The Third World War: The Untold Story

by John Hackett

At COMAAFCE’s operational headquarters the planners looked at it all ways but continued to shake their heads. They just could not see how an effective force could be brought to bear at a remotely acceptable cost in air losses. The use of calculators and operating manuals speeded up as heads drew closer together over the plotting charts;

  Twenty-five minutes later COMAAFCE was back on the line to SACEUR.

  “Look,” he said “those Swedes are having their own war up there, but if you can get them to let us into two of their southern airfields we can do it. All we’ll want is fuel for thirty aircraft between two bases. They’ll arrive and leave at night and there will be no fuss. Depending on how it goes we might need to recover to the same bases early in the morning but we’ll try to get them back to Britain, or at least to Norway. Of course if the Swedes could give some fighter cover on the way back from the Polish coast that would be great. But from what I hear that’s against their rules.”

  The senior Swedish liaison officer at SHAPE listened gravely to this request and undertook to put it straightaway to Stockholm.

  In half an hour the answer came back — yes, the two Wings could use the airfields, provided it was planned and executed exactly as COMAAFCE had said: namely, in and out on the same night with the highest security before and after the event. They could not agree to let the force recover to Sweden next morning unless it was in distress. Nor could there be any question of Flygvapnet (Swedish Air Force) fighters providing cover, for that would constitute offensive action in breach of the widely known and well recognized principles of defending Swedish neutrality.

  By noon that day, 13 August, eighteen USAF FB-111s and twelve Tornados (six each from the RAF and the German Air Force) had been detailed for the mission from Upper Heyford, Cottesmore and Marham in England. Cottesmore was the air base to which the German Air Force Tornados had been withdrawn from Norvenich in Germany. The Wing Commander who was to lead the RAF/GAF element left his crews studying their radar and infra-red target maps and took a Hawk jet-trainer down from Marham to see the CO of the FB-111s at Upper Heyford. These were old friends from their time together at the US Air War College at Maxwell, Alabama, and they had a lot to tie up.

  The essence of the plan was that the F-111/Tornado force, having flown over southern Norway to Sweden, would approach Poland from the north. Flying across the Polish plain at 70 metres or so they would have an excellent chance of avoiding detection until well over the coast, when the distance to run would be only 180 kilometres to Poznan and 270 to Wroclaw, and this would be covered in twelve to eighteen minutes’ flying. By refuelling and setting out from Sweden, the northern flank of the Warsaw Pact defences would be turned. This was the key to the whole operation. Evasive routing would keep them clear of the worst of the fixed defences which would anyway have minimum warning of their approach. With luck they might be taken completely by surprise. The force would be split when it crossed the Wista river north of Bydgoszcz and the two parts would then head separately to their targets. A hot reception by fighters would undoubtedly be waiting for them on their way back but they would have to rely on their speed and keeping as low as possible in the dark to get them through.

  At midnight, and with a bare minimum of airfield lighting, the two Wings landed at the Flygvapnet air bases of Kalmar and Kallinge. All thirty aircraft were refuelled and ready in little more than an hour before taking off again on their mission at 0200 hours. The primary targets were the multi-span bridges over the Warta and Oder rivers, which carried the main railway lines to Berlin from Warsaw and Krakow. Long trains of transporter floats, each train carrying up to fifty T-72 tanks or equivalent loads, were moving slowly to the west around the cities of Poznan and Wroclaw, sometimes spaced no more than a 100 metres apart. It would be a rewarding operation indeed if that flow could be halted, but bridges had always been difficult targets in air warfare. From above, it took only a small line error to produce a complete miss and bridges were designed to take heavy loads in the vertical plane anyway. Now it was all different: they were going to be hit sideways by missiles fired from 3,000 metres’ range with radar and infra-red homing weapons striking the bridge piers like giant hammers on a demolition job. Any missiles or bombs left over would be launched at whatever trains they could find in their path on the way out.

  The Tornados led both streams as they divided over the Wista river to the north. Their first task was to bring anti-radiation defence suppression weapons to bear against the SAM systems around the cities and on the bridges and to clear the way for the heavier armament of the FB-111s.

