World War Three 1946 Series Boxed Set: Stalin Strikes First

by Harry Kellogg

  General Twining

  He was churning up inside. On the outside he was as cool as you can be, but inside he was producing all sorts of chemicals and his body was not in balance with what he was thinking. His mind was overtly controlling how he was perceived but his inner chemistry was jacked up. The cause was his concern for the bombing crews he had sent out this morning. They were going to try a new and very risky operation. LeMay had warned him that if the planned SAM Dance maneuver ended up in tragedy, he would personally see to Twining’s courts martial. But, that really wasn’t his main concern. He was genuinely worried about his crews, about the boys he saw everyday walking to the briefings and standing in the chow line. He didn’t care what anyone said. They were his boys and his responsibility. If he had done anything to increase the chances of them not returning to their mothers and fathers then he would never forgive himself.

  In other words, he was a good commander and an outstanding leader. His men could sense that and they would have followed him to Moscow if he ordered it. On the other hand, they knew he would not put their lives in needless danger so they didn’t question his leadership. He had, himself, experienced ditching an airplane. He spent 6 days in a life raft during the last war when the plane he was on had engine trouble in the Pacific between Guadalcanal and Espiritu Santo. He knew what it was like to feel abandoned and forsaken.

  The fighters appeared first as usual. They were the lowest on fuel and the fastest. A CAP was formed when they were about an hour out to prevent or as least harass the inevitable Soviet attempts at incursion over their base’s airspace. Without the strong CAP, the crazy Ivans would follow them all the way home and shoot them down as they landed. They had actually experienced that a few times. The VVS has sent flights of longer ranged Yak 9s at very low altitude towards their forward bases. They had done a good job of shooting up the place. So, now a strong CAP was SOP at low altitude to deter the Ivans in the future. For the most part, it worked.

  He could tell from the radio chatter that moral was good. Improving moral was one of the main reasons he had let the development of the SAM Dance progress. Even if the tactic didn’t work as expected, it would give a temporary boost to moral. God knows they needed it.

  The losses were not sustainable, yet the Pentagon kept ordering them in. The Soviets were losing pilots as well. But, they were flying fighters and a few medium bombers so every plane shot down by us only involved the loss of one man. Each of our bombers shot down was 7 times as worse. From all reports, the VVS was keeping up with trained pilots and fighter planes where as we were not. We were losing more bombers than could be replaced in a timely manner, especially when it was the B-29. Even at full production, we only were able to produce 65 a month. Before SAC was given a breather, they were on pace to lose 100 a month.

  The most maddening part was that the Soviet’s oil production was increasing despite the SAC’s best efforts. The slow but inevitable loss curve in bomber numbers had developed much like the one the Luftwaffe experienced with their fighters. Unless something changed, they were going to lose this fight.

  He heard the first of the venerable B-24 Liberator bombers’ engines and decided to go back inside and wait for the reports. He was actually optimistic at least as far as moral was concerned. Temporarily, at least, the SAM Dance had done the trick.

  A few hours later, the reports were added up and he was looking at them with renewed hope. Twenty squadrons had pulled a SAM Dance and only three were hit by a SAM. Seventeen had successfully evaded the missile shot at their mission leader’s plane. This was very good news indeed. Losses were actually sustainable for a change and hovered around 6%. Very close, but sustainable when America’s manufacturing finally hit its stride.

  The corporate leaders had finally been shamed into making the switch once again from consumer products to military production. It seems the US was out of money. Being the good capitalists they were, it took some arm twisting to get them to support the war effort. Ford was poised once again to pump out B-24s and it looked like they would be the workhorse once again. The B-17 got the headlines while the Liberators did the work.

  It was kind of interesting that this war had been mainly fought using the last war’s equipment. He supposed that if the war dragged on more and more sophisticated machines would be fighting it out. For now, it was still the propeller vs. the propeller for the most part.

  You just couldn’t crank out jets as fast as you could piston engines. You could shoot them down as fast however. He mused that future wars will be fought and won or lost very quickly due to the fact that it was eventually going to be quality over quantity that would win the day. Today it was still quantity and they were fighting an opponent that was second to none in producing good-enough equipment in massive quantities. Quantity had been the issue for the Germans. Their equipment was superior to ours but they lacked the industrial capacity to match us. Their superior jets and tanks were not superior enough to overcome our greater numbers. But now we were in a war with an opponent who could potentially keep pace with our production.

  The Soviet Union and the US had something in common. Unlike the Germans and the British, our means of production were almost impossible to attack at the moment. Hell, we didn’t even know where their facilities were located. For the most part their manufacturing sites were so far inland and hidden that it was very similar to us having the Atlantic Ocean between us and their attacking forces. Their ocean happened to be the vastness of their country. We executed a very well planned attack on their oil fields and refineries before they could react, but they closed that window surprisingly fast.

  His mood took a turn for the better as he read the After Action reports. They were very positive and the SAM Dance maneuver was a qualified success. It had increased moral as well as shaved a point or two off of the losses. The reduced losses meant that on a 500 bomber raid another five or ten crews made it to base and 35 to 70 Americans made it home. 70 less letters that had to be written, and 70 more men would not be ripped from their families and shipped overseas, and that was worth it.

