Lions Will Fight Bears - Britain in World War Three, Spring 1988[{locked}]

Thirty–One

It looked like Barbarossa #2.

To those on the other side of the Iron Curtain, NATO mobilisation gave the appearance of a military readiness for an eastwards invasion that would attempt to complete what the Nazis failed to do nearly fifty years previously.

Not only did it cause immense anxiety, it caught the Soviets utterly unawares too: they didn’t see it coming at all. No alarm bells had been rung in Moscow beforehand by a neutered Soviet Foreign Office under the leadership of a complete non-entity that Shcherbytsky had put in charge there. Neither did the KGB, whose personnel now lived in outright fear of losing their lives because their analysis’ didn’t concur with their Chairman’s firmly held convictions, bring forth any warning either of what was coming despite their multiple sources in the West tipping them off about it… including an open Western media.

The waves of successive purges that Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky instigated in their country to secure their rule had made sure that there was no one who would dare tell either of them what they didn’t want to hear: that their devious plans to subvert the West had failed and it was getting ready to fight for its independence instead.

Why was NATO mobilising?

What was behind tens of thousands of American troops flying across the Atlantic on every trans-Atlantic jet available, ships moving the British Army across the North Sea and trains transporting the French Army over the Rhine?

It was the actions of Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky that had caused this to happen. In trying to understand what the Soviets were up to, harassed Western intelligence officers were exasperated and would throw their hands up in the air. What the Soviet Union was doing in how they were ending up contradicting themselves in trying to achieve political goals by the threat of military force came across in what was deemed near schizophrenic behaviour. It didn’t make sense when viewed from the West… because those analysts who briefed Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors were trying to understand Soviet actions from a Western perspective.

In Moscow, Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky were both living in their own fantasy worlds. They had surrounded themselves with yes men and were being fed incomplete and sometime utterly false information (by underlings who were either stupid or scared… or both) about how their grand plans to incorporate Western Europe into their sphere of influence was meeting with success.

The scheme to distract the United States by getting it involved in a conflict in Honduras was working out just perfectly. Britain had been frightened so much it wouldn’t act. The West German people were on the verge of revolt. And so the falsehoods kept being told to them.

Until, NATO mobilised ready for war.


Marshal of the Soviet Union Viktor Georgyevich Kulikov personally flew to Moscow to see Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky and accepted no excuses from their aides as to any delay. Kulikov held the position of the ‘Supreme Commander of the Unified Armed Forces of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation’ and had come from his command post at Legnica in Poland. He was a man who had seen countless of his fellow Soviet military officers arrested and disappeared in the past few months but who had hung onto his post (and his life) through a combination of luck and keeping his mouth firmly shut on the matter of politics.

He had a genuine fear for his safety when he flew to Moscow and a moment of weakness back in Legnica had nearly made him cancel his travel arrangements. Yet, Kulikov was a soldier and knew his duty; he took the plunge and went to see the leaders of his nation.

It was Kulikov who used the word ‘Barbarossa’ to Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky when he spoke of what he feared NATO mobilisation meant. The latter of the two politicians would use it again and again in statements to the world’s media afterwards in a concerted propaganda effort, without reference to Kulikov of course, but it was the senior military man who had put that word into his mouth.

Every citizen of the Soviet Union knew what Barbarossa meant. State propaganda had fed them its meaning since the end of World War Two: extermination at the hands of an evil regime hell-bent on the deaths of the Soviet people.

That aside, Kulikov spoke of a second Barbarossa because NATO mobilisation – from the intelligence reports he had been seeing when back in Legnica – meant that forty-plus Western combat divisions were deploying into fighting positions in West Germany. Of course it was going to take time for the troops to man those formations to arrive and the West would claim that they were there to supposedly defend Germany from the East, but every good soldier knows that the best form of defence is always attack. This was exactly what Kulikov informed Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky when he saw them: NATO was readying itself for war and war would mean that the West had to strike first.

Forty divisions was the figure that Kulikov brought to Moscow and it wasn’t something that he was exaggerating either when the armies of the West would fully deploy what forces they had into West Germany. His intelligence pointed to the Americans deploying another six to their four already in-country and the participation of the large French Army too in joining the armies of Belgium, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and West Germany on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Like his use of Barbarossa, the number was important because he could point to Soviet combat divisions in Eastern Europe under his command (those in East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia) which totalled only twenty-six.

Kulikov didn’t speak of the armies of those three countries – and their equal number (26 as well) of combat divisions – when he expressed how outnumbered his forces were on the ground and how threatened that apparent disparity in strength left his command in.

There was a very real threat to the Soviet Union from the armed forces of the West, Kulikov told Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky, and something needed to be done before Barbarossa #2 occurred.





Thirty–Two

Barbarossa #2 could be avoided in the space of less than thirty minutes. The Soviet Union had an immense arsenal of nuclear weapons at its disposal and its two leaders could launch a portion of these westwards to make sure that June 1941 didn’t occur all over again. Missiles could be fired and the nightmares of tens of millions of people in the West would come true. There would be no war launched against the Soviet Union should Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky take this step.

While such an action would ensure that the American-led NATO alliance wouldn’t be able to attack across the Iron Curtain, there would be equally fatal consequences for the people of the Soviet Union should the country’s missiles be launched; the West would return fire with their own missiles.

Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky didn’t want to see their country destroyed in a retaliatory nuclear strike should they chose to use those ultimate weapons of warfare. The Soviet Union would be destroyed in a nuclear conflict just as those countries in the West would be too. Even when presented with the option of a ‘limited’ nuclear strike that was deemed to be that of a tactical nature to halt NATO’s mobilisation – the immediate night-time launch of intermediate-range missiles armed with low-yield nuclear warheads at ninety-six military targets in Western Europe as per Operation APOLLO (* see below for how operational concept this would affect Britain *) – Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky wouldn’t authorise the use of nuclear weapons for the fear of what would happen in retaliation.

Bluff and bluster aside, the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union were not something that would actually defend the nation from a conventional military attack.

Something had to be done though…

…especially when media coverage came from the United States featuring Presidential nomination candidate Pat Robertson making comments regarding the ongoing American mobilisation which was shown to Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky. Robertson – whose importance behind the Iron Curtain was always overrated – had been quoted by both CBS and NBC as stating that it was his belief that NATO troops should ‘march upon Berlin and then onto Warsaw, before going all the way to Moscow’.

The advisers to the men running the Soviet Union pointed to this as a clear piece of propaganda authorised at the highest levels in the West to prepare the peoples there for warfare. It was claimed that someone like Robertson was influential and that his ideas had great credence with the American population – one only had to look at his polling numbers that the KGB had acquired from its sources. He was popular enough, so the theory put to Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky went, that the outgoing President Reagan would have to seriously consider it.

What the imperialists in Washington did, those in London and Paris would do too.

To say that the advisers that Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky had were living in la-la land would be the greatest understatement of the century.

Aside from using nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union had conventional military forces that dwarfed those of the West. Kulikov had come to Moscow warning of forty NATO divisions assembling in West Germany, but that number paled into insignificance with the size of the opposing military force that the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact could field in Eastern Europe within a short space of time. One hundred plus Soviet, East German, Polish and Czechoslovakian combat divisions could be fielded. There were twice as many Warsaw Pact combat aircraft available than NATO could deploy ready for war. The Soviet Union had much shorter and far more secure lines of communications for logistics – what warfare was really about as opposed to tactics – than the West did, with the United States being the most powerful member of that alliance and on the far side of the wide North Atlantic.

NATO mobilisation meant that at the very least the Soviet Union and her allies in Eastern Europe (doing as they were told, like all good puppet states) just had to the same.

Orders were sent out during the night of March 3rd for the Warsaw Pact to match the mobilisation of the West on the ground, in the air and at sea.

If Barbarossa #2 was attempted, it would at once meet with failure.


[Operation APOLLO was a pre-planned military action formulated the year beforehand (pre-coup) and updated weekly. It’s Soviet Defence Ministry planners had countless similar plans too.
Faced with intelligence pointing to a conventional military invasion coming from the West, thirty-two RSD-10 Pioneer – NATO codename SS-20 Sabre – missiles would be fired westwards at fixed military and civilian rear-area targets in Western Europe to stop the build-up to that attack. Each RDS-10 carried a trio of 150kiloton warheads that were extremely accurate.
Fourteen of those ninety-six targets were in Britain.
Four large RAF bases in southern England that were key Anglo-American airheads: RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire and RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk.
The same number of Royal Navy bases: Devonport in south-western England, Faslane in western Scotland, Portsmouth on the South Coast and Rosyth in eastern Scotland.
A pair of large civilian airports outside London which would become transport and refuelling hubs in wartime: Heathrow and Gatwick.
Finally, four civilian ports on the eastern and southern coasts of England: Dover, Felixstowe, Folkestone and Hull.
Civilian casualties from these strikes were expected to be immense, but Soviet targeting cared nothing for those. All that mattered was that these vital rear logistical hubs would be destroyed so that they couldn’t be used in an invasion eastwards.
The other eighty-two targets were very similar to these – a mix of military and civilian facilities – and located across West Germany, the Low Countries, and France.
If APOLLO had been undertaken when the West was in the early stages of a major mobilisation, then a NATO offensive (or even a defensive mission) could never have taken place.]

Thirty-Five

Marshal Kulikov wasn’t a man who liked to gamble. However, had he been he would have given himself fifty-fifty odds of being taken from his meeting with Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky and shot in the back of the neck within the basement of the KGB’s Lubyanka building.

He returned to Legnica alive though as well as in a foul mood.


Kulikov had gone to Moscow to not only give a first-hand warning to his country’s leaders of the danger that was very real from NATO mobilisation but also to get permission to put a stop to that gathering of the armies of the West facing those of his own. He had requested that the Soviet Armed Forces strike out at once… and with nuclear weapons too. All of his years as a senior officer had taught him that the maxim ‘attack is always the best defence’ to be true. He had studied military history in all its forms when in attendance at various military academies during his career and that was the best method of warfare to be employed if one wanted to win in armed conflict.

The effective and timely use of weapons of mass destruction – thermonuclear, chemical and biological variants – was something else that Kulikov had studied during his career as he made rose from a pimple-faced Lieutenant to the rank of Marshal. The morality of the use of such weapons were not something that Soviet military officers were taught to think about, just how to deploy them and when during combat operations.

It had been Kulikov’s hope that when he came back to Poland, he would arrive with instructions to launch a spoiling attack westwards as soon as possible to smash the NATO forces lining up ready to strike themselves. He would blast their rear areas with nuclear warheads, drop tens of thousands of paratroopers to seize key routes of advance and then send his tanks and infantry forward into battle.

How else could be best defend his country other than by smashing the armies of the enemies of the Soviet Union with all available weapons?


Instead of being given the permission to strike, Kulikov was instead ordered to mobilise the military forces at his disposal to best defend against such a threatened attack. He was told that all Soviet and Eastern European forces in his area of operation as Warsaw Pact Supreme Commander were at his disposal – East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia would do exactly as instructed by Moscow – and he was to ready them for combat.

Because he was a coward, because he feared not only for his own life but the lives of his wife and children too, Kulikov would do just as he was told.

NATO was still moving their forty divisions into place into West Germany; Kulikov was going to command a total of eighty-three once he managed to get his forces fully assembled. There would be about two and a half thousand Western combat aircraft accumulated; Kulikov would have almost four thousand.

He had more troops than the West. He had more tanks, more armoured vehicles, more artillery, more helicopters and more tactical aircraft.

In a war of numbers, Kulikov and the Soviet-led forces behind the Iron Curtain would soon be ahead.





Thirty–Six

Transition to War changed everything. Overnight, Britain became a different country as civil liberties were curtailed and a virtual police state was implemented across the nation.

Things started to fall apart a few days later.

*​

TtW begun before the mobilisation orders went out to the British military at midnight on March 1st. A hurried meeting at Buckingham Palace had seen the Queen meet with Thatcher, other Ministers of the Crown and civil servants. Her Majesty was read the texts of various pre-drafted legislation and she verbally gave her assent to each of these in turn. This was what was legally deemed an Order in Council.

Once the meeting was over with, Britain’s regal head of state left the palace and entered a RAF helicopter within the extensive grounds. Her husband was with her and they were off to meet the royal yacht Britannia in the Irish Sea, which would take them up to the lonely waters off Scotland’s Western Isles where they would sit out the coming war.

Her Majesty’s eldest son and heir, along with his wife and two young boys, had by that point left their country manor Highgrove House and were racing in a fast convoy up to a secluded and secure location in north Wales. Meanwhile, other senior members of the House of Windsor had already dispersed away from danger too: the Duke of York and his pregnant wife were down in Cornwall, Prince Edward was on a trans-Atlantic jet taking him to Canada, his elder sister the Princess Royal was being flown by Qantas to Australia and the Queen Mother was with Princess Margaret at Balmoral in Scotland.

As the Queen and her heirs moved away from potential danger (assassins and/or nuclear warfare were the worry), the Government set about executing her royal decrees.


MI-5 was the first to act upon the Orders in Council.

For decades, the Security Service had been waiting for the moment to come when they could arrest and detain those that the organisation deemed a threat to the country whether it be at peace or war. There were lists upon lists of people who were kept an eye upon by the spooks; people from all walks of life.

Between midnight and dawn the following morning, as the rest of the country slept and were not yet with the knowledge that Britain was on a war-footing, MI-5 and their agents sought to intern those they had been long keeping tabs on. Special Constables – police reservists – were used in the main by MI-5 officers as manpower for their arrests to be made against people up and down the country, though in each instance where front doors were knocking upon or even forced open in the middle of the night, there was always a regular police officer in attendance to make the actual arrest. MI-5 officers, television and the movies aside, didn’t carry weapons and nor could they make actual arrests of civilians.

Those detained by MI-5 were mostly those who would be considered the ‘usual suspects’, but that was not always the case. More than five hundred people were sought for arrest and the vast majority of those would consider themselves to have left-wing politics. There were trade union organisers, journalists, barristers, university and college lecturers, peace and disarmament advocates, civil servants and teachers on the lists of the Security Service. Only a few of these were thought to be people who had beforehand or would soon actively betray their country with the knowledge of doing so, yet they were all still deemed a threat to the national security of the nation due to their political beliefs and the sway they had over others.

Nearly a quarter of those detained were from Northern Ireland and there was violence used (on both sides) at the scenes of many arrests there. The UDR sent out armed soldiers to support MI-5 in detaining suspected terrorists and their political supporter; most were Republicans, though a few so-called Loyalists were arrested as well.

There were foreign nationals arrested too: residents and non-residents of the UK. Some were émigrés and others were refugees; a few had ‘stories of persecution in their homelands’ that MI-5 considered to be nothing but KGB created ‘legends’. Again, these people were thought to be ready to act against Britain on behalf of a foreign power.

