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Sixty-Three

President Biden felt it was his duty to return to Washington DC as soon as possible. The Secret Service and the Pentagon argued back vehemently against this decision. The President had been orbiting above the United States since late on August 6th, with only a short pit-stop outside Las Vegas to transfer him to the Night Watch aircraft. The best efforts of the FBI, the Marshal Service, and the Joint Special Operations Command, as well as countless state and local police departments, had failed to locate the Spetsnaz team responsible for President Obama’s assassination. The FBI had reason to believe that those commandos had left Washington itself though, having found the bodies of four civilians at the side of the road just outside the capital, with the prints of Russian-made boots in the dirt beside them. DC itself was perhaps the most heavily-guarded city in the world, even more so than Moscow at that moment. Soldiers, Marines & National Guardsmen were present all over DC, with whole rifle companies guarding places like the White House, the Capitol Building & the Pentagon. These two factors combined caused the DOD & Secret Service to relent and agree to allow Night Watch to land at Andrews Air Force Base. Soldiers from the 29th Infantry Division’s 116th Regiment, men and women native to Virginia, mounted numerous sweeps of the grounds outside the airfield and found no hint of enemy activity. Something of an implicit compromise between the President and the security establishment was negotiated; Biden would return to DC to carry out some political duties and give a speech to Congress calling for a declaration of war, but following this he would go to Site R with the Joint Chiefs. People who Biden wanted in his reforming cabinet were being contacted discretely. Congress wasn’t likely to put up a fight here and so President Biden could remain at Raven Rock when this was happening.

President Biden made an impassioned speech to a Joint Session of Congress, one which was televised and broadcast not only to the people of the United States but to the world over. Three layers of security surrounded the Capitol Building during this address. A company of US Marines from the DC barracks held the outer perimeter, while a second layer of security was manned by Capitol Police officers. Inside the building, Secret Service Counter-Assault Team and DSS personnel stood in every doorway and window, with Delta Force operators also accompanying them. The building itself was swept twice for explosive devices and other dangers, and the threat to the members of Congress and the Senate, not to mention to Biden himself, was thought to be minimal. There were still arguments from the Joint Chiefs about putting so much of America’s leadership in one place at the same time, but cabinet members remained dispersed and the sheer amount of security in place meant that a direct attack would be impossible to pull off.

“Two days ago, our valiant nation was attacked in a senseless, illegal, and murderous war of aggression by the Russian Federation and her allies. Military personnel in the service of the tyrannical President Vladimir Putin were responsible for the murders of President Barrack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Admiral Mike Mullen as well as many aides and political appointees, Secret Service agents, and Marine Corps aircrew. Russian forces also struck in the heart of Europe, in Belgium and in London, before invading the territory of no less than six NATO countries.

Consequently, a state of war now exists between the United States and Russia. While Russian forces are making gains in Eastern Europe, US and Allied military forces will soon recover from the surprise attack and strike back against President Putin’s army of conquest. There will be no surrender, no capitulation, and no negotiation, until Russian military forces have been wiped out. The United States has been attacked in such a way before, on December 7th, 1941, and on the 11th of September, 2001. In neither circumstance did our brave nation back down or walk away. We will fight this war, this war which we did not wish for but which was forced upon us, and we will not stop until total victory has been achieved. I must, therefore, as Congress for a declaration of war against the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus.”

Biden was met by thunderous applause from both sides of the aisle.

There wasn’t a member of either House in site who didn’t hail the new President’s speech as positive. There were some who, discretely, didn’t wish to vote in favour of declaring war, not because of pacifism or anything like that but rather because they felt it would push Putin’s back against the wall and make him more trigger happy when it came to nuclear weapons. That camp didn’t want to give Moscow the impression that the United States sought to drive on the Russian capital and have its occupants shot; others wanted Putin to face trial and discussions soon began about the prospect of a special operations mission to capture him. At least for now this was nothing but pure fantasy. More realistically-minded individuals lead the political charge and several fiery speeches were given by Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, long-term Democrat and World War II-veteran Daniel Inouye, and Democratic rising star Kirsten Gillibrand, to name a few; there were, of course, many, many more. Both Houses of Congress voted on whether or not to declare war on Russia. There was no question of what the result of the vote would ultimately be. The only real question, in fact, was by how big a margin the pro-war camp would win the vote. The resolution passed 96-0 in the Senate and 414-2 in the House of Representatives. There were several Senators and Congressmen & women from either party who couldn’t attend the vote. Some were dealing with the fallout from Spetsnaz attacks on their home states and others found transport to DC impossible to attain in time for the vote, with intense security measures in place especially along the Eastern Seaboard, and SCATANA still in effect.

America’s allies were also preparing to join the war against Russia. The Australian Parliament held a session on the morning of August 8th where the government asked the legislature to vote in favour of committing Australia’s armed forces to combat against Russia. Prime Minister Julia Gillard had only taken office on June 24th after serving for three years as Australia’s deputy prime minister. The fall of the previous prime minister meant that she took office, and Gillard was a woman who was determined to stand up to Russia. A small number of Australian troops – mainly engineers and other such support personnel – had been in Poland attached to the British Army’s 1st Armoured Division when war broke out on conveniently-timed ‘joint training exercises’. War had broken out in Europe and those troops were somewhat confused as to what they were meant to do, but their answer came soon enough after Gillard and her party won their vote by a massive landslide. Australia was going to war with Russia and they were to fight. The Royal Australian Navy (RAN) committed several of its vessels to search-and-destroy operations against Russian submarines that were known to be prowling around the Pacific in great numbers. Forward basing for Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) warplanes, either in Europe or in the Far East, was discussed by the defence chiefs.

A similar vote was called by New Zealand Prime Minister John Key of the centre-right National Party which ruled the country at the time. New Zealand, like Australia, voted to join the war, although doing so with less enthusiasm. New Zealand had a well-trained army but it was very small indeed and she had no air force to speak of. Where Australia could send warplanes, troops, and ships, New Zealand could do much less; that said, there would be some daring exploits indeed carried out by the New Zealand Special Air Service when a number of those commandos were sent off to Norway.

Two of America’s traditional allies in Asia were much more reluctant to get involved.

The government of Prime Minister Naoto Kan was one of realists; they knew that Moscow was lying when it made claims of pre-empting an attack by NATO and told similar lies. Tokyo offered its diplomatic support to the United States, but only its diplomatic support. The Japanese Self Defence Forces – a full-blown military in all but name – were highly capable, especially in the air and at sea. Nevertheless, entering into an armed conflict with Russia would mean attacks – mainly by cruise missiles – against the Japanese mainland and ultimately the threat of nuclear attack should things escalate totally out of control. The Japanese ambassador to Moscow, before the embassy was shut down in protest as Japan ended diplomatic relations with Russia, informed the Russians that any attacks against Japan, including American bases on Japanese soil, would be treated as an act of war and the Japanese Self Defence Forces would be ordered into the fray. Russia new it couldn’t afford to drag another Western power, especially one with a naval and air arm as strong as Japan’s, into the fighting. Russia’s Pacific Fleet was already in a bad situation and having to face down the Japanese would only make things worse. Russian commanders could do little but watch with frustration the massive air and naval bases in Japan that many officers felt should have been targeted already. The Republic of Korea was another country that didn’t want to go to war with Russia. In Seoul, it was felt that a South Korean declaration of war on Russia would invite the vast North Korean People’s Army to come swarming over the border, and so far South Korea had been given no promises of reinforcement from the United States. Even though the ROK’s powerful military could likely stop an NKPA offensive in its tracks, there would be weeks or months of bitter fighting, much of which would take place on South Korean soil. Economically, the risk posed by this eventuality was too much for Seoul to bear, and, like Japan, South Korea would remain neutral. For now. Unlike Japan, however, South Korea did allow the United States Air Force to continue operating from two airfields within the ROK, those being Kunsan and Osan Air Bases, where F-16s & A-10s were based in large numbers. The South Koreans also cut off diplomatic relations with Russia and made to remove their embassy as an act of diplomatic protest.

The refusals of Japan and South Korea to join the fighting at once would be met with long-lasting bitterness by many in the US. From a realpolitik point of view, though, it was the logical decision. Even if it victory was assured, for both Japan and the ROK, going to war with Russia would by default involve air and ground fighting on both nations’ home territory, with thousands of casualties both military and civilian, and perhaps trillions of dollars’ worth of economic damage. It wasn’t as though either Asian country had abandoned their ally; both responded against Russia’s actions with harsh diplomatic sanctions and continued to provide intelligence and communications support to US forces in the Pacific.

*

Back in Europe, changes were happening within NATO’s command structure.

Admiral James Stavridis was blamed for the fall of the Baltic States. It hadn’t truly been his fault; he hadn’t any choice in deploying forces to the three isolated nations. If he had sent the bulk of the American and British heavy forces in Poland into Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania on the eve of the war, they likely would have been cut off and destroyed, and Brussels might even have been left with no choice but to come to the negotiating table on Russia’s terms. SACEUR had done all he could to keep NATO forces in fighting condition and ensure that a counter-offensive could be launched in the future, but this wasn’t good enough for the politicians. Admiral Stavridis was relieved of his command. The history books would, fortunately, be kind to Stavridis. He was a man put in a terrible position by a long list of political errors and misjudgements. The fall of the Baltics could not fairly be attributed to him.

Replacing Admiral Stavridis was General David Petraeus. Commander-in-Chief, East, was the official title of Petraeus’ command in Krakow though CJTF-East would soon be renamed as the US Seventh Army. General Petraeus was promoted to the post of Supreme Allied Commander Europe. This decision had been a somewhat rushed one, but Petraeus was a competent and experienced officer who was more than capable of the task. Replacing, with some controversy, General Petraeus as CINC-East was General James Mattis of the United States Marine Corps. General Mattis, a veteran of both Gulf Wars as well as Afghanistan, was in the process of transitioning from being the commander of the Joint Forces Command to Central Command when fighting broke out in Europe. There was much controversy at the prospect of having a Marine Corps general commanding an army that involved no marines whatsoever. In the US, the Army Chief of Staff General Casey wanted to appoint one of his own officers as CINC-East, citing General Dempsey as a candidate. The concerns of Army and to a lesser extent Air Force officers were brushed aside; nobody could deny that Jim Mattis was an officer with a great degree of combat experience and was known to be aggressive and proactive, eliminating the risk of over-cautious behaviour.

The orders sending him to Florida were hastily cancelled, and the veteran Marine officers found himself aboard a C-17 headed for Krakow. General Mattis was going to war.





Sixty–Four

Norwegian forces weren’t able to retake control of the Russian-occupied Bardufoss facility. The joint airbase and civilian airport remained in the hands of those who had forcefully taken it. The initial Norwegian pull-out when hit by Russian paratroopers had been undertaken as a tactical retreat: they intended to return either within hours or otherwise a day or two. The fighting around Bardufoss after its capture gave no hint that the Norwegians would be able to do that. Russian transport aircraft flew in with human cargoes of reinforcements but also ammunition, equipment and supporting troops. With the latter, many of these were engineers and air defence troops. Fighting men worked on expanding the width of the airhead – making sure the main north-south running highway through Northern Norway was cut and defended – while those behind them at Bardufoss aimed to make the facility a fully-functional base of their own. Like the major commanding the reconnaissance company of the 11th Air Assault Brigade (the first man on the ground after the jump), the lieutenant-colonel who led the brigade’s engineering battalion had been to Bardufoss before. He’d come as a tourist when flying through here on a commercial flight. Satellite images and other military reconnaissance of the facility was one thing but to see the place on the ground with his own eyes aided that engineer just as it had the reconnaissance leader. Only war damage hadn’t been factored in because how much would occur was unpredictable but everything else was considered first. Those engineers worked to make Bardufoss extremely useful for the Russian military just as the riflemen on the frontlines did. Bardufoss was a helicopter base for the Norwegian Air Force and it was now used by Russian helicopters too. The runway (something historically funded by NATO cash) saw landings and take-offs from Russian transport aircraft with the planned use of it by Sukhoi-25 attack-fighters soon enough: Tuesday morning was looking likely that the earliest flight operations could begin from here. Bardufoss was held by the Russians because they had expanded their airhead out from here and into the surrounding areas. The facility was on lower ground with high ground to three sides with the other side being water. Upon evacuating yesterday, Norwegian troops from part of their widely-spread Brigade Nord (home-based in this region but spread out far and wide before the shooting started) had used those mountain slopes to engage the Russians below them with distance fire and also shoot at aircraft. Overnight and into today, with much of the 11th Brigade here now – those not lost during the wipe-out at Andoya or trapped near Evenes – those enemy forces had been engaged. Bardufoss was located alongside the E6 highway, the main supply route for the Norwegians. Their forces had been split in two and were further forced apart; moreover, there were Russian forces invading via both the overland and sea routes coming towards those cut-off Norwegians away to the north and east. However, the embattled Norwegians here weren’t going to alone for long.

In the lead up to the war, Norway’s NATO allies had sent forces to the country. There were aircraft and troops on Norwegian soil. Norway was mobilising many of its own men from the reserves to join these yet before then, the Americans, the British and the Dutch with their marines were in-place. Further reinforcements from outside were promised as well with the Netherlands promising to add a second battalion to join with the British brigade of Royal Marines, the Germans having assigned a brigade of paratroopers and the US Marines intending to expand their on-the-ground force significantly. NATO could and would outnumber Russian in the Norwegian theatre. Doing so was going to take some time. Ahead of that reinforcement, the US Marines went into action. The 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade began moving last night towards the fight at Bardufoss. They themselves were around Bodo, much further south, yet had the full support of the Norwegians with transportation and logistics, to add to their own impressive capabilities, in deploying towards that fight. This came after confirmation that the Norwegians had stopped Evenes being lost and also there was no follow-up to the Russian failure at Andoya. If either of those airbases on the western flank were in Russian hands, more caution would be needed than was now shown. The Americans had plenty of Marine Riflemen and came with tanks, artillery and air support too. That air support included both armed helicopters and combat aircraft: these struck out ahead of the main body of the 2nd Brigade before it could reach Bardufoss starting tomorrow. FA-18 Hornets flying from Bodo Air Station refuelled in mid-air when making fighter sweeps and bomb runs. As to the AH-1 SeaCobras / SuperCobras, these attack helicopters used forward landing strips held by the Norwegians for their own helicopter operations south of Bardufoss on the way in and back out for refuelling. American aircraft and helicopters came under attack themselves while striking at Bardufoss. The Russians put missiles and shells into the skies and took down several attackers. Those heights which they had, where they had rooted the Norwegians out of, were used for the air defence effort at Bardufoss. The FA-18s were soon forced even higher while the AH-1s flew looping missions coming in from overwater.

Everyone knew that Bardufoss was going to be a devil of a place to retake from the Russians and the Americans were quickly discovering how true that was. They had to strike now though and overcome resistance soon enough. What they didn’t want to do was to fight for Bardufoss after the Russians got significant forces there. Those reinforcements were the rest of the Russian Sixth Army.


Two Russian medium brigades – the 25th & 200th Motor Rifle – were inside Norway now after entering the country from the Kola Peninsula. The latter was out in the lead with the former railing behind. The advance elements of the Russian ground invasion force had crossed the Tana River and rounded the very-most northern extremes of Finland on their way. Going was hard. Norway’s defenders were making the best use of terrain available, terrain which they had for decades trained to fight for in such a scenario as this. Border troops long based near the Russian frontier had withdrawn to undertake delaying actions and were fighting alongside Norwegian commandos as the invaders came forward. The fight against the 200th Brigade was a brutal one. No quarter was sought and none was given. Both sides killed the enemy any way that they could. Still the Russians came onwards, running into ambushes and controlled demolitions on the way. They used their firepower extensively and caused themselves heavy delays to their timetable to do so. This was the only way to move forward though. All of that firepower couldn’t kill all of the Norwegians, especially those fast gained experience at getting out of the way, hunkering down and waiting for the exposed follow-up units behind the main fighting troops to come into view.

