The Second Battle of Britain - a Soviet Sealion

Second that James G, another great chapter.

187 – Slow Sunday


Today, the eighth day of the war, saw very little forward movement by the Soviet Army fighting in Western Europe. There weren’t any further daring, hell-for-leather advances undertaking to charge even deeper into NATO countries undertaken. In some ways, it seemed like the war had slowed down. The impression could have been that Plan Zhukov / Operation Elbe had come to an end. That wasn’t the case at all. This was not over, far from it.

Politics caused what was called afterwards the ‘slow Sunday’. There were Soviet field armies in Belgium which had the potential to advance southwards from there into France. There was nothing in their way in terms of a mass of capable NATO troops which could have stopped them from getting at least half of the way to Paris. A reorganisation had been completed to see the Third Shock & Eleventh Guards Army’s in position to make that advance where only the use of nuclear weapons – many of them too – would have brought them to a halt. Multiple routes could have been taken on a wide frontage with close to fifteen hundred tanks supported by everything else to allow them to get on their way to the French capital if need be. In West Germany, the multiple armies that the Soviets had there, along with the East Germans and the Czechoslovaks both providing smaller but capable forces, were on both sides of the Rhine and could have continued going west and south too. These were in a poorer shape than those in Belgium, yes, but there was the ability to keep going with them as well especially for those already over the river in the Rhineland. No advance was to be made here today either.


General Postnikov had his instructions from Stavka which told him that today was to be one of preparedness for further operations with his forces in West Germany. The Defence Council wanted him to ‘make mothers weep’ tomorrow. There was to be a massive offensive launched come Monday morning. Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces were shuffled about ahead of that. Despite all that NATO air power had done, there was still the ability to move fuel and ammunition around within West Germany to get units which had gone through their initial war stocks ready to fight again. They were missing equipment and personnel, which wasn’t being replaced, but would fight with what they had there while given extra supplies. The Second Guards Tank Army moved down from Lower Saxony towards the Rhineland while the Twentieth Army over in the Ruhr crossed over the Rhine too. The Czechoslovak First Army was in Bavaria and had yet to see the enemy. They soon would as they were brought towards the Rhine south of Frankfurt today, hit from above by American falling bombs as they did so. These reinforcements joined with all the others gathered together already on the Rhine ready to destroy American, French & West German combat forces holding onto the Rhineland. Yet, there was some ongoing fighting. The withdrawals made yesterday by NATO were incomplete with their troops still on the eastern side of the Rhine in certain places. Soviet interference had held them up and there were battles which took place where they tried to complete their withdrawals while Postnikov – often involving himself directly by cutting through the chain-of-command to talk to even divisional commanders – tried to smash them before they could.

As to those in Belgium, Postnikov had his orders for there to be no advance. There was to be the readiness to make one but it wasn’t going to happen. He was told that the desire was for NATO, especially the French, to see that it was possible for one to be made. The commander of the Western-TVD didn’t rage at such an instruction. He knew full well what the ultimate war goals were from a military point of view when it came to not sending the Soviet Army into France but for the French to give in politically fearful of the consequences of doing that. He left his subordinates there in the dark on that particular matter though. They got themselves ready to start going forward whenever an order came for them to do that. Word could leak out if the strategy was known and that wasn’t wanted. While those there busied themselves pointlessly, their assigned intelligence-gathering assets watched as NATO units poured into Northern France. There were Americans, Britons and Canadians arriving. The French themselves were still moving those troops of theirs which they had pulled from West Germany into position but leading units were arriving behind the Belgian frontier. Every soldier who arrived made things harder for that projected invasion of France. It must be said that victory still looked sure because the balance of forces was tilted significantly in the Soviets favour yet the delay in moving was to those on the ground a foolish thing to do. No one had told them about the grand geo-strategic play underway though.

