The Third World War - August 1985

by John Hackett

  In the early days of the war, the enemy’s ECM and its assault on the NATO radar stations seriously degraded the Alliance’s capability for close-controlled interception. But the weather favoured the defence, with good visibility beneath the cloud layer at around 3,000 metres. The inability, or reluctance, of the Warsaw Pact pilots to fly quite low enough offered the defending fighters many skyline sightings as enemy aircraft crossed ridges and hills. The Russians’ strong suit was their numerical superiority and not surprisingly they wanted to preserve it - so in the main their preferred tactics on interception were to evade. On balance, their air combat skills were shown up as inferior to those of the NATO pilots.

  But the weight of numbers took their toll of the Allied defences. While in the first few days of the war aircraft losses favoured the Alliance in a ratio of three to one, the HAWK SAM belt was eventually saturated and those radars that survived the initial onslaught were soon picked off by anti-radar missiles. The air bases themselves were subjected to intense air attack - with the notable exception of the US bases in the 4 ATAF area over which the F-15s maintained air superiority throughout the war.

  But although Warsaw Pact aircraft managed to achieve local air superiority on a number of occasions in the first week of the war, full air support of their ground forces proved impossible to sustain in the face of determined opposition from the F-16s and, on occasion, Harriers armed with air-to-air missiles. But mounting Allied aircraft losses, battle damage and fatigue often left the eventual outcome of this ferocious air fighting very much in doubt.

  Although the development of the Warsaw Pact offensive in the Central Region has yet to be followed on the ground (which will be done in the next chapter), coherence and continuity make it desirable to anticipate here its course and outcome sufficiently to carry this tale of the air war over Europe to a conclusion.

  COMAAFCE’s first indication of a distinct trend in his favour came with a Soviet attempt to launch airborne and heliborne assaults in support of their attack on the Venlo position on 14 August. They did not achieve surprise, and their efforts to gain local air superiority lacked concentration and determination. The ensuing melee in the air to the north and west of the Krefeld salient was greatly enjoyed by the exhausted and hard-pressed German and British soldiers, who afterwards christened it the Venlo Turkey Shoot.

  When the NATO forces improved their command of the air after the sudden release of reserves, local air superiority was exploited by precision-guided weapons on Soviet crossing points over the Lower Rhine and Maas, which helped to throttle the supply lines to enemy leading formations at a critical stage. With enemy divisions to the west of the Rhine isolated, COMAAFCE allotted 90 per cent of 4 ATAF resources to the Commander 2 ATAF, leaving the remainder of 4 ATAF and the remnants of 5 ATAF to support CENTAG. For the next two days this tremendous concentration of airborne firepower wrought havoc with the enemy forces west of the Rhine. But the air effort stood or fell on the retention of secure bases, a fact of which Allied air commanders had always been uneasily aware. On the very first day of the war some airfields were completely overwhelmed by combinations of high explosive and persistent chemical agents; others suffered their full share of misfortune. But rigorous peacetime exercises in the flexible use of air power now paid dividends. Although airfields, unlike aircraft carriers, could not be sunk, they could be overrun, and in the first days of war the enemy advance in the north forced the abandonment of no less than six German and Dutch airfields. The German Tornados were redeployed to the United Kingdom and their AlphaJets moved south. Dutch F-16s moved back into Belgium. When, four days later, the enemy crossed the Lower Rhine the RAF had to withdraw from its airfields. Its attack Tornados and Buccaneers went back to the UK and the reconnaissance Tornados were redeployed to the south. One of the greatest threats to NATO air bases lay in surface-to-surface missile (SSM) attacks as the enemy advanced and deployed his mobile missile systems further west. A co-ordinated missile onslaught on 2 ATAF airfields only just failed to catch the Allied aircraft before their redeployment. It was a very narrow squeak and the lesson was not lost on COMAAFCE, even though, in mounting the attack, the missile batteries gave away their positions and earned a particularly sharp and quick Allied air response.

