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

[James G]

One Hundred & Fifteen

The description ‘Spetsnaz’ was used as a catch-all term before, during and after the war for paramilitary and conventional military activities conducted by Soviet covert intelligence officers and commandoes. Spetsnaz were blamed too for the actions of terrorists who were foreign nationals and not Soviet born even if they did as they did for the advancement of Soviet political and military aims. It was an easy thing to do to mistake the activities of others for those of Spetsnaz special forces teams manned by GRU members and working for the Soviet Army though such mistakes weren’t always innocent.

In assassinations undertaken pre-war to further Soviet political goals, both KGB field officers and foreigners were responsible. Terrorist groups which planted bombs and set fires in the last days of peace worked on behalf of the KGB and they were coerced or even contracted to do so by that organisation. KGB men from Chebrikov’s own personal army aboard raided the Australian Parliament building and caused much destruction in New York City, not Spetsnaz soldiers.

GRU Spetsnaz practised the military art of ‘deep reconnaissance’ and they conducted raiding and reconnaissance operations far inside enemy territory. Some of those actions used unconventional means and were supported by deep-cover operatives who had established themselves in foreign countries under aliases, but these were military tasks to further military goals. These were highly-trained soldiers from the Soviet Army – and the Soviet Naval Infantry in a few instances – used in the deep reconnaissance role.

The deep reconnaissance activities conducted in support of RED BEAR were like the NATO stay behind missions but on a larger scale… and also befitting the Spetsnaz reputation.


Eight independent brigades of Spetsnaz commandoes entered West Germany when the war erupted. The forward-deployed brigade in East Germany pre-war (the 3rd Guards) was joined by another seven from military districts across the Western USSR. They were all now part of West-TVD and under the orders of Marshal Kulikov.

Getting inside NATO territory in mainland Western Europe, the Spetsnaz forces – broken down into detachments of various sizes, but never more than platoon strength and sometimes as small as a minimum of eight men – had used various methods of entry. Behind the first wave of fighters and strike aircraft that had gone westwards had come many light aircraft and helicopters. Spetsnaz soldiers had parachuted from their aircraft in high-altitude and low-altitude jumps as well as being dropped off by helicopters which had hugged the ground and made touch-and-go landings. Other commandoes had sneaked forward on foot behind the armoured reconnaissance units that had moved into combat when the first ground assaults had come. The intention had been to get into the rear, deep behind the main fighting forces. Submarines and even fast but shallow boats had deposited men all across the Baltic shorelines of northern Germany and Jutland. Some Spetsnaz had already been inside Austria – avoiding the alerted Austrian Army as they moved – and then crossed the Austrian-German border. There had been failures in many places and the causes had been manifold: carelessness, alert defences, bad luck, equipment breakdowns etc. Yet, hundreds upon hundreds of special forces soldiers off on their deep reconnaissance missions had managed to make their crossings and started moving further westwards deeper into West Germany and some were even aiming to reach the Low Countries and France too.

The whole of West Germany was crawling with NATO troops either engaged in direct combat, supporting those at the front or on security duties in the rear; West German Territorial troops had many armed men safeguarding the rear. Roadblocks were encountered, roving patrols had to be avoided and there was suspicion everywhere. Again, certain Spetsnaz troops got into difficulty right at the beginning of their mission when they came up against armed NATO forces on high alert for penetrations such as theirs.

Yet, at the same time, being behind the frontlines gave the Spetsnaz a wide array of opportunities to freely move about. Supplies and reinforcements were being shunted around with great haste. Medical convoys were waved through roadblocks. Civilians who had left it almost too late to flee from the fighting were hurried away westwards. Written orders and passwords for movement were the exception, not the rule. Soviet long-range artillery or aircraft would strike with seeming randomness and there would be chaos in those areas affected where people were moving in every direction. As was their mission briefs pre-war, the Spetsnaz moved seamlessly through all of this mayhem as they travelled towards their assigned operational areas. Sometimes they had to fight against attempts to stop them and those were bloody affairs, yet despite all the intelligence briefings given to men in the rear areas, NATO troops almost always found themselves utterly surprised that there would be dedicated fighting men this far in the rear who weren’t about to play by the ‘rules’ and who would kill without hesitation.


Spetsnaz detachments operating under West-TVD subordinate command were either within a reasonable distance of the frontlines operating under the command of field armies and fronts or they were sent much deeper to support West-TVD itself.

Generally, those who deployed into areas within fifty miles of the ever-moving frontlines were there conducting battlefield reconnaissance for the attacking Soviet forces. They watched roads for reinforcements being brought up and would report back what they observed while sometimes intervening in those movements of NATO troops too when the odds were thought to be on their side. Supply convoys were targeted in hit-and-run raids and weapons and ammunition sometimes taken by the Spetsnaz. When NATO units were withdrawing, especially when in disarray, those forces found themselves either maliciously led into ambushes. Convoys carrying wounded men were attacked too; not to kill those who needed further medical attention but rather to kill the medical personnel and destroy their vehicles so that they couldn’t be put to use elsewhere. Staff officers and messengers racing to deliver orders were an easy target when Spetsnaz came across them, especially when a fake roadblock could be set up to get at such high-priority targets.

As the Soviet-led field armies attacked, these Spetsnaz units tasked to aid in their operation would appear from under cover and assist in their attacks at crucial moments. Bridges that NATO forces were using to withdraw their troops across but had prepared demolition charges on were suddenly seized right at the last minute. Fuel and ammunition supplies being rigged for destruction would also be seized too so that they could be put to Soviet use rather than NATO getting the chance to destroy them. Minefields would be observed being planted in haste by engineers as the Soviet armies came forward and the Spetsnaz would take note of this to make sure that the heavy forces that they were supporting weren’t going to enter such areas. There were instances where the commandoes managed to get NATO forces withdrawing to be fired upon by troops manning the next line of friendly defences as a Spetsnaz sniper or machine-gunner would sneak in upon either formation and open fire upon the other in moments of confusion. Forward air control officers from NATO air forces tasked with supporting the ground forces were located and if they weren’t highlighted for attack by Soviet conventional forces, these high-priority targets would face a sudden ambush where possible with the effort then being made to bring ‘friendly’ air power down on NATO troops. Mobile columns with brigade and divisional commanders were attacked at times when they tried to find cover to direct battle from with the Spetsnaz aiming to kill senior commanders.

Letting their own senior commanders know what was ahead of them was the main duty of the Spetsnaz though. That was why they were kept so close to the frontlines rather than being sent further westwards. Having men on the ground all over the German countryside moving undetected allowed the field armies smashing into NATO to have reliable intelligence as to how NATO was reacting to their moves. The Spetsnaz complemented air reconnaissance and electronic warfare systems in a way which any combat commander wanted: multiple confirmations of enemy activity as well as opportunities for further attack.

The numbers of these commandoes operating behind the frontlines dwindled as the fighting went on. They would run into trouble which they couldn’t handle when situations were miscalculated. At other times they would be detected and hunted down in sweeps made by NATO forces of their rears though the Spetsnaz being a light infantry force as it was would take a lot of effort to go after. At no time was any effort spared by the forces of the field armies to directly intervene to assist those reconnaissance forces of theirs forward who had previously so assisted them when those men got into trouble. Unless they were themselves going to be directly affected by such NATO activity or it opened up avenues of opportunity, those special forces out front were expendable and the more that they fought back to try and save themselves the better it was for the main body of invading forces as they provided an unwitting distraction for the enemy. Their mission was to overrun West Germany and defeat the NATO armies here, not go on rescue missions of a few dozen men too far ahead and behind solid lines of NATO defences; this hadn’t been something that the Spetsnaz were briefed on before they went into action.


Those Spetsnaz sent further westwards were also on deep reconnaissance, though they undertook this mission with a different approach. External support was something truly that these commandoes had none of as they operated anything up to three hundred miles beyond the main fighting. Many of these detachments were sent by air-drop when parachuted by aircraft on what turned out to be suicidal missions for many of those pilots tasked to fly behind massed attacks by strike aircraft and deposit men very far forward of the invading armies. Other detachments, especially those sent to areas east of the German Rhineland, moved by civilian vehicles but they had less luck in getting to their operational areas as they were military-aged men who attention was drawn too when Western Europe was at war.

Nonetheless, those men who did get forward set about their deep reconnaissance mission. They got up close and personal with NATO forces far from the front to observe and when needed attack. NATO battlefield nuclear forces and air defence assets were moveable targets that had to be tracked and pinpointed for air or missile attack; failing either of those occurring the Spetsnaz would do that job themselves. Major bridges were watched for the mass movement of troops across them rushing eastwards and the demolition efforts that were prepared against those bridges were closely-observed. Airbases and dispersal air-strips were surveyed and attacks would be occasionally made against them if the Spetsnaz were ordered to do so in the place of a conventional attack.

NATO threw up huge logistical centres in the middle of the countryside in hidden locations – among forests especially – and the special forces soldiers followed trucks to locate these for attacks to come and destroy them. Military headquarters units and even civilian support organisations wanted to operate hidden from detection too, but against the role of the Spetsnaz was to find these against all efforts to conceal them. The territory to be covered was immense though, especially as the Spetsnaz was forced to search for the enemy throughout the Low Countries and across the borders of France too. Naval Infantry Spetsnaz – from a separate brigade to the eight others – operated among ports, harbours and coastal waterways all along the shores of the NATO territory that faced the North Sea and even parts of the English Channel too. These frogmen and commandoes in little boats laid mines and attempted to demolish facilities at some places while watching others for the arrivals of ships.

Causing chaos went alongside the actual surveillance mission that the Spetsnaz had. While they often radioed-in what they saw, they attacked NATO forces as well. With so many civilians having fled westwards far away from the fighting, there were gaps in security on the ground everywhere to be exploited for movement to get close to targets. Prisoners would be taken and intelligence taken from them in a bloody fashion so that what junior military men or sometimes the odd civilian knew about a particular located target could be put to use. Spetsnaz were far from the Manson Family, but they knew exactly how to get truthful intelligence out of people in a timely fashion. Their low numbers and lack of heavy weapons put them at a disadvantage when attacking targets of opportunity that would be defended, but along with prisoner intelligence and the temporary set-up of supply disruption points and intelligence centres in the middle of nowhere and thus with light security measures, the Spetsnaz were able to have a lot of success in causing NATO much grievous damage far in the rear.

Again though, the Spetsnaz took losses of their own. NATO would fight back at every opportunity. Mistakes were made by Spetsnaz in their operations and they would sometimes even misjudge the fighting abilities of formations that they went up against. The military forces of NATO were fighting a war which they had had a short period of mentally preparing themselves for; RED BEAR hadn’t seen strategic surprise and NATO soldiers were quite often prepared to fight at the drop of a hat so far from the frontlines… especially after word got round of what Spetsnaz were doing all over the rear. Even in little Luxembourg, with its one combat battalion of infantry far away on Zealand and reservists manning logistics points across the small country, those men fought off their attackers when they came for them with Spetsnaz expecting the puny little country to just roll over.

Even with the growing losses that were accumulated, the Spetsnaz detachments fought onwards. They were meant to continue to operate no matter what occurred and keep fighting until they were beaten or relived by Soviet armies advancing to the English Channel; no mention of such a thing as surrender was meant to occur to them. When they ran out of ammunition for their rifles, they were to take weaponry from the enemy. Serious medical casualties of their own were to be treated in the way that they had been trained: kill that man in a merciful way so that if treated by the enemy he couldn’t talk. If their ‘hides’ were found then they were to move on. Should radios break then they were to be discarded and raiding missions were to take over full time from reconnaissance and reporting back. If the detachments were actively hunted they were to strike out to hurt their hunters and keep moving to new areas.

The Spetsnaz were to keep on fighting because Soviet tanks were planned to eventually reach them… that was what they were told before they had set off and that was what they had to believe if the men wanted to keep their hope up of surviving this war.





One Hundred & Sixteen

NATO threw an immense tactical air attack eastwards that begun before dawn on the morning of March 18th. Aircraft from both the 2 ATAF and the 4 ATAF were tasked with improvised missions to strike across on the other side of the Inter-German Border on what the Americans liked to call ‘frag orders’. The pilots and weapons officers of the single- & twin-seat combat aircraft were all instructed to attack targets of opportunity on the ground in certain sections of East Germany. The targets would be Soviet ground forces moving forward in strength, which were expected to cross the border around dawn and attack NATO’s frontlines not long afterwards. Almost all other planned missions that the two multi-national air forces were meant to be conducting were cancelled and air-to-ground ordnance loaded onto all aircraft that would carry an effective weapons load.

Moreover, USAF ANG aircraft were committed to the massed series of rolling air attacks that were thrown together in a hurry. Those aircraft had been arriving in England and France for the past several days and were forming up in those countries with the aim to move them forward later in the weekend, but now those National Guardsmen who crewed those aircraft were going to see their first taste of combat here in Europe. Their comrades-in-arms had already fought over Florida and Cuba as well as across Newfoundland and Alaska yet above Europe was going to be a vastly different combat arena from those regions.

The strike was launched by NATO due to that urgent intelligence that had come in during the night from air reconnaissance concerning those field armies of the Belorussian and Carpathian Fronts. The five field armies fast moving forwards – identified as the Soviet First Guards, Fifth Guards Tank and Seventh Tank Armys to the north and the Soviet Sixth Guards Tank and Thirteenth Armys south of them – were rolling across East Germany and straight towards NATO frontline forces which had just about managed to repel four days of full-on attacks already. To be ready to fight off yet another day’s worth of Soviet advances, by fresh troops too, every aerial war-fighting asset available had to be used – there were no appreciable NATO ground reserves available at the time being. If pushing aircraft eastwards meant that there would be gaps in air defences that Soviet aircraft might be able to temporarily take advantage of and cause some damage, then that was going to have to be something that NATO would have to accept.

For three hours, NATO was going to send nearly every combat aircraft that it had into these attacks because to not do so might mean that the war could be lost should those Soviet third echelon forces launch their ground assault unmolested.


Soviet air defences hadn’t recovered from the overnight strategic air attacks by the 3 ATAF when NATO threw its waves of tactical aircraft forward. Radar sites had been attacked and SAM batteries hit with bombs. The 3 ATAF’s night-time strikes had shot down interceptors and littered their airbases with sub-munitions from cluster bombs. Those F-15s flying from England – two squadrons from the 49th Tactical Fighter Wing now joined by the 555th Tactical Fighter Training Squadron from Arizona – had ambushed the MiG-29s that provided close protection for the few remaining AWACS aircraft operating above East Germany and downed all three of those A-50 Mainstay aircraft flying during the night. Su-27P Flankers flying in PVO markings had failed too in attempting to defend the skies when attacked by those F-15s too; NATO appeared to have adapted to the air threat that such top-of-the-range Soviet interceptors posed to their combat aircraft.

Those air defences were unprepared for the scale of the attacks that NATO then threw at them with tactical-assigned aircraft as a follow-up to those strategic strikes. So many aircraft filled the skies that the surviving defensive systems found themselves overwhelmed by all of the hostile air activity. Many of those air defences were in the wrong place too as to where NATO aircraft started attacking; airfields and logistics centres weren’t being struck by these aircraft by rather instead the field armies moving forward. The forces of the Belorussian and Carpathian Fronts had their own mobile air defence systems with them operating separately from the Soviet-led area air defences employed on a strategic level across East Germany and while the latter moved to assist the former, this wasn’t an easy affair in the middle of the night when under attack and without any time being allowed to repair holes in the defences.

French, Spanish and even Portuguese aircraft joined the USAF, RAF, Luftwaffe, Canadian, Dutch and Belgian aircraft in attacking the Soviet Army from the air. There were some aircraft that weren’t capable of night-time operations and thus were waiting for there to be some light in the sky, but the majority of them were and they struck with bombs and missiles throughout the areas where Soviet ground forces moving forward had been detected. Radars, infrared systems and even night-vision goggles worn by pilots were used to locate those forces to be attacked. Some aircraft acted as modern-day pathfinders to highlight columns of tanks and armoured vehicles rolling westwards for other aircraft to attack.


Thirty-one ANG combat squadrons in total had been tasked to move to Europe from all across the United States after being federalised by the Pentagon. Several of these had still yet to or were in the later stages of deploying, but there were twenty in England and France by the morning of March 18th and eighteen squadrons took part in the big air offensive. The ANG flew multiple types of combat aircraft and those that had been transferred to Europe included units that flew A-7s, A-10s, F-4s and F-16s. The airframes flown were older than those in frontline USAF service – so too with the majority of the pilots – but they were well-maintained aircraft and the aircrews all had plenty of flying experience. Some units were extremely well-funded due to state delegations having influence on Capitol Hill and the aircraft had the latest systems fitted to the airframes that had plenty of flight-hours logged.

Flying alongside other NATO aircraft, these ANG attack-fighters and strike-fighters joined in the barrages of weapons being unleashed against the targeted ground forces below. There were defences put to use by those Soviet field armies though and the hundreds upon hundreds of attacking aircraft suffered at the hands of these. The Soviet Army had plenty of short- & medium-range air defence assets from anti-aircraft guns and SAM batteries capable of providing an air defence ‘bubble’ for units on the move while there were also thousands of infantrymen armed with shoulder-mounted missile-launchers too. The darkness affected Soviet air defences like it did the attacking air forces and there was also plenty of electronic inference used against them by NATO electronic warfare units that had had many years of training (helped by intelligence assistance of what the Soviets were capable of, a lot of which had come from the Israelis in their wars with Soviet-supplied Arab armies) as well as four days of full-on experience.

Aircraft were blown apart in mid-air or had pieces of them blown off but were able to make an effort to get back westwards. Other NATO aircraft were brought down with the wreckage falling among those forces which they attacked and pilots who had ejected now facing the prospect of a parachute landing in hostile territory when armed with only a pistol and a radio beacon that probably wouldn’t bring a CSAR helicopter this far behind the frontlines. When Soviet fighters appeared USAF F-15s and air-to-air tasked F-16s wearing the colours of several air forces fired off waves of missiles to keep them at bay; the NATO fighters had the guidance offered by AWACS support and the ability of those radar aircraft to see at much greater distances than the Soviets could with their pure land-based radar coverage.

On the ground, there was much destruction caused due to these aircraft striking from the skies. Tanks and armoured vehicles were hit in great numbers and so too were self-propelled howitzers and combat support vehicles. Soviet soldiers died long before they were expected to go into battle at the hands of an enemy at which they couldn’t fight back against. SAM systems employed faced specific electronic targeting with the older missile equipment not faring so well but the Soviets made up for that by launching many of them in a brute force fashion when faced with sophisticated jamming. NATO somewhat successful efforts at neutering these defences stood in stark comparison to the problems that they had dealing with other Soviet SAM systems though; the medium-range Buk and S-300V (known as SA-11 Gadfly & SA-12 Gladiator respectively) were a different matter. These newer models of SAMs were potent weapons of which not that much was known about pre-war and they had taken their toll on NATO aircraft since the war had begun. They were active in great numbers again tonight and did well.


Across northern and central parts of Upper Saxony the three field armies of the Belorussian Front were attacked pretty severely with more NATO aircraft sent against them than those of the Carpathian Front. Those armies were moving towards the North German Plain and on their way to engage the badly-depleted units of the British Second Army. There were three motorised rifle and nine tank divisions (four divisions in each of in those armies) present and the troops had come from across parts of the Baltic, Belorussian and Kiev Military Districts. Being Category B formations, they fielded older equipment and there was a substantial presence of individual reservists assigned to make up the numbers in understrength formations. Nevertheless, these were still powerful, fully-mechanised forces that it was going to take a lot more than air strikes to bring to a halt.

In Thüringen, the two field armies there consisted of four motorised rifle and four tank divisions based in peacetime across the Carpathian and Kiev Military Districts as well as a division from the Soviet garrison in Hungary. Again there was older equipment and reservists assigned but the two armies weren’t weak forces. They had plenty of tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery and stern discipline. NATO aircraft attacked these formations of the Carpathian Front like they hit those of the Belorussian Front though in less numbers due to the directions of the frontline to where they were heading thought to be able to weather their expected attacks somewhat better than others.

This was the Soviet third echelon, something that NATO intelligence had expected not to make an appearance for some time yet to come. It was here now though, ready to bypass those Soviet forces of the first and second echelons who had been bloodily repulsed by NATO but whom had inflicted immense losses upon the armies of the West already. The now-deceased Marshal Kulikov had brought them forward to win the ground war here in Europe and if they didn’t, they would at least open the way for the fourth echelon slowing coming behind them… another four field armies of even lower grade troops, yet again entirely unmolested by NATO attacks and fully capable of continuing the offensive that was RED BEAR westwards until the West was defeated here in Germany.

Multiple echelon, steamroller-fashion attacks with tank-heavy forces coming forward to bypass those units already having worn down the enemy were what the Soviet Army was all about.

[James G]

One Hundred & Seventeen

Northern Ireland was falling into civil war.

Throughout the Province, from the cities and the bigger towns to the farms out in the rural parts of Ulster, there was immense sectarian strife as well as armed attacks upon the security forces deployed. Death and destruction was occurring everywhere and an internal refugee problem was developing at a worrying fast pace. Northern Ireland Secretary Ken Clarke and the British Army’s General Sir Robert Pascoe were both unable to deal with this situation on either a political or military level.

Blame could be (and was) assigned to many different individuals and factors for the violence that tore Ulster apart. Everyone from Chebrikov for launching World War Three to Cromwell for invading Ireland in the Seventeenth Century was at fault for what occurred on the ground with mass murder and ethnic cleansing. The War Cabinet’s decision in London before the war started to remove much of the British Army from Northern Ireland and send those troops to the North German Plain was another factor. The Soviets supplied weapons to and then coerced terrorist groups like the INLA to murder and bomb as they did before the war commenced. There were British Army intelligence officers, personnel from the UDR and senior RUC policemen who colluded with Loyalist terrorists. Figures in the Irish intelligence community gave support to the Provisional IRA to act as they did in ‘defence’ of the Catholic community in Ulster when their country had just joined the war in support of Britain. Politicians in the United States had for years allowed money to be funnelled to Republican terrorist groups in Northern Ireland due to their romantic notions of the ‘struggle’ there. So-called community leaders and Ulster politicians encouraged that violence for their own selfish ends.

Yet… then there were the people on the ground who took those lives of others.

They were the ones who burnt down houses when families were inside them, committed acts of torture against others and gunned down the unarmed. Such crimes were illegal under any jurisdiction in the world no matter what the apparent geo-political motivation for it. Soldiers and policemen joined with civilians from both sides of the sectarian divide in acting in this manner on an unprecedented scale not thought possible inside a democratic, Western nation in the late 1980s. Belfast and Londonderry along with every other population centre across the Six Counties were turned into war zones.

The fighting in places spilled over the border into Donegal and County Louth. Soldiers from the Irish Defence Forces were dealing with thousands of Catholic citizens of Northern Ireland fleeing towards safety offered in the Irish Republic but had to deal with Loyalist paramilitaries attacking such refugees even at that point with sniper fire. The few British Army regular troops left in Ulster – two understrength battalions of infantry formed the bulk of that forgotten force – struggled to protect Protestant and Catholic civilians alike who were targeted by killers when they tried to stay where they were.

Nationalist terrorist groups like the Provisional IRA, the INLA and the tiny IPLO claimed that they were defending Catholic civilians and neighbourhoods from Loyalist attacks. They had massive stocks of weapons and put those in the hands of many volunteers who flocked to their causes all across the Province. These nationalist groups declared that they had the moral high ground and were only defending the innocent, but they were just as guilty of all the heinous crimes that their enemies committed too.

Loyalist paramilitary organisations with acronyms such as UDA and UVF murdered with near impunity in many places as they were on many occasions protected by elements of the security forces who colluded with them. These terrorists drove families from their homes like the Republican terrorists did and murdered based on ethnic lines. Crude propaganda came from these groups which portrayed anyone Catholic as being in cahoots with the Soviets and the anti-Christ who was the Pope in Rome.

Every day before and during the early stages of the war raging between East and West the death toll in Northern Ireland rose and by the morning of March 18th it stood at just under thirteen hundred…


Understanding what was happening in Ulster took time for many on the outside to grasp. A lot of false information along with wild rumours flowed out of the Provence and there were what were regarded as more important matters that needed attention rather than what were at first believed to be the usual elements of ‘The Troubles’.

In London, the War Cabinet was dealing with World War Three where not only were British military forces fighting abroad but the UK mainland had been directly attacked. There was the looming threat of nuclear war to be worried about and the still ongoing civil disturbances that were affected certain parts of the country after the mess that had been created when TtW was implemented without enough thought being put into that. No one wanted to believe that the situation in Ulster could have spiralled out of control as fast as it did nor that people there would act as they did.

In the Irish Republic, the government there had to first deal with unprovoked Soviet missile attacks against the country’s transport links and then the sudden Spetsnaz attack which targeted the country’s leadership on the war’s second day. President Patrick Hillery was killed and Taoiseach Charles Haughey was lucky to survive an assassination attempt against himself. Ireland wasn’t even officially at war with the Soviet Union at that point and certainly hadn’t been intending to take part in the conflict before these events happened. But then civilians started pouring across the border with claims of what was going on up there which were then quickly shown to be true.

The United States quickly moved to intervene on a diplomatic level when Ireland furiously protested at the instances of mass murder and ethnic cleansing, but even with their clandestine intelligence assets deployed on friendly territory in Ulster without British knowledge confirming what the Irish were saying, no effort was made to do anything else.

It was only when the realisation came as to just how many people had been killed, the scale of the refugee problem and that nothing was being done on the ground to stop this became apparent among these external actors did they all sit up and take notice of what was really going on in Ulster.

What was to be done though?




One Hundred & Eighteen

Neither fuel-air explosives nor thermobaric weapons were chemical weapons despite some protests from disarmament groups pre-war, and NATO initially following the Soviet lead in not using such armaments due to the worry that the Soviets might consider them to be with regards to the ‘ultimate ultimatum’.

Nerve agents like GB and GD (better known as Sarin and Soman) along with VM and VR also dispersed in gas form in addition to blister agents such as mustard gas and Lewisite were all chemical weapons by anyone’s definition. All six of these chemical agents were manufactured in the Soviet Union pre-war for warfare purposes and each of the half dozen different types were employed against NATO troops on the ground on the war’s fifth day across Germany.

Artillery, rockets and spray tanks fitted to aircraft used them in a tactical manner consisting of heavy concentrations against what intelligence pointed to NATO troops being vastly unprepared for their use. The Soviets were certain that after four days of conventional warfare the chemical defences of the forward-deployed NATO forces would be extremely low with tankers, infantrymen and gunners having mislaid or discarded their protection equipment when faced in life-or-death struggles across the German countryside. NATO stocks of similar weapons were reportedly to be being held far back from behind the frontlines with the combat assets ready to use them in retaliation to an expected Soviet strike early on in the war by now depleted in strength and spread out in an ad hoc fashion across the battlefields from near the North Sea coast down to the Alps. A political decision had been taken based upon this tactical intelligence and external strategic factors that there wasn’t going to be an immediate retaliation to their use and deploying such gases would prise open NATO defences once and for all.

It could be argued that countless Warsaw Pact soldiers – Soviets, East Germans, Poles and Czechoslovaks – were murdered by the employment of these nerve gases and blister agents too. To maintain the element of surprise, notice of no more than fifteen minutes was given to the Soviet-led forces on the frontlines that they needed to be physically prepared for chemical warfare and not all units got such a message in time. Many Warsaw Pact units were just like those NATO forces with protective suits and respirators being missing from fighting forces after four days of intensive combat.

This act of cold-blooded mass murder affected both sides despite being launched by one against the other.


French and American units were not purposely targeted by these chemical weapons attacks like British, Belgian, Canadian, Dutch, Spanish and West German formations were. Of course, local weather patterns and the mixture of fighting formations together in tactical environments meant that French and American forces were hit with the effects of such weapons, but there was a deliberate effort made by the Soviets not to target them on the battlefield. This political decision came all the way from Chebrikov in Moscow, not the field commanders on the ground in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and even the occupied parts of West Germany from where the weapons were launched from.

There was a very clear political intent in not using chemical weapons against the forces of those two countries owing to a belief that such an action would lead to an ever greater retaliation from France and the United States… plus the added benefit that Chebrikov saw of possibly causing friction within NATO.

The mixing of different chemicals put to use was another purposeful action on the part of the Soviets. The intention was to overwhelm any immediate attempt at chemical defensive measures as well as the expected medical intervention made afterwards to assist those frontline NATO troops who would suffer under this barrage by using weapons with a different period of lethality and separate methods of treatment.

A lot of thought had been put into this chemical weapons strike.


The battalion-sized 1 PWORY battle-group (formed from the first battalion of the Prince of Wales’ Own Regiment of Yorkshire and elements of the 17th/21st Lancers) was one of those many NATO units at the frontlines struck by the Soviet chemical attack. Part of the 24th Brigade with the 5th Infantry Division, the 1 PWORY was deployed near the villages of Gronau and Banteln on the Leine River. The British troops had been engaged in combat since the start of the war but had held their own against Polish and then Soviet troops deployed against them. Their war had been one of withdrawing constantly as part of the British I Corps’ needs to maintain the lines but the 1 PWORY hadn’t lost an engagement that it had fought in. The battle-group had taken some losses but was still in excellent shape and the feeling among the officers and men of the 1 PWORY was that this position holding the western side of the river could be held against anything more that the Soviets could throw against them…

…apart from an attack using howitzer shells exploding above the battle-group moments before dawn which dispersed VR nerve gas.

There was no warning given to the British infantrymen and tankers on the ground that the few shells which blew up above them contained such falling chemicals. It was first assumed that an aborted artillery strike against them had occurred with unknown factors bringing such an action to a stop. Up in the cold, dark skies above the 1 PWORY those chemicals mixed together (VR was a ‘binary weapon’) as they descended towards those men below, some of whom were foolish enough to be out in the open looking upwards.

In the northern part of the battle-group’s operational zone, to the west of the abandoned Gronau, those bursting shells spread the first of that VR gas before it came moments later further south along Highway-3 and down to Banteln. There were more than eight hundred soldiers on the ground including a few Bundeswehr and Belgian Army liaison officers. Within seconds, those men, including those inside tanks and armoured vehicles as well as inside their foxholes and trenches, were exposed to the gas. There was no visible sign or taste of smell of the gas. It was inhaled through the nose and mouth and also entered the human body through the eyes and the ears and well as the skin.

Within seconds British soldiers had runny noses and experienced a sudden shortness of breath. There was general confusion though a very select few of the officers – those trained in chemical warfare detection – started to realise what was occurring. Everything was happening so fast though with men starting to drool and then violently throw up before involuntarily crying, urinating and defecating. No one could control themselves let alone effectively search for their chemical warfare suits or personal kits that contained antidotes. Wild, uncontrollable spasms then took hold of those exposed soldiers as their muscles jerked; it appeared to be a scene from a macabre horror film with the affected soldiers being puppets tortured while suspended from unseen strings. The seizures that looked like the men all had epilepsy came next followed by their diaphragms stopped working and their respiratory systems shut down.

The 1 PWORY died a horrible death, one which any soldier wouldn’t wish on another.

It was all over very quickly for those immediately killed, yet there were still some survivors who were at the edges of the exposure zone. Such men would spend the rest of their lives suffering from the after-effects of blisters in their eyes and lungs, debilitating breathing troubles and immense physiological trauma. Medical personnel who came into the area afterwards, even when equipped with protective gear, would find that the particular nerve agent used here wasn’t the VX which they were expecting to encounter – VR was something different – and they themselves were later exposed due to the persistent nature of the gas and their protective equipment not being entirely suitable to be used in an area where a heavy dosage of VR had been used.

To the north of the 1 PWORY, the 3 LI (third battalion of the Light Infantry) battle-group deployed near Elze was hit with Sarin nerve gas which caused similar mass deaths, and near Bruggen further upstream along the Leine River the 3 RRF battle-group found itself struck with the Lewisite blistering agent. Combat support and service support elements of the 24th Brigade, just in the rear, escaped the chemical attack as the Soviets had carefully focused their attentions right on the frontlines across Germany, but local weather conditions would spread some of the weapons employed towards such formations in places.


Dawn broke across Germany right after the chemical attack. Tens of thousands of NATO troops were now dead or so terribly wounded that many would argue that the best thing to be done would be to put those wounded out of their misery. Unaffected troops, mainly those French and American frontline troops but also some other NATO forces who hadn’t been hit due to holes in the Soviet strike, rushed to locate and put on their protective equipment. Overpressure systems were switched on within vehicles while chemical warfare detection equipment was brought on-line to give some warning as to when the next attack would come.

There was immense panic within NATO formations who had just escaped the effects of the chemical attack where order broke down in some places as men feared that they were next. Soldiers abandoned their posts and started running, though such instances were thankfully few and far between. Everyone else was getting ready for either more chemical weapons strikes or an expected Soviet ground assault to come right on the heels of such an initial attack using those weapons of mass destruction.

[James G]

One Hundred & Nineteen

At the same time as the chemical strike in Germany occurred, the Soviets launched their air attack upon Seattle. This night-time attack (Seattle was nine hours behind Germany) against the city in the Pacific North-West came in response to the earlier American air attack against Kaliningrad in the western USSR. It was something that had been planned for a while and put on hold ready to be implemented should STAVKA decide that it was a necessary retaliation measure. After the naval base at Baltiysk was blown to pieces and this direct attack upon Soviet soil, the Soviets struck back by striking at Seattle as a comparable target.

A flight of Tu-22M3 Backfires from the Soviet Thirtieth Air Army (part of DA based in the Soviet Far East) conducted the strike upon Seattle. Eight aircraft left their forward base in north-eastern Siberia and headed for the Bering Sea to meet with airborne tankers. One aircraft had to abort an hour into the long flight and headed for an airbase on the Kamchatka Peninsula while the other seven flew onwards. They managed to avoid the US Navy operating from their carriers Nimitz and Carl Vinson at sea and also USAF fighter patrols of F-15s flying from the Alaskan mainland. Afterwards, the Backfires crossed the Aleutian Islands chain and then set a direct course for distant Seattle.

The long flight was lonely and radio silence was maintained. Each aircraft had a crew of four who tried their very best to keep alert even when racing towards what was known to be the well-defended shores of the American mainland ahead. A further flight of Myasishchev-3M2 refuelling aircraft – conversions of the old M-4 Bison bomber – were supposed to meet them closer to the target area for the second of four planned refuellings and all attention was focused upon meeting those tankers.

Long before they entered the coverage of them, the Backfires detection systems picked up the radars that the Americans had all down the coastline of the Alaskan Panhandle, through the Canadian Pacific coast and down to the shores of states of Washington and Oregon. Powerful systems scanned the skies looking for Soviet bombers heading for the Pacific North-West just like this flight of Backfires were. There was intelligence that USAF and Oregon ANG interceptors were deployed in number ready to follow guidance from those radars while there were SAM batteries in defence of the North American mainland too.

It was towards those defences of NORAD to which the Backfires flew.

