The Third World War: August 1985

by John Hackett

  Lawlessness was particularly in evidence in the towns. Houses left untenanted were an open invitation to burglary. Mugging in the streets, even in broad daylight, was common. Air raids offered particularly favourable opportunities for crime, though it was claimed by some that you were safer on the streets during an alert than after it. The ‘all-clear’ brought the muggers out again.

  It cannot truthfully be said that Britain was ever near collapse as an ordered society, though life in it in those few weeks was difficult for many, and dangerous for some, while death and destruction were widespread. Much went on as before. The weather was good. In the country the hay was in, the harvest promising. Industry, the railways, coal mining, went on much as before, though North Sea gas was cut off and little oil flowed. Movement was difficult but rationing hurt very few. Food distribution worked well enough, even under the stresses of refugee movement. Cricket was played. People swam, sailed and fished. There was even some racing. The school holidays were not yet over, though when they were very many schools would not reopen in the same place. People still tended to live a large part of their lives with, and through, television — perhaps even more so than before. Indeed, since television was an aspect of life which, in wartime, at once assumed an enormously enhanced importance, the part it played in the events of August 1985 deserve closer examination.

  The war brought immediate censorship to the television screens in Western Europe and the United States. In the years preceding the outbreak of fighting there had been considerable debate as to how far it would be wise to adopt open censorship, with the risk of breaking public trust in the television news, long established as the main source of news. The realities of the war swept those doubts aside. One of the most cogent arguments for censorship in the Second World War — the need to deny the enemy information which would be of value to him — was no longer valid. Soviet space satellites, with the detailed information they could afford, provided an immediate and much more accurate picture of what was happening than could be gleaned from the television screen. Had fear of informing the enemy been the only factor, risks could have been taken. But the risk which no government and no military leader in the West could accept was that of potential damage to civilian morale if the high and horrible cost in human suffering of this war were to be projected night after night into the homes of the public. This was a more important factor in the United States than in Britain and on the Continent, where the pattern of viewing had been much disrupted by the air attacks, which drove people away from their sitting rooms and into cellars and shelters into which they could not usually move their televisions. Here the radio reasserted itself as the main source both of news and of guidance from the authorities. But on the Continent, too, over wide areas, particularly outside the main cities, life was able to continue nonetheless with a considerable degree of normality, and the television screen remained the centre of attention. So the authorities from the outset adopted a policy of allowing the television bodies to cover the war as freely as they could whilst insisting on a rigid censorship of the material which emerged. In practice, this did not prove too difficult a task, for the highly mechanized, rapid, highly scientific nature of the fighting, together with the paralysing effect of chemical warfare on all but those equipped to deal with it, limited drastically the coverage which was possible. Battle losses among television cameramen, even in the comparatively short time the fighting lasted, were high.

  This policy of strict censorship prevailed throughout the three weeks of the fighting in Europe. Whether it could have lasted in such a rigid form if the conflict had gone on much longer is another matter. There were already signs of restiveness by the third week. In Britain the policy received its most severe test when Birmingham was destroyed. For the first twenty-four hours after the attack the authorities declared a complete ban on all pictures from the scene — pictures which were in any event difficult to secure. Coverage was concentrated on the size of the rescue operation, on scenes of fire brigades and rescue squads moving into the area, and on the damage on the periphery. But such was the wave of rumour and alarm which spread throughout the country that the government rapidly reversed this decision, and decided that only the truth would meet the situation. It therefore allowed the full story to be told, encouraged no doubt by the knowledge that the counter-blow on Minsk had already done much to loosen the links between the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites.

  The propaganda war, which was to a large extent a television war, was not, however, fought by the combatants for the minds of their own peoples only. It was also a war to influence the minds of the enemy, and the minds of the neutrals — and of their allies. Both sides saw immediately that the most effective propaganda they could make use of would be to emphasise the sufferings of their troops, giving the widest possible exposure to those scenes of casualties and damage which were being so carefully censored out. Within Germany the communist bloc were able to make immediate use of the East German and Czechoslovakian wavebands, already readily viewable within Western Europe, to disseminate such pictures. They reinforced this, particularly in the case of Britain, by disseminating material from satellites, utilizing for this purpose the fourth television channel which existed on most British sets, and which had by 1985 still not been used for entertainment. It should be added here that the main reason for this had, ironically, been the decision to divert into improved defence expenditure the resources which might otherwise have gone to financing further television. Though the British authorities were able to jam this wavelength, the Soviet Union were still able to infiltrate a considerable volume of material aimed at damaging the morale of Western audiences. It was almost all of terrible casualties, shown in close-up, of shocked and exhausted prisoners, of mile upon mile of damaged tanks, smashed vehicles and the wreckage of every kind of equipment. Many sequences showed shocked and wounded Allied prisoners pleading, whether genuinely or with false voices dubbed over, for peace.

