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

One Hundred & Seventy–Seven

BLACKSMITH had been about more than just liberating those trapped in the Hannover pocket. The original aim of General Kenny’s operation had to go past Hannover and either more further north or east from there by the end of the day. However, with the sorry state of those NATO troops trapped in the area around the city, as well as the urgent need for humanitarian relief, further advances had been delayed as those trapped British and Bundeswehr forces were rapidly resupplied and civilians were begun to be evacuated.

Additional military operations were planned for the following day, though that brought about the problem of allowing the enemy – at first caught off guard – to react accordingly to stop any further NATO advances. Thus, in response, those forces under General Kenny’s command in what had begun a salient deep into Soviet lines were strengthened and the scope of planned operations expanded. This was a natural course of events though not something initially planned for with BLACKSMITH.

General Kenny eventually decided that what had begun a single corps attack to relieve Hannover was to be only the start of a multi-corps major counter-offensive across much of northern Germany… one which the French Second Army would later join too. The enemy defences had been shown to be brittle, their reactions weak and their whole position liable to collapse should NATO be able to strike with enough force and certain guile too. Throughout the evening and the night of March 24th and pre-dawn the next morning, he marshalled his own forces and liaised with those not under his command on either flank to make BLACKSMITH the overwhelming success that he had always hoped it would be. General Galvin instructed him to make the maximum effort in trying to clear as much West German territory as possible of occupying forces and with that was the hope that as much damage as possible would be done to the Soviet Army: SACEUR didn’t want them escaping and being able to strike again if they were able to withdrawn and then recover.


Getting ready for further offensive military operations on the North German Plain meant moving around combat forces and also command elements. The British I Corps had gone to relieve the Bundeswehr’s I Corps in Hannover yet both of those hadn’t been the exclusive national commands as their names denoted. Both contained multiple elements from different NATO countries which would need reorganising as BLACKSMITH was expanded. There were other commands too with the British Second Army: the Bundeswehr IV Corps along the Weser north of the penetration at Hameln, the US III Corps south of there and the Belgian I Corps which had been a shadow of its former self after being effectively stood down last week all major assets deployed elsewhere. With that Belgian headquarters, there was a full staff and many rear-area support elements available and initially General Kenny had wanted to reactivate it inside the salient east of the Weser to become the operational command for some his combat forces already across the river and others fast moving that way.

Politics came into play though with that. The US Army moved to have their corps command take over the operational sector where that Belgian headquarters was to be as they were committing a highly-capable division over the Weser along with much fire support too. General Kenny got a lot of headache from what was really prestige efforts on the part of the Americans not wanting to be under the command of (even if it was in name only) the armed forces of a small country like Belgium. They forgot that the Belgians were their allies and were committing many forces to the British Second Army, far more than their own after the loss of half of the US III Corps at Einbeck, all in the name of pride. Rather than let the drama go on, General Kenny had acceded to the pressure which had been put on him while determined not to let anyone forget how important the Belgian Army was alongside his British, Bundeswehr, Portuguese and, of course, American forces.

Five corps commands were thus with the British Second Army as the second day’s counter-offensive operations begun. The former Kampfgruppe Weser formed the Bundeswehr IV Corps along the Weser with two divisions (one Belgian and the other West German) ready to hold back any cross-river distraction efforts to the left. Three divisions of the British I Corps were positioned around Hannover ready to move northwards towards the Aller River with much effort being directed towards guarding their own left flank – facing back towards the west but protected in part by the lower reaches of the Leine River – against efforts from Soviet forces on the Weser to move against them rather than be trapped. In Hannover, the Bundeswehr I Corps with its pair of British and West German battered divisions would concentrate their defences facing to the east against any enemy countermoves coming from that direction. Next in line was the US III Corps with a brigade of US paratroopers recently arrived from pre-war combat operations in Nicaragua along with the US 2nd Armored and British 5th Infantry Divisions; their mission was to engage enemy forces on and over the Leine south of Hannover. Finally, back on the western side of the Weser the Belgian I Corps operate where the Americans had commanded previously in guarding the right flank using two divisions (the Belgian 1st Infantry and the US 5th Mechanized Infantry Divisions) with a view to moving forward later in the day depending upon the hoped-for success that the US III Corps might have.

To control all of the planned operations for this large NATO force was an immense undertaking, especially with the multi-national composition. Many units had taken losses and there were also a lot of reservists in-place of regular soldiers. The ground where they would operate in had recently been violently seized from the British Second Army and was even closer to Soviet airfields than when General Kenny had his forces back on the Weser. What opposition had been encountered beforehand was weak, yet that didn’t guarantee that that would be the case with other enemy forces.


Delaying the offensive from late yesterday to today meant that the enemy forces ahead in territory which General Kenny wanted to take back were much stronger too… well at least on paper. Those two Soviet field armies, with fresh troops from inside the Soviet Union itself, had arrived on the North German Plain. The designations of the commands for the pair of four division strong field armies were unknown, though they were expected to be new yet with a history attached. Intelligence pointed to each controlling tank-heavy Category C Soviet Army units with reservists and older equipment though there were some worrying indications that there may have been some more capable formations with them.

‘Field Army A’ – later identified as the Soviet Second Guards Army with one Cat. B and three Cat. C motorised rifle divisions – had crossed the Inter-German Border and was approaching liberated Hannover from the northeast. It was thought to be heading for the crossings over the Aller which the British I Corps was going to head for and the northern pincer of an envelopment manoeuvre.

Two Cat. C tank divisions and then, surprisingly, a pair of Cat. A divisions (the 2GMRD from Moscow & the 4GTD from Nizhniy Novgorod) formed ‘Field Army B’: what was the Soviet Twenty-Second Guards Army. This southern pincer had moved from the Magdeburg area in East Germany before setting a course across the border south of the ruins of Braunschweig and actually heading directly for the Hameln crossing.

These fresh formations approaching were in addition to the scattered remains of part of the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army engaged yesterday during the offensive plus four more field armies too: the Soviet First Guards & Eleventh Guards Armys to the north of the salient and to the south the Soviet Seventh Tank and the Polish Second Armys. These were each strong enemy forces not ready to be easily beaten in battle and with now experienced and combat-hardened troops in their ranks. Overall, the numbers of men, and especially tanks, were on the Soviet side and all intelligence pointed to a tough fight ready to be put up by them too.

Not many people had had much faith in BLACKSMITH originally though.

*​

The Americans moved first with their helicopters getting airborne in the moments before light appeared in the eastern skies. Lt.-General Crosbie Saint as US III Corps commander was personally directing the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division rather than Major-General Price who had wanted a third combat-manoeuvre formation after his Forward Brigade had been left behind back over the Weser. From airheads hastily established in fields near a school south of Hameln, Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters which had served with the destroyed 101st Air Assault Infantry Division lifted two battalions of paratroopers into an airmobile attack. The helicopters flew fast and low, racing around SAM batteries silenced by long-range artillery bombardments and engaged too by escorting Apache gunships to land near the towns of Elze and Gronau. There were Soviet improvised crossings over the Leine at these locations and the men of 1/504 INF & 3/504 INF raced to take them after the helicopters then went back to Hameln to get the third battalion as well as some airmobile artillery too.

This forward airmobile assault went past the right flank of the Soviet Seventh Tank Army and deep into the enemy rear. A massive artillery assault was underway by the time those initial waves of troops had gone into action against rear-area enemy forces and so the helicopters had to take a longer, looping route backwards less they share the same airspace as hundreds of free-flight artillery shells.

That artillery barrage preceded the advance of the 2nd Armored Division. ‘Hell On Wheels’ had been the nickname of the division in WW2, yet this morning they unleashed carnage whilst mounted on tracks instead. First one then a second brigade advanced forward with M-1A1 tanks leading M-2 armoured infantry vehicles. The US Army edged forward following routes taken by scouts as they turned the flank of the Soviet Seventh Tank Army’s northernmost formation, the 107MRD, which had faced a night of air attacks as it had tried to edge forwards. After passing through the town of Coppenbrugge and following Highway-1, engagements were made against some of those Soviet scouts who had made it forwards even when heavily attacked from the air and those came on the slopes of the Ith Hills as the 2nd Armored Division raced for the Leine beyond. Those forests which covered the hills, rocky crags and ridges there provided cover and caused the detachment of a battalion of mechanized infantry to deal with them decisively less they melt away and come back to hit the logistics units following the American combat forces.

Soon enough, the main body of tanks and mechanised infantry had reached Elze and then the Leine to relieve the paratroopers there. It had been a mad dash as they had raced through the broken German countryside and there had been some delays caused by war damage as well as pre-war demolition to deny a westwards advance along this very route across low ground, but the 2nd Armored Division had made it and they now closed up upon those crossings over the Leine held open for their arrival.

Elements of the Soviet Seventh Tank Army had been moving northwards to engage the NATO forces in the Hannover-Hameln Salient though that difficult terrain of the Ith Hills and the meandering course of the Weser had restricted their movement. The 37GTD had been meant to follow the 107MRD but the narrowness of the gap which they were meant to move through had meant that the tank division was to follow rather than advance side-by-side with the motorised rifle division. With the 107MRD itself, while some scout elements backed up by tanks had been sent over the broken terrain on their right, the majority of the division (which had been pivotal in crushing the 1st Cavalry Division at Einbeck and thus greatly weakened) had driven through the countryside and small, smouldering villages northwards towards Hameln.

This Soviet movement was correctly anticipated by the US III Corps who deployed their second division under command there with the mission of defeating that attempt and even advancing through this area themselves, though that secondary objective was far too impracticable. The British and Belgian troops here met the Soviets head-on in small meeting engagements with each side trying to get the upper hand over the other. Not everything went to plan with the effort here to halt the Soviets though at the same time there was little gain for the 107MRD with the objective to reach Hameln.

Those old soldiers recently recalled to service with the British 29th Light Brigade – serving with units carrying the heritage of the Royal Scots along with both the Coldstream & Grenadier Guards, even if those men may not have all served with such historic regiments back when they were regular soldiers – had a tough time though when facing Soviet tanks and armoured infantry. The British 8th Infantry Brigade had only a few tanks of their own and therefore it was only the Belgians present with their armour which actually saved the British 5th Infantry Division from being destroyed… which many might have argued happened beforehand when a week ago the 1st & 24th Infantry Brigades had been gassed and overrun. Regardless, the defensive screen employed by the US III Corps to defend the flank of their armoured drive on the Leine held their positions and kept the enemy at bay.

What stopped the 107MRD and then the 37GTD behind wasn’t the Chieftains put to good use by the two squadrons with the 14th/20th King’s Hussars or the lone company Leopard-1s crewed by Belgians, effective as those tanks were backed up by self-propelled and dismounted anti-tank missiles teams, but instead a lack of ammunition: the Soviets ran out of this. They had just enough fuel for their advance but nowhere near enough ammunition for their cannons on their tanks and armoured vehicles nor the shells for their artillery in direct support. Both divisions had been pushed forward with the bare minimum stocks of ammunition available with right up until the moment of engagement with NATO tanks everyone waiting for resupply trucks to arrive carrying more of this. The armies of the West couldn’t have gone into battle in such a situation and nor did doctrine call for the Soviet Army to do so either, yet the urgency of need had been pressing and there were promises made of resupply.

Once the Soviet tanks weren’t able to fire back, those NATO forces opposing them weren’t strong enough to push forward due to their lack of mobility when facing dismounted enemy infantry which, while approaching the crucial point where they too were about to run out of ammunition for their man-portable weapons, didn’t cease fire. Many Soviet tanks and armoured vehicles were actually withdrawn after the lead units run out of ammunition and were struck by NATO weapons and so it was not as if there was a complete run-down of what was available either leaving the Soviets open to be driven through in a British-Belgian counterattack. Nevertheless, the forward units were blasted to pieces and created a death-zone ahead. The Soviet counterattack had been stopped cold here.


General Kenny had been perfectly happy to have the US III Corps strike eastwards before he had General Inge move the British I Corps northwards. He realised that their mission was to get as quickly to the Leine to fight that Field Army B there as far away from Hameln as possible and the US Army did love their helicopter assaults…

His attention was mainly focused upon the advance conducted very soon afterwards by General Inge’s corps. He knew that his duty as commander of the British Second Army was supposed to make him more focused upon the big picture rather than just his British troops in one of his five separate corps commands, yet it was something impossible for him to not pay detailed attention to what they were doing. The combat role he had for them as his main strike force – no matter what General Saint thought of his own advance to be the leading element – was at the forefront as BLACKSMITH continued. Here in northern Germany, General Kenny intended to smash the Soviet Army and the advance from Hannover north to the Aller to meet that Field Army A, trapping several others just to the west as that occurred, was key to achieving that ultimate objective.

He had hardly had any sleep while at his mobile headquarters as his column of vehicles had moved from location to location across the Bad Pyrmont area (located back over on the western side of the Weser) to avoid enemy activity. Sorting out the command arrangements had been troublesome and so too had been the efforts to marshal his forces with delays getting extra temporary bridges up across the Weser. Then he had had a furious argument over the radio in the early hours with the 3 ATAF’s commander when B-52s based in England tasked to support his forces during the night had dropped bombs on his own troops. The 7th Armoured Division had called-in that heavy bomber support to stop continued attacks by the 193TD to push them back west of Hannover and for their trouble they had more than a dozen of their Centurion tanks and over two hundred men killed by friendly fire: the 3 ATAF had refused to take the blame and claimed that forward air control had been faulty. Now though, even tired as he was, General Kenny was fully-focused upon the advance conducted by the two other divisions of the British I Corps.

With the Iron Division operating on the left and the Tiger Division to the right, the British Army moved forward just after dawn. They had had air support striking at the enemy during the night and moved under the cover of an immense artillery barrage (by Western standards anyway, not nowhere near what the Soviets had used during their advances earlier in the war) not after such a barrage. The hope was to catch the Soviets off-guard by moving forward without waiting for all of that artillery to have a telling affect. It was a gamble, but waiting only meant more time for the Soviets to prepare.

The Iron Division was back in operation around the Wunstorf Gap and also up near Neustadt too as the 3rd Armoured Division operated on both sides of the Leine there. It was anticipated that they would eventually be pushed back over to the eastern side of the river as they concentrated most of their attention in moving northwards, yet in their initial attack they tore through the rear of the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army. The Soviets had been trying hard to turn their combat power around one hundred and eighty degrees during late yesterday and through the night but this was no easy thing to do. Only small combat groups from that field army, some of which were actually lost, troubled the British forces which drove forwards with their 6th and 7th Brigades doing most of the fighting as the 4th Brigade was for now being kept back. Supply dumps, fuel distribution points, communications sites and river crossings were attacked and destroyed though it was soon found that there wasn’t much in terms of ammunition to be either captured or blown up. Many rear-area Soviet forces were engaged too with KGB field security units, penal battalions and towed anti-tank gun batteries took on. Those big 100mm guns with the long barrels which the Soviets liked to site at high points or in lower ambush positions covering roads were lethal and well-used, yet their general immobility caused their destruction and negated their usefulness. The Iron Division kept on driving northwards following the course of the river and still able to operate on both sides.

Advancing northeast, the Tiger Division faced much lighter opposition and moved faster. Their goal was to reach Celle on the Aller and get over that water barrier there to meet Field Army A on the other side. They raced forward and bypassed Soviet-occupied Hannover Airport – which, to be honest, hadn’t been much good to them after it had been destroyed during earlier fighting – knowing that time wasn’t on their side. Racing through this area of occupied Germany they ran into weaker opposition than their counterparts on their left with service support elements of the Soviet Army being their opponents. There were tank & vehicle maintenance sites, field hospitals and POW camps encountered: some delays came about when entry was made by British forces into those as the soldiers of the Tiger Division naturally were concerned with what they found at those and wanted to assist. Still, despite the distractions, the 4th Armoured Division soon reached the Celle area and struck for the crossings over the river there that the Soviets had so laboriously constructed and the NATO air power had left alone for the past couple of days.


Aircraft from the 2 ATAF were tasked in direct support of BLACKSMITH and those were flying in what was in many places free of ground fire from SAM batteries. There were still shoulder-mounted launchers with little range but still deadly in the right circumstances as well as many anti-aircraft guns, yet the lack of a major SAM opposition to their activities was telling. However, there were Soviet fighters operating in the daylight skies and these presented a major threat at all times.

Being able to conduct more operations than usual deep in the Soviet rear, NATO aircraft not only attacked but also monitored the progress of the Soviet Second Guards & Twenty-Second Guards Armys, which they still referred to as Field Army’s A & B. A-10s, Alpha-Jets and larger strike aircraft like F-4s, F-16s and Jaguars bombed and strafed the tanks and armoured vehicles with infantry aboard moving forward while reporting their movements to liaison officers back with the British and American ground forces advancing deeper into the Soviet rear. Neither enemy force could move unmolested and unobserved across the North German Plain and what air defences they had either quickly shot through their ammunition or saw those mobile defences destroyed.

They were unable to arrive where they wanted to be without detection with pilots broadcasting up-to-the-minute reports down to battalion-level on those movements westwards.

More B-52s arrived in the skies, flying low and opening their bomb-bay doors dropping immense quantities of unguided high-explosive bombs over these Soviet fourth echelon field armies in big attacks alongside those attacks by smaller tactical strike packages. The effects of the B-52 bombardments were more than just the destructive of the bombs themselves, even with all the devastation which fifty-one Mk117 750lb bombs carried by each bomber could cause. The Soviet reservists who manned the Cat. C formations part of the two field armies watched with fear as the ground ahead of them, where their comrades were, was obliterated with thunderous roars. Even men in the Cat. B and Cat. A formations were frightened by what they witnessed ahead of them and they saw the saw fear in the faces of their officers which tried to brave that out and keep them moving. A few B-52s were seen to be engaged by anti-aircraft fire and most of those kept on flying too… rumours swept through the ranks that such aircraft were almost invulnerable!


The pre-war fixed river crossings at Celle were all long destroyed yet there were seven pontoon bridges which the Soviets had constructed in and just outside this devastated town on the Aller. All of those fell into British hands when they swept into Celle and engaged Soviet rear-area forces there and those were put to immediate use. There were combat bridging units with the Tiger Division, yet their efforts weren’t yet needed. Challengers and Chieftains went over those followed by Scimitars, Scorpions, Warriors and FV-432s. The massed of tracked vehicles put a strain on those crossings, yet they had been built sturdy by Soviet combat engineers who knew quite a bit about building temporary river crossings. There were two imitation structures located there too and military intelligence staff officers had a close look at those up close and were amazed by what they saw there as those bomb-magnets looked almost to be the real thing even a few feet away… until they were touched by hand.

Straight away, the 11th and 20th Brigades moved into position on the northern side of Celle and waited for the first signs of combat. The enemy was only moments away from reaching them; they watched friendly aircraft flying low above them on attack runs and were able to watch as bombs and missiles fell from those aircraft.

Then, the first contact came with the lead Soviet elements meeting those British troops rushed into improvised ambush positions.


Just away to the west, the Iron Division soon enough reached its objective too. They had remained able to operate on the western side of the Leine as they followed it downstream though most of the division’s combat power and its following support elements stayed just across to the east. Their northwards advance took them up to Schwarmstedt and then the little stretch of countryside where both the Leine and the Aller converged before the flowing water would run towards the Lower Weser and eventually the North Sea too. Losses had been remarkably light during the advance yet they still hurt as the Iron Division had spent almost a week trapped in the Hannover pocket and taken losses when operating to defend themselves there.

