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

Two Hundred & Three

Acting President Bush had his base of operations no longer aboard the Doomsday Plane airborne twenty-four hours a day but rather on the ground instead. A fleet of helicopters were ready to depart with him and other senior people from Mount Weather at a moment’s notice to meet the assigned E-4B and other aircraft nearby, but for now Bush was running his temporary administration from the ground… or rather beneath the ground as the facilities here at Mount Weather were all inside this imposing natural structure towering above northern Virginia as part of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

ABC News had flown a helicopter over the site managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) five years beforehand as part of a programme speculating on locations and protocols for US Continuity of Government Operations so it wasn’t as if Mount Weather was a super-secret facility as many would have liked it to have been. Nevertheless, where Bush was now basing himself and the NSC at Mount Weather meant that he was close to Congress which remained at the nearby Greenbrier and also Washington too. Frank Carlucci wasn’t far away either being up at Raven Rock and Bush felt that this FEMA site was a far better location than other, distant sites of a smaller and more anonymous nature that had been suggested. Should the country be attacked with nuclear weapons then he wouldn’t remain on the ground but for now, with World War Three still non-nuclear, Mount Weather was where its executive branch was functioning from.

There was over six hundred thousand square feet of space below ground at Mount Weather with extensive and secure communications facilities. There were no major urban centres nearby but good access to transportation links. Security was excellent with a massive Secret Service presence on-site and a battalion of District of Columbia ARNG military policemen detached from their parent unit and deployed out here in rural Virginia. An airborne exclusion zone had been set up too so that no unauthorised aircraft or helicopters could approach.


Bush had the NSC meet this evening (it was gone Midnight in Europe) to discuss the conflict overseas as well as matters of national importance closer to home too. At the beginning of the gathering, the health of President Reagan was discussed first before anything else. There was a telephone conference with his doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital where he laid comatose and Bush had many questions for those doctors with Reagan. Twice in the past few years Reagan had been there and Bush had on both short occasions taken on the role of Acting President though this time it appeared that it would be a much longer period of time – possibly for good – that he would be standing-in for Reagan. The doctors there told the NSC that the President had been deliberately put into a coma otherwise he would have died after his stroke. They needed time and further assistance from specialists; Bush promised them whatever they needed and he vowed to the NSC afterwards that he would make good on that promise too.

The war and the course of that was why the politicians, the military officers and the senior spooks were here at Mount Weather and that took up the majority of their meeting. Carlucci (on the telephone), the Joint Chiefs and Colin Powell – who Bush had decided to keep on as National Security Adviser as the man was regarded as irreplaceable – briefed the NSC of how things were going worldwide mainly from an American perspective though also making much mention of the military actions of the other Allies too.

In northern Norway, the 2nd Marine Division was pushing for Kirkenes to liberate that remaining part of Finmark still occupied by the Soviets and facing tough opposition in the Arctic environment there. They were on course to get as far as the Soviet border within the next couple of days advancing as they were though. Across in Lapland, US Army light infantry units had linked up with the Finns and were now fully engaged against what Soviet forces remained in the Finnish Wedge. A digital map was shown to the NSC and Powell explained how from all sides the Soviet perimeter was being shrunken there. In southern Norway, those Soviet paratroopers which had arrived in the Oslo area on the war’s fifth day had finally been ejected from their positions near the Norwegian capital after Swedish and local Norwegian forces finally got their act together and eliminated those isolated forces.

NATO aircraft had been busy over the Baltic Approaches trying to find and eliminate Soviet coastal missile batteries after the loss the New Jersey early yesterday. The loss of life there had been great at the US Navy was still reeling from the sinking, though aircraft from the two carriers redeployed from the Mediterranean were striking back with vengeance. That sinking of that WW2-era battleship had come alongside British failures to conduct landings in Jutland though the NSC was told how the British were soon to try again. Their second attempt was going to coincide with the landing of the US 5th Marine Division soon enough and both amphibious assaults were anticipated to bring much success once they begun… and much reconnaissance effort was done first. Meanwhile, on Zealand, the Helsingor position that the Danes and Swedes were holding after Copenhagen had been lost a week ago was reporting a lack of any major enemy activity and the Swedes had been reinforcing their forces there after initial setbacks to make sure that when they advanced as planned, they didn’t meet defeat again.

In northern Germany, NATO forces there had spent the day continuing their advances eastwards. They were almost at the Inter-German Border in many places, especially the French on the left of the North German Plain and the Belgians on the extreme right. British, West German and US troops with the understrength III Corps were still moving forward in the centre and pushing back Soviet forces which they encountered. The fighting there was very hard going with many casualties being inflicted to NATO ground troops as they met enemy blocking units holding on to hopeless positions just to slow them down. In the skies above them, aircraft with the 2 ATAF were now in almost complete control of the aerial battlefield not just in the hours of darkness but in daylight too.

The US Fifth & Seventh Armys were facing enemy forces trying to hold them back too and there remained many bloody engagements for them too as they were fighting through central parts of Germany yet at the same time they had advanced far and deep in many other places. The Soviet-held Kassel Salient had been overrun by national guardsmen and they had destroyed a major enemy force in doing so while the Fulda Gap was being approached from the west by General Schwarzkopf coming up the Gelnhausen Corridor. The NSC listened to Powell as he spoke of how the commander of the US V Corps – who many people on the ground in Germany were now calling ‘Patton’, for many reasons – had done what many had regarded as impossible and advanced most of the way up Autobahn-66, defeating all of those before him. Soon enough he would reach the end of the Kinzig Valley and reach that tank country ahead where he would be heading for the Inter-German Border too. US Army troops in northeastern parts of Bavaria were pushing to retake Franconia and also closing-in upon East Germany there as well.

In southern Germany, French and West German forces were winning engagement after engagement with enemy forces and had smashed apart Soviet and Czechoslovakian units alike as they headed for the border with Czechoslovakia. They were making slightly slowly progress due to terrain and the number of enemy forces encountered and thus trying to stop them, but they were moving eastwards without halt.

Above both central and southern Germany, NATO air forces – led by the USAF – had dominance of the skies above the battlefields beneath them as well as ahead of the frontlines too all the way up to East German and Czechoslovak territory. The NSC was told how air units with the Socialist Forces were now being defeated in detail through superior electronic capabilities put to use by the Allies as well as their inability to learn from their errors. They couldn’t adapt and stuck to their doctrine while NATO had learnt the hard way and was now tearing them apart. Sometimes the enemy would get lucky, especially with some of their most advanced fighters and certain SAM units, but those were rare occasions.

The briefing was due to move forwards to conflict zones elsewhere afterwards though the NSC moved to talk for a while about the self-imposed stop-lines the NATO was currently following when it came to enemy territory. It had been previously agreed by Reagan with the NATO Council back before the war even begun that should there arise a situation where a counterattack took NATO forces eastwards, they wouldn’t enter enemy sovereign territory on the ground. Air operations were something different, but no soldiers were to cross into East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland or even the USSR no matter what. With Poland being so far from the frontlines and the Soviets having all of those nuclear warheads still pointed at the US and the wider West, what the NSC talked about here was adapting that policy with regards to the other two countries which were making war upon the Allies. Bush stated that he wanted to see West Berlin liberated and that Prague was somewhere else that he believed NATO should send its soldiers too if, as he put it, the Czechoslovaks ‘didn’t see sense’. He believed that those countries which had taken part in an unprovoked war of aggression would need to be invaded to fully end this conflict on the terms of the Allies. Maybe full occupation might be too much, but he wanted to see them invaded if NATO troops needed to cross border lines to defeat the enemy.

That decision of the Acting President’s raised no objection at Mount Weather – neither from Carlucci or Grassley (still in New York at the UN) over the telephones – and would be presented to America’s allies as soon as possible.

Back to the war itself, the strategic air campaign over parts of Eastern Europe was still ongoing. There were losses still being taken but the ability of the enemy to move reinforcements was minimal according to all intelligence while their supply transportation network was effectively destroyed. Weary of such a statement, Bush and Grassley both questioned that, but were told that all information pointed to such a situation. Poland had been especially targeted with its rail network bombed to smithereens and links through Poland were the key even more than those further west in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. There was an upcoming big air attack targeted against Berlin mentioned too and the NSC was briefed on the plan for that which was due to take place in the next few hours.

At sea, the North Atlantic and the waters around Europe had been dangerous for the US Navy and NATO naval forces early in the war yet losses hadn’t been as high as they could have been. Almost forty American major warships and more than a dozen submarines had been lost – NATO losses were double that – but the control over them was now in NATO hands. Soviet land-based naval aviation was non-existent after two weeks of war while their capital ships were either sunk or hiding in the Kara & Black Seas. The mighty Soviet submarine arm had expended itself and what vessels remained were apparently all trying to head home with few weapons left so that they could try to resupply from bases smashed to pieces by Striking Fleet Atlantic’s relentless air attacks on the military bases along the edges of the Kola Peninsula. Those sea-lanes were open for exclusive NATO use and the danger of attack against all of those ships at sea supplying Europe was now minimal.

Warfare on a small scale in the air and at sea around Turkey continued while the Middle East remained quiet; there was still plenty of US military combat power deployed in the Persian Gulf and ashore in Oman as well as several of the Gulf States too. There was mention made again like during Reagan’s NSC meetings about withdrawing some US Navy forces from there but again it was decided to keep what was there in-place. Oil flowing from the Middle East was keeping the Allies fighting and the US protected it there at source and during the initial stages of its transport throughout the world.

In East Asia and the Pacific, the war was still generally at a stalemate stage. The Allies and the Socialist Forces had checkmated each other with so much combat power deployed by each side yet most of it unable to directly combat the other. Bush asked how his decision to divert some resources away to Europe had been reacted to by those members of the Allies there and was told by Carlucci and Grassley that there had been the few expected grumblings but no more. The Soviet coast was still facing air attacks – from the US Navy and Allied aircraft out of Japan – and the Soviets were launching a few of their strikes back at Japan, but there remained no instances of ground combat where so many troops from both sides were posited yet not directly facing each other.


Casualties were discussed by the NSC, those suffered by the US in particular. The latest figures available to be presented to Bush were almost at the fifty thousand mark in terms of dead, wounded, missing and captured.

This was a staggering figure.

The US Marines had lost many men in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay and then some more in their advance across Finmark pushing towards the Soviet border. The USAF had seen personnel lost not just in aircraft but on the ground at attacked airbases too. Then there was the US Navy with all of those ships sunk including the carrier Ranger in the Pacific, the New Jersey in the Baltic Approaches and the cruiser Virginia which had all been big ship losses where most of their crews had been lost while hundreds of sailors had died aboard the carrier Forrestal in the fires there which had knocked that ship out of action. It was the US Army – including USAR and ARNG units assigned – which had taken the bulk of American military losses in the war though. It wasn’t just frontline troops but many in the rear which had become casualties of war in this great loss of life which had taken place on such a small time-scale. The wounded men were another matter too with so many of them with life-changing injuries.

It was explained that the number of losses wasn’t something that a lot of people were yet to understand. US Army Chief of Staff General Vuono told Bush and the other politicians meeting at Mount Weather that the men on the frontlines couldn’t possibly realise how many of their fellow soldiers had been killed or wounded as the war was so fast-moving and units were constantly engaged in mobile conflict. Such numbers were kept from the ordinary fighting men and junior officers to keep morale up and Vuono explained that if such a thing were to get out and sink in among those fighting, there would be a major drop in morale. The peacetime US Army in Europe which had been reinforced by regulars and afterwards by those Reservists and national guardsmen had all been taking major personnel losses but were still fighting; winning the war depended upon them not understanding how many of their fellow soldiers weren’t going to be around afterwards.

The NSC was briefed too on morale issues when it came to US military personnel released from POW camps in retaken portions of West Germany during the fighting there late last week. Of the sixteen thousand NATO military personnel rescued: six and a half thousand of those had been American. All of these had officially been listed as ‘missing’ before the wire pens where they were kept out in the open like animals had fallen to advancing NATO troops. There were a few USAF pilots, though it was mainly soldiers which were rescued from levels of depravity which the NSC had previously been briefed upon. Bush again showed his anger on this matter and queried how war crimes investigations were going regarding the treatment of female prisoners and those of ethnic minorities especially which the Soviets had been holding as well of those POWs who never made it to camps like those and were shot where they had surrendered when unarmed. He wanted to know what reconnaissance efforts were being made to locate further camps which there had to be located eastwards back in enemy territory and what plans were being made with regard to those.

The movement of the US Army’s final expected group of major ground reinforcements heading for Europe was talked over. Those old soldiers and the national guardsmen who would accompany them – the US II Corps and the US XI Corps respectively – were going through their final stages of training now while convoys of ships were underway and crossing the North Atlantic. When those ships started landing, the soldiers would be flown over to join them. The US Third Army was expected to be in-place ready to fight by the end of the week but there was an eagerness that both Powell and Vuono had to calm on the part of many members of the NSC to rush that. The national guardsmen with the US Fifth Army had been rushed into action last weekend and suffered accordingly due to them not being truly ready at first; they would be a much stronger force than they currently were had that hadn’t happened.


The meeting turned afterwards to diplomatic matters.

The outcomes of the failed attempt at ceasefire talks in Geneva the night before, which had been aborted almost as soon as they got started, were covered. There hadn’t been much hope for those and what Armitage and Ridgway had to say in paraphrased reports was discussed and so too was what Grassley was hearing at the UN in reaction from that. He was preparing for a trip to Europe later this week before planning to return again to stay on the ground in New York, but his work at the UN with other representatives of the Allies and diplomats from other nations was important. The Soviets and the few Socialist Forces countries had very few friends left on the international stage; Grassley was leading the effort to further reduce that number. Bush reminded him that he wanted the policy of offering inducements to countries to join the Allies kept up but to keep those vague for the time being and not to make any firm commitments. His Secretary of State was walking a tightrope with such a contradictory course of action, but it was to remain ongoing.

Cuba again come up in discussions as that matter remained unresolved. The ceasefire was holding and US Marines plus some downed USAF aircrews were back in the US after transferring through The Bahamas from Cuban custody. Guantanamo Bay still remained in Cuban hands though and the military was in-charge down there after the people had deposed Castro and then those generals had wiped out the spooks who tried to take charge in the aftermath. The original desire for the US to see Cuban Exiles allowed to return was still being refused by the Cubans and so negotiations were stalled. Cuban air attacks on the US mainland as part of their surprise attack had the American public, as well as Congress, regarding those strikes as another Pearl Harbor. Less than a hundred civilians had been killed in Florida compared to the almost two thousand more in Hawaii, Alaska, Seattle and parts of New England when Soviet attacks had come early in the war, but Cuba was still being vilified more than even the Soviets were.

Bush confirmed Reagan’s earlier policy that those Cubans who wished to return home – and certainly change the political, economic and social make-up of their country – should be allowed to and that Guantanamo Bay couldn’t be allowed to remain held by the Cubans. Maybe there was a solution in the long-run, but for now, that was the policy he was to follow as well.

Northern Ireland was mentioned when discussing international relations as part of the war. Again there was pressure coming from Congress with this as many of the elected representatives in secluded luxury at the Greenbrier Resort had been hearing disturbing reports for a while now coming from Ulster of what was happening there. The NSC under Reagan had discussed that a while ago after the Republic of Ireland had complained furiously about the effective genocide and ethnic cleansing going on there but that had been ignored for wartime unity. Grassley stated that the British were aware of what was going on and were far from pleased but couldn’t stop the killings there as taxed as they were with the conventional war on the Continent. CIA Director Webster spoke of how upset Thatcher was at the issue and she had already reacted politically, but Britain didn’t have the capability to act decisively there even with Ulster being an integral part of Britain. Something had to be done about this though, Bush told the NSC, for the events there taking place inside a nation with the Allies – especially one like the UK – just couldn’t continue.

South Africa’s role in the war was another matter so too was China’s absence from the conflict. The NSC covered other issues away from international affairs to do with the US economy and the latest news of emergency internal security following the terrorist attacks which had occurred across the country in the few days before the war and once it got started. Continued preparations for nuclear war should that break out were also talked over and then there was a late interruption with a NSA staffer delivering to his boss General William Odom two urgent notices which the NSA chief soon shared with the Acting President and the others. He told them that there was satellite intelligence – photographs and ELINT – of a massive further military mobilisation taking place across wide parts of the Soviet Union that could result in further Soviet troop reinforcements showing up in Germany at some stage. Moreover, the second dispatch sent to him, hot on the heels of the first, spoke of what he called ‘interesting developments’ in Moscow…

…after all that had happened since late last November, there were actually few gasps around the secure room where the NSC was meeting when they heard that latter piece of news whereas a year ago such news certainly would have caused great shock.





Two Hundred & Four

Operation CERTAIN VENGEANCE was an American-only affair; USAF assets alone were used in the air attack against East Berlin with many of those beforehand and afterwards returning to their NATO assignments with 2 ATAF, 3 ATAF and 4 ATAF. Carlucci had been instrumental in conceiving the mission before Bush authorised it and the strategic bombing was planned by his senior people at the Raven Rock facility in Pennsylvania where the operational side of the Department of Defence had transferred to rather than those ‘out in the field’ forward in Europe. For several weeks now, since West Berlin had been captured and then the East Germans had taken part in the war in a major way, the mission had been postponed several times as aircraft were needed elsewhere and there were other priorities.

However, in the early hours of Tuesday 29th March CERTAIN VENGEANCE got underway.


A total of twenty-six aircraft were involved with less than a third actually conducting the direct bombing attack against Berlin itself; those others provided support for the mission. The USAF had pulled together multiple assets as CERTAIN VENGEANCE was a mission which came from the very top. The eight strike-bombers assigned for a low-level attack run on Berlin would have four fighter-interceptors covering them nearby from above while there would also be a pair of air defence suppression aircraft with them too. A trio of heavy bombers with cruise missiles being fired against further air defences would precede the air strike, four airborne tankers were assigned in support for mid-air refuelling before and after the mission, there were three stand-off electronic warfare aircraft, an AWACS aircraft for mission control and a strategic reconnaissance aircraft flying high and fast at a distance to give mission feedback.

The FB-111As, F-15Cs and EF-111As came from airbases in the UK first and were met by KC-135R tankers above the Netherlands before they transited through 2 ATAF airspace. Aircrews aboard the single- & twin-seat aircraft going into East Germany airspace were nervous but still confident in their mission as they knew the level of support assigned to them. They had a full mission brief beforehand on everything that they needed to know – the targets for attack, enemy defences, the weather and emergency landing sites – and knew that their aircraft had been heavily-serviced beforehand. These fourteen aircraft flew over Holland and then above the North German Plain fast heading towards the frontlines and enemy territory beyond.

Three B-52G bombers acting as missile-carriers tonight had been launching missiles when over Belgium long before those attacking aircraft got over mainland Europe. These aircraft had come from Britain too but hadn’t flown that far forward: just to their launching points. The B-52s had each fired a dozen AGM-86C CALM missiles, an experimental version of the usually nuclear-armed -86B ALCM with a blast-fragmentation warhead instead. Technicians from Boeing had been involved right up to the last minute with those missiles when on the ground as the CALMs were something very new. Those missiles were out ahead of the strike aircraft and their escorts while the B-52s were on their way home.

Providing stand-off support for the mission were those three electronic warfare aircraft and the airborne radar platform which remained back far from the frontlines too. The RC-135V reconnaissance aircraft and two EC-130H jamming aircraft had battle-staff fully focused upon the entry and planned egress of the attacking aircraft and those cruise missiles as well. Then there was the E-3B with its radar seeing several hundred miles ahead over the horizon with a very accurate radar picture of the skies.

