Červený Poplach: The NATO-Soviet Standoff Over Czechoslovakia

Thanks again Pats, it's a great success and a lot of French readers really appreciate your work!

Update: Due to an unexpected medical mishap on my part last week, the release of Part 35 will be rescheduled for the week of December 15th.

Sorry for the delay in posting Part 35; I've had my hands full with getting ready for the holidays. I'll have it up by next Thursday at the latest.

Quick update: I've just started work on Part 36.

  


PART 36/Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes



Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year Reich died in the frozen rubble of Stalingrad and the searing deserts of North Africa. The British Empire’s quest to retain control of her American colonies came to grief in the Hudson River Valley near Saratoga. Napoleon’s last hope for dominating continental Europe was trampled under the boots of Wellington’s and Blücher’s infantry at Waterloo. The Confederacy in the American Civil War saw its vision of a Southern slave republic buried in the farmlands of Gettysburg. Persia’s fabled Achaemenid Empire was destroyed-- along with most of its armies --in the Battle of Gaugamela. Had Leonid Brezhnev been heedful of the lessons to be learned from these defeats, he might have avoided the chaos which would engulf his nation in the post-Czech War era. He certainly would have spared the Red Army from the disaster that was about to befall it as it launched what would turn out to be its final major strategic offensive against NATO in Europe. As it was, Brezhnev’s hubris would lay the foundation for the worst Russian military defeat on land since the Battle of Tannenberg in World War I.


By the time the battle plan for what was officially code-named Operation Zaitsev had been finalized, most clear-eyed observers on both sides of the Czech War could see that the USSR had for all intents and purposes lost the conflict. Even though there wasn’t yet a precise vision for what a cease-fire would entail, it was generally accepted the Kremlin had no recourse at that point but to accept some sort of a negotiated settlement with NATO-- if only to free up manpower for the still-raging border war with China or the campaign against the anti-Brezhnev rebels in Ukraine. The nuclear option had long since been taken off the table; despite diligent efforts to catch up with the United States in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis the Soviets still trailed them by over 10,000 warheads, and multiple Western military and diplomatic officials had stated any Soviet nuclear attacks on NATO military or civilian targets would be met with(in the words of President Humphrey’s national security advisor) a “cataclysmic” retaliatory strike. But Brezhnev was convinced he could still grasp victory-- or at least a favorable draw --from the jaws of defeat if he struck hard and swiftly enough at NATO forces in central Europe in just the proper place. That place, in his judgement, was in the countryside north of the Polish city of Bialystok. Most of the intelligence available to him suggested that the Bialystok region was one of the weakest points of NATO’s main defense line in central Europe.


The Soviet leader wasn’t entirely wrong in that assessment; most of the ground forces assigned to the defense of Bialystok and the area surrounding it were composed of reserve units with little experience in combat. These units had been rotated into the Bialystok region to give the first-tier forces a chance to rest and re-equip. Much as had been the case when Hitler launched his ill-fated “Wacht am Rhein” offensive in the Ardennes in 1944, Brezhnev hoped to catch NATO off-guard and drive a wedge into their front lines. His immediate goal was to seize the Polish capital Warsaw; his longer-time objective was to create a strategic bridgehead from which the Red Army could mount offensives to retake East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The first phase of Operative Zaitsev, timed to coincide with the 26-year anniversary of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, would be spearheaded by Red Army airborne units preceded with Soviet air force bomber raids on the most thinly stretched of the reserve contingents. At precisely 4:40 AM Moscow time on February 5th, 1969 a squadron of Tu-16 Badgers took off from an airfield in Belarus to carry out the opening air strike of Operation Zaitsev. For the first twelve hours of the offensive it looked like Brezhnev's gamble would pay off-- the reserve troops in the targeted areas were forced into an abrupt retreat and by 12:38 PM that afternoon Soviet ground forces had fully occupied Bialystok. The Polish government was sufficiently concerned about the way the situation was unfolding to order a precautionary evacuation of all civilians from Warsaw. The top U.S. Army commander in Germany dispatched tanks and artillery to Gdansk in anticipation of a possible amphibious invasion attempt by Soviet Naval Infantry troops.