The problem was though that the Iron Division had done too much too fast. The natural – and perfectly understandable – tendency of soldiers to avoid a fight when it was unnecessary had come into play with the British troops here moving as quickly as possible to their final objective and not causing enough destruction on their way. Determined enemy activity had been bypassed in the advance and therefore the whole purpose of sending the Iron Division along the course of the lower reaches of the Leine hadn’t been exploited as it should have been. The rear areas of the Soviet Eleventh Guards Army and part of the Soviet First Guards Army had been torn through yet many Soviet forces had avoided combat. Those troops had been forced to turn around and come back eastwards into the guns of the tank cannons of the Iron Division yet in the majority of cases there were a few clashes at distance and afterwards neither side would press home the attack. There had been wholescale destruction commenced against lightly-armed support forces instead of the main combat forces and that wasn’t what was meant to have happened.

With the 7th Armoured Division to the south of Wunstorf and guarding the flank back to Hameln, the Iron Division now had run a line north from there to just past Schwarmstedt: a distance of almost twenty miles. They were pulled back over the Leine when General Inge realised why they had so fast reached their objective so that attacks coming against them would have to cross over the water barrier first. Across the river now were half a dozen Soviet divisions certainly trapped with the possibility of another four being added to that list too soon enough. They represented a very strong force that given the right circumstances posed a major threat to British Second Army operations.

Yet… this wasn’t the worst possible outcome. There was still a river between them and the Iron Division, NATO now had tactical control in the skies over the battlefield and there was an acute shortage of ammunition with those trapped formations along with the fact that their supply links (as terrible as they had been away) were cut. This was a situation to watch with extreme care, yet for now wasn’t affecting the progress of BLACKSMITH.


The American 2nd Armored Division and the paratroopers with them saw major combat operations on the stretch of the Leine further downstream where they were. Air reconnaissance carefully tracked the forces moving towards them and ‘prepared’ the battlefield, especially US Army armed helicopters attached in support. Nevertheless, the Soviet Twenty-Second Guards Army, a.k.a. Field Army B, carried on moving through the murderous losses being inflicted from above with those behind driving those ahead.

There were two tank divisions out front: an established strength of six hundred plus tanks and a similar number of armoured vehicles. These were the 60TD & the 76TD, two reserve formations from the western portions of the Soviet Union. Neither was at anywhere near full strength in terms of tanks and other necessary equipment with the long advance which they had taken leaving behind a trail of broken-down tracked vehicles; those tanks were T-55s and T-62s too.

Operating just on the other side of the Leine, in the stretch of countryside between the river and the woodland of the Hildesheimerwald, the 2nd Armored Division tore apart those Soviet divisions. They came out of the trees and into the waiting guns of the US Army in an ambush first before the 2nd Armored Division moved forward to engage them on the move. Soviet tanks died in fantastic numbers with absolutely terrible return fire being given against M-1A1s which were almost immune to that. Apache and Cobra gunships filled the skies, though the pilots and gunners in those helicopters had to quickly use their infrared systems due to the thick, black smoke pouring upwards from hundreds of burning tanks. The 2nd Armored Division didn’t chase what Soviets made it back into the woods and instead started withdrawing themselves back towards their river crossings. They had last-minute intelligence that the pair of following Soviet divisions were much better equipped and were effectively defending themselves. It was decided by General Saint back at US III Corps headquarters and his subordinate General Price commanding 2nd Armored Division to let them move through the ruins of their comrades first before they came to where they could be better dealt with.


Those second wave divisions were now the two most capable Soviet armoured formations left available for combat in Europe: the 2GMRD, better known as the Taman Guards, and the 4GTD, the Kamtemir Division. All other Cat. A units had either been destroyed or depleted in battle battering past NATO defences in the early days of the war and these two from the Moscow Military District were the last of the best which the Soviet Army had. These units fielded excellent equipment, contained highly-trained men and brought with them their own ammunition stocks which they had jealously guarded from further distribution among their comrades. STAVKA had personally intervened to get them moving across Eastern Europe with Marshal Ogarkov sending them into action via their overnight staging post at Hildesheim as they drove towards Hameln with the reserve tank divisions out ahead of them meant to soak up and dilute enemy fire power.

NATO aircraft faced little success operating against the pair of divisions in their final push towards the 2nd Armored Division. The skies were filled with modern SAMs and there had been extra mobile anti-aircraft guns added to their defensive strength. In addition, there was specialised electronic jamming equipment in support operating in a mobile role as they moved into combat.

The Taman Guards moved north around the Hildesheimerwald with the Kamtemir Division coming around the south. Each went forward fast with heavily-armed reconnaissance elements tearing across the German countryside with strong anti-air assets. It was meant to be a successful assault to overwhelm what were thought to be lightly-armed flanking units on the Leine supporting the main NATO effort here on the North German Plain along the Aller. What wasn't realised however was that the Soviet Twenty-Second Guards Army was facing what would be a very determined effort by the US III Corps to stop them cold.

The 2nd Armored Division sat back and let the Soviets try to come right at them. Artillery fire missions scattered hundreds of anti-tank mines over the approaches towards the stretch of the Leine which they sat behind while the guns covered the Soviet-built pontoon bridges which they had left standing. As the BRM-1 tracked and BRDM-2 wheeled reconnaissance vehicles approached backed-up by advance guard units with T-80s those were engaged at maximum range by depleted uranium shells from 120mm cannons. Apaches hovering back to the west and popping up from behind cover started launching Hellfire missiles across the river to break up the main Soviet formations coming towards the ground forces. TOW missiles from both Cobras and ground launchers joined in too firing at distance as the two Soviet divisions moved slowly through the mine-covered battlefield where there also lay all those burning tanks.

When they reached the river, the Taman Guards and the Kamtemir Division faced intense fire all along the river banks. They started to prepare to use their own artillery in a counter-battery fire role but then found the rockets from American MLRS systems were launched in waves against those short-range radars employed to do that: the US Army had learnt a lot about how to deal with Soviet Army artillery techniques in the previous eleven days of warfare. Those 227mm rockets were then joined by Maverick missiles fired from distance outside the range of Soviet mobile SAM systems and coming from USAF F-16s waiting too for the opportunity to pounce. The missiles shot across the sky and then slammed into those battery command posts which had been using what they thought were secure communications links: the US Army couldn’t decipher what was being said, but they knew what was going on from their own unpleasant experience at the hands of massed Soviet artillery.

With artillery support cancelled out, the Soviets tried a rush manoeuvre going for an assault crossing. The river was shallow and narrow while they had plenty of combat bridging assets. Both divisions moved near Elze and at Gronau to make a start on such assaults, but again found that the 2nd Armored Division had a counter to this. NATO aircraft again filled the skies with many of these being older aircraft too but still very capable. They fired anti-radar missiles against Soviet SAM systems and then some of those, USAF F-4E Phantoms, started dropping napalm over those engineers gathering together. A few Soviet tank forces were pushed forward immediately afterwards to try to rush over those bridges still up and get over the river to throw the Americans off balance, but their advances in single-file slowly across the pontoon bridges were met with murderous, carefully-directed fire.

The elite of the Soviet Army had been stopped here at the Leine. They couldn’t go forward and even when trying to manoeuvre about away from the murderous fire coming at them from ahead and above, they were constricted by mines and the wrecked vehicles of their comrades-in-arms who had been torn apart here earlier. The Soviet Twenty-Second Guards Army was facing an utter disaster and wasn’t going to achieve its mission.


Up on the Aller, the Soviet Second Guards Army came at the Tiger Division with what should have been a four-to-one numerical advantage. Those divisions – the 32GMRD, the 96MRD, the 115GMRD and the 144GMRD (the latter being a Cat. B formation home-based in Estonia) – were spread out in their attack with two aiming for Celle and the other pair aiming for a sneaky attack a little bit further downstream near Winsen. Had the Soviets managed to pull this off, they might have had much success… yet not with these weak formations operating with little in the way of ammunition for their air defences let alone their tanks.

On the northern side of Celle, the Tiger Division smashed apart the 96MRD which came at them first and then retreated back over the river to let the 144GMRD move through the wreckage which littered the battlefield. The British were operating here with rigid discipline to pull back in the face of numerically strong opposition rather than if individual small-unit commanders wanted to stay in place and take on all-comers. That following Soviet division faced trouble getting to the river crossing sites and then suffered from mutinies which spontaneously broke out. Men were ordered out of their infantry vehicles to move through the ruins of Celle to close-up to the river but they wouldn’t do so. Officers were murdered and others fled. These weren’t young conscripts with ill-discipline, but were supposed to be older and more thoughtful men who understood that acting in such a manner would have consequences. The 144GMRD crumbled as a fighting force though without seeing combat. Instead, they were scared of what further B-52 attacks could do to them and also of whatever armoured force was ahead of them and had ripped the 96MRD to shreds.

The two other divisions couldn’t make it to Winsen. NATO air attacks, including those B-52s which the Soviet Army reservists were starting to dread, were operating in strength between there and the Soviet Second Guards Army’s right wing coming down off the Luneburg Heath. Those aircraft in the skies weren’t only dropping bombs but there were also mines being scattered from them too and these anti-tank mines knocked out countless Soviet tanks and tracked armoured vehicles. The divisions came to a halt to try to sort out their air defence situation and get engineers to work on clearing approach routes, but this only intensified NATO air activity. Aircraft which would have been over Celle were redirected towards the other Soviet forces nearby when no attack came towards the river at Celle (it was too early to understand about the ongoing mutinies) and therefore more attention was paid to the 32GMRD and 115GMRD.

The Soviet Second Guards Army came to a halt just like the Soviet Twenty-Second Guards Army had done so as well.

*​

All of this fighting had taken place before mid-morning with the Soviets brought to a stop and the British I Corps & US III Corps reaching their objectives. General Kenny’s continuing BLACKSMITH offensive was working and the Soviets couldn’t stop the forces under his command from doing what he wanted them too. Their anti-air situation appeared to be in the sorry state just as intelligence said it was and the sudden apparent shortage of tank ammunition for all of those thousands of tanks which they had seemed to be true too.

It was time now for his other forces under command to start moving too. The Belgian I Corps was sent orders to begin their attack while the Bundeswehr IV Corps was instructed to start ‘making noises’ as if it was going to go over the Weser in the attack too. Moreover, there was that still unmoving Polish field army just east of Hannover occupying a strategic piece of territory. General Kenny issued a command for the Bundeswehr I Corps – those forces which had been pushed into the Hannover pocket first – to start a cautious advance into their positions too to see if those rumours about a mass mutiny there were true.

He was being told that NATO ground forces across Germany were on the offensive almost everywhere and this was no time to be left out of that!

One Hundred & Eighty

Before the arrival in the North Sea late on the Friday night of the US Navy warships USS America and USS John F. Kennedy, HMS Invincible had been the only aircraft carrier in the Baltic Approaches region. There were Soviet aircraft operating from Jutland while enemy efforts had denied NATO the effective use of land-based air power from the North Sea coast of West Germany and the southern reaches of Norway while Sweden was forces concentrated its air efforts elsewhere. Only from the British mainland as well as the Netherlands had there been airbases where aircraft of NATO could be in close proximity to the North Sea, the Skagerrak and the Kattegat. The Invincible, with sixteen aircraft aboard, had been of limited effectiveness despite the best efforts of the RN to provide airborne coverage for allied warships in these waters.

But then the big ships of the US Navy arrived from the Mediterranean.

Those two massive fleet carriers which dwarfed the lone RN light carrier in size, crew and the number of aircraft carried came up from the south through the English Channel along with their escorts and also the battleship USS New Jersey: another warship which again dwarfed the Invincible. It was just a little bit demoralising for the RN to have to see those carriers arrive to ‘save the day’, as they knew the Americans would be boasting, while they had been struggling to hold the line here against enemy air efforts after the Soviet Baltic Fleet’s surface forces had been earlier stopped from coming through the Danish Straits. Of course, the RN wasn’t about to let the US Navy know how upset they were nor even how actually relieved they were too.

That just wouldn’t be done.

Yet, at the same time, with the arrival of the America, the Kennedy and the New Jersey, the Invincible and other RN warships present were now freed from their current mission which they had struggled with. They were now to be released from trying to combat the immense threats from Soviet land-based aircraft to concentrate on planned amphibious and airmobile operations in the region with victorious British troops in what was planned to be another tri-service military operation in the Baltic Approaches… therefore it wasn’t all bad news.


Just as the British suspected, the US Navy was flush with a little bit of overconfidence that their appearance in the North Sea was going to instantly win the war here. Between them the two carriers carried one hundred and forty plus combat aircraft while the guns and missiles mounted on their warships were plentiful. This was a formidable striking force, yet it would be operating in constricted waters not over the open ocean and thus vulnerable in many instances to a determined enemy attack if that opponent could show a little bit of imagination.

For now, as they crossed the North Sea and steamed past the Dutch coast aiming for the widest part of this stretch of sea between Britain and mainland Europe, the America and the Kennedy announced their arrival to the enemy. The carriers started launching Tomcats first to have those interceptors range far and wide ahead of the strike aircraft which were to be following them. There were liaison officers from both the 2 ATAF and the 3 ATAF which had joined the carriers earlier in the day so that flight operations from the carriers could be coordinated with them, and the entrance into this airspace of multiple US Navy went smoothly. The NATO air forces had taken many losses during their own operations and were very welcoming of the influx of what were reinforcements for them operating from mobile airbases complete with their own airborne radar, inflight refuelling and electronic warfare assets in addition to the specialised intelligence assets and wide-area air defence systems which the US Navy had too.

As the Tomcats set off for the German coastline and crossed friendly lines above East Frisia, they at once searched the skies using their own radars for hostile contacts which the Hawkeyes behind them were picking up over to the east. The skies were rapidly darkening and the Soviets operated few aircraft at night due to near-effective NATO air dominance in the hours of darkness, yet there were contacts spotted. Intelligence pointed to these being Soviet Air Force Fulcrums and Flankers or Flankers and Foxhounds in service with Soviet Air Defence Force’s units pushed forward over Eastern Europe far from their home bases. Either way, those fighters and interceptors were about to get a surprise…

…in the form of air-to-air missiles which they had yet to encounter over the skies of Europe: Phoenix missiles.

A squadron from each carrier was airborne and these started launching their missiles from just short of a hundred miles away to break up the Soviet flights kept back near the Inter-German Border and hopefully down many of those too. The US Navy was aware that their long-range missiles were best used against bigger targets that these, yet the lightning-fast missiles should come as a surprise and were being ‘escorted’ by waves of electronic warfare efforts to cover their approach. There were still more Phoenix missiles carried upon these Tomcats as well as Sparrows with a shorter-range too, but for now that first wave was away.

Corsairs, Hornets, Intruders and Prowlers followed the Tomcats on what was to be an Alpha Strike mission: US Navy parlance for a land-attack strike. When back in the Mediterranean, the two carriers had carried some US Marine aircraft too, but those had been left behind there now flying from bases on the Turkish mainland. Nonetheless, the America and the Kennedy had both had their air wing’s heavily-reinforced pre-war and now there was a little bit more room aboard each vessel for those which remained. These aircraft involved in this evening’s Alpha Strike got airborne with many weapons carried knowing that they weren’t going to operate too far from their carriers. There were plenty of divert locations for them to go to in an emergency as the US Navy’s airborne refuelling capabilities were usually covered by other strike aircraft with buddy-tanks (or occasionally the US Marines too with KC-130 aircraft) and that wasn’t something which was being done in strength tonight as all efforts were focused upon hitting the enemy hard with as much available strength as possible.

The Soviet interceptors were taken by surprise by the appearance of Tomcats firing Phoenix missiles at them when their intelligence had nothing like those on their threat boards: such aircraft were meant to be in the Barents Sea or the eastern Med. With the specialised efforts of a couple of EA-3B electronic warfare aircraft (conversions of the heavy A-3 Skywarrior bomber) playing their games, the Fulcrums and Flankers encountered at distance took many losses. The US Navy had been sharing intelligence between it’s fleets and also with NATO allies and really gave the Soviets engaged a lesson in the successful application of intelligence-driven electronic warfare. The Tomcats afterwards increased speed and edged further ahead of the strike aircraft coming behind them hoping to chase down survivors of their first missile barrage and making sure that NATO again owned the dark skies above Europe.

There were brand-new versions of the Hornet strike-fighter flying from the America – the F/A-18C variant – and these were fast into action among the older Corsairs, Intruders and Prowlers. Anti-radar missiles and close-in jamming came from the latter aircraft, while the attacking aircraft dropped bombs and fired short-range land-attack missiles. These aircraft didn’t join the Tomcats in going as far as deep into East German airspace and instead stayed above occupied portions of West Germany. The US Navy was operated this evening in support of the 2 ATAF so their aircraft could have a temporary stand-down for a short period of emergency but necessary maintenance after their aircraft had been busy all day and so they attacked tactical targets in support of the British Second Army. Those targets ranged from identified command posts for ground forces to the fire support assets of those ground forces: artillery, tactical missile batteries, and helicopter parks. There were attack runs made by Corsairs with cluster bombs over positions of Soviet tanks while Intruders put bombs atop pontoon bridges which Soviet engineers had over the Oker River near Braunschweig and Wolfenbuttel. The Hornets were focused against Soviet Army Scud missile-launchers and went after those in many identified hidden locations where they had been spotted by careful reconnaissance made by 2 ATAF efforts.

Enemy SAM activity was known to be weak yet the US Navy was still prepared for the worst with those Prowlers and then many strike aircraft having at least one anti-radar missile carried. That intelligence on the sorry state of air defences was correct though with few functions radars supporting SAMs to attack and opposition instead coming from anti-aircraft guns. Some of these were radar-guided, but many were aimed visually and using infrared: targets much more difficult to engage for now. With no enemy aircraft to challenge them and very few SAMs, only four US Navy aircraft involved in the Alpha Strike were lost before the mission was over. These strike aircraft had been flying rather high rather than the low-level attacks favoured by land-based aircraft with the 2 ATAF, yet these losses were staggering for their lack of success on the part of the enemy; double figures had been expected.

As to those Tomcats, the aircrews would later claim nineteen victories for themselves using their missiles with another one called for crediting using guns. Detailed analysis of gun camera footage and radar data, as well as collaboration by other pilots, would lower that number from twenty down to fourteen confirmed kills, which was still a high number. This was off-set against the losses to the Tomcats of three of their own. America-based VF-102 had a Tomcat lost over the Harz Mountains when a Soviet Fulcrum fired an infrared-guided AA-11 Archer missile at it in an unfortunate close-range engagement which the US Navy aircrew should have avoided when facing such an agile aircraft. VF-14 flying from the Kennedy suffered the other two Tomcat casualties as those aircraft went down over East Germany with one being struck by a missile from a Flanker fired at distance and another taking a hit from an S-300V SA-12 Gladiator SAM. With the latter, NATO was still struggling to deal with the S-300 series of missiles as they represented the best of the SAM capabilities of the Soviets and though few in number were proving exceptionally deadly. In addition, the supply efforts to keep such strategic air defence systems working were functioning, even if intermittently, enough to make them a real risk to NATO aircraft flying deep into enemy territory.

Regardless, the Alpha Strike in support of the ground forces across the North German Plain had been a major success. The attacking aircraft flew back to their carriers escorted by further Tomcats though there was always a watch kept on any Soviet raketonosets efforts as a threat to the America and the Kennedy despite intelligence saying that those flown by Soviet Naval Aviation which remaining flying (and there weren’t many of those) were in the Kola Peninsula ready to be soon finally destroyed by Striking Fleet Atlantic.


The New Jersey hadn’t been part of the Alpha Strike due to the battleship, which had just steamed halfway around the world, having been detached from the carrier group. Instead, the warship with her nine sixteen-inch guns, dozen five-inch guns and thirty-plus Tomahawk cruise missiles was with a trio of escorts and heading towards land.

