The Third World War: August 1985

by John Hackett

  Anti-tank defences, well disposed in depth, and in a highly favourable electronic environment, could do a great deal to offset a heavy numerical inferiority on the ground, particularly when the Allied tactical air forces were proving more effective than those of their opponents. It could hardly be a complete substitute for adequate strength in guns and armour on the battlefield, however. The commander of II British Corps had not lost all tactical control within his area of responsibility. His corps was still an operational entity, but it was split and penetrated, and between groups now no longer able to support each other the enemy’s advance went on. Though anti-tank defence detachments took a very heavy toll, missile re-supply to the launchers was proving more and more difficult. One by one ATGW crews were pinned down and overrun by motorized infantry in BMP, now for the most part, in a development of high significance, attacking mounted. By the late afternoon of 14 August leading elements of a Soviet tank division were approaching Julich.

  During the preceding night, however, a French armoured division had been moving into the area around Maastricht. This was part of a French corps previously intended for the Southern Army Group, but switched by SACEUR to this location at the urgent instance of AFCENT (after hasty discussion with the French government and swift intervention from Washington) late on the 13th. By first light on the 15th, though not yet in contact, this French division was in a useful and well-balanced position. Still rather thin on the ground as its units moved up, it was nevertheless in touch on its right with the left flank of a force of two US brigades, with which German Territorial units were operating in support, deployed and largely dug-in east and west of Duren.

  The peacetime location of HQ AFCENT at Brunssum, not far away, had now been finally abandoned, command having been long exercised from a field headquarters whose present location was near Liege. It was into the area of Aachen that the advanced parties of the newly arrived US Corps, the disembarkation of their heavy equipment in French ports now virtually complete, began to arrive just before dawn on the 15th.

  To the east of what was now becoming known as the Krefeld Salient two British divisions and one German were fighting with their backs to the Rhine. Their fire on the enemy’s flank, exploited by the timely manoeuvre of armoured squadron groups, could not stop his southward advance but did much to slow it down. On the other side of the Rhine, on the east bank, 14 August was a critical day. NORTHAG was at all costs determined to hold firm in the area south of the Lippe, to get the offensive now in preparation for the following morning off to a fair start. Against the weight of opposition pressing down from the north this was far from easy, but the battle that was now being fought, in great part by German troops both of the regular army and of the reserve, on German soil, was everywhere recognized to be of critical importance to the whole future of a free Germany. The Battle of the Lippe was above all a stand by Germans, to give the best chance of success in the counter-offensive for which Allied formations of six nations were now advancing to their assembly and dispersal areas in preparation for the attack. At nightfall the lines of approach for Allied units were still clear. They were kept clear till dawn.

  During the night the boundary between the Northern and Central Army Groups was moved northwards. It now ran from Koblenz to Hannover.

  We have treated the operations during these few days in mid-August 1985 with a degree of detail which might seem out of place in a book so limited in scope. The reason is quite simple: 15 August was a critical day, a major turning point in the whole battle for Europe.

  What would have happened if the Alliance had done as little for its defences in the past quinquennium as in the wasted years before is, as we look back today, painfully evident. The Russians would by this time have been secure on their stop-line on the Rhine, the Western Alliance would have lain in ruins, and the brutal obliteration of the Federal Republic of Germany would already have begun. The hopes of freedom in the subject peoples of the Soviet Union, both within the USSR and outside it, beginning once more to stir when war broke out, would have withered and died under a suffocating blanket of despair.

  What had been done within the Atlantic Alliance was not enough to prevent war. Brought to the edge of it by miscalculation and mischance, with time not on their side, the Russians were not held back from the invasion of Europe by the clear certainty that an invasion would fail. On the contrary, the opening, even if less attractive than before, still looked too good to miss, especially as it might not come again. What the Western Allies had just managed to do, through a new surge of confidence and resolve in some of them at least, was enough to soften the blow when it came, to prevent the swift military resolution on which Soviet Russia depended, to give time and opportunity for the use of some at least of the huge resources disposed of in the West, and eventually to spark off the explosions in subject nations which were in the end to bring the Soviet Union down.

  At midday on 15 August, as the units of the new US corps, fully equipped and ready for action, were hurrying under formidable defensive air cover by road and rail through France, while on the far side of the Atlantic further shipping was being marshalled into convoys to bring across the equipment for another, the welcome news reached AFCENT that the NORTHAG offensive had got off well and was making progress.

  For the first time Allied ground forces were operating under conditions of local air superiority. A formidable slice of 4 ATAF’s air reserves had been allotted by COMAAFCE to 2 ATAF. CENTAG and SOUTHAG were supported only by what was left of 4 ATAF, with the remnants of 5 ATAF and the French Tactical Air Force, the latter long released from the French government’s insistence that it operate only in support of troops under French command. For the time being, while the main counter-offensive battle was opened in the north, this was enough in the south. SOUTHAG’s turn would come.

