Červený Poplach: The NATO-Soviet Standoff Over Czechoslovakia

[pats2001]

 


PART 7/Mr. Ulbricht's Opus



By August 13th, just 28 days after the Operation Danube memo had originally been leaked to Czech intelligence officials, the number of U.S. troops who had been deployed to Czechoslovakia to assist in its defense against Warsaw Pact invasion was equivalent to the total number of combat personnel stationed in Vietnam for the whole of 1966. And they were just one part of what had become a 13-nation contingent of ground and air forces dedicated to deterring the Warsaw Pact from occupying Czech territory. The table of organization for Operation Pressgang now also included Danish medical units, Norwegian ski troops, Italian Alpini mountain infantry, Greek engineers, and even a search and rescue squad from Iceland's coast guard. Eleven other countries provided intelligence cooperation and diplomatic support-- most notably Israel, who monitored Soviet communications in the Ukraine through a Mossad listening post at the Israeli embassy in Bucharest, and Japan, which used her considerable influence in the Far East to rally her sister Pacific countries to Czechoslovakia's cause. China, while publicly neutral in the NATO-Warsaw Pact standoff, privately let it be known through back channels that they would not object to seeing the Kremlin taught a lesson. Cuba's Fidel Castro spent hours on the phone with both Brezhnev and Dubcek trying his best to mediate a political solution to the impasse before the socialist bloc as a whole suffered what the official Cuban government newspaper Granma called "an irreparable fracture".

In East Berlin, however, Walter Ulbricht was focused on a clash of wills much nearer to home. Since August 10th a group of Humboldt University students had been holding a sit-in protest at the Brandenburg Gate to demand the release of two classmates who had been arrested for criticizing the Ulbricht regime's support of Operation Danube. The protest itself was enough of a slap in the face to Ulbricht since it constituted a direct political assault on his government's legitimacy. but what added insult to injury for him was that on the other side of the gate West German students were staging their own rally in support of the Humboldt demonstrators-- further exacerbating the already serious tensions between the GDR and the Federal Republic. But worst of all from his perspective was that the uncertainly created by the protests throughout all of Berlin gave NATO a potential perfect excuse to send troops across the East German border. The Stasi had tried everything to put an end to the sit-in, but the protesters had refused to budge; some of the bolder demonstrators had actually physically confronted the Stasi agents, with at least one such confrontation escalating into a fistfight that left all the participants hospitalized. Fed up with the headaches the Humboldt protesters were causing him, Ulbricht summoned Erich Mielke to his office around 4:30 PM Berlin time on the afternoon of August 13th for a fifteen-minute closed door meeting at which he warned the Stasi boss in no uncertain terms that if the sit-in wasn't ended within 24 hours every single senior officer in Mielke's command would be fired....starting with Mielke himself.

With that dire warning echoing in his ears, Mielke returned to Stasi headquarters and telephoned then-East German defense minister Heinz Hoffman to request the assistance of the Volksarmee in suppressing the Brandenburg Gate demonstrations. Despite the heavy obligations placed on the East German military by NATO's intervention in Czechoslovakia, Hoffman agreed to provide two motorized infantry divisions to back up the Stasi in crushing the protests. Plans were set in place for the combined Stasi/Volksarmee forces to move against the Humboldt protesters at dawn the next morning. Mielke and his men expected to crush the sit-in demonstrators as swiftly as they had the June uprising fifteen years earlier. And initially, the course of events seemed to bear out that conclusion; several dozen protesters did, in fact, break and run as the crackdown started just after 5:45 AM on August 14th. But most of the other sit-in participants chose resistance; within minutes after beginning their strike the Stasi/Volksarmee troops found themselves being pelted with rocks, cans, bottles, and anything else the demonstrators could get their hands on. In a panic one of the Volksarmee soldiers fired two bursts from his AK-47 rifle at one of the protest leaders, who died within seconds. In a rage the remaining protesters swarmed the security forces and began viciously beating them; at least three vehicles were attacked with Molotov cocktails. By nightfall, there were at least 54 people confirmed dead and 126 more injured or missing. Mielke, realizing his crackdown had failed disastrously and he was about to lose everything he'd worked for, shot himself with his service pistol around 10:30 PM; one of his aides found his body forty minutes later.

Just as Ulbricht had feared, NATO quickly made the decision to dispatch troops into East Germany, citing the need to protect the citizens of West Berlin and also seeking to safeguard its troops in Czechoslovakia against a possible Warsaw Pact rear flank assault. At noon on August 15th American, British, and West German ground forces crossed the inter-German border along a four-mile wide corridor. Caught flat-footed by this action, Soviet forces in East Germany were cut off from one another, and by 4:30 PM that afternoon Leonid Brezhnev had called an emergency meeting of his top military advisers to try to come up with a response to the NATO incursion. Whatever hope the Warsaw Pact might have had that Operation Danube could still be implemented was, if not dead, then certainly in critical condition....

TO BE CONTINUED

[James G]

Feb 22, 2020 13:24:07 GMT stevep said:

Feb 22, 2020 8:42:04 GMT pats2001 said:

PART 2/When It Rains, It Pours

Even today it still isn't entirely known who tipped off the Federal Directorate of Intelligence Services to the Soviet plans for invading Czechoslovakia, although most of the available evidence points to sympathetic officials at the Soviet foreign ministry or the Soviet embassy in Prague. But when the now-infamous "Danube memo" reached the agency's headquarters early on the afternoon of July 15th, 1968 it unquestionably threw a monkey wrench into Brezhnev's efforts to put out the reformist fire lit by the Dubcek government. Above all else Operation Danube, the proposed Warsaw Pact contingency plan for imposing a military occupation of Czechoslovakia if Dubcek could not be persuaded by diplomatic means to give up his reforms, relied to a significant degree on the element of surprise to work-- and the cat had just been let out of the bag in a dramatic way. Dubcek's security and defense advisers were understandably shocked by the implications of the Danube memo, but their reaction was mild compared to that of Dubcek himself. In a BBC interview twenty years later, his old defense minister Martin Dzur would recall that Dubcek turned positively apoplectic as he read the translation of the memo's outline for how the invasion would be carried out; at one point the Czech leader actually had to be physically restrained from throwing a glass ashtray across his office. Once he finished reading the memo, however, Dubcek's rage gave way to a cold resolve that the Soviet Union would not be allowed to subjugate his country the way the Germans had 30 years earlier.

Correctly suspecting that pro-Soviet factions in the Czech security services would attempt to tap his phone lines, Dubcek resorted to using dispatch riders on motorcycles to make the necessary arrangements with his cabinet to plan his next move. Around 8:00 PM local time that evening he went on the state television network CST to deliver a 90-minute address on what he described as "a matter of the gravest importance to our people and the world". What he said next would send shock waves all across both sides of the Iron Curtain; blasting the Kremlin for what he called "an unconscionable betrayal" by its intentions to occupy Czech territory, he announced that Czechoslovakia was severing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact effective at 11:00 AM the next morning. These things alone would have been enough to raise eyebrows, but it was what he followed these with that would truly change the game in the nearly quarter-century old rivalry between NATO and the Warsaw Pact; he closed his speech with a request for military assistance from the United States, Britain, and West Germany in defending Czechoslovakia against the invasion threat. Dubcek had just made the first move in a dangerous game of geopolitical chess whose final outcome even Nostradamus couldn't predict....

