Soldiers and Marines Saga, page 48
“Good morning, Mr. President.” Whoops. It’s afternoon there. General Roberts here with Admiral Peavey of the UK. Admiral Peavey, as you know is NATO’s naval commander. Commandant Murphy and Generals Masefield and Clause are not available. They are in the field visiting their troops.”
“Good morning, General Roberts. Uh, what is your analysis as to how things are going?”
“We continue to do unexpectedly well, Mr. President, and the Russians and East Germans continue to do unexpectedly poorly.”
“Uh, General, the Chancellor called me earlier today. He is quite concerned about the bridges over the Elbe and Weser falling into enemy hands, upset about it really. I told him that overall I thought things are going rather well and that I’d look into it and get back to him.”
“Good thinking, Sir. You said the right thing. Unfortunately, Mr. President, it wouldn’t do at all to let the Chancellor know anything other than what the Russians and East Germans already know. As you know, his office is almost certainly compromised so that telling him something means you are also telling it to Moscow. It is my deepest fear that someone who is on the Security Council will talk out of turn and cause this war to be lost.” Someone like Secretary of State Hoffman.
“Uh General, some members of the Security Council here think we should privately tell the Chancellor that letting the Warsaw Pact leaders think they are breaking through in the north is deliberate on our part. Do you agree?”
“Absolutely not, Sir. I do not in any way agree. My God, Mr. President, leaking that information to anyone, especially to the Chancellor could cause us to lose the war. Please explain to the Security Council members that the Chancellor himself is beyond suspicion but that his office is undoubtedly penetrated. That’s why you must order them to never mention what we are doing to anyone. Clausen says the Chancellor’s office is penetrated. I believe him.
“Well then… what do you suggest I tell him?”
“Sir, I recommend you tell him the truth—that at this time we have no additional units available to send north because we are strained to the limit holding the central and southern fronts and stopping the advance towards Hamburg. That’s what we want Moscow and Ivanov to think and at this moment it is true.” Yes, it’s true.
******
According the intelligence report Colonel Barnes just handed me with last night’s NSA intercepts, the Soviet Chairman is upset, very upset, about how the war is going. He is apparently furious because his military people have kept him in the dark about the extent of their losses and damage we have inflicted. NSA says the Chairman only found out yesterday afternoon about the full extent to which the Warsaw Pact’s power plants and bridges have been destroyed and their staggering air losses.
What has really infuriated the Russian Chairman, according to the NSA report, is that he only found out the full extent of the losses because the leaders of the other Warsaw Pact countries, particularly the Czech Republic and Hungary, began calling him and urging him to make peace. They are distraught that so many of their refineries, bridges, and power plants have been destroyed.
The transcripts of Marshall Ivanov’s explanation are interesting. I wonder how we got what Ivanov was saying to the President but not the whole conversation.
“Yes Comrade Chairman, it is absolutely true we have suffered losses. And it’s true that due to a lack of adequate intelligence we were not prepared for some of the fascists’ actions.
“Yes that is true. But much more important, Comrade Chairman, is that we are continuing to make substantial advances on all three fronts. For example, and of the greatest importance, yesterday we captured intact the key bridges we need to support our move into the enemy heartland.”
“Yes. Intact, Comrade Chairman, we captured them intact. Our troops are pouring into the fascists’ heartland as we speak. We are winning, Comrade Chairman, we are winning.”
******
Iceland’s Reykjavik airport is super busy as civilian and military planes transiting the Atlantic from a host of counties pour in around the clock en route to Europe. The transiting planes were in a normal state of constantly arriving and departing when Reykjavik radar began picking up signals indicating a large number Warsaw Pact planes are approaching from the northwest. The alert sirens began sounding and an announcement was immediately made on the aircraft frequencies.
According to the identifiers picked up by Reykjavik’s radar, the approaching planes are Russian “Backfire” bombers and they are probably armed with long range cruise missiles. Forty-two minutes behind them are five full regiments of troop carrying transport planes, AN-12s. They apparently made a great westward swing out over the ocean to stay out of range of our AWACS. Why didn’t the NSA hear the communications related to this attack? Or did they and we didn’t get the word?
All of Iceland’s air defense fighters, a squadron of old Air Force F-4s, immediately scrambled to confront the oncoming Backfires and their escorts. Similarly, immediately upon hearing the tower’s urgent warning of a massive incoming raid, the transiting planes on the ground, at least those that could, began desperately trying to follow the F-4s on to the runway to escape.
Chaos is the only way to describe the effect of the sudden announcement that the Russians are coming. The airspace over Reykjavik quickly turned chaotic because many of the planes approaching Iceland for refueling cannot be diverted. They don’t have enough fuel to go anywhere else; they have to land.
Actually they don’t have to land at the airfield. An alert airman first class air traffic controller in the tower quickly took it upon himself to broadcast information about several other Icelandic airfields, including old Reykjavik which doesn’t appear on the pilots’ aerial charts because it is closed.
A number of the approaching planes immediately announced their decision to divert to those fields and a couple of in-bound tankers and some C-130s came on the air to say they have enough fuel and will try to make it all the way to Norway. Unfortunately, the amount of radio traffic quickly increased to such a volume that no one could understand anything as the panic stricken inbound pilots frantically asked questions and announced their intentions.
