The Third World War - The Untold Story

by Sir John Hackett

  “The operating and maintenance manuals have gone from the aircraft!” he is alleged to have said.

  His excitement was understandable. These were classified documents of high importance. Their loss was a serious matter. He was shortly followed into the lavatory by a grim-faced Major. Unaware that the attendant could understand Russian, the three men argued furiously for several minutes about whether and how the manuals could have disappeared and who was responsible.

  Then the Colonel said: “Understand one thing: NO documents have been removed from my aircraft. If it is necessary to replace certain damaged manuals on our return to base, you will do so; but if one word of this reaches the ears of the regimental commander I will personally ensure that every member of this crew sees nothing but a Gulag for the rest of his life.”

  History, therefore, had almost repeated itself. In 1939 the Poles had given Enigma to the West; in 1985 they seemed to have passed over the secrets of Cooker. Because of a political commissar’s fear of his superiors, and the airmen’s fear of the commissar, it looks as if the loss was never reported. By 3 August NATO commanders began to receive complete operational and technical data on Cooker. This did not get down to squadrons for another forty-eight hours, which was only just in time.

  Chapter 7: The Warsaw Pact

  Soviet hopes and aspirations for a world position of compelling power had by the beginning of the 1980s passed through two phases and entered a third. In the early days of the revolution it was confidently hoped that Marxist-Leninist ideology would prove an irresistible magnet to the peoples of the world and the Soviet Union would sit supreme above all nations as its unique source and sole interpreter. In the background, of course, would be the additional solid support of powerful armed forces. Hopes of ideological supremacy were never realized. There has never been a mad rush on the part of other nations to follow the example of Soviet Russia and set up Marxist-Leninist states. These hopes were before long replaced by the equally confident expectation that the Soviet Union would become an economic superpower. It would easily overtake the United States and exercise thereafter unchallenged authority as the world’s richest and most productive nation. There would, of course, still be the support of powerful armed forces. These hopes too were disappointed. The gross national product (GNP) of the Soviet Union by 1984 had not yet reached $3,000 per head of population, which put it in nineteenth place among European nations. By the early 1980s the Soviet Union had indeed become a world power of truly formidable might and influence, not through the attractions of its revolutionary ideology, nor yet through its economic performance. The Soviet Union’s power, which was very great, was almost exclusively military.

  Its development, and above all the desperate efforts to achieve military parity with the United States, had been costly. The economic growth of the USSR was at this time slowing down. None the less, its defence expenditure continued to rise at rather more than 5 per cent per annum and was probably taking up more than the whole increase in gross national product. One-third of all mechanical products in their final form were for military stocks, which was a serious handicap in an economy gravely short of equipment and machines. Most of the available research and development effort went to defence, as well as one-fifth of all metal production, together with one-sixth of the chemical output and about the same proportion of all energy consumed. Though the figures were made to look smaller by the Soviet Union’s internal pricing system it seems likely that by 1983 defence expenditure was absorbing something between 15 and 20 per cent of total GNP.

  The Soviet Union’s ageing leadership, the character and outlook of which had been formed in the great patriotic war, had always relied heavily upon, and been very close to, the military. On grounds of age alone changes at the top were inevitable before long. Brezhnev had never made the mistake (from which, when it was made by others, his own career had so signally benefited) of indicating an heir apparent in the leadership, but change in the mid-1980s there would certainly be and with the introduction of younger men into the Politburo and the military high command, men who had not been conditioned in the same way as their predecessors, a shift in outlook and priorities could be expected.

  Newcomers would hardly be likely to adopt more liberal policies. They would be hard-line realists, to whom the absolute supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and the safeguarding of their own positions in it, would override all other considerations whatsoever. Nevertheless, changes in structure, organization and style would certainly take place, if only to demonstrate that the leadership had changed. For the old guard, therefore, time was running out. They had until about the mid-eighties and probably no longer to extract full benefit in their own way from the Soviet Union’s military strength and its recently developed capability for projecting that strength at a distance, and to consolidate the world position this created. Beyond that time the distortion demanded of the economy for maintaining that position could not be indefinitely sustained, even with a populace long accustomed to its drearier consequences. Moreover, the growth in Soviet military strength had quickened defence expenditure in other countries and this in turn had reacted on the Soviet Union which, even if it had been inclined to recast priorities and spend less on defence, found itself, as the direct result of its own policies, constrained to spend more.

  There also loomed the spectre of an extensive and costly military re-equipment programme to replace material, much of which had been developed more than twenty years before to embody a rather different war-fighting philosophy. This would not happen all at once but could not, without encouraging growing weaknesses in the whole defence structure, be long deferred.

  There were other tendencies which also pointed to an approaching climacteric. The population of the Soviet Union increased in the years between 1974 and 1984 by some twenty-five million, but only about a quarter of this was Russian. Most of the rest was Asiatic, in which the increase was at about four times the rates found among Muscovites. The greatest increase was in Central Asia. By the early years of the 1980s the population of the USSR included some seventy million Moslems. Impermeability to external influences continued, as always, to be a prime factor in the maintenance of the supreme objective - the total dominance of the CSPU. The complete exclusion of such influences, however, could not be guaranteed, even in the Soviet Union itself.