The radars didn’t pick up the approaching Backfires though because the sleek long-range bombers dropped down low when they were offshore and also activated specialised electronic jamming equipment fitted. This wasn’t silent jamming where the Americans weren’t able to detect that Soviet aircraft because stealth means were being employed but rather direct electronic interference with those radars. As the Backfires increased speed during their final run towards the American mainland the strength of that jamming got stronger too as the distance between the aircraft and the radars closed. Interceptors were bound to be scrambled to locate the source of this hostile jamming but the inbound bombers were meant to continue onwards regardless of this because they had an important mission to undertake.

The interceptors climbed into the night-time skies above Washington and Oregon just as the Soviets knew that they would. F-15C Eagles from the 318th Fighter Interceptor Squadron and Oregon ANG F-4s from both squadrons of the 142nd Fighter Interceptor Wing were soon airborne and heading out to see with their radars engaged, especially those APG-63 radars on the F-15s with their look-down/shoot-down capabilities. The hostile radar jamming quickly affected those interceptors too and they couldn’t preform their mission tonight of defending the Pacific North-West.


Separating in to two groups – one of four aircraft and the other of three – the Backfires crossed the American coastline and went inland. They flew above the Olympic Peninsula, now with American interceptors long behind them, at supersonic speed. The bombers were on their attack run now and were expecting ground defences so the need was to move fast to avoid such SAMs.

The larger of the two groups took a course that sent them away from the Seattle metropolitan area where the other group was lancing towards and instead for a location on the other side of the Puget Sound: Bremerton naval base. The bombers climbed a little higher just before they flashed above their target and then opened the doors to the internal bomb-bay of each Backfire. A total of sixty-nine FAB-250 high-explosive bombs – each with a 220lb warhead – dropped from each of the four bombers before they shut their doors and dropped back down low as part of their egress from the target. Those two hundred and seventy plus bombs were left in their wake to fall among the warships alongside the piers, the facilities on land and also over the wider area which included the residential areas of the city of Bremerton.

Those other three bombers went directly for Seattle while each carrying an identical weapons load. Their bombs were delivered only moments later over the port facilities at Harbor Island and across the heavily-industrialised areas either side of that artificial island. The whole target area was lit up by civilian sources of illumination as Seattle’s waterfront was now being put to emergency wartime use yet it was believed that the city was ‘safe’ from attack. It was nine o’clock at night yet for the past several days the port area had seen civilians working twenty-four hours a day: hundreds of them were to be killed when the warheads from the falling bombs detonated upon impact with the ground, buildings and industrial structures.

Now the Backfires had to escape.


The nuclear-powered missile-cruiser USS Arkansas was in the Salish Sea when the Backfires bombed Bremerton and Seattle. After coming through the minefields laid in the Juan de Fuca Strait by a joint Canadian-US Navy effort, the warship was soon to head to Bremerton to have repairs undertaken after being hit by a submarine-launched missile on the war’s first day when up in the Bering Sea. The Arkansas had been part of the Nimitz carrier group when attacked and that damage was deemed severe enough for the cruiser to head back to Bremerton where emergency repairs could be undertaken. The aft section of the warship had been wrecked with the Mk.26 missile-launcher there, the Armored Box Launchers for the Tomahawk cruise missiles and the flight deck all knocked out of action. The guns still worked along with other missile systems, but the ability to conduct flight operations would need to be returned to the warship before it could again take place in combat in with the Pacific Fleet.

When the warning came that enemy air activity over the western area of Washington State was expected and then there came frantic radio calls confirming that Bremerton had been bombed, the air search radars aboard the Arkansas went active. Like the air defence radars of NORAD and the guidance radars for US Army’s HAWK missiles, the SPS-49 radar aboard the cruiser wasn’t able to get a track on any aircraft in the sky due to Soviet jamming attempts. However, the Arkansas had the latest model of the SPS-48 radar – the phased-array, three dimensional -48E – mounted atop her rear mast and some excellent enlisted technicians aboard who knew how to make effective use of such a system. Those bombers which had struck at Bremerton managed to avoid detection by the Arkansas, but those trio of Backfires which had just started the beginnings of a firestorm which would engulf much of Seattle’s waterfront were detected and tracked.

RIM-66 Standard missiles were lofted from the forward launcher on the Arkansas with these SAMs being fired in pairs against the bombers leaving the Seattle area. It took time for a reload to occur after the first pair of missiles had been launched and this was an issue that the US Navy was aware of and had corrected with its Ticonderoga-class missile-cruisers when they had first been armed with Mk.26 launchers like the Arkansas was. Those first two SAMs from the cruiser were the only ones that would manage to get anywhere near the Backfires due to those bombers racing away as fast as they were.

Two of the three targeted Backfires were downed. The radar-proximity fuses upon each missile went off when coming close enough to the targeted bombers and lethal fragments ripped into the wings and fuselages of those two bombers. Only the one bomber from the Seattle raid and the four which had hit Bremerton would get away from the general area clean.

It would have been better if the radar picture from the Arkansas could have been uplinked to the interceptors offshore and fast heading back towards land. Yet those USAF and ANG were part of NORAD and the Arkansas was with the US Navy. Compatible data sharing links like those used by other United States Armed Forces assets elsewhere weren’t available today between the cruiser which tracked the lone bomber that it had on its radar screens heading out to sea and even then those F-4 and F-15 interceptors had further bombers to search for.

Try as hard as the Americans did, the Backfires managed to avoid these efforts. Their powerful jamming systems were active and put to use in keeping them off the radar screens of the interceptors trying to locate them to avenge the air strikes conducted here against the American mainland. The five Backfires headed low away from the targets destroyed behind them before they would later climb higher into thinner air. Their fuel gauges were slowing how low their fuel states were and they needed to make their upcoming rendezvous with airborne tankers again… otherwise it was a long swim home.





One Hundred & Twenty

In addition to the attempt at planning geo-political games by withholding strikes against French and American units with their chemicals, as well as mixing different types of chemicals to hamper rescue and decontamination efforts, there was a third strategic element to the plan ordered by the now deceased Marshal Kulikov when it came to that game-changing attack.

Chemical weapons are often categorised by whether they are deemed ‘persistent’ or ‘non-persistent’. Those blister agents employed along with the VM and VR nerve agents were regarded as persistent meaning that lethal exposure to them would be a very real threat for a great deal of time afterwards. They may no longer be breathed in, but they were a contact hazard – especially when the Soviet attack had used a thickening agent that made sure that the areas where they were employed wouldn’t be somewhere that anyone would want to move through for a good deal of time.

Sarin and Soman were non-persistent: these chemicals would quickly disperse from the immediate area where they were intentionally spread. In adverse weather conditions like the cold temperature, the gentle wind and the light rain that came on the morning of Friday March 18th, they were only going to be effective for a very short space of time and there had been no thickening agents employed either to prolong their lethality. They were spread in an extremely fine mist that dispersed into somewhat safe levels very quickly.

Hot on the heels of where the Sarin and Soman was selectively employed came Warsaw Pact troops.


Those troops of the First and Second Western Fronts were sent forward forty minutes after the attack came. There was much light in the sky by this point and the tanks and infantry sent forwards could better negotiate obstacles than had they gone ahead right when dawn broke. This was far too early for them to be driving into a chemical environment, but the vehicles in which they moved were sealed and the overpressure systems running: there were firm orders for men not to leave their vehicles until they were ordered to. Of course, when tanks and armoured vehicles ran over mines, their seals were broken and the men inside exposed to the air around them… this was something that happened more than a lot.

Attacking westwards were the Soviet Eleventh Guards & Twenty-Eight Armys. These forces, as depleted as they were, went forwards onto the North German Plain and into northern parts of Hessen against the troops of the Bundeswehr’s I & III Corps. Both West German formations had been struck with those GB & GD weapons in a short but intense barrage of the nerve gases where again only those troops at the frontlines were hit rather than tactical reserves and rear-area support formations. There were British and Dutch troops with the Bundeswehr’s I Corps and plenty of American liaison officers with the West German III Corps; such men had joined the West Germans to whom they were deployed with in dying under the chemical barrage.

Marshal Kulikov’s usage of the certain chemicals in these two places had been to allow for the passage of the pair of battered field armies so that they could open the way forward for the Soviet third echelon to follow them.


Just like troops all across Germany – in fact across Western Europe and other active as well as inactive theatres of warfare worldwide – the Bundeswehr soldiers were either already inside their chemical warfare equipment or struggling to locate missing items of such kit when the Soviets made their ground offensive. Absolute chaos reigned as messages poured into commanders and instructions were issued to subordinates to get everyone ready to fight in a chemical environment. Bulky suits that made soldiers look and feel like spacemen were put on and vehicle overpressure systems switched on to keep the air inside ‘clean’. Chemical alerts were sounded all over the place and while they were false due to faulty detection systems, each had to be treated as real. There were panicked reports from frontline units of them being struck with all sorts of weapons while other formations weren’t answering radio calls. Higher commands – the British Second Army and US Seventh Army, to which both West German corps were assigned – issued instructions that more attacks were expected and also to send out fast patrols to get a clear idea of the conditions at the front.

And then Soviet tanks and armoured vehicles appeared.

Both Soviet field armies had taken massive losses in their earlier combat engagements with NATO forces. They had faced air attacks and NATO ground counterattacks. Personnel strength in many individual units was as low as fifty per cent with junior officer numbers being particularly hard hit with NATO targeting those specifically. Their offensives in the days beforehand had been brought to bloody halts and their effective combat power shot. Yet… that was in the past, when they went against solid defensive lines, which was far from the case today.


The Soviet Eleventh Guards Army came over the Aller River at multiple places. Bridging tanks had thrown crossings over due to the inability of specialist engineers to work in such a chemically-polluted environment. Thus the forces that got across the river were few at first due to the restrictions on just how many bridges could be lowered into place with local geography being as it was.

Two main axis’ of advance were employed: one which went over the Aller River in a westwards direction north of the town of Schwarmstedt and the second striking southwest from crossing east of there. The terrain on the ground was just like it was on the Soviet-held side of the river with flat countryside full of farmer’s fields and an abundance of paved roads linking villages and small towns. There were some marshy areas near Lake Steinhude, yet that was a fair distance away.

Between the River Aller and the Weser to the north of Nienburg were the Bundeswehr’s 3rd Panzer Division alongside British and Dutch forces: the 33rd Brigade from the British 3rd Armoured Division (the rest of that division was withdrawn southwards during the night towards their corps command far to the south) and elements of the shattered Dutch 1st Armoured Division now no stronger than a pair of understrength brigades. The Dutch and the majority of the West Germans had been at the front with the British and the rest of that Bundeswehr formation behind them in tactical reserve positions. The nerve gas attacks had shattered those units on the Aller River and the rear units were preparing for further chemical attacks when the Soviets arrived travelling fast across the countryside westwards and down upon the wider Schwarmstedt area too. If the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army units employed here hadn’t been as beaten up as they were, then the results here could have been very different. The Bundeswehr 9th Brigade and the British managed to hold back the Soviets here in confused and fierce fighting. It was found that the Soviets were actually more afraid of chemical attacks than the NATO troops were and thus this was a discovery quickly made use of. NATO infantry left the safety of their armoured vehicles to engage the Soviets on foot with man-portable weapons while the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army stayed inside their vehicles. Those Soviets needed to dismount, but they were under orders not to at that point; there had been a communications mix-up and the message wasn’t received by the forward units in this area that they were now out of direct danger.

MILAN missile teams from the 1 Q LANCS and 1 R SCOTS (respectively the first battalions from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment and the Royal Scots) backed up the Chieftian tanks from the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards in hunting Soviet tanks and armoured vehicles. Ten Soviet soldiers were inside those BMP-2s when hit and fourteen in the BTR-60s. The British soldiers here blew apart scores of these tracked and wheeled vehicles while having much success against T-64 and T-72 tanks as well. The 33rd Brigade took losses of its own, especially when elements of the 1 RGJ (first battalion of the Royal Green Jackets) battle-group counter-attacked in places, but there was only one side which was victorious from these encounters. West German Leopard-2s, Marder infantry combat vehicles and Jaguar-2 anti-tank missile vehicles supported Bundeswehr infantry in their efforts alongside the British in bringing those attacking Soviets to a standstill a long way from the Weser River. These were units that had yesterday broken out of an encirclement when further eastwards by tearing through the rear of the Polish First Army before coming back to man NATO lines here; yet it took all that they had to fight like they had for the past twenty-four hours and after halting the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army the weary British and West German soldiers were ready to collapse should another attack come their way.

The Soviet Eleventh Guards Army’s left wing, which had moved to the east of Schwarmstedt, made their crossings over the Aller River and drove southwards against the Bundeswehr’s 11th Panzergrenadier Division. These Bundeswehr soldiers had yesterday withdrawn over that river and left much equipment and many men behind. The Sarin and Soman employed against their frontline positions had been very effective and the troops deployed behind them had panicked afterwards with much internal disorder occurring. When Soviet tanks arrived, even with the depleted formations involved, the West Germans cracked here with the tactical reserves only half-heartedly fighting for the defence of their country.

Achieving greater success than expected, the elements of the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army advancing here were swarming all over the open countryside to the north of Hannover’s outer suburbs. The expectation from General Korbutov at First Western Fronts mobile headquarters – which was on the move every hour now to avoid a decapitation or chemical strikes – was that the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army would just open the way here for one of the Belorussian Front’s field armies to follow, but the initial objectives of that third echelon were soon already being met by the forces out ahead of it.

The Desert Rats soon put a temporary stop on the Soviet advance though. Attacking westwards from a starting position south of Celle, the 7th Armoured Brigade moved forward in full chemical gear into the Soviets flank. Challenger tanks from both the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment and the Royal Hussars (Prince of Wales’ Own) led infantry in Warriors and FV-432s forward in an advance over six miles all the way to Autobahn-7. The ground was perfect for such an attack with the edges of the Aller Valley providing ground perfect for an armoured assault of this nature and there being little offering for Soviet troops to dig in with haste. Taken by surprise and already weakened, the Soviets folded just like the West Germans had before them and were defeated in detail by the attacking British. Both sides were lacking immediate air support and heavy concentrations of artillery support too and so it was pure ground fight with all the intensity that came from only have to worry about the enemy in front of you rather than above or in the distance.

A brilliant tactical victory was won here by the Desert Rats over the course of a few hours this morning, yet their attention would soon be sharply focused back to the north again not long after they had started the process of collecting prisoners as well as tending to their own dead and wounded because further Soviet forces were crossing the Aller River for the second time.


Advancing behind the chemical attack against the Bundeswehr in their sector, the two divisions of the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army up in northern Hessen finally managed to get over the Fulda River. The Soviet 20GMRD and East German 10MRD used vehicle-launched bridges to cross that water barrier in a move which would have seen the attacking units slaughtered with such a slow rate of attack had the West German troops not been horribly killed by the nerve gas attack before they struck.

There were some survivors of the chemical strike here – some men had managed to seal their vehicles in time when the gas alarms wailed – but the fire from a very few Leopards and Jaguars in selected places wasn’t enough to stop the remaining combat strength of the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army from getting over the Fulda River. Those tanks and anti-tank vehicles were blasted with multiple counter-strikes after they had done their worst and then the two attacking divisions moved past the frontlines into the rear. Previous uncommitted units of the 2nd Panzergrenadier & 5th Panzer Divisions now came into action, yet they wouldn’t do what was expected of them. Each division had had a combat brigade held back and thus they were spared the effects of the chemical strike along with divisional assets. However, unlike how the Bundeswehr had previously fought all throughout the war, the pair of West German brigades in this area didn’t fight as hard as they had before; the men were scared of further nerve gases and the chaos in the post chemical strike affected them.

Those first Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army advances through the riverside frontlines had been made from all the way up near Guxhagen down to near Berba. Where the East Germans were in the south meant that they linked up with the outskirts of the areas west of the Fulda River taken yesterday by the Soviet 50GMRD and by that point that formation was cautiously moving forwards too. The Americans engaged in this latter effort hadn’t been targeted by chemical weapons though fought prepared for such weapons to be used against them at any minute. Thus the parts of the US 8th Mechanized Infantry Division engaged were cumbersome in their defensive efforts when prepared as they were for unconventional warfare with the men wearing spacesuits and no one wanting to risk damage to tanks and armoured vehicles that might bring suspected poisoned air from the outside in. They were now under Bundeswehr command due to be physically separated from the US V Corps but were unable to assist their allies in any meaningful way at this time.

The Soviets advancing towards them were turning in a southwestern direction towards the north-central parts of Hessen with the West German III Corps headquarters correctly assuming that they were opening the door for the Carpathian Front units coming soon behind them. The 2nd Panzergrenadier Division’s 6th Brigade tried and failed to stop the 20GMRD managing to reach Fritzlar on the Eder River with two hours of the Soviet attack commencing. The West Germans were almost equal in numerical strength to the Soviet division after the 20GMRD had spent four previous days grinding against fixed defences, but the Soviets were lavishly supported by extreme amounts of artillery and helicopter support in their drive on Fritzlar. The hesitation from the West Germans, as seen elsewhere – to risk themselves in a threatening environment –, was important here and they withdrew away to the west to allow the Soviets to move on towards their own objectives.

Combating the East Germans was the 15th Brigade from the 5th Panzer Division. Those Bundeswehr men were just as frightened of chemicals but they hadn’t seen the effects of such weapons up close and personal like the men of the 10MRD had. This reserve division – one of rather good quality – had been on the accidental receiving end of some of the nerve gases unleashed against other elements of the 5th Panzer Division with hundreds of its men killed when local weather patterns pushed Sarin and Soman towards them right before they advanced. Pushed forward by security troops enforcing iron discipline within the ranks, the reserve soldiers had then raced through defensive positions on the western side of the Fulda River where bodies lay of their fellow Germans in what were horrible scenes. Thankfully, the speed of the advance had got them past those bodies and not many men were able to see those bodies – some of which moved in spooky acts as the last embers of life were mercifully snuffed out – but they heard all about them; vehicle drivers and many gunners were unable to be given the chance not to see the epic death scenes that the majority of the infantry missed but they spoke of these.

The 15th Brigade fought back when their enemy appeared – thinking then to be Soviet at first but then realising that their fellow Germans were attacking them – but once again there were what many observers regarded as half-hearted attempts. The Bundeswehr was demoralised and they didn’t fight like they had before. Retreat was what they did, especially when the threat was of having major casualties inflicted upon them. When falling back into the high ground behind them, the western side of the Fulda River Valley was left open to the East Germans to seize. Villages where roads converged fell into their hands and only sniping fire from Bundeswehr units above them troubled such movements forward as the 10MRD finally ran out of steam in their forward advance: their fuel stocks had been raided to support the Soviet third echelon formations coming behind them who had had their own supplies attacked by NATO air power.

Like it was up on a portion of the North German Plain, here in northern Hessen, NATO lines had been torn right open… and this time there were no immediate strategic reserves to make counterattacks against the Soviet exploitation forces about to pour through those holes.

[James G]

One Hundred & Twenty–One

Having those doors opened for them meant that the Belorussian and Carpathian Fronts could pour though the open holes in NATO’s defensive lines without the worry of trying to force their way through mile after mile of prepared defences. The Soviet Eleventh Guards & Twenty-Eight Armys had shed blood so that the field armies of the third echelon following them wouldn’t have to do so and could instead focus on their deep penetration missions.

NATO air attacks had hurt and delayed the Soviet third echelon, but were never going to stop those ground forces. Those improvised air attacks had gone after forces on the move, not fixed in one place, and thus they hadn’t been as effective as NATO had hoped for them.

When had air power ever won a war?


Being funnelled as they were towards the openings in NATO lines to the west of Celle, the senior officers with the three field armies in the Belorussian Front were worried over nuclear weapons, not chemicals, right before they reached their lines of departure.

They were all bunched up together as they slowed down in approaching and then crossing the Aller River through a heavy fought over area. At any moment an American, British or French nuclear weapon could come and blast them all to smithereens here inside this occupied portion of West Germany before they could spread out and overrun the rest of the country. Every aircraft alarm and every shout of incoming rockets could mean that a thermonuclear reaction was just about to occur in the skies just above them and kill tens of thousands of Soviet troops. Doctrine called for the defence against the threat of enemy nuclear weapons being to disperse over wide terrain, yet that wasn’t possible as the field armies reached the waterway that was no longer and barrier and went across it on the few available bridges that there were in-place.

No nuclear weapons were used against them though nor chemicals either.

The Soviet First Guards Army moved directly westwards across the Aller River and in the direction of Nienburg and the Weser River behind. The 25GMRD and 72GMRD – second-line divisions out of the Kiev Military District – poured towards the British and West German troops ahead and their lead units soaked up withering defensive fire. Following behind though were the two tank divisions – the 19GTD based pre-war in Hungary and the 41GTD also from the Kiev MD – and these two formations made enveloping manoeuvres at once around the flanks of the NATO troops ahead of them with hundreds of tanks moving fast across open ground where there were very few defensive forces. In the face of this armoured onslaught, the British 33rd Brigade and the Bundeswehr 9th Brigade had no choice but to withdraw. They started this process by trying to fall back slowly but they had no defensive lines to which to withdraw to and the Soviet tanks flowing freely around their flanks made the prospect of trying to stay on the eastern side of the Weser suicidal. Permission was quickly sought from Generalleutnant Clauss to retreat over the Weser but communications between the West German I Corps headquarters and these two frontal units were interrupted by what was first thought to be intensive Soviet electronic jamming.

The West Germans decided to stay in their defensive zone between the two rivers, yet the British weren’t going to do anything like that. There was no point in fighting for a lost cause and trying to hold this particular stretch of territory was just that when fighting against such overwhelming odds as multiple Soviet divisions pushing forward as they were. Fighting while withdrawing as best as possible, the 33rd Brigade inflicted losses upon the Soviets but they took many casualties of their own too. The flanking manoeuvres that the Soviet First Guards Army were conducting were very fast moving affairs and the 33rd Brigade managed to lose a battle-group before it could get over the Weser River. The 1 Q LANCS was cut off by T-80s from the 19GTD and had to be left behind if the rest of the brigade was going to escape.

The British withdrew over the Weser to the north of Nienburg and just downstream of where the natural meander of the river was ‘corrected’ for shipping through an artificial canal. Bridges over which they had crossed during the night were traversed back in the opposite direction and elements of the 1 R SCOTS were tasked to hold them until the last minute before they would be blown up in the enemy’ faces. This particular effort managed to be pulled off, but then there came the issue with the West Germans being encircled to the south and reports that the Soviet 41GTD was already across the Weser at Nienburg after getting across bridges in-place there that the Bundeswehr hadn’t blown. In no fit state to halt that enemy crossing over this strategic river-line several miles away to the south, the British were unable to stop the Soviet First Guards Army from truly breaking free of NATO defences and reaching the western parts of the North German Plain.


Where earlier success had first been had before a last-minute British counterattack, the Belorussian Front pushed its two other field armies forward. The Soviet Fifth Guards Tank & Seventh Tank Armys went over the Aller River and immediately ran into the Desert Rats. The British 7th Brigade attempted to conduct rolling ambushes and to hold their ground through manoeuvre, but there were eight combat divisions in those two field armies who were all moving across the river and into battle. The Soviets had taken their wounds from the night-time air strikes but kept on moving and they weren’t going to be stopped here by what was regarded as nothing more than nuisance fire.

Engaging the British while on the move themselves, the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army moved in a southwestern direction while the Soviet Seventh Tank Army went directly southwards. Hannover and the NATO forces fighting to the south of there were up ahead and so too were crossings over the Leine River behind those forces to the east of that river. Should the Belorussian Front be able to get behind them, then significant numbers of NATO troops were soon going to be cut off.

Rather than die where they fought, the British withdrew here like they did a little away off to the north. The Soviet intention at a grand envelopment was something that Brigadier Wallace could see and the Desert Rats commander was informed that the Bundeswehr I Corps headquarters had been hit with a combined air and commando attack rather that communications with that just being jammed killing his overall operational commander. Therefore he acted on his own authority for the time being and pulled back in the general direction of the big airport to the northwest of Hannover; the Soviets were bound to be striking in that direction but there was better ground there for him to operate in if he wanted to keep making ambush attacks.

The Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army was heading the same way as the Desert Rats were, but the Soviet Seventh Tank Army moved away to the south. Hannover and its suburban sprawl was to be avoided, the mission orders stated, and the city bypassed so that the formations with the field army could go southwards and trap the right-hand units of the British Second Army – American, Belgian and British troops – down in that area.

No NATO force of any major significance were known to Soviet intelligence to be standing ready to oppose, let alone stop, these armoured drives this far into their rear.


Both the Soviet Sixth Guards Tank & Thirteenth Armys moved in behind the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army and entered northern parts of Hessen.

Kassel was avoided and the two field armies operated side-by-side as they spent the morning advancing in the direction of Marburg and Giessen in central Hessen: the entrance to the Lahn Valley which should take them all the way to the Rhine. The terrain in Hessen wasn’t as open as it was further northwards, yet the pair of Soviet third echelon formations driving onwards were going to cross it nonetheless. There were valleys to follow and high ground to be exploited when necessary but the main factor that would assist their advance here was the utter lack of any NATO ground forces ready to try and stop them either.

Like the Belorussian Front was, the Carpathian Front was having much success.


These advances throughout the morning allowed the Soviets to take great portions of enemy territory within a short space of time. They bypassed NATO forces where they could and only fought them when necessary. When the latter was done, the main body of the advancing units would seek a new axis of advance so that the penetration could continue and stubborn NATO troops would be pounded into inaction or surrender.

Of course, this left plenty of NATO units in the Soviet rear. As the morning got later many of those Bundeswehr units that had earlier failed so miserably to put up a fight when faced with onrushing enemy armour now attempted to break out of the positions in which they were trapped. They fought like tigers though found that the Soviets were all around them ready to allow the West Germans to move a little but not break free.

Elsewhere, wounded as they were by the chemical strike at first light, other NATO units tried as well to halt the massive deep thrusts that were these Soviet third echelon field armies before the war was lost here this morning.


The US III Corps had thoroughly defeated the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army two days before and spent yesterday collecting prisoners as well as consolidating its defensive lines facing eastwards. It had been the British Second Army’s premier counterattack force and put to use very well in that role. Individual formations had been bloodied in combat and a lot of ammunition expended. The Americans didn’t just want to hold onto the ground which they had retaken though, especially with the doctrine that the US Army followed of counter-attacking and launching deep penetrations of the enemy’s rear when possible.

During the night, before the Belorussian Front was detected coming forwards and preceding the chemical attack, the Americans had been preparing to pull back from their positions and hand over to the British 3rd Armoured Division – with its two assigned brigades (4th & 6th) plus the Desert Rats instead of the 33rd Brigade – when that formation arrived. General Kenny and also General Galvin knew the potential of the US III Corps and had been in the process of getting it ready to against act as a strategic reserve in northern Germany.

When those chemical weapons were deployed the Americans rushed to prepare themselves for a similar attack they expected to hit them. Better equipped for chemical warfare than other NATO formations, they expected to fight and win in a chemical environment. Yet, no nerve gases or blister agents were used against them at all and only conventional artillery attacks plus the odd heavy reconnaissance effort on the ground was made to threaten them. Attention was noted though of the West Germans being smashed to the north of them and when that was looked at in a strategic fashion, the Americans realised that where they were would leave them open to a Soviet drive coming southwards behind them on the other side of the Leine hoping to pin them in place.

This was something that wasn’t going to be allowed to happen. Elements of the Bundeswehr’s 1st Panzer Division to the north of them were under US III Corps tactical command and the West Germans there were instructed to follow the American units in withdrawing away to the west. The Leine wasn’t a mighty river barrier by any stretch of the imagination and the Americans had plenty of combat bridging units with them. General Kenny’s orders were for the US III Corps to pull back over that waterway and run their new defensive lines south from Hannover down to the British I Corps’ lines. The 1st Panzer Division and the US 5th Mechanized Infantry Division would remain with their defences facing to the east with the Brave Rifles along with the 1st Cavalry & 2nd Armored Divisions being ready to act elsewhere in northern Germany.

The Soviets moved forward much faster than anticipated though. The Belorussian Front’s field armies to the north of Hannover were identified as being tank-heavy formations and reports of the scale of their advances poured in to be met with alarm. The Americans were glad that they started to withdraw when they did though the West Germans pulling back with them were on a collision course with the Soviet Seventh Tank Army and it was clear that they weren’t going to come out of such an engagement very well. There was a newly-formed independent brigade of Belgian regular troops – relieved from guard duties in Brussels and at the abandoned NATO headquarters near Mons – in the Hannover area and this formation was added to the US III Corps command by mid-morning so that the original intention to have the armored cavalry regiment and the two divisions available for operations elsewhere could continue.

The Americans started to get ready to go into action to the north of them with the aim of starting another counterattack, this time to the west of Hannover, by midday… unless other strategic factors came into play to change that.


As part of the US XVIII Airborne Corps, the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division had been moved pre-war through airports in the Frankfurt Rhein-Main into field encampments still within that all-important region. A massive logistical effort had been put to use to get the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division’s war-fighting assets, particularly its three hundred helicopters (attack, reconnaissance, transport and communications models), across the Atlantic by air as part of REFORGER. Major-General Allen was waiting since the first hours of the war breaking out for the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division to be thrown into action somewhere in central Germany in an airmobile counterattack mission alongside the 82nd Airborne Division. However, the opportunity for that to occur hadn’t come and General Otis at US Seventh Army headquarters was fearful of sending the division into combat in helicopters after Soviet airmobile efforts had been so effectively slaughtered by NATO ground-based air defences when they had tried that. The Soviets themselves had more mobile anti-air assets deployed on a tactical level than NATO forces did and UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook helicopters would probably be shot down in great numbers should they be sent deep behind enemy lines loaded with the men of the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division.

Major-General Allen had actually feared that his division might not see combat at all!

When the Carpathian Front started moving forward at full speed towards north-central parts of Hessen this morning though, the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division was finally committed to action though. Orders came for the formation to move up to the heavily-forested region north of where the little River Ohm met the Wohra River. This would put them in the projected line of advance for the oncoming Soviets… with all their hundreds upon hundreds of tanks. As much anti-tank weaponry as possible would be taken with them and air support was promised. The journey north would take the air-lifted troops through friendly territory and they wouldn’t be making an assault landing either. There would be a very quick time spent on the ground getting organised before the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division would then be expected to fight the oncoming Soviets in battalion-sized groups, well-armed with anti-tank missiles and rockets, all over a wide area to blunt their attack during the afternoon.

The light infantry under Major-General Allen’s command was going to go up against the armour of eight Soviet combat divisions in a hastily-arranged, last-minute deployment.

What else could be done though? There were no other reserve forces available at the minute with the US Fifth Army still on the far side of France and NATO now scraping the bottom of the barrel to find any reserve available.


Meanwhile, Soviet and NATO forces on the ground across Germany, while in combat or readying to make a counterattack, all wondered when a retaliation for the chemical attack at dawn this morning was going to come. Everyone was waiting for it, everyone was equipped ready to deal with that and then a counter-counter reaction afterwards.

Politics had come into play though and this was causing the delay that no one on the ground yet understood.





One Hundred & Twenty–Two

Operation FIREBOWL commenced at a quarter past midday and continued for fifty minutes before it came to an end. During that short space of time, artillery and aviation units under NATO tactical command but responding to strategic orders direct from the Pentagon and routed via General Galvin launched chemical attacks upon Soviet forces across occupied portions of West Germany. Only United States Army and USAF assets were used: this was an American-only affair. If the political dramas weren’t bad enough before FIREBOWL took place where non-persistent GB and persistent VX nerve gases were deployed in aerosol and liquid form, then they would be tenfold afterwards. The United States’ allies across Western Europe were either left disappointed or outraged at what the Americans had done here using these chemical weapons without full authorisation and also that the strike was nowhere near as effective as one launched earlier by the Soviets.

After FIREBOWL, just as before, the leaders of nation states fighting for their very survival would clash with their protectors from across the ocean. The consequences were to be game-changing.

*​

There had been warnings that the Soviets were going to strike with chemicals before they did. American reconnaissance satellites configured for SIGINT had recorded broadcasted messages that were being transmitted between individual chemical warfare strike (and defensive) assets of Soviet Army units deployed forward in Germany and Czechoslovakia as the dawn attacks were coordinated. There was no interception of initial orders coming forward from STAVKA and such a thing was later thought by later intelligence studies to have been conducted using hand-written orders, but during the hours directly preceding the chemical strike forward units had to communicate with each other and that was what was spied upon from high up in space.

Information from those satellites was fed to NSA headquarters in Maryland were rapid signals intelligence interpretation correctly guessed the impending attack. Following procedures, this analysis was passed up the chain of command to the airborne National Security Council (NSC) on the President’s Doomsday Plane though classified as unconfirmed. Reagan and his top advisers were informed that there was no other confirmation for other sources such as aircraft on SIGINT or ELINT missions nor Green Berets forward deployed on the ground. Much of the RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire was a smouldering ruin after Soviet air attacks the previous day had hit that facility after it had previously been purposely left alone like RAF Fylingdales had been too. Therefore, nothing of any use could come from that specialist Anglo-American intelligence facility either to support what the satellites were pointing to.

The warning of the possibility of a tactical chemical strike in Germany came hot on the heels of the news that Soviet third echelon ground forces were moving forward past towards the Inter-German Border. Moreover, at the same time the NSC was concerned with the underway F-117 strikes against Kaliningrad and the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki. The signals intelligence about an impending chemical strike should have immediately become the only matter needing attention with so many American troops deployed in Germany yet due to that information needing confirmation and everything else of such great significance ongoing it was treated with a little less urgency than it should have been. That is not to say that the information was ignored it was just that further confirmation was needed while there was also no timing of such a strike being given to the NSC. This was a major blunder though not an intentional one.

Furthermore, at this moment such unconfirmed intelligence wasn’t shared with America’s allies. It would have been soon enough sent down the NATO chain of command but the NSC wanted to give their allies better information rather than alarm them with patchy intelligence.

This was more than a blunder: it was a strategic mistake of epic proportions.


Across Europe, the leaders of nation states at war sheltered in bunkers beneath ground and in some cases (France and East Germany in particular) those leaders moved around from location to location to stay on the move and avoid direct enemy attack. Those NATO governments did what the Warsaw Pact leaders did and used the most-modern communications methods to stay in touch with their allies as well as their forward military commanders. Everyone thus quickly knew that chemical attacks had commenced at dawn with the Soviets striking against Belgian, British, Dutch, Spanish and West German troops on the frontlines… and with American and French forces excluded from those attacks.

The effects of the blistering agents and nerve gases were different where used due to a variety of external factors such as weather and terrain, the intensity of the strike and if there was any last-minute preparation undertaken by individual units involved. The particular chemicals used also varied in how they effected units targeted. Confused and panicked reports flooded backwards from the frontlines to rear-area command posts and eventually national governments. Information conflicted with itself as that was sent to politicians especially as NATO members tried to assist their allies in informing them what was going on only to find that certain allies had already been told something different initially from their own sources. Rear-area combat support units activated their chemical detection equipment and immediately warnings came from those where detectors went off due to faults and also quite often traces in the background air of chemicals; again warnings were flashed backwards to governments saying that the Soviet chemical strike was more complete than thought while contradictory messages came that it was limited just to the frontlines.