Old Reykjavik and its abandoned runway may be too short for some of the approaching planes, and it has no fuel supplies, but it is still in fairly good shape and certainly a far better alternative than ditching in the always-cold and fatal waters of the North Atlantic. There are also several other airfields with short strips on the other side of the island.
******
All of the Russian Backfires fired their six long range cruise missiles long before they could be intercepted. Then they turned back. The F-4s quickly begin a frantic hunt for the slow flying missiles with the help of the Reykjavik radar station operators. They succeed in shooting down several dozen of the more than two hundred Russian missiles before they ran low on fuel and their heartbroken squadron leader ordered them to break off and head for Norway and safety.
Air force and Icelandic air traffic controllers in the tower and its adjacent control center could only watch their radar screens in horrified disbelief as the tracks of the remaining missiles began to converge on the field. For a few seconds they even saw some of the explosions as the proximity fuses on the missiles caused them to explode just a few feet off the ground. Then the tower and the control center and their lives were torn apart.
******
Dozens and dozens of Russian missiles rained down on the field. The tower was ripped by a series of nearby explosions and its occupants shredded by the resulting shrapnel and flying glass. A C-130 lifting off in a desperate effort to escape suddenly lost a wing and cartwheeled into an administrative office building, turning the building and its adjacent hangar into a huge ball of flames.
The nineteen hundred or so Marines of the Eleventh Expeditionary Unit were deployed all around the field for just such an attack. Their commander, newly promoted Marine brigadier Joseph Henry “Big Dog” Smith, watches the attack begin through his binoculars from a bunker about a thousand yards off the runway.
It isn’t really a bunker, just one of the many fighting positions the Marines hastily dug as soon as they got ashore. In reality it was a hole in the ground with a radio in it that was surrounded by sand bags filled with the dirt from the hole. Having the radio made it a headquarters.
“Air bursts,” the General shouted. “They’re not cratering the runways.” Smith knew exactly what that meant and he was right—the Russians were going to try to capture the field and they wanted to leave the runways intact so they can quickly start using them.
If the tower and the airport radar it contains had not been destroyed the tower operators would have seen the armada of transport planes and their aerial-refueled fighter escorts that follow the cruise missiles. The Russians had mobilized almost every available transport and aerial refueling plane left in their inventory, enough to carry all four divisions of the Fifteenth and Twenty-first Airborne Corps, Russia’s elite airborne troops, all the way from their bases in Central Russia to Reykjavik.
Almost eighteen thousand Russian paratroopers were about to descend on Iceland.
Smith shouted his orders into the mike he is holding.
“Topper One to all Topper Units, anticipate airborne attack at any moment. Launch all Harriers and helicopters.” Goddamn it, we are really going to take a hit.
“Send a flash to NATO,” he bellowed at a signals officer, a wide-eyed Chief Warrant Officer, standing in the doorway of the command vehicle parked nearby “Reykjavik closed indefinitely. Strong missile attack. Airbursts only. Airborne assault anticipated.”
A cigarette hung down from the side of the Chief’s mouth as he stood in a trance and looked at the exploding missiles with his mouth hanging open.
“Send that immediately, goddammit,” Smith shouted, as the Chief snapped his mouth shut and dove back into the truck. “Then get your ass out here with your weapon.” I’m going to need every man I can get.
******
Reykjavik’s remaining aerial defenses consisted of the six Marine Harriers which arrived with the Marines. To the dismay of the Icelanders living nearby who had complained bitterly about the noise, Smith had shrewdly placed them on the abandoned runway of the Old Reykjavik airport.
As the Harriers waited and prepared to scramble, their Marine ground crews picked up their personal weapons and got ready to fight as infantry. Also on Old Reykjavik were Smith’s six attack helicopters. They waited off to the side of the runway with their blades turning as a stream of planes and planes escaping from Reykjavik International began to land on their own with no tower operators to guide them.
Smith ordered the Marine choppers to wait. He wanted them to lift off and go for the paratroopers only after they began dropping. Smith was no dummy—he knows the parachutes in the air will prevent the Russian fighters from attacking the helicopters that are engaging the helpless paratroopers dangling from them.
Four big formations of Russian transport planes approached Reykjavik. Each was closely surrounded by aerial-refueled SU-27s tasked to stay close to the troop carriers in order to defend them. The first two formations came in side by side, one dropping its jumpers directly on to the airfield and other dropping them into an open area about five miles away.
The next two Russian formations arrived five minutes later and repeated the process.
******
The Russian fighters stayed with the troop transports all the way to Reykjavik. Their pilots did not know there were six Marine Harriers on the Old Reykjavik airport runway. They also did not know that one of the F-4 squadron’s planes got off late due to a radio malfunction and that a transiting four plane element of fully armed F-16s had been almost ready to taxi for takeoff when the evacuation scramble began. The F-16s are a ferry flight piloted by female pilots who, being women, were not eligible for assignments with combat squadrons.
