Soviet Domination - A Red Dawn story

   James

(283b)

January 1985: Sweden

Three hours passed after the reaching of the deadline without any Soviet action taken. Three long hours where Sweden’s government and military forces were on edge, waiting for an attack to come. Perhaps the Soviets had been bluffing all along. Perhaps…

…perhaps not.

Without leaving Soviet airspace, let alone going out over the Baltic Sea, a whole regiment of Soviet Air Force Bear bombers from the Strategic Reserve attacked Sweden and its capital. They were above Estonia and Latvia, a long way from Swedish detection. Cruise missiles were launched, old ones and new ones, before the bombers turned away and headed back to their bases. Those missiles flew onwards, heading west towards Sweden. The raced towards Government, military and economic targets in the general area around Stockholm. There were almost eighty of them.

Launch failures, navigation errors and Swedish military action brought that number down to sixty-one which were able to reach their targets. Sixty-one missiles could do a terrible lot of damage though and that they did. Casualties were immense. Swedish civilians bore the brunt of these casualties during the afternoon strike. Air raid sirens had wailed and people had got to cover but the big warheads on so many missiles hitting all over the place took so many lives. Another strike came in the evening, several hours after the first one. The same regiment of bombers fired another massive wave of missiles, these from above the Gulf of Finland with this strike. Once again, the missiles bore-in upon Stockholm. Huge casualties from the second strike were taken and among them this time were many of those from rescuers too. Sweden learnt the horror of war. Their capital was hit with a similar attack to which had been seen elsewhere such as the four British cities of Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle though more missiles were fired at Stockholm that at those (in an individual sense). The Soviet Union was Sweden’s neighbour and was able to hit it with ease. Swedish interceptors, Saab-built Drakens and Viggens, got some of those missiles in-flight, especially the older ones which were slow and in effect nothing more than drones, but they were unable to stop the majority. Nor were Sweden’s air defences able to do anything about those bombers. They could do this again at their leisure.


Dawn on January 10th saw the very south of Sweden come under military attack, a different kind to what hit Stockholm. Swedish interceptors engaged incoming Soviet attack aircraft coming north out of East Germany and Poland, taking down some of them yet many more aircraft came behind them: MiGs for fighter cover and Sukhois on strike missions. The naval base at Karlskrona over to the east was hit hard though the focus was on the western side of the Scania region for those aircraft as they raided military targets. The air attacks preceded a fast-moving assault convoy of Soviet naval infantry. The 336th Guards Brigade approached in hovercraft, assault boats and helicopters after coming up from the island of Rugen. There were amphibious ships carrying more of the brigade and a whole armada of warships in support. The weather was terrible – winter in the Baltic was hardly the time to launch a major amphibious assault – but Soviet forces went through it and onto land. The naval infantry started hitting their landing sites. They came ashore and were fast in battle with an alert and waiting Swedish Army. The first assault teams took heavy losses but this was expected. Behind them came the follow-on wave: more men brought in with armoured support and a lot of firepower available to push onwards. Within hours, Malmo was encircled. That city was left alone because the Soviets were pushing northwards. The naval infantry were joined by a brigade of airmobile troops who were flown into Malmo’s outlying airport, one which many Soviet and Swedish soldiers had died fighting over. Through the snow and over the flat terrain found here at the bottom end of Sweden, the Soviets carried on moving. Their opponents fought for their country and fought well. The Swedes didn’t give in easy. The first day saw the best performance from them where they forestalled Soviet advances in many places and conducted organised withdrawals from other points to maintain their order. The Soviets threw in an amphibious tank regiment on the second day though, tanks covered in battel by helicopter gunships with them. These helped open up the way for the drive northwards up along the western shore. Swedish strongpoints established inland were generally held though found themselves outflanked. Past Lund and on towards Helsingborg the Soviets went, taking heavy losses yet driving the Swedes back as they blasted all opposition in their path. It took another two days to get there but once reached, the city was like Malmo bypassed directly as the airmobile troops – with the 35th Guards Brigade; a unit tasked for operations in Western Europe and not Scandinavian-rolled but thrown into this fight – took over the advance and got to Angelholm. Those men were looking out upon the Kattegat, the waters on the far side of the Øresund. There they halted under orders from above and dug-in with landwards-facing defenses alongside the naval infantry and the tanks with them: the Swedish Army hadn’t been beaten, just shoved out of the way. Their mission had been achieved. The waters now at their backs were a fight for the Soviet Navy to have.

The Øresund was forced open using nuclear weapons. Underwater blasts took place where the Soviets attacked the Swedish Navy and its defensive minefields with a couple of dozen tactical nukes. The blasts were low yield and the only sight of them above the surface were the air bubbles which raced up. Torpedoes and depth charges were used to blast open what difficult and time-consuming demining would have had to do. Swedish submarines were targeted too when spotted, denying the little boats a fantastic opportunity to operate in crowded waters where they could have done brilliantly. Above the surface, the naval force which had escorted the landing forced onto the Swedish mainland was joined by more ships who entered the Øresund. They were in sight of Danish defenses over in Jutland which included coastal fortresses (very modern ones with big guns dug into the cliffs) and mobile missile batteries. Danish forces on land didn’t open fire. Danish naval forces withdrew into Fakse Bay & Koge Bay and also closer to Copenhagen itself. The Swedes were left all by themselves, abandoned by a terrified Danish government. Engagements between Soviet and Swedish naval forces, each with air support, saw each side lose ships and aircraft. The Soviets had the numbers and were ‘cheating’ with their underwater nuclear blasts. At one point, the Swedes appeared to have the upper hand in the fight with their mass of small and fast missile- & gun boats but then a lot of Soviet tactical aircraft showed up in daylight and were covered from fighters above keeping Swedish aircraft clear. Plenty of those boats were hit by air attacks, far too many to allow the Swedes any more hope. A withdrawal was made, one which soon became a panicked flight as what was left of the Swedish Navy in the Øresund went fast towards the Kattegat and out of the way. The Soviet Baltic Fleet followed them. There were a few minefields encountered, ones answered again with underwater nuclear blasts – the environmental damage was someone else’s problem –, and they then went towards the Kattegat as well. There would be a different war to fight there, but it wouldn’t be against the Swedes.


