The Third World War (21 page)

Whatever problems of command may have been emerging in the Red Army, the centralized organization and control of air forces that air power classically demands really fitted in rather well with the Soviet political and social system. Nevertheless, if iand forces were to operate with flexibility and initiative from quite low levels of command, depending on how the battle developed, the air forces might need to be able to act similarly and to learn to switch rapidly to autonomous reaction. This, they knew, Allied airmen were well able to do. Certainly, they realized that in a massive offensive the ether would be heavily jammed and that close control from headquarters a long way further back, where the situation in the air and on the ground could not be known from minute to minute, might not work too well. Their aircrew, moreover, were the cream of the military technocracy. There was perhaps even more cause for unease on their account than in ground forces in the long term if there should ever be a military need to take their blinkers off. For the time being, however, pre-planned targets for a setpiece offensive were the order of the day, and the generals and their planners had more tangible and appealing matters to contemplate.

In the last ten years the Red Air Force had achieved an entirely new order of air capability. From about 1970 onwards it had become apparent to uneasy Western observers that the men in the Kremlin had woken up at last to what air power was really about. A trend had been started which was quite as significant for
NATO
as the emergence of the Soviet Union as a global naval power. The Alliance’s counter to the numerical superiority of the, Warsaw Pact ground and air forces had always rested to a large degree on the high quality of its air power, chiefly in the ability of
NATO
air forces to bring heavy concentrations of fire to bear with extreme rapidity and accuracy at any point in the battle. Even if the Allies had had sufficient reserves to match an all-out Warsaw Pact offensive on the ground, the problem of the defensive alliance was that those reserves could not arrive in time to conduct a coherent forward defence against a surprise, or near-surprise, attack. In Allied strategic thinking air power filled this gap, offering as it did the ability to strike hard and repeatedly at the choke points along the frontier of the two Germanies through which a Soviet land offensive would have to squeeze. At the same time tactical air power would be projected strategically, in the^sense that large numbers of American tactical aircraft would fly into Europe from the United States in times of crisis. The concept of Allied air power holding a front against an offensive in this way, provided there were enough aircraft to do it, was valid and reassuring, especially since the performance of modern Allied tactical aircraft, and the effectiveness and accuracy of their weapons, had climbed exponentially on the back of commercially competitive Western technology to achieve a capability undreamt of in terms of the Second World War.

In the Alliance this superiority had long been comfortably thought of as a state of grace that would endure forever, almost irrespective of the effort that the Western world put into it. But now things were beginning to look rather different. Soviet combat jet aircraft had made their first appearance in the Korean War. By 1970 all of this first generation had been withdrawn from service except for a handful operated by the satellite countries. The second generation originating in the late fifties and early sixties reached its peak front-line strength in the early seventies. By the beginning of 1985 only about 10 to 15 per cent remained in service as the third generation took over. This generation had made its debut in 1970 and its numbers had risen steadily ever since. The Soviet Air Forces now had aircraft of broadly comparable performance to their Allied counterparts, although the latter were still reckoned to have the margin in detailed capability in all circumstances, especially where this was dependent on electronic and weapon technology. Numerically the Warsaw Pact air forces had for long outstripped those of the Allies; now a broad parity in performance was also in sight. But that was not the end of the matter. With more research and development effort devoted to military technology by the Soviet Union than by all the Western powers put together, there was plentiful evidence of a fourth generation of aircraft coming along, to include specialized air-superiority fighters to match NATO’s F-15s and F-16s and land-based V/
STOL
aircraft. Nothing very much was known of these in detail except that they were waiting in the wings. They seemed likely to appear on stage from 1986 onwards.