The end of the war’s second day saw the furthermost Russian units closing in upon Borselv. This would put the scout cars and tracked armoured personnel carriers, linking up with riflemen deposited by helicopter, at the eastern side of the Porsangerfjorden. That immense stretch of water had the larger town of Lakselv at its base. Stronger Norwegian forces were concentrated around there and these were those assigned to Brigade Nord. Two of that formation’s three combat-manoeuvre battalions, the Armoured Battalion and the Telemark Battalion, were there; the 2nd Battalion (a lighter unit) was the one split in two around Bardufoss. The Norwegians had an airfield at Banak for forward flight operations and extensive preparations had been made to shape the battlefield here with a fall-back position at Alta too where they’d withdraw to if needed. Even outnumbered, the Norwegians were confident of their position here. The ground would only allow the Russians to move one brigade at a time against them, not two abreast, and they would have to take Lakselv if they wanted to move onwards to Alta and then all the way to Bardufoss eventually. Norwegian Cold War planning had been for the main defensive position of the country’s armed forces to be much further west at the Lyngenfjorden position but in 2010, the Brigade Nord would fight at Lakselv. If the Russians had been inside Finland, then they’d be in trouble yet Finland wasn’t involved in this war. By the day’s end, Russian scouts were in control of Borselv after skirmishing with Norwegian commandos there. Next up with going to be the Battle of Lakselv and it would be a make-or-break fight for both the Russian Sixth Army as well as the Brigade Nord.

Russia’s Northern Fleet still had its ships at sea: the battle fleet and the amphibious group too. There was a whole brigade of heavily-armed Naval Infantry on the transports, all destined to join the fight ongoing inside Northern Norway. To get to that, to force a new front away from both Bardufoss and Lakselv, they needed to have the way opened for that first. That was the job of the battle fleet. It was quite the flotilla indeed where Russia had its big ships at sea. The aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov (equipped with Sukhoi-33 fighters) was present along with the battle-cruiser Pytor Velikiy and the missile-cruiser Marshal Ustinov. Several destroyers and a couple of frigates joined them. It was impressive as a battle fleet, that wasn’t in doubt, though to many in NATO these ships were all just targets to be put on the ocean floor. Norwegian submarines had already eliminated a destroyer, done significant damage to a frigate and also sunk a tanker when engaging the Russians off the North Cape. The Northern Fleet was past there now and inside the Norwegian Sea. They were far from shore, out to sea and rather inactive in any offensive manner. The US Navy had their own carrier charging towards them and the Norwegians had the coastline inside full of small warships, scattered marine commandos on several islands armed with missile-launchers and also a submarine present too. Ahead of the incoming American carrier, the USS Harry S. Truman, several NATO hunter/killer submarines were stalking the Russians from afar as they looked for an opening inside. NATO was waiting for the Northern Fleet to make its move with the belief that they would do so before they had all the pieces of their own in place to attack first. They weren’t about to be disappointed there.

Late on August 8th, the Russians made their move. The battle fleet increased speed and headed southwest: it was on a likely intercept course along the planned track of the incoming American carrier and its escorting battle group. This uncovered the Northern Fleet amphibious ships from close protection. They were moving themselves and sailing south once it was dark. Their destination was Tromsø. That was quite the interesting place for them to go to as not only would it mean (if they could successfully land there) they would be between Bardufoss and Lakselv, but it was also where NATO was in the process of moving the British 3rd Commando Brigade to so they would be behind the Norwegians. Royal Marines and the Dutch ‘cloggies’ with them were tomorrow going to go head-to-head with the 61st Naval Infantry Brigade.

Sixty-Seven

After two days of relative quite in the Pacific fighting would finally break out on a large-scale in the Far East. The Royal Australian Navy got its first taste of action early in the morning on August 9th. Out in the Java Sea on routine but conveniently-timed training exercises, a pair of Australian warships, HMAS Anzac & HMAS Melbourne, found themselves ordered to head southwards into the Sea of Japan and link up with the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet. Their task would be to support the airstrikes against the Russian Far East which were sure to be swift-in-coming. HMAS Stuart & HMAS Warramunga, two more frigates of the RAN, set sail from Garden Island off of Western Australia, joined by the diesel-electric submarine HMAS Collins. Those three vessels were to join the Anzac & the Melbourne further out to sea as they passed Singapore, itself a country that was mobilising and preparing to deploy troops in aid of NATO. En route past Jakarta, Anzac & Melbourne found themselves stalked by a contact which seemed to appear and disappear randomly in the murky Pacific waters. This was the Russian Project-636 (Kilo-class) submarine Mogocha. Her crew had been eagerly waiting to go into action against US cargo ships passing Indonesia, but instead, after Australia voted yesterday to enter World War III by an overwhelmingly high margin, they now had orders to engage whatever ships of the Royal Australian Navy or the Royal New Zealand Navy that they came across. The Kilo moved into position and fired a trio of torpedoes at the two RAN ships, only to have two of them miss and the third fail to detonate. The Australians quickly counterattacked, with both of the SH-60 Seahawk helicopters on each Australian frigate taking to the skies in search of vengeance. It didn’t take long for them to locate Mogocha, sinking her with an ASROC. Surprisingly, several of the Russian crew members survived the sinking of their boat and were hauled aboard the Melbourne as Prisoners of War.

Russia’s Pacific Fleet met far more success closer to home. An American surface action group was leaving Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan, tracked by another Russian submarine. Five vessels, USS Lake Champlain, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, the Burke-class destroyers Shoup & Oscar Austin, and the Perry-class frigate USS Taylor, were there, along with the supply ship USNS Arctic. There was meant to be a submarine from Guam meeting them outside the Japanese naval base, but a delay further south had meant that the USS Virginia would not be on station for some time, leaving the task force without any undersea protection. Those five US Navy ships were tracked as they moved further out to sea, with that Russian submarine, the Akula-class boat Samara, silently trailing behind them. US Navy maritime patrols aircraft as well as surveillance by the Japanese Maritime Self Defence Forces failed to detect the presence of the Samara because of a series of mistakes. Those mistakes would be disastrous for some. Pacific Command hadn’t been as prepared for war as European Command or STRATCOM with its ICBMs and B-52s had been. PACOM hadn’t been allowed to go to DEFCON 3 when other commands had done so and far less forces had been allocated to it that had gone to Europe. The result was that losses were going to be taken due to a general lack of preparedness and enthusiasm. So far, US warplanes were not being allowed to fly from their bases in Japan, and so the ships below lacked air cover as there was no carrier in the area and it would be several days before a carrier strike group would be in position to begin operations against Vladivostok or Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.

Samara launched several of her Shkval torpedoes in her first attack run. The American ships manoeuvred to avoid the projectiles, meeting some success. But not enough. The supply ship Arctic was hit and damaged while the smallest vessel in the surface task group, the Taylor, was sunk when a Russian torpedo slammed into her hull, practically blowing the ship in half with dozens of lives lost. The cruiser and the two destroyers scrambled their ASW helicopters in the hopes of catching the offender; their efforts would fail. Not only this, but the Russian submarine came around again to launch a second attack. In a combination of foul luck for the Americans and good luck for the Russians, a false positive was detected at the rear of the American fleet, diverting their attention in that direction and leaving Samara free to strike again from the east. The origin of the false positive was never discovered although some would speculate that it was a Chinese submarine. The Russian submarine paused to launch her SS-N-27 Sizzler anti-ship cruise missiles from afar after running away to buy herself some time to escape. She got off six missiles before being forced to flee away from her victims.

Four of those missiles were shot down; two would strike their targets with precision.

USNS Arctic, already gravely damaged, was struck and sank when a missile tore through her body and detonated. Many of her crew were killed and others would have to be fished out of the Pacific by helicopters, suffering from grave injuries. USS Lake Champlain also took a missile hit, albeit one less fatal than the strike on the Arctic. Damage control parties expertly gained control of the situation, extinguishing the fires where the Sizzler had struck in front of the bridge and preventing any major flooding, thus saving their ship and their own lives too.

The island of Guam came under attack later on in the day. Russian Bear bombers, only three aircraft in total but each laden with missiles, took off from the Kamchatka Peninsula and flew down southwards, avoiding with some effort the United States Navy’s scattered fleet in the region. Right now, the Americans were focusing on consolidating their forces, before pushing into the Sea of Okhotsk in future. The Bears were detected by a Japanese Air Self Defence Forces Sentry Airborne Warning & Control System aircraft. A decision on what to do next was made in Tokyo. The Minister of Defence was left with the decision to make, advised his Chiefs of Staff for the AWACS to vector in F-15Js from Hokkaido to shoot down the bombers. The Minister eventually decided to refuse this option; he was told that he could at least grant the JSDF permission to vector in American interceptors and allow the US jets to take off from Yokota Air Base.

Half of this request was granted. The F-16s on the tarmac at Yokota would stand down, but the JASDF would release its Sentry to the US Air Force and they could in turn use it to track the Bears and assist American fighters from Guam in shooting them down.

This just wasn’t enough to stop the Russian bombers. They launched their cruise missiles well away from Guam itself, never even needing to enter the interception envelope of the F-22s stationed there at Andersen Air Force Base. The KH-55SMs dropped down to a low altitude to avoid air defences and fighters, but some of them were splashed by the Raptors regardless. As always, it seemed, enough cruise missiles would get through to do the damage that was required of them, but not enough to shut down the airbase for good. A missile struck a hardened aircraft shelter, collapsing it atop several aircraft, while another Kent crashed into the main control tower; more missiles with runway-cratering warheads hit damage to the taxiways but failed to shut them down; the worst loss of life occurred when a Marine Corps KC-130 tanker, filled with fuel, received a direct hit. The predictable result of this was a huge explosion which killed twenty-two Marine Corps and Air Force personnel and sent a fireball rising into the sky. It could have been a lot worse, but Andersen Air Force Base had taken something of a beating. One of the biggest surprises of the day happened some hours after the missiles struck.

Sensors set up around Andersen AFB to detect attacks by biological or chemical weapons suddenly went off. The whole base went to the highest possible protective posture, with gas masks and NBC suits worn. A sniffer south of the airfield reported that it had detected a potential biological weapon rather than a chemical or radiological one. This information was sent up the chain of command. In the end, all it turned out to be was a false alarm. Many were shaken up though; Guam was the perfect place to attack with bioweapons, being an island and thus leaving little possibility of outside contamination. By the time the news reached Raven Rock about a possible biological attack on US forces, it had already been refuted. Fear had been struck into many hearts though. Chemical and nuclear weapons attacks had been considered in much more detail than potential biological strikes, and the Joint Chiefs wanted to put more effort into countering a potential escalation of the war to the WMD level.

All in all, the first day of real fighting in the Pacific Ocean had been a rough one for the Allies. Two warships had been lost and many casualties taken & damage incurred at Guam, with little to show for it beyond a single Russian diesel-electric submarine sunk in the Java Sea.





Sixty–Eight

The third day of the war saw a trio of large-scale engagements take place on the ground in Northern Norway. The first of those was in the western part of the region, over in the area of Russian occupation centred upon the captured Bardufoss Air Station. Taking over the fight from the embattled and far-outnumbered Norwegians, the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade moved into the attack to drive the Russian airmobile forces out of there and retake the Bardufoss airhead. They also sought to reopen Highway-6 too. It was going to be no easy task but they went at it with all they had. Part of the 2nd Brigade moved up from the south, following the main road up from Narvik, and thus running into the outer defensive lines of their opponents more than a dozen miles away at Setermoen; the rest of the highly-mobile force conducted a landing at Sørreisa, a coastal village on the Russian’s right flank. American tanks made all the difference at Setermoen. A company of M-1A2s aided the Marine Riflemen in overcoming Russian resistance there. Two of those tanks were destroyed and a third left temporarily disabled when enemy anti-tank missile teams did their worst but the others tipped the scales of the fight greatly in American favour. Their cannons especially had ‘fun’ when hitting Russian light armoured vehicles at distance and with great accuracy. In went the Marine Riflemen behind them and they were all over the Russians. An organised withdrawal became a rout when the retreat went to hell out on open ground. Only when the valley which the highway ran between the mountains was reached were the American stopped due to the Russians firing down from above and their mining of the approach. Before then though, hundreds of Russian casualties had been inflicted. At Sørreisa, Norwegian Home Guard troops had been fighting skirmishes there with Russian scouts when the US Marines arrived by hovercraft and helicopters. The village was taken in the briefest of fights and the Americans moved onwards. Another company of tanks escorted a battalion of Marine Riflemen in their LAV-25 & AAV-7 armoured vehicles to follow the road down to Bardufoss. The terrain here favoured the attacker, not the defender. The Americans were halfway to Bardufoss – they might have taken it too – before there were Russian aircraft in the sky. Flying impossibly low, and after getting through NATO fighter coverage, these Naval Aviation aircraft were Tu-22M Backfire bombers tasked today for the air-to-ground role rather than a missile strike over the ocean. They screeched in and dropped their heavy payloads of unguided bombs before flying away unmolested. Three dozen 1100lb high-explosive bombs fell atop the US Marines. While not perfect, the accuracy of the strike was rather good. American losses were horrendous. The tanks were generally unscathed but the other armoured vehicles, laden with men, came off far worse. The advance was halted around the village of Finnset. The Americans dealt with those as best as possible while also reorganised their men with the intention of moving again in the coming hours. Before they could do that, just an hour after the Backfire strike, a volley of long-range missiles arrived. These were Isklanders launched from a great distance away yet their impacts were remarkable in their accuracy as well. Again, there was a wave of human casualties. Neither the ‘luck’ of the air strike nor the ballistic missiles were just that. The US Marines were under observation with someone calling-in those attacks perfectly in terms of timing and devastation. Russian spotters were clearly nearby. The Americans spread out on the hunt for them, all the while delaying the continuing drive on Bardufoss until they could be located and killed.

The Norwegians had the same issue at Lakselv. They came under air and missile attack from afar right in the middle of their big fight against the Russian ground forces coming over from Kola. While the Brigade Nord – Norway’s heavy ground forces – was engaging the Russian’s 200th Motor Rifle Brigade in a fight which they believed they could win, those strikes took place. It was rather unfair and the Norwegians suffered gravely in the face of them. They had their own spotters out and were trying to do the same to the Russians but were hit themselves much harder. Norwegian F-16s made a fantastic strike over the 200th Brigade where bombs and rockets were used in a targeted strike (two of the fighters were lost to ground-based air defences post-strike though; a serious loss) to impact the fight yet in came another pair of those Backfires dropping their own bombs and Isklanders also arrived. The Brigade Nord had its frontline units hit along with its headquarters and artillery in the rear. Norwegian soldiers at the frontlines were winning until that strike against their support network. Norwegian tanks and armoured infantry, well-supported by heavy guns, were fighting the Russians, even with their T-80 tanks and their own armoured vehicles & artillery, to a standstill. The Russians were channeled into kill-zones and smashed up. Then the brigade commander and most of his staff were killed as well as knocking out of two of the three batteries of M-109 self-propelled guns. The senior surviving Norwegian officer was the lieutenant-colonel commanding the Telemark Battalion and he gave the order for a withdrawal when those strikes were followed by the Russians throwing in even more men. This was something planned beforehand should the worst happen – what came was unexpected in its form but not a complete surprise overall – and the Brigade Nord withdrew from the battlefield. The loss of the majority of their guns really hurt the Norwegians. The Russians had more of their own plus also their BM-21 rocket-launchers; the Norwegian Army’s MLRS systems had been in storage since 2007 and, while being broken out ready for use, they weren’t at Lakselv. Already outnumbered, the Norwegians were now significantly outgunned. Russian spotters clearly had them firmly under observation here ready for more distant strikes. Highway-6 (it ran the length of Norway) wasn’t followed by Brigade Nord as it went the long way around. They instead cut over the wilderness on a pre-scouted route towards Alta. The Russians had ‘cheated’ and won the day at Lakselv yet the Brigade Nord, even hurt as it was, would fight again: the Norwegians aimed to string the Russians out on their way to Alta leaving them open and exposed to more commando attacks on their lines of communications than they’d already had. The withdrawal was successful. The Norwegians cut and ran before the Russians though they would, before they though they could. It would be up to them to now try and follow for another fight further westwards.

Battle no. 3 was fought at Tromsø. It involved Anglo-Dutch forces fighting Russian marines, the 3rd Commando Brigade and the 61st Naval Infantry Brigade. Each moved on the Tromsø area to get there ahead of the other. Air and naval support was provided for each while they both had men on the ground ahead of their landings: Norwegian special forces and Home Guard troops for NATO with the Russians having commando frogmen there. What a fight it was. For each side, controlling Tromsø with a significant force meant not just denying it to the other but using the commanding position to influence the other battles raging both to the southwest at Bardufoss and to the east at Lakselv (later Alta). There was a reasonable understanding of the other’s intentions too and thus efforts made to stop their opponents from getting their men there ahead of friendly forces. Each could have backed out at the last minute, maybe they should have in fact, yet they went ahead. Tromsø suddenly became the key to winning the fight for control of Northern Norway when beforehand attention had been elsewhere. It would be a make-or-break for NATO and Russia too with neither side predicting the draw, rather than outright victory or defeat, which occurred when they clashed here.