  The Allied response was on similar lines. From West German transmitters a steady volume of comparable material was directed at East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland. To begin with little effort was made to hit at the morale of the Russians themselves. The Allies rightly appreciated that if the crack was to come, it would be within the satellite states. Two ‘black’ propaganda television stations, operating from the Federal Republic, one beamed into Czechoslovakia and one into East Germany, began broadcasting within hours of the outbreak of war. These had been skilfully prepared, with the aid of exiled broadcasters from those countries, to resemble closely the official communist stations. They presented themselves as being Czechoslovak Television and GDR Television, operating on a separate wavelength because of damage to transmitters on the main wavelength. They gave a service identical in pattern to the official service, but with the news, and in particular the newsfilm, selected to present the communist position in the worst possible light. Since the main stations were still transmitting, the device was readily detected, but investigations after the war showed that these stations had commanded a surprisingly high audience, due at least in part to the high quality of their transmissions. One feature was their use of recordings of popular serials and popular music programmes which ran on the official Eastern channels, which had been pirated off the air by agencies of the Federal Republic in advance, ready for re-use.

  The parallel propaganda battle for the minds of people outside Europe and the United States was also fought on radio and television. Three areas were of outstanding importance: Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. Both the Warsaw Pact and the Allied powers sought from the outset to use television to prove one central point to the people of these areas — that their side was winning. There was no time to go into the question of the rights and wrongs of the struggle. What was going to influence the attitudes of Africa and the Middle East and Far East was above all which side they thought was going to win. Soviet propaganda concentrated on constant radio reports of the success of their attacks, supp
orted by television news pictures of their forces in action — and winning. Allied propaganda was much the same, except that the message they had to convey was not one of victorious advances but of successful resistance. Every day that the Russians were held away from the Rhine was a propaganda gain of the utmost value, for it dented the image of Soviet invincibility.

  In this propaganda struggle the Allies were possessed from the outset of superior resources, both technical and human. The addiction of the peoples of Western Europe and America to television in the pre-war years now proved a boon. It had given Western Europe, and above all Britain and the United States, an efficient worldwide infrastructure for the swift transmission of television pictures, via satellite, all over the globe. The structure designed to meet the world’s hunger for pictures of European football, and news, was ideal for international propaganda. Every day, in peacetime, international newsfilm agencies, together with Eurovision and the other international television bodies, had been transmitting, chiefly from centres in London, New York, San Francisco and Madrid, a steady stream of programme material. Thousands of technicians were trained for this work and accustomed to doing it. The Allies could draw, therefore, on the hundreds of television camera teams, almost all now equipped with lightweight, highly portable ENG cameras, who worked for the many television stations of the West. When the fighting broke out the American networks operated from their relatively secure base in the United States as a united body, pouring out to the rest of the world a flood of material gathered by the camera teams of all the Allied countries.

  Three aspects of the battle for Europe received particularly vivid coverage. First there was the operation of the transatlantic air bridge. Day after day the television screens of the world showed the endless stream of transport aircraft bringing in and discharging into Europe men and war material from the seemingly limitless resources of the United States. Second, West German cameramen provided, with great courage and day after day, much dramatic footage of German resistance to the invaders, seen at its most spectacular along the line of the River Lippe. Not only were there shots of close combat, at once terrifying and moving, but interviews with the German infantry which left no doubt as to the strength of their morale and their great determination. Third, similar coverage was provided of the fighting through of the CAVALRY convoys at sea. No fewer than five cameramen lost their lives in this operation, for camera crews had been stationed on many of the escort craft and major transports, and others flew with maritime aircraft. Though there was considerable footage of the sinking of Allied vessels, this added a note of convincing veracity to the recording of the arrival of the bulk of the convoy. Culminating, as the work of these cameramen did, in scenes of troops moving away from the quayside in France, depleted perhaps but very formidable, this highly important battle was shown to the outside world as the victory which it was. In the field of peaceful electronics, the electronics of television, the Western technical superiority was to prove almost as important as its superiority in the electronic technology of the battlefield.