  Bremen airfield had been seized by US airborne troops and some, if not many, air-portable units had been flown in, under anti-air defences that were now proving more and more effective. The main attack, with three divisions up and two more to follow, moving across the Lippe just before first light, with elaborate deception measures to indicate an attack further west, was very greatly helped by the emergence of well-equipped and carefully hidden stay-behind groups of German Jagd Kommandos and British SAS (Special Air Service) left in the Teutoburger Wald ten days before. A brilliantly successful SAS attack on a Soviet divisional HQ did so much to confuse the Warsaw Pact defence that by nightfall on 15 August forward troops of a German division were once more back in Osnabriick.

  Useful and heartening though the Allied riposte might be, it could by no stretch of the imagination be seen as the victory over the invading forces of the Warsaw Pact which was immediately announced, to the great discomfort of Allied chiefs of staff, by the Western press and TV networks worldwide, above all in the United States. Little else had changed. In Norway, for example, AFNORTH, without much in the way of air support except what could be provided from the United Kingdom, and, with great difficulty, from carriers operating north of the Faroes, was still containing and harassing the Soviet advance in the exceedingly difficult terrain of Troms and Nordland. From the Skagerrak to the Hook of Holland the coast, and the hinterland to some depth, was in occupation by Pact forces under Polish command. Denmark had been overrun more than a week ago. Hamburg had been declared an open city, a declaration which the Russians had ignored. It was being left alone all the same, bypassed for attention later. The Berlin garrison, surrounded by troops from divisions now withdrawn out of the fighting in the FRG, was being almost contemptuously left alone. From the Baltic and Carpathian Military Districts of the USSR some twenty divisions were on the move to come in, as the next echelon, behind those that had followed up, out of Byelorussia, the first incursion from the GSFG.

  Further south little Austria had been brutally brushed aside. Two or three brigades of good mountain troops were fighting on with the French and Germans in Bavaria, and older folk in Graz were remembering again how things had be
en in an occupation by Russian soldiers once before. AFSOUTH, with its regional headquarters no longer in Italy but in Spain, had fallen apart. Soviet domination of the Italian peninsula, if unobtrusive, was complete. In Yugoslavia the civil war dragged on, with US marines, once in the eye of the storm before it became a hurricane, now virtually cut off in Slovenia and tenuously supplied by air. Greece was manning her frontier with Bulgaria, alongside Turkey-in-Europe. Asiatic Turkey was under some Soviet pressure from the north, though not yet an object of major attack. The Soviet Black Sea fleet had moved through the Straits already. That, for the USSR, was enough for the present in south-east Europe.

  The whole Allied position could hardly be called a winning one.

  In the Central Region itself there were now deployed some forty divisions of the Warsaw Pact, fifteen of them tank divisions. Though some, at least, of this formidable order of battle had felt the effect of Allied air and missile attack, not more than half of it had yet been in action against an enemy on the ground. By any standard it was still three to four times as effective in firepower as the aggregate of Allied troops arrayed against it, and up to now the Warsaw Pact had held the whole initiative.

  The Allied offensive of 15 August, nonetheless, was the key to changes of critical importance. In the first place it brought into being in the forward areas a new operational situation. The enemy had now to set about securing his flanks and rear before attempting to resume the full impetus of his forward movement, which it was only prudent for the time being to reduce. But there was more to it than this. The operational challenge to the Soviet High Command could, at least in the shorter term, be met and mastered. The political consequences of what was happening, in the chemistry of which the military action of 15 August can now be seen as a catalyst, could not.

  The Soviet plan to bring about the military collapse of NATO’s Central Region, with the occupation of the Federal Republic and the disintegration of the Atlantic Alliance, before there was time to mobilize the West’s superior resources, or for the Western Allies to come to an agreement on the use of nuclear weapons, had already gone quite badly wrong. The intervention of the French, and the vigour with which it was pursued, had been as unwelcome as it had been unexpected. The improvements to NATO’s defensive posture in the previous few years, though not such as to put invasion by the Warsaw Pact right out of the question, had been sufficient to make it a good deal harder to bring off. The magnitude of the superiority in electronic technology enjoyed by the Allies, above all by the United States, and the adroitness of its application on the battlefield, had also come as an ugly shock. This, among other consequences, had prevented the suppression of anti-aircraft and anti-tank defences upon whose elimination Soviet tactical practice, both in the air and on the ground, so heavily relied. It had greatly hampered, by the severe degrading of communications which were sometimes reduced almost to nil, the operation of mobile formations expected to manoeuvre in depth.

  The combined arms operations, moreover, upon which the battle-fighting method of the Red Army fundamentally depended, had been anything but a complete success. The Allies had operated, as it were, in the interstices of the method, separating components whose strength lay in their interdependence. The four main elements of the combined arms concept — manoeuvre, fire suppression, organic defence and combat support — had rarely been allowed to operate together in anything like the degree of harmony required.

