Altered maps

[Winner]

Thats weird, our resident military 'expert' has always told me if this had kicked off it wouldnt neccesarily gone nuclear form the start... seems as usual some people think they know a lot more than they know

As far as my shallow knowledge of the Soviet planning goes, they had always planned to use nukes, the sooner the better. The idea was to surprise and paralyze tha NATO forces and then roll over the forward defense forces in Germany (encircle and destory), rush to the Rhine, cross it, reach the Atlantic coast ports to prevent the Americans from sending reinforcements, mop up the rest of France (secondary objective), sue for peace under Soviet terms.

Of course, this doesn't preclude a change of strategy, but nukes were such an important part of WP strategy that I don't think they'd avoid it.

Interesting map BTW Winner. whered you get it?

I discovered it in some folder on my old computer when I was moving the files to my laptop and sorting them. Honestly I don't remember when or where I found it, it was probably when I was looking for some info about the Cold War NATO and Warsaw Pact maps.

 

[Winner]

Invasion by WP forces according to Hackett's Third World War:

 

[Thorbal]

I wonder why that kind of scenario has never made it into an FPS. WWII gets boring after a while. I mean, like Yahtzee said once, the Call of Duty series has been going on for longer than the actual war.

 

[Winner]

I wonder why that kind of scenario has never made it into an FPS. WWII gets boring after a while. I mean, like Yahtzee said once, the Call of Duty series has been going on for longer than the actual war.

FPS? It would be mostly fought with nukes, tanks and fighter planes. Foot soldiers would get slaughtered.

World in Conflict isn't enough for you?

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Would make for a great RTS though. Oh wait, that's been done.

Did NATO nations similarly draw up similar plans to invade Warsaw Pact territory?

 

[Dachs]

Did NATO nations similarly draw up similar plans to invade Warsaw Pact territory?

They were already outnumbered. Also, invading East Germany would have given the Kremlin one of the biggest propaganda victories in history.

Not seriously.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Let's say a counter-attack then.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I love how the WP is always the aggressor in these Cold War scenarios.

 

[Dachs]

I love how the WP is always the aggressor in these Cold War scenarios.

What else makes sense, in Central Europe?

 

[Winner]

I love how the WP is always the aggressor in these Cold War scenarios.

That might have something to do with the fact that WP was preparing, training and planning for this the whole time, while NATO was only planning how to stop the WP forces. For the whole Cold War, NATO was numerically inferior to WP forces, ranging from completely defenceless in the 50s to roughly equal in the late 1980s.

(in fact it think that if NATO really launched a surprise invasion of the WP, they might even have some chance - the WP officers were totally unprepared and untrained for defense, their training was focused on attacking and exploiting breakthroughs in the enemy lines. There were no plans - and plans were the alpha and omega of the Soviet officer's life - how to defend the WP countries from a NATO invasion. Perhaps if NATO invaded East Germany and Czechoslovakia in the 1980s and caught WP by surprise, it could have scored a similar victory as Israel in 1967. That said, it would most likely lead to an all out nuclear war anyway.)

 

[Winner]

Few more maps from Parallel History Project web pages (one of the best sources concerning the Cold War on the internet):

The Soviet view of the 1980s with regard to threats coming from across Scandinavia. (Illustration from Lars Ulving’s Rysk krigskonst [Russian Art of War], Figure 2.27.) In the 1950s, the threat consisted entirely of strategic nuclear bombers with a need for support from tactical aircraft based in the Nordic region.

Map from a Polish exercise in 1954, taken from Denmark during the Cold War. The map illustrates an amphibious operation against the Danish islands Sjaelland (upper left corner) and Bornholm (right), southern Sweden (top).

And a bonus:

"It is desirable to consider (...) nuclear attacks on such centers as Hannover or Brunswick, Kiel and Bremen. The destruction of these cities will likely cause a complete disorganization of political life, the economy, etc. It will significantly influence the creation of panic in areas of nuclear strikes. The exploitation of the effects of strikes by our propaganda may contribute to the spread of panic among enemy armies and populations (...). In order to exclude Denmark from the war as quickly as possible, nuclear strikes should be launched at Esbjerg (an important strategic point in the NATO system) and Roskilde (Zealand Island), and subsequently a widespread special propaganda action aimed at deepening the existing panic should be conducted to warn Denmark's troops and civilian population of the consequences of further resistance and the threat that, in the event of continuation of the war, further atomic strikes will occur."

