The Second Battle of Britain - a Soviet Sealion

It's very eady for such accidental clashes to happen: a Su-24 IIRC was nesrly shot down a couple of years ago for buzzing a US destroyer too closely while Crimea was occuring, and there have been near misses in Syria, plus all the old Cold War incidents of US spy planes being shot down - add something like that to a major crisis in the ME and it looks like real and deliberate provocation.

95 – No innocent intent


The Israeli Navy was active off the Lebanese coast. They were involved in the conflict with Hezbollah though in less of an active role than the rest of the Israeli Armed Forces. The Army and the Air Force had given Iran’s proxies in Lebanon a battering. Hezbollah lacked the ability to act at sea apart from the few occasions when they’d sent out some hi-jacked/stolen fishing boats. These had been either sunk or captured. The intention had been to send raiders down behind the frontlines into the southern reaches of Lebanon, even to Israel itself, but Hezbollah had been defeated in these endeavours. Apart from such at-sea incidents, the Israeli Navy wasn’t doing much else here. They weren’t involved in shelling of coastal targets and neither had there been any amphibious operations for them to support: the Israeli Navy wasn’t equipped for such missions.

Half a dozen vessels maintained the presence off Lebanon, located in offshore waters southwards away from Beirut. None of them were prepared for the attack which came their way.

The Soviet’s Black Sea Fleet had it surface flotilla active in the Mediterranean with the Fifth Operational Squadron. This was nowhere near Israel nor even Lebanon and Syria. The American’s with their Sixth Fleet made their presence felt around the Soviets. There were submarines active too, ones which the Americans had been having less success in keeping a firm eye on. Two of them had headed eastwards late yesterday in the direction of Lebanon, slipping away from American surveillance efforts. In Moscow, they’d made the decision to hit back at Israel following what was seen as the deliberate killing of their people in Syria. The submarines would do that in what was going to be quite the disproportionate response.

A torpedo hit the Israeli missile boat INS Kidon. It blew up right underneath the small but well-armed vessel. The Kidon almost at once broke in half. Water filled each end and down the two pieces of the boat went towards the bottom of the Med. Forty-six men were aboard: only eleven would survive. Moments later and close to twenty miles away, another torpedo was destined to do the same to a sistership of the Kidon, the INS Moledet. The torpedo was perfectly on-target yet the warhead didn’t work and there was no explosion. Physically hit though, there was quite the thud. The attempted attack would certainly have sunk the Moledet as well as taking the lives of many of her crew too.

The Israeli Navy had been taken completely by surprise. There was no warning of what had come through any of their many intelligence sources. They were not at a loss to find someone to blame from this. Syria was known to operate submarines – Soviet supplied Romeo class boats – and the assumption was made that they had somehow put a pair of them into action. It was recognised that this would have been quite the stretch for them to do but maybe they had Soviet help… Shamir and his Cabinet quickly assembled in Tel Aviv to discuss how to proceed. The immediate feeling there would be to strike back against Syria yet that would have to be agreed to and planned. In the meantime, out at sea there were rescue operations underway for those from the Kidon as well as protective measures to be undertaken to guard against further submarine attacks. These immediate problems were what the Israeli Navy focused on: they believed that the Israeli Air Force would probably handle a retaliation for this. Their day of being in the firing line wasn’t over with yet though.

Two separate flights of Soviet aircraft left bases in Syria which they recently moved to after leaving Iraq. The first, northernmost flight were a pair of Sukhoi-17Ms. They soon came out over the Med. to the north of Lebanon but soon swung south. The second flight contained a trio of MiG-23s. These went towards southern Lebanon. With each flight, the Israelis at once believed they were Syrian, not Soviet. The second flight, with those fighters, were quickly moved against by the IDF/AF. Whatever the ‘Syrians’ were planning to do with fighter-bombers over the area of Lebanon which Israel controlled, they aimed to stop that. The Israelis fired first. Quickly, their opponents returned fire. Missiles criss-crossed the sky. Return shooting by the ‘Syrian’ MiGs was much better than expected and two F-16s were hit. However, the IDF/AF got two of them in return and watched the third one flee. There had been an ejection of the pilot from one of those downed MiGs and he would be captured when on the ground by the Israeli Army. He was confirmed to a serving member of the Soviet Air Force: neither Syrian nor even a ‘volunteer doing his internationalist duty’. This came later though, long after what happened over Lebanon and out over the Med.

When the Kidon had been sunk, the US Navy had picked up the radio messages broadcast about the strike by the Israeli Navy. Sixth Fleet’s commander issued orders for an immediate air presence near that area. The concern was that this might be something repeated elsewhere. The Libyans had submarines too and while this area was far from where they could operate, the Americans wanted to understand what had happened here with this supposed Syrian attack to make sure they could be prepared for any attack on the Sixth Fleet. That was the justification though there was a lot of them just sticking their nose in really. S-3 Viking maritime patrol / sub-hunting aircraft left the carrier USS Saratoga and so too did F-14 Tomcats. The Vikings were searching for signs of the attacking submarines – ready to pass the information along to the Israelis – when the Tomcats were alerted by an AWACS aircraft that ‘Syrian’ aircraft were racing out over the water inbound on the rest of the Israeli Navy.