  Hunger for Western-style consumables was found everywhere. Listening to Western broadcasting was common. Probably as many as fifty million people in the Soviet Union in 1981, according to Vladimir Bukovsky, were already receiving the BBC, the Voice of America, Deutsche Welle and other Western radio stations. Very often listeners tuned in for the music and then stayed with the news.

  The other Warsaw Pact states were even more open than the USSR to outside influences, especially in view of the inability of COMECON to satisfy their consumer needs and resultant closer contacts with, as well as indebtedness to, Western economies. In the event, therefore, that the USSR should seek a direct military confrontation with the USA it would clearly be unwise to defer this beyond, say, 1985. In the more likely contingency of consideration in the Soviet Union of how far it could proceed with high-risk policies, in which the danger of a military confrontation would be considerable, it would clearly be more prudent to pursue such policies in the early 1980s than later on. The window of opportunity would not remain indefinitely open.

  The Soviets in their international relations after the Second World War and before the collapse of Soviet imperialism in the Third, though they were thought by so many to be masters of a shrewd and far-sighted strategy, often demonstrated a quite surprising degree of maladroitness. This was often so striking as to arouse comment at the time. Their extraordinary mismanagement of affairs in Austria in 1946 was a very early example, when their conviction that Austrian gratitude for liberation by the Red Army made it safe to allow free elections, in the confidence that a communist majority would be returned, resulted in the election of an Assembly without
a single communist member. There was also their mishandling of affairs in Yugoslavia, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in the Middle East, in the Indian sub-continent and with China, and their dramatic expulsion, lock stock and barrel, in 1972 from what looked like a deeply entrenched position in Egypt. Rarely, however, has the history of international relations shown a more outstanding example of maladroitness than the bringing about of the NATO Alliance and West German rearmament. The Reich lay prostrate before its four principal enemies - the USA, Britain, the Soviet Union and France - totally defeated. Within four years of that time, Soviet policy had so antagonized its former allies that, with their patience exhausted, the other three saw no alternative but to form a defensive alliance and then bring in the defeated enemy re-armed. Pro-Soviet fantasists in the West sought in vain to disguise the simple truth. NATO, a purely defensive structure, was brought into being by the USSR and by the USSR alone. The Soviet Union was itself the only begetter of what was to become its greatest bane.

  Citizens of the Soviet Union, as the 1970s moved on into the 1980s, may well by now have come to accept their lot with resignation, without any confidence, or even any hope, that it would ever change for the better. It would be wrong to suppose, as many did in the West, that they were also wholly lacking in awareness of what went on in the other world, outside the closed system which constituted their own. In addition to what came in through radio broadcasts from outside, the circulation of information within the Soviet Union itself was a good deal freer than was commonly realized in the West. It was certainly much freer than the Communist Party liked. A country in which a huge black market flourishes, however, is not one in which information does not circulate, especially when the black market is not only permitted by the authorities but even, as compensation for their own extraordinary ineptitude, actively encouraged, though the circulation of information, of course, is not. Though the concept of public opinion as a political force in a communist state is hardly valid, it was inevitable that in the Soviet Union, in the four or five years before the war, there was not only widespread awareness of what was going on in the outside world but strong currents of political opinion flowing from it. The boycott of the Olympic games made a far greater impression than was commonly realized abroad and the attempts by the Party to play down its effects and claim an outstanding public relations success produced in Moscow a veritable flood of the sick jokes whose volume and venom had long been the only reliable index of public reaction to events. The invasion of Afghanistan aroused wide interest and deep unpopularity and, as it dragged on with no satisfactory end even remotely in sight, it was more clearly recognized as a blunder of the first magnitude. The disposal of the dead in the Afghan campaign threw a particularly interesting light on popular attitudes. At first they were flown home for burial, but as the flow continued and the numbers grew this was seen to be unwise. Public concern in the Asiatic republics, from which most of the first troops engaged in Afghanistan came, was so marked (particularly in Kazakhstan) that from mid-1981 the practice ceased. The dead were now buried in the country where they died.

  It will long be argued, with the benefit of hindsight, whether the West should have made greater efforts in the early 1980s to take advantage of the Soviet Union’s difficulties, for example in Afghanistan and Poland. In the former, massive supply of arms to the ‘rebels’, or the active suborning of Soviet troops, would have required a greater degree of collusion by Pakistan than it was wise for that country to give. Moreover, Afghan disunity was almost as powerful a source of weakness as lack of heavy weapons. The Polish case too was a genuine puzzle. Could the West have saved Solidarity? After the imposition of military government, how far was it in the Western interest to do economic damage to the country in the hope that the Government and not the people would suffer, and so be led to allow the progress towards democracy to be resumed?

