The Second Battle of Britain - a Soviet Sealion

Oh, the crap's gonna hit the fan soon, methinks...

Great update keep up the good work

87 – An international outrage


Later analysed photos from satellite passes over Western Iraq would tell the Americans that, like the Israelis, they had been deceiving themselves into thinking that many of the Scud launchers there had been knocked out of action. Seemingly in panic, the Iraqis moved many of their innocently disguised trucks which carried those missiles heading eastwards across their country. They travelled in daylight and would have made perfect targets for air strikes. Without real-time spotting of what was occurring though, by the time what had happened was understood, the trucks were again out of view. They were now close to Iran, not Jordan, and, more importantly, not burnt out ruins in the desert. The non-destruction of them shouldn’t have come as a surprise. For some time, there had been many intelligence personnel involved at lower levels who’d warned their superiors that the Iraqis had been very clever in their game of make-believe when it came to the apparent destruction of their missile launchers. Those above them hadn’t wanted to listen. They’d reported to political masters, those pilling on the pressure, that the weapons had been knocked out when pilot reports had come in and there had too been the ‘evidence’ shown. Of course, when those Scud launchers did reappear, rather than take the blame themselves, those higher-ups blamed their underlings in some cases while in others questioned whether this was the real deception. The latter idea, the notion that Iraq was pretending it still had many more mobile ballistic missiles, was blown right out of the water when they fired on Iran… well at least it was Coalition forces or Israel those naysayers would then say.

Another impressive Scud barrage – the biggest one yet – where thirty-four (of thirty-nine planned) missiles made it skywards soon saw them crash into Iran. The targets for them were spread mainly across the western half of that country and where the Iraqis believed that the Iranian Army on the move could be found. There were other targets though, ones not of military value. Rashid would consider them to be ‘political strikes’ yet the rest of the world would regard what Iraq’s leader did to be the mass murder of innocent civilians.

The usual poor targeting with the Scuds saw many of them go astray. Few landed close enough to Iranian military units which Rashid was certain were about to begin crossing the border elsewhere away from Basra and that oilfield at Al-Fakkah. One of the trio of Iranian cities also targeted was also completely missed with the strikes into the other two only hitting them because these were large urban areas. Should Iraq have been firing missiles with high explosive or incendiary warheads as had been the case beforehand when using them against the Coalition and then Israel, then Iran could have almost shrugged off this attack. Different warheads were fitted to the Iran-bound missiles though. This was a chemical strike using nerve gas.

Clouds of slightly brown-coloured Tabun gas (it was an impure mix; the gas should have been colourless) drifted over parts of Iran. Through the border areas, many Iranian troops fell victim to the effects along with civilians too. Tabun – sometimes known as GA – was a lethal weapon yet there were ‘better’ gases: ones which Iraq was long trying to manufacture. Hundreds died as Tabun was now used. The numbers could have been higher, in the thousands, even tens of thousands, should another gas have been employed or the Iraqis had better aim with their missions. Two of those Scuds blew up over the Iranian city of Qom and two more above the capital Tehran. These were Rashid’s political strikes and the ones which would bring international outrage.

The deaths in Qom would number close to fourteen hundred. The gas killed about a third of that figure while panic was responsible for the remainder of the civilians who lost their lives. Qom, located south of Tehran, was the religious centre of Revolutionary Iran and where Khomeini had his powerbase. The civilians here were men, women & children. The young and the old died as well as the healthy adults. Those killed by the gas died horribly though there were other gruesome fates awaiting others who were crushed in the fleeing mass of people in the targeted areas or due to fires accidently started & vehicle crashes in the chaos which unfolded. Twenty-one hundred lives were lost in Tehran. Again, the numbers of dead who were directly killed by the unleashed gas was lower than those who were killed in the immediate aftereffects when the Iranian capital was gripped in panic like the nation’s religious heart was. Moreover, these scenes would have been repeated in Esfahan as well had the lone missile sent towards there made it rather than exploded prematurely in space. In each city where the gas was used, there were those who weren’t killed too. Tabun was a gas which would leave survivors crippled for life in various ways plus there was also all that panic-related cause of non-fatal casualties as well to add in. Iranian civilians left injured were larger than the numbers of dead.