The British would soon be in need of the services of her weapons in their planned military operations in the Baltic Approaches and although the crew didn’t yet know the details of the mission which they were on, they were eager to get underway with it after such a long journey.

The North Sea was turning into an area where NATO naval power was concentrating stronger as every day the threat in the North Atlantic got weaker, yet away from the two US Navy carriers and Invincible too with their air missions, the New Jersey was to lead surface action warfare here despite all of those smaller destroyers, frigates and missile boats with their firepower being nothing like that of the big battleship.





One Hundred & Eighty–One

The view of the Soviet military when it came to POWs was that such captives were useful. They were tools of propaganda, of intelligence gathering, of negotiation value and could be physically put to work too. This was a pre-war policy when it came to any hypothetical war with the West that in such a scenario, those enemy soldiers which fell into their hands held worth that was there to be exploited to further the goals of not only the Soviet Armed Forces but of the state too. The value of the individual lives of enemy POWs meant nothing to the Soviets yet they knew that the soft West had a vastly different opinion and that too was something to be made great usage from.

During the first week of warfare, what the Soviet and their Northern Tier allies of the Warsaw Pact did with POWs captured from NATO forces followed those plans made a long time ago. More than sixteen thousand enemy soldiers were captured during the immense battles with NATO forces across Denmark and West Germany and these were at once transported backwards from the frontlines as those moved further forward in the other direction. Almost two thirds of those POWs which the Soviets took into their custody weren’t frontline combat men or downed aircraft pilots, but rather support personnel assigned to NATO rear-areas which were overrun during offensives, especially those on that Friday when chemical weapons were used and the Soviet third echelon armies struck. Those who weren’t massacred by attacking units in the heat of victory after they had risen their hands – which was regular occurrence – were ‘processed’ and then moved away to be put to use.

There were Americans, Belgians, Brits, Canadians, Danes, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards and West Germans all taken in great number with token numbers of Luxembourgers and Portuguese too. Many were wounded while other had suffered mistreatment at the hands of their initial captors. They were those who were frightened into silence and those who fought back. Many sought to escape prolonged captivity after regarding their capture as a temporary and unfortunate matter; depression swept over others at the thought of the fate which awaited them in the hands of the enemy. The captures had occurred in West Berlin, along the battles for the area immediately west of the Inter-German Border, across Schleswig-Holstein and into Jutland, from the armoured drives westwards once the Soviet armies had finally managed to break free of NATO fixed defences and also from pilots shot down. There were so many POWs and a lot more than anticipated.

The Soviet Army took charge of those captured in combat with the exception of those Bundeswehr, Luftwaffe and even Bundesmarine (there were quite a few West Germany Navy ground defence troops for their bases who saw action) personnel who were turned over to the East Germans. Once military police units from the Warsaw Pact armies, who were many times assisted by rear-area troops when there was great number of captives, handed them over, the POWs met their true fates. Even pilots and aircrew didn’t go to the Soviet Air Force as some might have expected, but the Soviet Army instead along with those GRU and KGB personnel in support. Certain men and officers were identified and immediately removed by those spooks for their own purposes, yet the vast majority went through initial questioning where the standard response of ‘name, rank and serial number’ was met with a fist or a boot and more information demanded at the barrel of a rifle. Immense trails of paperwork were at once created in holding centres set up across occupied portions of Denmark and West Germany as information was collected here before trucks started moving POWs eastwards.

Draft plans for dealing with POWs had been put into practise overnight as the true camps for these captives were established in open fields across East Germany and western parts of Czechoslovakia. Weary of the dreaded NATO Barbarossa #2 taking place in part even if the Soviet Army had struck first to pre-empt that, the Soviets wanted their prisoners far away from liberation brought about by enemy action. Barbed-wire and improvised minefields were erected with haste to trap those POWs out in the open while any structures were built for official use only. These camps would be for the enlisted men and those officers which the intelligence services had no interest in and for now the Soviets themselves just wished to keep confined. Later, these men would be put to work in planned rebuilding efforts and then possibly released as part of any negotiated settlement with NATO, yet for now they were left alone… all alone. There was no shelter or no access to medical treatment for them just the very basic food rations and filthy, stagnant drinking water given. The Soviet Army had nothing to spare but bullets for those who tried to escape or make attempts to organise as a rebellious force. It could be argued that this was an act of premediated mass murder yet it was just that there was no care about the fates of these men. Those who survived this captivity were meant to be put to a real use at a planned later stage, yet they were fast forgotten by their captors.

During the second week of the war when the numbers of POWs gained diminished but still occurred, things changed. The intelligence services still took their catch of those who they were interested in – and there were quite a few instances of mistaken identity with this effort – yet the collapsing Soviet supply situation was in no way capable of moving large numbers of POWs to the rear without that effecting other more important warfighting operations.

POW camps were established in occupied territory and in locations where many in the Soviet Army’s rear-area services regarded as far too close to the frontlines. Again there were basic food rations and the water given was near undrinkable along with an utter lack of medical attention for those wounded, but being closer to the frontlines was a slightly better experience for those captives. They could hear the rumble of artillery and the thunder of aircraft flashing above them and so they knew that the fighting was still ongoing. US Army and Danish soldiers from Lubeck were in these latter camps and so too were more US Army soldiers from Einbeck. British TA paratroopers who had surrendered after the last of the opposition in small cities and big towns such as Braunschweig, Hildesheim and Salzgitter had finally been crushed arrived as well and these men told stories of how they had fought building-to-building in the big anti-tank traps which those places had been. Some men from the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division which had been crushed in central Hessen went sent up against tanks came to the camps and then there were Dutch soldiers who had evaded initial capture on the Luneburg Heath when their army collapsed before finally being caught. Finally, there were those few captured at the frontlines too since the first weekend of the war and aircrews of NATO aircraft shot down.

There were fewer men in a state of shock at their capture as those in the first waves of NATO POWs had been and more fighting men than rear-area service troops too. Even some Green Berets, as physically and mentally damaged by brutal enemy interrogation as they were, showed up along with a very few SAS men as well. Morale was still terrible among the captives yet they knew that the war was far from lost overall even if they had been taken prisoner by the enemy.

Many of these camps which housed the second wave of NATO soldiers captured were in occupied territory which saw liberation just as Soviet planners had feared when first BLACKSMITH and then the Germany-wide NATO counter-offensives finally got underway late in the war’s second week. In those they found scenes of horror awaiting them which even while that had occurred over a short period of time, weren’t something which anyone was ready for. Those prisoners which had caused their captors any difficulties had been murdered without even the pretence of justice and their bodies dumped in ditches for the flies and wildlife. Female military personnel in the camps told of serious sexual assault and rapes – often in gang-rape form – which had occurred before they were lucky enough to end up in these POW camps… other women had been brutally murdered after being used as they were by their first captors. There were ethnic minority soldiers who told of horrible fates to many of their comrades who weren’t Caucasian. Much of the enlisted ranks of the US Army in Europe were black servicemen while the military forces of the British, the Dutch and the French all had small but not insignificant members of distant African heritage serving among them. There were other minorities too serving in NATO armies – Filipino-Americans, Nepalese Gurkhas and French Pacific Islanders as a few examples, in effect anyone different to the eye – who had faced similar racist treatment that ranged from vicious beatings to lynching.

The scale of such war crimes, unorganised and not officially condoned by the Soviet Army but occurring with immense frequency to military personnel captured as it was already known to have been the case with civilians, was enough to tax war crimes investigators for the next few thousand years. What was of urgent attention first though were dump sites for the bodies of captured NATO soldiers where their remains lay either in the battlefields where they had fallen or at other locations… and then talking to the guards and security personnel from the camps who hadn’t managed to flee in time.


Those POWs which the Soviet intelligence services removed from initial captivity would have liked to have been inside those camps, even the ones deeper in enemy territory and far from the possibility of liberation by friendly ground forces, rather than where they ended up. The incident with how General Shalikashvili with the US Army – captured at Lubeck and then coerced into assisting in the surrender of the defenders of Einbeck – was just one example of what occurred with these intelligence-driven efforts to have the POWs put to effective use for Soviet goals.

Spying efforts pre-war as part of peacetime espionage efforts had given the Soviets much information as to the command structure of the NATO militaries. They knew who was in command of what, where and when. This was important, but of greater value was staff appointments within the armed forces of the West and thus those with access to information which the GRU wanted. The knowledge in the heads of the captives was to be drained through what were rarely subtle methods and instead through brute-force. The threat of being shot was one thing, but torture was regarded as being even more effective. There was too little value seen in physiological torture as that was time-consuming; the directed use of fire, limb removal and castration of those who they wished to give over information, of even their comrades standing/seated next to them, went a long way as far as the Soviets were concerned. The Soviets understood that many in the West regarded torture as being something which would produce poor results as men would say anything under pain, yet they didn’t want confessions or subservience but rather information instead that was often time-sensitive. Moreover, the fear that torture brought out in their captives was anyway often enough for them to get what they needed, especially when brought home by the screams and then subsequent disfigurement or death of those who it was used against.

The GRU wanted certain officers to issue false orders for the support of military operations and had most accomplishment with that when Shalikashvili had been used in that lone incident. They tried the same trick – though, admittedly, on smaller scales – elsewhere yet found that radio orders were better than personal attempts. The trick for the GRU was to move fast with their captives to act as senior officers bringing new orders yet that was a hard thing for them to achieve due to NATO radio security measures and the knowledge that officers were missing presumed dead or captured. Other captives had to be identified as knowing the correct radio codes and also whether anyone involved on the other side in the targeted operation was aware of the fate of that military officer to be used. This just got far too complicated for the GRU to do in a real-world situation where battle was being waged and the frontlines of combat were fluid. Small, isolated victories were gained but the incident at Bad Salzschlirf was always going to remain the biggest success there.

Many captives were taken for their perceived use as tools of propaganda.

The relatives of important Western political and military figures were snatched away from their comrades to be held for later use in KGB ransom efforts. Pictures, hand-written letters and audio recordings – even in a select few instances videos – were created using these people ready to be sent when the time was right to those free and safe in the West who cared about their loved one trapped in Soviet captivity pleading for their life. This was part of a long-term effort and one which was greater in effort involved, yet the hope was that when these hostage efforts were put to use, there would be much success as some of the POWs used here for these purposes were the close relatives of some very important people with real power and influence.

Other propaganda efforts involving POWs held by Soviet intelligence personnel were meant to have immediate effects. The same media efforts – photographs, letters, voice recordings and some videos too – were used to create statements which POWs were to make to be broadcast in their home countries as well as worldwide where the Soviets were able to at least try to do that. Certain individual captives were selected by the KGB for their perceived attributes. There were female military personnel, young male soldiers with good looks, those who were exceptionally articulate, ethnic minorities and others with language skills who were selected for this. They were to follow the Soviet script and if they didn’t they would face instant execution as an example to others present. Other signs of dissent were punished in the same manner: those who tried sending messages by blinking in morse code, using sign language, crossing their fingers, shaking of the head and using language nuances where they thought that those involved in the propaganda efforts wouldn’t be wise to this. The actual propaganda was of multiple elements with pleas for an end to the war, lies being told about how the war was being fought, falsehoods about so-called war crimes by NATO and suchlike alongside what the KGB thought would be clever efforts to sow discord by playing on race issues in the West and tales of failed cooperation between allies; there were even outright boasts made by the captives of the strength of Soviet arms against those of their own nations as a propaganda move made from a different approach. This barrage of propaganda efforts went to the home countries of those used in them, to neutral nations and also to be put to use in the Soviet Union too.

The interrogations of those with information, those held hostage and those making propaganda statements created paperwork for those who were involved in it just like with the actual ‘processing’ done at the POW camps where those captives were ignored and left to die as the initial planned needs for them came to naught. No thought was paid to where that evidence might eventually – sometime in the future – end up and the possible consequences for those who gathered it from their captives.

One Hundred & Eighty–Four

A rifle section on patrol along the Donegall Road with the 3 QUEENS battle group made the discovery in the early hours of March 26th of what was many years later referred to in all media mentions as the ‘South Belfast House of Horrors’. A pair of RUC policemen with the regular British Army soldiers were directed towards a house along a small terraced road leading off this major thoroughfare and the soldiers came with them. The information which they had been given was that there was a weapons dump in the house located within this stronghold of loyalist paramilitary activity yet there was a weariness on the part of those who went to investigate as a trap was expected.

No gunfire met the soldiers and policemen with them, just scenes of horror.

The house had been empty of tenants for more than a month beforehand and was bare of furniture and many household fittings too. In-place of those was blood and bodies. In every room of the house, including the small cellar where a hole had been dug in the floor as at attempt at a burial site, gruesome killings had taken place. There were bullet holes in the walls, the floors and the ceilings. Improvised manacles for binding hands were found while there were blood-stained hoods dumped there too. Instruments used for torture – pliers, hammers and steam irons – were discarded everywhere as well.

Initially, the soldiers believed there were up to a dozen bodies here but that was a gross underestimation after the pit down in the basement was evacuated of the human remains in there too. Nineteen people had been dumped here and it was thought that maybe more had been killed here and their bodies taken elsewhere. Other evidence later gathered by RUC forensic teams pointed to there have being up to ten perpetrators of the massacre committed here based upon fingerprints and personal effects located.

The victims of the killings here, those tortured and then shot, were not all fully identified even after the passage of time. Those who were named were all Catholics with ties to republican politics and the IRA active in Belfast with two of those being citizens of the Irish Republic. Most of the Donegall Road was a Protestant area with a heavy loyalist presence from the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the killers from that group had carefully chosen those who they wished to kill here from across the city.

More troops and many policemen flooded the area afterwards and they were met with stony silence when they started to try to question neighbours and other residents of the Donegall Road. No one knew anything. They hadn’t seen or heard a thing, especially not the screams and gunfire which would have come from the house where it was determined that the activities there had been going on for at least a week. There were no attacks on the soldiers or policemen from the UDA men in the area yet many suspected loyalist terrorists were known to be carefully watching the activities surrounding the house in question as well as attempts at trying to get locals to talk.

After the bodies found had been removed along with plenty of evidence, the scale of official activity was scaled back due to necessary commitments elsewhere across the city and the wider Ulster too. An efficient guard was put upon the house and there were plans for further acts of investigation to take place there. However, a furious fire broke out inside the house late in the day despite the fact that it was meant to be protected and then the local fire brigade were unable to respond due to commitments elsewhere too. The house was gutted by that fire and what evidence there might have been remaining was destroyed after the petrol-driven blaze did a very effective job in gutting the whole building.

The house would later have to be pulled down as it was structurally unsafe.


With the identification of the bodies recovered from the Donegall Road, investigators were hampered by the state which many of them were in. The men were naked and the faces of many caved in. There were fingerprints quickly taken from the corpses and at that point the RUC was able to start understanding why these people had been targeted for such gruesome fates as they had been by what had to be extreme UDA activity to smash Republicanism in Belfast once and for all so that those Catholics in the city who currently remained after many had been driven out would have no one left around to protect them.

Of those identified quickly, three of the deceased were known terrorists with convictions of IRA activity in the past and there was a strong suspicion by the RUC that they had continued their pre-incarceration actions once released. Another two men whose fingerprints were used to find out who they were had connections to IRA terrorism too. None of these men were innocent and no tears were going to be shed on their behalf by those who identified them as they had been involved in shootings and bombings across Belfast for several years. Each was known to be mid-ranking figure within the IRA from across parts of western and southern Belfast who the RUC’s intelligence gathering efforts had recently lost track of.

Identification efforts with other bodies pointed to three more of them being figures involved in local politics and another being what the RUC referred to afterwards as a ‘VIP’. The trio were Republican political organisers from south Belfast with both Sinn Fein and the moderate SLDP. They were well-known politicians across the city who represented the Catholic community.

That VIP was quickly identified as being Gerry Adams, the MP for Belfast West. He hadn’t been seen in several weeks and the thinking on the part of the authorities was that the absentee member of the House of Commons had left Ulster and gone to the Irish Republic like Alex Maskey – the Sinn Fein member of Belfast City Council – was reported to have done so. Instead, he had been kidnapped at some point and taken to the Donegall Road to be tortured and executed in the South Belfast House of Horrors.

These identifies of these nine men were quickly confirmed – with Gerry Adams this was helped with the scars on his body from the failed attempt on his life four years ago when he had been shot then – yet it would be very difficult with the remaining ten victims. It would take a while for who they were to become known and there was little pressure from above for this to be achieved too with everything else that was going on in Ulster and with World War Three raging. In addition, elements within the RUC with suspected links to the UDA and other loyalist terrorists were thought to be behind efforts to delay not just those identification efforts but to block the investigation into the massacre which had taken place too. MI-5 also became involved and they made sure that it was some time before there was any public mention made of the fact that Gerry Adams was one of those bodies removed from the Donegall Road; their rationale was that Ulster was already undergoing an undeclared civil war complete with ethnic cleansing occurring and the news of his death would only inflame that.


The previous December had seen the car-bombing murder by the IRA of the influential UDA organising figure John McMichael. Not a terrorist himself – the UDA wasn’t a prescribed terrorist organisation despite the wishes of many for it to be –, McMichael had been assassinated in what was later thought to have been a loyalist feud with the IRA being the unwitting triggermen for that internal strife. Nevertheless, the rank and file of the UDA and also those higher-ups not actually ‘in the know’ had been waiting since then for the opportunity for revenge.

During Transition to War and then with the pull-out of the majority of the British Army from Ulster, organisations like the UDA and others had been gearing up for the ethnic cleansing which they unleashed once war came. The IRA and other republican paramilitary groups struck first, those on the loyalist side believed, yet the situation there was muddled with tit-for-tat beatings, shootings and bombings resulting in civil war breaking out across Ulster. Both sides did some horrible things while attempting to justify their actions. Belfast and parts of County Derry (but not the city) would see Catholics evicted en masse from their homes and be left with thousands of empty homes after the conflict finally came to an end while isolated Protestant communities in the rural west and south were left vacant of their former residents too. There were bodies to be recovered everywhere while refugees from the fighting fled elsewhere within Ulster or to the Irish Republic and Scotland.

Those who committed the massacre on the Donegall Road were UDA men from across the city. It was authorised from high-up and certainly assisted by official figures: elements of the RUC providing intelligence and some of those soldiers from the UDR believed to have been involved in the kidnappings leading to the murders. To snatch their victims from their homes and hiding places and then to take them to the scene where they were killed was a major effort which couldn’t have been easily done without a lot of external help. Some of the actual men on the ground who did the killing would later be named in the media abroad when they became more ‘prominent’ during the later post-war years in Northern Ireland: men like J. Adair, M. Courtney, W. Dodds and M. Stone among them – killers and gangsters with fearsome personal reputations known to boast of their involvement in the killings which took place during the civil war.

Those organisational figures were never publically identified though despite their names being known to the British, Irish and even American governments.

The killings which were committed on the Donegall Road were to achieve just what the RUC initially believed about them. Gerry Adams was a spectacular coup for the UDA when in the main they had spent a great deal of time going after those republican figures which they did to deny them the ability to lead resistance to UDA activities across the city. Those victims unidentified by initial enquires were IRA men with wide terrorism experience: men who planned gun and bomb attacks to be committed by their followers and were key to the organisational structure of what remained of the IRA in Belfast. The UDA had decided that the city was to be free of republicans and Catholics and killing such people who wouldn’t remain when others had already fled would achieve that goal of theirs. The brutality of the murders themselves was down to the men involved yet those above them knew that that was going on.


While the events which became the South Belfast House of Horrors were shockingly horrible, they were only the tip of the iceberg and before the last of the sectarian strife had come to an end across Ulster, there would be many more discoveries made of similar, if somewhat less large, murder scenes like that one.