  In this propaganda battle the Allies had another weapon on their side — flexibility and speed of decision. The US President made one ruling of major importance immediately upon the outbreak of war. He resisted demands that a censorship board be established to guide and select the flow of television material overseas. ‘We must trust the networks and the individual broadcasters,’ he said. ‘We must rely on them to be both patriotic and sensible.’ An ad hoc organization of television professionals was set up and given scope to make the constant, split-second decisions on the choice of material to be transmitted throughout the world upon which television depends. They were guided — and in the last resort could have been controlled — by military advisers whose task was to ensure that no information of positive military value to the enemy was sent out. For instance, no coverage was given of the points of embarkation or the detailed composition of air loads from the US, still less of the location of their points of arrival in Europe. There was no coverage of the assembling of the CAVALRY convoys, no disclosure of their exact contents or destination. Shots which showed secret equipment in detail were excluded. But even such material as this was treated much less stringently than in previous wars, for, as has already been pointed out, it was known that the Soviet Union, by means of satellite surveillance, active pre-war espionage and the early capture of much equipment in the fighting in Germany, had access to most of these secrets anyway. By and large the broadcasters were free to treat this material very much as they wished, within the general understanding that it should be fairly selected so as to give a reasonably accurate picture of the broad strategic scene. This meant that coverage of Allied losses and withdrawals was balanced by coverage of Allied resistance and counter-attack. Within this broad understanding, however, the broadcasters were left to make their own judgments.

  This had two results, both of considerable value to the Allied cause. It meant that the material from Allied broadcasters reached the screens of the outside world ahead of that coming from the Soviet bloc; and that it reached those screens in a form that made it all the more convincing. It contained, if not the whole truth, at least a reasonably rounded version of the truth. Certainly it was more truthful than the coverage which came from Moscow. The communist material was not only less plentiful, there being fewer peacetime camera resources to deploy, but it was also dangerously delayed by their censorship machine. All Warsaw Pact footage of the fighting had to be screened, in both senses of the word, by Soviet officialdom. It arrived hours — and sometimes days — later than the Allied coverage. Day after day the first impression of the fighting available to television stations all over the world was that supplied by the Allies — and it was an impression of embattled countries which, whilst suffering heavy and grievous setbacks, were holding on strongly enough to enable the massive power of the United States to be brought to bear. This did a great deal to sustain the morale of key countries like Iran, a great deal to ensure the continued but friendly neutrality of the Far Eastern bloc, and a great deal, as post-war research has already shown, to raise anxieties within some African and Middle Eastern states that they might have backed the wrong side.

  Within that most television-addicted society in Europe, the United Kingdom, television played a curiously subdued role. By 1985 it had become in every way the main source of information and entertainment for the public. The various view-data systems which were then commonplace had added the dimension of a journal of record, a development which had weakened still further the impact of the newspapers. When war came, the public turned to television for news, guidance and information, and for that measure of entertainment for which the human spirit, however closely facing disaster, still has a craving. The first of these the television organizations were able to supply, in copious measure. For the first few days of the fighting the screens were given over almost entirely to continuous news programmes, interspersed with messages about air raid precautions or emergency services, with administrative instructions on such matters as rationing and evacuation. There were also frequent speeches from government leaders.

  Here the broadcasters found themselves on secure ground. Their touch was less certain when it came to entertainment. They fell back in the first instance on music, played from behind a caption card. But modern rock sounded suddenly out of place. Light entertainment and comedy struck such a false note that, after one channel had experimented with these as some form of relief from the gloom, they were abruptly dropped. One British regional station had an immediate and warmly approving reaction from its audience when it went over unashamedly to an abundance of frankly patriotic music. But there were limits to the number of times which even the works of Elgar could be played within the space of twenty-four hours. An early answer was found in the wide use of soap operas. Extensive re-runs of Coronation Street and Crossroads proved extraordinarily acceptable, if only because they were a reminder of a normality which had once existed, and which might, with good fo
rtune, exist again. And the Western, that one indestructible standby of television ever since its early days, also proved readily acceptable in wartime, with its recipe of fantasy rooted in reality, and its reassuring message that in the end the good and the right always triumph.

  CHAPTER 23: The Vital Peripheries: Middle East and Africa

  Almost fifty years ago General Wavell, when contemplating from the Middle East the stakes involved in an earlier world crisis, summed up the strategic balance in a statement remarkable alike for its brevity and its prescience. Oil, shipping, air power and sea power, said Wavell, were the keys to the war against Germany and Italy. They were dependent on each other. Air and sea power required oil. Oil had to be moved about in ships. Ships themselves required the protection of naval and air power. Wavell went on to argue that since the British Empire had access to most of the world’s oil, as it had to most of the world’s shipping, and since it was well endowed with naval power and potentially with air power — ‘we are bound to win’.

  To what extent did this sort of reasoning still apply half a century later? It was true that oil was still both cause and means of conflict; it was true that sea power was still largely dependent on oil and on the shipping indispensable to its transportation; it was true that air power and oil were still inextricably bound together — for use, for protection, for movement. What was no longer true was that ‘we’ — the Western Allies — still had a monopoly of all of them.

  Every great nation which without the benefit of sea power had sought to humble others in inter-continental struggles had in the end been humbled itself by sea power. It was a lesson enviously learned by the Soviet Union and carelessly thrown aside by its once greatest exponent — Great Britain.