Soviet Domination - STORY ONLY thread[{locked}]

October: Tanner

The 32 TFS had taken a total of four losses in air combat over the preceding few days. Lt.-Colonel Tanner’s Wolfhounds were flying F-15 Eagles, the very best aircraft flown by the very best pilots, yet they had been shot down in the skies over Colorado. They’d gone up against unexpected opposition in the form of Soviet late-model MiGs and paid for their overconfidence. It had been Tanner’s expectation that the Ninth Air Force’s commander would relieve him of his duty as squadron commander. That wasn’t to be. The chief operations officer from Nellis AFB – the commander and his deputy were too busy with Ninth Air Force operations over Arizona and California to address the issue – didn’t pass on any message of Tanner having his squadron taken away from him. The 32 TFS had taken down at least twice as many enemy fighters than what of their own had been lost, maybe far more if all of the kill claims could have been verified. Theirs was a combat mission and loses were to be expected. Continue the fight, Tanner was told.

Tanner considered himself a failure despite what had come from Nellis in the form of an effective ‘well done’ for bringing down those fighters and many other unarmed transports over Colorado. Many of his men had expressed the same view. A sense of despondency had come over the squadron. It was up to Tanner as their commander to stamp any of that out yet he was unable to. His own internalised issues with Nell remaining missing, caught somewhere behind enemy lines down in Texas, dead or alive there, distracted his every free moment. He did his job of keeping the 32 TFS flying but could do no more. There were others with the Wolfhounds, another pilot yet many ground personnel, who had close family members missing or confirmed dead too since the war had started. They like him were dealing with their grief on that matter all the while needing to keep doing their job in fighting this war. Part of Tanner wanted someone to come in – to relieve him or not; it didn’t matter – and force them all to ‘suck it up’. Another part of him screamed NO to such a hypothetical so that the fight could be continued to avenge those killed and help free those caught in occupied territory. Up here at Hill AFB in Utah, far away from the Ninth Air Force staff down at the bottom end of Nevada, no one had come to fix the things that Tanner was unable to address himself though. All that came was more operational taskings for the war still being fought.

The 32 TFS was to remain flying above Colorado where there remained ongoing fighting on the ground below. That US Army division retreating from New Mexico was making a turn to the east now, heading for Kansas rather than falling back direct into central Colorado. Their escape from attempted encirclement needed top cover. There was that fight through the general Colorado Springs–Pueblo area where the Canadians were now involved in which needed Tanner’s fighter to provide high-level fighter support to. The Canadians had some of their brand-new Hornets as well as older Freedom Fighters in the sky, adding to Air Reserve F-105s and Air National Guard A-7s already present. A squadron of F-4s, flown by national guardsmen from somewhere in New England but now based in Kansas, was to be involved in the air battles too. Their opposition: Soviet, not Cuban, MiGs in the form of Fulcrums (MiG-29s) as well as Floggers and Forgers. They were operating from several locations, many of them ‘rough field’ locations where their operating sites weren’t perfect yet were being used regardless of conditions.

Shoot down the bad guys, such was Tanner’s mission, alongside the other good guys doing the same thing in Colorado’s skies.


Six of Tanner’s F-15s, in three pairs, flew eastwards tonight away from Hill and took a long flight across almost the whole width of Colorado. A tanker met them on the far side and successful refuellings were made to top up their tanks. Tanner then brought them around, turning southwest as they headed towards where those bad guys could be found. Coming at the Soviets from an unexpected direction was the aim though Tanner would have to admit that those forward deployed units of theirs on the ground, being out ahead and not having a link-up yet with those coming up from New Mexico, would have to expect an attack from any direction. Still, it was the best that could be done. The mission was that of a fighter sweep. It wouldn’t be easy, not at all. Hunting enemy fighters ran the very real chance of being shot down yourself. Two of Tanner’s men had already been lost like that. It should have been impossible had been the earlier thinking there yet it had occurred.

Tanner told himself that this time he didn’t have such arrogance and overconfidence.

The Fulcrums came up, out of Pueblo Memorial Airport it seemed. Tanner had been told that again and again that little airport had been bombed but the Nicaraguans first and now the Soviets had kept working on lengthening its runway. Those fighters came out of there, reacting to what would be radar reports of aircraft appearing and coming towards them. Tanner was out front with Khasigian alongside him. They were the ones which the Soviet ground controllers should be seeing on their displays. The four others behind and lower shouldn’t be visible.

Climbing fast from what would have had to have been a strip-alert, the Fulcrums raced out of Pueblo on an intercept. He could imagine the eagerness in their pilots to get up as fast as possible towards the Americans inbound who’d just showed up out of nowhere and looked like they were on a bomb run. The Soviets would be trying to stop what they thought would be an incoming air strike… that was the plan anyway, one which Tanner hoped would work. He wanted those Fulcrums to think that they were going after fighters-bombers laden with air-to-ground weapons, not F-15s setting up perfect kills.

The Fulcrums reached the correct height. Their radars were coming on-line. Tanner had them where he wanted them.

“Fox Two!”

“Fox Two.” Khasigian repeated the radio call as he followed Tanner’s lead in launching Sidewinders.

These missiles were fire-and-forget weapons. Tanner led his wingman Khasigian in turning away, ready to dodge the expected counterfire from the Fulcrums. The Rocky Mountains were far away to the west and they were out over the Great Plains so there were to mountains to hide behind for cover. Hiding wasn’t the intention though. Tanner wanted the Soviets to see him and Khasigian running. He wanted all of their attention on this one pair of his F-15s, leading to his other two pairs being unmolested for now. He and his wingman weren’t going to be easy bait though, not when they had four of their Sidewinders in the sky closing-in upon those two Fulcrums.

The F-15’s fired missiles hit. The Sidewinders did their job as advertised. They locked-on to their targets and refused to be shaken free. The alert Fulcrums were downed. Now came the difficult bit.


This was a fighter sweep and two Fulcrums were excellent kills but just the start of it. Tanner and Khasigian turned back around again, looping in behind the other four F-15s. There would be no raid on the airport at Pueblo by them but instead they were going after fighters getting airborne from other Soviet-used sites across the bit of Colorado which they held. The Soviets would be pulling as many of them in the sky as possible. That theory, drawn up when back at Hill, was proved correct.

Contacts were reported across the skies. Fighters were lifting off with haste, still unsure about what they were dealing with and hoping to stop incoming air attacks on their bases. Those would be coming later: more of Tanner’s 32 TFS would be providing cover for ground attack aircraft. For now, it was all about pulling those fighters down to stop them interfering with what was coming afterwards.

A single Forger coming up from some dispersed site was fired at first with a long-range Sparrow shot. It was barely at the necessary altitude to allow it to even theoretically engage an F-15. It was shot at regardless. Dropping back down fast, the little pathetic Forger avoided the missile which lost track of it and escaped. Floggers and Fulcrums were what was wanted though. A pair of the former came racing east from over there in Fremont County, racing through the skies and ‘coming on dumb’ as Edmonds called out. He and Davies put them down into the ground with ease, again taking long-range Sparrow shots before the Soviet pilots could get off missiles of their own.

Four to zero was the score. The mission was a success but it wasn’t over with. Tanner was sure that there would be more Fulcrums coming up. His F-15s had made themselves known and were flying about being tracked intermediately by radars they only had partial success in jamming. They stayed away from the Rockies, out where they were in the open. Exposed would be too strong of a term but they certainly weren’t hiding.

Just the one Fulcrum showed up. It was joined by three Floggers. They all came out of Fremont County Airport. The odd numbers were strange but the strip-alert fighters – in twos – had already got skywards and this second wave would be those thrown into the sky with even greater haste. He and Khasigian along with Johnson and Voss (the other pair of pilots who had yet to shoot today) went after them, leaving Davies and Edmonds covering them.


“These guys are good, Stripe.” Khasigian was on the radio, seeing what Tanner was seeing on the radar display too.

“We’re better than them, Kitty, far better.” Tanner admired the tactical formation involved by those MiGs but it wouldn’t matter. Their trickery in how they came forward wouldn’t save them.

He waited until the time was right… just right…

“Wolfhounds!”

Upon Tanner’s command, Johnson and Voss unleashed a barrage of Sidewinders as their calls of ‘Fox Two’ were made. Those missiles raced towards the Soviet fighters. They scattered across the sky.

Tanner keyed his radio mike: “Fox One.” An identical radio call was made by Khasigian as he too put Sparrows into the sky. They fired against the scattering MiGs, each tracking them for missile kills. It wouldn’t have been fun to be in any of those Soviet fighters with many missiles coming from several directions. Tanner saw that only one, the Fulcrum, opened fire in return and shot what was only one missile towards either Johnson or Voss. As to those Floggers, they all ran without firing back.

That didn’t do them any good. Two were hit first by the Sidewinders then Khasigian’s Sparrow got the other. The scorecard for the 32 TFS stood at seven to zero for this mission.

What an achievement! Tanner hoped to turn that seven to an eight…

The Fulcrum escaped. It dropped down low and got away from Tanner’s missile. Worse, it’s own missile hadn’t been panic-fired and was a perfect set-up on Voss’ F-15. It blew up close to the F-15’s port wing and took most of that off. Voss ejected as his aircraft began to enter a spin. Tanner could only hope he’d come down over friendly territory though he couldn’t seriously hold out much hope for that. The frontlines of the fighting below were very fluid and where he was above didn’t look too promising.

Seven MiGs downed, one F-15 lost. Anyone else would have been dancing with joy but not Tanner. He led his fighters out over the mountains now that they’d lost that Fulcrum down in the valley below and the Soviets had no more aircraft coming up. There were more of his fighters coming in now behind, moving down from the north flying top cover for a whole bunch of A-7s, but he and his four remaining F-15s needed refuelling at a safe distance before they’d go back to Hill. Tanner wasn’t dancing because he had personally failed to get that last MiG and then seen one it’s missiles take down Voss.

So that loss was on him.

Listening to Davies and Edmonds and Khasigian on the radio, even Johnson who’d just lost his wingman, Tanner heard their celebrations. The fighter sweep had swept the skies clear and as the Corsair fighter-bombers came in, they’d blast the Soviets on the ground to bits. That’d surely help with the effort to keep the Soviets back from going further north from Colorado Springs deeper into Colorado and up towards Denver. They were sure of that, Edmonds especially.

Tanner cut out the chatter. The tanker had to be met with focus on that. Things being said over the airwaves, even on the internal channel, were subject to enemy interception. He was harsher than he needed to be. He knew that. He told himself he was being unfair on them, punishing them for his inability to save Voss from being shot down.

The Wolfhounds were silenced. Tanner led them away from a battle which they’d come back to again tomorrow with failure foremost in his troubled mind.



October: Bella

There was the English language saying that Colonel Bella had heard before which went ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t’… or something along those lines. He struggled to recall it in precise detail due to the translation into his native Spanish. Nonetheless, he understood what it meant and it summed up how he felt about the replacement of the dead Gómez with Putin instead. Commissar Gómez had been an evil bastard but Bella understood him and his type. The KGB man Putin was a whole different type of devil. He’d always been one, Bella had known that upon meeting him upon the Soviet’s arrival from Albuquerque, yet after what had happened when up in the mountains, Putin had changed. It was not a change for the better either nor one which Bella believed that he was going to enjoy being witness to.

Putin came back down into the valley below after his rescue by Bella’s soldiers. They had been lucky to find him, only due to the careless nature shown by those whom had killed Gómez and snatched Putin in not in any way covering their tracks. What they had intended to do with Putin, no one, not even he, knew. Those two American civilians, armed like they were with a strange array of weapons, had dragged him away from where the jeep had crashed and taken him into the woods. Bella’s men, looking for Gómez in fact, had killed those guerrillas and rescued Putin. He had shown no gratitude in rescue. Bella had been informed of the state which he was found in and had raised a smile at the humiliation suffered.

He wouldn’t have minded though if his men had accidently shot Putin though. They used up a lot of ammunition in taking on two men and sent bullets all over the place. Yet none had put a hole in the KGB devil. Sometimes life can be very unfair.


Until the DGI sent someone to replace Gómez, either by air or land – neither looking likely at the moment –, Putin would fulfil Gómez’s role completely rather than alongside him as first planned. Bella and his Cuban paratroopers were answerable now to the whims of the KGB captain. There was still a security zone to be maintained through the lowland parts of Fremont County stretching west away from Pueblo and due to Soviet soldiers being inside it, Putin wanted the Cubans on the outside. He had no intention of going up into the mountains again himself though expected Bella’s men to do. When before Bella only had some of his men available from his far-depleted 2nd Airborne Brigade, Putin gave him what he deemed ‘good news’ on that. Soviet paratroopers were taking over with that.

Full attention for Bella’s men was now to be on security tasks rather than any more direct combat with organised opponents. Putin wanted them to hunt down and kill all opponents with every man available. There were now no excuses not to do so.

Bella withdrew his men from the frontlines, such as they were, when Soviet troops took over there. They went to work alongside the Nicaraguans on the other side of Pueblo in once again securing Pueblo itself. That fight was no longer Bella’s. He had already reformed his units the best as possible and kept them in the new organisational structure. A month of fighting had seen Bella with just three companies of riflemen. Each and every man was a veteran, a survivor of many fights. They’d been here for well over a month, fighting beneath the shadow of the Rocky Mountains in the lowland areas with few ventures up on-high. Now that was to be all that they would do. Bella’s five hundred men were on the guerrilla hunt.


He went up with his men on the first major operation. It was his duty to be there, he told Putin, rather than stay in the rear. He wanted away from the man and didn’t know if Putin understood that fully or not. Either way, he didn’t care. He would be with his fellow soldiers rather than the secret policeman who’d made a mess in his trousers the last time he ventured upwards.

Two companies of men, moving on foot with Bella alongside them, moved out of Canon City and struck west. They split into two, one taking a more northern routing. The other company, which Bella accompanied, moved along the course of the Arkansas River and towards the area around the Royal Gorge. This was a tourist area, empty of such people now but full of hiding spots for guerrillas. A few weeks past, some of his men had wandered off up here and been slain. No luck had been found in finding the perpetrators and Gómez had had him kill those civilian hostages by machine gunning them into a ditch. This search was aimed to be more effective. Whoever was up in this high ground had been using it as a sally point for attacks downwards and observation too when it came to guiding in American air attacks with fighter-bombers, those infernal F-105 Thuds of theirs. There’d be military spotters with binoculars and radios alongside civilians with guns.

Guerrilla hunts were never easy and there wasn’t much choice of them being fruitful either. Bella tried though, this time he really did. He had his men do it properly and made the best use of them. Putin had said that he was trying to get one of those Yak-38 aircraft to assist yet maintenance problems were keeping them grounded. He rather he didn’t have any air support like that. His men had been bombed before by those Soviet-flown aircraft. Thankfully, today that ‘friendly’ aircraft didn’t manage to get airborne. It’s presence could only have made things worse.

There was no one to find. There were no physical signs of anyone either. In the places which his men went through, with men looking down as well as all around, covering each other as they did so, they found no trace of those whom they hunted. Bella had had hope when he’d told himself there was no chance and that hope had been shown to be as foolish as he should have none it was. When this rifle company reached the Royal Gorge Bridge, he contacted the other company. The captain had taken his men on the long hike towards the more distant Parkdale, the smallest of small towns further north next to a tourist campground. At Parkdale, each of the few buildings there had been burnt down. There was no sign of gunfire with discarded bullet casings nor pock-marked walls, just complete fire damage. Bella’s subordinate said too that whomever had set the fires here had kept them contained and not allowed them to rage out of control. The buildings were burnt down and nothing else. What was that all about? It wasn’t Bella’s men and the Soviets had only just arrived down below and not been up here. Who had done such a thing and why? It was odd. Bella wanted to know what had gone on there. The captain on-scene had no idea though. Mysteries like that, with someone knowing what they were doing and probably hiding something, weren’t what he wanted to have going on while he was out looking for guerrillas!

Oh, and where were the few people that had called the place home gone to as well?


As a boy, Bella had grown up by the sea under the rule of Batista. He’d joined the Cuban Army as a teenager under Castro and been educated after his compulsory service as a conscript so he could become a officer. His youth had only known poverty and the sea. There were mountains inside the island which was Cuba, the mountains from where Castro had launched his rebellion to liberate Cuba. Bella hadn’t been given the opportunity as a youngster to join scouting organisations (they had them in Cuba under Batista) which went hiking in them. As a soldier he had done so. He’d seen more mountains, as well as jungles and deserts too, when fighting to spread the revolution throughout Latin America. None of those sights had prepared him for what he found in Colorado though. The emptiness up on-high remained something which he had found remarkable since he first came here in the middle of last month. It was just so strange, so empty. It disturbed him in ways which he wouldn’t explain.

This guerrilla hunt was an overnight mission and so the men were camping out. As befitting their commanding officer, Bella didn’t have to drag his own tent up into the mountains on his back and he had his own one too. It was also set up for him. Perhaps some of the men might have something negative to say about that yet none did. That was just how things were. The men would sleep in shifts and it was the same with him and the company commander. He could have slept through the night but he wasn’t that type of officer. He let the company captain take the first sleep shift. With his rifle over his shoulder (Bella had a pistol too; not his favourite weapon at all) he wandered about. He had his binoculars with him too. It was dark now but he kept them with him just in case.

In the darkness, Bella looked back to the east from where he had marched these men up into the mountains. He found himself a good spot where he could observe so much of the valley below yet also get a good look off to the northeast as well. It was over there that the Soviets were fighting with their own paratroopers – moving on foot, in light vehicles and helicopters – were fighting to secure a place called Colorado Springs. Part of him wished his men were there, fighting at the front. He couldn’t see any of that fight from where he was, just the odd flicker of distant explosions. Pueblo to the east, much further down the valley, was somewhere he had a better view of. It was too far away to see any detail at all yet there was a light show there too.

The war was being fought on the frontlines by others now, far away from this ground which he had his men had won and held with their lives. He wasn’t needed in that fight. Instead, he was chasing shadows up in the mountains.



October: Putin

Captain Putin tried to put it all behind him. It wasn’t easy yet he tried. What had happened up in the mountains had happened and couldn’t be changed now. Those involved were all dead and he – just him – had walked away alive. He wouldn’t be going up there again and would rather stay down below in the valley instead. There was work to be done here, important duties to be undertaken. Putin would continue the work of Commissar Gómez. Major Ostapenko, his fellow Sword and Shield officer who he remained reporting to, had passed comment on this though hadn’t this time called Putin a coward again. Ostapenko was too busy dealing with matters within the 76th Guards Division and incidents of ‘disloyalty’ which he had found within the Soviet Airborne. Putin was more than glad to be not the subject of Ostapenko’s attention again. He buried himself in his work instead leaving the whole business of hunting for armed guerrillas in the mountains to others.

Right before he had been killed, Gómez had told Putin all of the success he had been having. That success was no idle boast. Throughout the valley of the Arkansas River, through the low-lying bits of Freemont County, the security situation which Gómez had brought about was impressive. He had eliminated all forms of resistance from a hostile population with speed. The Cuban paratroopers had shot down plenty of armed resistance upon arrival and then Gómez had used them to pacify what was left. This was done with a short but effective rein of terror. Executions, hostage-taking, searching through official records and interviews with detainees had been undertaken. Collaborators had been quickly identified and although many of them were used up and disposed of when they were no loner useful, the ones which remained were those whose value would be for the long-term. These Quislings were now cutting down resistance before it was able to rouse its head in any meaningful form.

Gómez had told him how Colonel Bella had complained but soldiers would always do that, Putin had long learnt, when their men were tasked with such duties. They had silly ideas of how to conduct warfare and believed it all came from fighting ‘properly’. The fools. War was about using every means of conducting that fight so that only victory could come. Afterwards the history could be written to reflect any sort of honourable fiction which was desired. Winners wrote the history books, didn’t they?


A couple of Gómez’s collaborators could speak Spanish; they all spoke English too. Naturally, none of them understood Russian. This was a problem for Putin because his duty here required him to talk to the locals yet he had faced the same problem back in Albuquerque and it would have been the same if he had been in El Paso as he was meant to have been too. Those on-high who assigned him his duties must have aware of this difficulty in communication when it came to languages. They had still assigned him though. He had to work around it. He had been given a KGB lieutenant who spoke English as well as his native Russian and one of the most-capable collaborators, Mark, (Gómez had marked him out as an ideological, not a mercenary) here was used by Putin because he spoke both English & Spanish. He would trust his own fellow Sword and Shield man over the word of the collaborator he had also brought in for translation yet Putin understood that there would be local nuances and slang words that it was best to have someone aware of. His own Spanish and his lieutenant’s English were taught in classrooms far away from here.

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t know such things. That is… well… things like that are none of my business… so… I don’t know and don’t ask too.”

Putin had what the man said translated into Russian for him. He had watched the man while he spoke and studied him afterwards as he remained standing in front of him. A former bank inside Florence was currently being used for Putin’s purposes. It was hot inside the little office in the back of the building, next to the vault, yet the beads of sweat on the man’s forehead, several which started to run down his face, weren’t being caused by that heat. He was sweating because he was lying. What he said gave him away more than that though.

His response didn’t fit with the question put to him about the murder of his neighbour. Who would he have not asked? He wasn’t clueless as to what exactly had happened. Maybe he didn’t know the exact truth of the matter but he had heard something and wasn’t telling them what he knew.

Putin had his lieutenant ask this man – Thomas – again who had killed the man who lived in the house next to his during the night. He was reminded too that this wasn’t the time to lie, not if he wanted to see tomorrow and he wanted his family to stay safe as well.

Thomas winced at the last bit, the comment about his family. The collaborator Mark said that he had two teenagers living with him and his wife, both young females who Thomas probably feared would get the attention of Soviet soldiers soon enough. Putin nodded at that observation made in Spanish while waiting on the detainee to reply in English.

The reply was then put to Putin in Russian: “Please, I don’t know anything. Burt had a lot of people who didn’t like him, going back years. He was one of those type of people who upset everyone. It might have nothing to do with what is going on now with… the new way things are… with you Russians here.”

The Burt who was spoken of had been one of Gómez’s collaborators, someone who’d been useful since they arrived in informing on his fellow townspeople who had hidden guns, radios and such contraband items which were meant to have been handed in. He’d also told Gómez of certain locals with ‘subversive politics’. Someone had then slit his throat in the night.

“We’ll keep him for the time being.” Putin addressed his lieutenant, not the detainee nor his other collaborator. “He needs to reflect upon his actions. I’ll talk to him again later and we’ll bring one of his daughters into see him too. Maybe then he might want to tell us what he knows.”

“Yes, Sir.”


Once all three of them were out of his office, Putin read through the files on the deceased Burt. That was a man who had had been looking forward to working with. The man wanted nothing but extra food rations: that was it. His greed was simply literal. Others working for Gómez had wanted other things, some of which they got but others not so much. The majority of them were in shallow graves. Not Burt. Like Mark too, he would have been a long-term asset, a valuable man. He had had no scruples in spilling secrets and had shown a willingness to do so rather than being forced to do so.

Gómez had believed that no one else had known what Burt had been doing.

It seemed that that assumption had been wrong. Someone else did know, probably several people including his neighbour Thomas who certainly hadn’t killed him but had an idea as to who might of. All information for him would be gleamed soon enough. Putin had no wish to harm the man’s children but would see that done if there was no cooperation soon enough. He would give him a couple of hours to think it over and then bring in one of them. The other collaborator said that those children were thirteen and fourteen. Children that age were dying every day in this war. If need be, Putin wouldn’t raise a finger to stop such acts occurring here. He’d rather not unless he had to though.

To be honest, Putin would rather have nothing to do with Thomas or anyone like him. It was people like Burt and Mark who were his interest, those who would provide information and keep a lid on the security situation through forewarning. Actual violence should only be the last resort now to keep the peace. What violence had been necessary had already been used during the initial fighting here and then the subsequent executions which Gómez had had done in public. But then Burt had been killed like he had, by his own people eager to shut him up. Putin had to discover who murdered him and detain them along with all those who had aided in that. Once he had them, there would be a public execution in Florence which the townspeople would be forced to watch.

He had to get the right people though. Killing this Thomas wouldn’t do no good. It might seem the simple, easy option, but it wouldn’t work. The real killers of their fellow citizen needed to be caught and everyone had to see them die. Once that was out of the way, Putin could get back to his primary mission here.

There were more Burt’s, others like him. Putin had so many uses for such people. He had a job to do here and he would do it. This was why he was here and doing it well would, eventually, get him out of here. That was all he wanted: to achieve success which would be noted by those above and then to move on elsewhere, upwards though. He’d be away from those mountains above when he’d come so close to dying himself. If many others, even innocents, had to die to see that happen, so be it because their lives were all unimportant when it came to him getting far away from here.



October: de la Billière

Brigadier de la Billière had been subject to hostile artillery barrages before, firstly when back as a young officer in Oman. Serving in Borneo, he’d even been shelled by his own side in an accident. There were some of the Canadians who’d come down into Colorado, men with their Militia forces, who’d served as foreign volunteers with the Americans in Vietnam (enlisting for service with the United States in an unpopular war back at home regardless) and been shelled there. When told about them, he was reminded of all of those Irishmen who joined the British Army for a taste of warfare. Most of these Canadians with him outside of Colorado Springs had never been directly targeted by enemy artillery before though. And what he’d witnessed had been the strongest he’d ever personally faced too. The Soviet Airborne had brought their artillery with them to the fight with included howitzers, heavy mortars and multiple-barreled rocket launchers.

Shelling from that artillery was being unleashed against the Canadians… and anyone else in the way. The Canadians returned fire. DLB had made sure that the gunners on counter-battery missions – targeting that Soviet artillery – had everything that they needed including radars and spotters. They knew their job, he had quickly found, for these gunners were men assigned for such a mission in West Germany doing the same thing there in a general European war. With the 4th Brigade being the lead unit, locked in combat with Soviet forces attempting to breakout from Colorado Springs and go further north, these were Canadian regulars who were long-trained to do what they were. This wasn’t the battlefield of Western Europe and training could only prepare them for so much, but they were doing the best that they could. When it came to those regulars, they needed DLB very little. Their commander, Brigadier Collins, politely but firmly made that clear. DLB understood the man’s need to want him out of his hair. DLB had returned to the Militia brigades after coming forward to the frontlines. He was a little bit humbled and had been chastised for effectively getting in the way. That was how things were though. There was no time for spectators in this war.

The reservists with the 3rd & 6th Brigades had seen some of that shelling too. Soviet artillery fire was focused at the frontlines, as their troops tried to force their way out of Colorado Springs and up the Interstate-25 corridor towards Denver, but they put some of those shells far out ahead of them as well. DLB had been told that when caught under fire, the Militia units had become quite adept at taking cover fast and wherever they were. They’d learnt some harsh lessons at first and responded accordingly. The mission for them was to support the flanks and rear of the 4th Brigade and in that they hadn’t just seen shelling. There had been attacks from the air – the men screaming outrage at the lack of proper air cover – and also Soviet raids with light units of theirs trying to infiltrate the rear. Civilians had streamed out of Colorado Springs when the fight had come to their little city, getting in the way of the fight behind made all around it though soon enough, everyone who was going to be able to leave and flee north did. The Soviets had their men in Colorado Springs and weren’t of the mind to let people flee from it, at least not northwards. There had been some unfortunate incidents with civilians being caught in crossfire during skirmishing. Both brigade commanders reported to DLB that there might have been some of them shot down accidently by their men, mistaking them for Soviet infiltrators. Reporting that up the chain of command, DLB was reminded by the divisional general that this wasn’t West Germany and therefore there wasn’t that whole support network in-place as was the case there to have armed local militia (the West Germans had a huge set-up) keep civilians clear. The Americans had been at war for a month and in many areas that was set up, making use of rear-area tasked national guardsmen, but there were none of those here as they were now caught behind enemy lines away to the south.

Orders for the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division coming down from above, in this instance being the US XVIII Corps, called for the Canadians to push the Soviets out of Colorado Springs and advance southwards to free up paratroopers of theirs and national guardsmen all caught around Pueblo. DLB had to wonder if there was anyone with any sense at the XVIII Corps headquarters. It was impossible for the Canadians here to do that. Even with the ‘reinforcements’ which had come from Shilo with those many extra armoured vehicles, the two lighter brigades of the division weren’t able to fully support the 4th Brigade on the battlefield with the enemy which they faced on a mission like that. The division of Soviet Airborne they encountered wasn’t a light unit and was successfully holding Colorado Springs. They couldn’t advance but they weren’t withdrawing either. The 3rd & 6th Brigades wouldn’t be able to push through them along with the 4th Brigade to retake the now ruin that was Colorado Springs after days of fighting full control of it. The 2nd Division just wouldn’t be able to it in a direct attack.

Such an opinion wasn’t shared by the XVIII Corps. They had subordinate forces fighting through West Texas, the edges of New Mexico and all the way up into Colorado. From the corps headquarters, somewhere out on the plains of North Texas, near Amarillo DLB had been told, orders came for an attack to be made, not continuous defence. An attack by as much of the corps as possible was being launched all across its operational area to relive other elements trapped and to knock the Soviets and Nicaraguans back from their own advances. The 2nd Division was advance south to Pueblo… or at least as far as possible that way. It was imperative that this be done with immediate haste.


The general sent DLB to accompany the 3rd Brigade in making the division’s opening attack. The 6th Brigade was needed where it was, part of it already subsumed by the 4th Brigade and the rest guarding the nearest bit of the eastern flank. The 3rd Brigade was tasked to advance even further to the east, away from Colorado Springs proper, and open up the Soviet’s flank. The destination for them was to reach the city’s airport, where Petersen AFB was and one of the Soviet Airborne’s opening airheads when they made their attack here. DLB was to coordinate divisional support for the 3rd Brigade plus assist the brigade commander en route. That assistance which DLB was supposed to provide, he was loathe to discover, was to make sure that he didn’t mess up. The brigade commander had zero combat experience and the divisional commander wanted DLB there. It was unfair on both of them, he’d protested, but to no avail.

Inexperienced he might have been, but the 3rd Brigade’s commander, Brigadier Lennox, conducted a brilliant attack. DLB marveled at how well he did in arranging the advance towards the airport in the best possible manner and making the best use out of his men. So many of them, almost all to be honest, were just as inexperienced yet they quickly showed their courage and how what refresher training they’d had before leaving Canada had been effective. The 1st Hussars led the way with their armoured cars and those ‘borrowed’ Leopard-1 tanks. The 4th Brigade’s tanks were having trouble in confined ground further to the west but the half dozen assigned to the 1st Hussars aided the Cougars in punching holes through the Soviet’s flank near Palmer Park. The Canadians dropped artillery either side of them too across the open ground and shot forward. Infantrymen, Militia units from Manitoba and Ontario, finished off what the armour didn’t get. Lennox had his men push onwards, eager to get going now that they would have the Soviets off-balance. DLB listened to him on the radio ordering one of his battalions to stay behind at staggering points, guarding the supply line but also a way out if things went wrong, and then having the rest of the 3rd Brigade rush for the Cimarron Hills and the airport beyond.

DLB rode in that Fuchs personnel carrier that he’d got from Shilo. The German-built wheeled personnel carrier festooned with antenna and staff officers within coordinated the incoming flight of helicopters meant to have a go at the airport’s defenders ahead of the brigade’s arrival. There were communications which he heard where some Canadian units got lost and others came under fire. His Fuchs was raked by machine gun fire too. He winced as the rattle-rattle-rattle of bullets bounced off the protected side while the vehicle drove onwards. It could have been Soviet stragglers firing, it could even have been the Americans themselves engaging an unfamiliar vehicle. He was safe inside: sticking his head out to enquire over such a detail wouldn’t have been the best of ideas.

Faster than DLB had thought possible, the 1st Hussars, with the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada right behind them travelling in M-113s, reached the edge of the airport. They’d followed the road signs for ‘Airport’ in the end, having better luck with them than their maps when moving at speed through urban terrain. DLB could only imagine that someone on the Soviet side would soon end up getting shot for not having those signs taken down.

“Tartan, Tartan.” The radio call was made and in went the helicopters towards the airport. There were four of them, Huey’s mounting guns and rocket pods. DLB had worried about them being involved in this attack and tried to see them not used like they were. He had failed to get the general to have that bit of the attack called off. Unfortunately, his concerns hadn’t been misplaced. Three of them were down when hit by major anti-air opposition in the form of plenty of gunfire. They did their job though: they had been quite the distraction.

Soviet paratroopers were elsewhere and at the airport were the support troops. There was a security detachment, one massacred when the Leopards crashed through the airport perimeter and took them under fire. The Cougars escorted the infantry in with the three companies of riflemen with the Queen’s Own Rifles going into the fight. Back to Lennox came reports of success with initial and then secondary objectives as the Canadians fanned out across the airport. They took it from the Soviets. Losses came though. DLB listened as the Lennox urged further haste with his medical units to catch up and so he personally put in a check on that. It seemed that the Soviets at the airport hadn’t been the best riflemen but they had used heavier weapons in the form of many RPGs shots to destroy M-113s carrying Canadian infantry. Though DLB wasn’t there to see it, he understood that the men hadn’t always dismounted quick enough from their vehicles (they remained unfamiliar to them) and paid for that. In the initial flurry of activity which came in the quick assault and victory, the Soviets had shown that even when beaten in a stand-up fight they weren’t finished completely.

With the trucks carrying the Field Hospital detachment came another infantry battalion. The men from the Militia element of the Royal Canadian Regiment joined in the fight to finish off clearing out of the last of the strung-out opposition, Soviets who’d taken cover where possible on the edges of the airport and were shooting inwards with whatever they could. It would be a harder fight to get at them now that surprise was gone. DLB’s vehicle arrived behind those infantrymen. He found Lennox soon enough and congratulated him. The man had led his soldiers in doing something that DLB had thought impossible. He regretted his doubt but that was good regret.

As it had been his brigade’s success, Lennox reported to the general on the successful capture of the airport. He was told to finish off opposition outside the airport grounds and also establish defensive positions, ones which faced inwards towards the center of Colorado Springs. DLB had already witnessed Lennox doing that. The general wanted to speak to him afterwards and asked how soon the 2nd Division could start making use of the airport for its own air operations. Its helicopter support was spread far and wide away to the north and would be best operating from the airport itself. Tomorrow at least, DLB told him. There were engineers arriving and they would soon be able to give a detailed timescale, but from the looks of it, clearing of wreckage and obstructions here would take some time. When the attack here had come, those Cougars had used their cannons to blow up several Soviet helicopters out on the runway. One of the Leopards had also put some shells into the base of the control tower around which enemy personnel with a rocket launcher had fortified themselves. The tower had come down in pieces. The fight here, DLB told his commander, had been fast yet very effective which meant that a lot of damage was done.


“We’re going to go over on the attack here, Peter.”

“Are they moving yet, Sir?”

“We’re already seeing their artillery fire dwindling and they’ve pulled some of their riflemen back.”

“That’s fast!”

Soviet forces over on the other side of Colorado Springs, north of the downtown area and near the interstate, were reacting to the airport seizure and DLB’s commander was getting ready to push the rest of his division forward. Rather than attack everywhere, the operational plan had been for a one-two punch to catch them moving.

“They’ve already shown that they can do that, Peter,” the general reminded DLB of how sudden the attack several days ago against Colorado Springs had developed, “and I’d rather hit them now than wait around for them to do the unexpected again.”

“Yes, I agree.” DLB was still wary about the whole operation yet the airport had been taken and if there was ever a time to move against these (unpleasantly) surprisingly-capable Soviet Airborne men, then it was now.

“We’ll be seeing you soon.”