  At the first bridges they had an easy ride, but when the gunners dozing over their ZSU radar-controlled anti-aircraft guns woke up to what was happening they put up such a dense curtain of fire that four Tornados had gone down before the batteries were silenced. Five FB-111s went the same way and two which had been straggling a bit had fallen to SAM near Bydgoszcz to the north when the force had split. In all, four bridges went down, with spans crumpling into the rivers carrying two trains with them. This was a tremendous achievement, of critical importance to the battle on the Central Front.

  Nineteen out of the original force of thirty aircraft swept round out of the target area to battle their way back along the shortest route to the Baltic west of Gdansk.

  The defences were now fully alerted but it was still dark, and flying not far below the speed of sound a bare 70 metres above the flat terrain they were a very difficult target for the MiG-23 Floggers of the GDR and Polish Air Forces waiting for them to the north. One more Tornado and an FB-111 went at this stage but, although it is difficult to know even now, it was the general opinion of the crews in the easterly stream that the Polish fighters had not pressed home their attacks with much enthusiasm.

  Four of the seventeen surviving aircraft with heavy battle damage made distress calls and, taking the Swedes at their word, put their aircraft down on the ground in the first light of dawn at Kallinge air base. Four Soviet Air Force Foxbats in hot pursuit into Swedish airspace were met by interceptors and the greater agility of the Swedish Viggens sent two of the Foxbats down before the other two turned away and headed back towards Leningrad.

  The two commanders, the American and the Briton, were still in the lead of their sections as the remaining aircraft flew on low over the sea towards the west. They had agreed the day before that they would cut the south-west corner of Sweden very fast and close to the ground, before pulling up over the mountains to make their pre-planned landing at Oslo in Norway.

  Next day was to see the massive B-52 onslaught on the front line near Venlo. If that was the bludgeon blow, this daring and skilful attack by night intruders had been the rapier thrust. As had looked likely, the enemy’s heavy bridging equipment had been taken well forward into East Germany, where it expected to be attacked, and where, of course, it repeatedly was. This resulted in scarcity of bridging and recovery equipment further back. Many trains had now to be sent back to Warsaw and Krakow and laboriously re-routed through Czechoslovakia to the south and Bydgoszcz to the north. On the map it looked like a relatively easy exercise, but yet again the inflexibility of Warsaw Pact plans was to create difficulties. Even more resulted from widespread sabotage by Polish workers, acting on exhortation and instruction over Western radio broadcasts. In all, the rapier had added a telling thirty-six hours or so to Soviet reinforcement timings. This was to multiply and would greatly exacerbate Warsaw Pact problems after the B-52 attack on the front line next morning, 15 August.”[7]

  The position near Venlo on the front of II British Corps, whose four divisions were flanked on the right by a US brigade and on the left by I Netherlands Corps, was critical. By nightfall on 14 August the Soviet 20 Guards Army was not far from achieving the front commander’s object, which was to force a way through the Allied forces defending the point of the Krefeld salient that Soviet forces had driven between Duisburg and Venlo, and thus open the possibility of carrying out the truly critical part of the whole Warsaw Pact operational pl
an. This was still, once a crossing had been forced over the lower Rhine, to swing left upstream and take CENTAG from the rear.

  Already trans-Atlantic reinforcement was building up and the massive augmentation the Soviet Union had hoped to forestall was well under way. The arrival in the Central Region of a fresh US corps was imminent. Its advanced parties began to arrive in the Aachen area early on the 15th. A French armoured division was approaching Maastricht. SACEUR had released four divisions from his last theatre reserves to NORTHAG, as from 0001 hours on 14 August, for the counter-offensive north-eastwards towards Bremen to open at first light on the 15th.