Chaos reigned in air-conditioned bunkers deep below the ground where men and women had been living on the edge for days now in cramped conditions waiting at any moment for their countries above them to be atomised in nuclear fire.


Below Whitehall, the War Cabinet was quickly informed of the true scale of chemical attacks that had taken place due to General Kenny being commander of the British Second Army. His multi-national force had suffered immense losses when hit with Soviet chemicals and plenty of information had poured into his headquarters. That information was relayed back to Whitehall in a timely and orderly fashion with General Kenny knowing that to panic and send faulty data wouldn’t be the best thing to do in this situation.

Britain didn’t have a chemical warfare capability. Not since 1956 had the country been equipped with military use chemical weapons and neither was there a biological warfare programme either. The knowledge was there but not the actual weapons – members of the British military called this ‘fitted for but not with’. Thermonuclear weapons were the only weapons of mass destruction that the country maintained and using them in response to the chemical attacks wasn’t going to occur.

Instead, Thatcher had been assured pre-war by Reagan that, like the rest of the NATO alliance, Britain was under the chemical umbrella of the Americans. The PM issued instructions that the wider country was to be immediately prepared for chemical warfare strikes while she tried to contact Reagan to have the American President fulfil his promise of retaliating with American chemical weapons on behalf of the NATO countries. The Prime Minister ranted and raged in a rare outburst when informed that the Americans were still ‘considering an appropriate response’ to the chemical attack. She would later be joined by leaders across Western Europe in being furious at how the Americans were taking their time to counter-strike with chemicals as the situation demanded and would take some time to calm back down.


Aboard the Doomsday Plane, when the news came concerning the use of Soviet chemicals there was a different kind of shock to that experienced in Europe. The NSC was alarmed at the speed of the Soviets in getting those weapons put to use when that initial patchy intelligence had led to the belief that that would be occurring later not almost at once. Politicians looked at their advisers as if they had been deceived by such people while the military officers and spooks reminded them that such a thing hadn’t been said at all.

Yet American troops in the field hadn’t been struck at with chemicals. Up and down the frontlines across Germany, from those troops pinned down in the Lubeck area to the US III Corps on the North German Plain, the US V Corps at the wrong end of the Gelnhausen Corridor and the US VII Corps in northern Bavaria, no American forces had been hit with blistering agents nor nerve gases. Of course this was at once known to be a deliberate strategic move on the part of the Soviets but knowing that didn’t stop the NSC reacting as the Soviets thought that they would. With their own forces not struck in such a manner the Americans took their time and didn’t act with as much urgency in getting a response ready. The President and his top people decided quickly to strike back on behalf of their allies yet had to discuss how to do that. They would wait until those decisions were made as to how wide-ranging FIREBOWL was to be and weigh up a counter-counter response on behalf of the Soviets before striking back and also reminding their allies that they would take the lead in doing so.

The Western Europeans didn’t quite understand that though and regarded the Americans as thinking of themselves – especially as they hadn’t had their troops hit by chemicals – rather than as equal partners in the NATO alliance. Thatcher was joined by her fellow leaders from Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain in getting angry at this apparent hesitation by the Americans to come to their aid and also acting selfishly. The French, who like the Americans hadn’t been hit by chemicals and like the British had nuclear weapons but not chemicals, were also up in arms at the United States taking its time but didn’t have the urgency of their attacked allies; they were confident that the Americans would hit back.

The West Germans were a different matter entirely. Throughout the pre-war tensions and military built-up, and once war commenced, Chancellor Kohl and his cabinet, in their Rhineland bunker, had been insistent that weapons of mass destruction weren’t used by NATO forces unless absolutely necessary. Such weapons were always going to be used on their territory as far as they were concerned and Germany along with its citizens was going to suffer enough from conventional warfare. It was the West Germans who convinced the rest of their NATO allies not to use fuel-air explosives when the Soviets didn’t and they also wanted to make sure that nuclear and chemical weapons of their allies were carefully held back from accidental use in unauthorised tactical situations. Kohl and his government did not want weapons of mass destruction used in Germany no matter what.

When major elements of the Bundeswehr were struck with Soviet nerve gases and then the massacred troops overrun and bypassed to allow the Soviet third echelon to move forward, the West Germans didn’t understand the scale of destruction wrought. Being as hard hit as their forward forces were and with those troops being under foreign multi-national command, they received little accurate information on just how devastating those attacks had been. Instead, the West Germans were quietly confident that their army along with the armies of their allies would be again able to push the Soviets back just as had been done before. They did not want chemical weapons to be used due to the expected Soviet counter-counter reaction with the thinking that that would be the use of gas against rear-areas where there were millions of German refugees or, even worse, Soviet tactical nuclear strikes behind NATO’s frontlines.


Reagan’s decision to strike back using chemical weapons – along with some fuel-air bombs with their almighty blast effects – was made to not only stop the Soviet third echelon from driving forward unmolested before NATO could effectively react but for other reasons too. The airborne NSC agreed with him that the Soviets needed to be stopped from upping the ante and strike rear-areas next with more chemicals or even nuclear weapons. He wanted to save the West Germans from themselves as well as keeping the pledge made to America’s allies that they were under the chemical umbrella of United States protection like they were under the nuclear umbrella. Messages were finally sent to the Western Europeans to this effect with the President personally speaking by teleconference to Thatcher, Mitterrand and Kohl.

Naturally, the West Germans were not best pleased at what Kohl regarded as being patronised but there was an even worse reaction elsewhere to this late in the day American decision to act as they did when they did.

*​

While FIREBOWL went ahead – the US Army fired special shells from six- & eight-inch howitzers and used rockets while the USAF dropped chemical dispersing bombs – the Dutch government met for extremely secret talks in its North Brabant bunker. Prime Minister Lubbers was convinced by his own War Cabinet to vote on whether the Netherlands should continue to take part in World War Three.

Five of the eight members (including Lubbers) agreed that the time was right for the Netherlands to withdraw from the conflict. The Queen, currently across the North Sea in Britain in a secretive move to ensure her safety, would have to give her consent for this, but the War Cabinet had decided that it was the only thing that could be done. The Netherlands would need to withdraw from the NATO alliance and withdraw its fighting forces from the field back to their country.

No foreign troops had yet to set foot on Dutch soil and much of the Royal Netherlands Navy was still at sea and fighting with its allies. Yet the Air Force and more-importantly the Army had been decimated in conflict. The last professional Dutch troops in Germany had just been gassed while two thirds of the combat aircraft that Dutch pilots flew had been lost in five days of warfare with no hope of immediate replacement. Tactical missiles and rockets were raining down on the Netherlands night and day along with bombs dropped by Soviet aircraft; civilian casualties were above the ten thousand mark from such long-range attacks. Civil order had long since broken down with Dutch refugees streaming south into Belgium while West German refugees were pouring into the country from the east. The country’s NATO allies were seen to be acting in their own interests now and just using the Netherlands for its geography (USAF aircraft were flying out of Dutch airbases loaded with chemical bombs before Lubbers and his War Cabinet was informed of FIREBOWL) rather than helping the Dutch to repel those missile and air attacks. Now, the Soviet Army had broken through the NATO frontlines and would soon be advancing on the Netherlands with intelligence pointing to their objectives being the Netherlands’ North Sea coast.

NATO was finished, the Dutch War Cabinet decided, but there was now a way out of this for the country. Such a thing would be immensely painful but any external political pressure or at worse a partial Soviet occupation (would they would try to resist) would be better than an invasion which when an attempt to repel that would result in the destruction of the Netherlands and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of the Dutch people.

The United States and other NATO allies weren’t going to like this and would try as they might to stop the Netherlands from seeking a separate peace as they intended to do, but the War Cabinet had decided to go through with this no matter what the consequences.

NATO was on the cusp of losing another member of the alliance.

[James G]

One Hundred & Twenty–Three

No Communist Bloc leader was keener on RED BEAR and World War Three than Erich Mielke. Even the Castro Brothers weren’t as eager to go to war more than the East German leader was. A communist to his bone and one of the last true believers in the glorious path to world socialism, Mielke didn’t need to be browbeaten, cajoled or threatened to taken his country to war against the capitalist West.

The destruction of the Federal Republic of Germany and the absorbing of its territory, resources and people into the German Democratic Republic was why Mielke so enthusiastically took his country to war. He didn’t believe that a NATO invasion was imminent though went along with the line because he was a student of Marxism-Leninism and understood that the masses needed something to believe in if revolution was to be achieved. The Big Lie that Soviet propaganda told the world – that NATO had actually struck first – was something that Mielke made sure that East German propaganda extolled as well. To him the Soviets could crush the armies of NATO all they liked whether they were preparing to move forward or not, all he was concerned about was forcibly incorporating West Germany into East Germany under his leadership and securing a socialist future for the German people.

It was a lofty idea but one which he was determined to make sure happened; his faith was in the twin abilities of the Soviet Army to defeat the armed forces of the West and his own security forces to be able to effectively take control of West Germany behind those masses of Soviet tanks.


Neither the Stasi nor the East German Army was able to conqueror West Germany. To hold the country against what would almost certainly be massive civilian resistance, let alone armed resistance from NATO stay behind forces, would be wholly impossible. Secret policemen and armed soldiers could do much, but the majority of the former were needed to maintain the regime in the East while the latter would be hard-pressed while fighting as part of the Soviet-led invasion westwards. Instead, Mielke had issued instructions just before the war broke out for other elements of the East German state security forces and paramilitary irregulars to put down all initial opposition across the Inter-German Border and make the first, bloody stages of a takeover work.

Reservists manned formations of the Readiness Police – part of the People’ Police – and detachments of the Border Guards: the Grenztruppen. These militarised organisations had many former service members who were not called up for active service with the East German Army and instead armed and marched westwards. Following long-established plans, Stasi officers commanded these formations of well-armed and disciplined men who went across into those parts of West Germany where Soviet-led forces had occupied after fighting there. Fifteen thousand paramilitary troops from these organisations moved westwards closely followed by almost eighty thousand men from the ‘Heavy Hundreds’ of the Combat Groups of the Working Class (the KdA).

These irregular militia were formed from local communist defence forces across East Germany. Four fifths of the total number of KdA personnel remained inside East Germany in their local neighbourhoods, but those men who didn’t entered West Germany. These were men in the mid-twenties and early thirties all with military experience. There were a hundred men in each detachment which moved forwards in armoured vehicles with battlefield infantry weapons. Indoctrination of them was strong and discipline harsh even for the civilians which they were. They had left their homes and places of work behind to ‘help implement socialism’ inside West Germany.


The portions of West Germany overrun by Soviet-led forces varied in depth back from the frontlines with NATO forces to the Inter-German Border. Up in the north, there was greater territory behind the frontlines while there was less occupied area in the centre and the south. Tens of thousands of square miles of West Germany had fallen though and much of that was a ruined battlefield. There were pockets of active resistance everywhere with immense areas of hazard over which the war had been fought and unexploded munitions as well as mines littered the ground. Hidden traps had to be uncovered and parties of NATO special forces troops roamed the countryside. Bridges were downed and forested regions either alight or with countless felled trees. Roads had been blocked and their surfaces blown up. Buildings were partially or wholly destroyed. Small dams had been either intentionally or unintentionally burst along with river bank flood defences so that the ground in many places was flooded. Dead bodies and smouldering tanks littered the countryside. There were chemical hazards from industrial and military sites that weren’t always clear. Demolitions and war damage had knocked out transport links and utility connections. Places of work lay empty and advancing Soviet soldiers had looted many areas in rash incidents before being brought savagely under control.

This was a nightmare landscape into which the East Germans marched to begin their operations to ‘reunify Germany’ and also one which was full of civilians.

Pre-war estimates stated that between fifty and one hundred and fifty thousand West German civilians were expected to be caught on the wrong side of the frontlines by the war’s fifth day. The East Germans had made plans to deal with refugees who couldn’t get clear of the fighting in time as well as those who would stay in their homes even when faced with instructions to flee – this figure didn’t include urban centres such as Hamburg and Hannover which were always expected to be invested rather than outright overrun during initial fighting. Three times the estimated number of West Germans were found to be in the occupied areas. Young men of peak fighting age as well as females of late teenage age (in the case of the latter there were the horrors of 1945 to be remembered) were disproportionately missing from those ranks of civilians. Other age groups of both sexes and from different backgrounds and social classes were all found to be in occupied territory either in-place or moving around. They were hungry and scared with many wounded from the side-effects of conflict as well as confused at the scale of their situation.

There were certain people on lists that the Stasi had who were wanted for arrest, deportation back to East Germany and subsequent imprisonment and interrogation. These were public figures and others ‘of interest’ who were regarded as threats to the new regime that would replace that which was now destroyed. Where they lived, where they worked and where relatives lived were known details and the Stasi went after such people while supported by the paramilitary and irregular forces alongside them. In many surprising cases such people as politicians, judges, senior policemen, civil servants, religious leaders, businessmen and former soldiers were at home; most had fled though guessing full well what their fate might be at the hands of the invader. Those that were at home were nabbed and taken away.

Across occupied West Germany, the East Germans set about establishing their control. These new areas which would soon be incorporated into the German Democratic Republic needed to be pacified of any sign of resistance and the people needed to learn that they no longer lived in a capitalist democracy. Following the Soviet model, the East Germans started population transfers moving civilians away from their campsites besides roads and out of small towns and villages into bigger towns that they had under their control and far away from where the groups of civilians were encountered. Men were separated from women and children over the age of ten from their parents. Those who could work were put to use while those who couldn’t were tightly controlled. Census takers moved in and so too did helpful officials who wanted to ask questions about homes, jobs and families – the Stasi knew exactly what it was doing.

Those who were mobilised to work were fed rations and kept away from their relatives or anyone suspected to be close to them. Men and women worked alongside each other yet slept apart as they set about clearing rubble and debris from the fighting. Their overseers tasked them to work hard with little equipment where muscles were used instead of brains. Those who had never done a back-breaking day’s work in their life before did so under the watchful eye of their East German ‘liberators’. A few were shot to give everyone else the idea that resistance wouldn’t be a very good idea.

As well as rebuilding parts of West Germany, the agents of Mielke set about destroying other parts of it. Demolitions commenced of ‘imperialist influences’ and ‘symbols of capitalist oppression’. This had already occurred in Berlin but it was now widened with historic buildings and monuments blown up. Libraries were emptied of certain books and any physical sign of political thought that wasn’t Marxist-Leninist destroyed. Everything from small businesses to the premises of national companies was nationalised with farmland joining in this mass orgy of state-organised theft occurring.

Propaganda was directed at those West German civilians reminding them that they were to blame for the war being fought elsewhere with their fellow countrymen – East and West alike – being killed for capitalism. They now had to atone for this and the best way to do so was to help rebuilt the reunited Germany that was being risen every minute of every eighteen-hour working day. Volunteer teachers were soon to be drafted in from the East to re-educate the children once schools could be reopened while workers and non-workers alike were subject to constant barrages of falsehoods about Germany’s history post-WW2 and the current ongoing war.

Mielke was doing all that he had ever dreamed of.


The East German secret policemen, paramilitaries and irregular militia aided Warsaw Pact forces in providing security for the transporting of NATO prisoners of war (POWs) eastwards through occupied portions of West Germany and deep into East Germany as well as into Poland later.

These men were captured in groups and individually in multiple engagements throughout the days and nights. Some POWs were given basic medical care when captured and afterwards, though that was the exception rather than the norm. Thousands of them were moved over great distances in terrible conditions without food or water for days on end and no access to even basis sanitation. They were stripped of their weapons, possessions and boots as well as subject to violent beatings and even murder. Officers were kept apart from enlisted men and non-coms separated too. POWs were classified by their nationality as well suspected usefulness to Soviet intentions with the KGB and GRU combing through them looking for certain individuals: those from prominent families in the West and also those who were on lists the Soviets had which suspected such men of having access to intelligence information.

American, British and other NATO troops were all under Soviet control when POWs no matter whether they were taken by East German, Polish or Czechoslovakian forces at the front. However, West German soldiers captured were turned over en masse to the East Germans with only minimal interference from Soviet spooks wanting a select few for their own purposes.

Mielke had issued instructions that all Bundeswehr personnel from general officers to conscripted infantrymen were criminals. They were all ‘traitors to Germany’ and needed to be treated as such. The plan was to kill all those of officer rank – up from the rank of Lieutenant to General – but only after the war was won and for now officers were imprisoned in open fields surrounded by barbed wire and left to starve in acts of mass, premediated murder; such people were not going to be around to make trouble for Mielke after the war was over. The conscripted Bundeswehr personnel were for now put to work inside East Germany under assistance of KdA and regular Grenztruppen in repairing war damage behind the frontlines there rather than in their own country. They were fed food and propaganda while Stasi infiltrators went to work to sow discord among them and prepare them for service with East Germany after the war.

The International Red Cross had made a public plea from Geneva for “both sides” to treat captured combatants well and respect their rights, but the East Germans were doing with the POWs in their captivity terrible things with gruesome plans to come into play later.





One Hundred & Twenty–Four

It quickly became apparent that FIREBOWL was nowhere near as effective as it should have been.

Post-strike intelligence showed that the Soviet Army units driving forward fast had been hit hard and generally accurately by the chemicals and fuel-air explosive (FAE) bombs dropped upon them yet they had been hit with what were regarded as glancing blows. The Americans struck at the Soviet forces when those opponents were tearing across the German countryside and only with up-to-the-minute, accurate intelligence were they able to get their weapons on target. Even then, with the Soviet tanks and armoured vehicles travelling fast as they were, getting the weapon effects desired were difficult.

FIREBOWL wasn’t an overall success and didn’t achieve the military results desired; there had already been the negative political implications too. In places the Soviet third echelon forces took grievous losses and in other instances they got off rather lightly casualty wise, but their drives deep into the NATO rear by the Belorussian Front and the Carpathian Front were not stopped.


In hitting the Soviet First Guards Army, the Americans used aircraft-delivered Sarin nerve gas which was deployed in aerosol form from bombs exploding at low-altitude. Between the lower reaches of the Aller River just before it met with the Weser – to the south of Bremen – three of the four advancing Soviet divisions who were preparing to chase after the British troops who had got ahead of them were attacked while engaged in assault bridging operations. The 19GTD, 25GMRD and 41GTD were each making separate attacks with assault units forward and the rest of those formations catching up with the lead elements. The vast majority of fighting men were inside their tanks and armoured vehicles with only the unlucky few outside and even then wearing chemical warfare suits.

Soviet Army personal NBC equipment wasn’t worth the fuss of wearing it. When faced with exposure to American-delivered Sarin those suits failed to protect the wearers from oral, nasal and skin exposure. Engineers, dismounted infantrymen on anti-tank duties and soldiers of service support elements mixed in with forward units were killed in horrible deaths. When the chemical alarms wailed as the first of the unlucky men started spasmining in their death throes, those other men outside the protection offered by vehicles fitted with air filtration and overpressure systems would have been better off running for their lives rather than trusting that their all-over protective gear would keep them safe. The protective systems fitted to the tanks and armoured vehicles did much better than the personal protective suits and kept men safe inside the steel confines of their vehicles though the air all around them was poisoned and there was also the worry over whether chemical traces would remain on the outsides of vehicles. Chemical defence units from the rear would soon be racing forward and find themselves vastly overstretched in trying to wash down thousands of vehicles.

The Belorussian Front’s Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army was hit when it was driving in the direction of Hannover Airport and the Wunstorf Gap beyond. Between Lake Steinhude and the western edges of Hannover lay good tank operating ground and that was where this field army was going towards eventually. In the meantime the British troops of the Desert Rats had to be either defeated in battle or pushed aside… but then American artillery opened fire from a distance with 155mm & 203mm high-explosive shells that filled the skies with VX nerve gas. These chemicals fell from the sky in an oily form (VX was a persistent weapon) in a carefully targeted strike between the retreating British and the Soviets chasing them. The Soviet 28TD & 29TD formations had more than six hundred tanks between them and would have soon torn the Desert Rats apart if they hadn’t at once came to a stop. Tanks were halted in-place and armoured vehicles kept their men inside. Chaos reigned on the edges of the areas affected by the chemicals with follow-on forces making desperate moves to avoid the VX which the Americans had spread and then F-16s appearing above before FAE bombs were dropped too.

Parts of both the following 8GTD and 193TD – another pair of tank divisions – were caught up in the immense blasts brought about by those FAE bombing attacks hot on the heels of the chemicals being utilised, but neither was badly damaged. The leading divisions lost exposed men but the majority of their strength was safe for now and needed only exterior decontamination efforts made to tracked and wheeled vehicles. Soon, much quicker than either the Americans or the British would have hoped, the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army would be on the move again with the trailing divisions taking over the lead and much of the field army’s strength still intact.

A last minute air intervention saved the Soviet Seventh Tank Army from the chemical strike lined up against this third Belorussian Front formation. USAF tactical strike-fighters, F-4E Phantoms from the depleted but combat-capable 4th Tactical Fighter Wing, were ready to hit the Soviets moving east of Hannover who were coming towards the US III Corps from the rear. MiG-29s operated by the 95th Fighter Aviation Division – part of the Soviet Twenty–Sixth Air Army – were in the skies above where this third echelon field army was though and these engaged those American strike aircraft as well as the F-15s detailed to provide fighter coverage. The hope was that the MiG-29s would be beaten or at least distracted by the F-15s wasn’t what happened though and the F-4s with their chemical bombs loaded with Sarin were all shot down or destroyed in mid-air explosions.

The chemical bombs were not the new binary weapons and thus when the aircraft carrying them either hit the ground or exploded while airborne, those gases were released where they weren’t intended to be. Concentrated in potent form or spread in the air (to fall to the ground eventually) in a weaker manner than intended, the Sarin would cause casualties everywhere but among the Soviets charging right towards the US III Corps.

The Carpathian Front’s two field armies in northern Hessen were struck at with Sarin, VX and FAE bombs. Artillery and aircraft delivered these in greater abundance than those put to use further north. The Soviet Sixth Guards Tank & Thirteenth Armys had their lead elements attacked with chemicals and the formations trailing behind struck at with those blast bombs. The 17GTD and 42GTD of the former formation and the 97GMRD and 161MRD with the latter faced losses among troops not inside tanks and armoured vehicles when outside. The casualties were horrific yet not numerically significant to affect forward operations.

More damage was done instead to the Carpathian Front’s field armies by the FAE bombs with the follow-up two divisions in each taking greater losses. Overall though, when faced with these weapons employed as part of FIREBOWL, the Soviets were moving forward very fast and hitting them effectively to bring them to a halt was a difficult thing to do. The divisions weren’t bunched up together and were travelling forward against extremely-light opposition so that they weren’t stopping for any appreciable length of time. There would have to be mass decontamination efforts made to protect against the after-effects of those chemicals, especially the persistent VX nerve gases, but not enough to bring the Soviet advance to a halt here either. Instead, where VX was used the Soviets would bypass those particular areas with following troops and continue onwards until stopped.


In each instance where the Soviet third echelon forces were attacked as part of FIREBOWL, thermonuclear weapons would have been best of employed rather than chemicals and the FAE bombs that the Americans deployed instead.

*​

General Kenny threw all available forces that he could against the Belorussian Front throughout the afternoon. Most of his reserves had long since been used up, but the Soviets had to be stopped and so previously-engaged forces were sent into action once again.

Kampfgruppe Weser – now with the Belgian 16th Armoured Division alongside the Bundeswehr’s 7th Panzer Division – moved towards the Soviet First Guards Army on the other side of the river after which this NATO formation was named. The Belgian and West German troops were in full chemical warfare gear yet even with that cumbersome equipment worn by them they moved fast enough to get there before the Soviets could recover enough from FIREBOWL. Meeting up with the British 33rd Brigade, these NATO troops were now in a position to stop what was anticipated to be a Soviet intention to dive towards the Ems River across near the Dutch border. When the Soviets did attack, beginning in the early afternoon and continuing onwards for the next few hours, Kampfgruppe Weser fought back. The Belgians did very well indeed alongside the tough fight put up by the ‘showcase division’ of the Bundeswehr. Several attempts to get over the river in strength were made by the Soviet First Guards Army only to each time see those repulsed by extremely bloody fighting as NATO held the line here. Everyone involved, on both sides, waited for the use of further chemical weapons to occur.

Just to the south, around Lake Steinhude in the region known as the Hanoverian Moor Geest, an area of bogs and marshland, the British Second Army headquarters had direct control over the Dutch troops withdrawn into here from Neustadt. The 302nd & 304th Brigades were light infantry formations of reservists which came under General Kenny’s direct command as rear-area security when the Dutch I Corps headquarters was wound up after its fighting units were destroyed. There were many smaller units missing from the pair of brigades and detached on security duties further backwards, but the remaining troops fell back to cover the gap between NATO forces in this central part of the North German Plain. With the Dutch War Cabinet meeting at that moment there was no problems with the Dutchmen falling back under NATO orders into an area where there was little danger of a massed Soviet armoured assault occurring.

In the Wunstorf Gap (NATO didn’t consider the area to have strategic importance like the Soviets saw it as having), the British 3rd Armoured Division linked up with the Desert Rats there. They British had fallen back to the Leine River here northwest of Hannover with the Dutch on their left and what remained of the West Germans on their right. Plenty of earlier casualties had been taken among the three brigades that now formed this division – the 4th, 6th & 7th Armoured Brigades – but they were all still able to fight. Everyone was all suited up for further chemical gear and the Iron Division was now standing in the way of a tank army with four divisions coming towards it. Soviet intentions were read as being to aim for the Weser in the Minden area to the rear and then eventually the Ruhr. The British were ready to try to stop the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army though.

The US III Corps met the Soviet Seventh Tank Army in a meeting engagement east of Hannover with the Americans moving north and the Soviets coming southwards. Reconnaissance elements on the ground and in the air from both sides made sure that each side was aware of the others presence and intentions and so each strove to avoid the main body of the other to hit flanks. The area for this series of complicated manoeuvres was too narrow for that to occur with any great deal of success though; the Brave Rifles and the Soviet 107MRD clashed head-on. When the trio of Soviet tank divisions came into play – 3 GTD, 34TD and 37GTD – they faced the American 1st Cavalry & 2nd Armored Divisions. Better-equipped, with further training and also with greater individual unit flexibility, the Americans held their own despite being numerically inferior to the Soviets. T-62s and T-72s came up against late-model M-1s and those American tanks won countless individual engagements. The Category B units attacking premier US Army formations didn’t need to decisively defeat the Americans in battle here there, just stop them coming northwards through the Soviet Seventh Tank Army. The Americans fell backwards slowly at first then soon with greater speed where tactical withdrawals became a controlled retreat. The Soviets kept on coming and were more willing to accept casualties than the US III Corps was here. Flanking strikes by the shattered remains of the Soviet Twentieth Guards Army – what remained of that formation after the Americans had previously ripped it apart – harassed the Americans too.

Here this element of the Soviet third echelon was still moving as evening approached even if it was being hurt very badly indeed.


The US Seventh Army threw away its reserves in trying to stop the Carpathian Front in moving southwards down through Hessen. The 5th Panzer Division sent two of its brigades northwards to join with the American airmobile soldiers of the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division in what would be later called the Battle of Kirchhain.

Even with the late addition of Bundeswehr tanks, the Screaming Eagles were ultimately sacrificed for nothing. Stung as they were by those chemical and FAE attacks, the Soviet Sixth Guards Tank & Thirteenth Armys rolled right through the American and West German troops who tried to stand in their way. Apache and Cobra gunships trying to support the soldiers with anti-tank missiles on the ground below were engaged by Soviet fighters, Hind helicopters with air-to-air missiles and SAMs coming upwards. The numbers were on the Soviet’s side even if the terrain wasn’t that perfect for a fast-moving advance. In fact, with the forests and hills being laid out as they were and the Soviet third echelon forces here having to slow down, did the Americans and West Germans even worse damage. They weren’t bypassed as thoroughly as they could have been had the ground been flatter and more open. The Soviets had objectives further southwards and rooted the NATO troops out of their improvised fighting positions throughout the afternoon in bloody battles for central parts of Hessen.

In just a few hours, when faced with a force numbering several thousand tanks overall, thoroughly destroyed this elite US Army division and the Bundeswehr armoured forces which had moved to assist it. It was an absolute disaster for NATO which destroyed a pair of highly-trained formations for no appreciable again at all and didn't slow down the Soviet attack.

The Soviets drove southwards towards Frankfurt and the wider Rhein-Main area rather than going southwest or even west. Cologne, Boon and Koblenz sat on wider parts of the Rhine that way but where the Soviet Thirteenth Army operated on the Soviet’s left its furthest westward penetrations were to invest Marburg and then Giessen with the communications links around those towns. The Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army meanwhile, on the right (the eastern side of the advance), left the dead and wounded Screaming Eagles behind aiming for Autobahn-5 as that highway cut across central Hessen. That road was crossed by mid-afternoon and the Carpathian Front kept on moving forwards. There were French and American troops ahead, those which had stopped two field armies in the preceding days which had moved west, but were now going to have to try to stop the Carpathian Front.


Across West Germany, further north from those Belorussian Front advances and to the south of where the Carpathian Front was moving, there would be later fighting too later in the day as well into the evening and the night.

Such would occur after events elsewhere in Western Europe though.

[James G]

One Hundred & Twenty–Five

Should the RN and RFA ships have avoided being attacked the evening before in the waters off Narvik, they wouldn’t have reached southern Norway in time with their cargoes of Royal Marines to influence events in this region… even then they wouldn’t have gone to the right place. RED BEAR hadn’t gone according to plan there, and in the wider Baltic Approaches too, but during the Friday afternoon and then evening matters were resolved satisfactory (but not perfectly) for the Soviets here.


The East German 40th Independent Air Assault Regiment begun the offensive to correct the military situation to the north of Germany when it was sent deep into Danish Jutland just after midday. The formation had been involved in successful combat on the war’s first day down near Hamburg and the two air assault battalions assigned went into action again. Soviet transport aircraft flew them low over East German Army controlled-territory that stretched deep into Jutland before then overflying Danish lines. Near Karup Airbase one of those battalions was air-dropped to meet pathfinders on the ground and then soon afterwards the follow-up battalion was parachuted in too.

Rather than a direct assault on the defended NATO airbase here in Jutland, the East German paratroopers landed to the south and west of the sprawling airbase in open fields. They moved fast from landing sites to establish themselves and then started advancing towards the airbase. Mortars were used to provide fire support against Danish and American security troops moving out from Karup and there were soon Soviet aircraft in the sky too with many MiG-27s making ground attacks. Their assault came as a surprise where it really shouldn’t have been especially with the tank formations of the East German Fifth Army not that far away. At once flight operations from Karup ceased when those mortars that the East Germans had brought with them were fired far forward of the advancing troops to close the airbase home to NATO aircraft.

Penetration came of the outer perimeter by one of the assaulting battalions and the NATO security forces couldn’t then stop the other battalion getting into the grounds as well. The airbase was too large for the weak, dismounted infantry to deal with effectively. There were East German helicopters soon buzzing around, flying from the paratrooper’s landing sites where temporary refuelling & rearming was taking place, and any minute further airborne assaults were expected. Both Danish and USAF F-16s were flying from Karup but those strike-fighters were now grounded. Ground crews who supported the air operations of those aircraft joined in the defensive fight but they were unable to stop the East Germans from getting onto the main runaways and also many of the buildings and hangars to the south. The East Germans were well-armed with ample fire support available while the NATO forces here had been taken by surprise.

There were detailed plans to destroy the usefulness of Karup’s facilities (in addition to the aircraft based here should they be caught on the ground) should the airbase be at serious risk of being overrun. The thinking had been that either Soviet tanks might have come charging northwards but now there were East German paratroopers here instead. Nonetheless, even amongst the fighting right in the middle of the airbase, both Danes and Americans set about placing demolition charges. A total of sixty-four F-16s sat in HASs all across Karup though and destroying them less they fall into enemy hands was a mighty task indeed. Priority was given to blowing up hangars, fuel storage, ammunition dumps and parts of the runaways over the parked aircraft but even carrying out those demolitions was a major task that needed proper preparation even with many explosive charges already in-place just in case.

The whole demolition process took too long and soon enough the East Germans firmly held both main runaways and the airbase to the west and south as well as having made advances to the north near the civilian air terminal here: this was a military-civilian facility. HASs with F-16s parked inside were already being blown open by East German assault engineers while they quickly too were busy trying to remove demolition charges. The whole destruction effort here was organised as a centralised affair less someone overreact to a raiding attack and destroy Karup when the place was so badly needed by NATO here in the Baltic Approaches. Every minute that was wasted either trying to place more charges at this late stage or deciding whether or not to destroy the facility meant that the East Germans took further control and disabled more explosives.

Eventually, but far too late, the Danes started blowing up their main remaining airbase with radio and command wire signals being sent to charges that littered the facility. Many explosions started tearing apart parts of Karup, but far too much wasn’t blown up at all: part of that down to American intervention from USAF officers not keen to see the destruction of their aircraft if maybe the airbase could be saved. Meanwhile, the East Germans kept attacking even when those blasts occurred as officers pushed the conscript soldiers onwards. The intention was to take as much intact as possible and then go after retreating NATO personnel who were expected to make an effort to flee from here into the Jutland countryside.

By the end of the fighting here, significant parts of Karup Airbase were wrecked either by the fighting or the demolitions. It would take some time before it could become a fully-functioning Warsaw Pact airfield yet that was a long-term goal, not a short-term one. The intention had always been to knock the NATO aircraft that flew from here out of action and open the way for further exploitation efforts, which were waiting on the anticipated success of the Karup operation, to commence.


Not long after it became clear that Karup as a NATO base of major air operations was about to fall into East German hands, the Soviet Baltic Front sent more of its troop-laden transport aircraft into action.

Propeller-driven Soviet and Polish aircraft flew all the way up across Jutland and then out over the Skagerrak… towards the Norwegian coast. The loss of Karup had devastated the 5 ATAF and the Norwegians were by that point focused on events taking place elsewhere in their country; what they weren’t expecting was a second major airborne assault for the second time in five days. Their fighters which remained in the southern part of Norway were not watching the waters between Norway and Denmark due to Karup being such a strong forward position, but once that was gone the Norwegians were temporarily defenceless.

The brigade-sized Polish 6th Airborne Division was soon air-dropped in part and the remainder airlifted direct into Kjevik Airport, near Kristiansand. The Norwegian coastal city and its nearby airport were to be taken by the Poles in a wider operation expected to last into the next day too. These Polish troops had like the East Germans seen successful combat on the war’s first day and been waiting around in reserve ever since with the expectation that they too would be used to finish off the Danes. They were now in Norway though and very far from home. Intelligence stated that there were few Norwegian troops anywhere near where they were to land and that from the airport an easy advance could be made to Kristiansand – this was a roundabout route by land – to take the port there.

