WP units in China

[Ursus Maior]

Originally Posted by Raellus

Under the unprecedented, I don't think it's really that far-fetched that West Germany might take a gamble on a rapid reunification by force.

It actually is one of the furthest fetched pieces of setting background information I ever read. It completely ignores how West Germans viewed upon the world and how little they cared in daily life about East Germany and - especially - East Germans. Not to speak of the quite open sentiment "finally we got rid of 'them'" shared by many West Germans living left and right of the Rhine (and thus in the major population centers). Then there is the German constitution, which expressively forbids preparing or participating in an offensive war or otherwise acting (directly or indirectly) against the peaceful coexistence of the people of the world.

And then there is of course the sheer impracticality of Germans waging a war against another nation, even a neighbor. The German Bundeswehr in the 1980s was split into a field army and a territorial army. The former was fully integrated into NATO command, the latter was a mobilization-only force (and parts that were not were part of NATO command structure). Any German troop-movement thus would have been known to SHAPE from the moment of its planning, simply because that's how carbon copies and telexes were flowing or because it would have had been signed off by NATO.

The first edition premise was so utterly bad that it's really not conceivable to me how this could have flown past anybody with a modicum of knowledge about postwar Germany. But of course, if such a war happens and the GDR would have had its premier troops half-way across the world that's a bummer for their defense. I don't know how the Soviets would have solicited the other Warsaw Pact members for volunteer forces, though: GDW got this one right, Article 4 of the Warsaw Treaty limited the self-defense alliance it created to "Europe", similarly to the clear boundaries the Washington Treaty sets for NATO.

I'm not aware of any material on how Moscow was "soliciting" (as GDW writes) its allies. The East Germans certainly would have been the easiest to convince, there always was a sentiment of wanting to 'please Moscow' in the party elite. But the Polish didn't share that urge, Romania had practically left the organization after the Cuban Missile Crisis (that fact was little known during the Cold War, but Romania's infidelity towards the Pact and the USSR war very clear: Romania abstained from maneuvers and the command structure of the Pact and did not allow any Warsaw Pact troops on its territory).

The Hungarian Army was probably the worst army of Pact forces still loyal to Moscow, mainly because since its dissolution after Hungarian Revolution in 1956 it had never recovered. There were almost no modern weapons and by 1988 the standard tank was a more or less non-modernized T-54/55. The Bulgarian armed forces were surprisingly well experienced, having given assistance to North Korea during the Korean War, repelled attacks from within Greece in the early 1950s and having participated in the invasion of the ČSSR. However, equipment by the late 1980s was sub-standard, with most tanks still being T-55s and readiness being generally very poor. The ČSLA, the army of the ČSSR, is usually ranked the best of the Pact armies after the East German and the Polish armies, but commonality with Soviet armed forces was not ideal. The ČSLA used its own BMP-variants (BVP-1 and -2 respectively) and had created the OT-64 wheeled APC together with Poland (here named SKOT) to mobilize its motorized infantry battalions.

Thus, using Czechoslovak forces in the Far East would have meant reequipping and retraining them, similar measures would have been in order for Bulgarian and Polish forces. In all honesty, I believe that it would have been best for the USSR to just hand out division-sized sets of older equipment to all allied forces, since T-62s, BTR-70s, SPGs and BMP-1Ps would have been an improvement for most volunteers and only the German, Czechoslovak and Polish volunteers (if any) would have known, how to operate T-72s. They could have been paid extra to bring their own equipment though, creating the "gap" GDW needed for its background story premise.