Much of the Dutch province of Limburg was still being held by troops from several different nations with those defenders also spread into West Germany in places, Aachen included. Belgian infantrymen from their Para-Commando Regiment were joined by Dutch reservists as well as West German volunteers in trying to contain a twin attack against the south of the Limburg Pocket launched today. Postnikov had troops holding elsewhere but ordered an attack here. Maastricht to the west and Aachen in the east were assaulted by Soviet and East German troops respectively. Taking the small cities wasn’t the goal: causing the NATO defenders to bleed to try and save them was. American and British troops to their north were masked by air and artillery attacks while this happened though weren’t really in any position to move down and save the day: they would expose the rear if they were foolish enough to do so. First Maastricht and then Aachen were abandoned rather than being fully fought over. Some men stayed behind, refusing to leave, but the majority fell back. The NATO commanders here wouldn’t fall for the Soviets clear aims. The Limburg Pocket was still holding on but its defenders had had themselves a bad day. There couldn’t be many more days where they could hold out.

Near to the French border in the West German state of Baden-Württemberg, there were remained NATO forces on the eastern side of the Rhine. The corps-sized French Rapid Action Force and the West German II Corps (the latter including many Canadians) were holding onto the Black Forest. They spent the day under attack by artillery and aircraft dropping bombs. Gas was used against them too. To those on the receiving end, it looked like the Soviets were softening them up for an incoming attack to clear this side of the Rhine. Intelligence correctly pointed to that Czechoslovak field army moving but it was incorrectly thought it was coming this way. An assault against them was something that was intended to be met head-on. They, along with NATO as a whole, were being deceived though. No attack was coming their way. Keeping them here suited Soviet strategy fine. There were a lot of good troops holding on to a large patch of ground. Half of their number could have been deployed to comfortably hold the Rhine from inside of France… which would have left the other half free to operate elsewhere to interfere with other matters.


Before taking over from Marshal Ogarkov upon that man’s death, Postnikov had been the intermediary between the former commander of the Western-TVD and Stavka. That had allowed him to so seamlessly take over when the time came because he knew that situation exactly. He’d thought he’d known all the problems which Ogarkov had faced too, ones which came alongside all the success that had been achieved. When taking over, Postnikov inherited those difficulties: the knowns and unknowns.

Soviet troops were at the frontlines on the far side of West Germany and through the Low Countries. Between them and East Germany was a huge expanse of occupied territory. West Germany had been fought over with NATO and the Warsaw Pact each blasting it to pieces while engaging the other. The destruction caused was something on an unimaginable scale. Postnikov didn’t concern himself with all those residential or commercial premises caught up in explosions and fire but instead the devastation to the transport infrastructure. That was where the worst of that had fallen in his view. Roads, rail-lines and canals linked his fighting forces with the rear. This damage had at the time done little to limit the advances made to conquer so much territory by those moving forward. The impact came afterwards. Many of Postnikov’s forces had gone through their on-hand supplies which they had taken with them. In East Germany, there were massive stocks of fuel, ammunition, spare parts and so much more. The scale of this was something which NATO had never been able to comprehend. They’d dropped their bombs on many sites, the warehouses and bunkers which they knew about, and then also bombed Poland too to stop resupply for Soviet forces from the Rodina. Every bomb dropped on Poland – and there were a lot of them – was a wasted one. Postnikov could be thankful for that.

However, he still had to get what was in East Germany across West Germany. A pre-war NATO intelligence indicator of an impending invasion by the Soviet Army was that civilian transport from the domestic economy would be mobilised for military use long ahead of the first tanks going over the Iron Curtain. That hadn’t been seen nor even hidden by means of maskirovka. It just didn’t happen. NATO had been caught with their trousers around their ankles waiting on such a thing because to them, it had to occur first. However, once the war started, and was fought the way in was in quite the unconventional manner with an out-of-the-barracks attack, trucks were needed to resupply units in the field who’d advanced so far and gone through most of their supplies. The architects of Plan Zhukov, which Postnikov had signed off upon before it went to Stavka in the months leading up to the war, called for the taking over of civilian vehicles in West Germany. They would be seized and put to use. There were so many to chose from. That sounded easy… but it wasn’t. There was no uniformity in vehicles and no experience for ill-trained Soviet Army mechanics in repairing them. Many West Germans took theirs with them when they fled with families while others sabotaged theirs too. This all hadn’t been foreseen because it was the action of individuals. Soviet generals like Postnikov could foresee NATO disabling military equipment rather than abandoning it intact to the Soviet Army, which they did too, but for civilians to do this without orders and on a scale so large was just not considered. As to people moving their families in them… well, no one had considered that happening yet at the same time there had been plans made to take advantage too of civilian panicked flight in vehicles. The lack of joined-up thinking was part of the cause of the Western-TVD having a truck shortage. Postnikov needed those trucks too. Back home in his own country, vehicles in civilian service were needed to keep the country’s economy ticking over. What few they had on-hand in occupied territory were being tasked to do so much. They couldn’t move all of those supplies, especially over a smashed-up transport network too. No one had ever thought about this beforehand. Postnikov wished that they – he – had!

