Soviet Domination - A Red Dawn story

nastyness everywhere and postwar things will be troubled in many places...more or less like in postwar europe; in all probability the killing of fellow americans will be put under the proverbial rug or glossed over doing a generalization of collaborators so to not tarnish the legend of the resistance.
Oh well another hint that things in Europe will go hot, it will be Sweden? It will be West Germany and co.? In the second case it will mean that the Soviet are too overextended, i know what James had said, but numbers aside, the war in Asia and North America had probably seen the use of the best equipment the Soviet had and a lot has been destroyed, as their men of the special forces (spesnatz and paratroopers)...so the forces in East Europe are neither the best equipped or best trained and a lot of the troops destinated to the first strike to take down critical point are dead or in other place.
All that to say that even in case of victory, this will mean going trough the strategic reserve of troops and equipment very quickly and not having time to replenish; and that the force facing France and allies are not the well oiled and precise warmachine that everyone feared but more a blunt weapon that win trough sheer force and numbers (important for the general consequences for the other front)

Frankly if i was in the men in command of the various european forces i will take an hint from 'Red Storm Rising'and launch a preempetive strike in East Germany to destroy as much of aircraft, road, bridge and railways as possible to gain time, while at the same type blow the dust from the old Operazione C3 of Supermarina and launch it at the same time.
Naturally if the Soviet don't launch their attack first instead of giving an ultimatum to Europe, yeah difficult but even this politbureau will understand that a fullscale invasion of Western Europe at this stage can bring down the all castle, so at least a though will be given, i'm not particulary optimistic that they will do it naturally, they seem in their own little world and opting for All or Nothing strategy

And now a very important question, how is the food situation in East Europe (RUssia included)? By now food from Western Europe will not come anymore and the last time there were a big famine in time of war had not gone well for the goverment of Mother Russia.

Yeah, it is looking increasingly impossible from a logistic point of view. Supplying the small 14th Brigade (much of that came from what was pre-war in Alberta) is one thing, a multi-divisional heavy corps is quite something else. The Atlantic is still contested too. Plus, the mainland European issue is getting worrying as we shall soon see.
The gap in the siege lines is for military use and dangerous. The official position is civilians shouldn't use it but they aren't being stopped. Other civilians likewise were told going over the mountains - where that fighting is too - is dangerous and closed but they still went. Denver isn't Stalingrad and civilians fighting are volunteers - again discouraged unless they are organised - rather than forced to. It is just the issue that a warzone is no place for civilians and the gap in the lines is somewhere on the frontlines.




It is a dirty war in many places, one where war crimes happen aplenty. Guerrillas but also US military forces will commit war crimes no matter what official policy is on the matter and afterwards most will be played down apart from the most extreme examples.
With Europe, it will be the flanks: Sweden and the Med.
NATO ever attacking Eastern Europe is - despite Red Storm Rising being a great book - never something that was going to happen on a political level. It could never be a surprise too. Look at after East Germany fell and how the Stasi had so many spies in East Germany. A French-led mini-NATO, with no pretence of real equality among allies, though maybe just Paris and Rome, could do it... and inform the West Germans / Low Countries as it begins.
A Soviet attack the other way would go very far but wouldn't win now, not with Western Europe as ready as it is. There will be morale and political troubles among reservists west of the Iron Curtain but more issues with available top-tier forces on the other side. As I've said before, they would get very far, get stuck, and it would probably go nuclear too. We're not going to see that though, despite fears in the story from some governments that it will occur. I have something else planned.
The food issue: a good point, see my explanation below to Steve.



It was in the Ukraine, spreading to Kazakhstan, where the harvest issue began in 1983 and would be worse by 1984... by 1985 it might be sorted but then war mobilisation makes that difficult as you say. Chemical experimentation and massive corruption led to a harvest failure and the poisioning of the land for several years hence. The Soviets covered that up from the West - who had some idea, not the scale though - as they brought food from Western Europe plus South America. All of that has stopped now. Trying to force Western Europe to sell them food for oil has failed as they mishandled it badly by trying intimidation and then using nukes in China like they did which lost them any - not much to start with - goodwill.
Western Europe retains the right in this story (from my POV as an author) to strike first though it would be difficult and need something strong to force it through the risk: mushroom clouds over Paris, Frankfurt, Rome and everywhere else if it goes wrong. I have ideas which are soon to play out.

