The Second Battle of Britain - a Soviet Sealion

Membership has been closed for years! Every so often, they open it up for a day or two. I jumped in quick.
You can ask Matt Wiser and JN1 over on ah.com. They are staff for that board though I wouldn't put too much hope in any action on that note: no fault of theirs, but the main admin makes the decision.
Sorry I can't be more helpful but I do suggest asking one or both of them for at least more info than I can provide!

102 – First contact


The passage through the Helmstedt-Marienborn Crossing by the armoured column there was one of six made at the same time out of East Germany over the Inner-German Border. Five further near identical groups of tanks, tracked armoured vehicles and self-propelled mortars, as well as the paratroopers carried, moved unopposed into West Germany too at the same time. The use was made of excellent road connections between the divided Germany where East German border guards got out of the way and the West Germans had no idea what went through them.

The 7th Guards Airborne Division took on the task of supplying the regiment groups for the northernmost crossings. In addition to the regiment which went through Checkpoint Alpha, two more passed through the civilian border sites at Gudow-Zarrentin and at Duderstadt-Worbis. The former gave the Soviet Airborne Troops access to Autobahn-24 and Hamburg beyond; the latter followed a major road (not an autobahn but still a good link) towards Gottingen and where the lower reaches of the Leine & Weser valleys were.

Coming out of East Germany too were the three combat regiments of the 106th Guards Airborne Division: like the other VDV formation, they too had a tank regiment with them split up among the columns. One group went through the Herleshausen-Wartha crossing to get onto Autobahn-4. Up ahead was the northern side of the Fulda Gap in Hessen. Two more regiment groups came out of the Thuringenwald, starting out not that far apart. There were a pair of good highways which passed through the Eussenhausen-Meiningen and Rottenbach-Eisefeld crossings. Soviet Airborne went into Bavaria by these routes.

A couple of miles into Bavaria, one of those columns met the enemy. Non-lethal gas had been used at the border sites to knock out of action the West German border guards there without destroying nor contaminating each location. When a patrol of the US Army’s 11th Armoured Cavalry Regiment was met by the Soviets on their way to Wurzburg via Schweinfurt, there was only the full use of the most-deadly weapons available. Two M-3 Bradleys, reconnaissance versions of the M-2 infantry vehicle, were fired upon before they could report in what their shocked crews were seeing. One was hit by a shell from a T-64 tank and the other was blown up by another one of those tanks firing a missile out of its gun barrel. It wouldn’t be long before all of the columns moving through West Germany was engaged in action though this incident was the first contact. The Blackhorse Cav’ detachment had been moments away from opening fire themselves and only caught out because the Soviets saw them first. Elsewhere, things were going to be different.

The invading columns moved through West Germany. The morning was getting lighter as the time went gone past H–0 and five o’clock. The war was fully underway now, here and elsewhere. They kept on advancing. The chosen routes for them to take provided excellent access. Many chokepoints were passed through, places where defensive fire could have rained down upon the Soviet columns had the way been blocked. Bridges and flyovers were physically prepared for demolition with explosives in terms of the infrastructure set-up: all that was missing was the men to man them and the actual charges. The West Germans and their NATO allies had spent many long years projecting passage of invading forces and had always intended to blow access routes up in the faces of the Soviet Army. The men were in their barracks though, the explosives locked in storage.

Making an average speed of forty kilometres per hour along open main roads, keeping together as they moved rather than spreading out, the columns kept up their progress of going west. How many kilometres inside West Germany could they go before being stopped?


Far smaller recon detachments also went over the border: the platoon-sized mixed groups of motorcycles and armoured cars. There were other road connections including four recognised border crossings which were made use of though the entrances into West Germany were nowhere near as dramatic as those big armoured columns. Those six sites which the Soviet Airborne went through were too made use of by these smaller teams who crossed after them.

Unlike their VDV comrades, these Soviet Army units quickly moved off the main roads. They followed less-travelled routes to get into West Germany. The bikes and cars split up too as they moved. Glances had been taken at the mass of tanks and tracked vehicles with members of the recon teams believing that they were big fat targets for an air strike… or a tactical nuclear weapon. They themselves moved with less drama. They went faster too.

Few radio reports were made at the start of their journeys. They didn’t catch sight of anything to report in. Activity around military bases which they went near to – not directly up against – got stronger as the time went on and the deeper into West Germany that they went. When felt appropriate, the detachment commanders did make radio reports. This was done out of sight. Engagement with the enemy wasn’t sought. They carried weapons but weren’t out for a fight.

