over the border and into the sovereign territory of a Warsaw Pact nation.

The Czechoslovak First & Fourth Armys couldn’t get out of the Bavarian Forest after they had crossed the border and down into the Danube Valley. RED BEAR called for that strategically important region to be reached to provide a wide buffer zone to protect Czechoslovakia, but so much had gone wrong with the first moves of the war made as they were that that objective couldn’t be met. The West German II Corps, later assisted by the Canadians when the Czechoslovak First Army made a stronger attack in spite of immense casualties, did exceptionally well in keeping the attacking Czechoslovaks far back and only just inside Bavaria.

The Soviet Eighth Tank & Thirty-Eighth Armys consisted of nine divisions with four in the former and five in the latter. These troops were all based pre-war in both Czechoslovakia with the Central Group of Forces or across in the western Ukraine as part of the Carpathian Military District. The Soviet Eighth Tank Army was meant to be an Operational Manoeuvre Group – though the expectation wasn’t that it would do as well as the OMG’s further northwards – while the Soviet Thirty-Eighth Army was supposed to have broken through the distracted US VII Corps and opened up northeastern Bavaria for the OMG following behind them. This part of Bavaria was known as Franconia after the historic Duchy and was the area of the Land (West Germany was a federated nation with ten regions known as Land’s which were somewhat comparable to American states) where exploitation efforts were possible for Soviet forces. Franconia was meant to be overrun and pressure later exerted on the Americans in southern Hessen at a later stage should the conduct of the war call for that.

Due to the distractions offered by the East Germans and the manner in which General Shokov pushed the men who manned it, the Soviet Thirty-Eighth Army had managed to advance forward deep into Franconia yet at the same time had not achieved what it had been tasked to. The right-hand side of the US VII Corps had withdrew in good order and not been routed while they had done terrible damage to the attacking Soviets. Kulmbach and Bayreuth remained in NATO hands along with the important road networks around them while the initial drive towards Nurnberg had been pushed back to Amberg and the threat from there now dealt with. In addition, there had been a later attempt by the 70GMRD to push in a surprise thrust towards Pegnitz right through the abandoned Grafenwohr training area to break open the Americans in the centre, an assault which had been bloodily repulsed at a village with a name unpronounceable to the Soviet soldiers who died there in great numbers: Troschenreuth.

Yesterday, General Shokov was meant to have done just as General’s Korbutov and Snetkov had done and pushed their OMGs forward no matter what to create breakthroughs in the NATO lines with massed armour rather than waiting for the infantry to do it for them. The Soviet Eighth Tank Army – with three tanks divisions and the highly-regarded 24MRD – had been lined up ready to move from its stand-by position around Cheb in Bohemia. General Shokov had been instructed to send those eleven hundred tanks racing through the Soviet Thirty-Eighth Army’s lines and towards Kulmbach on the Main River after detouring around the Fichtel Mountains. The OMG was moving forward and had crossed over into West Germany when intelligence reports had reached General Shokov that the US VII Corps were moving their forces around in a manner suggesting that they were expecting that attack to come and preparing to meet it. He had decided to not commit the Soviet Eighth Tank Army at that point and wait for more favourable circumstances later in the day; the then uncommitted 48MRD had pushed forward first to engage those American troops first.

A massive air attack by the 4 ATAF had then come and the target of that had been the Soviet Eighth Tank Army strung out along roads and in the middle of moving its air defences around. Canadian, Luftwaffe and USAF aircraft had been involved in this effort to target the divisions of the Soviet Eighth Tank Army and hurt them bad.

General Shokov had been subsequently replaced by his deputy and summoned back to Moscow to explain himself before STAVKA: everyone knew how that was going to end…


On the morning of March 17th, the Third Western Front conducted the attack which had been cancelled without higher authorisation yesterday. The Czechoslovak 4TD from their First Army – which hadn’t yet seen action – was attached to the Soviet Eighth Tank Army when the drive was made along the route of advance previously planned with a pair of Soviet Thirty-Eighth Army motorised rifle divisions making a short attack first to the south with the intent being to distract the Americans.

All told, seven divisions were committed to the attack.

The US VII Corps had been expecting this though. They had ample intelligence pointing to the Soviet OMG being just inside Franconia west of Cheb from air reconnaissance, scouting reports of Green Berets on the ground and strategic signal intelligence coming direct from the National Security Agency’s satellites.

When moving over crossings over the upper reaches of the Saale River to the south of Hof, the Soviet Eighth Tank Army was subjected to NATO air attacks that caused damage and delays. The French appeared in the skies and used Mirage-2000s while the Luftwaffe had their Tornados in action and the USAF dropped bombs from F-4s and F-16s. Soviet Army air defences had improved since the day before with better protection for troops moving forward while the radars, SAMs and anti-aircraft guns were themselves redeploying and so the air attacks didn’t have enough of the desired effect to cause a major delay.

By mid-morning, the Soviet 24MRD made the first attacks towards Kulmbach while the four tank divisions following them close behind waited ready to pounce. This Category A unit was known as the ‘Iron Division’ and the Soviet formation attacked the defences of the US 1st Armored Division: the ‘Old Ironsides’. Steel vehicles, rather than weapons made of iron, battled each other along the countryside either side of Highway-303 than ran across the hills to the northwest of the town. The Old Ironsides had their own divisional cavalry squadron – the 1/1 CAV – out front along with two further battalion-sized cavalry squadrons: the 3/2 CAV and the newly-formed 1/14 CAV (consisting of smaller armoured reconnaissance units from independent US Army and USAR brigades in Germany but not directly needed with them now they were with divisions). All three squadrons fought extremely hard and inflicted much damage on the attacking Iron Division. The Soviets had their lead units shot up and wasted too much effort being drawn into fights with these nimble formations that manoeuvred cleverly all over the battlefield making hit-and-run attacks to get the attacking 24MRD to expose its command units and the locations of its supporting artillery.

And then the 1st Armored Division made an attack against the 24MRD.

The Old Ironsides came up from the south right into the Iron Division’s left flank when all Soviet intelligence pointed to the American division pulling away to further defensive positions instead. Two brigades of tanks and mechanized infantry – with the divisional commander Major-General Edwin Leland at the front rather than in the rear with his command staff – went through the 24MRD like a knife through hot butter. Rather than a raid-type offensive, the Americans instead sought to take the ground back that the Soviets had just taken for themselves. The rear areas of the Iron Division were struck into with supply and artillery units shot up and forward progression against the remaining brigade plus those cavalry squadrons coming to an instant halt. The air defence screen that the Soviets were using was destroyed on the ground and into the suddenly defenceless skies (after command-and-control had been interrupted along with radar coverage) there were US Army helicopters. Apache and Cobra attack helicopters from the 1st Armored Division’s own aviation command along with more from the 11th Combat Aviation Brigade poured cannon fire, rockets and missiles into the Soviet and then Czechoslovak forces encountered.

Those helicopters covered the efforts of the pair of brigades on the ground which went towards the forward forces of the 24MRD from the rear while also took on the Czechoslovak 4TD as it was staging for an attack itself. Chaos, destruction and death reined over the battlefield. Hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles blew up, many of which were American too. Thousands of men were to die or be badly wounded in horrible instances of combat at close-range.

Amongst all of this carnage, no one apart from those senior American officers briefed upon such need-to-know information, realised that some of the Bell Jet-Ranger helicopters buzzing around the sky were not US Army OH-58s but rather Canadian Forces CH-136s. Those helicopters were busy not highlighting targets for the Apaches but rather watching the ground to the east and waiting for the next attacking division to make an appearance… that wasn’t a long wait.

The US VII Corps was commanded by Lt.-General Ronald Watts and he was cautious man and not normally the daring type. However, this was wartime and things done in peacetime wouldn’t work now. The Soviets further north had shown themselves willing to keep committing masses of tanks to action to ‘reinforce failure’, wholly opposite of typical Soviet military doctrine, and when the Soviet Eighth Tank Army was identified as coming towards his command, General Watts was forced to think the unthinkable. The course of action he opted for was to seize the initiative away from the enemy and do something that they weren’t expecting.


The Canadian 1st Infantry Division had moved up from the Regensburg area in the Danube Valley during the night. It had been transferred from the West German II Corps to the US VII Corps as requested by General Watts. When down in the Bavarian Forest, the Canadians had seen some action against Czechoslovakia units and been blooded a little, but the two brigades of the division had given a good show of themselves. About seventy per cent of the regular soldiers of the Canadian Army was with the division with a select few reservists under command though split up among component formations rather than separate attached units. They were well-armed and well-supplied… as well as about to bite off more than they could chew.

The resulting Battle of Ludwigschorgast (while actually fought to the north and west of that little village and around Highway-289) was a disaster for the Canadians. Their two battalions of Leopard-1 tanks and the infantry mounted in M-113s and wheeled Grizzlys were torn to pieces when they smashed into the Soviet 30GTD head-on instead of hitting the flank of that division. T-72s and BMP-2s, along with plenty of Soviet artillery, tore the Canadians to pieces. The 4th Mechanised Brigade-Group, the ‘show-piece’ of the Canadian Army, was thoroughly defeated while much of the 5th Mechanised Brigade-Group trailing behind them ready to follow up what was hoped would be initial success was shattered. The Canadians had too found themselves engaged from the air by a regiment of Soviet VVS Su-25 attack-fighters who broke off from their assigned mission further forward to hit the attacking division dying under the fire of the 30GTD.

Thousands of Canadian soldiers would soon lay dead while many more would fall into Soviet captivity when the 30GTD sent its motorised rifle troops forward to mop up those who survived its defensive efforts against this sneak attack. Urgent assistance had been sought at the crucial moment when the Canadians realised that they had run into more trouble than they could handle, but the Old Ironsides were at that point too busy to do so.

Like the Netherlands, Canada had just lost the bulk of its professional army far away from home and that was highly-trained men and expensive equipment that couldn’t be replaced overnight.


The destruction of the Canadian 1st Infantry Division came just as the Old Ironsides were fighting off a counter-counterattack by the Czechoslovak tanks of the 4TD’s 13th Tank Regiment. When news reached General Leland of what had occurred he was aghast at such destruction of the division operating alongside his in the mission of breaking up the Soviet Eighth Tank Army’s attack and spoke urgently to General Watts; the corps commander told him that it was time for the Old Ironsides to withdraw now. Plenty of damage had been done and the Soviets were going to take a long while to sort themselves out. An immense barrage of artillery was about to rain down on the Soviet Eighth Tank Army now that it could be held up just to the east by this fighting at the front and there would be many NATO aircraft in the sky too.

Protected against an attack as they withdrew by the cavalry of the 1/14 CAV, the Old Ironsides pulled out of the gap between the two Warsaw Pact divisions either side of them and towards the Highway-303 position. A lot of effort was made in taking their wounded back out with them but much effort had to be put into blowing up their own and enemy vehicles that were damaged but repairable too. Unfair criticism would come later of General Leland for the attention focused upon the latter mission when there came reports that a lot of trapped and wounded American soldiers who remained behind to fall into the dubious care of the enemy. Yet none of that was intentional… and this was war after all with all of the horrors that came with it.


The Soviet Eighth Tank Army had been brought to a halt.

Three of the five divisions had faced the enemy and while the 30GTD had won a victory, it had still taken damage in doing so. Guns from three US VII Corps field artillery brigades soon started firing heavy barrages towards the trio of divisions (15GTD, 30GTD and 31TD) which could still fight and then NATO aircraft returned. The Soviets had their own artillery on counter-battery missions and Soviet Fourteenth Air Army fighters in the skies, but there was a lot of fire-power being directed against them while they tried to approach the ground ahead that was a battlefield littered with dangers from the fighting there with access routes blocked.

The Third Western Front had seen tactical failure like the other Fronts had, yet again there was strategic success achieved even if those looking at the situation on the ground rather than from a distance couldn’t see that at the minute.





One Hundred & Seven

Across Germany on Thursday March 17th there were massive sweeping armoured thrusts by thousands of tanks countered by thousands more as NATO forces brought those of the Warsaw Pact to standstill once again. Up in northern Norway, the fighting took on a less extreme character – a combination of factors of the smaller forces involved, the difficult terrain and the terrible weather – and was also more decisive in outcome.

*​

The US Marines operating from and around Alta spent the day in combat with the pair of Soviet Sixth Army right-wing divisions that naval gunfire and air attacks had damaged yesterday. The 69MRD and the 77GMRD came back towards Alta after the massive delays incurred to their movement from the distant fire support that the 2nd Marine Division had due to instructions from higher command to sweep away what light forces were thought to be in-place there and secure that communications centre. The US Marines were determined to not let their opponents achieve such a thing because they wanted to prove the naysayers wrong.

Reinforced by the addition of the Marine Reserve units that had initially been left behind – the tanks and riflemen had made the long journey overnight and it had been a perilous trip – and concentrated towards Alta rather than operating over a wide area, the 2nd Marine Division acted as a raiding force. They had the tanks, the armoured vehicles that could carry Marine Riflemen and their own fire support on-hand to do this.

Pushed forward by a new commander eager to not suffer the presumed fate of his predecessor who had been fired for ‘cowardice’ and then arrested, the 77GMRD moved towards Alta again from the northeast. No barrages of sixteen-inch shells smashed into the understrength division this time though pilotless RPVs were spotted in the air shadowing the movement of the 77GMRD. A request was made for heavy air support from the Soviet Seventy-Sixth Air Army to locate and attack the battleship known to be out in the Altafjorden, but that was refused due to the Arctic Front having to keep its strike air assets ready to support the Soviet Navy’s soon-to-be doomed Northern Fleet. Across to the east, the 69MRD advanced towards Alta though yesterday’s battlefield where NATO air attacks had hurt that formation so hard too.

Closing in around Alta, both divisions ran into the US Marines.


There were now two tank battalions with the 2nd Marine Division and each fielded seventy M60A1 tanks. The anti-tank companies with both of those battalions along with the 2nd Light Armored Infantry Battalion gave the US Marines around Alta another two hundred plus armoured vehicles and this number didn’t include the one hundred and eighty ‘amtracks’ – the amphibious tracked AAV-7A1s – that were being used as personnel carriers. Such vehicles were all able to manoeuvre throughout (only the thick snow slowed them) the surrounding area and were put to task in hitting the Soviets as they came forward with multiple attacks from as many threat axis’ as possible.

Across on the eastern side of the Altaelva River, the 3/2 MARINES worked with the tanks, the eight-wheeled LAV-25s and the HMMWVs mounting TOW missiles to take on the leading elements of the 77GMRD when that division appeared. The amtracks ferried the riflemen around behind the M-60s as they were led into engagements by LAV-25s. The Soviet division had reorganised itself but there were still recognisable regiment-sized formations broken down into combined arms battalions. These battalion groups moved towards the river near the shoreline aiming to use the approaches to the demolished highway bridge to construct their own crossing. Rather than take them on in a stand-up fight from concealed positions and making a stand, the US Marines instead aimed to smash into the sides of the attacking battalion groups.

The Soviets were paying far too much attention to their right flank as it faced the open water – where that battleship just had to be lurking – and not watching inland enough. The US Marines used the rough terrain to conceal their advances and then started smashing into those targeted enemy formations. There were cracks of cannon fire and the sounds of missile launches that announced each attack rather than distant gunfire from the artillery assigned to the 2nd Marine Division, all of which was on the other side of the river ahead. MT-LB tracked vehicles were hit by HEAT warheads fired from the 105mm cannons on the M-60s and the 25mm weapons of the LAV-25s. Explosion after explosion tore the Soviet ranks apart and when the escorting PT-76 and T-55 tanks attempted to return fire, they found waves of TOW missiles arriving to blow them sky high.