And so the second attack commenced. The rest of the 2nd Division, Canada’s soldiers in Colorado with a few British Army officers like DLB scattered among them, made their follow-up attack: this time direct at their opponents as they shuffled men around. DLB would only hope that second strike caught the Soviets off-guard like the first had.

He’d find out soon enough.



November: Tanner

Lt.-Colonel Tanner was remembering why he first wanted to fly. He had the recollection of back when he was a young boy looking up into the clouds and imagining jumping into them, rolling among them and the using a finger to pop them like they were mis-shaped fluffy balloons. The only way to do that would have been to get up them in those clouds, thus by flying a plane. He could have been an airline pilot, a crop-duster even but he had ended up at the Air Force Academy. It was in the general direction of the Academy he was flying this morning, over there near Colorado Springs. The Rocky Mountains which ran through Colorado were below him as he headed east, flying low at the head of a flight of three more fighters. His eyes were fully open, concentrating on everything that he needed to be paying attention to when flying an aircraft like a F-15 into a war zone but his mind kept drifting. He pictured that again, playing among the clouds. It was silly yet it was there. He’d told Nell that once and she’d laughed and…

“Fulcrums!”

The urgent warning from Khasigian snapped his attention back to where it should have been.

Tanner saw them, two MiG-29s off to starboard. They were heading the other way and, in an instant, had disappeared behind one of the mountains. They were low like his F-15s were and he was sure didn’t have the fuel to spare to be flying like that. Whatever they were up to doing what they were didn’t matter. They’d been seen and now they were his.

“Kitty,” Khasigian’s call-sign was probably the most hated by the pilot who had it among all those with the 32 TFS with their own, “they’re ours. Follow my lead.”

“Copy, Stripe.”

There remained the two of F-15s as part of this flight who still had that fighter sweep to do. “Boxer, Panda: you stay with the mission and we’ll catch up soon enough.”

“Roger, Lead.” Panda acknowledged that he and his wingman were to both stay heading towards Colorado Springs.

Boxer had something to add: “Good hunting, Stripe.”


The two F-15s went after the Fulcrums which they had seen. Tanner was eager to put both of them down… once they were found that was. He took himself and Khasigian around several mountains though climbing up a bit to get a better look and also ease up on the air resistance. There was danger in being so low with eyes searching the skies for other aircraft too. Tanner had wanted the extra altitude for that reason. It paid off. There they were.

“Starboard, low and below, Kitty.”

“Tally-ho!” Khasigian had been on exchange with the RAF over in Britain a few years ago flying Phantoms and got ‘tally-ho’ from them. He’d apparently gone fox-hunting with some ‘country squires’. Yeah… it was odd.

Tanner energized his fighter radar and at once acquired the contacts he could see. He was above and behind the Fulcrums. They wouldn’t have known he was there before, but they would now. Their radar warning receivers would have gone off and the pilots would be frantically looking left and right. They couldn’t look up and behind though, not into the rising sun which was behind Tanner and Khasigian either.

Radar lock was achieved very quickly. The Fulcrums were trying to dodge but they still couldn’t see the threat. They started a climb, making things easier in fact. “Fox Two! Fox Two!” Tanner gave the Soviet MiGs a pair of Sidewinders and his wingman did the same. He watched the missiles go, willing them onwards. Any second now…

Tanner’s own radar receiver went off. The unmistakable wail that someone was lighting him up with a fighter radar caused the reaction in him which he had been certain that the Fulcrum pilots had. He looked to port and then to starboard. There were explosions below, where the Fulcrums were, yet it wasn’t them who’d locked-on to him. He pulled back on the stick and swung it to port. Khasigian, drilled alongside as to what to do in such a situation so nothing went wrong, broke to starboard. The two of them had to get a look around and fast.

Tanner couldn’t see anyone else.

“Above, above! More MiGs, Stripe!”

He couldn’t see those who Khasigian did.

The radar warning receiver switched to the continuous wail from an intermediate one. One of the MiGs, maybe more than one, had radar lock-on.

“Where, Kitty, where…”

“He’s got me! I’m…”

Tanner saw a blast out of the corner of his eye. That was Khasigian. Had he got out in time? He didn’t know if his wingman had ejected and he couldn’t see those MiGs. They’d be firing on him any second now. He swung the stick to port and then he saw them above, coming right at him. Had they fired yet? Where they Fulcrums, Floggers or something else? He didn’t know. He’d seen several of them though, three or four. He did the only thing he could. Tanner gave them all of his remaining Sidewinders (he still had longer-range Sparrows left), and made a sharp turn the other way, to starboard and dived. A mountain loomed ahead but he went around it. He just had to get clear and maybe he could…

There was an almighty bang. Tanner’s eyes shut. He opened them again. He was spinning. No, his F-15 was spinning. Sirens wailed in the cockpit and there were warning lights everywhere. The engines were out. Hydraulics and electrical power were out. He had an onboard fire. The aircraft was in a spin and the ground had to be coming up very fast. Any second now and whatever MiGs were left – he was sure he had to have gotten a couple of them, yes? – would finish him off.

He pulled the ejection handle. “Nell!”


After landing, Tanner rolled his parachute up at once. He dragged it into cover with him less it give him away. He had no idea where he was. He could have been in occupied territory or not. He’d find out soon enough but before then, he had to get out of sight. Then he could figure that out. With his pistol drawn, Tanner found some undergrowth to hide in. He had his radio beacon with him but there was a problem: it wouldn’t work. No rescue was coming for him from that. It wouldn’t turn on despite how many times he bashed it (probably not the best of ideas) nor swore at it. How many times had he been told that they were indestructible? Furious but cold and tired too, Tanner rolled himself up like he had done the parachute. His elbows and knees hurt. Ejection from an aircraft at several hundred miles an hour was never going to be kind on the joints, neither had been the hard landing he’d made. He shut his eyes, just for a few minutes to get himself right. Just a few moments was all that he needed.

Asleep in seconds, he dreamt of Nell. And he dreamt of those clouds too.

When he opened his eyes, there was someone standing over him. His pistol had slipped from his grasp. A boot was on his open palm with haste as he tried to reach for it.

Tanner looked up, squinting in the harsh sunlight to get a look at the figure above him. He saw the rifle first, a big one for the little girl holding it, and the tip of it’s barrel was inches from his face. That girl with the rifle had a question: “You American?”


An adventure with that girl and her cohorts awaited Tanner. It was one from he wouldn’t emerge alive several months down the line. Through it all, he wouldn’t know that back at Hill AFB there was a letter waiting for him. It had been delayed: there was a war on after all. It was a letter from Nell.

Nell, whose name he had screamed without thinking when ejecting from his down F-15, was alive and safe. He didn’t know that though and never would.



November: Bella

Colonel Bella watched the descending pilot in the distance. One of the paratroopers with him readied his sniper rifle to line up a shot. Bella was been amazed at the thinking on the man to believe that with his Dragunov he’d manage any success at such a range against a target which was moving erratically in the wind like that. The sergeant had a lot of confidence and would be useful at other times.

Not now though, not doing that.

“Don’t take that shot, Sergeant.”

Bella didn’t think it was right to shoot at an ejected pilot like that. In addition, he could have been Soviet or even Cuban! Who was to know at such distance? He intended to find out though. He beckoned over the company commander.

The man was fast over to him. “Colonel?”

Bella towered over the shorter man, a staff officer promoted to this combat position because so many of Bella’s other senior officers had been killed here in Colorado. “Let’s go get that pilot, shall we?”

“Si, Colonel.” The captain looked at the figure drifting down. He was a long way off. “Morales could slow him down by giving him a wound: he is a fine shot.”

There was another reason while this miracle shot named Sergeant Morales shouldn’t take that shot. It was one which Bella chose to voice. These were his men but the deceased Gómez had been active among them and Bella had to fear that one might now be reporting to that Putin creature.

“We’re hunting guerrillas who know these mountains better than us. Therefore, we’d best not advertise our presence to them by letting them hear a gunshot.” It would to do as a reason. “Have the men start moving, Eduardo, have them follow me.”

Bella led his men – some of who he feared could betray him; Gómez had been busy in his short time in Colorado – to find that pilot.


To get to where the pilot had dropped out of view meant going down then back up again. He had disappeared beyond a tree-line slightly above from where Bella and his men had started out from though in between there was a steep slope. It was fast getting cold and Bella was certain that within another couple of weeks, three at the most, it would soon start snowing here. Crossing the rough terrain of these mountains could be far more dangerous then when covered by snow. At least now, he could see where his footing was.

Despite that, he still took a tumble going across that slope. He sipped somehow and for the briefest of moments was up practically in the air. He shut his eyes without meaning to and then came down upon the ground again. It was a hard landing. He bashed his arm, his leg and his side. He started to slide, finding nothing he could grip on to. It was a very long way down! The captain grabbed him, his fingers digging into Bella’s forearm.

“I’ve got you!”

Something whacked into Bella’s head, to the back and on the side, as he came to a halt. His boots found purpose on a rock. Pain radiated from his arm where he was held. If it hadn’t been, he was off down below and he had to reckon that that would hurt a lot more.

“Pull me up, will you?” Bella tried to keep the panic out of his voice. Another man, who looked like he was precariously-balanced from Bella’s prone position, took ahold of his free hand and pulled too. Soon enough, Bella was sitting on the ground looking at how far he had almost fallen. It was even further than he had thought moments before. He was lucky. So much for being able to gauge his footing without the snow!


Some of the other men had slips too. None looked to have as come as close to Bella when it came to the near of life. He’d taken the men the wrong way. This had appeared to have been the shortest way across to where they’d seen that pilot land but it certainly wasn’t. Plenty of care had to be taken and much time was wasted.

Once finally off that treacherous slope, Bella let one of the senior lieutenants, Teniente Fuentes, – a man who he was evaluating to promote him to the rank of captain because he needed a real soldier for that role – take over the lead. The company captain showed suspicion but didn’t voice any of that. Fuentes quickly showed his worth and found them a better route back upwards than Bella would have chosen. He was keen too, leading from the front and the first man ‘over the top’ when it came to reaching the crest of the ridge they went up. Bella and everyone else followed to arrive upon a small, wind-swept plateau.

There was no sign of that pilot.

He’d come down here, Bella was certain, but had disappeared. It had been an hour and a half, maybe just a little bit more, since he’d taken these men after him. Bella had thought it would take a third of that time to get here. During that period, the pilot had vanished. He, his parachute and anything he might have had on him were gone. The men looked and Bella noted how Fuentes had them search inwards while also keeping watch outwards as well. Yes, Fuentes would get his battlefield promotion and lead this company soon enough when Bella transferred away the current captain. That good news didn’t make up for everything else though.

The waste of time and effort, several near deaths including his own, was all on him. He stood among his men, these paratroopers like him so far from home and in this terrible place, and had to wonder was it all worth it?

The immediate question concerned abandoning the mission of trying to track down the ghosts which were those guerrillas and going after that pilot instead. There was more than that though. Being up here in the mountains got him away from shooting civilians down below though also away from the frontline fighting role that he had previously had too. The Soviets were saying that they had retaken Pueblo and finally overcome American troops there, recently-arrived regulars as well as those pesky national guardsmen, and had done what Bella’s men had failed to do in all the time they were here. The 2nd Airborne Brigade, a battalion now in all but name, had effectively achieved nothing. Bella had brought his men to Colorado and to an early grave for so many of them. He himself had been subservient to the wills of the DGI and then the KGB in their ‘pacification’ drives.

Nothing of any worth had been achieved for all of the fighting done and all of the lives lost.


Bella let Fuentes led the way back off that plateau and take them a different way from which they had come. The search for that pilot was off. There came a comment from the captain that his sniper should have been allowed to take that shot – ‘Morales would have got him, Colonel’ – but Bella gave a dismissive wave of his hand to that. He’d already made his mind up on the replacement of that man with Fuentes and could no longer be bothered with the overpromoted fool.

They went back on the guerrilla hunt, the fruitless search looking for any sign of the presence in the mountains of armed men up here. There was plenty of ground to search and an enemy that was clearly adept at hiding. Still, Bella’s men carried on with that mission. He kept his own thoughts on the futility of that hunt to himself and no one else spoke up on it. They did their duty.

The whoosh of aircraft flying low and fast came not long afterwards.

Bella looked up and saw them, three fighter-bombers coming out of the higher reaches of the mountains proper ahead and overflying them. Several men fired their rifles upwards. He hadn’t ordered that yet there was no point in which he saw in afterwards having them punished. He was starting to suspect that it wouldn’t matter because there wasn’t anyone around to hear the rifle shots, not after the noise of those jets drowned almost the sound of that gunfire out.

Sergeant Morales was one of those who a shot upwards, his Dragunov firing at distant moving targets. “I GOT ONE!”

It didn’t look like that even if he had, it would make a difference. Bella watched the flight of what he saw were F-111s, wings swept back, race above the valley below. They dropped even lower and then he was sure that he saw bombs fall away from each one of them.

Wasn’t Captain Putin down there?



November: Putin

Captain Putin had been awoken just after two in the morning. Paul Armstrong, the man he had been seeking, had been caught trying to plant a firebomb up at the airport to kill sleeping members of the garrison detachment there. He’d been shot during his capture but was alive. Putin had gone racing up there, across the temporary bridge over Arkansas River between Florence and Fremont County Airport (the old one had been bombed into ruin), only to find that while Armstrong was still alive he wouldn’t be for much longer unless he was given immediate surgery. An American guerrilla caught trying to kill Soviet Airborne soldiers in their sleep wasn’t going to be given such medical attention by those same soldiers. Putin had to force the issue. He needed Armstrong alive so he could question him! Major Ostapenko had intervened when Putin’s demand hadn’t carried enough weight on the matter. Armstrong would have his life saved. It wasn’t likely that he was going to be treated well enough for any proper recovery, Ostapenko had said and Putin had agreed, so it was a ‘botch job’ on removing the two bullets from his belly. He only needed to be kept alive long enough to talk about what he knew before soon enough he’d be shot again: this time execution-style. Armstrong survived the surgery, undertaken by an unhappy medical team, and then sedated afterwards to recovery somewhat. Putin heard the comments made on all the effort made to save the life of this one American and understood them. However, there was a bigger picture that those who wanted to let Armstrong suffer and bleed out didn’t see. Once the sedation of Armstrong post-operation took place, Putin had gone back to Florence afterwards and caught up on the missing hours of sleep he’d lost.

It was late morning now. Putin woke later than he should have. He was hungry but before then he needed a shave. He needed to look proper when wearing his uniform and on duty, not dirty and haggard. Many of the Soviet Airborne had looked like that though Ostapenko hadn’t and neither would he. Alongside a neat uniform, a major part of that was having a cleanly-shaven face. He would be at the airport and there was the chance that Putin would run into someone more senior than Ostapenko once there. There was a shortage of many things ongoing, creature comforts such as razors included apparently, but Putin wasn’t affected by those. There had been plenty of little things like that seized from civilians because the KGB wasn’t stopped by anti-looting regulations from taking what was needed. The Soviet Airborne followed those rules: Putin didn’t have to.

Standing in front of the mirror, Putin took his time with his shave.

His mind was framing how he would interrogate Armstrong. This was the man he had been seeking for the past week or so, the guerrilla behind the spate of killings in Florence which had eliminated several collaborators Gómez had first turned and whom Putin had intended to use before their untimely deaths. He needed to discover who had been sheltering Armstrong while he had been doing this and who had provided him with those names. He also wanted to know how Armstrong had managed to get into the airport grounds too. Putin aimed to discover those answers. He hoped Armstrong would give up those answers easy. If not, then so be. He’d still talk.

Now that they had Armstrong and once he delivered the answers that Putin needed, and after he was finally taken care of for good (a bullet in the back of the head would do), Putin could get back to his work in the form of security he was here to do. He remained wanting to be noticed by those high above yet that meant putting the work in. It had to be done successfully too. His reports to Ostapenko were returned with the simple ‘carry on’, or variants of that, each time. Ostapenko wouldn’t get him his transfer nor a promotion. That could have been done if Putin had been involved in the recent interrogations of those prisoners taken from Cheyenne Mountain. Or, if he’d been sent up to Colorado Springs. Neither had been a duty which he was tasked to though. From what he’d heard too, Colorado Springs wasn’t somewhere that he would want to be at the minute anyway. Not being given the opportunity elsewhere was disappointing yet he could do nothing about it. Stay in Florence and work from there, Ostapenko had told him. Putin would… until he could go elsewhere. There was a good chance that soon enough, should things change at Colorado Springs, Denver would soon be somewhere that Putin might be needed. To go there would be a posting to do things that he’d been unable to do during his short time in Albuquerque.

Denver was a possibility that Putin pushed out of his mind for now. His shave was finished and reached for a towel, Putin heard the sound of aircraft. He turned from the mirror towards the window. There was nothing to see but he still went over and looked. The noise was getting louder, much louder. He wasn’t concerned, just annoyed. There had been the same sound not long ago which had awoken him when the Soviet Air Force were flying around those jump-jets of theirs, doing whatever they were doing. He stayed at the window as the noise increased even more.

Something was different this time…

Putin had seen the anti-aircraft gun, a towed ZU-23-2 twin-23mm autocannon, positioned just across the road yesterday. The gun barrels had been pointed upwards into the empty sky. He heard it open fire now and for a moment wondered why it would be shooting at friendly aircraft. But, of course, it wouldn’t be shooting at friendly aircraft, would it?

Ah, now he understood.

He walked back from the window and quickly down got on the floor. That gun wasn’t firing on the Yak-38s but American aircraft. The Americans weren’t sending their aircraft to Colorado Springs today but to here instead.

Putin told himself that he would be safe on the floor at a time like this. He survived the last air attack and aimed to survive this one. The gun pumped out more shells and the roar of aircraft got louder. He put his hands over his head and slid under the bed.

Be calm, he told himself, you’ve been through this before.

There was an almighty blast.



November: de la Billière

At the briefing, Brigadier de la Billière was told that the Americans had earlier bombed throughout the Soviet’s rear stretching from south of Colorado Springs down to Pueblo and then up through the Arkansas River valley towards Canon City. Around that airport near Florence where the Soviets were flying Sukhoi fighter-bombers on ground attack missions from had especially been heavily bombed: there should be no more Soviets nor Cubans alive there. A whole load of bombs had been dropped in a wide-ranging air attack to smash their air support and supply lines. This had taken place when the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division had begun its attack to finally rid Colorado Springs of the last vestiges of Soviet troops and secure the high ground of the Stratmoor Hills on the far side. The promise of what damage had been done was great though none of it was something that DLB had himself seen. Canadian aircraft had been bombing closer to the frontlines and he’d seen himself what had been actually done alongside what promises were made of those strikes. The two didn’t always match up. Additionally, the Canadian soldiers here had dug-in well and survived Soviet air attacks against them. He had to wonder if someone on the other side was getting the same sort of briefing as him where they were told that all opposing forces would have been battered into nothing by ‘targeted air power’.

The briefing covered more than just that. He was meeting with the Americans in the place of his commanding general who wanted to remain close to the fight at the front but knew that his superior already knew what else was being said: the Nicaraguans with their tanks were still coming north. Two divisions of them, one a heavy formation and the other lighter, were rolling up Interstate-25 despite every effort to slow them down. The New Mexico-Colorado state line was long behind them. The Americans were saying that they would be held up trying to follow that through Pueblo but they had no direct evidence that they’d been stopped. DLB had to assume the worst.

The worst being that they’d be here by tomorrow.

The Soviets with their 76th Guards Division, paratroopers supported by light armour and a lot of other fire power, had been pushed out of Colorado Springs and to the southern edge of the city by Canadian tanks. The Leopards which had been brought over from Europe and the West German ones borrowed from Shilo had been instrumental in crushing the resistance to the 2nd Division’s offensive. There were no Soviet tanks of their own and the Canadian ones had won the day where despite all of that defensive fire – missiles and anti-tank guns – they had plowed onwards. Even then, the enemy paratroopers had withdrawn rather than been overrun and been able to do that. The tenacity of such men was worthy of respect, politics aside. The Nicaraguans, DLB had been assured, were nowhere near as tough and their tanks weren’t the very best available. Those Nicaraguans had pushed the US Army out of New Mexico though, forcing them back and back again, and their tanks had worked just fine there. Rather than stand and fight a final decisive battle with them, the 4th US Infantry Division had – not to put too fine a point on it – cut and run in their effort to escape away to the east leaving the Nicaraguans to push onwards and this way. DLB had been instructed to gleam everything from the Americans possible about these oncoming opponents from the Americans. He wasn’t looking forward to reporting back to his commander what little he had found out.

The Canadians soldiers who’d come all this way, who’d retaken Colorado Springs using their numerical advantage and tank support, were now facing a victorious oncoming enemy far stronger in number with plenty of tanks of their own. They were supposed to have been stopped long ago and hadn’t been. It didn’t bode well.


Leaving the US XVIII Corps briefing, DLB was asked to speak with some others who hadn’t been in the meeting.

“You’re English?”

DLB smiled at the man’s surprise. “Yes, that’s right. Brigadier Peter de la Billière, British Army. I’m on a sort-of exchange… it’s complicated.” He extended his hand: “And you are?”

“Sergeant Joe Kenda, Colorado Springs P.D. Nice to have you here, all the way from England, Brigadier.”

A policeman? In a uniform that didn’t look civilian at all: what was up with that?

“We’re with the Colorado Militia,” another one of the civilians explained, “heading it up for the time being.”

Kenda furthered what his colleague said. “Myself and Sergeant Donovan here had to step up when, unfortunately, most of the others were caught by the Soviets, lined up and then shot. I’m a homicide detective; he’s from property crimes. They came in here aiming to shoot every serving officer and, well, a couple of us decided that we weren’t going to let that happen and got sworn for the Militia. We’re doing our bit.”

“We’ve got a hundred plus men now. P.D. officers mostly but plenty of sturdy civilians, men who can hold a gun and follow orders too, as well.”

DLB hadn’t been aware that this had been organised. Wasn’t there already another militia, a state defence force or some such thing. He asked that of the two policemen.

“Oh, the Governor set that up anew because it was stood down in Forty-Five,” Kenda replied, “but the state government up in Denver authorised local militias too. Anyway, I’ll get to the point, Brigadier, because I know you’re busy.

We’ve been helping with evacuation of civilians before your guys – they’re Canadians but you’re from England, okay…? – retook the city and afterwards. We’ve been under fire all over the place and sent our fair share of those Russians off to hell. We want to do more though. The city’s empty of all civilians who want to leave and those who won’t go, well we can’t do nothing for them. So, now, we want to know where we can fight because this is our city. We live here, Brigadier, and we’re not going anywhere else.”

Volunteers, organised and not, had been an issue which DLB had been told all about before he and the Canadians had come south. He’d seen them guarding the route which the 2nd Division had taken and also been aware that they had fought for this city before the Soviets were driven out. He had no doubt that there was patriotism and a willingness to give everything to a fight among them. The majority of the 2nd Division were part-time volunteers, civilian soldiers themselves. These two Americans here gave the impression of being capable men and he didn’t doubt that they could and would shoot at any more Soviets that they saw, Nicaraguans as well. The problem with volunteer militias was that they were civilians, even when policemen who didn’t always think of themselves as such. Obeying orders in the middle of a battle was something that couldn’t be relied upon with them. That was the issue.

Yet… he was in their country and these two men didn’t look like fools. He told them the truth. DLB explained that their help would be invaluable as guides and for the wealth of local knowledge of terrain that they had. Them and their fellow Militia members had no place on the battlefield in a direct combat role though, not as a standing unit. They had all sorts of weapons which could cause an impossible supply problem and no communications set-up. The Soviets, as had already been done, would shoot them on the spot as guerrillas if captured.

“I can’t tell you to go. It’s not my place to do that. Help from you and your men will be appreciated. The danger to you all is there though and your men need to understand that. I also want you to understand that if we have to withdraw, pull out from Colorado Springs, we will do so without hesitation. We didn’t come here to die but to fight wherever we can and win those fights by retreating if need be. If you want to assist us, you can, but this really isn’t a fight for you and I strongly recommend that you start going north. There’s a whole load of Nicaraguan troops coming this way, tanks too sergeants, and this is no place for militia.”

Neither Kenda nor Donovan looked fazed at the hard truth.

“We’re staying, we’re fighting.” Donovan was going nowhere.

Kenda gave the same determination: “Tell us where you want us and what you need. We’ll do what needs to be done.”


Downtown Colorado Springs, the center of the city with offices and public buildings, was burning still and the smoke from the many fires there was above much of the city. Over to the east where the airport was remained free of much of that smoke though. DLB returned to the divisional command post outside of the airport grounds. It was somewhere that he hadn’t wanted to see it located even when not inside the visible target which was the airport itself yet the siting in a warehouse building had been chosen by the chief-of-staff and the commanding general had consented. DLB had made his point clear on that, not been listened to (on most things, but crucially not all, his advice was taken) so tried to avoid being there unless he had to be. He had to be now and so returned to await the arrival of his superior who had gone forward. The general was off with the 4th Brigade near to the frontlines yet was meant to be on his way back.

DLB organised his notes from what he had taken at the Corps briefing and also had his aide sort through the paperwork – documentation on intelligence, communications etc. – to be delivered to the divisional staff. He was putting together in his mind too on what he would suggest to the general about the local militia.

The chief-of-staff relayed a message from 4th Brigade’s HQ. There’d been another Soviet withdrawal, a bigger one that before. They’d pulled out of the Stratmoor Hills and the valley below them where the interstate ran. The Soviets had gone right back, at least two miles this time while withdrawing under the cover of heavy shelling. The general suspected a trap and was staying there with Brigadier Collins to make sure that an ambush wasn’t blundered into. Consequently, he wouldn’t be back for a while.

“As much as two miles?”

“That’s what he said, Sir.”

That was odd. DLB went to the map. It was a lot of ground, defendable ground at that, to give up. He couldn’t work out why.

He spent some time with the Operations and Intelligence staffs and then with the divisional supply officer. There’d been further problems up in Denver with civilian evacuees from there blocking roads which had previously been clear and a re-routing of an incoming supply column of theirs would need to be made around the traffic snarl-up. A solution was found and afterwards DLB enquired whether there was any news on when the general would be returning. If it was going to be quite a while, he’d rather make a visit to one of the other brigade HQs instead of staying here doing little and at a fat target for an air strike like he considered this place.

The chief-of-staff went to check on that.

Before he got to the radio set, the operations officer threw down his own radio headset, stood up and shouted as loud as he could across the command post.

“GAS! GAS! GAS!” He bellowed it out, his face red. “Get your masks on now! Nerve gas!”

For a moment, DLB shamefully froze in inaction. Then the training kicked in. Like everyone else, he had his NBC suit on already with his gloves and helmet carried with him. On they went, his aide checking his seals and DLB fast returning the checks on the other man. Everyone was partnered up like that so each man could be properly protected. He had a million questions – where was the gas being used?, what gas was it? and so on – and there was also fear in him. Nerve gas was a whole different kind of weapon compared to bombs, bullets and shells: it was a truly horrible death that would come to those not protected against it.

The headquarters staff was buttoned up. Word had gone out across the division to all those who responded. Other subordinate units didn’t respond. Gas was being used… hence while the Soviets had withdrawn like they had. He hadn’t seen what was staring him in the face until he did now. Had the general? He wasn’t answering the radio calls. DLB and those with him, protected like they were, started to move. The HQ wasn’t staying here and DLB’s decision on that was final. They were all fast leaving, off elsewhere.


Outside, shells were exploding above the city.

Those without chemical warfare suits were in the way of the gas being released above their heads. DLB thought about those men from the Colorado Militia: they didn’t have such protection. He could only pray that all of the Canadian soldiers in the city had got their protection on as fast as the headquarters staff had. Yet, he had to worry that many hadn’t been that fast too.

While DLB worried over that, and told himself that his suit really was secure against the poison outside, a cloud of VE nerve agent spread throughout Colorado City. The gas was a binary weapon and mixed in the sky by the explosions, thickened with a special oil too which aided in mixture and subsequent use. Heavier than air, the cloud of VE drenched the city in the type of deaths which he had feared. DLB would survive the chemical strike, but plenty of those in the city wouldn’t.


End of Interlude

Late October 1984:

“Where the f**king f**k is the f**king Army?”

The curse-laden shout from the US Air Force airman at Dyess AFB came as he held his M-16 assault rifle with the barrel pointed at the half a dozen Soviet T-72 tanks which crashed through the outer perimeter of the Texan airbase followed by infantry carriers. He was meant to hold his fire – aim at the dismounting riflemen, he’d been told – but shot off his entire magazine as one of those tanks came right towards him and the other airmen behind the sandbags. The bullets bounced off the tanks doing no damage at all. Return fire came, a barrage of bigger rounds coming from the coaxial machine gun. Those men who’d dared fire on the steel beasts, including the airman with the obscenities, were cut down and left for dead. Around them, Dyess fell to Soviet occupation.

The airman had had a point. Where was the US Army? They weren’t anywhere near Dyess nor nearby Abilene either. They were over on the other side of Texas and away from where the Soviet Twenty–Eighth Army was attacking. It must be said though that there had been near the same comments made in other places by American tankers and infantrymen replacing ‘Army’ with ‘Air Force’. The US Army couldn’t be everywhere and nor could the US Air Force, despite the expectations that they be so. In a war like this, taking place across such a massive area, each side had the same problem with air-ground coordination in many instances. It just happened.

What occurred at Dyess was different though.


Dyess was one of several key sites taken by the advancing Soviets during a four day rampage through West-Central and North Texas at the end of October. That advance was contested only sporadically, generally unsuccessfully too, until it was finally stopped. From the air and on the ground with special forces & volunteer militia units, the Twenty–Eighth Army was engaged though it wasn’t stopped anywhere on its way nor bled properly. US Army and Army National Guard forces were out of place. Texas Command, the joint-service headquarters, had been wholly deceived as to where their newly-arrived opponents where and what they about to do: they thought the field army which had come across from Cuba (whose designation they didn’t know) was going to show up elsewhere and planned accordingly. It was one hell of a deception used, a major maskirovka effort relying on multiple lies to show the Americans what they wanted to see elsewhere. There had come intelligence from those special forces teams on the ground and air reconnaissance too of a major build-up of military strength elsewhere yet the intelligence never had enough confirmation for those above. They had that confirmation for what they were ‘seeing’ over in East Texas and refused to accept that they were being tricked.

From San Angelo, an important crossroads in the heart of Texas, the Twenty–Eighth Army began their attack. Two advances were made following attack axis’ north and northeast. The two divisions which went north headed towards Abilene first, taking Dyess on the way. The Americans had already removed their B-52s from there – sending them to Arkansas two weeks beforehand – but Dyess was still in use, now as a forward base for tactical-rolled F-4s and F-16s hitting targets away to the south. They wouldn’t be making use of the airbase after the Soviets took control. From Abilene, the 6th Guards Tank & 35th Motorised Rifle Divisions (the latter was the first formation withdrawn from East Germany by Andropov back in 1982; two years later it was here in the United States) carried on moving cross-country though with their supply units making use of nearby excellent roads links to follow them via Anson, Stamford, Haskell, Munday and up to Seymour. Heavily-armed recon units, supported by armed helicopters, made short-work of any opposition which close to stand and fight in the way of this drive north up to the Brazos River near Seymour. Through those little towns along the way there was death and destruction left in the Soviet’s wake. Onwards they went after Seymour: north, always north! Wichita Falls was next along with the nearby Sheppard AFB before the Soviets finally came to a stop, putting their tanks up against the Red River on the Oklahoma-Texas state line. There was opposition across the river which returned fire upon the Soviet’s approach and this was in the form of the US Army. They were over in Oklahoma, getting there ahead of the Twenty–Eighth Army though only just and not being able to bring the invaders to a halt back across in Texas.

The attack northeast by the 207th Motorised Rifle Division, supported by the army’s independent tank regiment, went through Santa Anna and Brownwood first. Soviet troops entered Camp Bowie, the Texas National Guard base which was empty but put to the torch ahead of those incoming invaders, before they then moved up to Stephenville. In the eyes of the Americans, they were heading right towards Dallas-Fort Worth! The immediate reaction was panic and American forces preparing for a fight south of there prepared to defend that immense urban area – full of internal refugees yet also so many important military bases – now from a flank attack as well. The Soviets avoided it though, once again doing what they had done in Texas with San Antonio first and then Houston afterwards: cutting off such cities and leaving them alone for the time being rather than face an urban fight. Their losses were way above projections already and would only increase disproportionally in a certain bloody fight which Dallas-Fort Worth would be. The 207th Division swung around Dallas-Fort Worth to the west going past Mineral Wells and then Decatur. The roads were used again for supply and towns like those blasted where resistance was met yet the Soviet’s combat forces remained going cross-country. Gainsville was as far as they got, just short of the Red River and Oklahoma. The Americans stopped them there with the US Army showing up with heavy units and fighting not in that town but outside it in a battle of manoeuvre where their strength was put to use. They counterattacked, catching the Soviets off-guard after using a little bit of deception of their own. The Blackhorse Cav’, half the world away from the Fulda Gap, took apart a whole regiment of Soviet mechanised infantry in a furious but short victorious engagement. Yet, the Soviets had gotten behind Dallas-Fort Worth and their aircraft made attacks against military bases inside that region now from three directions. Carswell AFB, NAS Dallas and Air Force Plant 4 (where combat aircraft were built) were struck, so too were the civilian airports where the US Military could be found. In addition, Scud missiles were fired at ‘general targets’ inside. The result was absolute civilian panic in the urban areas, something which aided their purposes greatly even more than by how they had effectively dragged the US Army right to the very northern edge of Texas making them fight where they hadn’t planned to and not on a ground of their choosing either.

Those American forces were the leading units of those returning from West Germany, the Seventh United States Army who had finally arrived in the fight on home soil. They weren’t over in East Texas where they were also needed because more advances were being made there.



Late October 1984:

In East Texas, the Fifth United States Army was attempting to undertake a similar series of inter-linked offensives as were being made out in California with the Sixth Army. Reinforcements had come to the Fifth Army, further fighting men in significant number. A defensive role was first envisaged for them before the direction came from above, beyond Texas Command and instead from the Joint Chiefs, for Operations Bald Eagle & Golden Eagle to occur. Parts of Texas recently withdrawn from were to be retaken. The Cubans and the Soviets were to be beaten back, preferably overcome rather and defeated in detail than forced to withdraw. The Fifth Army had suffered defeat after defeat itself in this war and there were many of those who believed that even with reinforcements, they would be unable to achieve this task set for them. The fear was the leadership was lacking but more so widescale morale rot had set in. In the place of the Fifth Army, it was said that the Third Army – which held those reinforcements for Bald Eagle and others to be committed as the follow up Golden Eagle – should take over the majority of the Fifth Army’s duties and undertake the big offensive instead. The Fifth Army was to go on the attack though with the Third Army behind them. Faith was put in the Fifth Army’s capabilities to preform the mission allotted to them.


