Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

Imagine an air drop to a cutoff Russian unit. And instead of the expected ammuniction, they get a church droped instead as a logistics officer srews up. www.facebook.com/100004482674745/videos/1075097279316351/UzpfSTEwMDAwMzI2NzQ5ODExODoyMDg4MDcwNDA0NjQ1MTg5/

Eighty–Two

The Battle for Havdrup had been followed by victory too at Koge on the coast. Russian forces on Zealand were limited now to the Danish capital. Copenhagen remained a battlefield inside and also on its outskirts. It could have been the scene of fighting for another week at least – in the worse-case NATO estimates – yet it was brought to a close today, the fifth day of fighting here. Russia’s Baltic Fleet marines, its elite soldiers with the remains of the 336th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade left alive and dug-in, gave up the fight.

NATO won the Battle of Copenhagen.

They did so because the Russians ran out of ammunition. They didn’t have missiles for their air defence systems. They didn’t have shells for the heavy guns which they’d brought ashore. They didn’t have rounds for the cannons on their tanks nor infantry fighting vehicles. Eventually too, they didn’t have bullets for their machine guns nor rifles. It was this that doomed them. NATO intelligence-gathering had missed this and thus made that wildly-optimistic estimate of how long the 336th Guards could hold on, even when surrounded here and without support, because they believed that the Russians had brought enough ammunition with them to fight a long battle. That was true, they had come to Copenhagen with plenty, yet NATO air and naval interdiction against aircraft and shipping, either when those were on their way or just arriving, meant that so much was lost because it could be disrupted. Prisoners taken at the frontlines by NATO troops hadn’t spoken of a munitions shortage until the very last day because they were unaware of it. Other Russian marines had fired their weapons off like they had huge stocks of ammunition to depend upon. No one in the rear told those at the front everything was about to run out. Only at the very end did those fighting and dying for this distant city so far from the Rodina realise that they had been deceived. They ran out of ammunition, understood that they were stuffed and so the whole Russian position collapsed like a house of cards.

Most of the brigade command staff were dead. That morning, RAF Tornado strike-bombers used Paveway laser-guided bombs to wipe out the command post for the 336th Guards’ HQ. Signals intelligence had led the effort to locate such a place and the targeting up-close had been done by Danish special forces inside the city. Eight 2000lb bombs – the jets were flying from Aalborg Air Base on Jutland and therefore could carry a heavy load – slammed perfectly into the targets after the British aircraft had flown over Copenhagen with little enemy anti-air interference and a complete absence of any Russian fighters. Many NATO aircraft were doing the same where they were able to act almost unmolested in the skies now. The thinking was that the Russian air defences had taken a pounding and while there may not be that many SAMs left, the Russians would be keeping some back. Another pair of Tornados had flown alongside those carrying the bombs and had come with several ALARM anti-radar missiles plus a lone Brimstone air-to-ground missile each as well to attack those suddenly absent air defences. This early sign that the last of the enemy anti-air cover was gone was still being considered as the day wore on and the surrenders happened. With those command staff dead, including the brigade commander, when it came down to it, it was lower-grade Russian officers who surrendered throughout the day: battalion and company commanders rather than anyone senior. They witnessed others doing the same thing and took the plunge into the unknown by having themselves and their men enter NATO captivity. British, Danish, French and German troops all took surrenders in and around Copenhagen. Their men were moving into the city, slowly at first, but soon enough with greater speed as the opposition gave in. Rounding up prisoners came alongside securing equipment and sites which the Russians had been using during their time here. There were many wounded enemy personnel too attend to as well.

The 16th Air Assault Brigade moved in from the southwest, with the British coming up from the scenes of their recent victories at Havdrup and Koge. The Franco-German Brigade struck from the western side and in from the north the Danish 1st Infantry Brigade pushed in. They had a more than just that three-to-one advantage over the Russians due to their significant numerical strength and the lower numbers of Russians left alive: all told it was more than six-to-one in the end. Those Danes with a detachment of their Jægerkorpset who’d guided in that bomb attack earlier in the day weren’t the only special forces in the city who met with the incoming troops to direct them to where they would find the Russians. Danish Home Guard soldiers including their own part-time commandos were present while both the SAS and French special forces were inside as well. Their numbers weren’t that great and they hadn’t had an easy time inside the urban environment which they’d entered, but they were now being relieved by the arrival of this large number of friendly troops. A few groups of Naval Infantry did fight on rather than surrender when the majority of their comrades were. This was a foolish mistake. The whole position of the 336th Guards had collapsed and to continue to fight was a doomed effort. Both the Danes and the Germans came up against these efforts while the British and French met just enemy forces who wanted to surrender. However, for the British, 2 PARA especially, they had a few unfortunate and fatal encounters when liberating the city. Danish ‘volunteers’ – sometimes patriots, other times criminals – who’d been active in the past few days, getting weapons by picking up dropped ones or ambushing lone Russian marines to take theirs, fired on the Paras entering the city. These were cases of mistaken identity in the majority of cases though in others, those shooting at these British soldiers were actually those who 2 PARA aimed to stop from killing surrendered Russians. The Paras saved the lives of those Russians, losing their own and killing Danish civilians in the process.