Furthermore, sixteen of those targeted for detention were well-known human rights activists connected with the anti-Apartheid and Palestinian causes: these were certainly not people regarded as the usual suspects that MI-5 should be arresting with the threat of war with the Soviet Union.

All told, across the nation a total of four hundred and sixty-seven people were arrested that night with another sixty-three missing for the time being from the grasp of MI-5. Over the preceding few weeks, another fourteen very dangerous people had previously been detained, but that action was nothing on the scale of this strike against Britain’s enemies real and perceived.

There was much back-slapping on the part of the Security Service afterwards as they assured themselves that they had detained as many troublemakers and foreign agents as they could. Britain, the MI-5 Director-General would later report to the Prime Minister, would not be harassed by a subversive fifth column as it prepared for war. Sir Antony Duff already considered him in good stead with Thatcher after the arrest the previous day of a pair of Angolan illegal immigrants who they suspected of being contracted by the KGB to cause the Isleworth air crash with a shoulder-mounted missile-launcher.

This hubris could later cost him dear.


The ordinary populous had never heard of the Emergency Powers Bill nor the subsections of the Defence Regulation Act.

Wednesday March 2nd 1988 should have just been a normal day for the vast majority of the British people. It was mid-week and the weather was fair. For months now, there had been worrying news from abroad, but that was becoming so much of a regular feature on the news that many had just got used to hearing of such things and tuned out the details. There had been voices nearly lost in the wind who spoke of how things might turn out in Britain should war draw close, but no one had really wanted to believe what a few left-wing radicals said about mass internment, complete nationalisation of resources and civilian mobilisation.

Thus when these things started to happen, it all came as a shock to the British people.

Those who turned up very early that morning at Heathrow and Gatwick Airport’s or at the harbours in Dover and Holyhead found that they would not board their airliners or ferries… that was for those who actually reached transportation centres like these. Accesses to motorways up and down the country were closed off to the public and many transportation points were designated as ‘RESTRICTED’ anyway.

When commuters tried to get to on their regular-scheduled long-distance early morning trains, they found train station workers unaware as to why there were no trains running that would usually criss-cross the country. Suburban commuter rail links were running, but the main national connections had been cancelled without warning.

As the morning worn on, parents found that their children’s schools had been closed. University students – when the more diligent of them tried to go in early – had the same experience with closed buildings. The faceless civil servants from the Department for Education had issued these instructions and no amount of cajoling from pushy parents or cries of confused children would open places of education.

Confusion reigned.

Businesses, factories and shops were open that morning though. People went to work as usual where they could and many found that they had been unable to purchase their usual morning newspaper nor listen to the radio on the way to their places of work. There had been empty shelves in newsagents and strange static on the radio.

It was all very odd.

In a select few locations across the country, civilians found themselves soon in large open prisons. The naval towns of Plymouth and Portsmouth were closed to outsiders overnight as transportation links were shut off by Territorial Army soldiers reinforced by bleary-eyed and pimple-faced Navy Cadets. No one was allowed in or out of these towns: no excuses were allowed to override these restrictions. Surprisingly, there were no instances of immediate violence at both places… this was down to the shock of such a thing occurring without warning as it had done.

There were less severe movement restrictions placed around villages up and down the country that happened to reside next to a RAF airbase or a British Army logistics & storage installation. Again teenage cadets backed-up reservist soldiers in establishing roadblocks and turning away those deemed ‘outsiders’ from coming anywhere near such places.

Hospitals were given firm instructions by the Department for Health to start turning away patients due for non-emergency procedures as well as to begin what was expected to be the difficult process to removing patients who didn’t really need to be there. Furthermore, they were to prepare areas not normally used as wards to be utilised in such a manner and to start calling in student nurses and regular volunteers to man the hospitals because experienced members of staff were about to be mobilised for military service.

High Street bank managers found themselves being instructed not to open their doors that morning. No matter what the pressing personal circumstances of their customers, there were to be no bank transactions made unless the Bank of England itself gave permission.

The Department for Transport issued an international warning that airports and ports in the UK were closed unless it was a dire emergency. On a domestic level, airport control towers and harbour-masters were instructed that private aircraft and ships – including fishing vessels and pleasure craft with the latter – were not allowed to depart for overseas journeys. Of course, many boats slipped their moorings and there was an instance of a light aircraft lifting off from a tiny airstrip in Sussex; in that latter instance the pilot of the twin-engine aircraft met with a RAF Hawk trainer re-rolled as a lightweight fighter mid-air telling him in no uncertain terms to return to the ground or face being shot down.

Like the national movement of people and goods, international travel and transport was overnight brought to a halt. This had been planned thoroughly and there were to be no hic-cups allowed.

In London, the Stock Market didn’t open for international business. Bankers and traders tried to contact their counterparts in New York and other financial centres worldwide, but to no avail: civilian telecommunications were closed to non-government and non-military matters. Not only were overseas telephone and telegraph links shut but so too were national links between regional area codes.

TtW had begun in earnest in the civilian sector.


For the British Government, TtW meant that preparations had to be made for the very worst to occur: an attack on the UK with nuclear weapons. National Government had to be devolved into Regional Government so that the country would survive in a post-attack environment. Minister’s of the Crown would rule over certain areas of the nation with draconian powers should those missiles come and they needed to be set up ready to do so.

Thatcher and her War Cabinet were to remain in Whitehall, but other Secretaries of State with domestic Cabinet responsibilities left London for underground shelters that were to be manned with key staff. The Ministers were all appointed by the Monarch and members of the Privy Council: their powers would be immense should it happen with the right to deal out extra-judicial capital punishment and mobilise the civilian population into war work.

Each and every one of those Ministers prayed that they wouldn’t need to put that authority into action…

*​

Of course, immense problems were expected to occur soon enough with all of this. TtW was something that no real-life practise had ever been put into beforehand. It had been planned to have full political support from across the country and the public was expected to portray the stereotypical ‘Blitz Spirit’ in the face of adversary.

From that very first day, things went wrong though. Home Office officials were not fast enough to act to stop an impromptu strike across wide sections of the BBC that delayed their effort to get out Government messages on the television and the radio when all other services were cut off apart from Radio 4. MI-5 had not focused enough on the BBC and the radical union members there among technical staff who worked in the corporation. TtW allowed for the Government to take over the airwaves and broadcast exactly what it wanted to so that the country could be informed and educated about what was happening, but no one had figured in the sudden actions of those electrical engineers who sabotaged their equipment before they went out on strike.

Of course, drastic action was taken and this situation was rectified with utmost haste yet this was a major oversight and could cause many, many fatal problems afterwards.


Police numbers were thinned by mobilisation as many officers were also military reservists. Special Constables were meant to increase their numbers during peacetime situations that required extra manpower, but again many of those were military reservists too. The British policeman was widely-regarded as firm but fair, yet this image wasn’t something that would be maintained by the ordinary public as TtW went into the following days. Civilians started to get angry when they couldn’t buy petrol from fuel stations in the face of government restrictions and when the banks remained closed. Other people wanted to visit relatives or flee impending nuclear war but the police wouldn’t let them travel by the motorways, the railways or ships that might take them across to Ireland.

Common criminals – actual and otherwise – were mistreated by policemen who hadn’t slept enough and always worried about back-up turning up. In communities across the nation, patience started to snap and the police, as the visible arm of seeming oppression, bore the forefront of anger.

Such a situation got worse and worse as time ticked by.


Plymouth and Portsmouth were the first of what was soon called ‘closed cities’, in the Soviet mould. Ports all around the British coastline were shut off from the outside world as they became military logistics hubs and these were all large population centres too.

Unlike the naval towns, restrictions on movements as these later locations weren’t so stringent, but they were still tight enough to upset civilians who were already on edge in the face of thermonuclear destruction. On the South Coast, Southampton, Folkestone and Dover joined the naval towns. Tilbury, Harwich, Felixstowe, Hull and Sunderland on the East Coast were shut off to the outside world like Aberdeen in Scotland was. Ships that few the flags from nations around the world soon crammed these ports as they either transported military wares from the UK to the Continent or used such places as transit points.


The build-up of anger against the authorities across the nation and the imposition of what was effectively martial law that soon existed in coastal towns and cities was by the end of the week about to reach a tipping point, one of no return.

Thirty–Nine

The Government had not gone all the way with Transition to War. There were many further steps that could have been taken to limit civil liberties and freedom of movement.

Yet, Thatcher and her government wanted a country to rule over after everything happened. There was an unspoken fear among so many politicians in the know that the whole East-West crisis might suddenly be defused at the very last moment. Britain was a major part of the Western Alliance, yet NATO was dominated by the United States and the secret worry was that they would at some stage reach an agreement with the Soviet Union to defuse tensions after TtW had commenced and done it’s worst.

It was always known that TtW was going to cause immense damage to Britain, but by limiting some of the effects of the stages of the process, there was the desire not to cause too much harm to the nation.

Nonetheless, lofty ideas aside, the injury to Britain politically, socially and economically was being done nationwide on a continual basis because something like this couldn’t be done piecemeal and not in Britain of the 1980’s too.


The hope was that the British economy would be able to survive, even in a somewhat limited form, with TtW underway. There had not been a wholesale nationalisation nationwide and the restrictions on everything from travel to electricity and use of the telephone were not localised. Businesses were supposed to stay open and the majority of people were meant to go to work…

…yet many people couldn’t go to work because their children faced schools that were closed and businesses couldn’t operate properly because the banks would only deal with commercial matters not personal ones: employees couldn’t get paid and thus spend their money elsewhere.

In other parts of the national economy, there was severe disruption where there was nationalisation that had taken place, in particular in almost all transport related industries.

People didn’t want to go to work either because there was a great deal of very real fear that the country would face warfare that involved nuclear weapons being used. Hundreds of thousands of people nationwide decided to make themselves refugees and flee the big cities and all over locations across Britain, especially near military sites. Families took to the roads in cars and headed out into the countryside, especially northwards and westwards, in the hope of staying in a hotel or a bed-and-breakfast. Money was an issue though and soon enough those who turned up at such places found themselves unable to pay for their stay. Other people decided to head to caravan parks or even attempt to camp out – the latter being not a good idea with winter only just gone.

In the cities that people left behind, there was a great deal of crime that commenced. Police numbers were low and so burglaries, street robberies, vandalism, arson, theft from shops etc. commenced with abundance. With such crime going on at such a great scale, businesses could not operate and people who had stayed in the urban and suburban areas of the country didn’t want to leave their homes. No one was getting paid either and this made many people who ordinarily wouldn’t turn to illegal means to get their hands on a little bit of urgently-needed cash break the law.

Rioting erupted soon enough when the first of the ration distribution points for the general public were opened where people could present their coupons. From supermarkets to corner shops, food stocks on the shelves had been brought up by a panicked general public on the first day of TtW. Afterwards there had been no deliveries made from nationwide food distribution points on the orders of the authorities as hasty printing was made of ration coupons for circulation. Local authorities, severely understaffed as they were by absenteeism, relied on the lists that they had of registered voters and ratepayers to know who to issue the rationing coupons to and also the honesty of people.

Not everyone got their ration coupons while others were deceitful. That didn’t matter anyway soon enough because who wanted to be told how many ounces of butter they could have with how many loaves of bread and that there was a certain amount of red meat that they could have as well.

Of course, ordinary people who were hungry and scared erupted in anger against this and anyone who stood in their way.

Brixton in South London and Toxteth in Liverpool were the first places hit with the rationing riots, but they were just the very first locations. Everywhere, up and down the country, no one was prepared to put up with food rationing on top of everything else. The police quickly had to call in elements of the already harassed Territorial Army to assist them.


As the country tore itself apart economically and then socially, there wasn’t a major political reaction to this because national politics had been wholly fractured by TtW.

Parliament had met after mobilisation had begun alongside TtW but it would not meet again until after the war began. During that pre-war session the news reached the House of Commons chamber that Hattersley had been murdered and thus the whole of the Palace of Westminster had been locked-down in tight security afterwards. There had been statements made by both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, but then Parliamentary activity had been suspended.

The vast majority of MPs left London and returned to their constituencies as it was thought that it was best for them to do. They were angry and full of questions, but a consensus was formed that for the time being it was best to act that way… no one thought that they would be away for as long as they were.

Many senior MPs from both the Labour and recently-formed Social & Liberal Democrats (SLD) remained in London at first as they were engaged in attempts to form a National Government with Thatcher’s ruling Conservatives. Hattersley’s assassination along with a deep distrust from the Prime Minister over the advisers that Neil Kinnock surrounded himself with forestalled this though; the SLD wouldn’t join a coalition government unless Labour would too. Later, news would be leaked to many of the top Labour people that many left-wing intellectuals had been arrested and thus that was the end of both official and unofficial high-level discussions over a National Government.

Still, under advice from the Security Service, there were Labour figures along with David Steel from the SLD who decided to remain in Whitehall where Thatcher’s War Cabinet was staying. There was a worry that the spooks had that following Hattersley’s murder these politicians were too in danger of assassination from foreign agents. There was no National Government, but such people were still Privy Councillors and were thus kept in-the-loop with regards to what was going on.

Politics was at an end for the time being though because there was no public debate on events taking place. There were no journalists around to brief and no matters of concern to constituents that could be brought to Parliament.

Politics was on hold.


If Parliament had been in session, then there certainly would have been arguments in the House of Commons that would have spilt over into the media concerning the diplomatic row that soon erupted between Britain and the People’s Republic of China.

The Chinese were furious with the UK for action taken in Hong Kong after TtW went into effect where the stock market in the colony was manipulated from London. Instructions had come from Britain that traders in Hong Kong were to work with what was left operating of the world economy in supporting the Pound Sterling. This effort would fail with near immediate effect, yet that didn’t matter to those in Beijing who had made agreements with Britain over the future of Hong Kong and considered this British action to be breaking the spirit (not necessarily the letter) of those agreements.

Britain hadn’t actually done anything wrong, but that was hardly the point.

Strongly-worded diplomatic communiques were sent to the Foreign Office in London where Tom King remained and these were joined by equally stern messages of displeasure of a similar vein that came from Washington. The Americans were at the time engaged in high-level negotiations with the Chinese to make sure that they stayed neutral in Asia in a conflict there should one commence between American and Soviet forces.

Anything that was going to upset the Chinese was not going to make Britain’s most important ally happy.


King remained in London along with members of the War Cabinet such as Thatcher, Lawson, Younger and Secretary of State for Energy Cecil Parkinson. They met in Downing Street on a regular basis but didn’t stray too far away from the ‘ring of steel’ that was being erected around Whitehall. The majority of the rest of the peacetime Cabinet was gone from London though.