TO BE CONTINUED

  Well that's obviously the POD this memo being leaked to the Czechoslovak's.  I'm not sure that Dubcek would have reacted that violently, especially the request for support from NATO as that would be a definite red flag to the Soviets.  Also by making this public this early what time does he have to secure the loyalty of the army and do what he could to isolate the Soviet forces already inside the country, which were substantial.  Is he going to be willing to have the Czech army firing on them if they move from their bases?

About the Central Group of Forces, I just checked this but I was already near certain, and there were no Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The Central Group of Forces was formed after Operation Danube.

[pats2001]

  

PART 8/We Interrupt This Program....

One of the things critical to maintaining a successful dictatorship is tight control over a nation's media, and up until the Czech crisis began the Soviet Union had been strikingly successful in that regard. The majority of the Soviet public never saw anything on their televisions or heard anything on their radios other than that which fit the narrow ideological parameters set by the CPSU Central Committee; newspapers were subject to a degree of censorship that would have made the most autocratic monarchs of the 17th and 18th centuries blush. But with the growing NATO presence in Czechoslovakia and NATO forces now having established a toehold in East Germany, a monkey wrench had been thrown into the Kremlin's propaganda machinery. For the first time in almost half a century there were alternative voices for the everyday Soviet citizen to listen to as Western public and private media outlets began setting up camp on the Iron Curtain's very doorstep; one of the most enduring images of the summer of 1968 for many Americans is that of Walter Cronkite standing outside the Magdeburg Cathedral as he anchored the first-ever live TV news broadcast by a U.S. network from East German soil. For many of Brezhnev's key advisers, and Brezhnev himself for that matter, Cronkite's presence in Madgeburg was an even more alarming portent of impending disaster than the presence of NATO military forces in Czechoslovakia or the troop columns steadily inching their way towards Berlin. He represented an open and serious challenge to the public relations narrative Moscow had been forcibly selling to its subjects since the end of World War II. Despite official Soviet state media's best efforts to discredit him, Cronkite grew to become one of the most trusted information sources for millions of eastern Europeans wanting to hear the full story of the Czechoslovak situation instead of the usual one-sided bombastic self-glorification from government-approved sources.

Cronkite and his fellow newsmen would have a front-row seat to one of the most critical turning points in Operation Pressgang. On August 18th, 1968 the Soviets and their East German allies finally took action to try to stem the NATO tide; just before 11:15 AM that morning, hundreds of Soviet and East German fighter jets crossed into Czech air space with orders to take out the principal NATO tactical assets in eastern Czechoslovakia, with special attention to the main U.S. armored corps headquarters near Brno. Minutes later three Soviet army divisions marched into western Czechoslovakia and the Willi Sanger Parachute Battalion was placed on full war footing with orders to attack the Czech defense ministry headquarters in Prague. Meanwhile, in East Germany, the Landstreitkräfte, the ground forces branch of the Volksarmee, launched a three-pronged attack on the southern edge of the NATO column pushing towards Berlin. In the Baltic East Germany's small but dangerous People's Navy commenced sub-hunting operations to counter the presence of U.S. and British nuclear submarines. On Hungary's border with Romania Hungarian artillery batteries shelled a dozen Romanian army outposts.

Napoleon Bonaparte famously said "no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy", but in some areas of the newly opened battlefront the Soviet-East German tactical blueprint fell apart even before first contact. The Red Army's notorious penchant for bureaucratic inefficiency would rear its ugly head early and often in the first hours of what would soon be called the Czech War; thanks to a communications breakdown the second wave of Soviet troops, which was to have entered Czechoslovakia by 1:15 PM on the afternoon on August 18th, didn't even start to leave their bases in the Ukraine until after 3:00 PM. Equipment meant for combat units was erroneously shipped to non-combat detachments and vice versa, and to compound the problem further both combat and non-combat contingents were given supplies that were ill-suited for the environment in which the troops would be operating; in one particularly ironic example, an engineering company was given winter clothes at a time when Europe was in the midst of one of its hottest summers in recent memory. As it turned out, such supply glitches would be the least of Moscow's problems....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

 

PART 9/Our Man In Košice

Mention the name Gustav Husak to the average Czech or Slovak these days and their first reaction will likely be to spit in disgust. To just about every Czech or Slovak over the age of 60, and a good many under 60 for that matter, Husak is a modern-day Quisling who turned his back on his homeland in its most critical hour for the sake of personal advancement. A former vice-premier in the Dubcek government who'd abruptly resigned in protest of Dubcek's decision to withdraw Czechoslovakia from the Warsaw Pact, Husak had been living in self-imposed internal exile in the town of Košice when the Czech War began; he'd been waiting for an opportunity to get revenge on Dubcek, and he saw it in the Soviet invasion. By the same token the powers that be in the Kremlin viewed Husak as a potentially useful collaborator in their plans to reimpose hard-line Communism on the Czechs. So when Husak contacted the KGB station chief in Bratislava on the evening of August 19th asking for a meeting with the commander of the Soviet advance forces approaching Košice, the station chief didn't hesitate to act on his request. Around 11:52 PM Prague time a nondescript brown Skoda 1202 car pulled up to the flat where Husak had been staying since his resignation and two KGB agents ushered him into the car for a 30-minute drive to the Red Army front lines. When Husak's identity had been verified to the satisfaction of Soviet military personnel, a call was placed to Leonid Brezhnev at the Kremlin; over the next two and a half hours Brezhnev and Husak hashed out the preliminary framework for an agreement to install Husak as head of the puppet regime the Soviets intended to install in place of Dubcek's government.

At 3:35 AM on the morning of August 20th, 1968 a Red Army helicopter flew Husak to the Ukrainian provincial capital Kiev; from there an Antonov transport jet took him to Moscow, where he arrived at the Kremlin just after 5:15 AM. By 10:30 Husak and Brezhnev had signed the final draft of what was euphemistically called "the Soviet-Czech Friendship Renewal Accord" but in reality constituted the proverbial thirty pieces of silver for Husak to become a Cold War Judas. At 4:45 PM that afternoon millions of Czech citizens and thousands of NATO soldiers were astonished to hear a radio broadcast in which Husak proclaimed the establishment of what he called "the People's Czechoslovak Republic". By his actions since July 15th, Husak asserted in his grandiose announcement, Dubcek had effectively forfeited all credibility as leader of Czechoslovakia and must now resign for the good of the country. Every day Dubcek refused to so, Husak claimed, would push Europe closer and closer to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Shortly after Husak finished his bombastic declaration, Brezhnev gave his own radio speech in which he bluntly stated that acceptance of the Husak puppet state as the legitimate government of Czechoslovakia by the West was a necessary precondition for ending hostilities between NATO and the Soviet Union. It was an audacious gamble on the part of Husak and Brezhnev-- and one which would backfire on them dramatically....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

  


PART 10/Polska walczy-- czy to prawda?(Poland Fights-- Or Does It?)