(Excerpt from a presentation by the commander of the Polish Front, General Zygmunt Duszyński, in 1961)

Just to let you know how absolutely insane the commies were

 

[Harbringer]

That whole annihilation thing has always deterred me from believing we were ever anywhere near nuclear war.

 

[RedRalph]

Just to let you know how absolutely insane the commies were

TBH Winner, how else would WW3 have been fought? you think NATO wouldnt have use dthe same tactics and stretagies in reverse?

 

[Theige]

TBH Winner, how else would WW3 have been fought? you think NATO wouldnt have use dthe same tactics and stretagies in reverse?

What do you mean in reverse?

NATO never wanted to invade the USSR, it was only a response to Russian aggression.

 

[RedRalph]

What do you mean in reverse?

NATO never wanted to invade the USSR, it was only a response to Russian aggression.

I mean if NATO was invading WP. I know its a less likely scenario than the other way around, but are you seriously telling me they wouldnt have had comparable plans to those shown here? and dont you thin their tactics would have been similar?

 

[Theige]

I mean if NATO was invading WP. I know its a less likely scenario than the other way around, but are you seriously telling me they wouldnt have had comparable plans to those shown here? and dont you thin their tactics would have been similar?

They may have had the plans, but any plans would have involved made up, nonexistent units.

As someone has already said, the balance of power in ground forces was very overwhelmingly in the favor of the WP, until the mid to late 80's.

Drawing up plans for an attack when the units to carry out said attack don't exist seems silly, but they very well could have done it anyway

 

[Winner]

TBH Winner, how else would WW3 have been fought? you think NATO wouldnt have use dthe same tactics and stretagies in reverse?

After they dropped the "mass retaliation" doctrine, no. And don't forget that NATO didn't plan to invade the Communist bloc.

But that's not what I mean - the commie generals were probably masturbating when they were devising these plans - they speak of near-genocide as if it was a legal military tactics. "Yeah, let's nuke those capitalist civvies, they'll run away crying and then then they'll welcome us as liberators!" Idiots

Flexible response doctrine (adopted in 1960s) counted with many "escalation levels", depending on the WP actions. NATO would probably not use strategic nuclear weapons right away (of course only if the Soviets did the same) and they'd start using battlefield nukes only if the situation was really desperate (multiple Soviet breakthroughs, fall of Western Europe imminent).

Look at these commie planners - they totally failed to recognize the nature of nuclear weapons - for them it was just a more powerful artillery and they treated it that way. They had absolutely no moral/professional objections to nuking civilian targets. Meh, we should have executed them all after 1989, if they had the chance they'd all become war criminals of the worst sort.

 

[RedRalph]

Yeah, unlike the Americans who actually nuked two cities in real life, not just in plans... but I'm sure Americans nuking cities during a world war is in some way totally incomparable to Soviets nuking cities during a world war

 

[Winner]

They may have had the plans, but any plans would have involved made up, nonexistent units.

As someone has already said, the balance of power in ground forces was very overwhelmingly in the favor of the WP, until the mid to late 80's.

Drawing up plans for an attack when the units to carry out said attack don't exist seems silly, but they very well could have done it anyway

The only scenario I can think of when a NATO first strike would have been possible is a pre-emptive strike against WP forces in final stages of preparations for an invasion of Western Europe.

But since the NATO forces were notoriously unprepared, I don't think it would have had a chance to succeed. WP spent decades practicing a rapid mobilization. If they had started mobilizing and finalizing their preparation, NATO wouldn't have had enough time to assemble its own forces for a strong enough conventional pre-emptive strike. It could have used nukes pre-emptively though, hoping to knock down most of the Soviet nuclear forces.

 

[Winner]

Yeah, unlike the Americans who actually nuked two cities in real life, not just in plans... but I'm sure Americans nuking cities during a world war is in some way totally incomparable to Soviets nuking cities during a world war

Don't fall into the abbyss of moral relativism. In WW2, nobody knew what nukes were capable off, and the situation in which the US used it to prevent much greater massacre was entirely different from these Cold War scenarios.

Soviet planners were seemingly totally oblivious to any care for the civilians. They'd just nuke them, gas them, massacre them, drive them out of their homes and shoot them on the roads (in order to hamper the movement of NATO reinforcements), use them as shields, whatever else necessary to crush the capitalist pigs. Their "liberation" of Europe would probably result in the greatest genocide in human history with hundreds of millions of dead people.

Funny that you criticize Israel for the very light civilian casualties in Gaza, but you seem to have no problem relativizing this. Hypocrisy again?