Royal Marines with the Brigade Patrol Troop – joined by some Dutchmen serving among their Mountain Reconnaissance Troop – met with Norwegian forces on the ground. There were regular special forces there but also high-readiness forces of their Home Guard. The Norwegian Home Guard was no joke, especially the locally-based reconnaissance & sharpshooter detachments at Tromsø. Clashes with Russian naval Spetsnaz took place with the Russians coming off far worse. NATO troops opened the way for the arrival of incoming forces to make use of the extensive transportation facilities which Tromsø offered. The Russian commandos failed to take either the airport, the port nor the tunnel & bridges. Helicopters started to deploy Royal Marines from 42 Commando into Tromsø as NATO won the race. Incoming Royal Navy and Dutch amphibious ships were bringing in more men and they were covered by external support. Everything was going oh so well before Russian aircraft turned up. NATO air support was supposed to be on-hand yet it was missing at the crucial moment when Su-27 fighters engaged Norwegian F-16s and neither the British nor the Dutch had fighters of their own present. Below the high-altitude fighter battle, several flights of Su-24s came in after racing down fjords where a couple of them fell to Norwegian missile teams but not enough to make a real difference. Tactical anti-ship missiles fired from the Su-24s hit several vessels in a complete failure of the overall air defence set-up. HMS Albion was struck by two Ka-31 missiles and the Dutch HNLMS Johan de Witt was hit by another. These were big ships, Landing Platform Docks with helicopters and well-decks, each well away from Tromsø itself. Neither would be lost but major losses occurred aboard in terms of men leaving them out of action. A trio of frigates assigned to support them (one British, one Dutch and one Norwegian) all escaped unharmed from this attack: their mission was to stop a missile attack but they had failed. Closer to Tromsø, other flights of Russian aircraft got in-closer aiming to hit smaller landing craft disgorged from the struck LPDs and also shoot-up any helicopters as well. They weren’t so effective yet did cause quite the amount of chaos. Everyone was asking where were those fighters from the US Navy aircraft carrier out to sea – why weren’t there American jets in the sky? 45 Commando was meant to follow 42 Commando into Tromsø before afterwards the Dutch 2nd Marine Combat Group (battalion-sized) would follow along with the 1st Battalion, The Rifles: a British Army unit assigned to the 3rd Brigade. There would be landings on the island which Tromsø sat directly but also all around it including the mainland to which it was linked. Much of 45 Commando was aboard HMS Ocean, a helicopter carrier which had hit an incoming Ka-31 anti-ship missile with its Phalanx multi-barrelled guns when RAM anti-aircraft missiles from the escorting Norwegian frigate had failed to do the job. The airlift using Sea Kings and Chinooks went ahead to get 45 Commando to Tromsø less they be aboard ship when another Russian air strike came. This was underway when the Russians started their own landing operations, coming in from the north.

The Northern Fleet battered its way past NATO efforts to stop them doing so. They took loses which NATO believed would have forced them to call off the landings and did so at a time when everyone was waiting for aircraft from the carrier USS Harry S. Truman was going to show up to finish them off. That wait for carrier aircraft would be a long wait indeed… Norwegian forces engaged the Russian amphibious ships and escorting warships. They used submarines, hastily-laid minefields and also the best efforts of the Kystjegerkommandoen (KJK: the Coastal Ranger Commando) to try and stop them. KJK special forces teams used CB90 highspeed coastal boats to deposit missile teams throughout fjords among tiny islands and inlets where they had Hellfires with them to join those fitted to other boats. A missile such as the Hellfire was going to ruin anyone’s day. Several of these were fired successfully at Russian ships while other vessels ran into torpedoes fired from beneath the waves or mines. Serious Russian loses were inflicted. Eyes went upwards. Where were all those incoming American aircraft? The Russians went onwards. Their own amphibious ships including two rather old Ivan Rogov LPDs removed from reserve status last year & patched up for service started launching landing craft and helicopters. Escorting them and other assault-rolled ships were many warships. The biggest was a lone destroyer but the rest were missile-armed corvettes all of which were very far from home and had had a terrible voyage. If it hadn’t been summer with reasonable weather, these would never have made it this far considering their age and condition. For many, this would be their last voyage too. They approached Tromsø and joined in the fight. The 61st Brigade had two battalions of marines – one specialising in helicopter assaults and the other for landing craft – as well as a battalion of tanks and two more of heavy guns. Russian mobilisation earlier in the year had seen a further pair of less-trained reserve marine battalions added to the brigade’s strength. They were all sent to Tromsø, aiming to land like NATO did on the island but also nearby. The 61st Brigade put men ashore in a hasty fashion and often in the wrong place. Exposed aboard ship, there was a rush to get them on dry land. An actual assault into Tromsø – onto the island of Tromsøya – failed when the Norwegians drove that off before the Royal Marines rushing to the landing site could get involved: how the Norwegians would celebrate! Legends about the prowess of Norwegian Home Guard men firing their HK416 assault rifles in an attack following the reputed words of their commander (Men dere som er rovdyret. Russerne er nå byttet. Til Valhall!) into battle like Vikings of old were created. Defeating that landing near the airport was equally down to KJK firing a Hellfire into one of the landing craft bringing in men of the second wave. Bigger and more effective landings were made outside of Tromsø. The Russians got men and equipment ashore and were fast out to surround it. Yes, Tromsø was wanted as a base of operations by the 61st Brigade and they weren’t finished here, but they were always going to move off it with their follow-up effort to strike into the Norwegian mainland. Now that was underway. None of this was over. NATO was still fighting here and the British and Dutch were going to carry on bringing in men to keeping fighting alongside the Norwegians to drive the Russians out of what ground they had taken.

Once again, men were looking skywards and asking where were those aircraft from the American carrier?


The Harry S. Truman couldn’t put aircraft over Northern Norway because the gargantuan carrier was alight and soon to be lost after a cruise missile strike.

The Russian Navy’s submarine arm had been having a terrible war with many loses taken to several boats in multiple theatres all for little real gain. In the Norwegian Sea, they got themselves a real prize though. The US Navy had sent one of its carriers across the ocean and inbound for fighting both the Russian Navy at sea and also influencing the battle over Norway. The Northern Fleet’s battle fleet, with its own big ships including Russia’s own aircraft carrier, were in the American’s sights. Meanwhile, a Backfire strike was planned with a ‘dance of the vampires’ included in that where those missile-carrying bombers would join with the surface ships of the Northern Fleet firing its own missiles. Each was looking at the other ready to attack their opponent in the skies and on the surface However, before then, the submarine Orel made its own attack and what an attack that was!

The Orel was a Type-949A (to NATO an Oscar-class) cruise missile submarine. It was designed to launch waves of cruise missiles rather than as a multi-purpose platform like other Russian submarines active in the past few days which had also been firing torpedoes too. The huge submarine was noisy and couldn’t get close-in to the Americans. Already, she’d nearly been detected when first stalking the Royal Navy from afar: a task group built around the HMS Ark Royal complete with ground-attack RAF Harriers aboard that ship had therefore been sent south and out of the way ahead of the Tromsø mission. The US Navy was aware that there was a submarine out there and got one late yesterday, hitting a smaller boat (as said, Russian submarines weren’t having a great war) which they believed was the one which had threatened the British. Afterwards, the Truman went onwards and thus to her doom. A volley of seven missiles – an eighth refused to fly – were fired from VLS tubes from the Orel before she disappeared. Two thirds of her armament remained available for later strikes, including having another go at this American carrier is this one failed… which it didn’t.

From ninety miles away, those seven cruise missiles shot from their launch point towards the Americans. They were fast, very fast. Each flew low and quicker than the speed of sound towards the Truman. Their launches were detected on radar and then the search radar which one of them activated was picked up too. Identified in milliseconds for what they were, the US Navy realised it was facing an attack by P-700s: missiles given the NATO codename SS-N-19 Shipwreck. These were known to operate in swarms using artificial intelligence and the fear at once was that they really were going to cause a shipwreck indeed. Defences measures were enacted. Several escorts fired their guns and missiles. Jamming systems came online and decoys were attempted. Two of the P-700s were brought down and one spoofed away. Given more time, the Americans could have gotten them all. They filled the skies with ordnance and the pair of missiles which they hit in-flight were those which climbed up higher to use its radar to guide-in the rest. Yet, the third one which did this matched up the radar profile of the targeted American carrier just as the two before had done wasn’t shot down. It guided itself and its three sisters into the ship ahead.

All four missiles struck the Truman down its starboard side.

These were huge missiles: each was ten meters long. They carried with them a 1600lb high-explosive warhead as well as unspent (and also high-explosive) rocket fuel. The force of their impact was extremely damaging and that came before the warhead detonations. Rocket fuel was spread everywhere and this went up too. The fires which engulfed the Truman were like the legends of hellfire. Almost six thousand crew were aboard. Men and women sailors of the US Navy were all in the way of the explosions and the fire. In the event of an attack on the carrier, everyone had a job to do. The crew tried and damage control efforts were made. Heroism was shown aboard. The challenge was too much though. The damage done was terrific and the fires moved with a rapidity unforeseen. Hundreds of casualties were inflicted at the moment of impact and hundreds more were caused within minutes. More and more of the ship was being lost to the flames and also the choking, deadly smoke. Soon enough, the carrier was effectively cut in half in terms of the ability to move damage control parties and firefighters up and down her length. The Truman just kept burning and this couldn’t be stopped.

Forty minutes after impact, the order came to abandon ship. Casualties went off first followed by the rest of the crew soon enough. There were several warships nearby which took aboard a mass of sailors each. Forty-one hundred got off, just over two-thirds of the Truman’s crew. The rest, all of those sailors who’d called the carrier home and gone to war aboard here, would be lost with her. In the coming days, burnt out and left drifting, the sea would take the Truman and those inside down to a watery grave at the bottom of the Norwegian Sea. As to those other US Navy ships which had been part of the battle group, two cruisers & three destroyers & a frigate & two support ships, they not only had to accommodate those who escaped from the Truman (many of whom were injured; the burns victims being plentiful), but they now had no air cover. There was a Russian battle fleet over the horizon. Its twenty or so Su-33s might not have looked that threatening when the Truman had her fifty plus FA-18s yet things were different now. Those Russian ships had all those missiles too: many more P-700s looking to cause another shipwreck. The US Navy turned around and ran from that fight. They headed south and seeking the safety of air cover from land. They could only hope that the Orel didn’t finish them off with another missile attack during that flight to safety.

Seventy-One

NATO had stopped the Russian attack on Copenhagen.

Soldiers from the Royal Danish Army and the British Army had fought courageously in a battle that had now lasted for nearly a week. For four days, fires had raged across the Danish capital and further south too where the town of Koge was located. The wreckage of tanks, aircraft and armoured vehicles were strewn across the island of Zealand and a huge number of buildings had been destroyed or damaged. And yet, the fight for Zealand was still not over. The time had come for a counterattack to be launched with the objective of breaking down the 336th Guards Marine Brigade into smaller formations and then destroying them with superior firepower. The full strength of the British 16th Air Assault Brigade was now present on the island, and Brigadier James Chiswell, the brigade commander, found himself placed in charge not only of his own troops but of Danish forces on Zealand as well.

Chiswell was a former Para, and had earned himself a Military Cross (MC) in Sierra Leone when fighting with his battalion.

Though the Danish were not thrilled at the thought of a British commander taking charge of the Allied military units around their capital, they understood that at this moment, it was the British Army that commanded the balance of forces on the island. The Danes had taken tremendous losses when their 2nd Brigade had been hit with thermobaric weapons on the first day of the war, and those casualties had only increased in numbers as the battle raged on.

Facing the 877th Battalion, with the small number of tanks and artillery batteries assigned to it, was 3 PARA. That battalion had taken murderous losses when engaging the Russians just after parachuting down into a landing site that was practically on top of them. They’d forced the Russians back though, pinning the 877th Battalion to the coast in what was now being called the Battle of Havdrup. Something of a stalemate had occurred their afterwards, with both sides too badly beaten-up to make any real advances. With more Danish troops coming in from the mainland, Brigadier Chiswell sent some of his forces south-west to support 3 PARA when it came to pushing the 877th Battalion back towards the coast. 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, moved northwards around the Fureso Lake, accompanied by several Scimitar fighting vehicles of the Household Cavalry Regiment, and then they went south Havdrup, where both sides were still shooting at each other with everything from rifles to tanks and missiles. 1 RIR battlegroup was to hit the Russian Marines dug in their while the Para’s, already battle-weary, would hold off any attempts at a counterattack.

Back in Copenhagen itself, Russian forces had pushed northwards up along the coast and into the suburbs of Værløse, securing themselves a disused airport there. That was as far as they got. Additional NATO troops from the Franco-German Brigade had arrived overnight from mainland Europe. The whole brigade was not yet in place, but Brigadier Chiswell was able to add a battalion of French cavalry and a German rifle battalion to his forces, along with, perhaps most importantly, the 155mm PzH-2000s provided by the Bundeswehr. These guns contributed mightily to the firepower of the 16th Brigade and the Danish 2nd Brigade, allowing for the Allies to launch their counterattack as planned on the morning of August 9th. A massive bombardment by the German guns was aided by British 105s, with both sides blasting away at Russian positions in the pre-dawn light. After these softening up attacks, NATO troops left their foxholes and improvised hideouts in the northern suburbs of Copenhagen, beginning a new chapter in the fight for Zealand. The Danish provided the heavy firepower with their Leopard-2s, and although many of these behemoth vehicles had been lost in clashes in the previous days, enough remained to support the Allied advance. British Scimitars with the Household Cavalry Regiment, fighting under the command of 2 RIR and 1 GHURKHA battlegroups, also went forward.

2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment – 2 RIR – mounted a helicopter assault to capture that airfield held by Russian troops in Værløse. They used Chinook and Lynx helicopters with the Army Air Corps, supported by many Apache gunships too. Nevertheless, it was a harder fight than expected. One Chinook was shot down by a MANPAD, with its entire complement of crew and soldiers killed. Others were damaged and machinegun fire raked the rear doorways as men disembarked. Determined efforts by 2 RIR eventually would overwhelm resistance from the Russians. Intelligence about the airport had been wrong; it was thought that this facility would be guarded only by rear-area troops. Rather, a couple of platoons of Naval Infantry rested their, along with several of the bloodied Spetsnaz teams that had initially struck in Copenhagen. It turned out that a battalion command post was located on the site of the airport, and with it, vast swathes of useful information and personnel too was captured.
The Russians were clinging on by the skin of their teeth, and they fought like it.

As British and Danish troops along with a smaller number of French and Germans made their way southwards through the ruins of what had once been one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, every street corner was bitterly contested. Whole squads of soldiers were cut down by machinegun nests, while tanks and armoured vehicles were destroyed by Russian BTRs or missile teams hiding in collapsed buildings. The urban nature of the fighting helped to offset the superiority of the 336th Brigade’s armoured forces, allowing for NATO troops to hit them with anti-tank missiles and sometimes even grenades when the Russian crews allowed themselves to be drawn into house-to-house fighting. There were some intense battles in the centre of the city, around Lyngby, when the Ghurkhas found themselves clearing out suburban houses of isolated Russian troops. Fighting sometimes involved bayonets and the Ghurkha’s legendary Kukris too. Along the coast, 2 PARA, supported by tanks with the Danish 2nd Armoured Infantry Battalion, moved down into the suburbs also, supposedly protecting the flanks of the remainder of 16 Brigade. Their fight was just as brutal as those faces by the Ghurkhas and the Royal Irish, with many casualties taken. Russian T-80s were knocked out by Javelin missiles and then enemy soldiers were cleared from buildings by grenades and rifle fire.

By the end of August 9th, the mishmash of attacking NATO troops would have reached as far south as Herlev, and 2 PARA would have its eyes set on the port of Copenhagen itself.

Back down at Havdrup, the fighting was a largely British affair, with a small number of Danish commandos involved also. 1 RIR battlegroup had seen some fighting during the past few days back in northern Copenhagen, but of all the 16th Brigades’ units, it was the least beaten up. That would change when those soldiers went forwards to clear the 877th Battalion from Havdrup and then push them all the way back to Koge and following that, drive them into the Baltic Sea. RAF Harrier GR9s and Danish F-16s gave as much air support as they could, while the Scimitars attached to the battlegroup raced towards Russian lines. The few T-80s with the 877th Battalion were knocked out by airpower, leaving the Scimitars free to engage enemy infantry while the British infantrymen came in behind them. Russian anti-tank missiles proved as effective as the British Javelins had been, knocking out several FV107s and inflicting some deadly blows.

