Things are not going well for the NATO Allies…Yet maybe they are.
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Timeline for World War Three 1946
Book One - The Red Tide - Stalin Strikes First
May 2nd, 1895-Sergo Peshkova is born
Aug 3rd, 1943 - Sergo attends a party where he meets Stalin and their unusual relationship begins
Aug 13th, 1943 - Sergo becomes an advisor to Joseph Stalin specializing in aerospace
Sept, 2nd, 1943 - Sergo is introduced to the spy apparatus created and managed by Lavrentiy Beria who has managed to place agents in every major top secret weapons system of the Western nations including their allies.
Nov., 24th, 1943 - Sergo is given full control of Soviet aerospace research and development.
Jan 4th, 1944 - Research on the German Wasserfal Ground to Air missile and the X4 air to air missile becomes a top priority under Sergo’s leadership using stolen materials from Peenemunde
March 12th, 1944 - An abandoned USAAF guidance system falls into Sergo’s hands and is developed into a workable system under his leadership
Aug 1944 - Three USAAF Superfortress B-29 bombers fall into the possession of the USSR
Dec, 18, 1945 - 17 of the 22 members of an elite atomic bomb assembly team killed in a series of seemingly accidental events during the holidays. 15 die in a bus crash. These deaths delay the American Atomic Weapons program for 6 months
May 1st, 1946 - May Day Parade in Berlin and Moscow
May 2nd, 1946 - World War Three begins with a surprise attack by the Red Army consisting of 60 divisions and over 7,000 combat aircraft.
May 11th - NATO is formed
May 13th, 1946 - The surprise attack is a complete success with 13 out of 22 US, British and French divisions overrun
June, 2nd, 1946 - The Red Army is across the Rhine River in force
June 6th, 1946 - American reinstitutes the Draft
June 16th, 1946 - After a valiant defense led by Charles DeGaulle, the French are defeated on the old Maginot line once again.
June 20th, 1946 - Operation Louisville Slugger is a complete success and a full Red Army Front is destroyed when 22 modern battleships unleash a devastating surprise attack on forces sent to encircle an allied army.
July 3rd, 1946 - Denmark surrenders to the forces of the USSR
July 13th, 1946 - France surrenders to the USSR
July 13th, 1946 - The Soviet Agent known as Delmar (George Koval) assassinates hundreds of American nuclear scientists using the world’s most deadly substance, Polonium, at conferences in Oak Ridge, TN and Dayton, OH. This cripples the US nuclear program for another 12 months and possibly forever
July 14th, 1946 - NKVD OMSBON advanced forces reach the French city of Le Havre
July 22nd, 1946 - NKVD OMSBON forces reach Orleans
July 27th, 1946 - USAAF attempt to drop an atomic bomb on Leningrad. The NKVD and its stable of spies is instrumental in warning the Soviet Red Air Force VVS. With a combination of the new Wasserfal Ground to Air guided Missile and hundreds of fighters the raid is decimated and an atomic bomb is lost in the Baltic Sea.
July 28th, 1946 - The Red Army is stopped temporarily on the Pyrenees Line by a combination of US and Spanish divisions using the rugged terrain of this mountain range located on the border of France and Spain.
Aug 2nd, 1946 - Italy is abandoned by the NATO Allies and all forces are pulled back to Sardinia
Aug 5th, 1946 - Wasserfal ground to air missiles (Stalin’s Fire) are used to great effect against a RAF bombing mission near Toulouse, France
Aug, 15th, 1946 - The Soviet VVS demonstrates its newest aircraft by flying at great heights over the entire British Isles in an attempt to intimidate the British people. This demonstration proves that the entire British Isles can be attack from the air unlike the First Battle of Britain where the Luftwaffe was severely limited in range.
August 17th, 1946 - The Strategic Air Command is formed with Curtis LeMay named as commander
August 20th, 1946The Soviet VVS continues a massive buildup of the Red Air Force on the Channel coast. It appears that a Second Battle of Britain is about to be fought.
