People's War

Well he is the head of the Stasi with his own private army under his control, so yes i think a lot more people are going to die.

Yes, that is true.




Regime change is really, really not wanted in Washington, London, Paris etc. But they kinda just made it happen!
Only a mild form though. What isn't wanted is a DDR collapse that they will have to pick up the pieces of.


His own army but his ally has a bigger one: all alliance of the People's Security and People's Army is all powerful.

Either the use of one of their nuclear bombs they do not have ore a invasion of West Germany.

Forty-five – Active-defence


Spider ballistic missiles were launched from out of East Germany during the night. Previous missile strikes westwards had come just before dawn following a night of Coalition air attacks against the DDR. That changed when the country was under the new leadership of Schwanitz. Just a dozen were fired, not joined by Scuds nor even shorter range ballistic weapons neither, but the strike was still quite something. Launch vehicles lofted the missiles and were with haste on the move to nearby hiding spots away from where they had fired. Expansive tin foil sheeting, soon soaked with water, was pulled over the launch vehicles to limit their heat signature. Coalition jets were in the skies above East Germany and those missile firings, all done within the space of a few minutes, didn’t go unnoticed. In the Thuringwald, a flight of Belgian F-16s managed to do significant damage to a battery of missiles when the concealment measures weren’t put into place fast enough. A flight of A-10s flown by US Air Force Reserve pilots sought out another missile battery post-firing in the same forested, hilly region of the DDR yet faced extensive SAM fire leading to two jets getting back over the Inner-German Border all shot up: the Spider set-up they had sought eluded them too. Later Coalition air strikes would seek out the missile launchers but to no avail. The East Germans were damn quick and pretty good – mistakes aside – at getting themselves hidden after they’d fired off their lethal weapons of war at distant targets.

Air raid sirens wailed across West Germany. The population there had thought that the missile attacks from out of the DDR had come to an end yet when they were woken in the early hours, terror gripped many. Anyone who lived near an American or British military base on West German soil, even within any reasonable distance of them, sought immediate cover within their homes. The Spiders sailed right over that neutral country though and instead crashed into neighbouring ones which were part of the Coalition engaged in conflict with East Germany. Copenhagen Airport, right there next to the Oresund, was struck by two missiles: Swedish civilians across the water over near Malmo were awoken but unharmed by the blasts which saw an aviation fuel tank detonate. Dutch Patriot missile crews claimed another Spider – unlike before, this one exploding in mid-air rather than killing people on the ground when shot down – in what was a fantastic achievement of their shooting skills. Alas, three more were unsuccessfully engaged and went where the fourth was meant to go: the Port of Rotterdam. Rotterdam was just inside the range of the Spiders in East German hands, just. A trio of huge explosions rocked that port facility with nothing struck being in any reasonable way military-connected. One of the three Spiders shot at the Port of Antwerp, away to the south of Rotterdam, had a misfire when launching (resulting in those A-10s in action over the Thuringwald) but the other two made near-perfect hits. Again, that Belgian port facility was a long way off from East Germany yet it was in range of those missiles and deemed a worthy target for them. The final three ballistic missiles slammed into French territory. It was France’s first time being the victim of such an attack. Honecker had refused to allow for strikes against France, fearing a massive overreaction with that. Schwanitz had had enough of France getting off seemingly scot-free from all that it was doing to his country. Rail connections around the northeastern city of Metz were hit pretty damn hard though one of the missiles, only a little bit off-course, slammed into a residential area rather than the nearby rail yard. Sirens had wailed in France as they had done in West Germany, Denmark and the Low Countries though not enough of those who lived in Metz had taken enough notice. There would be a lot of regret about that afterwards though whether the six lives lost of innocents in Metz could have been avoided in they’d reached their basements was debatable.

Both US Army- & Luftwaffe-operated Patriots, based in West Germany, failed to hit any of those missiles which sailed right over their heads into those economic/transportation targets far in the rear. The East Germans had previously only targeted military bases but there was a marked change in what they hit in their latest attack.