Nonetheless, 1 RIR would win the day. British infantrymen raced out from their covered positions, bursting into view in broad daylight towards the first ring of the 877th’s defences. Those defences lay in farmland east of Havdrup and the Russians positions gave them a clear field of fire. Airpower and artillery kept them down in their foxholes while the British troops closed to fighting range and then the battle really began. Infantrymen duked it out with some limited armour support, with trenches being cleared in brutal fighting, before 1 RIR went into Havdrup itself and fought some more skirmishes albeit on a smaller scale to clear that town of enemy presence. Two companies belonging to the 877th Battalion had been lost in that fight at Havdrup, and now the Royal Irish pushed onwards towards Koge, leaving their prisoners in the hands of Danish reservists behind them.

The Russian battalion commander at Koge found himself defending his beachhead with no more than a single rifle company and a mishmash of support troops and artillery, all while under constant bombardment from the air. He believed, nonetheless, that he could hold out long enough for the rest of the 336th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade to breakout from Copenhagen and reach his men. It was a futile hope, but the commander ordered his support troops to take up defensive positions in the woodlands overlooking Koge. Though this defence would achieve little to nothing in a military sense, it did cost hundreds more lives for no visible military gain. The exhausted men of 1 Royal Irish pushed on towards Koge. They were ambushed by enemy support troops fighting from the woodlands, and the battalion was pinned down for another hour in a battle which cost the life of the battalion commander before a counterattack was launched by his deputy, clearing out the woodlands of Russian troops.

The death throes of the 877th Battalion were made within Koge itself as 1 RIR battlegroup cleared out the town, reaching the port just before midnight, where they took the surrender of the 877th Battalion’s commanding officer.

The Russian force advancing northwards from Koge had not only been turned back, but totally destroyed as a fighting force with many of its men dead and more captured. The tireless efforts of 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, had seen this done in only one day, while 3 PARA had done an excellent job of securing the British rears. Back inside Copenhagen, a fierce battle was still ongoing and it looked like it would take several more days before the main bulk of the 336th Brigade could be broken down into more manageable pockets and then overwhelmed.





Seventy–Two

NATO troops in Poland would have loved to have been advancing and on the cusp of victory as those fighting on Zealand were. They weren’t though. They were desperately holding their ground on their flanks while along the rest of their long frontage, they were withdrawing. Russian and Belorussian forces continued to drive further into Poland. They could only be slowed down, not stopped. Driving them back to where they came from was nothing but a dream. The fighting through the Monday which was the war’s third day followed the same pattern as those through the preceding two where heavily-armed and well-trained professional military personnel from various nations fought and died across this part of Eastern Europe. Battles were fought on the ground and in the skies. They were fought at the front and in the rear. Long periods of inactivity came between the sudden, violent clashes. Communications and navigation issues plagued each side. Modern war in such a fashion brought the best out of some and the worst out of others. No one wanted to die for their country or any other foolish notion like that yet so many did when they were trying to just survive. This was a war in the manner which none of those had ever been involved in before. Counter-insurgency operations and curb-stomp conflicts against weak neighbours were nothing like this.

Air losses as a result of NATO’s Operation Eclipse the night before affected both sides. The Russians and the Belorussian allies had taken a beating in fighter numbers yet still had their ground attack aircraft available with many of those flying from diversionary airfields away from those heavily-targeted by NATO bombs. NATO had lost some fighters the night before though were mainly worn down by those operations and the several days now of continued flying. Reinforcements were inbound for each side in terms of air power. Russia was hurting after Eclipse and sought to redress the balance. They had had some success over the Baltic yesterday in targeting an AWACS aircraft and also a strategic reconnaissance platform as well. That mission had been a test run for today. Once again, flying in the skies far in the rear, this time above Belarus, MiG-31 interceptors launched AWACS-killer missiles. Huge KS-172S missiles shot across the sky and were flying in the radar-homing mode. NATO didn’t seem them coming – like they hadn’t the day before – until two of their E-3 Sentry aircraft were hit. One of these was above southwestern Poland, the other in Czech skies: they were supposed to be safe that far back at such great distance. The French E-3F was obliterated when it hit the ground near the German-Polish border. As to the other aircraft, this RAF E-3D was badly-damaged by the explosion of the missile’s warhead but managed to make an emergency landing at Pardubice Airport. It caught light when on the ground yet the aircrew all managed to escape with their lives due to the brave efforts of the Czechs there in freeing them before certain death. Hitting these aircraft brought confusion in the skies for NATO aircraft over Poland. They lost their airborne radar coverage as well as command-&-control for their own air operations. There were other AWACS aircraft but these would take time to get up and operational and would also face the same danger leading them to flying even further west. Radio intercepts incorrectly told the Russians that they had destroyed both aircraft in mid-air (though it hardly mattered that this was wrong here) and they pushed as many aircraft skywards as possible. Where there were gaps where they couldn’t insert MiGs and Sukhois, they put armed helicopters up aplenty too. Winning control of the skies over Poland wasn’t what they had done, but they had made the fight fairer by inserting mass confusion into the situation.


NATO and Russian aircraft were involved in the fight which was taking place through the region of Masuria. This part of northeastern Poland was once known as East Prussia though had been Polish for sixty-five years now. It was known as the ‘region of a thousand lakes’ but was also heavily-forested. There were good road links but the terrain here wasn’t favourable for large-scale offensive operations with mechanised forces. What it was good for was defence with all of that terrain to make use of. The Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (the coming midnight, this command would receive a name change) was trying to do that. The Poles on the left flank with their 16th Mechanised Division had long-trained to defend against an invasion out of Russian-owned Kaliningrad and they were doing so. Beside them, inland through Masuria, both British and American forces, with the French behind, had already pulled back where they had given ground to the Russians though not that much overall. This had been done to allow the Russians to waste their time using all their firepower against nothing and string them out too but it was also done to maintain contact with the American and Polish forces which had been in the Suwalki Gap next to the Polish-Lithuanian frontier. The American’s 2nd Cav’ had left that area with the Poles alongside them being lost. The whole right-hand flank of the ARRC was swinging backwards. The speed of that withdrawal now picked up. Russian tanks were pouring over the border from out of Kaliningrad yet also Lithuania too. They had brought down the heavy formations of their Twentieth Guards Army, those men who had overran NATO forces in Latvia and lanced through Lithuania. There were two of their tank divisions present yet also part of one of their airborne divisions in armoured vehicles as well. NATO was retreating here, but they weren’t leaving all that ground to the Russians without a fight anymore now that they had reorganised themselves to do this. Both the French 2nd Armoured and American 172nd Infantry Brigades – each who’d already faced air attacks – stayed out of this fight while the corps commander, British Army General Shirreff, used the British 1st Armoured Division as he did the Poles: to fight a delaying action.

The day would be remembered across the British Army and back home afterwards for the tremendous casualties inflicted. Elements of the Russian 10th Guards Tank & 98th Guards Airborne Divisions were engaged. NATO air power was supposed to keep the Russians ‘manageable’ but the loss of those two AWACS aircraft, and then an increase in local air defence assets (all of those rapid-firing guns and short-range SAMs), brought down several aircraft and drove many off. RAF Tornados firing ALARMs along with US Air Force F-16s launching HARMs – both anti-radar missiles – were unable to break the air cover above the Russian ground forces and then faced MiG-29s in the sky seeking them too. Below them, Russian armour and infantry hit the British hard and hard again. They kept on coming and not doing as expected. The battle wasn’t one which the British had come here to fight. Shirreff brought in the Americans to assist as he was forced to adapt to an uncooperative opponent. They helped hold back the Russians but this was a losing game. Casualties mounted, the Russians pushed forward into dangerously-forward positions and this couldn’t go on. Orders came for the British to withdraw from this delaying action with speed and for the Americans to undertake several localised counterattacks to assist in that before beating their own retreat. It was a complicated thing to do: fight while pulling out of a fight. It didn’t go well. The Russian paratroopers in their tracked and wheeled vehicles suffered heavily but Russian tanks did very well in destroying many British and American personnel carriers even when often coming out the losers of tank-on-tank fights where Challengers & M-1s engaged T-80s & T-90s. Eventually, the retreat was complete but the losses…

The 1st Armoured Division – Germany-based with additions from mainland Britain pre-war – had almost two hundred dead, another hundred plus missing (presumably all POWs) and about that number again totalled left seriously wounded. The numbers could have been higher. The Americans saved their bacon – taking close to two hundred casualties themselves – yet so did Royal Artillery missile teams using self-propelled and man-portable Starstreak missiles. These took down eight Russian armed helicopters which were on attack missions certain to inflict even more losses. The Starstreak was very effective and brought down those Mi-24s, plus a Mil-28 too, inbound against British troops with guns, rockets and missiles. Without the presence of so many of these missile units, firing on-target against helicopters which NATO aircraft should have got first, the grave losses would have been far worse.


The US V Corps, just American and Polish troops now after the light German forces had been lost, were doing the same as the ARRC. They too were holding on one flank – their south-facing right side – while retreating elsewhere and aiming to make Russian and Belorussian forces pay for the ground taken. The holding position by the Poles covered the approaches to Warsaw while where they fell back, they aimed to keep contact with the edges of the ARRC to their north. The last thing wanted was to allow for their enemy to race forward, rip open that seam, and charge deep behind both operational corps commands to God-knows-where. This left all of the Podlachia region in the hands of the invaders. This area of eastern Poland bordered Belarus and was full of the forces assigned to the First Guards Tank Army. A lot of Polish civilians had gotten away yet many more hadn’t. Russian occupation operations where it involved them wouldn’t be that severe – the Belorussians were present too though and not so ‘polite’ – but memories of the past and other occupations were present. In addition, hundreds of thousands of Poles here were surrounded by hostile forces turning Podlachia into their rear area base full of military equipment all which NATO aircraft were going to want to blast to bits.

At the frontlines, the First Guards Tank Army was both advancing and reorganising its positioning ahead of further attacks too. Their task was to go onwards, going northeast eventually and not towards Warsaw as NATO and especially Poland feared, but this wasn’t an easy feat. Assigned Russian and Belorussian forces in had come off badly from clashes in previous days with the V Corps. They’d won several fights and taken much ground yet it had been no walk-over. Orders from above were for the First Guards Tank Army to keep going with its forward forces. Two of the Russian heavy divisions, the 2nd Guards Motor Rifle & 5th Guards Tank, did just that. Russian tanks moved towards the Narew River. This was out ahead and where the American’s 3rd Infantry and Polish 11th Armoured Cavalry Divisions were falling back to. Trapping NATO forces on the eastern side of that river, or even better defeating them before they could withdraw over it to the west, was the aim. Both the Americans and the Poles fought a withdrawing action. It was a different fight to the one up in Masuria which involved larger forces and much bigger engagements. Russian helicopters also had far better time. The Americans had their Stingers but these didn’t have the success of British Starstreak missiles in the face of Russian jamming; Polish air defence teams used Soviet-era air defence equipment and neither could they get many helicopters. A flight of German Eurofighters came low after failing to get contact with Belorussian fighters up high and made a successful pass in the anti-helicopter role were they got two Mi-24s but that was it.

The Poles on the left got more of their men over the river than the Americans on the right did. V Corps did manage to undertake a successful retreat to the Narew. On the way though, they took major losses in doing so: the 3rd Infantry Division was in a bad state. As to their Russian opponents, the failed to stop this withdrawal occurring and were unable to secure a bridgehead. However, while they didn’t achieve what they set out to do, it couldn’t be said that they had wasted their day. They’d smashed up NATO troops once again and not been stopped when going forwards. They too had their own air problems when many assigned missions which were supposed to see Su-24s and Su-25s show up like the day before, especially since those two AWACS aircraft were brought down, didn’t appear. Roaming NATO fighters, even without E-3 support, were able to achieve much despite the problems brought about without the usual AWACS coverage. Russian hopes to have dozens of tactical strike aircraft show up at once causing epic amounts of death and destruction to NATO’s troops failed to materialise. They’d got to the Narew yet the First Guards Tank Army would have to fight the V Corps over on the other side tomorrow or the next day. For a river crossing, they’d bring the Belorussians up and also make use of the 3rd Motor Rifle Division to the north. Again though, that was for another time, not today.


Belorussian forces between their country and Warsaw were still assigned to the First Guards Tank Army yet were semi-independent now once on Polish soil. Their 37th Guard Motor Rifle and 38th Guards Mobile Brigades were in southern Podlachia and holding the Brest-Warsaw highway. Forward recon units had got as far as Zbucznka before being pushed back a dozen miles or so from there in a desperate Polish charge forward. The Belorussians no longer had orders to advance but instead to hold their ground. That they did, facing off against the beat-up Polish 1st Mechanised Division which was in no state to charge forward to liberate any more Polish soil than they had. The Belorussians had a big area of ground to hold and with not that many major fighting units. They were joined by further forces crossing the border though, those tasked to aid in their defence. Anti-tank, artillery, air defence and mining units – all with older but capable gear – moved in. Also coming over the border was a brigade of missile troops. The Belorussians used those weapons late on August 9th. R-17 tactical ballistic missiles, Scuds to NATO, fired on Warsaw. Again, they were old but capable: they’d been in storage for so long all waiting for this day to see action. However, they weren’t very accurate. Various military sites and also civilian infrastructure being used for the war effort on NATO behalf was targeted by these missiles. They landed where they landed: hitting or missing those targets. Warsaw was hit by more than ten Scuds that evening. The Belorussians had many more of them to use later.

Belorussian forces also took the capital of another NATO country under fire. Riga and Tallinn had already fallen to the Russians but Vilnius was the responsibility of the Belorussians. Their Fifth Assault Corps had squeezed and squeezed the Lithuanians into the Vilnius area while Russian tanks rolled down behind them across that small NATO country encircling them. Securing Vilnius was wanted in both Minsk and Moscow. The beacon of hope which a fighting Lithuania sent was demanded to be stuffed out. Heavy guns, and also Russian bombers joining in, blasted Vilnius. Military targeted were given this attention yet civilian losses mounted: weapons weren’t always on-target when they landed. Throughout the day, the Lithuanians were attacked from afar. Their frontlines were holding – though ammunition was running out – but this was too much. No NATO relief column was coming. Further resistance was deemed pointless and would only cause the loss of more innocent life. Vilnius surrendered. Belorussian false promises of good treatment were known to be lies and politicians plus senior military officers alike expected a bullet in the back of the head along with an unmarked grave, but they did so to save their fellow people. It was a grand gesture and they would make their mark on history… but they’d be dead at the end of it though. Lithuania fell like its two Baltic neighbours had done in the days beforehand.

Seventy-Five

First Guards Tank Army attempted to cross the Narew River. The main effort was made by the 5th Guards Tank Division a few kilometres shy of the Polish settlement of Wizna. Pushing up northwards through farmland which epitomised the term ‘tank country’, the Russian tanks hit the defensive positions on the other side of the river. The US 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division, once a premier formation made up of vast numbers of tanks and armoured vehicles, manned by personnel who were veterans of campaigns in the Middle East, had been shattered in the past three days of fighting. The first day of war had seen them withdraw westwards while fighting few real engagements with the Russians, but on the second and third days they had been in near-continuous fighting. The division had already suffered over a thousand dead and hundreds missing. They were in no shape to contest the Russians’ crossing of the Narew alone.

North of the American 3rd Divisions’ positions, the Polish 11th Armoured Cavalry Division was continuing its own fight with the Russian 2nd GMRD. This was a battle that neither side was winning. The Poles, as they had trained to do, were falling back from one defensive position to the next, both taking and inflicting grievous losses. Their fight was one of secondary importance when compared with the Battle of Wizna. Lieutenant-General Ryan had been in near constant contact with General Mattis at Seventh Army headquarters in Krakow since late yesterday night when the American division had fallen back over the banks of the Narew. Mattis told Ryan to hold his position and Ryan relayed these orders down to his division commanders. Whatever happened, the Russian forces couldn’t be allowed to cross the Narew; in doing so, First Guards Tank Army would have put itself in a position to tear a gap in the lines between V Corps and what was now I Allied Corps in Northern Poland. That just wasn’t going to be allowed to happen.

A truly immense artillery bombardment came before the Russians tried to actually cross the river. TOS-1 rocket launchers hit the Americans with thermobaric weapons while the 5th Divisions’ MLRS and howitzers as well as corps-level fires pounded the dugouts and buildings in which soldiers waited for the attack to come on the ground. Air attacks were launched by both sides; Russian Su-25s and Mi-28s made several attack runs against the American positions. The whole town of Wizna smouldered by the time the first bombardment was over. NATO airpower hit back in turn; American A-10s and German Tornado IDS’s dropped countless different types of munitions but found the airspace that they were supposed to rule contested by MiG-29s & Su-27s. The US Air Force sent its F-22s out over Eastern Poland and those aircraft scored many victories. 1st ATAF command was hesitant to channel a large portion of its resources to the tactical air campaign, however, and the loss of two F-22s to SAMs and a pair of AWACS planes to MiG-31s yesterday only made the command back at Ramstein even more cautious. As the war seemed to go day-in and day-out, both sides inflicted a great many casualties upon one another in the air, but these tactical engagements saw the US Air Force getting the better of the fighting, albeit having suffered greatly in the process of doing so.