   James

Another fine update James.

My ideas on an ending are still up in the air but it will be a combination of suggestions made!
They need those convoys. Their 'allies' are tapped out and so the reinforcement & resupply has to get through.
With Western Europe, when mobilised France/WG/Italy/NE/BEL can put a lot into the battle and the Soviets have weakened their set-up. Still, there is a massive force there which could go very far forward. The missing Americans, more than the Brits and Canadians, brought so much to the table when it came to NATO. Britain has its army and a strong one now with all its additions but the RAF and RN have been hurt.
The end shall come eventually.




Every modern war we have seen has witnessed the massive strain on logisitics and armaments. The Soviets are manufacturing stuff but need to get it overseas to North America and China through enemy forces and also radioactive holes too. Not easy.
The Sweden and Gibraltar fights, done simultaneously, will be very costly. redrobin65 did a list a while back of all of the MANY theatres of operation for the Soviets: I am sure it was past twelve! 



Thank you kindy, Admiral.



Oh, what they've lost in China was east of the Urals based forces but by now the western forces are arriving and China is a bloodbath still. The Soviets do have a huge force but moving it overseas is the issue. Special forces, paratroopers, naval infantry and air power has all been committed on a massive scale but there are all those tanks/infantry/artillery which would tear through an enemy in a slow but effective fighting steamroller if used.
Sweden, more than anything else, will be the issue which turns over the Western Europeans as it is too much. We'll see how that goes in the coming weeks.

(281)

January 1985: The Coastal Plain and the Gulf Coast

General Schwarzkopf found out about the raid by the Blackhorse Cav’ after the event. His V Corps was with the Third US Army; that raid had been conducted by a VII Corps formation under the Seventh US Army. Operational security kept knowledge tightly-controlled with only those who needed to know being told. Aircraft from the Sixteenth US Air Force – broken away from the huge and unwieldy Twelfth Air Force starting New Year’s Day – which usually supported the Third Army were tasked to help get the Blackhorse Cav’ back out from behind enemy lines as part of a big air intervention and this led to Schwarzkopf being informed once it was all over. He would have wanted to have conducted a similar mission with his own troops. The V Corps’ assigned Cav’ element was the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment (the ‘Third Tennessee’, from the Volunteer State) and those were good soldiers. They were needed where they were though, supporting the 5th & 24th Infantry Divisions on the frontlines where Schwarzkopf’s command held its sliver of East Texas. To be honest, even if they weren’t needed there, Schwarzkopf couldn’t have sent them on a mission like that. They weren’t as well-trained nor as best equipped as the Blackhorse Cav’ was: that was a cold hard truth, something not to be sugar-coated. If such a raid by the V Corps was going to be done, it would have to be by regular troops with more training than the Third Tennessee had ever received before the war and with a unit not as beat-up in war as the 278th Regiment was. To go into Texas properly, to liberate American soil there held by the Soviets and their allies rather than just raid it, was what the V Corps was getting ready for. There was a lot of ‘hurry up and wait’ about it for the men involved, but plans were afoot for the US Army to do just that. Schwarzkopf and his men would be doing just that soon enough.