Territory of the USSR
Once again a few brave men would be asked to do the impossible over the skies of Great Britain. This time the enemy was not lead by a buffoon in the form of Herman Goring. The Red Air Force VVS was led by a master of strategy in the form of one Alexander Alexandrovich Novikov, the man who ruled the skies over Mother Russia, Manchuria, East Germany and now most of Europe.
Prologue
The Katyusha rockets come fast and heavy. They were blowing the tops off of the surrounding hills like some kind of hedge clippers gone wild. Making that classic sound like a monk seal’s mating call. Rocket after rocket slams into the hill top near Es Bordes. Our positions kept falling one by one and then it was on to the next hilltop.
Our fallback position was the ridges to the West of Arros. The Reds were getting dangerously close to Vilac. The Reds were taking big losses but they were relentless in their advance and once they took ground they never gave it up.
Finally the Spanish were coming into their own and were becoming very good at making Ivan pay for every yard. They still haven’t mastered the art of taking ground but they sure could defend it. Over 50% of the forces were now Spanish. Unfortunately, without the ability to make counter attacks it was not possible to us to keep our flanks.
Oh, we could give them a bloody nose every once in a while, but for the majority of the time we were making retrograde movements just to keep from getting surrounded. We are all wondering where were all the US troops? We heard that they were having some trouble with the corporations and trying to get them to make the switch back from civilian goods but we never thought the vets would let us down.
Eventually we were going to run out of mountain tops and then we were dead meat against all that Soviet armor and as everyone knows the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
Chapter One:
Prelude to an Attack
20 MM Brass Cannon Casings made in Manitowoc Wisconsin at the Aluminum Specialty Company along with millions of others[xli]
Tin and Copper Make Brass
The tin came from the Cajalco mine in California. The piece of land that holds the mine is part of a 50,000 acre Spanish land grant. Because it forms a natural passageway through the mountains, the Temescal Valley had served as an old Indian camping ground, later becoming an alternate route of the Southern Emigrant Trail in the 1850s and 1860s, as well as a Butterfield-Overland stage corridor.
The tin ore was discovered when a shirt tail relative of the local Native American tribal chief was shown what looked like a possible deposit of “metaliferous rock.” He promptly filed claim.
The area became collectively known as the Temescal Tin Mines1 as hundreds of claims were filed despite two prominent geologist’s reports that questioned the profitability of the area. Nevertheless, miners kept coming to the area and digging. The Civil War interrupted most of the mining in the area. In 1868 almost 7000 pounds of tin were mined. Ore specimens were sent to England where they were pronounced the purest quality. The area was pronounced the only the workable body of tin in America.
An English syndicate became interested in the area and bought much of the land in 1891 and imported 200 experience Cornish miners, two were from the little town of St. Mawgan, Cornwall, Great Britain. After their arrival production of the mine increased dramatically. A pyramid of tin was built near the railroad and President Benjamin Harris had his pictures taken at the base of the Pyramid. Yet even so, within the short span of two years, unwise investments and bad management decisions led to the Cajalco Mine’s abrupt closure.
1927 the mine was reactivated and extensive improvements were made. Unfortunately the stock market crash of 1929 forced the closure of the mine once again. 1942 the Timko Corporation of Richmond Virginia bought the mine and reopened it to supply the demand of the military effort in World War II until its final clo
sure in 1945.
The Cornishmen who stayed in the area worked the mine until its closing. Our small amount of tin came from this mine in 1944.
The copper came from the Calumet and Hecla, mining company2 in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In 1864 William J. Hobart discovered copper in the area. The town of Red Jacket, now known as Calumet, was built next to the mine. By 1886 the area was the leading copper producer in the United States, in fact from 1869 - 1876 it was the leading producer of copper in the world. Again, like the tin mines, the copper mines fell on hard times and consolidated during the 20s. However they still continue to produce high-grade copper until the 1970s.
