Červený Poplach: The NATO-Soviet Standoff Over Czechoslovakia

[pats2001]

 


PART 19/Polonaise

When Dwight Eisenhower originally coined the concept of the "domino theory" in 1954 to make his case for supporting the government of South Vietnam against the Viet Cong insurgency, his logic was that if South Vietnam fell to the Communist North it would spark a chain reaction of other U.S. allies in southeast Asia being overrun by the Communists. Ironically, the outbreak of the Czech War had triggered a domino effect in reverse as one Warsaw Pact client state after another was breaking away from the Soviet Union. Alexander Dubcek had knocked over the first domino when he pulled Czechoslovakia out of the Warsaw Pact, the late Nicolae Ceausescu had tipped over the second by supporting Dubcek, and the third would topple shortly with East Germany's surrender to NATO(although the German Democratic Republic wouldn't be formally dissolved until early August of 1969). In spite of the Gomulka regime's best efforts to maintain its fragile grip on control of its people, Poland was steadily shaping up to be the fourth domino. The merciless brutality government security forces had inflicted on dissidents in the Market Square Massacre was proving to have just the opposite effect of what Gomulka had intended: far from being intimidated, the anti-Gomulka protest movement was growing more defiant than ever. Of course, it may have helped their cause a bit that West Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst counterintelligence branch was now providing some covert financial assistance for their efforts.

By the time of the Leipzig mutiny the largest anti-Gomulka organization, Nowa droga naprzód("New Way Forward", often shortened to simply "New Way"), had over three million members out of Poland's total population of 29 million, with branches in nearly every major Polish city. Warsaw alone was home to three New Way chapters, one of them situated just two blocks from SB central headquarters. One of New Way's greatest successes in its campaign to end the Gomulka dictatorship was the three-day Lodz tram workers' strike which began on October 6th. Like many other Polish cities in those days, Lodz relied heavily on its tram system for transportation of its citizens; with the system effectively shut down by the strike, Lodz's industrial plants soon ground to a halt since plant workers couldn't get to their jobs. This sparked a political crisis at the highest levels of the Polish government-- one so severe it prompted Gomulka to convene an emergency session of the Polish United Workers' Party Politburo less than 24 hours after the strike began. The session quickly devolved into an orgy of finger-pointing as every man in the room blamed the others for New Way's growth into a major threat to United Workers' Party rule. One of the men present at the session, former Katowice industrial district leader Edward Gierek, felt a strong and growing sense of discouragement; in his diary that same evening, he confided his fears that Poland was heading toward, in his words, "political Armageddon". While there has been considerable debate for decades about when precisely Gierek made the decision to enlist New Way's cooperation in his bid to overthrow Gomulka, it's widely agreed that the October 7th Politburo meeting marked a crucial turning point.

Gierek's main compatriot in his plan to oust Gomulka was Jan Dobraczyński, a member of Poland's Sejm parliament who also held the rank of general in the Polish People's Army. Dobraczyński was used to taking serious risks, having helped shelter Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of Poland and fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. By the time the Lodz tram workers' strike ended on October 9th, Dobraczyński and Gierek had made preliminary arrangements for a secret meeting with acting Polish interior minister Wiesław Ociepka to lay the groundwork for a coup d'etat. In the early morning hours of October 11th the three men got together in Gierek's office; exchanging handwritten notes to foil potential SB wiretapping, they put the finishing touches on their plans. The next day Dobraczyński arranged for Polish army units sympathetic to New Way's cause to be recalled from the Polish-Czech border on the pretext of rotating tired men home in favor of fresh troops-- in reality these units were intended to occupy key strategic points in and around major Polish cities as a safeguard against a possible countercoup the by pro-Gomulka forces. Worried the Soviets might invade Poland to try and quash the planned rebellion,  the general also contacted fellow New Way sympathizers at the Polish foreign ministry advising them to alert U.S. and allied defense officials in West Germany to the impending revolt so that NATO military assistance could be requested if worst came to worst. Not wanting to repeat the tragic mistakes which had doomed the Polish Home Army's 1944 campaign against the Nazis, NATO agreed to station aircraft carriers from the U.S. 6th Fleet and the Royal Navy's Western Fleet within striking range of northern Poland and place two detachments of U.S. Marines on standby in West Germany; F-4s of the U.S. Tactical Air Command and Hawker Hunters from RAF Strike Command were deployed to western Czechoslovakia to furnish air support for the insurgents in southern Poland.

The anti-Gomulka insurrection, officially code-named "Operation Sikorski" and known in modern Polish history books as the Autumn Revolution, began in earnest on October 14th with New Way calling a nationwide general strike of Poland's civilian industries. Incensed at this blatant defiance of his authority, Gomulka went on state television to order the strikers to return to work...only to be arrested by rebel soldiers just five minutes after the broadcast began. While the much-feared Soviet intervention never materialized, there was considerable fighting on the streets of Poland's cities as the rebels clashed with troops still loyal to Gomulka in what amounted to a civil war within the larger conflict between NATO and the crumbling Soviet bloc. Many New Way members became de facto guerrilla fighters, using homemade weapons to help defend the rebel troops against the forces of the Gomulka regime; indeed, the now-ubiquitous phrase "improvised explosive device"(IED) is thought by many historians to have originated in BBC news reports describing how the New Way partisans used these munitions to undermine government forces' morale.

Perhaps the most iconic moment of the Autumn Revolution came on October 17th in an event which has since come to be known as "Poland's Bastille Day", when rebel troops and New Way activists stormed Krakow's notorious Montelupich Prison and freed scores of political prisoners from SB detention. From his own jail cell back in Warsaw, Gomulka listened with increasing alarm to his guards' conversations about the rebel forces' victories against his troops and clung desperately to the fading hope that outside intervention might yet save his regime from final collapse. That hope died once and for all on October 19th when acting East German chancellor Friedrich Dickel signed the instrument of surrender formally ending hostilities between East Germany and NATO; forward-thinking people on both sides of the Iron Curtain quickly realized this surrender was in effect the first step towards an eventual reunification of Germany-- and that the post-reunification German government would more likely than not continue to side with NATO against the Soviet Union. Within hours after the West German government officially announced the surrender agreement, Gomulka was found dead in his cell; although rumors persist even today that Gomulka committed suicide, those with first-hand knowledge of Gomulka's final days believe it's far more likely he succumbed to a fatal heart attack brought on by anger over what he no doubt perceived as a betrayal of the fraternal ties between the GDR and the Polish People's Republic.

The Autumn Revolution, and the Communist era of Poland's history, came to an end on October 22nd when the last pro-Gomulka army unit surrendered at Poznan. With his power base secured for the short term, Gierek made three decisions that would have a profound effect on his country's future: the first was to open discussions with the New Way aimed at finalizing a timetable for the transition to multi-party government, the second was to terminate Poland's military alliance with the Soviet Union and order all remaining Polish forces on Czech soil withdrawn back to Poland within 40 days, and the third was to commission an inquiry into the Market Square Massacre. It was the third decision in particular which would have the greatest long-term impact-- but that lay in the future.

