by John Hackett
Although there had been hundreds of airfields in Britain by the end of the Second World War, by 1982 there were less than fifty in the hands of the RAF and the USAF — the latter having long maintained both strategic and tactical wings in the UK. Recovering the old wartime airfields was out of the question and for some years the RAF had been eyeing the civil airports with their modern runways and ground facilities. But nothwithstanding goodwill from national and municipal authorities, commercial, constitutional and communications problems had always stood in the way of their military use. By 1984, however, twenty-three airports had been earmarked and were exercised as satellites of main RAF and USAF bases. The rationalization of military and civil communications had been the main hurdle to clear; once that was done, and with a wider public appreciation of the threat to the country, the other difficulties fell away. The plan was to use these civil airports as dispersed sites for flights of up to eight aircraft and thereby distribute the precious air eggs in that many more ground baskets.
The difficulty lay in knowing how to sustain operations without technical facilities and logistic stocks. To ease the problem the airmen’s eyes had been resting on the civilian helicopter fleet which had grown to more than a hundred aircraft around the North Sea oil industry. The operating companies were very willing to play their part in national plans and readily agreed to a scheme, in emergency, of attaching up to four of their aircraft to each of the main RAF and USAF bases so as to form a logistic chain to the newly earmarked satellite airfields. The plan was exercised a few times before the war and when the real need came the civilian helicopter crews performed herculean tasks in ferrying technicians, weapon reloads, test equipment and spare parts. They did this by day and by night without regard to weather, often plying between airfields under missile attack. Hardened air crew that they were, some were heard to comment, with a nice taste for understatement, that it was quite relaxing after the rigours of flying to the North Sea rigs in winter.
A signal success came to these helicopters in the first days just before and after the outbreak of war as the ‘air bridge’ was swung across the Atlantic and US Boeing 747s and Lockheed C-5s were landing up to 300 troops in central England every four minutes. The commercial helicopters ferried thousands of troops and hundreds of tons of their supplies from the airfields to the railheads and east coast ports. This eased what threatened to become an unmanageable congestion on the roads and railways and cut vital hours off the reinforcement time from the United States to the continent of Europe.
None the less, what the Commander Allied Air Forces Central Europe (COMAAFCE) had described in 1982 as ‘the Achilles heel’ of his Command, the insufficient availability of stocks of fuel, ordnance, spares and other requirements on dispersal airfields, continued to give concern. Co-located operational bases (COB), from which both USAF and RAF aircraft could operate, alleviated the difficulty. It was never quite to disappear. The danger that reinforcement aircraft, together with those withdrawn from further forward, would arrive in such numbers as to swamp support facilities remained.
First priority in the British dispersal plan went to the large air tankers, the AEW aircraft, and the Nimrod anti-submarine patrol aircraft, all of which had key roles but existed only in small numbers. They were anyway far too big to be protected in the hardened shelters which had been built with NATO common funds at most of the operational airfields; but the smaller RAF aircraft like the Tornados, Buccaneers and Jaguars, as well as the Hawk jet-trainers in their secondary air-defence role, were also thinned out and sent to the dispersed sites when it looked as if the main bases might become too hot to hold them.
By 1984 British Airways Boeing 757s had been modified to carry out refuelling which was to be invaluable when the almost insatiable demand for air tanking started in the first hours of the war. Sadly a proposal by British Airways in the late 1970s that their new jumbo-jet cargo carriers should be built with floors strengthened for military loads got bogged down in a bureaucratic argument about who would pay for the airline’s payload penalty in peacetime. The Western allies were in consequence denied a very badly needed addition to their airlift for military vehicles.
And so it was that in these sorts of ways, and with a very free exchange of ideas within NATO, the Allied air forces made the best of the seven lean years before the war. But while their attention was turned to improving current effectiveness, rather than to bidding for solutions in the future, technology and its opportunities were of course not standing still.
