BY PAUL T HORGAN
While it has been argued that the turning point in World War II was at Midway, El Alamein, or Stalingrad, I have an earlier candidate. It was Operation Millennium, the 1,000-bomber night raid on Cologne. This marked the final change to area bombing from the flawed ‘precision’ piecemeal night bombing strategy forced on Bomber Command after the catastrophic Battle of Heligoland Bight of 1939 saw a force of Wellingtons suffer 50% losses in a daylight raid, demonstrating that Stanley Baldwin should have stated “The Bomber will sometimes get through” when he decided to frighten the British public.
Cologne can reasonably be argued to have opened up the ‘Second Front’ demanded by the USSR and their fellow travellers in the UK. Germany had to deploy thousands of anti-aircraft guns, hundreds of fighters, and over a million military personnel to defend their homeland. An anti-aircraft gun sited in Munich was of no use against a bomber stream attacking Dortmund. While the Hamburg raids of Operation Gomorrah are seen as a totemic example of the strategy, it did not come into its own until after D-Day, when Bomber Command started devastating German towns with Düren, Wesel, and Zweibrücken being almost 100% destroyed.
Ukraine seems to have also opened up a second front in the air war of late. Forbidden for political reasons from using Western-supplied long range munitions to strike deep into Russian territory, Ukraine has developed its own long range air weapons. They make use of Onboard AI and Machine Vision, Integrated Satellite Transceivers, and Autonomous Trajectory Correction to navigate to their targets, and also to receive real-time instructions from human controllers should new satellite images show changes to target data. Like Operation Millennium, Ukraine is now overwhelming Russian air defences but, rather than area bombing, is making precision attacks on choke points in the Russian war machine. Russia simply does not have sufficient anti-aircraft resources to protect every weak spot. This has seen Ukraine successfully reduce Russian oil refining capacity, destroy ‘Amazon-style’ warehousing used by the Russian military to distribute hardware, sink ships in the Sea of Azov, and attack remote facilities in the Russian interior, including microprocessor factories and Russian airbases housing bombers.
This is in contrast to Russian missile attacks, which look clumsy and uncoordinated by comparison. Russia is also hampered by the fact that it has to depend on its own territory for logistics and has to defend that territory from attack. Its guidance systems used to depend on Western hardware, but that supply is now severely limited and local substitutions are sometimes needed. Ukraine just has to defend Ukrainian territory while its logistical tail stretches back into NATO countries. Russia does not dare mount attacks on NATO territory for fear of triggering Article 5 and starting a war it would lose within days.
Ukraine also has its own Hamburg as a target city. But instead of fire, the weapon is ice.
Rostov-on-Don is the irreplaceable hub for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is the major land and sea logistics centre. It has been attacked before, but the onset of winter creates a massive opportunity for Ukraine.
By the first week of January temperatures will be well below zero in this city. If at that time Ukraine launches a coordinated campaign to destroy all the heating and power facilities in Rostov, the city will freeze to death. Like Moscow, Rostov pipes hot water to all its housing in winter from a central heating station. This makes sense, as if only cold water was piped, it would freeze and burst the pipes in the Russian winter. The hot water is used for heating as well as domestic consumption. If Ukraine destroys the heating stations and power distribution systems in Rostov, civilised life ceases. Ukraine now has the technology to do this.
The loss of hot water will cause the water pipes to freeze and burst. Residential tower blocks will become uninhabitable. The frozen ground will start to cause architectural damage in the buildings. The cold will have a cascade effect on the military as facilities lose power. Previously-heated railway points will freeze solid. Targeting by Ukraine thereafter may be a simple case of locating strong heat sources in the cold. The mass evacuation of the city will clog roads while the railways will be unuseable. Russian front-line troops in southern Ukraine will lose supplies just as winter is at its worst. Cases of frostbite will increase and military discipline, already fragile, will collapse. Russian vehicles will be starved of fuel and will have to be abandoned. The Russian army, making war using human waves reminiscent of 20th Century fighting, will face freezing in place or retreating. The Russian Navy, shorn of spare parts to repair the fleet, may have to beach its ships.
Russia will have to relocate surface-to-air missiles to defend Rostov, but that just invites Ukraine to attack areas made newly defenceless, like perhaps the southern front line. Russia in 2026 will face the same problem as did Germany in 1942, too much landmass to defend all at once. The freezing of Rostov will have a decisive effect on the war.
The prospect of attack on Rostov and its relative defencelessness has forced Russia to try to lessen its importance by trying to build hubs elsewhere. But if Rostov falls victim to Ukraine’s ‘Cold Bomb’, these magnify Russia’s choke points and makes them tempting targets that will need defences stripped from elsewhere. The loss of Rostov as a strategic hub puts Russia’s hold on Crimea at even greater peril than it currently faces. And if Russia loses Crimea, Russia has lost the war. Thereafter Putin will fall.
Russia’s problem seems to stem from making war as it was fought in the 1980s or 1990s against a now 21st Century enemy. Ukraine’s weakness up to now has been the enforced absence of long range weaponry so it could strike deep into the Russian interior, while Russia could strike anywhere in Ukraine at will. This has now changed. Ukraine’s striking power now seems superior to Russia’s because it has superior navigation and control technology. Meanwhile, Russia has been cut off from using Starlink, which has blinded frontline troops, while its own navigation technology lags behind Ukraine’s or is almost completely dependent on Western technology or a Chinese substitute. Ukraine is now winning the missile war.
Operation ‘Freeze Rostov’ (as I have called it) seems almost inevitable as it is so obvious, as is Russia’s inability to defend against it. The people of Rostov will suffer immensely for their leader’s folly, but given that Putin has made freezing out Ukraine a part of his strategy by destroying power stations, Russians and their useful idiots in the West can hardly complain, and these idiots seem obsessed about events on the East Mediterranean coast anyway, and strongly prefer not to talk about Ukraine.
The 1,000 bomber raid on Cologne signalled a new phase in World War II when, instead of resisting attacks, Britain herself meaningfully attacked the heartland of Nazi Germany in an aerial campaign that only ended when Bomber Command ran out of targets it could bomb in April 1945. The new phase of the Russo-Ukraine War commenced when Ukraine started its long-range drone offensive. Where Hamburg burned, it is quite possible that Rostov will freeze. The difference is that the burning out of Hamburg merely destabilised the Nazi regime temporarily. The loss of Rostov may, and probably will, cost Russia the war.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.