Finally, the last aircraft involved in the mission came down towards East Germany from over Sweden and then the Baltic but was staying away from Berlin. This was a SR-71A; an unarmed supersonic strategic reconnaissance aircraft. Extra mission pods hung beneath the aircraft tonight and its flight plan was to take it high above East Germany behind Berlin to the east as the strike was conducted there so its own systems and those extra ones carried tonight could record enemy responses for further analysis later.

Getting all of these pieces together and acting together in concert had been difficult, but after two weeks of warfare, along with decades of training, the USAF knew what it was doing.


The CALM’s entered enemy airspace first flying fast and low. They were using terrain contour matching guidance rather than the planned GPS navigation which was the ultimate idea for the missile in a conventional role and they were still very experimental. Three of them had mis-fire launches from the B-52s and another four had further failures in-flight; post-mission analysis would point to too many modifications being made to these missiles in the rush to produce them and send them across to Europe. The others soon started striking multiple targets across East Germany though and hit known strategic air defence sites far back from the frontlines. Batteries of SA-10 and SA-12 SAMs along with radars associated with these top-tier systems were targeted by those cruise missiles flying in beneath radar coverage and so too were several airfields near Berlin where some of the première air defence interceptors were based. There weren’t enough missiles to knock out most of the SAM batteries nor shut those interceptor bases, but plenty of disruption was caused by the sudden arrival of these missiles which the enemy didn’t detect for what they were until they started impacting.

The attack aircraft went forward in two waves of seven aircraft each: four strike-bombers, a pair of fighters and a defence suppression aircraft. Those F-15s stayed high with their radars being lit up once they were deep inside East Germany while the versions of the Aardvark down low had swept their wings back and kept their own active systems in stand-by mode. Penetrations were made through the weakened air defences while the fighters up above were soon shooting off many air-to-air missiles: they had distant warning coming from the E-3 back over the Rhineland for assistance.

CERTAIN VENGEANCE had begun with some of the strategic SAM sites with those more modern air defence missiles being struck at though there were plenty of air defences around Berlin in the heart of East Germany. The focus with those CALMs had been to hit defences around the approach and exit routes for the aircraft going deep, but not all of them had been hit and then there were others unknown too. Such an issue had been factored into the heavily-worked plan for this mission though and that was why there were those EC-130H aircraft flying over the Weser in northern Germany as the strike package reached Berlin. Targeted rather than blanket electronic jamming came from the antenna which festooned from the pair of aircraft and was directed against air-search radars and those of SAM systems. The lone RC-135 further back was assisting in this as the aircraft aboard that bigger aircraft were working in real-time to identify threats coming online. Therefore, a whole lot of electronic jamming was being directed against the enemy’s defences in the Berlin area.

With time being short before the Soviets and East Germans were able to react, the pair of strike packages coming in from the northwest and the southwest raced in towards Berlin. The unarmed EF-111As were in the lead with those stretched FB-111s behind them carrying heavy weapons loads of bombs. The Ravens were working hard at the tactical level with further jamming and much of that was generalised as they themselves were facing the same threats as the strike-bombers following them. The night-time sky was black up above beneath thick cloud cover which was over central parts of East Germany tonight, but from the ground there came flashes of unnatural light: tracer rounds from anti-aircraft guns and missile launches too. They raced towards all of that though as their targets lay ahead where those defences were trying to protect.

Four targets in East Berlin had been highlighted for attack, all of which were deemed of a strategic nature and were to be treated to a low-level bombing attack where it was hoped accuracy would be great and destruction assured. These were ‘regime symbols’ as far as Carlucci at Raven Rock was concerned and their bombing would be a sign to the East German regime of how determined that United States was to have its vengeance for the role played in the war by East Germany starting from the seizure of West Berlin.

The party headquarters of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the ruling communist party in East Germany, was targeted by the first two FB-111s on their bomb run coming up from the southwest and across West Berlin into East Berlin. They faced extensive anti-aircraft fire from multiple batteries firing into the sky after warning had been given of the approach of aircraft on an attack run. Most of that fire was wildly inaccurate and the USAF aircrews had to think that no one on the ground was worrying over just where all those 57mm high-explosive shells were going to land and whether they would do more damage over all that the bombs which they carried…

The building slated for destruction had been identified from long-time intelligence and last minute satellite observation too: this information had been fed into the nav/attack computers aboard each of the strike-bombers who went to hit it. Last-minute jinxing to avoid anti-aircraft fire complicated the bomb-runs made though and therefore the attack wasn’t perfect. Mk.82 and Mk.83 bombs were dropped from the USAF aircraft and those 500lb and 1000lb bombs – ten fell away from each FB-111 – didn’t all strike their target. In the main, the front of the building and the nearby street outside suffered the immense destruction when those warheads went off aboard the bombs dropped, yet there was still much damage done and there was certain to be much propaganda achieved when the citizens of East Berlin were able to see what destruction had been wrought.

The Palast der Republik was another target where the propaganda effect was sought by attacking it. The remaining FB-111s coming in from the southwest bombed that immense complex which East Germany’s ruling regime used as a showpiece of their country. Their rubber-stamp Parliament met there and it also housed many official state functions. Bombs fell atop this building too with much greater accuracy and when they went off they thoroughly wrecked it. Fires were soon started afterwards which the civilian fire service of East Berlin was soon struggling to cope with when the morning came.

The other two targets inside East Berlin were the headquarters of the Stasi in Lichtenberg and the Ministry of National Defence at Strausberg. Much of the functions which usually took place at both had been moved out before the war started though while again they were targeted for propaganda effect they were still in use in a limited fashion. Erich Mielke also had his office in the former location and a stated aim of CERTAIN VENGEANCE was to send a message to him.

One of the FB-111s heading for the Ministry of National Defence building was shot down seconds before dropping its bombs. That aircraft with the 393rd Bombardment Squadron (part of the 509th Bomb Wing based in peacetime in New Hampshire but now flying from the UK) was hit by a Soviet Army Tunguska combined gun and missile tactical air defence system. Rapid-firing 30mm guns and short-range SAMs had been blasted from this tracked vehicle which was crewed by East German soldiers with the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment after it and several others had recently been transferred to their control. At short-range it was a deadly system and it blew apart much of the wings and rear fuselage of the FB-111 hit.

The Ministry of Defence Building was still bombed though and so too was the Stasi headquarters; a further Tunguska system at the latter location tried but failed to hit the strike-bombers engaged there. Much destruction was again caused at each location as those bombs fell away from the aircraft overhead coming in at only a hundred feet above urban terrain. The noise of those aircraft approaching at speed was one thing, but then the blasts were even louder. Afterwards, it seemed like everyone in East Berlin had heard the attacks commence, especially as the sleeping city had already been awoken by defensive weapons firing but not conspicuously silent air raid sirens.

As the Americans started their egress, one of the EF-111s was lost too. The F-15s up above had been overwhelmed by so many enemy aircraft filling the skies – MiG-29s in both Soviet and East German markings – after those targeted airbase hadn’t been closed effectively by the CALM missiles. The USAF fighters had fired off many air-to-air missiles and were almost out of such weapons that they could only give a radio warning that several enemy fighters had reached the centre of Berlin before that EF-111 fell to a short-range missile fired by a MiG-29. The remaining attacking aircraft with CERTAIN VENGEANCE engaged afterburners while still above the city to start their escape while activating jammers and deploying chaff. Anti-aircraft guns continued to fire and SAMs were being lofted, but they managed to get away and were glad to hear a report coming from the distant E-3 that one of those MiG-29s which had reached Berlin to strike at them seemed to have been hit by a ‘friendly’ SAM and wasn’t giving chase.

The whole strategic air defence network throughout East Germany was alive though and it was taking a lot of effort for the distant jamming efforts to cancel out their effects. The remaining aircraft of the strike packages were meant to route around enemy air defences but not all of them had been plotted and many were very effective. An SA-13 battery guarding a major Soviet Army mobile communications column for rear-area command and control, travelling north of Berlin on East Germany’s rather good road network, reacted to enemy aircraft nearby and started firing SAMs skywards. These came fast and unexpected before anyone with the USAF – over East Germany or far away to the west – knew about it and another two FB-111s were hit with missiles. One of those would keep flying but the other blew up mid-air in a fireball which would take the lives of the aircrew aboard.


Three of the fourteen aircraft which had made the deep strike mission failed to return though CERTAIN VENGEANCE was a major success as those losses were regarded as minimal for what was achieved. Major strategic targets had been bombed right in the hard of East Germany’s capital with such damage being of immense propaganda value to where Berliners were concerned. The SR-71 uninvolved in the actual strike had made its high-speed reconnaissance run as the bombing attack was going on and the intelligence which that brought back later would be of great value too in seeing how the enemy reacted to such a mission against Berlin.

After all, this was just going to be the first air attack against Berlin.

Two Hundred & Seven

Making certain that the war would be won for the Soviet Union which he now led was Marshal Ogarkov’s priority; everything else was secondary. He had to defend his country at all costs and there could be no allowances made. The threat which came from the West, now full of vengeance, could only be stopped with a full commitment to combat rather than what had been in many instances a somewhat half-hearted attempt beforehand.

The war had been a disaster; there was no getting away from that. After the period of time that had elapsed up until now, the West should have been defeated on the battlefield and be now pleading for a ceasefire while offering all sorts of concessions. Ogarkov was convinced that if Chebrikov had listened to him from the start, then Soviet armies would still be on the offensive rather than the defensive as they now were. Too much attention had been focused upon politics though and the state within a state which was the intelligence services had been allowed to do as they wished. The West was powerful but at the same time it was divided and there was weakness there.

Everything had gone wrong though with RED BEAR and there didn’t seem to be any way to fix that situation now. Ogarkov no longer cared for the initial reasoning of the war taking place; all he was focused upon was ending it as soon as possible and achieving the best outcome for his country. The only way that he could see his nation emerging from all of this was to achieve victory on the battlefields of Western Europe. That was where the Motherland would be defended from invasion and where the armies of the West would have to be fought to a standstill. He anticipated this not being an easy task yet at the same time believed that it would work, especially under his personal direction.

As to the future, Ogarkov didn’t see himself as some sort of Bonaparte-type figure: he only wanted to lead his country to victory in this war. He had already identified someone in particular who he thought best to lead the nation after a successful conclusion though considered it rather dangerous to propel that man to power now fearing that his chosen candidate would end up being overthrown before the war commenced. The troika which had removed Gorbachev had then fought amongst themselves with Marshal Akhromeyev being murdered first and then Chebrikov killing Shcherbytsky… Ogarkov had then moved against Chebrikov. This pattern would only be continued unless someone put a stop to that using strength and such strength could only come following military victory.

Of course, before his visionary future plan to save his country in the meantime could take place, there was a war to be won first. Ogarkov had identified five key war-winning measures that he would personally oversee.


Firstly, military efforts in the Soviet North-West and in the Far East would continue to try to defend the country in those locations as much as possible. Offensive military assets had been near destroyed and much damage had been done to those defensively orientated, but the nation needed to be protected by every means possible against further air and naval attacks. Ogarkov had no fear that the West would invade with troops into the North-West or the Far East at this point in time; such moves would only come unless the Soviet position in Europe had collapsed and they were already marching on Moscow via Germany and Poland. His orders were for the Soviet military forces in those areas to hold out and protect Soviet soil as best as they could. In addition, in some of Chebrikov’s more lucid moments before he had descended into madness, Ogarkov had been assured that KGB influence operations had made the West understand that to directly invade Soviet soil would bring about a nuclear response. Maybe in time that threat would lose credibility among them, especially if their armies were tearing across Poland, but for now Ogarkov was certain that Murmansk or Vladivostok weren’t going to be captured by occupying troops.

The intelligence services which had caused so much damage to the war effort would remain active despite Ogarkov despising them as he did. However, he had successful neutered them at the top and knew for a while they would be subservient to his wishes. He wanted them to do what they were supposed to do not what they had been doing. Ogarkov sent firm instructions that the KGB was to maintain the political security of the Soviet Union and serve the countries interests in helping to secure control over the populations behind the frontlines on Europe’s battlefields. Moreover, the Third Chief Directorate with its KGB officers assigned to Soviet military units for political control was being disestablished with immediate effect. As to the GRU, Ogarkov wanted them preforming the role in which he thought they should be doing too: supporting the military efforts in their reconnaissance role. He told the surviving senior people within that organisation that they were to cut their ties with their operatives abroad at once and focus all attention on the tactical situation at the frontlines in Europe.

To win the military conflict in Eastern Europe so as to bleed the West dry, Ogarkov had mobilised all of those military forces across major parts of the country. Regulars and reservists held back beforehand – including half of the forces down in the Trans-Caucasus Military District which were defending against a Turkish attack that was never going to materialise – were to be pushed into East Germany, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere to defeat NATO in its counter-invasion. With these being tasked for a defensive mission, Ogarkov knew they wouldn’t need the extensive service support assets which weren’t there to supply them seeing as they only had to hold ground not take it: he believed that these troops he was forming-up into improvised field armies and sending into Eastern Europe could hold the lines there.

The supply problems across Eastern Europe which were being exasperated by external factors were going to be solved, Ogarkov had determined. He had committed the necessary personnel to make that happen who all had firm instructions that ammunition, fuel and food must get through to his soldiers fighting at the frontlines. The stocks of these were available but getting them where they were needed and on time too had become an immense problem that was having a disastrous effect upon wartime operations. Ogarkov wanted those supply links fixed with those originally tasked to do that job replaced wholescale, resistance from the Poles in particular to this movement which was becoming a problem ruthlessly crushed and also a reinforcement of air defences behind the frontlines to stop NATO air attacks destroying those supply links. Poland was seen as the key to the supply problems and Ogarkov made certain that his orders were firm that where the difficulties were present there was to be nothing to stop them anymore no matter what affect it had there in that country.

Lastly, Ogarkov gave the order for the Soviet Fourth Guards Army to finally commence their offensive which he had long been in heated discussions with Chebrikov about. In western Hungary, the Soviet Army had assembled a trio of combat divisions into this field army there ready to defend against any NATO moves to use Austria as a springboard for an attack deep into Eastern Europe. Such a sneak offensive from there didn’t look possible with assistance from the Austrians when an examination of how Vienna was behaving was undertaken, yet Ogarkov knew that if he was in the shoes of NATO’s senior generals in the West then he would be thinking about using Austrian territory with or without their consent. From there, NATO forces could move deep into Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Ogarkov had for some time been now wanting to counter that by moving first with the lone division left there from the pre-war Southern Group of Forces and the two reserve divisions from across the Ukraine moved in afterwards; after his assumption of power he decided to go ahead with not so much the fear of the West moving first but to knock them off balance. The weak Hungarian Army would be instructed to follow the Soviet Fourth Guards Army in their attack due to the strong numbers of Austrian soldiers fully mobilised across their nation and the enemy would have no choice but to move their own forces into that Alpine nation. Again this would go with the strategy of fighting the West on their territory and as far away from Soviet soil as possible. Ogarkov had issued the orders for the Soviet Fourth Guards Army to strike as soon as possible and much of their supplies were going to come from the Hungarians for the time being too.


There was no hesitation in Ogarkov when he issued these instructions, just as there hadn’t been when he had given the go ahead for his coup to depose Chebrikov. He considered himself a soldier and a patriot who was only doing his best for the Motherland. Russia came first even before the rest of the Union for him though he still wanted to maintain the grip that his people had upon their necessary empire. When foreign soldiers had been on Russian soil beforehand they had caused untold suffering to the Russian people as so he would do everything that it took to make sure that didn’t happen again.

A major part of ensuring that if his strategy for defeating NATO on the battlefields of Eastern Europe didn’t work was the posturing which he had the Soviet nuclear arsenal undertaking. Everything he knew about the West told him that that divided as they were, they would never launch a nuclear attack first. They might be fearful of one commencing under his orders, yet they wouldn’t land the first blow. If everything else failed, the Soviet Union was always going to survive due to its nuclear arsenal.

Ogarkov had no fears over that such a certainty wouldn’t be enough to ensure that the endgame he desired would be the result of this war.






Two Hundred & Eight

‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’…

Initially, when the first attempt was made at PORTER three days beforehand, the British military forces assigned along with their allies had taken a knock back in trying to land in Denmark and open up the Baltic for exploitation. The defences hadn’t been scouted properly resulting in the near disaster of landing in a well-defended area and the subsequent loss of the American battleship New Jersey too. Moreover, contact hadn’t been made with the Danish Resistance on the ground either and such an oversight where it wasn’t realised how strong such a force was had cost Britain dear. With hindsight, such mistakes were plain to see and everyone agreed how easily they could have been avoided.

This time, however, the British had done their homework and were sure that they were much better prepared for their mission. This wasn’t Norway where the then separate elements of the 6th Light Division had been operating in friendly territory where the enemy held onto isolated outposts: instead, Denmark was fully occupied and would be a much tougher task to take on. A great deal of reconnaissance was undertaken across the northern reaches of Jutland in the past few days and special forces soldiers had been sent in ahead to not only act as pathfinders but to scout where ‘friendly’ local armed militias were operating too so that contact would be made with them. Long-range missile defences had been located from the air and then attacked with intelligence flowing back that the vast majority of such mobile assets had been knocked out and the remainder too busy trying to hide their location rather than defend the occupied coast.

Moreover, the delay in the landing operation had brought an increase in time to prepare in other fashions too with further fire supporting assets being gathered – though none which could truly replace the New Jersey – as well as better arrangements made for the transport of the troops assigned for the assault. PORTER had been put together in a rush and there were still going to be problems that would crop up, though now it was hoped that as many wouldn’t be of a serious nature as they would have been beforehand.


Due to local tidal conditions, the Royal Marines – moving ahead of their sworn enemies the Paras – landed on the coast of Jutland an hour before dawn. They arrived along the beaches north of Frederikshavn just as they had planned to on the Sunday in landing craft though also came ashore by helicopter too in places with anti-armour teams being dropped off at key points. The darkness hampered the assault in some ways by forcing carefulness and thus slowing things down, but it was certain that their enemy on the ground from the East German Army was in no way prepared for an assault to come at such a time.

The Royal Marines named their assault beaches RED, GREEN, BLUE and YELLOW for ease of operations and their inland sites were numerically coded following the BLACK keyword. Reinforced company groups of rifleman came off fast landing craft along those beaches while helicopters raced inland to deposit more naval commandoes at the BLACK sites. BLUE beach was the scene of a horrible surprise when anti-personnel landmines were stumbled into in the darkness while at BLACK #3 a nearby anti-aircraft gun blasted several Sea King helicopters with many 23mm shells. These instances of resistance were painful but they weren’t going to defeat the landing operation here.

Those assault landing craft and helicopters had raced back to the Royal Navy amphibious group offshore to get more men for a return while there were other vessels assisting too. The amphibious capability of Britain in terms of assault shipping had been badly hurt earlier in the war yet with the time to marshal assets, the Royal Navy group had got some help. There were some Norwegian vessels present ferrying troops and equipment ashore and so too were refugees from the once mighty localised amphibious fleets of the Danish and West Germany navies. The five Berbe-class ships crewed by Germans were especially useful with their shallow bottoms and their beaching capabilities so that vehicles could drive straight off them.