From their previous defensive position around Waco, the American paratroopers from a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division (another brigade was in the process of returning from South Korea; the third one had been lost in Panama) and Arkansas national guardsmen supporting them stayed in their position as the US VIII Corps passed through them on the attack. The Cubans were on the other side of Waco and they were hit by a three-divisional attack consisting of heavy forces coming from New England and the US North-East. Previously, these Cubans had in several engagements rampaged throughout South Texas and taken apart several US Army regular formations, smashing the pre-war standing III Corps and moving from the Rio Grande to Waco via San Antonio and Austin. Waco was as far as they had been able to get though, no longer able to go any further after irreplaceable losses. Bald Eagle smashed them to pieces; the Castro Brothers down in Havana would be rather upset. Within two days, the 42nd Infantry Division arrived in Temple; the next morning the 26th Infantry Division got to nearby Belton. They had followed the Interstate-35 corridor southwards, going the opposite way from which the Cubans had travelled. It was to Temple and Belton where the Cubans had managed to organise a staged retreat, sort of successfully, but around each they were finally overcome. If they hadn’t been, and tried to withdraw further, the 50th Armored Division had already travelled cross-country on the attack and blocked the Lampasas River crossing points (the Cubans had thrown up many when the interstate bridge had been destroyed) to stop them going any further. The only escape for the Cubans was to run westwards, towards Killeen and where Fort Hood was. Many Cubans tried that escape, shot up by intensive air power and the flank attack conducted by the 107th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Those national guardsmen from Ohio hadn’t got fully into place in time and was then held back from full commitment in completing a full surrounding of the Cubans. There was so many of them and if the 107th Regiment had stood in their way directly, it was believed they would be torn apart. Instead, the Cubans went past their waiting guns and took immense damaging fire again and again, with those behind pushing those ahead of them forwards in to that devastating fire from up above as the Americans had the high ground. Only a few shots came back their way with any success. Bald Eagle hadn’t planned for this particular ending with some Cubans getting away but it worked out well enough in the end: the mission was rated a success.

The US V Corps had been pushed out of Texas the week beforehand, forced to withdraw into Louisiana after the Soviets had bashed them about and destroyed several previous subordinate formations including the 3rd Armored Division. The corps commander had been relieved from duty afterwards on orders from above after grave concerns about his leadership where he had committed the V Corps into action against the Soviet Eighth Tank Army in the particular manner chosen. Not everyone agreed with his dismissal for he’d gotten the rest of his corps out, ready to fight another day and really hurting the Soviets too (more than was understood on the American side) but, regardless, he was gone. His replacement was one of his divisional commanders: the then-commander of the 24th Infantry Division, a general by the name of Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf wanted to strike earlier than planned, coordinating his attack back over the Sabine River when the national guardsmen moved on Waco, but the Fifth Army HQ said to delay to let the Soviets shift reinforcements to assist the Cubans. It made sense. However, the Soviets didn’t have the forces to move: they’d already sent them off to San Angelo where the Twenty–Eighth Army there was hidden ready to go forward. When the V Corps finally got going, they met dug-in Soviet forces on the Sabine who were waiting for an attack. Neither the 5th nor 24th Infantry Divisions could first make serious headway and when there finally came breakthroughs, localised Soviet counterattacks occurred to block those. The Eighth Tank Army was weak but not incapable. They held back the V Corps from making any serious penetration back into Texas. Bald Eagle failed here where US Army regulars were unable to do what national guardsmen elsewhere had done any make a successful forward attack deep into occupied territory. Schwarzkopf complained furiously up the chain of command. His position, supported elsewhere, was that the attack over the Sabine should have gone when Waco took place. He didn’t have access to all available information there and did believe that this would have had more success that it would have. In hindsight, he was incorrect. However, his belief was shared widely… everywhere but at the Fifth Army HQ who put the blame on the V Corps. The command chain spat didn’t look good among fellow officers nor politicians who became aware of it. It was an internal matter though, one which should have been resolved within the Fifth Army or, if necessary, Texas Command.

Both of those headquarters and their commanders were soon heavily distracted though. When Bald Eagle came to a stuttered pause, before Golden Eagle could get going when the Third Army was supposed to come into play, the Soviets struck with their own offensive in Texas. That Twenty–Eighth Army strike towards the Red River and Oklahoma beyond changed everything. Golden Eagle wouldn’t happen.



Late October 1984:

The firing of the commander of the Fifth United States Army wasn’t as controversial historically-wise as Lincoln’s removal of McClellan nor Truman’s of MacArthur. However, it was still a big deal alone and there would be political consequences afterwards when, at President Glenn’s behest, Bentsen had the senior US Army general in Texas reassigned to a meaningless staff role in the rear right at the end of October. The general’s immediate superior, the head of Texas Command (who supervised all air, ground and rear-area forces), stayed in his post when there were calls too for his removal. Already during this war there had come many such removal of senior generals and admirals from their posts for failure – Western Command’s first commander (his replacement then liberating Los Angeles) and the commander of the Atlantic Fleet (who ‘lost’ all those aircraft carriers) – had already lost their jobs where reverses suffered due to clashes on the battlefield saw that occur. There were comments made that this series of firings was actually worse for morale than anything else as other officers, trying to do their jobs at such difficult times, felt the axe being sharpened for them too leading to all sorts of issues with that.

When the commander was fired, the Fifth Army was disestablished as a combat command too. Overnight, the whole headquarters staff was tasked as liaisons for a command transition and reported to opposite numbers from the Third Army which starting taking over. Subordinate combat and combat support units across Texas stayed where they were with the change only affecting them in top level leadership. Up in Colorado and also through the Texas Panhandle facing Nicaraguan forces in New Mexico, former Fifth Army elements moved to the command of the Seventh Army instead. Such changes went smoothly and while they took place while in the middle of an active war zone, there was very little disruption due to how it was done with higher headquarters replacement rather than wholescale action taken down through the ranks. There were further changes planned afterwards but that was how it was first done: direct change at the very top to begin.

The Fifth Army’s former commander shot himself the next day while on his way to report to Fort Campbell in Kentucky. He’d be going down in history for all the wrong reasons and made this choice rather than live see that.

There had been a push to get rid of the leadership of Fifth Army for some time. The commanding general had overseen six weeks of war take place across the US South–West, a conflict which had come as a complete surprise. The Fifth Army was a peacetime rear-area command suddenly transformed into a frontline role. The opposition which they had faced had constantly surprised them and over-preformed. Political interference had come repeatedly and, in the opinion of many, much of that was uncalled for. The commanding general had taken flak from the US Marines who were furious at how the 4th Marine Division had been lost at Houston in the disaster there. He’d come under fire from his subordinates too with the US XVIII Corps commander strenuously making it clear that he believed the deployment to New Mexico in the fashion it was done was an invitation to see his men killed for no good reason; his criticisms had come long before those from Schwarzkopf. Several state governors had seen their federalised national guard elements slaughtered on Texan battlefields where they were committed to plug holes and wiped out. They were far from happy about that and made their feelings well-known. Other generals within the US Army had sniped from the side-lines – it wasn’t very professional but it happened regardless – at how the Fifth Army had managed to oversee the destruction of so much of the pre-war US Army all the while being driven back, back and back again with defeat following defeat. Glenn and Bentsen had had to take criticism from Congress over at The Greenbrier: there were many so-called ‘military experts’ there. One of those experts, a fierce critic of how the war was being fought was former defence secretary Rumsfeld who’d been appointed as one of Illinois’ senators to replace a dead man. As can be imagined, Rumsfeld had a lot to say on the issue of the Fifth Army and it’s commander’s failures.

As to the man himself trying to fight the Fifth Army’s war, he had seen little backing from his own superior to keep outsiders off his back, all the while trying to undertake a task which, to be honest, was beyond his capabilities but also those of his staff too. In all fairness, the Fifth Army wasn’t set up for the task which they were given: the Eighth Army in South Korea and the Seventh Army in West Germany were meant to be wartime commands. After his subsequent suicide, there would be shock and sadness expressed at such a turn of events though little contrition for all that had been said and done. There was still a war ongoing and the consequences of the Fifth Army’s failure to defend the South–West were still taking place. One tragedy was forgotten among so many more.


The command reorganisation saw the further movement of troops. Bald Eagle came to a halt and the planned Golden Eagle was cancelled. The troops meant to go on the offensive were pulled into defensive roles instead. With both the Third Army and Seventh Army, each a multi-corps command consisting of many fresh troops, they now had to fulfil new roles. Another corps of national guardsmen, these from across the US South–East who had long been on anti-invasion duties in Florida and along the Gulf Coast, moved into North-East Texas into the Dallas-Fort Worth region; Third Army’s other two corps held where they were. As to the Seventh Army, they took over supervision of the XVIII Corps’ mission out on the western flank though the main effort for them was to halt the Soviets from getting into Oklahoma. All of those troops which had come across from Britain and West Germany, added to by others which started the war in the United States but were held back for a later mission, were meant to be those who would win the war for America on the battlefield in November. Calls had been made for urgent re-tasking of parts of the Seventh Army through October as it built-up back home in America to take on invading forces to halt their progress; such requests had been denied while it was being fully formed as the ships kept coming across the North Atlantic laden with equipment. Canadian troops had been sent to Colorado and Los Angeles defended by national guardsmen from the Mid-West rather than see the Seventh Army used in penny packet fashion. The thinking had been that they would undertake a major offensive, bigger than the ones started then halted as they were. Instead, in a desperate rush and long before everyone was fully ready and the whole command assembled, the Seventh Army was sent to Oklahoma to defend against a Soviet drive up onto the expanses of the Great Plains.

The Seventh Army wasn’t going to be winning the war for their country this year, not doing that. They were reacting to the enemy’s attack, racing to check their advance. There was a good chance that they could stop the Soviets too, especially because they were numerically superior to their opponents and also well-equipped. Yet, they weren’t taking the war to the Soviets and pushing them back to the Rio Grande and weren’t going to be able to when used in this manner. There was no choice though, none at all. In the Soviets got across the Red River, they would truly be deep inside the American heartland.



Early November 1984:

The United States now had proof that the Soviets had used nerve gas against them back in the war’s early wars when Adak Island in the Aleutians had been taken. There was confirmation too from abroad that Soviet chemical weapons had been recently used against civilian targets in both Britain and Japan, full wartime allies of the United States. The Soviets had repeatedly made use of gas after beginning the war with nuclear strikes and been selective about it when having the position of ‘no first use’.

A decision was taken in New York that a retaliatory strike using nerve gas, undertaken by American forces but to make the Soviets pay for hitting their allies too, was to commence. The Soviets would be gassed back.


Proof of the use of gas on Adak had taken time to come. The island’s US Navy garrison had provided a defence against a Soviet assault at the start of the war and then subsequently gone silent. No news had come from Adak of what had suddenly changed with regard to the resistance to an invasion there nor the fate of those defenders. Adak’s isolated position hindered answers to those questions. Nuclear weapons certainly hadn’t been used, the Americans were sure of that, and they had suspected gas had been employed. However, because there had been no reports of chemical attacks elsewhere and there was no direct proof, those in the shaken government who had urged for an early retaliation had been unable to get such a strike made. Prove it, they’d been told. It took time, but this was eventually done. As it turned out, those who found that proof weren’t actually searching for that specific thing at the time when they came across it. The Defence Intelligence Agency – acting in many ways on what would have been the CIA’s turf had that agency not been as crippled as it was – came across a potential Soviet defector, a supposed GRU three-star general. A trick was feared, one to deceive them as had happened before. The defector wasn’t disheartened by the cold suspicion he was treated with and established his bona fides. The DIA was given a series of official internal Soviet military reports on the chemical strike on Adak with every detail included. His thinking had been that they already knew much about this and he’d been confirming that: he didn’t realise then nor afterwards that there was so little known. When he defected, doing so in the Middle East, the defector was able to provide more information on that as well as telling the DIA and the US Government many other things of significance too.

Adak had been gassed because the Soviets had really wanted the airbase there to not just project power but also to use it to defend the Soviet homeland from a forward position. Faced with the opposition that his forces had, the theatre commander had requested and received permission at the highest level to do so. Afterwards, those on the Defence Council back home had had buyer’s remorse on the strike and feared a retaliation: there had been a cover-up over what had occurred. Those in Moscow realised that using gas against American military forces had gone too far… their remorse there strangely didn’t include the nuclear attacks. The defector couldn’t understand why the Americans he spoke to were rather flummoxed by that thinking.

North Korea had not long afterwards used chemical weapons – blistering & choking agents as well as nerve gas – in their fight with South Korea. In response, the United States would have wished to hit back immediately with gas of their own yet had been unable to because such weapons had long been removed from the Korean Peninsula along with the supporting infrastructure to support their use. Nuclear attacks had been made on the North Koreans afterwards, devastating them and changing the course of that war there. American chemical weapons were moved into South Korea following this, something which took time. Furthermore, other gases were also sent to be readied at Okinawa (not on mainland Japan though) afterwards. Short- & medium-range rockets were the carriers of the gases which the majority of the American chemical stockpile was formed from though there were also chemical landmines too. There were no air-dropped bombs, aircraft spray-tanks nor cruise missile warheads fitted with such weapons in the United States’ arsenal when the Soviets had so many of those. There had been political issues with gas in American politics going back to the late-Sixties which caused this. There was the knowledge there and production capability set ready all to make such capable delivery systems but a ban on it. When the war started, that ban was overturned and rapid work was done. The Americans couldn’t overnight fully-equip their entire armed forces with such weapons but they began to process to start to. The then questions over what had happened on Adak and the fact that the North Koreans had used such weapons made the Americans fear that they were going to be left far behind and thus exposed without such weapons of their own.

That concern grew exponentially when the Soviets used nerve gases on the British Isles and mainland Japan. Casualties were immense, more damage was done with fear though as panic unfolded. Decontamination of attacked areas was also time-consuming and difficult. The Americans believed that should they have their civilian areas attacked in such a fashion, they too would have the same problems. Combat troops in chemical warfare suits would generally survive in a gas exchange on the battlefield though it was impossible to protect civilians from gas when modern chemical weapons didn’t just need to be breathed in but entered the body through the skin. The ongoing effort to increase capabilities on the part of the United States had more effort thrown at it and the first stocks of bombs to be dropped from aircraft armed with nerve gas were produced. They offered the United States the ability to strike further afield with gas than the rockets which they had, much further.


Those gas attacks had hurt Britain but they caused greater concern when it came to Japan. Combined with conventionally-armed missiles, those carrying gas threw the country into uproar. In New York, there was a growing worry that Japan might be forced out of the war by them. The United Sates could carry on the fight without Japan, even without the use of their bases there too if it came to it, but would rather not for both military and political reasons. Japan hadn’t threatened to drop out yet the worry was that they might if they kept being hit like they were. The Americans worried too that other allies of theirs might be struck with gas. Such a country might believe that the Americans wouldn’t respond on their behalf and act to end their participation.

Eager to stop this from occurring, and with the determination to avenge Adak, Glenn authorised a chemical counterstrike. Vice President Baker along with Bentsen and Stevenson all agreed and those allied national leaders consulted (only a few) gave their nod too. The intention was to achieve what had been done when the United States had returned fire with nuclear weapons back in September: show the Soviets with deeds, not idle words, that the use of weapons of mass destruction would be matched like-for-like and thus would no longer occur again.

The Soviets themselves and their allies would be hit by chemical strikes. There were many options discussed with how to proceed with what became Operation Brimstone. Strategic strikes were contemplated, to take place far overseas. However, in something that did face internal American objection among the government, in the end it was decided to make the strikes of a tactical nature closer to home. Two of them would take place on the very edges of the United States’ (overrun) southern border; a third would actually occur on American soil where it was occupied. Many targets were considered and were dismissed, a lot of those due to the changing tactical situation at the end of October. Three were finally settled on though and the orders were issued. A statement to be sent to the Soviet leadership was readied to go as well. There were several last-minute concerns made though the will of the Americans on this issue held.

Brimstone went ahead on the morning of November 2nd.

Chapter Fifteen – Stalemate

Early November 1984:

The United States had held elections whilst at war beforehand. Mid-term and full elections, including presidential contests, had taken place during both the American Civil War and World War Two. For two months before the scheduled November 1984 elections, the country had been involved in World War Three and this was a conflict unlike anything previous that the nation had faced. The country had been struck with nuclear weapons and suffered an invasion which was yet to be fully stopped let alone see occupied areas completely liberated. There had been some consideration given, during late September especially, at postponing – not cancelling – the upcoming elections at least until the New Year. Such a course of action hadn’t been taken though. The elections would take place despite everything.

It was a matter of democracy foremost. The United States was a fully-democratic nation and that meant free and fair elections were to take place no matter what. Presenting this to the world was important yet so too was the belief that the American people needed to see functioning democracy taking place. October was a bad month for the country and November started terribly too: national morale was thought to be in danger of being imperilled further if the elections were cancelled. They took place on November 6th, as scheduled. However, it would be the strangest and controversial set of elections that the United States had ever seen.

Parts of seven different states were under foreign occupation. Almost all of New Mexico and the majority of Texas was occupied. Significant parts of Arizona and growing parts of Colorado were too. A previously far larger portion of California had been occupied but recent military operations had limited most of that leaving now only scattered pieces of California held by enemy forces. Small areas of Alaska and Florida were too forcibly held by the Soviets and the Cubans. The District of Columbia was a radioactive ruin while Maryland and North Dakota had been heavily hit by nuclear fallout. There were nuclear holes in Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota leaving smaller areas of those states gone. Air and missile attacks continued through other parts of the nation, generally through the regions near to the frontlines though not always, and there were foreign commando activities ongoing: the latter nowhere near as bad as they first had been. Chemical weapons strikes had recently taking place, causing devastation. The country was at war with full mobilisation underway and government-mandated measures to support that which effected all Americans. Crime waves and civil disturbances continued to occur. International trade was almost at a standstill and internal travel was subject to military control; the media had been brought under a great deal of government supervision. Millions of Americans were internal refugees, many in FEMA-run camps where conditions were not always very good. Nationwide security measures were deemed by some to be the elements of the beginning of a police state yet they were necessary due to the situation with the ongoing war bringing that need.

Amongst all of this, in the face of the worse situation that the United States had ever found itself in and the nation feared by some to be liable to collapse (a bit dramatic but nonetheless believed to be theoretically possible), the country held its elections.


Abraham Lincoln had run for re-election as president in 1864 on a National Union ticket. He was first elected as a Republican and history notes him as one, yet he won the White House for a second time under that banner alongside Andrew Johnson who was a Democrat: Johnson succeed Lincoln following the former’s assassination as technically a National Union president too. For that 1864 election, Lincoln and Johnson had contested the election as a merger of both the nation’s two dominant parties due to the extraordinary circumstances of the country being torn apart as it had been by war.

The National Union banner was used again. The description of Democrat-Republican – or Republican-Democrat instead – had been considered for this presidential election one hundred and twenty years later yet the historical precedent was employed instead. President John Glenn and Vice President Howard Baker contested the election on that fusion of their parties. Glenn had succeeded to the presidency following Ted Kennedy’s nuclear assassination (coming close to his own identical murder too) and Baker had been appointed to the vice presidency in the post-attack emergency as a symbol of national unity. There had been the thinking that Baker may only stay where he was for the two months and someone else would run alongside Glenn though nothing had come of that in the end. Jack Kemp, the previous Republican nominee for the presidency – on course to beat Kennedy – was dead. There was still electoral opposition to the Glenn-Baker ticket, something actually silently encouraged by the president to show democracy to the nation and the world. Minor candidates ran against the National Union on various platforms including an anti-war but pacifist position. Victory for Glenn-Baker was guaranteed and it came: they won an overwhelming election victory.

Six sitting senators had survived the destruction of Washington and escaped with their lives. In the following weeks, there had been appointments to the vacant senate seats from across the nation. Almost all of the states appointed either one or two to the US Senate as it was re-established with governors or state legislatures sending them to The Greenbrier out in West Virginia. The few vacant seats were ones which the laws of the particular states didn’t allow for an appointment by any other means than a direct election: these states couldn’t be represented in the Senate in any other way. Those who were appointed were only in position for a limited time, pending election themselves. The laws here varied again from state to state. Some of the appointees had taken the role on the condition that it be limited while the appointment of others were later regretted by those who sent them to the Senate. Other new senators had to be elected because the term which they filled was a seat scheduled for election due to one third of all seats being contested every two years. Elections took place to fill almost two thirds of those Senate seats. There was no National Union ticket here though none of the major candidates ran on an overt anti-war platform. There were outsider candidates involved in many races, those who had been allowed ballot access in exceptional circumstances. As with all Senate elections, it was more a case of personalities rather than parties when it came to these elections. The special appointees to replace the dead in Washington were often well-known figures from the state or national scene. A couple of them went down to famous defeats while others surprised everyone and won. Control of the Senate in terms of party affiliation went against expectations: the Democrats re-won the control which they had lost back in ’82. That majority was won on the back of those non-elected appointees too.

Only twenty-five Representatives had survived the outbreak of war and two of those had been kidnapped to ended up in El Paso under the control of the Soviets and the façade of the ‘Peace Committee’. There was no constitutional manner in which Congressmen could be appointed either by their states nor the federal government. They had to be elected. Seats could stay vacant for as long as it took but to be filled, democratic will had to be implemented. It was the issue with the House which had forced the government’s hand back in September when there was the thinking about delaying the elections. Without the House, the US Government couldn’t function effectively. Foreign occupation didn’t affect the Senate though it did when it came to Congressmen. There would be vacant seats in the House, waiting to be filled once those regions where the district was located was liberated from foreign occupation. These elections were contested nationwide along Democratic vs. Republican lines too. The Republicans won big. They had been on course to pre-war yet improved greatly on that. Many House races were dirty affairs, more so that the Senate races. Democrats faced the charge of being responsible for this war and there were charges laid of suspected treason against candidates who were said to have had Soviet sympathies in the past. This was rubbish: social democracy, democratic socialism and liberal policies in international affairs didn’t equate to pro-Soviet beliefs in any way. In addition, if the Democrats were to be blamed for Kennedy’s actions, the Republicans would have to share some of that for all that occurred under Gerry Ford too. The mud stuck when slung though. The House was in Republican hands after November 6th. There was a wide gathering of hard-line Congressmen elected, Democrats among the Republicans as well, who had been elected on a pro-war platform and one which wanted to see the conflict fought in a different fashion than beforehand. A particular stated aim for many of these Congressmen would be a forced change when it came to the Secretary of Defence: there was a firm intention to remove Lloyd Bentsen by them.

Governor races took place, many which saw former lieutenant-governors who’d appointed their resigning former governors to the Senate face re-election. Hard-line in terms of how they wanted to see the war fought candidates were elected nationwide in great number. There were also local elections which took place, from state legislatures all the way down. Seats and offices remained empty through areas under occupation mirroring the case with the US House of Representatives. Several state legislatures were to meet post-election elsewhere than where they were pre-war too. Juneau in Alaska, Santa Fe in New Mexico and Austin in Texas were occupied. Bismarck in North Dakota and Annapolis in Maryland had been drenched in fallout. These were problems not easily solved and politically troublesome.

All these elections had seen millions of American voters unable to participate. They had been killed, were in occupied areas or refugees. Further millions of the country’s voters didn’t turn out at polling stations. There were security fears – some which turned out to be more than just fears – yet also with a nation at war and elections seemingly ‘already decided’ by how the presidency was to be contested, voters stayed at home for all other races as well. The government hadn’t expected that nor were happy to see it occur. They had pushed for a massive turnout to show American democracy in action. Millions upon millions did so, just not everyone who could vote actually went out and did so.


The elections came with violence. There were deaths which occurred and terror which took place. Domestic incidents took place where individuals or small groups of radicals decided in the lead-up to the election or on the day itself that candidates in various races were traitors or dangers to the nation. Such people set out to kill those they demonised and their supporters as well. Several candidates faced murder attempts with certain successful assassinations taking place. These were an outrage never seen before in the United States. The war had brought about extreme reactions to election positions and there were those who see to use political violence for their own twisted ideologies. A candidate for the US House in California was slain; so too a pair of state legislature candidates in the Mid-West. Other murders took place at lower levels while attempts to kill more high-profile targets met with federal resistance. US Marshals were working with the FBI and the Secret Service to protect politicians. No protection like that was with Angela Davis in New York though. The controversial activist wasn’t running for office but on election day was at a protest rally in Harlem, at the head of a march against alleged (and probably true) police brutality against local African-Americans. New York had been hit with crime and violence and the police had cracked down hard. Davis was shot by a racist gun nut who’d travelled up from Virginia to kill her. The murder set off a wave of further violence first in New York – the nation’s temporary capital – and then other cities too.

The Soviets interfered in the election too, with bombs and bullets. Congressman Larry MacDonald – a survivor of the Washington nuclear strike, a noted anti-communist – was murdered by a sniper while campaigning in his native Georgia. John McCain out in Arizona was lucky to survive a car bomb attempt on his life and would win re-election to the US House afterwards: twice now the Soviets had tried to kill him (the first with the general strike on all of Congress; the second this targeted effort) but he escaped and would play a big role in the new House. In Tennessee, Baker had planned to attend an event in his home state the night before the election but the Secret Service wouldn’t let him go. A bomb struck that event without him, hitting those at a rally urging Tennessee citizens to get out and vote and remembering the state’s former members of Congress: all eleven who’d been killed in Washington. Former Senator Al Gore Snr., speaking on behalf of his son Al Jnr. who’d been in Congress that fateful day back in September and killed alongside everyone else, was among the dead in the Memphis bombing. Other bombs exploded at polling stations through Arizona, Oklahoma and Texas; there were some found and defused but the ones which weren’t killed many and also kept people away too.

In El Paso, the Peace Committee denounced the elections. They repeated the call for an immediate end to the war and stated that the voting was all a sham. The lies about the causes of the war were repeated and the demand was made that the ‘illegal government in New York’ either disband itself or be ‘taken down by the people’. The few traitors and many abductees (often with families held for good behaviour) were vocal but the influence was next to zero. There was no one listening. They were heard yet no one cared. Only the few very isolated incidents of support came from what might be considered the usual suspects, conspiracy theorists and the most hard-core American domestic communists, yet speaking up in favour of what the Soviet stooges in El Paso had to say was political suicide for anyone running for office and those non-politicians who made the mistake of doing so in an activist sense faced violence or the weight of the FBI on them. Those in El Paso were speaking out in support of those who attacked America with nuclear weapons, killed millions, were invading the nation and committing war crimes of an unimaginable scale: how could anyone agree with them? It happened though, defying all logic. The full story of how many of those in El Paso got there was still not known to most Americans too: the two kidnapped former members of the US House were regarded nationwide as traitors. The information on their circumstances was still secret. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been but that was the way it was with that.

From the Soviets and their allies on the international stage there came similar remarks calling on the United States to stop fighting, for the government to dissolve and the people’s will of peace to come about. There was a lot of that and it didn’t connect unless with those who agreed. The propaganda was done as a matter of course though. The Soviets weren’t going to win the war this way and knew that. They were aiming to win it on the battlefield and do so too without any form of military stalemate taking place.



Early November 1984:

The beginning of the Third World War marked the end of the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA headquarters at Langley was atomised along with all those who were at work there when a nuclear warhead exploded above the complex. Overseas in the following days, KGB activities – including the multiple use of third parties – saw the kidnapping and murder of plenty of their operatives. In neutral nations mainly in the developing world, though also in some parts of the developed world as well, this was especially violent. The usual rules of spy-craft were thrown out of the window in an orgy of targeted violence. Some governments complained and intervened, others looked the other way. CIA intelligence officers weren’t prepared for the attacks against them and suffered grievous losses. The ability to collect information worldwide was hit here and that only added to the disaster incurred at home with the strike on Langley.

Soviet direct action occurred at the same time as the political onslaught that the CIA got at home. They had failed to protect America by giving forewarning of the war. The CIA hadn’t provided any indication at all, absolutely no warning of any form as to what was coming. Nothing, nada, not a squeak. Politicians who might have stood up to those attacking the CIA were all dead and those left could offer no defence for a failure of the magnitude incurred. The CIA wasn’t responsible for all that had happened with the political decisions made in the Oval Office and also how other intelligence agencies were also completely blindsided, yet they couldn’t defend themselves at home like they couldn’t do abroad at a time when they really needed to.

In the immediate post-attack aftermath, when after the nuclear strikes the invasion had started, the CIA was still helpless. From aboard, they couldn’t provide the necessary intelligence that the US Government needed. Failed and poorly-planned operations to try to counter Soviet influence in places to stem the tide of the war blew up in their face in spectacular fashion. Further criticism came when the CIA was unable to provide any intelligence from south of the Rio Grande. Latin America was silent to CIA eyes and ears when the need was greatest for accurate and timely intelligence from there.

It was a perfect storm to bring down the CIA and see what remained of it disbanded. There was one final act in the drama that was the fall though: the saga of defector codenamed Peppermint.


Peppermint was that three-star general from the GRU who had recently defected to the United States, bringing with him confirmation of the gassing of Adak Island and therefore starting the process of chemical exchanges. Defense Intelligence Agency officers in Saudi Arabia whom he’d been in contact with through an Iraqi intermediary had got him over the border between Iraq and Saudi Arabia and then brought him to the United States. He had been with the DIA’s debriefers ever since. Peppermint was a real catch, certainly the most senior military defector whom had ever come out of the Soviet Union. No one of his rank had ever come over beforehand and for him to defect a few months into the war, bringing with him documents but more so what was in his head, gave the United States a serious intelligence boost.

However, not everyone was a fan of Peppermint and all that he said. The DIA had been ordered to ‘step up’ by the President where the CIA had taken the hit that it had and done so, co-operating with its shattered sister organisation. These two different agencies weren’t rivals nor at each other’s throats like the GRU and the KGB were in the Soviet Union: the two of them had a solid working relationship pre-war. CIA officers given access to Peppermint and were left with serious concerns over him and his story. There was no direct proof that this man was whom he said he was. His stated reason for defecting was that he had long wanted to but the death of his family on the war’s first day had made his mind up for him as there was no one left behind back in the Rodina to be punished in his place. The deaths of his family had come at the hands of the United States when Leningrad was subject to nuclear attack.

This man had had his family killed by Americans and afterwards defected to them to held bring down his own country’s regime! The CIA didn’t buy that, not at all, but the DIA stood by their man.

The CIA pointed to the blood of millions of Americans on the hands of Peppermint. This was because he claimed that he had been in charge of the counter-intelligence effort to protect that actual beginning of the war. Peppermint had signed off on all of the opening strikes made – with nuclear weapons, Spetsnaz actions, assassinations & poisonings and the big conventional attacks – to make sure that there was no chance that they would be exposed ahead of them taking place. The Politburo may have given the political order, but this general had allowed that to happen. The DIA said that, of course, this man had done something that had hurt the United States but he done those under orders and not off his own back for personal gain. Peppermint had only been in charge of the security around those actions, not actually committed them. He had only done what he had been told. How could he be personally blamed and therefore rejected as a defector with all of the information that he had on that basis? They saw this approach to hate Peppermint and thus not listen to him from the CIA as being ludicrous. The information which he provided filled in many gaps. There were things better understood when Peppermint explained how they had been done and the motives for them. The DIA saw things in a different light and this would allow them to understand other Soviet actions, ongoing and those in the future, in a new manner too. Furthermore, in addition to all of this, Peppermint could answer questions on events going back for decades, filling in holes all over the place. He was a willing co-operator and eagerly getting on with that.

The CIA wouldn’t touch anything he said though. Robert Gates, one of the deputy directorate heads within the CIA, had been appointed by the president as acting CIA director (quite the step up for him as a career spook rather than a political appointee) following the mess that the Langley strike had left the CIA in. Gates’ time with the president was limited, more so than any director before him. The CIA was filling a smaller and smaller percentage of the President’s Daily Brief. The DIA and the NSA were being called in to brief Glenn, Bentsen and the rest of the National Security Council set-up in place of the CIA. Gates’ position should have meant that he and the CIA had pre-eminence when it came to intelligence briefings yet that wasn’t the case. Gates had his people deliver an official opinion of Peppermint to the president, claiming that there was a chance that he was a false defector, the grandest of all maskirovkas. It looked petty, it looked like jealousy. Glenn was not in the mood to listen to that, especially when the CIA had no proof and only a seemingly personal issue with the DIA stepping up as he had called them to. Gates’ role as acting director was left as that and he had no say over urgent wartime budgetary appropriations for intelligence purposes, the majority of which were directed towards the DIA and the NSA. Not taking this lying down, believing that the CIA was being supplanted ahead of what he feared would be a disbandment of the CIA, Gates struck back further. He spoke with Vice President Baker and reminded him that those pre-war intelligence failings were shared: the DIA and the NSA had supported that analysis on the situation with Mexico that the CIA had put forward. All were to blame, not just the CIA.

Baker had witnessed first-hand how under Kennedy the CIA had been extraordinarily politicised to support the previous president’s worldview and fundamentally failed to do what it was meant to in protecting America and its people. Now their new head was doing the same: playing politics at a time like this. Gates rubbed him up the wrong way with what he was trying to do. Baker made it clear to the president that the calls from the Senate to break apart the CIA were only going to continue. The time was right to do this. A new intelligence agency needed to be built, one which would no longer play politics, and do its job. The CIA was beyond reformation after the hit had taken and subsequent activities. The position taken by them on Peppermint was the last straw.


The day after the election, Glenn announced the disbandment of the Central Intelligence Agency. He stated that there would be a complete intelligence shake-up with the multiple independent and semi-independent agencies. What would be formed would be something to serve the country now when it was at war and in the future. No specifics were given to the public – and thus the listening Soviets – though the agencies themselves were made aware of the scope of the plans which were going to be put into practice.

It was hoped that the United States’ National Intelligence & Security Service (NISS) would be active by the New Year.

*

Peppermint had confirmed what the DIA already knew about the Washington nuclear strike with missiles being successfully targeted upon the White House and the historic Navy Yard. He told them too of the failed blast which was supposed to occur directly above Capitol Hill. The blast effects from the two others wiped Congress off the face of the earth anyway yet Peppermint explained that three explosions had been planned in case one of them had failed, as it had ‘unfortunately’ done so. The use of that word – unfortunately – caused a reaction in the faces of the DIA officers which he had first not understood. He had been talking about the issue from a professional point of view, a detached manner. It was their national capital whose destruction he referred to. Peppermint had apologised and the discussions had moved on from there with no overt ill will. It was something noted though by his handlers. Would a false defector, someone sent to tell lies, make an error like that to deceive those who he was supposedly betraying his country to and thus risk the chance of setting them against him personally? No, of course not. It told the DIA that he was real. The CIA had seen that as another deception, another twist in the maze of mirrors that was the maskirovka.

As to Washington, there had been several overflights of the city since by specially-outfitted U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. Post-attack air sampling had been done to analyse the contents of the radiation cloud that afterwards brought fallout to Maryland. Photographs and radar images had been taken too, looking down at the multiple Ground Zero locations. There were those two inside the District of Columbia itself but others outside at Andrews AFB and also Langley too. The information gleamed was important for intelligence purposes of various forms when it came to weapons effects and were compared to other U-2 missions flown above North Dakota plus Ellsworth AFB, Offutt AFB and Kansas City.

Away from the ground zero locations where the craters were in the ground – the airbursts had been low and caused far smaller craters than had they been surface detonations – other images of Washington were recorded. When studied, they showed a dead city. The initial thermonuclear detonation had been followed by the blast wave and the flash radiation before then afterwards there had been a firestorm which had raged unabated. Caught in all of that had been the people inside the city, those who lived there and those who worked in the nation’s capital. There were no signs of life from Washington. Particular attention was paid to the White House and Congress because there were nuclear shelters below each but from the air nothing could be observed which showed any sign of life. Electronic communications had been silent since the moment of attack and these images confirmed the hole in the ground where the White House shelter had been and the physical levelling of Capitol Hill. No one was left alive down there. If they hadn’t died on September 17th, they would have lost their lives in the following days and weeks.


The aerial pictures showed signs of life outside Washington and the nearby nuclear ground zeros. There were military personnel and medical teams active through the northern edges of Virginia and across Maryland. National guardsmen from several states – including Maryland’s 58th Infantry Brigade, a good unit whose presence in Colorado or Texas would have been very welcome – were on the ground along with FEMA personnel and the American Red Cross. There were security duties to undertake and a wave of urgent humanitarian need across large areas.

The soldiers were working with military policemen in guarding a series of cordons set up too because there were people who were trying to get into the ground zeros.