Eleven Cabinet members had gone off to the Regional Seats of Government.

These politicians were spread all over Britain where they were in bunkers with selective civil servants and waiting for the worst to happen after which they were to assume absolute powers in-place of those in London who would presumably be killed in a Soviet nuclear strike.

The names of a few of these ministers were known to the public, but not many. Outside of Westminster, who after all had really heard of Baron Young, the Secretary of State for Trade & Industry, who was now responsible for ‘Region Three’ which he would govern from beneath Skendleby in Lincolnshire?

Or the Secretary of State for Transport Paul Channon who now resided in his ‘Region Ten’ bunker at Hack Green near Crewe?

An interesting political alliance was formed in Scotland – ‘Region One’ – though that was unrelated to the fractured national policy scene and wholly about Scotland. Secretary of State for Scotland Malcolm Rifkind had left London when his fellow Cabinet ministers did and taken an RAF flight up to his bunker near St. Andrews. He had insisted that his Shadow from Labour come with him so that Donald Dewar could return with ease to his constituency and the two of them had talked much on that flight.

Dewar ended up travelling with Rifkind to that bunker though left not long afterwards. Yet the two Scotsmen remained in contact with each other to the disconcertion of Rifkind’s security-minded civil servants. They both cared about their native land and had made a personal agreement to put differences aside for the greater good.

If only things could have worked out as well elsewhere.




Forty

The Secretary-General of NATO was Lord Peter Carrington. He was a former soldier and widely-experienced diplomat who had spent many years in British politics as Defence Secretary in the 1970s and the Foreign Secretary in the early 1980s. Thatcher held Carrington in high regard due to his resignation after the Argentinean invasion of the Falklands where as Foreign Secretary he publically took the blame for that event and deflected it from the rest of her Government.

Carrington’s position was neither a sinecure one nor one with little work; it was a full-time role that was very demanding upon him personally. He enjoyed it though and especially the challenges with diplomacy that he faced.

As the crisis between East and West had grown throughout the year, Carrington had been deeply involved in trying to keep NATO together as certain countries wavered at times over the maintenance of the alliance. He was instrumental in getting American assurance to Denmark that the small Baltic country would be fully defended from any more Soviet-led aggression. Carrington had also travelled to both Spain and Portugal to meet with the military chiefs of those two Iberian countries for talks about the military forces that they could realistically provide for NATO.

There wasn’t always success for him though; Carrington had failed like everyone else who had tried to get the governments of Italy and Greece to take Soviet aggression seriously. As NATO mobilised in early March, it looked like both of those Southern European countries would fail to honour their treaty commitments and sit out any forthcoming conflict.


With his personal connections to Thatcher’s government, he was her man at NATO. The Foreign Office had a diplomat – the capable Michael Alexander – assigned as the official Permanent Representative to NATO, yet Carrington’s political history and the strength of his personal relationships across Western Europe gave him greater influence on the Continental than his counterpart. While still doing his official duties as demanded by his position as the titular head of NATO, Carrington spoke to London on a regular basis and updated Thatcher’s War Cabinet on a wide variety of developments. His opinions on political-military matters on the Continent were listened to with great care because he was regarded as an expert in his field.

During the first few days of LION, Carrington was able to keep the War Cabinet studiously informed of developments made on the Continent with the mobilisations of the armed forces of Britain’s allies. They were hearing all sorts of things from diplomatic sources of which most were highly positive of how those mobilisations were going, but Carrington was able to give the War Cabinet more thorough information as to how that was all playing out.

Furthermore, Carrington was soon at the forefront of relaying information back to the War Cabinet about Soviet military responses to NATO mobilisation. The majority of Western military intelligence operations that were underway to look over the Iron Curtain and across into Eastern Europe was now being organised through NATO; therefore the British diplomat at the top of NATO was thus able to give his insightful opinion direct to London on how to interpret the fruits of that intelligence gathering effort.

American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft had been using their mounted Side-Looking Airborne Radar (SLAR) to search deep inside Eastern Europe to monitor the movement on the ground of vehicle traffic. There were countless convoys of vehicles tracked moving from known locations of military bases across East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia – deemed in NATO military parlance as the ‘Northern Tier’ of the Warsaw Pact – detected. Electronic detection equipment mounted upon aircraft and from both fixed and mobile ground stations intercepted radio transmissions associated with military movements. E-3 airborne radar aircraft operating in both American and NATO colours (the latter registered for legal purposes with the Luxembourg Air Force) tracked aircraft movements night and day across the dividing line that separated Europe in two. There were some images disseminated from the Americans and their reconnaissance satellites to NATO too which joined all the other intelligence that showed that the Warsaw Pact was mobilising just like NATO was.

Access to hard numbers on Soviet mobilisation efforts was impossible for the West to come by and Carrington was thus only able to give the War Cabinet what would best be described as ‘informed estimates’ from several sources who tried to make sense of all of this intelligence.

The NATO estimates were that all Soviet Army and Air Force assets based in Eastern Europe were beginning to concentrate within East Germany and in western Czechoslovakia. They were being joined by Soviet troops from garrisons in Hungary as well as regular and elements of reservist troops from the militaries of the Northern Tier countries. This was reckoned to number a force somewhere in the region of fifty combat divisions and several thousand tactical aircraft. In addition, the American satellites were showing activity at almost every known military garrison in the western portions of the Soviet Union from where there were fears that the same number of troops and aircraft again could be gathered and moved westwards too.

The War Cabinet was of course not alone in hearing this from Carrington and NATO as the alliance was an organisation that strove to treat all of its members as equal partners. All other NATO nations were given the same information on the movement of Soviet military forces and there was concern and worry at such news.

Yet there were other distractions for some NATO members, the United States in particular with the unresolved situation in Central America about to ignite…

Forty–Three

After five days of NATO mobilisation, the Northern Army Group was finally fully-assembled on the North German Plain. The troops under General Kenny’s command from five different armies were in-place in their wartime positions ready to defend West Germany. There had been problems and delays with getting his command assembled, yet none of those had been overly serious.

General Kenny was more than relieved that he hadn’t had to oversee this during actual conflict conditions as NATO plans had long called for.

NORTHAG’s operational headquarters had moved away from Rheindahlen and across into the Netherlands to the underground bunker at Cannerberg near Maastricht. General Kenny had his key members of staff here with him and Cannerberg was a fully operational facility with excellent communications, yet he didn’t like being in such a location at all. Unless the KGB and the GRU had both got out of the intelligence business without someone telling him, then he knew that they were well aware of the place.

The bunker would likely eat a thermonuclear warhead in a strategic conflict.

There were many people on his staff who held the conviction that there was no chance of the current stand-off between East and West turning to open warfare, let alone nuclear weapons being used. This was based on the idea that the Soviets would have realised by now that they had missed their shot at taking over Western Europe and would soon give up such an idea. General Kenny thought the very opposite on this matter.

He believed that they would have to lash out and strike westwards because they couldn’t ignore the build-up of NATO forces. In addition, while his attention was focused upon NORTHAG, General Kenny had access to strategic intelligence reports so that he could be informed of the geo-political situation at all times. He was aware of the utter chaos taking place across Western Europe, especially back home in Britain, and then also what was going on in Central America with Nicaragua and then Mexico. He reckoned that the Soviets would make their move to exploit this.

Away from his worrying thoughts over the future, General Kenny found himself having to deal with problems closer to home. On the Sunday evening, Cannerberg was visited by a high-level delegation (no other term would suffice in his mind to describe the visit) from Britain.


Defence Secretary Younger came to the bunker along with his junior minister – Ian Stewart, the Armed Forces Minister – and General Bagnall for a briefing from him. He met with them in one of the bunker’s briefing rooms and had some his capable younger officers talk them through NORTHAG’s deployments and the strategic situation that it found itself in occupying the North German Plain.

General Kenny’s staff officers explained to the visitors from London how the command was positioned ready to defend West Germany. Just like pre-war plans, the four operational corps commands were arrayed back from the Inter-German Border in an arrangement that provided front-line forces and tactical reserves. To the north, the Dutch had their three divisions now in-place (their reservist 5th Infantry Division had taken a while to form up) with another three divisions from the West German Army directly to the south of them. Next in line was the British I Corps with three more divisions followed by the Belgians with another two. From the Elbe near Hamburg all the way down to near Kassel, this initial defensive line was ready and well-prepared.

Behind the first line of eleven divisions, there were another two combat divisions placed strategically to move forward in an immediate counterattack – the West German 7th Panzer and the British Army’s 3rd Armoured Divisions. These were tank-heavy forces located where intelligence specialists reckoned that a Soviet attack westwards would have to be directed towards. The Americans had transported the troops of their US III Corps across the North Atlantic by air and then those men had linked up with pre-positioned equipment from now-empty POMCUS warehouses across the Continent: they had another three combat divisions sitting ready as the strategic reserve for NORTHAG ready to smash any Soviet breakthrough.

Finally, General Kenny had his rear-area troops for security duties spread all across NORTHAG’s planned area of operations. There was the TA-formed British 2nd Infantry Division as well as brigades and regiments from Belgium, Holland and West Germany, which formed the equivalent of another two divisions. In a tight situation, these reserves could be used in front-line combat, but their main mission was to combat expected enemy parachute and airmobile operations in NORTHAG’s rear.

Stocks of ammunition and supplies were firmly with NORTHAG’s troops giving them enough to fight with for almost three weeks of continuous combat and the distribution network necessary to keep his troops supplied was fully set up. Of course, NORTHAG would be in a better situation if there were even more troops available, but General Kenny was confident that in the early stages of a non-nuclear conflict he would stop the Warsaw Pact from overrunning the North German Plain and getting into the Low Countries or even to the English Channel. There were National Guard divisions forming up in the United States who would soon be ready to start moving to Europe while the French now had their army ready and positioned in the Rhineland ready to support NORTHAG and the Central Army Group (CENTAG: American, Canadian and West German troops in central and southern Germany) as necessary.

Bagnall was General Kenny’s predecessor and had nothing but praise for how NORTHAG was positioned and ready in terms of logistics for combat. He added to this with congratulations for his successor in getting the West Germans to stick to arrangements he had made with them back during his own tenure for providing strength in depth in their own dispositions. However, he did express his concerns over the abilities of Dutch and Belgian rear-area forces placed in West Germany for security; this had always been a concern of his.

The two politicians were not as well versed in military matters as the pair of career soldiers were, but neither of them was an idiot. They could see how General Kenny had arrayed his forces and the limits that he was working with in preparing for the worst. Their focus was on the British forces as part of NORTHAG though, which represented almost a quarter of the multi-national force commanded from here at Cannerberg. So many of them would be expected to lose their lives in full-scale combat and this was of great concern. General Kenny was asked what he needed to limit such expected casualties.

Flippancy wasn’t something that General Kenny was cursed with, yet his first instinct was to inform the politicians that there was no need for any of his soldiers – be they British or otherwise – to lose their lives if diplomacy could settle things. He held his tongue though and informed them in response that he still needed more troops. There was the British Army garrison in West Berlin and the newly-forming Independent Guards Brigade located back in Britain. The troops from both, neither of which was under his command, would come in handy very much and he could put them to use. Moreover, the supporting assets to maintain them would be more than welcome under NORTHAG command too.

Such things were political though, it was explained to General Kenny. The United States Army wanted to pull their troops out of Berlin too, but the effective surrender of the Western position there behind the Iron Curtain wasn’t something that could be done by London and Washington. As to the Foot Guards, those men were employed on vitally-important security duties in London and there was also the need to maintain a strategic reserve for the UK itself that didn’t consist of the reservists in the TA that remained behind after their comrades deployed to the Continent.

At that point in the briefing, Ian Stewart moved to explaining how he was making moves for NORTHAG to be renamed the ‘British Second Army’. This was the WW2 designation of the main British force that invaded Nazi Germany in 1945 across the West German Plain; the name had history to it. With the Americans using their Seventh Army headquarters for CENTAG, their National Guard forces being arranged under the command of the Fifth Army and the French too controlling their forces under the French First Army banner, he thought that this was appropriate for NORTHAG. General Kenny had thoughts on such a thing that was only about prestige not the lives of his men, but he decided to keep these to himself and thus was glad when Bagnall was able to direct the conversation back to the UK by referencing the Foot Guards in London.

The CGS stated that the Independent Guards Brigade could be deployed under NORTHAG should the situation warrant it with an immense Soviet Army presence be identified by intelligence as ready to strike. Yet at the moment such a situation wasn’t possible because the Foot Guards were busy assisting the TA’s 56th Reserve Brigade in dealing with civilian disturbances around the Greater London area. There were political developments back in Britain underway he added with a glance at the two politicians, and his hope was that the situation in the UK would resolve itself. Moreover, he understood that there had been rumours spread in West Germany by British Army reservists and TA personnel arriving on the Continent of major civil disturbances underway in Britain. The British Army was one of the most disciplined in the world, yet such things were always going to have an effect upon the morale of the men serving in NORTHAG.

From these comments, as well as his knowledge of the type of man Bagnall was along with the GCS’s superior Admiral Fieldhouse, General Kenny was quickly convinced that those ‘political developments underway’ back in Britain had been instigated by those of highest rank in the British Armed Forces. They were all men with families too and commanded soldiers, sailors and airmen who had families. From West Germany on the first day of LION, all dependants of soldiers serving on the Continent had been flown home with haste on aircraft that had in turn shipped reinforcing troops over. This had been done as it had to maintain morale of the tens of thousands of men serving so that they would know that their loved ones were safe away from the front-lines… well, as safe as anyone could be in a country with God knows how many Soviet nuclear warheads pointed at it. The point had been to get those families out of danger though, not to send them back to the UK where some of the stories being now told here on the Continent made it sound like all civilian control of the country had been lost.

General Kenny would ponder afterwards about what kind of political settlement would be made back home and what that would mean for the articles of TtW that dealt with national security, but in the meantime he still had a command to finish preparing for a war that he was certain was soon coming.





Forty–Four

It would be many years after the war before there was criticism directed at the British Armed Forces for their so-called ‘quiet intervention’ that took place with regard to British politics in the final weeks before war erupted. Even then, such reproach would only come from selective academic sources that many would regard as revisionist historians promoting an anti-establishment agenda. The Armed Forces had suffered great losses in World War Three and there was no a lot of public support for any negative reaction to how they behaved in talking to politicians before soldiers were killed in Germany in their thousands and bombs started falling on Britain.

Constitutionally, what those generals and admirals did do was nothing illegal nor wrong, just sensible and part of their duties as servants of the Crown.