Again, before there was even a hint of light on the morning sky, East German military action in retaliation for the air campaign against it took place in a different and unexpected form when commando teams were sent into action. None struck where they might have been expected to, where since the opening of hostilities there was a strong guard maintained against them: the frontline airbases. Schwanitz sent orders out for the Stasi-controlled raiding detachments on foreign soil to complete assigned missions pre-arranged for them. One team didn’t acknowledge the order and two more who did responded in the negative when it came to their ability to conduct the operations assigned for them due to enhanced opposing security measures. The others went into action though. None of those were thrown away into fool-hardly, risky and ultimately pointless suicide missions. They were valuable assets with a ‘reusable’ capability. Nonetheless, the casualty rate among them would be high.

One of the UK-based commando detachments failed to comply with instructions to strike but the other team did. Up in North Yorkshire, Menwith Hill Station was attacked. No daring assault was made to breach the perimeter fence to place satchel charges or blow up the computer systems there. Instead, firing from outside of the fence, mortar rounds were launched at the iconic radomes which provided weather protection for the communications interception antenna. Menwith Hill was an extremely important facility for American eavesdropping and with a couple of dozen mortar shells fired in quick succession, the commando team put a big hole in that capability. The SAS were later sent after them. At first, the attackers left behind their two mortars and split up into four two-man teams who moved towards safehouses far off. British regular soldiers tried to chase them down and there was police involvement too. It was the SAS, active on home soil, who eventually engaged the pinned down commandos where they were sent up against half of the attackers in firefights late the same afternoon. The other attackers escaped such attention though and continued to hide from the British authorities who were seeking them. Only one commando team was sent into action on West German soil. Others who had been there had moved onwards into Coalition countries. The remaining team struck at Sembach AB in the Rhineland. Two men and two women stayed away from the perimeter fencing itself and all of those armed personnel inside: they were also nowhere near the protesters whom the commando team considered to be quiet mad even if useful. They were in nearby woodland, below the flight path of aircraft taking off. Arranged as one spotter, one missile-man and two for close-in security, the commando team there fired a stolen US Army Stinger missile at a departing C-130 Hercules. With road access blocked by protesting West German civilians, the Americans were flying supplies in and out of their West German airbases. That four-engined transport was departing from Sembach on its way back to the UK to complete a turnaround. Munitions had already been flown in for the A-10s flying from the airbase. When hit by the Stinger, the empty C-130 was low enough and slow enough so that a recovery could be made to the nearby Ramstein AB. It put down there and wouldn’t fly again yet no lives were lost. US Air Force Security Police along with US Army soldiers who’d recently been sent to aid security efforts searched the woodland from where the missile was launched and recovered the disposable launch tube. They found none of the attackers though. As to the effect of the East German strike, crippling an empty transport aircraft wasn’t the goal at all. What it was instead, and what would be done, would be for combat take-offs to be launched from airbases across West Germany by Coalition aircraft. Since the start of Operation Allied Sword, American aviators had wanted to do that but ‘political sensitivities’ meant that that was something refused. That changed right after the incident outside of Sembach. Aircraft would be making zoom climbs, dropping flares with that. Security patrols would go outside of the airbases and be far more intrusive than before into the innocent activities of civilians. An already frustrated, even angry population, was certain, such was the East German thinking, to be be more so with all of that going on. The cost for the DDR was just one little missile.

Special forces activity took place across Denmark, the Low Countries and France where East German commandos sought to cause damage to both the Northern (in Denmark) and Central Europe Pipeline System. Those two networks, the latter far more extensive than the former, linked ports to airbases. It was a NATO set-up, decades in the making to allow for the rapid movement of aviation fuel to where it was needed in times of conflict. Use of the pipelines was made available to commercial operators too with many airports in recent years, since the Soviet threat disappeared, being connected. That helped pay for the costs of maintaining a complicated network with all sorts of infrastructure all over the place. Two explosions rocked isolated sites in Denmark far away from either the port facility at Frederikshavn and the airbases down in southern Jutland used by the Danes themselves and their wartime allies. Danish soldiers would later engage one of those departing commando teams, with casualties on each side, though the other would escape unharmed. Fuel deliveries were disrupted and damage was done. Fatal it wasn’t with regards to harming the Coalition war effort, but it wasn’t anything to be ignored. Six Stasi commandos (one of them a woman) died in a hail of gunfire on the outskirts of the Orléans–Bricy airbase not far from Paris. French special forces engaged them after the East Germans had been for some time tailed by intelligence operatives. Those attackers were seeking to enter the airbase and set off explosions with fuel connections at that rear-area transport hub. Instead, French bullets took their lives. An operation at Le Havre on the coastline of the English Channel had more luck though where a connecting fuel terminal went up in flames with those who struck getting away clean. In the southern reaches of the Netherlands and also at two sites in rural Belgium, all of them being out of the way quiet locations, explosive charges went off to ignite fires where aviation fuel would subsequently burn fiercely. The East Germans had more luck with those attacks than their strike to hit Brussels’ airport. The fuel terminal there was pre-scouted but at the very last minute, the commando team leader saw more Belgian soldiers than he could ever have expected. He gave the order for his team to stand down rather than die for no reason in trying to make an attack there. His men were best off surviving to fight another day and so he returned them to the their safehouse.