The mass surrender of the Russians hadn’t been anticipated. When it occurred, the NATO troops took those prisoners but also continued with their assigned mission as well. For the final offensive, one meant to be far slower, each of the trio of attacking brigades had been tasked an operational area of the city. They had plenty of maps, guides ahead of them in the form of those special forces teams as well as helicopter support. The latter was used by each to move men forward ahead of the ground columns. A couple of RAF helicopters, Merlins and Chinooks, were used to put Gurkhas onto Amager Island. This sat southeast of the historic heart of Copenhagen and was one of the areas – alongside the port district – where a final stand had been expected to be made some time from now. The Gurkhas hit several landing sites on the island told that they wouldn’t have a fight but hyped-up for one though. They were disappointed. At the airport they just found Russians willing to drop their rifles and throw their hands up. It seemed that every man here was wounded in some way or another. Copenhagen’s airport had been an initial entry point for the 336th Guards’ and then been bombarded from above afterwards in NATO air strikes. Its runways were shut and almost every building hit. There were aircraft wrecks everywhere and many unburied bodies of the dead covered in flies & maggots. As to the Danes, they moved into that central historic region of their capital and focused on getting men into important sites. These were places such as the Amalienborg & Christiansborg Palaces as well as the Kastellet Fortress and ministerial buildings. Soldiers dropped off by helicopters swept through them as they were retaken. There was gunfire at the Amalienborg. There were actually four palaces here, all built around a central square. This was the official residence of the Danish monarch yet Queen Margrethe hadn’t been in residence the morning of the invasion – she and much of her family were at the royal’s summer retreat off in Jutland – but the company of Royal Life Guards had been here. The bodies of those men, dumped in a shallow grave and yet to be covered up, were discovered by the liberating troops and they shot several Russian POWs in fury: one war crime was thus followed by another. The Christiansborg and the Kastellet were just as important to the Danes as their royal palace was. The former was the seat of the Danish Parliament as well as the location of the prime minister’s office; the latter was used as a major base for military-related intelligence services and the country’s military chief of staff. Their NATO allies were concerned at how much attention the Danes paid to such places when there was so much else to do in Copenhagen, but these places were important in Danish eyes.

Elsewhere in the city, buildings had been burnt down or were still alight. There had been looting and violence. Russian activities against the civilian population had been minimal unless they came under attack. Whole areas of the city hadn’t really seen the presence of the Russians. There were hardly that many men who’d come to Copenhagen: the immediate reinforcement for the 336th Guards in the form of a regiment of paratroopers to be flown into the airport from their St. Petersburg airhead had seen that called off when NATO quickly won control of Danish skies. Complete occupation of the city would have been impossible though even with those men. Copenhagen was large and the majority of the fighting men were either needed at the frontlines or to control the transport routes to them. All throughout the city, there were people in need. The hospitals were full of people wounded when caught in the cross-fire of fighting or who’d been hurt in violence undertaken by criminals. Many of those criminals weren’t what might be expected. They were ordinary people who’d seen Copenhagen occupied by foreign soldiers and then fought over while in the meantime they had no access to the everyday essentials like power, telecommunications, food and water. They’d taken things that didn’t belong to them. Others had tried to stop them. The state that so many people were in after just five days would leave NATO wondering about the fate of civilians caught up behind the lines in Norway, the Baltic States and Poland too.

Thousands of POWs fell into NATO hands. They had fighting men as well as supporting troops in their custody. Certain important captives were separated from others – officers and those in intelligence fields – yet there was a lot of attempts at hiding of identities going on among them. This was especially true of Russian Spetsnaz. NATO knew they were there as these men had ‘opened the gates’ into Copenhagen by taking the airport and securing port facilities when the 336th Guards showed up early on that Saturday morning. A few, just a few, had already been captured. Others were certain to be claiming to be just poor marine riflemen and disguised as such. Every single one of them was sought. It was the same with GRU personnel among the POWs. Like the Spetsnaz, teams of military intelligence officers had been especially active during the opening attack and throughout that first morning when the Russians were in Copenhagen. They’d been arresting people and busy throughout vital national infrastructure collecting documents as well as computer servers. Such people were hunted down by officers from the Danish intelligence services – FE and PET – who sent men of theirs to gather what information that they could on several important matters but especially on what NATO had deemed ‘Outward Flight Eleven’.