The whole area north of Frederikshavn was soon swarming with Royal Marines. They were getting air support from a couple of RAF Harriers operating from the decks of the carrier HMS Invincible nearby and knew that for the time being that ship would stay there protected by its own RN Sea Harriers for air defence. Eventually that carrier would have to move to more open waters but with it being less than thirty miles away at the time of the assault many missions could be flown from the aircraft based aboard. Close air support missions were called-in by the Royal Marines as they moved inland and while such attacks weren’t always brilliantly effective they did raise the morale of the attacking naval commandoes.

The local defences near the landing beaches came in the form of the East German tank battalion based at the village of Elling. There was infantry in Frederikshavn, but those tanks were the major threat to the Royal Marines getting ashore and securing the harbour facilities in the area including those in that bigger town as well as at the smaller Strandby. Harriers had dropped cluster bombs across the garrison that the East Germans had established moments before the landing stages of PORTER begun and then those Sea King helicopters flown by Royal Navy crews had started to drop of men from R Company, 41 Commando nearby. These were veterans of the fight against Soviet tanks at Skibotn and had shown their worth there in engaging such vehicles.

Moving on foot away from their landing sites where the departing helicopters had dropped them off, these Royal Marines took upon East German T-72s like they had smashed Soviet T-80s. MILAN missiles were fired first at distance and then Carl Gustav rockets close-in. The East Germans tried to fight back yet their manoeuvrability was hampered by unexploded cluster bomb munitions and the fact that their enemy had somehow predicted their deployment routes away from their garrison… those SBS soldiers already present had already taken a look at the ground and observed track marks from a recent deployment exercise conducted.

Then there came the rumble of massed gunfire from offshore that was similar to a battleship opening fire. The New Jersey might have been gone, but to partially make-up for that loss there was the presence of the West German gun-armed cruiser Deutschland. This was a training vessel for the Bundesmarine and had spent the war up until this point hiding along the Norwegian coast as while a big vessel the Deutschland had few weapons, especially for self-defence in the modern age. Yet she did carry a quartet of 100mm rapid-firing guns and was a capable military asset because of that. Those guns started firing at targets around Elling and such shots were guided by men on the ground.

The actual effects of the rounds weren’t that spectacular and those 100mm shells only knocked out lighter support vehicles and killed men rather than destroying tanks. Nonetheless, the East German tank crews initially panicked at the naval gunfire and then the men stalking them on the ground with man-portable weapons. More and more T-72s were destroyed or disabled. TOW missiles started coming from Lynx helicopters also flown by Royal Marines – 3rd Commando Brigade Air Squadron – and some of those had successful strikes against further tanks. Eventually, the East Germans were pinned down and some crews started to abandon their T-72s. It would take some time to finally subdue the rest of the garrison but for the time being the armoured threat to the landing beaches was over with.

Further troops came ashore as the skies got lighter and above the Royal Marines those Sea Harriers on fighter patrol found themselves engaged by a flight of Polish MiG-21s scrammed to intercede in the landing. Despite coming low and fast behind what they thought was capable electronic jamming, a NATO-manned Sentry airborne radar aircraft flying out of Norway detected that attack long before the Poles could get close. The Sea Harriers were vectored into ambush positions and then started launching missiles on cue. Several MiG-21s went down but a couple got away with fast evading; one in particular went fast over the landing area and engaged its cannon in a crazed attack as it sped past. A Sea King laden with further Royal Marines as reinforcements was shot down and crashed with many men aboard becoming casualties, yet even this couldn’t stop the arrival of the full brigade into Jutland.

An effort was being made to spread out from the landing beaches and to take over a large portion of enemy-held territory as fast as possible. Frederikshavn was approached though strong resistance was met at first before helicopter support was called-in and more gunfire from the Deutschland and Royal Navy ships offshore. Of greater importance for the time being though was to make a physical connection with the Paras landing near Aalborg.


5th Airborne Brigade’s contribution to PORTER was their landing at Aalborg Airport. The fire-fight a few days ago near here which had caused their Pathfinder Platoon to be wiped out when unfortunately engaging members of the Danish Resistance had put the mission to recapture this facility at threat, yet the airport was too important for its position and the fact that parts of the facility had been under repair after initially being wrecked in a deliberate sabotage effort when organised Danish military resistance on Jutland had collapsed. An SAS team held back in the UK for strategic missions had been sent to Aalborg to replace those dead pathfinders and they marked out landing zones for the air-drop of 1 PARA into the area as well as making sure that this time no eager locals interfered.

Just as dawn broke and following on from an air attack coming from RAF Tornado strike-bombers, Paras started jumping from low-flying Hercules aircraft near Aalborg Airport. The mobile SAM systems which the East German occupying troops and Soviet Air Force ground troops operated had been bombed and also jammed negating them, but there were many launches of man-portable shoulder-mounted SAMs against the transports. One Hercules was struck and had part of a wing torn off which would mean a flight to nearby Sweden rather than back to the UK so an emergency landing could be made in that Scandinavian country, but apart from that those short-range SAMs were thankfully ineffective enough to not disrupt the parachute assault.

The available light and favourable weather allowed 1 PARA to successfully hit their correct landing zones. They touched down to the north of the airport in open fields marked out for them and were hastily formed up by their officers. The battalion of riflemen came with light equipment but a lot of weaponry for fire support, with mortars and big machine guns being dropped alongside the men. They set off quickly to attack and seize the airport ready for the rest of 5th Airborne Brigade to arrive through there.

Danish Resistance fighters attacked Aalborg Airport on cue and showed great courage in attacking defended positions to keep the enemy occupied. There had been worries on the part of the British over their ability to make a stand-up fight, yet the civilian militia in this area had recently been stiffened by a few professionals who had arrived when the SAS had the day before. These special forces soldiers were from the Jaegerkorpset – the ‘Hunters Corps’ – and were trained in all sorts of unconventional warfare roles. Many of their comrades had been lost in action during the war but most success had been had working with stay behind missions. The unorganised Resistance had shown its worth during the conflict though and the Jaegerkorpset was starting to assist them in places.

By the time the garrison was fully deployed and getting ready to use their mobility and heavy armour in defence of the airport to take on the Resistance, the first of the Paras started to arrive in the area and coming from the opposite direction. Outposts spotted the British approach and the word went out but there was little time to get ready for an attack which 1 PARA was now excelling at after such operations in Norway. There would be a fierce fight for Aalborg Airport with the defenders being outmanned, trapped in one place and then having to suffer under the barrage of air attacks coming against them.


There were plenty of American aircraft in the skies above Jutland with the US Navy and the US Marine Corps committing aircraft to support their Operation BLACK PYTHON along the western coastline. British aircraft weren’t as numerous but were still present as Invincible was offering support for the ground troops employed and then there were also some aircraft flying long distance. Among those coming from afar were some older aircraft wearing the colours of the Royal Navy but based in the southern reaches of Norway.

Royal Navy operated aircraft and helicopters were flown by the Fleet Air Arm (FAA). Before war commenced and during the LION preparations for the conflict, the FAA had mobilised aircraft from storage, from training formations and trials units to reinforce those already in active service so that a large combat force could be assembled to support wartime operations. There were many helicopters serving aboard plenty of ships and then almost every single Sea Harrier naval fighter had ended up flying from the three aircraft carriers sent to the Norwegian Sea. Soviet raketonosets had then blasted the Illustrious and the Ark Royal on the war’s second day and the wrecks of such ships had destroyed many FAA Sea Harriers. There had been no more available and the air group aboard the Invincible had been left with a slowly-dwindling supply of these fighters to defend the Royal Navy at sea.

Some fixed-wing aircraft remained in FAA service though and these didn’t initially see combat action as they were deemed incapable of such in the high-threat environment encountered. French-built Falcon-20 and Jetstream aircraft built by British Aerospace were flown with the Fleet Requirements & Air Direction Unit (FRADU) to allow pilots to gain flight experience over water. These had a wartime role in maritime surveillance around the British Isles and had been doing such a thing to the west and south where the threat axis from enemy aircraft was less but it was thought that small ships might try to land enemy commandoes. Also with the FRADU were a total of twenty-six attack-fighters: subsonic Hawker-built Hunters. These aircraft were arguably twenty years out of date and operated in the training role with the FRADU. Their armament had long been removed and there was no capability for the operation of modern electronic warfare equipment.

Nonetheless, with Britain being short of everything at the moment and the FAA having taken the losses which it had, just under half of those Hunter attack-fighters (the GA11 variant) had been hastily fitted with gun & rocket pods and sent to Norway. They were meant to support the Royal Navy in engaging small enemy surface vessels though had yet to see action in such missions with the enemy having the remains of their Combined Baltic Fleet kept back to the south of Zealand. The Americans had assured the British that their carrier-based aircraft had eliminated that Soviet missile battery that had destroyed the New Jersey and then further hit other coastal defence missile sites that the enemy had established in Denmark too. There was plenty of photographic intelligence to point to this and the US Navy had the motive to destroy such targets as they had their BLACK PYTHON operation ongoing as PORTER was.

Some of those Hunter attack-fighters had still been assigned on the counter-missile patrol just in case and that turned out to be a very wise decision indeed.

A pair of these aircraft were racing along the eastern coast of Jutland during the PORTER landing operations. They were at a low altitude and burning up much of the fuel carried in their external tanks and soon to turn towards Sweden where they were meant to be refuelled on the ground before a return to Norway. Eventually the plan was for the Hunters to be based in Jutland, probably at Aalborg but maybe elsewhere like at Karup if the Americans didn’t make it a US-only base, but for now they had a limited range. The pilots of the two aircraft were visually scanning the coastline during their dash and looking for mobile radar station rather than what they thought would be concealed missile batteries.

They got lucky and detected a small convoy of wheeled vehicles near a place called Als. There was no civilian road traffic in Jutland, it was all military, and gunfire erupted towards them from what was thought to be an anti-aircraft gun. That fire wasn’t accurate though and the Hunter pilots were both instructors with plenty of experience and much gusto. Their aircraft broke formation and split up while heading inland to come back again towards the convoy before it would try to scatter. Their guns and rockets were armed and they expected to do a lot of damage to what was thought to be a radar platform along with communications and security personnel. Instead though, as they made a quick and sudden attack run, it was realised that they had found some missile-launchers instead. That would mean that a radar vehicle supporting these was elsewhere, but this was still a better target. 20mm cannons roared and plenty of 68mm SNEB rockets were fired before the attack was broken off. A few SAMs chased them but the Hunters went back down low just above the waves and rocketed away towards distant Sweden.

It hadn’t been those brand-new Slingshot missiles engaged – as those had been destroyed by the Americans – but rather some older Sepal missiles travelling into a launch position. The platoon engaged and smashed by the FAA attack-fighters was part of the surviving portion of a battery with Soviet Coastal Troops and getting ready to follow-up on intelligence about NATO ships in the Kattegat. Another platoon elsewhere was meant to join them in a massed attack of supersonic missiles which while not guaranteeing success when faced with NATO jamming surely would have achieved something. Instead, that attack as planned now wasn’t going to be taking place.

The Hunters had done their part very well indeed.


Meanwhile, British forces continued to arrive in and take charge of northern parts of Jutland. Nearby was also seeing the US Marines make their own landings too.

Two Hundred & Eleven

Whilst the fighting was spreading elsewhere, the vast majority of the combat taking place in World War Three remained within Germany. It was here where the massed armies of the two opposing sides were gathered and locked in their epic struggles to defeat one another.

This was where the war was going to be decided, everyone was sure, and where the vast majority of those lost in the conflict were going to meet their end.


In the northern portions of West Germany, there were two army group commands in-place there commanding NATO troops with a third on its way. In size these equated to the Front-level command structure employed by the Soviets though the armies fielded here by the Allies remained of a multi-national character, especially the British Second Army. There were American, Belgian, Portuguese and West German troops under General Kenny’s command while the French Second Army also had some West Germans with them along with a scattering of Dutch troops too who had survived the near total destruction of their previous command formations. Command problems between these combat units from different nations were few and far between due to the pre-war NATO structure and now only came about due to language problems after they had all shared combat and bled together. Units which had started the war under one headquarters were now somewhere totally different and formations with a clearly-defined structure before the first shots had been fired were now mixed-and-matched with others. There were new units which had been stood up – at the highest levels too – and then many others which had been disestablished.

The Northern Army Group had been the peacetime command formation on the North German Plain but what NATO forces were there now were almost unrecognisable after two and a half weeks of combat. Many troops remained in operational areas where they had spent their military service exercising over and therefore knew the ground well while others remained a fish out of water somewhere far from home and full of the unexpected.

General Kenny and his French counterpart were both leading their commands towards the Inter-German Border. They had political instructions to not go over that defining line, though there was pressure too coming to get as close as possible to there so that the last lingering portions of West Germany held by the enemy could be liberated. The population which had been caught the wrong sides of the frontlines was known to be suffering immensely under occupation and those West Germans needed to be liberated as soon as possible.

Moreover, there was also an unofficial race underway.

Senior military officers from several armies – in particular the British Army, the French Army and the United States Army – wanted to be the first to reach the border as a matter of pride for themselves and their organisations. Then there were the junior officers and the fighting men themselves who were all now well-aware of not only the treatment of West German civilians but also their fellow soldiers who had first fallen into enemy captivity and then been lucky enough to be rescued afterwards. Many men had returned to service though as battlefield replacements with different units and they brought with them horror stories of what the Soviets had done; some of these tales were exaggerations but many were very real indeed. The men wanted to liberate more of their fellow soldiers who remained prisoners of the enemy but they also desired a terrible vengeance too and considered the best way of doing that was to get into the enemy’s territory and give them a beating on the battlefield there.


The French Second Army was pushing up against Hamburg’s southern reaches still though avoiding the edges of the urban area and instead isolating those East German security forces encountered who were occupying the city. Fierce resistance was put up in places, yet those men who the French were combating were far from professional soldiers and all the dedication to the cause didn’t make up for the fact that they had no idea how to combat real fighting men. The French also moved eastwards towards the Elbe either side of the city; along the Elbe Estuary their moves were less contested than further upstream in the area around Luneburg. The Inter-German Border was not far away and again there were incidents where political troops from the East Berlin regime were engaged and fought against, but at the same time Soviet troops encountered here fought well too.

French tactical intelligence pointed to these being from the Soviet 3GMRD and that formation had gained a wealth of combat experience during this conflict. The Soviets were overcome with force of numbers as the French had the numerical advantage in this fight but the Soviets didn’t give in easy. They fell back to the Elbe and thus the border with the French hot on their tails aiming to reach that river but wouldn’t yield from those positions. The information concerning this unexpected development was shared up the chain of command by the French III & V Corps to their headquarters with the French Second Army, which soon afterwards was to confirm that other NATO forces were reporting the same issue in isolated but growing locations.

Throughout the day, senior NATO commanders started informing their political masters that a sudden boost of morale had infected many enemy units even with the continuing series of ongoing defeats they were suffering. It was speculated at the highest levels that this was due to Marshal Ogarkov taking over and political issues with the field formations being resolved but at the same time it was not anticipated to be in anyway generally effective overall.


The British Second Army was almost three times the size of the French-led army group on their left and operating over a much larger area. The units under command were all still engaged in chasing the retreating Soviets back towards the border though still some distance away in many places. There were plenty of enemy forces who weren’t about to roll over and be beaten nor withdraw and so the NATO forces under General Kenny’s command had to smash through them.

His British and Bundeswehr units remained along the Elbe-Lateral Canal and pushing towards the Wolfsburg area as well. Those new formations that the West Germans had put together after long being formed up in the Ruhr and the Rhineland were by now seeing action; three divisions had come under command full of old soldiers. This was the combat which many of them had been trained to fight in during their years as conscripts and afterwards thought that they had avoided when released from military service in the years leading up to the war. Now they were back in uniform and issued with older equipment – like what they were used to – and finally putting those soldiering skills which they were remembering to use. In some quarters there had been worries over whether they would be up to the job, yet General Kenny had never had a doubt about that. The NATO armies were all doing this and the West Germans were also defending their country too.

The enemy counterattack against the British I Corps yesterday had stung those assigned forces to that command greatly yet the British were recovering here. There had been many air attacks undertaken and long-range artillery missions commenced though through the Wednesday the British remained on the western side of the canal making sure their hold over the left bank was secure and building up their strength. A major push was planned for tomorrow and so before them all the necessary pieces needed to be in-place. With enough marshalled troops and plentiful fire support, once they got moving on the Thursday morning, the British Army planned to reach the Inter-German Border before anyone else could.

Operating in the area around Braunschweig and Salzgitter, and now across the narrow Oker River, the Americans were pushing forward too. Their US III Corps was still understrength and waiting reassignment to the US Third Army when that command formation along with reinforcements came into play, but before then it was advancing towards the Inter-German Border. Their troops got into a major fight around the forest at Oderwald that was particularly vicious and costly, yet they were still winning engagement after engagement, if slower than beforehand. The famous Helmstedt Crossing – also known as ‘Checkpoint Alpha’ – was not that far away from them though at the moment it was out of their immediate grasp. If the US III Corps hadn’t taken the losses that it had done earlier in the war then things might have been different, however…

Many former POWs returned to the US III Corps and this number was proportionally higher than anywhere else in northern parts of West Germany. The United States Army believed in having a very fast turn-around time with those soldiers freed from enemy captivity especially due to those returning to the US III Corps as having not been long as prisoners of the enemy. Some men were of course brought back to serve with their colleagues too early and were soon to suffer from mental and emotional problems, yet the vast majority showed little immediate signs of complications. They were generally as mad as hell as what had happened to them and at what they had witnessed happening to others and wanted to take the fight to the enemy rather than sitting in the rear dwelling on it all. This wasn’t a uniform approach being made everywhere else and certainly wasn’t always going to be the best thing to do, yet for now the US III Corps was benefiting from the increase in manpower. While not boasting about it to his superior General Kenny, the US III Corps commander General Saint was actually hoping that maybe he could get to Helmstedt before anyone else reached the Inter-German Border due to the infusion of manpower.

The race was on… though there were still a hell of a lot of the enemy on West German sovereign territory and sitting between NATO troops in northern Germany and the border which they were trying to reach.





Two Hundred & Twelve

The advance towards the Inter-German Border continued elsewhere too along with liberated occupied portions of West Germany and then, of most importance, smashing apart the enemy forces arrayed against NATO as well.

Three more army groups were assembled running southwards from the edge of the operational area of the British Second Army down to the Austrian border and these all had a multinational character too. The US Fifth & Seventh Armys were still combating the Soviet forces opposing them and pushing forward like everyone else while maintaining their make-up of primary American formations though with Spanish and West German troops assigned too. The French troops which had been with the latter formation had left that command effective last night with a view to transfer southwards to join the French First Army (with French, Moroccan and Bundeswehr forces assigned), but with this morning’s events in Austria that deployment was being altered. Those men with the French II Corps – which had been deployed forward in Germany pre-war – were not going to the Danube area in eastern Bavaria but were being tasked further southwards.


Of particular note with the day’s fighting in central parts of Germany was what many referred to Lt.-General Schwarzkopf’s attempts to seemingly win the war single-handed with the US V Corps. Though it was unprofessional, there was a lot of jealousy and backbiting when it came to the corps commander’s attempts to get the command he had recently taken over and then led into multiple successful engagements back into the Fulda Gap. His superiors were more than pleased with the drive and determination that he had, yet many of his peers were not so much and did ask what was the point in returning to that region apart from settling the issue of pride.

