Cold War Hot: Alternate Decisions of the Cold War
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The new weapons were quickly employed. The Rogachev Motorized Rifle Division attacked on a narrow ten kilometer breakthrough front through the Lower Saxon countryside determined to sweep aside the British armored cavalry screen and come to grips with the British Army of the Rhine. They made an impressive sight, four regiments attacking in waves of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. In one of those IFVs, nine infantrymen rattled around its cramped interior just like thousands more on both sides. They collectively flinched as airbursts cracked overhead. Instead of rending steel, an orange ball on a parachute floated through an open hatch. When the command to dismount for the assault was given, the squad rushed out with an enthusiasm their platoon leader had never noticed before. Instead of shaking out into an assault line, they were running all over the field chasing those little orange balls.
Colonel-General Valeri Odinstov was about to climb into his staff car outside the field headquarters of his 13th Combined Arms Army when the Luftwaffe Tornado fighter-bombers swung in low. A groan escaped from the terrified driver as the Tornados dispensed their canisters. Visions of a fiery death shot through Odinstov’s mind as the canisters peeled open. His mouth gaped. A mass of little orange balls, like garish dandelion fluff, floated out on tiny parachutes. One of the parachutes failed and its cargo shot earthward to strike Odinstov right in his open mouth. Despite the subsequent hell of Soviet dental reconstruction, he could count the event a blessing. He could rightly claim at his court-martial that he was not responsible for the utter breakdown of good order and discipline that followed at his headquarters.
Svechin General Staff Academy: December 2, 2007
“It has been argued that it could have been simpler and more effective to have taken out headquarters with conventional munitions. However, as pointed out in the original study from the American Center of Military History upon which this strategy was based, destroyed headquarters are automatically replaced by lower echelon staffs. A headquarters still physically intact but attempting to function through a thickening alcoholic fog cripples its subordinate elements more surely than unending combat.”
The Kremlin: July 19, 1989
The disaster that overcame the first echelon was repeated on a greater scale with the second echelon. The third echelon armies halted in Poland and Slovakia to dig in, but Red Lightning’s ethnic selectiveness factor was on the point of paying off.
The members of the Defense Council of the Politburo had not slept in three days. The Chief of the General Staff envied them. He had not slept in a week. His briefing on the mobilization of reserve formations was acting as a depressant on everyone. There was no good news.
“The loss of over 50 of our best divisions and the defection of all the Warsaw Pact armies except Bulgaria’s puts us on the horns of a dilemma, comrades. The front will collapse without reinforcement by newly mobilized formations. Unfortunately, the majority of such formations are from the non-Slavic republics of the Transcaucasus and Central Asia. They either don’t drink at all or are more moderate in their habits.
While they are inherently less vulnerable to NATO’s secret weapon, these peoples are historically and politically unreliable. They continue to resist the leadership of their Russian big brother and openly resent the reality of Soviet power. We are taking a great chance on placing these formations at the front, but we have no choice.”
The Front, June–July 1989
Privates Yusef Sultanov and Mohammed Ulsanbekov were not happy about manning a machine-gun position in the dank oak forest outside Lodz in Poland. The dry cleanliness of their oasis near Samarkand in Uzbekistan was an all too recent memory. They were reservists, as was the fat Russian captain who commanded their company. He had come from Tashkent, some administrator in the Ministry of Agriculture. He had actually been born in Uzbekistan but had not bothered to learn a word of Uzbek other than an impressive collection of curse words.
Captain Petrov’s tight uniform tortured his pudgy body. It was so much easier to be a boss behind a desk with all these swarthy Churkas properly bowing and scraping. But now he was afraid. There had been a subtle yet noticeable decline in the alacrity of their obedience the closer they came to the front.
He approached their position for the third time that morning on his ceaseless round of inspections. He muttered to himself: “And what am I supposed to do with 112 men of whom 83 are Uzbeks, 12 Turkmen, 2 Tajiks, 8 Tatars, 3 Ukrainians, an Estonian, a Mongol, one Greek, and only four Russians?” Looking down at the two privates in their position, he thought to himself: “And these two yellow dogs are not even the worst. At least, these two understand Russian, I think.”
“You two,” he barked in Russian in his best colonial apparatchik tone: “Have you seen anything to your front?” The Uzbeks smiled back, their black eyes blank of understanding. Petrov had that sinking feeling. He shrugged and trudged off to the next position along the muddy trail. The Uzbeks’ laughter followed him through the trees and seemed to strike between his shoulder blades. Did they really call him that? …in Russian?—“Captain Orange Balls.”