Looting of evacuated areas had already occurred but there were those who sought to enter the nuclear zones and recovery treasures hidden there. Some were wearing NBC suits – proper ones as well as crude attempts – and carrying hand-held radiation detectors; other travelled with no more than the clothes on their back, maybe a gas mask at best. These crazy people were out to find what they believed was abandoned inside. For their own sake, where possible they were stopped and detained. The cordon wasn’t fully-secure (the manpower wasn’t there for that) and there were some fools who slipped past. The fates which awaited them for going inside were not going to be good.

The US Government wanted to go into the ground zeros themselves too. There had already been the early dash to evacuate Bentsen from The Tank inside the Pentagon by helicopter before the second wave of radiation hit the facility and nuclear sampling done on the edges of the hot zones but further exploration was sought for the future. There would be no search-and-rescue missions for people but treasure hunts like those crazy people were doing. On one end of the scale this ranged from the federal facilities inside where there were documents and equipment which was wanted. The DIA’s new headquarters complex, partially-opened at Bolling AFB when the nuclear attack came though with much of the agency’s establishment still over in Virginia at Arlington Hall, was inside the outer cordon. At the other end, there was the partially-collapsed and burnt-out National Archives Building on Constitution Avenue. What was in there that was desired to be recovered? Oh, just such some historic artefacts such as the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Bill of Rights. Background radiation would make that a suicide mission even with full protection at this time but in the future, the United States was going to spend a lot of effort in hoping to recover those pieces of paper.



Mid November 1984:

The Soviet Twenty–Eighth Army had yet to clear the Texas side of the Red River of serious American resistance but the Central Front ordered the left wing of the field army to cross the water barrier into Oklahoma regardless. Those assigned troops on the right, still fighting near Gainesville, would continue the battle there, holding one half of the Seventh United States Army in-place. The rest of the American troops who’d returned from Europe were ordered to be destroyed by the advance made into Oklahoma on the way to the Great Plains deep in the American heartland.


Ahead of the attack on the Red River, paratroopers made an assault to open the way ahead. Soviet Airborne troops who’d seen action at the beginning of the war leading the assault into South Texas, the 103rd Guards Airborne Division, made an air-drop ahead of the ground assault into Oklahoma. Two regiments were used, one each making landings at Altus AFB and Lawton Airport. Both of those parachute assaults were fiercely contested in the skies and then on the ground. Several transport aircraft were knocked down and when the first battalion of each regiment landed at each airhead – the rest of their parent regiments were meant to be flown in rather than air-dropped – they came under intense defensive fire. The bombing runs made ahead of them had achieved nowhere near the required level of success against US Air Force ground personnel and Oklahoma national guardsmen. The 357th Regiment’s lead battalion failed to secure Altus and were driven off in an American counterattack, leading to a change mid-flight for the incoming follow-up battalion where they were going to have to jump rather the de-plane once on the ground. Over at Lawton, the 317th Regiment took control of the majority of the airport while suffering horrendous casualties and confirmation was sent for the second battalion to be air-landed. As the first of the transports came in to land, the Americans mounted a serious fightback and targeted those aircraft full of reinforcements with accurate and devasting fire: other transports had to then air-drop their cargoes of men rather than deliver them with what should have been much more safety by landing.

Altus and Lawton both lay in southwestern Oklahoma. Highway-62 connected them both and provided a lateral supply line behind the frontlines where the US II Corps fighting to stop the Twenty–Eighth Army as it made that assault on the river. They were each being used as forward airfields for air support missions in the Battle of the Red River. Taking them would have seen the Soviet Airborne tasked to exploit their position in the American’s immediate rear to launch attacks from behind and fatally undermine the II Corps. Soon enough, the tanks rolling north would then relieve the 103rd Guards Division. The plan was a good one and should have worked, considering the strength of American opposition on paper. Soviet intelligence summaries in regard to the defenders at Altus and Lawton were generally accurate too. They knew of the big Security Police detachment from the US Air Force (an organisation which had had a terrible war) at Altus and the strength of the national guardsmen at Lawton. With regards to the latter, the main unit of Oklahoma’s pre-war national guard, in the form of the 45th Infantry Brigade, had been lost in earlier battles for Texas. What was left was second-line units reinforced by recent and less-trained volunteers. The Soviets had believed the Americans would fight hard when the assault came but quickly lose. That turned out to be only half right. Neither the airbase to the west nor the airport to the east immediately fell to their complete control. Moreover, the 317th Regiment was fast in real trouble. Lawton Airport sat outside the small city after which it was named with Fort Sill over on the other side. That US Army garrison had recently been hit with a chemical weapons attack, one of the first blow-for-blow semi-strategic exchanges, right in the middle of the evacuation from there of the Artillery School. There were still troops there because of that, plus some tanks from a West Virginia national guard unit too: all of this unknown to Soviet reconnaissance efforts. The airport was fully retaken by the Americans and the men of a pair of two Soviet Airborne battalions (the third battalion had their air-drop cancelled and returned to Texas) left dead, prisoner or fleeing for their lives.

At Altus, the second and third battalions of the 357th Regiment all jumped from transports which survived American fighters to join those of the shot-up first battalion on the ground. There was a lake right in the middle of Altus, a patch of water where more than two dozen paratroopers heavily-laden with gear landed in and suffered the consequences of that. Others were scattered all around the town though there was an organised concentration soon enough around the small civilian airstrip to the north led by veteran officers who were quick to try and sort out the mess. As best as possible, men were gathered up by officers and sergeants into mixed units but still effective fighting forces. Altus had seen two thirds of its population leave in the preceding week and the rest didn’t cause a problem to the regiment which had the battle honour of Corpus Christi won on September 17th plus had gained further experience in combating armed resistance during anti-guerrilla sweeps through South Texas since then. The 357th Regiment moved to once again take the airbase which they had come here to seize, fighting their way there and then into it. Armed resistance from the airmen was as strong the second time as it had been the first but the Soviets had the numbers and combat experience. They had been stung by a counterattack using some light armoured vehicles the first time around but weren’t when they returned as those were quickly taken out with a lot of accurate RPGs from recovered weapons canisters. Altus returned to Soviet control and prisoners were rounded up, with many of them soon ‘shot while resisting’. The Soviet Airborne had their blood up and for a usually well-disciplined force, that was missing today. The killing stopped soon enough and what prisoners were left would soon be digging graves. Meanwhile, Altus was theirs yet a ruin. It was going to take far longer than expected to turn this place into a Soviet base.

The 103rd Guards Division was down to just one combat regiment now and Altus’ smashed-up state didn’t allow for a fast transfer of divisional assets into there. That small airfield nearby could take some transports but not that many due to its short runway. Reporting upwards through the Fifteenth Airborne Corps headquarters to the Central Front, the failure to secure Altus in a timely fashion but more so the loss of the 317th Regiment and Lawton Airport too saw punishment enacted from above. How could the ultimate mission of hitting the Americans through their real take place now? It couldn’t and therefore someone would have to pay. The divisional commander was relieved of duty and arrested by his political commissar for ‘wilful negligence’ and ‘cowardice in the face of the enemy’. The latter charge concerned how he’d been aboard one of the transports which had turned back from going to Lawton as that was where the divisional HQ was meant to be fast set up. He’d be shot by sunset by the KGB. It was bad day for him and the Soviet Airborne too: not something which had been expected.


While the fight was going on in the rear, the main battle raged along the river. The Twenty–Eighth Army came over near Burkburnett and Davidson. They went up against the II Corps in what was a fight which involved the use of gas by both sides once again.

Could the Soviets get to the airhead at Altus and also to retake what they’d lost at Lawton? Or would the Americans put a final stop to their repeated series of victories?



Mid November 1984:

The Americans did put a stop to the Soviets and their repeated series of victories. The US II Corps held the Red River and stopped the Twenty–Eighth Army from getting over properly and making an advance into Oklahoma to link up with their remaining paratroopers. It was a brutal fight, one where each side threw everything they had at it. Winning from each side meant everything, losing would mean disaster.

From the Soviet’s point of view, throwing everything at the fight meant the full range of a combined arms assault to win the fight. Fire power was key to that, the massed use of it to support the ground assault. Heavy howitzers, towed and self-propelled guns, fired from over back in Texas with shells pummelling the Americans. Most were high-explosive fitted with contact fuses though there were others which carried gas that was dispersed when they exploded in the sky. Rocket launchers aplenty were over in Texas too and they fired barrages of projectiles again and again across at the Americans in a sight to truly behold. There were strikes with tactical missiles too, these fired at identified American command posts detected by radio transmissions as well as the American’s own artillery forces. In the skies above, Soviet aircraft and armed helicopters were committed for close support missions. They rained bombs and shells down on those below, firing missiles of their own too. Before and during the ground assault, all of this external fire power was used to open the way for the advance northwards.

Davidson was a flank attack, a distraction effort. It was the shortest route to take over the Red River up to Altus where the surviving regiment of Soviet Airborne was yet the fight there was to gain American attention to take the defensive effort away from the main attack. A mixed brigade of Guatemalan and Revolutionary Mexican troops, with a small armoured component, attacked there. Soviet engineers helped to complete river crossings for these Latin American ‘allies’ to use though those engineers backed away once those were completed, allowing the assault to go on without them once the geographical barrier ahead was overcome. The Americans on the other side of the river fired on that crossing and then moved against those who came over into Oklahoma. Neither the Guatemalans nor the Mexicans with them stood a chance of getting very far. Davidson itself, a small town where any resident who had wanted to stay had been evacuated against their will, was the furthest the advance got. It was a death trap too. The Guatemalans out in front (a battalion of them supporting four Mexican units of the same size) moved to take that crossroads and faced national guardsmen defending it. These men were from Pennsylvania, with one of the 28th Infantry Division’s brigades. They let the Guatemalans move into Davidson and then hit them with everything they had while using covering fire to keep the Mexicans back. Davidson was levelled in a shelling to match the intensity of the Soviet barrage along the Red River. As the Guatemalans were left to die where they were, the men from Pennsylvania pushed on towards the Mexicans. Sensibly, those Mexicans who could run did so. They went back to the river… many not intending to stop until they got to another distant river, that being the Rio Grande. The Americans smashed through those who they caught up with, using their tanks and infantry carriers to go atop (latterly in places) the fleeing Mexicans and cutting down with gunfire any of those who decided to stop and try to make a stand. To the river crossings the Americans got. They secured them, both sides of the river, and then turned their guns back inwards facing the Mexicans who still ran their way. Hundreds more men were gunned down and then many more were shelled when they dropped to the ground. Only once victory was certain and the Mexicans offered no more resistance did the national guardsmen move in to start rounding up prisoners. Medical units moved in as well, aiming to treat what wounded they could get to. If the battle had gone the other way, there would have been no medical attention given to the Americans here if they lay wounded. They knew that but tried their best regardless: international law demanded it and just because it was being outrageously flouted by one side it didn’t mean the other had to too.

The Soviets had believed that part of either the 4th Armored or 6th Infantry Divisions would be diverted by the attack and Davidson, one which they had anticipated that the Guatemalans and Mexicans there could have gotten a lot further than they did. Intelligence pointed to the 28th Infantry being part of the II Corps but it was believed that part of that second-line formation would be in the rear tied up with the air-drops and the rest stretched out further west into the Texan Panhandle region linking up with the US XVIII Corps out there struggling to hold back the Nicaraguans. For them to show up at Davidson was a shock and made them question other information which they were sure they ‘knew’ too as they feared a deception. They were incorrect though. The air-drop at Lawton was defeated by other forces there and the one at Altus was to be met by the 28th Infantry’s 55th Brigade yet the approach by those who went over the river near Davidson became a priority mission ahead of Altus for that sub-unit. The 56th Brigade was already across in that part of Texas (moving ahead of Soviet expectations) and as to the remaining 2nd Brigade it was due to follow. The intelligence was correct, just the timing was off.

Those two other divisions within the II Corps were on the Oklahoma side of the Red River but positioned alongside each other back from the actual waterway stretching along the length of Highway-70 from Grandfield in the west to Waurika in the east. The Soviets were known to be over on the other side, concentrated around Burkburnett out ahead with more of their men back in the general Wichita Falls region. Forward defence on the river line was suicide and have robbed each American formation of their mobility. The Soviets wouldn’t attack everywhere, just in one or two specific places while making out as if they were coming over in far many more assaults. That huge artillery barrage, aided by air support, worked its way along the route of Highway-70 though with further impacts of the fire power used hitting points along the river to impact any forward troops the Americans had there: those were wasted fire missions. II Corps artillery units – a lot of heavy guns but no multiple-barrelled rocket launchers nor tactical missiles – had fired back at the Soviets to answer their barrage and the US Air Force had put a lot of aircraft in the sky… though never enough to answer the demands of those on the ground for air cover. The US Army troops waiting to move against the attack which would follow got hit hard by the strikes. It was the first taste in combat for these men. They’d been told what would be coming their way but being on the end of it was something else. ‘Lucky’ hits, if you wanted to think of it that way, struck them though most of the barrage couldn’t score those perfect direct impacts. The two divisions were spread out and dug into cover as best as possible. Each division was a mixed bag, stood up at the end of September from various other units initially on both sides of the North Atlantic. There were two Forward Brigades which had been in West Germany (one each from the 1st Infantry and 2nd Armored Divisions; the latter higher formation destroyed in Texas and the former out in the Texan Panhandle left short its third brigade) along with two Army Reserve brigades (from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania) and a further pair of training brigades stationed in Georgia and Kentucky which all formed the combat units of these new divisions. Supporting elements, including artillery, came from all over the place too. In addition, waiting with the 4th Armored and 6th Infantry for the Soviets to strike was the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, a unit which had come across from Britain. The Soviets thought that this Cav’ unit was down in Louisiana, mistaking a similar national guard unit there for them.

After the main part of the massed barrage of artillery and bombing was done with, the Twenty–Eighth Army sent its lead unit over the Red River. The 35th Motorised Rifle Division made multiple assault crossings – ones spread not that far apart – near to Burkburnett and came across zero opposition in doing so. The Soviets pushed onwards. They were to follow the course of Interstate-44, a highway which would lead to Lawton first then Oklahoma City beyond. A-10 attack fighters showed up soon enough, coming in extremely low and from the eastern flank to hit tanks and scout cars. Return fire from guns and missiles got a couple but not enough to bring the air attacks to a stop. The Soviets screamed for air support and got it. Unfortunately, the MiGs arrived when F-4s and F-16s arrived to join in with the A-10s. Half of the 35th Division was over the river and caught among a significant air attack with the assigned friendly fighters unable to keep the Americans off them. Their own air defences were targeted by those aircraft and were also joined by AH-1 Cobra helicopter gunships that the II Corps unleashed to fire at them from even lower altitudes than the US Air Force jets. The 6th Infantry moved into the fight, striking from the Soviet’s left. American tanks fired on the move and, as had been done at the Davidson fight, they went for the crossing points to cut off those already over the river all as part of an enveloping manoeuvre to destroy as much of the 35th Division as possible. The Soviets reacted better than the Guatemalans and Mexicans had done to this attempt, fighting as best they could to stop it and doing a lot of damage to the Americans. The 6th Infantry got tanks and infantry to some of the crossing points though, engaging more of the 35th Division on the pontoon bridges and also in both Oklahoma and Texas with direct fire.

The wheels came off the Soviet attack. They managed to keep a-hold of a tiny piece of Oklahoma and stop the Americans from rolling them up completely but the forward advance came to a halt. Half of the 35th Division was left back over in Texas when the Americans brought their helicopters in again with the AH-1s targeting what bridges hadn’t been already hit with tank fire by missile fire now and putting an end to them. The rest of that Soviet division, along with the 6th Guards Tank Division, was unable to get across. Soviet fighters eventually showed up in strength, driving off the American helicopters but the attack was over. The Americans brought in the rest of the 6th Infantry to try to crush those north of the river, men with their backs to the water and whom fast felt abandoned and all alone. The Soviets stubbornly held on and the Americans withdrew in a tactical fashion from what promised to be a bloody fight to allow for their artillery to smash the trapped Soviets rather than having their tanks knocked out and infantry killed in close-combat in a stand-still fight.

The II Corps had won the Battle of the Red River, employing in total only about half of their available force to it. The so-far unused brigade of national guardsmen from Pennsylvania were directed towards Altus to eliminate the Soviet airhead there now, not going to Amarillo as first planned. Meanwhile, Oklahoma wasn’t going to be taken by the Soviets. Other fights were taking place either side of the II Corps, both in unoccupied bits of Texas, and the results from each of those might or might not be as good as this, yet the II Corps had done what they had come here to do. That was to not just win but win handily.

*

During the fighting, there had been many aircraft shoot-downs with American and Soviet aircrews either killed in the skies above or ejecting and landing in both Oklahoma and Texas. One of those aerial kills was credited to a US Air Force F-4 Phantom which engaged what was thought to be a Soviet MiG-23 Flogger fighter-bomber with the pilot seen to eject. Soldiers from the 2nd Cav’ emerged from their covered positions near the town of Randlett when he came down. One trooper wanted to shoot him and came very close to before his sergeant pushed away the M-16 rifle barrel.

“C’mon, I’ll only shoot him once: nice and quick.”

“Let him spill his guts elsewhere,” the sergeant said, “and not here, will you, Private?”

The pilot wasn’t Soviet, neither had been his aircraft. When he was handed over to the regimental intelligence staff pending transfer to US Air Force custody, the pilot was found to be Bulgarian. There had been Bulgarian pilots who’d been shot down and captured before here on American soil, as well as East Germans and Czechoslovaks also coming from Eastern Europe. They had been men assigned to fly in Guatemalan and Nicaraguan air units alongside pilots from those countries, initially coming to Latin America in previous years on training missions as ‘international volunteers’. The volunteering bit was none of the sort: it was direct orders instead as part of state-ordered programs.

This Bulgarian soon found his way to the intelligence staff of the Twelfth Air Force. Captain Garvanov was given incentives to talk, some of which broke the spirit but not necessarily the letter of the law on international agreements when it came to prisoner interrogations. It wasn’t finger nail pulling but rather psychological means including a heck of a lot of lies told to the man to go with plenty of intimidation. He gave in and did spill his guts, metaphorically and not in the physical sense as he could have done in that field in Oklahoma. He was no volunteer flying aircraft in the markings of another socialist country. His home unit, the Bulgarian Air Force’s 25th Fighter-Bomber Aviation Regiment, was flying from a site which he identified on the map as Bergstrom AFB near Austin. He was able to point to a forward refuelling & rearming site in Central Texas which had had used on his final mission, one at Brownwood Airport too; this being somewhere that the US Air Force had yet to realise was in use in such a manner, allowing them to conduct a recon mission ahead of a later strike there. Captain Garvanov told them other things as well, smaller things which were either already known or needed to be confirmed like the Brownwood site. However, the most important thing, which went further up the chain of command, was when it came to how his unit had deployed all the way from Bulgaria to Texas via the Caribbean to come to the United States to fight. They’d been sent here from their base not that far from the Greek border and seen off with an appearance from the Bulgarian defence minister himself. Garvanov didn’t know of any other Bulgarian military deployments despite the urging of those questioning him to tell him what they said he must know. He didn’t and couldn’t say no matter what was done: he was a captain and those would be state secrets! All he knew was that the 25th Regiment, with pilots who all spoke Russian and flew aircraft built in the Soviet Union, were attached to the Soviet Twenty–Fourth Air Army for air operations in American skies.

The information on Garvanov and his fellow Bulgarians (another aircraft had been downed alongside his with the pilot not getting out but now there was a hunt underway to find the wreckage) from the Twelfth Air Force went to Texas Command who shared it with Western Command’s Ninth Air Force. There was still a lot of inter-service problems ongoing during the war between the US Army and the US Air Force – despite direct presidential involvement to ty and stop that – yet intra-service cooperation was excellent. They had someone in their custody who’d come down in Arizona, an East German who’d been flying a Sukhoi-22 Fitter. He appeared to have been flying for the Guatemalans though there had been confusion on him because no Guatemalan Fitter unit had been identified (forcing a search for them which hadn’t been fruitful), only a recently-arrived supposedly Soviet regiment of them flying from Davis-Monthan AFB. The Ninth Air Force interrogated him once again but he gave them nothing and wouldn’t fall for any tricks: held in custody for several days, he’d picked up from someone knowledgeable about how the Americans wouldn’t shoot him now he was in proper custody and so wouldn’t talk.

Were those fighter-bombers flying from near Tucson crewed by East German rather than a regiment of either Soviet or Guatemalan aircraft?

There had previously been those East German paratroopers, a few hundred of them, who’d been in action since the beginning of the war but that had been the sole commitment of Eastern European forces in North America. The Americans had regarded the commitment of forces from such allies as being unnecessary from the Soviet point of view. They used Latin American allies because they were in this hemisphere but their own and those of Warsaw Pact nations all had to come from the other side of the world. Why would the Soviets see Eastern European units deployed, taking up part of the strained logistics network that they had, when they could just send their own? Their allies offered nothing their own forces couldn’t in terms of capability and the only reason would be for propaganda purposes. However, there was nothing being done with announcements made on that issue. They were keeping it all a secret.

Something was up with this, something was being hidden. Getting to the bottom of this issue of participation of Eastern European allies in the Soviet’s fight inside the United States became a priority. For it to be hidden, it had to be important. For it to be important, it had to be something that the Soviets feared the Americans could find a way to exploit.



Mid November 1984:

To the east of the Soviet’s failed assault to get over the Red River, the other wing of their Twenty–Eighth Army remained engaged with the US VII Corps in the general area of Gainesville. The Americans had checked the Soviets and parried their initial attacks, but in came Soviet reinforcements. The US Army had got their own reinforcements there first though. As hard as they might try, and being close to being fought out through tiredness, the Soviet 207th Motorised Rifle Division couldn’t overcome the Americans. There were now a pair of US Army divisions, the 1st Armored & 8th Infantry, fighting them and they had the upper hand now. There remained the 25th Tank Division which the Soviets had brought to the fight too late and then kept back, now waiting for the 207th Division to open the way for them to charge forward by first giving the Americans a defeat. That defeat hadn’t come. Reconnaissance efforts – by air and electronic interception – told the Twenty–Eighth Army that the VII Corps was bringing forward their 3rd Infantry Division to join them soon enough. With all of those troops that the Americans were bringing to the fight, regulars in good formations, the Soviets wouldn’t be going anywhere further forward and there was a good chance that Americans would be able to mount strike of their own to drive them far back.

Orders for the 25th Division changed. In a change in doctrine (it wasn’t set in stone yet needed approval from on-high, all the way to the theatre command rather than just the field army and front headquarters), that tank division was sent forward out on its own. They were to no longer wait for the 207th Division to do what was increasingly looking like the impossible and break through around Gainesville to allow them to pass through there. The 25th Division would lead its own attack, taking a little diversion while doing so, and win this battle through a ‘daring thrust’.


Gainesville sat between the meandering course of the Red River located to the north and Lake Ray Roberts to the south. The American defensive position hadn’t been chosen specifically in advance where it had ended up, but they had found the perfect place to make use of local geography. The mass of Soviet tanks took advantage of that geography too. They shot forward on the American’s left flank and across rolling farmland through the top of Denton County. They were just to the south of the big artificial lake whose edges the Americans had anchored the end of their defence on. The 25th Division started to go around the lake in an anti-clockwise manoeuvre. Sanger was bypassed with gunfire coming from there from Texan volunteer militia answered with a rocket barrage but no stop was made: there was a long way to go and no time to waste. The movement of such a large force couldn’t be hidden from the Americans no matter how hard the Soviets tried once it got going and they spotted the mass of tanks and infantry carriers. The first concern was that they were aiming to enter the Dallas–Fort Worth area from the northwest and had chosen their attack to hit where the Third & Seventh United States Armies (each with their subordinate corps) met: a textbook location for a devastating strike. Panic erupted at the thought of this strategic attack. It was more tactical though. Denton was where the Soviets would have had to have gone through if that was to be the case, making use of the excellent road links there. The Soviets avoided Denton though, going east, not southeast. They went across open ground, rolling forward and looping around the edge of Lake Ray Roberts. It took the Americans some time to realise what was going on…

…but when they did, they reacted fast. The 3rd Infantry’s lead brigade, arriving in the VII Corps’ operational area ahead of the worst of the Soviet’s predictions on timing, was given an emergency divert to head the Soviet tanks off. Air support for the VII Corps’ forward engagements – the 207th Division had launched a head-on attack to keep the Americans busy – was diverted away. The Soviets had and continued to move fast, but the Americans were learning the hard way through this war that they would have to be just as fast or else lose.

At Pilot Point, as the Soviets were now turning north and close to the completion of their grand manoeuvre, they ran into the Americans. The 11th Cav’ was there first with a squadron of their recon troops ahead of the full brigade of tanks & armoured vehicles from the 3rd Infantry. An immense fight took place here, one where quickly almost everyone was involved. Both opposing units were bunched up, meeting their opponents too early for each to spread out. This hurt the Soviets more as they couldn’t fully get their whole division deployed into combat; the Americans were a smaller force and could do this better. The Americans engaged them on the ground and from the air. Soviet return fire was as expected – intense and lethal – but they had come to a stop and seen their planned enveloping attack headed off. The 25th Division had done all of this in two hours, starting at dawn. Once stopped, and through the rest of that day, they fought continuous engagements not just at the head of their advance but increasingly along their own southern-facing flank. Where they had attacked between the two American armies, that brought in forces from each. The Third Army released part of the 31st Armored Division to the fight from its defensive mission around Fort Worth. National guardsmen from Mississippi (the 31st Armored was a wartime formation with sub-units from Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee) in tanks tore into the Soviets while they were being engaged from the front too.

This wasn’t a suicide mission, not for a top-tier tank division like the 25th Division was meant to be. A withdraw was to made, a tactical retreat to stop what was going to turn into a defeat unless something was done. It was one authorised at the top just as the advance had been. Quicker than the Americans thought that their opponents could, the Soviets started to turn around and go back the way they had come. The first thought was that the Soviets were reorganising for another attack, trying to open another flank strike, but the retreat was then seen for what it was once it got going and off the tanks went back west at speed… leaving infantry units trailing behind. The 25th Division’s forward attack had pushed it to near the top of the US Air Force’s air tasking order but its retreat guaranteed it reached the pinnacle of that. A Soviet tank division on the retreat was something not seen before and probably wouldn’t be again for a while as far as the Americans were concerned. They fast threw every aircraft available at this with the Twelfth Air Force being aided by several cells of B-52s from the Eighth Air Force each with bellies full of bombs. The Soviets moved fast but as they did, bombs were rained down upon them as more aircraft joined in. The darkness they had used for concealment did them no good either: it only hampered them as sub-units got lost all over the place and fell victim to air strikes. Orders came for the American ground units to hold back – they weren’t happy to not be allowed to chase – and let the air power do the work. It was a free fire zone due to the open countryside below and friendly fire from above wasn’t desired.

Despite American hopes, the whole 25th Division wasn’t lost when it retreated back past Sanger. Many loses had been inflicted though, crippling one of its tank regiments and seeing its motorised rifle regiment nearly completely destroyed. On the other side of that town, which this time the Soviets went through with a vengeance to destroy resistance inside, there was the deep interlocking ground-based air defence network which gave protection from the air. An escape was made. Meanwhile, it was understood that the gamble hadn’t paid off for the Soviets. An extraordinary bloody nose for the Twenty–Eighth Army, a day after they had got another one in the Battle of the Red River, came to them when failure was met to get around behind the VII Corps like they had tried. As can be expected, this wasn’t something that was going to be ignored by the higher-ups.

Late November 1984:

Since the war had started, there had been a wide range of efforts made from individuals, organisations and nation states worldwide to bring it to an end. If a full peace couldn’t be gained, then a ceasefire or a truce was sought. Diplomacy was argued was a far better manner in which to settle the conflict rather than more deaths. There were serious attempts, but there were also games played. Some of those involved in the peace attempts were out to gain something for themselves or to attract attention, ruining the good intentions of others so too involved.

The United Nations Security Council had four of the five permanent members of the Security Council and three of the ten non-permanent members involved in the global conflict. Naturally, this made any progress which came out of the UN building in New York from other members to seek peace impossible. Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and then later China when it entered the war were those four nations which had veto power on anything that the UN might wish to say and do at a Security Council level. Further members on and not on the top-level body without that veto power were participants in the conflict, fighting on both sides. Other countries within the UN couldn’t get anything done through the organisation because there were repeated efforts underway by countries and groups of countries to win support from others and either bring them into the war or gain their favouritism. Peace was the last thing on the mind of some. The negativity across the UN was matched by criticism of the UN from outside. There was an attempt made by the Soviets and their allies to have the UN relocate from New York, accusing the United States of using the location for their own ends to undermine UN activities. This was opposed by not just the Americans but by other countries in addition to much of the UN secretariat – its administrative set-up – as well. As debates took place on that, a move which some other countries started to think might be a good idea less New York eventually suffer the same fate as Washington and Leningrad, any progress on trying to work towards the UN getting involved in bringing the war to an end were wholly side-lined: diplomats in New York worried about their own skin.

Other international groupings, multi-lateral trade organisations but also a few trans-national companies too, tried to add their input into stopping the ongoing war. Religious groups added their weight to the same efforts. Likewise, private individuals with international influence butted in too. The world war affected so many people and their interests across the globe. There was a desire from all over the place to bring the fighting, the killing and all of the destruction to an end. Nuclear apocalypse was another real fear. The initial use of such weapons between the two superpowers, and then the later Soviet-Chinese exchanges, had shown the true horror of such weapons to everyone, more than decades of words about weapons affects could ever do. Where great cities had once stood and millions of people had lived, there were now just holes in the ground and complete emptiness. Every day that the war continued, it was believed that the chance of even more cities, these across the globe, would eventually suffer the same fate. The nuclear fears were those which pushed the actions of several nation states, neutrals in this war, to try to end the war. Refugees, the collapse of much of international trade and the fear that they would inevitably themselves be drawn into the conflict when everyone had to pick a side when it came down to it only added to this.

France, speaking on behalf of the EEC and much of Western Europe, was at the forefront of early efforts with this. Neutrality had been declared at the beginning of the war by France and they tried to stop other countries from entering – thus expanding the war – while at the same time keeping themselves and as many neighbours as possible out. French diplomats were active at the UN (France was that fifth permanent member of the Security Council) but were left exceeding frustrated there and moved to afterwards focus elsewhere away from direct intervention in peace efforts to instead with other diplomatic initiatives with regards to refugees and trying to keep international trade ongoing as best as possible without interference from belligerent nations. However, the diplomatic activities of France failed due to its actions to keep itself out of the war (with intelligence-led security initiatives upsetting other nations) and then the verbal clashes with Soviet representatives in Strasbourg when Soviet approaches for a Euro-Soviet trade agreement fell apart. France had been doing so much and in the end they couldn’t maintain this position of great influence among many neutral nations. France was acting for itself and others became aware of that. Support given to the United States in helping to evacuate American forces from Western Europe with haste and in good order so they could go off to fight back home may have won American approval but Soviet diplomatic complaints on this did have a point: it shouldn’t have been done if France was claiming to be a true neutral. After Strasbourg, and then the Soviet-backed terror attack on a West German nuclear power plant, Paris and Moscow exchanged further strong words and even threats. Acting internationally to try and bring an end to the war was something France could no longer do when the Soviets and their allies refused to deal with France in anyway. Thus, France returned its focus back to Western Europe, doing everything to keep the continent out of the war but an armed camp ready to stop any invasion coming west.

India and Sweden were neutral nations whose international influence with diplomacy failed to make headway as the two of them sought to get the opposing sides talking. If the Americans and the Soviets could start talking, then there was a good chance that the war would come to a stop before it expanded even further than it already had. That thinking from the governments in New Delhi and Stockholm wasn’t complicated but putting the idea into practise was. The Americans and the Soviets each said that the other had attacked them first and pointed to all that the other things had done to them. The number of allies that each had, all treated as equal partners by the superpowers even when many were either vassals or (to be blunt) not very important in the grand scheme of things, only added to this complication. New York and Moscow each demanded that the considerations of their allies be considered when it came to initial talks. Multiple false starts came with Indian and Swedish peace efforts. America had issues with Soviet influence in India, thus Indian sincerity as a true neutral, and the Soviet negative position on capitalist Sweden with their ties to the United States destroyed these efforts from these two countries to bring peace to the world.

Switzerland was a nation recognised a true neutral. It was a capitalist state which the Soviets did have a negative opinion of when it came to politics, but on a diplomatic level, they were willing to listen to the Swiss. Swiss sincerity was recognised as something useful too for they knew that they would be honest brokers. The United States would work with the Swiss too: knowing too that they were honest brokers, even if sometimes a little too patronising when it came to just how honest and trustworthy their diplomatic efforts could be and near-lecturing the Americans on what they expected when it came to respect of that. The Swiss had from the very start been out to bring an end to the conflict. World peace was a lofty aim but more so stopping the war from expanding to their country – in an age of nuclear weapons, which had been used already, Swiss defences weren’t like they were in previous world wars – was the primary goal for Switzerland as a nation. The country was offered as a site for peace talks to take place within. Geneva was a preferred location for that. The security of any talks would be ensured and Switzerland would act either as middlemen or on the side-lines.

Getting the warring parties to stop fighting was the ultimate goal though initial Swiss diplomatic efforts moved to secondary aims. They were attempting to lay the groundwork for the primary goal in this. Foreign diplomats and innocent civilians caught in belligerent nations on the opposing sides when war began were where the Swiss started with. There had been no exchanges of those, as had been the case in previous conflicts. The Swiss pushed for their transfer through neutrals. This didn’t include civilians captured on occupied territory though, including the large numbers of Americans, Chinese, South Koreans, Norwegians and Portuguese. Parts of each of those countries were occupied with millions (far less in the case of Norway and Portugal) caught behind the lines. The United States and its allies wouldn’t budge on this matter, regarding it as a matter of principle. They didn’t equate the value of smaller numbers of diplomats, tourists, students and businessmen over the civilians in occupied territories. The opening Swiss plan here to get talks going came unstuck on this matter when at first the idea of diplomatic exchanges had been thought to be something simple to do.

Diplomatic agreements of any kind looked doomed.


However, the matter of civilians returned when it came to the use of chemical weapons. These were first employed in South Korea and then Britain and Japan too followed by the later use of such weapons in China and finally in Mexico and the United States. The worldwide reaction to this was one of horror. Denials were made from the Soviet side that they had done so with regards to the attacks in Britain and Japan (saying nothing on the matter of the Korean Peninsula and then China) while they asserted that the Americans had used those weapons first in North America. From the Allies, the use of chemicals was justified as legitimate retaliation. A proposal was made by the Swiss that no more chemicals be used anywhere in the world against either civilians and military personnel. It looked like a doomed effort when the North American exchanges became so frequent and they were no longer tit-for-tat attacks. From seemingly nowhere though, the Swiss started to receive a willingness from the Americans and the Soviets – speaking on behalf of their allies too, so they each claimed – to bring to an end the chemical attacks. This was jumped upon. Invites were sent for representatives to come to Geneva and they did. No face-to-face talks took place so the Swiss acted as middlemen. An agreement was made on November 21st to stop them yet there was one condition to that: China wasn’t covered. There had been another nuclear exchange, this time within China on a tactical level and with nuclear weapons came chemicals as well. The situation there was a mess and as that happened, the chemical deal about to be agreed in Geneva was taking place. It was about to fall apart yet by that point, the opposing sides had put a lot of effort into this, each for their own reasons. Usage of chemical weapons in China was left out of the agreement to not use them anymore. That wouldn’t bode well at all for future US-China relations and the Soviets would be make sure to exploit that how best they could.

