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Chapter Nineteen – Settling Scores



January 1985: The two Californias and Arizona

The armies of Democratic Mexico were on the offensive through Baja California. They moved southwards down the peninsula and also eastwards into the Mexicali Valley. The fight was against those serving in the forces of Revolutionary Mexico: rebels and traitors. The going was hard and slow with an opponent who fought back well yet the Tijuana Government’s forces made good progress. They were only able to do this though due to outside support from the Americans and increasingly the Chileans too. On their own, this would have been an impossible task for Democratic Mexico. The fighting on the peninsula ranging southwards was spearheaded by US Marines with the Mexicans in support. The former used their mobility with helicopters and landing craft to leap-frog down the Pacific coastline yet also strike inland through the mountainous spine. The latter were brought in to deal with stubborn and dug-in enemy forces. It was their country after all and if they wanted it back, they would have to fight for it: such was the position of the Americans on this. From the initial entry point of Ensenada secured last month, the 1st Marine Division reached as far south as San Quintin by the end of January. The coastal plain was favourable to the Americans though the mountains just inland remained hard going for the Mexicans fighting alongside them. There came plenty of air support for the Mexicans who fought their fellow countrymen yet it remained them who had to get up-close-and-personal in slugfests through strongholds. On countless occasions, scores were settled when prisoners serving in the army of Revolutionary Mexico – mostly officers though often common soldiers too – were summarily executed because they were seen as traitors. It was an outrage, a violation of the laws of war. It went on though, a lot. General Pinochet had sent Chilean forces to the United States with the aim of seeing them help liberate American soil – a very calculated move on his part – though they ended up fighting in Mexico instead. A mixed brigade-group of marines and paratroopers (with some light armour) aided Democratic Mexico forces in fighting out of the mountains and into the Mexicali Valley. The Chileans didn’t take on easy tasks but were instead right in the thick of the fighting alongside those fighting Mexico’s foreign-backed communists. Once down out of the mountains, the going got easier. Mexicali next to the US border was bypassed at first as the fertile valley was mission goal. It was taken and a link up made with American forces over on the far side who had retaken Yuma last year and moved from there downwards. The Chileans moved towards the Altar Desert and over where more American forces were on Mexican soil; those Mexicans they had fought alongside turned towards Mexicali. A fight began for control of the ruin of that city, one which would go on into February.

The arrival of the Chileans behind them ready to fight was welcomed by the Americans though they were still waiting on an effective resupply to build upon what they had. Portions of the Sixth US Army held onto the shorelines of the Gulf of California and a stretch of road across the desert running back to Yuma, but they remained incapable of doing anything else for the time being. Some fuel and ammunition had come forwards though nowhere near enough. The 5th Armored Brigade – the pre-war OPFOR Group from Fort Irwin – was eager to carry on with the successful war it was having. The way ahead for them was regarded as being open, all the way to deep into inner parts of Sonora if given the chance. That was not to be though. They were ordered to hold where they were for the time being. Above them in Mexico’s skies, there were some aircraft which aviation enthusiasts would have been very interested in when such planes clashed. Flying from MCAS Yuma now that it was free of the extensive Soviet air presence there earlier in the war, the US Air Force had F-5E Tiger light fighters tasked for the Ninth Air Force’s part-detached air division assigned to operations above Mexico alongside some F-4s and F-16s. These were from an aggressor squadron (similar to what the OPFOR Group had been doing) and were good aircraft flown by men who knew what they were doing; other F-5s in US Air Force service were flying in Arizona, Colorado and South Korea with each coming from aggressor units too. On two different occasions when above the Altar Desert and just over the waters at the top of the Gulf of California, the F-5s met French-built fighters. It was Super Mystères the first time, Ouragans on the second occasion. These were aircraft which had served previously in the air arms of Honduras and El Salvador with each of them having been supplied to those now-fallen regimes by the Israelis after they had previously made such good use of them in conflicts in the Middle East. After the fall of each Central American nation, their aircraft had either been destroyed by those who flew them or taken into Nicaraguan service. It was in Nicaraguan colours though flown by pilots from both those nations forced to serve their new masters in Managua that these aircraft showed up in. The Super Mystères fared better then the Ouragans yet each were taken down by the American aggressor pilots whizzing across Mexican skies and out-preforming their opponents. Post-engagement analysis on the part of the Americans questioned the use of such aircraft. The Nicaraguans and Guatemalans both were known to be almost out of Soviet-supplied MiGs but there had hadn’t been the expectation that such aircraft as what were seen would show up. The Soviets were focused elsewhere, even Cuba’s air force was busy in other theatres. This was of great importance for when the fight eventually moved onwards further into the northern parts of Mexico… when the supplies and reinforcements arrived that was.


In Southern California, war devastation was still widespread and crippling for the Americans as they reestablished control over their liberated soil. The huge Los Angeles Basin was one thing but it was further afield than that. The Imperial Valley had been repeatedly fought over and then there had been that pursuit of defeated & fleeing Cubans into Orange County. San Diego County was another site of much ruin. Ground combat, aerial interdiction and the deliberate sabotage (firstly by the Americans then the Cubans too) had wrecked a wide area. On example of the sabotage would be the Northrop Aircraft site at Hawthorne in Orange County, where those F-5s over Mexico were built. There had been a hasty evacuation from there of important equipment and personnel back in October by the Americans where they got out what they could and destroyed much more. The Cubans had then been all over the site – with the GRU too – when the area was occupied yet when the Americans came back, they found that the already partially-destroyed site had been thoroughly destroyed with complete demolitions by the retreating Cubans. The extent of general war damage was highlighted by a stretch of Interstate-8 which ran east-west across the bottom of the Imperial Valley: aka ‘the highway of death’. There were the wrecks of military vehicles as well as civilian cars all across it, burnt out ruins hit from the air over and over again. Cuban supply columns had been struck by B-52s on bomb runs during the push on San Diego and then during the last stages of Cuba’s fight in California, evacuations had been tried down this same road when parts of the earlier wreckage had been pushed aside only to be hit by more American air attacks when A-10s firing their mini-guns turned up. Bodies, in various states of decomposition, littered the vehicle wrecks yet all along the sides too. The whole area was extremely hazardous to human health and it was only one stretch of Southern California’s major roads vying for that title of ‘highway of death’.

American forces inside Southern California were reorganised though January after the fight had moved out of the state elsewhere. The US Marines were already gone but now the parts of the Sixth Army not in Arizona already moved across there. National guardsmen from the US IV Corps shifted eastwards to join the US I Corps. They left behind the 40th Infantry Division – California’s own guardsmen, the men who ‘had run’ from the first fight in L.A. – along with those two incomplete divisions of the Army of the United States who were now never going to be properly formed. Those volunteers and draftees raised in central and northern California who’d been directed into L.A. in a military police role after only a few months in uniform were staying there for the time being. There wasn’t going to be the entry of 23rd and 49th Infantry Division to the US Army’s order of battle as fully-formed divisions. The city of Los Angeles and the whole of Southern California needed their presence for security duties (the police forces had suffered gravely under foreign occupation) but also the big clean-up too.


Guatemala’s First Army – of three weak divisions plus attachments – held on to parts of Arizona still. If it wasn’t for the geographic factor of the Soviets stretching all up the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains nearly cutting the United States in two, they would have been long go defeated even when the whole mess of the Cubans in California had been going on. They should have been torn apart yet remained where they were along southern reaches of the state next to Mexico and then through eastern portions backing onto the mountains behind them. American forces moved in from California and doubled their ground strength as the majority of the Sixth Army was now in Arizona. The Ninth Air Force transferred aircraft across from California too. This movement of already assigned forces with both the Sixth Army and the Ninth Air Force wasn’t followed by any real reinforcement from outside though nor any big resupply either. Especially until the latter came, the Americans could only make limited offensive strikes against the Guatemalans. This was concentrated around the outskirts of Tucson and down near to the Mexican border. Tucson itself remained beyond the American’s grasp though for now. There were a lot of Mexicans there with the Guatemalans: men not well-trained or organised very well yet greatly armed. When they could, the Americans would retake the city but until then they remained fighting around its edges with raids and aggressive patrolling plus air strikes. US aircraft struck at Davis-Monthan AFB and Libby Army Airfield (next to Fort Huachuca) repeatedly, engaging Soviet air units flying from those sites. Far from helpless in the face of air attacks, which the Guatemalans often were, the Soviets struck back. They put together a big air attack late in January which focused upon Phoenix. All around that city, the US Air Force was using the military airbases and the airports for their own air operations which the Soviets went for along with the McDonnel Douglas military helicopter plant at Mesa too. Soviet fighters engaged American interceptors up high while down low there came waves of attack aircraft on strike missions. Aircraft on both sides went down, many of the Soviet ones from ground fire too coming out of Phoenix. The Ninth Air Force would claim a victory though it was a hard won one. The Soviets lost plenty of aircraft and were unable to achieve mission objectives yet they were hardly defeated in the manner than the Americans claimed either. The air battle which saw over two hundred aircraft ultimately involved in clear daylight skies above chilly but sunny Arizona was quite the sight for anyone on the ground to witness.

Flagstaff Airport in east-central Arizona was another centre of American air operations. It was home to two squadrons of A-7D Corsair attack-fighters (national guard units from Arizona) while not that far to the west, the Ninth Air Force had F-16s at Prescott Valley Airport too. The latter were busy with fighter operations and strikes far into the Rockies though did aid the former when they supported the 81st Infantry Brigade spread across eastern Arizona. Out ahead of those national guardsmen on the frontlines were Green Berets as well as Rangers operating inside occupied territory. A wide area was alive with special forces activity alongside the operations undertaken by guerrillas too. Native American tribal lands as well as mountains and forests were dangerous for the Guatemalans. They were safer at the front. The KGB had some people in those dangerous areas and for many of them, January in Arizona was fatal. They were hunted by the Green Berets for kill or capture missions. A big Rangers strike saw Winslow Airport raided, where the Soviets had Sukhoi-17 multirole attack-fighters, with much damage done to the aircraft there. Then there were the guerrillas. They sought targets of opportunity, often Guatemalan patrols or exposed fortified outposts that allowed the occupation to cover such a huge area. American propaganda was painting quite the picture of ongoing guerrilla activities nationwide though didn’t touch upon what was really going on when it came to the brutality shown by guerrillas to those they encountered. This was especially true with alleged collaborators and traitors which they would shoot when captured, even torture at times. There was a lot of settling of scores among locals. Those who hadn’t ‘taken to the hills’ and stayed behind with their families were accused of working with the occupiers. Some had, yet not willingly nor with malice against their fellow Americans. They did so to survive and because they were scared. They were then killed by their former neighbours. Green Beret teams witnessed this on many occasions when working with guerrillas to collect intelligence and also supply them with captured Soviet weaponry. Sometimes they stepped in to intervene and stop this, other times they looked away. The war behind the frontlines when it came to this was as brutal as it was on them.



January 1985: The Rockies

Back in December, five Soviet Army helicopters had been lost to enemy action over the Rocky Mountains west of Denver. During January 1985, that number reached seventeen: a three-fold plus increase. January’s helicopter losses to hostile action (accidents were another disturbing number) included the shooting down of one by an OA-37 Dragonfly light attack-fighter rapid firing its minigun and the downing of another when hit by a pair of RPGs – captured weapons in guerrilla hands – just after take-off. The further fifteen, almost one every other day, were brought crashing to the ground while in flight by the extensive use of man-portable air defence systems. These successful MANPAD hits were a couple of Soviet-manufactured SA-7s fired by the enemy though all the rest were American Redeye and Stinger missiles. There were other missile firings in attempts to down more helicopters with more MANPADs used too: the number of seventeen could have been as high as thirty if they’d all got through. The mountains were full of missile teams who had been brought in to purposely target the helicopters being used to move around & give fire support to the Soviet Airborne present. The 76th Guards Airborne Division needed those helicopters to aid its fight and when they went down, the losses really hurt. Mil-8 Hip assault transports and Mil-24 Hind gunships took the brunt of these attacks against helicopters in-flight. However, both single examples of bigger heavy transport helicopters were taken down as well. Carrying an underslung load of a 2A36 howitzer, a 152mm gun being moved to a new firing position, a Mil-6 Hook helicopter was shot down by a Stinger: the ammunition for that piece of artillery was inside the helicopter and detonated when the Hook crashed. Worse than that was the elimination of an even bigger helicopter, this one a new Mil-26 Halo, which was overloaded with paratroopers carried inside it going into battle. Another Stinger got this one and when the Halo crashed and burnt, just over a hundred men were killed. Attacks by Hind gunships using their mass of carried weapons as well as intelligence-led patrolling on the ground went after the missile teams. The Soviets got themselves American helicopters of their own supporting these men when a couple of UH-1 Hueys were downed and also shot out of the sky was an OV-10 Bronco flying low ready to airdrop another missile team. American helicopters weren’t as prominent in the fight as the Soviet ones were. Instead they were using Broncos and Dragonflys, derided as ‘slow-movers’ by other aircrew in the US Air Force. Tasked for observation & tactical reconnaissance, counter-insurgency and light attack roles, the aircraft supported the fight on the ground at a lower altitude to the ‘fast-movers’ – A-10s and F-4s mainly – higher above them. There was a lot for them to do above the forested mountains through the winter where they were painted in a winter camouflage scheme to remain hidden as best as possible. Such aircraft made use of improvised airstrips all over the place, those protected by the men of the pair of national guard armored cavalry regiments they were supporting as well as Green Beret teams too.

While events in the skies above were important, for those fighting on the ground what they had in front of them in the mountains was of more importance. On each side, the clashes with the other that they had were tough and costly. Neither the Americans nor the Soviets could force any sort of victory through Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The weather got worse than it had been the month before with the cold and the snow favouring no one. Troops from the two armies fought on with little gain in a series of disjointed, confusing fights. Higher commands of each had come to their senses and realised that neither could win: access to Denver couldn’t be forced open yet neither could it be completely shut off. The forces involved weren’t pulled out though by either the First US Army or the Soviet Twenty–Second Army. The result was that the men left up in the mountains were on their own and without any real purpose but to fight and die just because that was the way things were to be. Guerrilla activity took place around them with Patriot groups and independents in the mountains. Their raids and bombings had purpose to them, that being to kill the occupiers and anyone who was assisting them. Just as was the case down in Arizona, some rather unpleasant events took place and often within view of American special forces teams passing through. Soviet prisoners and also fellow Americans accused of collaboration with the occupier were killed. The guerrillas were hunted by specially brought-in counter-insurgency forces, men who’d helped break resistance in Afghanistan, Iran and Poland in past years as well as recently in parts of Texas. Their actions weren’t of the heavy-handed fashion – artillery strikes and machine-gunning dozens of hostages at a time – employed beforehand but with a more-targeted fashion using informers and technology to do this. Whether they could be successful in this, bringing an end to the mass of guerrilla activity, time would tell there.


In the shadow of the mountains, Denver started the year still under siege. Within weeks though a corridor was opened into the city, one that wasn’t via the air route or the dangerous paths up into the mountains. The whole siege wasn’t lifted, but a major hole was punched into the surrounding forces to the very north and it was widened to a width of four miles across by the end of the month. Boulder was the site of this gap, a town left a ruin when fought over. The Nicaraguans there held back the Americans as long as they could and waited on promised Soviet reinforcement which never came. They could no longer hold on as attacks came from ahead, from behind and from above. A withdrawal was made of what was left of a regiment, one authorised only by the regiment’s acting commanding officer. That major was an experienced man, a good officer with excellent political connections back home too. None of that saved him from a firing squad afterwards. He had withdrawn without higher permission and against orders, opening up Denver to the Americans to link up with their forces inside. The firing squad was formed of his own men under Soviet instruction and once they completed their task, the major’s body was thrown into an unmarked grave. Far away in Managua were the major had those connections with the ruling Sandinistas, they wouldn’t discover this until February and be very unpleased yet unable to do anything about that nor a million other matters that the Nicaraguans had no control over.

Every inch of that opened corridor was exposed to artillery fire. The Soviets couldn’t close it when they made a counterattack with tanks but they aimed to make it near-useless by shelling it. Through Boulder, traffic moved both ways in and out of Denver despite that artillery. What ammunition, fuel, food and medical supplies which could be spared went into Denver. Coming out were wounded American soldiers and some prisoners as well as civilians. The latter moved on foot and were officially barred from making the trip through the military area through no one in uniform was in the mood to try to stop them… many soldiers wished they could join them in fact. The shelling killed civilians on the way out yet those who made it had escaped from the hell which they considered Denver to be. Elsewhere around the city, the siege remained in-place though with other Nicaraguans battling the 82nd Airborne Division and civilian volunteers who defended Denver. The ‘Boulder gap’ was something sought to be repeated elsewhere. With cooperation from those inside, the 4th Infantry Division on the outside attempted to do the same in the Denver suburbs around Aurora. Buckley AFB (unusable) was in America hands outside of the siege lines with Stapleton Airport (partially usable) inside. The Nicaraguans right in between both, dug-in through housing tracks and burnt-out buildings. They wouldn’t be dislodged. Some progress was made in going forward but the Nicaraguans held on: there was a Soviet presence at their local headquarters, the Americans would discover afterwards, forcing the Nicaraguans to not withdraw or do anything but keep fighting. If Aurora could have been opened up, the whole siege could have fallen apart with it. That wasn’t to be. Maybe next month there would be more progress in freeing Denver.


Outside of the city and further eastwards away from Denver, the Soviets and other Nicaraguans not involved in the Denver siege directly held onto a lot of ground through Colorado. They were opposed by a significant Allied force where America’s allies had troops on the ground in number. The Americans themselves had the 174th Infantry Brigade – those soldiers from West Berlin – which formed the US XI Corps with the 4th Infantry Division as the First US Army’s northern force. The Canadians and British were to the south of them. The Canadians had formed a corps command of their own and included men who’d fought last year at Colorado Springs now joined by those who’d taken part in the battles for the upper part of the Alaskan Panhandle. Two Canadian divisions, one of them including a British infantry brigade, had assumed responsibility for a stretch of the frontlines running all the way to the New Mexico state line. It was a wide frontage though stretched over ground which favoured north-south – or south-to-north as the Soviets had done last year – manoeuvre rather than any attack east-west or west-east. The Soviets were constantly improving the defences of their long flank stretching back past Colorado Springs and all the way south against an attack coming with defensive positions including anti-tank guns, minefields and demolitions to create obstacles. The Canadians were looking at going westwards in the coming months as part of a general Allied offensive in the Spring. Reconnaissance efforts saw the Soviet preparations to meet that. It didn’t look like it would be easy for the Canadians to do. Some might have even said it was going to be an impossible task unless some magic trick could be employed. The longer the delay, the longer the Soviets had there to improve what they had.

Not directly attached to either the British 14th Infantry Brigade nor the Canadian I Corps, teams of specialist British officers and NCOs were also in Colorado. They were on an intelligence-gathering mission, looking at the terrain and the enemy. Back in London, there were still discussions ongoing with the national government as to whether the British Army should be sent in number to fight in North America. If they were to, if that decision was to be made to sent tens of thousands rather than just a few thousand to the fight, Colorado was one area being looked at: North Texas, the wider Dallas area, was another location where there was a second team. Matters such as where to locate supply points in the rear were just as important as the ground to be fought over and who was over there. The British Army team was in Colorado for several weeks in the middle of the month. They didn’t like what they saw and their later report wouldn’t give any favour to the idea of this being a place to make the best use of the British Army. The Texan team would paint a better picture. However, no decision on whether make that deployment across the North Atlantic to either had yet to be made back home. Events in Europe as January went on, those made it increasingly unlikely that the British Army could be making the Atlantic crossing too.



January 1985: The Great Plains

Any attempt by Nicaraguan troops with their Second Army to follow their revolt last December in the Texan Panhandle with another one come January was snuffed out fast by Soviet measures to eliminate those who they deemed troublemakers beforehand. Anyone who had complaints that they wished to share about a massacre which didn’t happen were taken care of: a bullet or two would do the job. When the Americans broadcast propaganda messages talking about the killing of thousands of Nicaraguan conscripts sent far from home to a war long beyond their homeland, the Soviets spent much effort into jamming those broadcasts where possible and at other times firing either artillery or tactical missiles at the source of them. They couldn’t afford to have another revolt take place. Until Soviet reinforcements could make the journey all the way to the very top of Texas, deep in the Great Plains, the Nicaraguans were needed to hold the frontlines against the Americans. The KGB was active in this suppression of a second revolt and gave assurances that their measures would work. Not daring to challenge the Chekists on this, the Central Front commander still moved extra forces to the region due to clear signs that the Americans were going to try to take advantage. Soviet forces were moved in too, not those of any of their supposed allies. An anti-tank battalion was dispatched to the area around Plainview with the towed guns & mobile missile-launchers placed in rear-area key points to stop any enemy breakthrough made. Several batteries removed from artillery battalions elsewhere were dispatched to the area where the Nicaraguan Second Army was positioned with the heavy guns there to support those on the frontlines. Air units elsewhere received no order to move and stayed where they were, but were given tasking orders to support the Nicaraguans too. None of this fire support was going to be enough though. Soviet reconnaissance efforts spotted American preparations to make a limited attack and so troops were needed. The only available troops were light ones but they would have to do: the 40th Landing-assault Brigade, the airmobile troops who’d won victory down in Panama back in September, were sent to the region as well to plug the gap in the lines where all those now-dead Nicaraguans had been positioned before.

Texan national guardsmen in tanks and armoured personnel carriers, the 56th Cavalry Brigade, had had to wait before they would move forward again but when given the word come January 5th, they were unleashed. They shot forward, racing towards Plainview when approaching the town from the northwest. Nicaraguan defences were smashed apart and the Texans couldn’t be held. Their attack ignored the area where they had previously opened up a now-filled gap. The arrival of those Soviet troops had been observed: why fight a strong opponent when a weaker one is sitting in front of you? Linking Dimmitt (where the 56th Brigade started their attack from) and Plainview was a good road running alongside a railway line and the course of that was followed. Those Soviet anti-tank units were present and caused some trouble (shells from hidden T-12 anti-tank guns scored some great hits upon M-60A3 tanks) yet as the Americans moved off-road rather than along it directly, these could be dealt with once identified when air support attacked such defences from above. Within two days, Plainview was reached. The Texans got there ahead of a brigade of the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division – part of the US XVIII Corps too – which moved down directly from the north. Nicaraguan troops in Plainview were refused permission to withdraw and stood their ground. They thus died where they stood. Later Soviet attempts to force open what they regarded as the Texan’s open flank came to nought. Their 40th Brigade was unable to get forward effectively with the light troops not being able to pack enough punch. After Plainview, the XVIII Corps was unable to move further forward for now as the attached units didn’t have fuel nor other supplies to go ahead any more: it had only been planned as a limited offensive due to these constraints. They had done enough for now though, smashing apart the right wing of the Second Army for good. There were some Nicaraguans over to the west, on the edges of New Mexico, but their whole previous position in the Texan Panhandle was fatally destroyed. The Soviets withdrew their men to the south in the hope that they could block a drive down to Lubbock come next month if stronger forces didn’t arrive in time yet that couldn’t be guaranteed.

Nicaraguan POWs were meanwhile moved northwards after the battle. They walked northwards towards Amarillo, finally seeing that city which they had previously been tasked to take yet had failed to. Along the way, while under guard from US military police units, the Americans observed outbreaks of violence among the captives. They had previously been searched and weapons removed yet some had hidden knives and other sharp objectives. These were used to kill others. At first glance, the infighting seemed odd. Officers and enlisted men were kept separate and there were no identified political officers among the groups of conscripts where murders occurred. Upon investigation, it was discovered that Hondurans and Salvadorans among the Nicaraguans had been killed by the latter. The men had all been assumed to be Nicaraguans by their captors but they weren’t and there were long-standing nationalistic issues dealt with brutally. The MPs themselves cared little about this and worried only about keeping the men from escaping. Others later on, those in psychological operations roles and propaganda teams, would try to exploit this for the overall war effort where nationalistic divisions could be played upon in a bigger manner.


The fighting over to the west in theory effected the wide flank of the Soviet Twenty–Eighth Army as that hinged upon where the Nicaraguans were upstream along the course of the Red River which separated Texas from Oklahoma. However, the distances were still quite something and the terrain – empty of any major population centres with few east-west communications and full of dry grasslands & barren canyons – didn’t favour as strike from the US XVIII Corps to roll up the Soviets from the side even if they had the strength, which they didn’t, to make such a move. The Twenty–Eighth Army could remain focused on the American forces over in Oklahoma and also those outside the extensive Dallas–Fort Worth area on the edges of the Great Plains. Troops from the Seventh US Army, primarily those from Europe, had brought the Twenty–Eighth Army’s offensive last year to a halt and continued to hold the ground which they had firmly within their grasp. Altus, Davidson, Burkburnett, Gainesville and Sanger were all battles of last year. That series of defeats at those points were all supposed to be in the past. Soviets plans were for the Twenty–Eighth Army to be moved out of the frontlines in the next couple of months and be replaced by the Seventh Tank Army, which would renew the attack once it was fully assembled on Texan soil after the long journey of its equipment and supplies (the men were flown across separately) from overseas. They’d be going into Oklahoma and onwards into Kansas… that was the plan anyway. Before then, the forces already here were to hold their ground and keep the Americans at bay.

The Seventh Army wasn’t going to do as the Soviets wanted them to do and remain inactive ahead of the incoming attack in the Spring. Overcoming the Burkburnett bridgehead across the Red River wasn’t possible but it was made useless as a springboard for any further attacks. Through January, engineering teams covered the Oklahoma side of the river near and far from where the Soviets had their toes over on the northern side with a mass of minefields and anti-tank ditches. There was a lot of thought put into this so that Soviets, when on the attack again, could be channelled into kill-zones and stuck in them where they could be blasted. Away to the southwest, where the Soviets had been stopped from getting behind Dallas–Fort Worth, and the Americans feared that they would again because they didn’t know how exactly the enemy planned to use newly-arriving forces, the same was done here in Texas. There was work done to prepare demolitions to blow lake and river embankments to bring flooding to more stretches of ground to further slow up an attack. The defensive measures were one thing, striking back at the occupiers of American territory on the other side of the static frontlines was to be done as well.

Passing through the positions of the 8th Infantry Division located around Gainesville, the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment conducted a raid in mid-January. The Blackhorse Cav’ raced forward, smashing through Soviet lines and deep into their rear before looping back around and coming back to American lines afterwards. They spent three days rolling across occupied territory. The regiment was stripped down for this mission, moving with only what was needed and taking with it no extra baggage. The whole thing was pre-planned though with built-in flexibility to allow for unexpected problems. Those cropped up. There were Soviet forces where there weren’t meant to be and then enemy aircraft showed up to first try to cut their line of advance then afterwards hit their retreat too. The purpose of the raid was to tear apart the rear areas of the Twenty–Eighth Army. This was done by going towards supply dumps, vehicle maintenance parks and communication sites. When reached, such places were shot up and Soviet troops who sought to fight were shot down. The Blackhorse Cav’ had to keep moving for the mission to succeed. This meant that they couldn’t take prisoners. Shooting those who surrendered wasn’t done – despite the temptation – and instead they were stripped of weapons and secured in-place while the Americans moved on. That was unless there were ‘special circumstances’ though: field court martials for violating the laws of war occurred among enemy officers suspected of committing war crimes. Many of those tied-up prisoners they left behind were shot afterwards though with some slain by guerrillas who came across them – a rare opportunity to get revenge for injustices suffered, damn the later consequences – and others later by KGB teams who accused the men of cowardice in the face of the enemy. Dragging the fuel and ammunition needed for the mission with them had to be done by those involved. The Blackhorse Cav’ was met by some specially-tasked CH-47 Chinooks on a couple of occasions which flew in some key supplies but air supply like this was infeasible for the whole mission. Guarding their own supplies on the move was taxing and so to was dealing with their own wounded while underway. Pre-mission planning for these tasks saw serious issues crop up in the field. Thankfully it was only a three-day mission: if it had been longer, these matters could have crippled the Blackhorse Cav’. Abandoned vehicles were left behind during their raid and destroyed less they be of any use to the Soviets. Some took battle damage yet others broke down despite all the pre-mission work done to make sure it wouldn’t happen. A couple of helicopters were also left behind. The air squadron attached to the regiment, complete with AH-1F Cobra gunships as well as UH-1 Huey and UH-60 Blackhawks, came along on the raid. They hopped from landing site to landing site, locations with changed all the time. This led to some major issues for the field maintenance of them and the near-impossibility of giving anything more than a patch-up to battle damage. However, having them along on the mission, giving the closest of all close air support was invaluable. Without them providing top cover, the scouting elements of the Blackhorse Cav’ would have missed the enemy many times.

The raid was considered a great success by the US VII Corps and the Seventh Army too. The reports which came back from the field and then reaction observed from a distance when it came to the Soviets showed that this had been worth it. The Blackhorse Cav’ had taken heavy casualties – the regimental commander among them unfortunately – but done what was asked of it in disrupting the Soviets greatly from launching any spoiling attack ahead of the planned late-February American offensives (there hadn’t been that intention but the Americans had assumed they could). From the Soviet point of view, panic had come when the Americans had done as they had for it was feared that the whole VII Corps was going over on the offensive when all the intelligence said that it was unable to. By the time they realised what was going on, that if possible they could catch a unit such as the 11th Cavalry Regiment should they move their forces around, the Americans were heading back to their own lines. Next time they would be ready, that being if there was a next time.



January 1985: The Coastal Plain and the Gulf Coast

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

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

***

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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



January 1985: Florida and The Bahamas

The Raid on Mayport was quite something indeed. Soviet naval Spetsnaz undertook a hugely-complicated and dangerous mission to strike at the US Navy base in the Atlantic-facing northeastern corner of the peninsula. They operated far from home: not just the Rodina but their Caribbean bases. The numbers of men involved, the scale of the task and the daring were all similar to earlier strikes made at the very beginning of the war. For the men from the 17th Brigade (home-based in peacetime along the Soviet Black Sea coast) tasked hit to hit Mayport in a company-plus mission, it would be a raid few of them would return from.

Launched from a staging post inside neutral The Bahamas – a neutrality which the Commonwealth nation was clinging on to; one which its traditional allies were happy to see maintained for their own sake –, a ship-to-ship transfer was made near an isolated island during the early hours of the day before the raid. Bahamian military forces (such as they were) missed the transfer of men from one ship with a dubious identity to a hijacked one; so did the Americans who had an armed watch over The Bahamas. That second ship was an American-owned though Bahamian-flagged vessel, one which was plying its trade though the island nation as well far beyond including into Florida despite the ongoing war. The majority of its crew were dead and long-since thrown overboard with the few left alive soon to join them once their usefulness was up… or someone came and rescued them as they hoped they would see. It was on its way to Jacksonville on a scheduled trip, one cleared by the Americans though with innocent purposes meant to be. While sailing from The Bahamas up to the estuary off the St. John’s River, the ship was overflown twice by the Americans. First, there was a P-3 Orion operated by the US Navy and then closer to Florida came Virginia Air National Guard attack-fighters assigned to the Tenth US Air Force, a pair of A-7 Corsairs, which made a lower flyby while bristling with weapons. Radio messages were exchanged including authentication codes to say that there was no duress that the crew was under. Visual inspection was made from above too with the ship recognised for what it was. Due to the arrival time late in the evening, the ship was instructed to wait out at sea. Its destination was the marine terminal on Blount Island, just up the estuary, but that meant passing by the naval anchorages first. No civilian ship of foreign registry was doing that in the darkness no matter what, not after all the hits that the United States had taken in this war. Armed coastguard personnel (since the war started, the US Coastguard was acting as part of the US Navy) came aboard and were satisfied with what they saw: they missed so much, duped and distracted. The inspectors left behind the ship which waited alongside two others to go into the Port of Jacksonville in the morning. It stayed where it was, watched but not watched enough. Over a hundred commandos – who’d been crammed aboard and hidden remarkably well when the Coastguard had been inside – did depart, leaving their mothership in the wee hours of the morning and went into action.

The raid was detected at the last minute. One of the raiders made an error and caused he and a comrade to be spotted by US Navy security troops. The smallest of things was all that it took for the naval base to come alive with defensive fire against intruders coming out of the water wearing scuba gear and carrying satchel charges. There were lots of them, these raiders, spotted all over the place once the firing started. None of them had been ready to strike yet and the plan to blast apart the security command post and the communications station had yet to be realised. When the detection was made, the rest of them men should have withdrawn. They had orders to press home their attack if detected early, if past the point that the planners deemed the ‘point of no return’. The defenders, the security personnel from a wartime raised force, were underrated and their morale thought to be low. In comparison, the dispatched Spetsnaz team was thought by those who sent them to be invincible on the attack against what was regarded as an isolated and ill-defended strategic outpost. Soviet hubris cost the raiders deal. The US Navy would defend their base with rifles, machine guns, grenades and their bare hands. It came to that, where it was hand-to-hand fighting, too.

When it was all said and done with the aborted raid over with, Mayport naval base was lit with fires and there were many bodies everywhere. The former consisted of buildings and a couple of very small vessels (tugboats and a patrol boat which took a RPG hit when firing upon men on the shore): none of the warships in harbour, including the training carrier USS Lexington here after its escape from the Gulf of Mexico, had any real damage done to them. The latter were the majority of the Spetsnaz and plenty of US Navy personnel alongside them. Medical teams moved among them in the darkness, looking for those alive who had their injuries attended to first while others worried about nationality. A couple of the raiders had fled against orders when the attack had gone as wrong as it did and headed back for the submersibles to ride along with underwater back to the ship in the estuary. They got back there to find it underway, moving without running lights and heading out to sea. These men were left behind yet they wouldn’t have had much luck aboard that ship. Running was the worst thing that could have been done by those aboard the ship. They should have abandoned it and made it to one of the identified coastal rally points to link up with any surviving Spetsnaz. The moving ship was just one big fat target for the US Navy to engage and its guilt as clear as day. When the sun came up, a trio of A-4 Skyhawk flying from NAS Jacksonville made a gun and rocket attack upon it to set it alight and stop its progress. The ship burnt, marking itself as a target perfectly for the P-3 which came late to the party but gave the gift of a Harpoon missile dead-on target against a defenceless vessel. That was the end of the Spetsnaz and their mothership though unfortunately the surviving innocent crewmen aboard as well.


Soviet commando action in Florida, staged through the territory of The Bahamas, didn’t drag that small country into the war. It could have, maybe in the opinion of some it should have too. Yet, The Bahamas would stay neutral and its people not know the horrors of the war that was affecting others. The government in Nassau were happy to keep out of the war and the superpowers, those who would make the decision in reality over what The Bahamas wanted, were of mind to do the same. The Americans and the Allies – particularly the British and the Canadians –, wanted neutrality there and so did the Soviets. All were taking advantage of that neutrality and the country entering the war couldn’t help either. If one side or the other based forces there, the other would have to stretch to cover that. Shipping and international financial links were being used by each through the country with the others monitored by espionage efforts operating out of the country. It was in no one’s interests for The Bahamas to go to war.

Days after the Raid on Mayport, the Soviet staging base was attacked by the Royal Bahamas Defence Force (RBDF). A maritime force though with marines – well… sort of marines; armed men operating from ships –, the RBDF had a difficult time striking where they did because they were so weak in terms of equipment and training. Unofficial American assistance was given in everything to do with the arrival of armed men and gunboats at the little island where US intelligence had tracked the passage of that ship from and spotted via satellite overheads a facility. Gunfire was returned and one of the RBDF boats was sunk. Eight of their men would be killed as well before finally return fire ceased. American aircraft – those national guard A-7s – were circling nearby and ready to strike though to do so would be a political decision and what was going on was being monitored from Raven Rock directly. Only with Chuck Robb’s say so would direct American intervention occur and his president had told him that was a last resort if the RBDF failed. They succeed in their mission though, storming that Soviet base. The bodies of two men killed by machine gun fire were found. There was no sign of anyone else and the base had been stripped out of equipment and anything of value beforehand. For the losses taken, the RBDF wouldn’t consider it a success. Their government would though for the action taken from its soil had been answered with firm force used. The Americans too would consider this to be something that needed to be done. Here a small country had stood up for itself and reasserted its sovereignty. If only other countries worldwide would do the same…

January 1985: The Middle East

What exactly happened in terms of the sequence of events and the motivations behind the fall of Gaddafi in Libya wasn’t widely known. General Haftar (the former colonel had the correct emblems of rank on his uniform; he was proud of them) was now in charge and Gaddafi was dead. The Soviets were pleased at this because they’d been behind this directly. That was what the other Arab regimes lead by strongmen spread from the Atlantic shores of Morocco in the west, to Syria in the north, to Egypt in the south and Iraq in the east knew. Allies and opponents of the Gaddafi-led Libya and the Soviets were unaware of how this had all occurred. They were more concerned about how it affected them. The views in the capitals of the many countries differed on specifics yet the general consensus was that the Soviets had used one of Gaddafi’s key military officers to topple him in a violent coup d’état when Gaddafi had been one of their closest allies. For the supposed allies of Moscow, this didn’t bode well for their own futures: if it could be done to Gaddafi, it could be done to them too if their actions displeased Vorotnikov. Arab regimes unfriendly to Moscow were also alarmed. They were no friends of Gaddafi but without him there they feared a wave of regional instability spreading from Libya in addition to making them consider that this was how the Soviets treated supposed friends so how would they treat those against them? With the latter – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the Gulf Arab Monarchies foremost among these –, none were at war with the Soviets yet their anti-Moscow position was something that had been pushed against with force used. The Soviet’s allies, Iraq, Syria and Yemen had been long doing as they were told but had strove to maintain their independence. Their leaders didn’t want to lose that… and also their lives too.