US Seventh Army commander General Otis and most importantly General Galvin as SACEUR were both behind Schwarzkopf’s offensive to return the United States Army to the rolling open terrain of the Fulda Gap as this was perfect tank country. Once there, the US V Corps would be able to smash apart the enemy forces opposing them in open battle rather than in more challenging terrain elsewhere and also reach the Inter-German Border. The 82nd Airborne Division, which had only seen action at Rhein-Main Airbase / Frankfurt International Airport and an aborted engagement trying to recapture the airfield at Hanau so far in this war, was committed to support Schwarzkopf. The two combat brigades assigned were transported by helicopter into multiple airmobile assaults during the entrance into the Fulda Gap before then being left behind when the tanks of the 3rd Armored & 24th Mechanized Infantry Divisions overtook them. There was intense Soviet opposition to this advance on the ground and also in the air where enemy aircraft were encountered in numbers not seen for a while. 4 ATAF assigned assets struggled against such opponents especially as there was no intelligence that such numbers would show up to oppose the US V Corps’ attack like they did, yet that did mean that other aircraft weren’t operated elsewhere at the same time.

Soviet and East German forces on the ground assigned to the Soviet Third Guards & Sixth Guards Tank Armys didn’t benefit greatly from the air support that they were given and the elements of those two field armies engaged in battle were unable to stop the Schwarzkopf. There was pressure on both their flanks from further American units on their right and Spanish troops to the left too. They were unable to stop the United States Army from getting out of the Gelnhausen Corridor into the open countryside and from then charging towards the Fulda River and the stretch of Autobahn-7 that ran through the area. A retreat was made back towards the border but many units with the Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army were given permission to fall back to the town of Fulda. From there they would be right on the Americans flank and also holding that major communications point therefore denying effective NATO control of the region until they could be blasted out of their new defensive positions.

The battle for control here wasn’t over yet, though Schwarzkopf was hardly on his own and when his advance continued into the next day more American ground forces would be entering the fight here.


The French II Corps was tasked initially to move towards the Nurnberg area and then move down to the Bavarian Forest to link up with their countrymen already pushing towards the Czechoslovak frontier along with the Bundeswehr. It was anticipated that they would make this journey quickly as traffic control procedures were already in place to facilitate such a transfer and transport was all assembled. The Soviet invasion of Austria changed the plans there though and all of a sudden the French were tasked to head for Munich with immediate effect though with a follow-up for them to then reach the Passau and Salzburg areas. Austria had long been maintaining its neutrality and combined with the chaos that the sudden invasion brought inside their country, there was no speedy contact made in terms of a liaison between their military forces and those of NATO.

General Galvin had ordered such a move because he believed that soon enough NATO troops were going to be needed in Austria as the flank there wouldn’t be allowed to be turned should the Austrians suddenly face a collapse. He couldn’t see into the future and adequately yet predict that they would hold and therefore had to do his job and react to the unexpected. Senior French Army representatives at his headquarters set about organising that redeployment and there were no political issues with such a move.

However, this was never going to be an easy affair.

It was a long way down to Austria and while NATO aircraft had the upper hand in the air war against the Soviets, they didn’t have air dominance or anything close to it. Such a redeployment could be badly delayed by long-range enemy air attacks and then there was also the enemy’s use of tactical missiles to be taken into consideration too. NATO troops in French uniforms weren’t going to appear overnight in Austria no matter how much anyone wanted that to happen.

Two Hundred & Fifteen

The Great Intelligence War still remained active in many locations around the world despite the losses taken by those involved and the rapidly approaching withdrawal from the playing field of Soviet spooks operating away from home. The Greek capital of Athens was where there was still kidnapping, shooting and murders occurring on a regular basis in a tit-for-tat fashion that had long since moved away from intelligence gathering and espionage and the local authorities were unable to handle this. Professional spooks and hired killers (in the latter category many weren’t even locals but rather foreigners living in Athens) were still combating each other in the shadows though their actions sometimes occurred out in the open too. It was all rather pointless when viewed from the outside, yet those involved all believed that they were doing the right thing.

Officially, Athens and the rest of Greece was a country at peace while most of the rest of Europe was at war for the third time this century. There had been no foreign invasions of its soil and nor where there any signs that such a thing was soon to occur killing Greeks like had happened in previous wars which had torn through the continent. However, at the same time, Greece was suffering greatly because of the war.

The economy was destroyed with the collapse of international trade and then a deliberate effort made by the US Treasury to ruin the liquidation of many Greek banks and finance companies in a serious form of economic warfare. NATO warships were present in number throughout the Aegean Sea and they made it clear with their physical present who ruled the waves there; Turkey was taking advantage of its strengthened position following this. At home, there had been clashes up and down the country between pressure groups from the left and from the right with marches and demonstrations that oftentimes turned to violence. With many ordinary Greeks being out of work, this situation was only exasperated. Many Greeks had been called up for military service and were along the borders with neighbouring Balkan nations as well as on islands in the Aegean and on Cyprus too. That should have kept many potential young troublemakers off the street, yet there had been a high desertion rate and in many cases weapons had been taken by those young men leaving their military units. Civil war was thought to not be long off.

Therefore, Greece had little concern for the foreigners who wished to kill each other in the backstreets of Athens because they had more pressing issues to deal with. Other countries may have taken the drastic steps of deporting such people en masse yet there were so many other things going on that the Greek government had no time to get round to this.


The British diplomatic and intelligence presence in Athens had been greatly reduced in the immediate build-up to the conventional side of World War Three erupting and then after the great clash of armies involved. Like many other NATO nations, Britain had tried to put pressure on Athens to honour its treaty commitments and stand by their allies in their time of need. Even once warfare had opened, there were still efforts made to get Greece to come onside and evidence was presented by British diplomats to the Greeks of Soviet atrocities committed. Eventually, the Foreign Office realised that this was never going to happen and many of the mid- & lower-level staffers at the Embassy were withdrawn from Athens. Diplomatic relations weren’t cut and the Ambassador remained in-place, yet members of staff with key skills were needed elsewhere for other duties.

As to the spooks, their numbers in Athens were cut back by hostile action. MI-6 had a small staff pre-war in Athens of intelligence officers and more had arrived in the build-up to war so they could support diplomatic efforts overtly and conduct covert actions as well. Once war broke out in the battlefields of Europe and the gloves came off elsewhere in the shadowy world of intelligence operations, British agents started going missing, being seriously wounded and being killed. They battled against Soviet agents also in Athens who were following an agenda that soon turned from keeping Greece neutral in the war to getting personal vengeance for their comrades and friends. During such conflicts, Athens Station lost their superior officer on-site and many talented intelligence officers who really shouldn’t have been running around with guns like they were in a James Bond movie.

Amongst this bloodbath – and as it was elsewhere – there remained attempts to do real espionage and intelligence work. MI-6 headquarters in London and Director-General Curwen were repeatedly sending out instructions of tasks to be undertaken. The British spooks which remained in Greece were for example to talk to a figure high up in the Greece security services or to discover if a certain politician in the government was being blackmailed by the Soviets or whether a ‘person of interest’ was using Athens as a base of operations for their own nefarious activities in relation to the war. All the while as these orders were being acted upon, British spooks faced immense danger to their lives.


One of those tasks that Century House sent to the overwhelmed Athens Station was to watch for the arrival of an Irish national at the main international airport coming in from Belgrade. His name was Sean Garland and someone with a history of much interest and concern to Britain. Intelligence pointed to him supposedly travelling across Europe after being recently in Moscow and attempting to get back to his native land… Belgrade and Athens were stops on his way. There were meant to be at least two bodyguards with him, maybe even three and they were not harmless people.

Garland was the General Secretary of the Worker’s Party of Ireland, a Marxist organisation with long-established links to the Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA). For some time now there had been intelligence pointing to him trying to establish links with Soviet and Eastern European regimes behind the Iron Curtain so that he could improve his party’s ‘internal security’ and this guaranteed that he would draw the attention of Britain’s intelligence services if his activities were just limited to that. Of course, his activities weren’t just limited to this. Garland was a terrorist who’d acted against Britain many times in the past and the goal he sought to achieve was the end of democracy not just in Northern Ireland but in the Irish Republic too: the result would be what MI-6 believed would be a totalitarian state that Britain couldn’t abide by. Before conflict erupted – and his own nation was attacked despite being a neutral – Garland had left Ireland by means which MI-6 wasn’t sure about but had been reported to be in Moscow. Shcherbytsky had encouraged many politicians of fringe far-left groups to come to the Soviet capital to build bridges with them and men like Garland had been eager to do that.

What Garland was up to, what his intentions were and what his thoughts were about the departed Shcherbytsky and that man’s ilk were unknown. There was no intelligence as to the scale of his links to the KGB or any other Soviet organisation. The true support that his party of himself had back home in Ireland, especially when he returned as he planned were further unknowns. What was certain was that he was trying to make his way back to Ireland by travelling through several neutral nations, using a false identity and accompanied by men who may or may not have been Soviet intelligence agents.

It had been decided in London that Garland and others like him must be stopped. The situation with the Irish Republic’s feelings about events in Ulster was very tense and someone like Garland was a threat to that, even if he only posed small danger. The British spooks in Athens were told to detain him and to do it in a clandestine manner if possible, but no matter what to make sure that they picked him up at the airport when he arrived from Belgrade so that the trail on the man wouldn’t run cold.


The ‘snatch’ mission at Ellinikon International Airport turned out to be a disaster.

Greek security forces weren’t about to allow armed men to try to seize an airliner passenger from an arriving aircraft and nor threaten fellow passengers with that man with automatic weapons. On edge as they were, they decided to shoot at those in the restricted area of the flight-line who had guns and keep shooting until such men were on the ground.

Three MI-6 agents, a local ‘contractor’, two of Garland’s bodyguards (fellow Irish nationals) and Garland himself were all killed by Greek security troops who had two of their own lose their own lives when the foreigners treating their country like it was the Wild West returned fire. Civilians present ran for their lives in a short but furious exchange of gunfire and then afterwards further security personnel were all over the scene establishing a cordon to keep the interested away.

MI-6’s Athens Station lost half of its remaining manpower and was wholly comprised afterwards when another Greek national hired as muscle-cum-shooter was arrested and soon spilled everything he knew.

It was all for nothing as well. Like all those other Western nationals which the once all-powerful Soviet security services had interests in and were using for their own ends, Garland had just been cut loose and had been ejected from Moscow along with many people like him. MI-6 would never be able to interrogate him and find out the secrets in his head nor listen to the plans he had been trying to put together back in his homeland to rid the island of Ireland of capitalism and bourgeois democracy to be replaced with his dream of a worker’s paradise.

In addition, Britain had just hammered another nail in the already closed coffin of Anglo-Greek relations. In the short-term damage would be done to the UK, yet those in Greece didn’t yet realise the long-term consequences. What else could they have done though? Like their actions throughout, they were only looking after their own sovereignty and what they regarded as the interests of their own people as most of the rest of the world seemed to have gone truly mad.




Two Hundred & Sixteen

The USAF-led series of strategic air attacks deemed Operation THUNDERSTORM had commenced as soon as it had gotten dark the evening before, but before the sun came up on the morning of the last day in March those strikes far to the east intensified. American combat aircraft took advantage of the so-called ‘Austrian Gap’ and streamed through a hole in the enemy’s battered but still functioning strategic air defences to hit targets deep inside Eastern Europe via an unexpected direction. Military and government installations – the latter being ‘regime targets’ – were bombed from Hungary up through Czechoslovakia and into southern Poland too.

Those aircraft had come from across mainland Europe and Britain too with F-15s and F-16s acting in the fighter role providing protection for many B-52 and F-111 strikes. Many of those B-52s had only been released from their strategic nuclear role held back in the United States and their presence was truly felt as they were able to deliver a lot of ordnance to targets far away from their bases. Soviet air operations of a planned offensive nature (against locations in western Austria and also the Alpine passes with Italy) were greatly disrupted by the sudden intrusion into supposedly ‘safe’ airspace especially as the NATO air forces in many ways had got the measure of their opponents. There were air battles across the dark skies to go with the destruction caused on the ground and both sides took losses, yet the winners and losers were clearly defined.


THUNDERSTORM was something that USAF planners with the numbered multi-national air forces across Western Europe had long wanted to undertake. There were far too many other missions that needed their attention and the needs of the alliance were always paramount beforehand above everything else. However, beginning with the air strike against East Berlin the night beforehand – CERTAIN VENGEANCE – the USAF was now being given permission to undertake such politically-orientated strikes that met American-centric war aims with NATO assigned assets. There was a balancing act both militarily and politically, but this was a course of action wanted at the highest levels of power and the USAF was doing as instructed.

The plans formulated in the build-up to and during the war for THUNDERSTORM for these air attacks focused upon that aptly-named Austrian Gap. The country remained neutral and though it had a large army once mobilised, its air force and air defences were minimal. NATO and Soviet aircraft had violated the skies above Austria though not in a deliberate fashion. Therefore there was a large geographically open patch of sky that neither side was putting to use in their air operations as diplomatic needs took precedence.

NATO had stripped some air defence assets away from their positions facing Austria as no Soviet air attacks had come through that route into Bavaria and West Germany and notice had been made of how weakened the already minimal air defences that the Soviets had on the other side of Austria were becoming too. A strategic opportunity had opened up yet politics hadn’t allowed such a thing to be taken advantage of.

Then had come the Soviet-Hungarian invasion of Austria and permission from on high for THUNDERSTORM. The USAF also considered the risk that the enemy would take advantage themselves of the skies above Austria and this was only another factor in the decision to act first.

To the east of Austria lay all sorts of targets that were regarded as almost open to a massive air strike. There were cities with political significance where the damage which could be wrought by a few well-placed bombs was hoped to have major propaganda implications. Enemy rear area logistics centres – such as they were anyway – were located that far deep in Eastern Europe tucked away. There were transport links that were being used to replace those already smashed further to the north and west and these made tempting targets as well. Then there were the airfields and communications points, further fixed targets, which had so far been unmolested by NATO air power.

There had been a lot of frustration surrounding the refusal to allow THUNDERSTORM to go ahead but once it did the USAF went at it with all that they could spare from other operations and then some too.


Budapest and Hungary on the western side of the Danube as it ran north-south through that country was hit on a smaller scale by THUNDERSTORM air attacks but struck had nonetheless. B-52s dropped bombs from high altitude over military bases outside the city and then some bridges over the Danube just outside the urban area of the Hungarian capital. More military bases throughout the country were attacked too while railway links were attacked; with the latter the aim was to disrupt movement of military forces by bombing marshalling yards and bridges. There had been a planned air attack directly upon the very heart of Budapest where government buildings were located though upon the request of the CIA those weren’t hit with a last-minute change to the flight plan of the F-111s heading that way.

Bratislava was the capital of the Slovak Socialist Republic, one of the components of the theoretical federation that was Czechoslovakia. Here in this city also by the Danube, there was no last-minute halt to the bombing of political targets. Several government and communist party buildings in the heart of Bratislava were bombed while there were further attacks against military targets throughout western parts of Slovakia too. A political goal was being sought here and it was one where tensions within Czechoslovakia were meant to be strained as this part of the country had yet to see the effects of war brought home.

Across in the Czech Socialist Republic, the other half of the union, military targets and communications links in Moravia (the eastern part of the Czech lands a-joining the bigger Bohemia) were bombed by the USAF. Again these were further areas so far almost untouched by the war and the opportunity was taken to hit rear areas through much of the support network for the armies of the Soviets and the combined Socialist Forces at the frontlines were using. Brno was particularly hard hit due to the rail links in and around that city and if there were political outcomes due to that, then those would only be an added bonus as far as the Americans were concerned.

Further past the Austrian Gap lay southern Poland again with transportation links, military bases such as airfields & supply centres and important cities as well. Aircraft taking part in THUNDERSTORM were focused upon those military aims yet some were tasked to try to exasperate what were already reported to be tensions on the ground throughout Poland. There was care taken to try the utmost not to kill civilians as collateral damage but the cities of Katowice and Krakow were still attacked despite the knowledge that civilian losses were inevitable. Bombs fell upon regime targets there and the railway links over which so many freight trains coming from the Soviet Union were using and some USAF aircraft even dropped dispersing containers from which thousands of propaganda leaflets floated away from.


F-15 and F-16 fighters used external fuel tanks to extend their range and had less weapons carried due to such a need on the THUNDERSTORM missions. Those fighters were not assigned to directly escort the B-52s and F-111s but to rather run long-range patrols to scour the skies of enemy aircraft. Their presence caused immense panic over the parts of Eastern Europe where they flew as Soviet transport aircraft were scattered all over the place trying to avoid them after panicked calls from ground controllers.

Those fighters engaged some of such easy targets as those big aircraft bringing men and high-priority supplies forward. Then there was a force of Soviet Blinder bombers staging out of Hungarian airfields on their way to try to bombs the Alpine passes through which the Italian Army was crossing that was caught when airborne and who had yet to meet their own fighter escorts. Such aircraft were slaughtered when airborne and USAF fighter pilots came away with impressive score tallies for such an engagement.

When they engaged in combat against more capable foes, those American fighters found their opposition confused and far out of their comfort zone. The Hungarian and Czechoslovak rear-area air defence interceptors fell prey to them as these were not pilots who had been in a full-scale war for more than two weeks like those flying aircraft with USAF colours. Massacres occurred in the skies between mismatched opponents but when was warfare ever meant to be fair?


Along with THUNDERSTORM, there were also Italian Air Force aircraft flying long-range missions across eastern parts of Austria and into Hungary. Tornado strike-bombers flew many low-level attacks of a general tactical nature against targets with the Soviet and Hungarian forces invading Austria though some of a semi-strategic nature too.

Italy had only just joined the war and didn’t have the combat experience that the USAF did. The Tornado crews were lucky that they faced weak opposition already being torn apart by the Americans as being out of the NATO structure for as long as they had been during combat meant that they had yet to receive what would soon become a tidal wave of intelligence on enemy tactics, capabilities and more importantly weakness in the electronic systems field.

Having remained neutral as they had also meant that Italian air missions over Eastern Europe weren’t co-ordinated with the USAF. The 5 ATAF had packed up and left Italy before war erupted and then wartime experience had brought about new ways of doing things for NATO air forces. There were quite a few close calls during the THUNDERSTORM and Italian air missions where aircrews on both sides almost mistook the other for the enemy and nearly opened fire. Italy was fast working to reintegrate itself within the NATO wartime structure yet that was going to take some time. For now they were acting independently and that wasn’t something that could last if they wanted to achieve something worthy in this conflict with their air force and their army too.

Two Hundred & Nineteen

Several days after it was signed, the agreement reached in the capital of The Bahamas would become known as the Treaty of Nassau. The US Secretary of State would fly across from Europe for that short ceremony while the lead member of the Cuban Military Council (formerly the Chief of Staff of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces) General Ulises Rosales del Toro would come up from Havana to add his signature in person too.

There were always anticipated to be many negative reactions to what was agreed in Nassau from all quarters, yet both sides believed that the settlement that was trashed out meant that there would be peace in the Caribbean, a viable future for Cuba and honour settled on the American side for what had occurred when Cuba had unexpectedly entered the war. The ceasefire would become a permanent peace treaty so that Cuba could be saved from the risk of further destruction and the Americans would be able to concentrate their efforts on fighting the Soviet Union and its puppets in Eastern Europe.

Regardless, the details agreed were always going to cause upset and resentment to many.


John Whitehead – Deputy Secretary of State – and his assistants from the State Department were those on the American side who were responsible for negotiations on behalf of their country. The Cubans sent many military figures from the senior Ochoa at first to junior-ranking officers specialising in military intelligence and foreign relations alongside their military careers to Nassau. Del Toro would eventually oversee the aspects of the agreement made in series of talks with the Americans and those he had sent there ended up being his ears and his mouthpiece instead of being like Whitehead was for the Americans. For The Bahamas, Prime Minister Pindling considered the talks and then the subsequent treaty a crowning achievement for himself and his country that would see him and his nation do well in the future. He had been busy in recent years trying to repair his country’s position following the revelations in the early Eighties about how The Bahamas had been used as a transit base to flood the United States with illegal drugs and was certain that the Treaty of Nassau would greatly help there.

