The Third World War: August 1985

the Allied countries.

Three aspects of the battle for Europe received particularly vivid coverage. First there was the operation of the transatlantic air bridge. Day after day the television screens of the world showed the endless stream of transport aircraft bringing in and discharging into Europe men and war material from the seemingly limitless resources of the United States. Second, West German cameramen provided, with great courage and day after day, much dramatic footage of German resistance to the invaders, seen at its most spectacular along the line of the River Lippe. Not only were there shots of close combat, at once terrifying and moving, but interviews with the German infantry which left no doubt as to the strength of their morale and their great determination. Third, similar coverage was provided of the fighting through of the CAVALRY convoys at sea. No fewer than five cameramen lost their lives in this operation, for camera crews had been stationed on many of the escort craft and major transports, and others flew with maritime aircraft. Though there was considerable footage of the sinking of Allied vessels, this added a note of convincing veracity to the recording of the arrival of the bulk of the convoy. Culminating, as the work of these cameramen did, in scenes of troops moving away from the quayside in France, depleted perhaps but very formidable, this highly important battle was shown to the outside world as the victory which it was. In the field of peaceful electronics, the electronics of television, the Western technical superiority was to prove almost as important as its superiority in the electronic technology of the battlefield.

In this propaganda battle the Allies had another weapon on their side — flexibility and speed of decision. The US President made one ruling of major importance immediately upon the outbreak of war. He resisted demands that a censorship board be established to guide and select the flow of television material overseas. ‘We must trust the networks and the individual broadcasters,’ he said. ‘We must rely on them to be both patriotic and sensible.’ An ad hoc organization of television professionals was set up and given scope to make the constant, split-second decisions on the choice of material to be transmitted throughout the world upon which television depends. They were guided — and in the last resort could have been controlled — by military advisers whose task was to ensure that no information of positive military value to the enemy was sent out. For instance, no coverage was given of the points of embarkation or the detailed composition of air loads from the US, still less of the location of their points of arrival in Europe. There was no coverage of the assembling of the CAVALRY convoys, no disclosure of their exact contents or destination. Shots which showed secret equipment in detail were excluded. But even such material as this was treated much less stringently than in previous wars, for, as has already been pointed out, it was known that the Soviet Union, by means of satellite surveillance, active pre-war espionage and the early capture of much equipment in the fighting in Germany, had access to most of these secrets anyway. By and large the broadcasters were free to treat this material very much as they wished, within the general understanding that it should be fairly selected so as to give a reasonably accurate picture of the broad strategic scene. This meant that coverage of Allied losses and withdrawals was balanced by coverage of Allied resistance and counter-attack. Within this broad understanding, however, the broadcasters were left to make their own judgments.

This had two results, both of considerable value to the Allied cause. It meant that the material from Allied broadcasters reached the screens of the outside world ahead of that coming from the Soviet bloc; and that it reached those screens in a form that made it all the more convincing. It contained, if not the whole truth, at least a reasonably rounded version of the truth. Certainly it was more truthful than the coverage which came from Moscow. The communist material was not only less plentiful, there being fewer peacetime camera resources to deploy, but it was also dangerously delayed by their censorship machine. All Warsaw Pact footage of the fighting had to be screened, in both senses of the word, by Soviet officialdom. It arrived hours — and sometimes days — later than the Allied coverage. Day after day the first impression of the fighting available to television stations all over the world was that supplied by the Allies — and it was an impression of embattled countries which, whilst suffering heavy and grievous setbacks, were holding on strongly enough to enable the massive power of the United States to be brought to bear. This did a great deal to sustain the morale of key countries like Iran, a great deal to ensure the continued but friendly neutrality of the Far Eastern bloc, and a great deal, as post-war research has already shown, to raise anxieties within some African and Middle Eastern states that they might have backed the wrong side.

Within that most television-addicted society in Europe, the United Kingdom, television played a curiously subdued role. By 1985 it had become in every way the main source of information and entertainment for the public. The various view-data systems which were then commonplace had added the dimension of a journal of record, a development which had weakened still further the impact of the newspapers. When war came, the public turned to television for news, guidance and information, and for that measure of entertainment for which the human spirit, however closely facing disaster, still has a craving. The first of these the television organizations were able to supply, in copious measure. For the first few days of the fighting the screens were given over almost entirely to continuous news programmes, interspersed with messages about air raid precautions or emergency services, with administrative instructions on such matters as rationing and evacuation. There were also frequent speeches from government leaders.

Here the broadcasters found themselves on secure ground. Their touch was less certain when it came to entertainment. They fell back in the first instance on music, played from behind a caption card. But modern rock sounded suddenly out of place. Light entertainment and comedy struck such a false note that, after one channel had experimented with these as some form of relief from the gloom, they were abruptly dropped. One British regional station had an immediate and warmly approving reaction from its audience when it went over unashamedly to an abundance of frankly patriotic music. But there were limits to the number of times which even the works of Elgar could be played within the space of twenty-four hours. An early answer was found in the wide use of soap operas. Extensive re-runs of Coronation Street and Crossroads proved extraordinarily acceptable, if only because they were a reminder of a normality which had once existed, and which might, with good fortune, exist again. And the Western, that one indestructible standby of television ever since its early days, also proved readily acceptable in wartime, with its recipe of fantasy rooted in reality, and its reassuring message that in the end the good and the right always triumph.

CHAPTER 23: The Vital Peripheries: Middle East and Africa

Almost fifty years ago General Wavell, when contemplating from the Middle East the stakes involved in an earlier world crisis, summed up the strategic balance in a statement remarkable alike for its brevity and its prescience. Oil, shipping, air power and sea power, said Wavell, were the keys to the war against Germany and Italy. They were dependent on each other. Air and sea power required oil. Oil had to be moved about in ships. Ships themselves required the protection of naval and air power. Wavell went on to argue that since the British Empire had access to most of the world’s oil, as it had to most of the world’s shipping, and since it was well endowed with naval power and potentially with air power — ‘we are bound to win’.

To what extent did this sort of reasoning still apply half a century later? It was true that oil was still both cause and means of conflict; it was true that sea power was still largely dependent on oil and on the shipping indispensable to its transportation; it was true that air power and oil were still inextricably bound together — for use, for protection, for movement. What was no longer true was that ‘we’ — the Western Allies — still had a monopoly of all of them.

Every great nation which without the benefit of sea power had sought to humble others in inter-continental struggles had in the end been humbled itself by sea power. It was a lesson enviously learned by the Soviet Union and carelessly thrown aside by its once greatest exponent — Great Britain.

The equation was now a very different one. The Soviet Union had some 8,000 registered merchant ships with a gross tonnage of 20 million; the USA less than 5,000 ships although a tonnage also of close on 20 million. The Soviet Union had 500 oil tankers, the USA 300. In reserves of crude oil the Soviet Union had some 6 1/2 billion tonnes as against 4 3/4 billion tonnes. The Soviet Union was the world’s leading crude oil producer, the United States the second. Yet the United States now imported 500 million tonnes of crude oil annually, nearly half of it from the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. The Soviet Union imported none. As if this were not enough, the Soviet Navy was the largest in the world, with some 250 major surface combat vessels and 300 submarines, of which 200 were nuclear-powered. Aircraft integral to the Soviet Navy totalled around 700. The Soviet Air Force had some 10,000 combat aircraft, including 1,000 bombers, of which one-fifth were inter-continental, 4,000 fighters in support