Firing as they were moving, some shots missed their targets and the Soviets weren’t placid in letting themselves being killed while not trying to strike back. Yet at the same time, the onrush of US Marines towards them caused panic in the 77GMRD’s units. They had been caught looking the wrong way and weren’t able to stop the M-60s from getting into their formations and causing further chaos there. The fast-moving LAV-25s came with the tanks in getting down onto lower ground and ‘mixing it up’ with the Soviets… that wouldn’t be something repeated when it was later realised just how many of these vehicles were knocked out by enemy return fire. Marine Riflemen inside these eight-wheeled vehicles really suffered when their transports were hit by heavy gunfire from the light enemy tanks: just like their counterparts in the US Army's 9th Motorized Infantry Division had in Schleswig-Holstein when operating in light armoured vehicles facing tanks too.

Meanwhile, up above these fights, the TOW missile teams fired long-range shots downwards careful not to hit their own side. Nearby, the mass of Marine Riflemen waited in their amtracks ready to be deployed if needed in reaction to any counterattack.

The raids didn’t last long and the tanks and armoured vehicles would very soon withdraw from their penetrations through Soviet lines before the enemy could reorganise itself to put up effective resistance. Getting away from a fight is never as easy as getting in one, but the US Marines had their long-range fire support available. Cobras made an appearance and then TOW missiles coming down from above helped allow for those withdrawals.

Meanwhile, the 69MRD again faced attacks by Harriers as it moved westwards. Yesterday those attack-fighters had been forced to carry lighter weapons loads because they were operating from the amphibious assault ships and striking far inland; that wasn’t how it was today. Flight time from Alta Airport – which the Norwegians had previously so thoroughly wrecked but some of that damage had been undone overnight – to the Soviets moving forward was short and the Harriers came out with heavy weapons loads. There were forward air controllers on the ground working with Force Recon teams and again the Soviets found themselves on the receiving end of targeted air power. SAM-launchers and mobile anti-aircraft guns were among the first targets before MT-LBs and BTR-60s loaded with infantry were highlighted for airborne attack.

Despite the strength of the air intervention, that division was still moving forwards and operating in a line of advance that would bring it to the south of Alta. The 2nd Marine Division’s commander could see that the Soviet strategy appeared to be to use the 77GMRD to go through the town while the 69MRD would bypass it. The latter formation wasn’t stopping despite the air attacks and so it would have to be engaged on the ground again. Like with the other raids, he sent his tanks and armoured vehicles into their ranks again in company-sized groups. The ground to the south of Alta was perfect for small-scale armoured operations with riflemen being able to operate from height covering the M-60s and LAV-25s below them. Artillery from the howitzers back on the western side of the river fired in direct support of each raiding operation this time with airburst shells designed to keep the 69MRD from deploying its own infantry to assist their own tanks and armoured vehicles.


By late morning, both divisions had called off their forward attacks and were trying to sort out their smashed ranks. There were destroyed vehicles and dead men everywhere with the overwhelming majority of those losses being taken on the Soviet side. The attacking enemy had shown an unwillingness to stand and fight and the Soviet Sixth Army couldn’t deal with these raiding attacks that had stopped them from fulfilling their objectives of reaching the Altaelva River and getting over it. Air support was again called for before the divisional commanders conferred and decided that the so-called intelligence upon the enemy in Alta was wrong and a deliberate attack needed to be made instead to overrun that town’s defenders rather than try to advance fast upon them and letting themselves be left open as they were.

The US Marines didn’t realise just how quickly their strategy of disguising their strength had failed. They had done so well that they had given the game away… yet that wasn’t understood. While they were patting themselves on the back and adding a little swagger to their walk, there was only minor objection raised when the battleship Wisconsin – which had yet to today fire her guns – sailed away under US Navy orders to hunt for any survivors of the Soviet Northern Fleet.

Very soon, the US Marines would miss the RPVs from the battleship as well as the on-call support of her guns.


Coming back at midday, the Soviet Sixth Army made their attempt to deal with the defenders of Alta. There had been some quick and brutal interrogation of wounded American prisoners taken and the enemy was identified as being US Marines. Such a force wasn’t thought to have such a large armoured component as forward junior commanders were claiming and the divisional commanders agreed – supported by higher command – that there was only a battalion of American tanks in the area around Alta. Other intelligence had said that the airport there had been destroyed by the Norwegians to stop it being used by the VVS at a later stage, just as what was planned, and so all aviation support was thought to be based on ships offshore. The air support thus requested was sent to hunt for those mini aircraft carriers while the 69MRD & 77GMRD were instructed to advance upon Alta in an envelopment manoeuvre to draw the attention of the US Marines to defend their base of operations rather than acting as mobile as they were.

Missile teams were sent forwards on foot first before the tracked vehicles made their moves with the intention of such men being able to get into positions ahead to cover the movement of the tanks and armoured vehicles when they advanced. Those missilemen were meant to break-up further American armoured attacks before all the attention of the US Marines would be on Alta itself. However, struggling through the snow-covered ground encumbered with missile-launchers and several reloads as well as their personal weapons, the Soviet infantry didn’t get as far as their divisional commanders thought they would before the tracked vehicles got underway. Frostbite quickly hit many men, others got lost in this strange and alien land while others dropped their weapons and set off into the unknown with the aim of finding the enemy and deserting to him.

When the main attack begun, each division committed a large regimental-sized force of infantry vehicles tightly clustered together to advance upon Alta. The 77GMRD’s combat force drove straight for where the Altaelva River Bridge had stood before it had been brought down by well-placed explosives while the 69MRD had its mixed regiment aiming for a crossing point identified as being suitable south of the town among one of the many bends in the Arctic waterway. There were bridging tanks with the attacking forces to allow a crossing to take place because there wasn’t expected to be the time to construct pontoon bridges as well as this water barrier not being so wide.

Those units of the 2nd Marine Division on the eastern side of the Altaelva River were warned of the onrush of concentrated Soviet armour by the Force Recon teams ahead and then reports from their helicopters on scouting missions. At once, they went back into the attack again: it was realised what was going on and such powerful forces couldn’t be allowed to approach and cross the river to get into Alta. All of the tanks were on this eastern side, not in the west, and no matter how strong those advancing forces were in numbers, they needed to be dealt with straight away.

In improvised countermoves, the US Marines made two pronged attacks. AAV-7A1s loaded with riflemen raced to get ahead of the Soviet armoured columns while the tanks and LAV-25s hit the flanks of them as the earliest opportunity rather than waiting for the ‘perfect’ moment to strike. Above them their helicopters started buzzing around those the Cobras and Hueys soon found that the enemy had helicopters in support too. There were airborne duels being them instead of each side using their helicopters to intervene on the ground. Yet the US Marines had their Harriers back in action soon enough and these were carrying cluster munitions designed to be unleashed above armoured formations travelling together. Forward air controllers on the ground had to get ready before these weapons were put to use, less those hit vehicles laden with US Marines rather than the enemy, but this air intervention would come soon enough.

Those dismounted Soviet missile teams who were meant to protect the armoured columns only did so sporadically. They didn’t stop either from being engaged effectively by the M-60s and LAV-25s (some of these mounting twin-launchers for TOW missiles instead of a 25mm cannon). Facing intensive flanking fire, elements of both columns were forced to peel away to deal with such attacks whereas the orders specifically insisted that such a thing not be done to delay the advance upon Alta. As before, when facing the tanks fielded by the US Marines, the Soviet T-55s came off worse than their opponents. They got lucky with some of their own fire, but couldn’t win such engagements.

Meanwhile, up ahead, riflemen from both the 2/4 MARINES and the 1/8 MARINES engaged those armoured columns from the front. Heavier TOW missiles and lighter AT4 anti-armour recoilless rifles (new-built weapons from Sweden) were used by some of the young US Marines these heavy weapons teams they were covered by rifle fire. The MT-LBs laden with infantry were forced to deploy their passengers in case a missile strike took out them out while carrying all of those infantry and the Soviet infantry engaged the Marine Riflemen as their vehicles went forwards with the columns. Artillery fire from both the 2nd Marine Division’s 10th Marine Regiment and its guns back in Alta and the artillery regiments with the 67MRD & 77GMRD came into play now. The US Marines had their 155mm howitzer shells falling among the enemy while the Soviet Sixth Army’s divisions threw 122mm and 152mm shells at the Americans. Both sides had removed their helicopters before the arrival of such inbound shells due to the very real danger of such artillery impacting with helicopters in the air above the battlefields on the ground.

Attacked from the flanks by tanks, engaged up ahead by walls of dismounted US Marines that were positioned ahead of them by their amtracks and then struck at by artillery bursting above them dispersing top-attack anti-armour bomblets, the two columns came to a stop. They had run into too much defensive fire to be able to move onwards no matter what their divisional commanders screamed into the radio for their regimental commanders to do so.

Once those columns came to a halt the US Marines started to withdraw. They were not strong enough to hold the Soviets back in fixed positions and so the amtracks returned from cover positions nearby and Marine Riflemen scrambled aboard. The M-60s kept firing to cover their own retreats now that enough damage had been done especially when the battalion of M-110 203mm howitzers with the 10th Marine Regiment opened fire with its heavy shells smashing into the enemy. Back towards the Altaelva River the attacking US Marines went afterwards, with crossings being made at places unused to get over beforehand with armoured bridge-layers employed: the 2nd Marine Division was worried that there might have been reconnaissance efforts made to determine where they had gone over first.

With their armoured columns halted and the attacking US Marines having pulled away, the Soviet divisions remained alone on the wrong side of the Altaelva River. They had no control over the road network in Alta and weren’t in a position to take on and destroy the Americans around the town. Such a situation with these strong raiding forces in Alta couldn’t carry on if the two divisions were to go down to the Lyngenfjorden and take on the NATO forces there.


For the third time today, the Soviet Sixth Army attacked again. The day was getting late and the sun would soon disappear over the western horizon. The Soviet intention was to finish off the fighting here so that they could race down south to get into attacking positions before it was too late to do so. The 77GMRD drove its remaining units upon Alta with the new plan now being that it would be sacrificed so that any surviving forces from that formation would join the 69MRD in heading towards the Lyngenfjorden position.

To where the Altaelva River Bridge had been downed on its eastern side the Soviets moved forward towards. This time the assault consisted of infantry pushed forward on foot with the tanks and armoured vehicles following slowly behind and providing over-watch for them. There was no opposition to this movements of thousands of cold and demoralised infantrymen from the ground though artillery and Harrier attacks thinned their ranks before they reached their first objective. Assault groups of infantrymen were assembled and small boats brought up as the 77GMRD prepared to go across the river at this location.

And then sixteen-inch shells started to smash into them.

The Wisconsin had returned from her foray northwards and it was her guns that opened fire upon the unprotected infantry. Aboard were many Soviet sailors rescued from the ocean that would have to unloaded and dealt with in Alta, but for the time being the more pressing issue of supporting the US Marines ashore was dealt with. Again and again the guns roared as huge shells, fused for airburst, slammed into where the enemy was. Underneath this relentless torrent of explosions above them which rained death downwards, chaos took hold among the men there. This was too much for many of them to handle and the watched as their officers were either cut down or hid from the falling shrapnel. Order was lost after orders came for the men to still try to get across the river and there was mutiny the spread quickly.

There would be no crossing of the river this evening.


Reporting back to Soviet Sixth Army headquarters, the divisional commander of the 77GMRD expected that he would share the same fate of his previous superior. He had failed in his mission and there was no way that the town ahead was going to fall into Soviet hands today with the men among his forward units in revolt and his field police units having to resort to shooting some of them.

However, the Soviet Major-General was informed that developments to the south meant that for the time being all further attention of the Arctic Front needed to be directed there. The 77GMRD was to stay put where it was and deal with the mutinies of its men ‘as harshly as necessary’. The 69MRD was being sent the same instructions: do nothing and wait.

The immense loss of live suffered appeared to have been for naught.

As to the US Marines, the 2nd Marine Division remained where it was for the rest of the day and into the night. They had won and won big but celebrations would have to come later for they had no idea that the attacking Soviets had given up for the time being.

*​

To the south, the defences of Fortress Norway didn’t face any further attacks after the failed efforts of the Soviet Sixth Army’s left wing to overcome them the day before and instead the NATO and Swedish forces made limited offensive moves against those Soviet forces on both Norwegian and Swedish soil.

General Howlett, who now had Swedish staff officers as liaison to his staff, issued those orders as overall NATO commander for Allied Forces Northern Europe. There had been intelligence pouring in overnight that those Soviet troops who had attacked yesterday out of the Finnish Wedge were in a terrible state. They were still on the sovereign territory of nations which they were at war with but were currently in no fit state to continue combat operations. Weather factors and passive interference from the Finns across the occupied northern parts of their country looked like they would forestall any further Soviet activity for the time being and these were regarded as having such a strong effect upon the ineffectiveness of the Soviet Sixth Army as their combat losses.


The Norwegian 4th Infantry Division had been given an ammunition reinforcement and there had been a shake-up in command from Commander, Northern Norway: a man who wasn’t happy with the previous day’s thrust by enemy armour into Skibotn that British Royal Marines had to deal with and thus ‘save the day’. Elements of the Norwegian 5th Infantry Division moved towards the Skibotn Valley, tanks and especially a mobile anti-tank company. The British 5th Airborne Brigade was now in the field too behind the Norwegians here and ready to take part in combat operations.

The US 10th Light Infantry Division remained in the Malselva Valley though they cautiously advanced forwards to make contact with the Soviets during the night. Those engagements that resulted from this during the darkness were fierce and confused affairs as the US Army infantry made contact with outposts established by the Soviet 71MRD. The Norwegians attached under the Americans command here used the distraction caused by that fighting to head southwards away from Skjold and followed the Malselva River further upstream. To their east were the mountains between the Dividalen Valley which they moved through and Sweden on the other side; the Norwegian 5th Brigade was slowly going to get around the Soviets flank as they traversed the wilderness.

Swedish troops from their 15th Army Division had moved northwards during the night along with many of their interesting Strv-103 tanks, Ikv-91 tank destroyers and regular infantry mounted in tracked Pbv-302 armoured vehicles. The 15th Army Division moved up along the Finnish border towards the ground incursion into their territory while supporting forces available from the 12th Army Division were at the same time concentrating around Kiruna in the rear.


Political discussions had gone on during the night with regard to how to treat Finland. The Swedes took part in these NATO talks though these were ‘officially unofficial’ as those military representatives were from a country that did not yet have a functioning government.

Opinions with regard to Finland from the Norwegians were that the Finns had allowed their country to be used as it was by the Soviets and should be treated as an enemy just like the Soviet Union was. This wasn’t something that was shared by either the Americans, the British or the Swedes who all thought of the Finns as being in an impossible situation. They had intelligence that pointed to the Soviet Army having the equivalent of a field army (the reinforced Soviet Thirtieth Guards Army Corps) in the Karelian Isthmus threatening to invade the highly-populated southern part of Finland while their troops were in the sparsely-populated Lapland and not interfering with Finnish civilians. Finnish military units hadn’t been observed making any hostile moves anywhere near the Norwegian and Swedish borders either.

Norway’s allies didn’t see Finland as an enemy and weren’t prepared to treat the small Scandinavian nation as such.

These discussions had come about with regard to how to conduct military affairs that would involve air attacks against Finnish soil and also possible ground advances into their nation, in particular into the Finnish Wedge. The Swedish military officers didn’t want to do such a thing and would rather have invading Soviet forces ejected from their own and Norwegian sovereign territory with halts being made at the borders. Eager to have the Swedes on side, the Americans and British agreed to this and browbeat the Norwegians into doing so too.

