Soviet Domination - A Red Dawn story

Not related to this timeline, but intersting to watch as it relates to how the first 5 days of World War III would look like in the air.

I did say when we were last with Arizona/California that there was too much optimism at the new US joint command post. That general will be for the chop for how he deployed his forces. The Cubans broke open the seem, between the I MAF and the I Corps and drove into a gap. That OPFOR Group, like most of the I Corps, sits now in the Cubans rear.
The US domestic situation when it comes to mistrust will be unpleasant indeed.
San Diego is certainly at risk but the whole of Southern California is one big set of airbases - which were used to hit the Cubans so hard - along with military bases. Troops are what the US is short on. So the loss of the whole region, if the Cubans can break out, will be a blow. the Americans have been blowing infrastructure and stores elsewhere but there is always hesitation in doing that.
Using your own nuclear weapons on your own soil? Would they? Would any country?

Nice to see "Big E" in action.

(174)

Late September 1984:

At the Federal Building in El Paso, the historic US Courthouse, there came a stage-managed event where the ‘Committee for Peace’ was presented to selected elements of the world media (the list was very selective) to publicise their call for an end to the war. A group of American nationals presented as notables and voices of reason called for the United States to cease combat operations and open negotiations when it came to bringing the war to a close. There were politicians as part of the committee, figures from academia and also well-known activists. The gathering of such people was unprecedented and saw the coming together of those who were known to be ideological opponents previously. Twenty-one members formed the committee though there were five key figures at the heart of it who spoke with the journalists who’d come to El Paso. No mention was made of them being under any form of duress and there were no foreign soldiers at the event pointing guns anywhere towards them. The image shown was meant to be one of willing people wanting to see an end to the war inside their country. They informed those who’d come to see them that the war had been started by the United States and it should be the United States which ended it. A change of government was needed for that to happen, once the fighting had been ordered to cease and the security zone established to bring that about. Peace, that was what they wanted, what all of the American people wanted. An hour later, the Federal Building was blown apart in what the media – who’d been ‘lucky enough’ to be evacuated form there along with the Committee for Peace – was told was an American air strike; like the preceding event, that too was a big fat lie. The KGB had the Soviet Air Force bomb it once they had their people clear and the cameras were nearby when an air raid siren sounded. Look at all of the civilian casualties the Americans have caused! Look at how nearly that could have been you!

The bombing ended the first act of show being put on. The Committee for Peace would later start to present evidence to the media, when gathered at a hotel in the city as the second act started, when it showed how the United States had started this war by attacking the Soviet Union with their nuclear strike against Leningrad. As part of that, there had been a conspiracy at the heart of the US Government where Vice President Glenn had ordered the nuclear destruction of Washington to kill President Kennedy (and most of the federal government) so that he could seize power. Glenn and a group of generals were behind the war, a thoroughly evil cabal. Documents were provided to the media which proved this and there also came testimony from three of the key figures in the committee to that affect. Both missing members of Congress which the FBI already strongly suspected had been kidnapped right before hostilities commenced were alongside Kennedy’s former chief-of-staff: a man who’d been with him through his first three years in the White House but left back in February this year. They spoke of Glenn’s power grab where the war he had launched to cement that and spoke too of the martyrdom of the blameless Kennedy along with so many innocent Americans. If only the conspiracy had been detected in time, this war could have been stopped before it killed so many. It hadn’t been, but with the knowledge now, there was a chance that the American people would listen and understand just what had happened where they had been duped and so many of their fellow citizens all killed like they had for a lie. Denouncements came of Glenn from others in El Paso and they revealed other so-called secrets as well about events pre-war, all juicy plots, plans and conspiracies which supporting evidence was given alongside. This war must end, so said the Committee for Peace, and there should be no more fighting against ‘Internationalist’ forces moving in to try and secure peace for not just America and the Western Hemisphere but the whole world too.