One Hundred & Eighty–Five

After almost two weeks of war, the Soviets had yet to invade Japan… or even Alaska. The North Koreans hadn’t attacked across the DMZ into South Korea either. There had been no Soviet-Chinese war taking place as it was thought there might have been. Air and naval activity on the part of the Soviets in the Western Pacific and occasionally out wider in the world’s biggest ocean had almost come to an end and they were now struggling to defend themselves from American-led Western attacks on the Soviet homeland.

Along those Pacific shores of the Soviet Union the concentration of Western military power grew stronger all the time. Japan had fully mobilised its military forces so that the country could provide a valuable contribution alongside the deployed forces of its allies which were inside Japan: those from the United States in the main yet there were detachments too from Britain, Australia and also Singapore. With those troops and aircraft in Japan were the warships from several more nations too in the nearby waters. Chile and New Zealand had a few warships alongside naval vessels from the other navies of the West (apart from the RN which didn’t have a warship east of Gibraltar) as those two countries made the necessary effort to defend their allies against Soviet aggression.

However, it was the military power of the United States which was dominant in this region and at the forefront of operations against the Soviets. There were US Army forces in Alaska (joined by a brigade from the Canadian Army), in Japan and in South Korea. The US Marines had a significant strength deployed south of Japan ready to move to there or to the Korean Peninsula, whenever the need arose for a deployment to either. Likewise, the USAF had many aircraft gathered in Alaska, Japan and South Korea joined by some reinforcing ANG elements too. The US Navy presence in the northern and western reaches of the Pacific dwarfed that of the other US armed services with three carriers remaining at sea (the Ranger had been lost on the war’s first day and the Midway under tow heading for Subic Bay in the Philippines) alongside the battleship Missouri and a deployment of almost eighty warships and thirty plus submarines available.

This immense US military deployment, especially at sea and in the air, was regarded as being instrumental in keeping the war being fought along the shores of the Soviet Union and in its skies rather than in Japanese waters and skies. As the Soviets struggled to defend themselves they were unable to influence the North Koreans into attacking southwards, something regarded as a nightmare scenario which could cost hundreds of thousands of lives there.

Yet… there as the war went on and it became clear that no invasions were going to occur by either the Soviets or the North Koreas, there were calls from many in the relocated key elements of the US Defence Department for some of those military forces in the Pacific to be redeployed. From his location at Raven Rock Mountain Complex, Frank Carlucci first lobbied President Reagan and the NSC for the transfer of what he referred to as ‘assets’ from the Pacific to Europe. Carlucci was not a popular figure and regarded by many with the NSC has having terrible people skills and there was a general relief that he had left the Doomsday Plane to set himself up at Raven Rock.

Following Reagan’s incapacitation, Carlucci’s ideas for removing some of those so-called assets – i.e. fighting men – away from the Pacific theatre received a surprisingly welcome ear in the form of Acting President Bush. The two men were far from close and Carlucci didn’t believe that should Bush win the Presidential Election late this year (campaigning for this had been suspended for the time being though no one seriously considered the possibility that it would be delayed let alone cancelled) he would lose his position. However, within hours of taking his Oath of Office, Bush had made a statement to the American public over the airwaves concerning his commitment to fighting, and winning, the war with the Soviets. He was very receptive to the Defence Secretary’s ideas for redeployment of some US military forces from the Pacific theatre though recognised that that wouldn’t be an easy thing to do.

Carlucci could point to how troops and ships had been moved from the Caribbean region to Europe yet in the case of the latter it was fought that it was best that the US Navy maintain its strong presence in the Pacific as they were the ones taking the war to the Soviets. Moreover, it could take several weeks for a major redeployment of an aircraft carrier along with escorts to travel halfway around the world to Europe. The US Marines could be flown to Norway or even the Baltic Approaches though while it would be easy to move the men themselves, all of their equipment and their amphibious assault ships would again have to cross the globe to get to Europe. Instead, Carlucci proposed to Bush that some elements of the US Army and the USAF be removed from the Pacific.

From Alaska, the men of the 6th Light Infantry Division – with two regular brigades and the 205th Brigade of USAR reservists – were slated to be flown to Norway. Operations were being considered to go southwards from Finmark into Finnish Lapland and there were already US Army light forces there. There was much equipment already in-place and the command staff of the US XVIII Corps, which had lost control of the 24th Mechanized Infantry & 82nd Airborne Divisions recently (with the 101st Air Assault Infantry Division having been destroyed in combat), was already there in Finmark taking charge of the 7th & 10th Light Infantry Divisions. Those US Army forces were cold-weather trained and could do much good in the Arctic conditions in Finmark and Lapland. Behind them, they would leave Army National Guard units from Alaska and Oregon along with special forces troops to guard against Soviet commando incursions there in Alaska as the Canadian 1st Brigade was also soon to be flown out of there as well. The Canadians would take some time to get to Western Europe due to the need to move its heavy equipment, but the 6th Light Infantry Division could be moved very fast indeed.

In South Korea, the 2nd Mechanized Infantry Division was there in-country along with much support elements of the US Eighth Army that included men from a brigade of California ARNG troops which had gone there rather than with the 40th Mechanized Infantry Division to Germany. The 2nd Mechanized Infantry Division had three brigades of regular troops including one of lighter units that had experience in helicopter operations. There was additionally a highly-trained USAR battalion – the 100/442 INF home-based across US Pacific islands – in South Korea as well. Carlucci wanted to fly that third brigade out of Korea along with that battalion of reservists, all of which were light infantry troops capable of airmobile assault operations, and bring them to Germany. The 25th Light Infantry Division in Japan along with the brigade of Hawaii ARNG troops would remain in-place due to the Japanese feeling safe with such numbers of American troops there yet Carlucci wanted to have plans made for their redeployment should the situation in the Pacific change. He told Bush that having so many experienced troops deployed in the Pacific where there was no chance of them seeing action when US ground forces were taking immense losses every day in Europe wasn’t something that should continue.

Three numbered air forces with the USAF – the Fifth, Seventh and Thirteenth – were in the Pacific with almost five hundred combat aircraft assigned after being reinforced in places by Air National Guard units. A-10s, F-4s, F-15s and F-16s were all deployed to fight off Soviet invasions but instead many of them had been taking the war to the Soviets alongside US Navy aircraft flying from aircraft carriers and also in a few cases land bases too. Carlucci wanted the A-10s in Alaska and the F-4s in Japan (the latter having come up from the Philippines) to transfer to Europe along with those troops selected for the move. These aircraft had seen little action and unless an invasion came, they were too needed more elsewhere with the capabilities which they offered. He was taking about less than eighty aircraft, which he said wouldn’t make that much of a difference either in the Pacific or in Germany, but such a boost in the skies over northern Norway really would.

There were still warehouses across the United States full of military supplies being emptied for the movement of military wares to combat zones. Europe always had first priority, yet much had gone to the Pacific theatre too. Carlucci wanted to shift the vast majority of those logistics efforts towards Europe and allow what was in the Pacific to be used up there rather than being continuously added to when it wasn’t being put to use. The US Navy and the USAF would still continue to receive what they were getting, but he sought to stop all of those supplies for the US Army being sent where they were when nothing in the way of combat supplies already in-place had yet to be used.

Carlucci’s redeployment plans for certain US military assets were put to the NSC by Bush. The Acting President was aboard the Doomsday Plane – the same one which Reagan had had his stroke aboard – yet was making plans for spending more time on the ground. The NSC flying with him was a rather divided body when it came to what Carlucci wanted and then there was Secretary of State Grassley on the ground at the UN in New York who warned that the South Koreans in particular were going to be unhappy with the removal of one American soldier from their country when all they could talk about was a North Korean invasion, let alone a brigade of them. Questions were asked over the opinions of military commanders in the Pacific to these planned redeployments and Carlucci reacted with anger to the hints that he had Admiral Crowe browbeaten into agreeing with him and therefore making sure that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had his lower-level senior commanders endorse what Carlucci wanted to do.

To Bush, arguments of this nature aside were started by those who were unhappy at his legal assumption of presidential powers in-place of Reagan. There were individuals within the NSC who shouldn’t have been present during meetings where they were causing trouble and trying to damage the war effort for their own gains. He gave his approval to Carlucci’s planned moves to shuffle USAF and US Army assets around as well as logistical support before he decided that unofficial attendees at NSC meetings were no longer going to be present aboard the Doomsday Plane. He was on his way to Greenbrier and afterwards there would be less people on the plane when it left there.

Meanwhile, orders were cut for troops and some aircraft to start leaving Alaska and South Korea. These would be moving to Europe as soon as possible and would be just ahead of the first waves of the US Army’s II Corps forming up across the United States ready to also go to Europe next week.

One Hundred & Eighty–Eight

The Finns waited until they were ready before they struck against the Soviet forces occupying parts of their country. The deadline which they had given had come and gone and Soviet commandoes may have launched a murderous assault into Helsinki, but only when they were confident that they could achieve their goals did the Finns finally make their long-awaited move. Their aim was to rid those occupying forces of control over airports and roads connecting Lapland with the Soviet mainland to the east and they began their military moves during the late evening just after dark.


In the southern reaches of Lapland, there were Soviet airheads at the airports near Rovaniemi and Kuusamo. Both facilities had long ago been cleared of any Finnish civilians yet remained near towns and there were extensive Soviet ground patrols made with the expressed intention of protecting those airheads from what they declared were ‘NATO commandoes’. The runaways were used by transport aircraft for refuelling and divert locations too during the initial moves by the Soviet Sixth Army invading Norway far to the north. After those flights had long since ceased, both airports remained in Soviet hands and they had seen very little activity before the most recent complete lack of Soviet flights through Finland imposed by the Soviets themselves. Troops and air support ground personnel still remained at both places though and in number. They had set up defensive positions and turned back Finnish military officers approaching with white flags to try to talk to them and used gunshots to do that.

Both airports were hit by intense Finnish artillery barrages the moment that the sun dipped below the distant western horizon as Soviet-built D-30 howitzers in Finnish hands blasted them. The Finns rapid-fired their guns and then against each airport came ground assault conducted on foot by the men of the Pori-Jaeger Brigade. This was a formation from the southwestern parts of the country brought north and used here as the men who formed the ranks were deemed trustworthy and very efficient. Each attacked facility was attacked by dismounted men moving through the deep snow covering marshlands near to each and easily got in among the scattered Soviet defensive positions to start eliminating them. Artillery was directed from general harassment to targeted hits against machine gun bunkers and mortar positions as the Finns took their time. They had plenty of man-portable heavy weapons and used these carefully to support pinned infantry. Their opponents were being attacked from all sides and were nowhere near as trained in combat operations as the Finnish were: these were rear-area troops with the Soviet Air Force. More Finnish Jaeger troops were brought forward in light armoured vehicles which mounted weapons of their own, especially at the centrally-located Rovaniemi. That airport, bigger with more defenders, fell first to the Finns and was in their hands within a couple of hours. Out to the east, near the Finnish-Soviet border, the resistance was stronger. The Soviets there felt like they weren’t that far from home and had never truly believed that they hadn’t been abandoned as they had. Nonetheless, eventually the Finns overwhelmed them too with the thousand-strong attacking battalion crushing the Soviet force less than seven times their strength.

The splitting up of this brigade of Finnish troops in two different locations far apart had been deliberate as they had been long trained for this type of assault and Finland didn’t have that many forces to spare. Those specialised assault light infantry had quickly done their job and ripped through the points of resistance which sat alongside two of the three major highways which ran north into Lapland proper. There were mechanised forces and some tanks too following them which avoided the fire-fights which the Jaegers got into but whose supply lines needed to be secured before the Soviets could possibly melt away from the initial contact points. There was no chance of this as the Finns killed and captured those Soviets at the airports and then chased what few remaining survivors into the snow and hunted them down so they couldn’t come back and cause trouble again.


There were three highways running northwards into the Arctic reaches of Finland: Highway-21 which straddled the Swedish border in the west, Highway-4 in the centre which went through Rovaniemi and Highway-5 in the east. Each one saw a brigade of Finnish Army mechanised troops move up them through the night as they slowly moved deeper into Lapland. Soviet supply elements had ceased using these, but there were still roadblocks and garrison forces arrayed along them and these came into contact with the Finns retaking their territory.

Official Finnish policy was to deny that they had NATO assistance, yet there were some Swedish and US commandoes on the ground operating ahead of the Finnish Army. Those scouting elements directed the Finns towards such enemy positions and they first tried the approach of calling for surrender and only afterwards attacking in strength to eliminate resistance to their passage. Some Soviet units actually did surrender, yet those were isolated incidents. In the majority of cases, the night was lit up by gunfire and small explosions.

Most Finnish armour was in the southeastern portion of their country with the majority of the fully-mobilised Army facing the Soviets massed in Karelia yet a handful of T-55 tanks and MT-LB tracked armoured personnel carriers were present to provide heavy support for the infantry used to take on enemy forces detected. These versions of Soviet weaponry weren’t top of the range models but were far from ‘monkey-model’ versions sold by the Soviet Union to their Arab client states. They were more than a match for the light Soviet forces which they encountered during the night-time advances northwards and assisted the infantry in rolling up all encountered opposition in a timely fashion so the Finns could advance. There were many places where it was feared that blockages could have been created by dropping bridges and such like so the Finns had plenty of combat engineers with them. However, it was instead found that none of that was done as these rear-area security troops with the Soviet Sixth Army hadn’t done anything like that to halt the advances towards them. Those units were desperately short of ammunition too and with no heavy weapons to back them up.


Like with the Finnish Army, most of the Finnish Air Force was concentrated in the southeast. Swedish-built Drakens and Soviet-manufactured MiG-21s were on strip-alert and airborne in some cases in a high pressure environment waiting for all-out war to commence with the Soviets across the border. There were many British-built Hawk light attack-fighters supporting those aircraft yet there were also some Hawks up in the north flying tonight in support of the moves into Lapland. These were Hawk-51 versions, specially manufactured for Finland and those in the skies over Lapland were from training units flown by instructors and trainees in the later stages of their education. Rockets and gun-pods were carried by the Hawks as they were outfitted for ground attack missions.

On two occasions the Hawks went into action. First they assisted the Northern Jaeger Brigade – coming north from Oulu at a tiny village called Pello along the Swedish border – to overcome stubborn Soviet resistance and then again along Highway-4 near the communications centre of Vikajarvi where the Savo Jaeger Brigade was temporarily held up. In both cases, the ground forces would have eventually succeed but faced with the prospect of heavy casualties from defensive fire it was thought best to bring in air support and let the fast and nimble Hawks do what they were good at. Soviet air defences this far in the rear of the Soviet Sixth Army – its fighting positions were facing north and west – were minimal with mainly anti-aircraft guns firing, yet a man-portable SAM did take down one Hawk near Vikajarvi.

This Finnish air activity was unofficially coordinated with both the Swedes and NATO. The Finns didn’t want to see their aircraft shot down as suspected Soviet aircraft by marauding NATO fighters and their new allies provided tactical air control parties on the ground to assist in that close air support flown. Distant friendly radar coverage for the Finns also gave them protection from any Soviet fighter interference coming from the east yet there wasn’t any of that yet making an appearance above their country.


The Finns chose to move through the night as this was their own country and they didn’t expect serious opposition from Soviet forces ready to meet them this far south. They attacked outposts and distant communication links as they headed through the darkness so that by the time the morning came, they would arrive in the northern parts of Lapland where they expected much stronger Soviet resistance to occur. At Ivalo and Kittila there were major garrisons around the Soviet-held airports at those locations while the Finnish Wedge was full of those defeated, but still well-armed Soviet ground troops. Extremely poor road links came west from the Soviet Union into Lapland from across the border in the northeast yet they too would be littered with enemy forces as well.

All of these portions of their country were due to be liberated by the Finns starting at first light and they were to be joined too by American forces starting to move southwards from Finmark in those portions of Norway recaptured previously from the Soviets. The US Army was sending light troops deep into Finland to meet up with Finnish forces while US Marines were meant to be making an assault eastwards to liberate those few remaining Norwegian areas across the lower reaches of the Tana River near Kirkenes and the Varanger Peninsula. Finland was to pull its weight in this effort yet their intention was solely to liberate their own country no matter what other nations not in their position might have wanted in a geo-political sense.


The bulk of Finnish military might was deployed facing Soviet Karelia… what had only less than fifty years ago been Finnish Karelia. Their tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery and aircraft, backed up by a lot of infantry and extensive minefields as well as preparations for wide-scale demolition works, was all positioned facing the Soviet border across the southeastern parts of Finland. A defensive posture was generally maintained, yet a pair of armoured brigades were standing ready to advance in counterattacks should the need arise. The defensive doctrine which the Finns had here was for light units to soak up Soviet attacks coming over the border while heavy units then went to work in tearing apart the advancing spearheads. Withdrawals were planned and while that happened, stay behind units would allow Soviet forces to pass over them before later unleashing chaos in the enemy rear. The marshy terrain was to be made use of to channel Soviet armour into ambushes while Finnish infantry would withdraw on foot knowing that they couldn’t be chased by tanks when doing so.

The true hope of the Finns was that all these plans weren’t going to have to be put into action though.

Finnish intelligence pointed to the fact that the reinforced Soviet Thirtieth Guards Army Corps was across the border and had been positioned near avenues of advance into Finland since the eve of war breaking out. They were sure that there were three combat divisions with this field army sized force including one of the Soviet’s right flank alongside the two in the centre. It was expected that the Soviets wanted the Finns to know these formations where in-place ready to attack should Finland do as it had done this evening. Recent information from the Americans with their satellite said that the Soviets there were weak and without supplies; the Finns didn’t trust that intelligence as what could really be seen from a satellite and it was hardly likely that in two weeks of staying still the Soviets there had used up their fuel and ammunition. Instead, the Finns were waiting for that Soviet force to roll into their country and they therefore had to be prepared to fight it no matter how much they wished that that wasn’t going to be the case.





One Hundred & Eighty–Nine

There were many media figures in the West who made their name with the coverage they provided during the war. Print journalists and broadcast reporters would be remembered for the stories which they filed and the memories of those on the home front during the war of the conflict would be forever shaped by what they read and heard from many of these media personalities who became household names. Careers were made and there were book deals as well as a lifetime of recognition for those who became famous reporting on the war from the perspective of the West.

The war was also dangerous for many in the media too. More journalists, reporters, photographers and support crews (producers, cameramen and researchers out in the field) were killed during the Third World War – in real terms and proportionally too – than in any other major conflict since the beginnings of the modern media. Many found themselves deliberately targeted by the Soviets and their proxies as the media of the West was seen as a propaganda tool for the United States and its allies, yet the majority died during military operations as the war was never confined to the direct frontlines and there wasn’t often a ‘safe’ rear from the media to operate from either.

Across Western Europe and in Canada too, the media found themselves under government control. There was no fair and unbiased reporting as media outlets came under censorship: moderate in some cases and severe in others. The sapping of morale was feared along with the leaking of information which might be of use to the enemy. Plenty of governments had fears over the politics of many of those in the media too and worried over what they might try and do if they were not kept under the most stringent control. There was legislation written in parliaments pre-war and this easily came into play on the eve of conflict so that the media was subservient to the wishes of their country’s leaders.

In the United States, things were a little different with self-censorship imposed by media companies with instructions coming down from on high that there was to be cooperation with the US Government and the Pentagon. Internally, the newspapers, radio stations and television stations censored themselves with experienced senior people working with the authorities to clear anything being printed or broadcast first-hand. As expected, there were a few problems with this on the technical side and there were also quite a few resignations of staff who had objections to this as they felt that their valued First Amendment rights were being violated… it would take many years for the majority of these people to gain work in the industry again in the post-war United States.