There was a battalion of Norwegian reservists from the 8th Brigade at Kristiansand though along with a field artillery battery of eight 155mm howitzers. The airport wasn’t directly defended but command demolitions had been placed there along with some of the towed guns already having the runaways zeroed-in. They reacted fast to the Polish landings with great chunks soon being blasted out of that runaway and most of the buildings destroyed in controlled blasts too. The Poles fought onwards and raced to move north following the route to Kristiansand itself but came unstuck when the Norwegians put up a serious fight at a little place called Alefjaer to dent the Polish advance. An organised withdrawal was then made back towards Kristiansand where ready-made defences were to be manned to make sure that the city wouldn’t be falling anytime soon unless external events brought that about.


Neither the Poles nor the Norwegians knew that Kristiansand was in the main a distraction effort and at most a supporting flank attack for a bigger Baltic Front effort to the east further along the Skagerrak which came a few hours later in the early evening. Soviet transport aircraft started unloading more paratroopers and this time those men were dropped near Oslo, the Norwegian capital.

Men from the 97th & 357th Regiments – previously part of the destroyed elsewhere 7GAD & 103GAD – now formed the 105th Guards Airborne Division along with some airmobile troops from the failed Eggebek operation back on Monday. The 105GAD had been disestablished nine years beforehand but had been remade during the past few days using these separate formations merged together. It was an ad hoc formation given an historical designation and it would operate as if it remained two independent formations barely fused together when on the ground in southern Norway.

The 97th Regiment, which had previously fought near Kiel, landed to the south of Oslo on the eastern side of the outer Oslofjorden. The now four battalions – part of the 37th Independent Landing-Assault Brigade was with the regiment – were dropped near the port town of Moss. The harbour facilities there weren’t the target of the paratroopers sent into this difficult terrain but rather the nearby Rygge Airbase. Blocking positions were established facing Oslo and troops – including regulars from Norway’s small professional army – there but the aim was to march upon Rygge and seize it… if not then deny it to NATO. Light armoured vehicles had been dropped with the 97th Regiment and those were put to use in trying to get to Rygge before darkness fell. The Swedish border wasn’t far away yet there weren’t expected to be any major resistance to the operation from the Swedes for some time coming; the airbase at Rygge was expected to be soon taken and NATO forces from them destroyed and scattered.

Meanwhile, much closer to Oslo itself, the 357th Regiment was dropped at Fornebu Airport. This location was right on the Oslofjorden and easily within touching distance of the Norwegian capital. Local weather conditions unanticipated by the Soviets negatively affected the parachuting operation and they could only be thankful that the men jumped from their transports at low altitude rather than high up. Nevertheless, many paratroopers drowned when they landed in the waters of the Oslofjorden.

At once the descending paratroopers came into contact with Norwegian troops in fierce fire-fights. The Norwegians didn’t want to lose their capital city and fought like tigers against the untested men of the 357th Regiment. With two thousand plus Soviet paratroopers committed, even with the men who were drowned and others blown wildly off course everywhere else, the little peninsula on which Fornebu sat was almost at once in Soviet hands. Norwegian intentions in defending their capital were to stop a conventional, quick march onto the mainland in its tracks though and they managed to seal off the peninsula. Guardsmen from the regular battalion around Oslo – the His Majesty’s The King’s Guard – had good positions already sited just in case such a thing like this was tried and they held back the Soviets.

However, the Soviet paratroopers weren’t about to be defeated here. They didn’t want to be pinned down on such a small peninsula as they were where the airport lay and needed to get onto the mainland. Experienced senior men and officers led the others in crossing the shallow water away to the northwest using small boats located and also by strong swimmers volunteered to do so. They reached the Drammen Road on the mainland and then started penetrating further inland and back eastwards towards Norwegian guardsmen blocking the bulk of the 357th Regiment from continuing its mission. The evening was getting later and night was fast coming; it was realised that the paratroopers were not going to get into Oslo before dark. That wasn’t the intention though as the lone regiment of the 105GAD here wasn’t enough to conqueror a city like Oslo all by itself.

Just being on the ground here at Fornebu like near Rygge and fighting the Norwegians as they were was enough for the day. The Baltic Front was playing a longer game than making a foolhardy rush into streets of Oslo with a couple of thousand men unsupported.


The fourth and final component of the Baltic Front’s correction of the strategic situation north of Germany came with the transfer up from the Danish islands of Lolland and Falster of Polish naval infantry onto Zealand. Rather than operate to the east in more open waters, Polish and Soviet vessels from dedicated landing ships to small warships to commercial vessels were put to use in moving the 7th Naval Infantry Division across the sheltered Smalandsfarvandet instead. This was an easier and safer journey in addition to being shorter. Undefended stretches of southern Zealand were landed upon despite extensive Danish demolition efforts and inland opposition from lightly-armed but sometimes fanatical Danish Home Guard and stay behind units.

Those Polish marines were then sent marching northwards throughout the early evening aiming to link up with the battered Soviet Naval Infantry of Admiral Ivanov’s 336th Guards Brigade. The plan was to have the Polish and Soviet units operate together in the morning to finish off Danish and NATO opposition on Zealand once and for all. Copenhagen was expected to be invested ready for a siege, but the rest of Zealand, like Jutland was too, would soon be held conclusively by the Baltic Front with no opportunity for NATO to counterattack and hold on here in the Baltic Approaches.





One Hundred & Twenty–Six

Both the United States and Britain each put a great deal of effort during the REFORGER and LION periods into not only mobilising their armed forces and deploying them to Germany to fight World War Three but also into beginning the process of building armies to reinforce or, at worst, replace ground forces lost in combat. The expectation always was that war could be a short affair yet there was much preparation made after the fighting started too into constructing follow-up forces for those engaged in fighting against the Soviets.

These two nations, the leading Western military powers, had the population and the economic base (especially in the case of the United States) to do this even when they anticipated that the war wouldn’t last that long. Not to do so would have been wholly stupid and possibly fatal for both. This was 1988, not 1940 though and thus not an easy undertaking.


As part of LION, former soldiers, individual reservists and TA part-time volunteers all were mobilised to join the British Army across in Germany and up in Norway too. Thousands of soldiers called up for active service joined those formations already in-place or deploying forward as units were brought up to strength and reinforcements added. In addition, instructors and late-term trainees joined with this mass deployment so that the British Army could be at peak strength. Not just fighting units but rear-area assets benefited from this immense increase in manpower.

Such an immense undertaking took place very quickly and there had been political significance for the disruption that this caused.

What Britain hadn’t done though was embark on a full-scale mobilisation of civilians were millions of men were conscripted like they were at the outbreak of World War One and also in the lead-up to World War Two. The British Army was an all-volunteer force of professional soldiers who wanted to serve their country not those forced too. Yet there were more than two million men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two – peak fighting age – residing in the UK.

Even if there had been the political will to, Britain could not arm, train and supply an army of two million. There just wasn’t the infrastructure to do so nor the possibility of Britain somehow magically acquiring the necessary tools and finances to build an army like that. Those two million young men weren’t just sitting at home ready and waiting to be conscripted either and sent off to training camps which didn’t exist to be taught by instructors who weren’t there and to exercise with equipment that Britain didn’t have. It just couldn’t be done.

Nevertheless, the British Army was still a small fighting force for a country with Britain’s population and there were emergency funds available. Not every single military instructor was in Germany with a fighting unit and not all of the TA had left Britain’s shores. Training facilities weren’t that large but they existed and there was some equipment available. The events during the build-up to war had brought about a surge of young men volunteering themselves for military services at British Army recruiting centres across the country in addition to older former soldiers wanting to return to service despite there not being an immediate place for them at the frontlines in Germany. The British Army was able to build a small ground force ready for an overseas deployment consisting of what were planned to be forty thousand men in an oversized combat division along with a whole range of combat support and service support assets to assist that formation along with the troops already across in Germany. It could be built with much haste and corners cut though not available to see action for a month at the earliest.

Using contingency plans – some of which were a little old – along with creative ideas from junior staff officers, the 7th Armoured Division was activated on paper that day that Britain went to war. The new 5th Infantry Division was already in Germany and at that point there was talk of a divisional command being given to British troops sent to Norway – which would have made those British Army troops and Royal Marines the 6th Light / Airborne Division – so the designation for this formation was to make it the seventh numbered division with the British Army. That notion of bringing those men in Norway all under one command never did go into effect, but the 7th Armoured Division kept its number and mission. Four brigades of infantry and armour were to be concentrated in this division with the individual infantry formations being named as second, third and fourth battalions of existing infantry regiments and the battalion-sized regiments of tanks being given high numbers of the Royal Tank Regiment.

The infantry units chosen to have these new formations sharing their designation were varied with much discussion taking place and infighting where senior people involved in the process wanting the history of their own regiments which they served in as new officers many years ago to be technically expanded. The British Army was a very traditional organisation but in times such as these there was little time to allow delays to be imposed when arguing over matters such as that. Regimental designations were assigned and there was no right of appeal; men were dying in Germany after all!

In training camps across Britain, from those on the Salisbury Plain to the north, east and west of the country, young men who had volunteered themselves in a rush of patriotism were joined by old hands in being rapidly turned into soldiers. Infantrymen were always something greatly needed but so too were men tasked with many other trades: tankers, artillery gunners, engineers and truck drivers to name just a few. Those former soldiers who were often aged in their late thirties and early forties but for a variety of reasons weren’t in Germany taught the youngsters how to fight. Discipline was important but other peacetime aspects of soldering were missed out in the crash courses given. A lot of simulation was used instead where in peacetime there would have been ‘real-world’ exercises, yet there was no time to spare. The situation across in Germany got worse every day and everyone involved in building the 7th Armoured Division knew that they had to hurry. They were creating soldiers here and soldiers who would be needed to fight abroad for their country less that fight take place here at home in Britain… if that nightmare scenario was to occur then quite a significant number more than forty thousand men would be called to arms.

While the soldiers were being made, the question on everyone’s mind was whether the 7th Armoured Division would ever get to Germany if the Soviets kept on advancing as they were and the British Army alongside their NATO allies continued to keep on losing ground as they were.


The British put a lot of effort into building a lone (though large) division; the United States Army and the US Marines set about building a total of thirteen new combat divisions.

Unlike with LION, when the Americans implemented REFORGER they sent complete units of brigades, divisions and corps (the latter equivalent to Soviet field armies) across to Germany rather than individual companies, battalions and small brigades. The Americans had further to travel than the British and didn’t react as fast and with as much seemingly randomness with their deployments to reinforce their forces already on Continental Europe. USAR units and separate regular formations were tasked to fill out gaps in combat divisions rather than ARNG attachments assigned in peacetime to allow the later construction of the US Fifth Army to be made up of those National Guard units; ARNG units weren’t mixed with regulars like the British did with their TA units.

Entirely separate from their US Fifth Army being hurried to form-up once in France, came the US Third Army; this headquarters formation without troops was located at Fort McPherson in Georgia. There were nine and a half million young American men in that peak age range (18 to 22) for possible soldiers and the United States had a different attitude to introducing mass civilian conscription than Britain. The Draft had been abolished after Vietnam, but the United States maintained the capability as well as the political will to mobilise millions of civilians should the situation warrant it: the threat of Soviet global domination certainly justified the possibility of immense problems coming from reintroducing the Draft. Putting nine million plus young men – excluding those already in uniformed service – under arms was too much even for the United States, but proportionally when compared to the UK, the United States made a much bigger effort.

There had been Soviet-led and KGB-inspired terrorist attacks against the country before and in the first days of the war along with the near breakdown of civil order in many places, yet America could still start to build itself an immense army with the further goal of sending a substantial lead force forward overseas first within a short space of time.

There were divisional-level headquarters for training commands spread across the United States manned by the USAR. A dozen of these were located from California to New England with the designations of the divisions having historical purposes. Eight of these were given notice to begin to transform into combat divisions while the other four were to greatly expand their training operations. Like in Britain, there had been a rush of volunteers who wanted to re-join the US Army when the threat of war became very real and such men were gladly accepted into service as volunteers were always more welcome than conscripts. Nonetheless, when meeting on Friday March 11th, a few days before conflict erupted, the US Congress and then the US Senate passed a rush series of bills that were later signed by President Reagan authorising the reintroduction of the Draft. With the looming worry of war breaking out at any minute these emergency bills went through the soon-to-be abandoned Washington with breath-neck speed though there had already been warning alerts sent by the Pentagon to those training elements of the US Army involved to be ready to start accepting draftees once the bills had been signed into law. The Selective Service Administration was going to start conscripting two million men based upon a lottery in an immense undertaking but to begin with there were those volunteers who were to be rushed through initial acceptance.

Those eight divisions – the 70th, 78th, 84th, 91st, 95th, 98th, 100th and 104th – were to form up where they were with men aged from seventeen to their late twenties joining them en masse. There were one hundred and seventy thousand plus of these inexperienced civilians who were to do their patriotic duty and be trained with formations eventually planned to go overseas taking with them older but potent military equipment taken from storage; the divisions of the US VIII and US X Corps would be fully mechanised. Afterwards, another one point eight million more conscripts would later follow them on the path to becoming soldiers with further formations to be stood up in time.

The pair of new corps commands which would be formed from those training divisions were to fast turn those civilians into soldiers, but there was also to be the US II Corps with the US Third Army. In California, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and Texas at the big garrisons from where the majority of the US Army forces stationed at those bases had left when deployed with REFORGER, another four combat divisions were forming up. The 4th Armored, 5th Armored, 6th Armored and 23rd Mechanized Infantry Divisions were all to be manned with former soldiers undergoing rapid refresher training. Individuals who were recently discharged soldiers had been sent to Europe and the Far East in the later stages of REFORGER to beef up numbers in places, but there were still many more US Army personnel who had left the service within the past year or two. These were men with valuable experience in the modern armed forces who now had access to the equipment that had been left behind by those divisions that went by air to Europe. A lot of this was on its way overseas to become replacements for that which was lost in combat, but there was still plenty left behind to train on and then equip these men; a force which numbered another ninety-six thousand men when including supporting elements as well as the 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

Furthermore, the US Marines were in the process of building another combat division – the 5th Marine Division – from former marines as well as promising volunteers before they were to later get draftees like the US Army. The refresher training and shock therapy given to new marines was intensive because the US Marines wanted to get this new formation overseas fast; they really weren’t about to mess around.

Like with the British Army, the US Army was concerned that while they were making this immense effort back home these new forces might not be available where they were needed before the war was all over with.


Away from this creation of new forces, the US Army busy moving other ground forces around too from initial deployments ready to go elsewhere. From Central America and the Caribbean, once they were sure that the Cubans were serious about a ceasefire that would lead to an armistice, troops there were redeployed like the USS Coral Sea was. The brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division which had fought in Nicaragua was to go to Europe to join the rest of that formation… the last remaining US Army major formation in Germany yet to be committed to action. The brigade of the 7th Light Infantry Division also in Nicaragua was to stay there, but the other two combat brigades of that division were to leave Florida and head for northern Norway. US Marines and ARNG troops were to remain in Florida and Puerto Rico but the US Army was pulling out of the region fast – apart from the small 193rd Light Infantry Brigade down in the Panama Canal Zone.

Based pre-war in California, the 177th Armored Brigade was a training formation providing an OPFOR mission to units deployed to Fort Irwin on a temporary basis. It had a wartime role though and had been in the process of moving to Alaska when its deployment was altered while on the way there. The US Army had decided to send the brigade to the Middle East instead to join the US Marines there. There were tanks and armoured infantry with this formation and it was moving through British Columbia when the re-tasking came directing it to divert to Vancouver on Canada’s Pacific coast. It was a long way to Oman, but that was where the 177th Brigade was to go without the men of the unit yet being told as to why that was the case.


Britain and the United States were both preparing to keep themselves in the war like their allies were (the majority of their allies anyway) by mobilising so many men and moving others around worldwide. Yet the ground war in Germany, where everything mattered militarily and politically, was very soon to be decided long before any strategic reinforcements from overseas could arrive.

[James G]

One Hundred & Twenty–Seven

During the Friday evening, Soviet-led forces across Germany sought to finally attain their military objectives on the ground there once and for all. The newly-promoted Marshal Korbutov pushed forward the armies of the East to complete RED BEAR goals by destroying the capabilities of NATO ground forces to conduct any further offensive action.

*​

The Polish First Army drove through what at times felt like a literal wall of defensive fire to push for the North Sea coast and the strategic military objectives located on and near the sea’s edge. Following an artillery barrage that had been going on continuously all throughout the day, the Polish made their evening attack northwards from the area around the burning town of Rotenburg against the French III Corps. Yesterday the French had counter-attacked the advancing Poles and stopped them from getting across the east-west running Autobahn-1, but now the Polish were able to push those French forces back. There had been a concentration of Polish fire power – supported by the remains of the Soviet 207MRD (which was now in combat for the fifth day running) – for this drive to get the treads of their tanks wet and a grim determination to get the job done here.

The three French divisions defending the area to the east of Bremen had taken plenty of casualties when fighting the Poles yesterday. They had ambushed their opponents in their counterattack then and caught the Poles unawares. The French were a numerically weaker force though and their army’s doctrine was one of counterattack and grand flanking manoeuvres, not holding onto ground with infantry dug-in in defense. They had been forced to do that during the night though and through the morning and now failed to hold back the Polish advance.

Avoiding Bremen and the defences of that city dug across the direct approaches to it (manned now by West German Territorial troops and the French 10th Armored Division), the Poles went northwards in the direction of Bremervorde. They crossed difficult terrain but to reach the communications centre that was that town would allow the whole region between Bremen and Hamburg to be under Polish control. The French divisions – the 2nd Armored, 4th Airmobile and 8th Infantry – all were forced to retreat rather than been destroyed in-place and fell back west in the face of the Poles moving forward rather than to the north or the east where they feared being trapped against the coast.

After Bremervorde was taken, the Poles struck out in all directions from there through now undefended NATO territory. They sent tanks eastwards to push towards Hamburg’s defences on the western side of the Elbe and then to reach all along the Elbe estuary too as far as the North Sea. Cuxhaven and then Nordholz Airbase were seized in the north, though the harbour and the airfield were both wrecked by last minute demolitions. To the west of Bremervorde lay the Weser Estuary as well as Bremerhaven; here the Poles faced a tougher fight. The French III Corps had some better ground to operate from here in tactical counterattacks rather than trying to hold ground and the lead Polish elements had outrun the coverage of their massed artillery. There were many self-propelled howitzers with the Polish First Army yet while mobile those guns took time to set up for concentration to be achieved effectively. The French were manoeuvring all over the battlefield as the skies now started getting dark and they repeated yesterday’s experience of smashing apart the Poles. Again and again the Poles kept on coming at them though despite being shot up as much as they were. Eventually the Poles reached the Weser midway through the area that the French were defending with their initial thought that they had split the French in half and now each part could be dealt with in turn; they didn’t understand that the French weren’t going to go along with that plan.

The French 4th Airmobile & 8th Infantry Divisions – brigade-sized formations despite their name – fell back into the Bremerhaven area where West German Territorial forces were. Much demolition work on the port facilities had already been done but so much more there was waiting to be blown up in the face of the Poles should the city and its strategic harbour facilities fall into enemy hands. Meanwhile, the French 2nd Armored Division pulled back to the Bremen area and moved through NATO lines there ready to stop the Poles from going any further that way either during the night or tomorrow, while also prepared to assist Belgian, British and West German forces south of there along the Weser.


Kampfgruppe Weser remained holding onto the western banks of the Weser south of Bremen throughout the rest of the day. The Soviet First Guards Army made another major attempt to cross over the river in the Nienburg area, where they had torn apart the Bundeswehr 9th Brigade earlier, but the British 33rd Brigade again pushed them back across the water barrier. Afterwards, the British would need a break from fighting and would withdraw back behind the Belgians and West Germans.

The immediate thinking was that Kampfgruppe Weser had repulsed the Soviets here and that they would now have time to dig-in and the Soviet First Guards Army had been stopped. However, NATO wasn’t aware that as the new commander of West-TVD, Marshal Korbutov wasn’t prepared to see third echelon forces stopped in their tracks. He had his own instructions from Marshal Ogarkov at STAVKA that if firm opposition was met when moving west, the drives were to be made either to the north or the south.

Despite being badly shot-up throughout the day, a pair of Soviet First Guards Army tank divisions struck southwards instead away from Nienburg and followed Highway-6 southeast and Highway-215 southwest. They were quickly heading southwards directly when the roads which channelled their advance across the marshlands ahead took them to the west of Lake Steinhude… into the path of those pair of Dutch brigades only just shifted back into that area.

The dismounted Dutch light infantry didn’t stand a chance. They weren’t dug-in and had very few heavy weapons let alone tanks of their own or armoured transport to manoeuvre in. Both brigades crumbled when attacked whilst on the move and the remains of them scattered across the countryside with almost contempt by the Soviet tank divisions. The Soviet First Guards Army advance didn’t come to a halt at that point either, especially when there was still light in the sky and to the east of them lay NATO forces which they could encircle should they keep heading southwards. NATO aircraft made some heavy tactical strikes against them and much damage was done, but the Soviet First Guards Army was making a last gasp plunge forward and wasn’t going to stop just yet.

Moving to the southwest, the Soviet forces rolled along the eastern banks of the Weser. Bridges were destroyed in their faces by NATO forces retreating in a panic and blowing them up, but going over them wasn’t the intention. At Stolzenau, Petershagen, Minden and then all the way down at Porta Westfalica the river was reached.

At Minden and Porta Westfalica it was Belgian forces from their 16th Armoured Division which saw intensive combat on the eastern side of the Weser before withdrawing back across it. The 17th Armoured Brigade’s Leopard-1 tanks and Jagdpanzer-Kanone tank destroyers shot up a regiment of the Soviet 41GTD but were eventually overwhelmed by numbers and had to fall back to those bridges before they were blown. The towns where the bridges were sat at the historic ‘gateway to Westphalia’ before that region behind led to the Ruhr and then Belgium. The hope was to keep the Soviets engaged on the eastern side of the river rather than letting them move up along the Weser here yet with the onrushing armoured juggernaut the Belgians responded to higher orders and pulled back.

The highway bridges taking Autobahn-2 above the Weser just a little bit further down near Holtrup weren’t reached as reservists from the West German 53rd Panzergrenadier Brigade maintained a bridgehead across the river in better defensive territory there, yet the Soviet First Guards Army spearheads did get as far as Eisbergen and Rinteln also on the Weser as the river there was further eastwards. Bundeswehr paratroopers from the 27th Airborne Brigade arriving in helicopters had landed during the fading light and had tried to stop the Soviets in the forested hills of the Wesergebirge before they could get as far as the crossings at Eisbergen and Rinteln but had failed to do so. After securing the river banks at the end of their drive the Soviet First Guards Army couldn’t have realistically gone any further as its fuel and ammunition supplies were shot. The field army had done what was needed though and completed their enveloping manoeuvre all the way along the Weser and trapped NATO armies to the east of them as they linked up with the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army who had reached Hameln.


The Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army had pushed through the Wunstorf Gap after engaging the British 3rd Armoured Division on the stretch of the Leine River that it tried to hold northwest of Hannover. Given enough time, the British would have set about conducted massed fixed defences on the ground of mines, obstacles, tank traps and multiple fall-back positions for their tanks and infantry to operate from. Yet there hadn’t been that time and they couldn’t stop the juggernaut that was the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army.

The Soviets crossed over the river in the face of British opposition slightly to the south of where the Iron Division was concentrated and used aircraft and helicopters to slow down the British reaction to this. NATO aircraft interfered with RAF Jaguars using the nearby Wunstorf Airbase before the Soviets quickly realised this and blasted that facility with massive barrages of long-range rockets.

Once it was clear that the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army had one division across the river and was now pushing another one in that direction, the British realised that a retreat was necessary. They didn’t want to get pinned with their backs to Lake Steinhude and there was also the news of the Soviet First Guards Army rolling southwards behind them. Major-General Jones, the British commander, instructed that his division fall back towards Wunstorf Airbase first before heading southwards. There were points along Autobahn-2 where maybe he could make a better stand after the pull back from the Leine. The Desert Rats would cover the retreat of the rest of the division as it started to move.

However, the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army was faster than the British were and followed Marshal Korbutov’s orders to go south if blocked to the west.

This third echelon field army was now doing what the Soviet First Guards Army was doing: reaching the Weser and taking the crossing points over it. The tank divisions assigned drove southwards heading for Hameln first before striking for the bridges at Hagenohsen, Kemnade and Bodenwerder before trying to reach as far as Holzminden and Hoxter. Again, road and rail bridges were blown up ahead of the advancing tanks but the goal of the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army was to reach those crossing points to deny them to NATO. They were engaging NATO rear-area forces as they moved while aware that while to the east of them there were American, Belgian and British forces in number; those formations were having their support units torn apart and also had to concentrate on other threats. Reaching Hoxter at sunset, the Soviets had completed their mission by this point. Their whole rear area and both flanks were exposed to NATO counterattack… if NATO had the forces ready and able to do such a thing.

At the moment there were no Western counterattack forces.


To the east, and now trapped on the wrong side of the Weser, were the remains of the Bundeswehr’s I Corps, the US III Corps and the British I Corps (the latter with two British and one Belgian division under command).

Numerically superior to the Soviet Seventh Tank Army which was coming down from the north, those NATO forces still had to deal with the Soviet and Polish first and second echelon forces which they had beaten back earlier in the week but not wholly destroyed. This distraction to their east, as well as the capture of the Weser crossings to their west throughout the evening, was more than enough to aid the Soviet Seventh Tank Army in pushing them all back southwards and overrunning those NATO forces not quick enough to get out of the way of the steamroller tearing through their positions from their left flank.

The Americans took the brunt of the Soviet Seventh Tank Army’s attacks and the Belgian and British units behind them joined in the withdrawal towards the southwest. Getting back over the Weser as fast as possible was now the immediate orders coming from General Kenny as overall NATO commander in northern Germany and so the forces on the wrong side of the river here tried to do that.

The German countryside between the Weser and the Leine was extremely hilly with winding roads linking towns and villages. The Belgians and British had recently begun construction on immense fixed defences here to guard against further Soviet and Polish attacks coming across the Leine from the east but they now abandoned them to head back to the Weser.

With all these NATO troops withdrawing as they were in the face on oncoming Soviet armour, there were immense problems. In places discipline broke down among some units while in contrast there were stellar examples of soldiering as the retreat was conducted very effectively. Soviet air attacks tried to take advantage of the confusion offered by the withdrawal yet NATO aircraft came into play to try to put a stop to that. American ANG fighters were now in the skies adding to the depleted numbers of the 2 ATAF and they helped keep an effective overall air bubble above the retreating NATO troops even if at time that was penetrated. Minefields were spread at random from launch platforms behind troops that were pulling back rather than carefully being sewn and taken note of by engineers; the hope was that even if the Soviets managed to get their hands upon detailed maps of where hand-placed minefields were they could never hope to know where those mines were scattered randomly. Vehicles which were damaged were blown up in-place by NATO units that couldn’t take them away with them to be repaired; supply dumps that couldn’t be moved in time were either destroyed or bobby-tapped with explosives to give those who would capture them a nasty surprise.

The withdrawals were to be made over the Weser at the fixed crossing points at Beverungen, Gieselwerder down to Hann. Munden. Other temporary crossings using vehicle-mounted bridges were thrown over the water too. NATO troops were funnelled towards these points with the Americans providing rear-guards so that the Belgians and British could escape the onrushing Soviets first. However, West German civilians who had remained behind this close to the front in the face of five days of combat moving closer every minute to their homes now chose to flee alongside the NATO forces when they saw how fast those forces were retreating. Chaos ensued when these civilians tried to flee with the NATO troops and there were bloody incidents when GRU Spetsnaz units attached in company-sized forces as forward reconnaissance for the advancing Soviets tried to seize crossings over the Weser while mixing in with the civilians. At Beverungen in particular, those commandoes seized the bridge over the Weser there in the face of British lines-of-communications troops from the 2 MERCIAN battle-group (TA volunteers a long way from Walsall and Worcester) being taken by surprise but when the pair of British light infantry companies fought back they had no choice but to use heavy machine guns, mortars and hand-held rocket-launchers to blast those Spetsnaz troops out of position to retake the bridge; plenty of German civilians were killed here by both sides non-intentionally.

The 37GTD reached Beverungen just before sunset and then elements of the 3GTD finally went through Gieselwerder and down to Hann. Munden not long afterwards. Plenty of NATO troops had managed to get over the Weser ahead of the Soviet Seventh Tank Army closing the access points to fall back westwards, yet at the same time many more were trapped. The Belgian 1st Infantry Division was across the Weser along with those parts of the British 4th Armoured & 5th Infantry Divisions which hadn’t been gassed earlier in the day. As to the US III Corps, only the 2nd Armored Division and the two regular brigades attached to the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division had escaped. The 1st Cavalry Division along with the 157th Brigade (from the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division) and the Brave Rifles of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had been stopped from escaping by the Soviet 34TD & 107MRDs on the wrong side of the Weser. With some unlucky British troops caught up with them, the half of the US III Corps left behind was to form itself into an ever-decreasing pocket all through the night as more Soviet forces and some Polish troops now moving in from the east ready to crush them.


General Kenny had had his British Second Army torn apart. The Soviets were now in control of almost everywhere east of the Weser running down from the North Sea to just north of Kassel where the frontlines were met with those of the US Seventh Army – the badly wounded Bundeswehr III Corps. Elements of his command had escaped but far too many were now trapped behind the new frontlines with no available method of assistance to be sent their way and no chance that those units could fight their way back westwards.

The British 3rd Armoured Division was now to the south of Lake Steinhude with the Soviet First Guards & Fifth Guards Tank Armys surrounding it and soon to move against those thousands of British troops. Throughout the Hannover area the remains of the Bundeswehr’s I Corps – parts of their 1st Panzer & 11th Panzergrenadier Divisions along with shattered elements of the British 1st Armoured & 2nd Infantry Divisions were pocketed on all sides too. Those US III Corps elements that didn’t make it over the upper reaches of the Weser were equally cut off.

Should the Soviets attack tomorrow over the Weser aiming to cross further westwards then the British Second Army wasn’t going to be able to hold them back: General Kenny had no doubt about that.

*​

In central Germany, the Carpathian Front kept on advancing until sunset and in a select few places even after darkness had fallen. The Soviet Thirteenth Army settled into a shielding role throughout western parts of Hessen guarding the left flank of the advance while also keeping one of their division’s moving forward southwards. The Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army conducted the main southwards offensive coming through central Hessen and aiming for the Rhein-Main area. There were American, French and Spanish forces just to their right yet the orders were for the Soviet tanks here to cut them off.

After the debacle with the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division being sacrificed for nothing, General Otis as US Seventh Army commander realised that his northern deployed forces were in major trouble. The Soviets were trying just what they did the day before by moving hundreds of tanks around behind the French II Corps and US V Corps in the Gelnhausen area though this time on a grander scale. He issued instructions to his two corps commanders there that they should at once pull back westwards into the urbanised Rhein-Main area; throughout the war the Soviets and their allies had shown an aversion to enter urban areas and Frankfurt and its surroundings was a very large built-up area.

In previous days, the US V Corps had stopped the Soviet Eighth Guards Army and then been joined by the French II Corps in tearing apart the Soviet First Guards Tank Army. The Americans and French had won epic battles here which should have afterwards been studied by military theorists for decades to come in how to defeat a numerically superior force by making best use of terrain, fire support and a final ambush manoeuvre. Now though they were having to abandon the positions which they had fought so hard to keep and to which channel further Soviet forces coming westwards out of the Fulda Gap towards due to a wide flanking manoeuvre about to hit their rear.

Spanish troops – stung by the chemicals unleashed against them earlier in the day when the Americans and French all around them hadn’t been similarly struck – joined with the US V Corps in providing flanking protection against Soviet spearheads coming southwards as they headed towards Hanau and the Frankfurt itself. To the south of them, the French moved to cross over the River Main around Wolfgang and Kheinauheim. They intended to afterwards move fast behind Frankfurt (which was located on the northern side of the Main) and then redeploy into new defensive positions across to the west on the other side of the city back over the Main near Mainz and Wiesbaden. This sounded like a complicated manoeuvre consisting of several crossings over the same river, but the French intended to move fast through secure areas using high-quality road links to get into their new positions. They were to allow the larger American forces to move into and through Frankfurt rather than to get in their way.

The Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army was coming forward very fast. American aircraft and helicopters which tried to interfere with its progress southwards had some success but just couldn’t put an effective dent in its advance. The chemical attacks upon the Soviets as part of FIREBOWL should have paid off, the Americans told themselves, and this third echelon force couldn’t be moving as fast as it was. Yet, the field army was as it raced for the Rhein-Main area trying to get to its objectives ahead of the defending forces expected to arrive at those.

Just as General Otis had thought, the Soviets weren’t intending to rush into Frankfurt this evening with tanks entering that huge urban area in number ready to be ambushed. The Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army readjusted its axis of advance as sunset approached and started turning southwest. The furthest drive towards Frankfurt itself was at Bad Homburg with one division reaching there and deploying to the north of the city in the beginnings of a semi-circular fashion. Instead, three tank divisions raced for the Main right between the western edges of Frankfurt and the eastern extremes of the suburbs of Mainz and Wiesbaden. Both urban centres were to be avoided so that the Main could be reached between them and the river ‘bounced’ so that Soviet tanks could reach the immense Frankfurt International Airport and the a-joining Rhein-Main Airbase. It was a brilliant, improvised plan based on forward intelligence pointing to a gap opening up in NATO lines in that area ready to be exploited.

At the last minute Soviet intentions were spotted when lead French elements in Wiesbaden weren’t hit by Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army vanguards when they should have been and American helicopter gunships ambushing plenty of tanks just west of Frankfurt near the river. General Woodmansee and his French corps counterpart both requested that General Otis ask General Galvin as SACEUR for permission to use chemicals and FAE bombs again here or the Soviets weren’t going to be stopped. General Otis quickly did so when he saw how the situation was developing but he couldn’t get an immediate answer to that request – neither a positive or negative response – as that was a political question that needed political consideration.

In the meantime, Soviet tanks from the 42GTD and then the 75GTD got over the Main during dusk near Florsheim and in the fast fading light raced hard to reach the sprawling airport on the other side of the river. They were engaged on the ground by American paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division; once again elite American light airborne forces went up against masses of Soviet tanks. The tactical situation was different here though with darkness all around and the Americans counter-attacking the tired Soviets who were a long way from further support. USAF aircraft smashed the assault bridges over the Main and assisted the paratroopers on the ground in pushing those elements of the two Soviet divisions back away from the airport – after much damage had been done there from the fighting to add to what had already been done by air and Scud missile attacks previously – and towards their smashed bridgeheads over the river. A stalemate soon ensued with the Soviets no longer willing to be pushed back and the 82nd Airborne Division being unable to finish off their opponents due to their man-portable heavy weapons needing urgent resupply. In addition, the M-551 Sheridan airmobile light tanks of the 3/73 ARM battalion had seen losses of ninety per cent when faced with T-64s and T-72s; the Sheridans had unfortunately lived up to their nickname 'Purple Heart Boxes' for the deaths caused among their four-man crews.