The airborne warning and control system (AWACS) was arguably the biggest ‘force multiplier’ of any recent developments and its impact on the war exceeded the expectations of even the most ardent proponents of its introduction to USAF service in 1977. The E-3A Sentry aircraft, based on Boeing 707 airframes, were readily distinguished from other 707s by the 30-foot diameter radome enclosing the radar and other antennae by which the aircraft was able to exercise much of the capability which put it so far ahead. An illustration of how it worked is worth giving.
In July 1985 the eighteenth and last of the E-3A Sentries assigned to NATO arrived at the German Air Force base at Geilenkirchen, near the Dutch border, to join the newly-formed European NATO squadron. The last of the thirty-four aircraft retained in the USA had joined 552 Airborne Warning and Control Wing at Tinker Air Force Base near the city of Oklahoma earlier in the year. Crews on this Wing had amassed considerable experience on regular deployments to Keflavik in Iceland, Ramstein in Germany, Cairo West, Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, and in South Korea and Japan. The crews of the NATO squadron, drawn from eleven Allied countries, had not travelled so far afield but had become very familiar with the airspace of central Europe, Norway, Italy and Turkey.
By the beginning of 1985 a regular surveillance pattern had been established in the Central Region of Europe. One Sentry from the NATO squadron was always aloft near Venlo on the German-Dutch border; a second from the USAF flew over Ramstein; and a third, also from the NATO squadron, patrolled to the west of Munich in Bavaria. Stand-by aircraft were held on fifteen minutes’ readiness. Their racetrack patterns were flown at over 25,000 feet. The serviceability of Sentry, based on a well-tried type of aircraft, had always been better than that experienced by new generations of aircraft and by 1985 COMAAFCE could confidently expect a daily 80 per cent serviceability rate from both the USAF and the NATO units. Moreover, with a four-man flight crew, additional to the thirteen men manning the equipment, extensive crew space, in-flight cooking and in-flight refuelling, each Sentry could extend its normal six-hour patrol time by several hours if necessary, which afforded great advantages.
From 1983 onwards, Sentries in both NATO and USAF squadrons had been built with almost identical equipment. The original computer speed had been increased threefold and the storage capacity fivefold. The Sentry computer could now process an incredible 1.25 million operations per second and, if necessary, could communicate with up to 98,000 air and ground users by the joint tactical information distribution system (JTIDS), a digital communications system resistant to ECM. Not surprisingly, in the early years of deployment the technical capacity of the aircraft had tended to outrun the imagination of those responsible for its operation, while there were many who considered its introduction into service premature and its technology potential excessive. In 1981, however, a separate subordinate NATO AWACS Command had been established at Maisieres near Brussels and an Allied staff had worked steadily both to exploit its functions more fully and to integrate Sentry operations with those of the British AEW Nimrod.
Sentry’s first and most obvious role was to look out for intruders into NATO airspace. Hitherto, low flying Floggers or Fencers could be detected only at some 30 miles’ distance by the scattered mobile forward radars close to the inner German border (IGB). Now that aircraft at any height could be clearly identified at least 200 miles away, and if flying at 5,000 feet or above, 300 miles away or more, the practical implications for NATO’s air defences were startling. Warsaw Pact
aircraft could be observed taking off from bases anywhere in Eastern Germany, for example, or from others half way across Czechoslovakia, or as they were flying close above the Baltic waves beyond Bornholm. Aircraft climbing to a high-transit flight level could be detected in eastern Poland and all the way across Eastern Europe as far as the Soviet border. Instead of three or four minutes’ warning of a surprise attack, Sentry could give an air defence sector headquarters, like that at Brockzeitel not far west of Dusseldorf, up to thirty minutes’ warning.
That was not all. Additional wiring had been asked for in the eighteen NATO aircraft to incorporate electronic support equipment, the peacetime euphemism for what was required to gather electronic intelligence. In 1983, after extensive debate in the Western Alliance, funding had been provided for this equipment to be installed. Thereafter, for the next two years, data on Warsaw Pact command and control procedures, surveillance radars, SAM guidance wavelengths and even individual Warsaw Pact aircraft call signs and pilot voices had been assiduously collected and fed into the system’s data banks. Indeed, the problem was not the accumulation of data, but the constant pressure on over-stretched NATO ground staff to ensure that it was all categorized, processed and fed into the seemingly limitless capacity of the new generation of computers. Perhaps, as some thought, there was too much of it all.