Russian and American tank crews again fought each other, this time from different sides of the Narew. American M2A2 & -A3 Bradleys used their Javelin ATGMs to knock out Russian vehicles. Dismounted infantrymen did the same, this time with more cover in the smouldering buildings that had once been the homes, schools and offices of Wizna. There were woodlands to the north as well from which the 3rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team fired at Russian vehicles from that direction. Abrams tanks poured down fire from their 120mm guns and the American artillery units contributed to the reign of explosives that was falling on the northern side of the Narew. The Russians, of course, fired back and scored their fair share of hits. The first attempt to cross the river had been a failure though; the carcases of burning T-80s, BMPs & BTRs lay scattered across the highway leading up to the Highway-64 Bridge which would have given the Russians access to the river. The 5th GTA’s commander shifted his artillery to the American positions which had now been exposed by their defensive efforts during his first attempt to cross the bridge. This second wave of artillery was more pinpointed that the first salvo had been. The positions used by American infantry units down to the battalion level had been sniffed out when missiles had been launched from them, and although doctrine would have called for US troops to move to different locations after firing off their Javelins, there was simply nowhere else to move to. Only the small forest and the buildings of the nearby towns provided cover. Those places were hit again by Russian artillery. American counterbattery fire struck back and eventually the Russian guns fell silent, but by this time the Russian commander felt confident enough to attempt a second crossing of the Narew.

The 5th GTA’s leading tank regiment began to roll across the Highway-64 Bridge. This time, the artillery continued and though there were losses the Russians got their troops across the river. Concealed M1A2s made short work of the BRDM reconnaissance vehicles as they began to head into Wizna, but they faced a tougher fight from the T-80s which followed. The 3rd Infantry Division was too beaten up to fight for much longer. The division simply couldn’t hold and General Ryan at V Corps had been screaming for reinforcements for days. Just as the Russians crossed the river, his wishes were granted when German troops arrived in numbers to contain the Russian bridgehead. The 10th Panzer Division, with its Leopard-2s and Marder IFVs came to the rescue. The Americans slowly began to pull back, taking up positions further north and east, allowing the Germans to pass through their lines. By now, a whole tank regiment was across the Narew, along with a pair of battalions from the motorised rifle regiment. American aircraft covered the 3rd ID’s withdrawal with AH-64D Apache gunships soaring over the treeline and obliterated what targets they could find with Hellfire missiles.

The Germans would face a tough fight in containing that Russian bridgehead. They came under artillery attack before they had even reached the frontlines, suffering somewhat and yet still remaining in fighting order. Titanic clashes occurred as the 12th Panzer Brigade’s Leopard-2s hit Russian armoured columns pushing up from the bridge into the town of Wizna itself. The Royal Netherlands Army had its 13th Mechanised Brigade attached to the German formation and their tanks contributed to the fight as well, raining down accurate fire on the Russian's bridgehead. Explosions roared and many vehicles were obliterated, their crews facing the worst deaths imaginable – being burned alive – as ammunition and fuel stocks cooked off. Before any more Russian forces could cross the river, the Highway-64 Bridge was blown to smithereens by German artillery. In their haste to withdraw, American engineers had failed to blow the bridge last night; an attempt had been made by the unit was overrun before it could complete the task. Almost as if by a miracle, the bridge had survived the fighting. This was due to the sheer number of air defence batteries located around it. Russian artillery units had forced their American counterparts to keep their focus on them rather than the crossing. Now, though, that bridge was blown and a regiment-and-a-half of Russian troops was on the northern side of the Narew. Bridging units assigned directly to 1GTA headquarters were sent rapidly to the front to set up pontoons, but for now those forces on the northern side of the river would be on their own against the 10th Panzer Division. The regimental commander on the ground outside Wizna kept pushing forwards. He wanted to be aggressive, to knock the Germans back and make them cautious. He sent motorised rifle troops into Wizna down the main highway while his own tank regiment pushed south-east, running into what was effectively a meat grinder of effective German fire. Those motor riflemen that went into Wizna came head-to-head with the Bundeswehr’s 23rd Mountain Brigade. These excellently-trained infantrymen were in their element inside urban terrain and used their own ATGMs to make the streets of Wizna into impassable pile-ups of destroyed armoured vehicles.

Behind Russian lines, bridging units went forwards, and the fight for Wizna continued.

*

NATO forces in Northern Poland had previously been under the command of Lieutenant-General Shireff’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps. That formation had now been renamed as I Allied Corps. It was an effective analogue to NATO’s Cold War-era Northern Army Group. With the British 1st Armoured Division and the Polish 16th Mechanised Division doing the bulk of the fighting thus far, I Corps faced off against the 20th Guards Army just as it had done yesterday. August 10th was set to be another day of heavy fighting and tremendous casualties. General Shirreff’s I Corps had been engaged in a near-constant fighting withdrawal for days not and his men were on the brink of exhaustion. Russian tactical airstrikes were taking a heavy toll on Shirreff’s supply routes through Poland. None of his units were going to actually run out of fuel or ammunition within the next twenty-four hours, but beyond that, Shirreff was told by his staff, this would start to happen at the platoon and company level. Shirreff’s position was extremely precarious here. With the Americans holding along the banks of the Narew River, he couldn’t withdraw very far or the very same gap in NATO lines that the Americans and later Germans farther south were fighting to prevent would occur. I Allied Corps had meant to get the 10th Panzer Division as it moved up to the front through Poland, but that unit had instead been assigned to Lt-General Ryan’s V Corps and was now heavily engaged in preventing the Russians from reinforcing their bridgehead over the Narew. Shirreff’s only reinforcement had come from the French 2nd Armored Brigade, which had been involved in several localised engagements since yesterday.

The Polish 16th Mechanised Division in the northern sector of I Corps lines was doing better than anybody had expected. In compliance with Shirreff’s orders they had pulled back somewhat yesterday to prevent a Russian breakthrough and keep the flanks of the British 1st Division secure, but they were holding out well along the Elblag-Ostroda salient, inflicting severe losses on the Russians’ 1st Motorised Rifle Division as they pulled back. The expected amphibious assault on Gdansk had instead occurred on Zealand and that was the Danes’ problem; for the 16th Division the failure of the Russians to land here could have been described as a miracle. Without worrying about Russian forces in their rears, the Polish division could focus on stopping the assault out of Kaliningrad. Using antiquated Soviet-era air defences, the Poles suffered heavily under a steady stream of air attacks as more Allied aircraft were diverted southwards to the ongoing fight on the Narew. They successfully downed a few Frogfoots and Hinds, but the losses suffered on the ground were extremely heavy. Their situation only worsened throughout the afternoon and after successfully holding out in place all morning the 16th Division was forced to begin pulling backwards at around three p.m. in the afternoon, leaving many hundreds of corpses behind in the countryside.

Shirreff’s 1st Armoured Division was busy engaging Russian troops with their 10th Tank Division. That Russian unit, with its T-90s, T-80s & upgraded T-72s actually outnumbered the British 1st Armoured, but that hadn’t stopped the British division from making the Russians pay in blood for the ground that had been given up yesterday. The 7th Armoured Brigade – the Desert Rats – had suffered particularly immense casualties when holding off an attempt by Russian forces to find a weak point in the division’s lines, although other units within the 1st Armoured had taken grave losses as well. Troops were forced to be more conservative with their ammunition usage given the precarious supply situation, although this didn’t stop missile teams knocking out several Russian attack helicopters with their Starstreaks. Infantry units with Javelin missiles fought well, blasting away at enemy armour in conjunction with the Challenger-2s assigned to the 1st Division. Scores of Russian tanks were left burning as the 1st Armoured Division fought their opponents for control of the area stretching from Gyzcko to Elk. Both of those settlements were left as smouldering ruins before the day was out.

If I Corps situation had been bad yesterday, it was about to become desperate. The 4th Guards Tank Division, a unit that had moved up through Kaliningrad from the occupied Baltic States, went forwards into battle once again. The 4th Division hit the point directly between the Polish 16th Division and the British 1st Armoured, tearing a hole open and thus achieving a breakthrough. Two days ago Russian forces had achieved a similar breakthrough further south where a brigade of the US Army’s 3rd Division had been overwhelmed. In that case, a speedy withdrawal had prevented the Russians from obliterating the American’s supply units in the rear, albeit while ceding yet more of Poland over to the invaders. Here, with I Corps general tactical situation, a hasty withdrawal wasn’t going to stop the 4th Division. They hit the northern flanks of the British 12th Mechanised Brigade, the 1st Division’s northernmost unit whose lines were meant to intersect with those of the Poles along the coast. An air attack by Su-24s did heavy damage to the 12th Brigade’s field headquarters and killed the brigade commander, leaving the unit in chaos while battalion (or rather, battlegroup) commanders fought to delay the Russian breakthrough. Shirreff had no choice but to send his outnumbered French reinforcements from their 2nd Armored Brigade into the battle head-on.

Sending a lone brigade up against a whole tank division, a well-equipped and battle-hardened one at that, was not something that any commander would willingly choose to do. The I Corps commander didn’t have the luxury of a choice though. He could either send the French into battle with a force far superior in numbers, or see the Russian division keep pushing forwards and encircling at best an entire NATO heavy division and at worst annihilating the entire corps. The men of the 2nd Armored Brigade went into battle knowing that the fate of the entire corps rested on their shoulders. First contact between the two units was made at Olsztyn when artillery shells came thundering down around the town and then French Leclercs met Russian T-80s. After a tremendous battle that lasted all throughout Tuesday afternoon, the French were able to plug the gap between the Polish and British division’s lines, albeit suffering murderous losses in doing so. A fighting withdrawal was made by the French brigade with them covering the area between the 16th and 1st Divisions as they pulled back, giving up as little ground as possible in order to avoid exposing the flanks of the still-holding V Corps in Southern Poland.

Another day in World War III came to an end.





Seventy–Six

The Norwegian’s Brigade Nord was in a bad shape after suffering hundreds of casualties and being forced to withdraw from Lakselv back to Alta in the face of the Russian cross-border ground offensive across Finnmark. They had thought that they could have held the 200th Motor Rifle Brigade back at Lakselv, even with there being another Russian Army brigade behind, but that had been proved impossible when the strong entry of external fire in the form of missiles and heavy bombers were used against them. They’d pulled back to Alta. This was a better position and in the manner which they did, the Norwegians spread the Russians out. It was supposed to be impossible for the Brigade Nord to be followed when taking the shortcut across the wilderness: the 200th Brigade was meant to follow Highway-8 and take the long way around to reach Alta. However, the Russians wouldn’t play by those rules. They took the shortcut too, smashing through Norwegian attempts to stop them with raiding units. Russian heavy guns as well as armed helicopters pounded Norwegian special forces teams to pieces and engineers cleared obstacles. The Russians came on towards Alta aiming this time to finish off the Brigade Nord for good. The 200th Brigade was tasked to do this while the following 25th Motor Rifle Brigade dodged the fight, went around Alta and headed further east. The Battle of Alta was fought not the way that the Norwegians wanted to do it. It wasn’t one which they controlled like they did at Lakselv. All of the 200th Brigade was thrown into battle with a clear aim to destroy the Norwegians with heavy losses of their own expected. In short, the 200th Brigade was now deemed expendable with the 25th Brigade being available. The Norwegians had their tanks, armoured vehicles and especially infantry in the way of a furious Russian assault on August 10th. The brigade commander was already dead and their own artillery had suffered losses even worse then their other components. The acting commander wasn’t just focused on what was at his front, he was looking to the rear too. Alta had been the rear-area field base for the Brigade Nord’s fight at Lakselv and was full of supplies brought forward before the war and also ahead of the Russian forces who’d taken Bardufoss Air Station spreading out from their overrunning Norwegian garrisons back in the Troms region. Those on-hand supplies were running out and the supply line was cut by that enemy presence there right on their main supply line. Ammunition expenditure, along with everything else in terms of consumables, was way above projections. An airlift into Alta’s airport had been promised but had yet to take place: it was now being delayed until tomorrow. How much could be brought in by what few C-130 Hercules transports there were available? Not much was the answer there. That second Russian brigade was also observed not moving direct on Alta but surely aiming to slip past. Not one to disobey orders, orders which said he was to hold until relieved either by the US Marines or the Anglo-Dutch marines, the lieutenant-colonel fought on. He was hoping to see the strategic situation reversed with his country’s NATO allies winning a victory where they were fighting away to the west.

Then the Russians dropped a huge fuel-air bomb on Alta in the late afternoon. It exploded in mid-air behind the fighting outside the town. The detonation above the airport was immense. Physical destruction radiated outwards into Alta. Up to a thousand people were killed, two thirds of them civilians. The airport was unusable and Norwegian supplies at their logistics base lost. The use of such a weapon was meant to intimidate the Norwegians into surrendering as well as causing all of that sudden destruction. They weren’t going to give in but neither could they stay. Finally, orders came for another withdrawal to be made. This time it wouldn’t be taking a short step back to another nearby position but a full-on retreat out of Finnmark. The Brigade Nord was instructed to abandon Alta and keep going, getting ahead of the Russian 25th Brigade too, and keep going to head towards NATO forces to the west. The strategic situation there hadn’t improved but only gotten worse. If the Norwegians stayed here, they were doomed. They could only survive by escaping and linking up with friendly forces. The commander did as ordered and started making his escape. The Brigade Nord could only live to fight another day, to avenge all of its losses, if it made it away successfully. Alta was abandoned with haste. Civilians there, but also Norwegian military wounded too, were left behind. Nothing else could be done on this note. The race was on for the Brigade Nord to make it out of Finnmark before it was crushed when inside.


At Bardufoss, the US Marines remained unable to take the airbase away from the Russians. Their Sixth Army had been given the addition of a further brigade of airmobile troops – the 31st Guards Air Assault, which should have gone to Copenhagen – to join those already operating on the ground in the region of Troms. Those men linked up with the 11th Air Assault Brigade starting early on Tuesday morning. Russian transports flew in and out of Bardufoss, making quick turnarounds after long and low-altitude flights to reach here, and then went back to airfields in the Kola Peninsula to get more of the brigade. Infantry units rather than light armoured vehicles or heavy guns were brought in. These reinforcements were fast despatched right to the frontlines. This was their first time in battle and they were thrown into it. They were fighting US Marines, so many of them veterans. It should have been a fight which the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade should have won. The numbers were against them though. The Russians were also now starting to conduct tactical air operations out of Bardufoss. It had taken them several days to get set-up, but they had Sukhoi-25 attack-fighters flying from here now. They flew low like the transports had done, between the mountains. Two came down in crashes where pilots misjudged the terrain and another pair were killed by US Marine FA-18 fighters flying from Evenes Airport away to the south. The others were making a difference though. They didn’t strike at the frontlines but rather behind them through the American’s immediate rear areas. Stinger missiles rose to meet them and failed to get a single one. Missile operators had had clear shots and their weapons should have found their targets. However, they failed to. The reason: jamming pods attached to the Su-25s with equipment tailor-made to block kills from the Stinger specifically.

The Russians were holding their ground where they fought the Americans. Positioned facing south and also west, they were no longer advancing. Their men dug-in and withered the storm of American fire power. There were heavy guns, helicopters and aircraft used against them which the Russians had to ride-out the barrage of ordnance used from each of those. Stuck in position, they did just this. They were battered and battered again but held, often because they had no other choice: getting out of whatever cover they had meant dying. US Marines on foot and supported by tanks tried to overcome these defences. They thus had to expose themselves on the advance to counterfire. They made progress in this yet not enough. The Russians had some heavy weapons of their own and while not as many, nor as well-experienced in using them, it was enough to keep the Americans back. A whole day was spent by the US Marines in trying to crack open a strengthening Russian defensive position for little appreciable gain. They did manage to several times shut down air operations at Bardufoss but there were many Russian airfield engineers there who kept on making patch-up repairs. Bardufoss was thus re-opened each time. A couple of transports made hard landings and wouldn’t fly again yet others, with ‘rough field’ capabilities, were able to get in and out again. Later in the day, with as many riflemen as they had now all sent in, heavy guns and more missiles were sent to Bardufoss instead. There had been an increase in American air attacks where they got through several attacks using AV-8Bs – the Harriers dodging anti-aircraft missiles – so the Russians made low-altitude air drops of those heavy weapons. The Americans were amazed at the Russian capabilities here in being able to fast adapt to a changing situation. That they could do all of this was known, it was just misunderstood that it could be done with such haste. The thinking had been that the ‘dense-headed’ Russians would stick to ‘the plan’ that they had and always wait for higher orders, all the way to the very top, before making any changes. They kept changing things up though. Therefore, even with their capable forces, and a lot of external fire support, the Americans weren’t going to be taking Bardufoss back any time soon. Russian casualties mounted but they held on. Bardufoss was theirs to keep.