The penetration across the Main had been brought to a stop but stubborn Soviet resistance there to having those forces they had got across the river defeated in-place forced General Otis to think about the future survival of his overall command rather than what the West Germans wanted. He had seen what had happened in northern Germany with the US III Corps having half its number left on the wrong side of the Weser and being pocketed there and was aware that that was what had nearly happened to his US V Corps. He expected that come dawn the Soviets would push forward again and try to trap his American troops in Frankfurt to be dealt with at leisure. Now, the West Germans wanted him to hold onto Frankfurt but that wasn’t militarily feasible: he needed to pull back across the Main to defend against an encirclement of the US V Corps. By moving southwards his new lines would be anchored on the French in Wiesbaden and Mainz to Frankfurt Airport and along to the Darmstadt area all to the east of the Rhine.

The US V Corps would withdraw from Frankfurt during the night though they would be moving even further away from the 8th Mechanized Infantry Division now left very far away across in eastern Hessen.


In northern Bavaria, equally tough decisions had to be made after the evening’s fighting there too.

There was a third Carpathian Front field army: the Soviet Fourteenth Guards Army. This formation consisted of four motorised rifle divisions of Category B troops based in peacetime across the Moldavian SSR. It had moved slowly across the length of Czechoslovakia during the war and not been spotted last night when the other five third echelon forces had been. It only moved into combat late on March 18th due to air attacks unconnected to its movement having hit transport links across western Czechoslovakia very hard. Early estimates had the Soviet Fourteenth Guards Army moving through Franconia where the second echelon Soviet Eight Tank Army was meant to have achieved success yesterday, but despite the Canadians being torn apart, RED BEAR goals hadn’t been achieved there.

Instead of attacking the US VII Corps in Franconia where the Americans there were concentrated and now veterans, the Soviet Fourteenth Guards Army was directed to the south of them coming across the border from Bohemia into central Bavaria. Back on the war’s first day the Czechoslovaks had charged towards the distant Nuremburg before coming unstuck ahead of Amberg. They had followed Autobahn-6 there through the Bavarian Forest but the failure of airmobile operations on their flanks and ahead of them had allowed a successful counterattack by the Bundeswehr’s 10th Panzer Division to stop them. Those West German troops had been gassed this morning though and now the Soviets poured through the Bavarian Forest aiming to do what the Czechoslovaks hadn’t been able to do and get deep into Bavaria… while also threatening the flank of the US VII Corps to the northwest.

The Soviets didn’t move as fast as they wanted and found that a significant part of the 10th Panzer Division remained active and were assisted by paratroopers of the 25th Fallschirmjager Brigade acting as mobile anti-tank teams, yet they still managed to advance a long way before sunset and then dusk darkened the sky. Amberg and its communications links were passed before the furthest the Soviet Fourteenth Guards Army could get westwards was a little place called Alfeld. The Soviets went northwest too and reached Pegnitz as well as the US Army training area of Grafenwohr. American troops met them in those drives northwest and it was quickly seen that the Americans were overstretched covering an immense area: facing the East Germans edging forward out of Thüringen to having to guard against the Soviet Eighth Tank Army and the remains of the Soviet Thirty-Eighth Army inside Franconia.

As anticipated, orders came down from General Otis to his forces in northern and now central Bavaria that they needed to begin to withdraw back westwards. With Soviet forces across the Main near Frankfurt everyone to the east was extremely exposed to a deep envelopment manoeuvre tomorrow should the Soviets be able to pull something like that off with their Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army co-ordinating with the Soviet Fourteenth Guards Army.

The US VII Corps was to start to withdraw and spent the night in full retreat all the way back towards Wurzburg and Nuremburg. A huge amount of West German territory that had seen victorious defensive efforts made to keep it out of enemy hands was now to be given up without a fight.


To the south of the penetration made by the Soviet Fourteenth Guards Army, in southeastern Bavaria, the remains of the Bundeswehr II Corps fighting there – the 1st Mountain & 4th Panzergrenadier Divisions – faced a nerve gas attack in the morning and then they were attacked by Czechoslovak troops throughout the day. By the evening, after holding the Czechoslovak Fourth Army back as best as possible for most of the day, the Bundeswehr forces here finally started to give way. Too many good units had been lost during the chemical weapons and that Soviet drive deep into central Bavaria threatened their left flank.

Previously their lines had been on the eastern side of the Danube but now they started to withdraw back over the river from near Regensburg down to Passau on the Austrian border. There were French troops from their I Corps now moving in ahead to the north of them to replace the 10th Panzer Division in the line and keep contact with the flank of the falling back Americans. If the French hadn’t been available then the Bundeswehr II Corps would have had to find troops that it didn’t have to spare to cover that gap which had opened up on their flank.

Overall, it wasn’t a retreat on the scale of the US VII Corps, but one which the West Germans didn’t want to do and only did due to the absolute urgency of the tactical situation.

*​

NATO appeared to have lost the ground war in Germany late on Wednesday March 16th when strategic ground reserves had been committed across Lower Saxony and Hessen. They hadn’t known then that such desperate counterattacks against Soviet second echelon forces would cost them as it did two days later, but when the third echelon forces struck today there had been no heavy counterattack forces left for NATO to deploy. Those forces which had managed to retreat ahead of Soviet encirclement and envelopment efforts had fates which contrasted sharply with NATO troops which hadn’t been able to escape.

The Soviets hadn’t known back on Wednesday that they had won but when Marshal Korbutov was able to review the overall situation late on Friday he now could see that RED BEAR with regard to Germany was over with. While there were opportunities to do so, there was no need for any major efforts to be made tomorrow to drive westwards. NATO had been beaten here on the ground in Germany and they were incapable of counter-attacking back eastwards let alone ever being in a position yet again to launch Barbarossa #2: the exact reason while RED BEAR was launched. In an idea situation, near Frankfurt the Americans would have been trapped there but their air power had saved them there along with the quick use of their paratroopers. There would be no need to make further major efforts tomorrow and instead he planned to follow new orders which were arriving from STAVKA to concentrate on eliminating and forcing the surrender of pockets of NATO resistance trapped behind the frontlines, especially in northern Germany, and to prepare for the arrival of fourth echelon forces – four field armies of the Reserve Front now moving forward through Poland with Category B, and even some C, units – to help defend what had been won in combat. Politics and events elsewhere were to now come into play but just in case those American and French forces far away in distant western France were foolish enough to try and strike eastwards, he needed to be ready. They were supposed to be lower quality units and not in great number as well as being a few days movement away: he and Marshal Ogarkov both regarded such apparent NATO ‘reserves’ with contempt.

As far as the Soviets were concerned, the war would now be all about politics… apart from a few matters to be cleared up in northern Norway.

[James G]

One Hundred & Twenty–Eight

No chemical weapons were used by either side in northern Norway.

Both sides had prepared themselves for the use of weapons of mass destruction after the events in Germany, but there was no deployment of them neither thermobaric and FAE bombs. In making preparations for the defence against such weapons, NATO defensive and Soviet offensive forces in theatre did little throughout the much of the day when it came to actual fighting. To those involved in World War Three up here they knew that this was a sideshow yet previously the intensity of the fighting had matched that undertaken in Germany. The cold Arctic weather had caused as many casualties as actual combat with frostbite and deaths from exposure taking place as well as accidents occurring by men operating weapons of war in a hostile environment with thick snow and freezing temperatures.

The Soviet offensive had been stopped cold. Eastern parts of Finmark were under their control yet after their offensives out of the Finnish Wedge into Fortress Norway and northern slivers of Sweden had been halted, the Soviet Sixth Army had been pushed back over the border into ‘neutral’ Finland.

Before the news came that the Soviets had sent airborne troops into the southern reaches of Norway around Kristiansand and Oslo, to clearly build upon their hold over Sola Airport near Stavanger, the thinking had been that NATO could go over on the offensive in northern Norway. The US Marines had a firm grip upon the Altafjorden area now with the possibility of using them and their base of operations to move towards eastern Finmark. Plenty of Norwegian troops in the Fortress Norway area had yet to be committed to action while there were well-trained British forces available with the 5th Airborne Brigade and Royal Marines who had fought at Skibotn. The US 10th Light Infantry Division was a light but mobile force with the US 7th Light Infantry Division on its way to Norway as well. Using land-based air support as well as those US Navy aircraft from the USS Eisenhower there were preliminary plans being made for the start of an offensive tomorrow towards Lakselv and the Porsangerfjorden area.

But then Soviet paratroopers arrived in the south.

Kristiansand, Oslo and Stavanger were down in southern Norway – a great distance away – yet all of Norway along with Denmark and Iceland were all part of the Allied Forces Northern Europe command under General Howlett. Previously, Royal Marines had been tasked to move away southwards before they had been attacked while loading onto ships in the waters off Narvik. General Howlett couldn’t allow what was happening elsewhere within the geographical area he commanded to be ignored just because the war had been so successfully prosecuted in northern Norway.


But then there was Sweden.

The Swedes had military forces available in the southern parts of Scandinavia though and were eager to prosecute the war which they hadn’t wanted to get involved in but had been unjustly attacked in as part of an unprovoked Soviet move. They had four combat divisions – which had been mobilised over the past few days – in the southern parts of their country and these formations were all now available for wartime operations. The new emergency government had a strong military influence with the Swedish Armed Forces making it clear that the best interests for the country for the time being were to fight alongside NATO while remaining outside that organisation in certain fields: officially, Sweden was a co-belligerent in the war against the Soviet Union.

Sweden had complicated relations going back hundreds of years with both its NATO neighbours Denmark and Norway yet this was 1988, not 1675. There were extremely friendly ties between the Scandinavian countries and those two nations had too been attacked by Soviet forces with invasions taking place of both. Sweden, furious at what had happened to her, acted to assist them both.

Down in Scania – the southernmost Swedish provinces – the 11th & 13th Army Divisions were both being prepared to cross the Oresund and move into Zealand. The well-equipped if untested Swedish troops of these formations would join Danish and what remained of multi-national NATO troops there aiming to keep Copenhagen out of Soviet hands. Up in western Sweden, near southern Norway, the two other Swedish mobilised divisional commands – the 1st & 3rd Army Divisions – had been without an overall mission until those Soviet paratroopers began to land along Norway’s southern shores. During the late evening of March 18th, all four Swedish divisions started to move towards the Norwegian border and also the waters that lay between Scania and Zealand.


Swedish moves to aid NATO in the south went alongside the further movements of their army inside the north-central parts of their country up towards the border with Finland. NATO commanders across in northern Norway were now less worried about their right flank after Swedish troops had been bloodied in combat and were moving reinforcements northwards too. Still though, they wanted to go over on the offensive in Finmark rather than waiting for the Soviets to make another attack in the north again… should they be able to find any forces to do so.

When attention returned during the late hours again to how to further act, there were voices once more for offensive action to be taken. The Norwegians wanted the Soviets off their soil and also pushed out of Finnish Lapland as well. They argued that NATO intelligence showed the Soviet Sixth Army was finished as a fighting force and was now no more than a collection of armed men without purpose. Moreover, if further intelligence was to be believed, then there were no more Soviet ground forces until reserve units forming up far away in the Kola Peninsula and wholly incapable of supporting those westwards of them. The time was rife, it was argued, for NATO to strike towards Lakselv and Porsangerfjorden just as had been earlier spoken off.

These discussions of strategy were interrupted by a massive Soviet air attack against the Troms area, behind the NATO frontlines and in the region north of Narvik in Fortress Norway, which came just after darkness.


Those Soviet Naval Aviation raketonosets aircraft that had caused NATO plenty of losses at sea were sent against land targets tonight rather than operating out to sea. The Soviet Northern Fleet high command wasn’t happy at all with this and argued that the aircrews were inexperienced for overland operations, but they were joined by Long-Range Aviation Backfires and Badgers in targeting the Troms area upon the specific instructions of the commander of the Northwest-TVD.

More than a hundred of the missile-bombers were loaded with masses of free-fall heavy bombs instead of cruise missiles and lifted off from their bases on the Kola Peninsula with little fuel in their tanks. They weren’t making a particularly long trip just one to get to the Troms area and back rather than going far out to sea; the less fuel carried the more bombs could be brought along. After crossing Lapland and then entering Finmark, the raketonosets now operating as heavy bombers deployed into small flights of four and six aircraft rather than massing in squadron and regimental strength. They didn’t need naval reconnaissance Bears to guide them to their targets as those were fixed and not mobile.

NATO E-3 airborne radar aircraft detected many of the flights even when the bombers were coming very fast and at low level but missed others as there was a lot of electronic jamming in the air along with the Soviet aircraft using terrain to mask their approaches in places. Fighters climbed up to meet them and SAM batteries readied for engagements but the Backfires and Badgers kept on coming as they followed the orders of their superiors which said that NATO wouldn’t be able to handle an air attack like this.

There were airborne interceptions and successful SAM engagements yet still the Soviet planners of the air attack had been correct; their strategy paid off as they overwhelmed NATO air defences on a temporary basis and started delivering heavy bombs onto fixed targets.

Bardufoss Airbase was the focus of many of the high-speed air attacks using dozens of 500lb high-explosive bombs. The lone runway, the taxiways, the flight ramp and the facilities were all struck by those falling bombs. There were NATO aircraft here in shelters but also in hangars and those in the unprotected latter went up in flames along with the majority of the airbase’s buildings. Other bombs missed the airbase due to pilot error, unpredictable gusts of Arctic wind and also when attacking aircraft had to avoid attacks right at the crucial moment. The snow-covered empty terrain around the airbase was soon littered with bomb impacts but so too was the recently-abandoned town of Andselv.

Other bombers struck at inland transport links through the mountains with the aim of having their bombs block roads and knock down bridges over rivers running towards the nearby sea. Small towns that served as communications centres were hit and so too were coastal harbours were NATO shipping was suspected to be using.

The city of Tromso was also targeted. It was full of refugees from across northern Norway who had been forced to leave their homes and had yet to be relocated southwards. The Soviets bombed it due to the port and the airport there and didn’t care for civilian casualties inflicted. Tromsoya Island was left engulfed in flames in many places afterwards, especially when not one but two Badgers crashed into the small island when carrying bombs and enough fuel to take them home after their aborted bombing attacks.

After an hour, the air attack was over. NATO claimed thirty-six raketonosets killed by fighters and SAMs with eleven of those wearing Soviet Naval Aviation colours and conducting strikes against land rather than ships; the Northern Fleet couldn’t afford even such modest losses such as these and weren’t any happier after their aircraft were returned to their operational control. Meanwhile, a wide area behind the frontlines up in northern Norway had been hit. The Soviet bombs had fallen everywhere and even when they hadn’t caused overt destruction to NATO war-fighting assets they did a lot of damage to the war effort up here due to the disruption and chaos that they inflicted.

All talk of NATO offensive action was called off for the time being. If NATO had known they would have taken consolation in the fact that the Northwest-TVD commander thought that more damage had been done than had been, yet that was a different matter entirely and not something which they could know or yet understand the major strategic implications of.





One Hundred & Twenty–Nine

Vienna was a city on edge.

The people who called the Austrian capital home were scared that the war ravaging most of Europe would at any moment spread to their country and their city. Troops from the fully-mobilised Austrian Army patrolled the streets alongside the police force and all of these armed men were nervous like the populous was that war would come to Vienna. Tens of thousands had fled, fearing that Vienna might become a target in a cross-hemisphere nuclear war, leaving behind their homes and jobs while causing immense destruction to the Austrian economy.

There were diplomats still in Vienna along with spooks from many nations too. Throughout World War Three and its immediate aftermath this historic city at the heart of Central Europe would have a major part to play in inter-governmental relations and espionage that went alongside the fighting involving millions.


Henry Grunwald, the Austrian-born magazine editor who served as the United States Ambassador Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary to his native land, had remained in Vienna along with a reduced staff at the diplomatic mission in the Alsergrund district. Acting under instructions from Secretary of State Grassley who remained in New York at the United Nations, Grunwald had been busy like American diplomats worldwide in making sure that the world knew that the United States was assisting in the defence of the West against Soviet-led aggression. He had been dealing with the Austrian government and diplomats from foreign nations in Vienna in making sure that the message was constantly being put across to that effect and countering Soviet propaganda spreading their Big Lie.

While a political appointee, not a career diplomat, Grunwald had been doing a good enough job for the past five days of warfare. He knew that the Austrians had no doubt that he was telling the truth and that they understood who was morally right as opposed to who was wrong. With Vienna being also home to a significant UN presence to rival both New York and Geneva, there was significant work for him to do in representing his nation here in the Austrian capital.

Working all hours of the day and night, broken only by short periods of often interrupted sleep, Grunwald dealt as best as he could with the surprise arrival at the US Embassy late in the evening of March 18th. Visiting unannounced at the now heavily-guarded complex – Austrian security forces were deployed outside – was the Cultural Attaché from the Soviet Embassy over in the eastern Landstrasse district. That Cultural Attaché was regarded as a KGB agent here in Vienna whom Grunwald had previously been briefed upon: now he was here at the Embassy asking to deliver a personal message to the United States Ambassador.

Acting on his own initiative (though with the backing of his State Department personnel), Grunwald allowed the Soviet access to the Embassy and then had a brief conversation with the man using interpreters. He was told that at the UN complex down alongside the Danube was ‘a spokesmen for Comrade Chebrikov for foreign relations’ and this person here in Vienna was Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tikhonov.

Grunwald was rapidly informed of who Tikhonov was and his high positions in the Soviet power structure until Gorbachev had gotten rid of the now seventy-two year-old politician. What he was doing in Vienna tonight apparently representing Chebrikov those State Department diplomats couldn’t whisper in the ears of Grunwald because they were dumbstruck at such a move, let alone the apparent request to meet with the Ambassador of here with absolutely no notice.


An hour later, Grunwald was at the UN complex. He had spoken with Secretary Grassley back in New York and been given permission to meet with Tikhonov – if it was actually him, a man known to Western diplomats and spooks – to find out what the Soviet politician had to say. Grunwald had been given clear and specific instructions from Grassley as to what to do and say… or, better, what not to do and say when meeting with the man.

Of course it was Tikhonov there waiting for Grunwald – to send an imposter or a kidnap team wouldn’t have been Chebrikov at all.

The two men had never met before and certainly didn’t know of the existence of the other. They had no history between them and no need for any sort of personal antagonism. Yet, their countries were at war and both men considered themselves patriots. There was a tenseness in their conversation while Tikhonov was gruff and short with Grunwald, a man who know that he was a little bit out of his depth.

Tikhonov informed Grunwald that he was here in Vienna to start diplomatic negotiations with the United States, superpower to superpower, concerning what he deemed a ‘termination of hostilities’. The Soviet Union wanted to offer the United States the chance to seek an armistice where the military forces of both countries would stop fighting each other worldwide and also ‘lead their allies’ into doing the same. Tikhonov made it clear that the Soviet Union was presenting the United States with the opportunity to request such an agreement – pending an overall diplomatic solution – not that the Soviet Union was offering one. Grunwald could contact his government with this news, he was told, and it would be best if the response to this proposal was delivered back here in Vienna as soon as possible rather than going through other diplomatic channels.

Tikhonov took his leave after relating this to the stunned Grunwald though made it clear that he was remaining in Vienna and could be reached through the Soviet Embassy here in Austria.


When Grunwald got back in touch with Grassley in New York, the Secretary of State’s office there put the call through to Reagan and the NSC aboard the Doomsday Plane. The President and his airborne advisers listened to a recording made of the conversation that had taken place in Vienna after the CIA station chief there had too attended the meeting and used a pocket-sized recording device to tape what Tikhonov had to say.

At once, Reagan made it clear that he understood that the Soviets were again up to their poor attempts at manipulation and blackmail, but he wasn’t going to play that game: there was no dissent voiced to this from the NSC nor Grassley. Chebrikov had launched an unprovoked war of aggression against the West, which had included deadly attacks against American civilians at home in the United States. Chemical weapons had been employed against America’s allies while their countries had been invaded. There were reports coming out of West Germany of how civilians in the occupied parts of that country were being treated which showed just what the Soviets had in store for everywhere else their war took them to.

Then there was this cynical offer of an armistice, one which Chebrikov wanted the United States to request and that that spymaster in Moscow would then consider! Reagan was having none of it.

Grunwald and his CIA station chief were both given instructions to immediately make contact with Tikhonov as soon as possible and deliver the response of the United States.


Tikhonov had been thought by Western intelligence services to have been one of the many Soviet politicians caught up in the purges which had plagued the Soviet Union since the Moscow Coup. He had been Chairman of the Council of Ministers before he had fallen out with Gorbachev and thus part of the ‘old guard’. It had been believed that he would have been killed off less he try and organise resistance to Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky (it was still not known that Shcherbytsky was dead) as others were reported to have tried to do. His experience in foreign affairs was known to be minimal at best and thus his travelling to Vienna to attempt superpower-to-superpower communication was very far from expected.

Certain elements of the Republic of Austria’s security forces had long ago been influenced by the KGB and in the days before war commenced and since, there had been overt control brought over parts of the intelligence services. The Austrian government was aware of this foreign interference in its internal affairs but was struggling to deal with it with the threat that such acts might bring about Soviet military action or possible terrorist attacks taking place against its civilians like had rocked Western countries. The Federal Ministry of the Interior had been infiltrated at middle- & lower-levels by KGB operatives using Austrians to do their bidding and such people were providing support for Soviet intelligence operations originating from Austria as well as now providing on the ground accommodation and security for Tikhonov now he was in Vienna. He was in a hotel building in the Floridsdorf district along with a small entourage that included many KGB security personnel protected by not only corrupt Austrians but also ‘local’ criminal elements too including a Yugoslavian career gangster by the name of Zeljko Raznatovic… a man who would in later years become infamous during the genocide committed in his home country there during the post-war chaos Europe-wide.

Whilst waiting upon the response to come from the United States – which he thought would take much longer than it would – Tikhonov remained in his hotel room throughout the night talking with those who had travelled with him from Moscow. These were Chebrikov’s people: KGB spooks. Being an old man, those members of his entourage struggled to keep Tikhonov awake and coherent as they again and again went through with him what he was to say when contact was re-established with the Americans. Different responses to diverse responses were covered by them so that Tikhonov could fulfil the role of Chebrikov’s spokesman here in Vienna.

Chebrikov was just as worried about the threat of nuclear war as the West was. Throughout World War Three his intention was not to go too far while at the same time maintaining a winning position to force members of the multi-national American-led alliance against the Soviet Union to drop out of the conflict. The United States was the only country that mattered, as far as he was concerned, and they could be dealt with while everyone else ignored for now on a diplomatic level. He knew that Reagan was a true patriot and was an enemy of the Soviet Union, but the thinking of the spymaster was that the man would eventually see that the West had lost the war where it really mattered – on the ground in Germany – and that there was no hope of recovery there after their armies had suffered major losses there alongside their allies. In today’s fighting more success had been had against the armies of other NATO nations yet Chebrikov was being told that the US Army had been battered and beaten while tens of thousands of their men were or were soon to be Soviet prisoners of war.

His plan involved Reagan asking for the fighting to come to a stop and for them to do so in a public manner so that the rest of the West would end up feeling betrayed by the United States and forced to once and for all cut their losses with America. The opportunity was given to them to request and armistice though Chebrikov believed that they would come back to him with the offer of a ceasefire in-place instead: he was ready to accept that and have his representatives make noises about prisoner exchanges and a withdrawal to pre-war positions to let the United States feel like they had won some sort of victory. To Chebrikov, this plan was one which he had convinced himself would work. He was sure that Reagan was surrounded by nervous advisers and would be beset by the fears of allies forcing him to act.

How Chebrikov misunderstood someone like the fortieth President of the United States Ronald Reagan.


Grunwald was in contact with Tikhonov during the early hours of the Saturday morning and the two of them met again before dawn, this time at the Soviet Embassy.

The United States was not prepared to accept Soviet attempts to force an end to the ongoing conflict through blackmail, Grunwald related to Tikhonov when he saw him; instead it only wished for a complete halt to Soviet military aggression which would be arranged through neutral United Nations supervision. Soviet terrorist activities worldwide were also to come to an end while the criminal treatment of Norwegian, Danish and West German civilians behind the frontlines was to at once cease. Furthermore, the United States spoke for all of its allies in demanding a cessation of attacks against civilian population centres and shipping worldwide along with an utter retreat from the territory of NATO and other nations which the Soviets and their allies had encroached upon.

Grunwald moreover informed Tikhonov that his president wanted Chebrikov’s ‘spokesman’ to go back to Moscow and relate these demands to Chebrikov in person.

[James G]

One Hundred & Thirty

Whilst high-level diplomacy between the spokesmen of superpowers failed down in Vienna, there were more pressing negotiations (for those involved) taking place in Lubeck. Inside this ruined little city on the Baltic, Soviet Army representatives entered the defensive cordon that the US Army and the Danes had established around Lubeck and met with the senior commanders on the ground during the night to call for the surrender of their troops here.

After approaching under a white flag, the Soviet Army generals who were the deputy commander of the East German Fifth Army and the commander of the Soviet 3GMRD met with the pair of NATO senior officers inside Lubeck: the commander of the Danish Jutland Division and Major-General John Shalikashvili from the 9th Motorized Infantry Division. The two latter men led the NATO troops inside the pocket which while mainly Danes and Americans also included some West German reservists as well as liaison and supply troops from many other NATO nations too. They had been trapped here in an ever-decreasing pocket since the war’s first day with supplies dwindling, a massive civilian emergency and sporadic Soviet air, artillery & rocket attacks. There was no hope of a rescue or a breakout for them and the Soviets knew this: hence their approach to the city to offer terms of a surrender.

General Shalikashvili was a widely-experienced soldier who had seen combat in Vietnam before spending five days trying to hold on here in Lubeck. He was an immigrant to the United States but fought like a tiger for his adopted homeland with all the passion that he could. He had hoped that Lubeck would be held onto and eventually relived when the tide of war turned against the Soviets… and US Army tanks rode to the rescue. That wasn’t going to happen though and he knew it. His men were dying alongside the civilians here inside the burning city and there was no longer any point in continuing overseeing the slaughter of everyone present for nothing.

The terms of the Soviet Army surrender offer presented to Shalikashvili and his Danish counterpart were simple. To start with, within the hour a ceasefire would commence with both opposing forces no longer firing upon each either at close-range or at distance. Soviet Army formations would then move forwards to take the surrender of the NATO forces inside the pocket and collect weapons and military equipment but to leave personal possessions of all military men alone. Medical care for wounded NATO service personnel would the responsibility of those already providing it with Soviet supervision and the promise to assist where necessary. Such NATO troops would then be removed from the Lubeck area and taken to holding camps at a location away from the city that the Soviet Army was setting up as fast as possible; the custodians of surrendering NATO troops would be the Soviet Army, not any other armed service. No mention was made by the Soviets about civilians inside Lubeck who were a few refugees who had trickled into the city and those inhabitants of Lubeck who hadn’t fled before the war.

After a consultation between them both, Shalikashvili and his fellow Danish Major-General agreed to accept these Soviet terms. What else could they do?


Once the Soviets and their small entourage had left, Shalikashvili oversaw the immediate destruction of certain documents at his command post that he felt were of a secretive nature and could endanger the national security of his country. He had messengers personally visit his outlying units to inform them of the surrender and the upcoming ceasefire rather than relying upon radio signals. Shalikashvili stretched his military police contingent to the edge of their capabilities in making sure that guards were immediately put upon what remained of the ammunition stores inside the pocket less someone decide to blow it up rather than see the Soviets take it; such a thing would only endanger the lives of his men who he was about to hand over to the Soviet Army.

Shalikashvili faced a pair of last minute entrées to try and stop the surrender. Lubeck’s acting Mayor – his predecessor had been killed several days ago in a Soviet rocket strike – pleaded with Shalikashvili that the East Germans would pour into Lubeck behind the Soviets and massacre the civilians inside; he said that he had heard terrible tales from other parts of West Germany overrun during the war of the East Germans committing crimes to rival the Nazis. Shalikashvili knew that the East German security forces weren’t exactly ready to follow the rules of warfare, yet he believed that there had been a lot of exaggeration made and what he had heard would generally have been rumour and propaganda. Moreover, he was surrendering to the Soviet Army not the East Germans.

The commander of the West German Territorial troops in the city, the brigadier controlling the 61st Reserve Brigade, wanted to conduct breakout with his troops away to the northeast where the Soviet encirclement was judged to be weaker. He argued that he hadn’t been consulted before an agreement was made to surrender nor were his men as reservists be treated correctly by the Soviet Army. Shalikashvili had given his word as a soldier though and couldn’t agree to allow such a thing; after a heated exchange he had the West German officer detained by his military police.

Among the NATO troops in the city there were his eight thousand men that he didn’t want to put at risk due to a rashness on the part of one man.


At a quarter to midnight, the ceasefire came into effect. For the preceding hour there had been little fighting, now the guns of both sides fell completely silent.

A column of Soviet BTR-70 and BRDM-2 armoured vehicles along with trucks rolled through NATO lines in the south down near Lubeck-Blankensee Airport and then up Highway-207 right into the city. They quickly arrived at the underground headquarters below an industrial facility that Shalikashvili shared with his allies. Other units from the Soviet 3GMRD were moving forward elsewhere, but it was on this column that attention was focused as the men in those vehicles soon entered the headquarters. Staff officers and technical personnel were disarmed in an orderly fashion and the men who had previously served as the headquarters staff led away. Soviet Army intelligence personnel then moved in, especially towards the radio equipment that Shalikashvili had only minutes beforehand used to broadcast the news of his surrender on to SACEUR and which he had refused a request from some of his men to destroy before the Soviets seized it.

There was no violence when it came to the Soviets disarming and rounding up NATO soldiers, even amongst the West German military personnel in the city. They found too that in accordance with the initial surrender offer that had been accepted, there had been no destruction of military equipment that had taken place nor any organised sabotage. Men were lined up and placed in trucks to be taken away from certain areas or were allowed to march out of other places: the Soviet Army was short of trucks even with impressed civilian vehicles.

As to Shalikashvili himself, he personally surrendered to the two Soviet Army men he had met earlier. There was no formal ceremony just a quick signing of a document and an exchange of salutes which were filmed by a camera crew which he suspected to be either from the GRU or the KGB. Everything was going just as expected with that…

…until he was away from his former headquarters and informed that some of the men now accompanying him were from the Polish Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (SB) intelligence service.


In reality, Shalikashvili was in the custody of the GRU and not the SB, but he didn’t know that. The Polish-speaking men who took him away from the Soviet Army reminded him that he was born in Warsaw in 1936 to parents who were exiles from the Soviet Union and stated that they didn’t recognise his abandonment of the citizenship he had with Poland. This was wholly illegal and morally wrong, yet it was what Shalikashvili was told his captors regarded as right.

Shalikashvili was just as a traitor to his homeland as his father had been; was he aware that his Georgian-born father had fought for the Nazis and fled without being punished?

At gunpoint, Shalikashvili was threatened with his own execution and that of many of his men whom he had allowed to become prisoners of war if he didn’t go along with the demands made by these men who claimed to be from the SB. They wanted him to assist them in getting other American military forces trapped behind Soviet lines to surrender like he had so successfully done up in Lubeck.

The rest of Shalikashvili’s war wasn’t going to be pleasant.





One Hundred & Thirty–One

Those in command in the Hannover pocket had no intention of surrendering even when encircled like those up at Lubeck had been. The British and West German forces here, along with almost eighteen hundred Dutch soldiers from various shattered formations who were now incorporated into the armies of their allies, had only been encircled during the afternoon rather than all week and Soviet approaches to offer terms for them to give up were brushed off.

General Hans-Henning von Sandrart was the most senior NATO officer trapped inside the pocket. The Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe – General Kenny’s immediate superior and one of General Galvin’s principle subordinates – had come forward late in the morning to view the situation on the ground and meet with the Bundeswehr’s I Corps commander to find that Generalleutnant Clauss had then been killed and then before Soviet third echelon forces swept into the rear. General von Sandrart should have been far back on the other side of the Weser as he commanded both the British Second and US Seventh Armys yet he was now trapped with everyone else east of that river barrier that the Soviet Army sat upon.

Those forces under his command were elements of the Bundeswehr 1st Panzer & 11th Panzergrenadier Divisions alongside parts of the broken British 1st Armoured & 2nd Infantry Divisions. Each of those four combat divisions had taken immense losses and were nearly not recognisable from their pre-war orders of battle with major parts being destroyed and then later merged together as each got smaller after every engagement. The formations had not necessarily been beaten in battle on a tactical level, but strategically they had been defeated and were cut off with Soviet field armies all around them.

Attacking forces with the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army were to the west of the trapped NATO forces while the Soviet Eleventh Guards & Twentieth Guards Armys were to the northeast and southeast respectively. There was no immediate direct strangulation that occurred where the Hannover pocket was concerned as those Soviet troops had yet to move inwards against the NATO forces that General von Sandrart commanded, yet that soon started to happen as it got later.

More than a quarter of a million West German civilians were inside the pocket too. These were citizens of Hannover and other parts of eastern Lower Saxony who hadn’t managed to reach safety in the west before Soviet tanks reached the Weser crossings. Their pressing needs for basic supplies of food, water, shelter and medical care were immense and compounded by the break down in civil order inside the pocket due to Soviet military attacks using aircraft, artillery and rockets that begun to grow in intensity throughout the night and into the early hours of March 19th.


Since the first shots of the war had been fired, Hannover had been slowly turned into a giant fortress. Even back when the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies were being held back right near the border, there had been the expectation that there would be a breakthrough at some point and that Hannover might be threatened with occupation. The NATO armies were confident that they could stop the Soviets but the West Germans had turned urban areas across their country like Hannover into rear-area bastions into which civilians could flee while reservists would defend.

The West German authorities had overestimated how much of an immense undertaking this would be. They couldn’t cope with the needs of civilians nor how there had been infiltration of Soviet commandoes into their modern-day fortresses. Weapons and in particular ammunition for the troops who were meant to man the bastions such as Hannover were transferred at the last minute to other NATO forces, those at the frontlines doing all that they could to hold back the Soviet advance.

Therefore, the city of Hannover at the centre of the pocket of NATO troops that had now formed around it, especially to the east and south rather than in the north or the west, was in reality a liability for General von Sandrart and his forces now positioned around it.


As Soviet armies slowly moved inwards, followed by East German and Polish forces too, NATO forces fought throughout the night as they abandoned what were regarded as indefensible positions on the outskirts and retreated backwards to best concentrate their firepower.

Directly to the east of the city, near Anderten where road and rail bridges crossed the Weser-Elbe Canal and there was also infrastructure connected to the canal’s system of locks, parts of the parts of the Bundeswehr’s 2nd Panzer Brigade fought at first east of that waterway before pulling back over it. They stopped East German troops taking the civilian industrial facilities over on the wrong side of the canal before engineers could blow up significant portions of multiple premises in the faces of the enemy. Leopard-2 tanks, excellent weapons which compared favourably to the best tanks that the Soviets could field let alone the East Germans, made short work of attacking invading troops trying to push forward fast in thinking that the Hannover pocket’s defenders could be easily overcome.