The Warsaw Pact, of course, was well aware of Sentry’s potential, publicized proudly as it was in the regular editions of Western military aviation journals. And, indeed, they had in 1982 deployed their own IL-76C Cooker to perform much the same function.
Under Sentry’s long shadow, the Warsaw Pact air forces had tightened signals discipline considerably, sought to decrease their air crews’ dependence on ground control and accelerated the introduction of their own digital secure communications links. Increasingly, Warsaw Pact squadrons were deployed back to central USSR for periods of intensive operational training unobserved, but there was now no way to maintain squadron effectiveness in Eastern Europe, or exercise their surface-to-air defences, without adding to Sentry’s data bank. There had been, not surprisingly, a determined attempt by the Soviet Union to mobilize public opinion in the FRG against the modification of the Geilenkirchen base to accommodate these aircraft. This had failed in 1982 in the face of patient and well-reasoned explanations by the Federal German Government of Sentry’s enormous contribution to deterrence. One thing was sure. Quick and violent counter-measures against the system could certainly be counted on if war came.
In the spring of 1985 the Sentries began to detect small but significant changes in Warsaw Pact air activity. SU-24 Fencers had been stationed in eastern Poland for four years, steadily replacing both MiG-21 Fishbeds and, latterly, early marks of SU-17 Fitters. The bulk of the Fencer squadrons, however, had remained at bases in the eastern Ukraine, in the Kiev Military District, or the Baltic Military District. In January 1985 regular rotations of the USSR-based squadrons began first to eastern and then to western Polish airfields. Sentry quickly detected the changing voices and call signs of the new crews, who were obviously very experienced. In May and June reconnaissance sorties by Foxbat G, equipped with sideways-looking and synthetic-aperture radars, and digital information instantaneous downlinks, were greatly increased along the IGB and were duly noted by the Sentries.
Throughout the spring the weapons range at Peenemunde in the GDR was used round the clock by Flogger Gs and Js during the day and by Fencers at night. Sentry could track both medium-level approaches to the range and the actual ground-attack procedures. This information was added to all the other indicators available to the Western allies which suggested steadily increasing Warsaw Pact military activity.
In mid-July the major Warsaw Pact exercise began which was to be used as cover for mobilization.
By 2359 hours on 3 August, the Sentries had watched five regiments of Hind E gunships deploy, as part of the ‘exercise’, to forward bases 30 miles from the IGB. Two regiments of SU-25 Flatfoot ground-attack aircraft had returned to their major bases north of Leipzig, which placed them in range of both the area around Fulda and the north German plain. More significantly, the intensity of the jamming now rapidly increased. Only spasmodic attempts had ever been made to jam the Sentries’ surveillance radar before. Triangulation from the three Sentries constantly on station quickly pinpointed the sources of the jamming as eight AN-12 Cubs operating in their ECM mode, cruising some 100 kilometres beyond the IGB. However, because of the narrow beam width of the Westinghouse AN/APY-1 radar installed in the E-3A Sentries and its low side-lobe characteristics, the effect on the AWACS’ radar screens was negligible and their effectiveness remained high.
The Sentries were not the only targets for the jammers: below and in front of them were the inviting targets of the NATO ground radars — static, still in process of modernization, and highly vulnerable both to direct jamming and to side-lobe penetration. One after another these reported to their sector commanders that their medium- and high-level surveillance was becoming impaired, despite rapid switching through the frequencies available to them. The effectiveness of Soviet Click jammers, long suspected, was now being confirmed.