  The Warsaw Pact air forces did not achieve their objectives to the full principally because they failed to gain tactical surprise and the Allied air forces were ready and waiting for them. In addition, NATO’s electronic warfare was of a superior quality throughout the campaign, and the Allied aircraft and their crews, as had always been hoped, proved significantly superior in technology and skills. The Allied defence plan had required the air forces to stem the Warsaw Pact flood and hold the ring until the armies were reinforced and in battle order. In this they succeeded. The furious air actions, air-to-air, air-to-ground and ground-to-air, vindicated classical air thinking over half a century. It also qualified some of the commandments in the airmen’s bible in important ways. For instance, while airmen rightly saw the need to fight the air battle above all, in the circumstances of this war they learned that there is no convenient tempo which can allow them to meet their tasks in the ordered sequence so beloved of the Staff Colleges. The airman’s belief, born of Second World War experience, and so irritating to the soldiers, that the chronology of war should allow them to fight the air battle and establish air superiority before addressing the problems of the land battle, were shattered once and for all. Everything had happened together.

  Given the limited resources that the West were prepared to devote to defence before the Third World War, the air forces saw the need to compete above all in qualitative terms. In this they were right; they would have been right in any circumstances - for a second-rate air force is an expensive national indulgence - but it is worth underlining the point that once the qualitative margin narrows between opposing sides then numbers become very important indeed. It was because of this that COMAAFCE’s counter-air offensive was so important. Happily the aircraft, weapons and electronic attack systems specially designed for this task proved highly successful and did more than anything else to offset the numerical advantage of the Warsaw Pact in the air.

  Outside the European theatre, but of crucial importance to it, a new air factor was manifested in the transatlantic air bridge. Despite the early lessons from the Berlin airlift back in the late forties, Western European strategists had been slow to see air transport except in terms of an extension of existing logistic support. Not so with the Americans, or for that matter the Russians, who in 1977-8 set up an air bridge to the Horn of Africa that even in those days moved tanks to Ethiopia in large Antonov transports. The reality was that air transport had now become one of the major strategic manifestations of air power. It was therefore particularly ironic that the British, in their defence economies of the seventies, should have so drastically cut back their air transport force - a cut which forced their planners to rely on the use of car ferries and steamers to and from the Hook of Holland in their efforts to find ways of getting British reinforcements to the Northern Army Group. Such measures were more reminiscent of the Paris taxis used to move troops up to the Marne in 1914 than appropriate to the development of air power in the second half of the twentieth century.

  Perhaps the most vivid vindication of classical air thinking was the organization of the command system of the Allied Air Forces in Europe in the early 1970s. It had long been the claim of the airmen that if the flexibility and capacity for concentration of air power was to be exploited then the air must be centrally organized. This was indeed what happened, very much under US influence and pressure, when a single air command was set up under COMAAFCE in Europe. When the lock was forced at the northern end of the region and the entire Northern Army Group was swung back like a huge door hinged on Kassel, it was this organization which enabled COMAAFCE to swing his air forces through ninety degrees to an east-west north-facing axis in a matter of hours. By the same token he was able to accept the suddenly released re
serves and apply them promptly to the battle to which air power made such a decisive contribution.

  CHAPTER 21: The Centre Holds

  Early on 13 August it was confirmed to SACEUR that the transatlantic convoys proceeding from the United States were at last within the UK Air Defence Region, under air cover operating from bases in France and the United Kingdom. Losses to personnel brought across by air (which included most of the units in reinforcing formations, together with the greater part of their light and some heavy equipment), had been high. Losses at sea to the ships bringing the balance of the heavy equipment, with considerable numbers of men and invaluable munitions, had also been heavy. Nevertheless there was now an early prospect of augmentation of the forces available to Allied Command Europe by some four divisions, together with a corps headquarters and corps and army troops. The massive build-up which Soviet action had been planned to forestall was already under way.

