Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

Part Six


One Hundred and Thirty

At first light on August 24th, Operation Noble Sword commenced. The liberation of eastern parts of Poland (northeastern parts would be covered by a different offensive) began with the intention that within a week, Noble Sword would then lead to an invasion of Belarus. Marching on Minsk would be for that later stage: for now it was all about freeing Poland.

The US V Corps were assigned the Nobile Sword mission. French and Polish forces joined with the Americans in going over on the attack with the still-arriving Italians waiting in the wings. This was no easy task for none of those involved. Russian and Belorussian troops fought as they had fought before: well. NATO firepower was matched with their own. They weren’t able to put any significant numbers of aircraft into the sky over the battlefield but still retained quite the extensive, and deadly, array of air defence assets. Everything from anti-aircraft guns to shoulder-mounted weapons up to mobile SAM platforms engaged enemy aircraft and incoming projectiles. Intelligence summaries from NATO correctly assessed the ability to do this though were incorrect in the available stocks of munitions for those weapons. Thus, the amount of successful air interdiction that the 1 ATAF was able to achieve on the first days of NATO’s much-anticipated counteroffensive was severely curtailed.

More success came on the ground. Here, firepower assigned to support the infantry and armour with V Corps was unleashed. Artillery and rockets, along with some tactical missiles which managed to get through Russian defences against them too, pounded the enemy. Return fire came. Guns, mortars and multiple-barrelled rocket-launchers were shot off against NATO. Nonetheless, as artillery fought artillery in what became duels between them, the V Corps started to take ground. Breakthroughs were made in many sectors up and down the frontlines which had been established over the previous week once the Russian-led offensive had run out of steam. Minefields, anti-tank ditches and obstacles were overcome by attacking units. Strong return fire came along with counterattacks made. The progress with several of the breakthroughs were reversed as those counterattacks drove the attackers back to where they came from, even beyond in a few circumstances. Yet, elsewhere, where the frontlines were pierced, NATO forces flooded into the gaps torn open and started expanding outwards where they rolled-up more defenders from behind if those nearby were unable to retreat in time or, if they did, chase after them.

It took some time for the overall picture to become clear. The fog of battle led to a confusing picture for senior people within both the V Corps and the opposing Russian First Guards Tank Army to understand what had happened. However, as midday approached, and then in the afternoon especially, it was apparent that the frontlines were ripped open in places and elsewhere unsustainable. NATO was coming on forward. The Belarus-Polish border was some distance away and not easy to get to, but that was where Noble Sword was going to take the V Corps unless the First Guards Tank Army could manage to stop them.


The Polish 11th Armoured Cavalry Division should have been removed from the frontlines and pulled back into the rear. It could have been replaced by another division, a non-Polish one, and rested while absorbing replacements before going back into the fight soon enough. No rotation to the rear had come though. The Poles, yet also their NATO allies, wanted the 11th Armoured Cavalry to remain on the frontlines throughout the lead-up to Noble Sword and also to take part in it. Smashed up and after taking tremendous losses, the division had fought on and on throughout the war. The patriotism was there with the men under command. It was well-led too. Moreover, it still retained significant strength throughout the course of the war which it had fought. This veteran unit was deemed irreplaceable. The 11th Armoured Cavalry was on the left flank of the V Corps’ attack. They fought today once more against the Russian Army’s 3rd Motor Rifle Division. Polish infantry and engineers got through gaps which the Russians were able to shut down in some places but fail to stop in others. The scale of the penetration became too much for the Russians to hold off. A withdrawal was ordered, a staged-managed one to fall back to better ground. Part of it was pulled off though there was another opening that the Poles found. The 11th Armoured Cavalry pushed forward tanks and opened up the 3rd Motor Rifle. At one point, during a moment of panic, it looked like at least half of the Russian division would be surrounded and thus possibly lost. Yet, under a huge barrage of covering artillery, most of those nearly trapped escaped. They left others behind who were sacrificed as a rear-guard. By the end of the day, a large portion of Polish soil was back in Polish hands. It was a ruin though. Holding it meant being able to use it as a springboard for further attacks in the coming days… but the cost was staggering in terms of lives lost.