  This was to be a critical day in the history of the Third World War. At the point of the Krefeld salient Soviet troops had penetrated II British Corps and by nightfall on 14 August Soviet tanks were not far from Julich. Unless the Soviet advance could be held up on 15 August the fresh US corps and the additional French division could not be brought into action in time, the NORTHAG counter-offensive towards Bremen would be stillborn, and the whole Allied position in the Federal Republic would be threatened by the Soviet thrust southward, up the left bank of the Rhine, in CENTAG’s rear. This, it was clear, was the time to use the B-52s standing by at Lajes in the Azores. On the morning of 14 August SACEUR ordered COMAAFCE to make a maximum effort at first light on the 15th, to slow down the Soviet advance and help to stabilize the position in the Krefeld salient. The action of the B-52 bomber force, at what was a truly crucial moment of the war, deserves attention in some detail.

  All were aware, ground and air commanders alike, that the practical problems raised by the decision to use the B-52s would be difficult to resolve. Defending forces would have to break contact far enough and long enough to give the B-52s a bomb line that would permit the maximum impact on Warsaw Pact armour with minimum casualties in NATO forward positions. That, COMAAFCE must have reflected pragmatically on the morning of 14 August, was now the army’s problem; his was to get as many of the B-52s as possible over the Krefeld salient at 0400 hours local time the following day.

  The targeting directive was received at Lajes at 1200 hours local time on the 14th. During the previous week the crews had increased the customary proportions of alert status, which ran from fifteen minutes to six hours. By 1500 hours that day the last batch of air tests was complete and thirty-nine of the B-52s were declared serviceable for the mission. It was now that the expertise built up by air crew and ground crew in several years of European exercises paid handsome dividends. One hundred MK-82 bombs were loaded into each bomb bay and, although the round trip of 4,000 miles would be well within B-52 range, a full fuel load was taken on board. By 2200 hours air crew briefings were completed. The target area was a strip of territory 10 kilometres from north to south by 2 kilometres east to west, due west of Neuss. It was believed that in that area at least three divisions of 20 Guards Army, with probably one or two of the leading regiments of the second echelon, would be concentrating for a final breakthrough. In practical terms the targets would include at least 20,000 troops, 1,000 tanks, 500 BTR and a further 1,500 soft-skinned vehicles essential to the forward momentum of the ground attack. The terrain was flat and offered little natural cover. The proximity of an Autobahnkreuz afforded a near-perfect identification point for either visual or radar bombing. Time on target would be 0400 hours and bombing height would be 40,000 feet.

  The B-52s carried a wealth of defensive equipment but exercises during the previous five years had pointed the need for fighter escort. On this occasion that responsibility was to be shared amongst French Mirage F-1Cs, 2000s and USAF F-15s. The B-52s’ route would take them north-eastwards across the Pyrenees and up across France and Luxembourg towards Cologne, where they would begin their bombing run.

  By 0300 hours the bombing stream was cruising at 525 miles per hour at 40,000 feet over France, still on a north-north-easterly heading. Above and to either side were loose gaggles of Mirage F-1Cs of the Commandement Air de Forces de Defense Aeriennes (CAFDA). The awacs screen, now pulled back over central France, detected no unusual enemy fighter movement either from the captured airfields in West Germany or across the inner German border.

  From the Meuse valley area onwards, the B-52s entered theoretical intercept range of Flogger Gs and Foxbats. To reduce Allied difficulties of identification and airspace management COMAAFCE had stopped all deeper battlefield interdiction or counter-air attacks in the Central Region after 2300 hours, so that anything coming across the FEBA could be assumed to be hostile. COMAAFCE’s staff had calculated that some kind of warning would reach the Warsaw Pact from agents in Lisbon and that the remaining IL-76 C Cookers, although now held well back over central Poland, would probably pick up the high-flying B-52 formation over central France. Seeing the formation, however, was one thing; deciding where it was headed was quite different. The known combat radius of the B-52s was so great that they could at any moment change heading and threaten troop concentrations, logistic support, command centres or any other targets anywhere between the Baltic and Bulgaria. Moreover, while COMAAFCE knew that Flogger and Foxbat units had been moved forward behind the advancing Warsaw Pact armies during the previous ten days, he suspected that the Soviets, rather like the Nazis with the Luftwaffe in France in 1940, had found it quite easy to deploy the aircraft themselves but much more difficult to support them quickly with enough weapons, fuel and battle-damage repair facilities to allow them to maintain a high sortie rate. It would, therefore, have been fatal for the Warsaw Pact’s air defence units to be thrown into battle either too deep in NATO territory, where the French interceptors were still relatively unscathed, or before the final heading and destination of the bombers were more definitely known.