When the military brass spoke to the remaining government ministers in London early on March 5th, they expressed a concern for the families of their men and women serving in uniform. Yet at the same time, their less overt motive was to allow the prosecution of the war that they all didn’t want but knew would be fought to be actually conducted. The country couldn’t go to war if it wasn’t working, if people weren’t being fed nor if it was rioting. They didn’t want to see soldiers having to revert to using their weapons on their own people nor having their military personnel run the national transportation system in the place of millions of absentee workers. To maintain the British forces on the Continent, at sea and defending the country from the air depended upon civilians in the rear because those service personnel needed to be fed, they needed munitions manufactured for them and they needed everything to be sent to them at the front-lines.

Furthermore, of utmost importance, who would want to fight for the near police state that Britain was fast becoming?

The generals and admirals couldn’t let that happen and so they quietly but firmly let the politicians know that the ongoing situation with the country falling apart had to be stopped and they believed that there just had to be some sort of political solution to the matter. Once that ‘advice’ was given, they stepped back from it all because they remembered their oaths to the Monarch and they were dealing with Her Majesty’s appointed ministers.

There was never any danger of the country seeing a military coup of any sort.


TtW was heavily focused towards a nuclear attack scenario taking place so that the country could survive in a post-attack world. That was why mid-level members of the Cabinet had been dispersed to underground bunkers and designated civil servants to help them run regions of the country where overall national control was expected to be atomised. The food rationing issue that set off the rioting across Britain and soon saw cities and towns burning with countless instances of arson was to do with the expected stoppage of food coming into the country after parts of it had been blown to bits. The travel restrictions that upset so many ordinary people and caused them to resort to violence was to do with the halting of refugees away from areas where fallout would occur and into undamaged parts of the nation.

The surviving of Britain after a nuclear attack was key to TtW with the other troublesome issues of the restrictions placed on the country mainly about how to stop traitorous saboteurs aiding the enemy being of secondary consideration. With mobilisation to ready Britain for war, this was why TtW had been implemented as it had been. It had to be done as far as the Government was concerned so that the country would fight a war and then be functioning afterwards.

The intervention by the generals and admirals was what caused Thatcher’s War Cabinet to stop and act to change things, yet before that there had been considerations voiced over whether something needed to be done anyway. Reports had flooded into Whitehall from across the country as to the break down in civil order that was spreading everywhere and there were already discussions underway as to if something should be done and then what could be done.


The night before, during a Friday evening that was lit by fires burning in the distance across northern, eastern and southern portions of London, Cecil Parkinson had been the man to voice the first concerns to the Prime Minister directly. The Secretary of State for Energy had turned down Thatcher’s offer of making him Northern Ireland Secretary after John Major’s death – Kenneth Clarke had transferred from the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster to that role – and stayed with her and the War Cabinet instead. He had made the decision to go out and conduct low-key visits with the soldiers manning the aptly-named ‘ring of steel’ that had been thrown up around Central London that night as a morale raising issue and also to see first-hand the conditions that they were in.

The battalion of Irish Guards in London were backed up by two companies of reservists from the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC) as part of what was called Operation PUBLICAN. Starting clockwise from Lambeth Bridge on the Thames and heading along Horseferry Road then to Victoria Station before going up Grosvenor Place past Hyde Park Corner and behind Piccadilly to Trafalgar Square and then Waterloo Bridge on the Thames again, this central part of the capital was cut off from the rest of the city. Ten foot high solid steel fencing enclosed this huge area with controlled access points. Royal Engineers had thrown up this ceaseless barricade and then the troops had moved in behind it to defend Whitehall, the royal properties of Buckingham Palace and St. James’ Palace and other important installations inside.

When down near Victoria Station – which was inside the barricades – Parkinson had run into an old acquaintance of his from back when he was a young National Serviceman in the RAF during the early Fifties. Parkinson’s acquaintance was a retired officer who had in recent years joined the HAC as a special reservist with the Home Service Force (HSF). The HSF was a Home Guard formation for ex service personnel and an organisation that Parkinson himself might have joined had it not been for politics. The retired Squadron Leader had some ‘interesting’ tales of taking his men down into South London to aid the police in quelling rioting there and Parkinson was left aghast at what he heard.

Parkinson’s related tales were not liked when they were heard. He informed the War Cabinet that those rioting were not just disaffected youths and wannabe left-wing revolutionaries as the common misconception was, but rather ordinary men and women. The situation was that bad for people that they had no choice but to loot and steal to survive and many of them were losing their lives in doing so.

So when those generals and admirals came a calling, there were already politicians somewhat aware and amenable to acting.


After Hattersley’s assassination, MI-5 had sequestered senior Labour Party politicians with the ring of steel in London. As MPs had headed home to their constituencies across the nation (there had been no travel restrictions for them), seven Labour MPs along with David Steel had remained behind. The Security Service had long known from Soviet defectors that KGB and GRU wartime activities would target opposition politicians in Western countries that they considered a ‘brain trust’ alongside government ministers. No more of them were going to be killed off.

Along Piccadilly there were a number of very fashionable hotels where these protected persons were put up in – the Ritz Hotel in particular – for their own safety… none of which would have done their public images any good especially in the eyes of the general public struggling as they were under TtW. They met freely and those among them who were entitled to such information were able to access Privy Council intelligence.

Even before they were approached on the Saturday by the Government, they talked and argued among themselves over whether to join a coalition National Government just as had been discussed beforehand. No agreement could be reached; there was great opposition to Thatcher and the whole notion that the country actually faced the threat of war, uproar over those reports they had heard of left-wing Labour-supporting intellectuals being detained without charge and the information they received of what was going on outside the ring of steel barricades that they could see from their hotels. There was the fear that they would never get elected again and that the public would turn on them like they would do on the Conservatives who were responsible for TtW. A division set in between the Labour politicians though and this had reached a point of no return when Nigel Lawson came as Thatcher’s envoy to ask them to meet with the Government at the nearby Lancaster House.


It was later called the Lancaster House Settlement and the agreement made there in that Foreign Office operated building would cause the post-war Labour Party problems that at times were so insurmountable that many in the ranks of the party spoke ironically of it all being a Conservative ploy. Of course that was a just tribal politics talking, but it was at times an opinion held by many.

Gerald Kaufman and Michael Meacher both point blank refused to have anything to do with the Settlement and berated their Labour colleagues who did sign up to join a National Government alongside David Steel. Their fellow Shadow Cabinet members Denzil Davies, Frank Dobson, Bryan Gould and John Smith all decided to join the Government because they thought that they were acting in the best interests of the country not just their political party.

As for Neil Kinnock, the Leader of the Opposition did what he always did: he took his time to weigh up his options. He wouldn’t agree to nor disagree to join a coalition with Thatcher’s Government after claiming that he needed to consult with the wider Labour Party.

All of a sudden, he would fade into obscurity where he should have taken centre stage.


Davies, Dobson, Gould, Smith and the Liberal Steel didn’t join the National Government in the place of Cabinet members with ministerial briefs but rather as Minister’s Without Portfolios. For them this was an important distinction and it was also something else that the Prime Minister had no issue with considering she could hardly reshuffle her Cabinet with it spread all over the country as it was. Instead, the five politicians left London to officially perform a similar role that Donald Dewar was doing up in Scotland unofficially there. Dewar had not been involved in the Settlement but his actions in working with Malcolm Rifkind north of the border had been the inspiration for what the Government wanted from these new additions to its ranks.

The Settlement was all about lessening the extreme social impacts of TtW so that the civil disturbances would if not cease then greatly ease up. Rifkind had allowed Scotland to be less tightly controlled than England, Wales and Northern Ireland were and had Dewar publically giving what official measures there were there his support. Such actions had initially caused the War Cabinet some unease, but they had been quickly shown to work and Scotland had not seen the level of rioting, destruction and deaths that the rest of Britain had. This personal initiative from two Scottish-born politicians who loved their country was thus to be given the green light nationwide.

On the Monday morning (March 7th), rationing was to be rolled back and freedom of movement restrictions lifted. Newspapers apart from the official London Gazette were to be allowed to be published (though under censorship) and banks were to reopen their doors. The chaos was not going to all of a sudden come to an end of course, but things were rapidly expected to improve especially with opposition political voices being able to speak to the public through the media in the place of local radicals setting themselves up as ‘spokesmen for the people’.

Other articles of TtW were to stay though and this is what had caused the split in the top ranks of the Labour Party leading to those who didn’t agree not signing the Settlement at Lancaster House. There would still be a self-imposed quarantine of Britain to guard against foreign saboteurs and the police and Security Service would keep their wide-ranging powers to act with near impunity. Strikes in industries that TtW deemed important to national security were still proscribed, the closed coastal and naval towns were still barricaded like Central London was and those detained by MI-5 weren’t going anywhere.

Despite how the politics had played out TtW was still in effect in Britain.

Forty–Seven

It took eighteen minutes before the first shots were fired in opposing CENTRE. The French garrison in West Berlin beat the city’s police force in doing so only by another minute with a wave of gunfire that would wake the city up and then leave countless dead.

To the detriment of the efficiency of the whole operation, the orders that the East German Army had were for its troops to avoid at all costs known and suspected military garrisons of the Western forces located in Berlin. They were to loop around them to obtain their objectives and stay hidden from them until those were secure. Afterwards, the plan was to close-in slowly and surround each one with overwhelming force. On paper this appeared to a brilliant idea, but it was nothing more than a flight of fancy.

Moreover, those in the know within the East German Army rightly suspected that their Soviet masters who had issued these orders didn’t think such a thing would work anyway.


Like their American and British counterparts, the French Army garrison in West Berlin was the size of a small brigade. The troops were of high quality and well-armed, yet their role was more ceremonial than combat. Knowing that they were positioned deep inside East Germany with the Soviet Army sitting on the real estate between them and the remainder of West Germany, the French troops expected that if it ever came to a fight they would be overwhelmed and without any external support.

There was also the worry that a nuclear warhead would blast the city to atoms very soon after any conflict begun that involved them.

This fatalistic attitude of the part of the troops deployed to West Berlin didn’t mean that they were either ill-disciplined or incompetent. There were good officers in charge of the garrison and the standard of conscripts sent to the city was high; the garrison prepared as best as possible for a war that if was fought they would lose but would achieve a little measure of glory in.

Late the previous evening, in a coordinated political move made by Paris, London and Washington, all Western garrisons in West Berlin had received firm instructions to stay in their barracks and only maintain a guard force suitable for protective security. The civil disturbances and the violence were being manipulated for political purposes by the East Germans, the garrison commanders were told, and it was best that no further excuse could be given to Mielke and his ilk. Thus, the French Army had in the most part pulled back as ordered into its quarters.

The garrison commander’s orders though had not been worded by politicians in the Defence Ministry within Paris but instead by senior French Army officers in Strasbourg who looked at the situation in West Berlin from a soldier’s perspective. These orders allowed the commander on the ground leeway to act as he saw fit to defend his command from attack. Thus while there were watchmen in positions overlooking the barracks where the soldiers slept, small detachments from the garrison were out on patrol in platoon strength near those barracks. The patrols were conducted during the night in both four-wheeled VAB armoured vehicles and AMX-30 tanks and didn’t stray too far away from French military encampments.

There were two separate occasions when clashes between the French and East Germans were only narrowly avoided due to both opposing forces only just missing each other in the darkness, but eventually one of those French patrols did stumble into the invaders. An infantry company mounted in BTR-60s from the East German 1MRD’s 3rd Regiment was racing towards an electricity substation within the French sector of West Berlin when a platoon of AMX-30s came out of seemingly nowhere and positioned themselves ahead of the East German’s line of advance. The road which the East Germans were using was blocked by the four French tanks, tanks which levelled their rifled 105mm main guns at the ten BTR-60s. This occurred within half a mile of the French garrison headquarters at Quartier Napoleon and on a road that the East Germans wouldn’t have taken had they hadn’t been making an unexpected detour around a road closed due to major construction work.

Following their orders, the East Germans backed up a bit to deploy into positions where they could surround the French force in-place while reinforcements were urgently called up over the radio. In addition, the guns on the French tanks were far superior to their mounted heavy machine guns.

The French troops were on their radios too with the platoon commander making urgent contact with his squadron headquarters. However, the East German retrograde manoeuvre – which was visible under the illumination offered by bright streetlights – alarmed that officer because it looked like the vehicles were preparing to deploy troops. The Frenchman, who assumed that the BTR-60s were Soviet and not East German, also believed that infantry in those vehicles would be carrying anti-tank weaponry.

He ordered his tanks to open fire rather than be engaged by man-portable weapons fired from foreign troops here inside West Berlin and near his brigade headquarters.


This was the very first incident, though very quickly there were fire-fights all across West Berlin. The civilian police fought to stop their stations being overrun by armed troops that invaded them in the pre-dawn darkness and security guards at civilian utilities and communications stations also tried to protect their installations. All of these civilians thought that they were facing Soviet troops that would be busy invading the rest of their country that morning and that was why these civilians were quite eager to go up against professional soldiers with the tragic results that entailed.

Nevertheless, had they known they were fighting soldiers of the cruel East German regime the results probably would have been the same too.

Along with the lack of either air or artillery strikes into West Berlin to prematurely announce their attempt at a coup de main, the attacking East Germans also conducted their assault without the use of electronic warfare. There was no overt radio jamming or attempt at subterfuge with silent jamming either. The radio frequencies that were known to be the ones which Western forces in West Berlin were left open to allow for communication within the city and to the outside too.

American, British and French troops in West Berlin had for many years worked together at times of international tension and communications links between them were set up. This radio network was backed up by buried cables that carried telephone links. The French garrison commander used the radio link that he had with his American and British counterparts to inform them of the incursion that his deployed patrol platoon was telling him about before adding to that information that those tanks of his had engaged ‘invading foreign forces’. However, word was already reaching the Frenchman’s counterparts of fighting taking place across the city with the police and both commanders were getting spot reports from their watch officers of sentries watching armoured vehicles rolling past Western bases.

Neither the American nor British garrison commanders had orders as to what to do in this situation. Their bases and their troops were not being attacked while the rest of the city was being overrun. Reports came thick and fast to them that where their troops met the invaders – at first misidentified as Soviet troops then corrected to East German Army units when vehicle markings were recognised – were backing away though taking up position to surround them.

For the French commander, it was a different matter though. His tanks had engaged and devastated an East German armoured column and thus already spilt blood. Further East German units in the same area were spotted moving to the scene of the initial fire-fight and these included T-72s, tanks which outgunned his AMX-30s. The platoon of his had pulled back to guard his headquarters with those heavier tanks following close behind. If he was in the position of his East German opponent, he would attack the men who had attacked his when they were pinned in their bases; he really wanted to strike out first to pre-empt such a move.