West Berlin was shelled come dawn.

Earlier attacks against that exclave had consisted of armed helicopters making targeted strikes and also pinpoint blasts where long-range mortars were used. Those had halted when the ballistic missile firings had done so too. American, British and French soldiers were still curled up in tight defensive positions – abandoning half of the city to any takeover so they could defend the other half – while all around them the citizens of the city, who were technically not West Germans, waiting for war to return to West Berlin. That it did when explosions rocked selected portions of the city. Those big mortars were back in action. East German Army units far away fired 240mm shells at several defensive positions which the soldiers of the Western powers had set up. Those came from M240 towed mortars, a weapon which pre-war the Coalition didn’t consider than the East Germans had in their inventory. They had some though, ones picked up from former Soviet storage depots and left unguarded for thieves to sell on the arms black market. In Charlottenburg, Kreuzberg and Wedding, those mortar rounds fell over a period of several hours with variable, unpredictable gaps between their arrival.

Joining them, though fewer in number, were laser-guided artillery shells. An illegally DDR-produced version of the Soviet-era Krasnopol weapon was employed. Those were fired by D20 howitzers far outside of the city with the 152mm shells falling on ballistic arcs to slam into further military targets. The mortars were to keep heads down, provide distractions and cause general damage whereas those guided shells caused immense destruction against the targets. They slammed into the entrenched military positions that the foreign soldiers had set themselves up in to make a fight for West Berlin a nightmare for East Germany to undertake. Defensive positions were near demolished in a good few cases with misses a rarity. A few of those under fire, those with artillery experience in particular, had to marvel at the quality of the shelling. What the East Germans wanted to hit, they did. However, a couple of those expensive shells, plus more of the bigger mortar rounds, fell off-target. Civilians had been evacuated away from military positions in the defended portions of West Berlin but not always far enough. More than a dozen innocent lives would be lost with the majority of those in the densely-populated Kreuzberg. American soldiers there waited for East German soldiers to come through the Berlin Wall – Checkpoint Charlie was in that section of the city – and into Kreuzberg where they intended to give them one heck of a fight. All that came instead though were those mortars and targeted shells. West Berlin remained wholly surrounded but another day would pass without an invasion taking place there.

Schwanitz’s three strikes – missiles, commandos and the targeted shelling of West Berlin – went ahead with out anyone in his regime questioning his use of such measures against the Coalition. Too much caution, too many fears of going too far had been in-place beforehand. Finally, he, and his backers in the Volksarmee, were allowed off their tight leash previously imposed. Under the rule of Honecker, only military-specific targets had been hit in response to all of those bombs which had fallen upon East Germany. Schwanitz changed the rules of the game with that though as he employed that active-defence strategy that he had long sought to see implemented. Airports, seaports and transport links targeted were done so to cause serious disruption among those targeting his country. The military strikes against the aviation fuel network was also regarded as something to go beyond what had been done before, to cause a reaction from the Coalition where they would have to expend far more effort to stop a repeat attack than it would take to mount one. Not sending missiles into West Germany, even the Coalition military bases there, but at the same time attacking West Berlin when (legal technicalities aside) it was a West German city, was Schwanitz seeking to be clever with what he was doing. He wanted to throw his opponents off balance, he wanted them to finally understand that the DDR was no longer going to ‘play nice’. They’d started a war against his country but it was one he intended to win. That wouldn’t come by matching them equally on the battlefield: instead, as before, it would come by not fighting fair.

Not the only ones ready to play dirty too.