The five days of warfare was mainly focused upon Stockholm on the first and then down in Scania in the next four. There were other clashes with aerial battles above the Baltic and around the island of Gotland in addition to a fight between light naval forces off the Aaland Islands. Full-scale war it was where this all occurred yet elsewhere, there was very little. The rest of Sweden was mainly left alone barring a few commando actions along Sweden’s winter-swept frontier with Soviet-influenced Finland and down the immense stretch of Sweden’s Baltic coastline. Sweden waited for something more, a major invasion either overland or a bigger amphibious operation than the limited – yet extremely violent – one in Scania. Neither came. Stockholm smouldered and the hospitals there were full of casualties. Tens of thousands of civilians were caught behind the lines in the occupied strip of Swedish territory while many more were fleeing the south of the country. The underwater nuclear blasts were known about by the government though not shared with the public. Everyone was waiting for what happened next. The Soviets did very little afterwards when it came to attacking Sweden beyond more than what they had. There were a series of air attacks made down in the south against Swedish military forces pushing against the Soviet outposts but no more. What Sweden couldn’t do was hit back against the Soviet Union nor liberate its territory. The Soviets didn’t push to take any more that they had.

Olaf Palme was forced to resign as prime minister by his government colleagues once the intense fighting came to an end. He wanted to stay on yet his fellow ministers forced him out. It was his actions which they saw as having put Sweden in this situation when it came to forcing Sweden into a position like it had ended up in. They formed a national government and had no intention of surrendering but wouldn’t see their country led by Palme any more. Fighting continued down in Scania. Swedish forces surrounded the occupied zone, digging-in just like the foreign occupiers were. Shooting and shelling took place in the following weeks there and in the skies there continued to be clashes too. Nonetheless, the Soviet-Swedish war had stalled into a stalemate. Another conflict had started though, that being the Battle of the Baltic Exits.


British and Norwegian naval and air forces took on the fight against the Soviet Baltic Fleet when it emerged from the Øresund and went across the Kattegat before turning west. The use of tactical nukes by the Soviets down in the south wasn’t matched in the north. They were expected by the Allies yet weren’t brought into play. Here it was just conventional.

Soviet aircraft were flying from Swedish airbases, which was something that earlier Allied plans hadn’t foreseen properly. Angelholm and Ljungbyhed were being used by Air Force and Naval Aviation aircraft along with more distant ones down in East Germany. The ability to have forward-deployed aircraft assisted the Soviets greatly in the effort to fight the way out. They did just that, engaging the Allies who tried to stop them who had their own forward airbases in southern Norway. There were more Soviet ships though a lot of them weren’t as capable as what the Allies could field. The Allies had been fast busy sewing minefields too. The fight was one where the opposing sides few times saw each other. Long nights and short days along with the use of long-range weapons made this happen. Both Danish and Swedish airspace (the latter in the wider Goteborg area; around which saw a city in fear) was violated during this. The battle was itself a series of many engagements all over the place without a fixed defining point that anyone could afterwards point to. As to a victor, that wasn’t easy to identify either.

The Soviet Baltic Fleet got out of the Baltic, fulfilling the whole point of going to war with Sweden. Many of the ships and submarines didn’t get past the Kattegat and the Skagerrak though and out into the North Sea to sail beyond them. Those that did so got out individually or in small groups and turned north to head towards the Norwegian Sea. The intention was for them to replace the Northern Fleet which had been decimated throughout December in fighting across the North Atlantic. Those that would reach ‘safety’ found in the Norwegian Sea were half of those who had made the breakout. The other half had either been sunk or turned back due to damage done to them. They’d gotten their licks in on the way, sinking Allied ships as well including five major Royal Navy warships – plus many smaller vessels and those of the Norwegian Navy too – and damaging others. The weather had helped with the breaking free of the Baltic Exits, so too had all of that air support given. Whether it was all worth it for the Soviets was a different matter. Was it? The war with Sweden wasn’t over and what they had done to that country would have immense geo-political effects continent-wide. Thirteen major warships (just destroyers and frigates, no aircraft carriers or cruisers were with the Baltic Fleet) reached the Norwegian Sea after the Battle of the Baltic Exits ended.

Getting thirteen ships out in open water brought the Soviets so much pain in response.

We will have to wait and see.

Sweden was, and still is, very well set up to defend itself from Soviet/Russian attack from the east across Finland, they learned a lot from the Winter War, however the Soviets have negated that in two ways:

Amphibious Assault
Stopping

The Swedish Centurions, should devastate the PT-76 Tanks the Soviets have brought if they go on the offensive, IF they can keep Soviet airpower at bay.

Still, while it's not many men, (maybe a few hundred thousand), every man stationed in Sweden is one that won't be sent to America or China.


I wonder if those Soviet troops know how lucky they are?