Ogarkov had been able to neutralise the worst of the KGB’s malign influence and activities where those directly affected the war being fought in Western Europe. Postnikov had believed that he would be able to do the same while at the same time not realising how much pressure his predecessor had been dealing with. He was discovering out that he couldn’t counter the Chekists. Their activities were determinantal to the war he was fighting. It was almost as if they were trying to actively aid NATO with some of the things that they were doing. Belgian, Dutch and West German civilians were being driven to resistance by the KGB. Postnikov wanted such civilians sullen and frightened, yes, but not purposefully obstructing wartime activities like they were. He issued orders to have those civilians shot, wasting men and bullets as well as inflaming resistance even more. What else could be done though? He was living for today with that where he was setting the stage for further resistance down the line. That was all down to the KGB and how they inflamed the civilians with their killings, organised theft in the name of politics and general evil occupation policies. They were also interfering directly with his own people. The KGB had been arresting military officers. Postnikov had his own ideas of discipline and he wasn’t exactly being fair when he demoted senior men to the ranks of penal units to be sent on suicidal missions because their failings infuriated him. However, the KGB was shooting officers and men for all sorts of infractions upon which they decided they had seen. Men were given field executions for supposed cowardice and defeatism. It was like it was the time of Stalin and his Chekists with their Great Purge! For the KGB to be doing what they did caused morale to sink. One of Postnikov’s senior subordinates, the general heading the First Western Front, a man who’d defeated NATO on the North German Plain and was about to make that attack in the middle of the Rhine, had a fatal heart attack. He died in fear of the KGB. NATO had tried to assassinate him with snipers and radar-invisible bombers but the KGB got him by questioning his staff about whether he had a ‘defeatist attitude’. Postnikov couldn’t stop the Chekists. He didn’t have the confidence of the nation’s leadership like his departed predecessor had: they were relying on the KGB to ensure victory.

Postnikov had told Ogarkov before the war had started that what the Western-TVD had assigned to it all the major combat forces that they were going to get. Unless something terrible occurred with Operation Elbe going wrong, what troops there were available was all that there would be. Plan Zhukov said that the war in Western Europe could and would be won with them. He’d been clear on that. Oh the irony of Postnikov now wanting more troops! He wanted the Polish Army, the bulk of it anyway. The only Poles in West Germany were their marines & paratroopers on the Danish border supporting the East German V Corps. Eleven more combat divisions, regulars and now-mobilised reservists, were sitting on Polish soil. The quality of these troops, training and equipment wise, wasn’t brilliant yet neither would they be cannon fodder. Postnikov would have liked to have used them not at the frontlines anyway because he did have forces available already. He wanted to use the Poles in the rear areas on partisan sweeps, securing what transport infrastructure was (still) useful and thus freeing up his many other forces doing those tasks. Postnikov also saw them as ‘bomb bait’ too: he envisioned NATO panicking and directing air strikes on them fearful of them heading towards France and thus those air attacks would be drawn off his own troops. In addition to the Poles, outside East Berlin there was a complete VDV division. Those Soviet Airborne paratroopers hadn’t seen combat and Stavka was keeping them there under their direct command. Postnikov would have liked to drop them along the western banks of the Rhine when he crossed it tomorrow. Ogarkov had used up the vast majority of the paratroopers and airmobile troops under Western-TVD command in many earlier missions. A big airborne drop along the Rhine would really open things up. Knowing what he knew though about what Stavka had said, what he’d told Ogarkov they would say in spite of that man not actually asking, Postnikov didn’t send the requests for such troops that he had his eye on. He dared not do it. He didn’t want to receive the refusal. He wasn’t brave enough to ask for more men like he wasn’t the type to not do exactly as those without a clear view of the situation on the ground wanted him to do when it came to all details of this fight he was supposedly commanding.