Media based in neutral countries reported on the war more freely and in many instances earned the ire of NATO. There were Austrian and Swiss journalists active in the western sides of the frontlines yet their government eventually worked with the West in tightening restrictions on what was reported by them to the international audience. The Italian media was free of constraints from its own government and said and wrote what it wanted and only movement restrictions imposed when journalists were active in NATO countries hurt their efforts to let the world know what was going on behind the frontlines. Italian freelance photographers were a big feature of the war in the West and were known for their daring and sometimes fatalist stupidity. There were rumours that both the CIA and the NSA, along with support from the French DSGE, eventually assisted in causing ‘technical difficulties’ on the ground to Italian media, further helped by local Italians too, yet none of that was ever proved. Still, television stations had power outages, some printing presses were burnt down and certain journalists were apparently threatened for filing stories regarded as unfriendly to the West. Such accusations were denied but they would continue to be made for many years afterwards. In the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and China, regions unaffected by the war, state-run media broadcast reports from the war yet there was very little on the ground journalism undertaken.

Through Eastern Europe and through the Soviet Union, foreign journalists who were foolish enough to remain there as war approached, weren’t treated properly by the Soviets. They were regarded wholesale as spies and detained right before war broke out no matter what country they came from. Quickly, KGB efforts released many from what were regarded as friendly nations yet the remainder stayed locked up. There had been a desire for reporting on the war ‘from the other side’ for many of these people and they very quickly regretted that notion that the Soviets were going to allow them to do anything like that.


What NATO wanted was for the media to be on their side. They were out to control the message being put across via news channels to civilians in their own countries, what their own troops might hear and also what those in uninvolved nations would be told. That message was simple: NATO had been attacked without provocation and while suffering setbacks, wasn’t losing the war to the Soviets.

They didn’t want the media to report that Hamburg had fallen to the Soviets or that the Dutch Army had been defeated in detail whilst engaged in combat. News reports that US national guardsmen had arrived in strength through ports in western France and that operations like EAGLE PUSH and BLACKSMITH were to take place were equally not desired either. Morale and public opinion was of great importance and so too was denying this information to the Soviets along with everything else that NATO had to worry about.

This sort of thing could generally be understood by the media, but it was the small things that caused problems. Interviews to be broadcast with civilians fleeing from the Rhineland across into Belgium and France were seen as detrimental to morale but the media regarded this as a matter of human interest. Where stories were written for publishing about areas of eastern England closed to civilian movement due to immense air activity these would provide confirmation for the enemy should their agents read them that that part of Britain remained a hub of important activity. Even where the media might wish to report on hotbeds of unemployment around certain European ports suddenly coming alive with jobs loading and unloading ships in what seemed like a morale-boosting story wasn’t what NATO wanted to see either due to the intelligence that that would provide to the enemy.

NATO military forces were aware that they were upsetting the media with their reporting restrictions but then they were after all fighting for the freedom of the West so that journalists would be free to move around as they did and try to report on these matters. It was often hard to get such people to understand that even when they were trying to help, they could do wrong.


When war broke out, on the western sides of the frontlines the media was at first seemingly everywhere. Civilians claiming that they were freelance reporters kept popping up and many of them had cameras and communications equipment. They tried to get pictures, video footage and conduct interviews where military operations were underway. Across Norway, Denmark and West Germany, the already harassed civilian authorities couldn’t control their movements and it was up to the NATO military forces to try to do so. Many were quickly accredited to Public Affairs teams yet the majority tried to roam independently and conduct their business. They found themselves caught up in air attacks or artillery barrages, ambushed by Soviet Spetsnaz teams who wanted their vehicles & identities and also detained by NATO military police units keeping them back from the fighting. The journalists would explain that they had a public interest right and that they were only seeking the truth, but these reasons usually feel upon deaf ears as they were pushed back for their own safety and that ever-present worry that if captured they would reveal information unwillingly to the enemy.

Those accredited journalists were usually with big media organisations which NATO military forces previously had dealings with. They remained far in the rear at headquarters units and with what they regarded as their ‘handlers’ from Public Affairs teams. News packages were prepared for them and briefings given too. Dealings between the military and the media differed with different nationalities and things were far from being done the same way, yet, generally, those who remained in the rear saw very little of the war. There were occasions where they did face danger and when that occurred it was very real though as headquarters posts were often the targets of stand-off attacks.

The media worked to not only file stories delivering back to their organisations up to the minute information but also to give themselves background information for future articles as well. They were far away from home and working hard in a dangerous environment where they quickly found that they had little friends. Those travelling independently were taking immense risks though those who were under the semi-protection with NATO military forces also faced danger too. There were instances where some journalists were detained first by specialist military police teams and then later representatives of NATO nation’s intelligence services under the suspicion of either knowingly or unwitting attempting to pass information to the Soviets. The vast majority of these allegations would later result in nothing more than a removal of those journalists from near the frontlines and an expulsion back to their own countries, yet there were arrests made of some of those detained with a view to legal action to be later taken against them.

Media personnel were killed and wounded everywhere and not just near the fighting either. They faced all sorts of dangers being near the fighting from enemy action to even friendly fire occurring at other times too. Wearing a bullet-proof vest bearing the word ‘PRESS’ and a white helmet didn’t do any good when faced with the explosion of an artillery shell or a bomb dropped by an attacking aircraft. Soviet air attacks against Western Europe meant that the media was again often in the firing line too when bombs fell on cities and against military targets back further west.

World War Three wasn’t a healthy environment for those reporting the news.


The US twenty-four hour cable-access news channel CNN really made a name for itself and many of its correspondents during the war. Home-based in Atlanta, CNN had been making waves before World War Three, but it was at the forefront of reporting on the conflict to its American audience back home and much of its coverage was further broadcast around the world too. Presentation was a big factor in this success and so too were the personalities involved in its wartime coverage.

The attractive female correspondent Christiane Amanpour and her male colleague Bernard Shaw played a major role in CNN’s wartime coverage. Both were in Germany before and during the war first reporting on REFORGER and then the conduct of the war. The former was initially at US V Corps rear headquarters while the latter was with the US Seventh Army main headquarters. Neither was the shy and retiring type yet they were likeable personalities who used their attributes to allow them to do their job very well. They filed stories and made broadcasts from Germany on how the war was progressing with the US Army in central Hessen. What they could say was censored on-site and then back at CNN where senior producers and a retired general had been brought in to work at the Atlanta offices, yet neither was about to put themselves and their fellow countrymen at risk on purpose. Their voices and pictures – video footage wasn’t coming direct from them though their words were broadcast over other images – quickly became known to the American public.

Shaw remained with US Seventh Army though Amanpour managed to ‘roam’ a bit. General Woodmansee and she had a good personal relationship and the US V Corps commander knew that she was actually a good morale booster for the troops in the field. She travelled with a pair of Public Affairs officers and also a small military police detachment throughout US V Corps’ rear and the special treatment given to her did cause some ruffles. Amanpour was a Briton with Iranian heritage and as a thirty year-old female civilian travelling around escorted by the US Army asking questions, conducting interviews and having video footage shot didn’t always go down very well with some. During the mad rush to withdraw back across the Main River and thus abandon the ground which the US V Corps had at first fought so hard to keep the Soviets out of, Amanpour and her small party were almost caught in a Soviet long-range rocket barrage harassing that withdrawal and they were very lucky to escape unharmed. She was later refused a request to go forward with the US Army when EAGLE PUSH failed though General Woodmansee had been ready to give her plenty of off-the-record comments afterwards to explain what had gone on there not only on the battlefield but politically too. Unfortunately, another one of those enemy rockets, a Soviet Scud theatre ballistic missile, then hit US V Corps headquarters when Amanpour was present.

The CNN correspondent was killed outright along with nine others including the Vice Chief of the US Army General Arthur E. Brown who had come to Europe to look into the circumstances surrounding EAGLE PUSH. General Woodmansee lost both his legs in the blast from the rocket warhead and was soon on his way out of Germany leading to General Schwarzkopf, who had accompanied General Brown at first, taking over command of the US V Corps. Post-war, General Woodmansee would contribute to a memoir concerning Amanpour.

Shaw survived a close encounter with the enemy himself as he furthered CNN’s reporting efforts from Germany with the US Army. Days after his colleague lost her life, he was with a column from US Seventh Army headquarters moving to a new location as it did twice a day – which was an immense but necessary effort – when that particular column ran into roadblock supposedly manned by West German Territorial troops checking for ‘Soviet infiltrators’. It turned out that those soldiers were actually Spetsnaz tracking the regular movements of that headquarters and there was a furious fire-fight. The Spetsnaz had underestimated their opponents on this occasion and were defeated: Shaw would later relate an edited version of this to his audience back home without going into specifics but with the drama still there.

Other American journalists with the print and broadcast media had equally dangerous encounters with the enemy and gained access in many places where others couldn’t or were present at momentous events too. Nevertheless, CNN’s correspondents in central Germany really made a name for themselves during the war and Amanpour’s tragic death contributed to that.


The British media was extremely tightly regulated due the war and in the immediate build-up to the conflict breaking out too. The BBC had come under state control, the independent ITV taken off the air at first and newspapers ceased being published for some time. These measures were taken as part of the overreaction that was Transition to War and were later eased in places, yet the British media wasn’t let off the leash. Experience from World War Two and what had been witnessed with the role which the US media was regarded as playing in the American defeat in the Vietnam War brought about this control imposed from Whitehall.

Like every country in the West, Britain had serious and professional journalists as well as its fair share of tabloid reporters who really couldn’t give a damn. The war to them was just another story and once newspapers were allowed to go to print again – with the censorship which they had to deal with certainly causing open revolt among their American counterparts had that been attempted in the US – they tried to carry on with business as usual… only to find that the British government wasn’t having any of that. Pool reporters were assigned to the military and civil servants restricted what the media back in Britain could hear, see and say.

There were some journalists – and others – who didn’t want to play by these rules though. Members of the British media deemed themselves as freelance journalists and tried to leave Britain to go to report on the fast-approaching war; almost all of them didn’t get very far as Britain worked effectively in the immediate pre-war period to shut down its air and sea borders for exclusive military use only. Of course, no barrier is ever full-proof and some of these freelancers managed to get through including a lone woman who travelled to the Netherlands the day before the war from Harwich in Essex after gaining entry aboard a ship carrying military vehicles to the Continent. Polly Toynbee was this woman who made that short overnight journey across the North Sea and then moved further across Western Europe afterwards. She was a successful semi-public figure back in Britain who regarded herself as having good reason to effectively flee her country against government wishes and decide to act like the journalist that she clearly was not in the middle of a war zone.

Toynbee had handed in her resignation at the BBC where she worked as the Social Affairs Editor with BBC News before the organisation had come under complete government control. Regarded as a socialist, a humanist and a campaigner for feminism by many, Toynbee had left Britain to try her hand at journalist after not being able to stomach the events back home with what she regarded as her country turning into a fascist dictatorship. Word had reached her of the detention by MI-5 of all of those left-wing intellectuals and she had – wrongly – thought that the Security Service would be coming for her next. So off she went to the Continent ready to write stories on the war from there and to add her political opinions to these. What she was hoping to see, who she was hoping to talk to and where any articles which she wrote were going to be published were all questions to be later answered.

For several days, Toynbee had a lot of luck. She managed to get deep into West Germany and across the North German Plain towards the operational zone of the British I Corps initially south of Hannover. There were those who were sympathetic to her because when she wanted to she could talk people round and get her own way. Eventually though that luck ran out and she was arrested by the Royal Military Police deep in the British rear after indignantly refusing an offer by them to assist her as a British citizen in getting back to the UK and verbally abusing them… or so their official report said anyway. Holding someone like Toynbee in detention wasn’t what the Red Caps wanted to do and they legally had no ground to do so, something which Toynbee repeatedly pointed out. Before this situation could be resolved with Toynbee removed from Germany and as far away from the Red Caps who were unlucky enough to have her in their custody, NATO frontlines collapsed on Friday March 18th following that Soviet gas attack. As the rear area support elements of the British I Corps fell back Toynbee and her escorts were separated in the confusing situation and the lone Land Rover which she was inside with a pair of Red Caps was hit with machine gun fire from a Polish BMP-1 armoured vehicle. Both military policemen were killed and the vehicle destroyed while Toynbee was left unharmed and in a bit of a state at what she had witnessed as enemy armies had torn through so much of the NATO rear.

The Poles handed this captive over to the KGB as they had no idea what to do with her but were sure that she must be of some importance – a dissident of some sort, they believed – and the KGB would want such a person in their custody.

To Toynbee, the Soviets weren’t socialists, even if they protested that they were in the form of the name of their country. They were totalitarian Stalinists who threw their enemies in gulags or psychiatric hospitals instead of them letting work for their national broadcaster. She regarded herself as lucky that she wasn’t immediately shot or tortured because she was certain that the KGB was just as aware of her politics and her influential beliefs as MI-5 and the British government was. The city of Karl-Marx-Stadt, formerly known as Chemnitz, was where she soon ended up and in a detention camp where the KGB had established deep inside East Germany for all sorts of captives of a non-military nature including journalists and the odd defector. Once the KGB had spoken to her, they had quickly taken the measure of this forty-one year-old Briton and realised that she wasn’t a spy like they believed most journalists from the West were but rather a propaganda tool that could be put to use for their own ends.

Toynbee was to be finally given the chance to write articles which would be used to try to influence opinion back in Britain. This wasn’t going to be a pleasant experience at all for her but her wishes were hardly something that the KGB worried over.

One Hundred & Ninety–Two

The Royal Navy was not having a good war. The destruction caused to the Task Force on the second day of the conflict had been gut-wrenching, but then further losses had mounted in dribs and drabs with warships, submarines and support ships being repeatedly lost in engagements. Submarines had attacked with torpedoes and missiles, aircraft had fired missiles of their own plus dropped bombs and used cannons, while there had been further missiles from Soviet warships too. These enemy threats were met in different manners in different theatres of combat yet there was always the surprise element to consider too. The RN had struck back with a lot of forces against their opponents and they had the support of their allies, yet the losses had kept totalling up as victories would often mean walking away with their own wounded too.

This combat was continuous twenty-four hours a day with vessels not even assured that they could be safe in port too when they came home to load weapons or extra crew. The men aboard the vessels of the RN as well as those ashore in support roles (in the latter case there were many women serving too) were tired and having to face danger at all times. Mistakes, often fatal ones, could occur making the Soviets not the own enemy to be encountered. There were rumours on several occasions that some losses which the RN had taken, especially in terms of the submarines officially listed as missing, had been the result of friendly fire. As best as possible, officers tried to keep the morale of the ranks up but wasn’t an easy task in many situations.

The war carried on for the RN and those serving among the Senior Service kept on having to do their duty aboard the many vessels which were still active and fighting.


HMS Brilliant had started the war in British Waters: the frigate had been on ASW duty in the North-Western Approaches north of Ulster and west of Scotland. There had been convoys inbound and outbound through that stretch of the North Atlantic at that time and Britain was deploying its strategic nuclear arsenal aboard its strategic missile submarines. After several days of patrolling there with no sign of the enemy seen and convoys moving away to use the Irish Sea due to the threat of Soviet naval raketonosets activity, the very modern ASW platform that the Brilliant was was needed further out in the wider ocean. The detection systems mounted worked better in deeper seas without interference from coastal noises.

Soviet submarines were active in great number across the North Atlantic during the early days of the war. Again and again, they would strike with torpedoes in the main though occasionally with missiles too against warships hunting them and convoys of civilian ships trying to avoid them. Using long-established procedures practised extensively in peacetime, NATO navies were working together to defend the sea-lanes once war broke out and the Brilliant became part of that effort.

A big and fast warship, the Brilliant carried more than two hundred crew. She had missiles and torpedoes as her main armament rather than the traditional main gun. SATCOM antenna was mounted for secure communications while electronic warfighting equipment came in the form of radars, sonars and jamming systems. When out in the North Atlantic, the Brilliant at first worked alone before joining a multi-national NATO force before returning to her solo duties. Information on enemy air and especially submarine activity was shared with the frigate and she too passed on details to other vessels as the RN’s underground command centre at Northwood outside London.

Two confirmed solo ‘kills’ were achieved by the Brilliant during the first two weeks of war and there was also a partial silhouette painted on both sides of her superstructure too which denoted an ‘assist’. A torpedo dropped by one of the Lynx helicopters carried had impacted with a Soviet submarine midway across the ocean and impact noises had been detected while the frigate’s own mounted torpedo tubes had fired a pair of such weapons against another Soviet submarine with confirmation coming of that strike too. On both occasions, the towed array sonar trailing far behind the Brilliant had at first acquired the contact before a long and difficult, plus dangerous, hunt was made to gain a firm track and then take solid shots at the targeted submarines to hit them when they were deep and liable to be sunk with an impact. The ‘assist’ had come in conjunction with a US Navy P-3C long-range maritime patrol aircraft following-up on targeting information maintained and fed to them by the Brilliant and then dropping its own torpedoes on that third submarine.

During that third successful engagement, the Brilliant had come under direct attack when on the other two occasions it was thought that the enemy didn’t know that the RN was after them until the very last moment when it was too late. A Sierra-class submarine had been that target and had fired off a pair of torpedoes blind moments before the Americans had sunk it: one had spun in wild, aimless circles while the other had smashed into the towed decoy also behind the Brilliant. It was thought that that impact had an element of luck to it after the Sierra’s destruction had meant that torpedo-guidance wires had been cut, yet that wasn’t something known for sure.

Radar images of distant aircraft had appeared on display screens aboard the Brilliant with what its own air-search radar could see and what was downlinked from allied sources too. There had been no possibility of using the carried Sea Wolf missiles against those aircraft due to range issues, yet one of those reconnaissance aircraft had actually been physically seen by many of the crew aboard. A Harrier flying from the Spanish Navy’s carrier in the North Atlantic, back when the Brilliant had been near to that vessel, had downed that Bear and it had crashed into the ocean very near to the RN frigate. The captain had resisted the temptation to smash another missile into the falling wreckage as it came down – just to make sure – and instead launched a boat to rescue Soviet aircrew spotted in the water. That had come with risks involved as the North Atlantic was a battle zone and to hang around trying to help the enemy wasn’t the best of ideas, yet leaving men to die as they would have done had been on that occasion seen as too cold-blooded. Three men had been pulled from the water with one dying moments after being boarded while the two survivors were given medical care and kept under guard for a later transfer.

That rescue had occurred whereas on another occasion wartime need had overruled compassion. The Brilliant had at one point been present when a convoy was attacked and a Liberian-registered merchantmen had been stricken by several torpedoes. The ship and its crew of sailors from all over the world had been left unaided as at that point the offending submarine was being hunted and was still dangerous and there had therefore been nothing that the Brilliant could do rather than expose herself to danger and assist in allowing that offending submarine to get away and sink other ships. Eventually, the hunting efforts of the Brilliant had helped in allowing a Canadian destroyer to sink that particular submarine, but it had been a bitter pill for many of the crew to swallow.

Without having to expend much ammunition, the Brilliant hadn’t needed to return to Britain to rearm like other vessels did. Those aboard were contained within their own little world full of dangers and heard little news from the outside. There were constant alerts and the ship was always a hive of activity even if it wasn’t constantly engaging the enemy. A sailor was swept overboard one afternoon during a storm so typical of the North Atlantic when he really shouldn’t have been and the loss was attributed to errors being made among the junior officers in not making sure that their men were rested enough and not liable to get into a situation where an accident like that would occur. Other crew members missed home and worried about their families. When contact was made twice with tankers for at-sea refuelling – once with the RFA Tidespring (to where the pair of Soviet prisoners went) and then with a US Navy ship – rumours did reach many of the crew about how the war was going. Afterwards, the captain was forced to make an announcement reminding men to do their duty and to not listen to such gossip as some sailors had heard things which they hadn’t liked.