Iran quickly made the world aware of what had happened. They’d openly complained to the UN in previous years when Iraq had used gas beforehand back during the Iran-Iraq War though world attention hadn’t been focused on what was done then. It was now. This time it was Iranian cities where there were foreigners present as witnesses and also Khomeini would authorise the civilian government to release to the international community video footage of the aftermath of the gas strikes too. Everyone would know what Iraq had done. No comment came in response from Baghdad. Rashid could have denied doing this – saying it was someone else or it was all a charade – but instead he did nothing openly. Iraq’s leader was waiting on the reply to the other message which he’d sent to Iran alongside his missiles. This was in written form and delivered through a personal contact where he demanded that Iranian forces leave Iraq ‘or else’. He’d wait… and he’d wait.


Out in the Mediterranean, there were another twenty Scud missiles and twelve launch vehicles all aboard a ship bound for Syria. These weapons were on their way to Iraq eventually though with Syria acting as a staging post because all of coastal Iraq was in Coalition hands. Assad had demanded a slice of the pie for allowing the planned transit through his country of these missiles like he had with other recent Soviet weapons deliveries to Iraq. He wanted four of those missiles for himself. Syria already operated the same system and paid for its own stocks coming from Moscow but Rashid – who really needed everything that he could get his hands on – had been forced to agree to Syria’s price or get nothing though the blockade that had been enforced on Iraq. Once those missiles and launchers reached Syria, the Syrians would take their price and then move the rest of the delivery across their country to Iraq.

That was once the ship reached the Syrian port of Latakia. Before it did, there were those who wanted to see the cargo aboard never get that far, or, if not, not make it through Syria to Iraq.

It was a Soviet ship, one flying their flag and registered to their country, which was heading for Syria: one of a third party nation might have made things ‘easier’. It had come from Sevastopol and gone through the Turkish Straits before transiting the Aegean and then going around the northern side of Cyprus inbound for Latakia. The Americans, the British, the French and the Israelis too were all aware of its cargo and monitored its voyage. None of those countries wished to see it reach Syria and offload those Scuds to be used by Rashid’s regime. What could be done though? Ahead of the Iraqi gas attack on Iran, the Western nations had been using diplomacy to try to get Moscow to stop supplying weapons to Iraq. They done so in public but also behind the scenes. The chances of success had always been remote yet it was done. With thousands of civilians now dead in Iranian cities, a renewed effort was made diplomatically. Still, the chances of that having any effect weren’t anything to count on. Shamir’s Israeli government had too attempted diplomacy on the same note once Iraq had attacked Israel. No progress had been made here either. This latest shipment of missiles and launchers was something that in Tel Aviv they were thinking of stopping using direct means. There had been consideration given to physically stopping the ship while it was at sea. Ideas had been bounded about using military action. An Israel submarine could sink the ship and slip away undetected. Maybe an at-sea commando raid could take place to get rid of those weapons in one of various manners that could be done if Israel had temporary control of the vessel. An air strike in the darkness over water, one conducted at distance too, could blow it up. In doing anything like that, Shamir and his Cabinet believed that they would stop those weapons ending up in Iraqi hands to be used potentially against Israel again yet this would cause an international outrage. There was a good chance that the Soviets would take retaliatory action direct against Israel in a form far worse than what Iraqi Scuds had and could achieve.

A different military option was presented to Shamir. It was one which would see Israel act when those missiles – all of which Israel believed were going to Iraq; they had no knowledge of Assad’s price – were no longer on that ship and instead on land out of Soviet direct control. They could be destroyed en route to Iraq, once in Syria. The prime minister agreed to this course of action. Those weapons would be landed at Latakia and once on the move, they’d be eliminated as a threat to Israel. Syria might or might not react militarily, but that was something which Shamir believed Israel could deal with: a Soviet reaction was just something in the end unpalatable to consider bringing upon his country.

88 – Comrade Marshal Tinker


Back in Moscow, it had been asked by several old time-servers at the Ministry of Defence: ‘is it wise for Comrade Marshal Ogarkov to be planning to invade West Germany with less than two hundred tanks?’.

This was a loaded question, one posed to elicit a strong and negative response on the basis of something which had truth to it but hardly told the true story. There were those there in Moscow who had long been questioning the wisdom of Plan Zhukov. They were involved in many attempts to undermine the field commander based out in Poland at his headquarters. This was something that they had seized upon and were aiming to use to their advantage. The figure of two hundred tanks – less than two hundred tanks in fact – sounded very unwise to those on the other end of being asked such a question: some of them would try and act on what they heard, correcting a sure mistake that Ogarkov was making. Many different powerplays, often with conflicting ultimate objectives, were underway within the highest ranks of the Soviet military. Ogarkov at Legnica had an army posed ready to launch a massive offensive at a moment’s notice yet there were those in Moscow who wished to sabotage the preparations for that all for their own political gains.