Yet they were seen, the BRDM-2 armoured cars especially. Four-wheeled and with adorned camouflage paint, they caught attention when spotted. There were two machine gun barrels sticking out of the turret as well. Everything about them said ‘army’, a foreign army too. West German civilians might not have known the designations of vehicles stationed with NATO armies based in their country but this certainly wasn’t one of those. NATO soldiers, on duty and not, knew what these were too when they saw them. These were the leading vehicles of an invading army and they were quickly being seen in many places, far from the Inner-German Border. Plenty of witnesses held their nerve in the face of such a sight but others panicked, even those who shouldn’t have. If the Soviet Army had already gotten this far…


When those few NATO soldiers at Helmstedt were left incapacitated by mortar-delivered chocking agents, they weren’t the only ones attacked by gas. Nor were those struck with tank fire like those on the road to Schweinfurt the only ones to see battle either. There were other personnel out near the Inner-German Border at the moment when the Soviets came across. Their numbers were in the low hundreds and they were in no position to stop what came their way, nor fully understand what was happening.

In the hours preceding the opening of Operation Elbe, Marshal Ogarkov’s concern that NATO would spot all the activity on his side of the Iron Curtain was proved true. It was the hours of darkness and there was much camouflage & deception employed, yet it was all just impossible to hide. The West had their satellites, their radar aircraft and their listening devices. To counter the latter, everything was supposed to be done with written orders. Radios were used though when they weren’t meant to be in defiance of those orders: the junior officers who did would be in a whole world of trouble. Much more was seen by NATO using other means. The activity inside military bases, aircraft flying and then the transit underway of reinforcements for the GSFG was noticeable. The Soviets tried to hide it all. They did a good job. The maskirovka had holes in it though. Human error as well as incidents of Soviet overconfidence were at fault.

Still… what was being done was so big that it was just impossible to miss even with all the deception.

Putting it all together in the short time frame that they had was what the problem was for NATO though. Given a day, two at the most, it would have been perfectly clear that the Soviets were about to invade. Nothing else would have made sense with regard to what was being done with the sudden military movements. There was no such time available though. What was seen was witnessed by many sources too. They weren’t in constant contact with other, sharing information and also analysis. If Ogarkov hadn’t attacked on the Sunday morning, by the Sunday night then things would have been much different because inter-service communication would have taken place. But, the circumstances weren’t in NATO’s favour.

In response to all the strange occurrences, alerts went out. This was no general war alert though. In different places among different nationalities of NATO forces inside West Germany and elsewhere, what was being seen was being interpreted in different manners. Most were only focused on what they were seeing too, not yet being told what others were. Personnel were sent to the border to keep an eye on things, ‘to have a nose about’ as those who went to Helmstedt were instructed. The Blackhorse Cav’, plus the 2nd Cav’ as well, sent detachments up to near the frontier in armoured vehicles. The West Germans – who never deployed their army to the Inner-German Border on patrol missions like their allies did – put some helicopters in the sky and also prepared for reconnaissance missions with Luftwaffe Tornados which would be making sideways surveillance. The British Army of the Rhine and RAF Germany had a few units stand-to and made preparations for a small-scale border watch mission but it wasn’t one yet underway when the war began.

Through all of this, no one in any senior position seriously believed that the Soviets were about to invade. There was speculation that maybe the Soviets might be redeploying forces internally as part of some sort of show of force with this just being the very beginning of that. Or, maybe they were preparing themselves for some imaginary expected American attack like the acts of aggression elsewhere in the world which they had been accusing the United States of.

An invasion moving westwards was just completely out of the question. It was what happened though. It was one which had only just begun too. The armoured columns going on forward recon and the scouting detachments were just the start of this. Operation Elbe was going to be a full show.

103 – A successful assassination


Chebrikov’s KGB had what they regarded as a workable plan to assassinate President Ronald Reagan.

It was an updated version of plans long in the making to eliminate whomever occupied the Oval Office. Ligachev, supported by Gromyko, refused to allow Chebrikov to authorise it though. The KGB Chairman had pushed hard but couldn’t get the support of his Politburo comrades to kill the man. Why was this the case? The whole intention of going to war wasn’t one to fight a conflict to the bitter end. It was supposed to be a limited war. Western Europe would be overrun, NATO destroyed and the threat to the Soviet Union of American-led military adventurism ended for good. Tens of thousands of American military personnel were certain to be killed in that war and the United States would be enraged at the ‘surprise attack’, Chebrikov’s colleagues had said, making war termination difficult enough. By killing Reagan would certain see a negotiated ending impossible to achieve. For the same reason that Sokolov was told that direct military attacks on American soil weren’t to occur unless the US hit the Soviet Union first, and then those would be proportional in response too, an effort to murder Reagan wasn’t to be done. Sokolov wasn’t happy what he was told – he wanted to hit Norfolk naval base with a barrage of cruise missiles to hit carriers and the facilities – and neither was Chebrikov. Both men followed the will of the Politburo though. As to the disavowed attempt on Reagan, Chebrikov kept the plan in-place as well as the infrastructure for it with people and weapons as Ligachev told him to do, though he believed that the opportunity was gone for good. If they couldn’t kill Reagan in the minutes leading up to the outbreak of war as he’d wanted, his people on the ground in America would never get the president. It would be impossible to do once war began.