  General Twining

  He was churning up inside. On the outside he was as cool as you can be, but inside he was producing all sorts of chemicals and his body was not in balance with what he was thinking. His mind was overtly controlling how he was perceived but his inner chemistry was jacked up. The cause was his concern for the bombing crews he had sent out this morning. They were going to try a new and very risky operation. LeMay had warned him that if the planned Wiley Coyote maneuver ended up in tragedy, he would personally see to Twining ’s court s martial. But, that really wasn’t his main concern. He was genuinely worried about his crews, about the boys he saw everyday walking to the briefings and standing in the chow line. He didn’t care what anyone said. They were his boys and his responsibility. If he had done anything to increase the chances of them not returning to their mothers and fathers then he would never forgive himself.

  In other words, he was a good commander and an outstanding leader. His men could sense that and they would have followed him to Moscow if he ordered it. On the other hand, they knew he would not put their lives in needless danger so they didn’t question his leadership. He had, himself, experienced ditching an airplane. He spent six days in a life raft during the last war when the plane he was on had engine trouble in the Pacific between Guadalcanal and Espiritu Santo . He knew what it was like to feel abandoned and forsaken.

  The fighters appeared first as usual. They were the lowest on fuel and the fastest. A CAP was formed when they were about an hour out to prevent or as least harass the inevitable Soviet attempts at incursion over their base’s airspace. Without the strong CAP, the crazy Ivans would follow them all the way home and shoot them down as they landed. They had actually experienced that a few times. The VVS has sent flights of longer ranged Yak 9s at very low altitude towards their forward bases. They had done a good job of shooting up the place. So, now a strong CAP was SOP at low altitude to deter the
Ivans in the future. For the most part, it worked.

  He could tell from the radio chatter that morale was good. Improving morale was one of the main reasons he had let the development of the Wiley Coyote progress. The losses were not sustainable, yet the Pentagon kept ordering them in. The Soviets were losing pilots as well. But, they were flying fighters and a few medium bombers so every plane shot down by us only involved the loss of one man. Each of our bombers shot down was seven times worse. From all reports, the VVS was keeping up with trained pilots and fighter planes where we were not. We were losing more bombers than could be replaced in a timely manner, especially when it was the B-29 . Even at full production, we only were able to produce 65 a month. Before SAC was given a breather, they were on pace to lose 100 a month.

  The most maddening part was that the Soviet’ s oil production was increasing despite the SAC ’s best efforts. The slow but inevitable loss curve in bomber numbers had developed much like the one the Luftwaffe experienced with their fighters. Unless something changed, they were going to lose this fight.

  He heard the first of the venerable B-24 Liberator bombers’ engines and decided to go back inside and wait for the reports. He was actually optimistic at least as far as morale was concerned. Temporarily, at least, the Wiley Coyote had done the trick.

  A few hours later, the reports were added up and he was looking at them with renewed hope. Twenty squadrons had pulled a Wiley Coyote and only three were hit by a SAM. Seventeen had successfully evaded the missile shot at their mission leader’s plane. This was very good news indeed. Losses were actually sustainable for a change and hovered around 6%. Very close, but sustainable when America’s manufacturing finally hit its stride.

  The corporate leaders had finally been shamed into making the switch once again from consumer products to military production. It seems the US was out of money. Being the good capitalists they were, it took some arm twisting to get them to support the war effort. Ford was poised once again to pump out B-24s and it looked like they would be the workhorse once again. The B-17 got the headlines while the Liberators did the work.

  It was kind of interesting that this war had been mainly fought using the last war’s equipment. He supposed that if the war dragged on more and more sophisticated machines would be fighting it out. For now, it was still the propeller vs. the propeller for the most part.

  You just couldn’t crank out jets as fast as you could piston engines. You could shoot them down as fast however. He mused that future wars will be fought and won or lost very quickly due to the fact that it was eventually going to be quality over quantity that would win the day. Today it was still quantity and they were fighting an opponent that was second to none in producing good-enough equipment in massive quantities. Quantity had been the issue for the Germans. Their equipment was superior to ours but they lacked the industrial capacity to match us. Their superior jets and tanks were not superior enough to overcome our greater numbers. But now we were in a war with an opponent who could potentially keep pace with our production.

  The Soviet Union and the US had something in common. Unlike the Germans and the British, our means of production were almost impossible to attack at the moment. Hell, we didn’t even know where their facilities were located. For the most part their manufacturing sites were so far inland and hidden that it was very similar to us having the Atlantic Ocean between us and their attacking forces. Their ocean happened to be the vastness of their country. We executed a very well planned attack on their oil fields and refineries before they could react, but they closed that window surprisingly fast.

  His mood took a turn for the better as he read the After Action reports. They were very positive and the Wiley Coyote maneuver was a qualified success. It had increased morale as well as shaved a point or two off of the losses. The reduced losses meant that on a 500 bomber raid another five or ten crews made it to base and 35 to 70 Americans made it home. 70 less letters that had to be written, and 70 more men would not be ripped from their families and shipped overseas, and that was worth it.