These were international waters. Israel wasn’t a formal ally of the United States. Those Su-17s weren’t on a direct course towards any US Navy ship. Nonetheless, orders came for the Tomcats to open fire. The exposed Vikings were under threat it was said and the ‘Syrians’ had already shown their hostile intent.

Without any radio warning nor visual identification, the Americans brought them down without suffering any losses of their own. The Sixth Fleet and thus the Pentagon & Washington would remain unaware for some time that those aircraft had been Soviet instead. They’d honestly believed that these were Syrians. Should the truth have been known, there might have been efforts made to try and stop the Su-17s from attacking the Israeli ships as they had come here to do – there was no innocent intent – without the use of force. The Americans wouldn’t have done what they did otherwise. The Syrians were considered fair game but the Soviets certainly weren’t, not with the international situation as it was!

Yet they had just struck once more at Soviet forces. It wouldn’t be the first accidental clash on August 20th either.

Well its got very messy and with the Soviet High Command so eager for a fight its not surprising that they misinterpret some of those actions. Plus the US has made clear mistakes as well in this actions. I can see how hot-heads in Moscow decided to go for broke, especially with the western powers distracted be the growing mess in the ME.

97 – Backing us into a corner


The Americans had sent a Hotline message to Moscow. They’d demanded to know why the destroyer Admiral Spiridonov had attacked and sunk their warship off the Iraqi coast. An urgent explanation was sought, the message ran, to stop the situation from getting any worse than it was. Ligachev and the top people in the leadership noted how there was no expressed regret for the loss of life aboard the Spiridonov when that ship had too gone down. Moreover, the Americans said nothing about the air incidents over the Mediterranean and Iraq where they had shot down Soviet aircraft in unprovoked attacks. The four-man defence council had agreed an immediate response to that before the full Politburo met in the early hours of the Friday morning. A briefing to their colleagues covering all that had happened, including the contents of the reply sent back over the Hotline, was given. There was an update too on the press conference given at the Pentagon. The lies told there by their secretary of defence and the chairman of the joint chiefs were discussed. They were claiming that the Spiridonov had attacked them first before then been sunk in self-defence. They were talking too about their navy shooting down Syrian jets over the Med. and Iranian ones over Iraq. Such a contemptable charade of innocence and attempts to claim that they hadn’t done what they had infuriated those listening. When usually there might have been some remarks made trying to understand what the Americans were up to, to possibly look at the situation from the other side, there was none of that today. There was only agreement that the United States under Reagan had slid into full on open aggression. They were muddling the waters talking about an attack made first by the Soviet Navy. The issue with them saying that the aircraft which they shot down had different identities was a lie which the Politburo couldn’t fully understand the meaning behind… but it was another lie regardless.

Several members put it to their colleagues that the Americans were going to keep doing this. As they had multiple times before, they were going to attack Soviet warships and shoot down Soviet aircraft. It was all part of their plan to rid the Middle East of Soviet presence, using the killing of military personnel to do that. Would they stop after they did that? Not likely! It would be somewhere else, a place of even more importance to the geo-political goals of the Soviet Union. Another colleague remarked that this time it had cost the Americans dear with the lives that had been lost aboard that sunken frigate of theirs. There were smiles on the faces of others at the thought of how that had backfired on them there. Yet, a further Politburo member pointed out how the losses they took there didn’t stop them from shooting down those Soviet jets over Iraq only a couple of hours later. Heads nodded in agreement.

Chebrikov went through a narrative of all of the near misses and clashes in recent months with regard to American aggression undertaken against deployed Soviet forces. Just in case anyone had forgotten, he spoke of the downing of that Soviet bomber over international waters of the Gulf back in May, before Rashid launched his war against his neighbours. He mentioned the near misses throughout the seas and skies within the Middle East and beyond afterwards. Each one of those was presented as something that the Americans were solely responsible for. American actions around the two bases maintained in Southern Iraq were brought up along with all their threats where they spoke about the ‘possibility of accidents occurring’ if the Soviet Union didn’t put out of Iraq. There had been that failed missile attack on the Spiridonov in the Straits of Hormuz before it had been attacked by the US Navy near to Umm Qasr. Now, all within a period of less than twelve hours, they’d shot down Soviet aircraft over the Med., sunk a destroyer and brought down MiGs over Iraq. The KGB chairman reminded the Politburo how those aircraft were leaving Iraq too, getting away from the war which the Americans had taken to the Iranians as well in a calculated series of attacks to see a conflict come with them.

