The Third World War (32 page)

In the Norwegian Sea, Strike Fleet Atlantic had succeeded in destroying five of the Backfire bombers returning from their attack on
CAVALRY
.
NATO
submarines had successfully attacked the Soviet surface strike force off the North Cape and sunk a A’l’ev-class light aircraft carrier and a Kara-class cruiser. Early on 12 August, within twenty-four hours of the combined air and submarine attacks on the
CAVALRY
convoys, US Strike Fleet Atlantic began to pound the Soviet naval bases and airfields in the Kola Inlet. C-in-C Soviet Navy, Admiral Starsky, in order to justify his decision to use the main Backfire force to attack the troop convoys, rather than concentrating on neutralizing the US Strike Fleet, accepted with alacrity the reports he received of the ‘annihilation’ of the
CAVALRY
convoys by air and submarine attack. He therefore ordered C-in-C Northern Fleet to send his available Backfires to attack Strike Fleet Atlantic. In fact, having lost only one more transport and two escorts to submarine attack, the convoys were now, on 13 August, under air cover from U K and France. One hazard remained to be overcome. The Le Havre mine countermeasures force, working round the clock to keep the approach channels swept, detected mines during the night of 13-14 August. Possible diversions of the troop convoys were considered. Cherbourg was in any case the destination of some of the ships. But every hour of delay in getting the troops and their equipment to the battlefield would diminish the prospect of averting the use of nuclear weapons, if the Soviet advance was to be checked. Itwasa balance of risks.

The French Flag Officer-in-Charge of the First Maritime District/had reason to believe that the mines had been laid by a small force of Soviet coastal craft, under cover of the severe fighting in the Channel four or five days previously. It had not been possible to plot all the contacts, while so many things were happening at once. He decided, therefore, having conducted a clearance sweep and reswept the main channel, to accept the planned number of
CAVALRY
transports in Le Havre, the remainder being sent to Cherbourg and Brest. In the event, there were no further casualties to the troop convoys. Out of the forty-eight transports which had sailed from the
USA
and Canada, twelve had been sunk or badly damaged. But ‘the US
CAVALRY
had arrived in time.’

This letter written at the time gives one man’s experience of Operation
CAVALRY
. It is from a young American serviceman.

Haslar Hospital Gosport, England

24 August 1985

Dear Mom,

You should have heard by now that I’m O.K..—some cuts, bruises and burns here and there, but believe me, I’m in good shape. I guess I’ll be back to duty in a couple of weeks. What then I don’t know. Another ship, I expect. I’m being looked after real well, though. Yeah, but how come you ended up in hospital? I hear you ask. O.K., well—you remember I was drafted suddenly to Military Sealift Command, at Norfolk Va? Next thing I was aboard a great big container ship in Boston. I’d better not give you the name. Believe it or not they censor your letters here. At any rate, this ship was loading the Army’s weapons. And then they slung a whole lot of bunkhouses aboard—big containers. About 120. Then came the soldiers, 1,000 or so. My job was-in the extra radio team we took for the voyage.

Things happened fast. Two days after we heard the Russians had invaded Germany we sailed from Boston. Then we waited in Halifax NS until the convoy had gathered. When we sailed there were forty-eight ships, all big and fast, and full of soldiers. We were really four convoys, each of twelve ships, three columns of four in each. Ours was ahead-We also had two aircraft carriers, but they were old ones, and full of troops. There was one at the head of each of our outer columns. My station was on the bridge. 1 had to pass the signals to the Skipper, or whoever was in charge of the ship—the watch officer. So I could hear and see a good deal. On the third day out things began to happen. We ran into some submarines that fired missiles. We weren’t hit then, but I could see columns of-smoke coming up here and there. Of course there were ships—troopships or escort ships, big and small—everywhere. We passed near where a couple of “choppers” were hunting a submarine. We didn’t think they had much chance of getting a “nuke”. But suddenly there was an explosion in the sea and we reckoned they’d got one.