  Chapter Three:

  Onslaught Begin s

  Figure 8 - Turkish Troops hours before the attack

  The First Hours

  November 25th, 1946

  Nazik reasoned that they wouldn’t waste another rocket of shell on a location they already destroyed. So as soon as the shell hit, he jumped into the newly created crater. It was still warm and smoking, but otherwise a good hole to hide in. He didn’t think there was one piece of Turkey within his eyesight that was not destroyed. The barrage of rockets, shells and bullets seemed to reach a crescendo and then, to his amazement, increased. How could they have so many guns and rockets pointed at his poor country?

  He had his back to the Turkish Straights and was one of the first to notice the parachutes. Thousands of them coming down behind their lines. He had only the vaguest ideas of what a parachute actually looked like. He had even a lesser understanding that some of the chutes were attached to armored cars like a balloon vendor’s cart. He did comprehend the men hanging from the majority of white cloth mushroom caps. More importantly, he was clear that they were between him and safety. The very safety he was going to run to when the shelling stopped. He would have left earlier, but the American had been watching him and his squad. When the American was wounded, he and many others started to look to the east. They urgently needed to escape the shelling and what they assumed was about to follow.

  For now they were about to be possibly cut off from even that avenue of retreat. It appeared that there was an avenue of escape left open to the southeast where fewer parachutes had fallen. Others saw what he saw and started to jump from crater to crater in the only direction that still seemed open to them. A trapped animal is at its most dangerous and a trapped Turkmen is even more dangerous individually than your normal soldier. No one excels at individual survival than these masters of stealth and hand to hand combat.

  It is quite possible that the way to freedom was purposefully left open. No records can be found of such a plan but it was curious that a quarter mile wide gap was conspicuously left open by the Soviet paratroops. This avenue of retreat led to a desert wasteland devoid of any strategic value. Armored cars where particularly useful in keeping the Turkish forces moving in a southeasterly direction.

  As Nazik made his way to the open avenue of escape, he noticed the Ruskies soldiers were not even shooting at them and even the ground was less tortured by the rockets and bombs. Contrary to what you might think, this these details unnerved Nazik even more than the massive barrage of hours earlier.

  Nazik and his men went to work. In less than an hour, he destroyed an armored car and shot or stabbed 7 other paratroopers. That made 13 kills including the crew of the armored car and one officer who was hanging around the vehicle. He had made his personal quota and it was time to save his life and lives of his men for another fight. Every bone in his body told him not to take the obvious retreat route left open by the initial paratroops. His animal instincts told him it was not safe. He had lost none of his squad and they had done a good job despite the others around them running at first chance.

  Three of his squad snuck off and ran with the waves of others to the corridor open to the southeast. Nazik led his men directly east from his original area of operations, the Kucuksu Palace on the shoreline overlooking the straights. It was a small palace that had been renovated in 1944 and was used by royal hunting parties as a stopping off point towards parts unknown. Nazik and his men had enjoyed their stay on the grounds. It was now a pile of ruins and rubble destroyed by the initial shelling and rocket attacks.

  Knowing full well what was about to happen, the Turkish high command made the controversial decision to make the Western part of Istanbul or European side, an open city. They were hoping to avoid Istanbul’s destruction, once again by an invading army, and had heavily fortified the eastern side or Asian side across the Turkish straights. Nazik was thankful that the western side was devoid of fo
rtifications as it made his escape much easier. His departure would have been without drama, except for the 10,000 or so Soviet paratroopers between him and short term safety.

  In his mind, he had made his twelve-kill quota and if everyone did as well they would have won. He did his part and his squad had done theirs as well. Now it was time to survive to fight another day. The centuries old Kucuksu palace had been obliterated in very short order because that is what enemies do to each other’s potential strong holds. From what he could discern, only a handful of artillery pieces had destroyed hundreds of years of history in a matter of minutes.

  There were some others who were actually making better time than his men and he. They shouted out that the Ruskies were coming across the straights in small boats and rafts by the thousands. With most of the opposition decimated by the guns, rockets and heavy attack aircraft, it was going to be a very easy crossing. There were no bridges to speak of and the government had destroyed all the ferries that had plied the straights.

  He supposed the Reds had built their own ferries and would be bringing them from the Black Sea once they gained both sides. They had decimated the opposition and had no problem with the great rivers of Europe. Consequently navigating the straights would be trivial. The paratroopers would clear the waterfront of all opposition and the small boats they were using would bring enough troops over to defend until the larger tanks negotiated the transports.

  Nazik caught a glimpse of something moving to his right, and signaled for his remaining men to spread out and go silent. He mentally thanked the American sergeant for teaching his troop the use of hand signals. Although some didn’t make much sense when translated into Turkish, others worked quite well. A couple signals were offensive. He chose to ignore them. His men had devised others to replace them while still remembering the meaning of the discarded ones. The figure he caught a glimpse of was wearing a similar uniform and carrying a weapon at ready. He moved differently than his countrymen and that is what caught his eye. He couldn’t put a finger on it yet this kind of instinctual decision-making is what had kept him alive in all the years of combat he had been through.