  For all these and other reasons the strategic programme had fallen so far behind that there was now a real danger of that massive Western build-up which it had been so important to forestall. Unaccountably, troop reinforcement over the US air bridge had continued and the Soviet Navy had been unable to prevent the safe arrival of heavy equipment by sea. More reinforcements were on the way. From the military point of view the question had to be asked: how much was there now to be gained by going on with a plan which had already failed?

  The political consequences of incomplete military success in Germany were to be far-reaching. The military might of the Warsaw Pact had not been defeated. Far from it. What had happened, however, was almost as important as defeat. The Red Army had been shown not to be invincible. As awareness of its limitations began to spread so hope began to rise in places where, up to now, only an occasional display of brave and fruitless dissidence had relieved the grey uniformity of a hopeless resignation.

  National revolt was still a long way off but the seeds of it were already being sown as, in spite of the strictest censorship, the news went swiftly round that all was not well with the offensive of the Warsaw Pact in Germany. From mid-August onwards growing partisan activity, with widespread sabotage and the disruption of rail communications through satellite countries, began to present an increasing problem on the lines of communication. This occurred first where, from the point of view of military supply, it mattered most — Poland. The same thing also began to happen in Czechoslovakia, and to a lesser extent in Hungary and Romania.

  Allied assistance to partisan forces, already some months in preparation, was immediately forthcoming. In the last year techniques of the Second World War, which some had feared might be allowed to lapse entirely, had been revived. The very large expatriate communities, particularly of Poles and Czechs, and to a lesser extent of Hungarians, in the United States, and of Poles born in Britain to ex-soldiers of the Second World War who had settled there, had been combed for recruits. Detachments of some size were already in an advanced state of training and were now, with munitions, weapons, communications equipment and supplies, being lifted surreptitiously by air into their own countries. Their principal task, in addition to the raising of now no longer wholly unjustified hopes of future deliverance, was interference, to the maximum degree, with rail and road communications.

  As the US air bridge had so dramatically shown, the personnel of military formations could readily be replaced by air. The Soviet airline Aeroflot had for years been organized for, and practised in, the task of personnel reinforcement, and in the ‘exercises’ which had preceded invasion had been fully mobilized for it. Some freight movement, too, even of heavy loads, was possible by air, but very large tonnages of fuel and munitions could not be handled so easily, still less the large numbers of heavy equipment, the tanks, SP guns and BMP, which were needed as unit replacements, and least of all the entire provision for an armoured or motorized formation moving up to relieve another which was exhausted and depleted in the battle. Road movement could help, though with all the disadvantages of wear and tear upon equipment the essential means of transport for combat formations remained the railway.

  Great improvements had been made in the last few years in the rail support system within the Warsaw Pact. Gauges had been unified, equipment standardized, tracks multiplied. Long stretches of permanent way nevertheless remained open to interference, only secure under close and continuous watch, a heavy drain on military manpower. Partisan attack, over the very long stretches involved, was becoming a great and growing problem, absorbing in protective duties increasing numbers of formations which should have been moving up to the front.

  The Soviet Union had always enjoyed the advantages of relatively short land lines of communication between the area of probable operations in Europe and the home base. The United States had the Atlantic Ocean to cross, involving much longer distances and less secure transit in slower and less efficient load carriers. Air transportation had modified the position and reduced the disadvantage to the US. It could not entirely remove it. This was a situation that the Soviet Union had always sought to exploit (with a success that throws an interesting light on the gullibility of some Western politicians) in any discussion on mutual force reductions. The advantage of land over sea routes would always persist, but the action of determined partisans, maintained in the face of measures of repression and reprisal whose very brutality underlined the importance of what was happening, was already doing much to reduce it.

  In absolute terms, moreover, the mass and volume (t
o say nothing of the cost) of all that was required, particularly in fuel and munitions, to maintain an army in field operations at an intensive rate against a similarly equipped opponent, was now very great. It had taken a quantitative jump since the Second World War. Warfare in the Middle East in the seventies had shown this very clearly, if on a relatively small scale. It was just no longer possible, at the rate at which stocks could now be exhausted, to sustain intensive operations of war for months on end. Head — and equipment — counts were no longer the true measure of an army’s capability. Formations in large numbers could be a liability rather than an advantage unless they could be kept effectively in action.

  The Soviet war-fighting philosophy, from whatever origins it may have been evolved, was in the circumstances of the 1980s exactly right. It enjoined the initiation of total and violent offensive action, swiftly followed through to the early attainment of a valuable objective. The position of military advantage thus secured would then be exploited by political means. Speed was everything. The corollary was that failure to secure the objective in good time must result in a thorough-going reappraisal, in which to continue to press towards the same end might very well be the least sensible course.