For the Kremlin, the fall of the Gomulka regime was a nightmare of almost Biblical proportions. At the height of the Warsaw Pact's power just prior to Albania's split with the Soviet Union in the early '60s, Moscow had had seven European allies it could rely on case of war with NATO; now it had lost five of those allies, and worse yet three of them had defected to the enemy camp while the fourth would shortly cease to exist altogether. The only partners the USSR had left in Europe were Bulgaria and Hungary-- and it was anybody's guess how much longer Hungary could be counted on if the latest intelligence reports from the KGB station chief in Budapest were any indication....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

  

PART 20/Bulgarian Rhapsody



Bulgaria's role in the Czech War tends to get overlooked-- perhaps because it didn't play much of a role. Even before NATO started deploying troops to Czechoslovakia, Brezhnev had long ago reached the conclusion that Bulgarian participation in the Warsaw Pact campaign to subjugate the Czechs would be more of a liability than an asset, and accordingly he did everything he could to keep Todor Zhivkov's regime at arm's length once the shooting began in earnest. He wasn't the only one to feel this way; when Zhivkov offered to deploy some Bulgarian People's Army motorized infantry units to the East German-Czech border to help reinforce the Sanger Battalion, Walter Ulbricht turned him down flat. Wladislaw Gomulka was equally unreceptive to a Zhivkov proposal to attach BPA tank corps to the Polish contingent in Czechoslovakia. Even Gustav Husak, whose People's Czechoslovak Republic puppet state was an international pariah, felt uneasy about getting too close to the Zhivkov regime. Such rejections struck Zhivkov to his very core, and in a desperate attempt to prove his forces could be of use in the Soviet bloc war effort he made what may well have been the most ill-advised military decision by a southern European leader since Benito Mussolini ordered the Italian army to invade Greece in 1940. On October 23rd, 1968, against the objections of his top generals, Zhivkov instructed Bulgarian ground and air forces to attack southern Romania; he also sent torpedo boats to raid Romanian naval installations on the Black Sea. Zhivkov arrogantly believed his troops could simply brush the Romanian army aside and take Bucharest within 36 hours or less, forcing the Romanian government to capitulate quickly and completely.

The invasion was doomed to failure from the moment it began. Zhivkov's first fatal mistake was believing the Romanians would be too preoccupied with the fighting in Hungary to do anything about the Bulgarian invasion; this assumption greatly underestimated the number of reserve troops and home militia the Romanian armed forces could draw on to defend the country's southern border. His second error was launching the offensive before his intelligence agencies had gathered the necessary information to enable sound tactical or strategic decision-making. But his worst misjudgment, the straw  that ultimately broke the camel's back, was failing to take into consideration how his other neighbors might react to what was essentially an unprovoked assault on a country which up until then had no conflict with Bulgaria. In one of his first major foreign policy decisions after succeeding the late Nicolae Ceausescu as president of Romania Gheorge Maurer had signed mutual defense accords with Greece and Turkey stating that if one of the three parties to the agreement were to be attacked by Bulgaria the other two would quickly come to the aid of the party under attack. Within minutes after the first Bulgarian troops crossed Romania's southern frontier the Romanian defense ministry had already contacted the Greek and Turkish embassies in Bucharest to notify them of the invasion; in turn the embassies duly contacted senior defense officials in Athens and Ankara.

By 1:00 PM Athens time on the afternoon of October 23rd Greek air force F-5s and F-104s were carrying out bombing strikes against military installations in southern Bulgaria while Turkish naval units moved to assist the Romanian navy in defending its Black Sea outposts against Bulgarian missile boat attacks. Zhivkov's already fragile mental state deteriorated even further as the full scope of the disaster sank in. Paralyzed with shock, he failed to take any significant action for several critical hours, leaving his beleaguered soldiers and sailors to fend for themselves against the combined power of the Romanian, Greek, and Turkish armed forces. The Bulgarian air force, most of its combat strength lost in action against the Romanians and the rest destroyed in the Greek bombing strikes, essentially ceased to exist as a coherent fighting arm. When Turkish marines landed near the seacoast town of Varna around 6:25 PM that evening, the jig was up for Zhivkov's dictatorship. And although most people wouldn't know it for almost three decades, the jig came dangerously close to being up for Bulgaria itself-- during one of many emergency meetings the Romanian cabinet held that evening, a senior diplomatic advisor to Gheorge Maurer advocated splitting up Bulgaria's territory between her immediate neighbors. Under this proposal Yugoslavia would have inherited the northwestern corner of Bulgaria including the capital Sofia; Greece would have occupied the southwest; the southeastern regions of Bulgaria would have come under Turkey's control; and the northeast would have been absorbed into the boundaries of Romania.

To his considerable credit Maurer swiftly quashed the proposal as both impractical and counterproductive. Still, the fact that it was even broached gives a strong indication of how deep the anger ran among the Romanian people at the Bulgarians for invading their homeland. Greater still was the rage the Bulgarians themselves felt towards Zhivkov; as the tattered remnants of the Bulgarian army retreated from Romanian soil, riots against his regime erupted in Sofia, Plovdiv, and a half-dozen other Bulgarian cities. The KDS, Bulgaria's main secret police agency at that time, tried desperately to suppress the rioters only to meet heavy resistance at every turn. Zhivkov and his deputies soon found themselves under siege as a particularly large and belligerent crowd of insurgents surrounded Zhivkov's headquarters inside Sofia's Council of Ministers building. Then-Bulgarian defense minister Dobri Dzhurov, fearing his country was about to descend into total anarchy and bitterly angry that thousands of good men had been needlessly sacrificed to assuage his boss' injured pride, decided to take matters into his own hands and arrested Zhivkov just after 8:00 PM as the first step towards restoring order. Despite Zhivkov's frantic pleas to Dzhurov to spare his life, Dzhurov handed him over to a firing squad without hesitation or remorse; 30 minutes later Zhivkov was executed in the Council of Ministers building basement. At 9:24 PM Dzhurov went on state-run television to announce the formation of a new provisional Bulgarian government and request the assistance of the Swiss embassy in Sofia in mediating a cease-fire with Greece, Turkey, and Romania.

Thanks in part to Dzhurov's decisive actions, the unrest in Bulgaria's cities died down by mid-morning the next day and Turkey had agreed to withdraw its marine contingent from Bulgarian soil. On October 27th Greek, Turkish, and Romanian diplomats met in Geneva with representatives of Dzhurov's government to sign the armistice pact ending hostilities with Bulgaria. Meanwhile, in northern Europe the long slow process of German reunification had gotten underway as NATO engineers were working with their East German counterparts to dismantle the once seemingly impenetrable Berlin Wall. For Brezhnev and his generals, the televised images of jackhammers and wrecking balls chipping away at what onetime West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt had dubbed  "the Wall of Shame" served to further exacerbate their already vivid fears that the spirit of rebellion that had swept through the Soviet Union's satellites might soon reach the Soviet Union itself....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

  


INTERMISSION 2/Another Word From Your Author



Well, it's been a wild ride so far, hasn't it? And I can promise you it's only going to get wilder as the next 10-episode set launches. As of the end of Part 20 we're all the way up to late October of 1968, so naturally starting with Part 21 I'll delve into the November 1968 U.S. presidential election and some drama at the annual October Revolution Day parade in Moscow. Subsequent episodes will cover the escalation of anti-Husak guerrilla activity in eastern Czechoslovakia, how New Way begins preparing to take its place in the post-Gomulka Polish political landscape, the impact of the Czech War on Chinese-Soviet border tensions and the resolution of the Pueblo incident, the first rumblings of potential dissent in Ukraine, and last but not least what's going on with the space race. I'm also going to sketch out a few of the ripple effects on some previously neglected areas like:

--the Finnish-Soviet relationship;

--Western pop culture;

--the 1968 Summer Olympics;

--and Northern Ireland.