By mid-afternoon on February 7th Soviet ground forces were sweeping south towards Lublin and Warsaw was in range of Soviet air force attack jets. Brezhnev confidently predicted to his advisors that it would be only a matter of weeks, perhaps days, before NATO's strategic position in Poland utterly collapsed and a new Communist regime could be installed to bring the Polish people back into the Soviet orbit. But his optimism on that score would be swiftly and emphatically dashed. Regular Polish army units mounted a heroic defense of Lublin and initiated a three-pronged counteroffensive to retake Bialystok; behind the Soviet lines NATO intelligence operatives assisted local partisans in making guerrilla raids aimed at disrupting the Red Army battle plan. When the leader of the main Soviet front sent his Polish counterpart a message demanding the immediate surrender of all Polish military forces, the Polish commander gave a simple two-word response: "Padnij trupem(Drop dead)!" Then, as if Brezhnev's woes weren't already dire enough, the 2nd Battalion of the British Army's Parachute Regiment decided to add insult to injury by air-dropping into Bialystok in the dead of night on February 12th and seizing a key Soviet defensive position on the eastern edge of the city. While the Soviets were trying to dislodge the Paras from that sector, US Army helicopters landed detachments of Green Berets to capture other important Red Army facilities in and around Bialystok. The much-feared amphibious assault on Gdansk never materialized as the Soviet marines who had been expected to conduct it were instead re-routed to Kaliningrad to guard the Baltic port enclave against what Brezhnev's senior generals regarded as the possibility of a landing by Western forces.

On February 15th the remaining Soviet forces in Bialystok began pulling out of the city and the drive towards Lublin was reluctantly called off. Within hours, the Red Army general staff ordered the cancellation of Phase 2 of Operation Zaitsev, which was to have focused on pushing to take Krakow and encircle Warsaw. Casualties on both sides of the battle for Bialystok had been heavy, but the Soviets had by far gotten the worst of it. And not all of the Red Army's losses were the result of enemy action-- postwar investigations by the U.N. would confirm that many Soviet soldiers had committed suicide out of despair or been executed by their officers for perceived acts of insubordination. The once-vaunted Soviet war machine was stripping its gears, and no one in the Kremlin wanted to think about what the consequences would be when that machine fell apart altogether....

TO BE CONTINUED

Nice to see it back.

    


PART 37/To Boldly Go…



It may seem hard to believe but “Star Trek” wasn’t always the pop culture juggernaut that we’re familiar with today. In fact, when the Czech War began the original TV series had barely managed to survive its second season on NBC and most of the signs were pointing to Season 3 being the end. Binge-watching wasn’t yet a thing and Nielsen ratings were still the primary metric for judging a TV show’s success or failure-- and by that metric “Trek” was barely keeping its head above water. Only a massive letter-writing campaign by fans of the series had kept NBC from pulling the plug in Season 2; even then it had been a close call. With the show still having difficulty gaining traction in its third season, some members of its cast and production crew had already started mentally preparing themselves for the end. It seemed to be less a question of if than when “Trek” would fade from the airwaves.

The Czech War changed the show’s destiny in ways few people would have dared imagine to be even remotely possible. For a world gripped with anxiety at the possibility-- albeit slim --that the war might still escalate into nuclear conflict, “Trek” provided a much-needed dose of reassurance that a bright future for humanity was still within reach. For US troops on the battle lines in central Europe, it offered a welcome reminder of home. And for the citizens of the countries that were formerly under the bootheel of the Warsaw Pact, the series presented a model for a more democratic way of life. With all those things in mind there was considerable pressure on NBC to keep the show going; accordingly in mid-January of 1969 the network’s head of programming announced that “Trek” would be renewed for a fourth season. That fourth season would witness a host of storylines influenced extensively by the NATO-Soviet conflict as well as the anti-Brezhnev rebellion in Ukraine. One episode in particular, the two-parter “By the Light of Inferno”, touched a deep chord within viewers who had family or friends stranded behind the Ukrainian battle lines. “Inferno” served as a parable for the real-life brutality the Red Army was inflicting on Ukrainian civilians and anti-Brezhnev insurgents-- not to mention the PTSD suffered by those who’d witnessed such brutality.

Within the Soviet Union’s own borders there was an underground community of people who embraced “Trek” not just as an act of political defiance but also out of boredom with the stultifying content of most conventional Soviet TV programming. Braving not just Soviet mainstream societal disapproval but also arrest or even execution by the KGB, the members of this community used any means they could to access Western TV broadcast signals for the sake of getting just a glimpse of Gene Roddenberry's vision of a better world. They also traded bootleg 8 mm films of "Trek" episodes, developing a smuggling network whose ingenuity would have made the most devious Prohibition bootlegger green with envy. Despite occasional KGB successes in arresting members of this network it would continue to operate right up until the end of the war-- often as not with the aid of some members of the very agency tasked with shutting it down.

The Kremlin's internal security establishment would sooner or later find itself confronted with far more serious problems than people ignoring regulations against consuming Western pop culture. With the cost of defeat in central Europe continuing to rise and the border conflict with China turning into an unmitigated disaster, the same tidal wave of insurrection that had washed through the armies of the Soviet Union's former Warsaw Pact allies was about to flood the Soviet Union itself....
TO BE CONTINUED