Considering that the Politburo had agreed that the intent was to eventually seek war termination in Western Europe, give back through diplomacy all that their tanks were ordered to go take – in time though, when the Europeans were ready to be ‘reasonable’ –, Chebrikov was authorised to sent his assassins to kill Western political leaders regardless. KGB murderers went after Chancellor Kohl, President Mitterrand and Prime Minister Thatcher. They were to be eliminated to throw their countries, the most powerful three on the continent, into political chaos. Their successors would be the ones with whom the Soviet Union would deal with for diplomatic negotiations.

The efforts to kill the three of them were made before the Inner-German Border was crossed, not when it was or even afterwards. Fifteen minutes ahead of the war starting, the KGB went after the trio. Ogarkov wasn’t told. He would have objected with the belief it would take away surprise and damage the war effort. Now, he would have been wrong but that was a moot point. Chebrikov got his way on this matter of timing though, believing that they too would quickly be impossible to get – like Reagan – once the fighting started.


In Bonn, there was a shootout at the Kanzlerbungalow, Helmut Kohl’s official residence next to the Federal Chancellery. West German security forces, here to guard against terrorists, were taken by surprise but recovered well and put up quite the fight. A dozen of them were slain in the early morning attack but the rest covered the escape effort of Kohl and his wife from the gunmen. There was a sniper though. Waiting patiently, he took what should have been the perfect shot to kill Kohl. At the last second, the chancellor’s wife jumped slightly while being hurried forward when one of the KGB assault team threw a concussion grenade. She was momentarily in the line of fire of the bullet intended for her husband. Hannelore Kohl – who as a twelve year old had suffered horribly at the hands of rampaging Soviet soldiers in Berlin – was killed at once. Her husband was dragged away from her body, his security team still firing back. Including the chancellor’s wife, eighteen lives were lost in Bonn. Only one of the six Soviets got away alive: they would have needed many more men to make this work. That sniper would hurry to a safe house and wait on the Soviet Army to turn up in this little German city beside the Rhine. Meanwhile, Kohl had just escaped with his life but seen his closest personal companion killed before his very eyes.

Thirty miles outside of Paris, there was a gunfight at the Château de Rambouillet. Francois Mitterrand would survive assassination like Chancellor Kohl would. He had no close brush with death though. The French president wasn’t here at his summer’s residence. He had been at Rambouillet until a few hours earlier before leaving to go back to the Élysée Palace following more news that had come out of the Middle East with more deaths caused by an Iranian missile attack on Saudi Arabia. The hit team sent to murder him didn’t know that. They came into the grounds, killing guards on the way and got into Mitterrand’s private quarters. Grenades and automatic rifles were used to bathe the rooms in a torrent of war coming home to France. This was done in case their target was hiding somewhere. But he wasn’t here. Other security troops came in to surround those now trapped inside. One of the KGB men called out in French that they had a hostage: Mitterrand in fact. Naturally, the bluff didn’t work and an assault was made. Two of the five KGB men who struck at Rambouillet ended up prisoner. Both were badly wounded, but they were now going to face quite the interrogation. They’d gotten inside to what should have one of the most-secure places in the country and only just missed the nation’s most-protected man. It wasn’t luck that had got them here, nor was that responsible for the eleven more dead in the château grounds either.

At the Chequers estate in rural Buckinghamshire, the assassins there got their target. Margaret Thatcher – plus her husband Denis too; his slaying wasn’t intended but was collateral damage – were killed in a hail of bullets in their private bedroom. Close to two hundred rounds were fired. Police officers, specialists from the Met. who guarded politicians, outside in the grounds as well as in the stately home too had been killed by having their throats slit or bayonetted in the back. This mass shooting was something different indeed. The killers from here made an escape once they were done. One of them was shot dead by an armed policeman right on the edge of the estate but the five others fled into the countryside. Chequers was left burning behind them when they’d set it on fire to help aid their escape. This put the total number of dead on British soil at nine. The surviving members of the hit team would have to keep running for a long time following their escape. Hundreds of British police and soldiers would soon be coming after them, running them to ground. In the meantime, Britain was left without a prime minister following a successful assassination.