To the southeast, the area around Mittlefeld saw a stunning tactical counterattack take place by British troops from the 22nd Armoured Brigade when Soviet troops tried to push them back too quickly. Chieftains and Scorpions from the 1 RTR battle group broke two Soviet Twentieth Guards Army tank battalions and allowed infantry from the 1 WELSH GDS battle group to race forward in their FV432s to hit Soviet infantry and particularly self-propelled howitzers moving up behind those tanks. The night-time fighting was often confusing and especially bloody, but the British did a lot of damage here before they fell backwards after inflicting a heavy defeat upon their opponents.

As the pocket shrunk inwards, there were countless instances of the NATO troops who were inside it fighting back against those closing in upon them. Many tactical victories were won though there were Soviet victories too especially as they tried to cut off small units withdrawing to thus weaken the overall strength of General von Sandrart’s command.


Away to the west, the British 3rd Armoured Division moved through the night towards the Hannover pocket. Two Soviet field armies had earlier in the day moved either side of the Iron Division with elements of the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army inflicting many losses upon it. The formation had been bypassed for later destruction but Major-General Jones wasn’t about wait around for that and thought that the best course of action was to cross the Soviet-controlled stretch of Autobahn-2 between his command and Hannover and head towards the larger NATO forces gathered there.

In their daring thrust forward to get to the Weser, the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army had left too few troops in their rear and the Iron Division crossed the Autobahn like a torrent and multiple locations as it drove eastwards. Trucks along that main road as part of supply convoys were blasted out of the way in a rapid movement because it could be assured that the Soviets would quickly take notice of this movement of a significant NATO force in their rear. In pre-war studies concerning how a Hot War might be fought, Jones was one of tens of thousands of NATO officers taught throughout the past few decades that there wouldn’t be conventional frontlines like previous wars with modern armies being as mechanised as they were now. He maintained his forward momentum to get away from a Soviet reaction and pushed for NATO lines ahead without stopping for anything.

Unfortunately, while tanks and tracked armoured vehicles weren’t tied to roads, much of the Iron Division’s support elements were wheeled vehicles that needed to traverse paved surfaces less they get struck and have to be abandoned. Jones had to use roads to complete the escape he undertook and when the Soviet reaction to his move came those aircraft which were sent against his command hunted for his troops on the mapped roads across this part of the German countryside. Missilemen carrying shoulder-mounted Javelin SAMs as well as both tracked and towed Rapier SAM systems were able to mount a partial air defence, but plenty of aircraft filled the skies.

NATO air officers claimed that they owned the skies above Europe, especially at night, but that wasn’t the case here tonight this far to the east. Aircraft from decimated air regiments so badly shot up in five days and nights of engagements with NATO fighters found that they had clear skies for the time being and made use of that. Many of them flew from improvised forward airstrips inside occupied West Germany too and thus were able to carry more air-to-ground weapons than usual.

By the time Jones had managed to get his division into the Hannover area and therefore under better air defence coverage, his command had suffered heavy losses from enemy air interdiction. The Iron Division had been saved for certain encirclement when alone further westwards and now would add to General von Sandrart’s defensive position, but it had been hurt bad when getting there.

[James G]

One Hundred & Thirty–Two

The US Fifth Army was nowhere near ready to move forwards. Like the French Second Army, the national guardsmen manning the strategic reserve that the United States was building up in France needed several more days before it was fully formed and ready to go to war. Orders came to General Schneider though during the early hours of the Saturday morning that he needed to at once send elements of his command forward as fast as possible to Germany.

The intention had never been for the ARNG formations to be sent piecemeal into combat but that was now the case.


The 42nd Mechanized Infantry & 49th Armored Divisions were the two divisional-level formations deemed ready enough to urgently begin moving towards Germany from St.-Nazaire and La Rochelle. The former was the ‘Rainbow Division’ with the majority of its New York based units left behind (for a long time the formation had been understrength) and now formed-up with significant North Carolina and South Carolina elements in addition to one New York brigade; the latter was headquartered in Texas pre-war and now with Louisiana elements attached to the ‘Lone Star Division’. Each had been planned to be the lead formation in the two new corps commands of the US Fifth Army but now they were both assigned to the US IV Corps along with the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment (a Tennessee-based formation) along with supporting assets and sent westwards.

Long-range Soviet air attacks against France had focused upon striking at road and rail links, especially where those went across rivers. RED BEAR anticipated that northern France would see NATO reinforcements moving across it and had therefore been heavily-targeted with raketonosets firing missiles into bridges as well as known rail marshalling sites. There had been Spetsnaz activity in France and those commandoes operating at long-range had caused further damage to transport links in the country when the French security forces really should have been more alert to the potential damage that such people could cause. Nonetheless, it was over these damaged transport links that the US IV Corps started to move forwards.

To move towards Germany, the US IV Corps would have to first use the French transport links that converged upon the wider Paris area. However, a long way before Paris were the road and rail routes through such cities and large towns as Le Mans, Nantes, Angers, Tours and Poitiers. Being across over to the west, far from the fighting in Germany, it was the work of special forces troops rather than cruise missiles that would at first hamper the movement of the ARNG forces heading for Germany. The French were sweeping the countryside chasing shadows as they tried to hunt down the men who had places explosive charges seemingly all over the place in the past few days to cause destruction on a grand scale, yet they were having little luck in that endeavour.

Briefed upon the threat that Spetsnaz commandoes might have to their movement, the ARNG troops now a very long way from home didn’t show any fear. The men spoke amongst themselves of how they would deal with such people should they get their hands upon them and meanwhile their officers made sure that when crossing over and passing through areas what were deemed as vulnerable to a sneak attack that effective patrols were sent out. There were some ARNG Green Berets with the US Fifth Army – men from Alabama and Mississippi – and these men scouted ahead of the US IV Corps as it started to edge forward; they investigated places where demolition explosives might be placed and also worked with the French to identify possible areas where Spetsnaz teams might be hiding out.

With all the previous damage being done by the Soviet special forces, the US IV Corps was forced to take detours around downed bridges and destroyed railway infrastructure.


The Rainbow Division was forced to avoid Nantes and its previously excellent transport links so that it would deploy away from its landing sites at St.-Nazaire. Bridges over the Erdre River to the north of this city on the Loire had been systematically downed in the past few days during a coordinated attack using explosive charges with the men assigned to defend them massacred. In addition, the railway infrastructure to the east was badly damaged due to acts of arson. The ARNG troops from Upper New York State and the Carolinas would have made good use of those civilians transport links around Nantes but now they had to use the less-capable routes at smaller towns throughout region to the north where rail bridges over smaller river couldn’t carry the weight of heavily-loaded freight trains and the road bridges weren’t wide enough for multiple lanes of vehicles abreast, thus creating choke-points.

Coming away from La Rochelle, further southwards along France’s Atlantic coastline, the Lone Star Division was forced to avoid Poitiers. Bridges over the Clain River, which meandered in that area, were downed or damaged enough to preclude their use by heavy loads. Instead of heading directly in a northwest direction taking the most direct route towards the fighting in distant Germany, this formation had to move southwest towards Angouleme and then Limoges first before it could reconnect its movement axis back northwest.

There was the worry when moving through the countryside that the ARNG might encounter communist guerrilla groups even here in allied France. Rumours had been spread the rural France was alive with KGB-supplied guerrillas who might wish to ambush the units of the US IV Corps as it snaked its way eastwards. Those were lies though, spread and fuelled by idiots or sometimes those with an ulterior motive. There had been some activity in the countryside in the first few days of the war where roadblocks had been set up in western France like in other places of the country by traitors to their country, yet those armed parties had been quickly dealt with and the instances along with the numbers vastly overblown. There were some tense instances due to this when elements of the US IV Corps approached roadblocks now manned by French security forces but thankfully there were no outbreaks of gunfire between allies here.


There were many national guardsmen manning those vehicles that formed up immense road convoys and also aboard French-operated freight trains which detoured around destroyed and damaged bridges. Yet, many more national guardsmen from multiple states which provided units of the now moving US IV Corps were still missing from their individual battalions, brigades and divisions. Getting the necessary men into France to get the US Fifth Army formed up and ready to move had always been the intention of the Americans with the majority of the fighting men planned to be flown over later in the weekend so that the ARNG could start moving early next week into Germany.

With those plans now changed, the transport of the rest of the men to crew all of the M-1 and M-60 tanks, the infantry to travel in the M-113 tracked armoured fighting vehicles and gunners for the M-109 self-propelled howitzers needed to be urgently brought forward. There were airports across France that were waiting for civilian airliners to bring in national guardsmen and those now saw aircraft landing laden with these men.

During REFORGER, hundreds upon hundreds of American and Western European airliners had flown tens of thousands of troops across the Atlantic. Afterwards some of those aircraft had been busy operating as medevac flights and evacuating civilians from countries such as the United States, Canada and Britain who had remained on mainland Europe despite the pre-war call for them to leave the warzone. There were some other airliners, bigger aircraft in the main, which had been turned into light air freighters taking military supplies across the skies (after internal seating had been removed) which didn’t exceed their weight limits.

Those airliners were now marshalled into service back as strategic transports to fly national guardsmen forward.

Airports across France had faced missile and commando attacks but the majority of those hadn’t been as successful as hoped especially at the bigger and better defended sites. Into those airports which lay on the line of march for the US IV Corps aircraft would soon start to land with fighting men deplaning from them to meet with the formations to which they were assigned to. It would be a complicated task but necessary to get the US IV Corps into battle.


The change of strategy to have the ARNG formations assigned to the US Fifth Army move towards Germany when the entire force had yet to be assembled, not least linked up with the French reserves and Canadian elements due to fly in, was made at the highest levels.

General Galvin asked Defence Secretary Carlucci late on the Friday evening for permission to have US Fifth Army formations sent forward at once. This was after SACEUR saw how much of a disaster NATO ground forces had suffered during the day and he realised that the only way to stop what he expected to be further Soviet penetrations westwards was to strengthen his own deployed army.

General Schneider hadn’t wanted to release the 42nd Mechanized Infantry & 49th Armored Divisions early because they represented a third of his soon-to-be available strength and had tried to resist the break-up of his command but to no avail. National Security Adviser Colin Powell advised the President and the NSC not to do so because he believed like General Schneider in the need for concentration of force. However, Carlucci and the rest of the NSC had the military situation explained to them that NATO forces in Germany were right on the verge of collapse and needed the infusion of reinforcements as soon as possible.

Therefore the weakened and changed US IV Corps was sent to Germany heading there as fast as possible.





One Hundred & Thirty–Three

Thatcher’s War Cabinet met in the early hours where those in attendance were tired and edge. The last few weeks had been emotionally draining for those involved, especially the past week with full-scale war going on and the expectation of dread that hung over them beneath London as they waited any moment for the end to come with reports of the first nuclear detonations taking place.

The military situation on the ground in Germany as well as in other theatres of conflict was covered in their meeting along with other important matters such as how the country was holding up. Every report that was given to them contained terrible news and there were dark thoughts that nothing would ever as it had been before with all the damage done militarily, socially, politically and economically to Britain.

One of the matter discussed was a request that had come from President Reagan for Thatcher to use British influence with South Africa. Despite the agreed ceasefire, pending a final agreement, with Cuba’s new military rulers, South African forces were still fighting Cuban forces in Angola. American and Cuban forces in the Caribbean had stopped fighting, but South Africa was still pouring deeper into Angola and engaging Cuban forces which were fighting back after first trying to arrange a ceasefire there. South Africa, Reagan had told Thatcher, was trying to wipe out the Cubans in South-West Africa once and for all and thus endangering the US-Cuba ceasefire; one which was of great importance to the United States as its military forces had been redeployed away from the Caribbean to Europe.

Thatcher had a personal distaste for Apartheid, yet the South Africans were a bulwark against international communism. Britain had not joined other Western nations in initiating economic sanctions and trade boycotts against South Africa with the aim of bringing down the regime there due to the feeling that what would come after the regime would be worse. This had earned the Prime Minister and her country much international ire as well as domestic pressures, but Thatcher didn’t want to see the communist-influenced ANC in charge in South Africa. She hoped that reason could be made to be seen by the government in Pretoria rather than to have the whole country destroyed through economic pressures and it handed over to the communists and thus the influence of Moscow.

Reagan’s request that London assist him in getting the South Africans to halt their military offensive was an appeal that she was ready to help them with though. Cuban and Angola forces had been utterly beaten and American military forces from the Caribbean were needed in Europe. Discussions with Foreign Secretary Tom King were underway as to how to do this when and aide to the MI-6 Director-General interrupted the meeting bringing him an urgent note.

Christopher Curwen at once brought the subject of the message he received to the attention of the War Cabinet.


Just as her grandmother had done at the outbreak of World War Two, at the beginning of the Third World War Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands had left her home country for Britain. It was thought best by all involved that she would be safer hidden away inside eastern England rather than across in her own country as there was the expected danger of Soviet assassins and also at the opening days of the conflict it had been feared that the Netherlands might be attacked by Soviet airborne troops. The decision had been controversial and was meant to be a secret.

Queen Beatrix was provided with accommodation at several country homes in Essex and in Hertfordshire. Her Dutch security team, supported by British MI-5 officers, were moving her every night due to fears for her safety; the Queen had argued that she might as well have stayed in the Netherlands if the threat against her life here in Britain was apparently so strong that she needed to be constantly moved. Certain landed families had been assisting her needs by providing their homes to her and her numerous security personnel as well as the small team of advisers and courtiers that moved with the Queen.

There was regular contact with the Dutch government back across the North Sea and with the Netherlands being a constitutional monarchy just as Britain was, Queen Beatrix was kept up to date on all matters of state, especially now in wartime. Late the night before a special messenger had flown across from Holland to where the Queen was spending the night of March 18th and met with her to bring news of what her government back home was planning to do with regards to taking itself out of the war. They sought permission from her to do so, though there was a tone to the message that the Queen hadn’t liked with regard to how she believed that they were instructing her to support their decision rather than requesting that she give her consent after reviewing what they had decided upon.

Personnel from MI-5 provided intelligence support to the Dutch security personnel escorting the Queen, though one among their number was actually an MI-6 officer; the Dutch didn’t know this. Queen Beatrix and the Netherlands were allies of Britain, yet they were still foreigners and matters of state regarding their country were always going to be of interest to the British government in wartime. Countries spied on their allies all the time and to not do so in times such as these would have been wholly foolish.


Curwen informed the War Cabinet what he had heard from his man out in the Hertfordshire countryside.

The Dutch government had voted to cut their losses and leave the ongoing war to declare themselves neutral. The mechanics of such a move had yet to be sorted out, but that was their intention. They had conveyed this news to Queen Beatrix and asked her to give her assent for them to continue. Instead of doing as they wished and thinking about the matter overnight before sending a reply, the Queen had at once refused to even consider such a thing. Her response – on its way back earlier than the Dutch government thought that it would come – was that she would not allow her government to do that in her name and denied them her consent to act as they wished.

Moreover, when speaking to her advisers with her, Queen Beatrix had stated that she thought it best if she soon returned to the Netherlands and dismissed her government. She had spoken of how her grandmother had acted during World War Two in crushing those ministers of hers who formed the Dutch government-in-exile located in Britain then; Queen Wilhelmina had got rid of her prime minister then who wanted to negotiate a peace with the occupying Nazis.

Knowing her history, Thatcher’s initial response was to refer to Queen Beatrix just as Churchill had spoken of Queen Wilhelmina calling the granddaughter like her grandmother ‘the only real man’ among the current leaders of the Netherlands.

While relieved as to what Queen Beatrix had done, there was still much concern among the War Cabinet. The Dutch government may decide to act extra-constitutionally and take steps to remove their nation from the NATO alliance and what military forces that they had left from the fighting too. News of what they wanted to do could get out and cause all sorts of problems not just in the Netherlands but in other nations too. A precedent could be set… though it was realised that the Dutch had acted as they had due to the example set by both Italy and Greece in the lead up to the war where those two countries had abandoned their treaty commitments.

The British War Cabinet decided that it had to act upon this news. There needed to be further confirmation of what the Dutch government was up to, but if it was the case that what had found out by Curwen’s officer with Queen Beatrix’s entourage was true – Curwen assumed that that his information seemed solid – then action needed to be taken. There was an instant consensus opinion that the Netherlands needed to be kept in the war and couldn’t be allowed to drop out. Its geographic position along with the military bases there as part of the overall NATO effort were far too important. In addition, the further example set of yet another nation leaving NATO wouldn’t be good at all.

What could Britain do though?

Could Paras and the SAS be sent to the bunkers that the Dutch government were using and force them at gunpoint to change their mind? Would MI-6 be able to plant a bomb to blown that government to kingdom come? Could, like it was still the Eighteenth Century, Britain pay some sort of bribe to keep the Dutch in the war? None of these were viable scenarios that the War Cabinet would even consider for a moment.

No, instead, the news of what MI-6 had discovered was to be shared with certain British allies – the United States and France – so that they could both assist Britain in keeping the Netherlands in the war and not allowing rash decisions made by frightened men just across the North Sea to potentially doom the Western alliance at such a crucial time as this.

[James G]

One Hundred & Thirty–Four

The air attack to the southwest of them didn’t halt the US Marines. They considered that their landing on the shores of the Altafjorden had won the war in northern Norway for NATO by stopping the Soviet Sixth Army’s right-hand drive and they were determined to finish off those forces which had spent the entirety of the day before doing nothing. Word had come that their brother Marines elsewhere (in the Middle East, in the Far East and even in the Caribbean) had so far not got involved and therefore it was up to them to take the war to the Soviets.

So they did early this morning on the sixth day of the war.


Throughout the day before, after the Soviets had self-imposed a stop order to sort out themselves, the US Marines on the ground in Norway had been busy getting ready to move forward once they were let off the leash. They had conducted air and ground harassment operations against the pair of Soviet motorised rifle divisions which they had brought to a bloody halt to keep their opponents off balance while at the same time sorting themselves out ready to advance. Casualties in men and equipment had been heavy for the 2nd Marine Division, yet it was still combat capable. The morale among the young Riflemen was high, even after the losses that they had taken.

In comparison, intelligence pointed to their opponents being in a sorry state. Reconnaissance conducted by air and by patrols on the ground – part of the harassment operations – had depicted that the 69MRD & 77GMRD had taken not only mission-destroying losses in terms of men and equipment, but had also suffered immense mutinies among the ranks. Both formations had seen large-scale if uncoordinated rebellions amongst the conscripts that formed their numbers and there had been extraordinarily harsh countermeasures instigated by field security units to contain those.

The Soviets had withdrawn back from the Altaelva River and were digging-in to defensive positions. All signs had pointed to them getting ready to defend what they had managed to take and if something was to be done about the presence of the Soviet Army here in northern Norway then the time to do that was now… even if the rest of NATO’s ground forces weren’t ready to get to that yet too.


The 4th Marine Brigade edged forward first directly to the east to Alta and approached the river where the single bridge that had before been positioned had long ago been demolished. Now their engineers threw multiple temporary crossings over the river and US Marines were soon racing to get over them. Riflemen moved in their amtracks along with tanks and armoured vehicles to get across to where they could move into battle.

The 77GMRD had suffered immense internal discipline problems with hundreds of men mutinying then many of those being shot. Junior officers were fearful of those who remained and this was on top of the terrible defeat that the division had suffered the other evening. There were sentries posted and even patrols out, yet those were inadequate and not focused enough upon their duty this cold morning to give the formation adequate warning of the onrushing US Marines pouring towards the 77GMRD.

If it hadn’t been for the terrible state that the Soviets were in, along with the sudden and immense fire support given to the 4th Brigade, then the US Marines might have been slaughtered when attacking troops digging-in. With rock-bottom morale and several feet of snow to dig through, those fox holes and trenches that the men of the 77GMRD should have had weren’t there though to provide proper fixed defences that should have beaten back an attack. Then there was all of those four- & six-inch shells from howitzers back inside Alta that smashed into the Soviets… to say nothing of the sixteen-inch shells inbound from the USS Wisconsin which had come deep into the inner parts of the Altafjorden to provide close fire support.

The Soviet resistance didn’t last long at all. In places it was mere seconds as what should have been highly-disciplined Soviet soldiers ran straight away at the first sign of the approaching Americans. Some of those men dropped their weapons before they ran while others didn’t do such a foolish thing as that. Generally, it took anywhere from a minute to ten before the Soviets truly crumbled and the whole of the position that the 77GMRD collapsed. Once the Americans were unleashing their firepower as they did best when on the attack the Soviet conscripts just couldn’t take it and fled. There were few surrenders from those men, instead they just started running towards the rear.


If the Soviets hadn’t had fled then the 4th Brigade would have had to beat a hasty retreat due to the numerical strength of their opponents; now though they could complete their mission.

Turning slowly back westwards in a semi-circle manoeuvre rather than chasing those fleeing Soviet soldiers, the 4th Brigade now moved towards the rear of the 69MRD. This second formation had suffered internal problems like the 77GMRD had though those were reported to be far less overall. They had also been digging-in to a greater extent too but still suffered from the depth of the snow on the ground and the rocky ground underneath.

Coming at the rear of the 69MRD, the US Marines faced the defensive forces of that division positioned to guard it from an attack like this while its main protective assets were deployed forward or to the flanks. The anti-tank guns encountered by LAV-25s and escorting M-60s leading the way were towed MT-12 Rapira models. These were 100mm weapons firing armour-penetrating shells which were expected by their crews to have torn through the tanks upon which they were fired. However, those MT-12 guns were firing upon up-armoured M-60A3 tanks which the US Marines were fielding here in northern Norway; the shells couldn’t penetrate those tanks either front-on or in their sides.

Those tanks fired back against the guns in their fixed positions too.

The 8th Marine Brigade moved forward to engage the Soviets now. They threw their own temporary bridges over the Altaelva River and also used helicopters to ferry men and some lighter equipment across to speed up their advance. They came at the 69MRD head-on though approached with caution and with every available howitzer of the 2nd Marine Division now supporting them as well as those guns from the Wisconsin.

Furious return fire met the 8th Brigade at first but that soon started to dramatically fall in intensity as the 4th Brigade got into the Soviets rear. Again, there came mass instances of men dropping their weapons and running away. Those men were disappearing into the wilderness all around them and there were occasions where US Marines tried to stop them due to the fears for them. Yet, at the same time, other Soviet troops were still fighting. The two brigades of US Marines weren’t that large in manpower terms and they didn’t have the numbers to do everything apart from win the battle to which they were tasked to finish.

Snow started to fall towards the end of the fighting and the commander of the 2nd Marine Division was very glad that the main fighting was over before that snow really started to fall heavy. Little pockets of resistance as surrounded Soviets units kept on fighting held out even in such weather and the US Marines struggled to finish off such resistance, yet they the benefit of distant fire support rather than having their men close-in in such terrible conditions.

Then came the task of combing the battlefield for the dead, the wounded and any recoverable piece of military equipment.


The US Marines managed to wholly destroy a pair of Soviet divisions. They had previously stopped the advance of those formations but in less than two hours this morning they utterly crushed both and scattered the remains across the harsh Arctic terrain. Again, they took losses of their own, but they had won a true victory here and made sure now that when the rest of the NATO ground forces up here finally got their act together, if those others wanted to join the US Marines in going further eastwards to liberate occupied portions of Norway, then that was possible.

Yet, such an advance would depend upon external factors beyond the influence of the US Marines.





One Hundred & Thirty–Five

The recapture of Flesland Airport by British Paras and Foot Guards had put a dent in Soviet air operations through southern Norway that even the landings near Oslo and Kristiansand couldn’t overcome. Moreover, the Swedes had gotten their act together and then there was the presence of HMS Invincible off the Norwegian coast too with its Sea Harrier fighters. Sola Airport outside Stavanger was still in Soviet hands, yet the danger of that facility being lost was seen to be very real. Seizing and making use of airports in southern Norway was all about providing a route for Soviet air attacks against the British mainland; other benefits were welcome but not as important as hitting such an important rear-area base for NATO’s war effort. Those problems in southern Norway were only going to get worse for the Soviets despite their ‘successful’ parachute landings on the Skagerrak coast however there was good news elsewhere.

Where the East German Army had taken over large parts of the Jutland Peninsula, the skies above their ground conquests were now open to Soviet aircraft. There was also going to be the danger of intruding NATO fighters, but that would now be minimal; there would be no hostile SAMs launched from Jutland either at Soviet bombers on their way to Britain. A clear path had been opened up – without long re-routing up over Sweden, through southern Norway and then back down over the North Sea – toward the British mainland now that the bulk of Jutland was under friendly control.

Soviet aircraft took advantage of this straighter shot towards the UK from their forward bases in Schleswig-Holstein this morning aiming to strike at the British hard before they could react properly to the new threat by redeploying defensive assets.


Four simultaneous air raids were conducted during the mid-morning with Backfires and Fencers from the Soviet Forty-Sixth Air Army striking selected targets in East Anglia, in Lincolnshire and up in the Humberside area. There were very few Royal Navy warships operating in the North Sea and the trio of Type-42 air defence destroyers (Birmingham, Exeter and York) were reported to be up in the northern parts of that stretch of water between Britain and Europe. Only land-based fighters and SAM defences stood between the attacking aircraft and their targets rather than mobile anti-aircraft platforms that could move ceaselessly across the water…

…or so the Soviets thought anyway.

*​

Fencers heading towards Essex and Suffolk were tracked and then engaged by a pair of French warships which had entered the North Sea during the night on their way to the Skagerrak.

The old cruiser FNS Colbert and the brand-new destroyer FNS Cassard were both armed with surface-to-air missiles and the radar systems to use those weapons at long-range. Until late yesterday, the veteran cruiser and the destroyer which had seen a rush-commissioning had been on their way to join the main body of the French fleet stationed in the North Atlantic south of Iceland. However, a change of plan due to the Soviet parachute landings near Oslo had seen them come through the English Channel last night and into the North Sea this morning.

After being cued-in by a report from a USAF E-3 airborne radar aircraft – which itself was busy getting F-15s ready to intercept those strike-bombers – radar data was fed to the French Navy. Several flights of those approaching Fencers were inside the range of the missiles aboard the Cassard while the Colbert had shorter-range SAMs for the close-in defence of both ships.

Using their passive tracking systems but relying heavily-upon the data from the E-3, the Cassard started to launch its RIM-66A Standard SM-1 missiles into the sky in a rapid fire fashion. Missile after missile was lofted from the warship using the Mk.13 launching system while the SPG-51 fire-control radars waited in stand-by mode: this was all American equipment aboard the French warship. Soon enough those missiles started to come within range of the Soviet strike-bombers and then the fire control radars went active to start to guide them towards intercepts.

The Fencers broke formation when engaged and deployed an array of electronic countermeasures. The SM-1 was an old missile yet the French had put a lot of work into upgrading its seeker head along with the American-built radars to guide them. Seven Sukhoi-24Ms were hit by the barrage from the Cassard with several others being very fortunate to avoid being struck in close misses.

Other Fencers dropped low as they sought to avoid inbound missiles with several making a turn to the south and thus straight into the path of more SAMs coming up from the waters below them. The eleven thousand ton Colbert had initiated her own radars and then launched Masurca missiles skywards. These were big missiles with a giant warhead to make up for their general inaccuracy and their approach upon the Soviet aircraft at first went undetected in the highly-active electronic environment: four more Fencers were downed.

*​

The Backfires that went towards targets across Lincolnshire – airbases and other military installations – were detected by the same E-3 that picked up those Fencers and further F-15s flying from Eastern England bases were sent against them. However, there were another ten of those big bombers on a separate raid and heading further northwards which weren’t at first tracked by air defence assets guarding the British coast.

The ten bombers were assigned to the 260th Heavy Bombardment Aviation Regiment, which was based in peacetime in the western Ukraine near the Polish-Soviet border… and had started the war with eighteen aircraft before combat losses had taken their toll. They were now flying from forward bases across the Inter-German Border in Holstein and thus now far from the frontlines in Germany. Each had come across the North Sea low and used up plenty of fuel in doing so but they had remained undetected during their approach towards their targets on the British mainland: those in the Humberside area.

Humberside, a name disliked by everyone who resided on both sides of the Humber Estuary but given to them by central government, had been generally untouched by the war. There had been a cruise missile attack commenced on the war’s third day against the British Aerospace facility at Brough which had caused great damage there and a further attack had come the day afterwards against the British Army mechanical transport school at Leconfield – the latter a former RAF base. Both of those struck military facilities were on the northern side of the river and the southern side had been left alone.

Hull and Grimsby, in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire respectively, had both seen troubles during the early stages of the TtW process and so too had smaller towns like Scunthorpe and Goole further inland. Those had petered out after a while especially after a strong local intervention from elements of the TA which weren’t deployed to Germany but rather had been assisting the overstretched civilian police with non-violent intervention. The economy had been wrecked like it had been elsewhere in the country by that immense upheaval though and a lot of people had ended up unemployed across Humberside, an area which had been struggling for many years beforehand. There were no major war industries across the region that could be put to immediate use though there were harbour and port facilities along the Humber that could, with time and effort, be useful for the war should there be the will to do so. In fact, in pre-war Soviet wartime planning, the port facilities at Hull had been targeted by a Soviet nuclear weapon should the war have gone that way and such a strike would have devastated the entire region.

Nonetheless, those underused port facilities along with power generation facilities across the Humberside area remained on Soviet targeting list for conventional warfare and it was towards those which the Backfires this morning went. The ports were expected to be busy and the power stations along with oil terminals were anticipated to be busy feeding a booming wartime economy that was assisting Britain in fighting the war.


The Backfires came up the Humber Estuary and were forced to climb up away from their previously extremely low altitude at one hundred feet above the surface to five hundred feet to make full use of their navigation and targeting radars. Electronic jamming systems went from the passive mode to the active mode, increasing their potency but also alerting detection.

There were mobile radar stations operating across the Humberside area manned by the RAF (reservists and volunteers mainly) which at once started tracking the fast-moving aircraft tearing through the skies above the wide estuary. Their reports were fed up the chain of command though by this point that E-3 which had earlier assisted the French Navy now had these Backfires too: the radar aboard the aircraft had a phenomenal range at full power and with good altitude.

There were targets on both sides of the Humber Estuary for the Backfires as well as at the end where it was formed by the merging of the rivers Ouse and Trent. In daylight, many of those were visible to the aircrews though there was also information within their targeting computers as to where the bombers were to head to individually or in pairs and trios.

Targeted so heavily by the Luftwaffe in World War Two, Grimsby was left unmolested by the Soviet Air Force. The town’s harbour wasn’t targeted but rather the neighbouring port at Immingham was instead: a pair of Backfires dropped high-explosive bombs above it. A third Soviet bomber very soon afterwards opened its belly bomb-bay doors when above the pair of oil refineries just inland around Killingholme. There were ships at Immingham though neither oil refinery was currently operational after the cessation of the landing of North Sea oil. Soviet targeting was terrible with the bombers coming in too fast and not enough attention being focused upon the strong coastal winds. Many bombs entered up in the water, across farmland or in the village of Killingholme. In addition, the Backfire which attacked the oil refineries around Killingholme noticed at the last minute the disused airfield just to the west. This hadn’t been used since 1945 but was clearly visible from the air; disregarding intelligence, several bombs were haphazardly aimed towards this stretch of pure agricultural land at the very last moment.

Further up the estuary was the Port of Hull. There were ships in the working docks to the east of the city including Roll-on/Roll-off civilian ships that had been put to much use during LION and in the first few days of the war delivering military vehicles to Germany through Holland and also the north German ports. Other civilian vessels now manned by crews of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary as well as volunteer sailors were in Alexander Dock, King George Dock and Queen Elizabeth Dock. The port here was working though not to the degree that Soviet intelligence sources expected that it would be.

Three Backfires moved to drop their bombs over the connected King George and Queen Elizabeth Docks with another one aiming for the smaller Alexander Dock. Ships at anchor along with the facilities were the targets of the bombs that fell away from the bombers though one of the Backfires had problems with its bomb-bay doors and thus couldn’t deposit its load of FAB-250 bombs. There were quickly fearsome explosions on the ground below though these were far fewer than expected if somewhat larger in intensity than anticipated.

The remaining three bombers went racing along the Humber Estuary, past Hull and then overflew the Humber Bridge on their way to targets further westwards. A shoulder-mounted SAM was launched at them from near that large suspension bridge but the targeting was off and the Backfires were at near supersonic speed. The wrecked aerospace facility at Brough was again bombed with one Backfire dropping bombs over that site while the two others went for a pair of the trio of power stations in the Aire Valley: Drax and Eggborough.

Radar warning receivers went off when the last two bombers begun their bomb runs over these strategically vital power stations and the threat reported was that of combat radars fitted to enemy fighters. The Backfires dropped their bombs as fast as possible – hitting Drax but spectacularly missing Eggborough – and broke away to the north due to the fighters coming up from the southwest. East Yorkshire and then the sea lay ahead and they weren’t going to join up with the rest of their comrades in going back down the Humber Estuary again. However, there were soon warnings of more fighters to the north too approaching and the Backfires went back for the Humber area to escape before those fighters coming in from both directions could converge upon them: the Backfire wasn’t equipped to combat a fighter aircraft.

Those fighters were RAF Hawk T1As. These single-engined supersonic training aircraft carried Sidewinder air-to-air missiles and while hampered by short-range, were nimble fighters in capable hands and perfectly suitable for air defence missions over the British mainland. They had dispersal bases up and down the country and eager crews ready to defend Britain. Following orders from mobile ground stations and also the American-crewed E-3, two separate pairs coming from North Yorkshire and South Yorkshire raced towards East Yorkshire aiming if not to stop those bombers then shoot them down so they couldn’t return with a follow-up mission.

The other eight Backfires were soon to escape but the two that had gone further inland found themselves caught between the vice applied by the Hawks. Sidewinders were launched at them when they were near the Goole area and then again as they cut across the very northern reaches of the Lincolnshire shore. One bomber exploded in mid-air and then a second was struck in the starboard wing. The latter Tupolev-22M entered a spin and climbed some before falling back towards the earth. Pilots in the chasing Hawks watched as the aircrew of the bomber each ejected – all four of them – and then their aircraft tumbled right towards the imposing Humber Bridge.

The RAF pilots each winced as that stricken aircraft made contact with that steel and concrete structure that linked both shores of Humberside together: the bomber hit the suspension cables south of the midway point.


Hull was one of those coastal towns on the eastern and southern shores of Britain which had become a ‘closed city’ when TtW had gone into effect. Of the thirteen shut off from the outside world, Hull had suffered the worst of opposition to such a draconian measure with major civil strife occurring in the face of such restrictions on freedom of movement. Teenage military cadets had been forced to assist older soldiers and sailors in closing roads guarding food distribution centres. The city council had been most unhelpful to the military and there had been strong opposition from local MPs to what had gone on. Thousands of people had fled but the majority of the city’s population had stayed and not been at all happy with what had happened with their city.