It was one hundred and eighty-eight tanks that Ogarkov planned to use, all late-model T-64B heavy tanks. They were the combat strength of a pair of independent tank regiments assigned to the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG). There remained five more of those regiments too – three again with T-64s, one with brand-new T-80s & the last one with lighter T-62s to be utilised in an airmobile role – and all were there to act primarily in a fire brigade role in wartime as a covering force but had a secondary offensive capability. The pair which Ogarkov had removed from their standard role, he had thus assigned to support the two airborne divisions which he was going to send into West Germany as the main advance guard should he be given the green light for Plan Zhukov to proceed. They would escort the Soviet Airborne units which would go over the Inner-German Border on the ground. What this meant was that there was a lot of truth to what was being said back in Moscow. The tanks alongside all of those tracked infantry vehicles were the initial force going into West Germany as per the operational plan which his staff had drawn up. However, they weren’t the only tanks: they were just going to be those out ahead. Those in the other regiments, plus the thousands more assigned to the rest of the combat strength of the reinforced GSFG, were going into West Germany too. They’d all be right behind those out in the lead, moving quickly after them.

Ogarkov knew what was going back in Moscow. There had been attempts at direct interference with countless elements of Plan Zhukov from those who thought that they knew best. They questioned seemingly everything and wanted it all done in a ‘better’ way. Efforts had already been undertaken to replace him and send someone else to Legnica, someone who’d rip up the current plan. As far as he was concerned, this was the only way to achieve victory in the manner which the Politburo wanted. There had been the idea presented back there to scrap the whole initial entry with fast & light (relatively ‘light’ anyway) forces and instead rely upon a huge sudden attack using thousands of tanks going over the border in the first minutes of warfare. Ogarkov believed that would fail completely. Plan Zhukov called for a staged entry of forces, all to make sure that the whole GSFG could achieve it mission of overrunning a large chuck of Western Europe as quick as possible pending a political resolution. To have a situation where Soviet forces were spread out everywhere, stuck in traffic jams and also lost, and having done nothing to complete the assigned mission, as Ogarkov knew would occur if he listened to those fools, wouldn’t bring about the rapid and low-casualty victory desired by his political masters.

The tanks which were causing all of that drama had been added by Ogarkov to the Soviet Airborne (VDV) divisions after he at first planned to just have all of those paratroopers in their vehicles go out racing ahead into West Germany alone. He’d wanted to do that because the VDV were capable of navigating themselves correctly and moving fast through unfriendly terrain to reach the distant objectives set for them. However, Ogarkov had been tinkering with Plan Zhukov since he had been given the order to have it ready to go within thirty-six hours of the instruction to go ahead. The wait since then had been arduous. He privately hoped no go order would come but he wanted it to succeed if that happened. The waiting around saw him make small changes in plans and organisation. Adding the tanks was one of the biggest changes. A concern had grown in him that when the VDV units with their men mounted in their BMD-1s /-2s & BTR-Ds did as tasked and reached their objectives, they wouldn’t have enough of a fright factor among opponents which they encountered. Plan Zhukov was to be a classic ‘deep operation’, one long so beloved of Soviet military theorists and only once really undertaken: back in 1945 against the Japanese in Manchuria. Soviet forces were to be almost everywhere at once – in the eyes of NATO’s governments, not in reality – to cause a complete collapse among them with the thinking that they’d been defeated. A tank, or almost two hundred of them, would achieve that desired outcome better. NATO troops taken by surprise might be able to cause enough damage to the VDV forces to convince their governments that they had a chance to reverse their terrible situation, but that would be different with tanks alongside those thin-skinned armoured vehicles. Ogarkov had done something similar with his Soviet Army motorcycle reconnaissance units that Plan Zhukov called for to be sent out far ahead too, covering an even greater distance than the tankers and paratroopers. Those were to operate as forward detachments to go around hastily formed NATO blocking positions and report-in on where the enemy could be found. He wanted them to bring another shock factor by their very presence but, with reflection in the past few weeks, he considered them to not being enough to force such a frightened reaction unless they had something to back them up. For each forward detachment of scouts on those bikes, Ogarkov would send a couple of armoured cars, BRDM-2s, to follow them.