By the way, that segment in Part 20 where Dzhunov has Zhivkov shot didn't just come out of thin air; in OTL 1989 Dzhunov actually did use the threat of execution to induce Zhivkov's resignation as head of the Bulgarian Communist Party. While I was researching Zhivkov's political career I found myself wondering what could have happened if Dzhunov had found it necessary to make good on his threat, and things took off from there. Anyway, thanks for hanging with me this far, and I look forward to having you stick around for the next leg of the journey.

[pats2001]

 


PART 21/And Down The Stretch They Come

Having secured their respective parties' nominations for the U.S. presidency, Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon went all out making their final case for being chosen to succeed Lyndon Johnson as President of the United States. Neither candidate showed any inclination to end America's commitment to defending Czechoslovakia; indeed, in his first major national security statement after clinching the Democratic Party nomination, Humphrey bluntly told reporters that his administration's top foreign policy priority would be to strengthen ties between Washington and Prague. Accordingly his campaign staff's top defense experts commissioned a 36-page analysis from the RAND Corporation meant to function as a starting point for possible future security accords between a Humphrey White House and the Dubcek government. To further underscore his commitment to strengthening U.S. ties with Czechoslovakia, the Vice-President flew to Prague on October 19th and accompanied NATO defense officials on an inspection tour of air bases near the Czech capital. Although the Nixon campaign blasted the trip as a "cheap publicity stunt", it helped boost Humphrey's standing among likely voters and may have also swayed a few still sitting on the fence to come down on Humphrey's side. A Gallup poll released on October 25th showed Humphrey enjoyed particularly staunch support among Americans of Eastern European descent; more than two-thirds of respondents in that category identified themselves as "likely" or "definitely" voting for Humphrey that November.

Even so, nobody on the Humphrey campaign staff was counting their chickens before they were hatched; thanks to Nixon's relentless touting of his credentials as a "law and order" candidate, the November election was predicted to be one of the closest-- if not the closest --in American history. Many pundits in the media at the time anticipated the possibility of the general election results coming down to a handful of ballots in states like Florida or Indiana. So did the Nixon and Humphrey campaign staffs; both groups had already retained the services of top-notch attorneys to file recount requests should it prove necessary to do so. The New York Times even speculated about the nightmare scenario of the U.S. Supreme Court having to step in to resolve a contested electoral result. And it didn't help matters much that notorious segregationist and former Alabama governor George Wallace was running his own third-party campaign, siphoning potential  young male voters away from Nixon and Humphrey. Wallace, already a controversial figure in the first place, had made himself even more of a lightning rod with his choice of running mate: U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, former chief of the Strategic Air Command and the most hawkish of hawks when it came to the Soviet Union. LeMay rarely if ever missed a chance to make his anti-Soviet views known to the public, openly advocating for a nuclear first strike against the U.S.S.R.'s largest cities to hasten the end of the Czech War. (Comedian Bob Hope was later heard to quip in response: "That kind of talk could keep Rip Van Winkle awake.")

After a short hiatus to let the families of their campaign staffers celebrate Halloween, Humphrey, Nixon, and Wallace each made preparations for one final campaign rally to energize their base ahead of the November 7th election. Humphrey chose to hold his election eve rally near Fort Benning, Georgia both to symbolize his campaign's commitment to improving care for wounded Czech War veterans and to receive debriefing from U.S. Army Special Forces officers regarding the latest tactical developments in eastern Czechoslovakia. Nixon's final pre-election speech happened at Madison Square Garden in New York before a packed house of GOP diehards whose raucous ovation for the former VP when he walked on stage made them anything but a silent majority. Wallace, in a move that would not only cause innumerable PR headaches but would subsequently put Wallace's very life at risk, held his final pre-election event at an outdoor venue in Wisconsin that in the past had been notorious as a KKK gathering spot; a young man who lived just a few miles from the site in question later became convinced that Wallace was the Antichrist and vowed to kill him...a vow which would lead to an act of unspeakable violence nearly four years later.

While Americans were going to the polls in record numbers to choose their next president and then returning home to follow the election results on network TV, an equally intense political drama of a different sort was about to play out in the streets of Moscow. Despite the KGB's best efforts to crush internal dissent Soviet antiwar activists had succeeded in organizing a protest march to coincide with the 51st annual Bolshevik Revolution tribute parade in Moscow's Red Square; Brezhnev's nightmare of a Prague Spring-like movement rebelling against the CPSU was starting to become reality, and the consequences for both sides would be explosive to say the least....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

 


PART 22/Singing The Song Of Angry Men

"What has happened in Moscow during the past forty-eight hours is an act of unparalleled barbarism, an unspeakable betrayal of the principles of civilization and a hideous stain on the reputation of the Soviet Union." One could be forgiven for thinking these were the words of an anti-Husak partisan or a NATO diplomat; in fact, they were the opening sentence of a November 9th, 1968 editorial in the official Soviet government newspaper Pravda. It says volumes about the depth of the horrors which unfolded in the heart of the Russian capital during those 48 hours that it was possible to even think of such a line, much less publish it in what was then the Communist bloc's most powerful print media outlet. Many modern historians have asserted that the Brezhnev regime essentially dug its own grave in its response to the November 7th Red Square protests; certainly there's little debate that Brezhnev's actions towards the  demonstrators helped to hasten the Soviet Union's final demise. The vicious crackdown the KGB unleashed on those who braved a typically cold Moscow autumn morning to call for an end to the war and to one-party rule can most accurately be described as pouring gasoline on an already raging fire-- indeed, it was the most violent crackdown by any Russian government against dissenters since the 1905 Bloody Sunday attack by Tsar Nicholas II's cavalry on unarmed protesters in St. Petersburg.

Brezhnev was tense to begin with when he arrived at the Kremlin on the morning of November 7th. The war on the Hungarian front was going extremely badly as Romanian forces had pushed as far west as Szolnok and appeared to be well on their way to fulfilling the late Nicolae Ceausescu's promise to have the Romanian flag flying over Budapest by Christmas. Gustav Husak's puppet regime was hanging by a thread as NATO regular troops and Czechoslovak anti-Husak guerrillas steadily chipped away at the Soviet army's tenuous hold on eastern Czechoslovakia. The United States was expanding its already substantial military presence in the former East Germany and had recently started negotiations with the Gierek government to lease airbases in Poland. And most disturbing of all China, the USSR's archrival for leadership of the dwindling Communist bloc, appeared to be taking advantage of Moscow's troubles in Europe to marshal the PLA's forces for a possible grab at the disputed Ussuri River territory along the Soviet-Chinese border. This on top of the growing internal unrest facing Brezhnev's government provided the conditions for the perfect storm of violent confrontation between the Kremlin's security apparatus and the increasingly emboldened Russian dissident movement. And sure enough the fuse would be lit less than hour into the parade as 500 antiwar demonstrators formed a human chain directly in the path of the troops marching down Red Square. Incensed at this blatant act of defiance, Brezhnev took to the microphone to personally demand that the protesters disperse immediately. The protesters rejected his demand in emphatic-- and in some cases profane --terms. Unable to contain his rage at their perceived insolence, the CPSU general secretary ordered KGB units in the vicinity of Red Square to crush the demonstration at all costs.