Field Headquarters, SACEUR, Location Undisclosed
General Smith-Wilson paled when he was told Iron Mike was on the secure phone. He did not need any more surprises. He already had in excess of 1,300,000 Warsaw Pact prisoners he had never planned for, and they were still pouring in. He did not even want to think about all the East Germans, Poles, and Czechs. He was appalled at the thought that the greatest contribution of his career would be the operation of the world’s largest drunk tank.
“Bunny! Change TWO!” Meyer shouted over the phone.
Smith-Wilson felt faint. “Yes, sir, we are still prepared to begin displacing west.”
“Dammit, Bunny, will you forget that crap. We’re moving EAST!”22
Svechin General Staff Academy: December 2, 2007
“Therefore, shorn of its military forces, Soviet power collapsed quickly. Who could have foreseen the changes, gentlemen? The secession of the Union republics, the introduction of capitalism, and the re-establishment of the monarchy—at least we were spared the imposition of a liberal democracy and a continued border with Poland. Only I am not sure I wouldn’t trade it for our new border with the Ukraine!”
The last line brought the expected chuckle from the audience. He always tried to end with a joke.
That evening Chonkin worked late. He dismissed his aides and surveyed the clean expanse of an uncluttered desk. From a small drawer, he drew out a box of his personal stationery. He took out several sheets and briefly admired the quality of the vellum paper and the black and gold two-headed eagle engraving of his coat of arms, the gift of his grateful sovereign. Dipping an ancient pen into a gilt inkwell, he wrote in English,
“Dear John,
I must thank you for your kindness in reviewing the manuscript of my latest book.23 I particularly liked your comments on how the art of the indirect approach is actually a variation on asymmetrical warfare. There is one point, however, that I wish to discuss further on the human element in war…”
Several hours and two dozen sheets of paper later, he finished. He personally addressed the envelope, enjoying the smooth flow of the ink across the rich paper. It read:
Mr. John Moran
c/o The History Department
Jeb Stuart High School
Falls Church, Virginia
The Reality
The sad reality of this chapter is that the alcoholism culture of the Russians was worsened by the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet experiment until it became a major source of concern to the reformist First Party Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the 1980s. Deaths of young fathers due to alcoholism had become a common social phenomenon and the major cause of the rapid decline of the lifespan of the average Russian male. The Soviet Union was the only country to be conducting research into infant retardation due to intoxication of the father at the moment of conception at this time and the only country that needed to. Within the Soviet armed forces, drunkenness remaine
d an enormous problem to the end. To Western observers the appearance in public of drunken Soviet officers was not an infrequent occurrence. Nor is it a problem that disappeared with the Soviet Union.
Would the use of alcohol as a weapon have worked to a useful degree? We will never know. We do know that it was a glaring cultural weakness and that the epitome of the art of war is to strike weakness. We also know that there is enough historical evidence to show that it did work on occasion in the past. What is more important than this particular deus ex machina is that the technological armies of the West increasingly are blind to the human element in war. “Men are nothing. Man is everything,” Napoleon has been quoted as saying. We neglect the study of man in war at our peril.
Bibliography
Barron, John, MiG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko, Avon Books, New Yotk, 1981.
Carrell, Paul, Scorched Earth: The Russo-German War 1943–1944, Little Brown, Boston, 1970.
Gabriel, Richard A., The New Red Legions: An Attitudinal Portrait of the Soviet Soldier, Greenwood Press, Newport, CT, 1980.
Goldhammer, Herbert, The Soviet Soldier: Soviet Military Management at the Troop Level, Crane Russak, New York, 1975.
Seaton, Albert, Battles: Moscow 1941–1942, Jove Books, New York, 1971.
Notes
*1. I.V Chonkin, The Masterpiece of War: Red Lightning and the Fall of the Soviet Union (The Chonkin Lectures) (Moscow, 2009), p. 12.
2. Aleksander Andreyevich Svechin (1878-1938), General, Imperial Russian Army, during World War I and chief of staff to General Brusilov, then Chief of Staff of the Army. Along with Brusilov, he went over to the Reds during the Russian Civil War. Served finally as chief of the General Staff Academy and made great contributions as a historian and theorist to the art of war. He was murdered by Stalin during the purges. His ideas were resurrected after the collapse of the Soviet Union and became an important theoretical underpinning of the new Russian Army.