The garrison commanders all had satellite uplinks from their headquarters back home as well as to the NATO Supreme Commander at his own headquarters in Belgium. They each contacted the American General Galvin’s senior staff and told them of the incursion into West Berlin while also requesting orders. General Galvin was unavailable though at that crucial moment though as he himself was talking to Washington.

Apparently, General Galvin had been told by Washington of the East German assault to seize West Berlin long before his subordinates on the ground could report this news to him.





Forty–Eight

Washington was six hours behind West Berlin and thus due to the lateness of the hour when the staff of the Soviet Ambassador in the United States called the Secretary of State’s office requesting an urgent meeting with the President, the initial reply was that such a thing would best be done first thing the following morning. Such a remark at once brought a response from the Soviet Embassy that sent chills down the spines of those at the State Department who had read up on the diplomatic activities right before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in World War Two.

Ambassador Dubinin’s chief-of-mission stated that the matter was of utmost urgency and that the Soviet Ambassador must see Reagan at 10:45 Washington time.

The new Secretary of State, Charles ‘Chuck’ Grassley – who had only weeks before been the senior Senator from Iowa before his surprise nomination and confirmation to replace the assassinated George Shultz – understood his staffers concerns, but at the same time knew that the Soviet request for an audience with the President must be important. He didn’t believe that Dubinin was trying to get the President to be at a certain place at a certain time so that the Soviets could declare war with a nuclear detonation in Washington like the expressed opinion of some people in his office did: that was just unfathomable to him. Instead, he realised that they must want their Ambassador to share something with the President that was time-sensitive.

Furthermore, if Grassley had been wrong in his estimation of the Soviets… well, Vice President Bush and Speaker of the House of Representatives Jim Wright were both currently purposely out of Washington so the United States would still have a President should the very worst happen.


Yuri Vladimirovich Dubinin was one of the very few Soviet Ambassadors abroad in a Western country who had not been recalled to the Soviet Union and replaced by someone else since the Moscow Coup late the previous year. Those diplomats in Western capitals had all gone home and the feeling among Western spooks was that they had been replaced because it was felt that they had too strongly supported the foreign policies of Gorbachev.

Apart from his senior position, there was nothing unusual about Dubinin in comparison to those other departed Ambassadors. His survival was an anomaly…

No one in the Washington cared much for Dubinin. They knew that he was a very smart man and was an effective diplomat for his country, but he was not someone who was friendly nor agreeable. He was a cold man – like most Soviet diplomats – and was also the personal representative of a hostile regime in Washington. Reagan was naturally wary of the man while George Shultz had always stated that he was dangerous because he had the intelligence to wrap the unwary around his little finger when he wished with the nuances of his attempts at persuasion in diplomatic matters.

When Dubinin arrived at the White House the time was twenty minutes to Eleven. His official car brought him from the Embassy and he had been driven through an empty and quiet city. The District of Columbia Police had finally managed to get civil order in the city back under control – they had refused an offer of assistance from the Defence Department using military police units – the evening before after days and nights of serious disorder. Many residents of the city had decided that American military mobilisation meant that their city was soon to be destroyed in a nuclear war and so had acted accordingly either by fleeing or looting. Violence and arson had occurred as a consequence… just it had recently done so in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and more than a hundred other American cities. Washington was now quiet though because the rioters had run out of steam and the police had finally had to resort to the use of CS gas and mass arrests to stop the looting, the burning and the killing.

Safe in his Embassy behind a wall of police offices that could have been out protecting their city, Dubinin had missed all of this violence that the actions of his country had caused.

Grassley met Dubinin upon his arrival and had to hold in his nerves. He was a competent and well-experienced politician yet the former city college lecturer and one time assembly line worker regarded himself as greatly out of his depth here. The two men briefly shook hands and then moved inside to see the President with each of them having an interpreter in tow but no other aides.

As the Soviet diplomat was brought through the White House towards the Oval Office, the Secret Service agents on duty – the size of the detachment on-site had been quadrupled from its usual size – threw laser death states at Dubinin and the young woman from the Embassy who walked behind him. Though they wished to, the Secret Service agents were forbidden from conducting a physical search of both foreigners here in the White House. Yet at the same time, the route taken to the Oval Office passed through a metal detector whose presence was hidden and the Soviets were given thorough visual checks as they walked. If there had been any doubt that over whether either of them might be doing something as utterly foolish as bringing a weapon into the White House, then neither would have got anywhere near Reagan.


As he had requested, Dubinin was shown into see a tired and worried Reagan at a quarter to Eleven. In the Oval Office with the President were Howard Baker and Lieutenant-General Colin Powell: his Chief of Staff and his National Security Adviser. Furthermore, Grassley and his State Department interpreter came in too along with a pair of Secret Service agents. The Oval Office is smaller room than people realise and thus was rather crowded with everyone in attendance.

Despite him bringing along the woman from Embassy who could translate English into perfect Russian for him (and vice versa), Dubinin spoke more than passable English when he addressed Reagan. He said that he was speaking on behalf of the Politburo – by which he meant Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky – as well as the Soviet people in stating that the Soviet Union only desired peaceful relations with the United States and the rest of the world too. He then moved to criticise NATO military mobilisation, the invasion of Nicaragua, the sinking of the ship Friendship in the Caribbean that had Soviet military personnel aboard and alleged CIA activities in West Berlin to encourage civil disturbances.

To the listening Americans, it appeared as if Dubinin was reading from an unseen but memorised script. He was also talking rather fast as if he had to say all of this before something else of greater importance was mentioned. There was no passion in his voice and no one present actually thought the he believed what he was saying.

Reagan stared hard at the man, facing down yet another communist as he had always done through his political career. He remembered being in West Berlin only the previous June and how the people of that city had such a passion for their own freedom and that too of their imprisoned Germans just across the Berlin Wall. Baker and Powell both found themselves waiting for what they thought was the inevitable follow-up stating that the Soviet Union was about to declare war. Grassley believed that the Soviet Ambassador was going to deliver an ultimatum that his country would have no choice but to refuse to accede to.

Dubinin informed the Americans that he was meeting with that troops from the East German Army were only minutes away from entering West Berlin. He added that they were not going to engage Western troops garrisoned inside the city and further too that would shy away from any fighting of that manner. This was being done to protect the sovereignty of the German Democratic Republic and also as a humanitarian measure to protect those people from the West Berlin Police.

Reagan and those with him were thus given twelve minutes notice of CENTRE.

Once Dubinin had said this, Colin Powell asked the President if he could leave the room for a moment and Reagan gave him a gentle nod of his head in acknowledgement; the National Security Adviser and serving officer of the United States Army briskly walked straight out of the Oval Office for the White House’s secure communications facilities.

Grassley was the next to speak when he asked Dubinin what was the Soviets role in all of this? He wanted to know why the Soviet Ambassador here in Washington was informing the United States Government of the East German incursion into West Berlin moments before it was about to occur? As a follow-up to that, Howard Baker questioned Dubinin as to whether the British and French governments, as well as the West Germans, were being informed of this all as well?

Answering the Secretary of State’s questions first, Dubinin said that the Soviet Union stood by their allies in East Germany. He declared that his country had only found out in the past few hours that the assault into West Berlin was to take place and there was nothing that the Soviet government could do to stop such a thing. He was here in the White House to help keep the peace by giving the United States notice that its troops deployed there might face a dangerous situation on the ground. As to Baker’s queries, Dubinin stated that only the United States was being informed in advance of this matter.

The lies that Dubinin told to Grassley were so ludicrous that they would have been funny had it not been for the seriousness of the situation. He and everyone else knew that the East Germans did exactly what their masters in Moscow told them to do and there was no way that such a thing would have occurred without their express blessing. With his follow-up point concerning only Washington being informed of what was about to occur, it was clear to Grassley that the Soviets were playing games with the West on this in trying to diplomatically isolate the United States in the fall out from the assault into West Berlin.

He expected that in the following days, the Soviet KGB would be spreading lies about the length of warning time that was given and also dropping dark hints concerning sufficient warning not being given by the United States to its European allies.

Turning to talk to Reagan directly, Dubinin reminded the American President that only moments before he had said that the Soviet Union only wanted peace; he didn’t think that there was much future for peace if American troops were surrounded inside their barracks in West Berlin with East German troops outside their garrisons. The Soviet Union could make an effort to try to persuade the East Germans to open up airports in the city that they were about to seize to allow American troops to leave (no mention was made by Dubinin of British or French troops), but his government back in Moscow would need encouragement to do this…

…encouragement could come if American troop levels in West Germany and in other places bordering the Soviet Union returned to what they had been before REFORGER.

This was superpower-level blackmail pure and simple.

There was a lot that Reagan could have said to Dubinin or even communicated directly to Moscow over the Ambassador’s head. Instead, he chose to speak for the first time in this extraordinary meeting with a simple comment that Dubinin could easily report back to Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky. The American President said ‘the United States of America will not have its serving soldiers held hostage, the United States of America will not be blackmailed and the United States of America will not have democracy imperilled like this’.


Dubinin left the White House straight afterwards to return to his Embassy and his secure telephone link back to Moscow.

Meanwhile, other people in Washington were communicating with those far away too. Powell had urgently contacted the Defence Department who had accordingly got in contact with General Galvin in Belgium. Baker had started making calls for a meeting of the National Security Council. And then there was Grassley who was tasked by his President with setting up a trans-Atlantic conference call between Reagan and three leaders in Western Europe: Kohl, Mitterrand and Thatcher.

By the time that latter call was getting underway, CENTRE had already begun.

Fifty–One

Trying to compare the Soviet Navy of the late Eighties to those navies of the West wasn’t something that was easy to do. The Soviets did things vastly different to how things were done across the ideological divide; their ship designers, their naval strategists and their admirals had a wholly diverse mind set to their opponents in World War Three.

When Western naval thinkers looked at the Soviet Navy, they deemed the majority of the fleet to be a ‘one-shot force’, especially with the surface units built and deployed and even to an extent with subsurface assets too. Soviet warships were built with massive and impressive missile-based armaments that were designed to be used just the once in a tremendous offensive bombardment of enemy vessels. Ocean-going vessels for what Western navies deemed ‘underway replenishment’ were near unknown in the Soviet Navy and therefore their warships would have to return to port to be rearmed to conduct further missile-striking missions. The Soviet Navy only had one partially-complete fleet aircraft carrier in the traditional Western sense; instead they had four light carriers from which short-range strike aircraft could fly as well as a pair of helicopter carriers.

The majority of the Soviet submarine force was only impressive through numbers. Their vessels were not up to Western standards in noise suppression or electronic sensors and the submarines never carried enough torpedoes. There were missile submarines in the Soviet Navy that had launchers for barrage missions like the bigger warships did, but these were again ‘one-shot’ assets. Only in the land-based naval aviation force with the massed air regiments of long-range subsonic and supersonic bombers did the Soviet Navy have a reusable striking arm as far as Western naval thinkers were concerned.

This analysis was supported by evidence that the Soviet Navy was dead last among funding and political influence among the branches of the Soviet Armed Forces.

There were four fleets of the Soviet Navy that included surface, subsurface, aviation and support assets: the Northern Fleet (for Atlantic operations), the Baltic Fleet, the Black Sea Fleet (including operations in the Mediterranean) and the Pacific Fleet (with responsible for the Indian Ocean too). Each of these fleets could support each other with the transfer of assets in peacetime with lines of communication that didn’t run through the immense Eurasian landmass though the ability to do so in wartime would be greatly curtailed unless the Soviet Army made substantial gains through NATO or neutral territory. This was thought in the West to be another reason why the Soviet Navy was at the bottom of Soviet military importance.

There was the matter of the missing allies that the Soviet Navy suffered from as well. The US Navy could be considered the primary competitor to which the Soviets should aim to emulate in peacetime and which it would have to fight in wartime, but the Soviet Navy would never just be fighting the Americans at sea. The US Navy would have the support of the navies of the West and many of those were of great strength; allies of the Soviet Union had paltry naval forces when compared to Britain, France, Japan and many other ocean-faring countries. Moreover, those smaller Western navies often had specialist capabilities that complemented those of the US Navy in many vital ways: there was no comparison among allies of the Soviets.

No matter what those with a political or economic agenda said, the Soviet Navy was in no way anywhere near ready to reach a position where it could truly threaten the West. Their warships were nice, big targets for American naval air power and any Soviet carrier-based aircraft would be shot out of the sky with contemptuous ease. Their submarines were plenty in number but would be hunted down in a well-practised methodical manner by British and American anti-submarine warfare assets. The scores of Soviet Navy coastal patrol and missile boats would be taken on by littoral naval forces belonging to naval powers like Norway, Denmark, West Germany and Japan. As to those much talked about Soviet naval bombers… well there were the F-14 Tomcat fighter-interceptors that the US Navy operated as well as a host of airbases along the coastlines of much of the world’s oceans and seas that could combat them.

Western naval analysts who were component and weren’t working to an agenda could easily see the flaws in the Soviet Navy and realised what a collection of targets that it would be in open warfare. The more astute among these intelligence specialists and strategists wondered whether the Soviets actually realised the same thing.

*​

Early in the evening of March 8th, as a generally-censored Western media was telling the world about the seizure of West Berlin, the majority of the Soviet Navy put to sea.

The Soviet Pacific Fleet stayed in port (for the time being), but the three other fleets sortied from their bases and into the Barents Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. The strength of the deployment in terms of vessels pointed to this not being an emergency sortie but rather one that had been planned over a period of time. All of those sailors would not have been gathered up so quick from their barracks nor as many vessels taken out of maintenance and put into the water on short notice.


The Black Sea Fleet had once held great strategic importance for the Soviet Union and Imperial Russia beforehand. Many wars had been fought over control of the Black Sea and others had been narrowly avoided – in particular Soviet desire post-WW2 to control access to the Black Sea through the Turkish Straits. The advent of large stockpiles of nuclear weapons along with intercontinental-range missiles had brought about a lessening of a need for a strong naval presence in the Black Sea by the late Eighties though along with Soviet dominance of much of the surrounding coastline. The northern and eastern coastline was in direct Soviet hands while to the west the communist states of Romania and Bulgaria were under Soviet influence. It was only to the south that the Soviets didn’t have control; and it was to the south too where all uses for the Black Sea Fleet lay.

NATO member Turkey controlled the southern shorelines of the Black Sea and any access to open water beyond – the Aegean Sea and then the Mediterranean – for Soviet vessels had to pass through the lone waterway towards there that the Turks controlled: the aptly named Turkish Straits. The Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles were all owned by the Turks and they had military facilities to defend them.