Um, reasonable, Soviets? Yeah, the response in these nations will be similar to the US's response to Pearl Harbor, so forget about that...

Talk about not thinking this through...

104 – Commandos and missiles


Marshal Ogarkov’s Western–TVD command had four complete brigades of Spetsnaz commandos assigned for operations in Western Europe. Several thousands of these highly-trained men were all available for combat. Should he have been able to, Ogarkov would have sent them all into action at once upon the very moment war broke out. There were dozens of NATO airbases which they could have raided, communications & logistics sites aplenty to strike at and countless other military & civilian targets on a hit list. However, there wasn’t enough transport to get them all forward at once to where they would need to be to achieve all that he might have desired for them. More importantly, he was unable to get them forward ahead of the outbreak of war without them being discovered. The circumstances hadn’t been right for that. Once the Inner-German Border was crossed, then the bulk of the Spetsnaz could go into action. They would be quick into that. Surprise would be lost but only in a strategic sense: there would still be plenty of localised shock on the part of the enemy when hit with what the large force, broken down into over a hundred detachments, which he had assembled. NATO forces in the rear would be on alert but still the Spetsnaz units could achieve a lot.

Ogarkov had managed to get some of the commandos forward first. In the short time he was given between being ordered to strike and the moment of that attack, orders went out for small numbers to make their way forward. He chose to send them to high priority targets to make the biggest impact and also to help open the way for not just their comrades but the armies he had under his command too. Men had gotten into Western Europe via various means over the first part of the weekend. They’d linked up with agents in place and weapons caches were opened. At H–0, they’d gone into action.

Geilenkirchen Airbase was hit by a Spetsnaz attack. This was a NATO run facility in West Germany, tucked up right against the frontier with the Netherlands. Multi-national aircrews and ground personnel from all nations of that alliance were present to operate and support the E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft based here. Those flew in Luxembourg Air Force colours (that air arm operated no others) with Geilenkirchen being a home base for them but they had forward sites elsewhere for exercises and wartime deployments. Eleven of the E-3s were at their home base when those commandos attacked. Six were destroyed in explosions caused by satchel charges and RPG shots while another two were badly damaged: the remaining trio were full of bullet holes by flyable. Little damage was caused to the base facilities but there was a lot of fighting. Two-thirds of the Spetsnaz team were killed with a few others taken prisoner and the rest at once on the run. NATO causalities were triple those of their attackers, including many slain when bombs were thrown into dormitories among sleeping men.

Another NATO-operated air facility, this one over in Belgium, was also the scene of an attack. Chièvres Airbase was near to the SHAPE headquarters in the Belgian countryside. The Spetsnaz struck here at the same time as mortar rounds were fired at the larger complex and a car bomb blew up there too. Few aircraft made use of Chièvres but it was to be the evacuation point of NATO’s senior commander for Europe: the American General Rogers who served as SACEUR. The Soviets hit the airbase to force Rogers to take another evacuation route. There were more men in the immediate area waiting with anti-material rifles (to penetrate protected vehicles), command-detonated mines placed beside roads and man-portable missile-launchers. Rogers, someone long in his position though who had been at odds with the Reagan Administration for some time now (if the crisis with Moscow hadn’t been going on, he would have been out of a job), was targeted in quite the operation to get him on the move. With Chièvres under attack, there was no helicopter coming out of there to lift him away. Rogers’ security team, fearing that SHAPE was surely only moments away from a nuclear attack when war suddenly came, were still determined to get him out of danger so to allow him to continue as role as SACEUR and directing NATO’s fight. They bundled him into a vehicle and drove away from SHAPE heading south. One of the several prepared ambushes was run into. Shots from a couple of those long-barreled rifles hit multiple vehicles which were armoured, in at least one of them the Spetsnaz were sure Rogers was. The column was halted and when troops poured out of several vehicles, the mines went off. Missiles were fired too. The massed firepower did its work. Rogers’ security team were being massacred. He was still alive, pulled from one of the shot-up vehicles and surrounded by soldiers. The Spetsnaz moved forward. Given another few minutes, they would have gotten him because they had more missiles to use up to blast the defenders and these were force-multipliers in the fight. However, the Belgian Army was quickly on-scene. There was an alert force which had got here extremely fast and went straight into action. The Belgians took many casualties but they won the fight. Rogers was pulled away to safety and the Soviets who had come so close to killing him were going to either be killed here this morning in Belgium or have to give themselves up. Making an escape back to their rally points and subsequently to hiding places was going to be impossible as more Belgian troops were flooding the area.

