The Third World War - The Untold Story

by Sir John Hackett

  “Comrade General,” replied the artillery commander, “permission to move the BM-27 battalion 5 kilometres back and another 5 to the south?”

  “Why?” barked Lieutenant Colonel Drobis, breaking in.

  “It’s a question of ballistics, of the laws of physics,” explained Colonel Zimin patiently. “We fire off several hundred rounds at a time. We want to cover a road which is at right-angles to the front - so the impact zone has to be spread along the road, not across it. Our present firing positions are too far forward and too far to one side to do this. So we have to fire from further back, and further to the south. We move back, fire and move forward again.”

  “In no circumstances,” snapped the KGB Lieutenant Colonel, “none at all. You stay where you are and fire from there.”

  “But then the zone will lie across the road instead of along it.”

  “Then try to get it along the road.”

  “I can’t do that from the present firing position, only 2 kilometres from the front line and 5 from the axis of the road.”

  “You want to retreat?”

  “It’s essential to move back at least 5 kilometres and 4 or 5 kilometres further south if the tank regiment is to break through.”

  “You go back to the rear, while we’re in the thick of it up here? Listen Colonel, you get your zone, or whatever you call it, along the road from the front line or ...”

  “It’s ballistics, Comrade. Our fire pattern depends on the laws of ballistics. We can’t make those up as we go along.”

  “Right. No more of this. I won’t allow you to retreat, and you refuse to carry out orders. Arrest him! You can discuss this further where you’re going.”

  Two KGB sergeants pinioned Colonel Zimin’s arms and dragged him out.

  General Pankratov went on looking stolidly at the wall map, keeping out of this skirmish between the artillery chief and the head of the Special Section. The divisional commander could see that another disaster was due in a few hours. He knew that, for all the theory of offensive action upon which it was based, tomorrow’s attack would get bogged down again just like yesterday’s and for the same reason. He was sad not to be able to do anything to protect the artillery commander, who was an old friend, but he knew that it would be useless to try.

  Many years ago, when the General was still a young lieutenant, he was puzzled at the irrational, even, he used to think, the idiotic way in which so much was done in the Red Army. It was not till he was studying at the Frunze Military Academy that he was able, with greater maturity and more experience, to take a closer look at the Soviet power structure. He saw it not the way it was theoretically said to be, articulated under an exemplary constitution, but the way it was in actual naked fact, a structure serving one end only, the perpetuation of the supreme power of the Party. It was also true that other elements in the composition of the USSR were more interested in the preservation of structures which embodied personal power than in their functional efficiency.

  The Red Army was the only organized power grouping in the Soviet Union capable of destroying the entire socialist system without harming itself. It was scarcely surprising therefore that in every battalion, regiment and division, in every headquarters at any level, in every military establishment, the Party and the KGB kept keen and watchful eyes on all that went on. There was a Party political officer in every Soviet company, in the post of deputy commander. There were KGB secret agents in every platoon.

  The KGB and the Party realized (for these were not all stupid men) that such close control kills initiative and contributes to a dullness of performance which in an army invites defeat. But what could they do about it? If they did not keep control of the army it would devour them. Here, as many realized, was a clear dilemma. An army which is allowed to think holds dangers for socialism. An army which is not allowed to think cannot be an efficient fighting force. The Party and the KGB, faced with a choice, as they saw it, between an efficient army which could threaten their own position, and an army which constituted no threat but was unlikely to give a good account of itself in battle, chose what they saw as the lesser of two evils. When war came it was even more dangerous to loosen controls on the army than in peacetime. The interference of amateurs in the persons of Party bureaucrats and the secret police in such highly professional matters as the conduct of military operations was certain to cause mistakes and even lead to disaster, but this was clearly far better than letting the army off the leash and out of Party control.

  General Pankratov, a high-grade professional, was quite confident he knew how to break up an American division. Neither the KGB men nor the Party stool pigeons knew how to do this and it was not possible to show them, for they were not professional soldiers. They would mouth their Party platitudes and act according to their secret instructions. They would always, of course, have to have the last word. Tomorrow, therefore, General Pankratov would do what they wanted, without any choice, and also without either originality or initiative. He would attack the enemy head-on, for this was the only way his controllers thought a battle could take place. If he did anything else he would be killed and a new commander would take over the division. A newcomer would almost certainly act in a way that the stool pigeons from the political department and the suspicious, watchful “Comrades” from the Special Department understood. If he did not, he too would be killed and another replacement found and this would go on until a commander was found who could easily be controlled and whose every move would be easily understood by everyone.

  Nothing, General Pankratov reflected, could be changed. The orders he would have to give for tomorrow’s battle would be foolish ones. Soldiers, of course, would now yet again be sent to a wholly purposeless death.