Laborers for the copper mine were Finns, Poles, Italians, Irish, and once again Cornishmen with one coming from St. Mawgan, Cornwall, Great Britain.
A particular tragedy of note happened in 1914 at a laborers meeting. A meeting hall was packed with 500 people when someone shouted fire. There was no fire. 73 people died with 62 of them being children. They were crushed to death trying to escape and this became known as the Italian Hall Disaster.[xlii]
One of them was our Cornishman’s youngest son.[xliii]
United States seems to have a knack for both finding, and producing exactly the resources it needed at exactly the right time. From timber to oil, tin, copper, gold and uranium, we’ve always found exactly what we need when we need it. The same was true in the Soviet Union and in addition both have needed help in bringing their resources to market. Much of that help for the Soviets is now coming from the former territories of Austria-Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany whereas the help for our tin and copper came from villages near St. Mawgan, Cornwall, Great Britain.
The Empire that the Soviets now held sway over holds every resource they will need to defend themselves from any aggressor. They just need time to exploit it properly.
The tin from the Cajalco Mine and the copper from the Calumet Mine combined to make the brass which was formed into the 20 mm cartridge casing that is the object of our story.
On the spent shell casing is stamped the letters AS which means it was produced at the Aluminum Specialty Company of Manitowoc. WI.[xliv] Manitowoc is 30 miles south of Lambeau Field in Green Bay, WI home of the World Champion Green Bay Packers and on the shores of Lake Michigan. Millions of exact replicas of our shell casing came from this company’s factory. Four former residence of St. Mawgan, Cornwall, Great Britain worked in this plant.
The projectile end of this assembly was shot in the general direction of a Tupolov 6 Reconnaissance aircraft that was actually doing quite well in evading the Spitfires sent up to intercept it until it's port engine became unreliable near St. Mawgan, Cornwall, Great Britain. This particular projectile missed its intended target. Others did not.
Our shell casing was ejected from the 2nd of two Hispano Mk II cannons on either side of the British Spitfire fighter plane’s port wing. It and 37 of its cousins fell through the air and fell on a house in St. Mawgan, as the projectile went on to miss its intersection with the pilot’s intended target. The second burst from this gun did not miss and sawed off the wing of the Soviet aircraft 6 minutes later in the twisting turn battle over Mawgan. The noise of the shell casings on the roof of the house caused the family living inside to venture out to explore what had made the noise. The three-year-old girl of the family saw our shell casing and picked it up and held it in her tiny hand as her father held her other hand.
They moved to the center of the street to get a better look and after a few minutes or so they started back to their home when the 8-year-old boy saw the wing from the Tu 6 with one engine still attached cart wheeling towards their home and screamed for his father and pointed his little finger at the falling hunk of metal. His father never did see the flailing wing but immediately reacted to his son’s cry of terror and pulled his family into a doorway on the other side of the street.
The wing hit the house and sliced like a knife through the roof and second floor where a small portion of the fuel in the wing tanks vaporized and then exploded from a spark caused by an iron fitting hitting a small fragment of flint in the stones on the fire place. The explosion went straight up taking a large portion of the second floor and blowing off the roof of the house while leaving the walls intact. The debris from the roof rained down upon our little family.
Family lore credited our shell casing with getting the family out of their house and to safety. The little girl cherished the shell casing all her life and it is now prominently displayed over the new fireplace mantle and still in St. Mawgan, Cornwall.
Two metals came from California and Michigan, both mined by Cornishmen from St. Mawgan were combined together by others of St. Mawgan in Manitowoc, WI, USA. This shell casing and the noise it made hitting the roof over our little family probably saved their lives. None of this can be proven of course, but try and tell that to a 69-year-old grandmother of six who still lives in the house she grew up in on that same street in St. Mawgan and you will get the story straight from the mouth of what was once a 3-year-old girl cowering next to her father as her home exploded in front of her eyes and if her 75 year old brother is sober he will tell you the same story.