While East Germany and Hungary might have been the Soviet Union's principal cohorts in its quest to subjugate Czechoslovakia, Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka was certainly not idle on that score himself. On his orders the Polish People's Army had dispatched two motorized infantry corps and an armored regiment to the Polish-Czech border to help protect the Soviets' northern flank as they pushed into Košice and began preparations to attack Bratislava; when Gustav Husak needed advisers to train his puppet regime's new militia, Gomulka sent drill sergeants from the Polish Naval Infantry to take on the job. Agents of the SB secret police bureau kept Moscow abreast of the latest NATO troop movements in western Czechoslovakia and helped keep the Stasi functioning in the aftermath of Erich Mielke's suicide. Polish fighter squadrons flew air defense missions in support of Soviet and East German combat forces on Czech soil. In the Baltic the Polish People's Navy worked side by side with its East German counterpart on anti-submarine patrols. Polish military transport planes regularly flew fuel, food, and ammunition to Hungary to help sustain the Hungarian Army's fight against Romania. Last but not least, Gomulka himself gave countless speeches exhorting his fellow Poles to back what he called "the glorious fight to defend socialism against the reactionary warmongers of NATO". And yet beneath all the proclamations of fraternal unity and the exhortations to resist Western "imperialism", there simmered a feeling among many younger Poles that Gomulka's unabashed advocacy of the suppression of the Prague Spring reform movement smacked of hypocritical betrayal not only of the ideals of Marxism but also of Poland's own national legacy of opposing foreign invasions. Taking a cue from the Brandenburg Gate sit-in as well as the anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States university students in Krakow, Warsaw, and Gdansk began organizing their own demonstrations, braving oppressive summer heat and threats of arrest or even execution by the SB to call for a swift end to the Czech War.


At first the demonstrators only assembled in small clusters numbering at most a few dozen. Some of the protest leaders were indeed arrested and imprisoned, and in extreme cases subjected to merciless beatings that could last for hours. But if Gomulka thought the arrests would short-circuit the demonstrations, he was in for a rude shock: on August 21st, 1968 some 5,000 students representing all of Poland's largest universities assembled in Krakow's Main Market Square for the biggest pro-Dubcek rally any European city had seen since Dubcek's July 15th speech announcing Czechoslovakia's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. It didn't take long for that already substantial number to swell even further as housewives, trade workers, and even some Polish People's Army troops joined the protest. By August 25th, three days after the protest had started and two days before Soviet forces in Czechoslovakia attacked the town of Lučenec, the demonstrators' ranks had swelled to nearly 11,000 people-- more than twice the number the protest had started with. Gomulka was outraged by this open defiance of his regime and ordered the SB to crush the Main Market Square protest at all costs. Accordingly, just after 4:30 AM on the morning of August 27th crack troops from the SB's Department III anti-state activities suppression unit moved in to disperse the demonstrators and arrest the demonstration leaders. That proved easier said than done, however, as the housewives and trade workers formed a protective cordon to shield the students. A tense standoff ensued which one Swiss journalist described as "reminiscent of an insect stuck in amber".

That amber would be shattered on the afternoon of August 28th, when one of the dissident soldiers supporting the student demonstrators opened fire on the SB contingent in an attempt to stop them from attacking the protest leaders. Within minutes, the young soldier was dead and a gun battle had ensued which would leave nearly 120 people dead before it was over. Despite state media's best efforts to control the narrative, word about the truth of what is today known as "the Market Square Massacre" steadily spread across Poland via word of mouth and an ingenious underground publishing network that distributed leaflets throughout Poland. As summer turned to fall and NATO geared up for what promised to be a bitter struggle with the Red Army in defense of Bratislava, Gomulka found himself increasingly in the crosshairs of a determined campaign by Poland's younger generations to force his removal from power....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

  

INTERMISSION/A Word From Your Author

Let me start by saying "thank you" to everybody who's taken the time to check out this series and encouraging those of you who haven't read it yet to give it a looksee. The Cold War is one of my favorite eras of history to explore; one of the earliest timelines I wrote when I started getting into alternate history in the early 2000s was a forerunner to the scenario I'm sketching out here. Sad to say the webpage that hosted the timeline is now out of commission. I was thinking about it the day I got the inspiration to create "Červený Poplach(Red Alert)", and now that I've been working on it for a while I'm enjoying the opportunity to expand on the hypothetical world I roughly sketched out in my first days as an AH enthusiast.

Next, a quick note about the pictures that accompany each chapter in this series. I found them via a number of painstaking searches on Google Images and saved them to my computer's hard drive so I could adjust their size as needed to fit the message window. Some of the photos were so big they would have crowded out the text, so I had to shrink them a bit.

Last but not least, here's a summary of what you can expect from the next batch of episodes in this series: terror threats on the 1968 Democratic and Republican National Conventions, rumblings of mutiny within the East German army, a KGB plot to take out Nicolae Ceausescu,  the butterfly effect kicking into overdrive in Vietnam, Warsaw Pact air strikes on Brno, the Navy Seals and the SBS executing a joint strike against East German naval facilities, and of course the Battle of Bratislava. Or to put it more simply....

BUCKLE UP, KIDS, IT'S ABOUT TO GET REAL!

[lordroel]

Mar 27, 2020 21:06:47 GMT pats2001 said:

BUCKLE UP, KIDS, IT'S ABOUT TO GET REAL!

This is going to be good then.

[pats2001]

  

PART 11/How To Get Arrested By The FBI In One Easy Lesson

Even before the Czech War erupted, it had been a given that the 1968 U.S. presidential campaign would be a turbulent affair to say the least. The Vietnam War in particular was proving to be a divisive issue, so much so that three and a half months before Dubcek pulled Czechoslovakia out of the Warsaw Pact Lyndon Johnson had given a televised address explicitly saying he would not run for a second term as President. Robert Kennedy had won the California Democratic primary on a promise to bring American GI's home from Southeast Asia-- a promise he was tragically prevented from keeping when he was assassinated just minutes after his victory speech. Former Vice-President Richard Nixon, the runaway favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination, had made it a major cornerstone of his campaign to "Vietnamize" the war, i.e. gradually turn over the primary responsibility for prosecuting the fight against the Vietcong to the South Vietnamese. But as the tension between East and West over Czechoslovakia intensified and NATO marshaled its forces for Operation Pressgang, all eyes turned to Europe and Vietnam became a secondary issue. No sooner had President Johnson committed the United States to defending the Dubcek government than the FBI began receiving tips that radical leftists were plotting attacks against the Republican National Convention in Miami and the Democratic Convention in Chicago, either in "lone wolf" actions or as part of extremist groups that wanted to wage their own private war against the federal government.

At the time, and for a number of years afterward, there were numerous allegations that the KGB had masterminded or at least encouraged these terror plots. But most of the available information about them suggests they were in fact largely homegrown. One such plot centered around the idea of packing a moving van full of explosives and crashing it into the Miami Beach Convention Center on the final night of the Republican National Convention; the aim was to set off a blast powerful enough to level the convention center and kill Nixon along with the rest of the RNC attendees. The conspirators never got a chance to carry out their plan, however; on August 7th, the day before the bombing was due to take place, the chief mastermind of the bomb plot was killed in a car crash while trying to evade Miami-Dade police who sought to arrest him on an outstanding warrant for possession of an unlicensed handgun. The remaining conspirators were swiftly incarcerated and would later receive substantial prison terms for their roles in the attack plot.