Reaction came to the partially-understood toppling of Gaddafi. In Iraq, Saddam arranged for the deaths to occur of a trio of his leading generals. They had ‘accidents’, low-key affairs rather than anything dramatic, to forestall any challenge to Saddam from men he regarded as too close to Soviet influence. Assad moved several Syrian senior officers he viewed with suspicion to less-important positions and had his secret police watch them intensely with a view to giving them Iraqi-style accidents at any moment. In Yemen, gifts were given to high-ranking generals and further promises made on that note to keep people who had Moscow ties sweet. Egypt and Libya were still technically at war though there had been no outbreaks of fighting since last summer. Sadat was long dead and buried, killed by Palestinian proxies of Gaddafi, and Mubarak remained wary of another assassination on Egyptian soil: that being himself. He was always on the move and surrounded by loyal people. Once the news came from Libya that Gaddafi was dead and killed due to Soviet wishes, Mubarak instructed his massed military forces on the border to allow for passage to be made of defectors and any former regime figures. They would be allowed into Egypt yet kept under guard. Such people could be useful for the future, even if their association with the deceased Gaddafi would otherwise make them distasteful. Other Libyans already in Egypt, long-standing opponents of Gaddafi, wouldn’t be allowed to murder their fellow countrymen as they might wish to but would instead ‘talk’ with them to see if any could be useful for the joint aims of Egypt and a future Cairo-aligned Libya. Saudi Arabia was home to many Egyptian troops, those facing both Iraq and Yemen in an ongoing stand-off. Providing for them was taxing for Saudi and had become mightily costly in terms of a financial drain since the flow of oil from the country to the West had been cut off by war. The Saudis were looking for an opening for some time and they found one in the fallout elsewhere in the Middle East following Gaddafi’s fall. With Egyptian backing, Saudi diplomatic efforts commenced to start to woo Soviet allies. Assad and Saddam both received visits from Saudi princes (Yemen was ignored) who whispered dire warnings in their ears over the Soviets deposing them if they didn’t do exactly as demanded yet they could still face hostile action even if they did. Did they want to end up like Gaddafi had done? There was another way for them and their futures. Break away from Moscow’s orbit. Do it carefully, naturally, but think about your own futures should you stay with them. Find away to get out of the mess you have got yourself in was the message… though none of these secret diplomatic missions came with the promise of overt Saudi or Egyptian military support to them.

Assad and Saddam each listened. There was no harm in listening, was there?


There was one democratic country in the region, one not led by a strongman or an autocratic royal family. Israel, certainly not an Arab nation, was the only democracy there. While neutral throughout the conflict, Israel remained part of America’s orbit. Quite rightly, the thinking in Tel Aviv since the beginning of the war began for others was that once the Soviets were done with the United States, Israel would be next on their list. Such an independent and strong country with a system of government like Israel’s, surrounded by hostile Arab countries which the Soviets would get to do their dirty work for them, had no future in a Soviet dominated world. Imaginations of Arab armies settling scores for decades of Israeli behaviour were had in Tel Aviv. Those weren’t pleasant. Neither would be the alternative to that because if it came to it, if those Arab armies came, supported by the Soviets, it would be the Sampson Option that would occur.

Many things that went wrong in the Middle East in terms of disasters and wars were blamed on Israel. If someone died, the Zionists had done it. If a plane crashed, Mossad was responsible. If hunger or disease occurred, it was the work of Israel. This was widespread. Arab countries blamed Israel for a lot of things, a convenient scapegoat for their own failings: an enemy to keep their own people in check. Over the past several months, many things that had happened through the region had been the work of Israel. Imagine that! All the things that Israel was accused of doing, all of those alleged actions, were now coming true. Israeli involvement was to blame for a series of accidents with shipping which occurred in the Suez Canal which the Egyptians responded to by slowing the passage of shipping due to the need for an increase in security (they knew those accidents weren’t what they appeared to be) with the result being an angry Moscow. Killings and disappearances in Lebanon were the work of local proxies which Israel put to work, all to give the Syrians and headache there and stop them from fully aiding the Soviets with their grand Mediterranean plans. Syrian interference in Jordan at the behest of Moscow was too forestalled by Israeli actions. There was also Israeli interference in Iranian-Iraqi relations where they caused several firefights on the border between those two nations: Moscow sided with its clients in Tehran to the fury of Baghdad. This all cost Israel dear. Mossad was tasked to do a lot, asked again and again to strike here and there. They lost men, including some of their own dead or captured rather than expendable local proxies. Rescue attempts had to be made to get Israelis out of foreign hands: Mossad would let such people be lost for good without trying.

What occurred with both Turkey first and the Libya caught Israel off-guard. Turkey cosied up to the Soviets, granting them access to the Turkish Straits with free reign for their shipping. The secular generals in Ankara, who Israel had believed they could count upon to remain opposed to Moscow, changed tack. Mossad was providing intelligence on what the Saudis were up to (if they knew, the KGB was sure to as well) with Iraq and Syria but this flew in the face of a Turkish about-turn when it came to their relations with the Soviets. Libya was far more important though. The new regime there was better understood by Israel in how it had come about and Haftar being pushed to do what he did. However, how it all developed with Haftar acting on his own when motivated by Soviet support all occurred so fast. Israel didn’t like this. They feared just what the Arab regimes did: that Moscow would find someone in the countries of their allies to topple governments even on their own or with overt Soviet support. That would bring closer to reality Israel’s doomsday fears. Israel could come under attack – treated as a sure thing in Tel Aviv; not a possibility – earlier than thought, without Soviet victory elsewhere in the world. That whole pre-considered sequence of events which Israel had foreseen, a road-to-war scenario, was shattered.

What to do, what to do? Israel was feeling itself pushed into a corner. They couldn’t allow another Soviet-aligned country to become the vassal state (Iran like) which they believed that Libya was soon to be whether Haftar wanted it to be or not. Their interests now were the same as those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Any overt alliance with Cairo and Riyadh wouldn’t do: Israel wouldn’t have any serious internal political fallout but it would bring down those regimes from within to be an ally of Israel. However, things could be done behind the scenes. Israel decided to make their own diplomatic moves to establish ties with Arab neighbours of theirs who shared the same geo-political objectives. Things were about to get even more ‘interesting’ in the Middle East than they long had been.



January 1985: China

Through the western reaches of China, the expansive Sinkiang region, Soviet military control was total. The province which bordered Mongolia and Soviet Central Asia had been overrun by the Soviet Thirty–Second Army and their pacification efforts were complete. The latter had taken some time to finish but after all the blood was spilt and all of the destruction caused, no longer would any organised armed resistance come from either the ethnic Uighurs nor the Han Chinese after so many of them were dead and the rest having witnessed this occur. Maybe in the future, in the coming months, the flame of resistance might be relit, but not for now. The Thirty–Second Army was moving on though, leaving Sinkiang behind. They had been joined by the wartime-raised Forty–First Army and re-tasked away from occupation duties for further offensive missions. Those would take place to the south. Moscow wanted the two field armies to go into Tibet. Lhasa and the Indian frontier of the Himalayas were the ultimate objectives for this offensive. To say the distances and the challenge of going that far were gargantuan would be a terrific understatement. There they were being sent though by those who made the decisions and wouldn’t have to go with them.

Other Soviet armies were now in China too. Soviet forces already formed and newly-raised field armies completed their deployment into China through January. Damage from the nuclear strikes inside China, Mongolia and the Soviet Union delayed the planned passage of them but they were arriving in force. Many of these men were conscripts doing their state-mandated military service yet there were large numbers of reservists among the men from this second-wave of Soviet troops arriving in China. Without an official country-wide announcement, reservists from across the Soviet Union on a wider scale than seen before had been called up for service during November, spent December in training and moved across Eurasia in January to reach the North China Plain south of Beijing. Not every possible reservist that the Soviets would call upon had returned to uniform, but the majority of those who did were now in China rather than sent elsewhere to fight the other wars their nation was fighting. An economic reaction to the missing hundreds of thousands of soldiers had yet to come within the Soviet Union when so many men went off to war though that would be certain if they were away from home for long. Moscow didn’t plan for them to be gone for a significant amount of time.

The arriving troops were preparing to begin advancing alongside forces already inside China starting next month. The weather would improve – not be brilliant but better than it was now – and the Soviets would march on the Yangtze River and beyond. The war would afterwards thus come to a close when the Chinese finally saw sense and gave in. It was all so simple, all believed to be a solution to the China War. Of course, before then it had been attacking China from afar which would bend China to the Soviet Union’s will, then it was invading Manchuria before it was taking Beijing and then afterwards going over the Yellow River. No, this time, this was supposed to work. An offensive to get to the Yangtze (as well as the march into Tibet) was to finally get Moscow the result it desired.

At a Defence Council meeting just before the end of the month, called when the Western Europeans formed their military alliance and put troops into Sweden, a voice of opposition was raised to the wisdom of this. It came from Gromyko. The Soviet Foreign Minister spoke carefully but plainly. China wasn’t going to fold, Hu wasn’t going to give in. No one supported him openly. Vorotnikov listened but assured him and the others that that wouldn’t occur. Of course the Chinese would give in. Of course they would.


Flying from Andersen AFB on Guam, B-52s based there had been busy flying missions over the Asian mainland since the beginning of the war. They were assigned a semi-strategic role in this though at the same time had to remain prepared to undertake nuclear strikes as well. The 43rd Bomb Wing had been joined by the 319th Bomb Wing in attacking both on the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam too. North Korea had been hit with cruise missiles and the B-52s had conducted bomb-runs south of the DMZ too, each time staging through Okinawa. The now-finished Vietnam missions – with that country playing no more role in this war along with Soviet forces there – had been undertaken with cruise missiles against land targets and the B-52s firing massed waves of Harpoon anti-ship missiles as well when staging through the Philippines: no B-52s had been directly above Vietnam because memories of a previous conflict were still fresh. The Thirteenth US Air Force had coordinated these missions and F-4s flying from Clark AFB near Manila had been involved in earlier actions offshore from Vietnam before half of the 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing had been reassigned to Korea. In January, the Thirteenth Air Force moved the last of those tactical aircraft out of the Philippines and to Okinawa. The B-52s were now no longer going to be making strikes to support the Second Korean War and instead would join the transferred F-4s – plus F-15 fighters already there – in focusing solely on China. US air power was being directed to intervene in the China War.

Soviet forces in Shandong received the first of this attention. Three airbases which they were using plus the port of Qingdao (better known in the West as Tsingtao) were hit with missile strikes. The F-4s came in the next day, going overland, and also went for Qingdao as well where they attacked the sheltered port area as a follow-up to the B-52 strikes. There was a lot of shipping gathered there in the form of Chinese vessels that the Soviets had assembled. The movement of troops into Shandong pointed to an effort to use the ships to transport those troops somewhere. These were civilian vessels and not specialised amphibious assault ships but that was what it looked like. Rockets, bombs and guns were used to attack them. Soviet interference came. Their fighters were engaged by F-15s but some broke low to go after the F-4s. Into the skies as well came SAMs and anti-aircraft fire. Where the B-52s hadn’t been risked, these smaller aircraft had been and they were hit when over China. Five aircraft were lost that morning to Soviet MiGs and SAMs during the first tactical strikes, a large number which if repeated in another strike was wholly unsustainable. US intelligence scrambled to get images of the area afterwards to see what they had missed in terms of air defences the first time. Only now did they spot all of those SAM batteries, only after the commitment of a full squadron of tactical strike aircraft. Uncomfortable reminders of air losses with another past war on the Asian mainland came. A temporary block was put on more strikes like this though both the B-52s firing cruise missiles and F-15s on offshore fighter missions – working with the US Navy – would continue for now. Those voices who had warned that this would happen, the prophets of doom on the United States playing an active role in the China War, had had their warnings confirmed. Large portions of the United States itself remained occupied by foreign forces and there was a war raging on the Korean Peninsula: getting involved in China couldn’t and shouldn’t be done.


Taiwan continued to be another participant in the China War. Its involvement was undeclared officially yet there was no doubt that it was happening. Everyone could see it. The Chinese government in Nanchang, the Americans and the Soviets were all aware. Taiwan wasn’t going to begin a campaign to ‘retake the mainland’ but it was stealing scraps from the table. Offshore islands which China had once control of near to ones near to others held by Taiwan were taken unopposed by Taiwanese forces after the Chinese left them. The biggest of those, the huge island of Hainan, remained in Chinese hands yet if the Taiwanese had their way, it would soon be theirs too. The contested Parcel Islands down in the South China Sea – also claimed by Vietnam –came under Taiwanese control. Taiwanese naval patrols were underway at the top of the South China Sea as well, in the waters off the British and Portuguese colonial possessions of Hong Kong and Macau respectively. They engaged ‘pirates’: real ones but also Chinese naval ships whose crews had abandoned their country and were fighting for themselves. Taiwan then made itself a nuclear power.

Everything else it was doing now had a nod-and-wink approval from the United States, with the Chinese screaming of American betrayal, but not this. In the spate of a few months, the Americans had gone from threatening Taiwan to supporting its actions. This was different though: the United States would have put a stop to what occurred at sea if they knew. In secret, Taiwanese special forces took over a ship in one of their supposed anti-pirate operations. It had come from Ningbo with a destination being Shantou and loaded with five nuclear weapons, all to be hidden down in southern China. Overland and air routes were impossible and it was thought that a safer transit would be made by sea especially if the ship in question acted innocuously. A Taiwanese spy alerted his handlers though and it was assaulted by well-trained and capable men who removed the weapons – two artillery shells and three free-fall bombs – before scuttling that ship with the dead crew aboard. It was hoped that Nanchang would never find out exactly what happened, thinking that the ship had been attacked and sunk. Taiwan wanted those nuclear weapons for future purposes. The last thing they would ever want to do would be to use them against mainland China to respond to a strike on Taiwan. The Taiwanese couldn’t imagine that ever happening, it was unthinkable.


Despite what the Taiwanese did offshore in dealing with ships, some of them contained refugees heading for Hong Kong and Macau, there was still a flood of the needy towards each. The Portuguese were overwhelmed. They lost control of law and order in their territory. The city was hit by violence, looting and fire. Thousands of the people who called the colony home, as well as thousands more who had fled here for their own safety, lost their lives. Half the world away, Lisbon could do nothing to stop this. Such a thing wasn’t going to be allowed to happen in Hong Kong. The colonial authorities had begged London for assistance yet been sent none. They were told to make do with what they had and stop the masses of refugees from entering Hong Kong illegally where their presence would ‘be a threat to public order’. There were tens of thousands of refugees who’d come overland and by boats already. These were causing all of the problems feared already. In addition, there was at least two hundred and fifty thousand more Chinese outside of Hong Kong, in the immediate vicinity and trying to get inside. Hong Kong was the promised land where there was no war, no hunger, no disease and safety for them & their families.

The 26th Gurkha Brigade was responsible for the defence of Hong Kong. There were two battalions of Gurkhas, a battalion from the Royal Green Jackets and the men of the Royal Hong Kong Regiment. A division or a corps, not a brigade, was really needed for this task. The British only had these men though and it was they who had to stop the flow of people. They did the very best that they could. Blockages were made to stop people entering Hong Kong and physical lines of troops deployed. Gaps appeared everywhere though. Desperate people will always get through. The only way that the British could have stopped the flow of people properly would be to shoot them. Those who made it to Hong Kong couldn’t be thrown back out – how could that be realistically done? – and more followed them. London demanded that the flow of people be stopped. It couldn’t. Things slowly started to fall apart in Hong Kong. It wasn’t fast like it had been in Macau yet was still occurring. Violence took place daily and there was mass looting. Those refugees who behaved, the overwhelming majority of them who didn’t lash out, were a massive strain on the colony in terms of food, shelter and medical attention. Help us, Hong Kong demanded. We can’t, London replied. To those looking at this with neutral and objective eyes, who could see where this was going, Hong Kong was eventually going to end up the way of Macau.



January 1985: The Korean Peninsula

Allied forces in South Korea once again cut the connections from invading forces south of the Han to their positions north of that river. From out of the Seoul Pocket, fighting a slow-moving and brutal battle, American and South Korean troops succeeded in cutting off North Korean and Soviet troops out ahead. They were then reinforced and the area of liberated territory widened when Commonwealth troops – the bashed-about Australians along with a recent increase in numbers of Malaysians – joined in. The Australians and Malaysians ended up with forward positions facing northwards and to the east; positioned southwards were the American and South Korean. These fighting men were tired and due for a break after doing what they had but orders came to push onwards, going even further south and retaking further occupied soil as well. They came up against North Korean troops whose positions looked formidable yet were brittle. First the 3rd Marine Division and then the South Korean 9th Infantry Division (the famous White Horse) overcame enemy resistance as they struck and broke through significantly. Their pace picked up as they advanced and all North Koreans before them broke. There came less and less return fire and a mass of surrendering prisoners. Two more South Korean divisions along with an armoured brigade, joined by the US Army’s 25th Infantry Division, entered the fight and broadened the frontage. Huge areas of previously-occupied land was retaken. Nowhere could the North Koreans hold on and they were barely even fighting any more. Away to the north, the other Allied troops facing further North Koreans dug in between the Han and the DMZ were facing strong and spirited opposition, but there was none of that to the south. Only when the Allied attack reached the Soviets and their two-division corps did the wildly-successful offensive come to a halt when they came into contact with those opponents. Once stopped, the Allies now had to deal with the staggering number of prisoners which they took in sixteen days of going forward. There were nearly one hundred and eighty thousand of them, the majority of whom needed urgent medical care too. The Korean People’s Army (KPA) had just fallen apart so completely and rapidly. Why?

It was a combination of many factors. Firstly, the KPA had been fighting south of the DMZ since mid-September and there had been no let-up at all. Conditions for the men enforced by officers and political commissars were almost barbaric. These men ate scraps, suffered ridiculously harsh punishments for the smallest things and were generally in sorry state. Victories which they won brought them nothing but another fight to have straight afterwards. Morale was non-existent. That would have long ago killed any other army but not the KPA due to the men who were frightened of their own regime, for themselves but also their families back home, more than any enemy they might face. The cessation of ammunition supplies was another key factor which broke the North Koreans. The first time that there had been a cutting of connections running back north, the interruption had been short and supplies already forward were used before the Soviets arrived to tear through Allied lines. Following behind their tanks came trucks laden with bullets and shells for the KPA. This second time that the Allies cut them off was worse than the first though and occurred when ammunition levels were at rock bottom. Instructions came that those cut-off troops were to fight with their bare hands if necessary and then seize from overcome enemies their weapons and ammunition. This was utterly stupid and wholly impossible. The KPA ran out of bullets and thus couldn’t return fire against the attacking Allies. Those who sent the orders for the men to fight with their bare hands weren’t the ones who would have to run into machine gun fire without having any covering support, were they? Thirdly, the final factor in the sudden KPA collapse was a rumour. It started within the North Korean lines themselves, one stamped hard upon by political officers with executions made. The rumour reached South Korean ears though and the ANSP (the successor to the Korean CIA; who’d long held a larger role than the now-defunct American CIA when it came to South Korean military affairs) decided to make use of it. They helped re-spread the story that Kim Il-sung was dead, killed at American hands. This meant that the certainly that the fighting men had that the regime would punish them for any surrender and also seek revenge upon their families too was gone. Kim was supposedly dead and back home there would be no deadly retribution for any failure to continue fighting when they couldn’t anyway.

It was a perfect storm. What began as a small Allied offensive became that rout of the KPA. There were still other groups of North Koreans south of the Han, already in isolated groups and not part of the collapsed force but they were ultimately doomed as well. The Soviets remained also yet they too were well and truly cut off. Their own ammunition was soon to run out but before then fuel, the lack of to be exact, looked likely to be the cause of their downfall. The KPA had long become a majority dismounted force but the Soviet Sixty–Eighth Army Corps had all of their tanks, their infantry fighting vehicles and self-propelled guns. They needed fuel or were fast going to be static pillboxes ready to be picked off by accurate fire. What really would have helped speed up the process of destroying both the last of the North Koreans and the Soviets too would have been significant air attacks. Those B-52s re-tasked from missions above the Korean Peninsula to the air strikes made against China would have been perfect for this. Combined Forces Korea had had no say over that decision and there was a mood of (an unsaid) ‘I told you so’ with that. They still missed those bombers though. Tactical air strikes just couldn’t make up for the tonnage that waves of bombers would bring to play. That B-52s were elsewhere though and there was still a war to fight. Reaching the Soviets was all that the Allied forces could do for now, at least until next month, and so they consiliated their positions around them and the smaller groups of North Koreans. An attempt was made by the Soviets to link up with one of those KPA pockets. A pair of battalions of T-64s from the 277th Motorised Rifle Division’s tank regiment – using up their fuel at an alarming rate – pushed forward in a major attack. This was deemed by the Allies to be an attempt to not retake territory or save those North Koreans but instead grab them to use as bullet-soakers around them when faced with overwhelming numbers of Allied forces closing in. It was a good attack, one which might have worked. However, North Korean communications were intercepted as they spoke internally over the radio where units were warned of the approach of the Soviets. South Korean tanks but also anti-tank units, guns and dismounted missile teams, got in the way and the attack ground to a halt short of its objectives. There was an anticipation that the Sixty–Eighth Corps would try again but they didn’t. They were now conserving their fuel. More fool them. Allied troops were moved to surround them, ready to move in at a later point.

The war south of the Han was won. The Allies had secured a victory. It was only now about convincing the Soviets and the last of the North Koreans that they had lost. Part of that included spreading more rumours among the KPA, this time with the Korean CIA doing all the work themselves to get this started. The newest story was that the ‘new regime’ in Pyongyang had made peace with the Allies. Similar attempts weren’t tried with any serious effort made for the fighting which continued north of the Han. The Australians and Malaysians – there were troops from New Zealand, the Philippines and Singapore too with them yet far fewer in number – joined with larger numbers of South Koreans in fighting there. The central mountain spine which ran down the Korean Peninsula saw crossings made over it of further South Koreans from the eastern side of South Korea during January. Over there, the KPA attack in the war’s first days had stalled and never gotten very far with no major successes occurring in going south like they did in better terrain to the west. The South Koreans had continually been sending smaller numbers of men for many months from their eastern defences to the west though still retaining large numbers of troops over there. Now, most of them were moving over the mountains and down to the western side of the country. The Americans had long wanted them to do it earlier, trying to bring them under central control of the Combined Forces Korea headquarters but the South Koreans had resisted this and kept them independent. They hadn’t kept them there when they were needed to the west because they were stupid. They were waiting for a time such as this when they wouldn’t be whittled away in small fights but could be used all at once. Making the transfer in the bad weather of the New Year was done too because the intention was for the North Koreans – aided by Soviet reconnaissance efforts – to not realise until it was far too late.

A bigger battle, nearer to the DMZ, to the northeast of Seoul was coming. The South Koreans were going to settle many scores with the KPA occupiers who had a hold of their territory there. Everything that they knew about the horrors of that occupation was true and they planned to put that right soon enough. Before then, troops moved forward and into position. Ammunition and fuel, what their opponents would kill for, what they had been told to kill for, was with them and while not plentiful, there was judged enough to do what needed to be done. That was to clear all South Korean territory south of the DMZ of the enemy. They’d move to do that in February and wouldn’t stop until every last occupier was dead or prisoner: allowing them to get back over the DMZ wasn’t an option.


[End of Part VII]

[Part VIII]

Chapter Twenty – Intelligence

February 1985: South Texas

The figure of thirty-five per cent destruction done to the contents of the Soviet convoys which had arrived in Texas last month had come from the Americans. Their intelligence-gathering had analysed which ships had been sunk during conflict in the North Atlantic and then the Caribbean as well as the damage done by bombing those ships when they were in South Texan ports unloading. That was the number presented to President Glenn. It came as a fixed figure though before presented to him, there had been wide variations on this before it was settled upon. One number was as low as ten per cent; another was as high as fifty per cent.

The Soviets had their own figure on the losses of equipment sent which didn’t arrive to be used for the war in North America. That was twenty-five per cent. This was an aggregate though. It consisted of several factors which all had to be taken into account. For example, of the tanks loaded onto those ships when they left the Kola Peninsula, only eleven per cent were lost. At the same time though, when it came to medical supplies to save the lives of soldiers fighting a war far away from the Rodina, close to half never got past the ports used on the Gulf of Mexico coast. Those variants went on and on. Another example would be the dispatched artillery where the losses of heavy towed guns had been low (relatively) but the loss of ammunition for those guns was high. Heavy engineering vehicles went down aboard sunken ships at an alarming rate yet there was plenty of spare tracks & pieces of replacement equipment for the vehicles which did get through as the losses among those were slight. Therefore, the number which the Soviets had, and also how the Americans made their own estimate, wasn’t about specific pieces of equipment nor stacks of supplies, but more than that what capability was lost. With what had reached Texas, twenty-five per cent less capability for both combat and support operations than sent could be achieved by what got through.

Early in the war, the Soviets had shipped over their initial armies from Cuba and seen American attacks occur where there were ships lost making the far shorter trip. Heavy losses had incurred among the cargo which was sent then in comparison to the number of actual vessels lost. The ships had been fast loaded and sent across to Texas. When certain ones of them were hit, the cargo they carried was all of certain items – tanks or artillery shells or mine-clearing equipment – and therefore plenty of that was lost at sea. What hadn’t been done was ‘smart loading’ of the ships. This was supposed to have occurred and would have seen ships with mixed cargoes: a lost ship would go down with tanks, artillery shells and mine-clearing equipment, not just when loaded with one of those types of cargo. Overall, when others arrived in Texas, the missing stocks of one of those would be lower. October’s events had hit hard and forced a weaker breakout from South Texas in the Central & Eastern parts of that state to occur. In particular, the 23rd Tank Division had ended up as a dismounted infantry unit while there were missing artillery brigades. Equipment had been stripped from some units to complete others because of incompetence over in Cuba. This wasn’t supposed to have happened again with the two big convoys sent from the Kola back in December to reach Texas in January.

Well, it had. There had been a repeat of ‘stupid loading’. The Soviet command in San Antonio discovered that smart loading had been cancelled when it was decided that more could be sent aboard ships if they were loaded the stupid way. There had been a belief that few ships would be sunk and this wouldn’t matter overall. Only when the ships arrived and the contents of them individually, not what was in the convoys as a whole, was discovered, did the end-users of the cargo realise what had happened. Ships had been sunk aplenty and much military material had been put on the ocean floor. Plenty of important stores did reach their destination yet there was a lot of non-important material as well… non-important to the combat arms officers anyway. They wanted more tanks. More guns. More assault bridge-layers. More missile launchers. More bullets, rockets and shells. More, more, more! They saw how it could have been delivered if that smart loading had been employed.

Waiting in Texas ahead of the convoys were tens of thousands of soldiers. The men who would form two Soviet field armies (complete with small attachments from Eastern European countries) had been flown to North America. Once the ships arrived and the unloading began, and American air attacks took place, the men were matted-up with their equipment. Decisions were made at the highest levels on the ground in Texas as to what to do with faced with the losses to cargo en route which had occurred. General Lobov – theatre commander in North America – had to get permission from Moscow up as far as the Defence Council for what he was forced to do with his reinforcing armies. Only with their permission could he field just one of them as a whole and break up the other to support his already-existing three. They didn’t like seeing this done: neither did Lobov. That was the way things had to be though. Blame would fall upon those who did the stupid loading in the Kola and the wrath of the Defence Council wouldn’t be pretty.

The Seventh Tank Army was moved through February northwards across Central Texas but stopped far short of the Red River and the Great Plains beyond. It would fulfil its planned exploitation role alone now rather than alongside the Eleventh Guards Army. That latter field army was broken apart to help complete the equipment ranks of the former and also adds bits and pieces all over the place to the Twenty-Second Army in Colorado, the Eighth Tank Army in East Texas and – most-importantly – the Twenty–Eighth Army in North Texas. The Twenty–Eighth Army was to be followed by the Seventh Tank Army, fighting what the Soviets considered the best of America’s troops along the Red River and in Oklahoma once again, so was given the best of what was available. The limits on what the Soviet reinforcements coming from the convoys brought were even more than just the masses of equipment and supplies which didn’t get throw. There were all of those extra men which arrived and they were a burden alongside their arrival as a bonus for the war effort. The men, the ones who’d recently flown in and the ones already in North America, needed feeding and they needed medical care – general as well as critical – to be given to them. The missing cargoes on the ships included the stocks to do this too. Living off the land while fighting a modern war was impossible when it came to feeding men and the health of the men was another issue which couldn’t be ignored. Soldiers got injured in battle yet they also were ill due to other causes. Treating them was becoming more and more difficult for the Soviets. Texas was full of the wounded and the ill. There had been some air evacuation flights going back home yet those were few and far between. What the Soviets had been waiting for was ships to send those who needed to go home on. There were now ships in the South Texan ports, those which had survived Allied attacks while on the way here. These were loaded through February and preparations began to send them home. Marked as hospital ships, they were still armed though – basic weapons but weapons nonetheless – despite international rules against doing such things. This was a decision made in Moscow where ships full of wounded would be protected on their way home. They were going to sail for home in March, going back across the North Atlantic. For one thing, American intelligence efforts missed the fact that these were hospital ships. That should be noted: they didn’t know before they would go and do what they and their allies did to them when later at sea. Secondly, the ships were armed and entering a war zone. The results were going to be predictable.


Lobov was told by the Defence Council that there would be no further significant reinforcement ‘for the foreseeable future’. The details weren’t given to him but he knew of the gauntlet that the convoys coming to Texas had run. There wasn’t going to be another convoy effort made for some time. Moscow issued orders that the war was to be won with what he had available and won soon too. The original war plan drawn up last year, long before he replaced the shot man who had been first in command, had called for a victory to be gained this Spring. That plans were still to be followed. He had fewer forces and so many expectations and the whole overall worldwide order had gone awry, but the plan was still the plan. Much of the American’s best forces had bene defeated last year and the rest of them, old ones and newer forces, were to be overcome through March and April. The fight would be on the Great Plains, this side of the Mississippi River. Oklahoma then Kansas were to be advanced through and Nebraska reached. On the eastern flank, Louisiana and Arkansas were to be sideshows there compared to the main effort going north. Over to the west, holding New Mexico and Colorado, plus keeping the Americans at bay in Arizona and where they had penetration Mexico, was all to continue. Lobov was made to understand that going north was his key priority though. The Defence Council, looking at the maps from far away, demanded that the Platte River be reached: that being the waterway which ran west-east across Nebraska.

They expected nothing less than Lobov to have his tanks reach there, leaving a defeated American Army in their wake. No excuses would be heard as to why that couldn’t be done either now nor in the coming months.

To aid Lobov, he received a courier direct to him. Only he was allowed to see the contents of the message (the courier left him alone) and, as if he was the character in a spy novel, he was instructed to destroy the message afterwards. What he was sent was what he was assured was gold-plated intelligence. The Americans were going to launch a general offensive in the eastern theatre – the north and west were different matters yet smaller affairs – beginning March 7th. Lobov was to strike first, going on the attack four days earlier. The Soviet offensive would gobble up preparing American formations, especially their forward supply units pushed ahead before their heavy units would attack, and this would only add to the ‘already certain’ Soviet victory.

The countdown to March 3rd was on. Victory or (don’t say it aloud!) defeat was coming.



February 1985: New York

Warren Christopher had been the Deputy Attorney General for the last two years during the Johnson Administration before he’d then gone back to private law when Nixon entered the White House. Following Ted Kennedy’s election, Christopher had been considered for a return to government, serving as Walter Mondale’s deputy at the State Department. That hadn’t worked out. The views of the incoming president on certain matters of world affairs had been at odds with his and Christopher remained out of government. He had become a critic of the foreign policy followed by the Kennedy Administration when it came to relations with allies and foes alike. His name was linked to many of the think-tank reports and newspaper opinion pieces which attacked the policies followed during those three and a half years. John Glenn and he had come to know each other though as vice president, a loyal one, Glenn had remained publicly distant from Christopher’s expressed views. There had been harsher critics, ones far less polite than Christopher had been, yet Kennedy had made it clear that such a man wasn’t welcome anywhere near his administration. It had been personal like that with many people and the thirty-ninth president. September 17th had come and in the resulting fallout, Glenn had reformed the US Government with much-needed replacements for the many dead. Christopher had been asked by the new president to take a non-executive role with the new administration, one working directly for Glenn. This was to head up the new Office of Intelligence and Security and this took an oversight role above the newly-created National Intelligence and Security Service. NISS had a Congressional mandate but Christopher’s office didn’t. Glenn wanted to create a Cabinet-level department for intelligence & security. This wouldn’t just be responsible for NISS though that would be the main focus. Congress was currently blocking any form of a Department for Intelligence and Security (other names such as National Security had been floated too) for various reasons. There were concerns over the powers which it would have and how those would be enforced with claims that they would violate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Christopher himself was called a ‘dove’: certain members of Congress wanted a ‘hawk’ and saw Glenn’s determination to put Christopher in that position as a challenge to them which they met. There were concerns now among some that the president had gone too far when NISS was created – erm… it was them really, not him – in merging so many formerly-independent agencies into one so quickly. It was to some an American KGB! Hyperbole aside, Congress had serious issues with then going further. To hand that all over to Christopher, or anyone else for that matter, in a Cabinet role was something Congress wasn’t so sure about.

NISS remained in limbo with neither the president nor Congress having complete control over it. It was still a new organisation though packed with long-term veterans from the Intelligence Community. Their fiefdoms had been broken up and many, many toes stepped on. They were blamed for the surprise attack which brought about the war yet their own feelings were that Kennedy had been to blame, not them. Or, if the CIA, the DIA, the NSA and the NRO were to get any blame, then it was upon the former heads of those organisations and plenty of people who were dead after the nuclear attacks. There were seven primary components of NISS (excluding the administrative and support parts) which formed their own divisions within the super-agency. The Foreign Intelligence Division fulfilled many of the roles which the CIA once had; the Defence Intelligence Division covered DIA tasks; the Communications Division undertook NSA duties; the Reconnaissance Division replaced the NRO; the Protection Division included the Secret Service’s executive guard role; the Counter-Intelligence Division undertook many former FBI tasks acting against spies; the Domestic Security Division had the duty which no former organisation in the United States had and that was to guard against the actions of American people themselves striking at the heart of the nation.

The stink kicked up by the CIA on one hand and the NSA on the other at being subsumed like they were was massive. The DIA and NRO found themselves quickly in leading roles within NISS and were generally happy. The Secret Service was a shadow of its former self and couldn’t object to what occurred. When the FBI lost its counter-intelligence duties, they had tried very hard to stop this yet hadn’t fought almost to the very end like the CIA’s remaining structure had tried to in an effort at martyrdom. The role of Domestic Security was something else entirely from all of this drama elsewhere. It was the assigned role of this part of the United States’ unified intelligence network which had upset many in Congress: if this had been peacetime and there was more of this in the public arena, the backlash would have been quite something too. Domestic Security was designed to focus upon anti-terrorism as its main undertaking. When the war started and nuclear attacks came, the country had been hit elsewhere by countless terror attacks from coast-to-coast. Plenty of those murderers were now dead, many shot ‘while resisting arrest’ too. This wasn’t going to be allowed to happen ever again. Given FBI-like powers in handling terror matters yet with stronger backing, NISS agents on Domestic Security tasks would stop any more terror attacks ever again and do so with a no-holds barred approach. Terrorism wasn’t just foreign nationals though. There was home-grown terrorism too which had already felt the long arm of NISS agents in the past few months. There had been separatists and secessionists who betrayed their country at a time like this with accusations (not all, but many, true) that they had been working with the Soviet KGB even if some of them weren’t aware of it. Congress feared that in the future, after the war, NISS would be able to step on the right to bear arms and for personal freedoms, all in the name of fighting terrorism. Some of their actions already had pressed the wrong buttons with senators and congressmen.


Voices in Congress called Christopher a dove. A dove he wasn’t. He was pragmatic and thoughtful. Glenn had tasked him to oversee NISS and defeat ongoing and future threats to the nation. That he had done. If Congress was fully aware of some of the actions undertaken by NISS so far, especially since 1985 began, they’d be calling him a hawk. Their fears of Domestic Security expansion in the future by knowing some of the things done behind closed doors now would have set them right off. Conversely, the deeming of him as a dove still held water though. NISS was in DIA hands and Christopher and his semi-independent Office of Intelligence and Security had oversight but not direct control over all that NISS did. Christopher wouldn’t have agreed directly to all that was being done. This was why there needed to be proper oversight and legislation. Congress argued with the president on this matter and meanwhile NISS did what it did.

High Value Prisoners (HVPs) – a recent capture of a KGB captain in the Rockies an example of them – were taken to ‘black sites’ across the nation; one was soon to be established on occupied Mexican soil over in Baja California too. Captured personnel from the KGB, the GRU and Cuban & Latin American nations were deemed as HVPs because they weren’t legitimate military POWs. The methods used to interrogate them and the conditions which they were held in didn’t meet POW standards. Their names weren’t on lists held by the Red Cross or the Soviet Interest Section that the Swiss Embassy represented to be passed on back to families abroad. Some very bad things were being done to these detainees with threats of the same made to others to get them to cooperate. Worse treatment was being given elsewhere to American captives in enemy hands, but that didn’t excuse the excesses of Aspen and elsewhere, did it?