The first part of the El Paso charade was seen by many Americans in its initial broadcast with the second act seen by far fewer. Those at Mount Weather, Raven Rock and The Greenbrier saw the whole thing. The Californian congresswoman and the Texan congressman, both missing from their homes and thus the rump Congress, were now confirmed to be in Soviet custody. Each had young children (one for the former, two for the latter) who were also missing, presumably with the KGB and thus assumed to being held to secure the full cooperation of their parents. When it came to the further committee members, there had been suspicions when it came to some of those that they too might have been kidnapped (family members included) yet the appearance of such a range of people was surprising. The KGB had chosen a cross-section of notables for their purposes. Some might have gone willingly though the chances of that weren’t very high, unless they were duped. The committee members came from across the country and also Americans in self-exile aboard in Cuba or living elsewhere in the world. The accusation against Glenn was the most surprising thing of it all when it was aimed at the American people: the Big Lie of an American first strike had been spread worldwide so it probably shouldn’t have been. There had come hints that the Soviets might try to put together an alternate government though it was suspected that that would have a full-on communist / liberation of the people angle. This conspiracy-spreading was something different. The claims that then El Paso was bombed so quickly like it was also shocked those surviving members of the US government for it presented something new for the Soviets in their propaganda war. Such ‘American’ attacks, physical actions or claims of them happening, were going to continue. The Committee for Peace would pop up again soon, all tightly-controlled by KGB personnel among them who scripted every word they said.

The destruction of Washington had seen the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) headquarters destroyed with most of the senior management there. This was an independent agency of the government which was being put back together like others were – the CIA, the FBI and so on – but something which wasn’t easy to do. When the Soviets had hi-jacked the television signal to get their coverage of El Paso out, the FCC was pretty much unable to do anything to respond to what was being sent out to millions of Americans primarily through the western half of the country. Urgent instructions from Raven Rock had the military start jamming the signal so that the second half of the broadcast was unable to get through to most of those who had seen the first half. The FCC was also struggling elsewhere where it come to the task set to them to monitor the media’s activities as the war got underway. They were given what many regarded as an impossible task. Still, the FCC tried where they aimed to get the civilian media to self-censor themselves where necessary and work with the military in other instances. There was a lot of patriotism quickly on display from the media where any hint of attacking the government at a time like this, especially in its conduct of the war, was rejected from being aired. Stupidity came instead of deliberately doing the Soviet’s work for them. Some journalists got too close to the fighting and ended up dead although some went missing too, presumed snatched to be used by the KGB. There were other journalists who said too much, gave away things that they didn’t realise they weren’t supposed to say. False information was given out where the media repeated things that they had been told after deciding themselves that it had nothing to do with giving away any secrets: they were making up their own rules and causing damage without knowing they were nor directly meaning to. Eventually that had to be stopped. Glenn signed an executive order giving the US Armed Forces sweeping powers of censorship and side-lining the FCC in doing so. It looked like a power grab to many as the government took control of information. If this hadn’t been wartime, the legal challenges would have been aplenty and been successful too. It wasn’t though. US Army Counterintelligence oversaw the immediate cessation of a lot of what was going out over the airwaves unless it was on message. There would be complaints over some of their activities yet it was them who made sure that all elements of the media started using the uniform terms ‘Free America’ and ‘Occupied America’. This quickly showed its real value in the propaganda war underway with good long-erm effects. The smearing of those at El Paso where they were all deemed to be traitors wasn’t so much of a glorious success due to the belief later that the truth should have been told about how many of the Committee for Peace ended up there or at least the truth bent the other way to say that all of them were forced to be there rather than just some. The decision was made though to smear them all as betraying their country and once done it was done.

Military support was also given to the recovering FBI in their implementation of the McCarran Act: an executive order here was forbidden by law and Congress had to authorise military police units to help the FBI rather than Glenn. The numbers of those being held in detention was growing before El Paso and increased afterwards. The definition of a subversive was starting to be applied a bit easily. Anti-war rallies were organised not by those in league with the Soviets but by those opposed to armed conflict. At a time like this, with the country reeling from nuclear attacks and being invaded, there were still those who came out to oppose war, any war. The organisers of such were arrested and the marches were broken up. Accusations came of racism in other arrests where African-American and Hispanics were detained as subversives. The charge of racism was denied and the airing of such claims was extremely limited as control of the media was established. There was concern starting to be expressed from some at The Greenbrier that maybe things had gone too far… The arrests continued regardless. The United States wasn’t turning into a totalitarian state yet some claimed that it was. Others shouted that it should be. Lock ‘em all up, there came the chants of certain extremists, when talking about anyone who expressed the most minor of objections to practically anything to do with how the war was being fought at the front and in the rear. Objections from some union officials of the demands made upon workers in industrial facilities being switched to wartime production in terms of hours and pay saw calls made for them to be locked up too. Not all of the union officials were truly representing their members while others were pushing for reasonable concessions for hard work being done. It was a complicated situation. To solve that, a couple of union bigshots, bigmouths, were arrested for charges unrelated to their expressed demands but their detentions didn’t look good. Everything was all legal though. It was just the same as the imposition of martial law when New York, other big cities and also Maryland saw outbreaks of rioting and criminality taking place. That had to be put down and was done with violence used as a last resort yet when it was, it was with success.