Next in line, on the Poles’ right, was the US Army’s 1st Armored Division. The ‘Old Ironsides’ had deployed to Eastern Europe in the past few weeks after moving from their home base at Fort Bliss in Texas. Getting the men and women to Poland had been easy – flights of military and civilian jets airlifted them over – but the equipment and stores for the division had been something that was bigger. The GRU had said that it would take the Americans three weeks at best, four weeks at the outset to do this. It had taken two weeks and that was in the face of Russian interdiction efforts too. Moreover, there had been that belief in Moscow that it would too take some time to get the 1st Armored ready: another week regardless of how long it took them to deploy. Today the 1st Armored attacked, not next week. Four brigades strong, and at full strength with manpower following American mobilisation of reservists and recently-discharged personnel, they went up against an opponent who matched them in numbers. One Russian and three Belorussian brigades were on the other side of the frontlines. The First Guards Tank Army had pulled the 2nd ‘Taman Guards’ Motor Rifle Division back into the rear and used attachments transferred from the Second Guards Army. Many of those troops were still digging-in, improving the defensive positions which they took over, when the US Army threw one of its best formations at them. There was some anticipation in the minds of many senior- & mid-ranking officers within the 1st Armored that the enemy would be a walkover once they arrived to fight them, especially those Belorussians. Junior officers and enlisted personnel were hyped-up ready for a fight but not plugged into that big picture belief. Two-thirds of the Belorussians had seen combat before while neither the other third nor that arriving Russian brigade (the 27th Guards Motor Rifle, a Moscow-based unit) had yet to do so. Like the 1st Armored and its first time in battle – this was nothing like Afghanistan nor Iraq – those new units found themselves in a baptism of fire. The fighting today was horrible. Casualties were horrendous. Each side found the other a brutal, unpredictable opponent who disrupted their plans and killed without mercy. The 1st Armored got their breakthroughs going and only saw one of those successfully counterattacked. As to their opponents, the Russians staged a retreat – a panicked one it must be said which saw them lost many men unnecessarily – and so did the two Belorussian units who’d previously been in action (the 6th & 11th Guards Mechanised Brigades) but the 28th Reserve Tank Brigade was shattered when on the counterattack. These Belorussians mounted an advance to cover the withdrawals but they were all over the place in geographic terms. Their commander lost control of them. In came NATO aircraft to take advantage. What was left of the brigade would eventually fall back like the others, yielding territory to the Americans, but their experience of battle had broken these men even if that wasn’t clear at first glance.

As was the case with the 1st Armored, the US Army had brought over the 1st Cavalry Division from their Texas base (the ‘First Team’ being at Fort Hood). They’d gotten here ahead of Russian projections on their ability to deploy into eastern Poland and replace the victorious but worn-down German 10th Panzer Division. The 1st Cavalry attacked into the sector of the frontlines held by another recent arrival too: that being the Russian’s 85th Motor Rifle Division who’d come here from Novosibirsk in eastern Siberia and transferred over the weekend to the First Guards Tank Army. Both the Americans and the Russians had men serving within each who had seen combat before elsewhere at other times but more so those who had been in recent weeks fighting in Poland as wartime transfers. They were supposed to have listened to and learnt from the experiences of veterans of the fighting here. One side did and the other didn’t. The Russians held the Americans off. Some ground was taken, but it wasn’t anything to justify the scale of the fighting. The 1st Cavalry was unable to mount a major push to get anywhere far forward. Localised counterattacks right at the frontlines by the 85th Motor Rifle held them off. NATO air power was waiting to come into play to take advantage of a Russian retreat but the Russians didn’t need to fall back here. There was fighting on the Bug River – near Treblinka again – where the Belorussians had previously humiliated US Army Europe’s 172nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team and the 1st Cavalry found Russians there who wouldn’t budge like they found the same up and down the frontlines. If this battle between the two opponents had been taking place in a vacuum, then nothing would have changed by the end of the day. It wasn’t though. Where the US 1st Armored Division made progress to the north and what the French would do on the other flank affected matters. Darkness fell late on this mid-August day. Only then did the frontlines move. The 85th Motor Rifle started falling back. Rear-guards were left behind as everyone else tried to slip away. If this was 1910 not 2010, that might have worked… but it wasn’t. One of the US Air Force’s E-8 JSTARS aircraft monitored the retreat from afar. V Corps was alerted and so the request was made for immediate air support. Russian air defences were always weaker on the move as they tried to coordinate that continuing coverage in a hostile environment and in came NATO jets. Yet, so too did Russian fighters. Aircraft were brought down by ground defences including several ‘friendly’ MiG-29 Fulcrums but also 1 ATAF assigned jets. Meanwhile, the 1st Cavalry moved forward to give chase rather than let the Russians escape to new positions which hadn’t spent the day being blasted to smithereens. Rear-guards were smashed past and the 85th Motor Rifle was caught in place. Eventually, it came to the stop for the day but by that point, the Russians had taken a significant beating. The American divisional commander was happy with that though his superior wasn’t best pleased at how long things had taken with the 1st Cavalry seemingly ‘having the slows’ for most of the day.

