Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

As Admiral Yamamoto may or may not have said, I think President Putin may have course to remember it,

I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

Canada finally gets a turn?

Congratulations to forcon and James G for reaching the 50 page milestone for this great TL, next target the 100 page milestone, can we do it, yes we can.

One Hundred and Ten

Russia sent its bombers loaded with cruise missiles towards the country from whose soil the Americans had launched their Operation Avenging Eagle over Moscow. That country was Britain and the attack came over the night of August 16th / 17th. There was no one wave of Tu-95MS16 Bears acting as raketonosets (rocket carriers) which made a lone attack, but rather eight separate small groups of them sent over a period of three hours: two, three and four bombers made these runs. It had been a week since Britain was last hit like this – Black Monday they had called that with those daytime raids – yet this was far more damaging. Casualties would be bigger too, especially among civilians caught by wayward Russian missiles. Revenge for the bombing of Moscow it was in one way though it was also part of something else. The Kremlin was now beginning a strategy of trying to force major Coalition powers out of the war by hitting them hard not to change their government policy but to see civil unrest bring that about. Britain was first on the list of America’s allies to be targeted this way yet she wouldn’t be alone in her suffering. The Bears would launch their cruise missiles some distance away from Britain. They fired them from over the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic. From the north, the northwest and then the west – the missiles flew over Ireland – those attacks came.

It wasn’t London which came under attack but instead Scotland was struck.

Having used up many of the newer models of the Kh-55 missile, the Russians used older stocks of them plus also Kh-22s as well. The latter were better known as the AS-4 Kitchen and had primary anti-ship mission. There were plenty of British and NATO warships which the Kitchens could have been sent against but the Kremlin wanted to use them for this mission. For many, when it came to the former type of missiles, those AS-15 Kents, this was more important than the use of Kitchens for land-attack roles. In ten days of warfare, Russia had been firing off their modernised Kents at a ridiculous rate: NATO intelligence summaries had for days been saying that they were going to run out of them and were eventually proved – almost (the Russians still had some left and were keeping them back) – correct here. Missiles like early versions of the Kent and the modified Kitchen didn’t have the best of accuracy. The Bears launched them though, using many against the same target due to that issue.

The RAF put interceptors into the skies to try to take down the cruise missiles. The raketonosets were long gone after launching but their payloads were coming towards Britain. Everything possible was done to try to shoot the missiles down. There were almost forty aircraft tasked for national air defence and as many of these as possible were put into the skies tonight at different times to go after those missiles. Based at RAF Leuchars in Scotland, though flying from several sites now, was No. 111 Squadron. They had eighteen Tornado F3s on strength tonight, which was up from a dozen pre-war. Replacements for losses (accidents, not combat losses) had like the extras added come when Tornados were removed from storage: some of those taken from storage included the four Tornados which until late last year had been flying in the skies above the Falklands before being replaced by Typhoons. Another over-sized unit was No. 29 Squadron. This was the Operational Conversion Unit for the Typhoon and remained at RAF Coningsby down in Lincolnshire with nineteen aircraft including the F2 and FGR4 versions of this multirole aircraft. There were no more RAF jets available. The rest of the Typhoons were in Poland and Norway while 111 Squadron was the last Tornado interceptor unit which remained active. Plans were afoot to stand-up an emergency squadron of more Tornado F3s – others taken from storage which needed more work after being retired much further back – but that had yet not occurred.

The Russians fired far more missiles at Britain than there were RAF aircraft to try to intercept them though the Tornados and Typhoons could carry a large weapon load. The main issue was the ‘missile spread’. There was no stupidity in how the attacks were carried out and this meant that the Russians attempted to spread their missiles out across the sky as far apart as possible to deny the British the ability to easily take them down. Those Bears which had flown the furthest south, and then sent their missiles over Ireland to come towards Scotland from effectively behind, were the best example of this. The RAF had to chase the missiles all over the sky. Aircraft on airborne alert and also those on strip-alert had to make long flights to reach them. They could only go after a few at a time. The time factor was another thing with the attack coming over an extended period of time to see the RAF busy for several hours. Previous attacks had come all at once. While that had left them overwhelmed, they could focus on doing their job then rest afterwards with personnel and equipment.

The strike on Scotland was only planned to be the opening stage of this change in pattern too where political objectives were now being sought rather than purely military ones. It was planned to be elsewhere in the UK in upcoming days following this. Russia’s aim was to stretch the RAF elsewhere away from its threat axis’ to the north and east, where they based their aircraft at Leuchars and Coningsby, away to the west starting with the missiles tonight which came from over Ireland.


The RAF managed to take down many of those inbound missiles. There had been Russian underestimation in the ability of the British to do this and they also didn’t know that two Sentry AEW1 aircraft had recently returned to the UK to join the one left behind when No. 8 Squadron was sent to the Continent pre-war. The Americans, the French and the NATO unit of AWACS aircraft were all using their Sentrys extensively over mainland Europe. Losses had come to such valuable aircraft from targeted Russian attacks against them. Therefore, despite just being two airframes, the removal of that pair to return to Britain was missed. However, Black Monday and the fear that that would happen again – as it did – had been behind that transfer of aircraft. The Tornados and Typhoons had their own radars mounted with excellent onboard systems to support the hunting of cruise missiles yet with one of the Sentrys in the sky tonight, the presence aboard of battle controllers and the greater range of the AWACS radar aided them. Kents and Kitchens were splashed aplenty.