This war was going to be a long war. The idea of turning back Cuban and Latin American forces staging from Mexico, with limited Soviet support, making border incursions met eventual reality of a full-scale invasion underway. The commitment being shown by the Soviets and their allies to this war became more apparent as the first two weeks of the war went on. Initial optimism that despite some American setbacks elsewhere, the war would be quickly won was shown to be false after San Antonio and then later Southern California. There was a shift from making fighting the war an equal priority alongside other key matters – the economy and re-establishing a working government – to making it the priority with everything else secondary. This came on the back of appointments made to the vacant positions of the vice presidency and the secretary of state with Howard Baker and Adlai Stevenson III taking those. Baker was the former Senate Majority Leader who had resigned from that role in 1981 and then his Senate seat in 1982 all as fall-out for his failed vice presidential run alongside Reagan against Kennedy and Glenn. He’d denied the charge of financial irregularities (the campaign had been dirty) but stood aside to leave the Senate and join one of those think-tanks in Washington which had caused Kennedy all that grief – but not enough – before the war came when warning of the Soviet danger. Jack Kemp had been making use of Baker as an advisor in his presidential run for this November and it was while he was at Baker’s Tennessee home that Kemp had fallen ill in the days leading up to the war. Kemp’s death by a poisonous substance that the FBI were still clueless as to what it was all about had saved Baker from being in Washington. His experience and his position as a long-serving respected senator (that scandal in ’82 aside) saw his name pushed as the Republican who should serve alongside the Democrat Glenn at a time where the country needed a lack of partisanship at the top. As to Stevenson, his appointment was a fudge when the past senator from Illinois was chosen when others were vetoed. Stevenson promised much when it came to the country’s international relations and had been making waves before the war opposing Kennedy’s foreign policy. Whether he could deliver on those promises was something different.


Within days of the war starting, Britain had flown troops of theirs across the Atlantic and into Canada. They had linked-up with stored equipment in Alberta at their training site and set off following the Canadian Army northwards. Admittedly, the British contribution in terms of numbers of men had been low and they had flown ‘light’ – which would cause them problems later – but they had reacted faster than the United States could in moving troops across the North Atlantic. Even the Western European countries seemed to be doing better than the Americans when they started to organise the movement out of the United States of what military forces they had in the country – training units – alongside their civilians back home. Again, the numbers weren’t huge, but they were doing what it appeared that the United States wasn’t doing: making use airlift capabilities across the Atlantic better than the Americans could. This was all about appearances though. The British and Western Europe were doing this yet so too was the United States. The American just made less of a show of it by not acting with outrageous haste in making such movements. What was moving across the ocean in terms of men and equipment was coming home and started doing so almost at once. It also dwarfed in scale those being made by others. There was also a war ongoing within the country with logistical assets assigned internally with cross-country movement of forces taking place alongside the overseas effort. Hundreds of thousands of American service personnel, plus all their equipment, were coming home from Europe.

There were elements of the US Armed Forces spread from Britain to Italy to the Low Countries to Spain and to West Germany. The US Army and the US Air Force had significant presences with the US Navy and US Marines having a far smaller footprint across the North Atlantic. Britain wanted the majority of the US Air Force based in the UK to stay and when Spain entered the war (which no one had foreseen) they too wanted what aircraft were based in their country to not leave either. As to the other nations, their neutrality was proclaimed as necessary and not hostile towards the United States. Betrayal came the counter-claim though that wasn’t directed so much at France, who stood with those countries, yet the French president was first to promise help just short of war to the Americans and backed that up by actions with a wealth of intelligence support and then assistance in helping the US Seventh Army in West Germany leave via France. That movement of the numerous forces out of West Germany going via France was what took the most time and gave the impression of things taking so long. Such a viewpoint missed the fact that from elsewhere, there came a vast withdrawal of American forces out of Europe ahead of that biggest force.