Operation Atlas was the name given to the joint British-Dutch deployment to Tromsø and the surrounding area which had started yesterday. The whole thing had been undertaken with haste. It was poorly planned and based on the assumption of it working due to expected successes by allies elsewhere. It was ultimately a failure which culminated in Russia winning a victory. Things could have gone a hell of a lot worse than they did though.

The Russian Naval Infantry getting ashore – if not on Tromsøya Island then nearby – and the Russian Navy taking out that American carrier destroyed the chances of success for Atlas. Tromsø was held by NATO marines linking up with Norwegian Home Guard troops yet the 61st Naval Infantry Brigade had made their landings nearby and were soon on the advance. Only half of the 61st Brigade’s tanks were on the mainland but those that survived everything thrown at them when aboard the landing ships were on land and now on the move. They followed Highway-8 away from their landing sites. This saw them bypass Tromsø – NATO was holding the bridge and the tunnel linking Tromsøya to the mainland – and go south. Almost twenty T-80s, along with a couple of dozen wheeled & tracked infantry carriers, struck down towards where this road met Highway-6 far out ahead. The junction of the two was at the town of Nordkjosbotn, at the bottom of the Balsfjorden. It was there that British and Dutch marines had been sent late yesterday. There was Z Rifle Company from 45 Commando as well as most of the Dutch 22 Raiding Squadron (another company-sized force) at Nordkjosbotn who’d been sent here by multiple helicopter lifts. The rest of the Royal Marines were at Tromsø and the remainder of the Dutch aboard ships some distance away. These men had been sent here to stop a Russian infantry assault by helicopters or maybe a ground column of armoured personnel carriers laden with riflemen. They weren’t expecting tanks, especially not as many as showed up: intelligence had said that the Russian tanks had been lost aboard sunken ships. However, warning came in good time of the approaching T-80s when they were spotted from above. Air strikes were promised to stop them and there was also the assurance given that a SBS raiding team would block the road with a rockfall when linking-up with some Norwegian stay-behind troops to do that. Neither occurred. The T-80s approached Nordkjosbotn. Using all weapons at-hand, the NATO marines made a stand. They didn’t have a chance though. Nordkjosbotn was flattened in the fight which lasted three hours of a beautiful day where the Russians dug out those defenders with tanks and infantry. The senior officer on the ground was the Dutch major who made repeated calls again and again for assistance. He was told that none was coming: Russian attacks were occurring elsewhere in the Tromsø area. His men and the Royal Marines had been sent here when told they would be supported. He was furious that that promise had been broken. For as long as they could, until it was just pointless to keep on doing so, the British and Dutch fought on. Finally, they surrendered. A breakout was made first by a dozen men under the command of a Royal Marines captain, covered by a rear-guard, and they would escape into the Norwegian wilderness – maybe they could make it to the Swedish frontier? – but everyone else was left dead and prisoner. Russian forces had control of Nordkjosbotn afterwards. The line of retreat for Brigade Nord away to the east was cut. Link-up between the Russian Naval Infantry here and Russian Airborne Troops operating from Bardufoss was now impossible to stop.

The Battle of Nordkjosbotn occurred when other forces involved in Atlas were under attack. Without the expected American carrier out in the Norwegian Sea providing air cover, those land-based aircraft, already whittled down by several days of combat, were on their own. There were Norwegian F-16s, US Marines FA-18s and RAF Typhoons. Those Typhoons numbered only nine aircraft: No. 3 Squadron had lost two Typhoons in combat (two SAMs, not fighters) while another hadn’t left its Lincolnshire base due to a mechanical issue. The nine were extremely busy. Flying from Bodo Air Station, some distance south, they were called upon multiple times to engage Russian fighters in the sky and also to attack ground targets. Today, Sukhoi-27s showed up in number over Northern Norway and focused on Tromsø. Another Typhoon was lost in combat with them. The RAF would claim two air-to-air kills in reply and were going for more when the four Typhoons in the sky found that there were eight more Su-27s still left in the sky. Outnumbered, they were pulled out of the fight. While these high-altitude clashes occurred, other Russian aircraft came low into what those on the ground and aboard ships called ‘bomb alley’. Tromsøya and the waters immediately around it, plus also those westwards, were all part of the ocean-facing reaches of the Balsfjorden. Sukhoi-24s flew in following the water, avoiding missile teams on land, to attack NATO troops on the ground and their ships too. HMS Cumberland, a Royal Navy frigate, was hit (she’d survive) while many more bombs were dropped on Tromsøya. The Russian Air Force didn’t have the aircraft numbers to keep this up forever, especially when a Starstreak missile got one of those Su-24s: jammers fitted to these aircraft to guard against Stingers couldn’t stop the Starstreaks. The Russian Navy then sent aircraft into bomb alley to follow the opening air attacks. From their distant carrier, they flew in several flights of Sukhoi-33 multi-role strike-fighters. Bombs were dropped on Tromsø Airport from where NATO helicopters were flying but their real targets were NATO ships, especially the amphibious ships known to be west of Tromsø. HMS Albion was hit again, worse than yesterday. This time a big Kh-41 missile slammed into the ship after another one was successfully destroyed before it could join in. The Albion was left alight. A heroic effort would commence to save her and minimize casualties yet she was out of action for the time being. Air defence missiles from the Dutch frigate HNLMS De Ruyter took down a second pair of incoming Su-33s using its Evolved Sea Sparrow system: the Russian pilots, overworked and under pressure, didn't see the stealthy ship until they were too late and in firing range. This was an excellent achievement and much needed: if not, more Kh-41s could have easily hit the already-damaged transport HNLMS Johan de Witt or slammed into the Albion or the undamaged HMS Ocean.

These NATO amphibious ships had a couple of other warships in addition to the Cumberland and the De Ruyter as escorts yet they were exposed where they were. The Russians were expected to come back again and again. They could make a submarine attack or even have their Northern Fleet fire cruise missiles from far away if they could get an accurate fix on these ships. Staying here meant that that was sure to happen. How long before those Russian pilots who survived NATO air defences managed to get home and report where they could be found? Would the Typhoons or Norwegian F-16s be available to stop that and could they? When under attack, these ships, nor those forces deployed on Tromsøya, were unable to support the operations of ground forces. 42 Commando and the rest of 45 Commando were off the ships already while the majority of the Dutch and also 3rd Commando Brigade supporting assets were still afloat; the attached British Army infantry battalion 1 Rifles was over at Andoya. The whole brigade had yet to reach land: now they were unable to with all of these incoming attacks. Nordkjosbotn was lost rather than held as a blocking position. The Russians had taken losses to their marines but had enough ashore to do what they were away from Tromsø directly.

Operation Atlas had failed.

An evacuation was ordered. From Tromsø, those Royal Marines there (plus selected Dutch forces) would be withdrawn. NATO was having to abandon its position here due to enemy action close and far. That evacuation would take place overnight and the British and Dutch would try to evacuate back to Andoya, getting as many men out as possible with as few losses taken as they could. This wasn’t going to be easy.

Seventy-Nine

NATO airstrikes into enemy territory had continued since the first night of Operation Eclipse. After the disaster that had been August 9th, when countless European targets had been devastated by Russian cruise missiles, 1ATAF command was under increasing pressure to take further action to prevent this from happening again. Yesterday, August 10th, had been another dark day for NATO, and the continuation of Operation Eclipse was marred by the need for many aircraft to be diverted to focus their efforts on reversing NATO’s increasingly desperate situation on the ground. After the past two days, the darkest in the Alliances long history, the strategic air campaign to win control of the skies of Eastern Europe and to destroy Russia’s logistical ability to supply its troops was back on.

With more aircraft arriving at staging sites in Germany and Poland, NATO commanders felt more confident in their ability to resume Operation Eclipse at its original pace. Defence-suppression or SEAD efforts were again the responsibility of the 31st Fighter Wing with its F-16CGs, as well as the Luftwaffe’s Tornado ECR’s. The Italians had some of those aircraft in their inventory and SACEUR would have welcomed them joining in the effort but for now, at least, that wasn’t going to happen. An immense amount of effort was put into destroying SAM sites across Belarus and in Kaliningrad also. These missions met much success in finding and killing enemy missile batteries but plenty of SAMs evaded destruction and several NATO aircraft were shot down by their intended prey. The next targets to be hit were, naturally, the major Belarusian and Russian airfields that could be located. These same facilities had been bombed night after night, along with civilian airports, but repairing them was a relatively quick task if a hazardous one. The Belarusians were beginning to use POWs as forced labourers when it came to clearing up targets bombed by NATO, in the hopes that this would prevent the Alliance from utilising delayed-action munitions. The same tactics were used as on the first night of the air campaign, when the less-stealthy F-15s were used to draw out Russian fighters. Now there were F-22s as well as RAF, Luftwaffe, and Spanish Air Force Typhoons up in the air behind the Eagles. Yet more vicious air battles would occur throughout the night but 1 ATAF would come out as the clear winner of those engagements. NATO pilots would report in excess of thirty enemy kills in air-to-air combat, while Russian and Belarusian pilots could claim less than ten. The Russian Air Force, despite making some powerful blows with their Raketonosets and cruise missiles, couldn’t keep this up for much longer. Russian commanders new it was only a matter of time before the airspace above them came firmly under NATO control, and that in itself would be an unmitigated catastrophe for them.

Bombs fell on targets that had been struck time and time again, but this time NATO escalated its air attacks. Not only were virtually all military and civilian airfields across Belarus and Kaliningrad struck, but NATO also began to target those sites in the occupied Baltic States. It wasn’t something that was looked at with much enthusiasm, but even if the airbases in Belarus were all neutralised, those in the Baltics, now being run by Russia and with civilian hostages being held nearby, could be used to mount effective air operations against the West. Sites such as Amari Airbase in Estonia and Lielvarde Airbase in Latvia, once used by NATO aircraft, were home to MiG-29s and Su-25s & -24s flying operations against Northern Poland. These bases were hit just like those in enemy territory were; less resources had been dedicated to their defence and so damage was somewhat more severe, but they couldn’t all be neutralised in a single night of operations. Tragedy struck when Belgian F-16s bombed Tallinn’s Lennart-Meri International Airport; one of their weapons strayed from its course and struck a housing estate, killing forty Estonian civilians and leaving the neighbourhood and flaming ruing. Moscow would, of course, tout this up, using it as evidence of NATO war crimes and as proof that the people of the Baltics needed Russian protection.


The air campaign, for the first time since its inception, also began targeting Minsk directly. There were several staples of Lukashenko’s regime that were set to be taken out, as much for the psychological affect as the strategic one. This was going to be done by F-15Es or the US 494th Fighter Squadron and also by Tornado GR4s belonging to the Royal Air Force, specifically, to No.617 Squadron. Those pilots’ home base at RAF Marham had repeatedly been attacked and they wanted revenge; soon they would get it. The Strike Eagles and Tornados flew out from bases in East Anglia, headed for Belarus. Refuelling over the Baltic Sea, they suddenly went low, diving underneath the colossal dogfights occurring above them. By the time they had reached their targets, it was nearing first light. Minsk International Airport had already been attacked by the US Air Force and B-52s had levelled the Belarusian Defence Ministry back on August 8th, but two more critical targets within the Belarusian capital were to be destroyed tonight.

The Tornados came in from the south-west of Minsk, flying at just over one hundred feet as they neared the city. There were six of them in the air; three more were being used for other operations and the other three had all been shot down days prior. Pulling up right before they reached the target, the swing-wing jets released several Paveway II laser-guided bombs. The bombs hit and utterly annihilated the headquarters of Minsk’s state-run television channel, the Belarusian Television & Radio Company (BTRC). There was some controversy at the destruction of such a target, but planners both at SHAPE and the MOD agreed that it was a valid military target. The BTRC was spouting Russian and Belarusian propaganda like there was no tomorrow, and it had been used to showcase footage of captured British pilots several days in a failed propaganda big. The legal validity of such a target was irrelevant now; the building had been totally obliterated, as had many of the buildings on Makayonka Street, where the BTRC had resided. A second wave of strike aircraft, F-15Es this time, hit Minsk from the north-west. They’d turned over Poland again and then flown straight into Belarusian airspace, skirting the Ukrainian border as if daring the Ukrainians to interfere. Their bombs, this time unguided Mark-84s, wiped out the National Assembly building where Lukashenko’s rubber-stamp Parliament would meet. The attack was catastrophic for the citizens of Minsk, with the building flattened, and again with much damage done to areas of the city that were unlucky enough to be close to the target. One Strike Eagle was brought down by a Belarusian Fulcrum when that aircraft’s pilot had responded to warnings of an air raid against the capital itself taking place. The American jet came crashing down into the heart of Minsk, exploding as it struck the ground. There had been losses and civilian casualties as well, but a huge propaganda victory had been won for NATO with the destruction of such important targets, and right within Minsk itself. This attack against Minsk directly wasn’t happening in a vacuum.

More Tornados and Strike Eagles, joined by hundreds of other aircraft, conducted strikes throughout the night. The two highway intersections at Mogolev, Orsha, and Gomel were pummelled from the air repeatedly in an all-out effort to prevent their continued use by Russian forces. A whole army was moving from Russia into Belarus at this point, and with the situation already particularly grave in Poland, this was something that NATO had to stop or risk losing even more territory. Spanish and Canadian Hornets and then German Phantoms bombed the three cities relentlessly, all the while dodging – and sometimes failing to dodge – Russian SAMs and fighters. Likewise, Kaliningrad was attacked with targets of similar logistical importance targeted and destroyed. The bridges over the Daugava River, running through Latvia, were taken out by NATO airpower when the importance of their use as a supply route to the 20th Guards Army was recognised. From Tallinn all the way up to Gomel, fires burned, explosions boomed, and aircraft plummeted into the ground.

As part of Operation Eclipse, the US Air Force would carry out a mission of its own, one that was highly-sensitive and extremely covert. After they had become available to him, Major-General Raymond Thomas at SOCEUR had sent a very small number of men from DEVGRU into Russia proper. They had executed a High Altitude, High Opening parachute jump, otherwise known as a HAHO insertion, from the back of an MC-130. They’d landed outside St Petersburg and immediately begun marking targets within the Russian mainland for destruction. B-2 Spirit stealth bombers from Global Strike Command were to execute this mission as it was deemed extremely risky both militarily and in a political sense. A huge number of SAMs resided around St Petersburg and in north-western Russia, along with interceptors and ground radars. Politically, NATO was quite hesitant about hitting targets within mainland Russia. Though most European countries had already been attacked from the air, there were many worries that direct air attacks on the soil of the Rodina would elicit a nuclear response. This might happen deliberately as a warning to the Alliance not to do so again, but it was also considered likely that Russia might detect the B-2s on a radar and mistake that for the first steps of a pre-emptive American or NATO nuclear strike and launch its own nuclear weapons on a massive scale. 1 ATAF’s commanders eventually won the argument that was taking place, brushing these concerns aside and gaining permission from their political masters to attack the Russian mainland.

Three targets had been chosen and the same number of Spirits (of only nineteen available) had been allocated to the mission. Each of the bombers was loaded with 2,000-pound GBU-31 JDAMs. No fighters or SEAD aircraft went into Russian airspace with them. It was felt that the deployment of such aircraft would tip off the Russians that something big was going on. Russian air defence forces did gain the occasional glimpse of the Spirits on radar, and MiG-31s were scrambled to intercept. The bombers kept disappearing though, never being ‘painted’ on radar for long enough for fighters to be vectored towards them.