It must be made clear though that this was on a military level up here in Northern Europe and not inter-governmental discussions on the geo-political level.


When dawn came, NATO attacked the unprepared Soviet Sixth Army.

Norwegian armour supported infantry attacks made by their 4th Infantry Division and British units in the Skibotn Valley. They struck at the 37MRD just as that wounded formation was preparing to make limited attacks of their own and this caught the Soviets off-guard. Norwegian Leopard-1s, NM-116s and NM-142s worked alongside Scorpion and Scimitar armoured vehicles from the British Life Guards in tearing through Soviet columns forming up before infantry arrived behind them. There were British Army helicopters in the skies above on attack missions though also inserting British Paras at key points.

The 37MRD collapsed at once. The already spent division couldn’t deal with such an attack and its units were overcome piecemeal especially as overall command-and-control had been knocked out after an SAS raid on the divisional command post. The commander and most of his senior staff were assassinated – for lack of a better term – by these commandos who struck just after the attack at the front had begun. With their heavy tanks lost and so much damage done the day before, the Soviets had no chance of fighting back when armour hit them as their own PT-76 tanks couldn’t compete.

The Norwegians and British were aiming to get to the Finnish border at the southern end of the valley before sunset… and they would get there too.

South of the Litle-Rostavatn lake, the Americans stopped a dawn attack by part of the 71MRD coming westwards in an effort to push away their forward positions by baited those Soviet vehicles and troops straight into minefields laid in the early hours. The Soviet division had been hurt by these the previous day and again they suffered major losses. Without any attached heavy armour force of their own, the US 10th Light Infantry Division wasn’t able to undertake a mobile flank attack against the Soviets deep into their lines like would have been best, but they used their lighter weapons and helicopter support to make sure that the 71MRD wasn’t going anywhere.

Ahead of them and on the Soviets left-hand side, the Americans put up an impassable barrier to impede their movement.

The Norwegians had their 5th Brigade cross over the border into Sweden near the Rostuja Lake and they slowly moved deeper into the now NATO-allied nation in a northeastern direction. After several hours light screening forces of the 71MRD positioned to the south were encountered, by the Norwegians were able to manoeuvre around those and aim for the narrow, frozen valley through which the Soviets had cut across Sweden to enter Norway through. The intention was to cut the 71MRD off from their line of retreat, but the Norwegians over extended themselves cutting across the mountains in this weather. They couldn’t reach that valley with conditions such as they were and were eventually forced to turn back from such an attempt at this wide-ranging flanking manoeuvre.

Across to the east, further inside Sweden, the 71MRD already had its possible line of retreat already cut by the Swedish Army. The 15th Army Division’s 50th Arctic Brigade – reinforced for this operation – moved up along their side of the Muonio River from near Vukkuri on the Finnish side. Strongpoints were established with infantry from the 50th Brigade linking-up with reserve units already in-place while the armour headed for the points right along the very northern reaches of the border where the Soviets had previously crossed over. There were pontoon bridges there guarded by security troops, but these light infantry units couldn’t stop the onrush of Swedish tanks that came at them hard. Those bridges were then soon afterwards destroyed and hundreds of Soviets fell into Swedish captivity.


There was air activity throughout all of this fighting in the war-ravaged region. Both sides used their combat aircraft to intervene on the ground and to fight others in the sky too. However, there were factors that limited air intervention so that it wasn’t as intensive as it previously had been.

The Soviet Seventy-Sixth Air Army had lost much of its combat strength after three days of warfare and there were no addition air reinforcements coming up to northern Scandinavia. The fighting over Germany was of all-importance and took precedence over everything else. The air regiments had lost so many of their fighting strength and thus weren’t able to be everywhere like they had previously been.

As to the land-based NATO aircraft assigned directly to northern Norway before war broke out, those had also taken losses. Similar to the Soviets, NATO needed its aircraft over Germany rather than on this important, but second-rate flank. There had been the arrival of US Navy aircraft in strength to land bases after the carrier Theodore Roosevelt was knocked out, yet those were aircraft still under US Navy command. During the early hours of March 17th they were involved in operations against the Soviet Navy and needed to stand down throughout much of the rest of the day after such intensive air activity.

*​

By the time it got dark again across northern Norway, the Soviets had suffered a series of tactical defeats across the Finmark that amounted to strategic failure to win up here. After the day’s events, there would no longer be any major threat posed from the Soviet Sixth Army deployed as it was far from Soviet territory.

NATO forces hadn’t won the war up here either and to do so would involve pushing the Soviets right out of Norway and the very small portion of Sweden they still occupied. Yet they had stopped the Soviets from winning and that was what was all important at the moment.

[James G]

One Hundred & Eight

The direct assault upon Flesland Airport started in the early hours of the morning, before the sun came up.

The British Army had seen how well its infantry units had performed in the Falklands during night-time assaults and there had been much training conducted in furthering those skills for fighting in darkness since then. However, the Norwegian reservists units who were tasked to assist the Independent Guards Brigade in retaking the airport near Bergen hadn’t been trained to anywhere near such a level and so the attack commenced at four a.m. – more than two hours before the sun would come up – so that the Norwegians would soon be available for support within a decent amount of time.


Conducting a ‘silent attack’, one without immediate air and artillery support to give the game away too early, 2 PARA moved forwards in the darkness. The Paras went past strongpoints identified during earlier reconnaissance efforts and started to engage those positions from the rear. This activity occurred to the immediate north of the Randal area and the fighting was fierce. Paras went hand-to-hand against Soviet Airborne Troops in squad- & platoon-sized fights. Both sides quickly called upon heavy artillery support in addition to the use of mortars and the fighting was very soon no longer silent.

At the 7GAD’s command post, in a bunker just outside the airport grounds, the fighting to the east of them was initially regarded as sporadic fighting between British patrols and the Soviet outposts, but when there came the crash of British and Norwegian guns, it became clear that a major ground attack was underway. At once, doctrine demanded that the division move reinforcements to the eastern side of the perimeter to prepare against those initial attacks succeeding or that fighting being a cover for a separate attack either side of Randal. Yet, there was no way that this could be done. During the night there had come further air attacks from mainland Britain that had reinforced the destruction caused the night before that. The long concrete runaway which the 7GAD was here in southern Norway to protect was no longer operational after it had been continually bombed with conventional and cluster munitions. Improvised ammunition dumps for the 7GAD had been hit and troops bombed in their barracks. Anti-aircraft guns, SAM-launchers and radars had been destroyed all over the place. Artillery and armoured vehicles had been knocked out whilst in situ.

Overrunning much of those troops that they engaged when the Soviets ran out of ammunition, 2 PARA moved afterwards to approach the highway that ran from Bergen to Flesland Airport from behind Randal. There were light armoured vehicles from the Queen’s Own Mercian Yeomanry following them and assisting in places, yet the advance was done on foot with those Ferret and Fox armoured cars providing covering fire for the infantry. These wheeled vehicles were crewed by TA men who weren’t trained enough to operate ahead of the infantry in the darkness against the heavily-armoured vehicles of the 7GAD which might be encountered in an armoured thrust forward. Once that paved road was reached, 2 PARA turned west and started to march upon Sandsli up ahead.

Behind the Paras came the two battalions of Foot Guards and the company of Gurkhas. Though unhappy at such a task, the Coldstream Guards were sent back eastwards to invest the Soviets outflanked from the rear while the Grenadier Guards marched onwards along with those men from the 2/2 Gurkhas. The task was to follow the Paras all the way towards Flesland Airport and either launch a second attack if the first one was halted or to reinforce success if that was met.

Moving ahead once there was light in the skies from their starting lines south of the Randal area, the Norwegian Brigade Bergen – with two of its three infantry battalions tasked – attacked the Soviets who occupied this part of their country. They benefited from air support in the form of a pair of F-16A Falcons flying from Rygge Airbase outside Oslo, though once those strike-fighters had dropped their bombs they had to make the long flight back home. The Norwegians would have liked on-call air support that the British had with their Harriers and Sea Harriers flying from HMS Invincible, but that wasn’t to be.

Both the British and Norwegian forces, advancing slowly as they were on foot, moved closer to Flesland and into Randal as the morning got later. There was a major shortage of ammunition for the Soviet defenders which they overrun and when surrenders were forced that number of men giving up each time got bigger from company groups soon up to a full battalion who gave up fighting just past Sandsli. RAF Harriers had bombed the Soviets when engaged in close-air support, but the tactical situation that the Soviets were in wasn’t that terrible that they would have had to give up if it hadn’t been for the abrupt lack of defensive fire that they could muster. Soviet armoured vehicles were only rarely encountered and instead there was just the smouldering wreckage of many of these to be marched past after they had been hit by air or helicopter strikes: the Lynxs with the Independent Guards Brigade had been very successful with their forward attack missions using TOW missiles.


Brigadier Mundell moved up to Sandsli after the crossroads there were taken and treated himself to a view of the airport a few miles away to the west when he went atop one of the buildings there with a flat roof. His nervous security team didn’t like him standing upright and looking towards Flesland with his binoculars as the brigade’s guns now started to air-burst shells above it and also with the RN’s frigate HMS Avenger offshore bombarding the Soviets with its main gun. Ahead of him, the whole Soviet position here was being overrun with one of the 7GAD’s regiments already being destroyed and the second one not putting up much of a determined fight to hold onto their perimeter defences of the airport itself. A decision was thus taken by him to conduct the coup de main which there was planning for to finish off this fight.

Put to use as assault transports rather than missile-firing attack helicopters for the time being, the Lynxs took aboard the Gurkhas that had been kept back from much of the fighting and airlifted that company forward. Racing ahead fast, the helicopters dodged some defensive fire against them – which was rather half-hearted – and deposited the Gurkhas into the airport terminal area. The Gurkhas went straight into action in seizing the remains of the burnt-out building and securing an area around the flight-ramp for those helicopters when they came back with more troops.

Like it was doing elsewhere, Soviet resistance here at the airport itself quickly collapsed. The defenders were demoralised from the previous fighting the day before along with two days of air attacks that had hurt them very badly indeed. Rumours had been spread among the men that they were cut off here far from any external support and they had been abandoned by higher command. Seeing the fire power being unleashed against them and unable to fight back because aircraft hadn’t brought in enough ammunition was just too much and they started to lay down their arms. Officers who tried to stop such a thing were shot down and men raised their hands in the absence of anything white to wave.

2 PARA’s C Company arrived at Flesland to find the Gurkhas already in control of much of the facilities here. There was still some fighting going on due to not all of the Soviet Airborne Troops wanting to surrender, but the Gurkhas were quickly boasting to the Paras who had come to relieve them that they had won the fight here all by themselves. The Grenadier Guards were meanwhile marching as fast as they could towards the airport and were soon only being slowed down by men wanting to surrender to them.

Like a house of cards falling apart after a gentle breeze, the 7GAD gave up the fight almost everywhere.

At the division’s command post, there was intense gunfire in the bunker when the divisional commander discussed among his staff the possibility of surrender too when the news came that individual units were mutinying and doing just that rather than fight. The Divisional Political Officer had some of his KGB Third Directorate people assist him in trying to execute the headquarters staff on the spot, but such staff officers weren’t going to accept such a thing and fought back. When the Paras got to the bunker, they found it littered with bodies and not an unwounded man present. The senior surviving man, the Colonel who served as the Chief-of-Staff and who had a rifle bullet lodged in his side, agreed to meet with Brigadier Mundell when that British officer was flown forwards to officially surrender the 7GAD despite that unofficially already have occurring.

Led by an aggressive and ‘politically-aware’ battalion commander, one of the 119th Regiment’s parachute battalions didn’t surrender like seemingly everyone else was doing. The battalion effectively escaped the madness at Flesland Airport and intimidated other smaller units into handing over their ammunition if they weren’t prepared to keep on fighting like they were. Towards the fishing port of Hjellestad the battalion withdrew to with the aim of holding onto the little peninsula there and maybe getting some later seaborne assistance. The movement southwards wasn’t fast enough though and caused too much attention to be drawn to it when so many organised groups of armed men were detected by airborne reconnaissance.

RAF Harriers returned from the Invincible and dropped cluster bombs all over the withdrawing Soviet battalion. Casualties were heavy from this air strike and the road along with the retreating paratroopers were following was blocked. Some men kept on marching, often tough veterans of the fighting in Afghanistan, but these were few and far between: the majority of the conscript paratroopers started giving up and they had the numbers on their side to stop interference from the veterans in doing this. By the time elements of the Coldstream Guards arrived in trucks after being diverted from their Randal mission, they found many of their enemy ready and willing to be taken prisoner. Less than a hundred men, including many staff officers who hadn’t experienced any fighting here and who had fears over the fates of families back in the Soviet Union should they surrender, had moved down to Hjellestad: the Coldstream Guards then set off to fight those men and not allow them to get established down beside the sea there.


By midday it was all over.

Norwegian liaison officers with the Independent Guards Brigade had brought their national flag with them and it flew from Flesland Airport despite the fact that British blood had been spilt in taking the facility. Gazelle and Lynx helicopters were now flying from the damaged runway with TA engineers from the 72nd Volunteer Regiment RE working hard to remove unexploded ordnance and survey the field for later repair to allow flight operations by British aircraft. Paras, Gurkhas and the Grenadier Guards started collecting prisoners and there were quite a few of them to be thoroughly dealt with: officers needed to be separated from men (political officers kept apart from both) and everyone searched for hidden weapons. There was an unpleasant find made when a burnt-out hangar was investigated at the northern end of the airport and bound bodies discovered there. The 7GAD’s Chief-of-Staff would state that those were the American and Norwegian military prisoners taken when the airport had been overrun at the beginning of the week: they had been held there but then killed when a falling bomb from one of those 3 ATAF air strikes coming out of Britain had set that hangar alight. The now-dead Divisional Political Officer had ordered that fire-fighting and rescue efforts needed to be directed against other hangars and structures rather than those POWs who would then burn to death.

A later forensic investigation would count one hundred and nineteen bodies there yet there would be dispute over that number afterwards due to many more NATO military personnel known to be present at Flesland when it was initially seized.

Away from that uncomfortable issue, Brigadier Mundell would spend the rest of March 17th collecting his own casualties and sorting out his brigade. Units had been mixed together all over the place due to tactical circumstances and there was much weaponry to collect. He was also wary of a hostile Soviet reaction to their loss of this vital facility and so he had his air defence missilemen – more TA personnel, this time two batteries of the 102nd Air Defence Regiment RA from Ulster – spread out far and wide with their shoulder-mounted Javelins to offer some protection against an air attack.

Flesland was now back in NATO hands, but there was still Sola Airport further south outside Stavanger in Soviet hands. The war was not over yet for the Independent Guards Brigade and the fire support that it had put to use here, in particular the carrier Invincible.





One Hundred & Nine

Soviet aircraft flying from East Germany operating in support of the Naval Infantry fighting on Zealand used thermobaric weapons during the fighting there on March 17th. These ‘vacuum’ type bombs were dropped atop advancing troops from several nations fighting there outside the Danish capital as Copenhagen was defended in part by the multi-national ACE Brigade-Group. In addition to the Danes from their Zealand Division, the Luxembourgish and West German elements of that brigade were struck by these bombs along with the American paratroopers of the 3/325 INF.

Thermobaric weapons, better known in American circles as ‘fuel-air explosives’ (FAE), were criticised by many as being chemical weapons, not conventional munitions. Their use today by the Soviets in bringing to a halt the successful NATO drive to push their Naval Infantry back from Copenhagen was the first occasion when thermobaric bombs were deployed during World War Three. As they hadn’t been used where it was first thought that they would be elsewhere, the Americans ‘advised’ their NATO allies who fielded such weapons not to employ them either. The Soviet Ambassador had made a big deal about mentioning chemical weapons when he had delivered the ‘ultimate ultimatum’ in Washington and the thinking had been that thermobaric weapons were being considered by them as weapons of mass destruction.