NISS was involved in many other aspects of the shadow war going on behind the frontlines. They had an ongoing espionage effort to get inside the inner workings of the governments of Revolutionary Mexico and Nicaragua. There had been some success with another spying effort made in El Paso with the Peace Committee which remained there and this including ‘snatching’ back several American nationals held prisoner there for KGB means. Domestic counter-intelligence efforts had taken apart several Soviet spy rings in the United States which were pre-war established but burnt by KGB overuse due to the pressure of war. Military intelligence efforts closer to the battlefields had been roughly-handed by Soviet counterefforts yet they were bringing back useful information of a strategic nature and there was an ongoing, top-secret deception programme (named Mechanic) which was believed to be soon to pay off big time. Major electronic eavesdropping operations were ongoing to do what America had always done well in conflicts and seize the mantle there to crack enemy communications and exploit them properly, not just react to what was intercepted in a hasty manner. Foreign Intelligence had seen work done abroad where former CIA operatives now working under NISS were trying to get back into the worldwide intelligence war which America’s embattled allies had been fighting without them for many months.

Robert Gates had managed, despite everything including resignations & dismissals aplenty, to keep a core part of the CIA functioning. That nuclear blast above Langley when the war started, Soviet killing of CIA assets overseas and Congress trying even more than any Soviet nuclear warhead to obliterate the organisation he worked for hadn’t completely destroyed it. Glenn had been talked around by a few senators – survivors of the nuclear strike on Washington and new ones alike; those who had many years of public office dealing with the CIA too – into intervening through Christopher to keeping Gates there and the CIA active. It had a new name, answered to NISS and lost some responsibilities, but it was still there. The now Foreign Intelligence Division of NISS was the CIA in new clothes. Back on their feet, they had been busy. Firstly, they had conducted those valuable overseas intelligence-gathering operations as well as working with allies (the wartime Allies but also traditional partners like the Israelis and even the French) to push back against the Soviets where possible. Israel still maintained total control over the flow of information from their man at the Lubyanka in Moscow who worked in the top-tier of the KGB – the man who sent that very late, and too late, warning of war – yet Gates’ people had access to what he said once Mossad passed that on. Gates wanted to have his people have more of a role there but Israeli said no. At this time that couldn’t be forced yet the future was the future. The number-three man at the KGB gave them details of a Secret Service man who had provided exact location details on Kennedy before the deceased president, but also the KGB’s spy too, ended up on the wrong end of several nuclear blasts. This was confirmed and opened up other matters which Foreign Intelligence shared with Counter-Intelligence (their old FBI contacts and they had a long-standing relationship even if it was tempestuous one) in rolling up what was to be called the Walker Spy Ring. This was a Soviet espionage effort which it turned out had done some real damage to the US Navy throughout the war. It was all about communications, not where ships were, but tracking intercepted signals and understanding how they were encoded, and had done the Soviets very well as they were able to deliver real-time information. Tens of thousands of American sailors had died not because the Soviet Navy could crack US Navy codes but understand how they worked and forgo the complication of decryption for immediate results. That was put to an end. Funnelling false information down the line would be done by NISS though, the US Navy changed everything to do with their communications and that was more important for them as it was their ships being lost and sailors killed.

Then there was Peppermint and Workman, the two defectors that the DIA and CIA respectively had received. Both Soviets in American custody claimed the other was a liar while the respective organisations which had taken them in fought the other over the legitimacy of theirs. NISS’s director had favoured Peppermint; Gates had got Christopher’s ear with what Workman had to say. That second defector, the one which Gates’ people had, had been able to aid with the taking apart of the Walker Spy Ring by giving information on one of the people on the fringes of that conspiracy which helped shore the whole investigation up. Peppermint, that supposed goldmine of information, had nothing: he’d never heard of this massive intelligence-gathering effort. He should have. He was supposed to be that high-up in the GRU and the whole thing, where the work of spies was made available to the military for real-time applications, should have involved him before he defected. When the US Navy made dramatic changes in fleet communications, there was a near instant effect that they reported back when it came to the Soviet Navy suddenly having a lot of failure in tracking to attack its vessels. From them, they let both Christopher and the Director of NISS know the value of intelligence gained… Gates made sure everyone understood that Workman had delivered while Peppermint was still talking of geo-political events and ‘what they all mean behind the scenes’. Workman had delivered and Peppermint was either the false defector that the CIA had said he was or a charlatan of the first order if one wanted to be charitable. The defenders of Peppermint had their ranks thinned by those walking back of what they had previously said about how wonderful he was. One of senior DIA people who’d beforehand soaked up all the praise which had come from the defection of Peppermint and who now retracted his support – he said with a straight face that he’d always had his doubts – was in-the-know when it came to that ongoing Mechanic military deception operation. This general, a self-serving and generally quite obnoxious fellow, did his country a great service without realising it by not discussing anything about Mechanic with Peppermint. If he had, events in the coming months would have turned out very differently.



February 1985: The American West

Mexicans remained fighting Mexicans throughout Baja California. The second stage of the Mexican Civil War was in full swing as the engagements between Democratic Mexico and Revolutionary Mexico continued. This fight was also joined by outsiders too with Guatemalans fighting alongside the army of Tirado López while the Tijuana Government was aided by Americans & Chileans. The Battle of Mexicali was a Mexican-only affair though. Possession of the ruin of that once bustling small city was won by Democratic Mexico. They rooted-out the last of the enemy – traitors to Mexico to a man it was declared and to be treated as such – and seized control of Mexicali. There wasn’t much left to have control of though. It really was a ruin, and there were dangerous chemical remnants along with many dead bodies inside. Almost every building inside had taken war damage with the majority of them either down or ready to collapse. The aerial bombing and shelling, then being fought over, had seen Mexicali targeted by an extraordinary number of weapons including chemical munitions. In the final stages of the fight, buildings were brought down upon defenders leading to much choking dust in the air from this. The bodies came from months of war which Mexicali had seen: they consisted of soldiers and civilians. Tijuana sent instructions to pull most of their troops out afterwards, leaving a token force there, because they feared for the health of their remaining soldiers. On the very northern edge of the town, the US-Mexico ran. US national guardsmen shot at some and detained other Mexicans who crossed over during that final battle and it was discovered afterwards that among the dead were soldiers serving Democratic Mexico too. It was one hell of a fight and desertions ran high as those pushed into it didn’t want to stay if they could find a way out no matter which government they served. The Americans sent an official expression of regret for the deaths of Tijuana’s men though didn’t acknowledge any blame. Despite the terseness of that message, it was a sign of relations far improved than how they had been months before: New York and Tijuana were at least talking now.

On-the-ground relations between the troops of Democratic Mexico and those of the United States and Chile down in the Baja California peninsula itself were far better than where they were at the top next to the border. Tijuana had its men fighting alongside those from overseas who engaged both Revolutionary Mexico and Guatemalans spread across the peninsula. Complicated command arrangements saw the Mexicans pointed at where to go by the Americans and then left to get on with it yet given heavy fire support which was tied-in. It was their territory after all which was being fought over and they were sent into the hard fights. Tijuana’s troops were taking too long though. The US Marines intervened in several fights themselves, distracting them from their own missions, to push back enemy resistance. Chilean troops were pushing down the eastern side of the peninsula – beside the Gulf of California – and were making good progress though through the central mountain spine and along tougher bits of the western coast, the Americans were slowed down. They wanted to get on with this and fully overrun Baja California. The whole peninsula would then be used as a base of operations against the Mexican mainland. From Western Command, new orders came down to the 1st Marine Division (through the two intervening mid-level headquarters) to tackle the task of taking the whole peninsula. By the end of February, this was achieved as Baja California fell into American hands. Democratic Mexico troops remained fighting at the frontlines as they kept on moving south yet the US Marines leapfrogged ahead. Amphibious and airmobile operations secured control of La Paz, Cabo and San Lucas. There had been an earlier reluctance to do this, to strike out so far ahead, but with enemy troops all at the front and the rear areas near devoid of them, they way ahead was open. Soviet naval forces off the coast were non-existent and the air threat was judged to be ‘minimal’. US Air Force units supporting both the US Marines and the Mexicans aided in covering the assaults launched by the 1st Marines which the Chileans joined in too with during the latter stages. They had more men recently arriving for the fight and rather sending them to San Diego then overland southwards, they arrived directly by ship into La Paz. Chilean and US Navy ships pushed in force into the Gulf of California from the bottom and shut off access to it. All up the stretch of waterway there were all those Mexican ports which had assisted last year with the invasion going into the United States. Wartime bombing had limited their usefulness, but now that the Americans had control over Baja California – there was fighting still inland through the middle ongoing – those ports were now out of commission for any Soviet, Cuban or Nicaraguan ship. The US Navy shut of access and that was backed up by land-based air support. Fighting inland along the peninsula for Tijuana’s troops to take Rosarito and other big towns would tie them up for a while but the Americans were behind the army of their opponents and had now thoroughly cut them off. Baja California should within a few weeks, by the end of March for certain, be fully cleared of the enemy.


While American troops were fighting to liberate parts of Mexico for Tijuana, there remained all of that American soil under occupation. This had become a political issue with Congress and was a cause of much anger. There was a strategic implication to gobbling up parts of the Pacific coastline of Mexico, to outflank enemy forces inland and better defeat them when the time came, yet understanding that was one thing while seeing foreign troops in your own soil doing all they were was another. Arizona’s representatives in Congress had been especially vocal on this matter. That had paid off. Those politicians got what they wanted and February saw the Sixth US Army and Ninth US Air Force launch an offensive in Arizona.

Operation Fire Lance was a limited affair when it came to far bigger things being planned elsewhere for March with other forces, though for Western Command it was their biggest operation to date. The trickle of supplies coming to the American West had been carefully marshalled and there were free-up forces from previous victories. That aside, there were never going to be enough men nor munitions & fuel to do all that was desired and scour the whole of Arizona for every single occupying soldier. Fire Lance would bring mixed results by the time it was over. A victory was won yet the results of that were uncomfortable for many.

To liberate Tucson, the 32nd Infantry Division went the long way around. They had previously been halted outside the city to the northwest, where the highway connecting Tucson to Phoenix ran. Guatemalan defenders were dug-in well covering that approach and barring further western access too. To the north there were mountains and the wilderness. The national guardsmen went around the latter, moving through no-man’s land and cross-country. They travelled light and fast, looping clockwise to get behind Tucson and then reaching its southwestern edges. That gave them access to both the international airport and Davis-Monthan AFB, each of those much used by the Soviet Air Force and joined too by East German air units. It was an East German aircraft on a reconnaissance patrol which spotted the mass of incoming M-60 tanks and M-113 armoured personnel carriers but the pilot report wasn’t believed. It had to be checked out. Command failures saw the ignoring of silence from Guatemalan outposts too with the belief that sudden & coordinated guerrilla captivity had pulled off the impossible and silenced all of them at once. It was US Army Rangers not guerrillas which hit those. As to the pilot report, Soviet aircraft went out themselves and faced strong US Air Force activity. Finally, one Su-17M3R pilot did get an accurate look at what was coming and confirmed the incoming storm of American armour about to hit Tucson from behind. It was too late to react. Within hours, the 32nd Infantry began reaching its objectives. They retook each of those important air sites – the airport was easier to take than the airbase – and also cut Interstate-10 running east and Interstate-19 running south. It was brilliant, it was just what was planned. What wasn’t foreseen was the Guatemalan immediate reaction. They fell back into Tucson instead of trying to fight their way out of the trap they were forced into. Tucson remained full of American civilians who’d been trapped there since the war’s early days and suffered under an occupation which was now only going to continue. Western Command had put into the Fire Lance orders for the 32nd Infantry’s attack to give the Guatemalans a way out, somewhere that they thought they could escape from and be destroyed while doing so, but things moved very fast on the ground in the heat of battle and that never happened. The Guatemalans weren’t in the mood to cooperate with American plans either. They fled into their secure, smaller defensive position: that being Tucson itself. The Soviets got most of their aircraft out – flying them to Mexico with haste and blowing up those which they couldn’t – though left behind many ground personnel who fought as infantry. The national guardsmen took them apart and only wished that the Guatemalans had stood their ground like that or tried to run south rather than retreating like they did. If the Americans wanted Tucson back, they’d either have to somehow get the tens of thousands of Guatemalans inside to surrender or take the city in a set-piece assault. The latter would run the risk of seeing another Mexicali.

Fire Lance had a second part to it. The Sixth Army kept its US IV Corps with more national guardsmen in the Altar Desert (on Mexican soil) yet moved the rest of the I Corps – which the 32nd Infantry belonged to as well – through the southern reaches of Arizona just north of the border. Both the 9th Infantry Division and the 5th Armored Brigade crossed the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation. This generally-empty area of ground was part of the Sonoran Desert and more no-man’s land apart from a few Guatemalan and Mexican outposts. Cobra helicopter gunships shot those up ahead of the onrush of American troops who advanced east. They were heading in the direction of Tucson at first glance though that city wasn’t their aim. Fire Lance called for the I Corps’ regular units to support the national guardsmen coming from the east in attacking the Guatemalans when they were supposed to retreat from Tucson and head south down I-19 back towards Mexico. The Guatemalans didn’t do that but the I Corps still moved to the other side of that reservation and the highway which ran lateral ahead of them. They still had the fuel and especially the ammunition for a fight. Going into Tucson couldn’t be done so they moved southwards. I-19 was followed as enemy convoys on that highway and military outposts down it all taken apart in one-sided fights. The skies were initially free of enemy aircraft after all of the disruption around Tucson but the Soviet Fourth Air Army had other bases and more aircraft. They soon sent many aircraft (MiG-21s, -23s and -27s) on attack and fighter missions which the Ninth Air Force countered with F-4s and F-16s. The air engagements were aplenty and there was little real interference to the operations of the I Corps as they then went after more of the Fourth Air Army’s bases. Nogales Airport was reached, home to that regiment of MiG-27s. When that was taken by the 9th Infantry, they also moved against the two Nogales’: the American town north of the border and the Mexican town south of that which shared the same name. The US Nogales fell but the Mexican Nogales – back from the border set among difficult terrain – was well-defended by many Revolutionary Mexicans who were dug-in and supported by heavy guns. The Americans couldn’t take it without getting into a bigger fight than they had come for. Their mission was to liberate Arizona too, not more bits of Mexico. The 5th Brigade was released to go further west while the 9th Infantry secured the border yet did take ground either side of the line. By the end of the month, still under good air cover, the Americans overran two more Soviet airbases on American soil when they smashed into first Libby Army Airfield (aka Sierra Vista Airport, which was next to Fort Huachuca) and then Bisbee Airport as well.

The Soviets had flight operations at Douglas Airport, even further ahead, which they too evacuated like they did before Libby and Bisbee were occupied but the 5th Brigade didn’t go that far. They stayed in the Sierra Vista area with forward positions as far west as Bisbee for the time being. This was done because they’d gone so far in a short amount of time and outrun their supply lines. Both flanks were long and exposed, especially the southern one facing Mexico. The I Corps was ordered to consolidate what it had and wait for more supplies to come forward. While they did so, the Soviet struck at Bisbee. This time it wasn’t aircraft but a regiment of tanks supported by low-flying Mil-24 helicopters. Those Hinds were on anti-tank missions and beneath American radar cover; a few missilemen with SAMs acting against them claimed kills but more evaded an incomplete air defence network. The 5th Brigade was caught unawares and only had one mixed battalion of infantry & tanks forward. The Americans were outnumbered three-to-one and not in position to defend what they had. Bisbee was evacuated from – the captured airport / airbase seeing hasty demolitions – and the Americans regrouped in number in the mountains between there and Sierra Vista. They still held a large amount of liberated territory and much of it was good defensive ground yet Bisbee had been too far out ahead. Concern was raised afterwards that there had been too much overconfidence when it came to how far they had gone. Intelligence summaries on the enemy had been weak and reconnaissance limited after victory had been ‘secured’. Guatemalan and Mexican troops had been overcome with ease and Soviet Air Force ground personnel had posed no challenge. Their tanks though, when the Soviets moved large numbers of them forward with speed, remained a very different opponent. The Americans who got out of Bisbee in time were lucky to have done so and withdrew with their tail between their legs.

The fight for Arizona wasn’t over. Fire Lance came to an end with successes made. Nonetheless, those remaining issues of the enemy holding American soil and not beaten – Tucson foremost among them but that smaller Soviet presence as well – remained to be solved.



February 1985: The Rockies, Denver and eastern Colorado

From a starting point of one, then two and ending up with four, the Soviet Air Force had sent air armies to the fight in North America. These were taken from across the western parts of the Soviet Union though with components from all over the place including units based in Eastern Europe too. Their peacetime deployment structure was changed dramatically upon arrival on the other side of the world yet also during the ongoing war. The Fourteenth & Twenty–Four Air Armies were in Texas, the Fourth Air Army was stationed across Arizona (until driven out during February) and the Twenty–Sixth Air Army was based through Colorado and New Mexico. Captured American airbases – for their air force, army, navy, marines – were made use of as well as civilian airports large and small. There was additional dispersion to some highway-strips and also improvised airstrips were created. Soviet military aircraft were designed for ‘rough field’ operations and while this didn’t mean that they could fly from just anywhere, there was the ability to make use of a lot of places that the Americans wouldn’t fly from. At the bases which they used, the Soviet air armies spent a lot of effort expanding them to suit their needs. Runways were lengthened, taxiways added and new structures erected. Defensive positions were constructed in and around them. Deception efforts were made to hide some activity while also set up dummy sites as well. Use was made of slave labour (POWs and civilians who were ‘volunteered’) to do all of this heavy work though the Soviets did bring in much equipment or used captured gear as well rather than solely rely upon unreliable hands. This was especially apparent where early on in the war, American POWs caused them a lot of trouble when put to work at sites which needed urgent expansion. Civilian construction vehicles as well as Soviet armoured engineer vehicles could do far more work than men with pickaxes and shovels; moreover, a vehicle wouldn’t try to attack its masters with the tools it had been given… or steal explosives to create a massive bomb blast.

The air armies operated on the army–division–regiment–squadron internal structure. Such a level of downwards command worked well for the Soviets. They incorporated additions of regiments flown by their allies into their divisions for ease of command. However, there were two Soviet air services who had elements sent to North America. The Soviet Air Force – the VVS – was joined by selective PVO regiments, from the Soviet Air Defence Forces, which included both interceptors and missile units too. Integration of these within the air armies didn’t happen at the PVO’s behest no matter what the VVS wanted to see there: they answered instead to the Soviet Army-led Front commands which controlled field armies and air armies. This was more than just an administrative matter. The VVS and the PVO had very different ways of doing things in the air and on the ground. There was an overlap in types of aircraft fielded though different variants were used. Inter-service rivalry was intense, enough to be a serious detriment to the war effort. The PVO really didn’t want to see its units sent overseas when their primary mission was defence of the Soviet homeland. The VVS didn’t want them in North America unless they could directly command them and integrate them as they had done with Eastern Europeans and Latin Americans. Such a split carried on though regardless. It was all about politics back home and wasn’t going to change. Meanwhile, the Soviet Air Force carried on with the war which it had to fight. The winter had seen even more extensive work down at the airbases which they operated from across occupied territory due to both the upcoming planned Spring offensive and also the reinforcements which they themselves received. The Fourteenth & Twenty–Sixth Air Armies were the main beneficiaries of that reinforcement. There had been plans to send more units that what came yet the situation in Europe halved that number. What was sent though were some particular VVS units recently either stood up as new at home or having transitioned to new aircraft / air defence missiles before they came across to North America. Many more Sukhoi-25 attack-fighters, designed for low-altitude battlefield roles, arrived and so did S-300 SAMs to counter American strike aircraft. Then there were the Sukhoi-27s. These Flankers were really needed. Concerns had been expressed back home that ‘wunderwaffe’ like these fighters weren’t ready to enter a war zone and needed more testing – the PVO had their Flankers in service before the VVS and sent some to Florida; in December, those had come off badly in clashes with American F-15s – yet these were dispatched to the war against the United States. There was a war to win and these aircraft were seen as war-winners.


Attached to the Twenty–Sixth Air Army were five aviation divisions. These were involved in three different conflicts though with overlap between each fight and the assigned air units. Denver and eastern Colorado were one fight, the second was flying from New Mexico against the Americans in the Texan High Plains and the third was in the Rocky Mountains. The 105th Mixed Aviation Division had that latter task. There were MiG-23 fighters and MiG-27 attack-fighters. Sukhoi-24 tactical bombers were flying in number and were joined by Su-25s too. Back in January, a regiment of Su-27s turned up. Much of the 105th Division was based inside the San Luis Valley within south-central Colorado. The valley was set among the mountains all around it. Two big Soviet airbases had been established inside (along with dispersed strips) with others outside away to the east outside the Rockies. The Soviet Air Force had put a lot of effort into establishing themselves here with the intention of staying. Paratroopers with the 76th Guards Airborne Division were fighting through the Rockies along with Spetsnaz some distance from the San Luis Valley so it was deemed a secure region especially since the flat terrain gave little cover for guerrillas. The airbases were defended close-in and far outside by missiles and also ground personnel on security duty. The surrounding mountains did give cover for approaching American aircraft on attack missions yet those same mountains were also full of radars and missiles too.

At the beginning of February, the 76th Guards, began falling back under higher orders. As they did so, there came the order that the 105th Division was to pull out of the San Luis Valley.

The Soviet Air Force objected strongly. Its bases at Alamosa and Monte Vista – huge expansions upon small civilian airports – were of great importance. Just outside the valley, over at La Veta on the edges of the High Plains, the new airbase there where the Flankers were flying from would be too close to the planned new frontlines to be of any viable use now. The whole 105th Division would need to relocate causing disruption to the Twenty–Sixth Air Army’s war. They demanded to know why did the 76th Guards needed to withdraw that far back. Couldn’t they hold back the Americans north of the valley and wasn’t it just a lone national guard regiment that a whole division of Soviet Airborne was facing? The orders stood though. A withdrawal orders for the paratroopers stood as the whole Soviet position in Colorado was shifting. Those airbases were to be abandoned and the infrastructure for the 105th Division needed to be removed where possible and destroyed where not. A timescale was given for this to be done. It was a timescale interrupted by uncooperative American actions.

The 116th Armored Cavalry Regiment broke through around Salida and pushed away the retreating Soviet paratroopers out of the lowland there up into the mountains above. They didn’t chase them but instead did as feared – just earlier than Soviet projections – and kept on going south. Highway-285 took the men from Idaho and Oregon into the San Luis Valley. American aircraft supported the tanks and infantry carriers as they drove through the excellent tank country which was the valley. At the spa resort of Mineral Hot Springs, there was a ‘fork’ in the road network. This was a good place to stop an attack, especially as beyond it two roads going south through the valley could be used afterwards. The bottleneck wasn’t defended though. The anti-tank unit which had meant to have been here saw its orders reversed as the 76th Guards chose not to see them lost for no good cause. The two platoons of gunners and missilemen wouldn’t have held for long and they were needed elsewhere. Such a decision doomed the 105th Division as the breathing room they were meant to have to evacuate in time didn’t come. Highway-17 was used like -285 was as an avenue of attack to charge directly at Alamosa and Monte Vista directly.

The 116th Cav’ crashed into Alamosa first, then Monte Vista next. Soviet personnel at each put up a fight. They stood no chance though. Each airbase was a hive of ongoing activity as forces pulled out from elsewhere were converging on both sites as air operations were being wound down too ahead of withdrawal. Communications with the 76th Guards headquarters were with the 105th Division but there was a delay – an accident, not something deliberate – in telling them about the American breakthrough. By the time that message was sent, battles were being fought at the airbases. The Americans on the ground and in the air did much damage and killed many enemies. There was an effort to spare some of what they found at the airbases but defending troops were everywhere. More firepower was unleashed in response to overcome this. American lives were valued more than capturing aircraft sitting on the ground.

The Americans would move on afterwards once they eliminated the last resistance at each airbase. Control over the whole valley was established when the 116th Cav’ went as far south as the Conejos area. They met resistance from the eastern flank where the Soviets blocked access to their approaches though inside the valley they were busy rounding up prisoners from occupation forces rather than any more serious fighting. In the skies above them, only after the losses of Alamosa and Monte Vista, did the 105th Division finally managed to get some significant air power to play a role. It was too late though. Those Flankers from outside the valley came over the mountains and met with both F-15s and F-16s in battle. Here they did well, holding their own in the sky. Just as the Soviet Air Force feared though their operating base was too exposed. The La Veta airbase was back from the La Veta Pass over the Rockies keeping it safe from ground attack but not from the air. The US Air Force used Leach Airport – inside the San Luis Valley and one of those dispersal sites for the 105th Division which hadn’t been fought over but abandoned successfully – to base a detachment of A-10s at. The ‘Hogs’ went over the mountains at low-level and popped up above La Veta. Their 30mm Gatling guns (with seven barrels: a fearsome weapon when used correctly) and waves of short-range rockets did terrible damage when making three attacks over four nights, each time getting past Soviet defences designed to stop them. Half a dozen of those Flankers, put inside partially finished protective shelters, were lost along with everything else done. La Veta would too have to be abandoned. What was left of the 105th Division would afterwards be broken up, attached to the other aviation divisions which were involved in the wider fight for the rest of Colorado including Denver.

***

February was when the Siege of Denver was once and for all broken open. That earlier gap in the encirclement north of the city wasn’t directly expanded upon but instead, attacks elsewhere to the south smashed apart Nicaraguan defenders. The Soviets couldn’t get to their aid in time. They ended up withdrawing their own troops first to Centennial on the edges of the city and the Castle Rock far outside. This left the Nicaraguans back closer to Denver all on their own. Instructions came for them to hold pending a return of Soviet forces. That was a lie: they were left to fight so the Soviets could establish stronger blocking positions in central Colorado. The Nicaraguans did what was demanded of them and held on until the very end. Almost two weeks of fighting took place before they were finally overcome. It was a very bloody final fight for them and saw Patriot forces – Denver militia groups – heavily-involved as the US 82nd Airborne Division left them too finish off a beaten opponent.

The siege would be declared over officially by February 11th though it was only by the 22nd that the last of the Nicaraguans around its outskirts of the city were eventually overcome. This news was spread wide and far across North America, then afterwards across the world as well.


Now the frontlines had moved southwards. The Castle Rock position blocked an American drive down the Interstate-25 corridor towards Colorado Springs. The Soviet Air Force had that area (plus further south towards Pueblo) littered with airbases for more of its air units and if lost, that would probably be worse than what occurred over in the San Luis Valley. Up at Castle Rock, the Soviet Twenty–Second Army was told to hold on. Their 66th Motorised Rifle Brigade and 120th Guards Motorised Rifle Division had taken terrible losses in the fights around Denver yet were in a position to stop the Americans with their US XI Corps from coming further south for the time being. The flanks were of concern though. The 76th Guards were over in the Rockies to the west and repositioning well though the Americans were applying a lot of pressure. To the east, over better terrain stretching southwards, that was where there was a lot of worry. More Nicaraguans who were joined with Revolutionary Mexico troops under their command holding a huge frontage. The Soviets had a brigade of their airmobile troops – men using light armoured vehicles as well as trucks – with them though the Canadians there increased in number and capability through February. Some British troops were among them too, other men who’d fought in Alaska earlier in the war and come south. Furthermore, Soviet intelligence-gathering spotted more reinforcements. Arriving in Colorado to come under the command of the Canadian I Corps was a division of the Army of the United States, one of those new-built formations raised at Fort Riley in Kansas and in its final stages of training now. What was identified as the 37th Infantry Division was going to be ready to strike soon enough. ABC forces (Americans, British and Canadians) were judged to be in the position to go through the NMS troops (Nicaraguan, Mexican and Soviet) with ease when they choose to. It looked likely they would get behind the Twenty–Second Army and cut them off by seizing Colorado Springs or Pueblo soon enough unless somehow stopped.

Permission for the withdrawals made in the Rockies and then from Denver had come from the highest levels. Moscow wasn’t in the mood to authorise retreats across occupied American soil. The propaganda value of doing so for the United States was one thing but so too was the planned upcoming major March offensives. Neither of those were benefitted by pulling back. They’d seen sense on those other withdrawals but not withdrawing all the way to Colorado Springs, maybe Pueblo, by their troops at Castle Rock. This wasn’t acceptable in Moscow’s eyes. Reinforcements were promised (from the broken up Eleventh Guards Army) but before then something was done of a strategic nature to put a stop to the flank threat.

Last-minute American intercepts of communications pointed to something about to happen in Colorado. There were worries than another gas attack, possibly even a tactical nuclear strike, was incoming. Soviet movements were alarming. Warning was sent to the highest-levels and this included the president where he went through (yet another) emergency evacuation, something he was grudgingly very used to by now. Things happened very fast though, before there could be a runaway reaction. Over Colorado, a pair of Tu-22Ms appeared. They’d flown from the occupied Dyess AFB down in Texas and each carried just the one bomb. Others of these type had been field tested by the Soviets just before Christmas down in Libya. Now they were used as part of the Soviet conventional arsenal. The Soviets were unaware of American interception of communications (which they couldn’t crack) informing their men to seek cover. There was no understanding of the risk they were running in seeing things get far out of hand. All they wanted to do was to put two extremely powerful bombs into action.

The towns of Limon and then Kit Carson were each hit by thermobaric bombs. Larger than what hit Sirte in Libya, these two bombs did as much damage as what occurred there and thoroughly destroy each target here in the United States. The equivalent of twelve tons of TNT but taking a longer-lasting and far hotter explosion than a conventional weapon was the yield of these bombs. Limon and Kit Carson were obliterated by what hit them. However, neither was knocked out for no reason. There were few American civilians at each and they weren’t a primary target either. Why these attacks came here were to destroy the Canadian military presence at Limon and the British around Kit Carson. The pair of towns were at crossroads in eastern Colorado and behind the frontlines. Here there were significant rear-area forces supporting the forward troops. Supply, communications, vehicle maintenance, medical and transportation units were concentrated. As intelligence information that the Soviets also had correctly said, the Canadian I Corps was right on the edge of a major attack. Hitting dispersed troops at the frontlines would have taken more bombs and not been as effective, the Soviets decided, but smashing apart these two support nodes would be. Covered by Flankers who had been moved to Pueblo Airport, and who engaged RAF Phantoms successfully, those bombers got in and out without taking any loses. Casualties were anticipated to be extensive among Allied troops at the targeted sites. As to the incoming major attack to cut their rear, the Soviets didn’t get hit by one afterwards. They waited on their own reinforcements and held onto what they had in Colorado, confident that eliminating the enemy military presence around Limon and Kit Carson had been enough. Time would tell on that.



February 1985: The Texan High Plains

Up on the Texan High Plains, where Amarillo and Lubbock were, Nicaraguan forces there began February in a bad way and just about holding back the Americans. Within a week, the Nicaraguan Second Army would be no more. The Soviets couldn’t stop the annihilation of their supposed allies. The Americans would get as far south as Lubbock and win themselves a victory on the scale of Denver yet one with far less outside attention. The loss of the Nicaraguans would fade into the background though.

The US XVIII Corps moved down from Plainview and towards Lubbock early in the month. The city itself wasn’t their goal but rather the transportation infrastructure around it with the road, rail and air connections. Soviet orders pushed the Nicaraguans to make another stand while they rearranged their own forces to bring the Americans to a final stop closer to Lubbock yet there was too much faith put in the Nicaraguans. First the 56th Cavalry Brigade cut through them and then the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division followed those Texans out front. The Nicaraguans were broken up into little pieces very quickly and even at that stage, there was Soviet belief that they would be able to delay the Americans when making individual fights, hopefully managing to shut the door behind the Americans. That wasn’t to be. Nicaraguan units folded easily when cut off. The Americans would be slowed somewhat, but only by the sheer amount of POWs they would have to deal with. Infighting among the different nationalities involved within the Second Army – only about sixty per cent of the men were Nicaraguans; the rest Hondurans and Salvadorans – occurred once again when they surrendered. There had been an American propaganda effort ahead of the fight to sew division yet this only became out in the open once there had come those surrenders. Military police units were forced to back away and let the enemy kill each other. This was for their own safety, their reports higher up the chain of command said, though down on the ground the view was very different. It was a case of sitting back and watching the enemy kill each other with glee at a lower level of command.

Soviet paratroopers from the 106th Guards Airborne Division were around Lubbock and they were joined by Bulgarian paratroopers as well. These men came here light and without any heavy forces in immediate support. A regiment of Soviet tanks had been supposed to join them yet they had been sent to avert disaster in Arizona: it was a long trip for them across to south-eastern Arizona but they got there in the end. Those sent to Lubbock didn’t give a damn about Arizona. Their only concern was the approaching enemy and reconnaissance aircraft spotting a further incoming American heavy force to join with the 56th Brigade. Intelligence identified it as one of the two brigades serving with the 1st Infantry Division. This left only a tiny American force to the north, facing what few Nicaraguans were left between Amarillo and New Mexico, yet that couldn’t be exploited at all at this time. To replace those missing Soviet tanks, there had been a Bulgarian brigade meant to come to Lubbock. The Soviets rated them and the paratroopers already in Lubbock as good troops, very good in fact, though they would rather have had their own men here when faced with oncoming Americans. The paratroopers would have to hold on until the Bulgarians got to them.

American aircraft and helicopters struck ahead of their advancing troops though didn’t have an easy time of it. There was a lot of defensive fire directed towards them and the Soviets – joined by Cuban aircraft too – fought them in the skies. Neither side could control the skies nor make a decisive input to the ground fight. Meanwhile, the XVIII Corps advanced onwards and reached the Soviets outside of Lubbock before the Bulgarians showed up. They had won the race… yet the Bulgarians weren’t that far off, just a day away. Lubbock’s airport, which was a major transport hub for the Soviets and where they had flown in all those men to fight here, was fought over with the 56th Brigade seizing it at first yet then hit with a fierce Soviet counterattack. It was to the airport where the Bulgarian 9th Tank Brigade went and they forced the Texans to withdraw. There was a belief that those men from the 1st Infantry would be present as well yet the intelligence here was faulty. The Americans were playing radio games with much deception used in what they were up to. More than that, they were splitting their forces and that wasn’t what the Soviets believed they would do. The detached heavy brigade showed up to the west where the Bulgarians had their paratroopers, over at Reese AFB. Unlike the Soviet Airborne who had their many BMD light armoured vehicles, the Bulgarian 68th Parachute Reconnaissance Regiment had no armoured vehicles: they were often called the ‘Balkan Spetsnaz’ because that accurately summed them up. Sniping, raiding, patrolling… that was what they would good for and their deployment was on the flank meant to secure it. The Americans threw tanks, armoured infantry and artillery at them in a full-scale assault though to grab the airbase. The Soviets tried to reach them in time because they weren’t about to abandon them like they had done to the Nicaraguans, yet they wouldn’t extricate themselves nor the 9th Tank Brigade from the bigger fight when the 101st Air Assault showed up behind the 56th Brigade. Reese fell into American hands and the Bulgarians there were either killed or scattered.

There was no let up in the American attack. The XVIII Corps kept on going. From the airbase, they made an advance going around Lubbock anti-clockwise. From the airport, they moved forward in a clockwise direction. They were gobbling up Lubbock from the outside and aiming to shut the door behind those inside. This would trap the Soviets and the Bulgarians. The time to make a decision for the Soviets on what to do was alarmingly short. In theory, the Nicaraguan Second Army was the higher headquarters for the Texan High Plains though with the Nicaraguans lost, the Soviet Airborne divisional commander took charge of his men, the Bulgarian tankers and a mixed assortment of various smaller support units in the service of many nations. Withdraw now, came the order, with utmost haste. A KGB colonel attempted to avert this with the reasoning that there had been no higher permission. He was ignored and told that he would be left behind if he chose to be. The man elected to retreat with the withdrawing troops though this would be far from the end of the matter. The fastest way out of Lubbock would be to go southeast and towards the high ground there: the winding course of the Yellow House Canyon would provide an excellent buffer against the stronger American forces moving clockwise. Such a thing would open up the way for the Americans to go further south though, deep into West Texas. The 106th Guards’ commander knew he’d be in trouble for the retreat he ordered but it would be worse if he did that. Going southwest and running away was just that; moving south and making a stand over better terrain there would be (in his eyes) a valid military action. Therefore, it was to the south they went. The Bulgarians covered the rear and, while hasty, the retreat was done with much success. Few men were left behind. A lot of equipment, stores and infrastructure was left intact though, all for the Americans to use. The Soviets and Bulgarians established their blocking positions and brought the Americans to a halt almost a dozen miles south of Lubbock. They’d got away from a doomed fight. That KGB colonel among them reported the unauthorised action and pointed to what had been left in Lubbock. He smiled when he discovered that the Soviet Airborne general was to be executed for ‘cowardice in the face of the enemy’ yet that smirk disappeared when he himself was arrested, faced court-martial and was taken to be shot (a process which took ten minutes in total) because he too was deemed a coward. Why did he go along with the retreat and not stay behind to ensure the destruction of all of that that was left behind? He never got the chance to answer that question.


The XVIII Corps couldn’t go no further than the Soviet’s newly-established positions, a line stretching east-west past Lubbock. The ground chosen for those was anchored among high ground either side and the middle was full of some further difficult patches of terrain which was of good use to a defender. With time, once fire support was brought up and a major assault could commence, this would be taken on. Not for now though. The 56th Brigade’s commander wanted to keep on going but the initial engagements his men met when reaching the defensive line made the corps commander realise that this was impossible. The Bulgarians fought Texan national guardsmen once again and this time the Soviets got some aircraft into play to make a difference. While it was late, it did its job. A pause was ordered. More than thought possible had been done already and the XVIII Corps was overstretched. He feared that the Soviets would suddenly get more reinforcements and come back north while his men were spread out all over the place. This was no time to be foolish and lose his corps.