Without wanting the other side to know the details of why, both the United States and the Soviet Union had the wish to end the use of such weapons. Chemical attacks had done neither of them much good. It had gained them nothing overall that they could see. Neither Britain nor Japan (despite some wobbles with the latter) had dropped out of the war and Soviet intelligence was aware that the Americans were bringing nerve gases into Japan ready to be used against the Soviet coast. Their civilians couldn’t be protected just like those in those two countries which they had attacked with gas beforehand. On the battlefield in North America, the use of gas by the Americans had killed many thousands of troops from the Soviet’s allies rather than their own. The lives of such weren’t valued highly in a humanitarian sense yet those men were needed to hold the line ahead of the delayed arrival of Soviet reinforcements. If they kept dying like they were, soon there would be none left! Furthermore, they would be removing from the Americans a weapon that they had made good use of and one which was feared was forcing the situation on the battlefield towards the stalemate that the Soviets didn’t want. The Americans agreed under pressure from their own allies so that their civilians wouldn’t be killed like they had been before. In addition, of more importance to New York was that they had seen the lack of effect that the chemicals used had on Soviet troops. Yes, they were killing Latin American soldiers but so many of them were dying on American soil where often there were ‘collateral casualties’ in the form of American civilians. Another reason was that American stocks of chemical weapons were running very low. They were keeping this hidden but couldn’t eventually do so when they physically ran out. The moment was right for each to agree to take these weapons out of the battle. Once agreed, pushed by the Swiss to get on with it, each then started to consider why the other side had backed down like they had. They would start looking for the reason why. That was another issue though. For now, the use of gases was going to cease.

Still with no agreement on diplomats and civilians, but with a deal struck on chemical weapons that each side was fast to honour, the Swiss tried their luck. They pushed for a worldwide ceasefire. There wasn’t much hope that one could come, especially with regards to China complicating everything, but the Swiss made the attempt. The head Soviet diplomat in Geneva put forward a proposal on this matter. His country was willing to see a ceasefire occur at once on the ground in North America. A stop to the fighting could occur very quickly if the Americans agreed to that. Peace could be settled later but for now a stop to the fighting could easily happen. This was put to the United States representative. Within hours, there came an immediate refusal to this. It would have meant to an end to all of the fighting and all of the killing but… it would too have meant utter disaster for the future of the United States. They would have no longer been able to fight back against those on their soil. The Americans wanted to liberate their country and continue the fight them onwards through the Western Hemisphere. Territory of their allies was under foreign occupation too. A sudden stop wasn’t going to happen!

The Soviet offer wasn’t serious. It was part of an important diplomatic strategy. They expected the Americans to deliberate more than they did and get themselves in a confused state before a rejection, but a rejection was expected for just that reason. Without as much time as hoped to take advantage, they still made their move putting into play what they intended to with the whole thing though. The Peace Committee in El Paso released the Soviet offer and the rejection from New York… spinning it in the manner as explicitly directed by the KGB personnel who controlled their every word and action. The rejection was released to the rest of the world too. The Soviet Union, a victim of an American nuclear attack launched during an internal United States coup d’état, was willing to see peace occur – that was how it was all put – but this had been callously refused by American warmongers. They were fast doing this, just as planned. The Americans struggled to react and the internal politics of it came into play. Explanations were given to the American people that there could be no end to the fighting unless all American soil was evacuated from by the invaders or liberated in battle: afterwards, liberation would have to come to Latin America as well. Overseas, the Soviet offer was agreed by the Allies to be a trick to affect the United States domestically and it gave them nothing either. Their countries had been attacked and some had territory under occupation. Britain and Canada at the head of this, though also smaller nations like Norway and the Icelandic government-in-exile, made firm their message to New York that this couldn’t be accepted: positions put forward formally even after the rejection in Geneva.

The Soviet message continued to be exported worldwide though. The United States had thrown away the chance for peace without even being willing to give the possibility of a stop to all of the killing a listening. The war would continue.



Late November 1984:

The last ship which had successfully landed its cargo at a Soviet-held port in the Alaskan Panhandle had done so back at the very beginning of the month. When outbound, heading back towards the Soviet Union for what would be a dangerous Pacific voyage, that ship was sunk by a lurking American submarine within sight of the port of Sitka. Other ships which had tried since to make it to Alaska had either been sunk or burnt-out far out to sea. Trans-Pacific flights in and out of occupied territory had ceased as well. It had been two weeks since the last successful transport aircraft had made it here to bring in supplies with no more managing to follow in the face of American air activity. The supply line back home had been forcibly cut and Soviet forces on the ground in Alaska were on their own. They were also under attack too with an effort to completely finish them off.

British and Canadian troops had last month driven the smaller Soviet forces off Canadian soil and back into the top of the Alaskan Panhandle. It was from their initial landing sites located there that the Soviets had come over the border aiming to reach and secure the communication nexus at Whitehorse, only to fail at the last hurdle. They’d been chased back and that retreat had been costly indeed. A delay had been forced to halt the attack against them, with the Soviets doing everything that they could to keep the British and Canadians back, but if they were going to manage to keep that up, they had to have supplies and reinforcements brought in. That had ceased and so did the halt against the restarting Allied attack. American ground forces remained where they were elsewhere in Alaska, guarding against other Soviet incursions (something thought pretty impossible in both London and Ottawa due to how the naval war in the Pacific had gone plus the China War), but their air and naval support was invaluable for the British-Canadian assault. For the men fighting on the ground, to be fighting and dying for American soil while their own soldiers stayed out of that was something that stirred some strong feelings. They were told how important it was that they fought here and the Americans were elsewhere in an important role… etc etc. That all sounded great until you were the one getting shot in the gut and dying in the snow for some godforsaken barrel place at the end of the world.

Haines and Skagway, the Soviet airheads for entry, were where the advances drove towards. American air power gave support to this alongside RAF and Canadian aircraft. The Soviets fell back towards where they had come in. The 11th Airmobile Brigade and the 345th Guards Parachute Regiment had a torrid time during their withdrawal yet neither the British and Canadians had an easy time either. It had started snowing as the temperature had dropped. The terrain wasn’t favourable to move across on foot but neither in vehicles either. Non-combat injuries and illness came as frequent as war wounds did. Everyone was tired and pushed to their limits with some men just wanting to lay down and give up. No, there was no time for that. Fight! That those involved did. The British made the biggest headway, pushing further ahead than they fought they might be able to. The Soviet withdrawal on the western side of the Allied attack went just as quick though. The 14th Infantry Brigade raced after the Soviet airmobile troops and chased them all the way down to Haines. Reconnaissance from above had showed the gathering of small aircraft and light watercraft there. It wasn’t reinforcements arriving to shore up the Soviet position: it was preparations for an evacuation to elsewhere in the Alaskan Panhandle. Covered by American fighters, RAF Jaguars on a strike mission got into the Haines area and bombed some of those aircraft and ships. What the British would have liked to have done would have been to insert men there ahead of the main body of Soviets falling back and trap them. They lacked the assault transportation to do so though. All they could do was hope that the air attack had done enough damage to make sure that no evacuation could come. Enough damage hadn’t been done though. The 11th Brigade managed to get some troops out before there was a final fight for Haines. Those who escaped went off towards Juneau though those who didn’t get away fought a final battle with the British while under the promise that the aircraft and ships would return for them. That lie kept them fighting until the very end. The British tried to force a surrender before them, wishing to avoid a costly last fight, but were left frustrated by Soviet refusal to see the writing on the wall. The final battle was a British victory yet the cost in terms of human lives really wasn’t worth it for the smashed up Haines.

Over at Skagway, the 345th Regiment fell back to there with the Canadians in pursuit. The Canadian 1st Infantry Division was just as eager to avoid a final fight against a trapped enemy like the British were. They made the effort to try to get the Soviets to see sense in their situation and that seemed to pay off when, under a white flag, a Soviet officer came forward asking for talks on the possibility of a ceasefire. There was some concern was expressed at this approach yet it seemed like a genuine offer. It was nothing but a ruse de guerre. Time was given for much of the 345th Regiment to get to Skagway and get out of there. They were bound for Juneau as well and almost all of them would make it. The ‘senior Soviet officer’ whom the Canadians had been talking too was nothing more than a captain who commanded a few dozen men to be taken into custody. So much for bagging the prize of a whole regiment of elite Soviet Airborne soldiers! A last bloody fight at Skagway had been avoided, just as everyone wanted, though in the manner which left the Canadians mightily embarrassed at having been duped in the manner that they had.


The Soviet evacuations to get some men away from Haines and from Skagway most of those there left control of the northern part of the Alaskan Panhandle in Allied hands. The Alaskan Panhandle was huge though, an archipelago which in length was almost the same as Scotland was running north-to-south. There were few roads, none providing any serious internal connections, and a forest-covered (now with added snow, more of which was going to fall over the coming months) inhospitable interior. The coast was full off off-shore islands, most of those being barren, and with Soviet troops at key blocking points. The only way for the British and Canadians to follow the Soviets was to use air and sea transport too, making contested assaults against defended points. Going overland, across the US-Canadian border and trying to attack in Soviet-held areas in that manner was impossible due to the impassable terrain there.

There was no desire to do this.

Soviet control over central and southern parts of the Alaskan Panhandle was secure with their control of Juneau, Sitka, Wrangel and Ketchikan. There was most of a division of motorised rifle troops there – now joined by those who escaped from the north – and while they were cut off from supplies, the geography of where they were located in defensive positions meant that they could hold on because they wouldn’t have to burn through fuel and ammunition in combat. Food would be an issue for them, medical supplies too, but they wouldn’t have to fight and thus face defeat. Neither the British nor the Canadians wanted to do down there. The Americans had the public position of wanting to see all of their territory retaken but even then they didn’t push for this, not least until next spring when the New Year would bring the full effects of American military mobilisation into play. Until then, they intended to keep up the air attacks and the naval activity (mining of all sea approaches especially) and conduct special forces raids throughout the winter as well as aiding Patriot groups – the resistance – too. The Soviets weren’t going anywhere and could be kept pinned down and busy for the time being.

This decision made to let the Soviets wither on the vine and allow for a stalemate to develop meant that the large numbers of Allied troops already in the fight and preparing to move forward wouldn’t be needed. The British had recently established a divisional headquarters – the 5th Infantry – to control their 14th Brigade and Canadian Militia units assembling inside Canada moving towards the fight. They had been thinking that the Soviets would make a longer fight of it and not run like they did and make a pursuit as near-impossible as it was. The situation on the ground had changed and so did their desire to keep their own troops here on what would be winter garrison duty. Such men, tired but with combat-experience, were too valuable to waste on that. The Canadians were thinking the same thing. They had so much of the regular forces here along with Militia units unbloodied behind them, the latter in quite the number due to full mobilisation of reservists across British Columbia and the Prairie provinces. The fight that their 2nd Infantry Division was involved in down in Colorado had seen significant loses taken to their forces there. Ottawa wanted to redeploy the majority of these troops rather than see them on garrison duty to have them replaced with Militia units. Pulling everyone out and sending them far away, leaving behind weaker forces to contain an unbeaten occupying force, even if it was cut off and couldn’t go nowhere, was a risky proposition. The Soviets had shown that they were capable to deception and the Allies thus checked & rechecked their intelligence gathered on the Soviet supply situation to make sure that this could be done without it coming back to bite them in the behind soon afterwards. It could be done as long as caution was employed. Some regulars were left behind with those Canadian reservists and the Americans made it clear that they didn’t intend to be looking the other way over the coming months while they got ready to retake what was theirs as soon as they were in the position to do just that.

The fight in the Alaskan Panhandle was over. That partially-built British divisional headquarters was merged into the Canadian set-up followed by the 14th Infantry Brigade too. The joint British-Canadian force – an over-sized division of experienced troops – marched away from Alaska, first heading to Whitehorse back inside Canada. This began their long redeployment. They were off to fight elsewhere against in North America soon enough.



Late November 1984:

The Berlin Brigade would be credited with saving the ICBM silos in Colorado from being overrun and stopping the Soviet Army cold. They arrived and won the day, achieving a miracle. Such a claim wasn’t necessarily false but it was far from completely true.

At the end of October, France jabbed a finger in the eye of the Soviets and flew American and British troops out of West Berlin while leaving their own there. This action taken by the French had come in response to the diplomatic clash between Paris and Moscow followed by the attack in West Germany against a nuclear power plant. Air France had flown back and forth to Tegel & Tempelhof using Airbus’ & Boeings. Thousands of soldiers had been flown out in a matter of days. With them had come weapons and light equipment though the aircraft used had been configured for airline use and not for freight. A lot more equipment had been left behind, including armoured vehicles, as well as major stocks of ammunition. In theory, those men could at a later date fly back there and meet up with all that they had left behind… in theory. After transiting first through Frankfurt and Paris, the US Army soldiers had changed planes (the British Army men had headed to the UK). They boarded US civilian airliners which flew them home before they ended up at Fort Riley in Kansas. These men with the Berlin Brigade were good soldiers though trained and outfitted for a different role than the majority of the rest of the US Army. Coming home with little equipment – it wasn’t like it was going to be shipped to them via East Germany – threw a spanner in the works for their immediate deployment into battle. They needed to be reequipped and in a different manner than what they had operated with when in West Berlin. This took time, something that the Berlin Brigade (now redesignated as the 174th Infantry Brigade) soldiers were frustrated about. They had to wait and wait. Fort Riley was home to the 1st Infantry Division, a formation short a brigade and in Texas over near Amarillo. They could have gone to join them– and the 1st Infantry really needed them – though were directed to Colorado once Denver happened and the Soviets pushed past that city.

The 174th Infantry Brigade had a full battalion of tanks, three battalions of infantry and a whole battalion of self-propelled guns when it entered the fight raging in northern Colorado. The soldiers who’d come all the way from West Berlin had linked up with reservists and pre-war recently-discharged veterans to complete their numbers. It was larger than other brigades in US Army service (comparable to those in British and Canadian service) and the expectation was high for them. The XVIII Corps really needed them to do well and that they did. They fought to bring to a stop the Soviet 120th Guards Division when it moved into attack again. However, this wasn’t done alone. The US 4th Infantry Division was on the same battlefield and so too was a lot of American airpower. The Seventeenth Air Force was the latter and it was them who could arguably have been responsible for the victory won which the former Berlin Brigade would get all of that credit for.

Based in West Germany, the 17 AF had suffered a reduction in combat strength under the Kennedy plan to slowly disengage from the decades-long stand-off across the Iron Curtain in the divided Germanies with the Soviets. They’d lost one combat wing with plans to remove another; the supporting infrastructure had stayed in place though mirroring what had occurred with the US Army Europe. When war had broken out everywhere but in Germany, 17 AF had seen its combat units fast return to the United States and reassigned to both the Ninth & Twelfth Air Forces as they fought on the western and eastern sides of the North American battlefield. Selected supporting units were sent after the combat units at speed though the majority lagged behind. These took longer to move and were lower down the list of priorities. The plan had been to fully dismember the 17 AF, just like the Third Air Force out of Britain had been, to support the 9 AF & 12 AF, and use those late-arriving assets to reinforce the other commands or replace losses. There had been a push-back against this from various senior officers within the US Air Force as a whole: the 17 AF was staffed and equipped (away from the frontline combat units) to fight a war in cooperation with the US Army on the modern battlefield in a manner which neither of the 9 AF nor 12 AF were. In the war’s opening months, such comments had been near ignored. The US Air Force was scrambling to fight a war which they were unprepared for and the 17 AF was still over in Europe or in transit. Their immediate task was to work with what they had, fighting the battle in front of them. From the beginning, the US Air Force had had a terrible war and only added to that by spending too much time playing the blame game with the US Army when things – repeatedly – kept going wrong over the battlefield as the two services fought their own wars. They’d been told repeatedly to stop arguing and work together though that had taken time to cease. Things had changed in Texas recently where the 12 AF got its act together though it hadn’t been perfect. On orders coming from Raven Rock, starting on November 21st, the 17 AF was tasked to stand-up as a combat command, taking charge of the air battle above Colorado in the place of the overstretched 12 AF in that region. This had been something which had been pushed for for some time with the proven issue that the 12 AF was struggling to cover such a wide area – from the Gulf of Mexico coast to the Rockies – and the 17 AF had arrived from Europe ready to step in. It wasn’t just a matter of convenience but an understanding that the 17 AF would be doing things a different way.

That they did. With immediate effect, the 17 AF began fighting what was deemed the ‘AirLand Battle’. This was something controversial, a wholly different concept of warfare on the modern battlefield linking air and ground forces completely together in a tactical fight but also stretching towards the semi-strategic mission too far beyond the frontlines. Under Rumsfeld, the Pentagon hadn’t liked the idea and there had been problems in getting it approved through Muskie. When Bentsen had taken over as secretary of defence, he had given it the green light. The doctrinal change had been contested within the US Air Force and also Congress yet the 17 AF had been practising (in training exercises) the AirLand Battle when over in Europe. The 17 AF had their liaison and operations staffs with the XVIII Corps and Seventh United States Army HQs ready for the moment that were allowed to start operations and that couldn’t have come a moment too soon.


North and northeast of Denver, the US Army and the US Air Force fought together on the battlefield. They gave the Soviets something which they hadn’t seen before when it came to the level of cooperation shown. It was something that the Soviets knew about – the open debates on the wisdom of the AirLand Battle had been plentiful – but had yet to occur and they were confident that as the fighting had gone their way before and the Americans had been acting foolishly, they would continue to do so. Victory disease is what they had. That cost them dear.

The 174th Infantry took on the Soviet’s 120th Guards Division head-on and brought their attack to a halt. Forward air controllers were all over the place and the air strikes struck on the frontlines and through the rear. The Soviets were brought to their knees by what came from above. Their rolling anti-air cover, something which to keep functioning while moving was extremely difficult, was a focus for the US Army to knock out to allow the 17 AF to get at them. This wasn’t about hurting them for the future, bringing in the ‘war-winning’ air attack, but to stop them right now so that those on the ground could tear them apart. What the soldiers from West Berlin didn’t finish off, the 4th Infantry did when they moved in afterwards. In a battle lasting an evening, a night and the following morning, a complete Soviet division was near-eliminated as the Americans won a fantastic victory. The US Army had cut those hurting knees away. Surviving parts withdrew out of the fight, escaping the torment, because the AirLand Battle concept had its limits and wasn’t fully complete (some mistakes were made, especially towards the end in the confusion of a long, overnight fight) but enough was done.

The Americans pushed on afterwards, heading towards the Nicaraguans between them and Denver. From out of the city, the 82nd Airborne Division attacked from behind, squeezing the Nicaraguans in between the two. 17 AF assigned aircraft rolled-in, dropping bombs and making strafing runs with cannons. The Nicaraguans couldn’t escape like some of the Soviets had been able to though as they had no room to manoeuvre. The Americans had done a little too well in keeping them fixed and smashed into an immovable barrier. There was a semi-circle of soldiers surrounding Denver on three sides and a lot of them. Their offensive combat capability was wiped out and this was a bit of a problem. They were blasted and blasted again, hit from above, in front and behind and had nowhere to go. The Americans needed to see the Nicaraguans on the move to do to them what they had just done to the nearby Soviets. The Nicaraguans couldn’t move. Casualties mounted as the AirLand Battle doctrine showed its limitations and the attacks were eased off in the manner which they did. If the Nicaraguans refused to budge and taking them on when they were in a defensive position refused to work, then the Americans would have to advance elsewhere. They went south, fighting less-dense numbers of Nicaraguans down the eastern side of Denver, going the opposite direction along the same route that the Nicaraguans had come and the Soviets had followed. Buckley AFB was retaken but more Nicaraguans were run into past there. Just how many men had they brought north? Every able-bodied man in their country?

The numbers of fighting men and the mass of weaponry which the Nicaraguans were using in a dug-in fashion brought the American attack to a halt. They had been stopped but not driven off nor beaten. Denver’s siege lines weren’t broken yet the men manning them had been given a pasting. There had been a failure for the 82nd Airborne to break a hole through, to link the fight inside with the one outside and that was eventually the deciding factor which brought the offensive to a halt. Out in the open and on the move, the Americans had been able to achieve a wonder but not been as successful afterwards in a slower, less-spacious fight. This wasn’t over yet the situation with Denver was now an effective stalemate. Outside of the city though, the threat to the ICBM silos – with all of the consequences which came from that – was over with and the Soviets given a defeat which would reverberate all the way back to Moscow and inside the Kremlin.

It could be said that a turning point had been reached with the war inside North America, one more important than the victories on the Red River and over in California. This was something different to what had happened elsewhere.



Late November 1984:

Late in the month, US Marines clashed with Mexican troops on the border between California and Baja California. It wasn’t those who held allegiance to Revolutionary Mexico that men with the 1st Marine Division exchanged gunfire with. Instead, it was men from Democratic Mexico – serving the interests of the Tijuana Government – that the clashes took place with. Right along the straight dividing line between the two countries, which hadn’t been an avenue of attack for the September invasion, short but violent instances of fighting took place. The two opposing sides should have been allies though politics had dictated that they were co-belligerents. In New York and Tijuana, there was talk of formalising relations and working together. On the ground between the two Californias, killing of those on the other side was the focus. The clashes were accidental and not authorised from on high. The fog of war brought them about. Feelings were already running extremely high after Mexico had been the staging point for the invasion – plus a significant part of the surprise nuclear attack – and in response Mexico City had been subject to a nuclear attack of its own. Recent American use of chemical weapons south of the border, in territory of Revolutionary Mexico, had exasperated that. To many Americans, Mexicans (no matter what their political allegiance) were the enemy; the same was thought by the majority of Mexicans towards the United States. This fighting took place when the US Marines were fighting to root out Cuban stragglers who were trying to avoid capture and Mexican efforts to stop Cuban forces crossing over into the (small) part of their country which they held. Local commanders on the ground, far below general officer rank, decided that the border line was involatile and no one from the outside could cross it. The Mexicans said that the Americans crossed over while the Americans claimed that the Mexicans had fired across it. Those in senior positions trying to work out afterwards who was right and who was wrong believed their own people yet were aware that in the fog of war, things like this were always going to be difficult to get to the bottom of. The three incidents of serious engagements – up to platoon level and where the border was crossed each way – and twice as many more smaller instances of cross-border shooting left just short of a hundred dead: sixty plus Mexicans and three dozen Americans. As to those Cubans who were the root cause of this, neither side picked very many up near the border at all. When commanders got involved, they shut down the shooting and met with ranking members on the other side to arrange for localised truces. There was still blame and accusations though several wounded were exchanged and handshakes arranged to give one’s word to the other that no more crossing of the frontier would occur. Generals and then politicians found out and there was a lot of high drama though the local truces held: all could agree that why the other had killed some of their men, they were meant to be fighting their real enemies.

These unfortunate events on the border aside, the US Marines continued with their mission in Southern California and were joined by national guardsmen with the 47th Infantry Division which pushed down from Orange County and towards San Diego. They fought other Cuban stragglers on the way and secured a firm link between the I Marine Amphibious Force and the IV National Guard Corps all along the Pacific coast. Elsewhere, the 38th Infantry Division made their way down into the Imperial Valley and reached the Mexican border at Calexico. This area had already been liberated when the US Army had raced through here but they had then moved off to fight elsewhere once victory had come. Some isolated and cut-off small groups of Cubans remained, in Calexico mainly, though the main focus was Mexicali. Cross-border fighting occurred again, but this time the ‘right’ Mexicans were engaged. There were a lot of them with whom shots were exchanged and the national guardsmen had their hands full. They wanted to push on, to take the fight to their opponents but orders came from above for to keep attacking from distance and remain north of the border.

That border line stop order affected the I Corps across in Yuma too. They had taken the Soviet lodgement in Arizona after winning success here yet weren’t allowed to keep going for now: not just south into Mexico but also much deeper into the occupied parts of Arizona along the border stretching away to the southeast. However, the I Corps was given instructions to secure the course of Interstate-8 as that freeway ran northeast from Yuma all the way to Phoenix. Soviet outposts as far as Gila Bend were present all along there, once supported by Yuma before it fell. The 9th Infantry Division used one of its brigades to overcome the last of those Soviets. They met some East Germans on the way, the very last of those good soldiers who hadn’t had a good war. About a hundred of those paratroopers were with Soviet airmobile troops manning trenches, machine guns pits and man-portable anti-tank weapons. This position was a strong one, especially how it faced towards Phoenix. The Americans came up from the rear though and had what their opponents didn’t have: mobility. Tanks and other armoured vehicles supported the infantry in rolling up the Soviets and East Germans. It didn’t take that long to do when done effectively with firepower used more than direct infantry assaults. Intersate-8 was open to convoys coming down towards Yuma though there was still a lot of de-mining to be done by engineers brought in once the scale of the Soviet mining effort made here was fully understood.

Across eastern parts of Arizona, the less-populated parts next to New Mexico, Guatemalan occupation remained. They were holding on because the Americans hadn’t moved against them due to not having the available forces on-hand. There were Native American reservations and lower parts of the Rocky Mountains all under Guatemalan control though their numbers were small and the ‘control’ bit wasn’t very accurate. Holding onto crossroads and small towns was what they were able to do. They wanted to be left alone, to not have an active role in this war if they could for these were soldiers who really didn’t want to be here. Being on American soil when the United States could still fight meant that that wasn’t going to happen though. There had come air attacks and now that winter was fast approaching – yes, it did snow in Arizona at the right time of year for that –, into that occupied territory the fight was to be taken to them when they had barricaded themselves into defensive positions. Like elsewhere through the Rockies over in New Mexico and up into Colorado, American special forces were being inserted into this region. There was a lot of them, planning to stay for a long time. They were air-dropped from transport aircraft or deposited in helicopter assaults yet the vast majority walked in. Teams of men set out to first establish base camps, weapons dumps and rally points. They came in with rations and medical supplies though planned to live off the ground as best as possible. The most-important things they brought, even more so than the weapons and ammunition they carried, were their radios. The air corridors above where they were to operate were used frequently by the Soviets and the roads over in New Mexico were especially busy too. Armed attacks with raids and ambushes would be undertaken though the Green Berets were in the main to be conducting reconnaissance missions. They’d get up high to do this. Anyone they came near, Guatemalans or downed Soviet pilots, better hope that they managed to evade these men for they were unable (and unwilling as well) to be able to take any prisoners.

It was already snowing in Colorado. The fight outside Denver had taken place during a snowstorm but that was only the start of the terrible weather. The temperatures plummeted with this while the amount of daylight hours was already remarkably short. Tiredness and lethargy kicked in. American, Canadian, Nicaraguan and Soviet soldiers all slowed down in everything they were doing. The furious, fast-paced battles only days before came to an end. Defenders were digging-in and attackers struggled to move through the snow. Radiological alarms went off among multiple detection units attached to either side. Dangerous, but invisible particles were coming down with the snow. Where did they come from? Fighting men were fast dragged into cover and when the alarms ceased, wash-downs came of equipment to remove traces of radiation. This put everyone on edge. Bullets, bombs and even nerve gas had been seen before but radiation was something else. There was still some fighting which took place though they were small in scale. The edges of Denver were alive with gunfire, including on the western side facing the mountains where the Nicaraguans didn’t hold any significant ground. Civilians were leaving the city and going up into the mountains, moving through the snow, but were running into ambushes from Soviet Spetsnaz. Massacring unarmed non-combatants wasn’t the intention: the Soviets shot a few of them and watched as panic set in among the masses. They could fire a rocket at a vehicle or two as well to add to this. The idea was to cause panic all the way back to Denver and its defenders, pulling them away towards the gunfire. Panic did come though troop movements didn’t occur as the 82nd Airborne Division stayed where it was pushed up against Nicaraguan siege lines along with increasing numbers of volunteers more and more so being organised in those groups of Patriots everywhere. Outside the city, what was left of the Soviet division near wholescale destroyed in previous days was ordered from above to try to withdraw what was left. This would abandon the Nicaraguans but who cared about them? American aircraft, flying in that terrible weather, using infrared systems to detect Soviet moves made in the darkness against the freezing background, made them pay for this effort. The Soviets were left stuck. Maybe the Americans could have let them get away and thus changed the situation around Denver to a significant degree though they didn’t know the Soviet intention of getting away and thus attacked like they did when seeing moving targets. If that hadn’t been the case, the upcoming winter in Denver would have been very different. No one afterwards was going anywhere for some time.

The bare minimum of snowfall fell around Amarillo and none at all reached the ground in Altus. The Texan High Plains and western Oklahoma weren’t going to be covered in snow. The fighting around each of them was nowhere near as dramatic as in previous weeks though. Nicaraguan troops moving up from Lubbock towards Amarillo might as well have been trying to march to the far side of the moon: Amarillo felt like it was that far away. They didn’t have the numbers nor the supplies to achieve that goal. The understrength 1st Infantry Division and the overburdened 101st Air Assault Infantry Division would have loved to have counterattacked to take advantage of Nicaraguan sluggishness but couldn’t make that move. They held them back instead, working to secure their positions in every way they could in case things changed. Inside Oklahoma, an attack on the Soviet Airborne soldiers holding onto Altus AFB by Pennsylvanian national guardsmen ran into trouble far from the air base held by the last fighting regiment of what had once been the proud 103rd Guards Airborne Division. The 28th Infantry Division used a lone brigade (its other two were tied up elsewhere) to make their attack and had minimal armoured support. It was a lazy effort, one which shouldn’t have been done when throughout the war such troops as those they faced had showed their worth in the most difficult of circumstances which they had found themselves in. The men from Pennsylvania made a series of stupid mistakes in their approach by sticking to the roads and using their radios too much. They had taken their time too, allowing the paratroopers ahead the opportunity to dig-in. The Soviets held. They mauled the national guardsmen, giving them a serious defeat where half of the attacking brigade was lost and the rest lucky to get away from a horseshoe-shaped ambush where a lot of firepower was unleashed against them. No Soviet aircraft were flying from Altus as the Soviets believed their men there lost (like they had been across at Lawton) but that would change afterwards. Other national guardsmen of the same division had done so well on the Red River but these men at Altus had embarrassed them comrades and their division’s great history too.

Through North Texas, East Texas and down to the Gulf Coast where the Louisiana state line ran along the Sabine River, the last part of what had been a crazy month in Texas with major advances and huge battles came to a close with far less drama. Neither of the earlier Soviet efforts to get over the Red River into Oklahoma and to push behind Dallas–Fort Worth restarted. Their Twenty–Eighth Army was temporarily fought out. The Americans reorganised their forces, shunting around units and establishing a better position. They’d come all the way from West Germany to fight here to stop the Soviets and done so but once their opponents had been brought to a halt, no immediate second attack came and nor was a counteroffensive able to take place. Both sides were worn out and in the wrong position, necessitating those moves behind the lines. Away to the south, there was a need for American forces which had struck south from Waco, overrunning the Cubans when they did so, to withdraw backwards from as far forward as they had gone. Their whole western-facing flank was exposed. The Twenty–Eighth Army could – the Americans believed this yet it was too optimistic – launch a flank attack and cut off three divisions of national guardsmen. Making that retreat wasn’t political acceptable. Previously-occupied American territory had been liberated from Waco to Killeen & Temple, halfway to Austin, and wouldn’t be given up again. Dig-in, the VIII National Guard Corps was told, and hold your ground. They did so, widening the salient they had formed on the eastern side as they did to give them more depth if stuck by that attack from the western side that was so feared. No attack from there was coming. Elsewhere, American and Soviet forces strung out far to the north of occupied Houston and down along the Sabine to the Gulf of Mexico fought themselves to standstill as each made small but focused offensives which ran into strong opposition and couldn’t achieve anything. The slowdown everywhere else didn’t affect the US V Corps nor the Soviet Eighth Tank Army but neither could get the upper hand over the other. Both had fought before and there was quite the understanding of the other forming when it came to how each would operate in combat. Each parent command for masses of veteran American and Soviet troops understood that the focus from superiors was on others so they were a sideshow now but they still fought on. Men died in their thousands for little gain. Tactical withdrawals followed by localised counterattacks took place. Over and over again, these two opponents fought on. They got nowhere and cancelled the other out. It rained here and there were some (fewer than in Colorado) radiological alarms as well with minute particles coming down from the clouds, exact origin so far undetermined. The lives lost and the time spent here was all for nothing but holding the other in place and giving the United States and the Soviet Union more men to put in graves.

Ten plus weeks of full-scale, unremitting warfare spread across American soil were taking their toll on all involved.



Late November 1984:

Secretary of Defence Bentsen handed a letter of resignation to President Glenn. The Texan would no longer be heading the Department of Defence and overseeing the nation’s war effort. Glenn had asked for Bentsen’s resignation and it wasn’t a request that the secretary of defence could refuse. The two of them parted on good personal terms with Bentsen being asked to assist in the transition team of his replacement. He could have said no to that request though he did not. If Bentsen hadn’t of resigned, if Glenn had fought to keep him, the secretary of defence would certainly have been impeached by Congress. The elections earlier in the month had returned members determined to see him go and they were looking increasingly certain to get that to happen if Glenn hadn’t acted like he did. Neither he nor the country needed a fight like that at a time such as this. Congress had been out to get Bentsen like they had ensured that the CIA was abolished and Glenn had caved in to them. As to whom would be the replacement for Bentsen, there had been some calls for a former defence secretary in the form of Donald Rumsfeld to succeed Bentsen. Hell, no, had been the response from the president. Glenn didn’t want him. Congress didn’t try to force that appointment as Rumsfeld wasn’t the choice of enough of them to matter. Glenn already had someone else in mind: Governor Charles ‘Chuck’ Robb of Virginia was whom he selected to replace Bentsen.

Robb was an up-and-coming Southern Democrat who’d won the Virginia state house two years beforehand. He was a quiet, unassuming but very serious man. Not a populist and certainly not a man to excite a crowd, he’d won over Virginia’s electors (taking down a sitting governor) regardless and was making waves within his party before the war started. Virginia had lost both its senators on September 17th though unlike other governors, Robb hadn’t at once done the you-me dance with his lieutenant-governor (resigning to allow his previous Lt.-Gov, now Gov., to appoint him to the reforming Senate) to replace one of the dead men. There had been a nuclear detonation within Virginia and many more over in D.C. and Maryland. Robb had overseen the state-wide response to those. He’d met with Glenn several times since the war started, adding to their pre-war acquaintance, first on state matters and then afterwards acting as an unofficial adviser to the president. Glenn had come to value his counsel. Robb was an ambitious man – he was a politician after all – and had positioning himself well for when the axe fell on Bentsen’s soon-to-be discontinued tenure as defence secretary. Discussions with the Congressional leadership had said that they had no objection to Robb – though they did ask if there really wasn’t anyone else; nope, there wasn’t – and once Bentsen was gone, rapid moves were made to get Robb confirmed. Bentsen kept his word as he helped Robb in taking control of the war before then departing. He had been hard done by and he had been the victim of a Congressional vendetta but he had been the secretary of defence when the nation was attacked and invaded in a bolt from the blue surprise attack. From the moment that had happened, his time in office was running out fast.


The change in the top, where a new man took charge at Raven Rock, came when the United States Armed Forces were in the middle of a war for the country’s very existence and struggling during that. Recent major victories had been won on home soil yet the war wasn’t being won neither at home nor aboard. The manner in which the war had commenced with that sudden attack in such an unexpected manner was one defining issue in how it had gone so far. In addition, there had too been events worldwide in the preceding years where the international situation, looked back upon now with hindsight, could been seen to have unfavourably shaped things for this all to happen. Recovering from this and turning it all around wasn’t something easily done.

