The Third World War - The Untold Story

by Sir John Hackett

  South-east of Magdeburg we swung north. Many hours of practice over Canada had taught us that loose station-keeping at night at low level was not easy, but by no means impossible. With 20 miles to go, Andy selected the “attack” mode on the TV display and the “stabilized” mode on the combined map and radar display to bring together visually computed target and aiming markers. I monitored the sequence in my head-up display in the front cockpit, just in case I picked up an aiming error and had to take over from the auto pilot.

  For a few seconds we thought we were going to achieve complete surprise, and perhaps our approach from the south-east rather than the west did give us a little extra time, but then we were well and truly lit up by several different surface-to-air defence systems. I loosed off both arm. The automatic self-screening ECM pod was obviously working well. Andy kept his head down. I think he was grateful to have his time taken up with placing his laser range finder on the main runway of the airfield, and with the fine tuning of the aiming marker. There was a fair amount of activity below us by now as we swept over the airfield. It was then that we lost No. 2 and Eric and Ken. I think they must have been hit by the guns or low level SAM. They were just blown apart. The rest of us sprayed the base with the JP-233s. I didn’t see the effect of our weapons but the sub-munitions put down by the Wing Commander spread out beautifully right across the runway. Unless our weapons failed badly, we cut it in three places and in addition scattered delayed-action mines all over the tarmac and the airfield itself. The damage will take a long time to put right. I didn’t see any Floggers but we expected them to be in their hardened shelters anyway. They’ll stay there for a quite a time now. One unexpected bonus was the presence of two Candid transports. Andy saw both those go up. I suppose the other side also has problems of airfield overcrowding. Our second four were thirty seconds behind us and according to their report we can assume that any additional warning the enemy had that they were coming in was more than balanced by the impact of the first wave. As the second four were clearing the area they lost one aircraft after it had dropped its weapons.

  So, we headed for home, but we weren’t there yet. We now had two problems to think about. First, whether there was any stray Flogger who fancied his look-down-shoot-down chances. After that there were our own air defence people who quite naturally get a bit tense about high-speed low-level aircraft coming out of the east. One or two of the Tornados still had ARM left but we had to rely on the ECM pod to get us back over the Warsaw Pact SAM. In fact, as we had hoped, their SAM (which had just rolled forward with the armour) were not as well co-ordinated as the kit we had found near the airfield. It takes time to site SAM radars and naturally they tended to concentrate on their fronts, not their rear, which was where we were coming from, still at 100 feet and still tracking quite quickly.

  So we crossed the FEBA over the Teutoburger Wald at a height, speed and heading which should have seen us through. As far as I know our IFF (identification friend or foe) kit was functioning but I don’t know how far it might have been spoofed earlier in the night. For whatever reason, some bastard let a SAM go. At least I assume it was a SAM. It could have been one of our own HAWK. I hope not. Andy hadn’t picked up any AI (air-intercept) radar warning and we didn’t see any other aircraft. It got Wing Commander Spier’s Tornado .The aircraft simply disintegrated in a ball of flame. No one could have got out. It was ironical, because one of the last things he had said in the briefing was to take care not to relax on the home leg because that was when the greater number of losses usually occurred.

  I took over the lead and we climbed to meet our tanker again. I must admit I’m glad that the mates up at the box (Ministry of Defence) decided in 1982 to go ahead with the VC-10 modification because there was no way we could have launched from Marham against Magdeburg on that routing without air-to-air refuelling. So here we are: five Tornados back out of eight, and one major Warsaw Pact base knocked out for several critical hours.”