Others slammed into Britain though.

Nuisance raids – a few missiles – struck airbases such as Leuchars as well as RAF Kinloss & Lossiemouth; the RAF was only operating Tornados with 111 Squadron from Lossiemouth, not Kinloss. There was an attack made against Rosyth dockyard as well, where there were several ships of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary present including the damaged RFA Gold Rover. That tanker was undamaged by three missiles which went after Rosyth and so too was the dockyard here. The trio of weapons all missed. One splashed into the waters of the Firth of Forth, another impacted an empty field outside of the town of Dunfermline and the third struck a residential street in the village of St. David’s. Casualties among civilians from the last one were over thirty, all innocents in this war in the wrong place at the wrong time and hit by an inaccurate weapon.

Neither the airbases nor Rosyth were the main targets. Those were Aberdeen and Grangemouth.

Aberdeen was a port city and housed a significant presence of infrastructure supporting the North Sea oil industry. Oil wasn’t flowing at the minute – the disruption was significant – but what was at Aberdeen was important regardless. Seven missiles got through the RAF’s defensive efforts to reach the city. Two landed short, another overshot and ended up in the North Sea. Four more smashed into Aberdeen. The harbour, which was the primary target, was only hit by one: the three others hit elsewhere within the city striking an industrial estate, a city park (just across the road from the main hospital) and, as had been seen further south near Rosyth, a residential street again. Casualties would reach fifty plus eventually. There were the immediate deaths and then those caused by a major fire which started at the port but spread from there.

That fire in Aberdeen was nothing in comparison to the one which took a-hold of the Grangemouth oil refinery. Near-misses included Falkirk Bus Station and a primary school inside the town of Grangemouth – both of which weren’t full of those who would usually be there – as well as several hitting fields or landing in the Firth of Forth. Only one death was recorded outside the refinery from these misses. There would be more than one hundred and forty casualties eventually coming from the strike where five missiles hit the refinery and set off a fire which just only grew and grew. It would be said afterwards that the whole of Scotland could see the refinery burning. Hyperbole like that aside, the fire was huge. Firefighters with Central Scotland Fire & Rescue Service were joined by those from other nearby authorities. There was also a military presence with Territorial Army troops providing assistance when it came to evacuating people at first before helping to try and create firebreaks. Those were needed because the fire spread into Grangemouth itself. An unfavourable wind drove the flames forward. That outwards spread, with fears that it could go all the way to Falkirk being overblown, was eventually stopped as efforts to contain the fire finally paid off but only by morning. The refinery itself continued to burn though. The grave loss of life came from smoke inhalation but also panic as well leading to those from civilians who went towards the flames, not away from them, when trying to escape the smoke. There was quite the failure at the on-the-ground command level here with many later recriminations coming from this. Moreover, accounting for over half of those casualties was the later explosion of the warhead of one of those missiles. It detonated several hours later and, in the darkness, no one had realised that they were close to where it had landed and failed to instantly go off. British military intelligence would later seek to discover if this was a delayed-action fuse aimed to kill rescue personnel: those had been used on other weapons especially at military airbases to knock out engineers. That wasn’t the case here though. Nonetheless, the high loss of life shouldn’t have been seen. Mistakes happened and cock-ups occurred resulting in the huge number of deaths.

Grangemouth would burn for two days. Emergency procedures to supress fire only partially worked – they hadn’t been designed to handle a multiple missile strike after all – and so the smoke kept on rising high above Scotland for all to see.

The RAF got none of those Bear bombers. Several navies of their allies did though. Returning home over waters which NATO was just filling with more and more ships, the aircraft came into missile envelopes of warships. The Bears had no counter weapons and flew without their radars on to avoid fighters coming out of Norway: they had intelligence that a squadron of F-15s flown by American national guardsmen had recently arrived there. The slow, propeller-driven aircraft flew long looping routes to avoid Norway but also had to doge further national guard-flown F-15s from Iceland as well. One flight of three and another flight of four each stumbled into missile attacks coming from below. The US Navy’s cruiser USS Normandy got two aircraft and she was joined by two destroyers getting one apiece: the Dutch HNLMS De Zeven Provinciën and Canadian HMCS Athabaskan. Considering that NATO was sending even more ships into the Norwegian Sea, plus that American Carrier Task Force with all of its fighters to join missile-armed warships as about to enter, Russian plans to go after Britain like this again were going to have to factor this threat in to a greater extent. The four bombers were shot down on their way home yet were lucky enough not to have been taken out on the way to their target. The chances of going so next time were getting lower. Of course, Britain would have preferred to have had more fighters or even flood the waters to the north of the country between the UK and Russia with their own warships, but they were hardly likely to complain that their allies took down those bombers. They might not have got them in the way in but the particular aircraft wouldn’t be coming back again. Like the situation with its most-advanced cruise missiles, Russia only had a finite supply of big bombers as well.

Would Putin nuke his own country to prevent massive outbreak fro happening, i think he would.

Mother of God! This is bad news...