  Quite apart from these personal and somewhat philosophical reflections, the General was also worried over some strictly professional matters. He had found it very difficult to relate the action of motor rifle infantry in BMP to movements of the tanks with which they had to co-operate. The vehicles moved at different speeds. The BMP were highly vulnerable to even light attack from gun or missile. The riflemen were often more effective dismounted than in their vehicles, in spite of the additional armament these carried. On their feet, however, they could not keep up with the tanks and were weak in fire power. It was increasingly the case, therefore, that tanks either came to a halt because they had out-run the infantry, or moved on into anti-tank defences which there had been no infantry at hand to suppress.

  Moreover, General Pankratov was again finding himself travelling round the old vicious circle. He could not call for air support unless the progress his attack had made had earned him preferential treatment over other divisions in the army. As he had already discovered, it was sometimes impossible to make the progress required to qualify for air support unless you had it in the first instance. The inflexibility of battle procedures was a good match for the tight restrictions placed upon a commander’s action by the Party. The two together made an almost certain formula for disaster, which was only kept at arm’s length by the enormous weight of forces the Red Army had available and the staggering degree to which the common soldier accepted casualties.

  General Pankratov looked up from the tank, vehicle and ammunition states which had just been given to him - none of which made any more cheerful reading than the personnel strength and artillery states he had already seen - and in a tired and indifferent voice gave the orders for tomorrow’s battle.

  He would go into action in his command vehicle, wearing a peaked military cap, as always. Steel helmets were hard on the head and difficult to manoeuvre in and out of hatches. If his BTR 50-PU were hit by anything that mattered, a steel helmet would be of no help anyway. General Pankratov, like most generals anywhere, was something of a fatalist.”*

  * He survived the war. What has been set out here was learned in a personal interview with ex-Major General Pankratov in the summer of 1986 in his home town of Vyshniy-Volochek between Petrograd and Moscow.

&nbs
p; The performance of Warsaw Pact formations had not in some important respects proved entirely satisfactory to the Soviet High Command. Co-operation between arms had been incomplete. Artillery support had been slow in response and inflexible. Junior command had been lacking in thrust, relying too much on guidance from above. The Western allies had been quick to exploit this weakness, applying their excellent electronic capabilities to the identification of command elements which they then often managed to take out. Coherence in units, in spite of the close attention of KGB barrage battalions, had not been high, often because of the low level of reservist weapon skill and the great difficulty in achieving co-operation between men who could not understand each other’s languages. Finally, there was the greater difficulty of co-ordinating infantry and tanks in action. Only infantry, in the long run, could effectively put down anti-tank defences, however powerful the assistance of technical aids to suppressive action by artillery and fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. The tanks were highly vulnerable to unsuppressed and well-sited ATGW, as well as to long-range fire from very capably handled Allied tanks. Without infantry the tanks of the Warsaw Pact were at a severe disadvantage. But the BMP was even more vulnerable than the tank, as well as being unable to move over the country at the same speed. It very quickly became Allied practice to try to separate infantry from tanks and this was often highly successful.

  There was enormous weight in the resources still available to the Soviet High Command. There were on 14 August forty Warsaw Pact divisions in the Central Region, of which fifteen were tank divisions, and no more than half of them had been in action. Their total fire power was three or four times as great as the sum of what faced them. Time, however, was not on their side. The reasons for an expeditious consolidation of the stop-line on the River Rhine had lost none of their urgency. Failure to keep up with the timetable could have unwelcome consequences.

  “Wing Commander Roger Pullin, Commanding Officer of 19 Squadron, could hardly believe his senses. It was 0430 hours on 15 August, he was very tired, he was down to his last five Phantoms, the main runway had been repaired twice, his crews - or what remained of them - were on their last legs from battle strain and sheer fatigue and now, standing on the other side of the plotting table in the hardened Squadron Ops block, between two rather self-important engine mechanics turned Squadron guards, was a real live Soviet pilot, still in his equivalent of a Mae West, “G” suit, leg restrainers, and all the rest. He was obviously a very angry pilot.

  The lads explained that he had literally dropped into the middle of the Squadron dispersal area, unclipped his parachute, thrown his revolver at their feet and, muttering under his breath, marched willingly with them into the Squadron block.

  Roger buzzed the Station Commander, notified the Ground Defence Wing Commander and then turned to the angry man before him. On the evening of 3 August, less than a fortnight but what seemed more than a century ago, Roger had stopped by the Officers’ Mess to pick up a bottle of Scotch. There had been much to think about since then and it was still in his brief case. He now took it out and in excellent Russian asked his visitor if he would like a cup of coffee or maybe something stronger. The pilot was taken aback by the offer, as well as by the fact that it was made in his own language. The Wing Commander was a Cambridge modern language graduate, who had done a tour as Assistant Air Attaché in Moscow in the late 1970s, but his visitor could not possibly have known that. Five minutes later they were sitting in Roger’s office, the door open and an armed guard a couple of yards away in the corridor.

  Roger had had quick instructions from the Station Commander.

  “Your man will be going off up the line as soon as they come to take him away, for specialist interrogation. What I want you to do is to get from him his own story of what happened to him and put it on a tape for me the way it might have come from one of our own boys, so that I can really get the hang of it. I gather he’s a bit het up and should talk freely. You’ve got about ten minutes.”