Russian transport aircraft had come in and gone out of Copenhagen Airport on the war’s first day at a rapid rate. This was before devastating fire power had been unleashed there to shut down flight operations. As expected, when the British Gurkhas got to the airport, they found many captives who’d been taken by the Russians still detained there. The wait for the airport to be reopened had been a long and doomed one. These captives were high-ranking prisoners from both military and civilian fields who should have been flown out but NATO action stopped that. A GRU captain surrendered himself (not disguising his identity as so many of his comrades were trying to do) along with almost sixty prisoners on the condition of good treatment… he was expecting that promised to be honoured yet would be surely disappointed. The majority of these now-freed captives were Danes but others were from further NATO countries. They’d been brought here to be taken off to Russia like those who’d left on Flight 11.

There had been a count by a NATO AWACS aircraft of the outgoing flights and thus Flight 11, believed to be a Russian Naval Aviation Antonov-26, had been given that numerical designator. It had come into Copenhagen either laden with men, equipment or stores before then leaving with a cargo of prisoners just after midday. Later intelligence from decoded signals intercepts and also human intelligence had pointed to Flight 11 containing a who’s-who of important figures nabbed straight away by the GRU to be taken from Copenhagen. They’d gone to these people’s residences in the early hours of the morning ahead of the sudden invasion to seize them and then rushed them off to the airport once the fighting started. The aircraft had been loaded with politicians, royals, diplomats and high-level military officers snatched away from Denmark. Several ministers and opposition figures were on that aircraft as well as ambassadors taken too. There were selected members of the Royal Family joining them alongside generals & admirals. The GRU had missed many people that they were after, enough to load a second aircraft, but got this first batch out. The An-26 had climbed out of the airport and flown away eastwards.

NATO had lost track of the aircraft not long after lift-off. The Danes were eager to know where it had gone but so too were their allies due to the other people aboard including both the American and German ambassadors in Copenhagen, plus the CIA chief-of-Station in the Danish capital, all of whom had been taken from their beds as well in violent actions. That GRU captain told his captors that the aircraft had been shot down. By who? By a NATO fighter out over the Baltic. How did he know that? He said he was told that and named the senior officer – someone who was ‘conveniently’ dead – who informed him of that. This questioning, and the lack of the belief shown by his interrogators, was where this POW started to realise the error of his ways in giving himself up so easily like he had instead of trying a different method of ensuring his future. Hindsight was a wonderful thing though.

Had the truth about Flight 11 been told? NATO sought to find out… though that wasn’t going to be easy.

Their ships were heading into the Baltic like that missing aircraft had. When NATO moved soldiers in Copenhagen and filled the skies above with aircraft & helicopters, several warships had been offshore within the Øresund shelling targets on land. Targeting for them was done by some of those special forces teams and they had done well. There had also been the stopping of several attempts by Russian forces to escape at this late stage. A couple of small vessels, civilian craft taken by fleeing Russians, had been halted before they could either run to Sweden or even further. Violence had been used in this yet also just words to convince those attempting to get away that it was either a choice of surrender or death and that choice needed to be made right now. One vessel which didn’t stop was a massive hovercraft. This was the RFS Mordoviya, a Russian Baltic Fleet Zubr-class assault hovercraft which had taken part in the initial assault into Copenhagen while laden with riflemen and armoured vehicles. It had been hit on the war’s first day in an air strike and seemingly-abandoned while run around on a beach off Copenhagen. The hovercraft remained on a target list for further attention yet kept on being lowered down when other more-important targets cropped up. It was thought useless anyway. That had been a deception: the Mordoviya was smashed up but was still capable. Out the Mordoviya went, racing away from Copenhagen and bouncing over the water at fifty knots. The daring escape might have worked due to the speed but no hovercraft was faster than NATO air cover. A Super Lynx-88 flying from the German frigate FGS Bayern, one of those which as part of NATO’s Surface Action Group in the Baltic had so smashed apart the Russian Baltic Fleet, slammed two Sea Skua missiles into the Mordoviya. Though the Germans didn’t know it, they’d killed many Russian intelligence personnel aboard from both the GRU & SVR who had sought this means of escape.

That Surface Action Group was at the bottom end of the Øresund and contained three of the original five NATO warships which it had started the war with. They were now being reinforced by many more. The Russians hadn’t mined the waters of the Øresund and ahead of the series of surrenders, NATO intelligence had finally been able to confirm that all of the Russian anti-ship missile launchers which they’d brought with them to Copenhagen to operate from land, and thus aid in the failed effort to close the Danish Straits, had been knocked out. There had been a pair of these Bal systems: towed trailers for coastal missiles as well as radars and command vans. One system had been knocked out in an air strike and the second one confirmed destroyed by a Danish commando frogman team. The Danish Straits were open to NATO use now with no land-based interference alongside them. The occupied Baltic states and also the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, all behind the frontlines of fighting in Poland, were away to the east. Between this open access for NATO and the Russians that was, there was what was left of the Baltic Fleet: a second battle would be coming there.