A few hours later, when it was dark, there was another missile attack—more ships hit. Again we got away with it. Two of our convoy were hit, though. In a moment they were ablaze, and hauling out of line. The rest of us said a prayer and pressed on. Next day we copped it. I got the missile raid warnings on my radio net. This time. as the submarines opened up on us, there came the air-to- surface missiles. We were a long way from Murmansk, but these boys found us and reached right out. Suddenly there was a terrible flash and bang-crack, all at once. Then in a moment another. We were all thrown in a heap. The Skipper (1 think it was) shouted, “Full left rudder! Emergency stop!” We had to haul out of line, you see. That’s about all 1 remember till 1 came to in a life-raft. 1 said, “Where’s the ship?” Some guy squatting there lifted up my head. “There,” he said, pointing. “She’s still afloat, but pretty near burned out.” 1 could see the smoke. I didn’t feel too good. But I guess 1 was very lucky. We all were, who were on the bridge, or somewhere aft. The missiles had hit amidships and killed most everyone around. Then the fire took hold. But as we turned out of line we brought the ship’s stern to the wind. And as we stopped, the wind took the fire away from the after superstructure, where we were—and a good many life-rafts. Some of the soldiers who jumped straight overboard when the missiles hit were saved. But hundreds were lost. It was bad. We were lucky. A British frigate found us, and that’s why I’m in Gosport, England, Mom. There’s a great joke going around here that Britain’s been saved by the US Cavalry riding in—like those old movies, you know?

Hope you are all well at home.

Love, Dan^ In assessing the outcome of the war at sea, which continued unabated until the
NATO
counteroffensive checked the enemy’s advance in the Central Region, it is necessary to consider the aims of the respective naval commanders, the extent to which these were achieved, and at what cost. In the first place, it may be said that in failing to interdict more than 25 per cent of the immediate seaborne reinforcements sent from North America to Allied Command Europe, the Soviet Navy failed to support the Red Army decisively.
SACLANT
and
JACWA
between them had for their part decisively supported
SACEUR
. As to the war at sea in general, the losses of warships, aircraft and submarines on both sides, during the first phase, had left the balance little changed since the outbreak of hostilities, although at a lower level. Losses had been heavy, and there were virtually no reserves. Replacement by new construction would take years.

NATO
did enjoy one advantage over the Russians, however. It remained a good deal simpler for the
NATO
navies to redeploy their existing surface forces than for the Soviet Navy to do so. Several important US units from the Pacific were soon on their way to the Atlantic, to replace elements of the Strike Fleet which had been sunk, some by air but more by submarine attack, during the withdrawal of the force from the Norwegian Sea. But the Soviet Baltic and Black Sea Fleets, despite the seizure of the Baltic Exits and the transfer of Black Sea units to the Mediterranean, were unable to support each other.
NATO
maritime strike aircraft in Britain, ‘the unsinkable aircraft carrier’, and
NATO
submarines in the Mediterranean, were a constant discouragement to Soviet naval movements. Soviet naval and air forces in the Middle East did succeed, for a time, in dominating the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea-But a combined US, British and Australian force, operating in the Indian Ocean, eventually neutralized them. Again, losses on both sides were heavy.

The movement of oil, food, raw materials and war equipment to north-west Europe was strongly opposed by Soviet submarines and maritime strike aircraft. But attrition of the Soviet forces was such as to wear down gradually the weight of attack. In 1974 Admiral Gorshkov had made this point: The underestimation of the need to support submarine operations with aircraft and surface ships cost the German high command dearly in the last two wars.’ Now his own country had made the same strategic error. Had the submarines been capable of operating submerged in large groups, as the German U-boats had done on the surface in the Second World War, there is little doubt that their campaign would have succeeded. As it was, the submarines could be dealt with in ones or twos—though nearly always with the loss, to missile attack, of one or more a^ti-submarine vessels. The escort carriers, frigates, patrol ships, helicopters and maritime aircraft had been built, as a matter of great urgency, during the period 1979-85. Of critical importance to
JACWA
had been the contribution of the Federal German Navy, which, with the strong support of the
NATO
Council, had been greatly strengthened during the period. The Federal German government, recognizing the supreme importance of the safe and timely arrival of the convoys bringing US and Canadian reinforcements to the Central Front, had increased its light naval forces and naval air forces in the Baltic. This had permitted the release of frigates to work with the additional UK escort carriers.