*3. Piotr III, born Piotr Dmitrivich Suvorov, had been a young airborne forces colonel whose charisma and leadership skills made him a magnet for all those who wanted to save Russia in the death throes of the Soviet Union. The fact that he had been a descendant of Russia’s most famous and revered soldier, Aleksander V. Suvorov, was a great help. Chonkin’s organizational brilliance was a perfect match. They served as a faithful team that saw Russia through the terrible civil war of 1990–92. The third member of the team was the young priest, Father Pavel, who blessed them on the same spot where St Sergei had blessed Dmitri Donskoi as he led the Russian hosts to defeat the Mongols and save Russia in 1380. Father Pavel was the spiritual inspiration of the Piotrist movement. More than a few miracles were attributed to him. Piotr was acclaimed tsar of the new Suvorov Dynasty in the Kremlin’s St George’s Hall in December 1991. A few years later, after the death of the old, KGB-tainted patriarch, Piotr made it known to the Holy Synod that he favored Pavel for the job. Russia rejoiced in its young Patriarch, and the Russian Orthodox Church marked its new flowering from that triptych scene at the St Sergeiv Monastery.
4. “The Big Bedroom” is the nickname given to the official briefing room of the US Army’s Chief of Staff.
*5. After retirement, Rauch was hired by a computer software development company and successfully marketed the new Powerpoint briefing system to the Army. He was responsible for the golden age of Army briefing in the late 1990s. Because of him, learning to manipulate Powerpoint was considered the most important skill a captain could acquire. Of course, there was a terrible breach of decorum when a certain captain asked him how George Patton got across northwest Europe without Powerpoint. A few words to some old friends and the captain finished his career early after a stint in the Recruiting Command.
6. V.A. Antonov-Ovesyenko, Zapiski o grazhdanskoi voine (Moscow, 1924), pp.19-20. In this context “armored brigades” refers to units equipped with armored cars.
7. Gabriel, The New Red Legions, pp. 152–59. A survey among former Soviet military personnel showed that 55.8 percent of the respondents had seen officers drunk on duty and 64.6 percent had seen NCOs in a similar condition. Over 30 percent thought that combat capabilities were degraded by alcoholism in their units. See also Krasnaya Zvezda, November 23, 1972, p. 2. Over one-third of all law violations by military personnel were also said to be committed in a state of drunkenness; cited in Goldhammer, The Soviet Soldier, p. 152.
8. Carrell, Scorched Earth, pp. 305–06.
*9. Red Lightning: Conception and Planning (Center of Military History, Washington, DC, 1995), pp. 39–43.
*10. Utah’s role in Red Lightning was immortalized in a downtown Salt Lake City monument and a major float in the annual Pioneer Day parade.
*11. Interview with Lieutenant General (ret) Courtney Massingale.
*12. Oscar S. Rauch, Godfather to Red Lightning: A Memoir (New York, 1997), p. 145.
*13. Panayiotis Koriopoulos, How Greece Won World War III (Athens, 1993), p. 173.
*14. The Slide Gap was indeed at the head of the next meeting’s agenda. The Politburo ordered GOSPLAN to include upgrading the Soviet Union’s entire briefing technology to full color slides. Within weeks plans were drafted to build a network of factories to produce slides at three locations for the entire Soviet Union—Talinn, Moscow, and Khabarovsk. Looking back on the Soviet threat, one is amazed that so much of what the Politburo did seemed to be conceived in the midst of an opiate dream. The best history so far of the post-Stalin Politburo was the recent book by Vladimir Luzhkov Dreamland and Other Fantasies of the Radiant Future (Moscow, 2003), see especially pp. 334–35.
15. Both under the tsar and the communists, the sale of alcohol was a state monopoly and the primary source of state income, exceeding all others.
*16. Edward Colliers, Black Horse Bookies (New York, 1997), p. 211.
*17. Red Legs is a nickname for US Army artillerymen who in the 19th century wore a red strip down the uniform trouser leg. The black beret was the object of the heart’s desire for the men of the US Army’s armor branch, but the dominance of the infantry ensured it would never ever be issued to the Army. Many men, however, bought the beret and wore it in defiance. In officers’ clubs, young armor officers were known to make grandiloquent vows to introduce the black beret should any of them become chief of staff. Of course, the introduction of the blue beret after the war killed any hope of that.
*18. Bulyagin and Yegorov, How We Brought Walmart to Russia (New York, 2002), pp. 34–36.
*19. Michael L. Meyers, How I Wielded the Red Lightning: Command in World War 111 (Boston, 1991), p. 245.
*20. Bulyagin and Yegorov, How We Brought Walmart to Russia, p. 45.
*21. Proceedings of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, US House of Representatives, July 23, 2002; the Committee concluded that the expense of buying Stolychnaya for this special purpose had been wholly unnecessary; it accused the Army of mirror-imaging its Soviet opponent in assuming more refined tastes when the Committee’s research showed that Soviet generals were just as happy with grain alcohol.
*22. Nigel Smith-Wilson, How Logistics Won World War III (London, 1992), p. 221.
*23. I.V. Chonkin, The Human Factor in Asymmetrical Warfare (Moscow, 2008), p. 311.