Those at the talks on Nassau from the American and Cuban sides had been generally isolated from the outside world. They had communications with their governments back home but were cut off from external sources of pressure in a deliberate fashion so that their discussions couldn’t be influenced by any form of protest or back-channel lobbying. The Bahamas could control who came into their country and get near the diplomats better than if such talks had been on the ground in either the US or in Cuba. Of course, their home governments could still be influenced by those with an agenda, yet the intent was to keep those at the talks away from such outside impact; there were too many personal interests from people and groups who wanted to have their input into what was going to be agreed at Nassau.

The Treaty of Nassau would cover all aspects of relations between the United States and Cuba from those of an historic nature to the present wartime conditions and into the future as well. There had been so many issues from those who attended the talks in Nassau to go through there and in consultations with their governments back home that at times it had been felt that no settlement would ever be reached. One was though and it was in those details where the controversy following the treaty would come from.

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A major foreign policy objective of the United States – and thus one with domestic importance too – was the status of the Cuban-Americans. There were exiles from the regime which the deceased Castro Brothers had deposed who had made their home in the United States and then those born to Cuban parents while in America as well who many considered to be Cubans as well. Generally, these people were opposed to the communist regime on the island while retaining their desire for the overthrow of that before they could return there. They were a major domestic political force and so too were their supporters.

The policy of the Reagan Administration, which was what Whitehead’s brief had covered even after Bush had become Acting President, was that the return of such people to their homeland was desirable for the interests of the United States. Such freedom to travel backwards and forwards between their homes in America was what was wanted along with the influence that such people would bring to Cuba… and then the domestic political effects in the United States too.

del Toro and his fellow Military Council had all risen to their positions by being good communists, but they all considered themselves Cuban first. They had a fear – and one which would prove correct in the coming years – that such people would want to do just as the Americans wanted and make changes to Cuba. Such people were their countrymen though and the Military Council knew that their country would need to go in a different direction in the future if it was to survive. The people had overthrown the old regime therefore finishing off communism on the island and then their own actions as the Cuban Armed Forces had made sure that there could never be a reconciliation with the Soviets.

The Treaty of Nassau would allow any Cuban – even one born abroad – who wished to return to Cuba to do so. In addition, those who had claims of property lost in the Revolution of 1959 and afterwards as well were to have those issues addressed. At the suggestion of Whitehead, an international panel of experts (all of whom were agreeable to the Cuban and US governments) would make the judgements on what would be claimed in compensation and how that was to take place with the Deputy Secretary of State agreeing to the Cuban wishes of an assurance that as long as no direct property was removed from their current owners that would be acceptable; they didn’t wish to incite another revolt among the people by taking land but money being paid was something they were willing to allow.


The Military Council consisted of generals and a few admirals all of whom were professional military officers. These men had done the wishes of the Castro Brothers under what they claimed was duress. As part of the treaty, military officers with the Cuban Armed Forces (the term ‘Revolutionary’ had been pointedly dropped) couldn’t face any action in the United States in terms of criminal or civil charges for what others would regard as war crimes during the short conflict or beforehand too on other occasions. This was for military personnel only, the Americans agreed, not those from the intelligence world or politicians.

As part of this commitment that del Toro had Whitehead assure him of to protect his own, Cuba also wished to see the return as soon as possible of all Cuban military personnel captured in the fighting in southwestern Africa with South African forces. The Cubans were very unhappy at what had occurred there and were alarmed at how the South Africans took their time to stop destroying the Cuban Army even after the US-Cuban ceasefire had gone into effect. Cuban wanted all prisoners back, again without any charges laid against them for any sort of alleged crimes. Cuba had promptly returned all American POWs as a sign of good faith during the talks in Nassau, they had reminded the Americans, and wanted their own officers and men back from Angola.

An agreement on this was reached so that those soldiers and their personal effects – not weapons – would be brought home by the Americans, not the Cubans (who would have struggled to do that anyway) and especially not by the South Africans either. del Toro’s representatives in The Bahamas at the talks had made clear their distaste for the racists in Pretoria but Whitehead had been forced to counter against his own personal feelings on the matter that South Africa was an ally of the United States in this war. Under usual circumstances when dealing with the Cubans, under the Castro regime, a diplomat such as him could have spoken of the outright racism of the Havana regime to Cubans of an African heritage and there could have been back-and-forth accusations made, but such things weren’t said in Nassau for the sake of diplomacy in addition to proclamations made from the Military Council about human rights in their country.

Cuba would be getting its troops brought home and families across the island nation would be pleased with that. Opponents in the United States to the Treaty of Nassau would take objection to the involvement of the American military in doing such a thing especially with the war going on and ships and aircraft needed elsewhere, but del Toro had been insistent on this and there was also an unstated American aim of a political nature here too: such returning soldiers would be grateful it was hoped of the United States bringing them home from South African captivity and would also tell tales of the defeat of Cuban arms in such a spectacular fashion as had occurred in Angola.


Once the Treaty of Nassau was signed, Cuba was then to enter the Allies by declaring war upon the Soviet Union.

This flip-flopping in diplomatic terms was something else that the Americans saw as something of great importance. Cuba had been left in a bad way by the conflict with the US and without the usual pre-war support of the Soviets it wasn’t going to have the logistics to deploy men abroad to fight with the Allies elsewhere in the world. The Cuban Armed Forces operated Soviet equipment and followed their doctrine; again, a presence of Cuban military might – such as it was – wasn’t really going to help the Allies. There wasn’t a military aim for the United States in having Cuba join the war though, just a diplomatic one.

Every single Latin American country would now be at war with the Soviet Union from Mexico down to the bottom of South America. Panama and Argentina had been pressured into doing so while the new regime in Nicaragua that the Contras had established with CIA support had declared war too. The neutralist government in Costa Rica had even been browbeaten into becoming one of the Allies. Across the Caribbean, many of the small island nations had done so too leaving only a few countries in the Western Hemisphere not involved and none of those remaining had any ties to the Soviets.

Acting President Bush had pushed for this even when Whitehead had told him that it would be difficult to get the Cubans to agree, yet the determination to force the Cubans to join the war with the Allies had been there. The Military Council had been weary of this but when they understood that they wouldn’t have to contribute anything meaningful to the cause they had gone along with it albeit with reluctance.


Diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba were to be fully restored. Embassies were to open in both Washington and Havana with the probable establishment of Cuban consulates in Miami and maybe New York as well.

Whitehead couldn’t get del Toro’s representatives to agree on any form of security treaty that would come with this restoration in direct inter-government relations due to the Military Council stating that they intended to hand over power ‘soon’ (their words on that matter) to a civilian government yet that wasn’t something which the United States pushed for overall. It was spoken about as both were with the Allies, yet there was no immediate need. The thinking on the part of the Americans was that there needed to be some agreement on Cuban military power so that never again could they attack the United States as they had done on its own soil. It would have been very difficult to get the Cubans to go along with that for it would have looked like an attempt to force a disarmament of them though the plan had been to offer them a pledge to not interfere in the domestic affairs of Cuba.

Such a thing didn’t work out and the Americans didn’t get what they wanted here. The Cubans were rather annoyed at the suggestion but then del Toro had sent word from Havana that if the United States wanted a joint security agreement then he would also want that to be linked to that request since talks started about America providing Cuba access to foreign loans to fix their economy now that they were about to declare war upon their biggest financial supporter.

The mess here with both sides wanting something that the other couldn’t give meant that it was left alone for now. The Treaty of Nassau would establish in its text the groundwork for something like this in the future so that discussions could come there, but there was nothing real in affect. Cuba wasn’t going to gain access to international loans with American help and in the long-term that would have some major negative effects to which both Whitehead and del Toro could only partially foresee when they concluded their talks on that matter.


Then there remained the issue of Guantanamo Bay, which the resolution to brought about most of the later opponents to the US-Cuban peace agreement.

When the Cubans had attacked the United States, they hadn’t just bombed the American mainland at Key West and outside Miami hitting military bases there but had too conducted an overwhelming infantry assault upon the military base at Guantanamo Bay. Immense casualties had been taken on both sides with the US Marines and the few US Navy personnel there putting up a furious if short and doomed defence while the Cuban Army having put all it had into taking the facility fast regardless of their own losses. del Toro and his fellow military officers had been distancing themselves when at Nassau from the air attacks made on Florida – blaming that all on the Castro Brothers – as they knew how the Americans had reacted to that politically, but for them Guantanamo Bay was something else.

It was Cuban soil which had been illegally held by a foreign aggressor which they had every right to retake in times of warfare. Of course, that was not how the Americans saw the matter. There were treaties going back throughout the Twentieth Century concerning their right to use Guantanamo Bay and they wanted possession of it back. Above everything else, resolving this issue was of greatest importance for both sides. There could have been no Treaty of Nassau if the matter of Guantanamo Bay wasn’t dealt with; it couldn’t be sidestepped as it was paramount to both sides.

The Military Council feared that to return to the previous situation where the Americans were free to do as they wished when it came to Guantanamo Bay following their own handover of it back to them would mean civil disorder on the scale that saw Fidel Castro lynched by the Havana mob. Anarchy would breakout island-wide with military units rebelling alongside the people. Guantanamo Bay was just that important to the Cuban people.

Should the Americans have let the status quo remain with the Cubans keeping their occupation, then any political figure involved would no longer have a career in office. It would be seen as the greatest of all capitulations and a personal betrayal to the men and women who had died there. The US Government didn’t have to fear being violently overthrown by the mob like the Military Council did if they gave in, but it was almost the same thing…

It was Prime Minister Pindling who approached them with a solution to this matter. He had stayed out of the details of the US-Cuban talks on other issues but intervened here in what the Americans later realised was something that had actually came from a back-channel move made by the British through their Commonwealth representatives in The Bahamas. The UK Government wanted the United States wholly focused on Europe while Pindling was thinking of his own prestige, but still what would be suggested would generally be beneficial for the goals of both the Americans and the Cubans.

US military forces would return to Guantanamo Bay within a month’s time and be allowed to re-establish their naval and air bases there. The Americans would pay for all of the necessary repairs and construction work themselves with Cuban enterprises doing this paid work not American or foreign companies. The remains of the fortifications which had been destroyed during the Cuban assault would be torn down and instead there would come a simple security fence manned by a joint US-Cuban guard force. Inside the facility there would be Cuban military personnel stationed as observers working similar to military attachés that would come with the re-establishment of formal diplomatic relations and such people would sit on a joint panel to oversee that the US military activities there didn’t threaten Cuban interests.

An initial offer made by the Americans of fifty years was negotiated down to just a tenth of that for their presence there. After that five year period, the United States would withdraw from Guantanamo Bay though there would remain the legal right for the Americans to return military forces subject to joint approval should the security of the United States be threaten by what were deemed ‘external threats’. Cuba would then run a military base there for their own purposes as long as it was kept functioning for such a possible return by the Americans and if they had trouble paying for the upkeep, then the United States could make payments for that. All backdated rent for the facility owed to Cuba would be paid (not really a significant amount) and beginning from the day American forces returned, that amount would greatly increase too.

Cuban sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay would be reaffirmed in the treaty signed in The Bahamas though the wording would state that the status on jurisdiction had changed to allow further Cuban control with their observers having some veto on what went on there. By May 1993, Cuba would have absolute physical control of the facility when the Americans departed.

Even with the diplomatic wording used in this part of the Treaty of Nassau, there were expected to be problems on the ground there when it came to what the Cubans could stop happening during that time the Americans remained and then when it came to possible later American military use as well. Nevertheless, what was to be put into a legal guarantee was the most that either side was willing to accept and it was understood that domestic public consumption was key. The US Government and the Military Council would both have trouble selling this to their own people yet recognised the trouble that the other would too.

*​

Within the United States during those ongoing talks in Nassau, the US Government had come under intense pressure when it came to how to act when it came to the Cubans. The ceasefire had been fiercely opposed by many and then any sort of talks made also strongly objected to. There were very few calls for a settlement with Cuba compared to those who objected to continued fighting with the Soviets… and there weren’t many doing the latter either. Cuba’s attack on the United States had made the country angry from coast to coast and from those of all sorts of political persuasions came passionate emotions.

Reagan and then Bush had both been away from the ghost-town that was Washington during the early stages of the war but as lobbyists, activists and even some politicians started returning to a city which many thought would be vaporised first should the war go nuclear, those opponents gathered together and became stronger by concentration. When such people had been scattered they had been outspoken in their opposition to Cuba but together they were a real danger. Calls were made for the ceasefire to be broken by the Americans and for Cuba to be bombed again and even invaded. There were demands that a military operation to retake Guantanamo Bay be mounted at once as news leaked that the Defence Department did have one planned with the troops and military assets available in the region; any success with Operation TROPIC JUSTICE was doubtful to the planners with the few assets available but those loud voices didn’t care about that.

Across the country there were protests concerning Cuba with so many Americans having strong feelings on the matter. As expected, this was stronger down in Florida and then the Governor Bob Martinez got involved. He had a reputation to repair after domestic troubles with a sales tax the previous year and the Republican Governor there believed that the best way to do that was to follow the call of the crowd in demanding that there be no talks with the Cuban generals for a settlement just for them to be deposed. Bush and other figures in his party had tried to talk him into calming the situation down but Martinez went too far and there was an ugly instance where FBI agents had to raid a warehouse in Miami where weapons were being assembled by an ad hoc ‘Liberation Army’ (a few hundred people at most) getting ready to invade Cuba a la April 1961. Martinez publically defended such people when those caught with those weapons which included heavy man-portable items like mortars, rocket-launchers, & heavy-calibre machine guns were arrested on weapons charges. Martinez himself was the son of Spanish immigrants and he was an example of those not of Cuban extraction themselves who took it upon themselves to fight for this cause – some with the best intentions of Cuba at heart and others doing so in an opportunistic fashion.

Whitehead came under attack as it was known that he was in Nassau talking with the Cubans and this diplomat who was serving his country the best way he knew how faced a torching of his private home in New York while he was abroad doing that. Certain newspapers ran stories concerning his personal life which were of a slanderous nature in another effort to change the course of events.

As Congress met at Greenbrier, there was much attempted interference in the US-Cuban talks coming from there. America was a democracy yet sometimes the actions of its politicians when it came to particular matters leave admirers disgusted. There were Congressmen and Senators who were working for interests that sought to scupper any agreement with Cuba while at the same time there were a few with genuine feelings on the matter who were unhappy with any sort of agreement being made with Cuba that wasn’t a diktat. Arguments and inflammatory statements came from Congress with regular fashion when it came to the situation with Cuba.

In later years, when discussing the matter, Bush would state that if the country hadn’t been at war with the Soviets and thus media attention generally elsewhere, the opposition to the Treaty of Nassau would have inflamed the American public to such a degree that it never would have been signed by his Secretary of State. He would also spoke of the trouble that would later occur when the treaty went to Congress for approval and what happened there.


For the time being, once the talks in The Bahamas were finalised and they waited for the Treaty of Nassau to be signed, some other matters outside of the text of the agreement were dealt with.

del Toro and the Military Council had authorised the disclosure to the Americans during those talks of some nuggets of intelligence to help sway the discussions. They knew that there would be great influence coming from the US Intelligence Community towards what was finally agreed upon and set out to buy some goodwill; the Americans weren’t fools and realised this yet took what was on offer because to not do so would only harm them.

The DGI had been crushed by the Cuban Armed Forces as senior people from that intelligence service had tried to maintain the Castro regime even without the deceased brothers. Many of those people had been killed alongside their Soviet puppet-masters at that military base when the Cuban Army had struck though other DGI officials had decided that their lives were more valuable that a principle. The decision was taken to give the Americans intelligence that wouldn’t harm the new Cuba and then of course a new intelligence service would be set up in the long-run.

Using that information from the Cubans, the Americans had formally arrested a female Defence Intelligence Agency analyst who was a spy for the DGI and then detained pending a decision an academic who advised the State Department when it came to pre-war policy towards Cuba. Both people had ideological motives for their activities and were secret supporters of the Castro regime. These were the opening offers which the Military Council gave the Americans on the promise of a lot more and once those talks were finished to a satisfactory degree in Nassau, the floodgates opened.

The US Intelligence Community was made aware of all sorts of figures who worked for the DGI currently and in the past. There were few spy rings but instead individuals in positions of power and influence. Some had acted for Cuban interests because they were true-believers yet more had been either brought or blackmailed into doing so. Their names and evidence against them was handed over in a tidal-wave of information that also included details of KGB activities in the United States that Cuba was aware of and then lists of people in Cuba that were wanted by the Americans. These defectors, exiles and even criminals were all promised to the Americans now that there was a peace between the two nations and diplomatic relations were to be restored. It was expected that the Americans wouldn’t make public the arrests of spies for the time being but the Military Council would televise the arrests of many people in Cuba which were known to be wanted by the US Government with the knowledge that such events would then play well to the American public.

Again, the Americans wouldn’t be foolish enough to know exactly what the Cubans were doing here in building bridges from one side.

There were very few United States military forces remaining in the region prepared to act against Cuba. The carrier Coral Sea was now in the Barents Sea while the training carrier Lexington had taken her place the US Navy had hardly made a like-for-like replacement with those vessels. USAF combat assets were minimal with the units involved waiting at any moment for a release order to come so they could redeploy to Europe. When it came to troops there remained the regular 193rd Infantry Brigade deployed in Panama with some elements in Puerto Rico now and the lone brigade from the 7th Light Infantry Division in Nicaragua slated to transfer to Norway but possibly Denmark now once the threat of further conflict was resolved. US ARNG troops from Florida and Puerto Rico were still in-place in both their home stations with the understrength 4th Marine Division (many assets deployed elsewhere) nearby.

That planned attack against Cuba, TROPIC JUSTICE, should it have been authorised was meant to land in southeastern Cuba to retake Guantanamo Bay though it had many doubters due to the limitations of military assets gathered. Peace now meant that these and the combat support assets positioned to assist the combat forces could all be redeployed elsewhere. The Lexington, the national guardsmen and a select few Marine Reservists were instructed to remain in theatre once the agreement was settled in Nassau, but the combat aircraft, the regular troops and the US Marines would all now leave the region to go to Europe. This wasn’t the biggest influx of American reinforcements, but all would come in handy where they went.

Finally, in an another immediate outcome of the Treaty of Nassau, of much later note within the United States domestically, some smiles were raised when the world of sport moved as it often did in a diplomatic fashion. The Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, an outspoken and widely-known figure, announced that he was putting together a team to make an immediate trip to visit Cuba. There were quite a few players who quickly announced they would be going to the country once everything was arranged and then some media drama about others who weren’t showing an interest in going. A series of expedition games were planned to show goodwill using sports as a means of that.

Throughout the conflict, nationwide sporting events across America had been cancelled; football, baseball, hockey, basketball, motorsports and golf prominent among these but in no way exhaustive. Those athletes were regarded as superstars with many of them having important public images. Some chose to express their views to the media throughout the war with the overwhelming majority (but not all) publicly supporting the war effort and US military personnel abroad. In the absence of organised events, extra training sessions occurred for those sports stars yet others wanted to take part in the war effort as best they could. There were plenty of volunteers for the military and then others who joined figures from the music industry and Hollywood in events to ‘support the troops’ at home and abroad. Across the United States there was still the fear of nuclear holocaust yet at the same time with the conflict being as conventional as it was there were plenty of echoes of World War Two.