The usage against NATO forces along with American servicemen on Zealand of these weapons was limited, but the effects were devastating.


A flight of Su-24 strike-bombers from the Soviet Fifteenth Air Army’s 75th Regiment dropped a total of seven thermobaric bombs across the eastern side of Zealand: two of these bombs fell upon the American paratroopers near Tastrup.

Those attacks came when the weather was perfect for them to take place with clear skies and very little wind. Ignited by a scatter charge soon after being dropped, the bombs dispersed a high quantity of powdered magnesium throughout the sky. The magnesium had already been heated inside the bomb immediately after being dropped and before it was scattered throughout the sky. Mixing with the air, the explosions started going off above the Americans on the ground below.

The Soviets had chosen thermobaric weapons for use here due to the potency along with this being a theatre of combat that was regarded as a sideshow. That potency of the weapons was due to them not being conventional explosives in the form of the bomb having its own oxygen charge as three quarters of the bomb’s yield, but rather relying upon the air to actually catch fire as it provided the fuel for the blasts that followed. There wasn’t just one blast from each bomb; instead there were multiple explosions that only grew in intensity as the surrounding oxygen in the air was sucked inwards to ongoing blasts that kept getting stronger each time.

There were thunderous roars that seemingly came from hell above while on the ground men literally had the air sucked out of their lungs to supply the super-heated fireballs that burnt them to death. Set off at a low altitude, the pressure from the explosions of the thermobaric bombs forced the red-hot fires that were caused deep down into sheltered fighting positions that those men had as well as inside every nook and crevice of the ground and any buildings within the blast range. The energy from the blast wasn’t wasted on destroying the structures in suburban Tastrup itself – though immense damage was done there – but instead upon killing fighting men.

In the path of the multitude of explosions from the two bombs that went off above them, the second coming ten minutes after the first, were the men of the 3/325 INF: the ‘Blue Falcons’ from the 3rd Battalion of the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment out of Vicenza in Italy.

Over five hundred of them were killed in the blasts, the majority of them with the first bomb. Those who survived would later consider themselves unlucky to not have been killed for their external burn injuries and the internal damage done to their mouth, throats and lungs would leave them crippled for the rest of their lives. The 3/325 INF was wholly destroyed by the attack upon them and its war was over.


These air strikes with such potent weapons, which were very effective in this instance, put a stop to the incursions into the already weakened perimeter that the 336th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade had on Zealand. Since yesterday, Danish and NATO forces had been counter-attacking and forcing the Naval Infantry back, but the employment of thermobaric weapons brought that to an end.

The Luxembourgish troops got off lightly – if the loss of one infantry company and more than a hundred men counted as ‘lightly’ – but those additional targeted forces in addition to the Americans took casualties as fierce as the 3/325 INF did. The West Germans had their 272nd Fallschirmjager Battalion as destroyed as the Americans were with several parachute companies wiped out to a man. With the Danes, their Zealand Division took severe losses among their attacking units with the forward momentum of those formations destroyed once the bombs fell from above. There were many losses too among the Naval Infantry, many of whom who despite getting the word at the last minute to keep their heads down, were caught up in these blasts. The Soviets had tried to be as ‘surgical’ as possible in these attacks, but losses among their own men were always going to be expected.

However, the Naval Infantry were in no position to do anything with this advantage gained on the ground. They had been so devastated by previous engagements with NATO forces that they were unable of conducting combat operations at the current time. For now, stalemate returned to Zealand once again.

*​

Across to the west, on the Jutland Peninsula, the stalemate that had been there too near the Danish border with West Germany was broken today. The pair of East German tank divisions that had initially had their fuel links cut were sent supplies to meet their urgent needs the evening before – ahead of expected NATO air attacks overnight – and were instructed to go into action.

With the 7TD on the left and the 9TD operating to the right, the East Germans invaded Denmark proper here and sent their tanks and infantry heading northwards. On the western side of peninsula there was the ferry port of Esbjerg while on the Baltic shore was Fredericia with its port and its connections to the island of Fyn. Afterwards there would be further moves northwards, especially towards Arhus Airbase, but for now the East Germans raced towards these locations on either coast.

Ahead of the East Germans was virtually no opposition at all to them. There were just Home Guard units with light weapons and NATO aircraft operating out of Arhus. Demolitions and physical obstructions would be encountered, but that was it.

Before the end of the day the East Germans would achieve their objectives and they were occupying the southern third of Jutland.


Further southwards, Soviet artillery and rockets crashed into the surrounded American and Danish troops pinned down around Lubeck. There had been harassment operations beforehand, but now the Soviets appeared to be serious in wanting to cause mass casualties among the trapped soldiers there so that they would accept the Soviet offer of terms of surrender.

The center of the city was set alight in what would become a roaring firestorm yet this wasn’t where any NATO troops were in their defensive positions. Instead the deaths that resulted from these fires that quickly burned out of control were among the thousands of West German civilians who hadn’t fled before war came to Lubeck. A lot more artillery fire was concentrated around Stockelsdorf to the north of the city center and into that suburban area the Soviet 3GMRD moved dismounted infantry once they thought that enough damage had been done there to the Americans known to be on the ground.

The men of the US 9th Motorized Infantry Division in this area fought house-to-house to stop the Soviet attempt to apparently drive deep through their lines. The HMMWVs had had their mounted weapons stripped from them and the infantry used the machine guns and missile-launchers to fight back. For more than an hour after the artillery fire had lifted and the Soviets had begun to attack, the Americans held their ground despite losing many men: they weren’t ready to give up.

Eventually the Soviets withdrew back to their own lines… yet they weren’t ready to abandon their efforts to take Lubeck and its make its defenders prisoners. There would be further fighting here at a later stage.

[James G]

One Hundred & Ten

The Soviet Navy’s Oscar-class submarine K-525 had been at sea for five days and had remained below the surface during that entire time. The eight year-old vessel had a crew of one hundred and nine men, nearly half of whom were officers rather than conscript submariners. Morale aboard was rather good despite all the problems that the K-525 was suffered when in dangerous waters like these; those namely being the vessel-wide failures of vital equipment that no amount of hard work could overcome.

The K-525 could fight though and that was why she was at sea.

This evening, the submarine was in the Norwegian Sea northwest of Tromso and in the immediate area where the surface ships of the Northern Fleet had been sunk earlier in the day. Radiological detectors aboard were giving off warnings of intensive radiation down below on the ocean floor where smashed nuclear reactors lay from the Kirov and the Phoenix. The submarine’s captain didn’t know that though because the satellite communications link had been playing up since leaving port. Messages sent via VLF had been patchy and the K-525 hadn’t been able to inform Severomorsk that it was running late for its rendezvous with Admiral Gromov’s Battle Group; the captain had no idea either that there were no ships for him to meet with and the Northern Fleet’s commander was at the bottom of the ocean below him.

Moving slowly and using her passive sensors to search for the Battle Group, the K-525 was waiting for a rendezvous that wasn’t going to happen.


Heading in the same direction too as to where the great naval battle had been fought earlier in the day was Striking Fleet Atlantic. The two remaining carriers and their escorts were heading for seas further to the east, not this now empty patch of water where bodies that had been floating earlier had already been dispersed far and wide across the ocean.

Aircraft from both the Forrestal and the Eisenhower had earlier played the deciding role in that naval engagement and those jets were undergoing maintenance in the hangars of both vessels while the pilots were resting. There were some F-14s in the skies above, out ahead and on the flanks of the combined carrier group, but the majority of these were stood down too as they were expecting night-time combat action as Striking Fleet Atlantic headed further towards the entrance to the Barents Sea. In addition to the fighters and the strike aircraft, other aircraft and many helicopters were operating during these last hours of daylight and would be later this evening too. There were airborne radar aircraft and anti-submarine warfare aircraft. Sub-hunting helicopters were in the skies too as well as transport models delivering freight and sometimes people between ships.

Monday’s losses had been terrible and the US Navy had been cowed by the offensive action undertaken against it, even if that wasn’t something that they would have liked to admit. The United States Navy was meant to be the most powerful in the world with a long and glorious history, yet it had taken fierce losses in men and ships and until today had little to avenge those. The naval-air strikes against the Northern Fleet earlier today had been one thing, but a real settling of scores with the Soviet Navy was coming once Striking Fleet Atlantic got closer to the Barents Sea, waters regarded by the Soviets as their back yard.


To the east of where the K-525 and the American warships where sailing were land-based aircraft flying over the ocean below. Neither was tied to the operations of those Soviet and American military assets below them, yet at the same time they were airborne to support those.

Soviet Naval Aviation had a couple of its surviving Bears (the Tupolev-95RT Bear D radar and electronic reconnaissance version) in these skies with nervous crews who every time they returned home learnt that further aircrews from the units to which they were assigned hadn’t made it back. These aircraft today had observed the naval battle from a distance and been present to guide in Backfire bombers when the time had been right… though that moment hadn’t come and those long-range missile-bombers had stayed on the ground in the Kola Peninsula. The Bears were on station at the moment searching for NATO forces to strike against.

From Keflavik Airbase on Iceland flew US Navy P-3s. Two of the runways there had had emergency repairs conducted upon them so that they were capable of flight operations for these big aircraft which were flying anti-submarine warfare operations. The P-3s were on ‘picket fence’ duty and providing a first line of defence against Soviet submarines moving down into the North Atlantic as well as also tracking submarines heading home with anymore expendable weapons. Their radars and sonars were wide-ranging and they were feeding information to Striking Fleet Atlantic.

Finally, the RAF had an unarmed aircraft of its own above this stretch of water. This was a Nimrod R1, the electronic & signals intelligence version of the aircraft used in greater number by the RAF for maritime patrol duties, and part of a programme that was shrouded in secrecy. Far from its wartime base in southwestern Scotland, the Nimrod – call-sign ‘Juliet One Tango’ today’ – was very busy. It was supporting British and NATO wartime missions from searching for Soviet Long-Range Aviation (DA) strategic bombers who might be out over the water heading for missile strikes against the UK to trying to intercept for later analysis encoded signals from maritime reconnaissance Bears to listening in from a great distance to tactical radio communications on the ground in Scandinavia from invading Soviet forces.

The actors were in-place and the stage was set…

*​

Darkness came by seven in the evening and Striking Fleet had passed by the Soviet submarine below without detecting that vessel as it headed towards an expected showdown with the Soviet Navy.

Aboard the K-525, the sonar operators there had spent several hours in frustration as their systems had been working at a reduced state and left them with little range to work with; the submarine was full of problems and was a maintenance nightmare.

The radar screens aboard those Bear Ds showed only empty seas: they weren’t aware that passive jamming was obstructing their systems. The sonar systems aboard the P-3s – receiving signals from sonobuoys dropped onto the surface – were far from the range of where the K-525 was. Only Juliet One Tango, the Nimrod, found itself with something to work with this evening.

The systems aboard the aircraft detected burst transmissions being sent from Soviet RORSAT satellites, part of the Legenda system, down to the ocean’s surface in an area where the American warships had just been distantly observed passing through. Intelligence from the Americans had previously confirmed that such signals from those nuclear-powered US-A satellites were for the targeting of anti-ship cruise missiles from their submarines and raketonosets.

Juliet One Tango was unable to properly capture the signals being sent at lightning speed down from very high above to what would have to be a submarine – the radar picture that Striking Fleet Atlantic had from its airborne radar aircraft wasn’t being sent to the Nimrod but there was voice communication between the NATO allies – down below. Jamming those communications where data was being shared was also something that couldn’t be done in the short time frame either. However, what Juliet One Tango did have was a location on the surface.

That information was quickly shared.

Hovering near the reported suspected position of the Soviet submarine was a SH-60B Seahawk. The helicopter was flying from the destroyer USS Thorn and distant from its mother-ship and at the end of its patrol. The contact was apparently only a few miles away though and instructions were sent for the Seahawk to activate its APS-124 surface-search radar, use its mounted sonar as well as deploy sonobuoys and to prepare for action. That radar at once detected what the computer said was a communications antenna sticking above the surface before contact was lost with that. Information then started pouring in from the sonobuoys being dropped that there was a large contact nearby too.

Yet, that contact was lost before the torpedoes that the Seahawk was carrying could be readied and dropped. The Soviet submarine – identified as an Oscar – was fast to get away and dive deep. No matter how hard the helicopter crew tried, the submarine couldn’t be found again even when assistance came from another helicopter racing towards the scene from a frigate also operating as part of Striking Fleet Atlantic’s ASW escort screen.


One of those P-3s in the distance charged course and increased speed as it came across the skies from the west hoping to assist the search. Striking Fleet Atlantic had made the request due to the worry over what a Soviet Oscar-class cruise missile could do to its ships with its missile arsenal and the P-3 responded.

It took time for the aircraft to arrive, but when it did the P-3 started working with helicopters and warships in searching over a wide area for the submarine that had just managed to escape. Other ships not actively involved in that submarine hunt were alerted to such a thing and manoeuvred themselves further away as the whole of the combined carrier group took evasive action less supersonic ten-foot long missiles break the surface and start lancing towards them.

Such activity was noticed by the Bear Ds in the instances that they managed to overcome the jamming of their systems that they had in the meantime become aware of was occurring. The radio calls from the inbound P-3, despite being encoded were detected, and so too were a couple of unguarded comments made over ship-to-ship radios. With this somewhat patchy intelligence, a decision was made that there was a high certainty that there was a major NATO naval force operating this far north, maybe even Striking Fleet Atlantic.

The radars carried by the big reconnaissance aircraft were activated – effectively dooming those aircrews aboard the Bear Ds – and information poured in when the radar waves burnt through American jamming.

Like the NATO forces, Soviet Naval Aviation shared information.


Sitting on strip-alert at their distant airbases in the Kola Peninsula was the Northern Fleet’s Backfire force. There had been a few losses taken during the past few days, but the five regiments still had the vast majority of their strength. Targeting date for the raketonosets was still arriving at Northern Fleet headquarters in Severomorsk ready for analysis – it would be hours old by the time the Backfires got into position – but the aircraft were very quickly lifting off.

From home-bases and satellite fields, some of the latter now far westwards near the parts of Norway and Finland under Soviet occupation (there were plans to move the Backfires forward soon across those borders), the raketonosets started to get airborne all with two massive cruise missiles under their wings.

Those raketonosets had so far had an ‘interesting’ war where it was thought by many that they had yet to be put to the full use that they should have been. American and British carrier groups had been successfully attacked by them and the French had been targeted, though in that instance the attack had failed. No other major NATO naval task forces had been struck at by these aircraft though, especially the flotillas of amphibious assault ships that were suspected to be in the Vestfjorden and which intelligence now said might have deposited US Marines into the Altafjorden. As to NATO convoys out in the open ocean travelling between North America and Western Europe, the Backfires had managed an attack against only one of those.

Much of the war for these expensive missile-bombers with so much promise had been spent sitting on the ground as they had done all day today waiting for the opportunity came for them to act. They relied on targeting data from external sources, but those aircraft providing that vital assistance were often lost before the raketonosets could get into strike positions.

Again, that would happen as the massed Backfires flew against Striking Fleet Atlantic this evening.


Meanwhile, the hunt for the Oscar continued. The search area kept expanding and more assets were deployed searching for it while Striking Fleet Atlantic continued on eastwards expecting that its fighters would tonight meet with those Backfires – how correct they were with that – after rounding the North Cape and when approaching the Barents Sea.