The Russian invasion of Copenhagen will be seen as the dumbest move since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor--and it wasted units that could have been used elsewhere, IMO...

Good updates, and waiting for more...

Eighty-Three

Beyond those initial wave of attacks on the first night of the war, the infamous Spetsnaz were still out there. During that first day, the GRU’s special operations units had achieved far more success than could possibly have been expected from them. Yet, casualties for the Spetsnaz units which had infiltrated North America and Western Europe were extremely heavy, and by now the vast majority of those men and women had either been killed or imprisoned, with a very small number still being on the run including the team in Washington DC which had murdered the American President. Despite these heavy losses, Russia expected more of its elite commandos. There were three Spetsnaz brigades which had been sent into the Baltic States & Poland, with a few going to Norway & Copenhagen, either on the eve of war or right when the fighting had been initiated. The term Spetsnaz in itself was an umbrella term, meaning ‘soldier of a special purpose’, and by some definitions could include members of radio-electronic units and similar types of unconventional formations. The majority of the time, however, the word itself was used to specifically describe Russian commando forces. Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, was in charge of these small units of elite soldiers, which belonged to the 2nd, 3rd & 16th Spetsnaz Brigades.

Operating in squad or platoon-sized units, the Spetsnaz who were out in Poland had orders to act independently and target NATO logistical and command & control areas. This task was performed excellently with the Spetsnaz causing many casualties and equipment losses amongst NATO rear-areas. The Russians had no external support given to them and were armed only with what they could carry. There were casualties and losses sometimes due to incompetence and carelessness and other times due to NATO troops being more on guard or just because of rotten luck. These missions rarely extended farther west than Poland. The commandos were told that they were to remain behind NATO lines for the duration of the fighting; they were told that Russian ground forces with the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 20th Guards Army would eventually roll right over enemy opposition, already in chaos due to the work of the GRU’s commandos, and link up with said commandos.

The more effective the Spetsnaz were in their task, which was technically dubbed as ‘long range reconnaissance’, the less time it would take for the ground forces to overwhelm NATO defences. Since the beginning of the war, these units had been operating almost entirely without radio contact in order to avoid giving away their positions, instead relying on educated guesses as to the locations of their probably targets given to them pre-war by intelligence officers. Eastern Poland was crawling with NATO troops and it was almost impossible to miss a suitable target if one was looking.

Field headquarters at the battalion, brigade and division level were a favourite target for the Spetsnaz. Some Russian commando teams had probably located NATO corps headquarters at some point, but such areas as those, if located, were deemed as too well-defended by Spetsnaz commanders for an attack to be made. The Poles had faced one of these attacks on the first night of the war against their 16th Mechanised Division; it had been repulsed and the Spetsnaz assault team had fled, but temporary chaos had been wreaked amongst the division staff. Similarly, one the headquarters of one of the battlegroups with the British 1st Armoured Division had been struck with far more success, leaving with the battalion commander and his executive officer dead and much communications equipment destroyed or damaged. Several attempts were made to blow the bridges across the Vistula River by Spetsnaz commandos, with varying degrees of success. At two of the bridges, located within Warsaw, the Spetsnaz were intercepted and either killed or captured by Polish GROM, but another bridge in Northern Poland was destroyed, denying its use to NATO as the Alliance’s logistical situation continued to deteriorate further. Logistical columns themselves were hit; men from the Royal Logistics Corps moving ammunition by truck up to the 1st Armoured Division had fallen victim to an ambush in which their convoy had been wiped out, with the munitions being transported either blown up or stolen. A Dutch support unit had fought its way out of a similar ambush with heavy casualties. Another command centre was hit, that of the 4th Infantry Division’s 2nd BCT. Havoc was caused once again and even though the attackers failed to kill the brigade commander they caused enough damage to slow the brigade’s deployment by some hours. One place where the Spetsnaz failed was when a small team, one consisting of less than a dozen men, attempted to cause casualties amongst the retreating US 3rd Infantry Division, but instead faced a hasty counterattack organised by a US Army Captain which saw the attacking Russian team wiped out.

These incidents were a few of dozens which took place all across the Polish countryside throughout the first week of war. The numbers of Spetsnaz slowly dwindled as teams were rendered combat ineffective after several costly engagements or as they were directly hunted down and exterminated; the Polish Land Forces’ Teir-1 unit known as GROM was dedicated to this mission, with support from the British Territorial Army’s 23rd SAS Regiment. There were over a hundred separate attacks launched in total, with a roughly equal rate of success and failure. Whatever the outcome of the war, it would leave the Russian Armed Forces in a terrible shape, with so much of its equipment destroyed and many members of vaunted commando and airborne units lying dead in the fields of Europe and elsewhere.