Two Hundred & Twenty

The position in the UK Government of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was considered by many to be a thankless task. It was a dangerous one too on a personal level with the Cabinet member undertaking the role facing arguably the greatest threat to their life within the government… as very recently exemplified by the assassination of John Major who had been killed very shortly after taking up the position. Ken Clarke, whom Thatcher had assigned as Major’s replacement at the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), had moved from the role of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to the NIO and knew all about the risks involved. Yet, at the same time, the ambitious Clarke knew that if he could succeed here then he could rise very high indeed in the government.

Foresight wasn’t available to him but Clarke’s wishes would come true and only three years later he would be in Downing Street…

Meanwhile, Clarke was forced to use all the political capital he had along with the force of his will to bring a halt to the terribly violent events going on in Northern Ireland. He was the minister responsible for Ulster and under his watch the situation had become one of civil war in the Province. There was ethnic cleansing and genocide taking place and that had to stop. Earlier measures had been tried and failed due in part to the external effects of the ongoing war, yet Clarke had come to realise that even such a factor as World War Three ongoing couldn’t mean that the murderous mayhem could continue. If the only way to stop that was through a draconian approach then that was the way it had to be. He had requested that Thatcher and the War Cabinet give him what were in effect dictatorial powers to address the issue and those were granted. Only with the powers that allowed the NIO to take complete control of the security forces and local government in Northern Ireland was he able to do this.

Nothing else had worked and this was the final result of all previous failures.


Major had been killed by the IRA and Soviet intelligence agencies had shipped weapons to the INLA in two pre-war events which had lit the fuse in Northern Ireland. However, while those Republican terrorist groups had been active in the internal conflict which commenced in Ulster after the shooting started with the Soviets elsewhere, it was Loyalist terrorists which had truly committed the worst of the atrocities that had then started taking place. That wasn’t something that many had wanted to accept for the Loyalists were seen as the ‘good guys’ – even if slightly misguided – while the Republicans were meant to be the ‘bad guys’. It was the former, not the latter who had started driving tens of thousands of innocent civilians from their homes and then committed massacres across Northern Ireland while the latter had reacted to these and done terrible things too those had been nowhere on such a murderous scale. Too many people had their political careers staked on the fact of who were the good guys and who were the bad guys and this had at first hampered Clarke’s attempts to deal with the crisis in Ulster as it got worse and worse with every passing day.

The Northern Ireland Secretary at first just hadn’t been believed and his reports side-lined by those who didn’t want to hear the truth. However, once tens of thousands of refugees had started to stream into the Irish Republic bringing with them tales of unimaginable horrors and then there had come identical reports coming up the chain of command through the British Army, the thinking elsewhere had changed. In addition, the reaction to all of this which had come from Dublin and then the United States – especially in the case of the latter nation – had piled on the pressure to act. The War Cabinet in London and then Parliament once it had finally met both had demanded immediate action and given Clarke what he had asked for. The conventional war with the Soviets still dominated the political scene but no one could allow the civil war to continue in Northern Ireland once there was repeated, overwhelming and confirmed evidence of what was occurring there.

The new Defence Secretary Cecil Parkinson – who had only taken the role upon the personal request of the PM and only for the duration of the conflict – had repeatedly stated to the War Cabinet his position in support of Clarke that this was happening on British soil and those people from both sides of the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland were British citizens!


Members of both the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) would protest furiously when orders came down from Clarke that their organisations were being taken under the direct command of the British Army and that they were all to answer to orders from professional soldiers instead of their own senior officers. The MI-5 presence of the ground came under command of the British Army too and again there was a lot of anger at this as well yet the Prime Minister was far from happy with what she regarded as the less-than-stellar recent performance of the Security Service so this went through as Clarke wanted. Each organisation was full of decent, honest and hard-working men and women though at the same time there were many members who had looked the other way when the atrocities were occurring and gone as far in some instances to aid and even take part in those. It was impossible to weed out the honest from the dishonest and Clarke had had to take this step because there was no time to be fair.

British soldiers from the mainland might have had many general sympathies with the Loyalist agenda and a hatred for the IRA but there wasn’t a connection between them and those committing the killings at a local level. Moreover, full-time soldiers responded to orders much better than those on the ground with a vested interest in helping those who they mistakenly believed were right. Clarke knew that he would be making even more enemies than he already had that might cost him dear in the future but he still went and did this because there was no other option that he could see.

There had to be the rule of law imposed and he put his faith in the British Army.


General Pascoe had been transferred out of his position as head of Northern Ireland Command and his place taken as commanding British Army forces in Ulster by General Charles Guthrie who had been serving as Assistant Chief of the General Staff. Pascoe hadn’t gone quietly and reminded those at the MOD that before war erupted in Europe he had seen his command stripped of troops and complained bitterly about this with warnings that the situation would fast get out of control. He hadn’t foreseen what would eventually occur in scale but his warnings had been there. Clarke had lost faith in the man though despite knowing just how hard Pascoe had been doing in such a difficult role due to the fact that the soldiers under his command had in far too many cases unwittingly done the bidding of those involved in the murders and mayhem. One of the worst example of this was Force Research Unit: a British Army manned covert reconnaissance organisation (part of 14 Intelligence Company) thoroughly implicated not just in collusion with Loyalist killers but also believed to be committing murders too. Clarke had this unit disbanded, its men sent back to the mainland and an NIO-led investigation started in to what had been done by these supposedly intelligence operatives.

Two battalions of regular British Army troops had remained in Northern Ireland following the LION deployment of the UK Armed Forces elsewhere and both of those were left understrength with many combat support units moving to Germany to join other formations with the reasoning that heavy weapons and engineering specialists weren’t needed. Pascoe and then Guthrie would have used such men for patrol duties because they were trained soldiers yet those wishes there had been overruled. In their place and also to replace other regular troops who had departed there had first come men from TA formations such as 4 PARA and then other units of less-capable reservists from the western parts of mainland Britain. Even those part-time Paras didn’t have the necessary training to allow them to keep the peace in Northern Ireland when they arrived as they ended up like the regular soldiers with 1 LI & 3 QUEENS chasing their tails and being deceived as civil war broke out. There needed to be an acclimatisation period and those reservists from the UK mainland who had been rushed in had missed out upon that.

Eventually thought, the soldiers all became aware of what they were facing in Ulster. They discovered the after-effects of massacres which had taken place, they witnessed homes being burnt down in an organised fashion as communities were burnt out and they came under fire from civilians with guns who then tried to melt back into the population. Military officers working with the UDR, the RUC, MI-5 personnel in Northern Ireland and also local authorities all started to understand that there was an undercurrent of cooperation between those organisations and many of those committing the violence. At the same time, the soldiers also understood that the violence wasn’t all one sided either; the Republican terrorists were out killing innocents just like the Loyalists ones were and made their own claims of ‘self-defence’ as well.

Guthrie’s instructions from Clarke upon taking over were to make sure that his men were ready to act when he got the political authorisation to act and the general did just that.


When it begun, Clarke’s solution to the problems in Northern Ireland was shockingly effective. He wasn’t a political or military genius it was just a case of him acting at the right time and with enough support behind him for what would have normally been regarded as too terrible to contemplate now being the only thing that could be done.

Martial law came into effect in Ulster.

The war zone that the Province had become was treated just like that with dusk-to-dawn curfews, a lifting of previous restrictive rules of engagement and the introduction of military courts. The soldiers were not going to look that other way due to the needs of someone’s political agenda and they were free to engage the enemy when they saw fit. There were always going to be objections back on the Mainland about this with the claim that it was ‘un-British’ but the only choice was a continued state of anarchy which had already claimed thousands of lives if the worst estimates were true. With complete military control over other elements of the security services on the ground in Ulster and then the NIO bringing in people from London to take control of the local authorities, the aim was to bring law and order back to Northern Ireland.

For those committing the acts which were now being treated as war crimes, the sudden unleashing of the British Army against them was a shock. No longer could they rely on being warned through back channel contacts of an impending security operation and there came a sudden end to the intelligence on where to find their ‘enemy’ which they were being supplied though those friendly sources. British soldiers opened fire at will rather than being forced to follow a complicated set of ROE: there was little hesitation on their part either to delay that because of all the horrors that they had seen beforehand and not been allowed to act against.


British military operations to end the violence came with two major operations to begin that process. The higher formations of the 3rd and 39th Brigades unleashed their men in wide-scale operations to the west and south respectively against those judged the most dangerous enemies first with the intention of hitting them so hard that they would collapse. Afterwards the soldiers would then conduct smaller operations elsewhere of an aggressive patrol nature after these first shock-and-awe strikes.

The first battalion of the Light Infantry (1 LI) battlegroup was the lead tactical unit for the mission deep into the west to stage an assault operation that bore all the hallmarks of a real combat operation around Enniskillen in County Fermanagh. The regular soldiers were joined by UDR men strengthening their ranks yet under tight discipline. Arriving at dawn in convoys of light armoured vehicles from several directions, the soldiers moved throughout the countryside surrounding the town rather than in there itself and focused upon the roads running northwest, west and south away towards the border with the Irish Republic. Catholic civilians from County Fermanagh and beyond had been travelling along these as they fled Northern Ireland only to be face robbery, rape and murder by Loyalist terrorists acting like brigands of the Middle Ages. Such killers had base camps, transport and stocks of weaponry to support them in their effort and had thought themselves to be invulnerable to any attempt to stop their activities… until they came up against some real soldiers.

The resulting clashes were a one-sided affair. 1 LI attacked those base camps with overwhelming firepower and then struck at those who tried to flee fighting. Men who thought that they were tough when killing unarmed civilians got a taste of their own medicine in being cut down with impunity. There had been no warning from their usual sources of any sort of operation even being planned against them just the biggest ambush which they could have ever faced. After the numbers among them of the unlucky and the foolish had been killed those with a bit of common sense who remained started surrendering to the British soldiers. They hoped to wiggle their way out of trouble by playing on patriotism and then rely on a later civilian court case where in the meantime witnesses against them would have moved on or could be intimidated. What they weren’t expecting was to be stripped to their underwear, hog-tied and then shipped off to a distant detention camp without any access to supporters or even a friendly solicitor. Their captors didn’t want them to trade information in return for being let go and instead quickly gave them military trials where the evidence against them that they were suspected war criminals was enough to see them detained until an undefined later date. Word would soon spread fast about this and such a thing was hoped to reach others engaged in similar actions elsewhere.

Down in South Armagh, the IRA men there were always going to be a tougher nut to crack than the Loyalists around Enniskillen. Elements of the SAS and some UDR troops had suffered greatly in trying to defeat the terrorists here which had established a war zone along the border with the Irish Republic but they had badly stung the IRA as well. Yet operations had been hampered by a refusal to allow crossing of the border over into the Irish Republic to engage those who fled after attacking and even Clarke hadn’t been able to get permission for that to occur. The IRA had their bases outside of Ulster and slipped across to fight the security services where they had much local support whenever they wished. 3 QUEENS – again with extra manpower from the UDR under command – were given the task of stopping this with the mission orders being for them to defeat the IRA once and for all from coming across and attacking security services infrastructure on British soil.

Using some helicopters but mainly travelling cross-country in a several fleets of Land Rovers, 3 QUEENS closed the border by moving from above and in from the northwest. They moved fast to seize the main crossing points and then spread out from there from company-sized groups down to platoons and fire squads. Plenty of ammunition and supplies were taken with them to allow them to operate out in the countryside in a mobile fashion on foot and in their vehicles patrolling the border area just inside Ulster and taking on those who tried to challenge them. Very quickly those fights came with the IRA though while successes came they weren’t as effective as the Enniskillen operation as the border was long and porous. Everywhere that the IRA and 3 QUEENS clashed in a stand-up engagement the British soldiers would win but the IRA really knew this terrain well and understood how to slip away from a pursing enemy. Of course, killing those IRA men was a major objective for 3 QUEENS yet so too was stopping them coming across the border doing their worst. Intelligence pointed to a wholescale stop order going out through the ranks of the South Armagh Brigade’s cross-border activity units and then local supporters on the ground on the British side of the border quickly realised that they were mismatched against a regular force of soldiers like this who they couldn’t observe up-close and pin down in an attack.


Clarke’s gamble was working. Martial law and the concentrated application of military power was putting a stop to the activities of the worst groups of offenders in the civil war. Once those initial operations were completed those troops would be joining the reorganised UDR and specialised RUC units through which Guthrie might as well have taken a flamethrower to get rid of the bad guys in retaking the rest of Northern Ireland for the forces of law and order.

Britain was no longer going to stand for ethnic cleansing, genocide and wholescale murder taking place on its own soil.

Two Hundred & Twenty–Three

Austrian military strategy was based around planning for the worst case scenario of defending their country against a Soviet-led attack coming from the east. Their defences were positioned to guard against an attack launched from Hungary with supporting efforts made from Czechoslovakia in the north and northeast as well. Guarding their rear areas from paratroopers and airmobile troops was another element of this plan as well and so with full mobilisation the Austrian Army was large and well-equipped with a wide spread across their nation.

Before the invasion occurred, the Austrians had military intelligence specialists analyse combat operations taking place throughout Germany. Those officers assigned as observers with the Bundeswehr and the French Army in Bavaria stayed well away from the fighting itself as Austria had been neutral but they had been able to understand the tactics employed by the Soviets on the attack and NATO efforts to defend against these, in particular counterattacks. The danger to Austria from Soviet forces in Hungary and the armies of their puppets was further planned against following these observations made and at the last few days of peace that Austria had there had been some small but not insignificant changes made to defensive structure to protect the nation.

Along the border with Hungary, through Burgenland, the Austrian Army was positioned with light infantry units scattered across the countryside through defensive works. There were fortifications with heavy guns from tank turrets up high with those weapons zeroed-in upon the natural avenues of approach. More light infantry units were deployed in hidden positions where they were supposed to hide until being overrun and attack enemy units from the rear in the heat of battle. Then, there were the heavy forces that the Austrian Army had in the form of the 1st Panzergrenadier Division located southeast of Vienna and the 3rd Panzergrenadier Brigade east of Graz. These forces were meant to engage the enemy after they had been blooded first and deliver a sharp counterattack to smash apart those attacking forces which had made it through everything else.

The heavy forces were the best-equipped units of the Austrian Army with their tanks and the majority of their mechanised armoured fighting vehicles as well as self-propelled artillery. Naturally, the Austrians positioned them to guard against enemy intrusions into Vienna and Graz and also hid them from overhead observation as well in a large effort at concealment. The fate of the nation would depend upon the Austrians keeping these units intact and ready to strike so that they could save the Republic from being overrun and occupied.

Such an approach on the part of the Austrians would cause them a major problem though. They didn’t want to commit these heavy forces until the time was just perfect and they were held back waiting for that moment. The senior command of the Austrian Army were the ones who were to issue the orders for them to move and not the local commanders on the ground because such formations represented all the mobile striking power available. Austria’s new allies in Italy and the NATO nations fighting in Germany were moving their own forces towards the eastern parts of the Republic though were still some distance away. The Austrians were dealing with the invasion themselves for the time being and so couldn’t afford to throw away their heavy forces at the wrong time and allow the Soviets to take Graz or, even worse, reach Vienna and strike into the heart of their capital like they had in 1945.

However, the Austrians waited just too long and had the heart ripped out of their army on the approaches to Vienna.


It took the Soviet Fourth Guards Army a day and a half – including much night-time fighting as well where casualties caused by ‘friendly fire’ were immense – to push through all of the outlying Austrian defences. Thousands of Soviet soldiers and hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles were expended in combating the light infantry and fixed defences that the Austrians had deployed to slow them down but they eventually got clear. A total control of the skies above them helped in this achievement as the Austrian Air Force couldn’t intervene and NATO combat aircraft had yet to make an appearance over the battlefield either. A lack of Austrian SAMs and the inability of the anti-aircraft guns fielded instead made sure that for the first time in this war Soviet Army helicopters were able to play an important role as well.

On both sides of Lake Neusiedl (often called the Sea of the Viennese) and into the northern parts of Burgenland, the Soviets drove forwards with the remains of their three divisions and towards Vienna. There remained plenty of harassment against their flanks and in the rear but they were chasing Austrian infantry units which were on foot while they themselves were in tanks and armoured vehicles. More and more of their opponents were crushed as this took place and the way ahead was open. Finally, at this point, there came reports from attack helicopters roaming ahead on scouting missions that Austrian heavy armour had been spotted moving forwards to engage them.

There were three combat brigades with the 1st Panzergrenadier Division and one of those consisted of motorised jaegers while the other two had those tanks and the armoured vehicles which had been so jealously kept back. The Austrian Army had planned to keep this formation together as a complete formation when employing it yet they were faced with the invading Soviets having made gains in two separate locations either side of that lake more than a dozen miles apart. There was no other choice available and so the division was split into two parts in a hasty decision whereas for the past several weeks everything had been about those parts working together as a whole. The timing was off and the heavy forces should have been committed earlier, but this last minute order to break the formation apart really was to be the death of the 1st Panzergrenadier Division.

To the west of the heavily-forested Leitha Mountains, where Autobahn-3 came up from Sopron in Hungary and through many towns south of Vienna, the Austrian 9th Brigade came forward to take on the Soviet 254MRD. Aircraft and helicopters had spotted the Austrians approaching and engaged many of the M-60 tanks and other armoured vehicles first and then the Soviets made a multiple regimental attack using a flanking manoeuvre to the west as well. Austrian observers had seen this attempted against NATO forces in Bavaria and watched how it had been countered, but they didn’t have attacking aircraft of their own, the necessary air defences to defend themselves and they didn’t have the numbers to take the losses which the Soviets came.

Everything went so fast with the Soviets all over them. Early model M-60s blew up when hit from the air and then on the ground while Kurassiers & Saurer-4K/4Fs were also torn apart. There was much bravery on display from the Austrians yet they were overwhelmed and T-64 heavy tanks backed up by scout cars carrying missiles which did them great harm. The infantry of the 9th Brigade was unloaded from their vehicles less they be killed when those were hit yet they were not ready to fight when the enemy appear and tore into them. Austrian artillery wasn’t in place and engineers hadn’t got out their equipment to start sewing minefields or constructing barricades. Supply trucks carrying ammunition forward were hit and so were command columns as well. Multiple-barrelled rocket launchers that the Soviets had couldn’t be countered and nor could their massed divisional artillery either. In Bavaria, NATO had aircraft and counter-battery artillery fire but the Austrians had none of the former and the latter wasn’t ready in time.

The 9th Brigade was destroyed before it could fully get into the fight and these professional soldiers of Austria along with their valuable equipment were all lost.

The rest of the 1st Panzergrenadier Division, the 4th & 6th Brigades, engaged the right wing of the Soviet Fourth Guards Army with those reservists there striking south of the Danube Valley. The Austrians weren’t fast enough to reach the road and rail communications centre of Bruck an der Leitha where the terrain narrowed between the mountains and the river and so attempted to launch a hasty attack against the flank of the Soviets moving westwards along the path followed by the highway coming from Gyor across the border in Hungary. Soviet control of the air was key here and they spotted the Austrians moving against them as well as being able to take many shots at them first before the clashes on the ground occurred. There were impromptu ambushes laid that the Austrians blundered into in their haste and they paid dearly for their last minute attack. The trucks with the infantry and then the tanks supporting the panzergrenadiers all faced an alert enemy that tore them apart piece by piece.