The contact with satellite that the submarine had made caused the worry that brought about this action because it was known that there was a Soviet RORSAT satellite above the Norwegian Sea tonight. That US-A model was being tracked by NORAD with data being fed to the US Navy and the only thing that could be done was attempts to direct jamming upwards towards it… with unknown effects. The US Navy wanted the damn thing shot down by the USAF and their ASAT missile programme – not an easy task at all – but Presidential orders were for Soviet satellites to be left alone as part of the wartime policy of the non-use of nuclear and chemical weapons as well as the ban on attacking single-use (not dual-use) nuclear-capable weapons systems such as strategic ballistic missile submarines that might be encountered at sea.

That P-3 from Iceland was soon to be joined by a Norwegian P-3 coming up from Bardufoss, but still the Oscar was undetected and presumably lurking ready to attack when an opportunity came.


Juliet One Tango was responsible for the hunt starting for that submarine and was also the platform that gave the Americans warning of the Backfires.

Just as the Bear Ds had picked up radio chatter with Striking Fleet Atlantic moving around, the Nimrod was able to detect signals being sent from radios previously identified as having the characteristics of those used by naval reconnaissance Bears broadcasting encoded messages in burst transmissions eastwards towards receivers known to be in the Kola Peninsula and used by Soviet Naval Aviation. Intelligence from aborted raketonosets missions was being put to use here in defeating further attempts at these strikes while there was also information sent from the RAF aircraft as to where those Soviet aircraft were.

F-14 Tomcats flashed across the sky on afterburner with their wings swept backwards to intercept those Bear Ds. One of them was soon shot down by an AIM-54 air-to-air missile fired at long range, yet the other big aircraft managed to detect such an inbound attack in time. The radar was shut down and the Tu-95 dove towards clouds below full of rainstorms. It wouldn’t be a pleasant ride for the aircrew, but for now they had managed to get away.

Despite listening intently for further distant communications, Juliet One Tango wasn’t able to tell the Americans whether this action had caused the Soviets to abort their mission. The moment that those reconnaissance aircraft had activated their radars those F-14s had been ready to pounce and would have done so soon enough anyway before the Nimrod was able to give further assistance in that. Therefore Striking Fleet Atlantic had to assume that only two of God knows how many aircraft shadowing them had exposed themselves this early and were written off by Soviet Naval Aviation so as to get the inbound Backfires heading for the correct general area. Therefore, there must be further Bear Ds flying around using passive detection systems and waiting for the right moment – when the raketonosets were close enough – to guide those missiles that were being carried by the bombers.

The Americans started increasing the radar output from their E-2 aircraft to find those aircraft.


But then the K-525 opened fire…

*​

The data transfer from the RORSAT had been interrupted by electronic interference of an unknown character and the captain of the K-525 hadn’t been able to gain all the necessary intelligence that it needed to conduct its mission. Two aircraft carriers had been detected along with a strong escort force though and aircraft carriers were priority targets for the Soviet Navy. The mission orders still stood for K-525: attack such forces at the earliest available opportunity.

The submarine was operating in an extremely hostile environment though with intensive anti-submarine warfare assets being clearly deployed against it with the intention to kill. In addition to that there was that electronic jamming activity present. Combining all of these external factors with a submarine in the bad condition that the K-525 was in, this was not a good combination for a successful mission.

Yet the K-525 had to try.

The radar antenna mounting the MRK-55 system was raised out of the water from its position above the conning tower. The surface targeting search-and-track radar went active at once and information was quickly fed to the missile targeting team aboard the K-525. Such an action had the immediate effect of broadcasting the position and intentions of the submarine to enemies near and far, but the information on the surface picture was urgently needed.

The captain of the K-525 found that he was positioned sixty-three miles away from the centre of that NATO carrier force – thought to be American and composed solely of US Navy warships – and behind it to the southwest. Jamming was at once being directed towards his radar but he was still able to see that there were fifteen plus contacts in range and the radar’s identification computer was classifying a pair of them as those aircraft carriers spotted from the RORSAT.

Urgent last-minute checks were made of the missiles sitting in the launch tubes positioned outside the inner hull (the Oscar-class were double hulled vessels) and there was a further missile which wouldn’t work. Two of the P-700 Granit missiles hadn’t been any good since the first tests were run earlier in the day and now there was a third. Yet the other twenty-one were good to go.

Hovering just below the surface and now with its surface-search radar antenna lowered, the K-525 violently shuddered every time a SS-N-19 Shipwreck missile was blasted out of the launch tube that it was in. Those missiles burst through the surface fractions of a second later and raced away in an orgy of noise, light and rocket smoke.

Firing was quickly completed and then the K-525 dove backdown towards the deep waters below confident that NATO forces would at once be gunning to retaliate.


Quicker than the Soviet Navy thought they could be, the US Navy was striking back. That P-3 aircraft that had spent a while now assisting in Striking Fleet Atlantic’s own ASW efforts was witness to the missile launch.

Both the pilot and co-pilot, long-experienced men with hundreds of hours between them flying P-3 aircraft on patrol and training missions but now in a wartime environment, physically watched the eruption of light on the surface below them in the gathering darkness of the evening and would afterwards each swear that they saw the missiles blasting away. Warnings were shouted to the tactical operations crew in the rear and the retort came that they were witnessing such a thing on their radar screens and were already preparing to act.

Two Mk.46 torpedoes fell away from the P-3 as it dived towards where the submarine had just disappeared from and when those weapons hit the water they went active with their own mounted sonars rapidly detecting the target which they had been launched against. Speeding up to full speed, they chased after and then struck the K-525 with a vengeance.

Both impacts occurred in the stern area of the submarine with one piercing the pressure hull near the engine room and exploding upon contact with the inner hull. Seconds later the following Mk.46 blew off the very rear of the K-525 in an action that tore off the already mangled propellers and penetrated the pressure hull but not the inner hull. The destruction from the first impact would have been enough to destroy the diving submarines as two compartments were flooded within an instant though the second strike upon the K-525 made sure that there was now no chance of ever gaining propulsion or control of the submarine. It was going to keep lancing downwards towards the ocean floor far, far below as internal bulkheads collapsed and more compartments were flooded.

If only those torpedoes had arrived a few minutes before…


Warning of the inbound missiles came from the P-3 after other sensors had already detected the launches. One of the carrier-borne S-3B Viking ASW aircraft saw the flashes on the horizon of those missiles visually before its crew detected them on radar climbing away from the surface and upwards to where their own fitted radars would activate. Electronic detection equipment aboard the Americans warships were quick to pick up those radar waves and the missiles were classified as Shipwreck’s as they attained the altitude to sweep the surface and get final confirmation of the information that had been fed into their computers. Those missiles were then tracked as they rapidly increased speed up past Mach 2.

SAMs started erupting from firing systems all across the flotilla of warships that was Striking Fleet Atlantic. There were calls of ‘inbound Vampires’ from air defence officers and automated systems started firing intercept missiles while anti-aircraft guns were readied for close-in engagements. Specialist electronic systems were turned on so that jamming could be directed against those missiles (and not interfere with US Navy systems while doing so) and chaff canisters were readied for launch into the sky to create ghost targets for those missiles to try to engage.

Everything happened very fast. The Shipwrecks were travelling at extremely high speed and so too were the missiles out to engage them.

The AEGIS missile-cruisers Ticonderoga and Leyte Gulf had been replenished after firing their full arsenals of RIM-66s against those Kitchen missiles from the Backfires on the war’s first day. These were the main air defence ships for Striking Fleet Atlantic and whose missile-intercept systems were ready to be put to use twenty-four hours a day to deal with unexpected missile attacks such as this. Both warships started firing at once from different positions hoping to engage the inbound missiles which intelligence pointing to having sophisticated evasion capabilities: it was thought best to use two firing vessels to overcome such ‘ducking-and-diving’. At the same time, count was kept on the available number of SAMs because air action was expected later after these inbound missiles were dealt with.

As the war games said would occur, the number of inbound missiles dropped rapidly when faced with effective countermeasures. The Shipwrecks had been fired from what was regarded as medium-range, not close-range, and Striking Fleet Atlantic was on permanent watch for such an attack. There were twenty-one missiles at first before that number dropped down to fifteen and then to ten. Anti-missile guns were firing by this point and those were Vulcan/Phalanx systems with six-barrels firing 20mm high-explosive shells from the two aircraft carriers.

The Soviet missiles were all only interested in the Forrestal and the Eisenhower. They paid no attention to other vessels and weren’t at all distracted by jamming efforts directed against them nor the waves of chaff in the air just above the surface that depicted images that radars mounted upon other missiles would mistake for more ‘juicer’ targets. There were nine missiles remaining, then eight, then seven, then six, then five, then…


Four missiles reached three vessels.

The thirty year-old destroyer USS Farragut had steamed right into the path of those missiles at the very last minute in not a kamikaze move but rather to engage them very close-in with its five-inch main gun. The destroyer had been making haphazard moves and one of the Shipwrecks hit the Farragut while trying to avoid it with impact taking place into the destroyer’s superstructure rather than into the side of the Eisenhower eighty yards behind. There was a fantastic explosion when the sixteen hundred pound warhead went off and the Farragut wouldn’t survive such an impact.

Two missiles hit the Forrestal with those Shipwrecks impacting along the starboard side of the aircraft carrier and then tearing through the steel there before their warheads (and remaining fuel) detonated within the hangars below the flight deck when striking the explosion & fire proof bulkheads between the hangars themselves. These blasts, milliseconds apart, were huge and killed hundreds of men inside the hangars and throughout the ship while destroying more than twenty aircraft. Thick black smoke was soon pouring from holes torn in multiple places on the carrier’s exterior and also up through holes made in the flight deck too. The fires that produced that smoke spread at lightning speed and the damage control parties aboard the Forrestal – their numbers thinned by deaths already incurred – had a hell of a job on their hands to try to save their ship.

For many long years afterwards, sailors who weren’t even old enough to have been in the US Navy during World War Three would tell sea stories of how they were aboard the Dwight D. Eisenhower when the carrier was struck by what afterwards was deemed the “phantom Shipwreck”. Everyone always seemed to be want to be part of the story that concerned that immense missile that went through the open port side of one of the Eisenhower’s hangar, didn’t hit anything AT ALL and then flashed out of the open starboard side of the same hangar. No one would believe this story; the angles were wrong, they would say, for that to happen and it was just impossible that such a thing could have happened with hangars being full of aircraft, helicopters and equipment. It just wouldn’t be a story that would be believed, yet everyone wanted to be a part of it nonetheless. The official US Navy report stated that this did in fact happen and that eleven sailors lost their lives: men who were literally blown to pieces by physical impact, burnt to death by the heat given off by the missile’s rocket engine or blown out to sea.

And the Eisenhower was undamaged.

*​

Flying fast across the skies above Lapland and then Finmark, the Backfires went towards their distant targets at sea in a direct line. There was a lone Bear D near to those American ships that had yet to be detected by the enemy and was up-linking information to the raid commander of the inbound raketonosets, especially since the Americans had gone to action in their missile defence efforts.

The aircrews were confident with Kitchen missiles hanging beneath their aircraft and in what was regarded as a friendly air environment. When they fired those, they expected that as usual any enemy air activity would be directed against them rather than their own aircraft that would be retreating afterwards. For now they just had to get to their firing position off the coast.


Aircraft had been catapulted off the decks of the Forrestal and Eisenhower when the carriers came under attack in a hurry; every one of them not aboard was one that wasn’t a potential fire or explosion hazard. Some of those aircraft had gone into the skies without weapons and not that much fuel, but the emergency had been great and that was the thing to do when faced with a massed missile attack.

From the Forrestal had come an A-7E Corsair with VA-105, an attack squadron that had earlier today been involved in the successful air strikes against the Northern Fleet’s surface ships. That aircraft was flown by the squadron commander and got airborne with a full load for its 20mm cannon, two Shrike anti-radar missiles and a pair of Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. He flew his attack-fighter away from the Forrestal just before it was struck and headed northwards towards a stand-by area as directed by one of the E-2s. There were other aircraft in the sky, all being directed away from the combined carrier group for the time being, but the A-7E was surrounded for a few moments by empty skies. The navigation radar was turned on because the pilot was concerned about a mid-air collision and then a lone aircraft was picked up all of a sudden away a little to the northeast. The radar’s identification computer declared that the aircraft eleven miles away and now being swept by energised radar waves was a Tupolev-95RT: a certain unfriendly.

Without hesitation, the pilot fired both of his Sidewinders and then got on his radio calling out the contact. There would be no need for that support though because the Bear D was hit by both missiles in the fuselage and the starboard wing: pieces of the aircraft would fall from the sky towards the ocean below.


Juliet One Tango took part in today’s naval activity for the third time when the antenna protruding from the jet-powered RAF aircraft intercepted coded communications that were broadcast from that Soviet aircraft just before it was blown apart that were directed to the southeast. Very quickly after this came a single radio call in return directed from the area where the Bear D had been broadcasting to in what appeared to be an attempt to establish contact.

Nothing being able to know what was being said was frustrating for the RAF communications intelligence staffers aboard the aircraft yet they knew that all information that they collated was going to be put to use at a later date after RAF Intelligence and the DIS had looked into it. What they were gathering from directional-specific radio broadcasts was important now though because it was interpreted as being the exact same type of communications transmitted between naval reconnaissance aircraft and raketonosets beforehand when they had attacked. The frequencies were the same and the encoding was identical too.

There were Backfires in the sky!


The Forrestal was alight with fires that would eventually be brought under control, but for now the F-14s from the crowded Eisenhower along with some of those already aloft were available to go after the Backfires that were going to try to finish off what K-525 had started. The RAF had given the F-14s something to work with and EA-6Bs and then E-2s trailed those interceptors as they shot across the sky heading inland towards Finmark.

The F-14s weren’t in proper squadron formation and not many of those were carrying their full weapons loads. Pilots and radar intercept officers (RIOs) were worried over whether the safety locks had been removed from some of the Phoenix and Sidewinder missiles in the haste to get airborne while others looked at fuel tank readings with a little concern even though other aircraft from Striking Fleet Atlantic were meant to eventually meet them to transfer fuel, on the return journey though. Nonetheless, the word was that there were Backfires out here in these skies above the northern reaches of Scandinavia and it had been Backfires that had destroyed the Theodore Roosevelt the other day, which was an aircraft carrier from which some of these US Navy aviators had previously flown from and aboard which friends had been killed.

When those F-14s were past Tromso and approaching the Lyngenfjorden, the E-2s started detecting multiple fast-moving aircraft in the eastern skies. There were more than a hundred aircraft showing up on their radar screens in regimental groupings… and that number increased too fast enough to give the US Navy a radar picture that – if intelligence was correct – represented the majority of the Backfire force available to the Soviet Northern Fleet. The US Navy aviators started to think if this was going to be June 1944 all over again and an Arctic version of the Great Marinas Turkey Shoot.

F-14s were assigned targets and then the missile firing began. AIM-54s were to be used at long-range when there was the possibility of using Sidewinders at visual range, yet there were more Backfires than F-14s airborne. The US Navy feared that should they get their interceptors to ‘mix it up’ with those raketonosets, the F-14s would end up chasing the Tu-22Ms all over the place with the Soviets retreating back eastwards. There may be hostile jamming brought into play should the F-14s wait or the Soviets might turn back. Moreover, to pull the F-14s too far away from the wounded Striking Fleet Atlantic wasn’t a good idea.

Phoenix missiles filled the skies and lanced eastwards.


By the time it was all over, forty-three Backfires had been downed and another nine would limp home. The raketonosets force hadn’t been destroyed, but the losses were quite severe and they had got nowhere near Striking Fleet Atlantic.

