The Third World War - The Untold Story (32 page)

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 rearward 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.

“SACEUR spoke over his discrete voice-net to Commander Allied Air Forces Central Europe (COMAAFCE) in his underground war room in the Eifel region.

“Can you cut the main rail links running west from Wroclaw and Poznan in Poland?” he asked.

COMAAFCE was startled. This would mean sending what remained of his irreplaceable F-111s and
Tornados
through the grim defences of East Germany and Poland. SACEUR’s question suggested such a complete misunderstanding of what they would be up against (and what they had already done at such high cost, for that matter) that he found it hard to be civil.

“I know things are bad,” he replied, “but have you gone out of your mind? If I sent thirty aircraft we would be lucky if ten got over the targets and five of them came back. And these are some of your dual-capable nuclear aircraft.”

“Okay, okay,” said SACEUR. “You airmen are always so touchy - I’m not telling you how to do it. I’m just saying what it is that’s got to be done. Give me a call back in half an hour.”

At COMAAFCE’s operational headquarters the planners looked at it all ways but continued to shake their heads. They just could not see how an effective force could be brought to bear at a remotely acceptable cost in air losses. The use of calculators and operating manuals speeded up as heads drew closer together over the plotting charts;

Twenty-five minutes later COMAAFCE was back on the line to SACEUR.

“Look,” he said “those Swedes are having their own war up there, but if you can get them to let us into two of their southern airfields we can do it. All we’ll want is fuel for thirty aircraft between two bases. They’ll arrive and leave at night and there will be no fuss. Depending on how it goes we might need to recover to the same bases early in the morning but we’ll try to get them back to Britain, or at least to Norway. Of course if the Swedes could give some fighter cover on the way back from the Polish coast that would be great. But from what I hear that’s against their rules.”

The senior Swedish liaison officer at SHAPE listened gravely to this request and undertook to put it straightaway to Stockholm.

In half an hour the answer came back - yes, the two Wings could use the airfields, provided it was planned and executed exactly as COMAAFCE had said: namely, in and out on the same night with the highest security before and after the event. They could not agree to let the force recover to Sweden next morning unless it was in distress. Nor could there be any question of
Flygvapnet
(Swedish Air Force) fighters providing cover, for that would constitute offensive action in breach of the widely known and well recognized principles of defending Swedish neutrality.

By noon that day, 13 August, eighteen USAF FB-111s and twelve
Tornados
(six each from the RAF and the German Air Force) had been detailed for the mission from Upper Heyford, Cottesmore and Marham in England. Cottesmore was the air base to which the German Air Force
Tornados
had been withdrawn from Norvenich in Germany. The Wing Commander who was to lead the RAF/GAF element left his crews studying their radar and infra-red target maps and took a
Hawk
jet-trainer down from Marham to see the CO of the FB-111s at Upper Heyford. These were old friends from their time together at the US Air War College at Maxwell, Alabama, and they had a lot to tie up.