Britain was home to five wings of combat aircraft from the US Air Force. The two wings of F-111s and the pair of A-10 wings flew back to the United States in ferry flights. This was no easy feat due to certain islands in the North Atlantic being unavailable but Madeira, the Canaries and Bermuda were open to assist and so too were facilities in the Irish Republic some time later as well. The aircraft were just part of the transfer: personnel and equipment were going too. As to that F-16 wing (transferred out of West Germany last year), they stayed for the time being fighting the war on the eastern side of the ocean which the F-111s were needed in yet they were sent home. There was a squadron of F-15s in the Netherlands: they went home too, aircraft and personnel. Britain and Italy both had support personnel for the US Air Force beyond combat aircraft; there were also non-combat aircraft in Britain. All would return to the United States. The wing of F-16s in Spain were needed at home more than in Europe – the US Navy was just as unhappy about this due to events in the Med. as the Spanish were – and they too made the trans-Atlantic transfer. Then there was West Germany: three combat wings and a major support network of aircraft and personnel. The F-15s at Bitburg stayed and flew air defence missions covering the withdrawal from any potential Soviet attack as the tension between Bonn and Moscow intensified due to lack of West German interment of American forces; the F-4 wings from Ramstein and Spangdahlem went home to fight the war in North America. Those F-15s were to eventually move to Britain in the end but until then they carried on flying over West Germany and the North Sea as well for the time being. Like all American forces in West Germany, they weren’t there due to West German permission but because there was the legal right to occupy the country following World War Two. Diplomatic wrangles went on with regard to that. West Berlin was the source of another major dispute of words rather than bullets.

The US Army had removed some forces from West Germany before the war started. The 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment and the Forward Brigade (part of the 2nd Armored Division; that being destroyed in Texas) were in Britain. Personnel were airlifted home along with dependents and shipping was arranged to have the mass of equipment sent afterwards to be used by others. Inside West Germany, a brigade of the 1st Infantry Division (the rest of the division soon fighting in New Mexico) had been readying to redeploy out of the country before pre-war tension kept them in-place. Like the units in Britain, the men now flew home with the equipment to follow later via ships. These early transfers of more than ten thousand combat troops went alongside the emptying of Western Europe of many non-combat personnel of the Seventh Army along with more dependents – wives and children – in airlifts. There remained the aircraft to transfer everyone though with the hundreds upon hundreds of civilian airliners now under US Government control. The personnel of a trio of divisions in West Germany, plus attachments, could all be flown out rather quickly. Instead, the decision was made, one which faced that strong opposition at home, was to conduct a staged withdrawal out of West Germany less the Soviets come over the border. This wasn’t due to a concern over West Germany but more so that in doing that without being opposed, all of the immense stocks of equipment and supplies would be left undefended. There were POMCUS sites too, all which the US Army wanted to strip bare and see everything taken home. That was why the majority of the Seventh Army was pulled out slowly and through France towards their Atlantic ports. Should the men have gone in a hurry, what would they be equipped with at home with when they left everything behind?

What had gone home first either took what they needed to operate with them – the US Air Force elements did that – or when it came to the smaller US Army units, were sent to some of the big garrisons in the eastern half of the United States to be equipped there – not easy, it wasn’t as if there were POMCUS sites in the US – allowing their own equipment to be used as later replacements. Through Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Virginia and Georgia, the II US Corps was being formed. There were national guardsmen (Pennsylvania’s 28th Infantry Division) along with US Army Reserve and regular US Army training units which those trio of smaller combat units making the transfer from Europe joined with. They were forming a counterattack force, three division’s worth, and not being rushed straight to the frontlines but being fully-equipped and worked up first. Secretary of Defence Bentsen had resisted calls to send those who formed the II Corps to the front piecemeal over the demands of others that they do so and Glenn supported him in this especially when it became apparent of the earlier desperate moves of troops all over the place having not as much success as possible. There were other national guardsmen working up through the Mid-West, the North East and down into the South East too. It would take another month for the Seventh Army to come home from Europe but before then, those already at home were supposed to go into the fight first. While they were getting ready, and fighting took place elsewhere nationwide with the Soviet’s Krasny Zvezda ongoing, through other parts of the globe the world was on fire.

Well it won't be a surprise attack, but yes: blast them all along the Soviet Far East while they think that the US is incapable because it is tied up at home.

What is that dot of red doing in Colorado, is that a para drop, i doubt they can hold until the main Cuban/Soviet advance links up with them.

So is this map i found on Devianart going to be how it is going to end up looking.