  With a heavy concentration of air defence and, of no less importance, elaborate precautions on the part of French police and troops to avoid civil disturbance and disruption (see Chapter 22), the ships of the CAVALRY convoy could be expected to begin discharging into French ports, where US troops were waiting to take over their equipment, early on the morning of the 14th. Fully equipped units would then move by road and rail at best speed through France and Belgium into the area round Aachen.

  At noon on that day, 13 August 1985, the Supreme Commander ordered the release of four divisions from the theatre reserve. They were to come under command to NORTHAG from 0001 hours, 14 August, for the purpose of opening an offensive from present forward locations in the direction of Bremen. This was to start not later than at first light the following day, 15 August. The operation, codenamed ‘Culloden’, was already far advanced in contingency planning.

  It was known for certain, from high-level surveillance, SIGINT and deep agency reports on troop movements, that the enemy divisions now in action were from 7 Guards Army, brought up (as was also the case with 5 Guards Army) out of the Byelorussian Military District in the USSR. Behind the leading motor-rifle divisions in the first echelon of the assault force were two tank divisions. In greater depth still, but with their leading units still only some thirty kilometres in rear, were three more divisions, believed to be from the Twenty-Eighth Army out of the same military district. It was now known that the unsuccessful airborne assault, by 103 Guards Airborne Division, had also been mounted from there.

  Of the Red Army formations met in action up to a week ago there was now little sign in the forward areas, though some were known to be dispersed well in the rear. Of those which had taken part in the initial assault on 4 August, no unit at all, on the unquestionable evidence of reliable local sources, now remained on Federal German soil. The Soviet practice of using divisions for three to five days in all-out assault, to very near the point of total exhaustion, and then extracting them for replacement by completely new formations, was clearly to be seen in action. On the Allied side most formations had already been in action more than once.

  At 0400 hours on 14 August Warsaw Pact forces, after very heavy air and artillery preparation, but no chemical attack, opened the expected assault on the Venlo position. Airborne attack in battalion strength on the flanks fifteen kilometres in rear, on Neuss and Roermond, proved fortunately to be of little more than nuisance value. Two German Home Defence Groups, one on each flank, each of nearly a brigade in strength, gave an excellent account of themselves in a role for which they had done much training: after some very tough opposition the German reservist and civilian soldiers triumphed over both attacks. Allied air defence entirely prevented any heliborne follow-up. The crossings over the Rivers Rhine and Maas remained in Allied hands, under the control of severely harassed engineers, open at least by night and even sporadically by day. The enemy’s attempt to isolate by airborne action the forward edge of the Allied battle area was thus a total failure.

  In the attack on the Venlo position the forward concentration of Allied forces, four divisions deployed between two rivers on a front of thirty kilometres, with anti-tank defences that were strong and well disposed in depth, put any use of the enemy’s light lead forces on the usual pattern out of the question. The attack came surging in, at first shooting light, after thirty minutes’ intense artillery fire aimed at suppressing anti-tank defences, with three motor-rifle divisions up, each led by its tank regiment, the tank companies coming in first and the motor-rifle companies following, mounted in their BMP, some 200 metres behind. Direct ATGW hits on leading BMP soon indicated that a mounted attack could only bog down. A dismounted infantry attack in great strength followed, under fire support from tanks, SP guns and BMP, with heavy concentrations from the tube artillery and rocket launchers of the enemy’s divisional artillery, and air-to-ground attack pressed hard in spite of considerable losses in aircraft. The very heavy weight of the assault, with unit after unit piled on regardless of casualties, began to tell before long. Here and there NATO defences, swamped by numbers, began to crumble. The enemy, within an hour or two, was seen to be gaining a clear advantage.