The French had formed a wartime-only division command to be assigned to V Corps for Noble Sword. Three-fifths of the French Army was currently being prepared for a Libya mission but there were others here in Poland including the 2nd Armored Brigade that had previously fought up in northeastern Poland. Now they joined with three more brigades to complete the Division Rapiere: Rapier Division. Attacking forward to the east of Warsaw, the French had replaced the part of Polish 12th Mechanised Division as that latter unit reorganised its area of responsibility around southern side the semi-salient that had been formed on Polish soil. The French hit the Belorussians from the front. They took on lighter, airmobile troops in the form of the 38th Guards Mobile Brigade and also the 50th Reserve Mechanised Brigade. The Belorussians also had their 37th Guards Mechanised Brigade but the Poles were dealing with them. Highway-2 ran east-west connecting Brest with Warsaw and this road was in the middle of the area of Poland occupied here. The French fought towards it. They had to go through the Belorussians and found them no push over yet kept on attacking. That brigade of enemy reservists was identified as being the weakest and this was exploited. The 3rd Mechanised & 7th Armored Brigades, Frenchmen seeing battle for the first time, punched through them. Belorussian regulars counterattacked including those airmobile men who in the war’s first days had massacred German counterparts who had then been defending Poland. The French won the fight. Their breakthroughs were expanded and the frontlines crumbled. Counterattacks were beaten off. The French brought in their veteran 2nd Armored & fresh 6th Light Armored Brigades to finish what they started. Then, of course, the Polish 12th Mechanised attacked too. Coordination here between allies was well done in timing and execution. What was achieved here today by the French and the Poles would outdo what other Poles and also the Americans managed with their Noble Sword attacks when it came to territory retaken. Overall, in balance, the elements of the beginning of the offensive further north would pay off more in the medium- & long-term but for now those here in the southern sectors were winning all of the plaudits.


V Corps would see an average advance forward made up and down the lines of maybe fifteen miles undertaken on the first day of Noble Sword. That might not have seemed much but it was better than staying still or even going backwards. In addition, the French and Poles in the south had pushed forward over thirty miles in some places: Belorussian withdrawals overnight would occur leading to even more ground being yielded and thus improving the situation northwards.

The First Guards Tank Army was still fighting on Polish soil. They had a strong grip of significant parts of the Podlachia region and there was no way that just one day’s worth of fighting would see them collapse. Significant natural and manmade geographic features still favoured them as the defender to keep NATO out of Belarus, obstacles which they themselves had to overcome when attacking from the other direction. Winding rivers – which had had their courses disrupted by war and thus posed a problem to those seeking to cross them – were present all over the battlefield: both the Bug and the Narew were prominent among them but there were smaller waterways too. Then there were the big towns of Bialystok and Biala Podlaska plus many smaller ones. These were full of civilians (who’d be hostages effectively) and who controlled them controlled the roads in Podlachia. Attacking into Belarus for NATO was possible without securing the towns and roads close to the border but unlikely to be tried.

Recent reorganisation where the First Guards Tank Army had been assigned many formations previously with the Second Guards Army – ones which had come from afar yet also closer ones too – had seen the shattered 5th Guards Tank Division go back over into Belarus. In better shape were the Taman Guards. They were located around Bialystok on the first day of NATO’s Noble Sword and held there as a counterattack force of more than a localised nature. The field army commander wanted to keep the 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division here. Not all of the V Corps had yet to come into play: there was still the American’s 101st Air Assault Infantry Division and also the Italians who had sent many men to Poland too. In Moscow they were talking about moving the Taman Guards, considering military strategy above the heads of both their commanders on the ground at Army-level and also Front-level (the Western Operational Command HQ was in charge of all Slava assigned forces), but no decision had yet been reached there. When the time came, it wouldn’t be the generals in the field but rather the politicians and the uniformed boot-lickers with them, who would be issuing orders such as those. And that would only benefit Noble Sword.