[chico20854]

June 3, 1997

Colonel Piotrowski rallies the defenders of Czestochowa with an inspiring speech. NATO troops are 20km outside the city and begin a massive artillery barrage prior to dusk.

The US 36 Infantry Division (Mechanized) enters action in Poland in the Battle of Sulechow. (see below)

Unofficially,

The Freedom-class cargo ship Boston Freedom is delivered in Beaumont, Texas and the Long Beach Freedom in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

The Executive Officer of the 5th Training Brigade at Fort Dix signs the drill sergeant arrested the prior day for inappropriate conduct out of the post MP station. There is no documentation to record how the NCO ended up on a C-141 transport plane that departed the adjacent McGuire Air Force Base three hours later, bound for Saudi Arabia.

Private Randall Cutler begins two days of doing paperwork at Fort Jackson before beginning basic training.

A series of nightime flights by USAF MH-60 Nighthawks of the 38th Air Rescue and Recovery Squadron deposits patrols from I Corps' Long-Range Surveillence Company (C Troop, 38th Cavalry) on hilltops in the North Korean front line corps' rear areas. (Each of the hilltops had previously hosted North Korean anti-aircraft guns; Allied artillery and airpower had erased those units, leaving them vacant to be exploited by the American recon troops).

In Poland and Germany, all CENTAF airfields and NATO command posts at Corps level or higher have deployed truck-mounted SS-23 guidance radar jammers.

In western Poland, the elite Soviet 35th Guards Air Assault Brigade is surrounded in the town of Sulechow, with American mechanized forces on all sides. After a furious artillery barrage, two of the 36th's armor battalions, 1st Battalion, 803rd Armor (Washington National Guard) and 1st Battalion, 632nd Armor (Wisconsin National Guard), rush the town from opposite ends, their M1 Abrams blasting the Soviet BMDs. American mechanized infantry in M113s soon follow, and after 12 hours of intense house-to-house fighting the town falls in the 36th Infantry Division’s first combat action since the Battle for Castle Itter in Tyrolia in the last days of WW II (where a combined US-Wehrmacht-French force defeated attacking Waffen SS troops).

V US Corps launches a series of armored probes of Lodz's defenses, which, while somewhat successful in penetrating the outer defenses, are each met by an aggressively led and pursued armored counterattack. The V US Corps commander, General Albert McKenzie, reports that the siege will be a long and bloody battle. The corps’ two artillery brigades begin digging in and the corps’ supply troops begin dumping large quantities of supplies (chiefly ammunition) into hastily established new depots before sending their trucks back to the railheads to the west to pick up more.

Second Western Front begins evacuating 2nd Guards Tank Army from the Gdansk Pocket. In the rear area in the south, 1st Guards Tank Army establishes a series of blocking positions outside Piotrków.

The aerial assault on the isolated Czech 15th MRD intensifies when the division is subjected to a day's attention from the 416th Bomb Wing's B-52s as well as other NATO airpower.

The 51st Coastal Defense Missile Regiment, transferred from the Black Sea Fleet to the Northern Fleet, begins combat operations in Severomorsk. NATO naval activity is increasing as Allied forces try to clear passages through the Soviet's defensive mine belts along the Kola coast; the coastal efforts are opposed by shore-based artillery and missiles as well as tactical aircraft.

In the Balkans, the Pact advance continues. The force that had broke south of Timisoara is cut off by counterattacking Soviet tank units and destroyed piecemeal, while 14th Army has finally cleared its rear area and continues its advance southeast, making progress as it drives for the Danube River. In Bulgaria, the Turkish 1st Army orders V Corps to withdraw from the Balkan Mountains while XV Corps is still able to protect its eastern flank.

Dawn brings the sound of gunshots to downtown Khabarovsk after nearly 10 hours of peace following the collapse of the northern rebel pocket. The shots are the KGB executing the officers of the mutinous 70th (my 122nd Guards) MRD as well as those enlisted men identified as the ringleaders of the mutiny. On the south side of town, the MVD and Army troops of the 73rd (my 192nd) Motor-Rifle Division continue to bombard the rebels holed up in the grain elevators of the flour mill. Additional rebel troops slip away in the lulls in the bombardment, arrested by surrounding MVD and Army troops.