When war had come, the US Armed Forces had been out of place and were at a peacetime readiness. Shocking early defeats on the battlefield weren’t actually that shocking when looked at closely in terms of the forces involved and how they approached the fights which they had lost. Numbers were an issue too. On its home soil, the United States had started the war outnumbered by an opponent who threw in a mass of men and heavy combat equipment in a targeted fashion. The immediate American reaction was to mobilise and then start to return what military forces it could from aboard. That mobilisation was full, mandated by Congress and following the law on this. Reservists of all stripes and then conscripts would serve their country. There were problems with the Draft as the Selective Service Administration was in a mess post-Vietnam and political squabbles since then had hampered preparations for peacetime planning for mobilisation in war. There were problems with reservists being pulled into units going off to war without proper refresher training. There were problems with ill-prepared national guardsmen sent straight into the fight too. Problems atop of problems had gone on as mobilisation did. Men returned to uniform though as reservists along with retired veterans and discharged personnel answered the call ahead of those drafted. Hundreds of thousands of those men who’d previously served were slotted into the fight all over the place, making up the numbers and acting as replacements for combat losses. There were men who went into frontline units though many more who reported to rear-area forces. The training units which were receiving the first batch of conscripts had many veterans assigned to them, double and even triple their peacetime numbers (in relative, not overall, terms) to deal with the mass of incoming servicemen who came straight from civilian life. Many retirees and discharged personnel had once been trained in technical fields when in uniform while others had medical experience or were experts in specialist areas: in peacetime after they’d left uniform, they’d become engineers, doctors or teachers. They all came back and all were needed to either return to those military roles or to go to the training units.

Mobilised and with conscription underway to train many more personnel, the US Armed Forces were soon huge in size personnel-wise. Those servicemen went off to war: some were killed, others were captured and a lot were wounded. The losses taken were quite something, especially in terms of medical casualties which, naturally, required a lot of effort put into treating them. Nonetheless, there were still many available men and more on their way. It thus wasn’t a direct manpower issue which brought about the slowdown in American military operations by the end of November leading into a winter stalemate, but an equipment and supplies one. Those fighting men and all of those in uniform behind them (the tail was a significant one too with fighting men far outnumbered) couldn’t be sent off to war in just their uniform. They needed everything that military personnel needed to fight in a war. It was a matter of having enough tanks and aircraft, but combat bridging equipment and radio sets as well. Having enough bombs and bullets was something so too was medical equipment, NBC suits and starter trucks for jet aircraft. The Americans had a lot of all of this. They had warehouses and open storage nationwide across their huge country. They had equipment stored overseas like the POMCUS stocks from Western Europe as well. There were factories at home which could build more of all of his from the high-tech combat vehicles and the weapons that made the big bang to the needed combat boots. Those war-stocks were burnt through at an alarming rate once the war began and the factories switching over to wartime use couldn’t keep up. The numbers of what was being used and what more was needed against what was left in storage and what could be manufactured fast tilted the wrong way. It took time to manufacture all of this new equipment and all of the supplies that were needed. Factories were working overtime and with full US Government funding but miracles were few. The impossible couldn’t be done – such as suddenly building all the hundreds of immediately-needed extra fighter jets in double-quick time – no matter how much they were wanted to occur. Moving equipment and stores around the country was another issue too, especially since there was an enemy effort underway to interdict that highlighted by their offensive up the eastern face of the Rocky Mountains. Those in the Western States really felt this. The country wasn’t fully sliced in two but multiple major east-west connections were cut and occupied areas had be gone around.

Before he had resigned, in meeting with Congress, Bentsen had told them that the mobilisation of conscripts was underway to field a total of twenty combat divisions (two of those with US Marines) by the Spring. Just twenty, he had been asked, why not fifty or even a hundred!? There was the manpower for that, they had said. It wasn’t just those divisions on their own, he had explained, but everything else too to support them and the already fielded US Army and US Marines. The US Air Force and the US Navy needed conscripts as well for their purposes. The twenty division number had infuriated the politicians though as it seemed so low. They were informed about the plans for military police and civilian support troops – sort of a super FEMA but an armed one under military control: Congress was already raising issue with some of the ideas here – to operate also, a big concept that would need many men to make it work. Those already serving combat units were all to get new support forces to add to their own already in service which took up even more men. All this needed to see these men equipped and supplied as well as keeping atop of what was needed for those already in the fight. This was a massive undertaking and was why they wouldn’t be all ready at the projected numbers for many months. Again, it was all about manufacturing all of what was needed, a time-consuming process in the case of a lot of it, and then getting it where it was needed in the right numbers at the right time.

Until this was all done, and with bad weather coming to affect military operations in some areas, as well as the slowdown with the Soviets and their allies in their offensive actions, led to what was seen with American forces easing off in their own offensive action ahead of winter. Time was needed for the United States to be able to get fully back into the fight after the intensive, panicked fighting of the last few months.

***

The Soviet slowdown came down to a similar issue with supplies and equipment rather than direct manpower. They could fly soldiers to North America but getting everything else they needed to fight to them was where the problem came. The war had started with Soviet forces packed into Cuba with far smaller numbers hidden at a few sites in Mexico as well. With them were masses of everything to allow them to fight, all matching what official studies had shown would be needed and consumed in planned military operations. There was a plan set with this, one which was meant to be stuck too. A lot more was on its way before the war began and continued to do so once the shooting started. There were ships at sea heading towards Texas, Cuba and the occupied islands in the Caribbean which wore flags of convenience yet also were hired from shipping lines of neutral countries like Finland, Greece and Yugoslavia: the cargoes and destinations with these ships were not what they were officially supposed to be. This was quite the impressive notion to move so much to the other side of the world in an undetected manner and get them to the Caribbean at least before this might be rumbled. The majority of the ships got to where they were supposed to be the first time around loaded with all of that cargo. Doing a second time around was difficult though when the Americans and the Allies discovered what was up with those ships flying neutral colours that weren’t unloading agricultural tractors in Columbia (just an example) but rather artillery shells in Brownsville. These ships were all over the world’s oceans and heading to different ports – transfers to smaller vessels were often made in the Caribbean – yet it all started to come apart through direct military action against them as well as geopolitical moves.

Pre-stocked equipment and supplies were used up faster than planned. The naval activity to ship everything overseas from the Soviet Union to North America which ran into those problems compounded the issue. Once ashore in Texas, all that was needed then had to get to where it was needed in the face of air strikes along with guerrilla activity too. From the beginning, the insertion of Soviet forces into Texas (and then onwards) had hit delays. The Eighth Tank Army had been held up and then the follow-on Twenty–Eighth Army had been delayed even further. This had affected the frontlines of the war yet everything behind them too as combat units got absolute priority ahead of everyone else. All those supply, maintenance, transportation and non-combat engineering units were knocked down the list of transfers behind tank & motor rifle formations. Supplies coming into Texas were appropriated by senior combat officers for their use and there was also the effective stealing of supporting units which they come across as well to give immediate reinforcements for their fighting forces in battle.

The Soviets had relied on their allies to help with the early stage of the war. There had been an expectation that getting the second wave of their own forces across to North America would take time because it would be contested. This movement couldn’t be disguised like the first wave had been. Therefore, ahead of them, Latin American forces were sent into action. Guatemalan and Nicaraguan troops in Mexico on that pre-war ‘defensive mission’ were involved in the initial attack with so many more soldiers then given orders to make the long march north up from Central America. Cuban forces had taken a major role in the war with Castro sending three whole field armies to the battles in California and Texas. Each of those had now been destroyed, eliminating the overwhelming majority of Cuba’s best troops. The rest of their regular forces were in the Caribbean from Key West to the Caymans to Barbados. Such huge losses taken couldn’t be replaced without major internal problems occurring in Cuba: the nation couldn’t and wouldn’t do what Guatemala and Nicaraguan had been forced by the Soviets to do and send all those peasants with a rifle in-hand and a target on their chest. Cuba’s forces had been far more capable than anything that anyone else in Central America could and now they were all gone. When it came to that second wave of the Soviet’s own forces, they were sending another two armies, big ones too with plans to break off bits if and when needed once in North America to assist elsewhere. Just two armies though, not the three planned as the second wave pre-war: the other one was staying in Eurasia and heading east. With those that were going as planned to the other side of the world, they had non-Soviet elements as well. Limited numbers of Bulgarian, Czechoslovak and East German forces were making the journey with them but no Hungarians and certainly no Poles. For those governments back in Eastern Europe, this wasn’t a choice they had made freely. They could take one thing from it though: at least they weren’t being told to send their own soldiers alongside Soviet forces to the China War.


Back in June, when war was decided upon, and long before the serious supply problems and the China War occurred, Marshal Ustinov had been told by Soviet marshals and generals that the war against the United States wouldn’t be won in 1984 with a mid-September start. The then general secretary had been briefed on the plans to win important battles before winter, reinforce heavily over the winter, and then to finish the war in early 1985. The mobilisation that the Americans would undertake was foreseen and losses among allies projected (though not on the scale as Cuba saw) to occur. Not a fool, nor a tyrant, Ustinov had agreed to this. The Politburo had signed off on this. Among those fellow politicians in Moscow who made the decisions which mattered had been the present General Secretary Vorotnikov.

Soviet forces were brought to a halt and suffered defeats. These weren’t defeats which would see them lose the war, just bring their series of success after success to an end as winter arrived. As supplies ran out and the whole rear-area network to keep the armies in the field capable of continued fighting started to fall apart, this might not have been factored in with pre-war plans but its occurrence wasn’t fatal as long as it could be fixed during the expected downtime of major operations. What exactly happened wasn’t specific to the plans put to the Politburo back in June yet it didn’t really deviate far from them too… especially when those making the reports sugar-coated them to save their own skins. There was thus no need for the overreaction which happened in Moscow.

Neither the war against the United States nor the one with China had yet to be won: neither did either show immediate signs of a near victory in-place of the stalemate which had set in. Vorotnikov declared to the Politburo that the people and the state had been betrayed. Lies had been told (the lies he spoke of weren’t true and he had no idea of the real ones) and promises broken (which they hadn’t) so therefore action must be taken. A vote of the Politburo removed the defence minister, a man nine months into his job and without the influence that predecessors had had. He would live, those below him wouldn’t. It was a shooting spree worthy of the Stalin years. In North America and in China, the wars hadn’t gone as planned and the reaction was to remove, arrest and execute those responsible. The Communist Party leadership and the KGB were in full support of Vorotnikov’s drastic actions and when it occurred, the Soviet Armed forces as a whole weren’t aware of the scale of what happened when marshals and generals (it didn’t go further down than general officer ranks) suffered this fate. There were survivors, men who’d curried enough favour and covered their behinds to escape, but so many more senior people who got the blame were the victims of the military purge. They hadn’t beaten the enemies of the Soviet Union and paid the price of that with their lives. These executions – including the commanders of the war being fought on American soil – were meant to change things at the frontlines of those wars which the Soviets had got themselves into. This was a world war though and those fights were being affected by events elsewhere to a far greater degree than any the executions of men with impressive shoulder-boards on their uniforms.

November 1984: Britain

On the morning of November 13th, the RAF used Lightning interceptors to engage an incoming flight of Soviet Tu-22 Blinder bombers out over the North Atlantic on course for the Irish mainland. The Lightnings were flying from a base inside the Republic of Ireland at Shannon Airport – yes, as can be expected, there had been protests from Irish nationalists at their presence – and the intercept was successful. One Blinder was blown apart and the other three driven off. Where they were going exactly (to bomb Ireland or the western UK?) was one question; another was why the surviving three had turned tail so fast and fled like they did without pressing home their attack. The next morning, more Lightnings, these flying from RAF Aldergrove up in Ulster, were cued-in by fighter controllers towards a pair of Blinders coming towards the Irish coast off Donegal from out over the Atlantic too. Once again, they could have been on a bomb-run to put their deadly cargoes anywhere across the divided Ireland or on the UK mainland at a point of their choosing from Glasgow to Bristol. The Lightnings failed to get either as the Soviet aircraft turned back around once detected and rocketed away. The Lightning was a fast aircraft but with short-range: a chase out over the ocean against retreating bombers wouldn’t be good for the long-term future of the pilot’s lives.

Heads were scratched among intelligence staffs as to what was going on here. These weren’t like other Soviet air attacks which had occurred over the British Isles – Ireland too had been bombed beforehand – previously when the Soviets had pressed home their attacks and also used bigger Tu-22M Backfires on bomb-runs. Those lighter Blinders had been seen before but firing missiles from distance, not trying to sneak inside like they had been caught attempting to. Clearly, these attempts had been test runs to look for gaps in defences with bombs carried if the opportunity presented itself yet a bomb attack being secondary behind penetrating British air defences for later exploitation. There was no other reason for what had been done. The RAF was correct in that assumption. However, they hadn’t seen a third penetration as part of a test run made, one further south, on the third day.


Backfires showed up on the 16th. There had been four of them flying from bases in the Soviet mainland and aiming for a refuelling stop in Iceland. One had diverted with a major in-flight mechanical issue to Andoya though. The other three had continued onwards after Iceland, going down the North Atlantic and far from Ireland’s coast. They appeared to have been on their way to the Azores yet swung back east and headed for the Celtic Sea first then the English Channel. A Royal Navy frigate, HMS Torquay, a training vessel pressed into a wartime patrol role, was in those waters. If these Backfires had been Naval Aviation bombers, the Torquay would have been dead meat but they were Air Force bombers and didn’t have anti-shipping weapons. A warning came to them from a hostile radar detection. The Torquay had the three bombers yet not the weapons to even try to engage them. The frigate did have a radio though and an immediate alert was spread far and wide. Unaware and told this approach was full-proof – it would have been had the Royal Navy not had a warship there to intercept hostile shipping –, the Backfires bore onwards. With their wings swept back, they were fast and the Torquay was left far behind. The reached land near Worthing on the Sussex coast; if they’d been going for the Portsmouth-Southampton areas to bomb the extensive naval and shipping facilities there, no one could have stopped them in time. Hundreds of possible targets for a bomb-run were ahead of the Backfires. There were military sites and civilian facilities in military use everywhere through Sussex and into Surrey. None of those nearby were any interest for the aircrews though: Greater London was where they were going, right into the very heart of the British capital were the pre-selected targets for their payloads.

The RAF got fighters up. Phantoms from East Anglia, their usual threat axis to the northeast not now the southwest, raced out of several airbases. From a Royal Navy airfield in the South-West there were Lightnings flying with the same squadron (No. 5 was spread from Aldergrove to Shannon to RAF Valley on Anglesey to RNAS Culdrose in Cornwall) who were there to stop an attack like this and they raced to catch up after being caught out. Closer, Hawk trainers armed for the close-in air defence role climbed out of RAF Northolt in West London. The Soviets had chosen the perfect route of attack. The British had their air defence forces positioned elsewhere to the north and east with recent stretches to the west of Britain. Southern-facing defences were few. Those subsonic Hawks weren’t exactly feared. Air raid sirens wailed across London and the Home Counties. Soviet intentions for Central London weren’t known to those on the ground. In addition, the sirens for a conventional air raid were the same ones which everyone knew would wail for a nuclear attack too. This brought a considerable amount of panic below. The Backfires flew on regardless, lancing at supersonic speed right towards their targets. Air-search radars were detected – these would have picked them up even without the Torquay’s warning – but ignored. Gatwick Airport was passed by and the London ring-road which was the M25 overflown. Croydon was bypassed too and then the Backfires went over Clapham Common. From the latter there came the launch of a pair of missiles into the sky with Rapier SAMs deployed here at one of several sites around London for the capital’s immediate air defence. The Clapham unit was quick off the mark in getting set up and launching but the Rapiers couldn’t get the bombers above with the Backfires too high & too fast with the Rapier designed for a different threat.

Two Hawk T1As, armed with Sidewinder missiles and fitted cannon pods, were London’s last defenders. The Phantoms were still over Essex and the Lightnings above Hampshire so it was up to them. However, those Hawks were right above the heart of Central London with all of those people below them, all in the way of the aircraft which they were meant to shoot down… hence force them to hit the ground. One of the pilots hesitated to fire against a target right in his gun-sights. He shouldn’t have. He was an experienced man, an officer selected for his aptitude and skills for the training missions and then further selected for last-ditch air defence. He held his fire though. His wingman didn’t and launched his Sidewinders. The Backfires had no self-defence missiles though like all Soviet bombers carried tail guns. These were no pointless addition to the bomber as they were automatic and radar-guided with an excellent rate of fire. One of the Backfires, which had shot past the hesitant RAF pilot, shot at him with the double-barrelled 23mm autocannon and hit the Hawk. The Sidewinders went for another bomber, each blowing up right behind it and doing ultimately fatal damage.

High and fast, this bomb-run wouldn’t be one for the aircrew on each Backfire to directly control themselves. Their targets were (reasonably) small and not easy to spot from the air under the flight conditions they were in. The bombers came under autopilot once lined up and the computer navigation took control to get them perfect. Other systems decided when the bomb-bay doors opened and released the bombs. Everything had been decided beforehand by satellite targeting. The impact of the Sidewinders affected one of the bombers and subsequently the aiming yet the others were true to the pre-strike mission planning. Forty-two high-explosive 1100lb bombs fell away from each bomber, ‘walked’ across the targets below.


Bombs from aircraft #1 followed a straight northern course in their pattern from Middlesex Guildhall and the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre on towards the western side of the Treasury, the western side of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office building and behind Downing Street as far as Horse Guards Parade.

Aircraft #2 had its targeting affected by the missile impacts. These just missed Westminster Abbey (not on the target list) but demolished St. Margaret’s Church then landed through Parliament Square going northeast to Westminster Underground Station, the Norman Shaw Buildings, along the Embankment and the last few landing in the Thames. These should have gone up Whitehall inside of those from aircraft #1 as far as Downing Street and the Cabinet Office instead.

Aircraft #3 dropped its bombs all above the Houses of Parliament and up as far as the parliamentary offices in the Norman Shaw Buildings (an accidental double whammy for them) as planned before then more struck the Curtis Green Building used by the Met. Police. The last bombs smashed into the Ministry of Defence.

The missing Backfire, on the ground at Andoya, was meant to have started its bomb-run at the Cabinet Office and walked its bombs up the western side of Whitehall through Horse Guards and the Old Admiralty Buildings as far as Admiralty Arch.

Whitehall and the centre of the British government, its historic buildings, had been hit with an attack of quite something. The Palace of Westminster, where the Commons and the Lords were, along with Big Ben towering over Central London, were hit by those oh so many bombs too.


What goes up must come down. Such had been the thinking of the Hawk pilot who wouldn’t fire. His aircraft was hit and came down though he managed to bring it down into the Thames before ejecting before it struck the water. He’d survive the ejection yet face a court martial for his actions. Other shells from the Backfire which had fired upon him that failed to strike the Hawk fell randomly all across the wider Victoria area. They landed all over the place causing death and injury though no major destruction. As to the struck Backfire, after the bomb-run it went out of control. First facing eastwards towards London’s South Bank, it spun (the tail was gone) and came down hard and fast into Central London. The four aircrew ejected, leaving their bomber to demolish another building: this being the London Trocadero. This was a historic former restaurant, now an exhibition and entertainment centre though recently shut once again due to wartime restrictions on crowds at non-essential locations. The whole structure collapsed around the Backfire which went into it, the falling masonry snuffing out a fire just started by the fuel aboard the aircraft. Dust clouds covered Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square but it could have been an immense fire had things gone the other way.

The other two Backfires tried to get away. Their destination was Norway, quite the distance ahead. The Phantoms got one of them, bringing it down over open ground in Essex and killing all four crewmen. The other escaped though despite all of the RAF’s best efforts and would make it to Orland. It got all that way there like it had got all the way into the very heart of London. Two others had been downed, one in the middle of the city, but there would be repercussions within the RAF for how all of this had been allowed to happen. Those aircraft could have been carrying gas and if the Soviets managed this, they could have hit an RAF base using the same approach of coming in what was effectively the backdoor. Internal RAF issues with the firing of some commanders and the reassignment of others were nothing compared to how the British Government reacted.

Whitehall was a ruin and Parliament was a wall of flames before the fires were put out.

Downing Street had missed a direct hit but the damage from hits either side made the whole set of buildings there unsafe due to blast effects: a few unexploded bombs were in the area too. The Treasury, the Foreign Office, the Cabinet Office and the MOD were all partially collapsed though the fires had been minimal and were soon contained. At the Palace of Westminster, the fires there burnt for a day and a half before not much was left. St. Stephen’s Tower, with Big Ben inside, had fallen into New Palace Yard.

The government was safe, much of it already dispersed and the rest evacuated when Torquay in the Channel had sent that warning. Three hundred and sixteen deaths occurred during the air attack, a low number indeed from such a bombardment. Emergency pre-attack evacuations had come and not many of the targeted buildings were in general use, Parliament especially since it was in recess. Much of Central London away from the Whitehall-Parliament area was already sealed-off due to the wartime security measures too. This all limited casualty numbers. Four Soviet aircrew from the downed bomber were located and detained though one died in hospital that night from serious internal wounds; the RAF would investigate though find no corroboration that the other three had been roughed up when in custody yet they showed signs of that. Dud bombs were scattered in places (eleven of the one hundred and twenty-six not going off at once) and a few of them exploded before British Army EOD teams could get to defuse them. It was one of these which went off in the gardens behind 10 Downing Street and put a final end to the use of that residence for prime ministerial use for good: 1100lb of high-explosive did an immense amount of damage.


On a military level, the attack on Central London gave the Soviets nothing. Their gas attacks in October plus conventional attacks on Britain had been far more effective. This was a political strike though, more important than the similar one days later in Madrid. The British Government had fudged the issue over a counterstrike for the nerve gas used in Ayrshire and South Wales – there had been a lot of division in the national government over that – but this just couldn’t go unanswered.

There was only one response that could be made. The RAF Vulcans could be making a flight in the early hours of the following morning. Their destination? Moscow.



November 1984: Britain

Six RAF flying officers refused to take part in Operation Sapphire, the strike on Moscow. One of them later changed his mind – the black mark against his name would never go away regardless – but the others were steadfast in their refusal. Their careers with the RAF were over. They would be court martialled, stripped of their commissions and forced out of the service. They’d never fly again, not just with the RAF but either as airline pilots in the future. Sapphire, even kept top secret, would stay with those men long after they wholeheartedly refused to fly to certain death in their Vulcan bombers for no good reason at all. This was wartime and picking & choosing which missions you wanted to fly when ordered to just wasn’t on. Such punishments faced by these men wouldn’t have come to them had they been Soviet aviators making such judgements on their superior’s wisdom: the KGB would have shot them for the nerve of questioning their betters.

No. 44 Squadron was the unit to which those men belonged, a squadron which had seen action in the Belize War. After that conflict, the retirement of the Vulcans and thus the squadron’s disbandment had been put on hold. This wasn’t directly to do with the war against Guatemala itself but instead due to President Kennedy’s choices made on the future of American nuclear forces in Europe. At the behest of the UK Government, rather than RAF figures who were very uneasy at this, the Vulcans were kept in service to try to fulfil the gap that would come from the American pull-out. 44 Squadron was tasked for NATO missions in Eastern Europe with conventional attacks – such as they had done in the Belize War – but also nuclear strikes. Those strikes were meant to be directly behind the Iron Curtain though, not any further east. The Vulcan was seen as beyond its prime and would likely not survive going any further than Poland: i.e. into the Soviet Union. When this war came, one so unexpected in how it played out with the instant demise of NATO, the Vulcans still flew. There weren’t so many of them left and many were fitted for the tanking role as well as either conventional bombardment or nuclear strike. Many missions were planned for them, the vast majority of which didn’t get off the ground… literally. There had been some air strikes with bombs dropped over occupied parts of Norway – suffering losses while doing so – and another strike on the Baltic coast of East Germany as well. However, in the main, the Vulcans had sat on the ground while planners drew up ideas of where to send them, often to targets that the aircrews believed would be to their doom. Sapphire was one of those plans drawn up many weeks beforehand, in response to the nerve gas attack on the UK mainland, and one which had ultimately been shelved like any other real response at that time. To those pre-briefed on it, it was madness. To send Vulcans all the way to Moscow to dump belly-fulls of conventional bombs over a select few targets in that city would be suicide for those flying the mission. The Vulcan was no Backfire and Soviet air defences were immensely-strong, not full of holes like Britain’s were. An American exchange officer who remained with 44 Squadron, a US Air Force intelligence officer, pointed to all of those radars, all of those SAMs and all of those interceptors. He’d told them that he wouldn’t fly such a mission unless it was a nuclear one and he knew that he’d have nowhere to go home to: his words might have stayed with those who heard them when the refusal to fly came.

Sapphire was back on after Whitehall and Parliament were destroyed. It went ahead despite the actions of those aircrew who acted in the way they did. Six Vulcans lifted off in the early hours of the morning after the bombing of Central London, flying out over the North Sea first with different pairs going off at different times. Two of them were quick to refuel at Sola Airbase in Norway, fully filling their fuel tanks after a light lift-off and then continuing eastwards into neutral Swedish skies. Behind them came the next two, a pair of bombers and a pair of tankers. Sapphire ran into problems at once. The Swedes picked up the Vulcans and radio messages were sent. The Vulcans tried to evade radar detection and the aircrews prayed that the Swedes wouldn’t send fighters after them: hadn’t there been a backchannel communication made with the Swedes asking them to not interfere? No Swedish fighters came up and the radio enquires ceased but the damage was done as those messages were heard far and wide. The leading two Vulcans, the first pair of tankers, went over the Gulf of Bothnia and towards Finland. There were known radar locations already plotted there to be avoided, Soviet-manned radars inside Finnish territory. These would be guiding Soviet interceptors back over in their own country, all to be avoided as well in the complicated plan which was Sapphire. Several unknown radars came alive, no doubt cued-in by what had happened over Sweden. These picked up the first two Vulcans and increased in strength – causing panic and alarm among the aircrews at such an unknown capability – to detect the following pair of aircraft, these the actual bomb-carrying Vulcans. These radars had a firm fix and there was no reason to not believe that MiG-25s and Sukhoi-15s weren’t coming towards the RAF aircraft, maybe even already inside Finnish airspace had they been already aloft. The leading Vulcans were approaching the waypoint where they were to make a turn to the southeast at this time. Their flight would take them right towards the Leningrad ‘hot zone’, the general area of destruction around that once mighty city through which they were to fly: a radar and SAM gap on the way to Moscow (one of those points of contention among the men who refused to fly). Turning while still above Finland and dropping down lower, the Soviet radars lost their lock on the first pair but still held a fix on the other four. The mission was still capable on continuing at this point as far as the planners had foreseen because the Vulcans were capable of hiding over Finland and above Leningrad.

But then the MiG-25s showed up, firing air-to-air missiles at bombers below them. Vulcan #1 was hit. Vulcan #2 was struck moments later. One exploded in mid-air and the other was going down. With that Sapphire was off. Physically, the mission wouldn’t go ahead without those two tankers unless on the way home the aircrews of the other Vulcans wanted to either land in the Baltic or be interned in Sweden. It was oh so complicated and fell apart. These MiGs were clearly not going to be the only ones either. The four surviving aircraft turned around and went low. They could make it to bases in Allied-held Norway without tanking or back to the UK with the bomb-rolled aircraft refuelling from the full tanks of the pair tasked for tanking over Norwegian airspace. The MiGs wouldn’t chase them there with Swedish airspace long out of bounds for Soviet aircraft after earlier incidents… although that wouldn’t be the case with the fallout from this when Moscow understood how the Swedes had been prepared to look the other way before someone on the ground messed up. Starting the following day, Soviet MiGs would be back violating Swedish airspace. Not today though. Some time later, the Vulcans were all back in Britain. Sapphire had aimed to put forty plus 1000lb bombs into Moscow, hitting the Soviet Ministry of Defence building and the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka (high profile targets), but had achieved nothing but see two RAF bombers lost with five aircrew killed outright and another five missing over Finland either dead or in the custody of the Finns, maybe the Soviets. Once again, Britain had been unable to meaningfully hit back at the Soviets for devastating attacks on the UK mainland. No firm message had been sent to them, what the politicians had ordered this tried for, to tell them that they would pay for doing so.

***

Sapphire was something that was top secret. It was a mission, subsequently a failed one, known only to the National Government’s War Cabinet and shared with the highest levels of both the Americans and the Norwegians rather than the wider Allies ahead of it. When Swedish airspace violations by the Soviets occurred afterwards, affecting the air war over Norway negatively, Britain only then revealed it to their other allies. The news of the aborted attempt to strike at the very heart of Moscow came to other politicians back in Britain as well. There had been a clamour for ‘something to be done’ to hurt the Soviets in their capital but this didn’t go down well at all. If it had worked, things would have been different despite what those enraged at it happening might have said. Political arguments commenced. There were accusations made that the decision to try to bomb Moscow could had caused a Soviet nuclear response and that the War Cabinet was playing with fire. In return, the still smouldering ruins of the buildings that had been once the heart of government, plus all the casualties from Ayrshire and South Wales, were pointed to.

The national government was arguing about that in November though they had disputes over other matters too. This was Britain’s third month of war and away from direct military actions, the effects of the conflict were beginning to fight. Food riots and widescale criminality continued. Economic effects of the war but also social matters – the closing of schools one of those – really hurt as they went on past the outbreak of fighting. Public morale was very low and there had been more peace marches. Troublemakers were locked up again but all troublemakers were supposed to have already been detained beforehand. ‘Police state Britain’, one MP called it, though he didn’t have the usual media soapbox to put that out widely. Foreign travel remained banned and much foreign trade was impossible. Rationing was causing issues with bureaucratic mistakes made at times causing anger that often led to violence. The War Cabinet, increasingly isolated from events, were kept out of the way of all that was going on as they were so involved in the direct war effort. They weren’t seeing the hardship the people were under and there was continued talk of the ‘Blitz spirit’ that they were sure that the people had. Other politicians not at the top were trying to get them to open their eyes, to understand that things weren’t being handled the right way, but criticism was met with attack and claims that those on the outside of the decision-makers didn’t understand that this was all necessary. This division continued with no end in sight as there couldn’t be politics as usual where such things might be solved with the war going on like it was.

Security around the country remained a big issue, allowing for the crackdown each time to come when violence erupted… though leading to more violence in response as could be expected. At the beginning of the war, police ranks had been thinned when reservists were recalled to the colours though special reservists soon took their place and tried to re-establish law-and-order. Alongside them were a lot of soldiers. Britain’s modern day version of a home guard, the Home Service Force (HSF), had been in its infancy pre-war but instant expansion came. Standing TA units went into intensive training duties ahead of overseas deployment and so across the country, HSF units were active. They didn’t just combat criminals and rioters but Soviet Spetsnaz teams which just wouldn’t go away. The majority of those in-country pre-war had been hunted down yet there came repeated raids coming from the sea along with the very occasional parachute-insertion too. These men made plenty of attacks, though with varying degrees of success and failure met in them. Military targets were hit less and less by the Spetsnaz as they focused more on civilian ones with bombing and shootings taken place. London as well as other cities remained shut down from the usual intense bustle of extensive commercial activities yet were like flames to the Spetsnaz moths as they tried for the high-impact attacks on the nation’s capital plus Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester and Sheffield.

What the Soviet commandos stayed away from were the big military encampments where the British Army was formed up ready for overseas deployments. An oversized corps command was engaged in repeated training exercises while they were equipped with increasing numbers of extra heavy weapons. Many lighter units were re-rolled as heavier ones with armoured vehicles for the infantry especially. There were tanks too, older Centurions and also some recently-removed Chieftains as well taken from storage. New-build equipment was being manufactured such as Cheviot tanks (the lighter, export-oriented Vickers MBT; the thinking was they would be excellent for use in Norway), Spartan & Stormer armoured personnel carriers and a lot of general-use trucks too in an effort to make the four divisions which formed the British I Corps increasingly lethal but also very mobile and dependent upon no one else when it was sent abroad. The formations within, combat and support, were all over-manned as well after so many former soldiers had fulfilled their reserve commitment in wartime. These troops were spread across the British countryside through much of England and into Wales: some TA units not tasked for intensive training were in the north of the country on defensive missions alongside the HSF. The intention was that with little notice, the British Army would return to the Continent should the situation change there. That would be to the traditional place where the British Army had long fought, the fields of Flanders. Even if the Belgians and Dutch said no, should the Soviets move into West Germany, then the British would be in the Low Countries ready to oppose them. There were detailed plans made for this to happen and units on training were still forced to maintain a readiness to deploy regardless of that. This concept of immediate reaction to a Soviet move into Western Europe was starting to look less and less likely though. The China War and the attitude of the French as they faced down the Soviets didn’t give any indication that unless something dramatic happened, there would be no need for a rapid deployment into the Low Countries to meet them in battle. Speculative deployments from planners paid to make plans had them going to several places, the American South-West being one of those hypotheticals where more attention was being paid to.

Other British forces were in combat as they had been for some time. There were British forces in Canada still and larger numbers across in Norway; the latter with a large air commitment alongside the ground forces. Britain had troops in southern Spain and Gibraltar with more stuck in Cyprus and others half the world away in Hong Kong. The Royal Navy remained closer to home, in British waters and through the North Atlantic rather than anything bigger in deployment scale. Ship losses continued to occur, though November was far ‘better’ than October without any significant sinkings of big vessels crewed by so many sailors whose lives were lost when they went down. In the air, Britain remained in the fight for the control of the skies as well, once again with close-in and distant fights. The majority of RAF air losses couldn’t be at once and quickly made up for with new-builds – it took quite the while to manufacture them – though ‘angary’ was used to help a bit with that: angary being the legal excuse to take Hawks being built for Indonesia and Nigerian-ordered Jaguars into RAF service. Angary made those two countries angry and it also affected other weapons under manufacture for foreign countries inside Britain (paid for by several neutral nations) taken into service due to wartime need. Other countries were doing the same thing, some not even making sure it was done legally and Britain was just doing what others were. For those who didn’t receive what they saw as theirs, that legality meant nothing but rage for them. Such military equipment was needed though for the war for Britain at home and abroad continued on unabated.



November 1984: France

The American-Soviet talked arranged by the Swiss in Geneva which ended up seeing a ceasefire on the use of chemical weapons – not the general ceasefire hoped for by any means though – took place when there were also other negotiations taking place in the same city. Through an Austrian backchannel, diplomats from France and the Soviet Union met again after the earlier spectacular fallout which had taken place back in October up in Strasbourg. This time it was lower-level officials who engaged in talks, not heads of state and foreign ministers. These were private affairs and kept secret. However, these discussions between two representatives of the nations seemingly on a collision course for war with one another were bugged by a British MI-6 team operating in Geneva without Swiss knowledge after they’d first been on the tail of the Austrian businessman involved and moved from him to these talks he set up. The British Government was very interested in what was going on.

The Soviet behaviour was different from how it had been during the Strasbourg summit. There was less finger-pointing going on from them against what Gromyko had deemed France not acting like a neutral but an enemy of the Soviet Union. No mention was made here of the French air-lifting American & British troops out of West Berlin, supplying ‘scrap’ in the form of sixty light armoured vehicles to the Irish Army (and shipping those direct to Britain to join Irish troops on Salisbury Plain too!) and French other arms shipments that they had clandestinely made to the British but the Soviets knew about. All of this had recently been brought up in government-to-government exchanges. However, the Soviet attitude in Geneva was similar to that used in the approach made to the Portuguese also in November where it was a case of ‘let us forget what has happened before and start again’. There was even an admission made that the terror attack against the Neckarwestheim nuclear power plant in West Germany was ‘regrettable’ though still not a direct acceptance of Soviet guilt. The Soviet representative spoke of the wish that his country had to trade with France and thus wider Western Europe too for mutual benefit. The offer put on the table last month was still there and he was sure that France would want to accept it.