  The 1 Guards Tank Army, deployed at the outbreak round Dresden, came into action against CENTAG on 5 and 6 August but by now two fresh US divisions flown in from the United States to man their pre-positioned equipment had come under command and the position had to some extent improved. By 8 August all of the Federal Republic east of a line from Bremen southwards to just east of Augsburg was in Soviet hands. Both Berlin and Hamburg had been bypassed but Hanover, Minden, Kassel, Wurzburg, Nuremberg and Munich had all been lost and a huge and threatening salient had developed westwards from Bremen into the Netherlands. The crossing of the lower Rhine by nightfall on that day, 8 August, had been successfully carried out and a strong Warsaw Pact bridgehead consolidated on the left bank of the Rhine as far as the River Waal.

  “A “Concentration Centre for Reinforcements” had been set up at Dresden. It was planned for a very high capacity and a rapid through-put, but the movement of tank armies over the Polish rail network had virtually taken up the system’s whole capacity and there was a significant fall in the flow of replacements of material and of personnel reinforcements from the USSR.

  Bringing 197 Motor Rifle Division back to full strength took four days instead of the stipulated two. The 94 and 207 Motor Rifle Divisions were in the area at the same time. All the T-72 tanks were taken from the motor rifle regiments of 197 Division and used to replace losses in the division’s tank regiment. To the motor rifle regiments old T-55 tanks were issued instead, taken out of mothballs. The heavy motor rifle regiment was brought fully up to strength with new BMP straight from two factories in the Urals, but there were no BTR replacements available for the two light regiments of the division, which should have been equipped with BTR 70s. The remaining undamaged BTR were collected into a single battalion, with the rest of the battalions having to make do with requisitioned civilian lorries. As for men, numbers were made up with reservists and soldiers from divisions that had sustained too many losses to be re-formed.

  At the Centre a collection of captured NATO tanks, armoured transports and artillery had been assembled and a training programme for officers and men was organized. The NATO equipment had usually fallen into Soviet hands as a result of mechanical failure, from damage to tracks by mines or gunfire, for example, though several prize specimens had been acquired when crews were taken by surprise in early non-persistent chemical attacks to which they had at once succumbed leaving their equipment intact as an easy prey to swiftly following Soviet motor rifle infantry. To their great delight both Nekrassov and Makarov, the latter now in 207 Motor Rifle Division, found themselves together in the programme.

  There was also a small camp of Western prisoners of war at the Centre. They were available for questioning. A special sub-unit of the GRU Soviet military intelligence ensured that prisoners answered questions willingly and correctly.

  The two Senior Lieutenants crawled over and under and through every piece of equipment they could find at the Centre, testing the feel of it all. They inspected the West German Leopard II tank and the Marder infantry combat vehicle. Good machines but very complicated. How could such equipment be maintained in the field if crucial repair facilities and supply bases in West Germany were lost? The US Abrams M-l tank wasn’t bad either, a low-lying predatory machine, but the main armament wasn’t really powerful enough and it had a disproportionately gas-guzzling engine. They were both impressed by the Chieftain and even more by the Challenger, fighting machines to be reckoned with - almost impenetrable armour, super-powerful armament and a dependable engine. The Leopard II was good and so of course was the Abrams. The Challenger was better. A few more thousand of these in Europe and the attack would soon get bogged down.

  The GRU officers were happy to give the necessary explanations. The British Army had the best tanks though too few of them, and the best trained soldiers, but it was short on automatic anti-aircraft guns. The British were practically defenceless against Soviet helicopters. The German Bundeswehr was both determined and disciplined with first-rate professional training. The East Germans
mostly fought against the Americans.

  Nekrassov asked how the Belgian and Dutch units had been performing in battle. He knew about the British.

  “Not bad at all,” he was told. “Their supply system is first class. Their equipment is not bad either. There are few of them, of course, but they are very good in defence. One great weakness is that soldiers query their orders. There is no death sentence for disobeying an order.”

  Nekrassov shook his head in disbelief and the two moved on.

  They then came to the captive officers, caged like wild animals. The GRU interpreter playfully twirled a thick rubber truncheon in his hand - an instrument which served as a dictionary might, to facilitate the interpreter’s job.