Gliding elegantly over St Petersburg, the first B-2 struck Russia’s second city. The bomber dropped no less than twelve JDAMs on Leningrad Naval Base. The amount of firepower used was simply staggering. All twelve bombs hit their target and fused correctly. Dockyards, hangars and barracks were all hit. A fuel dump was hit by one of the bombs, igniting a monumental explosion. This raid alone had obliterated the naval base, a target which would be far harder to repair than an airstrip. A second American bomber hit St Petersburg’s Pulkovo International Airport. Though technically a civilian facility, it had been converted for military use and it was believed that Russian Backfire bombers were flying from it, along with their tankers and some A-50 AWACS aircraft too. The SEALs on the ground outside the city had confirmed this. When the JDAMs hit, nearly all of the airports buildings were destroyed, flattened by the explosions themselves or burned down by the resulting fires. The runway was bombed as well, with craters littering it. The Russians also lost one of their precious A-50s, and several other aircraft as well, with them destroyed by nearby bomb hits. The attack on St Petersburg had been a huge military success, with both targets out of commission for the foreseeable future. The third target was Ostrov Airbase, further north than St Petersburg itself. Il-76s & An-22s had flown from here when dropping paratroopers into Estonia and Latvia several days ago, and it was also home to several fighter and ground attack aviation squadrons. Heavily-defended, only the B-2s had a real chance of getting through and hitting the base. Despite some near misses with Russian fighter patrols, the remaining B-2 got into position above Ostrov and unleashed its payload. The results were the same as they had been in St Petersburg; fireballs, flattened buildings, dead men and women scattered across the ground and wounded ones screaming out for help in agony and terror. This time, the bomber was not to get away. The Spirit that had struck Ostrov was shot down by an SA-20 just as it turned to leave enemy airspace. The left wing of the bomber was sheared off by the explosion, sending it spiralling from the sky. Both pilots safely ejected, but they were now hundreds of miles behind enemy lines with little chance of extraction. As the crew of a vaunted stealth bomber, should they be caught then they were looking at spending the miserable remainder of their lives in enemy captivity.

The loss of a B-2 and the presumed capture of the crew – the two airmen had reported that they were ejecting before doing so – raised more questions at Ramstein Air Base. For the first three days of Operation Eclipse, Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) missions into enemy territory to recover downed pilots had been deemed an impossibility. The helicopters that would have to fly such missions were immensely vulnerable and couldn’t always be protected by fighters. The policy of leaving downed pilots behind in enemy territory was not sustainable, however. Many experienced aircrew would be lost and with more planes than qualified pilots, NATO needed all of those who survived to be back up in the air, or at least telling new pilots coming to Europe from safer skies of what to expect. 1 ATAF decided on a policy change. In Baltics and Eastern Belarus, CSAR missions remained an impossibility. However, for those aircrew shot down over Poland and those who went down in the more western parts of Belarus, CSAR missions would now be launched. The US Air Force 352nd Special Operations Wing would fly these missions using its MV-22 Ospreys and modified HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters. The first such CSAR missions were flown on the night of August 11th, with aircraft of both models entering the treacherous airspace over Belarus at an extremely low altitude to recover downed aircrew. Of the dozen missions flown, there were many successes; fifteen pilots and navigators were brought out of Belarus alive, if sometimes injured either physically or psychologically during their experiences. Some had been on the run for days while others had only gone down recently, but all were grateful to be alive. One CSAR mission failed when an MV-22 was shot down by an anti-aircraft gun, leaving only more people lost in enemy territory who faced death or capture.





Eighty

The 5th Guards Tank Division, one of the best-equipped formations of the Russian Army, had yesterday broken through NATO defences aiming to keep them on the eastern side of the Narew River. They’d crossed over at Wizna after forcing the Americans back and then stopping an attempt by the Dutch and the Germans to push them back over. The costs had been enormous in terms of men and equipment for the 5 GTD. Orders coming from the First Guards Tank Army were for them to keep pushing onwards today though despite losses inflicted: onwards would mean lancing through the NATO rear and cutting off thousands of Poles and other Americans to the north. A great victory would be won by doing so, maybe enough to win the war. Engineers and air defence troops had been pushed into the wider Wizna area and there had also been the addition of the Belarussians too with their 6th Guards Mechanised Brigade brought up. The Belorussians had suffered losses on the way overnight when American A-10s had hit them, and SAMs lofted back at the attacking aircraft, focusing on their tanks especially, but it was mechanised infantry which was required here. The German 10th Panzer had its own infantry with included man-portable missile teams and so did the attached 13th Mechanised Brigade from the Netherlands: it was those tank hunters with Spike missiles who had been instrumental in blunting the 5 GTD from getting further late yesterday. Today, the plan was for dismounted NATO troops with their missiles to be overcome by friendly – Belorussian – riflemen, along with artillery and attack helicopters, before Russian tanks could start moving again. NATO air attacks were expected yet nothing like what came in the form of Operation Dragon’s Fire had been foreseen.

Should something similar to Dragon’s Fire have been tried twenty-five years ago – in the mid-Eighties, over the divided Germany let us say, against a Soviet force – it would have involved a far greater number of aircraft and a taken a much longer time to achieve. The morning of August 11th 2010 saw the US Air Force make an attempt to utterly destroy a Russian Army tank division on the move through Poland after it had forced a breakthrough with far fewer numbers of aircraft. There were just four of them used and making just one pass; in would have been as many as hundred aircraft (from various NATO nations) to try to do this in 1985. This would be different. Starting their mission the previous evening when leaving their base in Texas, the two pairs of B-1B Lancers carried a full weapons load leading to significant mid-air tanking on the way. They refuelled over Florida then again over the Atlantic before ‘taking a drink’ once again above France. The tanker which provided that last refuelling would wait for them to come back on their way to the wartime operating base for the 28th Bomb Squadron in southern England. Over Germany and then the Czech Republic the American bombers flew: they arrived over Poland just before it started to get light. They were in the skies north of Warsaw when they launched their payloads before then turning back away. That payload for the four B-1s combined consisted of ninety-six AGM-154 JSOW glide bombs in total. Each of those weapons, similar to a cruise missile, carried itself one hundred and forty-five submunitions to be dispensed in mid-air. Ninety-six multiplied by one hundred and forty-five equals thirteen thousand nine hundred and twenty. That figure was the number of falling projectiles targeted upon the Russians and Belorussians below. Not all of the JSOWs worked as advertised and neither did all of the submunitions. Russian SAMs were fired upwards at the last minute and while they were unable to get those departing bombers, they hit several of the incoming bombs before they could unleash their contents. Air defence weapons like the S-300V and Tor-M1 would have massacred NATO aircraft coming in on close-attack missions and did have some success with these weapons used yet not enough. Equipment failures and Russian SAMs saw just over ten thousand live falling projectiles left to descend upon the men and their equipment below. That was going to be enough. All of those tanks, armoured vehicles, support vehicles and especially Russian soldiers were right in the way of what fell from above. German and Dutch soldiers to the west, but unfortunately not those many Poles who were fighting around Wizna itself as cut-off irregulars, had received a warning to do their best to get into cover but there were a lot of them in the way just as the Russians were. This really was close air support.

Seemingly a million firecrackers went off at once.

5 GTD and 6 GMB were caught near-perfectly. A circling E-8 JSTARS aircraft some distance away had been monitoring their progress and last-minute information had been feed to the JSOWs before they were launched. The US Air Force really put a hurting on the invaders below and it was mostly accurate too with few friendly casualties inflicted. This was because the forwardmost Russians and Belorussians were not in the way of this attack and instead everything behind them was. There were still some stray submunitions which hit NATO troops, the Dutch especially, but it could have been a lot worse. Those which came down on target saw the bomblets explode with everything that they came into contact with. Impact with armoured vehicles, unarmoured vehicles, buildings and the ground saw them detonate on contact with them. Soldiers were within those or near to them. The ‘lucky’ ones were those killed outright. Others, so many others, weren’t so lucky when they were left with horrible wounds ranging from broken bones to burns to shrapnel wounds. Medical personnel were caught up in the tidal wave of thousands upon thousands of individual explosions: there would be no real effort to save lives which could have been on any serious scale when faced with all this destruction and casualties caused.

Russian tanks weren’t going to be striking out westwards from Wizna today. Dragon’s Fire had done its job in stopping them.


Other JSOWs had been used elsewhere over Poland through the several days of war so far though not in such numbers. There were other similar missions planned then called off yet more in the works. The situation to conduct such a strike as what was Dragon’s Fire had been waited for and done there because the need was desperate. It was also a case of the ability to do this away from friendly forces. NATO intelligence was scrambling to get an accurate fix on what they knew were several Russian divisions – with of their Second Army – moving through Belarus to do the same to them. Another Dragon’s Fire was aborted before launch (the B-1s flew from Dyess AFB to RAF Fairford with their missiles unused this time) because the 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division, Russia’s Taman Guards, were in too close contact with the Polish 11th Armoured Cavalry Division. The risk of blue-on-blue there was too high. The Poles there, fighting to the northeast of Wizna and also in the US V Corps area against First Guards Tank Army, could have done with such a strike. They had other air support, yes, but nothing like that. Dragon’s Fire only stopped that Russian tank division from cutting them off: it did nothing to directly aid them in their immediate fight. They were unable to hold back the drive forward made against them. The Russians added another division, their 3rd Motor Rifle, plus soon diverted helicopter support away from the devastation which was the remains of their planned strike from Wizna. The First Guards Tank Army had just suffered grave losses overall yet where today’s main effort was now going to be for them, they had the numerical advantage on it. This was put to good use. The Taman Guards and the 3 MRD pushed onwards. They forced NATO defenders from their defensive positions, backwards deeper into Poland. Rather than stand and be crushed, V Corps ordered a withdrawal made. The Poles did as instructed and fell back, getting away from the immense enemy firepower used against them backed up by Russians tanks and infantry advancing onwards. Their withdrawals made their opponents pay for the ground they took and they understood the staying in-place meant dying. Higher up though, from the Polish general commanding his division under American command, there came strong objections to such a retreat. More and more of Poland was falling under occupation. There were civilians left behind. He wanted to stay and fight, believing that he could win even against such odds. The orders stood though. Anchored on the Germans & Dutch who were still in the Wizna area in the centre of the V Corps’ line, the Poles to the north were to fall back through more of Podlachia into Masuria. There would be NATO reinforcements who would be coming to join them and to turn things around, just not here and not today.

The rest of both the First Guards Tank Army and the V Corps were fighting each other to the south of Wizna over a long stretch of frontline. NATO reinforcements showed up here allowing for an advantage in V Corps’ strength significantly: those in the north would have been furious had they found out. What was left of the Polish 1st Mechanised Division was replaced at the frontlines by the 12th Mechanised Division. The former was pulled back into the rear as the latter came forward. The Poles were fighting the Belorussians east of Warsaw. Coming into position overnight, these fresh troops advanced in a series of multiple localised counterattacks once it got light. Americans with the 172nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team joined them on the flank. Enemy strength was known to be weak and it was from out of occupied territory there where they remained firing missiles – at a lesser rate than what they started with – towards Warsaw. The Belorussians gave ground in some places but held in others. They’d been digging in and were able to whether the storm… if one wanted to call it a storm. Broken apart and used in many places, the Poles didn’t have the ability to make a breakthrough in attacking like this. Gaining what little ground they did, they weren’t going to cease the Scud attacks on Warsaw. Should they have concentrated, they would have forced an opening but that would have meant leaving gaps elsewhere. More men were needed overall and instead of them, a compromise had been reached where it was assumed that – despite evidence to the contrary – the Belorussians were weak and would collapse everywhere. That had been wishful thinking and assumed too that the untested men of the 12th Division would achieve miracles their first time in battle. What they were met with was a storm against them of defensive fire supported by recently-laid minefields as well as physical obstructions created by Belorussian engineers. There were also plenty of anti-tank guns and missile teams used by the Belorussians with their defence. The Poles couldn’t, wouldn’t maybe, sacrifice themselves in the face of all of that no matter how high their patriotism was to liberate their soil.

As to the Americans, they did concentrate their strength and got forward. Near to Treblinka – yes, that Treblinka – on the River Bug, the 172nd Brigade opened up the Belorussians on the southern side of the river and chased those who could get away over it. They were looking ahead at to what would come next and intending to get over the river to charge onwards. What they weren’t expecting to face was an immediate Belorussian counterattack which came seemingly out of nowhere. All the reconnaissance support given in the form of distant surveillance and forward scouts didn’t see the mass of riflemen and dismounted missilemen thrown into the attack instead of enemy armour that the Americans were anticipating would be used against them. These Belorussians were from their 38th Guards Mobile Brigade, that airmobile unit which had smashed apart the Germans a few days ago. Helicopters and light vehicles brought the attackers into the fight. American tanks and missile teams of their own engaged those yet were soon re-tasked to aid their infantry just as distant heavy guns fired on Treblinka from covered positions far away. It became clear that the 172nd Brigade had been led into an ambush where the Belorussians were just waiting for this. The humiliation at falling for it would follow later consequences for the brigade commander. In the meantime, where was his air support? His question was answered by the news that Belorussian SAMs – this time S-300Vs & Tor-M1s doing what they had failed to do over Wizna – had taken out several F-16s (American & Polish aircraft) and forced the cancellation of other missions. V Corps ordered a retreat, one to be done as fast as possible in the face of this. It was done but at a cost. M-1 Abrams’ and M-2 Bradleys were taken out by missiles and artillery shells ripped into American soldiers. They fell back, fighting their way south and west to where they had come and took out many attackers while doing so. However, the battlefield was yielded to the enemy to hold again. The Treblinka Catastrophe was something that would have long-lasting effects.


On paper NATO reinforcements already in Poland, not those committed from all those various countries to join the fight, were huge. The German 10th Panzer and Polish 12th Mechanised Divisions – the former including that Dutch brigade – had been sent into battle but there remained three more divisions in Poland plus two more Dutch brigades as well all uncommitted before today. The German 1st Panzer, British 3rd Mechanised & American 4th Infantry Divisions had yet to see action and were available; the Dutch 11th Airmobile & 43rd Mechanised Brigades were covering the Polish-Ukrainian border until the plan was for them to be later relieved by lower-grade NATO units but in larger numbers. Only the Americans were sent into action today though. The British had yet to reach full strength and the Germans were held as a counterattack force, alongside the shattered US 3rd Infantry Division, less Dragon’s Fire had failed on the Narew.

The 4th Infantry Division was dispatched to join the Allied I Corps fighting in Masuria.

Untested like those Poles east of Warsaw, these Americans sent into action near to Olsztyn did better. This was their first time fighting in Eastern Europe yet this US Army unit had many combat veterans within who while they hadn’t seen a war like this, they had been in battle before. Still, this was different. Russian heavy guns and aircraft attacked them when they took over the fight that the French had been in yesterday facing the 4th Guards Tank Division. ‘The fourth fought the fourth’ in the centre of the I Corps’ line. The Americans won the day where they stopped the 4 GTD from getting any further into Poland and caused them major losses. This entry of reinforcements into the battle here was needed. It allowed the rest of what was once the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps to be able to concentrate better on fighting the rest of the Russian Twentieth Guards Army. Lines were straightened in the form of tightening things up between component parts, supporting those in need and shortening the defensive zones. The French 2nd Armored Brigade came under British command on a temporary basis – the 1st Armoured Division now had four combat brigades assigned though with one of its own severely weakened after yesterday – and the Polish 16th Mechanised Division was able to focus more on the Russians on the left-hand side of the I Corps’ line. The main fight today was on the right though, over where each side had its physical connections maintained with friendly forces and the other would like to break open.

Russian tanks and paratroopers, their 10th Guards Tank & 98th Guards Airborne Divisions, kept up the advance forward. The British and the French were in their way along with the Americans with their 170th Infantry Brigade Combat Team also fighting to if not keep the Russians back, then maintain the staged withdrawal. The Russians advanced slower than yesterday. Yet they continued to move forward. NATO units here fell back as they were doing in so many other places. Staying where they were and trying to fight a static battle was suicide. They tried to make local counterattacks while withdrawing, seeking out opportunities, yet this was found to be impossible. It just couldn’t be done in the face of murderous fire from Russian artillery. They had brought forward so many heavy guns onto Polish soil. Plenty of those were older weapons yet they could still fire and fire well. This part of Poland was being blown to pieces. NATO yielded further territory to the invaders as Russia’s war machine here had slowed down but it was still moving forward. From above, aircraft fell from the sky. NATO and Russian aircraft clashed with each other and also air defence assets firing up from the ground too. Each side sent aircraft in to influence the fight underneath yet failed today to play an important role. Those below them needed that air support for countless close air support missions but were unable to get it. The only meaningful results from committing so many aircraft here were dead aircrew and many wrecks littering Masuria. Russian SAMs would claim many of those kills, plenty being friendly aircraft as well. They were filling the skies with missiles which hit what they could. Supply officers were watching the numbers of weapons on-hand dwindle while they waited for incoming resupply… and they waited. Meanwhile, NATO air planners threw everything they had at attempting to change their operational patterns in the face of all of those air defences: they had the knowledge though that unless everything they had done with air strikes in the rear having somehow failed when it looked the other way, there would be no munitions resupply coming forward for the Russians.

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.




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.

Eighty-Seven

The Russian Army wanted the release authorisation for its huge but clandestine stockpile of chemical weapons.