When the outcome of the 1985 war as a whole can be assessed, it may be that the downfall of the
USSR
will be attributed, ironically, to Gorshkov, the greatest Russian admiral of all time, whose forceful and successful advocacy of ever-increasing Soviet sea power led the comrades to disaster—when the seas got too rough the Bear drowned.

Even on land the Soviet Union appeared to have overreached itself. In the all-important central front of Western Europe, the Red Army had counted on very early and decisive success. This success had eluded its commanders. Instead they were faced with a check to their offensive and serious misgivings about support at home.

In 1957 the world ran into its gardens and out into the streets to watch Sputnik streak across the sky. Later they were to be glued to their TV sets watching men walking on the moon. Then came the link-up of the US Apollo and Soviet Soyuz spacecrafts, the politics of that misleading handshake in space engaging the world’s spectators more than its technology. As Congress cut back the funds for NASA’s (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) space programme the earthbound mortals with their daily lives to lead rather lost interest. Films like the record running Star Wars, first screened in 1977 and still showing in London at the outbreak of the war, and books about inter-stellar wars in deep space, fascinated and absorbed the public while real men and their machines performing tasks as they orbited the world, no further away than London is from Manchester in England,

255

p.

seemed of no particular account. That was not, of course, true of the small scientific-military groups whose task it was to think about and manage these things; especially so in the Soviet Union. It was this inner space from 300 to, at most, 32,000 kilometres that occupied their attention. The military applications of this extended area of man’s domination over his environment were seen as precisely those first sought in aviation—namely, reconnaissance and communications.

By 1985 the superpowers had developed astonishing capabilities in those directions. Especially dramatic was space photography of such high resolution that soldiers marching on earth could be counted in their columns. In the event of war, the Russians would be especially interested in seeing what was going on in the Atlantic and on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The US, on behalf of the West, had a prime interest in observing military developments and deployments in the heartland of the
USSR
by photography and electronic eavesdrop-ping, particularly during periods of tension oractual war, but also in routine times of peace. Communications satellites acting as relay stations in space had not only enormously increased the extent of available facilities, they had enhanced the reliability and quality of radio transmission and reception out of all recognition. They had also provided remarkable navigation assistance, with an accuracy down to a few metres, to ships, submarines and aircraft.

Just as this inner space was now a quite readily accessible extension of the atmosphere, so its military opportunities proved to be, in the main, extensions of existing earth-based facilities, considerably enhanced but not unique—and therefore never wholly indispensable. There was just one activity, of critical interest to the Allies, where the time advantages in war might be so great that it was perhaps a special category and an exception to that general rule. That activity was electronic reconnaissance. As noted elsewhere in this book, the West enjoyed a decided advantage over the Communist East in
ECM
, and for that reason the Soviet Union in peacetime shrouded its communications with every possible veil of secrecy. If the West was to exploit its electronic advantage to the fullest extent it needed to know from the outset of hostilities just which parts of the frequency spectrum, and in what modes of emission, the Soviet forces would operate. This information was urgently needed as soon as the battle was joined; the Soviet cloak of secrecy had to be torn aside. This could all be done very much more quickly and comprehensively from space reconnaissance satellites than would ever have been possible by monitoring the communications networks in the war theatre on the ground.

After the early scramble to catch up with the Soviet Union, when spurred into competition by the success of the Sputnik shots, the
USA
soon took the lead. Their vehicles and systems were demonstrably more capable, more reliable and more durable than those of the
USSR
. Out of that technological and engineering success came a difference of approach that was to be of fundamental strategic importance: the Americans invested their resources in complicated long-life, multi-purpose craft designed to function in orbit for periods as long as a year. The Russians, under force majeure, went for frequent launchings of simple, single-purpose, short-life payloads. The corollary to this in 1985 was thai the Soviet Union had a high launch capability—they had put no less than thirty-two photo-recce satellites in orbit in the previous twelve months, and on 3 August they had more than twenty launchers ready at Baikonur and Plesetsk with a variety of satellites ready as their payloads. The
USA
, on the other hand, had no more than a few giant Titan II rockets designed to put the thirteen-tonne Big Bird II satellites into space, and five Orbiter aerospace vehicles developed for their space shuttle system.