NATO had its own Special Forces units to work with. Operating both in the Baltic States and Poland, US Army Green Berets with the 10th Special Forces Group had lain in wait along those borders, allowing themselves to he passed by Russian forces. Polish Komandosów had done the same thing, as had a very small number of teams with the British 22nd SAS. The stay-behind teams began coming out of their foxholes and hideouts on August 8th, with the intention of causing similar havoc behind Russian lines. Snipers, ambushes, mines, and the direction of airstrikes were all utilised to slow down the advancing Russian and Belarusian forces. Where chaos could be sewn into the ranks of the enemy, the stay-behind teams did so. Those units were, like the Spetsnaz teams, working independently from higher command, mostly to avoid being tracked through their own radio transmissions. SOCEUR had not even been stood-up as a formation when these small groups of men had first gone into battle.

There were many more SOF units which reported to Maj.-General Thomas’ new command at Minsk-Mazowiecki Airbase. Newly-arrived Special Forces units from across Europe were tasked with infiltrating the occupied Baltic States and gaining entry into Belarus as well. The primary force with the responsibility of carrying out this task would be the 10th Special Forces Group. Although many of its men had already gone into the fight as stay-behinds, there were hundreds more Green Berets sitting around Poland waiting to be assigned a task. More Green Berets were already on their way to Europe to carry out missions which had not yet even been planned; National Guardsmen from the 19th & 20th Special Forces Groups, from Alabama and Georgia respectively, were being flown to Poland, and a battalion had been detached from the active-duty 3rd Special Forces Group in Africa to support European operations. US naval commandos from SEAL Team Eight were also available to Thomas. Those SEALs and Green Berets were supported by US Air Force special operations squadrons operating aircraft such as the MV-22 & MC-130J. Helicopters were also available in the form of those flown by the US Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Army Rangers with the 1st & 3rd Battalions of the 75th Ranger Regiment had been sent to Europe to carry out supporting missions too.

The British had their own commandos out there with the 22nd SAS. Two full squadrons of those elite soldiers had been sent to Poland in the past week. Like with the American Green Berets, there were some SAS men already out behind the lines, but more were needed to be sent back far deeper into enemy territory. The SBS was planning to send some of its men into Estonia or perhaps even to insert them along the coast of Russia (not even other NATO countries new about the DEVGRU team that had gone into Russia proper to identify targets for the B-2s). The SBS were haunted by the loss of nearly an entire troop of its men in saving the lives of several Latvian government figures, but this was no time for personal emotions or the potential public outcry if such a disaster were to come to light too soon. The Royal Marines set about planning to send their own commandos into action in the Baltic States along with the SAS as well as up in Norway. The British Army also had troops to support its Tier-1 elements. The recently-formed Special Reconnaissance Regiment was out there in Poland, and so too was the Special Forces Support Group, Britain’s answer to the 75th Ranger Regiment.

There were German soldiers under the command of the Kommando Spezialkräfte or KSK; Frenchmen from their 13th Parachute Dragoon Regiment; Belgians from the Special Forces Group, and Dutch troops with the Korps Commandotroepen. Elite troops from Spain, Portugal, Romania, Bulgaria, Canada and the Czech Republic would be joining in that fight sooner rather than later as well. All of them were highly-trained soldiers and most had been to Afghanistan or Iraq before. They were no strangers to violence but they would be fighting a very different war any that they had served in before now. In fact, while in Belarus, many of those soldiers would find themselves playing the very same role of the forces that they had themselves been fighting against in the Middle East.

Several days ago, on August 9th, Thomas had made his move when he had chosen to send Navy SEALs into Lithuania by submarine to begin reconnaissance missions, and on the same night, several more Green Beret Alpha Teams had been parachuted both into Lithuania and into Latvia. Throughout the next several days, hundreds more commandos would be sent into the Baltic States and Belarus. These insertions were mainly done through MC-130Js as well as RAF C-130s from No.47 Squadron. Green Berets, KSK, British & French SAS and Belgian & Dutch commandos all descended either into Belarus or into Russian-occupied territory. Sometimes they flown in by helicopters, often the same aircraft that were launching CSAR missions, but the majority of the time SOF unit commanders preferred to parachute in, with their Hercules’s being shielded by hundreds of other warplanes going in as part of Operation Eclipse.