188 – Airstrip One


Britain was full of American aircraft. The terms ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ and even the ‘USS Great Britain’ had been used. A member of the British Cabinet, not among Whitelaw’s war cabinet and someone who was a detractor of his overall wartime leadership, used the description ‘Airstrip One’ instead. He was a fan of George Orwell’s novel 1984 and employed such a remark in a derogatory manner as he criticised the scale of the American military footprint now in the country. Such a viewpoint wasn’t widely shared. Without all of those aircraft deployed from the United States to British shores, the war would certainly been going far worse for NATO than it already was. Those aircraft were needed here.

While there were Soviet troops on British shores, they were isolated now in one corner. Airstrip One was safe from seeing Soviet tanks overrun the airbases to where aircraft were based. That hadn’t been the case across on the Continent. Again and again, there had been pull-outs from bases which the frontlines came closer and closer towards. In far too many instances, those bases had been overrun before there could be an evacuation made with aircraft lost on the ground as well as all the highly specialised personnel to keep them in the war. It was true that similar scenes had been seen with a few of the East Anglia airbases in Britain but that was no longer a risk for those sent to the British mainland with the few Soviets left contained and a water barrier which tanks couldn’t swim across. Commando activity around still active NATO airbases across in mainland Western Europe was significant even more than a week into the war when the element of surprise was long gone. There was little of that in Britain now with attackers first having to get across to the island. Air attacks from the Soviets still threatened air activities from Airstrip One and so did ballistic missile strikes. Those were threats which couldn’t be countered as effectively as the others yet efforts were made to try to do so with varying degrees of success.


As to those American aircraft, there were a lot of them and they were at a large number of sites nationwide. There were those based in-country ahead of the war, those which had arrived in war’s first few days and then the latest influx of air power. The US Air Force was joined by the USAF Reserve and US Air National Guard in deploying to Britain. The US Navy got involved as well: they had land-based aircraft which needed a ‘safe’ location to fly from close to European shores. There were combat aircraft but also non-combat ones too. Hundreds upon hundreds of American aircraft were calling Britain home. With them came all of the personnel to keep them flying. Aircrew were the minority of these. The ground crews for the aircraft themselves, operational & intelligence staffs, base engineers, signallers and security units represented a huge commitment of personnel. They just kept on coming. Britain filled up fast. Those aircraft and personnel needed locations to operate from. In Airstrip One, they found plenty to use. Two of the existing large US Air Force bases in Suffolk (RAF Lakenheath & RAF Mildenhall) had been temporarily occupied by Soviet Airborne units eventually forced back out – with the resulting destruction coming from being fought over – and there was that standby base in Norfolk (RAF Sculthorpe) still in enemy hands, but the Americans had other pre-war bases to fly from. Moreover, the British gave them the use of plenty of other facilities. Some of those were seeing the RAF’s own flight activities but there were still unused locations even in the midst of the RAF having followed a policy of dispersion throughout the war. Into these facilities came the Americans. They based combat aircraft at training stations and standby facilities as long as there was a runway there to make use of. Air-freighters flew in equipment and materials for engineers – RED HORSE teams, regulars and reservists – to erect physical defences for the now American airbases. The Americans wanted to connect their airbases that they had in Britain. They set up short-range signal stations. Radars were flown in too. Much of this was connected to existing American and British systems though there was a lot of duplication too considering all the wartime damage done. Explaining this to their hosts, senior American officers said that they were expecting a long war to continue in the air and they wanted to be ready in case their supporting set up was subject to a new wave of attacks.