Attention afterwards turned to the efforts by the US Navy to save the Forrestal from those fires lit aboard.

[James G]

One Hundred & Eleven

NATO conducted long-range reconnaissance deep inside Warsaw Pact territory hand-in-hand with their strategic bombing efforts. Knowing what the Soviet-led forces were doing far from the frontlines, what they were getting ready to do later and also how they were reacting to what was being done to them was of vital importance. Just as important to warfare as logistics is – with tactics and weapons being of lesser value in the great scheme of things – so is accurate intelligence gained by reconnaissance. Since the first night of the war, as strike aircraft had flown eastwards, so too had aircraft on reconnaissance missions.

The 2 ATAF and the 4 ATAF had been undertaking tactical reconnaissance missions since the war started with aircraft overflying the battlefield as well as making incursions into East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Strike aircraft as well as escorting electronic warfare assets were sent over the borderlines to bomb artillery and air defence assets as well as supply forces and they were guided by missions flown earlier by tactical aircraft tasked for reconnaissance or dedicated photo-reconnaissance aircraft. Post-strike reconnaissance was often flown too with the aim to make sure what had been hit had been hit as well as to observe the Warsaw Pact reactions to such attacks.

Away from these tactical missions were those of a strategic nature. The 3 ATAF in Britain controlled aircraft tasked for deep penetrations in support of NATO missions to diminish the combat power of the enemy on the ground and in the air. Those F-111s and Tornados that went far across East Germany and Czechoslovakia as well as into western Poland were sent against targets pinpointed pre-war but also by reconnaissance missions in the past few days. The reconnaissance aircraft sent to scout where the laser- & television-guided bombs would fall to knock down those bridges, hit those rail marshalling yards and rip apart airfields had to get through multiple layered defences in what had been regarded pre-war as the densest and deadliest air defence system in the world. Time and time again the reconnaissance aircraft had done just that, though there had been casualties inflicted of course.

Away from the infiltration missions past all of those radars, anti-aircraft guns, SAMs and interceptors there were other reconnaissance aircraft who didn’t go anywhere near the frontlines and especially not deep inside Warsaw Pact territory. These 3 ATAF aircraft were still on reconnaissance missions, yet they operated in a stand-off role by remaining far away from danger and using electronic detection systems rather the cameras, radars and pilot reports to aid NATO’s war efforts. These stand-off aircraft were much larger than those sent eastwards and with larger crews as well as having zero self-defensive capabilities, yet their mission was different.


On the fourth night of the war, straight after darkness started to fall, NATO aircraft started their strategic reconnaissance missions just as they had done through the previous three nights. In daylight there was much enemy air activity and such things were very dangerous. However, the Warsaw Pact had unofficial ceded control of the night-time skies over Europe to NATO aircraft by relying in the main on ground-based defences rather than their fighters. There were still interceptors in the skies over certain points – namely PVO aircraft now forward-based in the Northern Tier countries – but the defence of Eastern Europe was now being heavily-borne by SAMs. Far too many Warsaw Pact aircraft had been lost flying at night against far more superior NATO aircraft in trying to challenge 3 ATAF aircraft and those combat aircraft had been missed during the daylight hours when needed to support ground operations and to also conduct long-range strike missions heading westwards.

TR-1A high-altitude aircraft came out of RAF Fairford – an airbase now much emptier than it had been a few days before after the B-52s based here had been lost in action – and headed eastwards. They flew out over the North Sea and across Jutland before looping down through the Baltic into East Germany and Poland. Up at an altitude of seventy thousand feet, those single-aircraft flights started their reconnaissance runs using cameras and electronic listening pods to gather immense amounts of data. Radars on the ground tried to track them to guide SAMs and maybe even interceptors at them, but with the ongoing war already haven taken its took on Soviet air defences over Eastern Europe there came no direct challenge to them tonight. The 95th Reconnaissance Squadron had started the war with thirteen of these aircraft and two had been lost so far: one to an accident on final approach to Fairford on the first night of the war and a second after being hit by a Soviet SAM last night. Tonight though, the seven of the eleven aircraft remaining on strength that went out would all later return to Britain and bring with them a goldmine of useful intelligence gathered.

Out ahead of the strike-bombers that would come later, the 3 ATAF sent its other penetration reconnaissance aircraft. F-111s armed with just self-defence air-to-air missiles and carrying reconnaissance equipment where bombs would normally be flew lone, high-speed flights into East Germany at low-level. There were unarmed EF-111A Ravens bristling with further electronic warfare equipment too that undertook similar missions. These Aardvark’s and “Spark Vark’s” would be back later flying in strike missions, though with different pilots. SAMs were lofted against them on their reconnaissance missions and anti-aircraft guns filled the sky with high-explosive shells; there were some losses.

Flying over friendly territory were those stand-off reconnaissance aircraft. The Americans had their RC-135V Rivet Joint in the skies while the RAF joined them with one of their (very few) Nimrod R1s. These aircraft were full of technicians aboard operating all of the capable systems aboard and feeding that information back to ground stations for immediate work to begin upon analysis.

Strike aircraft soon started going forward and although their numbers had been thinned out, there were still many of those F-111s and Tornados coming out of their British bases and on strategic attack missions. Yet, tonight, there would be few ‘spectaculars’ for these aircraft to achieve. The big bridges that had on previous night’s been downed in epic explosions were all gone now while no more big storage sites for fuel and ammunition – which too liked to go BOOM – were all destroyed. There were just conventional targets instead: airfields, transport links, mobile rocket artillery batteries and moveable command posts. There was still a lack of smart bombs available yet a big shipment had arrived at ports in southern Wales earlier in the evening in a fast convoy coming from the United States and those would be used tomorrow night instead.

The F-117 stealth attack-bombers were airborne later during the night. The ‘Bandits’ flew out of their bases on Anglesey into Eastern Europe though also with one mission going up to Scandinavia tonight too. The black jets flew single-ship missions without using their radars or fitted jamming systems and relied instead on their ability to hide from detection due to their angular shapes and radar-absorbing paint. Political interference with what the 3 ATAF had wanted to do had brought about five of the missions that the 4450th Tactical Group flew tonight. One aircraft each went towards East Berlin, Warsaw and Prague where GBU-10 laser-guided bombs (the F-117s were getting their weaponry via special flights of heavy C-5 strategic transports direct from Dover AFB in Delaware in a cumbersome logistics effort) where dropped on ‘regime targets’ in those three cities that were the capitals of the Northern Tier countries. Another Bandit flew up to Helsinki and through placid Finnish air defences to deliver two of those bombs into the Soviet Embassy building there, a centre of Soviet intimidation efforts inside Finland’s capital; there would be later repercussions for this attack that many would regard as a step too far. The fifth Bandit flew all the way to the port of Baltiysk in the Kaliningrad region on the Soviet’s Baltic shoreline and used unguided bombs rather than laser-guided weapons to strike at the naval base there; those bombs were fuel-air explosive weapons and this attack was a direct retaliatory strike for the thermobaric weapons used earlier in the day against US troops in Denmark. The aircraft was downed by a barrage of S-300P (NATO: SA-10 Grumble) SAMs operated by the PVO afterwards in the first combat loss of an F-117 while, again, this air strike would have repercussions.

Other F-117s were sent against command-and-control facilities inside East Germany. There had been intelligence gathered on very important targets to be struck and finally one of the ‘Kill Kulikov’ missions paid off after so many previous failures. The commander-in-chief of all Warsaw Pact operational forces in Europe was eliminated in a surgical strike on his command bunker near Leipzig along with many of his senior staff. Not that far away, near Erfurt, Colonel-General Snetkov was also killed when his mobile command post was attacked when on the move; the Bandit that dropped cluster munitions above the column of armoured personnel carriers and trucks loaded with command staff from the Second Western Front had been guided towards him by intelligence gained in real-time from one of those Rivet Joints far to the west.


The intelligence that the ongoing aerial reconnaissance efforts collected was important in many ways. All of it was vital, small and large in tactical and strategic senses… especially when some of what was quickly interrupted showed that five of the six Soviet field armies of the Belorussian and Carpathian Fronts – Category B units that formed the third assault echelon for RED BEAR – were inside East Germany and approaching the Inter-German Border; the sixth of those field armies was in Bohemia and wasn’t spotted. The deep strikes against road and rail bridges over river barriers to the east had been meant to seriously delay the arrival of those forces, but there were twenty fresh Soviet divisions now moving towards the frontlines with the possibility that they could see action by dawn.

NATO Intelligence had failed to anticipate the arrival of those forces and the time was very late now to be prepared for their imminent introduction to combat.

The West was in trouble.





One Hundred & Twelve

Four days of warfare across southwestern Africa took their tool upon the Cuban forces based in Angola as they tried to defend that country as well as foolishly take the war back to the South Africans in their own country. The Cuban Army and Air Force took an absolute beating by their opponents and their combat assets were destroyed en mass. Forward-deployed South African forces threw everything they had at the Cubans knowing that while they had reinforcements on their way, those from Cuba were cut off from the outside world with dwindling supplies, collapsing morale and a truly terrible strategic situation to be in.

Angolan troops started to desert in droves, but the Cubans fought onwards against the invading South Africans and also UNITA. Yet, Cuito Cuanavale and then Humbe-Xangongo fell into enemy hands and with these communications centres taken, plus a landing by South African naval forces at Namibe on the coast, the southern part of Angola was falling. Cuban commandoes found themselves engaged by the Botswana Defence Force when attempting to strike back at South Africa on its own soil while its aircraft didn’t have the range to go as far as its special forces had tried to. There was armed conflict on the streets of Luanda when a coup d’état failed to topple the regime of President Dos Santos and then soldiers from both sides fought each other in the city. Military warehouses across the country, fast being emptied by the Cuban and Angolans, then saw explosions and arson from South African commandoes striking on a strategic level deep into their opponent’s rear.

Communications links with the outside world, Cuba in particular, had been cut off by American action. There was no contact with the Castro Brothers back in Havana for their armed forces here in Angola while Dos Santos – troubled by the hostile attempt by members of his own government to topple him – was affected by this too because Cuba had led his nation into a world war which he had followed them into.

Much of the South African 7th Infantry Division – from Namibia – had invaded Angola along with parts of the 44th Parachute Brigade. The rest of both of those formations were moving through Namibia towards the fighting while the 8th Armoured Division was on its way too. AMSCOR sites inside South Africa were suddenly on twenty-four hour shifts pumping out weaponry, which while such armaments would take time to be important, showed the commitment that South Africa had to the fight. Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe were all sitting the war out with the ANC down in South Africa wasn’t able to do anything.

South Africa was going to win and Angola – along with the Cuban forces there – didn’t have very long left.

*​

Across the Pacific, those Soviet attacks that had been so wide-ranging for the war’s first two days came to almost a complete stop. Missiles were no longer slamming into military targets on land or at sea across the huge ocean. Hawaii, the Philippines and Singapore were left alone while the war became much more localised in the northern & northwestern Pacific, up near the Soviet Far East and the Sea of Japan. Soviet military forces were still engaged south of the extreme eastern portions of their national territory in attacking military bases and deployed forces in Japan and South Korea. The Sea of Japan was a war zone and so were the skies over northern parts of Japan. From the Kurile Islands northwards all the way up to the Bering Strait, further fighting took place.

Over this extensive region – though no where near as big as the whole Pacific Ocean – World War Three continued. The Soviets were on the defensive now, no longer were they attacking everywhere at once like they first had been. Even their offensive air missions into Japan and South Korea took on a defensive character as they only sought to hit air and naval bases in those countries from where attacks came towards the Soviet Union; there were no longer any attacks being made into Alaska either.

The Americans and their allies were striking back and those attacks of theirs were taking the war back to the Soviets.

B-52Gs flying from Guam armed with Harpoon anti-ship missiles (twenty could be carried on each bomber) had joined with the aircraft carrier Constellation’s battle group and Japanese naval forces into turning the Sea of Japan into a grave for much of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. Vladivostok itself had been attacked by naval aircraft to strike at the few Soviet warships that hadn’t left that port and come out to be sunk. Naval Aviation Badgers and Blinders had joined aircraft from the Soviet Air Force’s First Air Army in following those warships to the bottom of the ocean. The carrier Midway had remained in the eastern side of the Kurile Islands, but the battleship Missouri had passed through that island chain and entered the Sea of Okhotsk to bombard Sakhalin Island with her guns and missiles. Covered by Japanese fighters behind them, USAF aircraft had assisted those of the US Navy in attacking Soviet airbases and naval bases.

The Nimitz and the Carl Vinson had crossed from the Bering Sea and commenced attacks upon the Soviet mainland through the Kamchatka Peninsula. Soviet resistance had been fierce at first, but once that was overcome the whole Soviet military position up here was shown to be as brittle as it was around Vladivostok. The Soviet Far East was very far from European Russia and there were no reinforcements flowing eastwards to them to replace missile stocks for aircraft and SAMs and the aviation fuel being expended. Kamchatka itself was especially neglected by the few internal Soviet supply missions eastwards as it might as well have been an island due to the local geography forcing everything to reach the military bases on the peninsula by sea or air. There were ‘no-go’ zones for attacking US Navy forces here, as well as elsewhere, due to known strategic nuclear facilities and those were the only factors that hampered the soon-to-be uncontested American control of the air and the seas too.

The air and naval forces under Soviet command were being decimated by the Americans, but their ground forces remained untouched. There were seven field armies in the Far Eastern & Trans-Baikal Military Districts as well as Mongolia. These armies were positioned to defend the Soviet Far East against China in addition to the remote possibility that the Americans would try to make an amphibious landing somewhere too. During the built-up to RED BEAR, concentrated as it was in the West, it was thought that the Americans would eventually attack the Soviet Far East but those attacks were not thought to have an ultimate decisive effect. As long as the Soviets had their hundreds of thousands of troops here on the ground, everything else was of secondary importance.

However those air and naval attacks were devastating. The Soviets had achieved the destruction of the carrier Ranger on the war’s first day and some notable successes against US Navy and Japanese warships elsewhere, but that was the limit of their success. Attacking aircraft over Soviet shores were shot down though those losses weren’t crippling for the Americans either. By losing the air and naval war as they were, the positive side of keeping such a large ground force available was negated by this.

Something would have to be done to reverse this losing situation that the Soviets were in, but the question there was ‘what?’.


The new commander of Pacific Command – the Hawaii-based overall headquarters for all American and Allied forces in the Pacific region – was the US Navy officer Admiral Jeremiah. He had led Sixth Fleet naval operations as part of Operation EL DORADO CANYON two years ago and was commander of the US Pacific Fleet when the war begun. After Admiral Hays had been relieved of duty on Presidential orders for failing to prepare American forces effectively for the scale of the opening Soviet attacks (something that would be controversial post-war), Admiral Jeremiah jumped over several other men to take overall command.

The responsibilities for Pacific Command were all Allied military forces in the region, which included not just American units but Japanese, South Korean, Canadian, British, Australian, Filipino and Singaporean military assets too. There were British Gurkhas on Okinawa, Australian F-111 strike-bombers across Honshu and Canadian troops in Alaska all to be led by Admiral Jeremiah.

Away from control over these varied military assets, Admiral Jeremiah had to deal with the geopolitical implications of being in his command position. The Japanese in particular were sensitive to say the least at having their nation pay host to aircraft attacking the Soviet mainland while the Filipinos were screaming for American troops to deploy to defend their nation against their fears of an invasion coming from… anyone from the Soviets to China to Indonesia. There was also pressures coming from back home where the President’s advisers had apparently told him that the whole range of Soviet military action in the Pacific had been one big Maskirovka.