There was no shortage of missions to go around. Out in the Baltic States, Green Berets there were working with local resistance forces. Sometimes these were military units which had disbanded as all hope for their homeland was lost and then gone underground, while on other occasions the Green Berets were working with civilians who had taken up arms during or after the invasion and banded together to begin fighting back. Turning these local troops, especially in the latter cases, into fighting units would be a tough and lengthy job, but it was more than possible and there was a huge amount of support amongst the native populations. Other units, including other teams of Green Berets, operated independently. One Alpha Team in Belarus was able to call in an airstrike on a bridge over the Pripyat River, catching a whole company of Russian troops on the bridge as the Mark-84s did their terrible best. More men from the 10th SFG successfully attacked a Russian troop marshalling area, causing heavy losses with Javelin missiles and light machineguns before pulling back before the enemy could organise a response. Another unit, an eight-man SAS patrol, managed to sneak up to several parked Belarusian T-72s after silently dispatching the sentries (this was a particularly nasty job, done with knives rather than firearms) and then destroy over a platoon’s worth of vehicles with plastic explosives before ambushing the reaction force sent to deal with them and then disappearing into the night. Dutch commandos shot down a pair of massive Mi-26 Halo transport helicopters with shoulder-launched SAMs, denying a whole days-worth of supplies to a battalion from the 98th Guards Airborne Division as it fought with the British in Northern Poland.

With those success stories, there were always going to be failures too. Casualties amongst SOF units were extraordinarily high. In some areas of Belarus, it had been expected that dissenters could be raised to fight a guerrilla war against the pro-Russian Lukashenko regime, but when NATO Special Forces arrived they would an overwhelmingly hostile population. Any compromise by the locals would mean a unit’s position being reported to enemy troops and being so far behind Russian lines there was little chance of a successful escape for any troops unfortunate enough to be caught up there.

This shadowy, unseen side of the war would be just as brutal, if not more so, than any other.

Second that, great work forcon

Eighty–Four

Tromsø was evacuated and Operation Atlas came to an end. The whole thing was an unmitigated disaster, particularly for the British Armed Forces who’d led the whole mission. The Russians would afterwards take control of Tromsø as they completed what they had started and linked up their once-separate forces throughout Northern Norway together using Tromsø as the lynchpin of that that. That evacuation was one which was contested.

Russian aircraft, warships and submarines were all involved in making sure that NATO forces didn’t get away without leaving many of their own behind, dead or prisoner. Their Naval Infantry was unable to interfere due to being stuck on land on the wrong side of the Tromsøysundet Strait and watching helplessly as a Royal Engineers demolition team caused grave damage to both the Tromsø Brigade and the Tromsøysund Tunnel too. Neither of those fixed transport connections were wholly destroyed (despite everything, the Norwegians wouldn’t see that done) but they were left unusable for the time being. Where the Russians could get involved with their other available forces they did so though. Clashes occurred all over the place, near to Tromsø and far, between the opposing sides. NATO was trying to get away and though the Russians wanted them gone, they smashed them up as much as possible while doing so. Several ships were hit and so too were aircraft and helicopters involved in pulling out men as well as the – thankfully small – amount of equipment and supplies already brought in. This was countered with defensive actions and then also preemptive offensive strikes as well. It was a mess. The British and Dutch marines with the 3rd Commando Brigade got away. That was what was important. There were many Norwegians who came with them – yet others who wanted to stay and fight on regardless of the horrible strategic situation because this was their country after all – and they would all therefore be able to fight another day. That fight would certainly be one where rather than acting independent, next time they would fight under the command of the Americans. Certain air cover would be present then, not the promise of that which turned out to be fatally over optimistic in the face of enemy action. There would be better planning too and risks such as charging forward as done wouldn’t be repeated. Tromsø could have been another triumph like Copenhagen had been… if only luck had favoured Britain here. Prime Minister Cameron and Foreign Secretary Hague were both briefed on events pertaining to the evacuation ahead of each of them leaving London for a trip to the United States for the upcoming funerals of Obama and Clinton: the two of them well understood the humiliation their country had suffered.