What Austrian units the Soviet 50TD & 126MRD (Category C formations) didn’t destroy in open battles of manoeuvre here as these reservists following their warfighting doctrine perfectly, they surrounded and blasted at with artillery while making sure they wouldn’t hold up the advance… which was driving upon Vienna International Airport just ahead. That huge facility was located outside the city along the Danube Valley and right up ahead. There had been enemy air activity in the form of Italian aircraft present in that area; there was the possibility that maybe troops had arrived. Nonetheless, hundreds of tanks were being pushed that way and behind them the rest of the 1st Panzergrenadier Division had been destroyed in a battle which it hadn’t been ready to fight away from strategy meetings.


The Soviets had been perfectly correct to have paid attention to the airport located at Schwechat. Italian fighters were overhead there and above other parts of Austria as the Folgore Parachute Brigade arrived into Vienna International Airport. This reinforced formation had four battalions of paratroopers, another battalion of paratroopers from the training school at Pisa and airmobile artillery & engineers. They were all in the process of being flown into the airport just as the Soviets made their breakthrough and came with many heavy man-portable weapons but not with any armoured vehicles yet.

The Italian Army had assumed that in an invasion of Austria the airport at Schwechat would have been seized in an airmobile assault as it was located between the border area where the Austrian Army would fight and Vienna. Its wide open spaces were perfect for such an assault and they had been planning to recapture it with their paratroopers before the Soviets would set themselves up properly. When that attack never came they moved in anyway due to the need to establish a large airhead in northeastern Austria as part of the planned operations to assist the Austrians in stopping the Hungarians before they got to Graz and then driving northwards through the border areas to hit the Soviets in the flank before they could take Vienna. That operational concept of the Italian Expeditionary Army involved the Austrian 1st Panzergrenadier Division doing the role which the Italians thought that it would in assisting the lighter units in bleeding the Soviets dry in the border regions and so it came as a major shock to them when the Austrians did their own thing and deployed their heavy forces later than they should have and all for nothing too.

The heavy forces of the Italians were still a long way away from Vienna and the eastern part of the Danube Valley where they were planning to end up once their offensive got going but now their paratroopers were sitting right in the way of part of a Soviet combined arms army bearing down upon Vienna and the only organised opposition standing in the way of that.

The Folgore Brigade was in for a tough fight indeed and got little notice of what was coming their way directly towards them from not just the east but now the south too. Those paratroopers were right in the firing line…


Diplomats in Brussels had been discussing how they would make use of the Soviet incursion into Austria to counter-invade Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The news hadn’t reached them though and wouldn’t until after their discussions had finished that the Austrian forces outside Vienna had collapsed and unless the Italians were able to pull off a miracle, a whole lot of that country was soon to fall into enemy hands.

NATO would have to instead defend what remained of Austria free of the Soviet Army rather than using the country’s geographic position at the heart of Central Europe as a springboard for their own attack. Ogarkov’s apparent mistake that NATO senior commanders had been pleased to see occur as it looked like the Soviets were to come unstuck in Austria now appeared to be not such a major error at all. Things could change with time, but at the moment the situation on the ground there was going to cause a lot of headaches… as well as taking the lives of many too.





Two Hundred & Twenty–Four

The loss of Vienna International Airport to enemy control was a major blow for the Italian Expeditionary Army and its moves to combat the invasion of Austria. That airhead in the northeast of the country was planned to be very important in their operations and without it those would suffer. Nonetheless, it wasn’t the case that the Italians suffered a defeat there and neither was it won in any sort of victory by the Soviet Fourth Guards Army either.

The peacetime theoretical strength of the two divisions on the right wing of the advancing Soviet field army was just short of five hundred tanks yet such a number had been greatly lowered to almost half that figure after serious maintenance issues even before the Austrian-Hungarian border was crossed and then there had come many more tanks knocked out of action in combat with the Austrian Army. Nevertheless, those hundreds of tanks which still did drive upon Vienna by way of its outlying airport were still far too great in number and capability for the Italian paratroopers deployed ahead of them to take on. They had rather a lot of man-portable heavy weapons, including dozens upon dozens of MILAN missile-launchers, but no heavy armour of their own nor any time to construct major anti-tank defences. There only obstacle in the way of the Soviets driving towards the airport was the narrow Fischa River and that was far from a defensive position in any way.

The commander of the Folgore Parachute Brigade requested permission to withdraw and was granted such a thing very soon after some of his forward reconnaissance detachments operating in jeeps had disastrous clashes Soviet armoured scout cars along the Fischa River. Austrian Territorial troops had been demolishing bridges there with pre-planted explosives and then taking on vehicles fording the river, the enemy was too strong and the Italians realised the futility of making such a foolish stand. At the same time, they didn’t make a panicked withdrawal from the airport even though they were in a great hurry. Working with further reservists from the Austrian Army, the airport was to be wrecked and nothing of value left for the Soviets heading towards it. Explosions ripped apart structures and tore giant holes in the runways while aircraft sitting on the ground – generally commercial aircraft which were in a non-flying condition – were blown up as well. Thick plumes of smoke filled the skies and went high up into the atmosphere all around the airport and Italian combat aircraft operating nearby had to avoid this.

Back towards Vienna the Italians withdrew and past the petrochemical works to the Schwechat and Liesing Rivers. These were again shallow waterways where defending them would be difficult but the Italians moved fast to reach these last natural barriers before Vienna to set themselves up there through the night knowing that they could then be able to make a fight of it in the morning and hopefully by then be reinforced. Special forces troops with the Folgore Brigade (those commandoes with the 9th ‘Col Moschin’ Parachute Assault Battalion) set alight to much of the industrial areas ahead of the new defensive position chosen and in doing so hoped that this would further slow down the enemy from pursing the Folgore Brigade in withdrawing as they did.


The Italians were left with a wide open flank to their right though, stretching away to the west and south of Vienna. The paratroopers which had fallen back from their airport didn’t have the manpower to cover such a gap and of course still remained without any armour when the terrain over which the Soviets were advancing was perfect for a tank assault rather than where such a thing might be halted like in mountains or an urban area. There were many towns south of Vienna but highways too and where Austrian Territorial troops made a stand they were bypassed by the Soviet 254MRD as it kept on driving to Vienna aiming to reach the outskirts of that city before darkness fell.

The small airfield at Voslau was put to use as a forward point by the Soviets here with a temporary refuelling station set up with haste to assist their helicopter operations. Mil-8 Hip and Mil-24 Hind helicopters both made attack missions instead of airmobile operations as the speed of advance was being maintained on the ground and there were also several attacks made by Italian aircraft which while flying from distance caused the losses of several helicopters heavily-laden with troops. Voslau turned out to be a trap though as local Austrian commanders on the ground had wired the place for demolition but hidden the charges along with a small selection of volunteers with mortars also out of sight nearby. Once it was starting to be used by the enemy and fuel was spotted as arriving, blasts were set off and fireballs of aviation fuel lit the darkening skies followed by the arrival of mortar rounds coming in from all directions.

This success here couldn’t stop the Soviet armour from rolling further and further north and reaching the towns of Perchtoldsdorf, Brunn am Gebirge and Vosendorf when darkness came. These were right at the southern reaches of the city near industrial areas where there were numerous Austrian reservists digging in. Fires had been started and immense demolition work was going on as the Austrians caused epic destruction to the area to throw a blockade in front of the Soviets. Such an advance had come to a halt for the night anyway as the Soviet Army wasn’t going into an urban area in the darkness and the orders for them from the Fourth Guards Army had been to move to the northwest as well. The woodland of the Lainzer Tiergarten, broken and hilly terrain west of the city, was where the advance was meant to go next and end at the military airfield at Langenlebarn before reaching the Danube Valley. Such an objective as part of a wide flanking manoeuvre had been too far for the Soviets to reach yet they still had come a long way.

Through the night, as the Soviets cleared their rear areas, they engaged Austrian troops out front as well with probing attacks to keep them occupied and the pressure upon Vienna. Civilians were streaming out of that city as further Austrian reservists poured in to join those already there along with the Italians trying to set up defences against an expected assault in daylight. As this was being done, the 254MRD was being reorganised after the fighting it had undertaken and the losses taken during two days of combat. The once four-regiment formation was now no more than an oversized brigade in strength. The men were tired and there had been some major discipline issues involved when they had moved through Austrian towns as wholescale looting, rape and murder had gone on inflicting grave injustices to the Austrians who hadn’t managed to flee. The divisional commander cared nothing for the civilians and instead worried over his unit cohesion and whether the men would respond to orders to start advancing again to fight the enemy rather than see opportunities everywhere for personal riches and enjoyment; Austria was a culture shock for them coming from their barracks in Hungary.


The Italians had set their forward headquarters up just outside Graz with the command organisation having being airlifted forward along with security troops before the first of the heavy forces arrived in the city and started to deploy using the road network around it. Such an arrival had come just before the Austrian heavy forces were smashed outside Vienna and at once the danger to the paratroopers sent forward there to that city’s airport had been realised. The airlift had stopped and been re-diverted in part to Langenlebarn yet that facility was far too small for any large aircraft as the Austrian Armed Forces mainly used it for helicopters and the runaway was not suitable for C-130s which the Italians were flying… it was also a long way away from the Folgore Brigade.

The paratroopers outside Vienna couldn’t be abandoned and the fight which they were surely to have at first light would be fatal for them if the Italian strategy in Austria didn’t change. Those Hungarian forces marching on Graz had already been stopped by the Austrian forces in the southeast yet in the northeast was where the enemy which the Italians were in Austria to fight were now located.

A decision was made for the flanking attack upon the Soviets to now be redirected towards where they were located not where it was thought they should have been by this point. Such a reorientation of objectives had to be made and so new orders were issued for the leading Italian units not already too far into the southeast to instead go directly northwards aiming for Vienna. A night-time movement would be difficult and there would be issues with units getting lost and tired men expected to fight in the morning, yet that was the only choice available for the Italians.

It was the Ariete Armoured and Julia Alpine Brigades which were tasked to move through Styria and towards Vienna. The heavy armour and light infantry – the latter which could be moved by trucks and multiple helicopter lifts – with these two formations quickly got underway heading northwards with the objective being the woodland of the Lainzer Tiergarten. They would be following roads that wound through central parts of Austria and operating under some air cover but still suspected a troublesome journey on their way.

Two Hundred & Twenty–Seven

‘Abolition: the act of abolishing a system, practise or institution.’


NATO forces crossed over both the Inter-German Border and the Czechoslovak-West German frontier with the objection of abolishing the system of government in-place in both East Germany and Czechoslovakia. This was their political objective as decreed by their governments though on the ground with those engaged in the invasion eastwards the immediate objective was one of a military nature.

On the other side of those borders were huge armies of the Socialist Forces. They were primary Soviet yet there remained East German, Polish and Czechoslovak troops on the battlefields too. Such armies had been beaten in battles on West German territory and chased back across the Iron Curtain after suffering immense reverses yet they remained active. NATO armies had got the measure of them and had beat them yet a change of fortunes was always possible.

In addition, not far behind those armies and moving westwards were a lot more Soviet troops that had recently been mobilised ready for combat. These were regarded as much weaken in terms of combat strength with older men and less-capable equipment… but there were still a lot of them.

NATO forces needed to engage those forces – those already in play and the reinforcements coming towards them through Poland and causing chaos as they did so – as soon as possible less they make another attack into West Germany. So many men, so much equipment and so much effort had been expended in the victories pushing back the armies of the Socialist Forces and there was a worry that the cost would be even greater on the second occasion.

The time to do that – the only time – was right now, starting on April 1st.

*​

In the north, the French Second Army struck against the lower reaches of the Elbe and its defenders first before turning towards the Inter-German Border in an area where they were sure their opponents weren’t going to be expecting an attack.

Reserve infantry units with the French IV Corps remained pushed up against the southern reaches of Hamburg and along the Elbe Estuary, but to the southeast of there with armoured assaults towards the river opposite the downed crossings at Geesthacht and Lauenburg. The reorganised French V Corps undertook this manoeuvre with light armoured units in the attack yet along a narrow frontage to push enemy forces on the western side of the Elbe back towards the water before low-flying transport aircraft filled the skies. Immense artillery barrages had carefully targeted anti-aircraft guns and suspected SAM positions before the French Second Army made their second air assault operation of the war here but this time not very far ahead of their ground troops.

It was the 11th Parachute Division which again was dropped behind the enemy with that formation understrength following previous engagements yet still combat capable. Once over the Elbe, the French paratroopers attacked the defenders on the northern bank from the rear and especially their armour while bridging units came forward to get the troops with the 9th Marine Light Infantry Division over the Rhine.

The French took plenty of casualties and met extremely stubborn defenders who despite being on the flank of where the main French effort was expected fought very hard indeed. More French infantry units, those with the 4th Airmobile Division (no more than a large regiment despite the name), pushing forwards to secure the crossing sites so that several bridges of a temporary nature could be erected while the two West German towns were cleared of the main bodies of resistance.

Soon enough, as the morning went onwards, the French III Corps arrived and came across the Elbe. The enemy was reacting in pushing some of their forces out of East Germany westwards across the nearby stretch of the Inter-German Border but these weren’t enough as it was still believed that the French were going to strike a little further upstream. In addition, there were further French paratroopers on the Elbe-Lubeck Canal, just inside West Germany there, holding many of the crossing points. Those men were lightly-armed and in a potentially dangerous situation, yet they held their nerve in the face of the enemy who was still trying to figure out what was going on.

Four French divisions with the III Corps – the 2nd & 10th Armored, the 6th Light Armored and the 8th Infantry Divisions – were to be pushed over the Elbe and into Holstein with the intention of then turning eastwards to engage Soviet forces along the Elbe slightly further upstream. Each formation had taken heavy losses earlier in the war and were nowhere near as strong as they were, but they were pushed forward fast with the certainly of their commanders that they were going to knock the enemy of balance. Far to their north there were British and American marines fighting in Jutland proper, but they were here at the very base of the peninsula hitting the enemy where it wasn’t expecting to be struck.

The French soon went over the canal.

The French III Corps used its two armoured divisions to do that and enter East Germany into Mecklenburg-Vorpommern from the flank. The two other divisions with that corps were to start to follow the Elbe-Lubeck Canal going towards that city on the Baltic shores where intelligence said that there were nothing but East German security troops present and plenty of logistics assets meant to be supplying the troops fighting in Jutland. As to the rest of the French Second Army troops across the Elbe with them, they would now be able to start an approach towards Hamburg now again without the fear – unless the intelligence was wrong – of major enemy interference in this sector.

The French had successfully turned the Soviets flank and the risk here had paid off.


Significantly larger than the French Second Army was the British Second Army. This latter formation had a multi-national make-up rather than the exclusively French former. Some elements of General Kenny’s formation had yesterday evening gone over the border only to be pulled back very quickly with the wait for political authorisation, yet the whole of the army groups wasn’t ready to plunge across the Inter-German Border as only part of this huge command had reached that point.

On the left, the Bundeswehr-British IV Corps (once known as Kampfgruppe Weser but now very different in make-up and role) operated across the northern portions of the Luneburg Heath with a view to reaching the Wendland: a small portion of Lower Saxony that in peacetime had been a salient jutting forwards to the east. That was located near the Elbe and was beyond the towns of Luneburg and Uelzen which, along with a portion of the Elbe-Lateral Canal, formed the enemy positions ahead of them. There were three divisions under command with the exploitation force assigned being the 7th Panzer Division and the two leading twin attacks the new 17th Panzergrenadier Division and the British 1st Armoured Division. The 17th Panzergrenadier Division consisted of mobilised Bundeswehr former soldiers operating old equipment taken from storage along with the Territorial Brigade that had been stuck in the Hannover Pocket. The British formation which the West Germans were attacking alongside was almost unrecognisable from what had gone to war nearly three weeks ago now with regular, TA and Portuguese troops making up its ranks.

The IV Corps pushed forward aiming to reach the Wendland and thus the frontier with East Germany knowing that great success wasn’t expected of them. Other efforts either side of them were supposed to be the main attacks here in North Germany and their mission was to keep the enemy concentrated everywhere rather than where the real danger was. Despite this, those troops involved fought and died today advancing forwards into murderous enemy defences all the while screaming for fire support that was apparently too busy elsewhere. They would push the enemy out of Luneburg and Uelzen and also rout them along the canal ahead yet getting into Wendland and reaching the Elbe was just a little too far. Nonetheless, they still beat the enemy arrayed against them in open battle once he was blasted out of his defensive positions and did their job of keeping eyes upon the area with the hope that when they tried again the next day, they should get to those distant objectives.


When inside East Germany the day beforehand, for some of those involved it had seemed like a holiday excursion. Of course that hadn’t been the case, but many were caught up in the excitement of the event of actually getting over the border. Coming back today, everyone with the British I Corps knew that they were in for a fight and that was certainly true. The British Army entered Upper Saxony (Sachsen-Anhalt) into the Altmark region and went straight into heavy fighting.

The enemy here had many fixed defences but was also fighting a mobile battle too just as they had done right on the other side of the border yesterday. Small tank detachments engaged attacking British forces taking on infantry positions in ambush manoeuvres and co-ordinating those with intensive artillery and rocket barrages. Electronic warfare units with the British were extremely busy in breaking up these combined arms counterattacks by using radio jamming and signal triangulation for their own artillery yet the Soviets here were again showing they knew how to fight on the defence. For the corps commander, General Inge, reaching the communications centres which were Gardelegen, Salzwedel, Tangermunde and especially Stendal were important for future operations inside the enemy’s homeland but eliminating the heavy armour which the enemy had was paramount to his mission first. Many Soviet tanks encountered were showing extra armour plate fitted externally to them and whereas this had been done in an ad hoc fashion beforehand it appeared to be more organised now. The Soviets had been busy up-armouring their tanks and such additions to the defences of these tracked monsters made them harder to take down. Intelligence had pointed to this and preparations made but going up against such an enemy countermove like this was very challenging… and cost a lot of casualties that he couldn’t afford to take.

General Inge was expecting other Soviet defensive moves like their counterattacks, the extensive minefields and the small specialist detachments of Spetsnaz acting in a stay-behind manner (who managed to kill Major-General Rous, the Tiger Division commanding general in a stroke of luck) it was just that those combined with the nasty tank shock slowed things down. The British Army spent the day fighting inside East Germany and wasn’t defeated but its attack wasn’t achieving the hoped for level of success… yet.


Nearby, General Kenny’s two other operational corps commands, the Bundeswehr VI Corps and the Belgian I Corps, started the day inside West German territory with the intention of reaching the Inter-German Border and only with a stroke of good luck could they expect to cross it at this point.

The fighting to clear West Germany they engaged in took place around the smouldering urban areas of Wolfsburg and Braunschweig and in the border areas east and south east of there. For the Bundeswehr, including the two newly raised formations making up their number, pushing the Soviets out of West Germany was all that mattered to them and there were times where commanders couldn’t stop junior men going too far in that effort and having to deal with the consequences of fighting a very capable opponent who while had suffered many reverses hadn’t been beaten yet. The Belgians had recently redeployed and traded operational area with the Americans on the eastern side of the Oker River. Their troops took greater care while still aiming to destroy the enemy but a level of measured caution was always there due to their commanders not wanting to sacrifice any more lives than possible here. In doing so and with the Bundeswehr on their flank doing what they were doing, the Belgians managed to get to Checkpoint Alpha before sunset and have some of their men take the extensive East German facilities on the other side. Helmstedt had fallen to a careful attack they made and retreating Soviet forces from there had been caught in the open while pulling back ready for NATO air power to blast them.