By the beginning of 1985, Western analysts concluded that the strength of the Soviet tactical air armies in western Russia alone had increased since 1970 by over 30 per cent. The Naval Air Force was climbing on a similar curve, and there had been a vast increase in both strategic and tactical airlift, the number of attack and assault helicopters attached to the infantry having been almost trebled since 1970. The Soviet Air Force generals could look back on their own successful programme with every bit as much satisfaction as Admiral Gorshkov could look back on that of the Soviet Navy. In truth, it rather irritated them that the Admiral and his navy got so much of the limelight when the record of the air force was every bit as spectacular. In twenty-five years their unremitting efforts had increased the range and war-load capacity of the Soviet Air Forces by a staggering 1200 per cent.

This meant that Soviet aircraft could now range into the Atlantic and attack targets throughout
NATO
Europe’s rear areas, including the United Kingdom— targets that hitherto the West had considered immune from serious air threat. Moreover, they had the combat range for evasive and tactical routing, and for feint attacks. The air generals had been the architects of a vast, balanced air arm that had now significantly narrowed the West’s previous qualitative superiority. It almost goes without saying that in numbers it went far beyond what could conceivably be needed purely for defence. If things continued to go its way the generals could look forward to a not too far distant time when they could confidently challenge Allied air power and its ability to protect the strategic deployment of NATO’s reserves in an emergency. This would be a war winner. It was a professionally satisfying prospect.

With equal satisfaction they watched and listened throughout the seventies as military men and informed commentators in Western Europe tried to warn their countries about the critical part that air power had to play in defence of Allied security and the way the reassuring margin that had so long shielded the Alliance was all the time being narrowed. ‘None so deaf as those who will not hear* might well have been their cheerful comment, until 1979 when the United Kingdom embarked on major measures to expand the Royal Air Force and especially to increase its air defence component (see Appendix 1). Most of the Allies were similarly engaged in stepping up their defence effort, but the RAF air defence interested the generals particularly because the United Kingdom had a special place in their strategic plans. Its expansion programme was not welcome to the Kremlin or to the Soviet air generals, but they consoled themselves with the thought that they had really had a splendid run while the West, of its own deliberate choice, was looking the other way. Furthermore, their own experience, over many years, of the huge industrial and training effort needed to build up or increase a modern air force, caused them to wonder if the British government might not be in for a surprise when it found how long its plans would take to mature.

In the realm of space the Soviet Air Forces had recognized the military application of space vehicles for communications and reconnaissance from the earliest moments of their space programme. The
USSR-USA
competition initiated by the Soviet Sputnik some thirty years earlier had been a long-playing space spectacular for all the world to watch. Although the engineering approach of the superpowers was often different, and US reliability was always superior, in general terms the Soviet Union had acquired capabilities which matched those of the
USA
. These had proved very valuable in peacetime and it now remained to see what their importance would be in war.

There was another vital matter, upon which little of much significance was said in the Red Army, perhaps because so very little was known about it. It concerned the very nature of nuclear warfare. Though the recent tendency in Soviet military thinking had been to accept that a major war might open with non-nuclear operations, and that these might even be prolonged, it must be emphasized again that nuclear and non-nuclear warfare had never been regarded in the Red Army’s philosophy as alternatives. Each fitted in as an element in a total war-fighting capability, to be exploited as policy and occasion demanded. As we have clearly seen, the Western concept of ‘escalation’ out of conventional warfare into nuclear, and of further ‘escalation’ from battlefield nuclear action into strategic, had no real equivalent in the Soviet Union, still less the notion of a ‘firebreak’ between successive steps. Though a non-nuclear variant had been studied and fully prepared for, it had never ceased to be widely expected that a major campaign against
NATO
would probably open with massive attack in depth by nuclear or chemical weapons, or both, to be followed by swift and violent exploitation by formations (which would be largely armoured) attacking off the line of march. With nuclear weapons, penetration was expected to reach a depth of some 120 kilometres in a 24-hour period. Equipment in Red Army divisions was designed for action on an irradiated or chemically dangerous battlefield. Outside the combat zone, if a strategic response from the other side brought the homeland under attack with nuclear weapons, there was at least provision—not total but far greater than any until quite recently seen in the West—for the protection of some of the more important elements in the population, for the maintenance of essential services and for the continuance of the war.