Barely had the dust begun to settle from the thwarted bombing attempt in Miami when the FBI's Chicago field office received an alert that a pair of brothers with fierce pro-Soviet leanings were stockpiling guns and ammunition with the intention of going on a shooting spree at the Democratic Convention. Particularly disturbing was the alert's mention that one of the brothers was suspected to have acquired a pair of machine guns and planned to use them to kill as many of the convention delegates as he could. A letter the brothers planned to send to the Chicago Tribune claimed they were carrying out this action to initiate what they called a "people's war of liberation" against the "warmongering" U.S. political establishment. Needless to say the potential for heavy civilian casualties if this shooting spree were to go forward was enormous, and on August 28th the FBI moved quickly to capture them before they could strike at the convention. Arresting them would prove easier said than done, however, in the chaotic atmosphere which prevailed inside Chicago as a result of repeated clashes between the city's police and anti-Vietnam War protesters. It was a race against the clock to save the convention delegates, the spectators, presumptive nominee Hubert Humphrey, Humphrey's prospective running mate Edmund Muskie, and the press contingents covering the convention. Chicago police were doing their best to get everyone evacuated from the International Ampitheatre, but it was uncertain whether the evacuation could be completed in time.

The brothers were less than ten minutes away from the Ampitheatre, driving a rust-colored Chevy van, when the FBI finally caught up to them. In a desperate final attempt to evade capture, one of the brothers threw the van into a sharp U-turn only to crash into a lamppost and die as a result of blunt force trauma from the impact of the crash. The surviving brother, his face cut by broken glass, stumbled out of the van and tried to run from the FBI agents; Cook County sheriff's deputies tackled him just two blocks from the crash site and he was taken to Michael Reese Hospital under heavy guard. Under most other circumstances, these events would have been the lead story on the front pages of the next morning's editions of the Tribune and the Sun-Times; however, even as the arrest report was being filed, the world's attention would be dramatically redirected towards the fighting in Czechoslovakia as the Soviet and Polish air forces unleashed their wrath on Czechoslovakia's second-largest city....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

  


PART 12/Target: Brno



Brno's importance to the Czech people can't be overestimated. Besides being home to a number of cultural and historical landmarks and the nerve center of the Czech Republic's federal judiciary, Brno is also one of the largest IT hubs in eastern Europe and for most of the 20th century was Czechoslovakia's primary industrial center. When it became clear to Brezhnev that the Czechs and NATO weren't backing down before the Red Army or accepting the Gustav Husak puppet state as the new government of Czechoslovakia, he concluded drastic measures were necessary in order to force their hand. Taking a cue from the Soviet Union's old World War II foe Nazi Germany, he issued orders at 11:45 PM Moscow time on the evening of August 28th for the Soviet air force's Long-Range Aviation branch to carry out a terror bombing of the city as a warning to Prague of what awaited the rest of Czechoslovakia if Dubcek's government didn't agree to the Kremlin's terms. The Soviet bombers would be accompanied on their genocidal mission by attack jets of the Polish air force and escorted to their target by squadrons of East German MiG-21s; once the bombing was over, Antonov transport planes from Gustav Husak's Slovak puppet militia would drop propaganda leaflets urging the Czech people to surrender. At 7:30 AM on the morning of August 29th, 1968 three squadrons of Soviet Tu-95s and two squadrons of Polish air force Il-28s took off from bases in the Ukraine to carry out the lethal mission. The bombers were met by their East German escorts over southern Poland approximately 40 minutes later, and by 8:25 the Antonovs from Husak's militia had joined them in the skies above Low Tatras National Park.



As the bomber force entered NATO airspace and approached the outskirts of Brno, everything seemed to be going according to plan-- they hadn't been picked up on radar yet and no interceptors had move to challenge them. But just minutes before the first wave of bombers was set to attack, things began to go awry as one of the Antonovs suffered a malfunction with its cargo bay doors that prematurely released the leaflets it was carrying. A sharp-eyed Czech ground observer noticed the cascade of paper and phoned the local air defense command, who in turn duly notified the NATO regional air defense headquarters in Ostrava. Radio messages soon went out to every available NATO fighter within a ten-mile radius of Brno directing them to engage the bombers; anti-aircraft batteries opened fire on the lead bomber and the East German MiGs were compelled to break formation in order to protect themselves and the bombers against the swarms of U.S., British, and Czech fighter jets now descending on them.

From there the most ferocious aerial battle to happen in European skies since World War II ensued as the East German MiGs fought RAF Lightnings, U.S. Phantom IIs, and Czech MiGs; it was the Czech fighters which would sustain the heaviest losses, partly because of "friendly fire" mishaps and partly because of vengeful East German pilots eager to avenge what Leonid Brezhnev had called Dubcek's "betrayal" of the socialist cause. By 11:00 AM aircrew casualties on both sides already totaled well into the hundreds and scores of Czech civilians had also been killed after a stray Polish bomb hit a row of houses in one of Brno's outer districts; before the remaining bombers were forced to turn tail and seek safety at airbases in southern Poland, the combined number of confirmed dead among the attackers, defenders, and Brno's civilian population would top 10,500--  and more dead bodies would be found in the two weeks immediately following the raid, bringing the final total body count to nearly 12,000. The surviving Soviet, Polish, and East German aviators were lucky in one respect: if they couldn't make it home, they at least had the good luck to be captured by NATO troops and detained in relatively humane conditions. The crews of the three Husak puppet militia Antonovs weren't quite so lucky; two of them returned to the puppet regime's headquarters in Košice to be shot by Husak's secret police for bungling their end of the Brno raid, while the third made a forced landing in territory controlled by anti-Husak Slovak partisans and were summarily executed for treason.

In the end the Brno air strike did little to further Moscow's objectives in the Czech War; indeed, many modern historians have made the plausible argument that Brezhnev's attempt to wipe out the city may have actually constituted the Soviet leader's first crucial strategic mistake in the conflict. First, it further cemented Czechoslovakia's already strong determination to resist the Soviet invasion; second, it motivated NATO to dispatch additional air defense equipment and personnel to Czechoslovakia and West Germany; third, it diverted much-needed air support resources from the Soviet front in western Czechoslovakia and the Volksarmee troops trying to eject NATO forces from East Germany. In the months shortly after the Brno air strike a number of deputies to Soviet air force commander-in-chief Konstantin Vershinin would resign in disgust over their involvement in the operation, and Vershinin himself would be stripped of his command and court-martialed for incompetence. Given that Vershinin had been awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal during World War II and later served a distinguished tour of duty as head of the Soviet air defense services, it's widely suspected Brezhnev used Vershinin as a scapegoat for his own failure to force the Dubcek government's capitulation.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles from the fighting in Czechoslovakia and Germany, another war was reaching an unexpected turning point....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

  

PART 13/A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Hanoi Hilton

It's impossible to say with any degree of certainty whether South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu would have consented to cease-fire negotiations with Ho Chi Minh's Communist state in the North had the Czech War not broken out. But once the Dubcek-Brezhnev standoff escalated into open armed conflict and the superpowers refocused their attention from southeast Asia to central Europe, it steadily became clear to political and military leaders on both sides of the 17th parallel that they would be on their own at least in the short term; military aid shipments to Saigon and Hanoi were slowing to a trickle as Washington and Moscow prioritized their European battlefronts over what essentially amounted to a civil war in a second-tier country. There are differing accounts as to what led Thieu to finally open a dialogue with Ho, but historians widely agree that one of the major catalysts for his decision was an August 31st, 1968 meeting with his senior military advisers in which they told him that the ARVN forces under Saigon's command had, at most, only sufficient equipment and munitions to continue prosecuting the war with North Vietnam for another 18 to 24 months. When he asked them whether that would be long enough to hold out until the war in Czechoslovakia was over and Saigon could get a new infusion of U.S. military aid, they told him they couldn't guarantee such a thing.

In Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh was getting a similarly gloomy picture from his defense minister Vo Nguyen Giap. Without Soviet assistance, Giap said, it was difficult to envision the NVA or the Viet Cong being able to keep fighting the Saigon regime beyond the first six months of 1970. The only other possible source of foreign military aid was China, a nation with which the Vietnamese people had political and cultural tensions dating back centuries. Among other things Giap was concerned that the increasingly mercurial Mao Zedong might try to leverage support of the North Vietnamese war effort into political control over Hanoi.  As bad as losing the war to the South might be, Giap suggested to Ho, the prospect of becoming a vassal of Beijing was much worse. This left Ho with a serious political dilemma, one grave enough to prompt him to call a closed-door session of the Vietnamese Communist Party's Politburo early on the morning of September 2nd. As one of the participants in that meeting would later recall, the meeting was one of the stormiest any of its participants could remember attending; almost a dozen times over the course of the session Ho had to pound his fist on the table to restore order. But when the meeting finally ended around 1:30 PM that afternoon, a consensus had been reached that it might be prudent to extend an olive branch to Saigon.

After a few tense initial feelers between low-level diplomats at the two countries' respective embassies in Belgrade, the cease-fire talks were scheduled to begin in earnest on September 10th in the Austrian capital Vienna. The negotiators would arrive in Vienna at a time when the already volatile situation in Europe promised to become even more explosive; U.S. and Soviet troops were locked in a no-holds-barred fight for the historic city of Bratislava, while the Ulbricht regime in East Berlin found itself being confronted with the first rumblings of dissension in a National People's Army that heretofore had been unquestioningly loyal to its masters....

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PART 14/The Battle Of Bratislava

For most Americans September usually means the beginning of a new school year or the start of football season. But for U.S. troops tasked with the defense of Bratislava, September 4th, 1968 marked the opening of perhaps the most important land battle waged by an American army since Gettysburg. To senior military leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain it was abundantly clear that Bratislava held a critical early key to whether NATO could succeed in its campaign to save Czechoslovakia from Warsaw Pact occupation; a successful defense of the city meant NATO could at least hold the line against the Soviets and East Germans, while a NATO defeat would put Warsaw Pact forces in position not only to occupy Bratislava but also to launch a ground attack on Brno, possibly even make an all-out drive on Prague. And if Czechoslovakia fell, that in turn would jeopardize NATO's tactical position in East Germany and put West Germany at risk of eventual Soviet invasion. The message from Washington to the GIs on the ground was clear: Hold Bratislava at all costs.  While the Warsaw Pact held a slim advantage over the NATO forces in the area as far as tanks were concerned, NATO had the edge when it came to infantry personnel as many of the foot soldiers the Soviets would have normally relied on for the impending Bratislava offensive were tied down in the Slovakian hinterlands trying to suppress the anti-Husak guerrilla forces.

Backing the U.S. ground forces were British paras, Canadian artillery, Dutch and Belgian special forces units, Czech sappers, and last but not least volunteer militias comprised of many of the able-bodied adults from Bratislava's civilian population. The senior regional NATO commander had offered to evacuate the city's entire adult populace along with their families; most, however, had chosen to stay in the city-- and a good portion of them were former anti-Nazi resistance fighters who hadn't forgotten their combat training. These volunteers were deployed alongside the Belgian and Dutch special forces with the idea that all three contingents would harass the Soviet and East German units along their vulnerable southern flank. Just a few miles north of Bratislava a detachment of French paratroopers stood ready to provide additional firepower should it be needed; they would be the first French ground forces to see action in the Czech War.

It was just after 7:10 AM on the morning of September 4th when the Soviets launched their first salvo in the Battle of Bratislava, unleashing a massive combined armor and missile assault on the main U.S. and British troop positions along the northeast edge of the city. U.S. and British forces quickly returned fire, and a tank battle ensued the likes of which the Red Army hadn't experienced since Kursk. Although the T-62, the Soviet army's most well-known main battle tank at the time of the Czech War, had squared off with U.S. M-60 Pattons a few times in Vietnam under the auspices of the North Vietnamese Army, the Battle of Bratislava marked the first time Soviet and U.S. tanks had fought each other directly. For Red Army tank commanders who'd taken it for granted that their T-62s would easily overcome the Pattons, it was a rude wake-up call; on the first day of the battle alone the Red Army lost nearly a quarter of the armored strength it had originally committed to the attack on the city, and by the time the battle ended nearly six days later the Soviets had lost the best part of two full armored divisions and seen a third wiped out to the last tank. Their East German allies didn't fare much better-- on September 6th, 48 hours after the Warsaw Pact's initial thrust against NATO's defenses at Bratislava, the "Karol Swierczewski" Panzer regiment was virtually annihilated by a combination of American anti-tank rockets, RAF tactical air strikes, and a few well-placed booby traps courtesy of the Czech sappers.

By September 7th, 72 hours into the battle, the remaining Soviet and East German ground forces were pinned down and largely on the defensive. Moscow and East Berlin were doing their best to spin the situation to their advantage, but with Western media on the ground on Czechoslovakia and East Germany and Radio Prague beaming uncensored battle reports across the Czech border into East Germany and the Ukraine, it was getting harder by the day for Brezhnev and Ulbricht to pull the wool over their subjects' eyes. The handful of Husak puppet state militiamen who took part in the fighting at Bratislava weren't much help at all-- indeed, many of them simply threw down their guns at the first hint of actual combat and ran for the hills, with some choosing to sneak across the border into Austria and claim asylum at various NATO embassies in Vienna.

The Brezhnev regime experienced a brief glimmer of hope on September 8th when Red Army Spetsnaz commandos slipped through a gap in the NATO battle lines and captured the Bratislava-Petržalka railway station. As one of the city's main transport facilities, its seizure had been deemed a major priority for Warsaw Pact forces; the Red Army general staff was sure that with the rail hub under Soviet occupation it would just be a matter of time before the rest of the city was firmly in Warsaw Pact hands. But the bad luck that had been dogging the invasion forces since they first crossed the Czech border reared its ugly head once again; elements of the Czech Army's 22nd Paratroop Brigade, who'd been set to deploy to the nearby village of Stupava, were rerouted to Bratislava and surrounded the railway station within a matter of minutes. In the resulting two-hour pitched battle, an entire platoon of the 3rd Guards Spetsnaz Brigade was wiped out to the last man. The remaining Spetsnaz then had to fight their way out of the rail station in order to make it back to the Warsaw Pact lines. The 3rd Guards brigade commander, his mind shattered by the devastating losses his men had suffered, shot himself the next day.

In a final desperate attempt to gain control of the city, Soviet and East German infantry units attempted to storm Bratislava's Podunajské Biskupice borough around midday on September 9th...and it was at that point that the Czech volunteer militias and French paratroops made what may have been their greatest contribution to NATO's defense of the city. They stopped the Soviets and East Germans cold with a devastating enfilade that one Red Army captain would later describe as "a small taste of what Hell must be like". Even the Soviets, vast as their manpower resources were, couldn't forever sustain such brutal casualties, and around 1:00 AM Moscow time on September 10th Brezhnev reluctantly ordered Soviet forces to pull back from Bratislava.

For East Germany the failure of Warsaw Pact forces to capture Bratislava constituted more than just a military defeat-- it would prove to be the match that lit the fuse for the explosion which finally blew the Ulbricht regime apart for good. Grieving the loss of their comrades, and feeling they'd been misled about the depth of the Czechs' determination to defend their homeland, ordinary East German servicemen would steadily become more and more disenchanted with the political leadership in East Berlin. Even within elite units like the Sanger Battalion rumblings of discontent started to bubble up....