As to the Turkish Armed Forces, these were large and the weapons and equipment that they used was all Western-built though often hand-me-downs. In a straight fight between the Soviets and the Turks, the Soviets would certainly be able to overwhelm the Turks and take control of the vital waterways around Istanbul that would give the Black Sea Fleet access to the distant, open seas beyond… but Turkish membership of NATO made sure that the Turks wouldn’t be fighting alone. How to overcome this difficulty had been the subject of many political intrigues throughout the Cold War on the part of Soviet intelligence operatives but those had all come to naught.

In peacetime, the Soviet Navy was allowed to transit warships, submarines and even their light aircraft carriers (by designating those as ‘aircraft-carrying cruisers’) through the Turkish Straits to send vessels built on Black Sea ports to their other fleets as well as establishing a semi-permanent naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. The 1936-agreed Montreux Convention gave them the right to do this, subject to Turkish approval though. Since the attack in early February upon the pair of American warships off the coast of Soviet Crimea, the Turks had been making things very difficult there. Consequently, the flotilla of Soviet Navy ships in the Mediterranean – the 5th Operational Squadron – wasn’t up at full strength.

When the order came for the Black Sea Fleet to sortie and move into planned positions, the warships and submarines left their many bases along the northern and eastern coastlines of the Black Sea and headed for the Turkish Straits. No official communique to the Turks requesting permission to transit their waters was sent nor was any other intention stated. The vessels just bore down upon those Turkish-controlled waterways in great numbers.


The Baltic Fleet was another Soviet Navy flotilla with long-established strategic importance. In Imperial Russian and early Soviet times, it had like its Black Sea counterpart been of great value. The traditional enemy of Russia and the subsequent Soviet Union had been Germany and the Germans had a Baltic coastline. In the modern era, the West Germans only had a small stretch of their coast on the Baltic, which was now much further westwards than it had ever been, but they had military bases on the Baltic still. Moreover, just as they did in the Black Sea, the Americans sent warships into the Baltic whose presence threatened Soviet interests. The neutral powers of Sweden and Finland were Baltic nations and the Swedes in particular had naval forces that affected the balance of power in the region. To the south there were naval forces operated by the Poles and the East Germans which were nothing to be sneered at while the Danes had light naval forces of their own who would be expected to operate in conjunction with their NATO partners the West Germans in wartime.

Nonetheless, the Soviet Baltic Fleet was the strongest in the region. There were many warships, patrol and missile boats, coastal submarines, naval aircraft and naval infantry (marines in all by name) at Soviet bases that spread from Leningrad and the Gulf of Finland region down through the occupied Baltic States and to Kaliningrad. There was also access available for the Baltic Fleet to Polish and East German naval facilities in their countries too.

However, once again, Soviet naval access to the open ocean beyond the Baltic was blocked by geography.

At the western end of the Baltic were the Danish Straits. There were three separate shipping channels around islands of the archipelago that was Denmark. Sweden and then Norway sat on the northern shores of these waterway’s openings into the North Sea and Norway was another NATO member. Unless the geo-political situation saw great change, then the Soviet Baltic Fleet would always find itself bottled up in the restricted Baltic in wartime.

Those stretches of water that connected the Baltic to the North Sea were not under Danish control like the Turkish Straits were by the Turks. The Danes didn’t have the legal right nor the naval strength to close them to Soviet access. Thus the Soviets had been transiting vessels through the Danish Straits before their multi-fleet, coordinated naval sortie despite NATO military forces conducting harassment operations against this effort.

When the Baltic Fleet put to sea all at once and in great numbers, it was towards the Danish Straits that it headed in a great concentration of force.


The Soviet Northern Fleet was where the majority of the strength of the Soviet Navy was. Strategic submarines carrying ballistic missiles were assigned to the Northern Fleet as they were to the Pacific Fleet because there was open access to the world’s oceans from the Barents Sea that didn’t go through any choke-points. There were capital ships operated by the Northern Fleet where there weren’t in the Baltic and Black Sea Fleet’s due to this unrestricted access to the North Atlantic.

The Northern Fleet didn’t have a glorious (or infamous in places) history like those smaller fleets but where its bases were located was all that mattered to the Soviet Union. These were concentrated on the Kola Peninsula and around the Arkhangelsk-Severodvinsk on the entrance to the White Sea. This cold, wind- and snow-swept region of the Soviet Union was barren in many places apart from where the Northern Fleet had its naval bases – there were other military bases across the Arctic coast too – and there were many Soviet shipyards too.

In any war with the West, the Northern Fleet was always going to be of great importance due to the access it had to the North Atlantic and the Arctic region too. Europe and North America were physically separated by the Atlantic so ships and aircraft would have to cross that stretch of ocean. Across the Arctic was the North American mainland too and in a nuclear war scenario then that empty region would be of immense significance as well to Soviet interests.

Norway was adjacent to the Soviet northwest where the Northern Fleet was based yet while the Norwegians had military bases across their nation, these were not home to assigned NATO forces in peacetime. There were often Norwegian, American and British warships and submarines that would enter the Barents Sea and on occasion approach the White Sea though they would be harassed by Soviet forces when doing so – not the other way around as in the case of the Black Sea Fleet and Baltic Fleet when those flotillas went near NATO-controlled choke-points at the Turkish and Danish Straits.

With Western mobilisation, NATO forces had entered Norway, Iceland and the Norwegian Sea. They had troops on the ground now as well as land-based aircraft from all those airbases that had been built throughout the Cold War for such a thing in Norway and Iceland. It was the naval forces of NATO that greatly threatened Soviet interests though, especially the US Navy-led carrier task forces that formed up in the Norwegian Sea. The Americans had three of their aircraft carriers off Norway which were escorted by their own and NATO warships. From these aircraft carriers flew combat aircraft capable of hitting the Soviet mainland very efficiently and also engaging the Northern Fleet afloat. There was also a task group formed around an American battleship – the USS Wisconsin, which like the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt had been hastily commissioned for REFORGER – and groups of amphibious assault ships to support the landings of marines afloat from Britain, Holland and the United States.

This NATO naval presence was clearly meant to make sure that neither Norway nor Iceland fell to Soviet military action; in addition, that the all-important trans-Atlantic trade lines were not threatened. All told, the NATO naval strength in the Norwegian Sea was several times bigger than what the Northern Fleet could sortie.

Yet, like the Black Sea and Baltic Fleet’s, the Northern Fleet put to sea.





Fifty–Two

‘Anna Townsend’ was a thirty-two year-old single woman living in Barnstaple, Devon. She had a birth certificate, a National Insurance card and a passport that had stamps inside from trips to Ireland, Holland, Sweden and Australia. There was a bank account that she used into which her wages were paid and she used for everyday and monthly expenses while she also had a saving account for her modest savings. She paid income tax and National Insurance and also local rates. Her small, two-bedroom semi-detached house on the outskirts of Barnstaple was rented and she paid all of her utility bills and television license fees always on time. Her employer had leased her a car to go along with her job and that sat on the driveway outside and everything was always paid for and up to day legally-wise with the vehicle. A newspaper was delivered to her house by a paperboy every morning and the milkman also left a pint of milk by her doorstep as he made his early morning rounds. She had a membership card for the video rental store in town and also a library card which she sometimes used to lend books. There was a Neighbourhood Watch sticker in the widow of her front door and she had filled out all the necessary forms though had politely declined to assist any further in that. The postman had once accidentally delivered a letter for her to a neighbour and that was from overseas – in Australia where she had a pen-pal, Anna had explained – while there were also a few general interest magazines delivered weekly and monthly too.

Anna lived alone, not even with a cat, and very much kept herself to herself as English people liked to say. There had never been any sign of a boyfriend and when a nosy neighbour had managed to talk her way inside she had afterwards gossiped to the others who lived nearby how Anna’s little home was extremely tidy though somewhat bland in décor; there was gossip too for the neighbours about the empty vodka bottles in Anna’s kitchen bin. There were a few pictures of Anna holidaying abroad when she was younger in both Australia and Sweden and also a black-and-white framed picture of a little girl with two parents; Anna said that that was her with her parents taken when they were young and living on the Kent coast.

Anna worked for a local estate agent that had its office in Barnstaple though had affiliates throughout Devon, Cornwall, Dorset and Somerset. She was the only one there with a university degree – hers was a Bachelors in English Literature from the University of Manchester – though she never boasted about her education to her co-workers. In fact, Anna was regarded as a bit of an outsider among her colleagues because she seemed to avoid overtly socialising with them and wanted to go home to read even on a Saturday night! Nonetheless, she was noted as being very good at her job and there was even idle speculation as to why she didn’t go to work for a bigger company where there would be more money on offer to her.

The estate agents that Anna worked for specialised in finding properties for those looking to rent homes for a fixed period of time while they were working in Devon and the South-West of England in general, in particular those who had families with them. Contractors for industrial projects and construction were the main clients of Anna’s employer though there were also military families who were looking to move into a home that was not on an armed forces site. This was Anna’s forte: she was really good at helping find properties for such people. There were British Armed Forces as well as American military installations across the South-West and not everyone working at those wanted to have their family live on official quarters. Anna was on an approved list of estate agents to be dealt with by the Base Housing Officers at many military facilities and had established a good working relationship with such people. She was shy and didn’t flirt back with such military men, but they all knew that she knew her business very well indeed.

Anna knew where many officers in the military services of Britain and the United States who called the South-West of England their temporary home lived.


Up in Lancashire, ‘Daniel Nicholson’ called the town of Wesham home. The twenty-eight year-old who was registered as deaf in one ear but in otherwise fine physical condition: he was often seen jogging in the local area and went to the gym three times a week. He rented a smart flat above a shop in the centre of the town and lived a very unassuming lifestyle where he again kept himself to himself.

Monday through to Friday, Daniel would take the train from Wesham into Preston where he worked or travel direct from Wesham to other big towns in Lancashire like Blackburn, Blackpool, Bolton and Wigan. He was employed by a company that provided health and safety advice to factories across the region that manufactured military equipment. Daniel was an expert in this field and his company helped to protect such places, big and small, from the risks of fire, Irish terrorism or even sabotage-caused explosions. His company had a license from the MOD in Whitehall and all of its field employees like Daniel had passed a cursory check by MI-5 before they started their employment.

His physical condition and his good looks – Daniel was blond-haired with blue eyes – along with a trace of a South African accent attracted attention especially from the ladies. He would always smile at gentle innuendo from those ladies at his company offices and the women he met at the factories and industrial concerns he visited, though he never acted upon the opportunities for love or even a bit of fun that was offered to him. As to his accent, he would casually mention that his father was from Rhodesia (never Zimbabwe) but his mother had been a Lancashire lass born and bred before her untimely passing a few years back: hence his slightly odd accent.


There were seven other people living in Britain like Anna and Daniel. All were British citizens with no criminal records and each of them lived alone and had jobs that required them to travel widely. Each had access to information through their chosen profession that would be useful to a foreign nation attacking the country but none of this would be regarded as secret. The three of the nine who were women could never be reasonable expected to be called up for military service because they were all in their thirties while the half dozen men each had a physical disability that would also prelude them from military service apart from in the most dire emergencies. Each was considered a little bit of an outsider to those who knew them with no immediate family or close friends in their lives yet each lived in urban or suburban areas not little villages where such things would cause a great deal of local comment.

None of the nine were ‘real’ in terms of their identity. They each had a legend long crafted by specialists who knew exactly how to make someone ‘real’ in the West.

Anna, Daniel and the others were all born in the Soviet Union and long-serving undercover agents of the GRU (the Soviet military intelligence organisation) sent to live quiet and unassuming lives in Britain and to one day wait for the signal to be sent to them to finally put all of the effort into creating them to good use for the military objectives of their country of birth.

Along with collecting what the GRU regarded as valuable intelligence, these undercover agents were assigned to establish bases of operation inside Britain where their comrades from the GRU’s Spetsnaz commando force could operate from if and when they arrived in the country. The Soviet military intelligence service had a lot of plans for pre-wartime and wartime operations inside Britain and establishing multiple commando teams on the ground ready to act was key to many of them. After their arrival – either by overt civilian means in peacetime or by covert means during a period of international tension – those commandos would need safe and secure locations from which to operate from. Such places would have to be well out of the way of any sweeps by civilian authorities or military patrols and also the curious. There would need to be basic food and medical supplies on-hand along with methods of transportation. In addition, while the commandos were expected to bring their necessary weapons and military equipment with them during their insertion into Britain, the GRU had long ago realised that this might not always be possible. Thus, guns and explosives were smuggled into Britain beforehand and placed at and near the hideouts for the Spetsnaz commandos to use alongside or in the place of their own.

This whole effort had taken the GRU years to achieve and it was something that required constant updating. The nine agents in Britain in March 1988 had all been in the country for a different length of time to replace others who had come and gone. Other previous information had been gathered by their predecessors and similar hideouts for commando teams now abandoned. The agents in the field only knew their own missions while the actual commandos who would go into Britain had no details on-hand of the situation on the ground that they would be entering.

Britain was only one of many Western and Western-aligned countries where the GRU had agents like Anna and Daniel preparing hideouts for commandos. In every NATO country there were undercover agents just like there were the major neutral countries of the world alongside American-allied nations like Japan, South Korea and Australia to name just a few. They all kept a low profile and were chosen because they were very loyal Soviet citizens… plus had family members back home who were never going to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union.


For those commando teams to be sent to meet with the undercover agents, the GRU would only do so at the very last moment when there appeared to be the danger of warfare breaking out with the West. Unlike people such as Anna and Daniel, the Spetsnaz teams would attract attention to themselves nor would they have ever-so carefully crafted legends to allow them to avoid detection. For instance Anna in Barnstaple had a two hidden complete set of separate identities that she could fall back on in an emergency that would portray her as either an Australian or Swedish national; this wasn’t possible to do with the Spetsnaz personnel. Therefore the GRU would only send their valuable commandos into hostile territory where they were likely to be later caught and/or killed unless the situation demanded such a move.

NATO military mobilisation and the simultaneous series of pre-wartime restrictions on civilians that resembled martial law caught the GRU utterly unawares. They had no warning from the KGB that the West was about to do such a thing nor any political guidance to act first. All of a sudden the countries of the West shut down their borders and the only access in and out of them was to citizens of other countries heading home, the transfer away from the frontlines of military dependants and the movement of troops. There were opportunities with these, but nothing like the open borders beforehand.

It was an utter disaster for the GRU and their carefully-drafted plans to get their key personnel westwards to support the coming war…

…a war which the West believed was coming though one that no one in charge behind the Iron Curtain had actually been on the brink of launching either. This was why the commandos hadn’t been sent into NATO countries: the Soviet Union hadn’t been planning a strike.

Western mobilisation for what the Soviets saw as Barbarossa #2 meant that there would be rear-areas in those countries that it would be most opportune to attack just like if the Soviets themselves were about to strike. As the Soviets themselves mobilised to defend against a NATO strike the GRU was instructed to send its commandos into Western nations and conduct attacks on rear-area targets once the signal was given for them to begin: when that would occur would be a political decision.