The security of the port and the need to keep it running had been paramount though. The military had not wanted to upset the local civilians but they couldn’t have Soviet infiltrators or saboteurs interfering with their urgent operations to use the working docks east of the city nor the major road and rail links connecting Hull with locations further inland vital for the war effort.

Assigned to the military command in Hull was ‘218 (HSF) Squadron’ from the Royal Corps of Transport. This was a company-sized formation of the Home Service Force: the Home Guard for the Eighties. More than a hundred men formed its ranks, all of whom were ex-servicemen who hadn’t been called-up and deployed aboard. There were young and old men from all backgrounds and with all sorts of military skills who volunteered to spent five weekends a year in military training. While attached to the Royal Corps of Transport, that was only for administrative purposes. This HSF detachment in Hull was a force of infantrymen trained in static guard duties of ‘key points’.

Two of the three platoons assigned were now operationally deployed in Hull itself and at the a-joining port while the third had been given the task of mounting a guard upon the Humber Bridge. Twenty-nine men wouldn’t have been enough to stop a determined enemy assault (paratroopers, marine commandoes etc.) to take such a structure, yet… that wasn’t the threat. Instead, they guarded the bridge against the possibility of sabotage or an attempt by self-styled revolutionaries to seize it. Such were their orders anyway, but they were actually concerned mainly with directing all non-military traffic away from the road bridge to keep it clear for convoys. Armament for these men were SLR rifles, a lone medium machine gun and also a Carl Gustav rocket-launcher.

Soviet air activity had brought their commanding Lef-tenant to order a stand-to and the platoon of 218 Squadron soldiers had manned their firing positions either side of the bridge though had mainly been watching the clear morning skies. Then, of course, that Backfire tumbled into their bridge in a spectacular fashion.

The structural integrity of the Humber Bridge after that impact was something for more senior men than the HSF platoon to deal with though for the time being it remained standing. What was regarded as more of an important matter were the four parachutes seen in the sky before that impact and the fate of those men who had ejected from that downed bomber. Two landed right in the middle of the Humber itself and the men still caught up in their parachutes were observed suffering unwelcome fates as they were drowned while trapped within survival equipment.

Two more Soviet aviators landed on the ground on the Yorkshire side of the estuary.

One man was found atop of a public house almost within touching distance of the Humber Bridge along what was called Hessle Foreshore. He had been killed when impacting the tiled roof and suffered a broken neck. The HSF soldiers were soon assisted by some curious locals who had left their houses in recovering his body from there. However, there was a second aviator who had also landed near the Humber Bridge though further inland a bit on high ground away from the water’s edge. The HSF deployed several rifle squads to go searching for him either to aid him if he was hurt or to hunt him down if he tried to escape to get up to no good.

It took them more than an hour to eventually catch up with the Soviet Air Force Major who had tried to escape them. He had wandered northwest towards the village of Swanland and local children there pointed out his hiding place in a back garden for the HSF soldiers who surrounded him and, once they had his attention, motioned for him to surrender: no one among them knew any Russian. The Major had a pistol though and an unwillingness to surrender even when lost inside enemy territory and surrounded by motivated and armed volunteer soldiers.

218 Squadron soldiers shot him dead but only after he took a shot at them first.

[James G]

One Hundred & Thirty–Six

The war in Europe wasn’t going good for the West yet in the Pacific the United States and her allies were on the offensive there and winning the conflict with the Soviet Union. Relying primary on naval and air strength, the war had been taken to the Soviets on their homeland. There had been those initial wide-ranging enemy attacks and some devastating follow-up strikes, but American-led forces were now firmly on the offensive.

Airbases, naval bases, radar sites and identified command centres – all of which were firmly exclusively military targets – were struck at on a regular basis without a halt. The aim was for these Western forces to stop further Soviet offensive actions being taken across the Pacific but also closer to the Soviet mainland itself in both Japan and South Korea. Strategic nuclear military installations were left alone like civilian installations were though many of those military personnel involved anticipated that eventually they were going to go too far with their successes here and that a Soviet strategic attack would occur in response to what they were doing.

Nonetheless, the orders stood for the military strikes to continue so that all offensive capabilities of the Soviet armed forces in the Pacific theatre was to be eliminated.


The battleship USS Missouri – aboard which the Empire of Japan had surrendered to the Allies forty-three years beforehand – had returned to link-up with the carrier USS Midway after its raid inside the Sea of Okhotsk and those two capital ships along with their escorts were now outside the Kurile Islands chain and heading towards Petropavlovsk. The carriers from the Bering Sea, the USS Nimitz and the USS Carl Vinson, were on their way to join them in a mass concentration of US Navy maritime power. A few Canadian warships, some older destroyers, had joined the American ships though this was mainly a US-only affair where elsewhere in the Pacific other American-aligned nations had added their military assets to joint naval flotillas.

The approach towards Petropavlovsk by the Midway-Missouri group was interrupted though by Soviet submarines.

When the US Navy ships were almost two hundred miles south of Petropavlovsk, a Charlie-class missile submarine of the Soviet Pacific Fleet attacked the Midway-Missouri group with a barrage of missiles. Five of the eight P-120 SS-N-9 Siren missiles were unleashed from the submarine K-320 during a ‘pop-up’ attack undertaken from a range of less than forty miles; the K-320 carried eight of these missiles yet one wouldn’t launch while two were held back from the attack because they were armed solely with thermonuclear warheads.

After her attack, the K-320 commenced a crash dive as she sought to escape what was certain to be an inevitable American counterattack.

The Sirens were fire-and-forget missiles and they lanced towards the plotted targets ahead of them using their nose-mounted radars for guidance. They travelled at just below supersonic speeds but still moved extremely fast across the waters of the Pacific Ocean bearing towards the bigger targets which they had been unleashed against. SAMs were lofted by American warships towards them to intercept though no notice of these was taken as they didn’t come near the missiles on their final approach towards…

…ghost targets.

The Sirens hit nothing but thin air. They shot through imaginary targets which their computers plotted but weren’t actually there. All five raced around in a short circle and came back again at their ‘targets’ but again they hit nothing. The fuel supplies aboard each then ran out very soon afterwards as they had been fired right at their range envelope and so each missile dropped harmlessly into the sea.

There had been extremely tense moments aboard the US Navy ships during this missile attack. Before those Sirens with their 500kg warheads had been fired, the radar waves from the targeting radar that the K-320 had surfaced to use had been detected and evasive action had been taken, especially by the bigger Midway and Missouri. Other ships had remained behind to activate their electronic warfare systems to spoof the expected inbound missiles yet no one had thought that this would work out without any casualties being inflicted; it had though and now the US Navy was out for revenge.

SH-3H Sea King helicopters on anti-submarine warfare missions hunted for the K-320 alongside several escorting destroyers and frigates which were with the Midway-Missouri group. Sonobuoys were dropped and sonars searched the depths. Yet, remarkably, the K-320 escaped the vengeful hunt against her.

After such an attack, the Midway-Missouri group resumed course taking the US Navy flotilla towards Petropavlovsk. There were Soviet military facilities at the base of the Kamchatka Peninsula which had already been attacked but there were still many more. The carrier had her aircraft, the battleship had her guns and there were land-attack cruise missiles fitted to the Missouri as well as other warships. Plans had already been made based on earlier intelligence and those strikes would soon commence.

Then the Midway was torpedoed.

This time there had been no warning at all that the US Navy was being targeted for attack and thus no preparations made. Three torpedoes came out of seemingly nowhere from a Soviet Kilo-class submarine which lay waiting dead ahead of the carrier and had already been passed by several escorts. Two of those 53-65M wave-homing torpedoes hit the Midway in her stern on her propellers while a third struck the nearby destroyer USS Cushing which was meant to be providing close-in defence.

The Cushing was left dead in the water after the single blast of the torpedo’s 678lb warhead that blew apart her rear but after those two torpedoes which hit the Midway exploded the carrier didn’t come on an immediate halt as the momentum of her sudden last-minute panicked sprint kept the ship moving. There weren’t that many casualties aboard either ship from these impacts and neither was in an immediate danger of sinking, yet they were both soon left wholly immobile.

Within minutes, the attacking Soviet submarine was itself under attack: a SH-2F Seasprite flying from the frigate USS Rentz dropped a pair of Mk.46 torpedoes atop it and both of which struck home.

As to the Midway, the damage done was bad but not fatal. Emergency repairs to seal flooded compartments at the rear of the carrier took place to stop the flooding; all the while aircraft which had been airborne when the Midway had been attacked circled above slowly running out of fuel. Three propellers had been wrecked with a fourth one still functioning in theory though there was great hesitation in putting that to use less that cause further damage to the already weakened stern area. To allow the aircraft above to land though the Midway needed to be underway, something which it was soon decided wasn’t the best course of action.

The Midway couldn’t be repaired at sea and neither could it gain enough forward speed to allow aircraft to be landed by being taken under tow to allow that. There were FA-18s up on patrol along with an E-2 as well and those aircraft along with their crews were too valuable to be ditched. The US Pacific Fleet had already lost the USS Ranger to enemy action and so waiting around this close to the Soviet mainland for a further attack to come wasn’t going to be a good idea either.

The US Navy finally acted to resolve the situation as those aircraft were directed to head eastwards towards the Carl Vinson as that carrier was racing at flank speed and launching KA-6D airborne tankers. As to the Midway, another destroyer was tasked to take the carrier under tow and head back to Japan.

Several escorts went with the crippled Midway, but other warships remained with the Missouri. The battleship was to be assigned to link up with those other carriers and to continue with the planned land-attack mission.


Far away to the south, another US Navy carrier, the already-damaged USS Constellation, moved into the Sea of Japan through the Tsugaru Strait. This connection between Hokkaido to the north and Honshu to the south was swept by Japanese minesweepers before the Constellation and the multi-national escort group with her approached. There had been Soviet mine-laying taken place since the war had begun and several were detected and destroyed before the passage of such large force of valuable ships.

The Constellation still had damage to her port side from the impact of a missile on the war’s second day, but the carrier was fully operational and now truly on its way to take the war home to the Soviets. Australian, Japanese and Singaporean ships were part of her surface escort with the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force providing submarines to meet with them on the other side as well.

The Constellation was heading for the Vladivostok area to follow-up those long-range land-based aircraft attacks that had been undertaken beforehand though which were now to be added to by close-range naval air attacks. A Soviet counterstrike was expected yet it was known that their Pacific Fleet surface, subsurface and aviation assets had already taken major losses while Soviet Air Force formations in the Far East had already been decimated.

The US Navy was out to show the Soviets who ruled the Pacific Ocean.




One Hundred & Thirty–Seven

Like the British and West Germans up in the Hannover weren’t going do surrender, those elements of the US III Corps which hadn’t been able to get over the Weser in time were in no mood to surrender either. They had been cut off but that didn’t mean that they were ready to call it quits and fall into enemy captivity unless it was absolutely necessary.

Late the evening before, once it become clear that there was no hope of an escape either to the west or the south, the 1st Cavalry Division, the 157th Mechanized Infantry Brigade and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had fallen back into the town of Einbeck. While they would have liked to stay mobile and fight a battle of manoeuvre, the breaking of the logistics links westwards made that impossible. There were wounded men with them along with West German civilians who had attached themselves to the US Army despite all efforts to get them to disperse. The hope was that an eventual NATO counterattack back across the Weser, hopefully lead by the US III Corps elements which had escaped, would come to their rescue: they just had to hold out until then.

Einbeck was a small town between the Weser and the Leine which lay resting against the Hube Ridge: a major geographical feature upon which an attack to take the Americans in the rear made impossible. With those densely-forested hills to their north and east, the US III Corps elements started digging-in around Einbeck facing their outward defences to the west and south and waiting for the Soviets and the Poles to turn their attention against them.

Just as expected, those enemy attacks came throughout the morning.


Elements of the Polish Second Army – which the British and Belgians had so thoroughly defeated during the previous five days of war – approached Einbeck from the southeast. This was a force amounting to a pair of brigades that had once been the Polish 2MRD & 4MRD: high-readiness formations shattered hitting NATO defences much further east before the mass withdrawal yesterday of the right-wing of the British Second Army.

Forward scouting detachments tracked the Polish approach and put dents in them but the mass of onrushing tanks and infantry coming up from the Northeim area couldn’t be stopped. The Poles soon crashed into the Americans south of the town where the USAR reservists of the 157th Brigade was. Fighting from fixed defences without the benefit of being able to effectively manoeuvre wasn’t something that the US Army was trained to do effectively and this initial series of engagements favoured the Poles. The 157th Brigade was pushed back with its dismounted infantry and few remaining tanks having to cede ground south of the Ilme River. This narrow tributary which ran south of the town towards the nearby Leine was in no way a major water barrier, yet the Poles had lost so much of their bridging equipment in earlier combat that it did bring their advance to a halt before they could deploy both east and west ahead of their stop lines.

The Americans at once understood that the Poles had been sent against them not only to push them back into Einbeck itself so they were concentrated enough for artillery and air power to pound them, but also to distract them from a bigger attack which was almost certain to come from the west.

The US Army wasn’t to be disappointed.

The Soviet 107MRD moved against Einbeck from the west. This division had suffered at the hands of the US III Corps yesterday but was in a much better state than those Polish units assigned to support its attack to crush the Einbeck pocket. Massed artillery and rocket fire was given in support of the motorised rifle division as it came across from where it had seized Weser crossings yesterday and there were also plenty of ground attack aircraft assigned too. The NATO air defence network this side of the frontlines was all gone and the only worry now for Soviet aircraft was roving NATO fighters and not a coordinated SAM network. There were some US Army air-defence assets inside the Einbeck pocket but those were known to be running out of ammunition.

Facing no choice but to fight, the 1st Cavalry Division fought back. However, there was little opportunity to conduct a battle of manoeuvre with fuel stocks being depleted every minute and no immediate hope of those being topped up, so this affected the ability of the 1st Cavalry Division to fight as it would have liked to. The Soviets were able to push combined arms regiments against near immobile American positions knowing that the Americans would only fall back rather than be able to counterattack in fancy flanking manoeuvres.

The result was predetermined. Without being able to fight as they were best at, the 1st Cavalry Division fell back. Men died in great numbers, on both sides, while even more were left wounded and needed urgent medical care. The Americans withdrew from their outer positions and closer to the town behind them. Soviet aircraft and also armed helicopters – having a much better time than in previous encounters now the Americans were so short of anti-air ammunition – were present in great numbers. Those artillery barrages that the 107MRD had in assistance continued too.

Despite being pushed back from their forward positions first to the south and then to the west, the Americans had a firm hold on Einbeck. The town would have to be wrestled from them and that would only come if they were defeated here and survivors forced to surrender. As far as the US Army troops trapped here were concerned, that was not going to be anytime soon.

*​

Down on the banks of the Main River, far away from Einbeck up in northern Germany, Frankfurt was approached and entered by East German forces during the late morning of March 19th. Elements of their 10MRD, which was a reserve formation that had been with the Soviet Twenty-Eighth Army further northwards, were tasked to enter the city on foot and in light vehicles. Few of their tanks and armoured fighting vehicles remained with the division after their battles in northern parts of Hessen but those weren’t needed for the push forward to secure this major West German city.

The approach of these soldiers ahead of the rear-area security troops who would follow them came just as expected by the West German forces left in the city after the US Seventh Army had pulled away to the southwest the night before: they were waiting for their murderous fellow Germans to try to take the city from them.

Before the war West German Territorial Troops outnumbered the regular Bundeswehr two-to-one. There were seven hundred thousand of them and they operated in all sorts of roles from combat units tasked to operate at the frontlines in direct support of regular units to providing static guards at key points in the rear. There were brigades, battalions, companies and platoons of armed detachments nationwide.

Frankfurt was home to a mixture of different Territorial troops from multiple units though who were all now operating under a central command: Frankfurtgruppe. Twenty-four thousand armed men were inside the city and while mainly a light infantry force, they had a wide selection of heavy weapons too. Frankfurtgruppe was dug-in across the suburbs and in the urban area in buildings as well as below ground too as they made use of sewers and the U-Bahn subway system. There were tens of thousands of civilians who hadn’t fled when the Americans and French had decided that the city was un-defendable, though the majority of the population was gone… along with all of those refuges from other parts of the country further eastwards who had temporarily settled in the Frankfurt area.


The East Germans edged forwards seeking weak points in the city’s outer defences that they couldn’t find. Everywhere they moved forwards they found furious gunfire coming from seemingly every structure. The Territorial troops were quite well-trained and in many instances let East German units pass by them before attacking their flanks and trying to pin enemy groups down. When faced with countermoves, the Frankfurtgruppe troops had escape routes planned and fell back further. Buildings offered shelter from enemy artillery fire as homes and business premises provided cover unless directly hit.

Soon enough the East Germans tried a battering ram approach in selected places instead of infiltration methods across the whole area. Again though they found that Frankfurtgruppe wasn’t prepared to let them have one square meter of the city without paying in blood for it as fierce counterattacks came with the Territorial troops bringing some of their few armoured vehicles into play to halt such drives.

As the fighting went onwards, Frankfurt, the pre-war financial heart of Germany, started to burn all around those men engaged in the struggle for control of it as neither side had the time to tend to fires caused by the employment of heavy weapons in such an environment.

[James G]

One Hundred & Thirty–Eight

The first face-to-face talks between representatives of both the US Government and the new Cuban regime took place in The Bahamas. Aircraft operating under the temporary colours of the Royal Bahamas Defence Force flew to both Havana and New York to collect officials invited by the Prime Minister Lynden Pindling to hold talks under the auspices of The Bahamas.

On the American side, Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead came to the resort city of Nassau aboard once of those aircraft along with a small delegation from the State Department and the CIA. He had firm instructions from both Grassley and Reagan with regard to his dealings with the Cubans and was going to stick to those. Coming up from Havana at the head of the Cuban delegation was Major-General Arnaldo Ochoa. Ochoa was a mid-level military officer and a chosen spokesman for dealing with the United States to make sure that the current ceasefire was turned into a favourable diplomatic settlement for Cuba.

Pindling was acting as an apparent neutral observer and peacemaker on behalf of his country which while a member of the British Commonwealth had no part in the war though wished for a settlement to be reached between two of its neighbours. Both the Governor-General Gerald Cash and the UK High Commissioner Colin Mays were not officially part of the talks though both men were kept in the loop.

No one was here on holiday and so the meeting took place at the Prime Minister’s official residence rather than at one of the fancy hotels or tropical resorts. The Bahamas Government provided security and accommodation and also offered translators to both sides as well. The Bahamas was like everyone else keen for the ceasefire to be progressed towards a peace treaty that would make sure that fighting wouldn’t again commence on its maritime borders and threaten to further widen throughout the Caribbean region.


Once the talks commenced, Ochoa put forth the proposals that the generals back in war-ravaged Havana had instructed him to introduce. The Cuban Armed Forces were in control of their country after the mass civil uprisings had deposed the Castro regime yet their hold on power was delicate. They wanted the Americans to continue to refrain from attacking Cuba so that they could deal with regime elements still loyal to the dead Castro Brothers, including the DGI. There were Soviet military and intelligence personnel inside the country which too needed to realise that they were in Cuba not their own country and would have to do as Cuba wanted, not follow instructions from Moscow. Cuba’s new leaders also wanted an immediate end to the air and naval blockades imposed by the United States and support in later obtaining international aid from other nations: the Americans weren’t being asked for money directly rather the request was that the United States help Cuba attain aid from other nations. Finally, Cuba wanted an absolute assurance that Guantanamo Bay was to de jure return to Cuba as it already was de facto.

The presence of Ochoa from the Cuban Armed Forces in The Bahamas rather than a political figure came as an utter surprise to Whitehead and his party. As far as the United States was concerned, Caramés and Piñeiro were supposed to be in-charge in Havana after the Castro Brothers had been killed, not the Cuban military. There was absolutely no intelligence to explain what had happened since the last contact with the Cubans a few days before – made in New York through the Argentineans – to change the situation there on the ground and thus what Ochoa said and who he represented was rather disconcerting. Nonetheless, Whitehead had been sent to Nassau to negotiate with the Cubans rather than fretting for now over internal Cuban politics and the United States had some proposals for the Cubans themselves.

There had been a few aircraft lost over Cuba during the conflict with aircrews known to have bailed out over the island though the majority of the American POWs which the Cubans had taken during the fighting were from Guantanamo Bay; Whitehead told Ochoa that those men and women needed to be returned to the United States with great haste. There were Cuban exiles within the United States, and elsewhere too, and the US Government wanted the freedom of those people to return to their country to be respected. In addition, just as the Cuban had wished to talk about Soviet troops in Cuba so too did Whitehead; the Americans wanted such people disarmed and to come under immediate Cuban control.

As the talks continued there were agreements and disagreements. Both sides wanted action taken against the Soviet forces remaining inside Cuba and there was no objection from the US Government for Cuba to act against them. No more air or naval attacks would be undertaken against Cuba as per the initial unofficial ceasefire and therefore the Cuban military could move troops around unmolested to deal with those still loyal to the old regime without fear of attack. Ochoa informed Whitehead that the vast majority of POWs were in Cuban military custody though there were a few exceptional cases where the DGI had seized such people; Cuba would ‘rescue’ such people and then arrangements could be made to transfer all those POWs to a nearby third country, probably The Bahamas.

The questions of foreign aid, Cuban exiles and Guantanamo Bay were sticking points though.

Whitehead couldn’t give Ochoa the assurances that the Cuban wanted with regard to assistance from the United States for Cuban seeking later international aid. Even after conferring with Grassley up in New York, Whitehead could only give Ochoa a meaningless promise that it was something which would be positively discussed at a later date. He couldn’t make his Cuban counterpart understand that the United States could in no way guarantee such a thing… and then there was the fact that the world was at war with the fate of many nations hanging in the balance and thus access to aid afterwards was just impossible to give assurances of.

When it came to the issue of Cuban exiles, Ochoa responded to Whitehead’s mention of such people with contempt. Though he didn’t directly say it, it was clear that Ochoa and the generals which he represented had no wish for such people to come back to Cuba. The anticipation on the part of the Cubans was always going to be that those exiles would return to Cuba to try to take over politically and economically. Whitehead had been given firm instruction as to push for the free return of such people as this was a major geo-political objective of the United States with regards to domestic politics too… and so that such people would do just as Ochoa and his masters feared. When the thinking had been that Whitehead would meet with a DGI figure rather than a military officer, he was meant to have pressed for the return of such people then too so fulfil those national security goals of the United States to have what was anticipated to see a formation of a US-friendly government in Havana if not led by then influenced by those exiles.

Guantanamo Bay had been bloodily seized by the Cuban military in the face of fierce resistance from its US military defenders. The take-over of the naval base had come at the same time as the direct attacks against the American mainland by further Cuban forces and both events were going to be forever linked in the minds of the American public. Whitehead was under no illusions about his country’s feelings on the subject of Guantanamo Bay: it was never going to be willingly given up to legal Cuban control no matter how great the need was for a US-Cuban peace treaty. Ochoa spoke of the treaties of 1903 and 1934 with regard to the now Cuban-occupied facility and how in that latter treaty mentioned an ‘abandonment’ of Guantanamo Bay by the United States meant that it would return to Cuban control.

The tactical surrender of the US Marines and US Navy forces there was, according to the Cubans, an abandonment of the facility.


A significant portion of US military power concentrated against Cuba had already been reassigned prior to the meeting between Whitehead and Ochoa in Nassau. The aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea was already racing across the North Atlantic – after meeting up with the USS Saratoga out of Norfolk – while most of the US Army troops which had gone to Florida were on their way to Europe where they were desperately needed.

The WW2 veteran carrier USS Lexington had left Pensacola and her training duties behind to move south to replace the Coral Sea and there were other US Navy warships and submarines in waters nearby Cuba. A substantial number of US Marines and ARNG troops in Florida and the Caribbean, yet those assembled forces were in no way strong enough to invade Cuba even with air support offered by the USAF and ANG formations.

The air campaign against Cuba could be resumed but Guantanamo Bay couldn’t be retaken and there was no hope of putting US troops on the ground in Havana to get the new regime there to accept all that the United States wanted.

As to the Cubans, they had lost the war. The generals who Ochoa spoke for had seen the Cuban Armed Forces smashed to pieces from the air and watched their country standing on the verge of collapse. When Castro-era figures such as Caramés and Piñeiro had tried to replace the dead Fidel and Raul, the generals had turned their guns against them and their supporters to get rid of those who couldn’t understand that and whom wanted to try to blackmail the Americans with POWs in their custody.

Nonetheless, the Cubans weren’t about to roll over and let the Americans do as they had been always doing when it came to Cuba. The generals were going to accept a peace treaty in the end but it would be a negotiated one, not a Diktat.





One Hundred & Thirty–Nine

When transforming the Northern Army Group (NORTHAG) into the British Second Army during the early stages of LION, the British Army had not only been interested in prestige but in practicality too. NORTHAG had been under a British commanding general and with LION attachments, there were more British combat troops assigned than any of the four other national contributors. Five British combat divisions (each with a trio of brigades) had been assigned along with four from the Bundeswehr, three American, three Dutch and two Belgian divisions too. In addition, while the West Germans had provided the majority of the supporting infrastructure for the British Second Army yet there still had been a major British Army presence there too.

As to those British ground combat forces, there were no longer five divisions operational… just four brigades remained intact and combat effective west of the Weser. The combat-manoeuvre power of the British I Corps and those formations assigned elsewhere within the British Second Army (not including the Berlin Brigade either) had been either smashed to pieces, gassed or trapped on the other side of that river.

South of Bremen and now back part of the Bundeswehr–Belgian Kampfgruppe Weser was the 33rd Armoured Brigade. It had escaped the destruction wrought by the Soviet nerve gas attack and then the drive towards the Weser by the Soviet First Guards Army. A regiment of tanks and three battalions of infantry formed it combat-manoeuver strength yet there had been heavy losses taken and the 33rd Brigade needed rest and replacements before it could be effective in combat again.

Along the Weser to the south of Hoxter were the three other combat brigades: the 8th Infantry, 11th Armoured and 20th Armoured. The first consisted in the main of troops previously in Northern Ireland which had been transferred to the new 5th Infantry Division before conflict broke out: the 8th Brigade was all that remained of that division. The two others formed the combat strength of the rump 4th Armoured Division and while both the 11th Brigade and the 20th Brigade were each missing their TA infantry battalion which had been assigned to them as part of LION, the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders battle-group from the destroyed 19th Infantry Brigade had escaped from the encirclement attempt made against them by the Soviet Seventh Tank Army.

Other, smaller infantry and armoured formations of the British contribution to the former NORTHAG had made it back over the Weser before the Soviet Army took the crossings over that waterway, yet the British Army in Germany had been devastated by the losses taken in combat. So many men were dead and a lot more were either surrounded by enemy forces or in their custody. Whole formations had been destroyed during intensive fighting and the survivors of those gassed. TA formations had been especially hard hit, even when the majority of those deployed had been considered to be higher-grade units with better equipment and training that others which had remained behind in the UK.

Moreover, British Army units deployed in the rear close to the frontlines or at a distance backwards had suffered immense casualties too. There had been air and missile attacks against them along with commando strikes to say nothing of those which were caught up in the Soviet third echelon’s drive yesterday which tore through rear areas. Many rear-area units had been forced to flee in panic along with the fighting troops back across the Weser with their men thus scattered and equipment left behind.

More than forty-six thousand British soldiers were dead, seriously wounded, captured or trapped by Soviet encirclements (the latter in the Hannover pocket).


This was just the sorry state of General Kenny’s assigned British forces that he had under his operational control on the western side of the Weser. His Dutch troops were all gone now and the Bundeswehr had only one of its four divisions which had managed to escape destruction and/or encirclement. Half of the US III Corps was trapped on the wrong side of the new frontlines. The Belgians were in a better state than anyone else though two of the brigades assigned to their 1st Infantry Division had been near destroyed by Soviet nerve gas and that formation now consisted of no more than a lone reinforced brigade; the regiment of Belgian paratroopers had yet to see action while their 16th Armoured Division had fought well on the Weser without taking too many loses.

The French III Corps, at Bremerhaven and Bremen, and under British Second Army command, had taken heavy casualties though had used their excellent manoeuvrability to escape wholescale destruction of major units; the French also hadn’t been attacked with chemical weapons.

What remained of the British Second Army was a shadow of its former self.


The expectation had been that the Soviets would attempt a series of major crossing operations over the Weser starting earlier this morning. By the late afternoon, as General Kenny surveyed his command, such an attack had yet to come. Only where the Weser meandered near Porta Westfalica and West German Territorial troops of their 53rd Brigade had yesterday held onto the eastern side of the Weser had the Soviets struck. There had been fighting there this morning as Soviet First Guards Army tanks – supported by infantry formations from the disestablished Soviet Third Shock Army – pushed right up against the river there. The West Germans had grudgingly withdrawn after their ranks of M-48 tanks had been mauled, but they had made the invader pay there.

Instead of striking across the Weser, the Soviets had been busy on the other side in moving against the Hannover pocket and the Americans in Einbeck. There had been no massed air or artillery attacks westwards across the river of a tactical nature in preparation for a crossing operation nor any sign that air reconnaissance could spot of river-crossing equipment being brought forward in great concentration.

Like everyone else, General Kenny had breathed a sigh of relief.

Yet, at the same time, the senior NATO ground commander here in northern Germany had to wonder just what the Soviets were up to. If they were out to conqueror West Germany and afterwards the majority of mainland Western Europe, then why had the Soviet Army come to a stop? It didn’t make sense…


In the absence of a Soviet attack, the British Second Army was digging-in. Down from Bremen to as far as Hann. Munden near the northern reaches of Hessen, French, West German, Belgian, British and American troops were all busy preparing their defences. Combat engineers and semi-conscripted civilians assisted the fighting men in constructing earthworks, trenches and anti-tank ditches. Mines were laid in great abundance and there was much demolition work undertaken too. Everyone worked fast expecting that at any moment the Soviets would be pouring over the river aiming to strike further westwards.

In the midst of the overseeing of this defensive effort, General Kenny was distracted by a message that came directly to him from the Northwood bunker outside London where Admiral Fieldhouse bypassed the NATO command structure. This was not something truly underhand to the detriment of Britain’s commitment to NATO, but rather an important matter of political significance that the War Cabinet wanted General Kenny to be personally aware of.

He was informed that there had been discussions taking place among the Dutch government over a decision to quit the war – no information upon how this intelligence had been gained was shared – and that there was a possibility that that could become a reality. Thus, General Kenny was told that he was to not rely upon formations of the Dutch Army to hold key strategic positions without adequate non-Dutch forces located nearby ready to move to replace such units should they decide to march away back to the Netherlands without notice.

It was one of the most stupid things that General Kenny had ever heard. What Dutch forces did he have left, let alone those holding key positions? If they had existed, he couldn’t imagine a professional Dutch military officer ordering his men to do such a thing without giving adequate warning and so was London really serious on that? How did the politicians expect him to explain the movement of reserves around to be placed behind Dutch frontline troops, even if both such things were a figment of someone’s imagination?

With reflection, General Kenny wondered just how out of touch those politicians back home were. The war here clearly wasn’t going as they thought if that was what was at the forefront of their current thinking. Such people living in bunkers waiting at any moment for the first bursts of thermonuclear weapons atop the ground above their heads were going to be in a difficult mental place, but still.


Away from that matter, there was still the business of war to be getting on with. General Kenny liaised with General Otis as US Seventh Army commander to his south and also General Galvin; he wanted to find out just when those long-promised reinforcements from the US Fifth and French Second Armys were to arrive.

The answer to that question from SACEUR was that American and French units would very soon be here.

[James G]

One Hundred & Forty

It could have been a major Diplomatic Incident of the first order, yet this was wartime and the United Kingdom was allied with the Netherlands. Nonetheless, the arrest of a Dutch national who was part of Queen Beatrix’s security detail at Stansted Airport northwest of London was something of major significance. British specialist police assisted MI-6 in detaining and removing the security officer from the Queen’s entourage, her aircraft and the airport. Afterwards, as diplomacy was used to smooth over the upset Dutch, the arrested man was transported across to western England where he was to be questioned at leisure by experienced interrogators at a location from where he couldn’t escape using diplomatic immunity.

This British action to forcibly arrest and remove a Netherlands citizen from Queen Beatrix’s security team came just before the Dutch Monarch was about to leave Britain on an official Netherlands Government aircraft to make a secret flight back home. It was late evening by that point and as it was getting dark the need to leave Britain before blackout came was urgent for the safety risks of lifting off in darkness with such an important VIP aboard. MI-6 nevertheless moved to take the man whom they were interested in away before he could return home as it was feared that his connections within the highest levels of his own country’s establishment would allow him to get away with what he was suspected of long been doing. The arrested man was strongly suspected of being a traitor to his country secretly working for the interests of the Soviet KGB yet the Dutch didn’t believe that and he was about to head home.

Even though it was going to ruffle a few feathers, from the highest levels orders had come down for MI-6 to do what the Dutch wouldn’t do and detain the man for interrogation. The ongoing political situation with the government of the Netherlands voting to leave the war meant that a man close to Queen Beatrix with suspected Soviet loyalties couldn’t be allowed to remain where he was when Britain wanted her to force her government to keep their nation fighting.

Determined to get back home as fast as possible, while annoyed at what had gone on, Queen Beatrix hardly raised a complaint to what occurred. It was thought that afterwards, there would be repercussions to what MI-6 had done… yet subsequent events made that subject a moot point.


Queen Beatrix flew home on the evening of March 19th aboard a VIP-configured Fokker-28 twin-jet aircraft. It wore the registration ‘PH-PBX’ and was an excellently-maintained aircraft with very professional crew. It had been recently parked at Luton Airport in nearby Bedfordshire inside a guarded hangar and thus kept extremely secure.

PH-PBX lifted off from Stansted at a quarter past six in the evening, only minutes before sunset occurred. The aircraft soon climbed high into the sky and contact was made with the United Kingdom Air Defence Region (UKADR) HQ at RAF High Wycombe and was also tracked by land-based and airborne radars. There was no fighter escort for the Fokker-28 as it was only making a short flight across the North Sea at high speed but taking a southern routing away from the possibility of Soviet fighters ranging far from their captured bases on the West German coastline.

PH-PBX took a southeastern course away from Stansted and left British shores soon enough flying away from the Essex coastline. A turn was then made directly to the east so that the aircraft was heading towards the Dutch province of Zeeland rather than the Belgian coast. A transponder was active and reporting the aircraft’s position to ground stations over a secure network though the aircraft was still be tracked by NATO radar networks too. Everything was going perfect with the flight with good weather and PH-PBX was on its way to the Netherlands.

Then, an urgent broadcast was made from the NATO E-3 over eastern England which was tracking the Fokker-28 that there was an unidentified aircraft fast closing-in upon PH-PBX. The Dutch aircraft was instructed to take urgent evasive action and head south and low as fast as possible, yet those NATO air battle staff aboard that distant aircraft knew that it was already too late.