From Texas Command, word had initially come down that at the end of February there would come the long-awaited big offensive. The time ticked away towards that and through January, Schwarzkopf realised that the timescale was going to slip. He was privately told by his immediate superior at the head of the Third Army that it would be the beginning of March rather than the end of February. Regardless of that delay (still not official), the V Corps would be at the heart of that offensive. Beginning over the Christmas period and through this month, the V Corps received significant resupply and issuing of replacement equipment. It wasn’t enough, nothing was ever enough for Schwarzkopf who wanted more tanks and more heavy guns, though what came through was higher than any of the two other corps – both full national guard units rather than part regular / part reservist like his was – with the Third Army received. Moreover, before the V Corps took part in the offensive, Schwarzkopf was due to see the arrival of newly-raised reinforcements to his command. Both the 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 6th Armored Division would be assigned. They were part of the Army of the United States, formed up from volunteers and conscripts who started their training to turn them from civilians to soldiers at the beginning of October. That process was supposed to have taken a minimum of six months. Schwarzkopf could count. October, November, December, January, February… that was five months, not six. A month – even more as far as the early information about late February had been concerned – had been knocked off that and the ARUS was a lot smaller than at first planned. There had been many, many issues raising those new forces in terms of issuing them equipment and then that time had been knocked off their training. Unlike veterans and reservists, those soldiers were all green the day they reported for basic training. Schwarzkopf would be getting those green soldiers though and taking them to war. Both of those units were moved through January down to Folk Polk in Louisiana from where they’d first been raised up and down the Eastern Seaboard. They came to Louisiana to conduct their final training and were joined by equipment in an ongoing process which aggravated him with how painfully slow it was. He made several visits to Fort Polk and witnessed their training. Some of what he saw he was impressed with, other bits not so much. They would be going to war under Schwarzkopf’s command soon and would be his responsibility. He hoped to take them all the way to the Rio Grande though was painfully aware that many of them wouldn’t make it that far. A soldier and a commanding general, Schwarzkopf would do everything he could to keep them and the rest of his men alive. He’d do damn well all that he could. Whether it would be enough though was something that he could only pray it would be.

***

The two Soviet convoys which had made it across the North Atlantic entered the Caribbean at the end of 1984 and set course for Texas. There were a few ships which broke away for the Caribbean islands under Cuban occupation, ones shot-up and just making it across the ocean, but the rest were heading for Galveston, Freeport, Corpus Christi and Brownsville. The race was on to not just reach those ports along the Gulf of Mexico coastline through South Texas, but successfully unload their cargoes there all before the Americans could stop this from taking place.

The best solution for the United States at this point would have been four – no, eight: two each – tactical nukes. The harbour facilities at each of those locations, already mangled by war damage, could have been once and for all put out of operation even with low-yield blasts used. Civilian casualties would have been ghastly though, to be brutally blunt, acceptable in the grand scheme of things. A nuclear strike was considered. Planning was done and projections made on damage, casualties and fallout. But then planning for nuclear strikes all over the theatre of operations was conducted on a regular basis and arguments were put forth to the politicians at the head of the US Government for both their use and the non-use of such weapons. Glenn wasn’t prepared to order it. American nuclear weapons hadn’t been used on American soil (the Soviets had done enough damage with their own) and the president said that they wouldn’t be used at his direction. He wouldn’t reconsider the matter, he wouldn’t budge on the issue. This was a conventional fight and it would have to be fought without nuclear weapons despite them being used – very effectively – by the opposing sides at the beginning of the war.

Convoy #1 passed around Cuba to the south and went past Jamaica and the Cayman Islands before crossing the Yucatán Channel to enter the Gulf of Mexico. Five to six days sailing time behind, Convoy #2 also headed for South Texas via the Yucatán Channel which separated Cuba from Mexico after crossing the width of the Caribbean. The Americans threw everything at them on the way, everything that they could considering how the Soviets had directed their shipping to stay as far away from danger as much as possible and also protected it. Aircraft flying from Florida had to avoid Soviet and Cuban forces in Cuba and that was no easy task: still they made attack missions in the face of interceptors climbing out of the battered island in the way. American submarines active in the Caribbean faced a major anti-submarine effort from warships, land-based naval air power and Soviet submarines. Likewise, they too went after the two convoys while they were on their way across the Caribbean bound for the Gulf of Mexico. The US Navy lost submarines (a pair of them) like the US Air Force lost aircraft when going after the convoys. However, hits were made on shipping. Some vessels were sunk and others were damaged enough to have to be fast put into harbour either in Cuba or Mexico where cargo could be salvaged less be lost at sea. The rest moved onwards though, pushed onwards when bombs, missiles, torpedoes and minefield came their way. This was all the preamble though, the real drama started along the Gulf Coast.


B-52s – BUFFs: Big Ugly Fat F**kers – launched cruise missiles at the four ports before the ships arrived, during their unloading and afterwards as the cargo was moved off. All those AGM-86 cruise missiles which never got nuclear warheads and SAC had sulked about under the Kennedy Administration showed their usefulness in mass conventional attacks. The B-52s were either over Mexico, after taking the Pacific routing (California > Baja > north-central Mexico), or above the Gulf of Mexico with shorter flights and shooting them off twelve or twenty at a time. FB-111s and even some of the stealth F-117s joined in, getting in closer to hit the targeted port facilities with laser-guided bombs. A good proportion of those cruise missiles and smart bombs were used for taking down air defences though and they didn’t always do their job. Soviet fighters came up as well, taking shots at the bombers and the incoming cruise missiles too.

