The Second Battle of Britain - a Soviet Sealion

Thank you very much.
The VDV colonel there will rightly saw that this wasn't his fault but the British will be hopping mad. They'd won a fair fight and then watched such an act take place.
The KGB will all be discarding uniforms and either trying to mix in with VDV soldiers or going into hiding. I'm thinking that their commander had secret written orders to do such a thing if surrender became likely and he wouldn't stop that happening. Really, the whole demolitions there, like the mission to London, was all about propaganda in the end. A costly exercise for all involved with thousands dead, many British soldiers tied up when they were needed elsewhere and a lot of destruction done.



I did think over whether taking that bit out but I could imagine someone issuing those orders in ignorance of the situation on the ground.
There would be KGB captives facing a firing squad but whether they would be shot on orders, which would need political approval, is debatable. Some might be 'killed trying to escape' but others might get away with what they've done.

Interlude


Three captives; one


Sergeant Mikhail Ivanovich Kapalin – Misha – had been captured near to the River Ouse. As a POW, he was taken away from where he was transported into the rear. Though he didn’t know where he ended up, Misha was held temporarily with other captives at a British Army base in Cambridgeshire. Waterbeach Barracks was a Royal Engineers base, complete with an airfield from when it was once an RAF station, and not envisioned to be a long-term POW camp. Prisoners from the fighting in East Anglia were taken here and held for a short time while they were processed. A medical check was done, interrogations were undertaken with those willing to talk and once enough of a group was assembled to go to a pre-ready camp, transport in the form of trucks came to take those groups away. The British didn’t want to be moving captives in ones or twos onwards: they’d rather take many at a time to various scattered locations further afield. Misha was held with other NCOs who’d it been decided had no intelligence value to offer nor were they cooperative.

Tents and barbed wire formed the holding site on the western side of the military base. Misha was with a couple of dozen other POWs, all VDV men like he was, taken prisoner in the last few days. His experiences of captivity were unpleasant though nowhere near as bad as he’d feared. The humiliation was what upset him. He was their captive and he had to do as these Britons told him to do. He was used to a regimented life as a conscript but the arrogance of these people infuriated him. He hated them! They’d wanted him to talk, to become a stukach. Misha had refused and, after being told by another captive to, only gave them his name, his rank & his military serial number. No threats, no beatings nor torture came with his refusal to do their bidding. Misha silently wondered what he could have given them if he had been weak… he couldn’t imagine of what he knew that they would want. Others were talking though. There were informers who were cooperating with the enemy. They were having an easy time of their captivity. Misha was told they were getting better food, given vodka and might even be set free.

Pasha, another captive who was a fellow sergeant, told him this evening about Yaroslav. That fellow prisoner held with them was a yefreytor – similar to a corporal – and Pasha said that Yaroslav was talking with the British. He had too seen him receiving special favours. Misha couldn’t stand for that, could he? No, he told his comrade, he wouldn’t allow that to continue. Producing a sharpened piece of metal, Pasha told Misha that they should kill him. Misha agreed. He didn’t want that stukach to live and betray the Rodina. It would be two against one when they went after Yaroslav but Misha believed that they should have someone else with them: someone to keep watch. There was another yefreytor with them who Pasha suggested but Misha wasn’t so sure about his character. Another sergeant was suggested and Misha thought him someone who wouldn’t let them down. Anatoly came with them after approached though said he would only keep watch – that was all they wanted from him anyway – rather than get his hands bloody. Anatoly didn’t seem as outraged as Misha was that Yaroslav was an informer yet he was willing to see the killing of such a man done if Misha and Pasha thought it necessary. That they did.

They followed Pasha’s plan. Anatoly kept watch while Misha and Pasha came up behind Yaroslav. Pasha punched him in the back and he fell to the ground inside the tent he was in, one which was suddenly empty of everyone else. Misha got his arms and held them behind his back. The shiv which Pasha had made was waved in Yaroslav’s face. He struggled against Misha’s grip and so Misha had to put a knee of his into the man’s back to keep him still. Yaroslav begged for his life. Pasha told him he had this coming for being a stukach. Pasha hacked at their fellow VDV paratrooper’s throat. Blood went everywhere including over Misha. Yaroslav struggled even more than before but then he soon went limp. Pasha carried on regardless. From outside, Anatoly told them to hurry up. Misha let go of the now dead Yaroslav and watched as Pasha continued doing what he was doing. Only when he was ready, did he stop. The look on his face, one of glee, worried yet excited Misha too. Pasha wiped the blood off the improvised weapon and put it in one of Yaroslav’s dead hands. Let us go, he said, and wash up. Misha nodded in agreement. They went out of the tent and Anatoly asked what had happened. Look for yourself, Pasha told him. Misha said nothing and followed Pasha to find some water to get the blood off them both.