The Soviets regarded the Pacific as being of utmost importance to the United States and thus by attacking everywhere as they did there they assured that no military forces would be withdrawn from the region and even, with hope, reinforcements might be drawn in instead of sent to Europe and the North Atlantic. Such a concept was one that Admiral Jeremiah agreed with, yet as soon as he took command in Hawaii he was faced with the possibility of having his assigned forces detached and sent elsewhere. Those troops that he had couldn’t conceivably be sent to Europe in a hurry, but the apparent notion aboard Reagan’s ‘Doomsday Plane’ was that his aircraft and ships could be redirected away from him. He didn’t like that idea one big and was only able to counter it – for what he feared was a temporary period anyway – by it being pointed out that doing so would take too long. In particular, his carriers could hardly be in the North Atlantic overnight; they would have to sail across the width of the Pacific down to the bottom of the South Atlantic and then all the way northwards up the South Atlantic due to them being too wide to fit through the Panama Canal. Removing aircraft meant that they would be out of action for several days, even a week, while they and all their supporting assets redeployed halfway across the globe too.

The war could easily be over by the time such strategic redeployments were complete and those forces were still needed here in the Pacific too.

This was always something that was going to come up again though; every success in the air and at sea here in the Pacific meant that the fighting was being seen as being won here and those assets were thought to be freed-up for action elsewhere.

*​

The eruption of World War Three hadn’t closed the United Nations building in New York. Diplomats and their staffs were still meeting inside the complex beside the East River and arguments commenced inside alongside the usual grandstanding. Four of the permanent members of the Security Council were engaged in open warfare with each other and thus that committee wasn’t meeting. The General Assembly was though and that was where all the ‘drama’ was taking place with accusations being thrown and fistfights erupting.

Outside in the city that never sleeps, the initial ‘drama’ there over the past few days had greatly calmed down now. Rioting and severe civil strife had come to an end when members of the New York Army National Guard had marched into parts of The Bronx and Harlem to join the NYPD in enforcing effective martial law in those parts of the city which looked like the war elsewhere in the world had come to them. Looters were shot, armed gangs were tear-gassed and put into improvised holding pens and criminals were scared off the streets. The violence had been instigated by troublemakers but most of those who had been tearing their own communities apart and murdering their neighbours had been people who were scared of the thought of nuclear war and had quite literally gone mad. Bullets and tear gas put a stop to that, but it was an unpleasant sight afterwards.

Back inside the UN building, amid the chaos there, the Argentinian Ambassador to the United Nations asked to meet with Chuck Grassley on the morning of March 17th. He then brought the Cuban Ambassador with him unexpectedly, a man whom the Secretary of State had known was not someone who was regarded too highly as a diplomat. Using Argentina as a conduit – the country had been the only Latin American nation not to declare war upon Cuba and the Soviet Union – the Cuban informed Grassley that the Castro Brothers had been killed in American air attacks upon their country and that Manuel Piñeiro and Luis Barreiro Caramés were both now in charge of Cuba. The former spymaster and Central Committee member known as “Red Beard” was in power on that embattled island alongside the DGI chief.

The two men wanted to arrange a ceasefire…

*​

USS Saratoga had been docked at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard (actually located in neighbouring Portsmouth) since late last year and was undergoing a Service Life Extension Programme when war approached. This ship-wide overhaul of the whole carrier had been cut short overnight on March 1st when REFORGER begun.

The US Navy wanted to put the Saratoga back to sea as it was expecting losses to its carrier fleet once the war got underway.

The Theodore Roosevelt across in Norfolk was in the middle of her rush commissioning for active service when the mission to get the Saratoga ready to sea begun. This need to throw everything at having as many carriers at sea as possible was a massive undertaking. The other aircraft carrier here in the Hampton Roads was the Abraham Lincoln – a vessel which wouldn’t see any action – and work crews from building that vessel were transferred to getting those two carriers out to sea. The entire civilian workforce from both Norfolk and Portsmouth shipyards, plus men transported down from the shipyard at Philadelphia, all received double pay to complete this work while unemployed men with shipbuilding experience from across northern Virginia flocked to the Tidewater region to help them. There were no problems with the unions as men were getting paid and it was seen that getting the carriers out to sea was their patriotic duty.

Before war broke out, the Roosevelt managed to get to sea and those men who helped finish her were proud of their efforts. They further added to the workforce in preparing the Saratoga to follow her out though they weren’t informed that the Roosevelt was soon knocked out of the war through enemy action.

On the Thursday evening, the Saratoga went to sea. Aircraft started to join her during the night as she entered the North Atlantic while warming up her engines for a high-speed dash across the ocean. There were all sorts of naval aircraft that would complete her air wing: re-established combat units using aircraft taken from training units and removed from storage as well as US Navy air units land-based in Florida.


The original plan had been to send Saratoga to the Norwegian Sea to join with Striking Fleet Atlantic so it could become a three-carrier force again after what happened to the Roosevelt. However, two separate events occurred on March 17th that changed matters.

The Forrestal was set alight after the Shipwreck missile impacts upon her and Striking Fleet Atlantic was down to just one carrier. Straight after this news arrived there came the developments with Cuba wanting to surrender and thus the sudden availability of the Coral Sea.

Grassley’s message from New York was that he believed that the Cubans were deadly serious; they wouldn’t be using Argentina as a conduit if they weren’t. The United States was treating any nation which wasn’t standing alongside it as a potential enemy and the prevailing mood among countries officially neutral was that – apart from how things were going in Germany – the United States was winning the war. Argentina was now considering that it might not have been the best idea to antagonize the United States and thus would have made sure that the information from Cuba about the true situation was correct before it acted as a go-between up in New York to allow the new Cuban administration to talk to the Americans.

Removing the Coral Sea from the Caribbean was always going to be a risk because talks with those now in-charge in Cuba could break down – Piñeiro was known to be a hard-core communist – but it was one that it was thought worth taking. This aircraft carrier was sent urgent orders to cease air attacks upon Cuba and head northwards to catch up with the Saratoga so that they could both arrive in the Norwegian Sea together.

[James G]

One Hundred & Thirteen

The Battle of the Ofotfjorden took place in the early hours of March 18th. In this shallow stretch of water at the eastern end of the bigger Vestfjorden, long before it got light that morning, there were NATO ships that were attacked by Soviet aircraft and then a submarine too. They fought back against such an unexpected attack this far inside ‘secure’ rear areas along the Norwegian coast, but the attack here against the British and Dutch forces assembled near Narvik was extremely deadly.


The Royal Marines’ 3rd Commando Brigade had seen its detached elements all the way forward at Skibotn fight against Soviet tank forces while the US Marines that had previously been based in the Vestfjorden area sail away to do battle around Alta. The remainder of the brigade with its further two battalion-sized Commandos, the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps battalion and brigade support elements had all sat out the first four days of the war while waiting to be sent into action. Brigadier Ross had been insistent that the Royal Marines not be sent forward to Alta but rather to perform the wartime role envisioned for them for many years past: that of a fire-brigade to race towards the scene of a Soviet amphibious landing on the coast and counterattack that landing while it was still getting underway.

The Soviet Northern Fleet had been smashed yesterday though and those amphibious ships behind it had been reported as unloading several thousand men of the Soviet Naval Infantry far away in the Porsangerfjorden. Therefore there wasn’t going to be a fire-brigade role for the Royal Marines up here, especially after the beating that the Soviet Army had taken too in being unable to force its way out of the Finnish Wedge.

General Howlett, while being a British Army officer, knew that the exceptional forced-entry capabilities which the Royal Marines had were always going to come in useful and didn’t want to see them wasted. They had the amphibious ships and all necessary equipment alongside their training to complete landing operations somewhere, even against numerically stronger opposition. Combined with pressure coming from the War Cabinet back in London, he had decided that they would be sent southwards, further down Norway’s coast, to see action rather than continue to sit around doing nothing.

As a safety measure, the Bootnecks and their fellow Dutch marines – affectionately known as ‘Cloggies’ – had been garrisoned on land while their ships were in the Ofotfjorden. The Americans had done the same before they had sailed away and it was thought the best thing to do in case a massed enemy air or missile attack came and hit stationary ships crammed with marines. General Howlett’s instructions for the 3rd Brigade to be sent southwards came late the following evening and the troops started to be transferred to those ships so that they could sail away. The US Marines had done the same thing when they had departed to go and set up their ambush at Alta, but the British and Dutch used small boats rather than the mass of helicopters to move their troops from land to their ships. There were still some helicopters in the skies, but the men were moved via landing craft and small boats from Narvik, Kjeldebotn and Bogen (the Dutch were based at the latter) to reach the ships forming up outside in the middle of the Ofotfjorden.

There were many vessels in the Ofotfjorden. Cargo ships of the US Sealift Command were on the water alongside vessels that had been discharging military cargoes and were operating in support of many NATO nations. There were civilian Norwegian ships here too, many of which had been put to use during the pre-war evacuation of Finmark and also bringing troops and military equipment up from the central and southern parts of their country. A white-painted American ship sat out in the middle of this fjord and this was the hospital ship USNS Comfort. Those troops that were being transferred from land set out for six ships of the RN and the RFA that were positioned near those ports from where they were garrisoned.

The RN had their two amphibious assault ships up here: HMS Fearless and HMS Intrepid. Both of these had seen service in the Falklands six years beforehand and had taken Royal Marines as well as Paras into San Carlos. This morning, men from 40 & 42 Commandos were taken aboard the ships after coming from Narvik using LCU-9 jet-propelled landing craft which deposited them at the stern-positioned internal docks of both. Near Kjeldebotn, the auxiliary amphibious ships RFA Sir Galahad and RFA Sir Tristram took on Royal Engineers and gunners from the Royal Artillery. There were smaller landing craft used here in the shore-to-ship transfers but the runs were made at high speed. The Sir Galahad was a new-build ship only recently finished to replace the vessel of the same name lost in the Falklands while the Sir Tristram was a vessel that had been much damaged in that conflict and seen much repair. Off Bogen, near where the German battleship Tirpitz had spent some time hiding out in World War Two, the landing ships RFA Sir Bedivere and RFA Sir Lancelot were loaded with Cloggies as well as Royal Marines serving in combat service support roles for the 3rd Brigade.

The plan had been for the loadings of the ships with only men and their personal weapons to not take that long and that the amphibious vessels would be out of the Ofotfjorden by 0300 hours local time – long before it got light. Terrible weather arrived from the west though during the night with choppy waters even this far away from the Norwegian Sea and there were high winds magnified by the local geography in this part of Norway. There were RN and Royal Netherlands Navy warships waiting out in the Vestfjorden for the amphibious ships so an escort southwards could be provided but the delays caused by the weather impacting transfers of men brought that escort flotilla into the Ofotfjorden. The worry was that the amphibious ships were going to be vulnerable to enemy attack should they be caught stationary while loaded with men if they were still in-place when daylight came.

The British and Dutch were very correct to worry about this.

A trio of Sukhoi-24 strike-bombers appeared over the Ofotfjorden just before dawn. There had been four of these aircraft which had flown from their forward airbase at Enontekio in Lapland but one had been downed by a Swedish SAM when they were passing to the north of Kiruna on their way to pass through the cover offered by the mountains that formed the border between Sweden and Norway. These were older versions of the Fencer aircraft and part of the 34th Bomber Aviation Regiment now attached to the Soviet Seventy-Sixth Air Army but in peacetime with the Soviet Thirty-Fourth Air Army in the Azerbaidzhan SSR. Their crews were a long way from home and unused to operating in such Arctic conditions; the Caucasus Mountains were in no way preparation for those in Scandinavia. The combat systems on their aircraft weren’t up to the latest standard and the weapons that hung beneath their aircraft certainly weren’t the best that could be fielded. The pilots and weapons officers were to do their duty though.

Intelligence pointed to the Ofotfjorden being used by NATO warships and supply ships and it was towards naval targets the Fencers were sent against. The British ships weren’t specifically targeted and the actual expectation was that it would be American vessels that the Fencers ran into. They were also expecting that land-based SAMs could be encountered as well as fighters from Bardufoss and Evenes. The Ofotfjorden was anticipated to be a well-defended area, but also target-rich.

Coming up towards their engagement zone by flying above the calm waters of the sheltered Skjomen – an arm of the Ofotfjorden – the Fencers flashed over the bridge carrying the E6 Highway west from Narvik. They had to climb from their low-altitude approach and their Sirena radar-warning receivers lived up to that name as the detection was made of multiple hostile systems from airborne AWACS aircraft to search radars attached to HAWK SAM batteries. The strike-bombers activated their Orion-A radars as they made a sharp turn to the east while maintaining their altitude of five thousand feet.

Multiple targets were detected up ahead…

Each of the Fencers were loaded with identical armaments: five hundred rounds for the six-barrelled GSh-6-23 23mm cannon, four Kh-23 air-to-surface missiles, one Kh-58 anti-radar missile and a pair of K-60 air-to-air missiles. This was a heavy weapons load, but not an overbearing one: the Fencers were still able to thunder towards the targets that they were seeing near Narvik at high-speed.

Before anyone aboard any of the ships in this part of the Ofotfjorden knew what was happening, twelve missiles were coming towards them. The skies were just getting light on the horizon away to the east, but those missiles and the aircraft following them were coming from the dark west. Warnings were being shouted over radio links that there were aircraft in the sky but that information wasn’t disseminated well this morning to all those who needed to hear it. Two of those missiles had major problems with thrust and guidance (respectively) immediately after launch, but the other ten raced for the ships that they targeted against.

Known to NATO as the AS-7 Kerry, the Kh-23 was a command-guidance weapon that required the radar aboard the launching aircraft to keep highlighting the target to which the missile was directed against. With the short-range attack that the Fencers were conducting, with the aircraft intending to follow-up the missile attack with their cannons, this was something that while being dangerous was possible here whereas in other situations that was usually suicidal for aircrews involved. Those Kerrys flew at sixteen hundred miles per hour and were within a very short space of time smashing into targeted ships after only what seemed like cursory defence was made against them.

Three of the ships struck were Norwegian coastal ferries that operated in the wider Vestfjorden area and were anchored off Narvik. One of the Kerrys targeted upon them didn’t function correctly and its warhead didn’t detonate, but even then the impact against the vehicle ferry was enough to set it on fire like the other two after they had been hit by missiles whose warheads did go off: all three ships were quickly destroyed. A Canadian freighter and a Liberian-flagged container ship being used by Military Sealift Command were hit with another two missiles; explosions from the 245lb warheads after impacting these ships would cause major damage though extensive damage-control efforts would save these vessels, each of which had only been emptied of their war cargoes during the night at Narvik’s deep-water port of Fagernes.

In contravention of the Tenth Declaration of the Hague Convention of 1907, the hospital ship Comfort was hit by another two Kerrys. The ship, the biggest vessel in the Ofotfjorden, was struck both times in the superstructure on the port side. It hadn’t been targeted on purpose for the Soviet attack was done by radar and in the darkness, but that didn’t matter to those aboard. The US Navy crew of the ship along with its American, Norwegian and British patients being treated for combat injuries were all going to suffer from the fires that would take hold of parts of the Comfort.

Anti-aircraft guns from the Intrepid opened fire before the ship was hit. The communications centre aboard had managed to receive and understand the air attack warning with word being sent to the crew manning one of its two twin-30mm guns. Shells poured away from the ship upwards though had no effect upon the pair of Kerrys which both hit the Intrepid on her starboard side aft of amidships. Explosions rocked the ship from these which took place inside the rear of the well-deck. Meanwhile, Fearless wasn’t able to get her anti-aircraft guns into operation in time (not that it would have mattered anyway) though took less damage from the twin impacts that it took. Both hit the stern area on the port side of the ship and went into the well-deck area like those that impacted the Intrepid. Fortunately for the ship, but not for the men there, the force of those blasts was in the main at once vented outwards though the open stern doors… towards one of those LCU-9 landing ships there that was at that time loaded with more than a hundred men from 42 Commando.