  “Ask him,” Nekrassov indicated an American major sitting in the cage, “ask him why some of their vehicles have a big red cross painted on a white background instead of the actual camouflage markings. It’s stupid - just makes it easier for us to pick them out and destroy them. Why do they do it?”

  Evidently other Soviet officers had asked the same question. Without referring to the prisoner the interpreter explained to Nekrassov.

  “Vehicles with a red cross are ambulances,” he said. “They think we should not fire on them. They say there’s an international agreement to that effect.”

  “If there were such an agreement we’d surely have been informed.”

  “Of course.’’ The interpreter shrugged his shoulders. ”It would be in some manual. But I’ve never myself come across a reference to such an agreement anywhere. None of our books or newspapers mentions it.”

  “There’s certainly nothing about it in the Field Service Regulations.” Nekrassov shrugged his shoulders in turn.

  “Then ask if it’s true,” said Makarov to the interpreter, “that women serve on equal terms with men in their army?”

  The interpreter, again without bothering to translate the question, answered for what was obviously the hundredth time: “They do.”

  Nekrassov was perplexed. “That’s ridiculous! Women are not men. For one thing they need proper food and rest. They won’t get that in the army.”

  “What sort of rations do the prisoners get?” asked Makarov. He addressed the question directly to the interpreter, who simply affected not to hear.

  Nekrassov had never in his whole life talked to a foreigner from the capitalist West. He wanted to ask something the interpreter would not know already, just to hear an answer from this gaunt-looking American major in the tattered uniform.

  “Ask him if it’s true that in America anyone can write what he likes in a newspaper, even something against the President.”

  “That’s irrelevant,” said the interpreter abruptly.

  Nekrassov knew he’d gone a bit too far and allowed his friend Dimitri to hurry him off so that they could lose themselves in the crowd of Soviet officers glued in fascination to a Canadian armoured personnel carrier. One question too many and you’d end up in a cage yourself. “

  At the further end of the Central Region in the south an Allied Army group had been set up under French command (the Southern, or SOUTHAG, balancing up the Northern and Central), with responsibility south of a line through Karlsruhe (exclusive) and Nuremberg, north of which CENTAG with four corps under command (I BE, III GE, V and VII US) seemed, though not over-optimistic, reasonably hopeful of holding the position east of Frankfurt.

  If the Soviet High Command had put in 3 Shock Army immediately behind 1 Guards Tank Army the threat to CENTAG would have been far more serious. The Soviets, however, had committed 3 Shock Army in the north, to exploit the favourable position developing there for the execution of the truly critical part of the main plan, the breakthrough to swing southwards along the Rhine on the left bank.

  NORTHAG, with two British, one German and the remains of one Dutch corps under command, was now fighting grimly on a line running westwards from near Minden to Nijmegen in the Netherlands, facing north, with an ominous bulge in the south near Venlo, later to be generally known as the Krefeld salient. The I British Corps on the right had done well to stay in being, largely due here also to the successful use of anti-tank guided weapons, particularly those deployed in small stay-behind parties, operating with German Jagd-Kommandos in country which the British knew very well and which to the Germans was native soil. The tactics of the ‘sponge’, for the absorption of the flow of armour, had been paying off, but the situation could not stay the way it was much longer. In the west I German Corps was under heavy pressure along the Teutoburger Wald, the Soviet intention clearly being to drive it in very soon. Further west II British Corps with a US brigade and some Dutch troops under command was being hard pressed south of Wesel, defending the Venlo gap between the Rivers Rhine and Maas in the very tip of the salient.