Inside Lubbock, the treasure trove that the Soviets were angry that was left behind wasn’t considered such by the Americans. Yes, they got hold of a lot of stores and equipment and there had been no major demolitions done but it was hardly anything to get really excited about. An intelligence leak said that the KGB had shot the paratroopers’ commander for what he left behind. There was a hunt on for that ‘what’ was because nothing jumped out at the Americans as being worth a great deal. The stocks of ammunition and weaponry encountered weren’t too much. Other stores were looked upon with disdain. They fed their soldiers this? This was their medical equipment? This was their vehicle maintenance set-up? Reese AFB had been taken near intact though the airport was smashed to pieces after being directly fought over. Much of the road and rail links around Lubbock were damaged from American air attacks before the battle and almost nothing had been done to repair that bomb damage. Prisoners were taken from the men who didn’t get out but none of them could be considered valuable to anyone. The fuss that the Soviets made was confusing because they had managed to get the majority of their forces out. In American eyes, losing their men would have been far worse than what they got their hands upon.

Winning a victory like they had and liberating American soil was what the Americans regarded as a prize. There were civilians in Lubbock who were freed though not too many of them. So many of the small city’s population had left long ago before it was lost and those who had stayed behind – for various reasons – had seen the Nicaraguans ‘pacify’ them. After Lubbock, the XVIII Corps received the orders to hold onto what they had (as the corps’ commander had already done) and wait pending his own reinforcement. Elements of the Army of the United States were being attached to the XVIII Corps, new units coming to an end of their training and being equipped. There were artillery, aviation, engineering and support units aplenty. Of combat troops, the XVIII Corps received a new division. This was the 11th Air Assault Infantry. When it came time to go south again, these new volunteer recruits and conscripts would see their first taste of battle when the war moved to West Texas.



February 1985: Texas

Much of Texas still remained occupied by foreign troops while American forces remained not that far away but not in a position yet to move forward and liberate the rest of the Lone Star State. Within those occupied areas, the Soviets directed the overall occupation effort though had their allies undertake the majority of the tasks that this entailed. Revolutionary Mexico provided much of the manpower for that, with the belief that once the war was over, after the United States was defeated, Texas – and a lot more of what would become former American territory – would be ‘rightfully returned’ to them. Moscow had pointedly made no such promise on that matter but had given a nod-and-a-wink that this would occur. Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary – eight more Latin American and Eastern European countries – all too had personnel spread through Texas on non-combat tasks as well. Still, the Mexicans and the Soviets were the face of the occupation for Texans caught up on the wrong sides of the frontlines.

This wasn’t an occupation which met any international standards of how an occupying power should treat a native population, not in any fashion at all. Daily outrages continued to occur and these were gross violations of human rights committed against non-combatants. This was organised in places, unorganised in others. Texans were considered the enemy by the occupiers. There was no real effort to win them over in any way to if not agree with the occupation then accept it. The activities of the occupiers continually drove resistance. Armed attacks by guerrillas carried on – though at a lower level than before – and there too was much passive resistance as well. Over in El Paso, right in the far west of Texas, there remained in-place there that Peace Committee which consisted of American ‘notables’. They weren’t involved in what was going on with the occupation though. El Paso was all for foreign relations. The KGB controlled access to them from overseas media and government officials: no undertaking was made to have them used to try to influence things through occupied areas. There was a trickle of civilians which left the occupied areas with people getting out and reaching freedom. The vast majority were stuck though, trapped where they were and suffering. The actions of the occupiers were seeing these numbers reduced at quite a pace due to a growing number of fatalities. There had been shootings before and there would continue to be so yet the deaths occurring came due to the occupation. There was no food. There was no medical care available. Disease ran rampant through urban areas due to overcrowding of civilians pushed out of the countryside and into them. Austin, Houston and San Antonio had all seen many civilians initially leave them ahead of the invading troops though other people had stayed inside them. From El Paso along with large towns in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, far fewer people had managed to get away before all major exits routes for them were shut off and the frontlines of war had moved far away. In the cities and big towns, their populations had risen as over the winter months as those who lived outside of them had been forced to move to each. With the people all gathered up, they were deemed easier to control. This worked on a general pattern because there were fewer people outside across the countryside who could cause the occupiers trouble as they did what they wanted with Texas. However, the intensity of what guerrilla activity then did occur away from the concentrations of people was fierce with many of those left behind believing that everyone else had been herded off to be killed and they themselves had no choice but to fight. The ramming of their urban areas with people saw so many of them fall ill with the resulting deaths that came. Starvation took the weakest first but it would get everyone eventually.

Unless stopped, this harshest of all occupation measures undertaken – a recent development – would kill millions of innocents. It wasn’t a deliberate state policy of the Soviet Union to see this done… Tirado López remembered what happened to Mexico City and his view on what should be done in Texas was different. However, while no one in Moscow had signed-off on this officially, it was known about. The KGB didn’t stop the Mexicans from doing what they did. The Soviet Armed Forces knew full well too what was going on. Neither organisation was full of idiots who weren’t aware what was very soon going to happen. There was thus a lot of ‘hand-washing’ going on. Soviet senior people were making sure that their hands weren’t dirtied by involvement in what they were making sure that the Mexicans were doing all by themselves. The immediate benefit for them and their own wartime activities by that confining of people was plentiful. There was an anticipation that in victory or defeat, everything would come crashing down on the Mexicans when the scale of what was occurring was uncovered but, in the meantime, they’d washed their hands of the whole thing.

Soviet military officers were pleased to see the easier time they had moving those reinforcements which had made it across the Atlantic now through Texas. American air activity was still a major hinderance and there were increasing activities of inserted Green Berets, but with large-scale civilian interference gone, this became easier. Roads were used for moving equipment and supplies but also Texan railroads. The Soviets had brought over Railway Troops, specialist engineering forces to not just repair existing rail links but expand them too. This was a seriously challenging task for them to do because the rail network in Texas was nothing like it was back home or even in Europe – Americans liked their air and road travel rather than railways – but it was done regardless of all of those difficulties thrown in their way by way of lack of infrastructure and terrain. Convoys on the roads and the few railroads travelled away from South Texas and throughout the rest of the Lone Star State. They went west, north and east.

The Seventh Tank Army was the largest of those reinforcements on the move. At the beginning of February, the field army’s headquarters was situated in Corpus Christi. By the end of the month, that location had shifted to Seymour. This put the mass of tanks which formed a strike force that the Soviets had shifted north to win the war (almost) within sight of the Red River and Oklahoma beyond. They were almost ready to see combat.


Over in Oklahoma, through the north-eastern parts of Texas and down its very eastern edges along the state line with Louisiana, the United States had their unbeaten armies in-place. These too were being joined by reinforcements as the newly-raised Army of the United States arrived. These new troops were far smaller in number than at first planned yet there were still many more men in training elsewhere and only waiting on equipment and war-stocks which would all eventually come. The Third and Seventh US Armies absorbed those newly-arriving troops through February. Welcome too were the supply convoys which rolled in. Factories in the Mid-West especially yet also through the rest of the country had been busy turning out ammunition and so many more ‘consumables’ for military use.

Late February had earlier been pencilled-in as the time for a combined offensive to begin. That had been cancelled because the ARUS wasn’t ready. There were many voices who had demanded that an attack to liberate go ahead regardless. The new troops could catch up with existing forces which, it was assumed, would suddenly be able to do the impossible and tear threw Soviet and Soviet-allied forces to reach the Rio Grande. Chuck Robb – fully established in his role as Defence Secretary since replacing Bentsen – had refused to see this done, fully supported by the Joint Chiefs. It would fail miserable, President Glenn was told, and result in the immediate deaths of tens of thousands of American troops on the attack and see millions die when Soviet occupation continued for what could be another year. All that could be averted if there was a wait of just a few more weeks.

Therefore, a wait it was.

During that time, the Americans strengthened themselves with more than just numbers. They shuffled forces about and readied themselves for their offensive. That increase in strength also meant sending forward reconnaissance to gain a better intelligence picture of what faced them ahead. They already knew about the Soviet convoys and while overestimating the losses taken to the cargoes, they noted how the Soviets were making good with what they had brought across to the fight in North America. This led them to uncover two important issues. The first was that the Seventh US Army would have crashed head-on into the Soviet Seventh Tank Army and not gone lancing straight down through Central Texas on a successful cavalry ride as many had truly believed that could occur with apparent ease. Robb and the Joint Chiefs were vindicated on that matter of waiting.

Of more importance was the cities and the ghettos being formed in them. The term ‘ghettos’ came not from what certain areas of American cities were called where there was poverty and social strife. No, that wasn’t the case with what was seen in Texas. In a NISS report delivered to the President and the National Security Council, the comparison was made to the ghettos that the Nazis had formed in Poland during the early stages of World War Two. The evidence pointed (rightly) to Revolutionary Mexican forces being responsible for herding all those civilians together yet there was no misunderstanding over the fact that they wouldn’t have done this on their own without Soviet say-so. A conclusion was presented to Glenn upon what the Mexicans were up to.

They were going to deliberately murder all of those people in an act of genocide ahead of a later repopulation of Texas. Glenn asked for evidence of this. If true, he would act against this but the scale of his action foreseen demanded more proof than what was available. NISS was instructed to find that proof. NISS went out to find it.

Chapter Twenty–One – March

March 1985: The Alaskan Panhandle

The headquarters for the re-established 5th Marine Division had been set up at Camp Pendleton in California on October 1st 1984. A week later, it was transferred to Camp Smith in Hawaii. Southern California had become a war zone and while there remained initial entry training of new Marine Riflemen at the Marine Depot in San Diego, the 5th Marines needed real training to be undertaken away from the boot camp. At that point, when Los Angeles was at first under threat and then actually occupied, the Barstow area in the Mojave Desert was considered too to be too near to the frontlines. NAS Barbers Point in Hawaii had suffered from a nuclear attack in the war’s opening minutes yet elsewhere in the Fiftieth State, there was little wartime disruption. Space was available too to train the new division properly and so the 5th Marine left the mainland United States. There was always an intention to return though.

The war had seen the US Marines as a whole suffer a torrid time, especially early on. Reserves with the 4th Marine Division had been lost during the fighting in Texas when their division was taken apart in a thorough and devastating defeat. The 1st Marine Division had only just survived the Siege of San Diego but had had to retreat all the way there before they could finally achieve the first of (what would be later) many victories. The 2nd Marine Division had stayed in Florida and guarded the beaches there yet done nothing much in the eyes of outsiders. Across in South Korea, the 3rd Marine Division had fought battle after battle and took horrendous losses. There had been concern among some that the US Marines might end up being subsumed by the US Army due to wartime needs. Maintaining a separate service came with costs that could be saved during a war for national survival. The US Marines were fighting on land too, each time under US Army command, and not conducting amphibious landings. It would have been easier to fold them into the US Army. Such a thing would have been unthinkable before the war. The mythology of the US Marines along with their place in American military history was a matter of national culture. Moreover, Congress had been full of retired US Marines as well as long-term supporters who’d never let that happen… those were people who’d been killed though. The esprit de corps of those US Marines who kept fighting when all others would have folded, and then the victories which they begun to win, finally cut out all talk of a merger. They would remain a separate service.

The Cubans hadn’t been in Southern California for that long though the still-forming 5th Marines hadn’t returned to the mainland. They were established across Hawaii and everything was set up there for the division to be made ready for battle. Four regiments were formed up – the 13th (artillery), the 21st, the 27th and the 29th – along with all of the necessary supporting components. Men were never a problem when it came to getting enough of them; equipment and stores was an issue. This was especially true when it came to high-tech, big ticket items like tanks and new aircraft yet also it was lower down with ammunition stocks as well for the rifles and heavy guns. Morale remained good though, exceptionally high. The 5th Marines received recruits from Hawaii, American island possessions in the Pacific and also those from the mainland west of the Rockies. In peacetime, that dividing line for recruits to the US Marines ran down the Mississippi River yet with the progress of how the war was going on the mainland, that had shifted. Parris Island in South Carolina was where the new 6th Marine Division and a recreated 4th Marine Division too were both being formed-up and they took all of those other men who didn’t come to San Diego first before soon being flown out to Hawaii. New recruits arrived en masse in Hawaii and since October, thirty-one thousand had come. Not all were assigned directly to the 5th Marines as others joined supporting units and there were also those who were assigned as replacements for the dead & injured in South Korea. There were men who didn’t make the cut, those who were unsuitable for service as a US Marine, but the rest were turned into Leathernecks ready to be sent off to war.

Late February had seen the 5th Marines depart Hawaii aboard an amphibious task group. Some of those ships had helped put the 1st Marines into Mexico in previous months; others from that earlier mission were at that point on their way to the Korean Peninsula to help on the transfer of the 3rd Marines out of Asia. Escorted close-in by US Navy warships, and covered at a distance by the battle group around the carrier USS Enterprise, a course was first set for Vancouver Island. During the first days of March, extra equipment and supplies were transferred from Canada to the 5th Marines and the naval task group which had brought them closer to home. The ships moved onwards, now going north. The US Marines ‘hit the beach’ on March 10th.


Of beaches, there weren’t any to conduct an assault over up in the Alaskan Panhandle. That phrase was used by the Marine Riflemen and their officers to describe their landings over windswept, wild and rocky terrain that they found among the islands surrounded by fast-flowing channels of water. Landing ships and helicopters were used to make two simultaneous assaults into occupied territory. Soviet forces here on American soil had been left to wither on the vine over the winter after being turned back from their attempted invasion of Canada last year. They had held on, suffering in horrible conditions and without little outside support. Canadian military activity inland was restricted by the terrain there – the lack of communications links especially – but each time they had met with the Soviets, they had come away victorious. US Air Force F-4s (mainly Reserve and Air National Guard units), flying from several Canadian sites along the Pacific coast, had made many air strikes as well as fighter sweeps and given the occupiers no let up. Combined Joint Task Force Pacific NW included the Canadians, those aircraft, US Army Green Berets and now the US Marines.

Regimental Landing Team 27 landed around Sitka on Baranof Island. The port town and its airport faced the open ocean. US Marines were fast all over it and engaging Soviet forces they found there. Troops from a regiment of the 81st Guards Motorised Rifle Division were based here along with an aviation regiment of Sukhoi-17 fighter-bombers. They were in dire straits before RLT 27 arrived to rock their world. Within a day, most of the organised resistance from the Soviets was overcome. The port and airport were in American hands. A night-time counterattack by dismounted Soviet riflemen surprised the US Marines only by the foolishness of it. It was driven back and the Americans fought through the night and into the next morning as they chased down hidden survivors and eliminated the last of the Soviets as a fighting force. The battle honour ‘Sitka’ would join those of Iwo Jima and Vietnam. After the fighting was done, prisoners were marched to waiting ships ready to take them down to Vancouver. RLT 27 had no time to guard such POWs nor care for the ill-nourished and unwell men they found here. Sitka – known to history as New Archangel when owned by the Russian Empire; discussions had been made in Moscow of seeing it revert to that name when it, like all of Alaska, was ‘returned’ to the Soviet Union – was only a staging post for later operations for them when acting as part of the whole of the 5th Marines.

Across at Ketchikan, RLT 21 made their landing. Their target was another combined port and airport though one which might as well have been inland. Ketchikan was set far back from open water and nowhere near as exposed as Sitka. Force Recon Marines had been preceded by Navy SEALs in making sure that they way ahead was open for the mass of landing craft and helicopters which inserted the 21st Marine Regiment. Soviet forces here consisted of what was – on paper anyway – the best Soviet troops in the Alaskan Panhandle: the 345th Guards Parachute Regiment. This unit of Soviet Airborne had taken part in the initial invasion and marched all the way deep into Canada and nearly reached Whitehorse before the British and Canadians threw them back to where they came. They had escaped from the very top of the Alaskan Panhandle and been assigned to Ketchikan in the south. Promised reinforcement, even transfer back home, had never come. Allied intelligence summaries on the regiment had overestimated its remaining fighting capabilities. These ‘elite’ troops were no longer that. RLT 21 arrived ready for a major fight; RLT 29 was standing by right behind them. Air attacks were made in support and there was a lot of naval gunfire. The US Marines stormed in, hyped up to fight an opponent they were told would defend Ketchikan like tigers. Baby seals, the Marine Riflemen would call them afterwards: not tigers. Ketchikan was easier than Sitka. It was gobbled up and POWs taken in large numbers. RTL 21’s medical teams were overwhelmed not with combat casualties but attending to ill Soviet paratroopers. These men were full of disease and ‘looking like concentration camp victims’ in the words of the commanding American officer. The winter had really taken its toll on these men but so too was the fact that they’d long been abandoned.


Two easy fights had taken place where the 5th Marines arrived in the Alaskan Panhandle. They had seized both Sitka on the coast and Ketchikan ‘inland’ with ease and opened up the way in. There were further Soviet forces further ahead with Juneau having a large concentration of them but also more at places such as Petersburg and Wrangell. There was more of that motor rifle division (its tank regiment was in China though) and also what was left of an airmobile brigade as well. Supporting troops were all over the place where they were involved in internal lines of communication: something rather significant in such a region where there was a serious lack of roads for land connections.

The rest of the 5th Marines moved ashore. The two seized entrance points were joined by smaller sites where there had been no enemy forces present and RLT 29 was used to take control. Prince of Wales Island (a huge piece of land) saw the biggest supporting presence where the US Marines secured their rear base area. Civilians welcomed them though told tales of the horrors which they had suffered under occupation. Men of military age were missing – most marched off by the Soviets from their homes; others had joined resistance groups – yet so too were many young women: the fate of the latter was of grave concern. There was a dearth of food and medicine, plus fuel, and the US Marines found themselves involved in providing immediate humanitarian aid to the remaining population. This had been anticipated though not in scale. Canadian assistance was offered and grabbed at in this. Like POWs ahead of them, civilians were soon shipped out towards Canada where they too would have their lives saved. Staying where they were, even with the US Marines here, would have seen many eventually lose their lives.

For the rest of the month, the 5th Marines prepared to move onwards. They were going to go straight for Juneau it was decided. The mission orders had been for Petersburg and Wrangell to be focused on first before the bigger state capital yet this had changed. Enemy weakness but also worries over the fate of the people there led this. Juneau would be seeing the US Marines arrive early next month.



March 1985: Arizona

A platoon of US Army special forces troops from the 51st Ranger Regiment escorted two NISS officers (both formerly with the DIA) to the edges of Tucson along with a ‘guest’ of the spooks. The man wasn’t a prisoner, the Rangers had been told, but a guest. The Rangers had a different view of the man. He was an enemy, someone they would have had no hesitation in shooting given the chance. That wasn’t to be though. They protected him as he reached the Arizona city under foreign occupation and also kept the lives of the two spooks safe as well. Minefields, snipers and guerrillas were all a danger. Once the city limits and the Guatemalan outposts were within sight, that guest continued onwards all alone. He was off to join his camaradas (comrades).

“I hope his camaradas shoot him.” One of the Rangers spoke aloud his thoughts.

“If they do, Corporal,” the officer replied, “we’ll have to go in there and fight them all.”

“Then we get to shoot them all, don’t we, Sir?”

The Rangers lieutenant choose not to reply and watched the Guatemalan general walk into Tucson.

The next morning, Guatemalan soldiers who’d been trapped inside Tucson marched out of there and headed southwards. They kept their weapons with them and moved in good order down Interstate-19 towards Mexico. No vehicles were in the columns of men nor heavy weapons, just soldiers with rifles and man-portable equipment. American soldiers – those Rangers among them – kept the Guatemalans under close observation as they left United States soil. There were many, many men who lined the route who wished to shoot at these Guatemalans. The fact that they were getting to leave alive, or without being defeated and undergoing captivity, rankled countless numbers among the watchers. There were aircraft in the sky above and several aircrews visually lined-up attack paths for bombing and strafing runs. The stretch of the Sonoran Desert between Tucson and Mexico wasn’t favourable ground for guerrillas yet there were some of them there still, mostly recent arrivals to this region. Several of them did get shots off towards the Guatemalan columns and there came counterfire in return. Green Beret teams were extremely reluctant to fire directly upon fellow Americans who’d shot at the enemy and when they moved towards those groups to get them to stop, there were difficult scenes. What they wanted was for the Guatemalans to hurry up and get gone and that could only be done by the firing against them to stop. Guerrillas were disarmed – only temporarily they were told – and there were incidents of fisticuffs but Americans didn’t shoot Americans here.

It took two days for the Guatemalans to all reach Nogales and get over the border. In many ways, what the Guatemalans achieved was remarkable. It was a long walk and they kept their order during it with no rebellions, no mutinies and very few men making a run for it into the desert… a decision which the few who did regretted when guerrillas who still had their guns went after them. Then they were out, off American soil. Seventeen thousand, three hundred and sixteen men made it over the border according to the official count by NISS: a huge number of the enemy all who had avoided a final fight, and certain defeat, in Tucson and went on to fight another day elsewhere. Behind them in Arizona they left behind all of their heavy equipment, their wounded and also a scattering of other nationalities who hadn’t come with them. The national guardsmen with the 32nd Infantry Division moved into Tucson afterwards to seize that equipment, remove the wounded and fight anyone who wanted to stay & contest American control of the city: some Cubans and Mexicans plus Soviet Air Force personnel. A real fight for the city against those Guatemalans would have been very bloody for all of those involved – the occupiers, the liberators and civilians there – yet many American soldiers expressed regret that they hadn’t won a ‘real’ fight here. Questions were asked aplenty up the chain of command from junior ranks as to why the Guatemalans had been allowed to get away, in the fashion they had too. No answers were given. It was a secret not to be revealed beyond those at the top of the military command chain and among spooks. There were other enemy for the Americans to fight anyway, elsewhere in Arizona and beyond.

As to the Guatemalans, that former captive general officer who’d been set lose into Tucson to talk with his camaradas took them into Mexico to fight. The revolution had been betrayed, he had told his comrades, all for an imperialist foreign war launched by Moscow and Havana. Going south, they would fight Nicaraguans, Cubans, Mexicans and Soviets… even other Guatemalans. They were going to attempt to fight their way home. Getting out of Arizona was the easy bit behind them. On foot, without heavy weapons, and facing a journey of quite the scale lay ahead. NISS had pulled off a significant intelligence coup in doing what they had with those Guatemalans though as to giving them any more aid beyond seeing them to and over the border, such a thing wouldn’t be on the cards. Maybe it should have been given yet simmering anger won over playing it smart long-term on that issue.


Other bloody, drawn-out fights took place across Arizona through March. Those Guatemalans defectors setting off to cause trouble elsewhere weren’t the only occupying forces.

To the southeast of Tucson, the US I Corps set about finished off what had begun last month: eliminating enemy resistance to the liberation of the south-eastern corner of Arizona. A late-arriving Soviet tank regiment had stopped this in February though they were, for all intents and purposes, on their own. Scattered groups of LACom troops (including some other Guatemalans) and Mexicans couldn’t stop what the I Corps threw into the battle to clear this part of Arizona and get as far as the New Mexico state line. Around Bisbee, the Soviet tanks were caught in a cauldron where they were surrounded on all sides in a moving battle and under fierce attack from above. Air cover for them was absent: last month the Soviet Air Force had been driven out of Arizona and remained flying in Mexican rather than American skies now. The 9th Infantry Division won the Battle of Bisbee and then went onto Douglas. There were troops from Revolutionary Mexico attempting to block passage over the border in Douglas. They stood their ground and died. The 9th Infantry went onwards once victorious and into Agua Prieta to seize that Mexican town. The 5th Armored Brigade avoided those border clashes and followed the course of Interstate-10 as it ran eastwards. Blocking points established by Guatemalans and Nicaraguans were run over in a furry of violence. Bowie and San Simon were larger fights, each taking time for the 5th Brigade to overcome the resistance around each town and further open up the road. I Corps headquarters came under pressure from above to hurry their attacking unit along and reach New Mexico before the end of the month. The 5th Brigade was given extra air support from air units previously tasked to the 9th Infantry after it had completed its mission. Large numbers of F-4s and F-16s poured in on precision strike missions while A-7s and A-10s flew at lower level in a more tactical role. The skies being clear of enemy fighter interference allowed them to do their worse. New Mexico wasn’t just reached: it was entered. Dug-in Soviet heavy forces set among high ground either side of the interstate eventually brought the 5th Brigade to a stop about half a dozen miles inside. Liberating New Mexico and getting to El Paso would be for next month. For now, a huge chunk of Arizona had been retaken and the enemy beaten everywhere it was met.

Cuban troops flying down from Colorado had joined Guatemalan forces through eastern and north-eastern Arizona. Their unit identification and mission (the latter only in general terms) had been gained from the prisoner who was the commanding officer after he was taken following an air accident when leaving Colorado. The majority of his men might have got there when he didn’t, but it would have been best for them to have stayed further north. American special forces and air power did most of the work through March yet there were forward attacks made from the 81st Infantry Brigade too. Those national guardsmen got to Winslow when striking out from Flagstaff but that was as far as they could go. Ahead of them went raiding teams on the ground and air power, lots of each. Fuel-air explosives – similar to the thermobarics recently used by the Soviets in Colorado – were employed extensively in those air attacks and the Cubans took the full brunt of them… and the Americans went after them with napalm too. These weapons killed and injured many yet also terrified many more. That was the intent: to get the enemy to witness their use against others and flee rather than have to be next in-line. The Cubans only had a few desertions and mutinies. The Guatemalans were crippled by these occurrences. None of them wanted to be hit like that. Officers were shot, men ran and order fell apart. Green Berets joined with guerrillas – relationships had been built over the winter – in ambushes against patrols and snatching prisoners. The Guatemalan situation gave fresh impetus to their activities. They moved from the shadows and into the open. Small towns were entered and liberated for good. Stretches of road were secured and held rather than just struck by hit-and-run attacks. Sometimes their activities went tragically wrong where they miscalculated though at other times they punched far above their weight. Enemy counter-guerrilla activities were haphazard rather than organised as they were before. All around the occupiers, their enemies were holding ground. They themselves were cut off. It took some time to realise this but once they understood the results of the Bisbee fight and the drive down Interstate-10 to reach New Mexico by the US Army, it became clearer. American intelligence activities to get them to surrender occurred (no efforts were made similar to Tucson to organise a rebel-led defection) and these had success. The Cubans at first resisted these, offers to give in and receive good treatment as POWs which Guatemalans accepted, but soon part of the brigade once led by a colonel named Bella when in Colorado had surrendered in Arizona. The rest of the men then began to withdraw from forward positions. They pulled back away to the very northeast and deep into the Painted Desert. Attacks against those who carried on fighting continued from above and on the ground. This wasn’t over but a conclusion was in-sight for them: that would be a future either as dead or as POWs. Meanwhile, the areas which they left behind, more and more of Arizona, returned to American control. Almost all of it was now clear of a long and brutal occupation.



March 1985: Sonora

From the moment that Congress had been re-established, within days of the war starting, there had been open talk of what would happen with Mexico once the war was won. This optimism that victory would come and Mexico would be at the mercy of the United States with that eventuality flummoxed outsiders. In America’s darkest days late last year, when the Soviet-led war overrun significant parts of the nation and the country was still reeling from the nuclear attack, those discussions about how to effectively deal with Mexico post-war continued unabated. It was from Mexican soil where the war had come – the first troops and the first missiles – and it was there where America’s politicians sought revenge. They had the support of the overwhelming majority of the American people in this. Yes, the Soviet Union, Cuba and the others were all in for it too, big time, but Mexico held a ‘special’ place in this planned retribution. December 1984 had seen US Marines land on Mexican soil when they went into Baja California. This accelerated the movement to give Mexico what it was deemed to have deserved. Congress was instrumental in making sure that Herzog Flores and what was left of the pre-war Monterrey Government received nothing from the United States and too had their presence felt in stopping the Tijuana Council (which represented Democratic Mexico and received recognition) becoming only a co-belligerent in this war, not a member of the Allies. They weren’t happy to discover US Marines and Democratic Mexico troops fighting side-by-side and applied pressure on Glenn to see that stop despite the military necessity of that. Secretary of Defence Robb was summoned before the Senate Armed Services Committee and given a roasting by them; the House Committee wasn’t to be outdone on this either when they uncovered the details of much cooperation on the ground going on south of the border in Baja California. Glenn pushed back and Robb explained to Congress – putting it very bluntly – that Mexican soldiers were dying for Mexican soil which therefore didn’t mean that American fighting men had to, but this only eased the issue a little. The Tijuana Government didn’t have much favour in Congress and there was much cutting of specifics of aid to them due to Congress having the budgetary powers there. A weak post-war Mexico was what Congress wanted, a country wholly dependent upon the United States and as broken as could be. This was spoken of openly. Stevenson returned from Europe and the Secretary of State tried to weigh in on this and calm matters when it came to these attacks being made against Tijuana. Congress hauled him too before their committees and put him in his place on this. Some of that reflected the perceived failure of Stevenson in his role by Congress and thus was personal, yet the Mexico issue was something that many senators and representatives were driven by. They foresaw a future for Mexico and would implement that. That future for certain members – who declared this to all who would listen – was for Mexico to be broken apart as a nation, even with parts of it annexed to the United States. Others weren’t ready to see that happen yet the attention was on those who had the most dramatic things to say. Earlier comments from selected members of Congress where there was anger that the United States had its soldiers and marines fighting in Mexico rather than on home soil had become less and less after victories had been won in both countries: something which was quite the about-turn but politicians will always be politicians. American troops on Mexican soil would be there to stay for good, the proclamations from Congress came, and the occupied parts would never be given back whether they were officially part of a united Mexico, a fractured Mexico or former Mexico.

March 1985 saw US forces inside Mexico move into the state of Sonora. Baja California was already in American hands (though Democratic Mexico troops were the overwhelming body of men in-place) and now it was into Sonora they went. This put them south of Arizona and also in a position for further later moves across to the east… where the Rio Grande was and thus behind Soviet forces on the other side of Texas. Going that far was something considered for the future and would take a huge effort to do. Meanwhile, Sonora was being fought over. The western parts were entered in a two-pronged approach where the Sixth US Army moved forward in the early stages of the grand strategic outflanking manoeuvre which had so impressed Glenn, Baker, Robb and the rest of the top of the US Government who all signed off on this.


The US IV Corps moved across the Altar Desert – between Arizona and the Gulf of California – with their first objective being Heroica Caborca. That town was a major centre of communications with roads linking it across north-western Mexico. It had been a base of operations for the war when it was being fought in California last year and recently in Arizona. The Soviets had recently transferred aircraft from there which they had removed from Arizona too. Controlling it would give the Sixth Army the perfect position to go much further. Cuban, Nicaraguan and Revolutionary Mexico troops stood in the way. The fight was tougher than the Americans believed it would be, especially when it came to the level of Soviet air support and how fiercely those Mexicans fought there. Both the 38th & 47th Infantry Division – a lot of national guardsmen – were used in the wider battle that raged close to but also far from the town to win control of it. Victory did come after a time, just behind schedule. The Cubans managed to get away after making a fighting withdrawal whereas other defenders certainly didn’t. Those Cubans didn’t march away clean though. The IV Corps pursued them and chased them down, not letting them get away to establish blocking positions. A week’s worth of small-scale fighting took place before finally the Cubans could be brought to battle once again. This occurred at a crossroads, around a smaller town. The Battle of Santa Ana was one won by the 38th Infantry. The Cubans fought and died here. It was a last stand for men who hadn’t intended to make a last stand yet the Americans trapped them, pounded them with the heaviest of attacks and were done with them when they decided that they were. An earlier attempt to make a surrender didn’t work out when the IV Corps refused – on Sixth Army orders – to accept the terms of that surrender offered. The Cubans wanted free passage away, leaving their weapons behind, and promises of good treatment. Good treatment for POWs (though that would be what the United States decided it to be) would come but for the Cubans to be allowed to escape, even unarmed, was a no-no. They were blasted to bits and then taken apart before a final, unconditional surrender was made by the last of them. Santa Ana gave the Americans control now over where the east-to-west Highway 2 and the north-to-south Highway 15 converged. The fight won in southern Arizona by other Sixth Army elements was over by that point and those Guatemalans from Tucson were marching into Mexico after defecting to cause trouble already. Regardless, holding Santa Ana made sure that what occurred to the north couldn’t be changed by a sudden reversal originating from Mexico. Victory to the north meant that the IV Corps could focus on the south. They started moving forward, heading towards the city of Hermosillo. This was halted due to the events of March 25th in Mexico. When the IV Corps resumed marching forward again at the very end of the month and into April, it wouldn’t be towards where that city had once been.

The 1st Marine Division was also halted late in March when inside Sonora due to events on that day when millions died in Mexico. They too were marching on Hermosillo at the same time, aiming to take on and engage enemy forces around it rather than to occupy such a crowded urban area. Weeks beforehand, these US Marines who’d fought throughout the war seemingly non-stop in California and then in Baja California had arrived at the port town of Guaymas to the south of the city ahead. Guaymas was on the Gulf of California. There had been a focus on that port during last summer before the war when air strikes against ships going towards it, but not Guaymas itself, had been conducted during the on-off pre-war air campaign over Mexico. Guaymas had then been of vital importance for the invasion back in September with ships coming up from Latin America arriving there and unloading much vital war cargo. Air strikes had hit it including a strong B-52 raid before its importance to the war had been lost when war had come to Baja California and the Gulf of California had been closed by the US Navy. It was somewhere the Americans expected a big fight for and they hadn’t planned initially to send men there in a full-on assault. However, intelligence had pointed to a munity of the garrison there where the Revolutionary Mexico regime in the city had been targeted by a variety of counterrevolutionaries. Troops fought each other and the defences were weakened. Guaymas wasn’t that far away and the US Marines were instructed to go. The 1st Marines turned up in force. They made an easy landing yet fast discovered that while the Mexicans they encountered hated each other, they united once again to fight the invading Americans. They had been committed to the fight though and so threw everything at it. Victory came, a bloody one. Afterwards, before they could move on, there were moves made to bring Democratic Mexico troops over from Baja California to garrison their rear base when they moved onwards. That had been done back to the west. This was something that didn’t happen with Guaymas though due to events far away with Congress and its desires for Mexico’s future. Part of the 1st Marines, fighting men, had been left back at the town while they waited on more Americans – not Mexicans – to arrive. As to the rest of the 1st Marines, the division marched on towards Hermosillo after quite the delay inflicted due to politics. If the US Marines had been in or close to Hermosillo, it wouldn’t have been bathed in nuclear fire like it was.



March 1985: New Mexico

Answering to Rockies Command, the First US Army had its combat forces spread from Colorado down into the north-western part of Texas called the High Plains. The Area of Operations (AO) covered New Mexico too. Not part of the AO was West Texas. To those viewing the fighting across the western side of Texas from the outside, this might not have meant anything. However, in military affairs the boundaries of AOs were rather important. It stopped friendly fire incidents and made sure that focus could be maintained on the mission instead of getting side-tracked. The First Army had had its AO changed before and this wasn’t really anything difficult to do. However, it was unchanged from February into March. Two-thirds of the First Army was fighting in Colorado – the US XI Corps and the I Canadian Corps – and other third, the US XVIII Corps, was fighting in the High Plains and had been advancing southwards towards West Texas. This meant that the XVIII Corps was liberating occupied territory, yes, but also moving away from the main fight that the rest of the First Army was. They’d reached the edge of the AO after taking Lubbock. Air support from the Seventeenth US Air Force (under the Rockies Command too) was stretched to support them and so were the long supply links. The already long flank of the XVIII Corps facing New Mexico was getting even longer the further south that they went; it was the same on the other flank and made the forward movement all neck and no shoulders with the resulting strong possibility of them soon being cut off and lost. More than any of that, as the XVIII Corps drove on towards West Texas, they had no influence over the fight that everyone else with the First Army was fighting. The rest of Texas was in the AO of Texas Command – with its own two armies and two numbered air forces – and the First Army wanted to move the fight into New Mexico. It was there that the XI Corps and the Canadians were wanted to advance into from the north once they were done in Colorado. To do that effectively, the XVIII Corps needed to head west.

Roswell was where the XVIII Corps moved towards at the beginning of March. This took the enemy by the surprise. Soviet light forces stretched south of Lubbock were anticipating a head-on attack against them and had established fortified positions. The Texan national guardsmen with the 56th Cavalry Brigade stayed behind to keep them fixed in-place while everyone else entered New Mexico starting with an assault against that famous New Mexico town. The international airport to the south of there, once an airbase belonged to Strategic Air Command before being closed in the late Sixties, was the entry point. Back last October, Nicaraguan forces had taken it from the XVIII Corps when they had first been in New Mexico. Those Nicaraguans were all gone. Soviet aircraft (reconnaissance and electronic warfare jets) flew from there and there was a garrison of Revolutionary Mexico troops. A combat jump was made into Roswell and this was undertaken by the newly-arrived reinforcements added to the XVIII Corps in the form of the 11th ‘Angels’ Airborne Division. This was an Army of the United States formation, full of wartime recruits and conscripts as well as veteran personnel transferred from elsewhere to make the division not so green. The 11th Airborne consisted of four combat brigades, each based around a historic regiment, and incorporated forces which should have been with the 17th Air Assault Infantry Division. Fully-forming that latter division alongside the former had been too much for the Americans to achieve in the short time period available and so they had been merged into one (a large one at that) before deploying to combat zones. This was the 11th Airborne’s first taste of war.