They wanted better supply lines running through Belarus and the Baltic States.

They wanted for the Air Force to put a stop to the NATO bombing campaign, and for the FSB to wipe out those resistance groups operating behind their lines.

These were all things that Russian Army commanders wanted, but that they were not going to get. The stunning success they had achieved two days ago with the crossing of the Narew had been smashed by those US Air Force Lancer bombers; the breakthrough in I Corps lines had been contained by a French armoured brigade and then the Americans had sent a whole mechanized infantry division to reinforce the French. The German Army had its entire 1st Panzer Division, with all its men and tanks and fighting vehicles within a day’s travel of I Corps lines and the arrival of those men on top of the Americans who had gotten into the fight would mean the end of 20th Guards Army’s offensive capabilities.

Efforts to keep up the pace of the previous few days by the Russian Air Force were, in a word, underwhelming.

During the last week, the Russian Air Force had lost almost two hundred combat aircraft and had seen its bases bombed time and time again, with each NATO airstrike growing more effective. Last night’s raid on targets around St Petersburg caused fury in Putin’s inner circle, and more fighters and interceptors were diverted away from the frontlines to defend the airspace of the Rodina. Su-25s and Su-24s still flew sorties over the frontlines, bombing NATO ground units and attempting to repeat the accomplishments of August 9th, when NATO’s supply efforts throughout Poland and Germany had been severely hampered by effective enemy air power. This time, NATO fighters, arriving in ever more impressive numbers, were able to repulse the major attacks mounted on Poland, although some squadrons took heavy losses to powerful Russian SAM systems. By the time the day was out, dozens of burning wreckages littered the Polish countryside and the bottom of the Baltic Sea as well, but 1ATAF commanders in Germany certainly felt that they had gotten the better of the fighting in the air that day. There also drones from the USAF & the Royal Air Force providing surveillance footage of Russian troop movements; one of these aircraft was downed but many more, including several MQ-9 Reaper aircraft, continued to operate effectively.

There had been some successes achieved by Russian units; in particular, the two divisions on the northern flank of 20th Guards Army’s line of advance had made some noteworthy gains overnight. The British 1st Armoured Division had initiated yet another fighting withdrawal across a line which stretched from Szczytno to Ostroleka. Outgunned and thoroughly outnumbered, Lt.-General Shirreff’s premier division had fought the good fight for the past five days of war. Nevertheless, the battles that took place today would be the heaviest that the British Army had been involved in so far.

Challenger-2 tanks, supported by infantry riding aboard Warrior infantry fighting vehicles, halted the Russian advance for several hours before one of its units was annihilated. The 1st Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment had formed a battlegroup with tanks belonging to the Queen’s Royal Hussars; Russian T-90s overwhelmed their defensive positions and killed or captured over eight hundred British soldiers. The French Army plugged the gap with men from their 2nd Armored Brigade but it was a stunning loss nonetheless. Throughout the early afternoon the 1st Armoured Division continued to fall back, trading land for time until additional air support arrived. Diverted away from southern Poland, the US Air Force F-16s and some Spanish F/A-18s and RCAF CF-188s covered the British withdrawal with massive airstrikes. Shirreff would have preferred for a B-1B strike to be launched in similar vain to the one made yesterday, but doing such a thing would take hours.

The failed attack yesterday by the 4th Guards Tank Division was going to be repeated today. Russian officers were still reeling from the defeat yesterday but while losses had been heavy they had not been critical, and they now had a better idea of the Americans positions and tactics. Confident that they had a good chance of success, the command staff of 20th Guards Army sent its premier tank division towards American lines. A horrendous fight took place here with the ground around Olsztyn slowly being ceded to the Russians at a murderous cost. US Army AH-64D Apache gunships and some similar aircraft from the British Army Air Corps went low over the battlefield and obliterated Russian advance forces, however, before pulling back and hovering behind trees and low hills to guide in effective artillery. Success was met here with the firepower being brought to bear by the helicopters and artillery being too much for Russian units to take.

The 4th Infantry Division’s commanding officer, Maj.-General David Perkins, then took his division forwards in one of NATO’s first counterattacks of the war. It was only a slight advance but a morale boost nonetheless, with much of the ground that had been fought over today and yesterday coming back under Allied control as the M1A2s and Bradleys of the 4th Infantry pushed up along Highway-3, meeting heavy resistance and in reality only regaining a couple of miles of battle-scarred territory. Another victory was achieved when the 1st Motorised Rifle Division was thoroughly beaten by the harried but determined Polish 16th Mechanised Division outside of Malbork, with that Russian division stopped within sight of Gdansk. The effective halting of the Russian advance in the northernmost sectors of Poland dramatically improved the morale of NATO troops, but in reality it was a tiny achievement in comparison with the gains that Russian forces had made so far in Poland.

General Ryan’s V Corps had similarly mixed results throughout the day’s fighting. Bloodied and beaten by days of constant warfare, the 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division continued to pull back away from the lines to grant its personnel some rest and to allow for equipment to be serviced. That formation, once consisting of over twelve thousand soldiers, had barely seven thousand men and women left in its ranks by August 12th. Their position along the defensive line was filled by the German 10th Panzer Division, with a Bundeswehr heavy brigade and a Dutch mechanised unit, as well as well-trained German mountain troops. The Russians had seen their bridgehead obliterated by the US Air Force and with it, much of the 5th Guards Tank Division. Behind that division, their remained some scattered Belarusian units along with the 2nd Guards Motorised Rifle Division, a unit which had become almost permanently engaged with the Polish 11th Cav, and the fresher 3rd Motorised Rifle Division. New troops arriving at the front to come under V Corps command came from the British Army’s 3rd Mechanised Division. Eager to get into the battle after days of sitting in airplanes, trains and trucks, the men of the British division had heard stories of the Russian missile and commando attacks back home and were eager for vengeance.

With the 3rd Mechanised Division on their northern flank, the Poles no longer had to keep withdrawing; the numbers here were even and with the Russians breakthrough on the Narew not just contained but obliterated there was no reason to worry about attacks from the south. When the British 3rd Division clashed with the Russian Army’s unit of, ironically, the same name, successes and failures alike were met. There was to be a Canadian brigade group attached to 3rd Div. within the next week, but those troops would miss the fight that was about to occur.

Certain of a victory, if a costly one, when up against light infantry, the Russian 3rd Division sent its lead regiment right into a series of ambushes mounted by the 19th Light Brigade.

Heavy artillery units and RAF & Luftwaffe Tornados unleashed hell on the motorised rifle regiment that advanced towards the 19th Brigade, effectively destroying two of its battalions and sending the third back with its tail between its legs. The mistake made by the British troops was to pursue them. Passing through the 19th Brigade’s lines, the British 1st Mechanised Brigade launched a counterattack in the wake of the victory, hoping to chase the Russians back and perhaps even pocket some of their units on the banks of the River Bug. The British advanced eastwards from Kolno before running into the two remaining regiments of 3MRD, with a ferocious fight breaking out between the two formations. The 1st Mechanised Brigade slowly pushed forwards, taking increasingly heavy casualties before Lt.-General Mike Ryan intervened personally and ordered the brigade to get the hell out of there! For the pair of divisions, both with good equipment and troops, a high-tech stalemate occurred just east of Kolno with the occasional Russian patrol pushing through British lines and then being wiped out. Troops and tanks still fought bitterly, but neither side could make any real progress; they lacked the number, the support, and the geography to avoid advancing without being outflanked.

The Poles with their 11th Cavalry Division, now supported by the 12th Mechanised Division, also a Polish unit, kept 2GMRD at bay yet again in the farmland that lay between the British 3rd Division and the southernmost flanks of I Allied Corps. Like in the fighting to the north and south, so much blood was spilled and for practically no gain at all. This time, the Poles weren’t falling back at anything other than the tactical level when a few hundred metres of real estate would be given up to save a company or a platoon. V Corps had the numbers now to almost eliminate the risk of a real Russian breakthrough, but the situation was still quite dire, with much of V Corps area of operations under enemy occupation and thousands of men and vehicles being lost by the day. More worryingly to Mattis and Petraeus further up the chain of command, NATO intelligence had detected the movement of the Russian 2nd Army through Belarus, towards the frontlines in Poland.

In the coming days, huge numbers of warplanes as well as many commandos from countless nations would be directed against the 2nd Army to stop it from reaching the frontlines, where NATO units were already bloodied but were now firmly clinging onto their positions. Those troops couldn’t be allowed to reach the combat zone.





Eighty–Eight

Terrorism continued within the Baltic States… or the fight for liberation by brave freedom fighters went onwards. How one wanted to look at the situation which was ongoing through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania depended upon your point of view when it came to the situation with the joint Russian-Belorussian occupation of these three nations. Were those setting off bombs and killing people terrorists or the Resistance? Russian state propaganda was asserting that they were certainly terrorists. Statements coming out of Moscow declared that they were and there was on-the-ground coverage of the situation from media teams where they too pumped out the message that this was terrorism. What was occurring had all the recognizable hallmarks of such a thing. However, the counter to all of this, coming from the Coalition – though one which the Western media was carefully questioning – was the position that this was a legitimate series of strikes made by those fighting for their freedom; it was also said that many of the worst instances, the ones really played up by Russia, were in fact false flag attacks. The claim there being that Russia’s intelligence organs were committing those and blaming them on ‘terrorists’ all as part of its propaganda war. One of the terrorist outrages which attention was directed towards took place on the morning of the war’s sixth day. There was an explosion in the late morning within Tallinn. There had been small bomb blasts in the previous days in the Estonia capital, including those which occurred in areas of the city which could be considered Russian due to their ethnic makeup, but nothing on this scale. A five-story building was part-demolished as a third of it came down due to an explosion in the basement. The building was a hotel and one which occupation authorities had forced citizens of Coalition countries to stay in while they remained in Tallinn and unable to leave. There was no warning of the explosion. A lot of people in the immediate aftermath believed that maybe it had been hit with a missile: stories in the media had said that NATO missiles had crashed into other sites, killing further innocents. With this hotel though, there was a quick announcement that this was no missile attack. NATO wasn’t killing civilians this time but Estonian terrorists were. The civilians which they killed were Westerners too. The story told, by Russian media teams fast on the ground and given fantastic access all over what was a crime scene, was that those terrorists had been out to kill Russian and Belorussians soldiers in the lobby and also in the immediate area. Five of them were reportedly killed along with three Estonians – maybe these were part of the ‘terror cell’ came the speculation from Moscow’s agents – as well as sixty-four Westerners. The latter came from many nations. There were men, women and children among them. Many had dual-nationality with family members in Estonia who they had been with when the war started though others had been in the country for other reasons even when travel advisory notices had been issued in the lead-up to conflict. Like others across the Baltic States, they were stuck now in these countries. The Russians hadn’t evacuated these civilians like they had done so with those who had been inside Russia when the war started. Instead, they had been forced to report to the occupation authorities and confined to certain areas. Many of those places were near what could very well be regarded as sites which NATO would want to attack with air strikes. Thousands of human shields were spread across these occupied nations with no hint of any exit date for them. Statements from Moscow concerning the fate of these people were few but when mentioned, it was said that fears for their safety was why they remained where they were. NATO air and missile attacks, the Russian foreign ministry had said, put the movement of those people in danger. Today, sixty-four of them died in Tallinn but they weren’t the first and neither would they be the last.

A RQ-4 Global Hawk, one of the US Air Force’s many reconnaissance drones, had overflown the Baltic States yesterday – gaining images of that one hotel among many where known human shields were held – and the same unmanned aircraft today flew on a different mission where it was in skies to the south. This aircraft was on a flight above the Ukraine and undertaking a huge surveillance task with it. Large parts of the western parts of that nation were observed from above where the Global Hawk used its radar and its other sensors. Real-time intelligence was then fed onwards to a satellite. What the American drone was looking at was the Ukrainian military’s deployments. They had mobilised upon the outbreak of war yet stayed out of the conflict without making an official announcement about where they stood on the issue of neutrality. For a neutral nation, Ukraine certainly wasn’t acting like one in the eyes of the Coalition. Part of its army was on the Polish border and this tied down NATO forces from fighting the Russians & Belorussias in Poland. Other parts of the Ukrainian army were facing Romania and Moldova. It could be argued that the Ukraine feared being dragged into the war and these were only defensive moves that was a possibility but so too was that at the most opportune moment for the Kremlin, the Ukraine would enter the wider war. Other Ukrainian actions with its aircraft and ships, plus how the Ukraine had allowed passports to be used by Russian operatives, had shown that Kiev was not friendly towards the West. NATO and the Coalition didn’t know for certain what would happen. They didn’t want to be caught with their pants down on this and so acted accordingly. American satellites had overflown the country but there was only so much that they could see. A Global Hawk could appear away from the plotted paths of reconnaissance satellites to gain intelligence unexpectedly. The drone was fired upon while it overflew the Ukraine. Radar detection followed the launch of SAMs and these were in the form of S-300s: SA-10 Grumbles. NATO aircraft had been fired upon by these weapons where they were fighting Russia & Belarus and suffered losses while doing so. However, the S-300s in Ukrainian service preformed extremely poorly. They were older versions of the system but still… Maintenance and upgrades on these weapons had been neglected and the same could be said of the training. A distant E-3 Sentry aircraft (this one being a US Air Force one which survived when others were targeted by Spetsnaz at Tinker AFB in Oklahoma) was flying back over Slovakia when the Global Hawk was on its mission. The fighter controllers aboard, those concerned about an attack coming towards them using those super-long-range KS-172 missiles that the Russians had used several times now, watched as a pair of Ukrainian Su-27s lifted off from their airbase with the clear intent to intercept the drone. One of those fighters quickly returned to base for reasons unknown. As to the other fighter, it took a terribly long time to get anywhere near the drone and then made a failed attempt to fire upon the Global Hawk: it too then returned to base with haste. NATO considered afterwards what was going on. Intelligence analysts judged that the Russians had detected the drone and passed the information onto the Ukrainians due to what must be some sort of bilateral emergency defence agreement. Like with their SAMs, the Ukrainian’s fighters, even their supposedly best ones as the Su-27s should have been, were not in a fit state to see any real action. A dissenting opinion, one noted by senior officers and not rejected completely out of hand, was that Kiev was putting on a ‘show’ for the Russians and purposely avoiding direct conflict with NATO while promising fidelity to Moscow. With both of these viewpoints, this had all sorts of implications for the short- & long-term in both the military and geopolitical sense when it came to the ongoing wider war.

Ukrainian forces weren’t involved in the fighting in Moldova. They had six full-strength heavy brigades on the Ukrainian-Moldovan border (or Ukrainian-Transnistrian frontier if that was how you wanted to view it) – an impressive force on paper yet so too was their force of SAMs and fighters – yet those stayed back in their own country. It was only Transnistrian and Russian forces fighting inside Moldova. Moldova had joined the Coalition not by choice but due to that invasion. NATO forces moved into their country to join them in repelling this. One Romanian division plus the small mixed NATO brigade were present leaving the rest of the Romanian Army along with Bulgarian forces which had come north out of the fight: they were in-position to defend against an Ukrainian invasion into the Balkans. This latter effort tied up a significant number of NATO forces. It wasn’t just the troops on the frontline but those behind them and also air power. All of this would have been mightily useful in Poland. Romania and Bulgaria also had the issue of the Black Sea being a Russian military lake now so they might not have been able to send significant forces to Poland if there was no stand-off with the Ukraine, but they were currently sending none at all because of the uncertainty over what the Ukraine might do. When it came to the actual fight inside Moldova, the frontlines there had stabilized from initial entry made into now a bloody, static stalemate. Very little progress forward had been made by the attacking forces. There was no danger of Moldova falling and from there an invasion moving forward into Romania. Russian paratroopers sent there to join long-establish ‘peacekeeping troops’ hadn’t made the difference which the Kremlin had hoped that they would alongside the Transnistrians. When it came to the locals, it could be said that their heart wasn’t into it. Their leaders in Tiraspol had signed up to it but they hadn’t. Things would have been different if they were fighting off a Moldovan invasion into their own breakaway country. Morale problems were getting worse and an increase in punishments for breaches of discipline had failed to get anywhere. There had been murders of officers and men firing their weapons away from the enemy rather than at them. Full-scale munity didn’t look likely at this time but that didn’t mean that it couldn’t happen in the future if the men stayed here inside Moldova trying to push forward against insurmountable odds. Yet they wouldn’t be doing so for long. The Romanians were putting together a counterattack, using a lot of armour as the center-piece of that, to aid the Moldovans in liberating their soil. The fight looked likely soon to be moving back into Transnistria and their soldiers would surely fight better there than here.