Ogarkov tinkered elsewhere. He transferred units from one subordinate command to another. Some of these were combat units but many were supporting ones too. This was all paper movements though. The GSFG was in its barracks and so were those in regular Soviet forces garrisoned in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. Plan Zhukov was an out-of-barracks attack. Only those exercising in the field were the extra reinforcements which he had been allowed to bring into Poland to be present should that attack be given the go ahead. These administrative changes were often made on Ogarkov’s whims but there was too the daily GRU intelligence reports which he was receiving on the up-to-date status of NATO forces. What they were perceived to be up to in terms of their own exercises, deployment plans in case of war and personnel strength dictated his tinkering in response. Generally though, the majority of things stayed the same. The bigger elements of Plan Zhukov remained unchanged. Ogarkov was ready to unleash war upon Western Europe following a complicated series of operational taskings with massed forces. He’d still sent airmobile units in transport aircraft & helicopters as flank guards and to take key objectives upon the onset of war. Spetsnaz raiding teams would do their worse along with tactical ballistic missiles with chemical warheads. Strike aircraft would make attacks covered by massed fighter protection. There would be the movement across the Inner-German Border, and other parts of the Iron Curtain too, of an unparalleled combat force bigger than NATO could ever have foreseen. All the tinkering which he did didn’t make difference to the established plan for that eventuality.


The bulk of GSFG force remained there in East Germany and it was out of there where much of the attack which everyone was on-alert for would take place. Yet, Ogarkov was spending the majority of his time in Poland. The command complex at Legnica was one of several areas in this country which effectively belonged to the Soviet Armed Forces: Poles, civilians & military personnel, were only allowed into them with explicit permission. They didn’t appear on maps, even secret Polish military ones, but Legnica, the garrisons and the training sites all existed regardless.

At those training sites, Ogarkov watched several small-scale exercises take place. These would be some of the opening moves should Plan Zhukov go ahead across in West Germany. The commander of Western Strategic Direction witnessed first a Spetsnaz action. A detachment of close to fifty men conducted a dawn assault on a mock-up of a bridge which reassembled an autobahn flyover. The structure was carefully built to be a clone of what these men would find in that country: it wouldn’t take the weight of vehicles traversing it repeatedly but everything else was the same. The commandos arrived in civilian vehicles before racing into action at ground level and then up above too. They secured it from the soldiers posted to guard it. The exercises wasn’t ‘honest’ because the defenders knew what was coming and there were no live rounds or real explosives used – the simulation was still impressive – but it gave an example of how this was supposed to go. The aim was more than just to take out the guards (they’d be West German reservists if this was real: not Soviet Army riflemen) but to get the explosives-trained Spetsnaz among the assault force to work. These men had seen with their own eyes real flyovers in West Germany where there were holes already in-place within such a structure for the placement of demolition charges in wartime. Those on this training mission started removing the dummy explosives, located where they knew they would find them. This had to be done properly because, if this was real, to do it wrong could see such a bridge blown up in their faces… and a mission failure too.

Not long afterwards, Ogarkov went to see another operation being practised. This was an assault on an airfield (the one used here was often made use of for such purposes) conducted by the Soviet Army’s own air assault forces. The Spetsnaz and also the VDV weren’t part of the Soviet Army proper and, while Ogarkov would have operational command of them for Plan Zhukov, he also had those assigned too from his own service. One of the battalions of Desanto-Shturmoviy-Voyska (DShV) had flown over from East Germany direct into this mock attack. Transport aircraft dropped parachutists and also armoured vehicles as well. The landing sites were near to the airfield rather than atop of it. A quick assault was made though as the DShV men rapidly formed up to move onwards towards the objective. They took it quickly too, making a twin assault from two sides coordinated perfectly. Ogarkov knew that these soldiers had never been here before but they’d still achieved what they were supposed to within the allotted time. Things would have been different if this was real and the airfield properly defended – the transports could have been attacked by opposing fighters too – but all that he saw was impressive. It was lone battalions like this one, as well as brigade-sized units with several battalions under command, which would be doing this in West Germany to see Plan Zhukov work. If they failed on a significant scale, everything would go awry.

The tinkering and the exercises (small ones like these in the field; bigger ones on paper) would go on. Ogarkov waited for either a green light to implement it or a stand-down order to cancel everything.