Janet Henry, the leader of the ferry flight, led the escape of the F-16s. The other pilots followed her as she bypassed the planes desperately queuing to takeoff at the end of the main runway by taxiing to an unused crosswind taxiway and using it for her takeoff.
There is consternation and more than a few screams in the cockpits of a couple of the planes lifting off the main runway as Henry’s F-16s come from their right and passed a few feet under them. The F-16s were among the last planes to get off the ground before the missiles arrived—and each of them had fully loaded fuel tanks and a full load of Sidewinders and cannon shells.
Radar operators on the Russian AWACS had seen and expected some of the planes transiting Reykjavik to try to escape to Norway. They assumed the lone F-4 and the four F-16s were part of the evacuation and didn’t pay much attention to them, perhaps because they stayed low and slow and quickly disappeared from their radar screens. The Russian controllers never did see the Marine Harriers and assault helicopters on the ground at Old Reykjavik.
The fast-thinking leader of the F-16 element, one of the first women graduates of the Air Force Academy to be allowed to fly fighters, Major Janet Henry, call sign Hydra in response to some nasty banter she’d been subjected to in flight school, heard the commander of the Marine Harriers order them to wait for the Russian transports to get in range. She broke into his transmission and announced her element’s availability.
A few seconds later the voice of the Air Force lieutenant in the lone F-4 came on to say he too was available to join up.
The fast thinking Marine major commanding the Harriers advised them all to save as much fuel as possible by loitering to the north. Then, he quickly reconsidered.
“Belay that. They Russians are still out of range. Advise you land on Old Reykjavik to save fuel and get off the screens of any Russian AWACS that might be controlling the aerial invasion.”
The major was no dummy—he’d heard the report by the field’s radar operators before the missiles hit that the bogies are still more than forty minutes out.
Then the Marine major explained his advice.
“Our maps show the Old Reykjavik runway as abandoned but, in fact, it’s usable. That’s where we are. Exercise caution when landing; there’s no tower and we’re getting a lot of diverted traffic. It’s just south of the tall buildings in the center of the city.”
The Harriers commander, Major Daniel Orr, call sign “Rowboat,” then did something really smart – he ordered one of the Marine assault helicopters to lift off, go as high as possible, and scan with its threat radar. The F-4 and Hydra’s four F-16s had barely landed and swung around at the end of the runway when the chopper began reporting a large number of inbound contacts eighty miles due north.
The eleven American fighters sat at the end of the runway for almost nine nerve racking minutes while they waited for the Russian planes to get closer. Then the Harrier commander gave the word and they scrambled in one big simultaneous mass and bustered north with their afterburners lit. The American fighters had immediate radar contact with the troop transports and the Russian Moss radiating well north of the attackers immediately identify them in return. The controllers on the Moss quickly notified the Russian transports and fighters that enemy fighters were coming.
What dummies, Hydra said to herself when she saw the blips on her radar screen of the huge Russian formation with the SU-27s flying close to the transports—they’re making the same mistake the British made in the early days of World War II.
Major Henry was an avid student of military history and had written a term paper about early air fighting tactics while she was at the Academy. Had she had time to think about it she would have smiled as she and the other ten American pilots followed the Harrier commander’s order to quickly loop out and around the closely packed transports so their Sidewinders can come in from the rear and find the engine heat signatures of the Russian planes.
The American fighters closed with the armada of Russian transports and fighters quickly. It wasn’t until they heard their surprised AWACS controllers report the sudden arrival of NATO fighters and their missile warning systems began sounding that the Russian pilots realized Reykjavik’s air defenses had not been totally immobilized. The old fashioned radar on the Moss had not seen the NATO fighters waiting on the ground at Old Reykjavik.
Some of the SU-27s peeled away from the transports at the last moment and tried to cut the corner and get at the Americans as Hydra and the other pilots turned into the rear of the Russian formation. They were too late. The eleven American fighters were moving at speed as they went straight through the huge Russian formation firing their sidewinders and cannons at everything that moved.
The tightly packed Russian planes were easy targets and the Americans fired their sidewinders and guns every time a Russian plane appeared in front of them or generated a missile link, which was almost constantly because there were so many Russian planes and they were so tightly packed.
The Americans jinked and jerked and fired at everything because there are so many Russian planes and so few Americans. Many of the Russians could not fire for the same reason.
It was a turkey shoot as the Americans fired almost all their sidewinders and about half of their 20mm cannon loads in their first pass alone. Planes were everywhere disintegrating and dropping out of the sky. Thirty-two Russian planes and three of the Americans fell in less than one hundred and twenty seconds, many of the Russian transports spewing paratroopers as they fell. It is a great aerial victory, the only bright spot in what was shaping up to be a NATO fuckup of world class significance.
As soon as the American fighters completed their first pass through the mass of Russian planes, they reefed their planes around and charged right back through the on-coming and still somewhat close-packed Russian armada. That continued until the Americans ran out of shells and their guns fell silent. More Russian planes went down and so did three more Americans, one from a collision.
By the time the surviving two F-16s and three Harriers exhausted their rockets and shells they didn’t have enough fuel to reach Norway. So they headed back to Old Reykjavik one at a time to land and taxied at high speed to the Harriers’ service area at the end of the strip.