The escape saw the loss of several NATO ships. Two Norwegian frigates went down – the HNoMS Fridtjof Nansen and the HNoMS Roald Amundsen – while another, the HNoMS Helge Ingstad came away badly shot-up. Canada, Germany and Spain each had sent a warship (a frigate apiece) to join a NATO naval force off Norway before the war and they linked-up with the vessels of their allies covering the withdrawal from Tromsø. HMCS Toronto and SPS Canarias escaped destruction or major damage but the FGS Hessen went down long with most of her crew of German sailors far from home. There was a US Navy destroyer, USS Bainbridge, which came up from the south to take part in the engagements against Russian naval forces. This missile-destroyer, full of both SAMs and also Tomahawk cruise missiles, made an excellent impact before she was unfortunately torpedoed by the same submarine which sunk the Roald Amundsen; the majority of the American sailors were rescued though. The British and Dutch had many naval vessels involved in the evacuation from Tromsø and also covering that against attacks coming from Russian forces deployed to stop that. HNLMS De Ruyter – killer of two Su-33s the day before – got another pair of aircraft where she eliminated a flight of Su-24s with SAMs making a bomb-run as her successful deployment continued. There was a missile strike which hit HNLMS Evertsen though and this caused her much damage but she did survive; the frigate next to her, HNLMS Van Speijk, was blown apart. The Dutch amphibious ship HNLMS Johan de Witt had already been hit several days ago and was on its way to Narvik and thus out of the firing line: the loss of this ship would have been a disaster as she was full of Dutch marines yet to be gotten off plus also many casualties aboard. HMS Manchester and HMS Richmond, two important Royal Navy warships, were lost as a result of the impact of missiles slamming into them and exploding: the loss of life aboard the Manchester was especially high. HMS Cumberland had been hit the other day and avoided another during the evacuation and she was able to engage most of the other anti-ship missiles lancing towards a trio of amphibious ships with her own Sea Wolf SAMs. HMS Ocean was already gone (off with the Johan de Witt) but the smashed-up HMS Albion and the undamaged RFA Lyme Bay & RFA Cardigan Bay were taking out British, Dutch and Norwegian forces alongside Norwegian civilian vessels impressed into service for this too. Cardigan Bay was only hit by one Russian missile and there was hope first that she could be saved. However, the fire aboard spread and there just wasn’t the time. Those who could be gotten off her were yet too many others were left behind. This difficult decision had to be made due to the seemingly-ceaseless Russian attacks.

The naval losses with sinkings and damage done to NATO ships occurred within the fjord known as the Malangen and also the ocean-facing entrance to that waterway. Tromsø was away to the northeast. Russian ships from where missiles were launched from weren’t around Tromsø itself; this was the same with Russian aircraft as they weren’t flying from the airport on that island nor anywhere close. This was a distant fight in that respect with them being far away from where they were attacking. The Russian battle fleet, with an aircraft carrier and a battlecruiser at the heart of it, was still rather close to occupied portions of Norway, just not Tromsø. Many NATO submarines were at sea including those of the US Navy eager to get revenge for the loss of their own carrier. The Russian Northern Fleet chose to stay close to land. In doing so they risked Norwegian attacks from both littoral missile boats and coastal submarines – these Norwegians, especially those on the Skjold-class fast attack boats, were far from friendly forces – but this was thought the safest thing to do for the time being until bases inside Norway were home to air cover for them. Most Russian aircraft flying, apart from the dwindling number of Su-33s aboard their carrier, were based back in the Kola Peninsula. When the Bainbridge had fired off her Tomahawks in the direction of the Russians, those missiles didn’t have anti-ship warheads like they would have had had this been a Cold War era engagement. Instead, the warheads were fitted with anti-runway warheads and hit several of those captured Norwegian facilities that the Russian were setting themselves up at: NATO intelligence believed they were already being used instead of being covered with engineers. Alta, Banak and Hammerfest were each hit in this strike and this would cause major delays to Russian plans for them (even Alta which they’d hit with a fuel-air bomb before they took it). A couple of smaller Russian warships were hit by Norwegian missile boats and one of their submarines slammed a torpedo into the destroyer RFS Admiral Kharlamov to disable that vessel. Getting at the Russian Northern Fleet in the absence of the lost USS Harry S. Truman – that carrier and her aircraft were truly missed – would be up to NATO submarines. Eventually, they Russians were sure to move out into deeper water again. HMS Torbay was among one of those many NATO submarines: aboard her, her captain already had a planned entry into the boat’s war diary provisionally entitled ‘Peter the Great sleeps with the fishes’… that Russian battlecruiser had to come out to ‘play’ first though.


Away from the Tromsø evacuation, there remained fighting on land across Northern Norway.

The Norwegian’s Brigade Nord continued its escape through the wilderness to get away from the Russian invaders which had almost trapped them within their own country. They skirted both the Finnish and Swedish borders while doing so. The going was hard and it was opposed. A rearguard left at Alta hadn’t kept the Russians busy for long and they gave chase. Their own ground forces were engaged in the pursuit but so too were their aircraft and helicopters. Air attacks came and were fought against. A helicopter lift was attempted to drop a company of Russian riflemen, supported by missile teams, ahead of the Norwegians. These were men from an infantry unit attached to the untested 25th Motor Rifle Brigade. Their ambush site was good yet only if it was prepared. Some of the few Norwegian Leopard-2 tanks left were used to blast through them to keep the withdrawal of the Brigade Nord going. The Russian Sixth Army was left unable to stop the Norwegians getting away. They needed stronger air interdiction to do this yet those aircraft were being tasked elsewhere. Russian air strength in this theater of operations hadn’t been strong to start with and had only been weakened through combat losses. The numerical weakness that they had started with had only been something which they had been able to get away with because there had been few NATO aircraft in the region too. That was now changing.