There were still gaps in the borders of Western countries that the GRU set out to exploit to get their Spetsnaz teams into place to meet up with their undercover agents. Throughout mainland Europe and from Central America into the United States there were infiltration routes that could be used if care was taken. Military patrols by NATO forces on their borders were predicable with study and the great deal of internal movement of military equipment and supplies between NATO countries offered further opportunities.

The British mainland was something different though. The British had been very effective at sealing their borders when Transition to War (TtW) began in an effort to stop infiltration attempts. Any aircraft was likely to be shot down and a boat ran the very real risk of being sunk. The country was being used as a military base and there were too many radars, sensors and pairs of eyes looking outwards. Moreover, Britain’s geographic position at the western edge of Europe meant that any attempt at infiltration by air or on a boat meant passing through multiple patrol zones of the armed forces of other nations too.

Thus, the only route into Britain for the Spetsnaz teams assigned to operate in the country would be by using ‘friendly’ ships or submarines landing them on (hopefully) deserted stretches of coast.


Once the commando teams were underway to Britain, coded radio signals were sent to the nine undercover agents there. Anna, Daniel and the others had radio equipment in their homes that they were supposed to monitor at certain times (not every day either) for such a signal as the GRU sent them. This equipment was state-of-the-art and disguised as anything but what it was: a radio or a Sony Walkman for example. They were never to use this equipment to broadcast messages of their own unless certain situations allowed for that because the GRU knew all about the capabilities of NATO radio tracking equipment and didn’t doubt how good those Western operators of such systems would be at their jobs.

With a matter such as this though, the nine agents in Britain were expected to make a simple acknowledgement of the signal. This would be extremely brief and would also involve them removing their radio equipment out of their homes and to somewhere out of the way where quick use could be made.

Seven acknowledgement signals were received back to the GRU, not nine. To contact those other two agents in Britain, the GRU repeated their efforts at radio communication, but to no avail. They had no idea why two of their agents didn’t respond. Was their equipment faulty? Were they under surveillance at the time and didn’t want to risk capture? Had they been caught up in civil disturbances that the Soviet Embassy in London was reporting had plagued Britain? Had the two agents forgot their duties to the Motherland? Or, worse, had those agents defected recently to the British authorities?

The GRU had no answers to this worrying development.


Anna found solace from the missing of her homeland and the parents she had back home in the copious amounts of (neat) vodka she would consume at home alone at night. Daniel liked to work out in the gym to escape reflecting upon the wife and young child that he had at home in the Soviet Union. The separation from their lives back home hit all GRU undercover agents abroad in different ways. Their lives were intentionally lonely and they were in foreign countries where at any moment there could come the crashing in of their front doors by armed men seeking to arrest them. There was even the chance that they could face execution as spies.

One of the nine GRU agents in Britain – ‘Steven Douglas’, an employee of British Aerospace’s military division who oversaw field maintenance of aircraft across Scotland for his company but who spied on installations for his real home country – had recently fallen head over heels in love with a woman in Glasgow where he was living. He had for a while been answering adverts in the local newspaper for dating to release his inner sexual needs but there was one woman who stole his heart. She didn’t know the ‘real’ Steven Douglas, and if he had his way she never would, but for many years now his whole life had been based around successfully telling lies. The lovebirds were inseparable and Steven spent most of his free time at her house rather than his own. He had no time for monitoring his radio at home despite his inner fears and occasional nightmare of his GRU employers sending a hit squad to take his life due to his betrayal of his mission. When TtW occurred, his love’s neighbourhood had seen much violence and there had been rioting outside her home; he had moved in there and forgot about both of his employers and their needs for him.

It wasn’t Romeo and Juliet, but it was why Steven didn’t acknowledge the signal sent to him from his GRU masters.

Another undercover GRU agent was ‘Michael Carnegie’, a computer technician living in London who was working for a small company that had recently managed to secure a portion of a Government contract to install personal computers in the offices of workers across many ministries. This job gave Michael plenty of access to buildings and installations across Whitehall and he had been busy copying keys and drawing diagrams of the internal layouts of the places he visited: visits that often took place late at night where no one was around to watch over him. Unfortunately, Michael had been the victim of a street robbery near his home in Shoreditch in East London during the first days of TtW. Gangs of teenagers from the East End had been at that time conducting a crime wave to steal and even loot. Michael had been attacked by one of these gangs and refused to hand over his wallet – which held much of his carefully-crafted legend – to them and they had resorted to stabbing him to death with a kitchen knife before taking that wallet, pocketing the little amount of cash inside and then discarding it.

They didn’t know what a service they had done to their country for Michael had been someone very committed to acting for his GRU masters.

Anna and Daniel were among the seven who acknowledged their signal to prepare for the arrival of their comrades from abroad, yet one of those other five had already gone and done something that no one would have expected.


Her name was apparently ‘Lauren Turner’ and she had set up home in Portsmouth. Lauren’s cover was that of a civilian employee of the Royal Navy (RN) working in the personnel office sector of the RN base in the city, HMS Nelson (shore establishments of the RN were given names such as these following tradition). She had for a long time been gathering personal details of warship officers and conducting any spying activities around the base that she could. In all honestly, she had not been as successful at this she had hoped to be yet she had managed to fulfil the main part of her mission in Britain which was to establish a pair of separate hideouts in southern Hampshire for the arrival one day of Spetsnaz troops as well as stocking those locations with what was smuggled into the country for the commandos' use.

Lauren was a very intelligent woman who had proved herself before on operations for the GRU in the United States as well as at home in the Soviet Union. She was a natural-born liar with an expressed passion for the Soviet way of life and its communist form of government which she actually secretly detested. This was down to her hatred for her parents, both of whom were GRU personnel themselves though who had never served abroad as their daughter did. Her father had molested her as a child and her mother had slapped Lauren – then known as Irina Ivanovna Pavlenko – right across the face the one time that she had dared try to bring this horrible sexual abuse to light. Given an opportunity, a psychologist would have diagnosed this incident, occurring at the young age that it did, as being the root cause of Lauren’s later total rejection of the Soviet way of life, but the only psychologists Lauren ever saw worked for the GRU and would never have any further dealings with her had they knew about what her father had done and how her mother had been complicit in the continuation of that abuse through indifference.

Like she lied to everyone else, Lauren had been utter deceptive with the GRU psychologists who had spent time with her before she had come to Britain as they tried to seek the inner depths of her mind to look for possible hints of future betrayal inside of her. Lauren had long ago learnt to shut her mind off when she needed to.

Those hatreds that Lauren held deep down inside her hadn’t stopped her serving her country at home and abroad with the GRU though. She had decided that she would only do something when she thought that the best possible results could come of her actions. She wanted to damage the organisation that her parents belonged to, hurt her parents by having the GRU turn on them and also get away clean from any retaliation by the GRU. During her many years of training and indoctrination, Lauren had learnt how the families of those who betrayed the Motherland would suffer just as the traitor would and also that the GRU would spare no expense in tracking down anyone foolish enough to turn against it.

When Portsmouth became one of the closed naval towns on March 2nd, Lauren had been inside the cordons that went up to isolate the city from the rest of Britain. Civilian employees like her were all semi-conscripted by the RN and there was suddenly no way of her getting to those hideouts that she had prepared for the possible arrival of commandos; her little flat in Portsmouth’s Hilsea district was inside that cordon though along with the apparently fault video recorder in a cupboard which was actually her radio.

Lauren went to see the officer in charge of the RN Police’s Special Investigation Branch (SIB) at HMS Nelson the following day. She knew the man’s name and where he lived, but thought it best to see him in his office. After waiting for a while for an appointment without saying what it was all about, Lauren was called into see the Lieutenant-Commander (Lt-Cdr). He didn’t really have the time to be dealing with civilian employees being all mysterious with his secretary but the SIB officer was aware of instructions from the Commodore commanding the whole of Portsmouth, not just the naval base, that the civilians inside the outer cordon needed to be handled with care unless the city erupt into violence against the necessary military rule imposed to protect HMS Nelson.

The Lt-Cdr was very quickly told everything by Lauren and was left more than a little bit shocked at what she told him. He had doubted her for a few moments before she started reeling off the particulars of GRU spying techniques, many of which he had read about before in briefing documents. A junior SIB officer was called in to the Lt-Cdr’s officer to continue talking to Lauren while phone calls were made by the senior military policeman.

The radio equipment was recovered at Lauren’s house along with the sealed polythene bag buried in her garden containing her two other sets of identification. Lauren was able to give the SIB the name of a now-retired RN staff officer who had worked at the MOD in London and who been the man responsible for allowing her to get her job in Portsmouth; she told them that the man was paid by the GRU to be a traitor to his country. Maps were produced and Lauren pointed out the two hideouts that she had set up for the Spetsnaz commandos to use at their leisure. Moreover, she went over the improvised bobby-trap systems she had installed at each site plus the details of what was stored at those locations. The names of the few GRU operatives that she had had dealings with since being in the country – a list that was rather short in all honesty – was given over to the SIB.

Lauren could tell them a lot and promised to be the source of more information on GRU activities elsewhere too. She was a goldmine of intelligence and had a real willingness to be as helpful as possible… as long as those to whom she had defected to were willing to give her a new life and identity somewhere, anywhere that the GRU wouldn’t be able to find her.


As to Lauren’s radio, she told her latter questioners from MI-5 and the military intelligence service DIS all about it. Thus this was why the signal went out from the radio issued to Lauren like six others did to acknowledge the fact that Spetsnaz commandos were on their way to Britain. As to other GRU agents using deep cover like hers, Lauren had been unable to give any information there. Yet, British Intelligence would were able to track response signals like the one they sent back to the unwitting GRU to general areas of the country and then attempt to further hunt down Soviet agents in those places while monitoring nearby stretches of coastline to those regions.

Down in Hampshire, the coast would be watched like in other places for small submarines landing commandos, but it was known exactly where such a Spetsnaz team would be heading to lay low and move into an established base camp. When they did so, they would have a ‘meeting’ with British commandos ready in ambush positions to properly ‘greet’ them into the country.

Fifty–Five

The British military commitment to Norway was quite significant. While the majority of the armed forces was either deployed at home or in West Germany, there were still troops, aircraft and marines sent to Norway. Not only were those forces sent there to defend that country’s sovereignty as part of a NATO commitment, but their deployment was to enhance the security of Britain from there too.

Making sure that Norway wouldn’t fall to Soviet occupation and become a base for attacks launched against the UK was very important to the British Armed Forces.


When LION had begun, an RAF squadron had been the first of many British military assets to reach Norway. No. 1 Squadron with sixteen Harrier GR5s had flown from their base at RAF Wittering in Cambridgeshire to Sola Air Station in southern Norway first before then moving northwards to Bardufoss Air Station. Victor tankers refuelled the aircraft during their ferry flights all the way up into the Norwegian Arctic while Hercules transports moved personnel and some lighter equipment.

1 Squadron had previously deployed to Bardufoss on many exercises and there was fuel, weapons and equipment stored at the airbase for their use. The Norwegian guard force at the warehouses at once assisted the RAF personnel who came in by the Hercules’ in moving those stores so that 1 Squadron could quickly begin flight operations.

Behind those Harriers came troops from the second battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (2 RRF). 2 RRF was the British Army unit assigned to the NATO multi-nation ‘Allied Mobile Force – Land’ (AMF-L): a brigade-sized force of troops tasked with rapid movement to potential trouble spots to help defend NATO nations. The battalion was based at Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain and had been expecting to join with Canadian, Luxembourgish, Italian, Spanish and West German units. The AMF-L was instead going to Denmark and without either Canadian or Italian troops attached, but the cold-weather trained men of the 2 RRF – along with an attached battery of guns from the Royal Artillery – was transferred out of that formation and sent by more RAF Hercules aircraft up to Evenes Airport. Like Bardufoss, Evenes was in western Finmark and near Narvik, which would quickly become the centre point of British and then American military activity in northern Norway.

The troops travelled light but there were stores waiting for them on the ground; the Norwegians had for many years agreed to warehousing much military equipment at secure sites inside their country as long as no military units were garrisoned on their territory. Once they gathered up what they needed to from those warehouses, they set off for the little town of Skibotn located on the Lyngenfjorden – a place that would soon become famous in British military history.

These first moves to establish a British military presence on the ground in Norway were undertaken with great haste by the lead units and there were very few logistical difficulties in getting them there. Such a deployment had been long practised and there was smooth Norwegian cooperation because the government in Oslo had been watching with alarm the ongoing situation with Soviet aggression.

Following those Harriers and then troops from Bulford Camp came other forces in the following days. The RAF moved a squadron of Jaguar GR1 strike-fighters to Norway from RAF Coltishall in Norfolk and then two RAF Regiment squadrons: one of Rapier SAM-launchers and another of airfield defence troops in light armoured vehicles. These follow-on assets moved with many supporting assets and nearly everything apart from the Jaguars and the personnel needed was sent by ship. Requisitioned civilian ships were sent from Britain to Narvik and from there the RAF was able to prepare for sustained combat operations in Norway when the need arose.

Later RAF deployments to Norway came No. 240 Squadron. This formation was an Operational Conversion and training unit in peacetime for the RAF, but it was sent with five Chinook HC1 heavy-lift and seven Puma HC1 medium-lift helicopters. These helicopters were to assist in operations for the troops that followed the 2 RRF to Norway.

The 5th Airborne Brigade was to be the main British Army fighting force in Norway and it deployed initially with its three infantry battalions – two from the Parachute Regiment and the third a Gurkha formation – along with attached battalion-sized regiments from the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers and the Army Air Corps. Bodo Air Station, which was further down the coast from Narvik, was where the 5th Brigade initially formed up before it was moved up to Narvik first and then to link up with 2 RRF at the Lyngenfjorden.

Within days, the 5th Brigade was joined by two squadrons from the Life Guards with their light armoured vehicles and then another battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers was flown up from their barracks at Dover. Once again this was a light formation of troops expected to move on foot or at best in trucks, but the terrain to which they were deployed to was rather rugged. There were further smaller detachments of British Army units – mainly reservists and rear-area support troops – later added, but the reinforced 5th Brigade was the main British land combat force in-place in Norway.

The Royal Marines split their forces during their deployment. Two of their combat battalions – 40 and 42 Commando – joined the flotilla of amphibious ships that left Devonport and Portsmouth to join with the RN presence in the Norwegian Sea. The 3rd Commando Brigade’s gunners, engineers and helicopters also went with the HMS Fearless, HMS Intrepid and transport ships of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. Conditions aboard for those marines were tight but not too uncomfortable as they would have been had the extra men from 45 Commando joined them afloat. Instead, that battalion was flown from its base in Arbroath on the east coast of Scotland to Evenes where the marines were joined by instructors from the famed Mountain & Arctic Warfare Cadre – an elite unit which had spent much time training marines up in northern Norway over the years.