  Ineffective though pre-war efforts in the West had been to exploit Soviet difficulties, they had some interesting by-products. Very little was done in peacetime by Western governments, however tempting the opportunities, to prepare for intervention in the internal affairs of Warsaw Pact countries if war should break out. It was too risky for the CIA or other such agencies to make any large-scale preparations and their governments in general warned them not to try. The period of hostilities when war did break out was too short to organize much more than the support of subversion by the massive injection by air of supplies. What governments had failed to do, however, was in large part made up for by the efforts of those active individuals who had pressed hard for better exploitation of opportunities to harm the Soviet system in peace. Governments in the West found ready to their hand organizations, personnel, training arrangements and even stocks of equipment brought together by activist expatriates of the Baltic States and the Ukraine, and other constituent republics of the Soviet Union, let alone of Warsaw Pact countries. Those in the West whose national origins and interests lay in these countries flooded in, when war threatened, to offer their services. There were many more than could be used during the actual period of hostilities, but good use was made of some, particularly in Poland, the Baltic States and the Ukraine. More useful still were some of those exiles, driven out by communism, who on the collapse of the Soviet Union were more than willing to return to their own countries and contribute to their recovery. Since these often included many of the ablest men and women in their own nations, some with very high capabilities as administrators, their availability in the establishment of successor regimes was invaluable.

  The plan which was finally accepted in the Kremlin for the invasion of Western Europe by forces of the Warsaw Pact envisaged a swift occupation of the Federal Republic of Germany, to be completed within ten days, followed by consolidation of a front along the Rhine and the negotiation of a ceasefire with the United States from a position of strength.

  There were several very important reasons why the USSR should seek to secure the Rhine stop line with the least possible delay. The first was the need to achieve a decisive military success and a strong and clearly defined political base for negotiation before trans-Atlantic reinforcement could develop a truly dangerous momentum. The second was to give the West as little time as possible to resolve doubts and hesitations over the initial release of nuclear weapons - for it was naturally assumed that the West would need them first, to offset the conventional superiority deployed against them by the Warsaw Pact. A third and scarcely less important reason lay in the necessity to reduce to a minimum the strain of prolonged operations upon the coherence of the Warsaw Pact, particularly where those countries were concerned which, up to the war, had been described as the Pact’s Northern Tier - the German Democratic Republic, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The first two of these reasons are explored in the next chapter. The third merits attention here.

  The armed forces of each of these three countries, though all had been set up (ab initio in the GDR, in reconstituted form in Poland and Czechoslovakia) under close Soviet control, differed radically. All armed forces, even when they are raised within an externally imposed straitjacket, reflect the ethos and outlook of parent nations. The part to be played in the Third World War by the armies of the Northern Tier can hardly be said, in retrospect, to have been surprising.

  A role was planned for these armies, and initial tasks assigned, in a swift and violent invasion of Western Europe which was to be speedily successful. The plan was only one of many contingency operational plans kept constantly updated in the Kremlin, but it was of the highest importance. It was inevitably the plan which to the three countries concerned was of more importance than any other.

  Each of their armies had been organized, equipped, trained and oriented in the basically offensive mode of the Soviet armed forces and integrated into them as closely as differing circumstances allowed. The impatience of certain older and more doctrinaire officers of the Soviet High Command at the apparent unattainability of total integration was understood in the Defence Committee of the Politb
uro, its most important element, but had to be restrained. The armed forces of these three countries remained, as events proved, very different, each retaining marked characteristics derived from different parentage and upbringing.

  The army of the GDR (the National People’s Army or NPA) emerged as a totally new creation in the 1960s. It was always the smallest of the three, at little more than 120,000 strong at the outbreak of war, of which half were eighteen-month conscripts. It had no military tradition of its own (the re-emergence in the 1970s of historic distinctions between Saxon and Prussian units was of no great significance) and was entirely subservient to a Party regime whose interests were closely consonant with those of the Soviet Union. Fear of a threat from West Germany, carefully cultivated by the USSR, was helpful during the formative period, but Ostpolitik and detente reduced the value of this threat as a bonding material, and defection from the NPA to the West in the 1970s was considerable. This was rarely found, it must be said, among officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel, which was evidence of the degree of reward and encouragement offered to the military by the Party. While the two tank and four motor-rifle divisions of the NPA were to be assigned a fully forward role in the offensive of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG) in August 1985, the reliability of the NPA (not so much in the officer cadre, particularly at higher levels, as in the rank and file) was always to the Soviet High Command a cause for uneasiness. When the lightning successes of Warsaw Pact forces over NATO, upon which the loyalty of the East German NPA within the Pact depended, even more than it did with others, failed to materialize and there was civil commotion, starting with sabotage and violence first of all in Dresden on 11 August, it was not thought prudent to use the NPA, at least in the first instance, to suppress it. The Bereitschaftspolizei of the Ministry of the Interior were called in first and then, when the rioting spread on 14 August to Leipzig, a Wach-regiment under the orders of the Ministry of State Security moved in. When disorder spread further, Soviet permission was, with the utmost reluctance, sought by the GDR to withdraw NPA regular troops to suppress it, and permission was as reluctantly given. The three NPA motor rifle regiments brought back for the purpose on 17/18 August proved unmanageable. Orders were disobeyed, desertion was rife, officers were shot. The Party was still supreme in the GDR but from now on it was progressively less able to govern.