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PART 15/Zur Hölle mit Ulbricht!(To Hell with Ulbricht!)

By the time Warsaw Pact forces in Czechoslovakia regrouped near the town of Nitra on September 12th after their defeat at Bratislava, Walter Ulbricht had already seen his personal doctor at at least two dozen times. The combined stress from the still-ongoing Brandenburg Gate sit-in protests and NATO's  relentless advance on Berlin were taking an increasingly severe toll on his physical health. The outcome of the Battle of Bratislava served to make his plight that much worse; news of the disaster at Podunajské Biskupice had triggered severe migraines which forced him to briefly check into Berlin's venerable Charité hospital for treatment by its neurologists. According to medical records preserved today at the German Federal Archives in Munich, the East German dictator was also suffering from high blood pressure; a confidential report submitted to new Stasi director Markus Wolf on September 13th expressed concerns that Ulbricht might be at increased risk for stroke or cardiac arrest and recommended that Ulbricht be persuaded to retire from his office for his own safety.

And it wasn't just Ulbricht's physical health being jeopardized-- an appendix to that same report, drafted by one of Charité's top psychiatrists, hinted Ulbricht might be experiencing the first symptoms of mental breakdown. So there couldn't have been a worse time for him to be confronted by the prospect of mutiny within the rank and file of his own armed forces. Yet this was the exact situation that was brewing among ordinary East German soldiers in the wake of the setbacks which the Soviet bloc had endured in its attempts to crush Czechoslovakia. Even before the Battle of Bratislava Volksarmee political officers had been picking up hints of discontent within their units; just days before Poland's Market Square Massacre in Krakow the commissar for the Hermann Rentzsch heavy mortar detachment advised his superiors that he'd overheard two enlisted men in his unit express doubts concerning the Ulbricht regime's handling of the dispute between Prague and Moscow over Alexander Dubcek's reforms. Similarly the political officer assigned to the East German air force's Fritz Schmenkel fighter wing noted that many of the wing's aircrews were openly angry at the Ulbricht government in general and Ulbricht himself in particular following the disastrous Warsaw Pact air strike on Brno. Military security agents were doing their best to bring the grumblers back into line, but for every complainer who was silenced two or three seemed to crop up in his place. Censors with the Deutsche Post central offices in East Berlin were having to work overtime to keep letters that said anything disparaging about the regime from reaching the families or friends of East German servicemen. The Stasi, already under heavy strain trying to deal with escalating civilian unrest, found itself stretched almost to the breaking point in its efforts to squelch so-called "defeatist" talk among wounded soldiers, sailors, and airmen in the German Democratic Republic's military hospitals.

It was during the week of September 16th, as NATO advance units entered the Berlin suburb of Potsdam and Polish internal affairs minister Kazimierz Świtała was fired from his post under mounting political pressure from colleagues disgusted with his handling of the events precipitating the Market Square Massacre, that the West began to learn just how severe the discontent had become. A certain East German air force captain who was working undercover for the CIA gathering information on the overall morale of his country's armed forces notified his handlers at the U.S. mission in West Berlin that one of his fellow officers had been executed by firing squad the previous day on dubious charges of treason and insubordination. The condemned man, a sub-lieutenant with eleven years' distinguished service in the East German air force and a family history of commitment to Marxism dating back to the early days of Kaiser Wilhelm II, had been arrested after being overheard insulting Ulbricht in the most profane terms imaginable. Deciding they needed to make an example out of the sub-lieutenant, his superiors hastily convened a drumhead court-martial and sentenced the unfortunate man to death after a trial lasting less than twenty minutes. Just before the sub-lieutenant was executed, he shouted to the firing squad: "Zur Hölle mit Ulbricht!(To Hell with Ulbricht!)" It wasn't the first time those words had been heard in East Germany-- they had been the unofficial rallying cry of the Brandenburg Gate sit-in protesters for weeks. Nor would it be the last; during a September 19th emergency session of the Volkskammer legislature, a junior lawmaker shouted them at Volkskammer president Johannes Dieckmann in a burst of frustration.

But it would be the disillusioned men of the East German military who particularly took them to heart. Even within the Stasi there were rumblings of dissatisfaction, a growing sense that things had gone drastically wrong and the Ulbricht government's decision to support the Soviet intervention in Czechslovakia was at the root of many of those troubles. Like Frankenstein's monster, the security machine that had enabled the GDR's rulers to maintain absolute control over their citizens since 1949 would shortly turn on its creators....

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PART 16/Arrive, Raise Hell, Leave

Although the U.S. Navy SEALs special operations branch had existed since 1962 and seen action in Vietnam as early as 1966, it would be during the Czech War that they truly came into their own as a fighting corps. As soon as the first U.S. Air Force transport plane arrived in Prague SEAL teams were on the ground in Czechoslovakia to begin coordinating tactical plans with other NATO special forces units as well as gather critical frontline information for Operation Pressgang's command headquarters on the outskirts of the Czech capital. Once the fighting began in earnest SEAL teams initiated guerrilla-style raids behind the Warsaw Pact lines and ferried critical supplies to the anti-Husak partisans in Soviet-occupied eastern Czechoslovakia. After the war ended, they would shoulder much of the responsibility for tracking down and capturing suspected Husak puppet regime collaborators. But perhaps no mission they carried out in the combat zones of Europe better exemplifies their vital importance to NATO's war effort than the one they carried out on the night of September 16th, 1968 when they joined forces with the British Royal Navy's Special Boat Service(SBS) to raid the  East German navy's anti-sub helicopter base at Parow. Parow had been a thorn in the side of Western submarine captains since the Czech War began, and the Operation Pressgang central command unanimously agreed that it was time for this particular thorn to be yanked out. Originally NATO senior military leaders had intended to use air strikes to knock out the Mil Mi-8s stationed there and destroy the fuel and repair facilities the helicopters relied on to perform their assignments; however, with air defense of Czech cities and close air support of NATO troops in Czechoslovakia being given top priority by NATO's main air commanders, it was decided a ground strike by commando detachments against Parow might be more feasible.

Many of the details surrounding the Parow raid are still classified for security reasons, but it can be stated with absolute certainty the rumor of Israeli Defense Forces paratroopers accompanying the SEALs and SBS commandos on the Parow mission is false. According to a now-declassified Pentagon memo published in the Washington Post in 2012, the idea had been floated in the raid's early planning stages but was ultimately scrapped after NATO and then-Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan mutually agreed it would be logistically impossible to get the paras to Europe in time to take any significant part in the operation. The raid did, however, make extensive use of the signals intelligence gathered by Mossad's listening post in Romania. In particular the information the listening post acquired regarding the Parow base's guard detail played a critical role in determining when and how the commandos would attack. Knowing the guards would be prepared for a landing by boat, the combined SEAL/SBS assault group opted instead to come in via helicopter; at approximately 9:35 PM local time on September 16th the group disembarked from West German Bundeswehr UH-1s in an open field just a few miles from the Parow naval base. They arrived at the base itself approximately forty minutes later, and while the guards were changing shifts the SEALs and SBS men went to work planting explosives charges inside the helicopters parked on the base's main landing strip. For good measure one of the SEAL times also disabled the base's main phone link to East Berlin. The first charge detonated around 10:25 PM; by 10:42 the landing strip was littered with debris and the Parow base's personnel were frantically trying to put out multiple fires.