The French representative listened to what was said and reported back to his government. He was told to keep the Soviets talking. When he did so, the second day of talks came when Central London was bombed and the in subsequent days there came the intrusions into Swedish airspace by Soviet fighters to influence the air war over Norway. In addition, there had been another near-exchange of fire between Danish and Soviet naval forces at the western edge of the Baltic where the Danes refused to open up their waters to the Soviets and stood their ground in the face of serious threats. All of this was happening, all of it in Europe and which affected France, and the Soviets were still putting their trade deal on the table. For five days the Geneva talks went on before there came an impasse. France had its representative continue to reaffirm his nation’s position on trading with a country which had launched a war of aggression against its friends & neighbours with a refusal to do so. The Soviet attitude hardened and an outburst occurred when the Soviet representative lost his temper and laid accusations at France’s door of deception in how it approached these talks: France had never intended to come to an agreement. This accusation was true – smiles were raised back in Paris at that but also in London when reading the bug transcripts – yet of note was the opinion formed by France that the Soviets involved (their point man and those in the loop for these talks) had put a lot of faith in this all working. They were feeling the pressure from back in Moscow at the lack of success, the French believed, and lost control. This was too something very true: only positive news had been sent back to the Politburo until it all went wrong.

The talks were broken off. That same morning, in what was not a coincidence at all, the French newspaper Le Monde began a week-long series of long articles and opinion pieces which dominated its coverage. It was something a long time in coming from journalists who had been across in the United States for several weeks beforehand preparing for their newspaper to run this story. Le Monde had editorial independence from the French Government and had not always been a friend of President Mitterrand, but this all wouldn’t have been run if there was going to be official state opposition, not at a time like this.


Le Monde’s journalists on the other side of the North Atlantic had been travelling extensively throughout a country at war, granted official travel rights too by the Americans in doing so. When the US Government first was informed of the exact contents of the printed pieces they were a bit miffed because Le Monde didn’t follow the American line in what they printed and there was also criticism made of United States actions pre-war and during the conflict. However, the pushback there was very small because that was only to give some balance to the whole thing. Comments made about America which might not have been that flattering were nothing compared to the attack that they whole thing was on what was called the ‘Soviet’s Brutal War in America’.

The French journalists spoke to French and other Europeans across America. There was an interview with a French doctor, a volunteer for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), who’d treated American civilian casualties and explained in detail a Soviet air raid on a clearly-marked hospital. A Swiss journalist who’d been to El Paso to cover the Peace Committee in that occupied city had some tales to tell of the horrors which could be found there as well as the Soviet forced control of the Americans made puppets for their propaganda uses. There was a French exchange student who’d been in Texas at the beginning of the war and had some horror stories to tell of what she’d seen done to civilians but also been through herself. A Belgian diplomat was spoken to, a man who should have been in Washington on September 17th yet been up in New York; his wife and son were listed as missing after the nuclear strike but he was searching refugee camps for them against all hope.

The human stories came with analysis on what exactly had happened at the beginning of the war and how it had progressed with brutality. The trick played on the United States was laid out with Kennedy meant to meet with Gromyko in Washington that day but instead nuclear blasts occurring… and Gromyko’s plane never leaving Soviet airspace. The claim of the supposed coup by Glenn – where he had nuked Washington then Leningrad all to seize power – was rubbished for the pathetic fantasy it was. There were pictures of mass graves taken from aerial reconnaissance around San Antonio and then photographs taken closer from inside Los Angeles: these were all full of civilians who weren’t guerrillas but ‘class enemies’. There was admonishment made of American actions such as the nuclear strike on Mexico City and also their use of chemical weapons in Mexico too, more balancing of the series of pieces, but against them were more of more examples of brutality by the Soviets. In addition, a Nicaraguan Army deserter – actually a Honduran citizen forced into service of another country and sent to America – was interviewed and he confirmed these were all officially sanctioned and in fact the Soviets ordered their Cuban and Central American allies to do a lot of this to keep their own hands clean in places.

Le Monde wasn’t a newspaper for sensations. There had been other coverage in the French press before which had reported on the war though in nothing like this detail. The evidence that the French journalists had gathered was all laid out with unsubstantiated claims listed as well yet making that clear distinction. The journalists spoke of the disappearances made of other journalists from different countries & organisations who had gone missing with the suspicion that they had been killed for digging like this too into Soviet actions ahead of reporting them.

The coverage didn’t have French people marching in the streets demanding that their country go to war with the Soviets. Few people actually read it all and even then, these were things being done abroad in other nations. American actions pre-war in Mexico and also the abandonment of European defence by the recklessness of Kennedy affected the thinking of ordinary French as their nation had remained neutral in the war. There was too the nuclear issue. However, it certainly put many people of influence thinking as the public was being made aware of what many in the government and the security services already knew. Mitterrand himself welcomed this French investigative journalism (that was something from him indeed) yet claimed press freedom when it came to what Le Monde had done. The Soviets protested extremely harshly, calling it all a series of lies and stating that these printed lies had the backing of the French Government. France was once again working with the Allies, nations which had attacked the Soviet Union in a war of aggression!

Mitterrand’s position on this was key to what the Soviets did in response. They were getting nowhere with everything they had tried in first trying to force Mitterrand to accede to their wishes and then trying to sweeten him & his country. Personal pressure was applied to the French president, something quite direct with the aim to get him to change his mind and thus get them their way.


Outside of a small town in Burgundy, within a secluded house, a mother and her nine year-old daughter had been staying in comfort for several months now. They were protected by men with guns and isolated from the rest of the world apart from a friend of the mother’s who arrived late in the month to assist in the wellbeing of the daughter when she caught a cold. The security people, DGSE agents, had been forewarned of her arrival and she had been vetted. She was watched intensely despite her unthreatening demeanour and the long-standing relationship with the mother. The visitor was also a former nurse and two of the security personnel took the time to talk to her over their own minor ailments… and be distracted by her figure. She was approachable, she was likeable. She was also seen as unthreatening.

Both the visitor and the little girl then vanished from the country house.

They were gone in the middle of the night with no trace of them. The mother was distraught. When the father, an important man far away, found out there was hell to pay. A massive search took place with French police and even soldiers searching for the missing pair. The actual identity of the missing girl – i.e. who her father was – wasn’t revealed to those searching for her. She was gone though, very soon oh so far away. The visitor, that friendly nurse who had fluttered her eyelids at several of the security people, was located. She was found floating face down in a nearby lake, her throat cut. She’d been weighted down but something had gone wrong and she’d surfaced. The lake, and a river a mile or so off, were both searched extensively for the body of the missing child. She was nowhere to be found. Unbeknown to those searching for her, before they even knew she was missing, she was already over the border and into Switzerland with a destination even further east.

The nine year-old – she’d be ten in December, something she’d been telling everyone about because ten was a BIG age – was named Mazarine Marie Pingeot. Her mother was the historian and writer Anne Pingeot, the mistress of a politician and whose affair plus daughter was all something that the French public were unaware of. That married man, the little girl’s father, was Francois Mitterrand. The KGB had taken his daughter to change his mind over his country’s trade policy.



November 1984: The two Germanies

American, British and Canadian troops based in West Germany before the war had all long departed from the country. Belgian and Dutch forces had stayed behind alongside a mobilised Bundeswehr. In addition, the French had near tripled their peacetime commitment to West Germany – having those troops move forward as well – while Paris had secured the arrival of an Italian expeditionary force up from their country too. Those Italians had begun arriving at the end of October and through November, they joined those other Western European troops spread throughout West Germany. Added alongside local German forces, the whole nation was full of soldiers from West German’s allies who were spread far and wide across the Federal Republic. Some were in peacetime garrisons – such as the Belgians and the Dutch – but the majority were in wartime positions through the countryside. This was done because despite the wars ongoing in both North America and China, there was a real fear that the Soviets would send their armies into Western Europe too.

Their armies remained in Eastern Europe: through East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Some had departed in 1982 and 1983 yet the majority were still there. Intelligence reports suggested that behind them, in the western parts of the Soviet Union, there had been major redeployments of second-line forces off to fight those wars far from Europe limiting what the Soviets would be capable of in a wartime scenario – possibly making it impossible for them to take all of Western Europe in a war – but that didn’t mean that there was no concern over the still tens upon tens of thousands of troops that they had. News from those foreign war zones showed that the Soviet Army was no paper tiger either: one only had to look at how far their advances had struck deep into the heartlands of both the United States and China. The mass of troops had been there across the other side of the Iron Curtain for decades yet in all of that time there had never been such a threat to Western Europe as there was regarded as being now. The Soviets had pushed for a trade deal with Western Europe, one which could have seen the capitalist democracies economically beholden to the dictatorial communist regime in Moscow if it had gone through. Faced with refusal, there had come terror attacks undertaken by Soviet proxies first and then the armed intimidation. Soviet air activity over the Baltic and naval deployments on those waters had threatened Denmark and Sweden. Major military exercises right up against West Germany’s borders across Czechoslovakia and East Germany had occurred and there had been more of that above West Berlin including overflights of the exclave by Soviet aircraft since the French had airlifted out American and British forces from there. KGB intelligence activities in West Germany including the backing of terror groups had seen Soviet diplomats expelled en masse from the country leading to howls of diplomatic protests over a frame-up. Italy too, away to the south, had seen its offshore airspace and waters violated by Soviet and Soviet-aligned military forces with counter-accusation made every time that Rome protested alleging that Italy was conspiring with the Allied nations. The Med. was a war zone and that made things complicated yet all that had happened there to the south of Italy was clearly part of a wider attempt to bully Western Europe and force it to do the bidding of Moscow.

Western Europe stood firm. No, no, no: such were the answers to everything that the Soviets demanded one day and asked for nicely the next day in terms of a food-for-oil deal which had more wide-ranging complications below the surface than just a straight up trade arrangement like that. There had been moments of wavering at times within certain countries from selected politicians though there was a general holding together of political will. Moreover, true or not, there had come many instances of those who had argued that maybe there was a different approach to take meant that they were working for Soviet interests. Public will was less so strong on this matter yet that was changing in places as the wars abroad continued and at home there was evidence presented to them as to just what the Soviets were really all about now the dogs of war had been let off their leash. There was no longer any pretence that they were misunderstood and that dialogue could solve differences when Soviet nuclear strikes had taken place and their armies were fighting the brutal wars that they were alongside all of their activities to force their way with Western Europe. Other parts of Western Europe being involved in the wider war had an affect upon the thinking of those within those who were neutral. There were some who viewed Britain as long being too closely tied to the Americans – they were all Anglo-Saxons after all! – yet the Soviets had begun the war by attacking & occupying parts of Norway and Portugal as well: clear acts of naked aggression. Iceland was too under occupation and what had that little country ever done to ask for that? The later entry into the war of Spain and then Ireland were again fellow Western Europeans under attack by Moscow. Early European neutrality had come as a welcome relief of tens of millions of the citizens of the countries whose governments abandoned their NATO commitments: there was a wide-ranging relief that they had avoided a war which began with nuclear strikes and didn’t see West Germany & Italy invaded, France bombed and the Low Countries another battlefield. The cost of that neutrality for others became clear though. The public mood was shifting, not directly for a push for their countries to enter the war, but to maintain their defence, face down Soviet threats and also assist others in need.

Long before Argentine Relief had become a big deal down in South America with Buenos Aires (failing to) trumpet it as a sign of good faith towards the United States, what was later deemed European Relief had begun in West Germany. This was a series of several fund-raising efforts begun by individuals and organisations within the country to raise money for war-effected refugees abroad especially in the United States. Cash was asked for but also donations of medical supplies, warm clothes for the coming winter and such things as toys for orphans etc. A combination of the various efforts came under an umbrella organisation and then the West German programme was copied in several other nations: they too all eventually combined as well. It was a big deal and soon raised a significant sum of both money and goods. Some big names in the private sector contributed to it and then first the Luxembourg state before the Dutch Government followed them by giving official donations too. There were Soviet complaints. Why was there a fund for American civilians who were in this situation due to their illegal government’s actions? Why was this not being coordinated with the Peace Committee in El Paso and instead delivery on the American end going through New York? Why wasn’t money being raised for Mexican civilians affected by the American nuclear attack and all of the orphans created by American carpet bombing in Cuba? And so on. The money kept being raised and donations of goods continued though. Commercial flights laden with relief supplies – much of the cash raised was spent in Europe buying more clothes, medicines, toys and such like – then went across the North Atlantic to the United States yet soon enough other flights also went to further Allied countries, especially Britain, Canada and Norway. As was certain to occur, the Soviets furiously complained about this as well.


West German television was something that many people in East Germany were able to receive. There were areas near to the Polish border who were out of range of transmitters located in West Berlin, but the majority of people were able to pick up broadcasts made. Even if many East Germans didn’t dare watch what was on the airwaves, there were others who did and the whispers about what news was coming from out of the other Germany – and thus the wider West – was widespread nationwide. They heard about European Relief. They also heard reports on the war raging elsewhere and one which their country was involved in. Official state communications from East Berlin had told the East German people how the Americans had attacked the Soviet Union and nations in Central America before the British had then struck a ‘cowardly, nefarious’ blow against the then neutral German Democratic Republic. Their country was involved in this war not of its choosing. Only good news was presented from East Berlin, the right news. This contradicted what came from those West German broadcasts though. In late November, West German television showed interviews with two separate POWs which the Americans held, men in uniforms of East Germany’s military. The actual faces were obscured and names not given due to the West Germans obeying international law on this matter – the Americans claimed that these prisoners said they were volunteers and thus that didn’t count; it was a grey area indeed – but these men said they had been sent to fight for all East Germans and were now being held by the Americans. Each claimed they had defected though the West German broadcasts defined their ending up in American military custody as them deserting. There was a paratrooper who said he was from Cottbus and a pilot (who spoke of flying in Guatemala’s air force) who was reported from being from Thüringen. They spoke in German complete with the regional accents from both places. Each said that they had been forced to fight and had been ordered to commit atrocities. The West German broadcasts on this matter stated that there was some inconsistency over their stories and criticised the Americans for putting them on camera… yet they showed those images themselves to Germans both sides of the Iron Curtain. There wasn’t much doubt to many of those in the know about these maters that such a broadcast had been done deliberately and not without a nod-and-a-wink agreement between the broadcaster and the government in Bonn.

Unlike West Germany, East Germany hadn’t undergone a mass mobilisation when the war broke out despite the country being involved in the conflict. There had been selective call-ups of certain reservists who had specialist military skills but nothing on the scale of its neutral neighbour to the west. The security services had seen some activity in breaking up a few demonstrations too yet they were few and nothing serious despite the strong reaction to them. The biggest early contribution that East Germany gave to the Soviet-led war effort was Interflug, the national airline. It was under complete Soviet military control with aircraft and personnel. Losses were high. Then, feeling the strain of the needed manpower commitment for the China War, the Soviets made a request – a request which couldn’t be refused – for East Germany to supply limited military forces to fight the war in North America. The same was done with the Czechoslovaks and the Bulgarians too. Twelve thousand men in total were required from East Germany to man a complete combat division, ground support units and two aviation regiments of combat aircraft. These came from the nation’s peacetime standing military forces, not its un-mobilised reserves, though did require the calling-up of reservists to fill other posts when those regular men began their overseas commitment.

In many ways, it was a reasonable request. The Soviets could have demanded more, much more from East Germany. There was the concern though in East Berlin that this was just the beginning: that another request would come in the following months. Through November, those East Germans heading to North America began their journey to follow their earlier smaller commitment of now-lost paratroopers. The leadership was worried that the next request would be for far more men, needing reservists to be called up in greater numbers, and that also it would be to China they would be sent. There was the belief in East Berlin that those who went across the Atlantic would return some day – maybe after being prisoners even – but anyone who went to China would never be seen again. This wasn’t unrealistic. The China War was very different to the one being fought in North America.



November 1984: The Aegean

Greece and Turkey continued their war throughout November. Theirs was a separate conflict from the wider Third World War though its ongoing nature had important implications to that far bigger fight.


On Cyprus, the Turks won complete control of the island. Turkish military forces, supporting those of the separatist North Cypriots, took advantage of the inability of Greece to effectively send reinforcements across to Cyprus and they won the fight there. They drove Greek and Greek-Cypriot forces back, back and back again, all the way to the southern coast. A pocket had formed around Nicosia where Cypriot National Guard forces were trapped inside but the Turkish aim was to reach Limassol and Paphos. That they did, defeating all those who stood in their way. Many Greeks from the mainland surrendered towards the end of the fighting, often before they were beaten and the Turks ended up with a lot of prisoners on their hands to slow them down somewhat. They kept going as best as they could though and reached their objectives eventually. There was no escape for all those caught inside the island once any way out was taken by Turkish forces and this brought about further Greek surrenders. National Guard forces formed from local Greek-Cypriots carried on fighting though, many times until the death. The Turks blasted the pockets forming everywhere inland through the mountainous interior with artillery & air power and brought in Turkish-Cypriots (which included many Turkish mainland settlers) to do the honour of finishing them off. Nicosia remained the last bastion of resistance. Inside there were National Guard defenders as well as many civilians caught in there early on when a Turkish twin pincer movement of armour had shut off any way out of the Cypriot capital. Nicosia was still holding by the end of the month but those inside had no escape with ammunition running out and a major humanitarian crisis occurring. Surrender and be treated well, the Turks told them. Never, came the response: there will be no surrender.

The Battle of Cyprus was a conflict which involved more than just Greece, Turkey and the two different groups of Cypriots backed by those bigger nations. Through the middle of Cyprus, the Green Line, the UN Buffer Zone, ran and since 1974 it had been manned by peacekeepers from several countries. Those peacekeepers were ordered out of the way by Turkish soldiers pointing guns at them – on a few occasions, shots were fired over their heads to show seriousness; Ankara later sent formal diplomatic apologies to several nations – and the war bypassed the Green Line. Also on the island were two British military bases: the Sovereign Bases Areas (SBAs). One of these, Dhekelia, abutted the Green Line while the Akrotiri SBA lay much further to the south. There were UK military forces within each and they remained there during November. Shells arched through the sky above Dhekelia when the Turkish-Cypriots fought nearby against Greek-Cypriot forces and there was a stand-off between infantry units of the British Army and the Turkish Army not long afterwards. Turkish threats to make the British stand aside and let them advance through parts of the SBA were met with what was presented as solemn resolve to hold their ground though the British troops were in a terrible position and wouldn’t have been able to stop the Turks from taking the whole of the SBA if they chose to. Thankfully, Ankara wasn’t in the mind to see a fight with Britain happen – certain that they would then be at war with the rest of the Allies as the US Ambassador in the Turkish capital made that clear – and had its men on the ground back away. Nearby Ayia Napa to the east was overrun though by Turkish-Cypriots and the Turks themselves also advanced to the west of the SBA down to Larnaca. At Akrotiri, it took some time for Turkish forces to reach the edges of there, Cypriot civilians pouring into the SBA ahead of them and British troops being unable to stop the flow of them unless they had started shooting to hold back the crowds. Akrotiri didn’t mean safety for those civilians though because the Battle of Cyprus was involved by a further external actor: the Soviet Air Force. Flying from Syria, Sukhoi-24M fighter-bombers had been blasting part of the military infrastructure inside the SBA to pieces. Radars, communications interception antenna and hangars at Akrotiri – which had a strategically-placed airbase here in the heart of the eastern Med. – were hit by these attacks. Some incoming bombs and missiles went astray though, killing those in their path.


Cyprus was only one theatre of the Greek-Turkish War. Through the Aegean Sea, the military forces of the two clashed in the skies and on the water with air and naval engagements taking place. Whereas on Cyprus, the Turks fast had the upper hand and won the war there, things were more even through the Aegean with neither side being able to defeat the other. This was recognised by the Turks as there was nowhere to directly fight over, to see the forces of each concentrated in battle. What was happening instead was fighting over a huge area with just meaningless losses and no end in sight for the conflict. A battlefield was selected to be fought over to bring an end to the conflict by inflicting a serious defeat against the Greeks. Rhodes was chosen for that.

Aided by commandos ahead of them, Turkish marines landed on the island all around the big international airport to establish a bridgehead there before airmobile troops were flown in. Greek National Guard defenders along with Greek Air Force personnel fought bravely but were fast overcome and the airport was in Turkish hands. A follow-up assault took Maritsa Airbase (which had previously been the island’s civilian airport before the new larger one beside the coast was built) to put an end to Greek military air operations from Rhodes. Turkish marines stayed where they were holding onto the airhead while more infantry was flown in and aided in the drive on the port town of Rhodes itself. Greek forces were concentrated around here though bombed from the air and also shelled by Turkish warships just off the harbour. Rhodes was a tough fight and the Turks had a lot of problems rooting out dug-in resistance with the timetable for the fight’s completion delayed greatly but they won the fight in the end. As anticipated, the fighting on the island drew a major Greek response. They sent aircraft and warships to the fight and then Greek paratroopers arrived in the southern reaches of the island. In Athens, the fear was that Rhodes was the beginning of an island-hopping campaign all the way to Crete. That could be stopped by denying the Turks all of Rhodes. On each side, aircraft were shot down and ships were sunk. The Turks brought in more men to commence a drive south and the Greeks opposed them fiercely. Rhodes would remain partially-held by both sides by the end of the month, a battle which had drawn in significant forces onto and around the island. The main focus of the war in the Aegean was now being fought on Greek soil though, away from the Turkish mainland. Other operations around Greek islands off the Turkish coast were cut back in response to Rhodes and the Greeks shunting forces down to Crete along with putting further troops into Rhodes through herculean efforts to move them through small harbours. The Turks obliged this change in Greek focus, allowing them to do that and engaging them down there.

However, they still wanted to win the war overall and needed to inflict a serious defeat on Greece to match that won on Cyprus. With a defeat of an undeniable major effect, Ankara hoped to ram home to Athens that they had lost this war and bring the fighting to an end. Greece’s troops in Rhodes fought on though, holding part of the island in the face of all that the Turks threw at them. The patriotic fever fighting for their own soil was quite something and the Greek Government handled this rather well domestically… the first thing they had done right in this war. Greek civilians weren’t protesting for the end of the war, even if Rhodes was lost, but it to be fought until the very end brought a victory over the hated Turks. Maybe Turkey had gone too far by going into Rhodes…?


Soviet intelligence activity had lit the spark to set off the Greek-Turkish War (using Greeks to do their dirty work, not exposing their own people) with the aim of seeing a quick conflict fought and Turkey winning it. Their plan was to position themselves as a neutral and step in diplomatically at the end to establish a ceasefire. Both countries would then come under Moscow’s orbit with Greece directly and the Turks slowly dragged in eventually. That was all conditional upon a short war though. This was quite the geo-political strategy – madness as far as many were concerned – and also was something done while Soviet shipping for the wider war went through the Turkish Straits and across the Aegean Sea. When the shooting started, Soviet ‘reminders’ were sent to Ankara and Athens about the implications of seeing its own ships attacked during their ongoing war. Friendly-fire incidents where Greeks had fired on Greeks and Turks had engaged Turks had already occurred during the war. These things happened in fast-paced, violent modern conflicts where engagements often took place beyond visual range. With Soviet ships going through a war zone, some of them were attacked. Soviet responses were surprisingly restrained considering their actions elsewhere in the world. They had bigger plans for the whole region, ones which wouldn’t work by blasting the Greeks and the Turks. They were thus forced to escort their shipping, pulling away military assets from other tasks, and while this stopped the accidents occurring – a missile-cruiser or a flight of MiGs gave no doubt over the identity of shipping –, it did no good overall to the bigger aim of seeing the war ending to the Soviet’s desires.

This was far from how Moscow had seen things going in the Aegean. The fighting continued onwards with no end in sight unless the Soviet Union was prepared to overtly step in and take a side to force an end to it. It became increasingly clear that this would have to be done. Which side to choose though?

[Part VII]


Chapter Seventeen – Opportunities

December 1984: Baja California and California (US)

Democratic Mexico consisted of the city of Tijuana and a small area at the very northwestern tip of Baja California nearby. The Second Mexican Revolution and then the start of the Third World War had pushed them back all the way to Tijuana with Democratic Mexico almost wiped out for good. Cuba’s defeat over the border in California hadn’t immediately saved them either. The forces of Revolutionary Mexico who hadn’t been sent into America – thus to their doom – were no longer benefitted from Cuban air cover but still in a position to finally finish off Democratic Mexico. The fighting at the top of Baja California continued once December came with it looking likely that the Tijuana Government wouldn’t be able to hold on unless the United States gave them real support to hold back the final offensive to take their city. There remained serious issues of contention between New York and Tijuana, leaving Democratic Mexico outside of the Allies, yet Tijuana couldn’t be allowed to fall… or, more correctly, the Americans weren’t about to give Revolutionary Mexico a victory right on their border at a time like this. A decision came to intervene directly, more than just from the air like had been the case earlier in the year, but with ground forces. US Marines from out of California would be sent south of the border though not in a fashion expected by either of the two opposing sides in Mexico.

The war had seen the whole of the US Marine Corps engaged in conflict. In South Korea, the 3rd Marine Division remained committed there with the fighting all around Seoul. The 2nd Marine Division was still in Florida, where it had been since the start of the war and not having seen any real action apart from the occasional engagement with Cuban raiding parties. Reservists with the 4th Marine Division had been eventually wiped out during the fight for Texas and lost around Houston. As to the 1st Marine Division, they had fought repeated battles throughout California and come close to real defeat at one point before finally overcoming the Cubans last month. During all of these fights, across North America and over in East Asia too, the US Marines had fought the war on land and remained there. They hadn’t made many airmobile operations with all of their supporting helicopters and not undertaken a single amphibious operation. The capability was there with the assault shipping and there were many places that such actions could have been launched but circumstances had conspired to keep the US Marines from doing them. That now was about to change.

A week into December, the 1st Marines landed in Mexico. Replacements for earlier casualties had been integrated as best as possible into the blooded division though there was still a shortage of heavy equipment. The latter wasn’t needed so much for the Mexico mission, especially an amphibious assault like they made; the men were though, all those experienced Marines who’d left the Corps before the war and undertaken refresher training before the 1st Marines was carried in amphibious ships down from San Diego to land around Ensenada. The weather was good – winter in Baja wasn’t going to be a problem – and the US Marines were confident of success in what they were here to do. Their morale was rather high and there had been a reorganisation within the 1st Marines where the brigade-structure employed for operations inside California was changed to that of regiments – regimental landing teams (RLTs) – for the Ensenada mission: this was done for better operational control down in Mexico due to the type of assault that was to be made there.

December 8th saw the US Marines arrive in Mexico. Ensenada was beside the Pacific in a relatively sheltered geographic position from the worst of the sea conditions. The amphibious ships were in two groups, each led by one of the big Tarawa-class vessels that functioned as a helicopter carrier and also assault dock for landing craft. USS Tarawa supported 7 RLT while 5 RLT came from USS Peleliu and the others with her. Opposition to the landings made both north and south of Ensenada was light. Revolutionary Mexico forces stationed around the city which was supporting efforts to overcome Tijuana were in no position to stop the massive assault which came towards them. Harriers jump-jets and SeaCobra attack helicopters were forefront in attacking them before the ground forces could get at them – there was no assigned aircraft carrier to the mission – but soon enough there would be Phantoms and Skyhawks flying from identified sites around Ensenada which would be captured. 7 RLT took El Sauzal with haste, hitting undefended beaches and inland helicopter landing sites with haste and a readiness to fight anyone who stood in their way. Revolutionary Mexico troops weren’t at any in number. They did fire back when they could, even though it was clear enough to anyone with open eyes that this was a fight they were going to lose. The harbour at El Sauzal was taken and the road running north towards Rosarito (the frontlines outside Tijuana) blocked allowing for the main effort to be made into Ensenada where their opponents could be found. It was supply and other rear-area forces who were in the city, men who spent most of their time ‘amusing themselves’ with the locals. The airport located south of the city, also a base for the Mexican Air Force before the Revolution, was where 5 RLT landed. The actual airport and the nearby beaches were hit by incoming US Marines who shot down anyone foolish enough to stand up to them and they spread out fast. They turned towards Ensenada proper as well, squeezing those inside from both directions.

Within a day, Ensenada was fully in the hands of the 1st Marines. The amphibious ships remained off-shore for a few days, unloading equipment and supplies to support the men on the ground though eventually went back to San Diego. There were a couple of US Navy warships still in nearby waters to protect the captured port facilities and incoming supply ships making later runs but the US Marines were on their own here in Baja California. That was okay for them though. The airport had aircraft flying from it and they were busy fighting against Revolutionary Mexico forces who were fleeing in every direction away from Ensenada. The coastal lowland as far south as El Zorrillo was taken and security posts were established at high points through the inland mountains to control access, though the focus for the 1st Marines was to the north. They weren’t here just to hold onto Ensenada but to take on enemy forces located away from the city who’d fast be turning around and trying to retake it. The Guadalajara Brigade (named after the region in Mexico where it was raised) was that Revolutionary Mexico force who had to turn around and try to retake Ensenada. They had to otherwise they’d be squeezed between Tijuana and Ensenada and maybe the Pacific if the US Marines could cut them off by getting control over inland routes. Counterattack at once they did, the decision being taken by the commander on the strong advice of his Cuban deputy. They already lost this fight though, long before it begun. The coastal road which they advanced down, which they gone up the other way along before, was one fixed target for American air power with attacks being made from both Ensenada plus sites back in California. Armoured vehicles could only come down that route rather than go any other way. They were hit time and time again in targeted strikes with the men moving along the same route generally on foot bombed with what seemed like casual action. It wasn’t though: there was an aim to the seemingly random attacks. The Guadalajara Brigade was broken up into bits, manageable sections. In pieces these troops were left, each who came at the outskirts of Ensenada on their own through the latter stages of December. The US Marines had positioned themselves ready to meet this staggered approach by holding the coastal road by nearby high ground behind it too. The defences moved after each engagement, falling back towards Ensenada. Firing from distance and from under cover was done in the main though there were localised pushes forward when the Revolutionary Mexico troops came to a stop too in an effort to do even more damage. Using their helicopters as well as the mass of large amphibious transport in the form of AAV-7 amtracks gave the 1st Marines this advantage in mobility which they took full advantage of.

By Christmas, the fight was over. Democratic Mexico troops did something they hadn’t done in a long time and advance forwards. They moved down from Rosarito and rolled up what was left of their countrymen from behind when the 1st Marines finished off the last of those out ahead. The two forces met near Cibolas del Mar, a small town outside El Sauzal. Senior officers exchanged handshakes and pleasantries about the fighting capabilities of the other. There was talk about handling prisoners taken and also the swapping of radio codes to better coordinate any further operations nearby to stop accidental exchanges of fire. Then, the US Marines did something that they didn’t want to do but political events from afar had demanded: they let armed Mexicans back into Ensenada. Vice President Baker had been to Tijuana in previous weeks and there had been a deal struck with Democratic Mexico. The Tijuana Government still remained not a formal member of the Allies yet was now in a military alliance with the United States specific to North America. This meant that the fighting forces of the two sides were now to work together, not point guns at each other ready to fight if they could. Ensenada was handed over to Tijuana’s control because come the New Year, the 1st Marines were to move away from there. The majority of Baja California remained in hostile hands and all of that was all planned to be liberated through 1985 as opportunities to move onwards presented themselves.


National guardsmen with the US IV Corps didn’t cross down from California into Baja California like they wanted to. Mexicali and northern Baja California east of Tijuana was still full of Revolutionary Mexico troops within touching distance of the border. The national guardsmen wanted to go over, to defeat the Baja California Brigade and push onto the shores of the Gulf of California, but were refused permission. This continued stoppage of what should have been a follow-up advance to liberating US soil last month wasn’t about politics but a lack of capability to do so. Half of the IV Corps was elsewhere, not inside the Imperial Valley. The 40th Infantry Division and the two armored cavalry regiments which had won the victories in Los Angeles and through LA’s Inland Empire weren’t opposite Mexicali; they were back inside LA and transferred to the fight in the Rockies respectively. There were still two divisions with the IV Corps’ forward fight – the 38th & 47th Divisions – but both remained understrength after sustained fighting and without incoming replacements of men nor heavy equipment.

The month was spent in shelling and aggressive border patrolling from each side. There was external air interference which came, affecting both sides though nothing really serious. The IV Corps did go over the border – helpfully marked by the water-line of the All-American Canal, a narrow but defined stretch of water – during their patrols and there were also two long-range rescue missions to go after downed aircrew as well with one US Air Force being brought back but a US Navy aviator remaining missing. The national guardsmen on that second mission were men from Iowa joined by members of the Chilean military who went with them travelling a dozen miles south of the border. There were marines, paratroopers and commandos from the Chilean Armed Forces in California, no more than a hundred by the end of the month. These were all here ahead of a bigger force meant to arrive in January. Pinochet was sending them to aid the fight against the communists, seeking geo-political opportunities, and those men would be far from home. As to the trio of Chileans who went on that unsuccessful rescue mission (it wasn’t one which the US Navy specifically rescued but one which the 47th Division volunteered its men to make as they took their own opportunities), one of them was killed in Mexico by a sniper making him the first of their casualties.

Behind the frontlines on the border, the US Air Force was busy making the wrecked NAS El Centro, a US Navy training base fought over several times, a facility for their own future operations. Engineers moved wreckage of aircraft, vehicles and downed structures while specialist teams dealt with unexploded munitions. There were bodies to bury and some to be removed from the ground too: the latter being many US servicemen (from not just the US Navy but the US Marines and the California National Guard) whose remains were found dumped in a mass grave by the Cubans after the fighting though the Imperial Valley. It was an unpleasant yet necessary task. El Centro and the airstrip which was Imperial County Airport close by were going to be of great significance next year for flight operations over Mexico even when it was hoped that forward sites on Mexican soil could be taken. The work at El Centro was interrupted twice by enemy activity though. On the first occasion, El Centro was the target of several short-range ballistic missiles (with conventional high-explosive warheads) launched from inside Mexico by the Soviets as part of a wider series of late December attacks into California. Days later came an air raid. A pair of Sukhoi-24Ms made a low-level run under US Air Force fighter cover and hit El Centro. It became clear that the Soviets were not ignoring what was going on here. They had no troops of their own for hundreds of miles but their air support was still on-hand for their embattled allies who were positioned south of the border to defend Mexico. They too were getting ready for next year and all that it would bring.



December 1984: Arizona and Sonora

Five interstates ran east-west across the Rocky Mountains linking the West Coast with the rest of the country on the other side. Interstates #10, #40 and #70 were cut due to the Soviet and Nicaraguan presence around El Paso, Albuquerque and Denver. Interstates #80 and #90 were open with their routes through the mountains busy as well as heavily-protected. There were rail links too, mainly for freight rather than limited passenger travel, which also crossed the spine of mountains which ran through the North American continent. Several of these were cut due to the presence of occupying forces while others faced repeated enemy action especially in isolated areas making their use limited and unpredictable. The skies above the Rockies were another connection to the West Coast. The air routes for cross-country transport, sending men and supplies aboard both military and civilian aircraft (the latter under military control), were made use of flying far to the north of Denver and going above Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Despite some links being open, the enforced closing of some and the danger of using others meant that in many ways, the United States had been cut in two. The furthest Soviet advance had reached Denver and been finally stopped there but that was almost halfway to the Canadian border. While not cut off completely, the West Coast was on the way to being isolated especially as the most-important fights were taking place to the east of the Rockies on the edges of the Great Plains. The West Coast had held and so attention was focused by the United States on the fighting elsewhere. Next year when the general situation was foreseen to have improved, further American forces would move to the West Coast yet before then, those in place who won all of those important victories, would have to hold on with what they had.