Paratroopers jumped from aircraft shouting ‘Currahee!’ as they went into battle: the re-established 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment went into battle. Roswell was a tough fight for a green unit but it was one that they won. Another brigade, this one with men from the 511th Regiment (also with World War Two heritage), joined them on the ground after being airlifted rather than jumping as trained into the captured airport and fighting with them. The rest of the XVIII Corps was behind them but those veteran units were the follow-up force rather than sent in ahead. Once the airhead was taken, everyone else moved forward. There was the rest of the 11th Airborne which came via trucks, the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division (the Screaming Eagles) which also moved by road, a brigade of the 1st Infantry Division with armour and all of the corps assets. Better progress was made with the 101st Air Assault who fought at Hobbs and then Carlsbad – where they’d retreated from last year with their tail between their legs – on the left flank than the fight on the right flank. Around Cannon AFB, from where Cuban aircraft had already departed in haste, Nicaraguan defenders halted the American attack for some time. The 1st Infantry’s first brigade required a lot of fire support to pin them down and move around them to engulf these men. The delay allowed the mass destruction of facilities at Cannon… a place which had seen so much deliberate American destruction when they first abandoned the facility. However, once Cannon was taken and the Nicaraguans beaten with an advance following, the whole of the XVIII Corps was deep inside New Mexico and along both banks of the Pecos River thus denying it as a defensive position for the enemy. The rest of the 1st Infantry (another pre-war brigade plus a new one transferred from an aborted ARUS division) joined up with its semi-detached brigade after leaving Amarillo too.

Three divisions, all on the back of victories won, moved forward through mid-March. Their orders were to reach the next major river, the Rio Grande, as it cut through the middle of New Mexico. Interstate-25 ran from El Paso north into Colorado alongside that waterway. Enemy forces in Colorado would thus be completely cut off by reaching the river. Naturally, the First US Army expected the Soviet Twenty–Second Guards Army to respond once they realised what was going on. The Americans believed they were ready to counter that response.


The Soviet trans-Atlantic convoys which had crossed the North Atlantic at the end of last year had brought over two complete field armies to be built on American soil for offensive operations in March. Naval losses meant that only one was fully formed, and sent to the fight in Texas to get into Oklahoma and the Great Plains, while the other had what pieces were available broken away and dispatched as reinforcements to many battlefields. The Twenty–Second Army received a Soviet motor rifle division – which the Americans aimed to trap in Colorado – and also an East German brigade. The latter was dispatched to North America as a full division but what equipment was issued in-theatre was only enough to form an ad hoc brigade… part of what was missing was on the bottom of the ocean, part was taken by the Soviets. Those East Germans were sent to El Paso after the Soviets had already moved long ahead. American reconnaissance missed them here. Texas Command should have spotted them in the eyes of Rockies Command and informed them because it was in the former’s AO. Rockies Command should have been responsible, Texas Command would later say, because that enemy unit was assigned to those who they were fighting. This screw-up would lead to later recriminations with court martials aplenty. Before then, those East Germans marched away from El Paso. A Seventeenth Air Force reconnaissance flight spotted them once they were in New Mexico. The tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery along with the infantry were quickly at Alamogordo. This position in the White Sands put them ahead of where the 101st Air Assault Infantry was due to go. It was a problem, but one which the First Army headquarters told the XVIII Corps was manageable.

‘Manageable’ was quite the turn of phrase.

The Screaming Eagles did what they had done back late last year and held onto the Sacramento Mountains where the Lincoln National Forest and the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation was located. This time they wouldn’t be driven out by either frontal attacks now or flank actions as was the case in late 1984. They did their job and managed. It was up to the 1st Infantry Division to do theirs. They came at the East Germans from the north, entering the White Sands well-supported from above. Crashing into the first East German positions, the commander of the lead brigade reported to his divisional commander that they’d gone through them like a ‘knife through hot butter’. The second brigade was called upon though to overcome the enemy completely. It wasn’t the regular, veteran soldiers brought forward but instead those new soldiers; the veterans were kept ready to exploit the expected victory afterwards. The East Germans recovered well… so well that it was fast apparent that they weren’t recovering but in fact only getting started. These were good soldiers. They were up against bad odds yet if this was to be their end, then the end it would be. They wouldn’t be managed. American intelligence summaries comfortably assumed that these East Germans would not fight well so far from home for a cause which they had no part of. That was a foolish error. East Germany and its armed forces there in Europe, with all that was going across the other side of the ocean, was something different from its troops which had been in North America waiting to go into battle for some months now. These men were cut off from contact with home due to Soviet ‘security’ over communications. Their morale was fine and they knew nothing of what else was going on.

The ARUS brigade was led by officers contemptuously deemed ‘ninety-day wonders’ by other regular US Army officers who’d been through West Point, The Citadel, Virginia Military Institute and other such elite training facilities. These civilians fast turned into officers leading new soldiers were said to be not up to the job. At Roswell, the ninety-day wonders with the 11th Airborne had done good. Around the crossroads town of Tularosa – north of the bigger Alamogordo – the East Germans took on the inexperienced officers and men with the 1st Infantry. It wasn’t pretty. No big, dramatic flanking manoeuvres or modern cavalry charges across open terrain with a stunning victory. Instead, it was a horrible fight where men fought up close and personal. The East Germans took everything thrown at them and gave it all back. Very soon it became apparent that the brigade of Americans should have been pulled out. There was the belief that this was going to soon be over though… any moment now. Immense casualties were taken on both sides as they fought a static battle with no one looking likely to emerge victorious anytime soon without many more deaths and injuries. The Americans blinked. A withdrawal was ordered as the gutted brigade was pulled out. The East Germans refused to relent even then. They could have taken the opportunity to withdraw, to flee southwards. They did no such thing and instead pursued the retreating Americans. The whole of the 1st Infantry, both further combat brigades joining in, eventually had to be brought into the fight to counterattack and then surround the enemy. Tremendous fire support was then used against the now trapped East Germans who’d lost their chance to get away. They were blasted apart and finally there came a surrender arranged. It was a different affair than where other foreign troops on American soil had surrendered to the US Army. The East Germans, despite being communist forces, were allowed to keep some – maybe a little – honour in surrender. Rockies Command dispatched a media team with personnel not from the civilian field but psychology warfare troops. They made a recording of the event and conducted interviews with some of the POWs. This didn’t eventually end up on American television screens. The video tapes were requested by the British Government to be used elsewhere… complete with selected editing too, naturally.


Finally, after a significant delay, the XVIII Corps moved onwards. The 1st Infantry needed to recover – ‘ninety-day wonders sitting on their backsides’ came the remarks despite the whole division being fought out – but the two other divisions were still more than combat-capable. The Screaming Eagles took the lead this time with the Angels following them. Helicopters assigned to the 101st Air Assault Infantry brought US Army soldiers to the Rio Grande. The landing was made around Truth or Consequences, a town with an unusual name. Nearby was Elephant Butte Reservoir and the radar station which had been one of the very first places hit by Soviet Spetsnaz to open the war: the missile radars there had been facing south and were knocked out to limit detection of those SS-20s which hit the North Dakota ICBM fields. Of importance now was a Soviet built airstrip at Truth or Consequences that was used as refuelling & transit point. A Red Horse airfield combat engineer team sent by the Seventeenth Air Force was all over this very fast to clear and improve it for American use.

When the 11th Airborne arrived, its two untested brigades – built around the 509th & 517th Regiments – were sent into battle. These were more airmobile troops and flown in on flight after flight of C-130 transports which made rapid turnarounds at Truth or Consequences. They were sent northwards, past the reservoir’s dam which the Screaming Eagles held securely against any attack, and along the course of Interstate-25 which in this part of New Mexico ran along the western side of the Rio Grande. More ninety-day wonders and the green troops they commanded got their first taste of battle. They fought small, sporadic engagements against Soviet, Cuban and Nicaraguan light units through the last week of March. This blooded them. It gave them their first experience of fighting and they were lucky that their opposition was scattered enemy from transport, engineering, and communications units. After Truth or Consequences had been taken, the American presence there cut a hole in the links going north. All of these soldiers involved in keeping the fight going in Colorado were told that while they were in New Mexico, they were still soldiers. They had to fight until others – real soldiers – turned up. They had guns and training but weren’t organised to mount any real resistance to American soldiers learning their trade. American numbers, training and organisation won out.

The XVIII Corps’ position on the Rio Grande deep in New Mexico put them atop the main supply route for the Soviets. Smaller links had already been lost when they moved into New Mexico from Texas. The Twenty–Second Army was cut off. In addition, it was also engaged in a major fight itself up in Colorado. Regardless of what was going on up there, the Soviets would have to move against the Truth or Consequences position and the pair of American divisions there fast despite the distance or otherwise die in-place. Come next month, those soldiers with the 11th Airborne who lost their greenness recently would value the combat lesson they learnt.



March 1985: Colorado

Army of the United States troops were fighting in Colorado through March too. The 37th Infantry Division had been dispatched to fight with the US XI Corps south of recently-freed Denver. The Canadians had brought down a newly-raised division for their corps as well. In addition, the reinforcing fighting men were joined by many supporting forces. The First United States Army had a third of its strength down in New Mexico but the rest were tasked through the month to advance through Colorado. The fight was over a far smaller area than what was seen down in New Mexico. The Americans and Canadians (the latter with that smaller British contingent) moved to engage the Soviet Twenty–Second Guards Army in central Colorado. Castle Rock at the top, Colorado Springs in the middle and Pueblo at the bottom lay along the Interstate-25 corridor. Immediately away to the west lay the Front Range of the Rockies, which the Soviets were now only just holding onto rather than pushing past there as before. They were in trouble before the March attack. Earlier defeats and a shrinking area of control hadn’t been offset by what was sent to apparently improve their tactical situation this far inside the United States. A reinforcing division of troops, Soviets not those from unreliable allies, had arrived and so too had stocks of supplies. The latter though were what was left from convoys which had made it through air strikes, guerrilla attacks and pilferage on their way. It would be argued that the reinforcements of men and thus the need to keep them supplied in the fight, made the situation worse rather than better too. American communications intercepts had caught a ‘no withdrawal’ order which had come to them with an ultimate origin point as being Moscow. The Soviet leadership was watching the fight in Colorado with keen interest. The Allies gave them something more to maintain their interest.

The XI Corps began their march southwards starting at Castle Rock. Soviet forces here were those who had escaped destruction when the Denver Siege was lifted – unlike those Nicaraguans which they left behind – had established good positions though they were never going to be that effective. Military doctrine for all Soviet military forces prioritised offensive action over defensive. Any defence was only ever meant to be temporary, never long-term. A lot had been learnt by the Soviet Army when in North America yet truly fighting a defensive battle wasn’t on that list. Every time, in every region of fighting, when they had been forced back on the defensive, they had often fought well yet soon enough went right over on the counterattack at the earliest available opportunity. Sometimes that had done them well, other times no good at all. With Castle Rock, it was to be a case of the latter. Riding out the first American assault by the 4th Infantry Division, the Soviets went on the counterattack. The 120th Guards Motorised Rifle Division was a shadow of its former self but was ordered forwards once it was decided that the Americans had been ‘stopped’. That they hadn’t though. Soviet tanks and armoured infantry rushed forwards and did a lot of damage. The 4th Infantry was taken aback at the ferociously of the assault and reeled from it. They shouldn’t have: they’d fought the 120th Guards on and off for several months now. Sloppiness kicked in at the wrong time when the belief was that the Soviets would withdraw rather than hold let alone counterattack. However, the Soviets threw everything that they had at the 4th Infantry far too fast and shot forward too far. The Americans closed in around them on the counter. The 120th Guards was spaced far apart and couldn’t hold the ground it had taken. Orders for tactical withdrawals were made, back to the start-lines. The Americans followed them. This first fight outside Castle Rock had seen the frontlines return to where they were before it started. All that had been achieved by both sides was to see many of their men left dead and injured along with massive disruption caused to their combat units. Each had also shot through a tremendous amount of ammunition. It couldn’t be said that the Americans had that to spare, but it didn’t put them in the terrible state afterwards the Soviets found themselves in due to their equal high expenditure. The Americans had more available than their opponents.

When the Americans came at Castle Rock again, the Soviets were forced to limit their rate of fire when on the defensive. The 174th Infantry Brigade – the former Berlin Brigade which had achieved so much here in Colorado – was another long-term opponent of the 120th Guards. They made the next attack and broke through. It took a lot of artillery fire, massed rocket attacks and air strikes to do this and these were met with limited counter-battery and anti-aircraft fire. Before the Americans realised, the Soviets were starting to move backwards and that began with their fire support and air-defence assets. So much for the ‘no withdrawal’ order from Moscow. Pursuing was difficult but not impossible. The 4th Infantry returned to the fight and the larger numbers of Americans were all over the 120th Guards. They took bites out of it during the retreat which lasted several days as the Soviets fell back down the course of the interstate up which they had long ago come. The XI Corps followed them. If they could have got behind them then they would have but there was a Soviet brigade on the flank which shielded early approaches by the ARUS unit, the 37th Infantry, to the east.

Stopping the Americans from taking Colorado Springs was a mission assigned to the 59th Guards. This motorised rifle division had arrived last month and this was its first taste of battle. The 120th Guards passed through their positions and left the fight to this newly-arrived unit. They got a baptism of fire just as the 37th Infantry did. The fight was north of the occupied city, around Monument and the site of the USAF Academy. Green troops on either side engaged the other. The Americans fast got the upper hand. While the 59th Guards was a pre-war standing unit, it hadn’t seen any action before and so its ‘experience’ meant for little. The Americans were able to call on more fire support, with the ammunition for that too. In the middle of this fight, right at the wrong time for the Soviets, the expected chop from Moscow came in regard to the field army commander. He had explicitly disobeyed orders. He was removed from command, arrested and taken away. His fate would be no surprise: a firing squad. The deputy took over, a man determined not to follow the fate of the man he replaced. A counterattack was at once ordered. The Twenty–Second Army would march on Denver once again.

As expected, this was a disaster. Thankfully for the Soviets, it went so wrong so fast that it didn’t see the immediate destruction of the whole army come. Much of the 59th Guards was lost – what a short and ‘exciting’ time in the war they had had – and there was too a mass of casualties inflicted. The 37th Infantry had a bad time of it though emerged the victor. They had halted the Soviets in their tracks. The whole of the Colorado Springs area, around which the Soviets had been busy with major engineering tasks for wartime uses, was in range of heavy artillery units and on the edge of enemy air defences. The Seventeenth Air Force had been playing an active role since Castle Rock but now sent in even more aircraft. Target after target was hit with bombs and short-range missiles by aircraft which could dash in and out of Colorado Springs on the attack. They took some losses, though not on the scale they should have done had the Soviets had the ammunition to engage them properly. This couldn’t go on. The Soviets couldn’t stay here and take this for as long as the Americans wanted to do it. Options were becoming very limited though. While Colorado Springs was being fought over, the Canadians and British marched up through the valley of the Arkansas River and on Pueblo. There were three complete divisions with the I Canadian Corps and while not ‘heavy’, neither could they be considered ‘light’. Soviet light forces were sent up against them though: just an airmobile brigade who were rapidly chewed up. Should the Canadians get to Pueblo, which it looked very likely that they would, the rest of the Twenty–Second Army was cut off. Worse – if there could be anything worse – was what happened in New Mexico when the Americans put troops on the Rio Grande.

Moscow discussed reversing its orders on ‘no withdrawal’ without willing to admit they had erred in killing that general who had kept them an army to consider pulling back. The Defence Council met with several marshals and senior generals as they discussed the many options that they considered there were available. Only one option was presented to them, even from the worst of the boot-lickers who would usually try their best to give the politicians what the wanted. A withdrawal was all that could be done. With the greatest of haste, the Twenty–Second Army needed to retreat from Colorado and fall back into New Mexico. Part of the field army, along with what few Nicaraguan and Revolutionary Mexico troops there were at El Paso, needed to launch a two-prong assault towards Truth or Consequences at the same time. During the pull-out from Colorado, Soviet units would have to be sacrificed as rear-guard elements. The Defence Council had yet to take that final decision when the Mexico Massacre occurred… they were also heavily side-tracked by the ongoing battles in Oklahoma (the fight in North America which they saw the most important one) in addition to the Euro-Soviet War as well. Those events and the fallout from them distracted them. In the meantime, the 37th Infantry and the 174th Brigade attacked again outside Colorado Springs. Afraid to withdraw his men, the acting army commander did nothing while the rest of the 59th Guards was wiped out. Instructions from Moscow came afterwards and these included what role the 59th Guards were to fulfil: the return message that they were already destroyed didn’t please them. Not was Moscow impressed when they learnt that the Canadians had gotten their lead units to the very edges of Pueblo already. A second general would be shot, this man who’d followed his orders precisely without deviating from them at all. Talk about unfair…

As March came to an end, the Twenty–Second Army withdrew from Colorado. They made a run for it but did manage to get away with some semblance of order. A lot of what should have been done during the withdrawal didn’t happen though and so the Americans would overrun facilities which weren’t destroyed and capture war-stocks in many places. The 82nd Airborne Division, the defenders of Denver, arrived in helicopters at Petersen AFB, Fort Carson and the smoke-filled NORAD headquarters inside Cheyenne Mountain. They had their blaze of glory in taking such places and fighting the few men left behind with general ease. What the First Army failed to do was to surround and finish off a far smaller opponent when they should have. For the Soviets to pull out so fast was a surprise yet the Americans didn’t take enough advantage. The Canadians complained that they weren’t given enough support in taking Pueblo to cut off the Soviets but the First Army’s response was to ask what more they needed than a trio of divisions to do that: wasn’t their only opposition just a light brigade? It wasn't the fairest of criticisms. The Canadians hadn’t rammed home their numerical advantage because they hadn't been keen to take huge unnecessary losses in a foolish head-on assault when a careful approach would get a better – if slower – result overall. Yet, at the same time, there were specifics reasons than that why. During the last fighting around Pueblo, the Soviets had thrown in a regiment of their paratroopers armed with a lot of man-portable weapons, supported by a regiment of Sukhoi-25 attack-fighters as well: all at the crucial time to hold the Canadians back. Moreover, last month’s massive thermobaric air strike on the Canadians might not have killed thousands of them but they had taken hundreds of casualties still and had much of their supporting infrastructure blown apart. The effects were still being felt from that. The internal squabble went on while from above the First Army leadership came under fire from their own higher headquarters. Rockies Command had expected to eliminate the Soviets or if not completely destroy them, then shut the door behind them to do that next month. But the Soviets fled ahead of that.

The missed opportunity was significant and would have its affects. However, it wasn’t a disaster. The Americans had done immense damage to their opponents and what escaped wasn’t likely to be making any sort of return northwards. The Soviets were beaten. There remained that cut in their line of retreat much further south too, down in New Mexico. The troubles with the Canadians, which occurred where relations were excellent beforehand, were an unpleasant surprise though. The two allies had failed to cooperate correctly at the right moment – the 82nd Airborne could have been sent to Pueblo the Canadian commander believed – and this mattered. It would be something that needed urgent attention to correct for future operations. Those further operations would take place when the First Army followed the Soviets down into New Mexico.



March 1985: North Texas

When revealed many long years later, Operation Mechanic would be judged by historians to be quite the feat. The United States had managed to undertake a successful strategic intelligence deception to dupe the Soviet Army to a significant degree. They played Soviet beliefs back on themselves and let their opponents do the vast majority of the work for them too. Mechanic was really an exercise in Soviet self-deception when it came down to it. A lot of luck occurred with this. The plotters and schemers with NISS couldn’t have factored in just how much both the GRU and the KGB would fall for what was presented to them and then compete with each other not to disprove what was presented before them but instead try to outdo each other in proving it was true. In normal circumstances, the two organisations were at each other’s throats to do away with the other. One of them could have – maybe should have – shot down the whole thing to the detriment of their real enemy. They did no such thing though. Each of them promoted the certainty that Americans were due to launch a major offensive where and when all the information uncovered pointed to this occurring.

Mechanic was just a trick though, a big fat lie. The GRU and the KGB hadn’t uncovered preparations for an incoming American attack. Yet, with the belief that they had, the Soviets moved to act on that. It made perfect sense to do so. They ‘knew’ when the Americans would strike and therefore would strike first. Information gained, all of which was confirmed through several sources, all pointed to a fantastic opportunity. It wasn’t one which could be missed. To catch the Americans unprepared for an attack against them, when they were in the final stages of getting ready for their own, was what Mechanic led the Soviets to attempt. There was no consideration at all that they had been fooled and were about to fall for a trap of a magnitude that they couldn’t even imagine.


Before the Mechanic deception was fully played out, there had already been the intention of the Soviets to go over on the offensive in March regardless. This apparent intelligence success which they had only accelerated the timescale for the attack. Newly-arrived forces with the Seventh Tank Army were moved into position facing Oklahoma as they based themselves on the Texan side of the Red River. Part of the already in-place Twenty–Eighth Army was moved aside to join the rest of that field army to launch a supporting attack into north-eastern Texas. Supplies were rushed forward while fire support was assembled. All of this extraordinary activity was covered from observation as the Soviet made use of their usual camouflage, both physical and electronic. They took all measures to ensure that the surprise they were going to spring upon the Americans wouldn’t be spotted beforehand. It had all worked in the past and there was a certainty that it would do so again. Masses of tanks, guns and infantry were hidden away, all so that when they went into action, their appearance would come as a surprise to the Americans.

The whole offensive operation was planned out in great detail. The Soviets marshalled their forces for the opening attack, the follow-up breakthrough units and then those tasked for the exploitation role far beyond the initial battlefield. Objectives were set for advancing units to reach at set times. That time-scaling was done using structural ‘norms’: doctrine taught in Soviet military academies was followed in exact detail. Criticism of how the war had been previously fought had come and it was a reverting to the basics now. Beyond the attacking units, this was done with everything else too from the supporting artillery to engineers to signalling troops to supply units. Everything was plotted out perfectly. Officers who were considered reliable – that would mean whatever those who set that wanted to see – were put into the important positions and others were shunted aside. Excuses made for earlier failures on the battlefields of North America, where it was pointed out that lessons had been learnt from what had gone wrong before, were treated as just that: excuses. The war would be conducted the right way from now onwards when the Soviet Army returned to the offensive.

Ahead of that offensive, the Soviets shaped the battlefields which they would fight over. They sent out reconnaissance units. Some of these stayed silent while others were tasked to be noisy. American positions in defence yet also the readiness for their own offensive were all confirmed. There were attacks launched to deceive the Americans as to what the Soviets were up to, making it look – in Soviet eyes – as if they were only getting ready to defend themselves. Communications jamming was done on an on-off basis to test new systems of their own and to get a feel for some of the modernised equipment that the Americans were using. Bridges in the rear were looked at ready to be grabbed for Soviet use and cut American withdrawal routes. It was anticipated that the Americans would withdraw, would once again give ground like they had done before rather than stand and die, and so plans were made after information gained as to how to stop them doing that. That didn’t only include bridges over minor rivers through closer bits of Oklahoma and north-eastern Texas, but further downstream reaches of the Red River and then far beyond to the Canadian River in central Oklahoma. A couple of the noisy reconnaissance missions blew up smaller ones ahead of the attack to force the Americans to make greater use of others and thus keep them open with no intention of demolishing them: all ready to be taken by the Soviets. This was a major operation where the battlefield was expected to be huge in scale where it would stretch into Kansas and Arkansas within weeks of it getting going. American supply dumps far in the rear were observed with the intention to bomb some of them but seize others: a lot of American weaponry was anticipated to be taken and used against them. Soviet pre-attack strikes focused to hitting some of those where munitions which they couldn’t use, not those where there was usable weaponry.

Everything that could be done ahead of that offensive was. The Soviets would conduct this attack near alone and were assisted in only minor roles by forces of their allies. Successes on the battlefield like had been achieved in the China War, doing the same thing here as was done there, was certain to be achieved in this because it was being done right.


First light on March 3rd saw the Soviets march their armies forward as the offensive began.

The Americans were waiting for them in an ambush which the Soviets had no idea was there.

Chapter Twenty–Two – Capture & Collapse

March 1985: The Eastern Caribbean and the North Atlantic

Western Europe was too at war with the Soviet Union and those countries aligned with it. The EDA, eight countries of which seven were former NATO members, was fighting the same nations as the Allies – many of them once with NATO pre-war too – also were. There were talks underway for a formal, meaningful alliance between the two blocs but there were difficulties involved with that. This made the EDA and the Allies co-belligerents in legal terms. Physical separation meant that the politics aside, there was only some immediate cooperation in the war between the majority of the two blocs apart from on mainland Europe with the arrival of troops from several Allied countries to fight there alongside the EDA. However, between each bloc, there was the North Atlantic where the two were both fighting the Soviets. Early cooperation and joint efforts at sea fell back upon NATO understandings in many instances through there had been some quiet agreements made before the EDA entered the war where both Britain and Spain had (with American knowledge) discussed some things with France in the final stages of that country’s collision course with the Soviets.

In the eastern Caribbean, the French acted there generally alone though. Their defence attaché in New York was busy in helping to smooth over many issues before afterwards the military heads of France and the United States used their own people to establish better liaisons. An absence of any form of friendly fire was something that each wanted to achieve. French aircraft made attacks against Barbados and St. Lucia. They used Mirage-IIIs for fighter cover to protect several nights of bomb runs made by Mirage F-1s against Soviet military bases on those two islands. A strong French military commitment to the Caribbean had been made late last year when Cuba gobbled up all of those defenceless independent island nations and this included troops and naval vessels too. There was a need across in Europe for the military assets deployed here but over on this side of the ocean they were for now. Soviet Naval Aviation aircraft had already been attacked before when on land and faced increasing losses when flying out over the ocean all at Allied hands. Now, instead of as was the case earlier when the island’s air facilities were attacked from distant American bases, the French had the aircraft in-theatre to attack them from close-range. Repeated strikes were made. The French took losses but these weren’t crippling. What the Soviets lost in terms of aircraft were though. Naval air operations out over the North Atlantic came to a close. Orders came for there to be a dispersion of the remaining Backfires, Badgers, Bears and Blinders to save them. They moved to Grenada and St. Vincent away to the south as well as up to Antigua in the north. These kept them from being destroyed on the ground yet the dispersion meant that they would be ineffective in their role for some time due to all of the disruption to their ground support. Then Antigua was hit by the Americans not long after many of these aircraft arrived. F-111s flying from Puerto Rico hit Coolidge Airport in a heavy strike. French air cover hadn’t been provided yet at the same time, the French were active above St. Lucia were the Cubans had fighters and thus secured the flank for the US Air Force when it hit Antigua, leaving them only have to deal with what fewer Soviet fighters there were. Invasion fears spread through the eastern Caribbean in response. Cuba held all of those islands with few of their own troops. Local forces were present with their ‘gunpoint governments’ supplying them for security duty around all of the little people’s republics in the region. Apart from Grenada, none of those regimes were friends of Cuba. They were all forced collaborators: Allied propaganda did tell a different story yet that was the fact on the ground. With none of their own men available, the Soviets demanded that Cuba sent more men to the islands to protect them from a French invasion, maybe even a joint French-US amphibious assault, to take all of those harbours and airports which allowed the war in North America to go on. Cuba had the troops free – only reservists though – yet wavered over sending them. Meanwhile, the French began to make their own moves. They didn’t have enough forces in the region to launch a major assault but had the ships, aircraft and commando units to conduct raiding operations. St. Lucia was where they focused, the closest island to Martinique. The activity there was small yet effective. Local troops from the island did poorly in combat – only when the French targeted them and that was only by accident – before starting to desert. Moscow raged at Havana and the Castros bowed to the pressure. They sent extra troops to the island as well as a squadron of fighters. The numbers weren’t that large yet it only added to the massive overextension on the part of Cuba to this war. Meanwhile, the French kept up the pressure as they threatened capture of St. Lucia. American eyes were elsewhere in the region. Unable to strike at the current time yet with a significant introduction of forces to the region, they were getting ready to do so when they were finally ready. Cooperation agreements on that matter remained difficult though. Months of the Americans and the Allies fighting ‘alone’ weren’t going to be forgotten in an instant.

French and EDA naval activity was concentrated in both the Baltic Exits as well as the Mediterranean too. There was some EDA maritime activity through the North Atlantic though. Some French, Belgian and Dutch ships and submarines were active out in the open ocean. There were no major trans-Atlantic convoys to protect as would have been the case had this been a NATO-Soviet conflict yet the Allied nations on both sides of the North Atlantic were still sending ships each way. The Soviets had spent the war trying to interfere with that using aircraft and submarines. In addition, they themselves were trying to send ships across the ocean. Allied military activity through the past several months especially had put an end to the majority of that. Regardless, where possible, EDA military activity supported the Allies and that was done the other way too in acting against the common enemy. Information on ships, submarines and aircraft in Soviet service if located by either the Allies or the EDA was fast shared with the other. There were a few joint attacks made too. All of those years spent training together when in NATO might have been forgotten in political drama, yet officers and seamen with each new bloc worked together as if they were part of that former lone bloc. Each side saved the other’s bacon at times as well. Fuel and consumable supplies were exchanged when at sea and then in port too: Bermuda saw a Dutch frigate make a stop there and Spanish naval vessels transited through the French naval station at Brest. British-EDA naval cooperation closer to the mainland of Europe put all of that to shame though where they worked together extensively. Opposition to this came from many quarters in both blocs. Voices in the United States and Norway were the loudest against aspects of this cooperation yet there were some in Western Europe who were also extremely opposed to what was going on. Common sense wasn’t always followed in such criticism yet there remained many legitimate issues on this as well.

Elsewhere over the ocean, the Allied continued their ongoing air campaigns against both Iceland and the Azores. The US Navy focused upon that large island at the top of the North Atlantic. These were far larger than the French activity around Barbados and St. Lucia. The Soviets couldn’t get a track on the carriers involved and had what aircraft weren’t destroyed on the ground whittled down when trying to find them. A successful submarine attack hit several large escorts, but the USS Nimitz and the USS Saratoga eluded efforts to put holes in them. Losses on Iceland to naval aircraft and also the fighters there were many. Furthermore, the Soviets were temporarily unable to fly transport aircraft through Iceland. This was a major stop on the air route across to North America. The danger to defenceless air-freighters and airliners – carrying stores and men – going both ways was immense and so Iceland’s ability as a stopover and also as a safe travel lane was greatly limited. Lajes Field in the Azores was another part of that air-route. The RAF returned to bomb this airbase in March like they had done in February too. Their attacks were less significant yet nothing to be scoffed at. Soviet aircraft on the ground were targeted and the Tornados even managed to get a pair of air-to-air kills where the RAF shot down helpless transports using Sidewinders at close-range. The RAF wanted those Tornados over mainland Europe yet while flying from Portugal – using Madeira for divert purposes – they were influencing the overall war effort more in doing this. There remained Allied plan to retake the Azores and the Portuguese were eager to get on with it capturing their sovereign soil. Ongoing military activity over Western Europe put that on hold for the time being though. The Portuguese were displeased yet not fuming and acting out. They needed the British to do much of the heavy-lifting in getting their liberating troops into the Azores and to help collapse Soviet control with air & naval support and would have to wait. That was because, alongside both Ireland and Spain, Britain was fighting alongside the EDA on mainland Europe in one hell of an ongoing war taking place there.



Early March 1985: Europe

Strong condemnation in Ireland came when the comment was made that the ‘West Brits were off to fight for their English housemasters’. Irish opposition politicians and also non-parliamentary figures were criticised for their characterisation of Defence Force elements joining the British Army and heading off to war on Continental Europe in such terms. Those were the Republic’s soldiers, the response came, and patriotic Irishmen going off to fight to defend the threat to Europe and thus Ireland too. Those against the deployment were the same who had objected in the strongest of terms beforehand when the Defence Forces sent the same men to England last year for training. The argument put forth was that Ireland should send its men to the United States to fight there or, if not, then to Canada, Norway, Portugal or Spain: anywhere but mainland Britain. Now, the 6th Infantry Brigade was being sent off to war in West Germany while an integral part of the British deployment to the Continent. This reignited all that anger which stretched back to Ireland’s decision to join the war and then how tied the country, let alone its small military forces, was with Britain at the moment. The British were the enemy to such people; the Soviets were just some foreigners which their sell-out government was supporting the British in fighting for no good reason. The Irish soldiers who moved from Salisbury Plain first to Southampton and then across the Channel to Cherbourg were meant to be isolated from such things for the good of morale. That was impossible to do though. They knew what was being said at home by the loudest critics and knew too that there was much unsaid unease throughout their nation at not just what they had been doing but also the wider war. These men had a job to do though and a war to fight. All told, there were almost seven thousand of them attached directly to the 6th Brigade as well as independent supporting units. Ships from Ireland, Britain and France transported them across to Cherbourg and then they moved across the width of France and into West Germany. Ireland was sending its fighting men to war and, arguments at home aside about subservience to former/current colonial masters, it was a war which many people back home feared that they wouldn’t be coming home alive from.

Spanish troops moved into France too, aiming to link up with the British and the Irish going into West Germany. There had been other fights which Spain had sent its soldiers to take place in during this war. There remined some of them up in Norway and there had been those engagements both on Tenerife and at Ceuta. The majority of the Spanish Army had not seen action though. When the British had considered going to North America in-strength, so too had the Spanish. Madrid was keen to see the Soviets fought. Now that time had come. Their 1st Armoured & 3rd Infantry Divisions crossed through France via highways and rail-lines held open for their use while at the same time there was much air and sea movements too in support. As the Irish were, the Spanish were part of the British Second Army. This was a multi-corps command formed of six British divisions as well as many attachments. It entered the Continent through the Low Countries and France, avoiding entry ports direct into either West Germany and Denmark due to the ongoing situation in both latter countries. The deployment had been long-planned yet putting all that into practise was no easy feat. There was much help from the EDA in this though. These Allied troops would be fighting as a co-belligerent with the armies of Western Europe and were needed to assist them. There were logistical hiccups yet generally it went as planned. Thankfully, the movement of the large numbers of men, plus everything they brought with them to fight, was little-contested. There was a Soviet cruise missile attack on Calais during the deployment and also a submarine active off Ostend. Overall though, there was so much more that the Soviet could have done – were expected to have done too – to interfere. Defensive measures were in-place with the EDA and the Allies working together to cover this from Soviet action. However, the Soviets were busy elsewhere. They’d regret not interfering either on the Continental side of the deployment or elsewhere back in Britain. In recent months, since the they had gone into Sweden and combined with the losses inflicted elsewhere in the world with their many wars, the Soviet Union had been unable to strike against Britain with anywhere near as much fury as they had done previously. Their available strike forces were committed elsewhere. Many more British troops armed and in uniform were staying at home on internal security duties yet the last Soviet commando attack against Britain was on January 28th. Throughout the Low Countries and France, EDA security forces were everywhere and while they too fought than once the shooting war with the Soviets started at the end of February, there were very few attacks made against the rear areas here as well.


Scandinavia and Central Europe were where the fighting was taking place and where the Soviets were putting what available forces they had into. As March began, the war which started with EDA attacks against the Soviets had spread fast and continued to do so. Everyone in Western Europe was waiting for the Soviet Army to start pouring over the Inner-German Border either with or without an accompanying attack using weapons of mass destruction.

Up in the very southern reaches of Sweden, the Soviet lodgement there refused to be overcome. On land, in the air and in the nearby sea, Soviet and EDA forces continued to clash. The EDA wanted to eliminate that lodgement had had believed that they could with haste yet the Soviets held on. They were dug-in and wouldn’t be budged. French and Swedish troops continued their attacks though the West Germans weren’t involved in that. They had good troops there, elite Fallschirmjager and Gebirgsjager (paratroopers and mountain infantry), yet orders from Bonn kept them on defensive duties around the supply lines. That wouldn’t last forever though. The Danes had realised by now that the silence from their island of Bornholm – located out in the middle of the Baltic – wasn’t a communications issue but the Soviets had taken it and ended all resistance. Elsewhere across their country, they and the Italians (light troops of brigade-strength) engaged Soviet raiders through larger islands of the country who came in by air and sea. The main fighting wasn’t on land though but with engagements in the sky and on the water. Denmark was strongly attacked and the government feared that the Soviets would once again use nuclear weapons like they had previously done. An invasion was prepared for yet considered unlikely given the available forces that the Soviets had to hand. There were French troops in Demark, sent here beforehand. However, at the beginning of the month yet they moved down into Schleswig-Holstein, across into West Germany soon enough and towards the East German frontier. That was where any invasion of Denmark was going to come from and they joined more Danish soldiers there as well.

As most of West Germany was, Schleswig-Holstein was a battlefield of war. Soviet tanks had yet to begin pouring westwards yet throughout the country, there were armed military engagements taking place. The first few Soviet air strikes following the EDA attack elsewhere only led to counterstrikes against both East Germany and Czechoslovakia were they came from and then counter-counterstrikes. Bombs and missiles hit West Germany. Along the Iron Curtain there were clashes between light units were patrols ran into infiltration attempts; cross-frontier shelling and then counter-shelling was ongoing as well. Deeper inside the country, away from the direct military actions, Soviet attempts to cause chaos were ongoing. There had been murders and kidnappings of public figures as well as bombings and shooting incidents. The West Germans were meant to be prepared for this. They were still caught by the intensity of it and some remarkable failures occurred. The French believed that previous efforts to detain traitors and expel Soviet nationals before the war hadn’t been as effective as Bonn had claimed due to the influence that the KGB and the Stasi had over certain sections of the country’s security forces. The Inner-German Border was still more important than everything else though. It was behind there that the EDA lined-up its forces ready to oppose an invasion. Belgium and the Netherlands had deployed their armies into the country, following behind the last of the French. Where there was that low-level ground combat, the massed EDA armies stood back from this and let specialist forces take part in that. In the skies above, aircraft from the Low Countries – deployed ahead of their troops – joined with those of France in making those air attacks going eastwards. Bonn was refusing to allow the Luftwaffe to fly offensive missions, only defensive ones. Arguments back and forth between the West Germans and their EDA partners were ongoing on this matter. They would be resolved soon enough though.

