The Third World War: August 1985

concerning deployment of air defences had been solved by the adoption of a concept of defence in depth. Thus the first fighter barrier was deployed forward of the NATO missile belts to cover the ground forces; this was allotted to the American, Dutch and Belgian F-16s. Behind the missile belt, RAF Phantoms and American F-15s flew combat patrols to complement the rear area point defences. The air defence of France remained a national responsibility.

In the early days of the war, the enemy’s ECM and its assault on the NATO radar stations seriously degraded the Alliance’s capability for close-controlled interception. But the weather favoured the defence, with good visibility beneath the cloud layer at around 3,000 metres. The inability, or reluctance, of the Warsaw Pact pilots to fly quite low enough offered the defending fighters many skyline sightings as enemy aircraft crossed ridges and hills. The Russians’ strong suit was their numerical superiority and not surprisingly they wanted to preserve it — so in the main their preferred tactics on interception were to evade. On balance, their air combat skills were shown up as inferior to those of the NATO pilots.

But the weight of numbers took their toll of the Allied defences. While in the first few days of the war aircraft losses favoured the Alliance in a ratio of three to one, the HAWK SAM belt was eventually saturated and those radars that survived the initial onslaught were soon picked off by anti-radar missiles. The air bases themselves were subjected to intense air attack — with the notable exception of the US bases in the 4 ATAF area over which the F-15s maintained air superiority throughout the war.

But although Warsaw Pact aircraft managed to achieve local air superiority on a number of occasions in the first week of the war, full air support of their ground forces proved impossible to sustain in the face of determined opposition from the F-16s and, on occasion, Harriers armed with air-to-air missiles. But mounting Allied aircraft losses, battle damage and fatigue often left the eventual outcome of this ferocious air fighting very much in doubt.

Although the development of the Warsaw Pact offensive in the Central Region has yet to be followed on the ground (which will be done in the next chapter), coherence and continuity make it desirable to anticipate here its course and outcome sufficiently to carry this tale of the air war over Europe to a conclusion.

COMAAFCE’s first indication of a distinct trend in his favour came with a Soviet attempt to launch airborne and heliborne assaults in support of their attack on the Venlo position on 14 August. They did not achieve surprise, and their efforts to gain local air superiority lacked concentration and determination. The ensuing melee in the air to the north and west of the Krefeld salient was greatly enjoyed by the exhausted and hard-pressed German and British soldiers, who afterwards christened it the Venlo Turkey Shoot.

When the NATO forces improved their command of the air after the sudden release of reserves, local air superiority was exploited by precision-guided weapons on Soviet crossing points over the Lower Rhine and Maas, which helped to throttle the supply lines to enemy leading formations at a critical stage. With enemy divisions to the west of the Rhine isolated, COMAAFCE allotted 90 per cent of 4 ATAF resources to the Commander 2 ATAF, leaving the remainder of 4 ATAF and the remnants of 5 ATAF to support CENTAG. For the next two days this tremendous concentration of airborne firepower wrought havoc with the enemy forces west of the Rhine. But the air effort stood or fell on the retention of secure bases, a fact of which Allied air commanders had always been uneasily aware. On the very first day of the war some airfields were completely overwhelmed by combinations of high explosive and persistent chemical agents; others suffered their full share of misfortune. But rigorous peacetime exercises in the flexible use of air power now paid dividends. Although airfields, unlike aircraft carriers, could not be sunk, they could be overrun, and in the first days of war the enemy advance in the north forced the abandonment of no less than six German and Dutch airfields. The German Tornados were redeployed to the United Kingdom and their AlphaJets moved south. Dutch F-16s moved back into Belgium. When, four days later, the enemy crossed the Lower Rhine the RAF had to withdraw from its airfields. Its attack Tornados and Buccaneers went back to the UK and the reconnaissance Tornados were redeployed to the south. One of the greatest threats to NATO air bases lay in surface-to-surface missile (SSM) attacks as the enemy advanced and deployed his mobile missile systems further west. A co-ordinated missile onslaught on 2 ATAF airfields only just failed to catch the Allied aircraft before their redeployment. It was a very narrow squeak and the lesson was not lost on COMAAFCE, even though, in mounting the attack, the missile batteries gave away their positions and earned a particularly sharp and quick Allied air response.

The Warsaw Pact air forces did not achieve their objectives to the full principally because they failed to gain tactical surprise and the Allied air forces were ready and waiting for them. In addition, NATO’s electronic warfare was of a superior quality throughout the campaign, and the Allied aircraft and their crews, as had always been hoped, proved significantly superior in technology and skills. The Allied defence plan had required the air forces to stem the Warsaw Pact flood and hold the ring until the armies were reinforced and in battle order. In this they succeeded. The furious air actions, air-to-air, air-to-ground and ground-to-air, vindicated classical air thinking over half a century. It also qualified some of the commandments in the airmen’s bible in important ways. For instance, while airmen rightly saw the need to fight the air battle above all, in the circumstances of this war they learned that there is no convenient tempo which can allow them to meet their tasks in the ordered sequence so beloved of the Staff Colleges. The airman’s belief, born of Second World War experience, and so irritating to the soldiers, that the chronology of war should allow them to fight the air battle and establish air superiority before addressing the problems of the land battle, were shattered once and for all. Everything had happened together.

Given the limited resources that the West were prepared to devote to defence before the Third World War, the air forces saw the need to compete above all in qualitative terms. In this they were right; they would have been right in any circumstances — for a second-rate air force is an expensive national indulgence — but it is worth underlining the point that once the qualitative margin narrows between opposing sides then numbers become very important indeed. It was because of this that COMAAFCE’s counter-air offensive was so important. Happily the aircraft, weapons and electronic attack systems specially designed for this task proved highly successful and did more than anything else to offset the numerical advantage of the Warsaw Pact in the air.

Outside the European theatre, but of crucial importance to it, a new air factor was manifested in the transatlantic air bridge. Despite the early lessons from the Berlin airlift back in the late forties, Western European strategists had been slow to see air transport except in terms of an extension of existing logistic support. Not so with the Americans, or for that matter the Russians, who in 1977-8 set up an air bridge to the Horn of Africa that even in those days moved tanks to Ethiopia in large Antonov transports. The reality was that air transport had now become one of the major strategic manifestations of air power. It was therefore particularly ironic that the British, in their defence economies of the seventies, should have so drastically cut back their air transport force — a cut which forced their planners to rely on the use of car ferries and steamers to and from the Hook of Holland in their efforts to find ways of getting British reinforcements to the Northern Army Group. Such measures were more reminiscent of the Paris taxis used to move troops up to the Marne in 1914 than appropriate to the development of air power in the second half of the twentieth century.

Perhaps the most vivid vindication of classical air thinking was the organization of the command system of the Allied Air Forces in Europe in the early 1970s. It had long been the claim of the airmen that if the flexibility and capacity for concentration of air power was to be exploited then the air must be centrally organized. This was indeed what happened, very much under US influence and pressure, when a single air command was set up under COMAAFCE in Europe. When the lock was forced at the northern end of the region and the entire Northern Army Group was swung back like a huge door hinged on Kassel, it was this organization which enabled COMAAFCE to swing his air forces through ninety degrees to an east-west north-facing axis in a matter of hours. By the same token he was able to accept the suddenly released reserves and apply them promptly to the battle to which air power made such a decisive contribution.

CHAPTER 21: The Centre Holds