Nordholz Airbase near West Germany’s North Sea coast had been seized yesterday evening by armoured spearheads of the Polish First Army. French combat engineers had conducted hasty demolitions there and thought that they had disabled the facility for some time, yet they were unaware of Soviet designs on such a facility that had a long runway and a strategic position like it had. There had been urgent repairs conducted overnight and through this morning to the runaway itself rather than all the hangars, control towers and HAS’ which the French had so thoroughly enjoyed blowing up. Soviet combat aircraft had a rough-field capability and after the holes in the runaway had been filled in, it was acting as a forward base for aircraft assigned to the Soviet Forty-Sixth Air Army.

Fencer long-range strike-bombers which had earlier today flown against targets in eastern England, and then been engaged by French Navy warships, had used other airbases a little bit further east, but now Nordholz was operational slightly increasing range of aircraft sent on strategic missions. There were Fencers again over the North Sea though this evening they were tasked to strike at coastal targets along the Dutch and Belgian coasts rather than those on the British mainland. The port facilities at Den Helder, Hoek van Holland, Flushing, Zeebrugge and Ostend were all to be attacked with the hopes of hitting ships landing military equipment and the facilities for vessels coming across the North Atlantic to support the NATO logistics effort.

Eighteen Sukhoi-24Ms were on this mission, acting in flights of four and three, and they were operating at a great distance. The need for extra fuel tanks to be carried along with the low-level flights they took to circle around the top of the Netherlands and then come southwards to strike along the coast meant that they carried few weapons, yet each still carried self-defence weapons in the form of a pair of wingtip-mounted R-60M (NATO: AA-8 Aphid) air-to-air missiles.

The three Fencers heading for Zeebrugge were flying towards their Belgian target at low-level and had been using passive electronic radar jamming systems to avoid detection during their journey. In addition, the combat radar fitted to each strike-bomber was in a passive mode too allowing for short-range navigation and anti-collision. It was this trio of aircraft that stumbled across PH-PBX in an accidental fashion… though it was something that later wouldn’t be viewed as an accident with the coincidence of the detention back at Stansted of one of Queen Beatrix’s entourage before that flight left Britain.


One Fencer climbed upwards to get a look at the lone aircraft spotted heading west-east when the Soviet strike-bombers were flying north-south. The white-painted light passenger jet wasn’t positively identified for what it was, but there was no doubt that it was a VIP aircraft crossing from Britain to the European mainland. Standing orders were that if Soviet pilots spotted such aircraft either airborne or on the ground they were to be engaged due to the high probability that they would be carrying military or political figures of strategic importance.

The VIP aircraft tried to evade the Fencer which had closed-in upon it from the side, but there was no chance of escape: a single R-60M missile was fired using infrared guidance and its proximity fuse detonated the missile warhead soon afterwards.

There was an explosion and then the majority of the starboard wing of PH-PBX was blown off. Debris was immediately sucked into the engine mounted at the side of the rear fuselage and other pieces of wreckage tore into both the cabin as well as the tail. The subsequent decompressurisation and complete loss of flight control doomed the aircraft and all of those aboard.

PH-PBX was visually confirmed by the Fencer pilot and weapons officer falling towards the sea below before they took their aircraft back to join their comrades on the way to attack Zeebrugge.


The Kingdom of the Netherlands had just lost its Monarch at this all-important moment in its history.





One Hundred & Forty–One

Soviet paratroopers along the southern shores of Norway clung-on throughout March 19th. Those men of the 105GAD who had arrived by air the previous day wouldn’t be defeated by those Western forces sent against them no matter how hard the Norwegians and the Swedes tried to overwhelm them.

Rygge Airbase was captured that morning before the Swedes could arrive to take on those men of the Soviet airborne division’s 97th Regiment. The Norwegians were forced to abandon the facility once those invading paratroopers put all their effort into taking the airbase; airmobile light armoured vehicles rolled into Rygge hot on the heels of the retreating Norwegians who had flew their F-16s elsewhere and set about undertaking emergency demolition work. By the time the Swedes started to come close in the early afternoon, Soviet helicopters flying from there, along with the first of many combat aircraft planned to also use Rygge, attacked them furiously and held up their advance so that the paratroopers could dig-in not only there but nearby too along approach routes too.

The pair of Swedes divisions entering southern Norway to aid their Nordic neighbours thought that they were prepared for enemy air attacks, but they found themselves surprised by the presence of so many Soviet aircraft operating across the Baltic Approaches. The collapse of the 5 ATAF – due to the losses of its bases at Karup and then Rygge – meant that the air situation over the Baltic Approaches had wholly changed, and not for the good either.

The second of the two Swedish divisions entering Norway moved towards Oslo itself and took a more northern routing than the other. Their aim was to assist the Norwegian Oslo Brigade in retaking Fornebu Airport from the Soviet 105GAD's 357th Regiment yet by being slowed down as they were from the air, they didn’t reach Oslo in time to stop those paratroopers from really getting established there. The 357th Regiment was off the peninsula on which they had landed and taken control of the Oslo-Drammen road on the mainland, cutting communications to the Norwegian capital from the west. Norwegian troops were fighting in the city’s suburbs and restrained themselves somewhat due to the continued presence of civilians who had yet to be evacuated and thus the captured portions of the city couldn’t be retaken.

Once the Swedes were fully able to get into the fight, they anticipated overwhelming the Soviet paratroopers; first they needed to reach the areas where they were to fight and also better defend themselves against enemy air attacks.


Further Swedish forces moved throughout the day across to Zealand. From Helsingborg across to Helsingor and from Malmo to Copenhagen, those troops went across the Danish Straits in ships and aircraft to assist the Danes in keeping Soviet and Polish naval infantry out of their capital.

This crossing of the Oresund should have been no more than an administrative transfer from Sweden to Denmark; this stretch of the Danish Straits was practically NATO territory. However, with the strategic air situation over the Baltic Approaches being as changed as it had been, the Oresund was now a contested waterway.

Throughout the six days of warfare, there had been non-stop naval activity in the western portions of the Baltic. Soviet, Polish and East German naval forces had fought those of West Germany, Denmark and Sweden in countless engagements above, atop and below the surface. Maritime aircraft & helicopters, warships, patrol & missile boats and submarines had all fought time and time again. NATO and later Swedish naval forces had an overall defensive mission yet they had been offensive in places by taking the war to the Soviet-led combined Baltic Fleet and even struck at their bases as far east as Gdansk and Gdynia. The Soviet intentions were to crush NATO naval strength in the Baltic and then move their assets westwards through the Danish Straits – and also the Kiel Canal – to break out into the Skagerrak and then the North Sea beyond.

NATO had been holding the Soviets back in the Baltic until the majority of Jutland had fallen to the East German Fifth Army yesterday. Now with the USAF F-16s from Karup out of the picture, air control above the necessary exits points westwards was in Soviet hands and thus the naval situation had changed. Baltic Fleet lighter warships and their missile boats now had a reduced air threat and could operate with greater freedom all over the western portions of the Baltic, including previously ‘secure’ area like the Oresund.

Several aircraft and ships laden with Swedish troops and military equipment thus came under attack when on their way to Denmark. The Swedes fought back to defend themselves, yet men and military wares were lost during the crossing as well as great disruption caused. Nonetheless, while taking some losses, those two divisions would reach Zealand by the end of the day, ready to engage in combat on the approaching Sunday.


A pair of RN warships had entered the Skagerrak during the early hours of the morning and then went through the Kattegat and into the other side of the Danish Straits.

The frigate HMS Brave had previously been out in the North Atlantic and seen some action there defending the naval approaches to Britain from Soviet submarines. Those attacks had petered out as the first wave of Soviet submarines in-place before war broke out had expended their limited war-shots and then the follow-up wave had yet to appear after intensive NATO ASW activity in the Norwegian Sea. Due to the direct threat to the UK mainland coming from the east, and the failing NATO strategic situation there (the frigate HMS Charybdis had been lost off the Danish coast the evening before as just one part of that), the Brave had come around the top of the British Isles to join with the older frigate HMS Plymouth.

The Plymouth had been in the Celtic Sea a few days beforehand but too had transferred to the waters east of Britain as most of Denmark was overrun and then the Soviets gained a strong foothold on the German North Sea coast. This warship was due for retirement but was a capable vessel and wasn’t going to be paid off while there was a war on.

The two vessels came down the Oresund during the early evening and soon found themselves in action. The waters south of Copenhagen were reported to be full of enemy light naval forces and such intelligence was found to be very accurate indeed. Each RN warship carried a wide array of armaments from guns to missiles to anti-submarine weapons and multi-role helicopters. Their sensors were active and there was some air support available to them from the Swedes whereas before back in waters further north West German Marineflieger Tornado-IDS and RAF Buccaneer aircraft based back in Britain had covered them; combat was expected and then gained tonight.

Soviet, Polish and East German corvettes and fast boats were busy at first fighting the Swedes and weren’t expecting the Brave and the Plymouth. Those ships had gun and missiles of their own though weren’t carrying the armed helicopters that both British warships had. It was to be the presence of these naval helicopters, able to operate from the mobile air strips on the water which the two frigates were, which allowed the RN to inflict upon the enemy multiple casualties at first before a strong reaction could be made.

Sea Skua and AS12 anti-ship missiles were fired from the RN helicopters against a total of six vessels. Hit by these missiles were a pair of Tarantul-class missile-armed corvettes – one operated by the Soviets and another with a Polish crew – and four and four fast missile boats crewed by Soviets and East Germans. Each of those struck vessels were either sunk or too badly damaged to continue this far away from home, but there were still further enemy light surface forces that made an appearance.

Brave faced a pair of Osa-class missile boats racing towards it with their electronic jamming systems active and also their missile-targeting radars. One of the frigate’s assigned Lynx helicopters was at that time returning to the Brave after expending both its carried Sea Skuas and the other was on the flight-deck being readied for flight. Thankfully, the Brave had her own mounted weapons to deal with such a threat as well as information in her computers concerning intelligence data on radar systems fitted to Soviet-crewed Osa vessels. Two Exocet surface-to-surface missiles were launched while the Sea Wolf surface-to-air missile system was placed on alert.

The Exocets were fast yet only just reached the Soviets moments before they were to open fire with a planned volley of eight missiles, which surely would have been enough to overwhelm the Brave’s defences. The Soviet jamming was defeated and their automatic 30mm twin-barrelled anti-missile guns weren’t enough to stop the inbound RN missiles: both Osas were struck and took severe damage that resulted in fires soon engulfing each boat.

The Plymouth wasn’t so lucky. It too was detected by enemy with missile boats aiming to get close enough to open fire with supersonic missiles, but a flight of Polish Air Force Sukhoi-22 Fitter attack-fighters reached the RN frigate first. The trio of low-flying aircraft unleashed multiple Kh-23 (NATO: AS-7 Kerry) radio-command-guided missiles at close range against the frigate. Sea Cat missiles from the Plymouth were fired against those missiles along with shells from her 20mm guns, yet the swarm attack by so many inbound missiles fired from several directions at once made that valiant effort at self-defence all for nothing. Five missiles hit the frigate on her foredeck, in her main superstructure and in her starboard side.

Neither blast from those small missiles was enough to destroy the Plymouth yet a lot of damage was taken at once in multiple places and every effort needed to be put into fighting the fires started and helping the wounded. There was no respite coming though for those Osas which had broadcast an alert of where the frigate was for the Polish Fitters to strike soon fired their own missiles: six P-15M (SS-N-2 Styx) missiles with much larger warheads then impacted the Plymouth.

Aboard the Brave, the crew were quietly celebrating the news of the destruction of those missile boats which she had engaged when the depressing news came that the Plymouth had faced a heavy attack and was reported to be alight from bow to stern. The captain of the Brave spoke to his counterpart aboard the Plymouth over the radio moments before the order was given on that devastated vessel for it to be abandoned, but could offer no immediate help for the doomed crew of the older warship. There were too many enemy vessels in the immediate area and now attack aircraft too. It was time for the Brave to think about retiring from the battle and moving away further northwards, especially now that the Plymouth with her main gun had been lost and the Brave only had a limited number of Exocet missiles instead of a 4.5-inch deck-gun to put to use.

Yet another loss that the RN couldn’t afford to suffer had been inflicted.


Just away to the east of where the Brave and the Plymouth were fighting, the Swedes who had been expected to aid both RN warships were missing from that fight due to attacks commencing against themselves from further Soviet-led naval forces. Attacking Sweden as it had done, the Soviets had been expecting their military to only act in self-defence in an uncoordinated manner and not actively assist NATO. This assumption had been proved wholly inaccurate in most instances where the Swedish military fought, yet not when it came to defending the very most southern reaches of their own shores tonight.

The ports at Trelleborg and Ystad had been shelled by the guns of Soviet destroyers and multiple Swedish warships raced towards such places aiming to take on the Baltic Fleet. However, Soviet naval aircraft and submarines were ready for such a countermove and conducted several ambushes against those fast-moving reaction forces. The aim of this effort was to begin systematically clearing the eastern reaches of the Baltic of all opposing naval forces so that the Baltic Fleet could finally begin to move past the Oresund and up into the wider waters beyond without having to keep major forces behind to deal with the assets of the Western navies.

Although not as many Swedish vessels as hoped were sunk tonight, the Soviets were on course for their ultimate aims. They managed to sink or cause major damage to almost thirty ships from corvettes and missile boats to minesweepers and patrol boats put into action as well. There were some losses of their own, yet there was still the numbers on their side.

Bigger vessels of the Baltic Fleet – cruisers, destroyers and frigates – were now going to be able to move up towards the Danish Straits and pass through them engaging NATO naval forces without having the constant worry of the Swedes attacking their flank with highly-manoeuvrable and well-armed little ships as they had been doing so.

The war here in the eastern Baltic was meant to have been won at the beginning of the week but now as the week started to come to a finish, Soviet goals were being achieved.

[James G]

One Hundred & Forty–Two

Those French Second Army units which went into action before dawn on the morning of March 20th were not originally part of that command which had formed up in France once hostilities opened and was currently like the US Fifth Army moving across towards Germany, but rather formations from the Force d’Action Rapide (Rapid Action Force). There had been two divisions with this corps-level command and answering to French First Army headquarters. Unfortunately, the Rapid Action Force hadn’t seen any rapid action in a forceful-type manner for the first six days of the war and had been held back in the rear ready to pounce upon a Soviet force rushing for the Ruhr or the Rhine and ambush it… something that hadn’t occurred.

Throughout the past few days, the French Army had been reorganising itself on an operational level. In paper, France had the largest army in Europe with fifteen divisional commands though many of those were what NATO nations would regard as nothing more than large, reinforced brigades. Eleven of those had been with the French First Army inside West Germany when war broke out, including those Rapid Action Force formations. The III Corps had been transferred to British Second Army command and the II Corps had ended up assisting the US Seventh Army; the I Corps had moved into action in Bavaria.

The reorganisation consisted of having the French First Army headquarters taking over command in Bavaria and now controlling its own I Corps along with the Bundeswehr II Corps. That left the US Seventh Army having fewer forces to command – including the French II Corps – but thus not having such a large operational area with multiple command corps spread widely. Meanwhile, the French Second Army took over the Rapid Action Force and added another division to that while making it the French V Corps and linked up with the III Corps; there were two other corps commands consisting of one regular and four reserve divisions (three of the latter being new formations) trailing behind. This new headquarters was to command the great number of French troops in the northern reaches of Germany along the Lower Weser.


Moving in the darkness, though with the first signs of early morning light very soon to appear in the skies ahead of them, the French 6th Light Armored & 9th Marine Light Infantry Divisions advanced northwards away from Bremen. These were light armoured and motorised formations with wheeled armoured combat vehicles though didn’t need to stick to the main roads like Autobahn-27 or Highway-74. Again, the French Army was duelling with the Polish First Army and like before, when on the attack the French made great gains.

AMX-10RC armoured reconnaissance vehicles and ERC-90S tank destroyers led the way for the infantry in VAB armoured personnel carriers following. The big guns carried by the French armoured vehicles – the AMX-10RC had a 105mm cannon and there was a 90mm cannon mounted on the ERC-90S – poured accurate and devastating fire into Polish tanks and armoured vehicles of the second-line formations of the Polish First Army. When the infantry had to stop and deploy, they struck hard and fast trying to overawe the Poles especially when the towed 155mm howitzers of the French formations came into play as immediate fire-support at close-range.

By the time it got light, the French were halfway to Bremerhaven with their advance northwards and as deep as the important crossroads around the village of Kuhstedt with their northeastern drive. This time they had finished off the Poles for good and made sure that their opponents weren’t going to be able to recover as too much of their rear-area supply network had been smashed… or so they thought.

And then low-flying transport aircraft started dropping French paratroopers.


Aircraft from other NATO air forces – RAF and USAF Hercules' – joined French aircraft in making a short flight just over the Weser and not that deep into the enemy rear where the Poles were known to be setting up an operational air defence network. There was some anti-air activity from SAM batteries, which took out a trio of Hercules' and a French C-160, but the vast majority of the French 11th Parachute Division was successfully air-dropped where it was meant to be.

The six battalions of paratroopers were joined by their own ERC-90S tank destroyers as their light armour component. The area around the town of Zeven, an open flat area located at another strategic crossroads, was the chosen landing site for the 11th Parachute Division. This was to the east of where the rest of the French V Corps was at first operating, but right where the central rear-area of the Polish First Army was: their main headquarters and logistics centre. Zeven was just off Autobahn-1 running up to Hamburg and the rest of the French Second Army already assets in-place in northern Germany were on the offensive with the follow-up forces ready to join them.

The 2nd & 10th Armored Divisions – as wounded from earlier engagements as they were – led the French III Corps attack to regain territory lost yesterday and open an advance towards Hamburg. After Lubeck’s surrender, relieving the West Germans in that city was all-important as far as NATO was concerned with the added benefit of shutting off Soviet access to the southern shores of the North Sea. Those Bundeswehr forces in Hamburg, the 6th Panzergrenadier Division, would then come under French command too for further offensive operations. Moreover, the rest of the French III Corps who had previously withdrawn into Bremerhaven were to break-out of there.

It was a very bold plan indeed…

…but just too much for the French Second Army to achieve.

The Poles were taken by surprise and they initially collapsed in the first few hours of the French offensive against them. Yet there were Soviet troops in the rear who had previously been part of the Soviet Second Guards Tank Army, a first echelon field army which had been torn apart in the opening moves of RED BEAR and then disestablished. Those divisions had been reduced to brigades and the survivors given somewhat of a break from fighting though not what NATO would regard as rest and recuperation; many of the senior Soviet Army officers had become ‘advisers’ with the Poles. Those officers, along with the senior Poles of the Polish First Army staff, hadn’t been in Zeven when it was seized and rather were some distance away from where their main rear headquarters was in a mobile command post column.

After Zeven was captured and some of those French armoured vehicles raced south to reach Autobahn-1 at the Bockel junction, the Soviets struck to retake Zeven back again. The little town sat where road and rail links converged in this part of northern Germany (known as the Elbe-Weser Triangle). Polish troops scattered from there were turned around at gunpoint and pushed ahead of the Soviets to go back towards that town as well as southwards too. Many of the Poles realised that they were being used as live targets for the French paratroopers to expend their ammunition upon but they had no choice but to be pushed around by the Soviets in a dangerous and confusing environment.

Away from the fighting at Zeven, the French III Corps drive up Autobahn-1 and the countryside either side of that major road went fast in the beginning and the first AMX-30 tanks of the 2nd Armored Division almost reached the air-dropped light armour at Bockel before one of those Soviet brigades slotted into the gap between the two French forces and forcibly kept them from linking up by fighting to the west and north. There were T-64 and T-72 tanks which took on those ERC-90Ss and those heavy Soviet tanks could take a lot more punishment that Polish T-54s and T-55s. When faced with AMX-30s, the Soviets were equally matched, but they only had to hold their positions not fight and manoeuvre as the French were doing and thus exposing themselves.

Of course, the French III Corps wasn’t about to come unstuck like that during the big offensive planned to reach Hamburg and so the 10th Armored Division aimed to cut across directly to Zeven from behind where the 2nd Armored Division had been engaged by Soviet tanks. They found the countryside to the north of Autobahn-1 between them and Zeven full of Polish forces as well as more Soviet tanks pushing behind them. Many Polish troops tried to surrender, others decided to start fighting again and all the while those better-disciplined and organised Soviets following met the French in a highly-fluid, rolling battle. There was some air and artillery interference from both sides – as well as those dismounted Poles – but this was mainly a tank-versus-tank affair. The French had the numbers on their side and the willingness to push on to reach their comrades in Zeven, yet it took time and a lot of effort to beat back the Soviet tanks out in the countryside.

That was time that the French paratroopers didn’t have. They had captured Zeven only a few hours beforehand but by mid-morning they hadn’t been relieved by heavier ground forces and had lost a significant portion of their armour. The assigned 1st Parachute Hussars Regiment had three dozen ERC-90Ss but nearly half had been lost and there was an ammunition shortage with the remaining vehicles fast becoming apparent. Zeven itself was soon near surrounded by Polish troops returning at the head of oncoming Soviet tanks and the 11th Parachute Division wasn’t going to be able to hold.

The decision was made to abandon Zeven – along with all the vast quantities of military stores captured – and for the paratroopers to withdraw on foot away to the south towards the oncoming French III Corps heavier ground forces.

Even dismounted, the French move very fast indeed. They were out of Zeven at lightning speed as the paratroopers were marched away leaving rearguard elements behind them to delay an expected pursuit. This turned out to be a very good idea for soon enough Soviet tanks were pouring into Zeven with infantry following and ready to tear into and enemy paratroopers which they soon found that they couldn’t locate in great numbers.


The great French counter-offensive to retake what the Polish-lackeys of the Soviets had taken the day before came to an eventual halt just before midday. Their troops managed to break out of Bremerhaven and link up with the first two rapid action divisions unleashed and the frontlines were again pushed far away from Bremen, yet overall the offensive failed to reach the objective of Hamburg. The 11th Parachute Division was lucky to get away from their forward airhead at the speed they did and they soon enough linked up with those oncoming heavy ground forces that had only managed to get halfway to Hamburg.

The failure to achieve their aims came not from a badly-led or under-equipped troops, but rather a misreading of the enemy situation. It had been thought that the Poles were brittle and would be torn apart, as they were, but reorganised Soviet tank-heavy brigades behind them were prepared to fight and even counterattack. The French had no intelligence to suggest that the Soviets had consolidated their shattered divisions as they had nor armed and fuelled such forces – mobile ones no less – as rear-area counterattack forces rather than just as static defensive troops.

Plenty of light infantry reservists were now on their way to join the French Second Army, yet it lacked the ability to punch forward again at least for the rest of the day, maybe more. The paratroopers and very mobile light armour forces had been committed to action and bloodied so that they too weren’t able to redeploy elsewhere as needed. Then there were the heavier divisions which now truly needed to rest somewhat before trying another offensive like this again: which, short of an utter French strategic defeat, was just what the Soviets wanted.

*​

The US IV Corps with the US Fifth Army commenced a counter-offensive too.

These ARNG forces made their attack just as dawn arrived and struck in western Hessen with the aim of tearing apart the Soviet Thirteenth Army. Staging from Limburg – across the Rhine from Koblenz – the US IV Corps went through Bundeswehr lines on the edges of the Westerwald (the Western Forest) at the town of Solms with the intention of following the Lahn Valley up towards Wetzlar then Giessen. The aim was for the armored cavalry to lead the two mechanized divisions in a drive to tear right into the Soviets and penetrate deep into central Hessen and thus put the Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army to the south in a position where it would have to pull back its massed tank formations to defend the rear. This would then open the way for the US Seventh Army to go over on the counter-offensive itself later today at both Wiesbaden and Aschaffenburg, either side of the Rhein-Main area to threaten both flanks of the Soviet forces which had crossed the Main.

Again though, NATO wasn’t prepared for what its counter-offensive forces would find behind the frontlines.


Intelligence pointed to the Soviet Thirteenth Army as having only three divisions now assigned after one had been attached to the Carpathian Front’s main effort further south. One of those motorised rifle formations was meant to be further upstream in the Marburg area, one around Giessen and Wetzlar (with the forward point at Solms) and the third in the Taunus Mountains stretching southwards to the juncture with the Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army. The trio of divisions had been observed digging-in throughout yesterday so that they formed a long defensive line running north-south along the Soviets right flank as they focused their attention further southwards. Had they wanted to, the Soviets could have struck westwards through what scattered Bundeswehr opposition there had been keeping them back, but they thankfully hadn’t.

The aim of pushing the US IV Corps forward here was to smash the centre of the Soviet Thirteenth Army’s lines before they got too strong. The majority of the ARNG units assigned were high-quality units from long-time NATO-assigned formations equipped with modern equipment and well-trained. Those opposing Soviet units were what were known to be ‘Category B’ formations based in the western Ukraine with reservists making up the numbers in understrength divisions. They fielded modern equipment themselves, though not the very best of what was available. The clash of equals should have favoured the ARNG, the thinking went, due to the concentration of force used with an expectation that the US IV Corps would truly tear apart the Soviet Thirteenth Army even if there had been observation of what was thought to be not very extensive defensive works.


The 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment consisted of three battalion-sized squadrons of tanks and armoured vehicles (M-60A3s and M-113s) as well as a battery of self-propelled howitzers and its own squadron of armed scout and attack helicopters (OH-58As and AH-1Ss). The formation was home-based in Tennessee and had been fast shipped across the North Atlantic to initially be assigned to the US VI Corps, but now led the US IV Corps into battle.

Hitting the frontline positions of the Soviet 97GMRD, the men from Tennessee fought against forward positions and overwhelmed them in conjunction with a massed artillery strike assisted by the guns of the 142nd (Arkansas ARNG) Field Artillery Brigade firing eight-inch shells from their M-110s. Cobra gunships and Kiowa scouts buzzed around in the skies too, though many helicopters went down as the Americans found that the Soviets had plenty of anti-air weapons ready: not only SAMs and mobile anti-aircraft guns but also older towed anti-aircraft guns as well. Nevertheless, Soviet infantry bunkers were blown to pieces and their anti-tank missile teams smothered by massed fire.

On either side of the Lahn River came the two following divisions which were to engage the main body of Soviet troops behind the ruins of Solms and ahead of Wetzlar; the 42nd Mechanized Infantry Division was on the left and on the right came the 49th Armored Division. National guardsmen from New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana and Texas manned these formations that not only fielded M60A3s and M-113s but also early-model M-1s and M-2s as well, which was top-of-the-range equipment.

Like the 278th Regiment had done so, the Rainbow and Lone Star Divisions started hitting fixed defences and found that these were stronger than the initial outposts further westwards. Again and again the armored cavalry was found to have missed many of these as it was pushed forward to strike deep; it appeared that many defending Soviets had held their fire when in concealed positions to let the 278th Regiment pass. The main body of the ARNG had the available fire-power to blast away at what they encountered though serious losses were soon found to be taken in doing so.

Up ahead, on the other side of Wetzlar, were the extensive road networks around Giessen which the US IV Corps needed to take advantage of to burst into central Hessen right into the Soviet rear but they were being held up just past the immediate frontlines.

The Rainbow Division was caught ahead of the little River Dill. They wanted to conduct an assault crossing over there after coming through the forested Klosterwald. The 30th (North Carolina ARNG) and 218th (South Carolina ARNG) Brigades had been hot on the heels of the squadron from the 278th Regiment which they had been following along with the assigned divisional reconnaissance squadron (1/101 CAV) too. The 2nd (New York ARNG) Brigade behind them had been left behind to deal with the unexpected abundance of fixed strong-points in the Klosterwald. Just reaching that river was a challenge though as everywhere there seemed to be bunkers, trenches and hidden firing positions for tanks and missile-launchers.

The opposition was the 294th Guards Regiment of the 97GMRD with the infantry dismounted from their BMP-1 armoured vehicles: tracked combat platforms with a 73mm main guns, a coaxial medium machine gun and a mounted ATGM-launcher. Like the regimental tank battalion of twenty-four T-72 tanks (there should have been thirty-one but combat losses hadn’t been replaced), those BMP-1s covered the Soviet infantry and needed to be engaged and destroyed behind their earthwork defences. The Rainbow Division had a lot of successes but took so much unexpected return fire – even if it wasn’t always accurate – that their own losses mounted. The national guardsmen infantry had to dismount from their own vehicles to get into action without having their transports knocked out and thus the advance came to a halt on the river banks.

The Solmsbach River – another narrow waterway – had been crossed by the armored cavalry leading the Lone Star Division and then the men from Louisiana and Texas drove onwards through villages and the countryside. This area southwest of Wetzlar wasn’t flat but rather full of small hills and defiles between them. Here the Soviet 289th Guards Regiment fought as dismounted infantry away from their tank battalion and the BTR-70 armoured personnel carriers. However, their T-72s and armoured vehicles were used for local, small-scale counterattacks which the 2nd and 3rd (both Texas ARNG) Brigades plus the 256th (Louisiana ARNG) Brigade had to fight off so they could move around Wetzlar to the south and strike deep.

The 49th Armored Division soon found that the 97GMRD committed its reserves in their sector as the divisional tank regiment (the 110th Regiment) made an attack with its eighty-plus T-72s. In direct engagements with the M-60A3s that the national guardsmen manned, those Soviet tanks were equally-matched, yet there were plenty of them pushed forward all as one tidal wave of armour whereas the Lone Star Division – with twice as many tanks overall – had dispersed theirs supporting the efforts to take out strong-points and also coming up from the rear (as in the case of the 256th Brigade).

The Lone Star Division could not get past the Soviets, especially when those concentrated T-72s managed to get flanking fire support from all those undefeated strong-points that littered the area.


The US IV Corps attack came to a halt after covering no more than six miles in on the right and four miles on the left. Both heavy divisions, upon which so much emphasis had been placed on getting them forward into Germany, were unable to achieve even their initial objectives let alone get towards Giessen where the overall plan was for them to tear through the Soviet rear areas. They had not been beaten, defeated or smashed, just ran into crippling defensive fire that stopped them cold.

What the Soviets had managed to do was what NATO had initially done to halt the first echelon forces of the RED BEAR offensive in the opening days of the war. Fixed defences backed up by mobile local counterattacks by armour allowed numerical weaker defensive forces to stop attacks unless those on the attack were suicidal and there were other attacks far on the flanks to disrupt the defenders.

Thousands of national guardsmen had been killed and wounded for what many would afterwards regard as an absolute failure. It would be argued later that maybe if the rest of the US Fifth Army had been deployed alongside the initial third of the ARNG force employed then the Soviets wouldn’t have been able to stop such an offensive. Yet, there were two Soviet motorised rifle divisions dug-in to the north and south of where the US IV Corps tried to push forward.

Those arguments were important, but not for now. There was to be no deep drive into the Soviet rear to retake West German territory and by the time more reinforcements flooded forward, those Soviet defences were only going to get stronger. It was to be time for NATO to start thinking now about just what the Soviets were up to with their halting of further forward drives deeper westwards and instead concentrating on crushing trapped pockets of NATO resistance in their rear as well as digging-in everywhere as they were.





One Hundred & Forty–Three

The Soviet Union had been one of the founding members of the United Nations and the role of the Permanent Representative to the UN was an important diplomatic post with the country having a fixed position on the Security Council with a definitive veto. Dubinin had held that appointment before he’d gone down to Washington and his replacement was Alexander Mikhailovich Belonogov; another grey man who was the face of his country based in the United States though with a greater public profile that his counterpart as Ambassador to the United States.

Belonogov had not returned home to the Soviet Union on the eve of war or just afterwards (like Dubinin had) but rather stayed inside the UN complex beside the East River on what was considered extraterritorial ground. He battled with US Secretary of State Grassley behind the scenes in trying to win diplomatic support – or at least neutrality – from countless foreign nations through their own representatives here in New York yet the two men had not met with each other face-to-face… until now.

New York was six hours behind Germany and when Grassley met with Belonogov (at the latter’s invitation) it was almost three o’clock in the morning. By that point the much-heralded counter-offensives of the French Second Army and the US Fifth Army had come to a halt after only a few hours, though what was said bore no direct relation to that fighting there in Germany where NATO forces met with failure.


Grassley met with Belonogov expecting to hear what Grunwald had heard two nights before in Vienna: an insulting offer from the Soviets for the United States to concede defeat, in public no less, and except a ceasefire where the Soviets would hold what they had taken and thus bring about the collapse of united Western opposition to them. He spoke to the President and the NSC before he went to see Belonogov and the position of the United States was reaffirmed there that there was no be no acceptance of such a thing in any fashion.

His responses to what was going to be offered to him was predetermined and his lines might as well have been rehearsed unless the Soviets offered a surprise.

There was no surprise.

Belonogov tried to sell those Soviet terms better to Grassley than Tikhonov had to Grunwald, yet the Soviets were still demanding the same thing: the US to publically call upon the Soviets to give them a ceasefire. The term ‘termination of hostilities’ was again used along with a ‘halt where armies are’. That was what the Soviets wanted the United States to agree to, nothing more.

Grassley told Belonogov that the United States would not agree to such a thing. Whereas before Grunwald had not delivered a detailed reply to Tikhonov when in Vienna, Grassley did here in New York. The reasons behind the United States’ refusal to do so were carefully explained to Belonogov. The Secretary of State spoke of the terrorism directed against civilians in the immediate pre-war stage, the unprovoked military aggression undertaken worldwide, the use of chemical weapons, the effective terror bombing of civilian targets from Soviet aircraft, the treatment of civilians caught up behind the frontlines and the mistreatment of POWs. The United States wanted the Soviets and their allies to withdraw their armies back to their pre-war borders, release all civilian and military prisoners taken and for those who had committed crimes to be tried in a neutral, international court of law.

Belonogov afterwards spoke of how the United States and the West had lost the war militarily, politically and diplomatically. Grassley was told that the NATO armies in Germany were beaten, that the citizens of the West were in open revolt and that many nations were walking away from the West’s cause. There was a denial of the American charges that the Soviet Union had done anything wrong in defending itself after it was attacked first and all accusations of mistreatment of civilians and POWs alike were dismissed as lies.

The intransigence of the Soviets left Grassley shocked. They were the ones who had now made two separate approaches to call for a ceasefire (or, what was effectively a surrender of NATO) but were utterly brutish in their manner of their demands which they were making of the West. There was no way that the United States was going to do as the Soviets wished – should Reagan have been foolish enough to do so, Grassley was certain that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment would have come into play! – and surely they knew that too…?


After he left the meeting with Belonogov, Grassley spoke to the NSC aboard Reagan’s Doomsday Plane. He reported back on all that was said along with his personal observations and thoughts on the matter. The Secretary of State told them over the telephone-conference that he thought that the Soviets must be getting desperate if they were acting in this manner. He had no idea why that was the case but could only speculate that there were unseen pressures being brought to bear behind the frontlines where while they Soviets were wining there, something had or was going seriously wrong elsewhere. Grassley didn’t know what that was, but did anyone else?

If so, what could be done to take advantage of that to bring an end to the war?