A Swiss journalist covering the October Revolution parade for the newspaper Zürichsee-Zeitung described the first stages of the KGB's assault on the protesters as being like "the gates of hell burst(ing) wide open". And there was certainly a very Dante's Inferno-like element to the horrific scene that unfolded in Red Square as a hail of automatic weapons fire ripped into the demonstrators. Panicked civilians desperate to avoid being stuck in the crossfire stampeded in all directions, adding to the bloody chaos. Other antiwar protesters, who'd been waiting in the wings to unfurl banners in front of Lenin's tomb calling for peace with NATO, quickly changed their plans and rushed to counterattack the KGB forces in defense of their fellow dissidents. Using a variety of improvised weapons as well as handguns commandeered from the Moscow city police, they fought the KGB units tooth and nail. It was a valiant but ultimately doomed effort, as the KGB detachments had a significant advantage in terms of both firepower and numbers; by midday nearly 400 protesters had been killed and fifty-one more were seriously injured. Brezhnev, meanwhile, had been taken to an underground bunker for his own protection lest someone make an assassination attempt on him. By the time he finally emerged from said bunker just after 6:30 PM Moscow time that evening, the death toll from the massacre had risen to 1,120 as people who'd been trampled in the mad rush of civilians trying to flee the gunfire from KGB rifles began succumbing to their injuries in the Soviet capital's hospital wards. The ultimate body count as of the time the crackdown ended at mid-afternoon on November 8th was estimated by Western intelligence and media agencies to be just short of 1,450-- and declassified papers released by the Russian Federal Archive in the last decade suggest that number may have been a conservative estimate. Several of those papers make references to casualty tolls as high as 2,100, and a retired police captain with first-hand knowledge of their contents told the BBC in a 2012 interview for Panorama that he believed there had been no fewer than 1,800 deaths.

International reaction to the massacre ranged from quiet horror to vehement condemnation of the KGB. Richard Nixon, who had finally conceded the U.S. presidential election to Hubert Humphrey just hours before the massacre, blasted the KGB's actions as"outright terrorism" and demanded that the perpetrators be tried for war crimes. French president Charles De Gaulle called it "the most monstrous crime against human beings since the Holocaust". The government of acting East German chancellor Friedrich Dickel broke off diplomatic relations with Moscow while Marshal Tito made good on the threats he'd issued two months earlier and officially declared a state of war  between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. London's Trafalgar Square was the scene of a massive anti-Soviet rally that nearly turned into a riot when pro-Soviet radicals tried to disrupt the event. In Poland New Way, which was gearing up for its first formal convention as a mainstream political party, held a moment of silence at its new national headquarters in Krakow in memory of the victims of the massacre. At the Vatican, Pope Paul VI denounced the KGB's actions as "a monstrous affront to human dignity and conscience". In Thailand rioters tried to storm the Soviet embassy in Bangkok and were only prevented from doing so by the intervention of Royal Thai Police units. Finland, whose foreign policy had for generations been based on subservience to Russia, stunned the world by withdrawing its ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Soviet ambassador from Helsinki in a rare diplomatic rebuke to its massive eastern neighbor. Ghana, whose relations with the Soviet Union had been gradually deteriorating since the Ceausescu assassination, severed ties with Moscow altogether. Even North Vietnam-- heretofore a reliable ally of the Kremlin --issued a pointed criticism of the KGB's actions in quashing the Red Square protests. Egypt and Syria began distancing themselves from the Soviet Union and aligning more with China. Israel, noting that almost a quarter of the people killed or injured in the massacre were of Jewish descent, accused the Brezhnev regime of anti-Semitism in its actions.

Yet as bad as Brezhnev's internal troubles were already, they would shortly get even worse. A political volcano was about to erupt in the Ukraine as a fragile but growing independence movement saw the writing on the wall in the rest of Europe and began cautiously preparing its attempt to reassert Ukrainian sovereignty after decades of Kremlin control. The shaky position of the Red Army in eastern Czechoslovakia was about to get even shakier....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

 


PART 23/Where There's Smoke...



Since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution the Ukraine had sought to reclaim its sovereignty from Russia; it had waged a fierce and ultimately unsuccessful rebellion to keep itself from being absorbed into the fledgling USSR, and the Nazi invasion of 1941 had inspired Ukranian fascists to set up their own short-lived Axis state. Once the Nazis were vanquished and the Kremlin reasserted control over Ukraine it seemed as if the dream of an independent Ukraine was, if not dead, then certainly dormant. But the outbreak of the Czech War breathed new life into the Ukrainian independence crusade; seeing the success of the Brandenburg Gate protests in East Berlin and the New Way movement in Poland, young Ukrainians began cautiously forming an underground organization to advocate for Ukraine's secession from the USSR. It started modestly with anonymous leaflets being circulated around Kiev and Odessa in mid-September of 1968 denouncing what the leaflets' author called an "intolerable repression" of Ukraine's cultural identity by the Kremlin. Before long, the slogan "Ukraine free now!" was being inscribed on walls wherever anybody could get hold of a paintbrush. Under normal circumstances the KGB could have squashed the embryonic uprising like a grape, but with the Warsaw Pact disintegrating and the Husak puppet regime in eastern Czechoslovakia teetering on the verge of collapse Moscow was increasingly distracted from the political upheaval brewing on its own doorstep. Not that the regional Communist Party establishment didn't do its best to try and snuff the independence groups out-- they imposed citywide curfews in Kiev, Odessa, Rostov, and Kharkov in hopes of preventing any mass demonstrations in favor of Ukrainian secession from the Soviet Union. They also sent militia troops to arrest known and suspected dissidents in an attempt to neutralize potential leaders of an armed revolt. These moves would backfire severely on the Communist authorities; outraged by what they regarded as yet another assault on their cultural identity by the powers that be in the Kremlin, thousands of Ukrainians joined the Free Ukraine party(as it came to be known in the Western media) and organized the first of what would turn out to be a series of daily nationwide rallies calling for Ukraine to declare independence from the USSR.

By mid-October CIA deep cover agents inside the Soviet Union were receiving credible reports of plans by the more militant factions of the Ukrainian independence movement to seize key CPSU and Red Army facilities in the Kiev area as the first step towards a full takeover of the Ukrainian goverment. Around this same time, SR-71 reconnaissance flights picked up signs that Red Army reserve forces originally intended to be deployed to eastern Czechoslovakia were being re-routed to Kiev and Odessa. This aroused suspicions in Washington and Brussels that the Brezhnev regime was bracing itself for a full-fledged rebellion in the Ukraine-- suspicions which were confirmed the day before the U.S. presidential election when the newspaper Izvestia published an editorial darkly warning the Ukraine's citizens not to engage in what it called "political sabotage" against the government. The foreign intelligence section of Romania's Securitate, eager to keep an insurgency going until NATO could get in a position to directly intervene, began smuggling fuel and munitions supplies across the Romanian-Soviet border; when word reached Bucharest of the Red Square massacre Gheorge Maurer began openly moving Romanian army reserve divisions to the border in response to the tragedy. President-elect Hubert Humphrey, in his first national security briefing following his win over Richard Nixon, asked the Pentagon to write up contingency plans for deploying ground troops to Poland in the event that a potential Ukrainian conflict spilled over into Polish territory. The Poles themselves, for their part, made it a point to call up a substantial part of their army reserve to reinforce their defenses along the border with Ukraine and send a not-so-subtle message to their former Soviet allies about what the Kremlin could expect if it attempted to reassert control over their homeland. A perfect storm of insurrection was brewing.