The Royal Marines on land were then joined by Royal Marine Reservists and small detachments fused together in the reformed 41 Commando. This battalion was two thirds strength compared to the other three, but the quality of its men was just as good as all of the others. All Royal Marines were expected to be tough and independent soldiers ready to face any conditions.

Keeping some Royal Marines afloat and the rest in the Narvik–Evenes area wasn’t just about making life more comfortable for the men.

The Royal Marines were concerned that having all of their troops aboard ships would mean that they would be running the risk of seeing all of those men drown if there was a concentrated missile attack upon those ships by enemy action. The ships would be greatly protected, but it was still not best to put all ones eggs in the same basket. 3rd Brigade was tasked as a counterattack force to defend Finmark and those marines of 41 and 45 Commando could easily be moved by ship or air when the need arose.

In addition to these deployments by the RAF, the British Army and the Royal Marines, the RN sent personnel to Norway. The part NATO-funded base at Haakonsvern near Bergen would support RN vessels at sea while the civilian facilities at Narvik were turned into a major trans-Atlantic shipping point. Having personnel on the ground at these facilities would assist RN activities in the Norwegian Sea.


Norway, along with Denmark and the Schleswig-Holstein province of West Germany, were areas assigned to Allied Forces Northern Europe (AFNORTH). This regional headquarters of NATO was answerable to General Galvin in Belgium and was commanded in-theatre by General Sir Geoffrey Howlett from Kolsas near Oslo. This former Parachute Regiment officer and commandant of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst had previously spent much of his engaged in keeping the peace politically between Norwegian, Danish, West German, American and British military personnel attached to his command. Each had different ideas as to what military forces from their country would do in preparation for a wartime situation and arguments were known to often break out between them.

With Norway now at the frontlines in the brewing East-West conflict, many of those difficulties were resolved due to the realisation that everyone needed to work together. Still, it wasn’t an easy position for anyone to hold because AFNORTH covered such a large geographical area from the mainland of West Germany and the Baltic Approaches in the south all the way up to Finmark. Thankfully, Howlett had subordinate commanders for these different geographical areas and as NATO mobilised his Danish officer-in-command down at Karup Airbase took over command of that southern area; this delegation took away much of the drama that commanding a multi-national command brought about.

Operational command for Norway was then split in two with the southern and northern portions of the country under different Norwegian military officers commanding each. The Norwegian in command of the part of his country north of Norway was an effective soldier concerned greatly about the territorial sovereignty of his country though also someone willing to work well with the American and British forces flooding into the region.

The mission of Howlett’s Northern Norway command was to stop a Soviet attempt to seize Finmark and smash NATO forces there. Intelligence reports from satellites and electronic intercepts pointed to large Soviet ground and air forces being established in the Kola Peninsula opposite Finmark. The border between Norway and the Soviet Union was small and very far eastwards with much of northern Finland geographically positioned in between.

Trying to think like their Soviet counterparts, Howlett’s operations staff devised what they thought would be a sensible Soviet military strategy for attacking and conquering Finmark. There would be airmobile and amphibious assaults to seize key points across eastern Finmark as the prelude to a land offensive following Highway-6 by the Soviet Army. That one, lonely road ran from the Soviet frontier all the way to Narvik though it was only a two-lane road that went all over the place rather than in any sort of straight line. There were countless ways to block that road as it wound through valleys between mountains and over rivers. NATO special forces troops would make any effort to put that road to use hell for the Soviet Army no matter how many paratroopers and marines of their own that they used to try to seize and guard key points. Therefore, a major flanking attack was expected to be made through Finnish Lapland, Finnish neutrality notwithstanding. There were more roads and easier terrain to traverse for an attacking force coming westwards that way.

This predicted strategy envisaged the Soviets not striking through Sweden to violate their neutrality.

Howlett knew that there was nothing wrong with such thinking on the part of his planning staff and he would be very surprised if the Soviets did anything else once they finally launched open warfare against the West. They would want to engage and destroy NATO forces in Norway because these would be seen as posing a strategic threat to the Kola Peninsula and that a-joining area of the Soviet Union. Their naval activities would want a secure left (southern) flank and by holding Finmark there would be no use of the airfields in the region against Soviet military targets.

Most of Finmark, everything east of the Lyngenfjorden, had long been written off by NATO commanders… long before Howlett arrived as AFNORTH commander. There were no large Norwegian military bases in that area and once Norwegian military mobilisation begun, the civilian authorities begun making mandatory evacuations of those Norwegians living east of the Lyngenfjorden. All Norwegian and NATO military activity – apart from fighter patrols and special forces on the ground – was thus afterwards concentrated in what was known as ‘Fortress Norway’. Between the easily-defendable Lyngenfjorden and the mountains that formed the Swedish frontier, there was just one access route for the expected Soviet spearheads to try to pour through. The Norwegians had missile boats and coastal artillery to protect the seaward flank of Fortress Norway stretching more than a hundred miles all the way back west which were supported by NATO forces too.

NATO would let the Soviets come to them after crossing much of Finmark and Lapland too and then fight them at a place of Western choosing in a position thought to be very defendable.

As the final countdown for war begun, NATO forces in Norway – with a strong British presence – waited for that coming offensive.





Fifty–Six

To the civilians who lived near Geilenkirchen Airbase in the Rhineland the last few years had seen the arrival of many big four-engined jet aircraft which made plenty of noise during their flight operations. The Dutch and West German locals (the airbase was right up against the border with the Netherlands) were told by NATO public relations people that the twenty-one militarised Boeing-707s were vital for the national security of Western nations. All those civilians wanted was just a little bit of peace from the constant flying operations!

Geilenkirchen was home to the NATO ‘E-3A Component’. This was a collection of eighteen E-3A Sentry airborne radar aircraft and three full-sized training aircraft that came without the rotating radar-dome mounted above the fuselage. The aircraft and the base were manned by a wide collection of personnel from many NATO countries and was a joint-funded effort with the aircraft wearing the registration on their tails of the Luxembourgish Air Force (all aircraft were required by international agreement to be registered in a nation state). There were three operational squadrons which conducted regular deployments away from their home bases to various airfields across the NATO nations.

When NATO mobilised, all of the big jets flew away. Some went to Norway and others to Turkey though the majority moved to Melsbroek Airbase in Belgium; a location which was very far from the Inter-German Border and the Soviet tactical missile forces lined up behind that frontier.

Into Geilenkirchen instead came A-10A Thunderbolt attack-fighters from USAF airfields in Britain. These fighters conducted even more intense flight missions than the departed E-3As including very loud combat take-offs to guard against the risk of being shot down as they got airborne.

Of course, by that point the locals had more things to worry about than aircraft noise with their government making even stringent restrictions on their daily lives than the British authorities had done to their own.


The Welsh island of Anglesey was home to two military airfields: RAF Mona and RAF Valley. The former was a relief airfield for aircraft operating for the busy latter though RAF Mona had long been tasked with a wartime role.

Hawk T1 jet trainers usually flew from RAF Valley. Pilots who wanted to fly combat aircraft for the RAF were put through advanced training from this facility and the Hawks were a regular sight over the skies of this part of Wales as well as the Irish Sea. The locals on Anglesey didn’t really object to the airbase or the aircraft because of the significant contribution that the RAF put into the local economy. There were rules for peacetime flying that the RAF stuck too as well. In addition, there were Sea King search-and-rescue helicopters that flew from RAF Valley that were known to provide mountain and sea rescue to civilians – in this instance the military public relations people didn’t need to make any effort to reassure the people of Anglesey about the need for a military base on their island.

LION saw the Hawks leave RAF Valley. Like other Hawk trainers from across Britain, those aircraft were fitted with gun pods and Sidewinder missiles to provide air defence of the country. New bases were sought for the Hawks away from RAF Valley as ‘shadow squadrons’ were activated for their command.

Into RAF Valley and the nearby satellite airfield came the Americans. Night-time flights saw the arrival of aircraft viewed in daytime as futuristic and strange-looking black jets. Civilians were kept away from both airfields though the aircraft were photographed by a few fascinated locals. They were called ‘F-19 Ghostriders’, one resident of Dyffryn assured anyone who would listen to him, and written about in a technothriller book that he had read the year before.

Whatever they were called, they rarely flew during the daylight and the American airmen didn’t want anyone coming near their secretive aircraft.


On Sicily, the USAF and US Navy airbases on that Italian island had all been abandoned midway through the final week before World War Three erupted. With the Italian Parliament meeting and debating a move to intern the American military forces based there, the United States Armed Forces acted first and commenced an evacuation.

The US Navy had for many years been making use of Sigonella Airbase to base maritime patrol aircraft, helicopters and liaison aircraft there to support their Sixth Fleet operations in the Mediterranean. Sicily was centrally located and perfectly suitable for such a facility. Italian political moves to abandon its NATO allies had made such a position untenable and so the US Navy moved everything and everyone out and transferred its base in the Mediterranean across to British facilities on Cyrus… Greek-Cypriot complaints notwithstanding.

Comiso Airbase was a USAF facility where nuclear-armed BGM-109G Gryphon cruise missiles were based like they were in Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and West Germany. Much money had been spent on constructing the infrastructure at Comiso for the missiles while at the same time the Italian Communist Party had put a lot of effort into protesting that deployment. As the Italians set about vacating their treaty commitments, a decision was taken at the highest levels in Washington that the missiles would have to go.

Once again, it was to the British bases on Cyprus to where those cruise missiles were sent. If the Greek-Cypriots were upset at the presence of conventional American military forces on their island, then they were soon going to be absolutely furious with the nuclear warheads on the BGM-109G Gryphons arriving too.


NATO moves like these were just the tip of the iceberg when it came to redeploying their military air and missile assets as the Western alliance prepared for war. All across the western half of the European continent, aircraft, missiles and personnel were transferred to new locations.

There was haste employed though at the same time generally everything (apart from the abandonment of bases in Italy and Greece) fell back on long-established NATO plans.

There were headquarters formations long organised for command and control of NATO air forces in Europe as well as the anticipated large reinforcement of aircraft coming from the United States. Geographical areas of operation were set up and aircraft arriving in Europe or transferring across the continent would then come under the command of these. For operations over the northern portions of West Germany as well as the Low Countries there was the Second Allied Tactical Air Force (2 ATAF). The Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force (4 ATAF) would command air operations over central and southern West Germany. In the north of Italy, the Fifth Allied Tactical Air Force (5 ATAF) would be the headquarters there while out in Greece and Turkey there would be the Sixth Allied Tactical Air Force (6 ATAF). Air operations over the Baltic Approaches and Norway didn’t have a numbered air force assigned, but one wasn’t actually needed there.

The behaviour of the government in Rome meant that the 5 ATAF was not activated in-place when NATO mobilised. The Portuguese and Spanish air assets meant to deploy to Italy with American aircraft weren’t now going there. NATO military officers departed the headquarters facility that they had at Vicenza just as the battalion of American paratroopers nearby flew out for good and headed for Denmark. It was decided that the 5 ATAF would be established in Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein instead.

The Greeks weren’t behaving as hostile as the Italians were to their NATO ‘allies’ but at the same time there was no way that they were willing to host NATO forces on their soil. Athens regarded such a thing as an invite to attack by Soviet forces and while they would defend themselves from external attack, they were going to do so on their own. Therefore, 6 ATAF was activated only in Turkey and Cyprus. American aircraft flew into Turkish bases – the Turks were more than glad to have the reinforcement of their country’s defences – and Turkey became the southern flank of NATO.

Both 2 ATAF and 4 ATAF quickly doubled in size from their pre-mobilisation strengths. The two command formations previously had American, Belgian, British, Canadian, Dutch and West German aircraft assigned and those countries reinforced their commitments to the two joint air forces while the Spanish sent some aircraft to the 4 ATAF too. The French Air Force was mobilised ready to support both though, mirroring what the French Army had done, stood behind NATO forces as a separate formation ready for reinforcement missions.

In Britain, both the RAF and the USAF maintained significant strength. The RAF kept many aircraft back home despite deploying some aircraft to Norway and also reinforcing those already in West Germany with the 2 ATAF. There was air defence missions of the UK to be undertaken as well as the need to keep behind a long-range strike force for strategic missions. The USAF brought two extra wings of F-111s into Britain to join the two already there while at the same time adding to their established forces for long-range strike missions a wing of F-15A Eagle fighters, a wing of their FB-111As, two wings of B-52G Stratofortress’ and their tactical-group of secretive F-117A Night Hawks: those so-called ‘Stealth Fighters’ were the aircraft sent to Anglesey.

This massive reinforcement of American air power in Britain alongside the substantial RAF forces remaining in-place meant that there were more than six hundred combat aircraft flying from British airbases ready for war. There was a large staff of British officers at RAF High Wycombe meant to command the UK Air Defence Region while the USAF had their Third US Air Force headquarters at RAF Mildenhall. Prestige-wise the British would have wanted command over all air forces based in their country, yet two thirds of that six hundred number were American aircraft. It was decided to re-designate the American command staff as headquarters for the Third Allied Tactical Air Force (3 ATAF) as long as RAF High Wycombe remained a strong subordinate role in that set-up for air defence missions. With the USAF using British bases as a secure rear-are base for their planned long-range operations against attacking Soviet-led forces, the idea was that the small RAF strategic striking force would be assisted in terms of logistics, air-refuelling and intelligence by their American counterparts.

The headquarters of 5 ATAF was deployed to Karup Airbase and ended up being the smallest of the NATO numbered air forces ready to defend the West against attack. There were Danish and West German aircraft as part of 5 ATAF (including land-based aircraft of the West German Navy) as well as some American combat aircraft too. Many of the airbases from where 5 ATAF assigned aircraft were stationed were considered at risk of direct enemy assault though and many preparations were made away from the attentions of the concerned Danes for 5 ATAF to pack up and leave Denmark for southern Norway should the worst happen.

There wasn’t a numbered NATO air force for Western forces in northern Norway. AFNORTH had an air staff under General Howlett’s Norwegian subordinate commander and a USAF Lieutenant-General was sent to fill this role from the command base at Reitan near Bodo.

By establishing these separate commands with distinct areas of operation, NATO wasn’t engaged in a vanity exercise. It was a very necessary thing to do as the final countdown to war begun and the Soviets were showing no effort to come to a diplomatic solution to ease tensions. Aircraft were going to be more important in the Third World War than any other previous war and with NATO being the multi-national organisation that it was, there needed to be effective control over them with clear chains of command established.