What everyone aboard lived with was the very real danger that at any moment an attack could come against them which would be fatal for their ship and them. As the war went onwards, there were fewer and fewer Soviet submarines at sea after they had either been hunted down or were trying to make their way home for rearmament, yet the waters of the North Atlantic were still very dangerous indeed.


Less than a quarter of the RN’s pre-war strength of submarines went out into the North Atlantic. Instead, they concentrated to the east and north of the UK mainland as well as further northwards into the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea too. Some of those scored major kills taking on big capital ships of the Soviet Northern Fleet yet others didn’t see much – or in a few instances none – action at all in the war’s first few weeks. For those not engaged in attacking the surface forces of the Soviet Navy, their missions were to generally stay out of trouble until, as one senior officer back at Northwood put it, ‘trouble found them’. It was thought pre-war that the UK mainland would come under direct attack from Soviet submarines firing land-attack missiles and many submarines were meant to guard against this by reacting to one strike so another couldn’t be launched by that offending submarine. Other RN subsurface vessels were meant to patrol the Norwegian Sea hoping to stumble across transiting Soviet submarines and therefore protect that sea-lanes across the North Atlantic from these outposts; the ocean was a big place though. Even those submarines with the Task Force or sent towards the coasts where parts of Norway and Denmark had been occupied didn’t see much action as they were again on protective missions or conducting surveillance which often involved the landing of small groups of naval frogmen. It was those submarines up in the far north that would attempt to cover themselves in glory for the RN in this war though many would be lost in doing so.

HMS Turbulent had been tasked to hunt for Soviet amphibious ships when the war started and had patiently waited for those to come steaming around the North Cape and towards the western reaches of Finmark. The submarine had laid in wait for those to come so they could be sunk in a barrage of torpedoes taking Soviet Naval Infantry with them down to the ocean floor. Those ships didn’t come within the first few days and the submarine had been reassigned… only to realise much later that if there had been some more patience on the part of Northwood then that opportunity would have later come there.

The Turbulent instead had moved into the Barents Sea long before the US Navy arrived with their carriers. Surveillance had been the first mission in scouting enemy strength at-sea there while also scouting the approaches towards those many submarine bases for the possible later introduction of further RN submarines laden with mines. The Barents Sea at that point had been a target-rich environment and the Turbulent had eventually been released from her surveillance mission to engage enemy surface vessels. Five warships had been attacked with torpedoes – a frigate, two corvettes and two missile boats – with the confirmed kills of four of those. Another shot had been taken at a Soviet diesel/electric-powered submarine snorkelling at one point on the surface but for inexplicable reasons that attack had failed and instead the Turbulent had fast become the hunted rather than the hunter when aircraft dropped sonobuoys quickly followed by depth charges.

There had been some very near misses in that encounter and the submarine was very lucky to escape with it afterwards being realised that not enough reconnaissance of the immediate area had taken place before that failed attack.

The weapons load for a Trafalgar-class submarine as the Turbulent was was a stock of thirty torpedoes and Harpoon anti-ship missiles. In those engagements, only eight torpedoes had been expended and another sixteen remained along with half a dozen missiles. The thinking had been that with so many weapons remaining, the Turbulent could have spent several more weeks at sea on mission. But then the amphibious ships arrived, coming back eastwards after their failed mission. It wasn’t known aboard the submarine at that point that they had delivered their troops into already-occupied Norwegian territory, but that didn’t matter as the vessels spotted were a set of strategic targets fully loaded or empty.

This time there was no chance of calling on external support for a follow-up attack – in the form of NATO aircraft or even light surface vessels – but regardless the Turbulent made its move. Those ships were heading back to the Archangelsk area and apparent safety, but before then Harpoons and torpedoes were fired against several ships. The attack was hurried and not perfect, but still very lethal. Escorting warships were hit too along with the big landing ships. The log book on the Turbulent would record that they confirmed hits upon a destroyer, a frigate, three big amphibious transports (in the Soviet, not the NATO sense) and a suspected tanker. All six missiles and seven more torpedoes were launched in a trio of attacks occurring in fast succession from several angles of attack. Opposition was put up against the RN submarine, yet it got away without a scratch.

The usage of now more than two thirds of the weapons load, along with many fired decoys too, meant that the Turbulent went back towards the UK. What was believed to be a Canadian aircraft came very close to attacking the submarine during this journey home through the Norwegian Sea and no one was happy at what had been very nearly a fatal friendly fire incident as later analysis showed that that aircraft had come very close undetected to the Turbulent.

After a high-speed run, the Turbulent reached Faslane in southwestern Scotland on the second Sunday of the war. The base there had been attacked only once successfully by Soviet missiles fired from raketonosets and when those selected crew who went ashore did they saw some of the debris still remaining. They were told that Rosyth, Devonport, Portsmouth and shipyards too had been badly hit and Faslane was rather lucky in comparison. Once there, a quick transfer of more weapons was made from stores and then the Turbulent was back at sea to continue her war patrol.


The replenishment oiler RFA Tidespring visited Britain far more often during the conflict. This huge vessel fulfilled the role of assisting in keeping the RN’s warships and many of those of Britain’s allies at sea and sustained so they would keep on-station. Fuel was carried by this vessel manned by reservists along with ammunition, food, fresh water, medical supplies and sometimes spare parts for systems too. Three old Wessex helicopters flew from the support ship as well and they played a major role in that ship-to-ship supply effort when at sea but also made an appearance when the Tidespring was in port in assisting with fast-loading.

This veteran of the Falklands War, which had then carried part of 42 Commando to South Georgia six years beforehand, made multiple runs back and forth out into the North Atlantic from RN bases on England South Coast. There were other vessels involved in this too, yet Tidespring fast made a name for herself as she was always available and the professionalism of her crew. Other support ships faced danger and even destruction – those hit by cruise missiles when with the Task Force a major example – yet the Tidespring was regarded as a ‘lucky ship’. Several old sailors aboard hated such a description and tried to hush comments like that from younger men for fear of bringing bad luck, but the name stuck.

Those transfers at sea were assisted by helicopters with underslung loads, yet it was mainly the cranes and rubber pipelines that the Tidespring could do the most of her work. In rough seas and in the dead of night as well as in calm and bright weather the Tidespring did her duty. The loads transferred were never that heavy and some visited vessels received much more than others in need – orders would always come into play – yet the ship didn’t make enemies among others as again and again it showed up. On one occasion, when making a resupply run to HMS Active out in the middle of the North Atlantic, the crew aboard one of the Wessex helicopters dropped grenades into the water when there were reports of a possible submarine. This didn’t help out in any way and was rather silly to be honest, but it showed a determination to help that was quite appreciated.

When coming back to the UK to make fast loadings of stores, the Tidespring twice brought back prisoners. There were those two Soviet aircrew from that downed Bear on one occasion while on another five Soviet submariners rescued by a Dutch frigate after their vessel had been sunk and they had made a miraculous escape. Such people were treated with respect despite being the enemy: that was how the RN was meant to do business. In addition, the Tidespring sometimes returned with casualties too from combat incidents at sea with badly-wounded sailors who there might just be a chance to save with medical care on land rather than aboard the warships from where they came.

Devonport and Portsmouth were where the Tidespring made her visits too, those closed naval towns which had seen several visits by the enemy despite being so far away from what should have been the frontlines. These RN bases on the English Channel with easy access to the ocean beyond had each been hit on multiple occasions by missiles though so too had the urban areas around them: Plymouth was worse off than Portsmouth was. Nonetheless, civilians were then working for the RN to assist in the war efforts taking place as they were undertaking paid labouring duties in a semi-volunteer role. A couple of RN and NATO warships were at each base on a permanent basis as they had taken war damage and arrived on Britain’s shores, but mainly those vessels in port and staying there were civilian ones brought in between the movements of warships and support ships on supply runs; any damaged civilian ships were going elsewhere. The RN bases were being put to use in landing supplies coming across the Atlantic for NATO forces based in the UK and also to assist in civilian relief here through these facilities with all of their cargo handling capabilities and security.

Such efforts, everyone working together, were good for the crew of the Tidespring to witness. They were doing their part in the war and everyone else was doing theirs too.


On the eve of war, the RN had raced to get its hands upon many warfighting assets as possible. Sea Harriers and helicopters had been moved from training units to ships while light training aircraft had been assigned to coastal patrol duties around the UK. Retired personnel had come back to the colours and put to use while facilities were fast expanded. In terms of vessels, the RN had struggled to reinforce itself though.

There were a couple of older frigates soon to be decommissioned and therefore being rundown which were hurriedly re-crewed and sent to sea while brand new HMS Sheffield had been hastily commissioned early only to be sunk on the war’s first day. As losses accumulated, the RN didn’t have any real reserves with major vessels to put to sea. All they had was vessels being built for future service and in various stages of construction; six frigates and three submarines.

Those Trafalgar-class submarines being built by Vickers at Burrow-in-Furness were a long way away from getting to sea in any shape to fight when Soviet cruise missiles blasted the Vickers yard on the war’s first day. The Soviets wanted to destroy the capability of the RN to repair submarines there and putting an immediate end to construction efforts upon those vessels was only a bonus. Neither boat was going to see any war service and the hulls for submarines planned to be named Trenchant and Talent were later to be scrapped while the expected Triumph (three years away from planned service) was left smashed up with its future in less but still some doubt.

The frigates were planned to be the latest Type-22s for the RN with four of the five being the ‘Batch-3’ versions with main guns and the very latest technology fitted, a Batch-2 Type-22 and a newer Type-23. During the countdown to war, as Transition to War renationalised many vital national assets including shipyards (the irony of this didn’t raise many smiles), Coventry and Cornwall left the sites of their construction and were moved away from those locations regarded as exposed: Swan Hunter at Wallsend on the Tyne and Yarrow at Glasgow. These vessels were months away from commissioning and each would join the ranks of the RN during the first days of the war. The other four – the Batch-3s like the Cornwall and the Type-23 – remained where they were at those two shipyards plus Cammell Laird on Birkenhead. The RN could do nothing itself to defend those hulls and hoped for the best outcome for these vessels whose combined cost was in excess of four hundred million pounds.

It was not to be. All three shipyards faced attack like Burrow-in-Furness did and the hulls of these future ships weren’t outright destroyed, but they did take damage. There was a plan for the future Campbeltown to leave Cammell Laird and be towed across to Harland & Wolff but that wasn’t an official RN policy; the effort was too great for a vessel not expected to see service for six months to a year while Belfast had the sectarian civil war ongoing that it did… plus the shipyard there had been attacked with both of the famous Samson & Goliath cranes being brought tumbling to the ground.

Coventry and Cornwall both did join the RN and soon enough engaged in combat operations. They were fantastic vessels almost in top condition with what many people regarded as only cosmetic additions to be made before they flew the White Ensign; of course, not an opinion shared by all. That was it though. The RN could only raise reserves such as these two shiny vessels along with a fewer older frigates saved at the last minute too from what should have been the process of decommissioning them for scraping or to be sold aboard.


Away from these two new frigates, Brilliant out in the North Atlantic on ASW duties, the Turbulent soon to head back out on war patrol and the Tidespring making its back-and-forth supply runs, the rest of the RN was still fighting despite the difficulties. On the surface of the sea and below, in the air and on land, the Senior Service kept relentlessly taking the fight to the enemy and doing their duty no matter how much it cost.





One Hundred & Ninety–Three

Likewise, the Royal Air Force was having a difficult war where losses just kept mounting and there was no respite from the constant level of operations. Since the very start of the conflict and then twenty-four hours a day since then, the RAF had been in the thick of the action in multiple theatres. If fought countless engagements with the Soviets and tried as best as possible to live up to the standards set in the past in the face of the enemy.

In places the casualties taken, in terms of manpower and equipment, were staggering. Morale dipped alongside assets and so too did capabilities. That wasn’t an across the board situation though as while losses occurred there were too many victories won.


No. 3 Squadron, RAF had gone to war with sixteen Harrier GR3 attack-fighters and almost two hundred personnel. Their home base at RAF Gutersloh in western Lower Saxony had been left behind on the eve of conflict as that fixed location was believed to be highly vulnerable to enemy attack (as was rather quickly proved to be the case) and 3 Squadron had deployed into rough-field locations. All across the German countryside in a triangle defined by the edges of Osnabruck-Munster-Bielefeld, there were pre-scouted sites for the use of the Harriers with 3 Squadron along with its partner Harrier squadron at RAF Gutersloh too: No. 4 Squadron. The Harriers were dispersed into sheltered locations where there was an improvised runaway and mobile facilities to keep their aircraft flying and the personnel able to be free from direct enemy attack.

As can be imagined, this wasn’t an easy thing to do. Aircraft like the Harrier were maintenance intensive and they just couldn’t be operated from anywhere. There needed to be areas for the technicians to work and the pilots to plan their operations. Adequate shelter from detection and air strike too needed to be put to use while fuel and armaments needed to be fed to the aircraft so they could fight once in the skies. Using multiple sites as 3 Squadron did for several aircraft at a time, along with moving about as they did, was an immense undertaking in terms of logistics, man-hours and concealment.

It was worth it though. The Harriers were excellent weapons of war perfectly suited to the tactical role above the battlefields of the North German Plain. Hundreds of hours were spent with the aircraft in the air and engaged in combat missions; often times the same aircraft would conduct five or even six flights in any twenty-four hour period. There were almost three times the number of pilots for the single-seat aircraft than there were Harriers and 3 Squadron was able to remain connected to the NATO air logistics efforts so this could be maintained. The 2 ATAF provided tasking for the Harriers and consequently the aircraft flew missions in support of not just British troops, but those of their NATO allies too.

The Harriers carried a pair of mounted cannons and a whole range of external ordnance on their missions: missiles, rockets and bombs. 3 Squadron had its Harriers fire their 30mm cannons against a whole range of ground targets, launch Sidewinders against helicopters and in self-defence against attacking enemy fighters (not always with much success in the latter case though), unleash waves of SNEB 68mm unguided rockets against enemy troops and drop iron bombs as well as cluster bombs atop tanks and other enemy armour. The Harriers usually flew in pairs or in four-ship flights at the beginning of the war though as it progressed there were three-ship or lone flights undertaken. Reconnaissance missions were sometimes flown as well with intelligence-gathering equipment inside pods underneath the Harriers and the pilots making visual reports. Bad weather and night-time flying was dangerous, but something which the Harriers could do and therefore they fought at all times when needed. There were planned strike missions, armed patrols and alerts for emergency air strikes.

Combat over the skies of Germany was dangerous though and attrition occurred rather frequently at what eventually averaged out at a Harrier with 3 Squadron lost per day. There were replacements that came from the UK – out of war stocks and from training units – but the number aircraft flying kept dropping. In the first two weeks of war, a total of six aircraft arrived: a lone GR1 model, a pair of twin-seat T4 combat-capable trainers, and another trio of the GR3 models. Therefore, by the war’s fourteenth day there were only half of the original number of aircraft flown by 3 Squadron as there had been when the first shots were fired.

The Harriers were lost in many manners though none were directly destroyed while on the ground due to enemy action. Three aircraft went down to accidents due to pilot error, weather and foreign object damage (FOD): FOD being the ingestion into the aircraft of external elements. Meanwhile, enemy action destroyed another eleven Harriers. There was the danger of SAMs and anti-aircraft guns as well as hostile fighter aircraft. Losses were taken during attacks as well as before and after them all across the battlefield. Several pilots were killed outright in mid-air explosions or in crashes while others died trying to escape or fell into enemy captivity. At the same time, a total of six pilots lost when their Harriers went down did make it back to 3 Squadron through various means. The ground personnel assigned took losses of their own on two separate occasions: five men died when a stray bomb from a Soviet aircraft which wasn’t directed at them blew apart a portable hangar (which was empty) at one of their dispersed locations while another eight men fell to enemy gunfire in an aborted Spetsnaz attack against a convoy of support vehicles with 3 Squadron as it made its regular moves across the German countryside.

Those who manned 3 Squadron were regular RAF personnel assigned pre-war and those who joined during LION and later too. Those additions to the strength were reservists and fulfilled ground and pilot roles. 3 Squadron needed men with a whole range of capabilities from aircraft engine maintenance to air-strip engineers to tactical intelligence officers. Many of the personnel worked security duties in addition to their long shifts preforming flight-related duties; they were armed with SA80 rifles and provided protection for the dispersed facilities. The RAF Regiment had their 5 Wing supporting the Harrier squadrons in Germany – 3 and 4 Squadrons plus No. 233 Reserve Squadron which was the OCU unit usually based at RAF Wittering – and that light armour was to guard the dispersal bases. The tracked Scorpions and Spartans along with the infantry mounted in the latter vehicles couldn’t be everywhere in strength all of the time and so 3 Squadron had to assist in defending itself.

The men of 3 Squadron, deployed as they were out in the field, heard little of the war outside of their own bubble. The pilots saw much fighting and the staff officers went through intelligence reports yet what was going on elsewhere was rather beyond the majority of the men. West German civilians were encountered often and those were mainly frightened refugees where communication was stopped by the language barrier. 3 Squadron concentrated on fighting the war and taking the losses that they were suffering all the while knowing that those losses couldn’t carry on as they were.


No. 29 Squadron, RAF were based at RAF Lossiemouth in Morayshire throughout the war. Fifteen Tornado F3 interceptors were on strength when the war commenced with more than a hundred personnel assigned. The threat of hostile enemy action to the aircraft in the skies and those on the ground was just as real as it was to those deployed aboard like with 3 Squadron as even at home the RAF had to deal with the danger of Soviet air strikes and commando assaults commencing against them.

The Tornados were in action straight away and spent most of the first week of the war constantly in combat. They defended the UK mainland as best as they could from cruise missiles fired at distance from Soviet raketonosets before having much more luck in acting against conventional air attacks. Further missions were flown by 29 Squadron in patrolling out at a distance over the sea where less action was seen, but this too was of vital importance.

Air defence duty consisted of planned patrol missions, escorts for vulnerable support aircraft and rushed alerts to react to enemy action. Often these would be intelligence-driven flights preformed to wait upon Soviet aircraft to show up where they were expected to be within reach of the Tornados but 29 Squadron did spend most of their time reacting to the enemy. Aircrews sat in their cockpits aboard a fully-fuelled and heavily-armed interceptor waiting to race down the runaway at Lossiemouth and to climb into the sky towards… when they did they raced away at full-speed in combat take-offs in case there was a Spetsnaz commando on the ground with a shoulder-mounted missile. Information on enemy air activity came from various sources from satellites, electronic eavesdropping aircraft, ground & ship based radars aboard and then radars operating in the UK air defence role: those mobile facilities on the ground and airborne radar aircraft.

Using their Foxhunter radars for active attacks or relying on datalinks from AWACS aircraft, the Tornados would launch their Sidewinder and Skyflash missiles at detected targets. The mounted 27mm cannons weren’t used by 29 Squadron during the war as they often found that they had enough missiles to do the job (each could carry up to ten air-to-air missiles though usually carried six or eight when laden with fuel tanks to extend loiter time) and engagements took place beyond the range of the guns. The Tornados were interceptors, not meant for dogfighting. In the absence of radar coverage from external sources, the Foxhunter combat radars were capable of locating and tracking multiple targets which the Tornado aircrews would find for themselves on many occasions.

