Nazi Space Spy
Banned
This is getting hotter than I initially imagined. While I know this incident, judging by past foreshadowing in the tl, probably won’t go hot enough to start WWIII I’m still on the edge of my seat!
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
After investigating the issue after the event, the Finnish soldier who had leaked the cipher to the Swedes was court martialed, dishonorably discharged and sentenced to 6 months on a beach in Tahiti.
For LVT (which I'm fully in support of btw) to actually take off in the mainstream you need an early 20th century POD when Georgism was ascendant as an idea. The issue that LVT purports to solve, anyways - poor land use driving up housing prices - wasn't really an issue on the radar of people in the 80s USA anyways, when housing prices were fairly low to the point that commercial real estate was viewed as the investment that actually yielded something, hence the shopping mall/downtown office glut of OTL's 80s that ended with the S&L crisis and the construction recession of 1990-91.
The Soviet-Swedish War - Part V
The Soviet-Swedish War - Part V
Russian and, by proxy, Soviet military historiography emphasizes, and with good reason, 1814 and 1945 as the crowning triumphs of the Motherland, especially as Poltava lurks far, far back in collective historical memory. Elided otherwise, however, are a series of frustrated campaigns in the Caucasus and Central Asia that took decades to conquer and assimilate, or genuine disasters such as the Crimean War or the First World War.
The Soviet-Swedish War does not come close to any of those debacles, but the events of October 29-30, 1981, in the vicinity of Gotland are events that most Russians would probably prefer to forget. Having sustained three bombing waves of Sweden the day before that managed in the course of twenty-four hours to undo decades of work by the Soviet Union in cultivating a better image amongst Eurocommunist political parties and the Third World, the Soviets elected to escalate further by eliminating the threat of Swedish military installations on Gotland via a combined sea and air attack that would include small fireteams of Spetsnaz elites and a company of paratroopers to suppress resistance on the island. This would be timed to occur along with a further bombing campaign against northern Sweden's military infrastructure; all of this was meant to avoid civilian casualties in the Stockholm-Uppsala urban agglomeration or come too close to the NATO task force led by the Royal Navy in the vicinity of Bornholm. While there were few if any doves in the Politburo, Yuri Andropov had surprised observers by emerging, along with KGB Chairman Chebrikov, as one of the chief skeptics of further escalation. The Gotland operation was approved by Andropov as the final resort, and the hawks in the Politburo were unaware that the vultures were already circling for them in case things went awry.
What followed on the 29th remains a black day in Soviet military history that would lead to mockery in the West and recriminations at home, and ironically one of the tensest hours of the Cold War would diminish East-West tension for the remainder of the 1980s as the Soviets retrenched and reformed their military capabilities. The Swedes had deduced the Soviets intended to attack Gotland directly and spent the entire night reinforcing the island, and much of the Swedish Navy had been positioned to the island's immediate south, barreling northwards towards the Soviet Baltic Fleet. At 0800 on 10/29/81, the Soviets received permission to launch their attacks against Gotland and Lapland, and the world drew in a deep breath as the fighting unfolded.
The Battle of Gotland saw Spetsnaz put in ashore while paratroopers from airbases in Estonia were dropped over the island, but the disasters started early and kept going. One transport plane was shot down by a Swedish Viggen, taking fifty paratroopers down with it into inky waters of the Baltic Sea before anybody could bail out. Another fifty paratroopers were blown off course out of their drop zone by a strong win, dropping nearly half of them in the water where they drowned in their parachuters west of the island and forcing an additional dozen to swim to shore. Out of the entire operation, only two groups of paratroopers actually landed in the vicinity of their drop zones, coming in amidst heavy anti-aircraft and artillery fire.
The island was considerably more hardened than Soviet forces expected, too. The primary objective, the airfield at Visby that would allow Gotland's resupply by around-the-clock air transport, was heavy defended not just by a larger-than-expected number of men but trenches, barbed wire and even an ad-hoc minefield, and artillery and mortar fire tore through the woods as outmanned Soviet attacks were repelled one after another. The Spetsnaz, put ashore with the objective of seizing radar and anti-aircraft installations and either disabling or using them for their own purposes, only managed to capture a third of the targets they were assigned, with huge loss of life to their elite units even as they alone managed to kill close to a hundred and seventy Swedish troops on their own.