Remarkably for such an operation, no one was killed and the only serious casualty on either side was a Soviet Navy liaison officer who suffered a mild concussion and temporary hearing loss in his right ear. But the equipment losses for the East Germans were catastrophic-- 40 percent of the Parow base's helicopter inventory was destroyed outright with another 15 percent rendered permanently inoperable, and of the remaining 45 percent many would need extensive repairs simply to get airborne again. In effect, the heart had been cut out of the Volksmarine's anti-sub operations. At Volksmarine headquarters in Rostock the East German admiralty reacted swiftly and harshly to the Parow raid, sacking every senior officer at the base within 48 hours and ordering most of the junior ones arrested to face court-martial for incompetence and dereliction of duty; Volksmarine commander-in-chief Vice-Admiral Wilhelm Ehm is known to have personally carried out at least four of those arrests. By contrast the SEALs and SBS men would all be decorated for their roles in the Parow raid; one particularly astute SEAL team member would eventually parlay his combat experience into a successful political career in the U.S. Senate.

While Ulbricht and his senior military advisers struggled to devise a plan to compensate for the loss of so many helicopters at Parow, Hungarian dictator Janos Kadar had his own military problems to resolve. To date the Hungarian army's campaign against Romania had not gone the way Kadar had hoped it would; they had failed to gain any significant footholds inside Romanian territory. If anything, things seemed to be working out the other way around as Romanian ground forces had established at least three salients on Hungarian soil and occupied the town of Debrecen. Already Nicolae Ceausescu, never one to miss an opportunity to engage in rhetorical flourishes, was telling his fellow countrymen that by Christmas the Romanian flag would be flying over Budapest. This understandably didn't sit well with Kadar, and on September 21st he phoned the Soviet embassy in Budapest to request KGB assistance in what he euphemistically referred to as "solving the problem of Ceausescu". The KGB's response to that request would put the Warsaw Pact one giant step closer to the "irreparable fracture" Granma had warned about....

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PART 17/Nicolae Ceausescu Must Die



For Yuri Andropov, eliminating Nicolae Ceausescu was more than just a matter of national security-- it also meant an opportunity to settle a personal score. The KGB chief had been mortally embarrassed by the Operation Danube memo leak, and despite having no proof Ceausescu had been involved in any way he was convinced the Romanian leader was at least partly responsible for that leak. Ceausescu's repeated pro-Dubcek statements to the international press had incensed Andropov to the point where he was ready to kill Ceausescu himself. So when the Soviet embassy in Budapest notified him of Hungarian premier Janos Kadar's request for KGB assistance in taking Ceausescu out, Andropov didn't think twice about agreeing to the request. In the early morning hours of September 22nd, 1968 three of the KGB's most skilled assassins met with Andropov at the spy agency's headquarters in what is today Lubiyanka Square in the heart of Moscow for a debriefing as to how they would carry out the Ceausescu assassination. In the short time since Kadar's initial contact with the Soviet embassy in Budapest KGB agents in Romania had learned Ceausescu would be visiting Romanian occupation troops in Debrecen that coming Tuesday. Accordingly, it was decided the hit squad would liquidate Ceausescu using sniper's rifles; by 1:30 PM Moscow time that afternoon the assassins had already procured the necessary firearms for their lethal mission, and just before 5:45 PM they arrived in Budapest to rendezvous with agents of Hungary's State Protection Authority who would assist them in infiltrating Debrecen.

The assassins entered Debrecen at dawn on September 23rd; posing as Romanian soldiers on leave, they checked into a local inn and spent the rest of that day reviewing the information local informants had given them about the route Ceausescu planned to take during his visit to the city. When Ceausescu arrived at Debrecen Airport just after 12:30 PM Budapest time on the afternoon of September 24th, the KGB hit squad was ready and waiting for him. As the Romanian leader's motorcade was passing the Csokonai theater, a half-dozen shots were fired at his personal limousine; two struck Ceausescu squarely in the heart, a third blew a sizeable hole in the side of his head, and the remaining three bullets tore through his neck. Their lethal mission completed, the assassins fled the theater and were airlifted back to Budapest via helicopter. Despite the best efforts of Romanian military doctors, Ceausescu died of his wounds at 6:28 PM that evening.

It's difficult to envision with any degree of certainty what direction Ceausescu's political career might have taken after the Czech War had he not been assassinated. His reformist impulses were in a constant tug-of-war with his latent tendency towards megalomania, and his wife Elena(who committed suicide shortly after learning of her husband's demise) is rumored to have been an admirer of Mao Zedong. But once his death was confirmed by the official Romanian government newspaper Scînteia, he became a celebrated martyr figure to his countrymen. At his funeral on September 28th, tens of thousands of Romanians lined the streets of Bucharest chanting his name and waving placards bearing his portrait. Gheorge Maurer, the new acting Romanian president, gave a eulogy in which he promised to uphold Ceausescu's legacy(an ironic pledge considering it had been Ceausescu who undermined Maurer when both men were bidding to succeed the dying Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in 1965). Student demonstrators marched to Ceausescu's childhood home in Scornicești and left flowers on its doorstep. At the UN General Assembly in New York Romania's ambassador to the United Nations introduced a resolution calling Ceausescu "the greatest leader in our nation's history". Romanian occupation troops in Debrecen fired a 21-gun salute in memory of their fallen leader.

Although it would take the better part of a quarter-century to unmask the full story behind Ceausescu's assassination, there was little doubt in most people's minds even at the time that the Soviets had been extensively involved in the killing-- and when the doctor who performed Ceausescu's post-mortem autopsy held a press conference to display the Soviet-made bullet fragments he'd pulled from the slain Romanian president's body, anti-Soviet sentiment exploded across the world. In Saudi Arabia the Soviet embassy in Riyadh was the scene of furious protests and flag-burnings; Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was forced to deploy security troops to prevent hundreds of his fellow countrymen from storming the Soviet consulate in Alexandria. Yugoslav ruler Josip Broz Tito angrily phoned the Soviet ambassador in Belgrade to threaten a declaration of war by Yugoslavia against the Soviet Union. The U.S. Communist Party, which had been steadily weakening since the mid-1950s under the combined effects of McCarthyism and Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign, finally broke apart once and for all as many of its members quit the party in disgust over the party leadership's refusal to condemn the assassination; perhaps the most famous of these defections happened when political activist and future UCLA professor Angela Davis stood on the steps of the CPUSA's southern California regional office in Los Angeles and tore up her party membership card in front of dozens of reporters. Virtually every Marxist political party in western Europe passed resolutions emphatically breaking with the Kremlin over the Ceausescu assassination. Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who'd been awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviets in 1962, sent his medal back to Moscow with a letter attached saying he could no longer support the USSR in view of what he called its "hypocritical" behavior in the case of Ceausescu's murder. Rioters sacked the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang; curiously the North Korean government, which is normally very quick to mete out harsh punishments for even the most trivial offenses, took almost no action against those who had started the riot-- sparking persistent conspiracy theories in some quarters that then-North Korean ruler Kim Il Sung may have orchestrated or at least encouraged it.