The wait until Yaroslav’s body was found wasn’t long. The British guards caused a fuss once they discovered him when everyone was called for a count. Those were done at infrequent intervals, often during the night too which Misha was convinced was done just to make him angry. He forced himself to keep a non-interested stare when the corpse of the stukach was taken out of that tent. Pasha was beside him though he still had that grin on his face. There was a Briton who spoke Russian. He called out to the prisoners asking who knew what had happened. No one gave a reply. Misha knew that everyone here knew what had happened but no one was going to talk. There will be punishment, that Briton promised, if no one spoke up. Misha didn’t believe that the ‘punishment’ would be anything severe. He’d been punished when back home in VDV service and nothing he’d seen of these British so far made him think that they knew what punishment was. Still, no one said anything to their captives about the fate which had befallen Yaroslav. They were all sent to their tents and told to stay inside of them. Misha had to wonder if they were going to be sent to bed without supper. Was that the Briton’s punishment?

Trucks arrived the next morning. The NCOs such as Misha, Pasha and others were pushed towards them. One of the British soldiers here dug his rifle barrel into Misha’s side when he took his time getting aboard. Misha had known what was coming but took the consequence because he wanted everyone else to see. Pasha had already made a deal out of walking forward at his own pace and been given a whack by another one of the Britons. That soldier was given a telling off by his officer though the one who tried to hurt Misha wasn’t. Turning around, grabbing the man’s rifle and hitting him with it appealed to Misha but there were too many others with rifles. He didn’t want to get shot. Being a nuisance to his captors, and making sure everyone else knew this, was all that he wanted. He got aboard the truck. Comrades of his did too though Pasha went into another truck. None of those with him squeezed themselves up against him. They were aware that he was a killer – none had been inside that tent but they had their imaginations – and so they showed him the respect he deserved. As far as Misha saw it, captivity for him was going to be one of annoyances brought about by his captors yet not an overly onerous experience. He’d sit out the war and wait until it was over. When that happened, he’d return home and it would be known that he had done his duty when in the hands of the enemy. A stukach he’d never be nor a traitor to the Rodina either. A loyal soldier Misha was, one who fought on as best he could against the enemy. To Scotland those trucks would go and Misha would survive the war. As to going home… well, that remained to be seen.

Three captives; two


Detained as a suspected spy during the first hour of the conflict when that came to British soil, John Smith AKA Gunther Rädel was removed far from the edges of Norfolk to a special site in the Derbyshire Dales. He was in military custody and kept in isolation. At first, the British hadn’t been so sure as to what to make of him but once they realised that they had a valuable captive in their hands, then things changed. John was thought to be Soviet by them. He gave them no indication that he wasn’t and let them assume away. To interrogate John, the British just used the one person. The guards were changed, those who brought him food in the improvised cell which they had him in and also let him out for some exercise, but he only saw the one face during their attempts at questioning him. This man’s name was Turner. It was he who confronted John with his real identity.

Turner told John all that he knew about him. The British knew his name, his date of birth, the names of family members, his service with the Stasi’s foreign intelligence arm and details of his postings throughout Western Europe as well as the locations across Britain before the pub in Narborough. Turner reeled off the information from a file folder which he had spread out on a desk between them during the one-sided interrogation sessions. There were pictures too, ones of him in uniform and a family photograph of him with his two daughters. The hairs on the back of John’s neck had stood up when such a revelation had come. Turner had clearly been aiming to cause him concern and it had worked. He could only imagine that the British had a HVA defector or agent-in-place working with them who’d given them his official file. The betrayal made John mad as well as frightened though. From somewhere else, some unknown person was acting against him.

Dressed in civilian attire at a military base, John assumed that Turner was a high-level intelligence official with one of their civilian intelligence services rather than from the Defence Intelligence Service. For either their MI-5 or MI-6 Turner must be an employee. He was a well-spoken man, in his late Thirties. A good upbringing and an elite education had come to this Turner that John could detect. There was confidence in him too. John assumed that he’d made his name breaking other captives before – spies caught in peacetime – and Turner was acting as if he was going to break John as his latest success. That wasn’t what John wanted to see happen. He kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t said a single thing since he was caught at that roadblock. That was no easy feat to achieve. They tried to trip him up all the time and get him to say something, anything at all. Yet, no spoken words passed his lips to anyone. In this titanic battle of willpower, John was winning. Today, Turner brought someone else into the interrogation effort. John saw two burly soldiers drag in another captive of theirs. It was Vanya.