Soviet success in cutting off the West Coast had been part of the grand operational plan for the war in North America though it was undercut by the failing of the Cubans fighting in California and the Guatemalans in Arizona. The Cubans were all dead or prisoner now while the Guatemalans had barely managed to hold on. For the Soviets, this was a major disappointment. All that hard work – it really had been difficult – done in the Rockies had been for little real gain when those fighting on the West Coast had ultimately failed. There was regret too that the pre-war projected ‘Las Vegas operation’ had never taken place. This had been a plan to land an airborne division (the 106th Guards) at Nellis AFB outside that Nevada city and establish a big centre of operations in Clark County. Las Vegas itself would be left unoccupied by the Soviet Airborne – McCarran Airport heavily shelled though – as they focused on cutting the links to California closer in as well as securing the Hoover Dam and access to Arizona from behind. A month before the war started, the operation was called off. It was thought too risky as a whole first-rate division could have been lost: the 106th Guards stayed in Eastern Europe in case things went wrong there instead. Looking back, the Soviets now realised how effective this would have been. Nellis had been the centre of US Air Force operations in the first weeks of the war and while there was a big US Army presence at Fort Irwin as well as US Marines at Twentynine Palms who it was feared could have eliminated the Nellis airhead, those forces then wouldn’t have gone southwards to so thoroughly destroy the Cubans as they had helped to do so. Hindsight was great but ultimately useless. By now, Las Vegas might as well have been on the far side of the moon. The 106th Guards was now coming to North America but for operations over on the Great Plains as part of the underway mass reinforcement of combat forces.

The Guatemalan hold on pieces of Arizona was only able to carry on due to American weakness in the state. Their battered and beaten-up troops there had just about held on. They controlled slivers of territory a-joining Mexico to the south and larger but empty areas of the eastern parts of Arizona which backed onto the Rockies behind them. The Soviets, even the Guatemalans themselves, knew that soon enough the Americans would get their act together and retake all of this ground. Withdrawal back over the border into Sonora would have made military sense. Politically this was unacceptable though so they stayed. More troops were to the south. These were third-rate Guatemalan and Nicaraguan troops, dug-in across a wide area in a static defensive position which was daily being improved. It was those recent arrivals whom the Soviets believed would be those to rely upon come 1985. In the meantime though, attention was on Arizona.

Through there American forces consisted of regular US Army troops and national guardsmen from several states. Two corps commands were operational at the end of November yet once December came about, these became just the one. The X Corps – all of national guardsmen – had been earlier spun out of the I Corps (when the latter went to California) but was now temporarily disestablished. The strengthened I Corps controlled all of those in Arizona: two complete divisions, two large brigades and many smaller units. Their mission was to generally remain where they were. Spread from Flagstaff to Yuma in a semi-circular fashion keeping Phoenix far inside and Tucson just outside, the Americans were officially following that stop order with regard to any more forward advances. Like the IV Corps outside Mexicali, the I Corps in Arizona hadn’t been sent any major resupply or combat replacements for men who’d been lost. There remained lower-level fighting though through the month where no big offensives were due to take place but forward patrolling, raids and ambushes were granted permission to occur to keep the pressure on and look for opportunities to be taken. Several weeks in through this supposedly quiet period where the winter weather in Arizona was nothing to write home about, an opportunity presented itself for the I Corps. The 5th Armored Brigade was in the middle of an armed raid near to San Luis Rio Colorado and on Mexican soil within miles of the border behind them. Their tanks shot up Nicaraguan troops and engaged in a pursuit. From his command post back on the American side of the frontier, the brigade commander gave his forward units permission to keep going… he didn’t break his orders, just bent them. American tanks reached the shores of the Gulf of California within hours. The Altar Desert was between them and San Luis Rio Colorado. In addition, of more importance, the land link for the enemy to Baja California was cut by their presence. Permission was sought from the I Corps to hold their ground and for the whole brigade to extend this position. Discussions took place within the Sixth United States Army and then the Western Command headquarters on this. There was no political barrier to going over the border – the US Marines were by now holding Ensenada in Baja – just a military restriction fearing an overstretch. However, based on the local situation with enemy weakness, the permission came for the 5th Brigade to keep what they had taken. More troops moved forward, linked by a road in a reasonable shape and one which engineers moved in to sweep for unexploded munitions. A cleared area for helicopters was set up next to the sea at the southern end too so as to make sure that if there were unexpected problems moving supplies (what few there were) by road, these could come down by air.

A hold over a very small strip of Mexican soil didn’t make up for all of Arizona that remained in enemy hands though. Civilians from the occupied areas continued to successfully come out in small numbers though many others who tried to follow failed to make it. With those who made it came the horror stories of occupation by a foreign power whose hold on what they had was enforced through brutality. Arizona’s newly-elected Congressional contingent were already making a big deal out of this and that would only increase for the new session starting in the New Year. They wanted the pieces of their state under occupation liberated. The matter of supply problems for the I Corps was something they were (generally) briefed upon and the presence of Green Berets all over that region causing problems for the Guatemalans in their rear was hinted at too. Still, that didn’t see them about to give this up and just accept things they way that they were. The calls for an offensive not into Mexico but to clear Arizona would only get louder and louder.



December 1984: Colorado

Where the winter weather was at its worst was where the most of the month’s fighting in North America took place. During the snow, the freezing temperatures and the short amount of daylight hours, up in Colorado through the edges of the Rocky Mountains, serious engagements of a significant importance to the whole war carried on.

Denver had become a city of great significance with the ongoing siege around it which held throughout December. The American fight to keep it free from occupation and the Soviet wish to take it – thus striking what was certain to be a moral blow to American morale – became a struggle of wills between nations. It was more that just a fight for those involved but a big propaganda issue. None of this had been planned yet that was what it had become. Inside Denver, American forces, paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division along with a large militia contingent, fought to hold on for themselves and for their country. The Nicaraguans who formed the inner perimeter around them made several serious efforts to overcome those defenders. Twice they came strongly in major offensives against the city, focusing upon Stapleton Airport. They were turned back each time, the first time easier than the second. The airport was the target of countless attacks from afar with air strikes taking place yet in the main artillery, rockets and missiles had it zeroed in. The tower was down and the terminals were burnt out; the runways and taxiways blasted each time then given hasty repairs. The damage done should have forced its closure. It was the city’s airhead to the outside world though. The damage each time was patched up as best as possible and aircraft kept coming in. It took a special kind of pilot to not just fly into Stapleton but to also fly out again. US Air Force C-130 Hercules waited for the right weather – ‘right’ as in terms of terrible and thus to hide them – to come in with steep approaches either silently or making a show of dropping infrared flares to distract missiles targeting them. They then had to get back out again without being shot down too. On the ground, the C-130s were involved in fast turnarounds as they were often targeted there as well. In came supplies and sometimes personnel and out went casualties and evacuees. Many aircraft didn’t make it. Weather conditions or enemy action got them: there were wrecks near to and far from Stapleton. Those fighting for the city’s edges, to keep the Nicaraguans at bay, were outnumbered inside as well as on the outside. There were many, many civilians who hadn’t got away from Denver before the siege began. These were those who lived here yet also refugees who’d come from further afield. Food, medicines and even shelter was in short supply. Casualties from the fighting came when they were caught up in it including several times were Nicaraguan or Soviet raiding parties, small teams of men dismounted who’d sneaked inside, launched attacks from within the perimeter. Almost all of the civilians wanted out; a few wished to stay but they were in the minority. By the end of the month, there were nearly half a million of them all trapped inside. The US Air Force couldn’t lift them out yet were taking children and casualties… some of whom didn’t make it too. For everyone else who wanted to go, if they could make it themselves – and the US Army could only partially assist in this – then there remained that escape route away to the west. The Nicaraguans held a tight corridor to the north, the east and the south of the city yet the mountains to the west weren’t held by them. It was dangerous to go over the Rockies though.

Denver sat right below the Rockies, in the shadow of those mountains and the ongoing fighting up there. The Soviet presence though the high ground only increased through December in spite of all the bad weather. There was a wider strategic aim for the presence of first Spetsnaz units and then later Soviet Airborne troops yet as Denver became so important, a lot of what they were doing played into the siege of that city and the escape of so many of the people from there as the Soviets sought to tighten the siege and see the city fall. The Americans weren’t leaving them all alone up there. They had Green Berets in the Rockies, national guardsmen from the 19th Special Forces Group (based pre-war through many states) recently joined by reservists from the 11th Special Forces Group, a US Army Reserve unit. Detachments were from each were all over the Rockies and not just concentrated in the area immediately west of Denver. Here the fight became rather intensive. The Soviets were focused on cutting the ground routes which ran through the mountains down towards the city and further afield as well. Ambushes and raids took place rather than any stand-up fight before the 76th Guards Airborne Division put company-sized units into the mountains by helicopter insertion to join them. The reinforcement brought bigger operations yet also more American attention. The transport helicopters which came up faced missile attack with several brought down complete with cargoes of troops. The Americans were bringing in their own reinforcements, heavy ground units. Before these arrived late in the month, the Green Berets remained busy getting ready for them and taking on the Soviets. Protecting fleeing refugees coming from out of Denver was something they were little able to help with. They couldn’t for their numbers were few and they had more-important tasks to achieve. This caused anguish and upset elsewhere yet they had to remain focused on their mission of engaging enemy forces where found and keeping the fight going for this territory rather than ceding it to the Soviets. More militia, armed American civilians either in the semi-organised Patriot groups or independent clusters, were fighting here. Some intervened in aiding the flight of refugees while others either stayed or were unaware of the scale of what was going on. The majority of guerrillas through the mountains spent most of their time just staying alive rather than fighting. Yet a few others fought on, actively going out and seeking to fight in places. They conducted their own raids and ambushes, rescued or caught downed pilots when they could and generally fought a guerrilla campaign. There were things done by elements of the militia which were outside the rules of law. Prisoners, if taken alive, were rarely kept alive for long. There were instances where these guerrillas mistreated their fellow Americans who crossed their paths too: these were rare but did happen. The KGB had some people up here as well, men who were ordered here and certainly wouldn’t have volunteered for the mission they were given! That mission was to try to make contact with guerrillas in places and seek out a long-term arrangement with them. It sounded insane and when the first reports came back to the Americans that the Soviets were trying this, there was initial disbelief. It was happening though and nuggets of intelligence to confirm this came. A suggestion was made to President Glenn from the head of the new & still-organising National Intelligence & Security Service (NISS) and it was one given presidential approval. Both the GRU and the Soviet Army would be let known just what the KGB were up to here. So the KGB wanted to give guerrillas guns and ammunition, even intelligence, to make them fight their own people as separatists or terrorists? Okay… but whom else would they fight too with those too, eh? The ingredients to make an explosive meal were chucked into the bowl. When the weather warmed up eventually, hopefully by that point this meal would be ready for the KGB to eat. The Director of NISS was hoping to give the KGB a bad case of the runs, added too by lead poisoning of the gut as well.

A major command reorganisation took place at the beginning of the month when it came to American forces in Colorado (plus down into the Texan Panhandle too) to add to changes made at the end of November. Rockies Command – an army group headquarters – was activated along with a subordinate First United States Army; the Seventeenth Air Force was already in-place. The long-standing issue of the fight for the Rocky Mountains being a sideshow for Texas Command when it really wasn’t was aimed to be solved with this allowing for a better regional focus as opposed to a previous stretching of subordinate resources from the Gulf Coast all the way to the Utah state-line. Below the First US Army, where before there was only the US XVIII Corps with five combat divisions plus attachments stretched from Amarillo to Denver, there was now the new US XI Corps as well. In addition, Canadian forces in Colorado were meant to be joined by more coming down from the Pacific Coast – with a British brigade included – to form a Canadian corps command before the New Year. This lower-level change was again made to better coordinate the fight. The XVIII Corps would remain in command of those American troops fighting at the very top of Texas leaving the XI Corps and the Canadians in support to fight in Colorado. With the Canadians and their British allies – the Redcoats were marching in! – arriving, these consisted of the only substantial reinforcements for the Americans in battle through Colorado though. There were some smaller units coming from the West Coast but what was really needed were more men to fight outside of Denver itself. The 4th Infantry Division and the 174th Infantry Brigade (the old Berlin Brigade) were fought out. They couldn’t budge the Soviets from their Twenty–Second Army – roughly the same size of the US XI Corps – and Nicaraguans with their First Army (another corps-size force) from where they were. The occupiers were unable to advance either, just as worn down after so much combat had been seen in November. The frontlines remained generally static. There were outbreaks of fierce fighting where hundreds would die all for no appreciable gain. Morale among those fighting plummeted. Officers pushed them onwards and orders came from above for this and that to be done yet everyone was dead tired. Slogging through the snow and out in the cold away from any shelter was just what no one wanted to do. Even among the 76th Guards Division, the elite Soviet Airborne, there was little great drive among these men when they were sent away from the fighting southeast of Denver where they were holding back the Canadians – giving over their ground to an independent brigade – to go off into the mountains. They were comfortable where they were. Field court martials to make examples of some and general punishment for many took place. Munity wasn’t near but there were many grumbles and bad attitudes. This was only worse among the 120th Guards Motorised Rifle Division, another supposedly elite unit yet one which the US Army Berlin Brigade had smashed up, and then the Nicaraguans too. No one wanted to be here and if they had to be, they didn’t want to go off to fight when so many saw it all as being for nothing.

The cupboard for American reinforcements was practically bare. Troops were needed for Colorado, to move through the Rockies coming towards Denver from the west, and so Western Command had been instructed to cut loose its pair of armored cavalry regiments which had been in Los Angeles and then gone deeper into Southern California. Attached directly to the First US Army were the 116th & 163rd Regiments. These were national guardsmen based out of Idaho and Montana respectively. They’d been sent to Colorado before, back in late September. There had come an urgent order to sent them to Los Angeles – which they’d failed to reach to save it yet afterwards took part in its liberation – before they could see action against Cuban and Nicaraguan paratroopers south of Colorado Springs. Now, they’d been ordered back here again. Some very choice words had been used by many men within including the commanding officer of the latter regiment at the f***ing stupidity of all of this. Montana to Colorado to California and then back again to Colorado! What the hell! The orders were followed though. The two regiments went via Nevada, across Utah and into Colorado. Traveling though the Rockies, among the snow and over dangerous ground – the snow and the enemy –, the progress once in Colorado wasn’t that great. The national guardsmen in their M-60 tanks and M-113 armoured personnel carriers engaged Spetsnaz and Soviet Airborne, occasionally seeing accidental exchanges of fire with militia units too who mistook them for the enemy… or just fired at anyone in uniform they saw. Montana’s 163rd Regiment went along the course of Interstate-70, a long-winding road which civilians on foot were trying to follow in the other direction. There were cut passes through the mountains and tunnels underneath them. The whole area was infested with the enemy. It was hard going, slow and costly in terms of men. By Christmas, they had reached Silverthorne; New Year saw them reach Georgetown, still a long way from Denver. The 116th Regiment from Idaho fought to the south and followed the route of Highway-285 though not tied directly to that road. They reached as far as the Ute Pass and the town of Divide (a thoroughly deserted place) by the end of the month, tired and worn out as well. Neither regiment had got down off the mountains to the lower ground below. Many enemy had been fought yet many more had got away.

Engagements occurred all over the place with small fights rather than the whole of each regiment seeing action. In one of the many which the 163rd Regiment fought in, right before the New Year and up on the edges of the Arapaho National Forest, a platoon from B Squadron 1-163 CAV got into a terrible fight where they unexpectedly met Soviet armour instead of their commandos or paratroopers. Several companies of tanks had been detached from the 120th Guards Division to support the fight in the mountains when the Americans introduced their own. This meant a difficult journey for those sent into the Rockies. These Soviets detached for the fight travelled from the occupied Boulder on the lower ground and through the Roosevelt National Forest before going even deeper into the wilderness. A platoon of Soviet tanks, three T-72s, got lost and didn’t meet with the Soviet Airborne they were supposed to link up with. Instead, they and what began as three M-60s clashed, fighting at distance in a sudden and confusing fight. The Americans were soon down to just one tank, the Soviets two. There were shots exchanged between the two T-72s where one used its machine gun to fire on the other to apparently clear off people on foot around them. The American tank crew, lost like their opponents, engaged the firing second tank: it was afterwards one vs. one yet the national guardsmen couldn’t see the Soviets. However, all of a sudden they observed as purple smoke coming from the open turret hatch of the last T-72. The target was marked for them! They opened fire and hit the T-72, emerging the victors of a brutal fight which had come out of nowhere. The Americans moved on, not sure of what exactly had gone on there yet glad to have escaped alive. Only much time later would they learn the truth about a downed US Air Force aviator, a band of teenagers who shouldn’t have been running around with guns in the mountains and how that F-15 pilot by the name of Tanner had tried to save them before giving his own life for the 1-163 CAV. That was in the future though, some time off and when the war was over. Before then, the fighting continued through Colorado and the Rockies.



December 1984: Texas Panhandle

The command change with the First US Army being established and the splitting in two of the XVIII Corps to create the new XI Corps up in Colorado benefitted those down in Texas well. The XVIII Corps had lost half its strength yet for those fighting in the Texas Panhandle, this meant that the fight that they had they could focus on far better than beforehand: what was going on up in Colorado – oh so far away – was now the worry of those there. Keeping the very top of Texas out of enemy hands, denying them the opportunity they sought to extend themselves further and out into the Great Plains behind, was going to be easier now that the XVIII Corps just had this mission on their hands. Command & communications, artillery & engineering support and logistics were all simplified with a smaller area of operations that was now covered by the 1st Infantry & 101st Air Assault Infantry Divisions plus the 56th Cavalry Brigade of orphaned Texan national guardsmen. They held their ground through December when the weather was bad though not truly awful like it was elsewhere. Nicaraguans forces to the west of them couldn’t properly get fully out of New Mexico to get anywhere near to Amarillo while more of them away to the south may have taken Lubbock last month yet could get no further north than Plainview. A long stretch of ground spread up to where the corps boundary with the XI Corps was – going across where the Oklahoma Panhandle was; tank country in fact – remained unthreatened though it was watched and guarded in case the Nicaraguans, or more probably the Soviets with tanks, get into position to take advantage. The Canadians up there were stretched thin down through eastern Colorado yet the link was there and held secure. Come better weather in the New Year, once Spring started, the XVIII Corps with hopefully many reinforcements, was hoping to strike out in an offensive rather than defend and lose ground like before. The Americans were looking forward to that fight yet would get another one before that, far sooner.

Nicaraguan forces here in Texas were suffering during the lull in major fighting. There was still sporadic activity with deaths and injuries occurring yet the progress of the Nicaraguan Second Army had come to a stop. They couldn’t go any further than they had. It wasn’t just that the Americans had stopped them. Their advances had been halted by supply issues in the rear. They were second from the bottom of priorities (only ahead of the Guatemalans effectively stranded in Arizona) when it came to support given to them of ammunition, fuel, food, medicines and everything else. That was all desperately needed elsewhere. Some supplies still came through but none of any significance. The fighting men and the majority of the officers below general officer rank weren’t supposed to be aware of the issue. Naturally, they were. How could they not understand that near nothing was coming forward? The men were a long way from home. These Nicaraguans – and Hondurans serving for another country against their will – hadn’t chosen to be in their country’s army, let alone be sent to America to fight in a war like this. It was one full of misery, pain, hunger and fear. They were homesick. They were hurting physically and emotionally. They were hungry and when they did get fed, it made them ill. They were under the constant threat of death from either enemy action or for ill-defined acts of cowardice &/or treason. The previous battles which they had fought had been wonders undertaken by their army, real successes on the battlefield where they engaged and stood their own against the armies of the United States. Much of that success came due to actions taken on flanks by others and generous air support yet they had still achieved all that they had when fighting. No one cared about those any more though. The men didn’t see themselves as part of a victorious army. Skirmishing, patrols and shelling took place along the frontlines throughout the month and the Americans bombed them when they could. Guerrilla issues in this part of Texas, the open wind-swept country, was limited yet when it occurred, the Nicaraguans suffered under those too. The dead were buried here in Texas, not back home by their families. They had it lucky. The injured really suffered. Medical care was… ill-human. The field hospitals were butcher’s dens where amputations of limbs was done for cases where they shouldn’t have been: it saved on time and long-term care to just remove an arm or leg. Blood transfusions and burns treatments brought infections and painful deaths which just went on and on. Back last month, when the Americans had used chemical weapons, so many of the survivors of those attacks hadn’t seen any medical attention at all. They’d been left to die when so many could have been saved because there were countless casualties. Some lucky ones had been shot and put out of their misery by comrades yet the majority had screamed, sobbed and begged for a death which took a long time to come. All of this had continually brought about discipline problems within the ranks of these forced conscripts. Bad morale suffered elsewhere was nothing in comparison to the state of the Nicaraguan Second Army. December saw desertion rates hit a high and there were incidents of men shooting sergeants and officers. Others stole from the stores, taking what little there was and not caring about anyone else, or deliberately attacked their fellow soldiers with their rifles during disagreements. Nicaraguan political security units – Cuban trained personnel – were unable to handle this. The Cubans were first asked to send men but Soviet KGB detachments arrived instead. Ultimately, they played a central role in what became the Hereford Mutiny, one which broke a whole combat division just before Christmas.


Hereford was a Texan town on the road between Clovis over in New Mexico and Amarillo up ahead. It was around here – the fighting men spread out on a wide frontage to the northeast but with support troops near the long-destroyed town – that the Nicaraguans had their 6th Rifle Division. This was a lower-grade unit, part of the second wave of Nicaraguan troops sent to America; not the worst of units (those were still in Mexico) but not long-serving and better-equipped like others. One cold morning, an Antonov-12 transport aircraft in Cuban military markings flew very low over their positions and from it fell bundles of paper which floated downwards towards the Nicaraguans aided by an extremely favourable wind to reach them. The aircraft had been Cuban until the war’s second day back in September when it had landed in Florida and its aircrew defected though only after they’d airdropped men over the Florida Keys. No longer flown by those men, the US Air Force had it in service in a joint programme started by the DIA known as Operation Catfish with a special operations mission. It had several times flown elsewhere in Texas through the eastern occupied parts inserting Green Berets from low-altitude drops but this had moved to leaflets runs in what had been now deemed Operation Ranch Hand after the Soviets had got clued-in with those airdrops of commandos. Flying over the Nicaraguans, the leaflets were dropped and the aircraft got away clean. Information from those deserters who’d fled to XVIII Corps lines earlier in the month had spoken of the conditions and the Americans had seen an opportunity.

The paper had print on both sides. The front was full of propaganda: nothing dramatic nor going to be really effective either. On the back was a ‘safe passage pass’ which promised the bearer ‘comfort to sit out the war’ should they desert and use it to get away from their army. Thousands of these fell among the Nicaraguans. Some men grabbed theirs and read what it said, maybe thinking of trying to run to see that promised comfort. Officers within the 6th Rifle Division were thinking of using the leaflets for another kind of comfort. The chronic shortages for the Nicaraguans included toilet paper: here was plenty of that. It was needed too due to the bad food. The leaflets were collected up to be used for a purpose that the Americans hadn’t foreseen and one which would actually see Ranch Hand a failure. The mission would succeed though due to a fortunate (for the United States) turn of events.

The Soviets in the rear found out about the collection of the leaflets and saw one. They witnessed these being handed out to the men. The reason was explained for this. The senior KGB man in Hereford would have none of that, he believed he was being lied to. The shootings started, first with senior Nicaraguan officers. Then anyone found with one of the leaflets in their possession was to be shot too. This was remarkably unfair and the men singled out for execution for being in possession of what was toilet paper, not American propaganda, were seen to be shot by their witnessing comrades. One man was defended by his friends and a KGB man was shot. The KGB shot back. The Nicaraguans returned fire and there were more of them. The Soviets were surrounded by a mob; Nicaraguan officers seemingly disappeared. Soon enough, every one of the KGB men – the senior man a lieutenant-colonel – was dead, their corpses mistreated too. Things got fast out of hand beyond the initial kill crazy action taken against the KGB. Nicaraguan officers were killed by their men if they were unable to get away from Hereford. The mob spread out, armed and reaching the rear of the frontlines which faced ahead. A mutiny started as the rifle regiments saw order collapse with speed among them. No longer were they fighting the Americans ahead. They wanted to fight all the way back to their homes, taking anyone who stood in their way during that.

It was a long way back to Nicaragua. The mob of armed men didn’t even start moving for they were too busy seeking out more officers to kill and also attacking heavy equipment and even their field fortifications. They smashed and burnt what was in front of them, taking out their anger because despite killing their officers they still had no food, they were still cold and they well all full of pain. For almost twenty-four hours, the mob controlled Hereford. Then the KGB showed up, this time in number. A barrage unit of heavily-armed men arrived after the wider area had been sealed off. These men were outnumbered overall yet they came with armoured vehicles and heavy weapons. A Soviet Army artillery battalion a dozen miles off with big guns, tasked in support of the Nicaraguans, were given the order to shell Hereford. They weren’t told why, they knew nothing of the ongoing mutiny. 152mm & 203mm high-explosive shells blasted the Nicaraguans for some time while the KGB machine gunned anyone who fled south and west. Finally, satisfied that the Nicaraguans were done for, the KGB moved in. Quicker than they thought they could, they took control. The more numerous Nicaraguans had little ammunition and a complete lack of organisation. The KGB took them apart, breaking them into smaller chunks. Men surrendered, others fought on. In the end, be it that day or in later days, they’d all be killed. Some more shelling was needed in-places during the fight but it was soon enough over. The firing squads would be busy for some time.


Soviet efforts to conceal the Hereford Mutiny were good. They put a lid on the news well yet, as was always the case, word leaked out initially. What came out wasn’t always the truth. The news going backwards being stomped on to stop it was what travelled into occupied territory. Other news went into American-held Texas. The deserters who ran during the rule of the mob and then more who fled during the KGB attack all told of what happened. The Americans themselves witnessed the artillery barrage and then in later days reconnaissance efforts caught sight of the firing squads & mass graves. Eight thousand Nicaraguans were believed dead and a whole division knocked out of the war for good. This also left a massive gap in enemy lines. Another opportunity had cropped up. It was one taken by the 56th Brigade. These Texans, once part of the lost 49th Armored Division, were sent forward. Their mission was limited due to their own supply limits and also the support that the XVIII Corps could give them. These restrictions affected what they did yet didn’t deny them a fantastic victory. The Texans bypassed empty enemy positions outside Hereford and didn’t follow the road running southwest towards New Mexico but south instead deeper into Texas. They went towards the town of Dimmitt and then down to a crossroads at Sunnyside. Here they fought the flank units of the Nicaraguan 4th Motorised Rifle Division, a formation based around Plainview who’d been given orders to extend their frontage to cover Hereford. They hadn’t been told why – the 6th Rifle Division wasn’t mentioned – and were underway when the Americans reached them. The Texans won their fight, nearly defeating a whole regiment before the Nicaraguans were able to pull back into secure positions. The attack and the Texans sitting in Sunnyside afterwards split the Nicaraguan Second Army in two, their 2nd Motorised Rifle Division was away to the north with Americans in between them.

While the 56th Brigade had worn itself out when Sunnyside was a big fight, they’d opened up the front completely. The Nicaraguans had reacted only to hold on and not counterattack. The XVIII Corps started marshalling what few available assets it had, what it could spare from holding the lines and what they could support in battle. A pause of a week to ten days was needed and the weather wouldn’t be good come the first week of January, but a major attack despite all handicaps was being put together. The opportunity was too good to pass up and Soviet activity in response to what the Texans had done, let alone any Nicaraguan reaction, was minimal. A big battle was coming up as eyes were cast further forward more than just Plainview ahead.



December 1984: Oklahoma

The 103rd Guards Airborne Division had an illustrious history. It was a Rifle division in the latter stages of the Second World War and successfully fought to capture Vienna from the Nazis. As part of the post-war Soviet Airborne, it had taken part in Operation Danube in 1968 to eliminate Czechoslovak resistance and then gone into Iran as the first wave of assault forces eleven years later of the joint invasion of both Afghanistan and Iran. For operations in the United States, the 103rd Guards Division had been the first on the ground in Texas where it had secured the airheads in & around Corpus Christi to open the way in for the Soviet Army. America had then become a graveyard for the paratroopers though. One regiment was lost on the Gulf Coast of Texas long before Houston was secured and for no gain at all; the later assault by the rest of the 103rd Guards Division to seize Houston’s airports as part of the destruction of US Marine Reservists hadn’t removed the stain of the earlier defeat around Lavaca Bay. A further defeat had come last month where most of one of the pair of surviving regiments had been defeated at Lawton here in Oklahoma. The Guards title had been stripped from the division with orders on that coming from Moscow despite protests from many. This was important, the title meant something, and the punishment for failure was extended to all of the serving men with that stripping of their valued designation. What was left of what was now the plain 103rd Division had held onto their airhead around Altus AFB when Pennsylvania national guardsmen had failed to dislodge them from what they’d taken. They held onto Altus through most of December. The main frontlines were back to the south on the Red River which ran between Oklahoma and Texas leaving those paratroopers here on their own far out in front. They controlled the captured airbase and the surrounding town though moving any further, taking any more ground to link up with the Soviet Army forces on the other side of the river, was impossible. The 103rd Division was told to hold on where they were pending later reinforcement, a time for that unspecified. They were to hold Altus open for air operations to keep them in the fight via supply runs and also allow for combat operations from arriving attack-fighters – a squadron of Su-17s had been planned to be sent – to take place as well. The American’s actions made fulfilling those tasks impossible.

The 28th Infantry Division had seen one of its brigades get its behind whipped late last month when the first attempt had been made to retake Altus. The US II Corps, the national guardsmen’s parent command, wanted it taken less the Soviets there expand themselves either now or in the future further outwards. That would threaten their entire position on the Red River. The paratroopers inside Altus were to be overcome, even if it took the whole of the 28th Infantry to do so! Two of the division’s brigades, not all three, were used to squeeze and retake Altus. It took time because the approach was methodical and the 28th Infantry wasn’t able to use plentiful stocks of ammunition like would be needed to make it go quicker. Still, once underway, the task of beating the Soviets at their besieged airhead inside Oklahoma was one which the men from Pennsylvania set to achieve. They did what the Nicaraguans around Denver had failed to do there and shut off outside support for those trapped inside the pocket of resistance. Altus’ runways were shut when big artillery shells were fired at great distance when a couple of batteries of self-propelled M-107 guns were escorted by tanks to get close enough to bring their targets fully in range. The guns battered them with contact high-explosive fuses used alongside airburst shells as well to scatter shrapnel. There were also mobile SAM-launchers firing HAWK missiles which were escorted elsewhere outside the Soviet airhead and targeted approaching Soviet transports. Those big targets had to slow down to come in to land and it was then that they were engaged. The stocks of 175mm shells and SAMs were limited: the Americans could only hope that the Soviets didn’t realise how low their stocks were and shut down flight operations first. Thankfully, this worked out. A week of major losses with incoming transports as well as specially-trained airfield engineers saw the 103rd Division told that no longer would aircraft land inside their held perimeter. Drops of supplies would occur from high-flying aircraft using special parachutes to do this.

Infantry supported by armoured vehicles and also tanks moved around the edges of Altus, taking lumps out of the Soviets. Sometimes the men from Pennsylvania got unstuck. They could run into ambushes, coming off with many casualties. These eased up as time went on. The Soviets inside started to run through the last of their ammunition. The airdrops of supplies got fewer and fewer and as the perimeter shrunk, more of the parachute-retarded containers landed outside. ‘Waste not want not’ became the mantra of the supply officers with the 28th Infantry. Everything that was in those captured containers was taken back to the divisional base. It may not be useful now, they might never have a need for it, but someone would. Using Soviet ammunition themselves to solve their own issues sounded great in practice yet it wasn’t feasible when it came to rifle magazines, belts of machine gun bullets and mortar shells which didn’t exactly fit their weapons. As said, someone else at another time would find all that useful, not the 28th Infantry as it kept on plugging away at pushing the Soviets backed deeper inside their occupied area. It all took time yet soon enough they were in sight of the airbase to the east of Altus. The town itself – a ruin if there ever was one – was left alone over to the west with the focus on retaking this facility. American intercepts caught excerpts of radio transmissions coming out. Decoding teams believed that the commanding general inside was informing his superiors of his situation and saying he could no longer hold. What came back were orders to stand and fight to the last man if necessary: no mention came now of reinforcement. On the back of these intercepts, II Corps put in a request up the chain of command on behalf of the 28th Infantry for a series of airstrikes to help bring about the end of this fight. The Soviets were out of SAMs and anti-aircraft artillery shells. The Twelfth Air Force had many other tasks yet eventually they released some aircraft. Forward controllers on the ground guided the attacks in, hitting what was necessary. Without air defences, the 103rd Division suffered gravely. Each bomb-run was followed up afterwards by more nibbling away at their perimeter.

Christmas Eve for those in Altus under the assault was bad with intensive American attacks though on Christmas Day those eased off somewhat. December twenty-sixth saw renewed American action. This was the last full day of the Soviet Airborne being able to hold on. The next morning, there was contact made in person when the division’s acting commander – his general had been killed the day before in a bomb-run – went forward himself under a white flag and met with his opposite number from the 28th Infantry. A ceasefire was requested, pending a full surrender where the paratroopers would be able to ‘retain their honour’. The temptation to tell the 103rd Division’s colonel where his men could stick their honour after all that had been done to civilians and military prisoners inside the perimeter was there but the American general had his orders to avoid a final, bloody fight if the Soviets presented themselves. Before giving a response to what the Soviets wanted, he asked about the KGB inside the perimeter: where were they and what did they think about the surrender? Killed in the fighting or by their own hands, the Soviet colonel said with a straight face. That was a lie: the last of them had been shot that morning on charges of mutiny and fermenting rebellion. All that was a matter for others. The 28th Infantry’s general accepted the Soviet’s offer. A ceasefire occurred and then several hours later, a full surrender took place. Three and a half thousand Soviet paratroopers, two thirds of them carrying wounds, marched out and into captivity while national guardsmen moved in. Radios, documents and some vital equipment had been destroyed by the Soviets before the Americans could get a-hold of them but there was no trouble from the defeated enemy. The KGB men who’d taken their own lives were found… they’d apparently shot themselves with their hands bound behind their backs and hoods secured over their heads. None of the Pennsylvanian national guardsmen had ever seen anything like that before and all who witnessed such a sight would have stories to tell for many years.

The loss of Altus and the 103rd Division wasn’t a fatal blow for the Soviets. The assault into Oklahoma last month had been meant to seize airheads Altus and Lawton in coordination with a crossing of the Red River. The latter had failed when the II Corps, aided by the US VII Corps over in Texas, had forestalled the Soviet Twenty–Eighth Army; Lawton’s initial seizure had seen a strong American counterattack to retake the airport there. The men had Altus had received all of those messages to hold on yet no one was going to come to their aid even if they’d made it into the New Year. Once there, they were left to their doom. They’d been dismissed as failures and left in-place so as to keep American attention on them. Now that they were finished, this did free up the national guardsmen who’d overcome them yet that was expected. The Soviets correctly knew that straight after Altus was retaken, the Americans weren’t about to drive south and begin liberating what parts of Texas were under occupation. Things would be different come 1985 though: that was something that the two opposing sides knew very well. Until then, the frontlines on the Red River stayed where they were. Occasional heavy exchanges of fire took place and raids were conducted going both north and south too. Still, the Red River defined the frontlines in Oklahoma. There were Soviet troops still on the northern side, cluster around their salient north of Burkburnett, but they were dug into defensive positions and unable to either be dislodged or move. Casualties mounted but the stoppage of big offensive moves continued.