These high-profile Spetsnaz operations occurred when quieter operations took place back in West Germany, closer to the Inner-German Border. NATO had a SAM belt which spread north-south down that country. It was one with quite the depth of coverage. Soviet tanks were due to drive through it but before then, NATO would bring it into operation. In-place infrastructure was due to be joined by reinforcements in wartime making what was meant to be a significant barrier to enemy air operations. It was a defensive position long-studied for attack by Soviet planners. It was going to be hit by missile attack but Ogarkov sent his commandos in as well to hit certain parts of it. Knocking holes in the line would open the way for more of their comrades to get forward in transport aircraft and helicopters too. In several places, detachments of Spetsnaz struck. They used everything in their arsenal to do this from rifles to mortars to missiles to bombs. Personnel and communications were struck at. Radars were hit and the SAM-launchers targeted. It was costly work for them in a few places where near failure was met yet in others they achieved stunning success and did a lot of damage. This was the type of mission that the Spetsnaz were really good at. They ripped open this element of NATO’s defences to allow it to be penetrated by others.

Meanwhile, the rest of their comrades were making their way forward. All of those detachments, moving by air, land & sea were unleashed on operational missions. They weren’t all going straight into action either – some had orders to make delayed attacks – and there was no intention that their activities would just be one-time strikes. The Spetsnaz went into West Germany and Denmark initially. They were also under instruction to go further forward, right through Western Europe.


The KGB assassination teams had struck early and the Spetsnaz had opened their attacks at the moment the war started. Ogarkov used his ballistic missile force ‘late’.

There was a delay of a quarter of an hour. Soviet armoured columns had already gone over the border. Commando actions had taken place in Western Europe and there were other things going on elsewhere in the world. NATO was waking up to the war which had suddenly come upon them. They were rubbing the sleep out of their eyes at military bases throughout their territory. The delay was done to allow that to happen, so that there was a hive of activity at such places. It was judged that waiting for this to happen would bring more benefit to the Soviet’s war aims than striking right at the very moment the war began. Not everyone had agreed, but Ogarkov got his way on this.

NATO radar screens were suddenly full of distant contacts. From out of the eastern half of the continent came hundreds of missiles rising into the morning sky, from dispersed sites far from Soviet garrisons. They were on ballistic arcs. The western half of the continent was under attack.

Scuds and Spiders were used. These were the NATO codenames for the Soviet R-17 and OTR-23 systems. Their warheads were fitted with high-explosives and chemicals. Flightpaths took them to targets spread throughout Western Europe. There was nothing to interfere with their progress as NATO was defenceless against this. Only malfunctions and accuracy issues would impede the outcome sought by their use.

The range of targets was immense. Airbases, garrisons and naval bases were hit with a mix of both types of warheads. Major command posts such as the American one at Heidelberg and the British facility at Rheindahlen were at the top of the target list. The POMCUS sites for the US Army’s REFORGER mission were targeted with much use of chemical weapons against them. Another place drenched in gas especially was where stocks of chemicals belonging to the Americans at Pirmasens. All of the NATO countries which had their forces deployed to West Germany – the Americans, the Belgians, the British, the Canadians, the Dutch, the French and the West Germans themselves – saw those struck at. The missiles hit military sites in Denmark, the Low Countries and France as well: there was no limiting this just to the one country.

At the majority of these places, there were only a couple of missiles which made impact. There was a finite amount of ballistic missiles that the Soviets had available for use, especially of the newer and more accurate Spiders. Two or three, sometimes four, missiles hit the targets, staggered over a period of between five and ten minutes in duration. Elsewhere though, larger barrages occurred. Ogarkov targeted NATO missiles with his own. The Americans operated GLCM and Pershings with the West Germans also fielding the latter system. Further NATO forces also had missiles such as the Lance in service. At the garrisons for these weapons, the Soviets struck. They hit them repeatedly too.

The Soviets also used their missiles against civilian targets, ones which had dual-use for military purposes. Airports, rail facilities and ports were hit.

Where the Scuds and Spiders had made their impact, they killed and wounded those in the way. Military personnel suffered the highest casualty rates especially at the airbases and garrisons were those places had suddenly came alive. Civilian losses were significant as well, particularly when caught exposed in the locations where chemical weapons were used by the Soviets. The scenes were ones of horror, repeated again and again across Western Europe at a time when no one had imagined such a thing could have happened.

   James

   Had the Soviets considered that with a massive ballistic attack on Europe accompanying widespread terrorist attacks to cause disruption and confusion that someone in NATO might have mistaken it for having a nuclear element? In which case things could go very badly very quickly.