  COMAAFCE also knew that the Soviets were about to have their hands forced, because as the B-52s approached Luxembourg they were joined by four F-111EB ECM aircraft which effectively blinded all three Cookers and a large number of the enemy’s shorter-range surveillance radars. The Floggers and Foxbats had to be scrambled towards the last known B-52 heading from bases up to 400 miles away and, as the NATO planning staffs had hoped when they had first envisaged the use of the B-52, the fighters’ problems did not end there. Despite Soviet attempts to encourage pilot initiative, looser formations and reduced ground control, most air defence crews had been trained to fight in their own airspace against intruding bombers whose position and heading were precisely known. Not only were air crew conditioned to this; the aircraft were designed for little else. Foxbat was purely and simply a high-speed high-altitude interceptor with poor manoeuvrability, while Flogger G, although more flexible, was by no means an air-superiority fighter, though both would fare better at high level than at low against their NATO counterparts. A further complication was that Polish, East German and Czechoslovak pilots had expected to be defending their own homelands. Scrambling with little control from unfamiliar airfields against a vaguely defined target well away from their national airspace was not the best invitation to enthusiastic performance.

  Such enthusiasm for combat as they did have would shortly be reduced still further. The formation of F-111EB ECM aircraft was soon to be joined behind their jamming screen by forty Mirage 2000s and thirty of the remaining F-15s from 2 and 4 ATAF. As the bombers turned north-north-west over Cologne their crews could see outlined against the slightly lighter sky to the east the comforting silhouette of some of the most effective fighters in the world. Although the night was clouded, the city of Cologne and the river bend were crystal clear in the air-to-ground radar displays. Within a few seconds the offset aiming point, the Autobahnkreuz between Venlo and Duisburg, came up with equal clarity. Then, as the diary of 337 Squadron of the USAF records, ‘all shades of hell broke loose both in the air and on the ground’.

  It was, and is, impossible to say how many Warsaw Pact fighters were scrambled against the B-52s. The early warning Sentries identified eighty-five blips initially but their ability to note every target was soon lost in the very large numbers of airc
raft flying in less than 100 square miles of airspace. The situation was further confused by the attempts of three Soviet Air Force Cubs to jam both the bomber radars and the Sentries’1 own surveillance beams. The balance of advantage, for the time being at least, remained with the NATO force. The Warsaw Pact ground controllers could do no more than direct their fighters to the approximate source of the F-111 jamming and leave them to it. But, for the first time in the war, F-15 Eagles were able to engage to the full extent of their equipment. There was no need to close to identify: if it was heading west, hack it. At 50 miles the Foxbat and Floggers were clearly visible on the Eagles’ radar, and head-on at Mach 2 the enemy aircraft were well within the attack envelope of the Eagles’ radar-guided Sparrow missiles.

  Each Eagle carried four Sparrow and four infra-red homing Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. So many Sparrows were fired in such short time that to the bomber crews they looked like salvoes. But by no means all found their targets. A small proportion failed to detonate, one or two exploded against each other in what is called fratricide, some targets were struck by more than one missile and a few Warsaw Pact pilots were quick enough to react to their Sirena radar warning receivers and break the beams of the incoming missiles. It is possible, however, that more than 100 Sparrow missiles were fired in the first moments of contact and that some sixty attackers were hit. Sentries observed with interest that immediately after the opening contact, several hostile blips abruptly changed heading and set course eastwards.

  Most of the fighters that had escaped the first impact, however, were not deterred and at 20 miles from the bomber stream the powerful Fox Fire AI (air-intercept) radar of the Foxbats began to burn through the F-111 jamming to disclose the B-52s. By now, however, it was 0400 hours and the first light of dawn was reaching the upper skies. Still the advantage lay with the Western allies. Now the F-15s and the Mirages could use their considerable advantage in agility to close, identify and kill the fast-tracking MiGs with the wide-aspect infra-red homing Sidewinders and Magics.