As the war progressed and fewer Soviet aircraft came down over the Norwegian Sea from the north and then enemy long-range aircraft transited less through Norwegian airspace, the threat axis of the RAF’s long-range interceptor force, with 29 Squadron at the forefront of that, moved towards the east. The skies over the Baltic Approaches and then above the North Sea became the new danger zone and from that direction enemy aircraft flew against targets in Britain. The Tornados started to operate in the rear behind more tactical fighters and also the weapons systems deployed aboard NATO warships in the North Sea and there became fewer engagements for 29 Squadron during the second week of the conflict. There was thus attention given to other duties such as providing distant escort support for the strike aircraft with the 3 ATAF striking deep into Eastern Europe and also for ELINT aircraft flying across Sweden to look deeper eastwards with their stand-off electronic systems. Airborne refuelling from the RAF’s tanker fleet – TriStars, VC10s and Victors – was thus undertaken to extend the range of the Tornados even further.

Nevertheless, the need to provide UK air defence continued for 29 Squadron. They still scrambled to alerts coming in from the distance as the Soviets continued to try to hit Britain from distance and also conduct over the ocean missions. There were Bears to be engaged (those carrying missiles and those engaged in naval reconnaissance) as well as Backfires and Badgers as other big strike aircraft. Intelligence-gathering Coots and Mays – versions of the Ilyushin-18 turboprop – would make appearances on occasion as well. Then there were the more tactically-rolled Soviet strike aircraft in the form of Fencers and Foxbats to be engaged.

Losses for this formation didn’t come in direct enemy contact though they were still caused by wartime missions. Two Tornados would eventually be lost with one of those being a crash on approach returning home to Lossiemouth by one interceptor and the other occurring when an aircraft-wide electrical failure caused that tornado to fall from the skies above the North Atlantic down to the surface below: none of those four RAF aircrew survived. Tiredness among the Tornado aircrews was regarded as a major factor in that first crash while there was a strong suspicion that lack of attention to maintenance when on the ground could have resulted in the unexplained circumstances surrounding the second loss. The missions which 29 Squadron ran were often exhausting and required a lot of effort.

Still, with the situation as it was, the Tornados needed to stay in the fight and keep doing what they were doing best.


The RAF operated three dozen Nimrod MR2 maritime patrol aircraft at the start of the war with another trio of these conversion of the Comet jetliner being ELINT-configured R1 models. The maritime patrol versions were split between two locations: RAF Kinloss in Scotland and RAF St Mawgan in Cornwall. There were five squadrons flying these old but very-capable aircraft with four being regular units and the fifth being the OCU. That training formation, No. 236 Squadron, fielded just four of the Nimrods and had departed St Mawgan two days into the war to free up space there for the regular squadron – No. 42 Squadron – as well as US Navy P-3s to fly from that extensive location near Newquay.

236 Squadron was transferred across to the Irish Republic and made its new base at Shannon Airport on the west coast of Ireland.

The Irish Deployment, as it became known, was very interesting for the RAF. They were joined there by US Navy P-3s – the Americans had hundreds of these in service with more being removed form storage throughout the war – and also the multiple visits of airliners in military service plus NATO transport aircraft using Shannon Airport as a stopover point. When Ireland moved to play a major role in the war as a combat casualty centre, the RAF personnel watched as aircraft laden with wounded men arrived to be met by teams of Irish nurses and doctors… some of whom had been here on the war’s first day after the civilian facility was hit by Soviet cruise missiles. That attack had brought Ireland into the war and its unprovoked nature, which Irish diplomats worldwide made sure everyone knew about, allowed 236 Squadron to operate from here where usual pre-war circumstances would certainly have made this deployment impossible.

The Nimrods were submarine hunters in the main though did mount the capability for anti-surface missions as well as carrying some very good electronic warfare equipment. Based as 236 Squadron was in Ireland the range of the Nimrods allowed them to cover a good portion of the North Atlantic though it was only after submarines which the Nimrods were deployed against. The sonars and radars aboard were used with depth charges and torpedoes in this role.

236 Squadron contributed to the NATO war effort in that massive hunt for Soviet submarines at sea below the highway across the North Atlantic for all of those ships laden with what NATO needed to fight the war. The four aircraft ran patrol after patrol with extra aircrews and ground personnel in an effort to try to always have an aircraft in the air. That was an impossible task, yet it was still attempted. Initially, while many contacts were gathered on the sonars and the radars, these Nimrods didn’t see the enemy as those turned out to be ghost returns; the North Atlantic was full of animal life, strange noises and fierce waves. The RAF kept flying its submarine hunters from here expecting that soon enough they would see action… and they did.

In the war’s first two weeks, Nimrods flown by 236 Squadron assisted in the kills of three Soviet submarines working alongside other NATO forces and also gained an unconfirmed kill of its own upon another submarine where the aircrew aboard the aircraft involved were certain that one of their torpedoes struck home but couldn’t prove that. Many sonobuoys were expended during these engagements assisting other aircraft and warships while also on missions where nothing came of their flights in terms of action. The squadron commander would often brief his men that their efforts kept attacks at bay though and added to the pressure on the enemy when they were at sea left hiding beneath the waves and unable to make attacks in such a strong ASW environment. Some of that morale boosting was down to other circumstances surrounding the Irish Deployment.

Not everyone in Ireland was happy with the country being at war and then there were many more who were furious that the Irish Republic was allied with Britain. Centuries of violent history came into play and many of those who caused trouble were those who remained steadfast no matter what in their determination to have nothing to do with Britain. There was no need for British troops to go into the Irish Republic, even if either London or Dublin was at mind to do that, but the deployment of 236 Squadron to Shannon Airport eventually caused disturbances when some troublemakers learnt of it. Ireland remained a very ‘free’ country during the war with few civil restrictions made. The government had arrested some certain people, though those arrests were very few and had involved terrorist suspects on their way to Ulster. The country’s domestic intelligence efforts were directed against that external situation in Northern Ireland and no attention was being paid at all to Limerick: the biggest city in western Ireland and not very far away from Shannon Airport. Local agitators heard about the presence of British aircraft and ground personnel – made out to be ‘warplanes and troops’ – and, combined with what they were hearing about what was going on in Ulster, action was taken. There was a march organised from the city towards Shannon Airport which was mainly made up of concerned citizens but also many troublemakers made an appearance.

Thankfully, before things got out of hand, Irish police stopped that march from getting anywhere near the airport and there was little actual trouble… the long walk had taken place on a warm day with inadequate marshals. Nonetheless, that focused the minds of many in authority on the situation there and there was talk in Dublin of asking the RAF to move from Shannon Airport less than a week after they had arrived to assist in the defence of the country. 236 Squadron got on with its duties after a few heated days when nothing came of the politics surrounding their deployment. They kept up their hunts for Soviet submarines as they were in Ireland for.

One of the Nimrods took part in an engagement like no other Nimrod had during the war: it claimed an air-to-air kill. Back during the Falklands War, the maritime patrol aircraft had been fitted with Sidewinder missiles in case they might be needed in self-defence. Such capability had been retained and the missiles brought to Shannon Airport with 236 Squadron. Late on March 25th, one of the Nimrods on the Irish Deployment was several hundred miles out over the North Atlantic when they stumbled upon an unidentified airborne contact during bad weather that was disrupting radar performance. Upon investigation, that aircraft was brought into visual range and recognised as a Bear wearing the colours of Soviet Naval Aviation. Intelligence had said that only a few of them were left flying and none were expected where the Nimrod found this one. Regardless, after making a contact report, the lone Sidewinder missile was fired and that was then observed smashing into the starboard wing of the Bear.

Once that aircraft was seen falling towards the sea below and no longer scouting for its comrades, the RAF aircrew headed back to Shannon Airport discussing where their kill marking was going to go on the fuselage.


These were but a few examples of the war that the RAF was having. Losses were extraordinarily high among some formations and low or near non-existent among others. Replacements in terms of men came from reservists and in aircraft at first from training units; later, the Americans provided many aircraft. Such a situation couldn’t go on for ever as resources would soon run out. The RAF kept fighting where it could though and was still maintaining its tempo of wartime operations.

One Hundred & Ninety–Six

Movement to contact had taken place the day beforehand, but today the Finns truly went about forcing the occupying Soviets out of the parts of Lapland where they were. The tactical and strategic situations were just right for the Finns to move, especially with American forces moving down from Finmark too across the Norwegian-Finnish border.

Command for the liberation of Lapland was under the First Army Corps based pre-war in Oulu but now operating from the Rovaniemi area in a mobile fashion. There were six combat brigades under command operating on three axis’ of advance. This was complicated for the small organisation that the Finnish Army was with much command and control needed. There were American, Norwegian and Swedish liaison officers with the Finns acting as unofficial advisers with many of those recommending that two rather than three forward attacks be made, yet the Finns were sure about what they were doing and had been planning for this for almost two weeks now. All of their intelligence pointed to their Soviet opponents being weak, cut off and with terrible morale as they were spread across Lapland in isolated fashions and tied to fixed positions. The Finns had massed their forces enough to sweep them away and while grateful for the advice, they were going to do things their own way.

To the east, the town of Sodankyla was moved against by the Finnish Army first. The Lapland Jaeger Brigade had called Sodankyla home before the Soviets had crossed the border and the troops had withdrawn southwards. Now they returned along with the Pori Jaeger Brigade following them. The brigades moved up Highway-4 and -5 and converged upon the location where the Soviets had established a rear-area base for their operations against Norway and Sweden using Finnish territory. Heavy guns were used in assistance to blast Soviet positions though the Finns were aware that no matter how hard they tried to avoid it, Finnish civilians who had refused to leave the town were going to be caught up in that artillery barrage. Sodankyla sat at a major crossroads – therefore why the Soviets were there – and needed to be recaptured to allow further offensive action to take place and also to cut off Soviet forces to the rear.

Once that barrage was over with, the Finns moved forward and against Soviet support troops established there and hopefully whom would have suffered under that attack.

Kittila and the airport there in the centre was moved against by the Savo Jaeger Brigade, the victors of the fight for Rovaniemi Airport. Again, this town was at a major crossroads and where Soviet rear-area troops were established. The Finns used artillery and had some of their Hawk attack-fighters in the air but in this instance those light infantry forces assaulted the airport while around them the 3rd Armoured Brigade moved away in a northwestern direction. This reserve formation had much Soviet-built equipment including T-55 tanks and a few BMP-2 tracked armoured vehicles. The Finnish Air Force pilots in the sky were under strict instructions to be damn careful and not engage armoured vehicles on the ground unless those were directly marked for air attack as the Finnish Army was worried over friendly fire.

As the Finnish infantry wrestled control over the airport away from the occupier, their armour advanced nearby and started following the roads away towards the distant Finnish Wedge. That second brigade had been available to deploy some of its units should there be initial strong resistance at Kittila Airport but as the jaegers marched into there with ease there was no need.

The Northern Jaeger Brigade led the advance up Highway-21 and into Tornio while the smaller Kajanaland Jaeger Brigade followed them. The town rested on the Finnish-Swedish border right at the base of the Finnish Wedge where much of the Soviet Sixth Army was trapped and the Finns knew that the occupier here wasn’t going to roll over. Artillery preceded the attack though it was carefully targeted against suspected Soviet positions rather than as a general barrage. However, here unlike elsewhere, the Finns faced counterbattery fire from the Soviets which knocked out many of their guns. The lesson was quickly learnt with what the Americans called ‘shoot-and-scoot’ but before then many Finnish guns had been destroyed and Finnish gunners killed.

The Finns had meanwhile used their jaegers as infiltrators to get up close to many Soviet positions and started attacking trenches and strongpoints all around the Tornio area. Once they were spotted by their opponents, they opened fire with deadly effect while also calling in reinforcements. Penetrations were soon made through the morning yet the Soviets were at first hanging on and might have stood a chance… had they had enough ammunition. No resupply had come for more than a week and while none of what was available had been used up until now, it was fast expended. Tornio was meant to be an outpost guarding the rear and not a frontline position.

As Soviet machine gunners, missilemen and gunners started to run out of ammunition, their positions fell as the Finnish infantry were pushed forward by their commanders. The Kajanaland Brigade came forward to assist their comrades though casualties still occurred as it took time to completely clear the area of Soviet resistance. There were many fall back positions which elements of the Soviet force here kept trying to withdraw to as they ran out of ammunition and these provided quite a challenge for the Finns to eventually overcome. They would do so by the end of the day though liberating the town and eliminating the Soviets there had cost the Soviets quite a bit.

The 3rd Armoured Brigade had slowly moved across country nearby and avoided the fighting. Again, the formation was available to be committed if needed but the jaegers eventually had the situation handled. Instead, after taking their time crossing snow-covered terrain meeting many delays, this armoured formation got on the highway north of the town and started entering the Finnish Wedge. They very quickly got involved in running battles with Soviet armour moving down the other way to react to the assault upon Tornio. The Finnish were better armed and had much more precise intelligence upon their opponents than the Soviets did, yet there were quickly plenty of Soviet units involved in this fighting which took place in the late afternoon and into the evening too. Ammunition shortages on the part of the Soviets didn’t allow them to fight for long were encountered but they did again inflict casualties on the Finns.

Air power started to come into play and that changed the whole shape of the battle. The fast and nimble Hawks made attacks but so too did Swedish and USAF aircraft. All of those pilots were instructed to be very careful in their strikes so that they didn’t mistake Finnish armour for Soviet armour and in most instances they succeeded in this. Yet, unfortunately, there were some friendly fire incidents where BTRs, MT-LBs and T-55s were engaged from the air when there were no Soviet aircraft present. There had been issues with this on the ground too as both sides were operating similar equipment and there was always going to be a lot of hard feelings after such accidental engagements.

Regardless, such attacks coming from the skies, especially those which took place just before it started to get dark, meant that the Soviets had seen their counterattacks down Highway-21 destroyed and a hole ripped in their lines. They would struggle to plug that gap during the night as while Finnish armour didn’t move forwards without daylight, their jaegers carried on trying to push the Soviets back.


The US XVIII Corps, now without its airborne units and in effect a wholly different command yet with the same senior staff, came into Finland at the same time as the Finnish First Corps moved forward. Lt.-General Foss ordered the light infantry units under his command to cross over from Norway and to hit the Soviets as hard as possible.

The 6th Light Infantry Division advanced on the ground and via assault helicopters into the northeastern part of Lapland over the Tana River. These regular US Army and part-time USAR troops had only very recently arrived from Alaska and they were exceptionally well-trained in cold weather operations. The main attack was on the ground from Karasjok and heading for Lake Inari. Light vehicles and trucks were used so the men didn’t have to march though it was still a struggle to move following the road taking them into Finland. Engineers constantly had to clear the road of downed trees and mines while snowploughs were needed to move the thick snow on the ground. Opposition to this ground attack was rather light and came from scattered Soviet forces in no position to truly stop the Americans here and so they moved rather quickly only halted by nature.

An airmobile assault was conducted to take Ivalo Airport. The 1/501 INF battalion task force made that attack with helicopters taking them to landing sites nearby and then an attack being made on the ground. Several helicopters had trouble getting that far deep into Finland and there were worries over the viability of the operation but the almost instant collapse of Soviet resistance there made sure that there was success. Afterwards, the USAF flew the 3/3 INF in with those reservists being followed afterwards by ground support personnel from the USAF who fast wanted to turn the airport into a major station. There were A-10s and F-4s based back in Finmark who were soon due to operate from here and fly operations further to the east.

By nightfall, the 6th Light Infantry Division hadn’t made it as far as Ivalo, but were not that far away and were sure that they would reach there the next morning. Inari had been reached and it wasn’t far from there down to Ivalo following Highway-4.

The 10th Light Infantry Division and the two brigades of the 7th Light Infantry Division were all over to the west. These US Army troops were using Kautokeino as their base of operations to hit the Finnish Wedge from the western side and to also move against Enontekio. Opposition to their attacks was strong – as expected – yet just like the Finns found out, the Soviets hardly had any ammunition. They fought back to defend themselves when they had bullets and shells, but once those were gone units gave in. The Americans advanced slowly are were weary of mines laid in the snow but they spent the day pushing deep inside Finland and driving inside the positions of the Soviet Sixth Army here.

Once darkness came and General Foss reviewed the progress of his assigned forces, he was very pleased. It appeared that with one final push tomorrow the Soviet Sixth Army would be eliminated and then he could turn his attention to moving his forces fully into eastern Lapland. His orders were firm that under no circumstances was the US Army to go up close to the Finnish-Soviet border, let alone over it, and he intended to obey those. However, he had to wonder what would come next once the business of destroying Soviet forces here in Finland was done and there was his command plus all of those US Marines with the II Marine Expeditionary Force to the north of him. The Finnish Army, the Norwegian Army and the Swedish Army were all here too, not that far away from Soviet territory. If he knew this, then the enemy would do so too…





One Hundred & Ninety–Seven

NATO and other nations allied to the cause of the West in fighting the Soviets had been for a while now mobilising their military forces across the world. Many nations couldn’t provide those warfighting assets which could be put to use at the frontline, though their support in the rears was always valuable and thus freed up resources to be used at the front. When it came to the fight in Germany, while air and support forces were always needed, it was ground troops which NATO needed to have many of here as opposed to elsewhere and it was to Germany therefore where many nations were engaged in the process of sending reinforcements to NATO there for the fighting taking place to liberate enemy occupied territory.


In peacetime, the Belgian Army had nine formations of what were designated ‘Provincial Reserve Regiments’. These were based upon the country’s provinces and varied in size with battalions of motorised infantry and light armour. Two of those had been in Germany since the war started with a mixture of several individual units forming this pair of formations of near brigade-strength while those which remained had been slowly but carefully formed into a fully-capable light armoured division. The 4th Armoured Division was now ready and moved across the border into West Germany to follow the already newly-formed 18th Light Brigade made up of regular troops which had been created from units guarding national strategic sites moving several days beforehand first to join the British and then returning to national command.

This division had been a great struggle for Belgium to create with the troops being available but their assembly and fitting-out delayed by refugee problems across the country (those civilians came from West Germany), Soviet air and missile attacks against Belgium and also gathering enough service support assets to make a complete division which could fight cohesively. Luxembourg had helped out here but Belgium had to provide the majority of these elements and it hadn’t been easy to do. Still, once the 4th Armoured Division was ready to go, it was sent to Germany to join the Belgian I Corps there on the North German Plain.


France had already committed the vast majority of its regular army and many reservists to the fighting in Germany. There were long-established plans drawn up over many years pre-war on forming a trio of reserve infantry divisions which had then gone to the French Second Army in Lower Saxony. The government wanted to keep the remaining reservists in country less civil disturbances broke out should those occur again as they had done so early in the conflict as well as to guard against the possibility that Italy did something crazy and attack across the Alps… France’s allies regarded that as far from a possibility and rather paranoia.

The French Army had many troops deployed across the world from the Caribbean to Africa to the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. Grouped together, these weren’t Colonial Troops in the traditional sense but were referred to as such by many. These units consisted of professional soldiers whose presence so far away couldn’t really be justified with France fighting as it was to keep Western Europe free from hostile Soviet territorial ambitions. Moreover, with the country fully committed to the NATO alliance, those overseas possessions of France were hardly likely to fall to any form of a regional aggressor (if there was one) while the need to maintain the political status quo in parts of Africa wasn’t more important than the future of France as a strong, independent nation.

Air France and also some British Airways and Lufthansa aircraft had been flying these troops from their deployments across the world into southern Germany. They came from Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana in the wider Caribbean region, from Gabon, the Ivory Coast and Senegal in West Africa, from Chad, the Central African Republic and Djibouti further across Africa, from Reunion in the Indian Ocean and from New Caledonia and French Polynesia in the Pacific. More than twenty thousand men were eventually sent from overseas into Germany and they joined up with the French First Army in Bavaria. There were many Foreign Legion troops as well as men locally recruited in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The men only usually came with personal weapons and left behind what heavier weapons they had when deployed so far abroad as France wanted to keep what little remained overseas in terms of heavy weapons there just in case. France could have again called on its allies to assist in the movement of this, but it was hardly like that equipment included main battle tanks or self-propelled artillery instead of the armoured cars and man-portable mortars which it actually was.