The last time that John had seen him, the Soviet Airborne Troops officer had discarded his SLR rifle and charged towards attacking British soldiers with his AK-74 instead. John had crawled away from a sudden night-time fight and attempted to make a successful escape from Norfolk. He’d assumed that Vanya was dead. The leader of that six-man pathfinder team was alive though and here at the detention camp. Turner had those guards stand Vanya against the wall to the side. A hood was thrown over his head and there was no struggle from him. John thought that he was broken. Turning back to John, Turner told him (in that terrible German that he spoke) that Vanya – Captain Ivan Sergeyevich Ryabov – had told them everything about what had happened near to RAF Marham in the days before the aborted Soviet assault there. Vanya had done this rather than be shot. He’d been taken prisoner while wounded but also when fighting in British uniform and the consequences of that had been explained to him when being questioned. Vanya was brave, Turner added, but he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t fancy a firing squad in the face of non-cooperation. Was John, who’d been committing espionage in wartime, another illegal act worthy of a death sentence, going to continue to be stupid… or did he want to talk?

Vanya had been taken away and John sent back to his cell so, as Turner put it, he could think about whether he wanted to save himself or not. The detention camp was a disused farm with John’s cell being a six-sided steel cage inside a building. There was a mattress and a blanket to sleep on and a bucket to relieve himself in within the cage but nothing else. There were no curtains for privacy nor to shield out the spotlights which surrounded him twenty-four hours a day. He was kept like an animal. John was also given no idea of time and was certain he wasn’t being fed at irregular intervals. There were at least two sets of eyes on him at all times. When they took him out of the cage to exercise his legs, he stayed inside the cold and empty building with a chain attached to one wrist so he couldn’t wander. At the times they chose to take him to Turner, he was hooded, cuffed & shackled. They gave him water to drink and to eat he was handed bread with meat stew. A doctor checked him out at whichever interval the British decided to do that. For washing, John was taken out of the cage to the side, told to strip off the clothes they issued him and hosed down with cold water before a towel – which they wanted back as soon as possible – was given to him to use. No one had beaten him nor started pulling his fingernails out. Turner’s last remark to him today had been the first real threat issued. This was all being done to break him, but in the way that they wanted.

After seeing Vanya, John couldn’t get the image of him out of his mind. He’d been certain that that man was dead. He wondered over the others with that other pathfinder and whether they were all dead too. Then there was Sarah. Turner had mentioned her when he spoke of John’s apparent ‘marriage’ to her and where they had been posted across Britain before that final one. Turner had mentioned Sarah having a husband and child back in East Germany too: the spook had wanted to know if that man knew that his wife and John were sharing the same bed. Was Sarah alive? Was she in custody too? These were internal questions that John had but Turner had said nothing about her fate. There had also been questions during one of the sessions with Turner asked about employees of theirs. Names had been reeled off when it came to those who’d worked at the Royal Oak with them. Had Emma Pennock and Paul Anderson been spies, Turner had wanted to know. When it came to Leah Cosgrave, John’s interrogator had said her real name was Mary Lewis and told him things about Leah that John had long suspected to do with her being a fully-trained spy. Turner had wanted to know what John knew about her. Who he hadn’t asked about were Morgan nor Adams and Norton. John’s controlling officer and the two men who’d been staying at the Royal Oak when the war started weren’t people Turner had brought up. Whether he knew about them or not, John couldn’t be sure.

The surprise forced upon John with the captive Vanya made him consider that the British might have Sarah with them. Would she be brought in the next time he was dragged into a meeting with Turner? It was possible in light of recent events. He’d thought Vanya dead and left Sarah behind. John had to consider that everything had gone wrong more than he just knew. There was still an ongoing war, that he could be sure of, but how the war had gone in Norfolk he didn’t know. With Vanya as a captive, he had to consider that all was lost there. Turner’s fellow spooks could be inside the Royal Oak and the house which he and Sarah shared with Leah in Narborough. Those hides in the countryside for Vanya’s men could have been located too. Thinking about how he’d never seen Vanya die, John had to admit that he’d never seen Morgan killed either. Sarah had done that, at first blaming Vanya’s men, but he only had that Soviet pathfinder’s word for it. John was worried that he could turn up here. He was given some food, had a sleep and dreamt of being brought into Turner’s interrogation and seeing his former controlling officer there… but with maggots crawling out of his ears and empty eye sockets… telling him to talk because all was lost… When John woke up, he vomited and feared that his captors were putting something in his food to make him paranoid as well as give him such dreams as those.