That storm broke on November 11th when a group of over 2,000 anti-Brezhnev demonstrators marched to the KGB's Ukraine regional headquarters on Volodymyrska Street in Kiev and encircled the building in a human chain blockade. Despite the best efforts of the building's guard detail to keep the demonstrators at bay, they were greatly outnumbered, and within two hours the offices were under Free Ukraine control. The CPSU's control of the Ukraine would end not with a bang or a whimper, but with the rustling of paper as thousands of previously hidden secret police files were seized by the demonstrators and delivered to Polish diplomatic officials; the Polish diplomats in turn relayed them to NATO headquarters in Brussels. To add insult to injury for the Brezhnev regime, many of the very army reserve units he'd been relying on to crush the incipient uprising were simply standing aside-- or worse, actively collaborating with the insurgents. For the second time since the Bolshevik Revolution Ukraine was mounting armed resistance to CPSU rule-- except this guerrilla war would have a far more favorable outcome for the Ukrainians, even if it would take many months for the rebels to achieve their aim of an independent Ukraine. Across the Ukrainian-Polish border, meanwhile, a much more peaceful political transformation was unfolding....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

  


PART 24/Let Us Go Forward Together



For many Poles, the opening of New Way's first official national convention on November 9th, 1968 marked the fulfillment of a dream more than two decades old. Since the end of World War II the Polish people had resented Soviet domination of their homeland; the outbreak of the Czech War and the subsequent rise of the New Way movement had combined to galvanize them to challenge the pro-Moscow status quo being enforced by the Gomulka regime. Now, with Gomulka gone and the Soviets forced to remove all but a fraction of their ground and air bases from Poland to shore up their crumbling front in eastern Czechoslovakia, the Poles could go about reshaping their government without fear of outside interference. To further ensure his country's security the new Polish head of state, Edward Gierek, had opened negotiations with the White House to lease air bases to the United States. While it still remained to be seen what political shape the new Poland would take, it was already crystal clear that shape would look nothing like the old one.

Over the course of four days hundreds of New Way members met in Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science to debate the articles of the charter that would henceforth define the party's political identity. These debates weren't just academic exercises; as one participant at the convention would later describe it, "We were fighting to reclaim the soul of our country." One thing all the participants agreed on was the need to make the Polish military and security forces independent of ideological subservience to any political party; accordingly one of the first articles approved for the New Way's national party charter mandated that instead of swearing allegiance to the government, all future armed forces recruits would pledge their loyalty to the Polish people. By the time the convention adjourned on November 13th the participants had also approved articles calling for a free press; a ban on the arrest of political dissidents under any circumstances except where there was credible evidence a violent crime had been committed; and most crucial of all, the abolition of the ban on opposition political parties.

In practice, one-party rule had already largely become a thing of the past at the local and regional levels at the time the New Way convention delegates were sworn in; all that remained to formally abolish it at the national level was for Gierek to convene a special session of the Sejm, Poland's central parliament. But the New Way rank and file nonetheless believed it was important to get their views on the matter stated explicitly for the benefit of future generations of Poles. On November 14th, New Way's executive committee formally announced the ratification of their party's new national charter and dispatched translations of it to international media representatives in Warsaw. Within two weeks the Sejm had indeed officially revoked the one-party decree and Poland's first free elections in at least two decades were scheduled for January of 1969. Among those who would be standing for office was a then 26-year-old Gdansk shipyard worker named Lech Walesa, who was part of a slate of candidates running for seats on the Baltic port's city council; his campaign would mark the beginning of a remarkable political journey culminating in his accession to the Polish presidency in the early 1990s.

As could have been expected, the Kremlin reacted with alarm to the New Way's growing political strength. Within hours after the official ratification of New Way's national charter, Brezhnev confided to Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko that he feared Poland would declare war on the USSR by Christmas if not sooner. To some of Brezhnev's peers in the CPSU inner circle it felt like Poland and the Soviet Union were already at war; in his office at KGB headquarters Yuri Andropov read with concern a steady stream of reports from his remaining deep cover agents in eastern Europe that the Gierek government seemed willing to go beyond merely leasing air bases to the United States and outright endorse the deployment of NATO ground troops on Polish soil. But even as the Brezhnev regime grappled with what to do about a newly assertive and hostile Poland, an even greater problem was about to thrust itself back into the spotlight with a vengeance....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

  


PART 25/Too Close For Comfort



Before the Czech War began, the Slovakian town of Prešov had been best known as one of the five towns which founded the Pentapolitana trade league in the 1400s back when much of eastern Slovakia was under Hungarian control. Once hostilities between the Warsaw Pact and NATO commenced in earnest Prešov became the nerve center of the Husak puppet state's militia forces; the puppet militia's command headquarters, recruit training camp, and officers' candidate school were all located in Prešov. The town was also home to a detention center where captured anti-Husak partisans and any civilians who dared utter a whisper of criticism against Husak's regime were subjected to physical and mental abuses that still sicken the heart even decades later. There was even a modest improvised factory dedicated to manufacturing small arms munitions for the puppet militia. Last but not least, the Soviets maintained a KGB monitoring station on the outskirts of the town to eavesdrop on NATO signals traffic. All of these things made Prešov a tempting target for the partisans; accordingly the leadership of the two largest partisan cells were preparing a series of attacks on the facilities in question beginning on or around November 15th, 1968 as a symbolic act meant to inspire their fellow Slovaks to join the resistance to the Husak regime and its Soviet patrons.

There was also a practical reason for these attacks. A few weeks earlier a NATO intelligence liaison had informed the partisan leadership that NATO ground forces were
preparing for a major push on Košice to crush the puppet state for good; guerrilla raids on Prešov would offer the perfect distraction to tie up Soviet army units in
the area while NATO infantry and armor detachments swept into the Husak regime's capital. Eager to see Husak's so-called People's Republic overthrown, the partisans quickly agreed to co-ordinate their planned raids with the NATO thrust toward Košice. Late on the afternoon of November 13th, a coded radio transmission from Operation Pressgang headquarters in Prague confirmed that NATO forces would begin their drive on the Husak regime capital at precisely 6:00 AM on the morning of November 15th. With this information in hand, the partisans fixed 5:30 AM that same morning as the starting time for their strike on regime bases in Prešov. To keep the KGB and the Husak regime's Lidové ředitelství pro bezpečnost(LRB, or "People's Security Directorate") secret police guessing as to where the first blow would land, the partisans mounted a joint campaign with CIA and MI-6 deep cover agents to spread contradictory rumors claiming a dozen different facilities as the likely target for the initial attack. This tactic worked to near perfection; when the guerrillas started their assault on the puppet militia's HQ precisely at 5:30 AM on November 15th, the only warning most of the HQ's personnel had of the attack was a murderous machine gun fusillade that killed a third of its guard detail within seconds. Most of the rest of the guards promptly deserted their posts, leaving a handful of raw recruits and their officers to fend for themselves.