Down in Austria, the country struggled immensely to maintain its neutrality and stay out of the Euro-Soviet War. This wasn’t something that was going to be decided in Vienna though. Soviet intelligence operations watched the activities of the EDA – France and Italy were doing this – as the two of them sought to, in the eyes of the KGB, ‘capture’ Austria and add it to their military bloc. There were EDA troops on Austria’s borders and their intelligence operatives inside the country. Austria’s military was mobilised but from the east and the west, there were other armies poised to move in to fight on their soil too. A similar situation in the eyes of the Soviet Union was going on with Yugoslavia as well. A war which the country was playing no active role in was soon to bring the country to its knees and maybe even cause its collapse. Yugoslavia’s international trade was at a standstill and there was no more money from the West. The Soviets watched as the Italians sent a diplomatic team to Belgrade to talk with the Yugoslavian Government. A bomb went off before that meeting could take place, killing the majority of the senior Italian diplomats. Yugoslavia reacted angrily to this violation of its sovereignty. Relations with the Soviets had gone sour since the wider war had started and there had come all that use of Yugoslavia as a proxy for Soviet disguised shipping. Some elements of the Yugoslavian regime had enriched themselves; others hadn’t and had had no idea what was happening until Allied naval activity put a stop to the majority of this. When the money stopped coming from Western Europe to keep the economy afloat, job losses were made and prices for basic necessities were raised. Like Austria, Yugoslavia wanted no part of the war between the Soviets and the EDA like it had stayed out of the conflict between the Soviets and the Allies too. They were soon to be in this whether they wanted to or not.

During the last two days of February and the first six days of March, this quasi-war went on… until it became a real war.


Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary all mobilised their armed forces fully in response to the beginning of the Euro-Soviet War. This was a process held back through all the many months that they had been engaged in warfare against the Allies due to the economic and domestic problems which would come by doing so. Now things were different though. Hungary was the only one of the four which hadn’t sent troops abroad to North America nor had any outside of their borders; the other three already had sent regular forces to the Western Hemisphere (lone divisions or divisional-sized equivalents) and there were too Czechoslovak and East German forces both on the ground in Poland (each with two more pre-war divisions). Such military commitments – which came with combat aircraft and also many elite units for those foreign deployments when it come to ground forces – meant that reserves returned to uniform with full mobilisation was needed. The Bulgarians and Hungarians managed well with their mobilisations; the Czechoslovaks and East Germans had difficulties. Those involved men not turning up and also protests made. With the Soviets more than a little interested in these events, Prague and East Berlin cracked down hard themselves. The two regimes had those troops in Poland due to the last time a Warsaw Pact member had seen ‘troubles’ and had no wish for their allies in Moscow to take the decision to do the same to them. In normal circumstances such a fear might have been irrational when the protests were as small as they were yet these weren’t normal times at all. The strong responses were only met with a strong reaction. Protests weren’t nipped in the bud. The regimes of Husak and Honecker hadn’t expected that. They knew that propaganda broadcasts from Western Europe for many long months had been heard across the nation and they had believed that those wouldn’t set off opposition. That was partially true: such things where news from outside which contradicted the official government line wouldn’t have set off what occurred. It was a wider issue though. The hardships of war with restrictions on the supply of basic goods had built up anger. Now that the war really had come home, that combined with everything else to bring these about. Neither country was on the verge of revolt or collapse yet the situation wasn’t good at all.

This all occurred while the Soviet Army reinforced their forward-deployed forces in the Warsaw Pact countries. On paper, they doubled their strength by the scale of the deployment. Field armies and air armies moved forward, some of them those withdrawn back during the Kennedy-Andropov agreements on force reductions. The then American president’s critics had said that the Soviets would do this with ease and that the American pull-out he started couldn’t easily be reversed. Those had been prophetic warnings indeed. Streaming across Poland and into the three other Warsaw Pact nations at the top end of Eastern Europe came convoys of Soviet forces. Freight trains and trucks rolled westwards, all to link-up with those already based in forward roles. The Soviets moved their troops into attack positions, not defensive ones. However, many of the reinforcing units were significantly understrength. The Soviets had had their own mobilisation issues. These hadn’t been protests but absenteeism where the call to uniform hadn’t been answered. Earlier mobilisations had seen only small numbers of missing soldiers. With those who refused to turn out, they suffered from reprisals. The numbers this time were far greater. The Soviet state had the ability to still arrest and punish all of those who effectively deserted their army and betrayed their country by not showing up when they were meant to, yet in Moscow there wasn’t the will to do so.

It was one of many ongoing problems that the Soviet regime had and one not currently being addressed when it really should have been.


Across the Soviet Government, there was utter determination to finish this war that France and the EDA had started with them. The country had been attacked without warning on the orders of Mitterrand. This was a real first strike too, not one made up as had been the case with how the war was supposed to have started with the Allies. The Defence Council, the Politburo, the intelligence services and the military were all keen on hitting back and emerging victorious. Of that there was no dissent. It was the how that was the problem on that though, one which was causing delays in Moscow when it came to getting on with it all, as well as why this had all happened.

Vorotnikov and the Defence Council were the ones who were making all of the important decisions when it came to the many wars which the nation was fighting. Nonetheless, that didn’t mean that the other organs of the state were powerless and would just rubber-stamp this. The Politburo were the ones who gave authorisation to all that the Defence Council did while below them everyone else carried out instructions. The layers of government went sideways as well as downwards. There were all sorts of complicated alliances between different parts of the government. Personalities mattered and relationships changed. Historical difficulties between separate organisations were important too. It was all a maze when looked at from outside, yet also increasingly from within especially since last October when Vorotnikov had replaced the deceased Ustinov. Vorotnikov had enemies since the moment he was appointed leader. He was an outsider, brought in fast to take over. There were those who were passed over and others who didn’t get what they wanted from him once he was in power. The Politburo was headed by him but he was spending little time with his comrades. The war was important, no one would disagree with that, yet so too was everything else that was going on. He made more enemies. The orders for all those deaths to occur among military personnel and then spooks too for dubious war-related issues upset those also within each. Complaints were made to the Politburo on this. They had signed-off on that but they hadn’t understood how widespread this would be. None liked what they discovered.

The Politburo was even more displeased when they discovered why exactly the country was at war with Western Europe. In the words of one of them, they were fighting a continent which the plan had been to capture via diplomatic means instead of have to conquer in war all because of ‘a bastard child of an amorous Frenchman!’ Far worse things that that one particular kidnapping had been approved by the Politburo – other children had been taken for political purposes; babies murdered in bombings and nuclear attacks – but this was something different. They hadn’t been told about this. Some of them actually understood Mitterrand’s motivation now where their thought train ran that he had the EDA fight this war over that child. Where was the missing girl? The KGB chief told them the grim news on that matter. She was dead after accidentally dying during her kidnap and the body buried secretly & securely to avoid her being discovered. This maddened members of the nation’s ruling committee. They saw it all as an avoidable chain of events and – catching on fast to the mood – the KGB chief blamed Vorotnikov himself for this all: it was actually his fault but he wasn’t about to admit that, was he? The thinking on the part of the Politburo remained that their war with the United States and the Allies was still a legitimate one. The China War was now being seen as a major mistake and all the fault of Ustinov. Now Vorotnikov had given them this foolish war with Western Europe.

Gromyko emerged to lead what was beginning to be an opposition to Vorotnikov. Nothing to act openly against him was yet being spoken of and the opposition wasn’t plotting and scheming. That was only yet it must be said. There was for now just an alignment of thinking. It was the foreign minister who was moving things along now though when it came to how the Politburo coerced Vorotnikov and the Defence Council to act when it came to the Euro-Soviet War. They voted on this and the Defence Council followed. It wouldn’t be stopped but it would be a limited conflict in terms of goals and conduct. Nuclear weapons wouldn’t be used. West Germany was full of French nuclear weapons pointed eastwards, the French had several strategic missile submarines at sea and the KGB was saying that the Italians either was already or nearly on its way to having a viable (but very small) nuclear weapons capability. Chemical weapons were on the table though: where they had failed to work in North America, it was decided that they would be effective in Western Europe. This brought up the issue of troops from the Allies soon to be fought alongside EDA forces and – in a compromise which was nothing but an utter shambles when it came down to it – the Soviets decided to not use them against Allied troops no matter what yet attack the Western Europeans with them. The war would be fought on foreign territory in West Germany, Austria and Yugoslavia with the latter two countries used as a springboard to attack Italy and their armies forces to stand aside by direct threats made to their governments to fight them too otherwise.

That ‘real’ war, when the troops and tanks went forward, would begin at first light on March 7th. Everything was supposed to go to plan with this and the Euro-Soviet War would be won by a limited conflict too. Soviet forces were only going so far west, not all the way. They would defeat the EDA, and any Allied forces engaged too, close to the Iron Curtain and therefore a diplomatic solution was supposed to fast come. No one in power within the Soviet (fracturing) leadership considered the fact that they were making the same mistakes made in North America and China all over again.



Mid-March 1985: West Germany

To win a war in Western Europe, the Soviets would have had to throw everything at the fight and not fight a limited conflict. Furthermore, the best time to have done so would have been if not last year then before the EDA was fully able to get its defensive forces into place this Spring. It wasn’t a case of them finding themselves in a less ideal situation by attacking how and when they did. Instead, it was only going to bring them failure. That attack in West Germany opened with a wide-ranging use of chemical weapons, a good old-fashioned artillery barrage and targeted air strikes. Then came a full-on combined arms assault by Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies. They hit EDA military forces in the field who were supposed to be ready for what came their way.

The first ten days of the Euro-Soviet War in West Germany was all about how far Soviet-led forces could go. They reached their high-water mark at the end of that. Afterwards, the conflict would take on a far different character.


In the northern reaches of the country, the Soviets aimed to overrun West Germany from the Kiel Canal, through Hamburg and across to Bremen. Their tanks were to get their treads wet by reaching the North Sea. In their way stood Danish, Dutch, French and West Germany forces. East Germans and Soviets fought against an opponent which outnumbered them only slightly yet the belief was that the Second Guards Tank Army had the advantage with firepower and a much stronger armoured component. Conquering territory was secondary to overcoming and crushing those EDA forces, whose manpower numbers were higher by those in fixed defensive positions. Very quickly the wheels came off the Soviet assault. They faced an uncooperative enemy who didn’t respond in the manner which was anticipated. The gassing of so many of them didn’t have the desired effective either: the Danes and the Dutch took high losses yet the French and West Germans didn’t. Cutting down the numbers of opponents had to be done using bullets and shells rather than at range with gas.

Initially, going northwards across the Inner-German Border into Holstein, the East Germans there were stuck but the Soviets pushed in their second echelon to support them. The West Germans and the Danes refused to be split apart into two as desired and withdrew. They fell backwards exposing Lubeck to the east and Hamburg to the west but stuck together. Invading forces chased after them rather than pushing into either city: both defended by lighter forces dug-in and not fighting a mobile battle. As anticipated, the French pushed their 6th Light Armored Division into the fight. They came against the East Germans on the flank just as the Danes attempted a counterattack. Soviet reconnaissance units were meant to be watching to give warning. It was very, very late when they did: the French had lanced forward at high speed and under air cover which shot down many Soviet reconnaissance aircraft. The East Germans held their ground while the Soviets detached part of their own divisional force which was engaging the West Germans to not directly assist that fight but instead slip into a gap behind the French. The French were lucky to not get cut off by this and held the Soviets off long enough to properly engage them. The Soviets had failed to do all that they wanted yet denied the French the ability to fully beat those East Germans. They held and the Danes were ordered to make another withdrawal to see another fight on new ground. The East Germans followed after them, reconnecting with the Soviets beside them. The further forward that the invaders now went, far past the highway linking Hamburg to Lubeck, the more open ground that there was. This was the base of the Jutland Peninsula and it widened further back from the Inner-German Border. The countryside had fewer towns dotted around too. It was perfect tank country all the way to the Kiel Canal far behind. That was somewhere that the invaders found impossible to get to. They couldn’t beat their opponents and therefore the right-wing of the Second Guards Army was unable to fulfil its objectives. Both the East German 8th Motorised Rifle and the Soviet 94th Guards Motorised Rifle Divisions failed to break their opponents in any serious form. The cities on either side, and Kiel far off, were left alone as there was no desire to get into grinding fights for each while the EDA maintained mobile forces outside of them. Through the many days and nights, fighting occurred over and over again through Holstein. Huge amounts of destruction occurred and many deaths were recorded, especially among civilians. Battles near Neumunster on March 10th and outside of Itzehoe on the 13th – each for control of transport links around them – recorded no winners. For the beaten-up but still standing EDA units, this was an overall victory though. They had denied the Soviets their objectives. Waiting was done for the Soviets to throw in a third wave, a tank division or two, to try to finish them off and in response the plan was to fall back to the Kiel Canal but no such enemy reinforcement came… there weren’t those forces back in East Germany. The Danish II Corps (a third of the men being Danes) emerged from that first week and a half able to keep on fighting.

The rest of the Second Guards Tank Army – with four divisions plus attachments – went across the Luneburg Heath. The Dutch were their opponents though there was significant West German support for the Netherlands I Corps. Gas attacks hurt the Dutch greatly. Their protective equipment couldn’t stop deaths as well as terrible injuries coming from some of the ‘exotic’ chemical weapons employed against them. Then the Soviets and East Germans marched across the Elbe and through the open plain going for the North Sea coast, Bremen and the lower reaches of the Weser River. The Dutch fell backwards, fighting a defensive battle and aiming to bring the invaders to a halt soon enough. Soviet air power was a significant factor in stopping the Dutch from being able to do this as planned, especially the closer they were to the Inner-German Border in the first few days of the war. Dutch and West German aircraft were supported by some RAF fighters flying from further back but local control of the air remained in Soviet hands. They made use of that in excellent cooperation between ground and air units. The Dutch were forced to give up more ground earlier than planned to survive being crushed. The Soviet motor rifle division on the southern side of the attack was a first-rate unit but they were lucky to be facing an East German reserve division to the north. If they hadn’t, the Dutch I Corps would have been fully overcome. First an independent tank regiment and then two full Soviet tank divisions were eventually unleashed with their second wave. Those came forward with hundreds of tanks shooting up everyone in their sight… including what the Dutch were certain were incidents of friendly-fire against East German units where there were cases of mistaken identity rather than any intentional acts. That immense force coming at them forced the Dutch to withdraw to the western edges of Luneburg Heath. Because the pressure on them had been weaker when fighting East German reservists, they held more ground to the north and conducted a fighting retreated in a north-western direction. That was impossible to do forever. Whilst doing so, they covered Autobahn-1 which linked Bremen with Hamburg yet there was little military value in that road soon enough for them, the EDA as a whole nor West German civilians on the move where they fled in their many thousands along that highway. Soviet air attacks blocked that highway. The Dutch were unable to do anything to assist with the resulting casualties from that, but, of more-importance, was that they’d end up on the shores of the North Sea if they kept going backwards. The Dutch Government back home was rather alarmed. The EDA wasn’t NATO despite all talk of Western European unity. They didn’t want to see their army cut off and pinned against the sea far from home leaving the way free for the Soviets to move against the Netherlands at their leisure. Command for the Dutch I Corps was with the West German Northern Army (a replacement for NATO’s Northern Army Group) and they were the ones issuing the orders. For the Dutch to run and try and slip back westwards and out of the fight they were in would doom everyone else and permission was denied before it officially was asked. Into all of this came the Soviet 145th Independent Tank Regiment. It broke the worn-down Dutch 1st Mechanised Division eight days into the fight and tore open a gap through the scattered remains. The two tank divisions behind rolled onwards. If the Dutch had wanted to cut and run home, that was only an if, it wasn’t happening now. That regiment and what was left of the East Germans screened the movement of the rampaging tanks as they concentrated together to push through what was later called the Geest Gap: passable terrain between the Weser and Wumme Rivers, where there were road and rail links directly towards Bremen. The furthest Dutch forces were at Rottenburg; the West Germans held onto Verden. Between them the way was clear for the Soviets. Victory was in their grasp should they get through and then turn on the trapped Dutch behind them, wiping out their remaining 4th Mechanised and 5th Armoured Divisions caught behind. Soviet aircraft were everywhere and the tanks raced forward below them. They then slammed into the British Army before the Geest Gap could be exploited and the breakout beyond could occur. British screening units met them first, then heavier units behind. The way ahead was firmly shut.


North-central parts of West Germany were where the Soviets sent two more field armies forward into. The Twentieth Guards and Third Shock Armies – nine Soviet divisions plus three from East Germany (two of those reserve formations) – attacked side by side from the southern parts of the Luneburg Heath all the way down to the Gottingen-Kassel area. The Weser River was as far as they were supposed to go. Through the eastern side of that waterway, there were EDA forces in the form of the Belgians, the French and West Germans. All were to be crushed and not allowed to get over that river in retreat to fight again. Soviet war plans had long intended to use parachute and airmobile units aplenty in a fight here where they would have fought the Americans and the British instead of the French. There were no Soviet Airborne forces available though and the Soviet Army only had a lone brigade of airmobile troops plus two separate battalions of further helicopter-deployable assault troops as well. All those rear-area attacks to hold certain points for either exploitation or to distract what would then have been NATO units were no longer possible. What little the two armies were left with, they had to use wisely and in a limited fashion. Once the offensive came to a stop, it was understood just how missed those units – fighting in Sweden or dead in North America – had been. Air power was also something they were short on too: once again, what was left behind after other worldwide deployments was a shadow of the past massed strength.

The West Germans fought the Twentieth Guards Army. They were outnumbered though not to a significant degree. There was an East German reserve division meant to be assigned to support the Soviets yet it remained on the other side of the frontier throughout. The West Germans believed that those men were kept back due to Soviets fears that they would do terrible in a fight with West German forces and maybe even defect en masse. The Soviets had thought just the same in light of recent troubles across East Germany yet also the poor turn out of men. Regardless, the Twentieth Guards Army’s Soviet-only forces were more than enough for the West Germans. Those men poured over the border on the back of the opening horror of their gas attack and struck forward. The defensive line struck down the western side of the Elbe-Lateral Canal was somewhere the West Germans didn’t expect to hold for long but it fell very fast indeed. The Soviets used an airmobile battalion along part of it and those men, supported by specialist engineers, overcome demolition measures to turn the ground nearby into an impassable swamp. The Soviets pushed onwards. They engaged West German screening efforts and sought battle with them. It had been believed by the EDA that taking West German cities for hostage purposes would be a Soviet goal and so the West German I Corps’ commander was aiming to blunt an attack to take Wolfsburg first and the Hannover afterwards. It was his combat forces that the Soviets sought to take on though. None of the three motor rifle divisions with the Twentieth Guards Army (a command which had spent several years out of East Germany now) were first-rate formations but they did well in establishing contact with the West Germans despite those screening efforts to bring the heavy forces into the fight. It was a fight that the Soviets wanted and it was one that they got. The West Germans won a series of tactical engagements across a wide area for several days on the trot. The 26th Guards Motorised Rifle Division was left broken and the other pair (the 3rd Guards and 50th Guards) were on course to suffer the same fate. However, on came the second echelon Soviet forces. They pushed their two tank divisions forward – pushing onwards through waves of Luftwaffe aircraft striking at low-level on anti-tank missions despite all of the anti-air defences fired upon them – and out onto the Luneburg Heath. The West Germans fell back, shaking off combat with the motor rifle troops and going as far as the Aller River to run a defensive line where reservists from West Germany’s Landwehr had an impressive defensive position arrayed down that river. Through gaps held open, the West Germans rolled backwards and to the other side with three-quarters of their corps but left the rest, the 7th Panzer Division, free to fall back northwards to keep contact with where the Dutch were. The Soviets unleashed hell down the course of the Aller. Gas was used again along with thermobarics and napalm. Huge casualties came among the Landwehr men dug in and in the face of that. The Soviet’s 50th Guards then moved forward on the back of that attack towards Celle but the tank divisions didn’t follow them. Instead they moved west instead of directly southwest. At Engehausen and Winsen, past Celle, one tank division crossed the river to get at the rear areas of the West Germans. The other tank division chased after the 7th Panzer as they carried on seeking that fight. The 20th Tank Division got that tank-on-tank fight. The two of them duked it out for several days without a clear winner yet it was a West German victory overall because they had failed to be beaten. As to the Aller River, the 90th Guards Tank Division got in the West German rear among supporting forces and caused chaos between there and Hannover. There were three more West German divisions though. Three-to-one were not good odds at all, especially when the Soviet plan had been for at least two of them to be busy around Celle fighting the 50th Guards. Caught on the wrong side of the river and trapped, the Soviets fought onwards until they ran out of fuel and ammunition. No escape could be made and their surrender occurred on March 14th. Before then, two of those West German divisions then did as the Soviets expected all along, but only later, and went to Celle and then back over the Aller to engage the Soviets troops who had failed to get across despite all that they had done to the defenders. The Twentieth Guards Army fell backwards. It remained deep inside West Germany yet severely short of geographic and operational objectives. Further offensive capability in any major sense was now gone. The West Germans were looking to push them right back to where they came too.

The French and Belgians faced the Third Shock Army. Pre-war EDA intelligence believed, as NATO intelligence summaries always had, that in wartime this field army would act as a tank-heavy exploitation force – a tank army in effect – to go all the way to the Rhine once combined arms armies had done the main fighting. When it went into West Germany in March 1985, it consisted of three tank divisions and three motor rifle divisions (two of them being East German: one regular, one reserve) and fought in a combined arms role instead of as an exploitation force. The Belgians were in their NATO-assigned area whereas the French III Corps fought where the British would have been under former NATO command. The two sides were relatively-evenly matched in strength despite Soviet beliefs that they had the upper hand going into the fight. Attacking the Belgians, in difficult ground to the south where the Harz Mountains were, was a sideshow for the Soviets: they focused in the main on the French and believed that gas attacks on the Belgians would also keep them out of the fight to be addressed later. That was a mistake. Holding off East German reservists, half of the Belgians fought with the French against the main Third Shock Army advance over the border. The famous Helmstedt crossing and then the Elm Hills were early fights at the beginning of the invasion before the Soviets really got going. They made two big attacks on the ground with one motor rifle division apiece and used that airmobile brigade to seize a bridgehead around Wolfenbüttel right in the middle of the French III Corps rear areas to distract them. The French fought very far forward, further eastwards than the British would have fought in a NATO conflict, and just where the Soviets wanted them to. This cost the French dear and they came rather closing to suffering defeat. Only EDA air attacks over into East Germany – now the Luftwaffe was sending aircraft that way – saved the day when they slowed down the oncoming follow-up tank divisions. Realising just in time what was coming, the French pulled back. No one likes giving up ground which they had fought over and seen their fellow soldiers die to hold, yet the mass of Soviet armour (delays aside) was coming forward. Moreover, that Soviet airhead at Wolfenbüttel became an issue several days after landing. The West Germans with heavy Landwehr units had had them in-hand at first but the rest of the 37th Landing-assault Brigade was lifted in when EDA air power was shifted away from the area. Quickly, these men were on the move using their light armoured vehicles and linked up with the forwardmost ground penetrations. Now was the time, right now, for the French to pull back into new positions. Braunschweig and Wolfsburg were left for other West German reservists to defend in static fights while the French concentrated on dealing with Soviet and what they discovered were East German tanks. Each had a division of them – meaning another Soviet one was missing – showed up and went head-on into battle. The French divisions which they had here were small in peacetime yet full now in wartime of reserve units which included some light armour but mostly a lot of infantry armed with many anti-tank weapons. Without these, the Soviets would have run rings around and pounded the French into complete defeat. Extra men couldn’t save the 8th Infantry Division from being overcome though. A communications mix-up saw its links with the 109th Reserve Infantry Brigade (an independent force meant to cover gaps) opened up and the East Germans getting their 9th Tank Division through that opening. The 8th Infantry was crushed and obliterated by East German regulars doing very well indeed. The Belgians brought up their 16th Armoured Division to join in and nearly saved that French division which got caught and destroyed yet ‘nearly’ wasn’t enough. The Belgians were then in the way of that missing Soviet tank force. If they hadn’t have been there, the French could have faced the possibly of yet another defeat due to the Soviets getting forward fast and undetected. Caught east of the Leine River south of Hannover, the Belgians withdrew rapidly when the 7th Guards Tank Division lanced forward. This only opened up yet another gap, now between the rest of the Belgians to the south and the 16th Armoured which had come north. That gap was plugged by the entry of the Northern Army’s immediate reserve in the form of West German Fallschirmjager who weren’t going to be overcome in anything but a full attack considering the high ground west of the Leine which they arrived at and dug-into with haste. Inserting them here was necessary but still a waste of offensive capability. Meanwhile, the Third Shock Army ignored that (there were no assigned light units on-hand to engage them) and focused upon completing what they had come to do: trapping the French. If they stood, they were finished. If they withdrew, they would be caught and run down. Such was the intention yet that relied on the Soviet tanks looping around behind keeping up their advance. The Belgians fought them and had a torrid time in doing so. They did what they had to though, bringing the Soviets to a stop and allowing for incoming EDA aircraft and armed helicopters to attack them from above and giving the Belgians breathing room to reorganise. French artillery firing nerve gas shells were remarkably helpful in doing this, smashing those shells into Soviet rear areas away from the frontlines and having success there including hitting the divisional HQ. Nonetheless, despite their victory, half of their division was left combat ineffective and thousands of Belgian families would in the following weeks be left grieving when losses were revealed but for now they had saved the French III Corps from complete destruction. Without them, no matter what the French believed it their overall victory all being down to them when finally stropping the other two tank divisions, it was those Belgians who had saved their bacon in the end with their sacrifice.



Mid-March 1985: West Germany

Through Hessen in central West Germany, there were more French troops in forward positions. They were where the US Army Europe once was deployed to defend the Fulda Gap. North of them were West Germans also lined up facing eastwards and towards Thüringen. The Soviets had their Eighth Guards Army over there, reinforced from its peacetime rather strong strength now with East German reinforcements. The EDA troops were assigned to keep the Soviets and East Germans back from either making a rush for the distant Rhine across between Cologne and Bonn (a real West German concern) or going southwest towards the wider Frankfurt area, also next to the Rhine but closer. The EDA believed that the invaders could only do one of the two. They weren’t mistaken in this. There weren’t enough men available to both so the Soviets made the decision to only undertake one achievable goal rather than make two failures. They had their men march on Frankfurt going via the Fulda Gap. Fighting together, the French and West Germans aimed to stop them from reaching there. Doing that was just what the Soviets wanted them to do: beating the massed forces of both in battle was far more important than any city itself. The fighting in Hessen would be the decisive fight of the invasion, one which would draw in all available EDA and Soviet & Warsaw Pact reserves too.

The Eighth Guards Army attacked across northern Hessen with a trio of full-strength motor rifle divisions out front. Each sought to open gaps with the ‘winners’ getting support and the ‘losers’ being left to their own devices afterwards. Once across the Inner-German Border, they went for the Fulda River. The terrain here was reasonably good for an advance with heavy forces – better than anywhere else nearby – though not perfect. The Eighth Guards Army had long studied their forward route whereas the French hadn’t been here that long. Both West Germans on the right and French on the left engaged the three forward penetrations and when they reached the Fulda, the French unleashed chemical attacks in response to the earlier ones made when back near the East German frontier. Many bridging engineering units were caught by these with heavy losses yet not enough of them were killed or injured to cause any major delay. France didn’t have unlimited stocks of such weapons and the belief had been that this was the perfect moment to use them. It wasn’t enough. The 27th Guards Motorised Rifle Division fought the first of the West Germans and couldn’t get through them: they turned out to be those ‘losers’. Beside them, and then further southwards, both the 57th & 39th Guards each had more luck with the former getting between the West Germans and the French and the latter pushing the French back where they met them. That gap in the middle which the 57th Guards opened became the main attack. East German tanks followed first and turned northwards to get behind their fellow West Germans. Elsewhere, Soviet fears over Germans fighting Germans had seen this avoided where possible but here it was done. These were regulars, not reservists after all and thought the most reliable. They started their fight well and began getting deeper behind them while supported by Soviet forces. The other opened gap, forced by the 39th Guards, was then followed by a Soviet tank division which smashed into French units on the counterattack. The 3rd & 5th Armored Division conducted a perfect assault to break-up the penetration of Fulda Gap when moving forward yet couldn’t quite finish what they started. Much of the 39th Guards, plus independent screen units of riflemen and anti-tank units, held them off to allow for the tank division to escape the incoming storm. It then broke free and set off for the dash forward. Through the Fliede Valley they went first, when under extremely heavy air attack, before they reached the entrance to the Kinzig Valley. This was the way to Frankfurt with the heights of the Vogelsberg on their right and the Spessart on the left. Parachute insertions in the hills either side had been made of Spetsnaz units to engage what defences were below on the flanks but meanwhile the 79th Guards Tank Division pushed forward. The Eighth Guards Army knew that at this moment the EDA would have to throw in its emergency reserves.

This was perfectly correct. A West German panzer division (the 12th) raced around the Vogelsberg counter-clockwise to meet the Soviets at the bottom end while from each side French light Foreign Legion troops and West German Fallschirmjager converged inwards. Luftwaffe Alpha-Jets and Tornados streamed in alongside French aircraft, battling their way through Soviet air defences on the ground and a strong showing of their fighters above too. They were trying to stop the Soviets in the valley or, if not, then weaken them significantly for when they reached the flat plains around the Main River before Frankfurt. Once the EDA had made their commitment of their reserves here, the Soviets unleashed their own. Hidden behind the Eighth Guards Army back in East Germany was the Thirteenth Guards Army Corps: a mixture of several Soviet and East German units kept back ready for this. There was the 2nd Guards Motorised Rifle Division – the famous Taman Guards – along with the Soviet motor rifle brigade from East Berlin (with a big tank complement) and a pair of East German tank regiments released from their parent motor rifle divisions over in Poland. Between Bad Hersfeld and Hunfeld, the Thirteenth Corps tore forward. They went around the Vogelsberg following those West German panzers which had gone ahead of them and waited for the EDA response. This came pretty quick. The West German III Corps pushed forward hard against the Soviets and East Germans who were attacking them in a major counterattack. The East German 7th Tank Division fared better than the Soviet’s 57th Guards – everyone thought it would have been the other way around – yet still had to fall back too in the face of what came at them as they sought defensive ground to soak up the West Germans. The Eighth Guards Army held their flank position here despite this strong effort. All that the EDA had left was a partial division of Italians; one attached brigade had been dispatched the other month to Denmark. They were put in the way of the Soviet breakthrough and ended up facing the Taman Guards. The Italians put up a strong resistance but it was never going to be enough. They were crushed in a terribly destructive and deadly fight. They held out for longer than everyone else thought they would though and this gave their opponents the time to have one brigade of the 12th Panzer turn back around. The West Germans had hoped to get to the Italians in time. That didn’t occur but upon their arrival then went at once into the attack and ripped into the Taman Guards in the midst of their recovery from their fight with the Italians. Those other Thirteenth Corps units, the independent brigade and the tank regiments, were free of this fight though and still racing southwards. French Foreign Legion troops – an organisation strongly reinforced during the period of tension leading up to the war and a whole division being formed – tried to ease themselves out of their ongoing fight to get in the way but there were a lot of tanks, too many of them to do any damage to from the flanks when dropped off by helicopter runs. Only a lone brigade of West German Landwehr was available. This was of their tank heavy units which consisted of up-gunned M-48s. Forced to split up to face three attacking units attacking on separate axis’, the West Germans couldn’t stop all of them. They held both the two East German tank regiments – each with old T-55s – but not the Soviet brigade with its T-64 heavy tanks and all of those infantry carriers full of battle-hardened troops. The 6th Guards Motorised Rifle Brigade reached the Main at Hanau on March 13th. The supply lines running back were cut for them and this would doom them unless the 79th Guards Division would get out of the Kinzig Valley and reach them. That tank division had kept on moving, despite everything thrown at it and while behind schedule, emerged at Gelnhausen the next morning. It was just a short trip to Hanau for them. Linking up meant going through the rest of the 12th Panzer and this would trap all of those French troops still higher up in the Fulda Gap.

The 12th Panzer couldn’t do it. They were forced to retreat less be destroyed in-place. A link up then occurred and the Soviets were secure with their lodgement on the Main. They were now just upstream from Frankfurt and had seemingly won their fight. All they needed to do now was to crush the trapped forces caught in between, an opponent split into two. Doing so relied upon the Taman Guards holding where they were though and also the 12th Panzer not being allowed to get away. At this moment of victory, failure to do anything more came. French forces and those West Germans not at the very top of Hessen and held where they were there, all began to fall back. It was fast and sloppy with some men left behind, but the main body of the EDA forces escaped the trap. They went right through where the Taman Guards were. That elite Soviet Army unit had taken too many losses and was shredded when held firm as its position was passed by either side. It seemed like everyone wanted to take a shot at them too. Neither the Eighth Guards Army nor the Thirteenth Corps had any idea of what was happening unit it was too late. The French had lost their 12th Light Armored and 15th Infantry Divisions in the Fulda Gap but got the 3rd & 5th Armored Divisions out of there. The West Germans pulled out their worn-down 12th Panzer plus the majority of the deployed paratroopers; one cut-off battalion made a last stand around town of Bad Orb in the Spessart and a last stand it really was for them. Bad Orb was full of West German civilian internal refugees and there was no way out for them and the men who died trying to stop the Soviets from getting in there in the end. Tired and battle-weakened Soviet and East German forces couldn’t give chase against the rest of those more numerous EDA forces who fled once it was realised what was happening. Once the EDA had got the last of its men out that it would, while they couldn’t immediately go back into the fight again, neither could the Soviets give chase. This ‘great escape’ of their near-beaten opponents was certainly the greatest Soviet loss of their war objectives here in West Germany.


Bavaria was attacked from Czechoslovakia, not out of East Germany. There was an East German reserve division attached to the Eighth Guards Army which acted along the Inner-German Border but only in a defensive role alongside border guards. Across the frontier in Czechoslovakia was where the offensive came from. The Soviets had their Thirteenth Army and the Czechoslovak First Army was with them. Again, it was French and West Germans to fight, those dug-in in defensive positions. Part of the French were facing East Germany and were hoped to be distracted fearing an attack coming from that direction. The main assault was tasked to get into Bavaria, before encircling and crushing the rest of the EDA’s troops close to the Czechoslovakia frontier. Nurnberg and especially Munich were too far away to matter for the attacker’s objectives.

Very quickly, the plan fell apart. The French I Corps in north-eastern Bavaria (the historic Franconia region; where the Americans would have been in a NATO-led defensive mission) paid little attention to the East Germans – West German Landwehr screening units secured defensive positions back from the Inner-German Border – and they concentrated on the Czechoslovaks. They kept them from forcing open a gap with the motor rifle divisions they pushed forward and then then, once those were worn down, smashed forward in counterattacks. Requests for nerve gas use to finish this off was denied as the higher command believed that the French I Corps had this in-hand and the stocks of such weapons remained limited. To save their army, the Czechoslovaks moved forward one of their tank divisions. There was no gap for it to lance through but it was hoped that it could turn the tables on the French when they were coming forward. Opportunity came the way of the French to finish off the Czechoslovaks only a couple of days into the invasion. It wasn’t an opportunity passed up. A full-on eastwards assault was made and this went right after the Czechoslovak’s 1st Tank Division. They were caught exposed and smashed to pieces. Another tank division, the lower-grade 14th, was present in the First Army’s order of battle. It didn’t come forward but instead was urgently tasked to defend the approaches to the border and cover the Chep Gap alongside border troops. The French moved right up the frontier and engaged them at distance while dealing with smashed pockets caught in the rear. For longer than anticipated, several held out and the French had a harder time than expected yet in the end, they finished off all parts of the Czechoslovak Army left on West German soil. Consideration was given from above to order the French I Corps to go over the border and make inroads there. This was being discussed up until the very moment that part of the corps was urgently re-tasked to go south and assist the West Germans. The 1st & 7th Armored Divisions raced away because the Soviets had broken through the West Germans down there.

The Bohemian Forest and then the Bavarian Forest next were both between the Czechoslovak frontier and the Danube River. Czechoslovak paratroopers & airmobile troops from their 22nd Special Purpose Airborne Brigade supported smaller numbers of Soviet airmobile units in the valley of the Regen River there in Bavaria. They were meant to open the way for the Thirteenth Army to pour onwards. Initially, it took longer than planned and was thus seen to be going awry but once the successes came, they came fast. West German forces deployed this far forward as a political statement found that they had no way out. The 8th Panzergrenadier Division – reformed from its mountain mission with the Gebrigsjager units removed and forming their own large brigade – lost two thirds of its men with the rest only barely managing to escape to the northwest. Three Soviet motor rifle divisions poured forwards towards the Danube. The intention was to fight the rest of the West Germans on the eastern side of that wider river and destroy them there rather than have to chase them. However, facing a certain defeat if they stayed, the West Germans withdrew. The Soviets couldn’t stop them. They would have needed to have put strong forces on the Danube crossings via air insertions first to block a retreat yet didn’t have the men available due to them long having been sent elsewhere in the world. The 4th Panzergrenadier Division got over the Danube successfully. As to the 10th Panzer Division and that remaining brigade of the 8th Panzergrenadier, they both fell back towards the outskirts of Regensburg: the Landwehr had strong fixed defences there and the regulars intended to fight a mobile battle east and north of the small city. The Soviets sent half of the Thirteenth Army that way to give them that battle and win it. The 161st Motorised Rifle Division, followed closely by the 15th Guards Tank Division, engaged the West Germans near Regensburg and won a significant series of engagements. West Germans units scattered, falling back west and split apart. Most were caught on the wrong side of the downstream reaches of the Regen River (the upstream parts had earlier been fought over and here it met the Danube) and the Soviets this time could close those crossings by getting aircraft through to bomb them repeatedly while their 15th Guards Tank battered as much of the West Germans left fighting as possible. Two days of fighting saw the 10th Panzer eliminated. The French arrived but stayed on the other side of the river. While they couldn’t literally hear the screams for help from their allies across the Regen, it seemed that way with the sounds of battle being so close by. Going over meant destruction for the two French divisions though. They engaged Soviet small-scale crossing attempts and dropped shells over there yet stayed out of the fight while the 10th Panzer died. When the Soviets started moving again several days later, now the French were in a position to stop them. They fought with other West Germans – regulars and reservists – to bring to a violent end any more Soviet progress deeper into Bavaria. The Thirteenth Army was by now spent and unable to go any further. The West Germans would rue the day they ordered their army to go so far forward ahead of an invasion and be in the position they ended up in. This not only cost their II Corps half its pre-war strength but also exposed the long frontier with Austria too. While the war was being fought here, it was also being fought there as well. West German mountain troops with their 23rd Mountain Brigade ended up fighting there in a different but linked conflict.