The Americans put extra aircraft into Norway with additions coming from the US Air Force and the US Marines. A squadron of Air Force Reserve F-16s based in Florida had been alerted for a European deployment in the immediate pre-war days but that had been to do to Germany. The 93rd Fighter Squadron was now in Norway. Today was their first day of operations and they preformed air-to-air missions as well as air-to-ground strikes. With the latter, the F-16s joined in with the US Marines in attacking the Russians on the ground in the Troms region spread out from the captured Bardufoss Air Station. There were some further additions of AV-8s and FA-18s to join in attacking the Russian airmobile troops and their own air cover. Furthermore, EA-6Bs in US Marines service arrived to join in. These were especially useful in helping to aid in the electronic battlefield. Russia had had some successes there with its SAM-launchers and jamming units: the Prowlers brought in were only part of the NATO effort to counter all this and re-seize the mantle of electronic dominance which they believed was rightly theirs. American aircraft kept on attacking the Russians on the ground. The reinforcing 31st Guards Air Assault Brigade faced the same as the beaten-down 11th Air Assault Brigade did: lots of bombs and rockets. Their men held a large area of ground and were dug-in yet they were unable to spread outwards now in the face of the Americans in the skies. Only the Russian marines with their 61st Naval Infantry Brigade moving down from their landing sites near Tromsø were able to move effectively. However, the closer they came to the Bardufoss area, the more exposed they were to air attacks against them too. British Typhoons and Norwegian F-16s – their numbers much lower than when the war started – concentrated solely on air-to-air tasks leaving the US Marines and those newly-arrived American F-16s for ground attack strikes. Andoya, Bodo and the two small airfields around Narvik were all in NATO hands and they used these well for multiple air missions.

Furthermore, there was also HMS Ark Royal along with two US Navy amphibious assault ships which were acting as small aircraft carriers like the Royal Navy vessel was. Even combined, these were all no replacement for the sunken Truman yet they had to do for now. RAF Harriers flying from the Ark Royal and US Marines Harriers based aboard the USS Bataan & USS Nassau all made ground attack missions supporting the American’s 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade. They did so from inside the Vestfjorden, the wide waterway linking Narvik to the Norwegian Sea with the Lofoten Islands along its northern side. Back during the Cold War, there had been something known as the ‘bastion strategy’ which the US Navy could have adopted in using the Vestfjorden to place a carrier inside here to keep it safe while operating air strikes over Norway. Doing so had been considered by some to be crazy for it would have robbed such a vessel of its potential in movement yet others favoured the idea because the Lofotens were full of airfields (Andoya one of several of them) and the mountains along the islands could have been home to air defence missiles. NATO was employing the bastion strategy now. None of the small carriers within were stationary though this was still a high-risk gamble. Russian missiles, fired from aircraft or submarines, could strike in here if they could get a fix on the ships. No submarine bringing torpedoes was believed to be able to effectively act in the Vestfjorden as the improvised defences against them were improving all the time. It was the threat of a distant cruise missile strike which worried many. Wasn’t that how the Truman had been lost?

Bataan and Nassau were among many US Navy vessels off the coast of Norway. There had been casualties in their operations including warships such as the Bainbridge lost during the Tromsø evacuation and a sister ship, USS Cole (the destroyer which Al Qaeda tried to eliminate in 2000), also sunk during a fight with a Russian submarine near to Trondheim. The sacrifice at Trondheim of the Cole hadn’t been in vain. That submarine sunk before the destroyer went down had been lining-up an attack at the time against the mass of shipping moving north from there in Central Norway towards Bodo and Narvik up in the north. For decades, in caves near to Trondheim and where there were the important airbases at Ørland and Værnes, there had been a home for the storage of equipment for the US Marines. No troops were based in Norway and neither were there tanks nor aircraft & helicopters near Trondheim, but the Marine Corps Prepositioning Program Norway kept a lot of equipment secured. This was being moved up northwards ahead of the war starting, all to join the US Marines already deploying. That continued as the war was fought. Some was moved by road and rail with a lot going by ship. In addition to the emptying of the caves, Trondheim’s two nearby airfields were seeing huge transport aircraft in US Air Force markings turn up. It was the same up near Bodo. The rest of the US Marines with their II Marine Expeditionary Force were all arriving in Norway. II MEF would be taking over command of much of the NATO forces in-country – the British would be coming under their command and so too might those German paratroopers who’d already arrived but yet to see any real fighting – all fighting the Russians.

Tromsø had been abandoned to the invaders and the Norwegians had lost Finnmark. There was still much fighting to be had though.