It was around 5:52 AM when Husak himself first learned of the attack; the news sent him into a state of cold terror. He would be even more alarmed when, less than
25 minutes later, the Soviet ambassador in Košice confirmed that Red Army tanks, artillery, and infantry were engaging NATO forces along three different fronts near
the puppet state's capital and U.S. fighter jets were mounting air strikes in support of the anti-Husak partisans at Prešov. With each succeeding piece of bad news
that came his way, Husak's mental state deteriorated further and further. The straw that broke the camel's back would come around 2:38 PM local time that afternoon
with word that two advance units of British marines had been broken through the left flank of the Soviet battle lines with the support of West German artillery units. Disregarding the urgings of the Soviet ambassador and his own commanders to stay in Košice for the good of his supporters' morale, Husak hastily fled his offices and rushed back to his apartment to pack what few things he could carry in two suitcases. He then fled east with his family in a commandeered small plane towards Moscow; it would be the last time he ever set foot on Czech or Slovak soil as a free man.

It didn't take long after that for his advisers' fear of collapse to start becoming reality. As word of Husak's abdication spread and NATO ground troops steadily edged closer to capturing Košice, most of what was left of the puppet militia simply threw down their guns and surrendered to the first Czech regular soldier they could find; many of the rest left the country with the retreating Soviet armies or committed suicide. Košice was completely in NATO hands by midday on November 19th, and the last pockets of Communist resistance in Prešov were overrun by Czech and British troops the next day. The so-called "People's Czechoslovak Republic" disappeared from the world stage as quickly and dramatically as it had arrived. Naturally Brezhnev was furious at the loss of his most vital remaining bridgehead in eastern Europe, and when Husak arrived in Moscow just after dawn on November 20th the Soviet premier's first words to him were a bitter tirade denouncing what Brezhnev called his "utter incompetence". "We should have left you for the partisans to shoot!" the CPSU general secretary is said to have yelled at Husak and the end of their two-hour meeting. That condemnation would eat away at Husak's psyche for years, eventually leaving him a shell of his former self.

For most other people, however, the demise of Gustav Husak's ill-fated bid to usurp Alexander Dubcek as Czechoslovakia's leader was cause for celebration. One group who were particularly glad to see him go was the Czech national soccer team, many of whom were of Slovak descent themselves and had deeply resented Husak's transparent efforts to ride their coattails as they defied expectations to make it all the way to the semifinals of the 1968 Summer Olympics....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

   


PART 26/The Beautiful Game


The outbreak of the Czech War and the resulting absence of the Soviet Union from the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City granted a wealth of opportunities to many countries in events where they might not otherwise have had such chances. One of the greatest beneficiaries of this turn of events was the Czech men’s soccer team, who were using their country's fight for freedom as added motivation to play all-out in what promised to be one of the intense men’s soccer tournaments at any Olympics since the founding of the modern Games in 1896. With Hungary, the USSR’s last remaining ally in eastern or central Europe, boycotting the Mexico City Games in a show of solidarity with Moscow, a path had been opened for the Czechs to win Group D in the first round-- or at least make a respectable enough finish to enable them to reach the quarterfinals. Many soccer fans, Czech or not, were eagerly anticipating a possible showdown between Czechoslovakia and West Germany, who’d been added to Group C as a last-minute fill-in for the absent Hungarians. (1968 would mark the only time during the Cold War that East and West
Germany competed in the Olympics as separate nations.)

Even without the Czech War the Mexico City Games would have been politically charged in many ways. One nation, South Africa, had already been banned from the Olympics due to its apartheid government; another, North Korea, had quit the Games of its own accord after years of badly strained relations with the International Olympic Committee. Host country Mexico had been rocked by weeks of student unrest culminating in the horrific Tlatelolco massacre ten days before the opening ceremonies. The US Olympic team was coming to Mexico City at a time when American society was in the midst of its gravest racial and social crisis since the Civil War; two members of the men’s track and field team, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, would spark controversy by giving the Black Power salute on the medal stand after winning gold and bronze medals respectively in the 200-meter dash.

With many of the players in the Czechoslovak men’s soccer team being of Slovak descent, it came as no surprise that Gustav Husak’s puppet regime would seek to ride their coattails and exploit the team’s success for propaganda purposes. The official People’s Czechoslovak Republic state radio constantly referred to them as “our football heroes”, conveniently ignoring the small but important detail that none of the players or coaches wanted the slightest thing to do with Husak, who they considered a traitor to Czechoslovakia as a whole and the Slovakian people in particular. Goalkeeper Július Holeš, who’d been born in Košice, summed up his teammates’ feelings when he literally spat on a telegram from Husak wishing them luck on the eve of their first-round opener against Guatemala. To further emphasize their individual and collective disdain for the puppet ruler of the PCR, the team made it a point to prominently display a portrait of Alexander Dubcek in their locker room throughout their Olympic run.

The portrait seems to have worked as a good luck charm as well as a political statement: the Czechs were able to hold the Guatemalans to a scoreless tie and follow up with a 3-2 nail-biter win over Bulgaria. An eight-goal shutout win over Thailand was good enough to secure the Czech team the second place spot in Group D and a matchup in the quarterfinals with Group C winners West Germany. On October 18th, 1968 one of the largest crowds to witness any soccer event in Mexico’s history packed the Estadio Jalisco in Guadalajara for what promised to be a close match. One of the West German team’s assistant coaches would later tell Der Spiegel: “The whole stadium seemed to be holding its breath before we got started.”

As it turned out, the match would be even tighter than anyone had expected-- most of the first half was dominated by the two squads’ defenses, and neither side would even get a shot on goal until the 43rd minute when West German forward Jupp Heynckes fired a header that went just wide of the Czech net. With the West Germans and Czechs locked in a 0-0 tie at halftime, TV commentators calling the match began speculating that it might take a penalty shootout to decide who would advance to the semifinals. And the way things transpired up till the 83rd minute did little to discourage that assessment; if anything, after West German goalkeeper Sepp Maier robbed Czech forward Pavel Stratil of a potential corner kick score in the 79th minute, it seemed all but assured that the match would at the very least go into extra time. But at 83:29, Stratil’s teammate Miloš Herbst rocketed a perfect shot into the West German net to give the Czechs a 1-0 lead. The shocked West Germans mounted an aggressive counterattack in an attempt to equalize the score but succeeded only in leaving their net further exposed, a mistake Stratil exploited by knocking a head shot past Maier to put Czechoslovakia ahead 2-0. West Germany did manage to avert the shutout with a goal by striker Gerhard Müller in the 88th minute, but they were unable to get any closer than that and Herbst notched his second tally of the game just before time ran out to clinch a 3-1 victory for the Czechs.

In a perfect world the Czech team’s run at the Summer Games would have climaxed with a gold medal. But in the semifinals their luck ran out against Group B runners-up and eventual silver medalists Japan, who defeated them in a heartbreaking 5-4 extra time loss that saw Herbst carted off the field early in the match after sustaining a painful shoulder injury. They wouldn’t go home totally empty-handed, however; with Herbst’s teammate Ladislav Petráš substituting for him in their lineup, they were able to win a three-goal shutout over host country Mexico to claim the bronze medal. When the team was packing to return home following the closing ceremonies, the last thing they did before heading to Benito Juarez Airport for the flight back to Prague was visit Herbst in the hospital to show their appreciation for his efforts on the field during the Olympic soccer tournament. (Herbst himself would return to Czechoslovakia in early December.)