The British Second Army entered the fighting more than a week into the invasion. Had they arrived earlier, they would have joined in sooner but going from entry points on the coast to the border fighting in one bound was impossible plus also suicide for them. The EDA requested that some of the leading elements, those who had come in first do to so. This would mean breaking up the whole force and using it to plug holes everywhere. Steadfast refusal came to do this. This was about politics but also military sense as well. Together as one, the British Second Army was a counterattack force far greater than the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact had in mainland Europe. Broken up, they would be whittled away and also have to go under EDA tactical command for those fights. There would be a time to go into battle and the first few days weren’t it. The Allies would use their troops at a time of their choosing: this too meant most of the supporting air power as well.

Forming up in Lower Saxony, on the western side of the Weser, the British, Irish and Spanish troops were organised ahead of battle. Three separate corps were formed. One consisted of heavier British forces, the second contained the Spanish and the third was made up of light British units plus the Irish. Efforts at concealment were made though only on an operational level. There was no strategic surprise which could come from the entry of Allied troops into the war in West Germany due to the Soviets not being completely stupid but the aim was to not let them understand how and where the use would come. When ready, only then, did the British Second Army go into battle. This was after there came an agreement with the EDA where the Dutch would join them as a fourth corps command – needed for operational geographic reasons – and the EDA let them generally do their own thing in how they fought. London and Madrid got serious concessions from Paris and Bonn on this. There was an unspoken undercurrent of ‘you need us or you are finished’ with the movement forward and at that time, this was very true. The Dutch had been pushed aside and neither the French nor the West Germans had the forces to plug the gap that the Soviets had opened up near Bremen. The Allies wanted to make their entrance here too because it would give them a clear shot at going over on the counteroffensive. They weren’t going to plug a gap but drive on the Inner-German Border… and bounce it too aiming for the Baltic Sea on the other side.

Late on March 15th saw the first British engagements take place to stop the Soviets in the Geest Gap. The next morning, they went forward on the attack. The Soviets hit them with gas and casualties came despite all defensive preparations. RAF Jaguars and Tornados appeared above Soviet formations and dropped bombs. These didn’t contain high-explosives but the products of Britain’s emergency wartime nerve gas programme (they had the knowledge and the technical base; now there was the political will) of several different agents. Britain, and therefore by extension the Allies, were back in the business of using chemical weapons in this war once again: the Soviets had used them first despite earlier decisions not to against any Allied forces encountered. Someone had ordered that from Moscow, someone who didn’t have the support of his comrades on that matter. As to the British, they would use them all the way on their ‘trip’ to Wismar, Rostock and Stralsund if need be. The political will on that was firm with no disputes at home on it. Meanwhile, British tanks and infantry advanced with the Spanish and Irish following them. Everything with the war in West Germany would now be very different.



Mid-March 1985: Central & South-East Europe

On the afternoon of March 6th, there was an attempted change of government in Belgrade. This wasn’t a violent coup d’état but rather a matter of votes and changing allegiances. It failed. Moscow’s man – someone tied to them greatly – didn’t succeed in his attempt. There would be no strong federal government imposed, ruled over by the Serb nationalist who tried to gain power, but instead Yugoslavia would remain its loose federal structure instead with equal representation among the ethnic-led republics which formed the state. Moreover, the Serb who’d failed to get his hands on the leadership was therefore unable to fulfil his promises made to Moscow. Yugoslavia’s borders weren’t about to be opened the next morning to ‘a friendly army passing through’. Recriminations would come for him personally later down the line when the KGB got rid of him though it really wasn’t his fault that he had lost that vote. All the pieces had been in-place. He had done his job. Disruption in the internal workings of the highest-levels of the Yugoslav state had come from aboard though and changed the minds of those about to vote. This wasn’t from the Soviet Union but another country far closer. In the absence of a friendly new leader who’d do their bidding, the Soviets quickly made an official request that Yugoslavia open its borders to allow that access of that ‘friendly army’ to traverse the northern reaches of their country. This was to be done near immediately: early the next morning. Guarantees of not violating Yugoslavian sovereignty, paying costs incurred due to disruption and so on were made. Nonetheless, the whole way in which was it phrased upset Belgrade. The request was very much a demand. The requirement for immediate reply was impossible to fulfil too. There was another vote of the country’s leadership. With this, they voted to refuse Soviet access. Opening their borders would drag the country into a war which Yugoslavia wanted no part of. The fear was that once the Soviets were in, they would never leave. Moscow had said that it wouldn’t violate Yugoslavian sovereignty with the passage of its army but Belgrade considered the presence of any foreign military forces on its soil to be a violation. In saying no, Belgrade understood that the Soviets would be displeased and would try to force the issue. They only had to look at how many of their European neighbours had said no to Moscow in recent months and suffered invasion. Full mobilisation (the country had been partially mobilised for some time now with horrible costs coming from that) was ordered to occur nationwide. Contact was made with several governments abroad. Yugoslavia curled up ready to defend itself though with only very little warning.

The Soviets entered Yugoslavia on the morning of the 7th just as they (joined by their Warsaw Pact allies) too crossed Austria’s borders. No diplomatic exchanges had been made with Vienna: Austria’s capital was hit with a missile attack on government buildings to announce that foreign armies were just ‘passing through’. In the following days, both countries would join with the EDA. They were each being invaded as part of a war which they had wished to remain neutral in. Alone, the Yugoslavs would fare better than Austria would yet the two countries joined with Western Europe in their coalition against the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries.


Austria and Yugoslavia were invaded by Soviet-led forces so as to better get at West Germany and also attack Italy. The fight in Austria was planned from the outset to be one opposed because the Soviets noted EDA forces on Austria’s borders ready to move in and had long caught wind of secret contacts between Vienna with Paris and Rome. Everything was thrown at overcoming Austrian resistance. With Yugoslavia it was different. Entry was made with the belief that at the last minute, Belgrade would still back down rather than face what was coming their way. Soviet delusion here was quite something. Part of that was a necessary effort at self-deception too though… if that could be said to make sense. They hadn’t lined up enough of their forces to take on Yugoslavia as a whole, just to cross its Slovene constituent republic and part of Croatia as well to reach Italy. If the Yugoslavs were going to fight, that made that far more difficult.

In a pincer movement, Czechoslovak and Hungarian forces closed in upon Vienna. Austria had many of its troops around its capital and they were engaged by this twin attack. Other Czechoslovaks (with their Fourth Army) crossed into the regions of Lower & Upper Austria and engaged defending forces while lining up a follow-up advance afterwards westwards across Salzburg and towards Tyrol. It took longer than expected to both gobble up Vienna and move forwards across regions of the country bordering West Germany. The Czechoslovaks had a difficult time. Vienna fell though and within a week their tanks were in Salzburg – the city after which the region around it was named – where they met with EDA troops. Tyrol wouldn’t be somewhere that any of them saw apart from as prisoners. This was because within hours of the invasion by the Warsaw Pact, the EDA moved too into Austria. Striking up from their deployment area in the northernmost reaches of Austria, French Alpine troops with their 27th Mountain Division secured the Bremmer Pass to link West Germany to Italy. That initial move was of vital importance for the EDA war effort allowing the shifting of troops and supplies through the Alps rather that going all the way around neutral Switzerland. Moreover, the geo-politics of a physical link was of significant importance. Italian mechanised forces joined them later in moving through Tyrol and linking up with the West Germans along their border with Austria. It took some time to meet the Czechoslovaks head-on but when they did, the smaller EDA forces held their ground at first and then made an attack to free Salzburg. The Czechoslovaks put on a poor show and suffered a serious defeat there. Their Fourth Army wasn’t beaten and remained on Austrian soil but they had no offensive capability left at the end of this. Fights with Austrian forces all the way westwards – including having to eliminate cut-off pockets – had worn them down yet when it came to it, they should have put up a better fight than they did. On paper they were stronger. On the ground, they were just a paper tiger. Only bad terrain and no major reinforcements stopped the EDA from following this up and chasing the Czechoslovaks all the way back to the Danube. The Soviets brought forward a heavy division of their own after the Salzburg fight. This was a conflict not over with their arrival though one which stalled in the meantime while each side moved into place.

Italian forces had gone into Austria the moment that they could do so. A specialised company of Alpine paratroopers jumped to seize crossing points on the Drava River ahead of incoming tanks meant to follow overland. They went expecting to find Soviet airborne forces there and jumped ready for that. Exchanges of fire did come, though with Austrian defenders. Not everyone in Austria had got the message in time that Italy was with them. Through an eventual turn of local good fortune after such bad initial luck, the firing between allies stopped. Many were dead – Austrians and Italians – with no Soviets in sight. Where were their paratroopers who surely should have been here? Anywhere but in the Drava valley, Italy’s first line of defence on Austrian soil. The tanks from Italy arrived soon enough. Mountain troops moved into Austria as well as heavy units and the Drava Line was established. Italy had defensive belts back on its own soil but this was their forward position. Austrian troops joined them in the coming days, all ahead of the incoming arrival of the Soviets who came only by land. There was a full Soviet combined arms army, the Thirty–Eighth, which moved through Hungary and towards southern Austria opposite Italy. It turned up in stages, held up due to both local Austrian obstruction and EDA air attacks yet also due to a mass of transport ad logistical delays. Rather than an iron fist as planned, it was nothing more than a trickle. The Italians would have loved to have done more than they did in the end yet the situation in Yugoslavia made things more difficult for them in terms of what forces they could fight with on Austrian soil. What they managed to do was to hold the Soviets back. The Drava valley was somewhere long-planned to be where to meet Warsaw Pact forces. The Italians had high-grade troops here and faced generally second-rate opposition. There was a severe lack of Soviet air power to challenge them too. When met and contained – at a high cost in terms of casualties – the question was asked was whether this was all that the Soviets had. Where was the follow up? Where was their war-winning force? The answers to those questions asked in terms of where was across in Yugoslavia.

Ljubljana Airport was an airhead where Soviet airmobile forces made use of as their opening move into Yugoslavia. They only had the one brigade – the 21st, from out of Transcaucasia – who were only told hours beforehand that they would be meeting an opposed landing on the ground. Earlier preparations had been for a ‘friendly’ landing with only Italian air strikes posing a danger. Yugoslavian resistance at Ljubljana was strong from both regulars and reservists who came to the fight, following the sound of gunfire like a battle of old. The 21st Landing-assault Brigade held onto the airport for two days before it was overcome and a surrender made. The defeat was quite something for the Soviet Army to take on the chin. Coming across through Slovenia and bits of Croatia were two field armies to meet those light units before they were lost. The Hungarians fielded one; the Soviets another. Neither of those were with the very best troops available. Such forces were elsewhere in the world such as in West Germany, China and North America. The Yugoslavians made short work of the Hungarian Fifth Army across Croatia and in a few places stopped them cold on the border itself. Other aspects of that fighting saw the Hungarians get some way into Yugoslavia and then be brought to a stop where they faced a mass of defensive fire and couldn’t go no further: Zagreb was a million miles away from the furthest penetration. As to the Soviet Fourteenth Guards Army, they went through Slovenia and towards Ljubljana. The airmobile troops there were meant to fight Italian troops entering Yugoslavia – that was always expected – and hold them back before the heavy divisions would then beat them inside Slovenia before rolling victorious into Italy. It was a good plan… and one the Yugoslavians and Italians, first independently, then together, messed up. The Italians put significant forces into Yugoslavia early. Some fighting between Italians and Yugoslavians occurred early on with mix-ups ahead of a formal alliance and the fighting spirit of Yugoslavian forces to defend their soil against anyone. Nonetheless, once they were working together, the now linked EDA forces held off the Soviets. Ljubljana was somewhere the Soviets couldn’t get anywhere near. They struck southwards instead, breaking for the Adriatic from their forward position at Celje. The terrain wasn’t favourable in any way for this and there were local defence forces everywhere on the flanks to join with regular Yugoslavian forces in front. In fixed battles where the Soviets got things their own way, those Yugoslavians irregulars were dead meat in the way of the Soviet Army. However, they had many advantages on home ground and their opponent wasn’t at their best. The many horrible defeats were joined by many fantastic victories. Italian heavy forces held the Soviets off too very far away from their own soil – there was still panic behind them in Trieste from the civilian population who fled expecting a defeat of their army – but the Fourteenth Guards Army would never see Italy. The Soviets were brought to a bloody halt. Italy and Yugoslavia paid dearly in terms of casualties, but the Soviets weren’t going nowhere. They were stuck in Slovenia and in Croatia. All around them, they were under fire. Was everyone in Yugoslavia armed and in their militia!?


Invading Yugoslavia had consequences for the Soviet Union beyond the humiliation which came with their armies being brought to a halt. Bulgaria, one of the strongest allies of the Soviet Union, was unhappy at the turn of events. Belgrade had done nothing wrong in the eyes of Sofia. It didn’t deserve what it got, especially when that city was bombed five days into the war by Soviet aircraft which caused thousands of casualties. Yugoslavian deaths meant nothing to the Bulgarian leadership yet they worried over that happening to them should they refuse to do exactly as instructed. Those instructions were for Bulgaria to launch an invasion of Yugoslavia. Bulgaria had some troops in North America but the vast majority of its men were at home: many lined up ready to move into Greece at some later point. Now, the Bulgarian Army was forced to move against Yugoslavia. Sofia bent to Moscow’s will and made an attack. It wasn’t an invasion which was going to succeed and there was a lot of half-heartedness in this. Bulgaria had to keep other men back. This wasn’t due to any threats from Greece nor Turkey – long neutralised by Soviet diplomacy – but because of Romania.

In Bucharest, Ceaușescu raged both publicly and privately against the Soviet attack on Yugoslavia, one joined by first Hungary and then Bulgaria. This was an outrageous act of aggression, he declared, against fellow socialists. Romania mobilised its army and into defensive positions. Bulgaria took that as an excuse to be wary of any offensive action – very unlikely indeed – and the Soviets themselves had to reorganise low-grade forces spread across the Ukrainian & Moldovan SSRs just in case the Romanians got any ideas about intervening in Yugoslavia. This put those mobilised Soviet forces in the Romanian rear and (in theory) capable of invading Romania direct. However, the newly-formed Forty–First Army consisted of men who should have been sent against either Yugoslavia directly (straight at Belgrade from out of Hungary) or to plug gaps across in Slovenia. They weren’t meant to be sitting on Romania’s borders. This series of events all happened very fast. The whole region as ignited in war with some countries and readiness for war among others. Romania would in the end do nothing and Ceaușescu would just talk but it threw all Soviet plans awry because that wasn’t known.

The Soviets didn’t have a single soldier on Italian soil and neither was Austria fully subdued. Italy’s army had won a victory despite Soviet denials of that fact: they too had their reserves behind them all uncommitted while Moscow’s cupboard was bare. Their war with Yugoslavia was looking as it would turn into a mini version of the China War. Bulgaria’s relations with the Soviet Union were suddenly strained and Romania was hostile. The long-secure geo-political position in the Balkans had gone wrong and looked doomed to collapse. Western Europe had too ‘captured’ Yugoslavia as they effectively brought it into their camp. This wasn’t the end of things here either, not by a long shot.

Chapter Twenty–Three – Betrayal

Early April 1985: North America

April 1985 saw only eleven days of full-scale, organised warfare take place. No one understood at the beginning of the month that there would only be a week and a half left of fighting. Things were started that were foreseen to take a lot longer and were thus cut abruptly short.

***

Soviet intelligence was aware that the Americans had pulled troops out of South Korea starting the end of February. Some consideration had been made to being prepared for their arrival on the western side of the Pacific: in China or even on the Soviet coast somewhere. However, the more reasonable assumption was that they would be sent across the wide expanse of the ocean over to North America. The KGB believed that those Americans would go to join the fighting in north-western Mexico; it would be to Alaska that the GRU was certain they would be sent to. The GRU was only half correct while the KGB was entirely mistaken. The US Army’s 7th and 25th Infantry Divisions (the latter with Hawaiian national guardsmen attached) went first to California before moving into Arizona to join the war there. As to the 3rd Marine Division, they arrived in Alaska yet didn’t make immediate opposed landings either in the Aleutian Islands or in the Alaskan Panhandle where the GRU was sure they would. To the Alaskan Panhandle the 3rd Marines did go, though they were part of the follow-up force for the activities of the already-engaged 5th Marine Division and were thus ‘late for the party’.

Continuing where they had left off in March, the 5th Marines moved on Juneau. The small city which was the state capital was where about half of the remaining Soviet forces in the region were located. They were trapped there: cut off from everyone else and the rest of the world too. However, rather than leaving them be behind their defensive position, the Americans moved against them. The Soviets in Juneau were surrounded by civilians as well as POWs. They had brought many up to the Juneau area. Conditions among those Americans there were clearly bad and, after seeing the same elsewhere in liberated areas, political pressure rather than military necessity drove what was in effect a rescue mission on a grand scale. Getting to Juneau was far more difficult than it was reaching Ketchikan and Sitka. It was far back from the open sea, hidden behind unfriendly terrain and Juneau couldn’t be reached by land. Only going via air and sea could that be done. That was why the 5th Marines were here rather than the US Army. April’s first few days saw the final approaches made, making good of preparations made last month. There were some fights in outlying areas away from Juneau as well as air activity against the Soviet’s own aircraft flying from Juneau’s airport. This all preceded the main attack where US Navy ships – escorts and the amphibious transports – brought the 5th Marines towards Juneau. Those vessels went through the Icy Strait, around the tip of Admiralty Island and to Auke Bay. From there the assault on Juneau began with a start at dawn on April 6th.

The landings were strongly opposed. Soviet defensive fire against landing ships and transport helicopters was fierce yet overcome. Once the Marines were put ashore, they faced an opponent which was dug-in and hadn’t been softened up enough by pre-assault action undertaken against them. Regardless, the 5th Marines pushed on. The defences were reckoned to be brittle, just needing a hard whack to crack open. That was true in the end though at certain moments such a thing might have seemed optimistic. Some of the defenders fought well, those who unleashed all of that firepower, but others caved in. The Marines exploited the gaps they found. Juneau Airport was taken – it was left a ruin – and part of the division, RLT 29, pushed onwards in a northern direction up the Mendenhall Valley. The other two regiments (RLT 21 & RLT 27) moved eastwards. Juneau itself was in that direction with the mountain after which it was named looming above it. The Soviets had lost the 11th Airmobile Brigade in fighting for the airport but they had two regiments of motor riflemen around the city. They weren’t as exposed to naval gunfire and while still having to face air attacks, at least those shells from the warships offshore wouldn’t be able to give them their full attention. However, the 5th Marines had landed their artillery ahead of the two regiments tasked for the advance inland. There were a lot of heavy guns they brought ashore. The US Marines were experts at bringing supporting firepower into play to accurately cover their assaults. Those guns were joined by Harriers and Sea-Cobra attack helicopters in raining hell down upon the Soviets outside Juneau; all of those warships assigned hadn’t too shown up in Auke Bay. A flotilla of five US Navy and two Canadian warships came up the Gastineau Channel, a waterway which the Soviets believed they had covered with mines and a missile battery at its bottom end. Force Recon Marines had seized the small town of Hoonah back on April 1st. There was a small airstrip there which the Soviets hadn’t been using due to the short length of its runway. Hoonah on Chichagof Island would have been a good outlying defensive position to block the Icy Strait yet the Soviets didn’t have the men to be everywhere. Flying from Hoonah were Harriers in US Marines service and these weren’t those which were aboard the amphibious ships. From Hoonah to the bottom of the Gastineau Channel, it was a short flight for aircraft which could make vertical take-offs & landings but could make use of a short runway as well to improve their performance. Several bomb runs were made where forward spotters guided the bombs which blasted that missile battery to utter smithereens. As to the mines, there were a pair of minesweepers available. One of the US Navy ships hit a mine and the destroyer USS Richard S. Edwards had to be beached or it would have sunk and blocked access, but the rest sailed onwards with their own air support coming from those Harriers too.

The whole defensive position of Juneau had fallen apart when the Americans had opened up the rear. Tanks supported the 5th Marines and they had all that external fire support to call upon. The Soviets were long doomed here but this only accelerated things. There was fighting on the outskirts of Juneau on April 9th and the Americans entered it the next morning. Soviet shipping of various types – their own and others they had captured to make use of – was either destroyed by American attacks or scuttled when the seacocks were pulled to deny them to the enemy. Explosions took place inside the city along with executions as well. Juneau was being abandoned. The Soviets fell backwards, either into the wilderness around the mountain behind or over onto Douglas Island. Going either way would see them doomed. The Americans were all over them and there was no way out of this mess. Meanwhile, the 5th Marines fought against hold-outs in Juneau. They had to several times call off artillery or air strikes when it was realised they were about to fire upon trapped civilians and instead dig the enemy out by close-up fighting. Juneau was a battle honour that the men who fought in it would be proud to have earned yet would have terrible memories of.

There was still fighting in and around Juneau come April 11th before that all came to a stop. The Americans had won and were mopping up the last hold-outs as well as hunting down those who had tried to make a run for it. Minds were already being turned to going elsewhere afterwards. The 3rd Marines was due to take-on the Soviets in Petersburg and Wrangell and once that was done, long term plans were already there to go to Kodiak Island and the Aleutians through May, June and July with both divisions. Yet that wasn’t to be. Instead, attention was on redirected to dealing with the mass of prisoners taken who almost all needed medical attention (wounds but other issues) alongside all of those civilians that were encountered. There were lots of them killed in the crossfire of the Battle of Juneau yet no mass massacre had taken place: this wasn’t Mexico after all. The rest needed medical care and to have something to eat. They celebrated their freedom that the 5th Marines had given them.


No one had told Tijuana that the nuclear strike on areas of their country held by Revolutionary Mexico was about to take place. The status of Democratic Mexico as a co-belligerent of the United States – not as an American ally nor a country part of the Allies – was a factor in this but so too was the whole American position towards Mexico of any stripe. In the Glenn Administration, only Howard Baker could be counted on to speak up for Democratic Mexico but even then, the Vice President still had little love for the governing council in Tijuana. He put American interests first and only sought to temper the mood of others in the US Government, as well as the vengeful Congress, to keep them in the fight. The soldiers of Democratic Mexico were fighting alongside United States forces on Mexican soil. Every casualty they took was one less American casualty. Baker had raised the issue of telling them, not consulting them, but Glenn overruled him when other National Security Council members pointed to the KGB finding out. The leadership of Democratic Mexico was rife was Soviets spies despite many American (costly) efforts to root them out. Nothing was said to Tijuana ahead of the strike on seven Mexican cities.

As could be expected, the leadership in Tijuana was absolutely furious. Those had been Mexican civilians in those cities struck on March 25th! Millions had been killed outright, millions more would join them for decades in dying due to after-effects and their nation would be poisoned forever! Mexico City’s destruction last September was something that Tijuana had never gotten over but this was even worse. They knew the feelings of the Americans towards them and concluded that this was deliberate murder of Mexican civilians just because they were Mexicans as well as a purposeful move to destroy their nation forever. Nothing that the Americans said afterwards – none of which contained apologies; what the hell did ‘an expression of regret’ even mean? – could convince them that everything about this wasn’t just an act of vengeance. It was pure evil, Tijuana decided, and there could be no justification. New York stated that it brought down the regime of Tirado López. Who cared about that when it came with the bodies of all of those innocents and the complete obliteration of Mexico’s future?

Tijuana was unable to do anything in response at what was a betrayal of everything they had thought that the Americans would do to end this war and see them put in power to lead Mexico post-war. How now could they lead their country once it was all over with that had been done? Their impotence in inaction with a response was telling and something that the Americans had known as well.

News spread across Mexico in relation to the attack on those seven cities. There was exaggeration, lies, denials, shock, anger… a whole range of emotions from those who heard about what happened. The Mexico Massacre did bring down the regime of Tirado López. He’d centralised power in Guadalajara after learning nothing from the fate of Mexico City and the destruction caused there beforehand to his regime last year. That regime couldn’t handle another shock like that when so many institutions of the state, plus key people, were killed. Guadalajara was partially supported by some state infrastructure elsewhere – all ready to move there – which was over in the city of Leon… another target for American ICBMs. Public security, communications and leadership losses came in an instant. Afterwards, the fallout came: physical and metaphorical. Central parts of Mexico were especially affected by the physical fallout due to the running line of nuclear strikes from Guadalajara to Leon to Morelia through where Mexico City once was to Pueblo. Elsewhere, the three blasts further north in Chihuahua, Hermosillo and Saltillo brought more poison to the people and the land. Panic hit those not killed by the blasts as they left cities and towns. Security forces had no higher control who gave orders what to do and then they suffered immense rates of desertion too. Revolutionary Mexico just disappeared into the night as a viable nation. The remaining parts of its army – those not long sent off to their deaths up in the United States – were spread across the country and unaffected by the nuclear attacks apart from the loss of central command. It might have held together if it hadn’t been for the desertions which came. These were far larger than anything seen before and the ‘usual’ methods of stopping this – shooting some of those caught, threatening the families of the others etc. – just didn’t work. Munities took place too where officers were killed by their men aplenty. The mission for the army was that of wartime security throughout the nation with regards to supporting the supply links and guarding key points as well as POWs rather than public security. The Soviets relied on them to do this and while there was the use of some of their own people – as well as those from other allies – the army of Revolutionary Mexico provided most of the manpower. The desertions in these places really hit the Soviet rear areas hard.

All of the POW camps were technically under the control of the Soviets, the Cubans, the Guatemalans and the Nicaraguans. Officers and key people were appointed there yet it was Revolutionary Mexico manpower at those sites which was more numerous. When the men melted away or mutinied, the situation at each site varied. Some were kept under control, others turned into scenes of massacres where the mass of unarmed POWs were killed entirely. Further sites saw a mixture of actions where the situation was left unresolved and remained on edge. Such sites were often a magnet for desperate people in Mexico before the nuclear strikes who sought to approach them seeking the food and medicines that they were told were there: all of which they deserved, not those gringos. It would be how this turned out when so many people were on the move while angry and scared rather than anything else which would decide the fate of the many, many American POWs inside Revolutionary Mexico.

Away from the all of that chaos, there was still fighting which took place inside Mexico up until the April 11th cessation of that. The nuclear attack on Hermosillo was made with low yield blasts because the Sonora region was being fought over. There were US Marines with the 1st Marine Division alongside an ever-increasing number of Chileans and also national guardsmen from the 38th & 47th Infantry Divisions fighting in Sonora. They continued to do so after Hermosillo where they fought in mountainous terrain south of the US-Mexico border. No big battles were had by each, just a lot of smaller fights which went on and on. There were enemy forces to their south which were trying to run a defensive line yet the Americans moved eastwards. Their eventual destination was due to be the Rio Grande where they would reach it on the Mexican side, opposite Texas and downstream from El Paso, and thus provide a second shutting of the door behind enemy forces to the north. Progress was made through early April though the Rio Grande was still a long way off when the fighting came to an end on an organised scale.


Arriving in the San Francisco Bay Area rather than Los Angeles which was closer because of all the war damage further south, the 7th & 25th Infantry Divisions formed up there in Central California. The men had been flown across the Pacific with ease though they had to wait for the shipping which arrived carrying everything they would need to fight with. A submarine attack had slowed one convoy coming from South Korea but this delay wasn’t seen at the time to have a serious effect. Three days later than planned, these veteran troops started moving away from San Francisco. As it would turn out, that delay did mean something.

These troops arrived in Arizona after passing through Nevada and were assigned to the US I Corps there rather than forming a separate corps command as had been expected. I Corps, under the Sixth United States Army (which controlled all fighting through Arizona and onto Mexican soil), had the mission of liberating the last bits of Arizona. In the north-eastern portion of the state, the 81st Infantry Brigade – national guardsmen from Oregon and Washington – was waiting for their arrival to finish off the last of the Guatemalans. They complained over the hold-up but once the reinforcements arrived, the 81st Brigade made sure that their US Army comrades knew where the enemy was for them to take on. First into action was the 25th Infantry. The ‘Tropic Lightning Division’ fought in the Painted Desert on the Hopi Indian Reservation and smashed through everyone who stood in their way. The last of the Guatemalans were nothing in comparison to North Korean troops in terms of tough opponents though were rather spread out. This took a lot of work to move from one group to another and keep them contained in the fight rather than letting them get away. Later, the 7th Infantry arrived. These incoming men only saw one day’s worth of action, up on Navajo land, before the fighting came to an end. To come all this way and do just that was extremely frustrating but it wasn’t down to them when it came to stopping.

The rest of the I Corps did what those newly-arriving men had come here to do eventually: move into New Mexico from out of Arizona. Penetration over the state-line had begun at the end of March and that now continued. Interstate-10 ran to Las Cruces which sat on the Rio Grande and the 32nd Infantry Division went that way and ended up just short of there by April 11th. As to the 5th Armored Brigade and the 9th Infantry Division, they fought on the right flank in the very southern reaches of New Mexico with some operations taking place on Mexican soil too. Their destination was the Pass of the North: where El Paso and Ciudad Juarez were located. Most of the troops from there – Cubans and Nicaraguans – had been send northwards to Truth or Consequences and the Soviets realised very late that the US Army was tearing forwards across the desert. They couldn’t lose El Paso like they couldn’t lose Truth or Consequences. Immediate action was taken were light and disposable units were sacrificed before they could get heavier units to block the I Corps. The ‘light’ men were a battle-weakened regiment of Soviet Airborne which included some armoured vehicles with attached anti-tank units. Those deemed ‘disposable’ were the majority of the soldiers which Noriega had sent northwards. Panama’s ragtag force was good for nothing apart from being sent to die yet the men from the Soviet Airborne were wasted.

Fifteen to a dozen miles west of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, the Americans fought those sent to block them. The Panamanians were taken apart in one of the war’s most unequal and unfair unit-upon-unit fight. These weren’t soldiers. Noriega had sent the dregs of his country – criminals, the lame, even mental patients from emptied hospitals – all the way to the United States while keeping loyal men back home. The Soviets had demanded he send men last year and that he did. Only before the battle were these men given ammunition for rifles which they had never fired beforehand. The Americans were surprised to find out ahead of the fight that these men ahead were from Panama. They fought these were real soldiers, men who’d taken the Canal Zone alongside the Soviets away from their fellow US Army soldiers back in September. There was a deliberate effort made to utterly destroy this gathering of the enemy, not bypass them, before afterwards they would roll down into El Paso. There would be a delay in getting into that city but there was also a military need to eliminate the mass of Panamanian soldiers – almost twenty thousand of them – first rather than leaving them in the rear. As to the Soviet paratroopers nearby, they were just a bonus. What a short but deadly fight it was! The weakness of the enemy was noted first when it came to Noriega’s soldiers but there were so many of them and a lot of fighting to be done instead of head-scratching. The hard-fighting Soviet Airborne focused minds too as they took some time to beat. Only afterwards was there time to consider the opposition sent against the I Corps. Some soul-searching took place especially once POWs were questioned, but they had been an armed enemy sent in Panamanian uniform and organised as a military unit under central command. Legally and in a military sense, the Americans had been in the right… morally, that became dubious because there was some unexploited intelligence beforehand on this that was ignored in the rush to take on Noriega’s men. Once done, the Americans were due to move in to both El Paso and Ciudad Juarez come April 12th, yet that didn’t occur. They had each in their sights at the end of April 11th though had all of those prisoners – so many of them that needed something done for them – to keep their attention instead of going forward. As was the case elsewhere, not going any further ahead wasn’t the choice made of the fighting men here.



Early April 1985: North America

Further Army of the United States units had been released starting April 1st to join other ARUS elements who did so a month beforehand. Coming under operational control of the US XI Corps was the 41st Infantry Division, a formation raised in Pacific North-West. Arguably, the 41st Infantry still needed another month to prepare in terms of equipment issuing rather than the training of the men but they were sent forward despite missing some key bits of equipment. None of these were deemed wholly vital to the ability of the 41st Infantry to fight. In the eyes of the XI Corps’ commander, and that of his superior at the head of the First United States Army, all the hold-ups with the division had been bureaucratic and it was utterly stupid to keep them waiting in the rear. The XI Corps took the incoming reinforcing division to replace the 82nd Airborne Division which transferred to army command: the ‘defenders of Denver’ and those men who had retaken Colorado Springs were wanted elsewhere. The fight that the XI Corps had, along with the Canadian Corps on their left flank, was no longer anywhere near Denver, Colorado Springs or in Colorado anymore. They entered New Mexico at the beginning of April as they chased after the retreating Soviet Twenty–Second Guards Army. The Soviets kept moving fast but it was impossible for them to break free of the pursuit after them which sought to fix them in-place for their destruction. Every day and every night of fighting saw them lose more men to the advance of Allied troops who chased after them into New Mexico.

Across northern New Mexico, ABC troops (American, British and Canadian) from the Allies fought through early April. The Canadians, joined by the British, put on far better overall performance than they had done last month up around Pueblo… that being in the eyes of their American allies. This time they took a lot of ground and overrun the enemy to a degree which pleased the First Army command. Too much caution had been used at Pueblo, the Americans had said; caution was certainly what they had employed, their allies agreed, but only because it was necessary there and then against a dug-in opponent. Firstly around the town of Raton and then further down the course of Interstate-25, the Canadian Corps engaged Soviet forces on the run and were able to do much more. They used their overwhelming numbers far better in easier terrain to move across. British troops would end up going the furthest south when they reached the crossroads around Springer. They had leap-frogged ahead of the Canadians and barred the way for the Soviets caught behind. The enemy was squeezed in between a great victory won north of Springer through April 9th–10th. Once that was done with, they held in-place the next day while dealing with prisoners taken as the rest of the Canadians caught up. Planned operations were for them all to start moving onwards through the rest of the month as the Canadian Corps followed I-25 as it wound through north-central New Mexico first to Las Vegas (not the Las Vegas; this was a lesser-known but more historic town of the same name as the city over in Nevada) and then onto Santa Fe. That would hopefully then put them behind the rest of the Twenty–Second Army running from the Americans. Another battle was envisioned somewhere in the general Santa Fe area to finally finish off the Soviets before entry could then be made into Albuquerque all before the end of the month.

The XI Corps was following that same line of thinking with its advance through north-central New Mexico as it chased after other Twenty–Second Army elements. The 4th & 37th Infantry Divisions joined with the 41st Infantry, plus the former Berlin Brigade and national guardsmen in armoured cavalry regiments too (the XI Corps was rather large now), in fighting the Soviets through the mountains, forests and the wilderness of Indian lands. They managed to get hold of the 120th Guards Motorised Rifle Division one last time and give that Soviet unit a final defeat. For many months, the 120th Guards Division had been repeatedly engaged and taken losses after losses yet kept on fighting despite everything thrown at it. No more. Now it was caught, right in the valley of the very upper reaches of the Rio Grande. There was that final reckoning and a fantastic victory was won. The 41st Infantry played its role well in that and did what they had come here to do: fight and fight well. Soviet Airborne paratroopers with their 76th Guards Division slipped away though and out of what eventually because the trap for their Soviet Army comrades. They went east and west, into the mountains as their division split apart. What they didn’t do was stick together nor go south. This gave the XI Corps less urgency to make an immediate pursuit and rather recover its strength before finishing them off too. The 174th Infantry Brigade (the men from West Berlin) was assigned during that short break to urgently assist the 82nd Airborne and thus didn’t get to stop moving for a few days. The First Army, though its own higher headquarters of the Rockies Command, had been tasked to take emergency action against convoys of trucks which had escaped the main fighting and were right out over in the west near the Arizona state-line. On US Route-64 and -491, there were POWs being moved. Possibly they were going to Albuquerque the long way around; there was possibly too that they were going to be disposed of using rather unpleasant means. A good few thousand men – Americans but also some Canadians and maybe even a few Brits too – were in those convoys. Questions were asked as to why a wait of a day or two couldn’t come until the 174th Brigade and 82nd Airborne were more prepared. The reason why this couldn’t happen wasn’t given and it was understood by those lower down the chain-of-command that something was going on that demanded action be taken very soon. The Americans went after them. The 82nd Airborne made company- & battalion-sized combat parachute drops (the first time in the war that they had done this!) while the 174th Infantry went cross-country in a mad dash to link-up with those drop-zones. A lot went wrong but elsewhere things went as planned: it was all drawn up so fast and luck had to be factored in. Revolutionary Mexico guards, led by KGB officers, put up a fight but they weren’t prepared for what they faced when the Americans were able to conduct their arrivals properly and hit them with battle-hardened soldiers. The majority of the convoys were captured and the POWs within liberated. Two convoys weren’t liberated though, both near the town of Farmington on Route-64. Attacking American troops were held off after mis-drops and bad communications occurred. The prisoners were dragged from the trucks once those were stopped. The KGB had orders for what they had the Mexicans with them do despite this happening earlier than planned. Several hundred POWs were slaughtered and the KGB then made escape attempts while leaving the shooting parties behind to face the music. As expected, when the Americans caught up with them, the soldiers of Revolutionary Mexico were given ‘field justice’ in many cases. Only by the end of the day and the orders which came to stop fighting did the 174th Infantry and 82nd Airborne understand why the rush had been on to do what they did early on April 11th and not leave it a day or two more.