Approaching as fast as they were, the pilots of the Fencers didn’t have much time to choose which ships to target with their follow-up gun strikes. The sun ahead was just coming up on the horizon right ahead of them and there was already smoke pouring upwards to further make identification of priority targets more difficult. A SAM launch was recorded as coming from the other side of the Ofotfjorden – the Sirena systems said that this was a Norwegian HAWK – to further distract them. The three biggest ships that their radars displayed were chosen with one Fencer going for each.

The forward superstructure of the Comfort was peppered with 23mm bullets: two hundred and twelve hits would later be recorded in official US Navy records. There were massive casualties caused by this yet this attack wasn’t going to sink the vessel like those missile impacts hadn’t either. The fires and bullet damage were bad enough but the Comfort would survive.

Intrepid’s anti-aircraft guns, which had only paused firing for a few seconds after the missile impacts, managed to bring their fire effectively upon the Fencer that dove towards it with its cannon blasting away. The amphibious assault ship took hundreds of bullet impacts before the Soviet pilot pulled his aircraft’s nose up but the shells from the Oerlikon-30 anti-aircraft gun hit the Fencer in the nose area and behind in the cockpit too. The pilot was killed and the weapons officer badly wounded and unable to do anything when the aircraft spun out of control and crashed upside down into the water a mile away.

On Fearless, the superstructure beneath the main mast and where the cranes were for lowering the LCVP fast assault craft were located was hit by shells from the Fencer that targeted this vessel. Both of those LCVPs on the port side were wrecked beyond repair and more bullets tore into the cranes and the body of the ship behind. This wasn’t fatal damage, but it was far from inconsequential.

The pair of remaining Fencers rapidly swung away to the south again and disappeared towards the inland mountains. Norwegian F-16s out of Bardufoss set about chasing after them, but for now all attention was focused upon the eight ships in the Ofotfjorden that were on fire. Men needed to be rescued from those ships which couldn’t be saved while assistance needed to be given to those which were in trouble but there was hope for.


The Soviet submarine B-401 had entered the Vestfjorden late the evening before when following the Dutch frigate Abraham Crijnssen through what was expected to be an immense minefield. The NATO warship made enough turns once inside to confirm this suspicion to the captain of the B-401 that he was being guided past mines laid all over the place by remaining right up close behind the Kortenaer-class warship ahead. The frigate’s own sonars couldn’t hear the Kilo-class submarine due to its own engine noises.

The temptation to slam a pair of torpedoes into the warship ahead was overwhelming but it was something that the captain avoided. The B-401 had come all the way here from the Kola Peninsula avoiding minefields and NATO air activity and had learnt about the effects of those when its sister-ship B-402 (on the same mission) was lost to a minefield while rounding the southern end of the Lofoten Islands chain. The Vestfjorden and the Ofotfjorden at the end of that was meant to be full of American amphibious ships that were to be targeted and the Dutch frigate was taking the B-401 there.

When reaching the entrance to the Ofotfjorden, the B-401 was not happy to detect further warships that the Dutch frigate met with. A Tromp-class frigate was detected meeting with its fellow Royal Netherlands Navy vessel along a pair of RN frigates too. Four NATO warships were all now surrounding the B-401 and while the captain had been hesitant about entered these NATO-controlled before, he was now rather worried. To try to follow these vessels further to find those American ships – which were actually ships that the B-401 had passed by when moving up the Vestfjorden as those ships were hidden inside inlets along the Lofoten Islands – was far too dangerous. The NATO warships could shuffle their formation at any minute with the Dutch frigate not being at the rear of the little flotilla but rather at the side or the front where sonars on the other vessels would detect the Kilo.

Therefore, not long after the Fencers struck further to the east (which the captain of the B-401 wasn’t aware of), torpedoes were launched from the submarine to aid in an escape attempt as the whole mission appeared to be a wash-out. Four Type-53/65 torpedoes were fired out of the forward tubes, one for each warship.

The Type-53/65 was a wake-homing torpedo. Each one lanced towards the rear of the quartet of NATO ships and manoeuvred in an S-shape fashion to avoid decoys and defensive efforts that might come their way. However, the British and Dutch ships were far from expecting such a sudden attack here in the early hours. HMS Arrow, HMS Rothesay, HNLMS De Ruyter and HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen were all struck with varying degrees of damage absorbed by these lone hits that while not fatal were still rather serious.

The intention of the B-401’s captain was to leave the Ofotfjorden and then follow the known safe route back out. The torpedo tubes from which those Type-53/65s had been fired were being reloaded while there were still another two tubes that were loaded. Turning away to the north to complete a wide circle before racing away back westwards, the B-401 still had its sonar active and the sonar operators happened to detect activity up ahead. Small vessels were noted as moving around two larger ships that the computer systems identified as British vessels deemed as ‘landing ship logistics’ a miles away from Bogen. These weren’t as good as targets as American Tarawa or Iwo Jima class vessels, but they were still enemy amphibious ships and there was time to deal with them.

Again, the B-401 fired torpedoes, this time only two before racing away back towards that passage through the minefields before a whole range of potent NATO anti-submarine warfare assets started hunting mercilessly for the submarine.

The hasty attack by the B-401 meant that the torpedoes used weren’t properly targeted. In addition, both vessels which were fired upon only had their engines idling, not running at speed. The Type-53/65 missed the Sir Lancelot because it had nothing to home-in upon while the second torpedo stuck one of the LCU-9s transferring Cloggies to the Sir Bedivere instead of the transport ship. The resulting explosion of the torpedo’s 678lb warhead ripped apart the landing craft and blast effects caused immense damage to the Sir Bedivere too.


Three of the six amphibious ships and all four warships tasked with escorting them had been hit by air and submarine attacks. Hundreds of Bootnecks and Cloggies lay dead in these attacks with many, many more wounded. An immense ASW hunt would commence for the submarine which had caused much of that destruction and loss of life.

Meanwhile, 3rd Brigade was not going down to Sola Airport outside Stavanger today to assist in the planned recapture of that facility.





One Hundred & Fourteen

‘Stay behind’ teams from the NATO armies deployed in West Germany ready to counter RED BEAR had moved into position right before the war commenced. Small, independent patrol groups of professional soldiers had entered the forward areas near the border and gone to ground while waiting for the frontlines of the war to pass them by before they went into action. Hideouts had long been pre-scouted and the troops slipped into these and waited…

Across Germany, these stay behind teams consisted of soldiers from several NATO nations. There were American Green Berets from the 5th, 10th and 11th Special Forces Groups (the latter being a USAR unit) spread across Hessen and Bavaria. The Bundeswehr had its trio of Fernspäher companies in Lower Saxony as well as in Hessen and Bavaria too. There were Dutch special forces troopers from their 104th Commando Company sent ahead of their later-to-be smashed army. The Belgians had their ESR reconnaissance teams out ahead in their defensive sectors, men who held the traditions of the Belgian SAS squadron from World War Two.

The British Army had formed the Corps Patrol Unit before hostilities started and sent regular soldiers from 22 SAS forward along with elements from both 21 SAS and 23 SAS. These TA soldiers in those Special Air Service formations were joined by a company-sized force from the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC), further reservists who had also been trained in the role of stay behind missions.

These NATO troops did as instructed and waited for the fierce instances of combat to pass them by in the war’s first few days. In some cases they were unfortunately caught up in it, but this was always unintentional as the stay behind mission called for them to remain well-hidden and only come out from sheltered positions after combat had moved away to the west and there was little reasonable chance of a NATO counterattack coming back towards them.

Once active, out of their hides and moving through the German countryside, the mission of these stay behind teams was rather simple: cause destruction everywhere.


With the fighting having moved away a considerable distance, the stay behind teams operated across Warsaw Pact occupied West German territory just west of the Inter-German Border. The special forces men had all long exercised in these regions and knew the ground very well indeed. They were up against enemy combat service support units that the invader had moved across the border to support their operations at the front. There were mine-clearing teams and other engineers engaged in fixing transportation links. Signals troops were trying to string above-ground telephone lines and also dig shallow trenches for those too as well as setting up radio masts. Military Intelligence personnel were swarming over abandoned NATO equipment and also looking for stragglers from NATO units smashed by fighting who would be brought in for questioning. Air defence troops were searching for suitable locations to set up sites for radars and firing positions for SAMs. There were anti-tank weapons teams moving into defensive positions on the flanks and in the rear against expected NATO counterattacks. Staff officers were rushing backwards and forwards in light vehicles while there were motorcycle messengers too delivering orders before secure communications links were up and running. Soviet Army Field Police teams were moving prisoners about as well as looking for sites to be used as holding pens for those unlucky enough to fall into captivity. Medical units were moving to establish field hospitals and evacuating the odd ‘political’ wounded casualty; usually officers with important family connections. Vehicle recovery and maintenance troops were busy collecting damaged Warsaw Pact equipment to be put back together as well as setting up field workshops. Supply and transportation detachments were moving weapons and fuel about in addition to establishing new distribution points on this side of the border for the fighting units up ahead. There were traffic controllers that were positioning themselves at certain points to direct reinforcements to the right place at the right time. Headquarters units with bloated staffs were following cautiously behind the fighting units while trying to find safe locations to temporarily set themselves up in.

All of these supporting elements of the field armies invading West Germany, behind the fighting troops and the direct-supporting artillery, aviation and combat engineering assets, but ahead of the heavily-armed reinforcing units moving towards battle, were considered fair game for the stay behind teams to engage.

Ambushes were used against their targets, usually instigated by an explosive device first before gunfire would erupt from multiple directions. Sniper rifles opened fire against high-profile targets in other attacks and quite often fuel and ammunition trucks too where a blast would occur. The Fernspäher were rather effective at sneaking back into areas declared clear by the invader of mines and planting just a few more to cripple movements through those ‘safe’ areas. The Green Berets occasionally rescued downed pilots and also designated targets for laser-guided bombs dropped by the USAF, yet their main mission was those raiding operations against lightly-armed service support troops while waiting for reaction forces to show up before ambushing them too… especially those lead by incompetent KGB officers. There were instances where stay behind teams guided cut off units from several NATO formations shattered in battle back in the general direction of the frontlines after they had stumbled across such British and Bundeswehr units across Lower Saxony.

The SAS and HAC stay behind teams acted just as the Americans, Belgian, Dutch and West Germans did. They ambushed those vulnerable support forces who thought themselves safe away from the frontlines. There was very little interference with their missions from their higher headquarters as opposed to the Americans in particular as this was just the way it was supposed to be. There were radios that the British troops carried with them but they operated much better roaming across the German countryside finding their own targets of opportunity to attack rather than waiting for orders to come to them as to who and where to attack… you never knew who was listening in. When those radios were used, the British stay behind teams instigated such contact and would report back on major enemy movements of forces and fixed targets too well-defended for them take on.

This clandestine reconnaissance conducted up front on the ground deep in the invader’s rear was something that the other stay behind teams did too: it was just important as their raiding missions. All sorts of things were seen by these special forces inside occupied territory from attractive targets for NATO air strikes to reinforcements moving along certain roads where their objectives when reaching the frontlines could be accurately ascertained. Expensive radio equipment with burst transmission capability was used for this yet problems occurred due to enemy radio detection methods to sometimes that equipment breaking down. Action was taken on what was observed in many instances due to the pressing need to combat the progress of RED BEAR. The vast majority of these interventions on the part of the stay behind teams went alongside their raiding mission, though there were a few intercessions that weren’t part of their operational tasking.

The Dutch commandoes on the Luneburg Heath stepped in when ill-disciplined Soviet troops were robbing, raping and murdering West German civilians who had been caught behind enemy lines in a tiny village far from the frontlines. Those Soviet riflemen were shot down and the civilians ‘liberated’ for the time being. In a reversal of this situation in the north, a Green Beret detachment in Bavaria rescued a Czechoslovak fighter pilot about to be lynched by civilians armed with improvised weapons: the pilot was wounded and it would do the locals no good to act in that manner when reprisals came. Yet, those Green Berets then found themselves with a prisoner to deal with. One of the HAC teams on the North German Plain raided what they thought was a supply convoy and instead found that they had just liberated sixty-plus Bundeswehr prisoners being taken eastwards. Those men were armed with captured weapons taken from their guards and sent back westwards in the direction to where their British emancipators hoped were friendly lines.


The Soviet Army and those forces of the Northern Tier countries had expected such things to happen – they had their own Spetsnaz teams on ‘deep reconnaissance’ forward of their armies – and believed that such actions would be countered with the effective use of mobile security forces protecting their service support assets directly behind the frontlines.

Regular troops supported by KGB, Stasi, WZW and VZ (Polish & Czechoslovak military intelligence) armed detachments patrolled the rear areas and established roadblocks as well as reaction forces. Their mission was to combat stay behind parties though a lot of their attention was actually directed against combating deserters and what NATO intelligence would deem ‘berserkers’: individual soldiers who just snapped under the psychological stress of war when armed and would often run away from their units into the rear in a crazed fashion ready to take on anyone who stood in their way. Air and armed helicopter attacks that took place behind the frontlines sometimes struck at these security forces when they were meant to be on their protection missions, just to make their lives even more difficult.

Many of those security troops were from ‘Independent Protection & Guarantee Battalions’ assigned to divisional headquarters of Soviet divisions. These were well-equipped formations which provided headquarters security but on many occasions even their BMP-2 and BTR-60 armoured vehicles couldn’t protect the staff officers and divisional commanders from attack and what was effectively assassination missions against field commanders.

Successes came though when hunting for the stay behind teams. In response to attacks, the security troops would flood the area where the attack had taken place and tear apart the countryside for those offending NATO units. Artillery units meant to be assigned to combat units at the front would often be brought into play along with Hind helicopters… which while not pleasant for the NATO soldiers on the ground this all aided the effort to distract the forward attacking momentum of the Warsaw Pact forces. Snipers were especially sought by the Soviet-led security troops as the actions of such men would have an effect beyond all proportion to the actual damage inflicted by their long guns; morale would drop everywhere when troops were pinned down by snipers and seeing their comrades shot without being able to fight back.

The stay behind units often went down to the last man and the last bullet when they couldn’t escape the attentions of Soviet forces that came after them. Respecting the rules of war wasn’t something that the Soviets were known to follow and the special forces troops had killed many, many comrades of those men who trapped them and moved in to finish them off; the enemy wouldn’t be in a mood to deal with prisoners as they should. For those stay behind teams who weren’t take to take this way out, their fears were often realised. Yet, some members of certain stay behind detachments did fall alive into enemy captivity and these men then disappeared eastwards. Their captors would want to know everything that they knew and using torture to extract such time-sensitive information (it was assumed that the captured men would know where to find others causing equal amounts of destruction behind the lines) was thought to be the best method rather than long-term coercion and such methods like that.


By the morning of the war’s fifth day, almost half of the stay behind teams in Germany were no longer combat effective. The Soviets-led forces had managed to kill and wound many of the members of those NATO special forces detachments while others had found themselves hunted without mercy so that they were unable to undertake any more operations for the time being in areas crawling with trigger-happy security forces.

The rest of those stay behind teams were still active though. They were out causing death and destruction as well as distraction to the Soviet-led forces invading Germany. The results for their efforts were out of all proportion to their size, which was just what was planned.

Meanwhile, not too dissimilar events were going on west of the frontlines with Spetsnaz detachments operating behind NATO forces.