If, on the other hand, advantage were to be seen in a non-nuclear offensive, if Western battlefield nuclear weapons could be smothered or blinded and important results could be obtained even before
NATO
, without the stimulus of their use on the Warsaw Pact side, could reach inter-Allied agreement on the release of such weapons, this possibility too would be considered. Apart from the reduction in scale of the threat to the homeland and the absence of collateral nuclear damage in the theatre (which might or might not have its advantages), the. principal effect of a non-nuclear opening to the land battle would be a slowing up in the rate of advance. Instead of covering 110 to 120 kilometres in a day the assaultmg’fonnations would be doing well if they managed forty.

But whatever was said, planned or done about nuclear operations of war, whether by hard-headed realists in the East or by commentators in the West ranging from homespun tacticians to far-out philosophers, one thing was universally true. Nuclear weapons of war had never yet been used on the battlefield and nobody, anywhere, knew what would happen if they were. Even within an integral concept of total war-fighting, using all means at choice, the decision to use this one would need very careful consideration indeed. The harder-headed the realists having to make the choice, the more carefully would they be inclined to reflect on the possible—but completely unpredictable—consequences. The West’s increasing preparedness to defend itself was throwing an even harsher light upon this very important consideration.

Shortly after 0400 hours on Sunday, 4 August, it became clear to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and was at once made known throughout a world waiting in an agony of suspense, that the Warsaw Pact had opened a general offensive against the forces of the Atlantic Alliance. The invasion of Western Europe had begun.

To some the news brought a curious sense of relief. At least the uncertainty was over. For many others, particularly in the governments and armed services of ‘Allied countries, it raised the anxious question as to whether enough had been done for NATO’s defences since the seventies to repair the damage of the locust years. Could the West, in fact, survive? To most who heard the news, at least in Europe, it brought only grim and unhappy forebodings.

The Soviet intervention in Yugoslavia, and the swift

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p.

and forceful response to it from the United States, that conjunction of miscalculation and mischance in which could now be seen the spark which set off the general explosion, seemed almost to be forgotten. More important things were at stake. The very future of the human race might now become the issue.

From the outset the world was swamped with Soviet claims, flooding through every possible channel of communication, that this was no more than defensive action, to which the Warsaw Pact had been driven by neo-Nazi ambitions supported by capitalist imperialism.

“It has long been clear,’ the announcement proclaimed, ‘that the new Nazis are set on the reunification of Germany by force and the subsequent domination of Europe as an early step to world supremacy. The policy of “forward defence”, which is self-evident military non-sense if it does not mean action by the
FRG
east of the Demarcation Line, has never been more than a thin cloak for the firm intention to invade the
GDR
as a first move towards the dismemberment of the Warsaw Pact and the destruction of the
USSR
. The change of name from Vorwartsverteidigung (Forward Defence) to Vornever-teidigung Frontal Defence) has done nothing to disguise the nakedness of an essentially aggressive policy. Plans for the invasion are now, in total authenticity,’ as the announcement put it, ‘in Soviet hands, and their authors will in time be brought to justice. Meanwhile, it has become abundantly clear that there is no time to lose in cutting out the Nazi canker. Otherwise all hope will vanish of a lasting peace in Europe.’

The Soviet message to the world went on to give assurances that the purpose of the Pact’s action was first to restore peace in Yugoslavia, where troops from the capitalist West had invaded a socialist country, and at the same time to suppress the true source of disturbance to world peace. This would necessitate the occupation and neutralization of West Germany but no more than that, except for such other action as military security demanded. The integrity of French territory would be especially respected, and the French government was urged to allow its military forces no part in resisting those of the Warsaw Pact. The Italian government was ordered, in rather more peremptory tones, to consult its socialist conscience and permit no resistance to Soviet troops compelled to enter Italy.