The Romanian-American ethnic community held massive anti-Soviet rallies in nearly every major city in the United States; nowhere were these demonstrations larger or more confrontational than in New York City, where then-mayor John Lindsay was obliged to deploy NYPD riot squads to prevent the protesters from storming the Soviet UN mission in Manhattan. The atmosphere of the rally was perfectly summed up in a New York Post headline which said with the irreverent style typical of that paper: "MARCHERS HAVE REDS FEELING BLUE." Not surprisingly the Soviet UN diplomats didn't find it funny in the least. Nor did Leonid Brezhnev, who was incensed by the Manhattan protests and had to be talked by his senior military advisers out of launching a nuclear strike on New York City. As it was he denounced the rally with the kind of salty vocabulary more commonly attributable to another Soviet strongman, Joseph Stalin. In his postwar memoirs Andrei Grechko, Brezhnev's defense minister at the time the war began, would recall that Brezhnev came dangerously close to the edge of a heart attack at the peak of his tirade.

Brezhnev might have gone over that edge if he'd had even the slightest inkling of what was about to happen in Leipzig, East Germany. It was in that city where the discontent and frustration which had been building for weeks within the East German military towards the Ulbricht regime would finally reach critical mass....

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PART 18/The Leipzig Mutiny



Like the Kiel sailors' uprising that led to Kaiser Wilhelm II's abdication half a century earlier, the October 1968 Leipzig soldiers' mutiny which would prove the tipping point in the Ulbricht regime's final collapse came about as a consequence of declining morale. Since the Battle of Bratislava there'd been a growing sense of futility within the Volksarmee, a feeling that East Berlin's continuing support of the Soviet-led campaign to subjugate Czechoslovakia could only end in disaster. And it wasn't just ordinary soldiers who felt this way; many of their officers were coming to share this view, to the point where at least one senior Volksarmee general risked his career(and some would say his life) by urging Walter Ulbricht to withdraw all East German forces from Czechoslovakia and agree to a cease-fire with NATO. There  were similar rumblings of discontent in the Volksmarine, the Luftstreitkräfte(East German air force), and the Grenztruppen(East German border police). A  top secret report presented to Heinz Hoffman on the same day as Nicolae Ceausescu's assassination painted an alarming picture of just how serious the morale problem in all sectors of the East German armed forces had become-- one out of every three Volksarmee soldiers were deserting their posts every day, scores of Luftstreitkräfte aircraft had gone missing as their pilots defected to NATO, Volksmarine sailors were showing increasing defiance towards their ships' political officers, and even the normally politically reliable border guards had started openly criticizing Ulbricht's government in general and Ulbricht himself in particular. Furthermore, growing numbers of young men in those parts of East Germany still under the Ulbricht regime's jurisdiction were refusing to comply with orders to report for military service-- a sharp contrast to the situation in West Germany, where volunteers were flocking to Bundeswehr recruiting stations in droves, many of them motivated by the prospect that Germany might finally be reunified once the Marxist dictatorship in East Berlin was toppled.


Like another infamous German tyrant, Adolf Hitler, Walter Ulbricht had become steadily more detached from reality as his regime teetered ever closer to the verge of its ultimate demise. In speech after speech he continued to push the idea of ultimate Warsaw Pact victory over NATO even as U.S. and British warplanes were flying tactical strikes from bases just a few miles from Ulbricht's headquarters in East Berlin. Anyone who tried to pull him out of his fantasy land and get him to see the truth about the GDR's deteriorating military situation soon found themselves on the receiving end of the Socialist Unity Party leader's wrath. The lucky ones were merely fired; one of the most notable such dismissals happened on September 27th when Erich Honecker, a Politburo member who was responsible for overseeing defense and security policy for the Ulbricht regime and at one time had been viewed by many Western intelligence analysts as Ulbricht's most likely successor, was abruptly expelled from his position after cautiously suggesting to Ulbricht that some East German ground troops might need to be withdrawn from Czechoslovakia to reinforce East Berlin's defenses. Those who weren't so lucky could expect to be handed over to the Stasi for indefinite detention at best-- and outright execution at worst. A 1986 investigation commissioned by the modern German government into the Stasi's Czech War activities found that of the number of summary executions the agency carried out in the final weeks before Ulbricht was toppled, at least fifteen percent of the victims were party or military officials who'd crossed Ulbricht.

It was, above all else, an obsession with maintaining the illusion of control that drove Ulbricht to order that celebrations scheduled for October 7th to mark the 19-year anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic go forward as planned despite urgent and repeated warnings that it wasn't safe to do so. Nowhere would Ulbricht's decision have more dramatic consequences than in the city of Leipzig, where a state of near-civil war had been simmering for weeks. While the senior Volksarmee commander in charge of the Leipzig garrison was fully on board with Ulbricht's directive, many of his junior officers didn't share his enthusiasm-- nor did the majority of the enlisted men or Leipzig's civilian population. The chief of the Stasi's Leipzig precinct issued an ominous report to his superiors on October 2nd describing the atmosphere in the city as being "like a pile of kindling ready to be set afire".

The match which would start said fire came in the form of an October 5th verbal confrontation between the Volksarmee garrison commander and then-Leipzig mayor Walter Kresse. The argument quickly escalated into a physical showdown that climaxed with the enraged garrison chief ordering his troops to arrest Kresse for treason. To his astonishment and outrage, the troops instead formed a protective cordon around Kresse and arrested their general, throwing him and the Stasi precinct chief in the city jail. Adding insult to injury for the incarcerated general, most of his junior officers chose to side with the rebelling troops against their superiors. Before long Leipzig's streets were buried in an avalanche of discarded Socialist Unity Party badges and placards as the city's civilian residents joined the soldiers in their uprising. The garrison's senior officers, still loyal to the regime, joined forces with the local Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklass(Combat Group of the Working Class) militia and tried to storm the jail; despite initially being caught off-guard, the mutineers were able to repulse the assault.

Around this same time, British and French infantry forces backed by a West German armored corps were pushing towards Leipzig in a diversionary thrust meant to tie down Warsaw Pact units who might otherwise interfere with the final NATO thrust on Berlin. One of the British units was paused for a lunch break around midday on the afternoon of October 5th when they picked up a radio signal from the mutineers requesting outside assistance to keep their positions secure against an expected imminent assault by Volksarmee troops still loyal to Ulbricht. After hurried consultations with NATO Supreme Headquarters in Brussels and the main British field command post at Erfurt, the decision was made to pivot one of the French contingents to intercept the Ulbricht loyalists while the rest of the French forces continued with their British and West German comrades towards Leipzig to aid the rebels. American UH-1C helicopter gunships provided cover fire in both cases, many of those gunships being flown by crews who had previously seen action in Vietnam and subsequently been reassigned to the Czech-German front so that their combat experience could be utilized to maximum effect.

Ulbricht's mind, already heavily strained by the deteriorating overall military and political situation facing his government, snapped completely when he was informed that the Volksarmee troops he'd dispatched to put down the Leipzig mutiny had been defeated by NATO forces. Stasi director Markus Wolf was forced to remove him from office for his own safety, and in the early morning hours of October 8th longtime East German interior minister Friedrich Dickel was hastily sworn in as the new general secretary of the Socialist Unity Party. Being of a somewhat more realistic mindset than his predecessor, Dickel knew he had to act quickly in order to avert what promised to be a devastating fight for East Berlin; within less than a day of assuming his new position he had issued two game-changing directives, one recalling all remaining East German combat forces from Czechoslovakia and the other instructing the East German embassy in Belgrade to contact its U.S. counterpart to request cease-fire terms....

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