The immense American presence caused command tensions. The RAF remained in charge of Britain’s air defences despite many of those American air reinforcements coming into Britain being tasked for air defence duties and outnumbering them. This was something that the Americans could accept. However, when it came to their mass of striking power, the units which they deployed to Britain were under American command. Those were fighting in the war raging over the Continent. The existing command structures there were all American-led. It made sense not to change things. Voices of discontent came up. Perhaps some of that was jealousy, even anti-Americanism… perhaps there were just those who were ungrateful? If there hadn’t been the turning of Britain into Airstrip One for the mass of American air power, should the British have been on their own, then it would have been the Soviets controlling Britain’s skies. The RAF had been hurt badly and, despite a few efforts to make use of older aircraft which they could get their hands on, they were unable to re-equip themselves. Factories in the United States weren’t able to turn out aircraft in days as if this was World War Two again but the Americans had all of this reserve of air power that they sent across the North Atlantic. Britain just had to face up to the fact that on home soil it was now, and always had been, the junior partner in the air war taking place from its shores. It wasn’t just the Americans that had sent aircraft to Britain. There were the Dutch and the West Germans too. As with the surviving Belgians, the Royal Netherlands Air Force (KLu) and the Luftwaffe had sent aircraft to France when home stations were overrun, but facilities in Airstrip One were being used by them too. F-16s and Tornados with aircrews and ground personnel whose first language wasn’t English were calling Britain home for the time being. Admittedly, the footprint from the KLu and the Luftwaffe was smaller but the critics of the influx of the Americans didn’t have a vocalised issue with them being here. There certainly was some of what had been seen in the 1940s – the Americans: over-sexed and over here – going on across Airstrip One.


All of the airbases which the Americans, the British, the Dutch and the West Germans were using were considered targets in a possible widening of the ongoing, small-scale nuclear exchanges. It was believed that should the use of such weapons move from the below sea stage to the surface stage, then the air facilities in Airstrip One had a high-ranking place on the Soviet’s target list. They had to be on that list. Aircraft on NATO missions flying from Britain were making a major impact on the war and many of them had a nuclear role should things go that way too. The Americans had brought nuclear weapons with them to add to what they already had in-country and the British had their own ones. Furthermore, the Dutch and the West Germans would be using them – under NATO Nuclear Sharing arrangements – as well if there were exchanges of that nature where aircraft were dropping nuclear bombs and firing nuclear-tipped missiles. Preparations were well advanced across the many in-use airbases across Britain to begin doing that should the order come. There were defensive measures employed too. The longer the warning of an incoming nuclear attack, the more chance those in the way of that stood of not just surviving one but continuing to fight afterwards.

No nuclear weapons had been used so far today at sea unlike yesterday where there was the employment of them several times. There was hope that what had been seen on the Saturday wouldn’t be repeated on the Sunday. Those spread across the airbases of Airstrip One certainly hoped so. They were right in the way of any Soviet attack should things spiral further out of control than they already were: missile flight time from launch sites in the Netherlands to several of the facilities being used in Britain was as low as a minute, two for the rest. That wasn’t much time to react even with all readiness to do so! There was the additional issue of the civilian population. While the airbases themselves weren’t in urban areas, only the foolish would think that millions of Britons, tens of millions in fact, weren’t going to die if the Soviets started using nukes against airbases spread across Britain. That wish that there would be no nuclear exchanges today was a forlorn hope. Thankfully, Airstrip One wasn’t targeted by those but there were at-sea exchanges…

…below and now above the surface.

How long until the Soviets attack a US carrier in the far east with a nuclear anti-shipping missile. Either deliberately or by accident.

stevep given they're in politics at a fairly senior level, in the same party as Whitelaw but clearly a rival pretender to Thatcher's crown, the chances of them being a Soviet Mole are as proportionately unlikely as it is likely that they're just colosally stupid, but thinking they're being clever.

As this is 1986, I would put money being someone like David Mellor despite him being Home Secretary OTL. He was that capable of chronic ill-judgement.