Other American paratroopers – though those with far less experience; men with the ARUS-formed 11th Airborne Division – were fighting with the US XVIII Corps in south-central New Mexico. They were joined too be incoming reinforcements released from the final stages of training and fitting-out in the form of the 13th Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 34th Infantry Division. These formations moved towards Truth or Consequences and the Elephant Butte Reservoir just in time to aid the 11th Airborne. While the rest of the XVII Corps was dealing with an attack by Cuban and Nicaraguan forces trying to approach the bridgehead held on the Rio Grande / Interstate-25 position coming up from the south, the men facing northwards faced an attack coming downstream towards them. These were Czechoslovaks and they did very well in battle over on this side of the North Atlantic. Sent across at the end of last year as the 2nd Motorised Rifle Division – one of the better units of the Czechoslovak People’s Army – they had seen, as the East Germans had done with their division, the Soviets take a lot of their equipment and ammunition to help form their own units following naval losses. The Czechoslovaks were reformed into a brigade with extra men put on security duties through central New Mexico. The mechanised infantry brigade was kept as a reserve unit in the Albuquerque area and dispatched following the XVIII Corps’ penetration deep into the rear to form one of the two pincers moving on the 11th Airborne. Czechoslovak artillery preformed the best. Their RM-70 multi-barrelled rocket-launchers and DANA self-propelled guns were used very effectively to cause maximum casualties among the Americans and moved about rapidly to avoid counter-battery fire plus American aircraft. The guns covered assaults by tanks and mobile infantry. The 11th Airborne fell back and back again. Retreat was the only thing to do otherwise they would have been overrun. Thankfully, before the Czechoslovaks could crush them, the 13th Cav’ showed up to save the day. Thank God for the Cav’! The Czechoslovaks were halted before the 34th Infantry came forward and retook the ground lost while pushing the enemy back to where they had come, expanding the bridgehead as they did so before orders from above caused a stop to the fighting come the end of April 11th. As to the American paratroopers, they would claim victory afterwards because they hadn’t been beaten yet their ranks were thinned greatly by the dead and injured. Their saviours too took many losses in their first time in combat, all while holding off a determined enemy assault. Pre-battle intelligence coming from Europe said that in Bavaria, the French had kicked the Czechoslovak’s behind (though things were more even when the Czechoslovaks had been encountered in Austria) yet it was the Americans here who had been on the wrong end of the fight against such opponents. Truth or Consequences held in the end though and that was what mattered overall.

The rest of the XVIII Corps was fighting downstream against those Cubans and Nicaraguans who’d come up from the wider El Paso area before the threat from out of New Mexico by the Sixth US Army fully materialised. The regiment of Soviet Airborne paratroopers who should have been with them going upstream – following I-25 too – were re-tasked to the west and they were missed; the Panamanians weren’t at all. At Hatch first and then near to Caballo Lake, the 1st Infantry & 101st Air Assault Infantry Divisions held off their opponents while making a planned withdrawal where they made use of the ground and the ‘surprises’ which they left behind for those in pursuit. The surprises were a lot of mines (the Americans noted carefully where they left these; they were aiming to go back south in the coming weeks) as well as a lot of water. From the Caballo Dam, the waters of the Rio Grande were released: this had been building up from all that melting snow once the Spring Thaw had occurred far to the north in the Rockies. The dam wasn’t blown, it was just a case of a lot of water being released from it… at a rate of pushing forty thousand cubic feet a second. There was no tidal wave of anything dramatic like that downstream but instead just a giant bog formed. The ground below through which the Cubans and Nicaraguans moved was sodden and it slowed them immensely. American aircraft and helicopters picked off tanks and infantry carriers from above to further weaken and enemy which kept on coming, just at a torturous rate of advance.

Once the enemy reached the Caballo area, it was all spread out and arrived piece-by-piece. Some of the Cubans had swung away to the east to get out of the way of all that water. They found the uneven, rocky terrain a nightmare to cross when the 101st Air Assault was up there and the Cubans wouldn’t be making an outflanking move here. The main fighting was in the valley below the dam and the 1st Infantry engaged the rest of the Cubans and the Nicaraguans there in a fight lasting almost a whole week. It was a one-sided affair and the attackers knew that. Requests were made for it to be called off from the officers involved because this was just impossible. Those were refused: Truth or Consequences must be reached from behind to achieve the southern pincer in response to the Czechoslovak’s northern pincer. Therefore, it continued right up until the very end of the fighting. The Americans had to keep their divisions here to maintain that fight, all the while wondering what idiot would keep ordering these men to go forward into the free-fire zone which they firmly had set up.


Over in Central Texas, early April saw the Battle for Austin: ‘for’, not ‘of’. The city which was the Texan state capital wasn’t fought over directly. Instead there was a lot of fighting nearly with the intention of winning control of it and its transportation links before eventually taking it. The fight was mainly between American national guardsmen facing soldiers of Revolutionary Mexico though there were many Cubans engaged as well because Austin sat within their operational area up and along the Interstate-35 corridor. The once proud Cuban Second Army – which had ripped apart the US Army III Corps in the war’s first few weeks – was a shadow of its former self yet there remained thousands of Cubans left and they had the capability to fight. As the Third United States Army used moved in from the north and east, while maintaining a static blocking position to the south, intelligence said that that Cubans would cut and run away to the west. Analysis by NISS’s military intelligence operatives stated that due to events down in Cuba – an outline, let alone any specifics, all unrevealed to the Third Army – the Cubans would be looking to save their army. That was correct… but incorrect as well. The Castro Brothers in Havana had that intention but their men in the field weren’t under their direct command. The Soviets gave the orders and the Cubans stood their ground. Between Belton at the top end and San Marcos to the bottom, with Austin the middle, the fight for the I-35 Corridor went on through early April. The Cubans were far better opponents than the Mexicans yet the latter were no pushover when on the defence. They had to pounded down where they were dug-in and completely overcome. The Cubans sought battles of manoeuvre instead. The different actions of these two allies doing what they did caused the Americans all sorts of issues. If it was done on a bigger scale over a far greater area, the Third Army would have taken a lot longer to do what they did. However, there weren’t enough Cubans and the area of operations was small enough to manage this situation once the Americans were able to understand what was going on. In fight after fight, they dealt with the Cubans first and then surrounded the Mexicans. Over to the west was the rise of the Balcones Escarpment with the Edwards Plateau up above. That formed an effective barrier behind the I-35 Corridor and a natural obstacle which to pound the Cubans against before turning back on the Mexicans.

Late on April 10th, the 26th Infantry Division – American national guardsmen from New England – took Bergstrom AFB outside Austin from the dug-in defenders as they completed a partial envelopment of the city. They were going to start moving inwards the next morning and weren’t looking forward to an urban fight. Orders came to hurry that up, again unexplained. That was attempted but it couldn’t be done at the speed that orders originating all the way from New York wanted. A flurry of messages came promising full support in terms of extra firepower and aircraft all to take the city by the end of April 11th. Regardless, it just couldn’t be done. No one on the ground knew why there was this urgency. Troops from Revolutionary Mexico were making their last stand there and taking Austin just wasn’t going to happen with the speed desired. To say New York was disappointed was an understatement but political desires and military reality don’t always mix.

North of that fight, in parts of Texas opposite the Red River and also west of the Dallas–Fort Worth area, the Soviet Seventh Tank & Twenty–Eighth Armies (what was left of each anyway after the disasters of March) fought against a major counteroffensive by the Seventh US Army. The Americans were on the advance now after stopping what had come their way last month. The Soviets fell back away to the west and southwest; their southern escape route was cut by what the Third US Army was doing. The retreat was pretty organised and not a mad dash to escape. There was space to fall back into and it was a fighting retreat done well. An attempt to cut it off, where the US II Corps came over the Red River and tried to turn the rear of the Seventh Tank Army, failed when a lot of Soviet tanks showed up there and held the Americans off. However, despite that and other instances of the Soviets doing well while falling back, they were still falling back. They went deeper into Texas away from its outskirts yet they couldn’t keep this up forever. The Americans broadened their frontage as the days went by and across the rear they dropped Green Berets and Rangers aplenty at key points. These men scouted the way rather than trying to stop the Soviets from going backwards and sought to provide the Seventh US Army with a victory at some point by identifying where they could catch the Soviets in a real fight. The thinking was that it would be around Abilene – the general area, not exactly that town – in the end where that would occur, sometime later in the month. As was the case everywhere else though, at the end of the eleventh day of April, the fighting came to a close. Final victory on the battlefield would eventually elude the Seventh US Army when they’d done so much hard work ready to see it come.



Early April 1985: North America

Not that far away from San Antonio, the city’s mayor, Henry Cisneros spent the beginning of April waiting for the city to be liberated. Back from where Stormin’ Norman had his US V Corps fighting Revolutionary Mexico troops there, there was a gathering of FEMA forces along with those from several aid NGOs as well. Both had been involved in the efforts undertaken in Houston following that city’s liberation last month and would be moving into San Antonio once it was taken by the US Army as well. Lessons had been learnt from the reoccupation of Los Angeles when it came to the immediate response made to liberated cities. FEMA – semi-militarised due to its wartime role; conscripts not sent to the Army of the United States had been assigned to FEMA – had many security personnel alongside all those tasked for medical aid, getting the electricity on & drinking water running and engineering missions. The American Red Cross and other independent aid groups would be joining them going in. Cisneros was planning to enter his city along with them, hot on the heels of American troops. This was his home city, the one which he had left in October right before the Cubans arrived. He regretted leaving yet he knew full well that if he stayed then he would have long ago been killed. Moreover, this Hispanic-American politician from Texas wouldn’t have ended up in the office of the presidency twelve years down the line had he stayed either… but that was something for the future.

General Schwarzkopf’s men fought to take San Antonio away from its occupiers. He personally wanted the city but he was also being told from above that it must be retaken with haste. Following events over in Mexico, a massacre of civilians inside was feared. There were also many enemy forces there – not just men from Revolutionary Mexico – who all sat between the V Corps and the Rio Grande. Should they get away, they would join those down in the Lower Valley along the border and bolster the defences there. These factors all combined to see the V Corps drive forward into a strong position where there were fixed defensive lines. The 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment along with the 6th Armored Division secured the corps’ southern flank against the Soviets there while the 5th Infantry was fighting scattered Cubans to the north around San Marcos. Out in front were the 24th & 29th Infantry Divisions, the latter being the last of the second wave of ARUS units made available for April operations. They drove onwards through the opposition outside of the city and pushed right up against it in a semi-circular fashion. Strong air and artillery support was given to them though many times, last-minute wave-offs were made of incoming bombs and shells due to the presence of civilians escaping from the city during the fighting. Inside San Antonio there was a lot of shooting where men who should have been fighting on the outskirts were killing others inside. News from back home – confusing but horrible events – had come to the commander in the city and he had been instructed by his political officer that vengeance must be taken. Mexican civilians had been killed therefore American civilians must be too. Orders were given for firing squads to start doing that. However, while it is easy to order such a thing, to have masses of civilians killed by soldiers in an organised fashion is never easy. To shoot unarmed innocents after a guerrilla attack or in the heat of the moment is one thing but trying to do this over and over again to groups of the helpless lined up for that is not easy. It isn’t easy on the junior officers nor is it easy on the men in the firing squads. Maybe the first group will be shot, then the second… yet after a while it takes its toll and soldiers (no matter which army they serve) struggle to do it. In cases, officers and men shot at each other in munities which came from refusals to undertake their orders. Elsewhere, officers would declare to their superiors that they had killed all that they could find and had now run out of bullets too. Any mass slaughter needs strong-disciplined men driven by pure hatred which needs to be indoctrinated into them. Officers needed to be the sadistic and bloodthirsty type who aren’t afraid of the later consequences which would come. There were few men in San Antonio who fitted that bill, especially once the initial killing had stared and more were brought before them. Male prisoners begged for their lives, women screamed and children cried. Killing them all just was too much to be done in any meaningful fashion beyond initial fusillades of bullets. While all this was going on, the Americans outside forced their way into San Antonio.

Rather than killing civilians, if not on the frontlines trying to defend the city, then those Mexicans inside should have been destroying everything that was inside which would be useful for the Americans to later use. San Antonio was one of the most important rear area sites for the war effort, comparable to places such as Albuquerque, Brownsville, Corpus Christi and El Paso. It was full of the ‘unsexy’ stuff that armies need to keep fighting in the field with logistical infrastructure, vehicle maintenance sites and big communications set-ups: there was also a lot of ammunition in the city, all of which delays had seen it not sent onwards. Explosives and fire would have made a mess of all of this. It was all left alone, ready for the Americans to take. That they did. The 24th Infantry entered San Antonio first followed by the 29th Infantry not long afterwards. Starting April 8th, they began to clear the city. The military bases were the objectives set for them: to reach the pre-war existing American ones and the new post-invasion sites established by the Cubans and the Soviets. In between them lay much of the city and so the two divisions were tasked to secure them as well. During their fighting, prisoners were taken. Neither the 24th nor 29th Infantry Divisions were full of those who would kill everyone they came across who threw down their weapons and up their arms. However, many potential POWs were gunned down, especially those who weren’t quick enough to surrender or who had blood on their hands. There were sights that the American soldiers saw that they couldn’t forgive every enemy soldier they got their hands on for. Through the second and third days, much more of the city fell under American control. Fires started on April 10th and these were a big deal. By that point, those FEMA elements outside the city were already inside and there were firefighters among them in number. This had been another issue learnt from Los Angeles though this time it wasn’t criminals looting and committing arson but instead accidents and the results of a lot of heavy fighting. There were groups of Revolutionary Mexico soldiers caught and pinned down who were blasted with heavy weapons which caused several fires to rage. So much of San Antonio was already destroyed but it wasn’t going to burn down fully as it might otherwise have done.

On the fourth day of fighting in the city, Schwarzkopf received word to hurry up and finish this off. He wasn’t told why though his commander at the head of the Third US Army made it clear that there would no longer be much time to continue with this. A final push was ordered where the inner parts of the city as well as north-western portions (with fewer military sites and less opposition) were overrun. Third Army flew in a media team to record the scenes of the last bit of the liberation; this ABC News crew had been held back from everything else going on the city, missing what other camera teams witnessed with the horror seen, to be present for a staged event where San Antonio was announced as captured by the Third Army’s commander on the ground there. Schwarzkopf missed that event. He was busy moving the 24th Infantry to the southern side of San Antonio ready to move onwards. V Corps would leave the 29th Infantry here but everyone else was going south into the Rio Grande’s Lower Valley and all the way to Brownsville. There were Soviet forces there along with Cubans and more Mexicans. He thought he had more time but he didn’t. That stop order came and the V Corps was going nowhere… for now anyway.


Raúl Castro was assassinated at the beginning of April.

Fidel’s loyal brother had seen the writing on the wall last month when the Soviets suffered all of those battlefield reverses in New Mexico and Texas. Cuba was building new armies to replace those lost in California and Texas and Raúl had believed that with them, plus fresh Soviet forces, the war in North America could be won. But then the Americans stopped the Soviet’s attack into Oklahoma and then began their multiple attacks across the entire front. Before the end of 1985, he could imagine the Americans having by then liberated their own soil, occupying large parts of Mexico and ready to invade Cuba. It would have been best for Cuba to no longer be involved in the war by that point. Fidel still believed what Moscow said and told his younger sibling that they could still win this yet Raúl wouldn’t accept that. Quietly, he started trying to open contacts with the Americans. His aim wasn’t to turn on his brother but instead save them both and everything that they had rather than pay the ultimate price for making the mistake that they had. The plan had been to make a trade with the Americans in the end. Raúl expected a whole lot of drama to play out but he had bargaining chips to play with. There were tens of thousands of American POWs in Cuba – more than there were over in Mexico – and Cuba still held onto the Florida Keys as well. Raúl thought he knew what he was doing and his play was being made in secret. It wasn’t though as one of his closest aides was on the KGB payroll.

The KGB put a bullet in his head, dropping him with a sniper in public. Cuba wasn’t walking away like that. The Soviets wouldn’t stand for that betrayal. However, if they’d found out a few days later, or waited to act a little longer, things might have turned out differently for Raúl. Alas, that wasn’t to be. Fidel lost his brother and he was made to understand that no it wasn’t the Americans, it was the allies of his regime that he was bound to who had done this. They’d do it to anyone else who acted against them too.


Because the cessation of fighting wasn’t foreseen by the United States, at the time that it happened there was a major amphibious operation underway down in the Caribbean where US Marines were going into action. This started three days beforehand and once it became clear that major offensive operations would come to a halt, this disrupted Operation Caribbean Pirate. This consisted of assaults underway in the Virgin Islands, both the American and British possession there, against the Cubans. There was a battalion from the Coldstream Guards that the British Army sent down from Bermuda (where it was on security duties) to take part in the post-assault missions because there were islands there which were Crown possessions yet it was in the main an American-only affair. The Virgin Islands were next to Puerto Rico and in Cuban hands since the war started. They’d been taken when undefended to be used for their airports and naval anchorages. In February, Soviet hospital ships not sunk had run aground there and the Americans had afterwards taken a good look at what was here including the defences. Those weren’t much. It was decided that they could be retaken and used not just to keep Puerto Rico firmly secure but, of greater-importance, the Americans themselves would make use of the Virgin Islands’ bases established by the Cubans to exert control over the Caribbean to stop Soviet air and naval traffic. Recent French activities in the Caribbean too helped make this possible as well.

The 2nd Marine Division made the landings. They hit the beaches on St. Croix and St. Thomas plus also the British-owned Tortola. Cuban defenders were encountered on these islands but the US Marines came here for a fight which they knew they could win. These Marines had fought previously in Florida against raiders – replaced there by the recently-raised 6th Marine Division, who were rather disappointed to be left behind rather than coming south – and the Cubans they encountered were of lower-calibre than Cuban commandos and Soviet Spetsnaz. Much of Caribbean Pirate was conducted from Puerto Rico with US Air National Guard aircraft supporting US Marines aircraft flying out of there. There were amphibious ships, just not that many of them due to the proximity of Puerto Rico to the landing sites. St. Thomas and Tortola were fights won very quickly though St. Croix was harder than expected. There were a lot of Cubans on that island and their local commander had long-planned for a defence of this island in case of a day like the one which came when the US Marines showed up. Caribbean Pirate envisioned a quick victory there, one which didn’t come. Later on, St. John and Virgin Gorda – two more islands in the chain – were due to be assaulted next but the St. Croix delay slowed everything down.

When the fighting stopped on April 11th, there were still Cubans holding out on St. Croix while the British Army was having a parade in Tortola’s Road Town. Caribbean Pirate was on its way to being a hugely-successful mission, more than it already was, but it was cut off mid-flow due to events elsewhere in the world far beyond the control or knowledge of the men fighting for these idyllic tropical islands.

Early April 1985: The Caribbean and Moscow

Within hours of the Soviets using their nuclear weapons against American submarines across over on the other side of the world, the United States responded. They struck against Soviet maritime assets in the Caribbean. Conventional warfare was already taking place here but this was suddenly given a nuclear dimension. A ‘limited’ attack was made near to the island of St. Kitts. The US Navy was authorised to use such weapons against the submarine that they were hunting there that had been eluding them for several days now. The frigates on the surface and the aircraft above were all given that permission to make attacks with such weapons. This came as a surprise to those American forces yet they were quick to take advantage. The enemy which they were hunting – a Victor class attack submarine – had led them on a dance for several days when it had been pursued for some distance away from near Puerto Rico and towards the Cuban-occupied St. Kitts. Anti-submarine work was never easy and required a lot of patience. Nuclear weapons though changed things as far more destructive power could be brought to bear to speed everything up and make killing a submarine a lot easier.

One of the P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft got the kill. It dropped several nuclear depth bombs into the water right where one of the helicopters from a frigate had a track on the submarine. The helicopter made a mad dash to escape despite assurances that the underwater explosions would have no effect upon the crew of the SH-2 Seasprite above: they weren’t about to take the chance of glowing in the dark in the future! In the hours afterwards, with that submarine destroyed and the threat from it thus gone, the US Navy made several attacks against St. Kitts with the frigates and their helicopters striking enemy shipping in the area. While doing so, they were focused upon that and had no idea of the fallout from the nuclear attack they took part in. It wasn’t just here in the Caribbean where both the Dutch and French were rather upset at the use of such weapons near their colonial island possessions but far away in Moscow.


Messages went back-and-forth over the Hot-Line. There was the nuclear attack made in the Sea of Okhotsk and then the retaliation in the Caribbean which formed the basis of exchanges made through the link between the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States. Accusations were made, answers demanded and promises of further action issued.

The Defence Council met to discuss what to do. General Secretary Vorotnikov and Defence Minister Romanov took the approach that the situation had come to a head here with the Americans who were now out of control. They had won ‘some victories’ of their own in North America and were emboldened by EDA ‘partial successes’ in Europe. They had chosen to make an attack against the strategic missile submarines in the Sea of Okhotsk to frighten the Soviet Union into doing nothing in response and then struck with a nuclear attack in the Caribbean. What was coming next? Nuclear strikes against further Soviet allies following on from their attack on Mexico? Nuclear attacks on the Soviet mainland to follow those in Soviet waters? There was no reasoning with this maniac John Glenn!

Grigory Vasilyevich Romanov – the Soviet Union’s fourth defence minister since the war had started – put forward a course of action for the Defence Council to consider. This was something that Vorotnikov told them all that he favoured too. This course of action was for the Soviet Union to use nuclear weapons once again as ‘pre-emptive self-defence’. There would be strikes made in both North America and Western Europe and done in the correct manner, Romanov assured his comrades that the Soviet Union would ‘suffer little’ in any response. Due to the late hour when the discussion took place, Vorotnikov asked the Defence Council members to sleep on it and they would meet again in the morning to vote on whether to follow this suggested course of action. He was anticipating that despite some objections, it would be voted through.

The reaction from his comrades, and those on the Politburo who met afterwards without the knowledge of him and Romanov, could be best summed up as ‘hell, no!’.

They all recalled what had happened to Leningrad… Tashkent, Chita, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok too. They remembered when that lone Chinese ICBM had been shot down at the last minute above Moscow. These people weren’t going to see any more incoming nuclear missiles against their country if they had any power to stop that. It wasn’t the supposed maniac Glenn out of control, it was Vorotnikov and Romanov who were. It was they who had consistently gone against the will of both the Defence Council and the Politburo in what they had recently done in the form of the war launched against Yugoslavia, the return to the use of chemical weapons and so much more. Now they wanted to do this? That wasn’t happening.

The Politburo took a vote and once that was done with, action was taken during the early hours. The KGB was responsible for the security of Vorotnikov and with their chairman in the form of Kryuchkov as being the nation’s new leader’s right-hand in this matter, the now-deposed former general secretary was quietly taken into custody after being awoken from his sleep. Once bound, gagged and hooded, he was bundled on an aircraft and flown out of Moscow long before the sun came up. The KGB had a holding site for him down in the Crimea and from there he would never be heard from again. Vorotnikov had taken ill unexpectedly, the story would later be, and he would need much rest and recuperation. Romanov wasn’t so lucky as to get a free vacation to the sunny Crimea. The KGB wasn’t fully responsible for his personal security and shared that duty with the Soviet Army, an organisation which was currently fractionised. While the General Staff was fully-on board with what the Politburo did, not all of the lower-levels were and one of those included the part loyal to Romanov. The KGB was forced to let the military clean their own house and that included dealing with Romanov. Gunshots were exchanged at his official residence between soldiers wearing the same uniform. The attackers won out quickly though it still wasn’t easy and gave Romanov the time to attempt to make a run for it. He had no chance though. He was shot down dead long before he would get a few feet from the war zone in the heart of Moscow which was his residence. There were other arrests and killings during the night though no one else of any real noteworthy significance joined Vorotnikov and Romanov. Talking people around had been the order of the day either by appealing to their common sense and patriotism or by the KGB making them understand that their futures and that of their families lay with following the new order being established.

The coup d’état was complete. It was far less bloodier than it could have been and afterwards no one would call it that. Vorotnikov’s health was their concern and as to Romanov… well… there had been traitors there trying to kill him and when aid had been sent to him, he’d been accidently caught up in the gunfire: such things happen.


Gromyko chaired the Politburo the next morning, taking Vorotnikov’s seat at the head of the table. He was supported by his closest supporters in the form of Kryuchkov, Aliyev and Tikhonov. While retaining the foreign minister’s brief for the time being, Gromyko was now also the general secretary and that was what mattered. The Communist Party’s higher ranks, the KGB and the Soviet Army were all behind him. With that, he was unchallengeable.

A plan of action was put to the Politburo – the Defence Council remained active yet powers had returned to the wider Politburo – by Gromyko. They voted unanimously to follow this once input came from many corners. This was collective decision undertaken, the first of those on such an important thing for a long time now. Following the show of hands, Gromyko then set about having the agreed message sent down the Hot-Line to the Americans as well as an identical one sent via other links to Paris.

The Soviet Union was asking that the Allies and the EDA both agree to a ceasefire pending armistice talks.

Gromyko stated when Soviet forces would cease firing and requested that the military forces of all of those countries within each alliance do so. He assured those reading the messages that there would be no betrayal of this ceasefire from the Soviet Union nor its allies too. He was in complete control here. The timing of the ceasefire was to be that of eight a.m. Moscow time on April 12th: nearly twenty-four hours ahead of when the messages were sent.

Gromyko waited for the Allies and the EDA to respond.



Mid-April 1985:

Mossad still had their man inside the highest ranks of the KGB. The spy for Israel – codenamed Hazelnut – didn’t have the access to Kryuchkov to give forewarning of what was coming with the change in leadership at the top in Moscow. Even if he had, his handlers didn’t have real-time access to him where they could just drop by for a chat at any moment. Furthermore, everything happened so fast too. Once it became clear that Gromyko was in-charge, Hazelnut was able to point to the direct hand that the KGB had in everything and was able to reveal the fate of Romanov too. As to Vorotnikov… he wouldn’t discover that information for many weeks. Immense pressure came upon him to provide his handlers with further information. They were under pressure from back home as Israel was being harried by the Americans. To ask too many questions and to look at too many documents would cost him his life though. Oh, in addition, it would also mean a complete loss of the information which he was supplying as well.

Still the agent was pushed. Israel itself wanted him to find out more because they would use what he could provide to leverage their relationship with the United States in both the immediate term and the future too. Hazelnut couldn’t find out what exactly was wanted in terms of the precise reason why the Soviets were pulling out of the war and how they were going to go about negotiating their position. He did manage to uncover other things while risking everything digging – such as discovering the double bluff that the KGB was playing with the Americans over a supposed defector who they called Peppermint – though not what was sought from those from abroad. Israel and the Americans both wanted a window into the inner thinking of the Soviet leadership as it sought to end the war. Neither would get that and thus the Americans played the game that they did without being able to read the other guy’s cards.

Sometimes, life was just fair like that.


Once the ceasefire offer was made, and ahead of the outcome of that, instructions came from Moscow for a lot of ‘housecleaning’ to be made worldwide. The Soviet Union needed to protect its interests in all the many forms that those were. This would result in the deaths of many people as well as certain acts of destruction and the physical burying of things so that they wouldn’t be found.

In the mountains of north-central Mexico, up in the Sierra Madre Oriental range, the Soviet’s Strategic Rocket Forces had their SS-20 Sabre missiles there. The road-mobile launchers and assorted support vehicles were not going to be heading home. Nuclear warheads were removed first before every single vehicle was sent tumbling over several steep cliffs from long winding roads above. The destruction caused was complete and to many of those watching, such sights were extremely satisfying to see. Who wouldn’t enjoy smashing complicated pieces of equipment in such a way? Helicopters had first flown away the warheads before they would later be taken by aircraft first south deeper into Central America and then, hopefully, eventually home. Elsewhere across the Western Hemisphere, other stocks of weapons of mass destruction were on the move. Nuclear, chemical and biological (the latter not used in this war but available to be) warheads and dispensers were taken away to hidden places in the rear areas all to be later taken back to the Soviet Union too. As was the case with those missiles destroyed in Mexico, the associated weaponry which went with these actual warheads themselves was destroyed in-place. Removing it was too difficult and there was no way that it was going to be left behind. Explosives were used where there were no step cliffs; elsewhere, bits and pieces were dumped in river estuaries or even the sea.

Firing squads were busy. Those involved in the waves of killing were all unaware of what was going on and had no idea of the bigger picture. Orders came for the urgent shootings to take place of all sorts of people throughout the Western Hemisphere but also at selected places elsewhere in the world too. These were people whom the Soviet Union didn’t want to see survive the outcome of the war for a variety of reasons. Taking them away was considered but that process was difficult and fraught with the danger of things going wrong. It was easier to shoot people because the dead can tell no tales. Where possible, the bodies of the dead were disposed of by burning them or burying them. The dead included (but wasn’t limited to) the entire group of the KGB-controlled Peace Committee in El Paso – all of those Americans there either after being kidnapped, tricked or just stupid where they had been fulfilling Soviet propaganda – and others such as Mexican nationals with close ties to the Soviets, operatives of friendly intelligence services co-opted to do Soviet bidding (this was in the main on occupied bits of West German and Austrian soil) and high-value POWs held who could reveal what they’d been forced to talk about while in captivity. Documents were burnt and destruction was done to audio & video recordings of GRU and KGB activities during the war. Things were missed during this all and mistakes were made. Nonetheless, the people aspects of this housecleaning was pretty damn effective.

As the shootings occurred, the frame-up began too. There was to be evidence left behind in some cases to point to these things being done at earlier times and also by others too: namely the Cubans, the Guatemalans, the Nicaraguans, the Mexicans and the East Germans (the latter in Europe). Where some Soviet personnel were supposedly identified in other actions, these people were all conveniently dead. Overall, this seemed like a good idea from the Soviets point of view. ‘It wasn’t us, it was them’ could have worked if it hadn’t been so thorough and complete. Anyone looking at all of the deaths and disappearances would have to be stupid to fall for what was presented before them. It was almost as if the GRU and the KGB were staffed by good people all concerned with not violating any of the rules of law while in comparison, those other organisations manned by their allies, all of which followed the Soviet lead on every other matter, decided to do such things all by themselves just in the manner that their big brothers would have. Only a fool would fall for all of this baloney…

Evacuations were made from certain places of key people who were far from Soviet shores. Not everyone could be pulled away to safety from possible captivity though. Shooting such people was an option considered yet not chosen. Instead, long-established procedures were followed to disguise the identities of such people. At other points in the war the Soviets had suffered reverses and lost people they didn’t want to: this time they were prepared for that. Identification papers and cover stories pre-issued were ordered to be used. All of a sudden, GRU and KGB officers, plus many military officers & technical personnel in specialist fields, vanished into the wind; there were suddenly a lot more ‘boring’ logistical staffers, artillerymen and admin personnel.

***

The new Soviet leadership sent it’s ceasefire offers to both the Americans and the French with the intention of having each negotiate those on behalf of their respective alliances. There had been some thinking, suggested by others on the Politburo, that there be further offers made to countries such as Britain, Japan and West Germany as well to break open both the Allies and the EDA. This was rejected. Maybe it would work out yet there was the concern that it could backfire too. The problem of dealing with the wishes of many other nations would thus be put on the United States and France to attend to rather than the Soviet Union. Let them deal with the petty worries of such countries, the Politburo decided, while we concentrate on the big picture.

That big picture was for the Soviet Union to bring two of the three the wars it was fighting to a close. The China War was nearly won and would continue, but the conflicts with the Allies and the EDA were lost. Vorotnikov and Romanov had refused to accept that and spoke only of ‘reverses’ suffered, all which they had intended to correct by the use of a massive strategic nuclear attack. The rest of the Politburo had realised the truth though in the fact that those supposed reverses were real defeats.


The Americans were on their way to liberating the last bits of their own nation and were also already inside Mexico after destroying much of the rest of that country in that massive nuclear strike last month.

The Allies had won effective control of the North Atlantic.

The EDA had eliminated the Soviet presence in Sweden, stopped the invasions of West Germany & Austria cold and joined with the Yugoslavians to provide Moscow with what could only become a far-bigger war in the Balkans.

Into that fight in Western Europe had come the British, returning to the Continent in strength after politics had forced them out beforehand; the Americans would arrive before the year was out too once they were done in the Western Hemisphere.

The Mediterranean was a graveyard for Soviet warships; nearby, the dictators of the Middle East were turning their backs on Moscow.

South Korea had been ridden of both North Korean and Soviet forces; Japan had defended itself and the Pacific was an Allied lake.

All of that had occurred already and things were only going to get worse everywhere the Soviet Union was fighting both alliances. At home the economy was on the brink of collapse now and there were absences at a huge scale among the country’s military forces were reservists openly defied their mobilisation orders. Protests, mutinies and rebellions were surely next. To add to all of this, nuclear exchanges had taken place with the Americans. The British and the French had their own nuclear arsenals cocked and loaded, all with Soviet targets locked-in.

If it wasn’t nuclear war that would bring them all down, then it would be troubles at home soon enough and a loss of their ‘core Empire’ cough fraternal allies cough in the form of Eastern Europe and Iran & Afghanistan along with losing everything they had just won in China. If that meant the loss of disposable allies elsewhere in the world, then so be in. The humiliation would have to be suffered for the loss of such foreign wars yet the case would be made domestically and across the alliances which they would retain that they might not have won but they hadn’t lost either. That all could only be achieved if these conflicts with the Allies and the EDA were brought to a close now.

A ceasefire followed by an armistice was therefore what the Politburo had decided to see done. They told the Americans and the French when Soviet and Soviet-led forces would stop fighting and invited them to have their forces stand down as well. Following the ceasefire, there would be a retention of the right for self-defence yet no more conflict was sought. What was asked for beyond that was for talks to take place to turn the ceasefire into something secure in terms of no more fighting, that being an armistice. Mention was made of seeing to it that prisoners would be exchanged, the civilians would be given aid and there could be a stand down from the ‘dangers’ of further nuclear conflict.

This was all put on the table in two identical messages to both New York and Paris. There was no talk though of any form of surrender or any upcoming peace agreements in those. However, the Politburo was thinking of such things for the future. Many of their military forces aboard, along with those of their allies which they would have to force into it, would eventually have to surrender: hence those killings and suchlike. Moscow understood that the two alliances in the West would try to impose their will on the Soviet Union in response to domestic politics yet believed that these would be abandoned eventually. A strategy had been agreed where supposed red lines would be drawn in talks with the Allies and the EDA and then those would be backed away from in the form of concessions made: in return, reasonable things would be asked for across the table. Soviet diplomats would negotiate with the Allies and the EDA from a position of strength, turning each bloc – not the individual parts of each – against each other if necessary. They could always play upon wartime divisions between the two of them should the situation call for that.


Responses came to the ceasefire offers made.

The Americans provided the Soviets with far more difficulties than the French did. The Allies spoke of immediate Soviet withdrawals from occupied territories and surrenders in others after any ceasefire would take place. All parts of occupied American soil, Belize, Caribbean islands belonging to Britain & the United States, the Azores, Iceland and northern Norway were all at once to be handed over to them with Soviet and Soviet-allied forces inside surrendering along with all of their equipment too. Soviet forces were also to leave Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, South Yemen, Vietnam and North Korea as well as to retreat from the world’s oceans. Demands were made for POWs held to be at once handed over included those that the Allies said were held on other territory: i.e. on Cuba, inside Eastern Europe and within the Soviet Union too. This was the first response which came. Moscow replied asking for confirmation that the Allies were going to respect the ceasefire which they had called without commenting on these demands which came. The Americans simply repeated themselves. Such an impasse was broken by Gromyko having an address to Glenn made over the Hot-Line where he asked him whether keeping fighting when the nuclear situation was so tense was worthwhile for either of them? Couldn’t they just stop fighting? He said that these matters which the Allies demanded could and would be addressed but only once the ceasefire had come into place. Armistice talks could begin straight away afterwards, at a time and venue of the American’s choosing… but the ceasefire had to come first. There was a pause in communications coming back. Several hours passed. The Americans were clearly talking to their allies. Finally, there came a message confirming that the Allies would follow the Soviets into a ceasefire agreement. Glenn signed off that message by stating that there was going to be no withdrawal from those conditions – and they were far from exclusive too – when it came to armistice talks though.

Paris did the same as the United States did in at once responding to Soviet entrees with a long list of demands. They wanted surrenders of forces and withdrawals of others. This covered Bornholm, bits of West Germany, Austria and Yugoslavia as priorities in addition to Crete, Finland and the Caribbean as well. Furthermore, the Western Europeans spoke of handing over named people, paying financial reparations and their vision of a future for Eastern Europe: with the latter, there was quite the demand for the future of the two Germanies that they made there. The EDA put the Allies to shame in having a larger list of immediate, on-hand demands ready to go with urgent expediency! Along with all of this, the French stated that yes, they were open to armistice talks. They would decide when & where and they would inform the Soviet Union of the details of those once the ceasefire was shown to be working.

The ceasefire was firmly agreed and there was general agreement on opening armistice talks afterwards. Messages from both sides went out to their respective forces in the field that a cessation of fighting would commence. Caveats to those were sent where self-defence was authorised and how to approach blatant violations of a ceasefire. Then the moment came, at different times around the world, yet all at the same time too.

The fighting was over.

Now came the hard part: each side making sure that it wasn’t going to restart while also getting everything that they wanted from the fallout of the wars which they had taken part in.