The chances that both the shell casing and later the cart wheeling wing of the Tu 6 would both hit the same roof after dropping from a height of 8934 meters is astronomical I'm sure, but such is the irony of war.
On another note, the spent projectiles from the same shell fired by the Spitfire that missed the Tu 6, went on to kill a cow eating quite contently in the middle of a field some distance away. The farmer's wife was about to herd the cow into the barn and was about 2 meters away when the poor creature was struck. To this day the family living on the farm tells the story of expired cow and speculation abounds as to where the bullet came from. At every holiday family feast and reunion, the story grows more and more complex and convoluted. As the old saying goes "truth is stranger than fiction" and none of the stories concocted on the farm is anywhere near as interesting as the truth. The spent projectile is in almost pristine condition and sits on this family’s fire place mantle as a memento of their close brush with death.
Chapter Two:
Tale of an IL-10 Beast Pilot
IL-10 Beast
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From time to time we are going to explore the lives of the people who are about to fight and die over the Isles of Great Britain and France. These are the souls who will determine the fate of the British Empire.
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The following story is based on the book Over Fields of Fire written by Anna Timofeeva-Egorova and is presented both to encourage you to read her fine book and to illustrate how well the Soviet pilots were trained at the beginning of World War Two, contrary to popular belief. It also gives you a glimpse of Soviet life. And yes Anna was a woman. Names and situations have been changed but the story is basically hers.
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A poster appeared at the barracks "Future Airmen and Parachutists were invited to pull up stumps and build an aerodrome and hangers for gliders and planes." “Well if they needed stumps pulled we would go after work and pull some stumps. To be honest flying had always been a dream and now maybe this poster would be my chance. I headed for the given address to sign up.
The next meeting I found out my fate was to fly gliders and not planes. I was very disappointed but determined to be the best glider pilot I could be so they had to let me fly a real plane. We took off from a high bank over the Moscow River and hovered. The gliders were launched in a very primitive way. The trainee pilot would be shot into the air by the rest of us like a sling shot. If you were lucky you could last for 2 to 3 minutes of gliding and then it was back to pulling on the elastic bands to shoot others into the sky. Every day that summer I would go to the bank of the river and sling others into the air for my chance to fly for 3 minutes. [xlv]
DFS 230 glider
“In flying club we studied flight theory, aerial navigation, meteorology
and the "Flight Operations Manual" for the U-2 trainer. We were sternly drilled that the "Flight Operations Manual" was written in blood and was not to be taken lightly. We learned the basics on a plane mounted on a pedestal, manipulating the levers and how the different parts of the plane worked. We also learned from the mechanics how the engine worked and how to repair it if need be.
The day of my first flight had come. "To your planes" the instructor ordered. One by one we took our turns for our first flight. When my turn came and after I was strapped in the instructor spoke to me through the speaking tube. I was instructed to hold the levers softly and memorize the movements. After the third turn the instructor shouted "steer the plane." It was much unexpected and as I struggled with the pedals and the stick the machine would not obey my movements. It seemed like an eternity and I knew my flying days were numbered. I could not control that bucking beast. Besides that I was terrified.
The instructor took over, after it was apparent that I had failed, with not a word. After we had landed I expected to be thrown out of the program and was quite miserable looking I'm sure. He looked at me and said "no one succeeds on their first go". It was a reprieve. I was saved. I lived to fly another day.
Training proceeded apace with us all getting our hours in now that the war was over and we had time to be properly trained. I was too young for the Great Patriotic War but I was just the right age for this new war of aggression and I was spurred on by the Amerikosi's attempts at using their atomic bomb on Leningrad. My third day on the front I finally received my plane. It was not a high-speed fighter, nor a dive bomber, just a U-2. It was redesignated the Po-2 after its designer Polikarpov. But it was still the same old U-2 I had flown throughout my career. The same plane I had always flown. It had gained a new job and it would gain glory and earn the hatred of the enemy throughout the war.
World War Three 1946 Series Boxed Set: Stalin Strikes First Page 52