In earlier B-52 runs, made with solo aircraft over the Gulf of Mexico, the bombers had dropped a different kind of cargo which came into play only when the mass of Soviet shipping arrived. Mk.60 CAPTOR mines had been laid, more smart weapons. The mines sat on the surface off the Texan coastline with onboard computers at work sorting targets that mounted hydrophones detected. When a valid and also valuable target came within range, the CAPTOR turned from a mine into a torpedo-launcher and shot off a Mk.46 torpedo towards it. The CAPTOR was a fine weapon though one which could – if done correctly – be fooled, especially since the Soviets had their hands on several of these weapons for earlier analysis after capturing several examples. The majority of the fired torpedoes ‘got’ their targets. However, not all of those were real as the Soviets made extensive use of decoys due to the known threat.

Galveston first and then Freeport afterwards were hit with special forces attacks. US Navy SEALs struck at Galveston, transported in armed speedboats racing from out of hidden sites on the Louisiana coast. The boats provided fire support with machine guns, grenade launchers and even long-distance flame-throwers while the SEALs made a ‘noisy’ attack on the port. Stealth had been used in their approach; when the struck they put to use maximum violence in blowing things up and hitting ships. At Freeport, the harbour served the Dow Chemical plant in peacetime though since capturing the port (the chemical works had been devastated by American demolitions; what a clean-up that would need) the Soviets had been using it as a landing site for ships from Cuba, bringing in military equipment earlier in the war before Cuba was left empty of all that was there pre-war. A Ranger team had been parachuted inland nearby and made an assault on the landward-facing defences. Cuban and Mexican troops had previously engaged guerrillas and had success against them. The Rangers were something else. These men pressed home a major attack and caused a lot of damage before making their escape, one which was then pursued by Soviet armed helicopters and a Spetsnaz team brought into to hunt them down.

The US Navy’s submarine losses out in the Caribbean hurt them but they still had a few more tasked to carry on the fight against so many surface targets. Avoiding anti-submarine warfare efforts was difficult though not impossible. Once inside the protective screen, the shipping there was just a collection of targets. Both torpedoes and Harpoon missiles – launched at short-range to kill any reaction time – were fired. Another submarine was lost yet the final two of what had been five at the start escaped Soviet counter-efforts and followed the convoys into port, shooting at them close to land as well. Off Brownsville, within sight of the shipping canal from the sea to the smashed-up inland port, a Harpoon struck one of the ships that was carrying ammunition and the ‘lucky’ strike set off a chain reaction of explosions. A series of extraordinary large detonations took place where the targeted ship and another caught up in this were left a total wreck: there was even death and destruction caused to South Padre Island too where Soviet coastal defence troops were killed by falling wreckage that came down like the fires of hell upon them.


The wide-ranging attacks against the Soviet convoys went on for almost three weeks when they were at sea and then in port. When queued up ready to be unloaded of their cargos of tanks, guns, munitions and so much else, the ships were easily identified and immobile. This allowed the Soviets to better defend them as well though. American air power did the majority of the port work yet one of those submarines did fire off its last Harpoons against stationary vessels waiting to reach the quayside at Corpus Christi. The Americans ran reconnaissance missions during and after the strikes had taken place. They counted the ships which had been present when entering the Caribbean and then those that made it to port. They observed the damage done during the unloading process and then to the cargo when it came off them before it could be moved away from the bullseye targets which were the ports themselves. The end results were good. Of course, the nuclear attacks which were refused would have done a better job than all of these repeated conventional attacks. They also wouldn’t have seen all the massive loss of men and equipment that the Americans suffered in striking so hard over and over again, using up ammunition at an alarming rate to get the results that they wanted too. Still, the official summary afterwards would claim that forty per cent of the cargo carried on those ships in the two convoys when they entered the Caribbean and headed for the Gulf Coast either went down at sea or was destroyed on the quayside. Forty per cent was a big number though, naturally, not one hundred per cent which the US Army would have wanted to have seen.

The Soviets had a different number to put on this all.