They brought John back to Turner again. The hood was taken off when he was in that room with the Briton again. There was no Morgan nor Sarah there. It was just him, his interrogator and the soldier behind him at the door. Turner spoke in English again – forgetting his poor German – and asked John whether he had been thinking about cooperating. John gave him no response. Turner slid a photograph across the table to him. It was Sarah. She was dead on the ground somewhere with a bullet hole in her forehead. Turner said that the Soviets had shot her before he took the picture back. He gave no more information on when and why this had happened. John felt his stomach heave. He tried to assure himself that that wasn’t grief he felt. Turner told him that he’d done a fine job of holding out for long. John had done what he was supposed to and protect others involved while adding that, personally, he had to admire John’s resolve. Now it was time to end this, he added with a seemingly mournful tone, because there was no longer any point. Turner said that he himself had to move on and talk to other captives if John was going to continue to refuse to cooperate. He’d recommend that no further effort be put into trying to gain anything from John and his colleagues just treat him like they would other spies deserving justice. John was sick again at that point, all over the floor. His eyes felt heavy and his arms too. It was a strange, unexplainable feeling. Turner told him to open up and talk to him: that would make him feel better. A voice in John’s mind screamed at him to keep silent yet another cancelled that out as it said that all was lost and now was the time to talk. Talking was better than a firing squad and ending up like Sarah. John started answering Turner’s questions.

A doctor came in and gave John an injection. Turner told him that this would make him feel better. It did. He was able to tell Turner what he wanted. Once he’d started speaking, it got easier. He knew he was committing treason but he didn’t see the point in continuing his silent routine anymore. There were a lot of questions asked, some of which he couldn’t make sense of why such things were being asked yet still gave a reply to them. They brought him some water and food to eat here instead of in his cage. Turner encouraged him, once more remarking on his bravery on holding out for so long while also telling him that he had done the right thing in the end. Another injection was given when John felt tired again and he at once perked up in response. He was able to recall more things which Turner wanted to know. Furthermore, he told them things that they didn’t ask about such as Morgan, Adams and Norton. On and on he went as he spilled his guts. Eventually, after the longest of times, the tiredness finally hit him and no more of the ‘magic’ which Turner said the doctor was giving him in those repeated injections could keep him awake and his mind sharp. Turner let him sleep. They brought in a mattress and a blanket and let him rest here rather than back in the steel cage. It was a reward, John was told, for how well he had done. John’s eyes were closed soon enough. He was fast asleep when Turner’s military liaison met him outside of the room and behind another closed door. John’s interrogator was congratulated on what he had done with the photograph. It was a woman on the ground with tomato juice on her face (the military typist had to be talked into that!) who only looked a little bit like Sarah Smith AKA Sabine Escher. John had fallen for it though: more of that ‘magic’ drug he was given, Turner told the British Army officer. That brigadier wondered aloud where she actually was…

Thank you.
Yep, they could be shot very easily and this, like their captivity, would be legal.
How that all works out in the end, I'm still not sure.




'Everyone talks in the end' is the moto interrogators go by: it is just a matter of how it is done and whether the right approach is taken. The drugs used on him broke him.
She is out there and what happens is revealed below.
(no happy ending coming)



That is a good idea. She's shown here stuff at being clever and underestimated. I was thinking something along those lines - though not as clever as your move! - but I have taken a different approach. She's going to meet some people who won't play ball and allow her luck to hold up.

To each their just desserts. Excellent series of viewpoints.  That was a really well planned storyline setting the stage for the current fight in the East of England.

With the more generalized fighting in East Anglia, I wonder about the state/fate of a few items:

1. British POWs in Soviet hands- clearly high value prisoners are being ruthlessly exploited and will most likely “disappear”, but the ordinary prisoners (non-specialists and low level personnel) must be causing a strain on the VDV to guard, evacuate, and consolidate past point-of-capture(not even considering feeding and sanitation).  Letting your POWs just sit inside a locked hangar or some wire only works for so long until the capturing unit has to move. A corollary would be the state of retained personnel (Military Medical Services and Religious Personnel)- especially with regard to padres, who don’t have a direct counterpart in the Soviet Forces.  

2.  Key members of the Civilian government and security infrastructure- very unlucky MPs, county and large town council members, police leadership and members, key utilities personnel, etc.  I imagine some are being exploited as alluded to earlier in the work, some may have disappeared, and others are in some form of camp (requiring guarding,etc).  Not sure how much of an internal security lock the KGB has managed to date.

3.  Status of isolated UK/US/NATO personnel.  We’ve already seen them do some isolated damage.  How much effort is the VDV being forced to put into rounding them up, and how much trouble are they causing (I guess it goes hand in hand).  If the evaders witness VDV/KGB executing prisoners or isolated personnel get word of it, I’d imagine the temptation to go down fighting would increase in a few.  It would be interesting to see the intelligence any recovered evaders could provide.

4.  What’s the logistics situation looking like for the VDV- they’ve been consuming men, munitions, fuel, and vehicles at a prodigious rate.  Fuel can be pumped from gas stations, food can be seized, most munitions airdrop.  There’s a point where VDV men and combat vehicle replacements will get shut off (this is after all a feint)- when do the VDV’s cratered airheads become crammed with wounded paratroopers waiting evac and the desantniks began to depend more on captured or appropriated transport than their organic vehicles?