Gromyko referred to all of those threats made diplomatically in formal terms but also in informal settings too. The United States had been long at work trying to force the Soviet Union to abandon its friends in the Middle East and defended the actions of its thoroughly awful allies there when they had been thus encouraged to strike at the Soviet Union too. Would Israel and Saudi Arabia have done all that they had if the Americans hadn’t been supporting them? To be pushed around by a country such as the United States was bad enough, but to let the Israelis and the Saudis do the same was something that Gromyko said was unacceptable. He also said it would keep on going too. Furthermore, the foreign minister brought up recent activities by Bush and Schulz in Western Europe and Turkey. Those two were encouraging as many NATO countries as they could to accept the deployment to mainland Europe of increased American military forces once their REFORGER exercise was done: large numbers would stay on. With the Turks, Reagan’s vice president had been telling them that American wanted to base aircraft in the eastern side of their country to influence their wars against Iran and Iraq. This, Gromyko believed, would allow them to create more incidents of aggression not just against Soviet deployed forces but near to the Soviet border as Turkey shared a frontier with the Soviet Union too.

Defence minister Sokolov – whose failure to fire had seen Gorbachev lose the support of his comrades and thus have to step down – had increasingly become close to the very top of the leadership, right within Ligachev’s inner circle. He warned his colleagues about the strength of the American military should it be allowed to mass overseas on the territory of friendly allies. There were all those reinforcements on the way to the Gulf as well as into Europe. When they had them in-place, he was concerned that there would be more of those attacks made. These would be from a position of strength. They would take more Soviet lives and endanger Soviet influence in areas of strategic importance. At this time, especially with regards to Europe, the Soviet Union was strong and could deter such attempts. But if they let the Americans build themselves up further, aided by complicit allies, then the situation would change entirely. Sokolov laid his cards on the table: should the post REFORGER ’87 military deployment occur, this would fatally weaken the military position of the Soviet Union to defend its own allies and influence in Eastern Europe. The Americans would be able to do what they’d done in the Med. and the Gulf over the Baltic… maybe over Czechoslovakia or even East Germany too.

With these remarks made by his senior colleagues, and the rest of Politburo already seeing the writing on the wall when it came to the aggressiveness of the Americans, Ligachev addressed them. He told the Politburo how the Soviet Union was being backed into a corner. Reagan and his cohorts weren’t going to stop now, they would see themselves as on a winning roll. They weren’t scared of a Soviet response. It looked likely that they were trying to mentally prepare their people for a conflict with the Soviet Union by how that media event at the Pentagon had just done. Ligachev thought that Reagan was only seeking a limited one but what would be the cost to the Soviet Union of a ‘limited’ fight? It would be more than just people killed, the general secretary said, but the loss of influence and prestige abroad. It could bring them all down too.

This couldn’t stand.


He reminded his colleagues of the previous agreement made among them, here in this very room when there had been the worry expressed months ago that the Americans would do this, where they had collectively decided that in the event of a United States attack, the Soviet Union would strike out in defence. That attack had come. Therefore, they needed to strike back. To not do so put so much else in danger: their very rule, their very lives even.

Ligachev asked for a show of hands when he said that it could only be war that would avert this from continuing. Even the non-voting members of the Politburo were given the opportunity to participate, a break from procedure which no one objected to. There were no abstentions, there were no nays either. It was a unanimous aye from all. So a war it would be then.

Chebrikov, Gromyko and Sokolov laid out a course of action after this. It wasn’t something up for a vote nor any real debate. Ligachev gave his consent to it. Each of them stated that more time was really needed than they could agree to give to preparatory stage but that time was short. Many things that they might wish to see done ahead of war, wouldn’t be able to be something that could be done now. Alas, that was the way of things. Ligachev wanted this war that they had committed themselves to undertake to be quick, decisive as with as less negative cost as possible. That meant compromises would have to be made. Yet, the expressed aim was to achieve all that was wanted to by going to war and all that could be done with that in the time allotted from now to then would be done. Every advantage that could be gained ahead of the outbreak of fighting, would be taken.

Finished here with what needed to be agreed to, orders went out to Marshal Ogarkov in Legnica. Those orders were received and confirmed. Plan Zhukov – which was to become Operation Elbe (a simplistic, even deceiving codename) upon initiation of action – would go ahead in forty-five hours time. It could be stopped before that time, but it would take quite the event to reverse this coming war. Such a thing would also involve an almighty about-turn on the part of those serving on the Politburo. That wasn’t at all likely to happen.

So, the die is cast...

Nice work.

Plan Zhukov / Operation Elbe
The Zhukov name is a nod to Red Storm Rising, the surprise out-of-barracks attack.
Elbe is something I chose over something like 'Operation Red Storm' because the Soviets won't call it that. When invading Czechoslovakia in 1968, it was Operation Danube. So I went for a nice river name and for the historical comparison.

Good updates James G, 2 more and you reach the 100 chapters.