Then the Belgians had crossed over the Inter-German Border in that area. There was going to be great propaganda value from this the Belgians knew and they were mighty proud of themselves in taking this facility. Moreover, where their leading armour units had ended up at Checkpoint Alpha meant that they had cut the line of retreat for the enemy forces fighting the Bundeswehr and that was a further success for them.


The US Third Army was still not available for combat action with its newly-arrived formations still getting standing up ready to see action soon, just not today. At Einbeck – the town where the 1st Cavalry Division had made its doomed stand – Lt.-General Chambers was busy setting up his headquarters yet at the same time he wasn’t about to have his men be idle where ABOLITION was concerned. The US II & XI Corps needed another day but the US III Corps was also now under his command after leaving the British Second Army. These combat experienced if somewhat weary men had just been transferred slightly southwards into his planned operational area and were a potent striking force that he wasn’t going to have doing nothing for the day when the Europeans were busy invading the enemy’s homeland.

The US III Corps was sent tearing towards the East German frontier south of the Harz Mountains. General Saint as corps commander was instructed to have his troops attack in a southeastern direction with the aim of entering Thüringen though afterwards and once the II Corps were ready start making a turn across the high ground that was criss-crossed with roads back to the northeast. All intelligence pointed to the enemy being rather weak in this sector and certainly with nothing capable of putting a stop to a reinvigorated US Army when on the attack.

Just as hoped, the US III Corps reached the Inter-German Border and went over that. They headed for the communications centres of Nordhausen on the left and Leinefelde on the right. Only two divisions were involved in the attack – the weaken 2nd Armored & 5th Mechanized Infantry Divisions – yet the US III Corps would soon be assigned the 6th Armored Division while the US II Corps would join them the next day with three of its own heavy divisions as well.

An immense amount of fire power was expended in this effort as the Americans didn’t want to slow down unless they had to and any suspicious lump of mud or hilltop covered in undergrowth got the full-on artillery or attack helicopter treatment. So much ammunition had been flowing through the NATO-controlled sea lanes and this was being put to use here like it was everywhere else yet now destroying the enemy East Germany rather than parts of the allied West Germany. This was a country which was going to be laid waste to if the troops within the US III Corps had the chance to and they were sure that their newly-arriving fellow soldiers with the rest of the US Third Army would be feeling the same when it came to this as well.


The US Fifth Army with its Bundeswehr and national guardsmen would spend the day fighting to reach the Inter-German Border throughout northern Hessen.

West German troops with the new V Corps (which had replaced the hollow shell that was the III Corps with recently-created units adding to those which remained, primarily the 12th Panzer Division) fought east of Kassel to push against the Werra River that ran near the border. There was much high ground and thus areas suitable for enemy defensive operations, but their opponents were weak in number after recent shattering defeats and couldn’t make the best use of that. The West Germans were eager to tear apart the Soviets inside their territory and combatted them with their usual fury eager for revenge.

Along the middle reaches of the Fulda River upstream through Bad Hersfeld and down as far as Hunfeld those national guardsmen with the US IV & VI Corps also fought to liberate West Germany. They took part in tough fighting that was regarded as a sideshow to everyone else but them involved in the life and death struggles that took place to secure the western side of the river and push over it towards the border beyond. The enemy wasn’t giving ground easily here and so the national guardsmen took plenty of casualties in pushing forward.

The centre and right flank of the US Fifth Army had much extra NATO reconnaissance assets assigned to it in its efforts to close up to the border here with the advance heading towards Thüringen. This went alongside efforts being made south of them as well as everyone was wary about what the enemy were doing up ahead and deep inside East Germany there.


Schwarzkopf as US V Corps commander had his theories about what was leaving everyone puzzled. His analysts had presented him and his operations staff with intelligence pointing to Thüringen being the staging ground for a major enemy counter-counterattack being planned to strike back westwards again. That was based upon the belief that when those reinforcements arrived in East Germany after coming through Poland in great number they would all mass in one area rather than being split up as beforehand and then strike for the Rhine. Such a strategy made sense to him as if enough men were gathered with enough forward supplies waiting for them they could move forward taking on all comers and drive westwards even with heavy casualties being inflicted. NATO forces were not overwhelming in number anywhere and liable to such an attack if the enemy went about it the right way and with preparation too.

Such an attack, if he was right about it, would come through the operational area where he had his men fighting yet he wasn’t about to let that start anywhere on West German soil. Schwarzkopf led his men back into East Germany again after concentrating his men due to the enemy forces trapped inside the burning town of Fulda surrendering late last night and the progress of the Spanish on his right flank giving him more freedom to move. Out of the Fulda Gap the US V Corps advanced… and straight into heavy enemy defences across the border.

Schwarzkopf was driving for the Werra Valley ahead and then the Thüringen Forest on the other side of that. His aim was to defeat the enemy defences in these regions and then head towards the communications centres which were the towns of Gotha, Erfurt, Weimar and Jena beyond. When reaching those, if he was correct in his judgement, he would be engaging a huge enemy force there but, thankfully, he and the US V Corps weren’t in this war on their own.


Striking from northern parts of Bavaria to clear the last parts of this region of West Germany of the enemy were the rest of the US Seventh Army: the Spanish I Corps and the US VII Corps. General Otis – whose intelligence staff didn’t agree with Schwarzkopf’s smaller team on what the enemy was up to yet had no answers of their own – was playing a more leading role in the command of these two corps commands than with the US V Corps. Schwarzkopf had too many proponents back in the United States who were willing to allow him to do almost as he wished on the back of all of his success so far and for the time being General Otis knew that the wise thing to do was to let that occur. He was the senior commander and still gave the orders, yet Schwarzkopf knew how to fight and didn’t need a great deal of oversight.

Reaching the border was the objective for the rest of the US Seventh Army with a view to later crossing it. The Spanish took over part of the US VII Corps previous operational area and went northwards from parts of the winding Main Valley already in NATO hands up towards the frontier with a drive being made upon the Coburg area. This town and the area around it were being used for East German propaganda purposes in a manner which they were making their usual disaster about and was also regarded by General Otis as being a gateway into entering Thüringen from the south. When the Spanish struck in the area they ran into plenty of enemy resistance from East German troops though then moved a little to the east in a wide flanking manoeuvre. Through a lot of accident but some design too, Spanish tanks soon rolled over the Inter-German Border and found themselves inside East Germany around the nearby town of Sonneberg. Little actual fighting took place in conventional terms here but there afterwards came guerrilla activity that the Spanish had to make a lot of effort to effectively counter once darkness approached. NATO intelligence found that the local authorities had organised Free German Youth groups as a resistance force and such a thing was very effective in Sonneberg. Later in the night, despite misgivings high up in NATO of a political nature, the Spanish pulled out of the town centre area while still remaining inside East Germany outside the urban area. They were determined to go back in the daylight and address the issue though…

The US VII Corps was still pushing in a northeastern direction though Franconia aiming for Hof. That West German town was regarded as a key communications centre for an advance into Saxony to head for the industrial centres of Zwickau, Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz) and then Dresden. These were key war aims if ABOLITION was to live up to its name and were accessible to a strong advance following the highways heading away from Hof. The US Army troops here were pushed against enemy forces that were strong yet were more willing to give ground than expected. Naturally cautious, the Americans found that they had done the right thing as they edged forward as the Soviets they encountered were trying to be clever with immense armoured traps laid using hidden forces ready to counterattack from the flanks and plenty of minefields laid to cut off escape routes from such traps. Instead of failing into that or trying to deal with it carefully, the US Army here had assistance from the USAF in unleashing relentless air attacks. They wouldn’t be getting to Hof today nor seeing the border, but the intention was that by tomorrow that would be possible especially as air strikes were meant to go on all night.


An invasion of East Germany couldn’t be undertaken without a simultaneous attack into western parts of Czechoslovakia. The French First Army was deployed in eastern Bavaria and it was the French – along with Bundeswehr forces – which were going to have to undertake that mission despite Acting President Bush pushing for the destruction of the Prague regime. Moreover, the issue with Austria was something else to figure in as well.

Pilsen was the key to Czechoslovakia as far as the French were concerned and it was towards there they ultimately hoped to go with the majority of their forces while the West Germans covered their flank and then further French troops alongside some Canadian reinforcements coming to Bavaria would assist the Italians in Austria. This would have to be a major operation with the large amount of territory to be fought over and then the numbers of Soviet and Czechoslovakian troops to be engaged. The enemy had never been able to spread out effectively through Bavaria and that had cost them yet that also meant that they remained bunched-up along the border areas through those forests that separated the West Germany from Czechoslovakia.

The French attacked with an aim of driving on the border just as everyone else was doing throughout April 1st though they knew that it was going to be tough going. Their objective would be to clear West German territory then focus upon getting an offensive going towards the Pilsen area. Everything got off to a good start, including the deployment of the Moroccans in their first instances of combat but this was all going to take some time.

*​

ABOLITION was underway all across Germany.

NATO troops engaged in the fight went into battle with chemical warfare protection and behind them tactical nuclear forces were on alert too: an invasion of Warsaw Pact territory was something that had caused worries over an enemy nuclear response of a possible tactical nature. The political directive had been clear through that this was to take place and nothing was going to stop the Allies until the mission was complete.

Other factors remained in-play though especially those hundreds of thousands of Soviet reinforcements starting to pour through Poland and then the fighting in Austria as well that couldn’t be ignored while ABOLITION was ongoing.






Two Hundred & Twenty–Eight

The orders were issued in both verbal and written forms in Marshal Ogarkov’s own name and certainly would have made damming evidence at future any war crimes trial. There were multiple witnesses to these orders on the Soviet side, with the Poles and to later intelligence efforts made by the Allies as well to look into what went on inside Poland.

All and any forms of resistance within Poland to the movement of Soviet forces through their country was to be crushed with the utmost violence and intimidation efforts were to be made to discourage this occurring in the future again with disproportionate force used.

The early stages of the Great Polish Rebellion had been underway for some time now with Polish troops under Soviet officers as part of the Socialist Forces disobeying orders at first and then mutinying in places. Across Poland there had been civil unrest where violence had taken place yet at the same time much non-violent action had been taken too on the part of Poles with strikes, human blockades and intentional sabotage of the war effort. Measures responses had been undertaken – by Soviet standards anyway – and intelligence-led efforts had been tried to defeat these as well. In addition, NATO had been stirring up trouble as well to add to the already negative reaction of the Polish people to the war efforts.

Ogarkov had had enough of ‘playing nice’ with the future of his own country hanging in the balance and politics were pushed aside. He cared not one iota about Polish-Soviet relations now or in the future, just victory on the battlefields on the other side of Poland where it lay geographically between those and the Rodina. The gloves came off and his orders to be as harsh as possible on any and all resistance were going to be followed.

The Great Polish Rebellion truly would get going once his instructions were followed.


Those masses of Soviet troops which had been mobilised inside the Soviet Union and Ogarkov had ordered to move to East Germany with utmost urgency needed passage through Poland. The only viable way to get those men and their equipment to the battlefields was by transiting Poland as all other options were too much trouble. The train ferry service running from the Lithuanian SSR to Mukran on the island of Rugen could only take what would be small cargoes overall and despite being still operational was liable to an enemy attack that would close it at any time. Rail lines that ran from the Ukrainian SSR into Czechoslovakia and hence to East Germany were long and again not able to carry enough for the immense transfer required. There were aircraft available to move men in great numbers but certainly not everything else from the thousands of tanks to heavy equipment to supplies… those were also being used for other supply missions that were keeping key units stocked with certain missiles and such like.

It was through Poland on the railway lines that the extraordinary large Soviet Army force needed to move as the road links were poor and couldn’t compare to those rail links that connected the Soviet Union with Poland through multiple points and with a lot of infrastructure in-place. Hundreds upon hundreds of freight trains were to make back-and-forth journeys between East Germany and western portions of the Soviet Union and to make use of the rail transportation infrastructure in Poland. There had been a lot of damage done by NATO aircraft dropping bombs in the west and some home-grown acts of sabotage elsewhere throughout the country, but continuing repairs were to make good that damage and allow the trains to keep running.

Those trains weren’t meant to stop inside Poland unless it was absolutely necessary as there was a war going on; the soldiers weren’t sightseeing. Yet, circumstances would of course mean that they would and it was when they did that trouble occurred with the rebellious Poles.


Railway lines throughout most of Europe – both sides of the Iron Curtain – used the European Standard Gauge on their tracks with the result being that trains, passenger and freight alike, could criss-cross the Continent with ease between different countries. However, the Soviet Union used the Broad Gauge with their railway networks. While this at first glance appeared to be something minor – the difference in width was very small to the layman – for those involved in transportation it was anything but that. Trains couldn’t cross from European nations such as Poland straight into and across the Soviet Union due to different width’s being used upon the tracks. They had to stop and either the passenger & freight carriages be lifted onto new undercarriages in a time-consuming process even with automation, or everyone and everything aboard those trains needed to depart and load onto new trains using the different gauge. There were locations used on the main railway lines were newer systems were used and this Variable Gauge alternative was being made available elsewhere but that was a long drawn-out process.

This significant constraint in rail transportation between two allied nations had been in place since either was the modern country which they were today despite much talk through many years about making a change so that those railways in the Warsaw Pact countries would be compatible with those in the Soviet Union or, even better, making Variable Gauge available everywhere. Meanwhile, at cross-border locations along the frontiers between both nations there were multiple change-over points where trains either came to an end, they were lifted onto a new undercarriage with wheels and axles (a process known as a ‘Bogie Exchange’), or slowed down so that Variable Gauge could be put to use.

The Soviets were using all of the railway lines that they could as they moved across into Poland and the issue with the gauges came into play for them to a significant extent. Trains came to a stop or slowed down greatly in railway sidings inside Poland. These were far enough away from the frontlines that NATO aircraft hadn’t done damage to such places from the air yet on the ground there had been a few instances of sabotage beforehand from Poles trying to destroy this infrastructure. There was now a determination for that to not happen again and so Polish workers had been expelled en mass from such locations and Soviet railwaymen (who had been conscripted in a special category) operated such systems. For Soviets to replace Poles like this left the thousands of latter out of work and thus angry while the former struggling to operate systems that they understood yet were different from what they had expected.

The changing of gauges slowed things down to a great deal and then near several of those sites from where Poles had been expelled there were disturbances from unemployed workers who weren’t happy at ‘Russians’ taking their jobs.


Elsewhere in Poland, railway bridges over many of the country’s biggest rivers in the west had been bombed by NATO aircraft who often made repeated attack missions to make sure that if those structures above water weren’t destroyed the first time they would be bombed until they were. Those bridges above the Oder, the Warta, the Netze and parts of the mighty Vistula had been brought down and the rail connections cut.

Soviet-led efforts using their engineers and ‘encouraged labour’ on the part of local Poles had been made to construct new crossings where the old one were destroyed. There were temporary structures put in place and new air defences assembled to stop these being blown up like the ones which they replaced. Such hasty work mainly in the form of pontoon bridges over which track was laid was remarkable in its scope and the speed which these were constructed yet these were nowhere near as strong or as sturdy as those there beforehand. Heavily-laden freight trains couldn’t go over most of these new bridges due to their weight and so the solution that was the unloading of cargoes on one side of the river, the trains to go across and then the cargo – human and material – to be re-joined with the trains on the other side.

Everything possible was done to reduce delays where this occurred but of course something could also go wrong… especially with NATO aircraft knowing where the crossing points were and dropping bombs for disruption purposes over men and equipment exposed out in the open. Those on the ground waiting to get across rivers learnt to hate the sound of F-111s on their egress.

Trouble between Poles and Soviets flared at these locations when locals and ‘Russians’ interacted.


Elsewhere, there continued to be the arrival in Polish ports along the coast of ships bringing their wares from Soviet ports further along the Baltic. Warehouses with military equipment and stores throughout the Baltic States and the Leningrad area had been emptied and ships made the journey down to places such as Gdansk, Gdynia and Swinoujscie (the outer port for Szczecin) as this cross-water travel cut down on transport times. Replacing the dockworkers wholescale at such places was too much effort for the Soviets so they brought in plenty of their own supervisors and security troops to oversee the locals Poles.

Again, trouble flared in these locations as the Soviets treated the Poles like they were their slaves and their answers to any form of resistance was the barrel of a gun. Homemade bombs started to be used by certain Poles who had been pushed too far and there were also instances of arson and outright sabotage to answer the Soviet actions.


The Soviets soon found that they couldn’t rely upon the Polish security forces to the extent which they should have and this was evident in the mass disturbances that took place in Warsaw throughout the night of March 31st / April 1st.

Pro-democracy campaigners inside the city had been for weeks now trying to organise a big march through the very heart of the capital city calling for free and fair elections to take place in Poland. With the war going on and attention focused elsewhere they had first believed that this would have been less difficult than usual but instead of just combating security agents from the Polish UB the Soviet KGB had been active in Warsaw arresting and even killing the organisers. It had seemed like the march would never take place as time and time again those trying to get it going were caught by their oppressors. Finally, though more and more people got involved in organising such an event and these weren’t the usual people too. The ongoing war brought out fears in many people and they were looking for an outlet for those… which they found in what was starting to be called the Warsaw Underground.

The weapons of the Warsaw Underground had before been illegal printing press but in reaction of the overtly brutal crackdowns made lethal weapons had been gathered and had been used in a few instances for self-defence purposes only. With the march which they arranged and then led, such people – all of whom considered themselves true patriots – kept their clubs, knives and pistols on them but out of sight as they tried to lead a peaceful march. There had been calls made over radio waves that may or may not have been created by the West for them to rise up and depose their government but such a thing wasn’t viable. Instead, the march through Warsaw was meant to make a big show and encourage more people to join their cause rather than at this early stage bring about true change.

More people than anticipated turned out for the march and there were nowhere near enough marshals to direct people as well as a crowd that wasn’t prepared to listen to those who were apparently in charge and with lofty intentions. The pro-democracy march became an unruly mob soon enough and then took on the character of a riot when security forces in Warsaw tried to break it up and start arresting some of those taking part. There were protesters everywhere though who were heading in all sorts of directions through the centre of Warsaw. The organisers had lost control and the Polish security forces were not strong enough to take on such an unpredictable mob who soon started committing acts of violence themselves.

Arson, looting and assaults occurred throughout the centre of Warsaw. Poles fired on Poles and Molotov Cocktails as well as paving stabs were thrown. Some security troops decided to stand aside after refusing to obey orders to shoot the mob and where these instances occurred there was often a break in the lines of the security forces through which the mob moved and attacked anyone in authority who they came across.

With the war going on to the west and the need to assist in the railway movements to the east, Warsaw wasn’t at that point a stronghold for the Soviets. Nonetheless, they did have a presence in the city as it was the Polish capital and when the violence erupted they took notice. There were fears that the government was about to be overthrown and also that Soviet building and personnel in the city might be attacked as well. What Soviet security troops could be quickly gathered up were assembled and sent against the mob to drive them right out of the heart of the city in lightning assaults using automatic gunfire of an indiscriminate fashion. The Poles themselves would kill more of their own people than the Soviets would, yet the method in which the Soviets did their killing was brutal but effective. They stopped the government from being overthrown and then let Polish security forces chase the mob out of the city centre into the suburbs throughout the night and into the morning.

The Battle of Warsaw had been a bloody affair and what happened there rather confusing to most of those involved and both factors would make sure that when other Poles heard about it the worst possible reactions would follow.

After the deaths in Warsaw, the Great Polish Rebellion was now truly underway and taking place while the Soviets were trying to move their armies through the country on the way to save the war from being lost in Germany.