After a brief layover in Munich, the Olympic squad arrived in Prague on October 30th and were greeted by a raucously enthusiastic crowd of supporters the moment their charter jet arrived at the Czech capital’s main airport. Alexander Dubcek made it a point to personally welcome the players and coaches home as they stepped off the plane; from there the squad was escorted to Hradcany Castle for a celebratory banquet and awarding of the Order of the White Lion. They spent the subsequent six weeks on a goodwill tour of Austria and Italy raising funds for the rebuilding of war-damaged towns in eastern Czechoslovakia, then went their separate ways to relax with their families before returning to the pitch to start preparing for the Czechoslovak First League's 1968-69 season. In the meantime, the world's attention would be grabbed by another homecoming....

TO BE CONTINUED

[pats2001]

SPECIAL AUTHOR'S NOTE:

Before I get to work on Part 27, I wanted to say a quick thank you to everybody who's helped push this thread over the 1000-views mark. 

[pats2001]

  


PART 27/Thank You For Staying At The Pyongyang Hilton



Although few people remember it today, there was an incident six months before Czechoslovakia’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact that threatened to trigger a new war between the United States and North Korea. The USS Pueblo, an intelligence-gathering ship which had been in service with the U.S. Navy since originally being christened as a cargo transport ship in 1944, had been seized by North Korean forces in mid-January of 1968 and its crew detained as prisoners of war. Then-North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung had been confident that Lyndon Johnson, harried by social unrest at home and an increasingly unpopular war abroad, would quickly back down to Pyongyang’s demands. After all, hadn’t Mao Zedong himself called the United States a “paper tiger”?

That assessment would be swiftly and emphatically proved wrong with the outbreak of the Czech War. As the U.S. and its NATO allies met the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact cohorts head-on and chipped away at Moscow’s strategic position in eastern Europe, North Korean embassies and consulates in the affected nations sent back increasingly desperate reports of the ferocity with which the so-called “paper tiger” was pushing the Red Army back to the USSR’s borders. Indeed, even before the shooting started in earnest DPRK foreign minister Pak Song-chol had warned Kim that Johnson’s confrontational stance on Czechoslovakia might all too easily translate into a willingness to take military action against Pyongyang. By the time Poland’s Gomulka regime was overthrown in mid-October of 1968 Pak’s fears were starting to become reality as the U.S. Army substantially increased the number of troops stationed in South Korea and a U.S. Navy carrier battle group had taken up stations in the Sea of Japan. When a U.S. Air Force B-52 briefly crossed into North Korean airspace in early November, the incursion fueled fears in Kim’s inner circle that Washington was getting ready to start a bombing campaign similar to the one it had been waging against North Vietnam since 1965. And it certainly couldn’t have helped Kim’s nerves any that President-elect Hubert Humphrey’s first post-election statement on the Pueblo crisis strongly hinted the United States would be willing to take military action against North Korea if the Pueblo’s crew wasn’t released by the time Humphrey was inaugurated two months hence.

In this tense atmosphere conditions were ripe for the outbreak of a new conventional war between the U.S. and the DRPK-- or worse, the escalation of existing hostilities with the Soviet Union into full-blown nuclear war. It’s a bona fide miracle any of us are alive today to even think about it. By November 15th, when NATO launched its final push to capture the Husak puppet regime’s headquarters in Košice, the Korean DMZ had already been the flashpoint for nearly two dozen skirmishes between NKPA and ROK troops. There had also been isolated clashes between North and South Korean naval patrol boats, and on November 17th an ROK Air Force reconnaissance jet came under heavy fire from North Korean anti- aircraft guns as it was monitoring NKPA troop movements on the northern side of the 38th parallel.

The event that finally proved the tipping point in the Pueblo crisis, however, happened largely out of the public eye and would remain a mystery until the release of certain declassified papers by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service in 2001. On November 20th, 1968 Chinese ambassador to North Korea Jiao Ruoyu met with Kim Il Sung to deliver Mao Zedong’s response to a communique Kim had sent to Beijing the previous day inquiring whether the DPRK could rely on China’s assistance in the event of a new war with South Korea and the United States. Mao’s message was not what Kim had hoped to hear-- according to an NIS-drafted summary of the communique, China’s main strategic priority at least for the short term would be to safeguard its Ussuri River frontier against an expected imminent Soviet attack. North Korea would have to rely on its own resources to prosecute any new wars with the US-ROK coalition. Shaken by this development, Kim quickly called an emergency meeting of his cabinet to decide what their next move should be. According to a former KPA officer who was present at the meeting and subsequently defected to the United States, Kim's defense minister at the time, General Choe Hyon, bluntly told him that without outside support the Korean People's Army would only be able to prosecute a war with the South and its U.S. allies for twelve months, eighteen at the most. 36 hours later the Pueblo's crew was released from prison and Pueblo herself was being towed into international waters to be transferred back to U.S. jurisdiction.

But as one Far East crisis was ending, another was intensifying. The Soviet Union and China, whose relations had been steadily and sharply deteriorating long before the Czech War began, were marshaling their respective forces for what the political leadership in both countries regarded as an inevitable military confrontation over the hotly disputed Ussuri River territories along China's northern border....

TO BE CONTINUED

[gillan1220]

Nov 8, 2020 14:45:40 GMT pats2001 said:

View Attachment  


PART 27/Thank You For Staying At The Pyongyang Hilton



Although few people remember it today, there was an incident six months before Czechoslovakia’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact that threatened to trigger a new war between the United States and North Korea. The USS Pueblo, an intelligence-gathering ship which had been in service with the U.S. Navy since originally being christened as a cargo transport ship in 1944, had been seized by North Korean forces in mid-January of 1968 and its crew detained as prisoners of war. Then-North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung had been confident that Lyndon Johnson, harried by social unrest at home and an increasingly unpopular war abroad, would quickly back down to Pyongyang’s demands. After all, hadn’t Mao Zedong himself called the United States a “paper tiger”?

That assessment would be swiftly and emphatically proved wrong with the outbreak of the Czech War. As the U.S. and its NATO allies met the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact cohorts head-on and chipped away at Moscow’s strategic position in eastern Europe, North Korean embassies and consulates in the affected nations sent back increasingly desperate reports of the ferocity with which the so-called “paper tiger” was pushing the Red Army back to the USSR’s borders. Indeed, even before the shooting started in
earnest DPRK foreign minister Pak Song-chol had warned Kim that Johnson’s confrontational stance on Czechoslovakia might all too easily translate into a willingness to take military action against Pyongyang. By the time Poland’s Gomulka regime was overthrown in mid-October of 1968 Pak’s fears were starting to become reality as the U.S. Army substantially increased the number of troops stationed in South Korea and a U.S. Navy carrier battle group had taken up stations in the Sea of Japan. When a U.S. Air Force B-52 briefly crossed into North Korean airspace in early November, the incursion fueled fears in Kim’s inner circle that Washington was getting ready to start a bombing campaign similar to the one it had been waging against North Vietnam since 1965. And it certainly couldn’t have helped Kim’s nerves any that President-elect Hubert Humphrey’s first post-election statement on the Pueblo crisis strongly hinted the United States would be willing to take military action against North Korea if the
Pueblo’s crew wasn’t released by the time Humphrey was inaugurated two months hence.