There were additionally more than two hundred thousand young Frenchmen being mobilised across the country for military service. These would join later formations which were going to be set up once the French Army was ready and it would be some time before they could conceivable see service while the actual thinking was that the war would probably be over by then. Still, those men went through their intensive training to turn them from civilians into properly trained soldiers just in case.


Portugal had been a founding member of NATO and had long-term plans to send its military forces abroad in the event of a NATO-Soviet conflict. In 1973 Portugal had provided assistance to the US in the emergency logistical effort to resupply the Israelis after the Yom Kippur War (Operation NICKEL GRASS) whereas other European countries had not; that support had come in the form of Lajes Field airbase in the Portuguese Azores, a facility built with NATO funds. After the Carnation Revolution the following year and the influence of left-wing elements in the Portuguese governments which followed, many NATO nations worried over the commitment of Portugal to the alliance. The Portuguese military forces had spent long fighting guerrillas wars across Africa but after that revolution it was felt that they were weakened by underfunding and a lack of political will to keep them what they had once been. Portugal was supposed to send elements of its army to either Italy or maybe Greece in a NATO-Soviet conflict but with every year that looked less and less likely.

Proving their detractors wrong, once Portugal committed itself to the cause in the build-up to war breaking out, the Portuguese at once got their paratroopers and commandoes ready to be sent to Germany instead of Italy or Greece. Those made a stunning introduction to the war as part of the British Second Army’s BLACKSMITH operation to liberate the Hannover pocket. The Portuguese Air Force (A-7Ps and G-91s in the attack-fighter role) and the Portuguese Navy (a whole range of frigates and corvettes on ASW patrol duties) had already seen action beforehand and continued to do so while Lajes Field played a very important role in the war as a major ASW aircraft base and also a major staging point for trans-Atlantic flights too just as it had done in 1973.

Back in Portugal itself, the Portuguese Army mobilised their 1st Independent Mixed Brigade. This was an over-strength formation of tanks, mechanised infantry and self-propelled artillery supported by combat engineers and a range of supporting assets. To form a division, even a corps, as there were plans to do so was too much for the Portuguese Army, but their brigade was still a very capable force and was well-stocked with ammunition and fuel supplies to last for more than a month in combat if it came to that. The 1st Brigade was transported through Spain, up across France and then through the Rhineland so that it was to finally arrive in northern Germany late during the second week of the war ready to begin operations early in the third week. The Portuguese would be joining the British Second Army with the intention to have them deploy as part of the Bundeswehr I Corps now east of Hannover which was made up of British and West German troops which had been previously trapped in that city and now ready to move east with a vengeance.


Elements of the Spanish Army deployed forward to central Germany in the build-up to war had seen much action there. The 1st Armored Division had been fighting with the US V Corps in several important engagements while the Airborne Brigade had been held back as a strategic reserve and saw little action apart from assisting their fellow American paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division in the fighting at Rhein-Main Airport.

The four combat brigades which had gone to Germany – the 1st Armored Division included its usual two brigades alongside the 1st Cavalry Brigade – had been moved there quickly while a larger, if slightly weaker, force had been mobilised across Spain for eventual movement to Germany too. This was to be the Spanish I Corps with another two divisions plus attachments and would consist of most of the heavy forces of the Spanish Army. The 2nd Motorized & 3rd Mechanized Divisions (the latter including many Spanish Legion armoured units) travelled by rail and road through France like the Portuguese did but then crossed the Rhine into Baden-Wurttemberg to at first form up around Stuttgart. There had been massive Soviet Scud missile strikes against that city and the concentration of NATO rear-area support forces there and the Spanish had taken some casualties there long before they had got into action. It had been planned that they would join the French First Army in Bavaria, but after the performance put in by units already in theatre in Hessen, the Spanish were to join the US Seventh Army.

The Spanish had hundreds of their tanks with them as well as tracked and wheeled armoured vehicles, plenty of artillery and their own mobile SAMs in the form of tracked I-HAWKs. Much equipment was Spanish-built, but there was plenty of American- & French-manufactured equipment too that while not state-of-the-art was still of good quality. The Spanish expected to play a major role in further operations as they moved their corps into position between General Schwarzkopf’s US V Corps and General Watts’ US VII Corps.


West Germany was one of the most heavily militarised nations in NATO with large regular armed forces and well-organised reserves. The latter, in the Territorial Forces, had played a major role in the conflict right from the start. They had fought hard and well while taking many losses in many engagements at the front and in the rear too. In addition to organised divisions and brigades like these, the Bundeswehr had ‘Field Replacement Battalions’ with their divisions making them overly large compared to other NATO formations and capable of taking a lot of losses with immediate replacements on-hand. These tied up much manpower available to the Bundeswehr and so did all of those security units (with the Luftwaffe and the Bundesmarine too) scattered all across West Germany guarding roads and infrastructure freeing up other NATO units from such duties.

There were still many more Germans with military experience available across the country though and the Bundeswehr had been busy giving these refresher training and trying to form them up into new units. With Soviet armies in control of large parts of the country and their bombs and missiles falling elsewhere, this had taken longer than thought. Finally though, after organising troops across the Ruhr, the Rhineland and the Saar, a pair of corps had been formed each with a trio of divisions. These six new formations were equipped with a lot of older equipment but with men of much experience.

The West German V Corps was created to move into northern Germany with the Bundeswehr VI Corps slated to deploy towards central Germany. Each would take over the responsibilities and many of the already bloodied troops from the IV and III Corps respectively in a massive reorganisation of the Bundeswehr along the frontlines. Only the Americans planned to add more troops to the ground forces in Germany though the West Germans weren’t far behind in terms of numbers as this was their country after all which their allies were fighting so hard to keep free.


Morocco had been an ally of the United States since the time of US independence. The North African nation had firmly stood with their allies in Washington during the pre-war crisis and once war broke out, King Hassan II had at once given instructions that the Moroccan Army was to deploy a division of ground troops to Europe. Of course, he knew that this would be an immense undertaking for his nation, but he determined that it was to be done… especially as he was promised assistance from the US and other NATO nations, France in particular, in moving that division to Europe.

The 1st Motorised Division was to be an infantry heavy force though with a small but strong armoured component. Morocco had plenty of military equipment in its inventory from the US and France as well as officers which had been trained at the best military academies throughout the West. Hassan II repeatedly visited the camps where the division was being formed up during the process in what he hoped were morale-boosting visits. He was eager to get the troops to Germany so they could do their part and thus guarantee that whatever shape the post-war world took, the US in particular wouldn’t forget the effort which his country had made.

Morocco has a coastline on the Mediterranean as well as the North Atlantic yet there are few ports to the northeast in compassion to the west. Therefore, ships carrying the heavy equipment for the 1st Motorised Division sailed from Atlantic ports as well as from Tangiers on the Gibraltar Straits. Historical issues between Morocco and Spain meant that Ceuta and Melilla – Spanish colonial-era holdings on the Moroccan coast – weren’t used either though many of the ships unloaded cargoes in Spanish mainland ports while others went to Marseilles in France. The Moroccans made great use of airliners from NATO countries when it came to later moving those troops to man all of that military equipment as the two linked up when in Stuttgart at the same time as the Spanish were there. The Moroccans were to afterwards move from there to join the French First Army with the plan for their division – which had many French-speakers within, especially among the more-educated officers – to enter the frontlines as part of the French VI Corps there.


The destruction of the Canadian 1st Infantry Division in combat had been a painful loss for the combined Canadian Armed Forces. The 4th Mechanised Brigade-Group based pre-war in Germany along with the 5th Mechanised Brigade-Group and then the Canadian Airborne Regiment (in affect a reinforced battalion) which had arrived as part of the American-led REFORGER had been smashed in combat with the Soviet Eighth Tank Army when operating with the US VII Corps. Most of the support elements of this division had been destroyed too and with those losses included, the Canadians had lost almost three quarters of their regular ground forces in combat. Only the Danes and the Dutch of other NATO nations had taken worse losses proportionally.

What remained of the professional Canadian Army – the 1st Mechanised Brigade-Group – had moved from Alberta to Alaska in the last days of peace though it had been thought at the time that there was a good chance that no action would be seen there. It had been a political decision rather than a military sound one and even before the first shots had been fired, there had been plans drawn up by elements of the Canadian Army to redeploy that force to Germany with the thinking then that that force might reinforce those there. Therefore, after the 1st Infantry Division had been beaten in battle and it became apparent the Soviets didn’t have the intent let alone the capabilities to invade the North American mainland, the Canadians were able to quickly being the process of transferring those troops in Alaska across to Europe. This was to be a big logistical effort as their much of their equipment needed to come with them after so much was lost in Germany, but the determination was there.

The plan was for those regular troops to join up with elements of the Militia to form a new, three-brigade division in Germany: the 2nd Infantry Division. Some Militia units had been ordered by the government to go to Germany beforehand to assist the US Fifth Army and the deployment of those high-readiness reserve formations – the Canadian Grenadier Guards & Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada – was given first priority in terms of experienced men and supplies. Nonetheless, the Canadians had a large pool of reserves which to mobilise from and were able to make sure that those units being sent overseas were over-strength in terms of men as other formations mobilised but not deploying overseas were left behind not at full strength.

Having the manpower was one thing, equipping and supplying the new 2nd Division was something else. Canada had a tiny number of tanks pre-war with those not in Germany with active units or stored there shipped over fast so that almost all of the Leopard-1s in service had gone with the 1st Infantry Division to its ultimate doom in northeastern Bavaria. The Canadians ended up short on self-propelled howitzers too as well as heavy engineering equipment. Armoured vehicles and artillery ended up being sourced from the war stocks of the US Army in the end though there were many Canadians in uniform who bitterly complained to their government about this situation of having to take American hand-me-downs when the country should have had reserves of such equipment. As to tanks, the Canadians had some Centurion tanks in storage that had been retired when the Leopard-1 had arrived and the British promised them some too from their own stocks, but only after they had outfitted their earlier-deployed 7th Armoured Division with all of the Centurions they needed first.

Canada was thus able to form a second division to go to Europe. It wouldn’t be as heavily-armoured as the destroyed initial formation nor with as much ammunition on-hand (the 1st Infantry Division had seen the supply columns moving to support it too destroyed by enemy action last week), but was the best that Canada could do for the time being. The 2nd Infantry Division was also going to take longer to arrive than the ground reinforcements of other countries. The plan was to send it to northern Germany too so that it would join the French Second Army. Many French-speakers from Quebec were with the formation and it was thought that the Canadians would be best-suited deploying there.


Australia and New Zealand had both committed themselves to supporting the Americans in the Pacific rather than the British in Europe whereas as in the previous two world wars that had been the case. The two nations had small armed forces whose military focus had been on the Pacific for many years with some attention towards the Persian Gulf too.

A reinforced brigade made up of elements of the armies of the two nations had thus been sent to Okinawa first as a staging post before moving to Japan with the thinking that they would take part in the defence of the Japanese Home Islands in the face of a Soviet invasion. Such an attack didn’t come though and the whole strategic situation didn’t point to that occurring. In theory, those light infantry forces could have been flown to Europe but should they have them been deployed there, they would need to be supplied when deployed on the other side of the world. That was just too far away for the ANZAC force to go as a combat formation with the necessary support.

However, the Australian government first and then the New Zealand government afterwards did commit individual soldiers to Europe as exchange officers with both British and American units numbering a few hundred men in various units. Those UK and US officers with armour, infantry, artillery and special forces units didn’t go to Okinawa or Japan as part of that exchange but instead filled out the ranks of other NATO units.

Maybe more could have been done. Australian and New Zealand could have committed themselves to sending troops to Europe in number but the logistical effort of that was considered to be too much of a strain. Some of their warships did go to the Middle East to lighten the burden on the US Navy – which had deployed in strength there pre-war – yet in the Third World War the armies of the two countries wouldn’t see anywhere near the combat that scale of combat that they did in either the First or Second World Wars.


The US Marines were determined to fast-track the deployment of their new 5th Marine Division to Europe. The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Alfred Gray, was a ‘Mustang’: an enlisted man who had made the jump to an officer and then risen all the way to the very top. A true fighting Marine who made sure that everyone knew that every Marine was a rifleman first and foremost, he was left rather unhappy when the strategic situation left most of his servicemen out of the action. It had been a decision of the National Security Council to send the 1st Marine Division to the Middle East and then keep it there where it looked like those Marines would spend the war sitting on their behinds without firing a shot. The deployment of the 3rd Marine Division to the Western Pacific and the reserves of the 4th Marine Division to the Caribbean made sense and then of course the 2nd Marine Division saw action in Norway. Still, with only a quarter of the US Marines in action, General Gray hadn’t been happy. Using the strength of his personality, he forced through the creation of the 5th Marine Division and spent a lot of time down at Pharris Island and Camp Lejeune rather than with the rest of the Joint Chiefs aboard the Doomsday Plane protocol be dammed: his deputy, Assistant Commandant General Thomas Morgan, was there instead.

The 5th Marine Division had last seen action in Vietnam and many of the US Marine retirees had seen action there. Those promising volunteers being quickly transformed into Marines who were taught the basic skills of being a Marine listened to those experienced men as best they could as they tried to take everything in, though the activation and then shipping-out of the division was rather fast and it was hard going. The first stop for the new US Marines formation was southern England where the men were flown to airports at Heathrow and Gatwick while ships carrying their equipment landed at the ports of Dover and Folkestone. Amphibious assault ships which had moved the 2nd Marine Division forward into combat in Norway had meanwhile come south and set about loading the 5th Marine Division. They would have the escort of two aircraft carriers – though, unfortunately not the guns of the sunk New Jersey – for the planned mission which General Gray had insisted upon when he finally went back to the NSC and spoke with Acting President Bush: an amphibious assault against an enemy-held coastline where their presence would make a real difference to the war.


The US Army would be left slightly put out of sorts by the US Marines getting their reinforcements to Europe before the US Third Army could ship over. Inter-service rivalry came into play with this rather than any serious issues; after all, the commitment of the US Marines was much smaller than the US Third Army once it was all ready to move.

Lt.-General Andrew Chambers, the commanding general of this pre-war training formation home-based in Georgia at Fort McPherson had never expected to take the US Third Army to a war in Europe. His command was assigned to a theoretical war in the Middle East or maybe North Africa, not Europe where the US Seventh Army was and any reinforcements were meant to come with the US Fifth Army. However, the situation had demanded the presence of further American ground forces in Europe and General Chambers had a full-staffed headquarters capable of leading multiple corps each with several divisions should those forces be assigned.

A pair of corps commands were assigned to the US Third Army: the US II Corps consisting of those retired US Army soldiers in four new divisions and the US XI Corps with four ARNG divisions, both with many attachments. The headquarters staff of those corps and many in the II Corps came from across the US Army being reassigned though General Chambers’ lost some staff officers to them as well. This was a major manpower effort in itself as many retired officers returning to service as well as national guardsmen from those lower-readiness formations of the US XI Corps didn’t have the necessary experience with the most modern warfighting doctrines of the US Army.

Staff officers with the US Third Army flew out to Germany long before the men who would man the assigned formations were due to though at the same time as hundreds of ships started to load everything needed for General Chambers’ command to fight with at a host of ports on the Atlantic Seaboard and along the Gulf of Mexico coast too. This was a massive logistical effort which was to go alongside the ongoing supply efforts to Europe from North America and made possible by the sea lanes being almost clear of the Soviet Navy’s submarines and raketonosets interference plus the immense numbers of ships available from so many nations. Ships were loaded so that if one went down it wasn’t going to take a brigade’s worth of tanks with it or all the minesweeping gear for a corps. Combat loads were made instead so that when they arrived in Europe men would immediately meet up with the ships and be able to form up at the Dutch, Belgian and British ports where the ships arrived.

As to exactly where the US Third Army was meant to exactly deploy to, General Chambers had been at first expecting to be sent to Hessen or maybe Bavaria. He was later informed that instead it would be northern Germany where he was to take his command and the heavily-wounded US III Corps there would come under his supervision; the XI Corps was bringing with it the 155th Armored Brigade of national guardsmen from Mississippi (deployed initially in Florida to guard against possible Cuban intentions) to add to the strength of General Saint’s corps. When he finally arrived and in-place, alongside his eight divisions, General Chambers realised that there would therefore be twenty-three US combat divisions in Germany with ten of those being from the ARNG and the remaining thirteen regular divisions being of combat veterans and well-experienced men. Such a commitment on the part of his country would dwarf those from other NATO nations, even the West Germans.


After sending those four combat brigades to Germany late last week – three with the 7th Armoured Division – the British Army had been spent when it came to deployable manpower. The TA units left behind were lower-grade formations only suitable for home defence missions and arming conscripted young men was really becoming a challenge as those were coming to the end of their crash-course in becoming soldiers. General Bagnall as Chief of the General Staff – the most senior British Army officer in uniform – had thought this an embarrassment when other countries were doing all that they could to provide fighting men for Germany. He had seen what the French were doing in bringing those troops home from aboard and then spoke to the Chief of the Defence Staff about reversing earlier decisions when it came to British forces left overseas during the build-up of British forces which had been LION.

Admiral Fieldhouse had taken the requests of General Bagnall for some of those still aboard to return to the War Cabinet and been told that Thatcher and her ministers had discussed the matter and come to a positive conclusion. The regular British Army troops in the Falklands were to stay there no matter what but the battalion groups of infantry in both Gibraltar and Cyprus could be reassigned to Germany if they were replaced there by TA formations not necessarily needed for home defence as the Soviet Spetsnaz threat was as weak as it was. Soon enough the men of the 1 R ANGLIAN and 2 COLM GDS in Gibraltar and Cyprus were being transferred back to staging in the UK on aircraft which had previously flown to those two locations TA men from Wales and the West Midlands. When General Bagnall managed to release those highly-trained and well-experienced men from their duties overseas he had also managed to prise the 2 SCOTS GDS battle-group out of the London District too leaving another Foot Guards battalion (the 1 IRISH GDS) as well as many TA units to protect the nation’s capital from… the irrational fear that the government had of an airborne coup de main against London when that was now military infeasible. Too many regular soldiers were sitting out the war in rear locations when men had died by their thousands in Germany. Those three battalions were assigned to a new brigade headquarters which had been set up when General Bagnall had been thinking of moving TA units to Germany instead made up of the best available of those formations left in the UK though had ultimately decided to get his hands on regulars instead: the 32nd Light Brigade.

This new formation – with a historical designation to be proud of – was commanded by a staff officer which General Bagnall had had assigned as one of his aides since the war begun. Colonel Michael ‘Mike’ Jackson had been on the staff on the Joint Service Defence College at Greenwich before being attached to General Bagnall’s headquarters once war broke out and was, at forty-four, considered maybe too old for further promotion let alone a combat command position. The Chief of the General Staff rated him highly though with his aide being a tough former Para who started out his career in the Intelligence Corps and also had a university degree in Russian Studies; these were regarded as important qualities when it came to the political aspects of the war. Jackson was gazetted as a Brigadier and ordered to take command of the 32nd Brigade to lead it into action. The formation was to go to northern Germany and fill the gap in the 5th Infantry Division’s ranks as the Belgian brigade assigned there was to return to its own national corps.

Mike Jackson was to make a name for himself in this war as he led the last of Britain’s major ground forces committed as reinforcements to Germany.