It was at 0315 hours on 4 August, 25,000 feet over Ramstein in the Federal Republic, that the radar operators of the Sentry aircraft E-3A 504826 of 965 Squadron, detached from Tinker to USAFE (United States Air Force Europe), first saw twelve blips appear on their screens, crossing eastern Poland at 35,000 feet, apparently from the central Ukraine on a westerly heading, at a speed of just under Mach 2. Within seconds they were also spotted by the Sentries over Venlo and west of Munich and identified as Backfires. All data were flashed immediately down to COMAAFCE’s battle staff. The Ramstein, Wildenrath (RAF) and Neuburg (FRG) battle flights were immediately scrambled and climbed away to their intercept positions, still well west of the IGB. The Backfires crossed the Polish frontier into the GDR but then broke formation and in six pairs fanned out on headings in an arc towards Hamburg in the north and Bavaria in the south. All twelve were maintaining radio silence.
Then, while still 50 miles inside Warsaw Pact territory, they banked steeply and within a few seconds one after another inexplicably turned back towards Poland. The senior controller in 504826 began to express his surprise, speaking in a somewhat relaxed tone on his secure encoded downlink to his colleagues in the bunker 30,000 feet below. As they listened his voice suddenly stopped, and at the same moment the steady, friendly IFF (identification friend or foe) signal from 504826 which was being received by the two other Sentries abruptly disappeared. As subsequent events showed, even if the USAF crew had heard the warning shouted by the Dutch ECM operator in the Venlo Sentry there was little they could have done.
It should be recalled that one important modification to the original E-3A Sentry had been the fitting of hard points under the wings and fuselage which could carry chaff dispensers and air-to-air defensive weapons. Chaff comprised strips of metal foil exactly cut to simulate and amplify a given wavelength. A cloud of these would give the same response as an emitter on the same wavelength, and thus act as a decoy to attract a homing missile. At the same time as the electronic support measure (ESM) refit in 1983, and in a rare example of refusal to spoil a ship for a ha’p’orth of tar, NATO had also funded provision of these chaff dispensers. The USAF had taken a little longer to be convinced that the E-3A might not always see its attacker and be able to avoid him. Consequently, not all their AWACS carried this kind of protection. It was the misfortune of the crew from 965 Squadron that their aircraft that night had not yet been modified.
Lieutenant De Groot in the Venlo Sentry saw on his screen the Backfires suddenly turn for home. He guessed at once why. They would use their stand-off anti-radiation missiles, which had a range of 150 miles, and these would home on the radars of the Sentries and destroy them. Without waiting for any order from his commander he hit the chaff dispenser key and simultaneously shouted his warning. The well-drilled Italian ECM operator in the Bavarian Sentry heard th
e warning and immediately reacted in the same way. A few seconds later each of these two Sentry aircraft was rocked violently as Soviet anti-radiation missiles exploded harmlessly several hundred feet behind and below them in the cloud of drifting metal foil. The third Sentry, unprovided with chaff, was less fortunate. The missile struck. The seventeen US AF crewmen of the E-3A Sentry of 965 Squadron, far from their Oklahoma home base, became the first airman casualties of the Third World War. The wreckage of the aircraft fell over a wide area in the woods of the upper Mosel valley. The missile had ripped off the radome from the stricken Sentry’s mainframe and the aircraft had disintegrated.
The Backfires, however, had attacked not just the three Sentries. Each Backfire probably carried at least two anti-radiation missiles. They also destroyed six ground surveillance radars and damaged two others between Hanover and Mannheim. Yet, because of the rigid rules of engagement imposed by NATO on its air forces, they were able to return unscathed to their Ukrainian bases. The war had begun, but NATO airspace had not yet ‘officially’ been violated.
The crews in the two remaining Sentries had no time either to applaud the initiative of the Dutch officer or to grieve for their lost colleagues. On the encoded voice-link the clipped tones of the British duty commander, the air vice-marshal acting as deputy in COMAAFCE’s bunker, instructed both aircraft to adjust their patrol racetracks to cover the gap left by the Ramstein E-3A until the relief aircraft could come on station. The Venlo Sentry turned south, the Bavarian north; surveillance across the IGB was uninterrupted. At Geilenkirchen, the NATO Sentry on fifteen minutes’ stand-by was scrambled; at 0329 hours it climbed away, turning south to replace 504826.