  The visiting pilot’s name was Captain Leonid Balashov, and he had just been shot down by one of his own SAM. When Roger asked him how it had all happened Balashov let out a torrent of abuse and recrimination, none of it directed against Allied air forces but against the system that had put him in the same piece of sky as was being used at the same time by a massive Allied bombing effort half an hour earlier.

  What follows is taken from the account that Roger Pullin put on a tape for the Station Commander a few minutes later.

  “As if it wasn’t bad enough being scrambled without close ground control on a general heading towards an unknown target at ‘approximately’ 30-40,000 feet along with a bunch of cowboys in MiG-25s who had never shot at anything in their bloody lives and had no idea whatever about attacking as a formation, with a bunch of bloody Poles behind you and you never knew whether they would simply poke off or have a go at you before they did poke off ...”

  The Flogger pilot held out his mug for a refill.

  “I haven’t got twelve hundred hours on Floggers in thirteen years, and my Sniper badge, just by crawling round the Squadron Commissar. I’d guessed that this one was a biggy and I knew all about F-15s: to stand any chance at all you’ve got to stay low and pray your Sirena’s working so you can pick up the Sparrow lock-on in time to twist away and round it. And so I ignored the brief and went in low level. It was working too; I could hear and see the melees going on above me and I had the main bomber stream, or some of it, on my High Lark radar at 15 miles when I got my tail shot off. Bloody typical: for five years now Flogger pilots have been told to use their ‘initiative’. That was translated by the Squadron boss to mean that if a mission failed because you followed the plan, you should have done your own thing; if you did your own thing and it worked, then that proved that the boss’s plan was flexible; but if the mission failed for whatever reason you should not have done your own thing. Trouble was that the SAM trogs were also being told about initiative and that really was bad news. And in any case, how could you stay a competent fighter pilot and become a mud-mover at the same time if they only let you fly for 90 hours a year. Oh yes, since 1981 they’ve tried to make Flogger G drivers do ground attack as well. Now, if instead they had spent the time and fuel working up big regimental intercept attacks, or even let the Foxbat clowns mix it with the Floggers a bit - but no one at Army Headquarters would ever listen to the Squadron shags. They just push the bloody paper around and watch promotion lists.”

  The RAF police had now arrived. Balashov swiftly held out the mug just once more and broke, for the first time, more or less, into English.

  “Cheers, comrade. You are good troop.”

  He then moved off, a little unsteadily, down the corridor. The Wing Commander reflected, as he watched him go, on the unchanging characteristics of the fighter pilot everywhere - especially at 0430 hours after being shot down by his own side!

  It was clear, at least, that they had not yet solved the problem of airspace management on that side either! “*

  * The Hawk 1986, journal published by the Royal Air Force Staff College, Bracknell, England, p. 28.

  Whatever difficulties faced the Soviet High Command in the field, apart from growing concern in the Kremlin over signs of internal instabilities further back, all of which indicated a pressing need to bring the operations in the Central Region to an early and successful conclusion, there was no doubt that on the other side Allied Command Europe was in deep trouble. It is well known now that SACEUR was under urgent pressure from his army group commanders to seek the release of battlefield nuclear weapons. He was still resisting this, convinced that it would rapidly lead to the all-out nuclear exchange dreaded on both sides. He knew that the President of the United States shared this view. SACEUR recognized that he had to do three things: plug the Venlo gap, where a further heavy attack from 20 Guards Army spearheaded by the crack 6 Guards Motor Rifle Division could not be long delayed; relieve pressure there by a counter-offensive from south to north into the rearw
ard echelons following up this attack, in the general direction of Bremen; and interdict the movement through Poland of the armour now beginning to move forward from the group of tank armies in Belorussia. He had put together a theatre reserve, carefully husbanded and held under the command of Allied Forces Central Europe (AFCENT) with instructions not to deploy it without express instruction, of the equivalent of some seven divisions. He expected that if the trans-Atlantic air bridge held and the air and sea defences in the Western Approaches to the British Isles were sufficient to bring into port four big convoys now nearing the end of a hazardous journey, he could expect, even with the heavy losses there would have been at sea, the equivalent of two fresh US corps very soon. He had also managed to persuade the French to divert an armoured division intended for SOUTHAG to the north and expected it in the Maastricht area within forty-eight hours. Finally, he had great faith in the strength and capacity, as well as in the leadership, of the Allied air forces. Battered though they were they could still make a special effort and pull out something good.

  The Krefeld salient near Venlo would simply have to be held by the troops already there, assisted by the French and whatever he could push up from CENTAG (a brigade or two perhaps) until his fresh troops could come in, but he would also ask for a maximum effort from his air forces in support.

  The all important counter-offensive towards Bremen would be undertaken by NORTHAG, to which he ordered the allotment of four of his precious reserve divisions as from 0001 hours on 14 August, for an offensive to open at first light on the 15th.

  For the interdiction of tank movement across Poland, where Polish workers were being urged by Western broadcasting media to do their utmost to sabotage the rail system, he would ask the air forces to make one supreme effort.