  “The order to advance against II German Corps in SOUTHAG at 0400 hours on the morning of 7 August had been received on the previous afternoon by Major General Pankratov, commanding 51 Tank Division of 8 Guards Army on the Central Front. It found the division theoretically (though not in fact) at full strength, its personnel at an assumed total of 10,843, its armoured fighting vehicle strength at 418 T-72 tanks and 241 BMP 2s. Its artillery included 126 SP howitzers, forty-eight multiple rocket launchers (twenty-four Grad-P, twenty-four BM-27) and sixty-two heavy SP anti-aircraft equipments in combined rocket and automatic artillery units. The division was organized normally. It was a Category One formation, as was usual for those deployed in Eastern Europe, with its equipment complete and personnel at between 75 and 100 per cent, filled out to full strength in an emergency such as this. It had one motor rifle and three tank regiments, a regiment of 152 mm SP guns and one of anti-aircraft missiles, together with eight other separate battalions. These comprised a FROG 7 rocket unit, communications, reconnaissance, engineer, transport, chemical defence and repair battalions and another embodying medical services. Manpower, from many parts of the USSR, was by now some 10 per cent deficient.

  The day before the advance three further battalions were added to the divisional strength, in theory under Major General Pankratov’s command, in fact under the exclusive control of one Lieutenant Colonel Drobis of the KGB, the head of what was known at divisional headquarters as the Special Section. Two of these units were so-called KGB barrage battalions, manned by personnel of mixed origin with a relatively low degree of military training. There were cheerful, healthy looking young Komsomol workers alongside guards drafted from prisons and members of respectable bureaucratic families who had hitherto done little or no military service but whose engagement to the Party interest could be counted on as total.

  The barrage battalions were equipped with light trucks and armed with machine-guns and portable anti-tank weapons. The function of these units was simple and their location in the forward deployment plan of the division in the attack followed logically from it. They were placed well up behind the leading elements to ensure, by the use of their weapons from the rear, that the forward impetus of their own troops was maintained and there was no hesitancy or slowing down, still less any tendency to withdraw. KGB fire power was an important element in the maintenance of momentum. This caused losses, of course, but these would be readily compensated for in the arrival of fresh follow-up formations, so that the net gain could always be reckoned worthwhile. The use of KGB barrage battalions to stimulate offensive forward movement was, moreover, an essential element accepted without question in the Red Army’s system of tactical practice in the field. This was wholly oriented to the offensive. Defence played virtually no part in it at all and offensive impetus had to be maintained.

  Total refusal to countenance withdrawal could, of course, at times be costly. On the first day of the offensive two tank battalions of 174 Tank Regiment, moving forward from out of woodland cover, were caught almost at once in open ground by heavy anti-armoured air attack from the United States Air Force. Temporary withdrawal into cover, which was all that made sense, was flatly forbidden by the KGB. When the attacking ai
rcraft themselves withdrew, tank casualties on the ground were in each battalion over 80 per cent.

  The progress of 51 Tank Division in the attack on 6 August had been slower than hoped for, it’s leading battalion hammered by United States anti-tank weapons in front, against the anvil of the KGB behind.

  Of the three special KGB battalions attached to 51 Tank Division, the third was 693 Pursuit Battalion. This followed up in the advance rather further back. Its business was the liquidation of possibly hostile elements in the local population - any who were obviously reactionary bourgeois, for example, or priests, or local officials - as well as taking care of officers and men of 51 Tank Division who had shown insufficient fighting spirit.

  The divisional commander stood at the operations map in the BTR 50-PU which formed his command centre. On his right stood his political deputy, a Party man; on his left, his chief of staff; behind him Lieutenant Colonel Drobis of the KGB. Colonel Zimin, commanding the divisional artillery, was just climbing down into the BTR, closing the hatch firmly behind him. It was late afternoon on 6 August.

  “An important task for you, Artillery,” growled the divisional commander. “We’ve got a valley here between two hills with a road along the valley leading towards us. We tried to break through there yesterday, but got our fingers burnt. We start to attack and the Americans bring far too effective anti-tank fire along that road from positions further back.

  “If they try that again this time your BM-27 multiple rocket launcher battalion will take them out. They have to be suppressed in one go. So there’s a prime task for you for tomorrow.”