  At the same time as the main assault on the Venlo position, another attack was being made by one Soviet motorized division west of the Maas, southwards towards Roermond. Heavy Allied missile concentrations on crossings over the Maas and Lower Rhine, which were being kept open with great difficulty by Soviet engineers, took sufficient of the edge off this attack to enable one US brigade, operating with two Dutch regiments under command and anti-tank defences disposed in depth, which the enemy had found it impossible entirely to suppress, just to hold its own. Ground was given, but sufficient of the network of ATGW remained in action to foil the enemy’s first attempt at doing to the Venlo position on the west bank of the Maas, on a smaller scale, what the general Soviet offensive had been trying to do to AFCENT as a whole, that is, to roll it up from the rear by attack from north to south along the west bank of the Rhine.

  An even stronger enemy attack than that west of the Maas developed at the same time east of the Rhine, where units of II British Corps, with a Dutch brigade and a strong and very recently regrouped German division, together with three German Home Defence Groups, the whole force under a German general-lieutenant, had up to now succeeded in preventing the movement of any but light forces across the hardly formidable water obstacle of the River Lippe. Three things had here contributed to an extremely important delay in the enemy’s advance: flooding, which had done something to canalize movement from the north-east; the extensive use of mines; and close air support, exploiting the slight but growing advantage in the air the Allies now enjoyed and the evident superiority in electronic warfare which was contributing so largely to it.

  Of great assistance in the battle of the Lippe, on the right flank of the critical fight for Venlo, were the heightened protection from air attack electronic techniques afforded the Allied ground forces and, above all, the survival of effective anti-tank defences against all attempts completely to suppress them. What was of scarcely less importance here was the action on the ground of Federal German reserve and territorial forces.

  Even though a numerical superiority, at the chosen point of attack, of twenty or thirty to one in favour of the enemy could be greatly reduced, considerable advantage still remained to them. By nightfall on 14 August the forward edge of the Allied position east of the Rhine was back to a line from Paderborn to Duisburg. But for the tough fighting of the German territorial units, now reinforced by another complete group, even this could not have been held. What became known as the Battle of the Lippe was indeed something of a triumph for the reserve forces of the Federal Republic.

  By nightfall the centre of the Venlo front, between the Rivers Rhine and Maas, had broken. The two British divisions defending the position, with one German and one Belgian division, had been driven apart, and penetrations of up to twenty kilometres had been reported.

  Pressure from the enemy to exploit his advantage continued during the hours of da
rkness. A full-scale assault was resumed at first light. Repeated requests from II British Corps for nuclear fire support continued to be refused by AFCENT on the Supreme Allied Commander’s orders, but very heavy artillery concentrations, from both tube and missile systems, together with tactical air support on a scale not yet seen on the Allied side, was having a marked effect in slowing down the enemy’s advance. It had been possible during the night, moreover, to stabilize in depth a number of defensive localities, where the anti-tank network was found to have remained, to a surprising and encouraging extent, still in being. The enemy’s suppressive action had been very far from fully effective. His advancing armour and mechanized infantry now found itself obliged to move through a system of interlocking ATGW positions which was still formidable.

  What has been said before deserves to be said again. More and more, as the fighting in the Central Region had developed during the last few days, was the superiority of Allied electronic technology being seen on every side, both on the ground and in the air. Now is not the time to speak at length on the improvement in electronic techniques, in which the West had so very far outstripped the East over the last few years, techniques in which a dramatic reduction in the size and complexity of electronic components, as well as in their failure rate, had been accompanied by a phenomenal reduction in cost. It is sufficient to say that, almost unnoticed, the West, unhampered by industrial collectivism under state control and with the stimulus of commercial competition, had established a lead over the East. This had long been uneasily observed there but was now seen to be far greater even than had been suspected. Its results were manifest in every sphere: in the exploitation of the attack and reconnaissance capabilities of F-15 aircraft and remotely-piloted vehicles (RPV), for example; in the deadly impact of precision-guided missiles (PGM), which were immune to interference; in the netting of tactical electronic units; in the reduction of vulnerability to interference with communications by proliferation of channels; and in countless other ways. Allied electronic counter-measures and counter-counter-measures were at the same time reducing the effectiveness of hostile air and missile attacks without prejudice to their own.