In this tense atmosphere conditions were ripe for the outbreak of a new conventional war between the U.S. and the DRPK-- or worse, the escalation of existing hostilities with the Soviet Union into full-blown nuclear war. It’s a bona fide miracle any of us are alive today to even think about it. By November 15th, when NATO launched its final push to capture the Husak puppet regime’s headquarters in Košice, the Korean DMZ had already been the flashpoint for nearly two dozen skirmishes between NKPA and ROK troops. There had also been isolated clashes between North and South Korean naval patrol boats, and on November 17th an ROK Air Force reconnaissance jet came under heavy fire from North Korean anti- aircraft guns as it was monitoring NKPA troop movements on the northern side of the 38th parallel.

The event that finally proved the tipping point in the Pueblo crisis, however, happened largely out of the public eye and would remain a mystery until the release of certain declassified papers by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service in 2001. On November 20th, 1968 Chinese ambassador to North Korea Jiao Ruoyu met with Kim Il Sung to deliver Mao Zedong’s response to a communique Kim had sent to Beijing the previous day inquiring whether the DPRK could rely on China’s assistance in the event of a new war with South Korea and the United States. Mao’s message was not what Kim had hoped to hear-- according to an NIS-drafted summary of the communique, China’s main strategic priority at least for the short term would be to safeguard its Ussuri River frontier against an expected imminent Soviet attack. North Korea would have to rely on its own resources to prosecute any new wars with the US-ROK coalition. Shaken by this development, Kim quickly called an emergency meeting of his cabinet to decide what their next move should be. According to a former KPA officer who was present at the meeting and subsequently defected to the United States, Kim's defense minister at the time, General Choe Hyon, bluntly told him that without outside support the Korean People's Army would only be able to prosecute a war with the South and its U.S. allies for twelve months, eighteen at the most. 36 hours later the Pueblo's crew was released from prison and Pueblo herself was being towed into international waters to be transferred back to U.S. jurisdiction.

But as one Far East crisis was ending, another was intensifying. The Soviet Union and China, whose relations had been steadily and sharply deteriorating long before the Czech War began, were marshaling their respective forces for what the political leadership in both countries regarded as an inevitable military confrontation over the hotly disputed Ussuri River territories along China's northern border....

TO BE CONTINUED

Will the Chinese and Soviets have their own war as per OTL? This is gonna cause a three-war World War III.

[pats2001]

Nov 8, 2020 15:10:15 GMT gillan1220 said:

Nov 8, 2020 14:45:40 GMT pats2001 said:

View Attachment  


PART 27/Thank You For Staying At The Pyongyang Hilton



Although few people remember it today, there was an incident six months before Czechoslovakia’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact that threatened to trigger a new war between the United States and North Korea. The USS Pueblo, an intelligence-gathering ship which had been in service with the U.S. Navy since originally being christened as a cargo transport ship in 1944, had been seized by North Korean forces in mid-January of 1968 and its crew detained as prisoners of war. Then-North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung had been confident that Lyndon Johnson, harried by social unrest at home and an increasingly unpopular war abroad, would quickly back down to Pyongyang’s demands. After all, hadn’t Mao Zedong himself called the United States a “paper tiger”?

That assessment would be swiftly and emphatically proved wrong with the outbreak of the Czech War. As the U.S. and its NATO allies met the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact cohorts head-on and chipped away at Moscow’s strategic position in eastern Europe, North Korean embassies and consulates in the affected nations sent back increasingly desperate reports of the ferocity with which the so-called “paper tiger” was pushing the Red Army back to the USSR’s borders. Indeed, even before the shooting started in
earnest DPRK foreign minister Pak Song-chol had warned Kim that Johnson’s confrontational stance on Czechoslovakia might all too easily translate into a willingness to take military action against Pyongyang. By the time Poland’s Gomulka regime was overthrown in mid-October of 1968 Pak’s fears were starting to become reality as the U.S. Army substantially increased the number of troops stationed in South Korea and a U.S. Navy carrier battle group had taken up stations in the Sea of Japan. When a U.S. Air Force B-52 briefly crossed into North Korean airspace in early November, the incursion fueled fears in Kim’s inner circle that Washington was getting ready to start a bombing campaign similar to the one it had been waging against North Vietnam since 1965. And it certainly couldn’t have helped Kim’s nerves any that President-elect Hubert Humphrey’s first post-election statement on the Pueblo crisis strongly hinted the United States would be willing to take military action against North Korea if the
Pueblo’s crew wasn’t released by the time Humphrey was inaugurated two months hence.

In this tense atmosphere conditions were ripe for the outbreak of a new conventional war between the U.S. and the DRPK-- or worse, the escalation of existing hostilities with the Soviet Union into full-blown nuclear war. It’s a bona fide miracle any of us are alive today to even think about it. By November 15th, when NATO launched its final push to capture the Husak puppet regime’s headquarters in Košice, the Korean DMZ had already been the flashpoint for nearly two dozen skirmishes between NKPA and ROK troops. There had also been isolated clashes between North and South Korean naval patrol boats, and on November 17th an ROK Air Force reconnaissance jet came under heavy fire from North Korean anti- aircraft guns as it was monitoring NKPA troop movements on the northern side of the 38th parallel.

The event that finally proved the tipping point in the Pueblo crisis, however, happened largely out of the public eye and would remain a mystery until the release of certain declassified papers by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service in 2001. On November 20th, 1968 Chinese ambassador to North Korea Jiao Ruoyu met with Kim Il Sung to deliver Mao Zedong’s response to a communique Kim had sent to Beijing the previous day inquiring whether the DPRK could rely on China’s assistance in the event of a new war with South Korea and the United States. Mao’s message was not what Kim had hoped to hear-- according to an NIS-drafted summary of the communique, China’s main strategic priority at least for the short term would be to safeguard its Ussuri River frontier against an expected imminent Soviet attack. North Korea would have to rely on its own resources to prosecute any new wars with the US-ROK coalition. Shaken by this development, Kim quickly called an emergency meeting of his cabinet to decide what their next move should be. According to a former KPA officer who was present at the meeting and subsequently defected to the United States, Kim's defense minister at the time, General Choe Hyon, bluntly told him that without outside support the Korean People's Army would only be able to prosecute a war with the South and its U.S. allies for twelve months, eighteen at the most. 36 hours later the Pueblo's crew was released from prison and Pueblo herself was being towed into international waters to be transferred back to U.S. jurisdiction.

But as one Far East crisis was ending, another was intensifying. The Soviet Union and China, whose relations had been steadily and sharply deteriorating long before the Czech War began, were marshaling their respective forces for what the political leadership in both countries regarded as an inevitable military confrontation over the hotly disputed Ussuri River territories along China's northern border....

TO BE CONTINUED

Will the Chinese and Soviets have their own war as per OTL? This is gonna cause a three-war World War III.

At the very least they'll be stepping right up to the brink.

[gillan1220]

Nov 8, 2020 15:12:03 GMT pats2001 said:

Nov 8, 2020 15:10:15 GMT gillan1220 said:

Will the Chinese and Soviets have their own war as per OTL? This is gonna cause a three-war World War III.

At the very least they'll be stepping right up to the brink.

Blessing in disguise for the US and NATO. They would want to let the communists destroy each other.

[lordroel]

Oct 7, 2020 20:45:45 GMT pats2001 said:

SPECIAL AUTHOR'S NOTE:

Before I get to work on Part 27, I wanted to say a quick thank you to everybody who's helped push this thread over the 1000-views mark. 

Think it is more you who deserve the credit than anybody else.