As all this went on, Soviet bombers swept across the island, trying to destroy bridges, roads, electrical substations, and additional sites not assigned as part of the ground forces' operational packages, with the Baltic Fleet providing a helicopter platform for additional waves of attacks. It was at this moment that the Swedes struck - a massive wave of Viggens, regarded as one of Europe's best planes already, swooped in below Soviet radar directly towards the Baltic Fleet just as the Swedish submarine force closed in to torpedo distance.
Two Soviet destroyers were sunk, and an additional eight boats were badly damaged over the course of the following hour. The commander of the fleet, Ivan Kapitanets, ordered the vessels to withdraw without their attack or transport helicopters deployed, and one more ship was torpedoed as they retreated back towards Saaremaa and a helicopter carrier had to be scuttled as it took on water in Estonian waters. The Baltic Fleet had in a matter of hours been ambushed and humiliated for the world to see - and, worse, it had thus left the Gotland theater badly unsupported.
Moscow was in stunned shock and additional waves of support flights were routed exclusively to Gotland instead, with additional special forces and paratroopers to be dropped on the island. These drops went about as poorly as the initial ones, especially as, thanks to air and ground cover, the Swedish Army was able to continue landing men via airlift at Visby throughout the day to reinforce the beleaguered men already there. Despite the losses of several C-130s, the coordination between Flygvapnet and the Army allowed the island to remain supplied and the Soviets badly outnumbered all the way through the night, were the attempts to arrest Swedish landings was largely ended.
Soviet forces on Gotland were often cornered into surrender in fierce night fighting and even several Spetsnaz were captured; by midnight, the Swedish government relayed via the Finnish embassy that the number of captured Soviet soldiers had risen from the forty men taken off S-363 on the 27th to close to three hundred. An emergency meeting at two in the morning on the 30th - ironically enough, Dimitri Ustinov's 73rd birthday - of the Politburo in Moscow came to a consensus: the war needed to end. Soviet bombing runs for the next day were called off and feelers put out via Finnish Foreign Minister Vayrynen announcing to Sweden that the Soviets would immediately cease fire. When this news arrived at Western defense ministries, pressure (especially from the Pentagon and Secretary of State Katzenbach at SACEUR in Brussels) immediately appeared for the angry Swedes to accept this off-ramp. Sporadic fighting on Gotland would continue well into the morning of October 30th between isolated groups of soldiers on the island, but for all intents and purposes the brief, bizarre three-day war between the Soviet Union and Sweden had ended almost as soon as it had begun.
Good to know. I’m sure Russell Long would be over the moon enthused about to a proposal of it lol
At least it ends in a way that doesn’t make the Carey administration loom weak
Very different 80s for the Soviets ahead after this three-day facepalm
Ustinov probably has enough cachet (and a long enough relationship with Andropov) to be allowed to quietly fuck off to his dacha provided he stays there without too much hubbub, but the other hawks around him will probably get the full purge treatment
Carey got his brief place in the sun but it’s really the Swedes who shine, despite three days of sustained aerial attacks against critical infra across the country
I'd be surprised if Carey wasn't informed behind the scenes by the Soviet premier about this set of motivations from him.
At least now the Soviet Government can scale back on their military spending and focus on other, far more important sectors of the economy.
Andropov doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who broadcasts his thinking or motivations to anyone (if anything I may not really be capturing his opacity properly ITTL)
the shift to Goulash Communism is indeed a plank of Andropovism though the thinking around military spending for a guy like him is more of the “think smarter not harder” variety
Wonder how this will go for them later on. You continue to be an inspiration and probably better with this stuff than me ^^;
Also the cynical side of me wonders if the wind was "discovered" by the pilots after thye missed the LZ?
After this crushing military defeat? No dice.
Thank you! Too kind!
As I was writing my thought process was just pure old fashioned Russian/Soviet military ineptitude, so that would certainly jibe haha
Tough shit, the military had their chance to shine, and they blew it. Now they have to cope with less funding.
Honestly, I just had this idea of a couple pilots deciding that rather then admit to their superiors they dropped VDV into the ocean, they were gonna blame a wind. Not like anyone can disprove it.
Yeah, after tis though, they'll argue if they had more cash, they'd have done better.
They say, after already having a bloated budget at the expense of the state.
You know, depending on how far the soviet military gets cut and downsized, there is going to be an awfull lot of surplus military hardware suddenly free from any purpose, im sure that some enterprising dictator would be quite happy to take it from Soviet hands.